THE APOSTLES AND THE CIVIL AUTHORITIES.
By C. P. Bollman
THE apostles were from the first transgressors of the Roman law against introducing any new religion or any new object of worship. As we now know, Christianity was only the fruit of which “Judaism” was the flower; but in the eyes of the rulers, both Jews and Gentiles, the Gospel was a new religion; Jesus was “another God.” Evidently the purpose of the Roman law was to prevent stirring up the minds of the people. The language of the law itself plainly implies this. It reads:— Whoever introduces new religions, the tendency and character of which are unknown, whereby the minds of men may be disturbed, shall, if belonging to the higher rank, be banished; if to the lower, punished with death. And again, we find the following instruction given to those whose duty it was to enforce the laws:— Worship the gods with all respect according to the laws of your country, and compel all others to do the same; but hate and punish those who would introduce anything whatever, alien to our customs in this particular. But this is just what the apostles did by the preaching of the Gospel; they stirred up the people. It is just what Jesus said would be: “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to4send peace, but a sword.” For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.” The Gospel is truth, and truth and error can not dwell together in peace. There can be no compromise between them. When the apostles preached, they did not present the Gospel as merely one of a number of systems of religion all of which were good; they presented it as the only system of any value. They did not urge men merely to believe in Christ and worship Jehovah, but they besought them to turn away from dumb idols. To the people who were about to sacrifice to them at Antioch, the apostles said: “Why do ye these things? We also are men of like passions with you, and preach unto you that ye should turn from these vanities unto the living God, which made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all things that are therein.” Such preaching very naturally gave offense, especially to the heathen priests; and wherever the apostles went, tumult was stirred up against them, as in the instance already mentioned, and also at Thessalonica, where it was said, “These that have turned the world upside down are come hither also.” But the fact that the disciples were “disturbers of the peace” was no fault of theirs, nor of the Gospel. They were the aggressors only in this, that they taught the truth. But it was not alone by teaching a “new” religion that the apostles and early Christians made themselves strange to all the world beside. They preserved a separation from the world too little known in the church of to-day. Touching their civil relations it has been well said:— The early Christians uniformly held that they as Christians belonged to a kingdom which was in, but not of, the world,—a kingdom for which no earthly potentate had right or power to legislate; and this living faith loosened the bond of allegiance and dissolved the sense of obligation to all human authority, and was the negation of the lawfulness of temporal government over the subjects of the kingdom for which they recognized no king but Christ. While yielding ready obedience to all laws and customs which did not come in conflict with the higher law of the kingdom [of heaven] or the rights of conscience, they universally regarded these laws as extraneous to their own organization, foreign statutes, imposed upon them from without; and, being solicitous to render unto God the things which are God’s, they steadily abstained from any participation in the affairs of government; and quietly assumed the right to judge for themselves whether any law, regulation, or custom, prescribed by the sovereign power, or other human authority, was or was not such as they might conscientiously obey. . . . They obeyed all laws alike, except such as conflicted with conscience, and those they refused to obey in the very face of persecution, torture, and death. This fearless assertion of the rights of conscience necessarily involved the right to sit in judgment on all human laws and the powers that ordained them, and to determine for themselves whether the law was lawful. That helpless spirit of blind obedience to the decrees of despotic governments which characterized the pagan peoples was therefore impossible to the Christians. . . . The logical tendency of Christianity was, therefore, to originate the idea of personal liberty for all men, unknown to the world before; to repudiate the heathen doctrine of the divine character and right of kings; to sit in judgment upon their laws, and intelligently to obey, or refuse to obey, them; in a word, to cultivate and exercise, as a matter of religious faith, that spirit of personal independence, both of action and of thought, which we in later times denominate democracy. To despotic pagan rulers this attitude was simply intolerable. The acceptance of the Gospel was a veritable declaration of independence on the part of every man who embraced it. The Christian, tho obedient to every just requirement of the civil authorities, acknowledged no allegiance except to the Lord Jesus Christ. Even the service he rendered to Cæsar was not from fear of civil wrath, but from conscience toward God. While a pagan, the individual was Cæsar’s slave; after his conversion to Christ, he was the Lord’s free man. To the apostles and early Christians the kingdom of heaven was a reality. The King was known to the apostles personally; and from His own lips they had received the promise, “Verily I say unto you, That ye which have followed Me, in the regeneration when the Son of man shall sit in the throne of His glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” Every Christian was taught to live in view of that kingdom, and to regard himself as a citizen of that kingdom. He was exhorted to live “giving thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light; who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of His dear Son.” Col. 1:12,13. Being in possession of the Spirit of God, “the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession,” they regarded themselves as already possessing the kingdom, just as the lord-proprietor of a colony comes into possession of his territory when the charter is delivered to him. “Wherefore,” the apostle says, “we receiving a kingdom which can not be moved, let us have grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear.” Heb. 12:28. And yet no Christian ever thought of attempting to take possession by force of the territory of this kingdom. They were willing to bide their Lord’s time. Their sole mission was to win new subjects to the King. It was His to give them the kingdom, even as He had given them the earnest of the kingdom. It was not until about the time of Constantine that there arose in the church that which Neander describes as “a false theocratical theory, originating not in the essence of the Gospel, but in the confusion of the religious-constitutions of the Old and New Testaments.” The very essence of this false theocratical theory was then, as it still is, the idea that it is the duty of Christ’s church to take “the world for God,” using for this purpose not spiritual means merely, but seizing upon, and using to this end, political power as well. The sequel to the adoption of this theory by the church in the fourth century may be read in the history of the Papacy, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Dark Ages. Nothing could have been more foreign to the spirit of the Gospel then; nothing is more foreign to the spirit of the Gospel now. And yet, notwithstanding the warnings of all the dark history of the past, we find the church of to-day permeated by this same false theocratical theory. “The world for Christ,” is the war-cry of modern popular Christianity. The means by which it is hoped to achieve this result, were avowed some years since by a prominent leader in religious thought and work, in the words, “Christ must enter the realm of law thru the gateway of politics.” But the divine plan is still, as it has ever been, “Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.” C. P. BOLLMAN.