The Craziest Thing Paul Ever Did
July 26, 2010
I’m gonna start by admitting that my title is just for attention. Paul probably did way crazier things than this – but it’s still pretty crazy.
This is part of what we talked about yesterday at Ekklesia BA.
In Acts 17, Paul ends up in Athens waiting for Timothy and Silas to catch up. And because he’s Paul, he naturally starts sharing the gospel and arguing with local philosophers. They haul him in front of the high court to accuse him of spreading dangerous religions and he defends himself this way:
- “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…” (17:22-24) {this is the NIV, but I added the colon [:] where the NIV has a period}
This is crazy because Paul is standing at the intersection of 1st Century politics and paganism telling them, “your religious tradition is already teaching you some truth.” That’s not how we think of speaking to paganism today. The altar to an “unknown god” was already suggesting that there were powers the Athenians didn’t understand. Paul doesn’t start with sin and hell, he doesn’t even mention the cross – he starts with what they got right.
There are two implications of this (that I’m willing to post here today):
1960s culture wars
1. We Christians can engage the culture around us without resorting to “culture wars.” If Paul can find a common starting place with Greek paganism, we can find starting points with hipster culture, urban/hip-hop culture, even (can I say this in 2010?) corporate culture… We can start with the things they get right. I’m not saying any of these cultural expressions get everything right, but c’mon now – neither does church culture.
2. We as individual Christians need to start our attempts at evangelism with honest, authentic relationship. You can’t find a common starting point without getting to know someone first. No matter who you meet, God is already working on them. This is what John Wesley (accidental founder of Methodism) taught about God’s grace - long before we notice it, the Spirit of God is working on our hearts teaching us to recognize truth and lies, allowing us to choose some right from wrong. When you spend time with non-Christians, really trying to get to know them, you begin to find places where this truth shines through. That’s their altar to an unknown God. That’s the place you can point to and say, “You already know something very important. Let me show you more.”
