Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Evangelism from Acts 17:16-34
It is always a pleasure as well as a privilege to come to Elmbrook. I think I’ve taught so many night school courses here now that when I nose the car north it sort of goes into automatic pilot and finds its way here. It is good to be back. I would like to direct your attention to Acts 17, and I shall read verses 16 to the end. Paul has gone ahead to the city of Athens (then considered still the premier intellectual center of the Roman world), and he is waiting for two of his associates, Silas and Timothy, to catch up with him. Luke writes:
“While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there. A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to dispute with him.
Some of them asked, ‘What is this babbler trying to say?’ Others remarked, ‘He seems to be advocating foreign gods.’ They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection. Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, ‘May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we want to know what they mean.’
(All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.) Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: ‘Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.
Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else.
From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. “For in him we live and move and have our being.”
As some of your own poets have said, “We are his offspring.” Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by man’s design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.’
When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, ‘We want to hear you again on this matter.’ At that, Paul left the Council. A few men became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.”
About 35 years ago, a friend of mine, a fellow Canadian, went to India as a missionary. His primary task there was to teach theology in an Indian seminary. However, he was energetic and profoundly committed to evangelism. He learned Hindi fluently and spent as much time as he possibly could in Indian villages preaching the gospel.
He was not foolish. He was not easily snookered by the diversity of culture and language and religious experiences he was confronting. He knew Hinduism has a tremendous capacity for syncretism. It can take in other elements of religion and incorporate them into a large framework, so he, in presenting the gospel, took great pains to emphasize the exclusiveness of Christ, the sufficiency of Christ, and over the years, he saw many, many people make professions of faith and didn’t plant a single church.
Despite all of his warnings, all of his emphases, he found people were saying, “Yes, yes,” even to teaching about the exclusiveness of Jesus and absorbing him somehow into the greater pantheism that underlies Hinduism. After 12 years, he came home profoundly discouraged over this element of his ministry in India.
He thought things through again, went back, and this time all of his evangelistic hours were restricted to two villages, and he began with Genesis 1. He began with the doctrine of God, who human beings are, the distance between a sovereign, transcendent, personal God on the one hand and the created order on the other hand.
From there, he moved on to human beings made in the image of God linked to the rest of creation, yet unique in their capacity to reflect this God and to know this God. Then he went on increasingly to the Bible’s storyline where Abraham fits in, then the law, and so forth. At the end of four years, he had seen relatively few converts but he had planted two churches.
That’s such a different way of looking at evangelism from that with which we have been familiar in the past. In the past, here in North America, evangelism has meant something like this: We presuppose the overwhelming majority of our hearers basically share our worldview. Therefore, evangelism does not entail for us, at least until very recently, discussion about the characteristics or attributes of God.
Evangelism for us has meant something like, “We already know if we’re talking about God, he’s a certain kind of being. We already commonly believe history is moving climactically to an end with a heaven to be gained and a hell to be shunned. We already know there is a difference between right and wrong and good and evil. We already know sin is an ugly thing. It’s odious and we are culpable. We already know about this person named Jesus who came and who died on the cross and who many think rose from the dead.”
Evangelism has meant, for us, emphasizing certain relatively small parts of the whole Bible’s storyline. In particular, salvation by grace through faith, the substitutionary nature of Christ’s death, the importance of self-abandonment to Christ, faith. Even, you see, if we were dealing with atheists or agnostics, they were not generic atheists or agnostics.
They were Christian atheists or agnostics, so the kind of God in whom they did not believe or the kind of God about whom they were uncertain was a Christian God. Thus, our categories shaped the entire discourse. We didn’t have to worry about the kinds of questions my friend had to face in India, but that’s all changing. Here in the Western world that’s all changing. It is important to recognize there is enormous diversity.
A couple of years ago, a graduate of Trinity returned to TEDS after being out for eight or nine years. When he graduated, somehow he felt called of God to go and plant a church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the buckle on the Bible belt. Why you’d want to go and plant a church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where they have 800 churches already, I’m not quite sure, but God moves in mysterious ways. He told me when he first went there he spent a whole year before he found a single person who would confess to not being a Christian.
About the same time, another of our graduates who graduated within a year of this chap met up with me. His name is Randy Newman, a Jew by birth, a Christian by belief. He had worked with Campus Crusade for quite a number of years, and he came to us for some theological education then went back to Washington, DC.
The DC area has been the death of university workers. InterVarsity tried and had sort of wiped out. Crusade had tried and had sort of wiped out. They did a little bit and then they wiped out. He went back. He has been there now for about a decade, and now they have a staff of something like 15 or so.
They’re working in all the “George” universities: Georgetown, George Washington, George Mason, and so on, and Howard, and one or two other places. (Just about every other institution there begins with George.) Over the years, he has developed all kinds of creative ways to get conversations going and has seen many people converted. Every time I go to DC he meets me at the airport, tells me what he’s doing, and we spend some time praying together.
At the same time this other chap came back, he told me of a new tool they had developed. This was just a way of getting undergraduates to start talking. In this tool, one of the things presented to these undergraduates was a list, two columns in fact, and they were asked to make spot connections between a word drawn from the first column with any word they chose on the second column.
For Christianity in the first column, eight out of ten chose bigotry in the second column. This was not Tulsa, Oklahoma. This is an extraordinarily diverse nation, but the fact of the matter is that rising numbers of people now have bought into a worldview that is entirely alien from the Judeo-Christian heritage on which most of us were nurtured, and it comes to us as a great relief that Paul faced similar sorts of problems in the first century.
When Paul went evangelizing, he began in synagogues which had a biblical background, but he reached out to a world which knew nothing of a biblical background. What then may we learn from this passage about preaching the Bible to people who live in another universe, to biblical illiterates from our framework?
1. The realities Paul faced.
A. He faced pluralism.
Not merely in diversity. There were many, many religions in the ancient world. There was a kind of principled diversity organized by the government. The Roman policy when they took over a new turf was to arrange a god swap. They insisted some of the gods in the local area be adopted into the Roman pantheon and some of the Roman gods be adopted at the local level. The reason was political.
It was common knowledge that people were more likely to rebel if they could link together in their imagination people, gods, and land. In Old Testament times, the superpowers (first Assyria and then Babylon) broke up that triumvirate by transporting people out of their land. That’s why not only Israel but many smaller nations had their leaders and many of their artisans and others transported. It broke up this linkage which festered into rebellion.
The Romans did it another way. That was just a very expensive way of quelling rebellion, so the Romans instead broke up the link between gods and people and land. By adopting some of the gods of the newly conquered turf and by insisting the local people adopt Roman gods, then if war did break out, it wasn’t quite clear which side any of the gods were on. Therefore, it diminished the potential for rebellion.
Of course, what this did, in effect, was foster a policy of principled religious pluralism throughout the entire empire so that at the end of the day the final thing to worship gradually became the state itself. Not entirely dissimilar to our own world, the undergirding epistemology was radically different, but today in Western media, principled pluralism is on the agenda everywhere, and it is a doctrine which you almost dare not question. It is the new plausibility structure, as the sociologists would tell us.
B. He faced massive biblical illiteracy.
When he was in the synagogues, of course, that was quite different, but when he comes to the Areopagus, he is dealing with people who, despite all of their intellectual pretensions, had never heard of Moses. They had never read the Old Testament. They didn’t know the Bible’s storyline.
He couldn’t make a quick allusion to the Abrahamic covenant. He couldn’t start talking about the significance of circumcision before and after the promise. He couldn’t talk about moral and ceremonial law. Those were categories that were entirely alien to these people. Moreover, it wasn’t just a question of biblical storyline per se.
C. He faced profoundly alien worldviews.
They were not only biblically illiterate, but they themselves adopted essentially alien outlooks. When you become biblically illiterate, it is not that your mind is, therefore, a complete blank waiting to be informed. When you become biblically illiterate, you replace what was there in the heritage by other things.
What do we find that he confronts? Epicurean and Stoic philosophers, for a start. That needs a word of explanation. For us today, philosophy is one of those things taught in minor university departments for eggheads. It is of precious little use, we think, asking extraordinarily complex questions in words of eight cylinders or more, but in the ancient world, philosophy meant more or less what we mean by worldview.
It was very important in the Greek mind to have a kind of synthetic outlook, a worldview. There were competing worldviews, and they were debated in the marketplace of ideas, but it was not an esoteric subject. It was something everyone grappled with. Thus, when they begin to accuse him of being a babbler, the word suggests he was an eclectic thinker. He was a seed picker, like a little bird going along and indiscriminately picking up an idea here and idea there.
Their first charge against him was not that he was introducing a new philosophy (that is, a new worldview) but that he was almost incoherent. His categories were so alien. For, you see, not only were they polytheists, believing in many, many, many finite gods, they were by and large pantheists.
In the Greek mind, underneath all of the manifestation of these gods, there was one god who was virtually indistinguishable from the entire order. That’s why, in the ancient Greek writers they go back and forth between talking about gods and God in the singular without any embarrassment, but God in the singular who is manifested in all of these gods is not a personal being. The personal beings are all the individual gods.
Now along comes Paul who starts talking about a personal, transcendent God. They don’t have categories for that, and many of them are dualists. They believe matter is, in principle, bad and spirit is, in principle, good, and Paul is talking about a resurrection. That is, coming back to something that is, in principle, bad. They don’t have the categories, so he must not only inform them, but he must (to break English vocabulary) unlearn them. He must take away or replace some of their outlook.
Today we, too, face not only rising biblical illiteracy but outlooks and perspectives that are massively antithetical to a Christian outlook. Most of my evangelism is done in university settings. I did four university missions last year. The people whom I evangelize in university settings have never heard of Moses either, or else they confuse him with Charlton Heston. The overwhelming majority of them don’t know the Bible has two Testaments. They don’t know anything about the Bible’s storyline.
Many of them will tell you they’ve read the Bible, but they haven’t. The most they’ve done is pick up an odd snippet or clip here and there. “Judge not that you be not judged,” which is now the best known verse in the entire Western culture. It used to be John 3:16. It’s now Matthew 7:1, although people usually haven’t read the context or know where it’s found. They haven’t discovered that five verses on it says, “Don’t cast your pearls before pigs,” which means somebody has to decide who the pigs are. They haven’t got that far in the text.
Where do you start with these people? It is a massive question. If you go to these people and say, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life,” that is not a cheap shot at Crusade, but if you say that to these people, what do they hear? What do they hear? “Of course, God loves me. I’m rather cute. I mean, that’s his job to love, isn’t it? Nobody disputes that God, if he, she, or it exists, will love, and if he has a wonderful plan for my life, that’s also why I read the horoscope. Of course, I want to find out what this plan is.”
Do you know the hardest thing to get across to university students today? The notion of sin. All the vocabulary has changed. God, Spirit, truth, sin. It has all changed. Sin is a snicker word. “He sinned.” Snicker. Snicker. Snicker. There’s no odium to it. There’s no shame. In the latest polls, only 17 percent of Americans now believe definitions of sin ought to be connected with God. Do you see what that means?
That means sin is increasingly understood to be sociologically defined or defined by the interpretive community or defined by the individual, which means there is no absoluteness to it. There’s no essential heedlessness to it. There’s no defiance of God to it. But if you can’t get an agreement on what the problem is, you certainly can’t get an agreement on what the solution is. Paul faced all of that. The realities Paul faced were pluralism, biblical illiteracy, and profoundly alien worldviews.
2. The priorities Paul adopts.
A. He adopts the primacy of preaching to those with a shared heritage.
We read in verse 17, while he is in Athens, he reasons in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks. That is, with Jews who know the Bible, with proselytes (Gentiles who become Jews), and with other Gentiles who have been sitting in on all of this instruction and have absorbed a great deal of the Old Testament teaching and outlook but who have not yet converted to Judaism and become circumcised and so forth. He begins there.
Part of his reason for doing so undoubtedly is theological. Elsewhere, he writes again and again the gospel is for the Jew first and also for the Greek. He recognizes there is a kind of salvation-historical primacy to evangelism amongst the Jews. God’s grace came first to them. God’s covenant people under the Mosaic categories were the Jews, so he begins there again and again, but even on pragmatic terms, he is beginning with people who understand the categories.
As some of us reach out and starting thinking through how to evangelize in universities and in the media and in this rising percentage of Western peoples who don’t understand any of the categories, we still have to remember there are still a lot of people, not least in the Midwest, who have some kind of churchy background and who, at least in some measure, think in Judeo-Christian categories.
In Wisconsin, there are still an awful lot of lapsed Lutherans, lapsed Catholics, and even the occasional lapsed Baptist around, and many of these people were brought up in parochial schools or they have relatives who were brought up in parochial schools and they still have a lot of these sorts of categories, but if you go to Oregon or the New England states, it’s just not the way it is.
This means, therefore, while we strategize and think about how to evangelize postmodernists, and so on, we also have to bear in mind there are people a lot closer to home: relatives of Christians, friends of Christians, people who have been brought up in a similar heritage to us. We must not forget that. Not for a moment should we now switch gears so completely that we think we’re in India. We’re not. We’re in the Western world.
B. Paul adopts the urgency of preaching to those with an alien heritage.
Not only does he preach in the synagogue but also we’re told in the marketplace day by day with those who happen to be there. It is possible for us to become so caught up in our religious world, in our Christian world, that we simply do not have the contacts with this larger world that is now so alien to the gospel.
To be honest, that was something that just about took me out about 15 years ago. In my youth, I had done a great deal of university evangelism and the like. Then, eventually, I teach at Trinity. Guess who I’m teaching all week? Christians. On the weekend, guess where I preach? To more Christians.
The only non-Christians I bumped into were clerks in stores and the odd unbeliever next to me on an airplane seat or something like that, so I took the decision 12 or 15 years ago, that when people asked me to speak, I would very frequently insist it be evangelistic or I wouldn’t come. In some cases, that meant I didn’t go.
But friends would indulge my foolishness, and gradually, gradually I got back into a lot more university evangelism and that sort of thing so that I’ve been able to track the changing face of beliefs amongst university students. I’ve been evangelizing in universities now for 25 years, and it’s just not the same sort of picture anymore.
Paul makes this a principle. Not only does he preach on the soft turf, as it were; he goes after the people with an essentially alien culture, and in those days, the place to get into that kind of contact was the marketplace, which finally drew the attention of the intellectual leaders and brings him into the Areopagus.
How that works out in your community … We come in this crowd from many different states from around the nation. How that works out in your community I can’t tell you, but you have to find ways of getting into contact with hostile people … other than local church. That is to say, you have to find ways of getting in contact with people who don’t know anything about anything about the gospel.
It may be in a discussion group; it may be in a bowling team; it may be, in some places, street preaching; it may be on the Internet; it may be with a neighbor; it may be a Bible study with university students, or it may be noon-hour studies with workers. Many big companies nowadays allow you to set up all kinds of clubs and so forth over the lunch break.
Not least in this area, I know Christians in this church who have started evangelistic Bible studies and the like (exploration groups) during the 50 minutes or so of the lunch break at their own places of employment. There have to be aggressive, imaginative ways of making contact with people who don’t have any contact with the gospel.
Some of our students a few years ago were challenged to find some way into the business people who lived on the North Shore of Chicago. They take a very early train into the city. They work hard. They’re middle managers and up. They put in 12- and 14-hour days. Then they take the train back home. When they do come back home, after all, that’s it. The last thing they want is some crank going door to door passing out bits of literature. Home is the castle; don’t dare intrude. That’s not going to work.
Obviously, you can get at some of them on a one-to-one basis. Yes, you can. Friendships. Other Christians in the business area. But they also tried for two months just to see how it would work riding the trains. They took exactly the same train, got on exactly the same coach in and out every day, and within three weeks they had Bible studies going on the commuter lines into Chicago.
There are ways. It may not be for us the marketplace, but if you have the heart to reach out to people, you’ll find a way of connecting not only with the churchy people who are in close but with people who have no connection whatsoever. Maybe one of the things that needs to be done is to brainstorm together and find out what one another is doing, because there are many, many creative things being done out there about which I know absolutely nothing, but you are finding in your patch that it is a way of making connections with outsiders. Let’s learn about it.
These, then, are the priorities Paul adopts: the primacy of preaching to those with a shared heritage and the urgency of preaching to those with an alien heritage.
3. The framework Paul establishes.
When he approaches these people with his actual address (verse 22), he begins with a kind of reserved but warm respect. The language is well chosen. “I see in every way you are very religious.” That is neutral language. What Paul really thinks is already disclosed in verse 16.
If I had first gone to Athens at this point, I would have been mightily impressed by the architecture and the massive Corinthian columns and this heritage of intellectual prowess. Paul goes to Athens and sees a city full of idols. In other words, he is a man who is assessing what is going on, not in terms of the categories of respectability in the world, but in the categories of God’s gracious self-disclosure in Scripture.
He sees a city full of idols. He’s not intimidated by intellectual might. Intellectual sinners are merely sinners who can use their fallen minds even more creatively for sin. As a result, he looks around and he sees this city collapsed into idolatry, denying the very God who made them and gave them all of these intellectual powers.
When he approaches them, he approaches them very carefully. After all, Christians know that at best we’re poor beggars telling others where there’s bread. Paul knew with far less excuse he had been a persecutor of the church. He’s not condescending. He approaches carefully. “I see that in every way you are very religious.” He has clearly thought his way into how he’s going to get into the discussion. “For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship …” He doesn’t call them gods and he doesn’t call them idols. Not yet.
“… I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.” The gods in those days were judged to have certain domains of special interest. If you wanted to take a trip by sea, then you offered a sacrifice to Neptune. If you were falling in love, Aphrodite might help. If you were going off to war, then some incense offered to Zeus would be a good idea. If you were entering into debates in the Areopagus, of course, you wanted to appease the god of communication, and Hermes would be the one to go after.
But there were so many gods out there you couldn’t know them all, so to cover all the bases you actually offer something up to an unknown god. Paul sees this as a sign that people don’t really know what they’re doing here. They’re inventing things. They’re making things up as they go along. They’re covering their turf. But the God he talks about is a God who has made himself known. “What you don’t know, I’m going to proclaim to you.” That’s his way in.
Discourses at the Areopagus were doubtless even longer than this one (maybe two or three hours), whereas it takes you two or three minutes to read this, which means each clause here, each sentence, is doubtless a point. If we run through this address, we find his principled points, but we must recognize as Paul delivered this he would have given far, far, far more information.
Look at some of the things he makes as he establishes a framework before he introduces Jesus. “The God who made the world and everything in it …” He establishes a doctrine of creation and behind that a personal, transcendent God. That is, a God who is beyond time and space and creation, other than it, distinguishable from it, yet personally and powerfully acting. He does something. He makes everything.
Further, he is the Lord of heaven and earth. He is a providential ruler. He is not lost in a pantheistic sea indistinguishable from the rest of created order. He sovereignly rules over the lot. He does not live in temples built by hands. He is finally not domesticated by religion. He transcends that. You must not think he is the sort of God who can be controlled by erecting a temple in his honor and then pulling the appropriate strings so that somehow this God will give you just what you want. He’s beyond that.
Moreover, he is not served by human hands as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. This God is not like some of the Greek gods, whimsical and bad-tempered unless you stroke them in a certain kind of direction. He is self-sufficient. He is self-existent. He is happy in himself.
One of the great books to come out of the last 10 years or so is John Piper’s The Pleasures of God. Within this kind of framework, therefore, we return to the doctrine the Puritans used to call the doctrine of aseity from the Latin a se, from himself. He is self-derived. He is from himself, and he’s happy with himself.
It’s not as if he’s the sort of God who is bemoaning his circumstances unless, finally, we can go up to him and stroke him appropriately so he can feel satisfied. He’s a God who declares in the Old Testament, “If I were hungry, I wouldn’t go to you. I don’t need you to loan me two bits to buy a hamburger at McDonald’s. The cattle on a thousand hills are mine.”
Far from him needing us, it’s the other way around. We need him. “For he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else.” Can you hear here not only a doctrine of creation and of providence but of sustenance? Every breath we breathe is by his sanction. As Jesus taught, not a bird falls from the heaven apart from his sanction. We need him for everything.
Then he introduces anthropology. “From one man he made every nation of men.” He’s not merely a tribal god. One of the entailments of monotheism is that he must in some sense be the God of all, whether recognized or not. Not a whit of racism here. “From one man he made every nation of men that they should inhabit the whole earth.”
Whatever else he may say elsewhere about his covenantal relationship with Israel, he’s not merely Israel’s God nicely parked and controlled in one tribe. No. “He determined the times set for all of these nations in the exact places where they should live.” Is this a happy circumstance, a happy place now?
Already now Paul begins to introduce that this is an alienated world just the same. People do not know him as they ought. God arranged things this way so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, which presupposes that people don’t. Paul is going to say a lot more about what is at the essence of sin, but already he’s moving in that direction.
Yet, for all his transcendence, he’s not so far removed that he is unknowable. This isn’t a deist God. No. He’s not far from each one of us. In fact, that’s one of the things ancient paganism understood. Undoubtedly, they tended to understand it in a pantheistic framework, but still, they’re right in saying God isn’t far from each one of us.
“ ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ ” In the ancient world, poets were understood to be inspired by the muse. They were the prophets of the pagan world. Undoubtedly, when the minor poet says, “We are his offspring,” he is thinking in essentially pantheistic terms, but Paul says, “Whatever the categories, the truth itself is still there. Alien religions do speak some truth.”
Paul begins to sketch out in more detail a doctrine of sin. He doesn’t call it that. “Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by man’s design and skill.” We cannot reduce this God. We cannot make our religion into some structured idolatry. We cannot do that.
The heart of all sin is elevating myself or my understanding to the place where God is usurped, such that as a result, I either worship myself or something made, something in the created order, rather than the God himself, the God who is really there. “In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.”
This is not saying, of course, in the past they were all saved. If that were what Paul was saying, then, of course, he’s being very foolish to try to evangelize them. Leave them all in ignorance and still be saved. What he is saying, of course, is what Paul himself elsewhere says in his own writings in Romans, chapters 1, 2, and 3.
In the past, God has overlooked the accumulating sins and in forbearance does not come down in the judgment these sins deserve, but now as salvation has been brought closer and is wonderfully present, so judgment has been brought closer and is terrifyingly present. Thus, he is introducing a notion of history, because you see, most Greeks thought the world went around and around and around in cycles, and that is coming back now in one form or another of the popular views of reincarnation that are surfacing in all of our media.
Paul says, “That’s not the way it works. You begin with creation.” In the next verse he’s about to say, “You go all the way to final judgment where there is heaven to be gained and there’s judgment to face.” We’re heading in this direction, and somewhere along that timeline, God did something dramatic.
Now, at a certain point, we have reached a climax in this history that God is ruling over such that now salvation is broken out and the announcement of good news is to all peoples everywhere. “In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.”
Do you see what he has done here? He has established a framework in which to introduce Jesus. Some people, not seeing the point, have said Paul here errs prodigiously. They say elsewhere he just preaches the gospel. “Here he goes all intellectual on us.” The proof they adduce to defend this view is 1 Corinthians, chapters 1 and 2. In the next city, after all, in Corinth, Paul says, “When I came among you I resolved to preach Christ only and him crucified.”
Some interpreters have said, “You see, Paul is admitting he made a mistake in Athens. There he went all intellectual. You see what happened. Only a few stragglers believed (verse 34), whereas in Corinth, there he preached the gospel, Christ crucified, and he established a church. So don’t give me any of this intellectual egghead business. Don’t talk to me about outlooks and worldviews and perspectives. Just preach Jesus and the cross.”
Well, I’m the last person to want to argue that we shouldn’t preach Jesus and the cross, but with all respect, that is a profound misinterpretation of this passage, for eight reasons.
A. This simply is not the natural reading of Acts.
This interpretation depends on bringing in some material from another book and so interpreting Acts that it gives it a twist you couldn’t have gotten from reading the book of Acts itself. As you read through the book of Acts, Luke doesn’t suddenly send up a flag and say, “Look out, people! At this point, Paul errs.”
B. Acts 17 is, in any case, theologically entirely in line with Paul’s own expressed views as found in Romans.
Do you see how he lays out the doctrine of creation and fall and curse? Religion doesn’t work. What we need is the cross. He lays it out as a growing, sustained argument. If you wanted to find the closest parallel to this sermon in the entire New Testament, read Romans 1 and following.
C. Acts 17 does not say only a few believed (NIV) but, in Greek, “Certain people believed along with others who did certain things.”
Those are expressions found in Greek in a number of places in the book of Acts where Luke comments on the results. Our English translations have slanted things just a bit.
D. Transparently, Paul was cut off.
He got as far as the resurrection, and perhaps he had been going on the way he did when that poor chap fell out the window, just a bit too long even for the Areopagus, and he was cut off. If you want to know what Paul regularly did, even in a pagan circle …
E. Go back to verse 18 and following.
When Paul preaches in the marketplace and the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers begin to dispute with him and when they begin to question what he’s doing, their whole approach is caused, we’re told by Luke, because Paul was preaching the gospel, the good news.
How you get into it is a little different from what you’re doing. Paul, in the pagan context, was preaching the gospel, which for Paul inevitably meant the cross. The point is in this case he was getting there through the larger structure and the resurrection which was leading back to the cross, but he most certainly was not going to stop at the resurrection.
F. At this point, Paul was not a rookie.
It’s not as if he were a fresh graduate from TEDS who really did mistakenly think he knew it all and was going to evangelize the whole world and then made mistake after mistake after mistake of a pastoral nature because he hadn’t had a good mentoring relationship like the kind of thing you can get here at Elmbrook Church.
No. He had been on the road now for more than 20 years, and during that time he had been shipwrecked and beaten, left for dead, stoned, and cursed. He had taught in a church like Antioch, evangelized cross-culturally. This is not a Paul who is a rookie making fundamental mistakes.
G. First Corinthians 2 does not cast Paul’s resolution to preach the cross against the background of Athens.
In 1 Corinthians 2, Paul does not say, “I confess. I goofed in Athens, but when I came to Corinth, there I resolved to preach Christ and him crucified.” What he says instead in 1 Corinthians 2 is, “Over against the love of show, of rhetoric, of oratory, over against all that kind of perspective in which the form is more important than the content, over against all of that, in Corinth I resolved to preach Christ and him crucified.”
H. Paul is still arguing it is important to bring every thought into obedience to Christ.
In the context of 2 Corinthians 10 he is not saying it is important to bring every individual thought connected with your sexual life or your imagination or your motives into line with Christ. That’s true, but it’s not Paul’s point in 2 Corinthians 10. His point there, as the context makes clear, is that he is determined to bring every outlook, every worldview into obedience to Christ. Paul thinks “worldviewishly.”
If I have to add a ninth, a kind of bonus, I would draw your attention to verse 34. We’re told there a few men became followers of Paul and believed. We’re not to think by this that they believed immediately and on the spot. This is almost certainly a two-step declaration. Some sneer, but some say, “Paul, you’re onto something here. Tell us a little bit more.” As a result, they became followers of Paul, and because they became followers of Paul in (audio cuts off).
That has been increasingly the trend in university evangelism. It used to be a bare 20 years ago that you could put up a poster in a university and have some provocative subject such as, “Has anyone ever come back from the dead to tell us?” or something like that, and then you would go through traditionalist apologetics.
If you could prove (so far as you could and as convincingly as you could) to individuals that Christ really did rise from the dead, then humanly speaking (I know conversion is finally with God), you were 85 percent of the way to seeing people become Christians. That’s not the way it is today. In the first place, they don’t come out with banners anymore. The only non-Christians you get at university missions nowadays are those invited by other Christians.
I just refuse to do university missions any more unless I can get in there a week earlier or a month earlier and spend a lot of time with Christians to win their confidence, because otherwise, when I get there, they spend the first three-quarters of the week listening to me to find out if they can trust me enough to bring their friends. By the end of the week, we have a pretty good crowd, but it’s a bit late. The only way they bring unbelievers is if they have enough confidence in me to think I won’t embarrass them in front of their friends.
They bring them, and then what happens is the whole Christian message is so alien, so different, so strange, it takes a while to build up things, so it’s not uncommon now at the end of a university mission to find one or two or three people who have made professions of faith and 30 or 40 get enrolled in basic Christianity courses or Christianity Explained courses or one of those. Then many get converted in the weeks that follow.
I just had a letter this past week from the chaplain at Macquarie University in Australia where I did a mission last August. He was just keeping me up to date on the numbers who had signed up for this course or that course and who had been converted and who hadn’t and so forth. When I left not a single person so far as I know had become a Christian. Now there are quite a few. That’s common in university evangelism nowadays because the outlook is so alien. It’s foreign. Not even one Areopagus address changes things.
No. The people become followers of Paul and in due course believe. Again, I do not want to turn this business of evangelism into a mere information intellectual exercise. I believe in revival. If God comes down in sweeping revival, people will get converted in a flash, and they’re not going to require three hours of Areopagus address.
Yes, I know that, but God is still a God who works through means, and the truth of the matter is today in many of our circles we are closer to doing the kind of evangelism my friend was doing in his closing years in the villages of India, changing worldviews and providing a matrix and a framework in which to explain Christ. Otherwise, the message of Christ will not be heard in the categories you intend to bring.
4. The non-negotiable gospel Paul preaches.
You see, at this point Paul could very easily have said, “Let’s present the gospel in a way as inoffensive as possible. Do we really have to say anything about the resurrection? How about eternal life; a loving, personal God; immortality; fulfillment; and the abundant life?”
But this is the same Paul who elsewhere writes in 1 Corinthians 15, “If Christ be not risen, then we are false witnesses, and your faith is vain.” For Christianity is not a flexible, philosophical system that is divorced from history. It’s not like Buddhism. It is tied to God’s self-disclosure in history, and there are non-negotiables to it without which Christianity is no longer Christianity.
If that is utterly alien and even repulsive to the people with whom we have to go, well, I’m sorry, but we still have to articulate the truth lovingly, gently, as courteously and as graciously as possible, trying to understand the framework out of which they move, but you cannot compromise the non-negotiables of the gospel.
A. The exclusiveness of Christ.
In a postmodern world, one of the non-negotiables is the exclusiveness of Christ. It is quite easy to get converts of a sort. In a postmodern world, it is getting harder and harder to get converts who will avow the exclusive sufficiency of Christ, but until you have that, you don’t know whether you have a genuine convert in our world anymore or not. You may only have another spurious convert.
If you talk endlessly about the abundant life, how do people in a postmodern framework hear you? I’m all for abundant life myself. What does that mean? More sex? More money? More fulfillment? Some of my friends have abundant life, too. They use crystals. Where does the expression abundant life come from?
It’s only used once. It comes from John 10. There it’s talking about sheep eating a lot of grass. You can’t talk about grass on university campuses either! No. At the end of the day, while we seek to be winsome and gentle, we also must come up with the non-negotiables of the gospel, and only then are you sure that the professions of faith are genuine.
My time is gone. I want to close, however, with these two or three brief remarks. First, we must see increasingly our struggle in evangelism is a worldview clash. This means we now have to start farther back than we used to. John Stott is here. I owe him a great deal. One of the books he wrote, Basic Christianity, was instrumental in the conversion of my wife.
Over the years, I’ve given away many, many, copies of Basic Christianity, but I think John would be the first one to acknowledge in many circles that book is now almost useless because it presupposes too much. Isn’t that fair? There are many churchy people to whom I still give that book out, but in today’s environment it presupposes so much you have to start farther back or else you are not being faithful to the gospel.
That is what is meant also in Acts 20 regarding what is meant by the whole counsel of God. It is a framework without which the gospel, in some simple sense, is simply incoherent. To put it in contemporary terms, this means we must proclaim a metanarrative.
In a postmodern world, people like stories. They like narratives. They hate metanarratives. A metanarrative is the big story that explains all the little stories. Just as metaphysics is the big physics that explains all the little physics, it’s the big explanatory story. What you must see is the Bible establishes a big explanatory story for the entire race without which the story of Jesus or your story or my story is simply incoherent. That’s the framework. That’s non-negotiable.
The second thing I would want to say is if you ask me, “How do you get back into this discussion?” my first response will be, “That’s a second-order question. I’m happy to answer it, but it’s a second-order question.” The first-order question is not, “How do you get back into the discussion?” but “Where are you going?” For unless you see that where you are going is to establish the nature of the human problem in biblical categories, then you can’t establish the finality of the solution, the gospel, in biblical categories.
If you define human problems in terms of alienation, there is no way you can get back easily to the cross. Unless the alienation is itself understood to be anchored in rebellion against God, alienation from him and, therefore, alienation from one another, unless things are first defined with respect to God and his righteous indignation against all the rebellion, all the self-love, unless we understand sin as an offense before him, why the cross?
Chuck Colson tells a story in one of his articles of a journalist who phoned him and said, “I’ve got a deal for you. I’ll take you out to the best restaurant, and I’ll feed you at my expense provided you spend the whole evening trying to convert me to Christianity. Do we have a deal?” So Chuck went, and he tried his best evidentialist apologetics, all the proofs of this, that, and the other.
Of course, because this journalist was a postmodernist, he could paradigm those right out. “Well, you think that way because you’re a Christian. Of course, you think that way. That’s the way your interpretive community is bound to think.” He tried all of his best presuppositionalist apologetics. Well, presuppositionalism to a postmodernist is like announcing the pope is Catholic. The question is the justification of presuppositions.
Very frustrated, toward the end of dessert, Chuck finally said, “Have you seen the Woody Allen movie, Crimes and Misdemeanors?” Because undoubtedly there are many righteous people here who wouldn’t go to a Woody Allen movie, let me tell you what it’s about. In this film, the central character kills his mistress. Then he faces paroxysms of self-doubt and shame, and he’s afraid he’s going to get caught. To make a long story short, he finds out he’s not going to get caught. The police don’t have a clue. He’s scot-free.
Now he has to decide whether he’s going to live in guilt or if he’s going to view this murder as not much more than the disintegration of some conveniently arranged atoms, and he opts for the latter, and that’s the way the film ends. Crimes and Misdemeanors. But the film is quite self-evidently a reversal of a book written in the last century by Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment.
Here the main figure decides he’s going to commit the perfect crime, and he knows the way the police get you is by looking at all of the individuals around the victim’s life, so he selects an individual with whom he has no contact whatsoever, an old woman whom he doesn’t even know. He arranges the whole thing, and he kills her, and he too goes through paroxysms of shame and guilt. Then, in due course, he discovers the police don’t have a clue. He has committed the perfect crime.
But he is so reduced to shame and degradation for what he has done, that eventually, he goes and confesses his crime to the police. Crime and Punishment. Now Colson said, “Are those our only alternatives? You either confront massive evil and you say, ‘It doesn’t matter; it’s just the way the atoms bounced,’ or you confront it even in your own heart, and you say, ‘There is no hope; I am undone,’ and you writhe in agony of self-loathing and despair. Is there no alternative to that?”
The man began to listen. From there, Colson went on to Tolstoy, War and Peace. Do you remember Pierre? “Why is it that the good I wish to do I don’t do and the evil that I don’t wish to do I do?” Does that sound vaguely familiar? From there, he works into a Pauline anthropology. “Why are people made like that? Why do they react this way?”
From there into the Bible’s storyline and finally to the cross. The point of the whole story is not how he got in but where he went. You may get in any number of ways. Football heroes telling their testimonies. Who knows? At one level, I don’t care. The real question is … Where are you going?
You have to get to the Bible’s storyline with integrity of life and the witness of a transformed church and a holy, meek boldness and a godliness that transcends the transient norms of this society, a countercultural integrity that is truthful and wise and loving and self-denying, but ultimately, evangelism itself means the articulation of the entire package, the whole counsel of God, focusing finally on the Christ who dies and rises again on our behalf for our justification, or you have not declared the gospel. God help us. Amen.
