This is two classes dealing with acts, one on
world religions and one on philosophy,
neither of which is me, but it's something I
wanted to kind of look at, so when Bill
asked me what I would be interested in doing
for a lectureship focused on acts, this is
what I came up with.
I'll say more about kind of what leads me to
this as we go along, I'm glad to have
you present, and if you are in the wrong
classroom, certainly feel free to move around,
I mean
you made the trip so you ought to feel like
it's your time and don't feel badly about that.
Several years ago I took a group of older
members of our congregation where I was working
on a tour of restoration sites and we went to
Bethany, West Virginia to Campbell's Church
and that old building built in the 1860s has a
design common to its day, rare in ours,
which is like this room.
I hadn't thought about that until just a minute
ago, please come in.
The pulpit is at the front of course, but so
are the entrances, so on either side of
the preacher are two doors that let you into
the congregation and that's a good design,
I don't know why we got away from that, that
has a lot of potential for getting people in.
When I was a child in public school in the
1950s we began every day with a pledge of
allegiance, a reading from the Bible, and a
prayer, now my students here cannot even
imagine that, it's not that they've never
experienced it, they cannot imagine it.
In a sense the public schools that I attended
as a child were sort of Protestant parochial schools.
We didn't do anything that anyone would mistake
for being Roman Catholic, but there was sort
of a consistency about public education that
presumed a Christian, specifically Protestant
base that was characteristic.
That dominant culture of the 50s not only
shaped what happened in my public school education,
but it shaped also the church's mission.
Most of the issues that we talked about were
topics created by the manifold division of
Protestantism around us.
Now we took a brief detour in the early 60s
because of the Kennedy campaign to talk about
Roman Catholics, but by and large it was almost
all inter-Protestant discussions.
That's not just us, that was true, radio, TV
shows, virtually every denominational affiliation
had a program on the air, either radio or TV or
both, that dealt with those issues,
the Lutheran hour, whatever.
My point at this beginning is that that is how
we experienced the given world, a world
basically of Protestant Christian America, and
that world shaped our self-understanding
and our questions, which was why in the 50s,
60s maybe we could begin with Bible study.
We had all these Bible study methodologies that
quote cottage meetings, because virtually
everybody, Protestants certainly and most
people who were not in religious affiliation
sort of inclined that way even if they weren't
hooked up anywhere, granted the Bible a special
authority and had an automatic respect for it,
so it was a place that you could start
on common ground.
My real point of this is not just to do
nostalgia, although we're interested in that as
I get
older, to say that the cultural settings had a
great impact on how not only we understand
our neighbors but ourselves, so today almost a
half century after my childhood education,
the given world for we Americans has greatly
changed, I think all of us are aware of this.
Both in our common experience and from cultural
pressures, we live in a pluralistic society
today, not the common similarity of Protestantism.
I read somewhere and I've forgotten the year,
2030 I think, maybe sooner than that, the
report was in that decade there would no longer
be a single dominant ethnic group in America.
We were just absolutely pluralistic.
You kind of have to take that in to appreciate
how much it has changed.
As I said when I introduced myself a minute
ago, I'm not even an amateur about world religions
and so in many ways I'm way out of my element,
but one of the things I like to do in these
classes is to do something where I learn
something, so I get out of where I'm familiar.
What I do a little bit with is the New
Testament, so we're going to look at New
Testament today,
but I realized after I got started that I
really should have co-taught this with someone
who does world religions, but that's a hindsight.
In the study and conversation with world
religions today, there has been and are various approaches
and at the risk, or I guess the reality of
oversimplification, let me offer what I think
are the two major approaches for Christianity
to deal with world religions, if we reflect
upon it.
Now of course we can do a lot of things without
reflecting upon it, just to act.
Some people have seen the world religions as an
expression of a common human hope.
There's all the versions of various religions
are grounded in humankind, our fears, our
concerns, our aspirations.
On this model, religion is fundamentally a
human undertaking.
Other people have seen in world religions proof
of God's general self-revelation, what
is made known generally, what is frequently
called common grace.
And in this model, there is some possible
minimal awareness of God because God has done
certain things besides the covenant with Israel
and the new covenant grounded in Jesus Christ.
On this model, world religions are a divine matter.
They begin with God and then human awareness of God.
I think those are the two major options being
discussed today.
But I want to look at one incident and this is
in the book of Acts 14.
As you know, Acts seeks to answer many of the
great questions about the Christian faith,
not by direct thinking, but by indirect implication.
It tells stories, it does narratives.
When I was a student at Vanderbilt several
years ago, I was fortunate to have as one
of my instructors a rabbi, Lou Sibleman.
And what I learned from Lou was that his method
of dealing with questions was to tell a story.
Anything you ask him, instead of giving you an
answer, he told you a story.
And I think that's sort of what you see in Acts.
Instead of just saying, this is what Christians
think about so-and-so, it just tells you stories
about what happened, about what Christians say
and do, and then you're supposed to pick
that up.
The most obvious example, the one that I've
known since childhood, is how does one become
a Christian?
Well, Lou doesn't say, you do one, two, three,
four, five, as you recall, things to become
a Christian.
Instead, it just shows you people becoming
Christians, sort of cameos of conversion.
The familiar five steps of conversion that I
grew up with are thus, in a way, both biblical
and unbiblical.
They're not in the Bible in that form, that is,
the Bible does not have anywhere a list
of five things one does to become a Christian.
So to that degree, it's unbiblical.
But on the other hand, they are fairly, I
think, they're reasonably unfairly deducible
from what Lou does tell you in Acts.
And of course, Acts assumes that you will read
all of Acts, not just selections.
So he counts on you building your knowledge as
you read the whole book.
And so I think it is a biblical position.
Similarly, Lou does not tell us how the
Christian gospel understands and relates to non-Christian
There is no worse an explanation of it.
That's not quite true.
That's a little bit of an overstatement.
He does tell us how Christians relate to one
world religion, namely Judaism.
Acts does not have the term Judeo-Christian,
but it does assume an integral connection
between Judaism and Christianity, so much so
that one could say that Christianity is
Judaism in fulfillment form and churches
characteristically in Acts begin in synagogues.
Basically I'm a historian, a historian of the
New Testament.
And there are a couple of big questions that
virtually everything I do somehow feeds into.
And one of these questions is, how did
Christianity succeed?
How did it happen that in the early 4th
century, Christianity is the dominant religion?
And if you were looking around in the last part
of the 1st century to pick what's going
to be the winner 2 centuries from now, I don't
think you'd pick Christianity.
The other important question that I deal with
is how does Christianity relate to Judaism?
And Christians from time to time have answered
that in some ways that are unacceptable, one
of which is to say absolutely nothing and we've
sawn off the Old Testament.
And others try to say, no, Christianity is just
Judaism for Gentiles.
That's not true either.
I mean, Galatians, I think, is a sustained
argument that not only Gentiles but Jews as
well are justified by grace through faith, not
through the law.
But however you come down on that, and I guess
I'm still in the air about it, it seems to
me clearer that Christianity is integrally tied
to Judaism, at least in the early church
and in Acts.
But with regard to non-Jewish religious life,
Acts has indeed very little to say.
The most detailed story is found in Acts 14
that I mentioned, so if you want to turn there,
we're going to read that and then kind of
comment as we go along.
I don't know how the best way to do this in
terms of scheduling our time together.
What I think I'm going to do is go ahead and
make my presentation start to finish and then
we'll just have a question and answer at the
end instead of stopping as I go along.
But if there's something that's unclear as we
go along and you think you need to ask
a question at that point, I'm open to it.
But that's sort of what I'm going to start off
trying to do.
And Acts 14 beginning in verse 8.
Now at Lister there was a man sitting who could
not use his feet.
He was a cripple from birth who had never walked.
He listened to Paul speaking, and Paul, looking
intently at him, seeing that he had faith
be made well, said in a loud voice, stand
upright on your feet.
And he sprang up and walked.
And when the crowds saw what Paul had done,
they lifted up their voice and said in Lyconian,
the gods have come down to us in the likeness
of men.
Barnabas, they called Zeus, and Paul, because
he was the chief speaker, they called Hermes.
The priest of Zeus, whose temple was in front
of the city, brought oxen and garlands to
the gates and wanted to offer sacrifice with
the people.
When the apostles Barnabas and Paul heard of
it, they tore their garments and rushed
out among the multitude, shouting, men, why are
you doing this?
We are also men of like nature to you, and we
bring you good news that you should turn
from these vain things to a living God who made
the Heaven and the earth and the sea
and all that is in them.
In past generations, he allowed all the nations
to walk in their own ways, yet he did not
leave himself without witness, for he did good
and gave you from Heaven rains and fruitful
seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness.
And with these words, they scarcely restrained
the people from offering sacrifice.
Okay, that's the story.
What's typical to Acts is there's something
that the Christians do, in this case heal
someone, which is misunderstood by the crowd,
and then they do something in response, and
then the Christian speaker has to correct what happened.
The Pagan crowd interprets the healing work of
Paul and his companion Barnabas as another
example of the often told stories of Incognito
visitation of gods among humans.
This was, as you probably know, a
characteristic heritage of Greco-Roman civilization.
There are many stories in Greco-Roman
literature about the gods making a visit to
earth in
human form.
So they draw the conclusion, verse 11, the gods
have come down to us in human likeness.
In another course I'm teaching this spring, we
had to read a section of Homer's Iliad,
and the Trojan War began because the gods got
involved, well actually the goddess in
this case, but the gods get involved in human
life, and throughout the war, the ten years
around Troy, the gods and goddesses are always intervening.
In other words, this idea of the divinities
coming to earth in Masquerade and dealing
with humans was pretty well accepted in the
cultures of the day.
And in the neighborhood of Lystra, there was a
particular story in which Zeus and Hermes
had come to this area in Disguise, and two
locals, Bacchus and Philemon, received them
with hospitality.
Other people rejected them, and in the
subsequent flood, only these two people survived.
Now what the story wants to tell you is, when
the gods come, be nice, but it also warns
you that there are visitors you will have that
are more than you think they are.
In Greek culture, hospitality is a major virtue.
Again, that goes back to Homer.
So when this happens, this time, the people
decide they're not going to make that mistake
again, and so they decide that Barnabas is Zeus
and Paul is Hermes because he talks.
A lot, I assume.
One of the interesting things about this story
is that the locals speak to each other in
the native dialect in Lyconian, but they term
their visitors with the Greek divine names,
not local names.
They talk to each other in their regional
dialect, but they speak of Paul and Barnabas
as Zeus and Hermes.
About 300 B.C., this area, as indeed most of
the eastern end of the Mediterranean, had
become Hellenized.
There was a thin veneer of Hellenistic culture
spread all over this area, and local gods
were frequently translated and picked up the
names that they had in Hellenistic thought,
in Greek thought.
The polytheists by nature are not exclusivists.
Once you have made the jump to have many gods,
there's no particular reason to stop.
So they tend to acquire gods, and no one sees
any problem with adding yet another deity
to the pantheon.
And they also are willing to interchange names,
this is this is this.
That's why while they speak the native
language, they are accustomed to use the other
two names.
How one understands the various gods of the
nations was a problem that first came to full
attention in the Hellenistic world right after
Alexander the Great when he reshaped the world.
This class I mentioned in which we're reading
the Iliad, or read the Iliad, no selections,
we did not read the whole Iliad, read
selections of the Iliad.
We spend one class period in a really quick run
through Western Sylve on Alexander the
Great because he really deserves a label.
He remade his world, the world was different
after Alexander's brief career than it had
been before.
And one of the things that happened was it was
not really possible to be regional anymore
because Greek civilization reached from Greece
to the Indus River down to Egypt.
So all of these people have now learned about
other parts of the world by being moved around.
We raise the question of how do we understand
our gods and their gods.
The most popular answer to that question is syncretism.
Syncretism says that the names of different
gods are only a local term for a universal
reality, that is the gods are the same
everywhere, but they have different names
depending on
where you are.
The best example I know of this is that the
Romans themselves of course had gods, had
no Homer.
And so they simply adopted the Homeric stories
for their gods so that Zeus becomes Jupiter
and so forth.
This works really well in a world like this of
polytheism because most gods are either
expressions of nature or the activities of nature.
The reality is nature and nature's work.
And so to put different labels upon the storm
doesn't seem unreasonable but in fact sort
of obvious.
Now the other, that's the most common solution,
that's how people negotiated the varieties
of gods there were.
The other main solution, really philosophical,
was to see all the gods as only sort of fabled
expressions of natural realities and insights.
This would be an allegorical view.
There really are not gods, but the stories told
about the gods simply explained some
part of the world, the natural or the beyond world.
The Listerans see the activity of Paul and
Barnabas through their familiar understanding
of the recurring visits of gods to men.
And so they began to respond in the way that
their culture deems appropriate, they're going
to offer sacrifice.
As I read this again, getting ready for this
class, it occurs to me once more how compressed
all these stories are.
So this, you have a very brief sketch here, in
verse 13 they're going to have sacrifice
which alludes to pagan ritual, the most common
way that one does religion.
Religion in the ancient world means sacrifice.
It means temple, cultus, sacrifice.
Not many of us, I suspect, can appreciate that
or relate to that very well.
But for them, it not only made sense, it was a
great festival.
So for them it kind of came as a package deal.
You had sacrifice, but before the sacrifice you
had a parade, and after the sacrifice
you had a barbecue.
And so it's all sort of one big deal, and very positive.
I suspect whenever I tell my students about
sacrifice, they find that very apprehensive
and threatening, but in fact it's not that, it
wasn't that for them.
In fact, the same word in Greek means both
sacrificer and butcher.
So it explains sort of the sort of thing that
they're doing.
And if you go to see the Parthenon friezes,
which of course are not in Greece, but in
London, a long standing story, but what it has
around the top of the Parthenon, just
below the roof line of course, is a carving of
a procession going towards sacrifice, the
most famous one in Athens history.
So that's the response they make.
It's understated here, but I think to
appreciate what it would look like, you kind of have
to go elsewhere and pull in this stuff.
When Paul and Barnabas learn what is underway,
I've wondered about that part of the story.
It seems to me there's two possibilities.
One is that since they're talking to Iconian,
they don't know what this is, and they kind
of are observing and not catching on.
It seems to me kind of unlikely, I think you
would probably know what a sacrificial parade
is going to look like.
It may be that they are at some distance, and
so they only learn by second hand what's
going to happen out here.
But in any event, they refuse to be venerated,
much less worshiped.
Now we have to remember that not only were
there many stories about gods who became men,
but there were a number of stories in antiquity
about men who became gods.
Alexander the Great is one of those, but
several Roman emperors and other people.
So it's sort of a two-way street in the ancient
understanding of the relationship between
the divine and the human.
Paul and Barnabas manifest their disapproval of
these proposed actions, the sacrifice,
in a sort of a classic Jewish way.
They tear their garments.
If you go back to Mark 14:63 at the trial of
Jesus, that's what the high priest
does when he hears blaspheming.
It's a sign of being exposed to blaspheming.
And they give a response, explaining instead
the activity of God.
Now in this brief summary of what must have
been a much longer speech, Paul affirms the
common humanity of himself and the Pagan hearers.
We are men of common feelings, like you.
Christians are not substantially different from pagans.
We're not a superior people.
I want to come back to this towards the end
when I try to draw some implications out of this.
But I think at this point, one thing Christians
ought to remind ourselves of is that we do
indeed share a common humanity with the
non-Christian people of the world.
We have talked over the centuries so much about
the Christian West that we have tended
to equate those two, as if to be Christian is
to be Western.
I'm going to make that a little bit.
Paul does characterize, verse 15, Pagan
religions as vanities, worthlessness.
That is, he sees this religious action as insubstantial.
The same thing is mentioned in Romans 1:21,
that a refusal to acknowledge God by pagans
is because their reasonings is vain, empty.
Idolatrous worship, Pagans have reached
irrational conclusions about the divine.
In place of this mistaken view about the gods,
Paul points to the creation as a witness to
God and employs the classic terminology of
Jewish vision literature.
The creator God is contrasted with all those
Pagan divinities who are seen only as the
embodiment of various parts of nature.
That is, God is above the creation, not either
in it or equated with it.
Now, again, in polytheistic religion, the gods
are fundamentally equated with nature,
or different parts of nature.
The Jewish and here the Christian view sees all
of the creation as sort of only the outtracings
of God's activity.
I've spent a number of years working with Boy
Scouts in different ways.
One of the greatest experiences, what I enjoy a
lot, I guess, whenever I was a Scoutmaster
was when I got my kids out on a camp out and
finally got them all in their tents asleep
at night, usually around 1 a.m., to sit at the
campfire by myself with my last cup of
coffee and look at the starry vault of Heaven.
It's an impressive experience if you're away
from light filtration to see that.
So I understand why Pagans are so impressed by that.
The Christian response, however, is all of that
is just sort of where God's been working.
It is not divine, and that's the equation that
should not be drawn.
So Paul's point is that it's foolish to equate
the things that are with the divine.
The next point that he makes in this speech is
God's forbearance of Pagan Idolatry even
before the gospel.
Even those who did not know him or worshiped
him received his benefits that made life not
only possible, but good.
This is God's self-witness through the
provision of seasons and food that he is to be seen.
Is this a means of self-revelation or a proof
of his concern for all creatures or I suppose both?
This reminds me of Jesus' words at the end of
Matthew 5 about God sends his reign on
the just and the unjust, that God is
undiscriminating in his love.
To be honest, if I were God, that's not how I
would do it.
I would just wane on the just and pretty soon
the unjust would pick up.
I think we better change some things, but
there's the character of God and this here,
this is a way of manifesting God's not only his
existence, but his care for people who
are not in the covenant and have not known God
either through revelation of the Old Testament
or in Jesus.
I think it's notable that God is seen as not
only the provider of essentials for life,
but what makes life enjoyable, he says, and gladness.
God is the creator of gladness.
God's desire is for his creature not only to
live, but to find life pleasant.
Probably an aside, but I think this offers some
encouragement for Christian work to simply
improve the life of all people, even if some of
those people are going to reject the further
blessing of salvation.
I think that's a continuation of what God does.
God is concerned about people and their lives
being characterized by gladness.
While I studied again for this class, I had
failed to notice this sermon does not end
in the way that most sermons and acts end.
Most of them end with an appeal to believe in
Jesus or some sort of response.
This one neither asks for nor receives a response.
It's only a defense of Christianity over
against a misunderstanding that it's sort of a version
of Pagan religion.
In spite of this, in spite of the brevity the
Sermon has, it does allude in verse 15
to the need of all people for the gospel.
Paul says they have come to bring good news
that you turn from these vanities.
Christianity is not equated as another
religion, but as another form of their
religion, but
as a different thing.
When we began this class, I sketched how the
world has changed in my lifetime and how that
has impacted the church.
And let me now follow up and say that I suspect
we Christians really need to reflect more
than we have about the non-Christian world.
Except for those of us in academic or perhaps
in foreign mission situations, my guess is
that most of us have done very little thought
about the non-Christian world in general.
The immediate future is going to demand some
serious thinking and discussions about that.
I don't have something in my hip pocket to give
as a solution.
If I did, it would be too simplistic.
As I said, I'm too much of an amateur about this.
What I'm pretty clear is that we really need to
start thinking about it in a more intentional
way than at least I've ever been around.
Maybe your experience is different.
As you probably know, many non-Christian
religions are making remarkable advances in our nation.
Islam is very rapidly growing in America.
Buddhism is growing in America.
All of the sort of non-traditional world
religions that are growing in America.
And too often in our encounter with world
religions, it's only been over there.
We've only thought in terms of some distant
land and its people and its religion so that
it's kind of a package deal.
It's foreign, it's not Christian, and to be
fair, in our biases, it's barbaric.
All of those sort of biased assumptions we need
to look at.
And too often, particularly in the 19th and
20th century, Christianity in the foreign
world was tied to capitalism and democracy.
And again, we sort of presented a package deal
that to become a Christian was to become
a believer in democratic government and a capitalistic...
Mission work and how we see other people in our
land who increasingly we are going to
discover around us who just do not start from
the same place.
I was in high school and I guess like most high
school kids, we talked with my friends
about church.
It was all partisan issues.
We all kind of, you know, we do Bible study
because everybody knew, everybody had several.
That's changed.
And I don't think, at least in our lifetime,
that's going to reverse itself.
In fact, I think it's going to go stronger the
other way, that it's going to be more
and more the experience of pluralism.
And so, both what I teach here and what you do
in local congregations, your children,
your adults for that matter in Bible classes
are experiencing a much different world with
regard to world religions.
Well, let me see if I can draw some conclusions
here and we'll leave some time for discussions
as well.
What can we learn from the encounter in this
passage, from the encounter of Christianity
with world religions in this brief narrative?
We also have to consider Acts 17, which I'm
going to come to a little bit later, but next
class period.
First thing I think you have to say is the most
common approach to different religions
in the Pagan World is not the one followed by
Christians, at least according to Acts 14.
As I mentioned earlier, that is syncretism, the
equation of all gods by seeing all divinities
only as regional variations of the same reality.
There was a philosophical argument in the
Middle Ages called nominalism, which meant
that the only difference in realities were the
names you put on them, it was all an argument
over words.
It was an attempt to sort of take away
philosophy by denying there is any great things
to talk about.
It's just an argument over words.
And in a sense, that's what syncretism is,
although in a positive way, that all the gods
are equated largely in terms of the natural world.
At the present time, of course, that doesn't
happen very often.
What we tend to do is to equate all different
religions, modern people, modern western people,
what we tend to do is to change theology into
anthropology, so that all the gods are just
different manifestations of different cultural groups.
We neither deny nor affirm the existence of the
divinities, we just say, well, that's just
how this culture constructs its world.
Christianity did not go the route of syncretism.
Again, as a historian, and particularly a guy
interested in Alexander the Great, I keep
coming back to this, what that would have been
like in the 1st century.
One of the things I've used in my class, in my
freshman Bible class, to sort of illustrate
how pervasive syncretism was in the ancient
world, I've imagined a soldier in Alexander's
army, let's say someone from Macedon, who as
part of the conquest, ends up over here
in Syria, and down at the marketplace when he's
buying something to eat, he manages to
get a local to talk to him, and for some reason
the conversation steers into religion.
And so my mythical soldier asks the local, what
sort of gods you people have around here?
And the local guy says, Baal, Baal is the high
God, he's the Supreme God, he rules everything,
he's the chief of the gods, and kind of start
describing Baal, and the soldier says, oh
yeah, back home, we got him, Zeus, we call him.
You see, it's the same reality, we just got
different labels, or my same soldier gets
stationed down in Egypt, down in Thebes, or
Alexandria, has this conversation, and someone
says, I'm on Ray, he's the sun God, he's the
supreme, so I go through the whole school,
oh yeah, Zeus, back home.
Now if my mythical soldier gets stationed in
Jerusalem, and on the outside chance he
can find a Jew who will talk to him, and has
this conversation, and learns about the unpronounceable
religion, and says, oh yeah, create, create,
yeah, and the Jew would say, no, you worship
dumb idols, we worship God most high.
The Jews would not play the game, which is one
reason why they were hated by their culture.
Jews were regarded, among other things, as,
quote, haters of humanity, and the reason
is that everybody else is willing to play the
syncretism game, they understand that,
and Jews, and then Christians, won't play, and
it seems terribly arrogant to everybody else.
That's the problem whenever pluralism meets the
Christian religion.
Should we then see the religions of the world
as examples of God's general revelation?
There is a man named Clark Pinnock, who's a
fairly conservative evangelical, I think
that's how he described himself, who has
written several essays, including one I read
for this,
in which he talks about what he calls the
Melchizedek factor.
What he means by that is that when Abraham met
Melchizedek, he was already a servant
of the most high God, and obviously had not
ever before known about Abraham or any of
Abraham's doings.
So, Pinnock's point is that there is a faith
out there beyond the Judeo-Christian revelation.
He grants that it's a lesser light, but that
all world religions are responses to this
revelation that God has made through creation
and so forth.
That's one way in which Christians could
encounter world religions, I think.
Another way is to see the religions of the
world as examples instead of human resistance
to God, the theoretical equivalent of building
a tower of Babel to storm God's throne.
In this model, world religions are not dim
visions of the divine, but human arrogance
opposing it.
The only other significant text in the New
Testament which talks about Pagan religiosity
is the last part of Romans 1, and it's both
longer and more difficult than the passage
I've dealt with.
I'm going to make three or four comments that
come from Romans 1.
On your own, if you want to read Romans 1:18-30
subsequently, which is really Paul's
only discussion, extended discussion, of
non-Jewish, non-Christian peoples.
There we learn that God has provided some
awareness of himself to all humankind.
God has made known.
In so far as the Pagan World knows anything
about God, it's the result of God's activity.
So there is, I think from Acts, this idea that
God has made something of himself known.
But all that that is, at least in Romans 1, is
that people should have learned from the
created order not to make idols, or it's a very
limited awareness of God.
They should know enough from what they see that
God is not like things, and therefore
you don't make idols.
It's not a lot, but it is something.
But the third point, which is really what
Romans 1 is about, is that this divinely provided
revelation has been repressed and or rejected
by humankind.
It in fact resulted in an opposition to God,
not a relationship to God.
I suppose in a similar way that Paul describes
the law, that what the giving of the law did,
one of the things the giving of the law did was
to evoke the desire to break the law.
There's something about Paul and human
character that the making of any rule or law evokes
in us a wish to do something else.
I make a habit of driving the speed limit.
When I go from here to Dallas or Fort Worth,
which I do several times a year, I set my
cruise control on 70 and I go 70.
I do that for a number of reasons.
One is I'm getting old and less secure of myself.
Another is that I have children who are drivers
and I do not want to model bad behavior for them.
That's what is posted and so I do that even
though I risk greatly being run over every
time I do that.
Everybody's going 80 and I really think that if
we posted 120 there would be people who
would modify their cars so they could do 130.
There's something about that that evokes what
I'm after is I think Romans 1 affirms that
God has made available some knowledge of
himself, very limited knowledge, but that
that's only
theoretically possible.
What in fact happened was because of human sin
this knowledge has been, Paul literally
says repressed, held down.
How do we know that?
How do we know that that's what's happened?
Well in Romans 1 it's because of all of the
various social ills that characterize human
life apart from God.
Romans 1:27-31 you go through and read this
sort of litany of human sin.
It's an old idea that Paul knows because he
reads his Old Testament that if you don't
know God correctly you don't live correctly.
Now in the Greek world religion was not closely
tied with conduct.
Conduct had to do with your philosophy,
religion had to do with meeting certain obligations
for the city or for the home.
But for Jews and for Christians then religion
and conduct are so interwoven that bad religion
gets you bad conduct and the explanation of bad
conduct is bad religion.
They can read both ways.
I hope I'm being clear that maybe not that
Romans 1 I think affirms that there is available,
was made available by God and awareness of him
but that in spite of that what happened
was Pagans just like Jews opposed obedience to
God because we are all captive to sin.
Another consideration that's not raised in the
text that we're looking at but I suspect
is the most powerful today and the one that I
guess I have the most compassion about.
That is there are people, I have a lot of
students this way but a lot of people otherwise
for whom the issue of world religions is about
God's compassion and his justice.
It could sort of express the problem in this
way, if God condemns those who have never
even heard the story of Jesus is he not harsh
and unfeeling?
Is he unfair?
Let me say I think that's an important
argument, the most important argument I know
and the
reason it is is because it is focused upon the
character of God, not the goodness of
humankind, another argument.
I'm not very optimistic about building an
argument of salvation based upon the goodness
of humankind, it would be pretty unconvincing
to me at least but this argument is significant
because it does deal with the character of God
which I think is what Acts 14 and Romans
21 wants to point out, God's care extends that way.
So in response to that sort of provocative
question let me give you two reflections,
they're not answers of course and we can
probably talk about them but in response to
that objection
or that not objection but that observation.
The first is the fact is we do not have
ultimate answers to God's future.
We can either declare anyone approved or
rejected, that's God's job alone and we should
be unwilling
and undesirous to displace him and in fact what
difference would it make?
How I decide?
Whatever my judgment is does not have any
consequential value as far as I know.
Now and I know that can get understood as sort
of a weakness but to me it's just kind
of accepting of what the reality is, I don't
have any control over final outcomes so I'm
not going to spend much time guessing about them.
When I worked for a church in Missouri I got in
a discussion once with a member of our
congregation who was very politically active
and very interested in us reshaping society
according to the Christian truth and
particularly was concerned about some
legislation and I
said I don't have any optimism about that and
all I can do is kind of work on the church,
I have no optimism about rebuilding society.
If I can get Christians to be Christian that's
about all I can hope for so that's kind of
my first I think obvious but at least for me
true answer to the question about God's
ultimate decision but secondly and I think
equally if not more important this objection
underestimates the present value of Christ for
humanity in other words if we focus only
on where ultimately the people end up and we
try to answer that for God or give God
some good advice on how you should do that.
We tend to neglect the question of the present life.
To be honest I think most of us Western
Europeans and particularly Americans have the present
life so good and so comfortable that we have
difficulty imagining any help from religion
except at the point of death and beyond.
When I ask my students what is the gain to
being a Christian I do this every time when
every week study acts what do you gain by being
a Christian?
Always go to heaven or escape hell that's the
only thing virtually they can come up
with and the reason is because everything else
is pretty good the only thing I really
don't have a quick fix for or cannot use my
account for is eternity so I need some help
there but everywhere else I'm okay.
So that we have trouble understanding that an
awful lot of the world that's not true
and they receive a great benefit from Christian
faith in the present.
We receive it too we're just not we don't
reflect on it because again we kind of we
presume this is how life is because it's what
we know.
Several years ago I was talking to a friend who
was a missionary in Guatemala and he worked
out in the sticks with the K'iche Indians they
didn't use Spanish they used this native
tongue and he was evangelizing out there and I
asked him one time how open are they to
hearing about the gospel what do they think of
the story and he said well you know the
interesting thing is that the K'iche who have
become Christians what they value most out
of becoming Christian is they're no longer
afraid of every rock and tree they pass.
They lived in a world characterized by gods and
goddesses everywhere and the great danger
is you will do something to offend one who will
get you and not only will you not know
what you did you won't know to whom you did it
and so the problem of religion is figuring
out which God you've offended and how to make up.
Now I doubt that most of us have ever given a
thought to that that Christianity offers
us in the present protection against all the
demonic forces that are out there.
There may be people who are recovering from
various addictions who do see it that way
but I think the majority of us don't see that.
That's one of the things that the gospel is saying.
I was reading an article in a book about a
mission effort in Africa among the Messiah
and that person said that what the Messiah that
he dealt with found most impressive about
the Christian gospel was the idea of forgiveness.
All societies have some experience in which you
can do a certain deed from which you cannot recover.
You can do something that puts you beyond the
pale and you can't come back.
And the Messiah that he dealt with said they
found that was they knew about a creator.
They had stories about a creator God not the
same one of course but they didn't have that story.
So I think when Christianity engages other
cultures it's important for us to reflect
about all the benefits that Christianity talks
about and not only about what Americans tend
to do bottom line questions how is this
ultimately going to go.
Finally I would also observe which is also not
in the text that we read that if one were
to regard all religions as varied path to God
the only way one can do that is to overlook
the considerable differences and disagreements
among all world religions.
What constitutes the good?
What constitutes a successful life?
All of it in which you have to be incredibly
naive I think to say that these are really
all sort of variations on the same God.
The example that I use to illustrate this is
the word humility in Philippians 2 when
Paul quotes this hymn to recount Jesus work he
said that he humbled himself and took the
form of a servant.
From that story which is our foundational story
Christians have discerned correctly
that among the things which God approves high
on the list is humility.
In non-Christian Greek literature up to that
point the word translated humility almost
invariably means humiliated and it's a bad
thing you do not want to be that way.
So just take that one topic there's a major
difference between what is regarded as God
approved by the gospel and the story of Jesus
than other things that different religions
say are God approved and so however we start
talking about this we need to I think not
be so naive as to assume that because everyone
has some story about God that they're all
sort of interchangeable to a great degree.
Okay I talked for most of our time so you can talk.
In other words what does the rise of other
religions that we talked about in the early
part of your talk even the rise of your
religion atheism say about the validity and effectiveness
of the Christian message because it's does it
call into question the validity of the
Christian message if for example in England
there was once a Christian country and had
so many passionate Christian witnesses who is
now virtually effective.
Right well first of all secularism itself is a
fairly modern phenomenon and I don't
know that we've I don't know what box we use to
work with that but I guess there are
two sort of general observations one is that
Christianity affirms the ongoing activity
of sin in the world in a general way and also
even among Christians and probably what is
I'm not an expert probably what has hurt the
Christian cause irreparably more often
than anything else is the activity of
Christians doing things that the gospel I think would
not approve but not only doing them but seeking
to sanctify them with Christian faith.
I think secularism of Western Europe including
England is highly attributable to the two
world wars in particularly the first one but in
which the Christian nations of the world
fought each other and fought each other in very
uncivilized ways particularly in particularly
the first war and I think that experience made
it very difficult for many people to
have faith so that characterizes the conduct of
Christians it makes it more difficult to
see the story of the gospel.
The two common ways of dealing with
non-Christian world religions is either to see
them as an
example of God's general revelation or to see
them as an example of human Hubris opposition
Hubris arrogance before God yes it is okay
thank you I think it's 9.45 is the next down
we don't offer anything other than the hope of
the danger and these religions that are
growing right now offer nothing now because
we've lost it's not the look at it's our
approach is that same but I think particularly
where his mom is growing he is growing what
are you going to do about it I want to ask you
a question I enjoyed it I'd like to be
here next session I've got to be somewhere else
the last three days are you right?
Yes they are.