What is Context?

Context means “the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.”  These events, statements, and ideas are often written down and we know of them by reading about them.

But also, the older a text is, the more and more invisible is its context.

There are many different types of context.  The most common include:

1. Author’s Purpose (Why was this text written?)
2. Author’s Background (Who is the author? What do they do for a living? Are they trustworthy?  Here though we have to be careful because we need to pay attention to their argument before we dismiss it based on who they are)
3. Audience (Who were they?What were they like?)
4. Vocabulary (Does the author use any technical words or uses what we think are everyday words in a special way?)
5. Text Structure (What type of text is this? Is it a letter? Is it a book? Is it a story?)
6. Historical Context (What was going on at the time and place where this text was written?)
7. Cultural Context (What type of ideas were out there when this text was written?)

But wait!  Some of you may be thinking that context is nothing more than reading a passage and the part that comes before it and the part that comes after it.  But that’s not quite correct.  Context is much more complex than that.

A way to think about context is that you are in a dark room, and you are given one very weak light to try to reveal some big object in the middle of the room.  It reveals something about the object, but not enough so you can figure out what it is.  Then you are given several other lights, let’s say now you have a total of seven lights (one for each type of context listed above).  While they were weak by themselves, now they have revealed the object in the middle of the room.

Context is absolutely essential if we ever hope to read and understand the Bible and draw out from it as much as possible.  Yet, we do not always identify contexts when we read the Bible, and if we don’t we may have one or two dim lights trying to illuminate a dark object in the middle of the room.  We will get something about it, but we will not be able to adequately know what that object is.

Why Didn’t I Learn About This? 

Some of you are thinking, “Nobody ever taught this when I was in school.”  And possibly you were a high performing student too.  I believe you.

The reason for all this is that reading instruction has heavily emphasized comprehension only, and for that reason, there is no encouragement for students to read older texts, ones far removed from their time.

Think about it.  How many books did you read that were older than 100 years old while you were in school?  How many were not novels?  For the most part, the context of the books you read is essentially the same as the one you live in.

Now, how many books did you read that were less than 20 years old?  The context is almost the same.  Although, I found out that since the digital revolution of the 1990s, the context between then and now is indeed different.  To illustrate the point, last year (2018) I was checking one of my students’ reading ability, so I had that student read out loud to me.  She was reading a suspenseful short novel that was written in 1995.  In one scene, one of the characters takes out a camera, and has to replace the film quickly in order to take pictures of a warehouse where criminal activity is going on.  At this point, she stopped reading and had no idea what film was and why the character had to replace it in their camera.  I then literally had to explain to my student the historical context of the 1990s in order for her to understand what was going on in this scene.  After explanation, she understood, and she not only understood, but she realized how fast the character had to act before losing the chance to photograph the condemning evidence against the other character.  She had every other piece of context, but this one was enough to stop all comprehension and dissolve all feeling of suspense.  Now, there was one very positive thing that this student did: she identified the problem, which was she did not know what film was and its usage in cameras.  Most of the time, we do not cleanly identify problems in misunderstanding.

Now think about the Bible and how we are not 20 years apart from its writing like the book my student was reading, but we are 20 centuries since the last book was written in it.  Could it be that there is some context that we are missing that may possibly lead us to misunderstand the books?  Could it also be that we will not even be aware that we do not know the context?

There is good news in all this. For the grand majority of the time, we can determine the 7 types of context I listed above for the books in the Bible, but before getting into that, we need to see how big of a problem this is for all of us Christians.

What is the state of reading proficiency in the United States?

To begin with, readers can be classified into four categories:

1. Below Basic
2. Basic
3. Intermediate
4. Proficient

The average American adult (about 73%) reads at a sixth-grade reading level.  To word it another way, this means that the average American reads at Basic to early Intermediate skill.  The characteristics of this type of reader is that he or she:

1. Can understand information in short, everyday type written material.
2. Understand basic explanations in pamphlets, guides, or instruction manuals.
3. They can summarize
4. And they can possibly make simple inferences

Now, what characterizes a proficient reader?

A Proficient Reader can:

1. Read lengthy, complex, abstract prose texts.
2. Synthesize (put together) information across many different sources (this is absolutely necessary for determining context and using it to understand what you are reading)
3. Make complex inferences
4. Compare viewpoints

Only about 13% of adults are characterized as Proficient Readers.

But can’t we read without using those 7 types of context?

Some of you may be wondering about all this and may be suspicious of what I am saying.  You are thinking that you have always read books (you are probably thinking novels or self-help books and probably those written within the past 100 years) and you have never had to build an understanding of those 7 types of context beforehand.

You are right.  But it’s because the context of those books is your context, so there is no need for you to consciously build an understanding of context and use it.  You already have it.

The emphasis in reading education in the past 40 years has moved away from focusing on the critical reading, analyzing, and developing as a person by reading the classics of Western civilization to simply comprehension of texts, even those written very recently.

This emphasis on comprehension has taken away the ability of students to read anything they want, and now they can only read those things that are of a fairly recent date.

This is also dangerous because it gives us an extremely false confidence that we can read and understand the Bible, and if we find something off, then it cannot be us, but it must be the Bible.  And in reality, what is off is us, and our lack of having the right contexts to use in order to read and understand the Bible.

This is dangerous in two ways. The first is that anyone who decides he or she wants to start a Bible study does so and leads it and he or she is not equipped (although they think and fully believe they are), and they start misinterpreting the Bible royally.  This can lead to division in churches and indeed the founding of new churches, maybe even new denominations.

The second way this is dangerous is that someone who wants to read the Bible (either due to genuine interest or due to doubts) will not understand the central message of the books of the Bible and will leave either not believing or confirmed in anti-Christian sentiment.  St. Augustine is an example of this.  The man left Christianity when he decided to read the Bible in his late schooling and the beginning of his higher education, and he was ill-equipped (even though he was highly educated), and this led him down the road to heretical sects and finally to full blown skepticism.  Years later, when he was in his early 30s, did he finally begin to learn the right context for reading the Bible from St. Ambrose, the bishop of Milan.  The result was a transformed life (and one that continues to transform others) and one of the greatest Christian writers of all time.  He describes this in his autobiography, The Confessions, and he actually reflects on the act of reading and what it means.

Further, in his book On Christian Teaching, he goes in depth about how to read and understand the Bible, and he does so with such piercing insight that is centuries ahead of his time and still almost fully applicable to today.  He detects many of these different types of context listed above including historical and cultural context and explains how to use them in reading and understanding the Bible.  He went from skeptic in the Bible to a master teacher for others on how to read, understand, and live the message of the Bible.

Example of Context Building

The way we solve the problem of context is by asking the questions that give us the answers to the 7 types of context above.  If you scroll back up above, you’ll see that I have questions in parentheses next to each type of context.  For the most part, these questions can be answered for the books of the Bible, some much easier than others.  But answering these questions requires labor.  For example, it is not readily evident to a high schooler reading the Bible that each of the Psalms has its own context and it is not to be read as a book but as a set of poems on similar topics (this is Text Structure).  Also, it is not readily evident to that high schooler that the Psalms’ immediate context was used as praises in the Temple. (This answers on a basic level the questions of Author’s Purpose, Audience, Historical and Cultural Context).

Now let’s try building context to understand some things in The Epistle to the Colossians and The Gospel of John.

What is Love?

There are several words for love in the Greek language.  Two of the most common are philia and agape.

Philia

Philia can be translated as friendship.  It is a love that loves because of something.  There is some type of condition on which this love is based.  A friend is someone who has helped me, and I have helped them.  A friend is someone who shows me how to play a video game, and then grabs the other controller and plays with me, meets me occasionally, and shares common experiences with me.

Agape

Agape on the other hand is a love that does not love becauseof anything but simply loves without any type of condition.  This may seem like a strange concept to us moderns, but when we actually think about it, agape is necessary to human life and flourishing.

Everything philia is, agape is too, but agape has more characteristics than philia and that is where the difference begins.For example, agape is the type of love that considers a person’s potential and who they could be and not simply who they are now.  Agape sees the positives in the midst of all the negatives and works to develop those positives.  Agape is willing to put up with all the chaos of broken people in the hope of that person changing for the better.  Agape often does succeed in transforming people for the better.  Indeed, when the most hopeless of people have transformed for the better beyond what anyone was able to imagine, it is usually due to someone who showed them agape.

Las lágrimas de San Pedro (The Tears of Saint Peter)

 by José de Ribera, 17th Century

Agape, in a way, is the type of love that a good parent has for his or her child.  The child did not have to come to be, yet the parents chose to have the child.  The parents did not have to keep the child, yet they kept the child.  The parents suffer in the first several years of a child’s life.  They certainly do not love cleaning up after the child and waking up in the middle of the night on the child’s cries, but they love the child because they know who the child can become, what their potential is, and they work to see the potential become reality.  This type of agape that a parent shows is a love that gives more to another person than the other person can ever give back.

Agape is also the type of love that an effective teacher has for his or her students. The students can come in with horrible behavioral problems, rotten attitudes, serious personality issues, and in the end the teacher sees them for who they can become even in the midst of all the chaos and the negatives.  They will see the positives in that child and foster them until they overshadow the negatives, and the negatives will disappear because a new pattern of life will take hold in the child due to their education and being able to do the tasks that were formerly impossible to do.

The relationship between these two types of love, philia and agape, is dramatically portrayed at the end of the Gospel of John, although it is not readily apparent to we who read the Bible in translation.

The Ending of the Gospel of John: The Confession of Peter

The Gospel of John ends with a post-Resurrection appearance of our Lord Jesus Christ.  He has already appeared a few times to the Apostles after the Resurrection, and the Apostles seem to have returned to their occupations.

Seven of the Apostles are fishing with the Apostle Peter in the lead.  They go fishing at night because at night the fish would not have seen the boat above them. The whole night they do not catch anything.

In the morning, a man standing on the shore tells them to cast their nets on the right side of the boat, so they do.  At this point there is nothing to lose; maybe they will finally catch something.  They end up catching so many fish that the net fills up.

The Apostles did not know who was telling them this because He was on the shore a little far from them (about 300 feet).  This probably triggered the memory of an earlier instance where our Lord Jesus guided them to such a catch, so the Apostle John says to the Apostle Peter, “It is the Lord.”

Peter dives out of the boat and swims to shore. When the rest of the Apostles arrive, they find our Lord waiting for them on the beach and having made a breakfast of bread and fish.  They present Him with some of the fish from the catch and sit down to breakfast with Him.

Then, our Lord asks Peter something three times if he loves Him.

This is where things get very insightful, but not to us who read the Scriptures only in translation.

The first time Jesus asks the question, he uses the word agape, but Peter answers with philia.

The second time, Jesus asks the same question, and Peter answers the same.

But the third time Jesus changes his own question to use the word philia, but Peter becomes grieved because it is like Jesus is coming down to His level, and almost wondering whether Peter has even that type of love for Him.

Possibly the thought of the denial came up to Peter’s mind.  Our Lord Jesus had even looked Peter in the eyes right after he had denied Him a third time in front of the chiefs of the Jews during the trial.  This added to the suffering of our Lord Jesus because even His closest disciples, His friends had deserted Him.  This friend had even denied being part of our Lord Jesus’s group.  Because of this our Lord was not only alone at His trial, but He also felt all alone.

Peter answers and tells Him, “You know all things. You know I love (philia) you.

Interestingly enough after this, Jesus tells Peter a prophecy about how Peter will die.  The language is similar to the language Jesus used about His own death in the crucifixion. Since the Apostle John had written his Gospel after the death of Peter, he called to mind our Lord’s prophecy about Peter’s crucifixion when writing his Gospel.

The idea behind this prophecy goes back to something Jesus said during His last night with His disciples, and that was “Greater love (agape) had no one than this, that he give his life for his friends” (John 15:13).  Jesus was pointing out that Peter had not gotten to this point yet, but encouraged him that someday he would.  It would even be in the likeness of Jesus’s own death, Peter’s friend.

He ends by telling Peter, “Come, follow Me.” This is exactly the same as what He told Peter the first time He met him.  Our Lord has restored Peter back to the very beginning.

This story is a story of Confession; it might slip the attention of Western readers, but what has just went on here is a confession.

What is Confession?

It is interesting that this is the story that John decides to end with because in a way it is a call to every Christian to follow along.  We know from other Gospels that this is not the last time that Jesus appeared to the Apostles, and John never indicates it was.  Rather, this is where John has chosen to end his Gospel with a view to his audience.  The audience of John’s Gospel were Christians of the late 1^stand early 2^ndgeneration.  They had also been challenged by Gnostic heretics who denied the humanity of Christ. At this point, there were churches all over the Roman Empire, and John was the bishop of several in Asia Minor. He chose to end his Gospel to invite Christians to follow Jesus anew.

We all fall short, and we often do not love Christ with agape, but we need to confess that, repent, and answer His call to get up and follow Him again.  If we let the love of Christ reign in our hearts, then our actions will follow suit, and if they do, then our end will be in agape for Him and for each other.

In the early Church, Christians were most often called “the disciples” or “the brethren.”  The seal of discipleship in the early Church was Confession.  The greatest examples of Christians in the early church had confessors (that is, those whom they confessed to and received guidance from).  For example, Ignatius of Antioch and Polycarp of Smyrna were the disciples of the Apostle John; Irenaeus of Lyons was the disciple of Polycarp of Smyrna.  Augustine of Hippo was the disciple of Ambrose of Milan. Macrina the Elder was the disciple of Gregory Thaumaturgus.  Then her son Basil the Elder learned from her, and in turn he taught his daughter, Macrina the Younger, and Macrina taught her brothers Basil and Gregory.  The examples from early Christianity and indeed until today are too much to count.

This type of spirituality made the earliest Christians strong.  There is not only a continuity with the Sacraments of the Church, but also in the teachings of the church, and both are embodied in individuals we see and deal with, so the flame of the Spirit of Christ continues being passed down across the generations.

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“Don’t talk politics and religion,” goes the old saying.  For some, especially in professional workplaces, this has become a guiding principle.

Yet, the two most important things that define our life are our faith and politics.  We should wonder why the two most important areas of life are considered unopen to discussion.

The Purpose of Government

Throughout recorded history, the purpose of government has been to protect and provide for the general welfare of the people living within a specific area.

Government was not there to guide individuals on how to live their lives.  That was the role of religion.  Government was not there to give meaning to people’s lives, but it was there to allow people the opportunity to live meaningful lives.  There is a difference between giving and allowing.

Yet, today both liberalism and conservatism in the United States are guilty of trying to guide individuals on how to live their lives. The two parties have taken the place of religions.  This is in turn goes back to the principle of the worship of the will (which I wrote about recently).

The Origins of Modern Western Democracy 

All democracies in the West are Republican Democracies meaning that the citizens of a state vote for representatives whom they believe will represent their values and ideals and who will vote similarly to how they would if they were in that position.

This type of government arose gradually in the West when the nobles from different countries in Europe (who owned most of the land along with the King) began demanding the right to have a say in how their country was governed.  Their argument was: they had their land and their wealth at stake, so they should have a role in governing to protect their land and wealth.

Eventually, this transformed to include the new phenomenon of the middle class which while not being nobility, had considerable possessions including wealth and some land.  So, the argument the nobles used could extend to them as well because they had possessions at stake.

Democratic governing also took one more turn after the period called the Enlightenment.  Democracies in the West were built on the vision to actualize one’s own will, which in turn comes from the presupposition of the worship of the will. It is not surprising that working with that presupposition in conjunction with the collapse of values in the West leads to the chaos we see today.

The Necessary Conditions for Democracy

Democracy is not a self-evident form of government. In fact, the type of democracy we now have is a very late arrival in the history of governments because in order for democracies to exist, the people under its form of government should largely share the same faith, values, ideas, have a secure food supply, and actively support the way they live by their own money and means.

The earliest form of any recognizable democracy first arose in city-states like Athens which had a population of about 250,000 to 300,000 people in the late 5^thcentury B.C.  Half of that population was citizens with about 30,000 eligible people to vote.  The reason it was able to become democratic is because it was on a small scale (one city) and thus people had the same background when it came to values and ideas, they had a secure food supply due to trade, and the people worked to support their way of life.  Even then, it was highly unstable.  In the course of about 100 years, the government changed from democracy to a tyrannous oligarchy very quickly before going to back to democracy then being conquered by Alexander the Great in the late 4^thcentury B.C.

Because faith, values, ideas, a secure food supply, and active working to support one’s way of life are essential to democracies this is why in countries which have too many belief systems, ideas, and an insecure food supply are not able to sustain democracies but become dictatorships such as many countries in the Middle East and Africa.

The Fall of Democracy

No group of people can elect leaders who are better than them.  This is due to the fact that they are elected by voters.  The leaders will necessarily reflect the image of the voters.  Some may point out that in the past we had good leaders, but if past leaders appeared to be good, that was because they were a reflection of the values and ideals of the people who chose them at the time.

Further, if people have no stake in society, which is becoming more and more common, why are they worried about the vote?  It is actually because the government has become the guide of life that provides people with meaning.  They seek the government for this, but this cannot be given by the government.

In addition, the process of politics (even in the discussions of lay people) has been reduced to nothing more than name-calling and the portrayal of “the other side” as dangerous (either due to evil or to stupidity).  No democracy, no nation can be sustained in this way.  If these are the continual conditions of the political process in a country, then it is only a matter of time before the system of government collapses. And why?  Because it is a reflection of the people who are proceeding this way, and they are deeply divided. If a “house divided against itself will not stand,”so what about if the country is deeply divided against itself?

The process of politics ends up becoming fan clubs and hero-worship.  This is usually done by talking about how stupid or evil the other side is.  No doubt, some politicians are evil, and some are unwise, but not all, and this way of speaking is not a solution to any problem in society nor is it Christian.  It only leads to more division.

I myself have seen both liberals and conservatives get so angry if they perceive someone saying something about their candidate. With some, they begin having labored breathing; with others they sweat.  It usually turns into rudeness and name-calling.  Some even stop talking to others including friends or family members if they perceive they are of a different political tendency.  If one is willing to sacrifice his or her real relationships for their candidate, then this is worship.

On the other hand, it is the genius, rather, the evidence of the otherworldliness of Christianity that it makes the love of your fellow human being a main sign of whether you love God; this is the point of our Lord Jesus’s response when asked what was the greatest commandment that He responded with two: 1. To love God and 2. To love your neighbor.  The idea is that if you love God, you will keep His commandments, and since one of His commandments is to love your neighbor, then until this is done, the love of God is not yet perfected in you.  This is the theme in The Gospel of John 14-15 and a theme in the First Epistle of John among other places throughout the New Testament. In politics, it is a sign of your love for your government or political party that you hate those who belong to the other side.  Christianity transcends politics.

The proper way to talk politics is talking about the issues and the policies that are proposed or implemented to solve them.  I have a public speaking and debate group that meets after school once a week, and I am proud to say that one day they debated whether or not our current president has done good things for the country. I split them in half and assigned each group a side on the issue whether that was their personal opinion or not. Both sides produced the best arguments they could, but what got to me was not the arguments, but how no one got angry at the other side, no one made comments about others’ intentions in debating or accused them of stupidity or ignorance, and nobody felt hurt walking out. They looked at the issues and understood the underlying reasons. Those teenagers discussed politics better than most adults I know, and they left understanding a lot more about the complexity of politics, presidents, and the people who vote.  This led to a development in their personal characters and will serve them in the future when they vote if they continue with the same method.  If all were like them, we would have a much more peaceful country.

We also need to understand the limits of the law. Laws were designed to uphold morality, not to create morality.

The reality is (and this may be to the shock of many you who are reading this) if history has shown any patterns, then we can bet that no current governmental system we have will last forever.  But we can bet that the Christian faith will remain because the Christian faith transcends all nations and even languages. Governments do not transcend anything.

What Do You Value?

So, it’s time for you all to consider what you really value?  Where is our Lord Jesus and His Church in the hierarchy of your values?  Is He on the top of the list?  Is He in the middle of the list?  Is He at the end of the list?  What does He mean to you?  Who is He to you?  How seriously do you take His words?

Where is our Lord Jesus and His Church in the hierarchy of your values?  If He is not worth living and dying for, then you are not a follower of His at all.  It has been the pattern of Christianity throughout history to live and die for Christ even when the governments they were under threatened to make their lives miserable or to take their lives from them. This is the sole motivation for martyrdom: the value of Christ is above everything.

What does our Lord Jesus mean to you?  If He is nothing more than a name to hear on the weekends, then you are not following Him at all.

Who is He to you?  If He is not your Lord and Master, then you are not following Him at all.

How seriously do you take His words?  If you do not take His words as the standard by which you live your life, then you have not understood Him at all.  And if not, then you are not following Him at all.

If His words do not bear on your thinking at all when you go to vote, then you are not following Him at all.  Let me explain further what this last point means.

The Religionization of Politics 

At last we arrive to the heart of the issue before us. The reason politics has become so heated is because political parties have become religions.  This is due to the fact that countries are becoming increasingly secular, that is more atheistic.  Yet, humans are meaning-seeking creatures, so they have given the role of religion to government.  It has now become the guide on how individuals must live their lives.  This is true whether one is liberal or whether one is conservative.  Some conservatives may wonder how conservatism into this category, but that will become apparent below.

What we have now is a society dominated by two warring religious factions, and it has been designed to be this way because of party systems.  The fact that most Democrats have the same position on various issues and most Republicans have the same position on various issues has turned political positions into dogmatic ones.  The Democratic Party has dogmas that must be abided by; the Republican Party does too.

When someone aligns with a party, this is the problem.  An individual should be free to hold different opinions about different issues. Parties should be the way we lean, but not completely describe an individual.  If a person’s positions can be fully (or near fully) defined by a party, then the party has now taken the place of a religious group.

The irony is that these days people of faith often do not always agree with everything their religions teach, but they do often agree with everything their political party says.  Do you see the problem?  The roles of government and religion have been inverted.

If one steers away from the dogmas of a party or the positions of its most recognizable people, then that person is a heretic.  For example, many Democrats cannot understand Senator Joe Manchin, a Democratic senator from West Virginia who voted for Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, as seen in the opening lines of this article, “In bastions of blue in New York and California, I hear variations on this question: ‘Why did Joe Manchin, a Democrat, vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court?’ The question comes through pulsating necks and locked jaws, asked in tones of incredulity and shock.”  The people cannot process how he can do so and still be a Democrat because they assume (whether they know it or not) that a person who has taken the label agrees with all the positions of the party on various issues.

No wonder there is so much strife; it is two very imperfect religions reflecting the images of its voters and constituents warring against each other.  Both liberals and conservatives are entrenched in the religionization of politics.

Liberals always present themselves as being progressives, but the question that they must ask themselves is “What are we progressing toward?”  One cannot progress toward anything without first having a goal in mind.  If the answer to that question is “Progress is the government should give me the ability to get what I want.”  Then two further questions must be asked and those are “Is what I want good?” and “Why is it good?”

Conservatives always present themselves as conserving something, but the question they must ask themselves is “What are we conserving?” Two further questions should be, “Is what we are conserving good?” and “Should it be conserved?”

There is an alarming tendency that I see especially among Evangelical Christians, but it also creeps in to Orthodox Christian Churches, and that is to become countercultural and even reject the culture of the societies they live in.  Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying to accept the culture as a whole.  Indeed, many things need to be rejected from modern Western culture such as the insistence on the worship of the will that characterizes Western thinking and affects the behavior of Westerners all the way from recreational drug usage to abortion. It is all related to the worship of the will, and this must be rejected.

Rather, I am talking about the adiaphora of Western culture. Adiaphora are things that are morally neutral in themselves.  These include the cinema, nonfiction and fiction books, and music.  I have met seemingly devout Christians (and young adults too) who have no clue about the culture around them.  They do not know anything about trends in cinema such as superhero movies or franchises, they do not know about famous book series, and they do not know currently popular musicians.  (On the flip side, I once met an older Orthodox Christian nun at an academic conference who knew what Pokemon Go was right after the game was released; she didn’t play it though).

But why are some Christian young adults so often seemingly unware?  They think this way they are keeping themselves pure from the world, but they are confusing isolation with purity.  Purity is a choice of living by rejecting certain aspects of the world; isolation is rejecting the entire environment.  Purity reflects the spiritual health of an individual; isolation does not.  To use an analogy, purity is like a person having a strong immune system, and for that reason rarely gets sick; it is the result of living in a community (of being in an environment).  The environment challenged and strengthened the immune system.  It revealed what was there.  But on the other hand, if one is isolated, then he or she can never get sick, but that does not tell us whether his or her immune system is strong or not. Purity is a mindset and the actions that come from that mindset.  This is why the Apostle Paul said, “To the pure all things are pure, but to those who are defiled and unbelieving nothing is pure; but even their mind and conscience are defiled” (Titus 1:15).

The Early Christians: Cultural Engagement

If we go back to the past and see how Christians viewed culture and whether they interacted with their surrounding culture, we find a different attitude than today’s Christians.

Apostle Paul Preaching on the Ruins 

by Giovanni Paolo Panini, 1744

The Early Church Fathers had success because they were often trained in the cultural arts of their time. They had understood astronomy, music, literary composition, poetry, and the other fields of knowledge that contribute to art, and they used these arts in their prayers, preaching, and writings.

In the world of Late Antiquity, which was the world of the Early Church, a person’s literary style was praised on whether it imitated other classical writings while at the same time being original.  For example, St. Ambrose of Milan styled his book On the Duties of the Clergy (De Officiis) after the Roman statesman Cicero’s books On Duties (De Officiis) and On Friendship.

St. Gregory of Nyssa wrote his dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection reminiscent in style of the dialogue titled Phaedo by Plato covering the last day of his teacher Socrates.  Even the book Phaedo circulated under the title On the Soul in the ancient world.

St. Augustine in his autobiography of The Confessions imitates the composition style of the Metamorphoses (known in modern times as The Golden Ass) of Apuleius.  St. Augustine’s book is godly and pure; the Metamorphoses is everything but godly and pure.

The early Christians imitated style, not content, and thus they preached Christianity to the educated and literate masses, and at the same time they shifted the focus of literature from structure to content moving the hearts of the Greeks and Romans to the higher things of life and of God.

But something must be noted as well.  By imitating style and producing high quality Christian spiritual content, these early Christian writers showed that they accepted the good things of culture and rejected the bad things.

Modern Christians: Cultural Monasticism

Western Christians often view monks as those who escape from the world.  To make a long story short, this is a misunderstanding, but I will not address it here.  However, if we follow that definition, the irony is that Western Christians have become cultural monks.  They have escaped from participating in the culture they live in, so while they still live in their societies, they are detached; they either reject everything or more often they accept everything (thus becoming hypocrites), but it’s rare when you find that intelligent Christian who sifts and sorts and truly engages with the culture around them accepting the good things and clearly rejecting the bad things without compromising his or her Christian foundation.

The Danger of Parody: Preparation for Destruction

Current popular Christian cultural works seem to be a parody of culture, and Christians themselves are not aware of it.

This video continues the discussion on St. Athanasius’s book On the Incarnation with Thilo Young, a Reader in the Orthodox Church, on an episode of Thilo’s Theology Service.

In this video, we delve into On the Incarnation and consider the meaning of the Incarnation and how it transforms our lives. We discuss the book up until St. Athanasius’s treatment of the Resurrection.

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I recently discussed the context for the book On the Incarnation by St. Athanasius with Thilo Young on an episode of Thilo’s Theology Service.

Most Orthodox readers are not aware that On the Incarnation is actually PART 2 of a two-part work written on the Logos (which is the Word of God identified as Christ before the Incarnation).

In this video, we discuss the first book in the two-part work, which is in Latin titled Contra Gentes (which can be variously translated as Against the Heathen, Against the Pagans, or Against the Gentiles).  We discuss the historical, cultural, and philosophical background that underlies the two parts.  We also discuss the specific points St. Athanasius made and how he explains a system of Christian theology in this book.  This book, in turn, forms the context for understanding the second part of the work which is the celebrated On the Incarnation.  On the Incarnation will be discussed in the next episode.

If you found benefit from this blog entry, click here to like my Facebook page here OR sign up to my email list to receive my latest blog entries every week in your inboxes, and you will also receive my free eBook The Way of Christ.  Click here to sign up.

In the Scriptures, there is a recurring theme of humans doing what they will detached from God, and when they do, it ends in disaster.  It is the unifying idea in the Book of Judges.  In the Book of Judges is summarized in the statement, “everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 17:6; 21:25 NKJV).

This idea can be termed “worship of the will.”  There is actually one instance where this phrase occurs in the New Testament.  In Colossians 2:23, when speaking about the false teachers [who were teachers of Gnosticism, which was a blend of Platonism and Christianity], the Apostle Paul wrote, “These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-imposed piety, humility, and severe treatment of the body, but they are of no value in checking self-indulgence” (NRSV).

The Greek word which is translated as “self-imposed piety” in that verse is ethelothreskeia.  It means worship that is prescribed by one’s will thus not being objective.  That pattern of will-worship continues today, but unlike then, it has become the defining factor of Western thinking and behavior.

Photo by Rosemary Ketchum

Worship of the Will

Today, this bizarre idea has led to the average Western person thinking that the road to the most happiness is the one where we do whatever we feel like doing.

I remember I saw someone on television say something to the effect: “I can say whatever I want whenever I want to whomever I want.”  For the most part, this person was only applying the idea of the Worship of the Will, even though to an extreme degree.

While some may feel disgusted at what he said, he is only following the predominant principle which has come to define Western thinking and behavior.

What is interesting about this principle is that all past experience even up to the furthest reaches of history has shown us that this way of thinking DOES NOT work, and it does not work anywhere for that matter.

Imagine if at work I showed up when I wanted to, not when I had to.  That would not lead to the most happiness but to total loss.  If I were a student, and I didn’t show up to school, even if they didn’t impose truancy laws, it would still lead to my loss because I will not have a learned a thing, and today’s world increasingly requires all people to be educated.

Self-Mastery

On the other hand, Christianity promotes a virtue which can be seen as the polar opposite of the Worship of the Will, and that virtue is self-mastery.

In the famous verse about the fruit of the Spirit it lists this virtue, “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things” (Galatians 5:22-23 NRSV).

The word for self-controlin this verse is enkrateia.  Enkrateiadoes not mean self-control in the way most of us would understand it today.  This can be illustrated from a typical scenario.  Let’s pretend we are with someone, and that someone says something very offensive and we hold ourselves from cussing him out or hitting him.  We view that as self-control, but that is not what is meant by the word enkrateia.

The word enrkateia was highly developed among the Greco-Roman world at the time the Apostle Paul was writing.  It was seen as one having full power over himself or herself so that they could successfully be virtuous consistently.  It was the ability to choose the good and refuse the bad.  It was seen as the height of virtue and the source of all other virtues.  In Plato’s Republic, Plato lays out how one can achieve this self-mastery, and that is by using one’s mind to control one’s instincts and urges so that they are ordered by the rational mind and not the mind ruled by the instincts and urges.

We know how we ought to think and behave as Christians.  That is understood with our minds.  Plato further explained that this can only be built by habit, and then habit becomes our nature.  We need to get into the habit of bringing to mind what our faith teaches on certain behaviors like peacemaking, modesty, and goodness when we are faced in situations where we must make decisions so that the teachings of Christ and the Church would come up like a light in front of us when we are faced with these decisions and that we would use that light to choose rightly in order to glorify the Lord. Otherwise, we will allow our instincts and urges to rule us; simply, we will do what we feel like doing even if it should not be done.

There are three examples of how the Worship of the Will has changed our society (for the worse).

Examples of the Worship of the Will 

Cohabitation:

I once asked someone who was cohabiting why they did so.  This person had previously been married.  That person answered that they cohabited because “I want to be with someone because I want to be with them, not because I have to be with them.”  So I wondered to myself, why did people get married then?  It is because they wanted to be with someone, not because they had to be.  So, I realized that the person had no justification for cohabiting other than this is what they wanted.

It made me think more about the subject, and of course I realized that money had played a large factor for both that person and they person they were living with.

On the other hand, I have heard from others who cohabited that they did so to see if they were compatible before marriage.  They said it would allow them to know the other person and learn how to deal with problems.  Such ideas were seductive because of their potential to help a couple avoid issues in the future.

So, I decided to read the academic literature on the phenomenon.

Even though the sources I read were not written within the framework of the Christian tradition, as I read, I found Christian teachings about love and marriage and the blessings that flow from them being confirmed.

Click here for a brief articlelinking to studies if you are interested in a starting point to read about this phenomenon.

In this above article, it summarizes research by Scott Stanley and colleagues.  That research mentioned how people in relationships stay together for one out of two reasons: love or cost.

Those who stay together because of love are doing so out of their own freedom; nothing is constraining them to stay together.  But those who stay together because of cost are doing so because they are constrained; they would lose money (such as on increased rent if one becomes single). Even though they may not have started cohabiting solely because of costs, those who cohabit because of cost, (which is the majority of those who cohabit) if they get married, have more domestic problems, violence, strife, and the marriages often end up in divorce compared to those who did not cohabit before they married.  On the other hand, those who spent the whole of their relationship before marriage without cohabiting, had less of these problems after marriage on average.

When we step back and view this phenomenon from the Christian worldview about purity before marriage, it becomes clear that those Christians who are dating and then engaged for a long time without cohabitation are together freely without obligation, which is true love.  When they marry, it is also not because of obligation.  This is because they made the decision to marry after a long time being together.  On the other hand, when a couple begins cohabiting two months after dating, there is no confirmation that they truly love each other but they are reaping benefits (economic and other) that best come after people have chosen to freely love someone else with the purpose of marriage in mind.

It is amazing that when one takes this into consideration that what people thought was freedom (namely the Worship of the Will and its application in cohabitation) is nothing more than forcing yourself into situations which it would be undesirable and costly to get out of.  But those Christians who preserve themselves pure before marriage have shown that they love each other freely with no constraint other than true love.

Further, when people cohabit before marriage, then what’s the point of getting married?  What is different?  The essence and quality of marriage is destroyed by cohabitation. All it becomes is an extension of cohabitation, and cohabitation is nothing more than a parody of marriage. It is a chimera dressed up in appealing clothing.  The true commitments and challenges of marriage are not there; it is a limbo state between being single and being married.  It appears good at the beginning but the disasters that come from it are delayed.

Marriage, on the other hand, is sanctification and transformation.  One’s life is now set apart from what it was before.  Life has changed abruptly, but it was intended through the courtship of the man and woman who got married.  Life is not meant to continue as it was before the two got married in the same way that once a person becomes a Christian, his or her life no longer resembles the life he or she lived before.  Marriage is an image of repentance, conversion, and sanctification. This is so because the man is a symbol of Christ, and the woman is a symbol of the Church. And just like in order for Christ to save humanity, He became human, He is no longer only God, but now also Man.  Also, the woman is like humanity which has rejected the ways of the world to become the Bride of Christ.  The woman has left her former life to be joined to her bridegroom.

We live in a time that has seen words be redefined and lose their traditional meanings to take on newer meanings that are really nothing more than a parody.  While we may not give this much thought, it is actually of the utmost importance when it comes to preaching, understanding, and living the Christian faith.

This is because words are not only words, but they create concepts and frameworks of thinking (see the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis).  For example, when one believes that faith, is for example, nothing more than belief with zero evidence, and this person is a thinker, then it is highly unlikely when one hears that faith in Jesus is what God wants from us, that this person will even give Christianity serious thought.  And to be honest, this is a good thing because faith is NOT belief with zero evidence, and this is not its definition in the New Testament or indeed in early Christian literature, thus when early Christians preached that God wanted us to have faith in Jesus, they meant something else.

Yet, those who preach to a person with this conceptual framework attached to the word “faith” that we are saved by faith, then they will have lost a person due to their lack of understanding of what came to mind when this person heard the word “faith.”

There are many more words than just “faith” that must be RE-redefined in order for people to build the correct conceptual framework on which to accept Christ and His teachings.

Photo from Pexels

Words That Have to Be RE-Redefined:

Faith

Faith is popularly understood as belief without evidence.  This is not the Biblical meaning of faith.

Why people ever redefined this word may be due to a confusion that faith is believing without seeing.  Believing without seeing is not the same thing as believing without evidence.  For example, if I have faith in someone’s reliability, it is not without evidence, but rather it is because of the evidence of my prior experience dealing with that person.

If I ask that person for help such as in giving me a ride to work one day when my car is in the shop, then my faith is well placed.  I do not know for sure if he will come, I do not see whether he has set his timer to wake him up early and to get ready to pick me up, but I do have faith in him, and my faith will be realized and rewarded.

Faith is also in this case a way of seeing.  It is seeing through believing.

That faith is not blind is shown by the fact that we have the Old Testament prophecies foretelling the Coming of Christ.  We have the New Testament recording the work of Christ and the Apostles.  We have the works of the early Christians showing that they achieved what Christ intended.  All this is evidence for our faith.  The prophecies were written hundreds of years before Christ, and they were fulfilled in Him.  The New Testament has been subjected to critical historical analysis, and the result is that its portrayal of Christ is defensible when subjected to historical methodology.  Further, the works of the early Christians following the Apostles shows that they followed and furthered the things that were handed to them by the Apostles.

All this is evidence, and faith is a response to that evidence.  It is trust and loyalty (faithfulness) to Christ and His Church.  To get this corrected understanding of faith into the minds of your hearers before preaching will result in a different response from your hearers.  It will at the very least begin a dialogue, and dialogue was the main way the Christian faith spread.  This is how, for example, the Apostle Paul carried out his ministry.

Love

Love is popularly understood as romance or a feeling of euphoria.  This is not the Christian definition of love.

Love is when your actions are directed for someone else’s benefit by your own choice and care. Thus, love is often sacrificial and is not always reciprocal although it often does become reciprocal and when it does become reciprocal, it leads to a massive growth of love and thus develops a solid community.

Marital Love

When the Apostle Paul defined martial love in his Epistle to the Ephesians, he directed the actions of both spouses toward the other, not toward themselves.  He said to the husbands to love their wives to the point of dying for them, and the women to love their husbands to the point of submitting to them.

What the Apostle Paul said was radical in the Greco-Roman world.  Women were nothing more than stewards of the house and the source of legitimate heirs for the men.  If the men wanted, they could go to the Temple of Diana in Ephesus and worship her by sleeping with one of the 1,000 temple priestesses who engaged in the worship of Diana by ritual prostitution.  To forbid fornication and adultery, to make marriage only one man and one woman, and to tell the men to love their wives to the point of dying for them meant that the husbands were to give their entire lives and energies to loving their only wives.  What the Apostle Paul did was to bring a marital love that had been unknown in the Greco-Roman world.  The source of this understanding of marital love was Christ Himself.

Further, to tell the woman to submit to the men was not telling them to be slaves to the men. The women were really nothing more than that already.  Rather, he was telling them that they are no longer stewards of the house and the sources of legitimate heirs.  To understand what this submitting was, we need to understand how people begin to follow Christ.  They do it as a free response to His love.  So for the women, this submitting to their husbands is a free act of the will, an attraction to their husbands that results from a response of love to the husbands who were now to love their only wives with their entire lives.

It was a giving of oneself fully to the spouse.  This was nothing less than transformation of what love and marriage meant in the ancient world.

Happiness

Happiness is popularly understood today as a feeling of euphoria and excitement.

Yet happiness is not a feeling of euphoria and excitement, but it is a feeling of contentedness.  I think the reason these two ideas became conflated is because those who are content occasionally feel euphoric and excited, so people have forgotten the right road to that feeling and have sought the feeling by itself.

Rather, happiness is a feeling that everything is as it should be.  It is especially evident when someone is silent and alone.  If they are happy, then they will feel content.  If they are not happy, then silence and solitude are the most fearful thing they can experience.  True happiness may not even lead to a smile, yet it is true happiness if one feels content.

Most people today in the West are not happy, and what they think is happiness is not happiness. They are hungry for happiness and try to find it through various means whether it is sex, drugs, or the various types of entertainment.

When we tell them that the Christian faith will give them happiness, they will not find it if they understand happiness as a feeling of euphoria and excitement.  Thus, they will see Christianity as not keeping its promises and actually lying to them.

Christianity is not an easy road; it is full of tribulations.  Euphoria and excitement are often out of reach for many Christians such as those living under persecution, extreme poverty, or hardships. Yet the Bible promises that those who follow Christ will be blessed (see Matthew 5).  What does this mean?  This word “blessed” in Greek, which is makarios, indeed refers to happiness, but it is an internal happiness that makes one content, which is not the same as constantly euphoric and excited.  It gives those who are blessed a clear and convicting realization of purpose in their lives; they see that everything is as it should be between themselves, others, and God.  They can sit alone in silence and feel peace.  It was this type of happiness that was in the hearts of the martyrs and confessors when they suffered for Christ.  This is what led them to sing in their prison cells awaiting their martyrdom.  This is what led them to worrying about their own congregations rather than themselves when being led to their martyrdoms like St. Ignatius of Antioch.  Nothing could bring them down when they knew that the Lord of the Universe had redeemed them and had an eternal life prepared for them with our Lord Jesus Christ.

Christians should be clear when explaining what the Christian understanding of happiness is before telling people who are hungry for euphoria and excitement that following Christ will make them “happy.”  I even saw a pastor one time compare the happiness of following Christ to the high that former drug addicts got when smoking crack.  He said it was even higher.  He is confusing what people who smoked crack felt before when they had no feeling of contentedness or purpose, and that they themselves confused this feeling with happiness.

Happiness is blessedness, and blessedness is having full confidence in Christ Himself.  That blessedness will lead to wonders in a person’s life, but constant euphoria and excitement are not those, although euphoria and excitement may come, but then it will be rooted in Christ Himself.

Incomprehensible Words:

Then there are words that are totally incomprehensible even if RE-redefined, rather they have to be exemplified by life.

For example, try describing light to a person who never saw or describing music to a person who never heard.  Good luck. It is impossible.  Light can only be described to those who have experienced light.  In the same way, the following words can only be comprehensible to those who have experienced something of the reality that these words describe, even if to a little degree.

Hope

I remember the first time I had a student cry tears of joy because she had seen for the first time in her life that her work had value and a long-term value at that, and that her work led to real progress, and the result was that after so many years of being in below grade-level classes, she was going to start high school on grade level. I remember as I saw her progress throughout the year.  She had built hope and now understood its effect in her life even though she may not have associated her experiences with the word “hope.”  But if one were to come to her and describe hope to her now, she would understand it.  She would immediately connect the description of hope with the experiences she had.  I remember that this power of hope that began to live in her extended to her other classes; it affected her growth everywhere else.

I have seen the power of hope in many students.  It changes the way they think, behave, and work.  It brings in a flood of purpose and expectation in their lives.  It leads to happiness (“blessedness” in the Christian definition above).

These experiences of hope create a foundation which preachers can build on in order to bring to them the Good News of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Part of why the Son of God became Man was to speak our language, not only in words, but in sharing our life and personal dealings.  This includes the experience of hope.  But before hope can begin, faith must be placed in one due to his or her trustworthiness as built through experience.

There is a name under which hope is approximated today: Growth Mindset.  Most of the idea of Growth Mindset is nothing more than the Christian idea of hope.  But regardless, this concept is not widely spread today.  We live in an extremely competitive world, and some parents and communities expect nothing less than perfection.  To be perfect means there is no room for growth; it is either I am perfect or I am not.  It leads to hopelessness, and that in turn leads to depression, which in turn causes people to shut down and be closed to spiritual reality.

This is why Christians should be actively engaged in helping their communities because by doing so, we are building experiences of hope, and when the experience of hope is built, the Gospel becomes comprehensible.

Disclaimer: This article describes the beliefs of mainstream atheism especially the type that is anti-Christian.

What is a Myth?

A myth is a story that explains something about the world.  It does this by personifying natural forces and objects in the world.  Thus myths, contrary to popular belief, actually made some type of objective observation about the world.  This is why you often find the same myths appearing across different cultures.  It is not a coincidence that myths surrounding sun gods for example or fertility goddesses are very similar whether they were told in Greece, Rome, Egypt, Babylon, or Persia.  This is because these are not simply fictitious stories invented by imaginative people, but they actually observed something about the world and expressed it in a pre-logical and pre-scientific way.

We modern people mistake ancient people for being fools who thought myths were historical truths. They often did, no doubt.  But it was a bit more complex than that.  First, there was no clear understanding of historywhen myths first began to be circulated. Also, with the birth of philosophy, humans began to understand that myths did not describe historical events but explained patterns of life and existence in allegory.  This was possible because at that time philosophers were able for the first time to clearly distinguish history from myth.

Myths often were incorporated into religions to support religions like those of ancient Greece.

Atheist Mythology

Modern Atheism, especially in its form of New Atheism, is no different than the ancient religions in that it incorporates mythology to explain and understand the world with the exception that unlike the ancients (who were pre-logical and pre-scientific and did not have a clear conception of history), atheists believe their myths are accurate history.

Examples of Atheist Mythology

Here are three examples of atheist mythology:

Myth # 1: Christianity stopped the progress of learning especially of science

This myth goes something like this: Christians stopped the progress of learning, especially of science. Christians even engaged in days-long book burnings on a regular basis so that they rid the West of classical learning and it was only rediscovered after some brave and courageous people went to Muslim Spain and translated classical texts from the Arabic which the Muslim thinkers of Spain preserved.

Further, they personify the combined forces of evil and ignorance in the church, and the combined forces of good and knowledge as science.  The church and science are personified like the ancient myths personified forces and objects of nature.

The truth is that this myth is nothing more than a mix of a lack of context, distortion of facts, and lies.

The reality is that the most influential ancient Christian archbishops not only encouraged classical learning in specific texts, but they exemplified it in their own preaching, writings, personal letters, and their lives.  The amount of allusions and references that the early Church writers make to classical learning is overwhelming.  If you pick up Henry Chadwick’s translation of Augustine’s Confessions, the footnotes in that specific translation highlight all the allusions and quotations that Augustine makes to the classical writers and philosophers.  It is overwhelming.  This is because Augustine’s Confessions are set in the framework of education and at many times the classroom. Augustine saw learning as a doorway to deeper spirituality.  To exemplify this, he wrote a book titled On Christian Instruction where he aimed to teach people how to read and understand the Bible instead of having them depend totally on those who understood it.  This was to allow Christians to be thinkers and understand(and not only know) why the Church interpreted the Scriptures in the way it did.  Augustine argued that to be able to do so, one had to be educated and have a background in the various branches of education such as languages, history, the sciences, mathematics, and philosophy.  He goes through how each one of these branches of knowledge contributes to understanding the Bible correctly.  Thus, learning is a doorway to a deeper understanding of the Bible, and a deeper understanding of the Bible with the right heart, leads to a deeper relationship with God.

Basil of Caesarea exhibited a command of Greek education that was admirable.  When I read his Hexaemeron, I found myself having to look up some of the things he was referring to when he spoke about nature and the scientific body of knowledge of his day.  For example, I had to look up the Nightingale’s song and sea silk in order to understand and fully appreciate what he was talking about. To make clear how educated he was: I have Google and a huge amount of resources at my fingertips in the 21^stcentury, and I am college-educated and have been trained in research, and I didn’t know some of the things he spoke about; he didn’t have Google, and he knew these things all those centuries ago.  That is the mark of a truly educated person who values lifelong learning.  Not only was he educated himself, but as part of his pastoral duties, he wrote an Address to Young Men on the Use of Greek Literature, where he encouraged young Christians who pursued an education to read classical Greek writings, and to separate the good things from the bad like a bee who collects nectar from flowers.  Not every flower produces nectar, but the bee can draw out the nectar from those that do produce nectar and benefit from them.

These were not rare occurrences in the early Church, but these are representatives of bishops in the early church.

More than all this, at the heart of the Christian faith is a set of books.  The word for books in Greek is biblia, from which we get the word Bible in English.  These books which were brought together into a single volume led to the rise of literacy. Languages such as Armenian, Gothic, Ge’ez, the Slavic languages, and even Aleutian among many other languages had alphabets created for them for the first time because of the Christian faith in order to read and understand the Bible, and literacy was a positive effect of the creation of alphabets for these languages.  Other languages received alphabets by using already existing ones (like Latin) such as Old English and Old High German due to the missionary influences of Christians.

What about science specifically?  David C. Lindberg in his well-researched and clearly written The Beginnings of Western Science hows the Christian contribution to the development of science in the Middle Ages both in Eastern Christianity and Western Christianity through such movements as the translations of ancient scientific texts, commentaries on those texts, development of ideas within them, challenging them to come up with better science, and creating a terminology, conceptual frameworks, and early observations that contributed to the development of science.

Myth # 2: Christianity is an inherently violent religion

I don’t know where atheists come up with these claims, but it’s clear that those who claim this could not have read the New Testament (and understood it) if they make such claims.

It is one thing to say, for example, that the Roman Catholic Church has committed some atrocities in the Crusades in a span of a couple of centuries (which also negatively affected other Christians such as Orthodox Christians), but it is another thing totally to say that Christianity as a whole, of which High Medieval Roman Catholicism is only a small part, is inherently violent.  Most Christians who have ever lived HAVE NOT BEEN Roman Catholic. Catholicism only became dominant a few centuries ago.  Most Christians who have ever lived, lived in the East, and not in the West.  That majority never looked up to Rome; they had their own archbishops as Eastern Orthodox Christians still do to this day, and that majority never practiced warfare as a matter of course.

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and WITH ALL YOUR MIND” (Matthew 22:37).

“False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel.” -J. Gresham Meacham

The word “sophist” originally meant a paid teacher of public speaking and argumentation especially with respect to morality or politics.  The sophists often only cared about teaching their students how to persuade audiences regardless of whether their arguments arrived at true conclusions or not.

For this reason, the word “sophist” is now derogatory because it indicates someone who makes fallacious arguments but due to appealing to his or her audience’s emotions, is able to persuade them to change their thinking or take action even if his or her argument is not valid.

Introduction: The Old Sophists

In the early 6^thcentury B.C., the Greeks saw the birth of philosophy.  Philosophers back then asked questions about the nature of the world such as the following:

• Do we understand the natural world through our five senses alone or do we need immaterial thinking (such as deduction and mathematics) to understand the world?

• Do things in the world change, and if they do, then why do we perceive something permanent about the character of the world.

In a nutshell, in their examination of nature, they came up with very difficult questions, and these questions caused endless debates between schools of philosophy.

In the mid-5^thcentury B.C., a group of thinkers called the Sophists rose up (also among the Greeks) and claimed that all these questions about the natural world were nonsensical.  They declared that no one would ever arrive to answers on these questions, and we should spend our time focused on questions of morality, character, and governments, that is on practical matters.

The Sophists did not contribute much to these new questions because they also believed that these new questions would not have clear answers, but relativistic ones.  For that reason, they focused on teaching their students public speaking and how to win arguments even when their conclusions were not valid.  The focus was: learn how to persuade your audience to further promote yourself to public office.

This style of teaching was based on the Sophists’ worldview, which was relativism.  They denied the possibility of hard knowledge, and for that reason they also denied the absolute character of truth in any area of life.  The Sophists were hardcore agnostics and some were outright atheists.

An example of such a style of thinking can be found in Protagoras declaration that “Man is the measure of all things,” meaning that man is the source and origin of all truths.  It is appealing, but totally unsupported.

Or in Plato’s Republic, Thrasymachus argues that injustice is better than justice and that there is no true justice.  He argued that things perceived as just such as a shepherd taking care of sheep is nothing more than a way of giving the shepherd the ability to fatten, slaughter, and eat the sheep.

As you can see, this type of thinking is not helpful to the development of knowledge and the discovery of truth.

Atheists held to this type of relativism until science became an undeniable example of the development of knowledge and the discovery of truth about the natural world.

In the mid to late 5^thCentury B.C., a new philosopher rose up who responded to the Sophists.  His name was Socrates.  He affirmed the possibility of hard knowledge and came up with a method for determining the truth of this knowledge, which was by observing multiple examples of an idea, and then coming up with a universal definition based on those observations. Often, this was hard, and sometimes no clear answer emerged.  An example of this is in the Platonic dialogue of Euthyphro where Socrates does not arrive at any clear conclusion about the definition of piety.

Regardless, he showed that when we are faced with a difficult question, we should not give up by saying things are relative or impossible to understand.  He affirmed the absolute and universal character of truth and often succeeded at discovering the truth by putting forward valid arguments.

Socrates’s philosophy started a new flourishing of thinking, led the increase of knowledge, and led to the beginnings of methodological science. For example, his student, Plato, picked up where he left off and started applying this critical thinking to morality, the physical world, law, government, and even to perception and psychology.  Plato’s student, Aristotle, refined the ideas of the philosophers who came before him, and this led to the increase of early scientific thinking.  Aristotle produced the largest body of scientific work in the ancient world.  Although it was not modern science, it was the beginning, and all because science becomes possible when one believes there is absolute and universal knowledge and that that knowledge can be accessed by rational thinking.  If this belief is not firmly held, then science is impossible. It would be a useless and self-defeating endeavor to try to discover universal truth when one does not even believe in universal truth.

The New Atheists

“New Atheists” does not mean the atheists of today.  It refers to a specific type of atheism that is characterized by the preaching of atheism through argumentation based on disciplines such as science, history, and philosophy.  Most popular atheism books are written by New Atheists.

This article is not a repudiation of all types of atheism. There are some atheists out there who are sincerely seeking the truth and are willing to believe if they have their questions adequately answered; the New Atheists do not belong to that group. The New Atheists are not willing to believe.  They only feign to be open to evidence.

The younger generations of atheists who argue for atheism belong to the category of New Atheists and a number of college professors employ New Atheistic arguments even if they are not consciously aware of it.

What led to the rise of the New Atheists?

It is debatable what led to the rise of the New Atheists because the New Atheism is a recent phenomenon going back to the late 1990s and exploding in the 2000s following the publication of popular atheistic works. In those works, they argue things like Christians have perpetuated violence, have been superstitious, and have slowed down the progress of learning, and that these things are characteristic of Christianity throughout its history.

Yet, the reality is not that Christianity is not guilty of anything that the New Atheists accuse it of whether perpetuating violence, or being superstitious, or slowing down the progress of learning.  A little reading on the subject from the true scholars in those fields (and not the popular New Atheists who are not qualified to comment on those fields), shows that their arguments do not represent what really happened in the past.

The reason they have become so popular and have convinced many people is because of Western Christians’ poor engagement with intellectual culture and scientific discoveries.  Christians do not know how to answer these arguments because they are unread in their own history.

An American professor named J. Gresham Meacham wrote a prophetic article in 1913 titled “Christianity & Culture,”in which he explained what he saw as the decline of Christian engagement with philosophy, academic disciplines, scholarship, and learning in general, and he painted a roadmap of what the future would look like, and that future he predicted is the present we are living now.

He wrote, “Careful preparation for Sunday-school lessons as for lessons in mathematics or Latin was unknown.  Religion seemed to be something that had to do only with the emotions and the will, leaving the intellect to secular studies.  What wonder that after such training we came to regard religion and culture as belonging to two entirely separate compartments of the soul, and their union as involving the destruction of both?” (Meacham, 3)

The New Atheists are the New Sophists

So how do the New Atheists succeed in convincing masses of people? They generally do so through four methods: bad logic, name calling, distortion of facts, and lying.  These methods are the modern versions of the ancient Sophists’ style of argumentation.

Here are some examples showing each method in use by the New Atheists.

Method # 1: Bad Logic:

The Old Sophists were known for using the fallacy of equivocation. Equivocation means that you use a word with two different meanings.  First, you make an observation using one meaning of the word, then second, you apply that observation to the second meaning of the word.  This is not valid.

Here is an example of equivocation from the New Atheists:

Christopher Hitchens often used this following argument in his debates with Christians.  He would say,

“Think of an evil action done in the name of faith.  You have already thought of one.  Now think of an evil action an atheist would do just because he is atheist.  You can’t think of one.”

The Christian would then feel frustrated and would not have an answer while the atheists in the audience applauded.

Yet, when one stops and thinks, he or she would realize that Hitchens has no valid argument against Christianity because he is using the world faith with two meanings.  The first faith he is arguing against is Christianity, but his supporting argument, and the faith the audience just thought of (including you the reader) is radical Islam.

These two “faiths” are not the same, and you cannot use radical Islam to argue against Christianity.  This is the Fallacy of Equivocation.  It is a mistake in logic that leads to an invalid argument and a conclusion that cannot be supported based on the evidence one gives.

If Hitchens were honest (or had known how to think logically), he should have reworded the argument to say, “Think of an evil action done just because one is a Christian.”  He would have had difficulty getting people to think of an action that could not be debated unlike the example he gave above.  But Hitchens, like the New Atheists, is not interested in arriving at the truth, but for spreading his religion of New Atheism.  This makes the New Atheists the New Sophists; they are only interested in making their audiences atheists.

Method # 2: Name Calling

The New Atheists regularly engage in calling Christians names.  They call Christians things like “superstitious peasants” among many other things.  This serves nothing more than emotional appeal without substance.  It bothers those who are believers and it makes nonbelievers laugh.  These are nothing more than memes without pictures.  They are distractions to cover up the lack of substantive arguments.  This is also the primary method of an unthinking schoolyard bully.