Acts 17:22-31 – 5/10/2026
What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.
Acts 17:23
Paul’s appeal to the Athenians to follow Jesus is unlike any of the other recorded words of Paul, either in his epistles or in the book of Acts. Instead of starting from the Jewish belief in One God, Paul begins with the polytheistic paganism of the Athenians. The Athenian world, indeed the entirety of the Ancient Greek world, was populated through and through with gods. Divinity was everywhere. Worship of gods was built into the habitual fabric of the social life of the city. Temples and shines lined every road and could be found in every public place.
Paul’s appeal to the Athenians to follow Jesus is based on this rich religious experience of a reality saturated with divinity. For a culture who experienced the divine in everything, accepting yet one more God would be nothing. But Paul does not want the Athenians to merely append their worship with another god or supplement their piety with another place to offer sacrifices. Paul is appealing to those with whom a particular site of religious devotion resonates, an altar to an unknown god.
As we join the procession of people across history seeking the divine, Paul invites us to join those people who have yearned after the ultimate and concluded that it cannot be known. The Athenians, as the philosophical citizens par excellence, are on to something when they worship that which they do not know. That which is worthy of our devotion is that which exceeds our ability to fully grasp. The sense of the Holy and the Sacred includes within it the sense that human categories and human understanding cannot contain it or perhaps even approach it. The experience of the Holy and Sacred goes beyond our ability to speak clearly or know with certainty. When that sense of reverent awe is combined with the recognition that we cannot know, a temple to an unknown God makes rational sense in its admitting to the limits of human reasoning.
Paul’s appeal to the Athenians is simple, what they revered as worthy of worship but at the same time as unknown is Jesus resurrected. Jesus is the God to whom our furtive gestures of worshipful longing are directed. I used to hate this passage, thinking it to be the ultimate in presumption on Paul’s part. Here are the Athenians attempting to give expression to their piety which includes a humble recognition that they did not have anything close to complete knowledge, and Paul undermines that by saying “Oh you can know; the answer is Jesus.” I imagine being an Athenian and thinking, “Do not tell me how to live. Do not tell me how to worship.” The choice to worship what is unknown seems intentional on the Athenians part. They want to acknowledge that we cannot know for sure what it is that is most valuable.
Now that I have returned to the life of the church and to explicitly identifying as a Christian, I have taken a new look at Paul’s speech to the Athenians here in Acts 17. Instead of reading his speech at the Areopagus as Paul claiming to have knowledge that the Athenians lack, I read Paul as inviting the Athenians to find new freedom in their acknowledged lack of knowledge. Philosophy’s moral imperative to reject knowledge when one does not have justification is upheld. The particular virtue of Athens is upheld. Paul, by pointing through the unknown God toward the risen Christ, is inviting the Athenians to find new freedom in their virtue of epistemic humility. Not knowing who is the One being worshiped means that such worship can be directed to new ends, to new values, to new ways of living and thinking. When a lack of knowledge means that our belief is not constrained by the truth, we are given the freedom to search for life and wisdom wherever they may lead us, even it it means creating new ways of living and valuing.
Lack of knowledge, being in a state of ignorance about the most important and deepest things, may seem like a curse. Paul’s appeal to the Athenians shows that such lack of knowledge is an opportunity and a blessing. Ultimately, we are all in the position of the Athenians. We do not have access to the deepest mysteries. Knowledge of the ground of Being and of what is Ultimately True is elusive. Such knowledge is outside the domain of human cognition. We cannot know these kinds of things. Simply because we cannot know what is true with regard to these deepest truths does not mean that such truths are unimportant. What we worship ties into our deepest needs and our highest values. Paul shows that we can turn our gestures and longing toward the unknown into an act of love and hope by identifying that for which we long with Jesus. It’s not that we can know that Jesus is God; rather, it is in claiming Jesus as the unknown God, we make a leap of faith about how we understand our relationship to what is and to our fellow human beings. To affirm that the one who embodies self-sacrificial love is also the author of the universe is both something we could never know for sure and a radical rejection of a social world of competition, isolated individualism, and self-satisfied self-sufficiency.
This model of belief shows belief to be closer to a declaration than to a discovery. We do not uncover the way the world “really” is. We decide how we are going to make our way through a world that does not reveal its secrets. Choosing Jesus is not to know “for real” how the world works or what its origin or purpose is. We are simply not in a position to know such things. We should approach these questions, like the Athenians did, with epistemic humility, a recognition that we cannot know what it is we worship. In that humility we are given freedom to declare, in naming Jesus as the one to whom we give thanks and praise, that the way of love for all is the best life that ties into our deepest needs. Our lack of knowledge is the opportunity to construct a world where love is the guiding principle of all things. Is this naive? It can be, but if it is done clearly aware of its own limitations, it is not naive. It is an act of radical hope for a world of peace.
Further Reading: For more on belief as declaration instead of discovery and the idea that our beliefs about the unknown are moral commitments to living a particular kind of life rather than truth claims, see my paper “Philosophy in the Service of Life: Nietzsche and the Practical Employment of Thought.”
Reflections of a Dionysian Lutheran, comments on the daily readings of the Revised Common Lectionary.
Dionysus on a Bike 
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