[The following is a draft of some concepts I have shared with students over the last three decades.]
E. Glenn Hinson was the faculty director of my focus area of
study in Patristics for my doctoral program at The Southern Baptist Theological
Seminary. He introduced me to the realities that early Christianity was caught
in a dialectic tension between assimilation and accommodation to Roman culture.
The underlying question he repeatedly raised was whether a practice or a
Biblical exposition represented the church’s willingness to adapt itself to
culture with or without altering its core beliefs and/or practices. In other
words, as the church expanded its reach there were aspects of Roman culture
that could be absorbed without altering established patterns. Some aspects of
culture are benign in their affect. Other aspects of culture if adopted would
require the church to fundamentally alter its way of being in the world.
In one of my papers for Dr. Hinson I argued that Clement of
Alexandria represented well this tension with his vocabulary. Specifically, he
used the term “pedagogue” as a title for Jesus. A pedagogue was a slave
entrusted to served as a tutor and guardian for a young boy (Paul had used the
term in reference to the role of the law in preparing for the arrival of Christ
– Galatians 3.). My argument was that Clement demonstrated assimilation in his
use of a familiar term that he then carefully defined in a manner that was
uniquely Christian; By his definition of the term he was intentionally
attempting to confront and alter Roman culture rather than accommodate to it. My argument ran contrary to dominant
scholarship of the time, which argued that Clement should be seen as a key
figure in the Romanization of the church, a position I do not altogether dispute.
The issue is that Christianity began very much as a Jewish
movement that saw itself as the fulfillment of Judaism (the true Israel) and an
alternative society to that of the world, i.e., the Roman Empire. Within five
centuries Christianity in the West had come to see itself as the heart of the
Roman Empire and the sustainer of all that was good in Roman culture. How did
that transition take place and how did the transition affect the faith of the
church? I elsewhere have argued that Christianity in the West remains married
to Roman culture or at least to a Roman view of society. This is nowhere better
seen that in modern Evangelical portrayals of the family. For this post, my
thesis centers on the transition of the “mysteries” into the “sacraments.”
Cultural adaptation takes place on many levels and is
typically first apparent in things like attire, music, and art. For the most
part these are issues of assimilation. The Gospel can be sung with the aid of
pipe organs or steel guitars, full orchestras or a lone acoustic guitar, praise
teams or robbed choirs. Style will affect the content but need not distort it.
Language may be a tool of assimilation, but it is also the primary source of
accommodation. There is perhaps no better example of this than the affects of
translating the original New Testament manuscripts and the early Christian
practices from Koine Greek to Latin.
When the early church used Greek as a universal language, it
described its liturgical and communal practices with the vocabulary of the New
Testament. “Mystery” or “musterion” became an important word for them.
“Mystery” had as its fundamental meaning something that had to be revealed in
order to be known; it could not be discovered. From the Scriptures they learned
that the incarnation of Christ was the great mystery of God. They further
discovered that the incarnation of Christ was extended to the church, which was
after all His body. By the mid-second century, the “mysteries” were thought of
as those activities of the church that gave expression to the unity of Christ
with the church, especially the events contained in their shared worship. I am
convinced that at their heart the mysteries were those ritualized practices
that proclaimed “Christ is with us.” Chief among these were baptism, the Lord’s
Supper or Eucharist, Ministry of the Scriptures (Old and New Testaments - reading & exposition), extensive prayers, hymns & spiritual songs, the laying on of hands in prayer, and the sharing of the
kiss of peace.
In time Latin replaced Greek as the common language of the
Empire. The church followed suit. The Greek word “musterion” came to be
translated as the Latin “sacramentum.” The mysteries of Christ became the
sacraments of the church. The mystery expressed in water baptism became the
sacrament of baptism. “Sacramentum,” which appears to have as its primal
meaning “to touch the chin,” was the word used when a soldier took an oath of
enlistment. The oath was between the soldier and the general. The soldier did
not join the Roman army; he joined the Roman General’s army. The oath was
bilateral. The soldier swore to obey all of the general’s commands and the
general swore to accept responsibility for the obedient actions of the soldier.
The word “sacramentum” was chosen because the church had
come to think of itself as the “milita Christi” or Army of Christ. Baptism was
enlistment into the Army of Christ; the rite of baptism was then a sacramentum.
Very quickly “sacramentum” was the preferred translation for “musterion” for
all of the liturgical practices considered the mysteries. This single
translation signifies extensive accommodation to the culture of Rome.
Judaism was a communal culture with limited and
Scripture-regulated hierarchy (granted the system had been largely Hellenized
by the first century C.E.). Rome had a culture of empire with unbounded and
power-regulated hierarchy; the one with the power rules. For the earliest
Christians “mystery” constituted the church as the body of Christ. By the
fourth century “sacrament” constituted the church as the Army of Christ.
“Christ with us” in mystery was replaced with “Christ over us” through
sacrament as the primal paradigm. This fundamentally shifts the mission of the
church from conversion/inclusion to conversion/dominion. The mystery of
spiritual gifts being bestowed through any member was being replaced with a
theology of grace distributed by clergy through the sacraments. Clement of
Rome’s early second century dictum that the bishop was the first among equals
(i.e., the presbyters) was replaced with the inscription that the bishop is the
“Vicar of Christ” and the seat from which he presided over gatherings was now
called “the bishop’s throne” just like Caesar’s throne. In short, the church
had ceased to see itself as a mysterious contrast culture to Rome; it had come
to see itself as the redemption of Roman culture with all the overtones of
Cicero’s ordered society and Plato’s Greek Republic. The adoption of “sacramentum” for “musterion” signaled a
wholesale accommodation to the Roman culture of power and control was underway.
It is not my argument that the church became apostate in
this transition. Cultural accommodation seldom results in a sudden abandonment
of the core of the faith. It is my argument that a trajectory that would easily
intersect with apostasy was set. The church has ever sense weaved its way in
and out of the great mystery that Christ is incarnate by the power of the
Spirit in the life of the church.
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