Context

Following my discussion with Tim of the local evangelical church I found myself thinking about the context in which the early Church wrote the texts of the New Testament, at least the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles. I've been increasingly impressed over the last year or so by the urgency in them to define who is 'in' and who is 'out' in the Christian community and, occasionally, you can see a virtual surrender of the hope of making any sense of the matter - thus St John in the first Letter argues that you can identify false brethren by the fact that they leave, and if they hadn't left they wouldn't have been false, when of course necessarily they couldn't be defined as false brethren until they left. The context of this is the separation of Church and Synagogue, the process of those who accepted that Jesus was the Messiah being ejected from the mainstream of Judaism. This must have been a cause of enormous pain and distress to the early Christians, as significant numbers of their fellow-Jews rejected the message and drove them out. To regard those who denied that Jesus was the Christ with any charity would have required superhuman forbearance, and unsurprisingly the Christians don't. They curse them, call God's wrath down on them. It is a sign of grace indeed that St Paul in the Letter to the Romans actually rows back from those temptations and suggests that the Jews are still in a covenantal relationship with God even while they can't accept that Jesus is the Christ. This isn't the situation we are in now, of course. What these scriptures represent is a terribly cry of pain and loss, expressed as rage and resentment.

I wonder, increasingly, whether God's purpose in ensuring the survival of these texts is not that they should serve as a positive example to us, but a negative one. They embody, sometimes, what we should expel from our hearts, not cherish in them.