A Window on the New Testament

We’ve been covering the ancient Greeks in a couple of my classes this week, and it seems that understanding Greek culture sheds some light on the New Testament.  Paul’s missionary work took him to the cities of the Roman Empire, many of which were in the eastern part of the Roman Empire.

This area had been heavily influenced by Greek culture because of the conquest by Alexander the Great’s Macedonian and Greek army.  The fact that the New Testament was written in the koine, the simple Greek that formed the common language in these areas, bears witness to the influence of Greek culture.  The cities of this area were often populated by Greeks.  Even when the Romans conquered these “Hellenistic” kingdoms, the Greek culture and language remained strong.

A few things about Greek culture that I’ve learned that seem especially germane to the New Testament:

• Greek morality was best defined by concept of moderation, as you may know.  This meant that, for men, drinking, gambling, and extramarital sex (heterosexual or homosexual) were all permissible as long as one didn’t get carried away and become a creature of pleasure who was consumed by these things.  You can see why Paul had to write a lot about sexual morality to his readers.  He was preaching a very different approach to morality, one of avoiding immoral actions completely rather than simply managing pleasures.
• Women were thought to be a punishment on men for gaining the gift of fire from Prometheus.  (Of course, Prometheus got chained to a rock and had his liver eaten out each day by a huge bird.  The liver grew back and the next day the bird would repeat the process.  I’m going to go out on a limb and say that men got the better end of the deal.)  This is very different from the Genesis teaching of women as perfect partners for men.  Although Pandora opening of the box of evils might be compared to Eve’s eating of the forbidden fruit, the difference is pretty clear in that the Bible confers dignity on women from the beginning, while the Greek myth portrays them as a punishment from the beginning.  For Christians on the other hand, women were the spiritual equals of men, as noted in Paul’s statement “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”  I have read that women in the Greco-Roman world were attracted to the increased autonomy that they had in the Christian community.
• According to Simon Price’s Religions of the Ancient Greeks, the common denominator among the various Greek schools of philosophy was that they rejected the myths’ views of the gods as immoral.  You may recall from reading Greek mythology that Zeus was constantly on the lookout for women, spirits, and goddesses that he could seduce.  Greek philosophers, like the Stoics and Epicureans mentioned in Paul’s visit to Athens in Acts 17, believed that the divine had to be more dignified that this.  It’s my understanding that one reason that God-fearers like Cornelius were attracted to Judaism was because of the morality that Jews identified with God.  I wonder if philosophers might have been among them.

Another good source on Greek culture is James Davidson’s Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens.  This book and Price’s book were my main sources for this post.

A few notes on one of my sources from yesterday’s post…

In yesterday’s post on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” I referenced an article from LewRockwell.com called Myths of Martin Luther King.  Since it’s a fairly critical perspective on King, I didn’t want to just link to it without discussing it.  I included it because it had King’s actual quote about “Democratic Socialism.”

Marcus Epstein, who was an undergraduate at William and Mary at the time he wrote it, notes the trend among conservatives to claim King as one of their own.   He uses Michael Eric Dyson’s I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King, which was influential in my understanding of King as well.

In my opinion, Epstein is right that King was not a conservative.  He may have shared some conservative principles, especially with current conservatives, but he was definitely more on the liberal side of the political spectrum, especially in the 1960s when he challenged the established way of doing things.  Also, his chronicling of King’s adultery is, sadly, true, although I have read that he believed it was sinful even while others told him it was fine.  I can’t say for sure about the plagiarism issue as it has been a while since I read about that.

Yet there are a few troubling things about this article that I feel I should address.  First, Epstein seems to excuse conservatives in King’s day for not supporting the civil rights movement.  I think it’s a great thing that conservatives today consider the civil rights movement as a model, although they should understand the differences between their ideas and his.

Second, from what I have read, King did not have communist sympathies.  He did have people with communist ties in his movement, but it also seemed that his opponents liked to tar him with accusations of communist sympathies.  I don’t mean to impugn Epstein’s motives, but one of his links is from the Council of Conservative Citizens, which grew out of the old White Citizens’ Councils.  I’ve always gotten the impression that these were basically the gentleman’s KKK.  These were exactly the kind of organizations that called King a communist.

Finally, I think that his criticisms of King’s leftism focus more on his later years than the more optimistic early years.  As I tried to show in yesterday’s post, there was a transition in his thought.  I think that his shift to the left was completely understandable when so many opposed even a peaceful movement with violence and when equal laws turned out to leave people in poverty.  Maybe not the best approach, but understandable, and perhaps not surprising given the splits in liberalism that occurred in the 1960s.

Anyway, I stand by my conclusions on King, but I wanted to address this article since I linked to it.

A Great American Document: Letter from Birmingham Jail

If you’ve never read Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” do two things.  First, ask yourself, “Why not?”  Then, check it out.  And if you have, it never hurts to look at it again.

King’s letter is a long response to Birmingham ministers who had criticized the demonstrations in Birmingham.  The Birmingham movement in the spring of 1963 is a terrific story in and of itself, too long to recount here.  In his response, King moves effortlessly through an array of different subjects: why he’s in Birmingham, why the demonstrations were immediately necessary, the justice of civil disobedience, his disappointment with the lack of support from white moderates and white churches, and his defense of the protesters as the “real heroes” of the South.

What to do with such a letter?  I think that there are some great illustrations of larger truths about Dr. King and the civil rights movement.

• King’s theology has an interesting combination of roots.  Growing up in the black evangelical tradition, his theological training was in the liberal Protestant tradition.  To me, this means that his sermons and writings always seemed to draw heavily from both, fitting comfortably in neither category.  King’s liberal theology essentially taught him that the peace and brotherhood of Heaven could come on earth, drawing on the Social Gospel theology of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as well as other sources.  The idea was to create a “beloved community.”  You can see this thought running through the letter as he talks about “the gospel of freedom” and the ideal of brotherhood as something to be achieved in this world.  It’s my understanding that white fundamentalists and evangelicals were somewhat underground during this time with the more mainline liberal churches in the forefront, but King must have worked with many evangelically-minded black ministers in his time and also was good friends with Billy Graham.
• I don’t know if there was a bigger fan of American ideals in the late 1950s and early 1960s than King.  The “I Have a Dream” speech is a great example of this, and the Birmingham letter offers examples of this as well.  Expressing his faith in liberal American ideals, King hoped that African Americans could someday join American society as equals, overturning segregation with “integration” into the mainstream of the nation.  As his emotional discussion of the heroes of the movement concludes:

One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

• At the same time, you can also see the seeds of King’s change of heart in the later 1960s.  The Birmingham letter locates America’s racial problems almost entirely in the South, if my reading is correct.  He calls Birmingham “probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States.”  Yet when King tried to take the movement to my hometown of Chicago in 1966, he received a rude awakening.  The problems of the informal segregation in the urban ghettoes outside the South posed entirely different challenges: when black people moved into white neighborhoods or demonstrated for the right to do so, “white flight” or violence often followed.  King actually said that the hate that he experienced while trying to demonstrate for open housing in the Chicago was worse than anything in the South.
• This disappointment led to very different rhetoric by the later years of his life.  The Birmingham letter laments the “airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society” in which “the vast majority” of black Americans found themselves, and by the end of his life King seemed to be closer to pinning the blame for this on the American economic system itself.  In fact, he wondered if America might be better served by moving toward democratic socialism, and he was killed while in Memphis to support white and black sanitation workers in their strike.  He eventually spoke of the Vietnam War with fiery condemnation.

“Letter from a Birmingham Jail” challenges us as Christians not to tolerate injustice.  After all, it was written to Christian ministers who told King to slow down.  Furthermore, his career shows us that injustice needs to be confronted but that solving these issues is often very difficult.  We need to be careful that not to tell ourselves that since the legal playing field is basically leveled, that racial justice has been achieved.  While we shouldn’t feel the need to fall in line with a certain set of policies without good reason, we do need to listen to the perspective of our black brothers and sisters in Christ.  While we may not be able to create the “beloved community” on earth, we at least strive for it within the church and, I believe, let that beautiful vision challenge us to truly work for peace and justice even as we wait for God’s final reign.

This makes me feel a little better…

but not much.

The Effects of International Aid

On Wednesday night, I listened to a great episode of public radio’s Speaking of Faith.  Krista Tippett interviewed Kenyan journalist Binyavanga Wainaina about his perspective on international aid to Africa (you can listen to it or read the transcript if you want to).  He said that aid from both government and private sources are is oftentimes more about the giver than the receiver, and he even compared the mindset of those who believe that they can fix Africa to the old colonizers:

“A lot of people arrive in Africa to assume that it’s a blank empty space, and their goodwill and desire and guilt will fix it.  And that to me is not any different from the first people who arrived and colonized us.”

This was Wainaina’s reaction to Krista’s quote from a prominent American religious leader (she didn’t identify him, but her interview notes confirm that it was Rick Warren) who had experienced an awakening about AIDS and poverty in Africa.  It’s a great cautionary statement even if it’s a harsh comparison.

Aid, according to Wainaina often has great intentions (and he really does believe that they’re good intentions, despite his tough words) but often does not last, doesn’t take into account the knowledge of the people it’s supposed to help, or undermines the capacity of the society to build itself.  He’s got a darkly funny parody of the giver-centric attitude here.

That’s the bad news.  But here are two pieces of good news.  First, microlending, which actually puts capital in the hands of people in poorer countries, can do great things and also trusts the people of the country to do good things.  Secondly, although Wainaina is not a religious person, he said that local religious groups (both Christians and Muslims) often do great work because they are intimately connected with the people that they minister to.  I think that this is a reminder that Christian communities around the world, as the body of Christ, have the potential to fulfill God’s commands to care for the most vulnerable in remarkably effective ways. Perhaps this means that Christians hoping to truly help the world’s poorest need to think about supporting local solutions and that we need to make sure that large, global efforts based in the wealthiest countries really care about the perspective of local people and will have real staying power.

I’m no expert in this field, but Wainaina’s perspective makes a lot of sense to me.  Speaking of Faith is going to revisit this topic, so I’m sure my own thought on this will develop.

Welcome, Readers

My name is Scott Kistler.  I’m a community college history instructor who is interested in how a historical perspective can aid us in our Christian lives by giving us insight into Scripture, our faith, and the world in which we live.

This blog might be bad and/or boring for a bit as I get used to blogging.  I hope that it won’t stay that way.  I’d value any suggestions on improving the quality or the appearance of this site.

You can find out more about the title of the blog on the About page.

Anyway, I hope to write some reflections as I read and teach.  Most of my posts will be on history.  Some will be on other subjects of interest to me, like human trafficking, church-state relations in America, and the Chicago Cubs.