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.

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”).

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