Acts 5 reminds us that our actions matter. Moreover, we have a choice. We can fight against God and His purposes in the world, which will bring us to ruin. Or we can fight with Him, join Him in His battle, and see the world come actively under His Lordship.

Introduction
In our quest to uncover the end-times themes buried within the Book of Acts, we have begun to unveil the hidden depths and subtle intricacies of the early church’s well-developed eschatology. We learned that eschatology is not for cloud gazers, numerologists, or makers of jumbled charts but for those who are willing to put in the work to see the Kingdom built. It is not filled with a mass of spiritually overweight spectators who are just as much a consumer of church as the Nutty Professor is a consumer of fried chicken. But unlike the Klumps, this one is not a joke.
Instead, the eschatology Luke records is for the one who will put his hand to the proverbial plow and break a symbolic sweat. It is for the here and now not to decode the uncertain events concerning an even less certain future. Acts tells us when the Holy Spirit came upon the apostles and other believers, and when they began doing miracles in Jerusalem and Samaria, that the end was upon them; the end of the ages had come.
For some, that end would climax in smoke and flames, devastation and destruction, as seen temporally in the events of AD 70, which stands as a type of eternal hell. For others, the end of the Old Covenant era of temples, a priesthood, and feasts would be joyfully replaced by the reign of God’s one and only Son, who sat at His right hand until all of His enemies would be made a footstool for His feet. Moreover, as we learned last week, His reign would not cease, be paused, or could ever be overcome until the whole world, every family on earth, is under the blessing of God! What a glorious message our friend and brother Luke has been telling us!
Now, as we stand upon the plank of our ninth blog in Acts, my aim is for us to be recast into its bristling blue waters, a new tank of oxygen in tow, as we plunge into its fifth chapter. However, before we put on our snorkel, we need to remember the flow of the book. In Acts 1, Jesus prepares His disciples for what life and the Kingdom will look like in His absence as they wait for the promised Spirit to come and empower them. In Acts 2, Jesus sends the third member of the trinity upon them in dramatic fashion, causing a crowd to swell, Peter to preach, and about three thousand souls to be added to the believing ranks. After his first powerful sermon, in Acts 3, the apostles began performing miracles in the city, drawing another large crowd, and Peter preaching another powerful sermon. Out of fear that these events would spark an uncontrollable revival, the Jewish leaders began persecuting and arresting believers in Acts chapter 4, especially those who served God publicly.
As the narrative unfolds into Acts 5, we find the apostles released, only to be swiftly summoned before the Sanhedrin – the paramount Jewish council of the era. Their alleged transgression centers on their steadfast and unyielding proclamation of the name of Jesus despite explicit directives to desist from their missionary activities. This resolute commitment to their faith prompts vehement opposition from the religious authorities, who seek to quell the burgeoning Christian movement once and for all.
Acts 5:33-39, therefore, emerges as a pivotal juncture within this narrative. It is a moment when the Sanhedrin, incensed by the apostles’ unwavering conviction to continue unabated, prepares themselves to take severe and even bloody action against the apostles as they had against their Lord. However, amidst this maelstrom of tumult and theological fervor, an unlikely voice of moderation rose in the form of Gamaliel – a respected Pharisee and a learned doctor of Jewish Law, who plays prominently in today’s passage, along with the two false messianic figures we will hear about in a moment. He, Gamaliel, ardently advocates for the council to proceed with extreme caution lest they be found laboring against God.
The events chronicled in Acts 4 through Acts 5 encapsulate a volatile chapter in the annals of the early Christian church and will teach us much about eschatology. Let us read verses 33-39.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Friday, December 15, 2023
Our fundamental problem today is not that man is disenchanted or turned into liquid, but that he has been desecrated, in part by the impersonal forces of modernity, but largely by his own hand. The answer, therefore, must have consecration at its core. This cannot be legislated. Politicians have no authority over the spiritual imagination, to which the language of consecration speaks. The modern crisis of anthropology must find its solution among religious communities worshiping in local contexts. The answer is first and foremost a theologically informed liturgical one, for it is in worship that human beings are brought into the presence of the God, in whose image they are made and who grounds their common human nature.

This year marks the eightieth anniversary of the lectures that became C. S. Lewis’s book The Abolition of Man. Speaking to an audience at the height of the Second World War, Lewis identified the central problem of the modern age: The world was losing its sense of what it meant to be human. As man’s technological achievements were once again being used to destroy human life on an industrial scale, Lewis pointed to the dehumanization that was occurring all around. And as the war continued, the Final Solution and the atomic bomb served to reinforce his claims. Yet modern warfare was not the only problem. As Lewis argued, the intellectual and cultural currents of modernity were also culpable. The war was as much a symptom of the problem as a cause. Modernity was abolishing man. It represented nothing less than a crisis of anthropology.
Sociologists have proposed a number of concepts that characterize the modern age. These provide a useful backdrop to Lewis’s observations. Perhaps the most influential is the Weberian thesis of disenchantment. Whereas once the local god or saint kept the water supply fresh and sweet, now the local water purification plant does the same. Village life has been replaced by the anonymity of the city. People have come to be valued not for themselves but for their earning potential or their consumption. And disenchantment has worked its way into every corner of life: Whereas once love was a serendipitous force that culminated in a lifelong bond between two people, now we swipe left or right on our apps for the next hookup.
These changes bring with them a sense of loss. Modernity has shunted religion and the supernatural to the margins, at the cost of stripping the world of its mystery. The sea of faith recedes, Matthew Arnold wrote in a great poem, and we hear only its “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.”
The problem is not merely that the world has become prosaic. It is also that man has lost his sense of his own significance. The more we understand and control nature, the more we realize our own contingency and smallness amid the vastness of an impersonal universe. The unique intellectual brilliance of our species has, ironically, deprived us of any sense that we have special significance. As Pascal observed, the eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens those who reflect upon it. This is the ethos that haunts the work of many modern and postmodern writers: Kafka, Beckett, Sartre, Pinter. With no God-given human nature and no God-ordained human end, the question “What is man?” is easily answered: He is nothing much. His nature too is disenchanted.
A second facet of modernity, identified by Zygmunt Bauman, is its liquidity. We live in a world that is in constant flux. This observation is not original to Bauman. Both Marx and Nietzsche voiced it in the nineteenth century. The Communist Manifesto famously declared that the bourgeois era required a constant revolutionizing of production and of markets and thus of all social relations. Constant disturbance was a hallmark of modernity; as Marx put it, “all that is sold melts into air.” Likewise, Nietzsche’s madman, reflecting on the death of God, described the earth as unhitched from the sun, turning all old certainties into chaos. Both men spoke truth: The modern West is indeed in state of endless flux and offers us no place to stand, no firm grasp of who we are.
More recently, the flux has been intensified by what Hartmut Rosa calls social acceleration. If Marx was correct that industrial production was a source of constant change in society, it was so in large part because it depended on technology that was itself constantly changing. We too live in an era of constant technological change, but it no longer affects merely industrial production. Technology shapes how we live in every area, from education to romance. Our lives are technologically shaped in public and in private, and the technology changes so fast that we are unable to assimilate one development before another overtakes it. The result is a dizzy feeling that our ability to control even our personal worlds is constantly slipping further away. In such a context, the questions of who we are and what we are meant for become impossible to answer. Indeed, to borrow from Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” things seem constantly falling apart, and that includes the consensus on who or what man is and what he is for.
The abolition of man as Lewis describes it takes place against the background of two aspects of modernity: its disenchantment and its accelerating liquidity. Yet I want to suggest that we need to add a third category, that of desecration. Man is made in God’s image. That means that the abolition of man is a theological act with theological consequences. Neither disenchantment nor liquidity by itself adequately expresses this aspect of the problem. Desecration, a theological concept, does so.
We can see this more clearly when we reflect on the limitations of disenchantment and liquidity as explanatory schemes. The first is that these concepts speak only to a loss of that which once was. Disenchantment, of course, points to the loss of enchantment. Whereas once the supernatural pervaded the natural, and the transcendent set the terms for the immanent, now only the natural and the immanent remain. Likewise with liquidity: We no longer have, in Marx’s phrase, fixed, frozen relations. All true—but, as will be seen, there is more to our modern condition than these losses.
The second problem is that disenchantment and liquidity connote a lack of human agency. Both are the result of impersonal social processes: industrialization, bureaucratization, technologization, globalization. Connected to these processes is the reification in common language of the phenomena to which they refer: industry, bureaucracy, technology, the global economy. Each takes on a life of its own in our imaginations, and we humans feature within these processes as interchangeable objects, not as active subjects or persons. Yet the processes themselves are the result of human activity. If we have become cogs in the machine, it is because we built the machine.
Further, we must not ignore the agency of the cultural elites—the legal, educational, technological, artistic, managerial, and political classes. In the past, such elites saw themselves as tasked with continuity, with the transmission of values from generation to generation and the careful cultivation of the institutions and social practices that were necessary for this task. Today, the dominant impulse of our elites is toward disruption, destruction, and discontinuity. The abolition of man is a conscious project of our culture’s officer class, not merely the outcome of impersonal social and technological forces. Disenchantment and liquidity simply cannot do justice to this project.
The third problem is that neither disenchantment nor liquidity takes account of the theological significance of the transformations that modernity has wrought upon the understanding of what it means to be human. One need not be a Christian or even a theist to grasp that these transformations have theological significance. Both Marx and Nietzsche connect their understandings of the modern world to desecration. In the same passage that pronounces that all that is solid melts into air, The Communist Manifesto declares that all that is holy is profaned. And Nietzsche’s madman makes very clear that God has not simply ceased to exist in the moral imagination, but is dead—more than that, we have killed him. This slaying of God is surely the ultimate act of active desecration.
Both Nietzsche and Marx view this desecration as good. For Marx, religion is an opiate that prevents the proletariat from feeling the full pain caused by capitalism. Criticism of religion is therefore central to the revolutionary project. Desecration is a precondition for the coming of the communist utopia. For Nietzsche, the death of God, though placing a terrifying responsibility on the shoulders of human beings, is a necessary precondition for man’s self-transcendence. The only question is whether we are up to the task.
It is true that in modernity, desecration is not always the result of intentional agency. Mechanized warfare intensified modern problems surrounding theodicy and inflicted serious damage on traditional religion. Wilfred Owen’s great poem “Anthem for Doomed Youth” transposes the language of Christian liturgy to the slaughter of the Great War’s trenches. The faith is desecrated, but not by the actions of any particular individual—rather, by the chaos of a war supercharged by the power of industry, the fruit of a coincidental confluence of numerous aspects of modernity.
Desecration, however, is more often an intentional act. I noted earlier the impulse of modern elites toward disruption and discontinuity. Nowhere is this more obvious than in their preoccupation with desecration. From Algernon Charles Swinburne to Francis Bacon and beyond, the conscious profaning of the holy has been a constant theme. Take, for example, the opening lines of James Joyce’s Ulysses:
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:               — Introibo ad altare Dei.
So begins the greatest masterpiece of modernism, with the first line of the Mass, intoned by a man about to shave, with his genitals flapping in the breeze for all to see. Though Joyce’s conscious intention is presumably not to abolish man—by instantiating Homeric epic in the everyday life of modern Dublin, he ennobles man no less than he ironizes him—Ulysses opens with a moment of desecration that has implications for anthropology. To mock religion is in effect to mock the understanding of God and humanity that religion represents.
Much could be said about the anti-religious tendency of much of high modernism. What is important to note, however, is that intentional desecration has migrated to the popular culture of our own time. As the sophisticated Joyce in the 1920s mocked the Latin Mass, so the talented Billy Joel reminded us in the 1970s that Catholic girls wait far too long to lose their virginity, and now the buffoonish Lil Nas X performs songs as blasphemous as they are banal. Desecration is today mainstream, the preoccupation of even the lowest forms of cultural pond life.
Though further evidence that desecration has gone mainstream may be sought in many areas, I will focus on sex and death. Both have traditionally been matters of deep religious significance. Sex is the mysterious origin of life, death the mysterious end of life. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that a large part of the laws of the Pentateuch is preoccupied with the implications of sex and death for ritual purity.
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In the church the right of the denomination to legislate or enforce qualifications for office has been met with the notion that individuals who feel called to ministry have a de facto right to it and that the church may not deny them that without unjustly depriving them; office is regarded as the property of the person who wants or holds it, not the property of the church that invests it with authority.

My Dear Madam,
I read your recent letter with both interest and sadness. We have heard much from your leaders, but little from Memorial’s members, so your brief missive gives a fresh testimony upon our current controversies. I confess I feel a certain reluctance to respond, for communication is difficult where the respective parties’ perspectives differ, and I fear that is the case here. I bid you remember that disagreement does not equal hatred, and that Scripture teaches it is our duty to warn others if we believe they err. If you can accept it, this letter is motivated by the conviction that “better is open rebuke than hidden love” (Prov. 27:5). I doubt neither your sincerity nor your honesty, but only that your statements present a sufficient consideration of the matter. As it is our duty to examine all things (1 Thess. 5:21), you will, I hope, permit me to do so now.
One thing I note is that your claims are not necessarily decisive proofs of godly motivation. For example, you speak of your pastors “living out their faith and ministry with integrity and humility.” That might be proof of Christian virtue, yes, but we do not have a monopoly upon humility and integrity. They are also manifestations of God’s common grace, and it could be said of many of other faiths that they minister with humility and integrity (and piety, zeal, etc.) – yet they are not thereby saved, and their works are not thereby made pleasing to God. Describing his fellow Jews, Paul says:
For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.  For, being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness (Rom. 10:2-3).
Therein lays the essence of the question. Even if we grant your leaders’ humility and external integrity, many of us yet dispute that they are right in their teaching and actions.
Elsewhere you state your leaders “have made every effort to speak well of the brothers in the PCA who disagree.” That has not always been done: see here or Greg Johnson’s Aug. 16th tweet to potential attendees of Revoice 2022 (“Don’t let fear of the circumcision party hold you back”). I confess I am at a loss as to how accusing your critics of being in the same category as deniers of the gospel (Gal. 5:2-4; comp. 1:6-9; 3:10) is speaking well of them. But even if this were done reliably it would be no conclusive proof of Christian character. Some speak well of others, even privately, for reasons of self-advantage. One must then try to discern whether the motivation seems good or not, which can only be done by comparing the claim to more public statements. As above and elsewhere, such statements give occasion for concern.
Elsewhere you state “we also desire the peace and purity of the church.” Again, I don’t doubt your sincerity, but that statement could be made by any heretic as readily as by the pious. The real question is: what qualifies here as the peace and purity of the church? We seem to have very different notions of those concepts. From our standpoint it is a strange notion of desiring the peace and purity of the church that includes publishing books, articles, and interviews that attempt to normalize an abnormal experience and to make it acceptable to discuss publicly a matter Scripture says “must not even be named among you” (Eph. 5:3); to lend practical support to organizations (Revoice) that seek the same; to do the same with unbelievers who seek to glorify that which God abominates (“Transluminate 2020”); and to defend such practices vigorously at every turn. You desire peace and purity, but on your terms, not those of our constitution, Scripture, or much of the rest of the denomination.
We do the same, of course, but we think our terms are better, for they have the warrant of Scripture and the established practice of the church for two millennia. Those terms are, amongst others, that not merely errant behavior but also errant desires are sin, in that they are contrary to God’s preceptive will for human nature; that church officers must be above reproach (Titus 1:7) and examples of godly behavior (1 Pet. 5:3), known rather by their fidelity and good works (Titus 2:7) than by their public description of their private sexual desires; that perverse sexual desire in its various stripes does not occur in isolation, but appears in societies in which the reign and corruption of sin have proceeded far and issued as a rejection of God and many other heinous sins (Gen. 18:16-19:29; Eze. 16:49; Rom. 1:18-32); that giving intoxicating beverages to unbelievers who are using the Lord’s property for debauchery is not mercy or evangelism, but abetting revelry; that, subject to Scripture, the church has the right to determine whom it invests with office and on what grounds, and that it has a real right here against officers and candidates, who have no right to ordination by the church; and that responding to sincere concerns of wrongdoing with frequent, zealous, and emotional defenses and thus preoccupying the church with responding to faults rather than other matters is a strange notion of seeking her peace. (Please note I do not include the propriety of psychological counseling for those with perverse temptations in that list.)
I would gently remind you that such innovation of doctrine and practice and disruption of peace as has occurred in these matters has come from your party, who were under no obligation to host Revoice, publish articles at Living Out, etc. It is your party that has instigated this by attempting to import worldly notions (such as sexual desire being a result of an immutable, unwilled orientation rather than a matter of willful preference or a complex of hereditary and environmental causes); we but react in defense of the church’s traditional understanding.
Another thing I note in your letter is that your appeals are often highly emotional in nature. That is not objectionable as such—many of the New Testament epistles include strong emotional appeals—and it is understandable that, given your circumstances, you would feel strongly and speak in light of it. Let me reiterate: I do not doubt your sincerity or honesty, nor the strength of your feelings here, and I do not resent your sharing them. There are few things that are more reprehensible in our society than the tendency, common especially in politics, to exult at the suffering of our opponents. That is execrable and at odds with Scripture, and you will find none of that here.
But I do believe that you are mistaken on this point, and that your mistake lies in this: you make too much of emotion and put it in a central, commanding position rather than leaving it as a subordinate matter. Your letter is essentially a large emotional plea, and it is largely only an emotional plea. Again, it is not wrong, as such, to appeal from your feelings to ours; but in so doing you glide over the grave issues at hand and act as though your party has been needlessly and unjustly troubled. Again, that is historically doubtful—the initiative in stirring up the controversies lies with your leaders—and it gives insufficient space to revelation, which ought to guide all our considerations of such matters. You do allude to Eph. 4:4-5, but briefly and in the service of the emotional plea.
As near as I can tell, it is this preoccupation with emotion that characterizes much advocacy in matters of normalizing the experience of corrupt sexual desires. We are always hearing about the emotional experiences of those who have such temptations, and in both church and society it has often been implied that we who do not experience such desires are derelict in sympathizing with those that do, or that we have even injured them by not acknowledging, validating, and (in society at least) celebrating them in the midst of their emotional experiences. The formula has been the same in both church and society: elevate the autonomy, rights, and dignity of the individual self and of the individual person as representative of a minority group/distinctive class over those of the rights and authority of other groups and the institutions and larger bodies of which the individual is a part.
In civil society the duty and authority of the state to determine the qualifications for marriage was challenged by the plea that individuals’ rights to pursue happiness included the right to form sexual/social/familial relations according to their desires, not according to the needs or rules of the law, and that their rights on this point superseded those of the state and included the ‘right’ to have the state recognize and benefit those unions that they chose according to their personal dictates.
In the church the right of the denomination to legislate or enforce qualifications for office has been met with the notion that individuals who feel called to ministry have a de facto right to it and that the church may not deny them that without unjustly depriving them; office is regarded as the property of the person who wants or holds it, not the property of the church that invests it with authority. Central to every notion of the sacred, inviolable autonomy of the individual as a person or as a representative of a privileged class is the belief that happiness, emotional satisfaction, self-fulfillment, or whatever one wishes to call it, is the most important human need and right, and that it can only be had where that person is accepted and approved by the larger entity (society, church) and all its other members. In society, emotional experience and desire were elevated above nature and law; in the church, above Scripture and the authority of the church.
When you talk about “the toll [the controversy] has taken upon my leaders and the resources of our church—resources which should have been devoted to the care of the flock and the service of our community,” of how “the atmosphere in our church today is one of profound grief and fragility,” and of how the “charges against us feel unrelenting and disheartening,” you follow this same pattern. The emphasis is not upon how your leaders departed from sound doctrine and practice and troubled the church, but upon how those of us who have opposed their actions have made all of you feel. I admit my words here are pointed, but the truth is that your church’s present distress is attributable to your own leaders’ actions. They were under no obligation to host Revoice, etc., and could have desisted at any time—and still can now—but they persisted and now you find yourselves in your present plight. I take no pleasure in hearing of that plight, and I will not insult you by pretending that I personally or my party have been perfect in our demeanor in response; still, this is a bed of your own making, and it is not fair to the rest of us to imply it is our fault.
Third, I must politely demur from some of your practical suggestions. You say, “Those who criticize Memorial often do so from beyond our walls.” Yet as your errors have not been confined within your walls but have spread widely, it is permissible to criticize them from without, and practical considerations often mandate it. You say, “If we are in error, please come sit with us and help us understand our sin” and “please stop talking about us and come talk to us.” Time and again your leaders have been rebuked, and they have not listened but have hardened themselves, defended their actions, and suggested your critics were at fault.
You and some of your other congregants might desire dialogue, but I don’t see evidence that your leaders desire it or that it would lead to concord. Indeed, when you say that technology has allowed us “to distance ourselves from each other,” I fear you misdiagnose the reason for the distance. It is not the fault of the technology, but of your own leaders’ persistence in resisting rebuke.
Now in closing, I shall consider your final statements, but I must first warn you that they are, alas, quite somber, and that I write them with heaviness of heart. You bid us: “Remember that whether Memorial stays or leaves the PCA, we are still one body with one Lord” and that “You will still be our brothers and sisters in Christ.” We will of course not be one body in the visible sense of the church. You will have separated yourselves for reasons that we believe unjust (the avoidance of deserved discipline). As for the invisible church’s unity, it is a thing we have little ability to comment upon, its members being known only to God (1 Kgs. 8:39; comp. 1 Sam. 16:7; Prov. 16:2; 21:2; 2 Tim. 2:18-19); we humans must judge from external behavior.
And that behavior has not been good. Only one further example do I mention. Scripture says, “If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person’s religion is worthless” (Jas. 1:26); and “The evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks” (Lk. 6:45b). A correspondent sent me an article where your senior pastor used foul language in quoting an obvious heretic (Francis Spufford)’s alternative to the doctrine of sin, “The human propensity to [expletive subtracted].” That is not being above reproach or acting in a manner worthy of our calling. It is writing in a manner that would get one fired by many unbelieving bosses. And yet this is what qualifies as Christian ministry among you! All of which is to say that many of us suspect that it might be said of at least some of you that:
They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us (1 Jn. 2:19).
A grim prospect, surely, the writing of which is unpleasant. Yet Scripture can scarcely allow us to come to any other conclusion. When you then say that “we will still share the same table each Sunday,” I fear it might prove otherwise. Scripture is clear that not all that is meant to be communion truly is (1 Cor. 11:20), and it has been the long experience of the church that many retain the form without the right doctrine or the true relationship with Christ that sanctifies the form. In conclusion, whether Memorial stays or leaves you would do well to find a church whose leaders conduct themselves other than Memorial’s have; for “bad company ruins good morals” (1 Cor. 15:33). Now may God grant you every grace in Christ and give you understanding in this and every matter, that you might discern his will aright and act in a manner pleasing to him.
Tom Hervey is a member, Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church, Simpsonville, SC. The statements made in this article are the personal opinions of the author alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of his church or its leadership or other members.
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