Should Christians Be Stoics? (Part 2)
Survey of Second Testament Persons/Writers
One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, by C. Kavin Rowe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).
After discussing 3 ancient philosophers in the Stoic tradition—Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, Rowe turns to Second Testament writers/persons and a second-century Christian writer to examine why Christianity was an extraordinary challenge to the ways of life of their time, including the Stoics. He begins with Paul the Apostle.
St. Paul
As befits the effect of the apostle’s writings on the church and Western culture, this chapter is chock-a-block with themes difficult to summarize well. Rowe notes—and this fact is often forgotten—that what we know of Paul comes from ancient mail, mail that addressed specific circumstances and places and people, facts that are very frequently forgotten by readers. So anything we say about Paul is, at some level, generalizing from the specifics of what he has written in letters.
Defining God: “for Paul, God is he who has done what Israel’s history recounts” (p. 87). This is an important difference from the Stoics, in that Paul identifies God through what has happened, insofar as he knows that through the recounting of that history in the oral tradition and in Israel’s own accounts of itself. There’s no abstraction; the matter is very much concrete. Abraham’s life, the exodus from Egypt, giving of the Torah—all of these point concretely to who God is.
The great shift in Paul’s thinking was when he became aware (rather dramatically) that Jesus was the Messiah and that Jesus was to be identified with Yhwh, the “lord” of the First Testament. This shift led him to conclude that, in Jesus, who God is was in fact fully revealed. “To see God’s glory, says Paul, one must believe in the life, death, and resurrection of his Son” (p. 88) because this is what it means to see the face of Jesus. The great problem, according to Paul, is that the glory of the entire cosmos isn’t seen by people because of sin, which has occluded human reason: “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ unless it’s by the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor 12:3).
It is important to note that, for Paul, as a Pharisee who already believed in resurrection, death was not an end, a final thing. But with the resurrection of the Messiah, the shape of his hope changed. Rather than something simply to be anticipated and accepted, death is a symbol of all that is wrong in the world. It is the last enemy. How and when the resurrection will occur is not entirely clear anywhere in Paul’s writings; the eventuality of it, however, is certain.
How, then, does recovery from the generally recognized “bad choices” made by human beings take place within Christianity, as Paul sees it? It is through what Paul calls “a new creation,” a creation that is actually human at its heart. There are two elements to this: faith and community. The human response to the God of history is faith—or, better, faithfulness. It is Jesus who showed what faith is during his life and when he faced death (which even Jesus did not see as an event without anxiety). The community of those who began to see Jesus as the representation of God became the kind of society that mirrored the only God to the surrounding world. Recovery involved both elements, and the two elements work together: faith did include individual response, and that response then is thrust toward community life. Both are required for the representation to be successful.
The contrast with the Stoic approach is significant: for Paul, human beings are not capable of reasoning their way to a good life. The Stoics certainly knew that we, as human beings—as a lot and individually—often choose what is not good; but they thought that a well-trained mind could lead a person to do identify what is good and to do it. Paul, however, believes that “recovery and repair [of the human condition] comes to us from outside, from God’s side of the human predicament” (p. 111, my emphasis).
St. Luke
Two works in the Second Testament are attributed to Luke: the Gospel that bears his name and the Acts of the Apostles. These books are stories about Jesus and then the early church and they are intended to instruct Christians by telling the story of Jesus and his followers.
To begin, Luke portrays the basis of the Christian religion as being the coming of God to earth in human form. God is living; and God’s living is evident in the incarnate life of Jesus. God was not just “out there” as a force that lay behind the world and all that was in it but, in fact, something more: a being who chose to enter the created world in the form of the highest created being. Furthermore, Jesus claims, and slowly but eventually is acknowledged by his followers, to be Lord of that very creation; he shares an identity with the God of Israel (p. 121).
Chief among Luke’s concerns is to show how Jesus was a divisive figure. This was true among the people of Israel, where many saw him as Messiah but many others did not. One of the key features of the division was that, as Luke tells it, Jesus transformed the common understanding of the nature of the Messiah to include suffering and death. The latter threatened the truth of his Messianic identity, in the mind of many Jews. Luke’s story counters this threat by showing that the Father, God as known by all Jews, affirms Jesus’s identity. Furthermore, the promise of deliverance by the Messiah was elevated when resurrection (and then ascension) is shown to be the final stage of Jesus’s presence on earth.
Repair of life, one of the major themes of the Stoics, in Luke’s writings is presented as coming through forgiveness, release from sin(s). This repair is especially available worldwide, among all peoples and in all times. This broadening of the possibility of a change in life to all peoples is particularly seen in the work of the Apostle Paul. Luke’s consistent message, too, is that the locus of this work is in community, in the church.
The result of this understanding of the work of Jesus the Messiah in the Jewish community is division, even after the Resurrection. The sharp contention between the early Paul (as Saul), who strongly opposed the acceptance of Jesus by many Jews, and those who were followers of Jesus is stark. Violence resulted from the division: Stephen is stoned, for example. After Paul’s encounter on the Damascus Road, his travels throughout Asia Minor and Greece resulted in huge social dislocations: the message he brought created all manner of problems for local officials, civic and religious. Luke takes great pains in his telling of Paul’s travels to make it clear that the disruptions are not rebellion against the Empire, even though the message about Jesus and the formation of new communities (the churches) threatened the established way of life in the Empire. The social reconstruction is so substantial that the description of Jesus’s followers as “brothers and sisters” (i.e., siblings), the strongest peer grouping that exists naturally. This created divisions in natural families. (For much more on this, read Rowe’s World Upside Down, which tracks this clash clearly.)
“For Luke, the world is always invited to church” (p. 141). That is, the way of Jesus is open to all, because the true nature of the world and of human beings has been revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The expression of this is found in the community of (spiritual) siblings who have joined together in following this story. Unlike the Stoics, becoming wise does not require human effort; instead, it is a matter of seeing the truth in God’s Son, Jesus.
St. Justin Martyr
Justin was a second-century Christian, born around A.D. 100 in Palestine; he became a Christian after encountering quite a few other religious traditions, and he is mostly known because of his recorded dialogues with a Jew who did not accept Christianity as continuation of the Jewish tradition. He first attached himself to a Stoic teacher, then several other Greek philosophic traditions before coming to Christianity. By his time, the label “Christian” had come to be used quite broadly as applicable to followers of Jesus, one that had political capital.
Like many thinkers of his age, Justin believed that finding the truth mattered for life in this world and especially for being a ruler in this world (something he never was, though he addressed one of his defenses of Christianity to the emperor Antoninus Pius and the Roman Senate). He believed that there were better and worse ways to conduct life, even outside of Christianity. One of his great concerns was to show that Christians were not a threat to the prevalent Roman way of life in almost all respects. Christians were the first to pay their taxes; they believed in peace; they believed in and supported justice. For the Stoics, death was “just a part of life,” an end to existence; for the Christian, death was not a final end and the Christian rested in the hope that God would bring resurrection.
What Christians were not willing to do, however, was to give up their worship of one God, and for the Romans in general, this was deeply troubling, since the notion that each could have their own God (locally, especially, and secondarily or tertially) and must owe primary allegiance to the Emperor was the “normal,” the expected pattern.
In the end (truly!), Justin died for his faith. Sometime in the 160s, during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, he was tried for “impiety”—that is, failure to worship properly, as a Roman would by sacrificing to the standard gods. Justin and 6 of his friends were beheaded, after a trial. At his trial, he said: “No one in his right mind gives up piety for impiety,” a statement that would have been received no doubt with anger. He believed that to give allegiance to any God other than the God of Israel and Christianity was to proclaim falsehood; and he stood for what he believed was truth. In short, for Justin, to live by a false belief was worse than to die for truth.
There will be a third post based on this book, in a day or two. There’s enough left to say in summary that it’s best left to that! The “payoff” is coming soon.