Arguing in the Marketplace

Preached at Hanover Street Presbyterian Church

On May 1, 2005

By the Rev. Thomas C. Davis, Ph.D.

Texts:

Ecclesiastes 1: 1-14

The words of the Teacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.  Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities!  All is vanity.  What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun?  A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.  The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hurries to the place where it rises.  The wind blows to the south, and goes round to the north; round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns.  All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they continue to flow.  All things are wearisome; more than one can express; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, or the ear filled with hearing.  What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is noting new under the sun.  Is there a thing of which it is said, 'See, this is new'?  It has already been, in the ages before us.  The people long ago are not remembered, nor will there be any remembrance of people yet to come by those who come after them.  I, the Teacher, when king over Israel in Jerusalem, applied my mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven; it is an unhappy business that God has given to human beings to be busy with.  I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind.

Acts 17: 16-34

While Paul was waiting for [Silas and Timothy] in Athens, he was deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols.  So he argued in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and also in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there.  Also some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers debated with him.  Some said, 'What does this babbler want to say?'  Others said, 'He seems to be a proclaimer of foreign divinities.'  (This was because he was telling the good news about Jesus and the resurrection.)  So they took him and brought him to the Areopagus and asked him, 'May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting?  It sounds rather strange to us, so we would like to know what it means.'  Now all the Athenians and the foreigners living there would spend their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new.  Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, 'Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way.  For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, "To an unknown god."  What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.  The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.  From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him-though indeed he is not far from each one of us.  For "In him we live and move and have our being"; as even some of your own poets have said, 'For we too are his offspring.'  Since we are God's offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.  While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, how he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead."  When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed; but others said, "We will hear you again about this."  At that point Paul left them.  But some of them joined him and became believers, including Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris, and others with them.

Sermon Text

Let me begin my sermon with a show of hands.  How many of you out there have relatives or friends who don't go to any house of worship because they just can't accept the idea of a personal God: either they don't know whether such a God exists, or else, they are certain that such a God doesn't exist?

On the Internet I came across a list of famous people who were either agnostic or atheist, or else, whose ideas about God were so unorthodox, they couldn't bear to go to church.  I have a lot of guiding lights on that list, people whose intelligence and passion for honesty and justice I much admire; to name just a few: Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, the suffragettes Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, my favorite author, Mark Twain, and Albert Einstein.  These are all famous dead non-theists.  But many of my closest living friends do not believe in a personal God either.  I have much in common with them too.  I share their insatiable curiosity, their hunger to keep learning, their propensity to think outside the box, their yearning to be honest and real, their determination to avoid wishful thinking, their commitment to combating injustice, their compassion for all the creatures who share this fragile planet, and their awe and marvel for its intricate beauty, which approaches reverence.

Every day I interact with people like this, and so do you too, in the marketplace, that metaphor for all places-- schools, offices, factories, stores, theaters, restaurants, libraries--where we rub elbows with people whose company we do not choose.  Sometimes they share our belief in a personal God, but mostly anymore, especially in large urban areas, they do not.  Indeed, it is not uncommon these days even for our own children not to share our faith.  That is so in my family, and I'm a minister!  Contrary to what press coverage might lead you to believe, conservative churches do not represent the fastest growing spiritual sector in North America.  The fastest growing sector is the secular one, containing people who do not espouse faith in a personal God, and who do not attend worship anywhere.

Christians, both conservative and liberal, share a Biblical tradition that says that we have received good news about God's mercy through Jesus, good news that we ought not keep to ourselves.  We should go into all nations, says the end of Matthew's gospel, making disciples for Jesus, teaching them to observe all that he commanded.

That was what Paul was about, the days he spent in Athens, waiting for Silas and Timothy to show up.  The text says that Paul argued with Greek philosophers in the marketplace, with Stoics and Epicureans; and that they were so intrigued by his message that they took him to the most prestigious venue of the city, the Areopagus, where the council of the city's ruling elders met, so that he might share his message there.

I've always thought that Paul presented the gospel in a sensitive, but also culturally clever way.  He appealed to common ground.  He first commended the Athenians for their interest in religion.  He did not mention his concern about the statues of their city, which he considered idols.  Instead, he looked for what was good in their religious practice.  He had observed that there was one altar that bore an inscription to an unknown God.  "This is the way to appeal to common ground," Paul thought: "I will tell them more about the God whom they seem to know only vaguely."  He proceeded to share with them the story of Jesus, and, since Paul had not known Jesus personally but was acquainted with him only by his experience of the resurrected Jesus on the road to Damascus, Paul stressed the importance of the resurrection.  That was an unwise strategy, because some of the Greek philosophers whom he was trying to win over, the Epicureans, were materialists.  They did not believe in life after death, so they scoffed at his talk of resurrection.

Consequently, only a few converts were made that day.  After I did some research on the proper names in the passage, I wonder whether Paul might have been more convincing if he had known more about his audience.  Yes, he did quote one of the popular Greek poets of the day.  That was a good way to establish rapport.  But could he have touched much deeper chords in his listeners?

I looked up the word, Areopagus, and this is what I found: It means the hill of Ares.  Ares was the Greek god of war.  The hill of Ares was where his spirit was believed to hang out.  The mythology associated with that hill says that the Greek people tried Ares for murder there.  Imagine that!  The place where the god of war was worshiped became the place where he was judged!  He was acquitted, but the mere fact that a people would try one of their gods for unethical conduct, well, that sure tells me something about their moral fiber!

Paul could have appealed to that moral fiber in them, which incidentally ran very strong in many of their competing schools of philosophy, but he didn't.  He overlooked it, probably because he thought he had the truth going in.  He didn't need to look for the truth with his audience.  He thought he only needed to persuade the Greeks that his message was the correct one.  When Acts says that Paul was arguing with the Greek philosophers in the marketplace, the word, "arguing" there means what most of us take it to mean: scoring logical points against our opponents, so that by the force of our reasoning we can bring them around to see things our way.  In other words, arguing is debating, and successful debating is defeating our opponents so that our own views prevail.

This is not what the Greeks meant by arguing.  In his philosophical dialogues, Plato shows what the Greeks meant by arguing: It was not a process to determine whose views were the correct ones.  It was a process by which people who held differing views could try their ideas one against another, through elenchus (cross examination).  Together they made way by reasoning toward the truth.  People needed each other to find the truth, Plato taught, for without an opponent's cross examination one could not see the faults in one's own ideas.  So, arguing was not a win-lose game for the Greeks.  It was a win-win game.  Yes, it could often be adversarial in tone, because people often hold their views very confidently and passionately.  However, although arguing often is adversarial in tone, the process of arguing need not be smug or predatory, as our religious and political arguments often are.  Everything depends upon whether you believe you hold the absolute truth going in.  If you believe instead that your adversary may have a thing or two to teach you, then elenchus, that delicious, constructive polemic which the Greeks cherished, becomes possible.

Our text says (verse 21): "Now all the Athenians and the foreigners living there would spend their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new."  That sounds like a put-down to me.  Sounds to me like the author of that text thought that he had the truth already.  And those dilettantish Athenians, why they just fritter away their days talking all sorts of new fangled nonsense.  Such a waste of time!  All they need to do to know the truth is come to Jesus!  That's the subtext of his remark, it seems to me.  But I think that the Athenians already did share some ideas with Christians about justice and goodness and maybe even--some of them at least-- about God, which Paul himself recognized, though only superficially; and I think that if he had spent more time getting to know them, arguing with them in their way instead of his, he would have had many more of them appreciating what he had to contribute to the search for truth.

I base that supposition on what I learned about the people he was arguing with in his marketplace: Epicureans and Stoics.  What does the word "Epicurean" connotes for us?  Somebody who likes good food!  What does the word "Stoic" connote for us?  Somebody who is impervious to pain.  We miss an awful lot about the identity of the people Paul was arguing with if that's all we know about Epicureans and Stoics.

The Epicureans philosophized like many of the modern people I referred to in the first part of my sermon.  They did not believe in deities.  They were materialists.  They believed that when we die, our bodies decompose, and that's the blessed end of us.  They were also very ethical people.  They believed that we should live chastely and frugally.  They believed that happiness comes from friendship (philia), which was so nobly described in their literature that it approached the Christian ideal of self-sacrificing love (agape).

What did the Stoics' believe?  Their major teaching was that a wise person should be equally indifferent to pain and pleasure, to wealth and poverty, to success and misfortune.  Humans should shield themselves with apathy or insensibility.  This teaching bears much resemblance to Paul's comment in his letter to the Christians in Philippi (4: 11-12): "I have learned to be content with whatever I have.  I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty.  In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need.  I can do all things through him who strengthens me."  Of course, Paul's attitude about being content in all circumstances stemmed not from putting on the virtue of apathy, but rather, from his faith in God's care through Jesus.  Nevertheless, there was considerable common ground between his own ethic and that of the Stoics.

Perhaps Paul did point out that common ground as he argued with the Stoics in his market place.  I hope so.  It seems to me that pointing out common ground is the way that we should witness to unbelievers in our own marketplace.  Many, many of them are good people, people as much committed to love and justice as we are, people who, like the Epicureans and Stoics of Paul's day, share much in common with us.  We should affirm that common ground.  Above all, we should remember that what wins people's hearts and minds is not so much what we say, but what we do.  And what we do includes the way we argue.  Do we argue as if we already know all the answers, and we're just trying to win others over to our side; or, like the Greek philosophers of Paul's day, do we argue in such a way that demonstrates our belief that the search for truth requires all of us to submit to cross examination, and that we eagerly anticipate learning a thing or two, even from our opponents?