Discipleship

“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.