ACTS 17:16-34

Robert E. Dunham

University Presbyterian Church
Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Athens was arguably several centuries past its prime when the apostle Paul arrived, but it still afforded its visitors and tourists quite an impressive array of Hellenistic treasures—art, poetry, drama, and lively philosophical and religious conversation. In short, Athens was a thriving cultural marketplace, and so it is not surprising that the apostle Paul spent some time exploring the city while he waited for Timothy and Silas to join him there. Luke’s account of what Paul found, how he reacted to it, and how the Athenians responded to his reaction is one of the more memorable encounters in scripture. Here Luke provides an open portal through which the reader is invited to glimpse Hellenistic culture and to hear Paul’s provocative invitation to see a part of that culture through new lenses. In the end, Paul’s speech at the Areopagus may have been only modestly successful in changing Athenian minds (17:34), but after all the intervening centuries, it still offers the Christian community a model of faithful witness as it seeks to engage and challenge the cultural treasures and assumptions—and the longings—of the present time.

Context is everything. To understand both Paul’s speech and the response to it, one must first have a sense of the way religious conversation took place in Athens. The Hellenistic religious world Paul encountered was very pluralistic; in fact, it makes the multicultural religious stew of our time seem rather bland. In something of an antiquarian precursor to globalization, the Hellenistic world had been unified by the expansive conquests of Alexander the Great, and as a result, cultural habits and assumptions and beliefs began to flow in two directions. Some of the finest of Greek culture was exported to the far corners of the then-known world, and from those expeditions Alexander also sent or brought back to Athens the best of what he found. The cultural flow evidently included a steady procession of foreign deities, for by the time Paul stood in the markets of Athens, a great many religions were co-existent at the center of the Hellenistic world. Tolerance of foreign divinities was apparently quite remarkable. As people moved to Greece, they brought their gods with them, and they were welcomed. Joel Marcus notes,

The Greeks, and later the Romans, rather than telling the immigrants that they would have to worship the Greek and Roman gods exclusively, adopted the practical solution of saying, “All right, you continue to worship your gods and goddesses, and we’ll worship them, too—and you worship ours.” That way, no one’s god was slighted, and everyone was happy. (“Paul at the Aeropagus: Windows on the Hellenistic World” BTB 18)

If such tolerance was the norm, it is small wonder that Paul generated such consternation with his call to repentance and his reminder about judgment in vv. 30–31. The Athenian ideal was a realm in which everyone’s god was given space, but Paul spoke of a creator-redeemer God who demanded sole loyalty. His understanding was viewed as extremely narrow-minded and intolerant (Marcus, 145).

Content is everything. Still, looking at Paul’s address at the Areopagus, one would have to concede that Paul speaks with measured restraint. In that forum of respectful conversation, Paul begins with the language and tone of the philosophers. He compliments them on their religiosity. He cites their poets. He draws on their insights. Beverly Roberts Gaventa notes the uniqueness of this speech in Acts:

To those who have been reading Luke’s story from the beginning of Acts, this sermon initially looks odd indeed. Unlike the early sermons of Peter, Stephen’s defense speech, or Paul’s initial sermon in Acts 13, the Areopagus speech makes no reference to the history of Israel and quotes not a solitary word of scripture. Even the one reference to Jesus here is indirect, and nothing is said of Jesus’ death by crucifixion. . . . What Paul’s sermon does, [however], is to take the basic presuppositions of Christian teaching and recast them in language available to the audience. In this instance, the gospel is genuinely translated, even if some crucial elements never appear. . . . So successfully does the sermon speak in the voice of the philosophers that it makes some readers anxious, concerned that Paul may have been cheated by the exchange rate in the marketplace of Athens (Beverly Roberts Gaventa, “Traditions in Conversation and Collision: Reflections on Multiculturalism in the Acts of the Apostles,” in Making Room at the Table: An Invitation to Multicultural Worship).

Yet, having begun with concessions in tone and content, Paul then turns to remind the Athenian philosophers of their accountability to the one God. He speaks of his visit to the altar to an “unknown god” (17:23) and then boldly names that God for them as the creator of all that is. The conversation draws to an abrupt close when he speaks of God’s judgment and of the resurrection of Jesus (17:30–31). Though the philosophers mock Paul’s assertion of the resurrection, which for them was neither reasonable nor important (Marcus, 148), one cannot but sense that they found Paul’s introduction of the notion of judgment and accountability unsettling as well.

A model for proclamation. By employing the language of reason and invitation rather than reproach, Luke and Paul offer to the church one model for proclamation in our own multicultural time. It is not the only model, to be sure, for sometimes the Gospel simply cannot be accommodated and must be proclaimed clearly and boldly, but in this instance Paul is able to employ the forms of Athenian religion and philosophy to describe the quest of people for God, and then to name the God who is the source and destination of that quest. Luke Timothy Johnson observes that Luke does something very important in this passage by recognizing Greek philosophy as a “legitimate conversation partner” in the approach to theological understanding. Noting that Luke is able to say a great deal with only a few quips from the speech, Johnson observes, “His compressed sentences represent something of a sample of the far more sustained efforts at negotiating the religious and philosophical perceptions of the Greek world and those of Torah that could be found” (The Acts of the Apostles).

Luke thus demonstrates that the church can claim and even press revealed truth without disparaging other forms and other faiths, indeed by engaging those other forms as a beginning point of conversation. Too often in our time, public expressions of Christianity seem born of a deep intolerance, bolstered by an unwillingness even to engage other faiths (or their surrogates) or to take them seriously. Humility, on the other hand, compels us to recognize that the God “who does not live in shrines made by human hands” (17:24) also does not live in the shrines we construct from our own particular religious traditions (Gaventa, 39). Paul’s conclusions in Athens may well strike the Athenians as arrogant, but his manner and tone is certainly couched in the language of respect. Any proclamation of this text in interfaith or cross-cultural contexts should bear similar language and similar respect, and if we desire to be as effective as Paul, we will need to develop an awareness of what other voices are saying. It is not an easy balance to maintain —humility and respect, on the one hand, and confident proclamation on the other—but if Paul’s appearance at the Areopagus is to be taken as a model, such equilibrium proffers one faithful way to engage in earnest, lively conversation with the wider culture without losing our essential identity.
Equally helpful, though perhaps less obvious, is the way Luke records Paul speaking to the more subtle religious impulses of his audience, which are defined not so much by formal liturgies or dogmas or icons, but simply by unnamed hungers for meaning and purpose. Paul makes particular mention of the inscription on the altar “to an unknown God” (17:23). In so doing, Luke shows Paul “picking up the inchoate longings of this ‘exceptionally religious’ people and directing them to their proper object” (Johnson, 319). Paul’s assertion may have been perceived as intolerance, but his move to the claims and promises of the Christian Gospel is rather the bestowing of a gift. Johnson’s observation challenges the preacher to think about where such altars are constructed in our own time, to identify the ways such deep, though unnamed longings present themselves today, and then to articulate an understanding of Christ’s claim that makes the Gospel compelling in the face of those longings.

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