Priesthood in the New Testament Era Church, 3.
January 29, 2017 2 Comments
I mentioned in the last post that another difficult problem comes up in Acts 15, where the issue was how Gentiles fit into the Christian community. That was a tough one, and it took a lot of time to reach a widely accepted resolution but, in fact, this first trouble in Jerusalem telegraphs the later one in a much deeper way than is always appreciated.
The decision of the apostles was interesting because it had positive effects in some ways but caused difficulties in others. Belief in Jesus was more important than unity over Judaism turned out to be one lesson. That is a useful and unifying thing in some ways. The downside was this: tolerating Jews with different beliefs within the body meant that those Christians brought conflict with other Jews in Jerusalem, not Christians, but Jews who shared doctrine with the Hebrew Christians. That kind of conflict brought trouble for the whole church, and we see this happened, and it had deep and unforeseen consequences.
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