A Tale of Two Cities

Jerusalem and Athens

Observations from Churchill that make for interesting reading 50 years down the road.

The Greeks rival the Jews in being the most politically-minded race in the world.  No matter how forlorn their circumstances or how grave the peril to their country, they are always divided into many parties, with many leaders who fight among themselves with desperate vigour.  It has been well said that wherever there are three Jews it will be found that there are two Prime Ministers and one leader of the Opposition.

The same is true of this other famous ancient race, whose stormy and endless struggle for life stretches back to the fountain springs of human thought.  No two races have set such a mark upon the world.  Bot have shown a capacity for survival, in spirit of unending perils and sufferings from external oppressors, matched only by their own ceaseless feuds, quarrels, and convulsions. . . .

No two cities have  counted more with mankind than Athens and Jerusalem.  Their messages in religion, philosophy, and art have been the main guiding lights of modern faith and culture.  Centuries of foreign rule and indescribable, endless oppression leave them still living, active communities and forces in the modern world, quarrelling among themselves with insatiable vivacity.  Personally I have always been on the side of both, and believed in their invincible power to survive internal strife and the world tides threatening their extinction.  [Winston Churchill, The Second World War.  (London: The Reprint Society, 1954).  Vol. V:  Closing the Ring, p. 413.] 

Urbane or Prophetic

Paul at Athens

When Christians engage in the public square--that is, in any public debate, whether in the local community or the parliament--some counsel we must become as secular as everyone else.  We must win over the opposition using their frames of  reference.  We must appeal to natural law, reason, and common sense.  We must check in our Christian guns before riding into town to the OK Corral. 

Some claim biblical and apostolic warrant for such an approach.  They argue from Acts 17 where Paul was in Athens, debating with Greeks in the agora, that this is precisely what the Apostle himself did.  Consider the following:

What can we glean from this encounter?  St. Paul, without compromising his message, tailored it to his audience.  He spoke in Hellenistic rather than Judaic terms, as a philosopher more than as a Christian theologian, in a manner that engaged them rather than repelled them.  He relied on common grace rather than on the knowledge and acceptance of Christian doctrine.  "I have become all things to all men," he says in the book of Corinthians, "So that by all possible means I might save some."   [Michael Gerson, Peter Wehner, City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era (Chicago: Moody Press, 2010) p. 117.]

This is a simplistic, unsatisfactory reading of the text.  It is not an uncommon one, however.   A careful reading will quickly show the error of Gerson's and Wehner's view.