In every age of Christian history, missionaries and preachers have tried to answer the question: what prevents people from accepting the message of Christ and the Kingdom? Paul, meanwhile, answers this question briefly but quite concisely and...
In every age of Christian history, missionaries and preachers have tried to answer the question: what prevents people from accepting the message of Christ and the Kingdom? Paul, meanwhile, answers this question briefly but quite concisely and, perhaps, exhaustively. As always, he divides all people into the religious ("Jews") and the secular ("Greeks"), and both have their own reasons for rejecting the witness to Christ and the Kingdom. These reasons are easiest to see if we analyze the attitude of the two named categories of people toward the fact of the Savior's death on the cross. Without speaking of that death, of course, no witness to His resurrection is possible, and therefore no witness to the Kingdom or to Christianity at all is possible.
As we can see, the apostle considers the expectation of signs, "miracles," that would confirm for religious people the truth of the witness they hear to be a distinguishing feature of religious consciousness. In fact, they demanded this kind of sign from the Savior Himself during His earthly ministry. But the signs they expected had to fit the ideas and concepts characteristic of the religious views of those listening. This is exactly the kind of proof many of the Pharisees who listened to Jesus expected from Him: He had to do something that corresponded to their ideas about what the Messiah should be like and how He should behave. Death on a cross, however, in no way corresponded to such ideas, even if one allowed that resurrection followed it. According to the traditional Jewish ideas of that time, and not only that time, the Messiah was supposed to be not a crucified Righteous One, but a triumphant Victor, and moreover a Victor triumphing in our untransformed world, not in some Kingdom "not of this world." Therefore, for the Jews of Gospel times, the messianism of the early Christian Church was something completely unacceptable.
But the Kingdom in general does not fit into any religious framework, and therefore Christianity does not fit into one either. And every religious consciousness, including a "Christian" one, resists the revelation of the Kingdom when it goes beyond that framework, destroying both the framework and religiosity itself. It would seem that secular people should be free from this problem.
And they are; but here problems of another kind arise. Every pagan, and "secularity" is nothing other than practical paganism, lives exclusively or primarily according to the laws of the untransformed world. All his psychological and behavioral models, which determine his everyday existence, what is usually called "practical life," and in the Bible the ability to organize everyday practical life is called wisdom, are oriented toward the laws of the untransformed world, not toward the laws of the Kingdom.
This is what usually stops a secular person who hears the witness and begins to think about what he has heard. For him, trying to live according to the laws of the Kingdom is true madness: it is a radical breaking, the destruction of all established and commonly accepted models and ideas, in fact a rejection of the whole former life, and a voluntary rejection at that.
An adventure, an utterly insane adventure. And many pagans, "secular people," refuse any attempt to share in the life of the Kingdom because they are frightened precisely by this seeming madness. As we can see, the reasons religious people and secular people reject the witness are different and unlike one another. But the result is the same: rejection of the Kingdom. And of one's own salvation.
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1:22 For whereas the Jews demand of the apostles, as they did of their Lord, more signs still, after all they have seen already; and the Greeks, or gentiles, seek wisdom - The depths of philosophy, and the charms of eloquence.
1:23 We go on to preach, in a plain and historical, not rhetorical or philosophical, manner, Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumblingblock - Just opposite to the "signs" they demand. And to the Greeks foolishness - A silly tale, just opposite to the wisdom they seek.