St. Paul at Athens

“And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after Him, and find Him, though He be not far from every one of us: for in Him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also His offspring. Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device. And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent: because He hath appointed a day, in the which He will judge the world in righteousness by that Man whom He hath ordained; whereof He hath given assurance unto all men, in that He hath raised Him from the dead.”—Acts xvii. 26-31.

The passage: God made all nations of men from one blood to live over the whole earth. He fixed their appointed times and the boundaries of their homes, so that they might seek the Lord, feeling after him and finding him, though he is not far from any of us. In him we live, move and have our being, as some of the Athenians’ own poets have said: “We are also his offspring.” Being God’s offspring, we should not think the Godhead is like gold, silver or stone shaped by human art. God overlooked the times of this ignorance, but now commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has appointed a day when he will judge the world in righteousness by the Man he has ordained, and he has given proof of this to all by raising him from the dead.

The picture of St. Paul at Athens in the Acts has been filled in with light and shade by readers’ imaginations, but the main outlines cannot be erased. He was grieved to see the city wholly given to idolatry. He argued in the market-place with philosophers of different sects. The Athenians’ curiosity for something new would not have let him stay silent about why he had come to Greece, even if he had wished to. And he did deliver, on Mars’ Hill, the most elaborate of all his discourses.

We can easily guess what that discourse would have been if he had followed the method of spreading Christianity that is most admired among us today. He would have begun by offering proof that every other nation had been left to its own courses, unguided, while his own had been entrusted with a divine communication. The evidence, he would say, was not demonstrative but enough for men alive to their own dangers and ignorance: the Ruler of the world had made his will known to Abraham’s children. Strictly, what was revealed about God’s nature and purposes could not be called true, since men have no faculties for receiving knowledge of an infinite Being. But it was as near to truth as men could usefully get, and precepts built on it had proved beneficial in life. One of them forbade the worship of graven images. No reason was given, of course. How can an infinite Being be expected to give reasons, or how could men understand them? But since the Lawgiver has infinite power to enforce his decrees, was it safe to set any of them aside?

Turning from the people to the learned, he would then show triumphantly that every speculation about the gods had come to nothing and been absurd. By the very conditions of man’s being, he would argue, human dreams about a Nature so far above ours could have no counterpart in reality. He would strike impartially: at the Epicurean’s self-confidence, the Academic’s scepticism, the Stoic’s physical theology and stern ethics. If he favoured anyone, it would be some especially earnest inquirer, since exposing his blunders would be a greater victory for the Gospel than defeating a mere sophist. Then, with the ground cleared, he would commend his own religion to the crowd, as milder, less national and less dogmatic than the Judaism it sprang from. He would ask the Athenians’ common sense whether, in their hopeless ignorance of divine things, the prudent course was not to accept a faith that promised inconceivable rewards to its champions and utter ruin to those who rejected it.

I can think of only two reasons why defenders of this kind of teaching might say it was not Paul’s. One is that he was not learned enough to know the sages’ opinions, or logical enough to produce the overwhelming argument against them. I reply only that I take Paul to have been sent with the weapons suited to his work; if they think otherwise, let them say so boldly. The other is that such language might have brought down Greek indignation on him. But we have always thought Paul a brave man whose testimony was no sterner in safety than in danger. Nor can I admit that this kind of speech would have been more dangerous than what had already roused the fanatical rage of the Jews at Thessalonica and Berea. If his main aim was to win converts to a religion, I am not sure it would not have gained him more than Dionysius and Damaris. It would have appealed to passions he did not invoke. Epicureans and Academics would have found the attacks on popular worship plausible, and each would have welcomed the sneers at the others’ systems. And his own countrymen, if any were present, would have seen in him a champion, not an enemy, of their exclusiveness.

But let us now consider not what Paul might have said, but what he did say to the people of this idolatrous, philosophical, news-loving city.

I. “God hath made of one blood all nations of men, to dwell upon all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.” Paul had learned this by meditating on the calling of his own nation and by studying the Law and the prophets. God formed the nations of one blood, one family, and has watched over the bounds, circumstances and destiny of each. The Jewish nation existed as a witness to this fellowship, and against whatever divides nations and sets them at war. It also existed as a witness to the special work of each nation, with its own geographical limits and ties of kindred and race. It was there to say: “The one living and true God made you all to be one, and gave you your tasks. He has never left you alone. No fact of your history lies beyond his providence, and no thought has risen in your minds without his teaching. I, the Jew, the child of Abraham, stand forth to claim this for the God I worship. I reject the doctrine that any nation may deny its connection with any other. I declare that you, men of Athens, have had a divine vocation, and that God has appointed you a distinct and remarkable part in his great drama. You are utterly wrong to say that your fathers’ great deeds were theirs and not his, or that your institutions, freedom and wisdom are so human as not also to be, in the highest sense, divine.” This is a wonderful message, very unlike the one we heard just now. But read Paul’s own words attentively, and ask whether they say less than my paraphrase, or far more.

II. But why has God chosen the particular nations, and ordered their times and bounds? Paul answers: “That they may seek the Lord, if haply they may feel after Him, and find Him.” On this inspired Apostle’s account, God himself stirred up men’s thoughts and inquiries about his Being and Nature. Every circumstance of their outward position was ordained for the very purpose of giving their thoughts this impulse and direction. If we believed that, many puzzles in history, oppressive to those who read it as the story of their fellow-beings, would be solved. We can see how soil and climate, the temperament of races, their ideas of law and government, their internal struggles and dealings with neighbours, shaped their thoughts and feelings, especially about the invisible world and divine powers. If we could be sure that fertile or rugged soil, genial or cruel climate, the need of rule and of freedom, the activity that led to war and the deeper craving for peace, had all been means of giving them some glimpse of a Guide and Ruler, and of making them grasp something really in him, some side of his character or purpose, then the past would be an illuminated scroll, not a dark one. How one apprehension grew feeble and distorted, how others were rejected for its sake, how the polytheistic confusions arose, how they were fixed in the mind by selfish fears and kept up by dishonest priests who confused their own power with the unseen power, we can understand from later experience. The hard questions are, what was the starting-point of those thoughts, and how were they kept alive when so much in nature and in men themselves refuted them? Paul gives a decided answer. This feeling after God, found in some form in every tribe on earth, marked as a human necessity, yet threatened with death and derangement by a thousand tendencies in man, the Creator himself has called forth and sustained. Without his first word it could not have been; without his continual presence it would have ceased altogether.

III. Bold as this is, and strange as it must sound to those who think the way to defend the Old Testament is to treat all heathen ideas of God as mere tradition or imagination, the words that follow are more startling. We know them so well, and they have so shaped the speech of Christendom, that we forget how awful they are, how remarkable for the place where they were spoken, and how they contradict some of our favourite religious and philosophical maxims: “Though He is not far from every one of us. For in Him we live and move and have our being.” How often we wish we had never heard them in childhood, thinking they would strike us with overpowering force if we heard them for the first time. That wish is ungrateful and foolish; they have influenced us all our lives in ways we cannot conceive. We may not be more thrilled than Paul’s crowd on the Areopagus, but they may now break through the frost of custom and come on us like guilty things surprised by a forgotten presence. But is there not something in them we shrink from, fearing a dangerous Pantheism? Do we not tell ourselves that this is the special peril of our time, that the passage is true as it stands in the Bible, but that, since it can be perverted, we had better dwell on some other announcement, however suited to ages prone to a different error? Consider, then: if any city in the world was exposed to Pantheism, in the very age when the Apostle visited it, that city was Athens. Every form of idolatry and speculation was heading toward that gulf, and each, as it weakened, was bound to be absorbed in it. If Paul had no divine intimation of this, his talks with the philosophers in the market-place must have shown it to him. He must have seen it in the very inscription that was his text. The dedication to the Unknown God, whether it only expressed a wish in a time of plague to call on every possible helper, or a sense of some Being who could not be represented as demons or demigods were, equally declared that the nation’s mind was aiming at an all-inclusive worship, and that as each definite object lost its hold, more and more would slide into a lazy acknowledgment of the vague and indefinite. With this full in his mind, Paul says: “He is not far from every one of us; for in Him we live and move and are.”

I conclude, then, that Paul regarded this statement as the great protest against Pantheism and the other evil tendencies of the Athenian. It was a protest because it fully and distinctly asserted the truth that lay beneath Pantheism and that Pantheism was perverting. And it was a protest because nothing was so sure, if received, to fill men with awe of that Personal Being whom Pantheism denied. So the Apostle stands as a lasting witness to a maxim for all places and times: you can combat a prevalent error only by seeking the divine principle of which it is the counterfeit. Until you do, your cleverest scoffs and arguments will only strengthen its virulence.

IV. At last the Apostle approaches one of the teachers we may suppose he wished to refute. He speaks not of a philosopher but of a poet; but later poets liked to state philosophical sentiments, as earlier ones had built up popular mythology. Here is a sentiment of Aratus that can be turned either way. It may justify the old Homeric notion that men have divine parentage, or the sages’ proud notion that men can make themselves gods by wisdom: “For we also are His offspring.”

The sentiment might seem all the more alarming because it is in the singular rather than the plural. To speak of a son of the gods Apollo or Venus was a phrase most people of that time took as fable or metaphor. To speak of His offspring was to rise higher, and to assert that these poor frivolous people, who cared only to tell or hear something new, had a divine origin. Could you believe it? Paul adopts the phrase in this stronger sense. He endorses the poet’s words and applies them not to his own countrymen, or some of them, but to his heathen audience. He names no exceptions, no persons who had reached higher intuitions, and uses none of the qualifications the poet himself would probably have used. He looks out on the jeering, laughing crowd and says, “We, you and I, are also His offspring: the offspring of that Unknown God who made the heavens and the earth and all things in them, whom I have been declaring to you.”

V. He does not stop there. On this mighty assumption he builds an argument, the argument against the idolatry that had weighed so heavily on his spirit, and on it he rests the soundness of the Second Commandment: “Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device.” Do not call this an additional motive for abandoning their fathers’ tradition and their city’s habit. It is the only motive. He cannot urge them to a change that convulses the whole moral being and cuts so many links of old affection, unless their poet’s doctrine is true and they have a right to claim God as their Father in the strictest, fullest sense. I say it again: not in a vague, Pantheistic sense, in which he would be Father of all cattle and trees and flowers and therefore of them. The argument would then be worthless, since they could make the Godhead in the likeness of any object in nature. It was because he was the Father of their spirits, because they were spiritual beings made in his spiritual likeness to feel after him and find him, that conceiving him under their notions, or casting him in a material shape, was so degrading. The Jew’s whole burning indignation against the gods of the hills and groves comes out in this assertion, yet it is full of tenderness for every heathen. Only one who believed that God had loved the whole world, and sent his Son to take on the nature of the dweller in Athens as much as of the dweller in Jerusalem, could have said it.

VI. The tenderness toward heathens, the justification of God’s ways to men in all ages, and the ground for calling all of one flesh and blood, come out fully in the next passage: “And the times of this ignorance God winked at, but now He commandeth all men everywhere to repent.” I will not debate the force of the word translated winked at, or whether a better expression could be found. But we can be sure this sentence does not contradict Paul’s earlier claim that God had not overlooked the nations but ordered their bounds and directed their search for him. And it is utterly incompatible with the headlong, ungodly conclusions divines have often sanctioned about the heathen world and the guilt of its idol-worship. Paul certainly does not tell the Athenians what Tertullian, with his higher inspiration and later revelation, proclaimed with certainty: that their fathers were doomed to hopeless perdition. That opinion, which is said to have made an honest barbarian king refuse baptism, was not put before the Greek; a very different one was suggested. Yet the message to that generation was no less strong for involving no judgment on earlier ones: “God commandeth you to repent.” “Since through me he tells you that your poet’s words are fulfilled, and that he has sent his Son to claim you as his offspring, through me he commands you to cast aside the gods of gold and silver made by art and man’s device, and to turn and own him as Father. But not only through me. The message is to your consciences, straight from him. He commands repentance, and gives it to all who will have it. If you feel separated from him who is so near, he destroys the separation. If you have felt after him and not found him, he will reveal himself. The message is to all men everywhere. The separate, material gods shall not forever tear the nations apart. All in all nations are invited to become brothers by taking their place as children of the same Father.”

VII. But is the call to repentance not backed by a threat of punishment? If it were, I would produce it and dwell on it, for we cannot warn people too much of the heavy punishment they bring on themselves by serving material, sensual, unreal things instead of claiming their place as children of a gracious and righteous Father. But I cannot put into Paul’s discourse a word that is not there. He speaks of judgment, not punishment: “a day in which God will judge the world by that Man whom He hath ordained, whereof He hath given assurance in that He hath raised Him from the dead.” The two ways of speaking are as wide apart as the poles, however carelessly we confuse them. To proclaim a judgment is to proclaim an accurate discrimination of acts and characters. To proclaim God’s judgment is to say that he, who knows characters and acts perfectly, will discriminate. To proclaim his judgment by the Man he has ordained is to say he will apply the measure the Son of Man applied on earth. And he said, “It shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for Chorazin and Bethsaida.” He preached a gospel to publicans and harlots. He said, “Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees.” He told his disciples, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” With such language before him, how could Paul stand among the Athenians and say that God would cast off them or their fathers, when he had not cast them off yet? How could he help telling them that there would surely be a judging and sifting of all nations and men, since the Son of Man, the risen Head of Nations and of Men, had come to bind them all to God and to each other? How could he help saying: “He whom you have been seeking, and who has been seeking you, will be revealed in the fullness of his glory. He will know what each nation has done to fulfil the purpose for which it was called, and what each man has done to fulfil the purpose for which he was sent into the world. He will know who followed the light he gave and sought him, and who loved darkness rather than light and chose death. I, Paul, can pass no judgment on you or anyone; I do not even judge myself. But I know the judgment will accord with the truth. For he who is truth, who by dying and rising again has shown the truth to men, will be revealed in every man’s conscience. Every eye shall see him.”

My brethren, in this sermon I have set before you two methods of presenting the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. I have not hidden, and you all know, that the first has very powerful supporters and puts itself forward as the logical, the safe, the orthodox method. For the other I can say only that it was the method of the Apostle whom we affirm to have been God’s instrument for making his light shine through the world. By the one course we silence objectors, joining in the same auto da fé, as in all precedents, the representatives of the most diverse sects and schools, the devout and the scornful, the earnest and the frivolous. By the other we claim all these as witnesses for the God and Father who would lead them all to his Son. By the one we magnify the skill of the particular dialectician and reduce our common humanity to the lowest point. In the other the man who pleads is nothing, and the race is glorified by its union with a crucified and ascended Lord. To the one we owe a display of ingenious advocacy and fine metaphysical reasoning; to the other we owe the existence of a Christendom.

That is the testimony of the past. How the future will speak we wait to learn. What is at stake is nothing less than this. Shall the hundred and sixty millions in India be taught that all their mythology and philosophy is folly, or that God has sent his Son to claim them as his offspring? Shall the masses of our own people who have been alienated from our Churches be told that infidelity is false and foolish because it holds out a hope that man may know something of the Infinite, or that God wants all to know him, from the least to the greatest? And shall each of us accept every dogma of the Church and Bible because that is as likely to be true as anything else, or keep praying to him who cannot be mocked that he will give us knowledge of his truth in this world and life everlasting in the world to come?