Somewhere around the year AD 49, Paul, the Christian apostle, took a momentous step fraught with immeasurable consequences for the whole Western world. He crossed over from Asia and, for the first time, preached the gospel in a European city. Almost at once he ran into trouble. There was in the city a group of businessmen who owned, or at least managed, a female spirit-medium. Paul exorcised the spirit, which put an end to the fees which the businessmen received from the public for consultations with the medium. Whereupon, with the support of the infuriated crowd, they hauled Paul and his colleague, Silas, before the magistrates. ‘These men’, they alleged, ‘are Jews and are throwing our city into an uproar by advocating customs unlawful for us as Romans to accept or practice.’
Faced with civil commotion, the magistrates did not wait to conduct a proper investigation: they had the Christian missionaries publicly stripped, severely flogged, [p 73] and then thrown into a high-security cell in the local prison (Acts 16:11–40).
Now obviously loss of income is enough to account for the opposition of the businessmen; but it will hardly explain the fury of the crowd, who in other circumstances might not necessarily have been all that upset by the sight of wealthy businessmen suffering a reduction in their income. The fact is that the arrival of the Christian missionaries touched three areas of their lives in a way which, they instinctively felt, threatened their personal identity and security. And since the gospel can still affect people in this way, it will be worthwhile analysing these causes in detail.
First, there was national culture. The city of Philippi, though situated in Macedonia, was a Roman colony, independent of the surrounding provincial administration, with a government organization modelled on Rome itself. Its citizens were not only Europeans; they were also citizens of Rome, and very proud of it. They dressed like Romans and often spoke Latin rather than Greek.
And the missionaries were not only Asiatics; they were Jews! The very idea that Asiatic Jews should imagine that they could teach the European Roman citizens of Philippi anything was felt as an insult to their superior Western culture (which, incidentally, is ironic; for nowadays in many Asiatic countries Asian people regard the gospel as a Western religion and an insult to their superior Asiatic culture!).
But more than that: in a vast international cosmopolitan society such as the Roman empire had become, people would have clung to their own national culture [p 74] as a means of asserting their individual personal identity, and of not being lost in a meaningless, uniform sea of humanity. People still feel the same way today. And where a totalitarian government has suppressed local culture, as Franco for many years suppressed Catalan language and literature in Spain, it is understandable that, when the suppression is removed, local national culture should re-assert itself and resent the intrusion of alien culture.
Moreover, one has to admit that, in many parts of the world, visiting Christian preachers have often failed to distinguish between the fundamental truths of the gospel and the cultural trappings, music, architecture, style of presentation and so forth that have collected around it in their home countries. In so doing, they have confused the gospel itself in the minds of their foreign audience and unnecessarily provoked resentment.
But Paul was keenly aware of this danger. His own sensitive respect for other people’s culture is shown in a letter which he subsequently wrote to another Greek city:
Though I am free from all, I have made myself a servant to all, that I might win more of them. To the Jews I became as a Jew . . . To those under the [Mosaic] law I became as one under the law . . . To those outside the [Mosaic] law I became as one outside the law (not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ) . . . I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some. (1 Cor 9:19–22)
We may be sure, then, that Paul would not have attacked or tried to suppress anything that was good and [p 75] wholesome in the Philippians’ culture, nor have tried to impose on them anything that was merely cultural from his own Asiatic Jewish background.
That, however, brings us to the second area in which the Philippians felt—or said they felt—threatened by the Christian gospel. The laws of the State, they claimed, made it illegal for them as Romans to accept or practise Jewish customs. Now it is understandable that people who live under stern totalitarian governments should be afraid of getting into trouble with the authorities. The last thing they will want to do is to be caught attending some illegal religious meeting. But on this occasion their fears were actually groundless. At this particular period in history (as distinct from what happened twenty or more years later) neither Judaism nor Christianity was banned by the Roman government. And though in theory the Roman government reserved the right to forbid their own citizens from practising foreign religions incompatible with the national religion of Rome, in practice the government did not clamp down on their citizens in this respect.
On the other hand, what was highly illegal—and this the central imperial government did care about enormously—was for a magistrate to flog a Roman citizen publicly and send him to prison without first conducting a thorough and proper investigation. And Paul, the Christian missionary, though a Jew, was also a Roman citizen, the equal of any in Philippi! If the crowd in their fury did not know any better, the magistrates should have known. But this was not the last time that magistrates and judges have acted contrary to their own country’s constitution and laws in order to put unwanted Christians [p 76] behind bars. Yet it makes the Philippians’ appeal to the law look less than completely convincing.
Which brings us to the third, and perhaps the strongest, reason why the Philippians felt that the Christian gospel threatened their personal security. Paul’s action in putting an end to the medium’s ability to tell fortunes cut off one source of supernatural guidance which many people in the city craved for and felt to be an indispensable help to successful living—indeed to survival—in the harsh conditions of the ancient world. And they resented Paul for it, the more so because when he first arrived, the spirit-medium had given him favourable welcome and publicity; but Paul had rejected it and cast the spirit out. For the moment it must have made Christianity appear as an alien, hard-hearted, puritanical, interfering religion that had no feeling for, or sympathy with, the psychological needs of the individual caught up in the frightening complexities of life. No wonder the crowd was furious.
Why then did Paul do it? Precisely because of his compassion and his respect for the sacred inviolability of human personality. The spirit-medium had been invaded and taken over by an alien power. From Luke’s description of it as a spirit of Pytho, we gather that when the demon uttered its prophecies through her, the voice that came out of her would not have been her own natural voice, but a strange, unnatural sound. This would have impressed the Philippians as evidence that her prophecies came from some supernatural source. But for Paul, the Christian, it would have produced nothing but compassion for the woman, revulsion at the distortion of a human personality by an evil spirit and sheer indignation that [p 77] unprincipled businessmen should ‘own’ a fellow human being and make money out of her distress.
If this was part of the Philippians’ culture, then that part was frankly evil. Try to defend it, and on the same ground you would find yourself defending the drug barons and the drug dealers who make money out of destroying people’s minds: or the (now banned) practice of suttee in India, where, under pressure from the surrounding culture, a widow feels obliged to sacrifice herself on her husband’s funeral pyre.
And then Paul did what he did for the sake of the medium’s clients as well. Spiritism, in actual fact, cares nothing for the human personality, but tends to undermine and eventually destroy it. It purports to be able to warn of coming dangers and disasters so that people can then try, if possible, to avoid them. But all in vain; for when accident, disease, and death come, as sooner or later they do, spiritism knows nothing of the love and faithfulness of God the Creator which enables the believer to cry triumphantly, ‘I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor any thing else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Rom 8:38–39).
This gospel brings a person to know God as loving Father, to experience his salvation, care and guidance. It develops trust in the wisdom of his detailed providences, even when they pass comprehension, reveals the wonder and glory of God’s grand and ultimate purposes for his people, and assures them that he will make all the intervening details of life work together for that ultimate good. [p 78] Spiritism does nothing at all for the moral development of the human personality; whereas the guidance of the Holy Spirit is predominantly concerned with the development of the person’s moral character and increasing holiness.
Spiritism, then, attempts to alter the fundamental conditions which a loving Creator has laid down for human life on earth and so perverts the foundational principles for the development of a secure and mature human personality. It offers foresight of the future instead of present faith in the wisdom, love, and loyalty of the Creator. And without personal faith in God, its Creator and Redeemer, the human personality will ultimately disintegrate, if not in this life then in that which is to come.
Since, then, faith in God through Christ is so absolutely indispensable, it is necessary to distinguish faith both from pagan spiritism or sub-Christian superstition and from genuine spiritual exercise that falls short of what the Christian gospel means by faith. And this, in fact, is the point of one of the last stories which Luke records in this section of his history.
After leaving Europe, Paul eventually spent some time in Ephesus (Acts 19:1–7). There he met twelve men who were disciples of the illustrious prophet, John the Baptist, the forerunner of Jesus. These men were no pagans, therefore; but on their own confession they had never received the Holy Spirit. And why not? Because, while they had learned the necessity of repentance, and doubtless constantly repented of this and that particular sin, they had never learned what it means personally to believe on the Lord Jesus, to believe what he says, to take him at his word, and to enter into a personal relationship with [p 79] him. Taught by Paul, they, for the first time in their lives, believed on the Lord Jesus and received the Holy Spirit. And to mark the fact that now, and only now, had they become Christians in the true sense of the word, they were baptized in the name of Jesus.
The Holy Spirit, then, as we have said, banishes fear of the future, the haunting fear of failure, the blank dread of death and the grave, the hopeless desolation of bereavement, which are the very things which open people to the dangers of consulting spirit mediums with their amoral guidance, their deceptive comforts and eventual domination of the human personality. The Holy Spirit pours out God’s love into the believer’s heart and into the depths of his personality (Rom 5:1–11), thus providing a secure basis both for present stability and future moral progress. And that, surely, is no insult to any nation’s culture.
English (US) · 