05 - Greek Philosophy

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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All right, so we will press on with our study of church history.

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And I warned you last week that this would be sort of the tough week.

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I think of all the, maybe some sections during the medieval period might be equally dry.

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But this is pretty much the arid week. So you pay the price by staying awake this week, and you're good for however long this is going to end up taking us.

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But as we mentioned, it is rather important to have a background in the world into which the

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Christian gospel went. We looked at Gnosticism last week, and we talked a little bit about dualism.

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It's interesting, I'm going to be doing at least one dialogue up in Salt Lake City with a

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Mormon I've known for many years. First met him, I've said many times, the

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Lord protected me from fellows like this until I had a good foundation under me, because he's really sharp.

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And he's not your standard Mormon by any stretch of the imagination. And we're going to do a dialogue.

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And I was listening to some of what he's been doing recently up there in the Salt Lake area. And I was struck once again by how common it is for Mormons to say that what we believe about the

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Godhead, about the doctrine of the Trinity, and things like that, is because we adopted Greek philosophy.

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That the writers of the Bible didn't believe the things we believe. But this came later as Greek philosophy began to have an illegitimate impact upon the development of Christian doctrine and teaching.

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So it's very common for people to say that. And there's no question that certain of the early

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Church fathers, deeply, deeply influenced by various schools within Greek philosophy.

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And we're not going to take a whole lot of time to learn everything there is to know about Greek philosophy. But it is important to have some idea of what was going on.

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Let's start with the Stoics. The Stoics, founded in Athens around 305

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BC by Zeno of Citium. The name probably comes from the fact that Zeno taught at a stoa, at a porch.

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And so maybe that was where the name came from. Its leading beliefs would be the following.

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The universe is a rational whole pervaded by the logos, or reason.

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Logos is that term that we will see in John 1. 1, in the beginning, was the word, the logos.

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And that particular word has a wide range of meanings, even in the

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New Testament. And there will be many who will say that John is specifically attempting to make a play to the

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Greek philosophers by saying, in the beginning, it was the logos. I personally think that the stronger connection is to the use of the word, word, for God's word in the

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Old Testament, the memra, and things like that. But anyway, the universe is a rational whole pervaded by the logos, or reason.

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Knowledge of the function of the universe as a whole provides us with knowledge of how each individual thing must behave as it is related to this greater whole.

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Everyone must follow the rational will of the universe and live in conformity with the divine laws of nature. Everyone must accept with equanimity his rightful place in the scheme of things and fulfill the necessary purposes of that place.

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And so obviously, when someone, even today, and it's very rare that most people today have much idea of Greek philosophical schools, but if someone says, well, he took it with a stoic attitude, what would that communicate?

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Well, a lot of folks wouldn't communicate anything at all. But it used to communicate the idea of a certain level of equanimity, of not being either given to big highs and low lows.

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It's not this kind of person, but sort of being a stoic. So with equanimity, you take your rightful place in the scheme of things.

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So complaining, griping isn't really something that would be considered to be an appropriate thing to be doing.

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Duty is doing the most rational thing possible in accordance with the rational necessity fated by the world's soul.

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So it's the idea of fate. If you are a galley slave, well, then just be a good galley slave.

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There wasn't a whole lot of reason to attempt to improve yourself in light of the concept of fate, fate being a rather impersonal thing.

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It's just fated for you, that's the way you're going to be. And if that changes, well, it's all because of the fates as well, and you cannot influence them.

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All virtues are forms of knowledge from the stoic perspective. The cardinal virtues, reason, courage, justice, and self -discipline are ends in themselves.

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So the idea of being self -disciplined is definitely an element of this concept of stoicism.

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Virtuous living is the ultimate goal of life. The study of philosophy leads on to the virtuous life.

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The stoic strives to attain apatheia, the psychological state of insensitivity or indifference to pleasures and pains, emotions and passions, joy and grief, anxieties and mental elation.

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Autarkia is a state of self -sufficiency, a state of non -dependence upon anyone else for survival and the satisfaction of physical and emotional needs.

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And so you want to be without passions, you want to be self -sufficient, you want to be that person that just keeps that steady line, never getting out of control either direction.

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When you normally think of some of the representations of some of the

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Greek philosophers, you know, they're self -disciplined. They're not going up or down, very common in that presentation of them.

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All people are related as common cooperating rational members fulfilling the design of the eternal world reason.

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All things are predestined by fate, and all things recur eternally. Now those last two is interesting to keep in mind.

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As I said, fate or fatalism, very often, in fact, I'll be doing a debate in August.

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It was the one I was supposed to do a couple weeks ago, but had to cancel it over in Southern California. We're going to reschedule,

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I think, for the 12th of August. One of the things that the pastor that I'll be debating constantly repeats is that Calvinism is simply fatalism.

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And that's based upon the idea that if there is a determining, there is a God who determines what's going to happen in time, well, from his perspective, if there's any determinism, then that same thing is fate.

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The problem is, in some forms of Greek religion, the fates were personal, but the fates could not be influenced by mankind, really.

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Even the gods were subject to the fates. So fatalism is impersonal.

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God's sovereign decree is intensely personal, so much so that when you think about it,

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Muslims, well, some Muslims, have a very strongly fatalistic perspective, but they call it

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Qadar, Q -A -D -A -R. And Allah will accomplish his will, but Allah is transcendent above his creation, and so it becomes fatalistic.

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It's not so much that Allah is demonstrating his attributes or anything like that at all. There isn't any ultimate goal, really, when you think about it.

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But in the Christian faith, when we talk about God's decree, if we didn't have the incarnation, if we did not have the intimate involvement of God with his people, then we'd have a very different understanding of how things work.

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But when people say, well, you're a fatalist, I say, well, fate's impersonal. And the cross and the incarnation demonstrate that God's sovereign decree is extremely personal.

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And in fact, he becomes involved with his people in time. This isn't a puppet show.

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This isn't just acting out what's already been laid out beforehand, hence it has no meaning.

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The very fact of the incarnation, very, very different than any other system like that. So there are obviously, you know, sometimes people will say, well, you can't look favorably upon anything in any other religion or in a non -Christian philosophical system.

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Well, that's silly. An emphasis upon being kind to others or upon being faithful to your commitments or things like that, you know, we recognize that all comes from God's common grace, comes to the fact that he made us in his image, so on and so forth.

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But the reality is there are a lot of things in Stoicism that have parallels in Christianity in the sense that we are to be self -disciplined, that we're not to be that type of people that are just always looking for a high or crashing down to a low.

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There's a lot in the New Testament when you read Paul's epistles that he is exhorting people to a discipline of life that would echo with a

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Stoic. That doesn't mean he is a Stoic. And the weird thing about modern academia is that it's become wedded to this idea that everybody in the ancient world, if you had anything in common with somebody else, it meant that you borrowed it from them.

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The idea that this couldn't come from the fact that we're made in certain ways and that following the golden rule is found in almost every religion, that's not because all religions come from the same source, but because we live in this world and you follow the golden rule, you get along better if you don't than if you don't.

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But in academia, the idea is, well, obviously, Paul must have been influenced by Stoicism.

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And so he just borrowed it from there or borrowed it from someplace else, so on and so forth. That being based upon the idea that there can't be a divine revelation, so it all just has to be man borrowing from man, since man's the measure of all things.

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So there's the Stoics. Then you have the Epicureans. Epicureanism, a form of hedonism that held that the highest good in life is the absence of pain and the absence of vexing pleasures that bring pain or discomfort as their consequences.

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The aim of life would be tranquility. I love this word, imperturbability.

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That's a word that you could win a few Scrabble games with, imperturbability, of body, mind, and spirit.

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And so the Epicureans, when you hear the term hedonism, you normally just think of someone who's just going out and having a grand old time and just going pleasure, pleasure, pleasure.

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But that's not fully the case. There are different forms of hedonism.

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John Piper is known for a form of what is called Christian hedonism, the enjoyment of God as your highest good and things like that.

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But obviously, there are all sorts of subcategories and sub -subcategories.

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And if you're a philosopher, you want to get followers, so you'd always break things up.

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And you have to come up with something new, some new twist on things. And so you'll find all sorts of people who have different takes on these particular things.

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Then, of course, you have probably the biggest term as far as Greek philosophy is concerned.

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That's Platonism and, of course, going back to Plato. And anyone who has spent much time reading

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Plato will recognize what

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I'm saying when I say, I'm not sure that Plato understood Plato, honestly.

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It takes a special mind or a warped mind, nothing personal, Brother Callaghan, to be a philosophy major.

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Either you have to like to scourge yourself, you just enjoy reading books that are as exciting as chewing on aluminum foil or something,

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I don't know. But Plato, especially, just, anyway, a couple of the ideas here.

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And again, there's a lot here that, obviously, we could spend forever on, but no one would come back next week.

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And I wouldn't blame you, because I wouldn't come back next week either. So nobody would be here, so that's why we're keeping it brief.

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But some of the leading beliefs of Platonism, the world as it appears to our senses is not the real world.

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There are two realms, the realm of perfect, unchanging, eternal ideas or forms known only by our intellect, and secondly, the illusory or less real realm of concrete, individual, changing objects known by our senses and existing as imperfect copies of the perfect ideas.

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So the real world is non -spatial, non -temporal. The actual world is spatial and temporal.

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Abstract entities, such as universals, souls, forms, essences exist in the real world independently of our conception of them, and they are more real than sensible objects.

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Humans, through the use of their reason, can control their base emotions and their irrational nature and thereby develop morally and spiritually.

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Humans do evil because they lack knowledge of the good. So I wonder what

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Christianized Platonism looks like. Just an aside there.

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Philosophic knowledge of the true, good, and beautiful is essential to the development of righteousness and the proper guidance of oneself and of others.

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Philosophic knowledge can be attained by the rigorous application of reason through a process of dialectic.

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And so you can see some of this in the 17th chapter of the

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Book of Acts, where Paul is invited to come and speak to the philosophers of the

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Areopagus. And they're always looking for these types of dialogues, this type of dialectic.

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They want to engage in these.

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Well, Socrates was well -known for the Socratic dialogue, the means of instruction through question and answer and this type of thing.

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And so philosophic knowledge can be obtained by the rigorous application of reason through a process of dialectic.

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Humans possess a soul, and it is immortal. So it is often said that Christianity borrowed the concept of a immortal soul from Plato and from Platonism.

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There is a spirituality and a rationality that pervades all the universe. So most of the

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Greek philosophers and Greek philosophic systems had some kind of ordering principle, very frequently referred to as the logos, which is, again, why people look at John and go, oh, he's making a play for the

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Greek philosophers and so on and so forth, I think ignoring his own background.

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Then you have the cynics, the cynics. We have the term cynical, of course, which

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I've been accused of more than once. And especially when it comes to politics, that would be an appropriate description.

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I am cynical of every single stinking one of them. I don't care what party.

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I don't care what gender or in between genders anymore. It doesn't matter to me.

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I am cynical of all of them. The cynics taught that virtue is the highest good.

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Its essence is self -control and independence. Happiness comes from acting virtuously, which to them also meant using one's native intelligence to survive.

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So much for many of the millennials on college campuses to being cynics because of native intelligence, but you need a safe space.

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What can I say? It's sort of aimed at my foot, but at least it'll be nice and cool.

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They distinguished between natural values, conformity with the rhythms of nature, and artificial values, those imposed by individuals upon other individuals.

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Ignorance of one's simple nature and its simple needs leads to unhappiness. Embracing unnatural values, such as fame, wealth, success, achievements, pleasures, reputation, academic degrees, et cetera, leads to unhappiness.

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Some of you who know a little something about Eastern religion will note some parallels here, especially within forms of Buddhism.

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There would be some real parallels as far as unhappiness comes from unfulfilled desires, and therefore it's the control of your desires that will end up providing you with happiness once you just simply get rid of all the wrong desires.

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And of course, there's something very right to be pointed out. I mean, it's biblical. Where a man's heart is, that's going to be it.

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Where his treasure is, that's where the heart is. And if you desire fame, and wealth, and promotion, and things like that, and then you don't receive those things, then, well, there's the key to unhappiness, right?

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So again, there are some parallels there. Desires lead to unhappiness.

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Individuals should live in a state of nature with a minimum of desires and needs.

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So the cynic is a person who's living a very simple life, a simplified life.

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A minimum of desires, a minimum of needs. The individual who wants nothing, lacks nothing, has a minimum of needs, is like the gods who have no needs to be satisfied.

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Now, obviously, there were understandings of the Greek gods that would have been different than that, in the sense that a lot of the

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Greek gods had great needs, and desires, and so on and so forth. But some people would say, part of the reason you had the stories of the gods acting in exceptionally human ways were to function as parables, as to how we're not to function.

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So if you see gods, and you'd think, well, being a god would be pretty cool, you know?

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But when you see that the gods have desires, and then their desires become frustrated, then that becomes a parable as to why you should have a great limitation upon what your desires actually are.

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Obviously, Wall Street and Madison Avenue do not want us to become cynics on this level.

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This isn't good for capitalism at all. So the individual who wants nothing, lacks nothing, has the minimum needs, like the gods who have no needs to be satisfied.

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So in general, the cynics were ascetics, antinomians, that is, they were against the established norms, customs, traditions, laws of society, anti -intellectuals, non -academic, non -systematic, highly individualistic.

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They ridiculed luxury, and sensual pleasures, and idolized poverty. They despised the speculative theories of the academics, which they thought had no practical benefit for the individual, but enslaved him with false obligations.

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So these were the folks that weren't trying to make it in the academy of the day, and instead mocked it.

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And of course, when you ridicule luxury and idolize poverty, one of the things we'll see in the early church is, well, we'll see it throughout church history, is you'll have these groups that will develop that eventually end up prohibiting marriage for various under reasons.

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And of course, we even are warned against such groups in the New Testament, but it happened over and over again.

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And they all had the same fate. Generally, they die out quickly.

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And there's a couple of reasons for that, I think fairly obvious ones when you think about it.

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But there is always that element in man's nature down through history that embraces the idea that, you know, these male -female relationship things, really complicated, and a source of all sorts of friction and trouble, and so let's just get rid of all of them.

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Well, that's not the direction you want to go, but that's the direction certain people ended up actually going.

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So if someone describes you as cynical, obviously, we mean that in a way differently today than it was used in the ancient world.

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But there are some of the ideas of the cynics. Now, just briefly, once again, if you weren't here, is it true that there were early church fathers who were more influenced by Greek philosophy than they were by the

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Bible? Yes. Clement of Alexandria, great example.

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Justin Martyr is coming from a very, he never took off the pallium, the cloak of the philosopher, even as a

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Christian. And it's easy for us to go, mm, because we've got 2 ,000 years of church history and many advantages.

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We have a completed canon, which you have to remember, starting in the middle of the second century, there started being disputes over that.

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At first, it wasn't considered a big issue. But then as the collections of the

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New Testament started circulating, then questions came up. And we'll address those questions when we talk about canon issues a little bit later on.

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But some of these folks had a limited canon, so they didn't even have all of the

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New Testament. Remember, who were the two relatively early church fathers that could actually read both the original languages?

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Origen and Jerome. Remember, you are supposed to, that's, and when was the Council of Nicaea?

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Thank you very much. OK, good. We're going to make sure to, everyone's got these down. And Origen and Jerome is another one of those things you need to have memorized.

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And so especially, if you think about it, if you only have a portion of the

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New Testament, and you have a rather low view of the

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Old Testament as needing to be interpreted only allegorically, and there's already become a strong antipathy that has developed between your community and the

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Jewish community. So you can't learn from them. There's persecution going both directions.

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You put that together, and how many of us would have a really good balanced theology if we were in the same situation some of these people were?

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You know, people are a little bit surprised that I attempt to extend as much grace as I do to those in the past who came to what would obviously be to us wrong conclusions.

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Well, it's because I've taught enough church history to know that you need to look at where they were.

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And I know that I hope, if the Lord tarries till after my death,

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I know that I would like to be treated fairly. I don't expect to be, but it would be nice, at least for some people, to treat what

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I wrote and what I did fairly, look at the context in which I lived, so on and so forth.

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And so if I'm going to hope for that for myself, then I need to extend that to others as well.

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And so we can learn,

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I think, from when we look at those who were in error on important issues and ask ourselves the questions, if we had what they had, how much better would we have done?

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Or if you want to put it another way, isn't it amazing, given how little they had, how well they did in these other areas?

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These are some of the things to keep in mind. Hopefully, at least by the end of this study, the one thing that will not be something you will do just in a knee -jerk reaction is to look at anybody in history and just automatically transport them into our day as if they had access to the same information we have and stood upon the backs of the same giants that we stand upon, and then judge them as if they are a contemporary of us today.

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You need to recognize where they were. And sometimes that's really difficult.

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And you'll see lots and lots and lots of books that just don't even bother to try to do that. Now, when we come to the body of literature that has been left to us by early

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Christians, there are a couple of things we have to keep in mind. Man, if this thing starts itching, I am going to be in a world of hurt.

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That's all I can say. I think I will have to be tied down and sedated for a few days because that would get really ugly.

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Once again, when we talk about literature, when we talk about written sources, especially for some of you who are younger, some of you who are more of the millennial,

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I can't do that because of recording on this, you have seen a revolution in information technology in your life.

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My daughter can hardly remember a time before she had a cell phone.

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It's just been a natural extension of her life. I only pick on her because Josh is older, so I'm trying to go as young as I can.

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They've grown up with microwaves and cable TV and the internet and things like that.

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Most of us my age, we remember, I remember my first pager. I thought that was just a technological breakthrough.

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I felt like a doctor, a really important person, the first time I got a pager. Then you started getting text on your pager.

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That was an amazing thing. And when you first got the pager, all you could do, if you got a page, you're driving down the road, is pull over and try to find a phone someplace to try to call whoever it was that was calling you.

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And of course, in Christian publishing, Christian publishers don't know what to do.

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They still haven't quite figured out what to do with the advent of the Kindle and electronic publication, no longer having to produce as many paper books.

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What do you charge for an electronic book if you're not charging for the paper and the binding and so on and so forth?

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And all of that kind of stuff has radically changed. And in fact, it used to be you could only get published if you actually had something worth saying.

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Now, anybody, no matter how inane and insane, has the same level of platform almost as anybody else, though maybe not as much money to push it.

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So with that in mind, it's very easy for us to, well, a lot of critics of Christianity will engage in an extremely naive historiography.

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For example, you'll have it said, well, how do we know

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Jesus actually even existed? I mean, there's just so little evidence. I mean, there's just nobody talking about Jesus, contemporary with Jesus.

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Well, how many books do you think we have that were written in Israel in the first century?

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There are very few. We have Josephus, who's writing toward the end of that century. We have some

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Roman and Greek historians that really view that part of the world as the armpit, and it's really irrelevant.

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What are you expecting? I mean, let's be honest with ourselves. If we had to try to prove the existence of 99 .95

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% of all human beings that lived in the first century, so from what we call zero to the year 100, we couldn't do it.

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Because there's no historical record of them. We know they were there because somebody had to be there.

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Somebody was building the buildings. Somebody was keeping the human race alive. But you don't have

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Social Security numbers. You don't have names. You don't have dates. You don't have places. But there were armies marching against other armies, which means there had to be soldiers, and somebody had to be giving birth to those soldiers, and so on and so forth.

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But the reality is that we have become so accustomed to not only instant information being available all across the world.

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I mean, I heard about, you know, first thing I got up this morning, I see a notification from a friend of mine on my phone.

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He had posted something on Facebook about the Orlando shooting. So before I ever turned on a news channel or anything else,

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I had already heard about what happened in the early hours last night.

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Well, only a matter of, what, 50, 60 years ago?

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It might have been 24 to 48 hours before that information even got into the newspapers across the

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United States. And so news just didn't travel the way that it does today, and it had to travel in different ways, especially in the ancient world.

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You know, the invention of the telegraph and things like that made massive difference in how mankind learned about events and things like that.

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But especially when it came to the production of literature, in those early centuries, there were libraries, but you need to understand, almost every book or scroll, well, every book and scroll in that library had to be hand -copied.

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That's a long process. Most of us do almost nothing by hand anymore. There are some of you who are taking notes.

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But the majority of us don't do that anymore. Or you're doing it like Paul's doing it there.

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He's tapping away on his iPad. But can you imagine if you had to copy out books to have in your personal library, how big would your personal library be?

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And of course, in the ancient world, you have the question of literacy.

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How many people could actually read and write? They're not necessarily the same things.

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How many people had that capacity, had that ability? How did that vary from community to community?

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I think one of the things that's missed by a lot of modern scholarship is the very strong focus upon literacy and the reading of Scripture within Jewish communities.

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And as that being a part of the education of the Jewish young man, especially, it was very, very important.

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And hence, there was, I think, a higher rate of literacy amongst the Jewish community than there would be amongst others that were less focused upon literature.

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But also, you need to remember another date, another date.

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We call it the Peace of the Church, P -E -A -C -E, the Peace of the Church. It's when persecution is stopped, primarily in the western part of the

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Roman Empire. We'll get into the details of that later on. But the date is 313 A .D. It's only 12 years before the

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Council of Nicaea, 313 A .D. Up until that point in time, Christianity is a religio illicita, religio illicita, an illicit religion, illegal, under the

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Roman emperors. And from about 250, 260 to 313, so that last 50, 60 years, is the period of empire -wide and most extreme persecution of Christians, which included the destruction not only of Christian scriptures, but of any

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Christian literature at all. And so when you put all those factors together, we need to understand that the literature that has survived is fragmentary.

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For example, we're going to be talking here a little bit later on about a fellow by the name of Papias.

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Now, we only know anything about Papias' writings as they were quoted by other people.

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We don't have anything that he wrote. So we can only know him as he was quoted by or alluded to, or sometimes you can't tell which one's which, somebody that came along at a later point in time.

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And so what if there was some huge either natural disaster or more likely the

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Iranians and the South Koreans got together and...

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Sorry, North Koreans, thank you. North Koreans. South Koreans are nice guys. The Iranians and the

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North Koreans get together and launch missiles at the

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United States. And because we are so decrepit any longer in our leadership, they manage to take us out, and the nation falls.

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And 500 years from now, they're digging through the rubble of what we once were.

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And they come across the remains of a Christian bookstore. And you want to try to put together what the

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Christian faith looked like in 2016, but it's now 2516, and you've just found this deposit of literature that we'll call

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Berean. And only some of the books have survived.

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What kind of a picture is that going to give you? Heaven's Real, lots of Joel Osteen, and Oprah is probably going to be in there someplace.

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Are you really going to get a balanced picture of the historic

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Christian faith, or even a balanced picture of the Christian faith today, if you get fragmentary remnants from something along those lines?

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Well, that's frequently where we are, especially in looking at that earliest period of the

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Christian faith. Lots of things that were written didn't survive. Some things we'll never know about.

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Other things did survive, but were they the

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Joel Osteens of their day? What if someone dug up the

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LDS book in supply? It says it's Christian. So is that representative?

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These are some of the questions that we have to remember, that it's not like we have these people running around in each decade providing us with nice written summaries of all the doctrinal developments, and they're just giving us this journalistic, neutral recording of stuff.

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It doesn't exist. And if you approach the data in that way and assume that that's what we have, you're going to come to some pretty wildly wrong conclusions about what was actually happening.

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And that's why so very often historians, by very definition, have to be tentative.

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They have to say, well, it's possible that this person believed this, or he might have believed this, but what we have that represents their perspectives is insufficient to come up with a final conclusion.

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And a lot of people don't like that. They want absolute black and white.

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Well, okay. There will be people who will give that to you, but it won't necessarily make it true or accurate, but they will get a follower out of you anyways.

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So when we start looking next week at some of the earliest writings, we'll be looking at Clement of Rome and the

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Didache. Now, if you want, these materials are widely available.

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Almost all of these, the Apostolic Fathers, the next period we're going to be looking at from A .D. 95 to A .D.

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150. So 95 to 150. The people writing during that time period are called the

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Apostolic Fathers. They're the people who knew the apostles, or at least claim to know the apostles, or at least live in a time period where they could have known the apostles, to put it that way.

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Most of this literature is available online, something like the Didache. I talked about it recently on the dividing line because one of my

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Muslim opponents brought it up in the debate in South Africa. But all this stuff is available online.

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There are published editions with Greek interlinears and introductions and notes and just all sorts of things that are available to you if you want to be doing some reading for yourself.

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And certainly you could read all of Clement of Rome and the

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Didache literally in 25 minutes. I don't think

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I'd be stretching it at all. They're just not that long. But these are probably the two earliest non -New

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Testament writings we have from Christians. But the

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Didache wasn't even discovered. It was known to have existed, but the actual text did not come into our possession until like the 1870s.

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But it's become rather well known since then. So if you want to avail yourself of those, and of course they're available electronically, they're available online.

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ccel .org is a huge source of online church history resources, things like that you can just pull up on your phone if you want to do that.

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So keep that in mind if you'd like to read along or something like that as we're looking at some of those pieces of literature starting next week.

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All right, we have exhausted our time. Let's close the Word of Prayer. Father, we thank

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You for this time, opportunity to once again consider what You've done in the past. We ask that You would help us to remember that we live in that stream.

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We look back upon many who have served You, and we want to be faithful for those who would come in the future as well.