2016 Holiness Series: #4 Holiness in Early Church History

Once we get out of the New Testament holiness was not a difficult concept for early Christians to embrace.  This was because the Christians were under nearly constant persecution for the first three hundred years.

            Christianity was birthed in the Roman Empire.  The Romans did not much care what you believed as long as you participated in the civil religion of worshipping the Emperor.  Everywhere the Roman Empire spread conquered people would simply add worshipping the Emperor alongside worshipping whatever local gods they happened to have.  This worked fine, expect for the Jews, of course.  The Jews were eventually given a special exception from Emperor worship.  Since Christianity began as a sect of Judaism, it enjoyed this exception.  The very first Christians were persecuted by Jewish leaders and the Romans largely ignored, what was to them, a Jewish dispute.

            All that began to change with the Jewish revolt which culminated in the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 A.D.  After that, Jews, and by extension, Christians, no longer enjoyed the protection they had under Roman law.  Christianity became an illegal religion.  Those who were caught in the act of Christian worship, or suspected of being a Christian, would be brought in and told that if they would worship a statue of the Emperor they would be allowed to live, if not, they could have their property seized, and often they were tortured and usually killed.  Usually these executions took place in very painful and public ways, crucifixions, impalements, being burned alive, or being fed alive to wild animals.  However, all of this was a very good thing for holiness, because, as you can imagine, there were not many people in the church who were not taking it extremely seriously.

            Then the Emperor Constantine came to power. In 313 A.D. Constantine issued the Edict of Milan ensuring Christians the freedom to worship legally.  Eventually, Constantine would make Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire which would give rise to what we know as the Roman Catholic Church.  However, the influx of the rich and powerful into the church since it had now become “popular,” and the involvement of the church in the politics of the Empire, led to a lack of holiness within the church.

            In response to all this many Christians sought a purer and holier way of life away from the temptations of Roman world and monasticism was born.  The first monastics, or monks and nuns, were people like St. Anthony, who lives alone in the desert.  Soon these hermits, as they were called, and those who came to learn from them, formed themselves into little communities of holy living.  It would be the monastic movement, through later figures like St. Francis, that would keep the tradition of holiness in the church alive for over a thousand years through the fall of the Empire and the turmoil of the Dark Ages and the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church.

            Of course, in some ways monasticism itself became corrupt and legalistic, which led a monk named Martin Luther to lead a protest against the abuses and excesses of monasticism and the Roman Church.  This protest became the Protestant movement of which we are a part and which has its own rich history of holiness in many forms.

We will be taking a couple of months off from this series to have some articles in May, June, July, and August talking about General and Jurisdictional Conferences.  We will return to this series in September to discuss John Wesley and his unique contribution to the theology of holiness.