“What Would the Early Church Do?”: Duane W.H. Arnold, PhD

“What Would the Early Church Do?”

Duane W.H. Arnold, PhD

It was late in the afternoon—gray light slanting through the windows—when someone asked me in an email, “What would the early Church do if it were faced with policies like ours?”

It struck me that this was a question we should all be asking ourselves.

They were referencing government policies. Policies, I should add, that target the poor and the elderly with neglect. Policies that cage the alien. Policies that punish children for being born into the wrong zip code, or the wrong side of the border. Policies that, if we are honest, bear little resemblance to the Gospel and much to the machinery of empire and the pursuit of power.

Now, I’ve spent most of my life reading the Fathers—preaching with them, teaching about them, holding their words alongside Scripture, not as equal, but as honest voices from those who stood nearer the beginning. Men who knew what it meant to live in the shadow of power, and yet to follow Christ.

So I thought about the question—not as a slogan, not as a social media flourish—but seriously.

What would the early Church have done?

We know the answer. We’ve just grown uncomfortable with it.

They would have acted.

They did act.

They cared for the poor when the state wouldn’t. They welcomed the stranger when the culture recoiled. They resisted policies that crushed the weak, not with riots, not with slogans, but with a quiet defiance grounded in Christ. They did not cozy up to power. They stood at a distance from it, often at great cost.

Take John Chrysostom. Golden-mouthed, yes, but more than a preacher—he was a scourge of the powerful and a comforter of the poor. Preaching in Constantinople, he said to those gathered in their fine robes, “You see Christ in the chalice but not in the beggar lying at your door.” He wasn’t looking to make friends at court. He was calling the Church back to Jesus.

Or Basil of Caesarea. The empire watched people starve while the granaries of the wealthy burst with grain. Basil didn’t write polite letters to officials. He preached, “The bread you hoard belongs to the hungry. The cloak in your chest to the naked.” Then he built what would become the first public hospital. They called it the Basileias. No government grant. No imperial approval. Just Christians acting like Christians.

The truth is, the early Church didn’t rely on imperial favor. Most of the time they lived without it—or under threat of it. And still, they fed, clothed, healed, and took in those no one else would.

Even their enemies noticed.

Julian the Apostate—the emperor who tried to drag Rome back to paganism—looked at the Christians and said, “These godless Galileans not only feed their own poor, but ours as well.” You can almost hear the frustration. He wanted paganism to win, but couldn’t deny that it was the Christians who did the work. Not the temples. Not the philosophers. The Church.

Would anyone say the same about us now?

Dionysius of Alexandria, writing during the plague, told of Christians who nursed the sick and buried the dead while the rest of the city fled. “They were heedless of danger,” he wrote, “and took charge of the sick, attending to their every need.”

They didn’t do it because they had good policy. They did it because they had a Gospel.

Gregory of Nazianzus saw the poor and the refugee not as burdens but as kin. “They are made in the image of God,” he preached. “They are our brothers and sisters.”

There’s no asterisk there. No exception for citizenship status or political convenience.

This wasn’t an ideal. It was how they lived.

It’s fashionable in some circles now to say that the Church should stay out of politics. That Jesus didn’t criticize Caesar. That Paul didn’t march in the streets. But that’s not the point. They weren’t silent, and they weren’t passive.

They didn’t place their hope in empire, but they were not indifferent to injustice. They lived as those already belonging to another Kingdom. And they let the politics of that Kingdom shape their lives here and now.

When the Gospel is lived out fully, it will always unsettle the powerful and comfort the broken. And that is precisely what happened in the early Church.

So, if we’re wondering what to do—if we’re wrestling with the injustice written into law and policy—I would say this:

Be the Church.

Feed those the government ignores. 

Shelter those the system casts out. 

Speak when others are silent. 

And refuse—absolutely refuse—to bless what is anti-Christ.

We don’t need new ideas. We need ancient courage.

That’s what the early Church would have done.

That’s what the Gospel still demands.