Paul and the Not-Yet-Christian Believers
In Acts 19:1-7, Paul visits Ephesus and meets some “disciples” there. Paul asks them if they received the Holy Spirit when they joined the faith, and their response is baffling to modern readers. “No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.” Apparently, they had been baptized into John’s baptism, but they hadn’t heard of the baptism that the followers of Jesus provided. Paul quickly remedies this, baptizing them in Jesus’s name and laying hands on them. Then the Holy Spirit descends upon them with charismatic gifts.
In the Church today, we have a wide variety of denominations with different ideas about what is right and wrong. Some of us think we are so far apart from one another that we cannot possibly get along. All we can do is argue and try to convince our interlocutors of the errors of their ways. We fight over the details of theological language, does the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father or from the Father and the Son? Should children be baptized, or should that be saved for people who are old enough to understand its significance? Is the bread and wine of Communion really the body and blood of Christ or a symbol pointing to the spiritual reality of Christ’s presence? In addition to theological issues, we also fight over what some consider the political issues of the day. Should people from the LGBTQIA community be welcomed into the church and allowed to fully participate as their authentic selves or not? Should the church be concerned with helping immigrants on the border or securing the national boundaries? Should Christians do what they can to steward God’s creation and protect it from pollution and climate change, or should Christians stay out of the way of industry and technology as this world is passing away anyway?
With all these disagreements tearing the church apart, we sometimes long for the glory days of the past. I’ve long heard the narrative that for all Luther’s good work in reforming the church, he also tore it to pieces. The Protestants fractured the church into the disunified mess we see today, and now we can do nothing but argue and hate one another. As much as that is a nice story to tell, a reminder that even good things can have a terrible cost, it isn’t true. The church-dividing argument over the Filioque started nearly 900 years before Luther lived and worked. There have always been a wide variety of belief systems contained within Christianity, and we have often argued passionately about them.
If we convince ourselves that the church had always been united, on the same page with one another, until the Reformation, then this story in Acts will appear so nonsensical that we can hardly give it the attention it deserves. Take a moment to consider the tension in the text. On the one hand, these people in Ephesus are called “disciples” and “believers” by the narrator and Paul. They had been baptized and were eager to learn about Jesus and receive the Holy Spirit. They seemed to readily welcome Paul. And Paul visited them even though there were only about twelve of them. That means they must have either been very publicly professing a faith that Paul recognized as close enough to his own to assume they were fellow Christians, or they were in contact with Christians in the area and Paul knew about them before meeting with them. This isn’t a large assembly with their own dedicated building that Paul happened to walk by while strolling the streets of Ephesus. With a dozen people, they must have been somehow connected to the Christian community for Paul to find them.
On the other hand, they didn’t even know about the Holy Spirit. They clearly hadn’t received a Christian baptism. They didn’t even seem to know about Jesus. Perhaps they had been in Judea during the time of John’s ministry but left before Jesus came along. Perhaps some of John’s disciples spread out on their own missionary journeys after John had been killed, similar to what happened with Christ’s own followers. Strange as it may seem, this could mean that the followers of John and the Christians both saw themselves as belonging to one large movement. Though the followers of John didn’t know about Jesus and the Holy Spirit, they were close enough to Christians that they stuck together wherever they were dispersed throughout the Roman empire. Imagine Christians today seeing themselves as belonging to one common faith with people who hadn’t even heard of Jesus and had been baptized into a different name. It would be unthinkable. Wars have been fought over smaller disagreements and misunderstandings.
Nonetheless, consider how cordial Paul is with these Ephesians. He doesn’t show judgment or anger at them for having a different belief system. He simply follows along the path of John’s ministry. Yes, John was important, especially for calling people to repentance, but he wasn’t the end of God’s blessings. John came to point to Jesus, and now Paul can proclaim the good news of Jesus, and the Holy Spirit will visit these people with power as well.
We can learn a couple important lessons from this. First, Paul acknowledges the value of their beliefs. Rather than rejecting John’s ministry outright, he sees it as a stepping stone to Jesus. It isn’t wrong to believe something different. It isn’t evil to have never heard of the Holy Spirit. It isn’t disqualifying to have been baptized into a different name. These are good people, connected to the Christian community and worth spending time with. Second, Paul doesn’t hesitate to proclaim the good news to them and invite them to fully participate in the Christian movement. Their discipleship in John’s ministry may be good on its own, but perhaps more importantly, as a stepping stone to Jesus’s ministry. Third, there are people connected to the Christian community who wouldn’t be considered Christians by today’s standards. Churches today will exclude people if they come from a denomination that ordains women. These people didn’t even know the Holy Spirit existed, but Paul still visited them! What would the world look like if we shared Paul’s openness and care for outsiders?
As the church grew more and more powerful as a cultural force over time, it could become much more discerning about its friends. Today the church is so picky that Christians won’t even accept each other, but it wasn’t always this way and it doesn’t need to be. Paul shows an example of how other beliefs can be respected and built upon for the sake of the Gospel rather than being simply dismissed and condemned. Why should we fight over the precious charge to proclaim the good news to all the world? Why make war over the life-changing promises of God, when we can simply proclaim and watch the Holy Spirit work on a broken world?
