We are at lecture 4 Athens and Jerusalem, the Apologist. And I want to begin with Preyar from one of the very famous Apologists that we're going to talk about in this lecture, climate of Alexandria. The Preyar that I will use is a hymn, shepherd of tender youth. Climate wrote that we think around 200 AD. Perhaps the earliest of all the Christian hymns, certainly one of the earliest that we have. It's a very beautiful hymn and Preyar. As I pray it, you'll notice several references to children. Two children in Stanza 1 and infants in Stanza 3 in the syllabus. Actually, there are more stanzas that we're using just three of those. I think it's a very wonderful hymn to use in services of infant baptism, shepherd of tender youth. As I pray this, before I pray the amen, I'm going to pause for just a few seconds, give you a chance to name some children that you want to pray for in your heart, your own children or relatives or friends. So we'll pray for our children today and children of our relatives and friends just think of names of several children, should be easy. And I'll just wait a few minutes and you can just name those children for prayer. Let's pray. Shepherd of tender youth guiding in love and truth through devious ways. Christ our triumphant king. We come thy name to sing, hither our children bring to shout thy praise. Thou art our holy Lord the all-so-doing word healer of strife. Thou didst thyself a base that from sins deep disgrace, thou mightest save our race and give us life. So now until we die, sound we die, praise is high and joyful sing. Infants and a glad throng who to thy church belong unite to swell the song to Christ our king. Amen. Christianity not only suffered opposition, physical opposition in the persecutions, but in very beginning Christianity was opposed intellectually by people who attempted to show that it was wrong and to destroy it by intellectual arguments. The first opposition to Christianity on this level as on the level of physical persecution came from the Jews. So we have to look for a moment at Christianity and Judaism. We have in the New Testament itself reflected answers given by Christians to the Jewish attacks upon Christianity. Generally going along this line, Christianity is the continuation of Judaism. It is the true fulfillment of Judaism, Christ fulfills the law, and the church is the new Israel. And we see that through the New Testament. Certainly one of the primary places where we see the Christian apologist at work and the New Testament is Stephen's speech to the Sanhedrin in Acts chapter 7. And then the whole book of Hebrews takes up that theme as well. So in the New Testament there is an example, several examples of the apologist answering the attacks of Judaism upon the Christian faith. To move outside of the New Testament into church history, those Christian apologies against Judaism continue. The most outstanding of those is a book written by the church father, Justin Martyr. It's called the answer to trifo, or perhaps a better title would be dialogue with trifo because it's really a debate between a very educated, Hellenistic Jew whose name is trifo and the church father, Justin Martyr. For Justin Martyr's side of the debate, he depends largely upon two things that he wants to get across to his Jewish friend. And first of all he gives his personal testimony. He tells how he became a Christian. And that is a very important part of the apologist's work, not only as they speak to the Jews but as they speak to the pagans. Justin tells how he searched for many years for true faith. He explored the Greek philosophies and finally came to Christianity in which for the first time he found something that truly satisfied him. The trifo said it was too bad that Justin gave up following Plato, a man of great repute, to cast his like in with a group of rather insignificant and unimportant people like the Christians. The other part of Justin's argument had to do as you would expect with Justin attempting to show from the Old Testament because this is the Bible that they could agree on, Jewish Old Testament. Justin attempting to show that the Old Testament itself talked about Christ, the Messiah, and predicted the coming of Christ. And Justin becomes quite enthusiastic about this and begins to heap up texts that he hopes will overwhelm trifo and convert him to Christianity. One of the texts that Justin is particularly proud of is Psalm 9610. And as he read that in his Bible it said Christ reigns or the Lord reigns from the tree. Amazing verse in the book of Psalms about Christ being on the cross but Christ being king, he reigns from the tree. Well, trifo didn't recognize that verse and they had to do a little textual criticism then because one man was quoting a verse that the other man could not find in his Bible. Well, actually Justin Martyr was using the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament and trifo was using the Hebrew Bible. And in the Hebrew Bible those words from the tree aren't there. It does say the Lord reigns, the Lord reigns but not from the tree. Actually that was a Christian gloss. Christian scribe copying this in a copy of the Septuagint thought it would be a very nice idea to make that prophecy more explicit and added the words from the tree. So on that score Justin was wrong, he did counter by saying well I think that rabbis took it out because they don't want to have prophecies of Christ in their Bibles but that was not what happened at all. The Christians put it in. The stronger ground, Justin argued that to see Christ in the Old Testament at all is itself a gift of the Holy Spirit. Reflecting the teaching of 2 Corinthians 3 when 81 turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. And there he did present I think the Gospel in a very clear way to trifo. Well according to Justin's book the debate went on for two days and neither one was able to convince the other but it's a very impressive debate because it's so courteous. Church Father and the Jewish scholar argue back and forth but without calling each other names in fact they do it on a very high level of politeness. And finally trifo ends his part of the debate this way he says I confess I'm delighted with our discussion. We have found more than we expected more indeed than we possibly could have expected and if we could do this more frequently we should be greatly helped in searching the scriptures themselves. But since you are on the eve of departure and expect to sail any day please remember us as friends when you're gone. That was a very beautiful conclusion to this Jewish statement. Justin is polite as well although he does want to get in one more word before he leaves. Justin praised for trifo and his friends and says I can wish nothing better for you than this gentleman that you may come to the same opinion as ourselves and believe that Jesus is the son of God. So that is probably the most famous of the apologies written by Christians countering or answering the attacks of Judaism in the early church. It's too bad it's really unfortunate that the high level of respect did not maintain itself in later centuries. The Babylonian Talmud would add the anatomers the curses against Christians and Christians including the great preacher Christosdom of Constantinople will begin to think of Jews as Christ killers. So the level of the debate to generate significantly in coming years and that will produce great problems both for Christianity and for the Jews. But in the second century the real opponent is not Judaism but paganism. Just as by the second century the persecutions were coming not from the Jews but from the Romans. There were many anti-Christian writings some of those were very crude and some were very sophisticated. In fact there were very crude examples of graffiti placed on the walls of cities attacking Christianity. This bit of graffiti shows the cross, the Christian symbol, someone on the cross Christ that drawn in the form of a donkey and says in Greek, Alexander Savate Thayon, Alexander worships his God. It's interesting that this bit of graffiti comes from the city of Rome and shows that even people involved in graffiti and Rome in the first century and the second century were using Greek rather than Latin. Greek was commonly spoken even in Rome in the first century and into the second century before it was generally replaced by Latin but this kind of opposition, this kind of persecution was certainly there. You know anything about Alexander but somebody disliked him and disliked his God and so drew this crude picture in the palatine in Rome on the wall of a building in order to put down both Alexander and his God. But there were also some very sophisticated attacks on Christianity. Most important I think was a book written by a man named Celsus and his book was called True Reason. It's the oldest literary attack on Christianity comes from the second century. Celsus depicts himself in the book as a detached pagan, a kind of neutral observer. He's interested in religion but he doesn't have any strong feelings about it. But obviously his real purpose in writing the book is to try to give what he would present as an objective evaluation of Christianity and he uses practically every argument that has been invented up to the modern time against Christianity. And does it well? We don't have a copy of True Reason by Celsus. They've all been lost. But the church father origin in the next century answered Celsus's writing and thereby preserved about nine tenths of it. Our agent would quote Celsus and then give his rebuttal so by reading our agent's Contra Celsum against Celsus, we can get a good idea as to what Celsus was saying. Let me talk about some early apologists like our agent but even before our agent who write books to give a defense for the faith, three of those I will mention all in the second century. The first is the epistle to the magnetists. That is an anonymous letter. We don't know the author. He was writing to someone named Diagnetus and he invites this man to consider the superiority of Christianity to both Judaism and paganism. It's really a very beautiful letter. It's one of the most beautiful, most moving writings from the period of the church fathers. And I suggest in the syllabus that sometimes you read that because I think you will enjoy it. His letter describes Christians as the soul of the world. God has put them in the world and there they exist. In a way like the soul to bring understanding and truth and light honesty to the world. It's disappointing in reading the church fathers as I will point out in a later lecture that there is so little about grace in the writings of the church fathers. Grace seems almost to go underground in the post-apostolic period only to appear with Saint Augustine. And when we do find some exception to that, it's very satisfying. The epistle to the magnetists comes closer, I think, to a real understanding of the Pauline doctrine of grace as any document that I have yet read prior to Saint Augustine. Another writing from this period is the Octavius by Manitius Felix. That's also a conversation, a dialogue between Christian whose name is Octavius and a Roman pagan whose name is Casellius. The pagan intellectually presents the case of Christianity and the Christian refutes it point by point. It's rather sharply reason but rather winsome. Again, the level of courtesy is high in this writing and it is fascinating to read the Octavius of Manitius Felix. To see how, again, almost all of the arguments that have been used through the years against the Christian church were already there and how pertinent the replies to those arguments really are. In this book, could all be fiction of course, it probably was although it may have been based on some true incident. In this book, the Roman pagan Casellius is finally converted by the arguments of Manitius Felix and becomes himself a Christian. The third example that I'd like to give here are the writings of Justin Martyr. So we have Justin Martyr in both sections with his answer to trifle against the Jews and his first and second apology that he wrote to defend Christianity against the pagans. I think most people would say that Justin Martyr is the most outstanding of all the apologists. But I want to think now about two widely different approaches that emerged in the church as to how to answer attacks upon Christianity and particularly how to understand the relationship of Christianity and culture and this will bring us into two other apologists, climate and total again. The question very early on that the church faced was this how is Christianity to be presented in the Greek or Roman world? Christianity had moved out of the Jewish world in that first great cultural move into the Greek or Roman world and how should Christians think about this culture? Is it all bad? Was it good or was it somewhere in between? The Christian connection with Judaism was clear but it was not clear at first as to what the Christian connection was to be with pagan philosophers and pagan culture. It's interesting to see the church in certain parts of Africa wrestling with the same problem today as Christians first and second generation Christians try to decide how to view their African past, the ancestors and the traditional African religions. Should there be a clean break with all that and total rejection or was there something there that could be preserved that in a sense pointed toward Christianity and was fulfilled in Christianity? So the same issue that the church in the Greek or Roman world faced in the second century brothers and sisters in Africa face today. And two quite different answers were given to the question what do we do about culture illustrated by two quite different men who lived both in North Africa at about the same time. Both were fired with a determination to defend the gospel against his enemies and to extend it through evangelism. One of those men was climate, climate of Alexandria we call him. There was a climate of Rome you lived earlier. So it's always important when you say climate talking about the early church to distinguish between climate of Rome and climate of Alexandria. And I think that all of Alexandria is important to because it gives us some understanding of climate's origin where he's coming from literally lived in Alexandria and Alexandria was the intellectual center of the Greek or Roman world. Great Greek city founded back in the days of Alexander the great intellectual capital of the Hellenistic world. It was the city where the Septuagit had been translated first major translation project in history when Jews who now spoke also spoke Greek translated their scriptures into Greek so that people who did not know Hebrew both Jews and others could read the scriptures. Alexandria was the home of Philo the great Hellenistic Jewish philosopher who attempted to accommodate Judaism to Hellenistic thought and it was a place of continuing philosophical discussions. The Eoplatonism would arise in the generation or two after climate of Alexandria as a major intellectual force in the Greek or Roman world. Alexandria had the world's greatest library. It was finally destroyed unfortunately and much of the collection of the great books of antiquity were lost due to the destruction of the library of Alexandria but during the days when climate lived that great library flourished. So climate is part of that very intellectual center and when the question is as should Christians repudiate all of this or embrace it, climate's answer was pretty clear. He said this if someone needs food let him milk the sheep let him share the wall if he needs clothing in this way let me benefit from the fruit of Greek erudition he liked it he loved it and he was not about to abandon it. If this learning is a benefit to me then it is important not to lose it and he tried to make that point not only for himself but for the whole church. That was a very bold move on his part was not completely new we can find something of the same thing in Justin Martyr who says that whenever there is truth wherever there is truth it comes from Christ and so it belongs to us. But it's climate who really takes hold of this and begins to crusade for it. Climate takes over for the church not only the Jews Old Testament Christian said that's ours because part of our book is part of the Christian canon from the very beginning. But climate also says Greek philosophy is ours too and he took over some kind of take over movement. The Christians rather than rejecting learning and culture took it over and viewed it as their own of course it was not of equal value with the scripture but it was a real value. Philosophy is for the Greeks what the law is for the Jews schoolmaster to bring them to Christ so it has great value in leading people toward the truth and it has value for Christians to study as well to see what pagans really did know and to understand that as part of God's gift to the church as well. Of course worldly philosophy is incomplete true and full wisdom is found only in Christ. Henry Chadwick puts it in his book early Christian thought in the classical tradition clinics reverence for the greatest and noblest achievements of Greek humanism is never unqualified doesn't really stand up there with the Bible. He loves Plato and Homer but he does not read them on his knees. He's in his study but then he gets on his knees to read scripture. You can see that so often in climate he talks about that which the chiefs of philosophy only guessed at the disciples of Christ have both apprehended and proclaimed. So it's very rudimentary it's very preparatory it's very partial it is mixed with era but it has value and Christian should receive it as something of value. Now that was a bold move and an important one but of course it was not without its dangers. When a man like Clement and then later origin began to talk like this in the intellectual center of Alexandria there is always the danger that too much of the pagan past will somehow get mixed up with the understanding of Christianity. The danger of syncretism is always there on that side and that danger was not something that was not going to really cause great distress to the church because in Alexandria before too much longer there is the Valentinian gnosticism that we will look at later which was a kind of amalgamation of Hellenistic Greek thought and Christian thought which became the intellectually respectable form of Christianity for many people in Alexandria. So the danger of syncretism was there and actually proved to be disastrous for the church for a certain period of time. The tradition that Clement represented would also continue in origin and in Eusebius of Cessaria and we will look for it later as we move through church history but let me go to the other side because there was a very strong voice in opposition to all of this. About a thousand miles west of Alexandria in another African city Carthage wealthy capital of the province of Africa there lived a man about the same time whose name was to tell you. Italian was a very forceful individual and a very important one. He had been converted in his middle age years I think about when he was about 40 years old, he had been a lawyer, a very gifted speaker, a very dogmatic individual who saw things pretty clearly as he saw them and he did not see things the way Clement did. His most famous quotation on this topic is this, let me read it to you and you'll see exactly where Tatallion is coming from. What then has Athens to do with Jerusalem? See, Clement is trying to bring them close together. Tatallion doesn't like that. What has the academy to do with the church? What have heretics to do with Christians? Our instruction is from the porch of Solomon who himself handed down that the Lord is to be sought in simplicity of heart. Away with those who produce a stoic platonic and dialectic Christianity, we have no need of curiosity after we have Christ Jesus, nor of inquisitiveness after we have the gospel. Since we believe we desire nothing else to believe. For the first thing we believe is that there is nothing else we ought to believe. Well, it's pretty clear that he's not going to be tempted by syncretism. He was a combative personality and I think you can see that as you read him. But the church in Carthage was facing some serious problems. It was a church where there was a great deal of persecution and a church where syncretism was already a problem. There were all sorts of Eastern religions there and it was all too easy for Christians to slip over into one of those or to agree to worship the emperor in order to escape from persecution. Later as we come to the Donatist problem, we'll see that centered right in this area because many, many Christians were tempted and fell and denied Christ and adopted another religion or worshiped the emperor. And Titelion takes a very strong stand against all of that. The temptation to apostatize or compromise was great and Titelion is determined to stand against that temptation since the spirit of the world is so opposed to that of the gospel that Christians should withdraw from the world as much as possible. There's a danger on that side too, of course, and the danger is an almost total isolation from culture in the book by Celsius, true reason. He caricatures Christianity but perhaps he does reflect something of this Titelion attitude when he says that Christians say don't ask questions just believe. That was the way Celsius depicted Christianity was almost what Titelion is saying. Don't ask questions just believe. We should not think of Titelion though as an obscurantist individual who takes this stand because he doesn't know anything himself. He was not anti-intellectual, he was a great scholar. Great theologian. In fact, we'll see that some of our language for the Trinity and for the person of Christ, the two natures of Christ, that we find they come to at Nicaea and Calcedon, much of that language comes first from Titelion, one of the most significant and important church fathers. But we'll also see Titelion becoming a mountainist, the reasons that we'll have to talk about later. But Titelion knew as he put it that philosophers knock at the gates of truth, it sounds almost like planet. But the way Titelion explained it was that they stole any truth they had from the scriptures. So we don't need them, we've got it all in the Bible. And our reason is limited anyway. So we must accept unconditionally what God has made known. We can't reason our way into understanding of Christian truth. In fact, Titelion gloried in the unreasonableness of his faith. Titelion is on one side. Climates on the other. Climates wants to show some continuity with culture. Titelion wants to make a complete break with culture and with human reason. You may know this famous quotation from Titelion to I believe because it is observed. People have puzzled over that ever since he wrote it. God's sign has died. That is credible because it's foolishness. And he was buried at his risen that is certain because it's impossible. Well, he loved that sort of paradox. And he loved that way of saying things. The tradition that Titelion represents continued to. It continued in tation, the Assyrian, to an extreme extent. I wonder if anybody could be more extreme than Titelion, but Titian was. And it continued in early monasticism will come to later. Christians were fleeing the world and everything about the world to isolate themselves in the desert in order to be pure and untainted by both sin and worldly thought. And it continued, I think, in certain forms of later monasticism even up into the Middle Ages. Umberto Eco's novel, the name of the Rose, revolves around a monk's hatred for the writings of Aristotle because he believed that Aristotle and the study of Greek philosophy would so corrupt the church that he was willing to do anything, including murder, to prevent a book. By Aristotle from being available in the monastic library where he lived in northern Italy. It's a very interesting book with a lot of church history. If you can struggle through all the different languages that come up, including one language that's a mixture of all languages, one of the monks had learned so many languages he got them all mixed up and he could not speak any of them. Well, what are we going to make of all this? I wish I could give a answer here and tell you that climate is right or Titelion is right or both are right or neither one is right. But let me try to answer that by referring to a book that you may be familiar with Christ and culture by the American theologian H. Richard Niebuhr. Actually, it should say the St. Louis theologian because Niebuhr grew up, your St. Louis, his father was pastor of an evangelical in a reformed church in right city, reformed German reform congregation that denomination is now part of the United Church of Christ. But Niebuhr's book is very important and very helpful and certainly gives us paradigms that we can use as we go through church history and come to this particular theme. But as I say in the syllabus it raises as many questions as it answers so even Niebuhr is not going to give a final answer but look at the paradigms that he creates for us. How do we think of the church and the world or Christ and culture? We know where to be in the world but not of the world. What does that mean practically? And Niebuhr has five ways in which the Christian church has tried to answer that question. First is Christ against culture and his primary example there of course is to tell you Christ against culture, there are two different things and there an opposition to one another. The opposite view of that is the Christ of culture. That's when Christianity and culture comes so close together that there is really no way to separate the two. They are completely made one. I suppose the greatest example of that would be Eusebius of Cessaria. We'll come to Eusebius when we come to Constantine because Eusebius saw in the victory of Constantine the Christianizing of the Roman culture which to him was totally equivalent then to the church. We'll see St Augustine trying to separate those two things again in the city of God but with Eusebius of Cessaria they come very very close together so Christ against culture, two different things, Christ of culture, one thing and then the other three points of Niebuhr show some tension between Christ and culture but also some connection. There is the Christ above culture view and climate of Alexandria is the primary example here from the early church. St. Thomas Aquinas will be in the medieval church. There is Christ and there is culture. Christ is above culture. There is a definite link. There's not a total syncretism or mixture. There is always Christianity or Christ or the church standing above culture but lifting it up and pulling it on and then there is the view Christ and culture in paradox. We are to be in the world and not of the world and until the eschatology we just live in the tension of that situation. We can't understand it, we can't really fully embrace it. Niebuhr thinks that's Luther's view. It's also the view of some of the late medieval philosophers like Occam and the Scotus. We'll study those later too. You just put out with a bad situation. You have to be in the world but you have to be Christian and it's paradoxical. And then the final point in Christ and culture is Christ the transformer of culture. The church Christ Christianity is in the world to transform the world, to convert the world. Of course in the early church, St. Augustine is the primary example of this view and in the Reformation period John Calvin. Well Niebuhr even ends up by saying I can't choose one above the other. Each one has something to be said for it, some more than others. And it is hard. I find myself theologically at point E because I'm a Calvinist. Often I find myself emotionally at point A because the world looks so bad. And I don't see much conversion going on. So can't give an answer either. But at least we've got our five categories now. And keep those in mind because as we go through the rest of church history, there'll be a occasion when I'll use this as a kind of shorthand. I'll say this is Christ against culture view or a Christ above culture view. The grass withers, flower fades. The word of our God will stand forever. Yes, the question is, it sounds like Tatallion was pretty smart, well-educated man himself. And that's very, very true. He's not second rate in any sense. He's one of the great intellects of the early church. Perhaps with origin the greatest until we come to Augustine. So it's not that we have just an obscurantist figure here who is mad at smart people. He certainly could hold his own in any debate and probably win the debate because he was so incisive and so clear. And he used language so effectively. So it was not that he did not know it was that intellectually he had made a choice that that was not the way to go. But that kind of approach of trying to bring in as much as possible of human learning would actually undermine the church rather than strengthen it. Yes, the people on the climate side certainly did say not all of this is right and we must sift through it and receive what's what's right and reject what's wrong. So theoretically he was willing to do that. Origin was certainly willing to do that. But somehow they didn't do it very well, especially origin. We see him bringing in all kinds of Greek thoughts so that he can very often sound almost like one of the nostics. These people too would write books like the Christian nosticism using the language or the cultural context of the Greek world to present a higher form of nosticism.