Christians and empire

“One cannot serve God and the Emperor,” Tertullian wrote. Early Christians were anti-imperial then?

Not necessarily. When Celsus charged that Christians would leave the Emperor alone against the barbarians, Origen protested: “We help the emperor in his extremities by our prayers and intercessions more effectively than do the soldiers. Just as the priests must keep their hands unsullied for sacrifice, so also must the Christians, who are all priests and servants of God, keep their hands unstained by blood that they may be able to pray for the Emperor and the army in just cause. In this way we overcome the real disturbers of the peace, the demons. Thus we fight for the Emperor more than the others, though we do not fight with him, nor at his command. We constitute an army of piety by our intercession with the Deity.”

Christian misgivings about bloodshed, then, did not necessarily translate into opposition to the imperial order as such. Dorries summarizes the widespread Christian attitude:

“Origen linked the Church to the Roman peace. ‘In the days of Jesus justice came forth and fullness of peace. God prepared the place for his teaching and arranged that the Roman Empire should rule the whole world.’ Only within this framework of peace under one emperor could Christianity have been disseminated; the Christians had a responsibility, therefore, to maintain this peace. If they could not contribute to the support of the empire against external assault, they were all the more obliged to strengthen it from within.”