Wednesday, 13th Week of Ordinary Time

Acts 17:22-34, Part 1
Morning Prayer

Today, and tomorrow, we read Paul’s speech to the Athenians. Today, the focus is on the ways in which Paul, and we, can listen to worldviews that sound strange to us, and yet find in them a hint of the God who first revealed himself to Israel, and then through his Son Jesus Christ.

Let’s remind ourselves of Paul’s audience. Yesterday, we read of two schools of philosophy, whose supporters Paul got into an argument with. Boiled down, the Epicureans and Stoics had two fundamentally different understandings of God’s relation to the world. For the Epicureans, if God even existed, he certainly wasn’t involved in any way shape or form with the created world. For the Stoics, God was a force of reason that was in all created things. In short: For the Epicureans God was nowhere; for the Stoics God was everywhere.

What Paul says, basically, is, you’re both right and you’re both wrong. First, he agrees with the Epicureans who found all the shrines in Athens to be a waste of time. The only one that comes anywhere near the truth is the altar “To an Unknown God.” For many people, God is found in mystery. It is easier to say what God is not, than to say what God is. And with the Epicureans, Paul agrees that God cannot be contained within “temples made by human hands.”

But Paul then agrees with the Stoics that the God who made the world is not distant from it. Indeed, God is as close to us as the breath he gave us. "We too are his children,” Paul quotes a Greek poet. And for Paul, that means “all races of people” have the breath of God within them.

Today, too many people assume that science and faith are incompatible, indeed, are mortal enemies. But in fact, it was the Jewish and Christian belief in one God, separate from creation, which made science possible. Why study the cosmos, or the seasonal crops, if they were governed by the will of gods. If the world around us was subject to the arbitrary will of divine beings, then what consistent principles could we deduce from observing the world? Once it was understood that God was separate from the world, then it became possible to observe the world around us, and see consistency, to understand the rules by which physical things exist.

Back to Paul’s speech: he began, not by challenging the Athenians’ errors, but by looking for a common base of agreement. Yes, he will jump off that base in ways that shock his listeners. But before you tell anybody why they’re wrong, it helps that medicine go down easier if you first listen to them, and affirm where they’re right. That was Paul’s “evangelistic” strategy in Athens, and it should be ours today.