The Spread of the Gospel in Hindsight: The Church’s First 1452 Years

What can Christians today learn from the successes and failures of Christians in the first fifteen centuries of the breaking out of the Good News of Jesus the Christ? This article by historian Woodrow Walton is an Epilogue to The Gospel In History series.

With apologies to the Gregorian Calendar, A.D. 28 is selected as the date of the Resurrection of our Lord. Fifty days after the Resurrection, at the time of the festival of First Fruits, also known as Pentecost, the power of the Holy Spirit fell upon Jesus’ disciples. They were now His apostles and Peter became the lead spokesman. When Peter proclaimed Jesus as both “Lord and Christ,” there were among his audience visitors from countries bordering the Persian Gulf, lands approximate to the Caucasian and Kurdistan mountains, westward to Libya in northern Africa, and from what is now Turkey onward along the northern Mediterranean coast to Rome and beyond.

The Gospel spread quickly into the Mesopotamian-Tigris plains, northward beyond Antioch, and crossed the Aegean Sea into the Balkans and on to the Italian peninsula. It went westward across the whole extent of the North African coast fronting the Mediterranean. Acts 2:9-11 enumerated thirteen different geographical locales from Elam, bordering Iran, to Cyrene close to present day Benghazi, Libya.

This expansive geography from the Persian Gulf to the western edges of Africa indicates the eventual spread of the gospel from western Asia to the western edges of the Roman empire. The early Christians spread across this expanse within a matter of seventy-two years. The flourishing of individual Christian communities from east to west within a relatively short time occurred without benefit of motorized conveyances. The initial thrust was from Jerusalem to Damascus in western Syria and then along the Tigris-Euphrates valley. The martyrdom of Stephen initiated a spread northward. The ministry of Philip the deacon spearheaded the thrust into the upper reaches of the Nile Valley, Egypt. Out of Libya and Cyprus were the initiators of the church in Antioch, and out of Antioch into what is now Turkey. Who are these travelers who speak of Jesus who is said to be “Lord and Savior?”

That the Christians presented a gospel, not a religion, was a novelty and went against the grain of the dominant cultural mentality who adhered to a belief in gods and different philosophies of life. Who is this Jesus?

The fact that the Christian communities or groupings did not frequent the public baths and other major public arenas of activity raised suspicions as to who they are and what they represented. To use a phrase coined by the late John Stott, these Christians were counter-cultural and represented another way of life by their exclusiveness from the rest of society.

From this arose the first suspicions and first antagonisms which eventually boiled over into arguments and then persecutions. This opposition was at first sporadic then open attacks which, on occasion, boiled over into institutionalized persecution. Here is a salient point to consider. Attacks have a way of occasioning the rise of the “defense” of the Christian way. The defense came quickly, first with Stephen, then Apollos, then Paul, Peter, and others. Before the end of the century, a Roman from Samaria was converted to the gospel. His name was Justin. He is remembered as Justin Martyr.

The point is this is that antagonism and persecution do two things. First, opposition produces defenders known as Apologists. An apologetic is not a defensive posture but a posture of advocacy. The Apologists, from the first and second centuries down to our day and time, are advocates of the gospel. Rhetoric was taught in the days of the Roman empire and the Christian defenders had early training in public speaking and rhetoric. An example of their eloquence can be seen by reading Paul’s address to Athenian inquirers at the Areopagus.

Secondly, antagonism and persecution furthers expansion. To get away from sustained persecution, the Christians fast became refugees and emigrants which drove them further upriver into Africa toward the Sudan or further northward up the Rhine river toward Belgica and into Germania, present-day Belgium and Germany and northward toward present-day Romania. The result was the rapid spread of the Christian faith. Christians suffered death under the persecutions of Nero all the way through to the widespread Diocletian persecutions. By the time of the Edict of Milan in A.D. 312, Christians could be found in York in England and far afield in Nisibis, close to the Caspian Sea, in the fastness of Kurdistan. Persecution is self-defeating. Instead of stamping out, it only spreads the flames of the gospel message wherever it goes.

Julian, Constantine’s youngest son, wanted to bring back the old gods of Rome and set himself to eradicate the Christian presence from Antioch. He also had to blunt the attacks of the Parthians along the banks of the Euphrates river and defend the Roman borderlands. He failed in removing this distraction. Sozomen, the Christian historian, writing in the late 300’s, told of Julian’s dying words after being struck by an arrow from a Parthian cavalryman, “O pale Galilean, you have conquered.”

Two other situations faced the Christians in those early centuries, the growth of syncretism and spiritualism, and after that, a critical situation regarding the relationship of the Christian communities with civil authority once having been freed from overt persecution.

Syncretism and spiritualism forced the Christian Community to define itself against insidious threats not unlike that of what we face today in dealing with deviance in matters of religion, lifestyle, and spirituality. It comes in the wrapping of “tolerance.” The problem with tolerance is that it can degenerate into intolerance very quickly, becoming oppressive when it insists upon a singular mentality.

First of all is syncretism. Briefly, syncretism is the belief that all religions lead to God. There are two things wrong here. First of all, God is not at the end of any religion. Secondly, the Christian faith is not a religion. It is a Gospel. It is good news. Leander Keck once observed that we see God in the face of Jesus. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Jesus is Lord and Savior. God so loved the world, but love is not God. Religion is about us. Christianity is about Jesus who brought forgiveness, mercy, and regeneration of our lives. It is not God that is the issue but man. It is us that are lost, not God. The one road is the one taken to lost mankind and it led to a manger in Bethlehem and ultimately to a Cross outside Jerusalem. God invaded our world.

The last issue is the relationship between Christianity and the civil authority. The “city” or “community” of God is not best seen in its participation in whatever political system there is; neither is it best seen in its separation from the political order in either an “Anabaptist model” or “a separation of church and state” model. The church is best recognized as those individuals who by their existence within the social and political matrix infuse into that matrix a way of living which influences the whole social order with its love and concern for those who live within society. So it did within late antiquity and within the so-called “medieval world” by the creation of hostels for the traveler, the hospitals for the infirmed, critically injured and sick. It was the church who cared enough to rescue abandoned children, give haven to abused women, and elevated the slave. In fact, Pope Callistis, who died in A.D. 236, had previously been a common slave.

What is more, there never was such a “medieval” or “middle ages.” Neither was there a so-called “Dark Ages.” Those descriptions were the inventions of the Italians and French during the years of the Renaissance and the later Enlightenment of the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries to describe what transpired before them. It was good that “Rome fell” as it did. Never having crossed the Danube or even the Rhine, it was self-contained along the coastal waters of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic west coast of Africa and got no further than the Upper Mesopotamian. In the meanwhile, the church, through the monasteries, the parish system, and the emerging peoples of Europe, ushered in the age of progress in agriculture, technology, higher education, and the introduction of capitalism. If one wants a good thorough study, this author recommends the reader to tolle lege –“take up and read.” I am referring to Dr. Rodney Stark’s very thoroughgoing study The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success. It was published in 2005 by Random House. It is highly recommended by this writer.

 

It was the church

Consider the life-style of Jesus. The Christian life-style has to do with character and quality, not rules and behaviors. Behavior patterns can be programmed according to surroundings. Love, as society sees it, is an emotion. There may be affection in love but Christian love is volitional, not emotional, an act but not necessarily an action. It is pro-active and neither reactive or retro-active.

Christ meets us where we are at but does not leave us there. He does not accept as we are but raises us up – to all that we can be. We do not have to clean ourselves up to be acceptable to Him, Christ Jesus does the cleansing. We recognize ourselves as undone and recognize Jesus as saying “Done.” Christian faith is not about we do but what Jesus has done.

The Holy Spirit does not have anything to do with what most call spirituality. The Hebrew term, “Ruach haQodesh,” translated as Holy Spirit, refers to that which gives breath and life, and allows us to breathe and have life that is abundant in quality of life. The spiritualities of Hindu, Buddhism, and Taoism are all introspective and centered in self. The Christian’s devotion is outward, inward and geared toward the imitation of Christ and to His way of living.

In an effort to combat the inroads of Severan syncretism, eastern spiritualities, and religiosity, councils were called into being in order to face the critics, the heresies of Gnosticism and spiritualism, and the cultural attractions. The Council of Nicaea in northwest Turkey in A.D. 315 was a meeting of Christian leaders from York, England, Carthage and Cyrene in Libya, Alexandria in Egypt, and bishops from the Persian Gulf area. What resulted from it was the Nicene Creed which set forth the basics of the Christian faith for all time. It was re-affirmed in Constantinople in A.D. 385. It remains to the very present as the unifying document of all Christians be they Orthodox, Catholic, or Protestant.

There are two more considerations. One of these involves the misapprehension of Augustine’s The City of God and how the Christian community should relate to civil society and to the social and political order. It needs first to be considered in relationship to the proclamation of the kingdom of God and to St. Paul’s recommendation as to the Christian community’s relationship to “government authorities” set forth in Romans 13 and expanded upon within the letter to the Ephesians. There is a hint of the church as a “colony of heaven” within Paul’s letter to the Philippians. There is no justifiable reason for the church in western Europe to have taken a “triumphalist” position over the state after Pope Leo the Great confronted the Hunnic general Alaric in A.D. 452 and a few years later defended Rome from Gaiseric’s army by meeting face to face with the Vandal leader. When the civil state’s order fell apart, the church helped to keep order. From that point on, with tolerance on the part of the newer rulers after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Bishops of Rome, now referred to as “popes”, took the initiative to crown future rulers. Neither Paul nor Augustine, ever conceived of the church having that kind of authority.

By the same token, the rulers of the Eastern Roman Empire, known better by historians as the Byzantine Empire, involved themselves within the affairs of the church. Some of them were concerned Christians themselves, but many were Christians in name only. John Chrysostom, first in Antioch and then in Constantinople, suffered exile when he chastised an empress. Other Christian leaders suffered the same faith. The exiles only stiffened resistance against the civil authorities.

The intent of the New Testament writers was that the church exist within whatever civil order was in place but not exercising authority over the civil order. It is a counter-cultural community, the lifestyle of which influences the civil order without overt involvement. By the same respect, there can be no wall between the two as though church and state represent two separate entities. Jesus spoke of the kingdom of God as leaven. As an outside agent, the church, like leaven, influences the whole “bread” or social order. “Look,” said Justin, and many others, “how these Christians love one another.” Very early the church was regarded by the citizens of the Roman Empire as a “burial society” who cared for the dying and who also saved discarded babies. Augustine’s The City of God is a far more transcultural reality which instills into society and the civil order a better quality of life for the citizens of a state.

In the Islamic world and in India, the church has precariously continued throughout the centuries without any relationship to the socio-political order. This should give us pause on how to face the challenges of our modern world and how we involve ourselves within the public square and influence the social order. We are to have a lifestyle that resembles the leavening operation of yeast but without a yeast infection. It is not a matter of withdrawal from the public square or controlling the public square. It is a matter of being in the world but not of the world.

The last item to note is the impact of the church within their cultural contexts in both the East and the West. The monastic movement in both the Western branch of the Church and the Eastern Branch had an influence that is beyond measure. Their withdrawal was much like the bending of a bowstring empowering the momentum of a flying arrow. John Cassian was the man who introduced the principle of withdrawal, creating potential for the movement of western monasticism through private devotion and world outreach. Basil the Great was the man who promoted the principle of contemplative prayer and world outreach.

 

PR

 

“… But now I come to You, and these things I speak in the world, that they may have My joy fulfilled in themselves. I have given them Your word: and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. I do not pray that You should take them out of the world, but that You should keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. Sanctify them by Your truth. Your word is truth. As You sent Me into the world, I also have sent them into the world. And for their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they also may be sanctified by the truth. I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word; that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me.”

John 17:13-21 NKJV