Reflection:
As representative of the socio-economic impact of the kingdom, we will consider one particular episode in Acts: the ministry of Paul in Ephesus in Acts 19. Ephesus is important for our purposes in many ways. Ephesus is the climax of Paul’s ministry as a free man, where Paul sees the broadest effectiveness in his lifetime.[1] Luke spends much time developing what Paul does in Ephesus and how the gospel message impacts the city. As a direct result, Ephesus is the place where the lordship of Christ challenges entire industries and tradespeoples, in this case, the occult magicians and the silversmiths of Artemis. With the exception of tax-collecting, this is the first time a trade or a sector of occupational work is addressed as a clear category.
At the time of Paul’s ministry in Acts 19, Ephesus was a city conscious of economic decline. Even though Ephesus possessed one of the wonders of the ancient world, the Temple of Artemis, and even though Ephesus sat on a major trade route connecting Rome to the East, silt from the river was filling up the bay. The Ephesians knew their days of prosperity were numbered. They were in economic jeopardy, which helps explain why a riot could start so easily. We see resistance to the message of Jesus from both Jewish and Gentile communities. The Jewish community is more measured and less organized in its resistance; their resistance will only get stronger when Paul leaves for Jerusalem and some Jews follow him there and cause a riot. The Gentile community, however, is angrier and more organized in its resistance, because the root cause is their loss of profit. Chapter 19 can be divided into two basic parts: the first, ‘Jewish Acceptance and Resistance’ in 19:1 – 17, the second, ‘Gentile Acceptance and Resistance’ in 19:18 – 41. We will focus on the Gentile response.
Two major industries of the Gentile world are affected in Acts 19: the magicians and the silversmiths. These practices were not on the periphery of an otherwise secularized culture. To strike at the occult and the manufacture of idols was to strike at the core of the Gentile world. The magicians who commit themselves to Jesus – apparently a significant number of them – must now look for other work. Their previous livelihood is incompatible with their current profession of faith in Jesus. So they must burn their books of incantations as a gesture of their allegiance to Jesus. Luke records that they burned fifty-thousand silver pieces’ worth of books. The silversmiths, on the other hand, do not repent. They seek to hold on to their profession, and 19:25 is particularly illuminating. They say, ‘Our prosperity depends on this business.’ They start a city-wide riot in Ephesus playing on people’s fears of corporate pride, civic insecurity, and economic panic.
The complexities of extracting meaning from these passages to the present are many. What is the relevance of this passage for our inquiry? The significance of this passage should not be limited to blatant issues of the occult or physical idols, which would focus the application of this passage on the non-industrialized world where superstitions and polytheistic religions flourish, or minor undercurrents of the industrialized world (e.g. astrologers, psychics, wiccans, etc.). Both of these hermeneutical moves would technically be accurate, but would leave unchallenged the vast majority of the apparatus of the industrialized sector. Such a bias must make us pause.
Sociologist Emile Durkheim argued, and common sense suggests, that a physical idol is just the focal point of a metaphysic offering humanity a way to control its environment. People turned to idols because they wanted to control the outcomes of harvests, the weather, war, fortune, fertility, etc. An idol is simply an expression of the human desire for control, control that humanity does not want God to have. Defined this way, we may identify many overlapping systems of idols today, most of them rooted in materialism. As this passage illustrates, Gentile society is materialistic and worships money. Ephesians and Colossians support this assertion in simple terms: ‘Covetousness is idolatry’ (Eph.5:5; Col.3:5). Hence we need not enter into the debates surrounding various sociological analyses, like Jacques Ellul’s assessment that technology is an extension of magic – in that technological precision is similar in form and function to the precise incantations of sorcerers[2] – even though I believe these analyses have some validity and are underappreciated. We can simply stay within the radical critique of materialism offered by Jesus, as well as his prescriptive uses of money, since the degree to which materialism is endorsed increases the likelihood that some serious inequity or injustice is being perpetrated. Any behavior and any institution that does not conform to Jesus’ ethics of wealth should be viewed with suspicion and intelligently critiqued. Once the underlying assumption is gone that the engine of economic growth must be theologically protected, a Christian critique can enter in with compelling truth and power.
A Christian critique of injustice should address – and in some cases has already addressed – the following: the lucrative sex trade in Southeast Asia; the profusion of adult programming on all telecommunications media; the reinvigoration of child pornography across the globe solely due to the internet; the drug cartels fueling the economies of South American nations like Colombia; the military-industrial complex driving much of the U.S. economy; and various types of corporate behavior. For now, it is sufficient to point out all the major problems people in the U.S. have experienced as a result of the corporation, a legal entity that allows wealth to be deployed in the interest of those who possess that wealth: child labor and exploitation; the indenture and exploitation of slaves; labor disputes about pay and overwork; lack of safe work environments and working conditions; collusion; monopoly and price gouging; lack of equal opportunities for women and minorities; overt outward-facing racism such as bank red-lining and predatory lending; advertising and marketing practices playing on ethnic struggles; harmful or wasteful products being marketed to the public (tobacco, lead paint, remote control TV’s designed for toddlers, etc.); the impact of environmental degradation on other human life; inattention to the negative impact of massive layoffs and relocation of work on communities often causing massive urban poverty through transfer of jobs; corruption and intentional financial mismanagement designed to pool money for the wealthy (e.g. the Enron debacle); and corporate influence on political processes. In this last category, I have in mind especially tax exemptions for wealthy corporations, companies lobbying government for special protections, and U.S. oil interests influencing U.S. foreign and military policy in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. All of those issues manifest a myopic use of power by the wealthy, for the wealthy.
Thus, I believe that the primary area of engagement Christians ought to take up is the socio-political environment that allows for wealth to be managed by a select few at the expense of the broader community. This is why, in chapter four, we will critique corporations, banks, and political structures using Jesus’ ethics of inclusion, generosity, and reconciliation. It is important to note here that I believe a Christian critique of occupational work in the industrialized world should focus not on specific downstream products or certain ‘technologies.’ For example, Amish communities do not use electricity or gasoline. Other Christians take issue with ‘science.’ While this type of disengagement may be acceptable for small segments of the Christian community, it is far too specific to be relevant to the whole body.
Furthermore, a Christian critique of injustice should, as John the Baptist and Jesus did with tax collectors, personalize any injustices committed. While it is true that Christians must be sensitive to structural and institutional issues like law, Christians ought to call pimps, gangsters, drug dealers, corporate executives, managers, board members, stockholders, policymakers, and judges to take personal responsibility for the harm done to others, especially because we have seen that Jesus’ stern teaching against materialism can be invoked on any front. We should not merely place the blame on systemic factors while actual people bear no responsibility for changing both ourselves and the system. In fact, I am concerned that the system maintains itself precisely because, on the one hand, people shield their public lives from Jesus’ ethics and do not deal with their own materialism as it manifests itself in the professional, public realm; but on the other hand, if they acknowledge their complicity with the system, they often quit their jobs for others that provoke less inner tension, leaving someone else to fill that post. Both tendencies appear especially true for high-level politicians and executives. John the Baptist and Jesus, by contrast, apparently left quite a few tax collectors in their jobs, only with a radically different understanding of money and community. This means that some actual systemic change happened because personal change happened quickly. Too, this personalization of injustice is appropriate because the acceptance of Jesus’ ethics is a precondition of genuine conversion to Christ. Christian proclamation does not need to – and must not – wait for people to ‘receive Jesus’ and then ‘move on’ to Jesus’ ethics as part of ‘discipleship.’ Ethics and evangelism go hand in hand; both are necessary for conversion. If all these things are true, then our theological engagement with the marketplace and the political realm must be done publicly and actively, in tandem with evangelism, for the simple reason that we are calling all people to live fully within Jesus’ kingdom.
All this lends considerable weight to my belief that a Christian critique of injustice finds its firmest theological footing on Jesus’ massive critique of materialism and the general New Testament view that materialism is an idolatry demanding repentance, as well as Jesus’ vision for his kingdom community and his inclusive ethic towards outsiders and the poor. We have seen – and will continue to see – that ‘creation theology’ and texts like Genesis 1 – 11, long taken as justifications for the socio-political status quo among Gentile Christians, actually serve as polemical texts describing an ideal critiquing the entire Gentile world. Nor can a theological foundation be found by turning some vision of the future consummated kingdom into a blueprint for the present, as I will discuss in the next chapter. Oscar Romero wondered whether this was possible, and whether the end justifies the means, and I wonder whether kingdom advancement goes awry when Jesus’ ethics are downplayed, resulting in negligence or violence.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. At this point, we can say with confidence that civic and national security is not an adequate reason to stop an aggressive Christian public critique of questionable practices and institutions. Luke might have even conceded to Demetrius his point: perhaps the financial prosperity of Ephesus did indeed depend on the elevation of the Artemis cult and the proliferation of her idols. But such an argument does not necessarily carry the day. Even in conditions of economic decline, Christian critique of materialism-as-idolatry should be vigorous, especially when people are marginalized by people or institutionalized practices. Significantly, neither Paul nor Luke suggests that some kind of clever reconciliation is possible for the sake of keeping people employed or wealthy. For instance, no thought is given to the possibility that the silversmiths should now make silver idols of Jesus instead of Artemis.
[1] See Tannehill, Acts (1990): Luke makes this clear to us by paralleling Paul to earlier Christian leaders, including Jesus and Peter. (1) In Ephesus, Paul was God’s channel of bestowing the Holy Spirit, as were Peter and Jesus before him. (2) Paul cast out demons, as did Peter and Jesus before him. (3) Paul’s clothes were vehicles of God’s healing, as happened to both Peter and Jesus. Furthermore, and more importantly, (4) God reaches more people through Paul here than anywhere else. In 19:10 and 19:17, Luke says. ‘All the inhabitants of Asia [Minor] heard the word of the Lord, both Jews and Greeks.’ This is an ongoing situation for just over two years even when Paul was kicked out of the synagogue.
[2] Jacques Ellul. The Technological Society.
