Negotiating Christian Alterity
in the Epistle to Diognetus
If ever there was a question that the theologian Stanley Hauerwas had been keeping strange company through his membership on the Editorial Board of the neo-conservative journal First Things, it was clearly answered in the form of an opinion piece entitled “In Time of War” which appeared there in December of 2001, three months following the events on September 11th, 2001.
“The target was recognizably Hauerwas, a member of the First Things editorial board, and the rhetoric was recognizably that of the editor in chief, Richard John Neuhaus”. [1]
Hauerwas wrote an article for the very first issue of the magazine in 1990 and had contributed to First Things on a regular basis. As a welcome outsider[2], and in the absence of clear fault-lines imposed by external events, his creative approach and eclectic voice provided the monthly journal, over the years, with many of its innovative and unpredictable moments.
September 11th, however, provided just such a fault-line. The editorial “In Time of War”, is of a piece with much American opinion writing of the time. Indeed, before the prospect of the invasion of Iraq divided America’s allies, unreservedly sympathetic editorials appeared in the press throughout the Western World. Even knowing the ‘neo-conservative’ political position which First Things occupied, a present reading of the opinion-piece reveals a shocking degree of lock step with a nation grasping to identify its enemies - identified as those attacking America from beyond its borders and those giving comfort to the enemy and weakening the nation’s resolve from within. Most chilling of all was the blatant assertion that the nation was now gaining strength, unity and purpose in the midst of the conflict. The neo-conservative aptitude for creating alliances across an impossible range of actors had completely eclipsed the neo-orthodox project of never confusing Christ with culture. George W. Bush is quoted copiously throughout the article while only a single aphorism of Jesus is wrestled into place regarding the division of things belonging to God and to Caesar.
The “cardinal quote”, however, and the only text seen fit to include at length in an already long article, straddles the fifth and sixth chapters of the anonymous Epistle to Diognetus and was used by the editors, to remind readers of their responsibilities to the society in which they lived.
Christians are not distinguished from the rest of humanity by either country, speech, or customs. They do not live in cities of their own; they use no peculiar language, they do not follow an eccentric manner of life. They reside in their own countries, but only as alien citizens; they take part in everything as citizens, and endure everything as foreigners. Every foreign country is their homeland, and every homeland a foreign country. They obey the established laws, but in their own lives they go beyond the law. In a word: what the soul is in the body, that Christians are in the world. The soul dwells in the body, but does not belong to the body; just so Christians live in the world, but are not of the world.
The pillorying tone of the editorial with its frequent caricatures of the ‘pacifist’ position – a grudging acquiescence to the tolerable (and silent) non-resistance of the America’s historic Plain People and scorn for the ‘fraudulent pacifism’ of the noisy non-violent resister - was simply rhetorical adornment which served to identify the target of the editorial. The quote from Diognetus, directed against a theologian like Hauerwas, would have been regarded by the author(s) as the strategic coup of the entire offering. As an ‘argument’ it was thoroughly pre-emptive. The language of “alien citizens” or “alien residents” and that list of words such as pa/roikoj, ce/noi and parepi/dhmoj (and the cluster of related ideas found in the Septuagint, in Philo, in 1st Peter, the Epistle to the Hebrews and dotted throughout many of the Church Fathers) had been the warp and woof of contemporary expressions of historic ‘reserve’ in matters relating to Christian participation in the projects of the larger society. Beyond procatalepsis, which merely anticipates the use an opponent will make of a particular text or argument, the intention here was to fire a salvo deep from within home ground.
In a reply, in February 2002 in the same journal, Hauerwas remonstrated with the authors and complained that he was ‘being silenced’. As to the use of the offending quote from Diognetus in the original editorial, he only acknowledged that the Epistle had been quoted and proffered a lukewarm objection that no “concrete political position” had been suggested stemming from such a quote - the greatest “silence”, perhaps, in his reply. Unwilling not to rub salt in the wound, the editors, in their comments appended to the end of Hauerwas’s complaint, made reference to the Epistle once more, suggesting that no concrete political proposals flowed from the anonymous letter other than that Christians should, from time to time, make choices and that the editors of First Things had, as always, made theirs.
Resident Aliens is the title of a book by Stanley Hauerwas. The subtitle of the book, Life in the Christian Colony, is taken from the Moffat translation of Philippians 3:20 – “We are a colony (poli/teuma) of Heaven”. While he nowhere specifically cites the Epistle to Diognetus, there are others willing to quote entire passages of Resident Aliens as “…a modern paraphrase” of the ancient letter’s fifth chapter:
“The confessing church has no interest in withdrawing from the world, but it is not surprised when its witness evokes hostility from the world. The confessing church moves from the activist church’s acceptance of culture with a few qualifications, to rejection of culture with a few exceptions [emphasis mine]. The confessing church can participate in secular movements against war, against hunger, and against other forms of inhumanity, but it sees this part of its necessary proclamatory action. The church knows that its most credible form of witness (and the most ‘effective’ thing it can do for the world) is the actual creation of a living, breathing, visible community of faith.”[3]
The points of view expressed by early Christians are varied, over the first few hundred years of Church history, towards the societies in which they lived. They range from the hostile dismissal by Polycarp of Smyrna of the crowds baying for his blood (Away with the atheists!) and the terms of address used in 1st Clement from his “sojourning” Church in Rome to the Church which “sojourns” at Corinth to quite the other extreme, where Melito of Sardis explains to a noble correspondent how the birth of Christianity during the reign of Augustus has been “…an omen of good to your Empire, for from that time the power of the Romans became great and splendid”.[4] That Christian writers found themselves speaking to the great and the good in Roman society on their own terms is, itself, surprising, and the temptation is to see well-placed and socially apt Christians speaking to pagans “on their own terms” as a fall from what was ‘early’ or ‘primordial’ or simply ‘better’.
“Religion is essentially a way of thinking and of living within a larger social context. Religious difference from the world is therefore always social distance. At least this holds true for Christian faith.”[5]
Can one not, after all, identify a “line” running through parts of the New Testament and many of the Fathers in which the attachment of Christians to their social and political world is “transitory”, “feigned” or merely ‘relativized’ in light of where their true citizenship lies and their loyalties belong? When the old pacts and compromises begin, in our day, to fail, may we not then “…discover what has and always is the case”:[6] That Christians are their own city and Christians are aliens – as the Patriarchs had been – no ‘real’ citizens of a worldly domain. Where this has been forgotten across the millennia has there not occurred a wholesale absorption of the community of faith into the larger lump, with Christian exigencies and gospel imperatives taking second place to the concerns of party, race, nation and Empire? Reformers, for their part, always return to what life for Christians had been like before – when they were properly aliens and sojourners. They return with the sincerely held belief that there was a common heritage – that the sparse testimony to “alien citizenship….pulls together essential social-ethical traditions of the [New Testament] as a whole” and with respect to the traditional language of Christian reserve:
“It takes only a brief glance through the history of the church to see its potency. By the second century being “alien” had become central to the self-understanding of Christians. Later it was essential to monastic and Anabaptist movements alike, to Augustine and Zinzendorf, and, in our own time, to Dietrich Bonhoeffer (The Cost of Discipleship) no less than to Jim Wallis (Sojourners) or Stanley Hauerwas (Resident Aliens).[7]
The “complex” of texts which give rise to what Benjamin Dunning calls the “resident alien topos” spans the epistles of Saint Paul and early Christian writings within the first two hundred years. It can be found in a variety of forms in the Epistle to the Ephesians, in Philippians, in Hebrews and 1st Peter and in 1st Clement. It exists in starker modification in the writings of Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria and performs well beyond the Edict of Milan in the writings of Saint Augustine and his reflections on Cain and Abel in the City of God. At issue here is the universality of this self-designation among early Christians and, more importantly, the coherence of its application to their actual relationships with the surrounding Roman society.
The Epistle to Diognetus was discovered in 1436 by a young priest studying Greek in Constantinople who happened into a fish shop one day and purchased the codex he noticed piled amidst the papers set aside for wrapping fish. Upon the subsequent departure of the young man with three friends on their fatal mission to Muslim lands[8] the document was confided to the Croatian priest, and later Cardinal, Jean Stojkovic, upon whose death it was bequeathed to the Dominicans of the Istrian town of Bale in 1443. The manuscript passed through the hands of not a few acquisitive clerics until, eventually, it came to be deposited in the Municipal Library of Strasbourg in the late 18th century. Among the structures completely destroyed by flames on the single day of siege, which forced the capitulation of the town during the Franco-Prussian War, was the Library building in which the codex known as Codex Argentratensis Graec. ix sat on the shelf and where it burned in the fire. It had, however, been copied on three occasions in the latter half of the 16th century and collated twice in the twenty years prior to the Franco-Prussian War. While there are a number of textual variants between the three transcriptions, the 19th Century collations made for J.C.T. Otto’s Corpus Apologetarum Christianorum saeculi secundi allow for a reasonably solid reconstruction of the text.[9]
The Epistle to Diognetus, found near the beginning of the codex and erroneously credited to Justin Martyr, consists of ten chapters with a further two chapters of unrelated homiletic material, possibly an Epiphany sermon from the same hand, appended to the end. The existence of a “literary seam” lends itself to the possibility of multiple authorship[10] although Justin Martyr seems largely to have been excluded as a candidate. Consensus seems to centre now upon the middle to late second century as a date for the Epistle to Diognetus. The author is clearly acquainted with the letters of Saint Paul and quite possibly with Philo of Alexandria and he makes reference to “Gospels” in the plural. Consonant with task of a Gentile Christian writing a short letter to a pagan enquirer, he quotes nothing.
The closest neighbours to the Epistle, both in terms of provenance and of content would be the Preaching of Peter (100-130 AD) and the Apology of Aristides (140 AD) with a probable dependence of both Aristides and Diognetus upon the earlier document and no interdependence between the two later works.[11] The letter takes the form of a response to Diognetus’ questions intimated in the Prologue:
- Why do Christians not offer worship to the pagan gods or worship like the Jews?
- What is the nature of the Christian piety (qeose/beia) and practice?
- Given the universal truth claims of Christians, why has this worship and practice arisen so late in human history?
The questions – real or fictive – are addressed after the prologue and greetings of the first chapter:
- The gods of the Empire are merely objects made out of stone or wood or metal (chapter 2) .
- While the Jews certainly offer their worship to God they are subject to legalistic hair-splitting and arbitrary superstitions (chapter 3).
- The nature of the Christian’s relationship to the surrounding society can be explained with reference to God’s sending of the Son (chapters 5-7).
- The late advent of the Christian religion is itself a testimony to the long-suffering nature of God’s love (chapters 8-9).
- The reader might consider noting the humility and example of Christians and to take up, himself, the challenge of faith and the life of a convert (chapter 10).
One might labour overlong in the first four chapters on what appears in the work of many apologists as ‘boilerplate’. The polemic against the idolatry of the pagans (a restatement of the relevant portions of Isaiah 44) and the words spoken against the worship of contemporary Judaism has been described by Meecham as “flat and unoriginal”[12] and Marrou as “assez indigente et d’ailleurs emprunté”[13]. The author is, after all, about to launch into a discussion about the distinctives of Christian praxis and must dispense both with the simple charge of “atheism in civic matters” which has dogged Christian leaders and ordinary Christians and the widely-held belief that Christianity was a mere subset of another subset of Imperial residents, namely the Jews. There is a well-rehearsed polyvalence in the polemic against the pagans and the Jews:
“…the biblical Israelites…are classed as proto-Christians, and the contemporary Jews…are recalcitrant…”[14].
At the beginning of the fifth chapter the level of energy rises suddenly. Most modern commentators speaking on Christian distinctiveness will launch into the 5th chapter as if it were the beginning of the work when, in fact, the opening two verses form a sort of doublet which, when taken together, points the reader back to the previous polemical chapter. The author is not quite finished with his polemic against Judaism into which he now incorporates the original question of Diognetus as to whether the Christians constitute a new race[15] (kaino\n tou=to ge/noj). Making reference, once again, to the Jews he notes that the “distinction between Christians and other men” is
ou1te gh=
ou1te fwnh=
ou1te e1qesi
and the same list (land, language and clothing) is immediately taken up and expanded in an identical order in the second verse.[16] While Jews may claim both an historic homeland and habitual “quarters[17] within the urban environment of the Empire”, the Christians do not dwell in their own cities (po/leij i0di/aj) nor do they speak in their own particular patois (dialektw tini/ parhllagme/nh) or follow peculiar customs (bi/on para/shmon).
As to whether Christians constitute their own ge/noj, the author does not make the same affirmation as the Apology of Aristides, wherein the Christians do indeed constitute a race[18] stemming as much from their Progenitor as the Jews do from Abraham or as the barbarian races descend from their founding heroes, nor does he repeat the affirmation found in the Preaching of Peter, where Christians are described explicitly as a tri/ton ge/noj. None of the usual distinctions mark his community off from the larger group as a religious or ethnic minority yet, from within those similar life-practises of Christians to their pagan neighbours, a “remarkable” and “paradoxical” type of citizenship shows itself forth.
The word pa/roikoj appears four times in the New Testament. In Thucydides, the word was taken to mean merely neighbour.[19] In later Christian literature it becomes the loan word used in the Catholic tradition to refer to a Diocese and, ultimately, a local parish. In the ears of a pagan contemporary of the New Testament writers the word, in its simplest fashion, would refer to anybody outside the first and most basic level of enfranchised Roman citizenship. Rome inherited Greek notions of politei/a, with all the social connotations of belonging and the concomitant shame of exile, and made them her own. Roman citizenship was something, nonetheless, which could be aspired to. Racial and ethnic coordinates played into the division of the world into citizens and foreigners, especially during moments of conflict between communities, but it became increasingly the case, as Rome grew and her necessary alliances increased, that the tightest definitions were forced to widen and adapt. The author of the Epistle is using terms with his correspondent which would have not, on the face of it, have contained much theological import and we may not know exactly how effective a means of communication Diognetus might have found these terms so well known to the tax-man and the keeper of city rolls.
Can more clarity be achieved in the biblical texts from which these same terms and clusters of ideas emanate? The debate between John Elliott and Reinhard Feldmeier[20] centres around the question of “alien citizenship” in 1 Peter and whether it can be treated as a simple description of the sociological and legal status which the hearers had endured at one time – as rustics or marginal residents of the Empire or whether this was a state of life which they came to adopt at their conversion and baptism. In Elliott’s reading of the Epistle they are described as pa/roikoi and ce/noi in the same way that Paul (1 Cor 1:26) describes most of his hearers as neither powerful nor “nobly born”. These “homeless” hearers are now, according to 1 Peter, offered an oi1koj in the household of God. This would follow closely the logic of Ephesians where the letter’s recipients are told that they are “no longer ce/noi kai pa/roikoi but “citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God”. Following Elliott, one will note that the ‘alterity’ “so important” to the author of 1st Peter does not issue in clear statements of radical disjuncture with the surrounding society but, rather, in an increased sense of solidarity within the Church.
Where the issues of alterity in 1st Peter appear in a tight knot of just a few words, the Epistle to the Hebrews takes up the “topos of alien citizenship” and develops it at enormous length. The recital of salvation history uses the motif and applies it to all the forerunners of the present people of God. They were all outsiders – living by faith in the absence of a place they could call their own and “confessing” that they were sojourners upon the earth. The issue, in the early chapters of Hebrews where Christians are urged not to miss out on their invitation to enter into “God’s rest”, becomes an invitation to enter into the land which the forebears saw only from a distance and “also” ( in solidarity with the exemplars of the past) to lay aside every burden and to “run the race”.
The writings of Philo recite a similar narrative using the language of “alien citizenship” in a time where the tide was beginning to turn against the Jews of Alexandria,[21] to express what the proper stance of “the wise” should be with respect to the world around them. In this case, “the wise” refers to the Jews – to “…all the wise men mentioned in the books of Moses”, but there is, in Philo’s use of the term, a Platonizing tendency absent in Hebrews. The wise are not only Jews inhabiting the city and keeping a foot in both camps. They are:
“…risen wholly above the sphere of sense perception and have been translated into the world of the intelligible and dwell there registered as freemen of the commonwealth of Ideas, which are imperishable and incorporeal.”[22]
The terms ce/noi kai\ parepi/dhmoi are found nowhere in the writings of Philo but occur in the Septuagint translation of the relevant portions of the Book of Genesis and the very same exegesis of Genesis takes place in the Book of Acts (7:3-6) presumably with no recourse to the writings of Philo. With all this testimony to the historic saints of God being ‘outsiders’, the directives of Hebrews 13:1-7 are, we note once again, unremarkable and speak of a willingness to embrace the best values of the surrounding society. Alien status, here placed within the panorama of Israel’s history, does not result in difference but in a marked acquiescence to conservative family values of the sort which had numerous proponents within the pagan world beyond the Christian community.
This does not always sit well. Miroslav Volf, who began his article on 1st Peter with the axiom that “…religious distance from the world is…always social distance”, notes later, with palpable emotion, that he is “…still deeply troubled” by a lack of comment on the “…oppressive rule of the powerful” within the letter. The strong statements made at the beginning of Volf’s article bear little relationship to his conclusions at the end that the author of 1 Peter is prescribing only a “soft difference” amounting to a feigned ‘reserve’ in social matters granting time and space for evangelism. The household codes in 1st Peter 2 and 3 are exclusively read in terms of what they mean for the believers’ relationship with the surrounding world - and this in the face of a plain reading of the text which reveals an alternating focus upon both internal and external relationships and that this acquiescence was a good thing in itself. The idea of alterity in 1 Peter is presented to a congregation which is, in the same breath, being asked to conform radically to the surrounding society. Volf does admit that the dichotomy between “difference” and “accommodation” is a false one and that there is at play in 1 Peter, “…a complex pattern of symbols, beliefs, values, practices and organizations that are partly congruent with one another and partly contradictory.”[23]
The usefulness of these texts may not lie, then, in what they show Christians to have been “doing” in these turbulent centuries in different letters reflecting a variety of social settings. The value could be found, rather, in what Christian writers were “saying”. According to Rowan Greer,
“The paradox of alien citizenship has a value quite apart from its actualization”[24]
The value it had was as much “rhetorical” as “practical”. In both Hebrews and 1st Peter, according to Benjamin Dunning, the language of “alterity” does not so much “reflect” what the stance of the community was with respect to the surrounding society (and in so doing provide for us a canonical norm which we can return to) as much as it actively produces
“…a usable social identity, one that the text generates through its interlacing of the alien topos with the traditional social paraenesis.”[25]
The approach taken by Dunning (which Volf hints at but does not develop) provides a way of understanding the use of the idea of resident aliens in 1st Peter and Hebrews that avoids the unhelpful dichotomy between difference and accommodation. The terms used are not descriptions of an actual legal status held by marginal residents, nor do they refer, necessarily, to the automatic political and social alienation which the Christian would have taken upon himself following his conversion and baptism. It is, rather, a rhetorical status which the speaker constructs allowing the Christian community to take up the status of alien citizenship without retreating from the Roman society in which they live. Christian writers were able to define the playing field they would occupy, first of all for members of the community of faith in those letters written for their consumption. In other letters such the Epistle to Diognetus and the Apology of Aristides this same language of alterity is taken as a means of negotiating the community’s status in the eyes of their neighbours – not only agreeing to, but positively ‘glorying in’, the “charge” of being aliens while, at the same time, taking possession of that alien status and describing what it was and what it was not. It is an exercise in power expressed through language. In the Epistle to Diognetus the alternating description of reserve and engagement brings the reader, at the end of the fifth chapter, to what the author wants to say most: That his worthy correspondent’s own world, in spite of appearances, is both animated and held together by this community of aliens.
We do not know exactly what form the persecution of Christians took in the first centuries of Christian history. Short periods of intense persecution across large swathes of the Empire alternate with local vendettas by governors or judicial responses to complaints by citizens.[26] We do have evidence, however, that in the “breathing spaces” (which were longer than hagiographies might suggest) Christians were actively negotiating with their Roman concitoyens (and, indeed, with elements within their own fellowships) for a safe space within Roman society which was, nonetheless, an effective space for continued evangelism. Embeddedness and distance are factors which the early church negotiates with the predominant society and it is this negotiation which we find, front and centre, in the Epistle to Diognetus. It is, moreover, self description that does not accord with one set of visible behaviours. The language does something other than ‘describe in normative fashion’ what being a second Century Christian standing outside the predominant culture might have looked like. There were a variety of different ways one might be a Christian in the Empire.
“There surely is no one way of living the Christian life. Even the same circumstances invoke widely different lives, and the seed of Christian conviction produces widely different blossoms.”[27]
The idea that the Christian could be the soul of the world hearkens back to the nature of the love which the Christian bears for the world. The author answers the particular question which Diognetus posed about the nature of Christian love by changing the verb and transforming the object. The original question of Diognetus was about the nature of the “affection” (ti/na th\n filostorgi/an e1xousi pro\j a0llh/louj) the Christians have for one another. This is both “enlarged” in 5:10 and then “particularized” in 6:6. It is, in fact, love for all (a0gapw=si pa/ntaj) and extends (Xristianoi\ tou\j misou=ntaj a0gapw=sin) even to those who hate them.[28] Beyond their physical and cultural placement in the heart of the world, Christians have a vocation to fulfil therein. There are both similarities and differences between the description of life lived “in the flesh” but not “after the flesh” in the Pauline letters and that which appears in the fifth chapter of the Epistle to Diognetus. Both authors understand that Christians are thrown (in Diognetus,by ‘lot’) into this world and (e0n sarki\) live within the bounds of the flesh. For Paul, the assertion that Christians do not live ‘according to the flesh’ (kata\ sa/rka) is nestled within considerations of a life lived ‘according to the Spirit’. In the Epistle to Diognetus, the statement that Christians do not live according to the flesh (5:8) is followed closely by a reflection that the Christian’s citizenship is in heaven (5:9). Rather than describing this in terms of reserve or distance, however, the emphasis is immediately returned to the active dynamic of engagement with the world. Not only do the Christians obey Roman laws, they actively surpass these very same laws through the nature of their lives (5:10).
Christians do not animate the world merely by presenting to it a superior type of virtue although the Christians are presented throughout the fifth chapter by the author as good citizens and their virtue as solid and superior. That the Christians have simply been slotted-in to the role of the divine spirit which animates both the natural and the human community in Stoic thought is probably too simple, although in such a conception, the world is held together (sune/xetai) by the divine presence in the same way as the Christians, themselves, are described in the Epistle to Diognetus as sustaining (au0toi\ de\ sune/xousi to\n ko/smon) the world[29]. Without dismissing either of these, the brief words comparing the Christians in the world to the soul in the body admit of an explanation in light both of the Gospels and Pauline writings known to the author of the Epistle to Diognetus and parallels within other contemporary Christian writers.
The Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:13-16) declares that Jesus’ followers are the Salt of the Earth and the Light of the World and that these agents of God’s influence in the world are the same ones who have just been described, paradoxically, in the earlier verses (1-12), as poor, mourning, meek, hungry and thirsty while being, at the same time. merciful, pure in heart and capable of making peace. This takes up the challenge to Abraham to be a blessing to all the nations of the world (Genesis 12:3) and the words spoken by Moses to the people wandering in the desert that they would be a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6).[30] Romans 8:18-19 moves directly from the sufferings experienced by the Church to a statement of their vocation not only within the human community but within the entire created order. Creation itself “yearns” for the revelation of “the sons of God”.
Aristides and Justin Martyr both make reference to the piety of Christians being an agent for delaying judgement and for allowing the world to cohere. The world may be unaware of this agency but the marvels of creation have their permanence through the prayers of Christians:
“…since they [the Christians] know the loving kindnesses of God toward them, behold! For their sake the glorious things which are in the world flow forth to view!” …
“And to me there is no doubt but that the earth abides through the supplications of the Christians”. [31]
A “deformation” does soon begin to make itself known even within the writings of Justin Martyr where the negative side of this same motif appears. Rather than causing the earth to ‘subsist’ through the agency of Christians, God merely holds back his wrath:
Wherefore God delays causing the confusion and destruction of the whole world, by which the wicked angels and demons and men shall cease to exist, because of the seed of the Christians, who know that they are the cause of preservation in nature.[32]
The positive contribution of the Christian community to the human community and as agents within the created order, writ large, continues to subside and deform over time. The belief that the sacerdotal vocation of a small community of beleaguered believers sustained the universe was a fragile one and, gradually, the motif of ‘efficacious prayer on the part of Christians’ begins to gain a commodity value in the writings of later Fathers writing to their monarchs. The success of Marcus Aurelius against the Quadi in what is now Slovakia is credited to the prayers of Christian soldiers within the 12th Legion. Clement of Alexandria credits the birth of the Saviour and the creation of the church with the relative stability of the Roman Empire since Augustus. On the other hand, in the later writings of Tertullian, the list of forbidden trades and divertissements grows large and the place the Christian may occupy within society begins to shrink.
They may not be idol makers, panders or gladiators; idolatry with its attendant immorality has so corrupted other professions that Christians are also forbidden to become teachers, soldiers or civil servants.[33]
It may well have been inconceivable for a member of whatever Christian community is represented in the Epistle to Diognetus to have undertaken military service or to have been employed by the state in some undertaking which required the use of coercive activity or even to have supported and applauded the military actions of the Empire in defence of its borders. We are not given enough information in this Epistle. The concentration remains on the a few named exceptions to pagan social practice - the question of the exposing of children and the sanctity of the marriage bed (5:6-7). The concentration centres on the enormity of the church’s vocation in animating and upholding the ongoing life of the world.
Hebrews, 1st Peter and the Epistle to Diognetus represents a small cluster of texts – some directed to Christians and one directed to enquirers and detractors – in which the vulnerability of the early Church is held together with the weight and the importance of its vocation in the world. We are all too aware of how things fell out of solution in the centuries which followed the composition of the Epistle under consideration. “Two solitudes” present themselves in the writings of St Augustine. The church’s missional piety soon devolves upon monasticism while the main body of the church acquiesces to the concerns and ambitions of a Christian Empire. In the Epistle to Diognetus, we step back to a point before the approaches of Christians fell into one or the other concrescence. The argument made by an anonymous apologist was that Christians represented no threat to the fabric of the society in which they lived. Though they were considered to be standing outside, they were, in fact, surpassing Roman laws and standards of morality. Their love did not extend only to their own membership but was rooted in a love for all. They required two things of the society in which they were set and, faced with questions by a friendly outsider, the apologist sets forth his case:
“The first thing the Church asks of the world is the space – social, legal, political, even psychological – in which to carry out her distinctive ministry
The second thing the church asks of the world is that the world consider the possibility of its redemption”.[34]
It is surprising to witness the degree to which 1st Peter and Hebrews describe a style of life so much in keeping with their surroundings and that the Epistle to Diognetus, for all its description of the status of Christians as outsiders prescribes so little difference in style of life or distance from the daily concerns of other inhabitants of the city. That Christians, in the first two hundred years of the Common Era made good and reliable citizens and that Christian witness rarely prescribed a “concrete political proposal” which conditioned life in the cities of the Roman Empire
“…proves helpful in complicating over romanticized views of alien status as somehow more faithful to the essence of true Christianity…”[35]
It is possible that these Christians, in their day, could not possibly have conceived of a situation where they held, or were implicated in holding, the reins of power – judging, administering and proscribing. That they could not have conceived of a situation wherein they were somehow ‘responsible for the fate of society’ would be entirely inaccurate, however, for the very nature of the statements about Christians being the soul of the world indicates quite a contrary assertion. The community life of the Christians lived e0n sarki\ was nonetheless not lived kata\ sa/rka. It owed no debt to the flesh and the surplus, therefore, belonged to the world whose interests it served and whose salvation it prayed for.
The opinion piece in First Things requires little more than a few years’ hindsight to place it within its proper context as a regrettable bit of tub-thumping. The loss of dissident voices has rendered the journal more predictable and monochrome. Neuhaus’s reminder, however, that the Epistle to Diognetus can be read in more than one way, and that Christian alterity is something which is negotiated and is neither fixed in stone nor available for rediscovery in pristine form in evangelical antiquity must, to some degree, be heeded.
Bibliography
Chia, Roland, “Resident aliens: some reflections on church and culture” in Transformation: An International Journal of Holistic Mission Studies 17:92 (2000)
Dunning, Benjamin H., Aliens and Sojourners: Self as Other in Early Christianity, (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University, 2009)
Feldmeier, Reinhard, “The ‘Nation’ of Strangers” in Mark G.Brett, Ethnicity and the Bible, (New York: E.J. Brill, 1996)
Foster, Paul “The Epistle to Diognetus”, The Expository Times, 118:4 (2007)
Greer, Rowan, Broken Lights and Mended Lives: Theology and Common Life in the Early Church, (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University, 1986)
Hauerwas, Stanley, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989)
Marrou, Henri-Irénée, À Diognète, (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1965)
Meecham, Henry G., The Epistle to Diognetus, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1949
Poirier, Paul-Hubert, “Elements de Polemique Anti-Juive dans l’Àd Diognetum”, Vigiliae Christianae 40 (1986)
Volf, Miroslav, “Soft Difference: Theological Reflections on the Relation Between Church and Culture in 1 Peter”, Ex Auditu 10 (1994)
Weigel, George, “The Church’s Political Hopes for the World; or, Diognetus Revisited” in Carl E. Braatan and Robert W. Jensen, The Two Cities of God: The Church’s Responsibility for the Earthly City, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1997)
Williamson, Ronald, Philo and the Epistle to the Hebrews (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1970)
[1] Paul Elie, “The Sage of Non-Violence” in The Atlantic November 2007,
[2] Accounting for the pedigrees of the journal’s cardinal contributors, in terms of their neo-orthodox or paleo-orthodox leanings and the corresponding links (or not) with neo-conservative and paleo-conservative approaches to secular politics, is both fascinating and outside the scope of this essay.
[3] Roland Chia, “Resident aliens: some reflections on church and culture” in Transformation: An International Journal of Holistic Mission Studies 17:92 (2000), p.
[4] Rowan Greer, Broken Lights and Mended Lives: Theology and Common Life in the Early Church, (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University, 1986), p. 142
[5] Miroslav Volf, “Soft Difference: Theological Reflections on the Relation Between Church and Culture in 1 Peter”, Ex Auditu 10 (1994) p.18
[6] Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989), p. 17
[7] Miroslav Volf, “Soft Difference: Theological Reflections on the Relation Between Church and Culture in 1 Peter”, Ex Auditu 10 (1994)
[8] Henri-Irenee Marrou, À Diognete, (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1965), pp 5-7
[9] Henry G. Meecham, The Epistle to Diognetus, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1949), p. 69
[10] Paul Foster, “The Epistle to Diognetus”, The Expository Times, 118:4 p. 164
[11] Henri-Irénée Marrou, À Diognète, (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1965), p. 246
[12] Henry G. Meecham, The Epistle to Diognetus, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1949) p. 4.
[13] Henri-Irénée Marrou, op. cit. p. 129
[14] Paul Foster, “The Epistle to Diognetus”, The Expository Times, 118:4 (2007) p. 164
[15] Henri-Irénée Marrou, À Diognète, (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1965), p. 131
[16] Paul-Hubert Poirier, “Elements de Polemique Anti-Juive dans l’Àd Diognetum”, Vigiliae Christianae 40 (1986) pp. 219-220
[17] Henry G. Meecham, The Epistle to Diognetus, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1949), p.108 n. 2
[18] oi9 de\ Xristianoi\ genealogou=ntai apo\ tou= Kuri/ou 0Ihsou= Xristou=. See Marrou p. 132
[19] Liddell and Scott, An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889)
[20] Benjamin H. Dunning, Aliens and Sojourners: Self as Other in Early Christianity, (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University, 2009) pp. 9-14
[21] Feldmeier, Reinhard, “The ‘Nation’ of Strangers” in Mark G.Brett, Ethnicity and the Bible, (New York: E.J. Brill, 1996) p. 251
[22] Ronald Williamson, Philo and the Epistle to the Hebrews (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1970) p. 490
[23] Miroslav Volf, “Soft Difference: Theological Reflections on the Relation Between Church and Culture in 1 Peter”, Ex Auditu 10 (1994) p.26
[24] Rowan Greer, Broken Lights and Mended Lives: Theology and Common Life in the Early Church, (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University, 1986), p. 160
[25] Benjamin H. Dunning, Aliens and Sojourners: Self as Other in Early Christianity, (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University, 2009) p. 61
[26] as evidenced by the early Christian Novella The Acts of Paul and Thecla wherein a young woman, betrothed to a local worthy, embraces chastity, at the behest of Saint Paul, and is condemned by a local judge for breaking her legal contract to marry.
[27] Rowan Greer, Broken Lights and Mended Lives: Theology and Common Life in the Early Church, (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University, 1986), p. 160
[28] Henry G. Meecham, The Epistle to Diognetus, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1949), p.111 n. 11
[29] Henri-Irénée Marrou, À Diognète, (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1965), p. 142
[30] Henri-Irénée Marrou, À Diognète, (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1965), p.149
[31] The Apology of Aristides the Philosopher, chapter 16
[32] Justin Martyr, 2nd Apology, chapter 7
[33] Rowan Greer, Broken Lights and Mended Lives: Theology and Common Life in the Early Church, (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University, 1986) p. 144
[34] George Weigel, “The Church’s Political Hopes for the World; or, Diognetus Revisited” in Carl E. Braatan and Robert W. Jensen, The Two Cities of God: The Church’s Responsibility for the Earthly City, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1997), pp 66-68
[35] Benjamin H. Dunning, Aliens and Sojourners: Self as Other in Early Christianity, (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University, 2009) p. 14
