15^th June 2011

Acts 17:22-31 (Sunday 29 May 2011)

Rev Clive Skewes, Assistant Minister at St John's UCA Mt Waverley

When Paul came to Athens it was 500 years after the glory days of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Pericles. The current bunch of philosophers just wanted to argue everything without ever coming to any conclusion. That is rather like many moderns who like to see doubt as the correct attitude towards all things and congratulate themselves on being in the middle on vital issues. The truth is they are really nowhere. No battle has ever been won by spectators.

Paul found the all-pervasive idolatry of the city too disturbing to keep silent. Athens was famous for its temples that were great works of art.
There was no other place on earth where so many idols were exhibited. And they were indeed beautiful, but despite its outward beauty idolatry is disturbing because an idol in itself is an empty thing. To base your life on it can only lead to futility and ruin. In the ancient world there was also an occult association with idol worship, a snare for the unwary. An idol is a poor substitute for the living God; further it is an expression of turning away from God. So because Paul was provoked he not only reasoned in the synagogues with Jews and Gentile Jews about God and especially about what God had done in the life, suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, he also engaged in the market place with those who happened to be there.

Soon a group of philosophers paused, argued with him, conferred among themselves and took him to a meeting of the Areopagus, the Council of leading citizens. Five hundred years earlier this Council had tried and unjustly condemned Socrates. Though this was not now a law court, there was some similarity with what happened to Socrates. The aim of the Council was now intellectual entertainment at the expense of this fellow Paul whom they disdained as a babbler: a purveyer of half-understood scraps of second-hand learning.

Paul's audience was very hard to preach to. It contained the Epicureans who believed everything that existed had evolved. They did not have a concept of creation. They believed the world came about by an accident of atoms which were in perpetual motion from the beginning. Aristotle's followers held 'that the world was from eternity, and everything always was from eternity, and everything always was what now is'.

Then there were the Stoics who believed God was the world's soul which indwelt all things. God was in all men, all men were brothers. Living in harmony with nature brought happiness, and human affairs were governed by fate. Many Stoics were men of high moral principle.

The Athenians got more than they bargained for. In their arrogance, as guardians of the old order of nations, they failed to discern either the depth or the strategy or Spirit of Christ's hand-picked Apostle to the Gentiles/Nations. He was a man personally tutored by God to change the course of history at one of its critical turning points. Here was a cosmopolitan, Diaspora Jew from Tarsus, a Greek-speaking centre of learning and a Roman colony. He embodied the new order. In his teaching were those seeds which would later evolve into that synthesis of Jerusalem (revelation, spirituality and morality), Athens (intellectual and
artistic) and Rome (law, government and practical affairs) which gave birth to the modern Western world. This suggests one good reason for including sound and careful instruction in the Christian faith in the education of our citizenry.

Now this speech of Paul has often been taken as an example of how the Church should befriend the culture in which we live and build bridges to it. However, closer inspection of the whole passage reveals Paul, though courteous and respectful and well-acquainted with their culture, did not set out to befriend this alien culture. For one thing he didn't have time to do that, nor was he trying to build bridges. Remember why he spoke when and as he did. He was provoked/outraged by the idolatry of the Athenians.
In that culture there was not only the worship of the classical gods of Greek mythology, there was also a common belief that behind every natural phenomenon - trees, animals, rocks, streams, clouds, and so on - there were spirits, gods or demons who needed to be worshipped and placated.
Will Durant says that the ancients believed the air was so thick with spirits and demons that one could not spear a blade of grass between them.

The problem - as always for polytheistic people - was which was the right god to follow and pray to, which to appease when things went wrong? Had they covered all bases? Was there perhaps some deity they had failed to take into account? So just to make sure some one had erected an altar to the unknown god. This would give Paul the opening for a telling point.

Paul used the existence of this altar to go straight to the rotting foundation of classical pagan thought and culture. On the most important possible point of knowledge, the Athenians were forced to admit their ignorance, in a public monument! Their altar to the unknown God!

Perhaps it was built as an insurance against the wrath of gods the Athenians did not yet know. Or perhaps it expressed a cynicism aptly summed up by Gibbons, and most relevant today for a church tempted to flirt with the spirit of the age: the myths of the gods were, to the common people, equally true; to the philosophers equally false; to the politicians; equally useful. A modern echo is the claim there is no absolute truth, which is often used to undermine confidence in God, godliness and morality. Of course that is a self-refuting claim. How do you know there is no absolute claim? Why do you accept as universally true a claim that denies the possibility of universal truths? And is it not intolerant to impose this claim on others in the name of 'tolerance'?
Would it not be wiser and humbler to accept that 'the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth' is a desirable goal, one we strive towards by being carefully critical and open-minded as we handle truth claims, investigations and arguments?

Paul makes the decisive point: 'Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.' That is, the key to the field of Knowledge is Revelation. Revelation does not come from within. It comes from without. It is a word, the Word, which creates a crisis point. The Gospel is not one of the many spiritual novelties which capture the world's interest just because they are novelties. The Gospel is an utterly and really strange new thing because it does not belong in this category of spiritual novelties. It cannot be derived from the world of the philosophers. So Paul does not try to understand the world of the Athenian philosophers from its own view point and overcome it from within. Yes, he uses their own poets to expose the foolishness of their superstitions and to confirm particular biblical truths. But he does not say the Bible confirms the truth of their religion, nor that their poets' words were truth equal to the Bible. He is showing them even their own poets had some knowledge (though corrupted) of the God he is speaking to them about: the God they do not know. He uses their words to dismantle their own views.
Their poets are simply making a similar point to the revelatory word of the Scripture. To put it another way, he is not saying: 'Through your religion you can see the Gospel,' but 'Through this Gospel you can be enabled to see and see through all things, including your own superstitions.'

The substance of Paul's proclamation is powerful, and pregnant with implications for community order and national life:

* God - unlike the ivory and gold statue of the mythical Athena in the Parthenon up on the Acropolis - does not live in temples we can make with our own hands. Nor does he need our rituals and gifts or offerings to keep him happy. For God is infinitely sufficient, good and at peace in himself.
Instead it is God who made us and gave us everything we have. Hence our dependence on him. And our worship and service of this God is not based on fear, but love and simple gratitude, as we reflect his image to the whole of the created order.

* From one man, God created the nations setting their times and seasons and their places. This contradicted the Epicureans who inferred that the world and humankind was not made by God. Because they held that belief they were in ignorance about the purpose of existence and of the existence of the nations (the ethnoi). Paul reveals God made the different peoples so that 'they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him'.
That is, the different people groups were created to foster godliness, another reason for the Church to keep the Christian message in the public square and put the point of view of Scripture to our political representatives. The implication is that when nations forget that the primary purpose of their existence is to foster godliness and choose instead to make their greatest good power, prestige, selfish pleasure and wealth, as has happened to the secularised West, they walk down a road to ruin. Idols do not just come in the form of statuary surrounded by scandalous legends. Such foolishness always leads to futility.

* In the past, God had overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to turn away from their follies and superstitions and return to him - to repent. For he has set a day in which he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all people by raising him from the dead.

* This command is universal but it is not arbitrary. It is not a demand for blind obedience. God has offered proof to us by raising Jesus from the dead. For Paul's hearers the contemporary evidence was over 500 eyewitnesses, most of whom were still alive when the record was made so it was possible to check back with them and, secondly, the continued manifestation of resurrection power - in manifold ways - in the Church to this very day.

* It follows from these words that human culture is not autonomous or
absolute: there is a set day for judgement of the world with perfect justice. Communities and their citizens are accountable before their Creator for truth, right and justice.

* Since we are created from one ancestor, there is no justification for nationally or racially motivated oppression, aggression, exploitation or prejudice.

How did Paul's audience react? When you speak out as God's man or woman will you inevitably be recognised and acknowledged? Does the truth always and inevitably win out? Campbell Morgan points out that when they heard of the resurrection of the dead some sneered and others postponed. Human beings are the same in every age. These are not dead things at which we are looking. When did they begin their mockery and decide for postponement? At the point of the resurrection? No, that was the excuse.
It was at the point of moral application. While Paul discussed around their altar the doctrine of an unknown God, while he quoted their poets, even though their poets contradicted their philosophies, they listened; but when he said, 'Now he commands people that they should all everywhere
repent: inasmuch as he has appointed a day, in which he will judge the world in righteousness,' they mocked. People often find an intellectual excuse for refusing to be moral when God demands morality. Paul, discussing an altar and a theory of a God, will fail, as the Church often fails today, unless he says: 'But now ... repent.' That is the point where people begin to mock and postpone.

So was his sermon a failure? Luke records that on the day there was also another result. Dionysius, Damaris and others believed. Later Church history tells us there were wonderful results in Athens. In the next century Athens gave to the Christian Church Publius, Quadratus, Aristides, Athenagoras, and others, bishops and martyrs; and in the third century the Church was peaceable and pure. In the fourth century the Christian schools of Athens gave to the Christian Church Basil and Gregory. People cannot entirely mock the Christian fact out of existence. People cannot entirely postpone. The Apostle must pass on, his work being done, but he always leaves behind him Dionysius and Damaris. Christ always wins a vantage ground. (Campbell Morgan: The Acts of the Apostles)

Sources -

Campbell Morgan: The Acts of the Apostles

GE Mullings: Notes on The Mars Hill Strategy

Let Us Reason Ministries - Paul's Mars Hill appeal