THE GOSPEL IN COMMUNITY

In the wake of Paul’s travels throughout the Mediterranean, Christian communities sprang up, consolidated and began to multiply. This was the outcome of a deliberate policy on his part. He not only proclaimed the message of Christ and brought people into an intimate relationship with God, but drew the consequences of that message for the life of his converts and led them into a personal relationship with one another… For Paul the gospel bound men and women to one another as well as to God.

Acceptance by Christ necessitated acceptance of those who He had already welcomed (Romans 15:7); reconciliation with God entailed reconciliation with others that exhibited the character of the gospel preaching (Philippians 4:2-3); union in the Spirit involved union with one another, for the Spirit was primarily a shared, not individual experience (2 Corinthians 13:14; Philippians 2:1; Ephesians 4:3). The gospel is not a purely personal matter. It has a social dimension. It is a communal affair. 

-- Robert Banks in “Paul’s Idea of Community: Early House Churches in their Historical Settings”

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A COMMUNAL AFFAIR

“God has enabled you to share in the inheritance that belongs to His people, who live in the light. For He has rescued us from the kingdom of darkness and transferred us into the Kingdom of His dear Son, who purchased our freedom and forgave our sins.”  (Colossians 1:12b-14 NLT)

[The Apostle Paul] does not view salvation as simply a transaction between the individual and God. A person prior to his experience with Christ belongs to a community, however much his actions incline him (or his immediate circle’s) self-interest. And it is a new community that his reconciliation with God in Christ brings him, however much he experiences that event as an individual affair.

So this freedom granted by God not only transfers men and women out of a broken relationship with God, and a defective solidarity with others, into a new community with both, but also inclines them to live the kind of life that will extend and deepen that new community itself.

The gospel is not purely a personal matter. It has a social dimension. It is a communal affair.


-- Robert Banks in “Paul’s Idea of Community”


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SANCTIFYING TRUTH

Jesus prayed, “Sanctify them by Your truth. Your word is truth.”  (John 17:17 NKJV)

What makes some theological works like sawdust to me is the way the authors can go on discussing how far certain positions are adjustable to contemporary thought, or beneficial in relation to social problems, or "have a future" before them, but never squarely ask what grounds we have for supposing them to be true accounts of any objective reality.  As if we were trying to make. rather than to learn.  Have we no Other to reckon with?

-- C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)

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