The rights and wrongs of private property have naturally attracted the attention of various political philosophers and politicians all down the centuries; but it is perhaps a surprise to find the prominence which Luke devotes to the topic in the first major section of Acts.
The spectacular explosion of spiritual energy initiated on the day of Pentecost and its ever-increasing impact would automatically have forced themselves on the choice of any historian of the birth of Christianity to be included in his account. But, with a fine sense of balance, Luke has deliberately chosen to place an almost equal emphasis on the early Christians’ attitude to material things, and to the question of private property.
All who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. (Acts 2:44–45)
[p 26] Barnabas .&nbps;.&nbps;. sold a field that belonged to him and brought the money and laid it at the apostles’ feet. (Acts 4:36–37)
The full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common. (Acts 4:32)
And on top of all this, one of the miracles which Luke chooses to describe in detail during this period is the summary judgment inflicted on a certain Ananias and Sapphira, for what was seen as their deliberate collusion in an attempt to deceive both the apostles and God over the matter of their property (Acts 5:1–11).
What, then, shall we make of this phenomenon of the early Christian community of goods? The first thing to notice is that it was entirely voluntary. Peter explicitly told the aforesaid Ananias and Sapphira that their piece of land was their own private property. They were not forced by the Christian faith, nor by the church, nor, of course, by the State, to sell it and give the money to the church or to anyone else. And once they had sold the land, they still had the right to decide how to dispose of the money, if in fact they wanted to dispose of it. They did not have to pay it in to the central funds of the Christian group. Compulsory community of goods was no part of the Christian faith; history demonstrates what misery and disaster can result from that kind of pressure.
Secondly, we should not exaggerate or mistranslate what the Greek of 4:34 says. Not every property owner [p 27] who got converted immediately sold all his lands and houses and gave the money away. What happened was that property owners would from time to time sell part of their holdings and use the money to meet particular needs which arose in the Christian community.
The important thing to grasp about the early Christian attitude to material possessions was the motivation which lay behind it. ‘No one said,’ says Luke, ‘that any of the things that belonged to him was his own’ (Acts 4:32). Whose then? we ask. And the answer is, Christ’s. If they sold their possessions and laid the money at the apostles’ feet, it was because the apostles were the official representatives of Christ. If they kept their possessions and did not sell or give them away, they would still have regarded them not as their own but as Christ’s, and themselves simply as stewards responsible to administer them for the good of the community.
This still is, or ought to be, the true Christian’s attitude to material possessions, for it springs from the realization that Jesus Christ is not merely a prophet or moral teacher: he is the Lord and owner of Creation. The believer, therefore, is taught that if Christ gave his life’s blood to redeem him from the ruinous consequences of his insane rebellion against his Creator, then the believer himself is no longer his own property. He has been bought with a price.7 All that he is and has belongs to Christ, and is to be used in responsible stewardship in the interests of Christ, for the good of his people and of mankind in general, for the evangelization of the world, and for the furtherance of God’s purposes in the earth.
[p 28] But the topic goes deeper. One cannot read this first section of Acts without perceiving that, unlike some eastern religions, Christianity does not regard the material world as an illusion from which the truly wise man tries to escape. Unlike Platonic philosophy, it does not regard the body as the tomb of the soul, and hold that the soul should attempt to keep aloof from the body as much as possible. Christianity certainly teaches that the body should be disciplined and kept in proper control (1 Cor 9:27); but it disapproves of systematic neglect of the body as a means to salvation and holiness (Col 2:16–23). Understandably so. For the cornerstone of the Christian gospel is the bodily resurrection of Christ. Luke pointedly refers in his introduction to Acts (Acts 1:3), to what he had recorded in greater detail at the end of his Gospel (Luke 24:36–43). The risen Lord was not a disembodied soul or spirit. He had a human body, glorified—but nonetheless real and tangible. For the human body is an integral part of the human personality. God created it so, and is not ashamed of it.
Moreover, the gospel, according to the first section of Acts, is that God is not concerned merely with the spiritual salvation of individuals. He has plans for the complete restoration of the physical creation. This, as Peter’s second major sermon declares, has been the message of all God’s prophets (Acts 3:21–26). The Bible knows nothing of Hinduism’s degrading of the material universe into an endless, meaningless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth; nor anything of the modern atheist’s pessimism in holding, as atheistic science forces him to, that all human life and progress will end in meaningless oblivion. The Bible affirms that the whole creation has a glorious destiny. The bodily [p 29] resurrection of Jesus is the first fruits of the restoration of the entire universe; and the coming of the Holy Spirit to live in the bodies of believers is the first fruits of their great inheritance to come, when not only their physical bodies but creation itself will be delivered from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.8
Appropriately enough, then, the second major miracle in this section of Acts is the physical healing of a congenitally lame man (Acts 3). His physical handicap was a vivid example of the suffering of the whole creation; his miraculous healing a token in advance of its eventual restoration (Acts 3:21). Some will doubtless object: if there is a God, and he empowered Peter miraculously to heal this lame man, why did he not heal all sick people throughout the world? And why does he still delay to do so?
But there is a reason, as Peter explained to the crowd. They had murdered the very author of life (Acts 3:15). If they persisted in rejecting him, there could be nothing for them but eternal death. In his mercy, therefore, God was going to delay the time of the restoration of all things, that nature’s very pains might lead, or even drive, them to repent (Acts 3:19), so that, reconciled to God, they might be ready to participate when God’s plans for the redevelopment of the universe eventually swung into action.
The lesson is important for us, too. Our earth is not a self-created machine which just happens to have gone a little wrong, but which we with our increasing know-how and technology can put right, granted only sufficient [p 30] goodwill and international co-operation. Behind our earth stands a personal Creator and a personal Saviour. Not all the technological engineering, medical treatment, social aid, economic strategy, political prudence, and education of the masses that could ever be brought to bear upon earth’s problems could finally solve them and produce a paradise, so long as the world remains at odds with its Creator, and rejects its appointed Saviour.
It was this kind of thing, then, that the Christian apostles were preaching when, according to Luke, the opposition erupted; and it came, not from atheists and humanists, but from the ruling party in Jerusalem, the Sadducees (Acts 4:1–22; 5:17–42). All of them were at least nominally religious: some of them were priests of the highest rank in the temple at Jerusalem. But they held a worldview that was diametrically opposed to that of the Christians.
As Luke elsewhere reminds us, the Sadducees did not believe in the possibility of resurrection, nor in the existence of angel or spirit (Acts 23:8). That, incidentally, gives the lie to the modern fallacy that the Christian gospel was invented in a pre-scientific age when people were all prepared to believe in miracles like resurrection because they did not know the laws of nature and science. The Sadducees were certainly not prepared to believe. And if Luke, the trained medical doctor, was, it was because he was convinced by an honest study of the evidence.
Now the Sadducees, Luke tells us (Acts 4:16), could not deny the evidence before their eyes of the miraculous healing of the lame man; but they were not prepared to allow it to upset their predetermined worldview. In this, of course, they were very much like us today. None of us [p 31] comes to the study of cosmology or physics or biology with a completely open mind. We all have our pre-chosen worldviews, and it is they that determine our interpretation of the evidence, and not the other way round. What evidence fits into our worldview we accept; what does not, we tend to hold in abeyance.
Christians do it: for they frankly start from a God-based worldview. But the atheist does it as well. The Christian’s worldview is based on faith produced and supported by an abundance of evidence. But the atheist’s worldview is equally based on faith, for atheism cannot be proven. The question is: on which side lies the greater evidence? To ignore the evidence for Christianity is not scientific but obscurantism.
But to get back to the Sadducees. They had other reasons than their worldview for rejecting the Christian gospel. They were very much men of the world. Over recent centuries they had been deeply influenced by Hellenistic rationality and culture, and that, combined with the satisfaction of wielding religious and political power in the world as it was, induced in them worldly-mindedness and comparative laxity in matters of religion. They had wealth (they enjoyed massive revenues from the temple); they had power; they mixed in the highest circles (both Jewish and Gentile); they were educated and sophisticated. The world, as it was, was good enough for them. They could not see all that much wrong with it. As Paul would later say, they loved this present world. It was the only world they really believed in.
And here were these Christian apostles filling the heads of the masses with prophecy and the hope of a coming messianic kingdom, all based on their presupposition of [p 32] the reality of resurrection. It offended their Hellenistic sense of rationality; it challenged their lifestyle, their worldview and their vested interests. And, above all, they were the men who as the ruling class were chiefly responsible for the judicial murder of Jesus. They could not afford to allow the preaching of the resurrection of Jesus to become widespread, and so they tried to suppress it by force (Acts 5:40).
The historical sequel was that the Christians defied them and suffered for it. Then in AD 70, the pagan Romans came and destroyed the temple; and from that time onward the one-time persecuting Sadducean party gradually sank into oblivion. The lesson should not be lost on our generation.
Notes
7 1 Cor 6:19–20; 2 Cor 5:14–15.
8 1 Cor 15:20–25; Rom 8:18–25.
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