What Does It Mean to ‘Learn Christ’ (Ephesians 4.20)? A Comparison of Paul and Plutarch on Learning Virtue

In Ephesians, Paul has an interesting turn of phrase when he speaks of ‘learning’ (manthanō) Christ and being ‘taught’ (didaskō) ‘in’ Him:

Ephesians 4.20-24 "But that is not the way you be  learned Christ!— 21assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, 22to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, 23and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, 24and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness."

The power of Paul’s language can be better appreciated when we see how he is using it over against the alternative in Greek philosophy.  When Paul speaks of learning Christ, his concern is ethical.  His ethical concern involves not only what the righteous and holy life should involve; it also concerns how a corrupt person with deceitful desires might be renewed and put on the new self.  Thus, his topic, as Greek philosophers would say, is, ‘How can we be taught virtue?’

The near-contemporary of Paul, the Greek philosopher and author, Plutarch (born before 50, died after 120), wrote a work entitled ‘That Virtue May Be Taught’.  Plutarch’s language is more natural than Paul’s: we learn and are taught subjects, such as philosophy.  Paul, on the other hand, speaks of learning a person, Christ.  Thus, the subject matter of education is radically different. 

Furthermore, both Plutarch and Paul are interested in how people might overcome certain obstacles to learn virtue.  They even phrase the obstacles similarly.  Paul speaks of corrupt ‘deceitful desires’, and Plutarch speaks of ‘bad passions and affections.’  Yet they understand the obstacle of desires or passions differently.  The difference lies in Plutarch’s philosophy versus Paul’s Christian faith.

Plutarch's 'Middle Platonist' philosophy interacted with other philosophical systems, including Stoicism.  The core belief of Stoicism was that people should live according to nature.  If so, then one may well ask why one would have to be taught to do something that came naturally.  Plutarch, however, observes that people learn all sorts of things that they cannot do naturally.  Such learning makes sense.  Yet he then asks, should not the ‘skill of ordering one’s life well’ also be taught?  There appear to be two reasons that a philosopher such as Plutarch argues that virtue can and must be taught.  First, somewhat challenging Stoic thought, he argues that ‘so many things of a foreign nature’ have been mixed with nature that they have to be sorted.  Second, agreeing with the Stoics, he argues that, if virtue has to do with the right ordering of one’s life, then one of the other core convictions of Stoics also comes into play: reason is essential for the well-ordered life.  Plutarch says that, when prudence ‘is the governess, ranking all things in due place and order, everything is assigned to become useful.’  Reason, or prudence, needs to rule or order the passions of the soul and the appetites of the body.

How would Paul respond to this understanding of the human condition?  He would agree that there is confusion in understanding, although he would say that the problem has a deeper and more sinister dimension to it than the poorly ordered self.  He can speak of the need for the renewal of the spirit of the mind (v. 23), yet, as he had earlier stated in Romans 1.28, the problem is a ‘depraved mind’.  While the philosopher can affirm that there are obstacles to virtue because human lives need to be ordered by reason; Paul presses deeper to the spiritual level.

Over against philosophy, Paul explains from the Old Testament that the human condition of sin is so dire that it requires a divine work of forgiveness and transformation.  Moral depravity cannot be overcome by living according to the outward Law of nature revealed in creation.  On this, Paul and Plutarch are agreed (cf. Romans 1.18-32).  Nor can the depraved mind be overcome by living according to a conscience attuned to the inward Law of God in our hearts as, I would argue, he says in Romans 2.1-16.  Nor can it be overcome by obedience to the revealed Law of God in Scripture, as Paul says in Romans 2.17-3.8.  Thus, it cannot be overcome by learning the principles of philosophy (Colossians 2.8).  Nor can ‘self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body’ overcome ‘the indulgence of the flesh’ (Colossians 2.21-23).  This is because righteousness cannot be taught at the level of transformation, only at the level of information (Romans 3.20).

What Paul argues through the first eleven chapters of Romans is that God has provided the solution to the human condition.  Thus, his solution is not, as Plutarch’s, to teach virtue but to be ‘transformed by the renewing of your minds’ because of the mercies of God (Romans 12.1-2).  Only God can bring about the transformation of the sinful mind.  And so, as Paul says in this Ephesians passage, we must learn not a philosophy for virtue but ‘learn Christ’.  In this way, he says, we can be renewed in the spirit of our minds (Ephesians 4.23).

The philosophers, then, underestimated the problem humans faced because they saw it as the disordered life, where passions and affections held sway over reason.  They also overestimated the power of reason to set things right.  Paul follows Jewish teaching from Scripture that the problem is the sinful heart and the solution is God’s provision of redemption to deal with sins and to bring change (as Isaiah 59 already stated and as Paul argues, I believe, using this text, in Romans 3.9-26).  

To ‘learn Christ,’ then, is not only a curriculum but also a relationship.  Much of what 'right living' entails for Paul in Ephesians 4.20-6.9 would be affirmed by Plutarch.  Where they differ most, and fundamentally, is Paul's relational solution to the human condition.  The solution that Paul offers is the person, Jesus Christ, whose life brought transformation to those ‘in Him.’  Jesus was no great man of history, a kind of Hercules who accomplished great things and sets the example for others.  He was, as Matthew puts it, God with us (Matthew 1.23).  Only God could accomplish what sinful humans never could: the removal of sin and the transformation of human minds.  The believer does not simply follow Christ’s example; He participates in the power of transformation that Christ’s life—His death, resurrection, exaltation, and return (Paul unpacks what he says in the Ephesians passage in Colossians 2.20-3.4)--provides.  Each key stage of Christ’s life involves transforming power to put off the old self and to put on the new self.

The Missionary Call of Christian Counsellors and Pastors in the Post-Christian West

The calling of Christian counsellors and pastors is a spiritual calling and a missionary calling, rooted in the very Great Commission of Jesus to 'teach [disciples of Christ] to obey everything that He has commanded [in the Word of God] (Matthew 28.18-20).  This calling for nurturing ministries such as counselling and pastoring is increasingly difficult in a post-Christian culture that rails against the commandments of God.  Yet nothing is more important than that the Church gives a clear witness to God in such a culture.

There has been a trend in the United States to ban sex change therapy for minors since New Jersey was the first to do so in 2013.  The current list of states doing so is: New Jersey (2013), California (2013), Oregon (2015), Illinois (2016), Vermont (2016), New Mexico (2017), Connecticut (2017), Rhode Island (2017), Nevada (2018), Washington (2018), Hawaii (2018), Delaware (2018), Maryland (2018), New Hampshire (2019), New York (2019), Massachusetts (2019), Maine (2019), Colorado (2019).  In addition to the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, a number of counties, communities, and municipalities have banned conversion therapy.  Moreover, there are fourteen states with pending legislation to prevent such therapy.

Such legislation is billed as a protection of minors from abusive therapeutic attempts to alter their ‘natural’ sexual orientation.  The abuse, however, is on the other side.  What could be more abusive than to leave a child without helpful guidance while negotiating the confusing twist and turns of growing up?  And where is confusion more evident for children than as they become sexually aware?  

A child force-fed the sexual confusion and perversion of Western culture is only further abused by a culture that outlaws guidance in such matters.  As Plutarch wrote around AD 100,

Yea, and the very souls of children readily receive the impressions of those things that are dropped into them while they are yet but soft; but when they grow older, they will, as all hard things are, be more difficult to be wrought upon. And as soft wax is apt to take the stamp of the seal, so are the [9] minds of children to receive the instructions imprinted on them at that age (Plutarch, ‘A Discourse Touching the Training of Children,’ 8-9).[1]

What is interesting at this time in Western culture is that this ‘natural orientation’ argument has arisen during Postmodernity.  Postmodernity is the natural extension of Existentialism, set against Modernist, scientific arguments about identity.  Existentialism held that ‘existence precedes essence’, i.e., the human condition is that we are ‘thrown into’ existence without any essence of what it means to be anything.  There is, the argument has gone, no directive for being: our being is simply what we make it out to be through the choices that we make.  Nothing could be more opposed to science and religion.  As Francois Lyotard famously said, Postmodernity (following on from this Existentialist claim) entertains an ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’.  Nothing will define us.  We are what we choose to be.  And there is no ethic—no right or wrong—to say that our choices are better than anyone else’s.

This became the basis for the Postmodern ethic of ‘tolerance’ and ‘diversity’.  But what is tolerated is tolerated not because it is in itself good; it is tolerated because it is different.  The argument of what is ‘good’ is a Modernist argument.  Postmodernity puts its stamp only on what is alternative.  It is summed up in the practice of awarding prizes for participation rather than accomplishment, if one needs an example.  For Jean-Paul Sartre (Being and Nothingness), Existentialism criticized living any ‘imbalance’ on the grounds of being—what is—and of what is not (‘nothingness’).  The right way to live was to make choices.

If this is the background to Postmodernity, where, then, did this confused combination of saying that children are wired with a particular sexual orientation (‘being’) and must be given the right to choose their gender orientation with no guidance?  The only answer that comes to mind is that Western culture has still not sorted out its recent history.  It is at the same time this Modernist powerhouse of science and technology that operates according to laws of the universe and this Postmodern, Existentialist experiment absolutizing choice per se over what is chosen.  At the same time that advocates of sexual diversity attempt, without scientific proof, to argue that humans are hot-wired for an increasing variety of sexual orientations (not just male and female) apart from their biological make-up, they also promote ‘gender fluidity’.  They want the Modernist argument (science) if they can get it, but if they cannot, they will happily promote the Postmodernist arguments of fluidity and choice.  Who needs philosophical consistency in arguments when all that matters is the conclusion?

Yet something even more ominous is lurking in Western culture: the State.  Of course it is; the State always rushes in to bring regulation where religion and tradition do not.  (What would ancient Israel have been without the prophets to oppose the culturally influenced kings?)  In the United Kingdom, the State is promoting a sex education curriculum throughout the key stages of education that includes this new agenda of Western culture.  The United States has not quite seen the same level of State management as the UK in sex education.  Yet both are on the same trajectory.  The double-edged sword of Postmodernity, however, is the education of children to choose their own sexual orientations amidst an alphabet-soup of options without parental or religious interference and the litigation against counselling that would help confused children in a sexually perverse society find the truth.  (I say ‘find the truth’ in part for effect: it is this very notion at which such a culture scoffs while insisting that their view is true over against what virtually every culture since the beginning of time has believed.)

If one wants a gage to measure the quality of a culture, one might find it in how the culture educates and cares for its children.  Western culture aborts the unborn in the name of freedom (‘the mother’s choice’), sexualizes pre-pubescent children, perverts their understanding of sex, advocates feminism over masculinity, encourages children to make choices while legislating against guidance, administers puberty blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones on them, performs sex operations on them, and celebrates the legalization of mind-altering drugs.  While promoting every sort of sexual experimentation and perversity, it recoils in horror whenever anyone is simply accused of a single sexual impropriety as a teenager, as though it holds some moral high ground in such matters.  The duplicity is repulsive.

What is the way ahead?  It must be in the Church’s response to this double-edged sword with a clear plan and an unwavering stance.  On the one hand, the Church needs to educate its own children about sex.  In a post-Christian culture, Sunday School stories about David and Goliath constitute an inadequate education in the faith.  We need a Church education that is far more serious about the Christian faith.  It needs to be an education in Biblical literacy, to be sure, but it also needs to be catechesis in the faith, both in what we believe and how we should live.

Second, we need Christian counselling, not in the sense of therapeutic counselling (there is a place for that) but in the sense of pastoral counselling.  This begins in classrooms and through sermons and continues in the work of the pastors and the elders of the church.  The pastoral care of sinners is the primary calling of the pastor, not the running of programmes, church growth, Sunday worship services, and so forth (though all of this is important).

As the arm of the State gets stronger, it will see the Church as an enemy of the State.  This is the very point of the Book of Revelation, which paints in apocalyptic colours the relationship of Church and State in the era of the would-be god, the Emperor Domitian, ruler of the all-powerful State, the Roman Empire.  The State will try to silence the Christian counsellor and the Christian pastor (follow the battles in California, such as Assembly Bill 2943, recently stopped, AB 2119, recently passed, and now resolution 99, recently proposed, to get a glimpse of the battlefront).[2]  Whatever the world does, however, the Church needs to step up to the task of teaching a full curriculum and offering clear counselling about everything Christ has commanded (Matthew 28.18-20) us to obey, beginning with the biologically based, binary distinction of ‘male and female created He them’ (Genesis 1.27).

---

[1] Plutarch, ‘A Discourse Touching the Training of Children,’ Moralia, trans. Simon Ford, in Moralia, Vol. 1 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1878).

[2] For news and helpful resources, see the California Family Council site: https://californiafamily.org/oppose-ca-ab-2943-ab-1779-and-ab-2119-reference-materials/  (accessed 22 August, 2019).

Is There a ‘Right’ Music for Congregational Singing During Worship?

Answering this question is full of challenges, but I would like to suggest that there is such a thing as ‘right’ music for congregational worship.  The question is, ‘Will I, or anyone, convince anyone else about this?’  After all, if ‘beauty’ is in the eye of the beholder, and if worship is one’s gift to God, who is to be so bold as to say that this or that is ‘right’?  Perhaps the best way to proceed is with a serious of questions that others might explore further.  My own understanding of what ‘right worship music’ is will, I hope, come through by how I phrase these questions.  I do believe that there are cultural, generational, and personal tastes in music that need to weigh into some of the answers.  Yet this does not mean that anything goes—not at all.

So, here are twenty questions that I think are important to answer.  In fact, I think that the ‘right’ answers to these questions would lead us to ‘right’ music for congregational singing during worship.  The right answers might just revolutionize the kind of congregational singing that has come to characterize so many churches in the past thirty or so years.  I certainly hope so!

1. Where should musicians be placed in a church building?  Does placing a worship ‘team’ on a stage in front of the congregation make worship more of a performance than a support for congregational worship?  Does the worship team support the congregation or the congregation support the worship team?  (And what happens to our worship when we say 'support' rather than 'lead'?)
2. Is congregational singing suppressed rather than enhanced when new songs are frequently introduced?
3. What are the characteristics of worship music written to be sung by a congregation versus music written to be sung by a single person, band, or choir?  Should the goal be for the congregation to sing together?
4. Should worship music be sung to God?  Should it be about God and what He has done?  To what extent might it be about my/our experience, concerns, and faith?
5. Should worship music help believers to know Scripture (especially the Psalms)?
6. Should worship music help believers learn the Christian faith (theology)?
7. How important is it to use Church music that connects generations and contemporary congregations to the historic faith?  (If so, then a conservative approach to the music selections—choosing hymns and songs from earlier times—might play a significant role in tying contemporary believers to the historic Church.)
8. Should worship music be contemplative, helping people meditate on God?  Does this strengthen believers’ faith?
9. Should congregational worship music be emotional, stirring the heart?  If so, what sorts of emotions are appropriate?  (Joy, exuberance, thanksgiving, sorrow, etc.)  When is emotion manipulative or fascile?
10. What is the purpose of a choir for singing?  Perhaps choirs can help stir a congregation to worship through beautiful music, whether sung only by the choir or leading the congregation in singing.  Perhaps they constitute the church’s ‘singers’ who play a role in learning songs and teaching the congregation the songs of the Church.  And perhaps they bring the congregation into their worshipful experience of the music that they have had from earlier practices and times of prayer during the week.
11. Is music a certain ‘place’ believers ‘go’ in worship in the sense that it is good to have a section of the service devoted to singing instead of intersperse singing with other things—talking, prayer, introductions, etc.?  That is, does singing allow a congregation to enter into worship such that it is not as effective if mixed with other things?
12. If things like contemplation and group singing are important, are some musical instruments more helpful than others?
13. Who should choose music for a worship service?  If music teaches Scripture and Christian faith, should not choices be made by theologically educated persons in the congregation?  If worship music is educational (learning the songs, learning Scripture, learning the faith), then should not the same person keep track of what is sung and when?
14. While standing might be the better posture for singing, is it always the best posture for worship music?  (It might be difficult for persons in pain and with mobility issues, and it might be better to sit or kneel with meditative music.)
15. What are the different benefits of worship words on a screen and words and music in a book?  (Screens have allowed people to introduce new songs regularly—is that at all a good thing?)  Songbooks can be taken home and used in the home—they bring sacred music into the home, and they provide an approved collection of music to be learned by the congregation.
16. Should music be a major means of teaching children the Christian faith?  If so, some carefully selected songs should be learnt by heart rather than treating children’s singing as simply a time to sing some Christian songs.
17. How loud should worship music be?  (Who would have ever thought this question needed to be answered?!)  I think this question calls for some suggestions.  The answer to this question is surely about the sound that a congregation makes in singing if it is congregational worship rather than the performance of a worship band with electric instruments, microphones, and speakers.  It is surely about what constitutes reverence to God and allows meditation.
18. How should worship music be related to the rest of the service?  While some seem to think that the first song should be more energetic and contemporary, perhaps the first song should be a call to worship.  What about the relationship between what we say in song and what we say in prayer?  Which songs are appropriate for other parts of the worship service—before the sermon, in response to the sermon, and during the Eucharist?
19. How important is singing for discipleship?  Some people cannot hold a tune or have little appreciation for music.  How can they participate in worship expressed in music?  Too many churches have so restricted worship in contemporary times that there is little more than three songs and a sermon during church worship.  How can recovery of more elements of Christian worship help to include more people in worship?  Would simply listening to certain singers sing at certain times during the service help those who do not sing enter into worship through music?
20. Is it possible to use music to draw people closer to God?  This involves using music for more than ascribing worth (‘worship’) to God, learning the Scriptures, or even meditating?  Pentecostal churches used to use music at the end of the service to ‘tarry’ before God, seeking Him, listening to His voice, and praying.  (The demand for shorter services has often curtailed this definitive practice of earlier Pentecostalism.  A similar practice is known in Baptist churches with altar calls.)