After Pentecost

195:3.1Af­ter the con­sol­i­da­tion of Ro­man po­lit­i­cal rule and af­ter the dis­sem­i­na­tion of Chris­tian­ity, the Chris­tians found them­selves with one God, a great re­li­gious con­cept, but with­out em­pire. The Greco-Ro­mans found them­selves with a great em­pire but with­out a God to serve as the suit­able re­li­gious con­cept for em­pire wor­ship and spir­i­tual uni­fi­ca­tion. The Chris­tians ac­cepted the em­pire; the em­pire adopted Chris­tian­ity. The Ro­man pro­vided a unity of po­lit­i­cal rule; the Greek, a unity of cul­ture and learn­ing; Chris­tian­ity, a unity of re­li­gious thought and prac­tice.

195:3.2Rome over­came the tra­di­tion of na­tion­al­ism by im­pe­rial uni­ver­sal­ism and for the first time in his­tory made it pos­si­ble for dif­fer­ent races and na­tions at least nom­i­nally to ac­cept one re­li­gion.

195:3.3Chris­tian­ity came into fa­vor in Rome at a time when there was great con­tention be­tween the vig­or­ous teach­ings of the Sto­ics and the sal­va­tion promises of the mys­tery cults. Chris­tian­ity came with re­fresh­ing com­fort and lib­er­at­ing power to a spir­i­tu­ally hun­gry peo­ple whose lan­guage had no word for “un­selfish­ness.”

195:3.4That which gave great­est power to Chris­tian­ity was the way its be­liev­ers lived lives of ser­vice and even the way they died for their faith dur­ing the ear­lier times of dras­tic per­se­cu­tion.

195:3.5The teach­ing re­gard­ing Christ’s love for chil­dren soon put an end to the wide­spread prac­tice of ex­pos­ing chil­dren to death when they were not wanted, par­tic­u­larly girl ba­bies.

195:3.6The early plan of Chris­tian wor­ship was largely taken over from the Jew­ish syn­a­gogue, mod­i­fied by the Mith­raic rit­ual; later on, much pa­gan pageantry was added. The back­bone of the early Chris­tian church con­sisted of Chris­tian­ized Greek pros­e­lytes to Ju­daism.

195:3.7The sec­ond cen­tury af­ter Christ was the best time in all the world’s his­tory for a good re­li­gion to make prog­ress in the West­ern world. Dur­ing the first cen­tury Chris­tian­ity had pre­pared it­self, by strug­gle and com­pro­mise, to take root and rapidly spread. Chris­tian­ity adopted the em­peror; later, he adopted Chris­tian­ity. This was a great age for the spread of a new re­li­gion. There was re­li­gious lib­erty; travel was uni­ver­sal and thought was un­tram­meled.

195:3.8The spir­i­tual im­pe­tus of nom­i­nally ac­cept­ing Hel­le­nized Chris­tian­ity came to Rome too late to pre­vent the well-started moral de­cline or to com­pen­sate for the al­ready well-es­tab­lished and in­creas­ing racial de­te­ri­o­ra­tion. This new re­li­gion was a cul­tural ne­ces­sity for im­pe­rial Rome, and it is ex­ceed­ingly un­for­tu­nate that it did not be­come a means of spir­i­tual sal­va­tion in a larger sense.

195:3.9Even a good re­li­gion could not save a great em­pire from the sure re­sults of lack of in­di­vid­ual par­tic­i­pa­tion in the af­fairs of gov­ern­ment, from over­much pa­ter­nal­ism, over­tax­a­tion and gross col­lec­tion abuses, un­bal­anced trade with the Lev­ant which drained away the gold, amuse­ment mad­ness, Ro­man stan­dard­iza­tion, the degra­da­tion of woman, slav­ery and race deca­dence, phys­i­cal plagues, and a state church which be­came in­sti­tu­tion­al­ized nearly to the point of spir­i­tual bar­ren­ness.

195:3.10Con­di­tions, how­ever, were not so bad at Alexan­dria. The early schools con­tin­ued to hold much of Je­sus’ teach­ings free from com­pro­mise. Pan­taenus taught Clement and then went on to fol­low Na­than­iel in pro­claim­ing Christ in In­dia. While some of the ide­als of Je­sus were sac­ri­ficed in the build­ing of Chris­tian­ity, it should in all fair­ness be re­corded that, by the end of the sec­ond cen­tury, prac­ti­cally all the great minds of the Greco-Ro­man world had be­come Chris­tian. The tri­umph was ap­proach­ing com­ple­tion.

195:3.11And this Ro­man Em­pire lasted suf­fi­ciently long to in­sure the sur­vival of Chris­tian­ity even af­ter the em­pire col­lapsed. But we have of­ten con­jec­tured what would have hap­pened in Rome and in the world if it had been the gospel of the king­dom which had been ac­cepted in the place of Greek Chris­tian­ity.