Lausanne World Pulse – LAUSANNE REPORTS – The European Church Today: Reflections on Her Context
By Gordon Showell-Rogers
Looking Back to Look Forward
Europe is hugely varied. Albania and Switzerland could almost be on different planets. However, the entire continent shares a common heritage, geographical space, and some elements of culture in a globalised world. Europe today also shares some significant similarities with the world in which the early Christians lived. It is pluralistic, multicultural, hedonistic, and perhaps as open to new ideas as that century was.
Christians in first century “Europe” (today’s name for the western end of the Eurasian landmass) did not know what a difference they would make. They simply knew that Jesus had died for their sins and had risen from the dead. They understood that the cross and the resurrection had cosmic consequences. As a result, they went out and, by God’s grace, changed the world.
The Early Days of Christianity: Christ’s Arrival in Europe
The Book of Acts records the growth of the early Church in “Europe.” But what was Christ’s impact on European society? Rodney Stark, professor of sociology and comparative religion at the University of Washington writes,
Pagan and Christian writers are unanimous not only that Christian Scripture stressed love and charity as the central duties of faith, but that these were sustained in everyday behaviour. I suggest reading the following passage from Matthew (25:35-40) as if for the very first time, in order to gain insight into the power of this new morality, when it was new, not centuries later in more cynical and worldly times….When the New Testament was new, these were the norms of the Christian communities.1
Keith Hopkins, professor of ancient history at King’s College in Cambridge, is not always sympathetic in the way he writes about Christians. Nonetheless, he writes, “For all its idiosyncratic excesses, Christianity also promoted an image of self-sacrificing piety, of virtue, generosity to the poor, and kindliness to the sick.”2 And again,
The visual world of Christianity was startlingly different, in image and meaning, from the classical world of paganism. But the greatest achievement of ancient Christianity in this period was, I think, its remoulding of social ethics, its purposeful construction of the virtuous believer.3
And that remoulding of social ethics by a minority—often a marginalised and even persecuted minority—shaped every area of life.
Twenty Centuries Later
Dramatic changes have occurred across Europe (and the rest of the world) since that first century—from Constantine’s conversion and the growth of Constantinian Christendom, via the Enlightenment and the age of discovery to the present post-modern world. But one other influence must be mentioned in the European context: despite the great impact of the good news of Jesus and the resurrection, biblical faith is not the only root of European civilisation or of European culture (or European forms of Christianity). Because the other major root of “European civilisation” is Greco-Roman, European Christian thinking about life and church is shaped by both its Greco-Roman and Enlightenment contexts.