How did the early church evangelise? We shall do as we have done before - skim through the book of Acts, and pull in supporting references from the Epistles.
''Skim' is the operative word, for the spread of the Gospel is Luke's overarching theme in Acts; he gives more space to it than any other. Almost the best title the book could be given would be, "How they brought the Good News from Jerusalem to Rome." Ch. 1:8 is the caption verse to the whole treatise: "You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." Luke constructed Acts quite deliberately to show how the church did just exactly that. He began by showing how they witnessed in Jerusalem, and ended showing how they witnessed in distant Rome, and in between he shows the stages by which they progressed toward that goal.
Luke divided Acts into six panels. The end of each one is marked quite clearly by a brief summary statement on the theme of growth which keeps repeating like a refrain. He rings the changes on the words 'grew', 'multiplied', 'increased'.
Panel 1
The first is at 6:7 - "the word of God increased and the number of the disciples multiplied in Jerusalem." That was the first stage in their orders: Jerusalem first.
Panel 2
Judea and Samaria was the second. Luke marks the achievement of that stage at 9:31: "so the church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria had peace, and was built up... and it was multiplied."
Panel 3
To achieve the goal to carry their witness to the ends of the earth, they had to break out of the Jewish cocoon in which the church was born, and take the Gospel to the Gentiles. Luke's 3rd panel shows how it did just that. God overcame Peter's Jewish prejudice, and led him to share the Gospel with Cornelius, a Gentile, in Cæsarea. That was the big break-through, and the evidence for it was the planting of the first really Gentile church in Antioch. Luke ends that panel at 12:24 - "the Word of God grew and multiplied."
Panel 4
describes Paul's first missionary journey, which took the Gospel into Asia (Turkey as we know it today). Luke sums up that panel at 16:5 - "So the churches were strengthened in the faith, and they increased in numbers daily."
Panel 5
sees the Gospel spread a significant stage further into Greece. Here we follow Paul from Philippi and Thessalonica through to Athens and Corinth. Luke ends that panel at 19:20 - "so the word of the Lord grew and prevailed mightily."
Panel 6
The last panel follows Paul's progress to Rome, and ends with him "preaching the Kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ quite openly and unhindered." (28:31)
The Church has carried out its orders to the letter; her witness to the Gospel has expanded outwards from Jerusalem to Italy ... and from there as we know, Paul set his sights on Spain.
In succeeding centuries it would spread south into Africa, east into India and China and Japan, north into Europe, and west into first Britain, and then the New World and South America. In a very real sense, the story of Acts is still continuing: the twentieth century church is still writing it, in all lands, under all skies, and in the islands of the sea. The Gospel is dead if it does not spread.
So how did they spread it? The briefest answer one can give is to say that first they mastered it, and then they matched its presentation to changing audiences.
It is fascinating to watch them doing this as you sweep your eye over the book of Acts. All the way through, Luke gives repeated examples of Gospel preaching, at least one in each of the six panels - now to Jews, now to Greeks, now to rulers.
In Panel 1 we are given no less than four examples, each briefer than the last, starting with Peter's preaching on the day of Pentecost which occupies 24 verses, and ending with the statement of it given by the apostles to the Jewish Council which occupies only three. (5:30-32) It was being honed down to its essentials:
"The God of our fathers raised Jesus from the dead - whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him to his own right hand as Prince and Saviour that he might give repentance and forgiveness of sins to Israel. We are witnesses of these things, and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him."
Thereafter, in succeeding panels, we are shown how its presentation was varied to match the varied audiences to whom it was preached.
Paul's presentation of it to the Greeks in Athens for example sounds quite different to his statement of it to the Jews in Antioch of Pisistratus; but when compared, the same essential features are present in both.
If we are ever going to succeed as they did, we are going to have to do as they did - master the Gospel and match it. One of the saddest features of the church today is that when you ask a modern Christian, even a Christian who has been going to church for thirty years, what are the biggest difficulties he faces in sharing the Gospel with unbelievers, he will tell you (if he is honest!) "I do not know what to say," and "I am scared." We simply must find a way through both those barriers, or we shall die having done what Christians have been doing for so long - leaving it to the preachers to preach it in church buildings we do not bring unbelievers into to hear it.
As we have seen, there were two kinds of preaching in the early church, easily recognisable: Kerygma and Didache, or proclamation and teaching. The Kerygma, the proclamation, was Gospel preaching for the unconverted; the Didache, the teaching, was the application of the Gospel to life for the converted. Kerygma made disciples, Didache matured them.
The Kerygma, though varied in presentation was well-defined. Its essential features were these.
1. The note of fulfilment - the conviction Peter voiced on the day of Pentecost, that "this Jesus was delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God." (Acts 2:23)
The emphasis on fulfilment was a prominent feature of the early presentations of the Gospel; it is a note in the telling of the Gospel whose impact has diminished with the passage of time. It does not engage our interest today the way it did the interest of first century Jews - or first century Greeks and Romans either, for when we survey the sample presentations of the Gospel distributed through the book of Acts, it is clear that the apostles sounded this note as vigorously in their preaching to Gentiles as to Jews.
The Kerygma, though varied in its presentation was well-defined. Its essential features were these:
1. The prophecies are fulfilled and the Reign of God has been inaugurated with the coming of the Messiah, born of the seed of David.
2. He died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and was buried.
3. He rose on the third day according to the Scriptures.
4. He is exalted at the right hand of God as Lord of all.
5. He will come again as Judge and Saviour of men.
6. In His Name men are called upon to repent and be baptised for the forgiveness of sins and the gifts of the Holy Spirit and eternal life.
We may expand on these elements broadly as follows.
1. The note of fulfilment
That the prophecies concerning the Messiah were fulfilled was the conviction Peter voiced on the day of Pentecost, that "this Jesus was delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God." (Acts 2:23) That "His Christ should suffer was foretold by the mouth of all the prophets." (Acts 3:18)
The emphasis on fulfilment was a prominent feature of the early presentations of the Gospel; it is a note in the telling of the Gospel whose impact has diminished with the passage of time. It does not engage our interest today the way it did the interest of first century Jews - or of first century Greeks and Romans either, for when we survey the sample presentations of the Gospel distributed through the book of Acts, it is clear that the apostles sounded this note as vigorously in their preaching to Gentiles as to Jews.
Its primary meaning was that with the advent of the Messiah the Kingdom (Rule) of God had come. God had taken the reigns of history into His own hands. The Messiah is God's Regent: through Him God Himself now ruled directly in the affairs of this world. A direct consequence of this was that final judgement is committed into Christ's hands. God, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, His Son, took the stage of this world Himself. In Jesus the Messiah the Reign of God has begun. (The phrase 'The Kingdom of God' would perhaps be better rendered 'The Kingship of God' - His Active Rule.) (See Note 1 below) So we have to shape up or ship out, because the next step is the end of the line.
2. Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures
What we did with Him shows us the truth about ourselves; what God did with Him shows us the truth about God.
(a) What we did was to put Him down.
That shows what is really wrong with us. We just do not want God in our lives ... at all, and we will go to any lengths to keep Him out. We 'crucify' Him.
(b) What God did was raise Him up.
God reversed our human verdict on Him: we said "No"; God said "Yes" - for good and all. God suffered Him to die (it was no accident) and then raised Him. From God's side, the death and resurrection of Jesus means two things:
i. It means, first, that when in our sinfulness, we strike our blow at God, He takes it.
He absorbs it. He soaks up the hurt we inflict on Him. Jesus suffered what we did to Him, to the point of death. He bore our sins. (That is what it means that "Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.")
We have to be careful at this point. We are always tempted to inject some theory of the Cross into our Gospel presentation, saying, for example, that Jesus suffered the death penalty of the Law in our stead. Surprisingly, the Apostles in Acts never did that. You look in vain for any developed theology of the Cross in the Kerygma. The stubborn truth is that none of the statements of the Gospel in Acts offer any theory about the Cross at all. All they give is the facts - the brute facts. We did Him to death, and He took it. That's it!
That is how the apostles said it when they preached the Gospel - as Peter did in 1 Peter 2:23-24: "When He was reviled, He did not revile in return; when He suffered, He did not threaten; He trusted God with the issue, and bore our sins, in His own body, on the tree." That is all an unbeliever needs to know about the death of Jesus to become a Christian. We can oppose Him and wound Him to death, and He will take it; and that is proof that He loves us, because the proof of love is its capacity to suffer at our hands and not change. That is the Good News about God that is announced in the death of Jesus. (See Note 2 below) As Paul put it, "He was put to death for our offences." Rom. 4:25
3. He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures
ii. It means, secvond that "He was raised for our justification."
I venture to translate that: "He was raised to rightwise us." To 'rightwise' is an old English word we have half lost. Half lost, I say, because we have it hidden still in our word 'righteousness.' In olden days they said it as 'rightwisness.' Righteousness ('rightwisness') is the state of being 'rightwised.' By raising Jesus from the dead, where our sins had put him, (the Gospel says), God shows that we can be 'rightwised' to Him in spite of them. We can be related to Him rightly again (which is where the weight of the word's meaning is concentrated), despite the mischief we have done, because God raised Jesus from the dead. (See Note 3 below)
Again, I emphasise that all through Acts, no elaborate explanation of this is ever offered. All we are given is the facts: "we killed Him, God raised Him" - and we are expected to see what that means, without any theorising, because the meaning is staring us in the face. And it is so obvious, we miss it! Try to hear it for the first time ... "We killed Him; God raised Him." What does it mean that God did that?
That we killed Him is appalling. It is the most awful thing that ever happened in the history of the world. We killed Him ... unjustly, viciously, putting Him to the worst shame to which a man can be put - naked on a cross. There is His Son, taken down from the Cross, a disfigured, shocking, dead thing. How should God respond to that? Should He not have slain us all? Since we'd finished Him, shouldn't God have finished us?
But what did He do? He raised Him up and gave Him back to us! It was madness … or it was miracle - the miracle of a love nothing can kill. For what did God raise Jesus from the dead and give Him back to us to do? Haunt us? Be avenged on us? Put us all to a slow death the way we had put Him to a slow death? No. God gave Him back to bless us with His forgiving love - everlastingly. It is incredible. Doesn't God draw the line anywhere in what He will take from us and forgive? No, He does not!
Here is the way Peter told it: "Jesus you delivered up and denied in the presence of Pilate ... you denied the Holy and Righteous one, and asked for a murderer to be given to you. You killed the Author of Life." (Acts 3:13-15 and 26) There it is - the worst indictment ever delivered over the blackest crime ever committed ... against God!
And how did God respond? "By raising Him from the dead (we are witnesses to that)." And why? "To bless you," says Peter. That was said first to the very people dwelling in Jerusalem who had actually killed Him: "God, having raised up His Servant (Jesus) sent Him to you first! ... to bless you ... in turning every one of you from your wickedness." In Peter's audience that day there would surely be some who six weeks earlier had shouted "Crucify Him"; almost certainly too there were priests and elders among them who had engineered His death. To them Peter says, "God, having raised up His Servant (Jesus) sent Him to you first, to bless you, in turning every one of you from your wickedness." Here is the most incredible divine forbearance, blessing those who persecute.
What Peter said can only mean what Paul said it meant in Acts 13:38-39: "Let it be known to you therefore brethren, that through this man forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you ... and by Him, every one that believes is freed from everything you couldn't be freed from by the Law of Moses." What you could not be freed from by the Law of Moses was sins committed "with a high hand." (Num. 15:30) "The person who does anything with a high hand ... reviles the Lord. Because he has despised the word of the Lord, and has broken His commandment, that person shall be utterly cut off: his iniquity shall be upon him." No Old Testament sacrifice availed for that. Well, they had despised the Word made Flesh, there in Jerusalem. They had reviled the Lord, "sinned with a high hand" by slaying the Lord's Anointed. Now, having raised His Son, God says, "See, I will forgive you that! We, my Son and I, will bear your iniquity. We shall not count your trespasses against you. Never into all eternity will we hold them against you. Only repent of them, and trust us, My Son and Me, for its forgiveness, and no condemnation will be upon you, now or ever, for your sins." Jesus' sacrifice did avail for that!
The picture is simple and clear. In Jesus, God comes to us, His arms stretched out to us in loving appeal and with the promise of forgiveness, all the while we keep shooting arrows into Him. Our rain of arrows kills Him and He falls dead on the path. And what God does is raise Him up so He keeps right on coming, His arms outstretched still. "Trust me," He says, "and all is forgiven."
The sheer facts say it all. The Cross and the Resurrection of Jesus lay bare the heart of God. That is what Grace means.
4. The exaltation of Christ to Lordship
Never was a more costly obedience ever given to God, or a more perfect obedi-ence, than Jesus gave to bear the pain of God which He suffers to forgive sins, and bring all this blessed truth before our eyes. So the kerygma goes on to affirm that God rewarded Him for it - by exalting Him to the highest station in the entire created universe, giving complete authority over all life into His hands. The risen Christ is therefore Lord of the world.
5. His return as Judge and Saviour
He it is into whose hands God has placed the reigns of history, and He is guiding it to its planned climax, which will take place with His personal return to earth in power and great glory. "Christ having once been offered to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin, but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him." (Heb. 9:28) Into His hands too, final judgment is committed. (Acts 17:31; Rom. 2:16)
6. The next ingredients of the Kerygma are repentance, baptism, faith and the Promise of the Spirit.
All that is asked of us in the light of all this is to repent of the sins by which we wound Him, wounding thereby the only love that can ever relieve us of the guilt of them, and believe Him. In the light of the proof of love He has given, we may trust Him. We have but to commit ourselves in baptism to trust in His forgiving love forever, and we are gathered to His heart, made His true child, and given His own Spirit of love, goodness and truth to dwell in our heart, and keep us His forever!
That is the Kerygma.
It looked foolish in the eyes of sophisticated Greeks, this tale of a crucified carpenter they were asked to believe embodied the whole truth about God in life; and it was an offence to proud Jews, this tale of a humble rabbi crucified in weakness who they were asked to believe was their long promised Messiah (who was to smite God's enemies and rule the world, they said). It never occurred to them that God preferred to eliminate enemies by reconciling them rather than by smiting them. "The word of the Cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to those who are being saved, it is the power of God, and the wisdom of God." (1 Cor. 1:18)
"We are not ashamed of it," those Christians said. It is the most exciting revelation of God and the liberating truth about Him the world has ever been given. It makes sense of everything, and supplies a whole new dynamic for living that can change the world. Only let this shining truth lead us to a change of heart, toward God, toward our neighbour, and to our own aim in life, and trust God to forgive us and plant His own Spirit in our mind and heart, and we shall know, through the death and resurrection of His Son that He has rightwised us - related us to Him rightly - by forgiving love on His side, and grateful faith in Him on ours, so there is nothing we need ever fear again. We shall live all life in His grace!
That is the Gospel. That is the good news that caught light on the Day of Pentecost and spread through the world like a prairie fire. That is the 'Gospel truth.'
We have skimmed through Acts to see what early Christians proclaimed, reducing it to its bare bones; but we have not seen how they varied its presentation to different audiences; to that we turn next.
Note 1:
It had a further
value in emphasising the fact that the whole weight of history
confirmed the truth of the Gospel.
Since in consequence of the Fall mankind lost the knowledge of God,
there have nevertheless survived in all cultures and religions hints
and intuitions that make the Gospel, when we hear it, the 'truth'
that has always lurked somewhere just below the level of our
consciousness. God has not left Himself without witness to the hearts
of men and women in any age or culture. To take but one example,
death and resurrection myths are central to many ancient religions of
both the near and the far East. For those with eyes to see, the death
and resurrection of Jesus are the truth to which these ancient myths
bore a muddled and confused witness through the ages. When that is
perceived it is seen that the Gospel is the unveiling at last of the
elusive secret to the meaning of all life which has always teased
men's minds, and for which they have blindly groped.
But we in the West have lost the sense of history which urged people
of earlier times to this recognition; we have abandoned that whole
dimension of our heritage in favour of science and technology, and
whilst science and technology feed the mind, they starve the spirit
and leave us spiritually sickly. That is why we have the apparent
paradox in Western society today that precisely in an age of science
and technology we are witnessing a resurgence of the mystic and the
occult. The spiritual component really is a vital ingredient in the
nature of man, and if his spirit is starved he will find himself
driven to seek some sort of nourishment for it, even in defiance of
reason.
It is tragic that we have lost the skill so to present the Gospel
that we appeal to this intuitive ally in the hearts of men. We should
be able so to present the Gospel that people see, when we do, that
"of course, this is what life is all about." For behind the blindness
and ignorance with which sin has afflicted us there is always the
pressure of the Spirit God upon the spirit of man urging him along
the path to enlightenment and salvation. All the ages bear a weight
of testimony to the fact that in the story of the birth and life, and
death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, there comes to
fulfilment a thrust through history that is to be recognised as God's
'push' through all the ages. Somewhere deep in their hearts men know
that the ills and evils of life may not have their remedy except in a
mystery of pain and loss - in some sort of death in fact - suffered
by whatever 'power of good' it is that comes to grips with them, and
delivers us by neutralising their power over us.
Note 2:
Then along comes the Didache, the teaching, and says "Now be like
Him!" Christians are to love their enemies the way they have
discovered God loves His enemies (themselves, that is) before they
repent.
Note 3:
I owe the discovery to Rudolf Bultmann in his 'Theology of the New
Testament Volume 2' [SCM] p. 253. I am not a fan of
Bultmann's, but I found his discussion of Paul's use of
anthropological terms in this volume to be among the most perceptive
I have read.
There are three Greek words associated with righteousness which all
sound alike, but for which we do not have three English words to
match so they sound alike, and it is a very great pity, because the
odd word out in our English translations puts us off the scent. The
Greek word for righteousness, the noun, is 'dikaiosune', the word for
righteous, the adjective, is 'dikaios'; the verb in the Greek which
belongs with those two words is 'dikaiow.' Unhappily the English word
used to translate dikaiow is almost always 'justify.' But 'justify'
does not sound at all like 'righteousness' or 'righteous.' We need an
English word to render 'dikaiow' so it has 'righteous' in it. The
case presents an uncommon difficulty; we usually have like-sounding
words to render the noun, the adjective and the verb of a root, like
the noun 'purity,' the adjective 'pure,' and the verb 'purify.' But
we cannot get 'righteousness,' 'righteous,' and 'justify' together
that way. Should we make up a new word, like 'righteousify'?
Interestingly, there used to be three such words in old English. One
of them is not used any more; but if only we could recover it, we
could translate all three Greek words so their meanings and their
sound corresponded. The old noun was 'rightwisness,' the adjective
'rightwised' and the verb 'to rightwise.' They used to be able to say
'rightwise' instead of 'justify.' They said "we are justified by
faith" as "we are rightwised by faith." God did not "justify the
ungodly," He "rightwised" them. A righteous man did not have to be
described as "a just man;" he was described as a "rightwised man." A
man possessed of righteousness was possessed of 'rightwisness' - he
enjoyed the condition of being 'rightwised'. Now it is a simple fact
of language history that our modern words 'righteous' and
'righteousness' are both direct descendants of those old words: we
habitually pronounce words lazily, so the adjective 'rightwised'
became 'rightwis' (the 'd' dropped off), and survives into modern
English as 'righteous'.
If we had retained the verb 'rightwise', half the theological
arguments that have consumed the energies of earnest Christians for
so long (often to so little effect) as to whether the righteousness
Christ gives to the repentant and believing is imputed or imparted
righteousness would have been short-circuited. For the meaning of
that old verb 'to rightwise' combined both. It was very much a word
to describe what happened when there was a change in the relationship
between two people because a real change occurred in one of them. If
things had gone wrong between two friends over a misunderstanding, or
the bad behaviour of one of them so that they fell out with each
other, then when things were put right between them so they became
friends again, they were said to have been rightwised. For that to
happen of course, the person who had been in the wrong had to
recognise it, admit it, ask pardon for it, and come to a state of
mind where he was in agreement with the way the offended party had
seen it all along. He had to have the other's mind on his own
wrongdoing, and be quite sincere about it. In other (religious)
words, he had to 'confess and repent.' And the offended party had to
put away from between them the wrong that had been done, be willing
really to forgive, and receive his old friend back into favour
again.
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