Within evangelical circles it isn’t unusual to find leaders delineating a stark contrast between “believers” and “unbelievers” — people who can be identified as true Christians versus those who are clearly not recognizable as such. Some evangelicals use the term “Christian” to refer to themselves in contrast to adherents of other traditions thought to be less worthy of that label. I recall an incident some years ago when the local Roman Catholic archbishop was a guest speaker at an evangelical Christian college. He was somewhat taken aback when a student in the audience raised a question about the difference between Catholics and “Christians.”
It’s not uncommon for an evangelical pastor to decline to perform a marriage ceremony for a couple if he believes one of the partners is an “unbeliever.” Such a refusal is based on the admonition of the apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 6:14: “Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers.” An “unequal yoke” is held to be inappropriate for any joint enterprise whether a marriage, a business partnership, or any relationship of common cause. For example, the late Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority” movement received criticism because it embraced a diversity of religious groups, not only evangelical Christians but Mormons and others.
The stricture against an “unequal yoke” therefore raises the question of how, from a Christian standpoint, one defines an “unbeliever.” We can approach the issue by asking a simple question: “How many Gods are there?” In posing that question to a general audience today in our Western culture, we are likely to hear the answer: “one.” For people in our cultural environment it seems logical to reduce the inventory of divinities to a single member, namely the God who is understood to be the Creator of the universe. While people may effectively worship many entities, in particular their own selves, the appellation “God” is generally held to apply to only one entity.
But if we were to ask this question, “How many Gods are there?” in the Roman world of the first century, “one” is not the answer we would likely receive. The Roman world was awash in “gods” — not only the traditional pantheon of Zeus, Athena and the rest but also local divinities attached to various cities, family gods, divinities connected with trades and occupations, and in particular Caesar himself who, having declared his predecessor to be divine, claimed to now be the “son of god.” Life in the Mediterranean world involved everyone in a constant veneration of the gods appropriate to whatever situation in which one found himself. Such veneration was expected, and to abstain from it rendered a person socially suspect, even subversive to the social order.
Consider, then, the suspicion that would be directed toward people who became Christians and were therefore converted to the worship of the one God, the singular Deity worshiped by the Jewish community out of which the Christian church emerged. The Jews themselves, in a way, received a “pass” from the mandatory worship of the multiplicity of gods; the pragmatic Romans, recognizing the Jews’ fanatical monotheism, looked the other way when that community declined to take part in the public religious functions. But non-Jews who became monotheistic Christians were another matter, and their refusal to take part in the polytheism of their neighbors even led to the accusation that Christians were atheists.
Nevertheless, the Christians’ worship of the one God was a hallmark of their faith that distinguished their belief from the beliefs of others in their environment. As the apostle Paul wrote, “For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth — as indeed there are many ‘gods’ and many ‘lords’ — yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (1 Corinthians 8:6). For Christians, the “gods” of their neighbors were mere idols, or even demons. When Paul urges the Corinthian Christians to avoid being unequally yoked with unbelievers, he adds, “What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God” (2 Corinthians 6:16). So when Paul urges the Corinthian Christians to avoid being unequally yoked with “unbelievers,” the unbelievers he was referring to were not people who would entertain no religious belief in God. To the contrary, these “unbelievers” were people whose lives were inundated with gods, who were therefore not unreligious but hyper-religious.
This suggests that an evangelical pastor who declines to marry a couple on the basis of Paul’s admonition in 2 Corinthians 6:14 might reconsider what it means to be an unbeliever in the New Testament sense. To most people in contemporary Western culture an “unbeliever” would be someone who has no belief in God, but that’s not the person to whom Paul is referring. If a Christian comes to his or her pastor desiring to marry someone who hasn’t made an express profession of Christian faith, it might be well to ask some pointed questions of the projected marital partner before flatly refusing to perform the ceremony. Far from being the polytheistic “unbeliever” to which Paul refers, the applicant’s projected partner may be very close to affirming the oneness of God that is a hallmark of Christian belief. And he or she may not be far from affirming a personal commitment to Jesus as the revelation of the one living God, the “way, the truth, and the life.”
