Countercultural Holiness as a Defense of the Faith in the Apology of Aristides
“Something Divine Mingled Among Them”: Countercultural Holiness as Apologetic in the Second Century: Part 1 of 5
In the next few newsletters, I will be posting a shortened version of the paper I presented last week at the 74th Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in Denver. If you have read the paper I presented last year, you will notice some similarities between the two, since both of these presentations are part of a larger project that will eventually become an academic textbook focused on Christian apologetics in the second century A.D.
A few years ago, that was the title of the text that won the Christianity Today Book of the Year Award in the category Apologetics and Evangelism. When I read this work from philosopher and pastor Myron Bradley Penner, I was relieved to learn it is not the entirety of apologetics that’s on its way to the cemetery. It is only—in Penner’s words—“the Enlightenment project of attempting to establish a rational foundation for Christian belief” that’s drawing its final breaths. And yet, this dying approach to apologetics is not limited to one stream of apologetics.
If Penner is correct, this Enlightenment project is not the exclusive domain of any particular type of apologetics. Every modern expression of apologetics—presuppositionalism no less than classical apologetics, evidentialism no less than Reformed epistemology—is guilty of trying to launch arguments from objective, universal, and neutral common ground. Each approach assumes in differing ways the modern myth of “a common space free and disengaged from either the political or religious sphere.”
According to The End of Apologetics: Christian Witness in a Postmodern Context, no common grounds remain where the Christian and the non-Christian may meet. To seek such common place is to grant that space to secularity. Any apologetic that attempts to mount an argument from a shared rational foundation may be, in Penner’s words, “the single biggest threat to genuine Christian faith that we face today.”
What I wish to challenge in this context is not Penner’s critique of current approaches to apologetics. My goal is, instead, to challenge the post-epistemological solution that The End of Apologetics presents as the only effective form of witness in a secular age. The intent of this paper is not merely to challenge the solution but to suggest a better alternative grounded in the apologetics of second-century Christians.
An Apologetic of Edification
According to The End of Apologetics, the aim of apologetics today should be for the church to interpret society “back to itself theologically in such a way that both the difference between the way of the world and the Christian way of the cross is made clear.” The result would be a uniquely postmodern witness in which content becomes indistinguishable from form. A Christian who witnesses in this way declares to the world, in Penner’s words, “This is the truth I have encountered that has edified me. Take a look at my life, who I am and see if you think that it’s true. And I believe that if you consider your own life and appropriate this truth, you will find it edifying for you too.”
Any argument that contends for the rationality of a particular truth claim is off-limits, according to Penner, because it separates an individual’s cognitive commitments from the larger context of his or her life. Christians cannot correct this crisis simply by using rational arguments within the larger context of relationships with unbelievers. The arguments themselves are the problem. Arguments from the order of the cosmos and appeals to Scripture remove apologetics from the context of communal witness and reduce human beings to their status of belief or unbelief. What must replace such arguments, according to The End of Apologetics, is a communal life of wholeness and integrity that edifies the seeker.
The End of Apologetics is correct to point out that the presumption of neutral common ground is a delusion, though presuppositional apologists have already made this point for decades. The author also rightly recognizes that apologetics ought to be expressed in a community whose life together reveals the weaknesses in the way of the world—and this is perhaps the book’s strongest point. In the modern era, the defense of the faith has frequently been an intellectual and individual affair, separated from the life of the local church and focused instead on high-profile debates and superstar apologists with massive platforms, podcasts, and radio programs. Penner is correct to suggest that
Christian witness … requires a community—a church in particular—in which truthful speech is made evident by the quality and character of their practices and life together. … The ability to witness requires a community of like-minded people whose way of life together displays the truth being witnessed to and makes sense of the witnesses’ speech. It takes a community to tell the truth.
Yet Penner’s singleminded focus on the apologetic of an edifying community seems to sideline all appeals to the cosmos, to rationality, and to the historicity of Scripture—each one of which has, at different times and in a vast variety of different ways, served a central role in the practice of Christian apologetic long before modernity was ever a gleam in any historian’s eye. The End of Apologetics brushes past premodern solutions by dismissing such solutions as attempts to reconstruct “the order of the premodern world.” However, the impossibility of reconstructing a premodern order does not negate the possibility that some patterns from the premodern church’s witness in hostile cultural contexts might provide insight into contemporary practices of apologetics. In fact, one possible apologetics model in which the Christian community is central might be found in the second century.
For several Christian apologists in the second century—Aristides, for example, as well as Justin, Athenagoras, and the author of the Epistle to Diognetus—the life and witness of the Christian community functioned as an essential part of their pleas for tolerance and of their arguments for the truthfulness of Christian faith. At the same time, the emphasis that these apologists placed on the witness of the community did not exclude arguments that began with rational inferences from common apprehensions of beauty, order, and contingency in the cosmos.
The Apologetic Function of the Holiness of the Church
In Penner’s approach, the better life of the Christian community reveals to the non-Christian individual that his or her way of life is not edifying. For the apologists of the second century, the better life of the Christian community did far more than merely unmasking defective ways of being in the world. The life of the church also fulfilled and fit with the order of the cosmos itself. Far from setting aside appeals to the cosmos or arguments for the truthfulness of the text of Scripture, these apologists saw the life of the church as a fulfillment of the order of the cosmos and as a sign pointing to the self-authenticating truth of Scripture.
What I will argue in the remainder of this paper is that, in the Apology of Aristides in particular, the holiness of the church functioned apologetically as a crucial link between truths that were inferred from the cosmos and the truth that is revealed in Scripture. The apologetic of Aristides began with the order of the cosmos, moved to the nature of God and the holiness of the church, and then turned to the truth of the written Scriptures as the only means by which the countercultural life of the church could be understood.
The Text and Recipients of the Apology of Aristides
The original Apology of Aristides seems to have been written in the early or mid-second century. The textual history of the Apology is complex, and the form of the earliest Greek text cannot be established with certainty prior to the fourth century. For this reason, none of the arguments in this paper depend on the precise wording in any particular text or translation of the Apology.
In the Syriac translation of the text, the stated recipient is Emperor Antoninus Pius, whereas the portion that survives in far shorter Armenian version has Emperor Hadrian as the addressee. Eusebius of Caesarea likewise places the Apology in the reign of Hadrian. The Greek text survives primarily as an addition in a religious romance known as Barlaam and Ioasaph, and this adaptation does not preserve any recipient’s name.
The identity of the stated recipient is not directly relevant for the purposes of this paper. It does, however, raise the question of the intended audience of this and other early apologies, which is relevant for this discussion. It seems unlikely that the apologies of Aristides, Justin, and Athenagoras were actually presented before any of the emperors whose names they include as addressees. What may be significant, though, is the philosophical bent of each emperor addressed by these early apologists. Each one of the imperial addressees of these treatises was known to some degree as a philosopher. It seems that these names may have been intended less as destinations for the apologies and more as appeals intended to attract the attention of philosophically-inclined readers.
Click here to read part 2 of this article.
Great article! Excited for the next sets. Integrating objective arguments with subjective/communal edification is totally it. Throwing common ground out with the bath water sounds way too self-destructive, not to mention counterintuitive to natural theology.