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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek, and as promised we are beginning as beginning gets, I think, with the Greeks to go over some of the background. We talked about the Greeks in the context of the Greco-Persian wars, and now we need to go back and fill in how they got there.
Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth: and unto them were sons born after the flood. The sons of Japheth; Gomer, and Magog, and Madai [the ancestor of the Medes], and Javan, and Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras. And the sons of Javan; Elishah, and Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim. 5By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations.
The word here that’s rendered Javan comes across through other directions as Ionia. These are the Greek tribes. The name Elishah might be Helos, the person the Greeks actually remember as their ancestor.
That phonetic drift is so interesting to me. We have Giovanni as the Italian form of John. In Ireland that’s Ian or Eoin. The same letter gets taken away. It’s just very interesting to me, and I’m not a linguist. I don’t know what that means.
At this point they disappear from the record, but before we leave them there let’s look at “By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands.” The Table of Nations was written fairly early, while Shem, Ham, and Japheth were still alive, so the dispersion had begun but it hadn’t gone all that far, and the nations that are listed there are within a nice compass circle’s drawing of Mesopotamia, Ararat, Shinar, and thereabouts.
All of these peoples in the Table of Nations kept moving, or their descendants kept moving, so this is not a complete picture of the Japhetic peoples. Eventually they kept moving and got as far as Italy. Most of what we think of as Europe was settled by descendants of Japheth.
Notice too that they were divided in their lands, everyone after his tongue, after their families. The story of Babel doesn’t come until chapter 11, but the Bible has a lot of flashbacks where it takes us so far and says something and then says, as we would say, “Oh, but before we go on I probably should explain what’s going on there. What do you mean by tongues?”
Exactly. It’s part of storytelling. It starts in Genesis 2 where we run into, “What do you mean God said to them? Who’s them?”
“Let me tell you about man and woman and how they…” and so Genesis 2 backs up.
So we’ve got here the announcement in advance that language is a thing, division of language is a thing, and chapter 11 tells us how that happens. At the heart of that division was a theological/religious revolt against Yahweh. These people wanted to name themselves, make themselves a city, a community, a tower, a ritual shrine whose top was into heaven. That is a way of reaching deity, of becoming gods themselves, or confronting God and wresting heaven from him. What came out of that, aside from a faithful remnant – and it wasn’t very big as far as we can tell – were all of these nations.
So as we track of these what we would call Greek settlers moving westward to Asia Minor and then across to the Greek mainland, we need to understand that they are already pagan. That’s not to say that some might not have maintained some knowledge of the true God, some memory, some stories. Drop into anyplace in modern America and you’re going to get different memories of this thing called the Bible, this thing called Christianity. In some places Bible stories and the name God and Jesus are going to strike some deep memories even among people who don’t believe. Other places you drop in and they don’t know Jesus except as a curse word.
I remember a young couple that my wife and I ministered to, and we wanted to tell them the Bible story from Genesis to Christ. I was doing this in 45 minutes, and it eventually took almost an hour, but we were going along…Noah…flood. They looked at me, “No, don’t know. Ark? Oh wait, I just bought this little book for my girl. I think there’s that story in there.”
I got to Samson – surely Samson, long hair, super strength. “No, we don’t know that,” and these were educated refined people. They had a good income, handsome, wealthy, respectable, college-educated, and they didn’t know the first thing about the Bible. I couldn’t imagine such ignorance.
So when we look back through history, archeology, and the ancient writers, it’s a mixed bag. Some Christians in their eagerness to find that common thread will look and say, “Oh look here, this is a memory of the Bible.” Well, it might well be. It might be something else, because they did remember that Noah was their great-grandfather and Japheth was a godly man to a point. But very early his seed apostatized, so by the time we have any sense of them we find them building cities as religious institutions around the tombs of their ancestors, to step back even a little more, because that’s what each family did.
The pagan world was convinced of a number of things. First, all is one, so divinity is a thing and we’re all part of it. Also creation is impossible, which goes with the other thing. There’s no Creator God. Man and nature and divinity are all of one substance, so therefore they looked for God not so much in the sky above or the sun, they looked first of all in themselves. That’s where they expected to find God. And surprisingly enough, they thought they did.
Upon death, then, each father/grandfather/patriarch was assumed to shed this human coil and go off and his divinity would shine through, so when you buried granddad you’re giving him a toehold in this world where he can settle down and be comfortable. His heavenly throne isn’t heavenly at all, it’s in the backyard in a tomb.
No, there’s not. The word chthonic comes into play here. It speaks of underground materialistic death-oriented kinds of gods, gods that you find by going out and digging in the graveyard, very powerful and frightening gods. As long as you kept them happy they weren’t too bad. They knew their ancestors, looked out for them, would do what they could to bless them, but if you didn’t take care of them, nourish them, feed them…
They’d get very cranky and they might start roaming around, and so the stories of ghosts and such. This is not terribly far removed from some Latin American/Roman Catholic ideas of the afterlife. We’ve all seen Coco, right?
You haven’t? Oh, you need to see it just so you can go, “Oh my.” I think a cross appears on a wall once in the background, and there may be a passing reference to God or something like that. Everything else is bringing food and flowers and things like that to the dead ancestors to keep them happy, because if you don’t they get cranky.
But eventually they poof out of existence because this is a Disney movie and you really don’t want to show the ancestors coming back and terrorizing you. It’s clear that some ancestors do get neglected, and shame on the descendants who let that happen. We’re given a little peek into a very fantastical version of the other side.
For children or teenagers who have seen it, that’s kind of what we’re talking about here. The dead ancestors become objects of worship. You need to keep them happy. Also Agatha Christie’s mystery novel, Death Comes as an End, is set in Egypt and it’s very, very similar. The whole ancient world was like this. Keep the ancestors happy. Feed the ancestors. Bring wine and bread and such to their tombs on a regular basis.
There’s no elaborate metaphysical explanation of how the wine that you set on the tomb is transferred across dimensional boundaries to the god, and I don’t think anyone worried about it too much. It was just a given that it does that somehow. If we can get used to people believing the bread and wine actually becomes the body and blood of Christ, and you eat God, we can believe anything. So that was family.
Some of what went into that is that you’re worshiping your own ancestor, your own grandfather or great-grandfather or whatever, and he cares about you, his own bloodline, his own descendants. He doesn’t care about anybody else and is not inclined to help them.
Yes, proprietary is a good word here, absolutely. So you’re keeping him happy, he’s doing his best to keep you happy, and there’s no reason in the world anybody else should worship him, and there’s no reason in the world he should help anybody else.
The things that he needs have been passed down father to son, father to son – to legitimate son – and so some things go with this. Having a father in the household to perform the funeral rites and the worship both at the tomb and in the hearth fire in the home was very important. It was a masculine thing. Ladies were not allowed to do this.
It would be passed to a lawful son, normally the firstborn. Bastard sons were right out because they weren’t really bloodline, and great-grandpa would know that and would not tolerate their worship. So that meant that mom was really important if she was faithful. So we honor mom for being a faithful wife. Dad can sleep with anyone he wants, as many times as he wants, but mom absolutely needs to be faithful because we have to track a faithful legal bloodline father-to-son to know who has the right to pick up the funeral rites when dad’s dead.
Interesting that even adoption was acceptable. It wasn’t necessarily the bloodline per se, but it was the legitimacy.
Right, legitimacy was the thing that was really important. But daughters not so much.
Yes, they’re going to get passed on, so we don’t really care much about our daughters. We honor mom for bearing faithful sons, but she better be faithful. No messing around, mom. Dad does not have to be monogamous or faithful or anything, as long as he has one faithful line that he has maintained.
Also property – where the tomb is, we have to be there so that’s our family land. The hearth fire where we worship and bake our bread and enjoy family living together is a god too, so we need that. So thou shalt not steal means don’t take our land, don’t take our house. Even the greater claims of the State really couldn’t touch that one.
Aside from that, ethics were somewhat problematic. Things like love your neighbor – why? Love your enemy – why would we do that? That doesn’t make any sense. They’re outsiders, ‘the other,’ ‘them,’ and all the nice psychological terms we have these days.
But in time it became clear that families don’t do well in isolation. Families were linked with families, so you get the clans, the jins as they called them, and then the larger tribes beyond that. Eventually they might settle down into a city, and each time when you join with somebody you find a common ancestor. By the time we get to cities you’re going way back into mythical times and you’re locating a hero.
Hero didn’t mean to them what it probably means to us, unless maybe you’re talking Marvel and DC. A hero was a son of the gods. He was a divine or semi-divine being who was an ancestor of your family, because you know we’re all gods, and that being, something like Theseus or Achilles, some great semi-historical semi-mythical figure who was himself conceived by a god somehow, they became the person that you built your city around. The cities were religious institutions. This is something we’ve pounded on in the past in other contexts and we need to keep pounding on it.
Emily, would you pronounce the name of the author who wrote The Ancient City, because I can never pronounce it.
Denis Fustel De Coulanges. It will be in the show notes if you need the spelling.
They do actually have a consistent set of how their phonetics work. You just have to learn them, and the fact that they are completely different then our style of anything.
Somebody will have to give me a lesson. I hate coming to French names and knowing I’m butchering the pronunciation. The Ancient City is a marvelous book that tracks a lot of what we’re talking about here, and a lot of the material that I’m presenting comes from there.
It is interesting, if not amazing, to see how frankly the author admits the city is religious. The city was always religious. It’s always built around a god. The hearth fire of the home turns into the altar fire of a temple, and to belong to the city you must be a worshiper of that god. There’s no two ways about it. You don’t get to be secular or atheistic or uninvolved. You are committed to the religion of the city by virtue of being in the city. All the outsiders are outsiders. They are aliens, almost in the sense that we use the word in sci-fi.
If you couldn’t find some patriarchal connection, legal or bloodline that you could trace back, you really couldn’t get along with people very well. And even when you could, you didn’t always get along with people very well. Rachel has pointed out before how well the Greek city-states didn’t get along most of the time.
When I was in 6th grade I was told there were five things that united the Greek city-states: common language, common ancestor (Helos), common religion – but that comes much later. The Olympian gods come much later, and that’s where we may end up today if we get that far. It’s this ancestor worship coupled with some nature worship.
Next is common shrines, the Oracle at Delphi. It would be interesting to find out how that one started. It is a fascinating phenomenon in earth’s history, and there are questions that somebody somewhere knew the answer to once upon a time, but whether we’ll ever know them now I don’t know.
Then eventually participation in the Olympic games. These are all things that drew them together – common ancestor, common descent, and similar patriarchal-oriented religions, and the common language. These are the things that at least allowed them to talk to each other and do business with one another, but it didn’t guarantee they liked each other very much. More often than not they got together when they were threatened by some outside force, or where there was a good business deal. You can work with just about anything when the money is good.
So to speak of Greece before Alexander is almost like speaking of Italy or Germany before 1850. It didn’t exist. There were Greek city-states, and these city-states sometimes got along, often competed, often fought each other, occasionally came together in leagues or such, and what they had going for them was more or less a common worldview and this religion that was pulling together.
I mentioned a second ago nature worship. It was not uncommon for the ancient world to look up in the sky and see the sun and say, “Wow, that must be a god.” When you no longer believe in the God of the Bible, you worship and serve the creature more than the Creator. Let’s face it, those of us who live indoors most of the time may not notice the sun, but the ancient world soon enough did – the moon too, and the stars, and the constellations.
Yes, oddly enough. So these things they adopted, and the fertility of the land became very important. But as these cities had their own way of doing things, each one laid hold on these nature gods in different ways. They might give them similar names. The sun is the sun, right? The moon is the moon. How complicated can this be?
There you go. So it took time for these city-states to say, “All right, we all have a king of the gods and he’s named Zeus.”
But where do you go next? Does he have a spouse? A lot of the other cool kids on the block have spouses for their gods. We start going down the list, and it’s interesting that some of the myths that we take as ancient and set in stone, you peek back a little further and they’re not exactly so set in stone. And relationships in some of the older versions are not exactly at all what we’re used to.
In one of my articles for this I started with the simple question, “Who’s your favorite Spiderman?” Ladies, who’s your favorite Spiderman?
It’s a complicated question because the fact is until about two years ago I had loved every single Spiderman movie that came out, all of them, except for maybe the second Andrew Garfield one, which I think I fell asleep in. But I still loved Andrew Garfield’s Spiderman. But I think probably Tom Holland’s is the most actually Spiderman.
I like Tom Holland also as an actor, but I saw the Toby Maguire ones first so that’s kind of what brought Spiderman to life. The first one you see play the part kind of sticks with you the most.
And along those lines, the first one I saw – I don’t even know the guy’s name – was on TV with all of the cheesiness of TV special effects, so it was easy for me to give him up and just weigh the movies one after another. So Tom Holland, both as Spiderman and simply as an actor – besides he’s got a British accent, so that’s cool.
But he’s also actually a teenager at the time when Peter Parker is supposed to be a teenager. With Toby Maguire it was like, “Uh, you’re like 30, but okay, we’ll accept that for now.”
The reason I ask this is here’s a character that we know a little bit about. Everybody who has watched movies over the last 20 or 30 years knows the character. If you’ve read comic books you know him back from forever. Spiderman, Peter Parker, Mary Jane, The Bugle, friendly neighborhood Spiderman, with great power comes great responsibility – all of that and a few other things that everybody could name, and yet when you get down to talking about the individual character and characteristics that show up in these movies, everyone is completely different. That’s why we can talk about your “favorite” Spiderman.
The Greeks could talk about, “Who’s your favorite Athena? Who’s your favorite Aphrodite? Who’s your favorite Zeus?”
And we might be missing here the factor of allegiance to a city, because you didn’t travel between city and city. You belonged to one. So you could compare, but you have a loyalty.
There is a loyalty, but to what degree does that manifest? How official are the backstories, I guess. How official are the bios?
“But you guys are telling stories that we don’t have that are pretty cool, so we’ll take those.”
“Yeah, we’ll borrow some of those stories. Yours are a little cooler than ours. They don’t infringe upon our character or our loyalty to our city and its god, because we’re all descended from whoever Zeus is.”
To carry the literary metaphor out a little bit, as we came to the first Avengers movie we’d already seen Thor and Captain America and Ironman and Black Widow. We hadn’t seen Hawkeye yet. In fact, I don’t even know if he’s ever called Hawkeye for the first few movies. We had seen the Hulk in like three different iterations, none of whom made the cut.
No, some of us who read Marvel comics or the Avengers at least (I have a lengthy collection), knew that these characters did live in the same fictional universe, that eventually they teamed up as Avengers, that they had certain relationships, and one or more of the characters tended to be a leader at any given time.
But the MCU, the Cinematic Universe, we didn’t know what Hollywood was going to do, because you never know what they’re going to do to make a buck. So we waited, knowing that the Avengers movie was going to tell us the same old story differently, and we hoped we would like it, that it would be better than all the many potentially really rotten versions they could come up with, it would be something we could buy into, that we could watch a number of movies based around this, but that didn’t answer questions.
Is Tony or Cap going to be the leader here? Who’s going to get along with who? Black Widow love affair – yes? no? with whom? These questions weren’t settled until we saw the first movie, and somehow the script writers and the actors pulled it off and we came away saying, “Okay, those are our Avengers for this decade.”
We accept them. Something like that happened in Greece. Somebody, two somebodies in particular, brought all of the various interpretations of the gods together and provided in one book a genealogy and brief history of some of the major details, and in another into much longer epic poems that used them as major characters and showed us their relationships, who was born from whom, genetics, as well as how they got along or didn’t with one another. Who liked whom? Who was on whose side?
The two authors who did this were a man named Hesiod, who wrote Works and Days and Theogony. Theogony particularly is relevant here because it’s the genealogy of the gods, which takes us all the way back. “In the beginning there was chaos, and out of chaos arose the greater gods, and from these came heaven and earth, and they lay together and from them came the titans…” and eventually by the third generation or so we begin to get the Olympian gods.
Hesiod is tying them up, putting them in a package, and as it were selling them to the Greek people saying, “Here is the new standardized version and I’m telling it really well with polish and style which you’ll appreciate. You’re all buying in, right?”
And while they’re thinking about that, along comes this blind poet named Homer, unless it was another Homer who was also blind. Who was the Homer who really wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey? He writes these two classics – at least supposedly he does, and scholars still argue over that. Let’s assume he was a real guy and he wrote both of them.
Scholars still argue about Shakespeare being a person, so you know, we might as well just take it.
Let’s just go with it. Homer cast the gods as background characters in his two great epic poems – The Iliad, which is the story of the Trojan War, and The Odyssey, which is the stories of Odysseus coming home from the Trojan War and taking forever to get home.
For the time and for the culture these were great works of art. And although I think Christians have fussed over them and ooh’d and aah’d over them far more than they probably deserve, yet there’s something to be said for the literary skill and some of the patterns they set, but they are pagan works of literature. It’s one thing to say these are well-told stories about moving and compelling characters. It’s another to say, “And you should imitate them because this is how a young Christian man should live.”
I’m not kidding. I have an article written by a high uppity-up in the classical education movement who basically says, “The first canon in classical education, the one that teaches young men how to be legitimate young men, is The Iliad.” What book are you reading?
Yes, I would much rather have my children imitate Spiderman than Achilles. I’d even have them imitate Batman before Achilles. Captain America would be much better still. “There’s only one God, ma’am, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.” It’s amazing they slipped that one in.
So that’s what these poets give us. If we were going to do an extended intro to literature, that would be the next thing, but I don’t think we’re going to do that. I think we’re just going to keep going on. We’re going to consider the religious significance of this, because what Hesiod and Homer and others did was to take the gods and incarnate them as it were, make them just like us, very relatable, larger than life soap opera characters, superheroes, maybe super villains, just like us, and there’s the rub.
You can laugh at these characters. You can stand in awe of them. You can have the dressmaker print you some kind of little “Achilles lives” thing for your shirt. But can you worship these gods? And can you find in them a sufficient basis for ethics and epistemology? The general response of the next few generations is, “No, these are silly characters. These are not worthy of proud humanity. There’s got to be something bigger. There’s got to be something more.”
Hesiod and Homer, in elevating the gods to the level of some of the greatest literary characters ever, effectively destroyed them as objects of worship and as sources of morality and as cultural cohesive factors. The Greeks needed something else. So the moment of triumphs for the gods was the sunset of their influence as real religious objects of worship and as the focus of a worldview. There might be room for them in your worldview, but not that.
So the Greek philosophers, the pre-Socratics who followed, began to try to wrestle with this. It’s not that they rejected deity, that they rejected the idea of God. They just reacted those gods, because so would anybody else who had a brain.
They did not conform to the idea of what deity actually should be anymore.
Yes. They had slid so far from the idea of deity that the philosophers couldn’t handle them. So that’s the direction we need to go.
I think one thing we can add therefore in making connections in a Christian worldview is that we should keep this in mind as the gospel goes to the Greeks in the New Testament. For them to bring God down to be like man is to make Him not worthy of worship, and yet they’re going to hear of Jesus Christ who comes as God and yet in no way loses His glory when becoming man. Rather, he’s going to go all the way to the point of death, which would seem like the least glorious thing possible, and yet in that they actually will be taught that there is the greatest glory.
It’s always interesting to see those little brushes in the past where we understand that this is not who God should be, and yet when Jesus comes, in many ways he defies their expectations as well.
And the importance of glory in Greek literature. That’s a very important word, kleos. It’s all about winning kleos. So for Jesus Christ to humble himself is really revolutionary to the Greek mind.
Yes, it’s not the religion they knew. We’ll talk more about this probably next time, but the issue was not that they were secularists. Far from it. They were a very religious people.
Yes. “In all things you are very religious,” or very superstitious, depending on how you want to read the word. A good point there because he is talking to stoics and epicureans as well as hangers on.
Yes. He’s telling them, “You are overly religious, overly superstitious, because you’ve imbued every object with deity. Let me tell you about God who made the world and all things therein, who is not worshiped with men’s hands, seeing He’s Lord of heaven and earth and doesn’t need anything from His creation.”
“What are these words you’re saying, Paul? We understand them individually, but they don’t make sense to us.”
“We were just asking about Jesus and Anastasia and you’re talking about creation out of nothing? That’s not the way the world began. We know how the world began.”
I guess that’s where we take a step back now and we’ll continue this next time, but we can get our foot in the door. What we’re seeing then by the time the poets are done is we have this very polished literary refined sort of religion where the gods are amplified humanity. They are the best and the brightest and the most beautiful, despite the fact that they cheat on one another, and rape and pillage and have hot tempers. They’re still pretty cool as far as human beings go.
We have the unity of the polis, the city-state, that pulls things together, the religious city. And we have the mind of man and all of these things. We’re looking for a unity and a purpose, an epistemological anchor, but there’s that other side. There’s grandpa buried out in the backyard and I think I hear his bones rattling.
There were dark forces, underground forces, dead heroes. Another word that was used for these beings was demon. When the New Testament writers picked up that word and used it for the fallen angels that had opposed Jesus, they knew exactly what they were doing.
It already had a context, and that was these things that every pagan encountered.
“These things you’re afraid of? Guess what? They are enemies of the true God. They’re enemies of your souls. And yes, they are only too real.”
I’m more familiar with The Iliad than the other books in the Greek canon. You stumble across Agamemnon, for instance, saying, “I didn’t start the Trojan War. Why would I do that? That’s so unlike me.”
I would first of all beg to differ with him on that one, but he comes across as, “It wasn’t me. It must have been some god or other.” That’s a code phrase that appears in Greek literature. Sometimes it’s “some god,” meaning a god whose name they do not know. Sometimes it’s Zeus, broadly meaning the divine or sometimes a demon.
The idea is that there’s a divine substructure, chthonic substructure of deity that’s constantly bubbling up. It comes for a moment and interferes in human life and screws things up for us and then goes away. These are not the eternal deities of Olympus who’ve escaped all that and live in a frat party on Olympus all the time. These are coming and going, illogical things that belong to death and the underworld, and they are dangerous.
It's not that they are evil, because the Greeks didn’t really have that category, but they are frightening. They’re uncontrollable, they’re unpredictable, they’re irrational. So what we end up with forming one cohesive worldview is the beautiful, the polished, the ideal, the source of unity for thought and living, and at the same time this underground bubbling stream of unpredictable chaotic divine power.
And somehow these things live together because you know what? The people didn’t just give up their chthonic gods. They didn’t give up on grandpa simply because a new Avengers movie came out or just because Homer wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey. That did not compel everybody to go and turn grandpa’s grave into a trash dump or something. They continued on with the old religions, so there’s this constant tug back and forth in Greek culture.
Aristotle will use the words form and matter to try to show that he’s well aware that there are these two principles and that philosophy somehow must take them into account. And although matter is the lesser of the two, there’s no notion that this is the divine versus the non-divine. It’s just various flavors of divine, of divinity, struggling with one another, trying to find some kind of dialectical unity that people can work with and live with.
That becomes the job of the post-Socratics. When Socrates is gone, Plato and Aristotle have to struggle with this. Then the Hellenic philosophers have to struggle with this, trying to find some way to pull this all together.
What modern philosophy and historians have got wrong is they didn’t jettison religion to do it. They continued to cling to very religious basic principles and tried to make that the foundation of a new world order, a new worldview, and they simply failed. So by the time Jesus comes on the scene, Pilate can look him in the eye and say, “What is truth?”
He was speaking as a man of his time. He understood enough to know that Greece had no answers. The philosophers had no answers. To send young Christian students back to read the philosophers and hope that they will obtain some sort of insights into life is not only sheer nonsense, but it is ridiculously dangerous. That will become clear I think as we go along.
But you don’t hand it to your 3-year-old and turn your back to go fix supper.
I think something that will be interesting to talk about later is the connection we can see in the thought of the Roman Catholic church and the Greeks, since they’re a lot of the ones that started this in European thought.
I’m thinking back to your connection to Coco and such, and the ways that we see a lot of merging and blending of these older pagan ideas into the Roman Catholic system in various forms, where Roman Catholicism does look different in the different parts of the world that it goes to.
It’s very adaptable. It has the ability to, as you say, to blend, to assimilate, without actually altering itself because at root they’ve adopted some basic concepts and basic presuppositions that are not biblical. It’s not always easy to see that, especially if you live in America and you know the Roman Catholic priest who ministers down the block. He may actually believe the Bible, but you need to peel back and look at the system that’s been there for a very long time and see what the system says and what it allows. Then you’ll begin to get an idea why it is adaptable. But as you say, that’s for later.
For another time. For now shall we rack up some additional recommendations?
I have one, since we were talking about some god or other and the Fates. We didn’t quite talk very much about the Fates. I’ve recommended this before. It’s an Anglo-Saxon piece called The Heliand, colloquially called The Saxon Gospel. It’s a retelling of the four gospels as monks were ministering to the barbarians after the sack of Rome.
One of the themes that you can trace through it is, starting with this presupposition of, “Oh well, even the gods can’t get around the Fates. There are some things that are just the way they are and there’s no two ways about it.” It kind of starts off with, “The Fates said it was time for Jesus to be born,” and things like that, and then gradually it turns and says, “Oh, the Fates didn’t intend that,” so it’s kind of interesting. It's definitely not the inspired Word of God, but as a literary interaction with the gospel and with the pagan mindset it’s a really fascinating work.
It is a little disappointing at the end because the manuscripts are incomplete, so you get to the end and it’s like, “And we don’t have anymore.” I was ready for a climax and denouement, but we don’t get that.
It’s called The Heliand. It’s a little hard to find, but you can find it on Amazon.
Mine is very different. Recently in one of his sermons my husband David mentioned a modern hymn that has become one of my favorites. I was actually first introduced to it in Cornerstone chapel, and that is called “Yet Not I, But Through Christ In Me,” originally by City of Light.
Whenever I read through the lyrics it is very encouraging, particularly thinking of the pagan Greek religions and other religions that are constantly in the doing-doing-doing. You can never stop. You always have to keep pacifying and you never know what the Fates are going to do.
This song is very much an encapsulation of the finished work of Christ and the complete peace and joy that we can have in lots of different situations. So if you have never heard it, I recommend finding it. I believe the Gettys also sing it and others.
Mine at first seems not terribly relevant to anything, but I think it is – two books by Don Richardson. I know you both know Peace Child. He also wrote Eternity in Their Hearts. For those of you who don’t know Peace Child, it amounts to God has allowed memories – either direct memories or shattered twisted memories – of spiritual truth, of the gospel to survive in the remote corners of the earth in pagan lands.
The classic example here is Paul on Mars Hill saying, “The unknown god, I’m going to tell you about him,” and he’s not cheating. There is actual historical facts behind that that say, “Yes, it was the God of the Bible who intervened in Greek history,” and Paul is using that point back.
Similarly in China, early missionaries had trouble communicating the gospel in China because they were presenting Christianity as an alien religion, a religion of white men. But then somebody discovered that the very Chinese characters reflected a memory of something much more ancient. For instance, the word for ship was a boat with eight people on it. The word for righteousness was me standing under the lamb. The missionaries began to pick up on this and say, “Oh. We’re not telling you a new religion. We’re telling you your old religion.”
It made a difference. Peace Child is about one particular case study in Irian Jaya (New Guinea). Eternity in Their Hearts is more of a looking around at other cultures with much briefer stories.
My point here is that as we look at the ancient world, certain themes do reoccur as people try to invent their own religions. Surprisingly enough, man is not all that creative. There’s nothing new under the sun. He keeps coming up with very similar ideas, and some of them are probably memories of scripture. We need to be careful with this, but there have been times where the coincidences are so high, and sometimes they’re not coincidences.
There’s the story, and I don’t remember where it’s set but this is from Eternity in Their Hearts. A white missionary goes to a remote Indian village and spends a lot of time learning that dialect, because of course India has a ton of them. When he thinks he knows enough to carry on an intelligent conversation he goes to the marketplace, where there’s a lot of people coming and going, and a lot of old people just sitting there talking.
He holds up the Bible and says, “I bring to you words of life from God.” Most people ignore him, but a few of the older folks say, “What did he just say?”
“I know. Get him over here.” They call him over and say, “How can you know this thing, seeing that you are a white man? And you’re holding a book.”
“There was a time when our fathers built a ladder to heaven and God overthrew it, and we wandered south and east and came to mountains. We could not cross them and there was no place for us to go, so the demons of the mountains cut us a deal. They would let us through if we would worship them, and we have worshiped them ever since. But somewhere in our past someone told us that one day a white man would come with words of life in a book, and when he came we should listen and we would be freed from worshiping the demons.”
Sometimes God does not work in mysterious ways. Sometimes they’re very obvious.
Once you realize that the history of the world is exactly what the Bible says, and you’ve only got 4,000 years to play with, and most of it on this side is a lot less than that, we should expect these kinds of things. But no, we think of the Bible as myth and poetry or “These things happened a long time ago in Bible lands, these Bible times and Bible people,” rather than realizing they’re not that far back and that some people actually do have memories.
Anyway, I recommend Peace Child and Eternity in Their Hearts. Don Richardson is the author.
Recommendation: Peace Child and Eternity in Their HeartsThat puts me in mind of how Cornelius VanTil would talk about the point of contact. We talk a lot about the antithesis, where the pagan mind is always opposed to God, and yet there are still places to communicate and opportunities.
Right. There’s always a way to communicate, even though you’re opposed on every point, until God changes their hearts.
Thank you both so much for this conversation. It’s been a delight. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband.
I’d like to give a special shout-out to one of our most faithful listeners, Trish, who has not only listened to I’m pretty sure every episode, but she has started listening back through in this most recent series. She’s like, “I got up to date and then I just started the series 2 over again.” Thank you especially, Trish, for listening. I’m so glad that we’re saying things that are in some way helpful or encouraging or something to you, something to keep you listening.
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