Jerusalem council and the theological task, The

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Jun 2003 by Wiarda, Timothy

This article is partly about the Jerusalem Council and partly about hermeneutics, contextualization, and theological method. As I have been reading in the latter three areas recently, I cannot help noticing how often writers make reference to the Jerusalem Council. It sometimes enters their discussion in its pure Acts 15 form, sometimes as an event reconstructed from a combination of sources. Either way, the Council serves as paradigm and precedent for a number of proposals concerning the theologian's task. The proposals themselves are fraught with consequence, since they concern the shape and status of the church's message. Any NT episode cited on their behalf, therefore, deserves at least a few moments of our attention. What do various writers mean when they claim the Jerusalem Council as a model? And looking deeper, what are the marks and functions of a good biblical paradigm?

I. A SURVEY OF PROPOSALS

The scattering of writers I will cite share a belief that the Jerusalem Council offers a paradigm that may be followed today by those who develop theology to guide the church.1 These authors do not all highlight the same aspects of the Council episode, however, nor do they draw identical conclusions from it with respect to theological method.

1. The Council as a model for contextualization. The Council seems to be cited most frequently by writers who stress the factors of culture and ethnicity and who view the decision to free Gentile believers from the requirement of circumcision as a matter of contextualization. John Davis, for instance, considers the Council of Jerusalem to be the prime example of early Christian contextualization.2 That is to say, when the church debated circumcision, the underlying issue concerned the sort of principles that should be followed when Christian teaching was brought across ethnic-cultural boundaries. Those Jewish Christians who insisted that Gentile believers be circumcised did so because they assumed the law given to their own nation was valid for all cultures; those who rejected the demand for circumcision, on the other hand, were guided by the insight that what is binding on one people group is not necessarily binding on all. David Hesselgrave and Edward Rommen offer a similar analysis: the decision concerning circumcision was an instance of contextualization; the Council determined that salvation did not depend on the traditions and institutions of any particular ethnic group.3 According to Charles Kraft, the Jerusalem consultation was called in order to "make a decision with respect to Gentile converts and Hebrew culture." When the Judaizers insisted that Gentiles needed to be circumcised, they were in effect demanding that Gentiles submit to "cultural conversion."4

Davis, Kraft, Hesselgrave, and Rommen are concerned first and foremost with missiological issues: how the gospel should be expressed when it is carried across cultural boundaries, and how emerging national churches can formulate theology in ways that suit their own distinctive cultures. These writers clearly wish to conform their methodological proposals to biblical teaching and models; they work with Scripture in its final canonical form; and they all speak of circumcision and the law of Moses as if these were primarily matters of Jewish culture. Kraft expresses himself most emphatically on this latter point, but a similar assumption seems to be held by all of these authors, namely, that the Council exemplifies the same kind of contextualization that cross-cultural missionaries or national churches might also practice today.

For the moment I will note just two of the questions this approach provokes. They relate to what actually took place at the Jerusalem Council-the problem tackled and the solution agreed. First, to what extent did any of the participants in the original debate view circumcision and the Mosaic law as matters of culture? Second, was the theological decision that emerged from the Council conceived of as universal (applicable to all peoples, both Jews and Gentiles) or local (restricted to one cultural community)? Certain elements in the narrative of Acts 15 (the text to which these writers primarily appeal) make these questions fair, perhaps even unavoidable. Some of Peter's comments, for example, appear to touch on the universal-or-local question. He describes the law as a yoke that "neither we nor our fathers have been able to bear," and affirms that "it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we [Jews] are saved, just as they [Gentiles] are" (Acts 15:10-11). Remarks such as these do not, on the surface, sound like expressions of a culture-specific theology. As for how the Council participants might have viewed the connection between circumcision and culture, to suggest that the Mosaic law was purely a cultural product would run counter to the perspective of the Acts narrative (see 7:38, for example), as well as the convictions of the early church more widely. I assume, then, that when these writers speak of circumcision as cultural they mean that, though the practice was divinely commanded, it was a requirement given only to Jews, a God-given mark of their identity as a nation. To describe circumcision in these terms accords with the perspective of Israel's Scriptures-when looked at from one angle. Is it adequate, however, as a complete account of the circumcision command? The OT writings portray a tight link between the Jewish nation and God's covenant, so that for a Gentile to join one meant joining the other. Circumcision was the means of becoming a Jew, certainly. But it was also the required way for a Gentile to receive the blessings promised within the covenant relationship. Would not the early Christians have been mindful of the testimony of Scripture on this subject?5 If they were, then those who gathered at the Jerusalem Council had to wrestle with something other than simply the pressures of culture and ethnocentrism.