26 April 2023
In the Bible, context is everything.
The Talmud was the law of the land for people under the Sanhedrin's jurisdiction. However, Jesus made it painfully obvious that the Talmud was not at all consistent with Moses. A major element in His ministry was calling the nation back to Moses so that the people could see clearly how He was the promised Messiah, leading them into a new covenant. It was quite natural that there would be a strong continuity between the Old and New Covenants. The New would make no sense at all without some knowledge of the Old. But the Talmud was a perversion of the Old and had to be wiped away in order for people to understand the New.
The context in which Jesus and His followers operated was Rome's rising impatience with anything that smelled like a resistance to imperial rule. The emperors in particular were becoming increasingly convinced that the only way to nail this down was to portray themselves as the executor of divine will. It didn't matter what anyone thought of "the divine" in particular; the focus was on the authority of what it demanded. Thus, the cult of emperor worship came into being.
It rested on the broadly accepted assumption that there were multiple deities, and Caesar was just another among them. Moses himself wrangled with the broad assumptions of polytheism, and the Old Testament is notably henotheistic at times -- there may be other gods than Jehovah, but He's the one to whom you are accountable, and He doesn't share His people with any other deity. At some point Moses did state that there was only one God (Deuteronomy 4:39, 6:4), and the prophets echoed this (Isaiah 43:10, 46:9; Malachi 2:10), but that seems to have gone right over the heads of the majority of the nation. It took the Exile to make it certain in the general thinking of the nation. Only because Rome was openly invited by one Jewish faction to become sovereign over the nation did it seem sensible to allow Jews this peculiarity in Roman administration. Later Roman authorities moved toward rescinding it as the Jews became increasingly restless.
This is the background against which Christians were first regarded as another sect of Jews, and then distinguished only when the Jews disowned them and refused to cover them under Roman law. And because Christians were not a nation of people that Rome recognized, they lacked any treaty covering for this very odd notion that there was only one God. Thus, their resistance to emperor worship was regarded as inherently immoral, and a threat to the imperial government.
On top of that, some local client kingdoms had a blanket policy that in order to use any public facilities, one must ritually honor the local favorite pagan deity. Christian teaching forbade this.
It didn't help that Christianity was very evangelistic, and every conversion meant one more citizen withdrew from a very large portion of the empire's economy. Most taxable vices were attached to one form of idolatry or another, and abandoning these vices, along with condemnation of them as sin, was taken as a public attack of the various gods and goddesses, officially approved religions. The temples lost revenue, along with all the trades that supported the various rituals and related devotions. These things taken together, Christian religion was generally viewed as lawlessness.
So the Roman government began persecuting Christianity. The religion itself was flatly illegal in places, as we see in Peter's letters to the Christians in what is now northern Turkey. The Christians who didn't flee that area were completely wiped out over time. Later it became formal imperial policy that Christians should be rounded up and forced to publicly recant or suffer various grisly forms of execution.
With the rise of persecution, many church leaders began looking for ways to avoid the heat. At the same time, the Hebraic flavor of Christian religion faded away, and it became rather Hellenized. So, it's no surprise that when one emperor realized what a fine political tool Christian religion had become in his day, that he was able to get the church leaders to compromise. What he proposed in issuing the Edict of Toleration was that churches had to unify in a very worldly fashion. Not much later, a new emperor declared this corrupted Christian religion the official imperial religion. It became a political identity.
Now, roughly 2000 years later, Christian religion has morphed an awful lot farther. It can be found in hundreds of different flavors and virtually all of them have a strong political identity attached. In general, they fall into two partisan groups, and one of those partisan sides is now totally in control of the government system. Any conflict between government and religion is political in nature, because churches have almost uniformly merged into the political divide.
The persecution we see today is almost purely political in nature. Neither side is consistent with early Christian teaching, so it's not a question of faith at all. This is not like the Roman persecution. Under Rome, as long as one's faith specifically was targeted, most forms of resistance were a sin. Persecution was rather like carrying your cross alongside Christ, an injustice that God alone could judge.
While the political side on the outs with the government today would like to claim that moral high ground, it's not valid. Whatever persecution there may be is totally political in nature. The churches have staked out a political position. Refusing to name one political party or another does not hide the distinct political agenda churches espouse.
The Radix Fidem path seeks to step out of this context. While we agree that various items of the competing political agendas may make life more convenient for us, neither party represents our thinking. We find ourselves stretched between false dichotomies. Thus, this is not our fight.
That won't protect us as the dominant political agenda being locked into place starts painting targets on us. Please understand this clearly: They don't give a damn what we believe or teach. They are not against our faith because they are wholly unaware of it. Further, they reject the existence of faith itself. This is not faith persecution; it is just a political steamroller that flattens anyone who isn't promoting their side.
In Rome, followers of Jesus were recognized as a threat. In America, we aren't recognized at all. We cannot formulate a doctrine either way on whether to resist. Rather, we are each left to our convictions on the matter. Part of the problem is that there is only one single basis for resistance that the Bible recognizes: You must form a covenant community that requires defending. That business in Romans 13 about loving the brethren points to a covenant identity. We have some ideas about that, but we don't have any concrete instances we can point to. Thus, none of us has any grounds for claiming to defend the Covenant against outside attack.
What we do have is the grounds of conviction. As previously noted, this means you must react as an individual servant of the Lord. As tribulation increases around us, the most you can assert is the protection of your individual home and family household. You cannot claim any greater covering for whatever you do, aside from the covering of your own convictions.
Comments
DarkMirror
Judaism (Talmudism) had some excellent PR. Ask any American Christian and they'll consider Judaism one or two steps away from being Christian, when in reality it has much more in common with standard superstitious paganism than Christianity. Evie Christians really have taken the bait in that regard.
This document is public domain; spread the message.