Philosophers, Martyrs, and Canoes

Imagine a Christian church today somewhere in the American Bible Belt, a place where Christianity has roots deep enough and branches wide enough that worshipers have built a megachurch. This church accommodates thousands in multiple services every weekend. Picture the bustle and vibrancy of such a place, with its modern, clean, and comfortable architecture, including built-in coffee shop.

Now look up at the walls as you enter the sanctuary. You can see beautiful banners that remind churchgoers of precious truths about the One they are here to worship, Jesus. These large, deep-blue and gold, hand-sewn hangings each proclaim a name or description of the Lord drawn from the Bible. Your eyes scan across the many names, each of which communicates something important—Shepherd, King, Savior, Messiah, Friend of sinners, Immanuel.

And Philosopher.

Philosopher? Not likely. What would your reaction be? Is the preacher going to conclude with an altar call inviting you to “pray to receive Jesus as your personal philosopher”?

Now let’s mentally time travel to another church service. Let’s visit the gathering of a group of pious Christians some eighteen hundred years earlier, in the ancient city of Dura-Europos. This fortress town in modern-day Syria sat right on the Euphrates River, a formidable stronghold.1 It was ruled by a succession of people including the Parthians and Romans. Dura-Europos was remarkably diverse in culture, language, and religion, with places of worship for Christians, Jews, and various Greek and Roman cults—a truly metropolitan place to live and raise a family and plant gardens and worship one’s god.

That is, before it was attacked and overrun in AD 256. While the city was besieged, the inhabitants realized that the only way to protect the city was to cram everything they could find into the houses and shops that were built into the fortress wall—every bit of trash, debris, and rubble they could get their hands on. This worked for a while, but eventually the city fell to the Sasanians. The attackers came in, killed the inhabitants, took what they could find, and then completely abandoned the place. The desert sands began to drift and blow over the skeletons and drinking cups, eventually covering it over completely.

It wasn’t until right after World War I that European archaeologists stumbled upon Dura-Europos. When they did, they found that the buildings that were built into the side of the walls were an archaeologist’s dream! They were completely intact, preserved, and untouched because of the stuffed debris. Among other important discoveries, the researchers found a house church, frozen in time.

Figure 1. Wall painting from Dura-Europos of Jesus healing the paralytic [Yale University Art Gallery]

Now we can look at their church walls. What were their decorations? Like those in our imagined megachurch, these faithful Christians also used their walls to remind worshipers of who Jesus is. The painted images in this ancient church depict Jesus in various ways, as the Good Shepherd, the Great Physician, and the Water Walker. And as a Philosopher. In fact, in all the pictures of Jesus healing, teaching, and performing miracles, he is wearing the telltale philosopher’s robes, has the haircut that indicated his status as a philosopher, and is standing in the posture of a philosophy teacher (see fig. 1).

Philosopher. Painted on the walls of the church. Why?

It turns out the Dura-Europos believers were not alone. By the year AD 100, to everyone’s surprise, Christianity was spreading far and wide throughout the mighty Roman Empire. Around that time a man named Justin was born in Flavia Neapolis in Palestine, about thirty miles north of Jerusalem. As a thoughtful and sincere young man, Justin began to search for life, for some direction that would give him wisdom and meaning. He tried to be a disciple of a Stoic teacher, the most popular philosophy of the day. Unsatisfied, he tried connecting himself with a Peripatetic, a teacher of the ways of Aristotle. This too proved unworkable. When he approached a Pythagorean philosopher, he was told that he did not have the required training in music, astronomy, and geometry. Next, he began training in the ways of Platonism, with hopes that he would find the truth and behold the god of the Ideals.

He finally felt like his pursuit of wisdom was going well. But the true God had other plans. While walking near the sea, Justin fell into intense dialogue with an old man, a man who turned out to be a follower of Jesus of Nazareth. The man thoughtfully engaged Justin, challenging him with several insightful questions, pushing him to think about the soul and humanity’s fate—our fate that depends on the true and eternal God. Justin asked how he could learn to practice this philosophy. The old Christian’s answer was that it is the Hebrew prophets, inspired by the Spirit, who are the true philosophers of the world, and who point to the true wisdom to be found in Jesus. Justin’s heart was set ablaze, and he began reading and meditating on the prophets and the “friends of Christ,” coming to love the truth they spoke.

All of this is described autobiographically by Justin in what became his very famous book Dialogue with Trypho. This book was written in the classical dialogue style (first made famous by Socrates and Plato), where the teaching mode is an intense conversation. Dialogue comes from sometime in the 150s or 160s, after Justin had moved to Rome and set up a Christian philosophy/discipleship school.

This autobiographical info from Justin has a purpose. Dialogue tells the story of a Jewish man named Trypho who approached Justin and started a conversation with him. Why? Because he recognized by Justin’s apparel that he was a philosopher. Even as spurs and a ten-gallon hat would communicate “cowboy” to us, Justin’s robes, haircut, and manner said “philosopher.” Justin explains to Trypho his own story—how he came through many insufficient philosophies to finally find the true philosophy of Jesus. The Old Testament prophets were philosophers. Jesus was the greatest philosopher. And now as a disciple of Jesus, Justin is a philosopher too. Philosophy is a way of finding true life, Justin explains, and now he has found this true life in Jesus. Christianity is the true philosophy that through faith and the power of the Spirit enables people to see the world in a certain way and to live accordingly. It is the way to the truly Good Life.

And so this is what Justin did. Living in Rome, at the heart of the empire and its many philosophical schools, he taught people the true philosophy of Christianity. He dialogued, defended, apologized (that is, gave reason for his faith), both in person and in writings like the Dialogue and his First Apology and Second Apology.

And it got him into trouble. Justin was eventually arrested and tried before the city prefect Rusticus, one of the teachers of the great Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius (and no fan of Christians). Because Justin refused to sacrifice to the gods and show obeisance to the emperor, he was executed. Up until then he was known as Justin the Philosopher. After his execution for his faith, he became known as Justin the Martyr. Justin’s martyrdom is the appropriate consummation of his life following the philosophy of Jesus. Jesus the Savior-Philosopher died faithful to God. So did his faithful disciple, Justin the Philosopher-now-Martyr.2

Fast-forward to another dialogue that happened some years later, in AD 1999. The location is not Rome but Iowa, at the Republican Party primary debate in the run-up to the 2000 presidential election. The moderator of the debate asked each candidate this question: “What political philosopher or thinker do you most identify with and why?” The first to answer was then-governor George W. Bush. Without hesitation, in his sincere Texan drawl, Bush answered that the philosopher who most influenced him was “Christ.”

Now some might debate how appropriate or erudite of an answer this was, but this is what the future president offered. Bush further explained what he meant, and what he says is more Bible Belt than Beltway and more revivalist than rigorous. “Jesus as Philosopher” meant for Bush that when someone accepts Jesus as Lord and Savior, this changes their heart and thus their thinking. This is how Jesus is a philosopher. That answer is maybe a bit less sophisticated than Justin’s, but it’s no less sincere. Both Justin Martyr and Governor Bush recognized in Jesus someone who offers true wisdom for how to live well.

When we examine the long space of Christian history between Bush’s and Justin’s responses, we find a rich tradition of Christians answering the same way. In statues, altar pieces, sarcophagus carvings, sermons, theological treatises, and popular stories, when standing before emperors and governors, Christians have long talked about Jesus as a philosopher and Christianity as the true philosophy of life. Christianity is not just a set of doctrines but a divine whole-life philosophy worth dying for, if need be.

But something has changed. Something has been lost. If we were to conduct a Jimmy Fallon–esque “Word on the Street” interview today, I doubt many, if any, would offer that Christianity is a philosophy and that Jesus is a philosopher. No one is making “Jesus the Philosopher” banners for their church foyers. Amazon offers minimal hits that contain both “Jesus” and “Philosopher” in their titles, and the few that are found are usually academic historical studies, not for the average churchgoer. Syllabi for courses in Bible colleges, university religion departments, and seminaries do not present Jesus as a philosopher. This is not to mention university philosophy courses. If a philosophy professor suggested “Jesus” as one of the subjects to study alongside Aristotle, Kant, and Hume, he or she would likely receive the dual gift of raised eyebrows and a reprimand.

But this reflects a major historical shift. Throughout the vast span of the church’s history, Christianity has been understood as a sophisticated philosophy of life with Jesus as the Great Philosopher.

So what happened? To answer the question of why the modern church has largely lost this way of speaking of Jesus as the Great Philosopher, we must step back. We’ll need to understand the seismic shift that happened to the word “philosophy” over the intervening centuries. We’ll tackle this in the following chapter.

But for now, we all know that we don’t put “Jesus,” “Christianity,” “philosopher,” and “philosophy” in the same sentences or even paragraphs. Who cares? Why does this matter?

I think there are four significant things that have happened to the church as a result of this loss of “philosophy” language:

1. Our Christian faith is often disconnected from other aspects of our human lives. Christianity has become merely a religion rather than a philosophy of life.
2. We naturally look to other sources—alternative gurus—to give us the wisdom needed to live flourishing lives, to find the Good Life.
3. We have stopped asking a set of big questions that Holy Scripture is seeking to answer—questions about how the world really works and how to live in it.
4. We have limited our witness to the world.

Let’s consider these briefly.

Disconnected faith. Whether we intend it or not, our modern lives are often built like a chest of drawers, with distinct compartments for each area. Even as we keep our socks, underwear, exercise clothes, and jeans in different drawers (or at least, most of us do), so too our lives have distinct compartments—health, relationships, money, education, leisure, religion.

Christian people also have a specific drawer for Jesus. For some it is a small, low-placed half drawer that is only opened once a week or maybe twice a month on Sundays. For others—especially pastors and missionaries—the Jesus drawer is big and probably at the top of the cabinet with well-oiled rollers. Most Christians’ “Jesus drawers” are somewhere in between.

[fire_fly / Shutterstock.com]

A chest of drawers is a great thing for organizing clothes (and hiding cigars from your spouse), but not for structuring our lives. Humans are organic beings who thrive only when the many parts of our lives are connected together. Our bodies, our minds, our emotions, our habits, our praying, our relationships—all of these are intimately related. They can’t be compartmentalized, at least not if we want to thrive. One cannot remove the mitochondria or ribosomes from a simple cell and expect it to function. How much more for the infinitely complex human organism! We cannot treat our lives as if the various parts are unrelated and expect to experience meaningful happiness and the flourishing life that Jesus talks about (John 10:10).

Because of various shifts that have happened in the worlds of both theology and philosophy, most Christians today experience Jesus as part of their “religion” or “faith.” But it is not clear to most faithful Christians how this relates to the rest of the “real life” of vocations, vacations, relationships, emotions, and, ultimately, happiness. The way we think and talk about our Christian faith is often an exercise in drawer building, not life creation. Christianity may be a great religion, but how it provides a philosophy of life is not so apparent. As theologian Peter Leithart astutely observes, many Christians are dualists, mistakenly living our lives like a layered cake—with supernatural truths on the top layer of an otherwise natural cake. The “church adds a spiritual dimension to my life but leaves my natural world more or less intact.”3

Alternative gurus. In real life, Nick Offerman, most famous for his Übermensch role as Ron Swanson on NBC’s Parks and Recreation, is a man’s man, fully bearded and equipped with all manner of hardcore man skills. He has reached significant enough fame in American culture today that he has published a memoir full of his homespun wisdom. It is cleverly titled Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man’s Fundamentals for Delicious Living.4

In Offerman’s crude and swaggering style, he presents sixteen chapters that follow his own experiences. Each chapter is subtitled with a pithy proverb: “Eat Red Meat,” “How to Be a Man,” “Measure Twice, Cut Once,” “The Moustache Makes the Magick,” and several others that would not make it through the editorial process for any publisher concerned about lewdness and vulgarity (such as mine).

What is the man Offerman offering? He’s quite aware that he is giving his readers a philosophy of life, a way of seeing and being in the world that promises happiness, based on his forty-plus years of great success so far. The keys to happiness, according to Nick, are found in living a principled life that includes lots of hard work, lots of sex, lots of pork, and a little bit of luck.

Most people won’t completely adopt Offerman’s philosophy of life, even if they find him enjoyable as a character and comic. But what his memoir represents is what all humans long for and need—someone to help us figure out how to live well, someone who provides both a model and principles for real life. Offerman is inviting people to follow his example and adopt his attitudes. He’s a modern-man philosopher, a woodworking, BBQ-eating guru.

Sitting at assorted coffee shops working on this book, I often ran into friends, church members, and students who would kindly ask what I was working on. So I’ve tried out several “elevator speech” versions of describing Jesus as a philosopher. After one such account, a particularly thoughtful friend shared how this related to his experience. Despite his strong commitment to the church, his experience of Christianity has indeed been one of needing to find alternative gurus. As he described it, he learned from Bible college and many great preachers the vertical aspects of Christianity—who God is and what Jesus has done for us—and this is great. But he hasn’t found many teachers or leaders in the church who helped him think about the horizontal aspects of what it means to be a Christian—vocation, emotions, politics, and so on—in short, a philosophy of life. So he has found help for that elsewhere, in people like today’s famous psychologist-visionary Jordan Peterson. (We’ll come back to Peterson later.)

I don’t think my friend’s experience is uncommon. Because we have lost the image of Jesus as a whole-life philosopher, many faithful Christians find other gurus to help them figure out the questions of daily living. Our modern culture has plenty of philosophers on tap. We have philosophers of finance (Warren Buffett), philosophers of what books we should read to feel empowered (Oprah), philosophers of leadership principles (Ray Dalio), philosophers of productivity (David Allen) and how to get into flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi), philosophers of fashion and chic cool (Heidi Klum), philosophers of creativity (Austin Kleon), and philosophers of getting organized and getting rid of stuff (Marie Kondo). Christians often create their philosophy of life from a hodgepodge of these, often adding in a Christianized version of the same thinkers.

Christians and non-Christians alike benefit from such philosophers. This is not necessarily bad or wrong—we should gladly collect good lumber from any forest we can find as we build the houses of our lives. But it’s better to realize that Jesus the Philosopher is doing more than speaking to the religious and spiritual parts of lives—the vertical aspects. He is a guru for all human and horizontal realities too. When we lose the idea that Jesus is a life-philosopher, we are stuck looking to alternative gurus, whether of the Offerman type or not.

Loss of questions. In addition to Steve Martin (whom we’ll talk about in the next chapter), one of the greatest influences on my young comedic sensibilities was Douglas Adams’s five-part trilogy (you read that right) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Woven throughout this romping, irreverent science fiction world is the number 42. This figure is significant because, after the supercomputer named Deep Thought ran its program for 7.5 million years, it determined that the answer to the ultimate question of life is in fact 42. This didn’t exactly satisfy the recipients present at the time. Deep Thought pointed out to them that while 42 was in fact the answer, they had never specified what exactly the question was. Subsequently, Deep Thought then created the Earth as a supercomputer to figure out what the Ultimate Question was (Earth unfortunately was destroyed by the Vogons five minutes before its ten-million-year program completed).

I often think of this funny idea that we might finally have the answer but then forget what the question was. I think it is often true about the Bible. That is, Christians believe in the ultimate authority of what is taught in Scripture—we believe it has the answers—but we don’t always remember to ask the right questions of what the Bible is teaching. So, with our high view of Scripture in hand, we go to the Bible and ask important questions—religious, vertical questions—and that is good. But because of habits and training, we have stopped asking another set of questions—the human, horizontal, philosophical ones.

But this is a loss for us because it turns out that the Bible has strong and sophisticated 42-quality answers to the great human questions, the ones philosophy has always asked. These are questions like, What is the nature of reality? How do we know this? What does it mean to be human? How do we order our relationships and emotions? How do we find true happiness? In the modern world, we have forgotten to ask the Bible these crucial questions. And as a result, we have lost a major part of what Holy Scripture is saying and how it is meant to function in the Christian life.

Limited witness. Let’s return once more to Nick Offerman’s canoe-building advice. Not only is he presenting himself as a guru for how to live, Offerman also has very strong negative opinions about the problems with Christianity and Christians. In some ways the book is an antitestimony to his experience of formerly being a Catholic and then “born-again” Christian up until his first year in college. In the chapter “Hail Mary, Full of Beans,” Offerman describes his upbringing in the “fairy-tale” belief system of Catholicism. Protestant Christianity doesn’t fare much better as he describes his evangelical youth group experiences. At length and with a palatable vitriol, Offerman lambasts any Christian who would suggest that the moral teachings of the Bible should ever be used in public for any laws. This is all summed up with his aphorism “Horse Sense > The Bible.”

From a psychological perspective, Offerman’s violent reaction to Christianity reveals more about whatever personal demons he is seeking to exorcise than any particular insight he purports to have regarding the complex questions of church and state. But he does serve as an example of a real person whose early experience in Christianity disappointed him. It disappointed precisely because it was not large enough to make sense of his whole life. Christianity was part of his life but was ultimately discardable. It wasn’t presented to him in ways big enough to encompass his clever mind and eager spirit. (Plus he liked smoking weed.) The philosophy-of-life things that stuck and shaped him came from elsewhere. Hard work, diligence, family, friendships—these things he learned outside the church, Offerman says.

There is no way to know how much of this was the fault of his priests, his pastors, and his own choices. Who we become and what we believe (big philosophical questions) are the result of innumerable factors. But I think Offerman’s experience is not entirely atypical. Modern Christianity has often been practiced and taught in ways that divorce it from the rest of “real life.” The result is many churched children become adult “Nones.” These people are among that 23 percent of the American population who today answer “None” to the question, “What is your religious affiliation?”5 I suggest that one factor underneath this shift is the loss of seeing Christianity as a whole-life philosophy and Jesus as the Great Philosopher.