In the opinion of many, religion is self-evidently a bad thing. It has caused and still causes endless strife and bloodshed and therefore deserves to be rejected. But if that is so, logic would demand the rejection of politics also! For if religion has slain its thousands, politics has slain its ten thousands. However no one seriously argues that political thinking should on that account be abandoned and political activity banned!
The trouble lies, say others, not with religions in general, but with the monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Their conviction that their God is the only true God and their religion the only way to him has filled each of them with missionary zeal to force its faith on other people, saving their souls, if need be at the cost of destroying their bodies. Totalitarian ideologies, they admit, stand condemned for the same reason. They, too, have driven people with a similar missionary zeal [p 89] to export their political systems all round the world and to compel other nations to accept their creed and practice at the cost of untold human suffering. Polytheists, by contrast, so the argument goes, are peacefully prepared to let people believe in any gods they please, and would never dream of forcing their taste in gods on anyone else. Similarly liberal democracies are prepared to let each nation embrace whatever political creed—or religion, for that matter—it pleases without outside interference.
If that be so, Christianity, which is monotheistic and which has been filled with missionary zeal from its birth, has a lot of explaining to do. But that is nothing new. When Luke sat down to write his history of the spread of the Christian gospel, he could not body-text the fact that in many places—Philippi, Thessalonica, Berea, Corinth, Ephesus, Jerusalem—Paul’s preaching had been followed by civil unrest, so much so that the matter eventually came to the attention not only of the local magistrates, but of Roman provincial governors, of King Agrippa, and of the Emperor Nero himself.
Of course, it was infinitely easier for Luke to answer for the preaching and behaviour of the Christian apostles and evangelists of the first century AD, than it would be if anyone today tried to defend the plainly indefensible behaviour of which later Christendom has been guilty from time to time. In the first century, Christians obeyed Christ’s prohibition on the use of the sword either to promote Christianity or to defend it. Nowhere in the whole of Acts has Luke recorded that the Christians started any of the riots themselves or even retaliated against those who frequently attacked or persecuted them.
[p 90] Moreover, as the city clerk of Ephesus remarked, the early Christians did not go around desecrating the temples and holy places of other people’s religions either (Acts 19:35–37). Though Paul believed, and in his public lectures would have stated, that the pagan gods were not true gods, he did not, according to the same city clerk, denounce pagan gods in abusive and intemperate language calculated to inflame pagan sensitivities.
In Jerusalem, to take another of Luke’s examples, the entry of Gentiles into the holy courts of the temple was regarded as a desecration and was strictly forbidden, not only by the Jews but by the Romans, who were anxious to prevent the riots which any breach of this prohibition might provoke. Now Paul, as a Christian, believed that the temple in Jerusalem was fast becoming obsolete. The middle wall of partition (Eph 2:14) that separated Gentiles from Jews in the temple had no place in the Christian gospel. In the Christian churches which Paul founded, believing Jews and Gentiles mixed freely on equal terms without any partition of any kind between them, or between them and God.
In spite of that, when Paul visited the temple in Jerusalem for the last time, he fully respected its rules and regulations, outmoded though they were. He made no attempt to introduce Gentile Christians into the temple or to impose Christian beliefs and practices onto the now antiquated Jewish religious system.
However, Luke explains, he was accused of bringing Gentiles into the temple anyway. This caused a riot and was the reason why he was arrested by the Roman [p 91] authorities. But the charge was false and never substantiated, as Luke painstakingly makes clear.12
In later centuries, admittedly, Christendom behaved very differently. With pagan superstition, and in complete disregard of Christ’s prohibition, it sent whole armies on crusades and slaughtered thousands of Turks to recapture the so-called holy places. But to slaughter Christ’s enemies is a self-evident and indefensible perversion of the gospel which proclaims that Christ died for his enemies so that they should not perish (Rom 5:10).
Yes, someone will say, but while the early Christians may not have physically assaulted people of other faiths, they did insist on preaching that their God was the only true God, and Jesus Christ the only Saviour, to people to whom they must have known it would be deeply offensive. The Christians therefore are to be blamed for the violent responses which their missionary zeal provoked. Why could they not keep their beliefs to themselves?
This raises far-reaching questions. The early Greek philosopher, Anaxagoras, was put on trial in the Athens of Pericles’ day, for teaching that the sun and moon were not gods. Ought he then to have kept silent about the truth so as not to upset the Athenians? Shall we castigate Galileo for proclaiming his belief that the earth goes round the sun, when he must have known the offence and uproar it would cause? Do we not rather admire him?
The right of free-speech is a fragile plant, still often crushed by political and religious tyrannies; for their [p 92] power depends on establishing the idea in the minds of the people that their doctrines are the only ones it is safe or legitimate to consider. They must, therefore, prevent the people, if possible, from even hearing minority views.
Moreover, it is a frequently observed human weakness that a movement, while still a minority, will clamour for the right of free speech and protest against its removal; but when that same movement becomes the majority movement, it will in turn seek to suppress all other minority movements.
It happened, alas, with Christendom. The right to evangelize freely, which the apostles and early Christians stood for at such great personal cost and sacrifice, was denied to others by Christendom when it eventually joined forces with the State and became the established religion. It is surely, then, to the credit of true and original Christianity, and not to its shame, that it has always stood with those who have insisted on the universal right and duty to proclaim, with all due courtesy, what one believes to be the truth, and the right peacefully to persuade others of that truth.
There was, of course, one area in which the Christian gospel was easily open to being misrepresented. It proclaimed Jesus as King, or, to put it in Jewish terms, as God’s Messiah (= Anointed One). It was easy, therefore, for Christianity’s enemies to make out that this was intended in a political sense and was therefore treason against the reigning Caesar.
Luke cites one example (Acts 17:1–9). In Thessalonica the Jews accused the Christians before the local magistrates of ‘acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus’ (Acts 17:7). The charge was [p 93] specious, because in Israel itself there were individuals and parties who did interpret the Old Testament promise of a God-sent Messiah in political terms; and from time to time they put up candidates for this role who, they hoped, would drive the hated Roman imperialists out of Palestine by force of arms and restore to Israel their political independence. It was this kind of thing that eventually led to the Jewish revolts of AD 66–70 and 130–33.
Now the early Christian churches believed and preached no such thing. When, in Jesus’ lifetime, the crowds had come to make him king by force, Jesus had withdrawn. At his trial before Pilate, the Roman governor, he had made it abundantly clear that his kingdom was not a political, earthly kingdom, to be protected and advanced by force of arms. It was a spiritual kingdom to be propagated by the preaching of God’s truth. And when, in spite of this, the Jewish high priests tried to convince Pilate that Jesus was in fact a political activist, both Pilate and Herod gave as their verdict that he was no such thing (Luke 23:1–25).
Similarly when Paul was accused before the Roman courts of subversive political activity, both Gallio, the Roman governor at Corinth, and governor Festus and King Agrippa at Caesarea, after thorough investigation, pronounced Paul completely innocent of any such charge (Acts 18:12–17; 26:31–32).
Luke, for his part, makes clear what Christianity means by proclaiming Jesus as King (Acts 17:1–3). The programme which the Old Testament laid down for the promised Messiah, far from stating that the Messiah would set himself up as a political rival to other rulers on earth, prophesied [p 94] that he would suffer, die, and then be raised from the dead and ascend into heaven. This was the programme which, according to Paul, Jesus had fulfilled. When he comes again to set up his kingdom on earth, it will not be as a merely human politician, vying with other politicians for a share in the government of earth, but as the Lord and Creator of mankind coming with divine right to judge the world and to lead his creation into the next stage of its development.
Unfortunately, Christendom has shown a marked tendency to forget these distinctions and in practice virtually to identify the Christian gospel with this or that political system: in the fourth century with Roman imperialism; in the Middle Ages with feudalism and with absolute monarchy and the divine right of kings; in more recent time with liberal democracy; and still more recently with a Christianized form of Marxism in what is called Liberation Theology. And the prejudice against the Christian gospel which this habit has created in the minds of people and nations who have preferred other legitimate political systems has been regrettable indeed.
There is, then, an urgent need to get back beyond the intervening centuries to the authoritative words of Christ himself:
‘My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.’ Then Pilate said to him, ‘So you are a king?’ Jesus answered, ‘You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this [p 95] purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.’ (John 18:36–37)
What then was the truth that Paul proclaimed as he went around the Roman Empire preaching the kingdom of God (Acts 20:24–25)? We could perhaps find no better summary of it than that which Luke has given in recording Paul’s appearance before King Agrippa and the Roman Governor, Festus (Acts 26). After having gone through many court hearings, Paul was eventually obliged by the intrigues of his accusers to appeal over the head of the local courts to the emperor Nero. Partly, then, in order to be able to send a full report on Paul to the emperor, and partly to satisfy the genuine interest of King Agrippa, Festus arranged a hearing at which Paul should give an account of himself and of his beliefs, knowing that what he said might well reach the emperor’s ears and form the basis of his trial. His speech has become one of the great speeches of history, for, think what we may of Paul, his influence on the world has been immense.
He began by recounting his early life and religious training and then what lay at the heart of his bitter persecution of the early Christians. ‘I myself was convinced’, he explained, ‘that I ought to do many things in opposing the name of Jesus of Nazareth’ (Acts 26:9) Not, we notice, to oppose Christianity as a religion so much as to oppose Jesus Christ personally. Jesus was, as far as Paul believed at the time, dead. But the more he persecuted the Christians in order to stamp out their beliefs, the more he discovered that it was not a set of religious beliefs that he was [p 96] attacking, still less the practice of a system of religious rituals, but the person, Jesus. The Christians claimed that he was alive and that they were somehow in touch with him personally.
To Paul that was utter nonsense; but as the victims of his persecution suffered his tortures, Paul could himself see that it was not just a set of religious beliefs that sustained them but the reality, to them, of the presence of the living Lord Jesus with them. To eradicate Christianity, he would have to eradicate this Jesus. The frustration of it maddened him, goading him to ever more strenuous efforts until the day when the risen Lord met him and spoke to him: ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads!’ (Acts 26:14).
Why had he not seen it before? A superficial answer would be that he had not experienced his supernatural vision of a light above the brightness of the sun before. But then few of his victims, if any, had ever had such a supernatural vision; yet even without it, they had seen with an inner clarity and conviction that brings greater assurance and certainty than even physical eyesight could, that Jesus Christ was alive and available to their personal faith and fellowship.
Why hadn’t Paul seen it before? It was not lack of intelligence (he has proved to be one of the master minds of history). It was not lack of religious zeal. What was it, then?
The truth of the matter is, said Paul to Agrippa, that the inner eye of people’s hearts is blinded not merely by their own prideful independence of God, self-centredness and sin—though all these things have made their contribution—but [p 97] by a more than human spiritual power whose evil work it has been to blind men to the reality of God and his love and to inspire in them that same irrational and ultimately Satanic opposition to God that motivates his own wayward spirit (Acts 26:18). ‘The god of this world [Satan himself]’, as Paul wrote elsewhere, ‘has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God’ (2 Cor 4:4). A man may have perfect physical vision; but if a fog comes between him and the sun, he will not see the sun.
But there is a fog-dispellent, and Paul had seen it work on people a thousand times and more. It was the gospel which the risen Christ commissioned him to preach to the world at large, ‘to open their eyes, so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me’ (Acts 26:18).
With powerful confidence Paul urged this gospel on King Agrippa himself. But at that point in the proceedings, Governor Festus bawled across the courtroom, ‘Paul, you are out of your mind; your great learning is driving you out of your mind’ (Acts 26:24). It is extraordinary how irrational some people’s reaction to the gospel can be. Before Paul’s conversion, he was a persecuting bigot of the bitterest kind. But people did not call him mad for that, any more than people call Stalin mad for sending millions to their deaths because they disagreed with his policies and claimed the right of free speech to say so. But when belief in the gospel turned Paul into a preacher of God’s love, who never again persecuted anyone, and whose writings [p 98] have subsequently brought peace with God to millions, Festus called him mad. If Paul really was insane, perhaps we should pray, God give us more insanity! Or better still, we should turn to Jesus Christ and pray the prayer that myriads of spiritually blind people have successfully prayed: ‘Lord, that I may receive my sight.’
Notes
12 Acts 21:27–36; 24:1–21; 25:7–8.
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