WHEN PAUL CAME
TO ATHENS
Rev. Alfred Williams
Ladera Community Church
May 4, 2008
Acts 17:16-34
Prayer: May our minds be inquiring. May our hearts be open to the gift of your grace, O God, for your Love’s sake. Amen.
When Paul came to Athens, as the Book of Acts tells it, he experienced at best mixed success. He did not establish a church. In fact, he only made two converts. Ironically, Athens is the only place where Paul’s preaching did not provoke persecution. But then, Athens was a different kind of place and the Athenians were a different kind of people.
Athens was a university town with the highest percentage of Ph.Ds in the whole Mediterranean region. In the words of one commentator: “The Athenians lived on lectures. They were kept alive by a diet of speculation, argument, and discussion. They dealt in ideas as other people dealt in butter and eggs.”1
As was his custom, while in Athens Paul divided his time between the synagogue and the agora, the market place. In the synagogue he confronted fellow Jews and devout gentiles attracted to Judaism. In the market place he debated Athenian intellectuals and philosophers. Some dismissed Paul as nothing more than a babbler. Others identified him as the proclaimer of foreign gods. Curious about his message, they took Paul to the Areopagus, an elevated open-air site at the foot of Mars Hill, and invited Paul to present his new teaching.
According to the synopsis of Paul’s speech found in Acts, Paul began by attempting to establish common ground between himself and his Athenian academic audience.
Rather than following his usual sermon outline with its rehearsal of Israel’s history and its link to Christ, on this occasion Paul focused on God. He began by acknowledging that the Athenians were “extremely religious.” In effect he said, “I see altars everywhere. Obviously you have a deep religious thirst for knowledge. Let me tell you about my God.” Which led Paul to proclaim his belief in a monotheistic God who is both Creator and Preserver.
Had he stopped there Paul might have heard an “Amen” or two. Instead he went on to speak of a time when God, the Creator and Preserver, would become the Judge. Paul announced that the time for all to repent was at hand; that God had already appointed a man who would judge the world in righteousness; that God had given assurance to all by raising this man from the dead. With that declaration Paul’s lecture/sermon ended.
Some in the audience scoffed. Others said that someday they would like to hear more. If what Paul himself later wrote to the Corinthians is an accurate indicator, Paul left Athens for Corinth carrying with him a sense of failure. Some scholars make a connection between his unsuccessful attempt in Athens to proclaim the Gospel in “plausible words of wisdom” and his decision henceforth to speak only of “Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” (Corinthians 2:1-5)
This week I have spent a fair amount of time trying to discern what we can learn from this episode. This is where I come out – at least this morning. I believe that the time Paul spent in Athens was a missed opportunity. An opportunity the academic world and the church world have missed ever since.
What was that opportunity? It was the opportunity for the academic world and the religious world to think together about the mystery of humanity’s common existence.
To think together about what it means to be human in relation to our selves, in relation to other selves, in relation to the earth and the cosmos. And, yes, in relation to God. An opportunity for the academic world and the religious world to engage in that inquiry together. And to bring to that inquiry all the resources the academic world and the religious world have at hand. Where might such an inquiry begin? Where all inquiry must begin. By asking, “What are the questions?”
Thomas Merton, the Benedictine contemplative, once wrote to a friend. “When I first became a monk I was more sure of “answers.” But as I grow old in the monastic life and advance further into solitude, I become aware that I have only begun to seek the questions. And what are the questions? Can we make sense out of our existence?” Merton goes on to ask a singularly pertinent question, particularly of theologians and philosophers. “Can we honestly give our lives meaning, merely by adopting a certain set of explanations which pretend to tell us why the world began and where it will end, why there is evil and what is necessary for a good life?” 2 Which I translate to mean that something more than dogmas or creeds or mathematical equations and working hypotheses is required.
I am aware that Merton’s words may sound to your ears as so much babble, much as Paul’s words sounded to the Athenians. Possibly you will be helped by Jacob Needleman’s narrative of the time he came to the Branson School, a private high school in Marin County. Needleman is a distinguished scholar and teacher in Philosophy, Religion, Ethics, Medicine, Psychology, Education, Philanthropy, and Business. As his resume indicates, Jacob Needleman personifies the integration of the academic world and the world of the great religions.
Needleman was invited to the Branson School to bring the study of ethics more deeply into the school’s curriculum. He spent one full day lecturing: beginning with the seniors, then the juniors, then the sophomores.
At the end of the day he looked down at one hundred fourteen-year-old freshmen, the youngest students in the school. He began his lecture by saying that Ethics has to do with the question: What kind of human being do you want to be?
Before starting Needleman had invited the class to ask anything they wished about what it meant to be a good person. Not two minutes into his talk, a small hand flew up in the second row. At first Needleman tried to ignore it long enough to round off his opening remarks. But the hand was insistent, rapidly opening and closing a small fist. The moment Needleman’s glance met the boy’s eyes, the boy called out his question: “Why do people get angry?”
From here on let Needleman do the talking: “Why do people get angry?” It stopped me cold. I could find nothing to say. I walked to the edge of the platform and looked down at him. He was a child, but he was not playing a child’s game now. He was not being ‘smart.’ He was not trying to impress me or his friends and teachers. Or, if he was, it was only on the surface. Underneath the surface, behind the young eyes, I saw a man, a man only just coming into the chaos of human life in the world. ’I don’t know,’ I said. ’It’s strange, isn’t it? I know that some things make me angry and some things make me feel kind, but I don’t know why they do?’ The boy became quiet. He was thinking. After a few seconds, he said: ‘Why don’t you know?’ What a question!
“Finally, I turned to the audience. ‘Here we are. We’ve immediately plunged into the heart of ethics. The question is not only what we ought or ought not to do, but what are we? What is a human being? And what are our emotions?’ I felt like someone in a foreign country who knows only the basic words of the language. Ideas started rearing in my mind like wild horses. But I would have to speak about such ideas in a language of this foreign country of fourteen-year-olds.”
“Another hand raised. A slight olive-skinned girl. She spoke softly, her voice trembling: ‘Why are we destroying the earth?’ Again I was stopped. Finally, I answered, ‘Your question makes me think of the achievements of the human mind, especially in science. It makes me think of how much we have come to know about nature and how much we are able to do with what we know. And at the same time how much we use our knowledge to destroy ourselves and the world. Maybe we need to think more deeply about the contradiction in ourselves.’
“I paused. My thoughts were interrupted by a crackling voice in the back of the hall. ‘It’s the multinational corporations. It’s all about money. They don’t care what they do to poison the environment or destroy the rainforest or create poverty in Third World Countries.’ I interrupted him. ‘You know,’ - and I was even surprised to hear myself saying it - ‘maybe they do care. Maybe these bad heads of multinational corporations are also people like you and me. We need to understand that the person next to me or the head of a corporation or even the person who is seeking to destroy me – that he is like I am. Is it possible to remember that we are also like that when we have lost our contact with our ideals and ethical principles?’
“The questions came one after another. Questions about the world, about humanity as such, about other people’s needs and suffering, about the future of the world, about the happiness of their parents and friends, about babies born and unborn – and at the same time their own personal anguish and need was pouring through those questions as the blood in our human bodies pours through every tissue, organ and cell within us.
“These young people yearn for one thing and one thing only – down under and behind every shout and cry of their lives, they yearn to love. And without knowing it, they need, as do all of us, also without knowing it, to learn how to be able to love.
“The answer was clear: a human being is the being who yearns to love, who is built to love and to act justly toward others – just as we have heard (but is it heard anymore?) since ancient times in our Western world and in the great teachings of the East, just as Moses, Hillel, Jesus, Mohammed, the masters of India, the Buddha, Socrates, and the whole angelic host of the spiritually wise have taught. A human being is the being who yearns to love, who is built to love and to act justly toward others.” 3
Well, that is some of what happened when Jacob Needleman came to the Branson School. If Paul ever again comes to Athens, or to Palo Alto for that matter, I hope he makes a date with Jacob Needleman, more important with some high school freshmen, and invites them to ask anything they wish about what it means to be good, to be a person, to be human.
(1) Theodore Ferris, The Interpreter's Bible , Vol. 9; p. 231.
(2) Thomas Merton, A Book of Hours, pp. 104-105.
(3) Jacob Neddleman, Why Can't We Be Good? p. 257ff.
