Today on Renewing Your Mind... Talk to someone who claims to be an atheist or agnostic, and you'll discover fairly quickly they're quite confident in their unbelief. They usually appeal to philosophical and scientific arguments to make their case. As Christians, as the Apostle Peter reminds us, we need to be prepared to give a reason for the hope that is within us.
And with that in mind, we begin Dr. R.C. Sproul's classic series, Defending Your Faith. Frequently when I'm in conversations with people, often when I meet them for the first time and they ask me what I do, I mention, among other things, that I teach in a seminary. And so invariably they ask me, well, what do you teach? And when I reply that I'm the professor of systematic theology and apologetics, I usually get a blank stare, in fact, frequently a double blank stare because most people don't have any clue as to what systematic theology is all about. And if I am able to explain that to them, then they're really perplexed by this other subject, apologetics. And they say, what in the world is apologetics? Well, let's write the Word on the board because that's what this course is going to be concerned with, the discipline or the science of apologetics, which in the world of theology is normally considered a separate science from theology itself or from biblical studies. And the science of apologetics is devoted to providing an intellectual defense for the truth claims of the Christian faith.
And we like to say at Ligonier that one of our tasks is to help people know what they believe and why they believe it. And so the case that is presented for a particular truth claim, the evidence or the reason that is advanced why we should believe this rather than that is what the task of apologetics is about. Now, the term apologetics involves the science of giving an apology.
Now, in our language to give an apology means to say, I'm sorry for having offended you or for having done something wrong, but that's not the meaning of the term here. The word apologetics comes from a Greek word apologia, which means literally to give a reply or to give an answer. Now, let's take a moment and look at the biblical text where we encounter this concept of apologetics and its responsibility for Christians. If we look at the first epistle of Peter in the third chapter, in the fifteenth verse, we read these words, but sanctify the Lord God in your hearts and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you with meekness and fear, having a good conscience that when they defame you as evildoers, those who revile your good conduct in Christ may be ashamed.
And so the first aspect that we are told to be concerned about here is that we are told to be ready, stand ready, to give a defense or a response or an apologia, a reply to anyone who asks and who wants us to give a reason for the hope that is in us. And then he goes on to say in this injunction that the end of this is that those who revile the truth of Christianity might be ashamed, and that gives us a pretty important clue as to one of the main reasons for apologetics. But in the early church, the first century apologists and into the second century, the Christian intellectuals of that community had to be engaged in a defensive work answering false charges that were leveled against the nascent Christian community. For example, if we would read the writings of the one called Justin Martyr, who wrote the Apology or the Apologia, Justin Martyr was responding to the critics of the Christian church who were accusing Christianity of several things. First of all, the charges against the Christian community included that the Christians of the early days were seditious, that is that they were traitors who were undermining the authority of the state. By this time in Roman history the cult of emperor worship had emerged, and the loyalty oath was in effect to Roman citizens to proclaim their loyalty.
They had to recite the phrase, Kaiser curios. And the Christians who believed that Caesar was to be honored, as the New Testament teaches, responded by saying, as Justin Martyr did, look, Christian people are models of civic obedience. We're not keeping the police of Rome busy chasing us around trying to capture us for theft or for murder or for these other crimes. We try to be good citizens. We obey the speed limits. We pay our taxes.
We do all of these things. But we can't say Caesar is Lord. But rather we say Jesus, O curios, Jesus is the Lord. Now in American history, one who was nominated to the position of cabinet member in George W. Bush's cabinet, Mr. Ashcroft, was brought under sharp criticism because at a speech at a Bible college in the south, he had once quoted an early Christian founder of America by saying, we in America have no king but Jesus. And as a Christian, Mr. Ashcroft was trying to confess his supreme loyalty to Christ as king, and it got him in all kinds of trouble.
Well, that's the kind of problems that Christians had in the very first century when they said, we will honor the laws of the land. We will pay our taxes, but we will not call Caesar Lord nor would they call him sabotage or august because from the Christian perspective, the only one who is august is God Himself. And so the reply was to show the emperor, and by the way, the apology of Justin Martyr was written to the Emperor Antoninus Pius appealing to his name as well as to his reputation for fairness to be just in his judgment of Christians and not convict Christians on invalid rumors. The other charge that was brought against the Christian community was that they were atheists because the Christian community would not embrace the gods and goddesses of the Roman pantheon.
We remember the martyrdom of Polycarp when, as an old man in his late eighties, was brought into the arena in the presence of the emperor, and the emperor did not want to make a martyr out of Polycarp, who was bishop of Smyrna at that time, the venerable saint, because the emperor understood that if he executed this defenseless old man that it would look bad on the government, and so the emperor was trying to find a way to help Polycarp escape the death penalty. And he said to Polycarp, as Polycarp stood in the middle of the arena, all you have to do to have your life spared is to say, away with the atheists, because Christians were regarded as atheists in Rome because they didn't believe in the Roman gods. And so Polycarp in his wisdom said, oh, that's all you want me to do is say away to the atheists? He pointed up to the stands to all the Romans, and he said, alright, away with the atheists. And he replied by saying, I'm not an atheist. You people are the atheists.
And of course, the emperor didn't like that, and Polycarp was killed. But Justin Martyr was trying to answer the charge that Christians were atheists, and he pointed out that's a distortion of who we are. We are not atheists.
We are theists, and we are totally committed to the reality of God. It's just that we reject the religion of polytheism. Also, the Christians were considered cannibals because the rumor was spreading around Rome that these Christian people, these strange people, were meeting in the catacombs and meeting in secret, practicing cannibalism, because the word got out that they were engaged in eating somebody's body and drinking somebody's blood. And so the apologists had to reply to these charges and say, that's not true, that what we do in our meetings is that we celebrate a sacrament of the Lord's Supper where the bread represents the body of our Lord who was killed for us and so on. And so at that point, you see that what the apologists were doing was clarifying and replying to false charges and false accusations leveled against the Christian church. And beloved, that task of replying to distortions and false misconceptions of what Christianity is did not end in the first century or in the second century. That's a task that the apologist has to do in every generation because wherever Christianity flourishes, it is distorted, misrepresented, and its opponents and enemies will accuse Christians and the church of all kinds of things.
And so the task of the apologist at that point is to offer a defensive posture to repel these false accusations. But in addition to that, there was also the real struggle in the first three centuries with respect to the intellectual credibility of Christianity. And what had happened was that Christianity arrived on the scene at a time where Greek philosophy that had ruled the intellectual world in antiquity was in sharp decline. In fact, some historians will say that Western civilization was saved from the internal corruption and decay of the Greek empire as it was conquered by Rome and so on, and that civilization was restored and recovered by a new worldview, a new ethic that was articulated from Jesus and through His apostles, particularly from the Apostle Paul, so that there was a new not just religion but philosophy on the scene that was taking the place of ancient Platonism and Aristotelianism or Stoicism or Epicureanism and the other philosophical systems that were competing with Christianity for human commitment. In fact, we get a little glimpse of that in the pages of the New Testament when Paul visits Athens, which was the cultural center of the ancient world. It was the place where Plato had established his academy and Aristotle of the Lyceum and where Greek philosophy and Greek culture had flourished. And you remember when Paul finally came to Athens and he beheld the city, we read in the Scriptures that his spirit was moved within him because he observed that the entire city was given to idolatry.
Now, that was not the normal perception. The normal perception of Taurus and visitor to Athens was that this was the Zenith. This was the acme of the greatest culture of human history, that this was the substance of human grandeur that had been incarnated in the city of Athens.
Paul saw Athens as a city totally given to idolatry. And so he goes to the Areopagus, and remember that the god of war in Greek mythology was known as Ares, and his counterpart in Roman mythology was Mars. And so you'll sometimes read in Acts, you'll say that Paul visited Mars Hill, which is simply the English translation of the Greek, which has him at the Areopagus, which is the Greek version of the god Mars. But anyway, there's this hill where there's a temple to the god of war, and Paul goes there to proclaim Christianity and to work as an apologist in the middle of this intellectual culture. And there he encounters philosophers from the schools of Stoicism and Epicureanism.
And by the way, those are the only two schools of philosophy that are explicitly mentioned in the Bible. And so we see the Apostle Paul engaging in debate in apologetics in the public arena with representatives of other philosophies, in this case, Stoicism and Epicureanism. And it's an interesting study, and we'll look at it later on, on how Paul deals with the pagan philosophers on that occasion. But that little incident represents what the church was encountering all over the place in the first three centuries, head-on collisions with Greek philosophy and with other philosophical movements.
And so the Christian church was called upon to respond or to reply to the challenges brought against the church from the advocates of Greek philosophy. And again, if you study Athanagoras and if you study Justin Martyr, you will see something jump out of the pages, that their favorite motif in dueling with the pagan philosophers of that day was their appeal to the Logos, which is the Word of God that John introduces in the first chapter of his book. You know that when John introduces his life of Christ, his gospel, he begins by saying, in the beginning was the Word, the Logos. And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Jarring, isn't it? For in one breath, John is distinguishing the Word from God, saying the Word was with God. And then in the next breath, he's having an identity between the Word and God, saying the Word was God. And then he goes on to say how everything that was made came into being through the Word, and nothing that was made came into being apart from the Word. And that is consistent with other aspects of Christology that we find in the Bible that says that Christ is the one by whom, in whom, and for whom all things exist. Now we may not get all excited about that kind of a statement, but to the Greek philosopher, this was dynamite stuff, because in the history of Greek thought, this very Word, Logos, not only functioned as the simple everyday word for word, but it was a concept that was filled with philosophical baggage. Whereas in, for example, the philosophy of Heraclitus and later in the philosophy of Stoicism, the Logos was seen as the superior power in the universe that ordered and regulated all things in the universe.
The big question that the Greek philosophers were trying to answer was what we call the question of unity and diversity, or the question of the one and the many. We look out the window and we see birds, we see grass, we see telephone poles, we see automobiles, we see people, all this diverse manifestations of the world around us. And we look at that and we say, how does this make sense? Is the experience that we have of nature and life chaos that is a disjoined mass of meaningless, incoherent data bits, or is there something that makes all of this intelligible?
Carl Sagan, when he had his program on television and later his book, used as his title for that program, the word cosmos. And at the very beginning of that, he makes the distinction between cosmos and chaos. And the whole point of cosmos in Greek thought is that the world ultimately is orderly.
You can know it. It fits together. It makes sense. But there has to be some overarching principle or power that brings unity to the diversity, that makes the world in which we live a universe rather than a multiverse so that it can be known. And in Greek philosophy, the concept of unity and order and harmony was called the logos. Now, it would be a serious mistake to go to the first chapter of John's gospel and say that what John does here is just lift up the Greek concept of logos in their philosophy, bring it over and stick it into New Testament theology, and just bring it over without change.
No. He fills it with Hebrew content from the personification of God that is found in the Old Testament, from the wisdom of God that is found in the Old Testament, and that sort of thing. But there are parallels. There are points of contact that the early apologists jumped all over. They said, you're interested in logos?
So are we. And we're going to tell you that that which brings order and harmony to the whole created world, that which Plato contemplated in his metaphysical philosophy, the thing that Aristotle was trying to penetrate in his philosophical inquiry was the mystery of the divine logos, who is the one who brings order, purpose, and harmony out of all things. One professor of apologetics points out that you could translate the first verse of John's gospel like this, in the beginning was logic, and logic was with God, and the logic was God, and the logic became flesh and dwelt among us. Now, the difference, of course, between the logos of the New Testament and the logos of Greek philosophy is that this logic is not some impersonal force or power.
May the force be with you stuff. But the thing that was a scandal to the Greeks, but was so profound to the thinkers of that time, was that the one who is the logic of all the universe is a person, an eternal person, a person with a mind, with a will, with a personal identity. And that is the contribution at that moment that very early primitive Christian apologetics made in the Greek world.
And we'll explore that idea and others like it as we continue later on in this development. And with that enticing preview, we wrap up the first lesson of Dr. R.C. Sproul's series Defending Your Faith. We're glad you've joined us for this Saturday edition of Renewing Your Mind.
I'm Lee Webb. Dr. Sproul reminded us today that part of the mission of Ligonier Ministries is to equip Christians to articulate what you believe and why you believe it. This series, Defending Your Faith, is foundational in fulfilling that mission. We will be airing the entire 32-part series here in the Saturday edition of our program, and we hope you'll tune in each week. We're also making the entire series available to you for a gift of any amount. It's an ideal teaching tool for a high school or college Sunday school class at your church or a small group meeting in your home. So I hope you'll contact us today and request the 11-DVD set. Again, it's titled Defending Your Faith. To donate online, you can go to RenewingYourMind.org, or you can call us.
Our number is 800-435-4343. By the way, this is a special edition of the series that includes a digital study guide plus the audio files for each lesson. Let me also recommend Table Talk Magazine to you. This is another helpful tool in equipping you to defend the faith. You'll find guided devotions for each day of the month, plus articles devoted to a particular theological theme. For example, the February issue looks at what Jewish life was like during the days of Jesus.
You can learn more and subscribe when you go to TableTalkMagazine.com. There are different views of apologetics, and it's important to know the difference. Does it mainly consist of having our historical and archaeological evidence lined up, or is it more of a spiritual exercise? I hope you'll join us next Saturday as R.C. answers the question, Why Apologetics? That's next week here on Renewing Your Mind.
