Worshipping the Unknown God

This is a translation of the homily for Trinity Sunday (year III) in Varaldsøy Church in Kvinnherad, Norway, Sunday 15th June, 2025. The readings are as follows: Isaiah 6:1-8; Acts 17:22-34; and Luke 24:45-48. When quoting Scripture, I will use the Revised Standard Version (RSV), corrected to British spelling, unless otherwise noted.

Collect of the day (translated by yours truly):

Let us Pray:

Triune God, our created, saviour and life-giver, we peay: Enlighten our minds, renew our hearts, and give us a living faith, so that your church may proclaim the gospel of Christ, you who lives and reigns, one true God, world without end. Amen.

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Today’s Gospel is quite short and concise. There we read an excerpt from the journey that Jesus took with two men who were on their way to the village of Emmaus. They had become disillusioned by the death of Jesus and were trying to get away. But Jesus, having risen from the dead, walked with them, and they did not recognise him at first. And there he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and said to them: “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations.” This is the gospel in a nutshell. But for the Messiah to be able to do this, he must be God. But what is God? Who is God? Today, these are the questions we ask ourselves, as we come to Trinity Sunday. And then I will concentrate mostly on the second reading today, from the Acts of the Apostles, but first we will go to the first reading, from Isaiah.

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.” This is what it says. This is a text we sing when we celebrate the Eucharist. We lift up our hearts, or we are lifted up, and we partake of the gifts of Christ, under the forms or species of bread and wine.¹ And there we are allowed to participate in the angels’ praise, together with them and with the church, both here on earth and in heaven. For the Eucharist is a participation in the heavenly service. And there praise is our goal, for it expresses the faith we have in Christ. But this is not the praise of a very big and strong man up in the clouds, with a long, white beard. That’s not what we believe in. God is not a “mega version” of us. We find no such idea of God in the Bible, neither in the Old nor the New Testament. God is not like us at all. He is the incomprehensible basis of all existence and we exist only if we share in him. This is best seen in Mark 12, where a scribe agrees with Christ, saying: “He is one, and there is no other but he.” I have often thought that this is about there being no other Lord but God: “The Lord is one, and there is no other Lord but he.” That is correct, of course. There is no other Lord. But the text is more radical than that: “He is one, and there is no other but he.” That is the radical thing about our belief in God. God is actually the only one who is one. God is one, we are many. God is the only one who is completely One with Himself, we are fragmented and divided. I do not exist in myself, but only to the extent that God sustains me. Creation as a whole exists only because it has, so to speak, a participation in God. Without God we are actually nothing. As St. Paul has said to us today, in Acts 17:28: “In him we live and move and have our being.” That is the very essence of our relationship with God. God is the fundamental reality and we are only shadows of him. We exist only because he sustains us.

Today I will address this by looking at the story from the Acts of the Apostles, where St. Paul comes to Athens. In the part we have not read today, it says that “his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols” (Acts 17:16). He conversed with Jews in the synagogue and with those he met in the Agora, the great marketplace of Athens. Gradually he came into conversation with some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers, and like Socrates about 400 years before him, he was called a “babbler” and was accused of preaching “foreign divinities” (Acts 17:18).² He was therefore invited to present his message to the Areopagus. He started like this: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along, and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.” On top of such altars (or plinths or pedestals) there usually stood a bust, often of one of the many gods. But here St. Paul came to an empty altar, with this inscription: “To an unknown god.” We do not know who made the altar, but what is important here is how St. Paul uses it. He says: “What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.” But what did St. Paul mean by this? Did he mean that his listeners were completely ignorant, unlike him? This is how it may look in some translations, for example the New American Standard Bible: “Therefore, what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you.” But if St. Paul was trying to offend his listeners, it does not seem like they got it. Yes, they protested when he began to preach the resurrection and judgment (Acts 17:31-32), but they did not protest here. For what did St. Paul say? In Greek, we find the word agnooũntes. British theologian and Dionysius scholar Fr. Thomas Plant points out that this is not an adverb (“ignorantly”) or a noun phrase (“in ignorance”), but a participle that tells something about a process (“by/through ignorance”).³ So we can imagine that he said this (in my translation): “What therefore you worship through ignorance, this I proclaim to you.” What St. Paul is saying is not that these Athenians are more ignorant than he or us, but that they – rightly – recognise that they cannot understand God and that the one, true God cannot be captured in our categories and concepts. And that is exactly what St. Paul says in the following text, vv.24-25: “The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all men life and breath and everything.” And in v. 29 he emphasises that we must not think that God can be reduced to the physical, “that the Deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, a representation by the art and imagination of man.” As Fr. Thomas says: “it is, precisely, by the act of unknowing that the Athenians give proper honour … to God.” What is new about St. Paul is that he refers to Christ as the one who reveals the unknown God to us, without God thereby becoming tangible or comprehensible to us. God, who sustains us, cannot be understood in any way or captured in any concept. We also see this elsewhere in the Bible. In 1 Kings 8 we read about Solomon having a temple built for God. And at the dedication of the temple he says, in v.27: “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain thee; how much less this house which I have built!” Solomon recognised that we cannot capture God in our own categories and concepts. As St. Paul says of God in 1 Timothy 6:15-16:

The blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has ever seen or can see. To him be honour and eternal dominion. Amen.

This was also important for a theologian from the 5th and 6th centuries who went by the pseudonym Dionysius the Areopagite. You may know that name from the story we have read from Acts. He took the name from it. When St. Paul had finished his speech, it says that the vast majority did not believe him, but in v. 34 it says: “But some men joined him and believed, among them Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris and others with them.” This historical Dionysius thus gave an author from the 5th and 6th centuries a fitting pseudonym.

For it is precisely the unknown God that is central to this Dionysius. He maintains that there is a completely absolute difference between God and creation. He says that God is beyond being, even existence, as we understand it. He is completely beyond our categories and concepts God does not have being, for being is created. God is beyond all this, as the beginning and end of all things. Here the relationship between Creator and creature must be understood primarily as participation. As created beings, we participate in the source of all being. And we exist only because of this participation. To quote St. Paul again: “In him we live and move and have our being.” Everything, including our existence, is a gift. And therefore our relationship with God is not as givers, but as receivers. Without Him, we can do nothing, without Him sustaining us for all time we do not even have existence.

But this does not mean that God is far away. No, it is actually the opposite. It is precisely because God is so radically different from us that he can be so near and present. Because if we believe in a god with a small g who is just like a man in the clouds, a kind of cosmic giant, then He is a separate element in our shared reality, ultimately in opposition to all other things, like any other creature. Such a “god” is in the same category as us, and then he becomes even more distant in practice. He becomes like a great and unapproachable king or emperor. He becomes so great and powerful that he becomes completely lost, far up there. I do not believe in such a God, and neither did St. Paul. No, we do not believe in a man in the clouds. We believe in God with a capital G. We often say that he is always greater, but that he is also always near. That is true, but not in ways that can be measured. Martin Luther puts it this way, with a series of paradoxes:⁴

Nothing is so small but God is still smaller, nothing so large but God is still larger, nothing is so short but God is still shorter, nothing so long but God is still longer, nothing is so broad but God is still broader, nothing so narrow but God is still narrower, and so on. He is an inexpressible being, above and beyond all that can be described or imagined.⁵

When we realise this, that God is not in competition with us, we see that everything in creation is in direct relation to Him, who is always near. It is ironically the radical differentiation between creator and creature that allowed for communion. We can have a share in that which transcends us. For the one true God, with a capital G, is closer to us than we are to ourselves. As St. Augustine put it: “You [God] were more inward to me than my most inward part; and higher than my highest.”⁶ We do not “compete” for space with God. No, He fills all in all and He has revealed Himself to us, in creation, in the Bible, in the sacraments, but most of all in Jesus Christ himself. And we see this on the Areopagus. St. Paul preached that God is completely incomprehensible. He dwells in unapproachable light. But then he preaches that this incomprehensible God nevertheless comes near to us, in Jesus, so that we can have a share in God. As Jesus himself says in John 14:6: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me.” In Christ, God comes near to us, even though we do not understand Him. And He also comes to us in the gifts He gives us, in the words of the Bible, in the water of baptism, in the bread and wine of the Eucharist.

So, when we are asked about God, it is wise to be careful about what God we preach. Do we preach a god with a small g who is just like a little angry man in the clouds, a god who is in competition with us? Or do we preach the one, true God with a capital G, the one who fills all in all? That is important. Because the first one does not exist, and if he did he would not be God. But the one true God is the source of all existence and He comes to us. We cannot understand Him, but we can come near to Him and we can grasp the gifts He gives us. So therefore, when we celebrate the Eucharist, come up and receive. There, in a small wafer of bread and in a sip of wine, we receive Christ, who is not only one of us, but also true God. In the Eucharist we receive the one, true God who forgives all our sins and who gives us new life. That is the gospel, that is good news.

And in the face of that, we must only sing out in praise. And for Dionysius, it is precisely the praise of God that is the central mark of the church. When we see God, it is not the theory that is most important, but that we praise him. Dionysius says that we cannot understand what God is, but we can know who God is, for Jesus has made him known, as it says in John 1:18: “No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known.” And it is precisely because of this that we can praise God, because it is an expression of faith in Christ. In praise we can sing out “holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.” For is not our faith precisely a praise, a worship of God? Praising God does not mean that we understand Him, but that we express our love for Him, the love we have because He has given it to us. We thank God for His work. Yes, worship is simply an expression of the faith, the trust we have in God, the One who has created us, saved us, and lifted us up. We acknowledge that He is God, that we are His fallen creatures, and that we need His help. That is simply the essence of the gospel.

God is God, we are His creatures, and He calls us into a fellowship with Him and with each other through Jesus Christ. And through Him we are called to live in trust and faithfulness. It is a life of trust in the triune God. For even though we believe that God is One, we also believe, paradoxically, that God is three, not in the sense that there are three gods or lords, but that God reveals Himself to us as three persons. So I open and all my Divine Services with these words: “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” For that is the essence of our faith, that “we worship one God in trinity and the Trinity in unity,” as it says in one of our confessions.⁷ Everything proceeds from the Triune God and everything returns to Him. We cannot understand God or how God can be Triune, but we can look at the practical consequences of such a view of God. In Genesis it says that God created us in His image. And in Acts 17:28, which I have quoted several times already, St. Paul says that it is in God “we live and move and have our being.” The one God is, paradoxically, a mutual community of love. God is relational. And when we humans are created in His image, it means that we do not find ourselves until we seek the other. We are created for communion, and we have are responsible for each other. So when God calls us to a life of love, he calls us, in the deepest sense, to reveal God to each other, because God is love.

That is the answer to the question of both who and what God is: God – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit – is love.

Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, who was, is, and will remain, one true God, world without end. Amen.

1. This may sound like transubstantiation, and as I have argued in my PhD and my book, there is not much difference, but this is literally what it says in the German version of Confessio Augustana (CA), 10: “Concerning the Lord’s Supper it is taught that the true body and blood of Christ are truly present under the form [Ger. Gestalt] of bread and wine in the Lord’s Supper and are distributed and received there.” For the translation, see The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, eds., Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (Fortress Press, 2000), 27-105 (for the entire CA). On p. 44, n61, it says: “Gestalt, a term for the bread and wine, used here as the German equivalent for the Latin species, which already was associated with the doctrine of transubstantiation at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215.” For the original texts, see Die Bekenntnisschriften der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche, vollständige neuedition, ed., Irene Dingel (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 65-225.

2. This is partly based on my article “Apofasis, teurgi og kristologi: Om delaktigheit i den ukjente Gud” (Teologisk tidsskrift 13:4, 2024), 213-226. It is, unfortunately, in Norwegian.

3. Thomas Plant, “Into the Agora,” lecture at Towers of Faith, July 2020, cf. Thomas Plant, “The Areopagite Option: Dionysius as Metaphysical Mediator,” lecture at the Tabah Foundation, 29th November 2020.

4. Luther was in many ways a Christian Platonist. For some good treatments, see Knut Alfsvåg, Christology as Critique: On the Relation between Christ, Creation, and Epistemology (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2018), 32-52; Knut Alfsvåg, What No Mind Has Conceived: On the Significance of Christological Apophaticism (Leuven: Peeters, 2010). For a critical edition of Luther’s works, see D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 112 vols. (Weimar 1883-2009). These are divided into Schriften (Writings), 73 vols. (hereafter: WA), Tischreden (Table Talks), 6 vols. (hereafter: WA TR), Die deutsche Bibel (The German Bible), 15 vols. (hereafter: WA DB), and Briefe / Briefwechsel (Letters / Correspondences), 18 vols. (hereafter: WA BR). For translations, see Luther’s Works, 82 vols., eds. Helmut T. Lehmann and Jaroslav Pelikan et al. (St. Louis, MO: Concordia/Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press 1955-, hereafter: LW).

5. Luther, Confession concerning Christ’s supper, in LW 37, 161-372 (here: 228), cf. WA 26, 261-509.

6. St. Augustine, Confessions, III, 6, 11.

7. See Book of Concord, eds., Kolb and Wengert, 23-25 (here: 24), cf. Die Bekenntnisschriften, ed., Dingel, 51-60.