Emerging Scholars Blog

InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars Network

Tertullian

Book Review: When Athens Met Jerusalem, by John Mark Reynolds

When Athens Met Jerusalem. John Mark Reynolds (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009).
When Athens Met Jerusalem: An Introduction to Classical and Christian Thought by John Mark Reynolds (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009).

When Athens Met Jerusalem: An Introduction to Classical and Christian Thought. John Mark Reynolds. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009.

Summary: The Christian message advanced in a Greco-Roman World prepared in many ways by both the failure of the Homeric gods and the classic philosophers. This book explores the intellectual antecedents to the gospel in pre-Socratic, Socratic, Platonic and Aristotelian thought, culminating when Jerusalem meets Athens when Paul preaches on Mars Hill.

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Insights from works by people from other worldviews?

James W. Sire
James W. Sire (Ph.D., University of Missouri), retired editor of InterVarsity Press and author of The Universe Next Door and other books on worldviews and apologetics.

James W. Sire addresses another excellent question from Micheal Hickerson, ESN Blog Contributor:

Should Christians worry if they find themselves enjoying or gaining insight from artistic, literary or academic works by people from other worldviews?

I know that this has been a question within the Christian world from the ancients to the present. Didn’t Tertullian (c. 160-230) ask, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” But, though I was brought up in a modestly fundamentalist community, the question has always seemed strange to me. Why not? I respond. All truth is God’s truth.

But let’s say that we find ourselves falling in love with the works of Virginia Woolf or Albert Camus — which, by the way, I have. What then? What truth could there be in their explicit rejection of orthodox Christianity? Well, for one thing, no writer can reject all truth. It takes quite a bit of truth just to continue living. For another, all people have something true to contribute to our understanding of the world and its wonders. If nothing else, they contribute the knowledge and wisdom they’ve accumulated by living out the image of God in which they were created.

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Permit us … Convince us …

St. Patrick
St. Patrick

Prayer

“Permit us not, O Lord, to hear your word in vain. Convince us of its truth, cause us to feel its power and bind us to yourself with cords of faith and hope and love that never shall be broken. We bind to ourselves today, you our God: your power to hold us, your hand to guide us, your eye to watch us, your ear to hear us, your wisdom to teach us, your word to give us speech, your presence to defend us, this day and every day; in the name of the blessed Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, to whom be the kingdom, and the power and the glory, forever and forever. Amen.” — St. Patrick*

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