What Kills Us Makes Us Stronger

“With so much at stake, it is no surprise that Justin [Martyr] and so many other early Christians were willing to suffer martyrdom rather than renounce the Faith. As Justin writes in the First Apology:

‘For if we looked for a human kingdom, we should also deny our Christ, that we might not be slain... But since our thoughts are not fixed on the present, we are not concerned when men cut us off.’

In his Second Apology, Justin explains that Christian steadfastness even in the face of death is part of what drew him to the Faith while he was still a pagan:

‘For I myself, too, when I was delighting in the doctrines of Plato, and heard the Christians slandered, and saw them fearless of death, and of all other things which are counted fearful, perceived that it was impossible that they could be living in wickedness and pleasure.’

Living in danger of violent death made the early Christians serious. If you are willing even to be slaughtered for Christ’s sake, and know that this is a live possibility, then following his teachings is relatively easy. The hardest decision has already been made. The everyday temptations of the flesh, and the prospect of being scorned by the surrounding culture, are trivial by comparison with being crucified, torn apart by lions, or burned at the stake. This moral seriousness is attractive, and won converts like Justin himself. As Tertullian, another early Christian apologist, famously put it, “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”

...To the Roman emperor reigning at the time of the First Apology, Justin declared, with a nobility that seems beyond our reach today: ‘You can kill us, but you cannot harm us.’ He knew that what counts is our eternal destiny, and that absolutely nothing that we suffer in this life – not the secular world’s contempt, not persecution, not illness or poverty, not even death itself – matters one whit so long as we are true to Christ.

...We need to return to their example.”
~Edward Feser