We went on a tour of “classical” Athens today, with stops at the Acropolis, and the Parthenon which sits majectically upon it, and the ancient Agora. In between, quite literally, we went to the Areopagus, called Mars Hill by the Romans. The Areopagus, associated with the Greek god of war Ares, and many other figures from classical myth and literature, was also the site of the classical council of elders for Athens and later evolved into a homicide court. Students present short lectures on all of these sites for us, as do the professors and a superb Greek guide, Eleni Premeti. Ther student who presented on the Areopagus raised the issue of what the Apostle Paul was trying to accomplish in his speech to the Athenians on the Areopagus, as recorded by Luke in Acts 17.

She asked whether Paul was attempting to subvert the language of Greek culture and philosophy by adopting it in his speech to the Athenians in Acts 17 or whether he was engaging in a form of syncretism, since, as Luke records the speech, Paul does not include the name of Jesus directly. It is a question of significance for Christians of every era. Do we engage a culture in order to subvert the teachings which run counter to the truth? Or should we engage in forms of syncretism, however mild, by which we adopt aspects of culture with which Christianity might be in sympathy? How far should such syncretism extend? How far would subversion go in rending a culture? The issue of culture, it seems, goes even deeper, given that Christianity is the product of a particular culture in its earliest manifestation, which itself was influenced by the Hellenism of the preceding centuries. Christianity, like all religions, can never be “culture-free”; Christianity does not exist in a vacuum and it was not written on a tabula rasa. How many of the expressions of the earliest Christianity are themselves artifacts of a culture now gone? This does not diminish the truth of Jesus Christ, of which Paul spoke to a hostile or disinterested audience, but it does make clear that just as Paul spoke in the language of the philosophers, poets, and ordinary Greeks and Romans of his day to reach them with the Gospel, so, too, must we express the truth and reality of Jesus Christ in a language that resonates with our own culture. Paul, after all, had some success, to which the numerous Orthodox Churches scattered all over Athens bear witness twenty centuries later. But Paul was also correct about the perennial value of much of  classical Greek culture and thought: its virtues remain intact twenty centuries or so after Paul’s speech to its representatives on the Areopagus.

 

John W. Martens

John W. Martens is an associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn,where he teaches early Christianity and Judaism. He also directs the Master of Arts in Theology program at the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity. He was born in Vancouver, B.C. into a Mennonite family that had decided to confront modernity in an urban setting. His post-secondary education began at Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kansas, came to an abrupt stop, then started again at Vancouver Community College, where his interest in Judaism and Christianity in the earliest centuries emerged. He then studied at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, and McMaster University, with stops at University of Haifa and University of Tubingen. His writing often explores the intersection of Jewish, Christian and Greco-Roman culture and belief, such as in "let the little children come to me: Children and Childhood in Early Christianity" (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), but he is not beyond jumping into the intersection of modernity and ancient religion, as in "The End of the World: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Film and Television" (Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford Press, 2003). He blogs at  www.biblejunkies.com and at www.americamagazine.org for "The Good Word." You can follow him on Twitter @biblejunkies, where he would be excited to welcome you to his random and obscure interests, which range from the Vancouver Canucks and Minnesota Timberwolves, to his dog, and 70s punk, pop and rock. When he can, he brings students to Greece, Turkey and Rome to explore the artifacts and landscape of the ancient world. He lives in St. Paul with his wife and has two sons. He is certain that the world will not end until the Vancouver Canucks have won the Stanley Cup, as evidence has emerged from the Revelation of John, 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch, and 4 Ezra which all point in this direction.