God at Work After Pentecost: When the Apostles Were Gone
Study 4 — The Church Takes Root in the Roman World
There is a moment in every movement when the first generation disappears.
The people who saw it begin are gone.
The voices that knew the founders personally become memories.
The question is no longer, What did the apostles do?
The question becomes:
What happened to the church after the apostles were gone?
That is where our story takes us now.
We have left the world of Acts.
The great names of the New Testament are beginning to pass from the scene. Peter is gone. Paul is gone. John will eventually be gone.
But Christianity does not disappear with them.
Something rather remarkable happens.
The church keeps growing.
And during the second century—from about AD 100 to 200—it begins to take root throughout the Roman world.
A church without apostles
Imagine being a Christian around AD 110.
There is no New Testament bound between two covers.
There are no Christian radio programs, seminaries, publishing houses, or church buildings on every corner.
There is no Christian political influence.
The Roman Empire surrounds you.
And Christianity is still a small and sometimes misunderstood movement.
Yet the faith is no longer dependent upon the original apostles being physically present.
Christians are gathering in cities all across the empire.
They are teaching their children.
They are baptizing converts.
They are reading the writings of the apostles.
They are gathering for worship.
They are burying their dead.
They are caring for one another.
And they are telling other people about Jesus.
The church is learning how to live without its founders.
That may be one of the most important transitions in Christian history.
Ignatius on the road to Rome
One of the men who helps us see this new generation is Ignatius of Antioch.
He was bishop of Antioch in Syria.
Around the beginning of the second century, Ignatius was arrested and transported to Rome, where he expected to die.
We know something about his journey because Ignatius wrote letters to several Christian communities along the way.
These are not the letters of an apostle.
They are the letters of a man who belongs to the generation after the apostles.
And they reveal a church already spread across remarkably different places.
Ignatius wrote to Christians in Ephesus, Magnesia, Tralles, Rome, Philadelphia and Smyrna.
That list alone tells us something.
The Christian movement that began in Jerusalem had become a network of communities stretching across the eastern Mediterranean.
And Ignatius was deeply concerned about something that would become increasingly important:
How does a scattered church remain one church?
His answer involved faithful teaching, faithful worship and strong local leadership.
He repeatedly emphasized the bishop, elders and deacons.
The structure of the church was becoming more visible.
This was not happening in a vacuum.
The apostles were gone, and the churches needed ways to preserve what they had received.
Polycarp remembers John
Then there is Polycarp of Smyrna.
Polycarp is especially interesting because he stands almost like a bridge between two worlds.
He belonged to the generation after the apostles and is traditionally associated with the apostle John.
Here we get a glimpse of how Christianity was beginning to preserve its memory.
The faith was not being reinvented from scratch.
People were asking:
What did the apostles teach?
What did the churches receive from them?
What must we hold on to?
Polycarp became an important Christian leader in Asia Minor.
And eventually, like Ignatius, he faced death rather than renounce Christ.
His martyrdom, traditionally dated to the middle of the second century, became one of the most famous accounts of early Christian courage.
But Polycarp's importance is bigger than the story of his death.
He represents something happening throughout the church.
The first generation is passing away.
The second generation is saying:
We have received something. We must preserve it.
The Roman government notices
Christianity was still a minority faith.
And the Roman government did not always know what to make of it.
One fascinating glimpse comes from Pliny the Younger, a Roman governor in Bithynia.
Around AD 112, Pliny wrote to Emperor Trajan asking how Christians should be handled.
His letter is valuable because it is not Christian propaganda.
It is a Roman official trying to understand a movement that has become significant enough to require government attention.
Pliny describes Christians meeting on a fixed day, singing to Christ, binding themselves to moral conduct, and sharing a common meal.
Trajan's response became an important precedent: Christians were not to be hunted down simply because they were Christians, but if they were formally accused and refused to abandon the faith, they could be punished.
This tells us something important.
Christianity had become visible.
The empire could no longer simply ignore it.
But neither was Christianity yet the religion of emperors.
It occupied an awkward place between those two worlds.
A surprising Christian presence
And here is where the second century becomes especially interesting.
We tend to imagine early Christians as people hiding in caves, constantly fleeing Roman soldiers.
That picture is too simple.
Christians lived ordinary lives in Roman society.
They worked.
They bought and sold goods.
They raised children.
They traveled.
Some were wealthy.
Some were poor.
Some were slaves.
Some eventually served in positions connected with Roman institutions.
Christianity was not simply a collection of people waiting for the next persecution.
It was becoming a community embedded in the everyday life of the empire.
Archaeological discoveries have continued to complicate the old picture of what early Christianity looked like. Evidence from places such as the ancient city of Megiddo, for example, points to organized Christian worship in the Roman world long before Constantine.
The church was putting down roots.
And then came Justin
By the middle of the second century, another remarkable figure appeared:
Justin Martyr.
Justin had been a seeker.
He had studied philosophy.
He had searched for truth.
Eventually he became convinced that Christianity was not a rejection of reason but the fulfillment of what he had been seeking.
That conviction shaped his work.
Justin wrote defenses of Christianity addressed to the Roman world.
He wanted educated Romans to understand that Christians were not atheists, criminals, or enemies of civilization.
They worshiped the true God.
They followed Jesus Christ.
They believed in resurrection.
They lived by a moral standard.
And they gathered for worship.
Justin gives us one of the earliest detailed descriptions of what a Christian gathering looked like outside the New Testament.
Christians gathered on Sunday.
They read the writings of the apostles and the prophets.
A leader instructed the congregation.
They prayed.
They shared bread and wine.
They collected offerings for those in need.
Then they went back into the world from which they had come.
Christianity was becoming a recognizable way of life.
Not everyone agreed
But the second century was not peaceful inside the church either.
As Christianity spread, different teachers offered different interpretations of Jesus.
Some emphasized secret knowledge.
Some rejected parts of the Old Testament.
Some proposed radically different understandings of Christ.
Others insisted that the faith handed down through the apostles had to remain the standard.
This forced Christians to ask questions that would shape the next several centuries:
Which writings belong to the apostolic faith?
What did the apostles actually teach?
Who has authority to teach the church?
Who is Jesus?
How are His humanity and divinity to be understood?
These questions did not suddenly appear at Constantine's Council of Nicaea.
They had been developing for generations.
Indeed, writers in the early second century such as Ignatius already spoke openly of Jesus as God.
The later theological debates did not begin with Constantine.
They had much deeper roots.
The church was becoming catholic
There is another development worth noticing.
The word catholic originally meant something like universal or according to the whole.
Christians increasingly understood themselves not as isolated congregations but as one worldwide church.
A believer in Antioch belonged to the same faith as a believer in Rome.
A Christian in Smyrna belonged to the same body as a Christian in Gaul.
The churches were separated by geography, language and culture.
But they were learning to recognize one another.
That unity would become increasingly important as Christianity expanded.
It would also become increasingly difficult.
The larger the church became, the more questions it had to answer.
And the more different cultures it entered, the more difficult it became to preserve both unity and truth.
The seeds of later controversies were already being planted.
Christianity was no longer just a Jerusalem story
This may be the biggest change of all.
In Acts, Jerusalem dominates the story.
By the second century, Jerusalem is still important—but it is no longer the center of the Christian world.
Christianity has become a Mediterranean movement.
Antioch matters.
Alexandria matters.
Rome matters.
Smyrna matters.
Ephesus matters.
Carthage will soon matter.
Christianity is crossing languages, cultures and social classes.
The gospel is becoming something that belongs neither to Jerusalem nor to one particular people.
It is becoming a worldwide faith.
And nobody in AD 100 could have known where that would eventually lead.
A strange new kind of community
There was another reason Christianity attracted attention.
Christians were expected to care for people who were easily overlooked.
Widows.
Orphans.
The sick.
The poor.
Strangers.
Their faith was not confined to what happened during worship.
It created obligations toward other people.
That did not mean every Christian lived perfectly.
They did not.
The early church had arguments, divisions, moral failures and disagreements just as churches do today.
But Christianity was creating communities in which people from very different backgrounds were being taught to regard one another as members of one family.
That was a powerful idea in the Roman world.
And it helped Christianity survive.
The century that changed everything
By AD 200, Christianity was still a minority.
Rome was still pagan.
The emperor was not a Christian.
The temples were still open.
Christians could still be misunderstood, ridiculed and persecuted.
Nothing about the second century looked like the triumph of Christianity.
And yet, underneath the surface, something enormous had happened.
The apostles were gone.
The church remained.
The eyewitness generation was disappearing.
The testimony was being handed on.
Christian communities were appearing throughout the empire.
Leaders were emerging.
Worship was taking recognizable form.
Christian writers were answering the accusations of the surrounding culture.
And believers were learning how to remain faithful in a world that did not yet belong to them.
The church had taken root.
It was still small.
It was sometimes threatened.
It was far from perfect.
But it was there.
And it was growing.
The story is just beginning
The next century would bring a new set of challenges.
The church would become more organized.
Its teachers would become more influential.
Its understanding of Scripture and Christian doctrine would become more clearly defined.
And Christianity would encounter the Roman world in increasingly complicated ways.
There would be arguments within the church.
There would be persecution from outside it.
There would be extraordinary thinkers.
There would be martyrs.
There would be compromises.
There would be courage.
And eventually, the church that had once been regarded as a troublesome minority would find itself standing in the presence of emperors.
But that is still ahead.
For now, remember the surprising thing about the second century:
The apostles disappeared.
The church did not.
The men who had walked with Jesus were gone.
But the people who had heard their testimony carried it forward.
And quietly, steadily, across the Roman world,
the church took root.
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THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION
1. The church's one foundation
Is Jesus Christ her Lord,
She is His new creation
By water and the Word.
From heaven He came and sought her
To be His holy bride;
With His own blood He bought her,
And for her life He died.
2. Elect from every nation,
Yet one over all the earth;
Her charter of salvation,
One Lord, one faith, one birth;
One holy Name she blesses,
Partakes one holy food,
And to one hope she presses,
With every grace endued.
3. Though with a scornful wonder
Men see her sore oppressed,
By schisms rent asunder,
By heresies distressed,
Yet saints their watch are keeping;
Their cry goes up, "How long?"
And soon the night of weeping
Shall be the morn of song.
4. The church shall never perish,
Her dear Lord to defend
To guide, sustain and cherish,
Is with her to the end
Though there be those that hate her,
And false sons in her pale
Against a foe or traitor,
She ever shall prevail
5. Mid toil and tribulation,
And tumult of her war,
She waits the consummation
Of peace forevermore;
'Til, with the vision glorious,
Her longing eyes are blessed,
And the great church victorious
Shall be the church at rest.
6. Yet she on earth hath union
With God the Three in One,
And mystic sweet communion
With those whose rest is won.
O happy ones and holy!
Lord, give us grace that we
Like them, the meek and lowly,
On high may dwell with Thee.
Samuel John Stone
Ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but
fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household
of God; And are built upon the foundation of the
apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being
the chief corner stone; - Ephesians 2:19-20
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