We have no stake in the politics of this world.
We have nothing to gain by using political force, even when it’s truly popular and democratic in nature. Rallying the troops is utterly inimical to Christ. The church was never meant to have a political structure recognized as such today. It was meant to have a family structure by which all influence was voluntary. The ultimate sanction was treating you as non-family. When things got really ugly, they could kick you out of the meeting the same as any household could kick out an unwanted visitor. The whole thing was private and any reference to external authorities was actively discouraged.
Notice the radical difference between the council in Acts 15 compared to the First Council of Nicea in 325. In Acts, the apostles used their own personal influence and the results were hardly good politics. Instead, the whole thing depended on voluntary cooperation from the churches. The critical issue was the apostles making sure their work in Gentile lands didn’t alienate the original Judean church leaders. It was mostly about keeping ritual peace between them, not changing any teachings. In the end, nobody argued that the Gentile churches (often including a few Hellenized Jewish converts) had to be Jewish, but that their practical expressions of faith should cling to certain elements of ancient Hebrew piety as universal. It was tantamount to allowing Jewish Christians to be Jewish in Christ while asking the Gentile Christians to be at least Noachide, which would have been consistent with the Old Testament (so far as genuine scholarship can determine).
The point was this new faith in Christ made no sense without a Hebrew outlook on what mattered in this world. As we read Paul’s letters, we see he pressed this even farther in requiring Gentile churches to adopt some critical elements of Hebrew lifestyle (like conservative clothing), while dropping plenty that didn’t matter (like male head coverings). This was the whole point in learning to “rightly divide the Word” — which would have been the Old Testament at that point.
In Nicea, the whole point was not the content of teaching but the political uniformity. Constantine maneuvered the church leadership into politicizing things with his civil authority behind the results. As a pagan, he cared not a whit what they decided, only that they nailed down something he could wave around as the officially permitted doctrine. There was the implied threat of his power of the sword to those who didn’t fall in line. While that didn’t solve all the issues the synod took up, it was the clearest break point of the church leaders openly courting political authority. In their minds, clearly something had to be done or those poor souls might end up in Hell.
Somewhere between Paul’s Letter to the Romans, which bluntly states that spiritual birth is not in any way dependent on human choices, and that synod in Nicea, church leaders had come to assume God couldn’t do His work without their help. The salvation of souls really depended on them making sure the right stuff went into people’s ears. In other words, “salvation” had become a matter of human intellect and decision, a direct contradiction to Paul’s writing, not to mention Hebrew thought.
All political theory runs on the assumption that “salvation” depends on the right ideas getting through the right ears so that people decide the right things. This is a radical departure from a Hebrew outlook on reality itself, not to mention politics. The Hebrew outlook was that only tribal political and social structure could ever be valid in God’s eyes. You stuck with your kinfolk or you went on your own. Raucous though discussion might be, at some point someone already recognized as the final “decider” made the decision.
Not efficient you say? You miss the whole point. You can be sure the council in Acts 15 was as rowdy as any Jewish family dispute. At some point, they all recognized the word of the Spirit and yielded their opposition. That’s how they expected it to work. Had they not come to terms, they would have parted ways, but you can be sure Paul would have kept his ministry in line with his best grasp of what was the essence of Moses, not simply the contemporary habits of his own nation. The whole point is stability as God defined it over the vast expanse of His revelation, not political efficiency as humans imagine it. The church was a New Israel whose only sword was the Word of God. The church as a separate society had to remain stable based on traditional assumptions of how humans acted in concert, not as the world viewed such things.
The church leadership by 325 AD were wholly compromised in their basic world view. It was no longer Hebrew, but Western. The whole thing was a mistake, nailing down as obligatory something many genuine followers of Christ today do not accept, including yours truly. Trinitarian doctrine answers all the wrong questions. A Hebrew mind would not have asked any questions about the nature of the divine. A Hebrew mind would ask first about the testimony of who Jesus was, and then asked, “What do I do now?” Notice what Paul asked on the road to Damascus; that was a Hebrew approach. It never occurs to an Eastern mind to wonder about the nature of something, but of what the moral requirements are. Paul referred to the likes of the Arian question as disputes about words.
Nicea was Western legalism, not Hebrew Mysticism. It enslaved the churches to a Western legal frame of operation, totally foreign to the ancient Hebrew tribal lifestyle. This change didn’t come overnight; it began with the agitation of Judaizers, Gnostics and others who were trying to take advantage of the early Gentile churches. John’s Apocalypse and his letters warn of this very thing, referring to the political and intellectual compromise as the Harlot Church. It broke his heart to know what a vast wealth of moral advantage would be lost. John didn’t fear for people missing out on the miracle of spiritual birth, but the heritage of power to participate in the mighty glories of God. Instead, God would raise souls to life despite the bad witness of Christians who never completed the transformation of their minds into genuine spiritual agents of Heaven.
That transformation includes leaving behind human political considerations, and engaging in the ancient tribal ways of Hebrew families. We cling to eternal moral principles, not ephemeral considerations. Jesus said, “My Kingdom is not of this world.” (John 18:36)
