The apologists of the second century made no modest claim when they said that Christianity was the true philosophy. They meant that the whole project of Greek thought, the most sophisticated intellectual tradition the world had produced, had been reaching toward something the church had.

To see what they meant, you have to see the shape of the tradition, a trajectory that ends in a question.

Nature, then the person, then the city

Greek philosophy began with nature, in what is called natural philosophy. The earliest thinkers asked what the world is made of, how it changes, and what underlies the appearances, and they argued about water, fire, atoms, and the one and the many.

Then it turned to the human being. The tradition credits Socrates with the turn, and Cicero's description of it became the standard one. Socrates, he said, called philosophy down from the heavens, set her in the cities, and made her ask about life and conduct and good and evil. The question changed from what is the world to how should a person live. Moral philosophy had begun.

The step people skip came next, when it turned to the community. Aristotle opens his ethics by saying that the good for a human being is the subject of the most authoritative science. He calls that science politics. Although that can sound like politics outranking ethics, his reason is that the good life is lived in a community and can't be lived outside one. Man is by nature a political animal, meaning an animal whose flourishing requires a polis. The ethics is completed by the politics. The last book of the one hands you to the first book of the other.

So the progression runs from nature to the person to the community in which the person can actually flourish.

And then the city failed

Aristotle was writing as the independent Greek city-state was being absorbed into empire. Within a generation, the political community he had described as the condition of the good life had, for practical purposes, ceased to exist.

The philosophy that followed retreated. The Stoics and the Epicureans turned inward, toward individual tranquility and what a person could secure for himself regardless of the city, because the city could no longer be relied on. The tradition that had concluded that the good life requires a community found itself without one, and adapted by teaching people to need it less.

So Greek philosophy arrived, by its own path, at a precise and unanswered question. If the good life requires a community, where is one?

Paul at Athens

Paul stood in the middle of that tradition's home city and addressed it directly:

Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars' hill, and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you. (Acts 17:22-23)

He could have told them their search was worthless. Instead he told them it had a destination they hadn't reached. He quoted their own poets, For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring (17:28), and then announced what the poets had been reaching toward.

The apologists' argument has the same shape. Justin Martyr, a philosopher before his conversion, kept wearing the philosopher's cloak after it, and argued that whatever was true in the Greek tradition belonged to Christ, and that Christianity was philosophy's fulfillment rather than its enemy.

Their chief claim went beyond saying that Christians had better metaphysics. The thing the philosophers had reached toward and couldn't build, an actual community of people living the good life together, now existed. It met in houses, in every city, among slaves and free, Jews and Greeks, men and women. People entered it voluntarily. It was open across every boundary the polis had drawn.

Where the philosophers had a philosophy about a polis, the church was one.

The New Testament's political vocabulary

The apostles used the vocabulary deliberately.

For our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ. (Philippians 3:20)

Conversation here is politeuma, which means citizenship or commonwealth. Our political community is in heaven. Paul is writing to Philippi, a Roman colony proud of its citizenship, and he tells the church that it belongs to a different city.

Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God. (Ephesians 2:19)

Fellowcitizens is sympolitai, members of the same city. In the same breath he says household of God. City and household sit in one verse, describing one thing.

For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God. (Hebrews 11:10)

But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city. (Hebrews 11:16)

Abraham left a city to look for one. Scripture has its garden and its temple, but it ends in a city: And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven (Revelation 21:2). The eschaton is a polis.

Augustine, three centuries after Justin, made the claim at full scale, with two cities founded on two loves. The city of God outlasts every earthly polis. It is a community that exists now, mixed with the earthly one, and will be revealed at the end.

What the philosophers got right

Read with this in view, the Greek encounter has two columns like every stage.

The philosophers were right about the structure of the question. It runs from nature to the person to the community, and it terminates in the community, because a person isn't the kind of thing that can flourish alone. Aquinas took exactly that from Aristotle. For him the inclination to live in society sits alongside the inclination to know God, and both belong to the creature's nature. The argument that the church's design fits us is built on that foundation.

What the philosophers couldn't supply was the community itself. Once the city they needed had collapsed, they had no way to build another. The church claimed to have one that really existed. It met in Priscilla's house and Nymphas's house and Philemon's house, with a table and a shared purse and members who bore one another's burdens.

The irony

The church answered the philosophers' question by being a community. Then it borrowed the philosophers' form (the school, the lecture, the teacher on his chair and the students in rows) and became progressively less of one. That irony is why the Greek stage belongs in the story of the church's captivity.

It took the vocabulary and lost the thing the vocabulary had been reaching for. It could explain the polis with great sophistication, and it had traded the table for the lecture hall in which the explanation was given. Yet the gospel's answer to Aristotle had always been a household in which the good life was actually lived, together, by people who could be watched living it.

What this means now

Even without a philosophy department, a congregation can be the answer to the oldest question in Western thought, if it is a polis, a community small enough to be real, open enough to be entered, and committed enough to actually live the life together. Then a neighbor who has concluded that the good life requires a community, and can't find one, can walk into a house and find it.

The apologists offered that to the Greeks, and Paul offered it to Athens. The church has the same thing to offer a culture that has retreated, exactly as the Stoics did, into individual tranquility because its cities have failed.

The question is still unanswered everywhere except where a household of God is doing what it was designed to do. Our citizenship is in heaven. The citizens meet on earth, at a table, where the city can be seen.