Selected Scriptures

February 17, 2019

Fellowship Seminar – Session 4

Sean Higgins

Introduction

When Mo and I first got married we didn’t have a lot of money. One luxury we went without was cable television and, in a day before DVDs were invented, we had three VHS tapes of movies to watch. When I’m studying or writing I find it easier to play a movie that I’ve seen before in the background; I can look up and enjoy the scene and go back to my work.

One of the movies Mo owned, that we owned when two became one, was “Sleepless in Seattle.” Little did I know at the time that we would eventually plant our family near Seattle, nor did I realize what a profound impact that movie would have on my thinking for now over two decades.

It is one scene in particular that still elevates my mind. Meg Ryan (Annie) and Rosie O’Donnell (Becky) are watching a movie as part of the movie, and Rosie’s character tells Meg’s character, “You don’t want to be in love, you want to be in love in a movie.” True love, romantic and otherwise, is difficult. True love on earth takes work. True love in a sinful world, between sinful people, is a real mess.

Is it a mess worth making? Even those who put the extro in extroverts and those who come out of the womb not running from hugs must, at times, ask the question. In our seminars over the last four years we’ve talked about the difficulty of raising kids from diapers to be disciples, and we’ve talked about some of the challenges between a man and wife in the marriage relationship. Obviously these talks today about fellowship expand the relational circle outside beyond spouses and parenting to extended family and church family and the Christian community and to our neighbors. What does fellowship look like?

Platonic Fellowship Problems

In our Omnibus Tenebras class we just finished discussing The Last Days of Socrates by Plato. It’s a series of dialogues between Socrates and his friends as Socrates prepares to swallow poison given to him by the government as capital punishment for Socrates’ crimes against state and the gods. Socrates himself never wrote anything, so what we have is Plato’s presentation of what Socrates supposedly taught him. It’s reasonable to suppose that Plato stuck in his own philosophy with a Socrates sticker.

Plato did not like life on earth, life in the flesh. He became known as a philosopher of Forms, by which he meant that things here are only imperfect copies of the original and perfect form of the thing somewhere else outside of time and space. For example, the reason we recognize a chair is because it has enough “chairness.” It shares the qualities of the ultimate Chair, even though the qualities of the copy couldn’t be complete. Beauty and Justice never exist perfectly here on earth, but we can still recognize them if they share enough of the attributes of Beauty and Justice.

Even for human beings, the perfect form was not something that could be experienced in our meat wrappers we call skin. Plato’s vision of the ultimate human form included a sort of intelligence that was free from external pressures and demands. A body that gets tired can’t be free, let alone one that gets hungry and dirty and that must work in order to make money to buy or fix clothes, grow and cook food, et cetera. This was part of Plato’s argument, through Socrates to his friends, about why suicide was not merely endurable, but desirable. Socrates was about to be freed from all his problems, including his people problems.

Perhaps some of Socrates’/Plato’s philosophy of forms could work with certain concepts. I don’t claim to have seen the ultimate chair. I agree that in one way we’re limited to imperfect, finite versions of what is true, good, and beautiful. Even without considering the effects of sin, as Christians we look forward to understanding a [...]