What has given Christianity its strength as a religion, and as a way of life, and as an intellectual tradition is that it has always been confident of what it knows and has insisted from the very beginning... to cite Origen, that the "gospel has a proof which is peculiar to itself"... The existence of a serious dialogue between Christians and Greek and Roman philosophers, conducted at the highest intellectual level for over three centuries (the mid-second century to the mid-fifth), is evidence that Christian thinkers did not supplant reason by faith and authority. The assertion that the gospel had a "proof peculiar of itself" was not a confession of an unreasoning faith but an argument that commended itself to thoughtful men and women.
p. 53-4, Remembering the Christian Past, Robert L. Wilken
Comments