The Ancient Triumph of Faith
Today, even in the modern age that so many pundits wistfully desire to be “post-Christian,” we still reflexively look at civilization through the lens of Judeo-Christian religion and culture. The Old and New Testaments are known to all, even to those who haven’t read them, and to those who do not attend church or synagogue. For all the wailing of the modern atheists and pagans, our civilization in the West is fused with, framed by, and inseparable from the Faith. It colors and informs all perception and is the cultural air we breathe, even if, for so many, recognition of this goes unnoticed.
Indeed, so pervasive is it — so normal — that it is almost invariably overlooked just how unlikely it is that the Faith survived its first decades and centuries. For in its earliest sowings it came to take root and grow in the most unhealthy of soils, in a climate intensely hostile to its survival, and yet it not only survived, but thrived, despite every active attempt at its destruction.
How could this have happened, asked Harvard-educated religion scholar and church historian Alan Kreider in his 2016 book The Patient Ferment of the Early Church. “Nobody had to join the churches,” Kreider noted. “People were not compelled to become members by invading armies or the imposition of laws; social convention did not induce them to do so. Indeed, Christianity grew despite the opposition of laws and social convention. These were formidable disincentives. In addition, the possibility of death in persecution loomed over the pre-Constantinian church.... In many places baptismal candidates sensed that ‘every Christian was by definition a candidate for death.’”
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