Dr Paul Allen

And as is too often the case with ancient church history is we can’t be as certain as we’d like to be. We certainly know that by 300 the universal practice of the ancient church was to baptize children, to baptize the children of believers. The problem is what happened before 300 and how certain can we be about it? A number of years ago now two German Lutheran scholars marshaled all of their vast learning, one to say the early church did baptize infants, that is very early, and another to say the evidence just isn’t clear. Part of the problem in evaluating evidence is you can quote an early father saying, “We baptize children,” but that doesn’t tell you how old the children were. Obviously, it’s one thing if you baptized a one-month-old, it’s something very different if you baptized a thirteen-year-old, and yet they’re both children. And so when we look at the evidence in the early church in the second and third century, the evidence is simply inconclusive. I don’t think eith...

You’ve probably heard it many times. “We just need to get back to the days of the early church.” “You know, things would be so much better in contemporary Christianity if we were more like the early church.” While there were some great things happening then, I’m not so sure that I am eager to get back to the early church days. They, too, had their problems. Here are a few reasons why we might put the brakes on the glamorization of the early church. You were probably a slave. History estimates that approximately one-third of the Roman Empire’s population was made up of slaves. Apparently, many of those slaves became Christians. So, as a Christian, one could not come and go as they please; grab their Starbucks and quiet time whenever they wished; or go to their single’s group when convenient. As a slave, the individual was another’s property and subject to their master’s will. That’s a different situation than many western Christians find themselves today, thus, making the early c...