IT'S ALL GREEK TO ME......An Acient Hope, part 2

I sit here on this Sabbath morning pondering our recent celebration of July 4th and its importance. In a way, Christians place the same kind of relevance to AD 33. Sort of, freedom day, if you will. But as Jesus walked around an occupied and fallen Hebrew nation, a country who’s history was rife with examples of being the conquered, He had prepared for those final 3 ½ years, for His great sacrifice and the culmination of the great prophesies and revelation, by a lifetime, crammed into 30 years of studying the ancients.

Why care? Why not take some specialists word for it, then, individually just start at AD 33? The New Testament is all you need for salvation. Right? Give me a break, you silly Christian! You’ll soon mirror the Jewish nation in bondage!

Look! The New Testament was written in Greek, not King James English. If you want to read what John read, the Old Testament, the Septuagint, you’ll need to understand Greek, or if not, then understand the language’s origin and from where it came before translation. To understand the New Testament, you have to understand that it was created out of great philosophical works, from Homer to Plato and Aristotle.

As I sat and reviewed the pod cast of a discussion Hugh Hewitt had with John Mark Reynolds and David Allen White, about the importance of ancient Truth, I began to realize how parochial my primary Christian education had been, and even more concerned that the portions of Greek philosophy sprinkled into it were vast, taking into account that children in secular education today are not sincerely introduced to “When Athens Met Jerusalem".

You see, when John wrote, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”, he was sitting in a pagan city called Ephesus, and he was using language created by one of that city’s most famous residents, Heraclitus. You don’t have to care about Heraclitus unless you have grandkids like mine who have viewed the movie Pokohauntus, over and over and over…you get the picture. In the movie, Pokohauntus says, “You can never step in the same river twice”. She is not stating some kind of great North American wisdom. She is quoting Heraclitus. John, witting his poetic and prophetic statement of whom and what he believed the nature of Jesus and God to be, was being inspired by the very words of Heraclitus and his Greek words “en arche”, “in the beginning”, and then “en ho legos”, “was the word” Yes sir! Great Christian philosophy built right there in a pagan city on the words of a Greek philosopher. That does not diminish what John wrote. As David Allan White states it, “He was building on a language that was old and making something new of it, revealing something new to the world. It is as if he dropped an ideological atom bomb on a pagan culture, utterly destroying that culture, and replacing it with a Christian culture".

Those of us who enjoy the fruits of the greatest story ever told, whether by just tagging along, or by being one who has what some call, the fullness of faith, salvation, if you will, need to understand something important. “If you’re going to understand the fullness of time, you must understand the fullness of what the world brought to everything that made that thought possible and what occupied the minds of serious thinkers for a long while”. And that’s all Greek to me! B.C.

GET OUT THE DITCH, BRO..........An Ancient Hope, part 1

You might think the world changed on July 4th, 1776. I love my country's birthday, I do. It sure is a cool spot on the historical chart. But look, I see it as a great place to be catapulted back to ancient time, not to slip forward to a sliding scale of thought that makes all things new, the value measure, and intellectual trends, foundations on sand. Christian theology was borne to a new world by those who sought out to form an environment for their children, to grow in understanding and reason, shaped by a philosophic language that was a gift from the ancients, not just passed forward to generations of a reformed Christianity, but in greater part, Western Civilization. Could they observe us today, one would see a dismayed group of Greeks, horrified at the ignorance and the shrugging off of centuries of intellectual history.

So, why do we care? Recently I listened to Hugh Hewitt discuss this very concept with two smart and valuable intellectual giants, John Mark Reynolds and David Allen White. In that conversation lies the answer. "People who care about the fact that their children and grandchildren are buying into a set of lies that are awful, that are destroying our nation and destroying our children and grandchildren, need to go to deeper causes for those lies and find viable solutions that can create the kind of culture that produces 1776 instead of 1966". A good place to start is an introduction to classical and Christian thought that can be found in a new book by John Mark Reynolds, titled "When Athens Met Jerusalem".

Today, we find ourselves treating symptoms manifested from lies, not willing to confront and educate about the core disease, to perform preventative care, if you will. The affliction is a rejection of some basic ideas bought into by the Founding Fathers, and we don't even know we have rejected those ideas. For various reasons, the modern world is obsessed with progress and obsessed with that which is new. We are heading down a road, on which, we have no idea where we are going. No guidance! No sense of where we've been! We have veered off into a ditch! Where were the guideposts? Did we see them but not understand their importance?

It is clear understanding of reason and reasonable thought, handed down for centuries by ancient philosophers, an intellectual endeavor that will lead one to Truth, capital "T" Truth, objective, outside the self, eternal Truth. There is the road map that we found less than appetizing to consume and ignored what would have kept us out of the proverbial ditch. It's clear, the Founding Fathers and most of the great minds of the past recognized the source of wisdom. It is clear we do not, by our infatuation with things constantly new and seeking constant change, have any idea how to get out of the ditch. Study to show thyself! Get out the ditch, bro! B.C.