“History has been invaded by God in Christ in such a way that nothing can remain as it was. All terms of human community and conduct have been altered at the deepest levels. This description Scholar David Bentley Hart’s view on the impact of the Christian message was seen visibly and conspicuously in early Christian communities.
A historian note “social diversity” in these congregations, accompanied by an “ideal of human equality” – declaring: “in Christ, Christians taught, all were equal, and distinctions of rank and degree were irrelevant. In church meetings, educated people sat on an equal footing among slaves and small artisans. The new faith emerged in the context of cultural structures organized around brutal inequalities: freedmen and slaves, rich and poor, men and women.
Christianity could not – initially – challenge the social status quo in society as a whole. However, the gospel could and did eliminate these limitations and boundaries within the circle of Christian community.
Many researchers have confirmed that in these early congregations, “members from different social strata became extremely close to each other, supporting each other.” Although freedom from broader political oppression may have been limited in scope, equality within the Christian community was not.
But why not?
A family in Christ
Such fellowship is based on an astonishing idea that may be difficult for modern minds to comprehend: that God walks among us as minister, mentor, and traveling companion. He breaks bread with his friends, mourns the death of a friend, dines with sinners, and washes the feet of his apostles.
Following this model, some early Christians successfully transformed ad hoc communities into a society governed by love. A historian of early Christianity confirmed the world-defying novelty of “a group united by spiritual power into an extended family.” Morwenna Ludlow uses ” the same language, writing that “Christians described themselves as a kind of extended family or home.”
This isn’t just a nostalgic fantasy. The early Christians were actually ridiculed “because we called each other brother and sister.” Indeed, as these early Christians insisted to a skeptical world: “We are also your brothers and sisters.” The defining characteristic of these early believers was their practice of benevolence – as a writer Tertullian wrote. observed“Just look how much they love each other. »
The words of a scornful critic, Lucian, confirm how Christians sometimes cared for those who were otherwise looked down upon: “Well, what have we got in the end? An awesome god indeed: one who desires nothing more than to adopt sinners as his children; he who takes for himself the creatures condemned by another, the poor wretches who are (as they say of themselves) nothing but dung.
A more global humanity
Until the arrival of Christianity, most forms of community – even religious communities – were based on ethnicity or kinship. As a scholar said observed“Christianity now made it possible to conceive religion as an entity independent of the ethno-cultural components which were normally (and inevitably) attached to it. »
The sociologist Joseph Henrich confirmed that Christianity’s transformation of Western culture was cataclysmic, signaling the disappearance of various forms of tribal loyalty to kin and clan in deference to “voluntary associations” with “outsider groups.” In this way, Christianity instilled and motivated a version of love that transformed the world.
This was not a chance side effect, but a deliberate strategy. Any bond strong enough to transcend tribal and family loyalties had to be more than theoretical. Wayne Meeks argues that Paul’s letters reveal universal hybridization as a deliberate community-building strategy – with each church “by design” becoming “ethnically and socially mixed.”
Each of these revolutionary cells was deliberately developed to be a microcosm of the global reality that Paul and other early leaders believed was imminent. In the letters of Paul that shaped early Christian society, Wilhelm Wrade Remarks, “his zeal for the community…always takes first place; the question he always asks is: “What builds it?”
A stunning and shocking love
Christian love surpassed anything the ancient world had known. Rodney Stark notes how, despite recurring epidemics, as citizens fled infected areas, Christians remained behind to care for and cure the sick at the cost of their lives. Around 260 AD, at the height of yet another epidemic, the Christian Dionysius checked in a particularly poignant insight in the wake of our recent pandemic:
Christians demonstrated boundless love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of others. Heedless of danger, they cared for the sick, meeting their every need and nursing them in Christ, and with them departed this life serenely happy; for they were infected by others with the disease, bringing upon themselves the disease of their neighbors and cheerfully accepting their pains. Many, in caring for and healing others, transferred their death onto themselves and died in their place.
A century later, the 4th-century monk Rufinus describe how the Christians of Egypt treated arriving visitors:
As we approached this place and they realized that foreign brothers were arriving, they came out of their cells like a swarm of bees and ran to meet us with joy and eagerness, many of them carrying containers of water and bread. … When they had welcomed us, they first led us with psalms into the church and washed our feet and one by one they dried them with the cloth with which they were girded, as if to wash away the fatigue of the journey . . …What can I say that would do justice to their humanity, their courtesy and their love? Nowhere have I seen love blossom so much, nowhere with such prompt compassion, such eager hospitality.
Skepticism and ongoing challenges
In trying to decipher the appeal of early Christianity, the cynic Friedrich Nietzsche could only marvel at the apparent gullibility of the masses of converts who had found this “better way.” Power and domination were the source of the only true happiness, he said. insisted. The rich, the well-born, the noble possessed the true article, until clever priests convinced them that phantom joy was found only in pity, humility, selflessness, and companionship.
Yet even this great skeptic could not quite explain how so many of the noble, powerful, and wealthy were also persuaded to willingly abandon their privileges and aspire instead to humility, selflessness, and compassion.
Christianity exposed the deepest roots of our being: fragmented individuals finding wholeness only in a thriving network of relationships.
Christianity quenched a thirst that never found a perfect solution: as Martin Buber said diagnostic the essential human condition, “The desire for relationship is primordial”. Beneath the world of transactional relationships based on commerce, power dynamics, and self-interest, Christianity exposed the deepest roots of our being: fragmented individuals finding wholeness only in a thriving network of relationships. The model of a society of perfect love and deep unity had been drawn: “Here there is neither Gentile nor Jew, neither circumcised nor free.”
And, Paul says, “neither is there male and female.” “The Magna Carta of Humanity”, a researcher called this Pauline declaration. “There is nothing like this in all of antiquity.”
A revolutionary peace
A witness from the 2nd century amazed “If any of them have slaves, slaves or children, out of love for them they persuade them to become Christians, and when they have done so, they call them brothers without distinction . » Justin Martyr wrote how “we who hated and destroyed one another, and who, because of their different ways, would not live with men of another tribe, now, since the coming of Christ, live familiarly with them” .
Even the leaders of such a community are encouraged to act as servants of all, like the angels who call themselves “of humanity.”fellow servants.” And even Christ, God incarnate, washed the feet of his disciples and said“I don’t call you servants…but I called you friends.”
Of course, the revolution never found its perfect form. Paul begged Philemon for treating Onesimus as “no longer a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother”; but he did not repudiate the institution of slavery. And while denying that man and woman were not different “in Christ,” Paul went on to make man “the head.”
Yet the deeper threat to social hierarchies such as slave/master and boss/client was real, and opponents of the Christian revolution were quick to recognize the transformations taking place, even if they were incomplete.
It is important to revisit these witnesses to the transformative impact of the gospel revealed in Christ for two reasons. This speaks to how we have often fallen short of an original vision. But it can inspire us with confidence that we too might be able to amaze our contemporaries with a pious and more visible love that sees the image of Christ in everyone.
