“What hath Athens to do with Jerusalem?” This question was originally asked by Tertullian, a Roman citizen in Carthage, Africa, who lived from 155 — 240 AD. He started out as a student of Stoicism, the most popular philosophy of his day, and he is now known by some as the father of Western theology.
His question (“What hath Athens to do with Jerusalem?”) was not referring to geographic places. It was referring to the relationship between philosophy (symbolized by Athens) and spirituality (symbolized by Jerusalem), or the relationship between reason and faith; the relationship between those things that we can know with our minds alone, and those that require different modes of knowing—truths which are not accessible to us through reason alone.
Tertullian was trying to work out the tension between these two spheres of life because there was great disagreement about what their proper relationship should be in the early days of Christianity. Should they be treated as entirely separate dom…