How we answer this question depends upon where we stand, though this doesn't make it a "relative" answer.
If my task is to reconstruct history, than Athens can have nothing to do with Jerusalem. If we allow our faith issues to cloud the historical process, we cannot do the job of a historian. Why? Because faith agendas will control our history, even to the point of creating a history that looks like or supports whatever our faith is.
The question of the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus is a fine example of this as we have discussed on this blog and others in the past. As a historian, this is not a historical event because dead bodies don't rise. It is a faith event. Even the second century Valentinians seem to have understood this. What did the Valentinian teacher tell Rheginus about this? He said quite bluntly, "For, my child, 'the dead shall rise!' belongs to the domain of faith, not of argument."
If my task is to understand whether or not Athens has anything to do with Jerusalem as a believer, this is quite a different thing. Here each person must decide whether faith needs reason. This means that one must decide what "faith" is. I think that certain forms of Christianity have usurped the meaning of faith over the centuries so that today it is often tauted as believing doctrines that go against science or logic. When I study the ancient sources, however, "pistis" is something quite different from this modern definition. It is a person's relationship with "the holy," a relationship that is lived through imitation of saintly people and piety.
My own feeling on this issue is that faith without reason is futile, that a reasoned faith is necessary. This is not to say that reason is the entire realm of our knowledge. There is knowledge other than reason. But even this is supported by reason which is necessary in order to grasp and translate this kind of knowledge into something recognizable.
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If my task is to understand whether or not Athens has anything to do with Jerusalem as a believer, this is quite a different thing. Here each person must decide whether faith needs reason. This means that one must decide what "faith" is. I think that certain forms of Christianity have usurped the meaning of faith over the centuries so that today it is often tauted as believing doctrines that go against science or logic. When I study the ancient sources, however, "pistis" is something quite different from this modern definition. It is a person's relationship with "the holy," a relationship that is lived through imitation of saintly people and piety. My own feeling . . .
Thanks for your work in history writing, and these related thoughts about "pistis"!
I understand that Dallas Willard regularly asks a question of his Philosophy 101 students when they turn in their exams: "Do you believe what you wrote?" The students smile, he says, because they know that the "right answers" don't require their "belief."
In Greek rhetoric scholarship, "pistis" is a central term, with meanings far different from New Testament scholarship. Rhetoricians tend to impose their readings of the term over upon more conventional biblical readings. James Kinneavy, for example, with his Greek Rhetorical Origins of Christian Faith: An Inquiry (Oxford 1987) maintains that "pistis" means not "belief" or "faith" or "trust" but "proof" or "persuasion" in both Aristotle and in the NT. Likewise, George A. Kennedy, with his New Testament Interpretation Through Rhetorical Criticism (UNC Press 1984) tends to make Christian "belief and faith" an effect of the one "species" of "rhetoric" known as "epideictic" (p.20) and says that "Deductive proof in rhetoric is called the enthymeme" (p.16) so that "Each of the Beatitudes constitutes an enthymeme" (p.49); but Kennedy does not examine either "pistis" or "enthymeme" as the NT writers use the terms. Unless one is interested in the history of Greek rhetoric, and its contemporary study, this may not be relevant to NT studies. Nonetheless, I think (especially when looking at translation) it's good for scholars in both disciplines to listen to one another.
I had hoped to write a comment as well on this subject, as it is something that I deal with from my rather different perspective. Unfortunatley, lack of time and energy has prevented me.
I really only want to make a couple minor observations on your post.
I would agree with the fact that Athens (the modern academy) has little to do with Jerusalem (presumably either the Church or faith). Anyone who hangs around the university long enough knows that already. I question the ideology in the university that makes that so, but I concede the reality.
Similarly, I agree that the faith shouldn't be reduced merely to a set of propositions to sign onto. Faith is trust in a relationship. I would note that I honestly think that the thinking around orthodoxy is more sound than the alternatives and, hence, more helpful for building that faith, but that is something that I don't necessarily expect people to agre with.
So, oddly, I find myself agreeing with you more than I don't. I just have a different starting point and, I think, end point.
Peace,
Phil
“My own feeling on this issue is that faith without reason is futile, that a reasoned faith is necessary.”
I dare say, absolutely! Indeed, it is not the faith of “Jerusalem” at all. But, neither is it a faith necessarily derived through reason. This is the problem in Athens and among certain Gnostics, particularly the perspective implied in the Gospel of Thomas: “Whoever finds the meaning of these words will not taste death.” It is a faith that does not oppose reason but may be willing to suspend reason in recognition of reason’s limitations.
Living faith is more than belief, it is a propelled conviction that is grounded on a transformational experience that remains standing even when faulty reason appears to shake it and the faithful fails to find a defense when words are inadequate or can’t be found to articulate its truth. It stands through fear and trembling as secularism seeks to undermine it because at its height faith is— from a truly pragmatic position—infinitely stronger than the faulty reasoning of humans. This is where Tertullian is coming from. The faithful can say, “It appears absurd, so what!” This stuns the materialist-secularist as sheer gall. The faithful understands that it must appear this way to the faithless because the faithful is in communion with the living Sovereign God whom he knows is neither limited by faulty human reasoning nor constricted by the material forces in time and space that He created.
To be sure there are degrees of faith and the strong in faith have a responsibility to protect the budding faith of the child from the demoralizing forces of secularism that will focus only on transient materialism and leave the person with an empty, hollow soul (for lack of a better word) seeking fulfillment in what he believes to be vanishing. Actually the soul is filled with at best a silent dread of an inevitable, all too soon, extinction.
“For it is the place of faith my son and not of persuasion.” Tertullian and the author of the Epistle to Rheginos have a lot in common. Something must happen to the mind of the faithless for faith to enter but the effort to “persuade” (M.L. Peel trans.) need not be abandoned. How does one teach a child or an adult to appreciate a work of Buxtehude? With exposure, sensitivity and lots of patience but the Composer himself has the final Word.
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