What can early Christians teach us about living in a hostile culture?

Dr. Michael Kruger highlights the challenges Christians face in today’s increasingly hostile culture. Drawing parallels to the early church in the second century, he reminds us that adversity can strengthen our faith and sharpen our witness. The following is a transcript of the video above.

What can early Christians teach us about living in a hostile culture?

I think anybody living in the 21st century quickly realizes, particularly in the Western world, that it's becoming a much more of a hostile culture than it used to be. Speaking as one who lives in the United States of America, it's obvious that our historical rootedness and the Judeo-Christian tradition is slowly ebbing away, and we find ourselves feeling more and more like a minority report in our own culture and our own world. And it's not just that we're a minority report or viewed as bizarre and strange and weird and viewed with quite a bit of hostility in terms of the beliefs that we have. And every year that goes by, it seems those beliefs are looked at more and more critically. People ask me all the time, What are we? How do we think about that? What do we do in the midst of that? Well, one of the things I like to do in those situations is to put ourselves into a larger historical context.

The Larger Historical Context

Sometimes we think we're experiencing something that no one's experienced before in the Christian world and that it's all brand new. But I'd like to take us back to the second century for a moment. Why the second century? Because this is the first time Christians had to face a hostile Greco-Roman world without the help of the apostles around. They had all died out and Jesus had already, of course, been resurrected and ascended back to heaven. And here the church was on its own and the second century faced with a very, very hostile Greco-Roman world. If you think it's hostile in the Western world today, and it is in many ways it was nothing compared to the ancient Greco-Roman world. Christians, of course, received tremendous political persecution, [epq-quote align="align-right"]We don't need to be supported by the world in order for us to fulfill our great commission obligations. We don't we don't need to be supported by the world for God to bless our labors.[/epq-quote]martyrdom. But beyond that, they also endured economic persecution in terms of being restricted from certain participations in society. And then even more than that, were ridiculed and mocked intellectually and suffered what we might call intellectual or philosophical persecution. So they got it from all sides. And I think there are some lessons that can be learned there. Here's one of the lessons to take away from this time period. Even in the midst of all that hostility, this was the time the church found itself growing in great leaps and bounds. We tend to think that when we get resistance from the culture, that the church will grow stagnant. Actually, history tells us something very different. That when you have resisted from the culture, actually the church can still be and often is very healthy and can actually make great inroads into conversions in ways you may not actually have been able to do when the church is in power. Of course, Christendom in the history of Christendom has a time when Christianity does get into power. And one might make the argument that things didn't actually go that much better for Christianity after that happened. But in these early generations, we realize that the church made massive exponential progress and they did it in the midst of persecution. And that should be heartening for us as believers. We don't need to be supported by the world in order for us to fulfill our great commission obligations. We don't we don't need to be supported by the world for God to bless our labors. And the early church bears that out.

Learn How to Interact with Our World

Here is the other lesson I think we can take away from the early church, and that is that persecution made them stronger. The early Christians were forced to articulate their faith more clearly. They were forced to articulate their faith more persuasively when they said "Jesus is God". What did they mean by that? What did they not mean by that?[epq-quote align="align-right"]In the midst of all the battling we see in our world today, one of the upsides is it's going to make us stronger Christians if we learn how to interact with our world, with grace, with winsomeness and with persuasion.[/epq-quote] How do you square that with the fact that you already believed in the God of the Old Testament? Christians had to work hard to articulate what they believed to me to make it understandable and then to present it to a hostile, hostile world in a persuasive way. That I think can be a takeaway for us today, too. In the midst of all the battling we see in our world today, one of the upsides is it's going to make us stronger Christians if we learn how to interact with our world, with grace, with winsomeness and with persuasion. And we're forced to dothat by virtue of the fact that we're stepping in the arena of ideas. And so Christians cannot sort of, you know, rest on our heels like we may have been able to do a hundred years ago. We can't just take things for granted in our culture we could have done 50 years ago. We can't assume people will just get the basics like we could have assumed maybe even 25 years ago. Now we've got to start from scratch. And that, in the end, is going to bless the church. It's going to make us sharper, better thinkers and I think a better witness to a hostile world.

What can early Christians teach us about living in a hostile culture?