The Church and the World in Conversation: The City of God and “Interurban” Dialogue

Abstract

What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Tertullian famously demanded (De praescriptione haereticorum 7), and although he assumed the answer to his rhetorical question was, “Nothing whatever,” the evidence of the past two thousand years has been, “Quite a bit.” The very posing of Tertullian’s question betrays his indebtedness to the classical rhetorical tradition which was the mainstay of Greek and Roman education and shows that he, like all of us, was a product of the cultural world in which he lived. And yet his question cannot be dismissed so easily. To be sure, Tertullian represented one extreme position in the attempt to understand the relationship of Christians to the world around them. The opposite extreme can be seen in Justin Martyr, writing a generation earlier. Because Christ is the incarnate Logos of the Father, Justin argued, anyone who lives in accord with the Logos is a follower of Christ. Thus, he held, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus were really Christians although some had con-