Loading…

The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire is unavailable, but you can change that!

During the three centuries before the conversion of the emperor Constantine, the Christian church grew in the Roman Empire. It grew despite disincentives, harassment, and occasional persecution. What enabled Christianity to be so successful that, by the fifth century, it was the established religion of the empire? In this unique historical study, Alan Kreider delivers the fruit of a lifetime of...

Unlike many churches today, the third-century churches described by the Apostolic Tradition did not try to grow by making people feel welcome and included. Civic paganism did that. In contrast, the churches were hard to enter. They didn’t grow because of their cultural accessibility; they grew because they required commitment to an unpopular God who didn’t require people to perform cultic acts correctly but instead equipped them to
Page 149
Buy this book at Logos.com