Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
130 | Enemy of the State: Missions in the Early Church
177 Plays11 months ago
As we get close to the end of the early church series, we learn how persecution played a role in the spread of the gospel and how today's American culture parallels Ancient Rome. For more on the history of missions in the first 500 years, see this article: https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=cgm_hist
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Verity Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Verity Podcast. I'm your host, Felicia Mason-Heimer, and I am here to teach you how to know what you believe, to live it boldly, and to communicate it graciously to the world around you. I believe that women are ready to go deeper in their faith than ever before, and they don't have to go to seminary to do it. I am so glad you're here, and I hope you'll join me on this journey because every woman is a theologian.
Unexpected Break & Early Church Missions
00:00:29
Speaker
Hello friends and welcome back to Verity Podcast. Thank you for your patience as we took an unexpected break through all of January as I was working on the research to complete our early church series in this church history expedition that we are on. I am so excited to be back with you and today we're going to be talking about missions in the early church as we get closer to the end of this section of our study.
00:00:56
Speaker
So before we begin into this journey, talking about missions in the early church, I wanted to talk a little bit about missions in general.
Misconceptions About Missions
00:01:06
Speaker
I think sometimes when we think about missions in our Western American context anyway, our mind can default to the concept of a short term mission trip. And while I think that these can serve a purpose, especially if they're relieving the missionaries on site,
00:01:25
Speaker
and giving them a break in some way or accomplishing a task that otherwise could not be accomplished like a building being constructed as long as it's not stealing from the local economy or becoming some kind of field trip for American white people.
00:01:43
Speaker
then I think they can be really positive. But when we're looking at missions as a general rule, especially in history, we're talking about something more than a short term mission
Carver's Insights on Mission Goals
00:01:56
Speaker
trip. We're talking about a lifestyle of evangelism and discipleship. And of course, we're not doing an entire series on missions here, although that would be really awesome. It would be super cool to do a series and interview missionaries from around the world.
00:02:09
Speaker
That might be something we could do someday. For now, I want to talk about the idea of missions in the Bible and how that played out in the early church. Now, I have a book called Missions in the Plan of the Ages by Carver. This is one of my vintage theology books that I keep on my shelf. I absolutely love this collection. William Owen Carver had a theology degree, a doctorate of theology, and was at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.
00:02:38
Speaker
and wrote this book a long time ago. It was actually written in 1909. And so one of the reasons I enjoy reading older books like this is because I think that they give us a picture of how the gospel really hasn't changed over the years. We've just had to learn how to preach it in different contexts, both around the world
00:03:01
Speaker
and in our own cities. And so this book is broken out into several sections about what the meaning of missions is, what Jesus said about missions, what the missionary message and plan and power and work all are. But what I'm going to share with you is a little section where he was specifically talking about the goal of missions and how that played out in the early church, which is what we're studying.
00:03:50
Speaker
It was God that was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, not reckoning their trespasses unto them, and not so reckoning for the reason that this love-sent Son is the propitiation for the whole world. This attitude of God is eternal and is determinative in all his dealings with men. He is ever working towards the end that they who have not heard may have the glad tidings preached unto them, and that they who were no people may come to be a people of God's own possession.
00:03:58
Speaker
Here's what he says,
Missionary Work in Church History
00:04:20
Speaker
So it is that when people come to be God's ambassadors on behalf of Christ, they must go to all ignorant and erring men, beseeching them to be reconciled to God." This whole book is absolutely beautiful and amazingly written, but I particularly love the beginning and his heart for people meeting the love of God. And that's really what was happening in the early church and admissions.
00:04:42
Speaker
So if you have this idea of missions, that's the short term mission ship, or even the height of Baptist and Methodist missions, which would have been in the 1800s and the early 1900s, when you read about people like the Judson's or Amy Carmichael or Gladys Illward, there was mission work happening all through church history. And that's why in each section of this, I really want to focus on how missions were happening in those sections.
00:05:06
Speaker
When we get to the medieval era, I think that's one area where we often think that missions just weren't happening, but they were. And in the early church, we forget that the missionary movement was like the crux of everything. Like everything
Persecution and Spread of Christianity
00:05:19
Speaker
was a missionary movement in the early church. And so to understand this,
00:05:23
Speaker
I want us to look again at the persecutions that were happening in the first 500 years. So at this point in the series, if you've listened through the other episodes, you know that there were multiple persecutors of the church. I want to do a quick review on these persecutors and what was happening. I may mispronounce a couple of these names. I didn't have time to look up every single one of them before I was reading. So give me grace in that department.
00:05:47
Speaker
So the first persecution was obviously the Jewish persecution. This was the very first one. Jesus was killed by the Jewish leaders who were persecuting him. And then out of that began to persecute his followers. The Apostle Paul was one of the chief persecutors of the church before his conversion and his miraculous encounter with Christ. And so you have these Jewish leaders who are persecuting the Christians. And at first, the Romans thought that Christians were just a subsect of Judaism.
00:06:16
Speaker
That was why they weren't bothered by them. Jews were protected under Roman law. And so people like Pilate and the emperor, they're all looking at this and going, OK, y'all are just constantly fighting among yourselves. And I can't right now deal with that. So until it disrupts the peace, we're just not going to deal with it. Well, pretty quickly.
00:06:39
Speaker
it became apparent that the Christians were actually in conflict with the Jews. So they clearly weren't the same. They weren't in the same religion or religious structure. So the Romans began to pay more attention and the persecution shifted
00:06:55
Speaker
under Nero. We know that Nero persecuted the Christians. He blamed them for the fire, the great fire of Rome. And then as we move further into history, we have Domitian and Pliny, Marcus Aurelius. He was brutal to Christians. Septimius Severus, Maximinius, Trajan, Valyrian, Diocletian, and Licinius.
00:07:17
Speaker
And when you look at history, you kind of see an increasing hostility towards Christians under these leaders and emperors. Up to the point of Marcus Aurelius, it was kind of like if a Christian won't recant and won't worship the emperor, then yes, we execute them. But but it was kind of a concession. They didn't want to do it. But under Marcus Aurelius, things really shifted. And he particularly went after the Christians because he saw them as disrupting the peace
00:07:47
Speaker
of his kingdom. They were divisive because they refused to give their allegiance to the state. They were supposed to give their allegiance to Caesar and to the state to worship him as a god. And if they
Parallels: Ancient Rome & Modern America
00:07:58
Speaker
would not do that, then they were disruptive to the social order. I mentioned this in previous episodes, but this is a big parallel to modern day America.
00:08:07
Speaker
lots of parallels between ancient Rome and modern day America from our worship of sports and if you look at the parallels between the sports culture and the gladiator games very very similar even the structure and you look at these massive stadiums they're modeled after the stadiums that were in ancient Rome when you look at our culture of what we will sacrifice in terms of time and attention to give ourselves to these sports
00:08:34
Speaker
to give our allegiance to the state and the things that the state wants from us in American culture. This is very normative. And as we continue forward and as history continues to form, I think we will actually see a lot more parallels back to ancient Rome, including this idea that if you hold to a Christian worldview, you are an enemy to the social order.
00:08:59
Speaker
And that is what was happening under Marcus Aurelius and then of course under Severus and Trajan. You started to see this shift and the word that they actually would use for Christians was that they were atheists. Now you might think that's crazy. They obviously believed in God. Why would these emperors call the Christians atheists? Well, it's because the Christians would not affirm the Roman gods, the Greek and Roman gods. They denied those gods as real.
00:09:29
Speaker
and they believed in one living God. And so because they refused to give their allegiance to Caesar and to the Greek and Roman gods, they were viewed as atheists, unbelievers. And this is kind of like a mind bender a little bit. At least it is for me when I think about it. I'm like, I cannot imagine a society that's like the Christians are the atheists.
00:09:50
Speaker
But if you think about their worldview as like their God is the state and Caesar and this pantheon of constantly changing gods and goddesses who must be appeased, just replace those things with whatever is the God in today's culture.
00:10:10
Speaker
So if a Christian says, I serve a God who says I should honor the family and I should honor marriage and I should not seek to get revenge and I should honor the unborn and the life of the unborn and the elderly,
00:10:26
Speaker
If the person whose God is personal freedom or their own sexuality or a society that does not have young babies and inconvenient old people or the disabled, then yes, the Christian is an enemy of that.
00:10:47
Speaker
because they are an enemy of the gods of the age and that's what was happening in ancient Rome and so they were persecuted and treated as atheists, killed as atheists because they were disruptive to the social order. That was always the claim.
00:11:05
Speaker
And I think this is something that we should consider and be prayerful about as we think about what it means to be a missionary in today's society. Because you're teaching a gospel that is inherently offensive to the sensibilities of at least Western American society, where you are saying
00:11:25
Speaker
you must leave the gods of our age and our culture to follow the one true God.
Christianity's Growth Factors
00:11:32
Speaker
It got to the extent that the Emperor Hadrian executed 11,000 soldiers accused of being Christian in 117 AD. So he lost a massive amount of soldiers simply because they were seen as a threat. They couldn't be trusted to have an allegiance to the state because they were willing to follow Christ first.
00:11:52
Speaker
And you know, in Christianity, we admire this. We're like, yeah, Christ first. But if you think about it from a pagan perspective, they know you cannot have an allegiance both to Christ and to the gods of the age. And that is why they were persecuted and killed. So why are
00:12:07
Speaker
talking about persecution? Because persecution is what spread the gospel. That is what spread the gospel in the early church. Persecution led to the church scattering. If we go to Acts 8.1, it says, Saul approved of Stephen's execution. He was the first martyr, and there arose on that day a great persecution against the church in Jerusalem. So this was the Jewish persecution, and they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, except for the apostles.
00:12:33
Speaker
So this is Acts 8.1. This is the beginning of the scattering. And as we know, as the first century unfolds, the apostles actually go out as well. So at first they aren't scattered, but by the end of the book of Acts, they are scattered. And James becomes the Bishop of Jerusalem.
00:12:51
Speaker
Eventually, Paul goes to Rome, but he does three missionary journeys on the way. We know that Mark becomes the patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church. So he is believed to stay in that eastern area, Constantinople kind of area. We have some that went down to Africa since a Philip went down to Ethiopia. So you have the beginnings of this missionary movement that's happening all because of the persecution.
00:13:20
Speaker
So let's look at some of the missionary spread in these first 500 years. So we know that obviously Judea was first the place of missionary concentration. And then as Paul went out on his missionary journeys, he's going into Turkey and Gaul or France, Crete, Greece, and then eventually up into Rome.
00:13:46
Speaker
Some people believe that the Apostle Paul actually went to Britain as a missionary. Others believe that it was Joseph of Arimathea. We don't have evidence of either of those things, but we know that very early there were churches already in Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales by about 250 AD. My 120 AD Christians were already being found in Romania and Moldavia.
00:14:12
Speaker
And by 190 AD, there was widespread Christianity in North Africa, as well as Kurdistan and Hindu Kush. So you have a North African Christian population that's actually quite strong. By the time of Augustine, there's a strong Christian presence there. And this is naturally happening because of the land bridge that Israel is between Northern Africa
00:14:40
Speaker
and Europe. So it was a prime location for the spread of the gospel into Africa and then of course further south into Ethiopia. Some of the oldest churches that exist are in Africa. So at the time of the early church, this is according to Barrett and Johnson,
00:14:58
Speaker
The world is 2.4% Christian, 9.3% evangelized, with scriptures translated into seven languages, and a total number of 177,000 martyrs, which is about 1.5% of all Christians. This is at the rate of 1,200 per year. In 225 AD, Persia
00:15:20
Speaker
was already penetrated by the Christian missionaries and had over 20 resident bishops, which is really exciting as well. So you have the spread of Christianity from Israel in a span of about 200 years, reaching all the way down into Africa, over into Persia, upward into Europe, Gaul, and into the British Isles, and then over as well into
00:15:50
Speaker
Russia, starting to reach up into Russia, modern day Russia. So it's fascinating to see how quickly the persecution drove Christians to scatter and to share the gospel. If you remember from our discussion of the Nestorian controversy, there were missionary movements into China and other parts of Asia due to the spread of the Nestorian church, and that lasted until they were eradicated by the Muslims.
00:16:17
Speaker
So you have a really strong missionary presence.
00:16:21
Speaker
in the first 500 years of the church. So what caused this spread? Well, one of the things is the Roman road system. The Roman road system made it very easy to get around. They had created these phenomenal layered roads that you can still walk today because they're constructed with such excellence. It'd be really cool if you can look up a picture of a Roman road so you get a picture of what they were doing, how they were built, but this system extended through their entire empire.
00:16:50
Speaker
And I think this is an amazing testament to how a really brutal, divided, violent kingdom was used by God to spread the gospel. So you have this road system all throughout Europe, into Africa, and it made it easy for Christians to travel, especially the Apostle Paul, who was a Roman citizen.
00:17:08
Speaker
The second thing is they had a common Greek language. So yes, you have a Roman Empire and you have a Roman road system, but you have a Greek language that was spoken by almost everybody. So this common language allows you to communicate much more easily, even when you're crossing into a different territory.
00:17:25
Speaker
Thirdly, there was the logic in philosophy that was inherent to Greek culture, and this would have been well known to the Romans as well. This Greek culture emphasized arguing for your point, arguing for what you believed.
00:17:40
Speaker
giving a defense for the hope within you, essentially. When we look in the book of Acts at the scene in Mars Hill, where Paul is talking to these philosophers and he's saying, look, I'm trying to explain to you the living God
00:17:59
Speaker
and how to understand him. This is in Acts 17 22 through 31. You see the Apostle Paul explaining using Greek philosophy and logic how to understand the Jewish Messiah. And this is just amazing. One of the other reasons that Paul was so well equipped for what he was doing as a Roman citizen
00:18:19
Speaker
who's classically trained and is a lawyer in the Jewish tradition, he was well-equipped to have these conversations with these people and even asking them questions, which was a strong fundamental of Greek philosophy and debate. If you were classically trained, if you ever studied classical education, asking rhetorical questions and leading into debates of ideas is vital.
00:18:46
Speaker
to that structure and that educational system. And Paul used that to his advantage. So Greek philosophy and logic played a big role in the spread of the teaching of the gospel. The fourth way that the missions movement spread was through awareness of Jewish monotheism. So even though this is Christianity, the Jewish messiah is being proclaimed, and most of the cultures Greek and Roman and it is polytheistic, you still have this
00:19:16
Speaker
understanding of Jewish monotheism, understanding Jewish religion. And so they knew a little of what was being spoken about by the apostles. There was some understanding of the Jewish religion and an awareness that their God was not visible, so he didn't have an idol, and he was only one God. And so when the Christians came and spoke about this, they would have had at least some acquaintance with the system.
00:19:44
Speaker
Finally, there was a dissatisfaction with the pagan religions, the ancient pagan religions. They were starting to see them as maybe barbaric or primitive. And of course, the state religion and worship of Caesar was seen as a higher or more intellectual option. But at the same time, to hear about a God, a living God, who comes in bodily form to redeem humanity,
00:20:12
Speaker
is intriguing to a lot of people. Now it also was mocked openly because if you remember this idea that God would be just one God and come in bodily form as a perfect man who's not manipulating like Zeus because like Zeus came in a bodily form.
00:20:31
Speaker
but he manipulated people and he used people sexually. He's always after his own desires. This God came in bodily form only once and he did it to lay himself down, to be sacrificial. And in this Roman society, you don't lay yourself down for another person unless there's glory involved, unless there's something that you are gaining from it. And to have a God lay himself down to bring people to himself is
00:21:01
Speaker
an offensive gospel. And so in many ways, the gospel they were preaching was fit for the time in which it was spreading, but at the same time, it was challenging and offensive. So it wasn't easy to share, but it also directly met the needs and unspoken desires of the culture in which it advanced. And that is one of the coolest things about missions in the early church.
00:21:24
Speaker
So
Facing Societal Challenges & Conclusion
00:21:25
Speaker
this is a little bit of a shorter episode because I just wanted to do that quick summary of what was going on in terms of missions. And I think that as we think about missions in the early church in those first 500 years, it can give us an encouragement in the age we live in today to remember that the missions that we are
00:21:46
Speaker
accomplishing in this day and age are going into a society, at least in Western American culture, that looks a lot like ancient Rome. And so we should not be surprised when the people around us mock our worldview. We should not be surprised when they think it's ridiculous or stupid. We should not be surprised that they think it's a threat to their society.
00:22:06
Speaker
or a threat to our government, or that we are divisive because of our allegiance to Christ, or because we live so counter-culturally, or that we don't worship the system of sports, or we don't worship the option of abortion, or euthanasia, or whatever is currently acceptable in our culture. Because we are different, as led by the Holy Spirit of God, we should expect resistance in our mission.
00:22:34
Speaker
And we should also expect to be living on mission and evangelistically as Christians in this society. Now, that doesn't mean you go out door to door, but that you know what you believe and you are able to communicate that graciously and truthfully to the people God has given you. Missions in the early church spread because of persecution. In Western American culture right now, we are not yet persecuted, not at that level at all.
00:23:01
Speaker
But we should be ready and prepared to take a stand, not out of fear, but out of devotion to the God who loves us and who has promised to be with us and who laid himself down for us. We should learn from the stories of the people in the early church.
00:23:18
Speaker
Who went to the Colosseum and who died for their faith? We should learn from the modern missionaries and the modern martyrs and what they are going through around the world right now. How can we stay devoted to the Gospel and be willing to take a stand on truth even when it is counter-cultural?
00:23:36
Speaker
And not be afraid of that persecution, but to know that through persecution, the church has actually spread the most. And that is one of the amazing upside down kingdom realities of being a Christian. That when the church is most pressed, when the church is on the verge of being eradicated in the eyes of those who are persecuting, that is when it succeeds the most.
00:24:07
Speaker
Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Verity Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, would you take the time to leave us a review? It helps so many other women around the world find out about Verity and about every woman a theologian as a ministry and a shop. We appreciate you, and I hope you'll be back next week as we continue to go deeper into God's word and the heart of Jesus Christ.