“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.
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