Book Review
The Birth of the Church
Rebecca Lyman, Early Christian Traditions, The New Church’s Teaching Series, Volume Six ( Boston, 1999)
As the 21st century dawns, few new Christians are content to just take the Church’s word for much of anything. Surrounded by multiple faiths, there is nothing inevitable about becoming a Christian anymore. So, one of the obvious questions that needs answering is how Christ’s life ended up becoming the basis of a church which would become one of the most powerful and wealthy entities in the world. How did the simple yet inspiring wisdom of the Sermon on the Mount get transformed into such an enormous institution, whose theology and rules are now so complex and often intimidating?
There was nothing inevitable about the growth of the early Christian church. After Jesus’ death, there weren’t that many people alive who knew Him well, or had written down much about his life. To make matters worse, the Roman empire was filled with millions of people who honestly believed there was no way to get through the day without asking for the help of one of the many gods in their pantheon. The Romans relied on their gods to help get races won, and to curse business competitors. The idea that there was just one God, who had been here just recently and had the bad taste to suffer and die, well that seemed just crazy. Gods were for helping with practical matters, and they were eternal, so they couldn’t suffer, by definition.
So it was little surprise that the Romans gave the first Christians a hard time, making their religion illegal, and disreputable. So how did this radical religious become the ruling religion of the empire just three hundred years later? That’s the story that Rebecca Lyman outlines in her highly readable and brief book, Early Christian Traditions. The book’s title is a bit misleading. The book isn’t really about how Christians ate or lived on a day to day basis. Instead, it gives a good chronological overview of how the early Christians slowly grew into churches and then a religious movement.
The story is fascinating on a number of levels. Lyman does a very good job of putting Christianity into context by explaining what normal life was like for Romans. They saw no compelling reason to take some new form of religion in the first or second centuries – the empire was doing well, and this in itself seemed to confirm that the gods existed, and were well pleased with their subjects. Christians were bizarre outcasts, secretly having dinners in private homes, and baptizing each other in the nude. The best modern equivalent would be a cult.
One of the pleasures of the book is to see how wide open and accepting the church was in the first hundred years after Christ’s death. Women were welcomed at all levels of the church initially. People who had little to do with each other in normal Roman society sat beside each other as equals in Christian homes. Slaves and masters, women and men found a refuge from the stratified society of the Roman Empire. It was only when the church had grown enough to become attractive to mainstream Roman society that church officials discouraged women from positions of authority, since this would be offensive to regular Romans who held women in low esteem generally.
Lyman also provides a mercifully brief overview of how the early Church struggled as it tried to decide some major theological issues, such as whether Christ was God, or created by God. As the Roman Empire ran into trouble in the 3rd and 4th centuries, these issues became enormously important for Christians. The Romans felt that their misfortunes on the battlefields were a sign of the gods’ displeasure, so it was imperative that all subjects make appropriate sacrifices to the pagan gods. Christians who refused were risking their lives. So it really mattered whether they were worshipping Christ as simply a wise man sent by God, or whether their worship and martyrdom would result in their eternal salvation. These controversies were highly divisive, and could lead to fighting in their streets, as well as major splits among bishops.
Lyman has written this book to help Anglicans understand the roots of their creeds and many of the prayers still used in their services. Most of the references to Anglican worship occur in the introduction and in questions for discussion at the end. Any Christian who is interested in understanding how the early church evolved to become the Catholic Church will find this small volume a quick and valuable read.