Exotic, toxic city

After Daniel 1 

An exotic, toxic city,

a city alien to belief

and faith, a city

treasuring gods

of stone, gods of clay,

gods of metal.

 

An exotic, toxic city,

welcoming new citizens

who bend the knee,

rewarding those who

reject their own 

for the dazzling array

of wealth and power.

 

Yet even here, here

in this citadel of destruction,

and false worship, four

decline to eat what the city

offers, the king’s food, 

to show where life and

sustenance are born.

 

And it’s not from 

this exotic, toxic, city.

 

Photograph by Jisun Han via Unsplash. Used with permission.

3 Puzzles, 2 Interpretations, 2 Outcomes

You’re called upstairs to the executive vice president’s office. He has a report with numbers suggesting web trends, or something clearly happening on social media. “What does it mean?” he asks. “No one seems to know. Should I be concerned?”

This is your area of expertise. You look at the data; they conform what you had already been seeing and warning about for some time. You pull out your mobile and do two searches. You look quickly at Google Analytics.

As you look at the executive VP, you know you have two options. You can tell him what he wants to hear, that there’s no problem and someone is just overreacting. Or you can tlel him the truth.

“It’s bad news,” you say.

The prophet Daniel was called before King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon on two different occasions, to interpret the king’s dreams after all the diviners and court magicians had either failed or claimed they didn’t know. Both times it was difficult news – first, the eventual end of the Babylonian Empire, although not in Nebuchadnezzar’s lifetimes; and second, because of his pride and disregard for God, he would live among the animals for seven years.

Daniel’s interpretations were correct. And both times, despite the bad news for the king, Daniel and Daniel’s God were honored by Nebuchadnezzar. Chapter four of the book of Daniel is in Nebuchadnezzar’s own voice, and he recounts how, at the end of seven years of what we would likely today call insanity, he called out and paid homage to God.

After Nebuchadnezzar’s eventual death, the empire experiences a rather extended period of instability, with relatively short reigns by the succeeding kings. Daniel is still around when Nebuchadnezzar’s great-grandson, Belshazzar, is holding a state dinner for 1,000 nobles while the city of Babylon is under siege by the Medes and Persians. The king and his guests are startled to see words being mysteriously written on a wall, and Daniel is called to interpret the meaning of the “handwriting on the wall.”

It’s bad news. In fact, the Babylonian empire would fall that very night. Too late, the king realizes it was a mistake to take the golden vessels of the temple in Jerusalem to use as banquet dinnerware.

“Belshazzar did not act ignorantly,” says John Lennox in Against the Flow: The Inspiration of Daniel in an Age of Relativism. “As Daniel forcefully pointed out to him, he was responsible for his attitude and behavior. He acted against the evidence.”

The worlds of business and politics are far removed from the days of Nebuchadnezzar, Babylon and absolute rule. But the basic human condition of pride, relying on our own strengths and deliberately ignoring the obvious, is not.

For the past several weeks, I’ve been discussing John Lennox’s Against the Flow. The post covers Chapter 4, “The Testimony of Nebuchadnezzar,” and Chapter 5, “The Writing on the Wall.”

Painting: The Feast of Belshazzar by Rembrandt Van Rijn (1635); National Gallery, London.

Against the Flow: Retreat or Remain?

This week, as I read Against the Flow: The Inspiration of Daniel in an Age of Relativism  by John Lennox, I came upon this observation, which set in motion a chain of thoughts:

“They (Daniel and his friends) sought the wellbeing of Babylon by living in that city as salt and light for God. That stance involved sticking their heads above the parapet and protesting against the world-view that underlay the Babylonian system – and taking the consequences of doing so.”

That “Babylonian system,” Lennox says, was remarkably similar to the cultural system that now is in place in what we think of as Western culture – scientism and materialism, or science as religion and materialism in the sense of everything is material in the here and now and there is nothing after the here and now.

A child in the suburbs of New Orleans in the 1950s, I grew up in a time and culture strongly influenced by surging and often conflicting changes.

The post-World War II Baby Boom was continuing to explode, straining hospital and school services alike. The civil rights movement was gathering steam throughout the decade. The national religious revival associated with Christian leaders like Billy Graham and Carl F.H. Henry was ongoing. An almost religious reverence for science was created by the advent of the polio vaccine. And then I had the more immediate influences of family and what it meant to live in what was then (and now) what is perhaps the most different city in the United States, more an outpost of the Caribbean than an American city.

The 1960s were different: the civil rights movement; Vietnam and the antiwar movement; the proliferation of a lifestyle and philosophy summed up in almost a single word, “hippie;” the assassinations of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy; the broadening sweep of the drug culture.

By the time I entered college in 1969, it seemed to my parents that there were two Americas existing side by side, and one of them had become unrecognizable.

Billy Graham remained popular and the counsel of presidents; the hippie movement along with the growth of para-church organizations like Campus Crusade for Christ fed into the stream of what had become known as the Jesus Movement. I became a Christian in 1973 at the height of the Jesus Movement, directly through the influence of Campus Crusade for Christ. That was the same year the Supreme Court issued its decision on abortion in Roe v. Wade.

One thing I understood from the beginning of my Christian faith: Christianity was, at its most basic, countercultural. That point was driven home with a video series my wife and I saw at the church we attended in Houston in the mid 1970s – How Shall We Then Live by Francis Schaeffer.

The films, and Schaeffer’s books, were a revelation to me. First, they emphasized the importance of Christians being in the culture – not only for the growth of the Gospel message but also for the good of the culture. Hiding from the culture in figurative fortresses and Christian “ghettos” was bad for both the Church and the culture. Second, Schaeffer described over and over again how much of what is good about the culture has come from generations of the Church.

Over the years, I took Schaeffer’s message to heart, and found myself involved in a number of programs and efforts (and a controversy or two) that aimed at being salt and the light in the culture (including work).

Francis Schaeffer

Over the course of my lifetime, the United States has moved from a culture of shared Christian belief to what some charitably describe as “more pluralistic” and others less charitably as “increasingly pagan.” There’s no doubt that the Church’s influence in the United States has declined. And there’s no doubt that the culture has become more coarsened, violent and polarized. Christians might place the blame for this on the decline of the Church’s influence and the growing hostility of those espousing progressive politics. The opposite perspective increasingly points the finger at “evangelicals” for being the last roadblock for freedom and equality for all.

The debate is going to get worse. The hostility is increasing. Christians are becoming increasingly “objectified” by our political, cultural and media elites. This isn’t going to end well for Christians or for the country.

The temptation for Christians will be to retreat. I don’t believe that is an option any more. It’s certainly not a solution. We no longer enjoy the de facto protection of shared belief.

So what do we do? Lennox argues that we do what the Church has always done – give reasoned arguments, engage, answer questions, and “defend the Christian message against misunderstanding, misrepresentation, and vilification.” And he says this: “It was (and is) part of the convincing power of the Christian message that it gave credible answers.”

We have our work cut out for us.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been discussing Against the Flow. This post is based upon chapter 6, “The World-View of Babylon.”

Painting: St. Paul preaching to the philosophers at the Areopagus in Athens by Raphael (1515).

Against the Flow: Athens and/or Jerusalem

When I was working on a Masters at Washington University in St. Louis, I took a seminar entitled “Athens and Jerusalem.” It was taught by a member of the faculty of the Classics Department, Dr. George Pepe, who is still teaching some 30 years after I took the course.  Pepe is a specialist in Greek and Roman philosophy and Latin prose, and he took the name of the course from a quotation: “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem, or the Academy with the Church?”

The quotation is from the early Church father Tertullian (circa 155 to 240 A.D.), one of the first to write in Latin as opposed to Greek. He was an apologist for the Christian faith, writing work after work making logical mincemeat of the arguments of the pagan writers and the official policies of the Roman Empire. (One of his best known observations, still quoted today, is “The blood of the martyrs is seed.”)

In our seminar, we had a number of assigned readings in Tertullian. Since this was pre-Amazon and few if any bookstores carried the writings of the early Church fathers, the assignments meant I spent a lot of time in the Washington University library, in a study carrel tucked among rows of very dusty old books. Few students were enrolled in Classics courses, but the books on the shelves didn’t seem to mind my intrusions.

Reading Tertullian was a revelation. Even in English translation and some 1800 years after his death, the passion and the mind of the man were clear. In his arguments against the pagans, Tertullian took no prisoners. He pointed out all of the inconsistencies and contradictions of classical beliefs and practices, including all of the less-than-admirable traits and personal histories of the Greek and Roman gods. Yet he was more than an apologist; he was also one of the first theologians to tackle the question of the Trinity. Eighty-five years after his death, his works influenced the Council of Nicea and St. Augustine even later.

Aside from his passion, what struck me most about Tertullian was how contemporary his arguments sounded. Substitute “science and technology” for “Classical thought” or “The Academy,” and you have a very similar debate, a similar clash of worldviews. And in the 30 years that I’ve read, that debate has come only more to the fore.

The debate between worldviews is older than Tertullian, of course. Eight-hundred years before him, the prophet Daniel and his three friends Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego faced a very similar clash but in more severe circumstances. The church in Tertullian’s time faced on-again, off-again persecution; Daniel and his friends existed solely at the sufferance of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. Despite what they faced in their day-to-day life in a sometimes viciously polytheistic culture, the four remained faithful.

In Against the Flow: The Inspiration of Daniel in an Age of Relativism, John Lennox describes that faithfulness. And he draws a parallel to contemporary society.

“Babylon’s philosophy,” Lennox says, “resonates with the scientism to today that encourages us to look for both meaning and salvation in science and technology. But scientific analysis and explanation does not yield to us the meaning for which we as persons long. Babylon will leave you empty.” This was the argument against classical culture that Tertullian made as well.

Tertullian, despite his influence, was never canonized. It’s believed he became associated with the Montanists, considered heretical by the Church for their emphasis upon the continuing influence of the Holy Spirit (some scholars suggest that the Montanists have a spiritual descendant in pentacostalism).

But what he argued for is as important today as it was in his own time. Our culture, too, has embraced gods with clay feet, gods who cannot answer the truly important human questions or needs. “Athens or Jerusalem?” remains a vital question for all of us.

For the past several weeks, I’ve been discussing John Lennox’s Against the Flow. It is so packed with insight that I can only highlight a few things in each post, but it is well worth reading and re-reading.

Illustration: A 16^th century representation of Tertullian. We really don’t know what he looked like.

The Contradiction of Absolutes

They are allowed to wander through the city, the largest city in the world. They’re struck by the opulence; the wealth; the buildings devoted to religion, government and commerce. The display of so much of everything makes their own beginnings and roots exceedingly humble in comparison. It’s all designed to impress, and it does. It’s designed to remind the viewer of power and might, and it does.

And as if to punch the message home, they see treasured items from their own temple hundreds of miles away displayed with all of the other treasure taken from conquered nations. They see the wealth of many religions, and many nations, on view to press home the point of superiority.

Given that they were taken from their home and families to be trained to serve Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, it would have been easy to assume that their God was dead, conquered, and tossed aside like all the others. Everything in their own experience argued for it, that everything they had believed was a lie.

But that’s not what Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego did. In spite of triumph and power of Babylon displayed before their very own eyes, they choose to remain faithful.

Think of contemporary Western culture as a 21^st century Babylon, except more so.

The wealth, the power, the achievements, the great buildings, the advances in science all sing the same song together and separately. “It’s all relative. It’s all about us. If you want to believe in your little God, fine; just don’t do it in public. Look what we’ve achieved and accomplished without your Christian God. He’s only one of many gods, and who are you to say He’s supreme? There are no absolutes.”

If Daniel and his friends were alive today, you could almost hear the “Been there, done that” response.

I didn’t realize until I read Against the Flow: The Inspiration of Daniel in an Age of Relativism by John Lennox that postmodernism has been around in one form or another for a long time. It was in Babylon; it was in ancient Greece; it was what thinking and cultured Romans embraced even if they had to bow the knee to Caesar (remember Pontius Pilate’s famous question of Jesus: “What is truth?”).

The various philosophies that today we call postmodernism don’t last; they’re largely self-defeating.

“At the heart of postmodernism lies a patent self-contradiction,” Lennox writes. “It expects us to accept, as absolute truth, that there are no absolute truths. We should note this common, fatally flawed characteristic of relativistic thinking: it tries to exclude itself from its own pronouncements. The fact is that no one can live without a concept of absolute truth.”

No one can live without a concept of absolute truth. No one.

Not even postmodernssts.

I’ve been discussing Against the Flow by John Lennox and will continue to do so for the next several weeks on Mondays. It’s a deeply insightful, highly readable book. Lennox is a professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford and a speaker on the interface of science, philosophy and religion. 

Illustration: The Ishtar Gate was one of eight entrances to the city of Babylon during Nebuchadnezzar’s time.

We weep in Babylon

We weep in Babylon

   by the river

we weep in the city

   of demons, the haunt

   of demons, the fount

   of drunkenness, the wine

   that maddens, the place

   of the kings, the fatted calf

   of the merchants

A voice calls the few

to come out

to come out

from the haunt

the fount, the place,

the wine, the place,

while the kings

and the merchants

of Babylon weep

with broken souls,

weep, by the river

of Babylon.

Painting: oil on canvas by E. Thor Carlson