“Now all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new.”[1]
This was the explanation for the Athenians wanting to hear what Paul had to say. They brought him to the Areopagus so they could hear “the new teaching” he was explaining in the synagogues and market places.[2] They wanted to hear, presumably, because it was new.
I have a friend who, basically, doesn’t want to entertain the Gospel because it isn’t new. He is always looking for a new way of looking at things. He is a very philosophical and thoughtful person, but he thinks he would be bored in heaven (as he imagines the heaven of clichés would be – and he is probably right about that[3]).
But the writer of Ecclesiastes said two thousand years before Christ “there is nothing new under the sun”.[4] To prove a point, my friend who is always looking for some new thought to chew on is no different than the Athenians in Paul’s day, who were interested in “nothing except telling or hearing something new.”
Another good friend of mine, Gary Hill, who is a chief author of the Discovery Bible (an incredible NASB Bible packed with scholarly resources for the serious Bible reader[5]), described to me how seminaries require doctoral students to choose theses that have never been covered before. The pressure to come up with something new encourages people to go searching for premises that often stray from the way, the truth and the life.
The desire for something always new is nothing new under the sun. It is an age old desire that the writer of Ecclesiastes criticized 2000 years before the Athenians idolized new ideas 2000 years before post modernists championed the idea “that truth is relative and truth is up to each individual to determine for himself.”[6] The idea that each individual can manufacture his or her own truth is simply an extension of this lust for something always new. Continue reading “Nothing New Under the Sun?”
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