Irenaeus, Joseph Smith, and God-Making Heresy by Powell Adam J.;

Author:Powell, Adam J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Personal Heresy

The topics of identity and social cohesion are always intimately connected. In the second century, as we have shown, Roman identity and social unity was dependant on religious complicity from those within the boundaries of the empire. When residents such as Christians proved defiant and dismissive of rituals and traditions, the natural response from pagans was aggressive and primal. Here we recall Lorenz’s work on animal aggression and its function for establishing “pecking orders” and the manner by which Mol appropriated that observation for the study of religious identity. For the Romans, civil religion and its immutable link to the imperial cult fostered an identity and cultivated a stability encapsulated in the notions of pax romana and pax deorum. What is more, Sherwin-White argues convincingly that the second century witnessed an increase in Roman unity:

As the governing class came to be recruited increasingly from outside of Italy the distinction between Roman citizens, subjects and foreigners became blurred politically. . . . The peoples of the empire came to be regarded as “our people,” cives or homines nostri. This attitude led finally to the amalgamation of all subjects as Roman citizens under the constitutio Antoniniana.[91]

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