God In The Modern World Series

In a history class, as Chesterton observes, Christianity might be blamed both for the ineffectual mildness of Edward the Confessor and for the ferocity of Richard the Lionhearted, for being too pacifist and for being too warlike. A science lecturer may snipe at Christianity for suppressing modern knowledge in the name of outdated superstitions. An anthropology teacher will then attack missionaries for introducing primitive cultures to modern technology and health care. Some deride Christianity for being too rationalistic, reducing the mystery of life and the supernatural to a set of intellectual dogmas. Others dismiss it for being too emotional and mystical, an escape from reason into cloudy superstitions.

The point is not simply that the charges, taken together, contradict each other, but that Christianity is more complex, comprehensive, and whole than many of its critics realize. Chesterton provides the analogy: Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of my many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation…would be that he might be an odd shape, but there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall…Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the center.”

Paul has ran into a culture that we see today, one where even people who don’t agree with each other are willing to agree that they don’t like Christianity. But we also need understand what is going on with Paul. This is a change for him as well. Paul’s habit was to go into the synagogue and debate, he did that here too. There he found people who had a similar background to his, their life assumptions were the same, they spoke the same language both literally and figuratively. But then he goes outside the synagogue, outside away people who think the same as he does.

Paul’s habit was to go and proclaim Christ, in verses 2-3 we read, “He reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and proving that the Christ had to suffer and rise from the dead.” Now the Jews and the people around them got this, what’s the problem? Simply this, Paul had stepped into a world that didn’t understand the concept of a resurrection. To them when we died we simply became a shade bound to the underworld. It wasn’t really us it was a shade of us, something less then us. There was no hope of a resurrection, no thought of eternal life as something good, there was life, and something less then life, that was it.

So here is Paul with his well devised arguments, the ones that have been successful everywhere he’s gone, and he pulls them out and the Greeks call him a “babbler.” The Greek term is “spermologo” and the meaning that seems to fit best here is of a person who takes pieces of seemingly unrelated information and then tries to make them seem like they all fit together. It makes sense that that is what they would think of Paul because his central message was the resurrection which doesn’t seem to make any sense. If Paul is going to be effective here, he is going to have to change the way that he presents the gospel. Paul is going to have to be an innovator.