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“ Follow the Argument ” and Two Other Socratic Principles for the Christian Academic

“What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” So asked the early church father Tertullian, who notoriously answered, Nothing good. What has philosophical reason to do with Christian faith? What has Socrates to do with Christ? Tertullian’s answer to the question has not been the majority position throughout Christian history, but it has a particular resonance for many people today. Thanks in large part to the perception of conflicts between science—especially evolutionary biology—and religion, many critics of Christianity, and indeed many Christians, have posited a radical distinction between reason, argument, and evidence on the one hand and Christian faith and practice on the other. Few Christians today are willing to embrace the austere anti-logic of Tertullian’s “I believe because it is absurd,” preferring instead to think of faith in existential-fideistic terms. I mean by “existential-fideistic” something like the standard contemporary account that faith is a matter of “just believing,” of passionately giving assent to beliefs that in principle cannot be justified rationally. Christian beliefs might not be absurd or crazy—after all, the story goes, each person is entitled to believe whatever he or she wants—but it would be mistaken to look for reasons to ground these beliefs. For anyone holding this view, Socrates makes a rather odd patron saint. Still worse, critics in the spirit of Tertullian might argue that Socrates’ philosophical mission was essentially anti-religious, insofar as he attacked the traditional religious mythology of his time and set up human rationality as a competing source of truth. So why would the explicitly Christian Oxford Socratic Club of C. S. Lewis’ day take Socrates as a model and namesake, and adopt a Socratic principle as its guiding light? To bring the question more close to home, one might ask further: Why would the Gonzaga Socratic Club replicate this folly? The simple answer is that I think that Tertullian is wrong on this point and Lewis and the Oxford Socratic Club are right. Even if Socrates was not, a la Karl Rahner, an “anonymous Christian,” he sought to guide his life by principles of rational intelligibility that are entirely in concert with a broadly Christian outlook. I intend to demonstrate this claim by explaining Socrates’ basic methodology regarding rational argumentation, that articulated by the Socratic injunction to “follow the argument wherever it leads,” and linking it to a Christian account of faith and reason. Further, I wish to extend the connection between Socratic inquiry and the Christian quest for truth by recommending two additional Socratic principles closely related to the first.