The Altar With No Name

A traveler climbing from the harbor into ancient Athens passed altar after altar — and, among the gods with names, a stranger kind. The geographer Pausanias records altars there “to gods named Unknown.”¹ They were a hedge against some deity the city had overlooked, whose slight could bring a plague.

The apostle Paul, hauled before the Areopagus — the council that met on a rocky rise below the Acropolis — had seen one. He does not mock it; he reads it as a confession: “What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you” (Acts 17:23).

Then he names who is there. The God who made the world does not live in shrines or need tending; Athens’ altars feed him nothing, for he is the one who gives “to all mankind life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:25). The God no temple could hold built himself one of flesh, and when we tore it down he raised it in three days (John 2:19–21). He set the nations and their seasons, Paul says, so that people “should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him” (Acts 17:26–27). And then the sentence that turns the blank altar inside out: “Yet he is actually not far from each one of us” (Acts 17:27).

Not far. Israel had been told as much, long before Athens laid its first stone: “what great nation is there that has a god so near to it as the LORD our God is to us, whenever we call upon him?” (Deuteronomy 4:7). Paul neither shouts the altars down nor shrugs them off; he finds the nearness in Athenian poetry, a line about Zeus — “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

Why keep an altar for a god we cannot name? Because something in us will not stop reaching, even into the dark — into the career we feed, the marriage we ask to save us, the approval we keep sacrificing to. Those idols have names; the ache beneath them does not. The empty altar is that ache, cut in stone. It stays blank for a reason: a named god has a will, and a will makes claims.

The God who cannot be quarried from “gold or silver or stone” (Acts 17:29) has made himself known in a man — one whom “he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead” (Acts 17:31). The nearness has a face — near enough to be seized and killed, the far-off God “brought near by the blood of Christ” (Ephesians 2:13). The long search ends at a cross, where he had been searching for us.

So the age of groping is closing; the God once worshiped in ignorance now “commands all people everywhere to repent” (Acts 17:30). Some sneered — they wanted the soul freed from the body, and Paul was offering them a body back. A few believed: Dionysius, a woman named Damaris, and others (Acts 17:32–34). That turning — repentance — is the face coming round. We can stop keeping blank altars, not because we found the name but because he gave it. His name is Jesus, and he is not far from each one of us.