How A Band Of Brothers Forged The Church’s Most Important Doctrine: The Trinity (Matthew 28:19)

**depiction of the Cappadocian Fathers**

A golden age of biblical exploration and theological development occurred in the fourth century with a band of Christian leaders known as the Cappadocian Fathers: Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus. Their stories and their theological contributions are intertwined. They lived full and adventurous lives as not only theologians but as leaders of the church. But their most important contribution to God’s Story of Grace was solidifying Trinitarian truth for all time–the bedrock of Orthodoxy.¹From the area of Cappadocia (an area of modern Turkey), these three men refined our understanding of the biblical revelation of the meaning of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Their work helped to establish the formula of one God existing in three persons. (one ousia=essence in three hypostasis=person).

In this article we will look at the distinctive contribution of each man to the doctrine of the Trinity and then look at the big implications of this doctrine in the shaping of God’s Story in the world.

Trinitarian Theologians

All three were born after the First Council of Nicaea (325) and so entered into the life of the church in the midst of its aftereffects. The Council of Nicaea did not cease opposition to those upholding the truth it affirmed, namely: Jesus is fully God equal to the Father, very God of very God. On the contrary, in many ways opposition increased. Followers of Arius continued to press a reduced view of the Son claiming that the Son is created, and thus less, than the Father. In fact, by the time the Cappadocian Fathers were on the scene, the new level of attack by the Arians was to claim that the Holy Spirit is a created being, as well.²The opposition theologically created persecution politically. Arianism, for the next half a century, was backed by the emperors after Constantine– three of them being Constantine’s sons. The bishops who held to Arianism were able to hold seats of influence and power in the church. Because of this the three Cappadocians Fathers experienced serious and sustained resistance and harassment. Nonetheless, their arguments for the deity of Jesus and the Holy Spirit would prevail, and their theological and biblical insights for understanding how God exists as one God in three persons would forever be the standard clarification of biblical revelation. This would be later affirmed at the Council of Constantinople (381).

Cappadocian Fathers

Basil of Caesarea 330-379 **(ousia and hypostasis)**

To counter heresies like Arianism, Basil emphasized the distinction between the terms ousia (Greek word for essence) and hypostasis (Greek word for person). These words had been used synonymously; Basil was the first to make a distinction.³ In 377 a man named Amphilochius wrote to Basil and asked him to explain the distinction between ousia and hypostasis. Basil responded with the following:

The distinction between essence [ousia] and hypostasis is the same as that between the general and the particular; as, for instance, between [humanity] and the particular [man]. Therefore, concerning the divinity, we confess one essence [ousia]…; but the hypostasis, on the other hand, is particularizing, in order that our conception of Father, Son and Holy Spirit may be unconfused and clear.

Basil’s analysis is helpful as it utilizes a distinction with which we are all familiar. We all know the difference between describing a person as a human being (one who is a member of the human race) and identifying him as a distinct individual (e.g., Bob Smith). But the analogy should not be pushed too far.⁴ They are distinguished not by their substance but how they exist to and with one another.

**Gregory of Nazianzus 330–391 (homousia of the Holy Spirit)**

He significantly extended the case for the full divinity of the Holy Spirit, affirming his co-eternal and co-equal status with the Father and the Son. He did this by directly linking the Spirit’s redemptive actions to his divine nature, arguing that only God could perform God-level tasks like sanctification and rebirth which brings the believer into the likeness of God. His argument is that the Holy Spirit is homoousia (of the same essence) with the Father and the Son. To deny the Spirit’s divine essence, he reasoned, would undermine the Trinity and the economy of salvation leading to an incomplete or imperfect Godhead. In salvation and sanctification, the Holy Spirit makes believers “like God.” If the Holy Spirit were a created being–indwelling believers–they would be filled with a creature, who could not make them like divinity. Gregory declared, “If he has the same rank as I have, how can he make me God, how can he link me with deity?” But the Holy Spirit is able to make us like God since he is God.

In this respect, The Holy Spirit causes believers to participate in the very life and reality of the Trinity and makes that very life known and experienced to the Christian. He writes forcefully on this point in his Fifth Theological Oration making several key points. I will break his statements down into four categories:

Category 1: The Holy Spirit is joined with Christ in every step of his ministry.

Look at the facts: Christ is born, the Spirit is his forerunner; Christ is baptized, the Spirit bears him witness; Christ is tempted, the Spirit leads him up; Christ performs miracles, the Spirit accompanies him; Christ ascends, the Spirit fills his place. Is there any significant function belonging to God, which the Spirit does not perform?

Category 2: The Holy Spirit is given exalted titles.

Is there any title belonging to God, which cannot apply to him…He is called “Spirit of God,” “Spirit of Christ,” “Mind of Christ,” “Spirit of the Lord,” and “Lord” absolutely; “Spirit of Adoption,” “of Truth,” “of Freedom”; “Spirit of Wisdom,” “Understanding,” “Counsel,” “Might,” “Knowledge,” “True Religion” and of “The Fear of God.”

Category 3: This Spirit of God fills and sustains the universe.

The Spirit indeed effects all these things, filling the universe with his being, sustaining the universe. His being “fills the world,” his power is beyond the world’s capacity to contain it. It is his nature, not his given function, to be good, to be righteous and to be in command. He is the subject, not the object, of hallowing, apportioning, participating, filling, sustaining; we share in him and he shares in nothing.

Category 4: The Holy Spirit performs all the actions as the Father.

All that God actively performs, he performs. Divided in fiery tongues, he distributes graces, makes Apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. He is “intelligent, manifold, clear, distinct, irresistible, unpolluted”—or in other words, he is utterly wise, his operations are multifarious, he clarifies all things distinctly, his authority is absolute and he is free from mutability. He is “all-powerful, overseeing all and penetrating through all spirits that are intelligent and pure and most subtle”—meaning, I think, angelic powers as well as prophets and Apostles. He penetrates them simultaneously, though they are distributed in various places; which shows that he is not tied down by spatial limitations.

**Gregory of Nyssa 335–394 (distinction but not separation of the hypostasis)**

Gregory of Nyssa’s key contribution to this effort was defining the complete unity of the Trinity relating and functioning within the distinctive ways of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He explained that every divine action from creation to the governance of the universe is a single motion that proceeds in one direction with all persons of the Trinity. Within the unified motion of God there are distinctions of person but not separation.⁵ In this way he was able to highlight the relational interaction and dynamic of the personhood of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. For this reason he worked to more clearly define the working order or sequencing⁶ of the Trinity as seen in the scriptures:

The Son Proceeds From the Father

¹⁴The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth…¹⁸No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known. (John 1:14, 18)

…yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live. (1 Corinthians 8:6)

⁹For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form… (Colossians 2:9)

The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son and the Father

¹⁶And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever— ¹⁷the Spirit of truth. (John 14:16-17)

But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you. (John 14:26)

“When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father—the Spirit of truth who goes out from the Father—he will testify about me. (John 15:26)

Unless I go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. (John 16:7)

³²God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of it. ³³Exalted to the right hand of God, he has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you now see and hear. (Acts 2:32-33)

The Holy Spirit glorified the Father and the Son

¹³But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. ¹⁴He will glorify me because it is from me that he will receive what he will make known to you. ¹⁵All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will receive from me what he will make known to you.” (John 16)

It is clear from these scriptures that the three divine persons know and love each other. In this love, they are in communion with each other, and freely act together in their common will and purpose.

What Does This Mean?

The Trinity is revealed and understood through history. God continues to make himself known more fully in the relational progress of history. It is only through the outworking of the human experience that we are able to experience, understand and appreciate God’s Story of Grace. What is the reason for this? Finite humans can only perceive the infinite God gradually and can only worship relationally–in real experience. As Gregory Nazianzus wrote in his Fifth Oration: You see how light shines on us bit by bit, you see in the doctrine of God an order, which we had better observe, neither revealing it suddenly nor concealing it to the last. To reveal it suddenly would be clumsy… For God to reveal too much at one time would have created confusion rather than revelation. This is why history itself is the progression of gradual and relational experience, and God makes himself known this way.

The Trinity is the direction and shape of history. God’s decisive acts of creation and redemption are unfolding through the entire scope of history reclaiming and transforming everything to participate in the likeness of the Trinity. It is a movement toward a mutual and self-giving love, a balance of respect for the one (hypostasis) and many (ousia). This makes it fitting that the doctrine and understanding of the Trinity would itself be progressively hammered out and defined in a historical process. It is also fitting that the foundational ecumenical creeds of Nicaea and Constantinople are anchored to these most central and beautiful truths about God–one essence (ousia) in three persons (hypostasis).

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In ancient Greek, the word “ortho-” means straight or correct. The word “doxa” means judgment or belief. Orthodoxy basically means correct belief which is in the spirit of Jude 1:3: I felt compelled to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s holy people.
While some anti-Nicenes continued to object to Nicaea, many who wanted to ecclesiastically fall in line with the Nicene decision and its implicit support by Constantine shifted their arguments against the full divinity of the Son to a denial of the full divinity of the Holy Spirit. This was their way of straddling the fence in the controversy.
Hypostasis brings together the two words: ὑπό (hupo), meaning “under” or “beneath,” and στάσις (stásis), meaning “a standing” or “position.” This is an excellent words for the personal distinctions of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit underneath or existing in the one essence of God.
As we have seen, Basil is insistent that the divine substance is incomprehensible. “We do not know what God is in his essence, what kind of being he is, because ultimately he is not a kind of being at all.”
There are several scriptures which witness to this relational unity: ¹⁶As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. ¹⁷And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.” (Matthew 3:16-17); For it is we who are the circumcision, we who serve God by his Spirit, who boast in Christ Jesus, and who put no confidence in the flesh (Philippians 3:3); ⁴There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them. ⁵There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. ⁶There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone it is the same God at work. (1 Corinthians 12:4-6); who have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, to be obedient to Jesus Christ and sprinkled with his blood (1 Peter 1:2).
Gregory defined this ordering or sequencing by the Greek word (táxis) means “order,” “arrangement,” or “rank.” The word comes from the verb tássein (“to arrange” or “to set in order”) and originally described military formations before being applied to other contexts, such as the movement of organisms in response to stimuli.

Athanasius: The Logic and Beauty Of the Incarnation (John 1:14)

Athanasius was a larger-than-life figure living in a momentous time. Shortly before his death in 373, he wrote to a friend with a simple plea: “Let what was confessed by the Fathers of Nicaea prevail.” Upon his shoulders was carried the flame of vital Christian truth which the darkness of error and heresy was trying to choke. Just over a decade after the Council of Nicaea affirmed that Jesus Christ is very God of very God, the weeds of Arianism (denying the full co-equality in nature of the Son with the Father) were overtaking the garden of the church. Called by his enemies, “the black dwarf,”¹Athanasius exercised extreme courage on behalf of the gospel. For nearly half a century he carried the torch of truth while undergoing five exiles from his home, numerous accusations and murderous plots, all backed by the imperial power of Rome. For this reason he has been honored by Gregory of Nazianzus with the title: “pillar of the Church.” His contributions to the ongoing Story of God’s Grace are wide-ranging,²but his singular importance is centered on his defense of the full equality and unity of the Son with the Father against the overwhelming onslaught of the Arian heresy.

In this article, we will see how this one man bore the significant weight of faithful doctrine for the whole of the church. In God’s Story of Grace perhaps no person had been more important since the apostles to advance the image of God in the world. It was he who defended the the deity of Christ and protected the biblical boundaries so the church could more fully define the Trinity.³

Defender of Orthodoxy

Athanasius was born in the city of Alexandria sometime in the 290s. The city was a culturally vital city for the Roman Empire. It had intellectual leaders from paganism, Judaism, and Christianity—all drawn to the city’s philosophical schools and the fabled Alexandrian Library. He entered the service of the bishop of Alexandria and was discipled in theology and pastoral skills. During the time of his apprenticeship, the church was rocked by a controversy started by Arius, a deacon of the influential church of Alexandria in Egypt.⁴ Arius denied that Christ was fully God, arguing that only the Father was truly God, and the Son was created.

Despite the fact that the Nicene Creed was affirmed by an overwhelming majority at the Council of Nicaea, the Arians wormed their way back into positions of power and engineered the dismissal of key leaders who supported the Nicene Creed. Athanasius was one of them. The Arians leveled a series of charges against him. For example, he was accused of having arranged the murder of a Melitian bishop, Arsenius. Athanasius had to go to Tyre to appear before the emperor Constantine to refute this charge. Upon entering the room, Athanasius first made sure that his accusers knew what Arsenius looked like. To their surprise, the “murdered” man was then produced, alive and well, for he had been discovered hiding in the city of Tyre itself. This would be the first major volley he would endure through a lifetime of attacks.

“On The Incarnation”

Against the backdrop of the Arian heresy; Athanasius argued for Christianity’s distinctive claim that God, who is the origin of all things, entered human history as a man, to bring redemption to all things. He needed to counter the more neatly packaged story presented by Arius. This heresy was gaining ground because the message of the Incarnation (fully divinity taking on humanity), as one writer comments, “seemed messy and arbitrary to some, and manifestly unfitting, or even blasphemous, to others.” Athanasius, in response to this perception, mounts a series of arguments to convince his readers that the Incarnation was fitting, and that the death of Christ, both as to fact and to manner, was neither arbitrary nor unreasonable. At fewer than a hundred pages, On The Incarnation develops into a comprehensive understanding of the role and person of Jesus. It begins by detailing the continuity of Christ’s purpose in creation and redemption.

Continuity

To show that the Incarnation is not some strange and alien idea added to scripture, he begins his masterpiece by paralleling creation and redemption around the centrality of the very logos (Word) of John:

¹In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ²He was with God in the beginning. ³Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. (John 1:1-3)

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John 1:14)

Athanasius explains: “There is…no inconsistency between creation and salvation; for the One Father has employed the same Agent for both works, effecting the salvation of the world through the same Word Who made it in the beginning.” This, then, is not a change, but it is a manifestation in human form of who God has eternally been.

Corruption

After the Word created humanity, sin irreversibly and irreparably marred humanity. There is nothing that humanity can do to cure the disease of sin which had so irreparably sickened the human condition. As Athanasius spells it out:

Nor does repentance recall men from what is according to their nature; all that it does is to make them cease from sinning. Had it been a case of a trespass only, and not of a subsequent corruption, repentance would have been well enough; but when once transgression had begun men came under the power of the corruption proper to their nature and were bereft of the grace which belonged to them as creatures in the Image of God.

The Father could not bear to let death have mastery over his handiwork bringing it to nothing. His response was to “renew His image in mankind, so that through it men might once more come to know Him.” This was done by Christ coming to earth to take the form of a human.

Cure

The why behind the Incarnation is love. Christ was, according to Athanasius:

“…manifested in a human body for this reason only, out of the love and goodness of His Father, for the salvation of men….it was our sorry case that caused the Word to come down, our transgression that called out His love for us, so that He made haste to help us and to appear among us. It is we who were the cause of His taking human form, and for our salvation that in His great love He was both born and manifested in a human body.

What was needed then? The Word of God, who at the beginning made all out of nothing. Only he could restore the corruptible to incorruption, while maintaining the justice of the Father towards us. Again, Athanasius explains:

What, then, was God to do? What else could He possibly do, being God, but renew His Image in mankind, so that through it men might once more come to know Him? And how could this be done save by the coming of the very Image Himself, our Saviour Jesus Christ? Men could not have done it, for they are only made after the Image; nor could angels have done it, for they are not the images of God. The Word of God came in His own Person, because it was He alone, the Image of the Father, Who could recreate man made after the Image.

The Incarnation then appears as the solution to this dilemma, for by taking on human nature God healed it of the corruption and injury which sin had produced in it. “[T]hrough this union of the immortal Son of God with our human nature, all men were clothed with incorruption in the promise of the resurrection.” The great defender of Christ provides this analogy to help his readers wrap their minds around this:

It is like when a great king enters a city and stays in one of the houses there. The city is held in high regard by others, and its enemies no longer attack it, all because of the king’s residence in a single house there. So it is with the Monarch of all. He has come to our realm, and made his home in one body among his fellow people. As a consequence, the whole conspiracy of the enemy against mankind is beaten off, and the corruption of death which previously overcame them is finished. The human race would have gone to ruin, if the Lord and Savior of all, the Son of God, had not come among us to meet the end of death.

The beauty of this is that God did not create the world and hold it at an insurmountable distance, but he bridged the distance uniting himself completely with the world. By taking human nature into himself in a particularly intimate way, he healed it and even re-created it, thereby carrying on the creative activity that he always exercises with respect to the world in general, and our nature in particular.⁵

For the Lord touched all parts of creation, and freed and undeceived them all from every deceit.
Athanasius

Death

Having taken a body like ours, because we were all under the penalty of death he gave his body up to death in our place. Only death could stop the plague of corruption, the Word took a mortal body, so that all who become united with him might receive his immortality. As Paul declares:

³For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in the flesh, ⁴in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us… (Romans 8:3-4)

The Word knew that death was the only way that humanity could be saved from corruption, and yet it was impossible for the Word to suffer death, being immortal and Son of the Father. Therefore, he took on a body capable of death, so that this body, being joined to the Word who is above all, might be worthy to die in the place of all; and being inhabited by that Word, remain incorruptible, stopping our own corruptibility from then on by the grace of the resurrection. By offering up this body to death, as a pure sacrifice, he instantly took death away from all people.⁶ The great author provides another analogy:

When a king founds a city, if it is attacked by bandits from the carelessness of its citizens, he certainly does not neglect it, but avenges and reclaims it, for the sake of his own honor. How much more did God the Word of the all-good Father refuse to let humans, his work, go to corruption. He blotted out their death by the offering of his own body, and corrected their neglect by his own teaching, restoring all that was theirs by his own power.

In destroying the corruption of sinfulness, as Mako A. Nagasawa expresses it, “God’s love within each human being…could be received as love and not as torment, since our self-centeredness would resist and resent the call of God to be as other-centered as he is.”

All of this is summarized in the words of the inspired apostle:

God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:21)

Athanasius’ Lasting Influence

Athanasius anchored Christian truth in the logic and consistency of revelation. To the Arians the Incarnation of God in Jesus was not logical. Arius was driven more by Greek reasoning and imported that reasoning onto scripture. He was not alone in this problem. Many in the Christian movement were tempted to prioritize philosophical speculation and human reasoning in relation to God’s Word. Athanasius’ work is a masterpiece because he demonstrates the superior clarity of scriptural revelation to be a better guide for philosophy and reasoning. He places the majestic revelation in Christ as witnessed in the scriptures to its commanding perch over all human systems of philosophy. Because of this, Athanasius is often referred to as the Father of Orthodoxy.⁷

Athanasius captures the beauty of God’s Story. Through Christ, the Word made flesh, God re-shapes and re-makes our story. In sending Jesus as the Incarnate Son of God, we know the very heart and intention of this remaking is grace. David Bentley Hart eloquently describes it as follows:

“It is because Christ’s life effects a narrative reversal, which unwinds the story of sin and death and reinaugurates the story that God tells from before the foundation of the world – the story of the creation he wills, freely, in his eternal counsels – that Christ’s life effects [the] restoration in creation’s goodness…that created being is redeemed in him.”

We see a story of where the Triune God takes the human story and redeems it into his personal and loving being. In this story we see God taking on the sin of the world and continuing to shape human history after the image of the Trinity. As Paul declares God’s universal reconciliation in Jesus:

¹⁹For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, ²⁰and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. (Colossians 1:19-20)

Athanasius serves as an example of God’s remnant grace. As the heresy of Arianism was taking over the church, God preserved one man to be the point of the spear to fight the fight against overwhelming odds of darkness which were overtaking the church. When informed that the whole world was against Athanasius regarding his view of Christ’s full divinity, he replied, “Then I am against the world.” The life and work of Athanasius is a testament to the truth that “the gates of hell will not prevail.” (Matthew 16:18)

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Athanasius, from Egypt, is a historical testimony of the prominence and influence African Christianity had from its beginning. Such figures also include Augustine, Tertullian, Cyprian, and Origen,
He wrote the first treatise defending the full deity of the Holy Spirit in 358–359. His close friend Serapion of Thmuis, a town in the Nile Delta, told him about the Binitarianism of certain individuals in his church who confessed Christ as fully God but argued that the Holy Spirit was to be included among the angelic beings. Athanasius’s three letters to Serapion were the first of a number of important defenses of the Spirit’s deity written over the next thirty-five years or so. Athanasius’s biography of the Egyptian monk Anthony, written not long after the monk’s death in 356, was a “bestseller” in Christian antiquity and played a key role in the conversion of Augustine of Hippo in 386. Among the things that Athanasius related about Anthony was his phenomenal memorization of the entire Bible. It is most likely the case that Athanasius had also memorized most of the Scriptures. Athanasius’s Easter Letter of 367 contains the first known list of the books of the New Testament that corresponds exactly to the modern listing of the New Testament canon. Along with the Old Testament, Athanasius declared such books to be the “fountains of salvation, that they who thirst may be satisfied with the living words they contain. In these alone is proclaimed the doctrine of godliness.”
It was at the Council of Constantinople that the deity of the Holy Spirit was fully defined for the church.
Athanasius and Arius were arch-enemies from the same church.
Athanasius gives further reasoning for the nature of the Incarnation: For this reason He did not offer the sacrifice on behalf of all immediately He came, for if He had surrendered His body to death and then raised it again at once He would have ceased to be an object of our senses. Instead of that, He stayed in His body and let Himself be seen in it, doing acts and giving signs which showed Him to be not only man, but also God the Word.
For Athanasius, the problem was the corruption and decay within human nature itself, not a juridical imbalance that required appeasement through Christ’s punishment such as a penal substitution view of atonement: There are some other possible objections that must be answered. Some might urge that, even granting the necessity of a public death for subsequent belief in the resurrection, it would surely have been better for Him to have arranged an honourable death for Himself, and so to have avoided the ignominy of the cross. But even this would have given ground for suspicion that His power over death was limited to the particular kind of death which He chose for Himself; and that again would furnish excuse for disbelieving the resurrection. Death came to His body, therefore, not from Himself but from enemy action, in order that the Saviour might utterly abolish death in whatever form they offered it to Him. A generous wrestler, virile and strong, does not himself choose his antagonists, lest it should be thought that of some of them he is afraid. Rather, he lets the spectators choose them, and that all the more if these are hostile, so that he may overthrow whomsoever they match against him and thus vindicate his superior strength. Even so was it with Christ. He, the Life of all, our Lord and Saviour, did not arrange the manner of his own death lest He should seem to be afraid of some other kind.
The word “orthodox” literally means “right teaching” or “right belief,” stemming from the ancient Greek words orthos (right, correct) and doxa (teaching, opinion, or glory/worship). In a broader sense, it signifies conforming to established, correct standards of doctrine used to distinguish authentic Christian teachings from heretical ones.

How St. Anthony and the Desert Fathers Saved Christianity and Civilization (Matthew 4:1)

In a movement starting in the middle of the third century, the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, Arabia and Persia were increasingly populated by a rare breed of men. They have come to be called the Desert Fathers. By the early fourth century as Christianity would become popular and accustomed to greater ease, these men would serve as a prophetic witness to the church, injecting the leaven of discipleship and biblical truth into a church which found it increasingly easy to compromise. The Desert Fathers were men who were unable to passively drift along by following the tenets and values of larger society. They chose to live separated lives forged by seeking God with a singular focus in a scorching and barren landscape. In the biblical tradition of men like Moses, David, Elijah, John the Baptist and Paul, they left the noise of urban life and sought after God.

“Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.”
Matthew 4:1

Though strange to many, their role was indispensable to the continued unfolding of God’s Story of Grace. By their extreme example, they would call the church away from coasting into social complacency to embrace a robust calling to discipleship after Jesus. In so doing, they halted the church from descending into an indistinguishable mass of herd conformity to embrace the mutual and self-giving life of the Trinity.

In this article we will look at the movement of the Desert Fathers, particularly Anthony the Great (251–356), and examine how they were vital to the ongoing growth and development of God’s Story of Grace. They did this through calling the church to personal and doctrinal purity and providing crucial points of guidance to the larger society.

Origins Of the Desert Fathers

The rise of the Desert Fathers began as a spontaneous movement around key locations where Christianity was spreading. No one explanation can spell out this unusual phenomenon except a yearning certain men (in some cases women) had to pursue a higher level of discipleship with Christ. Being stripped of all self-reliance in the hot barrenness of the desert environment, their ears could be sharply tuned to the voice of God. Skip Moen describes the mindset of the Desert Fathers as men who understood, “Heaven on earth is not found in opulent surroundings. It is found in stinky mangers, hostile wastelands, the edges of humanity and the places no one wants to be.“

In this yearning, they were motivated to follow certain scriptural precedents.

Precedent # 1: Singleness

Paul spoke of the gift or calling of celibacy to the Corinthians:

³²I would like you to be free from concern. An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord’s affairs—how he can please the Lord. ³³But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world—how he can please his wife— ³⁴and his interests are divided. (1 Corinthians 7:32-34)

Eventually the movement of these hermits would evolve into a monastic movement with communities of monks. The original meaning of the word monk is “single.” These were men of an undivided, single and solitary focus.

Precedent # 2: Poverty

Another important strand in Desert Fathers goes back to the instructions which Jesus gave to the seventy-two missionaries to take no provision for the journey as they went:

Do not take a purse or bag or sandals… (Luke 10:4)

Like these early adventurers for Jesus’ kingdom, the Desert Fathers were pioneers, with nothing to go on but the examples of the biblical saints and the call of the mission they were to fulfill. Their call to poverty compelled them to innovate a new life and create a new culture in the desert.

Precedent # 3: Cross Bearing

Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” (Matthew 16:24)

These men lived lives of extreme discipline and self-denial. In some cases, it was too extreme. But these extremes may have been necessary to be a witness against the church’s increasing embrace of the world.

Precedent # 4: Preparation for Martyrdom

The primary Greek word for “witness” (Acts 1:8) in the Bible is μάρτυς (martus) from which we get the word martyr. Overtime as believers increasingly faced death for Christ, this came to be seen as a witness to the gospel. As the threat of martyrdom receded, the extreme life of discipline and renunciation came to be seen as a kind of substitute for martyrdom.

Anthony the Great

The most famous of the Desert Fathers is Anthony the Great.¹ Born in 251 in Egypt, Anthony had a radical conversion at age sixteen when he heard a sermon taken from the words of Jesus in Matthew 19:21:

If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.

In 285, as a young man, Anthony withdrew from civilization and ventured into the desert, giving away everything he owned. At first he lived in a desert region about 60 miles west of Alexandria. Later he moved to more distant locations in a search for the solitude he needed to center his attention more intensely on prayer and further disentangle himself from evil. According Athanasius, his biographer, the spiritual trials that Anthony endured over the ensuing decades prepared him for the remarkable movement that drew thousands into the barren wilderness. In Anthony, many found a leader who had faced his own demons and found a vision for a life deeper and richer than anything that even the best of the Roman Empire had to offer.²

Influence

They protected the church’s emerging doctrine of the Trinity.

In 325 the Council of Nicaea affirmed that Jesus Christ is true God of true God, begotten not made, of one essence with the Father. When Emperor Constantine, the sponsor of the Nicaean Council died, the new imperial regimes opposed those adhering this affirmation. Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, carried the torch to defend this truth, while it was being severely opposed. With his life under continuous threat and having to hide from his home in Alexandria for seventeen years, Anthony was for him a key source of support, protection and courage. In the sandy outskirts, Athanasius was able to escape while under the protection of Anthony and the other desert hermits. At one point, according to Athanasius, Anthony traveled to Alexandria and “denounced the Arians [those denying the deity of Christ], saying that their heresy was the last of all and a forerunner of Antichrist.” The Christian historian Sozomen (400-450) wrote that, “The monks were prepared to subject their necks to the sword rather than to swerve from the Nicene doctrines.” Had it not been for the protection of these Desert Fathers, the defenders of the Nicene doctrine would have been arrested and eventually killed. This would have spelled a probable end for biblical orthodox truth.³

They protected civilization.

Overtime the Desert Fathers built gathered communities known as monasteries which played a decisive role in the West as oases of civilization in a world descending into barbarism. Eventually, these monks protected civilization by preserving knowledge through copying manuscripts, which saved classical and religious texts from being lost. They preserved and systematically copied two main categories of essential texts: religious works that formed the foundation of Christian faith and a significant body of classical Greco-Roman literature. Most importantly was the preservation of the Bible. The most notable surviving example includes the 4th-century Codex Sinaiticus, found at St. Catherine’s Monastery. This is the old known copy of the entire Bible. Monks copied important philosophical works from ancient Greece and Rome, including the writings of Aristotle and Plato. In the Middle Ages, some of these Greco-Roman works were reinterpreted through a Christian lens.

They mediated conflicts in society.

By the third and fourth centuries certain Desert Fathers acquired considerable power precisely because of their position outside society. Their renunciation of sex, marriage, and property lifted them out of kinship and property networks. This, combined with their reputation for total devotion to God, favorably positioned them to be “third party” mediators and arbiters from quarreling villagers to powerful political leaders. Their radical independence enabled them to intervene with great authority even in public affairs.⁴

Conclusion

The Desert Fathers, though extreme to many, in fact served a vital role for the preservation and advance of God’s Story of Grace. In once sense, their separation was to preserve the reality of what radical discipleship could look like to a church that would move toward greater complacency and comfort. These desert hermits would separate from society becoming an example and inspiration of reformation movements in doctrine and spiritual life for centuries to come. This would allow society to form along the two tracts: increasing scale and growth of social structures of the state (the one) and the radical call of discipleship (the many).⁵The Trappist Monk, Thomas Merton, summarizes their importance and spiritual brilliance toward the larger society:

They were men who did not believe in letting themselves be passively guided and ruled by a decadent state, and who believed that there was a way of getting along without slavish dependence on accepted, conventional values. But they did not intend to place themselves above society. They did not reject society with proud contempt, as if they were superior to other men.

As stated earlier, in so doing, they halted the church (and the world) from descending into mass conformity so that humanity, in the development of history, could embrace the mutual and self-giving life of the Trinity.

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The first Desert Father was Paul of Thebes, also known as St. Paul the First Hermit. He is traditionally regarded as the earliest Christian hermit, living in the Theban desert in Egypt. A biography written by St. Jerome recounts his life of solitude, prayer, and reliance on divine provision.
In Alexandria, the theologian Origen (who lived in the early third century) had taught new converts about Christianity and amazed them with his renunciations, including sleeping on the floor, going barefoot, extreme fasting, and abstaining completely from wine. Origen did not invent the idea that one must pursue purity of heart in order to understand the deeper spiritual meanings of Scripture. But his teaching ministry at Alexandria in the early third century gave this idea a deep and longstanding influence in the church. It was from the church at Alexandria that Christianity’s first ascetics went out to the Egyptian desert, taking with them the great teacher’s deep insights into the reading of the Bible and the quest for holiness.
The Desert Fathers appeared to be a remnant given by God to preserve Christian truth affirming the promise of Jesus that the gates of hell would not prevail. (Matthew 16:18)
For example, a Desert Father by the name of Apollo more than once resolved conflicts over land boundaries between pagan and Christian visitors. In another instance, he converted a group of pagan priests, discipled them, and turned them over to the local parishes. Another example is John of Lycopolis, counseled Emperor Theodosius, as well as generals, tribunes, and wives of military officers.
The great developments have occurred in history when ideas which were developed or preserved in the margins of society take root in society. Such examples would be representative democracy, the Protestant Reformation, universal education.

The Council Of Nicaea: How the Church Came to Universally Affirm that Jesus Is Truly God (John 1:1)

**portrayal of Constantine before the bishops of Nicaea**

Constantine (AD 272-337) became the first Roman Emperor to convert to Christianity. After ascending to his throne in AD 306, he would go on to defeat his greatest rival, Licinus, in AD 324, to make his control over the empire secure. Having reached this perch, he faced an even greater threat to the strength and unity of his empire: a theological division within the rapidly growing Christian movement. This division was regarding whether or not Jesus Christ is truly God, equal in nature to the Father. This issue, if not addressed, would escalate a social rift that could eventually spread across three continents. To stave this off, he summoned a council of all the bishops (leaders over a region of churches) for the first ecumenical (worldwide) council. This became known as the Council of Nicaea. This would establish a powerful move forward within God’s Story of Grace. This council would develop the foundational creedal statement forever shaping the universal church’s belief in the deity of Christ. It would begin the process of formally unifying the beliefs and identity of a movement which had spread to millions in just three centuries. The diversity of the many churches would be brought closer together in the unity and oneness of faith, reflecting the diversity and oneness of the Trinity on earth.

The Council

The controversy that led to Nicaea had two key figureheads: Alexander and Arius,¹ both from Alexandria Egypt. Arius taught that Jesus was a created being, less than God. Alexander, in strong opposition, affirmed that Jesus was fully God, equal to the Father. Arius’ view was increasing in popularity, in part because he was able to put his teaching in witty rhymes set to catchy tunes. Even the dockhands on the wharves at Alexandria could hum the ditties while unloading fish. To him, the idea of Jesus being equal in divinity with the Father, threatened the oneness of God. In sharp contrast for Alexander, reducing Christ to a created being called into question the very heart of the Christian faith. If Jesus is not truly God then he alone is not sufficient to save humanity from sin.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” (John 1:14)

“I and the Father are one.” (John 10:30)

“Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9)

“For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.” (Colossians 2:9)

“Christ, who is God over all.” (Romans 9:5)

“Our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13)

Scriptures Alexander Would Have Used

Constantine appealed to them to come to agreement so that it would not cause commotion among the people they led.² His appeal was ineffective, and the controversy continued. To the emperor’s own mind, whether Jesus Christ was equally divine with the Father was a trivial matter in comparison with the unity of the Empire. Arius and Alexander, on the other hand, understood the consequences of the issue had unparalleled importance. So, without the two parties coming to agreement, Constantine initiated a conference of bishops to decide the issue.

On AD 325, about 300³bishops set foot upon the town of Nicaea, in modern day Turkey, along with thousands of other deacons and elders.⁴ In the conference hall where they gathered was a table in which lay an open copy of the Gospels, which was there to express the scripture as their ultimate authority. For three centuries they and their spiritual ancestors experienced periodic persecutions instigated by various emperors. Not that long ago they experienced their most fierce persecution under Diocletian. Now they were actually gathered before the leading ruler of the land as allies with him.⁵Constantine entered the hall without his customary train of soldiers showing that he was operating in the spirit of peace. As a mark of his reverence for them, he would not take his seat until the bishops nodded their assent. Like the king in chess, Constantine occupied a prominent position, but he did not actually do very much as the council went underway.⁶ He spoke only briefly compelling these men of the church to come to some agreement on the questions dividing them. “Division in the church is worse than war,” he declared solemnly. The once-despised religion was on its way to becoming acknowledged and favored by the state. This was all a monumental change for these leaders of the church.

The Controversy

The various sides in the conflict each raised their own points, and from the start there was a tremendous argument. It was possibly Bishop Hosius of Cordova (modern Spain), a theological adviser of the emperor, who suggested that the focus of the debate should be around the Greek word, homoousios. The word, drawn from two Greek words, means “of the same substance.”⁷This is very different to the modern idea of a physical “substance” like milk or copper. It means something more like “being” or “nature.” When homoousios is applied to Jesus Christ, it means that his nature (substance) was divine in the same way as God the Father is divine, not inferior or different. Jesus Christ was truly God alongside the Father. As the debate centered around homoousios, the two parties interpreted the word in two different ways as it related to the nature of Jesus Christ. It came down to whether you will put an additional i (Greek letter for i is iota) or not.

HOMOOUSIAS=SAME SUBSTANCE
HOMOIOUSIAS=SIMILAR SUBSTANCE (the i between the two oo’s-oio-changes the meaning of the word from same to similar)

Leaders	Viewpoint
Alexander	of the same substance— homoousios
Arius	of a similar substance— homoiousios

As the debate continued, homoousias rather than homoiousias won out.

This is the agreement of faith that the great council came to:

We believe in one God, the Father almighty, Maker of heaven and earth,
and of all things visible and invisible.
And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only-begotten,
begotten of the Father before all ages.
Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten not made,⁸
of one essence [homoousias] with the Father by whom all things were made;
who for us men and for our salvation, came down from heaven,
and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary
and became man.
And He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate,
and suffered, and was buried.
And the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures;
and ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of the Father;
and He shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead;
whose Kingdom shall have no end.
And in the Holy Spirit.⁹

This creed was agreed to and signed by the nearly 300 members of council. Only five refused to sign. Two of those five did sign later.

Importance of the Nicaean Council

The Nicene Creed is the basis of all other creeds. It’s difficult to overstate the importance of this moment. It was the first conciliar (worldwide) creed since Christianity began as a movement. It formed the basis of how conciliar counsels would function afterword. These counsels would help to define what is clearly taught in scripture on the most important matters of doctrine and faith.

The Nicene Creed would begin to formulate the standard for the definition of the Trinity. In affirming the divinity of Jesus the foundations for the Trinity were being laid in a clear way. Through the work of Athanasius and Basil (among others), they would provide the definitions and language to give clarity to the doctrine of the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity is the most distinctive and important picture of God from the Christian faith. It may be no accident, but providential, that the ideas and concepts around this doctrine were the first to be creedally and universally formed.

The Nicene Creed brought greater order and unity to Christianity. With the Christian faith numbering perhaps as many as 15 million, existing on three continents and innumerable cultures; this was the first authoritative statement which was declared and enforced for the entire church. This further established the development of the church into the unity and diversity of the Trinity. With all of the beautiful and wonderful diversity which was the church before Nicaea, there would now be an increased unity or oneness to hold the diversity together.⁹

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Most historians of the Council of Nicaea begin their story with the fiery exchange of words between Arius and Alexander. But the discussion of the nature of Christ has a much longer history in the church. The great third-century theologian Origen, for example, pressed a bishop named Heraclides to define the relationship of Christ to God the Father. After much careful questioning, Heraclides admitted to believing in two Gods but clarified that “the power is one.” Origen reminded Heraclides that some Christians would “take offense at the statement that there are two Gods. We must express the doctrine carefully to show in what sense they are two, and in what sense the two are one God.”
Emperor Constantine’s letter to Alexander and Arius, which was sent through Hosius, the Bishop of Cordova: “Concerning divine providence, let there be among you one faith, one understanding, and one agreement about the Almighty. But as for the things which you discuss in detail with each other during your trivial inquiries, if you do not arrive at one conclusion, they should remain in your own head, kept hidden in the secret recesses of your mind. Indeed, let remarkable shared friendship, true faith, honor towards God, and observance of the law remain unshaken among you. Return to showing friendship and favor to one another. Embrace the whole people once again. When you have cleansed your own souls, acknowledge each other as brothers once again, for friendship is often pleasant after a hateful situation once it has reconciled.“
About 1,800 bishops were invited.
To quote Eusebius: “The most distinguished of God’s ministers from all the churches which abounded in Europe, Africa, and Asia assembled here. The one sacred building, as if stretched by God, contained people from [a very long list of nations]. There were more than 300 bishops, while the number of elders, deacons and the like was almost incalculable. Some of these ministers of God were eminent for their wisdom, some for the strict living, and patient endurance of persecution, and others for all three. Some were venerable because of their age, others were conspicuous for their youth and mental vigor, and others were only just appointed. The Emperor provided them all with plenty of food.”
Just before a decisive battle in 312, Constantine became the first emperor to convert to the faith of those who claimed to be Christ followers.
Generations of critics have accused him of manipulating the proceedings, jamming words into the creed, and generally trumping theology with politics, but in fact he mainly sat and listened. An ambitious politician and effective propagandist, Constantine had come to power in the usual swirl of conflict and intrigue.
The term “homoousios” breaks down from the Greek words “homos” meaning same and “ousia” meaning “of one substance” or “of one being.” Brought together as one word, “homoousios” means “of the same substance.” Other Greek words used in the debates at Nicaea—words unclear to speakers of non-Greek languages, such physis (nature), and prosopon (person)—bore meanings drawn from pre-Christian philosophers.
Most of the pastors, however, recognized that something more specific was needed to exclude the possibility of Arian teaching. For this purpose they produced another creed, probably from Palestine. Into it they inserted an extremely important series of phrases: “True God of true God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father. . . . “
Following the Second Ecumenical Council in Constantinople in 381, the Creed was further supplemented with the following: And we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life, Who proceeds from the Father; who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; who spoke by the prophets. In one Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins. I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.
It is important to realize that the Nicaean Council sought to make clear what was in the scripture. There is nothing within the statements of the Council contributors or the Council statements which indicates that they saw themselves as doing nothing more than clarifying what is in scripture. They did not see themselves as an authority beside or alongside of scripture, but they saw scripture as their only authority.

What Caused the Early Church to Explode in Growth Against All Odds? (Matthew 28:19)

Christianity brought the first nonviolent revolution that changed the world from the inside out through conversion and discipleship. Far from causing violence, in its first 300 years, it was the brunt of periods of localized to widespread and systematic persecution and outright cruelty. This was experienced from the beginning (see Acts 8:1-4). The majority of its adherents were mostly poor, with little to no social status or influence. The Roman Empire consisted of 60 million people living over 2 million square miles (the continental United States is just over 3 million square miles), with over 30 nations and dozens of cultures connected by 250,000 miles of roads. The social and cultural barriers were vast, and the conditions were often hostile and dangerous. Yet, in 300 years, it went from a few hundred adherents to 35 million people (57% of the Roman Empire). Below are the projected conversion growth rates according to Rodney Stark¹:

7,500 Christians by the end of the first century (0.02% of sixty million people);
40,000 Christians by 150 AD (0.07%)
200,000 by 200 AD (0.35%)
2 million by 250 AD (2%)
6 million by 300 AD (10%)
34 million by 350 AD (57%)

Nothing like this type of revolution had ever occurred anywhere in the world. To imagine that in its early days (anywhere before AD 250), it would become the dominant religion in the whole Empire would be beyond the wildest imagination. The question before us is how did the liberating power of the Holy Spirit spread from Pentecost to reach and transform millions in just three centuries? The heart and core of the answer lies in the command Jesus gave to his first followers just after the resurrection:

“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations…”
Matthew 28:19

In this article, we will trace the early expansion of Christianity and then examine the core reasons that caused it to grow so dramatically. In this, we will see that Christianity emerged as the first decentralized mass movement of people, bringing new levels of personal freedom to millions while being linked to the same life and truth of the gospel. God further shaped humanity into the trinitarian image with increased liberty (diversity) and one gospel (unity).

Initial Messianic Movement

The Jesus’ movement started within Judaism. At Pentecost (AD 33), there were 3,000 who believed in Jesus as the Messiah. (Acts 2:41) Many of these were visiting Jerusalem from sixteen different locations outside the sacred city, some as far as Rome, 2,500 miles away. (Acts 2:9-10) Among the thousands who embraced Jesus as the Messiah, they would have taken their newfound faith back to the places where they resided and started embryonic churches.² There was a Christian group in Damascus (about 140 miles north of Jerusalem) maybe as early as AD 34.³

It is largely believed that a church was started in Rome by those who returned to that capital city from Pentecost. Many budding churches started as Jews returned to their places of residence after Pentecost. Nearly twenty-five years later (ca. AD 57), James and the elders at the Jerusalem church affirmed that many thousands of Jews believed:

You see, brother, how many thousands of Jews have believed, and all of them are zealous for the law. (Acts 21:20)

When it is stated that many thousands believed, the Greek term used is μυριάς (muriad), meaning ten thousand. Had there been ten thousand by this date, that would mean, overall, that Jesus’ movement made very little impression upon the Jewish people. Emperor Claudius took a census of the Roman Empire (AD 48), and it revealed that there were 7 million Jews in the Roman Empire, with 2.3 million in Israel.⁴ Perhaps around 400,000 were in Alexandria, Egypt. If these numbers are accurate, that would mean that 1/10th of 1% of the Jewish population embraced Jesus as the Messiah. That would hardly be a ripple in the ocean of the Jewish world at the time.

Paul and the Gentile Movement

With the conversion of Cornelius (Acts 10), the first Gentile believer, to Jesus’ movement around AD 40, a pivotal shift began to occur. The Christian faith would become predominantly Gentile in a short period of time, maybe as early as the mid-first century. The apostle Paul, though not alone, was central to accelerating this shift. By AD 49, when Paul reached Thessalonica, his opponents proclaimed:

“These men who have caused trouble all over the world have now come here…” (Acts 17:6)

Paul was formidable in taking Christianity in a westward direction (as the map above shows Israel, Syria, Turkey, and Greece) on his three missionary journeys which occurred over 13 years. (Acts 13-14, 16-17, 18:23–20:38) Though Paul was a notable missionary of Jesus’ movement, the spread of the faith took place through thousands of disciples, the vast majority unmentioned in the records of history.

300 Years Into 3 Continents

By AD 100, the Church had been largely established in all parts of the Roman Empire. Rodney Stark points out that of the 17 cities which were 1,000 miles from Jerusalem, 12 had a congregation by AD 100. All of the 17 cities had one congregation by AD 180. Of the 14 cities more than 1,000 miles from Jerusalem, 8 cities had one congregation by AD 180. By AD 250, all of them had a church.

Asia

Antioch: This became the second major home and hub of the Christian movement outside of Jerusalem. It was the third largest city in the Roman Empire, boasting 500,000 residents by the end of the third century. It is here that the gentile identity of Jesus’ movement was formed, as they were the first to be called Christians. (Acts 11:26) The church was predominantly Greek-speaking and spread throughout much of Syria. By the time of the Council of Nicaea (AD 325), the church had no less than 20 bishops from Syria present.⁵ This indicates the presence of the faith in many towns and cities in several different parts of the region.

Ephesus: We know little of the missionaries who labored here after Paul. One exception is the account of Gregory Thaumaturgos, known as the “Worker of Wonders.” This man, a son of prominent and wealthy parents, was a native of Pontus. In the course of his studies, he became a Christian. In the year AD 240, he was made bishop. He set out to preach the gospel to the pagans of his region. It is said that when he ascended to leadership, only seventeen Christians were there, while thirty years later, at his death, only seventeen pagans remained.

Edessa: The church spread to Edessa (southeastern Turkey). At this point, in the first century, it lay just beyond the Roman Empire, yet it had close ties with Antioch. It was later claimed that the founder of the church there had been one of the 72 disciples of Jesus (Luke 10:1-3), a man named Addai. According to Eusebius in his Ecclesiastical History, a terrible illness had stumped the court physicians of King Abgar, ruler of Edessa. In his desperation, he prayed to Jesus, pleading with him to come to his capital of Edessa. Eusebius records that the apostle Thomas commissioned Thaddeus to go there. “When he came to these places, he both healed Abgar by the word of Christ and astonished all there with the extraordinary miracles he performed.” Serapion, bishop of Antioch in about AD 200, consecrated an Edessene Christian named Palut to be bishop of the capital. From here, the gospel would spread to regions that are now Iraq, Armenia, and India.

Armenia: According to tradition, the disciple Thaddeus (Matthew 10:3) arrived in Armenia in AD 43, where he was joined by Bartholomew (Mark 10:3) in AD 60. Both men are said to have died there as martyrs. We also know that Syriac missionaries from Edessa reached Armenia by the third century. The traditional account, however, honors Gregory the Illuminator (AD 257–331) as one who advanced Christianity in Armenia. Gregory was himself an Armenian, a prince who was educated as a Christian in Caesarea (present-day Turkey). Upon his return, he found himself, like Daniel in Babylon, imprisoned in a pit by the monarch Tiridates III (reigned AD 287–330) for refusing to participate in pagan sacrifices. Gregory was recalled from his pit after twelve years to cure Tiridates, who had descended into a mysterious state of madness.

India: There is a body of evidence that shows the apostle Thomas traveled east, through Syria and Iraq, and reached India. He is believed to have landed on the Malabar Coast (present-day Kerala) and established one of the world’s oldest Christian communities.⁶

Europe

Rome: Peter preached in Judea and Samaria, before traveling to Antioch, Asia Minor (Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, and Bithynia), and finally to Rome.⁷ Christianity appears to have had a significant presence in the city of Rome by the late AD 40s. This rapid growth can be partly attributed to the large number of Christians who converged on Rome from other parts of the Empire. Paul referenced all of the disciples who had moved there from different parts of the world as evidence of this in Romans 16.⁸ There were some 30,000 Christians there by AD 250. Most were poorer and spoke Greek, which was the language of the lower classes, as opposed to Latin.

France: Christians from Rome went as missionaries to France, known at that time as Gaul. Irenaeus (AD 130-200), a prominent bishop in France, speaks of using both the Celtic and Latin languages, which would indicate that the church had gone beyond the Romanized people in France.⁹ By the end of the third century, many churches had been established in Spain.

Africa

Egypt: North Africa became rich with churches. Mark (Acts 12:12, 25; 15:37), who was the writer of the biblical gospel that bears his name and a traveling companion of Peter, was reported to have founded the Church of Alexandria around AD 49. There are further indications that he established the gospel presence in Libya, which was his place of birth. Simon of Cyrene (Matthew 27:32, Mark 15:21, and Luke 23:26), who carried the cross of Jesus, was also believed to be a strong influence in Libya. Alexandria was an especially strong center, producing such Christian thinkers as Clement (AD 150-c215) and Origen (AD 185-254).

Ethiopia: Christianity became the official religion of Ethiopia during the reign of King Ezana (AD 320-360). Irenaeus of Lyons (see above), writing in AD 180, reports that Simon Backos preached “the coming in the flesh of God” in his homeland of Ethiopia. Going back even further, Luke writes of the 1st-century conversion of an Ethiopian official (Acts 8:26-40). Could this official have started the first church in Ethiopia? In that it became the official religion of the nation in the fourth century, it is reasonable to think that it underwent at least a few centuries of steady Christian development.

Tunis & Algeria: There was rapid growth further west in what is today known as Tunis and Algeria. The churches here were the first Latin speaking churches. And out of them flowed some of the great Latin Christian literature of Tertullian and Cyprian, to be followed later by the famous Augustine. Augustine resided in modern day Algeria.¹⁰

What Caused Christianity to Grow?

Root Cause # 1: A contagious move of the Spirit. The fire of the Holy Spirit, starting at Pentecost, would ignite a transforming and unstoppable blaze from person to person to person. As God’s Story of Grace spread, millions of people discovered a new identity and empowerment to live lives of purpose beyond anything their culture provided for them. This is what Jesus promised would happen through the power of the Holy Spirit:

But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. (Acts 1:8)

Root Cause # 2: The message of the gospel. The message of the gospel was seen as the only and ultimate Good News for all of humanity to bring righteousness before God:

¹⁶For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile. ¹⁷For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.” (Romans 1:16-17)

It was this message that led to a rapid spread:

⁶You became imitators of us and of the Lord, for you welcomed the message in the midst of severe suffering with the joy given by the Holy Spirit. ⁷And so you became a model to all the believers in Macedonia and Achaia. ⁸The Lord’s message rang out from you not only in Macedonia and Achaia—your faith in God has become known everywhere. (1 Thessalonians 1:6-8)

Root Cause # 3: An exponential reproduction of discipleship among everyday believers. The movement of the Christian faith was a decentralized movement of everyday people who were equipped and trained to disciple more everyday people. As Paul writes:

Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. (1 Corinthians 1:26)

One evidence of this is that in the first three hundred years, the church faced several waves of violence and cruelty. In some cases it was very severe and was meant to severely cripple and wipe out the faith. Yet, these persecutions never worked because the early church was faithfully engaged in training and maturing leaders and missionaries to continue the spread of the gospel. As Paul instructed Timothy:

And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others. (2 Timothy 2:2)

For example, when severe persecution hit the Jerusalem church, they had to locally disband. Luke records that the persecution had a reverse effect:

¹On that day a great persecution broke out against the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria. ²Godly men buried Stephen and mourned deeply for him. ³But Saul began to destroy the church. Going from house to house, he dragged off both men and women and put them in prison.⁴Those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went. (Acts 8:1-4)

What is significant is that it was not the apostles who spread out. They stayed in Jerusalem. When Paul was jailed in Rome, he described the emboldening effect it was having on other believers:

¹²Now I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that what has happened to me has actually served to advance the gospel. ¹³As a result, it has become clear throughout the whole palace guard and to everyone else that I am in chains for Christ. ¹⁴And because of my chains, most of the brothers and sisters have become confident in the Lord and dare all the more to proclaim the gospel without fear. (Philippians 1:12-14)

Because Christianity was so decentralized it led to an exponential spread of the faith. Like interest in an investment, it grew slowly at first but then rapidly gained exponential momentum. At the root of all of this is that the church, in the power of the Spirit, discipled everyday believers, in the gospel of Jesus.

Conclusion

Christianity unleashed a decentralized movement which snowballed from thousands to millions of converts in 300 years. It brought a new movement of compassion and care, equality and dignity, freedom and purpose to everyday people. It expanded the realization of personal freedom in unparalleled ways. The world advanced in the shape of the Trinity coming to greater personal freedom. To make this sustainable, it would need to find a unity within all of the new diversity which was created on three continents and in dozens of countries and cultures. This diversity could lead to schisms and break in the church. God would have a solution to this. So the Story of Grace continues…

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Stark would be the first to admit that those figures are anything but precise, but they provide plausible limits.
Small groups of people with with a loose affiliation who were following Jesus through simple practices of discipleship which were modelled for them. (see Acts 2:42-47)
Because Paul went to arrest and detain Christians there, this is evidence of a church formed very early on. Meanwhile, Saul was still breathing out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples. He went to the high priestand asked him for letters to the synagogues in Damascus, so that if he found any there who belonged to the Way, whether men or women, he might take them as prisoners to Jerusalem. (Acts 9:1-2)
This number is not agreed upon by scholar. Yet, it is safe to sat that this number is in no way unreasonable.
Church organization consisted of a bishop (higher ranking leader) overseeing several churches in an area.
Sean McDowell writes: Early church writings consistently link Thomas to India and Parthia. Three points stand out regarding their witness to Thomas. First, the testimony that he went to India is unanimous, consistent, and reasonably early. Second, we have no contradictory evidence stating Thomas did not go to India or Parthia or that he went elsewhere. Third, fathers both in the East and in the West confirm the tradition. Since the beginning of the third century it has become an almost undisputable tradition that Thomas ministered in India. In addition to the traditions about Thomas in India, there is additional evidence that Christianity made it to India by at least the second century, if not earlier.
While the Bible doesn’t explicitly state his presence in Rome, many early Church Fathers, like Irenaeus and Clement of Rome, wrote about Peter’s ministry and leadership in the Roman church.
France was divided into Romanized and non-Romanized areas.
Marg Mowczko writes, “Of the twenty-nine people, ten are women, and seven of the ten women are described in terms of their ministry (Phoebe, Prisca, Mary, Junia, Tryphena, Tryphosa, Persis, and perhaps Rufus’s mother also). By comparison, only three men are described in terms of their ministry (Aquila, Andronicus, Urbanus), and two of these men are ministering alongside a female partner (Aquila with Prisca, Andronicus with Junia). These are numbers worth remembering.”
The theologian Thomas Oden has pointed out that the Christianity in Africa influenced the Christians in Europe well before European Christian would influence Africa.

How the Christian Ethic Of Marriage Improved the Lives Of Women and Children (Matthew 19:1-9)

The original sexual revolution began at Pentecost (Acts 2:1-3) when the Holy Spirit started a movement of restoring men and women to an exclusive sexual union of marriage. This is one man married to one woman in a sacred physical and spiritual connection which brings maturity in love and grows families. This marriage, intended from creation, reflects the mutual and self-giving love which is reflected in the Trinity, where God said:

²⁶“Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness… ²⁷So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them… (Genesis 1:26-27)

This brought a complete overturning of the sexual morality of the first century world, as we will soon see. The epicenter of this revolution is described in Jesus’ teaching on the sacredness of marriage. This would be used by the Holy Spirit to radically expand liberation and freedom in the world on a whole new level, especially for women and children. Perhaps few developments would prove to be more important in the ongoing movement of God’s Story of Grace.

In this article we will look at the moral condition of the Roman world when it came to sexual practices, and how the ethic of Jesus would bring a transforming liberation to millions through the ongoing impact of the Holy Spirit increasing a mutual and self-giving love in the world

Sexual Inequity In the Roman Empire

Marriage Inequity

Sexual relations were a major source of inequity between men and women. In the pagan world in which Christianity developed, girls were commonly married off at very young ages to much older men. In some cases girls were married before puberty. This was, of course, without their consent. Many famous Roman women had been child brides:

Octavia, daughter of Emperor Claudius, married at eleven.
Nero’s mother Agrippina married at twelve.
Quintilian, the famed rhetorician must have married a twelve-year-old girl who bore him a son at the age of thirteen.
The historian Tacitus married a thirteen-year-old.

Plutarch (AD 46–120) reported that Romans “gave their girls in marriage when they were twelve years old, or even younger.” The historian Dio Cassius (AD 155–229) agreed: “Girls are considered to have reached marriageable age on completion of their twelfth year.” This was considered normal, and the practice had very few objectors.

One reason Roman men married young girls was because there was a shortage of women. This was caused by high levels of infanticide (killing of infants) of girls, often times by abandoning them to nature. Even in large families more than one daughter was hardly ever reared. According to historian Rodney Stark, “a study based on inscriptions was able to reconstruct six hundred families and found that of these, only six had raised more than one daughter.” This meant there always was a considerable surplus of marriageable men. The best estimate is that there were 131 males per 100 females in Rome. The surplus was even higher in other areas of the Roman Empire. Because of this acute shortage, it was common for women to marry again and again, not only following the death of a husband, but also after a divorce. In fact, state policy penalized women under fifty who did not remarry, so second and third marriages became common, especially since most women married men far older than themselves. For example, Cicero’s daughter, Tullia, was not untypical. She married at 16 ,widowed at 22, remarried at 23, divorced at 28; married again at 29, divorced at 33. She died soon after childbirth at 34. Another woman was said to have married eight times within five years.

Class Inequity

In the ancient world sexual agency was solely in the hands of powerful men. Sexual offenses, including rape, could carry a death penalty. Prostitutes, however, were not given this legal protection and the rape of a slave would only be considered a crime if it was deemed to cause property damage against the slave’s owner. Women who married weren’t expected to attain any pleasure or enjoyment, they simply wedded in order to abide by the legal code and procreate. Moreover, the subservient wife was expected to turn a blind eye to her husband’s sexual infidelity. Males were allowed to sleep around as much as they liked so long as their mistress was unmarried.

Tom Holland has summarized the prevailing outlook:

Sex was nothing if not an exercise of power. As captured cities were to the swords of the legions, so the bodies of those used sexually were to the Roman man. To be penetrated, male or female, was to be branded as inferior: to be marked as womanish, barbarian, servile … In Rome, men no more hesitated to use slaves and prostitutes to relieve themselves of their sexual needs than they did to use the side of a road as a toilet.

Divorce and Remarriage

The teaching of Jesus on the sacredness of marriage and sexuality stood in the sharpest contrast from the picture just painted. In distinction from the rampant adultery and divorce of pagan society¹, Jesus words came as a devastating rebuke:

And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another, commits adultery. (Matthew 19:9).

The early church was unswerving in its commitment to the standard set by Jesus. This standard of Jesus caused the early Christians to reject the double standard that gave men sexual license. In consequence, Paul taught the equality of union between a husband and a wife:

²But since sexual immorality is occurring, each man should have sexual relations with his own wife, and each woman with her own husband. ³The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. ⁴The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife. (1 Corinthians 7:2-4)

No one in the culture of the day would have struggled with the first part of v.4:

The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband.

The second declaration was completely new and shocking to those not sufficiently adapted to the new faith.

In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife.

With this new ethic, Rodney Stark makes this interesting assessment:

In fact, devout Christian married couples may have had sex more often than did the average pagan couple, because brides were more mature when they married and because husbands were less likely to take up with other women.

Focused Look at Matthew 19

The chapter begins with the Pharisees coming to test Jesus on divorce and remarriage.

Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?” (Matthew 19:3)

Jesus responds:

⁴“Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ ⁵and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? ⁶So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” (Matthew 19:4-6)

When Jesus references the beginning, he is taking his hearers back to the Bible’s first chapters of Genesis when God created the original man and woman:

²²Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.

²³The man said,

“This is now bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called ‘woman,’
for she was taken out of man.”

²⁴That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.

Here, the phrase one flesh is descriptive of the union of bodies sexually which ties together the life-long marriage. From God’s eyes, sex is marital and marriage is sexual. But Jesus adds a sacred dimension with the phrase: what God has joined together. So, our human partnerships are not merely human; they are orchestrated by God. This means that before God there is no casual sex, and there is no easy divorce. With this stricter standard, Jesus’ questioners press him by appealing to the law of Moses:

⁷“Why then,” they asked, “did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?” ⁸Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. ⁹I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.” (Matthew 19:7-9)

According to Jesus, not everything in the Old Testament represents the original intention of the Creator. Some Old Testament legislation was a concession to human stubbornness—because your hearts were hard. Jesus’ intention is the restoration of the original pattern as taught in Genesis. Since marriage is for life, divorce is allowed only for exceptions. This means that the Savior is taking all of the sexual energy between men and women and focusing it in on one sacred union. Only in this union does sex become life-giving, bringing the married couple into mature oneness and creating children. This would have major implications in the way men were to treat their wives:

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. (Ephesians 5:25)

The ethic of Christianity was a radical overturning of the power dynamic men had over women. Men are now to be servants of their wives. Glenn Scrivener descriptively writes: “Into this world came the Christian revolution, where sex is painted on the canvas of divine romance and where two equals unite in a sacred and unbreakable bond.”

The Changes It Brought to Society

Over time the ethic of Jesus brought incredible improvements to society. Here are three:

The lives of girls and women improved. Unsurprisingly the Jesus movement captured the heart of large numbers of women who had been disregarded or abused. In the 2nd century, Celsus (a critic of Christianity) wrote disparagingly that Christians “are able to convince only the foolish, dishonorable, and stupid, only slaves, women, and little children.” This sneering remark was a boast for the early church. They were honored to give a voice to the voiceless. There was a considerable improvement in the quality of life for many women. A pioneering study based on Roman funerary inscriptions demonstrated that 20 percent of the pagan women were twelve or younger when they married. Four percent were only ten. In contrast, only 7 percent of Christians were under thirteen. Half of pagan women were married before age fifteen, compared with 20 percent of Christians—and nearly half of Christian women (48 percent) had not married until they were eighteen or older. As the power of the Spirit transformed hearts with the ethic of Jesus, most Christian girls married when they were physically and emotionally mature. Most had a say in whom they married which made for more secure marriages.

The Christian population increased. The average fertility of pagan women was so low as to have resulted in a declining population, thus necessitating the admission of “barbarians” as settlers of empty estates in the empire and especially to fill the army. In contrast, the growing Christian communities did not have their sex ratios distorted by female infanticide.

Pedophilia became outlawed. In the ancient world sex with boys and girls was celebrated by writers like Juvenal, Petronius, Horace, Strato, Lucian, and Philostratus. The word they used was pederasty: love of children. Christians were uniformly disgusted by the practice. What the classical world called love, Christians called abuse. In the reign of the Christian emperor Justinian (527–565), pederasty was outlawed and could be prosecuted well after the abuse took place. Here the church influenced the state to legislate against the sexualization of children.

Conclusion

As God’s Spirit empowered men and women to live in the marriage ethic of Jesus, humanity continued to advance in God’s Story of Grace to reflect the mutual and self-giving love of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

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A survey of marriage contracts, conducted by Semitic scholar Markham J. Geller, going all the way back to ancient Babylon found that they always contained a divorce clause specifying payments and divisions of property with the cause of divorce needing to be nothing more than a husband’s whim.

How Pentecost Led to Gender Equality (Acts 2:17-18)

As God poured out his Spirit on humanity to advance his Story of Grace, he increased mutual and self-giving love by elevating the status of women. In fact, had Jesus and the movement he started not appeared, the world would be an immeasurably darker place for women. Yet, this promise of true female empowerment was prophesied by the prophet 800 years before Christ.. Peter references this at Pentecost:

¹⁷“‘In the last days, God says,
    I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy,
    your young men will see visions,
    your old men will dream dreams.
¹⁸Even on my servants, both men and women,
    I will pour out my Spirit in those days,
    and they will prophesy. (Acts 2:17-18)

In this article we’ll see that Jesus’ example, treatment and teaching provided the way for women to discover and grow up in full dignity which was unprecedented. In God’s Story of Grace this has had an extremely important impact through the centuries for gender rights, freedom, dignity in shaping the world to more closely reflect the mutual and self-giving love that exists between the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

The Culture of Jesus’ Day

During the days of Jesus, the status of women was considerably low. Consider how women were treated from a Roman, Greek and even Jewish perspective. Roman law placed a wife under the absolute control of her husband. He had ownership of her and all her possessions. This involved the power of life and death over his wife. Divorce was an easy legal formality that could be taken advantage of as often as desired. Women were not allowed to speak in public. In Greek society the woman’s situation was even worse. Because concubines were common, a wife’s role was simply to bear legitimate children and to keep house. Demosthenes wrote:

We have courtesans for the sake of pleasure, we have concubines for the sake of daily cohabitation, and we have wives for the purpose of having children legitimately and being faithful guardians for our household affairs.

In the case of a respectable Greek woman, she was not allowed to leave the house unless accompanied by a trustworthy male escort. A wife was not permitted to eat or interact with male guests in her husband’s home; she had to retire to her woman’s quarters. Girls were not allowed to go to school, and when they grew up, they were not allowed to speak in public. Jewish women, as well, were barred from public speaking. The oral law prohibited women from reading the scriptures out loud. Many Jewish men prayed each morning, “God, I thank you that I am not a Gentile, slave, or a woman.” More will be said of the Jewish attitude toward women as we look at the sharp contrast of Jesus’ attitude and treatment of them.

The Countercultural Ways of Jesus

The low status that Greek, Roman, and Jewish women was categorically challenged with the appearance of Jesus Christ. His actions and teachings raised the status of women to new heights, even to the dismay of his friends and enemies. Nancy Hardesty and Leah Scanzoni, authors of All We’re Meant To Be, make the profound point: “Jesus came to earth not primarily as a male but as a person. He treated women not primarily as females but as human beings.” Females were seen by Jesus, alongside of males, as genuine persons. James Hurly writes: “He did not perceive them primarily in terms of their sex, age, or marital status; he seems to have considered them in terms of their relation (or lack of one) to God.”

Let’s look at three countercultural ways Jesus elevated the dignity of women.

# 1: Jesus Taught Women

Jesus regularly addressed women directly while in public. This may seem like NO BIG DEAL. But in that culture (as described above) this was unusual for a man to do, especially one of prominence. The rabbinic oral law was quite explicit: “He who talks with a woman in public brings evil upon himself.” Another rabbinic teaching prominent in Jesus’ day taught, “One is not so much as to greet a woman.” For instance, the disciples were amazed to see Jesus talking with the Samaritan woman at the well of Sychar. (John 4:7-26)

Just then his disciples returned and were surprised to find him talking with a woman.
John 4:27

To interact with her required that he ignore the Jewish anti-Samaritan prejudices along with prevailing view that saw women as inferior. This did not stop him from starting a conversation with her in public. We can understand why his disciples were amazed to find him talking to a woman in public. Imagine how it must have stunned this woman for the Messiah to reach out to her and offer to quench the very thirst of her soul.

This example does not stand alone. Jesus also spoke freely with the woman taken in adultery (John 8:10–11); the widow of Nain (Luke 7:12–13); the woman with the bleeding disorder (Luke 8:48, Matt. 9:22, Mark 5:34); a woman who called to him from a crowd (Luke 11:27–28); the woman bent over for eighteen years (Luke 13:10-17), and a group of women on the route to the cross (Luke 23:27-31). When Lazarus died, Jesus comforted Martha with this promise containing the heart of the Christian gospel:

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?“
John 11:25-26

To teach a woman was unusual enough, but Jesus did more. He called for a verbal response from Martha.

Another important example is taken from a scene, again, while Jesus was with Mary, Martha and Lazarus, who entertained him at their home. (Luke 10:38-42) Martha assumed the traditional female role of preparing a meal for Jesus, her guest, while her sister Mary did what only men would do, namely, learn from Jesus’ teachings. Mary sits at the feet of Jesus and engages in theological study, much to her sister’s chagrin. The clear implication is that Mary is worthy of a rabbi’s theological instruction. This again shows the countercultural contrast for the time as Jesus made a practice of revealing great theological truths to women. By doing this he violated another rabbinic law: “Let the words of the Law be burned rather than taught to women.”

# 2: Jesus Had Female Disciples

Besides these open discussions, he has female disciples. In a culture where the idea of women travelling around with a group of men or having the status of disciple was seriously questionable, Jesus has a number of women who are included in his circle.

After this, Jesus traveled about from one town and village to another, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God. The Twelve were with him,and also some women who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases: Mary (called Magdalene) from whom seven demons had come out; Joanna the wife of Chuza, the manager of Herod’s household; Susanna; and many others. These women were helping to support them out of their own means.
Luke 8:1-3

It is notable that the first evangelist to lead others to Jesus was the woman at Sychar. (John 4:39-42) In addition, the final words of Jesus on the cross were heard by women who were standing there with Jesus before his death. (Matthew 27:55-56) The first people Jesus chose to appear to after his resurrection were women; not only that, but he instructed them to tell his disciples that he was alive. (John 20:17) In a culture where a woman’s testimony was considered of little value, Jesus elevated the value of women to the highest level.

Further, Jesus did not gloss over sin in the lives of the women he met. He held women personally responsible for their own sin as seen in his challenge to the woman at the well (John 4:16–18), the woman taken in adultery (John 8:10–11), and the sinful woman who anointed his feet. (Luke 7:44–50) Their sin was not condoned but confronted. They were called to responsibility because they were called to discipleship.

# 3: Jesus Dignified Women

The full intrinsic value of women is seen in how he spoke to the women he addressed. Jesus addressed the woman with the bleeding disorder tenderly as daughter and referring to the bent woman as a daughter of Abraham (Luke 13:16). Theologian Donald Bloesch explains that when “Jesus called the Jewish women ‘daughters of Abraham,’ thereby according them a spiritual status equal to that of men.” He further showed the value and dignity of women in his teachings by including female imagery. The parable of mending the garment, an everyday image from the female sphere, is coupled with the parable of making the wine, an everyday image from the male sphere (Luke 5.36-39).

Author Dorothy Sayers, a friend of C.S. Lewis, gives a helpful summary:

Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man—there had never been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, who never flattered or coaxed or patronized; who never made…jokes about them, never treated them either as ‘The women, God help us!’ or ‘The ladies, God bless them!’; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously, who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no ax to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unselfconscious.

She continues:

There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could possibly guess from the words of Jesus that there was anything ‘funny’ about woman’s nature.

It is because of the counterrevolutionary person and work of Jesus Christ; Paul would make this declaration which stands alone in the ancient world:

There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
Galatians 3:28

This is the golden declaration of gender equality: “YOU ARE ALL ONE IN CHRIST JESUS.” It is a momentous and authoritative assertion of gender worth and co-equality which would go on to bring large political and social sea change as the transforming power of the Spirit would sweep through the world.

Thus in the church the role of women held an unparalleled prominence over such diverse roles and wide swaths of society:

Phoebe was mentioned by Paul in Romans 16:1 to be a servant or “deacon” who taught in the Cenchreae church, which was in Greece.
Junia, who was in Rome, was considered by Paul outstanding among the apostles. (Romans 16:7)
Four women, Mary, Tryphena, Tryphosa and Persis are described as servants who “worked very hard in the Lord,” among those in Rome. (Romans 16:6, 12)
Priscilla is a co-worker, who along with her husband Aquilla, were planting a church in Rome. (Romans 16:3) They travelled with Paul to Ephesus (Acts 18:18-19) and while there encountered Apollos who “they invited him to their home and explained to him the way of God more adequately.” (Acts 18:26)
Chloe (1 Corinthians 1:11), Nympha (Colossians 4:15) opened their homes where the church met. They were in Greece and Asia Minor (modern Turkey).
Tabitha led a benevolence ministry in Joppa, Israel. (Acts 9:36)
Philip’s four daughters were all identified as prophets. (Acts 21:8,9) They were in Israel.
Women prophesied in the Greek city of Corinth. (1 Corinthians 11:5)

To have this many women listed so prominently in the letters of the New Testament writers displays a sharp counter cultural revolution in the role of women in the church.

Effects of Christianity on Culture

Women continued to be elevated to places of influence. Here is a list of notable examples:

In 112, Pliny the Younger noted in a letter to Emperor Trajan that he had tortured two young Christian women “who were called deaconesses.”
Clement of Alexandria (150–216) wrote of “women deacons.”
Origen (185–254) wrote this commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans: “This text teaches with the authority of the Apostle that… there are, as we have already said, women deacons in the Church, and that women… ought to be accepted in the diaconate.”

Historians now agree that women held positions of honor and authority in early Christianity that was very distinct from the world around them.

Men and women were equally honored in the early church. A study of Christian burials in Rome, based on 3,733 cases, found that Christian women were nearly as likely as Christian men to be commemorated with lengthy inscriptions. This “near equality in the commemoration of males and females is something that is peculiar to Christians, and sets them apart from the non-Christian populations of the city,” according to Brent Shaw, a scholar of Roman history. This was true not only of adults, but also of children, as Christians lamented the loss of a daughter as much as that of a son, which was especially unusual compared with groups of the time.

Conclusion

As Christianity spread throughout the world, its redemptive effects elevated women and set them free in many ways. With the advance of God’s Story of Grace, the Christian ethic through the power of the Holy Spirit declared equal worth and value for both men and women. Husbands were commanded to love their wives and not be harsh with their children. These principles were in direct conflict with the social and legal norms which gave absolute power of life and death to the husband/father over his family.

To this topic our next article turns…

How Mercy and Compassion Became Universal Virtues (Acts 4:32-35)

God brought within the world a revolution of mercy and compassion where the dignity and value of each human being became recognized and responded to in a way that was largely foreign in the world.¹ When the Holy Spirit entered into humanity at Pentecost the worth and dignity of people would be understood and embraced in much greater ways leading to a revolution of compassion and mercy. What this article will explore is looking at the suffering and life of the ancient world and how the advance of God’s Story of Grace brought an understanding of the alleviation of suffering through compassion at a greater level. Christianity developed a social network of communities of support and care that allowed mercy to spread and further shape the world to reflect the image of the Trinity–a world that would come closer to being able to express mutual and self-giving love.

Here is how it began.

The Holy Spirit Rebirths Compassion

After the Holy Spirit entered the 120 in the Upper Room (Acts 2:1-3), his power began to spread into communities where the new believers had a oneness, love and unity that reflected the mutual and self-giving love of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. For those in their community (the church) who were suffering, the natural goal was to elevate their lives through material and practical support. This reality is first seen with measurable clarity soon after Pentecost:

³²All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. ³³With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all ³⁴that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales ³⁵and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need. (Acts 4:32-35)

This is the first spark which would over time blaze into a spontaneous movement of compassion and relief leading to ongoing ministries of mercy around the world. This was desperately needed in the world the early Christians inhabited.

Life In the Ancient World

Overpopulation

The importance of mercy and compassion for the spread of God’s Story of Grace in the ancient world cannot be overstated. The Christian movement emerged mainly in urban areas which were densely populated. Having its start in Jerusalem it would later have central hubs in Antioch and then Rome. Jerusalem may have had 25,000 people. Antioch (the third largest city of the Roman Empire) had around 200,000. Rome, the largest city in the world, boasted around 450,000 inhabitants. Though cities then were less populated than today, they were significantly more dense. Cities of the first century had a population of 200 to 300 people per acre. That is tightly packed, especially when considering that overly populated cities like Calcutta have 100 to a 120 people per acre.

Housing and Sanitation

Because the cities in the Roman Empire were desirable places for many to live compared to rural areas, immigration mushroomed their size. As population density swelled, houses were tightly built together and not well constructed in many instances. Private houses were rare as people lived in the equivalent of apartments. The collapse of buildings was a regular fear. The only source of heat was wood or charcoal braziers.² This made homes smoky, especially in the winter. To avoid asphyxiation homes were kept drafty. To make matters worse, to dispose of sewage waste most people used chamber pots and pit latrines. When pots were used they were emptied in nearby ditches which served as sewers. Not uncommonly people would dump their waste into the street. This meant that housing was often smoky, damp and smelly. With these types of conditions, people lived much of their lives in public places away from their homes.

Sickness and Disease

With the type of housing and sanitation conditions mentioned above, disease and sickness was not uncommon. According to Rodney Stark’s, The Triumph of Christianity, a recent analysis of decayed human fecal remains in ancient Jerusalem found an abundance of tapeworm and whipworm eggs signaling this to be a prevalent problem. Infectious diseases like malaria, dysentery, typhoid, and various intestinal ailments were rampant. This suffering was intensified by malnutrition and food shortages. Even Luke records this occurring during the days of Emperor Claudius:

One of them, named Agabus, stood up and through the Spirit predicted that a severe famine would spread over the entire Roman world. (This happened during the reign of Claudius.) (Acts 11:28)

Only the Strong Survive

There was not a lot of motivation to address the suffering on a large scale because in the pagan cultures, they possessed no basis for the concept of the dignity of human persons. Without such a belief, the right to live was granted or withheld by family or society almost at a whim. It was natural for some to hold that the strong were naturally to be dominant and the weak were rightly trampled. From this mindset, mercy was seen as a character defect and compassion a misguided emotion. Tom Holland in his book, Dominion, states that many in the ancient world made a positive virtue of discarding and abandoning the weak. Referring to the practice of casting aside unwanted babies, he writes:

Across the Roman world, wailing at the sides of roads or on rubbish tips, babies abandoned by their parents were a common sight. Others might be dropped down drains, there to perish in the hundreds. The odd eccentric philosopher aside, few had ever queried this practice. Indeed, there were cities who by ancient law had made a positive virtue of it: condemning to death deformed infants for the good of the state. Sparta, one of the most celebrated cities in Greece, had been the epitome of this policy, and Aristotle himself had lent it the full weight of his prestige. Girls in particular were liable to be winnowed ruthlessly. Those who were rescued from the wayside would invariably be raised as slaves. Brothels were full of women who, as infants, had been abandoned by their parents—

Describing the plight of the poor and suffering in the Roman world, Gary B. Ferngren, states in his article, A New Era in Roman Healthcare:

The sick and elderly were routinely left to waste away.
Unwanted children were often left to die of exposure.
If a father determined that the family could not afford to feed another child, that child would be abandoned on the steps of a temple or in the public square.
Defective newborns were routinely left to die of exposure.
Female infants were exposed more often than males, because girls could not really support the family.
The chronically ill were often seen everywhere in the streets, baths and forums of the Roman cities.

A Revolution In Care and Compassion

In the midst of all of this illness and squalor, the power of the Holy Spirit in the church began a revolution of compassion and mercy. The early church voluntarily pulled their resources and distributed them to those in need. (Acts 4:32-35) This was indeed revolutionary, but it was a revolution with good reason. Jesus spent much of his ministry alleviating the suffering of the sick and discipling others to do the same. (Luke 10:9, 25-37) He told his followers that in the day of judgement they would hear these words:

³⁵For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, ³⁶I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me….⁴⁰“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ (Mathew 25;35-36, 40)

The apostle James declares:

¹⁵Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. ¹⁶If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it?” (James 2:15-16)

The apostle John writes in a similar manner:

¹⁷If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? ¹⁸Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth. (1 John 3:17-18)

Another way the New Testament church practiced compassion and mercy was their love (agape) feasts. (1 Corinthians 11: 17-22, Jude 1:12) It was a weekly meal of the church, surrounding the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, which afforded outcasts an opportunity to fellowship with more well off members of society as equals. This was a setting where social barriers were removed bringing dignity to people deprived of it. For many it supplied needed nourishment from hunger. This movement of compassion developed into extended networks of care for those hurting and in troubling situations. (1 Corinthians 16:1-3) This approach would evolve into an organized system of care for widows. (1 Timothy 5:3-16)

This spark led to a flame that over time turned into a blaze.

From A Flame to a Blaze

The church began a revolution of mercy and compassion which exists today. This work continued on in movement and growth. Here are a few examples:

Within a couple of centuries the church in Rome ministered to 1,500 widows and others in need. It has been estimated that the Roman church spent annually 1,000,000 sesterces—an equivalent of several millions of dollars in today’s currency—on benevolent work. This is an astounding amount.
Starting with the ministry of deacons³ (Acts 6:1-6, 1 Timothy 3:8-13), Christians had been developing infrastructure in their own churches to help the sick. This would grow into a deacon-led care in which churches offered care for the sick. Most who served in this way did not have professional training.

This revolution would grow to an ethic of universal care. The churches’ program of benevolent care expanded to even those who were not part of the church. An epidemic of possibly smallpox or measles began in AD 250 in Ethiopia and spread to Rome. It lasted 15 to 20 years, and at many points killing thousands a day. Public officials did nothing to prevent its spread or care for the sick. By AD 251 the plague swept into Carthage. Cyprian, a Christian leader in Carthage, called the city’s Christians to care for the diseased and suffering. He urged the rich to donate funds and the poor to volunteer their service for relief efforts. Cyprian made no distinction between believers and pagans. This marked a new chapter. For the first time, Christians extended their medical care to pagans as well as Christians.

In the first two centuries, the church is the only organization to systematically care for the poor and sick of society. This brought the expansion of God’s Story of Grace in that it further advanced an understanding of the world where even the least among society was offered greater dignity and care. This began a revolution that is still in operation today. That story continued to expand, and it will be told in later articles.
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Israel was commanded toward compassion toward the poor and suffering. But this compassion was more civil than a cultural movement. Sometimes rulers would exercise relief toward their subjects, but this was never ongoing or widespread. In other cases there were grain laws to subsidize the poor with grain to stop social unrest.
A pan or stand for holding lighted coals.
Deacon is derived from the Greek word diakonos which means servant.

The Big Bang of All Lasting World Revolutions (Acts 2:1-13)

We come to the event in God’s Story of Grace which will cause the transforming purposes of God fashioning all of creation into the mutual and life-giving unity of the Trinity to speed up with intensity–Pentecost. This event is unrepeatable, but its effects will be reproducible in time and space throughout all of history. God will come closer into the world and bring the legacy of his work through the ages (Israel, Greece, Persia, Babylon) and spread it throughout the earth with revolutionary impact and power. This is because God has come closer to humanity, not only changing political structures, scientific knowledge and philosophical ideas but transforming lives.

This article will explore the origins of where this began as it establishes the original energy and movement to to heal and reshape a broken world.

What is Pentecost?

Pentecost is the beginning of the church–where God dwells in people–and through these people enters into a transforming mission in the world. Luke, writing in the Acts, describes the event as follows:

Reaping

When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. (Acts 2:1)

In the Jewish calendar there are three major feasts where the Jews were required to go to Jerusalem: Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles. Passover was a week long event.¹ In the last days of Jesus on earth, the Passover week started with Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem and lasted until the Saturday before his resurrection. Pentecost (which is the Greek word for 50), celebrated the first fruits of the wheat harvest² and occurred 50 days after Passover. So, what was originally celebrated as an agricultural harvest now is celebrated as a harvest of lives. On this day 3000 people will come to be followers of Jesus from fifteen different nations and people groups. (see Acts 2:41) These are the first fruits of the spiritual harvest that comes to Christ from His death and resurrection.

Regeneration

Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. (Acts 2:2)

What is described is what sounds like a violent wind. This is, of course, an appearance of the Holy Spirit, who comes with decisive and unmistakable gale force intensity to inaugurate God’s accelerated transformation of the world. This is the equivalent of a spiritual big bang which would bring a new order into the world. The Holy Spirit filled the whole house, but he does not stop there. The wind of the Holy Spirit will enter into the gathered 120 to become the transforming power to send them on mission to reshape the world into God’s mutual and self-giving unity. On a person-by-person basis he will uplift humanity above the the gravitational pull of self-centeredness and social disorder with his regenerating (born again) power. In the development of God’s Story of Grace, the Holy Spirit will now democratize (more widely distribute to everyday people) the power of his influence. History will now be centered with greater scale upon the larger movements of everyday people rather than on powerful kings and elites.

Resources

³They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. ⁴All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them. (Acts 2:3-4)

As we see the tongues of fire descend on each person, God will change his address where he dwells from the Temple in Jerusalem to the church (people who follow God). His very presence will not be in stones but people; it will not be stationary but mobile. His presence will be spreading throughout the localities and the world as God’s people are in movement. Originally God came to dwell closely in the earth by inhabiting Solomon’s Temple.³ Now he comes as close as he possibly can by inhabiting people.

Result

⁵Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. ⁶When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard their own language being spoken. 7 Utterly amazed, they asked: “Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans? 8 Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language?

Imagine a group of people who are not formally educated, from an area that is far away from a city, comes to a city and, all of a sudden, has this capacity to speak in another language with perfect pronunciation: no mistakes and clear articulation. This would be startling. But then it is even more astounding that those people are speaking multiple languages altogether: fifteen to be exact. This is seen by the fifteen countries listed below:

⁹Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, ¹⁰Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome ¹¹(both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!” (Acts 2:9-11)

If you looked at a modern-day map, you see they are coming from Northern Africa, the Middle East and Southern Europe. The clear message is that there is no language or culture that has priority over each other because of the outpouring of the Spirit.

What does this mean?

God’s Story will more intensely encompass all nations and every culture. The key means of widespread cultural transformation in the past (before Pentecost) was war and conquest. Now, through the work of the Holy Spirit, change will be centered on transformed lives through the gospel. This will turn the nature and order of the world upside down. This will lead to such social and political developments as: ordered democracy, large scale care for the poor, the overturning of slavery, human dignity and rights as a basis for governmental authority, elevation of the status of women, among others.⁴

God’s Story will honor and renew every culture. What was built through God’s work in all of the nations, Christianity would go on to accelerate the understanding and application of these gifts and transform much of paganism. From established legal codes of the Code of Hammurabi to the practice of astronomy in Babylon to the birth of understanding universal human rights in Persia, to the idea and practice of democracy, or the artistic expression of theater, to the theological conception of logos in Greece to the foundations of representative law from Rome. This would foreshadow what Haggai 2:7 calls the desired of all nations. The core longing of every nation and culture points to and has its fulfillment in Jesus Christ. If all of the world could gather up all of her right desires and consolidate their truest wishes into one request, it would find its fulfillment in Jesus. If all of the world’s philosophers could extract wisdom from all of their theories and condense them into wisdom, it would come down to heart cry of needing a God-made man–Jesus. And in Jesus Christ this is what was given. It is the Holy Spirit who makes his presence and reality known and lived.

And at Pentecost begins the amazing Story of Grace of how the world will be further turned toward the purposes for which it was created: to reflect the mutual and self-giving trinitarian life of God.

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1. ⁴“‘These are the Lord’s appointed festivals, the sacred assemblies you are to proclaim at their appointed times: ⁵The Lord’s Passover begins at twilight on the fourteenth day of the first month. ⁶On the fifteenth day of that month the Lord’s Festival of Unleavened Bread begins; for seven days you must eat bread made without yeast. ⁷On the first day hold a sacred assembly and do no regular work. ⁸For seven days present a food offering to the Lord. And on the seventh day hold a sacred assembly and do no regular work.’” (Leviticus 23:4-8) In the days of Jesus, the fourteenth day (v.5) would have been Good Friday. On the fifteenth day, Saturday, would have been the Feast of Unleavened Bread as Jesus lays buried in the tomb.

2. ¹⁵“‘From the day after the Sabbath, the day you brought the sheaf of the wave offering, count off seven full weeks. ¹⁶Count off fifty days up to the day after the seventh Sabbath, and then present an offering of new grain to the Lord. (Leviticus 23:14-15)

3. Notice the similarity of fire entering the Temple at its dedication with the fire that descended into the 120 at Pentecost: ¹Now when Solomon had finished praying, fire came down from heaven and consumed the burnt offering and the sacrifices, and the glory of the Lord filled the house. 2 The priests could not enter into the house of the Lord because the glory of the Lord filled the Lord’s house. 3 All the sons of Israel, seeing the fire come down and the glory of the Lord upon the house, bowed down on the pavement with their faces to the ground, and they worshiped and gave praise to the Lord, saying, “Truly He is good, truly His lovingkindness is everlasting.” (2 Chronicles 7:1-3)

4. This is testified in such books as Tom Holland’s, Dominion: How The Christian Revolution Remade the World; Rodney Stark’s, The Rise of Christianity; Glen Scrivener, The Air We Breathe: How We All Came to Believe in Freedom, Kindness, Progress, and Equality.

Fire From the Throne, Light In the World (Excursus on Daniel 7)

This is a second article providing an excursus (a more focused discussion) on the purpose and scope of the Story of Grace project. As stated in the first article on What the Story Of Grace Is All About (Excursus on Colossians 1:15-17):

It is the understanding of how God’s decisive acts of creation and redemption are unfolding through the entire scope of history reclaiming and transforming everything to participate in the likeness of the Trinity.

In this referenced article above, three guiding truths are elaborated from Colossians 1:15-17:

In God’s Story Jesus is Creator and Redeemer of all creation.
In God’s Story everything is being renewed into the likeness of the Trinity.
In God’s Story redemption and renewal is universal in scope.

In this second excursus, we will examine these very same three claims through another scriptural lens: Daniel 7. Daniel 7 is notable in that it is either quoted or alluded to a total of 58 times in the New Testament.¹ These fours beasts (which we will soon see) represent four empires which cover about 1,000 years of history.² Why are each of these nations called beasts? It possibly highlights their predatory and beast like behavior apart from the power of God. Because the taming power within these empires which limits their destructive deadliness is the restraining and overruling grace of God as seen in vs.9-10 and vs.13-14. Through this passage, we will see another picture of God’s Story of Grace unfolding with a central revelation God gives in the midst of history’s sweep.

Premise # 1: In God’s Story Jesus is Creator and Redeemer of all creation.

Daniel, writing in his mid 60’s (553 B.C.), begins the record of his dream:

In the first year of Belshazzar king of Babylon, Daniel had a dream, and visions passed through his mind as he was lying in bed. He wrote down the substance of his dream. (Daniel 7:1)

It is significant that Daniel receives this dream at this time because Belshazzar would be the last king of Babylon before Cyrus of Persia would overtake them. Daniel was recording this revelation at the beginning of Belshazzar’s reign.

Daniel said: “In my vision at night I looked, and there before me were the four winds of heaven churning up the great sea.” (Daniel 7:2)

The four winds of heaven churning up the great sea represents the chaos of the world in which the four beasts (vs.3-8) are about to emerge. This is the beast like and predatory world which has fallen away from the order of God’s creative purposes. The world is not naturally good. As Thomas Hobbes wrote in Leviathan about man in a state of nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Daniel’s dream provides a picture of this brutish nature apart from the grace of God.

He goes on the describe these four beasts which covers a period of around 1,000 years.

³Four great beasts, each different from the others, came up out of the sea.⁴“The first was like a lion, and it had the wings of an eagle. I watched until its wings were torn off and it was lifted from the ground so that it stood on two feet like a human being, and the mind of a human was given to it.⁵“And there before me was a second beast, which looked like a bear. It was raised up on one of its sides, and it had three ribs in its mouth between its teeth. It was told, ‘Get up and eat your fill of flesh!’⁶“After that, I looked, and there before me was another beast, one that looked like a leopard. And on its back it had four wings like those of a bird. This beast had four heads, and it was given authority to rule.⁷“After that, in my vision at night I looked, and there before me was a fourth beast—terrifying and frightening and very powerful. It had large iron teeth; it crushed and devoured its victims and trampled underfoot whatever was left. It was different from all the former beasts, and it had ten horns. (Daniel 7:3-7)

These four beast can be outlined as follows:

Lion…Babylon. (v.4) 605 – 539 BC

Bear…Persia. (v.5) 539 – 333 BC

Leopard…Greece. (v.6) 333 – 146 BC

Ten Horn Beast…Rome. (v.7) 146 BC – 476 AD

Verse 8 goes on to elaborate in regard to the fourth beast (Rome)

“While I was thinking about the horns, there before me was another horn, a little one, which came up among them; and three of the first horns were uprooted before it. This horn had eyes like the eyes of a human being and a mouth that spoke boastfully. (Daniel 7:8)

Some see this verse as catapulting Daniel way into the future with a picture of the anti-Christ in a revived Roman Empire before Christ returns to earth. (see Revelation 13:1-4) Others see this as representing a historical figure coming out of the Roman Empire. Whatever the interpretation may be, what stands out in the sharpest contrast is what is revealed next in vs.9-10:

⁹As I looked,

thrones were set in place,
    and the Ancient of Days took his seat.
His clothing was as white as snow;
    the hair of his head was white like wool.
His throne was flaming with fire,
    and its wheels were all ablaze.
¹⁰A river of fire was flowing,
    coming out from before him.
Thousands upon thousands attended him;
    ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him.
The court was seated,
    and the books were opened. (Daniel 7:9-10)

This is a revelation of God calmly coming to take his place as ruler and judge. As Ancient of Days:

Nothing gets by him.
Nothing surprises him.
He never learns anything.
He never misunderstands anything.
He is never caught off guard.
There’s never been a time he wasn’t fully in charge.

He is in no way shaken by these beasts.

What unfolds over the next five verses is a revelation of the Trinity. Daniel says that there were thrones (plural) set in place. There is more than one ruler and judge, one who sits along side the Ancient of Days. From the context of this verse the only other ruler and judge can be the Son of Man (Jesus the Messiah) as seen in vs.13-14, which we will view shortly.

The Father

The title Ancient of Days is a highly revered reference to God the Father.

The Holy Spirit

⁹His throne was flaming with fire,
and its wheels were all ablaze.
¹⁰A river of fire was flowing,
coming out from before him.

What is described with the picture of the throne with wheels ablaze is the moving omnipresence (everywhere presence) of God which extends his reach through a flowing river of fire that is coming out from before him. This fire flowing from the throne of God appears to be a symbolic picture of the Holy Spirit present on the earth carrying out the rule of the Father. The scriptures often equate the Holy Spirit with the presence of fire.³ It is this fire (the Holy Spirit) which will be poured out upon the earth at Pentecost in an intensified way.

The Son

In the midst of all the beastly activity, there is a rule which is taking place which overrides all other activity on the earth. Daniel’s vision highlights the ascension and the return of Jesus Christ.

¹³“In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. ¹⁴He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed. (Daniel 7:13-14)

The designation Son of Man is, of course, a revelation of Jesus Christ. It is the most common title that Jesus uses for himself in the gospels–a total of 88 times. He references himself more often as the Son of Man that he does the Son of God. Having its origins in the verses above, this is the highest and most exalted visualization of the messiah in the Old Testament. There are three distinctives which stand out about the Son of Man in the verses above:

He is given authority, glory and sovereign power which is a divine status which cannot be given to any created being.
All nations and peoples of every language worshiped him which is another divine status which cannot be given to any created being.
He will have an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed. This is another divine status which cannot be given to a human being.

When does this reign occur? It appears to occur after the victorious resurrection from death and is pronounced by Jesus in the preface to the Great Commission:

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. (Matthew 28:18)

In Daniel 7:13-14 appears to be the ascension where this reign is carried out through the mission of the church. This authority was given because Jesus accomplished the finished work of redemption on the cross for all that he created. Then he went on to express how and for what reason his authority will be exercised as seen in the next premise.

Premise # 2: In God’s Story everything is being renewed into the likeness of the Trinity.

As Jesus gives the Great Commission as the Creator and Redeemer of everything, all of the world eventually is to be immersed in the trinitarian reality of God. On the way to that eventuality, the followers of Jesus are to baptize (immerse) those who are a part of the church into the name (reality) of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

¹⁹Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, ²⁰and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age. (Matthew 28:19-20)

Those baptized are the firstfruits of the Spirit (Rom. 8:23), being immersed into the larger reality of God’s work of fashioning all of creation into his image into the mutual and life-giving unity of the trinity causing increased shalom and flourishing in the world.

Premise # 3: In God’s Story redemption and renewal is universal in scope.

So, as the Story of Grace continues, it will now address how the gospel advances the image of the mutual and self-giving unity of the trinity throughout the world. This can be seen in three theological truths:

Truth # 1: The grace of God is working within history. There is obviously in the text of Daniel 7 a sharp contrast between the picture of the beasts (vs.3-8) and the Ancient of Days (vs.9-10) and the Son of Man (vs.13-14). This contrast is meant to show that without the grace of God⁴through the Holy Spirit flowing within the world, the only experience we would have would be a predatory and warlike existence. Because of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit the beasts of the four kingdoms are restrained in their evil and the work and reign of God is still unfolding in history.

Truth # 2: The grace of God working within history laid the foundations for civilization.

Beast # 1: From Babylon (v.4) the world received a foundational understanding of law in the Code of Hammurabi, and the practice of the seven day week, which came through their magi who were star gazers.
Beast # 2: Through Persia (v.5) was born the experience of universal human rights through Cyrus.
Beast # 3: From Greece (v.6) the world is gifted with the idea and practice of democracy, the art of theater, the theological conception of logos, and the discipline of philosophy. Through the work of Aristotle came the foundational understandings of logic, biology, and ethics. From Aristotle’s student Alexander the Great comes the most important intellectual event ever, the Library of Alexandria. This established that the pursuit of wisdom and knowledge is to be a universal aspiration.
Beast # 4: Out of Rome (v.7) was the development of a greater application of law with the Twelve Tables which brought greater ordered equality of rights between the elite rules (patricians) and the common workers (plebeians). This desire for order equality based in law would provide for us the ideas of a senate, a republic, checks and balances, e pluribus unum (out of the many, one).

Truth # 3: After the death and resurrection of Jesus, the scope of God’s Story of Grace transforming the world intensifies. The changing of the world into the mutual and self-giving presence of the Trinity will happen at a greater scale because of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and the missional movement of the church. The fire that we see flowing from the throne of the Ancient of Days is poured out onto the earth in a greatly intensified way through the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. (Acts 2:1-4)

It is now to the post-ascension outpouring of the Holy Spirit that the Story of Grace will proceed.

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This is perhaps the most referenced and alluded to Old Testament chapter in the New Testament thus showing its centrality to understanding the revelation of God.
How long one sees this period depends on the length that they see the Roman Empire being extended.
John answered them all, “I indeed baptize you with water, but he comes who is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to loosen. He will baptize you in the Holy Spirit and fire. (Luke 3:16) When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. (Acts 2:1–4) Out of the throne proceed lightnings, sounds, and thunders. There were seven lamps of fire burning before his throne, which are the seven Spirits of God. (Revelation 4:5) The Holy Spirit is as personal as the Father and the Son, yet within the Trinity he is most pleased to be described in less personal and more analogous ways like fire.
This grace can be referred to in the category common grace. Common grace encompasses God’s provision of daily blessings, the restraint of sin’s effects, and the delay of judgment, all experienced by both believers and non-believers. To draw to clear a distinction between common grace and saving grace (redemption and restoration offered to those who believe in Jesus Christ) is problematic because they are closely linked. Common grace can lead to saving grace, as Paul states, Or do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, forbearance and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness is intended to lead you to repentance? (Romans 2:4)

Trinitarian Theologians

Cappadocian Fathers

Basil of Caesarea 330-379 (ousia and hypostasis)

Gregory of Nazianzus 330–391 (homousia of the Holy Spirit)

Gregory of Nyssa 335–394 (distinction but not separation of the hypostasis)

What Does This Mean?

Defender of Orthodoxy

“On The Incarnation”

Athanasius’ Lasting Influence

Origins Of the Desert Fathers

Anthony the Great

Influence

Conclusion

The Council

The Controversy

Importance of the Nicaean Council

Initial Messianic Movement

Paul and the Gentile Movement

300 Years Into 3 Continents

Asia

Europe

Africa

What Caused Christianity to Grow?

Conclusion

Sexual Inequity In the Roman Empire

Focused Look at Matthew 19

The Changes It Brought to Society

Conclusion

The Culture of Jesus’ Day

The Countercultural Ways of Jesus

Effects of Christianity on Culture

Conclusion

The Holy Spirit Rebirths Compassion

Life In the Ancient World

A Revolution In Care and Compassion

From A Flame to a Blaze

What is Pentecost?

What does this mean?

Premise # 1: In God’s Story Jesus is Creator and Redeemer of all creation.

Premise # 2: In God’s Story everything is being renewed into the likeness of the Trinity.

Premise # 3: In God’s Story redemption and renewal is universal in scope.

Basil of Caesarea 330-379 **(ousia and hypostasis)**

**Gregory of Nazianzus 330–391 (homousia of the Holy Spirit)**

**Gregory of Nyssa 335–394 (distinction but not separation of the hypostasis)**