Against the Flow: How Daniel Speaks to Us Today

The Book of Daniel in the Old Testament is filled with prophecies: the kingdoms which followed Babylon’s Nebuchadnezzar; the desecration of the temple in Jerusalem by Antiochus IV Epiphanes; the rise of Rome. The book also included prophecies of the end-times, dovetailing with the Book of Revelation in the New Testament.

In the last three chapters of Against the Flow: The Inspiration of Daniel in an Age of Relativism, author John Lennox describes the fourth and final vision, a kind of survey of the times that would follow Daniel. The information is detailed and in-depth, once again emphasizing the accuracy of what Daniel saw – and what the angel told him would happen.

Prophecy is an important study, and I’ve read the prophetic Old Testament books, read the Book of Revelation, and studied the Book of Revelation. I’m no expert, however, and if someone asked me what my favorite part of the Bible was, I would have to say it’s not prophecy and the study of end-times.  (If you want to know, my favorite books are the Gospels of John and Luke and the Book of Acts.)

So while I’m interested and intrigued with what Lennox writes about in these concluding chapters, I’m not completely riveted. What interests me most is what he had to say in the earlier chapters.

Despite some 2500 years, Christians today have a number of things in common with Daniel and his times.

Here in the United States, the last 50 to 60 years have seen a phenomenal shift in culture and values. It’s not so much a shift “away from the church,” although that’s certainly part of it. Instead, what more describes what has happened is an enormously significant shift in how we understand individual freedom. That freedom has become our Holy Grail, our expectation, our entitlement, what we demand. And that freedom has come largely through the impetus of the federal government, and especially through the federal court system.

What the Supreme Court says and decides has become so important, so wrapped up in this cultural concept of individual freedom at all costs, that we don’t mind the baggage these decisions brings with them as long as “our side” is vindicated and “wins.” (This also says something about the political polarization happening in the United States as well.)

Some of that baggage includes the court having to make up stuff in order to write the decision the majority wants. Harry Blackmun searched the Constitution long and hard in writing his opinion in Roe v. Wade and finally gave up using the Constitution to justify abortion. Instead, he turned to Roman law. Justice John Roberts was only able to uphold the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act by declaring it to be exactly what the Obama Administration and the Congress that passed it said it wasn’t – a tax. In fact, it was such a badly written law (which even most of its supporters didn’t read) that then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was right – they had to pass the law to find out what was in it. And the administration has had to rewrite key provisions of the law, not once but several times, to make its programs actually function.

What has happened with these court decisions and laws is that gradually, almost without notice, our society has been dismantling anything that could potentially stand between us and the federal government. All of the mediating institutions – the states and state legislatures, cultural and social organizations, even Congress – are becoming increasing superfluous.

I’ve heard many people compare these times to the end of the Roman Empire. If you read Roman history, you’ll find these people are wrong. Our times are not like the end of the Roman Empire; they do, however, resemble the end of the Roman Republic.

And the times of Daniel. Daniel lived under a succession of autocracies, where the king was essentially considered an absolute god. Because of his skill, competence and intelligence, he rose in position under both the Babylonians and the Medo-Persians.

More importantly, he had to learn how to navigate those autocracies and still remain faithful to God. He managed, through his own skill and wits as well as more than a little supernatural help. He had to make choices and decisions, hard ones, facing problems that could have been solved so easily – just bend the knee to the king; just worship the king for 30 days – that’s all, just 30 days.

Daniel couldn’t, and didn’t. He understood the consequences. He decided that being thrown into the lion’s den was less onerous than worshipping a false god.

He was a man of conviction and courage. He accepted God at His word. And he knew that God could save him, or not, but that regardless, he would still remain faithful and accept God’s plan.

In the times that are coming, that are now just arriving, we Christians will need the conviction and courage of a Daniel. That, to me, is the significant lesson of the Book of Daniel.

For the past several weeks, I’ve been discussing Against the Flow. This concludes the discussion. But the lessons learned go on.

And we do have another example, one closer to our times, that's worth considering. In February of 1974, a man was arrested by his country's secret police and then expelled from the country. This is what he was writing the day he was arrested: Live Not by Lies. 

He was blessed in that he lived long enough to see the downfall of the regime that arrested him. That, however, is not always the promise, as Daniel well knew.

Photograph by Xoan Seoane via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Against the Flow: Ideas Matter

My wife and I were both trained in journalism. In fact, that’s how we met – in the newsroom of the student newspaper at LSU. We would both tell you that we had good teachers and not-so-good teachers.

A required course for a journalism degree was “History of Journalism.” And one of the things I remember most from that course was the man who shaped 20^th century journalism, Walter Lippmann (1889-1974).

If you’re not familiar with Lippmann, you should know that he was the man who coined the term “Cold War,” gave us the concept of “stereotype” that we understand today, and articulated the modernist view of what journalism was about – the idea of objective, fact-based reporting.

Walter Lippman

While most journalists today would say their reporting is fact-based, fewer would claim “objectivity” as a guiding principle. The influence of post-modernist thinking laid siege to and largely obliterated the idea of objectivity.

This is why you get news stories today that read more like editorials and opinion columns than news. With the possible exceptions of business and sports news, my hometown newspaper, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, is a good example. And even the sports and business stories sometimes are more opinion-based.

Ideas matter. And ideas can linger, often for a very long time.

In Against the Flow: The Inspiration of Daniel in an Age of Relativism, John Lennox describes in great detail the vision the prophet Daniel received as described in chapter nine of the Old Testament book. It was a vision about the future of Jerusalem, so close to Daniel’s heart, and it was a vision about the future.

It’s not a simple vision to explain. Daniel reads in the Book of Jeremiah that the desolation of Jerusalem will last 70 years. The angel Gabriel tells Daniel that the “70 years” is actually 70 sevens – 70 weeks of years, or 490 years. At the end of 62 sevens, or 434 years, an anointed one will be put to death. And in the 70^th and final week, a ruler will implement an “abomination of desolation” that will lead to the end-time.

The end of the “62 sevens” happens to coincide with the time of Christ. After that, for those last seven “weeks,” interpretation is not clear-cut. The story picks up again in the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, and that last week becomes the seven years of tribulation under the Antichrist.

There is this thing called history that has played out between the time of Daniel and our own time. Lennox does a good job of arguing the case for the interpretation of Daniel’s vision that coincides with the one (largely the evangelical understanding) that I’ve been taught and accept. But there are others. And we laymen along with our theologians can get easily caught up in discussing (and arguing) the details as well as the overarching theme.

Lennox’s point about all this, however, isn’t to prove himself or his position right. But to point out that many ideas have been around for a long time – thousands of years – and still have consequences today.

“Those future events,” he writes, “are but the harvest of seeds sown by the ideas, attitudes, movements of thought and ideologies that have permeated society throughout history, even from ancient times. In our own time secularist naturalism in particular, with its marginalization of God and devaluation of human life and dignity, is no innocent thing. We need to recognize it for what it is, and spell out its implications for everyone who is prepared to listen.”

Ideas matter; they have consequences, good and bad. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels articulated a view of history, economics and philosophy that eventually gave birth to Soviet communism. Nietzsche influenced Adolf Hitler’s thinking. Lippmann shaped 20^th century American journalism. John Dewey’s thinking shaped what we know today as public education.

And ideas can last for a very long time.

For the past several weeks, I’ve been discussing Against the Flow, in which Lennox argues (rather successfully, I think), that there is much we can learn from the Book of Daniel and apply to many issues we face today. This post is taken from chapters 18-20: “Jerusalem and the Future,” “The Seventy Weeks,” and “The Seventieth Week.”

Top photograph by Ave Lainesaar via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Against the Flow: A Dark Vision of Relativism

The prophet Daniel had two visions that terrified him. One was of four beasts (Daniel 7). The other was of a ram and a goat (Daniel 8). Both were connected to the idea of a ruler who would terrorize the faithful (the faithful Jews, in this case).

Theologians and Biblical historians see the point of these visions in the person of Antiochus Epiphanes, the descendant of one of Alexander the Great’s generals who ruled what today is Israel, Syria, and part of Iraq, and who almost conquered Egypt. Antiochus believed he was a god, or perhaps “the” god, and everything was to reflect his deity: coins, building inscriptions, buildings, culture, religion – including the Jewish temple at Jerusalem. He was determined to Hellenize his empire, including Israel.

When the Jews resisted, he struck back, and hard. The temple was turned into a temple of Zeus. Faithful Jews were imprisoned and killed. Circumcised babies were killed, hung around their mothers’ necks, and thrown from the walls of Jerusalem.

Antiochus overreached (a gross understatement). He inspired the successful Maccabean revolt. He lost Palestine. His legacy is cited in the New Testament as “the abomination of desolation.” What is also clear is that the story of Antiochus Epiphanes is not over; both the account in Daniel and references in the New Testament suggest more is to come, at some point in the future.

In Against the Flow: The Inspiration of Daniel in an Age of Relativism, John Lennox discusses what happened, and what could happen, in great and fascinating detail. As he’s been doing previously in the book, Lennox draws the parallel with the multi-god worship practices on Daniel’s time with the relativism that dominates so much thinking today. And this he explains why this is important.

“Relativism weakens intellectual and moral resistance to totalitarianism,” he says, “and opens us up to manipulation and deceit; so that in the end the ‘truth’ we believe is dictated by those who hold the power.”

Earlier this month, a very small example of what can happen was noted.

Edward Schlosser is the pseudonym of a college professor. He writes for Vox, the online news and commentary site. In early June, he published an article that has gained a fair amount of notice: “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me.” What he described is the growing fear of professors, even and perhaps especially liberal ones, of offending their students in the normal course of teaching.

As in, “Your reading of that quotation by Mark Twain offends me.” Or, “You are not taking my opposing view seriously enough.” Professors have been reported and disciplined for less. Yes, in America. I wish I was making this up.

As Rod Dreher at American Conservative says, “Welcome to the Maoist Cultural Revolution.”

I have to admit it’s difficult for me to feel sympathy for a self-acknowledged liberal college professor. This is what post-modern thinking comes to – so far – and what “progressive” professors may well have brought on themselves.

It’s the ultimate challenge of relativism, boomeranged back on the very people whose thinking and beliefs enshrined relativism as the new religion. If everything is relative, your truth is no better than my truth, your “facts” no better than mine, and if you offend me or cause me anguish, I will report you, because I have the power to do so.

The implications reach far beyond the college classroom. Imagine a U.S. Internal Revenue Service punishing groups because they adhere to the “wrong” political philosophy. If they have that power, they can use it.

For the past several weeks, I’ve been discussing Against the Flow and how the book of Daniel in the Old Testament has meaning application for us today. This post is based on Chapter 16, “The Four Beasts and the Son of Man,” and Chapter 17, “The Vision of the Ram and the Goat.”

Painting: The Triumph of Judas Maccabeus by Rubens, circa 1630.

Against the Flow: Reclaiming Tolerance

The prophet Daniel found himself a victim of a rather contemporary definition of tolerance.

The Babylonian empire had fallen to the Mede-Persians. The new king kept Daniel in his high government position because, of all of his government officials, Daniel was the one who truly had the king’s best interests at heart.

The others became jealous – surprise – and determined they would do Daniel through trickery (an ancient version of “we have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it”). A new law, approved by the king: for one month, the king, and only the king, could be worshipped. After that, everyone could go back to worshipping their regular gods. What was wrong with one month?

Everything, for a man who worshipped the one true God. Daniel continued his prayers to Jehovah as he always did, was arrested, and, much to king’s personal dismay, placed in the lion’s den. Daniel survived unharmed. The king, enraged at what he had been tricked into, threw the officials and their families into the lions’ den. They did not survive unharmed. In fact, they didn’t survive at all.

If Western culture, and especially the American variant of Western culture, has a national religion, it would have to be the religion of tolerance. In the name of individual rights, everything is acceptable, and more than acceptable, everything must be acknowledged as acceptable. America, led by its cultural and governing elites, is worshipping at the altar of tolerance.

But it is not tolerance as it has been understood historically.

“One of the things that poses a real threat to human freedom is the contemporary understanding of tolerance,” says John Lennox in Against the Flow: The Inspiration of Daniel in an Age of Relativism.  “I say contemporary, because the old and good meaning of tolerance has been abandoned for something insidious and dangerous.”

Lennox explains: “Tolerance asserts the right to have convictions, to make judgments about right and wrong, which differ from those of others. It also asserts the right to express those views without fear. …Tolerance does not demand that we accept the opinions, beliefs, and lifestyles of others, but only that we learn to live without forcing them to line up with us.”

This traditional understanding of tolerance is not where America is today. This religion of tolerance recognizes one sin, and one sin only, and it isn’t intolerance. No, it’s what now perceived and defined as intolerance.

Of all the charges of intolerance leveled at Christians, none is worse than the claim of exclusivity – that faith in Jesus is the only way to salvation. There are not “many paths to God.” There’s only one. All of our so-called sins flow from that one. (Muslims have the same problem, but you will not likely find our cultural and political elites saying nasty things about Muslims, especially radical Muslims.)

By definition, we Christians are automatically intolerant.

Pointing this out is something of a non sequitur. You can be intolerant toward Christians and still cling to the belief you are tolerant because intolerance of systematic intolerance is a virtue.

Why does Lennox say this is insidious and dangerous? Because it’s the kind of thinking that afflicts totalitarian regimes.

We need to reclaim the original definition of tolerance, but it won’t be easy.

For the past several weeks, I’ve been discussing Against the Flow. This post is taken from chapter 14, “The Law of the Medes and Persians,” and Chapter 15, “The Law of the Jungle.”

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. 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.

Where’s Daniel?

One of the best known stories of the book of Daniel (and indeed the entire Bible) doesn’t include the character of Daniel. In his account of the story in Against the Flow: The Inspiration of Daniel in an Age of Relativism, John Lennox doesn’t speculate where Daniel might have been, but he offers enough insights to at least suggest an answer.

Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, had a 90-foot-tall golden statue of himself built, and he expects the leaders of Babylon to set and tone and worship the statue.

By this time, Daniel and his three friends – Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego – have moved into significant government positions in Nebuchadnezzar’s government. Like the other leaders, they’re expected to bow the knee to the statue.

For whatever reason, Daniel does not say where he was. There’s not a single reference to him in the story, except that he had asked Nebuchadnezzar to appoint his three friends as administrators over the province of Babylon, which the king had done, overwhelmed by Daniel’s interpretation of his dream.

The story focuses on the three friends. They refuse to worship the statue. Given a second chance, they refuse again. They tell the king that their fate – incineration in the fiery furnace – is in the hands of God. They acknowledge that God may choose to save them or He may not, but regardless of what God chooses, they would not serve Babylon’s gods or worship Nebuchadnezzar’s statue.

Enraged, the king orders the furnace heated seven times hotter than the usual experience. It’s so hot that the men preparing to fling Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego into the flames are themselves incinerated.

Nebuchadnezzar comes to watch. And he and the others see four men walking inside the furnace – the three friends and one who strikes the onlookers as almost supernatural, “like the son of the gods.” Some theologians see the fourth figure as an angel; others see him as the pre-incarnate Christ. Whoever it was, it was clearly someone whose purpose was to be with the three men and, perhaps, to send a message to Nebuchadnezzar.

The result: the three friends come out of the fire, completely unaffected physically by the experience. Nebuchadnezzar praises their God, and he praises their courage and faith. And then he decrees that no one can say anything against their God.

So where was Daniel?

The text doesn’t say. I offer an answer: Daniel was right there all along. The story reads like an eyewitness account. I suggest that Nebuchadnezzar refrained from throwing him into the furnace, even though he, too, would refuse to worship the statue. But Daniel’s position as such that even the king would have hesitated to order his death; after all, this was the man who had not only interpreted the king’s dream but told the king what he dream was in the first place. Sending Daniel’s three friends into the furnace could also have been the king’s threat to Daniel – bow the knee, or you could suffer the same fate.

The account of the fiery furnace suggests a larger question as well, and not the obvious “What would you have done in their place?” No, the question is, what do we do if our own government requires – if not overt worship – obedience to the point that it clearly is idolatry?

I don’t think this is a question of “if” but of “when.”

For the past several weeks, I've been discussing Against the Flow. This post is based on chapter 11, "when the state Becomes God." 

Painting of the fiery furnace in Daniel 3 by Philip Prescott Parham.

The Great Von Harnack, Prophecy and Daniel

I was reading Against the Flow: The Inspiration of Daniel in an Age of Relativism by John Lennox this week, and a reference to the so-called “higher critics” and what they believed about the date Daniel was written sent me back 30 years to a classroom at Washington University in St. Louis.

In the 1980s, when I was in my masters degree program, I took a seminar called “History of the Early Christian Church.” It was taught by a partially retired professor (he had “emeritus” in his title) who had something of a reputation for unfeeling toughness. He seemed courteous enough, at least during the first few meetings for the 10 of us in the seminar.

The crunch came when we had to read and defend our first papers. One young woman was selected to go first, and her paper reflected the fact that she had hurriedly put something together the night before. The professor’s withering, relentless criticism reduced her to tears. She fled the classroom. Without missing a beat, he turned to the next student to present and defend, who happened to be me.

There was nothing else to do but to do it.

Adolf von Harnack

I even remember the subject of my paper – the origin of the office of “bishop” (episkopos in Greek). I had done a huge amount of research, surviving several sneezing attacks in the old Classics section of the university library. In my paper, I argued that while it had appeared early in the church, the office of bishop didn’t exist in apostolic times, or at least for the first 125 to 150 years of the church.

The professor believed otherwise. He peppered my reading with questions. I answered. More questions, and more answers. At one point, I thought my ship was clearly sinking, when he quoted the church historian and theologian Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930), one of the leading lights of the so-called German “higher criticism” of the Bible in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. My professor invoked von Harnack on a regular basis; he always, always referred to him as “the great von Harnack.”

This went on for the rest of the two hours of the seminar meeting. In spite of several references to the great von Harnack, I kept punching back. My fellow students were clearly relieved that they had won a few days reprieve before they had to present; they were also somewhat aghast that I had dared to suggest, even indirectly, that the great von Harnack might not be entirely correct.

What was even more surprising was the professor’s overall reaction. He was clearly more than pleased with my paper. He stopped me after class and asked where I done my research, how long had I worked on it, and how had I come to be so interested in the subject of episkopos.

Two weeks later, when he returned all of our papers with his grades, he wrote on mine that he still believed von Harnack was correct. But he gave my paper an A+.

I’m not sure what von Harnack thought of the Book of Daniel; his focus was the New Testament and the early church period. But the higher critics in general rejected the traditional dating for the book, and maintained it had to have been written during the early period of Rome’s occupation of Palestine and not during the period of the Babylonian and Medo-Persian empires. Their reasoning was based on the assumption that Daniel recounted and interpreted Nebuchadnezzar’s dream by predicting a succession of empires, and there was no way he could have been that accurate in his predictions. Clearly the book had to have been written after the fact.

The higher critics rejected supernatural intervention, miracles, and prophecy in general; von Harnack, for example, entirely rejected the miracles of Jesus. If it couldn’t be explained by natural, historical methods, then it simply couldn’t happen the way the Bible recorded it.

As John Lennox explains in Against the Flow, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls knocked a hole in the higher critics’ date for the writing of Daniel. The book was found among the scrolls, accepted and venerated as Holy Scripture. Had it been written only 50 years before the Qumran community existed, it would not have been accorded this recognition. Clearly, it had been around for a lot longer.

We’re still living within the context of Daniel’s interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream (you can read the entire account of the dream and its interpretation in Daniel 2). And if you ever wondered where the expression “feet of clay” comes from, this is where you’ll find it.

I’ve been discussing Against the Flow for the past several weeks. Today’s based is taken from Chapter 9, “Dreams and Revelations,” and Chapter 10, “A Succession of Empires.”

Painting: Daniel Interpreting Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream by Mattia Preti (undated; Preti lived from 1613 to 1699); private collection.

Daniel Didn’t Picket and Scream

You have been taken into captivity, separated from family, friends, your home, and the place where you grew up. You are transported hundreds of miles away. You are placed in a special training school, to serve a conquering king. Everything is strange. You now live in a city where temples to gods and goddesses abound. You know you are likely never to see your family or home again. You are given a new name, in an effort to complete the separation for what you have known.

You continue as well as you can to pray and worship God. And then a day comes when the food you are given is better than fine from your captors’ perspective, but is unclean from how you were raised. Do you give in, since everything has changed? Do you rationalize this as something obviously God wants you to do? Do you accept and enjoy the food with gusto?

What if you decide that remaining faithful to God is what you will do? Do you protest? Do you argue? Do you challenge your captors? What if you’re dealing with a totalitarian regime, which will not likely take kindly to disobedience, civil or uncivil?

That is the situation Daniel faced in the Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar. He tells the man in charge of the students, who’s the chief of the eunuchs at court, that he cannot eat the foot.

How he does it, though, is instructive.

Daniel is respectful. As John Lennox points out in Against the Flow: The Inspiration of Daniel in an Age of Relativism, “We can be sure from what follows that Daniel had behaved in a friendly and respectful way towards the official and earned the man’s trust.”

Second, Daniel offered the man a solution – let him eat only the vegetables that were served and avoid the meat.

Third, Daniel had the confidence to follow through. The solution worked; Daniel had provided the chief eunuch with a way out of the problem.

Why didn’t the eunuch simply force Daniel to eat the food? Because Daniel’s behavior and achievements had already set him apart. He was an A+ student. That he of all the students would have objected required the eunuch to take his problem seriously.

Daniel’s behavior throughout the issue was godly. And the problem was resolved. Problems came later that wouldn’t be resolved, and Daniel would be prepared to pay the price for faithfulness. But he always behaved consistently.

In an earlier post, I referred to a time years ago when I was part of a community protest. Meeting after meeting we addressed a public board. We were always polite, gentle, and respectful. But we were also firm. What the board was allowing was wrong; the board was even illegally discussing the problem in closed sessions. The board didn’t really care one way or another, but elements within the community did and kept pressure on the board to reject our petition. What the board really wanted was for us to go away; a tax vote was looming, and the board was afraid that enough voters would reject the tax.

A showdown finally came. The board acted, harshly and viciously rejecting our petition. The meeting resembled a lynch mob, packed with people friendly to the board. It was ugly and an awful experience to go through.

What the board didn’t know was that our group was the moderates. When the word got out what had happened, the more radical and vocal people moved in. The next meeting started with hundreds of people in front of the board office shouting – and using megaphones. The board ultimately ignored them as well.

But the proposed tax went down to defeat.

Sometimes a gentle and respectful approach doesn’t work. Daniel would ultimately find that out. But whether it works or not is not our decision nor our plan.

The lesson is that we remain faithful.

Photograph by Peter Griffin via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

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.