It is the opinion of many that the chief business of Christianity—if it has any true business at all—should be to concern itself with moral issues and human values: to denounce lying, theft, and adultery, and all such individual sins, and at the same time to encourage people to forgive their enemies, to love and be kind to one another. If that is our impression, we are in for a shock when we first open the pages of Luke’s history and read for ourselves his record of the very first sermons which the Christians preached. They do not concern themselves with denouncing individual sins, nor with encouraging people to develop worthy virtues. That is not because the early Christians were indifferent to ethical issues and human values: the letters which the apostles wrote to their early converts are full of such moral instruction.
Luke’s record shows that the early Christians’ apparent lack of interest in individual sins was because they were preoccupied with one particular sin of overwhelming significance. The resurrection of Christ had demonstrated [p 19] him to be the Son of God with power; and the inevitable implication was appalling: Israel had crucified their God-sent Messiah; human beings had killed the source of their life (Acts 3:15); mankind had murdered its Maker. The crucifixion of Christ, as the early Christians saw it (basing themselves on the Bible), was sheer human rage against God: a concerted effort by both Jews and Gentiles to cast off God’s restraint and claims on them (Acts 4:23–31).
This is no exaggeration. The cross of Christ diagnoses what the basic trouble of the whole world is at all times. It is not man’s hostility to man: that is only a secondary symptom. It is man’s hostility to God. The crucifixion of God’s Son was but the cone of a volcano through which, at a certain time and place in history, there erupted that deep-lying resentment and rebellion against God which ever since man first sinned have smouldered in everybody’s heart, religious or irreligious, ancient or modern.
The parable of the Vineyard Keepers (Luke 20:9–15), which our Lord told primarily against the religious leaders of his time, makes the same point. The world we live in has a personal owner, and it is not us! We are but tenants and stewards. And the heir to the vineyard is the owner’s son.
But people are not content to be tenants. They live as if there were no landlord. Or if there is, they live as if he had no right to expect any dues of love, obedience, devotion, and service from them. They act as if they owned the complete freehold of their own lives, as if the world belonged to them. They have no love for the owner’s son for whom in fact the universe was made, who was the agent in its creation, is the maintainer of its present [p 20] stability, and is its redeemer and eventual restorer (Col 1:16–20; Heb 1:1–3).
As long as he keeps his distance, of course, the world doesn’t mind him. They can even affect a certain amount of religion. But let him approach, insist on his ownership and demand his dues—then the resistance starts. They denounce his demands as absolutism. They fight for their independence. They may, like the pseudo-Christian apostle, Judas, talk much about their concern for the poor (John 12:4–6); but like Judas they will readily deny God and Christ in order to gain or keep a place for themselves in the world (Acts 1:15–20). But to sell one’s Creator for thirty pieces of silver is to evince a value system that is fatally flawed. Sell your Creator for any sum, and you automatically reduce the value of your fellow-creatures catastrophically. And then, as a result, you must not be surprised to find yourself conniving at the elimination of thousands of human beings, if only social and political improvement seems to call for it.
As Dostoevsky says, ‘Without God .&nbps;.&nbps;. everything is permitted.’6 Atheism’s claim that you can eliminate all talk of God from morality, and base ethics simply on man’s inherent value, is fraudulent. It is like eliminating a bank’s reserves, and still expecting people to honour its bank notes. It will not cure man’s chaotic value system; it is itself the cause of a tragic devaluation of man.
If this, then, is how the early Christians diagnosed mankind’s basic sin, it is of more than historical interest [p 21] to notice Luke’s account of the astonishing offer of mercy, forgiveness, and reconciliation, which God authorized Peter to make to the very murderers of his Son. There was first of all the offer of ‘the forgiveness of your sins’ (Acts 2:38). Note the plural ‘sins’ and the personal adjective ‘your’ sins (Acts 2:38). Forgiveness not only of the particular sin of crucifying Christ, but of all sins—the wiping of the heart clean from the guilt of every transgression. And then, in addition, the offer of the gift of the Holy Spirit, who would establish a living and personal relationship between God and every believer, a sharing of the very life of God.
If this, then, was how Peter defined salvation, what terms and conditions did he lay down for receiving it? They were simplicity itself. The key demand was: Repent!
But then what was meant by repentance in this situation? First, we should notice the flow of thought that runs from the end of Joel’s prophecy, which Peter quoted at the beginning of his sermon (Acts 2:17–21), to the climax with which he concluded it (Acts 2:36). Joel had warned that there was coming a day when his hearers must face the wrath of God on account of their sins. If they would be saved from that wrath, they must call on the name of the Lord.
For the crowd at Jerusalem, then, repentance would in the first place mean turning round and facing the fact that, in spite of all their previous religiosity, they needed to be saved from God’s wrath.
Secondly, it would mean facing the (for them) alarming fact which the resurrection had demonstrated: God had made the very Jesus, whom they had crucified, both Lord and Christ (Acts 2:36). If now they wanted to be saved, mere promises of better behaviour in the future would [p 22] scarcely suffice. They must swallow their pride, turn about face, call on the very Jesus whom they had crucified, acknowledge him as Lord, and cry for his mercy. He it was who would personally give them the Holy Spirit, and establish their relationship with God.
Thirdly, while they had the Bible’s own explicit assurance that if in genuine repentance they called on the name of the Lord Jesus, they would most certainly be saved, they were required to demonstrate that their repentance was genuine. ‘Calling on the name of the Lord’ would have to be more than simply reciting a religious formula. It would mean capitulating to Jesus entirely, and accepting him as Lord of all they were and had. It would also mean publicly confessing him as Lord, not just in word, but in action. ‘Repent’, said Peter, ‘and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ’ (Acts 2:38).
Of course, we must be careful not to read back into Christian baptism in these early times, the meanings that developed in later centuries. There is no evidence in Acts that baptism was regarded by the first Christians as a ritual which conveyed the gift of the Holy Spirit. In fact, the historical evidence goes quite the other way. Cornelius and his friends, whom Luke later presents as the archetypal example of Gentile conversion, received the Holy Spirit before they were baptized (Acts 10:47). Obviously, then, it was not dependent on baptism. As Peter later explained, these Gentiles listened to him preaching that everyone who believes shall receive forgiveness of sins. They believed; and God, who read their hearts, gave public testimony to the fact that they had truly repented, and that their faith was genuine. He gave them the Holy Spirit [p 23] there and then, having cleansed their hearts solely by faith. Only afterwards were they baptized, and then only on the ground that they had already received the Holy Spirit (Acts 10:44–48; 11:15–17; 15:7–9).
On the other hand, the mere consternation of the Jerusalem crowd and their anxiety over their crucifixion of Jesus did not in themselves amount to genuine repentance. A few weeks earlier, they had publicly denied before Pilate that Jesus was the Christ (Acts 3:13–14). If they did now genuinely repent, they must show it. They must reverse their previous verdict; they must confess that Jesus was the Christ, and do so just as publicly as they had earlier denied it, by being baptized ‘in the name of Jesus Christ’. They had publicly stood with the murderers of Jesus, and shouted with them for his crucifixion. Now they must ‘save [themselves] from this crooked generation’ (Acts 2:40). They could not continue to stand with the murderers and still pretend to have repented of the murder. They must change sides; and baptism in the name of Jesus was a way of showing they had. If they were not prepared to do that, how would they convince anybody, let alone God, that their professed repentance was real?
Moreover, their repentance and their baptism in the name of Jesus Christ were not one-off events that had no further effect on their subsequent lifestyle. Luke tells us that thereafter they devoted themselves to ‘the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and the prayers’ (Acts 2:42); it was the natural outcome of their genuine repentance. Since they now believed that God had made Jesus of Nazareth both Lord and Christ, they would be eager to know in ever greater detail what the Holy [p 24] Spirit would reveal to them through the apostles about Christ’s relationship to God and to the universe.
And when it says that the early Christians devoted themselves to the apostles’ fellowship, it does not, of course, mean that they simply began to socialize with the apostles. It meant the outworking of the common life they had individually received through the Holy Spirit, which bound them together with the apostles and their Lord.
They were devoted to the breaking of bread, says Luke (and we notice the simplicity of the description by which this custom was named at this early period, answering to the actual simplicity of the custom itself). Before he died, Christ had called on his people constantly to remember him by simply eating bread together as a symbol of his body, and by drinking wine as a symbol of his blood; not in order to gain forgiveness, but in memory of him by whose sacrificial death they had already been forgiven. Sheer gratitude, if nothing else, would have led them lovingly to do it.
Likewise they devoted themselves to prayer. Now that they were reconciled to God and in fellowship with the ascended Lord, prayer ceased to be a mere formal routine and became active participation with the ruler of the universe.
Moreover, Luke is at pains to record (Acts 2:42–47) that the gospel and its implications revolutionized not only their spiritual life but their attitude to secular things as well. It even transformed their attitude to private property. But more of that in our next chapter.
Notes
6 The statement is made by one of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s characters in The Brothers Karamozov, tr. Richard Peavar and Larissa Volokhonsky (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990).
English (US) · 