RCIA Foundations: Daily Summaries Delivered

Athens & Jerusalem: St. Justin Martyr, Part III

The finale opens by gathering up the summer: the pagan voices the series kept hearing — the oracle at Delphi, Apollo and Athena — and the dark verdict of Christians who were being killed in those gods’ names. It returns especially to last week’s two biblical witnesses, the Magi and Melchizedek, and to the question they force: was any of paganism legitimate? Then the courtroom assembles. Justin had predicted his own prosecution in print, naming Crescens, a Cynic philosopher who denounced the Christians to the crowd without troubling to examine them. And the judge was Junius Rusticus — not a bureaucrat with a philosophy hobby but a Stoic of rank, the teacher Marcus Aurelius thanks by name in the opening pages of the Meditations. Socrates was condemned by a democracy that did not understand philosophy. Justin would be condemned by philosophy itself, seated on the tribunal.Then the class performs the trial, every part taken, from the court protocol that survives. Justin answers the prefect with a creed; asked where the Christians meet, he says their God “is not circumscribed by place” — the doctrine of Jacob’s Well, restated to the prefect of Rome by a man who grew up within sight of it; and he gives his address, a rented room above a bathhouse, open to anyone who climbed the stairs, with no fee and no prerequisites. Then Rusticus works down the line of the accused: a woman, a slave of Caesar’s household who says he has been freed by Christ, a refugee from Phrygia, believers raised in the faith by their parents. Justin had written a decade earlier that no one ever trusted Socrates enough to die for his doctrine, but Christ was believed by artisans and the uneducated. That morning he heard it as a roll call beside him in the dock. And then the exchange the whole summer has been building toward: asked whether he merely supposes he will ascend to heaven, Justin declines the hedge Socrates held so honestly — “I do not suppose it, but I know.” Not a better argument, the session argues, but a different kind of cause: not a conclusion reached by reason but an event, a dead man returned.The session closes by reading what these people actually did on Sunday — Justin’s description to the emperor of readings, homily, prayers and the Eucharist, the earliest account of the Mass we have, recognizably the class’s own Sunday across eighteen and a half centuries — and by closing the docket of the series’ three trials. And it ends where the transcript’s sociology points: on ordinary people. Socrates was a stonecutter, Paul made tents, Jesus was a carpenter, and the six who stood by Justin met above a bath. You are not marked as a Christian by being strange, but by your love.

Athens & Jerusalem: St. Justin Martyr, Part II

The session opens by going back to the old man on the seashore from Class 1, and reading him beside the road to Emmaus: a stranger falls in with seekers, expounds their own canon to its limit, sets a heart burning, and vanishes before he can be thanked. One road ends at the table, the other at prayer — and both doors, as the class works out, open only from the far side. Then the question the room wants to ask: is the old man Socrates? Literally no, he is a Christian elder. Typologically he is something better — Socrates on the far side of the introduction, the method finally in possession of an answer.The doctrine itself is the payoff of a word planted five weeks earlier. The Athenian philosophers sneered at Paul as a spermologos, a seed-picker; Justin, apparently without knowing it was an insult, turns it into a metaphysic — the logos spermatikos, the seminal Word sown in every human mind. Hence his boldest sentence: those who lived reasonably were Christians before Christ, Socrates and Heraclitus among them. But the seed is not the harvest, which is why the schools contradict each other. From there the class works through the keystone passage where Paul's altar, Plato's Timaeus and Socrates' trial all meet in one paragraph, and Justin's devastating sociological correction — no one trusted in Socrates so as to die for this doctrine; through his lawyerly amendment of the Myth of Er, at exactly the joints the class exposed in the Paul sessions; and through the argument he got historically wrong, whose collapse leaves only his better idea standing.Then Justin goes into the dock himself. His demonology hands the entire religious world outside the covenant to the enemy — and the session takes the census he never took. Scripture grants him demons but refuses him only; the pagan pantheons look like human projections cast on a real population of spirits; and for every ministry heaven performs there is a spirit bent on deforming that same ministry under the same name. Worse for his architecture, the counterexamples were in his own handwriting: he quotes a pagan oracle among the prophets without noticing; he reads the Magi — the clearest case in Scripture of God addressing pagans through pagan means, and then directly, in the same channel he uses for Joseph — as war booty freed from a demon; and Melchizedek, a Gentile priest certified by Scripture without call or conversion, is one of his favorite texts, deployed for everything except the question sitting on the page. That last one carries the session's largest claim: the Messiah's kingship descends through Judah, and his priesthood through a Gentile order — so the both/and is not diplomacy but design, ratified in the Person himself. And with the census finally taken, the class can do what Justin never did: audit the sign that guarded Socrates for seventy years, and ask which column its record belongs in.

Athens & Jerusalem: St. Justin Martyr, Part I

Born around AD 100 to a pagan family in Samaria, within sight of Jacob's Well, Justin went shopping for God among the philosophical schools, and this class follows him station by station: the Stoic who knew nothing of God and thought such instruction unnecessary, the Aristotelian who asked him to settle the fee, the Pythagorean who demanded music, astronomy and geometry first, and finally the Platonist, whose promise that the mind could ascend to look upon God — "for this is the end of Plato's philosophy" — set him alight. The summit turned out to be vacant. Then the turn: an old man on a seashore takes the young Platonist apart using Socrates' own method, corrects Plato on the immortality of the soul, points past philosophy altogether to the prophets — men who saw and announced rather than demonstrated — tells him to pray, and is never seen again. Justin's verdict on his own conversion is the sentence the session turns over: "Thus, and for this reason, I am a philosopher." He kept the philosopher's cloak, and around AD 155 wore it to Rome to file a formal petition with the emperor on behalf of the Christians — the defense of Socrates, in Socrates' own genre, quoting Socrates to the future Marcus Aurelius's face: "you can kill, but not hurt us."

Athens & Jerusalem: St. Paul in Athens, Part II

One word broke the room: anastasis. This session is about why — and why that word contradicted the court’s own founding charter, in the charter’s own vocabulary, standing on the charter’s own ground.

Spiritual Warfare, Part IV

Spiritual Warfare, Part III

Spiritual Warfare, Part II

Spiritual Warfare, Part I