Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, ‘Athenians, I see how extremely religious 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.” [Acts 17:22-23, NRSV]
Paul had left Berea where he had the pleasant experience of meeting with people who were a lot more open-minded than the people in Thessalonica. After listening eagerly to the message Paul preached to them, they would go on to read the Scriptures daily to see if what Paul said were really true. Many, including Greek men and women of high social standing, believed. But when the Thessalonian Jews heard of Paul’s activities in Berea, they came over to stir up trouble for him. The Berean believers at once arranged to send him to Athens ahead of Silas and Timothy.
While waiting for Silas and Timothy to join him in Athens, he became very upset when he noticed how full of idols the city was. So he held discussions with different groups of people in the city: with Jews in the synagogue as well as the Gentiles who worshipped there; with people who come by the city square; with Epicurean and Stoic philosophers who considered him an “ignorant show-off”. Athens, after all, is a city of philosophers and the foremost centre of learning in the Western world. So they took Paul and brought him before the city council, the Aeropagus and said, “We would like to know what this new teaching is that you are talking about. Some of the things we hear you say sound strange to us, and we would like to know what they mean.” The Athenians and resident-aliens, we must know, were brainy people who spent all their time telling and hearing the latest new things.
Paul stood in front of the Aeropagus and preached his famous speech on the Creator God by whom we all are offspring:
- ‘Athenians, I see how extremely religious 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 nations 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 grope 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.”
Notice how Paul moves quickly from an acknowledgement of the prevalence of idols of worship and the people’s propensity to spend time reasoning, to a revelation of who this unknown God was. He was not hesitant to proclaim the theology of God as the Creator of all things in heaven and on earth, so that he could raise the people’s awareness of their relationship with this God. And because it is from this one Creator-God that we all share the common heritage as being His offspring, it is in Him that “we live and move and have our being”.
From the one and only Almighty Creator, Paul shifted to the One He sent, the Crucified and Resurrected Lord:
- 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.’
Paul sought to draw all this to a reasonable conclusion. As children of the one true God, we would not let created objects like gold and silver to replace God. Moreover, he placed a responsibility on the people to repent, for Christ is judge on the day of the resurrection. On the resurrection of the dead, Paul would win some and lose some. [See Acts 17:16-34.] The same experience would greet all evangelisers down through history from Paul’s time.
Today, Pope Francis urges that we maintain the same spirit of openness to discuss and dialogue and not give in to the temptation to proslytise. In his interview with Eugenio Scalfari published in La Repubblica October 1, 2013, the Pope said:
- “Proselytism is solemn nonsense, it makes no sense. We need to get to know each other, listen to each other and improve our knowledge of the world around us. Sometimes after a meeting I want to arrange another one because new ideas are born and I discover new needs. This is important: to get to know people, listen, expand the circle of ideas. The world is crisscrossed by roads that come closer together and move apart, but the important thing is that they lead towards the Good. …
- “Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is Good.”
In Malaysia today, proslytism and islamisation are synonymous and blatantly pursued as a “secret” official policy of the Muslim government. Native folks in the Bornean states of Sarawak and Sabah have hitherto been predominantly baptized Christians. Malaysians sat up when news broke of entire villages of these simple Native folks being officially “converted” to Islam overnight. Upon investigation, the truth quickly emerged that they were each given a paltry sum of money [like RM100 or about USD30 per person], purportedly as some governmental welfare assistance. They signed some papers, purportedly in acknowledgement of receipt of the money. In reality, those were papers that were supposed to evince their “voluntary” acceptance of Islam. There is no telling how low the Muslim authority in this country is prepared to go in its push for islamisation of this multi-racial nation.
Native politicians began at once to take serious steps to rectify the situation.
In the meantime, the government machinery was suddenly very “efficient”, with different departments collaborating seamlessly in issuing “new” identity cards to the new “converts”, incorporating name-changes to Islamic identity.
This kind of tactics has nothing to do with Islam as a genuine and authentic world religion deserving of respect. It has every bit to do with a politics that has gone seriously wrong. The fact that the Muslim political leaders, regardless of the eyes of the entire world looking at Malaysia on this issue, could shamelessly proclaim that the law prohibiting non-Muslims from using the term “Allah” to refer to God applies only to Peninsular Malaysia but does not apply to the East Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah, is a pathetic comedy at a grand scale.
When you have utterly no respect for the fundamental rights of people different from you – rights that are enshrined in the country’s Constitution – you are breeding a culture of deep resentment, hatred and serious disharmony. When will they ever learn that a culture of oppression is ultimately a self-defeating culture, a culture of death? For their souls are tainted, and so are their children’s. Instead of feeding their children bread, they are feeding them poison. For an emerging multi-racial and multi-religious society like Malaysia, rich in resources and human potentials for hard work and creativity, the political leaders are so desperately vision-impaired. Do we have on the horizon a new crop of younger generation of politicians and thinkers who have been exposed to a more wholesome education, and who might begin to undo all the harm that is being done in this country in the name of “Allah”?
Copyright © Dr. Jeffrey & Angie Goh, May 2014. All rights reserved.
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