Jesus: Philosopher and Apologist
by Douglas Groothuis
Contrary to the views of critics, Jesus Christ was a brilliant thinker, who used logical arguments to refute His critics and establish the truth of His views. When Jesus praised the faith of children, He was encouraging humility as a virtue, not irrational religious trust or a blind leap of faith in the dark. Jesus deftly employed a variety of reasoning strategies in His debates on various topics. These include escaping the horns of a dilemma, a fortiori arguments, appeals to evidence, and reductio ad absurdum arguments. Jesus’ use of persuasive arguments demonstrates that He was both a philosopher and an apologist who rationally defended His worldview in discussions with some of the best thinkers of His day. This intellectual approach does not detract from His divine authority but enhances it. Jesus’ high estimation of rationality and His own application of arguments indicates that Christianity is not an anti-intellectual faith. Followers of Jesus today, therefore, should emulate His intellectual zeal, using the same kinds or arguments He Himself used. Jesus’ argumentative strategies have applications to four contemporary debates: the relationship between God and morality, the reliability of the New Testament, the resurrection of Jesus, and ethical relativism.
WAS JESUS A PHILOSOPHER AND APOLOGIST?
I had to face the question of whether Jesus was a philosopher and apologist head-on when I was asked to write a book on Jesus for the Wadsworth Philosophers Series. I already knew that Jesus articulated a developed worldview and reasoned brilliantly with His opponents. As I studied the subject carefully, however, I came to appreciate Jesus, the philosopher, more than ever. When Jesus defended the crucial claims of Christianity — He was its founder, after all — He was engaging in apologetics, often with the best minds of first-century Judaism.
Some Christians may be reluctant to label Jesus as a philosopher or apologist because they worry that such a reference may demean the Lord of the universe. One well-known Christian philosopher told me that emphasizing Jesus’ reasoning abilities could take away from Jesus as a revelator, a source of supernatural knowledge. I respect his concern but disagree for the following reasons.
Jesus was the incarnation of the Logos — whom theologians call the second person of the Trinity. As Christian philosopher and theologian Carl Henry and others have emphasized, the apostle John used the term logos to personalize the Greek view of the wisdom, logic, and rationality of the universe.1 Our English translations say, “In the beginning was the Word [Logos]” (John 1:1).2 Jesus embodies the rational communication (Word) of God’s truth. He is “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). We should expect that God Incarnate would be a wise and reasonable person, however much He may cut against the grain of human presumption, pride, and prevarication. Jesus, moreover, was both divine and human. As a human, Jesus reasoned with other human beings. He did not run from a good argument on theology or ethics but engaged His hearers brilliantly.
Jesus was not a philosopher in the sense of trying to build a philosophical system from the finite human mind. He appealed to God’s previous revelation in the Hebrew Scriptures (Matt. 5:17–19; John 10:31) and issued authoritative revelations of His own as God Incarnate. On the other hand, Jesus reasoned carefully about the things that matter most — a handy definition of philosophy. His teachings, in fact, cover the basic topics of philosophy.3 As an apologist for God’s truth, He defended the truth of the Hebrew Scriptures as well as His own teachings and actions.
When we inspect Jesus’ mind in action in several familiar stories from the Gospels, we see that His thinking was sharp, clear, and cogent. Not only should we believe what He taught because He is our divine Master, but through hard work, prayer, and reliance on the Holy Spirit, we should also strive to emulate His intellectual virtues because we are called to walk as He walked (1 John 2:6).
Presenting Jesus as a worthy thinker can be a powerful apologetic tool to unbelievers who wrongly assume that Christian belief is a matter of blind faith or irrational belief. If the founder of Christianity is a great thinker, His followers should never demean the human mind (Matt. 22:37–39; Rom. 12:1–2). In addition, Jesus’ strategies in argument can serve as a model for our own apologetic defense of the truth and rationality of Christianity, which I will discuss…
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Jesus: Philosopher and Apologist
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Why would you mount a philosophical defence of the existence of God, when discussing the matter with people who already believed in God? The disciples weren't asking him to prove God's existence, they were asking him to literally show them the Father, at which point he pointed to himself as God's self-revelation.
Posted by: Jason | 07/22/2012 at 06:53 PM
I want respectfully to dissent. In my view, you're equivocating on the term "philosopher." Being rational isn't the same as being a philosopher. Yes, Jesus was rational; no, He wasn't a philosopher. He was an ancient peripatetic rabbi. He thought, taught, spoke, and acted as a Jewish teacher, not as, say, Aristotle, Plato, Epicurus, or Zeno. All intellectual disciplines ought to be rational, but not all intellectual disciplines are philosophy. Rationality is not the private domain of philosophy. Simply by being rational one is not being a philosopher. Being articulate and rational meant you were made in God's image and were acting like it, not that everything was philosophy at the root.
As a Jew, Jesus took resort to the Scriptures reasonably and historically understood and applied. That's his "apologetic" against Satan or the scribes and pharisees. When his disciples asked Him to show them the Father, He pointed to Himself -- "he that has seen Me has seen the Father." He never, not once, takes resort to Aristotle's multiple so-called proofs for God's existence, never alludes to an uncaused cause, an unmoved mover, thought thinking itself, or to Plato's world of higher forms, to essences, substances, or to a whole host of philosophers' inventions. Because He was a man of first-century Palestine, and because such notions had been abroad for centuries, He easily could have employed such concepts, arguments and terms; He never did. He is the consummate model of the Hebrew mind, not the Greek. The Hebrews understood rationality to be rooted in God and His revelation, not in philosophy.
The revelation of God came to them in Divine actions and in inspired words that explained those actions -- in history and in Scripture -- not in metaphysics. The closest disciplines to theology are history and literary criticism, not philosophy.
Posted by: Michael Bauman | 10/09/2011 at 08:46 AM