The Impressive Contributions of the Early Church to Human Rights
July 12, 2010
John H. Armstrong
ACT 3 Weekly
July 12, 2010
The Impressive Contributions of the Early Church to Human Rights
John H. Armstrong
I believe the modern church faces some significant challenges regarding the understanding and application of human rights. The story changes, given a particular political and social context, but the need to embrace and defend human rights will always remain. The intricacies of human rights issues will continue to challenge us if we are faithful to Christ’s call to be “martyrs” who bear true witness to the grace of God. We can see the seeds of this witness in the first centuries of the Christian Church. Let me elaborate.
The Rights of Women
As I’ve already mentioned the early church struggled to embrace something like human rights before the edict of Milan (313 A.D.). This struggle took place during a time of intense persecution. Christian communities developed and spread in the Roman world, the center of civilization in the West. Rome was, put mildly, an unjust empire. The inhabitants of the empire were not equal in any meaningful sense of the term. Women were exploited by men and slaves by citizens who owned them. It took courage to challenge this way of life but Christian writers spoke to power boldly.
Bogdan Popescu, a Romanian Orthodox scholar, argues that the Stoics and Platonists realized the importance of improving the condition of women but never succeeded in changing the old traditions to any large degree. It was the early church that developed the idea of human rights.
Young girls were forced to marry and thus choose between the authority of their fathers or their husbands. According to Roman law they had to accept the authority of their husbands after one year of marriage. In some cases they were simply bought by their future partners. Men were free to have concubines while women were punished for adultery. It wasn’t until 178 A.D., under the reign of Marcus Aurelius, that feminine decadence was accepted. Men could divorce, quite easily, while women faced a difficult procedure and what followed created overwhelming difficulties.
The Early Christian Writers on the Rights of Women
The earliest Christian writers condemned this discrimination of women, particularly the idea that they were “possessed objects.” They also defended their freedom to marry the person that they loved. Clement of Alexandria stressed that women should be treated precisely in the same way as men. Women should love their husbands, but by conviction not by coercion under the law.
Clement of Alexandria argued that women are different only from a physical point of view but they possess the same nature as men. There is only one human nature, not two. Popescu, in his excellent article , “Human Rights in Early Christian Perspective,” further notes that they taught that there was not a good and bad nature but rather there were good and bad persons who both belong to the same (human) nature.
In Roman religion men had their own masculine religions (Mithraism) while women had a religious life devoted to Magna Mater. Within Christian communities women were afforded the same rights to the same religious life as their male equals.
With regard to children a Roman male had the final say and could abandon a child at will. Women had limited or no right in the matter. This situation changed radically inside the church.
Even after the edict of Milan the equality of men and women is stressed by several important Christian writers. Ambrose of Milan emphasized in one Letter (LXIII) that women were partners with men, not their servants. And Gregory of Nazianzus condemned laws made by men that only applied to for men when he wrote:
Why did they punish the woman but considered the man innocent? The wife is considered sinful while the unfaithful man does not suffer. I don’t accept this tradition. Men are legislators and all the laws are against women (Sermon XXXVII).
The Early Christian Writers on the Rights of Slaves
The Christian church did not attempt to create a revolution against slavery, in order to directly change the social structure of the empire, but within Christian communities a social transformation was immediately evident (cf. The Epistle of Paul to Philemon in the New Testament). Slaves were brothers and sisters, equal members of the same Christian family.
In the Roman world slaves were simply objects thus their lives were regulated in much the same way that an owner would regulate the life of an animal. One famous expression referred to: “slaves or other cattle.” Until the second century masters could kill a slave without any explanation.
Christian writers condemned this institution without seeking to directly overthrow the practice. It must be remembered that the relationship between the church and the state was sensitive thus the state’s response would have very likely threatened to ability of the church to be faithful to the mission Christ to make disciples.
The Didache, the earliest teaching manual of the church outside the canonical Scripture, advised masters to respect their servants because they were children of the same God (c.IV). Ignatius of Antioch recommended the same approach but added that the importance of “inner freedom” should be emphasized. Ignatius spoke of a moment coming when general liberation would take place but that the time was not yet since such an attempt would lead to even greater persecutions. In the Letter to Polycarp, however, he stressed that within Christian communities slaves must be treated in a different manner.
After the edict of Milan, when state persecution against the church all but ceased, Christian writers became more radical in their approach to this denial of human rights. Gregory of Nazianzus interceded for a slave who had been ordained as a bishop in order to gain his liberation. This is truly remarkable. A slave had become a bishop and a church father appeals for his release from servitude. Truly the church was applying the gospel to the liberty and freedom of all people.
John Chrysostom, considered the greatest of all preachers in the early church, considered slavery a mark of sin because God had created all persons to be equal. In Homily XXII on Ephesians he said, “slavery is a fruit of covetousness, of degradation, of savagery . . .” Chrysostom also protected slaves and challenged officials who wanted to be Christians but sought to preserve this “sinful” institution.
St. Augustine considered slavery a regrettable consequence of the fall and said that before Noah there was no evidence of the institution.
Conclusion
The modern idea of human rights is genuinely important, as I will attempt to show next week by looking at what happened in Germany after the Second World War. But to argue that human rights only belong to natural law, or to modern Enlightenment concepts of liberty, is wrong. Freedom, equality of opportunity, dignity and mutual respect for all persons is not simply the product of secular political and social thought. It is rooted in the New Testament and the practice of the early church.
But you might say: “The Christian church used ecclesial structures and arguments to justify injustice, the oppression of women and slavery down through the centuries.” You would, of course, be right. But the writings of the New Testament, and those of the early church fathers, demonstrate that these practices were contrary to the earliest expressions of the faith.
In fact, the writings that we do have of the first centuries of the Christian era demonstrate that it was Christianity that did more to change pagan society, especially in terms of the rights of women and slaves, than any other practice or philosophy. This remarkable story needs to be better known by Christians.
Bogdan Popescu concludes:
It is true that there is injustice within the contemporary world, mainly because the two pillars of the Roman Empire, the Oriental mentality and the Western pragmatism, survived. For this reason the Christians of our days have to pay attention to the heritage of the first centuries, to continue the direction initiated by early Christian writers (“Human Rights in Early Christian Writings”).
