Top-Down or Bottom-Up Repentance? The Shift Toward Mass “Evangelism” and Group “Conversions”

Introduction to the historic process by which the Early Church, a collection of outcasts bound together by a personal relationship with Jesus, within a few centuries became the chief bastion of worldly power and order held together by legally enforced adherence to a creed.

I readily confess that I have adapted much of what is in this article from Jacques Ellul, The Subversion of Christianity (see my Bibliography page), to which I refer the reader for a much more thorough treatment of the subject.

At its founding, the Body of Christ was a body largely of outcasts, bound together by their individual faith in and friendship with Jesus Christ. See, for instance, John 15:14-24; 1 Peter 1:1-2, 17-21. It spread from individual to individual, and through preaching to what were usually relatively small groups of people, among whom some individually believed and others individually rejected the message–often violently. See, e.g., Acts 8:26-35; Acts 13:5, 12, 42-48, 50; 14:1-5; 17:2-5, 16-34; 19:8-10. The New Testament examples of groups of people simultaneously coming to faith en masse are very few, and all relate to “households” or “households” plus a few invited friends. See, Acts 10: 24, 27, 30-33, 44-46; Acts 16:25-34; Acts 18:7-8; 1 Corinthians 1:16. The events at Pentecost in Jerusalem in Acts 2 and in the Temple in Acts 3:1-4:4 are not exceptions to this. At Pentecost, a confused crowd came together and heard Peter’s sermon. Many mocked, Acts 2:13, but many also believed–and all, and only, “those who accepted his message were baptized.” Acts 2:41. While the number who believed was in the thousands, it was only a fraction of the total crowd. Similarly, in the temple some time later, a crowd formed to investigate the healing of a paralytic by the Apostles, and Peter again preached to a crowd. Once again, many in the crowd believed–but not everyone did. Indeed, some of the ones who did not believe were “greatly disturbed,” and had Peter and John arrested on the spot. Acts 4:1-4. The crowd did not come to faith in Christ en masse; only certain individuals in the crowd did.

There are no New Testament examples of any other political or social units coming to believe in Christ as a unit, nor any indication that such events should be expected in the future, other than the prophetic predictions that “all Israel” will be saved and that a few other identified nationalities will be miraculously restored in the apocalyptic future. See, e.g., Romans 11:25-32; Isaiah 19:23-25; Isaiah 16:4-5; Jeremiah 48:46-47. And nowhere does the New Testament even suggest that the faith of monarchs, nobles, military commanders or chieftains will be imputed to everyone under their authority, just because the political leaders involved decree that all their subjects should be baptized, prohibited from openly worshipping other deities, taught to recite the creed, subjected to a form of “Christian” morality by law, and compelled to submit to a particular human church organization.

These things require only conformity to human authority. None of these things, even when imposed together, require any personal faith in Christ or relationship with him. And, as Christianity the human movement developed historically, divine enforcement of human authority became exactly the real, underlying purpose of “the faith.” “The faith” became faith in our human leaders.

Amazingly, when viewed from a modern perspective, there is absolutely no evidence of any mass conversions through exercise of human authority for the first century and a half of the Church. As Ellul points out, Jesus himself was tempted with the prospect of mass conversion of the whole world to his political control and rejected the offer:

 The devil, leading him up on a high mountain, showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.  The devil said to him, “I will give you all this authority, and their glory, for it has been delivered to me; and I give it to whomever I want.  If you therefore will worship before me, it will all be yours.”  Jesus answered him, “Get behind me Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and you shall serve him only.’”

Luke 4:5-8

Jesus did not question Satan’s ability to give him control of all of the world’s kingdoms–which humans had yielded to him–at that time. But Jesus refused Satan’s offer because he knew that all of the rulers of those kingdoms and their power would ultimately come to nothing, God having prepared something much better for us:

We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. No, we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began.  None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.  However, as it is written:

“What no eye has seen,
    what no ear has heard,
and what no human mind has conceived”—
    the things God has prepared for those who love him—

these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit.

1 Corinthians 2:6-10a (NIV).

And we can do the same:

What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words. The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit. The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments, for,

“Who has known the mind of the Lord
    so as to instruct him?”

But we have the mind of Christ.

1 Corinthians 2:12-20 (NIV).

Unfortunately, as individuals, and even as individuals who have the Spirit at work within us, we have all of us too often succumbed to the tempter’s deceit–offering us things we want that he really can give us, that really can be put within our power right now, at the cost of momentarily giving him our allegiance. Likewise, the organized church, as a group of human organizations, has all too frequently sought what it believed were its most important objectives by yielding to the temptation to seek or accept political power–power Satan could really give it–by ceding part of its allegiance to the kingdoms of this world–the very same kingdoms Satan offered to give to Jesus in exchange for his worship. To be sure, this temptation was delivered subtly, craftily, with the appearance that it was the right thing to do. Satan masquerades as an angel of light. 2 Corinthians 11:14. And the bait was usually taken with the best of good intentions. I will now give a short outline of the historical process involved, with details to be developed in later posts.

Initially Christianity was perceived as opposed to worldly power. Before Pentecost, all of the “official” religions of the Roman world and even of Rome’s civilized neighbors (e.g, Persia), except one–Judaism–were strictly “civic” religions. That is, they existed to support the ruling elite of a city or a larger polity (like the Roman Empire) identified with a city by giving that elite a visible connection with a deity or deities who would protect the city or polity and give it success IF everyone stayed in line and did EXACTLY what they were supposed to do. This included BOTH giving adequate and technically correct service to all of the relevant gods AND complete obedience to all human leaders. The pagan civic deities were generally conceived of as being at war with both deities representing malevolent natural forces AND the gods of enemy cities and enemy peoples. Pagan gods were also conceived of as being dependent on the sacrifices and ritually-correct worship of their adherents for power to carry on their warfare. And certainly the Roman civic religion was thoroughly pagan in all of these respects. Everything depended on the proper piety of the people. Although by late Republican and Imperial Roman times, many of the ruling classes could be described as pragmatically religious atheists or pragmatically polytheist philosophical monists, all in power continued to support the official cults because the masses believed in them and they therefore helped to keep the masses under control.

The genius of the Roman civic cult that permitted it to survive so long was that it was thoroughly pluralistic, in the sense that it readily adopted the cults of both allied and conquered people, and encouraged their adherents to continue worshiping their own gods. This started very early in the history of Rome, when Rome was expanding at the expense of its immediate neighbors in Italy and many of these culturally very similar people became the artisan and free laborer classes of Rome itself. Rome’s civic calendar expanded to include the festivals of some of these technically foreign gods, in which Romans participated. The only stipulation was that, in worshiping their own gods, subject peoples had to expressly recognize that the deities which represented the power and glory of the Roman civitas (or, in later times, the Empire or its semi-divine Emperor) was superior to all of their lesser gods, as demonstrated by the fact that Rome had conquered those gods.

As long as that stipulation was observed, foreign cults were welcome and were actively manipulated to improve their power over the populations that practiced them. Besides, those members of the ruling classes who still actually believed in the existence of the gods would not have wished to anger any god. Even a defeated foreign god can cause plenty of trouble if angered!

Of course, Judaism, at least in theory, proclaimed a God who was truly sovereign and not dependent on the acts of his people for anything, and whose very existence excluded the possibility of any other. But, in practice the official Judaism surrounding the cult of the Second Temple during Jesus earthly life was a “civic” cult in this same sense: it was thoroughly politicized, and maintained in existence to control its worshipers. And it compromised with the Romans and the Greeks before them in other ways, too, leading to the existence of both puritan separatist sects (e.g., the Qumran sect) and revolutionary sects (the “Zealots” mentioned in the New Testament).

On the other hand, among the educated upper classes of the Empire, the old gods tended to be honored and actively promoted as necessary fictions, mostly as a tool to control the masses. At the level of private belief and discourse among themselves, adherence to some current version of one or another of Greek schools of philosophy was the norm. All of the philosophical schools rejected the polytheistic mythical account of the world. Though none of the Greek/Roman “schools” of philosophy was anything close to homogeneous at the time of Christ or of the Early Church, it can be roughly generalized that those who would now be called Stoics, Middle Platonists (which could be mixed with a lot of other perspectives), or (Neo)-Peripatetics were monists–their view of the world at least included a single (“mono-“) origin of things, though not necessarily a personal or divine one. While the idea of a single (small “g”) “god” in this sense was certainly welcome among these groups, this came at the cost of an insistence that this “god” must be like Plato’s “Form of the Good” or Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover,” forces infinitely distant from us and completely other from us. Jesus–God come in human flesh–was an idea so far removed from these concepts as to be incomprehensible–and was openly mocked when Paul brought it to Athens. (See, Burning Cultural Bridges? Repentance and Paul in Athens, Acts 17:22-31). On the other hand, the other three major schools of Greek philosophy–the Epicureans, Cynics and Sceptics–generally were either outright atheists or taught that the whole question of the existence of god(s) had no meaning or importance.

Early Christianity clearly rejected all of this. See, Colossians 2:8; 1 Corinthians 8:4-6.

But the early rapid growth of the Body of Christ led to changes in teaching and practice which incorporated the “best” of Greek philosophy (compare, 1 Samuel 15:15) and the active friendship of those in worldly power into the very fabric of the organized church. Ellul conceives of this as two processes, the first of which accepted the friendship of the worldly power, temporally followed by an adoption of Greek philosophical constructs which supported this change. For reasons I will explain in later posts, I think it may be more accurate to say that the two processes largely occurred simultaneously, with the apologetic shift toward Greek philosophy starting slightly earlier (late Second Century CE) than the shift toward seeking alliances with human authorities (mid Third Century CE, during the Empire’s “Third Century Crisis”).

However, the remainder of this post will set forth a series of quotations that describe the process in the order in which Ellul described it, starting with the social causes and costs of Christianity’s early numerical “success:”

Another factor of deformation was Christianity’s very success. This success rested for its part on the Jewish dispersion. At this time the Jewish people formed an important part of the population of the empire. There was a Jewish colony in every large town. It was in these colonies that the first Christian apostles and missionaries worked. There they could spread the gospel with success although also encountering opposition. We know that the gospel was quickly received by the many poor, slaves, urban proletariat, etc. All the histories of the period stress the existence of a great religious hunger in the empire. The traditional religions had collapsed, and the surge of changes in the Mediterranean world necessitated a religion with a universal tendency. The imperial cult could not offer an authentic or generally satisfying religion .that would meet the need for all. It succeeded politically, but that was not enough. Everywhere a new type of religion was spreading in the form of the mystery religions with their emblematic and metaphorical theology, their celebration of rites of purification, their phenomena of ecstasy  and visions …. Some see Near Eastern influence here, but I take the opposite view. Near Eastern religions spread where this need was present, this appeal, this search for spiritual and mystical novelty, this abandoning of the ancient myths, this sense of the inadequacy of ancient rites dating back some five or six hundred years.

Ellul, The Subversion of Christianity, pp. 27-28

Of course, the temptation was always present, and often taken in good faith, to accelerate success by emphasizing points of similarity with the other popular religious movements which were then flourishing:

The opium of the people; Christianity was never this in its origins, but it took on this significance and function when it was contaminated by the many religions of this type under whose umbrella it spread. A religion of escape, we said. Now an essential point here is that escaping means abandoning the other great religious style, that of gathering and unifying (re-ligare, to bind, according to one dubious derivation). The traditional religions that were being abandoned were “civic” religions, religions of the city, whose aim was not merely to ensure individual salvation or gratification but to unite the city, to give it social cohesion, to establish consensus.

With the movement from the first century to the second, the empire passed from the one religious type to the other. Opposing the world and rejecting the imperial religion, Christianity profited greatly by the change. It did so all the more because there spread generally through the empire not only a hunger for salvation (which the claim of the Ptolemies to be Soter could not satisfy) but also a vague sense of fear (to which several literary testimonies bear witness). What appears is a religion that is not one of fear but of grace, of joy, of liberation, of hope. There is no doubt that this is how the first generations of Christians preached it. And this explains its success, its gaining of adherents, of converts. Later many good intellectuals also accepted this gospel, and by the third century educated circles, worldly women, and some of the elite who were interested in new things began to show some concern for this new teaching, this philosophy.

Ellul, The Subversion of Christianity, p. 29

At the end of the third century Christianity became fashionable. But this presupposed a movement of elucidation, of general response. In effect, theology, instead of being content to expound revelation, began to be interested in questions of all kinds and to do philosophy. Thus it wanted, for example, to show a correspondence between Seneca and St. Paul, etc. Discussing problems of the day was the price of success. Success was achieved, but there then came what seems to have been the inevitable and tragic reaction that whereas the good news had first been published for its own sake with no concern for success, now ineluctably success brought, as always, a desire for it from which Christians were not exempt. The only reproach that one can bring against them is that they were not aware of what was happening, namely, that society was inverting Christianity instead of being subverted by it’

Ellul, The Subversion of Christianity, pp 30-31.

.

As the apologists succeeded at attracting more people from the higher classes, in the last half of the Third Century, the third process began–a shift in emphasis from winning individual converts to winning leaders of entire blocs of unbelievers as converts, with the expectation that the whole bloc they led would follow, or, at least, be influenced or coerced by their leaders to populate the local churches (where they could “hear the Gospel”). The organized Church had already been prepared for this,

They soon acquired a taste for success. Not, of course, worldly success, the success that brought benefices and honors. But since a growing number of men and women were joining them, why not attribute this success to the will of God, and why not feel summoned to profit by it? Had not Paul said: “Woe is me if I do not preach the gospel”? Evangelism had at first been rigorous and scrupulous, but now the goal was numbers. It was no longer a question of one-by-one conversion, of house churches, but of large gatherings. Why resist the urge for mass evangelism? Why bother about the authenticity of the faith of the converts? Mass baptisms began to take place.

Ellul, The Subversion of Christianity, p. 31

Mass evangelism then became mass conversion, which became legally or socially compelled “conversion:”

During the third century the decisive change came. In the primitive church personal conversion brought entry and presupposed preparatory training. When the church became an affair of the masses, it became impossible to be sure of the authenticity of each convert. The process reversed itself. People entered the church first and then received the religious instruction that would guarantee the seriousness of their faith. Entry into the church was followed by spiritual training and the acquiring of knowledge. The net had to be cast wide so as to bring in as many as possible. But success put Christianity on a slippery slope. For fundamentally, why wait for deliberate entry into the church? Was it not just as simple to bring everybody in and then see to their education? One is, from that moment, on the road of the compelle intrare that Augustine made famous but that was in fact the practice before him. We are back to the relation between the church and the imperial power. This was the way of success. We have to recognize that it alone strangely perverted the first expressions of the incarnation of Christ in the church.

Success brought Christianity to the imperial family and the governing elite.

Ellul, The Subversion of Christianity, p. 31

The required price for the cooperation of those in power was, of course, reciprocal cooperation:

Christians and the church have wanted an alliance with everything that represents power in the world. In reality this rests on the conviction that thanks to the power of the Holy Spirit the powers of this world have been vanquished and set in the service of the gospel, the church, and mission. We must use their forces in the interests of evangelism. Wealth and various authorities receive recognition in this way and are put in the church’s service.

But what happens is the exact opposite. The church and mission are penetrated by the power and completely turned aside  from their truth by the corruption of power. When Jesus says that his kingdom is not of this world, he says clearly what he intends to say. He does not validate any worldly kingdom ( even if the ruler be a Christian). He puts us on guard against seeking any authority other than that of the Holy Spirit. Reciprocity has come into play, however, and a second set of factors has been introduced. Evangelical proclamation was essentially subversive. Put in danger by it, the forces of the social body have replied by integrating this power of negation, of challenge, by absorbing it through so disguising themselves that Christians thought there had been a social transformation. But this was in fact a mere semblance. It concealed the persistence of the assimilative force of a society that wanted to remain essentially the same. In reality the social group that gave strong adherence to Christianity (the political, social, and intellectual elite) brought with them a social ritual that was the exact opposite of what Jesus proclaimed. By way of simplification let us say that they brought a legal spirit (Roman), a philosophical interpretation of the world (Greek), a mode of action (political), and an aggregate of interests.

Fundamentally one might say schematically that the social body that had been effectively threatened by the diffusion of a faith that bordered on anarchism, on a total lack of interest in worldly matters (administration, commerce, etc.), on the promotion of a new mode of fellowship, reacted in self-defense and absorbed the foreign body, making it serve its own ends. Progressively, then, the church was led to see that it had to adapt the truth of Jesus Christ to different cultures.

Ellul, The Subversion of Christianity, pp. 20-21

All of this will be explained more fully in future posts.