Isn't That Ionic?

Built between 450- 430 B.C., the Parthenon is one of the greatest architectural achievements known to man.  Modern designers still marvel at the genius, mystery and beauty of this ancient structure and yet the construction is actually simple: a three step platform, a peristyle, a capital and the entablature.  But don’t let the simplicity fool you, this Doric temple is the crowning achievement of classical Greece and is unprecedented in her scope, requiring 100,000 tons of Pen telic marble and costing $ 1 billion in today’s dollars.  19^th century historian Auguste Choisy claimed the Parthenon to be “the supreme effort of genius in pursuit of beauty”.  But she is more than an amazing work of art; she is a public statement to the Athenian worldview; a philosophy steeped in rationality, reason, order, experience and the search for truth.  Bearing witness to her wonder requires more than an abstract study of her systematic dimensions; one must experience her mystery as well.

First of all, the engineering alone is pure genius.  For the first time in ancient history, the Athenians used marble as the sole material for the entire superstructure.  Each block was quarried and carried from Mount Pen Deli, 16 kilometers east of the city and up the mount of the Acropolis to the building site.  Her 46 outer columns are 8 x 17 feet in dimension and consist of 11 separate drums of marble, each drum weighing between four and 8 tons. Lifting these sections alone is quite the feat, much less fitting them together to form a single smooth surface without the use of mortar.  To do so, the Athenians created an ingenious way of ensuring the drums aligned perfectly.  The original joints fit together through an empolia, placed at the center of each drum consisting of a male square component and cylinder female component, allowing the drums to sit so tightly upon one another that the original joint line was not visible to the naked eye.  In fact, the gap between each drum has been measured to less that 1/5 the width of a human hair. 

But rationality and perfect mathematical proportions aren’t the only staggering characteristic mastered by the Athenians; mystery and life seem to be found in the columns themselves.   Although the outer columns, or peristyle, appear to have the same width from top to bottom, the drums at the base of the columns are wider and taper toward the top.  But more mysteriously, the columns are not straight up and down, they tilt.  The angle is only very slight, but scholars have calculated that if the columns continued upwards into the sky, they would meet one mile above the earth’s surface to form a perfect pyramid.  But even more important to us, measurements show that the columns bulge at their center, creating an optical allusion known as “entasis”.  This creates the impression of elasticity, as if the columns are bulging from the weight imposed by the building’s superstructure.  The Athenians gave the columns an anthropomorphic quality similar to a human muscle flexing during exertion, making the building almost come to life before your eyes.   Adding to this graceful and living appearance, each column’s outer surface has twenty grooves, or flutes that form concave vertical channels playing with light and shadow to give the columns a sense of animation.  More than just an indifferent edifice, seeing the Parthenon first-hand is a spiritual phenomenon invoking a belief in miracles.  For Ancient Athens, she was the physical manifestation of beauty, harmony, order, mystery and wonder.  All, in fact, attributes of the Judeo-Christian God, not the goddess Athena. 

And, similar to this holy place, rationality and reason alone aren’t enough to command belief in the creator God; experience is required, and experience leads to knowing...  Jesus even said that he became flesh so that we may have eternal life.  But what is eternal life?  “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”[i]  But how can we truly know God?  This is the point where the intellectual bankruptcy of the rational western worldview leaves us spiritually destitute.  If knowledge can only be understood through the genius and harmony of our western plausibility structure, there will never be enough reasons to prove the existence of God.  The mind alone will always leave one wanting.  Yet thankfully, we seek the God of the Israelites, those stubborn, prone to wander people who didn’t encounter God through reason but through experience.  Abraham Herschel says, “The essence of Jewish religious thinking does not lie in entertaining a concept of God but in the ability to articulate a memory of moments of illumination by His presence.  Israel is not a people of definers but a people of witnesses.”   They can believe because they have seen.   Judaism is not a three-step program of belief, it is a story: the story of a creator God, his people and his promise to restore creation.  This God of Israel is not always rational or easy to define in purely western terms.  He doesn’t fit nicely into our systematic theology.  He is holy, yet human; personal but eternal; one, and three; judge and forgiver; omnipotent, yet humble.  He is both the God of the Old and New Testament, connecting east and west through the experience of the mind and heart alike.

And much like the Parthenon, His incarnation is the ultimate synthesis of mystery and reason.

[i] John 17: 3

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Ecce Homo

Christmas Sunday has come and gone, and we in the Christian tradition celebrated and commemorated the Christ child born in Bethlehem. “For unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given” (Isaiah 9:6). This is the greatest mystery the world has ever known. God became flesh. He dwelt among us, walked our sod, ate our food and felt our pain. He laughed when something tickled him; he wept when he was sad and when he had to well, you know, go, he went.

I was thinking through this incredible paradox Sunday when singing Away in a Manager. Starting the second verse, I stopped singing and became quite frustrated with the lyrics of this little lullaby. You know how it goes…

“The cattle are lowing the poor baby wakes, but little Lord Jesus no crying he makes….”

No crying he makes? Seriously? Let’s reset the scene as best we can: Jesus has just passed through the birth canal and into the hands of a teenage mother, his attending nurses are a well qualified cow and two sheep, his bed is a trough where goats are feeding, the smell of the cave would knock over a shepherd and we are to believe the kid isn’t crying?

The anonymous writer of this song has unwittingly captured the philosophy of our age, and we tend to like it. We don’t like to think of Jesus in human terms, maybe because he reminds us to much of ourselves: Needy, cold, scared, helpless and dependent. We’d much rather him pop out of the womb doing miracles, maybe turning the cow’s milk into wine. Or maybe it’s because we’ve bought the lie that says the physical world is evil and the only way to obtain utopia is through the spiritual realm, maybe heaven itself, whatever and wherever that may be. Plato was one of the first to unleash this belief system onto the Western world. Plato emphasized the immortal and immutable soul over the mortal and degenerative body. He believed the soul or psyche was a prisoner inside the body and could only find enlightenment and freedom if removed from the chains of the flesh. In very simple terms, our material world is only a shadow of the ideal, spiritual world beyond and it is not to be trusted.

Early Christian Gnosticism piggy-backed on Plato and claimed that Jesus did not actually have a physical existence. The Gnostics believed the Apostles interacted with the phantom Jesus who merely appeared human. This concept was necessitated by a dualistic worldview, claiming that matter is evil and only light or spirit is good. This early heresy of the church still finds its way into our minds, songs and stories. But why is it so dangerous? For starters, this heresy discounts the death and bodily resurrection of Jesus, it destroys our understanding of Christ being the first fruit of a new creation, and it undermines Jesus’ ability to show us what it really means to be fully human as the perfect “image-bearer” of God.

The human Jesus spent 33 years showing the human race the image of the invisible God. He himself said, “If you know me, you know my Father.” The human Jesus shows us once and for all what God looks like and in so doing, gives us praxis for bearing the image of God. Jesus shows us what it means to be wholly human. The true, complete human being living through the spirit loves his enemies, cares for the weak, welcomes the disenfranchised, forgives the oppressor, feeds the hungry, does not boast, is not proud, sacrifices his wants and needs for others, submits himself to the authorities, brings peace to the war-torn and justice to the perpetrator. A life lived in Jesus’ image is a life transformed by the truth and love of God, incarnately shown to us through the bodily life of the God-man Jesus.

The Jesus of Christmas is also the Jesus of Easter, who rose in bodily form and in so doing, brought His kingdom to earth as it also is in heaven.

Status Lost

“Sir, let me escort you to the express security lane so you and your wife do not have to wait in line.”  Jennifer looked at me as if to say, “This is how you travel?”  Well, yes it is my dear. 

We were in London’s Heathrow International Airport on our way home via direct flight to Denver and Jennifer was about to experience the perks of frequent flying.  After being whisked through security and finding out our flight was slightly delayed, she started to sulk.  After all, she was 8 months pregnant and we had spent the better part of a week walking around the sights of greater London.

“Come with me”, I said as we entered the private Red Carpet Club.  Here, away from the crowds was an oasis of comfort and class.  Free drinks, complimentary food and personalized travel service all safely tucked away from the huddled masses.  Fine wine, hors d'oeuvres, flat screen TV’s and soothing music filled our waiting minutes. This is how I rolled.  I was special, I was significant.

 Flying 85,000 miles a year has its privileges.  Premiere check-in areas, special security lines and first class upgrades all fed my needy ego.  The best part may have been the early boarding process.  I would board the plane early, get comfortable, order a gin and tonic and await the riff-raff to pass back to the cattle cabin. 

I loved their looks of envy as they walked to the back of the plane wondering why they were not so privileged as to sit in such luxury.  I was a part of the “haves” and they were not.  Suckers. My arrogance knew no bounds.  The final coupe de grace came from the stewardess, who seemed to take great pride in slamming the curtain shut separating the two cabins, as if she were telling the losers in coach to ‘stay out’!  It was the life, at least for 2 hours or so each week.

The façade came tumbling down yesterday.  I received an email from United Airlines telling me that I did not fly enough miles this year to qualify for Premiere Executive status.  Significance lost.   

It’s amazing what little it took to make me feel important, to make me feel like my life was worth something.  A free drink, more leg room and a shorter line was enough.  I am such a jackhole.   But we do this all the time.  Whether it be the cool new car, the shirt with the horse on it, or the house with the pool; every day we are tempted to find meaning and importance via the temporal.  Part of being human means we are in constant search of things that make us feel valuable.  We are all on a quest for satisfaction.  We need to feel whole and complete. 

Blaise Pascal was a 17^th century French philosopher who made radical doubt the cornerstone of his belief system.  He wrote about such a feeling in his book, the Pensees:

        "What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace?  This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself."

Part of viewing life from a Biblical perspective requires us to ask the question, 'what does it mean to be human' and 'how do I find meaning and significance in this world?'  There appears to be a deep connection between the knowledge of God and being fully human.  Genesis 1:27 says "God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him."  We are the crowned jewel of His good creation.  Therefore, the human person has intrinsic and eternal value, which cannot be measured by man, or his relationship to other human beings.  But what does this mean and how does it help us fill the vacuum within?  I'd like to explore this a bit further and see how it helps us understand what it really means to be human.

See you next time....

Oh the Humanities, Part 2

Where were we?  Ah yes, I was about to wet my pants…

I remember it like it was yesterday.  It was a warm, sunny spring morning in East Tennessee when redbuds, cherry blossom and pear trees burst forth in full bloom in defiance of their winter sojourn.  The day had all the makings of a Shelley poem, I think I even saw a cloud in the shape of Ozymandias.  My romantic interlude ended upon entering Hyder Auditorium.   175 of my classmates and I opened our blue books and gasped…

It was the final exam of our sophomore year of Humanities.  We explored the New World, Enlightened the West and brought the world into modernity.  There was only one thing left to do, pass the final exam.  I opened the exam and looked at the first essay question, it was 50% of the entire final.  The question, “What does it mean to be human”?

2,000 years and two years of study brought us to this one simple question.  Are you serious?  Suddenly, I was having a panic attack, I had to excuse myself.  The only place I could go was to the restroom. 

The question seemed simple and yet I had no idea how to answer it.  Being human, and the answer to what it means to be human, may be the second most important question anyone of us can ever ask.  It seems paramount that we actually have a viable answer for it.  So, what I’d like to do is to answer this question correctly this time.  Maybe once we’re done, I can turn this in and increase my Humanities grade. 

What Does it Mean to be Human?