In Resilient Faith: How the Early Christian ‘Third Way’ Changed the World, Gerald Sittser—professor of theology at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington—shows how the early church emerged in the Roman world with a distinctive identity in Christ. The phrase “new race” or “third race” comes from a second-century letter written to a Roman official named Diognetus. Christians became the “Third Way” after “First Way” Rome and “Second Way” Judaism. Christ’s followers blended into Roman society seamlessly when it came to language, clothing, food, and commerce. But when life involved worship, sexuality, family life, caring for the poor, and proclaiming the gospel, they “functioned as if they were a nation within a nation, culturally assimilated yet distinct at the same time.”
The Roman way was an all-encompassing civil religion, tolerant, pluralistic, and syncretistic. As Sittser observes, “Rome’s religion was Rome itself.” It absorbed new religions into its pantheon, while maintaining absolute subservience to Rome and strict allegiance to the divine status of the emperor. Rome “had the most trouble with the religions that demanded exclusive commitment to one God and to one way of life. Most religions of this kind, especially Christianity, were considered by definition anti-Roman.”
Sittser recounts a conversation he had with a Kenyan pastor in Nairobi. The pastor asked why Christians in America refer to themselves as “American Christians,” suspecting more to the identification than a person who happened to be an American. The title “American Christian” seemed “heretical to him because it tempted Americans to confuse the two identities, and thus to import American culture (e.g., wealth) to other parts of the world, always ‘in the name of Christ.’”
The conversation highlights an explicit connection between first-century Rome and post-Christendom America. Indeed, Sittser’s description of ancient Rome fits America today. I believe the scholar-historian is the best person to bridge these two worlds and show us the “Third Way”—how to live for Christ in America without being “American Christians.” We must become bilingual interpreters of history, taking what we know of the early Christian “Third Way” and applying it to “Third Way” Christ-followers today.
Center and Substance
The centrality of Jesus Christ permeates Sittser’s understanding. As the “center and substance of the Third Way,” Jesus inspired a “subversive and peaceful” resistance movement, and witnessed to God’s coming kingdom. According to Sittser, “It was Jesus, Son of God, Savior of the world, Lord over all . . . this Jesus who gave rise to the Third Way.” From the beginning, it was Caesar or Jesus, “Rome or Christianity. It could not be both.”
Resilient Faith
Gerald L. Sittser
Sittser shows how the early church offers wisdom for responding creatively to the West’s increasing secularization. The early Christian movement was surprisingly influential and successful in the Roman world, and so different from its two main rivals—traditional religion and Judaism—that Rome identified it as a “third way.” Early Christians immersed themselves in the empire without significant accommodation to or isolation from the culture. They confessed Jesus as Lord and formed disciples accordingly, which helped the church grow in numbers and influence.
Sittser draws on Augustine’s City of God to show the crux of history is not Roman triumph but Christ’s redemptive work. Sittser offers a beautiful picture of authority in the early church, likening it to:
[a] circulatory system, a vast network of arteries that circulated gospel blood from one central organ, the heart. That heart was Jesus Christ, who lived a public life and taught, trained, and commissioned a large and identifiable circle of disciples. After his death, resurrection, and ascension, those disciples continued the movement, bearing witness that Jesus Christ was the incarnate Son of God, Savior and Lord. The momentum did not diminish after the death of the first generation either. A second generation took over, and then a third generation, the main arteries circulating life through relationship, witness, teaching, and leadership. And the heart of the movement continued to be Jesus Christ.
Sittser originally set out to write a different kind of book. He wanted to show how “the early church’s commitment to form people in the faith was the secret to its success in the Roman world.” He eventually abandoned this approach, however, because it was “misleading and incomplete.” He came to a different conclusion:
It was not how Christians lived or how they formed people in the faith, at least not primarily. Rather, it was more fundamental than that. It concerned what Christians believed about the very nature of reality or, better put, who they believed was at the center of reality—namely, Jesus Christ. The Third Way was a consequence of him.
Marcion and Millennials
Two features of Resilient Faith especially intrigue me.
First, Sittser gives me a new perspective on Marcion, the second-century businessman and philanthropist whose teachings were dismissed as heretical. In the church of Rome, Marcion was a crusader for jettisoning the Old Testament. He alleged it was focused on a wrathful, god and he preferred the simple and loving message of Jesus. “According to Marcion,” Sittser writes, “Jesus came to start a new story, not to complete an old one. . . . Christ came to enlighten, not to suffer and die.”
In effect, Marcion hollowed out Christianity of creation, judgment, redemption, and salvation, leaving “a spiritual fellowship that proclaimed a spiritual message.” Marcion’s proposal, Sittser argues, drove the church “to assert that Jesus came from God—and as God—to fulfill the redemptive story of Israel, as the apostles proclaimed.” Marcion provoked a crucial reaction in the second-century church.
But how should we react to the modern Marcionism that has gained traction in our age? The enduring thrust of his teaching, “a spiritual fellowship proclaiming a spiritual message,” permeates the mainline church and the millennial generation. We need pastoral theologians like Tertullian to help shape the direction of “Third Way” Christians.
If we had practiced the early Christian’s ‘Third Way,’ we might have better negotiated the move from Christendom to meaningful Christ-centered discipleship in the household of faith.
Second, Sittser’s focus on millennials is strategic. As a university professor, Sittser is immersed in the world of millennials; I suspect his motivation for exploring the early Christian “Third Way” arises in part from concern for former students who’ve drifted away from the faith. When millennials leave their Christian bubble and go off on their own, they begin “to breathe a different air, the air of unbelief and secularity. They step into a world in which Christianity seems unnecessary and obsolete. . . . They don’t reject faith, as if won over to unbelief through reasoned argument. They simply and slowly drift away.” These may be the believers we’ve lost in the confusing, ambiguous, and messy transition from Christendom to the new “Third Way.” If we had practiced the early Christian’s “Third Way,” we might have better negotiated the move from Christendom to meaningful Christ-centered discipleship in the household of faith.
Sittser is eager to go back to the future, learning both how the early church thrived as “alien residents” and also how we might live for Christ in our secular age.