Paradise Restored

162 Paradise Restored
the citizens could not. On this ground alone, the highly organized
Christian Church was an offense and an affront to the state, and
an illegal organization readily suspected of conspiracy” (The
One and the Many [Thoburn Press, 1978], pp. 92f.).
The witness of the apostles and the early Church was
nothing less than a declaration of war against the pretensions of
the Roman State. John asserted that Jesus is the only-begotten
Son of God (John 3:16); that He is, in fact, “the true God and
eternal life” (1 John 5:20-21). The Apostle Peter declared, shortly
after Pentecost: “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is
no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be
saved” (Acts 4:12). “The conflict of Christianit y with Rome was
thus political from the Roman perspective, although religious
from the Christian perspective. The Christians were never asked
to worship Rome’s pagan gods; they were merely asked to
recognize the religious primacy of the state. . . . The issue,
then, was this: should the emperor’s law, state law, govern both
the state and the church, or were both state and church,
emperor and bishop alike, under God’s law? Who represented
true and ultimate order, God or Rome, eternity or time? The
Roman answer was Rome and time, and hence Christianity constituted
a treasonable faith and a menace to political order”
(Rushdoony, The One and the Man~ p. 93).
The charge brought by the prosecution in one first-century
trial of Christians was that “they are all defying Caesar’s
decrees, saying that there is another king, one called Jesus”
(Acts 17:7). This was the fundamental accusation against all the
Christians of the Empire. The captain of police pleaded with the
aged Bishop Polycarp to renounce this extreme position: “What
harm is there in saying Caesar is Lord?” Polycarp refused, and
was burned at the stake. Thousands suffered martyrdom on just
this issue. For them, Jesus was not “God” in some upper-story,
irrelevant sense; He was the only God, complete Sovereign in
every area. No aspect of reality could be exempt from His
demands. Nothing was neutral. The Church confronted Rome
with the inflexible claim of Christ’s imperial authority: Jesus is
the only-begotten Son; Jesus is God; Jesus is King; Jesus is
Savior; Jesus is Lord. Here were two Empires, both attempting
absolute world domination; and they were implacably at war.
It was necessary for the churches of Asia to recognize this