We’re all familiar with the deficiencies of our modern churches. That’s why the Romantic impulse to find a “golden age” and a utopia of the mind is such a powerful force. We see it when people long for the “New Testament Church”. When you ask – “you mean like Corinth with its rampant spiritual chaos? Could it be one of the 7 churches of Asia Minor in the Apocalypse?” – the answer is usually “No”. Wherever we look we find that somehow sinners are at their normal sinful work and that – miraculously – God somehow manages to advance His kingdom despite the fact!
The Celtic Era is no different as this article reminds us: Raiding and Warring in Monastic Ireland.
Sometimes Celts would join the Vikings in raiding monasteries. Sometimes Abbot would take up arms against other Abbots. At least that is what the evidence suggests:
…on the 309 occasions when ecclesiastical sites were plundered between the years 600 and 1163, the Irish were responsible for half of the attacks and in nineteen instances the Irish and Norse combined forces. Moreover, there is documentary evidence for inter-monastery wars, abbots taking up arms on behalf of provincial overlords and high kings, and for monastic enclaves being chosen as the stages for battles between warring dynasties.
Given the lengthy time frame of this data (over 500 years) we might protest that our heroes the Celts had passed their spiritual prime and the soul entropy that affects this age had taken hold. Perhaps so. The fact that those we would idolize had the potential to disappoint in any way reminds us that we follow Jesus Christ the Lord, not men.
At the Fellowship of Ailbe our intention is to cast down idols, not create them anew. A judicious reflection upon the Celts from our modern vantage point as Missional and Evangelical people beholden to Christ and His Word is our intent. Despite the foibles, the Celts provide an important focal point for frenzied minds like ours in our messy world. While not pretending there is a Celtic Christian utopia beyond the next horizon, or that there ever was, we engage in this task to better serve Christ. The purpose for this is that even St. Paul advocated following leaders of peculiar virtue, so long as it allowed one to follow Christ Himself (1 Corinthians 11:1). Likewise, C.S. Lewis in his introduction to Athanasius’ On The Incarnation reminds us:
We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?”—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.
Therefore we seek a pattern for ministry that does not idolize or absolutize the Celts, but one which allows us not to absolutize ourselves or our age as we seek to serve the Lord of all eternity.
So we beg you expose the errors of our heroes and you do us a favor. Expose our own errors – and if God gives us grace to hear the truth you speak – and you save us from ourselves.
Until the Final Day though, let us follow the faithful as they follow Christ, especially such Christians as these Celts who help us escape the failings of our modern unfaithful age!
