Two preachers were on the roadside with a sign that read, "The End is Near – Turn Back Now". A passing driver yelled "leave us alone you religious nuts". Then the preachers heard squealing breaks followed by a loud splash. One preacher said to the other, "I told you we should have just said "Bridge Out".
Sometimes ministers have trouble saying things in a way that others will understand. That was the issue that faced Paul as he tried to bring the gospel to the people of Athens.
We need to understand the setting here. Paul has traveled from Berea to Athens ahead of Silas and Timothy. That trip is 3 days by boat or 12 days if you walk.
David Padfield, a minister in Illinois, put together this description of what Paul might have seen.
Supposing Paul arrived by ship, he would have landed at Piraeus and would have gone north from the harbor and entered Athens by the “Double Gate” on the west side of the city, where four highways converged.
Passing through the gates, Paul would have seen the Temple of Demeter with statues of the goddess and her daughter. A little further on he would have passed the statue of Poseidon hurling his trident. Beyond this, he would have seen the statues of Healing Athena, Zeus, Apollo, and Hermes standing near the Sanctuary of Dionysus.
Assuming that Paul explored the city he could have seen the Royal Colonnade, the Metroum or Sanctuary of the Mother of the Gods with her image. In the agora, the central market, he would have seen the altar of Mercy, which stood in a grove of laurels and olives. Nearby was a stone statue of Hermes, and a bronze statue of Ptolemy. In the city were the Sanctuary of the Dioscuri, the Temple of Olympian Zeus, the Sanctuary of Dionysus at the foot of the Acropolis, the Temple of Victory Athena, and the Wingless Victory. And in Athens was the e most famous Greek temple of all - the Parthenon.
An ancient proverb declared that there were more gods in Athens than men, and wherever the Apostle looked, in niches and on pedestals, in temples and on street corners, were gods and demigods. Busts of Hermes were on every corner and statues and altars were in the courtyard of every home.
Archeologists have yet to find an altar to “An Unknown God” in Athens, but such an altar would not be a surprise and it would not be unique. Outside of Rome, on the Palatine Hill, there is an altar dedicated to “The Unknown Gods.”
Why build an altar to an Unknown God? Writing in the third century, Diogenes Laertius tells a story of a plague that took place in Athens nearly a thousand years earlier. He says that a Cretan magician ended the plague by bringing a heard of sheep to the Aeropagus and releasing them. Each sheep was followed and when it lay down, it was sacrificed to the god whose temple was in that area of the city. According to the legend, a sheep lay down in an area where no temple seemed close, so that sheep was sacrificed to An Unknown God. We don’t have any historical records of that event, but it makes a good story.
Although Athens was named for a goddess, Athena, and was the home of the Parthenon, when we think of Athens we are more likely to think about their schools of philosophy than about their religions. Our passage here mentions two of these – the Epicureans and the Stoics. Both those words have survived into our language.
The Stoics were not as lacking in passion as our current caricature of them would seem. They believed that the world, including human kind, was driven by a natural law. It was a deterministic view that assumed that people had little or no capacity to shape their destinies. It was this attitude of “you might as well accept it because you can’t change it” that gave rise to their reputation of enduring without complaint. The Stoics rejected the old gods and believed in a sort of impersonal divinity that permeated all of nature. When Paul says “In him we live and move and have our being” he was using a phrase that would have appealed to his Stoic audience. They viewed God that way.
The Epicureans had an entirely different perspective. While they paid some lip service to the idea of gods, they saw them a distant and disinterested in the affairs of people. Their philosophy was based around the idea that pleasure was the highest goal in life which explains the current connotation associated with their name. However, it is unfair to dismiss them as mere pleasure seekers. They defined “pleasure,” not as transitory thrill seeking, but as achieving a sort of peaceful enjoyment. They followed a sort of situational ethics where moral decisions were based on which choice would yield the most pleasure for the most people. There philosophy included both the idea of deferred gratification, passing up a small pleasure now for a larger pleasure later, and self-sacrifice, giving up a pleasure of mine for a larger pleasure for others.
There are fundamental problems with situational approaches to morality, and Epicurean thought was no exception. In a debate, it may be well and good to talk about seeking the greatest good or maximizing pleasure, but in the real world how does one ever make those decisions. The approaches to ethics assume that individuals have an awareness of all the consequences of all their acts so that they can accurately assess what brings the most good. And even if people had that level of understanding, would they have the time to make the calculations.
As a matter of practicality, people have to act in accordance with moral principals that are chosen in advance, not in the heat of the moment. The great ethical question is what is the source of those principals. Do they arise from the laws of nature as the Stoics believed? Do they arise from the intellect of men, as the Epicureans believed? Or are they given by a just and loving God, as Paul asserted?
Paul arrived in the city and immediately began speaking in the synagogues. This was his normal practice and was also his most fertile field. Paul was an expert in the Jewish law and was comfortable with Jewish culture. He knew that Jews had a hope for a Messiah and that he could show in Jewish scripture that Jesus was the Messiah whom they sought. It is not surprising that Paul went to the synagogues. That was his comfort zone. The thing that is surprising is that he bothered to go anyplace else.
But our passage today says that he went and spoke in the marketplace as well. I wonder how that worked. Did he strike up conversations with individuals? Did he just start preaching on some street corner? Who knows?
The important thing for us to learn here is that Paul intentionally put himself in a place where he would be in contact with people who needed to hear the message. He went out of his way. He took risks. He crossed racial and social boundaries. He did things that must have been uncomfortable. More than that, he did these things before Timothy and Silas arrived to join him. He did not wait for back-up, but struck out on his own.
The good news is that Paul made an impact and people were talking about what was said. The bad news is that he seems to have been badly misunderstood. The Greek word for resurrection is Anastasis. Our name, Anastasia, comes from that root and the word sounded like a female name in Greek as well. It seems that when Paul talked about Jesus and the resurrection in the marketplace, people thought that he was talking about some new god and goddess, Jesus and Anastasis.
While Athens was full of religions, there was a law that prohibited the introduction of new foreign gods. While it must have been unusual to enforce such a law, we can guess that Paul’s activities in the marketplace upset someone who made a complaint. So Paul was summoned before the city council to explain himself. This was not a formal trial. There does not seem to be a formal charge, a legal defense, or a verdict. This seems to have been an inquiry to determine if laws had been broken.
We can learn from Paul’s approach when speaking to the leaders of Athens. He was not defensive or apologetic, in the negative connotation of that term. He also was not belligerent or insulting. He also recognized that this conversation would be a part of a process, not a one time shot. His goal was to get these philosophers to tolerate Christian preaching and to be interested enough that they would want to learn more themselves. He didn’t dump the whole load at once.
He begins by trying to connect with them. It sounds like flattery when Paul begins speaking about them being very religious. While the gods were venerated by the populous, the philosophers who must have dominated the council were uncomfortable with them. It was a good idea to speak highly of them in public, but their teachings showed that they saw the popular conceptions of the gods as misguided and primitive. When Paul says that he sees that they are religious, he is making a statement that they can not publicly deny, but which makes them uncomfortable.
Paul’s next move is brilliant. He claims to speak for the unknown God whom they already worship. This allows Paul to completely escape any possible legal charge that he is introducing new foreign gods. He is simply telling them more about a God whom they already accept. You will notice that in the entire speech, Paul never uses the name Jesus so that this God remains unnamed. But the real genius of this approach is that it allows Paul to criticize the obvious idolatry that permeated popular religion and to characterize the true God in terms that the philosophers, particularly the Stoics, would understand.
Paul shows that it is ridiculous to think that the true God could live in a temple or be represented by a statue, but he does something more radical. He attacks the notion that there can be any foreign gods at all. If there is truly a God, that God will be the God of all people in all places at all times. God would never be divided by the same differences that divide us. This was a radical concept at the time.
Beyond that, Paul says that we all find God because God is everywhere and we are all His children. The problem is simply that our conceptions of God have been too narrow. We shape stone or gold or silver and call it god. We build houses. We have a deep inner yearning for God, but we lack the understanding to respond appropriately.
This idea is illustrated in a story is told about Helen Keller. After Helen Keller’s teacher, Anne Sullivan, had given her the names of physical objects in sign language, Miss Sullivan attempted to explain God and tapped out the symbols for the name "God." Much to Miss Sullivan’s surprise, Helen spelled back, "Thank you for telling me God’s name, Teacher, for he has touched me many times before." Helen Keller knew something of God’s signature from nature, but it was wordless. She knew about an Unknown God.
We can learn much from Paul. He was willing to take his faith to the marketplace, even when that was uncomfortable. He was informed about the beliefs of others. He sought to connect with those with whom he spoke. He was not shy about pointing out places where he disagreed with his audience, but he wasn’t disagreeable when he did it. His message was that God is the God of all, and all are welcome.
There’s an ancient document from the second century called the "Epistle to Diognetus” in which the author makes this same point about Christianity reaching across boundaries. Here is part of what it said.
The Christians are not distinguished from other men by country, by language, nor by civil institutions. For they neither dwell in cities by themselves, nor use a peculiar tongue, nor lead a singular mode of life. They dwell in the Grecian or barbarian cities, as the case may be; they follow the usage of the country in dress, food, and the other affairs of life. Yet they present a wonderful and confessedly paradoxical conduct. They dwell in their own native lands, but as strangers.
They take part in all things, as citizens; and they suffer all things, as foreigners. Every foreign country is a fatherland to them, and every native land is foreign. They marry, like all others; they have children, but they do not cast away their offspring. They have the table in common, but not wives. They are in the flesh, but do not live after the flesh. They live upon the earth but are citizens of heaven. They obey the existing laws, and excel the laws by their lives.
They love all, and are persecuted by all. They are unknown, and yet they are condemned. They are killed and are made alive. They are poor and make many rich. They lack all things, and in all things abound.
Is it any wonder that the world found that sort of faith to be contagious.
