Their God Is Their Belly | Philippians 3:19
The United States is a society of abundance, we tend to often be quite indulgent as well. Indeed, we live in a breeding ground for belly-worship. Our society places very few limits on our consumption of stuff, so we are left to our own self-discipline and self-control. Of course, I believe that this freedom is better than the alternative, but such freedom undeniably reveals the truth of humanity’s sinful nature.
their god is their belly
Philippians 3:19 ESV
What does Paul mean by belly here? The stomach or appetite, as some translations read, represents our instinctual and base-level desires, our hungers, cravings, and lusts. For the ancients, the belly was the most animalistic part of all humans, and we tend to agree with them, even is subconsciously. After all, how often do you have a gut-feeling about something? Do you ever question whether or not you should just go with your gut? Have you ever felt the fluttering in your gut while in the throes of infatuation? Our gut is our primal nature, working beyond the confines of logic and reason and, because of sin’s corruption, always longing for things forbidden. For this reason, we must learn the twin arts of self-control and self-discipline, teaching our head how to keep the stomach on a leash. Christians are especially charged to do this.
But not so for these enemies of the cross. Instead of treating the gut’s cravings with a proper amount of skepticism, they elevate it into their god. Does this mean that they hold formal worship services to their own stomachs? Probably not. But worship is not exclusive to churches, temples, synagogues, mosques, and the like. Worship is simply devotion, a life dedicated to one’s deity. To worship a god is to obey it, follow it, yield to it, and serve it. Because we know the one true God, who created all things, and we know that He has love and grace toward us beyond measure, we Christians joyfully offer up our lives as worship toward the God of the Bible. Our Sunday gathering is a piece of our worship, a highly significant piece but a piece, nonetheless.
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Two Narratives Collided In A Wood
Was it really because Christians are misogynists? Was it really because men don’t care about the happiness and health of their wives? Was it really because Evangelicals hated black people? Or is it because they—like the rest of the world—are staring into a genderless, plastic abyss wherein women and men are not who God says they are, whereby they must, the cultural law says they must, enact their desires or they will not be whole and healthy?
I made some dear (IRL) friends upset yesterday who have been helped by Gregoire’s previous book. The day was also one of unrelenting frustration whereby I spent the whole of it in the car driving people around instead of doing what I planned. I was not able to respond to anything, nor even beat back my own sink full of dishes, nor walk the dog, nor keep up online. I did manage to read a second chapter of Gregoire’s new book but I’d like to do two chapters in one post, so I’m going to pick that up tomorrow. Instead, I want to try to put words to something that I think is swirling around in the cultural air. This will be hard because I prefer to have a tweet or an article to bounce off of, but, it’s International Women’s Day—so let’s celebrate with a listicle.
One. An alluring and powerful narrative has formed about the plight of women and the reasons things are so bad today. It goes something like this: Christians have irreparably damaged their witness, the Christian faith, and the lives of women by their unacceptable view of marriage and sex; and Christians have damaged the Christian faith by their view of the Bible.
Where did this narrative come from? How did it form? It has two or three sources. The first source, I think, is the culture itself which, in a short time, radically shifted from one view of what it means to be human, to another. It took a whole century for the new view to become entrenched, but I really think contraception was the millstone that sunk a “biblical view of the family” under the sea for most people. Even if they had some idea with their heads about human relationships, what they knew with their bodies radically contradicted that view. In a world where women can control if and when they have children, the biological reality of being a woman is not meaningful or substantive enough to undergird and support a society.
The second source of this narrative was the Christian reaction to this change. Christians reacted strongly, as they should have. But, in many cases, wildly and with a hint of hysteria. As the western world shifted from a positive to a neutral to a negative view of Christianity, it is not surprising that those people who refused to shift away from “traditional” and biblical norms became the bad ones. Moreover, as the defacto conscience of the whole, they are discovering that they ought to be quiet, but that they may not go away. In family systems theory, the “biblical view of the family” is the trap that holds all the toxic fumes of the larger system. The western family needs Christianity as its scapegoat. It needs Christians to occasionally react in sorrow and outrage. But secular culture cannot absolutely get rid of Christianity or it will have to face who it is, and that’s not pretty, so of course it won’t do that.
In the usual way of these sorts of cultural shifts, the outside assault on the “biblical view of the family” was helped by the inside repudiation of it. Many “Christians” now unreservedly accept a secular view of what it means to be a self. Assumptions about the needs and requirements of this new kind of humanity, though largely, I would say (after reading just two chapters of Gregoire) unexamined, drive the internal “culture war” that Christians are enduring. Health—both physical and emotional—are at the center of these assumptions.
It is hard for me to overstate how deeply I feel this shift myself. That is because I came in and out of American culture at key moments and was able to observe how it was changing. Christians through time and space have not had this new assumption of “health” at the heart of their faith. And not just Christians either. Most cultures around the world continue not to pursue this idea of “health.”
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Constantine’s Foil
Sometime before 325, the now-Christian Roman emperor Constantine wrote Shapur a letter, in which he encouraged the young shah to embrace Christianity.9 Constantine pointed out the presence of many Christians in Persia and urged Shapur to treat them well: “Now, because your power is great, I commend these persons to your protection; because your piety is eminent, I commit them to your care. Cherish them with your wonted humanity and kindness; for by this proof of faith you will secure an immeasurable benefit both to yourself and us.”10 In the process of making these suggestions, Constantine inadvertently called the attention of Shapur’s advisers both to the presence of Christians in their midst and to the fact that Rome now favored followers of the new religion.
Abstract: Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in the early fourth century brought an end to state-sponsored persecution in the Roman empire. Around the same time, however, the relatively peaceful Persian empire turned violently upon the church in its lands. Though the accurate number of martyrs remains difficult to assess, the most conservative estimates place the death toll in the Great Persian Persecution (339–379) far higher — even ten times higher — than the death toll in the worst Roman persecution. In response to such widespread assaults, many Persian Christians fled if they could. Many others, either unable or unwilling to flee, took courage from stories of faithful sufferers and stood firm. Today, their testimonies still give fresh courage to those who suffer for Christ.
When Western Protestants think of the persecution of early Christians, we often imagine believers being thrown to the lions in the Roman Colosseum. According to the story as we learned it in Sunday school and elsewhere, Christians were ruthlessly persecuted for their faith for three centuries, until Constantine’s dramatic conversion around the year 312 brought about a sea change in the Roman empire’s attitude toward Christianity.
This Sunday school version of the story, while not wrong, is both misleading and incomplete. It is misleading because it gives the impression that persecution in the Roman empire was continuous, when in fact it was sporadic, varying from nonexistent to severe, depending on where and when one lived. This story is also incomplete because it does not even acknowledge by far the worst persecution of Christians in the ancient world, the Great Persian Persecution instigated by Shah Shapur II in 339.1 Many Western Christians are not aware that Christianity quickly took root in Persia (approximately modern-day Iran and Iraq) in ancient times.2 A look at the differing fortunes of Christians in the Roman and Persian empires, as well as the ways they responded to persecution, yields important lessons for believers today.
Two Great Persecutions Compared
Persecution of Christians in the Roman empire was generally local in character, confined to a region based on the personal antipathy of the governor toward the faith. But there were two major periods of widespread persecution, encompassing most regions of the empire at the same time. These were a persecution under emperors Decius and Valerian in the 250s, and the Great Persecution under Emperor Diocletian, which began in 303 and lasted a couple of years in the western part of the empire and a couple of decades in the eastern part. It was during this Great Persecution that Constantine became a Christian and gained control over the entire Roman empire.
By carefully counting the martyr lists in given regions at given times, modern scholars can gain a general picture of the severity of the persecution and then extrapolate to arrive at guesses of how many believers were killed in total. An estimate that has gained scholarly acceptance is perhaps 3,000–3,500 deaths in all, of which maybe 500 happened in the west and 2,500–3,000 in the eastern parts of the empire.3 When we consider that in the early fourth century, the population of the Roman empire was between 60 and 75 million people, of whom perhaps 10 percent (or about 6–7 million) were Christians, we can see that the total death toll was relatively small.
In contrast, the Great Persian Persecution is traditionally regarded as having lasted forty years, from 339 until Shapur’s death in 379. In actuality, it was frightfully intense for a couple of decades and then ebbed and flowed until the early fifth century, well beyond the life span of Shapur himself. Estimating deaths from this persecution is much harder than in the case of Diocletian’s, but one of the earliest reports we have is sobering.
The church historian Sozomen, writing about 440, declares, “I shall simply state that the number of men and women whose names have been ascertained, and who were martyred at this period, have been computed to be sixteen thousand; while the multitude outside of these is beyond enumeration.”4 This statement, even if exaggerated, points to a huge death toll. Modern estimates have varied from as many as the eye-popping figure of 190,0005 down to a more “modest” figure of 35,000.6 Even the conservative estimate is ten times the number of Christians martyred in the Great Roman Persecution, although the Persian empire’s population (perhaps 18–35 million) was less than half that of the Roman, with a much smaller Christian population as well. By any estimate, the loss of life in the Great Persian Persecution was immeasurably greater than the death toll of the Great Roman Persecution a few decades earlier.
This staggering death toll is all the more surprising when we consider that prior to the fourth century, there had been no significant persecution of Christians in the Persian empire at all. Indeed, early in the fourth century, just as the Roman empire shifted from persecuting Christians (in varying degrees in different places and times) to favoring our faith, the Persian empire changed from basically ignoring Christians to unleashing a savage persecution on them. How did such a shocking change come about? To answer this question, we will need a brief overview of early Christianity in the Persian empire.
Treatment of Christians in the Persian Empire
The early Christian period took place during the long reigns of two great Persian dynasties: the Parthians, who ruled from 247 BC until AD 224, and the Sassanids, who reigned from 224 until they were conquered by the Arabs in 651. The Parthian period was one of relative peace in Persia, and there was essentially no state action against Christians, for several possible reasons.
First, the Parthian regime was benign and decentralized, with a great deal of provincial autonomy. There was little persecution of anyone for any reason. Second, the Romans were the major menace to Persia, and it was common for Persian rulers to take the opposite position on any matter that was important to Rome. Since the Romans were suspicious of their Christian population, the Persians tended to welcome them or at least to leave them alone. Third was the fact that Zoroastrianism, the dominant religion in Persia, was much closer to the Christian faith than Roman polytheism. Zoroastrianism was a dualistic religion focused on the conflict between good and evil, and there were superficial resemblances with Christianity, such as a belief in a coming messiah and judgment after death. As a result, Christians did not stand out in Persian society nearly to the degree they did in pagan Roman society.
The political situation of Persia changed dramatically in the early third century. Significant invasions from Roman forces fueled a popular rebellion against the peaceful Parthian dynasty. A much more authoritarian regime, the Sassanids, gained popular favor on a platform of keeping Persia safe from the Romans, and in 224, they took control. The Sassanids were strict Zoroastrians and made that religion the national faith of Persia.
This time period also saw the rise of Manichaeism, another form of dualism that was directly in competition with Zoroastrianism. Its prophet, Mani, combined many features of Zoroastrianism with some specifically Christian language (he even called himself a disciple of Jesus Christ), and Manichaeism spread like wildfire in Persia and beyond. It was clearly a threat to the national religion, and in the 270s Mani was executed by crucifixion.
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“The Holy Catholic Church [and] the Communion of Saints”
Written by R. Fowler White |
Thursday, July 14, 2022
From the truth that to each congregation of His church, Christ has given His Spirit and the means of saving grace both to gather His saints and to grow them. Moreover, we take confidence that Christ, by His Spirit and according to His promise, makes these provisions effective. Knowing these things, we must continue to confess, with much gladness, courage, and hope, that we believe in … the holy catholic church and in the communion of saints.In our series of blogposts on the Apostles’ Creed, we now turn to Article 9: I believe in … the holy catholic church and in the communion of the saints. Here in the Creed’s third section, we’re focused on the person and work of God the Spirit. Especially regarding His work, we affirm in Article 9 that He brings believers into fellowship with God the Father and God the Son (cf. 1 John 1:4), a fellowship realized in the church and in the communion of the saints. Like Article 8, the wording of Article 9 was perfected and expanded in the Nicene Creed. So, once again, our thoughts below will reflect the additions of the Nicene Creed.
The article before us has us confessing our belief in the church created by the Holy Spirit as the holy, catholic, and (with the Nicene Creed) apostolic fellowship of the triune God. First, as a holy assembly, we confess that the church has been set apart from the world for God’s use. Though we once were slaves to sin, we have become slaves to righteousness (Rom 6:17-18), God’s sons and daughters committed to His yoke of discipleship. Second, as a catholic assembly, we confess that the church is universal, reaching as far as God’s saving will, Christ’s saving work, and the church’s mission—in other words, extending across time, place, class, and race. Third, as an apostolic assembly, we confess that the church was founded on and is devoted to the Apostles’ doctrine. The church recognizes that, in keeping with Christ’s promise, the Spirit of truth gave through the Apostles all the revelation necessary for building His church. The Apostles’ official testimony cannot be repeated, revised, repealed, or replaced. It was enough, and it was final. Through the Spirit, then, the church is one (as the Nicene Creed puts it) in her common confession from heart and mouth: Jesus is Lord (1 Cor 12:3; cf. Rom 10:9-10). By the Spirit there is one holy commonwealth, one household of faith, one temple (Eph 2:12-22), one covenant people, one olive tree (Rom 11:17-24), one body (1 Cor 12:12-13). Across all times, places, classes, and races, converted offenders have been united—made one—insofar as they are each and all washed, sanctified, and justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God (1 Cor 6:10-11).
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