“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”
This famous quote comes from Tertullian, a second-century Carthaginian Christian, and the author of several theological tracts. Tertullian's question has echoed across the centuries for a very curious reason. He meant it rhetorically, and it is still normally posed as a rhetorical question. But where he expected readers to agree that Christianity had nothing of significance to learn from ancient Greece, later Christians viewed the matter quite differently. Over the centuries, Christianity matured into a faith that had everything to do with both Athens and Jerusalem. Rejecting Tertullian's call for a disciplined separation between revealed truth and natural reason, we have insisted across centuries that Athens and Jerusalem do indeed belong together. Sages and scholars have dedicated lifetimes to showing how these two pillars of the ancient world can, in fact, be united in one graceful edifice.
In a technocratic, post-Enlightenment age, it's easy to forget how incredible and vitally important this marriage of faith and reason truly is. Fortunately, Samuel Gregg has reminded us with his recent book, Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization. It's a delightful little volume, which manages simultaneously to be uplifting, substantial, and entirely unoriginal. That's not a criticism. The goal of a work of this kind is not to develop new ideas, but to familiarize readers with old ones that are in danger of being forgotten. It's rare to find a book that packs so many important truths into 166 lucid pages.
Read Full Article »