Note: From The Gospel After Christendom (Zondervan, 2025). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
Stephen Presley documents how the early church developed for apologetic purposes “the full set of rhetorical devices” they inherited from their cultural setting. [Stephen O. Presley, Cultural Sanctification: Engaging the World Like the Early Church, p. 85] Responding to challenges of their particular context, early apologists “defended the uniqueness of Christianity, argued that Christian doctrine and morality were more intellectually satisfying than the alternatives, appealed to the antiquity of Christianity, and showed how Christianity served the public good.” [Stephen O. Presley, Cultural Sanctification: Engaging the World Like the Early Church, p. 85] Presley describes how early apologists used a strategy of both/and: “assimilating”/”conquering.” Surveying works by apologists such as Justin Martyr, Origen and Aristides, Presley illustrates how these authors used their cultures’ rhetorical tools and forms of argumentation while simultaneously critiquing their competitors’ views to argue for Christianity’s truth and goodness.
Similarly, John Cavadini notes the dynamic and contextual nature of the early Christian apologies in contrast to the tendency of later theologians to interpret these apologies anachronistically by way of their own systematic theologies:
In such a context [i.e., of the early church], it is probably better to talk about strategies of persuasion, of the use of shared rhetorical convention and philosophical wisdom, to help leverage and secure Christian commitment, rather than to think in terms of the contrast between “natural” and “revealed” theology that has more of a place in later systematic or scholastic theology…. It may be that our readiness to use such categories as “natural knowledge of God” anachronistically has blinded us to the genius of these ancient strategies of persuasion and clarification, and kept us from learning as much as we can from them. [John C. Cavadini, Visioning Augustine: Challenges in Contemporary Theology, p. 241]
Asking which of the modern categories (e.g., presuppositional, evidential, cultural) the early apologists fit within is like asking what the early church thought about a liberal democracy. Attempting to answer such questions framed in anachronistic categories keeps us from a deeper understanding as well as a faithful retrieval of their work.
Augustine: Paragon of Early Apologists to the Pagans
Of all the early apologists, Augustine serves as a paragon for our purposes, in part because, as Gerard O’Daly shows, many of his arguments were retrieved from his predecessors’ writings and then creatively contextualized for a different situation. “The post-Constantinian Christianization of the Roman empire,” O’Daly argues, “had altered the context of apologetic. Rome had a new public religion, and the question of its efficacy in protecting Rome called for new arguments. Yet many elements of earlier apologetic could be, and were, exploited by Augustine.” [Gerard O’Daly, Augustine’s City of God: A Reader’s Guide, p. 39] Augustine was conscious of the universal longings and fears of the human heart. However, he also understood how cultivating desires and doubts hinges on historical factors. For example, the immediate occasion for The City of God was the sack of Rome and the pastoral and apologetic concerns this event triggered. With Rome in rubble, it was not just the future of the empire that was in question. Because many Christians had put their hope for the kingdom of God by way of the Roman Empire, the sack called into question the church’s legitimacy and future. In the days following Rome’s fall, pagan traditionalists escaped to Augustine’s North Africa and blamed Christians for the empire’s decline. These attacks by strident pagans added to the anxiety many Christians felt during this time of tectonic shifts and an uncertain future.
With these particular concerns in view, Augustine wrote his apologetic magnum opus with three groups in mind: pagan critics, former confessing Christians, and Christians who had begun to waver under the “weight of the Roman religious and political tradition which represented Christianity as a betrayal of all that had made Rome great and, most especially, as a betrayal of its gods.” [William Babcock, introduction to The Works of Saint Augustine, vol. I/6, p. xiv] Augustine’s response engaged history, challenged the assumptions of their particular social location, and offered a theologically nuanced way to live within the emerging situation.
His meta-approach in The City of God was to out-narrate the voices who accused Christianity of being harmful to the welfare of the empire and her citizens. In the first ten books, Augustine offered an immanent critique against his rivals, using the pagans’ own authorities – narrating a deflationary account of their history. In the second half (books 11-22), Augustine invited readers to try on the biblical story, arguing along the way that Christianity makes sense of history, the human experience and the material world.
Augustine’s biblical vision equipped him with the resources to critique Roman society’s social underpinnings. Without completely denying the relative value of earthly goods, his biblical eschatology furnished Augustine with a vantage point that transcended and critiqued the myths and ultimate aims of the Roman Empire. But as recent scholars have noted, his cultural critique did not simply deconstruct. Augustine cut in order to heal.
A Better Way to Happiness
Augustine converted pagan and Roman aspirations – represented by such words as peace, happiness and justice – to show how they are understood and fulfilled within the Christian narrative. For instance, rather than suggesting his opponents should stop seeking “happiness,” Augustine provoked them to reconsider how happiness should be pursued and where it is ultimately found. The “innate goods” common in this life are temporal and our experience of them burdened by the knowledge of their eventual loss: “The life, therefore, which is weighed down by the burden of such great and severe evils, or is subject to the chance that such great and severe evils might afflict it, should by no means be called happy.” [Augustine, The City of God, 19.4] Hence, Augustine challenged his readers to consider the possibility of another kind of happiness:
If anyone uses this life in such a way that he directs it to that other life as the end which he loves with ardent intensity and for which he hopes with unwavering faithfulness, it is not absurd to call him happy even now, although happy in hope rather than in this reality. Without that hope, in fact, this reality is only a false happiness and a great misery. For it does not make use of the true goods of the soul, because no wisdom is true wisdom if it does not direct its intention – in everything that it discerns with prudence, bears with fortitude, constrains with temperance and distributes with justice – to the end where God will be all in all in assured eternity and perfect peace. [Augustine, The City of God, 19.20]
His interaction with the concept of happiness is an example of an important feature of Augustine’s persuasive strategy. He entered the dominant cultural narratives of his day to offer a severe diagnosis. But then, as a good doctor, he offered the medicine of Jesus Christ and reassured his patients that if the gospel is humbly received, their personal stories would be redeemed and their desires healed.
Taken from The Gospel After Christendom © 2025 by The Gospel Coalition, used with permission from Zondervan Reflective.
Collin Hansen, vice president for content and editor in chief of The Gospel Coalition; et al.
