Faith and Culture: the Martyrs of Rome

Today is, in some circles, the remembrance of the First Martyrs of Rome, A.D. 64. Some were thrown to the beasts in the Coliseum; some were covered with tar and burned as human torches to the delight of Nero and his dinner guests. This began the persecution of Christians by the Empire, a process that extended in fits and starts for about two and a half centuries. Nero was looking for someone to blame for a fire that might have been started at his orders so that he could engage in some urban renewal. But the issue between Church and Empire ultimately came down to the insistence of the Christians that Jesus is Lord, and no other.

To cultivated Roman citizens, this was intolerably narrow-minded. If these Christians want to worship an obscure Jewish carpenter, fine. But they need to be tolerant of the customs of the Empire. No one really believed that the sitting emperor was a god, but what harm would it do to burn a little incense in his honor? It was simply the mark of being a good person, a part of the larger community, a broad community of many cultures, languages, and religions.

This week we read of an event that points down the same path:
German court rules that circumcision is 'bodily harm'

Just as the Christian faith was incomprehensible to the Roman authorities, the Jewish and Islamic position that circumcision is essential (e.g., Genesis 17:9-27) is incomprehensible to the German court. “The fundamental right of the child to bodily integrity outweigh[s] the fundamental rights of the parents.... [it contravenes] interests of the child to decide later in life on his religious beliefs.” A similar battle is being fought in the Netherlands, where the Dutch Medical Association opposes the practice.

But this is an issue on which, for a believing Jew or Moslem, there can be no compromise. “And the uncircumcised man child whose flesh of his foreskin is not circumcised, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he hath broken my covenant” (Genesis 17:14). From the second BBC link: "'It's written in the Torah, in the Bible, that we should circumcise the child when the child is eight days old. What God tells us to do, we must do,' said Rabbi Jacobs, one of the Netherlands' most senior religious leaders.”

I Maccabees 1:41-61 is an example of a prior attempt to suppress circumcision, one vividly remembered by Jews: Antiochus Epiphanes sought to “westernize” the land and rid it of its antiquated and barbaric customs. He forbade circumcision, just as the Germans are now doing: “According to the decree, they put to death the women who had their children circumcised, and their families and those who circumcised them; and they hung the infants from their mothers' necks” (v. 60).

Broad-minded secular culture will always eventually come into conflict with faith. It is the one thing that such a culture cannot tolerate, for it stands in judgment upon it. We modern Westerners are oh so tolerant of every possible shade of opinion or belief – except that we cannot tolerate anyone, whether Jew, Christian, or Moslem, who is sufficiently committed to the God of Abraham so as to put that commitment above all else.