Real Restoration: Acts: Paul on Mars Hills

Paul speech on Mars Hill (the Areopagus) in Athens, Greece is famous. We have to wonder why this speech is so well known but the preceding speeches and sermons, even Peter’s lesson at Pentecost, are not nearly as admired or studied. What is so interesting about this speech?

(Act 17:22-32 ESV) 22 So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. 23 For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.

Up until now, Peter and Paul had been speaking to Jews and God-fearing Gentiles. His audience already believed in the God of the Jews and was already aware of that God had promised to send a Messiah. Therefore, those presentations began with God and the prophets.

But in Athens, Paul was addressing pagans. They may have known something about the God of the Jews, but they weren’t God-fearers. Therefore, Paul had to start at a very different place. And, oddly enough, First Century Athens is much closer to 21st Century America than the synagogue in Pisidia Antioch or the Temple in Jerusalem. Most Americans, even those raised in a Christian home, know about as much about the prophets as the philosophers of the Areopagus.

24 “The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, 25 nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. 26 And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, 27 that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him.

Paul assets that there a god/God who is the ultimate creator — an idea not that strange to the philosophers. In fact, it’s not greatly different from Plato’s teachings in Timaeus.

“Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, 28 for “‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, “‘For we are indeed his offspring.’

Matthew Henry explains,

[T]he apostle here quotes a saying of one of the Greek poets, Aratus, a native of Cilicia, Paul’s countryman, who, in his Phenomena, in the beginning of his book, speaking of the heathen Jupiter, that is, in the poetical dialect, the supreme God, says this of him, tou gar kai genos esmen—for we are also his offspring.

To this point, Paul would be speaking well within Grecian philosophical thought — not that all would agree, but he began with his feet firmly planted within Greek thought. He was speaking biblical truths within the cultural context of Athens. He was beginning with common ground.

29 “Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man.

Again, by the First Century, many philosophers questioned the reality of the pagan gods. Not all philosophers rejected the gods, and certainly neither the Roman government nor most people did. But Paul was speaking among philosophers.

30 “The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, 31 because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

32 Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked. But others said, “We will hear you again about this.”

Paul now makes a major leap from Greek to Jewish thought. The Greek philosophers rejected any idea of a resurrection. They did, however, accept the notion of an afterlife. You see, “resurrection” refers to a bodily resurrection, whereas the Greeks believed that a human’s immortal soul survived as a disembodied mist and shadow. It was not a physical existence nor was it an existence of pleasure and joy.

N. T. Wright explains,

All [Greek philosophers], however, were agreed: There was no resurrection.  Death could not be reversed.  Homer said it; Aeschylus and Sophocles seconded it.  “What’s it like down there?” asks a man of his departed friend, in a third-century B.C.E. epigram.  “Very dark,” comes the reply. “Any way back up?”  “It’s a lie!” …

Thus, Christianity was born into a world where one of its central tenets, resurrection, was universally recognized as false.

Now, this is a shocking conclusion, since most modern Christians take Plato to be right: we exist after death as disembodied souls only. And that’s exactly the nature of Greek thought — and yet the philosophers rejected Paul’s teachings on the spot. The notion of a resurrection — coming back to embodied life — was absurd to their way of thinking.

This demonstrates the degree to which the early church syncretically absorbed Platonic thought into its doctrines. After all, all educated men knew Plato to be right! At least, that was the attitude of the educated, and thus his beliefs on the afterlife, women, and many other subjects was slowly incorporated into mainstream Christianity.

The Jews believed in a bodily resurrection, as did the earliest church fathers,although the Greeks did not. Indeed, some declared acceptance of a bodily resurrection essential to salvation.

Now, the question of the bodily resurrection has risen in importance due to N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, which I covered in some detail in the “Surprised by Hope” series. Wright argues that the bodily resurrection fits well with the teaching in Revelation 21 – 22 that heaven will descend to earth, and God will renew the old heavens and earth to become the new heavens and earth. That is, we won’t “fly away” to heaven and leave this old world behind. This world will be redeemed, as also taught by Paul —

(Rom 8:20-22 ESV) 20 For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope  21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.  22 For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.

The entire creation was cursed and will be “set free” from “bondage,” that is, redeemed from slavery. That will happen at the conclusion of God’s redemptive mission. It fits.

Thus, Paul contradicts the Greek notion that the world is evil and so the souls of the righteous must exist somewhere else. Rather, the Creation is good, but like humans, fallen. But God will make it all fresh and new at the same time he resurrects us, giving us new bodies to live in the new heavens and earth where will walk with God beside the Tree of Life.