Ancient emperors often sent dispatches around their realms. Archaeologists have found archives or them in various places, and they offer a look at what rulers and their servants had to deal with from day to day. Sometimes you have to plow through some highly formal language to figure out what is actually happening. Personal letters were usually less filled with formalities and more to the point. The collection of letters in the New Testament vary across the scale from formal to personal. Each of them serves to indicate some of the things the early churches faced in feeling their way along as they embraced the Kingdom of Heaven.
Accepting God's offer of divine citizenship is unlike any other previous loyalty. Earthly rulers can claim undiluted loyalty, and attempt to police compliance in various ways, but our Heavenly Sheik can read your very soul. His claims on your loyalty carry a gravity beyond this world. In the Roman Empire of the First Century, with all it's lesser feudal principalities, embracing Christ was more than a mere change of mental assent among the many tolerated or secret religions, but a radical change to the very core of life itself. The implications were both cultural and political, affecting economics and social stability in a fallen world already rife with conflict. Secular government reacted variously, depending on how the local officials interpreted the changes in human behavior among new Christians. But the surrounding society often had its own, different reactions. In most cases, those who did not know Christ reacted with various degrees of hostility to what they perceived as a threat from traitors.
On the one hand, translating the gospel message into another language carried no small concern over the pool of meaning one might face trying to identify equivalent words and phrases. On the other hand, some elements of the gospel require a rejection of the cultural and legal customs which give that language meaning. Across the Roman Empire, and beyond, people were already familiar with Jews and their odd ways. Christianity was a correction of Judaism. That Christianity was both an extension of Judaism, yet somewhat a repudiation of it, only complicated things. In places where there was no Jewish presence as a point of reference, there were complications of having to start from scratch. Either way, the gospel of Jesus Christ still suffered the same limitations on revelation from the very beginning: Ultimate Truth in the Person of God is not easily told in human terms.
The Letters form a corpus of examples in how this task played out in the real world. What constitutes a revolt against the sins of this world, embracing a new conquering Emperor named Jesus Christ, and instituting the changes He demanded in His newly acquired domain ran the gamut from calm acceptance to mass slaughter of Christians. People understood inherently the pleasure or displeasure of gods and rulers, but embracing the Code of Noah and Name of Jesus, living by His Spirit, could not help shaking things up. The letters serve to restate in various contexts what it meant to live by that Spirit. People who had embraced the gospel were often a very long way from Noah and Christ. Nailing the old self to the Cross was very much a daily, hourly, momentary task.
To then go on in recruiting more people as new revolutionary citizens of the Kingdom raised all sorts of new disturbances. You will note there are no neat evangelism packages offered. You may well try to make nifty packages from the Letters, but that invariably limits you to whatever cultural audience was addressed in the passages from which you take your package. Evangelism was not about memorized sales pitches, talking people into making a decision. What a man can decide, he can un-decide. It was about living, and therefore speaking, the ultimate truth of things in whatever context you found yourself. Nor was it about measuring results; that was God's part in the matter. It was about making His Presence known. All our focus on doing and being misses the point. Paul writes in one letter we have a mind to decide, and a body to act with, but it requires a complete change of will -- a divine miracle birthing a spirit -- to become a follower of Christ. It's not some static change of being, but a living birth into an eternal desire to please the only Person who really matters.
Trying to use the Letters as a source of rules is utterly foolish. Nor are they merely expositions of propositional theology. They are concrete examples of how Truth changes all things. The Empire of Truth, the Sheikdom of Love, the Kingdom of Heaven pays no heed to human borders and national identity. Call yourself anything you like, but without that miraculous desire to please God Almighty, you can't be a part of Him. The human intellect cannot begin to parse the meaning of holiness and sin, but the living Word of God can sharply cut and divide what pleases God in every case.
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By Ed Hurst
19 May 2009
COPYRIGHT NOTICE: People of honor need no copyright laws; they are only too happy to give credit where credit is due. Others will ignore copyright laws whenever they please. If you are of the latter, please note what Moses said about dishonorable behavior -- "be sure your sin will find you out" (Numbers 32:23)