Advent and the ‘Before Christ’ versus ‘Common Era’ Debate
An excellent history of Christians in the early church has me thinking about how we mark time. This is a very pertinent exercise as we welcome Advent, the four weeks leading up to Christmas day where we celebrate Jesus’ incarnational birth and anticipate His Second Coming at the end of time.
The book is Nadya Williams’ extremely interesting Cultural Christians in the Early Church published by Zondervan Academic in 2023. Studying early church writings is vitally important for Christians as it gives us a very helpful view of those who helped establish our common faith. While celebrating the goodness, fidelity and boldness of early Christians, Williams carefully documents that they were not a golden class of super Christians. Rather, her thesis “argues that cultural Christians were the norm rather than the exception in the early church – from the first century CE to the fifth century CE.”
Later in her book, she observes, “The idealization of the early church, and in general, of the past seems to be a timeless human instinct” as “nostalgia is a powerful force, and it leads us to idealize some of the past as a much better time than the present in which we live.” Williams adds, “But this ideal past when the church was fully holy and blameless is, in fact, a myth.”
This is an essential observation. Many good people do indeed idolize the early years and centuries of the Church. “Why can’t today’s church be more like the early church?” we too often hear. To be sure, there was much there worth valorizing as the book of Acts does. It is one reason why study of the early church is essential.
But it is also true that so much of the New Testament epistles, and even Revelation, highlight serious problems with early believers. Both sin and Christ’s enduring redemption touch every age and location of the Christian church and will continue to do so until His glorious return. As the Nicene Creed tells us, Jesus will “come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and His Kingdom will have no end.”
Advent recalls this: Christ’s return will indeed come and mark a new period of time without end. Thus, it is essential this Advent that we appreciate how Christians mark time. And that brings me to one niggling criticism of William’s book.
That is the use of BCE and CE, rather than the traditional BC and AD.
She employs it in the first sentence of her book, then throughout, and you can see it in the first quote used above. I trust it is used as editorial policy by Zondervan in their academic imprints because this way of noting time has become academically fashionable to show inclusiveness. The same has also happened in academia with replacing sex with gender.
This is an unfortunate development for a Christian publisher. As Francis X. Maier wrote in his very positive review of Williams’ book, this choice is “not a small thing” as “words matter.” He continues,
“Williams is a Christian scholar, writing for a Christian audience and a Christian publisher. If Jesus Christ truly is the center and most important event of human history, why would any Christian author, or any Christian publisher, conform his or her dating of time to the artifice of a neutered academic vocabulary? It’s a needless concession.”
It is indeed.
There is no compelling academic reason to adopt it. It refers to the very same designation of time, centered roughly around the years of Christ. The BCE/CE designation is often adopted as a means of being more inclusive to non-Christian readers and scholars.
Others use it because it has a more academic vibe. But this is an illusion. As Wikipedia, a site edited by many different perspectives, notes, “The expressions ‘2025 CE’ and ‘AD 2025’ each equally describe the current year; ‘400 BCE’ and ‘400 BC’ are the same year too.” There is no objectively compelling reason to replace one with the other, which is why there is an ongoing debate among Wikipedia posters on the use of CE vs. AD. Most of the objections to the traditional before Christ/anno Domini usage are because it favors a Christian perspective.
It is unfortunate that a Christian publisher would not hold to the wholly unobjectionable and traditional usage of Christ’s incarnation as their reasonable marker of time. For that is precisely what gives Christianity, and history, its meaning and purpose.
Image from Shutterstock.
