It is perfectly evident that such gospel could not be successfully watered down to a program of gradual political reform of the Roman Empire. And so far as Jesus organized any church it was only as a group of proclaimers of the coming kingdom.
After the rejection and death of such a rebel against all earthly authority, that group started the life of proclamation, moved thereto by their triumphant faith in the resurrection of their great leader. This resurrection stamped the radicalism of Jesus as true.
Hence the hatred of Saul of Tarsus. He was typical of the power-possessing class. Most of the modern descriptions of the ethics and religion of Jesus leave us wondering why Saul and the chief priests should so hate him and that the possessing class should kill him.
But when we realize that Jesus rejected the whole social order in which they were so comfortable and foretold its destruction and its ultimate damnation, and that with such winning tenderness and such convincing grace, we cease to be surprised.
None of us like to have our comfortable compromises ruthlessly ex-posed, or to see what seem to us the foundations of society attacked in the name of religion. When Paul came to see in the risen Jesus the evidence that this age was, after all, passing away he also became the proclaimer of a messianic judgment, and he restlessly roamed the world seeking like the older apostles “such as were being saved” (Acts 2:47). But his vision was related in much more distinctly Hellenistic forms, even though the thought itself remained thoroughly Jewish. No more than Jesus did Paul the Roman Empire.
It was, however, ordained of God, a minister of God for certain purposes. Obedience to it was duty, and as Rome protected Paul against Jewish fanaticism he saw in it a providential “minister of God to thee for good” (Rom. 13:4). At the same time Paul obeyed God rather than man, and though he felt no responsibility for the Roman Empire as such, yet he despaired of it.
The mystery of lawlessness was at work (II Thess. 3-10), and whether the passage moves, as seems unlikely, in the world of political allusion, or is a reference to apocalyptic hopes, it certainly marks the strong early Christian sense of a coming struggle between the two realms of the passing age and the coming order.
The Early Church and Politics At the same time two things were taking place that greatly modified the revolutionary attitude toward the existent social and political order.
In the first place, the Mesdid not come as soon as was expected. Men and women fell asleep before the coming. And, secondly, inspite of Rome’s occasional persecution, on the whole her general attitude of tolerance and real ignorance of what was going on made her the frequent protector against local hate and persecution.
Theoretically Rome was doomed, and when under Nero, or Decius, or Diocletian persecution broke out then the old revolutional apocalyptic attitude revived. But even then persecution was generally local, officials were reachable by bribes or influence, and many found it easy to compromise.
The fierce fanaticism of those who denounced their weaker brethren, and the constantly reviving narrowness of sectarian groups made the attitude of the responsible official church seem sane and well balanced, and so at last the protest against the social order and the existent world became simply a theory.
The burden of the evangelical message was increasingly a call to individual purification, to loyalty to the Christian group and the proclamation of immortality. The group itself became a redemptive church, with sacraments and officers, and responsible for the well-being, spiritual and temporal, of its members.
The separation from an evil world gives rise to an increasingly complex ethical casuistry, and a constantly changing relation of the Christian to the world he lived in. Even Paul is met by the difficulty of Christians going to dinner parties where meat was devoted to idols and then eaten.
What was the honest Christian to do? Tertullian is deeply stirred by Christian soldiers bearing the crowns that Mithras’ followers affected.
The consciousness, however, of the entire contradiction between a Christian’s life in the new age, and a soldier’s profession is lacking. Just as the inner contradiction between the life of love and the relation of master to slave was not clear even to Paul.
Politics were not the primary responsibility of the Christian groups, and so far as they touched them at all it was only as they touched trade and social life. Along one line alone Christian ethical consciousness marked the sharp contradiction between its ideal and those of the heathen world about it.
The amusements of the populace, its circus, its theaters, its dances, its excesses shocked and revolted men awakened to a sense of the redeemed life. Here in the middle stood the sexual interest.
Judaism has never been ascetic and has always strongly emphasized sane and normal attitudes toward the sexual relationship. But the moral feeling of the oriental world in its revolt against such excesses has constantly ended in a vain attempt at suppression of the natural instinct itself, and has defended that sup-pression by a doctrine of the inherent evil of life.
Oriental asceticism is linked with an entire negation of all life. This negation sweeps in politics also. The world and all its belongings are evil. The third and last part will be conclude Thomas’ views on the early church and politics and also look at the substitution of church for the state.
