“Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us” (1Pet 2:12).
Christians are called to holy living (Matt 5:48, 1Pet 1:16) and to love our enemies (Matt 5:44), our neighbors (Mark 12:31), and our brothers in Christ (John 13:34). Our lives can be a witness to the lost world around us (eg, Matt 5:16, John 13:35). We’re not very good at this (cf, Acts 6:1, 1Cor 6:6), but when we do it right, it is glorious.
What does it mean to love our brothers and sisters in Christ? Scripture expands on the call to love one another with dozens of more specific commands. One person has helpfully cataloged them.1 This is what it looks like to love one another: We honor one another, accept one another, serve one another, forgive one another, encourage one another, submit to one another, and pray for one another among many, many other instructions.
When we love the way Christ has told us to love, the world notices. The Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate (332-363) complained, “[Christianity] has been specially advanced through the loving service rendered to strangers, and through their care for the burial of the dead. It is a scandal that there is not a single Jew who is a beggar, and that the godless Galileans care not only for their own poor but for ours as well; while those who belong to us look in vain for the help that we should render them.”2
Early Christians were known both for their refusal to abandon “undesirable” newborns and for taking in those of others. They were known for marital fidelity and charity.3 They cared for orphans, widows, and prisoners:
Though we have our treasure-chest, it is not made up of purchase-money, as of a religion that has its price. ... These gifts are, as it were, piety’s deposit fund. For they are not taken thence and spent on feasts, and drinking-bouts, and eating-houses, but to support and bury poor people, to supply the wants of boys and girls destitute of means and parents, and of old persons confined now to the house; such, too, as have suffered shipwreck; and if there happen to be any in the mines, or banished to the islands, or shut up in the prisons, for nothing but their fidelity to the cause of God’s Church, they become the nurslings of their confession.4
They also cared for the sick — even plague victims. Shelley tells of one such account:
In the year 165, during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, a devastating epidemic swept through the Roman Empire. ... No one knew how to treat the stricken. Nor did most people try. During the first plague, the famous classical physician Galen fled Rome for his country estate where he stayed until the danger subsided. ... [But] Christians met the obligation to care for the sick rather than desert them, and thereby saved enormous numbers of lives!5
As Stark points out, countless numbers of those whose lives were saved by Christians undoubtedly became Christians, but besides that the world saw what was happening. As Tertullian put it, the unbelievers could not help but say, “See how they love one another.”4
As the centuries have progressed, Christians have been known for founding orphanages, hospitals, and schools. They have fed the hungry, nursed the sick, and taught people to read — even inventing written languages where there was none.
Sadly, this reputation has not followed Christianity to the present day because this behavior has not. But it can once more. The commands to love each other and our neighbor have not changed. We only have to obey them again.
If you’d like to view Christianity through the eyes of a charitable unbeliever, you might enjoy Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland (not Spider-Man).
1 "The 59 ‘One Another’ Statements in the Bible" https://churchleaders.com/smallgroups/small-group-articles/176356-the-59-one-another-statements-in-the-bible.html
2 Bruce Shelley, Church History in Plain Language
3 Epistle to Diognetus, ch 5
4 Tertullian, Apology, ch. 39
5 Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity
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