Acts 7:55-60

Acts 7:55-60 (NRSV)

⁵⁵ But filled with the Holy Spirit, he gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. ⁵⁶ “Look,” he said, “I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!” ⁵⁷ But they covered their ears, and with a loud shout all rushed together against him. ⁵⁸ Then they dragged him out of the city and began to stone him; and the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul. ⁵⁹ While they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” ⁶⁰ Then he knelt down and cried out in a loud voice, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” When he had said this, he died.

Acts 7:55-60 reports the death of an early Christian witness who offered criticism of the law and the Temple and introduces us to the leadership of Saul in the first persecution of Christians by Jewish leaders.  I break down the historical and theological details, especially concerning the Sanhedrin's rules for blasphemy and the act of stoning. I will bring out points about religious devotion leading to violence, not just historically but also in modern political ideologies. Forgiveness, while extraordinary, is crucial for breaking the cycle of consequences.

Stephen's martyrdom in Acts 7:55-60, criticized for speaking against the law and Temple, mirrors Jesus's death, highlighting religious devotion leading to violence. Full of the Spirit, Stephen received a vision of the Son of Man standing, enraging the crowd. They dragged him out of the city and stoned him for blasphemy, citing Deuteronomy 19:15.

The Sanhedrin tractate detailed specific conditions for stoning blasphemers, including misusing the Tetragrammaton and requiring three consistent witnesses, which were not fully followed in Stephen's case. Saul's role in holding coats instead of participating suggests variable local practices or his non-membership in the Jerusalem congregation.

Stephen's final words, appealing to Jesus and forgiving his persecutors, echo Jesus's own death, embodying sacrificial love. The analysis argues that forgiveness, though uncommon and counter-intuitive, is essential for freedom from the consequences of violent acts like the crucifixion of Jesus and the stoning of Stephen, which otherwise define the perpetrators.

Verse-by-verse study

The parallels with Jesus become even more obvious. Stephen was in good standing and full of the Spirit and wisdom. The text records an act of violence in the name of religious passion for God. In the history of religion, religious devotion has often led this violent result. Yet, such whole-hearted devotion to any cause can lead to acts of violence toward those outside the group. The modern era has seen this violent result in political ideology as well, especially embodied in the political Islamist, the Marxist, and the Fascist. Luke says that the Holy Spirit affirmed the faith of Stephen, as he received a vision, a visionary-ecstatic, prophetic seeing that grants this dying person a view of his destiny,[1] of the Son of Man (Υἱὸν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου) standing next to the Father, this standing indicating the urgency of this moment and the active presence of the risen Lord he senses, possibly to welcome the martyr, or to confess him as a witness in the judgment.[2] The communication of this vision to the crowd enraged them. Leading them to drag him out of the city and stone him to death, with the authority of Deuteronomy 19:15 behind them, since they accused him of blasphemy. The Mishnah tractate Sanhedrin 7:4 lists the blasphemer as one whose crime merits stoning. Sanhedrin 7:5 outlines the conditions under which this sentence can be issued, namely, the person must have misused the formal name of God, the Tetragrammaton (Tractate Shevuoth 4:13 also affirms this), and there must be at least three witnesses to testify before a judge as to what exactly was said. All the witnesses, interviewed separately, must repeat what was said, and they must agree. Finally, the mechanics of stoning a blasphemer are outlined in Sanhedrin 6:4, including the fine point noted in Leviticus 24:14, that the witnesses are to hold the accused, and all the congregation are to stone the person. It is not clear, then, why Saul merely holds the coats of those stoning Stephen instead of participating in the execution himself. Perhaps not being from Jerusalem, they did not consider him a member of that congregation. It is also possible that just as all the conditions of Sanhedrin 7:5 was not followed in this case, local practice of such judgments was still variable at this point in history. The final word of Stephen appeals to the Lord Jesus to receive his spirit, from Psalm 31:5 and like the death of Jesus (Luke 23:46). Recalling the death of Jesus again (Luke 23:34), Stephen asks the Lord not to hold this sin against them. His spirit is that of sacrificial love, forgiving in the spirit of Jesus. There may be some wisdom in the saying that urges us to forgive our enemies, but never to forget their names.^[3] To forgive is extraordinary and uncommon. It runs counter to our instincts, which is to declare our pain, nurse our hurts, gain sympathy, and get justice. The Jewish leaders in Jerusalem needed forgiveness. Without forgiveness, they would never be free of the consequences of their actions. Their act of crucifixion of Jesus, their act of stoning Stephen, would be their defining act from which they would never recover. They would remain the victims of its consequences. Forgiveness breaks the spell of their act.^[4]Jewish leaders carefully brought about the death of Jesus by legal manipulation.  Stephen's death was the act of a vicious, spontaneous, lawless act.

Application

My central thesis: Unrestrained “hot” faith—religious or ideological passion driven by rage—leads to violence, whereas “cool” faith, modeled by Stephen and Jesus, is marked by trust in God, sacrificial love, and forgiveness.

I widen the scope of the discussion:

 

·      Modern Christian martyrdom

·      Media silence in the West

·      Political indifference

·      Historical examples of 20th-century persecution [Document | Word]

Violence arises not from religion per se, but from ideology that narrows moral vision:

 

·      Religious extremism

·      Political ideologies (Marxism, Fascism, Islamism)

·      Nationalism and racial rage

 

This theme is reinforced by examples from history, media, sports, and pop culture.

Forgiveness is not merely a virtue but is a means of liberation:

 

·      Without forgiveness, perpetrators remain defined by their violence

·      Forgiveness “breaks the spell” of violent acts.

 

Stephen’s final prayer becomes the theological climax of the entire document.

We live in a part of the world where Christianity rarely makes the news unless it is to be mocked or defamed. Otherwise, the media is strangely silent about modern Christian martyrdom. In one month in 2013, 80 people died in Pakistan attending a Protestant church, assailants killed three members of a Christian wedding party in Egypt, and Jihadists in Syria target Christians. Political leaders in the West refuse to make the slaughter of innocents a foreign policy priority. Why the silence? "Three things distinguish anti-Christian persecution and discrimination around the world," said Denver's Archbishop Charles Chaput to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. "First, it's ugly. Second, it's growing. And third, the mass media generally ignore or downplay its gravity." ...

The secular West has been looking the other way for a very long time. Even the average church-going Christian is not likely to know that 45.5 million of the estimated 70 million Christians who have died for Christ did so in the last century. For this reason, scholars such as Robert Royal, president of the Faith and Reason Institute in Washington, D.C., and author of The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century, refer to the past century as one of the darkest periods of martyrdom since the birth of Christianity.[5]

Pope John Paul II has paid tribute to the Christian martyrs of the 20th century in a solemn ceremony at Rome's ancient Colosseum. Anglicans, Lutherans, Russian Orthodox and Pentecostalists joined the pope in prayer in an unusual ecumenical event attended by thousands of pilgrims. The Pope said countless Christians had been united in their readiness to die for their faith in the 20th century. Those who died in Soviet gulags, in Nazi and Japanese prison camps during World War II, in the 1994 Rwanda genocide and during the recent fundamentalist unrest in Algeria were honored in prayer and song. In his sermon, the pope said Christians had experienced "hatred and exclusion, violence and murder" in the modern age. He noted that some 3,000 priests were interned in the Nazi death camp at Dachau. A prayer read in Czech recalled the six million Jews who were killed in the Holocaust. The killing of more than a million Armenian Christians in Turkey during World War I was also remembered. Saying he himself witnessed "much pain and many trials" as a young man in communist Poland, he said his generation was particularly marked by war, concentration camps and persecution. Special tributes were paid to Russian Orthodox Patriarch Tikhon, who stood up to the Bolsheviks after the 1917 revolution, and Olga Jafa, a Russian teacher exiled to a Soviet gulag. The tributes also included Anton Luli, an Albanian Catholic priest who spent 28 years in prison, and Paul Schneider, a Lutheran anti-Nazi priest tortured to death in Buchenwald concentration camp. Many of the people who suffered or died for their faith were "unknown soldiers," the pope said.  "There are so many of them. They must not be forgotten. They must be remembered, and their lives documented," he said.[6]

I want to draw your attention to the crowd. It acted with rage. It was USA Today (September 2, 1992, 9A) which asked if we were becoming the "age of rage."  They asked the question, "Are we becoming a country of haters?"  Think of it.  Rap music began with a strong sense of rage.  Andrew Dice Clay, the comic, uses the theme of rage throughout his act.  There is a rise in skinhead groups throughout the country.  Racial incidents are increasing.  What is happening to us? Little League was started in 1939 with the aim of assisting youth in developing qualities of citizenship, discipline, teamwork, and physical well-being with proper guidance and exemplary leadership.  Yet, in 1992, one coach slashed a rival coach's throat with a pocketknife, blood splattering on one player's shirt.  In Terre Haute in 1989 a manager was clubbed with a baseball bat by a rival manager.  In El Centro, California league play was suspended after an umpire was threatened by a knife-wielding parent.

The crowd acted violently in the name God. Religion is not naturally violent. After all, connecting with the divine has been a matter for quiet persons. They search for communion with the divine and other like-minded persons. This desire for communion for that which is beyond the finite and temporal allows them to place their immediate ideas and concerns in proper perspective. Such persons can appreciate multiple forms of judgment and contemplation. In that sense, religious temperament opposes narrow-mindedness. When an ideology grabs the mind and passion of a person, the result is narrowing and limiting in a way that generates hostility. However, the desire for communion with that which is beyond our finite and temporal world leads to genuine liberty.[7]

Certain forms of religion become an ideology that leads to violence. Fascism and Communism are atheist but also have ideologies that lead to violence. All religions have their violent forms. Supposedly Christian militia receive no endorsement from the major brands of Christianity. A difference that Islam has with other major religions is that Islamists, the political ideology that leads to violence within Islam, is a major component of Islam and receives a sympathetic hearing among many other adherents of Islam. 

Do The Right Thing is a 1989 movie. Spike Lee wrote the screenplay and directed it. When this movie first appeared, the violence bothered some people; they thought it would cause trouble. Others felt the message was confused. The movie is violent, and if cussing bothers you, do not watch it.

The movie takes place during one long, hot day in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. It reveals the racial tensions in the neighborhood. At one point, Radio Raheem: (50:29 to 51:47) says:

 Let me tell you the story of "Right Hand, Left Hand." It's a tale of good and evil. Hate: It was with this hand that Cane iced his brother. Love: These five fingers, they go straight to the soul of man. The right hand: the hand of love. The story of life is this: Static. One hand is always fighting the other hand; and the left hand is kicking much a--. I mean, it looks like the right hand, Love, is finished. But hold on, stop the presses, the right hand is coming back. Yeah, he got the left hand on the ropes, now, that's right. Ooh, it's the devastating right and Hate is hurt, he's down. Left-Hand Hate K.O.ed by Love. If I love you, I love you. But if I hate you … I love you man.” 

 

            It often looks like hate is winning the war. It even seems as if hate has taken over religious people as well. I must confess that I look at passages like the one before us in a quite different light since 9/11. 

According to The Washington Post (August 6, 2007), an enormous mental gulf separates “cold” emotional states from “hot” emotional states. “We tend to exaggerate the importance of willpower,” says George Loewenstein, a professor at Carnegie Mellon who has studied the power of cold and hot emotional states. Avoiding junk food and shedding a few pounds seem like reasonable and responsible things to do. But then, you know what happens — you get stressed or hungry, and suddenly a bag of potato chips becomes completely irresistible. You go temporarily insane and eat the whole thing. People in a hot emotional state have blown many diets.

Well, many religious people have blown the principles of their religion in hot emotional states, doing much harm to the witness of their faith and to other people.

We want passion when it comes to our faith. Lukewarm is not the type of faith we want. It would hardly be a complement to say that someone was “ice-cold for Jesus.” 

Yet, hot faith can be a violent and deadly force in the world. Look around: Sunnis are fighting with Shiites in Iraq. Hindus are battling Muslims in India. The church has had plenty of violent sins in its history. Call them extremists, or call them crazy, but one thing is certain — their faith is hot. 

Several outspoken atheists have gone as far as to say that religion is the cause of most of the world’s troubles. Christopher Hitchens, author of the book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, blames faith for genocide, sexism, suicide bombings, genital mutilation, totalitarianism and every other problem in the history of the world. He scores some points — no one would argue against the notion that people do a great deal of evil in the name of God. I am sure none of us would want to defend suicide bombings and genital mutilation. 

The alternative to hot faith is not no faith, as Mr. Hitchens says. It is cool faith. What would cool faith look like?

Cool faith is trust in God. It is trust in a God who “does not dwell in houses made with human hands.” So often, we worship a god of our own making, instead of the Lord God Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, as the Apostles’ Creed says. We make a god that likes the things we like and hates the things we hate. Yet, God is above all and in all, working through all that God has made. God does not live in the tiny houses we make. Nothing in our finite world can contain an infinite Lord. A nation cannot do it; a political party cannot do it; a denomination cannot do it; our personal agendas cannot do it. When Stephen catches a vision of Jesus at the right hand of God in heaven, he sees God as not defined by the heat of this moment. God has a perspective on matters that we can never have.

Cool faith is also a sacrificial faith. Stephen is determined to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, so he does not fight back when the crowd attacks him. As the crowd throws the stones, he prays, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” He wants to be in complete and eternal relationship with the One who is his Savior. 

Sacrifice is a tough one for us. We show our strength by getting our way, sometimes no matter who we hurt in the process. We show strength by fighting for what we want, sometimes at all costs. But: 

• to be a good parent, you must sacrifice time at work to be with your children;

• to be a good spouse, you must give up some of your own desires to satisfy the needs of your partner;

• to be a good Christian at school, you must sacrifice some of your popularity to live the life that God desires for you;

• to be a good church member, you have to offer time and talent and money to advance the mission of the congregation. You may have to set aside what you want, no matter how much you think you are in the right, because the majority has made different decision from what you would have chosen.

 

            None of this is easy, and some of it can be painful, but sacrificial living is part of what it means to be a follower of the One who gave his life on the cross. In fact, in the next chapter, we find that the death of Stephen will lead to the conversion of a man named Saul, who in turn would become Paul, the great apostle for the Gentiles. Stephen would not see the result of his faithfulness.

Finally, cool faith is a forgiving faith. Stephen’s very last words are, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.”  Like Jesus himself, Stephen forgives his killers, knowing that they are acting out of hot faith — overcome by rage and passion. His final words echo the prayer Jesus said on the cross, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). 

This may be the biggest challenge of cool faith, but it is at the heart of being a follower of Christ. Look around the world, look around the public discourse in this country, and look deeply into this community and this community of faith. We have a forgiving faith. We need to practice it. As Christians, we live as people forgiven by God. Our job is to forgive — forgive our friends, our family members, our boyfriends and girlfriends, our brothers and sisters. Our job is to forgive our bosses, our coworkers, our opponents, our enemies … even ourselves. 

The hot emotional states of anger or anxiety are powerful. When we offer true forgiveness, we let go of the anger and anxiety that we feel toward those who have hurt us so badly. We also ask God to show them mercy, for in so many cases they did not know what they were doing. God knows, you know, the world needs a witness to a faith like that.

In a world ripped apart by anger and violence, in a world willing to injure what deserves respect, it is hard to believe that a hotter faith, a faith rooted in a hot emotional state, is going to bring us all closer together. A call for more passion is not going to lead to peace.

Instead, let us have the cool faith that leads to trust in the providence of God, sacrificial living, and forgiveness. Then, we can be part of bringing people closer together so that they can bear witness to the genuineness of their faith to the world around them.

The film ends on an ambiguous note due to two quotations. The first, from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., argues that violence is never justified under any circumstances. The second, from Malcolm X, argues that violence is "intelligent" when it is self-defense.

 

Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys a community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends by defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

I think there are plenty of good people in America, but there are also plenty of bad people in America and the bad ones are the ones who have all the power and be in these positions to block things that you and I need. Because this is the situation, you and I must preserve the right to do what is necessary to bring an end to that situation, and it doesn't mean that I advocate violence, but at the same time I am not against using violence in self-defense. I don't even call it violence when it's self-defense, I call it intelligence. – Malcolm X

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[1] Michaelis, TDNT, V, 353.

[2] Colpe, TDNT, VIII, 462. He could also be rising in anger to bring judgment on behalf of the martyr and all those who suffer for Jesus.

^[3] Attributed to both John F. Kennedy and his brother, Robert.

^[4] (Arendt, 1958, 1998), 237.

[5] --Susan Brinkmann, "The greatest story never told: Modern Christian martyrdom," Catholic Online Website, catholic.org. December 5, 2008. Retrieved December 21, 2013.

[6] --http://news.bbc.co.uk.com Retrieved November 5, 2001.

[7] Friedreich Schleiermacher, On the Christian Religion (1768-1834).  Seers of the Infinite have ever been quiet souls.   They abide alone with themselves and the Infinite, or if they do look around them, grudge to no one who understands the mighty word his own peculiar way.  By means of this wide vision, this feeling of the Infinite, they can look beyond their own sphere.  There is in religion such a capacity for unlimited many-sidedness in judgment and in contemplation, as is nowhere else to be found ... Religion is the natural and sworn foe of all narrow-mindedness and of all one-sidedness ... The man who only thinks methodically, and acts from principle and design, and will accomplish this or that in the work, un-avoidably circumscribes himself, and makes everything that does not forward him an object of antipathy.  Only when the free impulse of seeing and of living is directed towards the Infinite and goes into the Infinite, is the mind set in unbounded liberty.