I’m often amazed at how people often operate on false assumptions about the gospel message.
The Kingdom of Heaven is a kingdom of (a) the Elect who (b) aspire to live by the Covenant of Christ. Election was completed before any human walked on this earth. There is no human decision involved in Election. The only decision humans can make is to aspire to live by the Covenant, the “b” part above.
We all know that a lot of people pretend to “b” without “a”. There is nothing any human can do about that problem, though we can make some adjustments in how we associate in communities, so that it’s more difficult to pretend. But the point here is that we know there’s some pretense, and that there is no way to escape it totally. You can know for certain you are elect, but you cannot know about the brother or sister next to you in your faith community. You can get people to join your community, but you cannot ascertain that they are Elect.
You can produce hundreds of children, but there is nothing you can do about their election. You can raise them to be decent, but you cannot make them morally good. Only spiritual birth can change our nature, and that comes only to the Elect.
The covenant communities could simply stop having children altogether and it would not change the number of spiritually born. In theory, the covenant community would still grow from simple evangelism. This is why Paul could suggest it’s a good idea for believers to remain unmarried; it would not harm the growth of the gospel. It would be very tough to live that way, given our human natures, but it could work just fine for what really matters.
We don’t know for certain what motivated Paul to suggest that. He makes general comments about the state of the world in which they lived at the time, but we don’t have enough data to make the issue really clear. There’s no deep underlying Hebrew value at work, and nothing else in New Testament history to make it obvious. Whatever it was, the urgency wasn’t sufficient to dissolve existing marriages. And the whole of his letters suggest a full expectation that church leaders would mostly be married. It was just his personal recommendation that celibacy was a good idea.
Somehow, the folks in India where Thomas ministered got the idea that the pinnacle of Christian faith demanded celibacy. It’s part of their teachings today. And somehow that did not prevent the spread of the message. They had a different cultural attitude about such things than is common anywhere in the West.
So far as we know, Jesus was celibate. The logic goes like this: Jesus clearly taught that fornication and adultery were sinful. That covers everything sexual, leaving only a godly covenant marriage as the sole option. And He could hardly have been hypocritical about it as the Son of God. On top of that, He warned of a coming tribulation around Jerusalem. When it comes, He said that having small children would be a serious liability. It would make survival very difficult.
We can extrapolate that Paul was thinking about that when he gave his advice to certain churches. If that kind of teaching came to the ears of the general public in that part of the world, it would be a strong filter against fake believers in that culture (unlike India).
I could cite other teachings that would gain ridicule in Paul’s world. Christ rising from the dead is a big one. While the Jews were a primary source of hassles, there were other sources all too willing to persecute Christians for their faith. In spite of this, the Christian religion grew simply from new converts. That is, the Elect were being called up, recognizing that this was their tribe. The worse the persecution got, the more they grew.
Somewhere within the next generation or two, something in the New Testament Christian religion was lost. By the time of Constantine, church leaders were simply worn out on facing persecution. They had lost that fire of the first generation of those who followed Christ. They were so thrilled that an emperor had a use for them they were quite willing to agree with his policies for them and their religion. Instead of waiting for the Elect to awaken, they were ready to make the Christian religion a matter of imperial policy.
Today, it seems the vast majority of church leaders are convinced that Christian religion worked just fine like that. There are various mixtures of thinking that their brand of religion has conquered or should conquer the world. It shows up in their writings mostly as an underlying assumption. They will debate whether it should come by persuasion (logic, rhetoric, etc.) or by law, but the net result is about the same.
Folks, martyrdom built churches, not marketing.
