The Bible in a Year (with Fr. Mike Schmitz)
Day 336: The Council at Jerusalem (2024)
Sun, 01 Dec 2024
Fr. Mike walks us through the Church’s first council in Acts 15 and highlights the importance of the Church’s authority in the question of circumcision for Gentile converts. He also draws our attention to Paul’s treatment of God the Father and God the Son as equal but not the same. This sheds light on Paul’s conversation about head coverings for women in our reading from 1 Corinthians and reassures female believers about their roles in marriage and the Church. Today’s readings are Acts 15, 1 Corinthians 11-12, Proverbs 28:10-12. For the complete reading plan, visit ascensionpress.com/bibleinayear. Please note: The Bible contains adult themes that may not be suitable for children - parental discretion is advised.
Chapter 1: What is the significance of the Council at Jerusalem?
So Acts chapter 15 is a pretty critical chapter. Now, I Obviously, a lot of things are critical. But what's going on? This is one of the things that St. Paul is going to be writing about. He wrote about it to the Romans. He writes about it to the Ephesians. He writes about it to the Galatians. He writes about it to the Corinthians a little bit. But it's this thing called the Judaizers.
So the Judaizers were what? They were folks who had been Christian. We might have talked about this before. But they were Jews who had become Christian. And they held on to the idea that, okay, if Gentiles are going to become Christian, that's fine. If they're brought into the New Covenant, that's great.
But they first have to be brought into the old covenant in order to be brought into the new covenant. See, because think about this. That's all the first Christians came from the old covenant, right? They were part of the people of God that God established his covenant with in the Old Testament.
And so one of the ways, the way that if you're a man, you're brought into the old covenant, you're brought in through circumcision. And so here are the Judaizers. And what they thought was, well, that makes sense. If we're going to have Gentiles come into this new family in the new covenant and then they're brought in first like we were, circumcised, then baptized. That's just, that's the stages.
That's how we did it. That's how they should do it. And the big question was, do those Gentile converts have to first be circumcised before they're baptized? And you realize that they didn't, I mean, the apostles didn't know. Jesus didn't say anything about this. There's nothing about this in the Old Testament. In fact, if there's anything in the Old Testament, it says you got to be circumcised.
And so they don't have an answer. There's not an answer that God said in his word. There's not an answer that God said through the person of Jesus. So what do you do? In fact, it says there arose no little dissension among them. I love this. In chapter 15, verse 7, it said, after there had been much debate, much debate, like they argued about this. There were fights, we'll say.
In my family, we call them discussions. There were discussions. There were debates. There were fights here about we need to get them circumcised. We don't need to get them circumcised. But who determines that? I mean, this is the big question. This is the reason why we need the church and not just an invisible spiritual church. This is the reason why we need the authority of the church, right?
Think about this. In this section, in chapter 15, we have the first church council. It's called the Council of Jerusalem. We have the next church council. You know, we have Council of Nicaea, the Council of Ephesus. We have the Council of Constantinople. We have the Second Vatican Council. Those church councils look exactly like chapter 15.
The apostles, aka the bishops, their successors, and the Pope, aka the successor of St. Peter, they come together, they debate, like they argue about this, they fight about this. In fact, there's legends, I'm not sure if this is actually accurate, but there's legends that there was a guy named Arius in the 325, right? Arianism had taken over the world.
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Chapter 2: What were the main debates regarding Gentile converts?
I hope that makes sense. It just, you know, chapter 15 just highlights the need for the visible church to exist. And not only that, but that it has the authority to teach us. Some people say, I remember people asking this, they say, where is that written? Where's that written down? You know, okay, you have to go to mass on Sundays. Okay, where's that written down?
And I would say, well, there's a lot of indication in scripture, but A, why do you need to written down? Where would it have to be written in order for you to believe it? Because it could be written in the Bible. That's great. We believe the Bible is the word of God. But could it also be written in church documents?
Could it also be written by the church who gave us the New Testament, who gave us these 73 books? Could it be written by that authority? And we'd accept that authority. Now, speaking of authority, moving on to 1 Corinthians chapter 11 and 12. You know, here's our first challenging letter, our first challenging section of St. Paul when it comes to men and women.
And it's important to understand that as we move into this, when St. Paul is talking about the head, he's not talking about better. He's talking about source. It goes on, he says, I want you to understand, head of every man is Christ. Jesus is the source. Head of every woman is her husband. That husband's the source. Head of Christ is God. That God, the Father, is the source.
Now, this is very important to get that right right away. I want you to understand, the head of every man is Christ. The head of every woman is her husband. The head of Christ is God. Now, we have to understand this last piece. The head of Christ is God. Question. We just covered this a second ago. Is Jesus Christ God? Is he inferior to God the Father? The answer, of course, is absolutely not.
So Jesus Christ is not inferior to God the Father. Is Jesus Christ co-equal, co-eternal with the Father? Absolutely. So they are both God from God, light from light, true God from true God, right? So Jesus Christ and God the Father are completely equal in honor and dignity and glory. Yes. Are they the same? No, right? The Father is not the Son. The Son is not the Father.
The Holy Spirit is not the Son. The Holy Spirit is not the Father. They're all co-equal, one God. So that's the context for everything comes after this. So when St. Paul says, oh, the husband is the head of the wife, is he saying that that means she's inferior to her husband? Well, no, unless he means also that Jesus is inferior to the Father. And he does not mean that.
Keep that, keep this in mind. Very important that what he's talking about, he's talking about order. We believe that the Trinity is a communion of persons, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, loving each other, not the same, but loving each other with this fierce pouring out themselves in love and also receiving that love and submitting to one another, submitting to one another out of love.
This is just, it's incredible to even just begin to imagine what and who the Holy Trinity is. And what St. Paul's imagining, envisioning, he's right about this in Ephesians as well, envisioning is this same kind of dynamic between husband and wife in their marriage. Is that that relationship, that dynamic is, okay, yes, not the same. The man is not the woman. The woman is not the man.
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