This is the first post in a series that will highlight five ways the contemporary evangelical church can learn from church history about spiritual formation.
Jesus and the early church were willing to suffer.
Suffering is intrinsic to spiritual formation.
Christ himself suffered for sins and learned obedience through suffering (1 Peter 3:18 and Hebrews 5:8). He warned his disciples that they too would suffer (John 16:33). The account of Stephen’s martyrdom in Acts 7 is the first of many such stories in church history. The early church esteemed martyrs as saints to be imitated. In Water From A Deep Well, Gerald L. Sittser provides brief accounts for some of these martyrs, whose stories have endured since the first couple centuries of the church: Justin Martyr, Carpus and Papylus, Pothinus and the Martyrs of Lyons, Perpetua, Ptolemaeus and Lucius, and Polycarp.[1]
Icons used in early church worship provide a telling contrast: martyrs often exemplified the faith to the early church. In contemporary evangelicalism, the heroes of the faith seem to be Christian celebrities with large platforms, the most followers, and overflowing bank accounts. It is not as though the church has ever lacked martyrs to admire and imitate. Some were willing to suffer in living for Christ just as much as in dying for him.
The desert fathers, who Sittser identifies as “bloodless martyrs,” practiced asceticism, isolating themselves in the desert outside of the cities and inflicting suffering on themselves for the sake of self-discipline and devotion.[2] The most well-known desert father, St. Anthony, renounced all worldly possessions and devoted himself to “exercises such as vigils, fasting, celibacy, poverty, and solitude.”[3] In their struggle against the world, the flesh, and the devil, these saints were willing to suffer – not for the sake of suffering itself, but as a means to an end. They believed that such suffering [ascesis] coupled with “imperturbable calm” [apatheia] transformed one into a person of godly love [agape].[4]
The church of the Middle Ages was willing to suffer.
Whereas the ascetic desert fathers were willing to suffer in isolation away from communities, saints in the Middle Ages learned to embrace suffering while remaining “in the world but not of it.” Sittser provides an example, echoing G.K. Chesterton’s sentiment about the thirteenth century friar: “Francis of Assisi turned martyrdom into a way of life…” learning to “die daily to the gods- ego, pleasure, power, success- that threatened to dominate his life…”[5] Many such monks renounced comforts and took vows of poverty; mendicants did the same but outside of the confines of a monastery. Both embraced suffering as a powerful force in one’s own spiritual formation.
Unlike the early church martyrs, many Reformers were killed by Christian authorities rather than secular powers. In Switzerland, for example, Anabaptists Felix Manz and George Blaurock were drowned and burned at the stake, respectively, for their views on baptism.[6] During the English Reformation, William Tyndale and the Oxford martyrs (Thomas Cranmer, Hugh Latimer, and Nicholas Ridley) were killed for their religious beliefs.[7]
The modern church has been willing to suffer.
A couple centuries after the Reformation, Christians continued to advance the gospel at great personal risk and cost. Missionaries such as William Carey and Hudson Taylor left everything behind to take the gospel to new peoples and places. They were emblematic of the global evangelistic movement of voluntary Protestant organizations and Catholic religious orders of their time.[8] Jonathan Edwards was effusive in his praise for David Brainerd, an eighteenth-century missionary to Native Americans, because he
“…embraced the cross, and bore it constantly, in his great self-denials, labours, and sufferings for the name of Jesus, and went on without fainting, without repining, to his dying illness: how he did not only, from time to time, relinquish and renounce the world secretly, in his heart, with the full and fervent consent of all the powers of his soul; but openly and actually forsook the world, with its possessions, delights, and common comforts, to dwell as it were with wild beasts, in a howling wilderness; with constant cheerfulness complying with the numerous hardships of a life of toil and travel there, to promote the kingdom of his dear Redeemer.”[9]
Are we willing to suffer?
The modern tendency to avoid discomfort and danger has disadvantaged believers by depriving them of the lessons learned through suffering. Although persecution and suffering are minimal in the West, more Christians globally are dying for their faith now than ever before.[10]
It would be a mistake to seek persecution, but the contemporary evangelical church could adopt self-sacrificial practices and learn to live as “bloodless martyrs” in a modern context. For example, one may suffer in the flesh by fasting (i.e., denying oneself food for a given period of time for the sake of devoting oneself more fully to God). Perhaps the form of suffering most challenging to the Western church would be a denial of financial/material sorts. Many may find especially formative the practices of simplicity, minimalism, or courageous generosity (i.e., giving “until it hurts”).
We may have to get creative in how we might suffer for God’s glory and others’ good. The one who calls us to “deny ourselves and take up our crosses daily” may be pleased with the prayer, “Lord, how may I suffer for you today?”. He may even answer it.
All praise to the Christ who suffered.
He set an example for us.
Let’s follow him.
[1] Gerald L. Sittser, Water from a Deep Well: Christian Spirituality from Early Martyrs to Modern Missionaries (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007), 33-43.
[2] Sittser, Water from a Deep Well, 80.
[3] Sittser, Water from a Deep Well, 76.
[4] Sittser, Water from a Deep Well, 85-93.
[5] Sittser, Water from a Deep Well, 48.
[6] Sten-Erik Armitage, “Lecture – Radical Baptism.” Dallas Theological Seminary, November 2024.
[7] Sten-Erik Armitage, “Lecture –The English Reformation.” Dallas Theological Seminary, December 2024.
[8] Sittser, Water from a Deep Well, 260.
[9] Jonathan Edwards, The Life and Diary of David Brainerd,Section IV. Reproduced by Sten-Erik Armitage in EML730/PM510 Spiritual Formation in Historical Perspective – Reading Packet, Dallas Theological Seminary, 2024, p.229.
[10] Sittser, Water from a Deep Well, 47