The buzz

"First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all, that your faith is spoken of throughout the whole world" (Romans 1:8).

What are some of the things "spoken of throughout the whole world" these days? Bailouts, pirates, Twittering, slouching toward socialism. It takes a lot for a topic to reach flashpoint and catch on "throughout the whole world."

Evidently there was a real buzz in the first century. The gossip might have gone something like this: "Why, I met a man on the Apian Way who 'joyfully accepted the plundering of his property' (Hebrews 10:34) by Caesar's goons rather than say a bad word about his leader Jesus."

The buzz two centuries later, chronicled in the Easter letter of Bishop Dionysius (260 A.D.), was that during the plague, when people were tripping over themselves to flee Rome, Christians stayed to care for the sick. Emperor Julian (362 A.D.), no friend of Christians, gave them backhanded praise when in his attempts to bring on a revival of paganism, he suggested that the heathen priests emulate the "charity" of the Christians' "moral character, even if pretended."

Certainly the persecutions under Nero, Domitian, Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, Septimus Severus, Decius, Valerian, Aurelian, and especially Diocletian and Galerius created a buzz. Then came the first Christian emperor, Constantine, who baptized Europe, which may not have been good for the buzz in the long run. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in The Cost of Discipleship, "The world was Christianized, and grace became its common property."

The kind of faith that is "spoken of throughout the world" is not the voter registration kind. Perhaps a new wave of plague or persecution is what is needed to sift gold from sand. In that day we shall see "faith" that Paul would think worth writing home about.

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