Just as Paul resolved the issues necessary for Christian civilization, John resolved the issues about the ultimate future of the earth. His Apocalypse is a statement of how God will finally eliminate evil from the human system.
Of course in some of Paul’s letters he deals with the end of the age—but most of what he says can be narrowed down into saying that world culture will be unbearably wicked. The rest makes sense along the lines of what John says.
John says that after human culture has become unbearably wicked, there will be great disasters. On the human side, there will be horrible international warfare, famine, and disease; the natural world will experience environmental catastrophes. Polluted water, scorching heat, darkness, and the perhaps large scale extinction will be signs that the end is coming. Two international political leaders (= prophets) will have the power from God to preach God’s will to the entire earth, presumably through the international media.
At some point after this the world economy will collapse (“fallen is Babylon the great”). In conjunction with this or before, a world government will from with global power, at the head of which will be someone (false prophet) who will wield supernatural power, mostly in what he or she says.
It is in this situation that Christ will return. Although Christ’s aim is not to set up his own human government, such a political and economic situation will not be compatible with His purposes. And so there will be a great world war, as Christ and His better people are revealed to the earth, visibly re-entering human history.
The next piece is the first sign of good news. Christ and His people (or the better ones—John says martyrs) wield God’s power to make the earth a peaceful and happy place. The evil institutions which have always ruled human history will be removed. It is the personal presence of God in these people which will make this possible, and most likely they will be spread across the earth.
After a lengthy period, human freedom being as it is there will be a gathered attempt by the earth’s inhabitants to shake of Christ’s government. God’s response to this will be to send all evil persons to a waste place somewhere in the universe. The dead will be judged; human history will be transcended, and in its place will be a massive, properly integrated community of humans and angels who are completely faithful to God. Probably normal human life will continue, under the direction of this community (“the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it”). The triumph of God and his kingdom will be complete.
And then there will be a new beginning—one in which purposes which we cannot conceive of will be executed in a glorious fashion: “and they shall reign through the ages of ages.”
With such things in mind, the reading of the Apocalypse becomes encouraging. And it’s most important function is this: it gives us complete confidence that God’s good ways will, in the end, triumph over evil.

June 20th, 2009 | Nathan | 0 comments | Continued

The field of Roman ethics is too vast to even summarize in a post. However, some of the major themes will be developed here to prepare for later posts.
The Roman Republic is one of the most beautiful periods in human history. Its sheer length (over 500 years) coupled with the many great men who served within it make it an important time for any student of politics to consider. The Romans were a frugal, disciplined, religious, and patriotic people who provided the context to what would come to be known as Western Civilization. The Roman Empire was less admirable than the Republic, but it was still a gloriously powerful institution based on positive law and military might.
For our purposes, it is the ethical teachings of the Stoics which are most important to be examined. Zeno and Cleanthes were the greatest of the early Stoics, but little is left of their writings. The best text here to read is the “Hymn to Zeus” by Cleanthes. It is a good summary of Stoic theology.
As Aquinas noted, the popular conception of the Stoics as being without feeling is incorrect. Epictetus and Seneca did not believe that feeling itself was bad, but rather that unordered and excessive feeling was bad. They were a courageous group of people able to face incredible adversities with equanimity. The other teaching that they sometimes are criticized for is the notion that suicide is sometimes morally admirable. Rest assured that probably every suicide of the last 200 years was morally wrong and would have been considered so by the Stoics. But the suicide of Seneca was in itself an astonishing thing. In his case, he did not want to die, but was ordered by the emperor to do so. He respected the emperor’s authority, and was not afraid of death—so he acted accordingly.
The essence of Stoicism is finding happiness through being resigned to the will of God. They taught that many of the good and bad things that people experience are not under our control, and so we should not worry about them. Instead, we should focus on the good that we can do and become through our own choices, and seek to be content about the rest. In this context they spoke about living according to nature. A man once asked Seneca why he shaved if he believed that man’s happiness did not lie in one’s appearance. Seneca replied, “Man is a well-groomed animal, and it is appropriate to do so if I am able.”
If one had to categorize philosophically the apostles Paul and John, it would have to be as Stoics. Indeed, Paul’s ministry must have looked rather familiar to the Stoics of his day. At the time there was a special philosophical calling to be a Cynic philosopher, which basically was the Roman version of a prophet. A cynic was clothed poorly, slept outside, and traveled from city to city preaching righteousness. They were frequently beaten and driven away, but put their trust in God and carried on. In fact, when the monks first headed for the desert in the fourth century, they were often called philosophers. They were leading a life of asceticism and holiness that reminded men of Socrates and the Stoics.
Seneca’s best works are his Essays and Letters, and the works of Epictetus to read are the Handbook (Enchiridion) and Discourses. I hope to be able to describe Stoic teaching more in depth at a later time.

June 10th, 2009 | Nathan | 0 comments | Continued

“The Tao is infinite, eternal.”
—Lao Tze
“Suppose everybody in the world loves universally, loving others as one’s self.”
—Mo Ti
With this problem in mind: “how can life be made happy?” it is possible to examine what the great civilizations discovered in response to it. The discoveries that the Chinese made were defeated after several centuries, but they are so profound that we should not ignore them. Their thoughts will also serve as a good backdrop for the Western and Near Eastern attempts.

In the first millennium before Christ, there was a Chinese philosopher named Lao Tze who wrote a significant work called the Tao Te Ching. Anyone interested in having a happy life at the beginning of the 21^st century cannot afford to do without this book. It is the highest expression of the theology made publicly available in the Eastern world. In this work Lao Tze develops his idea that all of human life takes place within a spiritual environment called the Tao (“Way”). According to him, human happiness on the individual and corporate level comes from living in harmony with the Tao, and having the Tao fill and rule over human affairs. An unhappy person is one who lives in conflict with the Tao, and an unhappy nation is one in which the rulers do not understand or practice the Tao. The descriptions he gives of the Way are very similar to the descriptions of the LORD and His kingdom in the Hebrew Scriptures. This text and a few others became the basis of Taoism, a sizable philosophical and ascetic sect.

There is some hinting about an afterlife in the Tao Te Ching, but only so much as one would expect in, say, the Old Testament. Like most of the ancient writers, Lao Tze was not primarily concerned with individual immortality. In the end it was the metaphysics of Buddhism which defeated the Taoist movement on the public level in the East.

In the fifth century of this era there was a philosopher in China named Mo Ti (also written Mo-Tze or Mo Di) who taught universal love. His idea was that the happiness of human life depended on living in limitless love for all people. This idea works well with Lao Tze’s teaching about the Way, and could have served to make the Eastern world a beacon of human civilization in the highest sense. Unfortunately the teachings of Mo Ti were defeated by Confucianism several centuries later. But even today, one could make a happy life using the writings of these men and an appropriate asceticism. They also prepare one to read the Western texts with new eyes, and this is especially true regarding the Old and New Testaments.

June 3rd, 2009 | Nathan | 0 comments | Continued

Having discussed natural values, the next thing to investigate is our duties.  These are misunderstood today mainly because they are not physical entities.  They go beyond God’s law–or political law—and touch every aspect of our lives.  Every major civilization has been aware of the existence of duties—including ours until very recently.

Duties are simply things that we ought to do– or ought not do– based on our personal situation in life.  Two different people may and often do have different duties.  The health of and strength of our soul ultimately depends upon us doing our duties, and when we do our duties, God draws near to us.

It is important to realize that our duties exist whether or not we are religious.  A husband has specific duties to his wife, and a wife has specific, though different duties to her husband.  Every relationship, no mater how trivial, has duties associated with it, and our ultimate duty is to worship and serve God.

Because duties are realities stemming from the nature of the soul and body, most of them exist whether or not one is a Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and so forth.  Paul described the unbelieving Romans as “God’s rebel subjects.”  One of the main purposes of being religious is to help one to know and do one’s duties. And sometimes a religious person has additional duties (e.g. “love the brethren”) that a nonreligious person does not.

The ultimate basis of the existence of duties is the relationships between the members of the Trinity, but one does not have to know the Trinity to know many of one’s duties.  Plato and Aristotle knew nothing of Christ, but they knew that certain constraints were on every human life.   And whether or not one is God’s friend, one’s duties remain, and to fail to do one’s duties is to incur the wrath of God: at the Last Judgment, and in the slow (or sometimes quick) disintegration of one’s soul even in this life.  By contrast, to do one’s duties is to step into the flow of God’s life forever.  One of the greatest services the church can offer the world is to teach others—Christian or not—about their duties.

There is also an order to one’s duties: some are more fundamental and important than others.  We must hold to their priorities.  Jesus said:  “Woe to you Pharisees, for you tithe mint and cumin but neglect justice and the love of God.  These out you have practiced, and not left the others go undone.”  If we neglect our basic duties to do a comparatively trivial one, our soul loses its correct orientation and becomes alienated from God.

Unless I get sidetracked, I will try to write more about our specific duties.  Our first duty is to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with your entire mind, and with all your strength” and to “love your neighbor as yourself.”  Indeed, all of our duties are summed up in these commands.  But because life is complex, we must learn the specifics of these duties in the various relationships and work that we must do.

 

Our duty to God: To love, worship, and obey the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

                        To keep His Law; and to accept His Gospel, as we hear it.

 

Specifically:

Our duty to our parents: to honor them, and, as a child, to obey them.

 

To our children:  To be gentle to them, to teach them all good things (when they are still young), and to love and support them unconditionally.

 

A husband to wife: to love her and to be tender with her, and to be faithful in heart and body to her.

A wife to a husband: To reverence and obey her husband, and to be faithful also in heart and body.

To our friends: to be loyal and beneficial

To all people: to be polite and kind, and to keep our word, to hold others responsible for their actions, to be punctual.

To our work: to work hard and to be honest

To our leaders: to be subject to them as appropriate

To the truth:  To be reasonable

To our country: to love and defend her, and to keep her laws (In a democracy: to vote and respectfully assist in the political process)

To our countrymen: To have a special friendship and generosity to fellow citizens

To the poor:  To help them appropriately, to maintain fairness for them, to help meet their needs as we can.

To a foreigner: to assist him and respect him as a fellow human being

An athlete: to train hard, to love one’s sport, to be a good winner, and to be a good loser.

To knowledge: to act according to one’s knowledge, and to lead and teach to the appropriate extent.

To oneself: to maintain health, strength, and discipline; to take care of one’s needs and duties, to be well-groomed; to educate oneself as appropriate, to rest, to be a good person.

To wealth: generosity and frugality

 

The special duties of Christians: To love those who follow Christ with a special love, to keep our oaths made to Christ, and to obey the Scriptures.

 

            There are also special duties for each person’s place in life, which I will not annunciate here: duties of a politician, an artist, a pastor or a deacon, a businessman, a scientist a teacher, a professor, an employee, a writer, a professional athlete, a monk or a nun; indeed, every station in society has special duties associated with it.

There are duties of nation to nation, city to city, and state to state.  Within a nation, there are duties toward criminals and other subgroups.

This is not meant to be a comprehensive list of duties, though I think it encompasses most of our major ones.  Knowledge of one’s duties gives one great inner freedom, because duties simply are a basic part of reality, and when one is focused on them one has a place to stand to not be governed by his or her feelings.

The great tragedy of life at the beginning of the twenty-first century is that very few people know their duties, and even fewer do them.  This is a result of our political, religious, and intellectual history in the twentieth century.  Unless this changes, we will cease to live at the level of civilization we have enjoyed for the last 250 years, since our duties maintain the fabric of our society: that is, our domestic and international relationships, prosperity, and divine blessing.  May the Lord help us each to know and do our duties, and thus to enjoy His blessing!

October 6th, 2008 | Nathan | 2 comments | Continued

“The true Light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.” John 1:9

“All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” The Great Commission

The New Testament picture of a believer in Christ is that of a disciple. Though others have written at length on this topic, it is so important that to neglect to give it a place on my blog would be a disservice to my readers.

As we have said several times on this blog, human beings have a deep need for knowledge, especially knowledge of ultimate reality and the means to human happiness. There is so much important stuff for us to know that it is impossible to figure it all out on one’s own– even if one devotes his or her entire life to it.

The idea of a disciple is one which comes down to us through both sacred and secular history. The great philosophers of ancient Greece, Rome, and China all had a little band of followers into whom they poured their knowledge and character. The same could be said of some of the greatest of the Hebrew prophets. Jesus, as the greatest philosopher and prophet, does not deviate from this model. In his earthly life, he too had twelve intimate associates and several hundred serious students. To be a disciple of Jesus during his earthly ministry had a meaning that would have been clear to anyone who lived in the ancient world. This model of discipleship, however, is not unique to the classical world, East and West. It continued through the Middle Ages, and well into the Modern period.

One could of course still be a disciple of Plato or Lao-Tse today, in the sense that one could make the teacher’s writings, sayings, and example the basis upon which one lives his or her life. This is in fact done more frequently than one might imagine. In the same way, one could be a student of Jesus: using His life and teachings in the four gospels as a pattern for life. Since Jesus is the greatest of the ancient teachers, this would be a particularly intelligent thing to do. This is in fact the starting point for anyone who wants to be disciple of Christ today.

But there is more to Christian discipleship than this. As has been said already, the Son of God has a Divine nature as well as a human nature. He is present throughout the entire Universe, and he lives at every place and time. He is the expression of the nature of God, and the One who knows everything. A person has the option to become His disciple, to learn from Him how the world works and how to live one’s life.

The most important biblical example of this is the Apostle Paul. More than any other human being, he learned how to live his life from Christ, although he, presumably, did not know Jesus while He lived in Palestine. Paul is in fact a good model for us as to how discipleship should progress– although he had a unique calling which few of us could endure. In some important respects, each of the great Western and Eastern teachers were disciples of Christ. Studying their writings and lives will, I think, reveal that they learned much of what they knew from the Word of God teaching them. The Father teaches us of course, but so do the Word and the Spirit, as the opening quotes suggest.

This vision of things can allow us to see the place that reading the great teachers (mostly Western, although there are a few good ones from the East) has in discipleship to Christ. Although we learn from Him first and foremost, one of the ways that he teaches us is through those who have already begun to learn from Him. Ideally these would be people we know personally, but to some extent we can receive from those now dead men and women who left their writings and their example in the record of history.

As an aside, near the very top of the list are the Stoic philosophers. Although they were not Christian by any means, they distilled much of the wisdom that the classical world had discovered and made it available to ordinary human beings. While this is not the place to establish it, the apostles Paul and John both learned a significant portion of what they knew from the Stoics. The early monasticism made use of the example of the Stoics as well: I have heard that when the hermits first took to the desert they were sometimes called philosophers. We can confidently assert that a great help to Christian discipleship is available through the life and writings of men such as Zeno, Cleanthes, Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius.

But this takes us a little afield from the present topic, and I plan to write a post on the Stoics sometimes soon. What should be clear is that part of how we learn from Christ is through our teachers who are strictly human. The great Christians of history clearly belong to this crew, but those Christians we know who are farther along give us something special as well. Christ teaches about our teachers, and then we can learn from them properly.

What remains to be discussed are: the “material” that we are to learn from Christ, the means and progression of our learning, and God’s ultimate intention for discipleship.

February 15th, 2008 | Nathan | 0 comments | Continued