Social and historical setting: Christianity as culture critique

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521460835.018

17 - Social and historical setting: Christianity as culture critique

from B - CONTEXT AND INTERPRETATION

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008

Edited by

Lewis Ayres and

Assisted by

Frances Young: Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
Lewis Ayres: Affiliation:
Emory University, Atlanta
Andrew Louth: Affiliation:
University of Durham
Augustine Casiday: Affiliation:
University of Durham

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Summary

The third century is often cast as a period of increasing conformity to Roman institutions and values, one that carried Christianity further and further from its true and original identity. This story of conformity implies an interaction between two disparate cultures in which the weaker culture is modified and somehow diminished through its adaptation. Such a model imagines Christianity as a missionary enterprise seeking to take root in an alien culture. What this narrative obscures is the fact that Christianity was a movement originating within Roman society, invented as it were by ‘Romans’. It is precisely the fact that Christians lacked a unique cultural identity that made the emergence of Christianity such a dilemma for the Empire. Christians did not have a common ethnic identity – that distinctive dye of language, custom, ritual and local history that located other individuals and groups on the cultural map of the Roman Empire. Since the Roman elites were fastidious about their ‘Romanness’, expressed in the values of auctoritas, dignitas, romanitas and mos maiorum, these ethnic identities remained a powerful force in imperial society. When the imperial military and political map bestowed sometimes unwanted regional identities on areas organized into provincial administrative units, the custodians of this regional culture created a hybrid culture by crossing the values and traditions of this ‘Romanness’ with those of the proud, albeit local, elites. Christianity was shaped by the powerful cultural forces at work within the imperial and regional societies where it germinated.

Keywords

Roman hegemony African churches Carthage Christianity Roman society

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature , pp. 179 - 199

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521460835.018 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2004

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17 - Social and historical setting: Christianity as culture critique

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