Paul and Charitableness

The final entry in a long series on Acts 17
by Phil Johnson

For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ" (2 Corinthians 10:4-5).

harity is defined in 1 Corinthians 13. Among other things, it "does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth" (v. 6).

"Charitableness" (the postmodern substitute for charity) is something altogether different. It's a broad-minded, insouciantly tolerant, unrelenting goodwill toward practically every conceivable opinion. Its twin virtue—often labeled "epistemic humility'—is a cool refusal to hold any firm and settled convictions. These cardinal postmodern moral values are both seasoned with blithe indifference to the dangers of heresy.

In other words, if you want to be "charitable" by the postmodern definition, you must always leave open the possibility that someone else's truth is equal to if not better than yours. You must never write off other people's beliefs completely. Above all, you must seek to be conciliatory, not confrontive. Bottom line: you pretty much take the position that nothing we believe is ultimately anything more than a personal opinion.

Naturally, then, building bridges to non-Christian worldviews is deemed a better tactic than challenging error head on. Winning the admiration of unbelievers becomes vastly more important than demolishing the false ideologies that bind them. As a matter of fact, one of the best ways to gain non-Christians' respect and appreciation is by looking for common ground and then stressing those areas of agreement, rather than pointing out differences between what the non-Christian believes and what the Bible teaches. The more compliments and congratulations you can give to other points of view, the better. And the more your ideological adversaries like you at the end of the dialogue, the more gratified you are entitled to feel.

That obviously means that candidly telling someone he or she is in error is unacceptable. To the postmodern mind, direct contradiction like that is the polemical equivalent of dropping a nuke; it's an extreme last-resort tactic—rarely used at all in dialogues with unbelievers, but reserved mainly for other Christians whose views are too rigid or too conservative for your tastes.

Did Paul use the tactic of postmodern-style charitableness in Athens?

It sounds pretty silly even to raise that question, doesn't it? You know he didn't. He simply proclaimed the message Christ had given him to preach—"not with persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power" (1 Corinthians 2:4). Just as Paul had always done, he headed straight for the one truth he knew very well would sound most like utter foolishness to them: the resurrection of the dead.

Remember, the Areopagite philosophers were all materialists. Even the ones who believed in a kind of afterlife thought the idea of heaven and hell as actual places where people had glorified physical bodies sounded so utterly foolish and unthinkable that when Paul got to that point in his message, it brought the house down. End of sermon: "And when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked, while others said, 'We will hear you again on this matter.' So Paul departed from among them. However, some men joined him and believed, among them Dionysius the Areopagite, a woman named Damaris, and others with them" (vv. 32-34).

Three reactions, and I think it's a reasonable conjecture that Luke lists them in declining order from the majority response to the minority.

"Some mocked." That's what you would expect someone steeped in Greek philosophy to do. "Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified . . . to the Greeks foolishness" (1 Corinthians 1:22-23). Paul's worldview was so utterly and completely in contrast with the Athenian culture and belief system that most of these guys simply turned away.

That doesn't mean Paul failed. Listen: even if every last person in the philosophers' circle had turned away angry, that would not mean Paul's ministry strategy was wrong. His only task as an ambassador for Christ is to deliver the message clearly and accurately, and he did that. If they had all picked up stones to kill him (as the crowd at Lystra did in Acts 14), God would still have judged Paul faithful. But if he compromised the message in order to win people's appreciation rather than their repentance, that would not have been faithful.

Others said, "We will hear you again on this matter." Paul's straightforwardness evidently gained their interest in what he had to say. He had an open door to preach the gospel again to them.

However, some men joined him and believed. For a handful of people, including "Dionysius the Areopagite, a woman named Damaris, and others with them," this was the moment of conversion. They believed, and became disciples.

That's what faithful evangelistic ministry looks like. It doesn't cower before opposition. It isn't intimidated by human wisdom. It isn't shaken by rejection. It doesn't waver from the truth. It doesn't shift and change content to suit the preferences or felt needs of an audience. It has one theme, and that is Christ in His death and resurrection. It has one strategy—to unpack the meaning of Christ's death and resurrection and proclaim it with clarity. It confronts every worldview, every false religion, every superstitious belief, every human philosophy, and every skeptical opinion. It rises above all those things and speaks with unshakable authority, because the gospel is the truth of God, and the power of God for salvation.

Contextualize that.

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Paul and Contextualization

Yet another in a drawn-out series on Acts 17
by Phil Johnson

QUESTION: Where are the hordes of postmodernists, Emergent/emerging aficionados, and evangelical contextualizers who said they wanted to have a conversation about Acts 17? Not so long ago, people were crawling out of the woodwork to assert the necessity of seeking "common ground" with hostile worldviews. They insisted we must adapt our message to fit (rather than confront) unbelieving cultures. They were touting a brand of "missional" strategy where building bridges to other worldviews is supposed to be more important than demolishing them (contra 2 Cor. 10:4-5). So I've been making a long series of fairly non-trivial posts taking a serious look at the main passage most of those people cited as the singular biblical argument on which those opinions were based.     So to those of you who insisted that this kind of contextualzation is patently and absolutely essential, that Paul is the model of it, and that anyone who doesn't see the point in Acts 17 is naive, ignorant, backward-thinking, and blind: Most of you said you were just itching to discuss the whole question of contextualization in light of Acts 17. Where'd y'all go?

gain: there is an obvious and legitimate need to speak a language people understand if you want to reach them. Paul didn't go into Athens and speak Hebrew to the Areopagites. He spoke Greek. There's nothing the least bit remarkable about that. What Paul did not do was adapt his message to suit the basic values and belief systems of that culture.

Observe what he did do. Every dyed-in-the-wool contextualizer will tell you that he quoted the philosophers' favorite poets right back at them. "For in Him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own poets have said, 'For we are also His offspring'" (v. 28). He quoted two well-known Greek poets in quick succession. Epimenides, a poet from the island of Crete in the sixth century BC, wrote the line, "In Him we live and move and have our being." And Aratus, a Macedonian poet from the third century BC, wrote "we are also His offspring." Two lines from poets who were already ancient in Paul's lifetime.

Epimenides and Aratus weren't exactly the Lennon and McCartney of 1st-century Athens. Paul was not embracing aspects of the first-century Greek worldview or culture just to relate with the Athenians; he was not affirming something just because he wanted to seem hip and this poetry was fashionable in the Greek academy of his own day. Quite the opposite. He was quoting from their ancient literature to express his own worldview. His point was that these were truths about God that their own ancient ancestors once recognized also. Common grace had made these truths obvious (Romans 1:19), but the Athenian intellectuals had suppressed them. In other words, those quotations from the literature of their forefathers actually confronted the more contemporary and popular worldview of that generation.

As a matter of fact, Paul was doing his utmost to demolish their worldview, so he went systemically through a list of ideas they held in error, and he confronted them with true ideas instead.

There he stood in Athens, amid countless temples and idols. Talking to the culture's most enlightened minds, all of whom held worldviews that were for all practical purposes atheistic, materialistic, and superstitious all at once. Half of them (the Stoics) believed in an afterlife, but it was a disembodied, spiritual notion of the afterlife. The other half (the Epicureans) were such hardened materialists that they believed when the body died and the molecules went back to dust, that was it. By their way of thinking, there was no such thing as a human soul and thus no conscious existence after death.

It was very much like our secularized, atheistic culture today. So Paul is surrounded by these massive stone temples that were relics of a mostly-discarded belief system when he says what he is about to say:

God, who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands. Nor is He worshiped with men's hands, as though He needed anything, since He gives to all life, breath, and all things. And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope 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 also some of your own poets have said, 'For we are also His offspring.' Therefore, since we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, something shaped by art and man's devising. Truly, these times of ignorance God overlooked, but now commands all men everywhere to repent, because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead (vv. 24-31).

He could hardly have said anything more counter-cultural, more in conflict with the prevailing worldview, and less contextualized for Athenian philosophers.

Without trying to exegete every word of Paul's speech, let's notice a handful of his major points—at least six points in the span of six verses—that would have been deeply offensive to the Athenian philosophers. And Paul knew enough about their beliefs to know that he was challenging their most precious presuppositions—the building blocks of their whole worldview.

For one thing, in verse 24-25, when he says, "The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything"—Paul was summarily dismissing all the fundamentals of Greek-style religion. Paul certainly knew what Greek mythology taught. And the Athenian Philosophers weren't naive about world religions either. It wasn't as if they were clueless about Judaism or the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Paul wasn't introducing them to a God they had never heard of. He was telling them as plainly as possible that their beliefs were wrong.

He was declaring the truth about God—not in the philosophical style they were accustomed to, as if to make himself seem enlightened and wise, but he was preaching authoritative truth from God Himself. Furthermore, He stressed that the God of Scripture is not just another character who belonged in the Greek Pantheon. Notice: Paul insists that God is "Lord of heaven and earth"; He "does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands," but is fully self-sufficient and sovereign over all. It was tantamount to a bold and wholesale dismissal of every aspect of Greek religion. And you can bet those Athenians got the point.

Furthermore, when he said in verse 26 that God "has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth" he was attacking one of the common assumptions of the Athenian elite, because they were convinced the Greek race was superior to every other strain of humanity. When he said God "has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings," he was emphatically affirming the sovereignty of the one true God to this bunch of materialistic determinists who believed in the sovereignty of blind, mechanistic chance.

In verse 27, where Paul says, "God is not far from each one of us" (and then emphasizes that truth again in verse 28) he was declaring the immanence of God, an idea that was considered utterly ludicrous by Athenian intellectuals. And when (in verse 29) he ridiculed the idea "that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, something shaped by art and man's devising"—and then in verse 30 described that idea as the defining mark of "these times of ignorance"—we have to remember that he was talking to the one crowd in the entire world who were least likely to admit that anything they believed could properly be labeled "ignorant."

It begins to look like Paul was deliberately trying to provoke them. And in a true sense he was. He caps the sermon in verse 30 with a demand for repentance. And believe me: that was no less offensive on the Areopagus in the first century than it would be in the UN general council today. Paul could have hardly packed more hard truth and counter-cultural commentary into those few words. Every sentence Paul said had something in it that would be offensive to those philosophers.

Now, it should be obvious that in the sense postmodern evangelicals use the term, Paul was not contextualizing the gospel in order to reach these philosophers with a message that would sound friendly, comfortable, and easy for them to embrace.

Next time, we'll wrap this up with a word about "charitableness."

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Paul and Conversation

Another in our series on Acts 17
by Phil Johnson

aul declared the truth in the Areopagus without apology, without undue respect for their academic stature, and without artificial deference to their points of view. He preached the gospel; he did not sponsor a colloquium about it. In the synagogue and marketplace of Athens, Paul had engaged in discussions and debates about the gospel (Acts 17:17), but these were no doubt the typical sort of give-and-take every open-air evangelist would have with hecklers, inquisitive people, people under conviction, and people who are simply curious. Paul would have answered any questions or objections that came to him. It is inconceivable that he might have been holding round-table discussions with the goal of finding "common ground" and winning Athenians with persuasive words of human wisdom.

Especially now that he had his foot in the door and an audience with the Areopagus, he wasn't going to say, "Let's talk about this. I'm interested in learning more about your approach to the spiritual disciplines and your ideas about ethics. And tell me what you guys think about the God of Abraham, and maybe we can learn from one another."

Instead, he homes in on the very heart of what he wants them to know. He is preaching here, not inviting a conversation. Here's the start of his sermon: "God, who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands. Nor is He worshiped with men's hands, as though He needed anything, since He gives to all life, breath, and all things. And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us" (vv. 24-27).

Notice: this is a simple declaration of truth, not an offer to exchange ideas. He starts with the basic principles of theology proper. He declares that God is creator ("God . . . made the world and everything in it"). That's the essential starting place of all biblical truth. He affirms the authority of God ("He is Lord of heaven and earth.") He affirms the spirituality of God to these materialistic philosophers ("[He] does not dwell in temples made with hands"). And he affirms the sufficiency of God, His sovereignty, His transcendence, His imminence, and His power as the giver and sustainer of all life. It's a remarkable course in theology proper in a very brief economy of words. And all of it was flatly contradictory to what these philosophers believed.

But there's no give-and-take exchange of opinions. Paul does not act deferential in the presence of these great minds. He does not assume a false humility and pretend he's just a truth seeker on his own spiritual journey looking for companions along the way. He declares the truth of God to them with authority and conviction. He does not use the conversational style and subdued demeanor most people today think we need to use so that we're not thought arrogant.

Paul wasn't arrogant, because he was declaring infallible truth God had revealed. He was not merely floating an opinion of his own for the philosophers to kick around. And he used an appropriate method: a sermon, not a conversation.

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Paul and Culture

Another in our slowly unfolding series on Acts 17
by Phil Johnson



ead (and believe) enough of the trendy books and blogs that talk about missional living, and you'll get the distinct impression that fitting into this world's cultures is vastly more important—and a much more effective evangelistic strategy—than knowing the gospel message and communicating it with boldness, precision, and clarity.

What might Paul have thought of the missional fads of post-evangelicalism? Lots of people will argue that Paul is the very model of a postmodern ministry strategist, and that Acts 17 is the classic narrative passage where we see his genius for cultural assimilation in all its perfect splendor.

Really? Let's see how that chapter actually unfolds. At the start of it (Acts 17:1-9), Paul's ministry in Thessalonica so offends the Jewish populace that their leaders deliberately stir up civil unrest. As a result, the apostle can no longer minister publicly in Thessalonica without the threat of a riot. So he goes to Berea under cover of night (v. 10).

Berea is about forty miles inland from Thessalonica and not on a major trade route, so the plan might have been to go to the closest place where Paul might preach the gospel without quite so much deliberate opposition from Jewish leaders in the region. But when he arrived in Berea, he didn't lay low and hide out or try to minister silently through lifestyle evangelism. He started proclaiming the gospel in the synagogue and the public square there, too.

However, Luke says, "when the Jews from Thessalonica learned that the Word of God was preached by Paul at Berea, they came there also and stirred up the crowds. Then immediately the brethren sent Paul away, to go to the sea; but both Silas and Timothy remained there" (v. 13). So Paul's missionary team spirited him away into hiding yet again. He was clearly not winning general admiration and grass-roots popularity in the cultures where he was taking the gospel. People kept trying to kill him.

Paul couldn't go back to Thessalonica or Berea now, because his enemies in those cities were determined to disrupt any ministry he did. So "those who conducted Paul brought him to Athens; and receiving a command for Silas and Timothy to come to him with all speed, they departed" (v. 15). Commentators generally assume he went by ship, because that seems the easiest, safest, and most reasonable way to travel from the coast near Berea to Athens.

Now, here's the scenario: Paul is cut off from his missionary team and sent to Athens for his own safety. From Berea and Thessalonica to Athens is about four days' travel by land and two or three days by sea (depending on the wind and the tides). So when Paul sends word back to Timothy and Silas to join him in Athens, he probably has about a two-week wait before they can join him there, and he spends that time alone in Athens, investigating the city and its culture. But he simultaneously launches his public ministry in Athens both at the synagogue there, and in the public square.

Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him when he saw that the city was given over to idols. Therefore he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and with the Gentile worshipers, and in the marketplace daily with those who happened to be there. Then certain Epicurean and Stoic philosophers encountered him. And some said, "What does this babbler want to say?" Others said, "He seems to be a proclaimer of foreign gods," because he preached to them Jesus and the resurrection (vv. 16-18).

What's crucial to notice here, first of all, is Paul's relationship to the culture. He doesn't try to assimilate. He doesn't embrace the culture and look for ways to shape the gospel to suit it. He is repulsed by it.

Look at verse 16 again: "his spirit was provoked within him when he saw that the city was given over to idols." The Greek word for "provoked" is paroxuno, which is a very intense word meaning "exasperated" or "agitated." It conveys the idea of outrage and indignation.

Paul, of course, was well educated, and he was fully aware of the history and the details of Greek mythology and the religion of Athens. (He even had memorized passages from Greek poets and writers, as we are about to see.) But this was his first time to be in Athens and see all the temples and the omnipresent idolatry with his own eyes. Wherever he looked, he saw the signs of it—sophisticated, intellectual, completely unspiritual religion that was utterly without any reference to the true God. That was the defining mark of that culture, and it grieved Paul deeply.

So he immediately began confronting the idolatry by proclaiming Christ. Notice: when Luke says in verse 17 that "he reasoned" with people in these public places, he's not suggesting that Paul had cream tea and quiet conversation with them. It means he stood somewhere where people couldn't possibly miss him and began to preach and proclaim like a herald, and then he interacted with hecklers and critics and honest inquirers alike. Luke uses the Greek word dialegomai, from which our word dialogue is derived, but the Greek expression is a strong one, conveying the idea of a debate or a verbal disputation. It can also speak of a sermon or a philosophical and polemical argument. Paul did all of that, because he took on all comers.

In fact, in the King James Version, it says he "disputed . . . in the synagogue with the Jews, and with the devout persons, and in the market daily with [whoever] met with him." That's not to say that he was belligerent or pugnacious, but he proclaimed the truth about Christ without low-keying the tough parts or shaving all the hard edges off the counter-cultural truths. And then he responded to whatever questions or arguments or objections people raised.

In other words, he confronted their false beliefs; he did not try to accommodate them. Paul was deliberately and intentionally counter-cultural. He didn't say, Oh, these people think the idea of bodily resurrection is foolish; I'd better soft-sell that part of the message. He did exactly the opposite. He studied the culture with an eye to confronting people with the very truths they were most prone to reject.

The Philosophers

He wasn't winning any admiration from the intellectual elite for his cultural sensitivity, either. Notice verse 18: "Certain Epicurean and Stoic philosophers encountered him." They were not impressed. They called him a seed-picker and more or less made sport of him.

Who were these guys?

The Stoics were secular determinists who believed the height of human enlightenment was achieved by complete indifference to pleasure or pain. They believed everything is predestined unchangeably by random chance, and therefore nothing really matters in the ultimate sense. They were fatalistic. Think of them as secular hyper-Calvinists with a dose of Greek Mythology defining the theistic elements of their religion. Their goal was self-mastery through the overcoming of the emotions—and they lived austere, simple lives enjoying as few pleasures as possible. The Stoic sect was founded by Zeno around 300 BC, so the system was three and a half centuries old and a mainstay of Greek philosophy when Paul encountered these guys.

The Epicureans were at the opposite end of the philosophical spectrum. They believed the chief end of man was to enjoy pleasure and avoid pain. They indulged in all the finest things and richest pleasures this life had to offer. Epicureanism was likewise 350 years old, and one of its central ideas was that God is not to be feared. They did not believe in life after death, so their one goal was earthly happiness—practically the opposite of Stoicism.

The Stoics and the Epicureans were poles apart on the philosophical spectrum and obviously adversarial in many of their beliefs. There's no doubt that some of the most interesting debates between competing Greek philosophies pitted Stoics against Epicureans and vice versa. But they also shared some of their most fundamental beliefs in common, and those common beliefs were the defining elements of Greek thought and culture. Both philosophies were materialistic and man-centered and therefore they were united in their resistance to all biblical truth.

There was a third major strain of Greek philosophy not named here by Luke—the Cynics. Even though Cynicism isn't specifically named by Luke, it's almost certain that some Cynics were in the audience. The Cynics believed virtue is defined by nature—and true happiness is achieved by freeing oneself from unnatural vales like wealth, fame, and power and living in harmony with nature. They were first-century hippies, known for their neglect of things like personal hygiene, accountability, family responsibilities, and whatever. Cynicism was the oldest of the three major strains of Athenian philosophy, dating back to about 400 years before Christ, so Cynicism was also an ancient system—450 years old by the time Paul stood in the Areopagus. It was still a robust influence in the culture of Athens, and the Cynics had a peculiar knack for irritating the other philosophers.

Remember, Paul was grieved by Athenian culture. It would be foolish to suggest that he embraced any of the defining spiritual elements of such a culture. His message was counter-culture and disturbing to the ears of Stoics, Epicureans, and Cynics alike.

But some of these high-powered philosophers heard him disputing in the marketplace and thought, Hey, this guy would be interesting in a discussion with the elite minds of Athens. They could surely tell Paul was an educated man, not just a random crackpot. And yet his ideas seemed so bizarre to their way of thinking that they could not find a way to categorize him neatly in their systems. He was clearly neither Stoic nor Epicurean nor Cynic. He stood in opposition to all of them, and that was obvious, because of what he preached: "Jesus and the resurrection."

And their attitude toward him is obvious: "Some said, 'What does this babbler want to say?'" They used a word that meant "seed-picker"—comparing him to a chicken picking up a seed here and there—as if to say, "He has a cogent thought now and then, but it's so mixed with these strange notions about resurrection that we wonder where he picked up the knowledge he does have. He's rather like a seed-picking bird, pecking and swallowing here and there, but not really very sophisticated."

Paul was clearly out of step with every major system of human wisdom known at the time. Counter-cultural. That's exactly what they meant by "a proclaimer of foreign gods"—a prophet of some new and unconventional religion that fit nowhere comfortably into the existing culture.

Paul was nevertheless articulate enough and bold enough to catch these philosophers' attention, and that made him something of a novelty. That, according to verse 21, was something they loved: "For all the Athenians and the foreigners who were there spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing." Very much like our own culture. Athens was the place to surf the ancient Web and see what's new. Paul was the equivalent of a bizarre but intriguing viral YouTube video.

Mars Hill

So "they took him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, 'May we know what this new doctrine is of which you speak? For you are bringing some strange things to our ears. Therefore we want to know what these things mean'" (v. 19).

Now that finally gets us into the actual passage we want to survey: Paul's sermon. He is brought to the Areopagus ("Mars Hill" in the King James Version)—named for the place where these philosophers had started meeting centuries before. Here was Paul, surrounded by the most high-powered minds of the most intellectual city in the world, and he has an opportunity to speak to them.

Then Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said, "Men of Athens, I perceive that in all things you are very religious; for as I was passing through and considering the objects of your worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Therefore, the One whom you worship without knowing, Him I proclaim to you (vv. 22-23).

That is where many people today would say Paul adapted to and embraced their culture rather than being confrontive or antagonistic to the culture, because he begins with a reference to their beliefs (and especially the religious culture) of the city, and he makes that the point of contact.

But now remember, we have to read this in light of its own context, and verse 16 says this was the very aspect of Athenian culture that most grieved Paul. In other words, he homed in on the one point of culture that most disturbed him and began there, because that is what he most wanted to challenge. The false gods of Athens embodied the main lie he wanted to answer with the truth, and he made a beeline for it: "You are very religious," he says. "I can see it everywhere."

But the truth is, they weren't religious at all. They had all the trappings of religion, with temples and idols everywhere. But their ancient religions were nothing but superstition run amok, but all of that had long ago morphed into a simple love of human wisdom. That's what they worshiped: "The Greeks seek after wisdom" (1 Corinthians 1:22). Philosophy was the only god they really served.

The Epicureans didn't even believe in an afterlife, and the Stoics were materialists whose God was an amorphous and utterly impersonal notion of blind (but sovereign) chance. The Cynics deified nature. In other words, all the major strains of Greek philosophy were fundamentally materialistic. They had fashioned a kind of quasi-spirituality that in fact was not spiritual at all. None of them believed in a personal God. None of them had any higher value than human wisdom. Their ethics were naturalistic and materialistic. They were practical atheists—in many ways a mirror of our own society today.

They weren't truly religious at all. Paul was using sanctified sarcasm when he started out by observing how religious they were.

Now, their culture, like ours, had all the trappings of religion, and they were omnipresent: temples on every corner, idols, priests and priestesses, and lots of superstitions and deeply-ingrained traditions. But these were almost entirely devoid of any kind of true faith. That stuff just saturated all society. It had the very same significance as all the cathedrals in Europe today, or all the church buildings you'll see if you drive through New England.

The Unknown God

But in the tradition of their polytheistic mythology, the Greeks deified everything. There was a god of war (Ares); the sun god (Apollo); Hades, the Lord of the underworld; Hermes, the messenger-god; Poseidon, God of the sea; and Zeus, king of the gods. And those were just the Olympian gods. There were also primordial gods, including Aether, the god of the atmosphere; Chronos, the god of time; Eros, the god of love; Erebus, the god of shadow, and many more. Then there were the Titans, and the nymphs, and the giants, the river god, and hundreds of lesser gods. And of course no educated person in Athens really believed any of those gods were real, but they were part of the culture's mythology.

And when they ran out of things to deify, someone decided to erect a monument to whatever god there might be who was overlooked by the Greek system, just so that no deity was inadvertently slighted. They had this altar "To the Unknown God." Sort of like the tomb of the unknown soldier, but motivated by sheer superstition. Just in case they overlooked giving honor to a hidden deity somewhere, they had an altar that covered the bases.

Paul had seen that altar, and he seized on it for the opening of his message. This was by no means an affirmation of their culture. Just the opposite. It was Paul's way of homing in on what was spiritually most odious about the culture. In this quasi-religious, deeply superstitious, man-centered intellectual culture—here was an altar to something unknown. The irony was rich, because what they really worshiped was human wisdom and knowledge, but here was an altar to something they were admittedly ignorant about. And Paul more or less rubs salt in that wound. He places the accent on their utter ignorance of the one thing that matters most: This God whom you are utterly ignorant about; that's the God whose name I want to declare to you.

Don't miss what Paul was doing here. He wasn't shoe-horning God into an open niche in Greek mythology. He wasn't affirming their beliefs or embracing this aspect of their culture at all. He was seizing on this one supremely important point where they admitted their own ignorance, and he was using that as a foot in the door so that he could proclaim to them the gospel. As far as the religious aspect of their culture was concerned, he stood against it, and this opening statement made that fact absolutely clear to them. Far from using "culture" as a kind of pragmatic or ecumenical bridge in order to get himself into their inner circle and become a part of their group in order to win them, he stands in their midst as an alien to their culture and (in his own words) proclaimed the truth about God to them.

It was as if someone got in the midst of a bunch of academic postmodernists today and declared that the Bible is true. Just imagine an auditorium full of 21st-century university professors wringing their hands about epistemological humility and the dangers of overconfidence and the uncertainty of human knowledge and the subjectivity of all our opinions—and the whole dose of postmodern angst about being sure about anything. And suppose you stood up in front of that group with a Bible and declared, "Here's something you can be rock-solid certain about, because God Himself revealed it as absolute truth."

That's what this was like. It's hard to imagine any way he could have been more counter-cultural.



PS: Hang on. There's lots more to come.

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Paul on Mars Hill (part 1)

A short introduction to a series of posts on Acts 17:22-34



n Acts 17, Paul preaches to the intellectual elite of Athens. The narrative includes one of the classic examples of New Testament gospel-preaching. It shows us the apostolic evangelistic strategy in action. It's an especially helpful example of how to confront false religion, philosophy, and elitism in an evangelistic setting. And it takes place in a highbrow academic environment. It's one of the best-known portions of the book of Acts, but it's also one of the most-abused sections in all of Scripture. It's a favorite passage for those who insist if we're not finding (or creating) as much common ground as possible between church and culture we are not properly contextualizing the gospel.



People who are enthralled with style-driven missional strategies almost always single out this famous account. "Paul blended into the culture," they say. "He adopted the worldview and communications style of his hearers. He observed their religion and listened to their beliefs and learned from them before he tried to teach them. And he didn't step on their toes by refuting what they believed. Instead, he took their idea of the unknown god, embraced that, and used it as the starting point for his message about Christ. And there you have some of the major elements of postmodern missional ministry: culture, contextualization, conversation, and charitableness.

I think if we look at this passage carefully in its context, what we'll see is that Paul used none of those strategies—at least not in the way they have been defined and packaged by most today's postmodern, Emergent, and missional trend-setters.

Paul was bold and plain-spoken. He was counter-cultural, confrontive, confident, and (by Athenian standards, much less today's standards) closed-minded. He offended a significant number of Athens's intellectual elite, and he walked away from that encounter without winning the admiration of society at large, but with just a small group of converts who followed him.

That is the biblical approach to ministry. You don't measure its success or failure by how pleased the crowd is at the end of the meeting. Our first concern ought to be the clarity and power with which the message is delivered. The right question to ask is not how many people received the message warmly. (It's nice if they do, but that's not usually the majority response.) The right question to ask is whether the signs of conviction are seen in those who have heard. And sometimes a forceful negative reaction is the result of the gospel's convicting aspects. In fact, when unbelievers walk away without repenting of sin and embracing Christ, an overtly hostile reaction is a much better indication that the message was delivered clearly and accurately than a round of applause and an outpouring of good feeling from a crowd of appreciative worldlings.

We need to remember that. We're tempted to think that when people reject the gospel it's because we have done a poor job of presenting it. Sometimes that may be true, but it's not necessarily true. Of course, our job is to be as clear and accurate as possible, and not to be a stumbling-block that keeps people from hearing the gospel. But the gospel itself is a stumbling-block for unbelievers, so people will stumble and even get angry when they are presented with it. And we have no right to try to reshape the gospel so that it's no longer a stumbling-block. You can't proclaim the gospel faithfully if your goal is for no one ever to be offended or upset by it.

We could learn a lot from what Jesus did in John 6. That chapter begins with this in verse 2: "Then a great multitude followed Him, because they saw His signs which He performed on those who were diseased." They liked it when He did miracles, but they didn't want His message.

He preached to them anyway, and at the end of the chapter (v. 66), John writes: "From that time many of His disciples went back and walked with Him no more." And then while the crowd was diminishing to almost nothing, Jesus turned to the twelve and said, "Do you also want to go away?" (v. 67). And then in verse 70, He added, "Did I not choose you, the twelve, and one of you is a devil?"

In the face of a mass exodus of His disciples, Jesus was not concerned about doing what He could to seem more "likeable." He pressed the message with more clarity and more candor than ever.

That's exactly what Paul does in Acts 17. His strategy was about as far as possible from the postmodernized approach that drives so much of the contemporary evangelical church's outreach efforts.

Read it for yourself this weekend. I'm off to Dallas for a weekend conference.* Lord willing, we'll start an extended look at the text of Paul's sermon in Acts 17, beginning with the context of the chapter itself. Prepare yourselves.





* (For those who have asked for info about this conference: it's a weekend men's retreat sponsored by a church in the Dallas area.)

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Context and Contextualization

by Phil Johnson

More about why I've been so adamant in my refusal to embrace and celebrate a word so many people seem enthralled with.

efore the 1970s, the word contextualize was pretty hard to come by. It was, however, listed in unabridged dictionaries as a verb meaning "to study something in its own context." (The Oxford English Dictionary still gives that as the word's primary meaning.)

In the early 1970s, left-leaning missiologists made contextualization into a religious shibboleth. They also turned the dictionary definition of the word inside out. They weren't talking about studying or explaining biblical truth in its own context; instead, what they wanted to do was adapt and stylize religious ideas and symbols to fit into the cultural context of their target audience—namely oppressed and marginalized people groups.

It wasn't long before hip, young evangelicals discovered and embraced the basic concept, and then franchised it. Instead of targeting impoverished and downtrodden people, however, they turned contextualization into a tool for attracting Yuppies. People-pleasing activities quickly replaced God-exalting worship. Popular entertainment, apparently, was the one "context" the new evangelicals' target clientele were drawn to en masse.

Now post-evangelicals have canonized contextualization as the one essential belief they all agree on. The "context" that seems to interest them most is the postmodern underbelly of western youth culture. (They evidently believe nihilistic post-generation-Xers are the very epitome of an oppressed and marginalized people group, so in effect they have brought the term back to its roots.) They defend contextualization with a zeal most of them don't even have for the authority of Scripture.



A fundamental problem in all those cases is that the starting point of their hermeneutic is not a careful study of the biblical text in its own context—but a sympathetic self-immersion into various contemporary cultural contexts. The favorite emblems of faddish subcultures are then borrowed and blended with spiritual imagery in order to make selected elements of the Christian message seem as comfortable and familiar as possible. Re-contextualization or even de-contextualization would be more fitting terms.

I realize there are some sensible and sane evangelicals who are quite fond of the word contextualization—and they generally try to define it in innocuous terms that defy the word's actual derivation and history. That strikes me as an utterly wrong-headed way of thinking—especially for those who profess to be concerned about context and communication. And yes, I know the word is currently in vogue and gaining ground even in conservative circles. I don't mind being countercultural and uncool, so that plea carries no weight whatsoever with me.

Let me be clear: My objection to "contextualization" in evangelical and post-evangelical parlance is not because I think context is unimportant. On the contrary, context is vitally important—and when we're dealing with revealed truth from God, biblical context is vastly more important than the context of any contemporary subculture.

In that context, consider this comment from a semi-prominent post-evangelical blogger:

Phil Johnson’s current post on contextualization . . . should be read to get a clear picture of what Johnson and his supporters hear when they hear "context." Summary: the worst aspects of culture embraced at the most cost to the clarity of the gospel. Is that what missiologists and missional pastors mean by contextualization?

1. First, the fellow utterly misses my whole point. My objection to the popular notion of contextualization has nothing whatsoever to do with any phobia about context—either the word or the concept—properly considered. I'm simply pointing out that of all the contextual issues we must consider as ministers of the gospel, biblical context must always be first in order and is always of supreme importance.
        But biblical context is not what the word contextualization refers to. I frankly wouldn't care if the very finest aspects of culture dominated the concerns of contextualizers. I'd still reject the concept. What I object to is the utterly fallacious idea that something other than the biblical context should be the starting point for our understanding or application of spiritual truth.
   
2. Second, when considering our own contemporary cultural context, we need to make honest and biblically-informed assessments about what's compatible (or not) with timeless biblical principles—rather than uncritically embracing the ephemeral icons of popular culture.
   
3. Third, in questions about spiritual truth, biblical context is infinitely more relevant than any cultural context is. That's because meaning and truth are properly determined by the Author, not by the ambassador, and certainly not by the audience.
   
4. Finally, with regard to the question of what missiologists and missional pastors mean by contextualization," one of the problems with the term, as I pointed out the other day, is that no two people ever seem to mean quite the same thing when they use it.

The Emerging Conversation illustrates this problem. Some think in order to reach a generation weaned on Ultimate Fighting, South Park, and hip-hop, you have to live and breathe and speak that language, with all its profanity and vulgarity and sexual innuendo. Be loud and proud with it. And, they insist, if you don't frame the gospel in that kind of context, you simply cannot reach postmoderns.

Others take "contextualization" a whole different direction, saying that if you really want to reach postmodernized cultures and subcultures, you can't preach anything with strong convictions. Certainty is offensive to postmodern sensitivities; firm doctrinal positions are perceived as arrogant; so traditional approaches to Christianity are not only uncool; they are hopelessly ineffectual.

What both sides of the Emergent/emerging divide do agree on (in practice if not in precept) is that the application of spiritual truth should begin with the contemporary cultural context, not the biblical context. That's precisely where I think the idea of missiological contextualization went astray, and it happened at the very start.

Oh, and one more thing: the supreme irony here is that the word contextualization itself is a kind of religious jargon—the very kind of thing most contextualizers say we ought to eschew. Do a Google search for the term and see who is using it. Religious people—stylish evangelicals, postmodernized pundits from the emerging conversation, missiologists, church-growth experts, CT editors, missionaries who toe the School of World Mission line, and evangelical jargonauts of all types. Collectively, they seem to use the word at least 75 times more than anyone else. So it is exactly the kind of Christianese the champions of contextualization say we should stay away from. Odd, isn't it?

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Why I Don't Like the C-Word

A Short Prologue to a Discussion on Paul's Mars-Hill Strategy
by Phil Johnson

Contextualization? Why Not? Here's a handy index to this entire series: "Why I Don't Like the C-Word" "Context and Contextualization" "Paul on Mars Hill (part 1)" "Paul and Culture" "Paul and Conversation" "Paul and Contextualization" "Paul and Charitableness"

   remarked in a message at the Shepherds' Conference two weeks ago that I'm not a fan of the word contextualization—or the set of ideas usually associated with that word. Although the message was generally well-received by the pastors who heard it in person, it unleashed an avalanche of forceful reactions from people in the blogosphere—ranging from shocked disbelief to angry derision. The former reaction came from people who gave me the benefit of the doubt. They were merely stunned at my astonishing naïveté. The latter brickbats came from less sympathetic folk, a couple of whom said that they have pretty much always thought of me as a fundamentalist cretin anyway.

My favorite response was from someone who basically said, Sure, the word contextualization is misunderstood and much-abused today, but so is justification. Rather than simply discarding these terms, we ought to fight for their biblical meaning.

See, the thing is, contextualization isn't a biblical word like justification is. Although lots of people now think of contextualization as one of the most essential and elementary terms in the theological and missiological lexicons, it's a word no one ever even heard of until 1972, when Shoki Coe used the term in a paper delivered to the World Council of Churches. (Prior to that, the favorite fad in missiology was indigenization, which was a little more passive approach to tweaking the gospel than contextualization, but a similar idea in some ways.)

Anyway, critics in the blogosphere are nothing if not predictable. They intoned the baby/bathwater cliché; they recited mantras selectively adapted from 1 Corinthians 9:19-23; and they suggested that whether I knew it or not, I myself employed a kind of contextualization when I compared the Athenian philosophers of Paul's day to people who surf the Web and watch YouTube for viral videos.

As if I hadn't already addressed all those "arguments."

So I intend to begin a series of blogposts which will contain the heart of that message (including, especially, a close look at Paul's Mars Hill strategy). But first let me reiterate a few crucial things I said at the very start in my session at the Shepherds' Conference:

1. Definitions of the word contextualization tend to be murky and far too open-ended. It's one of those currently-popular jargon-words like missional that gets defined differently every time, depending on who is trying to explain it.
   
2. People explaining contextualization usually start by making the (obvious) point that in order to cross linguistic and cultural boundaries effectively, we need to translate and illustrate our message in a way that is suited to the understanding of the people or people-group we want to reach. Quite true. And if contextualization entailed nothing more than translation and illustration, the word would be superfluous. It practically always means something more—and that "something more" is what I object to, not the translation and illustration of biblical truths.
   
3. The idea of contextualization first gained traction among evangelicals in the realm of Bible translation, and it's easy to see why. Obviously, if you take the word of God to an Eskimo culture where they have no clue what sheep are, you need to find a way to explain all the pastoral references in terms that Eskimos can understand. Something like Psalm 100:3 ("We are His people and the sheep of His pasture") is naturally harder for an Eskimo to relate to than it is for a New Zealander. So in one famous instance, a group of Bible translators working in an Eskimo language translated the word "sheep" as "sea lions" throughout Scripture. (I can't imagine what that does to the 23rd psalm or why it wouldn't be a whole lot easier just to teach eskimos what sheep are, but there you have a classic example of verbal contextualization, showing how it can actually obscure more than it really clarifies.)
   
4. In postmodern missional strategy contextualization always seems to involve embracing the values of the target culture. Listen to those who talk most about "contextualizing" the gospel and it becomes clear that their actual goal—sometimes deliberately and sometimes unwittingly—is to make Christianity seem more familiar and more comfortable and less counter-cultural.
   
5. Many advocates of contextualization expressly state that proper contextualization involves temporarily adopting whatever worldview is held by the people we are trying to reach, so that we can speak to them as one of them, and not as outsiders and aliens.
   
6. In the real world, therefore, contextualization usually goes far beyond translating and illustrating truths. It also goes far beyond adopting the language and the social conventions of polite culture while avoiding certain cultural taboos (which is what Paul was talking about in 1 Corinthians 9:19-23 and 10:32-33). Today's contextualizers are trying to adapt the content of the gospel message as much as possible to the worldview of whatever subculture they see as their target audience. Not only do sea lions become an acceptable substitute for sheep; postmodern tolerance becomes an acceptable replacement for Christian charity.
   
7. In fact, people who are enthralled with contextualization nowadays tend to turn the "give no offense" principle of 1 Corinthians 10:32-33 on its head. Rather than avoiding cultural taboos in order not to obscure the gospel unnecessarily, they sometimes purposely try to flout as many taboos as possible. Unlike Paul, who wanted to avoid anything considered impolite or uncouth so that the gospel could be heard without unnecessary distractions, they want to maximize the shock-and-awe effect, thinking that is going to gain them a better hearing with the South-Park generation.

To sum up: proper cross-cultural translation and illustration ought to aim at making the gospel clear. Listen closely to the typical missiologist or church planter who champions the idea of contextualization—and what you'll usually hear is someone trying desperately to make the gospel more palatable. Unbridled enthusiasm about this sort of contextualization has dramatically changed the evangelistic strategy so that the number one goal in contemporary evangelical outreach is for the church to assimilate into the world as much as possible—and above all, be cool—so that the world (or some offbeat subculture) will like us. That is actually the driving idea behind both seeker-sensitivity and the Emerging church approach.

The idea of "contextualization" by adjusting Christianity to existing beliefs, values, and traditions was probably the twentieth century's most significant contribution to ministry strategy—and it is not a good one. It has made the church indistinguishable from the world, indistinct in its message, and (frankly) ineffectual as an evangelistic force in an unbelieving culture.

But the whole idea is actually unbiblical, counter-productive, and contrary to the real strategy the apostle Paul modeled and advocated. That's what I'm planning to demonstrate in a short series of posts beginning later this week.

Stay tuned.

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