Pre-Christian apologetics

Pre-Christian apologetics 

E. Feser

... In Book VIII of The City of God, Augustine noted that thinkers in the Neoplatonic tradition had seen that God is the cause of the existence of the world; had seen also that only what is beyond the world of material and changeable things could be God; had understood the distinction between the senses and their objects on the one hand, and the intellect and its objects on the other, and affirmed the superiority of the latter; and had affirmed that the highest good is not the good of the body or even the good of the mind, but to know and imitate God.  In short, these pagan thinkers knew some of the key truths about God, the soul, and the natural law that are available to unaided human reason.  This purely philosophical knowledge facilitated Augustine’s own conversion to Christianity, and would provide an intellectual skeleton for the developing tradition of Christian apologetics and theology.

Nor is it that hard to find common ground here.  Hinduism affirms a single self-existent and unchanging divine reality, even if this reality is usually conceived of in pantheistic rather than theistic terms; and there are explicitly theistic strands too in the Hindu philosophical tradition.  Hinduism also has a notion of the soul, even if its doctrine of reincarnation takes the idea in a direction foreign to Christianity.  In its affirmation of an objective moral order that operates like a law of nature rather than an arbitrary divine command, the notion of karma parallels that of natural law (though of course there are radical differences too).  In the Chinese context, Taoism, Confucian ethics, and Neo-Confucian metaphysics also provide a rich set of conceptual resources by which a discussion of natural theology and natural law might proceed.

So, what is the correct order of topics in a philosophically rigorous apologetics -- the kind I have attributed to Neo-Scholastic writers?  The key point to emphasize here is how much must be, and can be, established by purely philosophical arguments before one even gets to addressing the claims of Christianity specifically.  A rich system of “natural apologetics,” as it is sometimes called, must precede specifically Christian apologetics if the latter is to have its proper intellectual foundation.  And arguing for the existence of God is only one part of this task.  Let me sketch out the order of topics I have in mind.  (Mind you, I am not stating the arguments of natural apologetics or Christian apologetics here.  That would take a book.  I am sketching out what a complete system of apologetics would involve, and does involve in the best authors on the subject.)