Abstract
Alan Kreider is a highly respected and innovative scholar, and this detailed, painstaking, and challenging work will be a boon to academics and serious students of early Church History and Liturgy. His thesis hinges on two main propositions: the “patient ferment”—born of deep trust in God’s Providence—that marked the early Christians; and their habitus, the “distinctive behavioral acts, borne in their bodies that revealed their fundamental values” (p. 122).
The book’s trajectory moves from a close description of highly countercultural pre-Constantinian Christianity to the church of North Africa and beyond in early fifth century, a church by then much more compromised by the mentality of imperial Rome. Now the dominant figure was Augustine who, unlike the earlier Christians, was never steeped in the habitus of unhurried patience and thus able to wait placidly on the activity of the Holy Spirit.
Augustine had not experienced the extended catechumenate; he came to baptism as an adult and with minimal preparation. Although initially endorsing the importance of patience, he later “became anxious—concerned to control things, eager to micromanage them” (p. 295), due to the imminent dangers he saw, particularly from Donatists. This lack of patience became increasingly intemperate. Nevertheless, his stature and influence would contribute significantly over subsequent centuries. This, in turn, led to the justification of expansionary missionary efforts and the use of fear and force to eradicate paganism and extend the Christian faith. Kreider’s conclusion is that we have much to learn, even today, from the early church’s more measured, gentle, patient trust in Providence more than in proselytism.
Kreider’s commentaries on the Didasacalia apostolorum and Cyprian on Patience are excellent, and the archive he uncovers on patience in the early church is astonishingly rich. His condensed biographies of Constantine and Augustine are highly apposite. But in his pursuit of the characteristically Christian habitus and the development of the theme of patient ferment, he can become repetitive and strained. They are indeed the red thread that holds the book together, but red is not the only color in his palette. In the past half century, Christian denominations have widely and collaboratively repudiated as sinful, proselytism, or any missionary method that employs coercion or offers material incentives.