Timothy & Countering The Culture (part 19)

In the fourth chapter, Paul states that “every creation of God is good” (1 Timothy 4:4a).  With such words, the Apostle reaches back to the opening words of the Scriptural narrative, affirming the words that close out the first chapter of Genesis, which are “God saw all that He had made---and it was very good!” (1:31a)  One may think that such a statement is hardly revolutionary or counter-cultural, but in the Greco-Roman world, it was. 

Now, before ascertaining the counter-cultural character of this particular statement, which can be heard alongside the declaration of the covenant God’s creation being very good, it is necessary to recognize that this is not an assertion made in isolation.  Paul has written “Now the Spirit explicitly says that in the later times some will depart from the faith and occupy themselves with deceiving spirits and demonic teachings, influenced by the hypocrisy of liars whose consciences are seared.  They will prohibit marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth.  For every creation of God is good and no food is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving.  For it is sanctified by God’s word and by prayer” (4:1-5). 

What Paul has in mind as these things are written, and the issues to which he addresses himself by these words, are not relevant to this study.  Even though the statement about every creation of the covenant God being good does not stand alone and asks to be heard in context, it is also possible to hear Paul operating on multiple levels of communication.  Though he may be directly addressing a known issue within the church community, it is not preposterous to suggest that Timothy, along with those that will hear this letter, will pick up on statements that may be directed to wider cultural forces that could have a deleterious effect on the church of the Christ. 

The Hebrew mindset, which affirmed their God’s good creation, and by and large looked forward to their God’s redemption of His people and His creation---expecting that which defaced His good creation (death) to be defeated and removed and anticipating a resurrection of the righteous dead (especially Israel) into a restored world that will once again be pronounced as very good (a hope that was rightly carried over into Christianity)---stood in opposition to two major, highly influential, and when it comes to the Greco-Roman world, nearly universally adhered to religious/philosophical “schools” of the day, which were “Stoicism” and "Epicureanism.”  Regardless of which god(s) one worshiped in that day, be it the Caesar or any other deity, one’s religious tendencies could be colored by one of the two philosophical bents.  Naturally, those who worshiped Jesus as Lord and God could fall into the same patterns.  Undoubtedly, as shall be seen, this is something against which Paul wanted to be on guard.    

Plato, with his teaching about “forms,” in which (though this is much simplified) all earthly things were merely imperfect forms of that which existed in the heavenly realms, greatly influenced both the stoic and the epicurean approaches to life.  Essentially, the influential Platonic philosophy reduced all of life to the physical, which was bad, and to the spiritual, which was good.  Regardless of one’s particular philosophy, this would largely be the basis for one’s religious approach to life.  With this as a very shallow foundation, it is now possible to proceed to learn about these ideologies. 

Speaking In Tongues (part 2)

The very first recorded cases of that which can be termed as glossolalia, or ecstatic speech attributed to the activity of the gods upon a believer, goes as far back as 1100 B.C.  On that occasion, it was a worshiper of the Egyptian God Amun that was said to have attracted attention to himself through making sounds in a strange, ecstatic tongue.  He reported himself to have been possessed by the god.  Seven hundred years later, the famous Greek philosopher Plato demonstrated that he was quite well acquainted with the phenomenon of speaking in tongues, as he made reference to several families who habitually practiced ecstatic speech, with prayers and utterings offered as they were supposedly possessed by the spirit of their gods. 

Plato would also go on to point out that these practices had even been said to have brought physical healing to those who engaged in them.  Accordingly, and because they had no reason to presume otherwise, Plato and those contemporary with him casually and confidently asserted that these occurrences were in fact caused by some type of divine inspiration.  It was his suggestion that the god simply took possession of the mind during this state, inspiring the individual so possessed with utterances that he could neither understand nor interpret. 

In the century prior to the coming of the Christ, the poet Virgil, speaking of the Sybilline priestess that lived on the island of Delos, described her activity of speaking in ecstatic tongues.  This was explained by her being in some type of mysterious union with the god Apollo.  This union was reported to have happened while she meditated in a haunted cave, amidst what was described as the eerie sounds of the wind as it played strange music through the narrow crevices of the rocks. 

Several of the mystery religions that inhabited the Greco-Roman world in which the church first developed also recorded the phenomenon of speaking in tongues.  These include the Persian cult of Mithra, the Egypt-based cult of Osiris, and the Dionysian, Eulusinian, and Orphic cults of Macedonia, Thrace, and Greece.  Lucian of Samosata, a reliable historian of the ancient world that lived in the second century, to whom the church owes a debt because of his records concerning the meal practices of the Greco-Roman world, described an example of glossolalia in one of his written works.  In it, the ecstatic utterance was performed by somebody described as a roaming believer in the Syrian goddess that went by the name of “June” (the month is named after her). 

Focusing on Corinth, the prevalence of cults that spoke in tongues, especially in what is the wider geographic area by which the city of Corinth was bounded, informs an observer that there would be a high degree of familiarity with the practice within the city.  This becomes especially poignant if one was to consider the geographical and cultural position in which Corinth was situated at the time of Christ, and a short time later, of Paul. 

Where Your Treasure Is (part 1)

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. – Luke 12:34  (NET)

As is almost always the case, Jesus does not offer up these words as a disconnected aphorism.  Though it can be taken as a truth, it is only taken as such because of the context provided to it by Jesus and the Lukan narrative.  Though the overall movement of Luke’s Gospel will not be here touched upon, it would be entirely inappropriate to make an attempt to rightly comprehend a statement such as this without operating within a mental framework that is consistently cognizant that Luke is telling a story so as to communicate a particular point of view, and that every component of that story is serving a greater end. 

That greater end that would seem to be in Luke’s view is Jesus’ conception of the kingdom of heaven.  In fact, it is a reflection upon the kingdom of heaven that is the immediate precursor to the series of statements that concludes with “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”  To this point, and prior to this telling statement, Jesus has said to “pursue His kingdom” (12:31) and that the “Father is well pleased to give you the kingdom” (12:32b). 

Before moving any further, one must take care to not make the serious mistake of thinking of the kingdom of heaven as something distant, whether that distance be a matter of time or space.  For a Jew such as Jesus, the kingdom of heaven was defined as the Creator God’s rule on earth---the realm of their God and His rule invading and occupying the realm of the beings that He had created as His image.  Heaven was not conceived of as the post-death eternally blessed attainment of a life well-lived, and as such, was not a motivating factor in living according to that which would be expected of a member of the covenant people.  It is incredibly important to establish such things, as it is incumbent upon observers to know what Jesus would have had in mind, along with what His hearers would have had in mind, knowing that they had to share a common verbal and mental vocabulary if Jesus was going to be understood. 

The idea of heaven, and the attached idea of an eternal realm to be occupied by disembodied souls, would have been foreign to the religious thought-world of the Israel of Jesus’ day.  There would almost certainly have been an awareness of such ways of thought, but thinking along those lines would likely have been heavily resisted, as an alien invader.  It was Greek thought, popularized by Plato, that divided the physical from the spiritual, positing that the physical world was only a shabby reflection of the spiritual world.  Essentially, for the Greeks and for those influenced by Greek thought, physical equaled bad, whereas spiritual equaled good.  This was antithetical to contemporary Jewish thought.  Now, this is not to say that because it was Greek, it was wrong, but rather, it would have been foreign to Jesus, and likely rejected by Him and the earliest of those that sought to convey His message to the world. 

So it needs to be reinforced that thinking of heaven or the kingdom of heaven in such a way would not have been the position of one of the covenant people of the Creator God.  They knew that their God had created a world that was very good, that the good world He had created had been corrupted, that His image-bearers had been marred, and that their God was eventually going to act to not only restore this world to its very good condition, but that His restoring, redeeming operation, which would occur within history and be brought to bear in this creation, was going to create a world even better than the one that had suffered a fall.