Christianity THEN versus Christianity NOW!
HOW MARCUS BECAME A CHRISTIAN IN 90 A.D.
In what follows I will be describing one imaginary but realistic scenario about a person becoming a Christian in the first decades of the apostolic era: how they came to believe that Jesus was God’s eternally divine Son, along with what decisions, events, and experiences they underwent. There is no place in the New Testament that describes such a scenario for ALL that an individual actually did go through, so this story is based upon collecting the various teachings, events, and experiences that ARE described within it. I have studied the pre-Nicene Church in considerable detail for decades, so I am not conjuring up this description in my imagination.
One of the purposes for doing this is to show what Jesus intended and effectively created what HE called “Kingdom of God” Christianity, the only form of Christianity that has a right to the name! Another purpose is to show the contrast between HIS version of “Christianity” and the variety of alternate, lesser versions of “Christianity” that have come down to us today. While all of us are so often engaged in comparing ourselves against the “other guy’s” denomination or congregation, it seldom occurs to us that God may be giving all of us the same “F” on our report cards, because He compares us against HIS standard for “Church” as He described within the New Testament.
We will call our imaginary man “Marcus.” Marcus was a citizen of Ephesus, and the year was 90 A.D. He and his family, like many in Ephesus, were devoted to the goddess Artemis. Marcus was an intelligent carpenter but not well heavily engaged in the philosophical schools and debates of his day. As a result, he was just an ordinary skillful carpenter who did not look for hidden exotic meanings in what people said or wrote. Like any other carpenter, he just assumed that the words you used were the words you MEANT to use, and that they meant what most people mean by them. There had been Christians in Ephesus for almost 40 years, many or most of whom could still remember Paul, that apostle of Jesus who had brought the Message of Jesus to them. Some of them Marcus knew or had done work for. Their religion was controversial, but Marcus had no complaints about them as clients for whom he had worked. Through conversations with several of them he learned about a strange new depth in the kind of exclusive relationship they had with their god, a god who was not part of a hierarchy of gods such as he was accustomed to worshiping and sacrificing, a god who was more austere yet more kind and generous than any he had ever heard of. Their weekly meetings on his “day of the Sun God Hellios” went on for hours, but anyone was invited to the first half, where instructions and ALL sorts of activity could occur; many sick and disturbed people were also brought and healed in the name of their leader Jesus. During the second half of that meeting they had a very special and sacred meal at which only those who were pledged to follow him could take part. So, he accepted their invitation to attend the first part of one of their meetings; and that “one” meeting kept on repeating until he wound up becoming a baptized Christian! From New Testament descriptions, we cannot know in detail how much all of the teachings in the New Testament were taught to all converts by the time of their baptism. It is likely that some “catechumens” received more of them and some less. But for the purpose of this imaginary example Marcus is going to receive probably more than usual, because the New Testament reflects ALL of the teachings that were eventually taught to ALL disciples of Jesus.
A serious student of pre-Nicene Church history can detect that as the centuries passed, the total “package” of what was defined as orthodox Christian theology gradually became more and more complicated and nuanced, partly to react against teachers who added to the apostles’ teachings things that twisted them, but partly because of the curiosity endemic among highly intelligent people to “dot an ‘I’” and “cross a ‘t’” that Jesus, His apostles, and their first student teachers never felt the need to dot and cross and debate. In the early post-apostolic era what was taught was pretty much limited to what had been written down within the apostolic writings, which was all that Jesus and His Holy Spirit had felt the need to give to His apostolic teachers to understand, experience, and pass on through the inner tutelage of the Spirit, “who will teach you all things and remind you of EVERYTHING I said to you” (John 14:26). We can safely assume that the “EVERYTHING” that our brilliant and proactive Creator had mentioned He also made sure was written down for those generations that were to follow. And those early Spirit-experienced apostolic era teachers had minds that thought and interpreted the apostolic teachings in the same way that Marcus did: written communications pretty much meant what they SEEMED to mean to the average person!
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Marcus learned from them at his meetings that Jesus had taught them, “do NOT resist the evildoer; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also.” And he learned from them that Jesus had wanted His disciples to obey that teaching in the literal and good-willed way that He Himself had taught and then personally modeled it for them. When Marcus had expressed his awe and shock at a teaching that seemed to leave you utterly defenseless, they reminded him that the Spirit that had come upon them when they were baptized had inwardly assured them of another thing that Jesus had promised as a complement to that shocking challenge: other teachings such as, “With men it IS impossible, but not with God; for with God ALL things are possible”; “… no one arrested Him, because ’His TIME’ had not yet come.” They taught the story about various times such as how, “…all the people in the synagogue were filled with rage as they heard these things; and they got up and drove Him out of the city, and brought Him to the crest of the hill on which their city had been built, so that they could throw Him down from the cliff. BUT He passed through their midst and went on His way.” Between their confidence in Jesus and the assurance that His Pentecostal Spirit had given them, they knew that their Father in Heaven would guard them also in the same way until it was time to bring glory to Him in their deaths! For a disciple who was in that covenant into which Jesus had called him, it is GOD who has “determined our preappointed times and boundaries,” and you need have no worries about any circumstantial causes! You can imagine the dramatic effect that their testimonies had upon Marcus: neither his goddess Artemis nor any of the others in their Greek Pantheon EVER treated their devotees in such ways nor inspired SUCH radical devotion as the god of these Christians. He knew many Jews, and they sure did not act the way that these Christians did, nor cling to their lives and possessions in the shockingly loose ways that they did!
As Marcus listened to their many stories about Jesus and to their readings of the apostolic writings, he learned that they were committed to believe all that had been written in the same grammatically natural and literal way that we all use when reading any serious factual literature: words mean what they SEEM to mean, IF you are ready to obey them! Neither Jesus nor His apostles inserted the vagueness into their commands and promises that the Oracles of Delphi always inserted into their “revelations” – so that their “divine oracles” could never be seen to have failed when their proclamation turned out to disappoint the person who had paid so handsomely to get a god to say what they wanted to hear! Jesus had clearly stated over and over again that the way to “eternal life” that He taught was both difficult and unattractive to the great majority of human beings. He clearly was not a people pleaser who wanted to get as many people to “sign up” as He could get!
Jesus, Marcus learned, commanded that His disciples maintain an exceedingly loose hold on virtually EVERYTHING that Marcus had been taught to hold dear: “Give to those who ask of you…!”, “when you give to the poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing” was a form of suicide of one’s ego. None of his gods and goddesses had come anywhere near the idealism of their Jesus, in saying things like, “Do not worry then, saying, ‘What are we to eat?’ or ‘What are we to drink?’ or ‘What are we to wear for clothing?’ For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first HIS kingdom and HIS righteousness, and all these things WILL provided to you.” This Jesus did not mince his words: no matter how bold, how “ego threatening,” or how difficult to understand His words might be, He commands and promises clearly always meant what they SEEMED to be saying, no matter how very shocking He had to know what their impact would be. Some things that He said might not be immediately understandable because they were SO profound that it would take much serious meditation to understand what He meant. But His commands and promises would always wind up meaning some serious, deep and literal version of the words that He chose to use. He spoke with great care and picturesque details – unlike the supposedly wise philosophers whom Marcus was used to hearing, and more like the great scientists that made the Greeks famous throughout the world! He did not merely say generalities like, “Be fair with those who hate you.” Instead, He painted a picture of what to do SPECIFICALLY when that enemy physically struck you, and then let you figure out that it was also a principle that applied even to non-physical assaults!
They told him that Jesus had said, “The person who has seen me has seen the Father! … Do you not believe that I am IN the Father, and the Father is IN me?” To Marcus that was as bold and dangerous as if he were to say in the hearing of the very jealous and quick-to-punish Zeus, “He who has seen me HAS seen Zeus; Zeus and I are ONE!” But these Christians knew that what Jesus had wanted to communicate from His mind and heart came out perfectly through the actual words that He had chosen to use. And He clearly inspired His disciples to communicate in the same way, the way that carpenters thought and spoke and admired!
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They told Marcus about the time that Jesus told them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation. The one who has believed AND has been baptized will be saved; but the one who has not believed will be condemned.” They had already begun to invade “all the world” with His teachings, commands, and promises, and the story of how He had demonstrated the truth and authority of ALL that He had said and done by coming back from death in the very same body that they had rejected and murdered, and His promise that all who trusted Him enough to become His disciple would become beloved children of His Father in Heaven and be changed over time by Him so that eventually they actually “will BE like Him, because we will SEE Him JUST as He is.” Something happened with Marcus when he heard them proclaim that amazing promise. This Jesus, who was so intense and extremely truthful, brave, deep, and frank just had to also be offering to HIM what all these Christians had already accepted and upon which they staked their eternity. HE was BEING called by their God’s Holy Spirit, and He now believed that Jesus was who He had claimed to be and that he would be loyal to Him!
Marcus was taught about this immersion in water by them, that it was the way that God had appointed for them to fulfill His promise, that, “if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the MOUTH confession is made UNTO SALVATION.” And it was in that watery immersion where that God-created faith was confessed unto salvation! That is why Peter had declared that, “… BAPTISM now saves you–not the removal of dirt from the flesh, but an appeal to God for a good conscience–through the resurrection of Jesus Christ!” The place where you make that confession with your mouth that brings you into His new covenant of salvation is at that watery immersion, a “burial,” Paul had called it (Romans 6:4) – not because of some magical quality in the water that can only remove dirt from the flesh, but because of His covenant-making command and promise! Marcus accepted what ALL apostolic and ancient Christians believed and received with great confidence and hope: that once they fulfilled PETER’S version of that baptismal immersion they were “regenerated,” “born again,” and “saved” by God Himself! Within another two centuries, those later “highly learned” leaders – who were seemingly discovering things that were now approved and required by God that Peter and Paul had never thought of or chose to say – started to apply that apostolic “baptism which saves” to tiny human beings who were in no way capable of confessing ANYTHING, let alone confessing THEIR “faith that leads to righteousness,” and capable of forming a personal decision to become a disciple of His teachings, AS JESUS HAD STATED AND MODELED THOSE TEACHINGS! Another “spirit” than the one who was Holy was starting to repeat to them what had worked so well for him in the beginning: “HATH God indeed said…”! But let’s stick with the period in question, when HIS apostolic Churches had felt no need of being “improved upon” or “matured” by the leaders of His Church.
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Marcus’s apostolically taught and discipled teachers had also told Him about an event they had all been promised and – because no one had yet poisoned them against that promise – all had individually experienced: His Pentecostal promise, about which He had talked in some detail in John 14:16ff and 15:26ff. And Jesus had gone on later to get more specific about that coming event, how it makes you an ANOINTED disciple who now has the same Spirit inside of you – spirit and soul AND body – that had come into Him at His baptismal immersion:
“These signs will accompany those who have believed: in My name they will cast out demons, they will speak with new tongues, they will pick up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing it will not harm them; they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover” (Mark 16:17-18).
The only one of Jesus’s promises that they had originally found somewhat confusing was about that “picking up serpents.” But then the story of what had happened between Paul and that “viper” in Malta (Acts 28) started circulating and the mystery was cleared up!
They had also described to Marcus the variety of occasions described within the Book of Acts (chapters 2, 8, 9, 10, and 19), about the different ways that God’s Holy Spirit was given, but which demonstrate that this Pentecostal event was and always will be promised to, and required of, ALL who become His children! For example, the way that the believing and baptized Samaritan disciples had not received His Holy Spirit for some weeks after they had become apostolic Christians (Acts 8:14-17) proved that not all true disciples have experientially received Him simply BECAUSE they have believed in Jesus and have been baptized into Christ! It was much easier for Marcus to accept and have confidence in that Pentecostal promise than it became centuries later, because no one had yet arisen in the Church to sow faith-destroying doubts about His promise. So, when he was baptized into Christ the Promise of the event was not unexpected, even though the actual experience could not have been properly even IMAGINED prior to the occurrence of that event for him! When he was gathered to with a group of new believers, that invisible presence and power of God filled everything that constituted the man “Marcus” – his spirit and soul and body! And out of the abundance of his heart came some joyous words of worship that he could understand, mixed with some that he could not!
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And now that Marcus had been baptized into Christ, and had personally “received” His Holy Spirit in the way that the apostle Peter had said that he also had “received” His Spirit (e.g., Acts 10:47, 8:17) – now that he was a “brother in Christ” he was invited to share in that “breaking of bread,” “Lord’s Supper,” “Eucharist,” that every congregation regularly celebrated EVERY Lord’s Day (Acts 20:7). He was taught what the risen and glorified Jesus had taught them about what occurred in that eating of the bread and drinking of the wine over which their thanksgiving had been given to God. Jesus said that “This [bread] IS my body… this [wine] IS my blood” – another one of those deep sayings of His that surely had to mean some real version of what it SEEMED to be saying, but which was deeper than could be readily understood. However, if – as He had said – it was literally true that if you saw Him, then you were also seeing His Father, then that statement about “this IS my body… blood” also had to be as literally true AS STATED BY JESUS, even if you cannot wrap your mind around that mystery yet! Some things you have to believe and experience before they “make sense” to you, and this was clearly one of them! (Imagine trying to IMAGINE what it was going to “feel like” having 120 volts of electricity shock your body prior to the experience!) And Marcus’s ability to trust that His words were true even when not yet understandable had been greatly enhanced by His experience with his believing and then experientially receiving His Holy Spirit! That new indwelling Spirit of God said His “amen” inside of Marcus as he came to understand that in their sacred Eucharistic gathering one of the promises that Jesus had given them was being fulfilled: “Where there are two or three gathered together into my name, there I am IN their midst!” And in the EATING of that consecrated bread and wine He was experiencing the fulfillment of some promises given to those whom God calls: “Christ IN you, the hope of glory,” and, “If anyone loves Me, he will follow My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our DWELLING with him;” and “In that day you will know that I am IN my Father, and you IN me, and I IN you” – LITERALLY “IN” you! For Marcus and these early brethren, even though Jesus was not visibly present He was most certainly experientially and powerfully present through the supernatural “magic” of His Holy and Pentecostal Spirit!
For Jesus, for His apostles, and for those first generations of Christians, when they read those occurrences of the term “dwelling in YOU” they knew it meant ALL that “you” exist as: spirit and soul AND body; to be “in you” includes your visible, tangible, “feelable” body along with your invisible spirit and soul! His Pentecostal Spirit fills ALL of “you,” and His risen and glorified “body and blood” nourished and became one with ALL of “you” – spirit and soul AND body! In those early days, it was only the Gnostic “Christians” who were so resistant to your body being inherently connected to “you”! Much of later Protestantism has developed a tinge of that gnostic distaste for things “physical” being allowed to mingle with what is called “spiritual.” But from the very beginning of apostolic Christianity, like the Judaism that Jesus felt at home with, has always been expressed sacramentally, where God associates His promises and commands with physical things and symbolic actions: verbal confessions and watery immersions associated with entrance into His salvation, “tongues of angels” (1 Corinthians 13:1) associated with the Spirit’s reception, anointing with oil and/or imposition of hands connected with prayers for healing and ordinations, fasting from food and bodily prostrations connected with praying, baptism into Christ being likened to burial under the earth. For APOSTOLIC Christianity, and even much later, “Christ IN you” was always taken quite literally and comprehensively until much of Protestantism “threw out the baby along with the dirty bathwater,” in their zeal to discredit the Roman teaching of “transubstantiation” – that in the consecrated bread and wine the “substance” of the risen body and blood of Jesus actually replaces the “substance” of the bread and wine. Doctrinally, that Roman teaching is unauthorized “overkill,” but the various Protestant ways of crudely or subtly attacking the Roman doctrine actually eliminate the possibility of personally experiencing both the glorious presence of Jesus among them in the Supper and the intimacy of full union with Him in the eating of what He declare to be “My body” and “My blood”! Jesus’s commands and promises mean what they SEEM to be commanding and promising!!!
As I wrote in my catechetical Blueprint For A Revolution: Building Upon ALL Of The New Testament:
“Perhaps it is because the glorified Christ is the food of the whole man that Ignatius (c. 110 A.D.) called the Eucharist the “medicine of immortality and the antidote that we should not die but live forever in Jesus Christ.” And for this same reason, Irenaeus (c. 180 A.D.) reported that orthodox Christianity was in the practice of “announcing consistently the fellowship and union of the flesh and Spirit;” just as the Eucharist consists of two realities – an earthly and a heavenly – “so also our bodies, when they receive the Eucharist, are no longer corruptible, having the hope of the resurrection to eternity.”
“Is it not obvious to you, fellow pilgrim, that the anti-sacramentalism of much of Protestantism is rooted more in emotional reactions from the Reformation past than it is in the revelation of God?”
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Because he was now participating in Christ’s Church from the inside, Marcus soon realized that his brotherhood was not just another “religion” such as most of the citizens of Ephesus were very familiar with. He was not even a member of what the rebellious world calls “religion;” he was a citizen member of an entirely different DIMENSION, and an organic member of a body that was COSMIC! The “world” and its supposed valuable wisdom that Marcus and his fellow Ephesians knew had been turned upside down by these Spirit-filled and Spirit-guided followers of Jesus. They so often embraced what the world’s citizens ran away from! And they did not merely protest the violence that is in the Ephesian’s “world;” they CREATED a gentle “world.” They did not merely protest the greed and poverty that is in the Ephesian’s “world;” they CREATED and lived within a radically generous “world.” They did not merely protest the causes of immorality that is in the Ephesian’s “world;” they CREATED and lived within a pure and innocent “world.” The Ephesians’ beloved Greek philosopher, Plato could only IMAGINE a utopian society, that “Kallipolis” (“Beautiful” + “City”), which he described in his work “The Republic.” But that Holy Spirit from Jesus was inspiring these childlike Christians in actually BUILDING one right in Ephesus! He had even given it a special name, “the Kingdom of Heaven” and “the Kingdom of God” – the actual dimension and way of life that exists in Heaven under the benevolent rule of God, brought down by Jesus to planet Earth! No wonder that it was impossible to know the real Jesus without considering Him to be either demonic or divine! And it is no wonder that his Christian disciples that had become filled by the same Spirit that motivated Him also inspired the same kind of mutually exclusive reactions. SOMEBODY’S “world” is insane, and Marcus had come to believe that he would rather have his previous Ephesian world judge him as “insane” by their twisted world’s standards than not live within the world that Jesus had created for these childlike, trusting, Spirit-anointed, disciplined, generous, simple, pure-hearted creatures that formed the nuclear center of his new “world.”
That godly “world” naturally had a number of “newbies” like him, who were still liable to fall now and then back into some of the instincts that used to consistently rule him. But those who were considered “mature” among them made Plato’s supposed wisdom and intelligence seem like the revered man was merely acting like the many silly children who can IMAGINE living on the planet Krypton! Marcus was not mature yet – not fully – but he was now being nourished by God’s “solid food that is for the mature, those who by habitual use have trained their senses to distinguish good from bad.”
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CONCLUSION:
Later forms of evolved Christianity would slowly drift away from the grammatically natural and literal way that His apostolic fishermen, farmers, and carpenters were trained by His Spirit to read the teachings, commands, and promises that His apostles wrote. And this drifting was not the result of a mere misunderstanding of grammatical rules, but because the original way of understanding them were found to restrict that desired evolution that was happening among them, an evolution that would convert a separated nation of disciples who gladly yielded to each and every teaching, command and promise of Jesus, into a worldly “religious” group that would be thought of by their new worldly secular “partners” as a source of God’s blessing upon that supposedly “Christian empire,” (and later “Christian nations”), virtually ALL of whose citizenry could quite easily be members of both “church” and “Christian nation” without actually being true “disciples” of Jesus, as an original Christian and their Master would have defined and accepted them! Without knowing what they were choosing, those Christian leaders were allowing Satan himself, who is the “god of this world” and “ruler of this world” over each and EVERY nation, and empire – including those who claim to be “Christian” or even “FOUNDED upon Judeo-Christian principles – allowing Satan to have legal but unseen access to congregational debates, discussions and decisions, without even having to reveal himself to them as an actual demon, heretic, or other undesirable creature!
A brand-new phase of Christian Church history would now begin! Consequently, a new form of “WORLDLY ‘Christian’” now feeling at home in one of this world’s nations would be able “with God’s approval” join his fellow worldly citizens in warring against and killing his nation’s enemies as well as both the real and the “WORLDLY ‘Christians’” in that nation!
I have only touched upon a few of the numerous important differences between Marcus’s “Christian Church” and those of ours which have all too often merely borrowed the same name but are not living in, and living out, the same FUNCTIONAL reality of “Christian.” If you have learned to read the New Testament in the way that it was written to be understood – in the simple, direct, and frank manner that is normal among fishermen, farmers, and carpenters who have also surrendered to Jesus without qualifications or conditions and have thus actually EXPERIENCED His promised Spirit’s falling and filling and guiding – if that has been your experience then none of this will feel wrong, even if it does feel strange, in the way it did initially to Marcus!
What is the “Church” that consumes YOUR loyalty, the “Church” that is worth consecrating your future to take part in creating it? What is YOUR way of understanding the “Word of God” that was so clear and demanded fulfillment back in 90 A.D., but has become so cloudy, confusing, and full of “impractical” idealism by contemporary versions of “Christian Church.” Such “churches” have had to re-edit the MEANING of the New Testament words since ecclesiastical tradition requires that they stick with the actual words contained within it?
Why not read the famous Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-28). But instead of those “talents” being generous gifts of money, consider each talent as one of the wonderful promises and commands that Jesus had given to the true Christians of those apostolic days – things like the life-changing conversion into a “little child” relationship with Jesus that holds nothing back from your loyalty to Jesus; and the comforting watery immersion which gives assurance from HIM that your sins are totally washed away and that you are His covenanted child; and the Spirit-inspired non-violent gentleness that is the way of life within His Kingdom of God; and the supernatural miraculous Presence and total union with Jesus being offered in His Supper; and the experienced entrance and continuing powerful Presence of the very same Spirit that He had received when He was baptized; and incorporation into a God-created society that is a functioning initiation into the holy Presence, generosity, security, tenderness, justice, and glory that will be lived out in perfection for all eternity in His “new heaven and earth”!
Think of each one of those realities as one of the talents in His Parable, and the “ten talents” being the embodiment of ALL the richness that He had created in HIS version of what He had called, “My Church.” Consider the joy that He manifested toward those Churches who built with all ten talents. Then meditate upon Jesus’s attitude and treatment toward those Churches who did NOT consecrate themselves to wholeheartedly building with all that He had given them. “But his lord answered and said to him, ‘You wicked and lazy servant, you knew that I reap where I have not sown, and gather where I have not scattered seed? So you ought to have deposited my money with the bankers, and at my coming I would have received back my own with interest. Therefore take the talent from him, and give it to him who has ten talents” (Matthew 25:26-28). For some centuries His Churches were rather rich in the possession and use of His Spirit-created “talents.” But in later times – continuing right up to now – most Churches that think that they are the spiritual descendants of those apostolic brotherhoods, are rarely in possession of even one or two of those “talents.” But instead of feeling ashamed and repenting over our spiritual poverty when comparing ourselves to God’s Word, we justify our poverty by comparing ourselves to the more or less equally impoverished denominations and congregations within contemporary Christianity and assume that God judges with some kind of “academic curve,” so that we will hopefully get some kind of “passing grade” from God. But as that parable demonstrates, Jesus is not nearly as much of a “bleeding heart” push-over toward those who have used their clever theological “erasers” to wipe out what He considers essential tools in His mission to “destroy the works of the devil” as well as to enable those who claim to be His children to actually experientially know the meaning of “Christ IN you, the hope of glory”!
AMEN?
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