II. Exegesis
The following
verse-by-verse account of Luke’s text establishes the truth of Cullmann’s and
Stonehouses’s view cited above:
Upon entering
Athens, Paul’s spirit stirred within him (v. 16). The word translated here as “stirred” is the
Greek word from which we get our word “paroxysm.” Athenian idolatry made Paul shudder. He was appalled at the extent to which they
worshipped the work of their own hands.
He was in a city full of idols the way a forest is full of trees. The tense of the Greek verb here indicates
that, for as long as Paul continued to behold the idols that surrounded him on
all sides, his revulsion and disgust continued.
His response was no mere passing emotion or superficial reaction, but a
deep and abiding state of mind triggered by the collision of his theological
commitments with the pagan surroundings.
What he saw, he “looked upon with abhorrence. They were to him impersonations of everything
evil; they expressed the deification of lust, cruelty, revenge, fraud, malice, and
falsehood, and the deification of those evil things, not in the far-off past,
but now at the moment enthralling and debasing the souls for which Christ died;
so his spirit was stirred, the spirit of the faithful and devout Jew, on whose
heart was written that law of God, ‘Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven
image, thou shalt not bow down to them, nor worship them.’ . . . No matter how divine the beauty, their use
was accursed” (Sadler, Acts of the Apostles, p. 328).
“What will this
babbler say?” the Greeks around him
asked (v. 18). The word for “babbler” is
“seed picker,” which is “a small finch, here standing for those gossip mongers
who scuttled about the agora picking up news, novel ideas, they could pass on
to other “chattering parasites” (Plumptre, The Acts of the Apostles, p.
27). Their description of Paul in such
derisive terms, of course, was evidence of their contempt and ridicule.
The Greeks
leveled against Paul the same sort of charge leveled earlier against
Socrates: He seemed to them to be
setting forth strange gods (v. 18).
Conversely, they seemed to Paul to do exactly the same. They were no more respectful of his views and
his God than he was of theirs. They
thought as they did about Paul because he preached Jesus and the resurrection
(v. 18), a notion they considered bizarre and impossible. They themselves called it “strange,” which
tells us that, to them, Paul’s gospel was not a mere continuation or supplement
to their pre-existing beliefs, and they told him as much. Their view of the relation between their
beliefs and Paul’s is quite distant from the view held by modern advocates of
natural theology and the way they tend to meld biblical theology and natural
theology indiscriminately together.
According to some
commentators, because the Greeks employed the plural word “gods” here, they
believed that the Anastasis (resurrection)
which Paul preached in conjunction with Jesus, was itself a separate deity (cf.
Sadler, Acts of the Apostles, p. 330) a fact indicative of the depth of
delusion to which their minds had become habituated by their worship of false
gods, and not an indication of how their false gods prepared the way for the
gospel. For bringing up these “strange things” (v. 20), Paul was brought to
Mars Hill, where he was given the chance to explain himself.
Perhaps because
he rankled at their arrogant depiction of his teachings as “certain strange
things” (which is the sort of demeaning epithet Greeks might use of barbarians
and their ideas), and because of his abiding disgust at their idolatry, Paul
addressed that idolatry first: “I see
that you are excessively superstitious” (v. 22), he said, an opening not
well-suited to win their approval. Nor
was it intended to win it. Paul was not
at all tolerant of those who rejected the resurrection: Against such views Paul was vehemently
opposed, calling those who thought that way “fools” (1 Cor. 15: 35, 36).
Paul’s use of
confrontation here is not unique for him.
A man who called even his own Galatian friends and converts fools (Gal.
3: 1), and who corrected the apostle Peter himself in front of his friends
(Gal. 2: 11ff.), would not, and did not, shy away from pointing out to the
Athenian philosophers who came to hear him speak that they were “excessively
superstitious,” a tactic fully in keeping with his clothes-rending rant against
idolatry earlier in Lystra (Acts 14: 8ff.) and his subsequent denunciation of
what passed for wisdom in Corinth (1 Cor. 1: 17 – 2: 8). His blunt, confrontational style was
sometimes considered “contemptible” (2 Cor. 10: 10). Perhaps his Greek auditors thought it so this
time.
To Luke, the
author, the degenerate condition of Greek thought and religion was
obvious: The pursuit of truth in Athens
had shrunk to nothing more than a frivolous chase for novelty, he says (v.
21). With that polluted and shrunken
context as the background, Luke explains that, to Paul, Athenian religion was a
religion of ignorance (v. 23). But Paul
was there to dispel their ignorance, and he told them so. He was there to declare to them the truth
about the God of whom they were so shamefully ignorant, the God of Whom both
the Greeks and their renowned philosophers were ignorant. To Paul, their religion was characterized by
“ignorant reverence” (v. 23), and ignorant reverence is not real worship, and
it is not knowing God.
Naturally, his
explanation was not well received. As
Plumptre explains, “That any human teacher should have power to proclaim that
‘Unknown God’ as making Himself known to men, was what neither Epicureans nor
Stoics had dreamt of” (Plumptre, The Acts of the Apostles, p. 284).
But to Paul, the
case was completely different. He knew
what they did not know and could not know:
He knew God. He knew God because
he knew Jesus and the resurrection -- without which God remains unknowable and
unknown.
Of course, Paul
was not always so. When confronted by
the Lord Himself while on the way to Damascus, the first thing Paul asked was
“Who are you?” (Acts 9: 5). He had to
ask because, like the Athenians to whom he now speaks, he simply did not
know. He did not know even though he was
“circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of
Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee” (Phil. 3: 5),
none of which brought knowledge of God, and all of which his Athenian hearers
lacked.
In addition to
attacking their ignorance, Paul attacks (1) their temples, (2) their worship,
and (3) their arrogance. Surrounded on
all sides as he was by buildings dedicated to false gods, Paul told the
Athenian philosophers that God does not dwell in temples made with hands (v.
24), something he heard personally from Stephen, the Christian proto-martyr,
over whose execution Paul had presided (Acts 7: 48). In his statement against their temples, Paul
employs the words of Isaiah 42:5. Then,
echoing Psalm 50: 9-12, Paul further insisted that God is not worshipped with
the work of human hands, as if He needed anything (v. 25). Interestingly, the word Paul uses here for
“worship” he also uses in Romans 1: 25, in reference to worshiping the creature
more than the Creator, and in 2 Thess. 2: 4, in reference to worshiping the man
of lawlessness. Finally, Paul tells them
that God has made of one blood all nations (v. 26) -- a view to which no
self-regarding Athenian could consent.
The distinction between the barbarians and themselves seemed too
radical, too obvious, and too persistent to overlook. They thought that overlooking that
distinction was to think of themselves as no better than benighted slaves. But to Paul, these alleged distinctions were
meaningless (Gal. 3: 28). He undercuts
their arrogance by including them in the same boat as all other peoples and all
other nations. By explaining that God
had made all nations of one stock, and had set their national and historical
limits, Paul was drawing upon the Genesis account of creation and, it seems,
upon Deuteronomy 32: 8 and Job 12: 23.
Paul then
re-emphasized his contention that under God we all are in the same
condition. God has made us all one, Paul
said, and He has providentially laid out his plan for the nations -- where they
should live and when they should flourish -- as well as the reason for it
all: that under His guidance we might
grope after Him (vv. 26, 27). That is,
God controls the history of all nations.
Because He does, human history is a school, a vale of soul making, in
which we all must detect the impossibility of ever satisfying the longings and
“gropings” (v. 27) of the human heart by means of the gods of our own making. They should “seek the Lord,” he told them (v.
27), as well as how that seeking and groping ought to be done (vv. 30,
31). By explaining to his hearers some
of the things God does in human history, Paul is distancing himself quite
radically from the Epicurean god, who is detached and aloof from human life, a
god absorbed in nothing so much as sloth and cosmic disregard.
Having hit them
twice, once with their own ignorance and once with their likeness to all other
persons under God, Paul hits them again, this time with their own writers: Quoting Aratus (from Paul’s own home region
of Cilicia), and perhaps Cleanthes’ hymn to Jupiter, Paul asserts that we all
live in the light of God’s omnipresence, because we all are his children (vv.
28, 29). But because God is Who He is,
and because God does what He does, to worship humanly devised images and idols
is ignorant and irrational (v. 29). Yet,
despite all their providentially bestowed advantages, they were still ignorant. In His mercy and patience, however, God
momentarily overlooked their universal ignorance and postponed judgment. He has done so, Paul tells them, with the
purpose of eliciting their repentance (vv. 30, 31). Had God not mercifully and momentarily
overlooked their ignorance, his justice long ago would have crushed them under
the weight of their own idolatry. Now,
absent their repentance, nothing was left but judgment. The historical evidence of God’s plan in all
this is the resurrection from the dead of the very man who will be universal
judge (v. 31).
At the mention
again of bodily resurrection from the dead, the Greek philosophers had had
enough. They mocked. They subjected Paul to derision.
Paul left.
From Athens, Paul
travelled to Corinth, where his stance toward the alleged wisdom of Greek
philosophy remained the same as it was in Athens and before: antagonism and opposition – a stance notably
distant from the theological implementation and apologetic incorporation
practiced by our contemporary devotees of natural theology.
Paul
knows pagan literature and thought.
Because he does, he can use against the pagans themselves. But to say that he knows pagan literature and
thought is not to say he endorses it or that he agrees with it. Using it against them means only that he knows
their weaknesses in ways they do not. He
can beat them on their home court and by their own rules. He defeats them with their own tools. He knows the ways in which their paganism
cannot succeed and cannot be consistent even on its own terms. He exploits those failings against them, as
he does in Acts 17. He points out the
self-refuting character of their thought, which is not to endorse it. He is not saying that their thoughts lead to
God. The net result of pagans using
pagan thought is that God remains unknown.
To know Him means to understand Jesus and the resurrection, which to
pagans is folly but to Paul is the deep wisdom form before the dawn of time, to
echo C. S. Lewis in a different but related context.
III. Summary
The general tone
and tenor of Paul’s Areopagus speech was one of condemnation and
opposition. In Corinth, that tone and
tenor continued. Paul was not looking
for common ground. He was not building
bridges. He was tearing down
strongholds. Pagan beliefs and practices
were his target, not the object of his affirmation. The perverse beliefs of the Greeks are what
separated Paul from them. Their beliefs
were not a truth they and he both owned, but the foolish and wicked errors he
intended to correct. He did not reach
out to them on the basis of their beliefs.
He condemned their beliefs. They
returned the favor.
Paul knew the
options that fallen life gives us in this regard: Either we worship God or we worship things
that are not God. To worship God,
requires the mediation of Jesus Christ -- a mediation both of knowledge and of
salvation -- of which the Greeks philosophers had neither. In order to fill that staggering lack, Paul
determined to know nothing among them except Jesus Christ and Him
crucified. In this regard, just as it
was with Jesus Himself, nothing about the god of Aristotle or Plato crossed
Paul’s lips. At the shocking sight of
idolatry surrounding him on all sides, Paul’s spirit convulsed and wretched
within him, just as ours ought to do within us.
But rather than
wretch and convulse, some Christian theologians and apologists attach
themselves to Greek errors both for apologetic purposes and for theological
method. Paul did not. Rather than attaching his preaching and his
apologetics to their idolatries, he pointed out to them their superstition and
their ignorance and, in order to heal what ailed them, he directed them to
Christ and the resurrection.
Paul’s speech was
iconoclastic. Because the Athenian
marketplace reflected the hearts of those who made it and who frequented it,
Paul cast down their gods, not from pedestals made of marble, but from
pedestals in the human heart. Paul knew
that their invocation of an unknown god was a sham and a pose. He knew it was a suppression of the truth
(Rom. 1: 23). It was an evasion of their
obligations before the one God Who is.
It was a substitution of a false god for the real God. It was not innocent. It was as wicked as it was false. Suppression, evasion, substitution: It was what Cornelius Van Til said it was:
“culpable ignorance” (Van Til, Paul at Athens, p. 11). In Paul’s own words: “Where is the wise: where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this
world? For after that in the wisdom of
God the world by wisdom knew not God it pleased God through the foolishness of
the preaching to save them that believe.” (1 Cor. 1: 20, 21).
Do not miss
Paul’s point: The wisdom of God decreed
that, by means of the wisdom of the world, the world could not know God. Natural theology simply does not lead to
knowledge of God. To say otherwise is to
oppose both Paul and God. Human wisdom,
whether Aristotle’s or someone else’s, is more than merely challenged; it is
exposed, debunked, and rejected. The
Greeks, known for their supposed wisdom, could not locate even its beginning
(Psalm 111: 10).
Rather than
endorsing their natural theology, from verses 24 onward, Paul used it as a
weapon against them, resisting them and refuting them, sometimes with their own
words and ideas. He directed them to
seek God (v. 27), implying quite clearly that by their philosophy and religion
they had missed Him. Paul told his Greek
listeners that, despite their excessive religiosity (v. 22), they failed to
know God, and that they were ignorant (vv. 23, 30), in response to which he
placed before them the resurrected Jesus as Lord. Concerning Jesus, Paul mentioned that He is
fully human and, as such, is subject to death, and that he is Judge of the
world (v. 31). Apart from knowing that,
they could not and did not know God. No
one can. They were estranged from God,
and, by rejecting Paul’s message, remained so.
They demonstrated that amusement and novelty (v. 21) are not the same as
the pursuit of Truth. When the Truth
Himself appeared in Paul’s speech, they mocked it and turned away (v. 32). That was where their natural theology led
them. That is where it always leads,
away from God. Nevertheless, despite
their failing and their rejection of the truth, even when it was proclaimed
directly before them, the Greeks thought they offered God authentic
worship. Paul, in order to puncture
their bubble of delusion, highlighted their ignorance. By limiting himself here primarily to
highlighting their ignorance, Paul declined to trace out in fuller details the
whole litany of their evils and errors the way he did in Romans 1.
According to F.
F. Bruce, Paul “does not argue from ‘first principles’ of the kind that formed
the basis of various systems of Greek philosophy; his exposition and defense of
his message are founded upon the biblical revelation and they echo the thought,
and at times the very language, of the Old Testament writings. Like the biblical revelation itself, his
speech begins with God the creator of all, continues with God the sustainer of
all, and concludes with God the judge of all” (Bruce, Paul: Apostle of the
Heart Set Free, p. 239). To be sure,
Paul finds his preaching text in an altar dedication. But that they know they do not know God, and
that Paul knows they do not know God, is hardly an endorsement of their natural
theology. Rather, their ignorance offers
Paul a chance to explain to them the history of salvation, which, in this
speech, finds its climax in Christ, just as it does in Paul’s epistles.
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