Inverting The Order (part two)

Continuing with Caesar and the Lamb by George Kalantzis:

The first account of a Christian martyr is the stoning of Stephen (Acts 6:1-8:2) and the earliest recorded prayer of the church for the state is found in the First Letter of Clement (60:4-61:3), sent by the church of Rome to the church of Corinth at the end of the first century (ca. 90-95 CE). Scarcely a generation earlier, Paul had written to the churches in Rome to "be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God" (Rom 13:1). Paul had also instructed the Romans to "pay to all what is due them -- taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due" (Rom 13:17; also, 1 Tim 2:1-2). Jesus had talked about rendering to Caesar what is Caesar's (Matt 22:21). To these, Peter added: "For the Lord's sake accept the authority of every human institution, whether of the emperor as supreme, or of governors, as sent by Him to punish those who do wrong and to praise those who do right.... Honor everyone. Love the family of believers. Fear God. Honor the emperor" (1 Pet 2:13-15).

It was the same Peter, however, who, along with John, defined for the Christian community what "honoring the governing authorities" meant and how submitting oneself to the authorities was not to acquiesce to the [worship] demands of the state. Following the example of Jesus before the Sanhedrin and Pilate, Peter and John affirmed that obedience to the command of God superseded the orders of the state: "We must obey God rather than any human authority" (Acts 5:29, 4:19). With this seemingly simple declaration, the apostles exposed the true nature of the conflict and identified every other authority, secular or religious, as subordinate to God. The Good News of God's imminent kingdom (Mark 1:15) was interpreted as "the rejection of one emperor, Caesar, by the proclamation of another, namely, Jesus" (cf. Acts 17:6)....

The apostles neither rebelled against Rome nor sought a particular national identity separate from the eschatological kingdom of Christ. Christians honored the emperor and the governors as his appointed authorities by following the example of Christ in refusing their consent and by submitting themselves to the consequence of their rejection, including scourging and death. That is what "rendering to Caesar what is Caesar's" would look like in the new economy; a simultaneous "yes" and "no" that points back to God as supreme. In doing so, they overturned yet again the normative paradigms of the classical traditions and showed how, for the Christians, power is gained through submission. A truly countercultural movement the Romans did not comprehend.

Martyrdom, then, was not the fate of the powerless, those finally forced to admit the grandeur of the state. Martyrdom was a witness to the state of its subordination to the God of heaven. Paul had already given expression to that: "For Your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered. No, in all these things  we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us" (Rom 8:36-37).  (pp. 34-35)

Kalantzis sums up this section a little later:

The witness of the New Testament and of the early Christians was not one of an autonomous Christian political order, and yet, it was a wholly new political order. They honored the emperor by putting him in his proper place, under God, and commending him to divine favor. "I will honor the emperor," wrote Theophilus of Antioch (ca. 170 CE), "not by worshipping him, but by offering prayers for him.... He is not God. He is a man whom God has appointed to give just judgment, not to be worshipped." The distinction is crucial: the emperor has been given authority by God to govern according to God's justice, not Rome's. 

Christians insisted that their refusal to acquiesce to the simulacra [image?] of justice and worship [it] ought not to be interpreted as subversion or disloyalty but as a call to the state to repent and acknowledge its proper place under the authority of God (cf. John 19:11). It was civil disobedience.

A first principle of civil disobedience is the proposition that one cannot act contrary to conscience, even under compulsion. One acts or refuses to act, based on a higher conviction which, in the case of the Christian martyrs, was divine law. An equally important feature of civil disobedience was its non-violence. This, too, was an incontestable principle early Christians inherited from the teachings of Christ and the New Testament.  (pg 38)

Tying this together with my previous posts, the emperor's pursuit of your acquiescence is a reflection of how much he does not want to submit to God.  He will threaten to kill you if you do not acquiesce (or even "pretend" to), because your acquiescence is how he desires to kill God: by your own hands.  Our standing firm against him is for his own good, both as a testimony to him of God's lordship, and as a mirror by which he cannot help but know himself to be soaked in the blood of martyrs.  Our time to prepare to stand firm is today, not down the road.

Therefore, honor emperors and obey them insofar as they are not compelling you to worship them (or their State) by dictating to us new practices that denounce God and repudiate Christ.  But when he makes his move against Christ, he must be rejected; and yet you still can show him due honor by facing the unjust sword he bears against you.  By your death you defeat him, and testify to him that his true place is subjected to the God he hates.

So, if Christ by His own example has so reversed the pagan order of honor in relation to the State, how has He not also done so in how we relate to each other, and to our coworkers, and to any neighbor?  But of course He has!  Go the extra mile, turn the other cheek, give your coat also!  Blessed are the meek and the abused; rejoice and be glad!  This is true strength through personal weakness.  This is trusting God's crushings.  This is blessing the name of the Lord.

Let's return to Kalantzis once more:

For Justin [Martyr], Christianity had created a completely new ethic, inconceivable by the competing moral systems of his time: "We who formerly killed one another not only refuse to make war on our enemies, but in order to avoid lying to our interrogators or deceiving them, we freely go to our deaths confessing Christ" (Apol 1.39).  The Second Letter of Clement, the writings of Irenaeus (bishop of Lyon), Athenagoras' Plea on Behalf of the Christians, the Letter to Diognetus, the writings of Clement of Alexandria, as well as Tertullian, Origen, Cyprian, Arnobius, and Lactantius, all speak of the irreducible relationship between love of enemy and the Christian call to nonviolence. Love of enemy, insisted Tertullian, is a peculiar idiom found among Christians alone and it separates them from all other people.

We need to note, however, that neither Justin's argument nor that of the other early Christian writers, was one of passive acceptance of the pepromenon, a fatalism that acquiesced to fate at the hands of an omnipotent state. If interpreted as such, Christian pacifism loses its scriptural underpinnings and ignores the fact that Jesus called His disciples engage in active peace-making. The scriptural call to nonviolence locates the positive call to love -- especially the enemy -- at the nonnegotiable center of the Christian message. This reversal of power that originates voluntarily from the one in the perceived position of weakness, and is directed toward the strong, is expressed in the form of prayer for one's persecutor and aims to bring the enemy into Christian communion (cf. Rom 12:21)....  Christians do not kill or participate in war because the rule of Christ demands otherwise. In the fourth century, Lactantius put it this way:

When God forbids killing, He doesn't just ban murder, which is not permitted under the law [of men] even; He is also forbidding to us to do certain things which are treated as lawful among men.  A just man may not be a soldier (since justice itself is his form of service), nor may he put anyone on a capital charge: whether you kill a man with a sword or a speech makes no difference, since killing itself is banned. In this commandment of God no exception at all should be made: killing a human being is always wrong because it is God's will for man to be a sacred creature.  (pp 52-53)

Today, we commit murder all too often with speeches and writings. Not literally, but in the spirit of "he who is angry with his brother will be liable to the judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, 'You fool!' will be liable to the hell of fire," and also "What causes quarrels and fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder."

How is it today that we think we can treat the diversity among our own brotherhood so scornfully, while maybe even simultaneously becoming convinced to treat a God-hating tyrant with calm self-sacrificing respect?  How is it today that we can treat a tribe of naked, spearing headhunters on the opposite side of the world with more grace and patience than the we show to the church of a different denomination right next door?  Yes, yes, I know they aren't correct about doctrine X.  But does that justify your anger and insults and haughtiness?  Surely not.

How did we get this way?  We've hinted at it before, but Lactantius himself provides a big clue that we will look at next time.

Aborting an Abortion: A Martyr's Life

There is a certain blog I occasionally visit because it is sometimes good, sometimes troubling, and always very honest.

A few years ago, I was troubled by one post and its subsequent discussions. Seems a seasoned, well-known mega-pastor in the western U.S. took a call on his radio program from a young woman seeking advice on going through with an abortion. She was carrying conjoined twins who shared the same body but had two heads. The doctors had advised abortion because of the high risk of complications and because such children rarely live for more than a day outside the womb. After hearing the situation, the pastor assured the woman that if she were to choose abortion the Lord would not condemn her. Something of an online war ensued about the pastor's counsel.

Some commenters on that particular blog thread claimed "This abortion can be justified using the self-defense argument," while others made strict pro-life arguments that condemned the woman and pastor, while still others had nothing more to say than "The Bible is silent here."

One pastor commenting in the discussion thread wrote something like, "Given the difficulty of her plight, I have no specific Biblical counsel to offer her." But he went far enough to say that if she were in his congregation, he promised "love and compassion" and he wouldn't permit anyone to condemn her for having an abortion. When I read that, I felt that he was probably using the term "condemn" with little if any differentiation from "rebuke" and "reprove." I marvel that the notions of Biblical rebuke and reproof are often presented as the opposites of love and compassion. Yes, we all know that church can be notorious for self-righteous judges and prideful condemnations. But this commenter was a pastor who would have nothing to do with loving her enough to rebuke and reprove her in Christ. Much more needs to be done to correct the "fire-at-will" crowd than to command a congregation to say nothing at all in opposition to her choice. But that issue is not what I am treating here. (But for future reference, that same pastor in the comments section is known to have a particular doctrinal affinity for theologian Ben Witherington, whom I plan to quote in a future post).

Back on topic, I think the comments in that discussion are partly a symptom of our overt short-sightedness as a whole. Part of what helped me to see it that way were some statements I read a short time later in William Gurnall's devotional, "The Christian in Complete Armor." For example:

Temptation is never stronger than when relief seems to dress itself in the very sin that Satan is suggesting.  [As in "abort the twins" or "eat the pork" or "curse the name"?]

And again,

 Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Of all his plots, this is perhaps the most dangerous to the saints, when he appears in the mantle of a prophet and silver-plates his corroded tongue with fair-sounding language. In this manner, he corrupts some in their judgment by interpreting gospel truth in such a way that God appears to condone questionable behavior. These Christians get caught up in the world's morality under the disguise of Christian liberty....  How we need to study the Scriptures, our hearts, and Satan's wiles, that we may not bid this enemy welcome and all the while think it is Christ who is our guest!  [Christ has no rebuke of your abortion. Your circumstances exempt you. Divine justice will excuse you for fearing the doctor when you are under compulsion (4 Maccabees 8:22).]

And again,

Some martyrs have confessed that their hardest work was to overcome the prayers and tears of their friends and relatives. Paul himself expressed those same feelings when he said, "What mean ye to weep and to break mine heart? For I am ready, not to be bound only but also to die at Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus!"  [I am ready, not only to live destitute for this child, but also to die in the hospital for him as a demonstration of the grace of the Lord Jesus!]

What I saw was that the twins' mom wasn't thinking, "Dying (figuratively or literally) for these twins is the most Christlike and God-rewardable thing I can do, as a testimony to the greatness of the name of Him whose love compels me."  The commenters on that blog weren't thinking this way either. And I don't think this way either.  That must change!

Can you, can I, can the twins' mom say,

"O Lord God Almighty, I bless You because You have considered me worthy of this needy child by whom I will likely be exhausted of everything I am and have, so that I might receive a place of 'martyrdom' in the cup of Your Christ"?

Or say,

"God has judged me worthy to be found with this child. It is good to be setting from this world to God, in order that I may rise to Him"?

Or say,

"I know that many have lived destitute lives so that they might ransom others. I will do so for my baby"?

If God works all things together for the good of His people, and if He works all of our weakenings together for our strength, then all things should be viewed as happening for our faith. And suffering with faith is suffering for your faith:  a daily martyrdom grounded in loyal adoration of our sovereign God, even in the bitter providences. Especially in the bitter providences. Call it a martyr's life.