This Is Pretty Much What We Are Seeing Today

 https://x.com/nancyrpearcey/status/2038668554740892058?s=51&t=cLq01Oy84YkmYPZ-URIMYw

 

 Why the ancient Romans persecuted the early Christians: "In New Testament times, the Greeks had a term for the underlying principle that unifies the world into an orderly cosmos, as opposed to randomness and chaos. They called it the Logos. The Stoic philosophers conceived it as a pantheistic mind pervading the universe. But the apostle John applied the term to Christ. “In the beginning was the Word”—Logos (John 1:1). Every Greek who heard John’s gospel understood that he was claiming that Christ himself is the source of the order and coherence of the universe. As Paul put it, “in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). Creation has a rational, intelligible order that reflects God’s creative plan. 

  From the beginning, however, this New Testament concept of truth came under fire. The Roman Empire did not regard religion as the search for truth about reality. That was the province of philosophers, not priests. The Romans defined religion solely in terms of ritual, ceremony, and cult practices. The empire was perfectly willing to accept Christianity if it would take its place as just another set of religious practices. What the empire would not accept, says Catholic theologian Lorenzo Albacete, was Christianity “as a source of truth about this world.” How did the early church respond? It resolutely refused to reduce Christianity to Rome’s relativistic definition of religion. As Albacete writes, Christianity “would not accept a place with the religions of the empire” as merely another set of rituals and practices. It “saw itself as a philosophy, as a path to knowledge about reality, and not primarily as a source of spiritual or ethical inspiration.” The message of Christ’s resurrection—in a physical body, in historical time—did not allow for any dualism that shoved religion off into a separate sphere of life concerned only with spiritual rules and rituals. The early church insisted that biblical truth is a comprehensive unity, encompassing the realms of both priest and philosopher. Truth is a unified whole."