March 1995
Dear Co-laborer,
As you read this, d.v., I will be ministering in Southeast
Asia, spending time with men in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and
Philippines. I covet your prayer
for my time over there, that God will anoint, protect, and guide.
Eschatology, part
10
By the year 180 the tables had been turned on the Jews;
instead of their following Gentiles around, calling them heretics for not
adhering to Judaism, the Gentiles judged the Jews as heretics, something similar
to what Paul did in Gal 2:14f. The
Jews now became the enemy. They
were rejected of God. The Old
Testament was taken allegorically or figuratively.
If the spiritual interpretation of the OT was the correct one, then it
was always correct, and this is where the Jews went astray.
They took it literally. But
a literal interpretation is a spiritual interpretation, i.e., God never intended
the Bible to be understood literally. He
always meant His Word to be interpreted figuratively.
As noted in "eschatology, part 3," a figurative
document cannot be authoritative. If
the passage cannot be understood in its literal, grammatical sense, then who
decides its correct meaning? For
example, if I ask my son to stop by the store and buy milk en route home from
work, but I always speak in parables, then who decides what I mean by the
request?
It was precisely this question that faced the Church once
it embraced this convoluted hermeneutic. The
Church with her pope and bishops became the final court of appeal when they
spoke "ex cathedra."
Even with the reins of power firmly in their grasp, church
leadership still could not live with such appalling reasoning.
By the end of the third century the Church felt secure enough to distance
itself from Pauline anti-nomianism
as well as the forced logic of the earlier fathers who argued that the
figurative interpretation of the Old Testament was the literal one, and switched
to a partially literal interpretation of the Old Testament in order to
incorporate into the Church the laws and institutions of the Old Testament they
deemed appropriate.
The Church, however, maintained her anti-Semitic bias,
convinced that she was the true Israel. "...though
apparently the youngest of nations, (the Church) is in reality the oldest.
Furthermore, as she undertakes to bring forward proof for this conviction
by drawing upon the books of Moses, which she appropriated for her own use (cp.
Tatian, Theophilus, Clement, Tertullian, and Julius Africanus), she is thereby
dethroning the Jewish people and claiming for herself the primitive revelation,
the primitive wisdom, and the genuine worship.”
Harnack develops this by arguing that the Christian
attitude was one of believing that all others copied from them, not vice versa.
Theirs was the true philosophy for they had the wisdom of God!
“It suited their polemic, however, to designate Christianity as
philosophy...for two reasons. In
the first place, it was the only way of explaining to outsiders the nature of
Christian doctrine - for to institute a positive comparison between it and pagan
religions was a risky procedure. And
in the second place, this presupposition made it possible for Christians to
demand from the State as liberal treatment for themselves as that accorded to
philosophy and to philosophic schools.”
It sounds like the Church today!
With their more sound hermeneutic, they nevertheless
refused to revisit Paul's teachings regarding the Law and God's prophecies and
promises to the nation of Israel. Paul
was the only one who saw a place for a future, restored Israel, but he found no
place in the thinking of the early church on this point. If the Jews have any future, then how can much of the Old
Testament be taken figuratively? To
solve this, they ignored Paul’s teaching in Rom 11.
PAUL'S MOVE FROM
JUDAISM TO APOSTLE TO THE GENTILES
As Dom Dix, the Roman Catholic Patristic scholar notes,
Acts passes very lightly over the Jewish-Christian mission to the Dispersion,
even though it caused a ferment in Judaism.
Dix notes that Sir Idris Bell published a papyrus, which, in his opinion,
indicated that the very serious disturbances in the Alexandrian
ghetto in AD 42-43 originated in opposition to the activities of
Jewish-Christian missionaries "from Syria". The "continual rioting" in the Jewish quarters at
Rome, which resulted in the expulsion of many Jews from the city in AD 49
were ascribed to this cause. Possibly
the riots were directed against Andronicus and Junias, Jewish
"Apostles", who came to Christ before Paul,
and who are members of the pre-Pauline Palestinian Jewish Church.
We see traces of this in the earliest days of the Church.
"When the mob at Salonica in AD 50 complains to the
magistrates that ‘These people who have turned the whole world upside down
have arrived here now,’
they indicated a far wider and more notorious disturbance than S. Paul’s own
bare three years of missioning, mostly in remote towns in Galatia (i.e. south
central Asia Minor), could have caused; and the rumor that the movement is
disloyal to the Empire and proclaims ‘another Emperor, one Jesus’, suggests
a propaganda addressed exclusively to Jews.
No missionary to Gentiles would present ‘the Gospel’ as the
proclamation of a ‘Jewish king’!"
In Acts 18, while in Corinth, Paul meets with Aquila and
Priscilla from Rome, and at Ephesus with Apollos from Alexandria.
All are Jewish-Christian converts - but not Paul's converts.
These co-laborers of Paul formed a vast movement of Jewish-Christian
expansion, which begins (like Paul’s own missions, as he boasts) "from
Jerusalem",
which had spread through Syria almost before Paul was converted, and
which had reached out beyond Syria while he was still quiescent at Tarsus.
“This is a mission to Jews only.
In the light of the later controversy on circumcision and discussions on
the law and grace...it is easy to misunderstand this.
It was only to be expected that the Jewish Christians would stand firmly
by the declared attitude of Jesus Himself,
Who was, as S. Paul insisted, ‘a Minister of the Circumcision for the
truth of God, to fulfill the promises made to the (Jewish) Fathers.'
Before he wrote that, S. Paul had learned to add ‘and that the Gentiles
might glorify God for His mercy.' But
S. Paul himself insists also, again and again, that even for him this had
required a direct ‘revelation from Jesus the Messiah’,
by a vision which Acts xxii. 21 appears to situate in the Temple during
the disappointing visit to Jerusalem recorded in Gal i. 18 (=Acts ix. 26sqq.)
some three or four years after his own conversion (i.e. in c. AD 38-9)."
Dix observes that neither in Gal 1 nor in Acts 9 is there
any suggestion that Paul preached to Gentiles at that stage of his Christian
career. When he retired to Tarsus
for the next six years or so, in all probability he did not occupy himself with
evangelizing the local Gentiles. More
likely this ex-Pharisee needed time to recover from such a shock as the idea of
a mission to Gentiles, and fortify and understand this new idea by a fresh study
of the Jewish Scriptures in the light of God's call on his life, and to equip
himself generally to approach the Greek mind.
"With all his passionate sense of a mission to the
Gentiles, his epistles reveal that he always remained unmistakably a Jew talking
to Greeks about a Jewish ‘gospel’, from purely Jewish assumptions.
It was his love and his own burning faith in ‘the Gospel’ he preached
which won his Gentile converts, rather than his presentation of it....
"This question of a special revelation to S. Paul in
AD 38 or 39 set aside, it seems clear that before AD 40, at the very earliest,
the idea of a mission to the Gentiles had not been contemplated by anybody.
Jesus Himself was known to have made exceptions to His usual exclusion of
Gentiles from His ministry...But apart from express indications of the will of
God about individuals, the Gentiles as such were still entirely hidden from the
sight of the Jewish-Christian Church in connection with ‘the hope of Israel,'
by that ‘wall of separation’ built between the whole Syriac and Hellenic
worlds by centuries of conflict.
“It was the Jewish-Christian missions to the Jews of the
Dispersion which first faced the question, not of accepting but of seeking
Gentile converts. This step had
been taken at Antioch at a date which must fall somewhere between c.A.D. 40 and
44...”
CONCLUSION
Obviously Paul was not alone in his understanding that the
comprehensiveness of the gospel included the Gentiles.
Peter saw this in his encounter with Cornelius.
However, evidently none but Paul saw how the Gentiles fit into the Church
and how Israel fit into God's future plans.
It was this failure of the pre-Pauline Jewish-Christian mission to the
Jews to see how Israel fit into the eternal plan of God, that gave rise to the
anti-Semitism among the Patristics.
With the Jewish rejection of Messiah, the Patristics
deserted both the pre-Pauline and Pauline understanding of God's commitment to
Israel. These historic pre-millennialists
had a divided hermeneutic; the Revelation was interpreted literally, the Old
Testament figuratively. Adolf
Harnack showed the pathetic results of their thought processes in this regard.
Dix is no doubt correct that Paul received his
understanding of eschatology from special revelation.
As the other apostles demonstrated, the inclusion of Gentiles in the
family of faith apart from Judaism was not clear in the teaching of Jesus.
A Pauline understanding of how Israel and the Gentiles fit into God's
plan, however, makes good sense if you maintain a literal hermeneutic.
If you read the Old Testament like the morning newspaper, understanding
the inviolable nature of God's promises to Israel based on grace, then it
logically follows that Revelation 20 is the time when God will fulfill His
promises to the Jews as Paul taught in Romans 11.
Are we going to allow a proper hermeneutic to shape our
theological presuppositions, or vice versa?
As we continue to look at how this influences our lives, we will see that
this is not as easy a question to answer as it may appear.
This will be the subject of the next issue.
In a spirit of dependence,