22 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1
figures were, in some sense, prototypes for the Christian exem-
plar, the nationalistic morality they embodied was roundly ex-
coriated by early Christians like Augustine, whose interpretation
of the exempla virtutis emphasized allegiance to a transcendent
order beyond the saeculum.^9
Christians may have been critical of the particular ways in
which exemplarity was manifested in pagan thought and culture,
but the idea of exemplarity itself thrived within Christianity. For
Christians, writes Peter Brown, “God Himself was proposed to
man as the Exemplar behind all exemplars.”^10 The exemplary re-
lationship of God to man was facilitated by the idea that God,
for all of His omniscience and omnipotence, was not an absolute
Other to humanity. The creation myths of the early Hebrew Bible
bequeathed to Christians the idea that human beings had been
made in God’s image and raised the prospect of a godly original
condition or essential nature that could be discerned and pro-
moted even within the context of a fallen world. “The result of
this view,” Brown continues, “was to present human history as
containing a sequence of exemplars, each of which made real, at
varying times and in varying degrees, the awesome potentiality of
the first model of humanity.” While precedents can be identified in
the prophetic tradition of the Christian Old Testament, the gospel
narratives brought this idea of exemplarity to its climax in the
figure of Jesus Christ, in whom “the original beauty of Adam...
blazed forth.”^11 The precise nature of Christ—the relationship of
His divine qualities to His human qualities—was of course one
of the prickliest controversies within the early Church, and the
significance of Christ’s deeds was interpreted differently depend-
ing on where one placed emphasis. But as early as the Epistles
of Paul there was suggestion that Christ’s example was meant to
be imitated by ordinary Christians: “Follow my example,” Paul
exhorted the Corinthians, “as I follow Christ’s.”^12 According to
this conception of examples building upon examples, an apostolic
disciple of Christ like Paul was, as John Howard Yoder writes,
“merely an exemplary follower of the true example.”^13
Paul’s words capture both the foundational quality of exemplar-
ity within Christianity—Christ conceived, henceforth, as the ulti-
mate exemplar, a point of reference for all who follow Him—and