16-5-9 The Exclusivity Of Christianity

It is the exclusivity of Christianity which attracts. This is why those who have taught that other religions are equally valid ways of coming to salvation have made no converts. The exclusive nature of the Truth is one of the things which attracts, even though it might seem to us that this is what would turn people away from us. They were living in the 1st century in a spirit of religious pluralism, where one religion was seen as good as another; and we too live in the same atmosphere. Like them, our response must be to preach the exclusive nature of salvation in the real Christ. Thomas Robbins pointed out that one was " converted to the intolerant faiths of Judaism and Christianity while one merely adhered to the cults of Isis, Orpheus, or Mithra." Pagans never sought to make converts to any cult--only away from atheism, as they saw it. The very fact that conversion demanded something, a sharing in the sacrifice of the representative Christ, meant that there was something attractive about it. There was a cost to this religion- it was all about self-crucifixion. If the moral demands of the Truth are preached up front, this of itself is an attraction; the message itself has the power of conversion. The exclusivity of Christianity laid great stress on individual conversion. Most cults took their funding  from the state and from a few wealthy donors, rather than from a rank and file. Therefore it was a radically new concept for each man to lay aside what he could regularly (1 Cor. 16:1,2); and for the poor saints in one place to raise welfare to send to unknown ones in another part of the empire, e.g. the contribution of Corinth (who had not many wealthy) for the poor brethren in Jerusalem. That one had to give something from ones own pocket would have been a radical difference for the ordinary person.

Summing up, the early brethren were looking for a response. They were preaching toward decision, for conversion. The Lord taught us that He will make His followers fishers of men; and fishers catch something, they aren’t fishermen if they just offer a bait indifferently. Paul taught that his hearers should repent and turn to God and do works meet for repentance (Acts 26:20). The address in the synagogue at Antioch in Pisidia has three parts, each marked by an appeal to the listeners. Clearly it has been planned in advance, and was an appeal for response (Acts 13:16,26,38). These preachers weren’t shy in asking men and women to decide for or against the love of God in Jesus. They challenged men to do something about the message they had heard.  

Playing On Disillusion

There were many disillusioned with the Imperial Cult, and the exclusivity of Christianity appealed to them. Juvenal, a contemporary of Paul, had much to write in criticism of it. Especially noticeable was the fact that many were disgusted at the moral state of society. Surely sensitive people must have been impressed by the Christian focus upon morality. Many realised that all the many gods were all the inventions of the human mind, and there must be one true God who could be worshipped in the same way by all peoples. The Truth presented this to them, as Paul did in Athens. None of the religions offered reconciliation with God, nor did they offer in any certainty a hope of anything after death. Yet true Christianity offered just this. We also live in a world disillusioned with itself, knowing their moral filth, seeing through the hypocrisy of an evangelical movement led by adulterers, no longer turning a blind eye to the perversions of the Catholic priesthood. They are searching for something, but they don’t know what. We may be entering a post-Christian era, but not a post-religious one. People seem more interested in religion now than they were 10 years ago. The radical difference between us and the world, the uniqueness of our position, must be evident up front. Christianity is perceived as just another sub-culture within society. Yet the world’s experience of us should show them that real Christianity is in fact a radical counter-culture, although it is rooted in love. 

There was also a realization by many that ‘God’ and the gods had been abstracted into almost nothing in practice. It was strongly felt by Greek philosophy that anger and wrath were too primitive attributes to apply to God: “to attribute such an emotion to a divine being was absurd and blasphemous. Deity, every novice in Greek philosophy knew as an axiom, must be apathes, without disturbing emotions of any kind. The idea of the Divine anger was not something which penetrated into Christianity from its pagan environment: it was something which the church maintained in the face of adverse pagan criticism”. The preaching of a God angry with sin, passionately consumed in the death of His Son, feeling every sin, rejoicing over every repentance and baptism…this was something radically new. And such a God imparted a sense of urgency to those who preached Him and His feelings and ways and being, a need for urgent response, a need to relate to Him, which was simply unknown in other religions.

The urgency of man’s position and the exclusivity of Christianity must be more up front in our witness. We too can abstract God and His being into nothingness. His passion and feelings can be forgotten by us, so great is our emphasis upon abstract theory.

An Open Table

The exclusive, hard hitting message of early Christianity was mixed with an amazing openness in terms of fellowship. The issue of fellowship / association and disfellowship / disasociation was a major destructive influence within both Judaism and the later ecclesia of Christ. In first century Jewish thought, eating with someone was a religious act; and you only openly ate with those who were of your spiritual standard; and never with the unclean, lest you be reckoned like them. The Lord Jesus turned all this on its head- for He ate with sinners- and very public sinners at that- in order to bring them to Him. He didn't first bring people to Him, get them up to His moral level, and then eat with them. The anger and shock which met the Lord's actions in this regard reverberates to this day in many churches.

It's easy to assume that the arguments about "regulations about food" (Heb. 13:9) in the first century hinged about what types of food should be eaten, i.e. whether the Mosaic dietary laws should be observed or not. But the angst about "food" was more passionately about with whom you ate. Peter explains in Acts 11:3 how utterly radical it was for a Jew to eat with a Gentile. Bearing this in mind, the way Jew and Gentile Christians ate together at the Lord's supper would've been a breathtaking witness of unity to the watching world. And yet ultimately, Jew and Gentile parted company and the church divided, laying itself wide open to imbalance and every manner of practical and doctrinal corruption as a result. The problem was that the Jews understood 'eating together' as a sign of agreement, and a sign that you accepted those at your table as morally pure. The Lord's 'table manners' were of course purposefully the opposite of this approach. Justin Martyr (Dialogue With Trypho 47.2-3) mentions how the Jewish Christians would only eat with Gentile Christians on the basis that the Gentiles firstly adopted a Jewish way of life. And this is the nub of the propblem- demanding that those at your table are like you, seeing eating together as a sign that the other has accepted your positions about everything. The similarities with parts of the 21st century church are uncanny.

Yet Luke's writings (in his Gospel and in the Acts) give especial attention to meals and table talk. Societies tended to distinguish themselves by their meal practices (1). Who was allowed at the table, who was excluded- these things were fundamental to the self-understanding of persons within society. So when the Lord Jesus ate with the lowest sinners, and Peter as a Jew ate with Gentiles... this was radical, counter-cultural behaviour. No wonder the breaking of bread together was such a witness, and the surrounding world watched it with incredulity (Acts 2:42,46; 4:32-35). Note too how Luke mentions that Paul ate food in the homes of Gentiles like Lydia and the Philippian jailer (Acts 16:15,34).

The Heavenly Host

It was apparent that in the breaking of bread meetings, there had to be a host. The host was a vital figure. And yet herein lay the huge significance of breaking of bread meetings being held in homes- presumably the home of a richer believer- and yet it was the table of the Lord. He and not the master of the house was the host of that meeting. It's for this reason that it was unthinkable for any invited by grace to their Lord's table to turn away other guests- for it wasn't their table, it was the table of another One, and they were but guests. Attempts to bar others from the Lord's table in our own time are equally rude and deeply lacking in basic spiritual understanding. There are evident similarities between the breaking of bread experience and the marriage supper which we shall eat with the Lord Jesus in His Kingdom. The breaking of bread assembly is called "the table of the Lord"- and yet He says that we shall eat at "My table" at His return (Lk. 22:30). The Lord clearly taught the continuity between the breaking of bread and the future marriage supper by observing that He would not again drink the cup until He drinks it anew with us at the marriage supper (Mt. 26:29). The parables of how the Gospel invites people as it were to a meal are suggesting that we should see the Kingdom as a meal, a supper, of which our memorial service is but a foretaste. We are commanded to enter the supper and take the lowest seat (Lk. 14:10), strongly aware that others are present more honourable than ourselves. Those with this spirit are simply never going to dream of telling another guest 'Leave! Don't partake of the meal!'. But this is the spirit of those who are exclusive and who use the Lord's table as a weapon in their hands to wage their petty church wars. The very early church didn't behave like this, but instead sought to incarnate and continue the pattern of the meals of the Lord Jesus during His ministry. And this is one major reason why their unity drew such attention, and they grew.

Further, the Lord teaches that if we're invited to a feast, we should take the lowest place, genuinely assuming the others present are more honourable than us; and we take our place at that table awaiting the coming of the host (Lk. 14:8). Our attitudes to the seating and behaviour on entry to the feast will affect our eternal destiny- for when the Lord comes, He will make the arrogant man suffer "shame", which is a commonly used descriptor of the rejected at judgment day (Lk. 14:9). The Lord goes on in that same discourse to explain what our attitude should be- He tells the parable of the great supper, to which those who were invited didn't pitch, and there was a desperate, last minute compelling of smelly street people to come in and eat the grand meal. "When you are bidden of any man to a meal" (Lk. 14:8) is clearly meant to connect with "A certain man made a great supper, and bade (s.w.) many" (Lk. 14:16). Evidently the idea of eating with the Lord at His table connects with the breaking of bread. Our attitude at that memorial supper is in essence our attitude at the greater supper of the last day. We sit there with our Lord and with our brethren. We will sit there at the last day with the deep feeling, like the handicapped beggars had in the parable: "I should not be here. What am I, me, me with all my weakness, doing here?". If we sit likewise at the breaking of bread with that spirit, we will not even consider grabbing the best seat for ourselves; nor would it cross our mind to say to someone else sitting there "Hey you, what are you doing here? If you're here, I'm gone! Don't you dare take that bread and wine, you're not in fellowship!". Yet this is precisely the attitude of those who exclude their brethren from participation at the Lord's table; for the breaking of bread is a foretaste of the feast to come, and the Lord is teaching that our attitude to our brethren at it is in fact going to be reflected in how He deals with us at the latter day marriage supper. It seems so many of our exclusivist brethren are voting themselves out of their place at the Kingdom; although I believe God's grace is such that He has a place even for them.

And our attitude to others will be reflective of our perception of God's grace in calling us- as we were invited by such grace, so we will invite others to our table who likewise cannot recompense us (Lk. 14:12). If we are the blind and maimed invited to the Lord's table, we will invite the blind and maimed to our table. The extent of God's grace to us really needs to sink in. When was the last time you did an act of pure grace to others like this...? The servant seems surprised that after the crippled and blind beggars have been drafted in to the opulence of the feast, "yet there is room" (Lk. 14:22). Quite simply, there are more places in the feast of the Kingdom than there are people willing to fill them! How encouraging is that thought! The same Greek word for "place" recurs in Jn. 14:2,3, where the Lord Jesus taught that He was going to die on the cross in order to prepare a place for us in His Father's palatial mansion. The effort made in preparing the feast therefore speaks of Christ's life, death and resurrection for us. And it's so tragic that most people don't want to know. So in a sense, "all you gotta do is say yes". Just accept the invitation; take the messengers for real. Although perhaps we are left to read in the detail to the story, that many a desperate beggar just couldn't grasp that the messenger was for real, and preferred to stay put. Maybe only the truly desperate thought 'Maybe there's some truth in it...I've nothing to lose". The many places in God's Kingdom... are only for those who desperately want them. Those who make meaningless excuses about how busy they are, those who can't believe that really God could be true to His word and really give us beggars a place in His wonderful Kingdom... will by their own decision not be there.

And yet... the Lord followed right on from this parable with the demand to hate one's own life, pick up their cross and follow Him, without which we cannot be His disciple. He also told the parable of God coming with a huge army to meet us who are far weaker- and our need to make peace with Him and forsake all that we have in order to follow Christ (Lk. 14:25-33). These radical demands of Jesus are in fact a development of His parable about the supper. For amongst some Middle Eastern peoples to this day, refusing the invitation to enter the banquet for such a meal- especially after having signaled your earlier acceptance of the invitation- was "equivalent to a declaration of war" (2). And so the parable of us as the man going out to war against a far superior army suddenly falls into place in this context. "So likewise, whosoever he be of you that doesn't renounce all that he has, he cannot be my disciple" (Lk. 14:33). The renouncing or forsaking of all we have refers to the man with 10,000 soldiers renouncing what human strength he had in the face of realizing he was advancing against a force of 20,000. The picking up of the cross, the 'hating' of our own lives, the renouncing all we have... obviously refers to doing something very hard for us. But the context is the parable of the supper, where the 'hard' thing to understand is why people refused the invitation, why they just couldn't believe it was real and for them; or why they just let petty human issues become so large in their minds that they just couldn't be bothered with it. Simply believing that we will be there, that in all sober reality we have been invited to a place in the Kingdom, that God is compelling / persuading / pressurizing us to be there... this is the hard thing. This is the hating of our lives, picking up our cross, forsaking our human strength and surrendering to God.

Let's not under-estimate the struggle which there is to believe the simple fact that there are more places in the Kingdom than people willing to fill them; that really God is begging us to come in to the place prepared for us through the death of His Son. When we read of the Master telling the servant to "compel" the beggars to come in to the feast, it's the same Greek word as we find used in one of the excuses given for not going in to the feast: "I must needs go and see" (the field the man had supposedly bought that evening without ever seeing it) (Lk. 14:18,23). Just as our loving God, with all the power of His most earnest desire, can seek to compel us to accept His offer, so the power of our own flesh compels us the other way. The petty human issues had become so large in the minds of the people concerned that they ended up telling obvious untruths or giving very poor excuses to get out of attending; life had gotten on top of them and that was it. The story seems so bizarre; the refusal of such a wonderful invitation would've been the element of unreality which struck the first hearers.The point is that petty human issues, coupled with our lack of appreciation that we are down and out beggars, really will lead people to lose out on eternity. The other such element of unreality would've been the persistence of the host to fill the places with anyone, literally anyone, willing to come on in. It's not so much a question of 'Will we be there?' but rather 'Do we really want to be there?'. Because if we do, we shall be.

And we who have firmly accepted the invitation are also the preachers and bearers of the message. We are the ones who are to "compel" men and women to just believe it's for real and come on in. And we do this work with all the power of God's compulsion behind us. For He wishes to see the places filled. And yet we work against the terribly powerful compulsion of the flesh. 1 Cor. 9:13 states that necessity or compulsion is laid upon us to preach the Gospel. This is the same word translated "compel" in Lk. 14:23. The compulsion is laid upon us by the tragedy of human rejection of the places Christ prepared for them, and the wonderful, so easy possibility to be there. Significantly, this same Greek word is used elsewhere about the 'necessities' which are part of our ministry of the Gospel (2 Cor. 6:4; 12:10). The urgency of our task will lead us into many an urgent situation, with all the compelling needs which accompany them.

The theme of eating continues after Luke 14- for Luke 15 contains parables told by the Lord in answer to the criticism that He ate with sinners (Lk. 15:2). He explained that He had come to seek and save the lost, and that was why He ate with them (Lk. 15:4 cp. Lk. 19:10, where He justifies eating with Zacchaeus for the same reason). Note how in the case of Zacchaeus, the man only stated his repentance after he had 'received' Jesus into his house and eaten with Him. This exemplifies how the Lord turned upside down the table practice of the Jews- He didn't eat with people once they had repented, but so that His gracious fellowship of them might lead them to repentance. The parables of Lk. 15 speak about eating in order to express joy that a person had repented and been saved- the eating was to celebrate finding the lost sheep, coin and son. But the Lord was saying that this justified His eating with not yet repentant sinners. Thinking this through, we find an insight into the hopefulness of Jesus for human repentance- He fellowshipped with them and treated them as if He were celebrating their repentance; for He saw eating with them in this life as a foretaste of His eating with them in His future Kingdom. He invited them to a foretaste of the future banuqet. His fellowship policy was therefore to encourage repentance; and seeing He wished all to be saved, He didn't exclude any from His table.

Preaching a simple, clear Gospel and not being obsessed with fellowship issues were, in my view, one of reasons why the early church succeeded; and why we in the 21st century so often fail. The conversions recorded in the Gospels, those in Acts 2, and that of Paul himself, all occurred before the letters of the New Testament were written. Yet they were conversions made upon the same basis as we should be making them today- the preaching of "the Gospel" and belief into it. This indicates that the content of the Gospel preached and required for conversion was far less than what we have tended to think- many of the 'extras' refer to matters of interpretation which whilst true in themselves, are not fundamental parts of the Gospel message but rather what distinguishes us from other denominations. As such they may have relevance in terms of securing a sound convert into our group- but not into Christ. The Lord taught that His converts should remain in the synagogues (with all their false teachings about the death state, Satan, the nature of Messiah and His Kingdom) until they were thrown out. He had absolutely no 'guilt-by-association' mentality which later became so much a part of so many versions of Christianity. There's fair historical evidence that Christians remained in the synagogues until they were thrown out. Eventually the synagogues brought in "the blessing of the minim" as one of the eighteen benedictions (Shemoneh Esreh): "And for the Minim [Christians] let there be no hope [of eternal life]"- and all present had to repeat this. This of course forced Christians out of the synagogues- but it was a result of Jewish exclusion of them, rather than any fear of guilt by association on their part. This fearlessness in fellowship attitudes was a key to their success, at least initially; and the amount of time and energy expended by latter day believers on the fellowship issue is in my opinion a significant reason for our failure both in quantity and ultimate quality of evangelism.

Notes
(1) Mary Douglas, Implicit Meanings (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,1975) Ch. 7, 'Deciphering a meal', pp. 249-275.

(2) H. B. Tristram, Eastern Customs (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2004 reprint) p. 82.