Converts or Proselytes? The Significance of the Convert Model ~ Part 3 of 3

As the Church in Toronto engages with Paul’ epistle to the Galatians we sense the struggle the early Jewish believers had with the issue of whether Gentile (non-Jewish) believers in Christ were obligated to adopt Old Testament Jewish practices. The events in Galatians 2 indicate that the original apostles struggled with this issue. Paul’s writings show this question reoccurred among both Gentile & Jewish churches. Prof. Andrew F. Walls has examined this early phase of Christian history and pointed out its continuing significance for us today. This is the final instalment.

In earlier selections Prof. Walls enunciated the importance of the Jerusalem council’s decision in Acts 15 that pagan Greeks who became new believers in Christ were not Jewish proselytes, but Greek converts. Jesus’ death and resurrection changed the Old Covenant dispensation of Law into the New Covenant dispensation of Grace. That momentous change rendered the Jewish ordinances of circumcision, kosher diet, Sabbath and festivals mere cultural preferences, neutral in terms of the believer’s standing before God and membership among God’s people.  “Converts” means that Greek believers could remain in their Greek culture & lifestyle while learning to “live by faith in God’s Son” (Gal. 2:20) within that society, thereby “incarnating Christ” in an environment where Jesus Christ never lived in “the days of His flesh.” To paraphrase Prof. Walls—“as the Gospel crosses cultural frontiers [into 21^st century North American society], many things… are open-ended and unpredictable. [That] would be unbearable but for one thing: the knowledge that new believers receive the Holy Spirit.” He continues by asking “what if?”—Nigel Tomes

INTERNATIONAL BULLETIN OF MISSIONARY RESEARCH, Vol. 28, No. 1, Jan., 2004, pp. 2-6

What if?

One way of assessing the significance of the Jerusalem council’s decision [in Acts 15] that Gentile converts did not, like proselytes, need Torah [Moses’ Law] and circumcision is to consider what the implications of the opposite decision would have been; that is, [what] if the [Acts 15 Jerusalem] council had decided to retain the long-standing proselyte model and require the new believers to live under the same regime as the original [Jewish] believers in Jesus. It is safe to say that huge areas of Hellenistic [Greek] social, family, and intellectual life would have been left untouched by Christian faith. Whole stretches of Paul’s letters would have been unnecessary.

New Jesus Lifestyle

Consider, for instance, the passage in which Paul discusses what a Christian should do if invited to dinner by a pagan friend who may have bought the meat from a [pagan] temple where it had been offered in pagan sacrifice [to an idol] (1 Cor. 10:27–30). This was an entirely new problem for believers. No apostle or elder, however experienced, had ever faced it, because they were all observant Jews, and everyone knew that observant Jews did not sit at pagan dinner tables. Had Corinthian believers become proselytes and adopted the Jerusalem church lifestyle, there would have been no problem; the invitation [to eat temple-meat] would not be extended, or would be refused if it were.

But Paul envisages a new sort of Christian lifestyle, where believers do join pagans at the dinner table and have to face the implications of acting, thinking, and speaking as Christians in that situation, speaking of Christ, perhaps at a pagan friend’s table. Paul envisages Hellenistic [Greek] Christians operating within Hellenistic [Greek] social and family life, challenging and disturbing it, bringing about radical change in it—but from the inside, as a result of Christians expressing the implications of their faith within that society’s institutions. Yes, he says in effect, go to dinner with your pagan friend if you want to, but be clear in your mind, and be ready to make clear to people present, the Christian grounds on which you are eating or not taking the meat.

Jesus ‘Incarnated’ in Greek Society

This advice is part of a whole discourse on how Christians should act within the institutions of Hellenistic [Greek] society (1 Cor. 8:1–11:1). It shows a whole new Jesus lifestyle, a Hellenistic way of being Christian, in process of construction, and we can view much of Paul’s correspondence as being essentially about the principles involved in that process. This was necessary because the council of Acts 15 had made it clear that the new believers were not Jewish proselytes, but Greek converts. It was their calling to open up the ways of thinking, speaking, and acting characteristic of Hellenistic [Greek] society in the Roman East Mediterranean to the influence of Christ. Those ways needed to be turned to him—converted, in fact—until he was enfleshed there, as securely at home in the Hellenistic [Greek] East Mediterranean as he had been in Jewish Palestine.

Christ made Flesh in Greek Society

Paul speaks of himself as being in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed among the Galatian believers (Gal. 4:19). And Christ could not be formed among them all the time they [Greek believers] insisted on patterning themselves on Jewish believers, even exemplary Jewish believers. A Galatian Christ must be formed among Galatian Christians if Galatia was to meet the Christ of God. Is it significant that Paul’s tone is harsher with the Galatians, who were, with excellent motives, rejecting the call to a converted Hellenistic [Greek] lifestyle, than it is with the Corinthians, who were making a mess of constructing one? In that converted lifestyle every aspect of Hellenistic life and all its institutions must be turned toward Christ. And there were no precedents; the guideposts familiar to early believers were there no longer. At the Jerusalem council no one could have been certain what the converted Hellenistic [Greek] lifestyle, without the framework of the Torah [Law], would be like—except that it must recall the Christ who walked in Palestine and reflect the activity of the Holy Spirit. Christ would be made flesh once more, made manifest where he had not walked in flesh before, as he was received by faith in Hellenistic [Greek] society.

New Questions, Uncharted Territory

Hellenistic [Greek] social and family life created new situations for believers in Jesus and required Christian choices to be made on a daily basis. The choices were of a different order from those facing dispersion Jews in their cultural adjustment to the Hellenistic world, even though Jews and Christians had so many attitudes in common. Greek-speaking Jews were negotiating someone else’s culture while retaining their identity; Greek Christians were negotiating their own culture while expressing a Christian identity. Not only were new social situations constantly arising; an intellectual environment that combined the influences of Greek philosophy, Roman law, Eastern mysticism and spirituality, and astral science was giving rise to questions that no believers had found it necessary to ask before. That intellectual environment was the highway to a great outworking of creative theological activity [e.g. the Creeds of the “Church Fathers”], but it must have often seemed to old-style Jewish believers to be dangerous, uncharted territory.

Had the Jesus community retained the proselyte model, Christians would almost inevitably have been taken out of the intellectual mainstream and shut up to their own sacred books. But as [Greek] converts, believers in Jesus were required to turn their processes of thought toward Christ, to think Christ into the intellectual framework of their time and place. The eventual result was Christian theology as we know it.

The outcome of conversion was thus culturally and intellectually dynamic, creative, and innovative. As segments of Hellenistic [Greek] social reality and structures of Hellenistic thought were turned toward Christ, they received new life and meaning. The general effect of the proselyte lifestyle would almost certainly have been to draw the new believers’ energies in another direction. It might have produced very devout Christians, but their effect on their society and its ways of thinking would have been negligible.

Proselytes—the Safe Way

On many occasions since Galatians was written, good Christian people have tried to ensure that those they have brought to faith would become as much like themselves as possible; have the same priorities and avoidances, hold the same things important, take the Torah [Law] and circumcision of those who evangelized them. And itis safer. If any conservative- minded Jerusalem believers read 1 Corinthians, they would no doubt have found all their fears about the decision of the Apostolic Council [in Jerusalem (Acts 15)] confirmed and would be doubly sure of the folly of leaving raw believers, newly brought out of paganism, without the guidance of the Torah [Moses’ Law]. The way of proselytes is safe. They give up their old customs and beliefs and take up those of someone else. There is a sacrifice involved— they give up their national heritage and social affiliations. But once this is done, the guideposts are clear; there is a precedent for every eventuality, every situation has been met before.

Converts--Riskier

Converts face a much riskier life. Converts have to be constantly, relentlessly turning their ways of thinking, their education and training, their ways of working and doing things, toward Christ. They must think Christ into the patterns of thought they have inherited, into their networks of relationship and their processes for making decisions. And new issues, cultural or intellectual, where it is necessary to make a Christian choice, are arising all the time and with no exact parallels in the past. Proselytes may walk by sight; converts have to walk by faith.

Judaizing—a Persistent Tendency

The distinction between proselyte and convert is vital to Christian mission. It springs out of the very origins of that mission, demonstrated in the first great crisis of the early church. The later church has seen many heresies come and go, but the earliest of them has been by far the most persistent. The essence of the “Judaizing” tendency is the insistence on imposing our own religious culture, our own Torah [Law] and circumcision. Christian conversion as demonstrated in the New Testament is not about substituting something new for something old—that is to move back to the proselyte model, which the apostolic church could have adopted but decided to abandon. Perhaps they remembered the word of the Lord—his only recorded utterance on the subject of proselytes—that proselytes, won by infinite pains, readily become children of hell (Matt. 23:15).

Conversion--turning what’s already there to Christ

Conversion is not a case of adding something new to what is already there, a new set of beliefs and values to supplement and refine those already in place. Conversion requires something much more radical. It is less about content than about direction. It involves turning the whole personality with its social, cultural, and religious inheritance toward Christ, opening it up to him. It is about turning what is already there. Christ is formed among the elements of the pre-conversion life as He is received by faith there. And as the Gospel crosses cultural frontiers, many things, as the apostles and elders at Jerusalem realized, are open-ended and unpredictable. The realization would be unbearable but for one thing: the knowledge that new believers receive the Holy Spirit. In the Acts 15 account, it was the fact that God, who knows the heart, had given the Holy Spirit to the Gentiles as well as to the apostolic company; that reality clinched the matter for Peter (Acts 15:8). The Hellenistic [Greek] way of Christian living would be constructed under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. In a very profound sense conversion is the work of the Holy Spirit in the church.