Epimenides, Lewis, and the Van Tillians

Introduction

One of the difficulties that hampers our efforts in apologetics is an unfortunate tendency that we have in projecting New Testament categories back into the Old Testament. What this amounts to is that Christians tend to make a simple equation between Jew and Gentile in the Old Testament as being equivalent to Christian and non-Christian in the New Testament era. But this is simply not the case.

In the New Testament era, because the Church is now catholic and universal, it is necessary for everyone who wants to be saved to come to Christ for that salvation. They must call upon Him, and when they do, they have a responsibility to then be baptized in order to come into the visible Church. The elect among them are part of the invisible church.

In short, those who want to be saved today need to become Christians. But was it necessary for those who wanted to be saved in the Old Testament to become Jews? Well, not a bit of it.

Old Testament Goyim

We have multiple examples of Gentiles trusting in the God of the Jews, but without becoming Jews themselves. For ease of reference, let me pack just some of them into one paragraph for you.

We have Naaman the Syrian (Luke 4:27), and after his conversion (2 Kings 5:17) he was even given permission to push his master’s wheelchair into the house of Rimmon (2 Kings 5:18). We have the king of Nineveh and all his people (Jonah 3:6ff). We have Jethro, the priest of Midian (Ex.3:1). We have Melchizedek, a Canaanite priest and type of Christ to whom Abraham paid tithes (Gen. 14:18; Heb. 7:1-2). David stored the Ark of the Covenant at the house of a Gentile, Obed-edom (2 Sam. 6:10)—and he was a Gittite, which meant he probably graduated from the same high school that Goliath did. Later on, this Obed-edom was made a porter at the Tabernacle of David (1 Chron. 15:18). And when Solomon built the Temple, in his prayer of dedication he assumed that various Gentiles would pray toward this Temple, and would be received (1 Kings 8:41-43). And then when Jesus made a whip and cleared out the money-changers and the sellers of sacrificial animals, He was clearing out the Court of the Gentiles in order to make room for them to worship. “And he taught, saying unto them, Is it not written, My house shall be called of all nations the house of prayer? but ye have made it a den of thieves” (Mark 11:17).

Gentiles are simply not the non-Christians of the Old Testament. Quite a few of them were unbelievers, true enough, but then again, that was the case for the Jews as well.

The Curious Case of Epimenides

Now this being the case, what would make us think that the only saved Gentiles from the time of the Old Testament would need to be actually referred to by the Old Testament in order to be numbered among the saved?

So let us consider the odd case of Epimenides, a wise man from Crete, who lived in the sixth century before Christ, right around 600 BC. This would make him a contemporary of Jeremiah and Ezekiel. We can begin with some of the things that Paul says about him in his instructions to Titus, and then look at what Paul says and does when he comes to Athens.

Paul quotes him favorably in his letter to Titus, and in that place he calls him a prophet. Not a false prophet, mind you, but a prophet—”even a prophet of their own.” We don’t have any complete texts by Epimenides, but we do have various citations of him in different places. And according to one reconstruction of a portion of a work of his called Cretica, Epimenides was responding to some Cretans who had been maintaining that Zeus had been a mortal once instead of being essentially divine. He was so much a mortal in their account that they had built a tomb for him, which Epimenides did not appreciate at all.

You may recognize that last line as well—Paul quotes it in his sermon to the men of Athens (Acts 17:28). And this means it might be a good time to pause that discussion in order to talk about the relationship that Epimendes had with Athens.

Centuries before, the city of Athens had been suffering under a grievous plague, which they attributed to divine retribution for an act of treachery that one King Megacles had committed when he slaughtered some men who had surrendered under an amnesty. The Athenians had many gods, as Paul noted centuries later, and they had sought to propitiate them all, but to no effect. The fierce plague continued. The Pythian oracle then told them to send to Crete for Epimenides, which they did.

When he arrived, he had them build numerous altars to an “unknown God,” which they then did. The places where the altars were to be built were identified by sheep lying down at an unusual time in the morning instead of grazing. When they sacrificed to this unknown God, a remarkable thing happened—it stopped the plague. This placed a sharp distinction between this set of sacrifices and what they had been attempting in their sacrifices to false gods before.

In addition, Paul had made a sharp distinction as well. He had been horrified by all the idols, temples, and altars that he saw there in Athens (Acts 17:16). The verb used indicates that he was provoked, vexed, or exasperated by all of it. But there was one altar that he was not vexed by . . . an altar that Epimenides had had them build. We know that this altar did not provoke him because he preached to them that the God who was ignorantly worshiped at that altar (Acts 17:23) was the God of all creation.

Now this true God presides over all the nations of men, and why is this? According to Paul . . .

There are two citations here. One likely one is from Epimendes, in praise of the immortal Zeus, and (in the reconstruction) just two lines away from the passage that Paul quoted in his letter to Titus. The next citation is from a poet named Aratus, a Stoic poet from Cilicia, which incidentally was Paul’s own province. That quotation comes from another hymn to Zeus entitled Phaenomena.

So then some Gentiles are groping in the dark, seeking after God. In order to reconcile this with what Paul teaches us in Romans 3, which is that no one seeks after God, we must postulate that God was at work in their midst by various means, such as unlikely prophets. “And this, not of themselves lest any man should boast.”

Now clearly, not every Zeus is Zeus. There is the originally mortal Zeus that the Cretans thoughtfully built a tomb for. That’s not it. There was also the Zeus of folklore, the Homeric Zeus, famous for his skirt chasing and other inappropriate activities. That’s not it either. But then there was the Zeus of the philosophers, the Theos who had created all things, the Most High God. This vague deity something that Paul was willing to work with. Epimenides knew the true God . . . through a glass darkly. He knew that He had to be there, but did not appear to know His name.

Lewis Among the Pagans

In a number of places, C.S. Lewis argues that the untutored pagans did not get absolutely everything wrong. In the light of the foregoing, it seems undeniable to me that his central point is correct, and entirely biblical.

As the hermit History puts it in his allegory, The Pilgrim’s Regress, the Landlord (God) would send the pagans glimpses of something beyond themselves by sending them pictures. And the pagans would try to capture it in order to hang on to it . . . but it would never work out. Their image of the divine would regularly become diseased.

The fact that Lewis was looser with his charity than he should have been—think of Emeth in The Last Battle—does not mean that the central point is wrong. It just means that Lewis applied the point more liberally than perhaps was wise. The point still stands.

How that point from the Old Testament would apply to a pagan people in Central America in the year 200 A.D. would not be for us to pry into. The judge of the whole earth will do right (Gen. 18:25). I think we should rest content with the words of the Westminster Confession, which says that outside the church, there is no ordinary possibility of salvation.

Van Till and the Van Tillians

So let’s bring this down to Van Til. In my view, the great contribution that Cornelius Van Til made was in the field of epistemology. He demonstrated that apart from presupposing the triune God of Scripture, it is not possible to make any coherent truth claims at all. In my reckoning, this is self-evident—and this is why I count myself among the Van Tillians.

At the same time, I am not well-versed enough in all of Van Til’s works to say whether or not he dealt with a problem I see adequately, but I can say that a number of Van Tillians I have interacted with have fallen into a trap related to this. The trap consists of thinking that if a man cannot give a coherent account of his knowledge then it must mean that he doesn’t actually have that knowledge.

But no. Men know all kinds of things without knowing how they know. This is a place where I believe there is a lot of miscommunication between apologetic camps. Van Tillians often say that an unbeliever doesn’t know something when what they actually mean is that he cannot give an account of his knowing.

So, in the light of all the foregoing, did Epimenides know God? Will we meet him in the resurrection? Comments are open on this one, so discuss among yourselves. As always, behave.