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“Be tolerant of everything, except intolerance.”

If North America had a universal slogan, I think that this could be it. After all, it is what we value isn’t it? We value tolerance, or at least our version of tolerance (i.e., agreement and acceptance). We want everyone and everything in every place to be welcomed in with open arms (again, ironically, except anything or anyone that seems to us to be intolerant).

Being that this push for tolerance is so prevalent, it should not be surprising that the church has been affected by it; Christians have become increasingly more accepting of the culture around them. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Being welcoming, accepting and even accommodating sounds good and sounds like something that Christians should be. It doesn’t mean we have to indulge, but just that we refuse to denounce or renounce.

Instead of rejecting anything we adapt it to our lives. Maybe we even try to use it for Gospel purposes. Instead of causing disruption by going against the grain, we accept and conform to the world around us and so play our part in helping maintain the stability of our society. Again, it sounds right and good.

But my question is this: Are there not some things that are simply incompatible with the Christian life?

Book Burning

Take a quick look at Acts 19. Having promised that he would one day return to Ephesus (Acts 18.21), Paul finally at last returns. And he stays in Ephesus for two whole years, preaching, teaching, healing and exorcizing demons. In 19.11-20 Luke writes about one of those exorcisms and in particular he notes the reaction of the onlookers:

“And this became known to all the residents of Ephesus, both Jews and Greeks. And fear fell upon them all, and the name of the Lord Jesus was extolled. Also, many of those who were now believers came, confessing and divulging their practices. And a number of those who had practiced magic arts brought their books together and burned them in the sight of all. And they counted the value of them and found it came to fifty thousand pieces of silver.” (Acts 19.17-19)

Why did they have to burn their books?

For a long time, Ephesus had been known as a city with a high concentration of magical practices. It wasn’t that there were a few professional magicians who did a few specific magical things. Instead, magical knowledge was a part of everyone’s life; it permeated every part of Ephesian life: chariot racing, illness, romance. For every problem there was a magical solution found in a tablet, voodoo doll, charm bracelet or something of the sort.

Now you would think, being that magic was so deeply rooted in the culture of Ephesus, that the new believers there would still want to be tolerant towards it. That even though their faith was now in Christ instead of in spells, they wouldn’t see a need to destroy their books of magic. They could simply pass them on. They could edit them. They could use the books as coffee coasters.

But they do nothing like that; instead, they make a pile and they set it on fire, and in doing so they reveal their new understanding, that some things in their culture are incompatible with following Jesus. As Kavin C. Rowe writes in his book World Upside Down, “The mere existence of magic, implies Luke – not simply the practice of magic by those who now know better – is antithetical to the Christian way of life.”[1]

If you read on in Acts 19, you see that what starts with a book burning then leads to the abandonment of the goddess Artemis, which then leads to a complete disruption of the Ephesian economy. In the end, the Christians’ renouncement of their books of magic and their denouncement of the goddess, upsets the Ephesian way of life. Christians become a nuisance by their newfound intolerance of old things. But as far as Luke sees it and the new believers understand it, it can’t be any other way.

Because you can’t have Jesus and magic or Jesus and goddesses; they can’t co-exist, because they are two different ways of life. Even at the risk of upsetting the status quo, tolerance of magic arts and the shrines of Artemis is no longer an option.

Our Book of Magic

Now with all of that in mind, I wonder if there are books of magic in our day? Are there elements of our culture that we tolerate in our lives but which are actually incompatible with Christ? Of course, both of those questions are rhetorical. The answer is yes. Unless our culture and, more than that, our own lives have finally lined up perfectly with the Kingdom of God, then those elements are present.

The next question ought to be then why do we continue to tolerate them? Is it because 1) we don’t want to cause disruption or be seen as disruptive; 2) we have bought into the law of universal, unquestioned tolerance, or 3) are those incompatible things so a part of our culture, like magic was in Ephesus, that we can’t even recognize their incompatibility.

Probably the answer is all of the above to some degree, but I wonder if the third reason is especially true. I wonder if there are cultural norms that are so ingrained in our lives that we can’t even see the incompatibility of them with the way of Jesus. And I wonder what those things are.

Whatever the case may be, this much is true, that following Jesus means a different way of life then the way of the world. In as much as we claim Jesus as our Lord rather than Caesar our way of life will often turn out to be opposite to the way of the culture, and because of that we will inevitably be thought of as disturbers. As long as we are unaccommodating of certain things that our culture values, we will be thought of as the Jewish mob says in Acts 17, “Men who have turned the world upside down” (Acts 17.6).

In as much then as the world is not being turned on its head through our lives, we ought to be asking, “What are we tolerating in our lives that needs to be destroyed because it cannot co-exist with Christ?” and “Why are we still tolerating it?”

 

 


[1] Kavin C. Rowe, World Upside Down: Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 43.

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