CHRYSOSTOM'S PREACHING AND TEXTUAL COMMUNITIES

It is easy to assume that we can talk of a Christian community at Antioch in the fourth century. We see that there were people who called themselves Christian in the city and take for granted that this means we can talk about them as a cohesive group. Often this is simply a convenient way of speaking and does not entail our making a strong statement about the degree of social organization among those Christians. It is precisely through such references made in passing and without much thought that the notion of the Christian community becomes reified as fact. Because we are so accustomed to using the term we no longer question its propriety but use it as if it describes an objective reality. Technically, according to the definitions of social theorists, the term ‘community’ refers to a high degree of social organization. It means that community members meet together regularly, have some kind of shared social space and a visible presence and that they are united by shared goals that they can articulate publicly. In fact, for many social theorists the term community actually entails the ‘collectivity’ in question having a shared political organization' and ‘a territory with more or less physical boundaries’, such as modern nation states. We need not accept this strongest understanding of ‘community’ but can still recognize that we need to be more careful about how we use the term.