Christian Atheists?
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You don’t have to watch Making a Murderer to know that someone can be falsely accused. It just reminds us how serious it can be. It's horrifying to imagine being falsely accused and convicted of murder. Now, regardless of your personal conclusion about Steven Avery’s case, we all know that any accusation can potentially be false. There has to be strong evidence for an accusation to hold up under scrutiny and stand firm in the light of truth. If you dig deep enough, you might find out that the accusation is not true.
The earliest Christians were no strangers to false accusations.
Their religious behavior was so strange in the culture in which they lived that people made wrong assumptions about them. The accusations and rumors were crazy. One such rumor was incest. Since they celebrated meals together that they called “love feasts” and since they called each other brothers and sisters, some people thought that Christian worship involved orgies and even incest. But that wasn’t all. Another rumor making its way around was that Christians were cannibals. After all, they claimed to be eating the body and the blood of Jesus when they gathered together for worship every week (this is the kind of language they used to describe communion; see John 6:52-58 and 1 Corinthians 10:16-17). These kinds of rumors and accusations were so ridiculous that early Christian leaders didn’t even bother to give lengthy defenses in response. They simply denied these rumors and explained what they did together as a community of Jesus followers, a defining feature being the worship of only one God. This then led to another false accusation: atheism.
Here's what is telling about this accusation of atheism: people simply didn't have a category for their worship of only one God – and an invisible God at that.
Their neighbors and coworkers simply didn’t know what to do with this. How could you not have any visible gods? So they called them atheists. You see, polytheism was deeply ingrained in their culture. You worshiped many gods. That’s just what you did. There were many idols that you bowed down to in worship, and everyone was required to worship the Roman emperor. This worship of many gods was so deeply ingrained in Greco-Roman culture that Christians had to sit out of most social activities if they wanted to stay faithful to the one true God. This meant that they couldn’t even participate in the military. Since they refused to worship the emperor like everyone else, they were viewed as being subversive – potentially threatening the very fiber of society. People were suspicious that Christians were an underground network whose continued spread could lead to uprisings. All of this fear, suspicion, and misunderstanding led to false accusations that were part of Christian persecution. An accusation of atheism could lead to other charges, and there was no hope of a fair trial. Punishment could include imprisonment and sometimes even death.
Worshiping the one true God who created all things – and only Him – mattered so deeply to them that they were unwilling to budge from it, even under threat of persecution.
Their devotion to the God-who-is-one was staggering. It went against the grain of the culture in which they lived. It shocked their family and friends. Who knew belief could matter so much?
Their devotion raises questions for us:
Do we believe that God is one – the only true God who created all things? Or to hit closer to home, does it matter to us that God is one? How much so? Is it something we just assume is true, or are we so convinced of this truth that we’re willing to stake our lives on it? Why should we care so much about this truth? What difference does it really make? What if it cost us to believe that God is one and that only He is God? Would we still worship Him and Him alone? What if we worshiped Him now with that kind of devotion?
If you want to discover more about why it matters that God is one, check out our sermon: The Fighting Doctrine that God is One (God Who? #1)
