“In him we live and move and have our being.”
— Acts 17:28
Context & Key Themes
Acts 17 follows Paul through three Greek cities that represent three different kinds of audience. In Thessalonica, he preaches to synagogue Jews and God-fearers and meets fierce resistance. In Berea, he meets the opposite—a congregation that studies scripture with him and tests his claims honestly. In Athens, the intellectual center of the ancient world, he confronts the philosophical establishment in its own terms and delivers the most culturally adapted sermon in the book of Acts. Luke is giving us a study in how the gospel engages different kinds of hearers without ever changing the gospel itself.
The chapter also introduces one of the iconic lines of missional theology. In him we live and move and have our being. Paul quotes a pagan poet to make a Christian point. He takes what the Athenians already believed, shows them where it was right, and then turns the same truth toward the living God they did not yet know. It is apologetics of the highest order, and it is still the template for Christian engagement with every intellectual culture the church has met since.
Thessalonica
Now when they had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica, where there was a synagogue of the Jews. And Paul went in, as was his custom, and on three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead, and saying, This Jesus, whom I proclaim to you, is the Christ.
Paul’s method is consistent. Open the scriptures. Show that the Messiah was always going to suffer and rise. Name Jesus as that Messiah. Luke gives the sermon summary in one sentence, but the summary reveals everything. Paul is not inventing new content in Thessalonica. He is reading the Old Testament the way Jesus himself read it on the Emmaus road in Luke 24, and he is arriving at the same destination.
Some of them were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, as did a great many of the devout Greeks and not a few of the leading women. But the Jews were jealous, and taking some wicked men of the rabble, they formed a mob, set the city in an uproar, and attacked the house of Jason, seeking to bring them out to the crowd. And when they could not find them, they dragged Jason and some of the brothers before the city authorities, shouting, These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also.
The charge is revealing. The world upside down. The Thessalonian Jews knew what was happening with more clarity than many modern readers. Paul’s gospel was not a private religious option. It was a claim about the true King, and it would rearrange every category the world had built. The charge the mob brings is that Paul’s people are acting contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying there is another king, Jesus.
This is the political heart of the matter. The gospel names a king Rome has not authorized. The city authorities take a bond from Jason and let him go. Paul and Silas are quietly sent out by night to Berea before another wave breaks.
Berea
The brothers immediately sent Paul and Silas away by night to Berea, and when they arrived they went into the Jewish synagogue. Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so.
The Bereans are the other half of the contrast. They hear Paul and go home to check his claims against the scriptures. They do not reject his message on tradition, and they do not accept it on enthusiasm. They study. Luke’s admiring word for them—noble—has echoed through two thousand years of church history. Berean has become shorthand for any Christian who tests teaching against the Bible.
Many of them therefore believed, with not a few Greek women of high standing as well as men. But when the Jews from Thessalonica learned that the word of God was proclaimed by Paul at Berea also, they came there too, agitating and stirring up the crowds. Then the brothers immediately sent Paul off on his way to the sea, but Silas and Timothy remained there. Those who conducted Paul brought him as far as Athens, and after receiving a command for Silas and Timothy to come to him as soon as possible, they departed.
The Thessalonian opposition follows Paul to Berea and starts the trouble over again. Paul leaves. Silas and Timothy stay behind to finish establishing the Berean church. Paul continues south, alone, to Athens.
Paul in Athens
Now while Paul was waiting for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols. Athens in the first century was past its political prime but still the intellectual and religious heart of the Mediterranean world. Its streets and public spaces were crowded with temples and shrines. The ancient writer Petronius joked that it was easier to find a god in Athens than a man. Paul walks through the city, and the idolatry grieves him.
So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there. Paul uses two venues. The synagogue for his usual Jewish audience. The marketplace—the agora—for whoever was around. Athens had a long tradition of open-air philosophical discussion, and Paul simply joins it.
Some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers conversed with him. The Epicureans held that the gods, if they existed, were uninvolved with human affairs, and that the highest human good was tranquility achieved by moderate pleasure and freedom from pain. The Stoics held that a divine rational principle pervaded all things and that the highest human good was to live in accord with it through virtue and self-control. Between them they represented most of the sophisticated worldviews of the first-century Greco-Roman world.
And some said, What does this babbler wish to say? Others said, He seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities—because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection. They thought Jesus and Anastasis (the Greek word for resurrection) were two new deities Paul was importing. The misunderstanding is telling. It would be funny if it were not such a complete picture of how a culture saturated in gods could hear the gospel and immediately classify Jesus as one more item on the menu.
They took him and brought him to the Areopagus—the hill of Ares, also called Mars Hill, where the city’s philosophical council met. May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? For you bring some strange things to our ears. We wish to know therefore what these things mean.
Luke notes, in a tone that is quietly devastating, that all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new. A whole civilization, at the height of its intellectual sophistication, has become a culture of novelty junkies. Paul is about to preach the oldest and most enduring message in the universe to a crowd that lives for the latest idea.
The Areopagus Sermon
So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said, Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, To the unknown god. What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.
The opening is masterful. Paul does not begin with a rebuke of their idolatry, though the idolatry has already grieved him. He begins by naming a real feature of their religious life—an altar to an unknown god, erected presumably so they would not offend any deity they had accidentally overlooked. Paul treats that altar as an honest admission. You know you do not know everything. The god you have worshipped as unknown, I will now name.
The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.
Paul has begun where he always begins when speaking to Gentiles. Creation. The true God is the Creator of everything. He does not live in buildings. He does not need anything from us.
And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us.
Here Paul does something brilliant. He anchors the whole human race in a single common ancestor. All nations from one man. The Athenians prided themselves on being autochthonous, born of the soil, distinct from barbarians. Paul gently but firmly dismantles that claim. Every human being is kin. Every nation has been placed where it is by the same God, for the same purpose—that they would seek him.
Then he quotes their own poets. In him we live and move and have our being. Epimenides of Crete had written the line centuries earlier about Zeus. Paul takes the language, strips it from Zeus, and applies it to the true God. For we are indeed his offspring. He is quoting the Stoic poet Aratus next. Paul is doing something every Christian apologist since has learned from him. He is showing that the grain of truth in their best thought actually points to a God they do not yet know.
Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The argument follows naturally from the premise. If we are God’s offspring, then God is not something we made. The idols in the Athenian temples are products of human imagination. The Creator cannot be one of his own creations.
Then the turn. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.
The sermon pivots from creation to judgment to resurrection. God overlooked the ignorance of the past. He overlooks it no longer. A day has been fixed. A man has been appointed. That man has been raised from the dead as proof of what is coming. Paul never gets to say the name Jesus before the crowd starts reacting.
Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked. But others said, We will hear you again about this. So Paul went out from their midst. But some men joined him and believed, among whom also were Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris and others with them.
Three responses. Mockery. Deferral. Belief. The resurrection is the line the Greek mind would not cross. The idea of a god was acceptable. The idea of a god who rose bodily from the dead violated everything the Greek philosophy had committed to about the inferiority of matter to spirit. Mockery was the honest response for those whose worldview the resurrection had just broken.
But Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus itself, believed. So did Damaris. So did some others whose names Luke does not record. The Athens sermon did not produce thousands of converts the way Pentecost had. It produced a small group that stood up from the most sophisticated philosophical council in the ancient world and believed. That is a different kind of fruit, and it is no less fruit.
Reflection
Acts 17 offers three lessons in how the gospel engages different audiences, and the lessons are still useful.
The Thessalonian encounter shows that the gospel is always politically consequential. The charge that Paul was saying there is another king, Jesus, was accurate. It still is. The gospel claims a throne above every throne, and no ruler, magistrate, or culture gets a pass on that claim. The early church was persecuted by Rome not because it taught private morality but because it named a Lord Caesar had not authorized. When the church in later centuries became cozy with the state, it often lost the edge that made it threatening in the first century. The edge is not a bug. It is the point.
The Berean encounter teaches what a healthy congregation looks like. They listened eagerly. They examined the scriptures daily. They tested the claims being made before accepting them. This posture is worth cultivating. Christians who never test teaching against scripture tend to drift with whatever is currently popular. Christians who reject every teaching that does not come in their preferred style tend to miss what the Spirit is actually saying. The Bereans held the balance. Eager ears. Open scriptures. Daily study. The church has never gone wrong by imitating them.
The Athenian sermon is the template for Christian engagement with intellectual culture. Paul did not begin with scripture, because the Athenians did not accept scripture. He began with creation, which they had to accept whether they believed in a creator or not. He quoted their own poets back at them, showing them that the best of their own traditions was pointing in a direction they had not yet taken. He named their admitted ignorance—the altar to the unknown god—as the point where he could speak. And then he preached judgment and resurrection without softening either, because the gospel is not the gospel without them.
This is the model. Not a dumbed-down gospel adapted for sophisticated ears. Not a clever rhetoric that never arrives at the hard claims. The full gospel, preached in a form the audience can actually hear, using the resources the audience already trusts to open the conversation. The Athenian response was mixed. It always is, in any intellectual culture. Some mocked. Some deferred. A few believed. The few who believed were enough. The gospel planted itself in the Areopagus on a single afternoon, and the Athens church, small as it was, became part of the network that would eventually convert the empire.
In him we live and move and have our being. That line, lifted from a pagan poem about Zeus, applied to the true God, has become one of the most quoted sentences in Christian devotion. Paul took something half true and made it fully true. The church can still do that with every culture it enters. The grain of truth is always there. The question is whether there is a Paul available to show where the grain was pointing.