Early Christian Mission: An Applied Theology of Patience

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’” (pp. 283-5).  

So patience became important to my thought and research. In this lecture I want to explore the role that patience played in the life of Constantine I. And in order to think about Constantine, we’ve got to understand the three centuries of Christian mission that preceded Constantine. In looking at the pre-Constantinian centuries I want briefly to highlight eight characteristics of Christian mission. In doing this, I am aware that I’m painting with a broad brush; a lengthier treatment would require more nuances than I can supply in this lecture.

1. The Church was growing—not spectacularly but steadily; by A.D. 312 the Christian Church was sizable, between five to ten per cent of the imperial population.  

2. The Church was growing despite disincentives. It was against the law to be a Christian. If you were a believer, you could get gossiped about, scorned, harassed, or killed. 

3. 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 (Origen, Homily on Jeremiah 18.5.3). 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.  

4. The Church was both powerless and powerful. Vis à vis the state the church was weak. But the church, despite many failures, was powerful in prayer, healing, and mutual aid. And it was surrounded by rumors of the reality of God in their midst. 

5. The Christians placed great emphasis on their lifestyle, and I believe that this was a key to their mysterious growth. They were a religion of incarnation. God had demonstrated his character and will in the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ, who had said, follow me, and people will know you by your fruits. Unlike the pagans, the Christians fed people who were hungry; they empowered women; they provided burial for poor people so they wouldn’t be thrown out into common graves; they refused to abort or expose unwanted infants. The Christians grew in number less because their ideas were persuasive than because their lives were persuasive. 

6. The Christians’ lifestyle didn’t just happen; the believers were formed by leaders who thought deeply and intentionally about the practical formation of Christians. “Christians are made, not born,” said Tertullian (Apology 18.4.).. And the means that Christians used to form people who lived like Christians were catechesis and baptism. Catechesis—teaching—was a journey that in the pre-Constantinian period could last three years. But the duration of teaching varied, for it depended on the candidate’s capacity to learn how to live as a Christian. From place to place catechesis had characteristic elements:

• There was a relationship between the candidate and a sponsor, an apprentice-master relationship.
• There was a scrutiny of the candidate’s lifestyle: was the candidate living. in such a way that he or she could hear the good news? If accepted,
• the candidates were taught a new story—especially the Bible’s story. 
• The candidates memorized scripture and learned the words of Jesus.
• The candidates learned the Church’s way of life—how it functioned as a body, and how its members were expected to behave, especially toward the weak.
• The candidates learned these things not just by listening to oral catechesis, but by participating in practical catechesis—by watching the Christians act and repeating their actions as they entered into their life. The catechumens imitated what the Christians did, practiced it, and made it habitual.
• The candidates were taught to pray, and also were taught the Church’s rule of faith.
• At the climax to this catechetical journey came baptism. This was dramatic, very wet, messy, an over-the-top ritual that expressed the high stakes of what was going on: joyful liberation; the heightened danger of persecution; and empowerment—in which God was at work, and the Holy Spirit’s gifts were poured out (often at the time of chrismation), equipping the Christians spiritually to be faithful under pressure and to live in the strenuous way that was normal for the Christians. Baptism both commenced and enabled the Christians’ life.
• Finally, after the completion of catechesis and after the baptismal rite, the candidate was joyfully admitted to the community’s prayers and the eucharistic table.

What was going on in the catechesis and baptism? I believe it was what Orthodox theologian Vigen Guroian has called “deep ontological repair,” sanctification, the formation of believers whose habits and reflexes are Christian (The Melody of Faith: Theology in an Orthodox Key [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010], 50.). The newly-baptized Christians didn’t need to think what to do. They had a community of role-models who had shown them what to do; and they had developed inner habits and reflexes that had equipped them to live Christianly. These reflexes were central to their witness. A characteristic North African statement from the third century time put it like this: “We do not preach great things, but we live them” (De Bono Patientiae 3; fifty years earlier it occurred in Minucius Felix, Octavius 38.6).  Reflexively. Because at the heart of catechesis and baptism there was...

7. Habitus-change: Scholars have called this reflexive, embodied quality of life habitus. What is habitus? As argued by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, habitus is corporeal knowledge. It is “a system of dispositions borne not in the brain but in the body”; it is the reflexes that govern our behavior without requiring decisions (Pascalian Meditations, trans. Richard Nice [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000], 135). Habitus is what seems right and natural. And how is habitus learned? By relationship and story, but especially by interaction with people whose lives one respects and assumes to be normal. And above all habitus is shaped by repetition, by the sheer physicality of doing things over and over again so they become habitual (James K. A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works [Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013]: “Habitus is acquired, is learned, by incarnate pedagogies that in oblique, allusive, cunning ways work on the body and thus orient the whole person.”). Everyone in society has a habitus. Indeed, some scholars claim that humans are virtually hard-wired so that we cannot challenge the deeply socialized values of our upbringing.  

The early Christians disagreed with this. They knew that pagans had deeply-ingrained reflexes about wealth, status, security, violence. But they denied that the pagans’ habitus was hard-wired because they had been pagans and they knew that they themselves had changed. Listen to an imagined early Christian:  

8. For many early Christians, the cardinal virtue was “patience”. And what was patience for them? It was not a grim adjustment to a bad situation that wouldn’t go away; on the contrary, it was a buoyant trust in the God who at God’s own pace is patiently bringing God’s Kingdom; the God who is not in a hurry, who doesn’t force things, who may take centuries as God seems to wait for the fullness of time; but, the God who in the fullness of time has sent Jesus in the flesh as the perfect disclosure of his character; who through resurrection has vindicated Jesus who had lived and taught and been persecuted and crucified; whose raising of Jesus is an earnest of hope for all who will follow him; the God who in the fullness of time has poured out the Holy Spirit to empower Jesus’ followers so they can be in him and do what he taught. As a result of what the patient God has done, and what the church has done in its careful catechetical formation, “deep ontological repair” happens, and Christians can live a life of patience. 

As Tertullian, Cyprian, Lactantius and others pointed out, patience is the key to the spirituality of the Sermon on the Mount. As a result, believers, following and obeying Jesus, live patiently. Paraphrasing the Christians: “we do not need to be in control of things; we are not in a hurry; we are not bound by conventional values; we will accept injury without retaliation, and not be violent; we will trust the God of resurrection to vindicate truth, so we will not compel others to conform to our religious beliefs and observances. We Christians believe that because of the work of God, made powerful in our experience by our own catechetical formation, we can live lives of patience in our daily lives, our jobs and professions. In every area of life, we believe, there is a patient way to get involved, and God calls us Christians to discover this patient way. How can I be a patient gardener, or a patient craft-worker, or a patient scribe, or a patient weaver or slave or master? How can I be a patient businessman? God will show us.

Whatever their area of life, the Christians explored new, patient ways of living their lives; and many outsiders, both pagans and Jews, were attracted. St. Justin Martyr reported that when pagans saw Christians in commerce doing business patiently, they were drawn to Christianity, converted “from their ways of violence and tyranny” (1 Apol 16).  And why? Because the “strange patience” they saw in the lives of the Christians gave them hope for their lives as well.

An applied theology of patience—this was the tradition of the early Christians. It was formed in them by generations of nameless catechists, and passed down by theologians from Justin to Tertullian to Cyprian to Origen.