The Romans saw the gods as beings to be manipulated into providing blessings.
The gods themselves cared little, if at all, about the people. Indeed, the stories about the gods suggested that that gods might rape and commit murder at will. The gods were in no sense “good.” But they had great power.
The gods’ influence on humans was called numen. The gods had a need for sacrifice — a pinch of incense or the blood of a bull — and providing sacrifices to the gods would be rewarded with numen. You can think if numen as a finite pool of goodwill or beneficence toward humans. As one author explains —
In practical terms, whenever one invokes the aid of a God or Goddess, what is asked is that the deity will project His or Her special numen so that whatever task is to be attempted shall succeed in accordance with the Gods. The two most basic prayers in the religio Romana are Do ut das, “I give so that You may give,” and the formula: bonas preces precor, ut sis volens propitius, “I pray good prayers in order that You may willingly be propitious.” And the way that a God is propitious is to lend His numen. Every time a Roman went from his home, every time Julius Caesar climbed into his carriage, for every chore a matron might begin, or a farmer, or a carpenter, or a shoemaker, each would call upon a God or Goddess first so that their actions would be imbued with a favorable numen appropriate to the task they undertook. One never relied on only a single God for everything, lest he would be abandoned by the other Gods and not benefit from their numina as well. So with our prayers and our right we call down numina from the Gods.
The trade was not based on love or compassion but the need of the gods for sacrifice for nourishment.
The sacrificial ceremony typically involved a procession of the victims to the altar, prayer of the officiant with offering of wine, incense, and other foods, pouring of the wine on the animal’s head by the officiant, killing of the animal by slaves, examination of the entrails for omens, burning of parts of the animal on the altar, followed by a banquet on the rest of the meat. …
A peculiarity quite characteristic of the legal nature of Roman religion was the requirement that certain ceremonies be done just right, with exact, minute prescriptions. If a mistake was made, the ceremony had to be repeated. … Hence, these ceremonies were recited from a book.
Everett Ferguson, Backgrounds of Early Christianity
The distinctive Roman religious feeling may be seen in the words pietas and religio. Pietas meant doing one’s obligations. A “pious” person was one who observed the rites most scrupulously. Religio meant scruple or awe in the presence of the divine, the feeling of uneasiness if anything in the sphere of pietas was not performed. A person was under obligation.
Ibid. p. 173.
Just so, PBS explains Roman paganism —
Divine blessing
The objective of Roman worship was to gain the blessing of the gods and thereby gain prosperity for themselves, their families and communities. …
Cult worship
Unlike most religions today, the Roman gods did not demand strong moral behavior. Roman religion involved cult worship. Approval from the gods did not depend on a person’s behavior, but on perfectly accurate observance of religious rituals.
The goal was not to love the gods or to enter into personal relationship with the gods. Rather, the goal was to control the gods by following the rituals very precisely and giving the gods what they want.
The structure was not only legal but commercial. I give the god a sacrifice; he repays me with favor — provided I follow the rules exactly. Of course, the sacrifices often failed to work, meaning I’d probably messed up the ritual, said the words imprecisely, or otherwise gave unwitting offense — not because of the state of my heart but because I failed to follow the instructions with sufficient precision. As a result, the typical ritual included words such as these —
“If less than all of the sacrifice is successfully made,” then make an additional sacrifice with the formula “if something of this sacrifice was not pleasing to you, this sacrifice (I make) to you in atonement.”
Pagan worship was thus what we often call “magic.” In fact, magic is a residue left over from ancient paganism. It’s the nature of magic that you get the gods to do what you want by reading the “spell” and saying the words and doing the ceremony quite precisely, all because these gods supposedly care so much about the ritual and words that humans can manipulate them to their own ends by recitation and rite.
Why on earth would such powerful beings care what incantations are spoken and animals sacrificed by a mere human? Well, because the gods need sacrifice — which ultimately shows them to be weak.
Well, not all that weak. After all, if a human were to give offense to a god, the god might retaliate vengefully. The gods were not righteous at all. Indeed, they could be covetous and jealous. To deal with them at all was to approach great power and risk the penalty of giving great offense.
But to fail to sacrifice and participate in the rituals risked even more certain anger and retaliation.
Of course, some gods were seen as benevolent and kind-hearted; whereas others were seen as unpredictable and dangerous. Neptune, god of the sea, was clearly a dangerous god capable of great destruction. But seafarers had better sacrifice faithfully or risk even greater harm from an angry god.
Not surprisingly, the early church struggled mightily to persuade its converts to believe in the God of the Jews in the right way. The natural tendency was for new converts to fit this new God into their pagan worldview — seeing the Christian assembly as just another means of “sacrifice” designed to trade a few hours of Christian misery (sermons could be bad in the First Century, too) for God’s favor. After all, surely what God wants from Christians is sacrifice and scrupulous adherence to ritual — just like the pagan gods.
Well, this was the assumption of some, and we see much of this attitude in the rituals of the Medieval Catholic Church. It’s no surprise that the “magic” words “hocus pocus” derive from the Latin hoc est corpus (meum), this is (my) body
— words used in the Eucharist at the time of transubstantiation. The common folks saw and heard the priest reciting certain words out of a book in order to cause God himself to take certain actions. To them, it surely looked just like magic.
Thus, when we assume that God is mainly concerned with testing our faith with arbitrary positive commands, we paganize Christianity. When we separate how we live from getting ritual right — emphasizing ritual — we paganize Christianity. When we imagine that God’s favor depends on how well we conduct the Lord’s Supper rather than how well we treat our neighbors, we paganize Christianity.
I kid you not at all. Our obsession with finding obscure, hidden, semi-secret rules has nothing to do with First Century Christianity and everything to do with magic, witchcraft, and paganism. It’s a false worldview that just does not fit within real Christianity.
Here’s an example of current teaching among the conservative Churches of Christ —
“Mr. Mike, having a personal relationship with Jesus is a hoax. It’s one of the greatest false teachings of modern-day religion. You know why? Because it’s not taught anywhere in God’s Word. No one was ever told to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, nor is the principle taught in the Bible.
Shank, Michael (2012-06-01). Muscle and a Shovel Edition (Kindle Locations 2438-2441).
Randall went on, “All of Christ’s disciples are taught to love and obey Him. We are to keep His commandments , John 14: 15, and we’re to live in such a way that He knows us, Matthew 7: 23. Mr. Mike, if you love the Lord you’ll live in a way that He knows you.”
Shank, Michael (2012-06-01). Muscle and a Shovel Edition (Kindle Locations 2450-2454).
And so … we have an impersonal relationship with Jesus? Is that the lesson?
I have to agree with Shank that the phrase “personal relationship” does not appear in the Bible — not in most translations, at least. But to suggest that therefore it is a lie to promise a personal relationship with Jesus to Christians, as Shank does, is paganism.
It’s specious to suppose that the absence of certain words necessarily means the absence of the thoughts conveyed by those words. “Trinity” does not appear in the scriptures, and yet the idea certainly does.
The idea of a personal relationship is deeply embedded within the text. For example,
(Joh 15:12-14 ESV) 12 “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 13 Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command you.”
(Joh 17:20-21 ESV) 20 “I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, 21 that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”
(1Co 6:17 ESV) 17 But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him.
(1Jo 4:7-8 ESV) 7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.
(Isa 43:10 ESV) 10 “You are my witnesses,” declares the LORD, “and my servant whom I have chosen, that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me. ”
[I could insert here the entire Psalms.]
Being a friend of Jesus, being united with Jesus and God, and knowing God all speak about a personal relationship. The Romans and Greeks indeed had no personal relationships with their gods, nor did their gods care to have such a thing. But the God of the Jews is not like them.
(My objection to the term is that it’s not encompassing enough. Yes, we most certainly do have a personal relationship with Jesus available to us as Christians. But our relationship is also as part of the Kingdom, the community of believers. To some extent, we are in relationship with Jesus because we’ve been added to the church and included among the elect. Both are true.)
When ritual replaces righteousness, we have destroyed what Jesus came to bring us. After all, Jesus told us to seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, not His ritual.
Conservatives of the Church of Christ have a way of coming to a disdain of any phrase used much by the “denominational world”, especially if they feel that it is used to get around the essentials; they view “personal relationship” as fluff & stuff substituted for obedience.
Also, I believe much of the aversion that CoC conservatives have for “personal relationship” is because of the literal view of, “Jesus is away in heaven, therefore, not here”; so a “personal relationship” to them does not make sense; obedience that can be observed by Jesus does.
I believe that it will not be until the indwelling of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is embraced comfortably by the CoC that law, duty and rules cease being the passion; and that will be slow in coming. There is something about the immanence of God that the CoC, even some who claim to believe the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, cannot grasp, and afraid even to consider. What I see, and I am not sure if this is a reason or a result, is their comfort zone of “Christ can see me with approval when I obey; but is not too close when I sin.” But the personal relationship with Christ is nothing close to real until we stop fooling ourselves that we keep God at a distance when we fail to love. We may feel we can take a walk to be alone, but if God is God, there is no “alone” about it. When the Psalmist sang, “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?”, he was not being clever; he was speaking of the living reality of being God’s children in the entirety of our imperfection.
John,
Thanks. I think you’re spot on. The fear of “personal relationship” probably does derive from the CoC discomfort with anything but “Providential” actions today. For Jesus or the Spirit to speak to me is contrary to their modernist views.
The sad irony is that the conservatives constantly condemn “liberals” — but the liberals they so disdain insist on removing the miraculous from the scriptures — just as they do. The two sides actually agree that God no longer is involved in our lives, after the apostolic age. Both have entirely bought into Modernism — and a closed Creation and a Deistic God. They just disagree about how long God has been removed from our lives.
It continues to amaze me that the CoC, in large measure, continues to swallow this alternative pagan gospel. When I look at the old classic distinctives– weekly LS, no IM, plural eldership– I see that the CoC is not really so far from ordinary evangelical thought. Both share a high view of scriptural authority, believe in the need for obedient faith, organize themselves into what are by-and-large autonomous congregations, center their activities on the Bible and understanding it– the similarities far outweigh the differences, both in number and importance.
Then someone like Michael Shank comes along and reveals the great theological divide which still exists: reconciliation to God by faith versus reconciliation to God by our own good behavior. Those who talk about the divide between so-called conservative and progressive wings of the CoC do not often catch just how wide this gulf is becoming. The connection of progressive congregations to the denomination as we traditionally know it is becoming very tenuous. It has been reduced to a few reed-thin contact points: historical inertia (which is dying with every member who enters eternity), familial connections among members, and some common institutions like colleges and lectureships. It is becoming more and more like a large family reunion with cousins you see only once a year and with whom you now have hardly anything in common except the family name and a love for some elderly aunts and uncles.
I do not think the CoC is headed for some grand split. We are not organized enough for that. I do see an accelerating move among progressives to stop supporting the connections to the denomination, connections which are atrophying rapidly and irrevocably. At some point, people who hold to an entirely different view of the gospel than the traditional CoC will simply not be able to find sufficient common ground elsewhere.
John said,
“There is something about the immanence of God that the CoC, even some who claim to believe the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, cannot grasp, and afraid even to consider. ”
While I would not disagree with that statement at all, or with Jay’s remarks, I just think it goes deeper than that. Like picking at a scab on the skin when there is cancer lurking underneath. Take King David as an example: writer of most of the Psalms, inspired man, man after God’s own heart, a righteous guy. A man whom God indwelled,(personal relationship to the max) and yet, there he is, with Bathsheba,thinking no one is looking(certainly not God) and he starts this snowball of sin rolling down this hill and all the while never(apparently not anyway) giving any thought whatsoever that the God who he has such a close personal relationship with, the God who “sees him when he rises and when sees him when he lies down’, is seeing everything taking place concerning Bathsheba and Uriah. I guess we could call it a temporary lapse of reason perhaps, but if that man and others too(Solomon, Saul) who were so filled with the Holy Spirit, could conduct their affairs as if He wasn’t even there, not personally or (for that matter),not even observing their behavior from a distance (was He a Deistic God to them or was it just a failure to understand the God who indwelled them?), then maybe we shouldn’t be too hard on our brethren who aren’t as enlightened as we are about our having a “personal relationship” with Him.
I know very little about CoC, but I liked what John had to say. If you don’t mind hearing it from someone who is not from your particular worldview, I think the most telling insight comes looking at what Jesus says to the goats. “I never knew you.” The words immediately following this suggest that somehow action is indeed linked to this state of being known, but the most important thing here, I think, is the fact that the primary indictment is that of not being known. How can one claim to love God yet deny the importance of a personal relationship with Him? God is not some distant overseer only concerned with quotas and performance. Neither is God someone to be put off until needed. The Way. Jesus is the Way. Show us the way to the Father? Jesus is the Way. There is a Holy Highway and fools do not go upon it. What more does our God require of us than that we do what is right, that we love mercy, and that we walk humbly with our God? How does one do this if one isn’t trying to have a relationship with Him? And what did Jesus say to those who were more interested in Scriptural knowledge than in having a relationship with Him?
“You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.”
“Approval from the gods did not depend on a person’s behavior, but on perfectly accurate observance of religious rituals”.
This certainly brings to light Paul’s correction of the Galatians and Colossians. They both were reverting back to the basic principles of this world-salvation/sanctification by rigorous rule-keeping. Apparently, legalism was legion in the Greco-Roman world.
Interesting how many quote Mark 16:16 regularly but don’t mention Mark 16:17&18.
If one applies today, all three should.
There are some around here that believe all three are for today and observe them and even die trying to see if its true or not.
Scriptures true or not? This is one way to see if you really believe scripture or not.
Me, I only believe the ones that are for today.
Alabama John,
You wrote, “Me, I only believe the ones that are for today.” I’m just curious. How do you know which Scriptures are for today?
Jerry,
I pick and choose the ones that I want., or I ask the preacher of whatever church I’m visiting and they tell me. Same if you ask on blogs. My point being we all pick and choose and justify our beliefs by the scriptures.
Perhaps we need to ask and/or what was going on to warrant Paul’s correction of the Galatians and Colossians. This is why proof texting is so dangerous. It uses the answer to one problem to answer one that is completely different.
Also, people need to know that paganism is not satanism, but just polytheism.
…and/or understand what….
Typo corrected
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