Christian Mission as Applied Theology of Patience
by Erin Doom
Feast of St Cyril of Alexandria
Anno Domini 2020, June 9
1. Essays et al: "Early Christian Mission: An Applied Theology of Patience"
On Jan. 17, in the year of our Lord 2014, Alan Kreider presented a magnificent lecture at the fifth annual Eighth Day Symposium on “Constantine and the Transformation of Patience.” Here is the opening two paragraphs of the lecture:
Patience, we are told, is a virtue. And over the years, as I have read early Christian authors, I have often encountered the words for patience (patientia, hupomone, makrothumia) recurring in their writings. But it was not until I read Robert Wilken’s The Spirit of Early Christian Thought that I found a serious treatment of the theme of patience. Wilken not only persuaded me that patience was important to the patristic writers; he also helped me see that patience could be an overarching perspective from which to view the early Church’s missional growth. Partly as a result of his writing, patience has become the leitmotif of my forthcoming book Patient Ferment: The Growth of the Church in the Roman Empire.
According to Wilken, patience was “not considered a virtue by the ancients.” But it was the first virtue that a Christian wrote an entire treatise about. Around 200 AD Tertullian wrote On Patience. Fifty years later, Bishop Cyprian of Carthage followed with a second treatise, On the Good of Patience. In the early fourth century, the philosopher Lactantius made patience a central theme in his writing. Finally, a century later after Lactantius, in 417 the great Augustine added a third treatise, once again entitled On Patience. Wilken has convinced me of the special qualities of patience. As he emphasizes, patience is rooted in hope. It is “grounded in the Resurrection. It is life oriented toward a future that is God’s doing . . . [Tertullian], by introducing his readers to a virtue that was modeled on the biblical portrayal of God’s relation to the world and to human beings, . . . redefined what it means to be ‘like God.’”
The rest of his introduction, in good Eighth Day fashion, highlights eight characteristics of early Christian mission, including this third one:
The Church was growing despite the fact that it didn’t seem to think about growth. To contemporaries its growth was a mystery. As Origen put it, growth was an expression of the work of God. So the growth of the church was not in their control. The early Christians didn’t make it a high priority to promote the church’s growth. They didn’t do things that might strike today’s Christians as smart to do: they didn’t have mission programs, decades of evangelism, campaigns based on the Great Commission. After the first century they had almost no missionaries whose names we know. And the early Christians wrote no manuals of missionary techniques or treatises on the virtues of courage or boldness; instead they wrote church orders and treatises on the virtue of patience. In all this, the early Christians were patient. They didn’t seem worried about evangelistic success; they believed that if they lived the gospel faithfully and died well, God would attract to the churches the people that God was saving.
Sounds like Fr. Stephen in yesterday’s post on “The Violence of Modernity.”
2. Books & Culture: Patience with God
by Tomáš Halík
I plan to write a short review of this most excellent book, after I’ve finished reading it. For now, let me just offer you three teasers from the Introduction and the first chapter:
- Patience is what I consider to be the main difference between faith and atheism. What atheism, religious fundamentalism, and the enthusiasm of a too-facile faith have in common is how quickly they can ride roughshod over the mystery we call God … One must never consider mystery ‘over and done with.’ Mystery, unlike a mere dilemma, cannot be overcome; one must wait patiently at its threshold and persevere in it—must carry it in one’s heart—just as Jesus’s mother did according to the Gospel, and allow it to mature there and lead one in turn to maturity.
- When after the fall of Communism, Christ’s followers came out freely into the open after so many years, they noticed many people who applauded them and maybe a few who had previously shaken their fists at them. What they didn’t notice, however, was that the trees all around them were full of Zacchaeuses—those who were unwilling or unable to join the throng of old or brand-new believers, but were neither indifferent nor hostile to them. Those Zacchaeuses were curious seekers, but at the same time they wanted to maintain a certain distance. That odd combination of inquisitiveness and expectation, interest and shyness, and sometimes, maybe, even a feeling of guilt and ‘inadequacy,’ kept them hidden in their fig trees. // By addressing Zacchaeus by name, Jesus emboldened him to come down from his hiding place. He surprised him by wanting to stay in his house even though He risked immediate slander and criticism: ‘He’s accepted the hospitality of a sinner!’ // There is no written account of Zacchaeus’s ever having joined Jesus’s disciples, nor of his having followed Jesus on His travels like the chosen twelve or the throng of other men and women. What we do know, however, is that he decided to change his life, and salvation came to his house. In our times, the Church has been incapable of addressing its Zacchaeuses in like manner.
- I once saw on the wall of a Prague subway station the inscription ‘Jesus is the answer,’ probably written by someone on the way back from some high-spirited evangelistic gathering. Yet someone else had aptly added the words: ‘But what was the question?’ It reminded me of the comment made by the philosopher Eric Voegelin that the biggest problem for today’s Christians wasn’t that they didn’t have the right answers, but that they’d forgotten the question to which they were the answers. // Answers without questions—without the questions that originally provoked them, but also without the subsequent questions that are provoked by every answer—are like trees without roots. But how often are ‘Christian truths’ presented to us like felled, lifeless trees in which birds can no longer find a nest? (As a young professor, Joseph Ratzinger apparently commented, apropos of Jesus’s parable about the kingdom of heaven being like a tree in which birds make their nests, that the Church is beginning dangerously to resemble a tree with many dead branches on which there frequently sit some rather odd birds…). // It takes the confrontation of questions and answers to return a real meaning and dynamic to our statements. Truth happens in the course of dialogue. There is always a temptation to allow our answers to bring to an end the process of searching, as if the topic of the conversation was a problem that has now been solved. But when a fresh question arrives, the unexhausted depths of mystery show through once more. Let it be said over and over again: faith is not a question of problems but of mystery, so we must never abandon the path of seeking and asking. Yes, in seeking Zacchaeus we must often shift from problems to mystery, from apparently final answers back to infinite questions. // Paul, the ‘thirteenth apostle,’ who did the most to spread the Gospel, wrote: ‘I have become all things to all.’ Maybe at this time we will discover Christ’s closeness most effectively if we, His disciples, make ourselves seekers with those who seek and questioners with those who question. There are more than enough of those who declare they have already reached their goal and offer ready-made but often facile answers, and unfortunately they are also to be found among those who invoke the name of Jesus. Maybe we will make our belief more accessible to the Zacchaeuses of our day if we make them our neighbors, in Jesus’s sense, as they ‘look out through the leaves.’
3. Bible & Fathers: On Patience by St Cyprian
Rom. 1:1-7, 13-17; Matt. 4:23-25, 5:1-13. Online here.
Here' s the opening paragraph to St Cyprian's treatise on patience:
As I am about to speak, beloved brethren, of patience, and to declare its advantages and benefits, from what point should I rather begin than this, that I see that even at this time, for your audience of me, patience is needful, as you cannot even discharge this duty of hearing and learning without patience? For wholesome discourse and reasoning are then effectually learned, if what is said be patiently heard. Nor do I find, beloved brethren, among the rest of the ways of heavenly discipline wherein the path of our hope and faith is directed to the attainment of the divine rewards, anything of more advantage, either as more useful for life or more helpful to glory, than that we who are laboring in the precepts of the Lord with the obedience of fear and devotion, should especially, with our whole watchfulness, be careful of patience.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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