Two continents. Two countries. Nine cities. Thousands of miles. How do I begin to summarize an epic pilgrimage to Greece and Turkey in a short blog reflection? Since I’m a geek who loves to dwell on the parts that some people might find boring, I’ve decided to focus on Plato. If you were on the trip with us, you might be scratching your head. Did anyone mention Plato the entire time we were touring the ancient cities? Not as much as I would have liked. And here’s why: to follow the "Footsteps of Paul" is to realize that the Apostle didn’t walk alone. Long before he stepped onto the dusty roads of Greece, the groundwork for the Gospel was being laid by the giants of human thought. Our journey wasn’t just about the geography of our travels, but about a long, divine conversation between the mind and the soul.
While many of the sites we visited didn’t have a direct "Paul slept here" sign, they resonated with the echoes of the men who tilled the soil of the Western mind. In Athens, we were surrounded by the legacy of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. These men weren’t Christians, yet they spent their lives seeking "The Good," "The True," and "The Beautiful."
The rise of the early Church was possible because these philosophers had already challenged the world to look beyond clay idols and toward a higher, singular reality. They created the vocabulary of the soul. They were the "silent preachers" who prepared the world to finally hear the message of the Logos - the Word.
This connection hit home most powerfully at Mars Hill, where Paul pointed to their own altar to an “Unknown God” to reveal the One the Jews had known for generations. Two thousand years later, it’s hard to see it as much more than natural rock formation. Its edges have been smoothed by foot traffic and now it is a slippery and treacherous climb. Back then, it was a bustling center for Greek thought. Like the rock, the path of human logic is slick and precarious until faith gives us a place to stand, and Paul was the ultimate bridge-builder. He stood in the shadow of the Parthenon—the pinnacle of Greek reason—and didn’t tell the crowd they were wrong to seek truth. Instead, he told them that the Truth they had been searching for through logic had finally become a person.
At places like Thessaloniki and Corinth, Paul spoke to people who were already asking the "big questions" posed by the philosophers. He was taking the skeletal frame of Greek logic and putting the flesh and blood of Christ upon it.
Our final stop was Istanbul. While It is difficult to find a direct connection to Paul here, it felt like the natural conclusion to this intellectual and spiritual arc. While Paul knew it as Byzantium, it eventually became Constantinople—the capital of the empire that codified the very doctrines Paul pioneered in his letters. Istanbul sits at the crossroads of Europe and the Muslim world, and it was here that the Logos was kept alive. While the West entered what we think of as the Dark Ages, it was the thinkers in this region who preserved the works of Aristotle and Plato.
Walking through the Hagia Sophia, I was struck by how the "seeds" of Greek thought didn’t just grow into the Christian Church, but also nourished the Islamic Golden Age. The same logic Paul used to explain Christ was later used by Muslim scholars to understand the nature of God. Istanbul is a living testament to the fact that we are all, in some way, traveling in the same footsteps, looking for the Truth.
This trip challenged me to look at my own faith through a wider lens. It asks us to consider: Are we willing to see God’s hand in the "secular" world around us? In the faiths of others?
Just as Paul used the philosophy of his day to reach the hearts of his neighbors, we are invited to find the divine threads in our own culture. The road of the seeker is long, and it is paved with the thoughts of those who came before us. Whether through the logic of a philosopher or the devotion of a saint, may we all find our way to the "Unknown God" who has made Himself known.
Yours in the Word,
John Johns, Music Director