Greek Men Conjugate in Their Sleep

When I was growing up, my mother kept telling me that smart boys pretty much had three options professionally. You either studied to become a doctor, a lawyer, or a preacher. She was trying to get me ready for the future, since by the time I was a freshman in high school, I was more interested in making explosives in chemistry class and in playing football than in anything else. (If you weren't obsessed with football in Wisconsin in the 60's there must have been something wrong with you.) So when a victory over a track and field injury through surgery meant that I could continue to compete in football, it seemed like divine intervention to me and the die was cast. A preacher I would be.

In college in those days the place where all preacher wannabes met their Waterloo was in Greek grammar and syntax class, at the beginning of the sophomore year. If you didn't pass the verb exam with 90 percent accuracy, you didn't go on. You'd be steered at that point to a degree in "education," and become a certified teacher in the church, but not a preacher. We were, of course, terrified of this possibility, not because the outcome was so bad, but because it meant that we didn't have "the right stuff."

It was a good system, and weeded out the intellectually less gifted pretty quickly. By the second quarter of Greek you could already tell who was going to make it and who was not, and those over whom a question mark hovered tread their way precariously. Greek is a very difficult language in many respects, not in the least because of the precision of expression it affords through a multiplicity of inflections, both for the noun and the verb. And if you came to it without having learned Latin or French or German in the grades, you were at a distinct disadvantage, especially at the relatively late stage of college when beer and girls represented a far more appealing past time than drilling with flash cards two hours every evening. It's much better to get language under your belt before you get there so that you can actually spend your time reading the ancients in the original languages with smart guys who've spent their whole lives doing the same.

It's true that since this high water mark in the 70's there has been a precipitous decline in standards and expectations in America, but from the perspective of the history of education over the last hundred years, the story is really much much worse. For many years I mistook the high point in my own experience for the veritable Olympian heights, only to realize much later that it was merely a stop at the lowest of the base camps situated far below the summit. Today by comparison most divinity students aren't even mucking about in the grassy foothills far below . . . for them the mountain is not even in sight.

To appreciate my point fully consider some of the books used by a ministerial student during the years 1880-1884, which I acquired a hundred years after the fact through a friend. They are inscribed by one B. Henry Succop, who studied at what is now Concordia Theological Seminary, Ft. Wayne, Indiana, a scion of a storied and prolific clan of Lutherans of the day. The young Henry was wont to mark his progress in the margins of his books, recording the day, the month, and the year at each point along the way, employing perfect penmanship I might add. His youth is in evidence because just like any school boy he doodles, delightfully, on the pages as he daydreams. There are even some fine figures he created, colored, and cut out for imaginative moments upon his desk, tucked between the pages. This means that Henry was younger than the typical divinity student of today, who matriculates at a seminary only after completing an undergraduate degree somewhere first.

The only volume in evidence for 1880 shows Henry reading Julius Caesar's commentaries on the Roman civil war, in Latin, using a Weidmann edition published just two years prior. In 1881-82, he moves on to Cicero and Livy in Latin, and Plutarch's lives of Themistocles and Pericles in Greek, employing late Teubner editions dating from 1872 to 1877. In 1882 he is also reading Virgil's Aeneid, again in Latin, not in translation. Come 1883 Henry is quite busy, reading Cicero's Against Catiline and the Odes of Horace in Latin, as well as the Ajax of Sophocles and the Philippics of Demosthenes in Greek, again employing the latest Teubner and Weidmann editions as available. Rounding out the list for that year is Justin Martyr's Apologies, in Greek. For the final year, 1884, there is evidence for only one subject, St. John Chrysostom, in Greek. Quite the plate full apart from the rest of the curriculum, about which there are no clues. And, oh yeah, the trots between the pages, they're in German, his native language.

B. Henry Succop came to Concordia prepared to read the ancients in Latin and Greek, and not just the New Testament or the fathers, but the best authors the pagan past had to offer. This means he had learned his Latin and his Greek in the grades. It also means those so-called backward, conservative, fundamentalist Lutherans thought it important for their future leaders like Henry to spend time studying the cultural opposition. In consequence, Henry's library more closely resembles that of a classicist. Poke around in the library of a contemporary preacher if he'll let you. You'll find far lighter reading in it, I assure you.

If it be objected that Henry's experience was peculiar and parochial, it must be remembered that public school students of the day themselves were reading difficult Latin authors such as the historian Tacitus by the time they were in high school. This was the case because most colleges had a foreign language requirement of three semesters of Latin, and high schools were expected to send them students who could complete them successfully. Today, by contrast, the country is crawling with degree mills without such requirements. Majors in classical antiquity themselves often have to wait until the senior year for a seminar in Tacitus. So-called doctorates in less demanding fields stalk the land who have never once studied a foreign language for a week, and masters of divinity litter the landscape who have passed Greek with a rudimentary summer course and presume to rule on matters of eternal significance but can't pronounce the letters of the Greek alphabet arranged carefully to embody those ideas. "If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!"

No wonder the thoughtful man in the pew is sad. He is alone.

"Endeavour to Persevere"

Yesterday's sermon endeavored to tell the story of the Book of Job from the point of view of James 5:11, with a view toward encouraging us to reflect that our troubles often pale in comparison to those endured by Job, who persevered despite their severity: "Behold, we count them happy which endure. Ye have heard of the patience of Job, and have seen the end of the Lord; that the Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy."

No sermon, of course, can do justice to the many difficulties the Book of Job presents to the reader. Not the least of these difficulties presents itself in the opening chapter: "And the Lord said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thine hand. . . . [and] there came also another [messenger], and said, Thy sons and thy daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother's house: And, behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young men, and they are dead; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee."

It has always arrested my attention that this last of the preliminary calamities which fall upon Job estimates the value of his own progeny as just so many possessions, right down there with all the other possessions he loses: the caravan camels, the sheep, the oxen, and the asses. And the servants who go with them, who all likewise perish. Job is not unmoved, to be sure, and displays the proper mournfulness, but a student of the gospels cannot help but remember the jarring contrast this presents to the saying of Jesus: "Behold the fowls of the air . . . Your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?" In other words, whereas Job's story minimizes the worth of some human life, and does so in a way which makes it look like God toys with human destiny in a capricious, unpredictable, unreliable, unmerciful, yea even malevolent and Manichaean way in its dualism between good and evil, there is another story in the Bible which tries to assert itself from time to time, maintaining the infinite worth of every person to the God "who so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son . . .."

It is tempting to choose sides. Down that path endless debates ensue about the priority of the various testimonies of Scripture, screened through equally various interpretive lenses, which have multiplied in the twentieth century to such an extent that Biblical study has largely been reduced to bibliography. "Enlightenment" types still sketch out the progress of religion, from the offending God who appears in Job to the liberal Jesus of a daydream afternoon, who couldn't possibly have predicted the consummation of all things in his own lifetime. Stalwart defenders of the inerrancy of the Bible continue to want to have it both ways, never quite reconciling the texts and holding them, and us, in a perpetual, nervous tension.

Without disrespect to the text, may we not ask whether the text does not instead say something about the human imagination that we have written about God in both of these ways for about as long as writing has existed? Is the text not a reflection of our experience of reality, that we are born into a world of both joy and sorrow, of gain and of loss, of judgment and of forgiveness, indeed only to one day face death ourselves as sure as the noon day sun? The list of antonyms is almost endless, and the ineffable dream of religion is to escape from them.

A very famous man who died last year was wont to warn our generation that the line separating good from evil runs through every human heart. He was not well received. But evil and death do always seem to prevail. There can be no other explanation for the American century just passed with its millions upon millions senselessly slaughtered and gone. Countless sons and husbands and fathers who never came home, to live and prosper and work and love as my father came home to do in 1945. It is of such escapes that our dreams are made, our hopeful stories written, our belief in the goodness of life born anew established.

According to Chief Dan George in The Outlaw Josey Wales, the Cherokee nation is lectured by the Secretary of the Interior that they must endeavor to persevere on the reservation set aside by the U.S. government for the Indian nations. "We left," says Dan George, "and thought about the phrase 'endeavour to persevere.' When we had thought about it long enough . . . we declared war on the Union." And we know how that ended. As everything must, one way or another.

Against the Tithers

The preacher man on TV last night kept saying how false teaching is destructive to one's immortal soul. I couldn't help but reflect on the irony of that statement because nine years ago a good blast of false doctrine had worked wonders on me. It functioned like smelling salts, waking me to a clearer-headed assessment of where I had been. Not because the false teaching was in any way true, but because it was so blissfully, wonderfully, ignorant and out of place. That a Lutheran pastor actually fell for it showed me that his Lutheranism had been no match for it. It was a "peace that passes understanding" kind of moment.

I had been teaching my students at my church Paul's "authentic" letters, in chronological order, when the incident occurred. A fund raising campaign was getting underway for a building expansion and all classes were being asked to interrupt their curricula and incorporate some stewardship components to support the effort. The materials we were asked to use openly advocated tithing, arguing for it on the basis of mostly Old Testament precedents. The pastor himself one Sunday announced his intent to tithe, and actually blurted out the amount in dollars and cents from the pulpit. Proud of his title, the Rev. Dr. apparently took degree exams which hadn't covered such trivial matters as the command of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount "to give in secret and your father who sees in secret will reward you," let alone Paul's argumentation in the Letter to the Galatians against becoming debtors "to do the whole law." At the very least one would think that a real Lutheran would have some affection for the ideas of Paul, and that it would therefore occur to such a person that tithing speaks the very language of what Paul calls "necessity" or "compulsion," not the language of Christian freedom in the spirit, which we find so forcefully expressed in Paul's early letters. It turned out that the pastor's M.Div. was Lutheran, but his D.Min. was not.

Under such circumstances, about the only avenue open was to point out how tithing hardly even represented an intellectual category in early Christianity. One can see this in volume two of Luke's history of Christianity, The Acts of the Apostles, and despite the skepticism which sometimes attaches to this source, the broad picture it paints on the subject of money is clear enough and coheres with Paul's own testimony.

Paul's conversion to the Way occurred at a time when the followers of Jesus in Jerusalem were experimenting with a form of communism in which "no one said that anything he had was his own." Pooling of resources made it possible to supply the wants of a growing number of poor, dependent on the generosity of the Christians, both Jew and Greek. This distribution for the poor no doubt contributed greatly to the early success of the Christian sect, but the weakness of this arrangement was exposed by the famine in the land in the mid 40's, and the dispensers of aid themselves soon became in need of help.

It is at this juncture that Paul's role as a kind of entrepreneur comes into focus. Although entitled to compensation from the churches he had founded, Paul instead chose to self-fund his various missionary travels throughout the eastern Mediterranean from the proceeds of his own leather business, which he combined with his role as apostle to the Gentiles. This decision was taken in part to prove to the leadership of the church at Jerusalem that his conversion from violent persecutor to follower of the Way was genuine, but also to remove suspicions about the nature of and motivations behind his law-free gospel to the Gentiles and, indeed, to remove suspicions about the authenticity of his appointment as apostle by the risen Jesus. Paul's own testimony from his letters shows that he was not entirely successful in quelling these suspicions, and he operated under a cloud which seemed to follow him everywhere.

So instead of taking compensation from his various churches, Paul frequently had urged them to collect and set aside monies for the relief of the community at Jerusalem, "every man according as he purposeth in his heart." It is a pledge of support such as this, made freely and voluntarily by the church at Corinth, which for some reason had subsequently gone unfulfilled and which prompted Paul's comments about money in the correspondence which comes down to us in the two Corinthian epistles. Far from addressing such issues as how or even whether the local churches were to fund themselves, Paul's comments about money are instead focused on this "collection for the saints" at Jerusalem. It was the peculiar problem of the Corinthians that they had lost their sense of urgency about the suffering of their fellow believers and had become self-absorbed, which gives Paul's epistles to the Corinthians some of their special edge.

Paul's ultimate success with this collection must have been considerable, a tribute to his powers of persuasion. But the trouble which subsequently fell upon him in Jerusalem, when after many years of missionary activity he at length delivered the monies there, cannot have been due solely to such things as his reputed relaxation of circumcision rules for the children of Jewish converts to Christianity. Somehow the magnitude of the alms and offerings he had presented had become known outside Jewish circles, since after his arrest the Roman governor Felix kept Paul under confinement for two years hoping "that money should have been given him of Paul, that he might loose him." It would seem likely that Paul had bypassed the Temple administration in bringing his "alms and offerings" and had delivered the funds directly into the hands of James and the elders. Knowledge of this must therefore have leaked out of Christian, perhaps Greek, circles within the church. We can well imagine how anger and jealousy over this must have stirred up the hubbub against Paul in the city, and it helps explain one line of Paul's subsequent defense of himself, that "against the temple he had not offended at all."

A scrupulous person like a tither doesn't get into this kind of trouble.

Missing the Point

In no church at the present day where the Lord's Supper is offered is there even a memory of its original meaning.

This is hardly surprising when one considers that the meaning of the meal was already being lost in the middle of the first century, less than three decades since the death of Jesus. Despite the efforts of modern scholarship to recover it, most notably at the hands of Albert Schweitzer over a century ago in The Quest of the Historical Jesus, the situation in the churches today remains pretty much as it was in the nineteenth century, to the end of which Schweitzer had summed up the situation. But we ourselves aren't just nineteenth century liberals in this regard. We are still first century Corinthians.

Far from being a meal whereby grace was thought to be transmitted to the believing recipient who now resided comfortably in the kingdom of God the church, the meal was instead supposed to represent an occasion for proclamation of a message marked by earnest expectation of something not yet realized, the presence of Jesus: "For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death till he come" (1 Cor. 11:26). It was not a question of the Real Presence, but of the future presence. This longing for the Lord's imminent return had received its inspiration from the eschatological message of Jesus itself, but that message was already in the process of being reinterpreted and was losing its original force. Otherwise the Corinthians would not have inquired of Paul about it, as 1 Cor. 7:1 shows, and Paul would not have so replied.

Close inspection of the correspondence shows that Paul was disdainful of the demeanor of some of the Corinthians, based in part on the false assumption of some who thought that the kingdom of God had already come in some sense. Paul even mocks them for it: "And what hast thou that thou didst not receive? Now if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it? Now ye are full, now ye are rich, ye have reigned as kings without us: and I would to God ye did reign, that we also might reign with you" (1 Cor. 4:7-8). But the fact was, they didn't reign, and neither did Paul. As far as Paul was concerned, all the posturing of the Corinthians amounted to nothing but words. If they wanted to see evidence of the kingdom of God, he would come and show it to them in his capacity as an apostle of Jesus Christ, not in words, but in power (1 Cor.4: 19-21). This would not be a meeting of equals, where the outlaw Josey Wales meets Ten Bears.

Eschatological urgency is about the last thing the church wants to talk about today. The subject is too embarrassing, because the data raise uncomfortable questions. This is why one will hardly ever hear a preacher speak candidly about Mark's gospel which introduces Jesus' proclamation of the gospel of the kingdom of God in explicitly eschatological terms: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel" (Mark 1:15). The coming of the kingdom is so close, in fact, "that there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power" (Mark 9:1). Jesus himself expects not to eat the Supper after having just instituted it "until that day that I drink it new in the kingdom of God" (Mark 14:25). A Jesus of this sort could be someone who never expected to found a church, let alone a sacrament to sustain it. And based upon the relentless unfolding of history and the stubborn failure of it to come to a close, such a Jesus might possibly have been mistaken that the coming kingdom was just around the corner. The church already had had to respond to such questions by the time of the composition of 2 Peter: "There shall come in the last days scoffers . . . saying 'Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation'" (3:3-4).

The rationalization of the data which is now routine in most of Christendom prattles on about "the already and the not yet," wanting to have it both ways because that's what history has forced the church to do. The standard line of retreat is to assert that "the realized dimension of the kingdom of God is incomplete apart from the death-resurrection of Jesus and the coming of the Spirit" (R. H. Stein, The Method and Message of Jesus' Teachings, John Knox, 1995, p. 111). Paul would by no means acknowledge to the Corinthians a realized dimension of the kingdom in such terms. And if the ethics of Jesus as expressed in the gospels are sometimes too extreme, they also must be tamed in service of the hermeneutical expedient. "The ethic of Jesus is not an emergency ethic based on the nearness of the end" (Stein, p. 98). Accordingly, whatever does not fit the pre-conceived schema must not be universal ("Let the dead bury their dead: but go thou and preach the kingdom of God" Luke 9:60), or is a literary device of hyperbolic overstatement ("If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple" Luke 14:26). The multiplication of examples similar to these would only serve to underscore that there is a great deal of data which must be explained away.

Were it not for the fact that a piece of correspondence from Paul to the Christians at Corinth survived to become part of what we call the New Testament, we would know even less about the "sacramental" meal than we already do from the Synoptic gospels. More pointedly, however, were it not for the fact that the Corinthians had written a letter to Paul, which does not survive, asking him a number of questions about a variety of subjects, what we call First Corinthians would not have been written in response in the first place. Far from being everything we need to know to live our lives in Christ, the letters of Paul preserve but a matter of fact glimpse into the thought world of early Christianity.