Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Under the Roman Empire Christianity was but one of the religions - if indeed it was one religion and not a family. It grew under persecution and flourished under patronage; some authors wrote theology of set purpose, while others, as it were, stumbled on their own beliefs in works of casuistry, apologetic, exhortation, and controversy. It often happened that one man's apology was another man's heresy, one man's philosophical speculation another man's dogma, one man's defense of orthodoxy another man's gratuitous polemic. Sometimes a Christian sovereign would publish his own opinion; sometimes, in trying to appease two factions, he would be surprised to find himself the leader of a third. There is therefore no one stream of Christian thought in the early period, and a history of it cannot be a history of dogmatics. At the same time, it is a salient fact, which sets Christianity apart from the other creeds of the Roman Empire, that it formed a church, that this church was governed by councils, and that councils made pronouncements which it was dangerous for a Christian to oppose. In this chapter, therefore, I shall not relegate dogmatics to the margins, as some classicists do when writing about the church within the empire, but at the same time I shall try to deal an even hand to heresy and orthodoxy, while taking due account of the ambient culture and the plasticity of personal conviction ... log in or subscribe to read full text