Acts, Chapter 17 (NRSV)The story of Paul and his visit to Athens has been for a long time, a model to me of how Christians might best interact with people of different or no faith.
Athens was the intellectual center of western classical culture. While the days of the great flowering of philosophers had passed, their legacy, carried east and south from Greece by the conquering armies of Alexander the Great, had become part of the common heritage of the hellenized world. Paul was a product of that world. While he was trained as a rabbi, the way he writes and the way he constructs his arguments in his letters indicate that he was also trained in philosophy and rhetoric. He was a man of two cultures, a hellenized jew, and it is because of that comprehensiveness that he was so effective in taking the message of the Gospel to the gentile peoples.
In today's reading in Acts Paul arrives, apparently for the first time in his life, in Athens. He sees a city full of temples and graven images. Reconstructions of the city today indicate that it teemed with shrines and temples to nearly every god or demigod that the Greek armies had encountered during their campaigns. The best of Greek thought recognized that the idols were not the gods, and perhaps Paul hadn't realized how different the idealized thoughts of the philosophers were from the actual practice of people of the city.
At any rate Luke reports that Paul is distressed by what he finds and begins to argue in the synagogue against the idolatry all around. (That's an interesting choice of a place to hold forth against idols; it's the one place in all of Athens that you would expect there to be no idols.) His arguments bring out philosophers of two of the major schools of thought of the time, the Stoics and the Epicureans. They are apparently attracted to him because they were interested in any new ideas, and his teachings were certainly new to them.
Eventually Paul is brought to the Aeropagus, literally "the rock of Ares (the Greek God of War)". It was the place where legal matters were pursued, and in Paul's time probably the place where investigations into criminal matters took place. It's there that Paul makes a speech about a temple he saw in the city that was dedicated to an "unknown God". He uses the presence of that shrine as a way to introduce the people of the city to the good news that God has definitively and uniquely entered human history in the person of Jesus. The words of his argument, as Luke reports them, deal mainly with the issue of idolatry but there must have been more to the speech because it's the scoffing at reports of the resurrection of the dead that divide the crowd. Some of the people who hear Paul continue to listen to him and eventually are added to the Church. Many apparently don't and aren't.
But what I find interesting is the way that Paul chooses not to attack the Athenians, but to find things in their practice that he can use to lead them to a relationship with God. He does the opposite of the street preachers I used to encounter when I was in college, who would stand on the sidewalk near campus and shout condemnation at anyone who walked by. I never saw a single person converted that way. I did see a lot of people embarrassed by the behavior who would no longer admit to their classmates that they too were Christians. Paul doesn't shout or condemn. The word translated "repent" in the text (which is the word metanoia in Greek) might better be rendered "re-think" or "reconsider". There's no call to sit in the dust or put to ashes on their heads. Just a call to engage with these new ideas about God's nature.
When Gregory the Great sent Augustine of Canterbury to bring the Gospel to the British Isles, Augustine asked what he was to do about the existing shrines of the British people. Gregory replied "Things are not to be loved for the sake of a place, but places are to be loved for the sake of their good things." In other words, Gregory was telling Augustine to seek out the things that already existed in Britain and which pointed to the God that Augustine was proclaiming. Whatever he found that pointed to, or was adaptable to the Gospel, he should use to proclaim it.
I think sometimes we forget this principle. Which is ironic because it's part of our founding gift as the descendants of Augustine's missionary work. When we encounter people who believe differently than we do, rather than condemning them, we would do better to learn their ways, and seek the things in their lives that already point to Jesus. Such things will exist in any place. We believe Jesus is the Truth, and so where ever there is truth, we look to find the presence of Jesus. Paul did this in part in Athens, and it allowed some of the people who heard him to give him a fair hearing. Not all could hear, but some did.
How open are you to finding truth in other people? How much will you open yourself to that task when they do things that you find hard to accept or understand? People who are trying to communicate across cultural boundaries really need to acquire that gift, whether there are working in inter-religious dialogue, speaking about religion to scientists, or trying to talk about faith to a community that has lost its memory of the basic language of belief.
Where are you hearing the Truth of God in a surprising place today? How might you use that truth as a place to begin a dialogue about what you believe?
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