In Acts 7 we see Luke the Evangelist giving us some of his very finest wordplay. Here, the Beloved Physician gives us a fascinating insight into human nature through the inspiring power of the Holy Spirit, as well as his own genius for wordsmithery. And one of the many brilliant verbal choices that seemed good to the Holy Spirit and Luke was to use the evocative expression “gnashed their teeth” in verse 54.
This happens after the culmination of Stephen’s speech before the Sanhedrim, wherein he concludes with a condemnation of the religious rulers because they, like their fathers, always resist the Holy Spirit. Their anger at Stephen, whose wisdom they could not refute and who was clearly not guilty of anything even remotely worthy of death or imprisonment, leads to what is commonly called “impotent rage”.
I think that psychologically and emotionally the religious rulers are put in a tailspin because 1) Stephen is clearly a godly man who is making perfectly sound and reasonable arguments that cannot be refuted 2) Stephen is pointing a big finger right at the religious rulers and convicting them of sin (a sin they are irrefutably guilty of) 3) Stephen is plainly innocent of all the charges. He does not blaspheme Moses, the Temple, or speak ill of the law or traditions. In fact, his extended history (the longest single history of Israel in the Bible) shows his love for the Jewish people, their history, traditions, the utmost respect for Moses and the Temple, and his absolute orthodoxy.
This leads, naturally, to impotent rage. They hate Stephen and they want to kill him, but they cannot find any basis for an accusation. And because they have forced him to come in and offer a defense, they have caused themselves to hear these words of condemnation. They are to blame from beginning to end. And their own failures fill them even more with rage and hatred.
In Steinbeck’s The Short Reign of Pippin IV (which I think is the second best thing Steinbeck ever wrote) Pippin, the new king of France has decided that if he’s a king he’ll act like one and he calls on the government to stop doing evil and do good, and his friend Sister Hyacinthe, knowing that revolution is coming, attempts to get King Pippin to escape Paris in a nun’s habit. This exchange happens:
“A present for you, Sire, the time-honored disguise.”
“What is it?”
“One of my habits, a nun’s dress, the traditional means of escape. I see no reasons for either hemlock or cross.”
Pippin said, “Is it that bad? Are they really so furious?”
“I don’t know,” said Sister Hyacinthe. “You have caught them in error. It will be very difficult for them to forgive you. Your words will be thorns in every future government. You will haunt them. Perhaps they sense that.”
Now, Pippin is a tragi-comedy, a satire, but the observation Sister Hyacinthe has made is one that’s stuck with me for nearly 20 years since I first read Pippin: it is almost impossible for people, particularly powerful people, particularly proud powerful people, to forgive you when you publicly prove them to be wrong.
And that’s a big part of what’s going on here in this passage. But there’s something deeper and more significant going on and that’s the usage of the term “gnashing of teeth”. Now, this is a term that is used extensively in Matthew, once in Luke, and once in Acts and that’s it. It is, with this one exception, used exclusively to talk about the state of people who are separated from Christ, because they are in the Place of Torment, or perhaps Hell itself. Now, extensive theological work has been done on this subject, vis-à-vis what exactly “gnashing of teeth” is all about. And I would recommend Paul Tanner’s Bibliotheca Sacra article from a few years back.
But that’s not really pertinent to this essay. What is pertinent is that Luke surely knew the Matthean usage of “gnashing of teeth” considering the fact that he obviously used Matthew for some of his source material, and he himself uses the phrase to refer to eschatological torment. It is unreasonable to presume that Luke did not know that Matthew’s use is exclusively eschatological, and it’s impossible to think, coherently, that Luke didn’t know that HE had only used this term before in his writing to Theophilus to refer to eschatological torment.
So, is Luke trying to break the mold of usage? Is he disregarding Matthew’s very significant contribution? Is he ignoring his own usage? Or is there more going on? Interestingly, the Old Testament usage is uniformly NOT eschatological – with the exception of MAYBE Psalm 112, all of the uses of tooth-gnashing in the OT is that of ferocious, hateful, rage and threatening. So, maybe it’s an either-or?
Except the extrabiblical literature seems to uniformly be in favor of tying “gnashing of teeth” to the eschatological torment of the wicked.
So, we have all NT and extrabiblical data in favor of the ruin of the wicked and all the OT data in favor of the wrath of the wicked. Could it be that Luke is just using it as a poetic image that evokes an animal response in his audience? Could it be that 2 uses from Luke is not enough to speak authoritatively on this issue?
Maybe. Maybe we can’t say whether Luke intended anything more than a powerful turn of phrase. But I tend to not think that’s the case. How conscious Luke was of Old Testament Wisdom Literature is debatable – his familiarity with Matthew is not. His own usage is not debatable. Whatever Luke might have garnered from the Old Testament, he was certainly conscious that Dominical usage of the expression “gnashing of teeth” had taken on a clearly eschatological flavor – as Luke himself uses it that way! He may not have been familiar with extrabiblical uses like in the Sibylline Oracles, but he was certainly conscious of the eschatological flavor of this expression.
Thus, I think that while we cannot say that this is an image of the wicked suffering eschatological torment – it is certainly an ALLUSION to it. Luke knows what he’s doing and he’s doing so to demonstrate something that I and many pastors and preachers have pointed out many times before: Hell does not need fire and pitchfork wielding demons to be Hellish. Hell can be made Hellish by the denizens of Hell. The hate and rage of the pride of the religious rulers is all tied to what? To their resistance of the Holy Spirit and their murder of Christ. Their hatred and rejection of God and their persecution of Stephen are all evidences that they will be in Hell. But more than that – their own actions mean that they take Hell wherever they go. Hell is their home. They are Hellions in a totally unironic use of that term because they have taken on Hellish personas, or should I say, un-personas. Because, ironically, nothing destroys personality like ego. The all-encompassing self ultimately destroys the self. The worship of the individual’s own persona destroys that person and person’s persona and personality. Hell is Hellish because it’s peopled with Hellions. As Sartre said his play No Exit, “Hell is other people.” The irony that Sartre found was that what would make Hell Hellish would be the people in Hell who hate themselves and hate others and would torture others because they torture themselves.
Sin is always antisocial – it must be, by necessity! The Living and True God eternally exists in harmonious community – therefore nothing, ultimately, can exist in harmonious unity if it doesn’t find its completion in the Triune God. Anything and everything that rejects God ultimately leads to the atomization of the self from others and in that isolation, the destruction of the self.
We can only exist as selves, the way we were meant to exist, as we exist in relationship to others – and ultimately – to God. The very impulse that makes us love ourselves and hate others is the impulse that causes us to hate ourselves and need others. A rejection of God means a rejection of life and truth and that means that all our actions will be deceptive self-destructions.
I think, in part, this is what Luke is trying to get at in Acts. That God-haters make Hell on earth because they bring Hell with them wherever they go because Hell is Hellish because it will be peopled with Hellish Hellions. And the gnashing of teeth at Stephen is a subtle hint that the eternal and eschatological state of the religious rulers will not be different in kind from their temporal and mundane state. Those who gnash their teeth against God and His Christ and His saints on earth will gnash their teeth in Hell.
Luke shows us how our actions on earth will depict our eternal state because all of life is little more than a slice of eternity.