Several recent works on secularity and Christian faith have noted similarities between the challenges to Christianity in the second century and current tensions between Christian faithfulness and rising secularity (Michael Kruger, Christianity at the Crossroads, viii; Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 3–4; Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, 452–454). Given that a growing perception seems to be that Christianity is not beneficial to the social order, the ways in which second-century apologists engaged a culture which saw Christianity as a detriment to the social order may be deeply instructive for Christians today. One primary response of the apologists was to present the life of the church as evidence for the truth of the faith.
For Romans in the second century era, civic devotion was primarily—though not exclusively—a matter of divination, supplication, and sacrifice with the pragmatic goals of securing divine favor, avoiding divine wrath, and cementing the social order. Because Christians refused to participate in these religious rites, the church was perceived as a threat to the cohesion and stability of the social order. In response, Athenagoras, Aristides, Justin, and the author of the Epistle to Diognetus not only made the case that Christians pose no threat to the social order but they also contended that the ethics practiced by the church were a primary evidence for the truthfulness of Christian claims.
A key strategy in this ecclesial apologetic was to call Christians to catechize one another in ways that cultivated communities characterized by an identity that accomplished radical good for their neighbors and yet simultaneously marked Christians as separate from their neighbors. In other words, these apologetics were not primarily intended to present the life of the church as evidence to non-Christians; the goal was to call Christians to live so that non-Christians would see evidence through a combination of radical charity and distinctive identity.
I identify three key aspects of this habitus in the writings of the second-century apologists: (1) the practice of civic good that extended beyond the accepted boundaries of the dominant culture, (2) cultivation of an internal perception of the church as an alternative political structure with a different history from their neighbors, and (3) the formation of a supraordinate social identity without the negation of existing cultural and ethnic identities. Early Christians formed this identity by means—in terms of Philip Esler’s adaptation of Henri Tajfel’s social-identity theory—of crossed categorization, recategorization, and decategorization.
The paper concludes with a consideration of how contemporary Christians might contextualize these three aspects through radical charity, political ecclesiology, and countercultural diversity.