There’s nothing new under the sun. Especially when it comes to the way people criticize Christianity today. Christians have been caught off guard by today’s sharp criticisms of Christianity’s moral beliefs and intellectual credibility. It’s new to us — but it isn’t new to the Church. Michael Kruger’s book Christianity at the Crossroads: How the Second Century Shaped the Future of the Church shows we’ve been there before, and how the Church proved its critics wrong.

You may think ancient history is like, well, ancient history. But it isn’t as foreign as it might seem.

Stupid Christians?

You may think ancient history is like, well, ancient history. But it isn’t as foreign as it might seem.

Skeptics tell us these days, for example, that religion is a blind sort of faith, a false hope for not-so-bright people to hold on to. That’s old stuff. We’ve dealt with it before. Kruger tells us the second-century critic Caecilius charged Christians with having “no basis for their beliefs.” Christians were supposedly “uneducated and philosophically naïve, [and] they affirm absurd and problematic doctrines.”

But time has treated Christianity far better than its skeptics. Christianity has produced great minds in every age. Gregory the Great, Boethius, Augustine, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas and virtually everyone involved in the scientific revolution were believers.

Not only that, but the first universities were founded by Christians, who actually invented the idea of the university. And although there are myths saying Christians hated learning, they actually kept libraries to keep classical knowledge from being destroyed.

Undermining Government?

Here’s another one. Atheist groups like the Freedom From Religion Foundation say religion is all about violating the Constitution. It sounds a lot like what the prominent second-century critic Celsus once said. Christians were guilty of “a serious breach of civic responsibility,” he said, and also of undermining the social order. Celsus even went so far as to say that Christians “suffer from the disease of sedition.” That brings to mind the charge that conservative Christians are trying to build a theocracy these days. (Here’s one sadly hilarious example.)

True enough, Christianity had theocratic associations at times during the Middle Ages. As Rodney Stark has shown, however, the faith has always thrived best when it’s kept its distance from government. That’s why it’s stronger in America than Europe. And it also helps explain Christianity’s amazing growth in China since it was forced underground nearly 70 years ago.

As for Christians’ “breach of civic responsibility,” that was because they wouldn’t worship the emperor and the Greek and Roman gods. Caecilius was disturbed that Christians “foolishly, if not arrogantly, deny the Roman gods whose existence and power have long been established.” If that’s our kind of “foolishness” and “arrogance,” I’ll happily stick with it!

Haters?

There’s more, of course. Do you hear people today saying Christianity is a religion of haters? Tell them it’s old news. We were “haters” in the second century, too. Starting then, Christians have led the way as the first social group to extend medical and relief care to others outside their own group.

The challenge isn’t to explain why a certain group has some obvious flaws, it’s explaining why one group has been responsible for so much good.

Christians overturned long-standing Greek and Roman disdain for the poor, the sick, the disabled, and children and widows. Compassion is considered a virtue today, but that fact is almost entirely due to Christianity’s influence, along with its Hebrew prophet forerunners. How’s that for “hate”?

Nothing New Under the Sun

Of course everyone knows there are dark spots on our record. They exist across all of humanity’s record. The challenge isn’t to explain why a certain group has some obvious flaws, it’s explaining why one group has been responsible for so much good.

And yet we still get accused of being ignorant theocratic haters. There’s nothing new under the sun. I have a feeling that if we’re still around here another 18 or 19 centuries, Christians will face the same criticisms.

But I expect we’ll also have that many more centuries of evidence to show that following Jesus Christ is actually quite good after all.

(Quotations used here all come from pages 43 through 60 in Kruger’s book).

Tom Gilson is a senior editor with The Stream and the author of Critical Conversations: A Christian Parents’ Guide to Discussing Homosexuality with Teens (Kregel Publications, 2016). Follow him on Twitter: @TomGilsonAuthor.