Quotes from Alan Kreider

In between the two were the writers of the Apostolic Tradition, who forbade a catechumen or baptized believer from entering the legions, but permitted him, if he were attracted to the faith while in the legions, to stay there on one condition: "Let him not kill.

Given their changed context it was also a challenge, one imagines, to keep their biblical exegesis sound and their theological thinking straight. As theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once observed, "It is wonderful what a simple White House invitation will do to dull the critical faculties." 156

Ancient writers, we have seen, more often mention exorcism than anything else as a cause of conversion to Christianity.

Religion must be defended not by killing but by dying, not by violence but by patience.

According to "Clement," when the Christians talked about loving your enemies, their neighbors had been interested. But when they found that the Christians didn't do what they said, they dismissed Christianity as "a myth and a delusion." From Clement's perspective, Christians had to embody the message if the churches were to grow.

By the early fifth century the problem had become so acute that some theologians updated the church's theology of witness so that they no longer emphasized the Christians' exemplary behavior.

The Christians' focus was not on "saving" people or recruiting them; it was on living faithfully—in the belief that when people's lives are rehabituated in the way of Jesus, others will want to join them.

This, the Christians believed, was God's work and not theirs. So they did not engage in frantic action to save those who were not baptized; instead they entrusted the outsiders to God. The church, patiently, also entrusted itself to God, who would bring people into "the community of saints participating in truth" by the arduous means of catechesis and baptism.

As Tertullian put it around AD 200, "Christians are made, not born." 4

In this chapter and the next, I will contend that the Christians' habitus was formed patiently, unhurriedly, through careful catechesis as well as through the communities' reflexive behavior, and that it was renewed in the regular worship of the Christian assemblies.

the church's growth; it is life in "the way of Christ," distinctive and hopeful. Christians, as Cyprian knew well, were growing in numbers because they were distinct from the "unjust"—living patiently in relation to their neighbors and enemies, doing good to them, and waiting for them to come to faith.

So in 256 Cyprian wrote a treatise of encouragement for his people. "Beloved brethren," he wrote, "[we] are philosophers not in words but in deeds; we exhibit our wisdom not by our dress, but by truth; we know virtues by their practice rather than through boasting of them; we do not speak great things but we live them.

As Cyprian puts it near the start of his treatise, "We know virtues by their practice rather than through boasting of them."71 If patience is not good in the lived experience of humans, it isn't worth talking about.72

I must warn you," he says. Whatever persecutions the Christians have experienced, and whether it has been Jews or pagans or heretics who have mistreated them, Christians must not avenge themselves. Cyprian places himself among them: "We should not hasten to revenge their pain with an angry speed.

Tertullian recounts the narrative of Jesus, whose labors (unlike Hercules's) did not include killing, capturing, and stealing43 but who instead kept a low profile, who bore reproaches, who would not hear of forcing people, who ate at anyone's table, who declined to call for massive angelic intervention, who rejected the avenging sword, who healed the servant of his enemy, and thereby "cursed for all time the works of the sword.

We can hear the catechist intoning precept 26: "That it is of small account to be baptized and to receive the eucharist unless you profit both in deeds and works.