Out of this love for humanity, the Word of God became human, so that we might receive salvation. This gracious gift, for Clement, looks primarily like a regeneration of the human person: in other words, salvation means eternal life, yes, but one that looks like holiness, freedom from the passions of the flesh, and the darkness of ignorance.

We no longer live in a thoroughly Christian culture. Friedrich Nietzsche’s madman may have been right after all. If God is dead, we must revalue everything. The God of the Bible no longer sits supreme; and so we must revalue morals and create our own meaning. We make our own identities, values, and self-worth. Yet as we do so, we find ourselves struggling to find significance. Nothing seems to make sense.

In short, we live in a time of re-creating or revaluing all morals and meaning, which has the consequence of making life feel meaningless. It doesn’t make sense.

And this means Christian apologetics can no longer only emphasize the historicity of the faith (although this is good to do). Rather, we must also show how Christianity makes sense, how the faith genuinely teaches us what it means to be human in contrast to the shallow theories that we have created in place of the one’s revelation supplied.

It is not that there are no religious expressions today; it’s that there are too many. And everyone chooses as he or she wills. But it does not fit together. All is fragmented; all is diverse; all falls to pieces.

And hence we live in a world akin to the second century when apologists like Clement of Alexandria showed how the Word of God came at the fullness of time and how the thousand religious expressions of Greco-Roman society did not fit together, did not make sense. He was a master sense-maker.

In this article, then, I want to reflect on the life and writings of Clement in order to show how his approach to apologetics may be integrated into our approach today.

Clement of Alexandria

Born in about AD 150, Clement ranks among the great lights of second-century Christianity. He was a Presbyter and teacher at the Alexandrian catechetical school. The latter probably was more informal than the modern word “school” implies. Simon Wood explains, “We might compare it to a modern study club, meeting in a private home without formal class or public pretensions, vigorous in its search for truth” (Christ the Educator, ix)

Yet it cannot be doubted that Clement had a brilliant mind. Having immersed himself in the canon of Greek literature, he was at home quoting long passages of Homer and Plato just as easily as he could Holy Scripture. His intellectual capacity made him an effective apologist of Christianity within a world that was intellectually skeptical of the faith, sometimes even hostile. One example of this hostility involved imperial persecution of some Christians under Septimius Severus in AD 202.

Clement likely fled Alexandria during this period of persecution because we hear of him carrying a letter from Alexander in Jerusalem to the church in Antioch in AD 211. Likely, he died sometime shortly thereafter since the same Alexander wrote to Origen some years later, speaking of Clement and Pantaenus, as those who “have trodden the road before us” (cited in G. W. Butterworth, Clement of Alexandria, xiv).

Conversion and Influence

We know little about his conversion, but it seems clear that he grew up in a household that valued education. His grasp of Greek literature, philosophy, and religion suggests that he acquired this knowledge as a youth in Alexandria, presumably before his conversion. Of the latter, we do know that he wandered many lands, seeking knowledge and teachers. He found six who spoke plainly; these Christian teachers, almost certainly including his predecessor at the Catechetical school in Alexandria, the aforementioned Pantaenus, led to his conversion and ascension to the office of Presbyter in Alexandria.

That he came into contact with six teachers of Christianity in the mid-second century evinces how Christianity expressed itself during its early ascent. At this time, it still remained a minority faith, yet increasingly, as Clement shows, Christianity began to see itself as a player on the world’s stage. The early Apologists—Quadratus, Aristides, Justin, Tatian, Athenagoras, Theophilus, Melito, Minucius Felix, Tertullian, and Clement—all show the faithful not standing on their back foot but advancing the message of Christ into a skeptical and sometimes hostile culture.

Perhaps the two most famous of Clement’s pupils were Alexander (c. 170–251), bishop of Jerusalem, and Origen of Alexandria (c. 184–254). The latter, probably being the most influential Christian in the third century, not only for his apologetic work (Contra Celsum) but for his textual, biblical, and theological writings. As Gregory of Nazianzus wrote, “Origen is the whetstone of us all.”

Writings

Of his many writings, we have in full four: an exhortation to the Greeks to believe in Christ (Protrepticus), the Instructor (Paedagogus) that instructs in how to live a holy life, Stromata, which covers diverse topics within Christianity, and a literary sermon entitled “Who Is the Rich Man that Shall Be Saved?” Fragmentary records of other works exist, and unfortunately, others have been lost to the sands of time.

Yet the extant works provide a rather full introduction to his thought. Here, I am mostly interested in his Protrepticus because it aims to persuade unbelieving pagans to abandon Greek worship of the gods in favour of the one true God, the eternal Word from the Father. His basic question throughout might also be summarized: how does Christianity understand itself in a non-believing culture that is skeptical to the Faith?

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