CHAPTER XXI.

THE CLAIM.

HE is a prophet who can say what God will do and what men are to do. The claim which our author makes is determined by the great outer and inner dangers of his Churches. Persecutions threaten from without, an increasing worldliness from within. The Jews stir up persecutions against the Christians, and bring false charges against them; the Romans, as judges, do the will of the Jews. In such a time, patience, endurance and fidelity are the most needed virtues. Above all else, the test of a man’s Christianity is to be found in his refusal to participate in the imperial cultus. Only he who refuses to worship the beast and to bear his mark is a Christian. There must be no revolutionary resistance. Whosoever shall kill with the sword shall with the sword inevitably be killed. Here the patience and faithfulness of the saints can alone be of any avail.

Be thou faithful unto death! Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord from henceforth. Every Christian is to be prepared for martyrdom; i.e., here the “keeping of the testimony of Jesus.” The prophet has 377clearly recognized that the great struggle with Rome is now about to begin, and that this struggle presents a temptation for Christians, which all cowardly and weak souls cannot withstand. Hence the powerful glowing language of his call to be up and doing. It is the call to be prepared for death. No wonder that the Church of the martyrs highly esteemed this book and accepted it as canonical. The prophet has only one brother- combatant worthy of his mettle, the author of the concluding verses of Romans viii. “If God is for us, who can be against us?” may be taken as the motto of the book.

But if God is to be for us, things must first of all be changed in the Churches themselves. Worldliness has already begun to creep in. Ephesus has lost its first love. Sardis, decayed from its former estate, is spiritually dead. Laodicea is neither cold nor warm, boasts, indeed, of its riches, and is yet so miserable. Here we can see the condition of the Pauline Churches not so very long after the death of their founder. The worldliness is increased through heretical teachers, false apostles and prophetesses, who declare fornication and the eating of meat offered to idols to be allowed, deluding the Christians with the idea that only then the depths of Satan’s wiles can be sounded. It is ordinary heathen libertinism which is disseminated by these Nicolaitans, Christian messengers and prophets. Besides this, the catalogue of crimes at the end of the book shows us what kind of people called themselves Christian here and there.

The danger from within appears, according to the letters to the Churches, to be almost greater than that from without. It is especially to guard against 378it that the prophet cries: “Away with the false teachers; back to the first love.” The judgment of Christ will be without pity even upon those that are His. It is works alone that save, deeds of love, of fortitude, of fidelity. There is one thing that can surely save Christians lost in sin and the world, and that is martyrdom. For the first time a longing look is here cast back to the golden age, to the first days of Christianity. “Back to the first beginning” is the watchword.

Taking it all in all, it is an entirely untheological practical kind of Christianity. Fidelity in persecution, resistance to worldliness, clinging to the first love, such is the claim that the seer makes. He is still animated by the genuine enthusiasm of the first great age. We can trace this, even externally, by the fact that there is as yet no set form for repentance, no ecclesiastical law; as long as the judgment is yet to come, so long there is time for repentance. However strict the separation which is demanded from the world, there is as yet no legalism within, because the voice of the Spirit is still heard. But now that the struggle with the Roman empire has begun we can scarcely any longer speak of the Christians as a sect. The former sect takes its place in the history of the world, resolved for the present just to remain true to itself and to look upon world and devil as one.

There is no trace of any opposition to St Paul, however much his formulae may be disregarded. We misconceive St Paul altogether as long as we do not recognize that he would have made exactly the same demands in this position.