Acts 17. 16-33, Mark 7.24-30

Preached Canberra Baptist Church 31^st January 2010

It’s wonderful to have a Sunday School. It’s wonderful to have children in the church community, and learning about Jesus and the Bible and Christian faith. And it is wonderful to have teachers and leaders we can trust with the education of the children.

But trust can be lost. In one church I served, on a day of 40 degree heat, a Sunday School teacher took her sweltering class of six hot and exhausted children out for an ice-cream in an air-conditioned ice-cream parlour. Two children who had just started coming were withdrawn from the Sunday School and their parents left the church: "We don’t bring them along to have fun – they are here to learn about Jesus!" (with the firm implication that learning about Jesus should never be fun !!) I don’t agree with their view, but I certainly accept that the education of our children in matters of faith is a delicate trust shared between the church and the family. All of us are responsible for our own learning and growth in faith: it’s not only kids who need to learn: it’s important for teenagers and young couples and parents of children and GRANDPARENTS of children and even GREAT GRANDPARENTS of children – we all should be learning and growing.

When it comes to learning our children are often a model for all of us, and all of us have an interest in the educational values that our Church School embodies. You may have seen on the news the religious schools of some Muslim countries, the Madrassahs of Indonesia or Pakistan, where children, often just boys, are taught only the Q’uran. The assumption here is that the only knowledge you need in life is religious knowledge, learned largely by rote from the holy Scriptures. Secular learning is not valued – or even actively resisted. If you are like me its hard to articulate the feelings we have as we watch the children rocking back and forth as they recite the Holy text until they know it, and nothing else, by heart (and I think the word ‘heart’ is used advisedly in this context).

That is not so in the Sunday Schools of the Christian tradition. That kind of primacy of religious knowledge that then pushes out all other kinds of knowing is foreign to the followers of Jesus! Or is it?

We Christians have (in some churches) our own religious knowledge that is held to the exclusion of other ways of knowing. We might be prepared to indulge in ice-creams on a really hot day but there are other secular product that are not to be indulged at all.

I offer you two examples:

1. Creationism: Last year (2009) was the 150^th Anniversary of the publication of Charles’ Darwin’s The Origin of Species. Darwin’s famous work was featured in various media over the year, as was that Christian reaction to scientific ideas that goes by such names as ‘Creation Science’ or ‘intelligent design’. These approaches reject mainstream science and try to develop alternatives that are supposedly ‘science’ but don’t appear to contradict the Bible. It’s a clear case of some parts of the Christian church which reject modern western ways of knowing and develop their own religiously based alternatives – and although these approaches claim to be scientific they are clearly religiously based.

2. A second form of this rejection of modern western forms of knowledge is the development of "Biblical Counseling" in contemporary Southern Baptist Seminaries in the United States of America. "Biblical counseling" sounds pretty harmless but includes the rejection of psychology and secular forms of knowing as significantly helpful in any form of pastoral care. Hear what two leaders of this movement have to say:

Dr. Paige Patterson, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary

Crossroads Counseling, 2005: p. 4)

Dr. Daniel L. Akin, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary

Crossroads Counseling, 2005 p. 3)

Now is this just harmless idiosyncrasy, part of the quaint landscape of religious freedom? There is a serious issue that both these movements are dealing with: the desire to take Biblical truth seriously and to live faithful lives as disciples of Jesus. They believe that if we eat the ice-cream of science and psychology we are in danger of falling away from faith. They are right in their instinct that we should not be ‘conformed to this world’ (Rom 12.1-3). There is a danger in allowing our faith to be filtered uncritically through the assumptions of secular philosophy.

None of this is new. In the second century the church father Tertullian defended the infant church against the philosophy of the day when he cried "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem or the Academy with the Church?" Athens was the great city of Greece, the nation that gave us philosophy and logic, medicine and drama: what has any of that to do with the people of God?

We are a church which has a rather strong investment in Athens, in the life of the mind and all that human letters and science has to offer. There are some quite distinguished thinkers in the congregation who have made quite a splash in Athens

What authority do we have for this engagement with Athens? The two readings we have heard today point to why this engagement is appropriate.

1. Acts 17: Here we find Paul literally in Athens. His evangelistic approach is to analyze and find the points of connection between the gospel and the culture: the idol to the unknown God, his quoting from Greek philosophy, the bringing into close proximity the Greek and the Biblical views.

2. The encounter with Jesus with the Syro-Phoenician woman in Mark 7. She was an outsider, not particularly cultured but certainly not a citizen of Jerusalem, nor a daughter of Israel. Jesus offers the harsh judgment that the things of God are for the children of God, the people of Zion: citizens of other cities, Syro-Phoenician, Greek or Roman need not apply! His judgement comes in terms that border on the abusive – hinting that this woman is a ‘dog’. And the answer given by the woman caused Jesus to change his mind, perhaps to grow himself in his understanding of his own mission and the purposes of God. Where in Matthew’s gospel the story is made quite ‘religious’ ("Woman, how great is your faith!" responds Jesus), in Mark the encounter is left stark and simple: "for saying that you may go – the demon has left your daughter". Did Jesus learn something from the woman? In the encounter with the alien and the ‘strange’ did Jesus himself learn something about the inclusiveness and grace of God?

What stance shall we take? What strategic choices are the right ones for today? Should we follow Tertullian and cry "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" or do we side with Paul and say "I see how religious you Athenians are in every way…." ?

People in this church have always sided with Paul! And it is one of the great things about this community.

1. The attack upon secular forms of knowing has led to a powerful and aggressive secular backlash in which the nature of faith itself is attacked by secular thinkers as nonsense that must be rejected. Two of the most articulate voices today are Richard Dawkins (grounded in science) and Christopher Hitchens (coming from politics and ethics). By attacking science and secular knowledge we help to set up a kind of culture war. I am not against fighting a war with the culture, but every good general carefully chooses the terrain on which to conduct the battle. I wouldn’t choose to fight the good fight in the territory of science, psychology and sexuality. I would choose to fight on the ground of consumerism, human rights, ecology and the nature of values and ethics in the human community.

2. But Athens needs the gospel too: there is a panoply of idols worshipped by modern secular scholarship. Altars to an unknown God may not be marked, but they are many. G.K. Chesterton said "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing, he believes in anything!"

The Gods of our age need naming, and critiquing! I can quickly name two.

We hear much talk of "Spirituality": but who or what is "the Spirit"? What is actually going on in the great cloud of practices, beliefs, behaviours and experiences that is labelled ‘spirituality’ in the modern world?

Another modern divinity goes by the name of "Celebrity" – but who or what is being celebrated and what does the celebration do to ordinary people? I mainly come into contact with the world of celebrity through the magazines in doctor’s waiting rooms: by what cruel ordering of life are the bodies and faces of such rich and beautiful people imposed on those of us who are weak and ailing? The god Celebrity is indeed a harsh and pitiless deity!

There are many in this community who are thinkers of excellence. As a community we together create the context and the energy for preaching!! I am so glad we have the professors and the PhDs and the writers and all those creative intellectual types in our congregation.

But it’s not just about intellectuals. There is a danger of intellectualizing the gospel or valuing intellectuals over others in the church. This is too important for that. What I am addressing is a way of thinking and questioning that involves all of us, whatever our training or our cultural background, bringing faith into contact with life.

Along with other more discerning members of the congregation, I occasionally go fishing. Let me let you into on some secret fisher’s business. (You’ll note how sensitive and gender inclusive we fishers are.) Whisper it not in Gath and tell it not in the streets of Ashkelon but we fisher-folk are not intellectuals! There are no books in a fishing camp. There’s plenty of bush philosophy and even earnest consideration of ethics, but you could never, by any stretch of the imagination, call us intellectuals.

But we still exhibit the character of which I am speaking, a conviction that faith connects with life, and completes our life, and helps in making sense of life. Just as much as the professors, the pro-fishers are engaged in the connection of faith and thought and all of life.

It was Paul who reminded the Corinthian church that the gospel isn’t found through social position, or worldly cleverness or intellect:

As the actor and aphorist Will Rogers once observed, "Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects."

The theologian Langdon Gilkey wrote of his experiences of internment during the World War 2 in his book Shantung Compound . I heard him speak at a college dinner when I was a student. He sat at high table beside the President of the college Council, a very prominent man in the world of finance and banking. Gilkey spoke of the inversion of ‘usefulness’ that happens in a prison camp and how people with humble and practical skills are the respected and valued ones, not the lawyers and "dumb bankers". If we found ourselves translated into such a world who would we turn to for the practicalities of life and leadership in the world of the prison camp? I suspect it would not be the professors and certainly not the ministers!

What unites us all is a quality of questioning – the conviction that faith has to connect with life, that our capacity for thinking is all of a piece: that all our knowing connects with all of our praying connects with all of our hoping. They are not walled off into separate rooms of the mental house.

So all of us should engage the life of the mind and be prepared to ask questions! There is no question that God cannot answer. And we should not look on God only as one to answer our questions. The essence of the God revealed in Jesus Christ is sometimes to call us into question. How many questions does Jesus ask in Mark: 55 in 16 chapters!

The nature of knowledge is this: all nature, all human experience, the creative energies of artist and poet, the skill of the doctor and the analyst, ALL of these are the book of wisdom that God has given us. If we are going to nod over the book of learning, taking to heart the lessons of God, like the students of some religious madrassah, let it be the lessons of Scripture, but also the lessons of landscape or of literature, or the slow wending of the boat upon the lake in search of the trout, or the path of the plane in the hands of the skilled pilot, or the needle in the hands of the embroiderer, or the experiment quietly forming in the mind of the scientist.

The greatness of God is not limited to the Scripture and our thinking about God and responding to God should not be limited to just the Scripture. The poet Gerald Manley Hopkins wrote:

May the warm breast and the bright wings of God’s spirit inspire and guide all our thinking and our speaking, to the glory of God and the spread of the Gospel.