An Author Interview from Books At a Glance
It was so very long ago that we might wonder how the second century could possibly have shaped the Christian church of today, but Michael Kruger writes to explore just that question.
I’m Fred Zaspel, editor here at Books At a Glance, and we’re talking today with Dr. Kruger about his excellent new book, Christianity at the Crossroads: How the Second Century Shaped the Future of the Church.
Mike – welcome, and congratulations on such an important book.
Kruger:
Thanks, Fred. It’s great to be on the program and have a chance to talk about it.
Zaspel:
Your title raises a curious question right off the bat: “Christianity at the Crossroads.” How were the challenges and events of second century Christianity important or influential for the future of Christianity itself?
Kruger:
The title of the book is designed to capture, at least somewhat, the kind of thing that Christians were facing in the second century. Most of us don’t think much about what Christians faced in second century, but they really were at a crossroads in many ways. The decisions they made, the challenges they faced, the issues they had to tackle, all would determine whether the church would survive and what it would be like for the next 2000 years. What I try to tell people is that you’ve got to put yourself in the shoes of a second century Christian and realize that from a human perspective it wasn’t yet clear whether the church was going to make it. What I mean by that, of course, is not from a divine perspective. From a divine perspective, God was going to preserve his church and promised he would do so; but on the human side, it didn’t look like things were going all that well. Christianity was really at this transitionary point where it was unclear whether they were going to make it, and survive, and deal with all the challenges. I wrote the book to help people see that that crucial century really shaped who we are today.
Zaspel:
There’s really not a lot of other work on that subject, that time period, is there?
Kruger:
No. In fact, that’s another reason I wrote the book. I felt like there was a scholarly gap in studies of the second century. I cover this a little bit in my introduction, but in essence, the second century is sort of a forgotten time period because it is bracketed by two time periods that are much more popular. The first century gets plenty of attention, obviously, because of the New Testament books themselves. And then the third and fourth centuries get a lot of attention because the figures in them are so much more well-known, whether it’s Augustine or Constantine or Eusebius or Origen. And so, the second century was kind of there, caught in the middle, and scholars have typically moved past it pretty quickly. There was really no book that was a basic introduction to this time period, so that was part of the reason that I wrote it.
Zaspel:
How did Christianity fit in second century society? Were Christians accepted? Was there persecution? Did Christianity have any impact on that society?
Kruger:
Yes, well, it’s interesting to note that it was really only in the second century that the broader Greco-Roman world began to notice Christianity. In the first century Christians were largely just seen as a subset of Judaism. There are exceptions to that, here and there, but for the most part Christians weren’t really on the scene. In the second century their numbers grew enough that that changed, and the Greco-Roman world began to notice them, and they did not like what they saw for lots of reasons. So, in essence, Christians were misfits in the Greco-Roman world. They didn’t fit in; they were viewed as odd or peculiar or strange; but, beyond that, they were also viewed as a problem, as offensive, and as subversive to the stability of the Roman state. There’re lots of reasons for that, but the heartbeat of the complaint was that Christians were unwilling to participate in the worship of the Roman gods. And since they were unwilling to do that they were, by their neglect of the Roman gods, putting the state of Rome at risk of divine displeasure, if you will. So, people were upset with Christians. They didn’t look like they were good citizens; they weren’t doing what Roman citizens should do. And as a result, there’s a lot of negative perception of Christians. And they suffered in lots of ways: thrown in jail, arrested, some were martyred and killed. It was a tough time. When I said earlier that it wasn’t clear whether Christianity was going to make it, I mean, this was part of the reason, from a human perspective. They weren’t a popular group in the second century.
Zaspel:
The second century has been referred to as “the golden age of apologetics.” Describe the circumstances that brought that about?
Kruger:
Well, as I just mentioned, since Christianity found itself in a very hostile world, in a world where they suffered persecution and were accused of all sorts of things and were in danger for their lives, some Christians took up the role of responding to all the criticism. In fact, they were sort of forced to respond to the criticism. When I say forced, what I mean is that in order to survive Christians had to sort of make a stand. This is where Christian apologetics came from. Christian apologetics was, in a sense, born in the second century because that’s the first time Christians had to meaningfully interact with a very hostile, pagan world. And so the apologists wrote, and they wrote in droves. We have a number of these apologies from the second century where they were writing to make the Christian case. They did this in lots of ways – they defended Christian doctrines; they explained why Christianity made sense; they critiqued the pagan religions and why they did not make sense and why they weren’t worth following. They asked the government to give Christians civil and legal leniency, so they weren’t persecuted and killed. They tried to explain away misperceptions of Christians, that Christians were somehow bad citizens. So, the apologetics was a big part of the second century. We have a lot of those and they are really useful for today because if you read them, you realize, wow, these are the same arguments that we are hearing now that were made against Christians then, and you can even read the responses. It’s a very interesting aspect of this time period.
Zaspel:
What were the most prominent theological issues in dispute in the second-century church?
Kruger:
I devote a whole chapter to what I call theological diversity in second century Christianity, and one of the points I make in that chapter is that Christians were in a theological struggle during this time period and they were fighting for their lives. More than legally or politically they were fighting for their lives theologically. What I mean by that is heresies were popping up all over the place and Christians had to really think through what they believed and why they believed it and then respond to these heretical movements. And, of course, the heretical movements presented themselves as Christianity. This is one of the complicated factors – the heretics didn’t think they were heretics, they thought they were Christians, they thought they were Orthodox Christians. So there’s this interplay between different groups where they were arguing over various doctrines. There’s a variety of these doctrines they fought over. I don’t dive in the book that deeply into the particulars, but there’s a couple key doctrines that Christians argued about. One of them is the doctrine of creation. There were heretics like the Marcionites, and even to some extent, the Gnostics, who believed that the created world was not the work of the Christian God, that the Christian God did not make the world, that the world was inherently evil or fallen. And Orthodox Christians rightly pushed back against that and said, “No, no, no, the world is the result of the one true God and he made it and everything in it, and made it good.” So there was that doctrine, and then there’s always Christological debates about who exactly was Jesus and was he God? Was he man? Was he both? And how was he both? These were all very important disputes so how those turned out affected not just the second century, but arguably the next 2000 years.
Zaspel:
What was “the rule of faith”? And what role did it have in second century Christianity?
Kruger:
I have this chapter on diversity and another chapter I have right after that is early theological unity. So, yes, there was disagreement and there was diversity, but there was also a core set of beliefs that were widespread across Christianity during this time period that were held by Orthodox Christians in all kinds of regions and time periods. One of the things that made that kind of theological unity possible was this thing we call “the rule of faith.” The rule of faith is just language the early Christians used to describe a summary of what Christians believed. It was sort of like an early creedal statement of sorts, but it was a narrative of – here’s what we believe as Christians – and they would let it out. It was relatively brief, easily memorized, and easily repeated. The rule of faith was viewed as basically a summary of the biblical story line. It wasn’t some additional authority for Christians, it was just a summary of what they believe the Bible taught. And the rule of faith was very effective; it was a way to bind all Christians together and get them all on the same page and to quickly be able to express what it meant to be a Christian, theologically. In the book I document the role of faith across the second century and show how Christians in different places and different regions all used a version of the rule of faith and it really did bind Christians together.
Zaspel:
What do we know about the origins of the rule of faith?
Kruger:
Well, it’s hard to trace. I mean, we can see that the rule of faith has echoes even in the New Testament writings themselves. Some of the language from the rule of faith seems to be pulling from the biblical teachings and restating it and summarizing it. I don’t know if we know the first patristic source of the rule of faith; but we see versions of the rule of faith quite early, even in the early second century. There’s a good bit of ability to trace it, but I don’t know if we know exactly who was the first to put it together. It is interesting to note that the idea of using early creedal statements, of course, is visible in the New Testament itself. Paul, in his writings, often draws upon earlier material which one could call creedal of sorts. So that is, in many ways, the seed for the rule of faith. It was not unusual for Christians to do this sort of thing.
Zaspel:
You already alluded to this, but in what ways were the circumstances and challenges of second-century Christianity like our own, or different? And what lessons might we learn from them today?
Kruger:
One of the things that stuck out to me when I wrote this book was how much in common our current day has with the second century, particularly in light of the last 10 to 20 years in the Western world. In the last 10 or 20 years Christianity has become more of a minority, less influential, more criticized, and Christians are receiving more and more persecution. People are using less Christian assumptions and aren’t taking for granted the Christian worldview at all. So, the kind of challenges that Christians faced in the second century and the kind of questions they were dealing with are very similar to the kind of questions that we are dealing with now in our modern cultural moment. And I thought, therefore, that the study of the second century really has a lot to teach us. We can learn again what it’s like to live in a culture where you are a cultural minority and you don’t have any real influence, and what it’s like to live under persecution and hostility and how to respond to that. So, I think there’s a real mirror phenomenon going on with the second century. I think what’s notable about that is that a hundred years ago in the United States that really wouldn’t have been the case. I mean a hundred years ago in United States you would have looked back in the early church and you probably would have found more in common with the fourth century. But now it’s really the second that stands out as most analogous.
Zaspel:
Compare and contrast for us what Christianity looked like as the second century opened and closed.
Kruger:
There was a number of things that changed. I cover, in the book, a number of these sort of transitions. One of the things I think that changed was the sociological makeup of Christianity. At the beginning of the second, you’re still dealing with a religion that’s coming out of Judaism and has a number of Jews in it; and then, by the time you get to the end of the second century we could probably argue that Christianity had largely become a Gentile phenomenon. That’s one change; another change comes in the area of the way the church looks and the way it functions, even on a structural level. It seems that in the beginning of the second century churches mostly were localized and run by a local group of elders. Then, by the time the second century is over, it’s much more structured, and there’s even this sense of bishops over individual congregations. So there’s clearly some transitions there, that I think are noteworthy. There’s also a transition in terms of the canon of books. Christians at the beginning of the second century had, certainly, some books that they were reading, that ended up in the New Testament; but by the end of the second that core was quite clear and quite solidified so that by the end of the second you had probably 21 or 22 books out of the 27 that are fairly well-established. Those are some examples of the kind of transitions the second century included.
Zaspel:
You point out that second century Christianity was a “bookish” culture. Explain that for us. And how did this make discussions about the biblical canon necessary?
Kruger:
Yes, this is another thing about Christianity I’ve explored before in other writings, but I was interested in exploring it again. One of the things I discovered this time around is how unique this made Christianity. In our modern day when we think about a religion based on a book it doesn’t seem at all unusual. Christians do it; Jews do it; Islam does it; Mormons do it. We could think about many holy books out there, if you will. But, in the Greco-Roman world of the second century, that wasn’t true. You didn’t really have religions that were based on books. You didn’t have religions that used books as the basis for their practices or what they believed. That just didn’t happen. And so Christianity was looked at as a bit of an oddball. No one really knew what to do with Christianity because it was so bookish. Meaning that it was so textually centered, so reliant on the books of the Old and New Testaments as the basis for what it believed and what it taught. So, what Romans began to think is that Christianity really didn’t look like a religion at all, at least in the way they understood religion. It tended to look more like a philosophy. Christians are often seen more as a philosophy than as a religion, which is interesting. That tells you something about the way intellectual and textual dimension of Christianity was in the ancient world. That’s something we could learn also today. We need to make sure that we don’t lose that dimension. There’s a robust textual intellectual side of what it means to be a believer, and I wish Christians would be more confused with philosophers today than perhaps they are. That’s certainly what happened in the early church and we could use more of that now.
Zaspel:
That bookish or that textual orientation just stems from the nature of the religion that we are grounded in divine revelation, right?
Kruger:
Yes. Certainly, Christians weren’t new in their bookishness because they inherited it from Judaism. I think the difference is that Judaism tended to be, at least from the Roman perspective, rather isolated and limited to its own geopolitical entity; whereas Christians now were suddenly popping up everywhere in the Roman world. So you have a religion that’s much more in-your-face, if you will, that’s now bookish. So yes, Christians certainly inherited that idea, if you will; but from the Roman perspective it seemed rather odd and unusual. So this is really the heritage of Christianity – it is based on our Old Testament background. We’ve always had books that guide us, and of course still do now in the canon.
Zaspel:
What kind of growth did Christianity experience in the second century?
Kruger:
This is a debated subject. Certainly, everyone agrees that the answer to that question is a lot of growth. Christianity was quite small at the beginning of the second century and of course on a numerical level, still quite small even at the end of the second century; but on a percentage level had grown immensely. It had grown a lot. And there’s an ongoing discussion about how much and I won’t get into that here in terms of the debate. But the fact is, though, that Christianity was spreading so much that Roman officials were beginning to get worried. A great example of this is a letter that we have from a person by the name of Pliny the Younger. Pliny was a governor in a place called Bithynia and he had written a letter to the Emperor. In this letter he was complaining about Christians. His big complaint was that Christianity was spreading and it was spreading very, very fast. In fact, so fast that he called it a contagion. It was like a disease spreading throughout all kinds of different places. He said it spread from the city to the countryside, and it is said to include rich and poor, and educated and uneducated, and male and female, it’s everywhere. So, from Pliny you can get at least a sense that Christianity was really making some headway.
Zaspel:
Can you give us just a quick overview of your book, so our audience can know what to expect?
Kruger:
As our conversation has revealed and as the title suggests, the book is basically about the shape of the second century church and how the crossroads and the transitions it endured determined its future. What I do in the book is I trace these transitions; and I take the reader through them one at a time. In the book, basically, I lay out what we would call five different transitions. One would be a sociological transition, moving from a largely Jewish religion to a Gentile religion. I also trace other sociological dimensions, including how Christianity crossed over from rich and poor and also male and female. Then secondly, in the book, I cover what you might call a cultural political transition where I talk about Christianity getting noticed by the Greco-Roman world and how it began to endure political, legal, and philosophical resistance. I discuss what that resistance was like and how Christians responded largely with the rise of apologetics. Thirdly, I cover what’s called an ecclesiological transition where I talk about the way the church was structured and how churches worked and house churches and how people gathered together and who ruled the church and how that ruling happened and how Christians worshiped. That all changed quite a bit from the beginning to the end of the second century, so I document that transition. Fourthly, I talk about a doctrinal or theological transition where I talk about all the different issues that Christians faced as they battled heresies and tried to uphold orthodoxy and defended the right way to think about Christian theology. This is where I get into things like the role of faith and the different types of heretical groups from Gnosticism to Marcionism to the Ebionites and beyond. And then, finally, there’s what I call a textual canonical transition where Christians began to not just use the Old Testament, but they begin to adopt the New Testament and they begin to write their own books: apologetic works, theological treatises, letters, martyrdom accounts, and so on. This is a whole section on just how bookish Christianity was and how much they wrote and read and interfaced with each other. So, those are the five transition areas and anyone reading the book can expect to have a section on each of those areas as they learn more about the second century.
Zaspel:
We’re talking to Dr. Michael Kruger, author of the new book, Christianity at the Crossroads: How the Second Century Shaped the Future of the Church. It’s an important contribution to an often-neglected area of study, and it is a fascinating read.
Mike, thanks so much for your good work and for talking to us about it today.
Kruger:
Thanks, Fred. Good to be with you.
