Yeah, what he said.
We are not supposed to “change the world” as most people use that phrase. The world is going to Hell and there’s nothing any human agency can do to change that. The best we can hope for is to find the Covenant path that is a narrow and steep climb out of this fallen world (Matthew 7:13-14; see this list of references).
The Book of Revelation reminds us to trust the Lord to handle the political situation. Persecution is our natural element. Jesus said it’s not for us to know the way God works in the contemporary political scene (Acts 1:7). Peter in his first epistle taught the folks in what is now northern Turkey how to handle the government persecution of genuine faith in Christ. There was nothing about agitating against the government policy. Rather, the key was becoming more otherworldly. As soon as Christians moved away from this commitment, their witness fell apart.
Historically, that movement began shortly after the passing of Apostle John. What still exists of the correspondence and books of the Early Church Fathers shows a rapid drift into politics of controlling outcomes, both internally and externally. The early church controversies and councils were not at all like the first Council in Jerusalem in Acts 15. That first council was about process, not outcomes.
There is a distinct difference between the Apostles and the church leaders after John. The latter were far more Pharisaical in their concerns, in the sense that it had to do with picking the right words. It’s one thing for the Apostles to attempt expressing Hebrew thoughts in Greek words; it’s another thing entirely to attempt dragging Hebrew teaching into Greek structures of thought. The early church leaders were asking the wrong questions.
For years I’ve been saying that we do not ape the Hebrew way of life in the particulars, but we are obliged to embrace the Hebrew frame of mind. I wrote whole books showing the flaws of western rational thinking and promoting ancient Hebrew intellectual traditions. It’s more than just calling it “mysticism” — it’s a radically different set of assumptions about what is real and true. There is a vast body of literature showing how the Ancient Near Eastern folks in general, and the ancient Hebrews in particular, didn’t think like we do today in the West.
The West is wrong, evil, false; the Hebrew way is God’s way.
And all the disputes contained in the literature of the Early Church Fathers are western in nature, not Hebrew. Their declarations were chasing issues that would have embarrassed Jesus, who was the ultimate advocate for the ancient Hebrew orientation. All of His disputes with the Pharisees can be summed up as trying to pull the discussion back into the ancient Hebrew frame of reference, versus the Hellenized (western) approach of the Pharisees.
And the Early Church Fathers were distinctly more Pharisaical/western in their frame of reference. There’s nothing wrong with dismissing the whole pile as impertinent to the New Testament. In John’s Revelation, one of the clear elements is his sorrow at how the Hebrew outlook was disappearing from church teaching. He did his best to cast the whole book in terms of ancient Hebrew symbolism. If you don’t dig into Old Testament mystical symbols, you cannot possibly understand Revelation. His Gospel was another attempt to bring things back to a more Hebrew approach; he published his Gospel long after the other three.
John was right to be sorrowful over that loss; it was the true treasury of gospel teaching. By the time we get to the councils under Constantine, the church leadership had completely compromised with secular political concerns. They were so worldly that they were willing to obey the demands of a pagan emperor who simply wanted to use the already faded Christian religion of his day as a political tool. And the institutional Christian religion of that day shows the compromise, getting the leaders involved in a host of disputes over words. I’m not saying there were no problems they needed to address, but their solutions were all wrong. They were operating outside the biblical traditions.
Thus, the entire sweep of Church History after John was all chasing after the wind. Go ahead and study Church History — as a story of failure to adhere to Christ.
