Anabapt-ish Theology Book Club discussion

After reading the book, did your views on the topic change at all? What is your final impression of the book? What are your key takeaways?

Just finished. I’m impressed and convicted by the early church’s commitment to faithfully living in community. I’m even more convicted by the impatience that marks our churches today.

Kevin wrote: "Just finished. I’m impressed and convicted by the early church’s commitment to faithfully living in community. I’m even more convicted by the impatience that marks our churches today."

Where do you see impatience today?

It’s so easy to either romanticize or be extremely critical of attitudes and actions of people in the past, and the further the further back you go, the easier it is to go to the extremes. I started this book with a dislike of Constantine, a distrust of Augustine, and little knowledge of the other main players. By the end, I’d softened a bit to Constantine, hardened a bit towards Augustine, and learned a lot about Cyprian, Tertullian, Lactantius, and others. I really enjoyed the book, and this particular glimpse into the early church provided a lot of confirmation bias, and a few questions.
How do you define success, in quality or quantity? It would appear that until Augustine, the church generally viewed it as quality, while after that, with periodic exceptions, it’s been quantity, and the end justifies the means.
Was the rigour involved in catechesis prior to acceptance into membership actually part of the attraction? We’ve grown accustomed to Billy Graham style alter calls that are sometimes immediately followed by baptism. How do we appropriately ‘count the cost’ of discipleship?
The passage that runs between pages 151-152 contrasts the ‘belong-believe-behave’ attitude of many current progressive churches, with the ‘behave-believe-belong’ model of the apostolic church and the ‘beloved-behave-belong’ model that appears common in most evangelical churches. The recurring theme overall, I think, was best expressed in the quote from Cyprian on page 169, “We do not preach great things. We live them.”, and the line on page 209, ‘not to change theirs thinking, but their lives. How do we live such lives that we are a pleasant aroma rather than a stench to those around us?
And then, on page 229, one lone that could apply to the church today - mainline, evangelical, or anabaptist - ‘They don’t want pagans to know about Christian’s failures.” This is quire apropos in light of all the scandals being exposed in the current church, particularly the current discussion around Mark Driscoll, Mars Hill, and non disclosure agreements.
As I said above, I’ve somewhat softened my opinion that Constantine was the worst thing to ever happen to Christianity after seeing a bit of his humanity here. There is much on his approach that is to be decried still. The comment by Lactantius on page 259 “when people seek to defend a religion by bloodshed and torture, the religion is polluted and outraged” struck a chord.
I’m left wondering how different Christianity, and the world, would be today if we had chosen to follow Cyprian rather than Augustine. I suspect not much as power will always find a way.

Between traveling and work, I just finished.

I really enjoyed this perspective on the early church. It provided some historical evidence for some ideas I've been coming back to recently. One of those is that Christianity is something we practice and do rather than something primarily. I've thought that do a long time but this book gave me a vision for what that looks like in real life.