One of Robert Webber’s greatest gifts to the emerging evangelical community is the challenge to reintegrate the study and tradition of the early Church into worship.  Only recently, with much credit to Webber, has the evangelical church begun to realize that the time between the apostles and the Reformers was not void of true worship and good theology.  In chapter 2 of WGNW Webber seeks to position the story of the beginning of the Christian Church within its original context: the Empire of Rome.  Chapter 2, “God’s Narrative Emerges in a Pagan Roman World” introduces the reader to a world where the reigning worldview was not influenced by or the product of the Christian story.  Webber does an excellent job of explaining how the Church’s infant and toddler years were not spent with a world that embraced and fostered the message of Jesus, but one that was opposed and often militant against such a message, to culture that often has a hard time understanding this.

Webber begins his description by explaining the first two centuries of Church history and the persecution most believers in Jesus faced.  By chronicling the beginning of the Empire in Augustus through the second and third century persecutions experienced by Ignatius and Tertullian to the legalization of Christianity by Constantine, the reader gets an adequate introduction to the history of the Roman Empire. From there Webber details three sections of the Roman society that the young Christian movement came into conflict with: moral decadence, philosophical relativism and religious pluralism.  The morality of the ancient Roman world is here described as one of self interest and extreme sexual indulgence.  The description of the philosophical landscape begins with a treatment of the Sophists and their belief in the futility of truth.  Comparably, Webber also describes the reigning thought of Platonic philosophy and its duality, exaltation of the abstract forms and disregard for the physical world.  Finally, the religious world of Imperial Rome described here, was one where any worship was accepted with the condition that it also paid honor to the Emperor.  The Christian story that was quickly spreading across the Mediterranean world was in stark contrast to these three Roman ideals.  Juxtaposed to the lack of moral standards in the Empire, Webber claims that the early Christians found their ethical compass in the teaching of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures.  Against the philosophical relativism, Webber outlines a clear understanding of reality that is informed by the promise of, coming and commission from Jesus.  Finally, against the inclusively of the Roman pagan system, the early Christians understood Jesus to be unique in His worthiness of worship.  One could not worship Jesus as Lord and Caesar as Lord.  

Following these sections, Webber describes another story that was competing with the story of God, and even tried to co-opt some of Christianity’s story.  This other narrative is Gnosticism.  After a description of the ancient Gnostics, and their hyper-Platonic thought, Webber describes how this ultra dualistic philosophy is beginning to gain new ground today.  To conclude this chapter, Webber compares the societies of ancient Rome and the modern West, urging Christians to hold fast and defend the narrative of God as the the earliest Christians did.

In my opinion, this chapter is an excellent introduction to the position that the Church had in the earliest days as a enemy of the Empire.  If the reader is able to understand how Webber outlines the rising threat of Radical Islam and consumerism as the new empires, they should be able to understand how he sets the narrative of God against the other two.  I might have like to have seen a bit more discussion on Paul’s polemic against the Imperial cult and also a deeper discussion of Platonic thought in the rise of Christianity, both its good and bad.