On
the Unknown God and Who He Is
“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.’”
The
Greek culture is usually the first to come to mind when the topic of polytheism
comes up. Inventing new gods was not uncommon in the ancient world. Every
nation and province had its own selection of gods. There was a theological/mythological
explosion by the time the apostle Paul arrived on the scene. There were gods
and goddesses everywhere. To put it in perspective, there were more gods than
there were things to rule over. The Greek island Lesbos is known to have let
other cultures borrow their gods if the other’s gods were not living up to
their divine duties. Elijah taunted the priests of Baal that perhaps their god
was away relieving himself; if this had been said to Greeks, they may have
taken it under serious consideration to assign a deity over sewers. In any
case, there must have been a serious cultural/theological problem if a temple
to an unknown god had to be built. So what were the Greek’s problems? Why does
the unknown god resemble Yahweh more than any of the other plethora of gods
that they had? First, we must understand what the theological epistemology of
the Greeks was before we can answer such questions.
When talking about theological
epistemology, we are talking about basically the question how one knows comes
to know things concerning divine being or God. For the Greeks, their belief was
solely based upon their experience in the world. When one saw the roaring Ocean
an account for its existence and activity was needed. So a Poseidon had to be
fashioned according to the observations made by the subject. When one
experienced love and beauty an Aphrodite was needed to account for it. Of
course, she herself had to emulate their observations, so she was a promiscuous
goddess. The growth of civilization meant a growth of new activities/aspects of
society and gods were needed to account for them as well. Dionysius was the god
of wine, drunkenness, parties, youthful pleasure etc. There was even a god to
account for traveling, thievery, and language etc—his name was Hermes. They had
gods for cooking, childbirth, sculpture, horticulture, and, of course, the god
of gods, Zeus. The question of good or evil hardly played a role concerning the
essence or character of a particular god. If one happened to be good then
aren’t we lucky! Man is most creative when fashioning temples to house his
heart.
It
appears that gods were used the same way that the terms genus (category) and
species (members) are used. If there was a group of common things in the world
a god was assigned to watch over them. This played an important role in the
dilemma that resulted in the temple to the unknown god. The problem that came
out of their epistemological method was that as their understanding of the
world grew so did the necessity to find more gods to account for their
findings. Theological, though it may be, their method for knowing the gods was
purely naturalistic; and as they understood more and more their own ignorance
of the world, so did the fact that they may not have all gods accounted for.
There is simply no way to be certain that all the gods were known. There was a
fear that by not acknowledging all the gods that they were accidentally being
irreverent, impious, or even blasphemous to them. The relationship between gods
and men was clearly one-sided. Man was always left to himself to know the gods
via guesswork and start the relationship off.
To
hone in on this point, let us consider, briefly, the history of the temple to
the unknown god. According to some sources, Diogenes Laërtius states that Epimenides (a Greek seer) had a plan to stave
off a raging plague:
"He took sheep, some black and others white,
and brought them to the Areopagus; and there he let them go whither they
pleased, instructing those that followed them to mark the spot where each sheep
lay down and to offer a sacrifice to the local divinity. And thus, it is said,
the plague was stayed. Hence even to this day altars may be found in different
parts of Attica with no name inscribed upon them, which are memorials of this
atonement."
If the sheep
rested in an area that had no local deity, an altar to an unknown god was made.
Thus, the temple to an unknown god was founded upon tired sheep. The religious
epistemology concerning the god was based upon divine sheep casting. Nothing
more could be said of the god except he/she/it has an affinity toward sheep.
The flippant treatment of building temples reflects the flippant reasons for
believing in gods. Contrasting their temples with Israel’s temple to Yahweh,
the Temple was built as a symbol of the presence of God with His people. Reason
and natural observation were reaching their limitations. There were multiple
altars not only in Greece, but in Rome as well. In a way, the temple to the
unknown god was a mark and sign of frustration within the Greco-Roman world. The
temple to the unknown god was a realization that of all the gods they had
known, none of them appeared to be the cause of their present ailment (or at
least, were able to solve it) and that perhaps some unknown god was offended.
What could they do? Gods have taken permanent residence on Mt. Olympus and
don’t appear to want to come down again. The best they could do was to cast
sheep like dice in the hopes that someone will be appeased enough to end their
suffering. Their epistemology had been one of starting from the ground and
working upwards to peer into the divine realm for answers. With no help by
divine revelation, what became of their religious epistemology was to create
essentially a “Tower of Babel” of deities. It became a hodge-podge of gods and
a worldview that was shattered and disorderly. The devoutly religious devolved
into a hedonistic practice (as did the Romans), and the disbelieving
philosophers developed ethical practices that were based on ignoring the world
rather than trying to unify all aspects of the world into a cohesive and comprehensive
whole (e.g. Stoicism). Is it any wonder that from a culture like this that Pilate
answers Christ’s claim to be the truth with the question “what is truth”? If
according to Epimenides, “For in thee we live and move and have our being” then
why is it that we are so disconnected from him?
The Temple to
the unknown god also represents a loss of real reverence for their deities. If
Diogenes’ account is correct, then these temples were built merely to
accommodate their needs. If you are using sheep to guide you to the object of
your worship then one would be hard pressed to find a reason to show reverence
to a god who is a stranger. And really, if you are exchanging gods like playing
cards to other cultures, then there’s probably not much reverential fear going
on.
The problem
that these people were suffering from was a religious system contingent upon
the knowledge of a world that they did not understand. Their scientific
understanding of the world around them and the intricacies of human existence
were severely limited. It is as if one is using a bent and warped stick in the
dark as a measuring rod. If you are using creation to define its author, you
are going to get an author that looks like creation; if you are using a fallen
creation, you get a god who is less than perfect and reflects those fallen
aspects.
Their understanding does confirm Paul’s words in
Romans 1:18-23:
“The wrath of
God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of
people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known
about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since
the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine
nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so
that people are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither
glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile
and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they
became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to
look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.”
While
they tried to suppress the knowledge of the True God, they knew enough that to
account for all the aspects of creation, they needed creators. As is the nature
of man under any condition, they needed objects of worship. When basing a religious
system on observing a world that is afflicted with sin, that world will look
chaotic and confused; and that’s exactly the kind of religious system they got.
Their religion emulated the world around them, which is chaotic and sinful;
therefore, their religion is chaotic and sinful as well (and the stories of
their gods are rife with chaos and vice). Their deities reflected little of sovereignty
and providence, concepts that produce order and stability.
So
with all this in mind, what was it about the unknown god that Paul found so
familiar? As we mentioned before, their religious system was based on starting
from creation and attempting to work their way up to the divine realm. The
temple to the unknown god was recognition of that failure. Therefore, Paul used
that as an opportunity to tell them of a God that cannot be reached by
reasoning through sinful creation. Their religious epistemology was backwards,
man couldn’t work his way up to God; God must come down to us.
The god that the
pagans did not know was the God that is Lord of all creation, not merely a part
of it. The fact that the pagans did not know their own limitations as sinful
human beings was the reason why their intellect failed to reach the God that
unifies all creation under the banner of His sovereignty.
The
difference between Paul’s religious epistemology and the pagan’s was that faith
is brought down to us as a gift so that a gap in knowing may be bridged;
whereas the pagan method was merely to assent to the physical operations of the
world. Paul’s God was not merely the author and caretaker of a portion of the
world, but is the author of everything in the world and the sustainer of it.
For all the work and trouble the Greeks and Romans put into knowing the world
for the sake of seeking their gods, Paul informed them that their unknown God
was as close as their very breath and Who provided life for all. For all their
gifts into observing the smallest nooks and the farthest places, they could not
see the answer to their quest was closer than they could possibly imagine. It
is an irony of ironies to be given the very tools to find the One you’re
supposedly looking for only to refuse to open your eyes and retreat into the
darkness. They were without excuse.
Paul
assured his pagan audience that God does not dwell in temples made by man, nor
is He waiting to be served as if our aid was required. If they had ears to
hear, the Greeks could have discovered that the true God had everything under
control, and that the sovereignty and providence that they so desperately
needed from their gods dwelt within the one God who graciously makes Himself
known. There is a God who does not play hide-and-seek with those who seek Him but
comes full force into the soul to bring us into an everlasting relationship. No
god of drunkenness could withstand the God of grace and mercy; for in Him we
truly “live and move and have our being”.
