PAUL IN ATHENS
Modern culture is littered with clues that point to God. So how can we be more like Inspector Morse and less like Inspector Clouseau in building a case for Christ?

A few years ago, psychiatrists in the United States diagnosed a new illness. They called it ‘information anxiety’. Every day we are assailed by new information about the world – through TV, radio, internet, newspapers, post, adverts and fliers. And every day we feel like we’re falling further behind in what we need to know. Some people are unable to relax until they have scoured the daily newspaper, which now has more words in it than the average novel. You know you’ve got information anxiety when the first things you do after a long journey back from holiday are not to unpack and make a nice cup of tea, but to open the post, check the emails and flick on Ceefax to get the news like a junkie shakily craving a fix.

 

The information revolution has created problems as well as opportunities for those who have a message to get across. Among the cacophony of voices competing for attention, how do you make yours heard? The answer seems to be to make the message shorter and snappier. Consumer adverts have got this down to a fine art and now even politics is sold like a consumer product for us to purchase. If this is the new terrain, how does the Church get the Gospel across? I want to use the example of Paul in Athens (Acts 17:16-33) to express some of the principles that can help us in our witness to a changing world, because here Paul gives us one of the finest examples of how to adapt the Gospel to make sense in a specific culture.

 

Paul hadn’t travelled intentionally to Athens to do some evangelism. He had been spirited out of another town after attracting hostile opposition and was waiting to be joined by friends before moving on. In other words, Paul had been gifted a short-haul European city break where he could enjoy the sights and the local café culture. Yet what he saw there moved him profoundly. Athens, he found, was a city to devoted to idols and shrines to many deities. Now Paul was a man of rigorous monotheistic faith. He was hard-wired to be repulsed by any evidence of more than one God being worshipped. In his letter to the Romans he said of such people: ‘claiming to be wise, they became fools; and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or animals or reptiles’. There is real contempt and loathing for the kind of idolatry he finds in Athens. And yet he doesn’t write it off in practice. Instead he studies it closely, learning from it and making notes. Can this be the same Paul?

 

We soon find out, because Paul gets the chance to argue his case in the Areopagus, where the two a penny philosophers of Athens’ chattering classes passed their time. Paul begins by commending them for their commitment to religion: ‘I see that in everything that concerns religion you are uncommonly scrupulous’ he says. Before we choke on our popcorn, he continues: ‘for as I was going round looking at the objects of your worship, I noticed among other things an altar bearing the inscription ‘to an unknown God’. What you worship but do not know – this is what I now proclaim.’

 

In practice Paul did not condemn their idolatry as evil. He saw within it a genuine, if confused, reaching out by people to something greater than themselves. And he searched long and hard for some visible proof he could use to convince them of this – and found it in the altar to the unknown God. This tactic of engagement called him to swallow his disdain for their idolatry in an effort to understand and reach them. He had a genuine appreciation of Greek culture, shown in the way he quoted two poets to prove his thesis that God is present in history and in every culture, waiting to be found. Unseen and as yet unknown to them, but making his pitch in Athens through Paul. He probably enjoyed showing off his intellectual skills in front of them, but there is also integrity and tactical astuteness on display. The call for the church today to engage with culture as a means of reaching a community with the Gospel could hardly be clearer. God doesn’t wait for us to share this message, he has already littered the cultural landscape with thousands of clues for us to find and hold up to others for inspection. If we fail to relate the Gospel to these sources it will needlessly appear trapped in a distant past.

 

Paul realised that the Athenians would know little of the Jewish system of sacrifice on which the cross of Christ was based and so his initial appeal was to the idea of a creator God: ‘The God who made the world and everything in it…does not live in shrines made by human hands’ he says. We face a similar dilemma today. Although the motif of sacrifice is found in many places in our culture, few people understand the message of the cross. Like Paul, our initial pitch may sometimes need to be about creation – the idea that this world was, and our lives are, intended and not accidental. The whole concept of creation has become such a battleground with militant atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens that we may now have little choice but to fight many of our evangelistic battles there.

 

Paul went only so far in ingratiating himself with Greek culture though, because he knew there came a point where it had to be challenged and contradicted. Towards the end of his address to the Areopagus, Paul referred to the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. This was a calculated statement. It lay at the heart of the Gospel and so had to be spoken of, and yet he knew it would cause great offence. This is because Greek thinking saw the human body as a liability which the human spirit, in its nobility and wisdom, should aspire to be delivered from. The idea that the dead would rise to live in a body again sounded like the curse of karma, not the blessing of God. But it was a message Paul knew he could not compromise on. Our challenge is similar. Some people believe in a creator God, but they do not think it is possible to have a personal relationship with him. Furthermore, they may reject entirely - as not fitting with their image of God - that after death we must face his judgment on all we have done and how we stand in relationship to his Son. These are Gospel truths we cannot compromise on simply because they do not square with the values of a self-styled tolerant society where it is thought distasteful to describe God in such terms.

 

Paul appeals to us to use our Christian minds to engage critically with our culture. Some of it is good, some of it is bad. Just because we like something doesn’t mean that it’s right, or if we don’t like it, that it must be wrong. Aspects of our culture obscure God, some aspects of it are a conscious or unconscious reaching out to him. The clues we are searching for, like Paul in an Athens saturated with gods, are everywhere to been seen: in stories, novels, music, TV, the internet, in our attitudes to sport and fashion, in films and politics. All demonstrate in places the existence of an unknown God ‘who commands all people everywhere to repent’.

 

The mountain of information our society is buried under today feels stifling and may be leading to a trivialisation of life where nothing stands out as important because we’ve seen and heard it all before. It’s quite a task for us to pitch in and find the unknown God in all this, but the kind of challenge, like Paul before us, that we should relish.