No civil disturbances followed Paul’s preaching of the Christian gospel at Athens, as they had elsewhere. Citizens of the intellectual capital of the world, the Athenians, as Luke points out (Acts 17:16–34), were keen to investigate any new theory that came their way. And so, after some days of general preaching and discussion in the Agora, Paul was invited by Stoic and Epicurean philosophers to address the Court of the Areopagus.
And what did the philosophers think of the Christian gospel? Not much, according to Luke. Before Paul’s address, some of them had already dismissed him in contemptuous Athenian slang; and after it, though some were interested to hear more, others openly mocked.
Luke’s record at this point, we might think, is at least remarkably honest; but then neither Luke nor Paul would ever have felt tempted to hide the fact that the gospel was foolishness to the Greeks, especially to Greek philosophers. In his writings, Paul advertises the fact that ‘Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach [p 81] Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and folly to Gentiles’ (1 Cor 1:22–23).
This does not mean, of course, that the Christian gospel is anti-rational in the way that, for instance, Zen Buddhism self-confessedly is. Paul urges his converts: ‘Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature’ (1 Cor 14:20). His criticism of human philosophy was not even that it was based on logic rather than faith. Paul knew as well as anybody else that both philosophers and scientists have to accept by faith certain unprovable axioms before they can use logic to erect their systems of thought upon them. Paul’s criticism was that, in the nature of things, human philosophy was inadequate for the task of bringing people into a personal living and loving relationship with God: ‘the world’, he says, ‘did not know God through wisdom’ (1 Cor 1:21).
The truth of that is evident all around us, and it is no insult to philosophy or to philosophers to point it out. Indeed, the same holds true in other human relationships also. In courtship and marriage, for instance, bare philosophical logic is not normally the means a man uses to win a woman’s trust and love, and to induce her to become his wife!
It is not an excess of logic that keeps people from entering into a personal relationship with God, but something much more like ingratitude and pride. All mankind, says the Bible, originally knew God, but ‘they did not honour him as God or give thanks to him’ (Rom 1:18–21). To be under a constant duty to show gratitude to an almighty Creator is to admit to total dependence on another; and this many people resent and refuse. This is [p 82] the source of their alienation from God; and the resultant sin compounds the difficulty: for the guilt it produces makes people instinctively sense God as a threat and an enemy and increases their determination to resist admitting to his existence.
To penetrate this barrier of alienation, guilt, fear, enmity, misapprehension and mistrust, God presents not a philosophy but a person—and that person is God himself, incarnate in Jesus Christ. He presents not a theory about morality, but a historical event—the cross of Christ, demonstrating, more powerfully than mere words could, the hideous result of man’s sin and alienation from God; and simultaneously revealing, as no philosophical argument could, the reality and sincerity of God’s love for man in that, while we were still sinners, ungodly, and enemies of God, ‘Christ died for us’ (Rom 5:5–11). It is by the cross of Christ that man’s heart is reached, all barriers between man and God broken down, forgiveness and reconciliation made possible and hope for the future guaranteed.
Now some of the members of the Areopagus Court were Epicureans, some Stoics. Both philosophies were noble attempts to make sense of the universe, its physical workings and man’s place within it. Neither was intended to be mere academic theory; both offered practical advice on what man should aim at as his chief goal in life and how to cope with life’s pains and sorrows, disasters and evil. But when it came to hope for the elimination of evil from the world, or to any ultimate hope for the individual, neither philosophy had much, if anything, to offer.
Epicureans made pleasure the chief good to be aimed at in life; not the grosser pleasures, for they often involve [p 83] emotional turbulence, pain and hangover, but pleasure in the sense of trouble-free tranquillity. They therefore advised deliberate withdrawal from too much involvement in the rough and tumble of life. This philosophy in fact produced people who within their own Epicurean fellowships were renowned for their kindness and loyalty; but it was scarcely a philosophy which the ordinary working man, housewife, or business person could practise.
In physics, Epicureans adopted the atomic theory of the earlier philosophers Leucippus and Democritus which they combined with the doctrine of mindless, purposeless, creator-less evolution; and from these theories some of them, like the Roman Lucretius, drew their greatest peace of mind. Those theories proved, they felt, that no part of man survives death; and that therefore all fears of divine judgment and punishment after death are groundless and can be dismissed.
Of course, they did not preach the other side of this Epicurean ‘gospel’, namely, that if it was true, it meant that the millions of those who in past generations had suffered and died without getting justice in this life would now never get justice; and millions who were currently suffering major or minor injustices had no realistic hope of ever getting justice either. Hope of justice, then, was largely a mirage.
Stoics were very different. They held that at the centre of the universe and pervading all its parts was reason. It was the active agent in creation and controlled all that went on. They referred to this impersonal reason by many names—Nature, Reason, Zeus, God—but this Stoic god was not the transcendent, personal, loving Creator proclaimed by [p 84] Judaism and Christianity. He—or rather, it—was as much part of the material substance of the universe as anything else. In other words, the Stoics were pantheists. Unsurprisingly, therefore, when it came to the question of the elimination of evil and injustice from the world, they could offer no more hope than the Epicureans. Since, according to them, reason was at the heart of the universe, pervaded all its parts, ordered and controlled all its happenings, the world-as-it-is was by definition the best of all possible worlds.
Moreover the only real good in life was virtue, defined as living and acting according to reason. All other apparently good things were matters of indifference. So if a wise man saw two million Cambodians about to be massacred by the Khmer Rouge, it would be good and virtuous to attempt to save them. But if, in spite of his efforts, they were massacred, he would not grieve: his effort to save them was rational, therefore absolutely good; the two million lives of themselves were not an absolute good but only a matter of indifference. His own wisdom lay in accepting, without grief or protest, what was now shown to be fate and therefore the outworking of the universal reason.
At first sight, this Stoic teaching might appear the same as the Christian doctrine that ‘all things work together for good to those who love God’ and that therefore we can and should find comfort in submitting at all times and in all circumstances to the will of God. Actually, it is far removed from it. Christianity does not teach that the world-as-it-is is the best of all possible worlds. The ‘good’ to which all things work together is not the present world as it is, but the promised ‘good’ that by divine redemption every believer will eventually be conformed [p 85] in body and character to the risen, glorified Christ and brought to a world where righteousness reigns.
Stoicism had no such hope. Indeed the earlier Stoics had held that the whole universe, being in its every part and action the expression of universal reason, would at the appropriate time go up in flames and then be renewed exactly the same as it was before. Every event in history would be repeated in precise detail. Evil, then, was forever built into the system. There was only one way out: when circumstances made it impossible for a wise man to live virtuously according to reason, he was allowed to commit suicide!
There is no denying that this philosophy produced many noble, strong, principled characters; but in the end it was a philosophy of hopelessness. And the same is true of the modern equivalents both of the Epicureans (the atheistic evolutionists) and of the Stoics (the pantheists of Hinduism and of the New Age Movement). Paul’s comment on the Gentile world at large is especially applicable to both groups: they are not only without God (that is the true God): they are without Christ. They have no sense that God has a deep-laid plan for the redemption of creation and mankind, a plan promised and adumbrated in the Old Testament revelation of his purpose through the nation of Israel, put into action within history by the birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ and scheduled to be brought to its consummation at Christ’s second coming. And thus being ‘without God’ and ‘separated from Christ’, they are without ‘hope . . . in the world’ (Eph 2:12).
Of course, there were truths about God that the philosophers of the time could, and sometimes did, perceive [p 86] by a priori reasoning. Both Stoics and Epicureans would have agreed in principle with Paul’s point that the God who made the world and all things in it, should not rightly be thought of as dwelling in temples made with hands (Acts 17:24). It was one of the absurdities of ancient polytheism that the high god, Zeus, had his own special temple in Athens, distinct from the temples of Apollo and of the rest of the gods.
Similarly, the Greek poet, Aratus, himself a Stoic, had written—and Paul quoted it to the Areopagus Court—that we humans are God’s offspring (Acts 17:28–29). It followed that it was misleading to represent God by dead, impersonal images of wood or metal or stone. We humans are persons; it cannot be that the almighty Power that created us is less personal than we are—though this is the irrational notion which even modern atheism is forced to maintain. And both Stoics and Epicureans would have agreed with Paul that it was self-evident that an almighty Creator who gives to his creatures life, breath, and all things, was not to be served by men’s hands as though he needed anything (Acts 17:25)—although the notion has persisted from paganism even into some forms of Christendom that we can buy forgiveness and salvation from God by our meritorious deeds. If all the coinage in the world belongs to God by definition, we have no coinage with which to purchase anything from him at all! Like physical life itself, salvation must be a gift.
But what God has done, and will yet do for the redemption of the world, could never be deduced by a priori reasoning from general principles. It is the story of God’s sovereign intervention in history; and Paul summed [p 87] up the basis of the gospel’s announcement of a coming sinless world of peace and justice, in these famous words:
Now [God] commands all people everywhere to repent, 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. (Acts 17:30–31)
At the mention of the resurrection from the dead, Luke tells us, some, though not all, of the philosophers laughed, just as many a scientist today will laugh at the very idea of the existence of God. But they would have done better, as would their modern counterparts, to have thought a little more about the limitations of their philosophical and scientific disciplines. As Prof. Russell Stannard, formerly vice-president of the British Institute of Physics, has written:
For all its [modern physics’] value as a source of understanding, one has to accept that as an explanatory framework, its scope has its limitations. There are realities, such as consciousness, that lie outside its domain. There are why-type questions .&nbps;.&nbps;. that physics is powerless to address .&nbps;.&nbps;. it is impossible to take seriously the claim that science has, or will one day have, all the answers. In particular, it is absurd for anyone to assert that ‘science has disproved God’s existence’. This it could never do.
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