Abstract
This modern phenomenon we call Christianity is so enormous—in terms of age, scope, and influence—that it is easy for us to think it has always been this way. Or that Christianity had to be this way. But such thinking is a luxury of those who live after the fact. It is only in hindsight that events take on an air of inevitability. For the earliest Christians, particularly those in the second century, the future was not at all certain. It wasn’t yet clear whether this new Christian movement was even going to survive.
Over the last few years, my research has focused upon Christianity in the intriguing and oft-overlooked time period of the second century. And I have learned a number of important (and even unexpected) lessons. First, the second century was a time when the church was very vulnerable with little cultural influence or standing—and yet it still prospered. Indeed it spread so rapidly that Pliny the Younger regarded it as a ‘contagion’ that needed to be controlled (Ep. 10.96). When we look to the modern day, it is hard to miss the fact that Christianity has lost considerable cultural influence over the last generation and is now facing ever-increasing social and legal pressures. But, perhaps this is not the bad news that we think it is. God seems to grow his church particularly when she lacks political or social power.
Second, it is worth noting that the reasons for opposition to Christianity in the second century look remarkably similar to the reasons that Christianity is opposed today. The Greco-Roman elites regarded Christianity as a strange and even threatening superstition primarily because Christians refused to join in the communal worship of the Roman gods. Christians were committed to worshipping Jesus and him alone. In the minds of the Romans this was not only socially rude, but callously indifferent to the good of the empire (which was dependent upon pleasing the gods). Thus, Christians were charged with ‘hatred of mankind’ (Tacitus, Annals 15.44). These sorts of charges are still around today.
Third, the church of the second century demonstrates that little acts of faithfulness in the present can make an enormous difference over the long haul. Faced with doctrinal challenges from seemingly every direction, the members of the second-century church held fast to what they regarded as the apostolic message handed down to them. And those decisions set the theological trajectory of the church for generations to come. Indeed, one might argue that what we call ‘Christianity’ today was largely determined by the choices of the second-century church.
While prior generations may have enjoyed a time when the modern church was in a situation akin to the church of the fourth and fifth centuries, the current generation finds itself in a situation that is beginning to look a lot more like what the church experienced in the second. Thus, as we ponder the future, we should first look back to the past and learn from the church that has gone before.