Listen as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Biblical interpretation in this address from The Gospel Coalition sermon library.
Yesterday I went through a number of points and stopped at point number six, which was: From a Christian perspective, an omniscient talking God changes everything. I want to make two further points and then start applying them to the larger issues I have introduced. I will not spend a lot of time on this, but it is an important thing to say.
1. From a Christian perspective, postmodernism is characterized by astonishing hubris, arrogance; it is awesomely God-defying.
Now it’s important to think through why this is so. Sin, in the first instance, from a Christian perspective, is not merely a list of dos and don’ts, not simply doing things we shouldn’t do and not doing things we ought to do, except in a very profound sense that I’ll come to in a moment. Sin, in the first instance, is displacing God from the center.
I mentioned yesterday how difficult it is to get across the notion of sin in a contemporary context. Sin has become a snicker word. When anybody mentions sin, people snicker. There’s no odium or heinousness attached to it. It’s just a snicker word. People don’t think of themselves as sinners.
But from a Christian perspective, if in the beginning there was God and he made human beings in his image, his own image bearers, who were rightly related to him, so that when they woke up in the morning their thoughts drifted to him.… Their desire was to please him. What they wanted more than anything was to praise him and honor him and please him.
Their every heart’s desire was to bring him pleasure and glory, and their inclination was toward him, because each thought that was the center of the universe, God himself; therefore, they were also rightly related to each other. But with the fall, each image bearer thought of himself or herself in the center of the universe.
Not physically, not geographically, but in terms of outlook and worldview, that’s the way it works. So when you wake up in the middle of the night and think, you don’t immediately gravitate to, “How can I glorify God this day?” but you look at the whole world in terms of how it relates to you. That is the heart of all sin. It’s profound self-centeredness.
God, if he/she/it exists, must then also serve me, because I’m at the center of the universe. This God, then, can be accepted or rejected on the basis of whether or not I find him/her/it plausible. We start speaking of “The God I can believe in” or “The God I can’t believe in,” or we domesticate God, taking off the rough edges we find a bit uncomfortable.
Within that framework, the social pathologies begin to work out as well. If I am at the center of the universe and you’re stupid enough to think you’re the center of the universe, eventually we’re going to clash. If you have enough people in this little group over here thinking, “I’m at the center of the universe,” or “Somebody in our group or our race or our nation or our economic bracket or our system is at the center of the universe,” and there are other systems with other heroes, then you have all kinds of potential for struggle and race hatred and riots and war and mayhem.
If I am at the center of the universe, then what’s important in a family is that the family pleases me. If the family doesn’t please me, it can go hang. There you have the beginnings of breakdown and abuse and all these social, sexual, familial ills that beset a society where everyone is bent on pleasing himself or herself. You take what’s not yours because the culture owes it to you somehow, and on and on and on.
Now from a biblical point of view, therefore, the heart of all that is odious to God, the heart of all that is heinous, the heart of all that is profoundly evil is decentering God. It is worshiping the created thing more than the Creator who is blessed forever, Paul says. In other words, that’s the big lie. The biggest lie of all is for that created thing to be not some other idol, some other lesser god, not the sun god or the god Moloch or one of the Baals, but me, my speech, the speech of my group, which doesn’t even have to be true speech, so long as it’s true for me.
Thus God, even if he/she/it does exist, has to be dethroned. In the very nature of the case, we have defined all language and reality that way. Thus, if there was a terrible hubris, a terrible arrogance to modernism (and there was), it was characterized by the hubris of thinking that from our own finitude, from our own finiteness, we could build up a system of knowledge that would find out all truth and eventually move to the point where it could dethrone God and replace him.
Now we have gotten to the place, in a new hubris, where we deny there is any truth other than that which we make and define ourselves. It is the ultimate self-ism. Thus, from God’s point of view, although postmodernists look at Christians and think they’re extremely arrogant for saying other people are wrong, while they’re busy telling us we’re wrong for thinking so, yet from God’s point of view, this really is the extreme hubris. That brings me to my last point in coming back.
2. In the creation of epistemology, it seems to me, from a Christian point of view, it is extraordinarily important not to forget some dimensions that modernism largely overlooked; namely, sin and the work of the Holy Spirit.
You see, beginning from Descartes on (well, it stretched farther back, but Descartes is the transitional figure), there were increasing attempts to prove the existence of God from ontological arguments or design arguments, teleological arguments, or whatever …
There were attempts to prove the existence of God from some sort of agreed base, and then you move up from that base to defend the existence of God or to deny the existence of God, as the case may be. You start from your own finitude and try to move into an overarching God view, an omniscience view, an anchor somewhere.
But it has not proved stable, and even the Christian attempts in this area (and there have been many devout Christian attempts) have, almost without exception (there have only been a few exceptions), attacked the whole problem of epistemology without integrating into the epistemology the sin factor.
So we have arguments from design. Can you draw proper inferences about the existence of God from the complexity of the universe, the amount of time it would take to create, and so on? Well, I’m sure there are useful arguments there somewhere, and they are useful precisely for Christians, because Christians already are themselves in their minds assuming the existence of God in any case.
But if you are building up a whole Christian apologetic and an entire Christian epistemology on theoretical grounds, you cannot leave out sin, because in a Christian frame, sin has so corroded our noetic powers, it has so corroded the way we think, the way we evaluate, that we’re not looking at this sort of evidence neutrally or evenhandedly. We have biases in certain directions. So there is not only the factor of our finiteness we have to deal with; there is the problem of our sinfulness.
Look at it this way for a moment. Suppose this whole universe was more or less as it is except without any decay or death. Supposing it was already the new heaven and the new earth, and we’re here with properly resurrected bodies and the like. Now in the resurrected body, let us assume, just for imagination’s sake, that the resurrected body can still procreate. Jesus tells us it can’t, but supposing a resurrected body could actually procreate.
Now along comes Baby Ellen. When Baby Ellen is born, she doesn’t know a whole lot, but as Baby Ellen is born without any sin genes, without any inclination toward sin, without any of the noetic effects of the fall, how will Baby Ellen, and all of the other babies and teenagers, grow up in this perfect world? If you don’t want a resurrected world, just have a perfect world without the fall. Just go back to Eden without the fall. How would things be perceived?
Well, everybody would be walking with God. You would no more sit around and try to prove the existence of God than you’d prove that you are because you think, to coin a phrase. You would already be rightly related to him. To sit around and prove the existence of God as if thus you had domesticated him and put him in a box would be inconceivable.
You would look at the universe and, of course, there would be a proper place for doing science, its ordered place. You would have excellent science, fine minds to do it with, but at the same time, you would see God behind all of it all the time. The biblical writers knew a fair bit about the order of nature. They knew, for example, about the water cycle.
Ecclesiastes speaks of rain that falls from the heaven upon the ground, streams that go into other streams, and streams into rivers, and rivers into the sea, and from the sea goes up into the clouds. They knew about the water cycle, but it doesn’t stop the fact that most of them preferred to say, “God sends the rain.” It’s not that they’re animistic, but because their vision of God is that he stands behind this ordered array he has made.
Thus, the notion that science stands over against God wouldn’t even enter their heads. Some view of the “God of the gaps,” where science works all the time except where God actually happens to intervene and does something we can’t explain, wouldn’t occur to them. Thus, another whole epistemology now that is grounded in a God-centered perfect world to begin with.
Now we have a situation where sin has entered into the world, and we’re trying to reconstruct our defenses of God and our epistemologies and so on. If we start playing the game entirely by the world’s rules, as if all human knowing must not take into account human sinning, then we are inevitably concocting an epistemology that is sub-Christian. So we have to keep insisting on the noetic effects of the fall. Because of the noetic effects of the fall, Paul insists that even when people.… Paul insists. Jesus insists. John insists.
It’s a common thing in the New Testament, and it’s not all that uncommon in the Old either. The Bible does insist in the strongest possible ways that all kinds of people believe in God whether or not it’s the God of the Bible, and even the Devil believes in the God of the Bible, yet actually to know and trust this God and see him in proper proportion, such that we take him on board in faith and obedience and love, requires nothing other than the work of the Holy Spirit. Now how does that fit into most epistemological systems?
This is an extremely important point and brings me now to some reflections on using the Bible for discipleship and evangelism. First, our struggle now is a worldview clash. To pick up further on the point I’ve just made, for those of you interested in the subject, I brought in a book with me by Brian D. Ingraffia. I doubt you’ll find it in the book resources center, nor is this a book for everybody. It’s for a serious reader, anybody who’s actually working in the area of deconstruction and that sort of thing.
If you’ve had a philosophy degree or you’re pretty widely read, you’ll cope with it. It’s quite well written, but it’s not an easy book. It’s written by a Christian who teaches at Biola University, published by Cambridge University Press. It came out in 1995 in hardback and is already in paperback. The title is Postmodern Theory and Biblical Theology. Let me tell you what his thesis is. It’s subtitled Vanquishing God’s Shadow.
That phrase comes from Nietzsche. Nietzsche, the German nihilist of the last century, argued that all Western thought has been getting rid of God in some way or other, but by spending so much time on trying to get rid of God, it has always been fighting God’s shadow and thus is itself parasitic on Christianity. What you must finally do is so destroy Christianity and prove it’s stupid and ignorant and ugly that you vanquish God’s shadow.
Now what he is arguing in this book is that the philosophy of Nietzsche and Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, deconstruction, and that sort of thing, has this in common, that it is constantly opposing what he calls ontotheology. Now ontotheology is the construction of an entire theological system once you’ve already banished the God of the Bible in the first place. That’s what Descartes was doing, wasn’t it?
You banish God in the first place, then you try to reason from basics up, which is characteristic of modernism, until you have a kind of god who is more or less in line with the biblical God, and then when that whole system begins to break down, the god you’re rebelling against and reacting against and criticizing and destroying is not the God of the Bible but the god of ontotheology.
What he’s arguing is that the entire god of ontotheology is being destroyed by postmodernism, destroyed inevitably and infallibly, and these people are not even addressing the God of the Bible, who lives in another worldview. You see, these people are destroying this god who came out of a modernist worldview, but the God of the Bible comes out of a different worldview, and they’re not really attacking him very effectively at all.
What you really have to say is there is another worldview. This is a worldview clash of the first order. What they are saying, however, is that you cannot live in the biblical worldview and be a biblical Christian and be a thoughtful postmodernist. You live in one worldview or the other, but you can’t live in both. Cambridge University Press no less. Amen.
Now let us think through this question of worldview just a bit more. Take the period of George Whitefield, the great evangelical awakening of the eighteenth century. Howell Harris began preaching in Wales in 1734 and George Whitefield in fields outside Bristol in 1738. He describes how the tears of the coal miners, as they came out of the pits or as they were going in, would run down their cheeks and make rivulets in the coal dust as he preached to them the gospel.
John Wesley began in 1740. It was a time of massive decay morally, theologically, and so on, in the land. On Easter Sunday in St. Paul’s, London, according to the records, there were six communicants at Holy Communion. Over Easter Sunday, this next Sunday, I’m sure there will be more than six communicants at St. Paul’s in London.
In many parts of London and some other big cities, every sixth building was either a pub or a brothel. Slavery was rife in the empire. The rich were getting richer. The poor were getting poorer. There was enough social unrest that some people were already predicting revolution. Most people were illiterate.
The Industrial Revolution was producing all kinds of pollution and more money for the middle class, but the workers at the bottom end worked pretty gruesome hours from about the age of 6. There were 280 crimes on the books for which there could be capital punishment, including stealing a loaf of bread. England was not all that happy a place, nor was it a godly place.
Then, over the course of the next 60 years, by the preaching of the Word, there were tens of thousands converted, and these people were seen as on the cutting edge, the front end of social change for the better. Gradually, they took the strings of power, and while being Christians first, while being evangelicals in their witness, their outreach, their outlook, their confession, their prayer lives, their preaching, their teaching, they were interested in doing good in society in consequence of this.
Laws were passed through by John Howard with prison reform and John Birch and the Earl of Shaftesbury and the Countess of Huntingdon. They all had vast networks of influence into which they poured time and money, and so forth, and the face of Britain was changed. Now the intriguing thing is that although the nation had sunk to such a low state, it was still more or less operating with a Judeo-Christian worldview.
There were all kinds of people who didn’t know much about the Bible. On the other hand, if they had any conceptions at all of metaphysics, even without knowing the word, they believed that God existed, that he was all-powerful, that he had made things at the beginning, that history was going somewhere in a straight line. There was a teleology, even if they didn’t use the word. It was going somewhere. It had an end point.
There was a final judgment. There was a difference between right and wrong. There was a difference between truth and error. There was this person called Jesus who came and died on the cross, whatever that meant, and a lot of people believed he rose again from the dead. There’s this Trinitarian view. They might not have used the word trinity, but Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, in Elizabethan English. That was all part of the worldview.
Of course, more were a little more suspicious. Others were a little less suspicious. Some of them had animistic overtones that traced back centuries, and some were terribly worried about witches and demons and so on. How far that overlapped with the biblical worldview and how far it fell into superstition varied enormously, but this was the common worldview in Britain.
Even if there were also intellectuals in some places who were complete atheists or agnostics, that which they defined their views against was still a Christian worldview. When the gospel is preached in that kind of framework, you could assume certain givens in the population. You could assume certain epistemology. You could assume certain vision of God. You could assume certain things about right and wrong.
You could assume people felt guilty where there was sin. You could assume that sin looked bad. You could assume that they feared judgment. They were all givens. You could assume that there was a common belief that Jesus was coming again. You could assume that most people, if they thought about Jesus at all, knew that he was both God and man, and so on and so on and so on. In fact, there wouldn’t even have been much thought given to how much you could assume because it was so widely assumed.
So if you read today the preserved evangelistic sermons of Wesley or Whitefield, if you’ve tried to do any evangelism on a university campus today, what strikes you most about them besides their passion and their godliness? It’s how you couldn’t possibly use them today because people wouldn’t know what you were talking about. They wouldn’t have a clue.
I mentioned in another seminar that I had a friend in Canada some years ago. He went out to India, and he didn’t want to get involved in the Christian ghetto, so he learned Hindi fluently. He was doing evangelism in the villages, and so on. He spent 12 years there in three 4-year sessions scattered over 13 or 14 years.
Despite the fact that he was clear enough in his thinking to understand how dangerous syncretism is in India, and while he insisted that you had to trust Christ and Christ alone was the way to the God who had made us and all the rest, he found many, many, many Indians prepared to become Christians (i.e., they made professions of faith and they took Jesus on board) who never left Hinduism. Many, many professed converts and not a single church planted. He came home very discouraged.
He thought the matter through very carefully, went back, settled into just two villages, and for the next four years, in those two villages, he started teaching Genesis and Exodus. With Genesis, the doctrine of God (he’s personal and transcendent); creation (it’s not a pantheistic world; the world is different from God); the nature of human beings made in the image of God, yet different from God and answerable to him, the nature of responsibility; the fall (what’s the matter with this place in the first instance?); then a little bit of redemptive history and the like, and then he eventually came to Jesus and the cross, and so on.
He saw relatively few professions of faith, and he planted two churches. In other words, he had come to terms with the significance of a worldview clash. Now Peter Berger, in some of his social analysis, speaks of plausibility structures. A plausibility structure, in Berger’s use of the term, is a widely shared conventional assumption in society (it may not be universal, but very widely shared in society) that very few people question.
In a tight society like Japan there would be many, many, many plausibility structures. In a more open society like Britain or America, which societies are becoming more diverse, there are relatively few plausibility structures that are shared by the overwhelming majority of the population anymore. We’re just too diverse. We’re diverse racially, linguistically, heritage, religion, and so on.
The few plausibility structures that remain.… They’re not shared by everybody. Of course not. There are awkward people like Christians and devout Muslims and others around. But the few plausibilities that remain tend to be held onto very, very strongly. Now as postmodernism increasingly takes hold on the nation, whether you like the term or not, whether people use the term or not, whether they’ve ever read a postmodern book or not, as the assumptions of postmodernism take hold, postmodernism begins to be the prevailing plausibility structure.
That means there are all kinds of things that are widely assumed in the population that are not easily argued against because they’re the axioms of society. Just as when you go to India there are certain things that are not easily argued against because they’re the axioms of society. It’s a pantheistic world. It’s a polytheistic world. It’s a syncretistic world.
Now suddenly to come in with a form of religion that insists on monotheism, a transcendental, personal, and immanent God, a distinction between God and all other reality, an analysis of what is wrong not in terms of karma but in terms of rebellion, and a solution that turns not on reincarnation and trying harder with enough cycles to finally get to the top, but instead a Savior who comes and dies in your place as a substituted sacrifice because he himself is one with God.… Those things are entirely outside the plausibility structure.
You can go in and get a lot of “converts” by saying, “Jesus offers you an abundant life. Why don’t you take him on board?” Easy enough to do. But if you’re going to get converts who stick, you have to change the plausibility structure. You have to change the worldview. There just isn’t any choice, for at the end of the day, the Bible insists there is a metanarrative.
Now we all know what a narrative is. That’s just a story. A metanarrative is the big story that explains things, just as physics.… We all know more or less what physics is. We may not know much physics, but we know more or less what physics is, and metaphysics is the kind of undergirding explanation of all things, including the physics.
So a narrative is a story. There are a lot of little narratives in the Bible, but the Bible as a whole has a big story, and the big story is not just a big story; it’s a metanarrative. It’s an explaining story. It is the framework into which everything else in the Bible fits and into which, in fact, from a Christian confessional stance, all epistemology, all faith, all obedience, all experience, all explanation must fit or else it isn’t Christian; it’s something else.
Now in Western thought, as long as the Judeo-Christian outlook prevailed, that metanarrative was part of the assumption in the Western world. It was part of the plausibility structure. You didn’t have to argue that corner. Therefore, evangelism in that kind of worldview meant you could assume the plausibility structure. You could assume the worldview, give or take a wee bit. Some people were a little more off track than others, but you could assume that kind of given.
Even for the people who were opposed to it, it was that they were arguing against, so they knew something about it. That was the baseline in the culture, so when you evangelized, you assumed that was the baseline, and then what you did was explain more closely how awful sin is, what God is truly like, what redemption looks like, the purpose of the cross, the nature of salvation by grace through faith, and so on.
You pray to God earnestly that he will pour out his Spirit and bring people to genuine conviction of sin and shame and show that the only relief is through the finished work of Christ to whom they must appeal for forgiveness. But now suddenly, if that plausibility structure is wiped out for increasing numbers of people.… It isn’t wiped out everywhere in the country. Not yet. Partly because of religion in the schools, partly because of church schools, partly because of an older generation that picked up stuff in the past.
It’s all messy and spongy and not very clear at the moment, but there are rising numbers of people in the nation who know nothing about that baseline anymore and, in any case, whose plausibility structures are leaving all of that stuff behind, and many of whose plausibility structures are, in fact, profoundly connected with a postmodern epistemology. So what does evangelism look like now?
This means, therefore, that in our evangelism and Bible teaching to complete outsiders, we’re at the place now like the missionary going to India. Part of the job is to create a different worldview. We’re constantly concerned about painting the big picture, for if we don’t paint the big picture, the significance of Jesus won’t even be seen.
You cannot make sense of what Jesus is, what he came to do, what he accomplished, what his mission was, and what kind of faith you’re calling men and women to.… You can’t make sense of any of that without the biblical metanarrative. You can’t do it. Do you want biblical evidence? Look at the book of Acts. This is my second point.
Start with Acts 13. Here you find Paul typically beginning his evangelism in a new center by approaching the synagogue. There he would find Jews and proselytes (that is, Gentiles who had become Jews) and God-fearers, that is, Gentiles who were very sympathetic to what was going on in Judaism but who probably hadn’t been circumcised yet, who were still limited in their commitments but who were nevertheless exposed to the Old Testament and read it in Greek in the synagogue week by week.
Here in chapter 13 he explains the scriptural passages, all with this intent of proving that Jesus really is the Son of David, the promised Messiah, the one who was to come, the one who alone justifies people. He explains what the law of Moses is doing in this connection. Chapter 13, verses 38–39: “I want you to know that through Jesus the forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you. Through him everyone who believes is justified from everything you could not be justified from by the law of Moses.”
Sound vaguely like Galatians? Have you heard something on this theme recently? There’s such a hue and cry about it that (verse 44) by the next Sabbath, the whole city is gathering around to hear. People are really interested. The word is getting out. He’s still preaching with the assumption of a biblically literate crowd and still preaching that Jesus is the Messiah. Now you turn to Acts 17. We find Paul now in Athens and, as usual, he starts with the synagogue.
Verse 16: “While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks …” That’s what he always does. He starts there with a biblical base. “… as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there.” Now he’s starting to collect a crowd of people who may or may not be biblically literate. They might be pagans who have never even heard of the Old Testament.
“A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began a dispute with him.” The marketplace was sort of the Hyde Corner. “Some of them asked, ‘What is this babbler trying to say?’ ” “This seed picker.” It’s a word that is used of a little bird that goes around and picks up this little scrap and that little scrap and, therefore, is used of people who don’t think very systematically, who don’t have a whole philosophy.
Philosophy in that time did not have the abstract connotations it has today. It meant a whole outlook, a way of organizing and thinking through society, explaining it and ordering it, getting a value system, a structure, what we might call a worldview. A whole plausibility structure. There was an Epicurean model. There was a Stoic model.
They were competing in the open marketplace, and along comes this chap, and he sounds like one of these two-bit, tin-pot thinkers who doesn’t have things very well put together. He has picked up an odd idea there and picked up an idea there. He’s a seed picker. He’s an eclectic. He’s not systematic, not very rigorous. “But he seems to be attracting a crowd, so we’d better find out what he’s trying to say.”
“ ‘What is this babbler trying to say?’ Others remarked, ‘He seems to be advocating foreign gods.’ They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection.” He was concerned to preach the gospel. No doubt about it. “Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus …” That is, the sort of intellectual debating hall of the ancient world.
“… where they said to him, ‘May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we want to know what they mean.’ (All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.)” You have to explain places like Oxbridge to blue-collar workers in Liverpool. “They just do that. They spend all their time talking.” That’s what Luke is trying to do here.
“Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said …” Now the address is recorded, and you can read it in about a minute and a half. Undoubtedly the address took a long time … two, three, or four hours. Meetings at the Areopagus were not known for their brevity. So all we have are high points here. Wouldn’t you love to have a recording of the whole thing? I don’t have time to expound it at length. I wish I did. But I want to draw your attention to a few points on the fly.
He says, “Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious.” The word is neutral. The King James Version has “superstitious,” which isn’t quite right. He is commenting on the religion, but there is nothing in the word that suggests that he thought their religion was adequate, good, bad, indifferent. He is merely commenting on the fact that they are really religious. He says, “As I’ve entered into town and looked around, I’ve observed how religious a town this is.”
Then he says, “For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.” Now from an animistic perspective, where there are a lot of gods out there and you might not know them all, well, you offer appropriate sacrifices to the appropriate deities who will cover your travel, or you offer appropriate sacrifices to the appropriate deities who will bless your home when you want your home blessed. Maybe your wife is about to have a baby.
But there are enough gods out there. You can’t know them all, so just to make sure, you offer sacrifices even to an unknown god. It’s probably an animistic background at this point rather than a specifically Epicurean or some other philosophical system. In other words, Paul is making contact with people, and as you work into the address …
If I had time, I think I could show you that some of the language he uses and some of the connections he makes are fairly sympathetic to Stoic and Epicurean concerns. He does make some connections. Where he can see some common ground, he takes it. Yet at the same time, it’s not simply enough to take common ground. You also have to show where the ground is different or you’re not going to move people into another frame.
If all you do is say, “Hail, fellow, well met; we share some common ground,” you’re not moving them into another plausibility structure in which the coming of Christ makes any sense. Most Greeks thought, for example, that history went round and round and round. Many Greeks (not all) thought that matter was intrinsically bound up with something evil and spirit was intrinsically bound up with something good. That’s not a Christian definition of good and evil.
Then on top of all of that, they had different views of what the summum bonum is, the supreme good in life. What he begins to do is to paint a completely different worldview. “By offering something to an unknown god, you admit to ignorance about God.” Now in Greek thought, you can move from God, singular, to gods back and forth pretty quickly, because most of Greek thought is basically pantheistic.
That is, behind the expressions in various gods there is God, sort of plastic, pantheistic God, which is why some people have been mistaken when they’ve read Plato or someone and think that maybe Plato was a secret monotheist because actually he uses God in the singular sometimes. It’s a pantheistic world, by and large, with some exceptions.
Paul uses this and says, “Yes, yes, God is unknown to you. I want to tell you about the God who is known.” Can you imagine the effect that would have? You’re dealing with a first-class worldview clash. “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands.”
Here you have, first of all, a sovereign, transcendent God. He’s not part of this world. This is not any longer a pantheistic vision of reality. He made everything, and he’s so transcendent that, at the end of the day, he can’t be domesticated by sticking him in a temple. He’s bigger than all of those categories.
Not only so. “He is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else.” That is to say, Paul insists on the doctrine of aseity. That’s a good old Puritan word that we’ve largely lost. Aseity comes from Latin a se. That is to say, from himself. God is from himself in Scripture. That is, he is self-existent. He is independent. He doesn’t need anybody or anything else.
It’s not as if God was sitting there before creation feeling, “Boy, am I lonely up here,” whatever “up here” means before this universe. “I think I need to make some image bearers so I won’t be quite so lonely.” No, no. He’s the God of aseity. It’s not as if we are somehow going to add to him anything.
That’s why the God of the Old Testament says, for example, in the Psalms, “If I were hungry, I wouldn’t ask you. The cattle on a thousand hills are mine.” It’s not that he is hungry. “But if I were hungry, it’s not as if you have to bring me a sacrifice so I can have enough to eat.” He’s independent, whereas so many of the finite visions of god in the pagan world finally depended on a vision of god that made the gods’ happiness depend on what we do. Poor chaps, poor lassies.
No, no, no. He is not served by human hands. You can’t control him by stroking him. In fact, he is the one who gives all men life and breath and everything else. He’s the God of providence. He’s the God of sustaining power. Every breath you breathe is by his sanction. He drops that sanction and you die. Do not think of yourself as independent.
“From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth, and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live.” Here you have a God who’s not a tribal deity at all. One race of human beings. No racialism allowed here, thank you. Not even the Greeks. Not the Jews. From one progenitor he made the entire race of human beings. He’s not merely the Jewish God, a tribal deity at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. He is sovereign over all of the nations. He raises them up and he puts them down.
