# "The Unknown God"



## Gwallard (May 19, 2021)

Hello, brothers!

I encountered an interesting person today who pitted Paul and Jesus against one another. I can't say his arguments were anything very convincing, and he didn't seem to know as much as I thought he did (he didn't know the three uses of the law, what dispensationalism meant, or what covenantal theology or the WCF was), but they were at least interesting.

One of those arguments was that Paul was a syncretist, and he used Acts 17:23 as his proof, because Paul pointed to the Athenian's 13th god of the pantheon, "the unknown god." He called the normal interpretation of the passage - of pagans covering their backs about gods they did not know about - wrong, and said that "the unknown God" was a type of oneness spirit to the Athenians, which they had a temple dedicated to. 

I had never heard that argument. Anyone dealt with this type of argumentation before?


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## SeanPatrickCornell (May 19, 2021)

According to Wikipedia this is a theory that was invented by a fellow named Eduard Norden in 1913.






Unknown God - Wikipedia







en.wikipedia.org





As far as I can tell, it doesn't have any tangible support in the form of ancient writings or archaeology.

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## Gwallard (May 19, 2021)

I have found a review of it in English on JSTOR from 1915, and I have found the actual book in German here: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL13517420M/Agnostos_Theos 

I don't know German, and I have not found anything that I can really get into. Either pay barriers, language barriers, or lack of interest in our day.


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## Tom Hart (May 19, 2021)

Gwallard said:


> I don't know German, and I have not found anything that I can really get into.


It's 400 pages long and appears to be intensely boring.

Reactions: Like 1 | Funny 1


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## Ryan&Amber2013 (May 19, 2021)

I haven't, but I did just look into it. I like learning about other beliefs to see how credible they are, but this seemed very irrational, considering the context of everything else in the Bible. That's a weird verse to base a cult belief from.


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## Gwallard (May 20, 2021)

Ryan&Amber2013 said:


> I haven't, but I did just look into it. I like learning about other beliefs to see how credible they are, but this seemed very irrational, considering the context of everything else in the Bible. That's a weird verse to base a cult belief from.


I guess that is the rub: is the cult belief based on this verse, or is it based in archaeology and etc.? I haven't found anything about his argument to say that it isn't just from Acts 17:23 with some clever finagling.

But the below is claiming it's a gnostic-type (whatever that means) belief from the time. 









The Ancient Greeks, other than the 12 Gods, had a God known as the Unknown God. Has this God revealed himself to the world?


Answer (1 of 5): The Greeks believed in many more than 12 gods. The Dodektheon were the “12 Olympian gods” but there were several others many of whom were very important but worshiped in such a way that was not Olympian such as Dionysos, and Hekati. The “unknown god” was a place holder for any g...




www.quora.com


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## hammondjones (May 23, 2021)

Ah, yes, a 19th/early 20th century German theologian coming to tell us we've been doing it wrong all along. Feel as though I've heard that one before.

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## Tom Hart (May 23, 2021)

hammondjones said:


> Ah, yes, a 19th/early 20th century German theologian coming to tell us we've been doing it wrong all along. Feel as though I've heard that one before.


First of all, Norden was not a theologian, but a historian of religion, a classicist, philologist and Latinist.

But what is his theory? That the Greeks worshipped an unknown god identified with the God of the Jews? Or that the Christian God _is_ this unknown god?


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## Gwallard (May 23, 2021)

Tom Hart said:


> First of all, Norden was not a theologian, but a historian of religion, a classicist, philologist and Latinist.
> 
> But what is his theory? That the Greeks worshipped an unknown god identified with the God of the Jews? Or that the Christian God _is_ this unknown god?


As far as I've been able to find out, I think his theory was that the Greeks worshiped the "unknown god" as an identifiable 13th deity of the normal 12, with the added idea that when Paul identifies the "unknown god" he is in some way identifying the Greek, gnostic idea of that god with the true God.


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## C. M. Sheffield (May 24, 2021)

Tom Hart said:


> But what is his theory? That the Greeks worshipped an unknown god identified with the God of the Jews? Or that the Christian God _is_ this unknown god?


Neither. _The Unknown God_ is the god of which they have no knowledge. It speaks to the cognizance the ancient Greeks had that there were more gods of whom they were fully ignorant. And while this a sort of sad poly-agnosticism, it nonetheless proves useful to Paul when preaching the Gospel in Athens because there was indeed a God of whom they were fully ignorant—the living and true God.


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## Charles Johnson (May 24, 2021)

There were monotheists in Greece like the Platonists and Peripathetics that believed in a single creator god that was simple, impassible, etc. They did not claim to know this god's name, as far as I know. Paul actually quotes from Peripathetics in his oration, so it's quite possible that he had this sort of philosophical theology in mind. I don't see any reason why the Unknown God cannot be identified with this God of the philosophers. Paul clearly identifies the Unknown God with the Christian God when he says "I make him known". The problem with the idea that they were just "covering their bases" in regards to the pantheon is that the philosophers openly professed that the poets (who taught the pantheon) lied about the nature of the Gods. See Plato's republic, where he says "the poets lie". Many Greeks were not polytheistic (but also weren't Christians).


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## Charles Johnson (May 24, 2021)

The first couple books of Plato's Republic are helpful context here.


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## Tom Hart (May 24, 2021)

C. M. Sheffield said:


> Neither. _The Unknown God_ is the god of which they have no knowledge. It speaks to the cognizance the ancient Greeks had that there were more gods of whom they were fully ignorant. And while this a sort of sad poly-agnosticism, it nonetheless proves useful to Paul when preaching the Gospel in Athens because there was indeed a God of whom they were fully ignorant—the living and true God.


To be clear, I was asking about Norden's theory, not the Apostle Paul's.

Reactions: Like 1


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## Tom Hart (May 24, 2021)

Charles Johnson said:


> There were monotheists in Greece like the Platonists and Peripathetics that believed in a single creator god that was simple, impassible, etc. They did not claim to know this god's name, as far as I know. Paul actually quotes from Peripathetics in his oration, so it's quite possible that he had this sort of philosophical theology in mind. I don't see any reason why the Unknown God cannot be identified with this God of the philosophers. Paul clearly identifies the Unknown God with the Christian God when he says "I make him known". The problem with the idea that they were just "covering their backs" in regards to the pantheon is that the philosophers openly professed that the poets (who taught the pantheon) lied about the nature of the Gods. See Plato's republic, where he says "the poets lie". Many Greeks were not polytheistic (but also weren't Christians).


This is helpful. Perhaps some confusion is owed to moderns assuming the character of 1st-century Athens' philosophy and religion. Athens in this period was hardly religiously unified, as you point out. (Socrates had been condemned for upsetting the worship of the gods, but that was centuries earlier.)


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## Gwallard (May 24, 2021)

Tom Hart said:


> This is helpful. Perhaps some confusion is owed to moderns assuming the character of 1st-century Athens' philosophy and religion. Athens in this period was hardly religiously unified, as you point out. (Socrates had been condemned for upsetting the worship of the gods, but that was centuries earlier.)


If it's true that Paul is making a comparison to this type of Platonic god, then does this have implications for how Christians understand the "Great [Christian] Tradition" and its sometimes Platonic, or realist, metaphysics?


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## Charles Johnson (May 24, 2021)

Gwallard said:


> If it's true that Paul is making a comparison to this type of Platonic god, then does this have implications for how Christians understand the "Great [Christian] Tradition" and its sometimes Platonic, or realist, metaphysics?


Well, I have a couple thoughts on this. If Paul grants a certain, limited acknowledgment of the truth of the Greek's conceptions of God here and in Romans 1 ("having known God", Rom. 1:21) when it comes to the antithesis between their conceptions and the gospel he doesn't bar any holds, as in 1 Corinthians 1.
So certainly there are aspects of any Greek philosophical system that the Christian must reject. But the Reformed have general accepted the validity of a limited appropriation of Greek philosophy, although they haven't always agreed on the best way to do this. Personally I'm partial to the Ramist approach, which is Platonists, but one can certainly be more Aristotelian and still be Reformed.


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