Let us do good unto all men
There are those in our community today, and we honor them and respect their point of view, although I cannot share it, who really believe that we ought not, not merely that we need not, to shed our benevolence abroad on any other than Christadelphians or Christadelphian causes. I cannot understand this. They say, “The devil can look after his own. Our job is not to do with helping people outside.” But Paul says only that we shall get our priorities right. “Let us do good unto all men, especially them of the household of faith” (Gal 6:10).
Charity, though it begins at home, does not end there; and the kind of charity, the love of the New Testament, is not something that can be bounded by walls. We may not say: “We love one another, but we do not love anybody else. Our love extends to the back of our meeting room, but not outside.” That is not really love, it is partisanship. John Said “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19 NIV). (You will notice in all the new versions that the word “him” is deleted; in fact, even in the Authorized Version of that passage “him” is italicized indicating that it is not there in the original). What John is saying is, “We love, because he first loved us. We have learned what love is from Jesus Christ. We have learned how good God is to the undeserving and the unworthy. He has been good to us, and therefore we learn from him to love other people. Not a love that is bounded by this or that, or by our fads and fancies, but a love that is all-embracing, as his love has been in embracing us.”
“Limitation of sympathy”
It seems to me that the church in the first century was motivated by “other worldliness” more than by “unworldliness”. Now, by this I mean that they were not indifferent to their fellows. We have already seen from the quotations I have made from historians, and from the New Testament quotations as well, that the early Christian church was not indifferent to the needs of others. It was not indifferent to the poor and the weak and the despised. Their policy was certainly one of non-involvement in what Paul calls “the affairs of this life,” as he wrote to Timothy, “No man that warreth, entangleth himself in the affairs of this life” (2Tim 2:4). I would think almost certainly that they were more indifferent to worldly advancement than we are today; and yet kindness and benevolence characterized the Christian ethic at that time.
We have this rather strange anomaly, as I see it, that we as a community are well off, generally; sometimes very ambitious; many of our brethren do make their mark in all sorts of spheres; they get on, they have university education, they become the bosses, and the heads. We say, of course, that the Christian way of life requires us to be diligent in business; that they are quiet living people, and they give their minds to their work and are conscientious, so that the boss says, “That is a conscientious man,” and he promotes him; and this sort of thing does happen. But making all allowances for this, it seems to me that we tend to be much more interested in advancement in this world, and not as much concerned for its people, as the early church was.
I got the following references to Christadelphians out of a magazine that came to me through the post, and it refers to a book of Bertrand Russell’s, “Power — a New Social Analysis”, which many of us have heard of only because it mentions our community and puts us in a rather good light — he says, in fact, that:
“Christianity was, in its earliest days, entirely unpolitical. The best representatives of the primitive tradition in our times are the Christadelphians, who believe the end of the world to be imminent and refuse to have any part or lot in secular affairs.”
Now that has been quoted in my hearing a good many times, and yours too I dare say, and we are all rather pleased about Bertrand Russell giving us an honorable mention, because we do not usually get a mention at all. Although I do not suppose we would agree with anything he said about any other subject under the sun, we agree with him here that Christadelphians are the nearest of any other group of believers to the primitive Christian tradition.
But I am indebted to whoever wrote this article, because he tells us that Russell also made another reference to Christadelphians in the same book which was not very flattering, and we never hear that mentioned. Do you know what it says?
“But limitations of sympathy are also natural; the cat has no sympathy for the mouse; the Romans had no sympathy for any animals except elephants; the Nazis had none for Jews, where there is a limitation of sympathy there is a corresponding limitation in the conception of the good. The good becomes something to be enjoyed only by the magnanimous man, or only by the superman, or the Arzan, or the Christadelphians.”1
“Christadelphians” he said! He is linking us up with the Nazis now.
My observation of our community and speaking as one who loves it, is that one can be very zealous about what we call the truth, and yet very unkind with it. There is a “limitation of sympathy” very often. You can have a kind of religion that says, when the bombs are raining down on London, you are not to put out the fires, for they are the judgments of God. You are interfering. This was said, not by berserk men, but by sincere Christadelphians who felt that their interpretation of prophecy was such that they would be doing something wrong by helping their neighbors in these distressing conditions.
I do not personally accept this. I think Bertrand Russell is right, that there can be a limitation of sympathy where you hold this rigid closed-door mentality, as doctrinally we do. We say, “They are all wrong; the world is in darkness, so let them stew in their own juice.” Now you cannot really do this, and it was not the Christian ethic of the first century. I am convinced it was not. We sometimes find the same spirit in our own dealings with one another. There is nothing so bitter as two brethren who have fallen out with one another about Adam’s nature before the fall, or something like that. They treat one another worse than “the publican and sinner.” These kinds of arguments go on, and this kind of writing goes on; and vituperation and bitterness creep in the pamphleteering from one to another, and it is all in the name of Christianity.
This is understandable. We say, “Well, of course, when people feel strongly about things, you know.” But we ought to feel strongly about some other things as well. We ought to feel strongly about loving one another, and caring for other people, and being sympathetic, and being kind and gentle; because Jesus was all of these. He was a “strong man,” and he stood up and denounced error; but he was always kind, and patient, and gentle to those who needed help. To those who were down the bottom end, whose lamps were burning low, and the wick was flickering. He did not stamp people out — “the bruised reed shall he not break and the smoking flax he shall not quench” (Matt 12:20). He never quenched people, he poured in the oil of love, of his spirit, and helped them to burn again. And this is what we have got to learn from Jesus and, I believe, from the New Testament church.
The general picture
Let me now try to summarize our findings. The general picture we have of ecclesial life, in the later part of the first century, is probably not as unlike our own as we might have imagined, persecutions apart. That is interesting is it not? We are the first century church — “apostolic Christianity revived,” but we have to admit that we have not heard of any Christadelphian, at least in the UK, thrown to the lions or even put to death. There are people being put to death for their religion, for their Christianity. There are people suffering tortures for their faith. We may say that it is all misguided, and that they do not hold the truth; but I only record, without comment, that there are people who are undergoing tortures, real tortures, in prisons and in solitary confinement in parts of Europe, because they believe in Jesus Christ; while we ourselves have to say, “Well, we are like the first century church, but, of course, we do not have any persecution.”
There is as much activity, possibly, in preaching and teaching today as in the New Testament church. There were apostles, and prophets and evangelists at work in the field then, as we today have our Bible Mission workers, and campaigners, and men who do not spare themselves, who go out to preach this gospel as far as they can with great zeal and great devotion and great love. Their organized ecclesial life at local level, as we saw previously, was in a sense similar to our own. It may not have been exactly parallel, but they had comparable structure, with their arranging brethren (or eldership), and serving brethren; their speaking brethren, and so on. Their community activities consisted, as it would appear, mainly of the weekly meeting for the breaking of bread and worship, “When you come together on the first day of the week”; “when the disciples were gathered together for the breaking of bread”, and phrases such as that, indicate that their way of life was in some senses like our own.
The majority of members of the early church were not going off to Gaul to preach the gospel there, or up and down Italy, or over to Asia Minor. Most of them were getting on with a routine job; they had to, for they worked in households, or they might have been artisans or even slaves; and most of them were going about their daily vocations at various levels of society, though, as I have suggested, probably chiefly from the lower orders. Some were slaves, but some were slave owners — Philemon you remember, was a slave owner, and One simus was one of his slaves who had run away and had been converted in Rome. And what did Paul do? He sent him back to his master, and asked Philemon to treat him kindly and to forgive him for any wrong that he had done.
There were artisans and merchants; there was a doctor, and a government official; plenty of poor, but some wealthy, with large houses and estates and servants. The point being that the Christian gospel in New Testament times was for every man. It cut across all the social barriers. Barbarians, Scythians, bond, or free, male or female — it mattered nothing as far as Paul was concerned. This was a faith for living every day. It was a faith that men turned into the stuff of their daily lives. The slave in his service, the master in his business, the artisan making his leather goods, or tents, or whatever. They went about their jobs, and they were to turn their religion into the daily living. They were not, as I suggested earlier, all chiefs and no Indians. They were not all office seekers, nor all important people in the church. The majority of them were the humdrum stuff of the ecclesia, the people on whom the work was being done and for whom it was being carried out. “We are workers together with him,” Paul says, “You are God’s field, you are God’s building” (1 Cor 3:9). We are working on you, and the quality of the work will show in the quality of the lives of the people who belong to the Christian ecclesia at that time, on whom we are working, and the Day of Judgment, he said, will show what kind of workmanship has gone into it.
We do tend to think of ourselves today as all being involved at the top level, whereas, in fact, the importance of the Christian calling is in the daily life, in the kind of people we are becoming, in the way in which the Christian gospel is working itself out. There were those in the Thessalonian Ecclesia, you will remember, who appear to have thought that the day of the Lord was so near that there was no need to work at all, and they seem to have just lived on the largesse of their wealthier brethren. Paul had to point out to them that they could not go on like that:
“But as touching brotherly love ye need not that I write unto you: for ye yourselves are taught of God to love one another. And indeed ye do it toward all the brethren which are in all Macedonia; but we beseech you, brethren, that ye increase more and more; and that ye study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we commanded you; that ye may walk honestly toward them that are without, and that ye may have lack of nothing” (1 Thess 4:9-12).
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One