"C. G. Estabrook" wrote:
> Early christians, people who "are turning
> the world upside down" (Acts 17:6), are those who think they do not need
> to stake the meaning of their lives on the present socio-economic
> arrangement but rather on this world to come. They were rather greedy
> than sadistic or masochistic: they wanted it all, and forever. --CG
> Estabrook
Many historians have showed that Christianity changed a lot in the late classical period and the middle ages. Later it went on to become a mass ideology, with the group of changes that marked the slow, gradual, spotty beginning of capitalism and bourgeois society -- including day-to-day human interactions mediated through money, more widespread literacy, print media, and the psychological changes that flowed from all this. In particular many and changing variants of anal character and sado-masochist character structure.
As you say,
> the medieval notion of
> "atonement" was a thousand years in the future
>
The data on just what Christianity was like when it was confined primarily to the élites of medieval society are scanty. I've enjoyed reading about this too, but its distance in time, and experience from the Christianity of the last six or seven centuries is decisive.
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema