Acts 17:16-34 - How to Navigate the Marketplace of Ideas

When Paul goes to Athens, he’s waiting for Silas and Timothy to arrive, so whilst he’s waiting, he has to earn a living. Paul’s trade was a tentmaker, so he would have made some tents and then sold them. In Athens, the Agora was the marketplace. It’s at this place, just northwest of the Acropolis, where Athenians would have not only done a bit of shopping (including food, textiles, pottery and jewellery), but also it was the place for political discussions and cultural exchange.

The Agora was the place where the ideas of the day were discussed. Paul goes to that place and starts to reason with the various philosophers, especially the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers. Here’s a quick run-down of what they believed:

Stoicism

The stoics valued the pursuit of virtue as the highest good. For the Stoics, virtue meant moral excellence (wisdom, justice, courage, self-control and moderation), rationality, living in accordance with nature and emotional tranquillity. They believed in the acceptance of fate, and embracing adversity, in being indifferent to their external circumstances and a detachment from their emotions.

One of the most well-known Stoics was Seneca the younger, who in 49A.D. had just been brought back to Rome from exile in Corsica, where he became the advisor to Emperor Nero. Seneca famously said, “"Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labour does the body."

Epicuranism

Epicureans where materialists, they rejected the existence of supernatural beings and the afterlife. They believed in hedonic pleasure, but not in the sense of mere sensual indulgence. For the epicureans, the way to maximise pleasure was through the pursuit of tranquillity and the freedom from mental disturbances and physical pain. Epicureans advocated for a withdrawal from the participation in politics. Instead, they were much more interested in philosophy.

Into the Marketplace

When Paul starts to speak in the Agora, his message was always going to be at odds with both Stoicism and Epicureanism.

So what’s our marketplace? The marketplace of ideas these days has moved online. Twitter, Instagram and Tik Tok have succeeded the Agora to become the go-to place for the exchange of ideas.

So what are the schools of thought that are on offer in our marketplace?

Secular Humanism

Secular humanists have, in many senses, replaced the Epicureans in that they are empiricists, who focus on what produces human flourishing, a similar form of hedonism to the Epicureans. Secular humanists reject the belief in God as not only absurd, but harmful. They believe that ethics arise out of human evolution. Popular proponents of this worldview are Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Steven Pinker.

Postmodernism

Postmodernism denies the existence of absolute truth and objective reality, instead proposing relative truth (“my truth”). Drawing on Marxism, it seeks to deconstruct the institutions through the lens of race, gender and sexuality. Postmodernism gained traction in the 1960’s through the writings of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida and has become hugely popular online, especially through organisations like Black Lives Matter.

Linked to Postmodernism would be things like Environmentalism.

Traditionalism

The Trads advocate for the preservation of institutions such as marriage and the family, they are sceptical of progressivism in all its forms, they advocate for authority and hierarchy, religion and natural order. The traditional view is popularised by people such as Ben Shapiro.

Interacting with the marketplace

Much more can be said about all of these things, and this is only a very brief overview. The point is to understand what our marketplace of ideas is. What Paul does can provide a great example for us to follow in our marketplace. Paul doesn’t come and take sides. For him, the Gospel can never be pigeon-holed into one prevailing philosophy of the day. It sits above all philosophies. Here’s how Paul interacts with them:

Reason

Paul reasoned not only in the synagogue, but also in the marketplace. The role of apologetics is becoming more crucial than ever in our witness for Christ. There is the temptation to withdraw from the public discussion, but Paul does the exact opposite here. There are already fantastic apologetics accounts like Reasonable Faith, Inspiring Philosophy, and Capturing Christianity on the Protestant side and equally great Catholic accounts like Word on Fire and The Counsel of Trent. But there’s more needed. We need to make the Moral Argument for the existence of God, The Kalam Cosmological Argument and the Teleological Argument so well-known online that everyone has heard about it. We need more reasoning, not less.

Use their own words

Paul’s preach in the Areopagus is genius. Some say that this was Paul’s biggest failure, but I beg to differ. Firstly, because it says that one of the Areopagus believed Paul as a result of his preach and became a follower of Jesus.

Secondly, Paul carefully uses the Greek’s own philosopher, Epimenides, as a way of convincing people about Jesus. Put that into today’s language. That’s a bit like quoting Dawkins to the Secular Humanist, quoting Derrida to the Postmodernist and Shapiro to the Traditionalist.

The role of preaching, especially in the online sphere, means that we need to understand the philosophies in the marketplace, we need to be able to quote them as a part of our witness for Christ.

A Demonstration of the Spirit’s Power

3 years after this event, Paul writes from Ephesus to the Church in Corinth and said, “When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.”

Wise and persuasive words are good, but they have a limit. What sets us apart is the weirdness of the Gospel. It’s the demonstration of the Spirit’s power. If we only set ourselves up as another competing voice in the marketplace, we’ll be taken as just that, another option. We reduce what we have. It’s when the Holy Spirit’s power is unleashed, through the changing of hearts, the miraculous and more that we truly show God’s power. That then elevates the wisdom.

Possibly the greatest demonstration of the Spirit’s power we have is history. What do I mean by that? If we compare ourselves to the first century Greco-Roman world, we are nothing alike. We now have human rights, greater gender equality, slavery has been outlawed, universal healthcare introduced, schools and universities for everyone, not just the privileged. And all these things came into existence because of the Holy Spirit working in the lives of Christians. To show a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, we can show that the very fabric of Western society has been built upon Christianity. We’ve got results. And as well as that, the Holy Spirit is still working today.