The Christian Mindset - Part 2 — Art Katz

Paul's Arrival in Athens and the Coming Collision of Worldviews

In the life of Paul that came about by happenstance, circumstantially, by a man who did not intend to be in essence, who was really in flight from persecution, and was brought to the city by other men.

He was not there by his own volition or choice. And while he was waiting for his brothers and the Lord to catch up with him, God began to stir his heart by his spirit, and step by step something unfolds which becomes a jewel that is timeless in its importance and its value.

A confrontation or a collision between two essential forces or mentalities. One is Paul, the apostolic man, the Hebrew of the Hebrews, representing the mentality of God, and the other the Greeks themselves.

And not just any Greeks, but Athenians. And not just Athenians, but philosophers, Stoics and Epicureans. In other words, the cream of the crop, the finest of Greek civilization, meets the finest of Hebrew or divine civilization.

While the finest of the secular meets the finest of the sacred in a head-on collision. And I want to say to you that when we read this, we need to read it not just as an academic exercise, we need to read it as a description for a course upon which we ourselves are set.

Because what Paul represents as himself in Acts 17 is a statement of the church which he prefigures. And that what the end of the age is going to be is yet another collision between an apostolic body meeting the world head-on in the depths of its wisdom in a final and ultimate confrontation for which we need now to be prepared.

Are you following me? Okay. So let's begin from verse 14 of chapter 17. And then immediately the brethren sent away Paul to go as it were to the sea, but Silas and Timotheus abode there still. And they that conducted Paul brought him unto Athens, and receiving a commandment unto Silas and Timotheus, for to come to him with all speed they departed.

Paul Proclaims the Unknown God at Mars Hill

Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was stirred in him when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry. Therefore disputed he in the synagogue with the Jews and with the devout persons, and in the market daily with them that met with him.

Then certain philosophers of the Epicureans and of the Stoics encountered him. And some said, What will this babbler say? Others some, He seems to be a set-aforth of strange gods, because he preached unto them Jesus and the resurrection.

And they took him and brought him unto Areopagus, saying, or Mars Hill, May we know what this new doctrine whereof thou speakest is? For thou bringest certain strange things to our ears. We would know therefore what these things mean.

For all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing. Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars Hill and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things you are too superstitious.

For as I passed by and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription to the unknown God. Whom therefore you ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you. God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwells not in temples made with hands, neither is worship with men's hands, as though he needed anything, seeing he giveth to all life and breath and all things, and hath made of one blood all nations of men.

For to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed in the bounds of their habitation, that they should seek the Lord, if happily they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us.

For in him we live and move and have our being, as certain also of your own poets have said. For we are also his offspring. For as much then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is likened to gold or silver or stone, graven by art and man's device.

And the times of this ignorance God winked, but now commands all men everywhere to repent, because he has appointed a day in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained, whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, and that he hath raised him from the dead.

And when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked, and others said, We will hear thee again of this matter. So Paul departed from among them. Howbeit certain men clave unto him and believed, among the which was Dionysius, an Areopagite, and a woman named Damaris, and others with them.

Reading Acts 17 as a Timeless Confrontation

Amen. So we're going to be pouring over this text, we're going to be sifting it, scrutinizing, analyzing, burrowing in, because it's enormous. And I would just assume that most of us are guilty of the usual practice of too hurried or rapid a reading of the Word.

You cannot believe the treasures that are hidden in the few verses that I've read. What makes it all the more marvelous is the complete unselfconsciousness of Paul. He didn't take a deep breath and bring himself to his full height.

He didn't recognize that this was some momentous confrontation that was going to be recorded for time and for eternity. It's simply something that happened, an event that came upon him unawares, which makes it all the more glorious, because what is struck and what is sounded is what Paul is through and through.

His thinking and what he expresses is not just convenient doctrine, it's something that is written into his very nature and being. And what he expresses in these brief words is a total philosophy, a world view, a global view, or if I can use the fancy word, a cosmology.

From the word cosmos, it's a total view of the whole purpose of being, of creation, spoken to philosophers who did nothing else but spend their time in discussing and contemplating some new thing and never came to the end of their discussions.

The Bible speaks about those who are always seeking the truth and never coming to the knowledge of it. And from those of us who have had background like this, particularly in the academic world, we know what that means.

We always love to play with ideas. We always like to discuss scintillating things, but we really do not have any real deep desire to be confronted or to be found by truth, the kind of truth that makes requirement.

And in fact, if truth does not make requirement, if it is not costly, neither is it truth. Paul understood these things, and what's recorded here is a sublime confrontation that is universal and timeless and valid in every generation and especially our own.

Because the Greek spirit, the spirit of humanism, the secular mind has been brought to such a full perfection and sway in our generation that not only does it pervade the world, it also pervades the church.

Secular thinking describes not only the thinking of worldlings, it describes the thinking of those who profess to believe. And I mentioned two books last week. I'll mention them again to those who are here for the first time, that you should put in your order and get them.

I think they're outstanding. They were a great influence and inspiration for me and have a great deal to do with the subject and our discussion. By the same author Harry Blemire is an Englishman. The first is The Christian Mind, and the thesis of this book is that though Christians use a spiritual vocabulary and have a spiritual mindset or religious mindset on Sundays in terms of activity pertaining to the church, for all the rest of their week they are governed by a secular mindset.

That is to say that they move by the same rhythm and the same logic, the same suppositions and assumptions by which the world itself conducts its business. That indeed that there is a spiritual mind or a Christian mind or a biblical mindset which God did not intend to be confined to Sunday use, but to govern the life of believers.

And that what we need to do is to contend for the faith that was once given, to find our way back to that mindset consciously, to see the clash of these two contrary and conflicting views and to live our life consciously in the biblical mindset that God intends for his people.

The title of this other book is worth the price of the book alone, The Secularist Heresy, and the thesis of this book is this, that the very word secular is itself heretical. You say, what do you mean by that?

What he means by that is that there is nothing legitimate about the word secular. The world thinks so, but God never intended the distinction of secular and sacred. The whole of life was intended to be sacred.

The whole earth is to be pervaded with the glory of God. The principles of God and the commandments and the laws of God are to govern all men everywhere. Righteousness exalts a nation and not just the church.

So the very idea that we have allowed ourselves to submit or to subscribe to the idea that there is a sacred and a secular is itself a heresy. It's a distinction that should not exist. And part of our function as those who believe is to see that that distinction is dissolved and that the sacred comes into the secular, pervades it, finally captures it, and that the whole earth is permeated with the knowledge of God.

Okay, Paul believed that. We need to believe it also. Paul is not confronting religious men. That is to say, a church, and Marcel, is confronting secular men. He's confronting not the apostasy of the church, he's confronting the apostasy of the world.

And we need to know, this is part of the spiritual mindset, that the world is apostate. That the world is God-rejecting. And part of the prophetic function of the church is not only to confront the apostate church, but to confront the apostate world.

The world that sniggers and scorns at any reference to God in its secular discussions, thinks it bad taste to introduce the name of the Lord in a discussion on chemical dependency, when the fact of the matter is that the whole thing, the whole discussion is shot through with deception, as is suggested even by the phrases that they use.

Because chemical dependency is a euphemistic evasion of the reality of the satanic problem of drug addiction and alcohol addiction. And if we allow them to get away with the vocabulary of chemical dependency or abuse, we are acknowledging the premises by which they operate.

And therefore the problem is seen in a secular context, which requires a secular solution. Psychiatric or social. But if you call the thing for what it is, sin, then it's got to be addressed in another way.

And the appeal then is not for a social answer or a task force, as was suggested in those days, but repentance. To remind us that Acts 17 is a confrontation between two classic mindsets, thank you, and that in it, though Paul was not conscious of what he was expressing, is a whole statement of a Christian or spiritual world view completely at opposition with that which was held by the Greeks.

The Church Standing in the Midst of an Apostate World

It says, Paul stood in the midst, in verse 22, is a beautiful statement of the role that God intends for the church. Not at the sidelines, not at the periphery, not content with a schedule of services or activities or programs, but to stand in the midst of a secular and apostate world and to bring a penetrating statement of the reality of God, which if men do not see it and do not respond to in this lifetime, they shall eternally suffer.

That's why in the very same statement of the cosmology of God, that He created the world and is the Lord of the heaven and the earth, that He has appointed the habitations, the bounds by which men live for the purpose of seeking Him, in the same statement Paul ends by talking about judgment.

For God has appointed a day in which He will judge all men by that one whom He has raised from the dead. See, it's a complete statement. There's a church that needs to stand in the midst and not only confront and unmask the premises by which the world thinks and conducts itself, but to warn them that except that they repent, what does that word mean?

Change their mindsets and take on the mind of God and His view, they shall be judged and there shall be an eternal consequence for their willful ignorance of God. So part of the function of the church is to unmask the false assumptions, the premises, the unspoken values by which the world conducts itself and which no one ever faults or examines or questions.

If you leave something in silence, you are testifying to your witness or affirmation of that thing. So the standing in the midst is not just an accidental phrase and Paul stood in the midst. It's a picture of God's intention for us to unmask the false premises, the assumptions, the pretenses of an apostate and arrogant God-rejecting world.

You say, but they had a statue and a monument that said to the unknown God. Doesn't that show that their heart was in the right place and that they are God-minded and that they pay some acknowledgement to a God whom they do not know?

Doesn't that impress you? No. It doesn't impress me and it didn't impress Paul because the inscription on the monument said to the unknown God and what Paul discerned by the spirit was not only was he unknown to the Greek philosophers but they chose to willfully keep him unknown.

They not only preferred a God that was unknown, they preferred a God that was unknowable. You say, why would men prefer that? Because an unknown God makes no requirement but a God who is known does. A specific God has a specific will.

He speaks. He gives commandments. He says, thou shalt not. But an unknown God? What consequence is there for men in the world who have this kind of faint pseudo-spiritual reference to an unknown God?

As you can see by the eye of the spirit, all it is doing is inflating their own ego and giving them a sense of spirituality, a sense of being tolerant or even faintly interested in spiritual things. But the truth of the matter is that they don't want to know a God who makes himself known.

And what Paul says is that the very purpose of your life and being, that God has by one blood established all nations of men for what purpose? To seek their fortune? To establish their careers? To have successful businesses?

To live a comfortable worldly lifestyle? No. That they might seek after God if happily they might be found of him. Just let that sink deeply into your hearing. The utter simplicity of Paul, out of all of the motives for which men might reasonably and decently and even in a sense significantly live their lives on the earth, he speaks of one thing, the central thing, and he sees it with the eye of absolute clarity.

There's only one purpose for our human existence. It's to seek God and to be found of him. You know that that was the view of the church in the Middle Ages? That they looked upon the life on this earth as a veil of tears, as a transient and momentary experience, as preparation for eternity.

And that the whole issue of our human being and existence is the knowledge of and the relationship with God. That view is dismissed today as medieval. It came out of the Dark Ages. But the interesting thing is that Paul believed it.

And he believed it with such a totality that he could speak it with conviction to men whose mindset and lifestyle was completely contrary. You say, why don't we speak it with the same kind of penetration?

Because we ourselves do not really believe it. You say, what do you mean by that? I mean this. Believing is not just a matter of giving acknowledgement to credal truth. It's not just acknowledging the correctness of doctrine or Bible statement.

True believing is attested by true living. Paul lived what he believed. And that's why he could stand in the midst and speak this with such penetration because the words had a quality of penetration because it was in keeping with what his own life is.

That's why he was fleeing persecution. Because men do not want to hear something that challenges the comfort, the well-being, the culture that they have constructed for themselves in absolute ignorance if not defiance of God.

Human Attainment, Secular Humanism, and the Fear of God

There were two premises that ruled the Greeks then and that rule those who are Greek-minded now. And one is the premise of intellectual attainment. Greeks were keen about intellectual attainment. And their other distinction, the other foundational thing was moral attainment.

So by virtue of intellect and by virtue of morality one can come to a distinguished human life. So what do you think about this Jewish character who has not much to look at and comes into their midst and in the first statement he blows down their two premises.

I perceive that in all things you are too superstitious. Whack! If there's anything that an intellectual hates it's to be called superstitious because he prides himself upon his intellectual attainment.

But Paul was not impressed by the outward show. There are other things about being moral. It's really interesting. Plato was a homosexual. I think many of the great philosophers, Aristotle, men of great intellectual distinction also had boys with whom they practiced their homosexuality.

It was just a common feature of Greek civilization. And yet such men can conceive of themselves moral. Do you know why? Because they measure by themselves. Because the premise of secular humanism is that man is the measure of all things.

That's why they want God to remain unknown. And if they can throw a bone to appease their conscience by having a statue or a monument with the inscription to the unknown God it allows them the subjective sense that they're making some acknowledgment that there might be some force out there.

And then they're free to pursue their own sensual delight and gratification. A conflict of mindsets is more than just an idle engagement of ideas. It's a vital clash of lifestyles. And the reason that the church has not suffered persecution in modern times is because we have not stood in the midst of an apostate world to confront them with the phoniness of their pretense and their premises so as to challenge the way in which they actually live.

And the reason that we have not is because we live too much like them. Which is to say that unconsciously or otherwise most of our own life is governed by secular rather than by spiritual premises. Do you really believe, can I ask you tonight that the single dominating purpose for which we have life and being is to seek God that we might be found of Him?

Is that your ruling passion? It's not unusual to find ministers of God whose ruling passion is their own career. Although they will employ a complete Christian vocabulary and terminology with all sincerity they have not come onto the ground upon which Paul himself stood.

If you think that Paul came to Athens by accident it shows the kind of secular mind you have because in the spiritual mind there is no such thing as accident or happenstance or circumstance. Paul was not ruled circumstantially.

He was ruled by the Spirit of God. It gives every appearance of a man not having control over his own situation. He was brought by other men. But I believe with all my heart he was in God's place in God's appointed time.

I believe that there is a Mars Hill that is waiting for us. There is a place of confrontation waiting for us that is a final and ultimate confrontation. But the reason that we have not ascended it yet is that we are not yet ready.

We are not yet apostolic. We do not yet have a Pauline mindset. We do not see with the single-eyedness of a Paul. And we cannot proclaim with conviction the way that he could because our lives are not yet in conformity with what we profess to believe.

Much more than we realize we have been affected by secular assumptions that the real purpose of our life is our family, our well-being, our comfort, our acceptance, our satisfaction. And if we can do God a service at the same time, who could ask for anything more?

In fact, isn't that the picture of American Christian respectability? To be a good family man and successful in your career and to give God an hour or two on Sunday and to acknowledge him by saying grace over the table and putting a dollar in the collection plate or on special offerings for missionaries, something like that.

It is so distorted. It is such an aberration, such a removal of the passionate thing which God intends for all men. That maybe before we confront the apostate secular world, we need first to stand in the midst of the church and to confront it.

Idolatry, False Religion, and the God Made for Human Purposes

In the American Standard, it talks about the object of your worship. I mentioned this last week. We spent a few minutes in this text at the end of the session. What therefore you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim unto you.

While I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, I also found an altar. I love that statement because it gives a penetrating statement of the nature of idolatry. Idolatry is always the elevation of objects over God, examining the objects of your worship.

It was a false subject and therefore also a false worship. Paul nails it in his very first statement. Whom you therefore worship in ignorance, and you can write down in your notes, willful ignorance. It's not an ignorance that is accidental, that they couldn't help themselves.

It's the kind of ignorance by which men choose to be ignorant and to keep God as unknown. Him I proclaim unto you. So I want to raise a question now, just to bring again the subject to our own situation.

What is being unmasked is false religion, false philosophy, insincerity. Men who profess to hold intellectual integrity as a value are false in the very thing that they profess to seek. It's neither moral nor intellectual.

It's a pretense and a sham that gives the faint impression of a kind of spirituality, but it is a pseudo-spirituality. It has for the object of its worship not God, but objects. And my question is, to what degree is that a statement of our present Christianity?

A sham, a pretense, giving the appearance. Is it possible for idolatry to be conducted even in the name of Jesus? What you see here is men fashioning a God in their own image and for their own use. That's why the very next statement has to do with, God doesn't live in temples made by human hands as if he's in need of anything that hands could make.

And as I survey, excuse my impression, our contemporary Christianity, that's the impression I get, we want a God that serves our purposes. We're fashioning him as an instrument for our ends. And you need to understand that because it's not always carnal.

It could even be, in a sense, spiritual. We want to receive the benefit of church attendance. We want a Sunday school where we can bring our children. We want a nice, happy addendum to us, to our week-long experience.

We want the sense of uplift by having gone to a church on Sunday. We want to feel the kind of sanctifying and uplifting thing that a proper church atmosphere should provide. You say, what's wrong with these things?

What's wrong with them is that it has at the central object of its concern, man himself. False religion and idolatry, by whatever form, even in the name of Jesus, will have as its central object and concern man himself.

Spiritual self-gratification. You say, but shouldn't men have uplift? Shouldn't they experience blessing? Shouldn't they receive benefit of the word? Shouldn't their children be instructed? Yes. But these should be secondary consequences of a single-eyed pursuit of God for his own sake and for his glory and not the first object of our concern.

You see how subtle it is and how faint is the line and the boundary between true faith and idolatry. As a matter of fact, the only one who can unmask it is a Paul. That is to say, an apostolic man or an apostolic or a prophetic presence.

Someone so steeped in God. Someone so absorbed in concern and passionate concern for the jealousy of his glory that the faintest deviation of that which appears to be God and yet is a misuse and a misappropriation, is made only an object for the purposes of men, is identified and spoken to with boldness.

Him whom you ignorantly worship, I declare unto you. That's very bold and it has to be. It will always be looked upon as offensive. In fact, it's nothing less than a miracle that Paul came down from that mountain alive.

These kinds of confrontations don't end by your being applauded. They may end by your being carried away. Remember that the first martyr Stephen suffered his death because of the confrontation that he brought to men who thought themselves religious through the power of the Spirit and Word which he proclaimed to them.

As your fathers did, so do you always. So do you also. You do always grieve the Holy Spirit. And when they heard that, they gnashed with their teeth upon him because men cannot stand to be confronted over a construct that they have made for themselves that celebrates their own spirituality if it's a pretense or a sham.

And the instance, the situation of Stephen is a graphic illustration that Jews could even use the things given by God, the law, and the whole construct of Jewish religion and yet fashion it in such a way as to form a kind of an idolatry that elevates themselves pharisaically.

That when a simple waiter on tables, a busboy comes in the power and the anointing of the Holy Spirit to confront them and to challenge them with their false, they cannot bear to hear it. If you've ever been to Paris, you can visit the Hill of the Martyrs, excuse my French pronunciation, Montmartre.

Have you ever heard of that? M-O-N-T-R-T-E, something like that. It's famous now. It's on the left bank for artists, for prostitution, for red light district and all that jazz. But do you know what the original meaning of Montmartre was?

This guy Dionysius, it says that some said, we'll hear again of this matter, some scoffed, and it says, some clave unto him and believed. Among them was Dionysius. Interesting that the very name means revelry.

It means orgiastic, sensual revelry. And the man who was named by that, hearing the bold proclamation of this unprepossessing Jew, who had nothing about him that was impressive, among these distinguished and scholarly and erstwhile philosophical Greeks, heard the power of God given to those who speak the words of God and clave unto Paul and believed.

And according to Christian history and legend, this same Dionysius became an evangelist of God to proclaim the gospel and came to a pagan part of the world in Europe today called France and on that very place in Paris, he went up to a hill to proclaim to the pagans their deceptions, their illusions, their myths, their shams, their pretense, but did not come down.

Do we love truth enough that we're willing for a confrontation in which we might not necessarily be a survivor? And maybe unconsciously because our first concern is not seeking God that we might know him, but it has been our comfort, it has been our security, it has been our well-being that we shrink from the kind of confrontation that might be costly.

I can't think of a more desperate need for this hour than men like Paul or a church like Paul in the midst of an apostate Christianity that is really an idolatry in the name of Jesus that does not require anything from men, but their mere bodily attendance and the dollar in the collection plate, that there needs to be in the midst of all of this, which is celebrated as Christianity, an apostolic, powerful, and bold presence that shows unto them the way of truth.

Apostolic Speech and the Spirit's Empowerment

Wouldn't it be devastating for Paul to come into the midst of little old ladies and to give them the kind of blast that he gave these Greek philosophers? Isn't that something of the gist of the question?

Well, the premise upon which the question itself is framed suggests that we have a control over what we speak or that we can determine the content or the character of our speaking in any situation. But what I want to say is this, and it's a spiritual view, a mindset, is that Paul himself was not the author of his words on any occasion, either before Greeks or before Jews.

And that's why he was so powerfully relevant whether he was in a synagogue or on Mars Hill. Because in the same way that Jesus said that the words that I speak are not my words, but the words which my Father gives me, I believe the same is also true for Paul, which is really the statement of the glory both of his life and his ministry.

What was standing on Mars Hill was the incarnated God in the body and life of a man who forsook his own distinction, his own academic ability, his own brilliance, his own Jewish attributes, and counted them as dung that he might know Christ.

And what was being expressed out of his mouth was the wisdom of God appropriate for that particular moment and for that setting. See, we are on really profound ground right now. In fact, we are on really the heart of the offense of the faith.

People don't mind a Christianity by which the believer subscribes to certain principles or tries in an admiring way to follow the precept or the example of Jesus. But to believe in the supernaturalness of a resurrected and ascended God who has somehow incarnated in the very man who is speaking, that is mind-blowing and offensive.

Paul did not just proclaim to them the resurrection. He demonstrated it. And what I want to say is that if Paul ever stood before old women, I believe that the wisdom of God and the grace of God who knows these women because they are utterly transparent in His sight, would speak through the apostle in the way appropriate to that need.

And the enormous significance of what is being transacted by the words that come out of the mouth of the minister who faces them, it's an enormously significant thing. But no less significant than Paul on Mars Hill, not just in terms of those who were then before him in that moment of speaking, but something is being established that is timeless and it is going to affect every subsequent generation.

And it is even, in fact, becoming the core of our own discussion in these days. Why? Because it is the one place in all Scripture that shows in a profound way the clash of two mentalities that are absolutely opposed, the mentality of the world and the mentality of the kingdom.

If Paul knew that, that he was not just speaking to men before him, but that what he was going to say was going to be recorded for posterity and influence generation after generation and even be a text that might release the church in our generation to be that apostolic presence and to come to a Mars Hill confrontation with apostasy, what then would he have said?

And the answer is not one syllable other than what he did say. You know what? One of Paul's most frequent statements, and I repeat it continually myself, and all of us who stand before men in the name of God need to, and that is who is sufficient for these things.

And I want to tell you that though this is a little building and we have only a handful of souls, it was our prayer for tonight. If you think that I think that this is just a class and that the only issue is to get through the material and to present it reasonably so as to edify those who come and then think that it's well done, that that's it, you're mistaken.

I see this in an eternal context of meaning. In other words, I bring even to this situation the mindset of a Paul. I see this apostolically. I see this thing that is happening tonight as once and for all.

We'll never again be able to repeat it. I see it as being something that is going to come into the spirit and consciousness of those who assemble. But there's a mystery even that goes beyond that, that we spoke in prayer before some of you came tonight, and that is suggested in Isaiah where the prophet says, Hear, O heaven, and give ear, O earth, for the Lord hath spoken.

That there's a mystery by which the word goes into the earth and into the air, into the heavens, to perform a work irrespective of or despite or even beyond people. And maybe as we go on in this hour, we're going to come increasingly into this kind of prophetic experience where there's a mystery of speaking that goes beyond those who are hearing you.

I believe that that's taking place tonight. I can't explain it. There's something that is going into this community. In fact, it ought to be true every time the word of God is spoken by men, and especially so in the secular situation where up until now we have been barred.

There's something that God is wanting to penetrate and to bring a measure of light, and that the enemy, these principalities and powers that brood over this place would be required to recoil. There's a strategy of God that goes far beyond this class tonight that has to do with His ultimate purposes for Castillac, for this region, for revival in this area, for which this is a fitted portion and part.

Knowing or sensing these things, how then ought we to speak? How then ought we to conduct the class? I have to tell you, and I said half-jokingly tonight as I began and last week, I don't know how to commence.

Who is sufficient for these things? And that brings us again, and I'm going to hammer this again and again, the whole central premise of Paul that was so devastatingly displeasing to these Greeks, for which reason they called him a babbler and they scoffed, was the issue of resurrection.

Which is to say, the issue of a supernatural God who has come into earth historically in a moment of time and performed something that has been recorded and witnessed and through it has affected all subsequent generations through His death and resurrection.

You see, this stops men from the vagaries of being only superficially spiritual. I have heard rabbis talking about higher powers or how do they say it? They use a pseudo-spiritual vocabulary that seems at first hearing to be very honoring and flattering to God that acknowledges somewhere up there in some distant place there's a higher power.

But what it is, is an absolute cop-out. They do not want to recognize the specificity of God. They don't want to have to face a specific God who has come historically in a moment of time and done something that once and for all rips the mask off of every false pretense of religion and says, absolutely, this is the way.

And if that were not so, Paul would not have to be in Greece. This is the gospel for all nations going into all the world because Paul himself said that in times past God has winked at your ignorance but now commandeth all men everywhere to repent.

See, these are bold and absolute statements. And I, boy, Lord help me. It's the absoluteness of the faith which offends men. It is the supernaturalness of the faith which offends men. It's the resurrection of the faith which offends men who do not mind it only as a doctrine.