ACTS 17 IN BIBLE INTERPRETATION

Acts 17 is presented as Luke’s “stress-test” chapter for the gospel: Paul reasons from Scripture in Thessalonica, is vetted by Berean Scripture-testing, and then collides with pagan intellectual culture in Athens. That blend explains why the chapter repeatedly becomes a battleground for apologetics, natural theology, contextualization, repentance, judgment, and resurrection.

The interpretive history is traced along recurring fault lines: whether Paul’s Creator/providence argument is “natural theology” or a prosecutorial indictment of idolatry; whether the “unknown god” altar is a friendly bridge or an exposure of ignorance; and whether Acts 17 licenses cultural synthesis or warns against baptizing pagan categories. Early and late antique readers tend to treat it as apologetics without flattery; the Reformation (Calvin especially) uses it as an anti-idol hammer grounded in the Creator–creature distinction; later modernity often tries to dilute it into generic theism, though the sermon itself refuses that by ending with repentance, an appointed day, and resurrection.

In the Old School Baptist orbit, Trott and Beebe treat Mars Hill not as a misstep but as authoritative apostolic preaching. Trott uses Acts 17:30–31 to resist turning repentance into a “new-law” condition and to insist on a real future judgment-day (“appointed day” cannot be collapsed into the gospel era). Beebe applies the passage polemically: repentance includes renouncing idols, and “idols” include respectable confidence in salvation “by the works of their own hands.” The philosophical backdrop clarifies why the sermon detonates at the end: Epicurean materialism makes resurrection conceptually impossible, while Stoic Logos/providence talk offers verbal overlap that Paul overturns with Creator–creature transcendence, moral accountability, and bodily resurrection. Modern debates (Clark vs. Van Til) then use Acts 17 as a proving ground: Clark stresses philosophy’s tolerance of theism until resurrection-as-history; Van Til reads the speech as worldview demolition with no neutral ground. All of this is gathered under Paul’s broader theme (1 Cor. 1–2): the offense is not merely “religion,” but the gospel’s public claims—repentance commanded, judgment fixed, and resurrection as God’s assurance.