So, more fun in my carrel: reading two books back to back with similar titles on the same subject which come to wildly different conclusions.
Glenn Hinson's The Evangelization of the Roman Empire argues that after the close of the New Testament period, Christianity spread by planting churches, not by charismatic preachers. Hinson shows how the ecclesiastical machinery of sacraments, clergy and church discipline were deployed for missionary ends. Moreover, the early church was sociologically inclusive but theologically exclusive, and this drove the church to conquer the world, rather than settle for being one credible option among many.
So if you were a thoughtful, moderate Southern Baptist--not ashamed of the gospel but ashamed of the casual racism in the pews, a bit more ecclesiastically minded than your brethren, deploring the "I'm spiritual but not religious" Zeitgeist, and maybe even the individualism of your own revivalistic tradition, you'd be happy to learn that your ideal Church was the primitive Church! And sure enough, Hinson taught at Southern Baptist Seminary for years until he retired--just before the fundamentalist takeover. Why, he even taught across the street from my carrel at BTSR.
I'm not saying that Hinson necessarily looked down the well of history and saw his own reflection. It may well be that moderate Baptists do embody the primitive Church they and the whole Anabaptist tradition they aspire to. Still...
On the other hand, Ramsay MacMullen's Christianzing the Roman Empire argues that Christians carried the day because they were awesome exorcists.
Well, there was more to it than that. They held that the world was going to end soon, that God hated all the religious practices that supposedly made the world go round, and would punish their devotees in everlasting fire, but would bless with immortality those who said goodbye to all that. And then they proved it--by casting out, in shrieks and groans, those spiritual powers the pagans spoiled with their sacrifices and amulets.
The Good News was disturbing. Its confirmation--in Spirit and in power, and not with plausible words--had to have been chilling. Newly converted Christians were scared straight pagans.
Now the pagans could cast out demons too. But pagan inclusivity and Christian exclusivity meant that math was on the side of the Christians.
MacMullen gives an example: say you've got two, evenly matched exorcists, one a pagan, the other a Christian. And you've got a hundred other pagans watching. And they perform equally impressive miracles. And the pagan exorcist wins half the crowd to his God, and the Christian half the crowd to his. It's Even Stephen, right?
Wrong. While the 50 who go over to the pagan God simply add that deity to their pantheon, the 50 that go over to the Christian God have to repudiate the entire pantheon. At the end of the day, there were 50 less pagans.
Reviews of MacMullen's book in scholarly journals tend not to be kind. Hinson himself penned a review that faulted the book for ignoring the institutional factors that led to the triumph of Christianity. In other words, "The problem with MacMullen's book is that it's not my book." Heh.
Surely it's a reductionist thesis. There was more to conversion than that. There was their exemplary charitable services. There was their willingness to die for the faith. There was the rough egalitarianism that prevailed within--which Hinson mentions.
But I like this book. It grasps the nettle, the uncanny, the numinous, the supernatural and the downright weird that ancient Christian literature is shot through with.
Historians are intellectuals, and it stands to reason that when 21st century intellectuals research a topic like conversion in the Roman Empire, they're liable to be attracted to stuff like Celsus and Origen's debates over Christianity, and Augustine's long and winding road from Manichaeism to Neo-Platonism to Christianity--and decide that these examples are normative, because that stuff's normative for them. As for miracles--who knows?
But as MacMullen points out, all ancients expected the unexpected. "What really happened?" is our question, not theirs. They would have assume it happened and would have act accordingly. Figuring out how people acted on their beliefs is the historian's work, MacMullen maintains. Questioning the validity of their beliefs moves you out of the realm of history and into the realm of--Ha, Ha--theology.
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