More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Christians had to guard the newness of the message without isolating themselves from the culture or accommodating themselves to the culture, which required them to form people in the faith and thus grow a movement of genuine disciples who could survive, and even thrive, in such a world. Rome would have ignored Christianity if Christians had been too isolated; it would have absorbed it if they had become too accommodating.8 For the most part it did neither.
Over time the designation “Third Way” faded as Christianity became the only way—that is, the dominant religion in the West. The emergence of Christendom—the symbiotic relationship between church and state, Christianity and culture—made the Third Way irrelevant. There was no need for it as long as Christianity, having no major rivals, ruled the culture.
Not that Christianity was uniform or the church united. Arguments often divided the church, sometimes irreparably.
According to Tocqueville, Christianity worked at the grassroots level—in homes, public schools and private colleges, churches, and voluntary societies (nonprofits), which served the needs of the country beyond what government was capable of doing.
Tocqueville believed that democracy, more than any other political system, needed religion, but only if religion remained separate from the state, independent of outside interference, resistant to control, and thus free to operate on its own term.
The “we” did not include everyone; it often excluded large segments of the population, and did so knowingly.
Christendom made being Christian relatively normal, easy, and convenient.
It could mean that they are only attracting members from other churches and isolating themselves from the larger culture, not learning how to engage and win it.
Power at the expense of the gospel is not a power the church should ever seek.
Attn frank graham, jerry falwell jr
The problem is the compromised identity of the church itself and the compromised message of the gospel.
The best hours of Western Christianity might be ahead of us, not behind us, assuming
we dare to think differently about what it means to be Christian and to live as Christians in a culture that is changing. But our worst days could be ahead of us, too. There is no guarantee that Christianity in America will regain its strength
It is the result, I think, of living in a post-Christendom society, where much of the cultural power, privilege, and influence of Christianity has been eroded, leaving little more than a thin layer of topsoil. Belief has become not only intellectually implausible, if that even matters anymore, but also personally irrelevant.
Faith might not have been genuine or deep, but it was still widespread and established. It was a cultural habit, like wearing robes for a graduation ceremony.
In general, we learned church history from a Christendom perspective. Questions of correct belief loomed largest, at least as I remember it. We studied it as a kind of history of the Christian family, which was our family.
I was teaching a Christendom course. My students were asking for something different. I discovered that they needed something different because they are growing up in a world very different from the one that existed only a generation ago.
Christians engaged the culture without excessive compromise, remained separate from the culture without excessive isolation.
Christians figured out how to be both faithful and winsome. They followed a Third Way, living for the unseen reality of the kingdom as they saw and believed it in Christ. They immersed themselves in the culture and over time transformed it from within, though never aiming to directly.
Rejecting both accommodation and isolation, early Christians immersed themselves in the culture as followers of Jesus and servants of the kingdom of God.
Could it be that we are entering a period of Western history in which Christians will no longer be able to rely on the favor of the state, the popularity of Christianity, and the power of being the dominant majority?
Maybe that is good. To the extent power corrupts, we should reject it.
the issue was a largely economic one
For one, he healed through his word alone. As God spoke creation into existence, Jesus spoke healing.
For another, he wielded a power that no one had seen before. He could heal the blind, resuscitate the dead, calm storms—all by a simple command. He exercised absolute power—over sickness, the natural world, and death—but only in a benevolent way.
for many prophets lived on the margins, denounced corrupt political and religious rulers, and called the people of Israel to repent and return to God.
The entire world of the disciples had been swallowed up by light, life, and glory. They had been exposed to a new dimension of reality, as if eternity had invaded time.
Over the past two millennia many of his followers and admirers, such as they are, have found reasons to follow and admire him, but only on their own terms.
In our own day we find people believing in a capitalist Jesus, a positive-thinking Jesus, a liberationist Jesus, a mystical Jesus, a manly Jesus, an American nationalist Jesus. Jesus has always been malleable to human whims and wishes.
Could the church stay committed to Israel’s faith, considering how Judaism—as the rabbis taught it—departed from it? How could the church adopt the ancient story as its own? It seemed a complicated business.
According to Marcion, Jesus came to start a new story, not to complete an old one.
Athanasius (d. 373), bishop of the church in Alexandria, identified the twenty-seven books now included in the New Testament and, in a festal letter to his Alexandrian diocese (367), acknowledged that this list was—and had been for some time—functionally canonical, and should therefore be recognized as the final canonical standard for the church.
The first historian of the church, Eusebius, believed that Acts 28 did not end the redemptive story. It continued long after the last of the apostles died. It would not end, he implied, until Jesus returned to establish a new heavens and a new earth, bringing history to a close. In the meantime, the church had kingdom work to do.
God’s people are not always on the “winning” side. Perhaps they never are, or at least never should be. Someone had to develop a more nuanced philosophy of history that would take into account decline, failure, and defeat, even of the church.
Rome was to blame for its own fall, as even Roman historians—Tacitus and Suetonius, for example—had already argued. Its entire history—including its greatest accomplishments (and Augustine could name them)—was full of corruption, violence, and idolatry. Rome did not fall because the gods turned against it. It fell because it failed.
One is the history of fallen angels and of a proud humanity in rebellion against God, the other the history of God’s people who are pilgrims on earth. The former worships the self, the latter worships the only true
The plot involved mostly unknown and unimportant people who trusted and honored God, “choosing rather to share ill-treatment with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin,” for they considered “abuse suffered for Christ to be greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt” (Heb. 11:26 NET).
He noted that Christians won converts not through public debate among elites—as Celsus would have wished—but through quiet witness in their homes and places of work, which he found disconcerting.
these
What matters most to me is the process by which the first disciples developed basic Christian belief, not the intricacies of the doctrines they spelled out.
In the months that followed, they revisited their entire experience of Jesus. They remembered it differently in the light of the resurrection. They also reviewed their entire understanding of the Old Testament story. Again, they understood it differently in the light of the resurrection.
He willed to save man by persuasion, not by compulsion, for compulsion is not God’s way of working.”
and power always has an element of compulsion
“All this He saw and, pitying our race, moved with compassion for our limitation, unable to endure that death should have the mastery, rather than that His creatures should perish and the work of His Father for us men come to nought, He took to Himself a body, a human body even as our own.”
It was as if all the light of the universe—galaxy upon galaxy of blazing brightness—was reduced to the flicker of one candle without suffering any diminution, without becoming less radiant than it was before. It was as if all the weight of the universe was reduced to the lightness of a feather, light enough to tickle the palm of your hand, without becoming less heavy than it was before.
But early Christians started not with the questions but with experience. It was never a matter of speculation but of careful and deliberate reflection on their personal knowledge of the man Jesus.
Gregory argued at the outset that the goal of theology is not knowledge of theology itself but deep, personal, intimate knowledge of God. It is relationship.
Jesus Christ is therefore the perfect and final mediator. He is both window and mirror. We see through him into the very being of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and we gaze at him to see what we are and what we will become in him.
He wrote with passion and confidence because he viewed his circumstances in light of the gospel, which told a story of God’s victory over sin, death, Satan, and hell. No amount of difficulty could convince Ignatius to believe otherwise.
He assigned responsibility to the emperor Nero, by then unpopular, crude, and corrupt.
As
All religions address a problem and then offer a solution. In the case of Gnosticism, the “problem” was the existence of the material world, including the human body, which seemed in the minds of Gnostic teachers to be destined for decay, destruction, and death.
That heart was Jesus Christ, who lived a public life and taught, trained, and commissioned a large and identifiable circle of disciples.
