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.

Why Study Church History?

Thirty years ago, I felt a need to study church history. What I knew was largely confined to the New Testament and basic facts from general history courses.

My primary sources of reading (remember this was pre-internet) was the monthly catalog from Christian Book Distributors (CBD), Christian bookstores (which didn’t carry much on history), and used bookstores. In the mid-1980s, as part of a masters program at Washington University in St. Louis, I took several seminars related to church history – “Athens and Jerusalem,” “The Idea of Rome,” and even “The History of the Early Christian Church.”

That masters program brought me to the university’s library. The collection on the church and Christianity was large – and largely unused. I had virtually no competition for books.

I read some wonderful books. The works of the 19^th century historian Sir William Ramsay were reprinted in the early 1970s, and CBD had them available for a steep discount. Ramsay, an atheist, traveled to New Testament lands to disprove the truth of Christianity, and became a convinced Christian. His writings include The Church in the Roman Empire, The Cities of St. Paul, and The Letters to the Seven Churches.

My course work at Washington University introduced me to the writings of the early church fathers, like Iraneus and especially Tertullian, the Roman lawyer turned Christian apologist who became a kind of heretic, although the exact nature of his heresy is not known today. Even in English translation, to read Tertullian is to read the passion of a razor-sharp mind. For one of the courses, I read Peter Brown’s Augustine of Hippo, one of my all-time favorite books.

At used bookstores, I found titles like Scenes from the Life of St. Paul by J.S. Howson (1909) and The Life and Letters of St. Paul (1928).

Other books I read along the way include The History of Christianity by Kenneth Scott Latourette, The Rise of Christianity by W.H.C. Frend, and New Testament History by F.F. Bruce (anything by F.F. Bruce is good).

Recently, I began to revisit some of the books I’ve read and find some new ones. Tomorrow I’ll be posting a review of Ben Witherington’s A Week in the Life of Corinth, and I’m currently reading a 2012 revised edition of The Apostle: A Life of St. Paul by John Pollock, first published in 1969.

Why do I read church history?

It’s interesting. I find it fascinating.

It’s important. You learn things about the church that you don’t find in general history books, like the role of the church in the anti-slavery movement (and the role of the church in trying to maintain slavery in the U.S. South), how the church likely saved Western civilization after the collapse of Rome, and (more recently) the role of the church in the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Not to mention that modern capitalism was one of the results of the Protestant Reformation.

Church history also provides perspective. The church didn’t leapfrog from the Book of Acts, make a brief stop at the Reformation and then appear again with the rise of mega-churches in the United States in the 1980s. For 2,000 years, Christians have struggled and fought and lost and won and prevailed and retreated. Culture wars existed before.

What studying church history also creates is a humbling and deep sense of gratitude for the Christians who walked before us and what they, with God’s grace, made possible.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Ten Books (15, Actually)

Several of the more serious/theological bloggers at Evangel picked up a meme in the past few days. It started with economist Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, and then spread to Evangel. The meme was “the list of the 10 books that have influenced me in my worldview and outlook on life.” (You can’t list the Bible, either.)

I thought it was kind of a cool idea, until I read their lists.

I was totally intimidated. I mean, these guys – Adam Omelianchuk, Joe Carter and others – read some weighty stuff, mostly theological and mostly of the seminary-type of theological.

I felt like a pagan.

Then I wandered through my bookshelves, and put together my list. It was a good thing. When I looked at my list, I didn’t feel like a pagan any more. Just eight tenths of a pagan.

Anyway, here’s my list. No surprise, it’s heavy on fiction.

The 10 Books That Have Most Influenced Me, and Because I Get Carried Away, It's More Like 15

The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I read this early in high school, then I read everything he had written that was available. And then came volume 1 of the Gulag Archipelago in 1973, and you can trace a direct line from its publication to the collapse of the Soviet Union less than 20 years later.

The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor, edited by Sally Fitzgerald. When she was asked why Southern authors always seemed to write about freaks, she said it was because Southern authors were still able to recognize one. That comment alone endeared her writing to me. These letters are gems.

The War of the End of the World, by Mario Vargas Llosa. If there is any writer who deserves the Nobel Prize for literature, it’s Peruvian-born Mario Varga Llosa. But he’ll never get it, because he long ago turned his back on radical leftist politics, very uncool by Nobel Prize committee standards. (I’d also place The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes of Mexico in the same category of “unbelievably talented Spanish-speaking writers who probably won’t get the Nobel Prize because their politics is wrong.”)

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. You can’t grow up in the South without being influenced by Faulkner. You just can’t. You can’t grow up anywhere in the United States and not be influenced by him, even if you don’t know it. And he’s been dead for almost 50 years.

Dickens by Peter Ackroyd. It’s the biography to end all biographies, and it’s 1,083 pages, not including notes and index. It’s heavy enough to be a weapon. (Amazon says it is currently unavailable, even through Amazon's used bookstore network.)

Augustine of Hippo by Peter Brown. My first entry in the “I’m not a total pagan contest.” Brown recreates the life and world of St. Augustine, and I felt like I was there in the room in Hippo when he was dying, the town under seige by barbarians invading from Europe. An extraordinary work.

They Stand Together: The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914-1963), edited by Walter Hooper. Greeves was C.S. Lewis’s friend from childhood, and Lewis could say things to Greeves that he couldn’t say to anyone else.

The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. III: Tertullian. My second entry in the “I’m not a total pagan contest.” Tertullian was a lawyer (I forgive him for that) who is generally considered the father of Latin Christianity. He wrote a lot of apologetics at a time when it wasn’t exactly cool to be a Christian (roughly 200 A.D.). He also ended up with some air of disrepute for deviating from standard orthodoxy, although it’s not clear exactly what that deviation was. But his passion comes pouring though, even in translation.

The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. I read this not long after I became a believer. Lewis is a great favorite of Christians, partially (at least) because he adds intellectual weight (see, we’re not all blathering yahoos). I first read it because people told me I should. But then I learned that Screwtape started out as radio addresses during World War II, and so this little volume actually straddles two media forms – broadcast and print. It was right up my communications alley.

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. Someone once said you should read Don Quixote three times in your life – when you’re young, middle-aged and old. I first read it my senior year in high school, and I read the unabridged version. I loved it. I next read it in my early 40s, during a vacation week we spent at Orange Beach in Alabama. I haven’t read it a third time, because I’m waiting to get old.

The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien. I read the pirated versions in college, and then my first year after graduation bought the authorized versions and read them as well. I reread all four right before the first movie came out in 2001. Quite simply, they are likely the greatest works of imagination of the 20th century.

So those are my 10, er, 15. What are yours?