All Together Now
the Jews rose up together against Paul and brought him before the judgment seat, saying, “This man is inciting the people to worship God contrary to the law.” Acts18:12b-13 NASB
Contrary to the law – How do you read this verse? These are orthodox Jews claiming that Paul’s message encourages men to worship a false God. Were they right? Of course, we want to say, “No.” Paul followed the Torah. He vociferously claims as much in his defense before Felix. Paul claims to be orthodox, that is, one God, YHVH, and one authorized agent Messiah, Yeshua. Christians claim Paul is innocent because “Jesus” is God, but that would mean the orthodox Jews were correct and Paul certainly doesn’t agree with them. Paul never suggests we should worship Yeshua as God. In fact, he specifically states that Yeshua is a man even though he is also the Messiah. What’s really happening here is that the orthodox Jews find Paul’s view of the Messiah to be unorthodox. Paul is out of step with the “majority” opinion. One must wonder if the Christian world with its Trinitarian doctrine isn’t subject to precisely this objection, worshipping a God contrary to the Law. I’ll leave that debate to you.
What I want you to notice in this verse is something else—the reaction to difference. The reason the Jews rose up is because Paul’s ideas challenged their view of the Messiah, not because Paul was a Trinitarian. What this verse demonstrates is the power of group-think. Paul and the rest of the followers of the Way were “outsiders.” They didn’t agree with the norm, and that was a problem. Notice that the apostolic accounts don’t contain any reports of debates about this. They tell us that Paul actively engaged in argument with Jews in the Diaspora, but they don’t tell us what he said or what they offered as counterarguments. Too bad. If they did, we might clear up a lot of confusion about Paul’s point of view. The reports that we do have catalog the results of non-conformity. We need to pay attention to that.
Christopher Bollas makes some telling remarks about the contemporary need to conform:
“I believe that we are witness to the emergence of a new emphasis within personal illness or we are just getting around to perceiving an element in personality that has always been with us. This element is a particular drive to be normal, one that is typified by the numbing and eventual erasure of subjectivity in favour of a self that is conceived as a material object among other man-made products in the object world.”[1]
“A normotic person is someone who is abnormally normal. He is too stable, secure, comfortable and socially extrovert. He is fundamentally disinterested in subjective life and he is inclined to reflect on the thingness of objects, on their material reality, or on ‘data’ that relates to material phenomena.”[2]
Normal has its rewards: acceptance, inclusion, a sense of security, pride in being “right,” identity-politics, but it all comes at a cost, perhaps an almost invisible cost. Normal demands relinquishing exploration, abandoning questions, and turning away from disagreement. Normal loves other “normals,” but it doesn’t tolerate different very well. Paul’s story gives us a pretty good idea of what happens to the non-normals. Not a lot of fun. But . . . perhaps today is a day for some self-evaluation. Just how important is it for you to be normal?
Topical Index: heretic, normal, law, Acts 18:12b-13
[1] Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 135.
[2] Ibid., p. 136.
