The Unknown God

Introduction

In Acts 17, Paul in Athens delivers his Areopagus sermon before the city’s philosophers, pointing to an altar inscribed ‘to an unknown god’. Revd. Mark Fletcher explores how Paul engaged a sceptical, sophisticated culture — and argues our own society has moved past mere ignorance to worship an unremembered God, one it has quietly turned its back on.

There is something very special about the great cities of this world. I don’t know if you have a favourite, maybe New York or Rome or Paris or London, but we are reflecting today on perhaps the greatest of them all and the experience of Paul in the great city of Athens. There’s something really significant about cities. They have this kind of energy, this creativity. They are often a melting pot of cultures and innovation. I think they matter. And Christianity was foundationally an urban phenomenon. It was born in Jerusalem, and it spread from city to city in the ancient world throughout the world. And it might just be that this place, this city of Athens, is the most significant of all. It is one of the oldest cities. It is the birthplace of democracy. It is the home of Plato and Aristotle and Socrates. And its legacy has been fought over by every empire that has passed through, from the Persians to the Romans and the Ottomans and even the British.

And you will know, I’m sure, that its skyline is dominated by a momentous building called the Acropolis. In fact, the Acropolis is a vast complex of temples to various gods, including most famously of all, the Parthenon, one of the wonders of the world, and which would have in Paul’s day housed a monumental 13-metre high golden ivory statue of the goddess Athena, from which the city takes his name. But far from as I would be, or perhaps you would be, being awestruck. Did you hear Paul was actually slightly troubled by the whole experience? He was greatly distressed, says verse 16, that the city was full of idols. And I don’t think that’s just Paul being oversensitive. I think actually in the experience of it, most of us would find the really competitive world of sort of competing pagan gods in the ancient world quite a sort of bewildering experience.

And it is into this maelstrom that Paul brings the message of Jesus. He brings it to a city which I suspect he thought may well have been the greatest stage of all. There must have been a sense that if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. And however, rather predictably, the initial response to his preaching is somewhat dismissive. They said, verse 18, What is this babbler trying to say? He seems to be advocating foreign gods. But despite that, there is here a genuine interest in significant new ideas, and Paul is taken by some Stoic and Epicurean philosophers to the Areopagus, and you can still go there. You can still stand in the same place where Paul would have stood, surrounded by the intelligentsia of Athens, where he was asked to give an account of his message.

And what we have here is, I think, hugely significant, because what it offers is a very different type of sermon than we really have recorded anywhere else in the book of Acts. And it sort of offers us a basis for engaging respectfully but incisively with a sort of sophisticated intellectual non-Christian culture. And the first thing that is really noticeable about it is the extent to which he has observed and listened carefully to them and to their ideas and to their poetry. For Paul, all good engagement with people begins by listening very carefully to what they think and have to say. The great Swiss theologian Karl Barth used to say that he prepared his sermons with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other. And I think there’s a really important process of listening that takes place there. I think places where our culture does its thinking matter. And so good cinema and good literature are places where we can listen well to what’s going on.

And Paul is, on many levels, very sort of respectful of them. He recognises the seriousness with which they take the question of God. Verse 22, he says, People of Athens, I see that in every way you are very religious. But he isn’t overawed or intimidated by this august place, and he sees that for all of their wisdom and learning, there is something missing, and that they know that there is something missing. So in verse 23, he says this, As I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription, to an unknown God. And so you are ignorant of the very thing that you worship, and this is what I am going to proclaim to you. And my suspicion is that it is true now as it was then, that for all of our culture’s knowledge and wisdom, for all of our access to literally all of the information you could ever want in the palm of your hand at any given moment, we have not found the answer. And deep down, we know that.

Paul then goes on to make his argument, but instead of arguing from the Bible, as he almost always does in previous examples, he actually argues from logic here, which is significant. And so verse 24, he says, The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples made by human hands. Essentially, he is arguing that their view of God does not make sense. It is far too small that the God who spoke the universe into existence and made everything cannot be contained by temples and does not need our sacrifices or our insignificant offerings. No, by contrast, says Paul, God has given you everything that you have. Verse 25, He’s not served by human hands as if he needed anything because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else.

True religion is not an attempt to manipulate the gods to get what you want. True religion is the possibility of actually knowing God for yourself. Verse 27, God did this so that we would seek him and perhaps reach out to him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. I love this thing. I love this thing of sort of stepping into the heart of culture and engaging with it. And Paul has walked into the kind of philosophical, academic heart of the ancient world. And essentially what he’s arguing is what real philosophy should be. You know, philosophy means the love of wisdom. It is philo-sophos. But I think that the problem with so much of that which passes for philosophy is that the sort of appearance of being clever, the appearance of wisdom becomes more important than actual wisdom.

And I don’t know if you spotted, but Luke, who wrote this account, is actually a bit dismissive of the whole project. So in verse 21, it says, all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their whole time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas. And I thought, gosh, that reminds me of, I don’t know, everybody listening to podcasts all the time. We are all listening to these new ideas, but Paul would say, what are you doing with them? Are you following them to the logical conclusion? And perhaps genuine intellectual inquiry is actually rare because it requires humility. It requires a willingness to accept when you don’t know or that you’re wrong. And perhaps we don’t find God because we don’t want to face the consequences of finding God. If we say that we seek the truth, we need to be willing to live with the consequences of the truth. And God is not a tame God. He requires our lives and our hearts.

But that phrase, he is not far from each one of us, is wonderful and really important, actually. It’s, I think, one of the defining things about Christian theology. We talk about transcendence and immanence. So transcendence is the God who is above the heavens, but immanence is a God who is nevertheless not far from each of us. He is sort of just out of reach. And if we ask and seek in humility and faith, he will allow himself to be found by us. So Paul is sort of challenging their failure to kind of follow through the intellectual journey to its conclusion. He even uses some of their own poets to challenge them, and his challenge is that for all their apparent wisdom, for all of their learning, they simply haven’t followed through the logic of their position to its right conclusion. And you could say the same in our day, that for all of our knowledge there is a tendency to not really follow through the implications of the things that we know.

I think our society is not like them, defined by their religiousness, but by our irreligiousness, by our rejection of God. But has our rejection of God made us happier or built stronger or more resilient societies? Has our moral revisionism set us free or made us better or wiser people? And has all of our technological achievement and economic sense, that success meant that we’re more in control of the world or less? It seems that we are further than ever from knowing what it means to be human or what our lives are for. No, I think the conclusion of our world is that without God we are isolated and lonely and struggle for meaning or even hope in the world. The great apostle Paul goes to the intellectual heart of his culture and proclaims to them the unknown God. But for you and I, I think what we proclaim to our world is not the unknown God but the unremembered God, the God of our forefathers, the God whom our society has turned its back on.

And the apostle leaves the greatest challenge of all until last. In verse 31, he says, For God has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed, and he has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead. Paul treats them with the greatest respect, but in the end he doesn’t soften the challenge. It is not enough to simply talk about our ideas. We need to follow through to where they lead, and real philosophy, a real love of wisdom, is about knowing the truth and allowing that truth to change us. If there is a God, it matters more than anything else. That needs to be the thing which shapes our lives and defines who we are.

But also I think we should be confident, inspired by Paul, that we can engage with our world and our culture unafraid, because people are made in the image of God. And when we do this, when we engage respectfully and treat people with dignity and honour, and yet are also brave enough to challenge error and complacency, then God is at work in that. He does open people’s eyes, soften people’s hearts, allow people’s lives to change. Because he is not far from each of us. And if in humility and faith we will seek him, if we reach out, he can be found. And so we say to ourselves and to our friends and neighbours, knock and the door will be open to you. Seek and you will find. Ask and it shall be given to you. But remember that when you find the truth, the truth requires a response. Are we willing to bow the knee before the only one who is worthy of our lives and our worship? Amen.