Justin Martyr

The Argument

Justin Martyr is the first great apologist of the Christian church — the first writer to make a sustained public argument for Christianity addressed to a non-Christian audience. His two Apologies and his Dialogue with Trypho are the founding documents of the apologetics tradition, and they establish a method that has proven extraordinarily durable: take the best of the existing intellectual tradition seriously, show where it points, and argue that Christianity fulfills what it was reaching toward.

His key concept is the Logos spermatikos — the seed of the Word scattered throughout human reason. Justin argues that wherever human thinkers have arrived at genuine truth — Socrates, Heraclitus, the Stoics — they have done so by participating in the Logos, the divine reason that was fully incarnate in Jesus Christ. This is why Christians can claim whatever was rightly said among all men as their own property. It already belongs to the Word.

For literary apologetics, Justin's Logos spermatikos is the most important apologetic concept in the tradition. It is the argument that makes it possible to read Dostoevsky and Ellison and O'Connor and even Wells and Lovecraft as participants, however unwilling, in a conversation about the nature of reality that is ultimately theological.