The First Christian Scholar
Philosophers, then, are children, unless they have been made men by Christ.
Clement of Alexandria, Stromata
We live in an “us versus them” world. Everywhere we look, someone is drawing a line in the sand insisting that everyone on his side is correct while everyone else is wrong. This is true in many areas of life. Doctors argue over best treatment protocols, scientists debate origins, churches adopt labels to distinguish themselves from others, and politicians . . . well, politicians have raised divisiveness to a high art.
This, of course, is part of human nature. We tend to define ourselves as much by what we don’t believe as by what we do. In 1913, poet Edwin Markham wrote the short poem “Outwitted!”:
He drew a circle that shut me out —
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in!1
Titus Flavius Clement would have agreed with that worldview. Better known today as Clement of Alexandria, he is remembered as being “the first Christian scholar.”2 He lived in one of the greatest cities of his day: Alexandria, a city known for its emphasis on learning and philosophy, a city that would become the center of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The metropolis may have had over one million inhabitants in Clement’s day, and this Egyptian city, named after Alexander the Great, had the largest library of the ancient world. It rivaled educational centers such as Athens, Antioch, and Rome.
Clement took advantage of his educational opportunities. Traveling widely, and learning from the best teachers of the day in both ancient and contemporary philosophy, he eventually came to see the teachings of Christ and the apostles as the pinnacle of knowledge. Arriving in Alexandria, he became a student of Pantaenus, who had founded a school in the city. In Clement’s day, it was not unusual for learned men to set up private schools and take in students. Clement stayed with the school as a teacher, and later became head of the institution. Like Pantaenus, whom Clement considered an expert in biblical interpretation, Clement taught the superiority of a Christian worldview.
Drawing a Wide Circle
He could have drawn a circle to embrace those who believed as he did and exclude those who didn’t, but Clement took a different approach. Instead, he taught believers and nonbelievers alike. Jews, pagans, and Christians attended the school and learned side by side. The way he did this tells us much about the man.
Clement taught a “new philosophy,” emphasizing the importance of knowing—of gnosis. The Gnostics were a heretical cult that troubled the church beginning in the days of the apostles. Many of the books in the New Testament, like Colossians, were written to combat their false teaching. Gnostics believed that they and they alone held special knowledge. They undermined the teaching of the apostles by changing the nature of Jesus, whom they believed was not a man but only appeared as such (some even believed that the Christ-spirit cloaked the human Jesus). And they departed from the apostles’ message of the cross and the resurrection, believing salvation came through their special brand of knowledge. They also held to a dualistic world: light versus dark, physical versus spiritual. In their philosophy the two couldn’t mix, therefore only the man Jesus died on the cross, the Christ-spirit having left prior to the crucifixion. In many ways, they were the New Age movement of the first two centuries.
Clement understood the appeal of the Gnostic philosophy and its dangers. Gnostics believed they held greater knowledge than the apostles and this undermined church teaching as handed down in the Bible. To them, church doctrine was incomplete.
Clement believed in the power of knowledge and its ability to point the way to Christ. Although he used many of the terms the Gnostics used, he was very different from them and held a biblical worldview. His way of spreading the gospel was to show how the philosophy of the Greeks and others were predecessors to the knowledge of Christ. As the Law of Moses was meant to prepare the Hebrews for a coming savior, so Greek philosophy was intended to prepare people for the gospel. Since Christ had come, it was time to move to a deeper, more accurate understanding of God’s ways. Clement taught the superiority of Christian doctrine and tried to guide his students to an intellectual and heartfelt relationship with God. He wanted to show, in a scholarly way, that Christian faith was reasonable, the obvious choice for the thinking person. To do this, he had to challenge the Gnostic belief in two Gods—one good, one evil.
The pagan mind was comfortable with multiple gods and contradictory philosophies. Clement showed a better way.
A Christian Philosophy
The apostle Paul taught the members of the Galatian church, “Therefore the Law has become our tutor to lead us to Christ, so that we may be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor. For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:24–26).
Clement seems to have adopted this approach, customizing it for the Gentile mind. To him the ancient philosophers were needed to prepare the mind for the higher philosophy of Christ. “The way of truth is one, but into it as into a perennial river, streams flow from all sides.”3 He believed that “understanding is sent by God.”4 That is not to say that he put human philosophy on the same level as divine revelation. Human reasoning could be faulty, but “the teaching which is according to the Savior is complete in itself and without defect being ‘the power and wisdom of God.’”5
For many years, Dr. Joel Gregory taught preaching at Southwestern Seminary in Fort Worth. Many of his sermons are unforgettable, and he passed his knowledge on to hundreds of young preachers learning how to convey spiritual truth through the spoken word. In a sermon delivered in central California, he described the confusion many of his students encountered. They asked, “Dr. Gregory, when I preach should I begin with the human need and move to Scripture, or start with Scripture and move to the human need?”
He replied, “It doesn’t matter where you start as long as you get to the truth in the Bible.” Clement held the same idea. It didn’t matter if his students began with Greek philosophy or the writings of Moses, as long as they ultimately came to the truth of Christ.
Clement wrote three books. In Exhortations to the Greeks he portrayed faith as reasonable for the thinking person, worthy of study and superior to everything that had come before.
In The Instructor he taught the need for proper Christian behavior. The Gnostics of his day cared nothing for individual behavior, but Clement believed it was one of the hallmarks of the Christian life. He included sections on eating, laughter, clothes, sleep, and even shoes. In each case, he tried to move the person of faith closer to God.
He left his last work unfinished. Miscellanies (also called Stromata) is a collection of topics for the “Christian Gnostic” (the educated Christian, not the heretical sect). The work is meant to bring people of faith to a greater knowledge and to living in a Christlike manner. Even incomplete, it is considered his major work.
Clement’s goal was to reach the well-educated people of his time. Lovers of knowledge deserved a knowledgeable presentation of Christ and Christian living. He also cautioned the young church to choose its icons wisely, preferring images that represented some aspect of the faith. He wrote, “Let our emblem be a dove, or a fish, or a ship running before the wind, or a musician’s lyre, or a ship’s anchor. And if there be a fisherman, he will remind us of an apostle, and little children being drawn up out of the water.”6
Clement had to abandon his school and flee Alexandria to escape the persecution ordered by Roman Emperor Septimius Severus in 202 AD. We have no information of his activities from that year on. He died around 215, and the cause of his death is unknown.
Clement had a strong influence on many church leaders, including many of his pupils. Origen was one of his most famous students. His lasting legacy will be his lifelong pursuit to portray Christian faith as worthy of serious intellectual study, and his willingness to draw a circle that included those outside the church in order to present the gospel in a way they could understand.
Clement of Alexandria helped give birth to the intellectual acceptance of faith—evidence that one does not have to sacrifice learning and deep thinking to embrace faith. In fact, Clement demonstrated the two work well together.