The Early Church Confronts Legalism
(Bible Study - October 1999) As Jesus’ earthly ministry drew to a close, he issued his final statement concerning the community of the Pharisees. Never had they won a single theological point against the Lord, never had they made the slightest adequate defense of their rules-and-rituals religion. Now, at the end, he can go no further with his legalist opponents; they are of no further use except as a good example of a bad example of religion. This series of woes against the Pharisees (Matthew 23) stands in contrast to the beatitudes with which the Lord commenced his teaching ministry.
To finish their evil work, they crucified the Son of God. But they were stultified yet again, for on the third day God raised Jesus from the death of crucifixion, seated him at His own right hand, and declared him Son of God in power (Rom. 1:4).
However, the Pharisees’ foul work continued. Although Jesus had nailed their rituals to the cross (Col. 2:14), the Pharisees received this doctrine no better than anything else he had done with them in their many confrontations. Unaware of the utter futility of their religion, the Pharisees continued for centuries, finishing their Talmuds and commentaries and multiplying laws yet to this day.
Continued opposition to the gospel
The emergence of the inchoate church created at least two crises for the Pharisees.
One, of course, was theological. The Pharisees weren’t by any means ready to
capitulate on circumcision, Sabbath keeping, and so on. Now they faced not just one
proponent of justification by faith, but an entire movement espousing, as they would
esteem it, the heresy of dispensing with ritual law.
The other crisis was financial, and thus had a greater impact on the Sadducees than the Pharisees. The Jewish system required a substantial revenue base to support the Temple. Widespread defections from the synagogues to the ecclesias would have serious economic consequences. Although the New Testament writers do not explicate this point, we have enough information about the economics associated with the Temple (e. g., Mk. 11:15, 16) to posit that the new ecclesia would cause the Jewish leaders fiscal alarm as well as jealousy.
No wonder, therefore, that the early church faced the same opposition the Lord faced. He crucified the law, not its adherents. They crucified him, and lived on to continue their destructive work. Unlike the immortal Jesus, the mortal church was vulnerable to the encroachments and assailments of the Pharisees. Jesus had won the theological battle for grace, and God proved it by raising him from the dead, but now came a new battle. Could an organized body of believers uphold a covenant of grace? The Pharisees lived on to fight against this movement. They provided the primary foil to the Lord’s ministry, and they continued in that role with the early church. Except the riot at Ephesus (Acts 19:23-40) and the jailing at Phillipi (Acts 16:19-21), every confrontation in the book of Acts came by instigation of the Jewish leaders. To fully realize the many ways in which the Pharisees confronted the early church would make a lengthy study. Some of their nefarious activities included:
1. Stoning Stephen and Paul (Acts 7:58, 14:19).
2. Inciting riots in public places ( Acts 21:30).
3. Pretending to be disciples to preach adherence to rituals (Gal. 2:4).
4. Writing letters, with Paul's signature forged, containing false teachings (II Thess.
2:2).
5. Bribing Greeks to riot against Paul (Acts 17:5, 13).
6. Accusing Paul of treason against Rome (Acts 17: 7, 18:12).
7. Accusing Paul of preaching for various selfish reasons (I Thess. 2:5,6).
8. Preying on vulnerable new converts to reclaim them into the law (Gal. 1:8; Col. 2:8).
The above list of Pharisaic strategies against the church only contains the deliberate efforts to dismantle the new religious institution. The Jewish leaders often had little regard for ethics or civility in their determined resistance to the growth of the new faith. Of course, they firmly believed they were protecting God-given truth. However, another threat to the Truth came from a different source, an entirely ingenuous group. These were the new believers who had yet to shed the vestments of ritual worship.
Judaizers in the ecclesias
Paul distinguished between the deliberate onslaught of the Jewish leaders and the
guileless legalistic inclinations of new converts. Judaizers clearly came in two classes:
those who deliberately set out to wreak theological and physical destruction, and those
who sincerely embraced salvation in Christ, yet struggled with the new idea of
justification by faith, occasionally lapsing back into legalistic doctrine and practice.
Of course, the first group preyed on the vulnerability of the second.
We can learn how Paul differentially treated these two classes by looking at one of his earliest letters, that to the ecclesias in Galatia. Here, with legalism the main issue in the survival of these ecclesias in central Asia Minor, Paul approaches the two persuasions with entirely different attitudes and strategies. Naturally, he addresses the letter itself to the struggling faithful in Galatia. He refers to the evil outside Judaizers, but we have no record of any direct writings to them.
So, Paul addresses the members of the ecclesias as brethren, not at all inculpating them. He treats them as the deceived, and the outside agitators as the deceivers. For the members of the ecclesia, he has compassion, although mixed with dismay. For those causing the problems, he has contempt. These people fall into two different classes, though they hold the same theological error. To the one, the misleaders, he would not yield or submit "even for a moment" (Gal. 2:5). To the others, the misled, he had patience to wait in travail "until Christ be formed" in them again (Gal. 4: 19).
We make this point on the distinction between the two groups of legalists to give us a perspective on handling similar issues in today’s ecclesial environment. Currently, we have no parallel to what Paul and the early church faced in the first century. We have no equivalent of another religious group setting out deliberately to infiltrate and destroy our body from within. We have no opponents who believe we are a financial threat to them. We have no single religious denomination out of which we all came which has jealously set out to destroy our faith. While we certainly face oppositions, we have nothing to compare to the first-century ecclesias’ struggle against the vehement antagonism of the Jewish establishment.
We do, however, have problems with legalism that develop out of our growth process in the faith, until Christ be formed in all of us. We all attempt, from time to time, to reduce the Truth to a code and foist our scruples on others. We need to be sure that we handle such back-slidings the way Paul would, as internal struggles of faith, not as external agitation.
A key passage in this regard comes from Galatians, probably Paul’s first epistle directed primarily against legalism. Paul queries the believers who had begun to crumple under pressure from the Judaizers:
"Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law, or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun with the Spirit, are you now ending with the flesh?...Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and miracles among you do so by works of the law, or by hearing with faith?" (Gal. 3:2,3,5 RSV).
The surface meaning comes to us quickly: Paul reminds them that when they practiced legalistic religion, they had no manifestation of the Spirit. When they came under the operation of faith, they experienced the operation of the Spirit. Acts 14 records several miracles Paul and his band did in Galatia (Acts 14:4,10,20).
These miracles clearly testify to the working of God, and they also manifest His character. Healing, goodness, mercy, life, and all the attributes of Deity come to humans by the operation of faith. Under law, they had no such experience of God. They only had the sterile experience of the false religion of rules. They had no access to mercy or grace. They had no access to a living God, because their worship centered on the dead letter of the law (II Cor. 3:6). Through the apostles’ miracles, Jesus showed the character of the God of grace.
The Holy Spirit gift of healing obviously brought healing. Tongues and interpretation of tongues brought unity to ethnically diverse congregations. Prophecy, teaching, and utterances of wisdom brought the authoritative word of God to formative ecclesias, and so on for other spirit gifts. Giving a foretaste of a relationship with a living God, the Spirit gifts reflected access to God unavailable through the law.
The Lord God and the Lord Jesus obviously well knew the struggle their people would encounter as the disciples established a religious movement based on faith in the risen Christ. They would have opposition from the Jews and Greeks on theological issues, they would have the daily wrestling of spiritual living in a pagan society, they would have the internal striving against the flesh, and they would face persecution from their jealous former colleagues in Judaism. They would have an entirely strange gospel to preach. They would have an entirely new relationship to build with the heavenly Father. They would have an immortal high priest in Jesus. How could they accomplish all the work of the gospel? God’s answer: the tangible manifestation of His powerful Spirit, allotted to the apostles and their designees (Acts 8:18) for the work of establishing a community believing and preaching grace.
When we consider, then, the work of Holy Spirit in the first century, we should immediately consider first the historical context. It was the discarding of 1,500 years of futility under the law so that people could know God through faith in Christ. The gifts manifested the power and love of God, giving life to believers through their faith.
Gentiles, too
Another message carried by the giving of the Spirit gifts came when the Gentile
Cornelius and his household received the gifts of the Holy Spirit (Acts 10:44). This
constituted evidence of their justification by faith. Now Gentiles, who had never had any
national connection to the Lord God, received grace and acceptance into His family. Peter
quickly and rightly interpreted the significance of the Holy Spirit gifts now poured out
on Gentiles and immediately commanded baptism for them (v. 47).
Gentiles, too, received the Spirit! As uncomfortable as this may have been for Peter to accept, he took it at face value, and then defended his actions to legalistic brethren of the "The Circumcision Party" (Acts 11: 2). Initially appalled that Peter would even enter the house of Gentiles, let alone eat with them and baptize them, they castigated Peter and the six brethren with him (vv. 2, 3). However, Peter rehearsed the entire episode in their hearing, emphasizing the pouring out of the Holy Spirit on Cornelius’ household (vv. 15-17). This silenced Peter’s foes, as even they realized that God had accepted Gentiles.
The giving of the Holy Spirit gifts showed the Jews that they could have a relationship with God only through faith, not through law. If faith, not adherence to law, was the key, then Gentiles could have the same faith. Bewildered Jews would now eat side-by-side with awestruck Gentiles, sharing in the same grace through the same faith. How compassionate God was to nurture his newborn church, a mixed multitude, with the guidance, teaching, healing, and witness of the Spirit gifts.
The Jerusalem Conference
The Jerusalem conference brought to a head the controversy over keeping the law in the
dispensation of grace. Some brethren in the ecclesia at Jerusalem believed new Gentile
converts should, as they still did, practice the ritual laws. Note that Luke describes
these legalistically-minded brethren as "believers who belonged to the party of
the Pharisees" (Acts 15:5). These brethren were of the class of sincere
believers, but still not yet mature in their faith. The leading faithful brethren did not
expel or ignore them; in fact, the whole conference seems a concession to their scruples.
Unlike outside agitators, these brethren held sincere faith in Christ, but needed help in
letting go of their deeply imbedded justification-by-works mind set. It was tough in those
days, as brethren had to wait patiently for the light of Christ to shine in each heart as
people matured, each at his own pace.
"After much debate," the conference climaxed when Peter retold the episode about his call to Cornelius’s house and the ensuing events (Acts 15: 7-9). Gentiles received the Holy Spirit and acceptance of their faith. Barnabas and Paul then related their own experiences of the Spirit gifts working among the Gentiles (v. 12). Finally, James summarized the evidence, added some scriptural exposition, and declared the law void with respect to Gentile converts. On the other hand, though, he cautioned that Gentile converts must cease their former pagan practices (vv. 19-21).
This approach carried the day. The key point again: God’s character, demonstrated in His powerful gifts, made available to those outside the law. Jewish believers had to come out of legalism, and Gentile believers had to avoid lapsing into it. God accepts people by faith. He reveals His character to us only through faith. To establish this vital point for the newborn ecclesia, He manifested Himself through the Spirit gifts to Jews and Gentiles alike based on their faith.
Today we have different circumstances, but the same challenge. We can only apprehend the character of God through our faith, not through any code of rituals or standards.
Next: Saul the Pharisee becomes Paul the apostle of grace
David Levin