What a time to have a book appear about divine guidance! The endless, and on the whole very depressing, debates among Catholic and Orthodox Christians I have been watching, especially over whether the sacraments--the Eucharist especially--have some kind of magical properties given by God to "protect" people from pandemic have been almost entirely unedifying to behold. I'm already bracing myself for people to next start in on the apocalyptic claims, purporting to divine providential purpose in this pandemic. Years ago now one of my professors once said to me that in his view the three most theologically abused words were, and are, "Divine Providence wills...."
Along comes the calm, cool scholarship of Fr John Jillions in this moment. So I am doubly glad to be able to post this interview now about his new book,
Divine Guidance: Lessons for Today from the World of Early Christianity. (I should, as the wretched lawyers say, "declare interest" here: he was on my
doctoral jury, and I have long considered him a friend whom I respect greatly.)
AD: Tell us about your background.
JJ: I was born in Montreal, and after leaving Canada in 1963 I and my brother and three sisters grew up in Southern California, Connecticut, and New Jersey. My mother’s side is Russian—my great-grandfather was a priest in Kishinev (now in Moldova)—and Orthodox parishes were part of our life from the start. My father was born in London and although he gave up the Church of England as a conscientious objector at the age of 12 he never objected to my mother taking us to church (in fact, he thought it would be unfair to leave us on our own to decide our faith later if we’d never been given the opportunity to experience it.) I never intended to be a priest, but a crisis while I was in the middle of my college years, at McGill University, led me to experience the mercy of God in a way that has never left me. And that took me to seminary and eventually ordination as a deacon and priest.
When I first told my Russian grandmother that I would be going to St Vladimir’s Seminary she said immediately—and quite prophetically—“you will have an interesting life.” Indeed it has been that. Married to Denise Melligon in 1979, we have three grown sons, and two grandchildren.
We have had opportunities to serve the Church in many different ways: Parishes in Australia, New Jersey, Cambridge (UK), Ottawa and now Bridgeport, Connecticut. Studies in Thessaloniki and then Cambridge, where we were involved in founding the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies. Teaching in Ottawa with the Sheptytsky Institute at Saint Paul University and later as an adjunct at
St Vladimir’s Seminary and Fordham University. And for seven years (2011-2018) I had the privilege of serving as Chancellor of the Orthodox Church in America at a difficult time in its history.
AD: What led to the writing of Divine Guidance: Lessons for Today from the World of Early Christianity?
JJ: I’ve been interested in how people perceive God’s direction in their life from the earliest years I was a priest serving in Australia in the mid-80s. How do they discern for themselves that it is God’s voice and not a delusion? It is striking how pervasive across cultures and history is this experience of perceived divine guidance.
The Old and New Testaments are of course packed with such encounters. So this was the obvious topic for me when in 1994 I started a PhD in New Testament at the University of Thessaloniki, under the supervision of Prof.
Petros Vassiliadis. I did most of the research at Tyndale House Library in Cambridge, where
Dr Bruce Winter served as my co-director. He helped place the broad questions I had about divine guidance into the focused context of Paul’s Corinth where there was such a mix of Jews and Gentiles. The dissertation was finished in 2002, but I think subsequent pastoral and life experience have helped fill out the book and make it useful for a wider audience.
AD: “Divine guidance” sounds rather anodyne in the abstract, suggesting the perhaps leisurely seeking of a bit of advice on some private choice or other, but your introduction opens with some harrowing realizations of how public, and how violent, many of those quests and claims are. Have humans—especially Christian humans—always been so conflicted over the seeking, and finding, of what God wants us to do?
Yes, and rightfully so. It is all too easy for any of us to be deluded. And it’s all the worse if we are so confident in our delusion that others follow, often to disastrous consequences for themselves and others. We need a degree of skepticism when someone says, “God told me…” Especially if their “guidance” is out of step with everything else we know from the scriptures, saints and life in the Church.
This is one reason I deeply appreciate the very cautious Jewish approach to God’s guidance. That isn’t to say that everything unusual is suspect. The scriptures and lives of saints are full of inspired people doing extraordinary and even weird things. But a sense of natural inspiration, direction and communion with God in our daily life ought to be the norm, as the Psalms repeatedly demonstrate. “Make me to know your ways, O Lord; teach me your paths. Lead me in your truth, and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; for you I wait all day long” (Ps. 25:4-5).
AD: Your introduction sets the scene for us, noting you will largely focus on Pauline literature and communities in a wider and comparative Greco-Roman context. What influenced those choices for you? Why Paul’s writings and not, say, John’s?
We simply know a lot more about Paul, his writings, their historical context and Corinth than we do about any other single community or writer in the New Testament. But it would be a useful next step to compare and contrast the approaches to divine guidance elsewhere in the New Testament and throughout the later history of the Church (and in other religious faiths as well).
AD: Drawing on insights from Raymond Brown, Veselin Kesich, Andrew Louth, and others, you note how much modern biblical scholarship is “largely shaped by anti-supernatural biases.” Some of this, you go on to suggest, is shaped in turn by the Reformation and then the Enlightenment. In a time when Christians are moving past Reformation polemics, and philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre have shown how Enlightenment notions of “rationality” and “religion without the bounds of reason alone” smuggle in all sorts of problematic practices and claims, are we living in a time when we can give renewed, un-ironic attention to the multitude of stories in Scripture of people seeking, and finding, divine guidance qua divine?
Yes, thankfully. Communion with God is the main point of the scriptures. Why not take seriously the multitude of encounters with God recounted in the Bible? Even love of neighbor is ultimately meant to bring us to deeper love of God. As Evelyn Underhill told the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1930, “God is the interesting thing about religion."
AD: Your first chapter tells us the importance of using both literary and archeological sources. What is the significance of both, but perhaps especially the latter?
Ancient literary sources can be read as the record of elites, and thus skew the picture of popular belief at any given time. Archaeology helps broaden the picture and also date it more accurately. This is especially important in a setting like first century Corinth where the Roman influence distinguished it significantly from its ancient Greek history. On the other hand, archaeological evidence of a particular religious practice doesn’t tell you what people thought of it. This is why literary sources are crucial. Reading the literary sources alongside the archeological helps give a much more accurate and balanced view of the mix of attitudes in circulation.
AD: Between your chapter on Homer, Virgil, and Horace, and your first chapter on Paul, there is well over a hundred pages of detailed study of many other Roman, Greek, and Jewish writers. Clearly the ancients and so-called pagans had a lot to say on the topic. Are there certain common themes or methods across this vast body of literature that early Christians picked up and used with some regularity?
The most common theme is shared skepticism about pagan religion—labeled superstition—and its practices. And the second broad theme is the pursuit of truth, virtue, courage, and fearlessness in the face of deprivation, suffering and death. Seneca, for example, was much admired by early Christians, to the point that many believed that Paul and Seneca had a lively correspondence (they both died around the same time, as victims of Nero). But we can’t exaggerate this common ground. Christian devotion to Jesus Christ was viewed as sheer stubbornness that deserved punishment. So Marcus Aurelius could wax philosophical as a learned Stoic but at the same time be brutal in persecuting Christians.
AD: You note an important tension in Paul’s Corinthian letters: a “reticence to use guidance language” (p.190) but also a firm conviction that God does offer guidance precisely through the Cross and through “weakness” (p.201). Tell us a bit more what you mean by this.
Paul stays clear of the words “guidance” and “guide” even though they are frequently found in the Psalms. I argue that this is because these words later became so intertwined with pagan notions. But this does not at all mean that Paul abandoned the sense of God teaching and leading His people through many and various ways. These include the Holy Scriptures, the tradition of prayer and worship, elders and the church’s communal wisdom. But where the Jewish community was centered on the Torah and the tradition of its interpretation, Paul and the early church were centered on Christ and His Cross and Resurrection. It was Paul’s special genius to see the self-emptying weakness of God on the Cross as the heart of the new guidance He was offering to all.
AD: Can it be said that if God does speak and offer guidance in cruciform ways drawing on what is weak and foolish, this may in fact be salutary to warn us off overly powerful gurus as well as our own overweening pride in thinking we are smart enough, strong enough, saintly enough to always know what God wants?
True. But that uncertainty should not stop us from trying to be followers of Christ and doing good as best we can with whatever information and faults we have. I’m always struck by the paradoxical combination of humility and boldness in Paul and the saints. Also, as
Fr Paul Tarazi teaches, God’s will is not a complete mystery: “After all, He has given us a book of 1,500 pages!” The paradox is that Christians seeking to follow the crucified Christ may come to very different conclusions about what to do in practice. But as I heard Fr Thomas Hopko once say, even diametrically opposite forms of action can be “of God” if what motivates them both is love of God and desire to serve our neighbor.
AD: The psychoanalyst in me read your section on “uncertain guidance” in ch. 13 with especial attention. There you note that Paul does not in fact rely “on signs of prosperity” but often instead on weakness and opposition. What other “counter-cultural” lessons, as it were, does Paul offer us in trying to find methods for seeking, and verifying claims of, divine guidance?
Paul is not naturally counter-cultural. His entire pre-Christian experience is in the opposite direction, as an upholder of conservative cultural and religious norms. This is why he found the Christian movement so wrong and offensive. Everything changed with his encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus. Henceforward, the single lens through which he looked at life and decision-making became Christ. As he told the Corinthians, “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified” (1 Cor 2:2). That was and remains the primary counter-cultural lesson we can learn from Paul in filtering whatever claims to divine guidance come our way.
AD: At the very end of your last chapter, you briefly work in Lev Gillet and also Kallistos Ware. Tell us a bit more about their experience and relevance to your study.
Their experience, as recounted in the book, is of interest because it took place in the context of an academic study at Oxford University on religious experience. The Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre, which is now based at the University of Wales, was collecting thousands of accounts of religious experience in the 1970s. As a way of reflecting on all this material interviewed a number of scholars, theologians and pastors about how they understand this persistent phenomenon.
Interviewed separately, Fr Lev Gillet and Fr Kallistos Ware (as he was then) gave very similar criteria for evaluating such experiences. They said it must be repeated. It can be short and authoritative, or come through gradual “infiltration by God.” It can be tested by asking others who understand your problem to pray for a solution and to ask for guidance, and see whether the answers converge. But the most definitive criterion is to pay attention to the feelings and actions that the experience produces. “Does this guidance create in you sorrow, bitterness, hatred? Or does it create in you joy and love for God and other people? Judge the tree according to its fruit.”
AD: Sum up your hopes for the book, and who especially should read it.
I have a number of simultaneous conversations in mind with this book, and Paul’s first century world has much to contribute to each. The first is with biblical scholars who have been hesitant to enter sympathetically into the first century’s community of discourse, in which rational and mystical are intertwined. The second is with Christians and others who feel their own experience of God has not been taken seriously. The third is with those who are looking for how the early church understood and evaluated divine guidance, in the hope of better understanding their own experience today. The fourth is with “nones and dones” who retain a sense of wistfulness about spirituality and God but are disappointed and/or skeptical about institutional church life. Paul said, “our knowledge is imperfect” (1 Cor 13:9): the fifth conversation is with traditionalists who have been reluctant to see change in interpretation of divine guidance as a continuous thread in the history of thought and of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures.
