Transcript
I have very often stood in a village street in India and preached to people for whom the name of Jesus Christ means absolutely nothing. And if the people are sufficiently interested to listen, they are going to ask the question, who is Jesus? And you have to begin to answer that question. And of course you have to answer it in their language. You cannot answer it in your own language. What word will you choose out of their
language to say who Jesus is? If there was a word which was already suitable, then you would not have to preach that sermon. They would already know. You have got to find a word which already exists there, but which necessarily exists. A word is a word that belongs to their own culture and therefore to their own view of life. The commonest word that is used in speaking about Jesus is the word Swami, Yesu Swami. And Swami means
Lord. But the word Swami is applied to millions and millions of gods, demigods, heroes, great human beings. And to call Jesus Swami is in no sense whatever to... Ascribe to him the kind of lordship that we mean when we say Jesus is Lord. There is no word which could convey that meaning. Or I have heard very often preachers use the word avatar, which is the word usually translated incarnation. According to a certain school of Hindu thought,
the Vaishnava school, whenever unrighteousness is rising and righteousness is failing, God incarnates. God incarnates himself in order to restore the rule of righteousness. Well, you can use that word, but then you are simply saying that Jesus is one of a series. There have been many more before and there will be many more to come. You are not giving him a place which makes him unique. Or if you start, as I have certainly heard an evangelist do,
after telling a good story, which makes everybody listen, he then takes a big breath and says, 4,000 miles away, 2,000 years ago, in a country called Palestine, there was once a man called Jesus. And immediately the crowd begins to melt away. Because obviously this has nothing to do with my life here today. And so on. One could go on speaking. Where do you find a way of speaking which says who Jesus is in the
terms of their own culture? You cannot. Because... Ex hypothesi, that culture already does not contain a place for Jesus Christ. So you have to use the words knowing that they do not express the lordship of Jesus absolutely. But then, of course, immediately you have to remember that you have oversimplified the problem. Because I, the Englishman, standing in that street as a Christian missionary, I'm also a product of the culture in which I speak. And in terms
of which I try to make sense of my experience. And my use of the word lord in regard to Jesus is shaped by what that word lord means in my culture as an Englishman. Now, of course, none of us... I do not see my own culture. Just as I do not see my own spectacles. Spectacles are the means by which I see what is out there. And I am not conscious of my spectacles as such. In
the same way, I am not conscious of my culture. My culture is the way in which I make sense of the world. And therefore, I simply take it for granted. Only when I meet another culture am I compelled, as it were, to take off my spectacles and look at them. And recognize the fact that there are other ways of seeing reality. And that my understanding of Christ is shaped by my own culture. And has, therefore, the
relativity that belongs to that. But fortunately, that is not the end of the story. Because in due course, if all goes well, there will be a new world. There will be a bible which comes into the hands of the people in that village. And they will begin to study it. Probably the young people, the young men and women of the village will study it. Because they will be more ready to take up new ideas than the
old ones will. And when they begin to study that bible, they will meet somebody who does not happen to be a 20th century Englishman. Um, They will meet somebody who does not happen to be a 20th century Englishman. somebody who is different from both their own culture and the culture of the missionary who brought the message of Jesus to them. They will find somebody who stands out of the pages of that book as a living person,
who puts questions to them, who challenges them, and who also puts questions to this message that the foreign missionary has brought to them. And so a triangular relationship is set up, and this is the point that I want to emphasize. A triangular relationship is set up, of which the three points are the receptor culture – if I may call it so – the receptor culture, the missionary's culture, and the scriptures. It is a three-cornered relationship.
Not just a two-way relationship. And because there is a third factor in the situation, both of these other elements will be changed. May I give you two illustrations of that? The first is an illustration of how the presence of the Bible will call in question the understanding of the Gospel according to the missionary's culture. There is a fascinating book by David Barrett called Schism and Renewal in Africa, which is a very large study done over
a period of five or ten years, of about 5,000 independent church movements in Africa. And as you know, an enormous number of these independent movements have grown up, breaking away from the churches founded through Western Christianity. And one of the facts that he brings out is that these breakaway movements develop only as the scriptures come into circulation. He has taken a sample group of 472 tribes, and he has worked out the percentage of tribes in
which independency has occurred – that is to say, in which there has been a breakaway movement. And the figures are as follows. Where no scriptures have been published, there are only 10% independency movements. Where portions of scriptures have been published, there is a 56% independency rate. Where the whole New Testament is published, there is a 67% independency rate. And when the whole Bible has been published, there is an 81% independency rate. That
is out of a sample group of 700. So it is a fairly large sample. The point being, you see, that when the African peoples get the whole Bible into their hands and begin to study it, they see that there is a radical difference between what they read in the Bible and what the missionary has told them. That the missionary's interpretation of the gospel – usually missionaries coming from North America and Western Europe – is different. It
is not the same thing as what they find in the Bible. Here is Barrett's summary of the impact of the Bible on them. With the translation of the Bible, African societies began to discern a serious discrepancy between missions and Biblical religion. The missions were assaulting their institutions but Biblical religion upheld the family, land, fertility and the importance of women and appeared to endorse polygamy and respect for family ancestors with a few exceptions all the institutions above
appeared to the African leaders to have close parallels or even tacit approval in one or other parts of the Old or New Testament so that the Bible introduces a critical element which operates to judge both the receptor culture and the missionary culture and if I could quote another illustration a small and trivial one from my own experience I have a vivid memory of as a very young missionary fresh out of a theological college in Cambridge trying
to learn Tamil and trying to conduct a Bible study on St. Mark's Gospel with a group of village teachers and before long of course I had got into the middle of one of these miracle stories where Jesus was casting out devils and Westminster College Cambridge didn't give me an awful lot of help to deal with casting out devils and I was making rather heavy weather of trying to comment on this passage in Tamil and these village
teachers looked at me with growing disgust and then one of them sort of interrupted and said what are you making such a fuss about such a simple matter for and proceeded to reel off half a dozen examples of exactly the same thing in his own village which had happened in the last two or three months of exorcisms in the name of Jesus and said come on get on with the passage it's perfectly straightforward Jesus was already
known to them as one who casts out devils and all my nonsense trying to find some other explanation of it was just so much more complicated than I thought it would be. I think that's what I'm trying to do. Stupid and well I give these as two illustrations of the fact that you have a triangular relationship and it is impossible to predict how this relationship will develop and one can see every possible variety of development sometimes
what happens is that the I think most often what happens is that there is an initial movement of rejection the old culture is rejected and the new culture is accepted very often because it is the younger people who are radicals who are dissatisfied with the old culture and who welcome the new culture and who accept the gospel in the terms which the missionary has brought it in and therefore the old culture the dances the music and
so forth are all mixed up with the old religion and therefore they are rejected. But then a new stage comes when or rather no even immediately there is the struggle to interpret the new message in the language of one's own people and that means one has to use the thought forms the images and therefore you find people searching the old scriptures for pictures for illustrations which will illustrate in a way that people can immediately understand the
new truth that they are trying to say. But then a stage will come when the old danger has disappeared. The second generation is no longer afraid of the power of the old faith an idol is no longer a terrifying thing, there is no longer any fear of demons. All of this has become desacralized and therefore you can so to speak turn back again as Christians and recover your own culture. You can start using old traditional forms
of art and dance and music and so forth but one still sees the conflict going on. I have a vivid illustration in a case that occurred recently in the Theological College in Madrid with which I was connected, where the principal who was rather a go-ahead, radical sort of man, had commissioned a series of bronze statues representing Christ the King, because the chapel was dedicated to Christ the King. This place, Madure, was the seat of a
famous dynasty of kings, the Pandian kings, from about the 1st century to the 17th century, an incredibly long, long dynasty of kings. And the Pandian art developed over the 1700 years has a particular style to portray a king, a style that one sees all over the temples and so forth. And this artist, who was himself a convert, but he was a convert from Islam, portrayed Christ as a Pandian king in these statues. Now, the outcry among
the Christians in Madure was so great that the statues could not be put into, into the chapel, and they have, to this day, they have to be in the students' common room. They could not allow these to appear in the chapel. Or again, I have had arguments with senior Christian friends about why so many of them prefer Western hymn tunes to the beautiful Tamil lyrics, which are sung to the traditional Carnatic melodies of the Christian church.
And I have been told, I've been thoroughly ticked off and told that, for me, I simply have no competence to speak because I have no understanding of the power of the old ideas which are evoked by these old tunes. And to sing, even to sing the beautiful Christian words to these old tunes is to evoke the power of these old feelings. And we will not have this in church. Therefore, we will sing very bad Western hymn
tunes with very bad organs. Well, of course, there is always also a younger generation which will take the opposite view. And one can point now to churches in Asia, for example, which 25 years ago were very strongly expressing their dissociation from the local culture, who are now very eager to recover, to recover the old culture, to, so to speak, baptize the Hindu festivals into the Christian calendar and so forth, to try to sort of undergird and
recover the old culture. And the situation is further complicated by the fact that in every culture there are always conservatives and radicals in any culture. There are some people who love the old, and there are some people who love the new. And when you get a cultural meeting, then the situation becomes a marvelous opportunity for total misunderstanding. I had an illustration when I was asked to preview an uncut edition of a film that had been made
of the Church of South India. And this film showed these statues that I've referred to in the college in Madurai. They're not statues, they're vast reliefs, really. And then it went on to show Dornical Cathedral, which was an attempt by the first Indian bishop, Bishop Azariah, to build a cathedral in an Indian style of architecture. But inside it, he has a lot of what we would call rather sentimental Victorian pictures of Jesus as the Good Shepherd
and so forth. And the film commentary, it was a pity to see the contrast between the very adventurous ideas expressed in the statues in Madurai with the very conservative ideas expressed in the cathedral at Dornical. And I said to him, now look, from who is the conservative and who is the radical? From your point of view, those pictures represent your old culture. And because you happen to be a radical, you don't like them. These statues are
your old culture. These statues are something new to you, and therefore you like them. But for the people in India, these statues are the old thing which they are fed up with, and these pictures are the new thing which they love. So that when you have the meeting of churches, the radical in one culture embraces the conservative in the other culture, and vice versa. The bright young theologian in Oxford, wants to get his theology from Bangalore,
just because it's new. And the bright young theologian in India wants to get his theology from Oxford, just because it's new. And so the radical in one culture becomes the conservative in another, and vice versa. You know, it has often been said that every anthropologist is a radical in his own culture and a conservative in the culture which he studies. And this is absolutely true. The thing which is exciting and new for the Western visitor is
the old thing which we're fed up with for the young person. And so you have young people in Madras getting electric guitars and using all kinds of cheap Western music, whereas a visitor like me says, why don't you sing your beautiful old Tamil lyrics which are so beautiful? And which seem to me to be much more beautiful than all this cheap Western stuff that you're running after. Well, you see what I mean. It's a very, very,
there is no simple answer. We have all these simple stereotypes. The missionaries came and destroyed the old culture and so forth and so on. It is a far more complicated interaction than that would suggest. So one has to ask what to do. How do you proceed? I think that the first thing to say is that we have to preach the gospel, we have, first of all, to take seriously the other culture. We don't absolutize it, but
we take it seriously because, in fact, we do not communicate at all, except as we communicate in the terms of the other culture. Even if we speak the language of that culture, we are already absolute. Accepting provisionally, not finally, provisionally, the thought forms of that culture. I've said provisionally because they will have to be changed. But how do we take that culture seriously? Not just by simply accepting it, nor, on the other hand, by asking people
simply to reject it, to migrate it, out of their culture, into another culture, in order to know Christ. My old colleague, A.G. Hogg, who was a great philosopher, who was the teacher of Radhakrishnan and many other distinguished Hindu philosophers, used to use the phrase challenging relevance. He said that the operative words are challenging relevance. It must be relevant. In other words, the hearer must see it. See that the preacher is talking about something in the
real world as he knows it. He is not going to have to ask to forget about his own problems and listen to the preacher's problems, listen to the preacher's way of understanding the world. He must be addressed within his own world, in his own terms, in his own language, about the issues which he is concerned with. So, the view of himself is true. But, on the other hand, a challenging relevance. Within that world, he has got
to have questions raised which cause him to reexamine his own world, his own culture, and to question it. I think that one of the most beautiful examples of this is the book of Hogg himself, entitled karma and redemption you know how for the Hindu the concept of karma is absolutely central it plays the same kind of role in Hindu thinking in Indian thinking not just Hindu but Buddhist and all forms of Indian thought karma plays the
same kind of role as the idea of cause and effect does for us when we see something happening we try to find out what is the cause and by cause we mean what is the antecedent physical happening for the Indian mind the question is not cause but cause in another sense in the sense of karma what is the karmic force that has produced this result so the concept of karma the idea that everything is linked together by a moral chain of action and award, of action and punishment or action and reward is absolutely basic. Now it's no use asking the Hindu
just to forget about all that, to write it off and start thinking in other terms as a precondition for listening to the gospel. It's no use at all. You have got to address him within the terms of that world. And so Dr. Hogg embarked upon a profound study of the whole doctrine of karma and he restated the gospel in terms of karma in which christ appears as the one who is the author of karma and actually bears the
karma of humanity so that without leaving his own world the hindu meets with christ but with a christ who so to speak breaks open his world and becomes himself the center for a new way of understanding the world so that challenging relevance the the to to take absolutely seriously the reality of that culture but to um to present and and to present christ within the terms of that culture in such a way that he himself judges
and changes that culture and therefore i think that it is good that we drop these words accommodation and indigenization which don't convey the right idea because the danger of these words is that they always tend to be backward looking they always when you talk about indigenization you're always encouraged to think about that culture as it was in the past and i have often had arguments with people visiting madras who come to the cathedral on a sunday
morning and are very surprised and distressed to find that people are wearing european clothes and behaving much in the way that a european congregation would do and i point out to them that all these people are spending five or six days a week in air conditioned offices working with computers and all kinds of modern technical devices and operating on international commercial markets and so forth do you really think that on sunday they ought to go back
to the culture of their grandparents in order to be authentic christians this is their culture now but if you go to a a village, you will find a church where the people are wearing Indian clothes, singing Indian tunes, living in the way of the culture of that village. But don't try to tie the church to forms of culture which may in fact be passing away. Therefore, I much prefer the word which is used nowadays, the word
contextualization, which is rather an ugly word, but it points to the fact that the important thing is that you should be related to the real context as it is now, which is always a changing context. You are always being called upon not to relate to something which is passing away, but to ask the right questions in relation to what God is doing to this culture. The second thing that I would say is that it is not
enough simply to relate ourselves to the culture in the way that I've suggested. We have also got to relate ourselves to the other manifestations of the church in other cultures, the ecumenical. If each of us went our own way with our own contextualization of the gospel in our own culture, then there would be no reality about the universal church. Here is where we have to quarrel with McGovern, where we have to insist that while Christ speaks
within each culture, he is also real. So greater than all cultures, and therefore the forms of the church must be such as to manifest the transcendence of Christ over culture, so that however diverse our expressions of Christianity may be, and they ought to be diverse, the Christianity of an Indian village ought not to be a reproduction of the Christianity of New York. They ought to be different, but at the same time they must be so related
to each other that we can listen to each other, correct each other, that we can warn each other when we are going outside of the authentic limits of Christian discipleship. To put it again simply, that there must be a form of the church which manifests itself as a yerde of life. That it cannot be a preacher. The third point is that, without which that is not possible, it is in an authentic relation to the great Christian
tradition as it is embodied in Scripture, if excerpts from Sir centrality of scripture as i believe for the authentic doing for the authentic contextualization the context must never be allowed to dominate the text the text has a primacy the given message the fact that the scriptures have been translated into most of the languages of mankind is already a kind of contextualization um it is one of the incredibly significant facts of the world that these scriptures are
in fact read and studied and loved in 1,500 different languages and each language is not just a language it is the it is the the the heart of a culture the heart of a way of understanding reality and these cultures are profoundly different from each other anyone who has been involved in Bible translation will know how enormously difficult are the problems in involved in trying to translate the scriptures into other languages. But it remains a fact
that the scriptures do provide the center point around which these different contextualizations can be kept together. For me, it was one of the profoundly important experiences of the assembly at Nairobi that we began that assembly by spending the first four days almost entirely in Bible study in groups of about a dozen or 15 each. The groups having been carefully selected to include a very wide variety of different kinds of people from different cultures, different political backgrounds,
different confessional backgrounds, so that within each group there was a very, very sharp conflict of human background. And the experience of spending these four days or so in the actual study of texts, certain given texts that we had to study, where we were forced in each other's presence, so to say, to be able to understand each other's behavior, to be able to explain how we interpret this text, and to listen to Christ speaking to us out
of that text through the understanding of another person from another culture, was I think the reason why the assembly was able to speak later in the way that it did with a real unanimity about Christ as the one who frees and unites. And it's in our minds. I see that as a kind of model of the way that gospel and culture have to be related. We have to take absolutely seriously the different cultures in which we
live, and we have to express the gospel within the terms of those cultures, not as fixed entities which are eternal, but as God-given realities which are always changing and which are always in a process of evolution, and within which there is always a great variety of conservatives and radicals within each culture, some happily content with their traditional culture, some rebelling against their traditional culture. That, first. Second, that we do our work with Christian thinking together,
listening to each other's different understandings of the gospel. And thirdly, that we do it with our center in the scriptures, where there is given to us the one central tradition by which all that we say is to be tested. Now, of course, there's a lot more that we could say. I didn't have time to finish, but I will do it after coffee, the interpretation of this in terms of Paul's language about the powers. But my main
point that I would want to make is that we recognize the reality of the cultures, but we do not absolutize them. We recognize with McGovern that, and with many of the great German missiologists, that we have to take the folk, the tribe, the culture, the human group seriously. And that may be a tribe of people in the highlands of New Guinea, or it may be the tribe of the industrial workers, or the university students, or the
acting fraternity, or whatever human group provides the identity of the members that make it up. But I think it's important for the people who work that way. I gave a lecture, Mission and Ministry. Actually, I've had a little job in fitting the bits into the right holes on this course. And I have given for tomorrow the title Mission and Unity. I did also want to talk about the goal of missions. And I think there might be
time, perhaps, in a second, just in the latter part, not after coffee, but in the latter part this morning, to say something about that, and then leave tomorrow clear for mission and unity. So we'll start off, at any rate, with this theme of mission and ministry. And here I want to introduce you very specially, in a preliminary way, to the works of Roland Allen. We were looking earlier this week at the questions raised by Donald McGovern
with his, Chris, criticism of traditional missionary methods, centering on his claim that there is a confusion between discipling and perfecting, and on his criticism of what he calls the mission station approach, as distinct from the people's movement approach. And that led us into a discussion about the whole meaning of conversion, which is a very difficult. It's a difficult issue, granted that all true conversion must involve some change in the pattern of behavior, and granted also that
the preaching of the gospel must not become simply the preaching of a new law, as it so often has. How do you answer the question of, so to say, what it is that the missionary has to transmit? This really links on to our other question of the goal of missions. But if you say that, let us take here this great and important word, tradition, tradition, or in the Greek, paradosis, which means handing over, it's a very
fundamental word in the New Testament. The gospel is what has been handed over to us. It is the tradition, in the New Testament sense. It is that which has been handed over, given to us. But what is it that has to be handed over? Is it the whole apparatus of the church, of the church itself, the church which sends the missionary? Is it the whole pattern of life, the whole pattern of church organization, the whole style
of Christian living, that has to be handed over? What are the tradenda, if one can use that, the things which must be transmitted? If the missionary is truly to have done his job? That's the question that Roland Allen was wrestling with. And he comes up with answers which are, to some extent, the same, but in some respects, quite different from those of McGovern. Roland Allen, whose dates are 1868 and 1947, Roland Allen, in the 19th century,
was a missionary of the SPG in China, SPG, Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. That is the rather more Catholic missionary agency of the Church of England, as contrasted with the CMS, the Church Missionary Society, which is the more evangelical agency. He was a missionary of the SPG. Therefore, he came out of the Anglo-Catholic, Anglican, Stratum of English Christianity. He retired due to ill health in 1903. He did not, like Roland Allen, found an
institute to propagate his ideas, like McGovern. But he started writing books. A stream of books came from his pen, which quietly and insistently, questioned the whole missionary method. Now, it's worth remembering that Allen was writing at the height of the power of modern missions. That period, the first 10 years, the first 20 years of this century, was the period when modern missions were at the height of their power. They had the world before them, and they
believed that they were on the winning side. Indeed, that they were on the home run, so to speak. They were on their way to the goal. The evangelization of the world in this generation was a real possibility. Allen questioned. He kept on asking searching questions. Basically, on the line, you may be successful, you may be confident, you may be getting hundreds of missionaries and thousands of converts, you may be building up magnificent institutions and churches, but
are you being faithful to the New Testament, to St. Paul's methods? His first major book was called Missionary Methods, St. Paul's or Ours. Allen's ideas only slowly began to be recognized. In fact, an institute was founded,
not by Allen himself, but by one of his disciples, called the Survey Application Trust, which still exists, but it was never a big, powerful institution like McGovern's. And in our own time, Roland Allen's works are being reissued, and I think perhaps he is being more respected and studied now. And I think perhaps he is being more respected and studied now. than he was at the time when he wrote. Now, what is the essence of Allen's criticism
of missionary methods? As I think I will show, it really centers on the whole question of ministry, but let me lead up to it in the following way. He asks, what were St. Paul's essential missionary methods? And he asks, what were St. Paul's essential missionary methods? He answers, essentially, in five points. Firstly, Paul chose a key center from which a whole district could be influenced. He went to the key spot, and there he preached and established
a congregation. And as we know, for example, in the case of Ephesus, from Ephesus, evidently the gospel spread out through the whole of that province, as we gather from both from Colossians and Philemon, but also from other early church records. So that's the first point. He went to the key center. Secondly, when a church has come into being, he moves on. Secondly, when a church has come into being, he moves on. He brings it down to
the second simple step. Heовор's practice in faith. And you can imagine what it is. If you were educated to be a great pastor, if you were educated to be a great pastor, you wouldn't sell your church to a wise man who Vader should. It's not the same. He's not a wise man who doesn't love being kept. He Corinne was an author of a book and an author of aBooks out of the ark, Paul moves on after,
in some cases, even only a few weeks. Soon as there is a congregation of believers, Paul's work is done as a missionary. He moves on. There is no younger church stage where one is training up this young church to become self-governing. This whole way of thinking rests upon a complete misunderstanding. It rests upon a conception of the job of the missionary which is attuned to the law rather than the gospel. The missionary imagines that he
has to teach people a new law, therefore he has to train them up. He has to train them up in the obedience to this law, and that is a misunderstanding of his task. His task is to give them the gospel. And if they have truly received the gospel, then the Holy Spirit himself will teach them. And they will not need a missionary in a mission bungalow to tell them what to do. So you see, we're coming
back to the question of what has to be transmitted. We're coming back to the question of what has to be transmitted. Thirdly, Paul does not establish any financial relations between himself and the new church. Here there is an A and a B. On the one hand, he does not ask the new church to support him financially. financially. On the other hand, he does not offer to support the new church financially. Take these two points separately. He
does not ask for the support of the church. Now, as you know from Paul's great troubles that he had with the Corinthians, who obviously suspected him of trying to make money out of them, Paul insists that he has a right to ask for their support. You remember the passage in 1 Corinthians 9, where he says that he has the right as a worker in the church to be supported. 1 Corinthians 9, the whole first part of
the chapter. He talks about, thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn. A very, very favorite text for village catechists who are found out having made a mess of their accounts. But Paul says that he has a right to the support, but he refuses to exercise that right. He will not accept their support. Now, this historically... Historically speaking, is a matter of tremendous importance for the early history of the church. As you
know, for the first, I suppose, for the first several centuries, at least until the time of Constantine, the normal situation was that the ministry was a purely voluntary unpaid affair. When we think of the bishops assembling for the Council of Nicaea, we often think of sort of prelates in the style of modern bishops and cardinals and so on. It's good to remember that those bishops who assembled at Nicaea, most of them were people who earned their
living in a secular occupation. One of them was, in fact, a shepherd. I mean, he was a shepherd full stop. And many of them had been slaves. Some of the early bishops were slaves. So, the church began, essentially, with a nonprofessional ministry. Indeed, the whole conception of a profession is, of course, a modern post-Reformation concept. It's almost an anachronism to speak about a nonprofessional ministry. The whole idea of a profession had not arisen at that
time, but it was a ministry of people who supported themselves by their own labors, as Paul did. But, on the other hand, since Paul had insisted that he had a right to be supported, therefore that did not preclude the church from developing a financially supported ministry. So that Paul's example left the way open both ways, and it prevented the church from being tied down forever, either to a paid ministry or to a nonpaid ministry. Lois, you
obviously had a question. I was trying to think of that in terms of Jesus in chapter 10, Luke. Was that all Paul's philosophy? Because Jesus says, you know, he tells him to carry no bag and no purse, no sandals, no suit. And the idea is that the laborer deserves his wage. Yes. Yes, and Paul quotes that. He says, where are we? Am I not free? Am I not an apostle, et cetera? Well, he
does say somewhere we have, yes. There is a phrase of Paul where he says the Lord, yes, it's verse 14 there. In the same way, 1 Corinthians 9:14, in the same way the Lord commanded that those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel. He quotes that. So Paul accepts it that he has a right, but he refuses to exercise it. He doesn't exercise that right. I can think of quite a few
Christians who have played on that. You know, who still today impose that kind of idea. Well, in the ministry, so you should be volunteering there. It's kind of dangerous to me. Yes, it can be misused both ways, so to speak. I mean, I've also once... Yes. You mean Paul's example is dangerous? Yes, well, a lot of Paul's ideas were dangerous. Well, at any rate, this is a good thing for us to discuss because we'll have more
of this. Paul, says Roland Allen, Paul, on the one hand, refused to accept the financial relationship of being supported by his... Congregation. And on the other hand, he did not undertake any support of the congregation. There were no subsidies for the young churches. There was no Antioch Mission Board, which raised funds and sent them to Philippi and Thessalonica and Ephesus. There was never any conception that the younger church has to be financially supported by the older
church. No financial relationships either way. There was no way between the missionary and the church. That's his third point. His fourth point, and this, of course, is fundamental. He does not exercise control over their development, but he leaves them to make their own decisions. I mentioned the point yesterday that at no point anywhere in his letters does Paul quote the Ten Commandments as law. He gives them guidelines, but those guidelines, as I said yesterday, are based
on contemporary ethical teaching. The sort of practical advice that he gives in the latter part of several of his letters, the so-called house tables, as the New Testament scholars call them, have been shown to reflect, rather, the... ...contemporary Stoic morality. They are not quotations from the Old Testament as law. He warns those who start to keep the law. He warns the Galatians that if they begin to keep the law, they are severed from Christ. I
test... And he has a similar warning in Colossians against those who are trying to keep the law. The laws of Sabbaths and new moon festivals and so forth. That this is to be severed from Christ. On the contrary, he insists that they have to make their own decisions. Even on the question of idolatry. Which one would have thought was absolutely decisive. He does not quote the decision of the Jerusalem Council of Acts 15, to which I
referred yesterday. In his discussions with the Corinthians, look at 1 Corinthians 10, when this question about food offered to idols comes up. Now, one would have thought that Paul could have simply laid down the law here. The elders and apostles at Jerusalem have decided so. But he doesn't. He reasons with them as people who are capable of making their own judgments. Look at 1 Corinthians 10:14 and following. Therefore, my beloved, shun the worship of idols.
I speak as to sensible men. Judge for yourselves what I say. The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one loaf, we who are many are one body, for we partake of the same loaf. Consider the practice of Israel. Are they not who eat the sacrifice partners in the altar? What
do I imply then? That food offered to idols is anything, or that an idol is anything? No. I imply that what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be partners with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake the table of the Lord and the table of demons. He's arguing with them as people who are capable of making their
own judgments on a reasonable matter. And in the question of discipline, for example, even in this very painful case of discipline, we don't of course exactly know the details of this case and what it was that the person was guilty of, but even in that very extreme case, Paul calls upon them to excommunicate this man. He doesn't he doesn't try to speak as a in modern days, it doesn't really much matter what denomination you belong to,
whether it's an Anglican bishop or a Baptist superintending missionary or whatever it is. At a crucial point like that, he would have simply written a letter, this brother is cut off, excommunicated. Even then, Paul doesn't do it. He simply says, I call upon you to meet together and deal with this. Brother. He doesn't, so to speak, act over their heads. It's they who must act. In other words, he does not directly control their ethical decisions. He
does not lay down a law. He treats them as a body who have received the spirit, who are communicants, who are participating in the body and blood of Christ, and who therefore can be reasoned with, can be argued with, can be rebuked, but cannot be ordered about. And finally...