Guns And Athenagoras: Inverting The Order (part six)

Quoting from:

http://www.npr.org/2014/03/10/287311237/kentucky-southern-baptists-draw-crowds-with-gun-giveaways

That article provides an example of a church appealing to people's self-empowerment drives, and calling it evangelism. 

It's an hour before suppertime, and the line outside Lone Oak First Baptist Church in Paducah, Ky., is wrapped around the building. The people are waiting for more than a Bible sermon; there's a raffle tonight. Twenty-five guns are up for grabs.

There's nothing new about gun raffles in Kentucky, even at a church. Last year, there were 50 events like this one in the state. The Kentucky Baptist Convention says it's a surefire way to get new people through church doors....

In attendance is Tom Jackson, who's not a particularly regular churchgoer. "I do believe in God and I do believe in living the way that he wants you to live, let's put it like that," he says.

Jackson says he believes in turning the other cheek, but also in the right to defend himself and his family how he sees fit. You can turn the other cheek, he says, only to a point.

"[If] somebody kicks your door down, means to hurt your wife, your kids, you — how do you turn the other cheek to that?" Jackson asks.

"Turn the other cheek, only to a point."  I don't recall that being the theme of Christlike response to abuse and threats.  And back when Judas led to Gethsemane the Roman soldiers who kicked down the door with intent to hurt Jesus, the one man who fought back was rebuked by Jesus.

The early churches, who faced real kick-the-door-in mobs as well as hateful magistrates and emperors, provide us with a refreshingly different but very difficult answer to Jackson’s question, “How do you turn the other cheek to that?”

Let’s return to the Epistle of Diognetus for help first, then I will introduce a new early church writer.

Christians are in the flesh, but they do not live according to the flesh [so much for shooting people]. They live on earth, but their citizenship is in heaven [if they don’t take up arms for Lord Jesus (do medieval crusaders get some exemption?), why would they take up arms for Lord Caesar?]… They love everyone, and by everyone they are persecuted [they don’t shoot them].  They are unknown, yet they are condemned; they are put to death [they don’t shoot back], yet they are brought to life…  They are dishonored, yet they are glorified in their dishonor [glorified by God, not by Smith and Wesson].  They are cursed, yet they bless; they are insulted, yet they offer respect [they don’t get even].  For doing good, they are treated like evildoers [they don’t pull the trigger]….  Epistle to Diognetus 5:9-16a

The author then moves into a lengthy analogy, which I think is very relevant to provide:

In a word, what the soul is to the body, Christians are to the world. The soul is dispersed through all the members of the body, and Christians throughout the cities of the world. The soul dwells in the body, but is not of the body; likewise Christians dwell in the world, but are not of the world. The soul, which is invisible, is confined in the body which is visible; in the same way, Christians are recognized as being in the world, and yet their religion remains invisible. The flesh hates the soul and wages war against it (even though it has suffered no wrong) because it is hindered from indulging in its pleasures; so also, the world hates the Christians (even though it has suffered no wrong) because they set themselves against its pleasures. The soul loves the flesh that hates it, and Christians love those who hate them [love is not expressed with gunfire]…. The soul, which is immortal, lives in a mortal dwelling; similarly Christians live as strangers amid perishable things, while waiting for the imperishable in heaven. The soul, when poorly treated with respect to food and drink, becomes all the better; and so the Christians when punished daily [by someone kicking in the door looking to cause harm] increase more and more. Such is the important position to which God has appointed them, and it is not right for them to decline it [it is not right for them to shoot].  Epistle to Diognetus 6

The entire feel, theme, intent, and message of the preceding words flies in the face of the idea that we turn the other cheek only to a point.

The new writer I will introduce is Athenagoras, who wrote Plea On Behalf of the Christians to the emperor around 177 AD.  After commending the emperor for allowing the multitude of religions in the empire (yet 200 years later Christians revoked that openness toward the others), he turns to making a plea for equal openness toward Christianity:

While admiring your mildness and gentleness and your peaceful and benevolent attitude towards all, everyone enjoys equal rights; and the cities, according to their rank, share in equal honor; and, through your wisdom, the whole empire enjoys profound peace.

But you have not cared for us who are called Christians in this way; and although we commit no wrong, but as it will be shown in this discourse we are of all people most piously and righteously disposed toward God and your reign, you allow us to be harassed, plundered, and persecuted – the mob making war upon us only because of our name….

The injury we suffer from our persecutors is not aimed merely at our money, or our civil rights, or our honor, or anything of less importance – after all, we hold these things in contempt (although they appear of great importance to the masses), for we have learned not only not to return blow for blow, or to bring to court those who plunder and rob us, but to those who strike us on the one cheek to offer the other, and to those who take away our shirt to give also our coat – for when we have given up our property, they plot against our very bodies and souls….  Plea On Behalf of the Christians 1:2b-4

These statements from among the great cloud of witnesses point so clearly to Christlikeness.

Compare them with the words of the main speaker at the gun raffle evangelism show:

"I brought a gun with me tonight," McAlister says. "I know that's very controversial."

...And he welcomes the controversy; the best seats in the house are reserved for reporters. On stage, he cocks what he calls his most valuable gun.

"There's no government on the face of this earth that has the right to take this gun from me," he says to thunderous applause.

The closing line of the article quotes the speaker's own justification of his message:

"If simply offering them an opportunity to win a gun allows them to come into the doors of the church and to hear that the church has a message that's relevant to their lives, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that," he says.

Your “relevant” message would have no relevance at all to a persecuted church, like those who lived and died the Christlike way 1900 years ago.  Your message feeds the virus of self-empowerment.

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.

Does Mark X the Spot?

Mark 16:18  ...they will pick up snakes in their hands, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them...

News spread several days ago that the "reality TV star" of a show about snake-handlers had died after being bitten by a snake during a religious meeting.  We looked up a few news videos about the fellow; he had been bitten several times in the past, and even lost a portion of a finger due to a snake bite.  He never sought treatment for the finger as it rotted on his hand, nor when it had finally broke off.  His wife insisted on keeping the finger chunk, and it was displayed proudly on camera to the reporter.

It reminded me of a quote from a preacher who was very influential to me early in my adulthood.  He would say, "You can take the Word of God and preach yourself."  Meaning:  using the Bible, a preacher can exalt himself and not God.  Such is epidemic these days, as selfish ambition and pride are at the root of many hearts.  It is not limited to snake handlers.  For my own purposes, I have labelled such things rather broadly by the term "self-empowerment."  Self-empowerment is an antonym of martyr cross racing, and I plan to blog a series of thoughts on it in the not too distant future.

But today, I want to point out that it is a fact, though not overly expressed in churches, that the oldest Greek manuscripts of Mark do not contain 16:9-20.  And further, the ending contained in verses 9-20 is not the only competing ending to Mark;  there are other different and somewhat shorter endings that are known to exist.  None of them have a strong case for being original.  In fact, it may be that 16:8 really is the final verse of Mark as originally written.  The Gospel of Mark has a theme known as "The Messianic Secret," mainly because Jesus is so often shushing people about his identity throughout the Gospel of Mark.  Ending his gospel with an empty tomb may have been Mark's stylistic intent; we just do not know for sure.  Possibly, as later scribes copied the gospel of Mark, and being confused that their source did not feature a post-resurrection appearance, a few scribes may have uniquely and individually scribbled in different conclusions to round out Mark to make it similar to the other three gospels.

Given that situation, why would a scribe include a line about taking up snakes and drinking poison?  I am suggesting two stories that would yield those scribal interpolations.

First, there is the account in Acts of Paul being bitten by a poisonous snake while assembling firewood, but being unharmed.  Notably, Acts does not mention that what had happened to Paul was a fulfillment of Jesus' words; therefore, it is possible that the story about Paul became the source of a later scribal interpolation to conclude Mark, namely, 16:9-20.

Secondly, among the Apostolic Fathers is a fellow named Papias, who lived roughly from 70-150 A.D.  He apparently wrote a five volume work on the sayings of Jesus that has since been lost to us, except for parts quoted by later ancient Christians. One such writer who quoted Papias was Eusebius, the church historian from the era of Constantine. Eusebius wrote:

"That Philip the apostle resided in Hierapolis with his daughters has already been stated, but now it must be pointed out that Papias, their [the daughters'] contemporary, recalls that he heard an amazing story from Philip's daughters. For he reports that in his day a man rose from the dead, and again another amazing story involving Justus, who was surnamed Barsabbas, who drank a deadly poison and yet by the grace of God suffered nothing unpleasant."

Notably again, there is no mention from Papias that this occasion fulfilled any words of Christ. Thus it is possible that this story in Papias' books was an inspiration for a later scribal interpolation known today as Mark 16:9-20.

What is further striking is that both the occasion of Paul being bitten, and the occasion of Justus swallowing poison, are accidental occasions.  It was not Justus' intent to drink poison, but miraculously by the grace of God he wasn't harmed.  It was a one time thing, just like Paul being bitten while assembling fire wood. If intentionally handling snakes and drinking poisons was normative and routine worship in the apostolic churches, Papias would not write about an "amazing story" handed down by word of mouth about how surviving poison graciously happened to one guy one time. 

Therefore, since these two stories are closely related to Mark 16:18, and both of these stories are about accidental, one-time occurrences, then the actions of intentionally and routinely handling snakes and drinking poisons in religious meetings -- and refusing medical care upon being bitten or overdosing -- is not even fairly defended by Mark 16:18.  It is much more akin to jumping from the pinnacle of the temple:  putting the Lord your God to the test.  The devil suggests that doing so will help your ministry grow and bring glory to God.  Jesus counters that it is a sin. 

Acts, Papias, and Mark together "X" out that interpretation, whether 16:9-20 is a scribal interpolation or not.  What we have instead, then, with snake-handling, is a drive for self-empowerment: taking the word of God and exalting yourself.

Don't get smug; "biblical" self-empowerment is expressed by you and me too.  Martyr cross racing is about putting it to death.