An Unknown God - Easter 6 2023
Paul at the Areopagus - Acts 17:22-31
One thing unlikely to be worth preaching about is the historicity of Paul’s Areopagus speech. Scholars do not see this as a stenographic record (how would such a thing exist anyway) but, in the respectable tradition of Greek historiography, a plausible and suitable speech composed by the author of our work for the character and the situation. If this makes you uncomfortable, think of (pre-modern) portrait paintings; of course a sense of the person is to be conveyed, but success is not limited to a sort of objective accuracy. Just as for visual art, a speech set in an ancient historical work is composed to meet a criterion of truth that depends not on whether Paul used these particular words in this order, but on the appropriateness and plausibility of the speech.
Again, however, that recognition is not “good news” to be preached, it’s a bit of context that should help the preacher understand the nature of Luke’s art and expound the text accordingly. It means, for instance, not attempting to psychologize Paul when preaching this; as an aside, I would suggest it is almost never legitimate for narrative literary texts, even though it seems to be widely practiced by preachers who should know better.
Paul’s Areopagus’ speech—or Luke’s Paul’s Areopagus speech—is a fascinating message to this Athenian audience, and to us as well, about the nature of religious belief and practice in relation to the person of Jesus.
Paul was not the only person to observe how religious the Athenians were; it was a widely recognized trait of the city. There are however two quite distinct pictures of Athenian religiosity being presented here, even though we may need help to see them, given the differences with our own. First comes Paul’s acknowledgement of the ostentatious, traditional, and very material religion of altars, statues, and temples; this had also been the first thing to appear in this Athens narrative as a whole, when Paul arrived and was immediately “distressed” at the number of “idols” (17:16).
That narrative prologue to the speech, which we won’t hear Sunday (unless you want to extend the reading—try going back even just to v. 16 and you will in fact get a better sense of the whole) then has Paul encountering Stoic and Epicurean debaters, who take him to be a dabbler (“babbler”, NRSV says, which isn’t quite the idea) and “a proclaimer of foreign divinities” (v.18). While the Stoics were likely quite pious in terms of traditional religious practice and Epicureans less so, the philosophers’ views on what really lay behind religious devotional actions were all somewhat patronizing or critical.
So there is a sort of set-up for the speech here, in which Paul has encountered two different forms of Athenian god-talk, one traditional and one more circumspect, but both these have gone negatively. And the fact Paul then moves to another venue, the Areopagus (“Mars’ Hill”) could be interpreted as transition to a trial more than a seminar. This was the venue of an Athenian council, and the text says they “grabbed” him (see v.19), which in Acts can often mean arrested (16:19, 18:17). So they took him to the Areopagus, to what might have been a court, to say his piece.
What becomes more striking in the speech when we have read those extra few verses before it is that while Paul’s religious experience of the materially and intellectually cluttered acropolis and agora was overwhelmingly negative, and perhaps this scene is itself a trial, his speech works to accentuate the positive, at least to begin (this is also standard rhetoric, the captatio benevolentiae or appeal to goodwill, but there is more to it).
The speech itself (our reading) begins with Paul’s consideration of material religion, via the famous reference to the altar of “an unknown god.” There really were such altars, in Athens and elsewhere; they represent an attempt by traditional polytheism to fill gaps, to placate or cultivate divinities otherwise unknown. While hinting at a sort of worthy agnostic piety, the acknowledgement that traditions may miss the mark, they are also grounded in the notion that sacrificial offerings are not just important but perhaps needed by the gods.
Paul thus allows this as praiseworthy, but does so somewhat ironically; for he then proclaims this God precisely as one who did not need their altar. In doing so, he moves to a quite different account of religion, one that both draws on the prophetic critique of idolatry and also falls quite close to at least some views held in Greek philosophy. First he (echoing Stephen in Acts 7) asserts that God does not require the goods offered in worship from humans, being the author of life and creation. The philosophers would probably have agreed. Then he pursues that philosophical connection, to the point of quoting or alluding to both Epimenides (probably - the “in whom we live and move” line) and Aratus (more certainly - “we too are his offspring”), to affirm the transcendence of God as well as the intimate relationship between humans and the divine.
Yet in the end Paul sweeps past this connection too, to his crux: that the difficulty of religious knowledge represented both by Greek (or other) cult and by philosophy—and by implication by the expectations of Judaism, whether built in stone or uttered by prophet and psalmist— have been answered by the Christ event. Religiosity and philosophy will not provide the truth, Jesus will—not because he was a better teacher than the philosophers, but because God raised him from the dead. The emphasis on Jesus as judge (v.31) may confirm the scene as “Paul on trial”—a recurring theme in Acts.
The Areopagus speech then is a pithy Christian answer, with a Pauline flavor, to the problem of religious knowledge. While respectful of the human impulse to seek God, it does not offer the same affirmation to the results. It is reminiscent of the apostle’s own words in 1 Corinthians, “For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1:22-24).
Even with the decline of institutional religion at this moment in western history, these questions—and the answer—still have currency. Many people today, in the Church as well as outside it, seem more deeply wed to their own spiritual quests than to the resolution that Paul gives. It is no disrespect to them, or to our neighbors of other faith traditions, to suggest with Paul that we put our trust not in our own religiosity—whether traditional and ritualized, or interior and reflective—but in the one whom God raised from the dead. God is indeed closer to us than we know, our life-giver and ground of being. Yet while Paul acknowledges with us that the phenomenon of religion and the problem of God are worth attending to, their value might really be in readying us for the realization not that we have found God, but that God in Christ has found us.