Progress and
Regress in the Early Church
Jason
S. Heath
Michael
Green’s book Evangelism in the Early Church highlights a
leap forward and a fall backward in the apostolic and post-apostolic
church that are very instructive for us today.
The former is greatly needed in our day and age, the latter
is something we must guard against at all costs.
Progress
in Communicating the Gospel
The
leap forward is the “translation” work that was done to make the
Jewish context of the person and work of Jesus meaningful to a pagan
world as the gospel spread. Jesus’
identity was couched for a Jewish audience in the preaching of the
early chapters of Acts in Jewish terms – he was the Messiah,
God’s Anointed, who came in fulfillment of the promises given in
Scripture. Hence early Christian apologetic in the Jewish milieu draws
heavily upon the Old Testament.
However,
as the gospel began to reach pagans, these appeals might as well
have been in Chinese: the pure pagan, without any association with
the synagogue, had entirely different categories for his conception
of God. Appeals to the
Old Testament carried no weight with him – similar to the
unchurched person today. Their
categories were drawn from several sources: the state cult, the
ancient philosophers, and the mystery religions.
Desiring
to communicate to people in the language they spoke, we find Paul
particularly fitting the implications of the coming of Christ into
new language familiar to his audience. Paul quotes the Greek poets
and emphasizes facets of Jesus’ work that resonated with the Roman
world: soteria (salvation), huiothesia (adoption), apolutrosis
(redemption). Conversely
other ideas are de-emphasized: the “kingdom of God” for
instance, or the title “Messiah” – Christos becomes
virtually a surname for Jesus in the pagan world.
The underlying concepts however do not disappear, but are
re-encoded into a vocabulary fitting the ears of those to whom they
are presented.
This
approach is not without danger, as Green
observes in the problem of the Logos concept being identified
too closely with Christ, resulting in an impoverished understanding
of Christ as impersonal Reason.
But, says Green,
The
risk was worth taking, even though it was fraught with many
disasters. Of course
it was worthwhile, otherwise Gentile Christianity would have
perished as Jewish Christianity did….If Christ is for all men,
then evangelists must run the risk of being misunderstood, of
misunderstanding elements in the gospel themselves, of losing out on
the transposition of parts of the message so long as they bear
witness to him. (171)
In
our day, so far removed from the world of the Bible, how are we to
navigate these perilous waters, between a “faithfulness” to the
original meaning that bears no relevance and a creative
reinterpretation that loses the full power and reality of truth in
translation? This
challenge demands from the Christian communicator several things:
-
A critical engagement of the “pagan” world of our day
– both in media and in personal friendships with real non-christians.
When Paul was in Athens, his eyes and ears were attuned to the
religious “atmosphere” of the city, resulting in 1) his being
“greatly distressed” (as opposed to apathetic disengagement) and
2) his observations providing the bridge into the world of his
audience in the form of the altar to the “unknown God”.
But this keen observation must be personal too, drawing upon
our conversations with real people and their real beliefs.
What is it our pagan friends long for?
What emptiness in the modern world do they feel most acutely
that the gospel satisfies? What concepts does our world misunderstand (Hallmark card
“inspiration” of the bible, Christ’s death as merely an
example), which may require more patient and thorough explanation on
our part?
-
Expository preaching – The “whole counsel of God”
needs to be kept as an anchor stabilizing the message as it is
communicated in new creative ways.
Most heresies are not blatant falsehoods but subtle emphasis of
what is peripheral and playing down what is central (e.g. liberal
focus on social aspects of gospel, fundy “majoring in the
minors”). Teaching
straight through the text of a book will let the text control what is
emphasized – providing hermeneutical control to our translation work
and preventing us from skipping difficult areas (e.g. judgment, call
to “count the cost” in discipleship) that are not easily heard in
our age.
-
Creativity in communication – If the two points above
are the “two worlds” that we must bridge between, creative
expression is the tool that we use to forge the link.
The word “creativity” sends shivers up the spines of the
more conservative, fearing that it will inexorably lead to perversion
of doctrine. Hence it is probably underemphasized as a tool of
“translation”. Where
it is utilized in modern preaching, it means the cute story tacked
onto a sermon, unrelated to the text, that makes the audience laugh.
Here we are taking it as the next step following the serious
exegesis of the second point above.
When utilized properly in this role, it concretizes the meaning
of what would otherwise remain mysterious, and does so in a memorable
way, while remaining faithful to the biblical concept.
A good example are McCallum’s illustrations in “Walking in
Victory”. His illustration of failure to “present yourselves to God
as those who have been brought from death to life” (Rom. 6:13) as
the man freed from prison who is still defecating in the wastebasket
and scratching his remaining number of days in the wall is an
excellent example of creativity that is memorable, understandable, and
faithful to the idea behind the text.
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