Primitive

I approach this coming Sunday’s text from Acts with some trepidation. I cannot count the number of sermons, devotional talks, and the like, which I have heard holding up especially the last few verses of Acts 2:29-47 as a model for current church life, often making an unfavorable comparison of present churches to what we see there in the early days of the church in Jerusalem. Even the name of a Christian music group (2nd Chapter of Acts) in the twentieth century implies that there is something about Christian life in these verses that has been lost and which needs to be recovered and implemented once again today.

Something about the desire to return to and recapture a lost golden age of the church rubs me the wrong way. It partakes of a general human tendency to view at least some aspects of the past as superior to our present condition. That viewpoint was expressed in the 18th century in a “primitivism” associated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others, who suggested that human life in an older, simpler, more primitive form than modern western civilization was somehow better.

In Christian history there has been a recurring call to get back to the beginnings and restore the glory of the primitive church. Chrysostom in the 4th century was one of the first to make the Acts 2 church an indictment of current church life. Almost all the reforming movements of Christianity, including Protestantism and Evangelicalism, had a sense of returning to something earlier, more basic, and better than the then contemporary form of Christianity.

I won’t deny the suggestiveness and even normative force of verse 42, “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” That fourfold description of church life–which we might unpack today as Bible reading and teaching, sharing in community, receiving of the Sacraments, and participation in well-ordered devotional worship–would be an excellent schema for any congregation’s mission statement.

However, it should be clear that verse 42 even with the additional activities named in verses 43-47, cannot really capture all that Christians have discovered and received from the Lord over the last two millennia about how to be His people. Despite the statement that “the Lord added to their number” in verse 47, nothing is said about how to accomplish the growth of the church. And verses 44 and 45, about the sharing of possessions, are pretty much ignored by many people who want to see the surrounding verses as a normative primitive model for current church life.

The plain truth is that the story of primitive glory days, to which we can somehow return, is as much a myth in church history as it is in human history in general. The faith which Peter preaches in the text just preceding (verses 32-36) those “primitivist” verses is that glorious life together is a gift which comes by the grace of God who sent His Son to die and rise to redeem us into the hope of our own resurrection. The glory is in the future, not in the past.

We can certainly learn something from that first church, as I’ve said, but we cannot read off from these verses, or from any collection of Bible texts alone, a detailed plan for being the people God wants us to be. That can only happen through an on-going relationship with the risen Jesus and a constant willingness to receive again the message of the Gospel and discover how the Holy Spirit is going to implement that message in us today.