“How does the Christian faith intersect culture?”

Athens was one of the great cultural and intellectual centers of the world. Some of the world’s greatest philosophers—Plato and Aristotle and Socrates once walked these streets and taught there. But Paul was disturbed by its godlessness.

Godlessness=simply living without God, to be God-LESS; to ignore Him, to live in a VIRTUAL REALITY, as if we are in control; to live without gratitude toward Him; to live as if there is no need to be forgiven, no need for atonement; to be independent and autonomous from the God that loves us.

Every person has a Worldview or philosophy. It may not always be fully thought out, but WV usually answers the questions,

Stoics saw self mastery as the goal of life. They believed in Reason. They didn’t believe in a personal God but that the divine was in everything—in me, in you, in the trees, the rocks. Their motto, in modern terms, was “Live a life of Reason.” They believed that the soul survived the body.

Epicureans did NOT believe the soul survived the body. This life is it. YOLO. So they taught that pleasure and the avoidance of pain was the highest good. So their philosophy was, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”

God’s Aseity means He doesn’t NEED us. For those of us bent toward “performance,” this is good news, indeed.

Note that this first quote is from the Hymn to Zeus, by Epimenides of Crete, and the second is from a Stoic poet named Aratas. As Arthur Holmes said,

“All truth is God’s truth."

This question—“how does a Christian relate to culture?—has been really tough for the church to answer historically.