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Wednesday 1 November 2017

Discover & explore: Christianity in Roman London





Discover & explore: Christianity in Roman London at St Stephen Walbrook with Alastair McKay and the Choral Scholars of St Martin-in-the-Fields featured music  including: Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire – Plainsong; Psalm 148; O sing unto the Lord – James MacMillan; and Nunc Dimittis – Ben Parry.

‪Next Mondays "Discover & Explore" at 1.10pm will explore The Temple of Mithras and St Stephen Walbrook as the #Londinium series continues - https://ssw.churchsuite.co.uk/events/zutt4ok1‬.

In his reflection Alastair said:

A little over 1700 years ago, the Roman Emperor Constantine issued a decree, known as the Edict of Milan, which changed the course of Christian history. The proclamation outlawed the persecution of Christians because of their religious beliefs. It also ordered the return of church property which had been confiscated during earlier persecutions of Christian believers. This edict transformed the practice of the Christian faith by the peoples of the Roman Empire from a hidden activity that was outlawed and persecuted, into something that was permitted. The church could now own land and Christians could worship openly, and could have Christian iconography in their homes.

Before long, practicing as a Christian was the acceptable face of religion in the Roman Empire. And so while there’s relatively little evidence of a Christian church in London prior to the fourth century, form this point onwards, we know that Christians were present in London and more widely in England. Not long into the fourth century, three bishops from these shores, the bishops of London, York and Lincoln, attended a synod of bishops from across the Roman Empire convened by Constantine on the continent. If there were bishops, that meant there was a church, a body of Christian believers whom they served.

Now, while Constantine is best known for being the first Roman emperor to embrace Christianity, there’s also evidence that he may have continued in his pre-Christian beliefs as well. Perhaps it was a case of hedging his bets, and trying to cover himself in relation to the old Roman gods. What is intriguing is that some of the very limited evidence we have for Christian practice in England during the Roman period suggests that early Christians here may have done something similar. The village of Lullingstone in Kent, which today can be found just outside the M25 motorway, is the site of a Roman villa which functioned as a Christian house-church. The surviving wall paintings in the house suggest a Christian faith on the part of the well-to-do home owners; they also suggest that Christianity had become mainstream, and that respectable families embraced the Christian faith, just as their emperor had done.

At the same time, there are signs that pagan worship may have continued in this home, in a cult room in the basement, underneath the main gathering space. It’s not clear whether this represented the family hedging their bets, by trying to keep the old gods happy; or whether some members of the family might have clung to their old beliefs while the rest of the family adopted the new Christian faith. Either way, it seems that the transition to embracing Christianity in Roman Britain wasn’t straightforward, and involved an element of compromise.

The ruins at Lullingstone also suggest that the Christian church in Roman London followed the pattern of the early church of mostly meeting in people’s homes, rather than in dedicated church premises. This was probably a pragmatic decision; it may also have reflected that truly devout Christians were relatively few in number. Just because Christianity had been legalised, didn’t mean that it became widespread in London. Recent re-examination of some pottery fragments found in Brentford, do however confirm that the Christian faith spread beyond the capital city of Londinium.

A pottery shard, found in the 1970s during an excavation in Brentford, is inscribed with the chi rho, the first two letters of Christ in the Greek alphabet. This was a common symbol in the early Christian church. Close examination revealed that the pottery was made in Oxfordshire, rather than being imported, suggesting an early Thames-side Christian community in Roman Brentford. A reminder that the river Thames was thus not just a thoroughfare for trade, but also for human encounters which led to the sharing of newfound faith beyond the city of London.

It’s also worth reminding ourselves that Emperor Constantine’s embracing of Christianity was not without its downsides. Previously, Christians had been unwilling to engage in military action, and saw killing other people as incompatible with their Christian faith. Now, with Constantine crediting the Christian God with helping him secure military victory, Christians proved ready to join the army and to use violent military action in service of the state. And once Christianity became established as the state religion in the years following Constantine, the pendulum swung in an opposite direction: the state now began to impose Christianity on everyone and to persecute dissent, in much the way that it had once persecuted Christians before Constantine's conversion. Christian bishops also saw the opportunity to take advantage of the situation by using state power to punish heretics, pagans, and Jews, in ways that today we’d deem deeply un-Christian.

The demise of the Roman Empire in the fifth century also saw the demise of Christianity in London. The early Saxons, who populated most of England in the fifth and sixth centuries, were pagans, and rejected Christianity. It would take another hundred years or more before further missionary work initiated from the church in Rome saw the Saxons converted, and England moving to re-embrace the Christian faith. So whatever Christian seeds were sown during the Roman period, the Christian faith didn’t take deep root until later centuries.

What might we learn from the signs of Christianity in Roman London? One lesson is the need to avoid the compromises of some of the early believers, and to grasp that we are called to give ourselves whole-heartedly and single-mindedly to God. Just as God didn’t compromise, but gave whole-heartedly and without holding back in Jesus, God’s only Son.

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