One of the favorite phrases of the late Christian apologist and novelist C.S. Lewis was “chronological snobbery,” which he defined as “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate of our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that count discredited.”
It’s an idea that more Christians ought to pay attention to, particularly as the gospel gets watered down by modernity. And, if they need a reminder, ancient Christians from a much earlier chronological time — 400 A.D. or so, to be precise — have a few words for them.
According to an Aug. 3 Fox News report, an important discovery was recently made during an excavation at the city of Olympus, which Fox described as “an ancient Lycian port city in Turkey’s Antalya province.”
“The city has been excavated continuously since 2006, but during the recent season, archaeologists uncovered multiple mosaic floors, along with large storage jars called pithoi,” the outlet reported.
However, the site “continues to surprise us with its mosaics,” excavator Gokcen Kurtulus Oztaskin said.
“In 2017, 2022 and 2023, we discovered richly decorated mosaic floors at the sites we worked on. This year, we uncovered and restored the floor mosaics of Church No. 1.”
And what did the message say? It had a decidedly unequivocal message for the unbeliever or the unrepentantly sinful:
“Only the righteous shall enter.”
The city may have been abandoned by the 12th century, but the lessons from 1,600 years ago ring truer today than they ever may have in the past.
Would America be a better place if Christians actually cared about being holy?
Surely, the warning was put there for a reason: namely, that those who considered themselves righteous, wouldn’t. And now, in 2025, churches — which generally don’t have mosaics, if they have anything but drab modern architecture — have less consideration about holiness than at any time in recent memory.
We talk about how open-minded, forgiving, loving, helping, and comforting we are as Christians. Yes, Christians should be those things — but there is one thing more important than all of that, and that’s holiness.
It’s not open-minded to tell a homosexual or an adulterer that the precepts of the Bible don’t apply to them. It’s open-minded to guide them into repenting from that.
It’s not forgiving to tell people who have rebelled against God that they need to forgive themselves. It’s forgiving to tell them to ask for God’s forgiveness.
It’s not loving to accept people as they are. It’s loving to tell them that God accepts them as they are — with the expectation that they will grow into something better through his love and his law.
It’s not helping to lead people to comfort. It’s helping to lead people from the wages of sin, which is death and hell.
We seem to have forgotten that, but we aren’t the only ones. In Olympus, they forgot it, too. It’s rare to hear a sermon preached about holiness now, and it was perhaps rare enough then that they felt the need to put it down at the entrance.
Holiness is God’s defining nature. 1 Peter 1:16: “Be holy, because I am holy.”
We would do well to remember that. Holiness makes it easier for us to draw closer to God, it allows us to hear his Spirit more clearly, it demonstrates our being set apart for him from the world, and it effects wonderful things in the world. We’ve got to start teaching that again.
Over a millennium and a half ago, Christians in modern-day Turkey realized they needed to start teaching it again, too. Let us not be chronological snobs and think that we know better than they did.
Maybe we should remind people that our churches should aim to be like heaven in one way: “Only the righteous shall enter.” We will fail, of course, because we are imperfect. But he isn’t, and he works in us everywhere — but especially our houses of worship.
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