Divine revelation in Athens

Let us keep in mind that the scientific modern man does not accept divine revelations as source of knowledge.

Nor did the Athenians in the days of St. Paul. The very word scepticism comes from classical Greek.

Among the crowd there were Epicureans. These had adopted the materialistic view of world suggested by Democritus and his theory of atoms. "Everything goes by chance so let us at least be happy for tomorrow we die."

There were also Stoics who are not that far from the atheist humanism of today bravely accepting the facts of life and believe that one day cease to exist.

It is an encounter between a Jewish man of God and a specialist trained by a once dead man to talk to proclaim the good message to the Gentiles and Greek philosophers and free thinkers curious about the international crowd passing their famed city.

If we look at the reactions in the audience we cannot call St. Paul's the speech at Areopagus a rounding success.


Close encounter with God of Israel
The Areopagus speech of St. Paul is an encounter of human civilization at its highest and the God Almighty, God of Israel, the only real God there exists.

In this way the speech of S. Paul, as presented in the Acts of Apostles, is a divine corner stone of revelation, a central pillar of information given to humanity by God Himself through his chosen people.

There is no other such foundation stone and no continuous revelation that would modify what was written in the Acts some two thousand years ago.

That is what we have.

That is on what we should depend on - the uncorrupted, genuine Word of God.

And even the text is so short there is plenty in it for humanity to learn. I only concentrate here on some aspects that are relevant to our current discussion in the Space Theology blog on the essence of being.