All kinds of Christian love

One of the distinguishing features of the early Christians which I discussed last month was the fact that they loved one another. The apostles taught them to love one another not only in some kind of religious and pietistic fashion. Christians had to have a code of conduct and a set of values which guided them in how they related to one another and to the broader society.

This is captured in the two great apostles’ teaching, and I wish to refer especially to Peter’s First Letter and to Paul’s letters to the Ephesians and Colossians and to Philemon.

The two apostles saw a well ordered and disciplined Christian community with everyone knowing their obligations to the family, to the Christian community and to the state. The apostles’ teaching in this regard covered what we could refer to today as family and labour relations, and obligations to national leaders like the state president.

At the family level, children had to obey their parents, and in return fathers had to be very careful not to exasperate or embitter their children, but had the obligation to teach and train them in the ways of the Lord.

With regard to married spouses, wives had to submit themselves to their husbands, taking holy women from the Scriptures like Sarah, Abraham’s wife, as role models. The relationship between husband and wife was analogous to that between Christ and the Church with husbands loving their wives as Christ loved the Church.

But there was more: the relationship between husband and wife was one of complete unity as the husband was expected to regard the wife as part of his own body, literally reinforcing the teaching of Genesis 2:24 and Ephesians 5:31: “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.”

There are aspects of the teaching of Peter and Paul which Christians of our time will not readily accept because of today’s idea of freedom and gender relationships. An example of this is the assumed unequal relationship between husband and wife implied in the immediately preceding paragraph.

Another example has to do with slavery. Most progressive people of our time cannot accept the idea of a person being the possession of another, but in Paul and Peter’s time slavery was a fact of life, and the apostles had to find a way of reconciling the teachings of Jesus with the problematic of the slave and slave master relationship.

The apostles taught that slaves had to work for their masters honestly and diligently as if they were working for the Lord. In return, slave owners had to treat their slaves well, conscious of the fact that both slaves and slave owners had one master—God.

 

It was with this idea of the equality of all people before God that Paul was able to send Philemon’s runaway slave, Onesimus, back to him, pleading with Philemon to accept that as slave master he now had the obligation to treat Onesimus “no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother” (Philemon 16).

Onesimus had run away from Philemon after stealing his master’s money in Colosse. Paul had converted Onesimus to Christianity in Rome, and he was now returning to his master as a brother in Christ. We can reasonably argue that if Paul and Peter were writing in our time, they would be writing about how house owners and domestic workers should treat one another.

An important theme in Peter and Paul’s idea of social relations is our obligation to rulers and other secular authorities. Both wanted us to respect and pray for our rulers.

According to Peter, Christians are free people, freed from that which shackles secular society. However, that should not mean freedom to do anything evil. Rather, we should submit ourselves to every rightful authority “whether to the king, as the supreme authority, or to governors”.

Christians should be exemplary in behaviour both in relation to one another and in relation to secular society: “Show proper respect to everyone: Love the brotherhood of believers, fear God, honour the king.” (1 Peter 2:17).

With this kind of code of conduct, Christians could truly live as lights whose behaviour demonstrates that they are a holy and chosen nation.