A Sanctified Shakedown
Fear of damnation is incompatible with the gospel.
The first thing Paul noticed as he wandered the streets of Athens: there are no atheists here.
Paul had been dropped off in the city, waiting on Silas and Timothy to catch up with him, and, like most of us would do when we arrive someplace new, he’s getting the lay of the land.
Athens is lousy with divinity. Zeus for the weather, Ares for war, Aphrodite for love, Artemis for the hunt and for childbirth, Athena for wisdom and for the city herself. You could not throw a rock without hitting another rock shaped to represent some god. Temple. Statue. Idol. Everywhere you look. And, just to cover all bases, the Athenians had even erected an altar to an unknown god. Almost like an insurance policy. Just in case they overlooked an important temple and pissed off the wrong divinity. Please don’t smite us!
Houses of worship were as ubiquitous in Athens as Starbucks is in any American city today. Or actual houses of worship in any southern American city. Or ATMs anywhere in the world except when you need cash. Maybe these edifices were like AGMs—automatic god machines.
Paul, observing the glut of divinity on display, has a visceral reaction. Not surprised. Disgusted.
Paul is a Pharisee, a member of the Jewish sect known for its strict adherence to Torah and its absolute commitment to Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. His commitment is so total that earlier in Acts we find him holding the coats of the men who are stoning Stephen.
Paul becomes a Christian because he encounters Jesus and sees in him the fullest expression of the God he has been worshiping all along. He does not abandon his commitment to Yahweh. He recognizes that Yahweh has come in flesh and blood. Jesus is God’s complete self-revelation. Paul goes all in on Jesus because he was already all in on Yahweh, and he recognizes them as the same.
So when Paul walks through Athens and sees idol after idol, he can’t keep quiet. He starts arguing in the synagogue, in the marketplace, with anyone who will listen. People get annoyed enough that eventually they haul him over to the Areopagus, the philosophical court on Mars Hill. They want to hear something new, and they want him to defend it.
This is not a low-stakes setting. Athens is the city that executed Socrates for “corrupting the youth.” The Areopagus is a place where ideas have consequences. Paul is standing in front of every philosopher and thinker in the city, and he has a choice to make.
He could come in both barrels blazing. You filthy heathen pagan sinners. You disgust me. And you’re all going to hell!That option is on the table. He could thunder against the idols, condemn the people for worshiping them, and let the chips fall. Plenty of preachers since have made that exact move.
Paul does not make it.
Instead, Paul does his best to understand why there are so many pagan idols in Athens. He identifies himself with the Athenians in their desire to encounter the divine. He begins by saying, Athenians, I see how religious you are. I noticed your altar to an unknown god, and I have good news. I know who that God is.
He doesn’t quote scripture. He doesn’t condemn them for their existing beliefs. He quotes their own poets back to them. In him we live and move and have our being. For indeed we are all his offspring.
The God they have been worshiping as unknown, Paul tells them, is actually the substance of all being, the fabric of being. The one in whom we all take our breath. Our entire existence exists within the creative will of God. Everything we are is within the imagination of God. God is the one who said let it be and it was.
This is Paul’s missionary masterpiece. Some might point out that he’s not overly successful. After all, there is no letter to the Athenians in the New Testament because Paul didn’t found a church there. But there are believers. Seeds get planted. Even the skeptics walk away with something to chew on.
And, not to get overly pedantic, but the mother church of the East is the Greek Orthodox Church.
None of us is likely to get hauled in front of a philosophical court and told to defend our faith before a panel of scholars. But every one of us has occasion, in our lives, to bear witness to who Jesus is. And every one of us has a choice in how we do it.
For a long time, the church chose Paul’s first option.
You can wag your finger. You can call people rotten sinners. You can tell them they’re going to hell. Shape up or ship down. It’s an effective motivator. Fear works. It packs altar calls and stacks decisions. How many of us heard, sitting in a pew somewhere on a Sunday night, the closing question: What if tonight on the way home you have a fatal car accident? Do you know for certain that you would go to heaven?
No 12-year-old in history has paid closer attention to his father’s driving abilities than I did on those fearful car rides home.
Fearmongering is not the gospel. It’s a sales pitch for fire insurance. That’s like saying, Nice soul you got there. Be a shame if it burned in hell for all eternity. It’s a sanctified shakedown.
And it doesn’t work long-term either. You probably know how that story ends. When people get fear-mongered into the church, they end up exhausted. They get tired of trying to figure out exactly what God wants from them so that God won’t send them to hell for all eternity. At some point they say, I don’t know what to do anymore. I can’t figure out what God wants. I’m done. Some leave. Some stay, and they’re exhausted too.
That is what they were told God was like: Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. A spider on a web, one millimeter from eternal destruction. That is what they were told the gospel was.
Paul does not do this. Not one time, in any of his writings, does Paul consign anyone to hell. He says things like God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to the knowledge of the truth. Paul’s primary move, again and again, is to tell people that what they are looking for is right here, waiting for them. There is a God who loves them, and that God has a name.
Why does that God love them? Paul says it through the Athenian poets: In him we live and move and have our being. For indeed, we are all his offspring. You are God’s offspring. You are God’s children. The God you suspected might exist somewhere, the God you erected an altar to just in case, has been here the whole time.
This is what it’s like to look for a light switch in a dark room. You feel along the wall. You don’t know exactly where it is. And when you find it, the switch clicks and the room floods with light. Light that was there all along, just waiting to be found. Augustine got at the same thing centuries later. You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.
Salvation is not, for Paul, an item on a divine to-do list. The redemption of the cosmos, the restoration of all that is, is not something God decided to do because he was bored on a Thursday. This is God’s project. This is the only thing on God’s agenda. The God who said let there be light is the same God who says let all things be new. In the Psalmist’s words: Send forth your word, and we shall be created, and you shall renew the face of the earth.
There is a moment in the Gospel of Luke where Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem for the final week of his life. He looks out over the city and he mourns. Oh, Jerusalem. How I longed to gather you to me as a mother hen gathers her brood under her wings.
That is God’s default posture. Not a fist. Open arms.
It’s really hard to shake your fist when it’s nailed to a cross. God proves God’s love for us in this: while we were still sinners, while we were still weak, while we were still shaking our fist at God, Christ died for us. That is not me talking. That is Paul, in Romans 5. The cross is not about God being finally satisfied that he had killed somebody. The cross is about a God who, while we were still shaking our fist, was already opening his arms.
Christ did not die so that God could be finally satisfied that God had killed somebody. I have heard the gospel presented that way too many times. God is mad at you, but Jesus took your punishment for you. That is not what Paul says. That is not what the cross says. Jesus did not bleed and die to take a punishment on our behalf. He bled and died to make a relationship between God and God’s creation. He came to restore it, to renew it. Not to satisfy God’s wrath. Not to assuage God’s anger. To prove God’s love.
Unless God has a split personality, God is not angry. God loves us. God desires us. God longs for us. God will go to every length to gather us in.
God is not in the punishing-sins business. God is in the restoring-lives business. God is in the renewing-all-things business. God is in the making-it-right business.
The Athenians erected an altar to an unknown god because they suspected there was something they were missing. Some divinity unaccounted for. Some piece of the puzzle they couldn’t quite see. They were right.
We are not so different. We have our own pantheon: power, money, sex, endless pursuits of things we can’t name and don’t understand. We serve them with a devotion the Athenians would have recognized. Like them, we are looking for the next thing.
As we grope in the dark, looking for that thing we can’t name, we will all find that what we longed for was there all along. Wanting us. Desiring us.
That’s the gospel.
Accept no substitutes.