The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart.
—ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN1
Tradition records that the apostle Paul was beheaded in Rome during the reign of Nero, probably in the mid-60s CE. It was the end of a hard life. In his second letter to the Corinthians he detailed the adversity he had faced, relative to other eminent leaders:
I have worked much harder, been in prison more frequently, been flogged more severely, and been exposed to death again and again. Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was pelted with stones, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea, I have been constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, in danger from bandits, in danger from my fellow Jews, in danger from Gentiles; in danger in the city, in danger in the country, in danger at sea; and in danger from false believers. I have labored and toiled and have often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food; I have been cold and naked.2
Paul’s story was familiar to first-century Christians. Ten years after Paul’s death, during the famous fire that destroyed much of Rome, the emperor Nero—suspected as the arsonist—arrested a group of Christians, charged them with arson, hung them up in his garden, and burned them alive as human torches. Other Christians met comparably cruel fates at the hands of gladiators or the teeth and claws of various beasts in the Roman Coliseum—horrific deaths arranged for entertainment.
The first Christians confronted a challenging political reality. Their emerging faith was quite literally a “deadly superstition,” as the Roman historian Tacitus wrote.3 Nevertheless, the movement that came to be known as Christianity grew steadily more popular, helped along by treating the disenfranchised, especially women, better than the state or popular alternative religions.
Historians estimate that Paul was one of but a thousand Christians in 40 CE. By 100 CE this number had increased sevenfold, and by 200 CE it surpassed two hundred thousand. These improving fortunes did not go unnoticed. In 313 CE the Roman emperor Constantine converted to the new faith that by that time claimed almost nine million adherents—15 percent of the population of the Roman Empire. Christianity became the official religion of the empire, and by 350 CE more than half of the populace—some thirty-two million people—are estimated to have embraced the newly approved faith.4
Christianity at the beginning of this formative period confronted radically different challenges than at the end. The seven thousand or so Christians meeting secretly at the end of the first century lived in the shadow of persecution from a hostile Roman political system—one prepared to execute them for crimes like refusing to pay appropriate respect to the Roman rulers and their pagan deities.
Early Christians came to understand themselves as separate from the political—and sometimes oppressive—structure in which they were embedded. In their eyes the state responsible for this nightmare must be sinful and its leadership possessed of an otherworldly evil spirit; swearing allegiance to such a sinister carnival was inconceivable.
“Our contest,” wrote one of Paul’s followers who penned “Paul’s” letter to the Ephesians, “is not against flesh and blood but against powers, against principalities, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual force of evil in heavenly places.”5 Early Christians came to see their situation in cosmic terms—a conflict between the power of Satan and the demons possessing their enemies, and the gracious purity of their own movement, freed from such evil by its faith in Jesus Christ. The “world” and its entanglements had to be avoided. Some responded by fleeing into the deserts and living in caves.
Some Christians, unable to avoid worldly entanglements, received death sentences, often carried out in the Coliseum as part of a public spectacle that included gladiator fights, slaughter of animals by people and slaughter of people by animals, and execution of criminals. The audiences that witnessed the deaths of Christians, however, were often struck by the peace with which many of these gentle, sincere, and often illiterate believers went to their deaths. Christians about to be killed would sometimes even show concern for an executioner squeamish about killing children and young mothers.6 Some observers were so impressed by the fortitude of the martyrs they converted to this new religion, and became influential Christian leaders, embracing the new Messiah at great personal risk. Who was this Jesus whose followers seemed fearless of death? And what were the beliefs energizing his followers, who placed loyalty to their leader more highly than their own lives, who would rather die than surrender to Rome?
The Christian communities of the first centuries were scattered—geographically, culturally, educationally, theologically. They worshiped in secret, without central organization or common texts. Faith communities were small, local, with a single leader, isolated from similar communities. Their beliefs were diverse, even on basic questions like whether Christianity was simply a new expression of Judaism.
The important theological question of sin and its origins had no generally accepted answer. What is striking, however, are the constant references in early Christian documents to Satan and demons as the sources of evil in the world, and the absence of reference to Adam and his fall into sin. On those many occasions in the four Gospels when sin rears its head—Herod’s slaughter of the innocents, the modest betrayal of Jesus by Peter, the fateful betrayal by Judas, the conviction by Pilate—the explanation is always cast as cosmic warfare between the forces of good and evil, God and Satan. Satan is everywhere, even tempting Jesus in a memorable encounter in the wilderness. And this framing occurs despite Paul’s “second Adam” theological explanation of Jesus’s death and resurrection, which predated the Gospels by a couple of decades. Early Christians did not understand Paul’s theology of sin in the same way that most Christians do today.
Christianity’s transformation from persecuted minority sect to official religion is remarkable. Converts to the new religion included philosophers who came to Christianity after searching for truth in Greek philosophy, as well as the disenfranchised. Christianity freed women of all social ranks to seek the warm sun of equality and even leadership, out from under the relentless patriarchal cloud of their times. Slaves saw their lots improved when their masters embraced Christ and mysteriously turned into better people. These remarkable conversions were often treated like exorcisms. Through the ritual of baptism, Christ expelled demonic forces and came to dwell in them.
Christianity was attractive to pagans, skeptics, and, of course, Jews, although Christianity became increasingly non-Jewish and eventually even anti-Jewish.7 New believers came with prior religious ideas, like special days, creating theological confusion. What, exactly, did it mean to be a Christian? What texts were authentically Christian? What ideas were unacceptable?
As concern about basic survival retreated, Christian leaders were pressed for various reasons—theological, social, political, biblical—to develop an orthodoxy. Canonical texts were identified, edited, translated, and gathered into what we now call the Bible; shared beliefs were clarified and universalized; unacceptable beliefs were labeled as heresy and their champions expelled; ambiguities in the Bible were cleared up with supplementary doctrines and creeds.
Few questions have received more attention from Christians than the origin of evil. If God created a perfect world—the only kind a perfect being could create—what went wrong? The world is filled with terrible things: people live in a vale of tears, surrounded by suffering and death, persecution and war. Such things could not have been created by a good God so they must be the result of some evil, unplanned event that thwarted God’s purposes.
This chapter explores the changing explanation for sin, as it slowly diminished in the Christian imagination from a horrific evil controlling the other to the more universal sense that there is something wrong with all of us.
We start with Justin the philosopher, born at the beginning of the second century. The well-educated Justin came to Christianity around age thirty, frustrated at his failure to find a satisfactory truth in Greek philosophies. Instead he found meaning and inspiration watching Christians endure martyrdom. These martyrs followed a God that seemed as real to them as the troubled world that persecuted them. They embodied the transcendent integrity of which Plato had spoken and by which Socrates calmly accepted his death sentence.
After his conversion Justin grew to despise, but not disbelieve in, Roman gods. Behind the chiseled faces of these ubiquitous statues—Fortuna, Hercules, Apollo, Dionysus, Roma—Justin saw “spiritual forces of evil in heavenly places.”8 These gods, he thought, embodied a genuine evil wholly separate from the goodness embodied in the followers of Christ. In reflecting on the cruel mechanisms used to kill Christians, he declared, echoing a popular refrain, “We know that those who invented them are demons.”9 Justin, after a significant tenure as a leader shaping the early church, would eventually join, via beheading, the martyrs he admired.
Justin used his considerable influence to argue that Christians posed no threat to the Roman Empire and were, in fact, model citizens: they paid their taxes, obeyed the law, and did more than their share of exemplary good works. Their refusal to worship the pagan deities of the empire could be overlooked. So why were they persecuted?
Justin addressed the Roman Senate in writings titled The Second Apology of Justin for the Christians, exploring questions of good and evil, sin and righteousness, right and wrong. Significantly, he makes no mention of Adam and Eve or the Fall to explain why the simple goodness of Christians was being met with such evil. In fact, Justin’s Apology doesn’t even mention Adam. Justin instead invokes one of the strangest stories in the Bible:
When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair; and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose. . . . The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.
The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, “I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.”10
The creatures known as Nephilim in this verse—the offspring of the “sons of God” mating with the “daughters of men”—have always been a puzzle. The King James Version that I read as a child translated this word as “giants.” But a more literal translation would indicate something worse than giants, like bullies or tyrants.
Justin, consistent with the interpretive milieu of his time, embellishes the story of the Nephilim by identifying the “sons of God” as fallen angels who were supposed to look after the creation but got sidetracked by women:
God, when He had made the whole world, and subjected things earthly to man, and arranged the heavenly elements for the increase of fruits and rotation of the seasons, and appointed this divine law, . . . committed the care of men and of all things under heaven to angels whom He appointed over them. But the angels transgressed this appointment and were captivated by love of women, and begat children who are those that are called demons.11
Justin then makes a most offensive claim, namely that the Roman gods—who Christians refused to worship—are the demonic offspring of fallen angels who mated with human women. The poets had mistakenly identified these demons as the pantheon of gods now worshiped throughout the empire. The Roman leaders persecuting the Christians, said Justin, were possessed by these demons, which accounted for their barbarism and cruelty:
Among men they sowed murders, wars, adulteries, intemperate deeds, and all wickedness. Whence also the poets and mythologists, not knowing that it was the angels and those demons who had been begotten by them that did these things to men, and women, and cities, and nations, which they related, ascribed them to god himself, and to those who were accounted to be his very offspring, and to the offspring of those who were called his brothers, Neptune and Pluto, and to the children again of these their offspring.12
Justin, like his fellow Christians, takes the gods seriously. Unlike a modern Christian who would dismiss the conversation by saying that Zeus and Apollo don’t exist, Justin acknowledges a supernatural—although less powerful—dimension to the powers that would eventually, as he anticipated, order his own execution at age sixty-five.
Justin’s theology explained how the evil of the regime persecuting the Christians sprang from an entirely different source than that responsible for the temptations experienced by Christians. In the world of second-century Christianity, shaped by the drama of martyrdom, Christians perceived well-defined “good guys” and “bad guys.” Although Justin and his fellow Christians might fall short of the perfection to which Christ called them, their failure was certainly caused by demons. A demon would be explanatory overkill for why one was impatient, vain, or inclined to tell white lies. Only the truly bad guys doing truly bad things—non-Christians—were possessed of demons. The line separating the good Christians from the bad persecutors was clearly drawn between them, creating a sort of moral boundary that one could cross through repentance and conversion.
This notion of a moral boundary separating good from evil frames early Christian disputes about the meaning of Adam’s sin. Was everybody evil in the same way or could sin emerge from entirely different sources? Were white lies and cruelty rooted in the same human flaw? Or could simple human imperfections account for the former, while the latter needed demons? Paul did connect Adam’s sin to Christ’s death, but the nature of this connection was ambiguous and admitted different interpretations of what happened when Adam sinned. It would be centuries before Augustine would explain this connection as “original sin,” imputing Adam’s transgression to everyone and moving the boundary between good and evil until it ran through everybody, and not merely between the good guys and the bad guys.
The key question was do we differ from the pre-Fall Adam because he sinned? Did he pass something down to us that makes it impossible for us to avoid sin? Or do we have the same chance to avoid sin as Adam did?
Early Christians were of two minds. On the one hand, we may all be like Adam and Eve in our capacity to resist temptation. The story of Adam may simply be our story, reflecting the real challenges—but not impossibility—of resisting temptation. Adam was a primordial Everyman, falling short despite his best intentions, a dramatization of what we would have done in his situation and what we must avoid in our situation.
On the other hand, God’s response to Adam’s sin was not confined to Adam. The ground was cursed. Abel the farmer must have had a harder time of it because of his father’s sin, although no mention is made of this. Childbirth became painful for all women—not just Eve—and serpents were reduced to crawling on their bellies. Adam’s descendants clearly lived in a different world and possibly were different from the first man. Did Adam do something that changed him in ways that were passed on to his descendants? Are we now powerless to resist temptation? Or are we still free to not sin, to live perfect lives, as the Genesis story suggests was the case for Adam?
The Hebrew scriptures suggest that Adam passed nothing on to his offspring. Subsequent sin—Cain’s murder of Abel, the wickedness of Noah’s generation, or the folly at the tower of Babel—is never described as inevitable. Adam’s sin is never mentioned again in the Hebrew scriptures. Paul, as we have seen, embellishes the Adam story in ways that certainly stretch the authorial intent of the writer(s) of Genesis, but Paul nowhere suggests that Adam’s unfortunate choice was made by a “pre-Fall” human. And, significantly, Paul also does not argue that subsequent human sin is inevitable because of what Adam did.13
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the four “biographies” of Jesus written years after Paul’s letters, all deal with good and evil, but they set up the tension as being between Satan and Christ, not between a sinful nature and the knowledge of good. Adam, in this light, is the first sinner only in the sense that Neil Armstrong was the first human to step onto the moon. Something extraordinary occurred when Armstrong took his “one small step for a man,” but that event certainly did not transform humanity.
Many early Christians felt empowered by the freedom they believed God had given to them at the creation. But Adam’s sin made this freedom ambiguous. Was God’s command to the first couple to “be fruitful and multiply,” for example, a universal command that everyone must start a family or just a temporary mandate to get things started? Many assumed the latter, and avoided starting a family, lest they become entangled in the social order of a world they rejected.
So many aspects of this deeply personal freedom embraced by the first Christians have since been incorporated into Western society that we can easily overlook its initially radical character and thus overlook an important part of the Christian legacy. Who today considers it radical to enjoy the freedom of being single and childless? But such choices were once quite radical.
To appreciate this we must note what it meant to be a person in the Greco-Roman cultural matrix of early Christianity. This world was shaped by an ancient tradition that placed citizens within a social network that provided their identity and value based on their contributions to the common good. “A human being is a political animal,” wrote Aristotle in his Politics, laying out blueprints for how people should relate to each other.14
People were born into social structures that defined their future roles; many believed it was in the natural order of things for certain people to be slaves, while nature intended others to be leaders. Prepubescent girls were promised to men they had not met; such marriages served sociopolitical functions; children, often many, were expected from married couples; family businesses or political offices would be thrust onto people and demand unreasonable levels of attention. This entangled web of responsibilities provided the identity of those born into it. These expectations were so universally accepted that abandoning them to chart one’s own course was, quite literally, idiocy. Elaine Pagels writes, “In Greek, the term ‘idiot’ literally referred to a person concerned with personal or private matters . . . instead of the public and social life of the larger community.”15 In contrast, Christians saw themselves as citizens of another world, the kingdom of God. God, not the social order, gave them their identity. The significance of this otherworldly identity can be seen in the term born again that was used to describe one’s conversion into it.
The New Testament constantly references “the world”—a world that Jesus and many early Christians believed was about to end. Jesus famously asked, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”16 “Do not love the world or the things in the world,” commands the author of First John. “The love of the Father is not in those who love the world; for all that is in the world—the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches—comes not from the Father but from the world. And the world and its desire are passing away, but those who do the will of God live forever.”17 Such injunctions encouraged Christians to liberate themselves from anything that prevented them from seeking God. When Jesus told the rich young ruler to “sell what you own, and give the money to the poor,”18 he was not thinking only of the poor who would benefit from the donations. The great wealth of the young ruler was itself a prison from which he needed to be liberated.
Early Christian attitudes toward sex make sense only in the context of this call to freedom. Because Christians rejected contraception, abortion, infanticide, and homosexuality, there was no truly recreational sexual activity. Procreation and sex were intimately linked. To have sex was to invite the entanglements of parenthood. When Christians rejected sex—and most did not—it was not out of a prudish conviction that it was “dirty”; they were rejecting the larger world of responsibility that came with children and family, as well as keeping powerful and sometimes destructive temptations under control. They were, in the final analysis, not so much walking away from sex as they were walking toward personal freedom.
These early Christian attitudes were especially attractive to women, who were often born into heavily scripted lives controlled by men—lives dominated by the challenges and pains of bringing children into a world with appalling levels of infant and maternal mortality.
Consider the case of Gregory of Nyssa (335–ca. 395), who longed to escape the complex script of his life. Venerated as a saint, he was the bishop of Nyssa from 372 to 376 and from 378 until his death, and played a major role in developing the influential Nicene Creed. Gregory was married, wealthy, socially entangled—and frustrated by these barriers to seeking God. He understood the cost of raising a family, struggles experienced even more acutely by women:
There is pain always, whether children are born, or can never be expected; whether they live or die. One person has many children, but not enough means to support them. . . . One man loses by death a beloved son; another has a reprobate son alive; both equally pitiable.19
The life idealized by Gregory, sought after by many and achieved by some, related ambiguously to the social blueprints God provided in Genesis. A controversy arose about how Christians should think about this. In celebrating their freedom to follow God, were ascetically inclined Christians disobeying God’s command to “be fruitful and multiply”?
Celibacy for both genders was thus controversial and became even more so as the circumstances of Christians improved. After Christianity became an approved religion with significant social benefits, rejecting the world no longer had the same logical clarity. Christian commitment, in fact, required little actual commitment, as nominal believers joined the movement for personal gain rather than spiritual transformation. Many of these Christians began to argue that celibacy was a pointless sacrifice. One especially entertaining debate illuminates the way Christians on both sides of the celibacy question looked to the story of Adam and Eve to adjudicate the dispute.
The story takes place in Rome, at the end of the fourth century, after Christianity had become politically powerful. It had become clear that the end of the world was not imminent and, whatever Christ meant when he said he would return shortly in glory, he apparently did not mean shortly in any conventional sense. Practices that made sense in the short run—like selling all your possessions or avoiding having children—didn’t seem quite so sensible for the long run. Christianity was becoming the establishment, attracting different adherents with different agendas and different levels of enthusiasm.
Ascetics and celibates, however, still retained their stature as the most authentic Christians and such withdrawal from the world continued to be widely endorsed, despite the Christianization of that world. A provocative quotation of Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel supported the high value placed on abandoning the world: “For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can.”20 There was also, of course, a sense of adventure in heading off to live a life of spiritual contemplation. A few celebrated examples of wealthy Christians renouncing their fortunes and heading into the desert seeking God inspired more of the same, especially among young people. Ascetics occasionally returned to civilization with grand tales of self-discovery, spiritual engagement, and encounters with God. Not surprisingly, such tales sometimes motivated children from well-connected Christian families to renounce the plans their parents had made for them to become part of the world.
Something like this happened to Jerome, born around 347, who studied as a youth in Rome. Although baptized as a Christian, Jerome was reckless, with behaviors that often required dramatic repentance, which he sought by visiting the sepulchers of the martyrs. He even lived for a couple of years in a cave and returned to civilization with horror stories: “I used to sit alone, because my heart was filled with bitterness,” he wrote in a letter to his friend Eustochium. “Day after day I cried and sighed.”21
Back in Rome after his failed stint as a hermit, the brilliant Jerome became secretary to Pope Damasus I, the first pope to embrace the opulent splendor that soon characterized the Vatican. Jerome also became a spiritual advisor to some socially important women. One of them, Paula, was wealthy—and possibly Jerome’s lover.22 In a letter written in 384, Jerome encourages Paula’s daughter Eustochium to view her virgin status—the symbol of celibacy—as a mark of spiritual superiority, even over her married sister Blaesilla. The letter acknowledges that celibacy brings hardship and loneliness, and Eustochium is told to “nightly wash your bed and water your couch with your tears.” But note Jerome’s curious attempt to ground his celibacy recommendation in the experience of Eve:
Say to yourself: What have I to do with the pleasures of sense that so soon come to an end? What have I to do with the song of the sirens so sweet and so fatal to those who hear it? I would not have you subject to that sentence whereby condemnation has been passed upon mankind. When God says to Eve, In pain and in sorrow you shall bring forth children, say to yourself, That is a law for a married woman, not for me. And when He continues, Your desire shall be to your husband, say again: Let her desire be to her husband who has not Christ for her spouse. And when, last of all, He says, You shall surely die, once more, say, Marriage indeed must end in death; but the life on which I have resolved is independent of sex.23
In this passage Jerome transforms Eden into a paradise of virginity, arguing that the curse on women is actually a curse on those who forsake virginity and accept the spiritually inferior life of the family. The admonition “Let her desire be to her husband who has not Christ for her spouse” is especially dramatic. Jerome is stating that women must choose between Christ and a husband. In articulating this viewpoint three centuries after Paul had penned the letters linking Adam to Christ, Jerome expressed the widely held view that the consequences of Adam’s sin were born by Adam himself. A woman could avoid these consequences simply by choosing a lifetime of celibacy: no children—no pain of childbirth. Everyone gets the same choice as Adam and Eve to avoid sin and the curse.
Critics challenged Jerome. Concerns grew about the spiritual value and even the wisdom of abandoning a world that few believed was run by demons. The challenges came to a head in a polemic penned by a celibate monk named Jovinian and delivered to Jerome in his austere monk’s lodging. Like Jerome, Jovinian had once shaved his head and wandered barefoot in the desert, avoiding meat, wine, and women. Also like Jerome, he grew weary of that life and reentered society. But, unlike Jerome, Jovinian developed serious questions about the value of renouncing the world. Did God really think virgins were better than faithful wives raising children? Was avoiding good food and wine really better than enjoying it and being thankful to God? Was heaven really arranged so that those most deprived in this life enjoyed a higher place in the next?
Jovinian, as was typical for Christians navigating the world of sex, invoked the story of Adam and Eve, noting that God had commanded the first couple to be fruitful and multiply. God also appeared to bless the cycle of life in which “a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.”24 Jovinian’s polemic enraged powerful leaders who had become invested in a tradition that praised celibacy. Pope Siricius excommunicated him and had his writings destroyed (we know his ideas only as quoted in Jerome’s response).
Jerome assaulted Jovinian viciously, arguing that his words were those of the devil. Jovinian, he writes, says that “virgins, widows, and married women, who have been once passed through the laver of Christ, if they are on a par in other respects, are of equal merit.” Calling him an “Epicurus,” Jerome attacked Jovinian’s claim “that there is no difference between abstinence from food, and its reception with thanksgiving.” He objects to Jovinian’s egalitarian claim “that there is one reward in the kingdom of heaven for all who have kept their baptismal vow.” If true, this implied that there was no special divine favor for those making extreme sacrifices.
Jerome insults Jovinian’s arguments as the “hissing of the old serpent,” alluding to the shadowy tempter in Eden, and suggests that by arguments like this “the dragon drove man from Paradise.” Jerome interprets the invitation to eat the forbidden fruit in Eden as though the indulgence signified the ending of a fast, yet another completely new—and far-fetched—application of the story: “For he promised that if they would prefer fullness to fasting they should be immortal, as though it were an impossibility for them to fall.” This is certainly an ingenious defense of self-deprivation. Jerome then glorifies the primordial state of Adam and Eve, free of social and parental obligations, and calls the primordial couple “unhampered.” Freedom from such “hampering,” as we have seen, was a motivation for celibacy. “While he promises they shall be as Gods, he drives them from Paradise, with the result that they who, while naked and unhampered, and as virgins unspotted enjoyed the fellowship of the Lord were cast down into the vale of tears, and sewed skins together to clothe themselves withal.”25
Jerome goes on at some length, heaping coals of rhetorical fire on poor Jovinian’s head, twisting and proof-texting scripture as he builds an elaborate fence to keep these ideas away from a Christianity that had come to celebrate celibacy, self-denial, and radical austerity as the most appropriate paths to God.
THE STORY OF Adam and Eve continued to be socially normative for Christians, despite its ambiguities and contradictory interpretations. God created people to be a certain way, to act like this and not like that, to follow these rules and not those—and we get this from Genesis, argued Jerome, Jovinian, and everyone else in the conversation.
Jovinian’s responses were also exercises in twisting and proof-texting scripture. His arguments ignore comments made by both Jesus and Paul affirming the ascetic life, although neither one condemned marriage. (Jesus and Paul both seem to have believed that the world was going to end shortly, which probably shaped their views of social life.)
This, of course, is the nature of the maturing Christian tradition. Charismatic leaders articulate visions that capture the imagination of a generation. New understandings emerge that must be rooted in scriptures that never spoke to those issues or did so with great ambiguity. New social considerations need new blueprints. Ambiguity quickly becomes a theologian’s best friend, creating imaginative space to read new agendas into ancient texts, to make them speak with authority to new problems.
The moral chasm between Christians and the world in which they lived closed over the course of the first few centuries. The closure came from movement in two directions. The first was that a Christianity without social benefits became a comfortable religious home for the less dedicated and more opportunistic; as a result Christians were often less holy and saw little need to think of themselves as separate from the world. The second was that a state—the formerly maligned world—with no intention to persecute Christians seemed far less evil and its agents no longer possessed by demons. The line between morally upright nonbelievers and nominal believers grew increasingly hard to find in a world where belief was often convenient and rarely required sacrifice. Dramatic exorcisms no longer accompanied the conversion of new believers. Embracing a state-sanctioned religion, as Christianity came to be, was like joining a big club. For those born into it, it was hardly more dramatic than learning to walk. Gone were the days when following Jesus implied putting one’s life—or anything else—on the altar. Not surprisingly, this led to new challenges in understanding human nature and how that nature was or was not affected by what had transpired in Eden.