Hello Dr. Han. Just real quickly, I read a good number of your works from your
first work Rome Sweet Home, and all the way through the The Lamb's Supper, and A God Who
Keeps His Promises. At least one or two others in my mind. The most extraordinary
was The Lamb's Supper. But anyhow, I have a question. It's more historical.
I read the New Testament a few times, my knowledge is very sketchy...
How did Paul evangelize in the Greco-Roman world? A world that knew
nothing of messiahs, and there might have been just one part of that ancient world,
maybe the Persian world, that might have known something of a messiah. If remember
the three kings? What was his strategy? Just as we sometimes we speak
of a Socratic method to truth. Was there a Pauline method to giving Christ to the
world? We know he didn't do too good in Athens, and so Athens was a world
expecting a philosopher king. Expecting a Caesar...
Yeah Russ, Dr. Hahn has the gist. Let me jump in at this point because I know
you didn't intend to insult my favorite New Testament writer. And you didn't, but
everybody just assumes that in Acts 17 Paul failed when he evangelized the
Athenians on Mars Hill. If you look carefully at the end of that chapter, you
discover that Dionysus was converted, who in the tradition becomes the first
bishop and a great saint. And arguably more. But if we're just simply concerned
about quantity as opposed to quality, then we might describe this as a
failure. But I think it's a great first attempt. And what we have to recognize in
Act 17:16, as he is approaching Athens and begins to preach, you're right. He doesn't
have the Old Testament law and prophets to draw from. He doesn't have the the
Messiah as an expectation. But what he does reveals how much cultural homework
he did, so that in his Proclamation there is a great deal of cultural engagement.
Because you'll note that in acts 17 he does something like he does in the
book that he wrote to Titus.
He quotes Epimenides. 'Epimenides was, I think,
around the fifth century. And he was the most revered of the sages, the poets,
and the prophets of the time. And the the story goes, and this is backed up in a
book by Donna Richardson entitled Eternity in Their Hearts, in a chapter
called "The Melchizedek Factor," he seemed to be aware of the fact that Athens was
faced with extinction about four centuries earlier due to a pestilence
and the Athenian elders that exhausted all of the material and spiritual means to
avert this thing, or to get it lifted. And so they consulted Epimenides who came
from Crete. And when he arrived he basically gave them this advice:
You're going to have to admit that you have offended the heavens, but that you're
also ignorant of the God that you have offended. And so we have the quotation
from Epimenides, "In him we live and move and have our being," but when Paul is
pointing to these altars to the unknown God,
"Agnostos Theos." What most people don't recognize is that those altars go back
about four centuries. Because Epimenides advice to the Athenian elders was,
"Bring the sheep of your flocks to this hill in the morning, and any sheep
that lay down, from the grazing, build altars there and offer those sheep as
sacrifice." The Shepherd's laughed because they said that in the morning, sheep
don't lay down on the ground. But the next morning they did. And they erected
altars wherever they did. And they offered the sheep, and the plague was
averted. And so when Paul is talking about the the altar to the unknown God,
on the one hand, and then quoting Epimenides on the other, we have failed to
connect the dots. We have failed to see how culturally engaged Paul was, how much
cultural homework he did. Now the the philosophical spectrum in Athens was so
wide. You had skeptics. You had relativists. You had Stoics. But you had
people in every camp who were prepared by the Holy Spirit to hear the gospel of
Jesus' death and resurrection. Does that mean it's all got to be done in a day?
That they're gonna be saved by the evening? No. But men like Dionysius were
evangelized, presumably catechized. And not just baptized, but
ordained to the priesthood and the Episcopate. So I would say study Paul to
see how he evangelized the pagan world that wasn't expecting a messiah, and get
ready to engage your own culture by really doing your homework and mine. So
that we can speak to people who really have no familiarity or background with Christianity.
Russ in San Antonio, thanks for the call.