Trauma recovery in the early Christian movement

Abstract

This article examines the early Christian movement, as portrayed in the New Testament, through the lens of trauma recovery. The authors suggest that many of the practices narrated and exhorted in the New Testament compare positively with best practices developed for post-traumatic growth. The article first gives an overview of current research on trauma recovery, focusing especially on group methodologies. Curt Thompson’s ‘confessional community’ framework is an important model for resilience-building. Next, the authors discuss the existence of trauma among early Christ followers. Crucially, the threat of trauma can be as damaging as the traumatic event itself. Even if few Christians experienced state-sanctioned violence, the expectation that such could happen, coupled with the reality of social ostracism, would have produced trauma from a sociological perspective. The remainder of the article focuses on practices that would have assisted Christ followers in flourishing. The New Testament is full of familial language, suggesting that early Christians formed a type of fictive kinship. This synthetic family structure would have lessened the loss of family that many Christians faced. One function of family in the ancient world was ensuring that everyone in the kin group was fed. Christ followers did this in the form of sharing goods. The love and encouragement that are ubiquitous in the New Testament are analogous to the corporate support used in modern recovery groups. Finally, the propensity of early Christians to reinterpret their suffering based on a Gospel metanarrative accomplished meaning-making – another key modality in modern trauma recovery. The authors conclude with a call to analyse ancient texts with a focus on trauma resilience.