SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!!Yesterday, I posted about not wanting to return to the first century church. If you haven’t read it yet, I’d recommend doing so before we go any further. It’s ok, I’ll wait…

Welcome back. We ended that post by saying that there are aspects of the early church that we, as Christians, tend to glaze over. I suggested that these aspects could make us reconsider our desire for a “return” to the “first century”. I should also probably say that it isn’t my goal to destroy anyone’s faith in or admiration of the earliest saints. To the contrary, my entire academic life has been, and will continue to be, devoted to studying those early Christians. To completely tear them down would negate all of my efforts to better understand them. My goal is to help everyone have a better understanding of what was happening in the first century church.

With that being said, since when does chronological proximity make humans any less flawed and the Holy Spirit any more God? Peter was with Jesus himself for almost 3 and a half years and still denied him three times. When Jesus returned, the Bible tells us that some doubted, not just Thomas. Even after Jesus’ resurrection his disciples found themselves in despair, scattered, and returning to their former lifestyles. Just because the earliest Christians were closer to Jesus’ and the Apostles’ actual time period, doesn’t mean that they were better or more spiritually capable than us. Has the Holy Spirit gotten weaker since He arrived on the scene? Of course not. Have humans gotten any more or less “sinful” than in the first century? No.

Heck, why do you think Paul even had to write letters? To correct problems that arose in churches he had planted! In Corinth guys were sleeping with their step-moms (1 Corinthians 5:1). In Thessalonica people were spreading rumors that Jesus had already come back, so Paul had to write two letters assuring them that when Jesus came back, they’d know about it. (1 & 2 Thessalonians) Paul even got so mad at the people in Galatia for wanting to follow the law, i.e. being legalistic, that he told them to emasculate themselves! (Galatians 5:12)

People in the “First Century Church” were just as screwed up as we are today. It didn’t matter that they had seen Paul in person. They still had to deal with all the crap that we deal with today:

  • How much should Christians focus on morality?
  • What parts of the Gospel are non-negotiable?
  • How do we tell the world about Jesus?
  • What does a Christian life look like?
  • How do we know that Jesus hasn’t come back already? What if we missed it?
  • What if your step mom is really hot?

Being able to hear the powerful words of Peter and the other Apostles didn’t make the people of the first century church any more holy, we just think it did.