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Bible Dictionaries
Stoics
Fausset's Bible Dictionary
or Acts 17:18; Acts 17:29. The pantheists of antiquity, as the Epicureans were the atheists. Zeno of Citium founded the Stoic school, 280 B.C. The painted stoa or "portico" where he taught originated the name. Cleanthes and Chrysippus succeeded; Seneca popularized their tenets; Epictetus (A.D. 115), as a Stoic, gives their purest specimens of pagan morality; and the emperor Marcus Aurelius tried to realize them in his public conduct. But egotism and pride are at the root, whereas humility is at the foundation of Christianity. Individual autonomy is their aim, faith in the unseen God is the Christian's principle.
The Stoic bows to fate, the Christian rests on the personal providence of the loving Father. The Stoics had no notion of bodily resurrection, it is the Christian's grand hope. In common with the Stoics Paul denied the Epicurean notion of the world's resulting from chance, and a God far off and indifferent to human acts and sorrows; for, as the poet Aratus says, "in God we live, and move, and have our being"; but he agreed with the Epicureans, God "needs" nothing from us; but he rejects both Stoic and Epicurean doctrines in proclaiming God as the personal Giver to all of all they have, and the Creator of all, of one blood, and the providential Determiner of their times and places, and their final Judge; inferring the sinful absurdity of idolatry from the spiritual nature of God, which is that wherein man reflects His likeness as His child (not in visible body), and which cannot be represented by any outward image.
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Fausset, Andrew R. Entry for 'Stoics'. Fausset's Bible Dictionary. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/fbd/s/stoics.html. 1949.
