the pagan and the pharisee

According to legend, Karl Barth was giving a lecture when a student asked, "Sir, don't you think God has revealed himself in other religions and not only Christianity?"

Barth replied, "No, God has not revealed himself in any religion, including Christianity.    He has revealed himself in his Son."

First of all, professors!   Am I right?   Echhhhh.

Shut up, Karl.

Second, I think the whole thing turns on what you mean by "reveal."

If you mean it in the sense of direct and special revelation, then by all means I'd agree with Barth's characterization of the Logos —– the One Christ for all the cosmos.

If you mean it in what we may call the Frazerian sense (as in Frazer, the author of that great work The Golden Bough, which is never far from me), then the questioner's point remains.    And I'd agree with it:  the God who wrote His law on the heart of every person gave every people 'good dreams' —– ideas of redemption expressed, never fully, in their myths and paganisms.

I think about this in church, when we recite the thing we do every week:  a prayer in the prayer book that says "In You we live and move and have our being."   That's a quote from the Apostle Paul, who was in fact quoting a phrase from the Greek worship of Zeus.    It's from Cretica, by Epimenides of Knossos, a Greek poet from the severalth century BC.    And Paul isn't just quoting one little thing and leaving it at that:  he knows his audience will hear that phrase and fill in the rest.

If I were to sing, "Just a small town girl…," you might hear in your head the next phrase, "Livin' in a loooonely woooorld," and you might even get that iconic keyboard riff in your head.

In the same way, Paul stands in Athens and says "In Him we live and move and have our being," and his literate audience might hear in their heads the whole thing:

They fashioned a tomb for you, holy and high one….
But you are not dead:  you live and abide forever,
For in you we live and move and have our being. 

Zow!    A divine one, thought dead, proven to be living!    (Bonus:  legend says Epimenides received that revelation in a cave!    #Bam.) 

Of course, that divine one was, uh, Zeus.    Not Jehovah.

But Paul quoted it.    He was saying the Greeks were right about the wrong God.    Certainly, in putting together the Book of Common Prayer (the one churches use for group prayers in service), Thomas Cranmer and friends were aware of the phrase's pagan origin;  just as certainly he and they affirmed its truth about the Right God.

I firmly believe that God revealed (at least in the lower-case sense) an aspect of His nature and Law to the Nahua peoples of central Mexico, as evidenced in their writings, the written evidence of their 'good dreams,' that He might not have revealed elsewhere.    In the same way that He gives each person and maybe each people some unique aspect of the Imago Dei, He may give each people some vision of the Logos as well.    Thus when the Gospel at last comes to them, they may greet it as an old friend or lost love —– and then bring to the Church the fresh waters of new testimony. 

But back to Cretica, because there's more.    Paul was a Pharisee in good standing. 

That group had its origin story in the wars of the Maccabees, who drove out the invaders from Israel.    And who were the invaders?    The Seleucid Empire, which was Greek and Greeky. When they took over, they worshiped Zeus in God's Temple (sacrificing pigs in the process —– the ur-unclean animal in Judaism).    When the Greeks were out and the Temple was cleansed, and there wasn't enough oil for the sacred flames, the legendary miracle of the oil happened; it's what we celebrate at Hanukkah.    So Hanukkah is a celebration not just that God provides, but that God honors those who drive out the false pagans and restore purity.    Purity is the driving idea behind the Pharisees, who were as close to Hanukkah as we are to the Battle of the Alamo.    Just as your grandmother might say, "When I was a little girl, we had an old lady in our church who'd been kissed as a baby by Susanna Wilkerson Dickinson!", people in Paul's day might have been within a degree or two of Jude the Maccabee. 

That driving-out of the pagans is that close to them.    Its lessons and reverberations are as near to them as the Alamo is to us.

So, let yourself get struck by this:  it's possible that Epimenides' song to Zeus, centuries old at that point, was sung in the Temple in Jerusalem —– sung to Zeus.    And now, too few generations later, here's a Pharisee, a Son of the Maccabees, embracing that very phrase and saying it's true —– true of Jehovah. 

Paul seems to claim, here and elsewhere, that the pagans were getting some inkling of the cosmos right without knowing it.

This is how Christ pierces the world.