A Family Faith: Domestic Discipling

By David F. Wright

[David F. Wright is Professor of Patristic and Reformed Christianity, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland.

This is article three in a four-part series “The Making of the Early Christians,” delivered by the author as the W. H. Griffith Thomas Lectures at Dallas Theological Seminary, February 5-8, 2002.]

As is well known, the nuclear family in the traditional Western sense is in something of a crisis. If government policies still favor the family, at least as a context for raising children, they are increasingly reticent about the marriage of husband and wife as its core. Some of those within the churches who are sympathetic toward alternatives to the two-parent family rightly point out that the teaching of the New Testament, and particularly of Jesus Himself, is more equivocal about family bonds than the Old Testament might lead one to expect. The radical demands of serving the Lord may disrupt family relationships and certainly cannot be assumed always to cohere with a “happy-families” pattern of life. Jesus’ relations with His own family, not least His mother, displayed at times a discomfiting detachment.

The cost to family harmony of confessing Christ in the pre-Constantinian period is nowhere more sensitively and vividly illustrated than in the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, the account of a group martyrdom at Carthage in A.D. 203. This persecution was directed against conversion to Christianity and those who promoted it—teachers and catechists. Perpetua was a young upper-class woman with a newborn baby, and Felicity, her slave, was heavily pregnant. Fortunately Felicity managed to give birth before the day of martyrdom dawned. Otherwise she would not have died with the others, “going from one blood bath to another, from the midwife to the gladiator, ready to wash after childbirth in a second baptism.”[1] In this exquisitely feminine text Perpetua’s husband is never glimpsed at all (later recensions supply the deficiency). She was estranged from her father, who “alone of all my kin would be unhappy to see me suffer” (from Perpetua’s prison diary),[2] but she rebuffed his repeated pleas that she have pity on his gray hairs—and on her baby—by abandoning her stubborn stand. Felicity’s child was to be brought up by one of the Christian women, and Perpetua’s child presumably by her parents. The other familial dimension to the narrative follows Perpetua’s realization that as a martyr-designate she wielded special intercessory power. In a vision she saw her brother Dinocrates, who had died of a disfiguring facial cancer at the age of seven. At first she saw him suffering, but later, after she had prayed, he was healed.

A gamut of familial relations are at play in this story, informed by a delicate intimacy of personal feelings in which human affections are surrendered to the glory of a gruesome martyrdom.

No Evidence of “Children’s Ministry”

Neither family nor the care of children is a subject on which early Christian literature is extensively informative. But, if only because most churches were house churches, with the owners acting at least as hosts and hostesses if not also as pastors and leaders, family and children could scarcely avoid being fundamental concerns. This circumstance helps explain the prominence of the so-called household codes in the Pauline letters.[3] The overseer, Timothy was told, “must be one who manages his own household well, keeping his children under control with all dignity (but if a man does not know how to manage his own household, how will he take care of the church of God?)” (1 Tim. 3:4–5). If the household was the locus and the core of the church, the emphasis on hospitality also takes on additional force.

Yet what today might be called children’s ministry is almost invisible in the primitive churches. Markus once referred to Irenaeus’s Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching as “his little Sunday-school Bible-history,”[4] but there were no Sunday schools.

Do the passages in the New Testament epistles addressed directly to children assume their presence in the normal assemblies for worship? Aland argued strongly for this understanding in an untranslated work of 1967, which included his final response to Joachim Jeremias in their celebrated debate on the origins of infant baptism.[5] Evidence for the baptizing of infants in the first three centuries adds little to the present inquiry, other than the presumption that baptized children were admitted like other baptized persons to the communal meal.

Infant communion is in fact explicitly attested almost as early as infant baptism. Cyprian’s tract on The Lapsed, that is, those who had in one way or another compromised their Christian profession during the persecution of Decius, records the experiences of a baby girl (parvulam filiam) left in the care of a nurse while her parents fled the persecution. The nurse took the child with her to perform the sacrifice to the gods required by an imperial edict, and the child was given, as a token of her participation in the sacrifice, a piece of bread dipped in wine. When the mother, unaware of what had happened, recovered her daughter and took her to the eucharistic service, her convulsive tossing and turning and then choking and vomiting when she was almost force-fed the consecrated wine disclosed that something was seriously amiss. As Cyprian commented, “The eucharist could not remain in a baby or a mouth that was defiled; the drink which had been sanctified by the Lord’s blood returned from the polluted stomach.”[6]

At least this child’s treatment was not as lamentable as that of some others. Describing what seemed almost a stampede by Christians to carry out the edict of sacrifice, Cyprian depicts parents carrying their babies and leading their youngsters “to be robbed of what they had received in earliest infancy.”[7]

On the credit side Cyprian counted boys associated in “the glorious confession” of those awaiting martyrdom in prison.[8] While he was hiding to avoid arrest, Cyprian wrote to his presbyters and deacons who were holding the fort. The rebukes he asked them to transmit to certain troublemakers were reinforced by visions both by night and by day in which “innocent young boys, who are here with us, are being filled with the Holy Spirit, and in ecstasy they see with their eyes and they hear and they speak the words of warning and instruction which the Lord in his goodness gives to us.”[9] Much later the oracular voice of a child bade Augustine to “take up and read” in the Milanese garden, just as a decade earlier in the same city it was a child who started the chant “Ambrose for bishop” when Ambrose, pious but unbaptized, turned up at the church as the Roman governor for the region to see fair play in what threatened to be a fractious episcopal election.[10]

Some children may even have been spiritually precocious. Origen’s advanced knowledge of the Scriptures and zeal for martyrdom while still a boy were recorded by Eusebius of Caesarea.[11] But apart from their attendance at worship, no provision for the nurture of children in the communal activities of the congregations is documented. There were no children’s talks or children’s sermons. The later manual of church practice known as the Apostolic Constitutions gives orders for the catechumens, unbelievers, and heterodox to depart—but for the mothers to receive their children. The latter, who had previously stood together under a deacon’s watchful eye, would be with their mothers for the Lord’s Supper, presumably because they had already been baptized.[12]

Children in Abundance

The virtual invisibility of children in the corporate life of the churches had nothing to do with their paucity in numbers. Reliable considerations lead to the conclusion that Christians had more children than did pagans. The evidence is set out by Stark as “the fertility factor”—which he had not found discussed in earlier works on the growth of the Christian population in the patristic era.[13] On the one hand Christians did not resort to practices that contributed to demographic decline in the Greco-Roman world, such as abortion, infanticide, exposure of unwanted children, especially baby girls, birth control, including contraceptive devices and nonreproductive forms of sexual congress. On the other hand the ranks of Christianity contained “an abundance of fertile women,”[14] perhaps 60 percent or more of its membership.

The surplus of women over men posed a major problem, given the vigor of the marriage ethos and standard teaching that marriages should take place only “in the Lord.” The oversupply was especially critical among upper-class Christian women, for whom marriage to a social inferior might well entail legal and financial disabilities. The gravity of their plight provoked Callistus, a bishop of Rome (ca. 200), into recognizing for church purposes what one might call partnerships between women and lower-class men, even slaves, without legal marriage.[15] Mixed marriages did occur, nearly always between Christian women and unbelieving men, and scholars agree that most of the products of these unions were brought up as Christians.

Other voices, it is true, were to be heard dissuading from marriage, sometimes pointing out what a troublesome burden children were, even how distastefully messy they could be. Asceticism was surprisingly influential, especially but by no means only among fringe Christian groups. Tertullian wrote a treatise to his wife, in which he first implored her not to marry again if she survived him; she would have a God-given opportunity to recover her singleness. Then Tertullian became more realistic, and he told her that if she did marry again, to be sure he was a Christian.[16]

The evidence points largely to presumptions in favor of marriage and childbearing among early Christians. Another practice linked to both was adoption. The Didascalia, a church-order and pastoral handbook, from the first half of the third century, commends the adoption by Christians of orphaned boys and girls. “Whoever has a son, let him adopt a girl; and when her time is come, let him give her to him to wife, that his work may be completed in the ministry of God.”[17] Given the incidence of unwanted children among non-Christians, it may be that adoption was practiced more widely among believers. Felicity’s newborn baby was probably adopted within the Christian community in Carthage. Among a small group of martyrs who died at Pergamum around the time of Polycarp’s death (or perhaps later, under Decius) was Agathonice. When her turn came, the crowd as well as the proconsul urged her to have pity on her son. Her reply was uncompromising. “ ‘He has God who can take pity on him; for he has providence over all. Let me do what I’ve come for!’ And taking off her cloak, she threw herself joyfully upon the stake.”[18]

There was an odd sect in Roman North Africa which Augustine later brought into the church. Known after Cain’s brother as the Abelonians, they married but without sex and procreation. Each couple adopted a boy and a girl, who in time married and did the same.[19]

The numerical expansion of the Christian movement came about partly through bearing and rearing children at a rate perhaps considerably higher than the population as a whole. And their discipling was largely a domestic affair. The later fourth century affords several biographical or autobiographical testimonials to godly upbringing by pious parents (in every case without infant baptism), but prior to that time evidence is more difficult to find. Eusebius’s account of Origen’s nurture by his Christian parents is unparalleled in the pre-Constantinian period.

Training and Upbringing of Children

When Tertullian reviewed the occupations open to Christians, he debarred school teaching, but he allowed Christian children to attend secular schools. This seems the reverse of what might be expected. The twin counsels together would ensure that no Christian boy or girl would ever have a Christian teacher! In Tertullian’s mind the principles of teaching and learning were different. The teacher cannot help commending, affirming, and bearing testimony to the myths of gods and goddesses in the literature he teaches. He also encounters other problems from the pervasive reach of pagan religion. “But when a Christian learns these things, already understanding what idolatry is, he does not accept or admit them, all the more so if he has understood it for some time. Alternatively, when he is beginning to understand, he must first understand what he learned first, namely, about God and the faith. Thus he will reject and repudiate the idols, and will be as safe as one who wittingly takes poison from the unwitting and does not drink it.”[20]

Tertullian acknowledged the necessity of education even for divine studies, let alone public careers. Was he then making a virtue out of necessity? Even if some element of rationalization is present, the reasoning remains noteworthy. Tertullian’s guidance breathes a strong confidence in the effectiveness of the Christian teaching of the young, presumably chiefly in the home. This was where the making of early Christians took place during childhood.

The fullest passage devoted to the teaching of the young in ante-Nicene literature is a rather severe chapter in the Didascalia, entitled “That Children Should Be Taught Crafts.”

And teach your children crafts that are agreeable and befitting to religion, lest through idleness they give themselves to wantonness. For if they are not corrected by their parents, they will do those things that are evil, like the heathen. Therefore spare not to rebuke and correct and teach them; for you will not kill them by chastising them, but rather save them alive: as our Lord also teaches us in Wisdom, saying thus: “Chasten thy son, that there may be hope for him: for thou shalt strike him with a rod, and deliver his soul from Sheol.” And he saith again: “Whosoever spareth his rod, hateth his son.” Now our rod is the Word of God, Jesus Christ: even as Jeremiah also saw Him [as] “an almond rod.” Every man accordingly who spares to speak a word of rebuke to his son, hates his son. Therefore teach your sons the word of the Lord, and punish them with stripes, and bring them into subjection from their youth by your word of religion. And give them no liberty to set themselves up against you their parents; and let them do nothing without your counsel, lest they go with those of their own age and meet together and carouse; for in this way they learn mischief, and are caught and fall into fornication. Now, whether this happen to them without their parents, their parents themselves will be accountable before God for the judgment of their souls; or whether again by your license they are undisciplined and sin, you their parents will likewise be guilty on their account before God. Therefore be careful to take wives for them, and have them married when their time is come, lest in their early age by the ardour of youth they commit fornication like the heathen, and you have to render an account to the Lord God in the day of judgment.[21]

However, the teaching of the rudiments of the Christian faith to children was not always so strict and proper. Celsus, the pagan critic of Christianity who wrote the first anti-Christian treatise around A.D. 170, wrote the following.

In private houses also we see wool-workers, cobblers, laundry-workers, and the most illiterate and bucolic yokels, who would not dare to say anything at all in front of their elders and more intelligent masters. But whenever they get hold of children in private and some stupid women with them, they let out some astounding statements as, for example, that they must not pay any attention to their father and school-teachers, but must obey them; they say that these talk nonsense and have no understanding, and that in reality they neither know nor are able to do anything good, but are taken up with mere empty chatter. But they alone, they say, know the right way to live, and if the children would believe them, they would become happy and make their home happy as well. And if just as they are speaking they see one of the school-teachers coming, or some intelligent person, or even the father himself, the more cautious of them flee in all directions; but the more reckless urge the children on to rebel. They whisper to them that in the presence of their father and their schoolmasters they do not feel able to explain anything to the children, since they do not want to have anything to do with the silly and obtuse teachers who are totally corrupted and far gone in wickedness and who inflict punishment on the children. But, if they like, they should leave father and their schoolmasters, and go along with the women and little children who are their playfellows to the wooldresser’s shop, or to the cobbler’s or the washerwoman’s shop, that they may learn perfection. And by saying this they persuade them.[22]

Origen’s response to Celsus’ charges is not very informative about Christian practice.

The distinctiveness of the new people of Christians may explain the paucity of documentation of discipling within the family setting. Here is a perceptive comment by John Barclay of Glasgow.

It is not altogether clear how Christianity was to become embedded in that sphere. Christian households had no Lares or Penates before whom family members could express their solidarity by honouring the beneficent deities of the house. Nor, by contrast to Judaism, was it obvious where Christian belief should influence the customs of the house. Gentile Christians rarely bothered about Jewish food-laws—except in some cases in relation to food “offered to idols”—so the daily production, purchase and consumption of food was far less obviously a “Christian” activity. Perhaps specifically Christian prayers of thanksgiving for the food, which may be hinted at in 1 Corinthians 10:30–31 and Romans 14:6, are the most that could be expected here. If Christians did not observe the Sabbath or Jewish festivals, where was their Christian tradition “ritualized” within the annual cycle of family life? And in what context were children to experience that “engraving” of the Christian tradition on mind and soul of which Philo and Josephus spoke in relation to Jewish children?[23]

Franz Dölger, distinguished master of the discipline of “Christentum und Antike,” claimed that seasoning with salt and sealing with the sign of the Cross were domestic rituals of Christians, but the evidence points rather to ecclesial observances administered to catechumens from early years.[24] But the Didache, the earliest of church-order texts, compiled perhaps around A.D. 100, instructed Christians to fast on Wednesdays and Fridays (i.e., days different from Jewish practice) and also to pray the Lord’s Prayer thrice daily.[25] Hippolytus’s Apostolic Tradition also gives guidance for daily prayer both on first waking after washing one’s hands and before touching anything else, and at the third hour, “for at that hour Christ was nailed to the tree.”[26] Children no doubt were pres-ent at some of these times of prayer.

Including the Children

The church of those centuries displayed an inclusiveness that pagans like Celsus commented on—despite the fact that Galatians 3:28 (“neither male nor female”) did not extend to “neither adult nor child.” Early in the second century Pliny reported to Emperor Trajan that the Christians in northern Asia Minor comprised “many of every age-group.”[27] Irenaeus lists “infants, little children, boys, youths and old men among those who through Christ are reborn in God,”[28] in what has often been often viewed as a reference to infant baptism. Wiedemann regards the baptism of very young children, whenever it may have begun or become normative, as attesting to the unambiguous inclusion of children alongside adults in the Christian church, with a clarity unparalleled in pagan religious ceremonies and communities.[29]

This may well have been more fully realized in a context in which baptism on personal profession was the more common practice. Certainly when a child of Christian parents faced premature death, the custom was to baptize him or her so that the child died pistos, fidelis, a believer. It was for this baptism that such a youngster was in the making when death supervened. There are touching marks of affection in the epitaph tributes to these children, showing that at whatever age they died, parents were confident that it was appropriate to mark them with the baptismal seal which designated them as members of the Christian people. The third-century catacomb of Priscilla in Rome includes these inscriptions: “Sweet Tyche lived one year, 10 months, 15 days. She received [grace, i.e. baptism] on the 8th day before the Kalends. She gave up [her spirit] on the same day. Irene who lived with her parents 10 months 6 days received [grace] on April 7 and gave up [her spirit] on April 13.”[30]

This inscription comes from Catania in Sicily and dates from the early fourth century: “Her parents set this up for Julia Florentina, their dearest and most innocent infant who was made a believer. She was born a pagan on the day before the nones of March before dawn when Zoilus was censor of the province. She lived eighteen months and twenty-two days and was made a believer in the eighth hour of the night, almost drawing her last breath. She survived four more hours of the night so that she entered again on the customary things. She died at Hybla in the first hour of the day on September 25.”[31]

These and many other such inscriptions reflect the seriousness with which Christian parents viewed the Christian formation of their children from earliest days.

Notes

1. Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas 18:3, ed. and trans. Herbert Musurillo, in The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, Oxford Early Christian Texts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 126–27.
2. Ibid., 5:6. Cf. Clarissa W. Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation: Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 19–21.
3. Especially Colossians 3:18–4:1 and Ephesians 5:22–33. See also 1 Peter 2:13–3:7.
4. R. A. Markus, “The Problem of Self-Definition: From Sect to Church,” in The Shaping of Christianity in the Second and Third Centuries, vol. 1 of Jewish and Christian Self-Definition, ed. E. P. Sanders (London: SCM, 1980), 8.
5. Kurt Aland, Die Stellung der Kinder in den frühen christlichen Gemeinden—und ihre Taufe, Theologische Existenz Heute 138 (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1967).
6. Cyprian, The Lapsed 25, ed. and trans. Maurice Bévenot, Cyprian de Lapsis, Oxford Early Christian Texts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 36–39.
7. Ibid., 9.
8. Cyprian, Epistle 6.3.1, trans. G. W. Clarke, The Letters of St. Cyprian of Carthage, vol. 1, Ancient Christian Writers 43 (New York: Newman, 1984), 65.
9. Ibid., 16.4.1; cf. Thomas Wiedemann, Adults and Children in the Roman Empire (New York: Routledge, 1989), 100–102.
10. Augustine, Confessions 8.12.29; and Paulinus the Deacon, Life of Ambrose 6, trans. F. R. Hoare, in The Western Fathers (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1954), 152–53.
11. Eusebius, Church History 6.1-2.
12. Apostolic Constitutions 8:11–12, trans. W. Whiston, ed. James Donaldson, vol. 17 of The Ante-Nicene Christian Library (Edinburgh: Clark, 1870), part 2, 224.
13. Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1997), 115–28; cf. “the literature is empty” (127).
14. Ibid., 126.
15. Ibid., 111-12.
16. Tertullian, To His Wife (Ad Uxorem), trans. S. Thelwall, vol. 11 of The Ante-Nicene Christian Library (Edinburgh: Clark, 1869), 279–303.
17. Didascalia Apostolorum, 17, ed. and trans. R. Hugh Connolly (Oxford: Clarendon, 1929), 152–53.
18. Martyrdom of Carpus, Papylus and Agathonice, in The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, 28–29.
19. Augustine, Heresies 87.
20. Tertullian, Idolatry 10, trans. S. L. Greenslade, in Early Latin Theology, vol. 5 of Library of Christian Classics (London: SCM, 1956), 93–94 (italics his).
21. Didascalia 22.
22. Celsus, quoted in Origen, Contra Celsum 3.55, trans. Henry Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 165–66.
23. John M. G. Barclay, “The Family as the Bearer of Religion in Judaism and Early Christianity,” in Constructing Early Christian Families, ed. Halvor Moxnes (New York: Routledge, 1997), 76 (italics his).
24. F. J. Dölger, “Beiträge zur Geschichte des Kreuzzeichens VIII,” in Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 8–9 (1965–1966): 42-45. See also David F. Wright, “Infant Dedication in the Early Church,” in Baptism, the New Testament and the Church: Historical and Contemporary Studies in Honour of R. E. O. White, ed. Stanley E. Porter and A. R. Cross, Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series 171 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1999), 359–60.
25. Didache 8, ed. Andrew Louth, trans. Maxwell Staniforth, in Early Christian Writings (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1987), 194.
26. Hippolytus, Apostolic Tradition 41, trans. Geoffrey J. Cuming, in Hippolytus: A Text for Students (Bramcote, Nottingham, UK: Grove, 1976), 29.
27. Pliny, Letters 10.96.9, ed. J. Stevenson, rev. W. H. C. Frend, in A New Eusebius (London: SPCK, 1987), 19.
28. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 2.22.4, trans. Robert M. Grant, Irenaeus of Lyons (New York: Routledge, 1997), 114.
29. Wiedemann, Adults and Children in the Roman Empire, 186–92.
30. Joachim Jeremias, Infant Baptism in the First Four Centuries, trans. David Cairns (London: SCM, 1960), 78–79.
31. Everett Ferguson, “Inscriptions and the Origin of Infant Baptism,” Journal of Theological Studies 30 (1979): 41. The phrase “entered again on the customary things” has been interpreted in different ways. Some have seen in it an allusion to the eucharist.