The (Not So) Unknown God

'Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said,

‘For we too are his offspring.’

Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”'

--Acts 17: 22-31

I'd like to take some time this week to talk about this important moment from the Acts of the Apostles.  Last week we heard in one of our Sunday readings about the death of Stephen, who is regarded as the first martyr of the Christian faith.  His death was, at least in some small way, attributed to a young man named Saul, who had launched a fierce campaign against the Followers of the Way.  This campaign was halted, though, after an encounter with the living Christ along the road to Damascus.  Following that experience, Saul repented of the wrongs he had done and become a full-fledged member of the very community he was trying to stop.  By the time we find him this week, Saul has even taken a new name, Paul, and for much of the rest of the book of Acts we hear his exploits preaching and teaching among the Gentiles; that is, among non-Jewish folks.  One of the most heated arguments in this early church was whether one had to be Jewish in order to be considered a Follower of the Way—folks like Saint Peter insisted that only Jews could be permitted, though he later softened on that, while Paul felt that God was opening the message of salvation originally given through Moses and the prophets of Israel to all people through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  So Paul makes it his mission to share this good news with folks who have no understanding of the Scriptures and no connection whatsoever to the stories and beliefs of his own people, and what better place to do that than in Athens.

An Eastern icon of Paul preaching to the Athenians.

As a lot of you know my wife Kristen and I honeymooned in Greece after we got married two years ago, and the first place we spent time was Athens.  We were both struck by the fact that Athens could be described as the original metropolis—for lack of a better turn of phrase.  Other cities would try to copy what Athens had in terms of architecture, art, philosophy, religion, food—first Rome, then Paris, then New York—but none can really beat the original.  Athens had it all, and still does.  If you wanted to have a conversation with someone about things that really mattered, this is the place you wanted to be.  It was a big reason why we wanted to go there for our honeymoon.

We find Paul, then, standing at the Areopagus, a small hill, also called Mars Hill for the Latin name of the God of war.  It stands in the shadow of the Acropolis, the great hill in Athens that serves as the home of the Parthenon, the huge temple of Athena that was the jewel of the architectural reforms of King Pericles in the 5^th century BC.  This is where meaningful conversations happened in Athens, and Paul finds himself right in the middle of one. 

We can learn a few things from the way that Paul engages with the Athenians.  First of all, there is no sense of proselytizing on Paul’s part, he isn’t trying to convince the Athenians that they have been wrong all this time and that he has all the answers.  He acknowledges right out of the gate that they are a religious people; in fact, religion was so much a part of their daily lives that it was something they took for granted.  No one really denied the existence of the gods, but they were so commonplace that they were often pushed to the sidelines when it came to conversations about “real” issues—something that the Athenians seem to share with many in our culture today. 

Paul starts with the positive, relating to his audience.  He commends them for their deep sense of devotion, but he also points out something interesting:  they hold the gods in such high devotion that they elevate them to a place of unknowing, as they partake in the spiritual flavor of their culture but can’t really name a core belief, hence the altar to an “Unknown God,” which was a catch-all, or a sort of spiritual insurance policy, to make sure that the Athenians were honoring ALL the gods, even the ones that they didn’t actually know.  There’s an acknowledgment of the reality of the divine, but there is little desire to be in relationship with the divine, let alone to actually believe the divine would want to be in relationship with them.  This is what Paul seeks to undercut, to let them know that the God they call Unknown is, in fact, known, as in this is the God who created all things, loves all things, and has made all of humanity siblings in one great big family.

Notice that Paul never mentions Jesus in any of this.  He isn’t concerned with winning anyone to his side, but rather of simply letting people know the truth that he knows, which is that we are all united one to another in this God.  As Marcus Borg points out in his book The Heart of Christianity, it is the kind of faith that imagines God as the encompassing Spirit in whom everything that is, is.  The universe is not separate from God but is in God.  Paul Tillich called this the "Ground of All Being." 

This is Paul’s point.  It’s not an argument about the validity of a certain doctrine or discipline.  It’s not a theological discussion on the merits of Christ’s presence in a post-Resurrection world.  It’s a pretty simple point, one that cuts through all of the philosophical jargon of Paul’s day and, one would hope, cuts through the dominant philosophies of our day:  conservative Christianity, secular humanism, spiritual-but-not-religious, neo-nationalism, etc. etc.  Paul meets the people where they are and in doing so brings the light of Christ into their lives without ever mentioning his name!  I wonder what might happen if we were able to cut through the static of our own personal and even communal philosophies to just get down to the reality of the presence of God in our midst.  What might happen then?

When we were in Athens we climbed up the Acropolis to the Parthenon and on the way down stopped on the Areopagus and took in the awesome reality that Paul stood in this place and talked with the folks here about God.  As we stood there we noticed something quite remarkable.  To our left was a group of folks that we determined were mostly Episcopalian—one of them a bishop—all white folks and presumably pretty well off financially.  They were in Athens for a conference on the church and climate change.  Just in front of them was a man, presumably homeless, with clothes falling off of him, who wandered up to a trash can and picked out a half-drunk cup of iced coffee.  As he proceeded to finish it, we noticed that nobody seemed to pay him any mind, and even when he walked away none of the church folks to our left seemed phased at all by the moment.  We wondered:  could that have been Jesus?  Could the presence of God have broken through in that moment, also?  And is this what it means for us to be church?  To be so consumed by our own worldviews, by our own philosophies, wants, and desires, that we are blind to the presence of God and the needs of God’s people right in front of us?  Are we eager to continue to seek out God in our midst or are we convinced that we’ve already found God? 

Kristen and I at the Areopagus in Athens on our honeymoon in 2018.

What the Athenians had become were a people so religious that they had literally put their gods on their shelf, in the place of honor in their homes, and left them there.  We do the same any time we think that we have figured God out, or any time we get bogged down in doctrines and disciples and forget the spirit of why we do what we do or what it even is that we do.  This leaves us blind to the reality that God is, in fact, present everywhere that we turn: on the Areopagus that day Paul preached and on that day the homeless man finished that coffee in front of those church folks.  Out there now in a hurting world that is too often ignored, leaving God to go unnoticed. If we have eyes to see and hearts that long for that relationship, then this God will be known to us.