June 27, 2021

The Unknown God

Be wise with your decision about College

Know what your young person is getting into

Understand the mission statement and worldview of the school that you send them to

Athens was the heart and soul of Art, Philosophy, and Literature.

Religious philosophy became the center of their culture

1. Epicureans

• Supreme good is happiness
• Wanted simple pleasures, friendships, and retirement
• The absence of pain was a pleasure
• Being “Untroubled” over the positive experiences of pleasure
• They lived to “Philosophy” with friends
• They would rather do that than enjoy the pleasures of food, drink, and sex

1. Stoic Philosophers

• • Cared about virtuous behavior and living according to nature
  • Recognize your own self-sufficiency
  • Be independent of others
  • Suppress your desires
  • Live your life based upon virtue

•  Everything we face in life was an opportunity to respond with virtue. Even bad situations. Even painful or scary ones. If we act virtuously, they believed, everything else important could follow: Happiness, success, meaning, reputation, honor, love. “The man who has virtue,” Cicero said, “is in need of nothing whatever for the purpose of living well.”

We know this today as “Universalism.”

• The Universalist believes it impossible that a loving God would elect only a portion of mankind to salvation and doom the rest to eternal punishment. They insisted that punishment in the afterlife was for a limited period during which the soul was purified and prepared for eternity in the presence of God.

• In Christian theology, universal reconciliation (also called universal salvation) is the doctrine that all sinful and alienated human souls—because of divine love and mercy—will ultimately be reconciled to God.

• • They believed that perception is the basis of true knowledge

• The skeptical scenarios (dreaming, brains in vats, differently situated sense organs, etc.) call our attention to a crucial distinction between appearance and reality: how things perceptually appear is not necessarily how things really are; things could appear the same though really be different, and they could appear to be some other, incompatible way and really be the same. Further reflection on the scenarios suggests that although I might know very little—perhaps nothing—about how things are in the external world, I can nevertheless know quite a lot about how it appears to me that things are.

• They identified the universe and God with Zeus
• Only God and nature are good
• Nature is perfectly rational

“Jesus is God in the flesh who died and rose again for our salvation.”

Areopagus (hill of Ares).

• God of thunder (Thor)
• God of the heavens (Zeus)

Take a ways:

1. Our world is still influenced by the Epicurean’s and the Stoic’s
2. Paul made it clear that Jesus is truly God

• The proof was in the resurrection

1. There is a time of judgment by God

• He will judge the world
• Repentance is still necessary for entry into Heaven