Atoms and Anastasis

Atoms and Anastasis

Paul knew about atoms. Before today’s reading from Acts, we read that Paul was in Athens by himself while his companions, Timothy and Silas, went to Thessalonica to check on their fellow Christians. And of course, Paul got into trouble. He started arguing with two groups of philosophers, Stoics, and Epicureans who had reasoned their way to understanding that big things must be made of small things that they called atoms. So what we hear Paul talking about today is the basic nature of reality, which reason gets us a lot of the way to understanding. What Paul brought to this continuing philosophical argument was the revelation of God’s love in Christ Jesus, which is still more real than that what our highest reason can attain.

To set the scene, Paul had gotten into trouble when he started talking about Jesus and the Resurrection, or in Greek Anastasis, a feminine as opposed to a masculine noun. To some hearing half of what Paul said, they likely thought that Paul was talking about a god and a goddess, Jesus and his consort Anastasis. These were deities that the Athenians had not heard of, as it’s translated in the NRSV, “foreign divinities.” Who else in ancient Greece had been accused of “promoting foreign divinities?” Socrates. So, we are told, Paul was taken to the top of the hill next to the Acropolis and faced the Areopagus, which was responsible for trying serious offenses. Paul was not just engaging in an academic debate. He was on trial.

So, in today’s reading, Paul cleverly dismisses the charge of foreign divinities by pointing out that the Athenians had built an altar to a god whose name they didn’t know! Then he basically shows how the Stoics and Epicureans are both right, and both wrong, the emphasis on the latter. At the risk of over-simplification, when it came to God, the Epicureans were deist: There might have been a God who started this creation ball, but has had nothing to do with it since. And all bodily forms eventually dissolve back into atoms. The Stoics were more pantheistic, believing that the Universe itself was divine, and that all things shared in that divinity. Important to Paul’s argument, they also believed that history was a cycle, which if true, could feel like one damn thing all over again, until the current universe was destroyed and a new one born.

Point by point. Paul makes a concession to the Epicureans, then to the Stoics, then pointing out the Epicureans’ error, then the Stoics. Contra the Stoics, Paul states that, “For in him we live and move and have our being,” in other words, we are in God, not God in us.” But contra the deist Epicureans, Paul states, “For we too are his offspring.” For the Epicureans, God so transcended the created Universe that he might was well not be there. For the Stoics, God was so immanent (that is close to us) that there was no escape from the cycle of history that we were caught in. Paul insists that the one and only God is both transcendent and immanent. God is not capable of being contained “in shrines made by human hands.” But having made all nations and peoples, those nations and peoples could indeed “search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him.”

Finally, Paul tells the Stoics and Epicureans that they’re both wrong about the end of history. Contra the Epicureans, we do not dissolve into our component atoms forever. Contra the Stoics, we are not caught in an eternal vicious cycle of collapsing universes. For “he has fixed a day when the whole world is to be judged in righteousness by a man he has appointed. Of this he has given assurance by raising him from the dead.” This is anastasis, not Anastasis, Jesus’s divine consort, but the Resurrection of the dead, of which Jesus is only the first. Resurrection—transformed creation—is the end of history.

Now for the epilogue not read in today’s reading. Many laughed out loud at Paul. A few joined Paul and became believers. And the rest said, “We will hear you again about this.” It doesn’t seem that Paul won reams of believers among the skeptical Athenians. But Paul did beat the rap. And he planted the seed of possibility that the story of creation is not an exercise in futility, but the exercising of those muscles of faith, hope, and love. Nearly two millennia ago in God’s good timetable, Paul knew about atoms, and testified to resurrection. Nearly two millennia later, on that same infinite timetable, we know about atoms, and testify to resurrection.

May 10th, 2026

6th Sunday of Easter

The Rev. David Kendrick