When Christianity with its message of salvation through Jesus Christ began to spread throughout the Greek world, it met Greek philosophy. Philosophy began among the Greeks in the sixth century B.C. with the first Greek philosopher Thales, and reached its peak in the fourth century B.C. with Plato and Aristotle. When Christianity met it, Greek philosophy had splintered into many schools. But they shared a common rejection of the polytheistic religion of the Greek and Roman world with its many gods. When any of these Greek philosophies held to the belief in God, it was a belief in one God. Christianity shared with Greek philosophy this rejection of the belief in many gods. But Christianity was also often rejected because it appeared to be a belief in three Gods: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. The Christian teachers and apologists tried to correct this misunderstanding and attempted to explain how these three were, not three Gods, but one God. And in their attempt they often borrowed the terminology and concepts of the philosophers. They eventually worked out a formulation of the Christian doctrine of Trinity in the fourth century A.D. at the Council of Nicea A.D. 325. But in this formulation, no attempt was made to formulate a Christian philosophy; that is, a Christian understanding of reality that addressed the classic problems of Greek philosophy: the problem of the nature of reality, the problem of the one and the many, and the problem of change and the unchanging. Whenever faced with these problems, the Christian thinkers and theologians have often borrowed from one or another of the Greek philosophies, usually Platonism and Neoplatonism. The classic example of this was the Bishop of Hippo in North Africa, Augustine. In his classic treatment of the doctrine of the Trinity, Augustine formulated a Christian philosophy that turns out to be a synthesis of Christian and Neoplatonic ideas. This Augustinian philosophy came to dominate Christian thinking through the Dark Ages from the sixth to the thirteenth centuries A.D. in the West, until the philosophy of Aristotle was introduced into Western Europe. The Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas formulated a synthesis of his Christian (Augustinian) theology with Aristotelian philosophy, called Thomism, which came to dominate the thinking of Christianity in the West during the medieval period and Roman Catholic church after the Reformation. The Protestant Reformation at first rejected this synthesis with the Aristotelian philosophy, but the Protestant theologians after Luther used the Aristotelian philosophy in formulating their theologies. With the rise of the modern physical sciences many of the ideas of Aristotelian philosophy were abandoned (for example, his explanation of motion and of the geocentric universe) when they were shown to be wrong.
This has produced a crisis for Christian thinking. As long as Christian thinkers borrow from non-Christian philosophies to formulate Christian theology and to explain Christian doctrine, they become subservient to non-Christian thinking and those Christian doctrines are open to rejection when those philosophies are shown to be false and in error. Some Christian thinkers (Tertullian and Karl Barth), recognizing this situation, have rejected philosophy totally and attempted to formulate a Christian theology to explain Christian doctrine completely without reference to all philosophy. But they have not succeeded in this attempt and have often adopted the very non-Christian philosophies (Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism) they have rejected when dealing with the problems of truth, God's being, and Christian values. The solution to this situation is not to reject philosophy as an human intellectual activity dealing with those problems characteristic of the whole of reality (the problems of knowledge, being and values), but to develop a distinctive Christian philosophy based on the Biblical record of God's revelation of Himself. In this book we shall attempt to formulate this Christian philosophy.