The First 300 Years: No place to hide
The LIfe of Christians in the Roman World
This last summer I told one of my grandchildren that I would join them in their summer reading assignment. After he showed me the 500 page work of historical fiction, I wondered what had possessed me to make such a promise! Not only was it long, it was about the life of Christians at the time of Nero. God had something for me in this task.
The book, Quo Vadis raised some significant questions about the daily life of the first generation of people in Christ. Curious as I am, I set myself to read more thoughtful works on those times, such as one on how the Romans saw Christians, why people became Christians, and how the earliest pastors encouraged Christians to live when everything in the culture was against them. I have also dipped into the writers of those times.1
The First Centuries
What I have discovered is fairly straightforward:
The Roman world was thoroughly religious. One author says that birth to death, marriage and the household, politics, trades and work, the military, socializing, entertainment, arts, and music were all “imbued with religious significance.”
The Roman world was deeply conservative. Innovation, change, and disruption to the social order were met with opposition. The gods and social stability were interwoven. Change was sacrilege. Conformity was expected for all.
Whether to show honor to the gods of Rome, including Caesar, was a choice every Christian faced every day of their lives.
Refusal to show such honor brought social and legal consequences. It meant loss of business, tensions in the household and neighborhood, accusations of atheism, and suspicion of being involved in a new religion.
The Roman world could be grossly immoral, cruel, violent, and oppressive. It was not difficult to stand out.
In other words, Christians had to choose every day whether to align themselves with the true God or to show deference to idols and the moral character of their culture.
What would that look like today?
Let me engage in a little creative thought. Imagine this:
When you entered Target or Walmart or a grocery store, there would be religious shrines or opportunities to show deference to the gods who have caused that enterprise to prosper.
Sporting events would begin with a priest offering a sacrifice, placating the gods for unknown offenses, and praying for their favor for the home team. The crowd would engage in a “confession of faith” honoring the greatness of our nation followed by a recital of the creed about the supremacy of our President.
Political meetings would require religious rituals to bookend all deliberations.
Work gatherings, especially the ones involving meals, would also begin with a prayer to the patron deity.
At holiday gatherings there would be a mandate to honor the head of the household and his gods.
I could go on. What I want you to sense is this: every day a Christian would have to decide whether to murmur those words, participate in those rituals, or to remain silent and abstain. There would be many opportunities to self-censor.
Of course, many of these practices would be formalities as opposed to acts of devotion. And, we can guess that the larger the gathering, the less likely it would be that anyone would notice.
But that is pragmatism. There is a principle at stake: would you or I be willing to stand out, to be noticed, as someone who would not take the name of a false god upon your lips? or someone who refused to participate in moral compromise?
Back to the early years
P\In those days, people did notice. This is why the NT is a pretty consistent witness to the social and political consequences ordinary Christians faced. You find it everywhere. It was the norm.
Heads of households observed the wife or the children or the slaves choosing Christ as opposed to their deity. They noticed the women saying “No,” to expectations of sexual favors. The folks who made an income off the trade in idol worship swag saw sales fall. Trade unions saw the Christians slip by the altar at the door without an offering, and then eat vegetables at the meal rather than partake of meat offered to idols. Jewish people noted this new cult of fellow-Jews who confessed Jesus as Messiah and began to hob nob with Gentiles.
Those who noticed may have ignored the miscreants, at least until they faced misfortune or shame for doing so. Or they have have shown opposition in one form or another — some mild, others severe. And the political officials sometimes reacted by accusing these Christians of being treasonous and atheists who upset the very stability of Rome.
And this was exactly what Jesus said would happen. Those who hate him will hate his followers.2 We will be persecuted for righteousness.3 Religious people will even think it is pleasing to God to rid the world of those who preach the Good News of God’s grace through Jesus.4
The times they are a changin’
For the most part we who are Christians in the democratic West cannot imagine these kinds of conditions. We have lived under the secular truce of tolerance. The State offers us freedom of conscience in exchange for the church not seeking to hold the levers of political power.
That tolerance has been morphing for a while, more obviously of late. It is now acceptable to deny freedom of conscience or to offer fierce criticism of Christianity.5 Simply to uphold the moral clarity of Scripture in all things sexual is to invite cancellation, loss of job, bad grades, or harm to our social standing. It is anything but universal, but there are real requirements of conformity in some places.
In some sense, we are moving toward a society where everything is saturated with a new religion — a religion that is an ideology. The priests of that ideology would require rituals and confessions of faith if we are to be allowed to buy and sell and work and earn wages. How far along we are is anyone’s guess.
Will you be faithful?
If our world becomes more expressive of this hatred for Christ, and establishes rituals and confessions of faith that indicate submission and loyalty to the new religion — how will we live?
I find many Christians become angry and shocked. My question to us is simple: How can you be shocked? Don’t we believe Jesus meant what he said? Anger and shock are not the right response. Rather, we are called to quiet faithfulness.
How will you live if every day you face the choice of worshipping idols of our age or honoring the true God alone?
What will you do if it becomes impossible to hide your identity in Christ without losing your job, your credentials? Courage will be necessary, courage grounded in the fear of God. And some will deny the Christ they once professed.
Of course, the early Christians were shrewd enough to use the system for their own protection. Paul’s Roman citizenship both protected him and opened doors for him to appear before Caesar’s court.6
Then and now: when there is no place to hide
In that world, there was no social or economic or political benefit to becoming a Christian. Conversion was a social debit, enforced locally with greater or lesser severity, for almost 300 years.
Our society may be on that trajectory. We are a long way from 1976 as The Year of the Evangelical. A godly response will require us to let go of our sense of entitlement and to be faithful at all costs.
In that world, despite the immense disadvantages to professing faith in Jesus, the church grew. It grew across all classes of society, in both sexes, across all regions. It grew from thousands to millions, through waves of martyrdom and persecution.
For us, I do not want to romanticize the benefits of persecution. For a number of years I have seen first hand the condition of churches that were the object of scorn by their nation. They are not pristine. Nor were the churches of the first centuries. Internal discipline was a constant need. Protecting the flock from wolves from without was regular.
I simply ask: what will you and I do when we can no longer hide? be silent? when we can no longer be generally religious without being clear about God and sin and redemption through Christ? We need to embrace the call to be quietly faithful in our daily lives, bearing witness to the Savior of all, loving our enemies, and refusing to act on anger.
If you want some more recommendations, message me.
John 15.20
Matthew 5:11
John 16:2
I want to be careful not to generalize too much. There are nations in Europe which do indeed restrict the freedom of Christians to practice as they believe. Germany has long outlawed teaching children at home.
In another post I want to talk about what my focus is as a Christian and citizen.