During the first round of research for my recent study of vital mainline Protestant churches, I sent my project associate, Joseph Stewart-Sicking, to Calvin Presbyterian Church in the small working-class town of Zelienople, Pennsylvania. Joe grew up Roman Catholic and became an Episcopalian as a student. He had never attended a Presbyterian service, much less spent a week observing the life of a Presbyterian congregation. Throughout the week he called in reports of how the people of Calvin Churchâtheir lives and their spiritualityâintrigued him.
When Joe returned to the office, I asked him, âWhat surprised you the most? What did you see or hear that you did not particularly expect?â
Joe thought for a moment and replied, âGregory of Nyssa.â
âWhat?â I asked.
âGregory of Nyssa. Other early Christian theologians. And the desert fathers and mothers. Every time I asked them about their spiritual practices, they told me about church history.â
Joeâs response startled me. Not all Presbyterians are familiar with the fourth-century theologian Gregory of Nyssa. But there, in a modest church in a small western Pennsylvania town, folks had found spiritual friends from the early church, people whose ancient wisdom they embraced for today. Across the country renewing congregations like Calvin Church are becoming conversant with ancient Christian theologians, practices, and texts. From Jesus to St. Benedict in the sixth century, people are discovering the distant Christian past anew.
Back for the Future
Few periods of church history have captured as much popular attention as early Christianity. At my local bookstore the Christianity section is full of dozens of books about Jesus, the Gospels, Christianity and the Roman Empire, and ancient churches. I recently counted: other than contemporary issues, fewer than twenty books on those same shelves cover topics beyond Christianityâs first four centuries. In addition, three shelves are devoted solely to what the bookstore manager tags as Hidden Histories: Gnosticism, the Gospel of Judas, and Mary Magdalene. Early Christianity is a publishing sensation.
Popular interest in ancient Christianity did not begin, however, with the current trend. Since Albert Schweitzerâs Quest of the Historical Jesus appeared in English in 1910, Protestants have actively pursued the question of who Jesus really was and what Jesus actually taught. Although a German theologian, Schweitzer introduced the notion to mainstream North American Protestants that somehow the original message of Jesus had been corrupted by later interpretations and that Christians must strip away the historical accretions to find the real Jesus.1
This notion meshed with romantic ideals of the day. Many people hoped that they could somehow recover the original purity and simplicity of the gospel and, by doing so, reform or recreate their churches.2 For a century scholarly Christianity has embarked on a quest backward. The ancient faith may be the best source to renew the present. During much of the last century the focus has been on Jesus and the first decades of the Christian movement, as in Schweitzerâs Quest or more recently in the Jesus Seminar, with writers such as John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg. Parallel to the interest in Jesus, a new fascination with ancient worship and liturgy took shape, and the emphasis on the primitive church widened to include the first five centuries of Christianity, not only Jesus and his immediate followers.
Will the Real Rome Please Stand Up?
In many churches today Christians can be heard to remark that our worldâthe world of the twenty-first centuryâresembles the period of the early church more than any other time in history. Typically, they mean that Christianity is no longer the dominant way of organizing life in an increasingly secular and pluralistic West, that in most Western countries Christianity is institutionally on the wane and does not command the influence and privilege once accorded it.3 With some regularity many Western believers now speak of living in a post-Christian society. As a result Christians now find themselves members of one religion among many: Christians can no longer assume that their faith is the birthright religion of the majority, and that the faithful need to adopt a missionary vision in order for their churches to survive in religiously and culturally diverse societies.
Although many Christians think such comparisons are recent, thoughtful observers noted this change around the turn of the last century. âIt is unlikely that Christianity will retain so nominally exclusive a sway as it has hitherto done in Western Europe,â predicted Wellesley College professor Vida Scudder in 1912. âIn all probability, the day of its conventional control is passing and will soon be forgotten.â She continued:
By comparing the situation to that of the early church, modern Christians remember the religious status of their ancient ancestors as outsiders in non-Christian Rome. Because they faced issues similar to those we face, they serve as guides for us.
This kind of thinking, no matter how helpful the comparison, may tempt Christians toward historical romanticism, the belief that if they could only recreate some pristine age everything would be well. As much as contemporary believers might find similarities between our time and that of Christianity in ancient Rome, the two are not the same. The ancient Mediterranean world that Rome once ruled was a vast, culturally diverse set of societies, unrelated by languages, economics, religions, and histories, all forced into political unity by a brutal military. Vast numbers of people who inhabited the Roman Empire resented or hated Roman rule and experienced few, if any, benefits from its social and economic structures. The empire was not in any modern way even vaguely democratic or inclusive; instead, it was a rigidly hierarchical and status-based world of haves and have-nots, of masters and slaves. Unlike a Hollywood sword-and-sandal film, the ancient world was not a pleasant place absent conveniences such as sewer systems and running water. As sociologist Rodney Stark describes, âGreco-Roman cities were small, extremely crowded, filthy beyond imagining, disorderly, filled with strangers, and afflicted with frequent catastrophesâfires, plagues, conquests, and earthquakes.â Unlike Western urban life today, where even the poor have access to marginally acceptable services, âlife in antiquity abounded in anxiety and miseryâ for nearly everyone.5
Not only was the ancient world entirely different from our own, the time period dubbed âthe early churchâ lasted five hundred years, a half millennium. In the fifth century the great theologian St. Augustine was almost as far removed in time from Jesus as we are from the Protestant reformer Martin Luther. In those five centuries the ancient Mediterranean world underwent huge political, cultural, and economic changes; these massive transformations influenced Christian practices and theology, creating and recreating congregations that adapted and readapted to the changes around them. âEarly Christianityâ and âancient churchâ were not monolithic realities. Instead, if we are thinking about them rightly, we will understand that these five centuries were messy, chaotic, violent, and foreign to our understandings and imaginations. Ancient Christianity grew up in a vast geographic space, in many cultures, and over a long period of time, developing through diverse spaces, peoples, and centuries. Romanticism fails us; post-Christian Christianity is not that of the early church. If we are honest, we can barely understand those centuries and the people who inhabited them. Our ancestors are strangers to us; they lived in an alien world.
Christianity as a Way
If the Roman world was so completely different from our own, what can be said of early Christianity that has any meaning to us today? What âhigh adventure,â as Vida Scudder suggested, does ancient faith hold for contemporary people?
For all the differences between our world and theirs, for all the complexity of primitive Christianity, a startling idea runs through early records of faith: Christianity seems to have succeeded because it transformed the lives of people in a chaotic world. Indeed, in his study of the growth of Christianity in the ancient world, Rodney Stark suggests that
Throughout the first five centuries people understood Christianity primarily as a way of life in the present, not as a doctrinal system, esoteric belief, or promise of eternal salvation. By followers enacting Jesusâs teachings, Christianity changed and improved the lives of its adherents and served as a practical spiritual pathway. This wayâand earliest Christians were called âthe People of the Wayââbettered existence for countless ancient believers.
The way, with its transformative power, challenged the status quo and infuriated ancient defenders of Roman religions, many of whom argued that the new Christian religion was an immoral sect, with secretive rites and rituals that undermined traditional Roman values of loyalty and family. Indeed, early commentators scarcely attacked Christian doctrines, but they consistently portrayed Christian devotional practices as radical and socially divisive. Christianity had effectively âcreated a social group that promoted its own laws and its own patterns of behavior.â7 These behaviors, at odds with Roman custom, earned Christians the reputation of being revolutionaries and traitors to the good order of the state.
Christian defenders, such as Justin Martyr (ca. 100âca. 165), used the example of Christian practice to make the case that Jesusâs way âmended livesâ:
To Justin, the old ways had passed; a new way opened in Jesus. Far from being divisive, Christianity was an inclusive faith that might bring diverse peoples together. However one interpreted the effects of the new faith, both enemies and defenders of Christianity understood that the new religion transformed people, giving even women, peasants, and slaves a meaningful ability to reorder their lives.
The way was based on Jesusâs teaching recorded in Mark 12:28â34.9 An unnamed questioner asked Jesus, âWhich commandment is the first of all?â And Jesus replied with what is now called the Great Command: ââYou shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.â The second is this, âYou shall love your neighbor as yourself.â There is no other commandment greater than these.â Loving God and neighbor was, according to Jesus, the way of the Kingdom of God and the path of salvation. In the account of this teaching in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus adds, âDo this, and you will liveâ (Luke 10:28).
Early Christians understood the centrality of Jesusâs teaching. The Didache (ca. 100/120 CE), an ancient Christian instructional manual, opens with these words: âThere are two ways, one of life and one of death, but a great difference between the two ways. The way of life, then, is this: First, you shall love God who made you; second, love your neighbor as yourself, and do not do to another what you would not want done to you.â10
Jesusâs followers took these words seriously. In many cases, and unlike contemporary practice, the process of becoming a Christian took several years, an extended time of teaching spiritual inquirers the way on which they were embarking. Christianity was considered a deliberate choice with serious consequences, a process of spiritual formation and discipline that took time, a way of life that had to be learned in community. Many early Christian communities frowned upon instantaneous conversion. Manuals like the Didache served as textbooks for converts. To drive home the point, early church architects built baptismal fonts to resemble sarcophagi, symbolizing death to the old way of life or, more erotically perhaps, as a vulva to indicate the birth of a new life.11 Thus, in the context of their world of suffering, Christians were taught that the faith as a radical way of life comprised the two loves, and it was these two loves that they strove to enact in their own souls and in their communities.
It is upon the Great Command that we find common ground with ancient Christians, not because our world is like theirs or because they somehow knew how to be better Christians than we do. Many of them, to be sure, did not follow very well; they, like us, struggled, doubted, and failed to walk the way. Yet even in our shortcomings (or perhaps because of them), we stand with them in the way. Generative Christians, like them, seek a life organized around love for God and neighbor. We recognize their longing for change. And in many quarters Christian communities are once again embracing the ancient insight that the faith is a spiritual pathway, a life built on transformative practices of love rather than doctrinal belief.12 We are, beyond mere romanticism, recapturing wisdom from ancient Christianity. How our ancestors interpreted and practiced the way, however, holds some surprises and challenges for us today.
