MATTERS OF CONSCIENCE

Distinguishing between
Essentials and Non-Essentials
(Romans 14:1-10)

Difficulties often occur in the Christian community when cultural practices are prescribed as essential to Christian faith. In reaction, permissive attitudes can arise that risk compromising the distinctives of Christian faith and conduct. In this sermon, preached at Greyfriars Classical Service on 11 November 2007, Rob Yule expounds Paul’s wise and conciliatory approach to such debatable issues of conscience, calling for unity in matters that are essential to Christian belief and behaviour, and mutual respect in matters which are not.

Where do you draw the line?

What are the appropriate boundaries of Christian belief and behaviour? Every parent struggles with these questions as their children reach adolescence, begin to push parental boundaries, and find their own path in life. But every thinking adult faces these questions too, particularly in times of rapid social change when the boundaries of what is acceptable and what is not acceptable are called in question.

As a teenager I was never allowed to go to dances and socials. Years later, my mother — perhaps realizing that dancing was astronomical units down the scale compared to 21st century social ills — said to me, ‘I do hope this never affected you, Rob.’

‘Indeed not,’ I replied, telling her for the first time a secret from my high school years. In the district high school I attended in the late nineteen-fifties, ballroom dancing indoors was substituted for physical education outdoors on rainy afternoons.

I began to look forward to inclement weather, and the cancellation of outdoor sport. Dancing was much more attractive than being dumped in the mud, bruised on frozen ground, or having the scab of my TB injection knocked off in a rugby maul. We gathered in a classroom, and the teacher set up a portable record player and played vinyl records of waltz tunes and foxtrots. In that safe environment I experienced rather special times of tenderness and dawning awareness of the opposite sex — in that last era of innocence before the advent of the contraceptive pill dramatically changed the boundaries of sexual behaviour in the next decade.

The constitution of the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand allows for ‘liberty of opinion’ on matters which ‘do not enter into the substance of the Reformed faith.’ Hardliners sometimes criticize that for allowing too much leeway in what church leaders may believe. They say it allows theologians like Lloyd Geering to deny the physical resurrection of Jesus or gays to advocate sexually permissive lifestyles. I disagree — matters as important as sexual conduct or Jesus’ resurrection can hardly be viewed as peripheral to Christian faith.

But somewhere between Puritanism and permissiveness, not allowing dancing and promoting gay lifestyles, one must draw the line. The question is: where?

Who were the ‘weak’?

Scholars differ as to which groups in Rome Paul is referring to when he mentions ‘the weak’ (14:1-2). He could be referring to…

1. Converts from paganism, sensitive about eating food or drinking wine that might have previously been offered to idols (rather as South-east Asian converts today shrink from Western Christians burning joss sticks — because they associate the smell with pagan temples).

2. Ascetics, who (like modern vegetarians and ‘Greenies’) refused to kill animals and eat their flesh, or perhaps (like ancient Nazirites) to drink wine. It’s perhaps odd to regard such people as ‘weak’, when Daniel and his friends (Daniel 1:8) or John the Baptist (Matthew 11:18) would be regarded as strong and courageous for making such lifestyle choices.

3. Legalists, who perhaps thought that abstaining from meat and wine and observing special days might earn brownie points from God. But it’s doubtful if Paul would have regarded such people as fellow-believers, since he argued so consistently in the early chapters of Romans that salvation is by faith in God’s saving grace alone — certainly not by vegetarianism, Sabbath observance, or avoiding alcohol.

4. The fourth (and most satisfactory) view is that the ‘weak’ were Jewish believers, who conscientiously continued to observe Jewish requirements regarding food and special days. They would have kept the weekly Sabbath and annual festivals. They would have tried to observe Old Testament regulations about eating only the meat of ‘clean’ animals. They’d have wanted to be certain that their meat was kosher (that the animal had been slaughtered in the right way), or, unsure of this, may have abstained from meat altogether.

In the Hellenistic world, after the conquests of Alexander the Great, the observance of dietary laws and the Sabbath became very important defining characteristics of Jewishness over against the spread of pagan Greek culture. So these observances would have added to the already-existing tensions between Jewish and Gentile believers in Rome.

What is our attitude to food or rest days?

Paul shows a special concern for the ‘weak’. He is anxious to protect them from those who would despise them, ridicule them, or treat them with contempt. His attitude is in keeping with the decree of the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15:5-29), which was specifically designed to curb the strong and guard the consciences of the weak.

In welcoming Gentile converts, the Jerusalem Council upheld an essential theological principle: that we are saved ‘through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ’, not by the Jewish rite of circumcision (Acts 15:11). But the Council balanced this concession to Gentiles with the request that Gentiles observe certain Jewish practices. I believe this was not merely to avoid offending Jewish sensibilities, but because of the intrinsic religious, moral, and health benefits of these practices. They were asked to avoid food offered to idols (occult pollution), sexual immorality (moral impurity), and non-kosher meat (meat with blood in it, a danger to health).

I personally think Jewish food laws deserve greater consideration by non-Jews for their health benefits. Avoiding the meat of birds of prey (which feed on carrion, dead meat), or of animals with only one stomach (which ingest more harmful bacteria than animals with two stomachs that chew the cud) make very good health sense. So too does abstinence from sexual immorality: it avoids damaging sexually transmitted diseases, now becoming epidemic in New Zealand.

Paul deals not only with food but with whether Christians should keep a special day each week. Jewish believers — then as now — observed Saturday, the Sabbath, as a day of rest. Gentile believers, if they were freemen, would have had a rest day every tenth day. But if they were slaves, they might never have had a rest day at all.

From very early Sunday was when the early Christians worshipped God, in honour of Jesus resurrection. But Sunday wasn’t a rest day for 300 years — till Emperor Constantine made it so in 321. It was Puritan Nicholas Bound’s True Doctrine of the Sabbath (1595), that gave English-speaking Christians the identification of the Christian Sunday with the Jewish Sabbath that many of us were brought up with.

In fact, Sunday is not the Sabbath. The Sabbath is the seventh day of creation, when God rested from his labours (Genesis 2:2). Sunday is the eighth day of creation, the beginning of the new octave, when God raised Jesus from death and began recreating the universe. As David Pawson points out, Sunday isn’t a rest day for God: it’s his ‘busiest day’! ‘More people become a new creation in Christ on Sunday, than any other day of the week!’ (Unlocking the Bible, p. 1025).

In the church in Rome that Paul was writing to — a church made up of Jewish and Gentile believers — tension regarding observance of special days would have been intense. Jews kept Shabbat as a strict rest day, but Gentiles didn’t keep a special day at all. This tension would have increased after the Jews were first expelled and then readmitted to Rome. Jewish believers would have returned to a church where Gentiles were now in charge, and Sabbath observance lax or non-existent. It was into this situation that Paul wrote, counseling sensitivity and respect for the feelings and convictions of their disadvantaged Jewish brethren, while at the same time insisting that diet and days are strictly non-essentials of the faith.

How do we decide what are non-essentials?

We need to distinguish between essentials and non-essentials of the faith, as Paul does. He describes the issues causing tension in the Roman church as dialogismoi (14:1): literally ‘matters of discussion’, ‘matters of opinion’, or as we might say today, ‘matters of personal preference’ — on which it isn’t necessary for all Christians to agree. The sixteenth century Reformers called such things adiaphora, ‘matters of indifference’, not fundamental to the Christian message or way of life.

Paul says whether you observe diet or days is not an essential of the faith. These are matters of discretion or choice. We need the same flexibility with similar issues today. Some Christian parents want to send their children to the safe environment of Christian schools. Other Christian parents argue that children should develop their moral sinews in mainstream society. In the seventeenth century the Puritans hotly opposed the giving and receiving of wedding rings, and the nineteenth century Holiness movement strongly resisted jewellery and cosmetics. Catholics and Anglicans kneel to pray, Presbyterians and Baptists sit to pray, while Pentecostals and charismatics pray standing with hands upraised. Curiously, the most frequently mentioned prayer posture in the Bible is prostration — flat on your face on the floor before God (Barry Leisch, People in the Presence of God: Models and Directions for Worship [Crowborough, Sussex, Highland Books, 1990], pp. 168, 323)!

The Lord may lead us to a certain course of action, but we should be careful not to elevate our personal conviction to the status of a binding obligation for all Christians. This is where pastors and Christian leaders need to be especially humble and discerning. We mustn’t elevate non-essentials — especially issues of culture, ceremony or personal conviction — to the level of essentials, and make them tests of orthodoxy and fellowship.

On the other hand we mustn’t dismiss fundamental theological or moral issues — like belief in the resurrection or avoidance of sexual immorality — as if they were merely issues of cultural difference or personal preference.

John Stott says, ‘a safe guide is that truths on which Scripture speaks with a clear voice are essentials, whereas whenever equally biblical Christians, equally anxious to understand and obey Scripture, reach different conclusions, these must be regarded as non-essentials.’ He adds, ‘In fundamentals, faith is primary…. In non-fundamentals, love is primary…. Faith instructs our own conscience; love respects the conscience of others.’ (Romans, pp. 374-5).

As Richard Baxter, a great advocate for moderation in the religious controversies of the seventeenth century put it:

In essentials unity;
In non-essentials liberty;
In all things charity.

Rob Yule, 11 November 2007
© 2007, Greyfriars Presbyterian Church