Today's Scripture Reading (March 25, 2024): 1 Corinthians 1
I
don’t like medical specialists. I have a number of chronic medical conditions
which include extreme allergies, eczema, and lung problems. As a result, I have
seen a lot of specialists over the years. But they never seem to work, or maybe
more precisely, it sometimes seems like an improvement in one area results in a
worsening in other areas. I don’t want you to think that I don’t value them because
I really do. But there is a part of me that really believes in the wholistic
concept that the body is a unit, including your mind. Suffering is not just
contained somehow in the physical realm and it is not just what happens to your
body. Everything inside of you is connected.
And there I fall out of favor with dualistic idea of Greek wisdom.
The
Christian Church has battled wisdom for much of its existence. A lot of what we
believe about spirituality is actually Greek wisdom dressed in Christian
clothes. And at several points of our history, well-meaning eccentrics have
stood up and said so. Most of them were written off, but a few were heard. For
Christians, the argument often comes with regard to our body and our soul. The
question is, are the body and soul one, or are they separate parts that combine
to make us, us. For the Greeks, that was part of wisdom. And well-meaning
Christians down through the ages have argued that we have fallen into Platonic
(meaning from Plato) dualism; we have come to believe that the body and soul
are separate and different. It was one of the early church’s heresies. Gnostic
Christian believers believed that only knowledge (which was in the possession
of the soul) could be permanent and in connection with God. It was your soul
that could be saved. Your body belonged to the other realm; it was evil and
could not be redeemed. It also meant
that uniting yourself with a prostitute was okay because it only involved the
body. The belief was eventually rejected by the early church but many have
argued for the separation of body and soul ever since while others have
despaired at the influence of Greek wisdom on Christianity.
Greek
Wisdom is the “Don’t Leave Your Brain at the Door” theology. It is the idea
that God can be reached through reason alone. In the beginning of this age of
reason, Blaise Pascal came up with his challenge. He said that there are two
types of people in this world, those who believe and those that don’t believe.
He also argued that there were only two ultimate eternal realities in the world,
either God exists or he doesn’t. If you don’t believe and God exists, then the
result is hell. If you don’t believe and God doesn’t exist, then the result is
nothing. On the other hand, if you believe in God and God exists, you get
heaven. And if you believe in God and God doesn’t exist, then you spent your
life living in a positive moral condition and probably made the world a little
better, but there is no eternal impact. Therefore, it makes more sense to
believe in God than not to believe.
But
here is the problem. Paul says that God has made man’s wisdom foolishness. The
reality of experience is that God can’t be reached by reason alone. We have
tried in the West and belief has declined. There has to be something more.
As
Paul wrote these words, he was just a few years away from an unfortunate event
at the Jordan River. it was about fifteen years after Jesus’s death and
resurrection that a man named Theudas had claimed that he was the Messiah. Theudas
taught that God was on his way to deliver his people. There was nothing the
people had to do to receive God’s salvation but to walk out to the River Jordan
and watch a miracle of God. We don’t
have a clear idea of how many people Theudas led to the Jordan, but if it is
the same Theudas who is mentioned in the Book of Acts, there was 400 men plus
women and children who followed Theudas into the River Jordan to meet with God
in a miraculous event. But apparently, God didn’t show up. The Roman Army did,
and they marched out, met them, and killed them.
So,
Paul says the Greeks look for wisdom and the Jews for miraculous signs, but you
need to know that the truth lies elsewhere. Reason alone won’t get us there,
and miraculous signs takes away the need for faith. Neither wisdom nor signs
will save us. As Paul wrote to the church at Ephesus, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift
of God” (Ephesians 2:8-9)
Tomorrow's Scripture
Reading: 1 Corinthians 2
No comments:
Post a Comment