Pharaoh in Greek Dress: I Learned the Creeds and Practiced John Galt
Jazz, Shame, and Being With — Essay #9
I spent years speaking Christian language while being formed by a very different grammar—one that prized self-sufficiency, mastery, and quiet certainty that I had figured something out. This essay traces how Stoic and Gnostic patterns seeped into Christian formation, why they felt compelling, and how the early church once built practices designed to resist them.
Dear friends—
Here’s the short version: many of us learned Christian vocabulary while being formed by a very different grammar—one that prizes self-sufficiency, mastery, and the quiet confidence that we have figured something out. This essay names that grammar, traces where it came from, and shows why it has proven so resilient inside Christian life.
This essay is not about exposing hypocrisy or scoring a theological point. It’s about a formation problem that operates below the level of belief. I know this grammar intimately because it formed me. I learned to speak of grace, participation, and communion while something else was quietly training my body. The result wasn’t bad faith. It was a mismatch—Christian words carried by logics the tradition once worked very hard to resist.
If that already feels uncomfortably familiar, good. Stay with me. The goal of this essay is not to shame recognition but to slow us down long enough to see what the early church saw coming—and what they built to form something different.
What follows begins with a figure you may recognize.
Watch him walk in.
Shoulders back. Smile ready. He knows who he is—a man who’s built something, who’s disciplined himself, who’s earned his place. He’s a good Christian. Ask him. He’ll tell you. His faith is strong. His family is intact. His opinions are correct. And if you disagree, well, that’s your problem.
The ancient Stoics would recognize him immediately. They’d call him a Sage. The Gnostics would recognize him too—he knows who’s in and who’s out, and he’s certain he’s figured it out. What the early church would have recognized is harder to say. They spent centuries fighting both formations. They didn’t expect them to merge.
I recognized him because I’ve been him. For years I walked into church with that same set to my shoulders, that same quiet certainty that I had figured something out. PhD in theology. Rector of Episcopal parishes. I knew the vocabulary of grace, participation, communion. What I didn’t know was that my practices were forming something else entirely.
This essay is about the grammar underneath—and what the early church understood that took me decades to learn. They saw him coming. They knew the threat. And they built practices and institutions designed to form something different: not Sages but Saints. Not the self-sufficient and the sorted, but the received and the vulnerable.
For over a thousand years, those practices held. Not perfectly—the tensions were there from the beginning, the resignification never complete. But the dikes held. The sea pressed, and the land stayed dry.
I want to show you what they built and why it mattered. Because I received the vocabulary without the practices that made it mean what it was supposed to mean. Somewhere between their achievement and my formation, the conditions changed. The pressures shifted. What had been held in place was released.
That’s a longer story—one that winds through wars and councils, through professors nobody remembers now and the families who absorbed their ideas without ever reading them. It crosses an ocean and arrives, eventually, at a plantation on Bayou Boeuf where my mother’s family owned what they should never have owned—and at Sunday dinners where I was being formed before I knew it. This essay is the first movement: what was at stake, and what was built to protect it.
Maybe by the end, you’ll start to see what I’m seeing—why he keeps walking in, shoulders back, smile ready, and why he’s exactly the kind of Christian our common life knows how to produce.
Maybe in yourself.
The Grammar Before the Mutation
In the last essay, I traced the economy of manna—God’s strange pedagogy in the wilderness where yesterday’s provision couldn’t be hoarded and tomorrow’s worry was forbidden. What I didn’t say explicitly was what that economy was forming.
It was forming Saints.
Not saints in the Hallmark sense—people who are especially nice or unusually pious. Saints in the technical sense: persons whose identity is received rather than constructed, whose security comes from belonging rather than achieving, whose vulnerability is the site where grace operates rather than weakness to be overcome.
The ancient church developed vocabulary for this. They called the goal koinonia—communion, participation, being-with. They contrasted it with autarkeia—self-sufficiency, the inner citadel, the fortress self that needs nothing from outside.
Here’s where I have to confess something embarrassing.
I spent decades in Christian formation—seminary, ordination, parish ministry, doctoral work in Christian ethics—and for most of it, I was being formed in the wrong grammar. I knew the vocabulary of manna. I preached about receiving, about gift, about grace. But my practices were forming something else: achievement, self-construction, proving my worth through what I could master and control.
I was learning the words while operating in a different logic entirely.
Let me make this concrete with a simple table—a diagnostic I’ll return to throughout this essay:
I know this theology in my bones now. Receive, rest, contribute. The manna economy. And I still obstruct it every day. (You probably do too. We should talk.)
But here’s the problem: the early Jesus movement didn’t emerge in a vacuum. It emerged in a world where another vision of human flourishing was already dominant—and that vision looked remarkably similar in some ways, devastatingly different in others.
Within a few centuries, the church would also have to navigate an even older temptation: the grammar of Pharaoh wearing philosophical clothes.
When Jesus-Followers Met Stoics
The Grammar We Were Meant to Inherit
The Only Manna We Keep handed us a grammar worthy of creatures who live by gift. Augustine showed us the heart that can only rest by receiving; the Cappadocians revealed a God whose very life is shared rather than seized; Aquinas let humility and magnanimity grow together like roots and branches; Luther warned us how quickly the self collapses when it tries to become its own foundation. Taken together, these voices describe a single way of being in the world: identity is received, agency is participatory, and pride becomes ordered only when communion is its ground.
I didn’t know any of this at twenty-one. Just after I got engaged, I entered what I now sheepishly call my Ayn Rand phase. I was an economics major at Annapolis at the beginning of the Reagan revolution, indoctrinated into what we now name as neoliberal economics—Milton Friedman, the Chicago School, markets as salvation. My supreme exemplar wasn’t Jesus of Nazareth. It was John Galt: unencumbered, unashamed, answerable to no claim he had not chosen. I recited the Creeds and inhaled the wafer and wine on Sundays with my fiancée, and Monday through Saturday I imitated John Galt as the human ideal. Appeals to altruism? That was the moral language of control—how the weak manipulated the strong.
It was a vision of freedom that felt heroic, even salvific, precisely because it asked nothing of me I had not already decided to give.
Christian imagination was never meant to begin with the self constructing itself. It was meant to begin with the self held—steadied by a love that precedes striving, liberated by a belonging that does not require achievement. From this foundation, the great risks of life, the creative work of contribution, even the courage of leadership, become acts of gratitude rather than bids for justification.
This was the grammar the tradition entrusted to us, the one in which humility and courage, dependence and agency, vulnerability and strength were not opposites but neighbors. It names a life in which the creature does not shrink in false modesty nor inflate in anxiety, but stands upright in the radiance of a gift already given.
And it is precisely this grammar that the modern West forgot.
The Shared Ground
The early Jesus movement emerged in a Stoic-saturated world. When Paul arrived in Athens and encountered philosophers at the Areopagus, when educated Romans considered this strange new Jewish sect, when the early apologists tried to explain what the assemblies believed—Stoicism was the cultural furniture of the empire.
And here’s what makes this complicated: Jesus-followers and Stoics shared massive common ground. Both traditions cared about virtue. Both thought the good life required wisdom. Both believed in a logos—a rational principle ordering the cosmos. Both emphasized moral seriousness, self-examination, preparation for death.
An educated Roman encountering the Jesus movement might have thought: “These people are Stoics who got confused about one particular Jew.”
The Stoics would have understood Pharaoh’s logic perfectly. Not the cruelty—Stoics weren’t cruel; Marcus Aurelius wasn’t Rameses. But the grammar underneath: you construct your worth through what you achieve. The Sage builds an inner citadel. The Sage needs nothing from outside. The Sage is self-sufficient.
This is Pharaoh in Greek dress.
Not because Stoics were villains. Marcus Aurelius wasn’t Rameses. But the grammar underneath is identical: you construct your worth through what you achieve. The Sage builds an inner citadel. The Sage needs nothing from outside. The Sage is self-sufficient.
Same song. Different instruments.
What “Grammar” Means
When I say “grammar,” I don’t mean rules for constructing sentences. I mean something deeper—the logic that determines how words actually work.1
Think about the word “freedom.” In one logic, freedom means freedom from—escape from constraint, independence, self-sufficiency. The goal is a fortress self, impervious to external threat.
In another logic, freedom means freedom for—capacity for love, availability for relationship, openness to the other. The goal is communion, participation, vulnerability that enables connection.
Same word. Different logics underneath. And the logic determines what the word does when you use it.
Phrase Book vs. Immersion
Imagine taking a phrase book to France. You memorize the phrases. You can order coffee, ask directions, express gratitude. Anyone listening would hear French words coming out of your mouth.
But you’re not thinking in French. You’re thinking in English, then translating. The grammar underneath—the way concepts relate, the logic of how meaning is made—that’s still English. You have French vocabulary operating within English grammar.
This is what can happen when traditions encounter each other. And it’s what I’m increasingly convinced happened to me.
For years I used Christian vocabulary—grace, participation, communion—while operating within a different grammar entirely. The grammar of achievement. Of self-construction. Of proving my worth through what I could master and control.
The question isn’t whether early Jesus-followers borrowed vocabulary from Stoicism. Of course they did. (Everyone borrows; that’s how language works.) The question is whether they successfully resignified that vocabulary—transformed it so thoroughly that it operated within Christian grammar—or whether the old meanings persisted underneath, waiting.
A Necessary Caveat
I need to be careful here. It would be easy to caricature Stoicism as purely about the inner fortress—individual self-mastery divorced from community. But Marcus Aurelius wasn’t meditating in a cave; he was governing an empire. Stoic philosophy had communal, political, and relational dimensions that I shouldn’t flatten.
The question isn’t whether Stoicism was “bad”—it was a serious attempt to live well, and many of its practitioners exhibited genuine virtue. The question is whether Christian resignification actually transformed the grammar, or whether the Stoic grammar persisted underneath the Christian vocabulary. And whether—when the practices that sustained resignification weakened—the old meanings flooded back.
The Resignification Concept
Here’s what I’m learning from scholars who study how language works: when communities borrow words from other traditions, they don’t just transplant vocabulary. They attempt to transform the meaning—to make the word serve new purposes within a new story.
The technical term is resignification: taking an existing term loaded with established meaning and redeploying it in a new context where it acquires new significance.
But—and this is crucial—resignification is never complete. When you borrow a word, the old meaning doesn’t disappear. It persists within the new usage, like a palimpsest where earlier writing shows through.
The Philippians Gambit
Watch Paul try it.
When he writes to the Philippians, “I have learned to be content [autarkēs] whatever the circumstances... I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (Phil 4:11-13), he’s not inventing a new word. He’s borrowing a term loaded with Stoic freight—the sage is self-sufficient, virtue alone suffices for happiness, you need nothing from outside—and attempting to resignify it.
Paul’s move is audacious: contentment comes not from Stoic self-mastery but from Christ’s power working through human weakness. The sufficiency is Christ’s, not his own. ‘I can do all things’ becomes the opposite of what it sounds like—not a boast but a confession of dependence.
This is resignification as it’s supposed to work. The vocabulary stays; the logic transforms.
But here’s the question Paul couldn’t answer from Philippi: What happens when readers don’t catch the flip? What happens when the Stoic freight persists underneath the Christian usage, waiting?
What the Next Generations Heard
Paul intended the flip. But intention doesn’t guarantee reception.
Within two centuries, you can watch the borrowed vocabulary straining against its new home. The church’s brightest minds attempted the same resignification Paul had modeled—and the results were uneven.
Clement of Alexandria is a revealing case. He hoped philosophy could serve faith, that Stoic moral seriousness might steady Christian life. But certain Stoic habits resisted baptism. The Stoics prized apatheia—freedom from disturbance—as the mark of the wise. Clement tried to Christianize this ideal, urging believers not to be ruled by passions, yet the grammar he borrowed carried implications he could not fully purge.2
In his Stromata, Clement describes even Christ as ‘entirely impassible, inaccessible to any movement of feeling’—eating not from bodily need but only to prevent onlookers from thinking him phantasmal. (Let that sink in: Christ performing hunger for optics. The incarnation as PR strategy.)
Here the crack opens: if perfection means transcending emotion, then vulnerability becomes deficiency, need becomes weakness, and the God who weeps at Lazarus’s tomb starts to look like a concession rather than a revelation.
Clement did not intend this. But the echo lingered.
The same tension appears in Justin Martyr, the church’s first great apologist. Justin embraced the Stoic concept of logos spermatikos—seeds of reason scattered throughout creation—arguing that philosophers like Socrates and Heraclitus had participated in the Logos before Christ’s coming.3 The move was generous and strategically brilliant: it claimed the best of Greek thought for the church.
But the Stoic logos was cosmic order, an impersonal rational structure governing all things by necessity. Justin’s grammar conversion was real—he insisted that Jesus Christ is the Logos, not merely an instance of it—yet the borrowed vocabulary carried traces of its origin. When providence sounds like rational architecture rather than personal address, when cosmic order substitutes for covenantal love, virtue quietly becomes alignment with structure rather than response to a summons.
The pattern recurred wherever borrowed grammar outpaced converted meaning.
I know because I lived it. At naval nuclear power school, my skipper’s Bible study introduced me to Logos—”In the beginning was the Word” rendered as rational order, cosmic structure, the principle that governed the universe. I didn’t hear John’s gospel. I heard ancient validation of what I was already becoming: homo economicus, the rational optimizer, unencumbered by irrational claims. Jesus became John Galt with a beard.
Maybe Justin’s logos spermatikos was always vulnerable to this. Or maybe I just heard what I was tuned to hear.
Paul flipped autarkeia. Clement couldn’t fully flip apatheia. Justin strained to flip logos. The resignification project was real—but incomplete.
None of this displaced the ancient grammar. Most of the time the tradition corrected itself with remarkable grace—later Fathers like Maximus the Confessor would explicitly address these tensions, distinguishing natural passions (which Christ assumed) from disordered ones (which he healed).4 But the fault lines remained. The patristic inheritance was not a seamless cloth but a tapestry stitched over earlier frameworks that occasionally strained under the weight of Christian claims.
Whenever the impulse toward self-mastery was not fully transfigured—whenever courage drifted toward stoic resolve rather than magnanimity, or serenity toward emotional detachment—the grammar wavered.
At the time, these tensions felt minor. They were the ordinary complexities of a living tradition. Yet history shows that if an anthropology compatible with the Way is not defended with clarity, another anthropology eventually takes its place. Stoicism waited patiently in the wings—admired for its rigor, respected for its discipline, compelling in its confidence. It offered an alternative vision: a world where the self stands upright through achievement rather than gift, mastery rather than mercy.
These early fractures did not yet redefine Christian identity. But they created the conditions in which a more thorough Stoicization could one day take root.
The Reclamation Metaphor
Here’s the image that helps me understand why this keeps happening:
The Dutch reclaimed land from the sea. They built dikes, installed pumps, maintained constant vigilance. The land they created is real—you can farm it, build on it, live on it.
But the sea never left. It’s always there, always pressing. Stop maintaining the dikes, and the sea doesn’t negotiate. It just comes home.
The early Jesus-followers reclaimed vocabulary from the Stoic sea. They resignified apatheia, autarkeia, logos—built new meaning on what had been Stoic territory. The resignification was real.
But the Stoic meanings never left. They persisted as traces within the resignified terms, always pressing.
The dikes were practices. Weekly Eucharist. Creedal confession. Catechesis. Virtue formation in community. These held the resignification in place.
When practices weakened—when the dikes weren’t maintained, when the pumps stopped—the sea reclaimed the land.
The Contemporary Collapse
This is how you get prosperity gospel preachers quoting “I can do all things through Christ” as a self-help mantra for achievement. No one converted to Stoicism. The resignification just... failed to hold.
The vocabulary stayed Christian (the land still has Dutch names). But the operative logic drifted back toward Stoic patterns (the sea is back). No dramatic conversion event. Just gradual re-inundation.
Paul’s intended flip—”I can do all things because of Christ who strengthens me”—became the Stoic original: “I can do all things through my own empowered effort.” Same words. The grammar reverted.
The Diagnostic: Circumstances and Consequences
So how do you detect mutation if the vocabulary stays the same?
Here’s a reframing that cuts through: when you use a word or concept, ask two questions:
Circumstances: When and where do you apply it?
Consequences: What follows from applying it?
Stoics and Jesus-followers both have the concept “enemy.” But post-Sermon on the Mount, the consequences of applying that concept diverge dramatically. For the Stoic: rational management, emotional indifference. For the Jesus-follower: love, prayer, non-retaliation.
The mutation shows up not in whether you have the concept but in what follows when you apply it. Same vocabulary, different consequences.
The Stoics weren’t the only alternative pattern Jesus-followers encountered. There was another, perhaps more seductive, that attacked the very foundation of incarnational faith—not just bodies in general, but one body in particular.
When Bodies Don’t Matter
The Gnostic Challenge
I know Christians who weep at movies about refugees. They feel the injustice. They grieve the suffering. They identify as compassionate people.
Then they vote for policies that cage children at the border.
For years I couldn’t make sense of this. How could someone hold both? Were they hypocrites? Did they not see the contradiction?
It took me a long time to realize: there is no contradiction—if you’re operating within a certain grammar. A grammar where what you believe and what you do occupy different registers entirely. Where your heart can be in the right place even if your practices tell a different story.
The ancient church had a name for this grammar. They called it Gnosticism. And they fought it tooth and nail.
But here’s what I’ve only recently understood: the spirit/matter dualism that the Gnostics taught—the idea that bodies don’t ultimately matter—wasn’t the engine of their heresy. It was the justification for something more fundamental.
The engine was what theologian J. Kameron Carter calls covenantal severance: abstracting Christ from his Jewish, covenantal flesh.5
Universal Solvent vs. Particular Covenant
Think of a universal solvent—a hypothetical substance that can dissolve any container you put it in. The problem, of course, is that you can’t actually store it anywhere. Whatever you put it in, it destroys.
Gnosticism functions like a universal solvent on Christ’s particularity. It dissolves the scandal of incarnation—that God chose this people, spoke this language, was born of this woman, was crucified under this political authority. Gnosticism says: all of that is accidental. The real Christ is spiritual, universal, above all that messy particularity.
But when you dissolve Christ’s particularity, you also dissolve the container that gives the Way its shape. What remains can be poured into any container—any cultural hierarchy, any power arrangement, any system that needs religious legitimation.
The ancient Gnostics poured it into a hierarchy of spiritual natures: pneumatics, psychics, hylics. Some people are saved by what they are, not by covenant relationship with God.
Carter names the theological root: covenantal severance. I want to name what it produces operationally.
First, what I’ll call the supersessionist standard: a supposedly universal criterion of belonging that just happens to ensure a targeted group always fails—justifying their exclusion. The Gnostic version worked like this: Create a purity test (spiritual nature). Frame it as universal (gnosis is available to the worthy). Ensure the targeted group fails (those bound to covenant, to matter, to particularity can never measure up). Use their “failure” to justify exclusion (they’re not spiritually capable).
The test looks fair. That’s the point. Anyone could be a pneumatic—it’s not officially about your ancestry or your body. But the criterion is designed so that certain people always fail. The institution that controls the “universal” standard gets to decide who’s in and who’s out.
Second, what this produces: dominative identity. Carter calls it “whiteness”—and his diagnosis is correct. But I want to name it differently, because the sin isn’t inscribed on bodies; it’s a story embraced. Dominative identity is the embrace of a false story in which a righteous “we,” defined by purity and possession, is threatened by a contaminating “them”—requiring defensive domination rather than vulnerable communion.
The supersessionist standard is how dominative identity gets enforced. Continuous marking of who fails the purity test maintains the “we.” Anyone can adopt this story. That’s what makes it so dangerous.
Centuries later, as Carter shows, the same dissolved Christ got poured into racial categories. Dominative identity became, in his devastating phrase, a “replacement doctrine of creation.”
And in our moment? I’m watching the same dissolved Christ get poured into competing containers of Dominative Christianism. “Real Christians” are defined not by participation in Christ’s covenantal flesh but by cultural markers, political allegiance, the right opinions.
The Gnostic mechanism hasn’t changed. Only the container.
Pharaoh’s Division Logic Applied to Humanity
Think about what Pharaoh did. He divided Israel: some were useful (skilled labor), some were disposable (male infants). He determined who counted. The institution—Pharaoh’s administration—decided who belonged and who didn’t.
The Gnostics did the same thing to humanity. Pneumatics at the top. Psychics in the middle. Hylics at the bottom. Some people saved by nature, others damned by nature. The division wasn’t based on anything you did—it was based on what you were.
And here’s the mechanism that made it possible: covenantal severance. Abstract Christ from his Jewish particularity, and you create a vacuum. Something has to fill it. For the Gnostics, it was spiritual hierarchy. For later centuries, it would be racial hierarchy, national hierarchy, whatever hierarchy the culture provides.
The Gnostic move wasn’t really about spirit versus matter. It was about who gets to determine belonging. Once you sever Christ from his particular covenant, the institution that controls the “universal” Christ gets to decide who’s in and who’s out.
Pharaoh would recognize this immediately.
Contemporary Recognition
I’m watching this happen again in real time. On both sides.
On the political right, there’s a concept circulating called “Heritage American”—the idea that how long your family has been in America determines how American you are. It sounds like patriotism. But listen to the grammar underneath: some people are more American by nature, by accident of birth, by ancestry. Others are formally included but culturally excluded.
On the progressive left—including academic theology—I encounter what I’ve come to call Providential Identitarianism. The framework sounds different: God has providentially established distinct cultural identities, and those identities determine who has authentic voice, who can speak with authority, who gets to adjudicate belonging. Some people have epistemic privilege by nature of their identity position. Others can be allies, can do the work—but can never speak with the same authority.
I recognize the second pattern because I’ve operated by it. In academic spaces, I’ve sorted people by identity category before listening to their arguments. I’ve assumed that position determined insight.
But here’s what I’ve had to face: the grammar is identical.
The Gnostic logic is precise: formal belonging at the bottom, cultural authority reserved for the elect at the top.
The ancient Gnostics called the elect “pneumatics”—those saved by spiritual nature. The contemporary right calls them “Heritage Americans.” The contemporary left calls them “authentically positioned voices”—and sometimes finds Jewish particularity itself an inconvenient complication in its moral calculus.6 7
Different containers, same dissolved Christ.
Mining vs. Gardening
Once you sever Christ from his Jewish particularity, the spirit/matter dualism follows naturally.
Think of two ways to approach a human being.
In one vision, humans are like ore. There’s something valuable inside—call it the soul, the spirit, the divine spark—trapped within worthless matter. The goal is extraction. Separate the valuable from the dross. Escape the prison of the body.
In the other vision, humans are like plants. Body and soul grow together, in relation to earth and sun and rain. You can’t extract the “real” plant from its material existence. The goal isn’t escape but flourishing. Cultivation, not mining.
The Gnostics were miners. But the dualism was symptom, not cause. First they severed Christ from his Jewish body. Then they decided bodies in general didn’t matter. The order is important. Covenantal severance came first; metaphysics followed. And once you’ve severed Christ from his particular flesh, what matters is extracting the spiritual essence—which can then be mapped onto whatever hierarchy you prefer.
Hologram vs. Incarnation
The technical term is Docetism—from the Greek dokein, “to seem.” Christ only seemed to be human. He looked real, interacted with the environment, but there was no there there. His body was a hologram, a projection, a visual demonstration.
But notice: Docetism only makes sense if Christ’s Jewish particularity doesn’t ultimately matter. If the incarnation is just a demonstration of spiritual truths—not the actual site where God and humanity are reconciled—then of course the body is optional. It’s a teaching aid, not the thing itself.
This matters enormously. If Christ’s body was real—if he was hungry, tired, scared, killable, and specifically Jewish—then God has skin in the game. The incarnation cost something. What happens to this body, in this covenant community, matters to God.
But if Christ’s body was appearance, then the incarnation was a performance. Moving, perhaps. Instructive, certainly. But ultimately costless. God demonstrated something without risking anything.
And if God’s body didn’t ultimately matter, why would yours? And if this covenant doesn’t ultimately matter, then particularity itself becomes infinitely transferable—available for whatever myths of sacred pedigree the powers find useful. Which is exactly what happens perennially, as we shall see.
Escape Room vs. Dinner Party
Here’s another way to see it. Is salvation more like an escape room or a dinner party? Or better: Is salvation something that happens to you, or something you’ve always already been invited into?
In an escape room, the world is a puzzle designed to trap you. Success comes from finding hidden knowledge that others don’t have. Only the clever few escape. The physical environment is an obstacle to be decoded and transcended.
At a dinner party, the world is a gift to be received and shared. Success comes from being welcomed into relationship you didn’t earn. The invitation preceded your existence—you were created for this table. Everyone is invited. The physical environment—the food, the table, the embodied presence of others—is the medium of communion.
The Gnostics were escape room Christians. They had special knowledge (gnosis) that separated them from the ignorant masses. They were the clever ones who had figured out the code.
They missed the table because they were looking for the exit.
The question for us isn’t theological. It’s phenomenological: Which does your community feel more like? Are you solving puzzles together, or breaking bread?
The early church recognized the threat. And they built elaborate defenses—not just against spirit/matter dualism, but against the more fundamental move of severing Christ from his covenantal flesh. For a while, it worked.
How the Church Held the Line
The Particularity Fortress
“I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth…”
I must have said those words a thousand times before I understood they were weapons. Every clause about materiality—about earth, about flesh, about bodies—was a polemic against people who’d rather have a hologram than a Lord with dirty feet.
But it took me even longer to understand what they were really defending. Not just bodies in general. Not just matter against spirit. They were defending the scandal of particularity—that God is the Creator, YHWH, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That Christ is not a spiritual abstraction but the Jewish Messiah, born of a Jewish woman, in the line of David, fulfilling the covenant made with Israel.
“Maker of heaven and earth”—not a demiurge who botched material creation, but the Creator who called matter good. And not just any Creator, but the God who took on Israel’s story as his own—speaking through prophets, making covenant, assuming particularity as the medium of his presence.
“Born of the Virgin Mary”—not a hologram projected into the world, but actual flesh taken from an actual woman. A Jewish woman. In a Jewish family. In a Jewish village. The Word became flesh, and the flesh had a family tree.
“Suffered under Pontius Pilate”—not a demonstration of suffering, but real pain in a real body under real political authority. The Roman occupation of Palestine is in the creed. History is in the creed. The particularity is deliberate.
“Resurrection of the body”—not the soul’s escape from its prison, but the body’s redemption and transformation. The risen Christ still bore the wounds. The particularity traveled through death and out the other side.
Irenaeus’s Vision
Irenaeus, writing in the second century, saw what was at stake. Against the Gnostics who wanted to mine the spirit from the dross of matter, he insisted: creation is good. Incarnation is real. Bodies matter. Practices matter. What you do with your flesh is your faith made visible.8
But he saw something deeper too. He understood that the Gnostic move wasn’t just philosophical error about spirit and matter. It was theological treason—an attempt to decouple the Way from Israel’s story, from YHWH’s covenant, from the scandal of a God who chooses particular peoples and particular persons.
His concept of recapitulatio captured this: in Christ, God was gathering all of creation back to himself—but through Israel’s story, not around it. The covenant wasn’t bypassed by the incarnation; it was fulfilled. The Church doesn’t replace Israel; it’s grafted in.
And the glory of God? Irenaeus wrote one of the most important sentences in Christian theology: “The glory of God is the living man.” Not the escaped spirit. Not the extracted soul. The living man—embodied, breathing, material, vulnerable. This is profoundly anti-Gnostic. The whole person, alive and in relationship, is where God’s glory shines.
Email vs. Handwritten Letter
Think about the difference between an email and a handwritten letter.
An email is pure content. The medium is invisible, irrelevant, interchangeable. What matters is the message. You could type it, speak it, think it—the “information” is identical.
A handwritten letter is different. The time it took, the physical trace of the hand, the envelope’s journey, the moment of opening—these aren’t incidental to meaning. When I was at sea as a submarine officer, my wife sent perfumed letters. The scent, the handwriting, the paper that had been in her hands and was now in mine—her presence crossed the ocean through matter. This is what the Gnostics couldn’t see: embodiment carries what abstraction cannot.
Sacramental logic works like handwritten letters. Bread, wine, water, oil—these aren’t mere illustrations of spiritual truths. They’re the medium through which grace operates. Material things carry grace. No spirit/matter split possible.
But more than that: this bread, in this community, with this prayer. The Eucharist isn’t just about matter-in-general. It’s about the particular body of Christ—the body that was born in Bethlehem, raised in Nazareth, crucified in Jerusalem, risen on the third day. The particularity is the point.
The Eucharist as Liturgical Fortress
In my grad school notes, I called the Eucharist a “liturgical fortress.” Here’s what I meant.
Every week, the early Jesus-followers gathered around a table. They took bread and wine. They said specific words about specific events: “On the night he was betrayed, he took bread…”
And in that practice, they forced a question that Gnostic grammar couldn’t answer: Is this bread Christ’s body?
If you said yes—if you believed that material things could carry spiritual grace, that the incarnation didn’t end at the ascension but continued in sacramental presence—then you’d already rejected Gnosticism. You couldn’t maintain the spirit/matter split while kneeling at that rail.
If you said no—if you believed the bread was “just a symbol,” that the real action was purely spiritual, that matter couldn’t carry grace—then you’d exposed something. You’d revealed that your grammar was still Gnostic, no matter what vocabulary you used.
The Eucharist was a weekly test. A practice that made Gnostic grammar unlivable for anyone trying to live it consistently.
Christological Anthropology Made Visible
The early church understood something I had to learn the hard way.
When I left the submarine force and began my business career, my wife and I struggled to adapt to our new life together—chiefly because my Jesus-follower identity had not conquered my John Galt-follower habit of seeing other people as objects. I felt love for my wife. Why didn’t that suffice? It was only when an ex-NFL linebacker taught me that love is not a feeling but an action—a movement toward the other’s flourishing—that I began to understand: you cannot be withsomeone without concrete practices that embody curiosity about their life.
The early Jesus Movement built institutions on this logic. Their response wasn’t just creeds and sacraments. It was institutions—concrete, material, organizational expressions of what Christological anthropology actually produces.
Consider what the early church invented:
The hospital. Before the Jesus Movement, there was no institution dedicated to caring for the sick regardless of their social status. Basil of Caesarea built the Basileia in the fourth century—a complex so vast it was called a “new city.” It included facilities for the sick, housing for the poor, hospices for travelers, and training for medical care. The idea that strangers deserved healing because they bore Christ’s image became brick and mortar.9
The refugee shelter. Xenodocheia—literally “stranger-receivers”—provided care for travelers, refugees, the displaced. Roman society had hospitia for citizens and guests with status. The early assemblies invented care for those with no status at all.
The orphanage. Orphanotropheia cared for children who had lost their family networks. In Roman society, children without paternal protection were legally and socially vulnerable. The early church created institutions that said: these children matter because they bear Christ’s image, not because they have a powerful father.
Plague nursing. When epidemics struck Roman cities, the wealthy fled to their country estates. Jesus Movement members stayed. They nursed the sick—including pagans—and buried the dead. Rodney Stark estimates that this practice alone may have contributed significantly to the Movement’s growth: basic nursing care dramatically improved survival rates, and survivors remembered who stayed.10
The invention of “the poor.” This sounds strange, but bear with me. Roman society had categories for the destitute, but they were understood as losers—people who had fallen out of the patronage networks where the powerful alone decided who deserved protection. The Jesus Movement created “the poor” as a theological category: persons who deserve care because of their need, not despite it. The poor became, in Peter Brown’s phrase, “the treasures of the church.”11
Pharaoh Logic vs. Manna Logic
Here’s the contrast that reveals what was at stake:
This table is a diagnostic. Which logic is operating in your community? In your politics? In your gut reactions to “those people”?
Notice something: the left column is Pharaoh logic. Worth tied to status. Care through hierarchy. Provision rewards the deserving. The institution determines who belongs.
The right column is manna logic. Worth through bearing the image. Care flows to need. Provision responds to hunger.
What the early church built wasn’t just theological—it was economic. Manna economics made institutional.
The Julian Evidence
The experiment has been run.
In the fourth century, Emperor Julian—called “the Apostate” because he tried to restore paganism after Constantine—attempted to replicate Christian charitable institutions using pagan resources.12
He failed.
Julian wrote frustrated letters complaining that “the impious Galileans provide not only for their poor but also for ours, while our own [poor] lack support from us.” He tried to create pagan hospitals and stranger-shelters. They didn’t take.
Why? Because you cannot sustain Christological ethics without Christological anthropology. The practices require the theology. If every human being is Christ’s image—if the stranger is Christ in disguise, if “whatever you did for the least of these you did for me”—then hospitals and xenodocheia and plague-nursing make sense. Without that theological foundation, the practices don’t sustain themselves.
Julian proved something empirically that we keep forgetting theologically: you cannot sustain Christian ethics without Christian ontology. Cut the root; the fruit rots. Every time.
You cannot sustain manna institutions with Pharaoh grammar underneath.
Empirical Confirmation
Not belief. Not self-identification. Practice.
A recent survey found that consistent church attendance is one of the strongest predictors of rejecting antisemitic and racist attitudes. Infrequent attendance is one of the strongest predictors of falling into the segment that holds both.
Not belief. Not self-identification as Christian. Practice—showing up, week after week, to a table where the Body of Christ is shared without hierarchy.
The patristic thesis has empirical support. Practices hold resignification in place. Where the practices weaken, the old meanings flood back. The Eucharist is still working—where it’s actually practiced.
The Framework That Held
The patristic achievement was extraordinary.
Creeds that encoded resistance to covenantal severance—every clause about materiality a polemic against those who wanted a hologram instead of a Lord with dirty feet. Sacraments that required material things to carry grace—bread you could taste, wine you could smell, water that got you wet. Virtue ethics that insisted on embodied practice as the site of transformation—not technique mastered in isolation but character formed in community. And institutions—hospitals, shelters, orphanages—that made Christological anthropology visible in brick and mortar.
For over a thousand years, this framework held.
The Stoic and Gnostic patterns were still there—resignification is never complete—but the practices and institutions kept them contained. The sea pressed against the dikes, but the pumps ran and the land stayed dry. Jesus-followers learned through their bodies that matter mattered, that particularity mattered, that Israel’s God was still their God.
I find myself moved by what they built. Not nostalgic—I know too much about medieval Christendom’s violence and exclusion to romanticize it. But moved by the attempt. Moved by the recognition that formation requires architecture. That you can’t just announce manna grammar; you have to build institutions that make Pharaoh grammar unlivable.
They understood something we’ve forgotten: practices hold resignification in place. Weekly Eucharist. Creedal confession. Catechesis. The hospital that treats the stranger as Christ in disguise. These weren’t decorations on top of belief. They were the dikes that kept the sea from reclaiming the land.
What I Keep Asking Myself
I received the practices. I said the creeds. I took the bread and wine for decades. The architecture was there—battered, compromised, but there. And still the Stoic grammar got in. Still I walked into church with shoulders back, smile ready, quiet certainty that I had figured something out.
How?
Part of the answer, I suspect, is that the practices had been weakened before they ever reached me. Something happened between the patristic achievement and my formation in late twentieth-century American Christianity. The dikes were breached somewhere. The sea got back in. By the time I showed up, I was swimming in water that looked like Christianity but operated by different logic.
The next essay will trace how that happened. It’s a story of wars and schisms, of reformations that recovered something essential and lost something else, of philosophical systems that filled vacuums nobody planned to create. It’s a story of how ideas become air—how a philosophy professor in the sixteenth-century Netherlands shaped the formation I received four centuries later without anyone in my family ever reading his books.
But before I tell that story, I want to sit with this one a moment longer.
The early church built something. Against Stoic self-sufficiency, they insisted on participation. Against Gnostic escape, they insisted on incarnation. Against Pharaoh’s division of who counts, they built hospitals for strangers and orphanages for the abandoned. They took the vocabulary of their culture and tried to make it serve a different grammar—and for a thousand years, it mostly worked.
They knew something I’m still learning: you can’t think your way out of a formation problem. You can’t read your way to transformation. The grammar that shapes you operates below the level of conscious belief. It lives in your body, your reflexes, your gut responses to vulnerability and need.
Which means the way out is the same as the way in. Practices. Communities. Institutions that form you before you’ve decided what you believe.
The Sage Who Walked In
I started this essay with a man walking into church. Shoulders back. Smile ready. Certain he’d figured something out.
I’m still that man more often than I’d like to admit. The formation runs deep. But I’m learning to notice when it’s running—when my chest tightens, when my need to be right crowds out my capacity to receive, when the Sage shoulders his way past the Saint who’s supposed to be showing up.
The patristic Christians would tell me to keep taking communion. Keep saying the creed. Keep showing up to practices I didn’t design, in communities I can’t control, receiving grace I haven’t earned.
They’d tell me the dikes need tending.
They’d tell me the sea is patient.
Next: “The Perfect Storm: How the Fortress Fell”
CODA
Formation doesn’t announce itself.
It keeps time.
You don’t defeat a grammar by outthinking it.
You outgrow it by staying.
Practice by practice.
Week by week.
Together.
The Series
This essay belongs to Jazz, Shame, and Being With—a twenty-essay arc tracing shame and pride from neurobiology through theology to political formation. If you’ve been reading along, you know where we’ve been. If you’re new, or if you’d like to see the architecture of where this is heading, the Reader’s Guide maps the full journey. Every essay is a real door. Start anywhere that calls to you.
ENDNOTES
Derek Woodard-Lehman was in my wedding. We carpooled to Duke together for three years, which means we logged hundreds of hours in a Honda talking about everything that matters—theology, marriage, doubt, vocation, the weird grief of becoming whatever we were becoming. I was there when he defended his dissertation. He’s a theologian trained at Princeton under Jeffrey Stout, which sounds very impressive and is, but what I actually know is that he’s the kind of friend who will spend Christmas Eve walking you through a philosophical labyrinth because you’re stuck and he has the map.
I’d encountered C. Kavin Rowe’s argument that Stoicism and Christianity are “incommensurable”—sealed traditions that cannot be bridged without conversion—and I was both fascinated and troubled. Derek patiently walked me through: from Rowe to MacIntyre’s actual position, from Davidson’s attack on conceptual schemes to Taylor’s Gadamerian defense, and finally to John Bowlin’s distinction between “first” and “secondary” precepts. The “circumstances and consequences” diagnostic that structures this essay emerged from that conversation—a Christmas gift I’m still unwrapping.
The full philosophical apparatus appears in a separate document for readers who want the academic scaffolding (email me!). But the accessible version here—grammar as “logic underneath,” resignification as incomplete transformation, the Reclamation Metaphor—attempts to honor what Derek helped me see without requiring you to wade through the maze he guided me through first.
This is where it gets weird. Clement of Alexandria tried to baptize Stoic apatheia—and the results are theologically alarming. In Stromata VI.9, he describes Christ as “entirely impassible, inaccessible to any movement of feeling,” eating not from bodily need but merely to prevent his disciples from thinking he was a ghost. Let that sink in: Christ performing hunger for optics. The incarnation as PR strategy.
Eric Osborn, with admirable understatement, calls this “somewhat Docetic in nature” (Clement of Alexandria [Cambridge, 2005], 226–33). Robert Wilken notes that for Clement, apatheia meant “the eradication of all passions” (”Maximus the Confessor on the Affections,” in Wimbush and Valantasis, eds., Asceticism [Oxford, 1995], 412–13).
Here’s what I find both fascinating and troubling: Clement wasn’t trying to betray the faith. He was trying to commend it. But as C. Kavin Rowe points out, you cannot borrow philosophical categories without their grammar coming along for the ride. Clement assumed he was adding Christian content to a neutral container. He was actually smuggling in a Christology that made the Incarnation a kind of divine theater. Later Fathers—especially Maximus the Confessor—would spend centuries cleaning up the mess, distinguishing natural passions (which Christ genuinely assumed) from disordered ones (which he healed). See Rowe, “The Art of Retrieval: Stoicism?” in Method, Context, and Meaning (Eerdmans, 2019), 299–315.
I have a soft spot for Justin Martyr. He’s trying so hard. His adoption of the Stoic logos spermatikos (First Apology 46; Second Apology 8, 13) shows both the promise and the peril of early Christian engagement with Greek philosophy.
Justin’s claim is bold: everyone who lived according to reason—Socrates, Heraclitus, Abraham—participated in the Logos and were thus “Christians before Christ.” It’s a breathtaking universalism. It’s also a philosophical trap. For the Stoics, logos governs all things through impersonal necessity; for Christians, providence is personal and gracious. Justin insists that Christ is the Logos—reason becomes person, cosmic structure becomes personal summons. That’s a genuine transformation.
But as L.W. Barnard observes, Justin remained “a true eclectic” (Justin Martyr: His Life and Thought [Cambridge, 1967]), and the borrowed terminology kept whispering its old meanings. When you say “Logos” to a philosophically educated second-century audience, they hear impersonal cosmic order whether you want them to or not. The Catholic Encyclopediaputs it with unusual candor: “The relation established between the integral Word, i.e. Jesus Christ, and the partial Word disseminated in the world, is more specious than profound.”
Ouch. But fair. Justin opened a door that would take centuries to properly guard. See also Ragnar Holte, “Logos Spermatikos,” Studia Theologica 12 (1958): 109–168; and Rowe, “The Art of Retrieval: Stoicism?” in Method, Context, and Meaning (Eerdmans, 2019), 303.
I first understood Maximus the Confessor through Sam Wells, who has become a friend and whose work shapes nearly everything I write about incarnational theology. His Constructing an Incarnational Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2025), especially Chapter 4, develops Maximus’s account of theosis as the theological foundation for his “being with” framework—the alternative to Stoic self-sufficiency that this whole essay is trying to articulate.
Wells shows how Maximus, in Ambigua 7 and 41, gives us the most sophisticated patristic account of human participation in divine life. The key insight: human nature achieves its fulfillment not through autonomous self-cultivation but through the incarnate Word who draws humanity into Trinitarian communion. We don’t build ourselves into worthiness. We’re drawn into a life already underway.
For Maximus directly, see On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, trans. Nicholas Constas, 2 vols., Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014). But I’ll be honest—Wells made Maximus accessible to me in ways the primary texts hadn’t. Sometimes you need a guide.
I need to name a debt here. My argument runs parallel to J. Kameron Carter’s groundbreaking Race: A Theological Account (Oxford, 2008), particularly his analysis of how “covenantal severance”—the abstraction of Christ from his Jewish particularity—created vacuums that racial categories filled. Carter’s work remains indispensable. I’m not trying to replace it; I couldn’t if I wanted to.
But my genealogy traces a different pathway. Where Carter focuses on Kant, Enlightenment rationalism, and the theological apparatus enabling modern racial theory (which I will pick up in the next essay), I’m asking an earlier question: how was affect reshaped before reason was racialized? The “supersessionist standard” I develop here is a diagnostic tool for identifying patterns across five centuries—not a comprehensive theological genealogy of race. That tool will be especially important in my next two essays.
My contribution—if I’m right, and I hold this with open hands—is to trace how the neuropsychological conditions that made racial reasoning feel natural were established through the mutations I examine in this essay series. Carter shows us the intellectual architecture. I’m trying to show the emotional infrastructure that made the architecture feel like home.
This is contested terrain, and I’ve tried to learn from scholars who approach it from different angles—including angles that make me uncomfortable. That’s usually where the learning happens.
The pattern I’m tracing (Christian universalism abstracting Christ from Jewish particularity, creating vacuums that get filled by other identity markers) shows up across the political spectrum, not just on the right. Susannah Heschel’s two essential books—Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago, 1998) and The Aryan Jesus (Princeton, 2008)—trace how this abstraction enabled both liberal Protestant de-Judaization and Nazi theological programs. That’s a range wide enough to make everyone nervous, which is probably the point.
Marc Ellis’s Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation (Orbis, 1987; 3rd ed., Baylor, 2011), especially chapters 1–3, offers a sustained internal critique of liberation theology’s blind spots regarding Jewish experience—written by someone who shares liberation theology’s core commitments. For the contemporary academic debate around antisemitism, identity epistemology, and progressive moral frameworks in the wake of recent campus controversies, see Shaul Magid’s bracing “Judeopessimism: Antisemitism, History, and Critical Race Theory,” Harvard Theological Review 117, no. 2 (2024): 368–390.
I don’t agree with everything in these sources. But if the supersessionist pattern I’m diagnosing is real, it should show up wherever Christian (or post-Christian) universalism operates. It does.
I’ve found these critics of identity politics helpful precisely because they’re writing from the left, not the right—they share the commitments they’re questioning, which makes their critiques harder to dismiss. These aren’t culture warriors; they’re people doing the painful work of examining their own house.
Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap (Penguin, 2023), especially chapters 2–4, traces how ideas that began as sophisticated academic theory became simplified slogans with institutional power. Susan Neiman’s Left Is Not Woke (Polity, 2023) argues—with considerable courage given her context—that contemporary identity frameworks have abandoned Enlightenment universalism in ways that betray the left’s own best traditions. Michael Walzer’s work, from On Toleration(Yale, 1997) to The Struggle for a Decent Politics (Yale, 2023), offers a sustained meditation on how pluralism can be maintained without either relativism or domination.
What these authors share is an analysis of how identity-based frameworks can shift epistemic authority from shared reasoning to positional legitimacy—a move that reshapes inclusion without necessarily intending exclusion. The pattern rhymes uncomfortably with what I’m tracing in Dominative Christianism: different content, similar grammar. That rhyme keeps me up at night.
Irenaeus of Lyon is one of my heroes—a second-century bishop who saw what was at stake and refused to flinch. In Adversus Haereses (especially Book III.18.1–7 and Book V.21.1), he argues that Christ “recapitulated” (ἀνακεφαλαιώσατο) all of humanity in himself, sanctifying each stage of human life by actually passing through it—not performing it, not merely appearing to experience it, but genuinely living it.
This is participatory Christology with teeth. Where the Gnostics depreciated materiality as beneath the divine, Irenaeus planted his feet: the Word became flesh precisely because flesh matters. The incarnation isn’t a regrettable necessity or a pedagogical accommodation. It’s the point.
See The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1885). Irenaeus provides the patristic foundation for the incarnational theology I develop throughout this series. When I lose my bearings, I go back to him.
Kavin Rowe assigned me this book at Duke. I thought I'd read it. Turns out I'd skimmed it with the confidence of a Sage who assumes he's already understood. Decades later, Christianity's Surprise keeps teaching me things I should have learned the first time. On page 76, he cites Gregory Nazianzen's phrase "new city" (Oration 43.63), and something clicked that I suspect Kavin was waiting for me to notice all along.
The Basileia wasn’t merely a building. It was an alternative polis—a community organized around Christological anthropology rather than Roman civic logic. Where Roman society sorted humans by status (citizen, freedman, slave; healthy, leprous; useful, disposable), Basil’s “new city” sorted by need. The poor, destitute, homeless, orphans, and lepers occupied different sections of a single complex because they shared a single dignity: each was Christ in disguise.
Here’s what gets me: Basil’s argument to the provincial governor wasn’t a request for charity. It was a claim that the hospital provided “a crucial public service.” The tax exemption that followed established a precedent we’ve somehow forgotten: Christian institutions that served the vulnerable deserved public support precisely because they served the public good.
When contemporary debates pit “religious” against “public” institutions, they forget that the public institution of the hospital was a religious invention. The Basileia created the template that every hospital since has followed, whether or not it remembers whose image it was built to serve. For broader context, see Gary B. Ferngren, Medicine and Health Care in Early Christianity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 124–131; and Andrew T. Crislip, From Monastery to Hospital (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).
This one haunts me. Rowe, drawing on Rodney Stark’s The Rise of Christianity (Princeton, 1996), 73–94, tells the story of what happened during the Antonine plague (165–180 CE) and the Cyprian plague (251–266 CE). Basic nursing care—hydration, food, elementary hygiene—could reduce mortality dramatically. The difference between life and death was often just someone staying.
While the celebrated physician Galen fled Rome for his villa in Asia, Christians “visited the sick unprotected, assiduously serving them, tending them in Christ” (Rowe citing Eusebius, HE 7.22). The contrast with pagan practice was brutal: Bishop Dionysius reported that pagans “would thrust away even those who were just beginning to become diseased” and “cast them out in the roads half-dead.”
The differential survival rates had demographic consequences—Christians survived at higher rates, and pagans nursed by Christians often converted afterward. But as Rowe observes, “the point was... that the plague-infested human being was no less Christ than the healthy one” (p. 70).
Physicians who saw only infected bodies fled. Christians who saw Christ stayed. I think about this every time I’m tempted to ask whether theology actually matters.
Here’s another thing Rowe helped me see (Christianity’s Surprise, 65–72): the institutional creativity of early Christianity is easy to underestimate because its inventions became so ubiquitous we forgot they were inventions.
Christians “invented” the category of “the poor” as persons requiring systematic response (p. 65)—not occasional charity but organized, sustained care. They created xenodocheia as “the Christian invention of the shelter for the poor” (p. 67), and established hospitals as “in origin and conception, a distinctively Christian institution” (p. 70). The orphanotropheia were “utterly unique, truly sui generis” institutions with no ancient precedent (p. 72).
Every modern hospital, homeless shelter, and orphanage traces its institutional DNA to these Christian innovations. We walk past them every day without seeing the theological fingerprints. Rowe’s analysis draws on Peter Brown’s work on late antique poverty and Gary Ferngren’s history of early Christian medicine—both worth the deep dive if you want to understand what the early church actually built.
Emperor Julian—”the Apostate”—tried an experiment, and I find it weirdly comforting that it failed.
In his Letter to Arsacius, High Priest of Galatia (Letter 22/84, in The Works of the Emperor Julian, trans. Wilmer Cave Wright, Loeb Classical Library 157 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923], 3:67–73), Julian complains that “the impious Galilaeans support not only their own poor but ours as well.” So he tried to create pagan charitable institutions that would rival Christian ones—temples that fed the poor, priests who cared for strangers.
It didn’t work.
As Rowe puts it: “What Julian discovered in antiquity is the point that Nietzsche and Sartre made sharp in the modern world: as a whole, all that’s needed to defeat moralizing is simply to ignore it and go your own way” (Christianity’s Surprise, 52).
You cannot sustain Christian ethics without Christological anthropology. Julian could copy the behavior; he couldn’t copy the vision of human dignity that made the behavior make sense. That’s the experiment I keep pointing to when people ask whether theology matters for practice. Julian ran the control group. It flopped.