Church History

Why Christians Must Be Counter-Cultural Like the Early Church

Critics often argue that much of what Christians think of as biblical truth and morality are inventions of late twentieth century American conservatism. So, Christian sexual ethics are products of 1990s “purity culture.” Claims about the exclusivity of Christ are remnants of Western ideological imperialism. And the pro-life movement was invented by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to get Ronald Reagan in office.

However, the first Christians were known and often attacked for many of the same practices that Christians are today, just without the lions. In fact, just as the creeds of the Early Church clarified what Christians must believe, there are other writings from that time that clarify how Christians should live.

For example, Justin Martyr’s beautiful description of the Christian worship service would fit what most of us still experience each Sunday:

On the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits; then when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things. Then we all rise together and pray, and, as we before said, when our prayer is ended, bread and wine and water are brought, and the president in like manner offers prayers and thanksgivings, according to his ability, and the people assent, saying Amen.

The Epistle to Diognetus, written by a Christian to a non-believing friend in the second or third century, described the Christian’s way of life:

[Christians] dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. They marry, as do all [others]; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table, but not a common bed.

Probably the clearest example is The Didache, a second-century summary of Christian moral teaching. It commanded the church, among other things, to be pro-life: “you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is born.”

A key reason for the explosive growth of the Early Church is that Christians lived by this ethical command. In the ancient Greco-Roman world, abortion and the killing of infants through a practice called “exposure” was considered legally and socially acceptable. Most of the babies left to die were little girls.

In his book, The Rise of Christianity, Rodney Stark described how Christians would search out and save little girls who were left to die by their pagan families. After a few decades of this life and death dynamic, there was a shortage of women for pagan young men to marry. So many ended up going to church to find wives. Also, because Christian women did not have abortions at the same rates as pagan women, a particularly brutal practice at the time, they also had higher fertility rates.

In the end, the explosive growth of Christianity across the empire was all about math. God used the obedience of early Christians to change the world. Of course, if we were to take a time machine back to speak to some of these baby rescuers, and ask if they realized how significant their obedience was going to be in the history of mankind, they’d be puzzled. “I don’t know anything about that,” they’d say. “I’m just hoping to help her.”

This is why the Christian life could never be reduced to random acts of kindness. God orchestrates history, and among the things He uses is the obedience of His people. Critics will tell us to “get with the times,” but it was precisely by being counter-cultural that Christianity rocked the Roman Empire. Ordinary people living out extraordinary faith are what transformed the world.

Reformation Day: What Really Happened?

Most people, even those with no interest the history of Christianity, know the story of the great Martin Luther and his revolutionary doings 507 years ago today on October 31, 1517.

The great reformer ignited a bomb that changed the course of history with the sparks from his protestant hammer as it drove a nail into the rugged wooden door of Wittenberg’s main cathedral. Second only to the nails driven into the cross of Christ, this hammer divides Western history into before and after.

But what most people believe happened on this date, now celebrated as Reformation Day, is actually myth. Simply put, it’s likely the famous door episode never happened. It certainly didn’t happen as portrayed in popular history and classic paintings.

A carefully researched history, published on the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation by Richard Rex, a noted professor of Reformation History at Cambridge, explains,

Bizarrely, there is almost no reliable evidence for this well-known story. There is no credible evidence that Luther actually went and nailed them [his 95 Theses] to the church door that day, and every reason to believe he did not.

Eric Metaxas echoes Rex’s take in his important book on Luther explaining on p. 111, “So the image in our collective minds of Luther audaciously pounding the truth onto that door for the world and the devil to see is a fiction.” He adds the picture of a fiery reformer signing his own excommunication with a hammer “is very far from the truth.”

Nearly all serious Luther historians agree on this.

The only posting Luther did was posting a letter to a bishop under whose authority he stood, dated October 31, 1517. He went to bed that night never having taken up a hammer nor approached any church door with a document and nail.

This letter contained his famous 95 Theses and a very personal cover letter, warning the bishops of the abuse of indulgences by the perversely extravagant proto-television evangelist Johann Tetzel. Luther himself clearly tells us his state of mind and heart when he dispatched his Theses,

I was then a preacher, a young doctor of theology, so to speak – and I began to dissuade the people and to urge them not to listen to the clamors of the indulgence hawkers; they had better things to do. I certainly thought that in this case I should have a protector in the pope, on whose trustworthiness I then leaned strongly…

Luther was certainly not full of thunder but simply being a dutiful pastor to the flock. As Metaxas explains, Luther, at this point, “was a faithful monk in the only church in Western Christendom.”

His letter to Archbishop Albrecht was not a fiery rebuke or correction riddled, but instead was riddled with lap-dog praises, greeting Albrecht as my “most reverend Father … worthy of reverence, fear, and most gracious,” and Luther’s “Most Illustrious Lord.” Luther contrasts himself mightily as “I, the dregs of humanity.” He meekly asks to be spared for having “so much boldness that I have dared to think of a letter to the height of your Sublimity” and that the good archbishop might “deign to cast an eye upon one speck of dust, and for the sake of your pontifical clemency to heed my prayer.”

Metaxas describes the letter as nothing less than “a model of cringing sycophancy.” This evidence shows the October 31st Luther was actually a purring kitten, while legend has him a roaring lion.

The great Reformer’s bold spirit arose sometime later. Luther’s initial warning letter of Tetzel’s abuses was of no effect. The financial scheme was greater than he imagined with Albrecht on the take, splitting the proceeds with the pope after giving Tetzel his hawker’s fee.

The Document and the Door

Some two weeks later, the Theses were likely posted on the doors of the Castle Church at Wittenberg as a proposal to scholarly debate, or disputation, as these typical exchanges were called.

Such invitations for debate were everyday business for professors and nothing worth noting in itself. To use imagery from basketball, this would have merely been Luther’s call for an intramural pick-up game. The debate never happened. No one responded to the invite.

And the posting of these academic invitations would not have been to only one door, the great Cathedral of Wittenberg. It was university policy that such invitations be posted on the doors of every church in the town of Wittenberg, which boasted at least six or more. So, the posting itself was not an event to be sure, but a mere administrative task.

And it was not Luther doing the posting with hammer and nail. Professors did not do such menial work.The person posting the document was most likely a custodian armed with a brush and pot of glue, or a modest tack at best.

But Luther’s Theses did indeed eventually bring great thunder to the world, launching nothing short of a civilization-changing movement. Few can dispute this.

However, it was not that mighty sound of a hammer upon a famous door, but the clackity-clacking of this new contraption called a printing press that was the detonation point.

It was here that his revolution really sparked.

His 95 Theses were printed and sold, without his knowledge or consent, by enterprising printers, their pamphlets spreading “throughout the whole of Germany inside two weeks” as Luther himself tells us.

Luther went viral before viral was cool, and the monk himself had little to do with it.

While Luther never mentioned any posting on a door in Wittenberg in any writings, it was his faithful friend Philip Melanchthon who is credited with launching this famous but mythical scene. He did so some years after Luther’s death and was certainly not an eyewitness to the supposed event.

Why make a point of all this on this day? Because truth matters in the mouths and traditions of Christians who follow Jesus who is the way, the truth and the life.

Of course, none of this takes anything away from the singular influence of the great Refomer, not only on Christian faith and practice, but on nearly every other sphere of human culture: politics, economics and industry, education, distribution of the printed word, art, the status of women, and the nature and significance of marriage and the family, just to name a few.

It’s simply impossible to construct a definitive list of Luther’s work’s total influence upon history and faith. But we must realize that the Reformation’s anniversary is more faithfully honored when we replace the myths surrounding it with facts.