Church History in Plain Language

by Bruce L. Shelley

Several prominent factors, however, appear to have contributed to the growth of Christianity. First, and rather obviously, early Christians were moved by a burning conviction. The Event had happened. God had invaded time and Christians were captivated by the creative power of that grand news. They knew that men had been redeemed and they could not keep to themselves the tidings of salvation. That unshakable assurance, in the face of every obstacle including martyrdom itself, helps explain the growth of the church. Second, the Christian gospel met a widely felt need in the hearts of people. Ancient Stoicism, for example, taught that men achieve tranquility by the suppression of desire for everything that man cannot get and keep. “Before the external disorder of the world and bodily illness, retreat into yourself and find God there.” Thus the Stoic soul stood firm in the storms of life by practicing apathy, the discipline of not being attached to people or things. If a person was not emotionally attached to things, he could not be victimized and thus could live in tranquility. Stoics called for the virtue of courage in facing whatever was to come. While Christians were committed to the personal God revealed in Jesus, they could still admire some Stoic convictions, once those convictions were refitted for Christian teaching. For example, Stoics called for facing suffering with courage, independence from the things of this world, and a trust in a greater providence. Many peopl...

One expression of Christian love had a particularly far-reaching effect. The church often provided burial service for poor brethren. Christians felt that to deprive a person of honorable burial was a terrible thing. Lactantius, the North African scholar (c. 240–320) wrote, “We will not allow the image and creation of God to be thrown out to the wild beasts and the birds as their prey; it must be given back to the earth from which it was taken.

The impact of this ministry of mercy upon pagans is revealed in the observation of one of Christianity’s worst enemies, the apostate Emperor Julian (332–63). In his day Julian was finding it more difficult than he had expected to put new life into the traditional Roman religion. He wanted to set aside Christianity and bring back the ancient faith, but he saw clearly the drawing power of Christian love in practice:

Atheism [i.e., Christian faith] has been specially advanced through the loving service rendered to strangers, and through their care for the burial of the dead. It is a scandal that there is not a single Jew who is a beggar, and that the godless Galileans care not only for their own poor but for ours as well; while those who belong to us look in vain for the help that we should render them.

Finally, persecution in many instances helped to publicize the Christian faith. Martyrdoms were often witnessed by thousands in the amphitheater. The term martyr originally meant “witness,” and that is precisely what many Christians were at the moment of death.

This period, however, the age of extraordinary expansion before Christianity moved from the catacombs to the imperial courts, serves to remind us that the church is truly catholic only when it is impelled by the gospel to bring all men to living faith in Jesus Christ.

Fundamental to the Christian lifestyle and the cause of endless hostility was the Christian’s rejection of the pagan gods. The Greeks and Romans had deities for every aspect of living: for sowing and reaping, for rain and wind, for volcanoes and rivers, for birth and death. But to the Christians these gods were nothing, and their denial of them marked the followers of Jesus as “enemies of the human race.

One simply could not reject the gods without arousing scorn as a social misfit. For the pagan every meal began with a liquid offering and a prayer to the pagan gods. A Christian could not share in that. Most heathen feasts and social parties were held in the precincts of a temple after sacrifice had been made, and the invitation was usually to dine “at the table” of some god. A Christian could not go to such a feast. Inevitably, when he refused the invitation to some social occasion, the Christian seemed rude, boorish, and discourteous.

Other social events Christians rejected because they found them wrong in themselves. Gladiatorial combats, for exampl...

As late as the early fifth century, Augustine tells the story of his friend Alypius, who agreed to attend a spectacle to please a friend, but resolved to keep his eyes shut. When the shouting began, his eyes popped open, and he was yelling above the rest.

In short, the early Christian was almost bound to divorce himself from the social and economic life of his time if he wanted to be true to his Lord. This meant that everywhere the Christian turned, his life and faith were on display because the gospel introduced a revolutionary new attitude toward human life. It could be seen in Christian views of slaves, children, and sex.

In this kind of society, some Christians also held slaves but they treated them kindly and allowed them to have the same rights within the church as anyone else. At least one former slave, Callistus, became the bishop of Rome.

The accusation certainly was not true, but large numbers of Christians were arrested and a terrible persecution followed. Many Christians were even crucified. Some were sewn up in the skins of wild beasts; then big dogs were let loose upon them, and they were torn to pieces. Women were tied to mad bulls and dragged to death. After nightfall Christians were burned at the stake in Nero’s garden. The Roman people who hated the Christians were free to come into the garden, and Nero drove around in his chariot enjoying the horrible spectacle to the full.

The popular notion held that disasters would strike if the gods were neglected. In his Apology Tertullian writes, “If the Tiber floods the city, or if the Nile refuses to rise, or if the sky withholds its rain, if there is an earthquake, a famine, a pestilence, at once the cry is raised: ‘Christians to the lion.’ ”

Emperor Decius (249–251) took another important step in persecution. Caesar worship was made universal and compulsory for every race and nation within the empire with the single exception of the Jews. On a certain day in the year every Roman citizen had to come to the Temple of Caesar and had to burn a pinch of incense there, and say “Caesar is Lord.” When he had done that, he was given a certificate to guarantee that he had done so. After a man had burned his pinch of incense and had acknowledged Caesar as Lord, he could go away and worship any god he liked, so long as the worship did not affect public decency and order.

Thus we see that Caesar worship was primarily a test of political loyalty; it was a test of whether a man was a good citizen. If a man refused to carry out the ceremony of acknowledging Caesar, he was automatically branded as a traitor and a revolutionary. Exaltation of the emperor, then, created a problem for the Christians. They had not failed to pray for the emperor in their meetings, but they would not pray to him in private or in public.

Scholars have studied Roman coins and have found a striking similarity between the praises Christians offered in worship of Christ and the adulation Roman citizens directed to the reigning emperor. The coins, usually celebrating the blessings each successive emperor was to bring to a waiting world, announce his reign with, “Hail, Lord of the Eart...

In one sense Rome was right because many Christians considered this conflict of loyalties a cosmic struggle. The Revelation of John in the New Testament reflects the Christian response to the imperial cult in Asia Minor toward the end of the first century. John traces the oppression of believers to the devil himself, to the great red dragon, who wages war against the saints through two agents, the beasts of Revelation 13. The first is the beast from the sea (or abyss), the imperial power. The second is the beast from the land (the false prophet), or the imperial worship. And what was the Christian defense against this attack from Rome? They conquered the dragon, John says, “by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death” (Rev.

“I have never been interested in a historical Jesus. I should not care if it were proved by someone that the man Jesus never lived, and that what was narrated in the Gospels were a figment of the writer’s imagination. For the Sermon on the Mount would still be true for me.” Gandhi was a great man. But he was not—and never claimed to be—a Christian. Many people who profess to be Christians, however, approach Christianity just as Gandhi did. They try to separate what Jesus said from who Jesus was. They want to set aside the doctrine of a supernatural Jesus and exalt his ethical teachings. They find the beliefs of historic Christianity an embarrassment. They prefer to stress Christian behavior.

Many modern Christians would rather not discuss the central teachings of Christianity. They are not sure that ideas about religion or theology are all that important. “I love flowers,” a minister once said, “but I hate botany; I love religion, but I hate theology.” This widespread attitude often springs from good reasons. Theology can be dull, or much worse, it can be ruthless. In Christianity, however, the answer to bad theology can never be no theology. It must be good theology. God gave us minds, and he surely expects us to use them in thinking about his truth.

Theology comes from two Greek words: theos, meaning God, and logos, meaning word or rational thought. So theology is rational thought about God. It is not identical with religion. Religion is our belief in God and our effort to live by that belief. Theology is the attempt to give a rational explanation of our belief: it is thinking about religion.

Theology is using our own language and our own way of thinking to explain God’s truth.

Since the first Christians were all Jews, they presented their message about Jesus in terms of the promised Savior of God’s people: “Jesus is the Messiah (Christ).” In their preaching to Jews, the apostles emphasized the resurrection of Jesus more than his death because it demonstrated that the man executed as a criminal was nevertheless God’s Messiah. Following guidelines laid down by Jesus himself, the apostles pointed to Old Testament passages that had been fulfilled in his career and in the beginnings of the church. “This is what was prophesied” was frequently on their lips. In describing Jesus they used Old Testament images. He was the Passover Lamb, the second Adam, the Son of David. He was the stone the builders rejected, but God chose him to be the cornerstone in the construction of his church.

They also sang their beliefs. From time to time the New Testament quotes one of these hymns. First Timothy 3:16 (NIV) is likely an example: He [Christ] appeared in a body, was vindicated by the Spirit, was seen by angels, was preached among the nations, was believed on in the world, was taken up in glory.

When we read the Fourth Gospel carefully we recognize that the author is fighting on two fronts. One set of readers he has in view are not convinced that Jesus was in the full sense God. To them he points out that the life of Jesus can only be explained by the fact that in Christ the eternal Word of God has become incarnate. Toward the end of his gospel he explains his purpose in writing: “that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31, NIV). In other words, he has to persuade some readers of Christ’s deity. John had other readers, however, who had to be persuaded of Christ’s full humanity. They evidently thought of Christ as an appearance of God on earth in human form but without actual flesh and blood. Against these John points out how at the crucifixion of Jesus real blood and water flowed from his pierced side. Thus John fights on two fronts, against those who thought Jesus was a mere man and against those who believed him to be a heavenly ghost.

The basic belief of the Gnostics was what we call dualism, that is, they believed that the world is ultimately divided between two cosmic forces, good and evil. In line with much Greek philosophy, they identified evil with matter. Because of this they regarded any Creator God as wicked. Creation by a deity, they felt, was not so much impossible as it was indecent. Their own Supreme Being was far removed from any such tendency to “

Gnostics created their own versions of Christian literary works. Generally Gnostics took Jesus to be one of the many lesser deities lacking the purity and potency of the supreme reality or god. It was only such a lesser being who would engage the evil material world at all. Even so, they predictably picture a Jesus who was unconnected to the environment he came from and the movement he left behind. He rejected his Jewish orientation, the Torah, and Jewish titles like Son of God. He is not pictured as performing miracles or defeating death in resurrection. This was an otherworldly Jesus who passed on knowledge by what he said. Scholars differ concerning what the “Gnostic Jesus” actually taught. Often readers reconstruct a Jesus from these sayings who looks like the readers themselves. It is fashionable to picture a Jesus who is tolerant and inclusive of people who claim intuitive, prophetically given insights (typically suppressed by the controlling bishops). This Gnostic Jesus supposedly supported women, despite a misogynist declaration about women not being included in heaven at the close of the most famous of the Gnostic documents, The Gospel of Thomas.

The church seems to have known of these Gnostic gospels and rejected them. The documents may actually include some things that Jesus said, but they were rejected because they leave the wrong overall impression of Jesus. Other Gnostics used different arguments to escape from the dilemma of a human Savior. One group insisted that Jesus did not really have a body at all; it was a clever hallucination—the same heavenly ghost idea we saw in Docetism. In any case Gnostics agreed that the Christ could not be human. Thus we have what a modern Christian must think a striking surprise. The first major test to faith in the Event was not denial of Jesus Christ’s deity; it was rejection of his humanity

Compared with apostolic Christianity, Gnosticism was full of surprises, not the least of which was a strange doctrine of “predestination,” for lack of a better term. Many Gnostics recognized a kind of proletariat and bourgeoisie of heaven. The lower spiritual class lived by faith and the upper class, the illuminated or the perfect, lived by knowledge. Still a third group, the spiritually disadvantaged, were not capable of gnosis under...

If the Gnostics had triumphed, Christians would have surrendered their priceless heritage from Judaism. The robust message of Christianity to all men would have shriveled to a discussion by a chosen few, and Christ would have ceased to be the model human, the second Adam. He would have been lost among the many gods of the mystery religions.

Orthodox Christians found the Gnostics very difficult to combat. Gnostics claimed that they had some secret information. Jesus, they said, had passed on this information to the gnostic teachers of his time and had hidden it from the materially blinded Jews who founded the church. If this line of argument failed, Gnostics would appeal to a special revelation from heaven to prove their point. Yet Christians rose up to cast out the gnostic heresy, and in doing so they clarified their own orthodox convictions. The best summary of early Christian beliefs is what we call the Apostle’s Creed, to this day repeated every Sunday in many churches. It was not written by the apostles, in spite of its title, but appeared first as a baptismal confession in second-century Rome. Scholars call the early version of it the Old Roman Creed: I believe in God Almighty And in Christ Jesus, his only Son, our Lord Who was born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary Who was crucified under Pontius Pilate and was buried And the third day rose from the dead Who ascended into heaven And sits on the right hand of the Father Whence he comes to judge the living and the dead. And in the Holy Ghost The holy church The remission of sins The resurrection of the flesh The life everlasting.

Answers to Gnosticism Responding to Gnostic Challenges (Ancient or Contemporary) The ancient church points the way for us today, responding to the Gnostics and other efforts to revise or distort Christian thinking with three basic responses drawing from clergy, creed, and canon. By clergy we mean that the leadership of the early church had direct connections with the men whom Jesus had called to himself to be his inner circle; it was a matter of custody: the ones whom Jesus had traveled with and taught for three years had passed on the message and left a written witness to their encounter with Jesus. Identifying with these witnesses is the sure way forward. By creed we mean the early condensing of the basic Christian story and message in a simple narrative summary. While they come from different places with substantially different emphases, the summaries of Tertullian (from North Africa), Irenaeus (from Turkey), and Origen (from Alexandria) are amazingly similar: the basic message of Christianity involved the Father sending his Son to the world to recall, reclaim, and restore it through the death and resurrection of the Son and the ongoing work of the Spirit. This consistent and publicly accessible message is sure. By canon we mean the four New Testament Gospels, which were firmly embraced by the great body of the church within the second century. Early fathers knew of other renderings of who Jesus was and rejected them; instead they held to these four gospels as giving th...

“There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God,”

In orthodox Christianity redemption came not by some secret knowledge of spiritual realms but by God’s action in history. The Son of God entered time, was born of a virgin, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and was buried. That is not gnosis; that is Event.

Understanding Gnosticism Today Two analogies or comparisons may help us assess Gnostic claims about Jesus. The first is about historical proximity. The church’s gospels are written about thirty to sixty-five years after Jesus’ life. This span of time would be comparable to the relationship of a fifty-five-year-old professor in the year 2010 to the Vietnam War or the Korean Conflict, which occurred in his lifetime. This professor can assess what he reads about these conflicts with his own living memory and that of his eyewitness contemporaries. By contrast, the earliest Gnostic gospel is probably written 140 years after Jesus’ life (and much later for all except The Gospel of Thomas). This span of time would be comparable to our professor’s relationship to the Civil War. Our professor would have no living memory of or connection to these events. Fortunately, the Civil War is remarkably well-documented. Without its many eyewitness accounts readers would be left to depend upon retellings by people with no memory of the events they report. Another comparison centers upon the difficulty of offering historical reconstructions of events and persons. There have been a great many books and movies that reconstruct the life and work of Abraham Lincoln. These typically share some general consensus about the outline of his basic life story, family, and service, but they still vary about his motives, religion, and person. But a very different reconstructing of his life emerges from the ...

Roman officials came to see that the suppression of Christianity demanded the destruction of the Scriptures. So the last great persecution of Christians included the burning of the Scriptures. To this day we find it almost impossible to think of the Christian faith without the Bible. It is the foundation of Christianity’s evangelism, its teaching, its worship, and its morality. When we look back over Christian history, we find few if any decisions more basic than those made during the first three centuries surrounding the formation of the Bible. The Scriptures served not only as the inspiration for believers facing martyrdom, but as the supreme standard for the churches threatened by heresy. If catholic Christianity was orthodox, the Bible made it so, for the constant test of any teaching was, what do the Scriptures say?

The Bible contains two portions: the Old Testament, which the early Christians claimed along with the Jews, and the New Testament, which the early Christians produced in spite of the Jews. The Old Testament promised; the New Testament fulfilled.

Christians, almost without exception, embraced the Old Testament as their own. Early Christians, both Jews and Gentiles, believed that Jesus was the fulfillment of the promises running through the Old Testament. Christians also inherited strategies for interpreting from Jesus. Jews in Alexandria had read much of the Bible as allegory. They sought a deeper spiritual or intellectual message beyond the literal meaning. Still others employed a method called typology. The reader discerns a pattern (type) or correspondence between two images or stories. Thus, the story of Jesus may be read with an awareness that he is like an Old Testament sacrifice or an Old Testament deliverer such as Moses.

The Scriptures were composed through the Spirit of God, and have both a meaning which is obvious, and another which is hidden from most readers . . . . The whole law is spiritual, but the inspired meaning is not recognized by all—only by those who are gifted with the grace of the Holy Spirit in the word of wisdom and knowledge.

The Greek translations of the Old Testament included the books of the Hebrew canon, with additional books as well. Protestants routinely call these additional books the Apocrypha, or more generically the Deuterocanonical books.

Early Christians differed over the question of the Apocrypha. In the West the influential Augustine, the well-known bishop of Hippo, embraced the Apocrypha as part of the canon of Scripture. During the sixteenth-century Reformation most Protestants rejected the Apocrypha as canonical. The Roman Catholic Church, following Augustine, accepted the books. And that is how the churches differ to this day.

For example, as a young man Justin Martyr searched energetically for truth in a variety of philosophical schools: first as a Stoic, then a Pythagorean, then a Platonist. But none of them satisfied him. One day, while meditating alone by the seashore, perhaps at Ephesus, he met an old man. During their conversation the stranger exposed the weaknesses of Justin’s thinking and urged him to turn to the Jewish prophets. By reading Scripture, Justin became a Christian. Scores of other men and women in the early days of the church had a similar experience: Tatian, Theophilus, Hilary, Victorinus, Augustine.

The mere act of reading a book in Christian worship did not assure the writing an eventual place in the canon. We know, for example, that Clement, Bishop of Rome, wrote a letter to the church at Corinth about AD 96 and eighty years later it was still the custom in Corinth to read Clement’s letter at public worship. Yet Clement’s letter was never added to the canon. Books read at the worship of the church had a special position and had started on the road that led to entrance into the canon of Scripture—but some did not make it.

In the early church the apostles held a place that other men simply could not fill.

Clement of Rome reflects this general attitude of Christians when he writes, “The apostles were made evangelists to us by the Lord Christ; Jesus Christ was sent by God. Thus Christ is from God, and the apostles from Christ . . . . The Church is built on them as a foundation” (1 Clement 42).

About AD 140 a wealthy and much-traveled ship owner from Sinope on the Black Sea came to Rome. His name was Marcion. Although the son of a bishop, Marcion fell under the spell of the gnostic teacher Cerdo, who believed that the God of the Old Testament was different from the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. The God of the Old Testament, he said, was unknowable; the Christian God had been revealed. The Old Testament God was sheer justice; whereas the God of the New Covenant was loving and gracious.

Marcion developed Cerdo’s distinction. He held that the Old Testament God was full of wrath and the author of evil. This God, he said, was only concerned for the Jewish people. He was prepared to destroy all other people. In contrast, the Christian’s God was a God of grace and love for all, who disclosed himself in Jesus Christ, his Son.

Because he believed that the God of the Old Testament loved the Jews exclusively, Marcion rejected the entire Old Testament and also those New Covenant writings that he thought favored Jewish readers—for example Matthew, Mark, Acts, and Hebrews. He also rejected other Christian writings that appeared to him to compromise his own views, including the Pastoral Letters (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus). So he was left with only a mutilated version of Luke’s gospel (we suppose he omitted the nativity stories) and ten letters of Paul. The Apostle to the Gentiles, it seems, was the only apostle who did not corrupt the gospel of Jesus. Marcion’s garbled Christian views were firmly repudiated by the church in Rome, and Marcion was excommunicated from the church in AD 144. Before long, however, Marcionite churches appeared, modeled on orthodox congregations. They had their own ministers and rituals. For example, they did not use wine at communion, as a result of the ascetic emphasis of their teaching. Some of the Marcionite beliefs spilled over into the various gnostic sects, and Marcionites were themse...

Most importantly, however, Marcion presented the orthodox churches with a twofold problem: his list of New Testament books, shaped in the image of Paul, and his rejection of the Old Testament. Marcion’s worship of Paul was little short of idolatry. As he saw it, Paul was the great enemy of the law and the great spokesman for the gospel. He was in fact the supreme figure in the church. Marcion believed Christ had descended from heaven twice, once to suffer and to die, and once to call Paul and to reveal to Paul t...

Does the New Covenant make sense without the Old? By retaining the Old Testament the church scored two important points. First, it insisted that faith for the Christian would identify the idea of the creating God with the idea of the redeeming God. Marcion’s message was too easy. Marcion had not only misread the Old Testament; he also broke the unity seen in the entire Christian Scriptures: the same God who made the world also chose Israel; that God sought to reclaim his creation by Jesus, who fulfills Israel’s destiny. Second, by retaining the Old Testament the church underscored the importance of history for the Christian faith. Christianity is a historical religion, not just in the sense that it comes from the past or that it is associated with a historical character named Jesus. It is historical because it stems from the belief that within history itself, in a particular place, at a particular time, God himself took a hand in human affairs. And that means that living by faith for the Christian includes facing the puzzles of human existence—all of the “why, Lord?”s of life—and still believing that God has some good in mind. If Marcion, a heretic, nudged the churches into thinking about forming a New Testament, another troublemaker, Montanus, forced the churches into thinking about closing it.