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This year, things seem to be different. First, this isn't the slow news time that Holy Week often falls into. The U.S.-China spy plane conflict beat out Newsweek's religion piece for the cover story. Second, the newsweeklies each reported on something less than predictable. Not totally unique, mind you—Christianity Today, Books & Culture, and Christian History magazines have all dealt with the subjects of this week's stories in depth—but better than usual.

U.S. News: Why did Christianity succeed?
U.S. News & World Report gets the closest to the old standard "Who was Jesus?" cover story by scooting forward a few centuries and asking why Christianity succeeded. "As the movement expanded during the second and third centuries, it proved to be anything but simple," writes Jeffery Sheler. "The nascent Christian church was torn by persecution and internal division as Christians struggled to understand and apply the meaning of Jesus's life, death, and Resurrection in the roiling religious caldron of the Roman Empire. Perhaps even more than the seminal events of the first century, those later conflicts and controversies would forge Christianity's future-shaping its creeds and canon and transforming a renegade Jewish sect into a powerful world religion." In a mere 3,000 words, Sheler describes how the fall of Jerusalem, persecution, the fight against heresies, and political maneuvering helped Christianity succeed.

Sheler does best when discussing the role of persecution, though he perhaps gives too much weight to the claim of Tertullian, an early theologian, that "the blood of the Christians is seed!" As Christianity Today managing editor Mark Galli has written, sometimes—even in the early church—persecution works. (Everett Ferguson had a similar article in Christian History, arguing that it took centuries for such "seed" to bear fruit.)

The U.S. News article gets shakier as it moves into internal church conflicts over orthodoxy. For starters, there are way too many "sneer quotes": "church leaders … [defined] the tenets of Christian orthodoxy against the 'false teachings' of the heretics." The word heresies—even in the historical sense—never appears alone in the article, only "so-called heresies." The reason for this is that one of the journalistic hooks in this story is that "heretics" where merely practitioners of a Christianity persecuted internally. "[Scholars] argue that in simply dismissing the teachings of the Gnostics and other early minority voices, modern Christians may be depriving themselves of experiencing the faith in ways that are no less valid than those officially sanctioned by the church," Sheler writes. "Perhaps the most tragic shortcoming of the emergent church in the second and third centuries, says James D. G. Dunn, theology professor at the University of Durham, England, was 'its failure to realize that the biggest heresy of all is the insistence that there is only one ecclesiastical obedience, only one orthodoxy.'" That's the biggest heresy of all, eh? Maybe we're not so far removed from the Jesus Seminar after all.

Readers who find this U.S. News article interesting will certainly want to check out our sister publication, Christian History, especially its issues on Heresy in the Early Church and Converting the Empire: How the Early Church Evangelized a Hostile Pagan World. There's also Persecution in the Early Church, but it's not available online.

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April (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45