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The 4th century social justice warrior

He was the first to condemn slavery, over 1,500 years ago. Gregory of Nyssa critically examined society, looking at the relationships and structures everyone takes for granted.

Ryan Gilfeather

Ryan Gilfeather explores social issues through the lens of philosophy, theology, and history. He is a Research Associate at the Joseph Centre for Dignified Work.

A mosaic shows a saint with a beard holding a bible and his hand held up in a blessing.
Gregory of Nyssa fresco.
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In January 2023 the Church of England committed £100m to invest in communities affected by historic slavery. Rightly so. Research since 2019 shows that the wealth it accumulated through historic investment in a slave trading company and receiving gifts from slave traders, may still benefit its finances today. This past is, as the Archbishop of Canterbury says, shameful. So, it is only right that these actions are addressed.  

This story also highlights the complex relationship between Christianity and enslavement. On one hand, inspired by their faith, Christians led the fight for abolition. But on the other, some Christians supported and benefitted from the enslavement of other humans. And, the further back we look in history, the more Christians seem to accept enslavement as part of the fabric of society.   

There is, however, an exception. In the late fourth century AD, Gregory of Nyssa, a bishop and theologian, critically examined this practice of enslavement, which so many others did not even think to question, and explicitly names it as a sin, about a millennium and a half before the abolitionist movements. Gregory is, in this way, a light in the darkness and an inspiration to Christians today.  

He is convinced, on a fundamental level, that the domination of one human being over another in slavery is incompatible with Christian belief. In one of his sermons on the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, delivered in Cappadocia (Turkey), he calls slavery a sin. 

It is a ‘gross example of arrogance…  for a human being to think himself the master of his own kind’: When someone…arrogates dominion to his own kind, so as to think himself the owner of men and women, what is he doing but overstepping his own nature through pride, regarding himself as something different from his subordinates?'  

It is wrong to dominate others, because all human beings share the same fundamental nature. That nature is being made in the image of God:  

'God said, let us make man in our own image and likeness. If he is in the likeness of God, and rules the whole earth, and has been granted authority over everything on earth from God , who is his buyer, tell me?' 

Since we are made in the image of God, we share His freedom to choose our own path, be it good or evil. When you enslave another, you take away this fundamental freedom and treat them as if they are animals, lower than the image of God:  

'Why do you go beyond what is subject to you and raise yourself up against the very species which is free, counting your own kind on a level with four-footed things an even footless things?' 

Therefore, Gregory says it is a shameful arrogant pride to enslave another human being, because you treat that which is made in the image of God as less than human, denying them the freedom God has given them.  

We see this conviction about slavery as domination playing out in his biography of his sister Macrina. As wealthy aristocrats, his family owned enslaved people. Yet, at the heart of his narrative about his sister’s life, he explains how she began to treat her family slaves as equals:  

'Weaning her [mother] from all that she had been accustomed to, she led her down to her own standard of humility, showing her how to live in equality with the whole body of virgins (slaves), that is, by sharing with them the one table, the same kind of bed, and all the necessities of life on an equal basis, with every distinction of rank removed from their life.' 

Gregory does not explicitly say she freed these enslaved people, but inviting an enslaved person to share one’s table was a way of freeing them called manumissio inter amicos. In these passages, he particularly praises Macrina for undoing destructive relationships of domination, where one human treats another as less than themselves and lower than the image of God. 

Gregory isn’t perfect. His condemnation of enslavement centres on the enslaver: he encourages his audience to avoid the moral pitfall, rather than expressing concern for the enslaved people. In another text he says it is good to free slaves, but he does not appear to campaign to end slavery. As we saw in the biography of his sister, he is so concerned to undo the relationships of domination of one person over another, that he is less clear if these people are free to leave. Finally, there is no evidence from his contemporary theologians that Gregory persuaded anyone else that slavery was a sin. In these ways, from our perspective today we would want Gregory to go further to dismantle slavery, or shift his perspective.  

But, we don’t need him to be perfect. He offers a light in the darkness, not the rising of the sun. Gregory is an inspirational example of critically examining the fabric of one’s society, looking at the relationships and structures everyone takes for granted, and having the clarity and courage to see and proclaim that they are fundamentally incompatible with what he thinks the Bible says about the worth of human beings.  

Many Christians are inspired by this way of thinking today. Even if they don’t know Gregory of Nyssa’s name, they will be drawn to charitable giving, certain professions, or activism, out of a deep desire for all to be treated with equality, because all are made in the image of God. To name one example of many. In the UK, Christians were heavily involved in the real living wage campaign. Society at large told them it was impossible to pay a wage where one did not need to choose between feeding and seeing one’s children. But, they campaigned alongside other community groups so that workers are being paid enough to live on, because they were convinced, like Gregory, that all human beings are due the same dignity and worth.  

Enslavement: Voices from the Archives.

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Eden in the East End

Belle Tindall writes of her afternoon in an East End kind of Eden, and tells the stories of how, through All Hallow’s Church, Christianity is being lived out in Bow.
A neo-Romanesque church sits at the acute corner of two roads. To its side a tower block rises over a row of low-rise flats.
All Hallows,Bow. 'Ahaba' is an old Hebrew and Arabic word for love.
Google.

Feeling increasingly restless in the comfortable confines of West London, Rev. Cris and Beki Rogers, along with their family and seven others, decided to take on All Hallows Church and make Bow their home.  

Fast forward thirteen years, and here’s Cris, sat with a coffee on the corner of an intersection in the heart of London’s East End, flanked on every side by blocks of flats and talking over the sound of heavy traffic: this is Cris Rogers’ Eden.  

‘I love this place’, Cris delightedly declares, ‘I love the sounds, I love the smells, I love the people’.

And why wouldn’t he? This is the place where Clara Grant, the infamous ‘Bundle Woman of Bow', founded the Fern Street Settlement in 1907, ensuring that thousands of children were warm, fed, taught and loved.  

It is where, in 1913, Sylvia Pankhurst established the East London Federation of Suffragettes, fighting for the rights of working women.  

It is where, in 1985, the profoundly influential grime music artist, Dylan Kwabena Mills (perhaps better known as Dizzee Rascal) was born and subsequently raised.  

It’s not hard to see why Cris describes his home as a place of profound justice, of resilient compassion, of innovative creativity and of rich community. In ways that we’re likely to be unaware of, we exist in the cultural ripple effect of places such as Bow. We owe them a great debt. And yet, there is, of course, another way to perceive and speak of Bow; a perception which places its focus upon slightly different identity markers.  

It is, according to the Government’s Deprivation Indices, one of the most deprived communities in the UK. It has an above average crime rate, with a particularly high number of home break-ins. The percentage of home ownership in the area is 17 per cent, which is dramatically lower than the national average of 65.8 per cent. It is also a community that, because of the establishment and closure of St. Clements Mental Health Hospital, has an increased number of residents who live with mental illness and addiction.  

It is true, in many ways, Bow struggles.  

And it’s not that Cris and the community at All Hallows ignore these facts. On the contrary, they’re on a crusade against poverty in the area, working to eradicate it entirely. They’re also relentlessly pursuing justice and offering support to those in their community who need it most.  

No, ignorance is not the source of Cris’ perspective - Jesus is.  

I’m aware that such a sentence is in serious danger of sounding eye-rolling-ly twee, so allow me a moment or two to explain further.  

The playwright himself took the stage, the author jumped inside the page, the architect inhabited the plans. Admittedly, it’s downright strange. 

John, one of Jesus’ four biographers, opens his work with a prologue of epic proportions. Nestled into this prologue is this line –  

‘The Word (that’s Jesus) became flesh and made his dwelling among us’.  

In John’s original Greek writing, the words ‘made his dwelling’ can be more literally translated as ‘tabernacled‘, or rather, ‘pitched his tent among ours’. Author Eugene Peterson subsequently paraphrases it this way:  

‘The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighbourhood.’ 

The belief that God squeezed himself into the confines of humanity is certainly one of the more mystic elements of Christianity. The premise is that the playwright himself took the stage, the author jumped inside the page, the architect inhabited the plans. Admittedly, it’s downright strange.  

And yet, this is the bedrock of what theologians call Incarnational Theology, a theology of Jesus’ embodied presence on the earth. Or, what Cris Rogers would call ‘moving in and living deep’. It's the astonishing idea that Jesus is present amongst, he is present alongside.  

If the Incarnation happened, as Christians believe that it did, if Jesus really did pitch his tent next to ours – in that, he literally entered into time and place – then the implications of such aren’t only spiritual. The gospel (for want of a less Christian-ese word) is also a physical encounter, it is intent on changing one’s day, one’s week, one’s life, in tangible and practical ways. It must still be found in time and place. The church (as in, the people, not only the building) is one of the most obvious ways through which this could happen, as they take their lead from the one they represent and they themselves ‘move in and live deep’.    

So, with that in mind, back to Bow. 

For the residents of Bow, this thing called ‘Christianity’ is not a set of ideas that floats in the ether. On the contrary, it’s the people that teach them to speak, read, and write English in their ESOL lessons. It’s as tangible as the presence of the food banks, as obvious as the building on the intersection, as relentless as the recovery courses that run week after week.   

Of the people who flow through All Hallows Church 40 per cent are in varying stages of recovery from addiction. It’s not surprising, therefore, that a major focus of Cris’ team is helping people through those often-complicated stages. Whether that be through the AA/NA courses (including one delivered in Russian), or visits to Pentonville Prison when addiction has taken hold once again and paved the way for behavioural mistakes to be made. After all, recovery from addiction is anything but linear.  

And then there’s the recovery service. Every Tuesday evening the building hosts around 40 people who attend a specifically recovery-oriented service, held by Raf, the curate at All Hallows – who himself is ten years clean and sober. This service combines the twelve step programme with the Bible, week after week after week, building a community upon the power of these two liberating texts.  

Moving in and living deep means that the team at All Hallows can take Jesus’ instruction to ‘love their neighbour’ completely literally. Even when that neighbour is breaking into their church’s coffee shop for the fourth time. It means that, together, those neighbours can love their home well and refute the notion that someone has made it when they finally have the means to move out of it. It means that Cris was right where he needed to be when someone walked past their church building on the way to take their own life, and decided to ask for help instead.   

This is what incarnational theology looks like on the ground. This is how Christianity makes itself known in Bow. As Cris says, ‘we are called to love the hell out of our estates as no one else can’.  

An East End kind of Eden   

I’m telling this story through the vehicle of Cris, his family and his team, but this piece really isn’t about him or them; it is about Bow. A beautiful place filled with beautiful people. It’s a story of a group of people living in and learning from a community they know and adore. It’s a story of the mystic nature of incarnational theology looking like a Russian recovery course. It’s a story of being enchanted with one’s home.  

I say this because, as Cris has observed, words matter. The story you tell about a place matters. This is the reason that they have re-written the words to a hymn from 1885, the third verse of which goes like this:  

When through the woods and forest glades I wander 

And hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees. 

When I look down, from lofty mountain grandeur 

And see the brook, and feel the gentle breeze. 

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God to Thee, 

How great Thou art, how great Thou art.

Beautiful as these words are, the story they tell to residents of places such as Bow, is that beauty is elsewhere, that God is more present, and somehow easier to find, in places that look nothing like their home. In order to counter that, these are the words that ring out from All Hallows on a Sunday morning:  

When through the estate and shaded parks I wander 

And see the shops and people in the streets 

When I look up and see the tower blocks’ grandeur 

And hear the cars and the sound of dancing beats.  

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,  

How great Thou art, How great Thou art. 

There is a kind of Eden in the East End, in fact, there are numerous. And while I can’t speak for them all, I can say that Bow is one of the most special places I’ve ever found myself (with some of the best coffee).  

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