HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE?
Part 10
THE RISE OF CHRISTIANITY
“The people of the West have discovered history. Perhaps this has been their greatest discovery. With their farseeing periscopes they have pulled the heavenly bodies so close that they had to give up their secrets. They have split the atom into its basic components. They have penetrated the mysterious forces that keep the universe together. All those discoveries were magnificent, but the most important one of all is that the human race discovered history. It is this that has changed its own existence and has given life on earth a new, glorious perspective.”
That’s how Johan Herman Bavinck starts his eagerly awaited book with the telling title of Between Beginning and End: A Radical Kingdom Vision, soon to be published by Eerdmans, Grand Rapids.
Thanks to history which spawned a book with the title of The Rise of CHRISTIANITY we have an idea why people chose the Christian Way. It has given us a historical perspective on happenings almost 2000 years ago. In it Rodney Stark, the author, professor of sociology and comparative religion at the University of Washington, explained how and why early Christianity was so successful. Now that we experience the exact opposite – church closings, denominations struggling with diminishing numbers, confusion in the ministerial ranks – it makes sense to find out how a tiny and obscure messianic movement from the edge of the Roman Empire managed to dislodge classical paganism and become the dominant faith of Western civilization. It may even tell us how to reverse the downward trend.
In my series of How should we then live, The Rise of Christianity will be followed by The Fall of Christianity. That makes sense: nothing rises forever, eventually there is a fall. It is my opinion that, given the current ecclesiastical situation, one that is, I think, beyond reform – some tinkering here and there will not help- the fall of Christianity is not only inevitable but even necessary to pave the way for the New Creation where the Bible and the Church are no longer relevant: more about that in Part 11. Don’t be alarmed: there is a historical precedent for such radical change.
There’s no doubt that the Christian movement has had a phenomenal growth. The author consulted various sources and concluded that the number of Christians grew 40 percent per decade, from a mere 1,000 in the year 40 A.D. to 1,500 10 years later, to 7,500 at the turn of the year 100, to more than 200,000 a century later, increasing five-fold to more than 1,000,000 by the year 250, numbering 6,300,000 in the year 300 and almost 34 million in the year 350 when almost half of the then world population was nominally Christian. It helped that Emperor Constantine himself was favourably inclined toward the new movement.
Who became Christians?
For most of the 20th century historians and sociologists were of the opinion that, when the Way was at its infancy, Christianity was a movement of the dispossessed – a refuge for Rome’s slaves and impoverished masses. They based this on 1Cor. 1:26-28 where Paul writes that there were not many of the wise, mighty and noble. But there were some, and those who joined were quite prominent. In the church of Corinth was Erastus, ‘the city treasurer’. Then cities were like states. In other words he was the minister of finance, not a mean position. Pomponia Graecina in Rome was a woman of the senatorial class. Already Jesus, in his wanderings, attracted high-class women whose husbands occupied prominent positions in the land. Far from being a socially depressed group, some now argue that the lower classes were disproportionally under –represented in the early church. To me that make sense. Here’s why.
Human nature has not changed all that much in the last 2000 years. The Romans pacified the masses through games and food handouts. Today the majority of people, thanks mostly to TV, too have become more passive and no longer open to persuasion. Then as now members of new religions –like Christianity- were almost always members of the more privileged classes. Two thousand years ago what Christianity taught was certainly totally different: love your enemy, no adultery, don’t get rid of unwanted girl babies, don’t divorce, don’t bear arms, all principles completely out of line with the then reigning philosophy.
It is obvious that people don’t switch allegiance to a new faith if they are happy where they are: for many Christianity offered a viable alternative. Is that true for today as well? That’s next week’s topic.
Since Christianity then promoted pacifism – the Jews too refused to bear arms – there was a risk of persecution, especially since the new converts rejected emperor worship. Yet even the most brutal persecution of Christians was haphazard and limited, and the state ignored thousands of persons who openly professed the new religion. The ones most vulnerable here were the leaders who when imprisoned hoped and prayed to rely on their friends and relatives in high places – often within the imperial family- to use their influence to obtain pardon.
Another myth was that the mission of the apostles among the Jews was a failure. That was true among the very orthodox section. However, a large part of the Jews in the diaspora had become Hellenized, the equivalent of being secular. Their number was quite large: there were many millions of Jews spread around the then known world, perhaps as high ten percent of the world population of some 60 million.
Rodney Stark posed three propositions:
- New religious movements mainly draw their converts from the ranks of the religiously inactive and discontented, and those affiliated with the most accommodated (worldly) religious communities.
- People are more willing to adopt a new religion to the extent that it retains cultural continuity with the conventional religion with which they are already familiar.
- Social movements grow much faster when they spread through preexisting networks.
Based on these three theses he concluded that Christianity offered twice as much cultural continuity to the Hellenized Jews as to Gentiles, with the result that a lot of Jews accepted Jesus as the Messiah. Luke, the author of the bible book Romans, relates how Paul, arriving at a new city, always first made his way to the local synagogue.
Epidemics and Conversion
In his 1200 page CHRISTIANITY the First Three Thousand Years Diarmaid MacCulloch does not mention epidemics. However, he does point out that “What really offended (the non-Christians) was: Christian secretiveness and obstinate separation into their own world…… Yet the separateness and dogmatism of the early Christians were as much strengths as weaknesses; they produced a continuing stream of converts. This inward-looking community could attract people seeking certainty and comfort, not least in a physical sense. Christians looked after their poor – that was after all one of the main duties.”
Please note: Christians then formed their own communities.
Rodney Stark cites a different cause, one which proved even more successful, but came at a high personal price. In the year 165, when there were approximately 150,000 Christians in the Roman Empire, a smallpox epidemic, lasting for 15 years, killed from a quarter to a third of the empire’s population, including the then emperor Marcus Aurelius. At the first onset of the disease the heathen pushed the sufferers away and fled from their dearest, throwing them on the roads before they were dead and treated unburied corpses as dirt. The Christians, on the other hand, showed their values of love and charity, nursed the ill back to health, often at the expense of their own life. All this resulted in substantially higher rates of survival, while their unstinted service to the ill and afflicted drew in immense number of converts. Claims the author: “Had classical society not been disrupted and demoralized by these catastrophes, Christianity might never have become so dominant a faith.”
Johan Herman Bavinck commented on the early days of Christianity. He writes: “With a degree of nostalgia do we remember how in the ancient church baptism was experienced as real renewal. Then coming out of a pagan culture and the enchantments that life there offered, people would hesitantly approach the cross of Jesus Christ, where they would gradually being taken in by his word which displayed a new life in which only Christ was Lord and King. When then, at last, such persons, drawn from darkness, experienced baptism, a new world would open for them. That meant that they would often be shunned by their old friends, perhaps even their own parents, but they were received in a new circle, the communion of Christ and they would stand with that congregation in the life-connection of the risen Saviour. In the most perfect sense that was real renewal as the old was indeed a matter of the past, and look, it now all was new! In its ultimate sense the fact of baptism can only be compared with the Flood that once had consumed the ancient world, of which baptism, literally, was the symbol. Through that global baptism an old world, doomed to demise, drowned forever, and a new world arose, a world filled with God’s precious promises. Baptism meant forsaken the world and becoming a new person for the sake of Christ. It was submerging in Christ and again rising up in him. Baptism was the entrance to a new world, a new heaven and a new earth. It was custom at one time to assume a new name to show once and for all that the old person was dead and a new one was born in Christ. That is how radically people experienced the transition from the old to the new, from Adam to Christ, “The old has gone, the new has come!” (2 Cor. 5:17.)
This is an aspect Rodney Stark did not mention. Leaving the pagan Roman world and adopting the Christian way, meant a complete re-orientation. Conversion then was total. Just imagine the re-adjustment. Paganism too required all, as the Emperor was God, not unlike now when Capitalism is all-consuming. Allegiance to the Roman Ruler was mandatory. Festivals involved total allegiance. Converting to Christianity meant that everything was up for change: family relations, eating habits, living arrangements, living in new Christian communities. Yet these new converts still had to go out into the world, a world that lived under the full control of the evil one. They were still surrounded by secular life as it played out in the masses, in their own environment. Their work or job situation was in peril as well. Could they still make a living, now that they were estranged from neighbours and family?
A long time ago, when I was in business to appraise properties, I was asked by a business owner whether I was ‘born again.’ To me it was an embarrassing question because I knew that what he meant with ‘born again’ and what I understood it to be was totally different. For him it was enough if I answered in the affirmative. How could I explain to him that it involved much more than speaking in tongues and declaring Jesus as my Saviour? Yet today having the name of ‘Christian’ means very little: most people call themselves that way. For some it means attending religious schools and attending church. For most it may not even mean attending a service, something which is happening in ever decreasing numbers. Culturally there really is no difference between ‘Christians’ and non-Christians: we all drive cars, we all hope that the economy will grow, even though it means more pollution. We all hope to go to heaven, even though the Bible never mentions that. For many it means that the correct way to organize a church is along hierarchical lines, with priests, bishops, cardinals, usually excluding women.
In the old world, with The Rise of Christianity, the new converts were faced with totally different circumstances. Christians then and now are called to life, and that to the fullest. This week I was really struck by Matthew 7: 13-14: “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction (to me this suggests the Capitalistic way), and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” What could that mean?
I will probe that question next week in Part Eleven: The Fall of Christianity.