The Global Church---The First Eight Centuries: From Pentecost through the Rise of Islam

By Donald Fairbairn

Discover the Variety and Unity of the Early Church

The Christian church of the early centuries spread throughout much of Asia, Africa, and Europe, spoke many languages, was situated within diverse cultural settings, and had varied worship practices; yet it maintained a vital unity on core teachings at the heart of the Christian faith. In The Global Church--The First Eight Centuries: From Pentecost through the Rise of Islam, author Donald Fairbairn helps readers understand both the variety and unity of the church in this pivotal era by:

• Re-centering the story of the church in its early centuries, paying greater attention to Africa, Turkey, and Syria, where most of the church's intellectual energy was nurtured
• Highlighting Christian communities outside the Roman Empire, as far afield as Persia and India, alongside those within it
• Identifying key events by their global, not merely Western, significance and taking into account early Christian interactions with other religions, particularly Islam

The Global Church--The First Eight Centuries is an ideal introduction to the patristic era that broadens the narrative often recounted and places it more firmly in its varied cultural contexts. Students of the early church, formal and informal alike, will appreciate the fresh approach and depth of insight this book provides.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zondervan
• Release date: May 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9780310097860

Donald Fairbairn

Donald Fairbairn is the Robert E. Cooley Professor of Early Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and a part-time professor at Evangelische Theologische Faculteit in Leuven, Belgium. He received his Ph. D. in patristics from the University of Cambridge in England, and his books include Grace and Christology in the Early Church (Oxford University Press) and Eastern Orthodoxy Through Western Eyes (Westminster John Knox Press).

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PREFACE

They raise their voices, they shout for joy;

from the west they acclaim the LORD’s majesty.

Therefore in the east give glory to the LORD;

exalt the name of the LORD, the God of Israel,

in the islands of the sea.

From the ends of the earth we hear singing:

Glory to the Righteous One.

—Isaiah 24:14–16

This book is a history of the Christian church in the patristic period. The word patristic comes from the Latin word for father and refers to the period of the church fathers—the men and women who shaped Christian faith and life during the church’s earlier centuries. The patristic period is regarded as the formative period of the church, the time when its teaching, practice, and spirituality took shape.¹ The book is written primarily for an evangelical Protestant audience and is intended as a textbook for university- and seminary-level courses on church history, although I hope it will be useful to general Christian readers as well. My fundamental goals are to portray clearly the full global extent of patristic church history and to show that in many ways, the history of Christianity in these centuries is a single story. Whereas many church histories focus on the portion of the story that took place in Europe and led eventually to Protestantism, this book also seeks to give significant attention to Christianity outside of Europe and the Roman Empire, deep into Africa and Asia. In the epigraph to this preface, Isaiah prophesies that God’s people will praise him from the ends of the earth, and that prophecy began to be fulfilled earlier in Christian history than we may realize.

I would like to explain three key matters related to the intended audience and the twin goals of this book. First, the phrase evangelical Protestant audience in the initial paragraph calls for elaboration. The Protestant Reformation began in the early sixteenth century as a protest movement against many aspects of Roman Catholicism. All western Christian groups that are not Roman Catholic grew out of the Reformation, although many of them today are not aware of their history and may not use the word Protestant to describe themselves. Protestant churches have historically been focused on the Bible and on the message of the gospel—the good news of Jesus Christ—and the word evangelical comes from the Greek word for gospel. In the historic sense of the phrase, therefore, evangelical Protestant describes those groups that derive from the Protestant Reformation and organize their lives explicitly around the Bible and the message of the gospel. Today, however, evangelical is often as much a political word as a spiritual one, and many Christians who are in fact evangelical and Protestant in the historic sense prefer not to use the word. Thus, some of you who read this book may shy away from the word evangelical, while others of you may be unaware of your connection to Protestantism. Nevertheless, most of you are likely to have a common commitment to the Bible, to the main principles of the Reformation, and to gospel-centered faith. For the sake of brevity, I will describe such readers simply as Protestants.

The second key matter that needs explanation is the use of the word church. In the New Testament, that word is used in two main ways. First, it designates each individual local church, and second, it describes all the local churches considered collectively and universally. Thus, the New Testament writers refer to the church in this or that place, and to the church as a whole. I will argue that the church had a single story for the first several centuries of Christian history, a story that took place in many different places throughout the Eastern Hemisphere. In making this argument, I will be using the word church in these two biblical senses—universally and locally. Nevertheless, this book will also chronicle the way that single story eventually became different stories—the way the one church became several churches that were not in fellowship with one another. As I describe that movement, I will be forced to use the word churches in a different sense, to refer to discrete entities such as the Church of the East and the Roman Catholic Church. Thinking of the churches in terms of entities (denominations, in later Protestant terminology) is very familiar, but even as we use the word that way, we need to recognize that the New Testament knows no such distinctions. The fracturing of the church into discrete churches was and is a tragedy that violates the biblical concept of the church itself. The familiarity of using the word church to refer to such entities and denominations should not obscure the fact that this usage in later Christian history constitutes a shift away from the situation in the New Testament and in earlier Christian history.

The third key matter is how to organize a book that seeks to describe the whole church in the patristic period, emphasizing its global reach and its single story. One obvious way would be to divide the material by geographic regions, telling the story of Asian, African, Byzantine,² and western Christianity in distinct sections or chapters. I believe this would be a very good way to arrange a history of later Christianity, when the churches in those regions had become largely separate from one another and thus had substantially independent histories. But in the case of earlier Christian history, such an arrangement might give the impression of more fragmentation and isolation than was actually the case. The fact that the story of the church in earlier centuries was one story in a way that the story of the later churches was not has led me away from a primarily geographical arrangement of the material.

Instead, I have sought to arrange the book according to time periods, and in doing so, I have been confronted with the question of when to begin and end the patristic period. On one hand, all delineations of historical periods are somewhat arbitrary, but on the other, we must draw lines somewhere to organize the flow of history into manageable units. Choosing the beginning point for church history is relatively uncomplicated: The church began on Pentecost in the year AD 30,³ as described in Acts 2. Of course one could start the story much earlier so as to include God’s action with his people in the Old Testament. But since the Old Testament people of God were not technically the church, we normally stake out the day of Pentecost as the starting point for church history. Accordingly, in this book I will begin the history of the church with Pentecost.

The answer to the question of where to close a book on the church in the patristic period is not very clear-cut at all. Traditionally, western treatments ended the patristic period with a date that would mark a good beginning point for the medieval period, and three such dates have commended themselves to western historians. The first is the year 451, when the Council of Chalcedon was held. In the estimation of many western scholars, this marked the end of the great period of early theology and the beginning of medieval theology. The second potential dividing line is the year 476, when the Germanic soldier Odoacer took control of Italy. This event meant that for the first time, there was no Roman on the throne of the western Roman Empire, and thus it was seen as the symbolic end of the Roman Empire itself. A third potential dividing line is the year 604, when Pope Gregory the Great died. Gregory was one of the main figures in the increasing Romanization of western Christianity, and so his death marks a good transition point to the Roman Catholic Middle Ages.

The problem with all of these dates, however, is that they did not bring about any discernible transitions for the church as a whole. In Syria, Persia, what is today Turkey, and Egypt, the Council of Chalcedon in 451 was not the end of the great theological developments but the middle. The eastern discussions of Christ’s person would go on for more than three hundred more years. Likewise, whether a native Roman or a German sat on the throne of the western empire in 476 is rather immaterial, because the actual Roman emperor had ruled from Constantinople since 330 and would do so until 1453. Similarly, while Gregory’s papacy was certainly transitional in the West, it marked no change of any consequence from a Greek or African or Asian Christian point of view. The use of any of these dates would color the story by suggesting that European transitions should determine the periodization. Any of them would make a great event with which to start a history of the western European Middle Ages, but if we seek to tell the story of patristic Christianity as globally as possible, none of these dates will do.

A far better date for ending the story of the patristic church, I think, would be 800, because by this round date the full effects of the most cataclysmic event to hit the Christian church—the rise of Islam and the subsequent Arab conquests—were fully evident. After Muhammad’s death in 632, his Arab followers conquered vast territory in western and central Asia and in northern Africa. By 800 these conquests had redrawn the map of the world, forcing Christians in most parts of the Eastern Hemisphere into second-class status in societies newly dominated by the Crescent. But northern Europe was largely unscathed, and Christianity in Europe began its long rise to ascendancy. Indeed, the world as we typically envision it—with a mostly Christian Europe and a mostly non-Christian Asia—became a reality only after about 800. Thus, in this book I will extend my treatment of the patristic church past traditional stopping points, such as the years 451, 476, and 604, so as to include the Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries and the church’s varying responses to the rise of Islam.⁴

With this end date in mind, I have adopted for purposes of periodization two other round dates that also held global significance: 300 and 600. The first is a convenient date for the end of the church’s sojourn in a primarily pagan world, because the early fourth century saw the conversion of four kingdoms to Christianity: Armenia, Georgia, Aksum (roughly modern Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Yemen), and the Roman Empire. The conversion of these kingdoms brought about a sea change, as many (by no means all!) Christian churches transitioned from living in pagan societies to living in societies that were at least nominally Christian. The year 600 was also globally significant as a round number because up to that point the church did not have to contend with Islam. After that point (or to be precise, after 634), the church throughout most of the Christian world began to face the Arab threats.

Accordingly, I will seek to tell the global story of the patristic church in three major time phases. Part 1 of this book will address the church in the pagan world (ca. 30–ca. 300). Part 2 will cover the Christian kingdoms prior to Islam (ca. 300–ca. 600), although it will also give attention to the church in kingdoms that never became officially Christian. Part 3 will deal with the rise of Islam and the resulting shifts in Christianity (ca. 600–ca. 800). Within these parts, I will dedicate chapters to movements and themes that took place within the time period covered by that part, and in many cases the movements will feature participants from all three continents where the church was present: Europe, Africa, and Asia.

NOTES

1. As we will soon see, there is considerable ambiguity about how deep into Christian history one should consider the patristic period to have extended.

2. Byzantine is a modern word that historians use to describe the eastern regions of the Roman Empire—approximately Greece, Turkey, the Middle East, and Egypt—from AD 330 until 1453.

3. We do not know with certainty the year of the crucifixion, resurrection, and Pentecost. Christ was crucified on the first day of the Jewish Passover (Nissan 14 according to the Jewish calendar), and that day was a Friday. Within the requisite time frame, the two years when Nissan 14 fell on a Friday were AD 30 and 33. The former year is more likely the correct one.

4. Another advantage of extending the patristic period to the year 800 is that it enables one to include all seven of the great councils of the undivided church, the so-called Ecumenical Councils. The last of these took place in 787.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has grown out of a long pilgrimage. Throughout my adult life and teaching career, I have become increasingly aware of how much more there is to the story of the patristic church than the part that took place in Europe, the part with which I was already familiar. That pilgrimage began in 1990, when I spent a year ministering in what was then Soviet Georgia (east of the Black Sea, south of the Caucasus Mountains) and first came into contact with the world of eastern Christianity. On one memorable day that year, I stood in the ruins of a Georgian church from the early fourth century and marveled that a few months earlier I had not even realized Georgia had an ancient Christian heritage. That day, and that year, reshaped the course of my academic and spiritual lives, and this book is one of the products of that reshaping.

Many people have helped bring this book to light. I acknowledge my debt to some of the twentieth century’s giants in the field of global Christianity during the patristic period: Stephen Neill, Samuel Moffett, and Thomas Oden. I never met any of them, but my eyes were opened to the fundamental Africanness and Asianness of early Christianity by their work. I would also like to express gratitude to some great patristic scholars whom I have met. Henry Chadwick, W. H. C. Frend, Winrich Löhr, Andrew Louth, and R. L. Wilken have been inspirations for me, as well as acquaintances. T. F. Torrance and L. R. Wickham have been mentors of incalculable value.

I would like to thank my old college friend Norman Birkett for his careful reading of the entire manuscript, with an eye both to historical accuracy and to the ways readers from various Protestant traditions would react to it. I would also like to thank my Gordon-Conwell colleagues Scott Sunquist and Todd Johnson, and my former students Viacheslav Lytvynenko and Rebecca Price, who offered much-appreciated encouragement along the way and made important suggestions about the manuscript.

At Zondervan Academic, Madison Trammell initially approached me about the project and provided valuable advice as I was writing the manuscript. After Madison left Zondervan Academic, Katya Covrett ably stepped in and offered needed historical feedback as well as crucial guidance about how best to make the work a genuine textbook. Josh Kessler and the marketing team brought expertise and sensitivity to the project. Brian Phipps ably and cheerfully oversaw the editorial process, and Dale Williams worked tirelessly on the maps and images that have helped bring the material to life. My thanks go out to them and the other staff members who helped bring this book to light.

For more than twenty years, my wife, Jennifer, has been my sounding board for virtually every idea that has gone into any of my books. Our children, Trey and Ella, have grown up with a dad engaged in one writing project after another, and they reach young adulthood and begin college as this book goes to press. I thank the three of them for the joy that our life together has been and for their encouragement of my work.

In spite of the scholars on whom I have relied and the invaluable assistance of the people I’ve mentioned and others, mistakes and deficiencies remain. They are my responsibility alone. I pray that in spite of such inadequacies, this work will make a contribution to your grasp of the extraordinary, global work of the Lord with and through his people in the first eight Christian centuries.

TIMELINE

INTRODUCTION

You may come to this book with little or no knowledge of (or even interest in) church history, or perhaps with an interest in Protestant church history but not the patristic church, or maybe already armed with significant knowledge of the church before the Reformation. As a result you may come to this book with different questions than other readers. First, if you have little background in Christian history at all, you may be asking why we should be interested in church history in the first place. Second, even if you are interested in Protestant history, you may wonder why we should care about earlier Christian history, before the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Third, if you know a fair bit about the patristic church, you may be bewildered by the different perspectives that scholars take toward that time period, and especially by their seemingly critical attitude. You may be asking what the right approach to the earlier church is. These are all important questions, and I believe that I owe you the courtesy of serious answers to them. Let us consider them in turn before we begin the story.

WHY SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT CHURCH HISTORY?

Protestants are people formed by and dedicated to the Bible, committed to the authority of the Scriptures alone. The great eighteenth-century English preacher John Wesley famously prayed that he might be homo unius libri, a man of one book, and with him we declare ourselves to be people of a single book. We sense an unbreakable bond with God’s people from the Old and New Testaments. We know their stories, we rejoice in the ways the Lord worked in their lives, and we hope or expect that God will work in the same ways in our lives. As contemporary African American preachers so poignantly remind us, God can do it again! He can, and he may, deliver us just as he delivered his people through the exodus and other saving events of Scripture. Indeed, we often expect God to work in our lives exactly the way he has worked in the lives of his biblical people, so much so that we apply directly to ourselves scriptural passages that were originally meant for people who lived millennia ago and halfway around the world.

Because of this thoroughgoing allegiance to the Bible, we as Protestants may have a sense of discontinuity with others who call themselves by the name of Christ. While we may feel some distance from other groups of Protestants, we sense this disconnection most notably with Roman Catholics. We reject the Catholic Church’s alleged exaltation of itself as a source of authority and insist that the Bible alone holds spiritual authority over the lives of believers. We are likewise suspicious of common Catholic practices such as giving attention to Mary and other saints, practices we assume are merely human traditions that crowd out the Word of God. We insist that believers sit under the Scriptures. Again, we are people of a single book, and we are right to consider ourselves so.

This unwavering focus on the Scriptures—as good as it is in itself—nevertheless has a downside that we rarely acknowledge. It obscures the fact that in addition to being people of the Book (first and foremost), we are also products of a history. Of course, at one level you know that history did not jump from the end of the book of Revelation to the birth of your pastor or your parents or whoever first shared the Christian message with you, skipping the intervening years altogether. But while we know intuitively that there was history between the Bible and us, we often act as if that history does not matter, as if the chronological and cultural space between the Scriptures and ourselves does not exist.

Because we often fail to grasp the significance of the history between the Bible and ourselves, we also fail to realize that we are products of that history. The story of Christian history between the end of the New Testament and the present has shaped us, just as the Bible has shaped us. Indeed, perhaps the major way postbiblical history has formed us is that it has shaped the way we read the Bible. Think about it: no matter how well you know the Bible as a whole, you probably gravitate toward some portions of Scripture over others. You probably start with certain biblical ideas and use those to explain other ideas. Why? What makes you start here rather than there, or gravitate to these passages over those? Many factors are involved, but one of them is the particular history of which you and I are a part. Our approach to the Bible has been shaped in the crucible of Christian history in particular times and places. So it is important for us to learn the history that has produced us and formed our approach to the Bible.

Such study of history should never replace the direct study of the Bible, but it is still important because it helps us to know ourselves, to know why we come to the Bible the way we do. In fact, learning the history of which we are products may make us even better at approaching the Bible than we already are. To use an apt image, we—like all other people—are wearing glasses. When we study the Bible, the way we look at it is influenced by the glasses we are wearing. Whether we realize it or not, our glasses have been shaped by centuries of biblical interpretation and Christian practice.

To take an obvious example, a common Protestant conviction is the importance of individual attention to the pages of the Bible. Most of us agree that regular attention to Scripture (both corporately and individually) is essential to healthy Christian life, and many of us may assume that a Christian’s solitary reading of Scripture is the primary way the Holy Spirit works to transform the lives of Christians. Little do we realize that for nearly three-fourths of Christian history, such individual Bible reading was not even possible for any but the wealthiest of Christians. Most people could not read, and paper was frightfully expensive at the time the books of the New Testament were being collected. Even after the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, most Christians’ contact with the Word of God came in other ways than through private Bible reading.

Not until the rise of German Pietism in the late seventeenth century did individual and group Bible reading begin to be common among laypeople of modest means. We are products of the rise of Pietism. The heart and soul of our spirituality is shaped by it. In the most literal way possible, our approach to the Bible—not just the way we interpret it but the way we physically read it—is a product of historical developments that are barely 350 years old. What happened earlier? How did Christians encounter the Word and grow in their faith? They could not have done so in the way we do, so there must have been other ways of doing so. Moreover, the day is soon coming when people will read everything on their devices and will be unable to fathom what might have been involved in reading a physical book by turning pieces of paper one at a time. In a similar way, we can scarcely imagine a world in which paper books were few and almost everyone had to encounter the Bible solely by listening to it, in groups rather than individually.

To continue the illustration, it is easy to imagine a contemporary Protestant claiming that anyone who is truly saved will read the Bible for himself or herself regularly. Someone who says this has probably never thought about the history of paper and of reading that I just gave. (For that matter, such a Christian may not have thought about what to make of people who cannot read for one reason or another.) That person’s proclamation obviously reflects the history that produced him or her. But equally important is that such a proclamation betrays an ignorance of how much our own approach to spirituality has been shaped by paper, increased literacy, and Pietism. Such historical ignorance leads to distortions, like substituting a particular approach to Scripture (we ought to read the Bible regularly on our own) for the universal truth that we need to attend to the Bible regularly, in community.

This example is only one of innumerable instances in which a new technology or a social situation or a political event or a people migration or a geographic peculiarity or a climactic accident—the list goes on and on—has affected the history of God’s people. And that history, or at least certain strands of that history, produced the particular kinds of Christianity that we are a part of in the twenty-first-century English-speaking world. If we do not know that history, we will not know whether and how history is influencing us as we look at the one book we value above all others, the Bible. On the other hand, the better we know that history—with its twists and turns, its conflicts and resolutions, and even its schisms—the more balanced our approach to the Bible can be. The study of Christian history is important for Christians because it helps us to see who we are—products of particular combinations of factors and historical movements—and thus it helps us to approach and interpret the Bible with more balance and comprehensiveness.

To return to the image of glasses, we should recognize that glasses are ordinarily things through which we look, not things at which we look. But if we long to understand the Bible even better and more comprehensively than we already do, we need not only to look at the Bible through our glasses but also to look at the glasses long enough to ask how they are affecting our vision. Maybe our glasses are fine. Maybe the prescription or the tinting needs to be adjusted. Maybe (although this is unlikely) we need new glasses altogether. But just as an optometrist’s equipment can help evaluate the accuracy of a person’s glasses, so, too, the study of history can help us assess whether our spiritual glasses need adjustments.

We therefore see that the study of Christian history can help us to understand where we have come from as Protestants and to set our own emphases in context. The Reformation was a reaction to what Roman Catholicism had become in the Middle Ages. It can be understood well only against the backdrop of the world of medieval Europe; and only with such an understanding can we avoid the mistake of unduly absolutizing aspects of the Protestant movement that may have been overreactions.

Thus far, perhaps you are with me in acknowledging the value of studying the particular set of historical movements and circumstances that has produced us. Then maybe you are ready to dive into the history of your denomination (or the history of nondenominational Protestant Christianity, as the case may be). You are likely also willing to wade into the history of the Reformation from which all current versions of Protestantism (not just yours) derive. But what about Christian history before the Reformation? What about the patristic church that is the subject of this book?

WHY SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT PATRISTIC CHURCH HISTORY?

On this issue, you—like many—may find that your potentially suspicious attitude toward Roman Catholicism makes it hard for you to imagine the value of learning its early history. But I suggest that two factors combine to make the study of earlier Christian history important for Protestants. First, understanding how the western church came to be dominated by Rome and how the Roman church strayed from Scripture in ways that brought about the protests (hence the term Protestant) of the sixteenth century helps us understand the Reformation better, and therefore understand ourselves better. To switch from a visual image (glasses) to an auditory one, Christian history can be understood as an ongoing phone conversation about how best to serve the Lord. Listening only to Protestant thought is like turning on the phone in the middle of the conversation without knowing what was said before. Surely there is value in listening to the earlier part of the conversation.

But there is an even greater reason to study the earlier history of the church. Roman Catholicism was by no means the whole of Christianity before the Reformation. Rome dominated only the western church, which was only one portion of the earlier church, the Latin-speaking portion that flourished in what would later be called western Europe. That region was not the center of the Christian world in the early centuries. After all, Christianity began in Asia, and for at least its first millennium, Asia (especially what is today Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey) and Africa (especially what is today Egypt, Ethiopia, Algeria, and Tunisia) dominated the Christian world. Yet perhaps you have never thought of any of those countries as Christian, and you may never have even considered that there could have been many Christians in any of them until British and American missionaries arrived there in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, you may have unconsciously accepted the common idea that Christianity was a European faith until Protestants brought the gospel to the world in the last 250 years. But in fact, Europe came to dominate the Christian world only after the year 1000. What was going on before that time? And why is our impression that Christianity was a European faith for its first eighteen centuries so far off the mark?

Europe dominates our impressions of Christian history because European Christianity is what led to the Reformation, which produced the groups to which all English-speaking Protestants belong. But European Christianity was never the whole story, and only after about the year 1000 was it the main story. A whole Christian world existed beyond the confines of what would later be called Europe, a world whose history ran parallel to, and often intersected with, the history of Roman Catholicism that led to the Reformation. Consider a few tidbits from the story of earlier Christianity outside of Europe: First, the Nicene Creed, finalized in 381, is the most universally accepted statement ever produced by the church after biblical times, and it was shaped, drafted, and approved almost entirely by people from Africa and Asia. Second, the Bible was available in more than a dozen African and Asian languages by the year 500, at which time the only European languages in which it was available were Greek, Latin, and Gothic. Third, the greatest Christian renewal movement of the first millennium was monasticism, a movement that began in Egypt and spread to Syria and what is today Turkey before finally arriving in Europe. Fourth, after about 750, Christians in Asia routinely held long and fruitful conversations with Muslim theologians and civil leaders. These tidbits may come as a surprise to you, but they serve as reminders that treating the pre-Reformation history of the church as merely Roman Catholic history is significantly incomplete. There was much more to the story, and we may have much to learn from it.

Thus, we see that the study of earlier Christianity can help us in two ways. First, it can help us understand the context of the Reformation. Second, and even more significant, it can help to expand our vision of the church universal. Few of us would say that there are no genuine believers outside of Protestant churches, but we often act as if Christianity came to a given region of the world only when Europeans or Americans brought the Protestant message there. Actually, God was at work throughout much of the Eastern Hemisphere long before the modern period, and attending to the rest of that vast story may deepen our appreciation for the Lord’s work with his people, as well as provide unexpected lessons we can apply to our own faith.

We live in a world in which people of different backgrounds, from different cultures and countries, holding to different worldviews, rub shoulders in what seem like unprecedented ways. But such pluralism is not actually unprecedented. The world in which the church was born, in which it flourished and expanded for several hundred years, was also a world of vast cultural and religious variety. We owe it to ourselves to learn the story of the church in that world, because in unexpected ways, our world today has more in common with that earlier world than with the later world of western Europe that produced the Protestant movement. It is valuable for Protestants to study not merely Protestant church history, but the history of the church before the Reformation as well.

WHAT PERSPECTIVE SHOULD WE TAKE TOWARD THE PATRISTIC CHURCH?

All of us wear perspectival glasses; we look at the Christian faith from a perspective honed in the crucible of our history. Not only is this true, but the figurative glasses we wear also impact the way we look at the history that in turn affects the way we look at Christian life today. We work with a conscious or unconscious perspective about the past. That perspective grows out of our approach to Christian life today, but the interpretation of the past produced by that perspective also influences our approach to the faith in the present. Thus, the question of whether we have the right (or at least, an acceptable) perspective on the earlier history of the church is an important one. Perhaps a concrete example would help us consider this issue.

Many years ago, a student of mine (who later became a historian himself) asked me what year we should stop paying attention to the church. It was a strange question, and it took me a few moments even to grasp what he meant. This student assumed that the New Testament church was pristine and that things got worse and worse from AD 100 until the late Middle Ages, before the church was dramatically restored to its pristine greatness at the time of the Reformation. His question, then, was about how quickly the decline into semi-apostasy took place, and therefore how many centuries of earlier Christian history were worth his attention, before he tuned out the interval from then until the Reformation. Was the decline precipitous from the time the ink was dry on the last New Testament book, or was it gradual until, say, AD 500 and precipitous only after that time? We may smile at this student’s naivete, but this attitude is very common among Protestants. We look at the many problems of late medieval Roman Catholicism, and we assume (likely without realizing we are doing so) that things had to be much better in the first century, so we deduce that most of the middle centuries of Christian history (if not also the early centuries) were a time of falling away from the truth. Some of us (like my student) may think that such falling away took place somewhat gradually at first, and thus one could call this perspective the gradual decline of the church.

Many of us, however, locate the beginnings of precipitous decline earlier, perhaps at the conversion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century. We may think that when the church allied with the Roman state, it lost its pilgrim status, began relying too much on political power, and began incorporating pagan elements into its worship and practice. Thus, some of us argue, the church ceased being the church in fundamental ways, and the descent into the problems of Roman Catholicism began apace. I call this perspective on Christian history the sellout of the church to paganism, and I suggest that either this perspective or one of gradual decline is the default mental setting of many Protestants today.

These perspectives are certainly not completely wrong, but notice some of the problems with them. First, as we have seen, the church was present far beyond the bounds of Rome. Even if pagan elements began infiltrating the church in the Roman Empire in the fourth century, did the same thing happen in the Christian empires of Aksum (approximately modern Ethiopia) and Armenia? And what of the church in empires that never officially embraced Christianity—Persia, India, and China? The sellout of the church perspective is incomplete because it is based on only one region. A second problem is that both the gradual decline and the sellout perspectives fail to consider the possibility that anything about Christianity could have been bad early on and gotten better as time went along. A brief reading of second-century Christians’ efforts to explain the Trinity leaves some Protestants bewildered—how could people so close to the apostles have understood the central mystery of the faith so badly? Perhaps we should not be too surprised by this. Do we expect a new believer today to grasp the Trinity well or even decently at the beginning of his or her Christian journey? No. Why then do we expect the earliest non–divinely inspired Christian writers to have done any better? The church needed time to reflect on Scripture to find appropriate ways of describing the great truths of the faith. We should not be surprised that in many cases (especially the articulation of doctrine), things got better as time went along, not worse. Thus, neither the sellout perspective nor that of gradual decline is able to handle all the complexity of the early church.

Another perspective, very different from either the sellout or gradual decline attitudes, is common in academic circles, and I label it the orthodoxy is arbitrary perspective. Many contemporary scholars do not even speak of early Christianity but instead refer to Christianities in the plural. They focus on divergent understandings of the Christian faith (such as Marcionism and various forms of Gnosticism) that early Christians themselves called heresies, and the scholars insist that these were no more or less valid than orthodox Christianity. Indeed, they argue that there was no consensus at all in the ancient Christian world, and one prominent historian is famous for saying that some early Christians believed there was one God, others believed there were two, still others that there were 30 or 365.¹ According to these scholars, what we today call historic orthodoxy, with its faith in one triune God, was merely the version of Christianity that won out in the end, and it triumphed not because of its intrinsic truth value, but simply because it had the support of the people who won the political battles. Orthodoxy is arbitrary, these scholars argue.

This perspective is not completely wrong either. There were varieties of Christian practice in the early centuries, and there were varieties of belief as well. Politics did play a major role in the resolution of doctrinal controversies. But scholars who hold to this perspective generally overstate the prevalence of heretical views (making them appear to be a larger percentage of the Christian world than they were), and they almost always work from the assumption that it made no difference which version of Christianity one affirmed. If you are familiar with contemporary retellings of early Christian history (or even if you simply watch the History and Discovery Channels), you have probably come across confident assertions about the early church that flowed from this orthodoxy is arbitrary perspective. You may have wondered how the presentation of early Christian history you have encountered from such sources can be squared with your possible assumption that the church was united and pristine early on but got worse only later. The way many scholars depict earlier Christianity (orthodoxy is arbitrary) differs radically from the way typical Protestants think of it (gradual decline or the sellout of the church). The clash between these presentations may leave us bewildered until we realize that different perspectives are at work, shaping the varied narratives with which historians tell the story of history.

Of course there are many other perspectives one could take toward early Christianity, but the ones I have mentioned are perhaps the most common and are certainly sufficient to raise the question of how we should approach the history of the early church. We should certainly reject any perspective that regards truth as relative and should thus be wary of reconstructions that seem to underplay the degree of consensus the church possessed about the Christian faith. We should also avoid absolutizing one region of the church by failing to discern the differences in the situations Christians faced in different areas. We also need to avoid the temptation to read earlier Christian history merely in light of our own later (Protestant) theology, with its sharp distinction between the church and the political sphere (a distinction that was unknown in earlier ages of world history). Instead, we need to listen for both the consensus and the complexity of the earlier church. In one sense, Christian history during the patristic period really was a single story of a common faith worked out in very different situations throughout the known world. But on the other hand, the consensus was not always obvious, and the proper relation between unity in teaching and potential diversity in practice was not readily apparent either.

Christian history is complex, as is all history. To approach it fairly, perhaps we need to begin by acknowledging our preconceived perspectives and recognizing that we should hold those perspectives lightly as we consider the material of history. In some cases the evidence will indeed fit our perspective. For example, on issues related to penance and other practices that later provoked Luther’s ire, the church really did go downhill (from a Protestant point of view) in the late first millennium and early second. But in other cases our study of the history itself should lead us to modify our perspective on that history. For example, we need to come to grips with the fact that it really was possible to have faith in God, his Son, and his Spirit without being able to articulate the doctrine of the Trinity in ways we today recognize. And thus, we need to recognize that in the articulation (as distinct from the affirmation) of central doctrine, the church got better, not worse, as time went along.

It is not possible to be purely objective, nor do we want a cold indifference toward our subject matter in the interests of scientific objectivity. Our perspective on the Christian faith as we live it today affects our perspective on the history of the patristic church (and vice versa). We cannot get around this perspectival influence. But once we recognize that the influence is there, we can allow the material of history to reshape our perspective where needed, to broaden our attitude toward the history of our faith. This is the way the study of history changes us and should change us. It is my hope that with a more complete and nuanced picture of the patristic church, we will also come to a more complete grasp of the Christian faith as a whole and thus be better able to worship, to live out our faith, and to minister in a complex world today.

Ultimately, the history of the Christian church is important because Jesus Christ builds that church. He has been doing so since the very beginning, and so the whole of that history—not just the history of our group or of Protestantism—is an important part of the story. Let us now begin that story by turning our attention to the world in which the church was born.

NOTES

1. Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 2.

Part 1

THE CHURCH IN

THE PAGAN WORLD

(

CA

. 30–

CA

. 300)

Chapter One

IN THE FULLNESS

OF TIME

The World of the First Century

In Galatians 4:4 Paul writes that God sent his Son when the set time had fully come. In the context of the biblical passage, the set time is the time when an heir’s father gives him his inheritance, prior to which time the heir is under the tutelage of guardians. Paul likens the Jews to the young heir waiting and learning as he looks ahead to adulthood. This depiction of the Jews as sons and