One True Life

Today we start a new (well, 2016) book: One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions. Jim Eisenbraun referred it to me. You can read his three-part summary here, here, and here.

As is my usual style, I'll post a snippet and sometimes comment on it, sometimes not. I hope you enjoy the ride! Here's the first one, summarizing his previous book (see excerpts here):

the scenes that displayed pagan resistance to the coming of the Christians illuminated fundamental features of Christianity's surprise: businessmen discerned the danger to their livelihood (Philippi, Ephesus), politicians found themselves in a pickle (Felix, Festus), local religious authorities saw their celebrations stop (Lystra), and so on. The modes of resistance varied, but they were all eventually intertwined with a sort of violence—the type that was based on the truth that the repentance and cultural reconstitution required by the Christians amounted to a devastation of constitutive patterns of a long-established, normal way of life.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, ix

<idle musing>
If only that were true today! Unfortunately, it seems that Christianity has imbibed so much of culture as to be a part of it. Perhaps the only distinction that Christians can claim is to be more obnoxious and loud-mouthed than anyone else.

May we once again be leaven that makes the whole loaf edible, instead of a errant yeast that poisons the loaf!
</idle musing>

The enemy of the church

From the forthcoming Kerux commentary on Acts from Kregel (not yet posted on their website):

The great, insidious enemy of the church is not persecution but comfort, not want but plenty, not beatings and arrests but being ignored. It might be difficult for the church in free countries today to imagine the constant anxiety of immanent persecution at any moment in the apostles’ day. Our persecutions will be light in comparison.

<idle musing>
Both points are true: comfort is the enemy, and any persecution is light. The second point needs to be highlighted. Some would have you think that the sky is falling because some small discomfort has to be incurred because you identify w/Christ.

Of course, there is also the sentence that makes me cringe: I've heard people say: "I'm a Christian, so I don't have to do X," where X is something not core to the faith, but core to their comfort in the faith. As if that is a witness to the goodness of God!

The scripture is true: "As it is written: 'God’s name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.'” (Romans 2:24 NIV, quoting from Isaiah 52:5 LXX)
</idle musing>

Tolerance/intolerance in perspective

[T]o say that we should be intolerant of Acts’ intolerance is simply to replace one scheme of life with another (tolerance, remember, always gets its meaning from the larger schemes in which it occurs). What then is the justification for this intolerance? Presumably it would be the truth of the scheme. But that of course is just the point at issue. Acts confronts its readers with a claim to a total scheme. To confront Acts with a counter-claim is not to be more “tolerant” (this is an illusion) but to be intolerant in a different way, and to claim (a) that Acts is wrong, and (b) that the different scheme is right (the possibility that neither one is right is but a subset of (b)—you are right that Acts is not right, even if you are wrong about your own alternative). So it seems that we are left with the decision that Acts wants to enjoin us to make.—World Upside Down, page 264 n. 91

<idle musing>
Food for thought, isn't it? The book of Acts is trying to get us to decide whom we will serve. It's either Jesus Christ as God or Caesar and Rome as god. No alternatives. One or the other. And we are still being called. Either Christ as God or our culture as god. One or the other. You can't have both.

What a great way to end a book...it leaves you thinking and considering the ramifications. I hope you enjoyed the excerpts from it and will consider reading it.

By the way, I ran across a good post late last week about the kind of missionary the world needs. Here's an extended quotation:

Christianity in so many parts of America has been blended together with American, nationalistic culture to the point that the Jesus many believe they are following is just a false American caricature of the real thing. In many ways, the tradition of Jesus has become a civil religion that is able to exist in complete harmony with American ideals instead of being something that was designed to turn culture on its head– showing those within culture a totally different way of living and being.

This week my heart feels particularly broken for this obviously unreached people group. Case in point: I issued a call to love our Muslim neighbors in our communities– loving neighbors being what Jesus called the second greatest commandment– and it was met with outright hostility, and even calls for acts of violence against Muslims. One Christian minister said that telling people to love their Muslim neighbors was a “slap in the face” and that we should do no such thing. Others said it is impossible to exist with Muslim neighbors. And, even some “Christians” said that the only approach to Muslims is to kill them before they kill us.

Or, there’s the response I get when I suggest that we should actually love our enemies (a core aspect of the message and life of Jesus): outright disgust, and immediately objections that surely, Jesus didn’t really mean that. Better yet, there’s the times when I suggest that Jesus invites us to give our loyalty to God’s Kingdom instead of earthly nations, and the Christian response is quite predictable. “Go somewhere else” I’m often told, or as one internet commenter said recently, I’d do better to just “shut my mouth and pay homage to our soldiers.”

Day in and day out, I am faced with the heartbreaking reality that perhaps the last unreached people group has been sitting right in our very pews– those who have succumbed to an Americanized, civil religion, that is only loosely based on Jesus.

Heartbreaking, isn't it? We've elevated culture above the words of Christ...Lord, forgive us!
</idle musing>

Yes or no?

Those who want to speak of polytheisms must at least acknowledge that whatever it would mean to speak of polytheisms, it would not mean that they could—together or individually—incorporate a metanarrative that would mean their extinction. In this sense, they are unified, and we may be justified in speaking of polytheism. With respect to their intolerance of the Christian way of life, they are all united. They oppose it. What this turns out to mean is that the true/false distinction cannot be eliminated without making a true/false judgment about Christianity—that it is false.—World Upside Down, page 262 n. 73

<idle musing>
As you probably have gathered if you read this blog much, I am not a fan of the "culture wars." But what Rowe is talking about here is much deeper than what the people waging the culture wars are talking about. What Rowe is talking about is the philosophical foundation of the whole system. He is not talking about moralism or certain practices. He is talking about the very ideas that undergird the system. And in that respect, there is a culture war—and there always has been.
</idle musing>

Missing the forest for the trees

Yet we would misread the nature of the Christian mission according to Acts were we to think only of the individual “heroes” of the story as the icons who best figure forth the missional identity of the church (e.g., Peter, Stephen, and Paul). Though Acts obviously focuses much attention on these characters, the modern individualism that has long ground the lenses of our interpretive perception can all too easily blind us to the fundamental importance of the communities and established networks that finally make sense of the main characters lives in the first place.—World Upside Down, page 252 n. 210

Roman government

The system of control employed by the imperial government was in its general lines the same as that invented by the republic—to maintain the ascendency of the wealthier classes. As before, the constitutions of the cities were so arranged as to give the control to the rich, and any attempts to upset this arrangement were severely checked. Left-wing politicians found themselves relegated to the islands. If the assembly proved too active its meetings were suspended. Above all the formation of clubs which might organize the voting power of the lower orders was strictly supervised and often prohibited.—Jones, The Greek City, 134 as quoted in World Upside Down, pages 248-249 n. 180

<idle musing>
The more things change...you know the rest. Reminds me of The Who's "Won't be Fooled Again." Except we are. Always.
</idle musing>

Define sin

If the concept of “sin” means an awareness that there are dire problems in the world that need addressing, or that human beings are complex entities with competing and frequently injurious desires, then—other than a few naves—it would probably be hard to find people who were not aware of sin.—World Upside Down, page 247 n. 165

Little tidbits of information

It is worth noting that Luke himself does not employ κὐριος [lord] for any pagan divinity.—World Upside Down, page 237 n. 69

Nope, not that way. This way:

Thus the truth claim about Jesus’s Lordship does not lead in Acts to a narrative blueprint for the need to coerce others for their own good but to a form of mission that rejects violence as a way to ground peaceful community and instead witnesses to the Lord’s life of rejection and crucifixion by living it in publicly perceivable communities derisively called Christians.—World Upside Down, page 173

<idle musing>
Would that we would recover some of that! Even so, make it happen Lord Jesus!
</idle musing>

Inherently theological

Plainly said, all political thinking is inescapably theological. Our theological judgments may of course be hidden by a limited range of vocabulary that attempts to eliminate explicit theological terms from “pure” political discourse….”politics” cannot help but to take particular positions on the question of God, on God’s relevance to world mechanics, on human nature, on our place in the cosmos, on the significance of our existence, on the telos of human community and so on—in short, on the whole range of issues that must be engaged in order to think intelligently about life together.—World Upside Down, page 169

Circular reasoning

Tolerance and diversity, that is, can never of themselves produce tolerance and diversity or work as centrally organizing conceptions or principles precisely because they cannot of their own conceptual resources answer the questions, what will we not tolerate? what kind of diversity is unacceptable? Answering these questions invariably requires recourse to a more comprehensive pattern of thought, one in which tolerance and diversity receive meaning and explication.—World Upside Down, page 166

A word to the wise

In practice—and in principle—ancient polytheism cannot be read as religiously systemic tolerance; to do so is to engage in political fantasy.—World Upside Down, page 165

<idle musing>
He isn't afraid to step on toes, is he? But he's correct...that's why Christianity couldn't be tolerated. It tore the fabric of polytheism apart at the foundations...
</idle musing>

We need a better perspective

Despite common interpretive tendencies in contemporary American Christianity, salvation is not, according to Acts, oriented solely toward the internal aspects of the human being (soul, heart, etc.). Against all spiritualizing tendencies, Luke narrates the salvation that attends the Christian mission as something that entails necessarily the formation of a community, a public pattern of life that witnesses to the present dominion of the resurrected Lord of all. If, after the unavoidable impact of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and our contemporary consumerist culture, we have trouble grasping this point, we would do well to remember that the ancient pagans did not.—World Upside Down, page 155

A higher allegiance

Where the narrative of Acts clearly rejects any hint of the notion that Jesus is a rival for Caesar’s throne—that he competes with the emperor for the title κύριος πἀντων [Lord of all]—it does so on the basis of a more startling claim: Jesus, the bringer of peace, simply is the Lord of all, the mode of being that is Caesar’s represents a violent refusal of this universal Lordship. Differently said, Caesar is the challenger, not of course because Jesus wants to rule the empire, but in the sense that the self-exaltation necessary to sustain Caesar’s political project is inevitably idolatrous. Dominus et deus noster [our lord and god] pays the imperial bill, but for the Christians it claims an allegiance—a form of devotion—that belongs only to another: the true Lord of all.—World Upside Down, page 152

<idle musing>
Nothing like turning things on their head, is there? That's probably why the apostles were accused of "turning the world upside down!" Would that Christians today were accused of that! Even so, Lord Jesus, may it come to be!
</idle musing>

A whole new paradigm

By contrast, according to Acts, sacrificing to the gods, soothsaying, magic, and so forth, do not “make sense” for the early Christians. The reason is not hard to find: the wider predicament in which these practices made sense has disappeared. Thus the collision between the Christian mission and the larger Mediterranean world is both extraordinarily deep and “thick” for the reason that it entails multiple layers of a whole world of sense-making, that is, a social imaginary. In Lystra, for example, Paul and Barnabas’ call “to turn to the Living God” states the challenge to the locals’ pattern of worship and sacrifice to the gods not so much in terms of the practice itself, as if the goal were simply to get the Lystrans to substitute horn blowing for sacrificing, or in terms of the normative notions of pagan sacrifice (for it to work properly, you really ought to be doing it this way rather than that way), but in terms of a different total framework, one in which sacrifice to the gods becomes literal nonsense, or, in biblical language, idolatry.—World Upside Down, pages 145-146

<idle musing>
Amen! Good preaching! This is key to understanding the radicalness of the gospel. It's just as radical today—if we will just listen to the Holy Spirit's nudges. Our culture is just as hung up on the wrong stuff, we just don't see it. Unless the Holy Spirit opens our eyes—and we have to be willing to let him!

And, given my Wesleyan/Arminian viewpoint, he is always nudging everyone of us. Always calling us home. Always giving us an unease with the status quo...
</idle musing>

We could use a dose of this

In Lystra and Philippi no less than in Athens and Ephesus, both the critiques and the reactions they evoke arise out of the identity of the God of Israel as on who is fundamentally distinct from the cosmos, or in more directly Jewish terms, who is the Creator, not the creation.—World Upside Down, page 141

Again, the centrality of the resurrection

As difficult as it may appear to the modern mind, we must look to the resurrection of Jesus to understand the Christian mission in Acts. That is the “place” from which Christian mission begins.—World Upside Down, page 122

Another look at peace

For Luke as for Rome, to be the Lord of all is to be the “peacemaker.” But the respective ways in which they construe this role could hardly be more different. For Luke and not for Rome, the paxof the dominus mundi [lord of the world] is the kind of humble service that accepts its own suffering and death. The particular challenge entailed in the Roman emperor’s claim to be the κύριος πἀντων [lord of all] thus turns out to take the form of a violent refusal of the Lordship of Jesus Christ, the primacy of peace that is manifested in the willingness to serve God rather than humans through trial, suffering, and death.—World Upside Down, page 115

Caesar? Peacemaker?

In Luke’s vision, the practical corollary of the primacy of God in Jesus Christ is, to employ contemporary language, the primacy of peace and service. Where the lordship of the Roman emperor entailed a pax predicated upon pacifying strength and terror, the lordship of Jesus, so Luke believed, produced a revaluation of the world’s sense of pax. If the Caesars could be called “peacemaker,” it was not without the realization that their form of peace was tied to a still deeper possibility of military violence.—World Upside Down, page 113

<idle musing>
Possibility? I would say probability—no strike that—certainty is the right word. And it still is for any country that claims that there is peace through war. I'm looking you/us, America...
</idle musing>

No competition

Jesus does not challenge Caesar’s status as Lord, as if Jesus were somehow originally subordinate to Caesar in the order of being. The thought—at least in its Lukan form—is rather much more radical and striking: because of the nature of his claims, it is Caesar who is the rival; and what he rivals is the Lordship of God in the person of Jesus Christ.

Yet, we would be mistaken were we to think that this rivalry takes place on a level playing field—an ontological basis, say, that is deeper than both Jesus and Caesar—as if there were two competitors playing for the same prize, the title κύριος πἀντων [lord of all]. In this way of thinking, κύριος πἀντων is something separable from Jesus himself, a trophy, as it were, that he (rather than Caesar) wins. But in Luke’s way of thinking, κύριος πἀντων is who "Jesus" is: Jesus is completely inseparable from his identity as the universal Lord. Caesar’s rivalry thus takess the form of wrongful (self-) exultation to the sphere whose existence is exactly concomitant with the identity of God in Jesus Christ. Politics, that is, inevitably involves the question of idolatry. From the perspective of the Graeco-Roman world, therefore, things are indeed upside down: Jesus’s lordship is primary—onotologically and, hence, politically—not Caesar’s.—World Upside Down, pages 112-113

<idle musing>
Oooh! I like that! It does indeed turn the World Upside Down! Now, I dare you to bring this insight to bear on the current situation in the U.S. political scene...as I read somewhere after the last election, if the results of yesterday's election left you either elated or depressed, then your hope isn't in God, it is in the political process. And that, my friend, is idolatry, pure and simple idolatry.
</idle musing>