In a comment to my last post, Lee asked:
Does the fact that Latin Christendom managed to turn back Islam at Tours and ultimately eject it fromt the Iberian penninsula mean that they were doing something right?
OK, I’ll admit that when I said that the Muslim conquest of Byzantium might have indicated God’s judgment, I opened a pretty dicey subject that could lead us on a direct route to Jerry Falwell saying that the 9/11 attacks happened because of America’s pagans and homosexuals. So let me clarify.
I wrote about the church in the context of God’s covenant with it, and his promise that “the gates of hell shall not prevail.” But God is only known to have made a covenant with two entities — the church and Israel. So my first disagreement with Falwell’s saying that God lifted his “veil of protection” is that I see no reason to believe that America had a veil of protection in the first place. America has been fortunate in a lot of ways, but I don’t see all good fortune as a sign of God’s approval.
It’s a little-noted fact that when Jesus is describing bad behavior in litanies like Matthew 6, his only comment about the consequences of their actions is “They have received their reward.” In other words, he acknowledges that people who pursue earthly things are often rewarded with earthly things. Therefore, I don’t doubt that a country that pursues an empire can receive an empire, with no help from God. An army can win a battle simply by having better weaponry and better tactics. But they retain the reward only so long as they have those advantages, and the world being the way it is, that will not be forever.
So in some sense, I think you can detect God’s favor more from people’s defeats than their victories. When the church first appeared it was persecuted, but it grew anyway. When barbarians conquered Christianized Rome, the Christians converted their conquerors, and so church growth continued. The shocking thing about the conquest of Byzantium isn’t that the Christians lost the battles, but that so many of them defected to their conquerors’ religion, and almost nobody went the other way. This exposes that there was something false about the church’s apparent success, to the extent that it was supported by human power rather than God’s. Since the Western church defeated the Muslims militarily, they avoided being put to that test.
Have you read Rodney Stark’s The Rise of Christianity? He takes a sociological approach to why Christianity grew in its earliest years. The approach has some fairly obvious limitations, but he theorizes that Christianity flourished because 1. it offered a sense of identity based around familiar concepts that was suitable for people who had lost their ethnic roots in the cosmopolitain Roman empire, 2. the respect that women received in Christian communities led to their overrepresentation in those communities, and consequently high rates of intermarriage with pagans leading to more conversions (plus a high fertility rate due to Christian prohibitions on abortion and infanticide) and 3. during times of disaster (fires, plagues) Christian communities offered a lot in the way of mutual aid (which both led to a higher survival rate for Christians and attracted converts).
Obviously there are limitations to any analogy between that time and our own, but those lessons seem like they might be relevant.
Comment by Lee — September 30, 2005 @ 6:13 am
Well, I don’t think the problem is that Christians don’t have a good enough “church growth strategy.” Aside from the fact that such ideas often fail or take us to Rick Warren-land, it seems to be repeating the error of our forebears by thinking the church depends on human power rather than God’s power. We can look back now and try to analyze why the church grew in the Roman era, but at the time they seemed to just trust that the Spirit was doing it. Might that be the strategy to imitate?
Comment by Camassia — September 30, 2005 @ 7:57 am
Right – I didn’t mean to suggest that contemporary churches should adopt those sort of things as a “church growth strategy.” And presumably that’s not why the early Christians were doing those things either. It was more likely a matter of seeking the Kingdom of Heaven first and having the rest added on. What I think is interesting is that, if Stark is right, attracting converts happened as a result of the churches doing the things they were supposed to be doing anyway.
Yoder writes somewhere or another of why he thinks that “faithfulness vs. results” is kind of a false dilemma. Becuase God is ultimately in charge, we can trust that faithfulness will have the kinds of results God wants it to have. It’s interesting (though not of overriding importance naturally) that Stark has argued on “secular” grounds that this appears to be what happened.
Comment by Lee — September 30, 2005 @ 8:24 am
John Dominic Crossan also notes that, based on anthropological and archeological studies
and historical accounts, earliest Christianity was centered in the domestic arena — the
home, which is the sphere women controlled. Earliest focus was on the Kingdom of Heaven,
God’s presence in Jesus first and then the Holy Spirit. The idea of the Kingdom present
among them spoke to both Jew and pagan who were on the lowest rungs of that society. (My
extremely condensed take on The Birth of Christianity by Crossan.
I’d like to believe that Christianity’s appeal wouldn’t be limited to those of lowest rank
in society, but Christianity went through changes as it gained in the political arena. Was
the Christianity that appealed to outcasts the same Christianity that appealed to rulers?
Women’s role in society at large didn’t grow with the Church. As the Church began to
exchange its private spaces (home and family) for public ones (political influence), I
suspect it was difficult for Church leaders to understand the nature and impact of that
exchange. They were more or less inventing a new kind of wheel, and in this case culture
had a greater impact on reinventing a Church growing in power than did Jesus’ teachings.
Comment by Bag Lady — October 1, 2005 @ 1:50 pm
It’s interesting that you wrote that while I was writing the post about churches’ man shortage. It crossed my mind that in a larger sense, maybe one reason for it is that in the post-Constantinian era churches are reprivatizing, and have become something you choose to do on your off hours rather than a public duty. Maybe more to the point, in the industrial era housewives often want to get out of the house and do things like serve on church committees, while men come home from the office and don’t especially want to deal with another organization and its politics. It does seem that churches that draw more men impress upon them that church is something they need to do, not just a nice place to be.
By the way, that article in the Atlantic about new religious movements a few years back (which isn’t online for free any more, alas) quoted a researcher who said that most early Christians were actually middle-class rather than the social dregs, and that this is the norm for new religions. I have no idea if it’s true, but it is an interesting challenge to the conventional wisdom.
Comment by Camassia — October 1, 2005 @ 3:17 pm
Do you recall the time frame (for early Christians) discussed by the researcher? Crossan
focuses primarily on two or three decades following Jesus’ death, observing that changes
occurred over that relatively short time. Not all followers and converts were poor,
evidence of which he sees in Jesus’ exhortations on poverty, Paul’s scolding on mis-handling
of the Lord’s Supper, and extracanonical writings of the early Church, especially the
Didache. The latter contains rules for community life that indicate pretty clearly a mix of
economic classes, but still, it’s several decades removed from Jesus’ life.
I’m really only just getting started learning about earliest Christianity, and it does seem
that there’s plenty of room for controversy.
Comment by Bag Lady — October 2, 2005 @ 7:44 pm