A statue to an unknown god presented Paul with
an opportunity to proclaim to the “extremely religious” Athenians the God “in
whom we live and have our being.” It seems such an obvious mission strategy
surely someone else had tried to slap a name tag on the god “yet to be named” pedestal
but then maybe the Athenians were just as happy to allow their unnamed god to remain
anonymous. Paul managed to persuade at least two people, Dionysius and Damaris,
but the absence of a New Testament letter to the Athenians might be a measure
of Paul's limited success. A good number of people in our time prefer God to remain unnamed
even if they might go to that unnamed god in times of crisis or for cultural rituals that
still crop up even in decidedly secular societies. But the God "not served by human
hands" still desires humans to search and perhaps in groping find the One who
“is not far from each one of us.” It looks to me as if God leaves finding God up to chance and quirky circumstance so it hardly seems fair that a day would be fixed where ignorance is no longer
bliss. On the other hand if the world is judged in righteousness by the man God
appointed, and Jesus forgave even those who nailed him naked to wood, maybe the
rest of God’s offspring have more than just a chance in hell to bump into the
God who died in order to be found.
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