Skip to main content

The Known Unknown

Acts 17.22-31
At Speakers' Corner in Athens Paul takes on the debaters. Talking to a Jewish audience he would describe how the Church of Christ is the new transformed Israel. Speaking to Greek people, who pride themselves on being open-minded, scientific seekers after truth, he tries a different pitch.

He's come to tell them about the unknown god whom they suspect might be out there, within and beyond the framework of existence, what Donald Rumsfeld called 'the unknown Known' or 'the known Unknown'. (That's an example of choosing the wrong pitch for your audience.)

It's comforting, at a time when we cannot go into them, to remember that this God, 'who made the cosmos and everything in it, …does not live in shrines made by human hands.'

Despite our many achievements, which have only multiplied since Paul's time, we still find ourselves 'groping' in the darkness for a God who is actually 'not far from each one of us', wherever we are, if we could but see him, 'for in him we live and move and have our being.' 

God has been patient with us, says Paul, and has 'overlooked' our 'ignorance'. But now God asks us all to recognise that he's with us in Jesus, 'the [righteous] man whom he has appointed' and whom he raised from the dead.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

I don't believe in an interventionist God

Matthew 28.1-10, 1 Corinthians 15.1-11 I like Nick Cave’s song because of its audacious first line: ‘I don’t believe in an interventionist God’. What an unlikely way to begin a love song! He once explained that he wrote the song while sitting at the back of an Anglican church where he had gone with his wife Susie, who presumably does believe in an interventionist God - at least that’s what the song says. Actually Cave has always been very interested in religion. Sometimes he calls himself a Christian, sometimes he doesn’t, depending on how the mood takes him. He once said, ‘I believe in God in spite of religion, not because of it.’ But his lyrics often include religious themes and he has also said that any true love song is a song for God. So maybe it’s no coincidence that he began this song in such an unlikely way, although he says the inspiration came to him during the sermon. The vicar was droning on about something when the first line of the song just popped into his ...

On "Crazy People", By Casting Crowns

On Crazy People, by Casting Crowns When I heard the song, I liked it. It’s funny. I’m not sure it’s woke, though. If you know what I mean?  Woke means ‘being alert to racial discrimination and other kinds of prejudice’. And some people feel that the word crazy is un woke because it stigmatizes mental health issues.  According to woke people, calling someone crazy seems to imply that he or she isn’t living in the real world and can’t make rational decisions, that they’re mentally deranged.  I looked up the politically correct alternatives to crazy. A woke dictionary suggested, ‘ irration al , r idiculous , s illy and a bsurd’. If you think it actually is absurd to suggest that the word crazy can be replaced by the word absurd then I guess you’re un woke. But crazy does have wider meanings that have nothing to do with mental health. It can mean ‘to be infatuated with someone’ or ‘to be passionately excited or very enthusiastic about something’.  I guess the song wr...

Luther and Loyola

James 1:17-27 Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 Within Christianity there has always been a tension between two poles. At one end of the spectrum stands Martin Luther, who said that Christian faith is about trusting in God to put us right - or make us righteous - through the saving death of Jesus. Luther came to this conclusion when he was a professor of New Testament studies in a little town in Germany called Wittenberg. One year he decided to teach his students about Paul’s letter to the Romans and that’s when it suddenly dawned upon him that Christian faith is all about trust. At the other end of the spectrum , stands someone like Ignatius Loyola the founder of the Society of Jesus. He spent a lot of his later life in crisis, first struggling to overcome severe wounds that he had suffered when he was a soldier and then during two short periods locked up in a cell by the Spanish Inquisition. He came to believe that the Christian life is a similar sort of struggle, a lifelon...