“The Christians, O king, have found the truth by going and seeking for it….They do not do to others what they would not wish to be done to themselves. They comfort those who wrong them and make friends of them; they labor to do good to their enemies…He that has gives freely to him who has not. If they see a stranger, they bring him under their roof and rejoice over him as if over their own brother; they call themselves brethren, not after the flesh but after the Spirit and in God…” -Aristedes, Apology, 15 (to Roman Emperor Hadrian, c. 130 A.D.)
Paul’s magnum opus, the letter to the Romans, was written to Christians in the capital of the ancient world, the city of Rome. Rome was the USA of the day, the world superpower, both militarily and culturally. Its tentacles spread all over civilization, but the heart was the city of Rome itself, a city much like New York City and Washington, D.C., all rolled into one. Rome was also very religious–the city was filled with temples to the pantheon of “gods.” But these gods were very much like the humans that worshipped them, driven by human desires such as lust, power, and greed. These gods did not stand “above the world” (what we might call transcendent); they were earthy, much like the world (what we might call immanent). The Romans were pagans, finding meaning and satisfaction in this world, not from a transcendent God. They were what we today would call “secular” in the sense that religion didn’t have much effect on their lifestyles (we get our word secular from the Latin word saeculum, meaning “of this age” or “of this world”). Roman citizens (at least if you were a man) pretty much did whatever they pleased, morally, sexually, and in any other way. The Roman poet Juvenal describes Rome as “a city of perilous streets and fire-plagued tenement housing, a city pervasively indolent, hypocritical and corrupt, stocked with licentious husbands and faithless, conniving wives, in which it is next to impossible to make an honest living.”[1] Unwanted babies were thrown out for the dogs to feed on; slavery was the norm. There were few restrictions on sexual freedom (again, if you were male). For the pagan, “sexual fulfillment, whether heterosexual or homosexual, and whether within or outside marriage, is inherently natural and good (for men at least); it is a manifestation of the ‘mysterious, indwelling presence of the gods.'”[2]
WHERE THE POWER AND WISDOM OF GOD IS
When Paul wrote his letter to the Christians in Rome, the sect of Christianity was tiny, with some estimates of only a few hundred to not more than 1,000. And yet Paul was so bold as to tell the Roman Christians that the gospel, the message about God coming in the flesh in the person of Jesus and all that entails, is the “power of God at work in the world,” the salvation of humanity (Rom. 1:16). As Paul had previously written to Christians in the Greek city of Corinth, his message was “Christ crucified,” which was scandalous to the Jews and foolish to the pagans, but it was the “power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:24). Looking back over the last 20 centuries, it is amazing how true his words turned out to be. The message of the gospel, lived out in ordinary lives all over the Roman Empire, slowly (along with persecution) permeated and completely transformed the way people viewed everything: God, themselves and each other, truth, marriage and sexuality, and social justice. The Christian message (and Christians living out that message) reformed practices that “were taken for granted in the pagan world: infanticide, slavery, inequality, the neglect of the poor and diseased.”[3] We can thank the Christian gospel for our Western notions of human dignity, freedom, equality, and social justice. As David Bentley Hart writes:
Even the most ardent secularists among us generally cling to notions of human rights, economic and social justice, providence for the indigent, legal equality, and basic human dignity that pre-Christian Western culture would have found not so much foolish as unintelligible. It is simply the case that we distant children of the pagans would not be able to believe in any of these things…had our [Christian] ancestors not once believed that God is love, that charity is the foundation of all virtues, that all of us are equal before the eyes of God, that to fail to feed the hungry or care for the suffering is to sin against Christ, and that Christ laid down his life for the least of his brethren.[4]
TODAY’S MODERN PAGAN AGE
Think about the world we live in in 2020. It is a “post-Christian” age, resembling and even imitating the pre-Christian pagan world. Indeed, many academics proudly want to throw off any Christian heritage (for example, former Yale Law School dean’s recent book Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan). In many ways, “paganism” just went underground during the last 15 centuries, ready now for full bloom. As Steven D. Smith writes in Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac (a book to which I will return in future posts), “the latter part of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first have witnessed a renewal of the fourth-century struggle between Christianity and paganism–a struggle seeking to reverse the ‘revolution’ that Christianity achieved in late antiquity.”[5] And just like the Roman pagans, modern paganism is not very tolerant of the Christian message. As Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet wrote in 2016: “The culture wars are over; they lost, we won….Taking a hard line (“You lost, live with it”) is better than trying to accommodate the losers.”[6] In particular, the Christian notion of marriage and sex as sacred, as a commitment mirroring God’s commitment to humanity, is as ludicrous to modern skeptics as belief in a transcendent God. As in pagan times, sexual morality “came to mark the great divide between Christians and the world.”[7] The times are eerily familiar. But although we live in a modern pagan age, we must remember that Christianity not only survived but transformed the prior pagan age. The message of the gospel is still the “power and wisdom” of God, and Jesus and the Spirit of God still move among us. As Charles Haddon Spurgeon said, “The Word of God is like a lion. You don’t have to defend a lion. All you have to do is let the lion loose, and the lion will defend itself.”
HOW TO BE A CHRISTIAN IN A PAGAN AGE
Although we live in a pagan age that is becoming more pagan and more intolerant of Christians, we do not need to fear in the least. But how are we, as Christians, supposed to live in this pagan age? The letter of Romans is helpful, and especially Romans 12, words written to Christians in that prior pagan age that are equally relevant to us in our own pagan age. After describing the grace and truth of God for 11 chapters, Paul gets practical in chapter 12. These ancient, practical words have immediate relevance during our politically divisive, secular age. Please read Romans 12 today, and as you do, consider how much it echoes many of Jesus’ statements in the Sermon on Mount (early Christians would memorize the entire chapter of Romans 12). Below are certain verses from the chapter, paraphrased in The Message. I would suggest reading the chapter using a number of different Bible translations to get a real feel for what Paul is saying. May you be blessed in your reading!
So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.
The only accurate way to understand ourselves is by what God is and by what he does for us, not by what we are and what we do for him.In this way we are like the various parts of a human body. Each part gets its meaning from the body as a whole, not the other way around. The body we’re talking about is Christ’s body of chosen people. Each of us finds our meaning and function as a part of his body. But as a chopped-off finger or cut-off toe we wouldn’t amount to much, would we? So since we find ourselves fashioned into all these excellently formed and marvelously functioning parts in Christ’s body, let’s just go ahead and be what we were made to be, without enviously or pride-fully comparing ourselves with each other, or trying to be something we aren’t.
Love from the center of who you are; don’t fake it. Run for dear life from evil; hold on for dear life to good. Be good friends who love deeply; practice playing second fiddle.Don’t burn out; keep yourselves fueled and aflame. Be alert servants of the Master, cheerfully expectant. Don’t quit in hard times; pray all the harder. Help needy Christians; be inventive in hospitality.
Bless your enemies; no cursing under your breath. Make friends with nobodies; don’t be the great somebody.Don’t hit back; discover beauty in everyone. If you’ve got it in you, get along with everybody. Don’t insist on getting even; that’s not for you to do. “I’ll do the judging,” says God. “I’ll take care of it.” Our Scriptures tell us that if you see your enemy hungry, go buy that person lunch, or if he’s thirsty, get him a drink. Your generosity will surprise him with goodness. Don’t let evil get the best of you; get the best of evil by doing good.
[1] Quoted in Steven D. Smith, Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018), 55.
[2] Smith, 121.
[3] Smith, 128.
[4] David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 32-33.
[5] Smith, 259.
[6] Smith, 365.
[7] Smith, 124.