Our Ancient Challenges

No.167: July 7, 2023

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Papyrus 47 (fragments of the Book of Revelation)

Dear Friends,

I think I am becoming more and more known for my phrase, “These are precedented times.” It is one of my missions in life to help people avoid cultural anxiety and panic, the roots of which are often the sense that the world has never before seen the challenges we face, and the fruits of which are things like desperately clinging to bad people and bad ideas (e.g., Donald Trump, “Christian” Nationalism).

That said, there is a sense in which our challenges are new. They are relatively new for us. It is jarring to live in a culture saturated for so long in Christian atmosphere suddenly obsessed with things like cross-dressing and genital mutilation. In the context of the Christian west this is a very new development. But in the context of pagan societies, it is as old as fallen time: androgyny, cross-dressing, and bodily mutilation has always gone hand-in-hand with paganism. You can read all about it here.

Our current cultural upheavals are best seen as symptoms of a deeper problem. The last wisps of Christendom’s oxygen are fading and we are experiencing the re-paganization of the Western world. You can read all about that in Steven Smith’s Pagans & Christians in the City: Culture Wars From the Tiber to the Potomac. Or, for a more concrete “on the ground” view, Tara Isabella Burton’s Strange Rites: New Religions For a Godless World. The “old gods” never really went away. They went underground, and they are making a strong reemergence right before our eyes.

And what do they care about? Well, what are our cultural flashpoints? Here are my top three. First, racial discord—how can different peoples coexist and settle their grievances? This is manifest in the rise of Critical Theory, and its answers do more to stoke grievances between people groups than settle them. Abortion makes the top three, too, going by the moniker “bodily autonomy.” And, finally, total sexual autonomy; the right to sleep with whomever one wants, to morph and bend one’s sexual behavior and to mutilate one’s body in essence.

Racial identity, disposal of unwanted children, and free sex. Those are the top priorities for a significant segment of western society—perhaps even half of society.

Here is a CNN report just this week: “Under strict abortion law, Texas had nearly 10,000 more births than expected in last nine months of 2022, research suggests.” The article is a fairly straightforward recitation of the facts, but the online world of progressivism put a pretty strong opinion spin on the story: namely, that this is some kind of tragedy. How awful that ten thousand babies were allowed to be born in the oppressive, theocratic state of Texas! Those babies represent, you see, a violation of a woman’s bodily autonomy.

This all brings me to what I really want to share with you this week. The other day I was reading a translation of a very ancient document and was reminded—and just completely astonished—of how … precedented our times are. It was written in the context of the Greco-Roman pagan world. No one knows for certain the identity of its author (although Charles Hill has argued that it’s Polycarp). It simply says, in Greek: “Mathetes.” That could certainly be his name, but “mathetes” in Greek simply means “Disciple.” It could be a term used to preserve anonymity; it is written by a disciple of Jesus.

“Mathetes” wrote a letter to someone named “Diognetus,” and scholars generally date this letter to around A.D. 130—one thousand, nine hundred years ago. Why did he write it? Because this “Diognetus,” apparently a pagan of some sort, was curious about this newfangled group of people called “Christians.” Mathetes writes:

Since I see the, most excellent Diognetus, exceedingly desirous to learn the mode of worshipping God prevalent among the Christians, and inquiring very carefully and earnestly concerning them, what God they trust in, and what form of religion they observe […] I cordially welcome this thy desire, and I implore God, who enables us both to speak and to hear, to grant to me so to speak, that, above all, I may hear you have been edified, and to you so to hear, that I who speak may have no cause of regret for having done so.

Just think of that. We have a document from the very earliest days of the Christian movement, the days when Christians were an extreme minority often suffering brutal persecution. And the document describes who Christians are.

For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity […] But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers.

Interesting that Christians are here described as transcending all racial and cultural differences, isn’t it? In Christianity we find a religion that considers country, race, language, and customs as nothing. In other words, you can’t spot a Christian by some distinctive dress or uniform or language or code. A Christian can exist anywhere among any people or culture. The implication seems to be that this is a religion that brings unity to all peoples and cultures because it “relativizes” racial and cultural differences. This is just as Paul said: “There is neither Jew nor Greek” (Gal.3). And it is quite different from the Jewish diaspora, where Jews in pagan cities sought to remain separate from their surrounding cultures by way of clothing, food regulations, and so forth. The Christians had a very different catholic impulse; their religion transcends and incorporates racial and cultural differences because it finds its ground in another world—the world of the “new creation.”

So according to Mathetes in the early second century, Christians seem to have a strange and unique answer to … racial discord.

He goes on:

They marry, as do all others; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring.

That is an astounding sentence. It leaps off the page. The very fact that he says it would seem to indicate how strange it was that these people “do not destroy their offspring.” Killing your unwanted children was normal in the pagan world. And according to Mathetes in the early second century, Christians stood in stark contrast. They cared about life for babies.

He goes on:

They have a common table, but not a common bed.”

There’s another one that just leaps off the page, doesn’t it? Not a common bed. Their “table” is common, open to all—hospitable. Their beds are not. The Greco-Roman world was promiscuous in the extreme, with elements that will now sound familiar to us today: homosexuality, pederasty, fornication, cross-dressing, castration, and even sexual slavery. You could drop a modern “Pride Parade” onto the streets of Rome in the second century and it would be just another Tuesday. According to Mathetes in the early second century, Christians stood out because they did not believe in sexual autonomy.

Friends, our cultural flashpoints have been seen before. They are precedented. Our fathers and mothers in the faith faced a cultural onslaught that makes ours tame by comparison. And they overcame. Yes, often through great suffering and persecution. And we ought to consider their example. How did they do it? Mathetes tells us:

They love all men, and are persecuted by all. They are unknown and condemned; they are put to death, and restored to life. They are poor, yet make many rich; they are in lack of all things, and yet abound in all; they are dishonored, and yet in their very dishonor are glorified. They are evil spoken of, and yet are justified; they are reviled, and bless; they are insulted, and repay the insult with honor; they do good, yet are punished as evildoers. When punished, they rejoice as if quickened into life; they are assailed by the Jews as foreigners, and are persecuted by Greeks; yet those who hate them are unable to assign any reason for their hatred.

There are a lot of honeyed tongues telling us these days that this sort of meekness is for the pathetic and the weak, that we need to scrap the rules and “punch back twice as hard.” In some circles men are obsessed with actual physical strength and conditioning as some kind of badge of Christian devotion. Others are suggesting, in the name of Christ, that we scrap our laws and entire Constitutional order to “seize power” and to “reward our friends and punish our enemies.”

I am obviously not against standing against the tide and resisting our cultural shift into rank paganism by lawful means and through every institutional avenue available to us (civil society, family, education, church, marketplace, etc). But, listen: if it is absent love, if it is done for vainglory or envy or greed and grift and power (which is mostly what the loudest voices are about these days) it is nothing but a banging gong or resounding cymbal (1 Cor. 13). If Christians follow the ways of the world and engage in pure power politics then their witness is simply salt without saltiness, worthy of being trampled underfoot.

But we have a far better message and it is the exact same message Mathetes explains to his pagan friend Diognetus:

But when our wickedness had reached its height, and it had been clearly shown that its reward, punishment and death, was impending over us; and when the time had come which God had before appointed for manifesting His own kindness and power, how the one love of God, through exceeding regard for men, did not regard us with hatred, nor thrust us away, nor remember our iniquity against us, but showed great long-suffering and bore with us, He himself took on Him the burden of our iniquities, He gave His own Son as a ransom for us, the holy One for transgressors, the blameless One for the wicked, the righteous One for the unrighteous, the incorruptible One for the corruptible, the immortal One for them that are mortal. For what other thing was capable of covering our sins than His righteousness? By what other one was it possible that we, the wicked and ungodly, could be justified, than by the only Son of God? O sweet exchange! O unsearchable operation! O benefits surpassing all expectation! that the wickedness of many should be hid in a single righteous One, and that the righteousness of One should justify many transgressors!

That is as pure a gospel presentation as I’ve ever read, and it was written to a pagan around the year 130. And among the wickedness laid upon the Son of God was racial hatred, killing babies, and common beds. It was true in 130 and it is true in 2023.

You can read the whole letter here.

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