Condemnation, attempts at
heavy-handed transformation, or a mission-denying withdrawal and separation are
not the means by which either Paul or Jesus asked for or expected the culture
to be countered. Remember, Jesus saved his denouncements for the leaders
of the people. Rather, the culture is countered, and the
transformation into a culture that comes closer to living as the true
humanity originally intended by the Creator, through the kingdom-modeling,
sacrificial, love-motivated and service-oriented activities of the members of
the body of Christ, as they demonstrably and tangibly live out, in imitation of
Jesus their claim that Jesus is Lord, and that He is Lord even over the Caesar
that bears the title of “son of god.”
What appearance will be taken by
these activities? Naturally, one can find the answer on nearly every page
of Scripture. Believers can look to the Jesus tradition as embodied by
the Gospel accounts. They can look at Acts. When it comes to Paul,
an observer can look at the entire body of work that is attributed to him in
order to formulate an answer to this question. However, this study is
focusing in on a letter to Timothy, to whom Paul refers as his genuine child in
the faith, seeing there what can be understood to be, regardless of Timothy’s
“position” in the church, a personally directed letter that demands a personal
response of a single member of the body of Christ, who is presumably attempting
to live and to serve as part of a community that is yet one small component of
a global kingdom. Thus, realizing that there is a helpful
counter-cultural message in the text of the letter may show the letter to be
even more useful than some have previously imagined.
When one thinks about countering
the culture, it is almost inevitable that the first thoughts run to laws and to
government. In many ways and in many places, humans are brought up to
think in such ways, believing governments to be either the source of problems
or of solutions to problems, and are thereby ingrained with an almost
unshakeable desire to effect changes that they would like to see through the
coercive power of laws and regulations. Government is recognized as the
locus of power for the enforcement of laws. By extension then, a
government is an entity that has the power to regulate behavioral
changes. Such thinking was probably just as true in the days of Paul and
Timothy as it is now.
As the church presented a
counter-imperial and counter-cultural ethic, it would be quite easy for the
members of the body of Christ, who saw themselves (and should still see
themselves) as representative of a kingdom to which all other kingdoms are
subservient, to slip into a mindset that being counter-imperial or
counter-cultural also meant that they were to be anti-government, especially if
that government was actively oppressive towards Christians. It is quite
understandable why their Roman rulers were suspicious of so many Christians,
considering the fact that Christians claimed to serve a Lord that was far
superior to the emperor, while at the same time affirming their loyalty to a
kingdom that was not Rome.
It was one thing to maintain
loyalty to tribal deities and to long-standing territorial power structures
that could be taken advantage of by Rome as a means of preserving order and
extending its reach, and which could stand side-by-side with Roman imperial
ideology and worship, but it was quite another to take a position that ran
contrary to that ideology that also served to discount the worship of Caesar,
and even going so far as to place a criminal that was executed by Rome at the
center of its worship and allegiance. This was a direct affront to the
power of Rome and to all community and civic sensibilities.
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