Chapter 5: Why They Succeeded Where We Often Fail. Years ago, when I began my study of early Christian writings, I was primarily interested in tracing the historical developments of Christian doctrine. It was an academic challenge. I wasn't expecting to be inspired or challenged by what I read, but it didn't work out that way. I was soon deeply moved by the testimony and lifestyle of the early Christians. "So this is what absolute surrender means," I said to myself.
Although I was often viewed as a Christian of above-average commitment in the Christian circles I was in in those days, I painfully realized that in the early church I would be considered a compromising, spiritually weak member. The more I read, the more I longed to have the close walk with God that the early Christians enjoyed. I wanted so much to be able to shrug off the cares of this world as they had. I wanted to pattern my life and attitude solely after Christ, not after the culture of my day.
But I seemed powerless to do so. Why could they do what I couldn't? I began searching for answers in their writings, where I found three primary reasons: 1) the supportive role of the church; 2) the message of the cross; and 3) the belief that obedience was a joint venture between man and God. Our first subheading: How the Church Helped Individuals to Grow Spiritually. "No man is an island," wrote the 16th-century Christian poet John Donne.
Humans are by nature social creatures, and we tend to conform to the society around us. That's why it's so hard to swim against the current of our culture. Yet there have been times in human society when large numbers of people have rejected the values and lifestyle of their culture. The hippie movement of the '60s is a prime example. During the 1960s, thousands of young people, many of whom were from middle-class backgrounds, rejected the materialistic pursuits and the fashionable dress of mainstream America.
Instead, they pursued a different way of life. What enabled those young people to break out of their cultural mold and be non-conformists? The answer lies in the fact that they weren't really non-conformists. They just conformed to a different society. And this was one of the secrets of the early Christians. They were able to reject the ungodly attitudes, practices, and entertainment of their culture because they had conformed to a different culture.
Tens of thousands of other Christians shared the same values, attitudes, and standards of entertainment. All the individual Christian had to do was to conform, conform to the body of believers. Without the church, practicing a godly lifestyle would have been infinitely more difficult. Cyprian observed, "Break a branch from a tree, and when broken, it will not be able to bud. Cut off a stream of water from its source, and it will soon dry up." The early church was a disciplined church.
Yet, unlike some later religious groups, the early Christians generally didn't try to legislate righteousness through a plethora of rules and regulations. Instead, they relied on sound teaching, righteous example, and the transforming work of the Holy Spirit. Churches that depend on extensive rules to produce personal holiness can easily end up producing pharisees instead. For this reason, the early church emphasized the need for new believers to change from the inside out.
Externals were considered worthless unless they reflected what was happening inside a person. Clement explained, "God does not crown those who abstain from wickedness by compulsion, but those who abstain by choice. It is impossible for a person to consistently live righteously except by his own choice. The one who is made righteous by the compulsion of another is not truly righteous.
It is the freedom of each person that produces true righteousness and reveals true wickedness." For example, despite its teachings about simple dress, the early church didn't require individual Christians to wear any special or distinctive type of clothing. And early Christians didn't all dress alike. Even though the church opposed cosmetics, some Christian women used them anyway.
Other Christians ignored the counsel of the church and attended the theater and the arena, and they were not put out of the church for doing so. Nevertheless, the church's method was effective, for even the Romans testified to the fact that most Christians voluntarily followed the direction of the church in these matters. Of course, the church can effectively teach by example only if it, as a body, has conformed to the teachings of Christ. Otherwise, the church can be as much a hindrance as a help.
For example, what would be the attitude of most Christians today toward a believer who dressed simply and modestly regardless of fashion? Who took no interest in the violent sports of today? Who refused to watch television programs and movies that centered on immorality or that were spiced with profanity and graphic violence? Let's be honest, he would probably be viewed as a fanatic. Moreover, if a whole group of Christians lived that way, they would probably be called a cult.
In short, today's church would view such Christians in the same way that the Romans viewed the early Christians. For a present-day Christian to live like the early Christians, he would truly have to be a non-conformist. And it's extremely difficult to be a non-conformist. Our next heading: Shepherds Who Graduated from the School of Hard Knocks. The church-wide commitment of the early Christians was a direct reflection of the quality of their leadership.
Today's evangelical churches are typically governed by a pastor and a body of elders or a board of deacons. Normally, the pastor is a professionally trained man with a seminary degree who wasn't raised in the congregation that has hired him. Frequently, he has no governing authority in the congregation other than the power of persuasion. The body of elders or board of deacons are normally men with full-time secular jobs. They oversee church finances and programs, and they often establish church policy.
But typically, no one in the church goes to them for spiritual counseling, and they aren't usually the shepherds of the flock. Although we use many of the same names for church leaders, as did the early Christians, such as elders or presbyters and deacons, our church government differs considerably from theirs in substance. Instead of a sole professional pastor, the entire body of elders or presbyters were full-time pastors in the early churches.
As Christianity grew, all Christians in a given city were not able to meet together in one place, but each separate fellowship of believers in that city had at least one elder or presbyter to shepherd them. And each city had one overseer or bishop who coordinated all of the individual congregations in that city. This helped to unify the local bodies of believers. As a result, the early Christians could truly speak of the church in Corinth or Alexandria instead of churches.
The overseer or bishop and elders weren't outsiders brought into the local church. Rather, they had generally lived in that community for years. Their strengths and weaknesses were well known to the entire congregation. Furthermore, they didn't qualify to serve as overseers or elders by studying in school and stuffing their heads with knowledge. Rather, the congregation was just as interested in the depth of a leader's spirituality as they were in the depth of his knowledge. How close was the man to God?
Had he lived for years as an example to other Christians? Was he ready to lay down his life for Christ? Tertullian told the Romans, "Our presbyters are proven men who obtained their position not by purchase, but by established character." There were no seminaries. A man learned the necessary skills to be a church leader through the school of experience. He was trained by the existing body of elders, and he learned how to walk closely with God and to shepherd others by seeing and imitating their example.
He was given hands-on experience under their supervision and was allowed to make mistakes. He had to be able to teach by example as well as by word before he could even be considered for service as an elder or overseer. Lactantius explained the difference between Christian and pagan teachers. He wrote, "As to anyone who teaches principles to live by and molds the characters of others, I ask, is he not obligated himself to live by the principles he teaches?
If he himself does not live by them, his teaching is nullified. His student will answer him like this: 'I cannot practice the things you teach because they are impossible. You forbid me to be angry. You forbid me to covet. You forbid me to lust. And you forbid me to fear pain and death.' This is totally contrary to nature. All living creatures are subject to these emotions.
If you are so convinced that it is possible to live contrary to natural impulses, first let me see you practice the things you teach so I will know that they are possible." Now, after describing what a student would normally say, Lactantius went on to write, "How will the teacher take away this excuse from the self-willed unless he teaches them by his example so that they can see with their own eyes that the things he teaches are possible? For this very reason, no one obeys the teachings of the philosophers.
Men prefer examples to words because it is easy to speak but difficult to act." In one of his letters, Cyprian described the process of selecting a new bishop or overseer. He wrote, "He should be chosen in the presence of the people under the eyes of all and should be proved worthy and suitable by public judgment and testimony. For a proper ordination, all the neighboring overseers throughout the same province should assemble with the congregation.
The overseers should be chosen in the presence of the congregation since they are intimately familiar with his life and habits." Once an elder or overseer was appointed, he normally stayed in that local church for the rest of his life unless persecution forced him to move. He didn't serve for three or four years and then moved to a larger congregation with better compensation. As was mentioned earlier, not only the overseer, but the entire body of elders were normally full-time shepherds and teachers.
Unless the congregation was simply too small to support them, elders were expected to free themselves from any secular jobs. By doing so, they could devote their full attention to the flock. We have copies of a series of letters exchanged between two early congregations concerning the fact that an elder had been named as executor in the will of a deceased Christian. Under Roman law, a person named as executor in someone's will was required to serve, whether he wanted to or not.
And the task could be extremely time-consuming. So this elder was quite shocked that any Christian would name him as executor since that duty would take him away from his shepherding responsibilities. In fact, the entire body of elders was stunned. Now, imagine the benefit to the early Christians of being shepherded by bodies of elders whose sole concern was the spiritual well-being of their congregations.
With so many full-time pastors, each member of the congregation undoubtedly received close individual attention. To serve as an elder or overseer in the early church, a man had to be willing to lay down everything for Christ. This began with material possessions. An elder didn't leave his secular occupation in exchange for a middle-class salary from the congregation. It was considered heretical for a congregation to pay any salary to its overseer or elders.
Instead, the church financially maintained its leaders on the same basis it supported the widows and orphans. Generally, this meant leaders had the necessities of life and little else. But leaving behind the material things of the world wasn't their only sacrifice. Elders had to be willing to take the lead in suffering, imprisonment, torture, and death.
Most of the writers cited in this book were overseers or elders, and more than half of them, Ignatius, Polycarp, Justin Martyr, Hippolytus, Cyprian, Methodius, and Origen, ultimately sacrificed their lives for Christ. With such extraordinary commitment from their leaders, it's not hard to see why the ordinary Christian of that day was inspired to walk closely with God and to avoid the pattern of the world. Our next subheading, People of the Cross. No one likes to suffer.
I recently read a survey of American people on their views about the national budget deficit. Practically all those interviewed agreed that the deficit had to be reduced. But at the same time, about three-fourths of them were opposed to either raising taxes or cutting federal spending. In other words, they wanted the deficit to go away painlessly. Painless. That's also what we want Christianity to be. But Jesus told his disciples, "He who does not take his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me.
He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it." Despite what our Lord told us, the message of the cross is not very popular today. When we share the gospel with non-believers, we rarely mention Jesus' words about having to carry our cross. In fact, we often give the impression that once a person accepts Christ, his life will forever be filled with bliss. In the early church, new believers heard a very different message. That is, being a Christian would entail suffering.
These words of Lactantius were typical. He wrote, "He who chooses to live well for eternity will live in discomfort for the present. He will be subjected to all types of troubles and burdens as long as he is on earth, so that in the end, he will have divine and heavenly consolation. On the other hand, he who chooses to live well for the present will fare badly in eternity." Jesus had similarly contrasted the narrow, cramped road that leads to life with the broad and spacious road leading to destruction.
Ignatius, who was the bishop or overseer of Antioch and a companion of the apostle John, was arrested for his Christian testimony. While he was en route to Rome for trial and execution, he wrote letters of admonition and encouragement to several Christian congregations. He told one congregation, "It is necessary, therefore, to not only be called by the name Christian, but to actually be a Christian.
If we are not ready to die in the same manner of his suffering, his life is not in us." To another, he wrote, "Bring on the fire and the cross. Bring on the packs of wild beasts. Let there be the breaking and dislocating of my bones and the severings of my limbs. Bring on the mutilation of my whole body. In fact, bring on all the diabolical tortures of Satan. Only let me attain to Jesus Christ.
I would rather die for Jesus Christ than to reign over the ends of the entire earth." Shortly after penning those words, Ignatius was brought before a screaming mob in the Colosseum of Rome, where he was torn to pieces by wild animals. Tertullian encouraged a group of local Christians who were languishing in a Roman dungeon with these words, saying, "Blessed ones, count whatever is hard in this lot of yours as a discipline of your powers of mind and body.
You are about to pass through a noble struggle in which the living God is your manager and the Holy Spirit is your trainer. The prize is an eternal crown of angelic essence, citizenship in the heavens, glory everlasting." He also told them, "The prison does the same service for the Christian that the desert did for the prophet. Our Lord himself spent much time in seclusion so he would have greater freedom to pray and so he would be away from the world.
The leg does not feel the chains when the mind is in heaven." But most new believers didn't have to be warned about the coming suffering. They had seen it for themselves. In fact, one of the most powerful means of evangelism in the early church was the example of the thousands of Christians who endured suffering and death because they refused to deny Christ. In his first apology, Tertullian reminded the Romans that their persecution only strengthened the Christians.
He said, "The more you cut us down, the more in number we grow. The blood of Christians is seed. For after thinking about it, who among you is not eager to find out what is really at the bottom of it all? And after inquiring, who does not end up embracing our teachings? And when he has embraced them, who does not also willingly suffer so that he may partake fully of God's grace?" Full gospel. In our century, this familiar term has come to mean Pentecostal or charismatic.
However, one of the problems in our churches today is that we rarely hear the full gospel preached, regardless of whether or not we are charismatic. We usually hear only the part about blessings. We rarely hear the message of suffering for Christ. We are so far removed from the message of the early church that most of us have virtually no concept of what it means to suffer for Christ.
A few years ago, I heard a pastor deliver a sermon on the verse, "If you suffer as a Christian, do not be ashamed, but praise God that you bear that name." That's from 1 Peter 4. The pastor commented that most Christians in the United States have no concept of what it means to suffer as a Christian. After the service, I was talking to the pastor when a deacon walked up to him and thanked him for the message.
The deacon agreed that most Christians in this country don't understand what it means to suffer for being a Christian. However, the deacon said he knew exactly what it meant. He then went on to describe the pain and suffering he had endured a few years previously while undergoing an operation in the hospital. As I drove home from church, I marveled at how well the deacon had illustrated the very point the pastor was trying to make. We American Christians don't know what it means to suffer for being a Christian.
We think that when we endure the same tribulations in life that are common to everyone else, we are suffering for Christ. Of course, there are ways to carry our cross other than enduring persecution. Clement commented that for the average Christian, the cross might be represented by enduring marriage to an unbelieving spouse, obeying unbelieving parents, or suffering as a slave under a pagan master.
Although all of those situations could entail much emotional and physical suffering, they were a rather mild form of the cross for anyone who had already committed himself to endure torture and death for Christ. Although early Christians endured painful marriages to non-believers, today thousands of Christians are divorcing their believing spouses without hesitation, simply because their marriages are less than ideal. Such persons would rather disobey Christ than to put up with even mild suffering.
I've had Christians tell me that they just couldn't endure living with their spouse any longer in a marriage marked by constant arguments. I wonder what such people will say on Judgment Day to Christian men and women from the early centuries who were able to endure having a red-hot iron poker gouged into their eyes, or having their arms torn off, or being skinned alive.
Why is it that those Christians had the power to endure such excruciating tortures when we so often lack the power merely to put up with an unpleasant marriage? Maybe it's because we haven't accepted the responsibility of carrying our cross.
Several years ago, a Christian woman who was contemplating divorcing her husband because they were not getting along told me through teary eyes, "I don't want to have to live like this for the rest of my life." Later, I reflected on the expression she had used, "for the rest of my life." I thought about the times that I too had used those words. My use of that expression revealed that heaven wasn't a reality to me, at least not in the sense that my life on earth is a reality.
The early Christians readily accepted the message of suffering because their eyes were set on eternity. They didn't think in terms of suffering for the rest of their lives, but as suffering for 50 or 60 years at the most. The rest of their lives would be spent in eternity with Jesus. Compared to that, present trials were inconsequential. Like Tertullian, they realized that the leg doesn't feel the chains when the mind is in heaven. Our next subheading, are humans capable of obeying God?
The early Christians didn't attempt to live such uncompromising lives simply on their own strength. They realized their need for divine power. Of course, that's nothing new. Throughout the centuries, Christians of all denominations have realized that we need God's help in order to walk by His commandments. And I don't think that any of us have deliberately set out to serve God without His help. What frequently happens, however, is something like this.
Initially, we do walk closely with God depending on His power, but we later begin to backslide spiritually and slowly pull away from God. Normally, this process begins internally. Outwardly, we still act the same. Although we still go through the motions of one who is depending on God, our prayers begin to become cold and formalized. We may still read the scriptures, but our minds and hearts are on other interests. In the end, we find ourselves depending entirely on our own strength.
The problem isn't that the church doesn't preach about the need for relying on God's strength. In fact, evangelical Christians generally teach that we are incapable of doing anything good on our own strength. But if we humans are simply unable to obey God, there's nothing we can do about our disobedience except to pray for God to change us into obedient persons. Yet, does this really work? I remember my excitement when I first heard someone preach that we can't do anything good by our own power.
Only God can do good things through us. We only have to ask God to change our faults and to overcome our sins for us. Ah, so this is a secret, I thought to myself. I couldn't wait to put the idea into practice, simply letting God change my faults and eradicate my sins. I prayed eagerly for God to do this very thing. I gave it all to God. Then I waited, but nothing happened. So I prayed more. Still, nothing changed. Well, at first, I thought the problem was just me. Were my prayers not sincere?
I finally talked to other Christians in private about the matter and found that I wasn't the only one with this problem. Others had obtained no better results than I had. So why do you go around saying that God magically takes away our faults and turns us into obedient persons, I asked them. Well, because that's the way it's supposed to work, was the reply. I realized that most Christians were afraid to express themselves honestly about the matter for fear that they were the only ones who hadn't been successful.
So here we were all reenacting the story of the emperor's new clothes because we were afraid others would consider us unspiritual. Now, I'm not saying that the sit back and pray approach hasn't ever worked for anyone. I'm saying that it hasn't worked for me, and historically, it hasn't worked for the church. Our evangelical doctrine on this matter comes from Martin Luther, who taught that we are totally incapable of doing any good by ourselves and that both the desire and the power to obey God come from him alone.
Although these were cornerstone teachings of the German Reformation, they didn't produce a generation of obedient, godly Christians. Rather, just the opposite. Lutheran Germany was a cesspool of drunkenness, immorality, and violence. Sitting back and letting God do all the work produced neither a godly church nor a godly nation. In contrast, the early Christians never taught that humans are incapable of doing good or overcoming sin in their lives. They believed that we do have the ability to serve and obey God.
However, first, we must have a deep love for God and a profound respect for His commandments. As one early Christian writer, Hermas, phrased it, "The Lord has to be in the Christian's heart, not simply on his lips." At the same time, the early Christians didn't believe that they could overcome all of their weaknesses and remain obedient to God day after day simply on their own strength. They needed power from God, but it wasn't a matter of sitting back and asking God to do all the work.
They believed instead that our walk with God is a joint project. The Christian himself must be willing to sacrifice, to pour his energy and very soul into the project, but he also must recognize his need for God's help. As Origen explained, he makes himself known to those who, after doing all that their powers will allow, confess that they need help from him.
The early church believed that a Christian must earnestly desire and seek God's help, and it wasn't a matter of a one-time request either, but a continual process. Clement taught his students, saying, "A man by himself working and toiling at freedom from sinful desires achieves nothing. But if he plainly shows himself to be very eager and earnest about this, he attains it by the addition of the power of God. God works together with willing souls.
But if the person abandons his eagerness, the spirit from God is also restrained. To save the unwilling is the act of one using compulsion, but to save the willing, that of one showing grace." So the early Christians viewed personal righteousness as a joint project between God and man. There was an infinite supply of power from God. The key was to be able to tap into this power. The earnest desire had to come from the Christian himself.
As Origen remarked, "We aren't blocks of wood that God manipulates at his fancy. We are human beings capable of desiring God and of responding to him." In referring to the necessary eagerness on our part, Clement wasn't referring simply to a bare desire. Rather, he said we had to be willing to suffer painful internal persecution. Putting to death our fleshly ways is going to hurt. And if we aren't willing to suffer internally, wrestling with our sins, then God isn't going to supply the power.
Now, some persons may be disturbed by this early Christian teaching, but as Jesus said, "Though you do not believe me, believe the works." Before we disparage the theology of the early Christians, we had better have a good explanation for their power. We can't deny the fact that they had incredible power. Even the pagan Romans didn't dispute this.
As Lactantius declared, "When people see that men are lacerated by various kinds of tortures, yet remain unsubdued, even when their very torturers are worn out, they come to believe that the agreement of so many and the unyielding faith of the dying is not without meaning." They realized that human perseverance alone could not endure such tortures without the aid of God. Even robbers and men of robust frame are unable to endure tortures of this kind.
But among us, boys and delicate women, not to speak of men, silently overcome their torturers. Even the fire is unable to extort a groan from them. These persons, the young and the weaker sex, do not endure mutilation and the burning of their whole bodies because they have no other choice. They could easily avoid this punishment if they wished to by denying Christ, but they endure it willingly because they put their trust in God.
In summary, the church today could learn some valuable lessons from the early Christians. Three factors enable them to live as citizens of another kingdom and as people of a different culture. One, the supportive role of the church. Two, the message of the cross. And three, the belief that man and God must work together for man's holiness.
Now, I could have ended the book here and let it simply be an inspiring historical sketch, but then I would have only told you half of the story, and the whole story needs to be told. However, I'm going to forewarn you that the rest of the story will probably make you feel uncomfortable. I know it did me.