Our very own Sze-kar Wan, Professor of Biblical Studies at Southern Methodist University, shared his reflections on Acts 17.22–31 on Sunday, March 17.
Sze-kar's question/dilemma is a deeply Christian one
What is it about Christianity that makes it possible, even acceptable, to threaten the existence of others—even those who profess the same faith and worship the same God, let alone those who do not call themselves “Christians.” It might be easy to dismiss those carrying a Bible in one hand and an assault rifle in another as fringe elements. But we can’t hide from the fact that they and we and I call ourselves “Christians.”
...read on...
Sze-kar's question/dilemma is a deeply Christian one
What is it about Christianity that makes it possible, even acceptable, to threaten the existence of others—even those who profess the same faith and worship the same God, let alone those who do not call themselves “Christians.” It might be easy to dismiss those carrying a Bible in one hand and an assault rifle in another as fringe elements. But we can’t hide from the fact that they and we and I call ourselves “Christians.”
...read on...
I’ve been struggling with trying to come to terms with Christian nationalism. I grew up Evangelical, my home church was the Boston Chinese Evangelical Church, and I went to an Evangelical seminary with the full expectation of working within the Evangelical circles. I spent two summers doing evangelistic work in Boston Chinatown, going around the neighborhood, which included the old South End where Chinese immigrants could afford to live, making public announcements in English, Cantonese, and my native Hoisanese. I am still very proud of that work. But the capitulation of American White Evangelicals to rightwing politics has produced a frightening form of nationalism—a form of nationalism that is partly based on racism and partly based on Christianity. This alarms me especially these last few weeks when images of angry people, armed with guns and God and threatening violence on anyone who advocates isolation and face masks, flash all over the internet. The world sees men in fatigues and flak jackets, armed to the teeth—in one case even carrying a grenade-launcher—barging into statehouses, restaurants, and whatnot, demanding that they be, quote, “liberated” from the lockdown. Invariably they brandish God as one of their weapons of choice.
I am not going to debate the politics or the science behind all this. My question is: What is it about Christianity that makes it possible, even acceptable, to threaten the existence of others—even those who profess the same faith and worship the same God, let alone those who do not call themselves “Christians.” It might be easy to dismiss those carrying a Bible in one hand and an assault rifle in another as fringe elements. But we can’t hide from the fact that they and we and I call ourselves “Christians.”
Today’s text in Acts 17 gives me a clue. Luke puts Paul in Athens, on the famous Mars Hill, Areopagus, to debate the Greek philosophers, but what I find discomforting is that he does so by marshaling Greek philosophy. The message to the Greeks isn’t that different from the message to the Jews earlier in Acts: All need to repent (17.30)! But the rationale here is different, yet also the same. To the Jews, Luke appeals to biblical prophecies to make his case: Jesus is the messiah Hebrew prophets all point to. Now to the Greeks, he uses the same strategy: Questions raised by Greek philosophers are answered, ultimately, by the resurrection of Christ. In both cases, Luke uses the profound resources available and familiar to his target audience to convince them that he, in fact, knows better than they what they are looking for. In the case of the Jews, he offers Christ as a fulfillment of long-awaited messianic prophecy—even if they have no idea that their long search is over. To the Greeks, he refers to what philosophers have long railed against vulgar religiosity—that God could not be identified with the images and statues we all see and touch in the temples (17.24–25)—to tell them that this emerging thing called Christianity in fact represents the highest realization of Greek philosophical ideals.
He cites an inscription found in Athens, “To an unknown God” which can also read “To an unknowable God.” The Greek is capable of meaning both, and I think that’s intentional. He then “proves,” as it were, this unknowable God turns out to have made concrete revelation of the divine nature—by creating the heavens and the earth (17.24), engendering the human race by making the first ancestor (17.26), giving life to all living beings (17.25), and finally by appointing “one man” to be the judge by raising him from the dead (17.31). If we wish to find God, even touch God, Luke tells us, we don’t look in “temples made by hand” or through services rendered by “human hands” (17.24–25), because God is in fact “not far from each one of us” (17.27). But that’s not a Christian idea; Greek philosophers had been saying the same thing for centuries before the Christians came into the picture. Their longstanding search “proves,” for Luke, that God is the creator. What they have long aspired to has been achieved in its highest form in Christianity.
Luke goes one step further, though. He tells his audience that we all belong to the same race, the race of God. He begins by citing what is familiar to his audience, this time a saying by the Greek poet Aratus, “We too are his people” (17.28). But then he immediately reinterprets the saying to mean we are “the people of God” (17.29)—that is, the Yahweh of Jacob, Abraham, and Adam! And that--our common ancestry—is the basis for repentance.
Know what exactly is happening here. The basic criticism against popular religiosity, that non-thinking people are fixated on images and statues, comes not from Hebrew Scriptures but from the learned elites present in and produced by Greek culture. They define high Greek culture. But then Luke transplants the whole argumentative edifice in Christian soils by erecting it on the biblical creation story. And that, according to Luke, is the basis for repentance. In a single stroke, Luke co-opts a Greek story and makes it into a Christian one.
Why does that bother me now? It didn’t before but now does. It’s one thing for a minor, persecuted sect like the Christians in the late first century to claim universality. Then it sounds like a bravado designed to pump energy into a flagging movement or to encourage those who are discouraged or who are losing faith. But it is something categorically different when, two centuries later, Christianity is weaponized into a supremacist ideology to silence all dissenting voices—dissenting religious and political voices, I might add. Leaving its humble beginning as a proscribed sect, a superstitio, a religio illicita, as the Romans called it, that is, an illegal social group, it becomes the principal ideology of imperial domination. If diversity represents a danger to governance, Christian universalism is the answer. All thoughts are subsumed under the Christian label. And the type of muscular, militaristic Christianity we witness today is a direct descendant of that. I call it hermeneutical hegemony.
Is there a solution? It’s not accidental that here Luke emphasizes the resurrection at the expense of the cross (17.31). Elsewhere, Paul calls Jesus’s death on the cross “love,” as he says in Galatians 2.19–20. It represents a concrete act of self-giving that grounds triumphalism in the death and suffering represented by the cross. We all want victory, but are we ready to endure that defeat which is an integral part of victory? Maybe if we as a culture and I as a person am less focused on winning and more on losing, we might have enough humility to get through this without hurting anyone.
I am not going to debate the politics or the science behind all this. My question is: What is it about Christianity that makes it possible, even acceptable, to threaten the existence of others—even those who profess the same faith and worship the same God, let alone those who do not call themselves “Christians.” It might be easy to dismiss those carrying a Bible in one hand and an assault rifle in another as fringe elements. But we can’t hide from the fact that they and we and I call ourselves “Christians.”
Today’s text in Acts 17 gives me a clue. Luke puts Paul in Athens, on the famous Mars Hill, Areopagus, to debate the Greek philosophers, but what I find discomforting is that he does so by marshaling Greek philosophy. The message to the Greeks isn’t that different from the message to the Jews earlier in Acts: All need to repent (17.30)! But the rationale here is different, yet also the same. To the Jews, Luke appeals to biblical prophecies to make his case: Jesus is the messiah Hebrew prophets all point to. Now to the Greeks, he uses the same strategy: Questions raised by Greek philosophers are answered, ultimately, by the resurrection of Christ. In both cases, Luke uses the profound resources available and familiar to his target audience to convince them that he, in fact, knows better than they what they are looking for. In the case of the Jews, he offers Christ as a fulfillment of long-awaited messianic prophecy—even if they have no idea that their long search is over. To the Greeks, he refers to what philosophers have long railed against vulgar religiosity—that God could not be identified with the images and statues we all see and touch in the temples (17.24–25)—to tell them that this emerging thing called Christianity in fact represents the highest realization of Greek philosophical ideals.
He cites an inscription found in Athens, “To an unknown God” which can also read “To an unknowable God.” The Greek is capable of meaning both, and I think that’s intentional. He then “proves,” as it were, this unknowable God turns out to have made concrete revelation of the divine nature—by creating the heavens and the earth (17.24), engendering the human race by making the first ancestor (17.26), giving life to all living beings (17.25), and finally by appointing “one man” to be the judge by raising him from the dead (17.31). If we wish to find God, even touch God, Luke tells us, we don’t look in “temples made by hand” or through services rendered by “human hands” (17.24–25), because God is in fact “not far from each one of us” (17.27). But that’s not a Christian idea; Greek philosophers had been saying the same thing for centuries before the Christians came into the picture. Their longstanding search “proves,” for Luke, that God is the creator. What they have long aspired to has been achieved in its highest form in Christianity.
Luke goes one step further, though. He tells his audience that we all belong to the same race, the race of God. He begins by citing what is familiar to his audience, this time a saying by the Greek poet Aratus, “We too are his people” (17.28). But then he immediately reinterprets the saying to mean we are “the people of God” (17.29)—that is, the Yahweh of Jacob, Abraham, and Adam! And that--our common ancestry—is the basis for repentance.
Know what exactly is happening here. The basic criticism against popular religiosity, that non-thinking people are fixated on images and statues, comes not from Hebrew Scriptures but from the learned elites present in and produced by Greek culture. They define high Greek culture. But then Luke transplants the whole argumentative edifice in Christian soils by erecting it on the biblical creation story. And that, according to Luke, is the basis for repentance. In a single stroke, Luke co-opts a Greek story and makes it into a Christian one.
Why does that bother me now? It didn’t before but now does. It’s one thing for a minor, persecuted sect like the Christians in the late first century to claim universality. Then it sounds like a bravado designed to pump energy into a flagging movement or to encourage those who are discouraged or who are losing faith. But it is something categorically different when, two centuries later, Christianity is weaponized into a supremacist ideology to silence all dissenting voices—dissenting religious and political voices, I might add. Leaving its humble beginning as a proscribed sect, a superstitio, a religio illicita, as the Romans called it, that is, an illegal social group, it becomes the principal ideology of imperial domination. If diversity represents a danger to governance, Christian universalism is the answer. All thoughts are subsumed under the Christian label. And the type of muscular, militaristic Christianity we witness today is a direct descendant of that. I call it hermeneutical hegemony.
Is there a solution? It’s not accidental that here Luke emphasizes the resurrection at the expense of the cross (17.31). Elsewhere, Paul calls Jesus’s death on the cross “love,” as he says in Galatians 2.19–20. It represents a concrete act of self-giving that grounds triumphalism in the death and suffering represented by the cross. We all want victory, but are we ready to endure that defeat which is an integral part of victory? Maybe if we as a culture and I as a person am less focused on winning and more on losing, we might have enough humility to get through this without hurting anyone.
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