L.T. Johnson, Among the Gentiles: Greco-Roman Religion and Christianity, (Yale/Anchor, 2009), 480 pages.

There are books which catch a rising tide of interest and scholarship in a subject and become seminal studies.   There are books which go against the tide of general scholarly opinion, and sometimes they survive because of their excellence.  And then there are books which float along calmly downstream and people recognize them for what they are, not timely tomes  or decent dissents but something here today and gone tomorrow.   Luke Johnson is, as Wayne Meeks has dubbed him, a contrarian.   He likes to play the role of the loyal opposition to some of the sacred theories and ideas in the world of Biblical studies.   While he may be a contrarian, he is not a curmudgeon, in fact he is well respected right across the guild of Biblical scholars, and rightly so.  He is a scholar’s scholars and at the same time a really nice person.  It’s hard to disagree with someone like Luke when he is so congenial in his way of being disagreeable.   I have loved reading many of his books, and have been helped by numerous of his Biblical commentaries.     This review however must tackle his latest footnote-laden monograph, and give it a thorough once over.  It deserves it, not least because it won the $100,000 Grawmyer Prize awarded in Louisville to a top book in the field.

Let us start by mentioning some of the things that are missing in this study, that should be present.  If one is going to tackle the subject of whether Christianity could be labeled a ‘religio’  in the ancient and Greco-Roman sense, and at what juncture one could actually call it such,  one would have thought that attention would have to have been paid to the many many articles on the social history of the Greco-Roman world and early Christianity written by Edwin Judge, now conveniently collected into three volumes (two are out, and one is forthcoming— see the volume my old mentor David Scholer edited Social Distinctives of the Christians in the First Century (2007), and the gigantic collections of essays being published by J.C.B. Mohr).  Johnson’s study is vast,  one third of the close to five hundred pages are footnotes,  there is extensive documentation—- and not a single reference to, or engagement with the work of Judge, or for that matter any of his disciples, such as Bruce Winter or Peter Marshall or Robert Banks, to mention but three.    This is not merely an oversight,  this is a huge lacunae in such a study.

But that is not all.  Also M.I.A.  is any engagement with the detailed work on early Jewish Christianity in the first four centuries of the Christian era by Richard Bauckham.  Likewise, he is nowhere to be found in even the bibliography which go on for for well over a hundred pages.    Why is this important?    Because Bauckham has demonstrated at considerable length that Jewish Christianity continued to be an influential force in Christianity beyond the canonical era, and that we neglect that history at our peril.  And the result of such neglect is not hard to find in this study.   We could start with the fact that Johnson thinks only Hebrews and James are canonical books written largely for Jewish Christians.  Really?  What about Matthew or Jude or 1 John or even possibly 1 Peter.  The canon has in fact more volumes written primarily for Jewish Christians than Johnson is prepared to allow.

Though Johnson admits that the structure of the earliest Christian communities are indebted to the synagogue structures, and that the church continued to use the LXX as its sole Scriptures for a very long time, he wants to argue that in fact Christianity, almost from the first developed as a Greco-Roman religion, on par and in many ways like pagan religions in terms of its religiosity or religious sensibility as he calls it.   Now there is a strong case to be made for a good deal of what Johnson wants to assert, but not at the expense of recognizing the ongoing indebtedness of Christianity to not very Hellenized Judaism and its Holy Book.   Take for example  Johnson’s argument that the eventual structure of Christianity involving as it did priests, temples/basilicas, and sacrifices owed most to the already extant Greco-Roman religious structures.   Johnson is of course not the first to argue such a case.  We see this kind of case in the works of one of Johnson’s Yale mentors,  Ramsay MacMullen (see his recent book The Second Church and its review in my blog archives at Beliefnet).

The problem with this argument is that it doesn’t give sufficient credit to the degree to which the OT institutions, involving priests, temples, sacrifices, holy days and the like influenced the thinking of people ranging from Clement of Rome to Augustine.  One could certainly argue that OT exegesis and hermeneutics by Christian thinkers of the first four centuries which turned Sunday into a sabbath, and the Lord’s Supper into a sacrifice and the ministry into a priesthood, and church buildings into places where the sacrifice of the Mass was celebrated  had as much to do with how Constantinian Christianity turned out as did the influence of Greco-Roman religion.   In other words,  the case Johnson makes in this book is lopsided, or even one-sided.  What was needed was ‘both sides now’  to present us with a fair and balanced picture.   Be that as it may, there is a very great deal to be said on behalf of this ground-breaking work, and we will begin to interact with his positive case in our next post.

I must confess I am not in any way a fan of horror movies, and so I had some apprehension that this movie might degenerate into such a film.  And you can tell from many of the reviews that those reviewers who went into the movie hoping to have the Devil scared out of them, were disappointed.  No, this film is a psychological thriller, along the lines of Shutter Island, though without the surprise twist in the tale.   I went to see this movie because Anthony Hopkins is one of my all time favorite actors, and he has memorably won awards for his performance of famous Christians— Paul in Peter and Paul in the 80s,  C.S. Lewis in the Shadowlands in the 90s, to mention but two examples.

In this movie Hopkins is playing a real priest,  Father Lucas Trevant, the exorcist, still practicing in a town near Florence, a man who, as the credits tell us, has performed some 2,000 exorcisms.    The story is in fact based on a true story, an account written up by  Matt Baglio and turned into a best seller  (see picture above).  Sometimes books don’t turn into good movies, but this is not one of those times.  There is in fact more theology in this movie than in the last ten I have reviewed on this blog.

The occasion for this movie is in fact what happened only last November at the Vatican, in which there was a meeting because of the ever increasing rise of the demonic, or at least reports of the demonic in Europe as well as in America and elsewhere in the world.   The Vatican, as the story goes, decided it was time to put an exorcist in every large parish or diocese possible to deal with the increase in things demonic.  This of course would require training priests in the ancient rite of exorcism  (hence the name of the movie).

The movie then tells the story of a young man who grew up Catholic, the son of a mortician, and decided to go to seminary, and then on to Rome to learn about exorcisms. His name was and is Ted Kovaks, and he currently has a parish outside of Chicago.   This story is not the stuff of Hollywood fantasies and imagination.  It is a story based in a real spiritual journey of a real priest, a priest whose faith in God was somewhat shaky, and his belief in the Devil and demons even more so.  In this sense,  this movie, like the Meryl Streep movie could have been dubbed ‘Doubt’.    But in fact,  it is more about convincing the priest, and indeed the audience of the reality of the demonic.

I must confess, I need no such convincing.  I am already there.  Recently a friend of mine named Sarah was asked to do a Discovery Channel special.  Now Sarah is your prototypical modern person, very bright, likes to think of herself as open-minded,  comes from a family of scientists and had serious doubts about the demonic.  She was taken to some exorcisms and other such events, and came away pretty shaken up.  She saw evil things she could not explain.   I understand.  And as she said to me “running into the Devil causes a crisis of faith, now I need to figure out what I believe about God”.

Until you run face forward into the powers of darkness, it is easy to bracket all such thoughts out of your mind, or place it in the category of the boogeyman you feared lived under your bed when you were a child. I remember well an occasion when I went to my first exorcism service.  There were people writhing on the floor of Tremont Temple Baptist Church in Boston, and it was easy enough to think some of this was sympathetic counterfeiting.  But there were a couple of examples that were not at all like that, and scared me good.  Demon possession, I am convinced is real, and it gives new meaning to the phrase ‘don’t get bent all out of shape’.   But what of this movie?

As I said its a psychological thriller and develops its tension slowly, like bringing a pot gradually to a boil (the movie lasts less than two hours and has a PG-13 rating for a couple of intense scenes).  The tension as it turns out dwells in the character played by a good Irish American boy  Colin O’Donoghue.  Unfortunately his performance does not rise at all to the level of Hopkins  (about whom some are saying this is his most impress screen performance since Hannibal Lecter, indeed one could say he acts like a man possessed).

Does young Mr. Kovaks believe in the Devil, or does he not? And can he be convinced of his existence through experiences?   As Father Lucas tells him “failure to believe in the Devil will not protect you from the Devil”.   When Father Xavier asks young Kovaks “Do you believe in sin?”  His answer is yes, but he adds ‘But I don’t believe the Devil makes me do it’.   If a familiar and trite answer. It is nonetheless a good answer because Christians who have the Lord Jesus and the Holy Spirit in their lives cannot be possessed by demons, and indeed cannot be compelled by Satan to do this, that, or the other.  Satan is rightly portrayed in this movie as being a deceiver, a misleader, a liar, a being who preys on human doubts and frailities.  One of the dangers of this sort of movie is that Satan comes off looking strong and powerful, and Jesus and Christians come off looking like wimps.   Needless to say ‘wimp exorcist’  is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms.  You don’t go dance with the Devil or dabble with darkness regularly unless you have some courage.  I remember in seminary my roommate’s story of running into demon possession in a man in Bluefield West Virginia during a summer ministerial internship.  The   story still sends chills down my spine.

To its credit, this movie does not caricature priests or the Catholic church, and it certainly attempts to portray the powers of darkness as all too real, not the figments of human imagination, but it quite rightly tells us that a person, including a priest,  first must pursue every normal psychological explanation for what is happening to a disturbed person, before entertaining the possibility of possession and the need for exorcism.  Christians of course have problems, indeed sometimes psychological problems but one thing that is not the case is that Christians unawares can be possessed.  This is just bad theology, and so it is unfortunate that Hopkins is portrayed as being a victim of possession at one juncture in this movie.

Unless a Christian renounces his Christian faith, the Devil may bewilder or bother, pester or pursue a Christian, but he cannot possess him.  “Greater is he who is in us, than any of the forces in the world.”    There is entirely too much loose talk in some Christian circles about the Devil making Christians do this, that or the other and even more loose talk about having a cold that a demon created in you etc.  Of this sort of thing the Bible says nothing.    I even heard a seminary student once blame the Devil for his wreckless driving which led to him totally a professor’s car!

The NT however does not let Christians off that easily.  It calls us to take responsibility for all our actions, and it tells us that if we resist the Devil, he will flee.  And have you noticed that in the more than half the NT which deals with Christian life after Pentecost,  we hear nothing about Christians being possessed— for example, Paul doesn’t even mention the word demon but once in all his letters?  Demon possession is not a problem he confronted in the Christian church, it would appear, unless of course someone commits apostasy of some sort.

We need to maintain a balance then between giving the Devil his due, and giving him far too much credit.   Jesus’ death on the cross has already stripped the Devil and his minions of much of his power.   But at the same time, as C.S. Lewis famously said in The Screwtape Letters, the Devil’s best smokescreen is convincing us he doesn’t exist.

This movie is not a great movie, not even with another fine performance by Anthony Hopkins.  But you will hear more about Christ and the Devil in this movie than probably any other movie this year.  It raises some of the right questions about faith and doubt and supernatural evil, and in that sense it has ‘the Rite stuff’.   It is worth seeing if for no other reason than it can prompt you to ask yourself— now what do I really believe about Satan and demons?

   For reasons not clear to me, Protestant Christians, whom I spend the most time with, seem to have some very funky notions about prayer, that are not well grounded in the Bible, or for that matter the early Jewish practice of prayer.  And some of them are based in a very bad exegesis of what Luke 18 says and implies about prayer.   Luke Johnson in his fine commentary on Luke (p. 274) has this to say about the matter:

“The parable itself makes clear that ‘always’ does not support any technique of ‘perpetual prayer’ or method of mysticism but rather consistency and perseverance in praying. Luke-Acts emphasizes not only the prayer of Jesus but also that of the disciples (6.28;11.12; 22.40,46;Acts 1.4;2.42;3.1; 6.4,6;10.4,9,30-31;12.5,12;16.13,16,25; 20.36; 21.5; 22.17;28.8).”[1]

He helpfully goes on to add, 

“The love of God can so easily turn into an idolatrous self-love; the gift can so quickly be seized as a possession; what comes from another can so blithely be turned into self-accomplishment. Prayer can be transformed into boasting. Piety is not an unambiguous posture.… The pious one [i.e. the Pharisee in Luke 18.1ff.] is all convoluted comparison and contrast; he can receive no gift because he cannot stop counting his possessions. His prayer is one of peripheral vision. Worse, he assumes God’s role of judge: not only does he enumerate his own claims to being just, but he reminds God of the deficiency of the tax-agent, in case God had not noticed. In contrast, the tax-agent is utter simplicity and truth. Indeed, he is a sinner.  Indeed, he requires God’s gift of righteousness because he has none of his own. And because he both needs and recognizes his need for the gift he receives it….For Luke, prayer is faith in action. Prayer is not an optional exercise in piety, carried out to demonstrate one’s relationship with God. The way one prays therefore reveals that relationship…if prayer is self-assertion before God, then it cannot be answered by God’s gift of righteousness; possession and gift cancel each other out. “[1]

No wonder God so often answers our prayers with an emphatic NO!  Prayer as a means of self-exaltation, self-indulgence, self-agrandizement, self-congratulation, self-promotion, or prayer used as a sort of ouija board to get what we want out of a reluctant God are all very bad, and very unBiblical models of praying.  Thankfully, Jesus came to teach us a new model— the Lord’s Prayer, which should really be called the Disciple’s prayer, though interestingly Jesus seems to pray a form of this prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane.  What is noteworthy about the Lord’s prayer is that it is a collective prayer, a prayer for the people to use together— ‘give us this day’   it says,  ‘forgive us’  it says.   We should not be praying for things for ourselves that we would not want to share with the body of Christ.  And notice that this Lord’s prayer encourages us only to pray about the basics—- praising God (hallowed be thy name), asking that God’s saving reign and God’s will be done on earth as in heaven (not his in heaven, and our wills on earth), asking for daily bread (not, notice, lavish banquets), asking for forgiveness of sins and debts (an increasingly necessary prayer in our debtor nation), recognizing that in some mysterious way, our receiving of foregiveness is affected by our willingness to forgive and actually forgiving those who have wronged us, and we pray not to be put to the test, but to be delivered from the Evil One.    This is Praying  101 for Jesus’ disciples, and it does not sound like the old Janis Joplin song— “Oh Lord won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz, my friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends…..”

If we turn to the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector there is yet more to ponder from this same chapter. 

The example of the pious Pharisee in this parable, who is no hypocrite, reminds us that prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, while all excellent religious practices commended by God and the Bible, in themselves don’t make a person more ‘spiritual’ or ‘holy’. Indeed, these practices may simply make you more focused on your own needs, more hungry, and poorer!  Much depends on the heart that uses these spiritual disciplines, and in the case of the Pharisee we are right to see a note of pride and self-centeredness in his prayer.  The word ‘I’ keeps coming up in that prayer, and he improves his sense of self-worth by putting others down.  It is then not the spiritual discipline itself that makes a person more holy.  It is the humbling one’s self in the sight of the Lord, being completely honest about one’s sins, and pouring out one’s heart with open hands to receive what God will give, that makes the difference in this story.  Notice that the tax collector has no previous ‘good deeds’ or spiritual practices to appeal to, to make his case with God.  It is God alone who justifies and sanctifies the man, not the spiritual practices, though God may use such practices to that end. 

We are always looking for a short-cut, a how too self-help manual to improve our lives, but this parable warns about how one’s piety and spiritual practices can actually get in the way of your receiving what God would give, because one is in danger of thinking that the regular exercise of such practices entitles one to something, entitles one to make a claim on God, and so they become a means to a self-seeking end, rather than a means of growing in one’s relationship and dependency on God and his grace.      

Think on these things.