Theology | Quotations | Good Ideas

I very much appreciated this post by ye olde fearsome pirate:

Challies’ objection comes from that same, tired, old attitude so common in evangelicalism that the stories of those whose lives have been hurt by sin simply should not be told. Sin is always something that happens to “them,” and talking about it like it’s something that happens to one’s hearers is simply not “uplifting” or “glorifying to God.” If the verbal marginalization of the sinners goes deeply enough into the psyche, they simply cease to exist. I’m sure Challies feels quite compassionate for all those kids out there in the broken homes. Out there. Not in here. The kids in here have good little Protestant families where they have family devotions around the table every night based on the Westminster Catechism and sing the Doxology before bed.

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The Weighty Things of the Law

Theology

Jesus’ main criticisms of the Pharisees were that they were zealous for “the traditions of the elders” but neglected “the weighty things of the law”. However, I think that it’s obvious that these two criticisms go together: it’s not the Pharisee’s traditionalism per se that Jesus objects to, but rather a misplaced zeal that caused the Pharisees to value the letter of their tradition above the spirit of God’s law.

Or maybe it’s not obvious. There are many Christians who, I suspect, are innately suspicious of any ecclesial (or, in Jesus’ case, rabbinical) tradition that goes beyond the bare text of Scripture, even if the purpose of that tradition is specifically to protect and encourage obedience to Scripture. The two examples I gave in my last post were Orthodox Jewish and Roman Catholic customs about reverencing the name of God, both of which go far beyond what is actually prescribed in the third commandment, but both of which try to ensure obedience to the commandment through their additions. Now, the best objection to this kind of custom is that it can replace the spirit with the letter: if you’re properly bowing your head at Jesus’ name, you don’t have to worry about loving your neighbor. They also can replace a spiritual criterion with a ritual one: a good Jew is one who scrupulously avoids writing or saying the name of God, not one who actually loves God with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength. These considerations militate against tradition, and many people conclude that a minimalistic tradition is the way to go.

Nonetheless, what is lost if you do both? If you always bow at the name of Jesus and you love your neighbor as yourself? I have a hard time seeing what’s wrong with that. To put it differently: if the Pharisees had been zealous after the tradition of the elders but hadn’t forgotten the weighty things of the law, would Jesus have been after them?

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The Names of God

Theology | Good Ideas | Bad Ideas

Devout orthodox Jews today often abbreviate the word God in writing as “G-d”, as is explained here. The other day I read a reminisce from an elderly Roman Catholic gentleman, and he said most Roman Catholics used to devoutly bow whenever the name of Jesus was used.

Question: are these good ideas or bad ideas?

At one level it’s obvious that they are both unnecessary: the third commandment says not to use the Lord’s name in vain, but it does not stipulate that you should never write all of its letters or that you shouldn’t ever mention Him without bowing. I find it faintly ridiculous to insist that a violation of these customs necessarily means violation of the 3rd commandment. These seem to suggest that this stuff is a Bad Idea, or at least not necessarily a Good Idea.

However, these both also serve a purpose. Namely: with the commandment against blasphemy fenced about this way, it’s almost impossible to commit blasphemy. That is, if you are trained to so respect the name of God that you won’t even right it in full or say it without bowing, you will find it almost impossible to actually blaspheme without either explicitly rejecting your training or being a rank, deliberate hypocrite. If you haven’t been trained to think this way–if you have never been trained to use any particular respect when invoking God, you might never really know when you’re blaspheming, or worse, you might get the idea that it doesn’t really matter how we speak and write about God, and so just stop even thinking about blasphemy as something important. This suggests that these sorts of rules are a Good Thing.

Were you expecting some sort of a conclusion? Sorry to disappoint. I’m not sure what to say, but I think that I have another post on this topic (tangentially) that I will write tomorrow, or whenever I get around to it.

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Good Things

Reviews | Good Ideas

The following are Good Things:

A re-imagined image of St. George the night before he fought the dragon. I don’t think I can actually call this an “icon”, but like all good art it conveys a spiritual reality the same way that icons do.

A beautiful, if completely impossible, ending to Harry Potter. CS Lewis would applaud.

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Introduction and Explanation

Life | Theology

What follows is an essay that I have written in response to Pagans and Christians by Robin Fox. This essay was not originally intended for the blog, so I feel the need to explain it, and to explain especially why I read the book, why my response is so long, and why it isn’t really much of a response. Fortunately, the same story will cover all three questions.

Some months ago I was talking to our rector Fr. John, and he asked me out of the blue, “Have you ever considered Holy Orders?”

My response was decisive: “Um.”

“Well,” he said, “think and pray about it, and we can talk about it .”

So I did, and I talked to Larisa, and we prayed and thought some more. Next time I talked to Fr. John my answer was this: I’ve always thought had some sort of calling to mission or ministry, so the answer is a tentative “Yes”. However, I was cautious about the state of the ECUSA (this was before General Convention), so I was extremely reluctant to actually become a postulant or do anything formal for a while. This was quite agreeable to Fr. John, and he presented me with an alternative choice: to meet together with a bishop from one of the Continuing Anglican churches in the area–whose name also happens to be John–and to do informal coursework with him until our ecclesial situation is sorted out.

So I started. The first book he assigned me to read was Pagans and Christians, as mentioned above, and it took me quite a while to get through it. It’s over 700 pages of dense, encyclopedic material about the religious cultures of paganism and Christianity in the ante-Constantinian era. Once I finished it, I took a week to write the essay which follows in four parts. The essay draws from the book, but it does not cover even a quarter of all of the material in the book. Instead, I took what was most interesting to me and worked it out into a historical thesis and a bit of contemporary application.

So here it is. Hopefully it’s interesting to someone. I’m posting it in reverse order so that the posts appear in the proper order on the blog, but those of you reading the feed will have to live with the reverse post. Sorry.

Missions Today
Post-Apostolic Missions
What The Early Church Did
Missions After Constantine

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Missions Today

Theology

(Part I. Introduction is here.)

“Go and make disciples of all nations,” Jesus said. This is an unambiguous dominical command with a clear application: we must go to all nations and ethnicities of the world and preach the Gospel to them after the model of St. Paul, bringing as many of them as possible to baptism and discipleship within the Church. The practice and impulse to missions therefore is an essential feature of the Church, and should occupy a significant proportion of our energy and money.

Or so the Lord’s commandment, now known as the Great Commission, is understood today by nearly everyone in nearly every corner of Christianity. While there are a multitude of issues that divide and distinguish various Christian bodies, the necessity of self-conscious mission is not one of them, and most Christian bodies go at it with great fervor. Evangelistic crusades are a regular feature of Protestant church life in America and have risen to the level of a cultural institution in the rural South. Tens of thousands of well-to-do evangelicals spend hundreds or thousands of dollars apiece for the chance to work as “short-term missionaries” in Guatemala, Kenya, and other third-world countries. In the Roman Catholic Church the “Coming Home Network” promotes the stories of Catholic proselytes, and popular speakers and writers such as Scott Hahn and J. Budziszewski eagerly discuss their conversions from Presbyterianism and atheism. An Orthodox parish in Phoenix offers free Orthodox Study Bibles to inquirers, and the Antiochian Orthodox Church in America has a department of missions led by a prominent former Protestant evangelical and fervent evangelist Peter Gillquist. These are churches with widely divergent doctrinal commitments and liturgical practices, but the theory and practice of evangelical missions unites them and dominates the contemporary Christian understanding of missiology.

However, I want to argue that this is not an unqualified good, and in particular that it may be misleading to assume that this model of missiology is universally applicable or attainable. The reason is simple: the early church had no missions of this type, and it’s doubtful that this kind of missionary activity would ever have become widespread if it were not for the conversion of Constantine. This is a reaction to Pagans and Christians by Robin Lane Fox, in synthesis with my own readings of the Church Fathers and meditations on Scripture. If my thesis is correct, it should temper our confidence and our expectations of a missions strategy, and lead us to consider other ways of being the Church in a society that is increasingly post-Christian.

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Post-Apostolic Missions

Theology

(Part II. Introduction is here.)

The period between the deaths of the apostles and the conversion of Constantine is generally depicted as a period of unqualified success and undiluted orthodoxy. Constantine’s conversion is seen as the inevitable (but sometimes also tragic) crest of a wave of Christian converts that had flooded the Empire at every social level as a result of the evangelical efforts of the early Church. In _Pagans and Christians_ Fox sets out at several points to specifically rebut this assumption, and his arbuments are, to me, completely persuasive. He depicts quite a different Christianity from the victorious, missional army depicted in popular accounts and suggests that early Christianity was small, insular, and isolated.

The first point is demographic: at no point or place in the first three centuries of Christianity did the percentage of Christians in pagan society rise above five percent, and the percentage across the whole empire was probably two to three percent. He bases this estimate on several observations: first, that pagan authors rarely referred to Christians except when they had specific polemical reason to, that evidence for Christian burials and inscriptions is very scarce throughout most of the empire, and Constantine himself was forced to make several concessions to the pagan practice of the majority when he assumed power. Estimating the exact number of Christians in the empire is notoriously difficult and different historians have given very different numbers, but Fox puts Rome as the most Christian city in the empire at the time of Constantine’s conversion with around 5% of the population Christian. This number is based on the bishop of Rome’s own report of the number of widows supported by the church, and so can be considered fairly accurate. Elsewhere we have to guess, but still there’s no grounds to think that it was much higher in other cities. Furthermore, Christian and pagan sources alike agree that Christianity was mostly confined to the cities, with little or no penetration to the countryside.

So the end result of three hundred years of mission was this: one twentieth of the population converted in the most Christian city, much less elsewhere, and hardly any in the villages. This is not an overwhelming evangelistic success–but of course, we would like to think that there were, nonetheless, moments of significant breakthrough. What had happened to the crowds converted through the miracles of the Apostles and the other saints of that era? Fox spends some time discussing this, and most of the stories he simply discounts as legendary. I don’t necessary agree with this assessment, or at least I have no attachment to the scepticism he uses to discount such accounts. However, even the stories themselves illustrate the relative sizes of the Christian congregations: sixty converts are reported as momentous growth in a story from the third century. If the average Christian congregation was thirty to one hundred souls, as Fox estimates, then the addition of sixty in one miraculous event would be hugely significant. At the same time, the conversion of sixty pagans would hardly be noticed in the broader society.

However, the most important factor leading to the relative weakness of Christian communities in the post-apostolic age was the simple fact that there was no ongoing Christian mission following the death of St. Paul. The deliberate, energetic effort to attract converts was simply unknown in the post-Apostolic church. This is important enough and shocking enough that it needs to be restated: deliberate public evangelism was simply not a part of Christian practice between the death of St. Paul and the conversion of Constantine. The early church was not “evangelistic”, as we understand the term today. By this I mean that there was no practice of public preaching, no commissioned Christian missionaries, no efforts to bring non-believers into the early Church’s liturgies, and no attempts to motivate the laity for converting their neighbors. In fact, in some ways the early Church erected significant barriers to those wishing to join the Church, barriers that were only lowered after the conversion of Constantine.

The first of these barriers was language. There was no effort to translate the Gospels and other Christian writings into local languages: they were written in Greek and translated into Latin and perhaps Syriac at an early date, but these were the prestige languages of the Roman empire. The multitude of “dialects” used in the countryside and provinces were never to see translation of the Scriptures or liturgies, and this was a significant obstacle to the spread of Christianity out of urban areas or outside of the borders of the Roman Empire.

The most significant barrier, however, was the long catechumenate. The Church required at least three years of preparation before adult proselytes were admitted to baptism, during which time they were not only barred from the Eucharist but often literally expelled from the liturgy after the reading of the Gospel, when the preparation of the Eucharist began. The purpose of this catechumenate was not just to instruct proselytes in Christian doctrine, but to initiate them into the Christian moral lifestyle and ensure that they were willing to live by the strictures of the Christian community. We don’t have explicit information about how this affected proselyte’s ability to enter the Church or what percentage of catechumens actually received baptism, but in any case this contrasts with the modern evangelical tendency to add people to the Church as quickly as possible.

These astounding characteristics pose several important questions for those of us living in an age accustomed to the notion of explicit evangelism. What was the early church doing, if not evangelizing? Why didn’t they evangelize, and how did they understand the Great Commission? How did they grow without evangelism? And most importantly, what does this imply for us? I’ll talk about each of these individually.

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What The Early Church Did

Theology

(Part III. Introduction is here.)

What was the early church doing, if not evangelizing? The short answer is: trying to stay alive. This was a non-trivial task, and not just because of persecution. As difficult as persecution was, through most of the first three centuries of Christendom persecution was local and sporadic. No, the main questions and difficulties that the early church faced were questions of authority, moral order, and right practice. Very early on the apostolic line of bishops became the primary source of authority in the church, but this invited abuses of episcopal power and struggles for legitimacy. (Persecution could, ironically, increase this problem, because martyrs and confessors sometimes tried to undermine the bishop’s authority.) The bishops then had to deal with church bodies that were often unruly and immoral (a problem that begins in the New Testament), and which suffered from a serious split between ordinary laity and the handful of dedicated perfectionists. This split was a symptom of the third difficulty: determining what was right Christian practice, what was expected of all Christians, and what overachievers could legitimately aspire to. Was celibacy required of all serious Christians, or could it be reserved as the province of only a few? What sort of fasts were required? What was to be done with Christians who lapsed during persecutions? Could Christians who fell into serious sin after baptism be forgiven?

These were hardly settled issues in the post-Apostolic age, and the internal debate and conflict arising from these issues occupy most Christian writers from that period. At the least, the bishops and presbyters that we know of seem to have had their hands full controlling their flocks without worring about running after those outside. In the epistles and narratives from that era, there is much concern for right doctrine and proper living, but no exhortation to evangelism. In fact, a few moments’ reflection reveals that the same is true of the New Testament. Paul, the consummate missionary, has hardly a word suggesting that his converts should continue his work. He is concerned that they live and believe rightly, but he is not concerned that they continue to be missionaries in the same sense that he was. It appears to be that the missionary calling was understood as a special apostolic calling–which leads to the next point.

Why didn’t the early church evangelize and how did they understand the Great Commission? As I just said, there were plenty of other things keeping the early Church busy. However, it’s not as if the early Church held a conscious ideal of evangelism but never got around to it. Rather, they seemed to view the missionary calling as unique to the Apostles and therefore completed or obsolete in the post-Apostolic age.

Fox doesn’t much address this question, but the shape of the answer I’ve given is clear from the writings of the ante-Nicene Church Fathers and even from the New Testament itself. St. Paul wrote that he had “fulfilled the ministry of the Gospel” from Jerusalem to Illyricum (Ro. 15:19-21) and needed to move further west–and this at a time when the Church was limited to a handful of congregations in the major cities. St. Irenaeus, living in the second century, states in Against Heresies that the Apostles had proclaimed the true Gospel “everywhere”. A common patristic argument was that the Eucharist was celebrated from the East to the West, fulfilling the Old Testament prophecy of Malachi 1:11. Each of these suggests a common idea: first, that the Apostles alone had been charged with the Great Commission, and second, that they had fulfilled it by spreading the Church throughout the Roman Empire during their own lifetimes. Subsequently, there was nothing left to do: there were some Christians in every corner of the Empire, and the Eucharist was celebrated by all of them. Subsequent growth was good, but it did not carry the urgency of a dominical command. This was also in accord with the New Testament writings, which abounded in moral and doctrinal exhortations but had very little to say about evangelism.

How did they grow without evangelism? Because the early Church did grow, despite the negative comments I’ve made above. And this may be the most surprising thing of all: the Church continued to grow without the public preaching and deliberate evangelization that characterized the apostolic age and our own age. How did this happen?

If the early Church took anything to heart, it was Peter’s admonition to “be always ready to explain the hope that is in you.” This is one of the only Pauline exhortations that can be construed as evangelistic, and it’s the one that we see most consistently applied in the ante-Nicene age. There were numerous Christian apologiae published during this era, the most famous being those of Justin Martyr and Origen. These were works that attempted to defend Christian doctrine and practice using the language and arguments of Greek philosophy, and they appear to have been popular among Christians from the time of their composition. It’s unclear how much impact they had on their pagan readers–Fox says that they were appreciated by Christians much more than the pagans they were ostensibly written for–but there were at least occasional conversions through these. St. Gregory, for example, was a well-off young intellectual when he was converted through his contact with Origen.

More common than these rarefied intellectual conversions were people who were converted through simple personal contact with Christians. Fox says that marriage was a major reason for conversion–a situation that persists into our own day. Many others converted out of admiration for the Christians’ moral lifestyle, which was starkly different from the surrounding culture and which demanded abstinence from all sorts of things (like publicly offered meat and gladitorial games) that were part of the fabric of everyday pagan life. Justin Martyr makes this peculiar Christian lifestyle a major part of his apologetic defense of Christianity. We can see a general improvement of attitudes towards the Christian people from the early second century when the crowds demanded Polycarp’s death to the late third century when the pagan populace often resisted enforcement of the Emperor’s decrees of persecution. There was one notable instance of Christians being used to bring bread to the people of a besieged city, and many instances of reciprocation in which pagans helped their Christian neighbors to hide from persecution. By this time Christians could be found at all levels of society, and the most pagans seemed to regard them as peculiar but benevolent. There were still outbursts of popular persecution, usually precipitated by natural disasters attributed to the gods’ anger at those who had forsaken traditional pagan worship. Goodwill towards Christians was not universal. Nonetheless, through the decades the Church had distinguished itself as mostly upright, if peculiar, and in this environment it’s not surprising to find a small but steady stream of conversions. This small, steady stream appears to have been the major source of Christian growth in the early centuries of the Church.

The other source of conversions were the occasional extraordinary contacts impressions that Christian martyrs or saints occasionally made. We have inherited many stories of people converted at seeing the way that Christian martyrs and comported themselves, from the centurion at the Cross to the king of Armenia converted through St. Gregory’s endurance in the pit. Some of these stories may be exaggerated, but their central truthfulness can hardly be doubted. Likewise, we must admit the veracity of the miracles attributed to many old saints that attracted converts wherever they went. These things come closest to being evangelical activities of anything in the post-Apostolic church. However, even here we should realize that the saints and martyrs did not do these things for the purpose of attracting converts, but simply as an expression of faithfulness. Conversion of pagans was a side-effect of the Church being what it was.

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Missions After Constantine

Theology

(Part IV. Introduction is here.)

The missionary as we understand him disappeared with the death of the apostles, and did not reappear until after the conversion of Constantine and the establishment of Christianity. The practical reasons for this have been discussed above: the Church had few human or monetary resources to spare for missions during the years of its persecution and incubation. Constantine’s conversion solved the financial issue, but the doctrinal issue remained: if the Great Commission was the province of the Apostles, there was no doctrinal impetus for missionary activity. This was solved by the development of the episcopate: by the time of the third century, it had become commonplace to see the bishop as the inheritor of apostolic authority and prerogative; conversely, the bishop might take up the apostolic duty of bringing the Gospel to new areas outside of the Roman Empire or converting the barbarians tribes wreaking destruction throughout the Empire. Thus, all of our credible sources of Christian missions date from the post-Constantinian era, and almost all missionary saints were bishops. A third, political motive also encouraged missions after Constantine: as the Empire began to fracture, the Church was the major civilizing force in Europe and abroad, and spreading Christianity was an important way to increase unity and pacify formerly warlike tribes. This shows how deeply indebted our modern concept of missions is to Constantine.

I say this not to discredit missions but to vindicate Constantine. The commissioned, supported missionary only existed after Constantine gave the church affluence, and early missions owe much to the political and theological milieu of that era. All subsequent Christians missions until modern times depended on an affluent, established church that had resources to spare sending clerics and money to pagan lands. Furthermore, the evangelical Protestant trope that all Christians should be missionaries–now accepted to some degree in Catholic and Orthodox churches as well–depends on a double theological move: first the elevation of bishops to apostolic status, then the use of the “universal priesthood of believers” to elevate the laity to episcopal status. None of this was possible before Constantine. The conversion of Constantine is without a doubt the most fortuitous event for Christian evangelism in the entire history of Church.

All of which is rather ironic, because the Church in the West no longer lives in Constantinian Christendom. We have entered a post-Christian age, in which the church has been disestablished and no longer controls public discource or public funds, and when less and less of the population professes any form of the Christian faith. It’s clear, therefore, that new missions strategies are necessary to effectively present the Gospel to our own culture, and calls for such a strategy can be heard from all corners of the Church. For the most part, the suggestions offered have been variations on the Constantinian missionary model discussed above: either send dedicated missionaries to the West, or find ways to make ordinary Christians into missionaries. These strategies have a certain amount of success, especially because the Church still has large residual affluence and cultural weight. They should not be abandoned, and neither should traditional missions into countries with minimal Christian presence cease. However, there are several ways in which classical Christian missions, along with our understanding of the Church, may adapt to learn from the example of the pre-Constantinian church.

Typical evangelistic training and efforts in this culture tend to work with apologetics and morality. First intellectual barriers to conversion are removed, then Christ is presented as an atonement for personal moral failures. However, neither of these was very important for the early Church’s growth. The Christian apologists were intellectually important but practically irrelevant to most Christians and converts, and the moral appeal was lost on Greek audiences that had no understanding of “sin” in the Christian sense. Today, things are much the same. A spirited defense of Christian truth-claims is likely to be meet with a shrug, and the offer of forgiveness of sins will hardly be comprehended. In the growing postmodern culture, exclusive doctrinal claims are not so much opposed as simply ignored. Many missiologists attempt to remedy this with “pre-evangelism” that tries to restore the latent Christian assumptions in our culture to make hearers more receptive to the Christian message–a tactic which works only as long as our Christian past remains relatively fresh in memory. There was no such option for the early Church.

The early church managed to grow without the techniques we associate with evangelism because it lived as a distinctive community within the pagan culture and allowed the community to be its own apologetic. This sounds very lofty, but it’s attested by the earliest apologetics and the Christian converts that we know of. The small, steady stream of converts described above appears to have consisted mostly of people attracted in this sense: not convinced by the weight of evidence or seeking release from sins, but drawn and convicted by the uniqueness of the Christian community. This presumes, of course, that the Church lives as an identifiable people with a peculiar lifestyle. In this sense, there is something to be said for the separatist programmes of the Amish or other fundamentalist sects in the U.S., whose moral and cultural demands put them visibly at odds with the larger culture. The visible peculiarity of early Christians was a major source of converts, and it can be so again if the Church can put it into practice. Conversely, Christian groups that try to maintain “relevance” to the broader culture may eventually become irrelevant, as outsiders will be oblivious to the message and indifferent to the sameness of its trappings. Those churches that try hardest to assimilate to the culture will risk ultimately ceasing to be Christian–a fate already seen in the liberal mainline churches and some of the largest evangelical churches.

Therefore, the challenge for those churches that consider themselves catholic will be to form an identity as a peculiar people in a hostile culture, but without retreating into the sectarian and isolationist extremes of fundamentalism. This will be difficult, because the catholic churches are used to holding a position of influence in the culture–but the resources to do so are already present in the great Christian tradition. They are, indeed, present in the writings of the martyrs and apologists of the early Church, and in the witnesses who have served God under persecution in our own day. Their courage and orthodoxy should encourage us who will be tempted to worship at the altars of Mammon and Media–gods just as pervasive and just as wicked as Apollo and Athena of old. We must also remember the world in which they lived and not shrink back from inhabiting a similar world. The Church of the future may be numerically small and culturally insignificant. It may also be an evangelistic failure–that is, a Church in which people dribble in in ones and twos rather than coming in floods. But as long as it is faithful, it will still be the Church.

This may sound like acquiescence to failure. If only a wealthy, powerful, and numerically strong church is “successful”, then the charge is true. However, I do not recognize that picture of success. The early church was poor, weak, and numerically marginal. But it still preached the Gospel in its liturgy and lived the Gospel in its community, and the Holy Spirit still added to its number. The Constantinian project of state- and culturally-supported Christianity may have failed. But the gates of Hell will not prevail against the Church.

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