With Paul at Sea

Learning from the Apostle Who Took the Gospel from Land to Sea

Stutzman

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781621891673
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What Jesus began on and around the Sea of Galilee, Paul continued on and around the Mediterranean Sea. With Acts as the stage, the biblical narrative shifts from land to sea. Paul is the central actor in this part of the drama. Luke, the playwright, traveling with Paul on portions of his journeys, was deeply impressed by Paul's challenges and his creative engagement with both the pagans and the Jews living in the Roman Empire.In With Paul at Sea, Linford Stutzman, himself an accomplished sailor, relates key highlights of his personal experience of sailing Paul's voyages two thousand years later. Including examples of discoveries in the cities and harbors of Acts, combined with historical, archeological, and biblical evidence, Stutzman demonstrates the contribution and relevance of Paul for Christians in the twenty-first century. Portraying the modern world as a sea, the church as a ship, and a life of faith as sailing, With Paul at Sea is an invitation for today's Christians to travel with Paul.

part 1

The World Is Like the Sea

I saw the ocean for the first time when I was five years old. Although our family lived about a two-hour drive from Newport, Oregon, my father, whose income from logging and farming kept the family clothed and fed, and who also pastored a small church in our community of Cascadia, seldom had time for a vacation. But somehow on that unforgettable day Dad had squeezed, not only a day in at the coast, but also his family of seven into our 1950 Ford sedan.

I stared in astonishment and a little alarm out at across the vast Pacific Ocean. I could not see the other side! “Where does it end?” I asked.

“It doesn’t really,” Dad replied, “but if you went far enough on the ocean you would reach Japan or anywhere else in the world.”

I tried to imagine Japan across the endless water and, failing that, settled for wading in the waves along the beach. But from that moment on I dreamed of crossing that ocean one day, all the way to Japan.

The waves on the Oregon coast can be glorious and terrifying as they smash, roaring and foaming, into the rugged rocks that make the Oregon coast so picturesque.“Where do they come from?” I asked.

“From storms far away,” Dad answered.

For years after that encounter with the sea, whenever gale winds caused the tall fir trees to sway and dance outside of our house in the Cascade foothills, I imagined them to be the tall masts of sailing ships in storms at sea.

I have never sailed to Japan or experienced a storm on a boat in the Pacific, but the Mediterranean, as the myriad of ancient shipwrecks attest, has lured and destroyed the lives of many daring, foolhardy, desperate soldiers, sailors, traders, and slaves. It lured me too.

For most of my life since viewing the ocean in Oregon, I have lived and travelled on the other side of America’s oceans. I have been awed by the beauty of human achievements throughout history, the power of ancient and contemporary culture, and the deadly storms that destroy civilizations.

The world is like the sea, and Paul, growing up in Tarsus, a port city on the eastern end of the Mediterranean, was a man of the sea.

1

Empires: The Quest for Stability

Empires

Everywhere we sail around the Mediterranean, the remains of ancient empires are visible, at least in those places where modern empire building has not buried the amazingly durable remains of the past under parking lots, shopping malls, gigantic resorts, office buildings, and apartment complexes. At the edge of ancient harbors, magnificent temples crumble into piles of half-buried, eroded stone next to busy streets, boutiques, and sidewalk cafes. Many theaters, once the scene of Greek comedies, are overgrown, garbage-strewn tragedies.

If the Mediterranean is the cradle of civilization, it is also the graveyard of empires. The overgrown archeological sites are the neglected cemeteries of past human attempts to control the future, to live securely, to dominate the environment and their enemies. The ruined temples and theaters are the sad, magnificent headstones of once impressive, but always partial and flawed achievements of human creativity and control that have long been laid to rest. The descendants of these empires continue to live in the areas of former greatness. The inhabitants of the Roman Empire, once united by the Mediterranean Sea, are now divided into nations with different languages, religions, cultures, and aspirations.

While the attraction to empire building in some form or another seems to be universal, not all civilizations are equally successful in establishing vast empires, nor are all regions of the planet favorable to sustaining them. The majority of societies must settle for tribal, local, and perhaps national control. However, the quest for control and stability on all levels of human relational organization seems to be universal. Egypt of ancient times and Rome of the first century were two of the most successful in recorded Mediterranean history.

Egypt’s achievements are legendary. While there is no evidence that Saul1 had ever visited Egypt, many thousands of other Jews were living and flourishing in the port city of Alexandria during his lifetime in the first century. Because of the relative ease of travel by ship between Alexandria and the seaports of Palestine, stories of the marvels of Egypt—two of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World were in Egypt—would have circulated throughout the Mediterranean, including to Jerusalem, impressing Saul and everyone else. Anyone who has viewed the Great Pyramid of Giza, built almost 5,000 years ago and towering above the desert landscape by more than 146 meters, understands why, for this incredible structure held the record of being the tallest human construction in the world for over 4,000 years. The nearly eight million visitors who come to Egypt every year continue to be impressed.

I remember one particular group of thirty Eastern Mennonite University students on the Middle East cross-cultural study semester visiting, on the day after we arrived from the USA, the pyramids of Giza, the oldest of the Seven Wonders, and the only one of these Wonders still substantially intact.

“I cannot believe they did this without cell-phones or computers!” “How could they organize that many workers?” “Why would they spend years and fortunes building a tomb?” they asked with jet-lagged awe, astonishment, and disbelief.

These awe-inspiring pyramids are massive monuments to the ideals of empire—durability, stability, dominance, power, and control. To this day the pyramids testify to Egypt’s successes in achieving their ideals through human organization and exploitation of their natural and human resources. The shape of the pyramid mirrors the shape of the social structure of empire, a monument that demonstrates the staggering human cost of building and maintaining the power and glory of the empire carried out by the majority at the lower levels, and the vast rewards for the a small number of elite at the top. Why do empires exist? How do they emerge?

The explanatory foundations of the origins and continued existence of the Mediterranean empires, large and small, durable or fleeting, are linked to their creation myths that explain the nature of both the cosmos and the empire. The use of the term “myth” does not connote fabrication or an untrue story. Myth refers to the official, perhaps sacred story, the collective, selective memory of a people sharing some kind of common identity. These creation myths serve to explain and clarify the reasons for divine blessing and favor for a particular people and the ways that these blessings and divine assistance can be sustained. These stories legitimize the dominance of the favored groups of people and identify their enemies. Creation myths may justify conquest, slavery, pillage, and destruction. They often support the right of the emperor to rule and for defeated subjects to serve the empire. These myths are visible in the monuments, temples, statues, triumphal arches, mosaics, and steles around the Mediterranean. Creation myths help organize and sustain the power of the rulers in their personal and collective quest for lasting control of their part of the world. There are powerful advantages to empire building if the creator and sustainer of both the universe and the empire are believed to be the same god, and if the empire’s subjects view their rulers as representing their powerful gods. A brief look at creation myths in relation to empire may be helpful.

Creation: Sea, Land, and the Quest for Stability

In the beginning was sea and chaos. On this both the Egyptian and the Hebrew creation stories agree, as do many other versions of creation myths around the world. The first creative acts of the god(s) bring order to this chaos, and life begins. Division between land and sea is one of the several acts early in the creation sequences, for this division is the condition for human life to exist.

But it is the Hebrew version that gives the most unique insights into and perspective on the universal human propensity for empire building. This biblical creation account shaped the worldview of the young Saul, his understanding of the Roman Empire, the kingdom of Israel, and eventually his vision of the kingdom of God. The biblical account also has vital prophetic implications for Western Christians.

It is not within the scope of this study to compare and contrast various creation stories, but rather to demonstrate the distinctive insights that the biblical story of creation and fall bring to empire building, that seemingly irresistible attraction throughout history of humans to build systems of control over nature, the future, and other people, including women and enemies. This attraction to create order out of chaos and stability through domination, depicted in the story of the fall, shapes human social relationships through every level of complexity, from the relationship between two people to complex global empires. In contrast to the creation stories of Egypt and other the ancient Mediterranean empires, the biblical creation story implies that all human empire building is associated with sin and separation from the Creator. In this regard, the biblical account of creation is unique among creation stories of empires.

How is the creation story anti-empire? We begin with the trees in the Garden of Eden. There were many good trees in the garden; in the very middle were two special ones—the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (Gen 2:9). This is a significant pairing. One would expect that if God had provided a special, positive “Tree of Life” and invited the human pair to eat of it for eternal blessing, the forbidden tree would have been labeled the “Tree of Death.” Or logically, if the forbidden tree was called the “Tree of Knowledge,” that the opposite would have been the “Tree of Innocence” or the “Tree of Ignorance” in the story. However, the names of the trees are “Life” and “Knowledge of Good and Evil,” which are not immediately recognizable as contrasting categories.

In addition, the Tree of Knowledge contains the knowledge of both good and evil, not just evil, as one would expect. What could possibly be wrong with knowing good? The contrasting categories of good and evil are contained in the one forbidden tree. The names of the trees in the story, while contradicting conventional wisdom, provide unexpected and profound insight into the shape of relationships in the history of human organization.

According to the story, Adam and Eve did not eat of the Tree of Life. Why would they want to? They were already alive. Nothing in the story indicates that death was present anywhere in their experience. They did not need more life and they were not familiar with or threatened by death. They could not be tempted by what they already had. So while the Tree of Life from which they could have eaten was present in the middle of the garden, it was the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in which the serpent waited to point out their limitations and their potential.

We discover, as we look at the long view of history, that the serpent mostly told the truth. “You will not die,” the serpent said to the woman and the man with her, “for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God [or gods],2 knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:4b–5). That this tree would give Adam and Eve the ability to know good and evil was, of course, correct. According to the serpent, they would then “become as gods,” which was also partly true, and they would do so without any negative results. This last part was a complete lie, but not obviously so, depending on how death was understood in the humans’ imagination. The temptation, therefore, included the denial of death, or at least the failure to acknowledge it.

According to the story, the re...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part One: The World Is Like the Sea
• Part Two: The Church Is Like a Ship at Sea
• Part Three: Living by Faith Is Like Sailing
• Bibliography