Faith Before Belief?: How the Earliest Christians Defined What It Meant to Be Faithful

What did it mean to be a faithful Christian before Christianity had creeds, councils, and carefully defined doctrines? The earliest followers of Jesus clearly believed something. They proclaimed that Jesus was Lord. They baptized converts, gathered for worship, shared meals, taught moral obligations, and expected loyalty to Christ even under pressure. But how clearly were the boundaries of Christian belief defined in the first generations of the church? Faith Before Belief? follows the development of Christian faith from the earliest followers of Jesus through the end of the second century. It examines what Christians believed, how they expressed those beliefs, and how disputes gradually forced Christian communities to define more precisely what counted as faithful teaching. Rather than asking when Christians began to believe, Harvey L. Cox asks a different question: When did particular beliefs become tests of Christian faithfulness? The answer reveals a period in which faith, loyalty, worship, practice, and belief were already intertwined, even though the boundaries of acceptable doctrine had not yet been stated with the precision later Christianity would require. Along the way, the book considers the role of the apostles, early Christian writings, baptism, worship, moral teaching, competing interpretations of Jesus, emerging ideas of authority, and the growing need to distinguish faithful teaching from teachings increasingly regarded as outside the Christian tradition. Faith Before Belief? examines the period that prepared the way for the developments explored in Cox's earlier book, Before the Creed, while standing on its own as a study of how Christianity moved from inherited conviction toward increasingly defined belief. For readers interested in early Christianity, the formation of Christian doctrine, and the historical development of orthodoxy, Faith Before Belief? offers a clear account of how the earliest Christians began answering a question that would shape the church for centuries: What does faithfulness to Jesus require us to believe?