Eric Metaxas
For the first seventy or so years of Christianity’s existence, the Greco-Roman world paid it relatively little attention. There were persecutions here and there (like the one that claimed the lives of Peter and Paul). But, for the most part, it wasn’t until the second century that their pagan neighbors began to focus their attention on just how different Christians were.
As Michael J. Kruger of Reformed Theological Seminary wrote at The Gospel Coalition, one major difference was that “Christians would not pay homage to the other ‘gods’ ” of the Roman world. Since paying homage to these “gods” was a civic as well as a religious duty, this refusal caused Christians to be viewed with suspicion. Incredibly, some pagans even accused Christians of atheism!
As Kruger notes, there was another area in which Christians stood out like the proverbial sore thumb: and that was sex. As Kruger writes, “While it was not unusual for Roman citizens to have multiple sexual partners, homosexual encounters, and engagement with temple prostitutes, Christians stood out precisely because they refused to engage in these practices.”
Thus Tertullian, the second-century apologist who has been called the “Father of Western Theology,” wrote that Christians “do not hesitate to share our earthly goods with one another. All things are common among us except our wives.”
The author of the second century “Epistle to Diognetus” wrote that Christians speak and dress like their neighbors and added “[Christians] share their meals, but not their sexual partners.”
Obviously, Christians regarded sexual ethics as a mark of what it meant to be what Peter called “a peculiar people.”
But that still leaves us with the question “why?” Were they and the God they worshipped “killjoys” who were opposed to pleasure? That’s how they and we have often been depicted, that is, when they (and we) weren’t being accused of trying to subjugate and oppress women.
To understand why all of this is, to borrow a phrase from the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, “nonsense on stilts,” you need to understand the world into which Christianity was born and how revolutionary the Christian message concerning sex really was.
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SOURCE: BreakPoint
Eric Metaxas
