Water From A Deep Well | Belonging E02

Hello and welcome. My name is Yinka Dawson and I'm the host of Practice in the Way with John Mark Homer. a podcast featuring teachings and conversation with John Mark and other voices to help us journey into a deeper life with God in the modern world. Today we're continuing our series Water from a Deep Well.

with John Mark and Dr. Gerald Sitzer, which explores the rich history of Christian spirituality and how we can learn from and practice the wisdom of early followers of Jesus in their unique eras. In this episode, John Mark and Dr. Sitzer discuss how the early church function Community against the backdrop of the dense and difficult environment of Roman cities and why that countercultural life drew people in. Here's Jean-Marc. Welcome back to Water from a Deep Well. Wow.

Where we are learning with Dr. Gerald Sitzer about the history of Christian spirituality. In the last session, we covered the early Christian martyrs, the spirituality of witness. But in this session, we want to look at the early church itself. What made it special? Why were people drawn to it? How was it the same or different from the church today? And what can we learn from the early Christian communities?

This is belonging, the spirituality of the early church. Doctor Sitzer, time map this for us. What era of Christian history are we talking about? Same period as last time, so the birth of Christianity uh spilling over into the early fourth century. So kind of similar dovetails into the period of persecution. Yeah, uh most church historians say the big one of the big uh turning points was when the Emperor Constantine became the Emperor of Rome. He had some kind of quote conversion experience.

I don't wanna I don't wanna blame uh he he be he was crowned emperor in three oh seven. There was a couple of big battles and he finally became official emperor in three twelve over the West and over the entire empire in three hundred twenty three. And, you know, we make a big deal about Constantine and Christendom if is if they're the same. They're really not the same at all. Christendom took a long time to emerge, but the conditions did change because Christianity gained legal status.

And not just legal status or recognition, but increasing Roman favor as well, imperial favor. So not just an end to persecution, but a beginning to prosperity. Uh correct. You know, buildings go up, basilicas, they're huge. Church buildings for the first time. All that changes and it does change the landscape quite a bit. So we want to focus on the pre-Constantinian period. Now in this time, the first you know few centuries

The church is facing persecution. People are dying, and not just bishops and leading men and women, but women and children at times, entire families. What drew people like I what's the motivation? If you're a a Roman living in Corinth or Philippi or Rome itself or Carthage, what drew you to join a Christian community knowing that you were facing the possibility of death.

Well here we begin we need to use a kind of imagination uh to leave our world uh as it is and try to enter their world. So first of all, let's go to a city. Um Rome was an urban culture, the empire was. Even though less than ten percent of people lived in cities, cities kind of controlled the culture as they do today. And so you had some really big cities, Antioch, Ephesus, Carthage, Alexandria. Rome was the biggest.

And uh by the year three hundred, Rome had between a million and a million and a half people. in a very small footprint. Yeah. These are incredibly dense cities. Very dense cities, and some things to observe about them. We actually have information from a census that was conducted in Rome around the year 300, ordered by the Emperor.

And in this census they discovered there were eighteen hundred domiciles, they called them. In other words, private homes. Now private homes then and now are not the same thing. These are bedrooms. These are estates. These are estates. Only for the super wealthy who had staffs and this kind of thing. Yes. Forty thousand apartment buildings. that were between three and six stories high. Wow. Most of them one, maybe two rooms.

Uh the richer people lived toward the bottom, the poorer people toward the top. Now think about these homes. No heating. No windows. There was glass then, by the way, but only the rich used it. No plumbing. Again, the rich had plumbing. Nobody else did. No running water. uh no heat source Uh unbearably hot in the summer, unbearably cold in the winter. They used chamber pots. They cooked over small charcoal br uh you know, little stoves and they had a whole Oh n I'm no privacy.

Your home was like a room to sleep in more. That's correct. Uh public toilets. They actually had public toilets. You'd all sit in the same place together. You can still find archaeological ev evidence of that today. It's quite interesting to observe that. Inevitably it forced people outdoors because who'd want to stay in those little places that were so miserable? And so about thirty to forty percent of these cities were devoted to public spaces. Mm. Uh forums, parks. Marketplace.

And marketplaces, agoras, where you could find anything and everything that you needed. And people hung her out there because there was no refrigeration, so you had to buy food every day and other kinds of supplies. So you have an have to imagine a very kind of public life. Hmm. Everybody's living on top of each other. Watching Netflix on your couch for the day. No, you're not. Um you know. Okay.

That's the first thing uh is the this the setting. The second is that the Roman way of life was just very, very different from the Christian way of life. Everybody had gods and goddesses. Everybody went to offer sacrifices if the the their wife wasn't getting pregnant or they wanted to a level a curse against one of their opponents or enemies or uh uh business competitors.

Um they would go to temples every day, monuments, they had gods and goddesses and little altars at home. Religion was a very transactional kind of religion. Yeah. The entire system was transactional. It was based on rewards and punishments. It was a shame-oriented culture. There were stories that kind of made sense of life, but in the end, when you face death,

There was nothing. It was oblivion. Really, when we look back now from a Christian perspective, it feels terrifying and unsettling. There's no comfort there at all. Well then they meet Christians. Now last time I set it up with me meeting you and you're running a uh a stall in the marketplace. So that's exactly what happened, is that pagans and Christians were running into each other all the time. There were no Specialty Christian stores or Christian schools or anything very

kind of environment. And it would be obvious that you were different right away to me. Uh how you treated your wife, how you treated your children, how you conducted business, what you believed your lifestyle, you visited orphans, you cared for the poor. All of that was I'm not visiting temples, I'm not making sacrifices. You're not doing some things that are popular and you are doing some things that are unthinkable to Romans. Romans hated the poor.

The only poor they would accept are the poor that could do something for people who are richer than them. Yeah. And I mean, there's a literature on this written by really reputable scholars that just say if you were poor and you were living in the city of Rome, you were living in abject misery, ready to die, and nobody cared about you.

until Christian showed up. Honest to God, that is a true statement. And so the Christian lifestyle in terms of what they didn't do and what they did do was immediately recognizable to people. And what they saw they liked. Mm. It was life giving to them. Yeah. Costly. But life giving takes.

Tell us about the early Christian communities.'Cause I'm not in your hypothetical scenario, I'm not just a baker who's loving my, you know, four daughters and not sacrificing to idols, but I'm a part of a community. Tell us tell us more about these early Christian communities'cause they're A bit different than, you know, an American church today.

Yeah. Well first of all I want to identify what's recognizably the same. I always look for continuity so I don't exaggerate difference. That has its own kind of historical danger. um, the worship would be somewhat recognizable. Wouldn't have a pulpit, wouldn't have a building, wouldn't have long sermons, you would have a gloss on the text and that sort of thing. But you the the order of worship was

largely the same in many ways. Okay. So that's one continuity. The belief system was recognizably the same. Yes. The value system was recognizably the same. So y we would if we we if we knew the language, we would feel at least like we were in a familiar space, even though there were clear differences. The first is we don't find any kind of material imprint of Christianity in the first three hundred years. There are no buildings, archaeologists have found. None. Mm.

Met in homes. There was very little Christian art that would be passed over. There's just nothing, with one exception. The Bible. Now we don't have an official Bible, uh, a canonized Bible till the year 367. We have a functional Bible really early. The Gospels uh bound letters of Paul that are copied and circulated. But what's really fascinating is that they use a new technology. It's called the codex. Uh most books were on scrolls. And when this new technology began to be developed.

Which is really the first book. Uh exactly, the first book. Christians jumped on it and used it right away, but almost exclusively for only one book in the Christian library, and that was the Bible. And so that became their material artifact that was passed on from one generation to the next, the dominance of the Christian story, Old Testament and New Testament. So they're living meeting in homes or halls. Yep. How what's the average size of a church?

I'd say somewhere between twenty-five and seventy-five people. But get this, we have evidence that they met every morning for prayer. Wow. Now again, they're not getting into cars though, are they? They're walking a hundred yards They live really close to each other. Because of the density of the population. So there's just a lot more sharing of life together. They know each other, they're eating together. They eat a meal together, right? Tell us about that, the agape face, tell us what that is.

That carried over. Eventually the Eucharist and the the feast were separated, but m shared meals was an important part of their life together too. And then of course you had the mentor or sponsor and the catechumen. Yes. That was another part of the relationship. Yeah, yeah. So it was smaller and

And it was made up of a diverse group of people, right? It was very d very diverse. Uh because I again we're used to some of that if you but particularly live in an urban environment, you're used to different ethnicities and different walks of life. But that was not common in the r Roman world. No, it wasn't. Uh the the ethnic separation was severe. We have evidence, for example, in the city of Antioch, a city of maybe two hundred, two hundred and fifty thousand people, eighteen different

identifiable ethnic groups that lived in their own enclaves and often didn't get along. Yeah. And Christianity was breaking that cultural barrier. I mean think about it theologically, John Mark. the radical statement that Paul makes, if anyone is in Christ, that person is a new creation. That becomes your primary identity. Uh you're no longer ethnic, male, female, rich, poor, all those other kinds of identifiers that separate people into different categories.

You're Christian. You're a new creation. You are what God has made you to be through Jesus Christ. And then it goes on to say, and Christ came and broke down all dividing walls of hostility. Now that applied primarily, of course, in the New Testament did you and Gentile, but it could apply to anything Roman. Barbarian, educated, uneducated, rich and poor. Mm-hmm.

And so that began to bleed out. I I put it this way, is that a new primary identity bleeds out and begins to transform all your secondary identity. So that means I'm still a father or a husband uh or uh a merchant, but I'm gonna be a different kind of father, a different kind of husband. uh a different kind of merchant because I'm a different person, I'm a new creation in Christ. Well you can imagine what that does to the social order over time. Yeah.

It changes everything. Now it never did it perfectly. Uh it still hasn't to this day and it never will. But you can see the radical implications of just those two statements alone. I love what Paul says about himself before he was a Christian. He said that he was blameless before the law. uh that he was a card-carrying Jew, that he was born of Jews. I mean, he had the idea.

Pharisees. Yeah. He had the ideal resume from a Jim uh from a Jewish point of view, and then what's the very next sentence he says? But whatever gain I had, I countered as loss for the sake of Christ. He burned the resume up, or I should say, he began to use it differently, and that was for the cause of Christ. So that begins to permeate the Christian social order and its influence on the Roman world.

And it was attractive to people. Yes. Attractive to the poor, attracted to refugees and immigrants, attracted to people who wanted a fresh start because they wanted to be a new creation in Christ.

Now you talk about a new social order. You write about this in this chapter of Water from a Deep Well. This wasn't just like a nice idea about a new like emotional relationship to your career or your ethnicity. There was like a profound socioeconomic effect it had on the church. Talk to us about. You know, it's hard for us living so far downstream where the modern nation state in many ways has been based on Christendom values of care for the poor, care for the sick.

We have wealth redistribution through taxes and government programs for a welfare state. None of that existed, right? In the Roman Empire. There wasn't like a disability pension for those that were injured, right? So t talk to us about the economic implications of this Christian theology in the early churches. Well, they began to develop a different ethic about how Christians live in the world.

And what's interesting to observe is that they weren't revolutionaries. They didn't burn any buildings down. We don't have any events of protests, nothing. That happened later on in Christian history on a number of occasions, but not back then. They would claim they were just good Roman citizens doing their jobs. And they said, well, we're not going to worship the emperor, but we're always going to pray for the emperor.

So in one sense, they were pretty low key. They weren't obviously threatening. They did not play Rome's game, as I've mentioned before. And part of that's because they weren't trying to stick their head up and get killed. Right. But part of it is they were following the example of Jesus. The imitation of Jesus was central to an early Christian ethic.

Uh, the way Jesus treated children gave them a cue for how they should treat children. One scholarly book says that early Christianity invented childhood as we know it today. So that began to affect how they related to the society around them. There's an example that comes out of Carthage in the second century. A catechumen was doing a form of work that was considered unacceptable to a Christian ethic, and so they required him to quit that job. Before he could be baptized.

Exactly. And they found him another job. Can you can you even imagine that in our church today? You sign up to get baptized and well the elders want to talk to you about what your career is first and and then if it doesn't comply, they help you find a new vocational path. Exactly. That's one one example. But there are so many like that where it would take a collection. Or widows, right?

Right. They took care of widows. In fact, eventually that project grew so large that they create kind of orders of widows to care for them. There's evidence that in the Roman church uh by the third century there were over fifteen hundred people on the church's larger church. In the city of Rome. In the city on their payroll that they were taking care of, including a lot of widows. They eventually started orders for widows and orders for virgins who wanted to remain celibate.

And they would help women who had lost a husband who did not want to remain celibate to either find another spouse or they would go on the payroll of the church once they hit the age of sixty. Uh they'd visit people in prison and bring them food because prisons didn't do that kind of thing. I mean it's pretty amazing the social services they provided on the grassroots level.

Again, did not exist from the Roman Empire. Again, it's just hard for us to imagine that. And it's even hard for us, I think, to figure out how to do that today because so much of that work is done by the government now because of the influence of Christian spirituality. Ironically, isn't it? I'm sorry.

Permeated the social order in a way. Another example, um in in uh Justin Martyr, his account of early Christian worship, um they take a collection not just of money but of material. Sunday. And the rule was Deacons immediately brought it out for distribution. So you would come to church on Sunday, again your church is twenty five to seventy five people, and you would bring there's no like automatic, you know, withdrawal from your checking account. Yeah.

Bring bread, yeah, exactly. Zucchini, whatever. You'd bring an extra cloak and you'd bring that to worship, and then the deacons would immediately distribute it, run it off to this quarter. Elderly widow there that couldn't get in, the shut in, whatever it may be. Yeah, and listen, John Mark

hand to mouth for ninety percent of the people living in the Roman Empire. Wow. There there was a huge disparity between the rich and poor, and there were very few rich and a whole lot of poor. Again, our rather even distribution of wealth Uh comparatively. Comparatively speaking, yeah. Uh enormously different compared to the Roman world. It was not a happy place for most people. And the Christian community and the Christian ethics

Confronted that world and began very slowly to turn it around. Another interesting piece of evidence has to do with fourth century preaching. Okay, so now we have an official uh church uh Yeah, this is kind of post Constantine right. Constantine gives it legal recognition, more and more favor. By three eighty one under the Emperor Theodosius, Christianity becomes the official religion of the Empire.

Scholars crunch numbers and they think that in the year three hundred there uh maybe ten percent of the Roman Empire was Christian by three sixty Fifty percent Christian. Holy cow. So people are going to big churches and listening to some star preachers. But when you And this is a huge change. I mean, this is uh and it's a mixed bag. It's not all good. We'll get into that later.

We read some of the sermons of some of these uh rather tempestuous and and uh Those life uh sermons from people like John Chrysostom, and you should see them go out. Caesarea. Yeah. They go after wealth and abuse of wealth. If we preach those today, we'd be thrown out of their our churches. Honestly, it is amazing that they had the temerity to be able to take on

the wealthy of the Roman Empire. John Christensed him to do it and he had in the imperial family sitting in church while he did it. And that's a reason why he was exiled and martyred. Yeah. And many of them, like Basil, for example, who, you know, is credited with kind of the first hospital, right? Founding the first hospital. Hospital. Gave it up, right? He came from old money, as we would call it. Gave it up, gave his possessions away, became a monk and then a priest, and then a bishop.

Yeah, there's some great stories actually of of the conversion of wealthy people in the fourth and fifth century. There's another one, Melanie the Younger. She was so wealthy from her family inheritance. Uh they had a a large chunk of property in Italy and they couldn't find a buyer because there was nobody that had a m Nobody had enough money.

She eventually began to distribute that wealth all over the place. She knew Augustine. Uh she ended up in Jerusalem. She founded a monastery and it was a monastery for a lot of women who practiced a profession that wouldn't meet the approval of Christians. I mean, there were some amazing people who made significant uh sacrifices of their wealth and their prestige and their position to be followers of Jesus. And their biographies kind of set the standard.

The standard. Now, economic redistribution, that's one example. Um, another that you write about is the plagues. Tell us more about this is really key in the development of the early church. Well, uh the the the history of plagues around the world is a fascinating study in and of itself. uh the bubonic plague being the most famous uh yeah it began in 1347. um but there were two major plagues in the Roman world that occurred one in 165 and the other in 250.

Uh the two fifty plague, we actually have quite a bit of literature about the way Christians responded to it. It's called Cyprian's Plague, by the way. He was a bishop in North Africa. because we have a number of his sermons that actually address the plague. And we have some letters that bishops wrote to their d uh uh to their congregations and the the area uh uh over which they presided as bishop. So we have some evidence that described Christian behavior.

In the face of catastrophic suffering during these plagues. So, for example, in the case of Cyprian, he preaches about it. And he lends the Christian worldview to how people made sense of the plague. And why there was suffering in the first place. He talks about the sovereignty of God. He talks about the suffering of Christ. He talks about the sacrifices that Jesus has made of us.

uh that you know, God ascends the rain to fall on the just on on on the the righteous and so on. Uh we need to do the same thing. And that gives us evidence, we have some evidence that Christians began to care for non Christians pagans as well as their own. Yeah,'cause the economic redistribution was more like this alternative society inside the church, right? But with the plagues it begins to spill out to anyone.

Anyone. So they take care of those that have been abandoned by by their own relatives who were left to die in the street? And Christians would take them in or if they died would give them a decent burial. Mm-hmm. Uh in the case of uh sickness, Christians would step forward in spite of the risk that they face. And care for those that were sick. There's an interesting passage in a letter that Dionysius wrote. He was the Bishop of Alexandria.

where he says to his congregation, I know some of you had relatives who cared for the sick, and the sick recovered, and the relative died. And he said it's obvious that they took the disease and put them on themselves. Now that's bad science, but it's great theology because he's referring to what Jesus did for all of Well, this was noticeable in the Roman world. Here these Christians are responding very differently. They're not running, they're not terrified, they're not abandoned.

In the same way. Instead they turn and face death at the risk of death anyway, in caring for these people who are being so catastrophically affected by uh the plague. Very different, by the way, from uh some of the behavior during the bubonic plague in thirteen forty seven where high ranking church officials would withdraw to their Now we're far into Christendom at that point. Yeah, and it's the priest.

that died first. Yeah. Because they were caring for their own little flocks in in the village.

Wow. I mean it sounds like for these early generations of Christian communities Jesus was certainly Lord and Savior. I mean, to the point they were willing to die for. But it seems like Jesus as example in his death and in his incarnation played a larger role than it does for many of us in our discipleship today. Am I hearing that right? I think yeah, you are right about that, John Mark. There's a lot of evidence that the imitation of Christ

uh in early Christianity was kind of the standard of their ethic. In fact in the so called letter to Diognetus, I mentioned this once before, uh, he actually talks about the imitation of Jesus being uh the standard that they were to aspire yeah uh to follow as best as best they could. Now they never confuse Jesus with anybody else. Yes. Jesus was the Son of God. And he was unique and yeah

Uh Jesus revealed God by being God. We don't do that. We're adopted into the Christian family because of what Jesus has done for us. But Jesus becomes not only the way To new life, Jesus also becomes the way of life. It's both and it's not either or. I I find that really um compelling to me. Yeah, you said they put more emphasis on the incarnation than we do. Mm-hmm. Tell us more about that.

Well they situated the coming of Jesus into a a larger narrative perspective that really goes back to to Genesis. God created us in his image. In Jesus Christ, we see the perfect image of God. To put it this way, Jesus becomes in early Christianity both a window and a mirror. Okay, as a window, we look through Jesus Christ to see the very nature of God. So that when you see Jesus you're seeing God. When you're praying to Jesus, you're praying to God.

When you follow Jesus, you're following God. Okay. Jesus is the perfect manifestation in human form of God. He's a winner. As as um as Origen said, God became little so that we could understand him, but without becoming anything less than what God was before. Or I would put it this way, it's like all the light of the universe is gathered together and diminish till it becomes as small as one flickering candle without having anything any less light in it.

So God comes to us as Jesus Christ to reveal who God is for us and what God does for us. Okay. Um, so Jesus comes to fulfill the story. Uh, first he's a window, we look through him to see the very nature of God, but he's also a mirror. And in looking at Jesus we look at what God wants us to become. Mm. So We're the What God created us to be, to share in the divine glory. Yeah. Um so where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom, and we all with unveiled face.

Behold, the glory of the Lord are being changed into that likeness from one degree of glory to another, for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. Transformation to reflect the very nature of Christ. Wow. So these early Christian communities, if the meta question for this conversation is what drew people in knowing that they would face the possibility of death?

you have this social stratified society and now you have rich and poor and Roman and Jewish and barbarian and Greek altogether in a family. You have People with a fear of death and a pagan way of life, and now you have this just absolute freedom from the fear of death. You have a whole new way of life that's beautiful, that's good, that's compelling. You have economic redistribution.

you have caring for the sick and those on the margins of society. It sounds like these and these early churches are small. Again, these are not mega churches with millions of dollars in the coffers. Nothing against that. But again, you said twenty-five to seventy-five people on average. It sounds almost like extended families.

Well, there's a good book about that actually written by a scholar that uh uh the Christian faith redefined how we understand family. Yeah. And that uh we're brothers in Christ. You and I are, for example. Um rather than the Roman way of understanding family that was governed by the patrifamilia, the person who is the head of the entire family and the family network and slaves and servants and merchants and anything uh anybody who came under that particular umbrella.

And uh Jesus is now our patrifamilia. And uh what a different kind of uh figure he is for us, you know. I do want to issue one warning though, and that is we can't turn it into a golden age. It was a different age. They had just as many problems as we have today. They were a different kind of problem. Read Corinthians.

Uh exactly. No one wants to be a pastor of that church. And the reason why I say that is because if you treat it as a golden age, it becomes inaccessible and unrealistic. Yeah. If we treat it as a model we can learn from And translate to our own era, it becomes something to which we can aspire or at least learn from. That's my goal.

So it wasn't a golden age, but certainly there was something special in those first few centuries before Constantine, before the beginning of Christendom. Am I right about that? I would say you are right about that and here's the thing I wanna I wanna guard most fiercely, John Mark. The church's independence.

But there was a huge advantage the church had in being independent from the Roman world. So it could kind of grow up without excessive Roman interference. And they were able to hold it off enough. to main or to develop their own distinctives that set them apart. And I would say to every church in every era, guard your independence. Do not become subsumed or dominated by some culture or state. Yeah, you and you don't just mean by the state, you mean by the culture itself. Correct.

Now not too much isolation, but enough independence to follow our own pathway. Yeah. What's the main thing you think we can learn from this era of Christian spirituality that you call belonging? Uh, that community is a primary form of witness to the world, as John himself says, they'll know your my followers by how you love one another. And especially now in our particular era of isolation and loneliness and division, um

Christian communities can do uh an enormous amount of good just by being a community that's healthy and welcoming of other people. It's really a primary form of witness today. And honestly

John Mark, it's like we have an open field of green grass to run the football down. We don't we don't have any opponents anymore. Yeah. Our culture is in such a state of stress right now. We have opportunities to Falling at our feet if we only take advantage, and one of them is just a good, healthy, small church. Hmm. Let's start there, which It doesn't need to be ten thousand people, it can be two hundred. And if there's twenty five to seventy five.

Right. If there's some love and a welcoming spirit and a little bit of diversity. It's gonna have an impact. had the bars set low.

Right. It is right now. And the opportunity is very high. Yeah. belonging, the spirituality of the early Christian communities. Thank you for sharing. As you're listening to this, you may want to ask yourself questions and reflection like, who is my community? Where am I living in a family-like atmosphere? Sharing meals was central to the early church.

Where am I eating together with other Christians? Who are those Christians? Economic redistribution. What does that look like in my life besides just? paying taxes, but living out that value and vision in the church as the kingdom of God. Thank you for listening, and we'll be back next time with Struggle, the spirituality of the early Christian desert saints, the desert mothers and fathers.

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