As I am taking a mental break from working on my dissertation, I saw in the news today that Joshua Harris, author of I Kissed Dating Goodbye and popular teacher in the 2000s, no longer considers himself a Christian. There are many questions to ask as to what lead to this, such as the role of repetitive public shaming and pressure in guilting a person for his failures by people who refuse to accept his admission of his failure. However, what has drawn my interest is a post by Michael Brown asking if a person who has fallen from faith an ever return based upon Hebrews 6.4-6. It this question I seek to explore.

But firstly to clarify, this is intended as a time to try to criticize Harris or figure out what he did wrong. In fact, I think he has gone through a struggle that, in some way, resembles the type of struggles that the recipients of the letter (or sermon!) to the Hebrews faced. While I grieve the news, I don’t want to start heaping onto Harris, as the instruction of the Hebrews is to build up those who have been going through a period of persecution, not to judge them.

Nevertheless, there are reminders about judgment in Hebrews that should not be ignored. But, does Hebrews 6.4-6 actually teach that once people fall away that they can never become restored again? Here is the passage in the NSRV:

For it is impossible to restore again to repentance those who have once been enlightened, and have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, since on their own they are crucifying again the Son of God and are holding him up to contempt.

Now Brown suggests that this passage is related to a pressure to return to a Temple-based sacrifice system that no longer saw Jesus’ sacrifice as necessary or salvific. He then suggests that Hebrews 6.4-6 is describing a specific state that they remain in insofar as they continued to rely on the sacrificial system.

The problem I find with this interpretation, which isn’t from Brown but from the commentaries I am sure, is that we nowhere get a glimpse of the preacher of Hebrews dissuading the Christians from relying on a sacrificial system. The problems seem to be the audience’s sustained faith in Jesus and continued faithfulness seems to be in question, not specifically what they are tempted to turn to in response. The stream from which Brown’s interpretation comes from echoes too much the false idea that early Christianity was a religion that was built on the rejection of the Torah, and in the case of Hebrews its sacrificial system. Put differently, it treats the struggle of Paul in Galatians and in the situations of the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15 as the all-defining disagreements that early Christianity was always defined by.

Now, part of the reasons for this interpretation stems from the fact that there are a litany of references to sacrifice in Hebrews. But to construe this as a warning against going back to the sacrificial system overlooks the more explicit purpose of Hebrews, to point towards Jesus was one has suffered and in virtue of that can offer help to the audience. The themes of atonement are rather in service to how Jesus is an aid to the believers, which can enable them to face their own persecution. Hence Hebrews 12.1-4 can speak of Jesus as the pioneer and perfecter of faith and then remind the audience that they have not gotten to the point of shedding their own blood. Jesus’ sacrifice serves as an analogy for believers own lives, although their own sacrifice doesn’t have the redemptive significance of Jesus, who inaugurates a new covenant through His obedience.

Another explanation is to be offered. I would suggest a better explanation is that Hebrew 6.4-6 is describing those persons who have grown and matured in Christian faith to the extent that they understood the significance of Jesus and the powers of the age to come, but then they abandon their faith. This is not a new believer who fell away, but this is a person who finally got it and understood the true power and significance of God in Jesus Christ. For a person to have grown and matured that far and then to fall away is tantamount to an absolute betrayal. Hence, the preacher’s words describe such an action that in effect re-crucifies and treats Jesus as a disgrace; this is a language more describing of a traitor. So much has been provided to them and yet they spurn their faith in Christ.

I think this is best situated with a potential temptation by these believers to resort to the worship of angels. Paul makes a reference to the worship of angels in Colossians 2.18. I would also hypothesize that the early Christians in trying to understanding who Jesus was connected Jesus to the “messenger” who went before Israel and in whom God’s name was in (Exodus 23.20-21), which Paul connects to Jesus in 1 Corinthians 10.1-13. While the language of a messenger (מַלְאָךְ) in Exodus 23.20 doesn’t have to refer to what is described as later in Jewish history as angels, the early Christians identified Jesus as κύριος in part due “my name is in him” in Exodus 23.21. However, such a tradition could have veered differently in some circles and developed the idea that Jesus was an angel rather than One who is identified with God. One possible motivation for this belief was the role that angels regularly played in apocalyptic literature as figures of power and ones who brought revelation. While it is pure speculation, my hypothesis is that would-be “prophets” associated with some of these specific apocalyptic traditions were responsible for what 1 John is resisting in people who deny that Jesus was human and is from God (1 John 4.2-3). In short, an angel Christology seems to be lurking in the wings for the early church that regards Jesus as some sort of revered angel, which would in their eyes make Jesus powerful but not the all-powerful God.

This heresy, which we can safely call it, is evident in the first chapter of Hebrews. There, the preacher of Hebrews begins by establishing that Jesus is identified with God as one who reflects God’s glory and the direct, visible expression of God’s very nature (Hebrews 1.3). Then, he proceeds to establish a distance between Jesus and the angels by pointing to some passages deemed messianic that describe his exalted status. The point is to remind the audience of Hebrews that Jesus is someone more than just an angel. He is the very presence of God, yet also human in every way we are.

So, the audience seems to be tempted in some way to downgrade their view of Jesus and His power and status. The motivations for this can be complex, but we might imagine some it may stem from the experience of oppression and persecution that leads them to ask, “why isn’t Jesus saving us?” Downgrading Jesus to an angel, in which case his death wasn’t a real human death with real human consequences and struggles, would be to limit the shape and power of Christ’s redemption to the apparent reality of the present circumstances. But the preacher of Hebrews endeavors to teach that that what Jesus did on the cross as deep, pervasive power and impact upon them and their lives and future. In addition, the way of life of following Christ would be difficult under such strenuous circumstances: be hospitable? Don’t take vengeance? Be willing to suffer? IF one downgraded Jesus to an angel, one could then justify taking matters into one’s own hands to better one’s circumstance and leave that particular ethos behind.

So then, I would suggest falling away in Hebrews 6.4-6 was in reference to the idea of downgrading Jesus to simply an angel and the rationalization that would provide to engage in sinful behaviors rather than to continue the pathway of faithfulness. To have experienced the depth of God’s power and then to fall away with such an idea was tantamount to treat Jesus’ death as superfluous, a mere mirage, as unimportant, and thus an act of betrayal that brings contempt upon Jesus once again.

Though, to be clear here, though, this is a question about who Jesus is and His power; it isn’t, strictly a question about why Jesus allows bad things to happen and the struggles that come with that. I don’t want to connect falling away here with struggles with one’s faith and understanding, but rather to be the type of person who has experienced and understood the power of God in Jesus Christ and to then downgrade their view of Jesus. This is what the preacher of Hebrews is referring to.

But, allow me to go a bit further here: the preacher isn’t referring to the idea “once you reach such a level and then fall away, you can never come back.” Rather, he is painting an image of a fully constructed building that has then collapsed. In Hebrews 6.1 he refers to the elementary teachers as a building foundation, with the idea that the rest of the instructions constitute the building as a whole (compare this to Paul’s language in 1 Corinthians 3; this is one of the reasons I think Apollos is the preacher of Hebrews). The word for falling away in Hebrews 6.4, παραπίπτω, conveys the image of the metaphorical building toppling over on its side.

With this image in mind, I want to suggest the meaning of the phrase restore again to repentance (ἀνακαινίζειν εἰς μετάνοιαν) in Hebrews 6.6 (although the NRSV and other translations put in n Hebrews 6.4 for the ease of understanding) is best understood as a metaphorical renovation. If the building has toppled over, there is nothing there to renovate and restore. The implication being that a person who has grown so far and collapsed in their faith can’t just engage in repentance of some sin and be restored to the community but otherwise, their faith is still solid. Their entire faith has been toppled. There is nothing left to salvage.

This doesn’t mean, however, that such a person can not return to faith. The purpose of the image is to exhort the audience of Hebrews to continue further in their faith amidst the difficult times they are facing rather than just give up at this point. To give in to what to the tempting heresy they are facing would be to lose all that had been given to them. The preacher of Hebrews doesn’t want all that they have gone through to have gone to waste, essentially. Fall away now, and they will lose everything and will be liable to God’s judgment for receiving the good things from God and not bearing any fruit (Hebrews 6.7-8). It isn’t falling away here, and you can never return, – it is falling away here, and you have nothing to stand on.

So, in other words, the preacher to Hebrews isn’t saying, “once you fall away, you can never return.” Rather, his point is closer to the idea that if you destroy your faith, you can’t just do a little repentance here and there and then be good as new.

How applicable is this passage to Joshua Harris? I don’t know, nor do we really need to focus on that. Whether Harris is going through a dry spell that has made him no longer consciously identify with Jesus but still retains a deeper connection to Him or he has fallen away closer to the sense of Hebrews 6.4-6 is not for me to know from a distance. But, I would hope you, after reading this, would no longer read Hebrews 6.4-6 as describing the inevitable judgment of those who have fallen away, but as describing the implications of losing faith in Jesus as the one from God that abandons all that one has been given and grown from.

If you are familiar with the theological blogosphere and Twittersphere, you may have heard about Mark Driscoll’s comments about Calvinism (If you haven’t seen it, you can watch the YouTube video here). To summarize, Driscoll said that he didn’t hold to the five points of Calvinism because “it was garbage.” Now, being Wesleyan, I am not too inclined to defend Calvinism as a theological system, but this is a bit strong of a statement. But where my real concern comes in his rationale for why it is a problem: Driscoll describes the “young, reformed, restless” crowd as “little boys with father wounds.”

This, my fellow Christians, is a potentially abusive type of speech, and we should shun it. I don’t say this because of what Driscoll was known for in the past. I say this with a broader knowledge and experience of how this type of explanation for people’s behaviors, be it religious or otherwise, has a real potential for falsehood and damage to other people.

Let me begin by saying that the single biggest inflicter of psychic wounds are parents. Psychological studies have shown that parents are one of the most significant impacts on people’s lives and damage is done there can have a tremendous impact on the rest of people’s lives. Furthermore, stories of parental abuse are far too common too stomach. But we need to bring a bit of sobriety about this: this isn’t because “parents” are dangerous or that all problems people have can be derived from their parents, but it is because parents more than any other type of figure in a person’s lives have more time with children and more power over them in positions of vulnerability. Statistically speaking, people are put in more vulnerable situations when it comes to their parents than anyone else. This is a basic fact of child-rearing, as the vast majority of children are raised by parents when they are vulnerable and therefore there is the greater chance that the problems of the parent can lead to harm coming to the child.

But, here is where we need to step in and recognize something: parents are not the only possible source of wounds in life. Peers who bully can cause great harm. For instance, social ostracism has the power to induce panic and fear into someone that can become a trauma. Institutions that refuse to be accountable can sow devastation. Need I mention the stories of trauma in religious spaces? Spouses can tear apart the life of another; we know this as domestic abuse. A person who has had good parents can have deep traumas caused by the behaviors of other people. I would know.

Secondly, people’s choices are not solely dictated by their psychological wounds, parental or otherwise. There are reasons, for instance, that someone might adhere to Calvinism, such as its simple, parsimonious way of explaining God and salvation that requires little ambiguity in understanding the role of God’s work. Furthermore, Calvinism can seem like a plausible interpretation of Scripture depending on how one’s faith community defined the terms read in the Bible. This is not due to “daddy wounds” of Driscoll’s condescending explanation.

But when we appeal to Driscoll’s type of language to explain why people do things we don’t like, we are doing something: we are appealing to a common idea within the culture, as we in the West are deeply aware of the damage that parents have inflicted on children growing up, and then treat that as an explanation everywhere we find it expedient for our purposes. After all, if something is due to their “daddy wounds” it means that they are in deep error and that they are the ones who need to change.

This is potentially abusive on multiple levels. Firstly, when wrongly applied, it denies the truth of why people think, feel, and act as they do and instead substitutes it with some explanation that is far from the truth. Secondly, it treats people as simply passive people who have not thoughts and feelings on their own, even when people do have parental issues. There are many people who have such pains in their past and to use it as an explanation for things you don’t like disregards the fact that they may have grown and healed beyond them. Thirdly, it has a way of gaslighting people by making them question themselves unnecessarily because someone doesn’t like what they think, feel, or believe (rather than observation of an actual pattern of behavior). 

Finally, however, and this is getting rather personal, in some instances (though not in Driscoll’s case) blaming things on “daddy wounds” can be a form of blaming the victim and inflicting pain on the innocent. Take my brother for instance, who committed suicide. While never formally diagnosed, he fit the patterns of bipolar disorder. That combined with the teasing blurring into bullying he received in high school were likely contributors to his decision to take his own life. My parents, who were not perfect but did a good job to raise up children who were kind, fair, honest, and hardworking, were devasted. But what then added to their pain is that some people had the audacity to blame my brother’s suicide on my parents. They who think they knew so much had no idea how foolish they truly were. They had little knowledge of the situation, but their unthinking words and implications without any sense of involvement inflicted needless pain on a family that was already suffering. To do this was the blame my family, who were victims of losing a loved one due to a primarily genetic disorder that was beyond our control.

I have heard even similar implications directed towards me as I deal with the effects of my college and adulthood trauma (in addition to the losing of a brother) and trying to return back to a sense of normalcy. People who have never talked to me in detail about the reasons I struggle have made statements to me that imply that my upbringing was the source of the problems I experience and not the experiences of losing my own capacities and sense of connectedness from events in college and later one. While I believe such people to be well-intended, even then, it doesn’t take away from the pain when people make judgments about things they haven’t talked to me about directly.

The problem is this: we in Christian circles have treated psychological and therapeutic principles as tools for our own usage in explaining people and their lives, even though we have not had the necessary training to really do such.¹ Since the matters of faith, religion, and spirituality are so connected to psychological concerns, we have been tempted to integrate psychology knowledge into our repertoire of tools to address the problems we see.

And often times, this is often with the intention to help. For instance, I think Driscoll is sincere about what he is saying and trying to help people to see the problem with Calvinism. But the problem with ‘helping’ is that, firstly, we can often be tempted to frame the problems in ways that make us look better and not necessarily with a real concern for helping the people we think we are trying to “help.” This means that we are readily tempted to pull out the psychological explanations that make us look the best, and not necessarily reliably explains the situation or effectively helps the persons. Secondly, because in Christians circles we have often treated our intentions to help as a substitute for thinking well and understanding, we are inclined to think we know what people’s problems are. When it is joined with the refusal to listen so as to learn, it leads to people unknowingly acting in ignorance. People substitute the psychological principles for actual understanding because people feel they have good intentions.

But let me be clear: this is not healthy but a potentially damaging pattern, even despite what we might feel to be good intentions. It needs to stop. Driscoll, as a person who has been somewhat of a bully in the past, seems to be trying to become more sensitive to emotional concerns, but at the same time, he still acts in a way that would be potentially toxic if used in a more interpersonal setting rather than the rather generic discussion of a broad group of people (which can still be harmful through creating stereotypes, but doesn’t tend to have the immediate consequences). Ceasing bullying doens’t come by spouting a few words that show emotional sensitivity, but it comes by a sense of patience that doesn’t jump to extreme explanations for something someone merely dislikes (though, to be clear, sometimes there is bad behavior that needs to be spoken to when there is an actual pattern). “Daddy wounds” are not something to throw around to diminish other people, to explain why people do things we don’t like. “Daddy wounds” are serious matters that should be addressed by people in the know, not talked and gossipped about by those who are ultimately unaware of what the facts of a person’s life are

The question of what is ‘true’ has loomed over the history of the Western intellectual tradition since the pre-Socratics, when philosophers as early as Thales tried to ascertain what was the fundamental makeup of the cosmos. Thales thought the cosmos was ultimately made of water; Anaximander thought the originating principle of the universe was the infinite. Others like Heraclitus and Parmenides didn’t try to explain the origins of what we see but the fundamental nature of the world, with Heraclitus advocated for the fundamentally changing nature of the world whereas Parmenides consider the way of truth to be fundamentally unchanging and everything else to be appearances and opinions. While Parmenides ultimately used truth in the way that has come to influence Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and the course of Western intellectual thought, it wasn’t unique to him as the pre-Socrates as a whole were trying to discover something more fundamental that was responsible for what they otherwise readily knew. As a consequence, when we talk about truth, we today use it to refer to some sense of the way things really that appearances do not deliver to us.

But, here is my hypothesis that will probably never be directly validated: what was guiding the intellectual activities of pre-Socrates prior to Parmenides wasn’t a sense of truth that is distinct from appearances, but a sense of discovering what we can reliably understand about the world around us. I would suggest when Thales was suggesting the originating principle as water, he was saying something about the world could be understood in relation to water. Rather than Aristotle’s fitting Thales into his hylomorphism, what if Thales theory of the originating principle was more about saying something about the effects of water upon the world than it was simply trying to discern an original cause. In this sense, Thales intellectual purpose could be considered more pragmatic, concerned about getting to a systematic understanding of how things are rather by finding something that could shed light on all of it. To be clear, it would still entail Thales believing water is the origination of everything as ‘true,’ but for a specific reason: the perceived reliability of the idea. Something that is considered reliable is therefore also true. It was Parmenides who then took this sense of truth and separated it from the world of appearances. I present this hypothesis more so for the purposes of a thought experiment than any full confidence in the idea: what if Parmenides conception of truth was a change from an earlier understanding of truth as something that is reliable?

Allow me to flesh this idea out in a modern context of diagnostic medicine. What is the difference between the symptoms of an illness and the causes of an illness? A symptom is not responsible for all or most of the problems a person has, whereas something that is a cause is implicated. Consider a person who has a painful headache and feels very exhausted. It is likely that a person’s exhaustion is the cause of the headache. In this case, knowledge about the physical effects of exhaustion is reliable to understand the headache and this is the end of the story. However, in another cause, it could also be the headache that is functionally causing the exhaustion. In both of those cases, there is some knowledge we have about one phenomenon that is useful to explain another phenomenon. Still, it could also be the case that there is another cause, such as the person has motion sickness (Thanks WebMD symptom checker!), in which case neither symptom can be considered the cause of the other.

What is at play here is this fundamental idea: our knowledge about one thing is intuitively considered to provide us a reliable understanding of something else that I am aware of (although, what I know about and what I am understanding may, in fact, be considered coextensive upon further understanding). I know one person is sad because I see them crying. I know a computer hard drive is crashing because I hear a clicking. My sense of the truth of the matter of a person feelings and the state of my computer is understood in terms of what could be referred to as appearances. AT the same time, another person may mask their emotions, leaving me clueless as to what they are feeling. My hard drive may be about to crash but there will be a discernible signal of this being the case.

This is how our sense of knowledge and understanding works in day to day life. Truth is delivered by appearances rather than distinct from the appearances. It wasn’t until philosophers tried to analyze thinking itself that we developed a concept of truth that approaches our modern notion of theory. Now, there is a good reason for Parmenides thinking: many ‘appearances’ provide little explanation whatsoever ever. The color of the table I am sitting at doesn’t explain why I can put my laptop on it without it falling to the ground. Then, there are the cases of deceiving appearances. A person’s crying may not be a sign of sadness, but a sign of happiness. The sound of clicking coming from the computer may be a problem with the fan rather than the hard drive. Our inferences based upon appearances are often at fault and there are many appearances that seem to have no significance. It is a small move from many or most appearances do not reliably tell us anything to all appearances are unreliable. While most of our brains are capable of handling the issue of selective reliability of perceptions well by learning to contextualize perceptions and beliefs with other perceptions and beliefs to determine if something is reliable in this case or not, the conscious act of analysis would not discover the contextual nature of reliability that happens largely without conscious knowledge of it, but most of us would have been left unsure how to distinguish between appearances and thereby regarded no appearances providing truth in virtue of our instinctual bias and strong aversion to false positives rather than false negatives.

The point here? Parmenides ontological distinction between truth and appearances is reflective of the failure of conscious analysis to reflect the way most people developed a sense of what is true. It is a reflection of philosophy’s difficulty with understanding the way human thinking generally makes sense of the world; our brains are capable with some degree of success of discerning which perceptions provide a reliable understanding of other things in our experience, environment, and world more broadly. The way we are generally able to determine what is true is by developing intuitions for what is reliable, which is a result the neural integration of the various networks of neurons together that fire under certain specific experiences that occurs over the course of time.¹ That is to state that our sense of what is true is (a) largely the result of pre-rational assumptions that (b) are sensitive to experiences but not necessarily rational reflection, and (c) emerges from what appearances our conscious minds would perceive to be reliable due to the processes of neural integration that occur mostly outside of conscious thinking.

To my understanding, the concept of reliability wasn’t a major factor in philosophy until the emergence of it in 20th century philosophy in the field of epistemology. The closest we get to the notion of reliability that I am personally aware of (and I am not a scholar on the history of philosophy) is with Hume’s explanation of causation as constant conjunction as an explanation for our understanding of causation. The pragmatist tradition gets close to the idea in proposing that truth is discernible by the consequences, but, in my admittedly truncated knowledge, it still regards truth as operating more in the philosophical, theoretical sense than investing a sense of truth within our appearances.

However, there is a tradition within Western history that does regard reliability as the conditions for discovering truth and can ‘invest’ this sense of truth within what appears: the Hebraic-Christian tradition. Without going into a full analysis of the tradition, I will simply give a basic exposition on this from the perspective of my orthodox Christian theology: we as Christians trust God and we trust God is known in the historical appearance of the human Jesus Christ. Faith is not the result of some calculated reflective process that determines the truth of the Christian claims apart from the reliability, or to use more Biblical language, the trustworthiness of God. The truth of God is known by the trustworthiness of God as revealed in Jesus Christ who is the fulfillment of promises and prophetic visions of the (Old Testament) Scriptures. Then, when it comes to the Spirit, they do not appeal to some higher methodology to distinguish between various claims to inspiration from the Spirit, but rather they seek the test the true origins of people’s claims to revelation, prophetic inspiration, etc. on the basis of what is considered to be reliable, which is most notably summarized in Jesus as Lord.

Now, in making this claim of a way of knowing truth that is closer to pre-analytic forms of knowing truth, I am not trying to say the Christian tradition is true in virtue of this fact. Even if my hypothesis about reliability as a theory of truth is the right way to go, it could be the case that the early Christians wrongly thought knowing Jesus is an absolutely reliable way to know the truth about God. The point is rather this: there is a distinctly different way of conceptualizing truth within the history of the Western intellectual tradition that has largely been won by the tradition of the Greek philosophers. While it was present in the Augustinian synthesis of the Gospel with Neo-Platonist ontology and in the metaphysics of Aquinas’ appropriation of Aristotle, it wasn’t until the revival of classical thinking in the Renaissance that lead to the emergence of the Enlightenment that truth as a theory really became the prevailing understanding of what truth is. Furthermore, because of the Enlightenment’s reliance upon reason, rather than reliability, as the conditions for discovering truth, there was a neglect of the way that claims to truth were often times far from the case and become increasingly unreliable.

In this context, post-modernity found its genesis in question the foundation of ‘truth’ in the Enlightenment, with people like Foucault developing skeptical responses to claims to truth as veiled forms of power. When truth is disconnected from an unconscious sense of reliability or trustworthiness that is responsible for pre-analytic conceptions of truth, “truth” becomes increasingly untrustworthy and worthy of the post-modern scorn. But much as Parmenides conscious reflection made him mistrust all appearances even though this was not an adequate reflection of how people generally thought, post-modernity mistrusted all claims to the truth even though most people have an intuition of truth that created an aversion to the stronger forms of relativism. The ultimate consequence of this is that whereas Parmenides thought all appearances as unreliable, postmodernity has simply masked the unreliability of appearances in a veiled attempt at power without being trustworthy and reliable. AT the end of the day, post-modernity reflects the ultimate failure of Parmenides, mediated through the influence of Plato’s Socrates, to take account of the concept of reliability that unconsciously directs pre-reflective thinking; post-modernity is Parmenides without the way of truth, and thereby making the same fundamental error but with one significant consequence: the views of post-modernity are fundamentally untrustworthy to all but those who the various fragmented views represent. Post-modernity and the views heavily influenced by it are incapable of bridging people together to work towards a communities, social networks, and societies that can be trusted by a wide range of people because it has no real concept of reliability and trustworthiness to begin with, but only the suspicion that is ultimately selectively ignored for one’s own claims. 

This is not to suggest that the solution then is to go back to modernity, as its conception of truth did not reinforce reliability but rather the unthinking idolatry of reason, The Enlightenment worked only so far as its conception of truth was ultimately considered reliable, even as it was not capable of giving what the proponents of the Enlightenment promised. The way to move forward is to rediscover a new conception of truth that is really the notion of truth in its more pre-analytic form as practiced in most of daily life. It is in “relying” on reliability and, when applied to social relations, trustworthiness to provide us what is true.

And from a perspective of Christian theology, it would deliver the possibility of re-conceptualizing our understanding of various theological and doctrinal matters that have been influenced by the historical victory of the Greek and Enlightenment philosophical conceptualization of truth over pre-analytic conceptions of truth. For instance, we can consider Scripture is  to be true not because it provides us abstract knowledge about God qua God Himself in isolation (such as the predicates of omniscience, omnipotence, etc. or metaphysical claims about God’s nature as being in opposition to sin) or even that it provides some “witness” to God that is separate from the truth of God (thereby unwittingly recapitulating Parmenides’s distinction of appearances and truth), but because we discover it reliably informs us about God’s will and purposes for our lives and the world. Additionally, the basic formulation of the Trinity as God being three-in-one can be understood as an important reflective account explaining how we can know God through the trustworthiness of our knowledge from Jesus Christ and the inspiration of the Spirit that conditions and forms our faith and spiritual life, and not simply as a doctrinal formulation about God Himself. Finally, it can provide an answer to a specific type of apologetic and philosophical questions: how can we know God exists? By finding that God is trustworthy, rather than by some other form of rational analysis independent of discovering the trustworthiness of God.²

I love sports. I grew up playing them. Throughout the years, I have played baseball, football, soccer, tennis, basketball, and volleyball. I haven’t played much in recent years as I haven’t had the regular opportunity to play with other people, sports has always been part of my life. I love watching sports too. Having been in Scotland the past two years, I haven’t been able to watch much of the sports I love in the United States, especially Mississippi State athletics.

So, what I am about to say isn’t a criticism of sports, per se. However, it is a real pitfall that comes from some of the intended consequences that occur when we blend Christian faith and sports. When sports and faith are combined, there is a real tendency for people to take faith to be some sort of guarantor of victory in the type of things that the wider world considers significant, both in sports and in the rest of life.

Consider, for instance, the oft-stated and oft-criticized ‘praise’ of those who won a championship: “I want to thank God for winning.” While this type of public proclamation hasn’t been as common in recent years, whenever it happens Christians in America looking for some sort of cultural recognition to hang their hat on cheer such public statements on television. Meanwhile, people criticize such prayers, thinking that God has more important things on his hands than deciding who wins a sports championship. Certainly, God is a bigger God than the critics, who can be concerned about everything in life, including sports. But beneath the somewhat false portrayal of God in the critics is something that is of deeper substance: is God out to give them a sports championship? Was that His real purpose?

Or look at how readily athletes appeal to Philippians 4.13: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me,” including doing things such as marking it out in eye black, which Tim Tebow was especially known for.  Once again, many of us Christians will celebrate when we see a figure use a Scripture reference like that. Sometimes the more sober minded among us will point out that the verse is used out of context. However, I would say that critique doesn’t get at the real point. Why? What does this action convey? While it is a mistake to reduce the meaning to one single thing as it can convey and be intended in many different ways, one implication of this message is often “I can win this game through Christ who strengthens me.” The problem isn’t simply that the Scripture is used out of context from the specific situation Paul’s writes about. In fact, I would suggest Paul’s statement has an aphoristic meaning to it that is meant to apply to a variety of circumstances, not the difficulties that come with not having enough. Rather, the problem is that the way it gets used in the context of athletic competitions with the goal of winning.

The risk in the fusion of faith and athletics is that athletics turns people faith into an expectation in competitive, social victories over one’s opponents, whether it be in sports, in one’s career, in one’s relationships, etc. This is the risk that is unique to athletics; it is a risk whenever we try to bridge faith too tightly with another occupation, hobby, career, goal, etc.: rather than letting Christian faith shed light on that activity, we instead define our faith in terms of the goals and purposes of that activity. Politics is a shining example of this, where rather than the light of the Gospel shedding light on politics, it becomes more often the case that politics tries to determine the shape and true importance of faith. Put more generally, when we apply the symbols of Christian faith to other forms of activities, there is the possibility that we define the symbols of Chrisitan faith by the goals of those activities, whether it be the goal of winning in sports and life or the goal of ideologically conformity and societal victory that is deeply entrenched in the practices of political power.

If the fusion of sports and faith were simply contained to the sports field, then the problems this would cause would be relatively contained. However, unfortunately, sports is often an avenue in which we learn, develop, and refine our social skills in how we discipline ourselves and socialize with others in teamwork and competition. It is also often used as a metaphor for life. Because sports are not contained off from the rest of life, the way we join sports and faith will also impact others parts of life that our involvement in sports will impact. This is where my real concern lay: not that we treat Christian faith as some sort of tool of our sports victory, but that we treat Christian faith as a tool we use in the broader, social spaces of our life and we seek to be victorious in those areas, without concern for the impacts upon others. When the Gospel, directly or indirectly, becomes a message about our success and victory in the social arenas of life, it becomes real easy for us to see people as potential roadblocks to our victory, as potential opponents that we need to find a way to overcome to win. Insofar as sports determines the shape of our faith, we can see others who stand in our way as something less than with the intentions of our loving God. Furthermore, since sports often teach us to never give up but to constantly strive to win, it can also create in us a resistance to repentance because that can entail an attitude of submission, which is what “losers” do.

But, the Gospel is not the story of the winners, but of the losers. For, God is opposed to the proud but gives grace to the humble. As Jesus says, the first shall be last and the last shall be first. It is the poor in spirit who are blessed, not the rich. It is meek who shall inherit the earth, not the strong. Jesus does not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. This is not to ‘glorify’ losing, being weak, poverty, sin, etc. There is nothing glorious in them themselves. Why is that? Perhaps, it is because it is in those positions in life that we are most willing to learn, we are willing to look towards someone or something to direct our lives as we feel helpless ourselves, we are most willing to receive a hand of help from those who can teach us. It is in recognizing our sin, that we repent, which isn’t an attitude of shame-filled “I am a terrible person” sort of humiliation that the self-righteous often seek as signs of their own validation and other people’s subservience, but rather an attitude of “I have been getting it wrong, but I want to go in a better direction.” Those who feel they are winning, who feel proud, who feel first, who feel rich, who feel strong, who feel righteous are very inclined to be self-contented, almost to the point that they will see no reason to change and learn. Faith and sports can be marshaled in that direction, to teach the ‘losers’ that they can still get up, that they are not forgotten, and that they can learn and grow from them.

Having been a head soccer coach for a year in a recreational league on two different occasions, I have found that this lesson is more satisfying in my time. While I did not make this conscious connection at the time, there was something satisfying in my time as a coach. Overall, I probably have something close to a 30% win record as a head coach. It isn’t because I don’t know how to play or coach. I played most of my childhood, where I had to learn how to play because I wasn’t as naturally athletic as some others. My father was also my soccer coach growing up, so I learned some from him. It is simply because I didn’t know the league or the players when I got assigned the team whereas the other coaches knew the league, so I got the team that was, intentionally or unintentionally, set up to lose. But, if you were to track my win-loss record over the course of the year, you would see my teams winning more later in the year. Why is that?

Because coaching is about teaching kids as much as it is about setting them up to win the game. In fact, before it is ever about putting them in the places to succeed and win, coaching is about teaching. And I took pleasure in that as I saw players ranging from those who didn’t know how to play to those who had physical talent but not sure how to use it and I saw them get better as the season went along. We were learning; they were learning how to play and I was learning how to coach as neither they or I were able to win.

I remember this one kid who was one of the fastest players on the team but was always out of control and made big mistakes as a result that would give the other teams goals, despite me trying to teach him time and time again how to slow down and take his time. It frustrated me as a coach to see it happen again and again, but as a person he was one of my favorites as he was a sweet and wonderful kid who was always willing to try. He just didn’t quite get it because no one had taken the time to teach him (his home situation was not the best) and I was admittedly having a hard time figuring out how to teach the concept of slowing down to a 9-year-old. But, after nearly a year, towards the end of the season, despite many efforts that were left in frustration, I started to notice that he was beginning to take his time every now and then. He didn’t always have to go 110%, but there were moments when it is better to go 60-70% and figure out what to do from there. Even though I was not the best at what I was trying to do, eventually, the light bulb started to go off. He was learning and growing, along with the rest of the kids, because he wanted to be better at soccer. While he wanted to win, sure, he wanted to do the best that he could. He was at almost every practice even when others wouldn’t show up.

While I never explicitly express my faith in my coaching and teaching the kids, though people knew I was serving as a pastor, I found my understanding of God’s guidance and direction of us impacting the way I tried to approach sports, competition, and coaching. Sports and Christian faith intersect more when it comes to how we live when we are on the losing side, when things don’t go our way, when we make mistakes that cost us, and when the deck is unfairly stacked against us.

God has victories for us in life, for those of us who love Him. Some of those may turn out to be victories in career, in relationships, or even in championships on some occasions. But God’s victory in the Gospel is firstly about how He gives those who are on the losing side due to the way the powers of sin and death have stacked the deck against them. That type of victory sometimes means we lose some of the time, maybe even much of the time, because the deck has been stacked against us. But rather than trying to cheat to beat cheaters, to destroy those who destroy, to tear down those who tear down, the Gospel shows us how to learn and grow in our ‘losses,’ to let God direct and lead us through His Holy Spirit amidst the struggles with sin, injustice, and brokenness towards the type of victory that Jesus experienced and has. Because, unlike the President’s haughty and arrogant derision of people as “losers,” it is Jesus who gives victory to the ‘losers,’ and brings contempt to the self-proclaimed winners.

The more I work through my dissertation on 1 Corinthians, the more I am struck by a simple premise that explains roughly half of Paul’s discursive style in the non-Pastorals: Paul is a philosopher of sorts. Certainly, such an idea might appear to be an error prima facie. Even Troels Engberg-Pedersen, who has advocated for interpreting Paul in light of Stoicism, does not go so far as to say that Paul is a philosopher. However, the more I study 1 Corinthians, the more I am left with this basic feeling: the problems of the Corinthians seeing Paul and Apollos as competitive teachers of wisdom cannot be well accounted for if Paul did not, at least in some form, act like philosophers were expected to act in the day.

But this thesis bears clarification by first answering the question: what is a philosopher? While we all seem to have our images of what a “philosopher” is, there are not necessarily the same thing. For some, being a philosopher is to be engaged in the study of philosophy; a philosopher reads people like the ancient philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle and the more recent philosophers like Nietzsche or Heidegger, etc. in the continental tradition or Russell and Ryle in the analytic tradition. This definition of a philosopher is largely defined by the study of a particular domain of thinking that is known as philosophy. However, this definition isn’t perfect. For instance, the philosophers of science such as Kuhn, Popper, Lakatos, etc. studied primarily the practice and thinking that occurs in science and formulated ideas about the field.

So, maybe we can define philosophy as a field that studies thinking in its various forms. This gets closer to the image we might get when we think of an academic philosopher, who studies ideas and the logical consequences of those ideas. But yet, this definition of a philosopher doesn’t quite work either unless we add an explicit qualification of being professional. For instance, two friends in conversation in a coffee shop (guess where I am at as I write this!) may talk about the way to approach relationship issues and one of them gives advice based upon some overarching principles about how they think relationships work and the other says “You are quite the philosopher.” While such designation is not serious in terms of defining an occupation, that it can be used to describe someone who thinks deeply about how they approach various life circumstances means that being a philosopher isn’t necessarily about precise logical analysis of abstract systems of beliefs and propositions.

It is in this last sense of the usage of “philosopher” that is closest to what I am meaning when I describe Paul as a philosopher. While philosophy from the Presocratics through to Socrates and up to the Hellenistic period had largely preoccupied itself with more “theoretical” ideas about the world and its constitution, from the Hellenistic period into the Roman era, philosophy took a turn towards focusing on ethical matters. As Europe had increasingly integrated various peoples and cultures towards political integration through the processes of regionalization that Alexander the Great’s empire and then the Roman empire created, the various structures of meaning and norms would begin to break down. Concomitant with that would have been an increase in anxiety about one’s life and place in the world, especially in light of the more familiar local governance that people were closely connected to being replaced by imperial governance and its system of laws that were ultimately enforced by penal and military power. How one is to live in such a context would become highly imperative to determine. Epicurus’ philosophy based upon finding happiness, far the hedonist that Epicurus is caricatured to be, was trying to promote a way of thinking that avoided the anxieties and features that come from the reality of death and the consequences of impulsive, hedonistic behavior. The 1st century AD Roman Stoics of Seneca and Epictetus gave a lot of time discussing ethical matters of how to live within the various circumstances of life. While certainly there were some ‘philosophers’ who had a fascination with the more abstract and logical matters of philosophy, these were regarded as misleading people and a charade; philosophy was practical and it addressed the anxieties that people faced in life.

Philosophers in Paul’s day were helping people to deal with the realities of life: to that end, they are closer to our modern day therapists than our image of philosophers in the modern day. Now, to be clear, this comparison isn’t perfect. Philosophers were expected to have a knowledge of logic and reasoning, although therapists and counselors who employ cognitive techniques may have some basic understanding of reasoning themselves. Philosophers also had certain ontological views on the way the world is and certain definitions of virtue that helped them to determine the norms for how one should learn to adapt in the world, whereas modern-day therapists typically allow for the client’s own values and norms to determine how to adapt. Philosophers also didn’t delve deep into consciousness, but their therapy typically focused on finding the errors of reasoning. Finally, philosophers didn’t do talk therapy like we do today. They may instruct classes in how to think, but their ‘therapy’ wasn’t typically personalized to a single client. Nevertheless, with these qualifications in mind, the goals of the philosopher in Paul’s day were closer to the goals of modern therapists: to help people to live and adapt in the world in a way that maximizes their well-being. Philosophy in the Apostle Paul’s world was more concerned about therapeutic and ethical interests rather than with logic and abstract propositions.

To that end, I would contend that it is best to understand part of Paul’s discourse in his letters as most aptly described as a form of philosophical discourse. Paul engages with Christians across the Roman empire on various matters such as how to live in the face of suffering (Romans 5.1-5), how to become virtuous/righteous by being conformed to Christ through the Spirit (Romans 6, 8). In addressing matters of marriage, he provides practical advice that should impact one’s decision on whether to marry or not (1 Cor. 7). Rather than seeking for one’s own benefit in matters of eating meat, Paul instructs in how one should seek other people’s interest above one’s own due to its association with idolatrous temples (1 Cor 10.23-11.1). Rather than judging each other based upon the appearances of the flesh, one should consider looking at each other in terms of the new creation being created in them (2 Cor. 5.16-17). Paul instructs the Galatians in how to live out their freedom that they have been given in Christ by living by the Spirit rather than the flesh (Gal. 5). Rather than letting anxiety reign, Paul advocates engaging God in prayer and focusing on the good in life (Philippians 4.4-9). The list goes on and on.

Moral instruction was not unique to philosophers, as the Pharisees themselves engaged moral instruction insofar as the Tannaim represents the Pharisees form of ethical thinking and instruction. However, once Paul moved away from a Pharisaical life where righteousness was derived from the interpretation and application of Torah, he could not employ the same style of ethical guidance as his ethical instruction was based upon the power of God at work in the love of Christ to demonstrate what God’s righteousness was ultimately about. The shape of Paul’s ethical reasoning becomes more narrative-driven rather than being based upon a hermeneutical approach to the Old Testament Scriptures. To that end, he shares much more common with the ancient philosophers, who would regularly make use of their mythical and philosophical stories of figures like Odysseus and Socrates as ethical narratives to guide their own behavior. Nevertheless, Paul also does not do philosophy the way that they philosopher did it, at it is the person of Christ who makes known the shape of God’s redemption and the nature of human life rather than simply serves as an example of some noble or lofty ideals.

Furthermore, Paul was a philosopher only in a constrained sense. His vocation was as an apostle who proclaimed the story of God’s redemption of humanity in the death and resurrection of Jesus as foretold in the Jewish Scriptures. To whatever degree Paul was capable of philosophical thinking and speech, it did not define his apostolic proclamation (1 Cor. 2.1-5). He primary saw himself as God’s ambassador, empowered by the Spirit to speak to and, through the Spirit, demonstrate the nature of God’s in-breaking love into the world. To that end, his wisdom was more defined by what he did in laying the foundation of Christ down (1 Cor. 3.10-11) than any wisdom exhibited in the form of philosophical discourse. However, Paul could speak in more of a philosophical manner (1 Cor 2.6-16) but even this was due to the inspiration of the Spirit to make known what cannot be known through the normal modes of philosophy in observation, learning, and reasoning (1 Cor. 2.9).

As a consequence, what defined Paul’s philosophical thinking from that of his nearest contemporaries, the Stoics, is that God’s wisdom is unknowable except through specific acts of revelation and that God’s wisdom isn’t based upon the way of the current order of the world, but how God is transforming the cosmos by Christ and through the Spirit to bring about a new creation that is eroding the order of the present age. As such, Paul’s philosophical thinking is more eschatological, if not even apocalyptic in a sense, that persistently relies upon the direction and inspiration of the Spirit for a person through faith to be intellectually and ethically be formed into the ultimate eschatological pattern that Jesus Christ is the source of and first visible appearance of.

Paul is firstly an apostle whose primary task is to proclaim the story of the resurrected Messiah to the Gentiles. However, in guiding the Christian communities he was responsible for teaching and in engaging with the conflicts with other outsider teachers who were leading them astray from the Gospel, Paul could engage in a form of thinking and discourse that closely resembles philosophical discourse in terms of style of instruction and its goals, although radically different in the presuppositions that determine the shape of the philosophical reasoning in taking the narrative of Jesus Christ as constitutive for the content of his philosophical thinking.