Extract from
Stepping Out of Bounds
Learning from the Breakthroughs and Struggles of the Earliest Christians
Chapter 2
Inspiration
The course ‘Principles of Worship’ was not one I was looking forward to during my first year in seminary, but I still remember it as the best I have ever done. Having become a Catholic about a year before, it was perhaps surprising that I had not found the experience of Catholic worship altogether helpful. I had been drawn by the depth of silence at daily mass and in quiet times alone in church rather than the busy Sunday worship, and my initial leaning in seminary was therefore much more towards courses on spirituality or pastoral practice.
But the late 1970s were heady days in the Catholic Church. Twelve years on from the Second Vatican Council, my year group was almost 40 strong, the largest intake of students for twenty years. Radical movements were having an increasing influence in Central and South America. The election of the first non-Italian pope for centuries was galvanizing the confidence of ordinary people in Poland. A new and more open way of thinking about the Church was taking shape. Since the Vatican Council, Catholic worship was one of the things that had changed most. From mass with a priest with his back to the people saying barely audible prayers in Latin, all emphasizing the mysterious distant strangeness of God, the priest now stood to face the congregation, creating a circle around the altar, speaking in people’s mother tongue, emphasizing God in the midst of the community.
Six years later, I was ordained a deacon and then a priest. Those ‘principles of worship’, which the course in seminary awakened me to, had become a major part of my life, shaping how I understood community and faith.
Thirty years further on, my common situation for worship now is the simplicity of a Quaker meeting. Although I still attend the local Catholic and Anglican Churches, I am also part of a Quaker community that gathers in silence around the four sides of a simple room in our Meeting House, eyes closed or looking at the ground, or sometimes at the faces of those present. From time to time, someone stands and speaks, perhaps about their lives or a current issue that is concerning them, sometimes expressing an insight from Quaker experience over the past three hundred and fifty years. Occasionally, without fanfare, someone, anyone, will speak with a surprising power, not necessarily in easy fluent phrases, but unmistakably sounding a deep silent chord within the whole group, creating a pin-drop silence in which everyone knows something extraordinary is happening, even though to the outside observer, there is little evidence that anything has changed.
The subject of Quaker worship did not arise in that course in seminary, but we did talk about moments like this, moments when words arise spontaneously in the context of worship. To avoid reflecting on this phenomenon would have been to distort the history of the Catholic mass. I remember vividly being introduced to one of the earliest descriptions of Christian worship. It comes in a short piece of writing known as the Didachē, the first Greek word of the title, ‘The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles’. Most scholars date it to the middle or late first century, which places it at the time of the writing of the New Testament. Indeed, it is included in some of the early lists of the books that eventually become the Church’s scripture. It contains a section giving guidelines on baptism and holy communion. We find there one of the earliest Eucharistic prayers, the words that are prayed over the bread and wine before these are shared with the community.
First, concerning the cup:
We thank you, our Father, for the holy vine of David your servant,
which you made known to us through Jesus your servant.
To you be the glory forever.
Next, concerning the broken bread:
We thank you, our Father, for the life and knowledge
which you made known to us through Jesus your servant.
To you be the glory forever.
Even as this broken bread was scattered over the hills,
and was gathered together and became one,
so let your church be gathered together
from the ends of the earth into your kingdom.
To you is the glory and the power through Jesus Christ forever.
While this sort of text is well known to Catholics and other Christians, it is not part of the Quaker tradition, where the conviction that every time and place is sacred has led to a serious reservation about traditional forms of worship with special set words and actions. While the purpose of such ritual may be described in terms of bringing the sacred into everyday life, the Quaker view has been that, in reality, it serves to separate particular people and places and times, introducing a division between the sacred and the everyday that, in practice, proves difficult to overcome.
But there is a major Quaker element of this earliest eucharist that comes just a little later in the text. After further brief prayers it says this:
But permit the prophets to give thanks however they wish.
(tr. Michael Holmes)
Just like the Friend who spoke in the Quaker meeting, prophets, if present in the community, were expected to speak words that arose in them in that moment. ‘To give thanks’ in this phrase is translating the Greek word, ‘eucharist’. So this brief instruction is not just referring to a general sense of thanksgiving after communion. ‘Eucharist’ is a description of the whole ritual including everything described above, including the words said over the bread and wine.
A lot of the discussion in my Catholic course was about the different forms of the Eucharistic prayer. In a tradition that has a concern with the ‘validity’ of the sacraments - what makes them objectively effective - the variety of written Eucharistic prayers that have come down to us itself presents some problems. Not all of them contain all the elements of what has become the approved form of this foundational Christian prayer. But the issue here is at a different level. One of the very earliest examples we have of a community gathering ‘in the life and knowledge of Jesus’, allows space for a prophet to speak the Eucharistic prayer, open to what the Spirit leads them to say in that particular moment.
Strange as it seemed to my seminary year group, who were used to the set words and rubrics of Catholic worship, this encouragement for prophets makes perfect sense in the context of first century Christianity that we are about to explore. To get an accurate picture of the motivations of the first Christians we have to acknowledge how central the experience of prophecy was for Jesus and the earliest Christians. In a Christian context, prophecy means literally ‘speaking words from God’ or also, as we shall see, ‘speaking words from Jesus’. These words could take a variety of forms rather than just be predictions about the future (although this could be an important element). Even though it takes some detective work to reveal just how important prophecy was, its broad significance for the earliest Christians can be seen without difficulty. The Acts of the Apostles contains repeated references to the Spirit guiding people.
Paul and Timothy went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been
forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia. When they had come
opposite Mysia, they attempted to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus did not
allow them…
Acts 16:6f
One of our tasks is to see how, over the first decades, this central importance of prophecy was not without challenges and, eventually, the Christian tradition took a different turn. The somewhat untidy and spontaneous inspiration of the prophets gradually receded in importance and a hierarchical authority structure of bishops, priests and deacons developed. Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch between 98 and 117, was a notable advocate for this ministerial structure, but the way he claims authority for this structure is revealing. In his letter to the church of Philadelphia in Asia Minor, he uses an emphatic prophetic formula to affirm the importance of hierarchy.
Thus, at the time I was with you, I cried out, speaking with a loud voice – the very voice of God – ‘Be loyal to your bishop and clergy and deacons’.
Ignatius to the Philadelphians, 7:1-2 (tr. Maxwell Staniforth)
Even 70 years after Jesus, the new development of a church hierarchy needs prophetic authority, as Ignatius puts it, words ‘cried out’ spoken in ‘a loud voice – the very voice of God’ to have real legitimacy.
Soon after these words, Ignatius shows he is completely aware of a question, which is very relevant to the Quaker tradition but which also comes up regularly throughout Christian history, particularly when there are movements for renewal in the church: how do you know these words are genuinely inspired by God? In his answer Ignatius claims that the instruction ‘never to act in independence of the bishop’ is given to him from the traditional source of prophecy: ‘the preaching of the Spirit itself’. For readers today, especially Quakers with their reservations about hierarchy, that command is unlikely to remove a suspicion that Ignatius is simply claiming the authority of God’s Spirit for his own view. The fact that he needs to defend his words in the letter is likely to mean that at least some of his first hearers had their doubts too. But these words from the turn of the first century raise a vital question, one which has been obscured in subsequent Christian life and history by the authority invested in hierarchical leadership and in biblical text. Given that prophecy was central for the first Christian communities, preceding both Church hierarchy and the New Testament, how did they decide what prophetic words could be trusted and acted upon? Much of the conflict that we will see in earliest Christianity is related to this question.
The voice of conscience and creation
When I was growing up, my father was a parish priest in the mainstream of the liberal Anglican/Episcopalian tradition and from time to time he was dealing with people who felt they had been given a message from God. My father was highly suspicious of any such claim and clearly did not believe this was the way of God – at least, not in the normal run of parish life.
But a key to seeing prophecy differently is to separate this idea of divine communication from a limited and simplistic image of God. It is easy to ridicule the idea of God sending down set messages, rather like someone with a gigantically powerful computer in the cloud downloading messages into the heads of receptive (or gullible) Christians. We will indeed have to take seriously the idea that in the conception of the first Christians God has an unfolding purpose and prompts people to play their specific part. But in the biblical tradition prophecy is consistently linked with the idea of God as Spirit and this may help us think of it in a more subtle way. In this view, the Spirit is always at work in creation, an invisible power we can align ourselves with or resist. Prophecy is a manifestation of the Spirit taking complex and meaningful form in our minds as words or images that feel like they come from beyond us.
Such experiences are not uncommon and they have an affinity with the rather archaic sounding idea of prophecy. In everyday situations, many people will speak of having an intuition, those moments when we feel particular guidance to take a certain path or direction. This is often associated with the idea of ‘trust’, which we may refer to whether we go with what we feel or not. We make a bad choice and say, ‘I should have trusted my intuition’ or ‘my gut sense’. More significant still is what is often even today called the ‘voice’ of conscience, the widespread experience across different cultures of sensing strongly a right way to act when presented with a personal moral choice. It is not unusual for people to describe this as something that is heard inwardly, a voice more deep and insistent than that of our normal thinking. These experiences tend to relate to specific isolated moments, but question any group of people and there are likely to be several who can speak of feeling guided to take a particular direction that comes to shape their whole life. This can be referred to as a ‘vocation’, a word that contains within it the idea of a ‘voice’ that calls, as in ‘vocal’. Some people feel this sense of a ‘calling’ in life from childhood – ‘I knew from early on that this was what I wanted to do’. Some have a moment of deep recognition later in life that they have found a role and purpose where they feel fully themselves. Others will talk in the same way of finding their life partner.
What all these experiences have in common with prophecy is a sense of direction that is felt within but which at the same time seems to come from ‘outside’, from somewhere other than our own cleverness or reasoned conclusions. Indeed, often a characteristic of these more widespread experiences is the way in which they lead us to take risks and act with a confidence and boldness that surprises us. We have a sense of ‘knowing’ that is stronger than reason. Breakthroughs in movements for radical social change often bring together the voice of conscience with a complete clarity about what must be done to make change happen, whatever the cost.
Inspiration has this quality too. Creative artists will often be amazed at what suddenly emerges and comfortably speak of something that is created through them rather than simply by them. The same can happen in scientific breakthroughs. The Scottish engineer, James Watt, tells the story of walking across Glasgow Green one Sunday when he suddenly saw what he needed to do to dramatically improve the steam engine, turning it into the force that initiated the industrial age. Of course, all those involved know the hard work in immersing themselves in the skills and knowledge of a scientific discipline or an artistic tradition. But the moment of breakthrough has a different quality from hard work. It is at least as much a gift received as a push of effort.
The idea of ‘expansion’, of being released from the fixed way things seem to be and seeing possibilities in a new way, links all these experiences and will be helpful throughout the book as we seek to understand the centrality of prophecy among the first Christians. Breakthroughs seem to come from a place beyond where we are, stretching how we think, sometimes dramatically so, sometimes just the next step beyond.
An experiment whose time has come
I have suggested that there are affinities between prophecy and secular understanding and I trust that people who would not describe themselves as Christian will also find something of value in this book. Readers of other faiths will no doubt recognize parallels with what I describe here, which I hope may translate into shared insights and co-operation. But as I anticipate that my primary readership will be either Christian or familiar with the Christian tradition, I will use the language of that tradition, while recognizing, as the tradition explicitly does, that any language has limitations in describing anything to do with God.
One problem with using familiar Christian language is that it can make it harder to escape traditional interpretations, especially ones we may associate with a particular Christian denomination, one we belong to or one we have been glad to get away from. I will try and help prevent that happening by going back, from time to time, to the original language of the New Testament to help show how things that were vital in early Christianity have been overshadowed and obscured by later developments. To introduce one obvious example, which is at the heart of this chapter, I will be suggesting that for the first Christians, ‘the word of God’ was not scripture. When the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews described ‘the word of God’ as something ‘living and active’ (Heb 4:12), it links directly with a refrain that is repeated several times in the opening section of Hebrews: ‘O that today you would listen to his voice, harden not your hearts’ (Heb 3:7f,15; 4:7). This is the voice of prophecy, the living word that the first Christians claimed was being heard among them. Given the weight of centuries of tradition, it takes a real effort not to slide back into interpreting ‘the word of God’ as scripture and lose sight of the simple but powerful claim that we will find is at the heart of the gospel.
So in traditional Christian terms, prophecy can be described as the wisdom that comes from God. But it should already be clear that, despite using the traditional language, such as ‘what God is asking’, ‘what God requires’, or ‘what God has done’, we will be exploring an alternative understanding that we have already hinted at: prophecy as participation in the unfolding of creation, or in religious terms, God’s continuing creation. The New Testament talks of humankind made in the image of God. The first Christians were discovering what it might mean to think in terms of creation, God’s creation happening in and through us. Today, with all that humankind has achieved, we have the opportunity to explore further our role as co-creators with God – conscious participants in God’s unfolding creation – guided by the living word of God, speaking in and through our own particular situation.
This understanding can be illuminated by a brief look at the Quaker tradition. It can be understood as an extraordinary 350 year-old experiment in how to keep the possibility of the living prophetic word at the heart of a community without falling back on a text which captures a past moment of inspiration. The bold claim is that, in the silence of Quaker worship, the living word of God may be heard and spoken. There is no restriction on who may be the instrument of the spoken word, but vital to the movement’s success, has been the development of ways of testing the word, when the community is involved in discerning if this word is reliable, if it is from God.
The fruits of the Quaker way are well known in the US and Britain and several other countries have significant Quaker communities too. This is a movement that has been persistently involved in effective social action. Lots of people would agree with Quaker causes down the decades – prison reform, abolition of slavery, compassionate mental health care, to name three obvious ones – but few, if any, have found such a determined sense of practical purpose to follow causes through to substantive and lasting change. Arguably, the source of this sustained effective action is the well worked out Quaker understanding that prophetic inspiration does not simply prompt the genesis of an idea but also lies behind its nuts and bolts implementation. Administrative and financial considerations can also be Spirit-led. And once a proposal for change is tested and embraced by the whole community, there is a real strength to sustain and follow through on what is understood as ‘the will of God’.
Through William Penn, the early Quaker founder of Philadelphia, the movement had a substantial influence on the founding principles of the United States. Under Penn’s firm and direct influence, the city pioneered a tolerance of religious diversity (Philadelphia was the only place in the whole British Empire where the Roman Catholic mass could be celebrated publicly), an education system open to all that brought a high level of literacy, stimulating the kind of intellectual discussion and debate that made the city a leader in science and medicine. Mental illness was decriminalized and treated with care and compassion. All these developments flow from the fundamental Quaker insight, expressed in the Quaker form of worship, that all people may be ministers of God’s word. Other radical groups have also been inspired by a vision of equality. But the first Quakers found a way of combining that breakthrough insight with a rigorous form of testing by the community that deliberately did not require following fixed written teachings or rules. Both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine studied Penn’s theories and these provided primary sources for the idea of an amendable constitution, a flexible, responsive, political system that rejected an elite hierarchy of crown and aristocracy and enabled widespread participation, upholding the vision that ‘all people are equal under God’.
Quakers are a small group and relatively few people are aware of the nature of the experiment they have been living since the 1650s. ‘Primitive Christianity Revived’ is one way that Friends described how they were seeking to live; William Penn made this phrase the title of one of his books. Even among Quakers, this is often viewed as just another version of the repeated claim of various groups through Christian history to be living as the first disciples lived, imitating the life that can be glimpsed in the Acts of the Apostles and other New Testament writings. But the claim of the earliest Quakers is more subtle than that. From their perspective, to imitate the apostles, in the sense of what they did and said, is a mistake. The revival they called ‘primitive Christianity’ is specifically the Quaker witness to listening and responding to the direct guidance of the Spirit in the present, both for individuals and the community. It is in this precise sense that they believed they were reviving the practice of Jesus and the first Christians.
Inspiration, expansion and conflict
In this book I will offer a view of the New Testament period, which has come to make vivid sense to me in resolving a number of difficult issues in New Testament scholarship. More importantly, it gives us a new way of understanding the early Christian breakthrough that does not lie in yet another reading of scripture. Rather, it has the potential to refocus Christian efforts away from the difficulty of interpreting the teaching of Jesus for the very different world we live in today – as useful and inspiring as this can be - towards speaking and acting with the same confident prophetic power we recognise in Jesus and his first followers. Vital to this picture is the view that the New Testament is witness to a time in which prophetic inspiration was central. As we have noted, ‘scripture’ is traditionally described as ‘the word of God’, and refers both to the Hebrew scriptures and to the Christian books known as the ‘New Testament canon’. Canon means literally ‘rule’ and that is a substantial dimension of how scripture has been seen down the years. There has been the expectation that, with the right interpretation, answers can be found in it for the Christian community – either specific answers for particular problems or principles on which moral decisions can be made.
Instead I would suggest that our need today is to approach the Christian scriptures in a different way, not as a source of answers or even sound principles, but rather as a witness to a most extraordinary experience of how to live and act, which is still there to discover. The key players back then are the small group of Jews in the New Testament story. The Jewish community, even at the time, was recognized by contemporaries as having a deeply rooted and sophisticated understanding of the relationship between the divine and the human. Yet this small group is confronted by events that dramatically expand their conception of God and the world and their purpose within it. The pages of the New Testament are full of evidence of this breakthrough. But they also reveal just how difficult it was to make sense of this development.
Their struggle to do this is woven into the New Testament story. As a consequence, it is both the breakthrough they experience and the ensuing conflict that come to define the Christian community and eventually the Christian religion. Complex factors gave rise to the boundaries that mark out the early Christian community. One source is the hostility towards the first Christians from many of their fellow Jews; another is the violence they met from the Roman authorities as the Christian gospel spread. But a further significant factor in the mix comes to light once we recognize the impact this hostility and violence had within the Christian community. A community increasingly under external threat, the internal life of the very earliest Christian communities was also marked by serious friction between different groups and individuals as they wrestled with new and controversial understandings.
A major value for today of the books of the New Testament is that, despite attempts to paper over the cracks, they reveal this conflict within the early church between individuals and communities over what this spiritual breakthrough meant for their ongoing lives. At points the different players and writers of the New Testament are deeply at odds with each other. They all witness that God has done something extraordinary among them but there are sharp disagreements over what that demands of them. It is nigh on miraculous that we have had passed down to us a set of writings that all forcefully affirm that something essential is revealed to humankind through the life of Jesus, but which do not convey one single consistent line about what those events mean. What we will come to see is how, paradoxically, in honestly revealing this struggle, this extraordinary collection of texts with its diverse and clashing interpretations, more clearly reveals the authenticity of the underlying inspirational experiences that were widespread among the first Christians.
It is in examining and seeking clarity about the conflicts in earliest Christianity that we discover a major tool for identifying the nature of the transformation that people were experiencing. For this task we will be drawing on some of the best of recent biblical scholarship. The primary challenge is that, within the gospels, conflicts in which Jesus was involved are shaped by and, indeed, conflated with the struggles of different emerging Christian communities. It is here that scholarship is needed to disentangle them, clarifying the nature of the conflicts among early Christians and revealing how these are not identical to the conflicts surrounding Jesus. As we pursue this aim, the consistent underlying nature of early Christian experience will emerge.
We will first need to look at how Jesus was regarded as a prophet and how that plays out in his public life. Mark, more than any other text, highlights the profoundly disturbing nature of the very first experiences of transformation for those who were with Jesus, shaping the way the early Christians tell the story of Jesus. The letters of Paul provide a first-hand account of early Christian experience along with ample indication of how difficult it was to find the right response to it in community life. The Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, considered as a two volume work – as is usual in New Testament scholarship –, build on that picture, presenting God’s Spirit as the source and the agent of expansion into the wider world. In Matthew’s Gospel we find a writer who primarily interprets this transformational power in terms of renewal and thus offers the radical teaching of Jesus in a way that is fitted to the life of an ongoing community.
Towards the end of the book, we look at the later writings of the New Testament associated with the name John. Alongside discovering further confirmation of the importance of prophecy we also take a fresh look at insights that have formed and nurtured Christian religion over the centuries. These are texts written in a situation of severe conflict and, shaped by that, present an elevated view of Jesus in a way that has had profound implications for the development of the Christian religion. The breaking down of boundaries between people that characterizes the earlier texts is replaced with a sharp and clear division between insiders with their Christian faith and outsiders identified particularly with the Jews. In a time when Christians are an oppressed minority, this aids survival, but when Christianity becomes dominant, this has profoundly destructive consequences for the Jewish people.
The last chapter draws on the Pastoral Letters to Timothy and Titus. Despite being presented as letters of Paul, most scholars place the writing of them as early in the second century, making them the latest documents in the New Testament. Here we encounter a community concerned with its reputation in the wider world. The remarkable public role of Christian women has become controversial and we will see how the first bishops justify pulling back from this central aspect of the early Christian breakthrough.
The whole book is concerned with the relationship between radical spiritual experiences and their relationship to community and the structure it needs. The conclusion will offer some pointers to the relevance of what we have identified as central to earliest Christianity to the situations we face in Christian and other faith communities today.