Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely spiritual you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all peoples to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps fumble about for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we, too, are his offspring.’ “Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”
Acts 17:22-31
Introduction
The Pentagon has become an extremely spiritual place. It hosts regular prayer services. Some of the people in charge talk frequently about God, even insisting that God supports their military actions.
But outward spirituality does not always reflect inward devotion to the God who raised Jesus from the dead. Our spirituality can be misguided and distorted, our devotion being directed toward an image of God forged by our own minds. It’s a reality as old as humanity, at least as our story is told in Scripture. The name given to our wayward faith is idolatry.
Paul’s speech to the Athenians in Acts 17 addresses idolatry. He calls for a repentance, a turning from idolatry that leads us to see God and humankind rightly. God does not need human hands to protect him, and God made all human beings as family, “from one blood” (Acts 17:26, see NRSVue translation note). For Paul, a spirituality that does not believe and practice these truths remains in “the times of human ignorance.”
The so-called “Secretary of War” would do well to listen to Paul, and so would the rest of us.
Paul Preaches Against Idolatry
The Apostle Paul once ventured through the city of Athens. Seeing the city filled to the brim with idols, Paul became deeply distressed (Acts 17:16). So, he began to preach the gospel in Jewish synagogues and in the city’s public spaces. Some philosophically-inclined Athenians brought Paul to the Areopagus, a place used for various civic and judicial purposes. They asked him to tell them more about his strange teachings.
“Athenians,” Paul observed, “I see how extremely spiritual you are in every way” (Acts 17:22). First, Paul flatters them. Then he tells them the truth: for all their spirituality, they do not yet know God. Instead, they know only idols. Gods that need to be sustained. Gods that need to be protected. Gods that need to be served by human hands.
Paul worries that the Athenians’ idolatry has distorted their theological imaginations in two ways, causing them to misunderstand both their relationship with God and their relationship with other humans.
As for God, Paul labors to reject any notion that God depends upon human beings. God neither needs humans for protection nor does God need the service of human hands, “as though God needs anything” (Acts 17:25). Idols give humans a false sense of their necessity. Like his fellow Jews, Paul rejects the notion that God needs anything at all. Instead, it is God who “gives to all mortals life and breath and all things” (Acts 17:25). A spirituality that makes God reliant upon human works is not devoted to the God who created and sustains all things.
As for other humans, Paul’s speech implies that idolatry can reinforce an “us” versus “them” mentality. In contrast, Paul insists that God has created all people for unity, making “from one blood…all peoples to inhabit the whole earth” (Acts 17:26). Our sharing in one blood points to our origin in God. We are, Paul says, God’s offspring. The implication is that humankind cannot be divided into “us” and “them,” even if the peoples have been given specific places and times. A spirituality that fails to recognize the oneness of humankind has for its deity merely “an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals” (Acts 17:29).
The Athenians were extremely spiritual, but their spirituality had little to do with the God whose power Paul proclaimed. At best, theirs was a fumbling about like one searching in the dark. At worst, their spirituality was a willful deception. “The idol is a collective self-deception,” explains Willie Jennings, “a point of facilitation where human fantasy and wish, circulating around material realities, generate distorted hope. The idol facilitates a hope of control of both my life and the life of the gods, that is, to draw the gods into common cause with me for sustaining my life” (177).
In other words, idolatry is a spiritual condition in which we conflate our desires and our will with the divine, but we remain oblivious to the conflation. Idolatry fashions God into our own image, then asserts God’s providential favor over our initiatives. Such a system makes it increasingly difficult to suppose that God might desire or will something other than what we have dreamed up—let alone that God might actively work against what we desire or will. A “distorted hope,” indeed.
The Pentagon’s Problematic Spirituality
The Pentagon has recently become a stage for spiritual spectacle. (I should clarify that I am sure some, even many who work at the Pentagon have an earnest, genuine faith.) It hosts regular prayer meetings, presided over by Pete Hegseth, who calls himself the “Secretary of War.” Higher-ranking military members have told their subordinates that the war in Iran is an eschatological Christian battle. The “Department of War” released a video that combines scenes of warships and explosions with the Lord’s Prayer. Hegseth and others under his leadership draw a great deal of attention to their spirituality (and some well-known Christian leaders celebrate these highly publicized acts of piety).
The spirituality displayed at the Pentagon echoes the problems Paul preached against on the Areopagus in Athens. Look at a few comments made by Pete Hegseth in recent months.
“Protecting our culture and our religion from godless ideologies and pagan religions, not political,” Hegseth says. “It’s biblical.” Paul’s speech to Athenians problematizes such a claim. Idols need to be protected, but not God. Paul proclaims that God is the God who made all things and who raised Jesus from the dead. Does such a God need us to protect Christianity? Hasn’t God committed to preserving the church in life and death? Don’t the church and the gospel find their preservation in God’s gracious gift of the Holy Spirit? God is not an idol who needs our protection. God will accomplish what God has promised.
Beyond this, Paul preaches that worshipping the true God unifies humanity across its cultural divides. Paul is not antagonistic to culture as a rule. He even tries to connect with the Athenians’ culture in his speech by referencing their poets. Paul becomes critical of culture when cultural identity threatens or subjugates one’s identity in Christ, for instance, when one’s culture becomes the grounds for justifying violence against those who belong to another culture.
Consider another statement: “The providence of our almighty God is there protecting those troops,” Hegseth claims, “and we’re committed to this mission.” This claim straightforwardly links the mission of the American military with God’s providential involvement in human history. Such claims are hard to confirm or deny because, well, human beings cannot enter the mind of God. Idolatry, however, teaches us that we can. The authors of the Barmen Declaration, a document crafted to resist the National Socialist takeover of the German Church, spurned the kind of spiritualizing Hegseth engages in: “We reject the false doctrine that with human vainglory the Church could place the Word and work of the Lord in the service of self-chosen desires, purposes and plans.”
I could trot out additional examples—from Hegseth claiming that Western culture and America are the logical product of the New Testament to his prayer for God to enable soldiers to enact “overwhelming violence” against enemies. But these examples are enough to show that the “Secretary of War’s” spirituality, at the least, rhymes with the spirituality of the Athenians.
There may not be any idols of gold or silver in the Pentagon, yet idolatry still distorts the theological vision of Hegseth (and others in the current administration). The idolatry is inextricably linked to dominating ideologies—like American exceptionalism, nationalism, and militarism—that disfigure the gospel to support the use of force under the guise of peacemaking.
A Word for Athens, the Pentagon, and Us
Of course, idolatry was humanity’s first addiction, and we have not been able to kick the habit altogether. The Pentagon is not the only place where spirituality has been hijacked by idolatry. We are all capable of being like the Athenians, living under the deception of idols in ignorance.
We live in a hyper-ideologized age. The inner circles of both “us” and “them” are getting smaller and smaller. The world is increasingly polarized, partisan, fundamentalist. Or at least it seems so. There are forces—including algorithms—at work, teaching us to think in “us” versus “them” frames. If we do not fully embrace one of the dominant and dominating ideologies, then we find ourselves without a “home” or “tribe” or “people.” We are orphaned.
This has led to a precarious situation, where many of us cannot see one another rightly. Americans have significantly increased in “partisan hostility” since 2016. Americans are more likely to view those belonging to the “other” party as more immoral and extreme. As Johanna Dunway explains, though most Americans remain more moderate in their political views,
when people are asked to evaluate the opposing party, they often feel considerable animosity based on what they hear from that party’s elite and governing members. They tend to assume members of the opposing party are more extreme than they are, which creates the perception of greater policy differences between Democrats and Republicans in the public than truly exist.
As Americans, we have bought into an idolatrous habit of mind. Our partisan allegiances are warping our vision of our neighbors. We are allowing our ideologies to impair our vision of one another.
Paul rejects such idolatrous thinking. He calls Athens and us out of idolatry through repentance (Acts 17:30). Turning from idolatry will mean questioning our own ideologies. If our ideology causes us to see others—let alone our enemies—as worse than they are, then we no longer “have” an ideology. “In truth,” as Karl Barth once said, “[the ideology] already possesses us” (227).
That is the irony of idolatry. We think we are in control when, in reality, the idol has taken control of us. Lord, help us.
I do not mean to create a kind of false equivocation. The ramifications of Pete Hegseth’s idolatry could lead to the destruction of an entire civilization. My idolatry leads mostly to assuming others are worse than they are. They may not be equal in consequence, but any form of idolatry is a threat to the deep human unity for which God created us.
Conclusion
Paul preached from the Areopagus, the Hill of Ares. Like Athena, Ares was a god of war. Ares was infamous for his brutality and bloodthirst. The Hill of Ares was traditionally believed to be the place where Ares was put on trial for murdering Poseidon’s son, who had raped Ares’s daughter.
On this hill and in this city, both devoted to gods of war, Paul proclaimed a God who did not kill, but raised Jesus from the dead, from a state-sanctioned death (Acts 17:31). It is Christ in his death and resurrection who shows us the way out of idolatry, an idolatry that echoes today in the halls of the Pentagon.
The way out of idolatry is not a better ideology. The way out of idolatry is love. A love shaped like the love Jesus has revealed, that fulfills his commandments (John 13:34–35; see John 14:15–21). A love for God, a love for neighbors, a love for enemies. A love that does not kill, but gives life. A love that does not anxiously cling to our will, our desires, our ideologies. A love that lets God be God. A love that lets us see others as God sees them, honoring the one blood that unites us all.
For the Athenians, it was easier to believe in idols than to believe God would raise someone from the dead. For many of us today, it is easier to abide by our ideologies than it is to love our enemies or to suppose God could love our enemies. May God fill us with the full measure of the Spirit, the Advocate, who makes God’s love known to us, and empowers us to love even our enemies as our siblings.
