For the Apostle Paul..the reality {Jesus Christ} that burst upon him on the road to Damascus...is the ultimate explanation for why his work, so contested, so agonizing, so demanding, so inevitably open to misunderstanding, would not go to waste, but would grow, would produce not just “a religion,” but a new kind of humanity—new people, a new community, a new world. A new polis. A new kind of love

 

Apostle Paul, Rembrandt

Rabbi Akiba

“There is a famous story of how Rabbi Akiba, one of the greatest Jewish teachers of all time, went on praying the Shema, declaring his loyalty to the One God and his determination to stand for his kingdom, as the Roman torturers, catching up with Jewish rebels after the Bar-Kochba revolt in AD 135, ran steel combs through his flesh until he died a horrible and lingering death. He continued to pray: “Shema Yisrael, Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might . . .” (“soul” here means “life”). His disciples, standing by like Socrates’s friends as he drank the hemlock, asked him in awe and horror how he could go on praying that prayer even now. His answer, recorded much later but reflecting what we know of the man, is a model of wise, humble Jewish thought. All his life long, he explained, he had been troubled by the words in the prayer “and with all your soul.” He wondered what that meant and if he would ever have the opportunity to fulfill that part of the prayer. Now that he finally had the opportunity, he declared, he was going to seize it. This, then, was what it meant to love the One God with one’s life. Akiba died with the word echad, “one,” on his lips: “Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one.” Echad. A statement of loyalty. Of loyalty even to the death. In my mind’s eye I see Paul, perhaps also surrounded by friends, awaiting the executioner. He too will be praying, and it might well be the prayer of loyalty and love, of Jewish-style loyalty, of Messiah-shaped loyalty, the monotheism of the inaugurated kingdom: “For us there is One God (the father, from whom are all things, and we to him); and One Lord ( Jesus the Messiah, through whom are all things and we through him), and you shall love him . . .” It flows better in Greek than in English: 

Heis theos, ho patēr, ex hou ta panta kai hēmeis eis auton, Kai heis kyrios, Iēsous Christos, di’hou ta panta kai hēmeis di’ autou.

This is what made him who he was. This is the reality that burst upon him on the road to Damascus. This, he would have said, is the ultimate explanation for why his work, so contested, so agonizing, so demanding, so inevitably open to misunderstanding, would not go to waste, but would grow, would produce not just “a religion,” but a new kind of humanity—new people, a new community, a new world. A new polis. A new kind of love. It would do things he could hardly have dared to imagine. He prays the prayer, over and over. He prays it with the rhythm of his breathing. He prays it with the spirit’s breath in his innermost self. He declares his pistis, his loyalty, his love one more time. One God, one Lord. One. His life’s work has been to bear witness, openly and unhindered, to the kingdom of God and the lordship of Jesus, and that is what he now does in prayer as the executioner draws his sword. Loving this One God with his heart, his mind, and his strength. And, finally, with his life.”

NT Wright - Paul, A Biography

Saint Paul in Athens, by Raphael, 1515.

Below is what is most likely an abbreviated summary of Pauls statement at the Areopagus, which was in effect a court proceeding where Paul could have been severely punished or killed.

“So Paul, standing before the council, addressed them as follows: “Men of Athens, I notice that you are very religious in every way, for as I was walking along I saw your many shrines. And one of your altars had this inscription on it: ‘To an Unknown God.’ This God, whom you worship without knowing, is the one I’m telling you about. “He is the God who made the world and everything in it. Since he is Lord of heaven and earth, he doesn’t live in man-made temples, and human hands can’t serve his needs—for he has no needs. He himself gives life and breath to everything, and he satisfies every need. From one man he created all the nations throughout the whole earth. He decided beforehand when they should rise and fall, and he determined their boundaries. “His purpose was for the nations to seek after God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him—though he is not far from any one of us. For in him we live and move and exist. As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ And since this is true, we shouldn’t think of God as an idol designed by craftsmen from gold or silver or stone. “God overlooked people’s ignorance about these things in earlier times, but now he commands everyone everywhere to repent of their sins and turn to him. For he has set a day for judging the world with justice by the man he has appointed, and he proved to everyone who this is by raising him from the dead.” When they heard Paul speak about the resurrection of the dead, some laughed in contempt, but others said, “We want to hear more about this later.” That ended Paul’s discussion with them, but some joined him and became believers. Among them were Dionysius, a member of the council, a woman named Damaris, and others with them.

Acts 17:22-34

...His main point ought now to be clear: “What I am saying to you may sound ‘new,’ but it is in fact hidden within your own culture. It is well hidden; in fact, you have covered it up with foolish and unnecessary superstructures. But though the specific news about Jesus and the resurrection may be a shock to your system”—it was, and they laughed at him for it—“the underlying truth that it unveils is a truth about the world and its One Creator God to which, at its best, your culture dimly and distantly bears witness.” Paul is not trying to begin with Athenian cultural symbols and build up a philosophical argument that will arrive at Christian truth. He is managing at one and the same time to rebut the charge of “proclaiming foreign divinities” and to sketch a worldview, a metaphysic, in which it might just make sense to say that the One God has unveiled his purpose for the world by raising Jesus from the dead. He is a Sherlock Holmes figure, explaining to the puzzled police chiefs that their different theories about the crime all have some sense to them, but that there is a different overall framework, under their noses all the time but never observed, that will solve the whole thing. So he begins with the famous altar inscription “To an Unknown God.” Much ink has been spilled by scholars on what exactly such an inscription might originally have meant, but Paul is not concerned so much with its past history as with the excellent opportunity it presents him. It isn’t just that he is grasping at a kind of theological straw (“Here you are yourselves, admitting that there might be one god you don’t know yet, so let’s see if we can build on that”). He is picking up the idea of “ignorance” itself and using it as a lever to critique the entire world of normal pagan religion. “That was just ignorance,” he says, in the tone of voice the Athenians themselves might use to dismiss the muddled thinking of less sophisticated peoples, referring to the idols of gold, silver, or stone, made by skillful human beings, that were ubiquitous in Athens itself as well as everywhere else. Paul is echoing, of course, the normal critique of idolatry, again as found in the Psalms or Isaiah and closer to Paul’s day in a book like the Wisdom of Solomon; it echoes too what he had said at Lystra. Some of his philosophically inclined hearers would have agreed. “If you set aside this ignorance,” he continues, “you will discover not only that idols are a shabby and misleading representation of the true God, but also that this God doesn’t live in temples made by human hands.” So much, then, for the majestic Parthenon, there in plain sight across the valley. “Our wonderful temple,” the Athenians realize he is saying, “is a category mistake!” “So too,” insists Paul, “is the kind of worship offered at temples. People are trying to feed the divinity, when all along he is the one who gives everything to us” (again, just as Paul had said at Lystra). “If I was hungry,” Israel’s God had said in the Psalms, “do you really suppose that I would tell you about it?” So who is the true God, what is he like, and what relation does he have to the world? Here Paul steers a thoroughly Jewish course, acknowledging the half-truths of the ruling philosophies, but seeing them all within the larger whole he is advocating. The One God is the creator of all. As Moses had said (Paul does not refer to him, but this idea is deeply rooted in Israel’s scriptures), this One God made all peoples and allotted them their times and places. Above all, he wanted them to know him—ignorance was never his plan. He wanted them, after all, to be image-bearing humans, not unreflective puppets...God gives everything to everyone; what he is looking for is not initiative, whether theological or epistemological, but response. Nothing like that is found in Stoicism. Still less in Epicureanism. Third, the Stoics’ view of history was cyclic. Their vast whirligigs of time, with periodic conflagrations and restarts, were the inevitable result of pantheism; if to pan, “the all,” is all that there is, then it must be what it is forever, going around in a great circle and repeating itself endlessly and exactly. No, says Paul, history is linear. The “ignorance” admitted by the inscription “To an Unknown God” is a temporary phenomenon. The Creator has allowed it for a while and is now prepared to draw a veil over it. History—time itself!—is moving forward toward a goal very different from either the Stoic “conflagration” or the Epicurean idea of everything simply dissolving into its component atoms. The goal is now a day of ultimate, world-righting justice. All this of course provides a further irony. Again we find ourselves wondering whether an onlooker would have winced and thought, “Is Paul going too far? Is he now going to tease the judges with the news that their oh-so-superior court is at best a secondary forum? Is that the best way to win friends and influence people in Athens?” But Paul is in full stride. God has established a day “on which he intends to call the world to account with full and proper justice by a man whom he has appointed.” Full and proper justice. I slightly overtranslate here, but it makes the point I think Paul was making, which is that this will be true justice, not the second-rate variety provided by the highest court in Athens!...The nations of the earth can rage, plot, and strut their stuff, vaunting themselves against the true God; but God will laugh at them and announce that he has established his true king, his “son,” who will call the nations to account. “Now therefore,” says the psalm, “be wise; be warned, O rulers of the earth.” Again we sense Paul’s subtext. Athens, with its symbol of the owl, prided itself as the home of wisdom. No, Paul implies, true wisdom would consist in recognizing that the One Creator God has now unveiled his purpose for the world before all the nations. That purpose is focused on the Jesus who was crucified and raised and marked out thereby as God’s son, the one through whom God would fulfill his ancient promises and put the whole world at last to rights. Paul has thus worked his way around at last to explaining “Jesus and Anastasis”: it is Jesus and resurrection! These are new ideas, of course, and “foreign” in the sense of coming from the Jewish world, not being homegrown in Athens, and indeed flying in the face of the old slogan from Aeschylus. But at a deeper level, Paul is implying that this is not foreign at all; it is, rather, the reality to which so many signposts had been pointing. Paul is not suggesting for a moment that one could start from those signposts and work one’s way up to Jesus and the resurrection. But he is certainly suggesting that the puzzles and inconsistencies—the ignorances, in fact—within the world of Athenian and other pagan cultures functioned like signposts pointing into the dark, and that when the true God revealed his ultimate purposes for the world in Jesus’s resurrection, one would then be able to see that this might be where the signposts had been pointing all along. Yes, this is new. The final punch line explicitly contradicts what Apollo himself had said at the foundation of this very court. But it makes sense. People have sometimes sneered at Paul for a failed bit of philosophical theology. Hardly anyone was converted—though one member of the court, Dionysius, came to faith along with a woman named Damaris and others. But that wasn’t the point. What mattered is that Paul went out from their presence. He got off. If this was a trial, he was acquitted. Jesus and Anastasis might be new, strange, and even ridiculous to these senior Athenians. But Paul had convinced them that the heart of his message was something to which their own traditions, read admittedly from a certain angle, might all along have been pointing.”

Paul, A Biography NT Wright

Where there is no vision, the people perish.

Proverb 29:18

“God is {not} dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his {substituted idols} shadow will be shown.”

Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Now with Christianity a decisive differentiation has occurred, one which can perhaps be elucidated by the Platonic parable of the cave. Plato has his human beings chained in the cave, their faces turned to the wall, upon which they see nothing but the shadows cast by the objects carried past behind their backs. The situation becomes dynamic when one of these people is “forced” to turn around and is then dragged up to the cave entrance where he can see the sun.

Question: Who “forces” this man to undergo the conversion, the periagoge?

Here you have the problem of grace, on the Platonic level of transposition into para­bles or myths. It is this “forcing” that in essence is differentiated in Christian “revelation” or grace as the experienced intrusion of transcendence into human life which can break in from outside so overwhelmingly that it may call human freedom into question, as it did with Paul or Augustine.

This is new. And it has an important philosophical-technical consequence in that today no one would think of developing a theory of mystic experiences in the form of a Platonic myth. For a theory of this kind we now have the differenti­ated Judaeo-Christian vocabulary, as for example in Maimonides’s very detailed theory of prophecy, which strongly influenced Bodin.

Plato could not take the stage as a prophet; he had to conceal the authority of the man inspired by revelation behind the symbols of the philosopher king (Republic) or the royal ruler (Statesman). A further consequence of this was that the community of the inspired man’s followers could be imagined only in the form of a polis, a city state, not as a congregation or church beyond secular politics.

The differentiation of the problem of church, the understanding that the orientation toward transcendent perfection is not a political one, is still another achievement of Christianity.

Eric Voegelin