Introduction
Thus series of articles is based upon a set of addresses, given by Bro. Len Richardson some years ago, and which were later (in 1996) published in “The Australian Christadelphian Shield”, which ceased publication in 2002. Bro. Len was a very well-known speaker in England, who died in 1997 aged 81, after a life full of activities and a writer of several quite well known books. Among these are “Sixty Years a Christadelphian” and “Balancing the Book”. They have been updated to better reflect the North American scene, and to remove some of the problems in transcribing the spoken word, but I hope I have retained Bro. Len’s unique style, which I so enjoyed on several occasions.
The Editor
Apostolic Christianity
We like to think that our Faith is what we describe as “Apostolic Christianity revived,” and we quote with evident satisfaction, at times, the writing of Bertrand Russell, a philosopher whose other views we probably reject decisively. He said that it was probably true that the Christadelphians in some respects were the nearest approach to the Christianity of New Testament times1. We get a good deal of satisfaction from this, and in fact it is not at all unknown for it to be one of our lecture subjects on Sunday evenings — “Apostolic Christianity Revived”; which is a big claim to make by any standards.
It is probably true that we are the nearest of the denominations around us to the Christianity of the New Testament, but what I am asking in this series is, how near are we in fact to Apostolic Christianity? I am not trying to “prove” anything; I haven’t an axe to grind! I am neither trying to shock you nor to reassure you, and I am not whistling in the dark. I have tried as nearly as possible in this study to arrive at some objective conclusions about how near we really are to the Christianity of the New Testament.
I know it is virtually impossible to approach any question with a completely open mind. I do not think any of us who are thoughtful people would ever say that we approach anything with an open mind. We may pretend we do, but be assured that there is very little at all that is approached with a completely unprejudiced mind. Yet we always tell other people that this is the way they ought to approach religion.
I have tried to make this a genuine endeavor to dig into the New Testament and find where we are like the New Testament Church and where we are not like it, to see how close we really are in some respects; and in others how far we may be away from the First Century Church. In our organization, doctrine and spirit, to study the points of accord and discord between our community and the 1st Century Christians.
Where we find agreement between the ways we behave, the things we believe, and the way we organize ourselves it will confirm us in our faith. Where we find divergences, as I think we shall from time to time, it may be possible for us to make adjustments; though in some cases the Apostolic conditions cannot be revived, as for example in respect to the miraculous element. I do not think many of us would expect to see the miraculous element that was there in the early church revived in our own day, though of course there are some who would say that this is because of our lack of faith! I feel that the weight of evidence is that the “gifts of the spirit,” that is the power to work miracles and to do similar miraculous acts was withdrawn towards the end of the first century, and I would not be looking for a revival of that kind of work of the spirit. In any case, it is clearly not among us, and it is one of those areas in which we will have to accept that there is a big difference between us and them, inasmuch as the Apostles with the power of the Holy Spirit were able to work the tremendous miracles that were so to impress their generation with the truth of their message. Leaving this for the present, however, we are going to start as seems appropriate with Jesus himself, and with the indications of the future church that we get in the Gospel records.
Jesus Christ in the Gospels
The work of Jesus Christ as recorded in the Gospels is very different from the picture of the church which we see in the Acts and in the Epistles. I don’t think any of us will quarrel with that statement. As soon as you go over from the end of John’s Gospel to the beginning of Acts you are aware of a difference. As soon as you come into the second chapter of Acts you are plunged into the work of the New Testament Church, which is quite different from the vagrant itinerant preaching of Jesus and his Apostles as described for us in the Gospel record. There we see Jesus going about with a small band of first twelve, and then seventy, disciples, who helped him in the work of preaching his message in the towns and villages of Judea and Galilee.
He did not set up ecclesias or establish groups of believers, and they had no buildings in which they met. “A sower went forth to sow the seed” is a good description in fact of what we see Jesus doing in the Gospels. The sower went forth to sow his seed, and his message was, “Follow me.” He began by challenging individual men, Peter and Andrew and others, who became his close disciples: “And Jesus, walking by the sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers. And he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men. And they straightway left their nets, and followed him” (Matt 4:18-20). So with this brief challenge they followed him. This term “Follow me” is a summary of the message of Jesus Christ as we see it in the Gospels. A few followed him, the majority did not. Many heard him gladly, but most of them did not become his disciples. Twelve men went everywhere with him; a few women looked after his material needs; and his message was always a call to men to accept himself, to adopt his standards and love his person.
“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls” (Matt 11: 28-29).
His message to the men of Israel among whom he went preaching the Gospel was: “If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him” (John 14:23). Is this one point of difference with our own preaching of the Gospel in the twentieth century? He preached “the Kingdom of God,” we say. He went everywhere preaching “the gospel of the Kingdom,” and we tend to make it mean that Jesus went about giving Christadelphian lectures about the throne of David, and the restoration of Israel, and the signs of the times, and Gog coming down against the land of Israel, and similar ideas which we talk about when we preach the gospel of the Kingdom of God. But Jesus does not appear to have given anything like Christadelphian lectures on the subject.
The Kingdom of God
In the Gospels the Kingdom of God was a wider term than “a divine political kingdom soon to be established on this earth.” Certainly Jesus preached this gospel. Reading between the lines of his teaching, to his disciples particularly, we see this “divine political kingdom” as a background to his instruction and exhortation. But clearly, I think, his understanding of the Kingdom of God was much more than just a divine political kingdom soon to be established. His preaching of the Kingdom was much more than just a divine political kingdom soon to be established. His preaching of the Kingdom was almost entirely concerned with the ethics and morality of the Kingdom — now, in this life.
What he was teaching men, when he preached the Kingdom, was that there was deliverance from sin; deliverance from death; and eternal life to be obtained by following him. This was his message. It was a present and an urgent thing to Jesus.
Mark tells us in the opening of his Gospel that Jesus went throughout all Judea preaching the gospel of the Kingdom and saying: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel” (Mark 1:15). So in some sense the times were then fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God was then at hand, in the person of Jesus; in the preaching of his message he was calling upon men not just to take an intellectual interest in Old Testament prophecy, but to repent; to change their minds — to change their way of life — and to “follow him,” with all the implications of that phrase.
On another occasion he said: “Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein” (Luke 18:17). And it seems that in this saying of Jesus we get this larger view of his preaching of the Kingdom. A divine political kingdom in the end of time, when the Son of Man should come in his glory and all the holy angels with him, was certainly there; but what Jesus emphasized in his preaching of the Kingdom was that you have got to become subjects of the Kingdom now if you entertain any hope of entering it in the age to come. “Except you now receive the Kingdom of God as a little child you shall not enter into it then.”
He was concerned with men’s behavior and attitudes towards God and towards their fellows. And this comes out continually in the Gospels. We know it; I have always known it; I have tried to avoid it sometimes in my thinking. I have wished that Jesus did give the kind of lectures I give when asked to speak on “the Kingdom of God,” but he did not in fact.
What is recorded of the teaching of Jesus is almost entirely concerned, in his public message, with calling men to repentance; with their attitudes and their behavior towards their fellow men, especially their attitudes towards God. The first and great commandment: “And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself” (Luke 10:27). These were the cardinal principles of the teaching of Jesus Christ, and he was the center of the message. Not Abraham, not David, not Moses, but Jesus was the center of the message.
Men were to receive his teaching and were to act on it, seeing themselves as children of their Father in heaven. We notice that he does not call God by the Old Testament names of awe; not once does he use the name Yahweh; not once does he address God as “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”
Of course Jesus knew better than you and I the names of the Deity, but he taught us to think of God as “our Father who art in heaven” — your heavenly Father who knows your needs — and men were to imitate the character of their Father. “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect” (Matt 5:48).
A community of believers
There are clear indications even in the Gospels that Jesus intended his work to take a more structured form than we see in the four records given by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John; that there was to grow up later on a church, a community of believers, with positive function in society. Now I take you first of all to Luke:
“Also I say unto you, Whosoever shall confess me before men, him shall the Son of man also confess before the angels of God: But he that denieth me before men shall be denied before the angels of God. And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but unto him that blasphemeth against the Holy Spirit it shall not be forgiven. And when they bring you unto the synagogues, and unto magistrates, and powers, take ye no thought how or what thing ye shall answer, or what ye shall say: For the Holy Spirit shall teach you in the same hour what ye ought to say” (Luke 12:8-12).
You may say, how does that bear on the subject of the New Testament Church? I see it in this way: Jesus is saying to his disciples that the time is coming when they will have to testify publicly to their faith in him, and that because of this faith, and because of their testimony concerning him, they will become a persecuted people. He envisages an identifiable witness of those who believe in him in the world; they would be clearly identifiable as his disciples; set, as it were, against “the world.” Set against the magistrates, principalities and powers of their day. Here would be people recognizably disciples of Jesus, and persecuted for their faith in him. And so he said to them
“Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven” (Matt 5:14-16).
Clearly he is envisaging here a community activity of all the believers, as a light shining in the world; a city set on a hill; a candlestick to give light to all that are in the house. Or again he says, “Ye are the salt of the earth,” (Matt 5:13), the grains of salt sent out into the world to permeate society with Christian thinking.
He did not see his followers therefore as being withdrawn from the world as a kind of secret society, in privacy, but as a community of men and women influencing society to goodness and truth. And this I see as an indication that later on (and indeed this text from which I have quoted speaks of what will happen to them later on) when this time comes for the church corporately to witness in the world, and to be tried before judges and magistrates, they are not to worry about what they should say, but are to speak by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit of God.
- In 1938 Bertrand Russell wrote, “Christianity was in its earliest days, entirely unpolitical. The best representatives in our time are the Christadelphians, who believe the end of the world to be imminent, and refuse to have any part or lot in secular affairs. ” Power, A New Social Analysis, p 83 in Routledge Classics 2004.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One