CH1-03 Patristic Fathers and the Ecumenical Councils

throughout the roman empire?

throughout the Roman Empire?

We often think that the Roman Empire accepted Christianity at about the fourth century. And there’s truth to that. It’s sort of when it became an official accepted religion, if you will. But I think that the factors that contribute to its acceptance go all the way back into the first century when you have a marginalized movement that was basically asking people to leave, in many cases, comfortable lives — at least comfortably social lives — to join a movement that no one initially would have thought had any future. There had to be something there in that message that was appealing enough to make people who thought that it was worth leaving their present position for. Sometimes we think the Roman Empire was so depraved that people naturally turned to Christianity. Sometimes we think that it was just, you know, the appeal of, you know, some other aspect of the movement or negative about Rome. But I think, ultimately, it is something appealing about the message of the gospel itself that gave and provided something for the Gentile world, the Jewish world, everybody who ultimately becomes part of the church, that what they’re getting is something that far outweighs what they’re losing. And I don’t think we can really appreciate what they’re losing. Today we can go to a church, no big deal. In those days, becoming a Christian would have involved possibly leaving your own social group, leaving your own family… Roman society itself had a lot of built-in positive aspects that kept all of its members somewhat secure. I mean, wives, families, their brothers, their fathers, etc., were all had important relationships that kept everybody pretty much, like I said, functionally secure. Christianity is taking people out of those secure relationships. And I think that, in many cases, a lot of the commands that Christians have, such as, “Do not divorce,” etc., are good in and of themselves, but they’re also there to really facilitate this new community and protect all of its members. If a married woman joins a Christian church, and then she loses her ties with her family, and then she’s divorced, she’s got none of the safety net that she would have had in the Roman world. So, I think that all would have been, right from the beginning, a very appealing thing; also, the idea that everybody was the same in the sight of God. And so, as years go on, this — that started in the first century, by the time you get to the fourth century when Constantine decrees that Christianity can be legal — it was just kind of a natural step in some ways. Obviously not natural in the light of history but it wasn’t nearly as shocking as it would have been. So, ultimately, it starts in the first century is why it spread, not with some political movement that is often suggested that happened in the fourth century.