What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?
Tertullian's question echoes forward
Tertullian asked the question in the second century and the fourth and fifth centuries spend their energy answering it.
What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What has philosophy to do with theology? What does the intellectual tradition of Greece — Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics — have to offer to a faith built on the claim that God became a carpenter in an occupied province and was executed as a criminal?
The answers that emerge in the patristic period are diverse and in permanent tension with each other.
Tertullian's own answer is roughly: not much. Philosophy produces heresy. The simple faith of the creed is sufficient. Seek no further.
Justin Martyr's answer is: everything that is true in philosophy was pointing toward the Logos who became flesh. The philosophers were reaching toward what Christ completed.
Origen's answer is: the tools of philosophy are essential for understanding scripture at its deepest levels, but they must be subordinated to revelation.
Augustine's answer is: spoil the Egyptians. Take what is true from wherever you find it and bring it into the service of the gospel, the way Israel plundered Egyptian gold to build the tabernacle.
All of these answers are still alive. The debate between them is still the central debate in Christian intellectual life — how much of the surrounding culture to absorb, how much to resist, where the synthesis produces clarity and where it produces confusion.
Tertullian's question has no final answer. It requires a fresh answer from every generation.
“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church?”
— Tertullian, Prescription Against Heretics 7, c. 200 AD
“Be careful that you don't let anyone rob you through his philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the elements of the world, and not after Christ.”
Your generation has its own version of Tertullian's question. What has this cultural moment to do with Jerusalem? What does the church absorb, resist, transform?
The answers from church history suggest that the question cannot be resolved once and for all — that each generation has to do the discernment work for itself, aware of both the dangers of isolation and the dangers of capitulation.
The church that never engages the surrounding culture becomes a museum. The church that fully absorbs the surrounding culture becomes redundant.
Where is your community on this spectrum? And where do you think it needs to move?