Reading: Introduction to the ancient Greeks

As you are making your way through the first weeks of this course, I hope that the thought
does NOT occur to you, "What am I doing this for?" This week we are looking at some of the
teachings of the ancient Greeks which were and ARE very significant for our understanding of
the world in which we live. The truth of the matter is that much of the manner in which we think
and even educate in the western world arises from the ancient Greeks. Their thinking was so
seminal and so intriguing that they have continued to this day to influence how their heirs think
of the world. For example, the following is a quote from a website re philosophy.
Empedocles' philosophy was influenced not only by Pythagoras, but also by the ancient Greek
mystery traditions, which included the Orphic mysteries and the underworld cults of Hades,
Hecate, Demeter, Persephone and Dionysius. In his own thinking and writing, and in works and
practices of the alchemists, neoplatonists and gnostics that further developed his theories, the
four elements are not only material and spiritual forces, but also facets of a human being. Their
varying combinations result in different personality types.
Since we know that Carl Jung (1), one of the founders of modern psychology, studied mystical
literature and alchemy, we can easily conclude that his conceptualization of intuition,
sensation, thinking and feeling as the four basic archetypes or components of personality is
clearly a derivation of Empedocles' ancient theories about fire, earth, air and water. Jung
focused initially on the polarities of introversion (directing one's attention inward toward
thoughts, feelings and awareness) and extroversion (directing one's energy outward toward
people, actions and external objects), combining each polarity with predominances in thinking,
feeling, sensing and intuiting, to develop eight basic personality types.
The four personality variables of the Meyers-Briggs test (and its offshoots, the Keirsey test and
the DDLI) (2) also appear to be a further development of this psychological philosophy.
Most philosophers and alchemists also believed that the four elements exhibited itself in man
as four varying natures and that one was more prevalent in each individual than the other
three. An individual leaned more to one particular type rather than possessing equivalent
amounts of all four. Empedocles said that those who have near equal proportions of the four
elements are more intelligent and have the most exact perceptions.
from The Four Elements by Charlie Higgins
http://www.mension.com/elements.htm
http://www.webwinds.com/thalassa/elemental.htm

I, for one, am very intrigued by the Meyers-Briggs materials. And to think, Empedocles started
us thinking in this direction a long, long time ago.

Reading: Advice to Christian Philosophers by Alvin Plantinga

My aim, in this talk, is to give some advice to philosophers who are Christians. And although
my advice is directed specifically to Christian philosophers, it is relevant to all philosophers who
believe in God, whether Christian, Jewish or Moslem. I propose to give some advice to the
Christian or theistic philosophical community: some advice relevant to the situation in which in
fact we find ourselves. "Who are you," you say, "to give the rest of us advice?" That's a good
question to which one doesn't know the answer: I shall ignore it. My counsel can be summed
up on two connected suggestions, along with a codicil. First, Christian philosophers and
Christian intellectuals generally must display more autonomy-more independence of -- the rest
of philosophical world. Second, Christian philosophers must display more integrity -integrity in
the sense of integral wholeness, or oneness, or unity, being all of one piece. Perhaps
'integrality' would be the better word here. And necessary to these two is a third: Christian
courage, or boldness, or strength, or perhaps Christian self-confidence. We Christian
philosophers must display more faith, more trust in the Lord; we must put on the whole armor
of God. Let me explain in a brief and preliminary way what I have in mind; then I shall go on to
consider some examples in more detail.
Consider a Christian college student from Grand Rapids, Michigan, say, or Arkadelphia,
Arkansas-who decides philosophy is the subject for her. Naturally enough, she will go to
graduate school to learn how to become a philosopher. Perhaps she goes to Princeton, or
Berkeley, or Pittsburgh, or Arizona; it doesn't much matter which. There she learns how
philosophy is presently practiced. The burning questions of the day are such topics as the new
theory of reference; the realism/anti-realism controversy; the problems with probability; Quine's
claims about the radical indeterminacy of translation; Rawls on justice; the causal theory of
knowledge; Gettier problems; the artificial intelligence model for the understanding of what it is
to be a person; the question of the ontological status of unobservable entities in science;
whether there is genuine objectivity in science or anywhere else; whether mathematics can be
reduced to set theory and whether abstract entities generally- numbers, propositions,
properties-can be, as we quaintly say, "dispensed with"; whether possible worlds are abstract
or concrete; whether our assertions are best seen as mere moves in a language game or as
attempts to state the sober truth about the world; whether the rational egoist can be shown to
be irrational, and all the rest. It is then natural for her, after she gets her Ph.D., to continue to
think about and work on these topics. And it is natural, furthermore, for her to work on them in
the way she was taught to, thinking about them in the light of the assumptions made by her
mentors and in terms of currently accepted ideas as to what a philosopher should start from or
take for granted, what requires argument and defense, and what a satisfying philosophical
explanation or a proper resolution to a philosophical question is like. She will be uneasy about
departing widely from these topics and assumptions, feeling instinctively that any such
departures are at best marginally respectable.
Philosophy is a social enterprise; and our standards and assumptions-the parameters within
which we practice our craft-are set by our mentors and by the great contemporary centers of
philosophy. From one point of view this is natural and proper; from another, however, it is
profoundly unsatisfactory. The questions I mentioned are important and interesting. Christian
philosophers, however, are the philosophers of the Christian community; and it is part of their
task as Christian philosophers to serve the Christian community. But the Christian community
has its own questions, its own concerns, its own topics for investigation, its own agenda and its
own research program. Christian philosophers ought not merely take their inspiration from
what's going on at Princeton or Berkeley or Harvard, attractive and scintillating as that may be;
for perhaps those questions and topics are not the ones, or not the only ones, they should be
thinking about as the philosophers of the Christian community. There are other philosophical
topics the Christian community must work at, and other topics the Christian community must
work at philosophically. And obviously, Christian philosophers are the ones who must do the
philosophical work involved. If they devote their best efforts to the topics fashionable to the
non-Christian philosophical world, they will neglect a crucial and central part of their task as
Christian philosophers.
What is needed here is more independence, more autonomy with respect to the projects and
concerns of the non-theistic philosophical world. But something else is at least as important
here. Suppose the student I mentioned above goes to Harvard; she studies with Willard van
Orman Quine. She finds herself attracted to Quine's programs and procedures: his radical
empiricism, his allegiance to natural science, his inclination towards behaviorism, his
uncompromising naturalism, and his taste for desert landscapes and ontological parsimony. It
would be wholly natural for her to become totally involved in these projects and programs, to
come to think of fruitful and worthwhile philosophy as substantially circumscribed by them. Of
course she will note certain tensions between her Christian belief and her way of practicing
philosophy; and she may then bend her efforts to putting the two together, to harmonizing
them. She may devote her time and energy to seeing how one might understand or reinterpret
Christian belief in such a way as to be palatable to the Quinian.
One philosopher I know, embarking on just such a project, suggested that Christians should
think of God as a set (Quine is prepared to countenance sets): the set of all true propositions,
perhaps, or the set of right actions, or the union of those sets, or perhaps their Cartesian
product. This is understandable; but it is also profoundly misdirected. Quine is a marvelously
gifted philosopher: a subtle, original and powerful philosophical force. But his fundamental
commitments, his fundamental projects and concerns, are wholly different from those of the
Christian community-wholly different and, indeed, antithetical to them. And the result of
attempting to graft Christian thought onto his basic view of the world will be at best an
unintegral pastiche; at worst it will seriously compromise, or distort, or trivialize the claims of
Christian theism. What is needed here is more wholeness, more integrality.

Reprinted from Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers vol. 1:3,
(253-271), permanently copyrighted October 1984. Used by permission of the Editor. New
preface by author. Journal web site: www.faithandphilosophy.com
COPYRIGHT/REPRODUCTION LIMITATIONS:
This article is the sole property of Faith and Philosophy. It may not be altered or edited in any
way. It may be reproduced only in its entirety for circulation as "freeware," without charge. All
reproductions of this data file must contain this Copyright/Reproduction Limitations notice.
This data file may not be used without the permission of Faith and Philosophy for resale or the
enhancement of any other product sold.

Reading: Plato's Thought

An Introduction To Plato’s Thought

What follows here is the summary of Plato’s thinking that has been put together on a
website called the Philosophy Pages by Garth Kemerling which are licensed under
a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

What follows is only a short excerpt of all that Mr. Kemerling has on the site re Plato. It is what I
wanted to have you be aware of so that you have a small idea of Plato. More will follow in the
following activities.

The Cycle of Opposites

The first argument is based on the cyclical interchange by means of which every quality comes
into being from its own opposite. Hot comes from cold and cold from hot: that is, hot things are
just cold things that have warmed up, and cold things are just hot things that have cooled off.
Similarly, people who are awake are just people who were asleep but then woke up, while
people who are asleep are just people who were awake but then dozed off.
But then, Plato argues by analogy, death must come from life and life from death.
(Phaedo 71c-d) That is, people who are dead are just people who were alive but then
experienced the transition we call dying, and people who are alive are just people who were
among the dead but then experienced the transition we call being born. This suggests a
perpetual recycling of human souls from the realm of the living to the realm of the dead and
back.
If this is an accurate image of reality, it would certainly follow that my soul will continue to exist
after the death of my body. But it also supposes that my soul existed before the birth of my
body as well. This may seem like an extravagant speculation, but Plato held that there is ample
evidence of its truth in the course of ordinary human life and learning.

The Forms
As Socrates had proposed in the Meno, the most important varieties of human knowledge are
really cases of recollection. Consider, for example, our knowledge of equality. We have no
difficulty in deciding whether or not two people are perfectly equal in height. In fact, they are
never exactly the same height, since we recognize that it would always be possible to discover
some difference—however minute—with a more careful, precise measurement. By this
standard, all of the examples we perceive in ordinary life only approach, but never fully attain,
perfect equality. But notice that since we realize the truth of this important qualification on our
experience, we must somehow know for sure what true equality is, even though we have never
seen it. (Phaedo 75b)
Plato believed that the same point could be made with regard to many other abstract concepts:
even though we perceive only their imperfect instances, we have genuine knowledge of truth,
goodness, and beauty no less than of equality. Things of this sort are the Platonic Forms,
abstract entities that exist independently of the sensible world. Ordinary objects are imperfect
and changeable, but they faintly copy the perfect and immutable Forms. Thus, all of the
information we acquire about sensible objects (like knowing what the high and low
temperatures were yesterday) is temporary, insignificant, and unreliable, while genuine
knowledge of the Forms themselves (like knowing that 93 - 67 = 26) perfectly certain forever.
Since we really do have knowledge of these supra-sensible realities, knowledge that we cannot
possibly have obtained through any bodily experience, Plato argued, it follows that this
knowledge must be a form of recollection and that our souls must have been acquainted with
the Forms prior to our births. But in that case, the existence of our mortal bodies cannot be
essential to the existence of our souls—before birth or after death—and we are therefore
immortal.

Immortality of the Soul

Use of the dialogue as a literary device made it easy for Plato not only to present his own
position (in the voice of Socrates) but also to consider (in the voices of other characters)
significant objections that might be raised against it. This doesn't mean that philosophy is
merely an idle game of argument and counter-argument, he pointed out, because it remains
our goal to discover the one line of argument that leads to the truth. The philosopher cautiously
investigates every possibility and examines every side of an issue, precisely because that
increases the chances of arriving eventually at a correct account of reality.
Thus, Simmias suggests that the relationship between the soul and the body may be like that
between musical harmony and the strings of a lyre that produces it. In this case, even though
the soul is significantly different from the body, it could not reasonably be expected to survive
the utter destruction of that physical thing. (This is an early statement of a view of human
nature that would later come to be called epiphenomenalism.) But Socrates replies that this
analogy will not hold, since the soul exercises direct control over the motions of the body, as
the harmony does not over those of the lyre. Plato's suggestion here seems to be that it would
become impossible to provide an adequate account of human morality, of the proper standards
for acting rightly, if Simmias were right.
Cebes offers a more difficult objection: what if the body is like a garment worn by the soul?
Even though I continue to exist longer than any single article of my clothing does, there will
come a time when I die, and some of my clothes will probably continue to exist. In the same
way, even if the argument from opposites has shown that the soul can in principle outlast the
life of any particular human body, there might come a time when the soul itself ceases to exist.
Even if there is life after death, Cebes suggests, the soul may not be truly immortal.
In response to this criticism, Plato significantly revised the argument from opposites by
incorporating an additional conception of the role of the Forms. Each Form, he now maintains,
is the cause of all of every particular instance that bears its name: the form of Beauty causes
the beauty of any beautiful thing; the form of Equality causes the equality of any pair of equal
things; etc. But then, since the soul is living, it must participate in the Form of Life, and thus it
cannot ever die. (Phaedo 105d) The soul is perfectly and certainly imperishable, not only for
this life, but forever.
Despite the apparent force of these logical arguments, Plato chose to conclude the Phaedo by
supplementing them with a mythical image of life after death. This concrete picture of the
existence of a world beyond our own is imagined, not reasoned, so it cannot promise to deliver
the same perfect representation of the truth. But if we are not fully convinced by the certainty of
rational arguments, we may yet take some comfort from the suggestions of a pleasant story.
Retrieved from
http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/2f.htm

Reading: Plato's Allegory of the Cave

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

What follows is the beginning of a long passage in Plato’s Republic in which he teaches about
the way people understand life and our perceptions of life. This is one of the most famous of
his stories because it asks us to decide what we believe about the reality we see, hear, and
touch around us. After reading the passage below, click on the link to watch a five minute
video which will summarize the allegory for you.
-------------------------

And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened: --
Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light
and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs
and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented
by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a
distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you
look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front
of them, over which they show the puppets.
I see.

And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues
and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the
wall? Some of them are talking, others silent.

You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.

Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another,
which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave?

True, he said; how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to
move their heads?

And of the objects which are being carried in like manner they would only see the shadows?

Yes, he said.

And if they were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose that they were
naming what was actually before them?

Very true.

And suppose further that the prison had an echo which came from the other side, would they
not be sure to fancy when one of the passers-by spoke that the voice which they heard came
from the passing shadow?

No question, he replied.

To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.

That is certain.

And now look again, and see what will naturally follow it' the prisoners are released and
disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to
stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp
pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his
former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive some one saying to him, that what
he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his
eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision, -what will be his reply? And
you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring
him to name them, -will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he
formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?

Far truer.

And if he is compelled to look straight at the light, will he not have a pain in his eyes which will
make him turn away to take and take in the objects of vision which he can see, and which he
will conceive to be in reality clearer than the things which are now being shown to him?

True,

And suppose once more, that he is reluctantly dragged up a steep and rugged ascent, and
held fast until he 's forced into the presence of the sun himself, is he not likely to be pained and
irritated? When he approaches the light his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see
anything at all of what are now called realities.

Not all in a moment, he said.

He will require to grow accustomed to the sight of the upper world. And first he will see the
shadows best, next the reflections of men and other objects in the water, and then the objects
themselves; then he will gaze upon the light of the moon and the stars and the spangled
heaven; and he will see the sky and the stars by night better than the sun or the light of the sun
by day?

Certainly.

Last of he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of him in the water, but he will
see him in his own proper place, and not in another; and he will contemplate him as he is.

Certainly.

He will then proceed to argue that this is he who gives the season and the years, and is the
guardian of all that is in the visible world, and in a certain way the cause of all things which he
and his fellows have been accustomed to behold?

Clearly, he said, he would first see the sun and then reason about him.

And when he remembered his old habitation, and the wisdom of the den and his fellow-
prisoners, do you not suppose that he would felicitate himself on the change, and pity them?
-------------------------

Here is a link to a short video which examines the allegory for

us. http://ed.ted.com/lessons/plato-s-allegory-of-the-cave-alex-gendler

Video: Aristotle's Golden Mean

Aristotle taught that our lives were meant to be flourishing. His idea of the flourishing of life was
to live a life of virtue. And virtue is the golden mean between deficiency and too much of
something. Click on the link to learn about the way Aristotle advises us to live.

Reading: Some reflections

Proverbs 9:13
13 The woman Folly is loud;
 she is undisciplined and without knowledge.
14 She sits at the door of her house,
on a seat at the highest point of the city,
:15 calling out to those who pass by,
who go straight on their way.
:16 "Let all who are simple come in here!"
she says to those who lack judgment.
:17 "Stolen water is sweet;
food eaten in secret is delicious!"
:18 But little do they know that the dead are there,
that her guests are in the depths of the grave.

High on the Acropolis in Athens is the Erechtheum. A significant feature of this temple
dedicated to Athena and the memory of her contest with Poseidon for the allegiance of the
Athenians’ hearts is the porch of the Caryatids. The temple was built in about 400 BC. It is
one of the more intriguing spots on the Acropolis. Each of the pillars for the roof of this porch is
a carved statue of a woman. Each of them is unique even though the ones on the near side all
have the same leg moving forward and the three on the far side have the other bent
forward. Each seems to be inviting people to come to enjoy the cool shade of the porch they
are providing by holding up the roof. The statues demonstrate the skill of the artist to create
something beautiful.

Yet, one of the interesting features of this porch was that it was only accessible from the
inside. Only those who were authorized religious figures could recline in the shade. It was an
inviting place, yet was off limits. That helps me to understand something of how Solomon’s
personification of Folly can be understood. The woman Folly has gone to the highest point of
the city to call out to all the simple people, “Come to me!” But the problem is that no one can
actually do that.

The promise could not be carried out. The promise was instead an empty invitation. In fact, as
Solomon says, little do the simple know that the dead are there, her guests are in the depths of
the grave? As this porch beckons to us to relax in the shade, little do we know that the dead
are buried there. This porch is said to be the tomb of an ancient king of Athens.

There is something inside of me that says that deceptiveness is something to be avoided. I

think that is what Solomon was saying as well. For in the early part of chapter four of
Proverbs, he tells us of wisdom who has also gone to the highest point of the city and called to
people to come to her and so to learn how to have understanding in life. I know this pushes
the symbolism in ways that maybe no one else sees, but Solomon’s wisdom has sent out her
maidens and hewn out her pillars which are seven in number. The porch of the Caryatids has
only six. Isn’t that the way it always is with humanity? We, in our folly, always come up short
of what God desires us to be.
Reading: The Acropolis in Athens
Psalm 121
:1 I lift up my eyes to the hills--
where does my help come from?
:2 My help comes from the LORD,
the Maker of heaven and earth.
The psalms of Ascent, of which Psalm 121 is the second, were sung by the pilgrims heading to
Jerusalem to worship the Lord God of heaven and earth. But on their way to the city of
Jerusalem, they had to pass through a variety of places where one would lift up ones eyes to
the tops of the hills and see a temple or holy place or high place or sacred grove or such on the
hill. As we learned in Greece, these high places were considered to be places that were near
unto the God that was worshipped in that place. One went to these high places to receive
insight into the working of that particular God and how to influence that God to bless me as a
person. Wherever one goes in Athens, the Acropolis, with its temple to Athena, is visible in
one way or another. We’re told that no building can be designed and built which would
interfere with the view of the high place and the Parthenon that others now have.
So we need to ask ourselves, what do we make of that? The ancients often built their holy
places so that they would be seen by others from a great distance. What do we build that
others can see today? Our high places today are commercial buildings, high rise apartment
buildings with high price tags, banks, insurance companies, big firms with lots of
money. Government buildings housing offices of the people who run our communities rise
above the skylines of the towns and cities in which they are found. Today, these are the
places we turn to for help in times of trouble. Hospitals build towers that house various
treatment facilities.
Is your company in financial trouble? Well, maybe you can get a government grant that will
change things. Is your health failing? A modern tower of healing might be just the place for
you to go to find help in this time of need. These places now tower over the skyline and form
the places to which we look for help.
But the psalmist says, I lift up my eyes to the hills and I’m reminded that my help is not in any
of these places that dominate the skyline. My help is in the name of the Lord, who made the
heavens and the earth. Not long ago, I heard someone say that poets are the ones whose
voices and verse shape our experience of reality. I think that is correct. For the poets help us
to get a handle on our understanding of how things work. In our own day, just think of the
power of songs—poetry set to music—to shape our understanding of our world. So here the
psalmist, a poet, teaches us that the reality we all need is that the God who made the heavens
and the earth is our only source of help.

Reading: The Greek Pantheon

Acts 17:22 Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: "Men of Athens! I see
that in every way you are very religious. 23 For as I walked around and looked carefully at your
objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now
what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.
As Paul made his way around Athens he became more and more convinced that he was
among a people who were very religious. It was not difficult to discover what it was that made
him think that. This is a photo of one the Athens University buildings that was constructed in
the 1800’s in the “classical style.” Part of what that means is that it includes a pediment (the
triangular area above the columns) where a depiction of the Greek pantheon is to be
found. The twelve gods of the pantheon are arrayed in various poses to depict their place in
the scheme of things. The depictions of these gods were found in a great many places around
Athens as Paul made his way around the city as a tourist. The most important of the gods
would be found in the center and the lesser ones would spread out from the center to either
end.
Paul, as he makes his way around the city and observes all the idols, cannot keep his mouth
shut. He soon begins to interact with the people he finds in the marketplace as he tells them
that he has news for them about the God whose altar he found. It was inscribed to an
unknown God. Paul soon runs into the guys who spent a great deal of their time in Athens
thinking about philosophy and religion. The professional thinkers in this regard became
members of what is known as the Areopagus. This was not only a hill on which they held their
meetings; more importantly, it was the court of appeals for faith and philosophy. Here the
official members of the Areopagus would listen to presentations from visiting professors of
philosophy and make judgments regarding whether these ideas might continue to be taught on
the hallowed ground of the ancient city known for wisdom, i.e. Athens. For, we are told, all the
Athenians and the foreigners who lived in Athens spent all their time doing nothing except
listening to the latest ideas. It was, indeed, the forerunner of the modern university!
So Paul seizes on the opportunity to announce the good news of Jesus to these men who sat
in judgment on the latest ideas. To Paul this was much more than an idea. It was a faith that
touched one’s very life in all its aspects. To the Athenians, this was another in a series of new
ideas to be intellectually debated and verified or rejected. So Paul has his work cut out for
him. While they are very religious, the listeners do not think their faith has any holes in
it. Except for that one God they did not know. But they already had twelve and the pediments
of all their public buildings depicted these gods for them. What could Paul have to say that
would interest them? Just this: the God you don’t know is seeking you out and he is not a God
made of stone. He is present in Jesus Christ. He is calling you to repent of service to those
gods of stone. Now, that was news!

Reading: The Sourian Kouros

Genesis 1:27 So God created man in his own image,

in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

Genesis 2:25 The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.

The Greeks were masterful at doing sculpture. Everywhere we went there were statues that
graced many of the temples and significant city monuments. One of the more intriguing
aspects of the statues is the fact that in the early era of Greek sculpture, the male form is
normally found nude and the female form is found fully clothed. The statue that is pictured
here is one that was found in the temple of Poseidon at Sounion. The statue is about nine and
a half feet tall. His size is similar to that recorded for Goliath as he faced off with David (I
Samuel 17).
As the ancient Greeks sought to honor their gods, they would make these statues which are
thought to have been made in the image of Apollo. Although that idea is debated, one can see
in the image an attempt at portraying what the gods looked like. For, upon careful
examination, the kouros, as statues of this sort are called, is not really like a human being. In
fact, this cannot have been a sculpture that is based on a human being since the proportions
are not like any human being that exists. The following paragraph is from a college handbook
about the kouros sculptures:
“The sculptor uses .. divisions of the body to establish a set of rigid proportions based on
simple mathematical relationships. Most obviously, the width of the figure is equal to its depth
and approximately one quarter of its total height. The body is proportioned so that the distance
from the base of the foot to the base of the knee cap is also one quarter of the figure's total
height. This one to four proportion based on the total height is also found with the distance
between the navel and the chin, and between the top of the head and the base of the neck at
the clavicles. The latter relationship makes the head itself one sixth of the statue's height. Far
larger in proportion than one observes on the actual human body, the height of the kouros's
head corresponds exactly to the width of the figure at its hips.”
Mathematics as the basis for how a figure is made would have been exciting to the Greeks
who were adept at discovering mathematical concepts. But, and here my confidence in the
Scriptures comes out, God in creating humanity, made us in his own image. He also forbids us
to seek to make an image of him. Why? Because when I look in the face of another human
being I am to see the face of God. God’s image is a living breathing person. Today we are
clothed because of our sin and the distance that has put between us. God in Christ has
bridged that distance and now we know him personally again as we did at the very beginning.

Reading: The Olive Tree

Romans 11:17 If some of the branches have been broken off, and you, though a wild olive
shoot, have been grafted in among the others and now share in the nourishing sap from the
olive root, 18 do not boast over those branches. If you do, consider this: You do not support the
root, but the root supports you. 19 You will say then, "Branches were broken off so that I could
be grafted in." 20 Granted. But they were broken off because of unbelief, and you stand by
faith. Do not be arrogant, but be afraid. 21 For if God did not spare the natural branches, he will
not spare you either.

Mythology has it that Athena, the great goddess, offered the good people of Athens the olive
tree as her gift that would make their lives better. At the same time, Poseidon, the god of the
seas, offered Athens the ocean as a safe place for their ships. Whomever the Athenians
chose by a democratic vote would be the patron God of the city. They chose the olive and
Athena. The curious thing about that choice is that the people of Athens chose their God! It
was the first instance of what in recent eras came to be known as humanism—the teaching
that humanity is at the top of the universe’s hierarchy of authority. The olive tree which is
ubiquitous around Greece, as in the photo accompanying this blurb, has come to symbolize the
power of people to choose their own gods and their own destiny.

The Christian scriptures have a different take on who is authoritative. In the quote from the
letter of Paul to the Romans, it is quite clear who is in charge. It is God who is in charge of the
destiny of humanity. God acts in such a way as to create a family he calls his own, but he
does it one person at a time. Paul describes the action of God as taking branches and pruning
them away or grafting them in to the one tree that is his family.
The mystery that surrounds all of this, as Paul makes it clear, is that we affect what happens to
us as we believe and stand or as we become arrogant and are pruned away. Still, we have to
admit that God is the one who is working in the tree. He is the one with the tools which he
uses for grafting or for pruning. He is the one who makes the decisions regarding any
particular branch. He is aware of all that is happening in our lives and he is seeking fruit from
us.
The olive tree takes about eight years from seedling to first harvest, but then can produce for
hundreds of years with the proper care. I like to think that Paul is saying when we humbly
remain in the tree that is Jesus, we will produce fruit far beyond our own lifetimes. As the tree
grows and develops, the strength of the previous branches is given to the new growth. Just
think, I am strong today because the Apostle Paul was faithful in his day. What might God do
with our faith hundreds of years from now?
----------