Being the Church Then and Now: Issues from the Acts of the Apostles
William Loader
4. "You received the Law as given by angels and did not keep it." (Acts 7:53)
Religion and the Fundamentalisms: on not losing touch with the centre
Introduction
Luke tells
us how Stephen stood before the great Sanhedrin, before the Jewish assembly and
challenged its religious authority. “You received the Law as given by angels’
refers to the Law given by God to Moses. Tradition had it that God gave it
through the hands of angels. It came through angels and therefore from God. It
is God’s word, scripture, the Bible of the Jews and the early Christians. It
also represented the basis of the temple worship and its traditions. Stephen is
not challenging that belief. He is not challenging scripture. He is challenging
how it is kept and how it is understood. The Sanhedrin, the assembly, the
leaders of the religious community, were mostly devout and committed people,
but they had failed to keep and understand scripture. They had failed to
understand the nature of true worship.
What does
it mean to keep and understand the scripture? Fundamentally it was over this
issue that the Church split from Judaism, and then, in turn, nearly split
itself wide open in the years that followed. I want to explore this issue by
looking at the two scenes sketched briefly for us in the readings: the conflict
between Hellenists and Hebrews and the speech of Stephen itself.
1. The
"Hellenists" and the "Hebrews"
The first
episode, Acts 6:1-6, is very complex and can be read at many levels. The
presenting problem was a complaint by the Hellenists against the Hebrews that
their widows were being neglected in the daily welfare distribution. That
already needs unpacking. The Hellenists are Jews whose first or main language
is Greek. This had come about primarily because they had been among the very
large numbers of Jews who had lived and been brought up in areas of the world
where Greek was the main spoken language and that included most of the then
known world accessible to Jews and also included parts of Palestine itself.
They were Greek speaking Jews. The Hebrews here are Jews whose first language
was Aramaic, the main language spoken in Judea and Galilee. They were all Jews,
but obviously different languages keep people apart, even though there will
have been a number who were proficient in both. There would have been two
communities, two kinds of worship, and a whole host of other social and
community activities catering for the separate language groups. That already
makes it very complex.
And who
were the widows? Why widows? Jerusalem was the holy city. Many who had lived
most of their lives away from Judea in places like Egypt, Rome, Asia Minor,
Greece, Syria, returned home in the their later years to Jerusalem so that they
would die in the holy land. The structure of the society dictated that women
were dependent. Men had power. Men had money. Women were safe and secure if
married. But widowed, they were exposed to dangers of exploitation and often
lived in poverty dependent upon the mercy of those who obeyed the scriptural
exhortation to remember the widows and the fatherless. Divorce thrust women
into even greater danger. There was relief, even daily welfare distributions,
but it was relief within the framework of an unequal and unjust society. There
was little other than this kind of band aid charity.
The
underlying injustice was so much part of social life it was invisible. It was
perhaps easier to notice slavery, but by and large slavery and the position of
women went unnoticed. It is always hard to see the things that are most
visible. Despite the catch cry that in Christ there is neither male nor female
slave nor free, it has taken 1800 years to face at least the crassest forms of
slavery, and we are still in the process of understanding the revolution of the
gospel in relation to women in society. And, of course, Christians still use
scripture to ensure male power in the community and in the Church, for the issue
here, too, is about a right understanding and use of scripture and this is why
we need to listen to Stephen.
Luke
allows us to see only the welfare symptom of the problem of women living in a
male dominated society. In his account it is incidental. It doesn’t have to
stay that way. His account tells us more, however, of an equally complex issue:
the living together of two languages, and therefore also culture, groups. Can
you just imagine all that could go wrong? After all, these were really of
migrant people returned to enjoy the benefits of our land where we have always
lived and worked. They are Jews but they have strange ways, dangerous ways. We
know. We have heard of people’s sons going off into far countries and
squandering their living. For Judeans the Galileans were bad enough. They spoke
in a funny way. These others spoke Greek. They were worldly, open to foreign
influences, and probably had secret practices that if only you knew would shock
you deeply. Or, from the other side of the fence, many who returned did so
precisely because of a very deep religious faith. Away from their homeland they
had developed strict conservative religious practices and returned home to find
the big commercial enterprise of the temple, wealthy high priests, all on side
with the country’s millionaires, bending the divine Law. The tensions of
multicultural Judaism in Jerusalem were very great and many of them must have
been equally present among the first Christian communities.
Luke doesn’t
tell us who was in the wrong in the Christian communities, whether the problem
was a misunderstanding, an administrative bungle, a slip of unwitting
prejudice, a blatant piece of discrimination, racism or sexism. As usual in
such circumstances, we can imagine that people rushing in with slogan analyses
at each level to compound the problem with the unmixed ingredients of truth.
Luke’s economy of words speaks of an immediate response by the young Church’s
leaders. It makes fascinating reading. First we notice that the apostles take
the issue seriously. They are busy preaching, Luke tells us, but they stop and
they listen. Some real listening takes place. The problem is not swept under
the carpet; it was, after all, potentially explosive. And notice what the
apostles do. Apparently they address the Greek speaking community and tell them
to choose leaders for themselves. There’s even a kind of primitive autonomy
here. We might at least have expected them to want to keep holding the strings
themselves. instead they give the initiative and responsibility to those who
have the problem — well, almost. Let’s not idealise from these sparse comments.
There were no women among the seven.
But listen
to Peter: it’s not good for us to leave preaching the word of God to serve
tables. The issue was important, but Peter, says Luke, is not going to allow
the immediate issue to be the all consuming issue, to eclipse the gospel. It
represented the working out of the gospel in relationship to an issue which had
arisen; but that issue did not take over, as issues so easily can when we, and
clergy in particular, become overwhelmed with responsiveness, with distributing
the fruits of the vine instead of seeing the primacy of keeping people
connected to it. All too often ministers of the Word serve tables and the ministry
of the Word and the diaconate functions are not clearly seen.
Luke is
passing on very early tradition which probably had most to do originally with
the need for a structure of leadership to be established for the Greek speaking
Christian church, the Hellenists. All of the men appointed have Greek names. It
is clear from what follows in Acts that they were first and foremost leaders of
the community rather than welfare workers. Stephen is a preacher, Philip an
evangelist. The early church had the freedom to shape its structures in accord
with central concerns of the gospel. It knew what was at the heart of the
tradition, of the scripture and it streamlined its doings to that end. This
centre of scripture and tradition was the gospel of Jesus Christ, the gospel of
love. The Church lived from this centre and loved from this centre. It loved so
much that it gave structure and organisation to that love, taking seriously the
cries of the needy and creatively responding to the multicultural situation it
faced. This was a far cry from the way of handling scripture and tradition
which Stephen attacks. For he confronted the opposite of flexibility., he
confronted devotion to scripture and tradition which had lost touch with its
centre, but we shall turn to this later.
The
conflict between Stephen and the Jewish authorities was fierce. It cost Stephen
his life. It also engaged the rest of the Greek speaking community in the
dispute. The Hellenist Christians were driven from Jerusalem. The Hebrews, the
Aramaic speakers, whose leaders, Peter and John, had earlier been arraigned
before the Sanhedrin, seem to have been largely untouched by the conflict. When
the Hellenists were driven out and persecuted by fanatical Jews like Paul, the
apostles and their Hebrew Christian community continued largely unpersecuted in
Jerusalem. There may have been more than just cultural and language differences
between the Hebrew Christians and the Hellenist Christians. Perhaps the
tensions between Paul and the Gentile churches and the mother Jerusalem church
and its representatives have their roots here. Again, the situation is complex.
Hellenist
Jews like Paul accuse Hellenist Jewish Christians of not keeping the Law, of
speaking against Moses and the temple. These were doubtless the conservative
strict Jews who had had to preserve their Jewish faith in foreign lands. Paul
had grown up in Tarsus near the southern coast of Turkey. For them scripture
was scripture. It was God’s word and to be kept to the letter. Theirs was a
consistent and logical position. Who were human beings to start making value
judgements about which commandments of God are more to be obeyed and which are
not to be taken so seriously. Surely all of God’s word is to be obeyed. Start
watering it down here and soon you’ll have undermined its authority altogether.
This is a very convincing stance borne out of deep devotional conviction and it
has had a strong following in every age, precisely because it makes sense; it
is simple; and it avoids the pitfalls of tampering with God’s will and word.
When
Stephen says, “You received the Law as given by angels”, it would seem on first
reading that he, too, follows this line. Certainly it was the position of those
who opposed him among the Jews and among those Jews and Jewish Christians who
were later to oppose Paul himself. For Paul, for instance, had suggested that
food laws could be dispensed with except where it caused particular offence to
people with weak consciences; but scripture declared quite clearly which were
clean and which were unclean foods. The coming of the Messiah could not
suddenly alter the status of creation and make unclean food clean. So Paul
advocated a position that contradicted the clear teachings of scripture. And
his accusers were, strictly speaking, correct. We shall return to that
tomorrow.
But the
issue with Stephen and the Christian Hellenists was not much different. They
not only preached that God had raised Jesus from the dead and made him Messiah.
That had been offensive to the Jewish authorities because it amounted to a
claim that their judgement had been unjust and had been controverted by God.
Stephen and the Hellenists went beyond this. They called into question the
scripture and tradition itself. They appear to have picked up Jesus’ teaching
about the vision of the kingdom making the present temple dispensable. This was
unthinkable. How could the worship, the liturgy, the structure of the temple,
laid down in scripture itself and elaborated by tradition, be changed? Did not
God’s Law, God’s Word stand forever?
Stephen
and the Hellenists called into question a way of handling scripture and
tradition which appeared strict and devout, but denied ultimately the central
concerns of the scripture. These strict devout people kept it to the letter at
one level. They were the original fundamentalists and some of them, like Paul,
were probably as fanatical as some forms of Islamic and Christian
fundamentalism we know today. They kept the Law, the scripture, but at a deeper
level they failed to keep it. They failed to grasp the heart of scripture. They
were so bound to literal obedience to its words, that they failed to obey its
Word. They clung to the familiar and the manageable. They were like those of
whom Jesus said, They traverse sea and land to make a single convert, they make
much of tithing, they adorn the tombs of the prophets, but they have neglected
the weightier matters of the Law: justice and mercy and faith.
2. Stephen’s Speech
Stephen’s
speech is a cruel indictment of pious organised religion concerned about its
rightness and self preservation. Notice the subtle hints along the way: Abraham
was called to leave the familiar and set out for the unknown on the basis of
God’s promise. Moses came as deliverer to his people, but initially his people
rejected him saying, "Who made you our leader and judge!" And then
later at Sinai they want to go back to the familiar, back to Egypt. Then God
gave them the tabernacle, symbol of his presence with them, but later Solomon
turned the tabernacle into bricks and mortar. He built the temple. But, says,
Stephen, the most high does not dwell in what human hands have made.
Every step
along the way there is a contrast between those who live from the heart of the
scripture and the will of God and those who want to preserve the familiar, who
want to make life, make God manageable. But God is not manageable. God cannot
be isolated by a temple or by a book. God is always greater than the temples
built to divine honour and God is always greater than the witness to the divine
word.
Stephen
was accused of attacking the Law, the scripture, the tradition of Moses, and
the temple. At one level these are, as Luke says, false accusations. He does
not deny the scripture as scripture. He is not arguing that Old Testament
scripture once was valid and now since Jesus must play second fiddle. He
upholds the scripture, as does Paul later, but, he argues, scripture, when
treated as a set of infallible rules, has been turned into an idol which usurps
the place of God, so that those who idolise it reject the gospel and crucify
its Lord. The scripture bears witness to the one single infallible source, the
one single authority, God who seeks the liberation of his people. This is the
deep heart of scripture and scripture is its witness. This leads to an entirely
different approach to scripture, one of greater depth, of greater centredness,
one more consistent with the thrust of scripture itself.
Stephen
also does not attack the temple. He was not arguing that the temple and its
organisation and pattern of worship were invalid. This, too, like scripture is
given by God. The institution of worship is God given. It is, after all, given
in scripture. But it is possible to do the same with institution as some do
with the scripture. It becomes no longer a witness, an aid to glorify God, an
instrument and embodiment of the coming kingdom. Instead it becomes the
fundamental. It becomes the idol. So the same dynamics of fundamentalism that
apply to scripture use apply now to the institution and we have institutional
fundamentalism, ecclesiastical fundamentalism, liturgical fundamentalism.
The
crassest example of this is reflected in the issue of ordination of women,
where the heart of the gospel proclaims one thing, but institutions,
another. Perhaps we should tread more sensitively. We have learned the wisdom
of this in ecumenical politics. But the danger is that all the while our
sensitivity supports a fundamentalist structure which by taking itself so
seriously denies the heart of the gospel. The commitment to unity is unity in
the gospel, unity in the gospel which must sometimes stand over against the
institution or betray itself as a league of disobedience.
The issue
is similar here to the issue of scriptural fundamentalism. We know ourselves
committed to scripture and we are also committed to ecumenism, to ministerial
order, to liturgical order. I am not talking about abandoning any of these
commitments, but I know and have been disturbed how easily my zeal slides over
into a possessive, protective, defensive fundamentalism or plays into the hands
of those who do. It is always difficult for genuine Protestantism to survive
without becoming sectarian on the one hand or being assimilated on the other by
the sluggish spirituality of historical institutions.
Martyrs
are often rash. Perhaps we should have taken Stephen aside for a quiet talk.
But our commitment to ecumenism is best served by a faithfulness to the heart
of the gospel which gives us freedom to love and to critique the canons of
tradition, be they the canon of the mass, the canon of ministry, or the canon
of scripture. For the fundamentalisms of liturgy, institution of ministry, and
scripture continue their drive to usurp the God of Abraham, the God of the
promised unknown, the God of Moses, the God of salvation and liberation, and
the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, whom the fundamentalisms always crucify.
Our study
began with the innocent flexibility of a Church facing issues it is scarcely
half aware of, but a Church willing to listen, and to put love into careful
structures of leadership, a Church living from the heart of the gospel. It has
ended with Stephen’s confrontation of the fundamentalisms which convert faith
into religion. They stoned Stephen as they crucified Jesus on basically the
same issues. But Jesus was raised; and after Stephen came Paul. In every
generation we re-enact the crucifying and the rising. That is our confession
and our courage. That is also our business and our agenda.