We Look for a Kingdom: The Everyday Lives of the Early Christians

by Carl J. Sommer

Ignatius Press, 2007

457 pages, $19.95

To order: Ignatius.com

1-800-651-1531

Take in a blood-soaked contemporary film of ostensibly escalating violence and you might buy into the illusion that evil continues to magnify as time inexorably advances, that pretty soon we’ll be broken eggs in hell’s own apocalyptic handbasket.

Thank heavens for Carl Sommer’s We Look for a Kingdom, an enlightening and exhaustive study of how Christians before 313 confronted and prevailed over dire questions of evil in their midst.

The author’s erudition could warrant an academic slant, yet Sommer easily adopts a wise Midwestern tone while delivering honest assessments of currently circulating questions. Wondering how second-century apologists condemned abortion? And what about that vexing question of deaconesses?

Chapter by chapter, Sommer skillfully lays out the evidence, piece by piece, in a patristic Scrabble, his expert hands properly arranging documents to spell lucidity where previous researchers fumbled only into jabberwocky. As each of Sommer’s deductive solutions makes more sense, you’ll begin to wonder why you hadn’t thought of them yourself. Those deaconesses, for instance, served only to aid in full immersion baptisms of female catechumens.

Not limited to potentially polemical topics, the study engages us in the more routine details of day-to-day living. The first third, in fact, focuses on life among the Romans, a broad picture racked into sharp focus by Sommer’s literary cinematography. Portraits, for instance, of typical marriages among Jews, Greeks and Romans draw us into empathy for the advent of “the family as a school of love,” a concept unknown before the Christian sacrament.

The big picture emerges as the author synthesizes all these pieces into a pithy conclusion:

“If I were making a list of reasons for the success of the early Church against her pagan adversaries, the fact that the Church had bishops would be high on that list. But there is another little-known factor. … Cultural wars are won on the level of ordinary people, and the ordinary Christians of the first three centuries were quite extraordinary. They lived out the vocations God gave them with quiet strength, fulfilling their duties to Church, family, and neighbor.”

While Sommer’s organization divides each chapter into manageable subtopics, following the thread of the overall argument requires effort, even with the author’s helpful summaries. And since the book’s variety of topics and sheer length lend themselves to very gradual ingestion, jotting notes on a bookmark between return visits is a must.

That said, Sommer’s accomplishment endows the reader — the layperson especially — with a time-honored user’s manual to follow John Paul II’s exhortation “to animate temporal realities with Christian commitment” (Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, For the Twentieth Anniversary of Populorum Progressio No. 47). Through that witness acclaimed across the life of the Church we can be assured that evil continues to drink only its own poison.

Stephen Mirarchi is

based in St. Louis.