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A great argument can be made that all morality and goodness comes from the heart of God. By extension then, God’s people should be the most moral humans on the planet.
Anyone believing this may be surprised to hear, then, that one of the biggest reasons the church was persecuted by the Romans revolved around their belief that Christians belonged to the most immoral cult in existence!
There were two main reasons the Romans had for labeling the church “immoral.” First, the church hosted weekly “love feasts,” joyous meals shared together in which the church also celebrated the Lord’s Supper (Communion).
What’s the big deal about that? It kinda sounds like a potluck dinner combined with prayer service, right?
Well, since these love feasts were usually done in private [largely due to persecution], and only certain people were invited [baptized believers who followed Jesus Christ], many eyebrows were raised and speculations were rampant. The most popular rumor was that these love feasts were nothing more than sexual orgies.
Further compounding this wrong assumption was the fact that Christians called each other “brother” and “sister.” Even some husbands called their wives “sister,” and vice versa; this really indicted the church in Rome’s eyes.
Putting all this together left the Romans with only one (incorrect) idea of Christian worship services: they must be orgies in which Christians eat and drink their fill, and then after they’re completely drunk, participate in indiscriminate and incestuous affairs.
OK, since you put it that way, it doesn’t sound much like a potluck dinner combined with prayer service, after all.
But there was a second major reason the church was labeled immoral: Christians spoke of “drinking the blood of Christ” and “eating the body of Christ.” Bear in mind, that’s exactly what Jesus told them to do in John 6:56. Knowing that the Christians’ Christ was (at one time) a baby, Rome wrongly assumed that Christians were also cannibalizing infants.
Those are some of the reasons why Rome thought the early Church of Jesus Christ was an orgy-having, baby-eating group of immoral cultists!
Ahhh…the power of rumors (and stupidity).
Resource’s Origin:
The Story of Christianity Volume 1 by Justo L. Gonzalez. HarperCollins, 1984, Pages 49-50.
Topics Illustrated Include:
Assumption
Church
History
Immoral
Law
Mistake
Persecution
Reputation
Rumor
Sexual Immorality
Sexual Sin
Truth
Worship
(Resource cataloged by David R Smith)
