new Delphi

 

Luke is a culturally Greek follower of Jesus, writing for a culturally Greek audience.

If you lived in that world, and you needed to make a big decision, a decision that either way would change your life, and especially any decision that would impact upon other people, you would first go and seek guidance from the Oracle at Delphi. There, the Pythia (priestess) would enter the inner chamber, sit on a special seat, and breathe in the spirit of Python. In a trance state, she would utter oracles, foretelling the future in intelligible but ambiguous sentences.

When Luke recounts the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, he describes the event in such a way as to make the explicit claim that the Church — wherever it was found — was the new Delphi.

Two thousand years later, we still seek oracles to help us make significant decisions. Baby Boomers tend to take counsel from trusted family members or friends. Generation X (their younger selves would be amazed to hear) are most likely to seek the advice of an expert (including podcasts). Millennials, many of whom describe themselves as ‘spiritual, not religious,’ advocate meditation and mindfulness, and voraciously consume self-help books. Generation Z, the youngest adults, look to Web 2.0 content creators and social media influencers, with a marked and growing divide between young women — largely left-leaning and environmentally aware — and young men — in large numbers turning to the right, and influencers who argue that feminism has destroyed society.

Whatever our preferred source of counsel, we are all prone to confirmation bias. In this regard, too, we are no different from our ancestors. The oracles were notoriously ambiguous and interpreted according to the supplicant’s own desire. The legendary king Croesus enquired of the Pythia whether he should go to war with his neighbour. On being told that if he crossed a certain river he would destroy a great empire, he took this as a good omen, only to have his army defeated and his own great empire destroyed. The oracle was both an accurate and ambiguous foretelling. All too often, we suffer a similar fate, at our own hand.

In depicting the Church as the new Delphi, Luke foretells a community where the Spirit of God speaks in intelligible utterances that are weighed by men and women, youth and old age, together, as the best guarantor of not falling into the trap of Croesus. This takes us beyond our own generational, or gendered, preferences, into a more rounded discernment, as we recognise the gift that God has given to each one, as God sees fit.

Too often, my own charismatic evangelical tradition has determined what to do and sought the Holy Spirit to baptise our own interpretation. Whereas God, being a god who speaks but who does not coerce or violate human will, most often speaks in ambiguous, rather than deterministic, utterances. And then invites us to bear witness to what unfolds.

The crowd gathered at Pentecost, who heard the great things of God declared in their own native languages, asked, ‘What does this [utterance, phenomenon] desire to be?’ What does the future that is being foretold wish to become? This is less a question seeking definite knowledge and more a question paying attention to whatever will unfold.

What would it look like in practice for the local church to be such an attention-paying community of prophetic priests and priestesses available to the wider communities in which we are set? To be the new Delphis?