When our Pastor reached the last part of Acts 17 in our serial exposition of Acts last week, I realised that Paul’s address to the Areopagus Society was even cleverer than I’ve always assumed.
The usual understanding is that the Athenians believed in all kinds of false gods, and Paul meets them where they are through his reference to the altar of the Unknown God, avoiding Jewish references and quoting Greek poets to lead up to his case for Jesus.
This is not untrue, but when you appreciate that his audience consisted, primarily, of Epicureans and Stoic interlecktuals, the critique of paganism is shown to be not a challenge to his audience, but part of his “meeting them where they were.” For real philosophy buffs like these, the Greek mythos was intellectually ridiculous, for the very reasons that Paul gives.
The Epicureans, if they believed in gods at all, considered them as much a natural product of atomistic chance as the rest of the cosmos. The Stoics were pretty much Pantheistic in their religious views. If either party gave a nod to civic religion, it was more likely to be for its utility in maintaining ‘οι πολλοι in good order than because they believed it themselves. They were “cultural pagans” in the same way that Richard Dawkins is a “cultural Christian.”
So it’s likely that the Areopagus was nodding in agreement at the folly of worshipping any god that happened to have been missed out of the directory, and at Paul’s perhaps naive description of the role of idols (which proper pagans actually believed to be the locus for the god, not the deity itself). Paul seems to be doing the equivalent of concurring with new atheism’s “Pixie in the Sky” jibe.
Yet to preach the gospel faithfully, he has to put the true God into the picture, and so he presents him in the kind of universal philosophical terms that, say, Plato would. The supreme God may not have been the Epicureans’ or Stoics’ “flavour,” but he was a familiar and even noble ideal of respectable philosophers. He also happens, as the Apostolic Fathers later argued, to be largely consistent with the biblical picture of God that the Jewish Scriptures had described for centuries before Plato.
So Paul stresses the universal God, and that universality, incidentally, is particularly stressed by his allusion to the monogenicity of mankind (a hidden allusion to Adam, of course), countering the original charge that he was proclaiming “foreign gods” in Jesus and Anastasis (Resurrection). Paul would have introduced the indispensability of the Hebrew Scriptures to any converts, later on.
It is the Resurrection – or perhaps even the claim about a divinely-appointed human Judge of all mankind – that loses most of the Areopagus. The Epicureans, of course, would have no truck with chance collisions of atoms bringing people back to life. And the Stoics believed that time recycled eventually, so we are fated to live exactly the same lives over again in the next cycle, not to get a new bodily life in this one. And it is doubtful that either school would take kindly to the idea that their own lives would be judged by some appointee of God who was not even a member of their philosophical disicpline.
Our pastor pointed out that, in essence, the Epicureans and Stoics are still with us. Tom Wright consistently refers to orthodox Neodarwinism as “Epicurean,” the chance interaction of atoms and molecules providing their basis both for biogenesis and mutation, and the belief that chance can lead to order underlying natural selection and, even more, neutral theory.
Of course, Neodarwinian theory is set in the wider Epicurean scheme of materialistic scientism, which originally included, as a matter of faith, the eternal existence of the universe just as it did for their Greek forebears. The last was demolished by the indicators of an original creation event in Big Bang theory. And despite string theory and the James Webb telescope, multiple hypotheses to circumvent that creation event have failed, or require even more non-Epicurean fine-tuning of parameters than classical cosmology exhibits. Subsequently, the supposed powers of mutation and natural selection are likewise now in severe doubt, and partly as a result of that, the hyper-Epicureanism of the New Atheists is currently well on the wane.
Epicureanism, though, still abounds in the academic trade and in popular culture (hat tip to David Attenborough for making it part of his National Treasury). But interestingly, as it fades, variations on Stoicism seem poised to take its place. Their Pantheism was popular in hippy culture, for example in Ian Anderson’s 1970 lyrics to Jethro Tull’s My God:
You are the God of everything
He’s inside you and me.
The original resurgence of theistic evolution included a heavy dose of “Process Theology,” Panentheism being often enlisted to attribute some kind of volition to nature. As Neodarwinism loses ground in this decade, a good number of biologists are avoiding God by recourse to Panpsychism, the twin sister of Pantheism, proposing that atoms or molecules of “mind” in agglomeration explain the teleology seen in nature, just as combinations of atomic matter explain its structure. This, too, seems akin to Stoicism.
Stoic ideas are also represented in the “union with nature” ideas that form the modern cult of Environmentalism, not to mention New Age ideology. Stoicism even feeds into the Socialist Globalism that, politically speaking, still dominates the West.
Since there’s nothing new under the sun, Paul’s culturally-sensitive but theologically uncompromising methodology is very useful for informing Christian witness to the intellectual class today. His poor results, though, remind us that Luke’s Athenian philosophers are among the most resistant audiences found in Acts. They don’t organise hit-mobs, and are urbane and polite, but detached, in the main, from the will to repent and commit to Christ. And so Paul doesn’t waste too much time on them, instead decamping to Corinth, a far riskier and more rumbustious place, but one where he spends eighteen months reaping a spiritual harvest.
That too seems, possibly, to be reflected in today’s “silent revival” amongst unschooled working class ruffians, whilst the educated hold their noses and celebrate David Attenborough’s centenary instead.
