Patient Ferment

The full title of this book by Alan Kreider is “The Patient Ferment of the Early Church”. This work, at a little over 300 pages, is extensively researched. Alan provides insight from documented sources on how a small group of Christ followers were able to impact the world. This book is not for the faint of heart but provides great perspective. Check out the excerpt below for a take on Evangelism.

Unlike many churches today, the third-century churches described by the Apostolic Tradition did not try to grow by making people feel welcome and included. Civic paganism did that. In contrast, the churches were hard to enter. They didn’t grow because of their cultural accessibility; they grew because they required commitment to an unpopular God who didn’t require people to perform cultic acts correctly but instead equipped them to live in a way that was richly unconventional.

The churches chose this approach for good reasons. The first was theological: they believed that the God whom they worshiped revealed himself in Jesus of Nazareth, an embodied human who at ultimate cost demonstrated the way to live, and that Jesus’s way was saving and life giving for individual humans and their communities. It was vital for the Christians to live in his way, unusual though it was, because they thought that it was true. The second reason was evangelistic: the churches’ primary witness was a product not of what Christians said but of how they lived. It was rooted in the assumption that the lives of Christians and their communities provided embodied evidence of the truth of their words. How could the Christians undercut this approach to mission? By admitting new people too quickly whose behavior compromised the Christians’ distinctive attractiveness.

What happened was this. Non-Christians and Christians worked together and lived near each other. They became friends. Non-Christians were at times attracted by the Christians and interested in exploring Christianity further. The Christians could not take them to Sunday worship services-these were off limits to people until they had been catechized and baptized. But the Christians could invite their friends to go with them early on a weekday to meet the church’s “teachers.” Would the teachers admit them to a process of study and habituation-lasting for some time-that would eventually lead to their admission to the community? Would they admit them as catechumens en route to baptism?

The non-Christian applicants went with their friends/sponsors to meet the church’s teachers. In this meeting, called the First Scrutiny, the teachers-at times clergy, at times laity-gave primary attention to the sponsors and asked them to “bear witness” about the candidates. The sponsors had to answer questions, not about what the candidates believed or (as in conventional associations) about whether they could pay hefty initiation fees (the churches required none), but about how the candidates lived. Why this concentration on how they were living? There were two reasons.

The first reason was the candidates’ teachability. The teachers wanted to know that the candidates were living in such a way that they were able “to hear the Word.” Can they appropriate what the teachers are teaching? According to the Apostolic Tradition, the church gave major attention to these questions. And for good reason. The teachers, like the early Christians generally, believed that the surest indication of what people thought was the way they lived, and they were convinced that the candidates’ behavior was the most reliable predictor of whether they would be able to learn the Christians’ habitus. The teachers, with the candidate standing by, pressed the sponsor about the candidate’s behavior in light of the church’s deep rejection of idolatry, adultery, and killing. Would the way the candidate has been living enable him or her to “hear the Word” (to master the church’s teaching with their bodies as well as their brains)? For example, actors who gave pagan theatrical performances-could they hear the Word in a community that vigorously repudiated polytheism? Gladiators who killed in the arena-could they hear the Word in a community that forbade the taking of life? Prostitutes-could they hear the Word in a community that emphasized chastity and continence? The Apostolic Tradition specifies that, in each case, these people needed to leave their professions if they were to be accepted as potential Christians; their professional commitments made it impossible for them to comprehend the Christians’ teaching.

In the case of certain other professions, however, it was somewhat different. The Apostolic Tradition asserts that their practitioners would be capable of hearing the Word on one condition-if they took socially costly steps necessary to modify their behavior. Painters, for example, could be accepted as catechumens if they refrained from depicting pagan themes.” As for soldiers, the Apostolic Tradition assesses them, like the members of other professions, by their capacity to hear the Word: did their external professional commitments the tasks and milieux and religious commitments of their jobs-enable them to receive the Christian good news in churches that emphasized patience and in which reconciliation with the alienated brother was a precondition for prayer? The Apostolic Tradition’s assumption is clear. Inner and outer are inextricable; if you live in a certain way in everyday life, you cannot hear, comprehend, or live the gospel that the Christian community is seeking to embody as well as teach. The church will not baptize people in hopes that they will change thereafter.

The church’s witness was the second reason that the teachers carefully examined the candidates in the First Scrutiny. As a catechumen, would the candidate’s behavior represent the church well or let the church down? Christians are to “be competitors… among the nations [gentes]” by their exemplary behavior; if they behave conventionally, the pagans will conclude that there is nothing in Christianity worth investigating. So if a potential candidate is married to a husband (who may be pagan), let her be admitted as a catechumen, provided she is willing to be taught “to be content with her husband.” Her admission is conditional on receiving teaching; as we have seen, the church was open to having women members, chaste and sexually disciplined, who were married to pagan men. However, the church categorically refused to admit to the catechumenate other candidates whose occupations contradicted the church’s teaching. For example, in the case of men who were makers of idols or gladiators whose profession involved killing, the teacher’s verdict was crisp: “Let them cease or be cast out.”

But for the sake of the church’s witness, other candidates whose jobs were at least in part acceptable could be admitted on the condition that they gave up their unacceptable behavior. For example, in some places soldiers had been attracted to the Christian communities that rejected all forms of killing, including killing in warfare. So the teachers responded to a soldier by saying, “Let him not kill a man. If he is ordered, let him not go to the task nor let him swear.” If the soldier was unwilling to submit to this limitation of his professional behavior, the verdict was “Let him be cast out.” Four times in chapters 15 and 16 of the Apostolic Tradition, the teachers accept applicants on the condition that they receive teaching; three times they accept applicants on the condition that they give up unacceptable behavior; and ten times the teachers respond by categorically refusing applicants. In one case, the teachers are astonishingly flexible: when a man teaching young children (whose lessons involve pagan stories) has no other trade, the teachers determine that “he should be forgiven.” Church leaders of a later age might have said, “Let’s admit them as they do their current jobs and eventually, when they have ‘heard the word,’ they will think their way into a new life.” The church of the Apostolic Tradition says in effect, “No, our approach is the opposite. We believe that people live their way into a new kind of thinking. If we admit them as they engage in idolatry, immorality, and killing, they will be unable to ‘hear the word,’ and they will change the church, fatally compromising its distinctiveness, which is the basis of our witness.”

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