The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire

by Alan Kreider

Publisher:

Baker Academic

, 2016

Overview

During the three centuries before the conversion of the emperor Constantine, the Christian church grew in the Roman Empire. It grew despite disincentives, harassment, and occasional persecution. What enabled Christianity to be so successful that, by the fifth century, it was the established religion of the empire?

In this unique historical study, Alan Kreider delivers the fruit of a lifetime of study as he tells the amazing story of the spread of Christianity over its first 400 years. Challenging traditional understandings, Kreider contends the early church grew because patience was of central importance in the life and witness of the early Christians. Patience was the virtue about which the patristic writers wrote most–Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine all wrote treatises on it. Patience entailed trusting God, who was inexorably at work; obeying Jesus, who embodied patience and called his followers to live in unusual, patient ways; and responding to people who were attracted to their life and message in such a way that they would be formed to become patient believers. Instead of writing about evangelistic method, the early Christians reflected on prayer, catechesis, and worship, all of which formed believers to have patient reflexes and to participate in a church that grew not by plan but by ferment. This book will benefit professors, students, and scholars of ancient Christianity, mission, liturgy, and Christian formation as well as pastors and church leaders.

Key Features

• Examines the unlikely spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire
• Explores how patience became an important foundation of Christianity’s spread

Contents

• Part 1: Growth and Patience
  • The Improbable Growth of the Church
  • The Good of Patience
  • Push and Pull
• Part 2: Ferment
  • Christians as Agents of Growth
  • Communities as Cultures of Patience
• Part 3: Forming the Habitus
  • Catechesis and Baptism
  • Worship
  • “Wise Doves” in the Didascalia apostolorum
• Part 4: The Transformation of Patience
  • The Impatience of Constantine
  • Augustine and the Just Impatience

Top Highlights

“And a final clue: the worship of the Christian community, repeated week by week, shaped the worshipers’ habitus by giving them kinesthetic as well as verbal habits.” (Page 51)

“A third clue: Christians can learn to embody distinctive approaches to difficult situations—even torture—by preparing themselves.” (Page 50)

“Unlike many churches today, the third-century churches described by the Apostolic Tradition did not try to grow by making people feel welcome and included. Civic paganism did that. In contrast, the churches were hard to enter. They didn’t grow because of their cultural accessibility; they grew because they required commitment to an unpopular God who didn’t require people to perform cultic acts correctly but instead equipped them to live in a way that was richly unconventional.” (Page 149)

“Led by Bishop Cyprian, the Christian community responded to the crisis not by cultic acts to appease the gods but by practical deeds to help suffering people.” (Page 65)

“Why did this minor mystery religion from the eastern Mediterranean—marginal, despised, discriminated against—grow substantially, eventually supplanting the well-endowed, respectable cults that were supported by the empire and aristocracy? What enabled Christianity to be so successful that by the fifth century it was the established religion of the empire?” (Page 1)

Praise for the Print Edition

Alan Kreider has done it again. Here he utilizes his immense grasp of early Christian sources, texts, and scholarship to illuminate for us the virtue of Christian patience and its formative nature in articulating an approach to worship and life. Highly recommended.

—Maxwell Johnson, professor of liturgical studies, University of Notre Dame; author of Praying and Believing in Early Christianity

In this lively and insightful study, Alan Kreider draws on deep learning to offer a picture of the early Christian communities at a time when their future was anything but certain. Ancient men and women come to light in this study as people whose improbable success in winning converts was the direct result of their own struggle to live with—and live up to—the powerful ideals of patience and humility. Kreider has the rare ability to read ancient sources from a fresh perspective and to see the growing pains of ancient churches in a way that benefits from—and illuminates—modern pastoral insight. The Patient Ferment of the Early Church is a marvelous and inspiring book.

—Kate Cooper, professor of ancient history, University of Manchester; author of Band of Angels: The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women

In this remarkable book, Alan Kreider refocuses our attention on patience, the cardinal virtue of the early church's witness, with rich attention to how this was cultivated in worship and catechesis. The allure and beauty of a patient people is something a triumphalist church forgot. I can't imagine a more timely history for the church in our secular age.

—James K.A. Smith, Calvin College; author of Desiring the Kingdom and You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

Product Details

• Title: The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire
• Author: Alan Kreider
• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Publication Date: 2016
• Pages: 336
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Topic: Early Church

About Alan Kreider

From the United Kingdom and Europe to Korea, Alan Kreider has introduced people to Christ by teaching and living out the foundational beliefs of the Anabaptist faith. For 26 years, Alan and Eleanor, his wife, were mission workers in England, where they transformed the London Mennonite Centre into a teaching and resource center on Christian discipleship in the Anabaptist tradition, urban mission, and conflict mediation. While in England, Alan served as director of the Centre for the Study of Christianity and Culture at Regent’s Park College, Oxford University; as an itinerant preacher and speaker; and as a teacher at Oxford University and the University of Manchester. Upon their return to the U.S. in 2000, Alan and Eleanor became mission educators for Mennonite Mission Network, an assignment that took them to England and Australia in 2005 as well as to churches and communities across North America. Alan served as an adjunct member of the AMBS faculty beginning in 1997, and became associate professor in 2004. “One of the joys of my life is to meet Christians from different places and traditions and to learn from them. How do they understand Christ and the good news? How do they worship? How do they experience and share their faith? Studying the history of Christianity is like that-meeting sisters and brothers from other places and periods and having a trans-chronological conversation with them. They can’t tell us what to think or do; but they broaden our horizons, offering us clues that are often astonishingly useful to us today.”