CHAPTER ONE
preoccupied by the petty politics of the Roman aristocracy, as the institution needed for a reformation of Christendom.
Christendom at the First Millennium a supporting culture that came into existence with the formation of the Church at Pentecost. It was not the product of the legalization of Christianity in the fourth century, though Emperor Constantine’s embrace of the faith opened new opportunities for expansion. This culture was the product of the earliest Christians’ way of living, which in the eyes of Roman pagandom deviated sharply from what was considered normal. The author of the second-century Epistle to Diognetus commented on the “wonderful and confessedly striking method of life” lived by Christians. CHR ISTENDOM WAS A CIV ILIZ ATION W ITH
They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. . . . They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven.2 From the start, the inhabitant of Christendom was one who lived in an incongruous union of earth and heaven, of world and paradise. It might have seemed to those who read the Scriptures that the world has little in common with the ways of heaven. Jesus had declared that His kingdom is not of this world, and in the Sermon on the Mount He had sharply contrasted the values of each. Man’s fulfillment—and that of the world in which he lives—lay not in this age but in the kingdom of heaven. Yet there was more to the faith than this, and it was contained in the doctrine of the Incarnation. The “hypostatic union” (as theologians would call the joining of two natures in the person of Christ) was in fact the most 2
The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, edited by Alexander Robert and James Donaldson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985), 26–27.
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