The Influence of the Early Church

The Bible tells us we're to set our mind on things above, not on things on earth. Jerry Sitzer says that's part of how the early church changed the world they were living in. They believed in a kind of transcendent kingdom that was not of this world, but it had everything to do with this world. So, Christianity was kind of a seditionist, a subversive movement, but not in the way we popularize it or conceive of it today, where we're marching, we're protesting, we're forcing the powers that be to bend to our will.

They didn't do any of that. And that was the secret, in my opinion, to their impact and their success. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Anne Wilson. I'm Bob Lapine.

You'll find us online at FamilyLifeToday.com. Are there things we can learn from the first century church about how to have an impact in the world we live in? Jerry Sitzer says there's a lot we can learn.

We'll talk with him about that today. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today. Thanks for joining us. I think all of us at some point have looked at the small band of people who were around when Jesus ascended into heaven and thought, how did they change the world?

Because they were really nobodies in that culture. Yeah, exactly. And you think, what can we learn from them that can help us figure out how we can change the world today and point people to Jesus today? And we're going to get a chance to visit that theme today with one of my favorite people. All right? Jerry Sitzer is joining us again on Family Life Today. Welcome back. Thank you, Bob. It's so good to be here. You guys go way back. We do. And this is your first time to meet Jerry.

I'm already fascinated by the talks that we've already been having before recording. Yeah. Jerry is a professor at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington, although your season there is coming to a little bit of an end, right? Official retirement next June. Wow.

And how many years? Thirty-one. Think of the students. Think of the legacies. You have impacted the lives of so many men and women who, some of them still write to you and call you and talk about the impact you had in their life. Last Monday, I taught my last History of Christianity I class, and about a dozen alums showed up. And the last thing we did in the class was sing five great hymns from the History of Christianity.

Did you really? It was just glorious. I want to be in your class. We sang a hymn by Prudentius, historic hymns, Prudentius. We sang Be Thou My Vision. We sang a hymn by Francis of Assisi. It was lovely. Was Mighty Fortress, was that one of them? No, I kept pre-Reformation.

You stayed out of the Reformation. Bernard of Clairvaux. Jerry has written a book that is still a classic. I mean, anybody you know who is going through a season of loss and grief, the book A Grace Disguised—I don't know how many copies that sold, I don't know how many I've given away—it's part memoir because of the season of loss and grief you went through, but it's also how God meets you in that season and shepherds you through that season and what you can learn about him and about yourself in that season. It's profound. It's a book we keep in our Family Life Resource Center. Your new book is fascinating. It's a book called Resilient Faith, and the subtitle is How the Early Christian Third Way Changed the World. So we've got to start with what is the third way, don't we?

Yes, we do. I'll try to make this short and sweet. The phrase first appears in a second-century document written by an unknown Christian apologist.

That's a defender of the faith. He wrote around the year 140. It's very short. I'd really encourage listeners to read it.

You can find it online. It's called The So-Called Letter to Diagnetus. It's beautiful. It's beautifully written.

It's only 12, 14 pages long. And this unknown author is writing to a Roman official, and he uses the phrase third race or third way to describe what the Roman official already knew about Christianity. There was something about the Christian movement that was so new and so unusual and unique that Rome didn't know what to call it.

So they called it the third race or the third way. The first was the Roman way. The second way was the Jewish way. Rome was very familiar with Jews. There were a lot of Jews in the Greco-Roman world. About 10% of the population was Jewish, some 5 million people.

I didn't know that. The third way was this new, small new religion called Christianity. And Rome was partly fascinated by it, partly disturbed by it, and partly hostile to it. And so the unknown author of this letter writing to Diagnetus wants to explain, describe what made Christianity so unique, hence third race, third way. Interesting that Judaism stood out because Rome was conquering people right and left, and they all had their tribal religions, but somehow Judaism stood out among those religions.

It did. These were called diaspora Jews because they were away from the Jewish homeland. And by 70 AD, that was shut down. You know, the temple was destroyed and the wall was broken down. Most Jews were already dispersed.

That pretty much dispersed the rest of them. Rome respected Judaism because Judaism was an ancient religion and Rome liked things old. They were always suspicious of new things. And Rome had a tremendous capacity to absorb new things into its pantheon of gods and into its various rites and rituals. Judaism could not be absorbed. And they actually gave Jews favors. They didn't force Jews to serve in the army, for example. Judaism was different enough and observable enough that Rome could keep an eye on it. As I say in my book, it's like an opposing team wearing a jersey.

You always know they're there. They practiced circumcision. They ate kosher. So that it tended to isolate Jews. And because it was so difficult to become a Jew, Rome could respect it, but very few people became it, so to speak. In the book, I say that the way of Rome was accommodation. The way of Judaism was isolation. The way of Christianity was different.

It was immersion. Christians in this early period, roughly from 35 AD to the eve of Constantine, the last great persecution around the year 300, so we're saying we're talking about a 265-year period of time. Christians had this amazing capacity to fit into the Roman world.

Speak the same language, shop in the same markets, eat the same food, dress the same way, speak the local languages or dialects. They had this tremendous capacity to adapt but not be absorbed. They were able to maintain high standards of discipleship and a very distinct belief system and yet not isolate.

Now, that's amazing to me, and that's really the story I tell, how they actually did that. So as we look at where we are, and would you say America's post-Christian today? No, I do not think it's post-Christian. We still have very high rates of identification of Christian belief. Most recent poll is 70% of Americans self-identify as Christians.

By the way, 10 years ago, it was 84%, so in 10 years, that's, from a statistical point of view, a precipitous drop. But most Americans still identify as Christian. I would say we're post-Christendom.

That is, it's not culturally familiar anymore. There's not as much privilege and power being Christian as there used to be. I mean, Christianity and America were virtually synonymous for several centuries, and I would say that's not the case so much anymore. And even Christian morality or Christian identity, things like kids knowing what Easter is all about, we've lost a little of that in the culture. Well, just look at the process in the last maybe 25, 40 years, the Church spent centuries Christianizing a pagan calendar. We're paganizing a Christian calendar. All you have to do is look at Christmas or Easter. My favorite holiday now is Thanksgiving because it's kind of the least perverse. It's not commercialized.

It's not as commercialized outside once you get past the turkey, you know. In the world, not of the world, that's, is that encapsulating the third way? Yes, except I think when we hear that, it's often we're in the world but not of the world, but they had a strong kingdom theology. The Jesus they followed was Lord. They called him Lord, and they paid a price to call him Lord. He was in competition with Caesar, but it was such a different kind of competition. Jesus never raised an army. He never wrote a book.

He never built a palace. It's kind of interesting, in one of the chapters of the book, I contrast the difference between Caesar Augustus, who was called the Son of God, and Jesus of Nazareth, who was called the Son of God. Really different sons of God, those two are.

And you know, if we had been living during that period, we would have wanted to be invited to parties in Caesar's palace. Not a party in a stable in Bethlehem. Right. That's the God we serve. But we call that God Lord.

Jesus Christ the Lord. So, they believed in a kind of transcendent kingdom that was not of this world, but it had everything to do with this world. So, Christianity was kind of seditionist, a subversive movement, but not in the way we popularize it or conceive of it today, where we're marching, we're protesting, we're forcing the powers that be to bend to our will. They didn't do any of that.

Right. And that was the secret, in my opinion, to their impact and their success. This is what I find fascinating, because we think, okay, what's our strategy need to be? What should cultural engagement look like? What's the approach we need to take? And I read your book, and it's believe that Jesus is who He is and that the kingdom is real and that it's bigger than the world we live in, and live like that's true, and watch what happens.

And watch what happens. And they did that with enough success to maintain a growth pattern and an impact on the culture for 265 years. That's a longer period than going back to our Declaration of Independence. Now, obviously, there were exceptions. There were Christians that fell away.

We know this. I mean, the documents indicate this. But the general trajectory, scholars estimate that in the year 40, there were about maybe 5,000 Christians. By the year 300, there were 5 million.

And that happened under a great deal of duress the whole time. You said it went 265 years. By the time Constantine becomes the emperor, that was a shift away from the third way?

It's a complicated story. Constantine gave legal recognition to Christianity in the year 313. And the Emperor Theodosius, at the end of that fourth century, made Christianity the official religion of the empire. And the numbers changed dramatically. So we can estimate in the year 300, about 10% of the empire was Christian, about 5 million people, just on the eve of the last great and biggest persecution under the Emperor Diocletian. By the year 360, 50% of the empire is Christian.

And it became popular. Real Christian or nominal Christian? Well, a lot of it is nominal. I mean, you can't handle that growth rate.

Yeah. And before that, they had a process by which they would disciple people, take two to three years. And that elevated the level of serious Christianity to a critical mass in a given church. And all that began to break down. It happened slowly over a period of maybe 100 years, but all of that began to break down.

Well, the third way becomes less meaningful as a category when it's the only way. And then for the next many, many centuries, Christianity, especially after it won tribal groups, became the only way. The only real religion.

There were Jews and Muslims, but they were much smaller in number and more marginal. For somebody to come into the church in the first 200 years, I say this, and I think of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch who's traveling, right, and they baptize him right there. Right away. Cornelius baptized right away.

But let's think about this. What book was the eunuch reading? Book of Isaiah. Yeah, in chariot. So he was a God-fearing. Right. He was familiar with Judaism.

I mean, he's got a text in front of him. So he's obviously an important court official. Cornelius was a fellow traveling Jew. He built a synagogue.

He was loved by Jews. So early conversions in the apostolic period were usually people who were either Jews or associated with Judaism. But imagine what it's going to be like when the Christian movement grows from Jerusalem to Samaria to Antioch, which was a very diverse city. They said scholars estimate 18 identifiable ethnic groups.

And then that became the launching pad for missions to Corinth, Philippi, on it goes, Roman world, Carthage, Alexandria, on it goes, begins to break into different language groups. Well, imagine what it would be like for a Christian to meet somebody who came from a genuinely pagan background. They don't know anything about Genesis. They don't believe the world was created by God. They don't know about Moses and Abraham and Esther and Ruth. They don't even know the categories, creation, fall, redemption, blank slate, nothing, zero. Well, you baptize them into what?

I mean, they didn't know enough. And so they developed this process of two to three years to gradually move them into the Christian fold so that being Christian was truly meaningful. And that's two to three years of catechetical training, and you couldn't be baptized. You could not be baptized until afterwards. They were called the rights of initiation.

But think about that. And I like the fact that you chose the word training. It wasn't education. It was training. It was more like what you do with an athlete or a musician, not what you do in a conventional classroom. And that culture is similar to what we're living in right now, right? I think so. So we should copy a lot of the discipleship methods. That's music to my ears.

Honestly, I'm right now, I'm actually busy at Whitworth developing a two-year new catechuminate. Makes sense. And it's not just information. The Reformation catechisms were information doctrine-driven. They taught doctrine. They taught the biblical story. They taught something along the lines of creeds, all that.

But they had a sponsor, what we now call a mentor. They trained them in discipleship. It's interesting, during the rights of initiation, when they were being scrutinized or examined by the bishop before baptism, they wouldn't simply ask, Ann, do you believe in God the Father Almighty? Ann, do you believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son? Ann, do you believe in the Holy Spirit? Do you believe in the life of the church? And you would say, yes, yes, yes.

Repeat that. Then they would ask, Ann, are you visiting widows? Are you reaching out to the poor?

Are you visiting prisoners? That was as important to them as having correct doctrine. And that was all part of the training process under the guidance of a mentor, who would go through the same training with them.

So mentors would go through it two, three, four, five times, just like athletes do. It's like musicians playing scales every day. And the people who were asking the question were people who were doing that as the rhythm of their own life. They were taking care of the widows and the orphans and doing, their orthopraxy and their orthodoxy were both solid. They were a seamless whole. And I love the fact you used the word rhythm.

So this is amazing. Early on, before we even get into the second century, one of the earliest Christian manuals written, the Didache, actually says Christians should be taking three times a day to pause to turn to God. In worship. By the middle of the second century, it's five times a day. These were natural rhythms that they developed, constantly turn toward God. You work in the world, you raise your families, you turn toward God. They used the Lord's Prayer three times a day. I mean, all of these rhythms that taught a disciplined way of life, and if they had not done that, Christianity would have been reabsorbed by the Roman world.

The only way it could remain distinct was either isolate from the culture or train people with enough maturity and strength to be able to live in that culture and not capitulate to it. And if they don't do good works, they don't change the world. They don't change the world. Doctrine is not going to be enough.

It's got to be both. Rome complained about the good works, often with a kind of grudging admiration. I mean, I've got quite a bit in the book about even emperors. In fact, there's an early second century document where a Roman provincial governor is writing to the emperor Trajan, and he said, Christians are affecting our economy. They're not buying temple merchandise. They're not buying animals for sacrifice. Merchants are complaining because the Christian lifestyle is challenging pagan values. Oh, Lord, make that happen again, honestly. The same document, though, is where he said, oh, how they love one another, isn't it?

That's another document, but yes, the same thing. They had a reputation for the care of each other. We have evidence in a plague that swept the Roman world in the year 250, and Christians were exemplary in how they cared for the sick and the dying. They would not only bury their own dead, they would bury the dead of their pagan neighbors.

At risk to themselves. Well, and then he did. In fact, a bishop writes a letter to his diocese and says, many Christians were heroic in how they cared for the sick, and they got the disease themselves. And then in this wonderful kind of theological statement, bad science but good theology, he said, they took on the disease of other people onto themselves. And he said that because some of the people they were caring for recovered, and they died. And so they had, of course, they have the vicarious sacrifice of Jesus as a kind of image. So their point is, they took on the disease themselves just like Jesus did for all of us. So you're talking to a lot of moms and dads, to a lot of people who love Jesus and who long to see the gospel explode in our culture. Do parents start to integrate monastic lifestyle patterns into their home? Do we start to have worship at 730 in the morning with our kids and chant? I'm thinking, where's that discipleship stuff you're writing?

Well, I mean, yes, Bob. I have a chapter on identity and community, and I make three brief points. One is that the Christian movement introduced a new kind of fundamental identity in the Roman world. It's not based on wealth or status. It's not based on ethnicity or religious identification. It's based on being a new creature in Jesus Christ.

And that shapes all what I call your secondary identities, whether you're married or single, whether you're husband or wife, whether you're a household servant or a master. Christianity didn't erase those categories. It slowly began to transform them. The other thing is that Christianity claimed to be a new commonwealth.

Rome thought it was the empire of the world, the commonwealth, controlled by its army, its rituals and rights, and ultimately the authority of the emperor. And this little fledgling movement said, actually, no, we're the new commonwealth under Jesus Christ as Lord. We're creating a new kind of people that's global. But then they turned right around and created something vital at the local level they called the oikos, oikumene, commonwealth, oikos, household, a new household church. So I would suggest that families need to think of themselves as units of discipleship, not just for the nuclear family but for kids that play soccer with their own children, neighbors, single people, elderly people, and we become discipling units in our families. And that means, you know, we have to think about our values, that we're going to raise children who are not going to be professional athletes, which every parent with a seven-year-old soccer player thinks he or she is going to be, and of course we all know that's nonsense, but that we do soccer as a way of interfacing with non-church people to introduce them to the Christian way of life and Christian belief system. And let me suggest three categories for moms and dads to think in, because as I read through, these guys know that I preached through 1 John earlier this year, and in 1 John...

He talks about it all the time. I do, because it was profound. Could you preach one of those sermons right now, Bob? In 1 John, John says, right belief is an essential aspect of our faith.

Absolutely. If you don't have right belief, you don't have Christianity. He then says, right morality, how we live and how we honor righteousness is an essential part. So somebody who says, I believe the right stuff, but their life doesn't reflect biblical morality, we've got to ask a question, what's going on there?

And then how you love others is the third aspect. And so as parents, as we're raising our kids, I think we have to be asking, are we teaching them to believe the right stuff? Are we teaching them to live Christianly in their moral, ethical, righteous living? And are we teaching them that you sacrificially love those in your world? Those are kind of those three categories that I would think, if your oikos is focused on those three things, you're probably raising countercultural kids.

Yeah. It's interesting to think about how homes and churches function in our culture. In the Greco-Roman world, most people were poor. Ninety-five percent were either lower, what we would call lower middle class or under that. And they lived right on top of each other.

As I mentioned in my book, there was a survey done in Rome around the year 300. They identified a little over 1,700 domiciles, homes, mostly of wealthy people. That's only 1,700 in a city of a million. Forty-two thousand apartment buildings. Where was everybody living? In these dense apartment buildings with no plumbing, no fresh water, no toilets, nothing. No windowpans.

You had to learn how to live together, didn't you? You did. And so Christians were visible. You could not hide being Christian.

You would either be exposed as a fraud or you would be admired for the way you lived your life. People shopped in marketplaces every day, including Christians. Christians would run stalls. People could observe how they were raising their families, how men were treating wives. Wives were treating husbands.

They would go home. Their neighbors could hear them. And they started churches in these places. They didn't have buildings yet. That wasn't until much, much later.

So they were so much more visible. You think about our culture, the way we build homes. No front porches, patios, fences.

We're isolated. We go to churches, which are like castles surrounded by cement moats, parking lots. City planners call churches dead spaces. You get in your car, which is like a wormhole, and you go to your Christian school or Christian friends or Christian church. It creates an isolation from the very people that God loves and for whom Christ died. That's like a haunting phrase to me, for whom Christ died. We've got to figure out how to first disciple our families and the circle of people with whom we're associated.

But then we have to learn how to create genuine interfaces with a world that's bleeding, that's bleeding. If anybody knows that, it's you folks, just the breakdown of family and relationships. A few years ago, for the first time in American society, over 50% of people above the age of 18 were unmarried. They're lonely. They're isolated. And we've got to figure out how to reach them. And part of that, think about it, in terms of the culture today, maybe I'm reaching too far, is those oikos, villages, are sitting right here.

There it is. If I step into a Twitter social space, I am stepping into their world. That's not the only way.

It's not the only way, but it is a way. But that is a, I cannot hide if I step in there. It's like they're on top of me.

I'm on top of them. And when you look at that, what we're doing there, it's not pretty. It's ugly. And Christians are behaving often in a really ugly way. All we're doing is adding to the shrill voice of our culture.

Hating, not taking responsibility for the language we use. I mean, it sounds so simple and almost embarrassingly obvious, but character is a way of bearing witness to the gospel. If I am quick to listen and slow to speak. And slow to anger. And slow to anger.

If I'm kind to people. Slow to tweet. We could do a lot more of that, couldn't we? Or if we tweet, we speak in kindness.

We deal directly with people rather than anonymously with people. I mean, these are becoming radical acts of discipleship in our culture. This is where we can learn from history. We can learn from those who have gone before us rather than thinking, oh, they didn't know anything about our day and about technology. No, they knew about life and about humanity and about Jesus. And I love your book, Resilient Faith, how the early Christian third way changed the world.

And I think it has a lot to say to us today. You can go online at familylifetoday.com to order a copy of Resilient Faith by Jerry Sitzer. Again, our website is familylifetoday.com. You can also order by calling 1-800-FL-TODAY. So again, the website is familylifetoday.com.

Or call 1-800-358-6329. That's 1-800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word TODAY. Get a copy of Jerry Sitzer's outstanding book, Resilient Faith, how the early Christian third way changed the world. Let me say a word of thanks to those of you who are a part of our mission. We want to change the world here at Family Life one home at a time.

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Go to familylifetoday.com to donate online or call 1-800-FL-TODAY to donate. And thanks for your support and for being a part of helping to change the world. And we hope you can be back with us tomorrow as we continue our conversation about what we can learn from the early church that applies to how we live for Christ in the 21st century. Jerry Sitzer will be with us again. Hope you can be back as well. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas, a crew ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.