Undeception

On a cue from Philip Harland, I found this remarkable passage showing an example of the perception that some pagans entertained of mid-second century Christians. It’s not pretty:

[Cynics and Christians] divide and upset the household, and bring into collision those inside with each other, and tell them the worst ways to manage their household. They never say, find, or do anything socially productive. They do not participate in panegyrics (festal assemblies), nor worship the gods, nor help govern the cities, nor comfort the sorrowing, nor make reconciliation with those of opposing persuasions, nor arouse the young – or anyone else for that matter – to the affairs of the world.

–Aelius Aristides in The Defense of the Four, as cited by Frances Margaret Young in The theology of the pastoral letters, p. 17.

This was written by an orator who is associated mostly with Asia Minor but who was certainly well travelled. It’s difficult to say how widely his observations applied to Christian communities throughout the world at the time, or whether he was taking just a few bad apples and making gross overgeneralizations. I point it out because 1) much of what Aristides described then seems to correspond to various visible factions of Christianity today and because 2) to the consternation of a wide range of critics both ancient and modern, those commonalities are probably indicative of what a significant constituency of the early church thought was proper.

First of all, the upending of cultural norms for household management seems to be a part of very early Christian behavior. Galatians, a book whose Pauline authorship is virtually uncontested, famously dismissed fundamental social and cultural distinctions between male/female and slave/free. Granted, he might well have been referring specifically to those classes’ equality in standing before God rather than calling for a social revolution, but the tendency is certainly to extend theological outlooks beyond into broader ramifications, and whether or not Paul intended it it appears that this is exactly what happened. Early secular testimony like that of Celsus (as quoted in Origen) shows that Christians were sometimes characterized as giving undue deference to “stupid women”; Harland notes that there was apparently a tradition of attributing somewhat more egalitarian positions to Paul (e.g. The Acts of Paul and Thecla) than have been associated with him in recent years. It is sometimes argued that the emphasis upon maintaining social norms involving gender that we see in the (probably late, pseudo-)Pauline epistles of Ephesians and the Pastorals look for all the world like they were intended to “stop the bleeding” caused by the inevitable exploitation of Paul’s teachings on Christian liberty that would indeed cause much upheaval if not moderated. Christian feminism has left a very bad taste in my mouth, but the more I learn, the more I begin to realize that there is a very strong, very early tradition challenging the male hierarchical pattern that won out by the time of the ecumenical councils.

It also occurs to me that for the most part, those whom Aristides is criticizing seem to be following the advice of the NT in regard to involvement in society. The ubiquitous NT teaching to abstain from the world to remain pure for the returning Christ would naturally lead them, as it does many in the Left Behind crowd now, to avoid entanglement with “the affairs of the world”. If the end of the world had been around the corner, why should they have bothered “arousing their young” to do anything of lasting significance? It’s interesting to watch these eschatological expectations disappear in the following centuries as Christians came to terms with the fact that the apocalypse was not so imminent and as a resolve to make the best of this world grew until the medieval understanding of Christian mission modeled upon Augustine’s The City of God developed. Yet in the last couple centuries imminent apocalypticism has returned and, not coincidentally, its proponents are reading Scripture at face value like those whom Aristides is criticizing — with the grossly obvious oversight that part and parcel of superficial interpretations of Scripture are the manifold statements of imminency that are impossible to square with a gap of two millennia between the NT and us. This appropriation of first century expectations to our immediate future leads many to retreat from engaging society in a useful way for the reason that it’s pointless to rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic. Most evangelicals have little patience for subtle, long-term forms of influence, preferring if anything to utilize the strong arm of the state to enforce their ideals and heavy-handed moralism in their forays into the arts, ostensibly in the effort to show the returning Christ that they’ve been busy and have remained out of defiling contact with the world.

To my mind the most damning way in which the modern church resembles the Christians from whom Aristides drew his generalizations is in his pronouncement that they did not “comfort the sorrowing, nor make reconciliation with those of opposing persuasions…” Here again, I suspect that most of this can be laid at the feet of an imminent eschatology. Jesus’ light rebuke, “The poor you will always have with you,” was surely not intended to imply, “You won’t have a chance to remedy poverty before I come back, so don’t bother trying,” but rather “There’ll be plenty of time to fulfill your righteous concern for social justice after I’m gone in a few weeks.” Despite Paul’s many admonishments that believers should strive to live peaceably with all people, there was enough backbiting and indifference toward keeping up good relationships that it apparently struck Aristides as characteristic of Christians in general. I can imagine that if you thought your mission was to hunker down until the bomb exploded and took out all the infidels, you’d expect that exercising the faith was more about maintaining purity of mind, and hence beliefs, than it was about counteracting the defective aspects of society.

Now, my guess is that Aristides’ various indictments listed above were of stereotypes that didn’t apply to any one group of Christians; for instance, I imagine that the more eschatologically minded were not the ones pushing the social structure envelope. But it is nonetheless intriguing to consider  how and why the church then might have looked like the church now.

As I have asked before, so I ask again: how much do evangelicals really want the modern church to look like the early church? Are we aware of how much we already do?

Here’s an excerpt from the first part of a review of a book I’ve been interested in since I first heard about it. It’s from the New Perspective school of thinking, and at 1218 pages it promises to be an important work on the subject. The book is entitled, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul, written by Douglas A. Campbell. The review itself, written by Dr. Richard Beck, is quite readable and easy to follow, although certainly lengthy enough.

According to Campbell, Justification Theory was the big mistake. When you read Paul through the lens of Justification Theory you get a wildly distorted Paul. And the debates within Pauline scholarship are created by this distorted Paul. This warped, funhouse mirror image of Paul. And if Justification Theory is wrong and alien to Paul then clarity might be achieved if we could read Paul through the spectacles he was wearing. To see Paul as he saw himself, not as we see him through the prism of Justification Theory. So Campbell’s project is twofold. First, show us the flaws of Justification Theory with a particular focus on how Justification Theory is implicated in the debates within Pauline scholarship. And, second, show us an alternative reading of Paul, one that approximates, as best we can, how Paul understood his own theology.

So what is Justification Theory?

First off, as a theory, Justification Theory is a way of explaining Paul. More specifically, it is a way of organizing the Pauline data–textual data mainly, but also historical, theological, anthropological and sociological data–in a way that makes sense of it all. And, like all theories, if Justification Theory creates more problems than it solves we grow dissatisfied with the theory and begin to wonder if a better theory should replace it.

Most Christians already know the broad outlines of Justification Theory. It is the consensus view on salvation, what it is and how it happens. A part of what Campbell does is to specify the theory in great detail, proposition by proposition, so that any disagreements about the theory can be taken up and debated point by point. But we don’t need to go into that amount of detail. I’ll paint the theory in broader strokes. In fact, I’ll summarize Campbell’s description of Justification Theory with a picture (click on it for a larger view):

A reader wrote in recently and asked some really good questions about my eschatology, which I have described on this blog as preteristic. Preterism is the belief that all (or most) of the eschatological expectations of the writers of Scripture were directed at the events culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Jewish temple.

My position has evolved significantly since I’ve been writing on the subject, the earliest relevant posts dating back a few years. In the intervening time, key aspects of my theology have changed. Particularly, I have become more convinced of the Scripture’s organic nature and origin and have thus rejected inerrancy as an unfair expectation. As a result I have also grown increasingly distrustful of tidy theological schemata composed of verses here and there from this chapter and that book that find some way to incorporate every verse that appears to contradict the main contention, no matter how contrived the resolution may be. But because I continue to regard it as a relatively coherent system as systems go, preterism has so far escaped close scrutiny in light of my revised bibliology (at least on the blog), but in recent months I’ve been increasingly aware that it is indeed due a revisiting.

You’ll find that most every preterist is firmly committed to inerrancy and as a rule will actually appeal to inerrancy as proof that the time statements necessitate first century fulfillment of NT prophecy (“Were Peter and Paul wrong about when Jesus would return? Certainly not!”). Replying to the email really gave me a chance to reassess what I believe about preterism since letting go of expectations of inerrancy.

In this post, and particularly with my limited knowledge, I can’t adequately describe or engage biblical and historical criticism’s treatment of the eschatology found in the Gospels, which I believe stand as the foundation for New Testament eschatology. I can accept many conclusions of biblical criticism (even the Jesus Seminar), but I don’t at all buy the widespread rejection of Jesus’ apocalyptic sayings, e.g. in Mark 13, Matthew 24, as inauthentic. As far as I know, there is little doubt that the apostles and early Christians were convinced of an imminent eschaton, and this makes the most sense if we accept the testimony of all four Gospels that Jesus himself expected this. I am quite comfortable (admittedly as a non-expert) saying that at least some of these passages satisfy the hard reading criterion for authenticity: why record your prophet prophesying something that didn’t happen? Even supposing that Luke’s identification of Jesus’ subject as the time when Jerusalem would be “surrounded by armies” (21.20) was an attempt to salvage a failed prophecy, you still have to motivate why he’d leave the account in at all unless there was an unignorable tradition that the core of them, necessarily including the time statements, were authentically Jesus’ teachings and perhaps even characteristic of his ministry.

Then once you’ve got such imminent eschatology coming from the mouth of Jesus, you’ve got to put him in his own Hebraic context. When we do this, I’m convinced we must recognize that his apocalyptic language referred to something besides the end of the world as we know it (i.e. the physical cosmos). I think no small part of the problem results from critics not taking the ancient tradition of Hebrew prophetic diction into account and hence, much like the “Left Behind” crowd (and indeed, most Christians throughout history since at least the late first century), falling into the trap of over-literalizing the apocalyptic. The prophets of Israel in OT times prophesied “day of the Lord” after “day of the Lord”, each coming and going without the stars dissolving or physical returns of God on the clouds despite use of exactly this imagery; this is a particularly cogent argument if the critics are right that the accurate prophecies were actually composed post hoc, since the writers would hardly have expected anyone to believe those things to have happened in the past. Indeed, Israel seems never to have really had a concept of an end of the world or consummation of history: God simply settled the account and history moved on. It was precisely this sort of reckoning, a localized judgment, that Christ taught in his eschatology. The parable of the tenants (Matthew 21.33-46), for instance, sees the return of the landlord as a punishment of those whom he had left stewards of His property, clearly referring to the religious leaders in charge of the care of God’s people Israel.

Now, localized though it was envisaged, the promised event was nonetheless of much wider scope and significance than the one city upon which judgment was wrought in AD 70. This is because it marked a clear transition to a new, more refined expression of the relationship of God and humanity modeled upon Christ’s self-sacrifice on the cross. Jesus’ statement that God would mete out judgment in the person of the Christ was a claim of access to God’s authority implicit in both the original metaphor in Daniel and in Christ’s self-identification as the Son of Man.

One of the newer developments in my own thinking is that, unlike most preterists, I recognize the very real possibility of a tension between the teachings of Christ and the understanding of the writers of the epistles and Revelation regarding what the Day of the Lord would look like. The original expectation presented by Christ, clear enough in the Gospels, seems to have been given wider application by later writers of the NT (especially pseudo-Peter and the author of Revelation), from whom I think I detect more literalized beliefs about what Christ’s return and judgment would look like on the stage of history. It appears to me (most preterists would deny this) that there may have been some misunderstanding and overextension of the judgment to visibly encompass more of the world than it actually would, fueling furious missionary movements that covered the Empire in decades’ time. There was also the widespread supposition that it would be at that time that Sheol, the place of the dead in which all of humanity slept awaiting judgment, was emptied (the Resurrection of the Dead), followed by the judgment of all those alive at the time. From this the early Christians had the notion that the whole living world had to have a chance to repent before Christ returned to judge it (e.g. Acts 17.30-31); but if this evangelization before the judgment was as important as they obviously thought it was, I hate it for the Chinese, the Australian aborigines, and those in America at the time whom the message never quite reached!

I think whatever misunderstanding of eschatology the Christians entertained is attributable to a recognition of the epochal importance of the passing away of an old world into a new, spoken of in OT terms of a new heavens and new earth but interpreted outside that context in a Greco-Roman world. Indeed, I suspect that some of the later NT writers’ apocalypticism and the early church’s futurism came from a misapprehension of some of the old Jewish apocalyptic language of Jesus that was directed toward the Jewish leaders who would have (or at least should have) recognized its OT color, whereas others not reared in Judaism might have not known how literal to take it.

One thing I was asked was why the fall of Jerusalem would have been significant enough to justify such breathless anticipation. It’s actually pretty simple: for all practical purposes, it was the end of Judaism. After the dismantling of the center of the Jewish cultus, the temple, and the diasphora that caused Jews to lose trace of their genealogies, Judaism as prescribed in Torah disappeared and was replaced with an essentially different system. Christianity was originally seen by Paul and most other believers as the fulfillment of Judaism, not as a competitor to Judaism, but since this opinion was not shared by the religious leaders of Judaism who resented Christian claims and used their political power to persecute Christians, Christians themselves increasingly grew anxious to be vindicated by God in a tangible sense. For this reason I believe that the scope and applicability of this particular Day of the Lord was indeed universal: it was the definitive episode in which the ethno-centric Jewish cultus by which YHWH was introduced to the world was displaced (or at least profoundly revised) by inclusive Christianity.

So if there’s no consummation of history in the future, what about our judgment? While I entertain serious doubts about the so-called General Resurrection, I believe this at least: Christ will hold every individual accountable. All the speculation – even by the authors of Scripture – about how and when notwithstanding, the clear unequivocal testimony is that God is judge, and seeing no statements in any NT eschatology that predict another Day of the Lord judgment (much less an impending end of the world), I conclude that God will judge us all individually, in His own time rather than in some end-of-time, get-in-line courtroom.

This was quite a mouthful, and I didn’t go into a whole lot really, but this was useful to me as a starting place.

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Further reading from a preterist perspective:

The best book I can recommend that you buy is the recently revised version of Behind the Veil of Moses by Brian Martin. It is an expansive explanation of preterism, taking into account most applicable Scriptures. He really explains the hermeneutics required for understanding eschatology and Scripture in general (audience relevance etc.) quite well.

My own opinions on the dating and references of Revelation are admittedly underdeveloped, but suffice it to say that I’d much prefer to take my eschatology from what we can recover of Jesus’ views than from that problematic book! However, if you’d like a preterist “walkthrough” of Revelation, I’d recommend The Parousia by James Stuart Russell. Russell and this book are chiefly responsible for modern interest in preterism. I should note that it was written in 1878 and so some of the style is a little stilted, but I still find it eminently readable and fascinating. It can be read online or downloaded for free.

Even the most conservative varieties of preterism trouble many evangelical believers on the grounds that the ancient church already viewed the apocalypse as incomplete and awaiting a yet future consummation. Many acknowledge a first century referent for most of Jesus’ prophecies but still await a universal final judgment and the Resurrection of the Dead in our future; however, they have precious little textual support for breaking up a clearly single, imminent eschatological expectation into segments spanning millennia, depending solely on church tradition and the problem that even the later first century church expected a final judgment consummation of history. My blog has frequently addressed concerns with dissenting from the expectations of church tradition, most recently here, and I offer what I find to be a completely sufficient explanation above for why Jesus’ statements were misconstrued within the first century.

Today Joel Watts posted a quote from one of the Early Church Fathers on the subject of the Eucharist (a.k.a. the Lord’s Supper or Communion):

For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these; but in like manner as Jesus Christ our Savior, having been made flesh by the Word of God, had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so likewise have we been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh. For the apostles, in the memoirs composed by them, which are called Gospels, have thus delivered unto us what was enjoined upon them; that Jesus took bread, and when He had given thanks, said, “This do ye in remembrance of Me, this is My body;” and that, after the same manner, having taken the cup and given thanks, He said, “This is My blood;” and gave it to them alone. [Emphasis all Steve's]

This wasn’t post-Nicea, folks. The doctrine of transubstantiation, or Real Presence, which teaches that the bread and wine literally become Christ’s body and blood upon the blessing from the Church leader, goes way back.  The above quote was from Justin Martyr in his First Apology (ch. 66), written about 155. When looking at the Early Church Fathers, we don’t get a whole lot earlier than Justin Martyr. Interestingly, wider context shows that his main point wasn’t even that the elements became Christ’s body and blood — that was a given — but that the Church leadership was entrusted with the administration of the sacrament. And it’s clear that Justin is under the impression that this teaching was handed down by the Apostles, so at very least it well predates 155.

I’m not taking a position on whether he was right or wrong here, but that this was an exceptionally early witness to a doctrine that many “orthodox” Protestants who highly depend upon “historic, orthodox Christianity” nevertheless reject (this was not true of Martin Luther, who insisted on a literal interpretation of “Hoc est corpus meam,” meaning “This is my body.”). These same orthodoxy-loving Protestants characteristically dismiss out of hand all kinds of perfectly compelling textual, historical, and scientific evidence that contradicts what they regard as the teaching of “historic Christianity”.

From my experience, dissenting from another Christian’s belief on the grounds that it has somehow departed ways with “historic Christianity” is simply the most convenient way of ignoring that belief without having to address it honestly. Granted, not all beliefs warrant the same level of scrutiny before being put on the back shelf or dismissed; I certainly wouldn’t expect everyone to personally debunk every shady conspiracy theory, fantastic claim, or alternative explanation with transparently misguided motivations. But many other beliefs deserve to be examined and not simply ignored, particularly when they’re held by other well-intentioned, critical thinking believers. Letting the question of whether a point of view is right or wrong be answered solely by an appeal to ”orthodoxy” is not critical thinking: it’s blind faith that an intellectually honest lover of truth should not allow to be kept under lock and key to exempt it from analysis and authentication.

Read 1 Cor 5.11-13 (below). The church usually focuses on the words I omitted in the “…” But what about the words I left in? Do we do what Paul instructed? Is our church really very much like the first century church? Do we really want it to be?

“But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who calls himself a Christian who is…greedy…or verbally abusive…or a swindler. Do not even eat with such a person. For what do I have to do with judging those outside? Are you not to judge those inside? But God will judge those outside. Remove the evil person from among you.” (1 Cor 5.11-13)

(Prompted by an insightful comment by RJS at Jesus Creed.)