A Christian Historical Lesson: Ancient Athens

The 19th century Anglican scholar J.S. Howson wrote a very good biography of the Apostle Paul, and one of the lights he turns on for a public-school-educated twenty-first century ignoramus like myself is what ancient Athens was like. Athens is where Paul proclaimed the Gospel boldly and faithfully in the Areopagus in Acts 17, and Howson does an excellent job of giving the reader a feel for the place.

And it reminds of a place I know pretty well.

A religion which addresses itself only to the taste, is as weak as one that appeals only to the intellect. The Greek religion was a mere deification of human attributes and the powers of nature.

J.M. Howson, the Life and Epistles of St. Paul

Sound like anything familiar? Watched any movies lately that seem to make a god very much like us or a god who is the sum total of (“Mother”) nature the being we should look to for fulfillment and restoration?

Or how about looking for all the joy and hope you’ll ever get in physical pleasure and the pursuits of earthly life here and now? Ring American at all?

To the Greek this world was everything: he hardly even sought to rise above it. And thus all his life long, in the midst of everything to gratify his taste and exercise his intellect, he remained in ignorance of God.

Howson

Looking for transcendence and meaning and awe in nature or physical pleasure is not a new pursuit.

To be sure, all of us enjoy the glimpses of joy that come in beholding the Grand Canyon or a redwood tree or having one’s back scratched or a good cup of coffee, but the foolishness that isn’t new but is certainly current is the decision to seek all of one’s hope and joy and sense of purpose in temporal objects and experiences. Athens’ error is America’s: Believing the created world will bear the weight of our worship.

We also, like the men of Athens, refuse to seek out the specific God who has actually made us and our world, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Jesus Christ.

As we are told by a Latin writer that the ancient Romans, when alarmed by an earthquake, were accustomed to pray, not to any specified divinity, but to a god expressed in vague language, as avowedly Unknown: so the Athenians acknowledged their ignorance of the True Deity by the altars ‘with the inscription to THE UNKNOWN GOD,’ which are mentioned by Heathen writers as well as by the inspired historian… The Athenians were ignorant of the right object of worship.

Howson

The imprecise deity of Athens would nestle in quite well in the current American pantheon. We are a people of a vague, benign god who wants for us only what we already want for ourselves. Our gods sound like us and look like us. The American gods are thoroughly human gods.

The people of ancient Athens were very religious or, to use our day’s verbiage, “spiritual.” They sought out transcendence and higher thought and meaning. But they did so by thinking about mythical stories of anthropomorphic gods. In our time and place we often seek out the deeper things of life in nature, in environmental causes, or in getting our favorite politician elected. For much of America, “the climate,” a supposedly wounded and anthropomorphic mother, is our goddess, and a favorite politician is our Hercules.

The great beauty of the story of Paul’s mission in this cauldron of paganism is that the true God who made the men of Athens was seeking to save people from among them, and that in His grand story of rescuing and remaking the world He would rescue people who had rejected Him. Athens’ deities are so much dust scattered in archaeological sites, now, but the Good News of the Resurrected Savior is still coursing this globe and saving men just like those who heard Paul’s Gospel in Acts 17 in confusion.

We are an Athenian America, it seems to me, but He is also ever still the same saving God.

Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked. But others said, ‘We will hear you again about this.’ So Paul went out from their midst. But some men joined him and believed, among whom also were Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris and others with them.

Acts 17:32-34