Culture War: How the Early Church Conquered Rome 33AD to 330 AD...applied today

As the whole "Greater Israel" prophetic project of Dispensational Theology visibly falls apart in the Middle East it is time to assert: The Kingdom does not come through a triumphant military "Greater Israel". We win the culture wars and extend the Kingdom of God in the 21st Century the way we converted ancient Rome.

The Kingdom of God will not be established by a nation of people in Palestine who declare themselves to be "the chosen" of God with the right to re-establish a Jewish Kingdom by bombs, warfare and destruction.

It will be established in all nations on earth throughout the 21st Century in the same way it spread through all the nations of the Roman Empire.

The Question That Changes Everything

Here is a question most people never stop to ask: Why on earth did anyone become a Christian in the first three centuries after Christ?

I mean that in the most literal sense. In the Roman world of 33 to 330 AD, converting to Christianity was not a lifestyle upgrade. It was not the spiritual equivalent of joining a popular new community center or finding a church with a great band. To become a follower of Jesus in the Roman Empire was to paint a target on your back. It was to risk your livelihood, your family, your social standing, and quite literally your life.

And yet the church grew. Explosively. Unstoppably. Within three centuries, from a handful of frightened disciples in an upper room in Jerusalem, the Christian faith had stretched from Carthage to Egypt, from Mesopotamia to Spain, from Jerusalem to the far edges of Britain. Scholar Larry Hurtado rightly notes that “no other cult in the Empire grew at anything like the same speed.

That is the phenomenon we need to understand. Not just as a matter of ancient history, but as urgent instruction for Christians living in the hostile cultural climate of the 21st century. Because here is the startling truth: the world that hated Jesus then is not so different from the world that marginalizes him now. And the power that transformed Rome is available to us today.

The Rome That Hated the Gospel

To appreciate the miracle of early Christianity, we have to feel the weight of what converts were walking into. The Roman world was not neutral ground. It was deeply hostile to the Christian faith and that hostility operated on multiple levels simultaneously.

Political Persecution

In Rome, there was no separation of church and state. The public rituals that honoured the gods were not optional religious exercises—they were civic duties. When you participated in the sacrifice, the procession, the temple feast, you were publicly declaring your loyalty to Rome and to the supernatural order that undergirded it. You were saying: I belong here. I support this society.

When Christians refused, they were not seen as merely eccentric or religiously peculiar. They were seen as anarchists. Seditionists. Enemies of civilization itself. Under Roman law, Christians were classified as “atheists”, because they denied the gods and therefore enemies of the state. As historian Clayton Croy describes it, “the threat to Christians’ lives pervaded the first three centuries… Even when martyrdom was not being carried out, all that stood between Christians and the executioner was the lack of a "delator”—an accuser.

Social and Familial Rupture

But the danger was not only legal. Conversion shattered the convert’s social world. In the Roman world, the actual practice of daily religion was ancestor worship. Your family’s gods were your gods. Your ancestors’ rituals were your rituals. Family was not simply important it was everything. It was your identity, your security, your future.

To become a Christian was to abandon your ancestors. It was the ultimate betrayal in a world that defined loyalty through bloodlines and inherited pieties. You became what the Romans called a “rootless alien”—a criminal without country, a person without a people. Humiliation, ostracism, abuse, threats, hatred, ridicule: these were not occasional inconveniences. They were the daily fabric of the Christian life.

Paul’s letters document this world in vivid detail. Writing to believers in Thessalonica, he speaks of those “who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and also drove us out” (1 Thessalonians 2:15). The writer of Hebrews calls believers to “endure a great conflict full of suffering” (Hebrews 10:32). Peter addresses people who have been slandered, threatened, and treated as aliens in their own communities (1 Peter 3:9, 16). These were not metaphors.

Cultural Contempt

And then there was the cultural contempt. Roman literary sources describe Christians as evildoers, prone to incest and murder, charlatans who believe outrageous things, lowlifes and scum, intellectually inferior. From the halls of the Senate to the streets of the marketplace, to be a Christian was to be looked down upon, laughed at, and despised. The intelligentsia found Christian belief absurd. The social elite found it embarrassing.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Why They Came Anyway: The Two Gifts No One Else Offered

Given everything, the persecution, the social rupture, the daily danger, the cultural contempt, why did people convert? Why did they stay converted? Why did they refuse to recant even when faced with the executioner’s sword?

The answer lies in two extraordinary gifts that Christianity offered for the first time in human history. Not programs. Not political platforms. Not cultural influence. Two gifts that met the deepest hungers of the human soul and that the Roman world, for all its power and grandeur, simply could not provide.

The First Gift: A God Who Loves

The Greco-Roman gods were not loving. They were not kind. They were powerful and capricious, magnificent and dangerous and they were not interested in you as a person. Their job was managing the cosmos. Human beings were, at best, useful instruments for keeping the divine machinery running. You worshipped them so they wouldn’t destroy you, not because they cared.

Christianity announced something unprecedented: “God is love” (1 John 4:8). Not merely powerful. Not merely just. Love. The God who spoke the universe into being had entered into it as a human being, had lived among the poor and the broken, had touched lepers and eaten with sinners, and had died a criminal’s death not out of defeat but out of love. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son” (John 3:16).

This was not a refinement of existing religion. This was a revolution of love. This is one of only two sufficient explanations for the explosive growth of early Christianity: for the first time in history, the divine was linked to love. The Creator was also the Father. The Almighty was also the Shepherd who searches for the one lost sheep. The Holy God was also the One who “came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10).

To a world full of people who felt like cosmic orphans used by the gods, discarded by fortune, crushed by empire, this was not just good news. It was the best news imaginable.

The Second Gift: Death Is Not the End

The ancient pagan world had no robust hope for life after death. Death was largely regarded as the end. Perhaps a shadowy, diminished existence in the underworld, perhaps nothing at all. The body was temporary. The self was fragile. The best the philosophers could offer was a kind of noble resignation in the face of the inevitable.

Christianity changed everything with a single historical claim: Jesus of Nazareth rose bodily from the dead. Not as a ghost. Not as a spiritual metaphor. Not as a comforting legend. He rose in his own body, transformed and glorified and appeared to hundreds of witnesses (1 Corinthians 15:3–8). And because he rose, he promised that all who are united to him by faith will also rise.

I am the resurrection and the life,” Jesus declared. “The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die” (John 11:25–26).

This was the second revolutionary gift: not just everlasting existence, but the promise of bodily resurrection. Individual, personal, embodied eternal life. No other religion in the ancient world offered this. No philosophy came close to it. And it changed the calculus of suffering entirely. If the Roman executioner cannot take from you what Christ has given you, what power does Rome really have?

Paul captured this defiant logic with stunning clarity: “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21). The martyrs were not dying in despair. They were dying in hope and that hope was contagious in a way that no amount of Roman violence could suppress.

The Third Gift Hidden in Plain Sight: A Peace That Passes Understanding

There is a third element that must not be overlooked. Justin Martyr, one of the great philosopher-converts of the 2nd century, wrote of his conversion in his Dialogue with Trypho. He said that he became a Christian because he found in the faith a philosophy that was “both safe and profitable.” What he had found, at the core of the Christian life, was a peace that the world simply could not manufacture.

Jesus had promised exactly this: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid” (John 14:27). This was not the peace of circumstances, the kind that evaporates the moment the circumstances change. This was a deep, internal settledness, a shalom that came not from political safety or social approval but from the presence of the living God within the human soul.

The Romans of the first century, for all their philosophy and power, were no different from people in our own era: everyone seeks inner peace, and few know how to find it. When Christians carried this peace into a world that was frantic with anxiety and they carried it visibly, joyfully, even under persecution it was irresistible. Once you find that peace, Justin knew, you will never want to give it up. No matter what.

The 21st Century: Same War, Same Weapons

Now let us come home. Because everything I have described about Rome in 33 AD has remarkable resonance with the world Christians inhabit today.

We do not face the literal executioner’s sword in most of the Western world though our brothers and sisters in parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia know that reality all too well. But the cultural playbook is recognizable. The intellectual contempt for Christian belief is open and unapologetic. Committed Christians are increasingly categorized as dangerous, as obstacles to progress, as relics of a pre-Enlightenment past that civilized people have outgrown. Our moral convictions are caricatured as bigotry. Our confidence in Scripture is labelled as ignorance.

The social costs of faithful Christianity are rising. To hold traditional biblical views on sexuality, marriage, life, and human identity in many professional and academic environments is to risk your career, your reputation, your relationships. Young Christians face extraordinary pressure to either abandon their convictions or keep them private. To live, as Paul’s congregation was tempted to do, a public secular life and a private Christian one.

The parallel is not exact but it is real. And what it calls for is not a new strategy. It calls for a recovery of the original power.

We Are Not Fighting for Cultural Dominance

Here is the first lesson from the early church: they did not win Rome by fighting for political power. They won Rome by living an alternative life so compelling that the empire could not ignore it.

The early Christians had no senators, no armies, no institutions. They had no platform, no media access, no cultural influence by any conventional measure. What they had was the living reality of Jesus Christ in their midst and they lived it out in front of a watching world with such unmistakable authenticity that people were drawn in even at enormous personal cost.

This does not mean we disengage from politics or culture. It means we remember what our primary weapon actually is. Paul wrote, “For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds” (2 Corinthians 10:3–4). When we mistake political influence for gospel power, we make a category error that has historically weakened the church, not strengthened it.

The Gospel Is Still the Most Radical Thing in the Room

Our culture is desperately anxious. Beneath the noise and the performative confidence of secular progressivism lies a generation that is lonely, purposeless, and terrified. The mental health crisis among young people in the West is not a peripheral issue it is a signal. The architecture of secular meaning-making is failing. The gospel’s two revolutionary gifts, a God who loves and a future beyond death, are just as needed in 2026 as they were in 85 AD.

The person sitting in your workplace who seems to have everything together is almost certainly searching for what Justin Martyr found in the Dialogue with Trypho—a faith that is "safe and profitable", a peace that the world cannot give. They may mock what they see in you. But they are watching. And what they are watching for is whether it is real.

The Holy Spirit Is Still Moving

We must also recover the dimension of the early church’s witness that is perhaps most neglected in sophisticated Western Christianity: the immediate, tangible power of the Holy Spirit.

The early church did not grow only through argument, however brilliant. It grew through encounter. The sick were healed. The demonized were set free. Dreams were given and visions were seen. People experienced the undeniable presence of God and concluded: this is real. This is not philosophy. This is the living God. From Pentecost forward, the Spirit was not a theological concept to be debated but a person to be encountered—“poured out on all flesh” (Acts 2:17), transforming ordinary people into vessels of extraordinary grace.

The same Spirit is available today. Jesus promised that those who believe in him would do “greater works” than he himself did (John 14:12). Paul prayed that his churches would know “his incomparably great power for us who believe” (Ephesians 1:19). This is not inspirational language. This is a promissory note. The church that walks in genuine Holy Spirit power, in gifts, in healing, in prophetic witness, in supernatural love, carries something the 21st century cannot explain away.

Practical Wisdom for the Cultural Moment

So what does this mean practically for those of us who are living faithfully in an increasingly hostile culture? Let me offer several concrete takeaways from the early church’s example.

Stay Visible, Not Hidden

The temptation Paul’s Corinthian congregation faced, to live a public secular life and a private Christian one, is precisely the temptation many of us face today. The pressure to compartmentalize, to keep faith politely out of public view, is immense. But it is a gospel-killing compromise. Jesus said, “Let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:16). The peace that witnesses, the love that confounds, the hope that endures, these only work when they are visible.

Build Counter-Cultural Community

The early church grew in no small part because it built an alternative community, one where the slave and the free, the Jew and the Greek, the rich and the poor ate at the same table (Galatians 3:28). In a rigidly stratified Roman world, this was extraordinary. In an equally fragmented and lonely 21st century world, the church that practices genuine covenant community, radical hospitality, mutual bearing of burdens, genuine accountability, joyful shared life, is doing something the culture cannot replicate.

Embrace the Cost Without Resentment

One of the most striking things about the early church’s witness was not just that they suffered—it was how they suffered. They did not become embittered. They did not become vengeful. Peter instructs believers not to repay evil with evil or insult with insult but with blessing (1 Peter 3:9). Paul tells the Philippians to “do everything without grumbling or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation” in which they “shine… like stars in the sky” (Philippians 2:14–15). The joy of the believer in the midst of unjust suffering is a theological argument that no one can debate away.

Tell the Story You Are Living

Justin Martyr became a Christian and then wrote about why. Paul became a Christian and then could not stop talking about it, even when talking about it got him beaten. The early church grew not primarily through formal evangelistic campaigns but through the natural overflow of people whose lives had been genuinely transformed, who told their story to their neighbours, their family, their fellow guild members, their slaves, their masters.

Peter’s instruction is permanent: “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect” (1 Peter 3:15). Notice the precondition: people must be able to see that you have hope worth asking about. Your life is the evangelistic argument. Your peace is the sermon. Your joy is the evidence.

The Dangerous Power Has Not Diminished

Let me bring us home to where we started. Why on earth did anyone become a Christian in the first three centuries? Because they found something that their world could not supply and that no amount of persecution could take away: the love of a God who is personally interested in them; the promise of a future that death cannot terminate; and a peace so deep, so settled, so other-worldly that it simply could not be explained apart from the living presence of the risen Jesus.

History is not ultimately driven by impersonal economic forces or sociological conditions. It is driven by ideas that people believe, embody, and then live out. The idea at the center of Christianity—the resurrection of Jesus, the love of God, the hope of eternal life, the gift of the Spirit—is the most powerful idea the world has ever encountered. It turned a handful of frightened disciples into a movement that outlasted the empire that tried to crush it.

That power has not diminished. The Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead is still being poured out. The peace of Christ is still being given. The love of God is still the most revolutionary announcement in any human language. The tomb is still empty.

So to you dear friend, pastor, student, professional, parent, worker, leader, who are living out your faith in a culture that is increasingly skeptical, sometimes contemptuous, and occasionally hostile: do not be discouraged. You are not in a new story. You are in a very old one. And you already know how it ends.

The power that converted Rome is in you. Not because you are remarkable, though you may be, but because the One who lives in you is. “Greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world” (1 John 4:4). The culture wars of the 21st century will not be won by Christians who are angrier, louder, or more politically organized than everyone else. They will be won as Rome was won, by people who have found a peace the world cannot give, a hope the world cannot destroy, and a love the world cannot manufacture. And who refuse to keep quiet about it.

Which is why the Kingdom of God will not be established by a nation of people in Palestine who declare themselves to be "the chosen" of God with the right to re-establish a Jewish Kingdom by bombs, warfare and destruction.

It will be established in all nations on earth throughout the 21st Century in the same way it spread through all the nations of the Roman Empire.

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