Nobody Knows
Acts 17:22-31

May 1, 2005

It often happens as a sort of backwards Murphy’s Law that the most interesting, and perhaps most important, verse for a Sunday Lectionary reading is the verse that immediately precedes the assigned reading. Paul is in Athens, the intellectual capital of the world, and he is disturbed by all that he sees and hears. Too many gods, too many idols, too many ideas. He teaches among the Jewish community, but they are blasphemed by his proclamation of Jesus’ resurrection. Other philosophers hear of his unorthodox ideas, but are mildly intrigued. Let’s take him down to speakers’ corner in the Areopagus in downtown Athens and see how intriguing and entertaining he can be.

“Now all the Athenians and foreigners living there would spend their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new” (Acts 17:21). Isn’t that just what a true conservative wants to hear, how those decadent effete Athenian intellectuals lollygagged all their time playing with ‘new’ ideas? Conservatism, by definition, is not interested in new ideas. Except, of course, their own new ideas. Conservative Christians claim that Paul clearly proclaims the old time religion, but it is very clear that Paul gets up on to the soap box and argues for an idea so new, it seems silly and unbased in reality.

That Paul was a brilliant man, a genius, is evidenced by his ability to take what was around in abundance and weave it into a masterful piece of rhetoric that is more than mere rhetoric. He was not just being a good extemporaneous speaker or a clever improvisationalist; Paul saw an opportunity in almost everything and in any situation to preach the Gospel - even to those who would not be preached to.

He starts from what abhors him, but he turns his abhorrence upside down into a positive observation - you’ve got a lot of gods. You must care about gods, and you don’t want to neglect a single one. Once there is more than one god, who can tell where the limit lies? Just to be scrupulous, Paul notes, you even have erected one statue with the label TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Beware of Greeks hedging their bets.

Modern archaeology and science may help interpret Paul’s rhetoric from a lateral position. These scholars have looked in vain for some record, literary or physical, of the worship of this Unknown God. There is no concrete evidence that the Athenians had put up such a statue. But when you are polytheists, who can count and know them all? So Paul may have teased them without their being aware of the tease. He made up the story about the Unknown God in order to get them to buy into his message: I know the one God you need to know, but probably have never heard about. And off Paul goes preaching about God the Creator and God’s Son until he gets the originally curious bored, and the merely curious excited.

Sometimes you say the right thing for the wrong reason. This Unknown God should not be allowed to crumble away like so many Greek statues. It is in the first instance a god they did not know about. Never heard of him or her. But then, as Eugene Peterson translates the title, this is “the god nobody knows.” Maybe they have heard of this god, but nobody - and that’s a lot of bodies - really understands anything about him. This is not just innocent ignorance, but a lack of perception and comprehension. We are not smart enough to know anything about this god.

A curious matter about the original language used. In Greek, Paul refers here to the agnostikon theo - “the agnostic god.” I am taking liberties with the grammar, but the word gnosis means “knowledge” while the prefix “a-” indicates a negative or absence - “without knowledge.” Here is a god for whom you and I are agnostic, without knowledge. It really wouldn’t do to have an agnostic god running around looking for people to believe in him. What would the conservatives do who insist that we can know all that we need to know, without hesitation, without doubt?

Nevertheless, how much do we really know about God? Do you and I have the right grey stuff, the right spiritual frame of mind to know much about the God who is creator of heaven and earth?

When you go home today, will your children ask you, “what did you learn in church today?” A legitimate and usually unasked question. We have already heard about an agnostic god; now let’s grapple with apophatic ideas about God. Eastern Orthodoxy has been particularly fond of apophatic descriptions of God for millennia. It didn’t take long before they realized that God is too big to describe. You always miss something important, God is too big to swallow intellectually, and the danger is that you will begin to cheat, take shortcuts and believe that you fully comprehend the nature and essence of God.

Eastern theologians found that the negative way was more honest and doable. Let us describe what we know God is not. God is not physical, nor can God be measured in size or capacity. God does not die or is measured in terms of time and years. God is not hatred or death. There are lots of negative characteristics to be added.

The point of apophatic theology is to liberate us from the delusions of describing God anthropomorphically, that is, like a human being, and then believing we know exactly who God is. Following that, it doesn’t take long before we are convinced we know God well enough to know how God does and should act. Pretty soon after that, who needs another God when you can tell Her what she has to do for you?

Apophatic means “turning away from speech” and its promoters recognize that God is really beyond all words. The more we talk about God, sometimes, the less we know. It is perhaps only in silent prayer in which we silence our rational thoughts that we come into the presence and essence of God, a mystical awareness of the ground of being that is indescribable.

Paul was referring to this Unknown God, the God nobody knows, as a ingenious straw man for his preaching to the Gentile Athenians, schooled in the greatest philosophies, yet ignorant of the place of the one true God in creation. He was speaking directly to those unfamiliar with the Jewish tradition, but I also think he was hitting us on the tangent. Nobody really knows our Unknown God.

Our preferences seem to revolve around a god who is external to us: a god whom we can keep at arm’s length and whom we can ignore when we don’t want to be bothered. A god we can activate at our discretion and call up when we are in a crisis or in need of a good heart-to-heart conversation is the god we think we know and deserve. If you have that same level of contact with a friend, how much do you really know about that person? And how much do that person know about you?

Negative theology does not work that well for most of us. It is true that nobody knows a lot about God, but we can’t just shrug our shoulders and walk even further away because our words are not adequate. We have to say something, think something, answer something. We may believe a mountain-top experience is what we need - a trip to a geography of breath-taking beauty, a worship service of elegance and deep meaning, the accomplishment of some extraordinary feat.

Paul declares that now you and I need to repent and look around us. Repenting means turning around and seeing the world from a different and fresh perspective. Paul turns us around to the fact that God is not very far from us at all. God is the creator who is in the midst of everything that is and we are. “We live and move in him, can’t get away from him!”

Martin Luther adapted Psalm 46 into his great hymn, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” definitely a positive statement about the omnipotence of God. But later in verse 10, “Be still and know that I am God.” No need to think, to experience some extraordinary, to do a good deed. Be still, quietly quiet, and God will surround you and you will know God no longer as an idea, but as the One Who Causes Things to Be.

The end of this episode is disappointing and anti-climactic. Once again, when the notion of resurrection emerges, eyes roll, brains switch to sleep mode, excuses abound for stopping the discussion, muted giggles about the inanity of Paul. “We’ll hear more about this kind of stuff later,” they claim. They, after all, know the important stuff already.

You know, I’ve heard the same apathetic responses this past week right here in Regina. It is funny how time and experience, science and technology have not changed the knowledge of God. We don’t know any more - and all the manuals sitting on the shelves at Chapters do not really help - and I submit, we don’t know any less.

Yes, the God nobody knows. Yet, God knows you and it is remarkable what God will let you know. And what you can do with what you know!

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan