Dissident Dispatches
Page 5
Questions:
1. What does Hall mean by “Judaeo-Christianity”? He suggests that Bauer’s interpretation of the victory of Roman orthodoxy over heresies ignores “Judaeo-Christianity” but never explains what he means by that phrase. This question does seem to matter since Hall adverts at several points to the possibility that there was substantial Jewish influence on the Gnostic movement.
2. This leads to a further question: Was the proliferation of heresies driven by interest/ethnic groups and, if so, what is the relationship between the interests and the doctrines?
3. For example, how do we account for the obvious appeal of the mind/body, spiritual/worldly dualism of Gnosticism? Was that dualism the product of Plato’s philosophy? Was that philosophy itself the product of the dualism between slaves and free citizens built into the foundations of the Athenian polis?
4. Were Hellenized Jews favourably inclined toward Gnosticism because it denied the incarnation of Christ in the worldly form of Jewish flesh and blood? What other elements within the Hellenized educated classes of the second century might be attracted to a Gnosticized Christianity that allowed them to spurn contact with the degraded and worldly caste of slaves welcomed into the church by St Paul?
5. Did Christian orthodoxy begin to define itself in opposition to the anti-institutional and antinomian streak in many of the heresies? Does that suggest that the mission of the church in this world is to establish a spiritual dominion over the nations, peoples, and tribes throughout the world?
Learning Cell # 3
Doctrine and Practice in the Early Church, Chapter 9
In this chapter, Hall describes the strategy adopted by Cyprian of Carthage to help the early Church cope with the threats and dangers arising out of the mid-third century crisis of the Roman Empire. Political instability, economic collapse, and barbarian invasions led many to blame Christians for their troubles. During major persecutions, such as the one launched by the Emperor Decius in AD 250, many baptized Christians lapsed into apostasy to save their skins. When the pressure eased, many of the lapsed asked to be permitted to rejoin the Church.
People who joined Christian churches in the third century became members of widely scattered minority groups surrounded by often hostile majority populations. The survival of such Christian communities depended upon their ability to generate powerful bonds of in-group solidarity. The boundaries between every church and its host society had to be sufficiently permeable to allow the recruitment of new converts while remaining rigid enough to discourage opportunistic defections by fair-weather friends in times of persecution.
Cyprian recognized that the social cohesion of the church would be fatally undermined if bishops ignored mass apostasy. Many of those who had violated their baptismal oath by committing idolatry still considered themselves Christians and believed that they should be restored to communion. Some of those who themselves had suffered torture and imprisonment (the so-called “confessors”) exercised a pretended right to reconcile lapsed persons to the Church. Hall describes how Cyprian “set about repairing the disaster” by opposing “lax restoration to communion.”
The experience of dealing with that crisis led him to emphasize both the vital significance of baptism as a marker of Christian identity and the importance of episcopal authority “as the essential glue which holds the universal Church together.”
Questions:
1. Were the persecutions an essential ingredient in the genesis of Christian identity and episcopal authority? It is often remarked that the presence of hostile and threatening out-groups enhances in-group solidarity. Had pagans and imperial authorities simply adopted a policy of benign neglect or outright indifference towards Christians, would the Church have maintained a coherent collective identity?
2. To what extent, therefore, was the development of the early Church comparable to the process of ethnogenesis as it appears among early medieval tribes and ethno-nations e.g. the Anglo-Saxons, Normans, Vikings etc.?
3. A related question is to what extent did the creation of early Christian communities piggy-back on already existing ethnic and tribal identities? We know that Jews were the first and most important ethnoreligious community to provide a critically important pool of recruits for the Church. Were there others?
4. Among Gentiles were already existing ethno-nations in a process of decay and disintegration thereby creating a “market” for alternative collective identities? Was the collapse of a coherent concept of Roman citizenship one of the reasons why Rome came to play such an important role in the early history of Christianity? In other words, did the Christian church provide opinion leaders in a decaying Roman society to relive the glory of the ancient Rome republic: the City of God erected on the foundations of the greatest ever City of Man?
Learning Cell # 4
The Martyrdom of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas
This piece is a prison diary written by Vibia Perpetua, a 22-year-old Christian martyr, who was arrested, along with four other catechumens, in Carthage. Her account is introduced and concluded by an anonymous narrator who describes how Perpetua and her fellow-arrestees died in the arena after having been “condemned to the beasts” by Hilarianus the provincial governor. After her arrest and during her imprisonment, Perpetua’s father visited her on several occasions, begging her to perform the sacrifices required of her by the authorities, for the sake of her child and family if not for her own sake. Perpetua was the nursing mother of an infant son and at first she was able to feed the baby only when her father brought him to the place where she was first confined.
Perpetua resisted all the appeals made by her father and publicly confessed her Christian faith at her trial before the governor. Indeed, she was baptized only shortly after her arrest. Not long afterward she was lodged in a foul dungeon for a while until being moved to a better part of the prison where she was able to care for her child. While in prison she wrote of the visions that she and a fellow prisoner, Saturus, had of their impending combat with the devil and of the inevitable fulfillment of their deepest wish which is to ascend to the throne of God in heaven. The power of their desire for martyrdom is also illustrated by the story of Felicitas who fears that she will be spared because she was eight months pregnant. But Felicitas, too, was granted her wish to die in the arena beside Perpetua.
Questions:
1. What was the nature of the “persecution” suffered by Christians in Carthage? It does not appear to have been a dragnet designed to round up every Christian in the city. One of Perpetua’s brothers was a catechumen too and he was not arrested. Indeed, her father suggests that it is only Perpetua’s stubborn pride which prevents her from being released.
2. Was the martyrdom of Perpetua, Felicitas, and Saturus, therefore entirely voluntary? How did other Christians manage to escape a similar fate?
3. Was the refusal to perform the ritual sacrifices required of her a point of honour for Perpetua and her fellow arrestees? The narrator certainly believes that the heroic deeds of martyrs such as these did render honour “to God and comfort to men” when recollected by their posterity.
4. How could Perpetua know that she would live on in the memory of other Christians whose faith was not as strong or as demanding as her own? Was it her mission to replicate the self-sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ?
5. Was this “tradition” of martyrdom therefore an essential ingredient in the eventual triumph of the church over the pagan religions of classical antiquity? Once again, the narrator is convinced that these stories of martyrdom would help those “of weak or despairing faith” to realize that “supernatural grace” is present not “only among men of ancient times,” but among his own contemporaries as well.
Learning Cell # 5
Peter Brown, “The Christian Holy Man in Late Antiquity”
In this chapter, Brown deals with “one stage in the long process of Christianisation” in which a critical role was played by the “holy man,” those few chosen individuals who were
believed to have “achieved, usually through prolonged ascetic labour, an exceptional degree of closeness to God.” Not only did such people validate “practices which were widespread within the Christian communities” of late antiquity they also performed a service for a spiritually exhausted pagan world by facilitating “the creation of new religious allegiances and of new religious patterns of observance.” In short, they became “arbiters of the holy.”
The successful holy man attracted public recognition and often lived in splendour becoming dependent, therefore, on “the steady, often disquieting flow of gifts and favours from the outside world.” There was another side of that gift exchange in which his benefactors received a “seemingly effortless, ‘gravity-free’ flow of divine favours that stemmed from his person.”
The holy man contributed to Christianisation by helping “to negotiate an honourable surrender” by the pagan gods that were displaced by the new faith. The Christian hagiography publicizing the deeds of the holy men “played a major role in the creation of a specifically Christian form of religious ‘common sense.’” Sitting on his pillar, one of the most renowned holy men, Symeon “radiated an order that seeped from his person…into the column itself and the sacred space around it.” Such men helped to give birth to “an imaginative model of the world” in which God could be “placated by bursts of human prayer and contrition, offered to Him by His favoured servants,” thereby restoring order to the world.
Questions:
1. Why had holy men “been shot into prominence…by an exceptionally stern and world-denying streak in late antique Christianity”? What does Brown mean when he suggests that those who approached the holy men did so with expectations shaped by “the hierarchical and patronage-ridden social structure of the later Roman Empire”?
2. How could such expectations be satisfied by fostering a “notion of a God who loved His own Creation” and thereby nurturing “the tenacious hopes of an overwhelmingly agrarian society locked in the tyrannical, warm embrace of the earth”?
3. Was the holy man an urban or a rural phenomenon or somehow both at the same time?
4. If the holy man was the product of a “world-rejecting culture,” is a “world-accepting culture” likely to be less receptive to the process of Christianisation? Or is the Christianisation of such cultures simply the next necessary stage in the emergence of Christianity as a world-historical religion?
5. If the holy man is the iconic representative of Christianity in a world-rejecting culture, who or what sort of man best represents the Christian spirit in a world-affirming culture?
6. What sort of culture do contemporary Christians inhabit? Is there a place for the holy man in today’s world? If not, has the process of Christianisation come to an end or perhaps even gone into reverse?
7. Synagogue of Satan?
The Theological Significance of the Destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in AD 70
Introduction
There is a close connection between the crisis of modern Christianity and the embrace of the higher criticism by mid-nineteenth century Protestant theologians. Especially in Germany, the traditional devotional approach to the Bible was replaced by the “objective” techniques of historical and literary criticism. As a consequence, educated Christians turned their attention away from the “supernatural Christ” to the “historical Jesus.” A new sort of Kulturprotestantismus, or cultural Christianity, was born: Jesus Christ became a teacher of ethics rather than the incarnation of the divine. The crisis was real enough; it reflects a continuing failure by Christians to recognize the pivotal moment when the “supernatural Christ” burst back into human history to avenge both the crucifixion of the “historical Jesus” and the persecution of his faithful followers during their forty year mission to the ends of the earth.
In AD 70, Roman armies under Titus besieged Jerusalem to crush a long-running Jewish rebellion. Their triumph was a bloody affair; not only was the city sacked and pillaged but, according to the contemporary Jewish historian, Josephus, the dead, most of whom “were pure and holy” Jews, numbered over one million.54 The Romans also utterly destroyed the massive Temple complex. In doing so they ripped out the redemptive heart of Old Israel. The Temple was the hub around which revolved the ritual observance of the Mosaic Law underpinning Israel’s covenant relationship with Yahweh. For Jews and Romans alike the event was of world-historical significance. But the providential meaning of the destruction of Jerusalem cannot be confined to the realm of secular history.
Christ himself prophesied the he would come again in judgement on Jerusalem. And the disaster that befell the Jews in AD 70 came as no surprise to first-century Christians. Forty years earlier, standing outside the Temple with his disciples, Christ declared that “not one stone here will be left on another” when he came again at the “end of the age. The Day of the Lord’s return was not to occur in some far distant future, perhaps thousands of years later. Christ assured the crowds who heard him that “this generation will certainly not pass away until these things have happened” (Matthew 24:2–3, 34). In the period between the advent of Christ and his return in AD 70, a profound transformation occurred in the life of Israel, changing forever what it meant to be a Jew.
During Christ’s ministry, it was already clear that the only truly righteous Jews, the saving remnant of Israel, were those faithful to the risen Christ. On the eve of the destruction of the Temple, Christ tells John of Patmos that those “who claim to be Jews though they are not, but are liars” are in reality the “synagogue of Satan.” (Revelation 3:9). As E Michael Jones observes, the “Jews” who rejected Christ effectively redefined themselves; they transformed Judaism into a false religion in which carnal Israel became its own Messiah.55
Prior to the Vatican II Council in the Sixties, Roman Catholic tradition held that God was through with Israel at the Cross and “the Jews were collectively cursed for all time because of the Crucifixion”.56 The crucifixion, therefore, was seen as the central event in the redemptive history of mankind. The problem with this interpretation is that the Mosaic Law remained in force until the destruction of the Temple. Jewish Christians were still circumcised in the flesh as well as in the heart. Indeed, Christ had made it clear that not one jot or one tittle of the Law would be disturbed until the end of the age when all of God’s promises to Israel were to have been fulfilled (Matthew 5:18). The preordained end of Old Israel came when God used the Roman armies to demolish the Temple; only then did the Law cease to bind the New Israel. It was at that historical moment — not in our still distant future — that Christ came again in the glory of the Father. This was the Parousia (the Second Coming in modern parlance) prophesied by the inspired writers of the New Testament.
The Last Judgement
It was at the parousia that Christ rendered his final judgement on Old Israel. It was then that the Lord avenged, fully and completely, the Jewish crime of deicide and the subsequent persecution of the early church. The end of the Old Covenant left the widely-scattered Jewish diaspora high and dry. Those who refused to accept the New Covenant were compelled to re-invent Judaism as a highly particularistic ethno-religion younger than and set in opposition to Christianity.
Accordingly, the Talmud became “the defining document” of those who insisted that the advent of Christ had changed nothing and that the Old Covenant remained valid. Two versions of those rabbinical writings developed over several centuries; the one reached its final form in fifth century Palestine, the other was completed in Babylon in the seventh century AD.57 Modern Judaism, whether it flatly rejects the Messiah or seeks instead to reclaim a merely mortal, “kosher Jesus,” remains in a permanent state of denial, refusing to accept that God was finished with Old Israel in AD 70.58 For Christians, of course, the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple marked the creation of a new heaven and a new earth. After the demolition of the Temple, the gospel found a new spiritual home in the Christian nations which became the true, spiritual, seed of Abraham.
Only in AD 70 when the gospel of the kingdom had been preached to the whole world (Greek: oikumene) did the time and the season become ripe for the fateful intersection of secular and redemptive history which inaugurated the Christian age. In the New Jerusalem that arose out of the ashes of the Old, the leaves of the tree of life were for the healing of all nations not just carnal Israel (Revelation 22:2). Anchored in the hearts of Christ’s faithful followers, the early church (ie the spiritual Body of Christ) burst into history as a temple not made with hands.
Unfortunately, few Christian theologians now attach more than a merely “local” importance to the first-century destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. Jews, of course, continue to deny the apocalyptic significance and divine provenance of what can be called the First Holocaust. Any suggestion that the Roman armies which laid waste to Jerusalem were the providential instrument of divine vengeance designed to punish the Jews for the crime of deicide is automatically labelled anti-Semitic.