How Often Do Christians Think About the Roman Empire? Probably Not Enough
I’ve never been asked this question, but apparently it’s been quite the trend on social media. It turns out that 21st century men (and women?) think about the Roman Empire quite a bit. The reasons vary, but Christians, at least, should think more often than they do about how their ancestors in the faith lived, worked, and worshiped in the latter days of the Roman Empire.
Historians and scholars have long puzzled over how a movement led by marginalized Jews could have eventually overwhelmed one of the largest and longest-lived empires the world has ever seen. Others have pointed out the similarities between our cultural moment and the end of the Roman Empire. By examining some of the ways that the early church defined itself in the late Roman world, Christians today can learn valuable lessons for how to live in our own rapidly re-paganizing culture.
We often forget how odd the Christian movement was. Historian Larry Hurtado reminds us: “In the eyes of many of that time, early Christianity was odd, bizarre, in some ways even dangerous. For one thing, it did not fit what ‘religion’ was for people then. Indicative of this, Roman-era critics designated it as a perverse ‘superstition’” (Destroyer of the Gods, 1-2). Yet, this strange new religion quickly grew and conquered the Roman Empire. Early Christianity was simultaneously “perverse” and strangely attractive. What made the early Christian movement so attractive? What can Christians today learn from our fathers and mothers in the faith?
Faithfulness–Not Relevance
The early Christians focused more on being faithful, and in creating a distinct culture, than on being “winsome” or “relevant.” In his book, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire, historian Alan Kreider argues that several factors set apart the early Christian movement, and ultimately led to its surprising growth. Of primary importance was an emphasis on patience. Kreider writes:
Patience was not a virtue dear to most Greco-Roman people, and it has been of little interest to scholars of early Christianity. But it was centrally important to the early Christians. They talked about patience and wrote about it; it was the first virtue about which they wrote a treatise, and they wrote no fewer than three treatises on it. Christian writers called patience the “highest virtue,” “the greatest of all virtues,” the virtue that was “peculiarly Christian.” The Christians believed that God is patient and that Jesus visibly embodied patience. And they concluded they, trusting in God, should be patient–not controlling events, not anxious or in a hurry, and never using force to achieve their ends (1-2).
Perhaps paradoxically, this emphasis on patience led to high standards of life and morality in the early church, which created a distinctive Christian subculture. This is bound up in what Kreider terms habitus. Habitus is “reflexive bodily behavior” (Patient Ferment, 2). Early Christians focused less on winning arguments and more on winning others through their habitually patient behavior: “When challenged about their ideas, Christians pointed to their actions. They believed that their habitus, their embodied behavior, was eloquent. The behavior said what they believed; it was an enactment of their message” (Patient Ferment, 2).
Thirdly, Kreider notes the importance of catechesis and worship. “The early Christians were uncommonly committed to forming the habitus of their members” (Patient Ferment, 2). Pagans needed to be re-trained, and needed to develop different habits. On this score, the early church was probably too restrictive. New converts entered the catechumenate, a time of training and probation, which could last years. They were excluded from the latter part of the church’s worship service (the prayers and Eucharist). No doubt this increased the sense of awe and mystery, and created a sense of anticipation, but this already displays the unhealthy tendency to split the church into two tiers of those who are more holy/advanced Christians and those less committed or less mature. Our churches today veer to the opposite extreme, welcoming everyone with no standards at all for admission and inclusion. Surely there is wisdom in walking between these extremes. Groups like the Catechesis Institute are seeking to renew and apply the ancient patterns of catechesis to the contemporary church. Learning from the past requires creativity–not just a cut-and-paste approach. As Mark Twain put it: “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.”
Fourth, the early church embodied what Kreider calls “ferment.” Although this was not an early Christian term or concept, it helpfully captures aspects of how the early church grew and how it interacted with the surrounding culture. “It was not susceptible to human control, and its pace could not be sped up. But in the ferment there was a bubbling energy–a bottom-up inner life–that had immense potential” (Patient Ferment, 3).
Kreider’s book is full of insights about how the early Christians lived their lives differently than the surrounding Greco-Roman culture, and how their radically counter-cultural lifestyle (“habitus”) was attractive and compelling to their pagan neighbors. Here’s one of the key takeaways: “Unlike many churches today, the third-century churches described by the Apostolic Tradition did not try to grow by making people feel welcome and included. Civic paganism did that. In contrast, the churches were hard to enter. They didn’t grow because of their cultural accessibility; they grew because they required commitment to an unpopular God who didn’t require people to perform cultic acts correctly but instead equipped them to live in a way that was richly unconventional” (Patient Ferment, 149). The Gospel calls us to live in a way that is noticeably different from our non-Christian neighbors. Like the early church, this will be either attractive, or will bring persecution. The early church can remind us of how to be faithful in both eventualities.
Revolutionary Sex
Another aspect of the early Christian witness is even more relevant to our hedonistic culture. In a world of sexual license, the early church preached–and tried to enforce–sexual purity and abstinence. In opposition to the pagans, Christians taught women and men that sex was a God-given gift, to be exercised only in marriage. Pagan cultures, as with most non-Christian cultures throughout history, had a double-standard. The purity of women was closely guarded, while men had much more freedom. Slaves, including children, were at the mercy of their master’s lusts. The first sexual revolution was the Christian moral revolution, as Kyle Harper points out: “The heightened place of sexuality in the overarching structure of morality, the respect for the human dignity of all persons, and the insistence on the value of the transcendent and sacred over the secular and the civic—these all went hand in hand in the growth of Christian culture” (“The Sexual Revolution”).
Hurtado emphasizes that, “more typically in the Roman era, sex with prostitutes and courtesans, and with young boys as well, was not only tolerated but even affirmed as a hedge against adultery–specifically, sex with another man’s wife or with a freeborn virgin. It is noteworthy, therefore, that Paul, with some other ancient Jewish voices, condemns a far wider spectrum of sexual activities, labeling them all as porneias, and that he posits marital sex as a hedge against these various temptations to extramarital sex of any kind. In short, Paul reflects a broadening of prohibited sex well beyond adultery. This alone represented a major shift in comparison to the attitudes of the larger Roman world” (Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods, 165).
Although isolated pagan writers advocated sexual restraint (Musonius Rufus being a notable example with his claim that sex was only for procreation, and not for pleasure), these teachers only focused on a select group of students or disciples. Hurtado comments:
By contrast, the early Christian texts reflect a rather strong effort to promote widely in circles of believers a collective commitment to the strict behavior that these texts advocate … These texts, therefore, which come from various locations and across the early Christian centuries, represent a historically noteworthy social project. It was probably novel in its time, comprising the formation of groups of believers translocally in the collective observance of certain behavior that was held to be essential to their distinctive group identity (Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods, 170).
The early church also opposed the sexual use, and abuse, of children, which also set them apart from the Roman culture: “[I]n the Roman era the sexual use of children, including young adolescents and also younger children, was widely tolerated and even celebrated lyrically by some pagan writers of the day, such as Juvenal, Petronius, Horace, Strato, Lucian, and Philostratus (Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods, 167). These practices were all described by the term paiderastia. The Christian church roundly condemned these practices and refused to compromise with the surrounding culture. Today, with a barely-disguised revival of pagan adult/child erotic activism, Christians need to hold firm and refuse to compromise, following the example of the early church.
Worship and Culture
One reason the church grew was because it focused primarily on the centrality of worship, and defined community in terms of liturgy. Kreider comments: “The growth of the church in early centuries was a product of the church’s worship” (Kreider, Patient Ferment, 221).
The very practice of gathering weekly for worship was counter-cultural: “[I]n comparison with the wider Roman-era pagan religious context, the early Christian emphasis on corporate worship by members of a given ekklesia, and on gathering regularly, comprised a distinctive pattern of religious observance” (Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods, 61). This weekly worship formed a distinctive community. The liturgical practices of singing, praying, and partaking of the Eucharist together flowed out of the sanctuary and affected the rest of their lives.
This new culture was distinctive in its transnational and trans-ethnic make up. It created a new culture, defined and nourished by worship, where everyone could worship freely: men and women, Jew and Gentile, slave or free. Our culture loves diversity and inclusivity (narrowly defined by the progressive elites). The early Christian church was radical in practical true diversity, founded on a common confession. Thus, these early communities reflected the Unity-in-Trinity of the God they worshiped.
Early Christianity was remarkably inclusive in its social composition. Although the apostles and early church leaders did not preach an impatient abolitionism, they did proclaim a message that was subversive of the institution of slavery. As Hurtado remarks, when early Christians heard or read texts like 1 Peter 2:18-25, where the sufferings of slaves are compared to the sufferings of Christ (see vv.21-25), this was comforting to slaves and should have made Christian masters reconsider their own behavior as slave owners. According to Hurtado, “this sort of compassionate rhetoric addressed to slaves was unusual, if not unique, in the Roman world” (Destroyer of the Gods, 177).
Postmodern Pagans
Our postmodern pagans celebrate belief in anything and everything, except in ultimate Truth. They mandate obedience to the gods of the postmodern/pagan polis–BLM, transgenderism, postcolonialism, COVID orthodoxy, to name just a few in the current revolutionary pantheon.
Early Christians refused to participate in the liturgy of their culture. They refused to bow down to the gods of the age. In pagan Rome, reverencing one’s household gods, and the gods of the city, was an important part of both familial and patriotic duty. To not participate, and to actively criticize and reject these practices was bizarre, and ultimately a threat to both family and political life. As Hurtado puts it: “So, refusal to participate in the reverence due these deities could be taken as a disloyalty to your city and as disregard for the welfare of its inhabitants … to refuse to worship these deities could be taken as a deeply subversive action or at least a disregard for the political order”(Destroyer of the Gods, 54). Additionally, “In short, early Christianity was the only new religious movement of the Roman era that demanded this exclusive loyalty to one deity, thereby defining all other cults of the time as rivals” (Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods, 86).
An Ethic of Love and Compassion
The early Christian movement was also marked by a distinctive ethic and a practice of love and compassion that went against the grain of the surrounding culture: “Indeed, the emphasis on God’s love and the appeal for an answering ‘love-ethic’ characterizing Christian conduct comprise something distinctive. We simply do not know of any other Roman-era religious group in which love played this important role in discourse or behavioral teaching” (Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods, 65).
According to New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, the Roman Empire had an ethic of “dominance”: “In a culture of dominance, those with power are expected to assert their will over those who are weaker … It was a commonsense, millennial-old view that virtually everyone accepted and shared, including the weak and marginalized.” The consequences of this belief were manifold: “It made slavery a virtually unquestioned institution promoting the good of society; it made the male head of the household a sovereign despot over all those under him; it made wars of conquest, and the slaughter they entailed, natural and sensible for the well-being of the valued part of the human race (that is, those invested with power)” (Ehrman, Triumph, 5). Ehrman notes that in such a society, the instinct and institutions to help the poor, weak, and suffering were absent. Christianity changed this: “Leaders of the Christian church preached and urged an ethic of love and service … All were on the same footing before God” (Ehrman, Triumph, 5). The Gospel led to concrete manifestations in the culture–one might even say the Gospel had revolutionary applications in the pagan context:
The very idea that society should serve the poor, the sick, and the marginalized became a distinctively Christian concern. Without the conquest of Christianity, we may well never have had institutionalized welfare for the poor or organized health care for the sick. Billions of people may never have embraced the idea that society should serve the marginalized or be concerned with the well-being of the needy, values that most of us in the West have simply assumed are “human” values (Ehrman, Triumph, 6).
Chad Brand and Tom Pratt also note the stark contrast between the Christian ethic and paganism: “Generosity was also foreign to the classical mind-set … Roman pagans practiced liberalitas, not caritas [patronage] … Part of the problem in the Roman context was that their religious traditions did not emphasize charity. There was no theology of grace, and so no corresponding concept of caritas (benevolent love). There was also no notion of community participation in the religious traditions. Priests performed at the temples; everyone else was a mere spectator” (Brand and Pratt, Seeking the City, 269).
Infanticide & Adoption
The early Christians were pro-life from the very beginning: “With abortion and abandonment, we come to a distinct parting of the ways between Christians and general Greco-Roman practice” (Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods, 146).
Although some pagans disapproved of the practice of infant abandonment and exposure, it was only the Jewish and early Christian movement that launched a full-frontal attack on the practice: “Nevertheless, beyond expressing such pronouncements and sentiments, neither these pagan moralists and philosophers nor others of the early imperial period made any serious effort to bring infant abandonment to a halt or sought actively to dissuade the wider populace from it” (Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods, 147). He also remarks: “So far as we know, the only wide-scale criticism of the practice, and the only collective refusal to engage in infant exposure in the first three centuries AD, was among Jews and then also early Christian” (Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods, 148).
Summarizing the Epistle to Diognetus’s teaching about God’s loving redemption manifested in Jesus, Hurtado summarizes the conclusion the Epistle draws: “Given this demonstration of God’s love for humanity, the author urges, what response can anyone make other than to love God in return and also to imitate God in loving others, sharing their burden, seeking to benefit those who may be worse off, and providing for their needs (10.1-6)” (Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods, 153-54).
While we must resist the temptation to idealize the early church, realizing they had their flaws and struggled in many of the same ways that we do, we can also learn from their example, and be motivated to imitate their strong stance on vital issues like life, justice, charity, and sexual purity. In particular, we should remember Kreider’s point that the early church did not grow through relaxing its standards or by opening its doors in seeker-sensitive inclusivity. Rather, because of the distinctive lives of many early Christians, and because of the early church’s focus on teaching and training its people in the basics of Christian theology and the requirements of Christian ethics, many in the surrounding culture were drawn to these strange and counter-culture people. May we live strangely attractive lives as well.
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