B. B. Warfield on "False Religion and the True"

Warfield’s sermon on Acts 17:23 was first published in The Power of God Unto Salvation (218-254) and reprinted in Biblical and Theological Studies, 560-580. You can also find it online here. It is well worth a read, since much of what Warfield finds in Paul’s challenge to the Greco-Roman pagans in Athens applies today.

Warfield’s text, “what therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you,” leads him to discuss Paul’s approach to pagan Gentiles during his Gentile mission. Below are a few excerpts.

Warfield distinguished between Paul’s approach to pagan Gentiles (as he does here) and those Jews familiar with the Old Testament.

These words give the gist of Paul's justly famous address at Athens before the court of the Areopagus. The substance of that address was, to be sure, just what the substance of all his primary proclamations to Gentile hearers was, namely, God and the judgment. The necessities of the case compelled him to approach the heathen along the avenue of an awakened conscience. . . . The peculiar circumstances in which (this sermon) was delivered have imprinted on this address also a particular character of its own. Paul spoke it under a specially poignant sense of the depths of heathen ignorance and of the greatness of heathen need. The whole address palpitates with his profound feeling of the darkness in which the heathen world is immersed, and his eager longing to communicate to it the light intrusted to his care.

Given the similarities between the Greco-Roman audience gathered on the Areopagus and our own age (ignorance of the things of God, the angst of our age, the triumph of the subjective over the possibility of finding objective truth), Warfield describes Paul’s preaching as bringing light into darkness. “Heathen” is a great term to describe many of the unbelievers of our age, and I wouldn’t mind seeing it come back to common usage.

Warfield describes Paul’s passion to approach the pagan intellectuals of his day (who were much like the podcasters and influencers of our own) by challenging them at the very point where their self-perceived “wisdom,” is merely a cover for their ignorance of the things of God.

[Paul] was in Athens, as it were, in hiding. But he could not keep silence. He went to the synagogue on the Sabbath and there preached to the Jews and those devout inquirers who were accustomed to visit the synagogues of the Jews in every city. But this did not satisfy his aroused zeal. He went also to the market place—that agora which the public teachers of the city had been wont to frequent for the propagation of their views—and there, like them, every day, he argued with all whom he chanced to meet. Among these he very naturally encountered certain adherents of the types of philosophy then dominant—the Epicurean and Stoic—and in conflict with them he began to attract attention.

Warfield points out that Paul’s challenge to pagan wisdom was grounded in what the Lion of Princeton describes elsewhere as the chief fact of the Christian faith.

[Paul] was preaching, as was his wont, "Jesus" and the "resurrection "—doubtless much as he preached them in his recorded address, to which all this led up. Some turned with light contempt away from him and called him a mere smatterer; others, with perhaps no less contempt, nevertheless took him more seriously and anxiously asked if he were not "a proclaimer of alien divinities."

Despite the presence and confidence in the assembled pagans in what they considered “wisdom,” Paul sees it as mere ignorance and darkness, men who worship that which they know not. While in the very heart of the Greco-Roman world (Athens), Paul seeks to bring the light of the cross and empty tomb into pagan darkness.

The hinge on which the whole speech turns is obviously Paul's deep sense of the darkness of heathen ignorance. As our Saviour said to the Samaritan woman, so Paul, in effect, says to the Athenian jurists and philosophers, "You worship you know not what." The altar at Athens which he signalizes as especially significant of heathen worship is precisely the altar inscribed "To a Notknown God." The whole course of their heathen development he characterizes as a seeking of God, if by any chance—"in the possible hope at least that"—they may touch Him as a blind man touches with his hands fumblingly what he cannot see—and so doubtfully find Him; nay, shortly and crisply, as "times of ignorance." The very purpose of his proclamation of his gospel among them is to bring light into this darkness, to make them to know the true nature and the real modes of working, the all-inclusive plan and the decisive purpose of the one true God. Therefore it is simply true to say that the hinge on which the whole speech turns is the declaration that the heathen are steeped in ignorance and require, above all things, the light of divine instruction.

Like those among us who reject religion for “spirituality,” Paul calls it what it truly is—superstition.

It is accordingly not all a scoff when he tells them that he perceives that they are apparently "very religious." The word he employs is no doubt sometimes used in a bad sense, and accordingly is frequently translated here by the ill-savored word "superstitious." So our English version translates it: "I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious " or " somewhat superstitious," as the Revised Version puts it.

The ancients at Athens were confident in the wisdom passed down to them and to which they tenaciously cling. Yet is is not wisdom at all.

This is what the apostle thought—not of some heathen, but of heathen as such, in their religious life . . . the philosophic minds of Greece and Rome in the palmiest days of their intellectual development and ethical and aesthetic culture; of the Socrateses and Platos and Aristotles and Epictetuses and Marcus Aureliuses of that ancient world, which some would have us look upon as so fully to have found God as veritably to have taken heaven by storm and to have entered it by force of its own attainments. To him it was, on the contrary, in his briefest phrase, "without hope and without God."

Warfield cautions his hearers,

Embark once on that pathway and there is no logical and—oh, the misfortune of it!—no practical stopping-point until you have evaporated all recognizable Christianity away altogether and reduced all religion to the level of man's natural religiosity. A really "undogmatic Christianity" is just no Christianity at all.

The answer is . . .

All that makes the religion we profess distinctively Christian is enshrined in its doctrinal system. It is therefore that it is a religion that can be taught, and is to be taught—that is propagated by what otherwise would be surely, in the most literal sense, the foolishness of preaching. . . . There are many who have cried, Lord, Lord, who shall never enter into the kingdom of heaven. Not because you are sensitive and easily moved to devotion; not because your sense of divine things is profound or lofty; not because you are like the Athenians, by nature "divinity-fearing "; but because, when the word of the Lord is brought to you, and Jesus Christ is revealed in your soul, under the prevailing influence of the Holy Ghost, you embrace Him with a hearty faith—cast yourself upon His almighty grace for salvation, and turning from your sins, enter into a life of obedience to Him—can you judge yourself a Christian.

I hope this whets your whistle to read the sermon in its entirety. Warfield is at his best here—a strong apologetic for the Christian faith, a serious challenge to pagan ways of seeking wisdom, and a wonderful and compelling presentation of the Gospel.