Monotheism in Athens

Monotheism in Athens April 4, 2016

Paul’s apologetic sermon in Acts 17 is often taken as a model of apostolic accommodation. He quotes “one of your own poets,” speaks of “divine nature,” introduces the Athenians to a God they already vaguely know. His sermon is not so much news as an elaboration of what the Athenians already half-suspect.

There is something to that, of course. Paul’s rhetoric is, as always, cunning. But the theology isn’t compromised a whit. Paul ends with judgment and resurrection and Jesus, but from the very beginning, he is making claims that must have startled his audience of philosophers. He claims, after all, to know the unknown God, which means that this unknown God is somehow capable of self-revelation.

Acts 17:24-27 alternate between statements about God’s as Creator and God as providential Lord:

A. God made the world and everything in it.

B. God needs nothing, and gives life, breath and everything.

A’. God made every nation from one man.

B’. God determined the boundaries and time periods for all nations.

The claim that the unknown God is the Creator is hum-drum in a post-Christian as in a Christian culture, but it wouldn’t have been so to Athenian thinkers. Presumably, the unknown god of Athens is the high God that is beyond the named and characterized gods of the myths. Though the Athenians do not claim to know this god, they do know at least this: That this god cannot be the maker of the physical universe; he is too exalted to involve himself in the affairs of nations, determining national boundaries and the rise and fall of kingdoms. That’s a job for demiurges and lesser beings. Following Genesis, though, Paul announces that the Creator God is identical to the high God, and that this Creator God has not left the world to run on its own, but orchestrates the history of nations.

This Creator is a genuinely high God, utterly without need. He is “not served by human hands as though He needed anything” (v. 25). But this independence is not indifference. Rather, the independence of God, His need-less-ness, means that He is the ultimate Giver of gifts. He doesn’t give to receive; He needs nothing, and so He gives freely, life, breath, and everything to the “offspring” that he has made. He is utterly needless, and yet He has organized the world so that human beings will seek and find him, though He has never been distant in the first place, since “in Him we live and move and have our being” (v. 28).

Paul’s argument is a polemic against the Athenian idolatry that has provoked him. Given the nature of God, we know that God doesn’t live in temples and doesn’t need our worship; given the nature of human beings, we know that He is not gold, silver, or wood. Jesus has been raised from the dead to judge idols and their worshipers. But within this polemic is a positive theology proper, as high octane a theology proper as one could wish. However cleverly Paul accommodates to his audience, his theology is Jewish-Christian creational monotheism.


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