Biblion Bible Commentary
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To an unknown god
Acts 17:22-31
22 Paul stood in the middle of the Areopagus and said, “You men of Athens, I perceive that you are very religious in all things. · WEB
Paul argues from creation, from a shared human descent and from their own poets — and lands on a fixed day of judgment guaranteed by a resurrection.
The opening is diplomatic and double-edged: I perceive that you are very religious in all things. The word could be praise or the observation that they are excessively god-fearing, and an audience of professional debaters would have heard both.
His text is an altar he found, inscribed TO AN UNKNOWN GOD — the insurance policy of a city determined not to offend a deity it had overlooked. He takes their own admission of ignorance as his starting point. What therefore you worship in ignorance, I announce to you. He is not introducing a foreign god, which was the charge; he is naming one they have already conceded they do not know.
The argument then dismantles pagan religion without ever mentioning an idol. The God who made the world and all things in it, he, being Lord of heaven and earth, doesn't dwell in temples made with hands — the same phrase Stephen used before the council, now aimed at the Parthenon on the hill above them. And he isn't served by men's hands, as though he needed anything, seeing he himself gives to all life and breath and all things. The whole economy of sacrifice as feeding the gods is reversed: the giving runs one way, and it runs from him.
The next claim is the most radical thing said in Athens that day. He made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the surface of the earth. Athenians prided themselves on being sprung from their own soil, a people apart from the barbarians. Paul tells them that every nation on earth descends from one, which abolishes the distinction they most valued — and it is the same fact that makes the message he brings addressable to everyone.
He adds that God determined appointed seasons and the boundaries of their dwellings, so history and geography are not accidents either. And the purpose is stated: that they should seek the Lord, if perhaps they might reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. The verb for reaching out is what a blind man does feeling for a wall. That is the honest condition of the search — groping — and the answer to it is not that the seekers are clever but that the object is close.
Then he quotes their own writers. For in him we live, move, and have our being, and we are also his offspring. He uses pagan poetry as a point of contact, not as an authority; what the lines establish is something his hearers already grant, and he immediately turns it against them. If we are God's offspring, then the divine nature cannot be like gold, or silver, or stone, engraved by art and design of man. Living beings do not descend from statues. Their own poets have refuted their own temples.
The close is abrupt and gives no ground. The times of ignorance therefore God overlooked. But now he commands that all people everywhere should repent. The patience has a terminus, and what replaces it is a command with no exemptions.
And the reason is a date already fixed: he has appointed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness by the man whom he has ordained. The evidence offered is not an argument but an event — he has given assurance to all men, in that he has raised him from the dead. Everything ends where every sermon in this book ends.
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