Athens – The Birthplace of Western Philosophy
This morning, I am writing and filming from the balcony of my hotel in Athens. And on this particular morning, I’m thinking about some of the things for which we must be thankful to the Greek people. The Greek people have given us democracy. They have given us engineering. They have given us science. They have contributed to the arts through music, drama, and poetry, giving us some of the great sagas of the West, including the Odyssey and the Iliad.
And, of course, they’ve given us philosophy. The father of Western philosophy is Socrates. Socrates lived in the 5th century, and we primarily know Socrates through the eponymous testimony of his two most famous students, Xenophon and Plato. Plato, of course, is so important to Western philosophy that one scholar said that all of Western philosophy is either arguing for or against Plato. However, all Western philosophy has to take Plato into account.
But Socrates is the father of Western philosophy. And philosophy has to do with two primary ideas, at least in the West. So the primary question is, how do we know what we know? What is the source of knowledge? How do we discern knowledge? How do we test truth claims? This area of philosophy is known as epistemology. The other philosophical idea that Western philosophy deals with is the meaning of the good life. What does it mean to live the good life? What does it mean to do good, become fully human, and avoid evil and injustice? And Western philosophy deals primarily with those two issues.
As I was thinking about the ideas of Western philosophy and how Western philosophy was born in this country, I was also thinking of the biblical wisdom literature. So, the biblical wisdom literature is found primarily in Ecclesiastes, the book of Proverbs, and Job. There are some smatterings of the wisdom literature in other parts of the Bible, but those are our primary sources. What Proverbs primarily claims (and its ideas fall right in line with the Torah, especially with Deuteronomy) is that the best way to live and the best possibility of achieving the truly human life, the good life, is to obey God. Following his precepts and his commands will give us our best chances to live fully human lives.
However, the book of Ecclesiastes and Job raises some questions about this premise. What happens when you follow the precepts of God? What happens when you pursue wisdom? What happens when you pursue the good life and seek to avoid evil, and life turns out terrible anyway? The Book of Job and Ecclesiastes says that sometimes you can do all the right things, and life does not turn out as you had hoped. Bad things still happen to good people, and sometimes, even good people struggle with the apparent meaninglessness of life.
The purpose of raising those questions is to keep us from giving superficial answers to difficult questions and problems. The biblical wisdom literature intends to make us honest and force us to have intellectual integrity. It also tells us that we cannot gloss over or skip over the problems of suffering, evil, injustice, or even the meaninglessness we find in this world. It shows us that we must wrestle deeply with those things. It does not forbid us; in fact, it invites us to raise and wrestle with difficult questions, but it does so while reminding us that the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord.
Living in light of who he is not only permits us to ask questions, but it empowers us to ask those questions without shrinking from them, without moving away, and without being an intellectual or emotional coward. The wisdom literature says, listen, you have a human responsibility to ask these difficult questions. And the book of Ecclesiastes gives us the emotional permission to sometimes not be okay with the answers we find, even when those answers come from God’s word. It reminds us that sometimes we will have to live with that unease because we’re human, right?
So the fear of the Lord, in Ecclesiastes and Job, along with Deuteronomy and Proverbs, encourages us to seek to do good, to seek what is right, and to do justice while shunning evil. The temptation in a painful, broken world of suffering and injustice is to give up on doing good and to join in with all the wrongdoers, right? To just seek pleasure by any means necessary – to get whatever we want to get out of life – to simply seek our own good and our own needs, while ignoring those around us. That all seems so logical. But the wisdom literature tells us, no, shun evil. Stay away from wickedness. It’s a poison to the soul. It’s a poison to the mind. It is a poison to the human family and to society.
And so all of this culminates in the person of Christ, where the biblical story and the message of God is always going. Paul says that Jesus embodies the wisdom of God. The crucifixion is where we see the wisdom of God come into focus. In Jesus, God steps down into humanity. He walks the human path with us. He embodies our suffering. He takes it upon himself to begin redeeming the human story from the inside out.
Paul says in 2 Corinthians that the wisdom of God is weakness and folly to the Jew and foolishness to the Gentile or Greek. He says, “where are the philosophers of this world? Where are the wise sages of this world in light of who Jesus is?” But, what seems like weakness is, in reality, the strength of God. The foolishness of the world is the wisdom of God embodied in Jesus. If we want to understand life’s most challenging problems and questions, and if we’re going to understand God’s answers and wisdom, we must look at Christ. We must look at the crucified Christ and understand God’s answers in light of his life, death, and resurrection.