Chapters In Church History

CHAPTER ONE

The Church and the Roman World

GO YE therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.

The first chapter in Church history begins with the divine commission of the Lord to His disciples that closes St. Matthew’s Gospel. As the New Testament age comes to an end, the story moves out from the early years of the Christian Church, as told in the Acts of the Apostles, into the wider scene of the ancient Roman world. With the beginning of the second century it has been carried beyond the historical records of the New Testament.¹

Already the New Testament has witnessed the mighty acts of God that brought the New Israel of the Christian Church into being among the disciples of Jesus. Already the Fellowship has been aroused by its divine commission to bring the redeeming power of Christ into the lives of all men. Conscious of its worldwide mission, Christianity has broken out of the narrow confines of Old Israel. The Gentile mission has gone forth, empowered by the passionate conviction, as St. Paul expressed it, that there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male or female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. Already we have had our first glimpse into the life of the early Christian communities. We have seen the extraordinary power of the Holy Spirit at work in their fellowship. We turn now to the events of the next two centuries in the life of the Church.

Before us is the record of the expansion of the Church, its early organization and development, its discovery in the terms of Christian theology of what the mighty acts of God in Christ mean to mankind. Here, too, is the heroic story of the struggle between the Church and the Roman Empire, and the ultimate triumph of Christianity in the ancient world.

THE FULNESS OF TIME

IN A FAMOUS passage in the Epistle to the Galatians St. Paul used an unforgettable phrase to describe the moment in history when the Christian revelation was given to men: When the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth His Son. . . . St. Paul is asserting that God acted to redeem His creation when the world was ready. Christ came in a fulness of time.

Christians have always believed that in addition to the preparation that God wrought in the history and religion of Israel, there was a unique readiness for the Gospel in the ancient world itself. The Gentile mission met with amazing success. All over the Mediterranean basin, St. Paul and the other Christian missionaries found a ready response to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Little communities of Christians sprang up in the chief cities of the empire—Antioch, Alexandria, Ephesus, Rome, Carthage—and in hundreds of smaller towns. Each one became a center of evangelistic activity for the surrounding area.

This triumph of Christianity was due in the end to the missionary outreach of those who knew the presence of Christ in their fellowship, and to the moral splendor of their lives. But the spiritual strength of Christianity poured into a world which was uniquely ready, even hungry for a Gospel of redemption. First-century life was spiritually restless. Religious, cultural, and political conditions in the Roman world all pointed toward a divine over-ruling of history to serve the purposes of God in the proclamation of His Gospel.

THE ROMAN POLITICAL WORLD

As ST. PAUL and St. Barnabas sailed from Cyprus on their first missionary journey, the political power of imperial Rome was entering its final phase.² The circle of Mediterranean lands had long been under Roman rule. Only a few years before the death of Christ the final thrust of Roman power to the north and to the east had begun. Now as the apostles set out, the conquest is nearly complete. Roman soldiers are subduing Britain in the northwest; Roman governors are extending their authority in Syria and the other states in the east.

From the Scottish border, down the Rhine-Danube line, out to the banks of the Euphrates, the fortresses of the legions keep watch over the peace and security of Caesar’s dominions. Beyond these outposts lie the trackless forests and wild steppes of central and eastern Europe, the country of the savage Germanic and Slavic tribes. As yet these frontiers are quiet. It will be two centuries before migrating hordes of barbarians begin to make their presence felt upon the walls that enclose the civilization of the ancient world.

Christian missionaries went out into a civilization of one-world. Here was the first element of readiness: a situation in which men could travel speedily and safely over a vast network of roads and waterways that linked town with town all the way from Jerusalem to London, from Gibraltar to the shores of the Black Sea. Not until modern times did Europe and the Near East know anything approaching the ease of travel and communication established by political power of imperial Rome. The way was cleared for the apostolic missionaries.

THE GRAECO-ROMAN CULTURAL WORLD

IF ROMAN power provided the political unity, policed the roads, and kept the peace, what spread over the empire by these means was largely Greek. A thin veneer of Greek culture extended over all the lands bordering the Mediterranean Sea. When a man traveled from Spain to Alexandria, or from Milan to Antioch, he moved everywhere in the familiar atmosphere of Hellenistic culture. The modern world again is growing accustomed to the unifying force of a common culture. For example, the Eskimo in Alaska, the Filipino in the Pacific, or the Brazilian in South America drives a Ford, smokes a Lucky Strike, and looks at movies made in Hollywood. He speaks of democracy. It is Americanism which has influenced him. So it was with Hellenism in the ancient world. Though Greek influences were more in the realm of ideas than of business or politics, it was this kind of a situation that existed in the Roman Empire.

The thin veneer of Hellenistic culture was just deep enough to provide the Christian missionaries with two invaluable aids: a common language and a common set of ideas.

Whatever his native tongue, nearly everyone in the Mediterranean world had a smattering of the simple Greek into which the language of classical Greece had developed. It was the common speech of the empire. As such it was not only the language in which the New Testament was written, but also the tongue in which the Gospel of Jesus Christ was proclaimed. Christian missionaries everywhere in the apostolic age could make their language understood, and it seemed to them that in this fulness of time God had overruled the confusion of tongues dividing men for centuries. As He had once confounded the language of those who sought to reach heaven by the Tower of Babel, so now He had prepared the way for those who would know Him in Jesus Christ.

Furthermore, the spread of a common set of ideas, or ways in which men thought, was of immense assistance to the apostles. How important this was is obvious. We know today that one does not preach the Gospel in precisely the same way to a New York congregation, the folk of a Chinese village, or a band of African savages in the hinterland of Liberia. In each case there are different cultures in the background that shape men’s understanding and thinking. This cultural background sharply affects the way in which the Christian message is made real and compelling to people. But the task of the first-century missionary was providentially simplified. Everywhere men and women heard and understood the Good News of their redemption in Christ in the same patterns of thought.

THE PREPARATION IN THE SYNAGOGUES

STILL another element in the world of ideas played its part in this unique readiness for the Gospel. Judaism had already marked out a path around the Mediterranean ahead of Christianity. Dispersed through the centers of the empire were colonies of Jewish merchants and traders, despised by the Romans, yet perhaps for that very reason suffered to maintain their community life and their synagogues with little interference. The religion of these Jews had a strong attraction for the more serious-minded pagans. Jewish monotheistic convictions and high moral standards won respect from earnest men in a day of spiritual decay and moral decline. The strong personal conviction of the Jew that God was concerned with human events and human history appealed to those who could find no ultimate principle of meaning in pagan life. Indeed, the very antiquity of the Jewish faith gave it authority in a world that placed a high value upon things ancient.

As a result, large numbers of Gentiles frequented the Jewish schools and were drawn to the fringes of the synagogues. They may not have been converted in great numbers, but they came to know something of the religion of Israel. They met the Old Testament in its Greek version, absorbing its ethical ideals, catching a glimpse of its hope for the coming of a Messiah. To such Gentiles the Christian proclamation came with great force. The Gospel of a New Covenant, the message of the fulfillment of the Old Testament hope in Jesus the Messiah, fell upon prepared ground in their hearts. It is not surprising that the first Gentile converts to Christianity were those made ready by the missionary spirit of Judaism itself. Even in the synagogues of the dispersed Jews, God’s preparation in Old Israel was manifest.

These external conditions—the political unity of the ancient world with its ease of travel and communication, the cultural unity that provided a common language and familiar patterns of thought everywhere, the preparation made by the Jews dispersed throughout the empire—gave force to the Christian conviction that there was a unique readiness for the Gospel at this moment in human history. But equally important was the religious atmosphere of the empire. The spiritual restlessness of the ancient world, too, was part of the fulness of time.

RELIGIOUS PAGANISM

MEN today think of paganism as meaning without religion. Much of the paganism of the modern world is irreligious, but this was not the case in the world in which the Early Church found itself. Ancient paganism was religious paganism. One of the most remarkable features of Graeco-Roman life was the religious ferment that pervaded it. People sometimes say of the first century that by this time the gods of Olympus were dead. It would be more accurate to remark that they had merely once again changed their shapes. No longer appearing, as in the old mythology, to take their capricious pleasures in the world of men, yet the old gods still symbolized the mysterious supernatural forces beyond men’s control or understanding.

Moreover, the little domestic deities, the lares and penates of the household, were still the protecting spirits of the family, field, and market place. The Emperor Augustus, seeking to halt the moral decay in Rome’s civic and social life, had striven valiantly to recall men to the sturdy virtues of the ancient Roman religion of hearth and harvest deities. He had failed, largely because the primitive religion of the old Roman city-state in the days of the Republic had little appeal to the hordes of different peoples in the immense imperial world. It could hardly serve as an effective bond of unity, for example, between Caesar’s Asiatic subjects, inheritors of a thousand years of culture and civilization, and the savage tribesmen of the German forests or the British fens who were the newest Roman provincials.

Thus the religious beliefs and observances of a bygone day exercised little real power in men’s hearts. Those few who clung to the old-fashioned virtues found their strength in the ethical ideals of the Stoic philosophers; yet Stoicism, like nearly all that remained of the ancient philosophies, was an evangel for only the highly educated minority. The masses of people in the vast empire, craving escape from the frustrations of life, sought to satisfy their spiritual hunger in the new mystery religions. These, at least, spoke a message of personal salvation.

The real religious excitement of the pagan world centered in those cults called collectively mystery religions. As a result of Rome’s conquest of the remains of the empire of Alexander the Great in the Near East, the exotic religious movements of the Orient drifted westwards. From Greece, Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor came these salvation-cults, promising their adherents immortality of some kind, and providing an emotional outlet for thousands of people.

There was a rough similarity among these Eastern religions. In most of them salvation was portrayed in the death and rebirth of a legendary semi-divine hero or saviour-god. The central rite of the mystery was the symbolic initiation of the believer into the immortality conferred upon him by the divine deliverer. Nearly all the mysteries were cults of emotional ecstasy. Some were harmless enough, though with generally little ethical content. Others were so openly erotic that even the tolerant imperial authorities refused to countenance them. But none made exclusive claims upon their adherents. Men were free to seek all the consolations that the religious world offered.

This spiritual hunger of the ancient world was fertile soil upon which the seeds of Christianity could be sown. The climate of religious restlessness was itself part of that fulness of time in which the Christian revelation was given. Men were searching for a Gospel of redemption.

Christianity came into little open conflict with these manifestations of pagan religion. It is true that from time to time high-minded pagans sought to revive the ancient philosophies as ways of life, but their limited appeal seldom made them a serious barrier to the spread of the Gospel. In fact, once men trained in the philosophy of antiquity became converted in numbers to the Christian Church, Greek philosophic thought itself was interpreted as a special kind of preparation for the ultimate truth that Christ revealed.

The oriental religious ideas of the mystery cults, on the other hand, were often a menace to the integrity of the Christian faith. The danger did not arise when the Church stood opposed to the array of pagan cults, but rather when men sought to import the ideas behind these cults into Christian thinking. This was the story of the great theological crisis in the Early Church. But before we look at the conflict of doctrine which threatened Christianity, let us turn to the more immediate struggle into which the Church was thrust: the clash with the imperial Roman government.

CHRIST OR CAESAR?

THE first clash of loyalties came to the early Christians when they were confronted with the demands of the final religion in the Roman world, the official State Cult. The one thing which the diverse peoples of the empire had in common was their subjection to the rule of the Caesars. The eagles of the legions cast a long shadow from Scotland to Persia. A single universal political allegiance marked this one-world.

Seeking to bolster that allegiance with a kind of divine sanction, the Emperor Augustus and his successors gave it religious expression in the imperial State Cult. Though little more than a religion of civil obedience, it demanded that men give their highest loyalty to the State and all for which it stood. The totalitarian state religion was a kind of supercult, to be added to whatever tribal or personal religion a man might have. The design was to provide throughout the empire a bond of spiritual unity, knitting together the various peoples in their highest allegiance. The final altar of the pagan world was this altar of Roma and her glory.

The cult of the state naturally centered in the person of the Emperor. He was the living symbol of the protection, peace, and prosperity which the state brought to its citizens, the gifts, so to speak, of the divine Roma. This was not emperor worship in the sense that the Caesars were supernatural beings, but it was plainly the worship of the divinity of the state, embodied in its imperial leader.

Here is the tragic situation that has been repeated again and again in the history of mankind: the civic life of a society receiving the idolatrous loyalty of its own citizenry. Here is man making an idol out of the works of his own hands, turning to worship the social and political order that he has built.

The fall of all the great civilizations of the past five thousand years has been presaged by this idolatry. Already it was sapping the spiritual energies of the classical world. When man’s own created order of things demands of him the allegiance he can give only to God, then the forces of self-destruction are at work in his civilization. The Roman Empire was already dying. Barbarian invasions did not bring about the decline of Rome. The root cause of decay was that spiritual desolation in which the ancient world could no longer resist man’s idolatry of man. The empire in the end worshipped itself to death. Those who have seen this demonic principle again at work are increasingly aware that the last altars of ancient Rome speak with grim warning to the modern world.

But across the centuries the voice of Christian courage speaks with equal clarity. The challenge came to the Church before the first century was ended: Christ or Caesar? Which receives man’s primary allegiance? Christians perceived that within the State Cult the real enemy of man lurked. The deepest spiritual temptation is not the simple idolatry of ignorance or superstition, but the ultimate idolatry of human pride. The pagan world, aroused to fury by the fearless and stubborn refusal of Christians to participate in the State Cult, poured abuse and scorn upon a people whose watchword was Thou shalt have none other gods but me. The charges leveled against the Christians were not what are called religious. They were rather those of a social and political order that saw in Christianity a dangerous and subversive force. The charges were those of disloyalty, lack of patriotism, and denial of civic obligations.

THE CHURCH OF THE MARTYRS

THE persecution of Christians was the inevitable result of this clash of loyalties. The Church poured out its courageous challenge to the empire in the blood of the martyrs.

Never was this more bravely done than by St. Polycarp, aged Bishop of Smyrna, and grand old man of the Early Church. Dragged before the proconsul in the year 155, Polycarp bore with dignity the taunts and jeers of the mob in the crowded stadium. Before him stood the altar of Roma; a pinch of incense dropped in the flame would suffice. The magistrate was not unkind. Remember your age, he said. Swear by the divinity of Caesar. Others urged the old man. "What harm is there in saying Lord Caesar . . . swear by him . . . curse this Christ."

Polycarp looked at them steadfastly. Eighty and six years have I served Him and He has done me no wrong. How then can I blaspheme my King who saved me? And they led him away, like the thousands before and after him who were tortured and burned, stoned by the mobs, torn apart by the wild beasts of the arena, or crucified in imitation of the Lord for whom they died.

We need not trace the persecutions in detail. The first outbreak occurred in Rome when the Emperor Nero sought to lay the blame for the devastating fire of 64 A.D. upon the Christian groups of the city. The last persecution closed in the year 311 when the imperial Edict of Toleration acknowledged that Christianity had captured the empire.

In the two hundred and fifty intervening years Christians lived under an ever-present shadow of death. There were moments, even years of respite in one locality or another, but no Christian for six generations was entirely free from the threat of discovery and arrest. Crime need not be alleged against him; membership in the Christian Ecclesia was enough. Non licet esse vos was the decree: It is not lawful for you to exist!

The early persecutions were local in character, as often the work of unruly mobs as of the magistrates. Nero’s persecution, in which St. Peter and St. Paul were martyred, was confined to the capital city, while the outbreak of 175-180 A.D., during the reign of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, was chiefly felt in Gaul, Asia Minor, and Rome. Similarly, the great persecution of 202 A.D. took the lives of hundreds of Christians, but its heaviest force was exerted in the localities of Egypt and North Africa.

Persecution did little to diminish the zeal of Christians. On the contrary, it heightened their fellowship and increased their sense of mission in the dying ancient world. The expansion of Christian communities continued without pause, and by the middle of the third century the Christian population of the empire was large and influential. Men and women had been drawn to the Church from all classes of society. In many areas the Church now made little pretense of concealment.

THE LATER PERSECUTIONS

THE sudden increase of Christian strength in the third century was partly due to the