Category: church

Idolatry and Mars Hill

~ jim0211 ~ Leave a comment

Although there are various expressions of Christianity, many different denominations, one thing that is common is the belief that idolatry is a sin. In fact, perhaps one of the chief sins.

After all, the Ten Commandments clearly forbids it, and idolatry is clearly taught against all through the Old Testament, especially in the prophetic writings. The Jews were so strongly monotheistic that Rome gave them special leeway to practice their religion. Christians picked this up, of course, and were thus known as “atheists” because they did not believe in the deity of Caesar, only in the one true God.

Against this historical and theological backdrop, it’s interesting to look at Paul’s speech on Mar’s Hill.

When Paul was in Athens, he was very troubled by the amount of idolatry on display there. He started to speak about Jesus in the public square and as a result was asked to speak at the Areopagus, a group of intellectual Greeks. Among the things that they commented on was that he seemed to be speaking of “foreign divinities”.

Given all these things, one would expect a scathing polemic against idolatry and a clear declaration of God as the one true deity, incarnated in the one true Lord, Jesus Christ.

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Exploring Antioch and Laodicea

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As discussed in earlier posts, I think that evangelism – proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God – is a key aspect of the Christian faith. It’s a vital part of the way we should live in this world, which is why Jesus pointed to it many times, trained and sent out disciples, focused the disciples on it in the beginning of Acts, and perhaps even why God has given us the book of Acts as the main picture of the early church.

Given the clear directive and the amount of effort put into evangelism, one would expect continual growth of the kingdom. However, this clearly isn’t happening, and it seems to many people that the world is getting spiritually darker every day. Whatever tactics are being used today to grow the kingdom, it’s clearly not working.

Trying to understand this led me to the letter to the Laodiceans in Revelations. In that letter, Jesus rebukes the church in Laodicea as being lukewarm, which in the context of the letter, likely meant that the church was ineffective and not fulfilling its purpose, just like both cool refreshing water and hot healing water became unpleasant, even useless, when piped from their sources to Laodicea, because the water was lukewarm.

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Remembering Resurrection

~ jim0211 ~ Leave a comment

For many Christians today, it seems that the world is getting darker all the time. Not just in statistics like dropping church attendance, but in the growing secularism of many of our systems, the growing acceptance of immoral behavior in our leaders, the growing wealth disparity and other signs of a greed-dominated culture, and so on. In many cases, people still describe themselves as spiritual even when they stop associating with any specific religion, so the need is there, it just isn’t being met by Christianity.

Of course, there are many theories, books, and pundits that try to explain these observations, for most part focusing on the social, psychological, and sometimes even spiritual, trends of the last century or so. However, I’ve also noticed, really highlighted by the Covid pandemic, how different many of our beliefs and practices are from the early church.

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