Sermon 29th May 2011
Acts 17:22-31
Then 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.’
When the apostle Paul went to Athens, he
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.”
Paul’s first hand observation is that the Greeks are indeed very religious. Paul had been debating with some philosophers of the Epicurean and Stoic schools of thought. Epicureans gave us the idea of atoms, and Stoics believed in the eternity of the four elements, earth, air, fire and water, and aimed at living according to nature.
Paul observes that the Athenians have an altar to the unknown God. This unknown God, he says, made the world and everything in it.
"In him we live and move and have our being" is probably from Epimenides (6th century BCE), and "We are his offspring" likely comes from Aratus (3rd century BCE).
There are two strands in understanding how God relates with us. The first is in God as creator. The second is in God as love. When we praise and say thanks to God as creator, we are acknowledging the creative presence of the God of love in our world and in our lives. God as Creator refers to the world in which we live, and so focuses on nature and the natural forces that drive the creation. Science too understands the world of nature, and we should not confuse the scientific way of understanding the world with the religious one. Religion is not a scientific explanation, and science I suggest, cannot explain the world of religion.
When Paul goes to Athens he begins with an observation about the world and how we can search for God in it.
Paul uses two arguments.
The first is an argument of God as creator, and the second argument is a plea to repent based on the resurrection from the dead. The first argument has had a long history in philosophy and theology, based on the belief that the universe is not self creating. It is often called a natural theology in that it does not rely on revealed knowledge, as does, for example, the belief of the resurrection of the dead.
Now one observation we can make of Paul’s arguments here is that he uses both natural and revealed knowledge as a basis for knowing God. Natural theology may not stand on its own, but it does provide a reason that the God who is disclosed in human experience is also the source from which the cosmos flows.
Paul puts it this way:
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.”
Let me do a bit of name dropping here about the history of this argument
There is a technical term for this argument and it is called the cosmological argument. Its origin was probably with Plato, it was formulated in three versions by Aquinas, rejected by Immanuel Kant, and reformulated by Leibniz. There is an ongoing discussion today of these arguments. I am name dropping to underscore that fact of the rich debate from earlier centuries. I want to make this point that some of the best minds in our history have discussed this matter, and I believe there are some things to support the view that Paul expressed to the Athenians.
The cosmological argument simply put is the idea that every thing that is caused depends upon a logical chain that can be traced back to a first cause, or to a cause outside the world.
I am not going to discuss that in detail, but I do want to say a couple of things about it. The first is that the cosmological argument is not a proof for the existence of God. I don’t think that the theist can prove the existence of God. Equally I don’t think the atheist can prove the non-existence of God.
However if you look at the world today and wonder about its origins, science can trace a chain of causal connections, with explanatory reasons back to the original big bang. Presumably before the original moment there was nothing.
Now we can ask the question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” “Why does anything exist at all?”
We could say that as we seek an explanation of why there is something rather than nothing, a religious answer will suggest that the cosmos comes into being through an act of creativity. For the apostle Paul, as we search for God, we can find him because in him we live and move and have our being.
The apostle Paul then switches from the idea of finding a creator from whom we live and move and have our being, to the need to repent. Paul’s statement here is very brief, and I am not surprised that the Greeks found it unconvincing, with some wanting further discussion.
The need to repent assumes that I have the humility to recognise my mistakes, or to recognise that greed or evil has distorted the good life. That is a moral argument. It requires that I recognise the need within me, or the need within society, to search for a better way of life. For the Christian, the experience of the resurrected and living Christ offers a spiritual path to the good life.
This morning we have considered very simply some issues around the view expressed by Paul about God as Creator. Paul puts the view that the Greeks were a religious people, and the altar to the unknown God expressed an openness to their appreciation that their knowledge may be limited. Paul sees that a creator God underlies the foundation of our lives, and it sustains who we are. In addition Paul proclaims the resurrection experience as the basis for the need to repent and to seek a God who loves us as shown in Christ Jesus.
John Howell
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