The Ancient Exercise of Fasting
The church practiced the discipline of fasting early in its history. Jesus expected His disciples to fast early in His teachings (Matt 6:16, English Standard Version). For the first few centuries after Jesus, Christians faced the threat of persecution until the conversion of Constantine in the fourth century. 1 Once Rome lifted the ban on Christianity, effectively ceasing persecution of the church, some Christians looked to an ascetic life as a sacrificial offering and retreated to the desert. 2 As part of the desert fathers’ ascetic life, they practiced discipline as a means of spiritual formation. 3 This blog entry explores how theologians thought about and practiced the spiritual discipline of fasting in their lives, ministry, and writing over the first several centuries. The desert fathers traveled deep into the desert for solace when the Roman empire began to look favorably upon Christianity. A few “pillar saints” practiced long-term fasting in the desert, and an el