Turning the World Upside Down

The Christian Revolution in the Book of Acts

Ever since my encounter with C. Kavin Rowe's book World Upside Down: Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age in 2013 I've found found myself returning to its central insights over and over again. World Upside Down is a book that has stayed with me.

Rowe begins his analysis of the book of Acts by noting the political paradox at the heart of the story. On the one hand, toward the end of Acts, Paul is repeatedly dragged before civic and Roman authorities and charged with political subversion and disturbing the peace. And in every instance, the civic and Roman authorities find nothing wrong with Paul. The message seems to be clear: In the eyes of Rome, the Jesus movement is an intramural theological squabble among the Jews that poses no political threat to Rome. Paul's message about Jesus' resurrection is deemed to be politically innocuous.

And yet, on the other hand, Luke clearly recounts how city after city was thrown into political turmoil as the kingdom advanced. As the gospel moves into contested territory riot after riot breaks out. Clearly, the proclamation that "Jesus is Lord" is far from being politically inert.

So that's the political paradox of the kingdom in the book of Acts. On the one hand, Rome could find nothing politically subversive about the early Jesus movement. And yet, the kingdom turned the Roman world upside down, eventually even replacing it. How to make sense of that?

To get at the source of the civic upheaval caused by the gospel, Rowe works through a series of collisions in the book of Acts, locations where the gospel crashes into pagan culture. To understand these events we need to have a proper understanding of ancient pagan observance. Specifically, the issue wasn't merely about religious observance. Our modern separation between a public, secular sphere and a private, religious sphere was unknown in antiquity. Idolatry was, rather, an entire way of life, the cultural worldview that sat at the foundation of civic life--morally, socially, politically, and economically. Idol worship was the glue that held everything together. Leaving idol worship, therefore, wasn't simply a matter of changing where and how you worshiped. Turning away from pagan idolatry would upend an entire social order, unleashing drastic social, economic, and political consequences. As Rowe states:

The turning away [from idols]...was not simply an epistemological act--"knowing better," as it were. Rather, the removal from pagan religious practices, so Luke tells, was a public act with economic and political consequence...

[In the story of Acts] to follow the Way is to inhabit the world in a manner fundamentally disruptive to the practices inherent to the present religious order. That such a disruption unfolds economically is but a necessary consequence of the inseparability of ancient religion from economics, or, to put it more along Luke's lines, the primacy of the identity of God for a comprehensive pattern of life.

Rowe tracks this collision through the narrative of Acts, with particular attention given to the events in Lystra, Phillipi, Athens, Thessalonica and Ephesus. The events that transpire in Philippi and Ephesus nicely illustrate of the conflation of idolatry and economics. For example, in Acts 16 Paul performs an exorcism on a slave girl who is a soothsayer. Upon learning of the exorcism, the owners of the slave girl are thrown into a rage:

When the owners of the slave girl realized that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace to face the authorities. They brought them before the magistrates and said, “These men are Jews, and are throwing our city into an uproar by advocating customs unlawful for us Romans to accept or practice.”

Another example of this idolatry/economics conflation comes from the riot that breaks out in Ephesus in Acts 19. Magic was big business in Ephesus. Spells, charms, amulets, statues, totems and magic scrolls were used for almost everything--from blessing a business venture to healing disease. But as the Jesus movement established itself in the city the following happened:

When this became known to the Jews and Greeks living in Ephesus, they were all seized with fear, and the name of the Lord Jesus was held in high honor. Many of those who believed now came and openly confessed what they had done. A number who had practiced sorcery brought their scrolls together and burned them publicly. When they calculated the value of the scrolls, the total came to fifty thousand drachmas. In this way the word of the Lord spread widely and grew in power.

A contemporary fiscal estimate of the value of 50,000 drachmas can only be guessed at. But the economic impact was large enough to agitate the local economy, eventually leading to another riot.

Such disruptions caught the attention of the Roman authorities. And at the heart of the Jesus movement there was a potentially seditious claim being made. As recounted in Acts 17, this was the accusation being leveled at the church:

“These men who have turned the world upside down...they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus.”

Acting against the degrees of Caesar and proclaiming another king would have been worrying to the Empire. Especially given the rioting in multiple cities. And yet, despite all this damning evidence, Luke also portrays the officials of Imperial Rome vindicating the followers of "King Jesus."

Again, that's a strange paradox. According to Rowe, the answer to this puzzle is that Luke is crafting his narrative to ward off accusations that Christians, in claiming Jesus to be King, were violent insurrectionists. Yes, the gospel was socially, economically and politically disruptive--it turns the world upside down--but the followers of King Jesus were not calling for the violent overthrow of the Roman government. Given all the rioting caused by the gospel, Luke was worried, according to Rowe, that Imperial Rome would get the wrong idea about what the Christians were up to. So Luke presents a narrative where Christians, though proclaiming loyalty to King Jesus, were non-violent. At the same time, and this is the balancing act, Luke doesn't want to portray the gospel as culturally, politically, and economically innocuous. For the gospel was, in fact, highly disruptive. Here's Rowe summarizing this argument:

[T]he Christian mission as narrated by Luke is not a counter-state. It does not, that is, seek to replace Rome, or to "take back" Palestine, Asia, or Achaia. To the contrary, such a construal of Christian politics is resolutely and repeatedly rejected...

Basic, then, to Luke's portrayal of the state vis-à-vis the Christian mission is a narratively complex negotiation between the reality of the state's idolatry and blindness--its satanic power--and the necessity that the mission of light not be misunderstood as sedition.

Luke threads a needle to portray a non-seditious social upheaval. The revolution the church embodied eschewed the bloody path of political revolution to detonate a explosion at the civilizational foundation of Roman culture. Ignoring the political power of the empire, the early Christians interrupted the sacred order of Roman civilization. And that attack, upon the practices of worship of Roman culture, proved to be deadly and decisive. Rome would not survive.

So that's Rowe's analysis of the book of Acts, and the reason I keep coming back to it is that, to my mind, the witness of the early church sets before us a vision of cultural influence. More and more, it seems to me, Christians on both the political right and left are obsessed with political power. Instead of converting others to the non-violent way of King Jesus the goal is to win elections to coerce compliance via the power of the state. That's been the shift, from conversions to elections. And by "conversion" I mean turning away from the idolatry at the heart of American culture, an idolatry that has come to possess American Christianity as well. Here's a simple test: The degree to which you place your hope in elections, as measured by your worry and dismay over electoral losses, is the degree to which you are beholden to false gods.

And yet, to suggest that Christians eschew the coercive use of political power is to invite charges of moral and social irresponsibility. To turn your back on politics is to turn your back on your neighbor, a failure of love. Against this accusation all I can do is point to the witness of the early church in the book of Acts. Their apathy toward the state did not translate into abandoning their neighbors. What they did was neither irresponsible or ineffectual.

In proclaiming King Jesus, the early Christians turned the world upside down.