IN THE early centuries of the Church, in about the year AD200, a fierce North African Christian called Tertullian asked a sharp question: “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” For Tertullian, who had a lawyer’s sharpness of mind, stood resolutely for Christianity as revelation, act and gift of God. Although, in his many writings, he makes use of Stoic philosophy, it was as an aid not as a source of truth. In his later years he joined the Montanists, an early example of charismatic, Pentecostal Christianity with a stress on the immediacy of the Spirit and a corresponding perfectionist view of the Church.

Tertullian poses in a sharp way the question of the relation of Christianity and culture, the Church and human reflection and exploration of truth, theology and philosophy, which has recurred in every period of the Church’s history. When Christianity first moved from a Jewish context to the wider Hellenistic world Christians had to face the challenge of Greek philosophical thought and the cults of local deities as well as the religious rites acknowledging the semi-divine status of the Roman emperor.

On the one hand, the choice was clearly between “Caesar is Lord” and “Christ is Lord” — and Christians suffered persecution and martyrdom for refusal to offer incense to the emperor — on the other hand, there were those, like the early Christian writer Justin who saw Greek philosophy, and Plato in particular, as preparing the way for the Christian revelation.

God, who had created the world through His ordering word, had sown seeds of the Word in the understanding of those who had wrestled with the deep questions of truth and meaning. Christ was the fulfiller of the human search for truth, for the good and for beauty. Athens did emphatically have much to do with Jerusalem.

But Tertullian, and the “puritan” traditions of which he is the father, were alert to the danger of the Church becoming so enmeshed with culture that there is no word of judgment upon culture. There can never be a simple endorsement of the culture in which in any age the Church is set. “Christ is Lord” remains the fundamental Christian confession, certainly as the desire of the nations, the fulfiller of the deepest human longings, but as the embodiment of the love of God which goes to the uttermost in self-giving, and suffering, and even death, He is the one who judges all that falls short of that love.

It is a sinful world in which men and women are capable of appalling and distorting evil, which needs that love in both judgment and redemption. In that love triumphant we find the only source of eternal life and the resource of transforming grace. It is that triumph and lordship that was celebrated last Thursday on Ascension Day.

Christians have therefore a twofold responsibility. They are called to find God in the undergrowth, the unexpected places of contemporary culture, and to welcome all who are explorers and searchers and seekers. But there can never be an uncritical endorsement of culture. Whether it be the rhetoric of multiculturalism and political correctness, or the pick-anmix individualism that makes subjective choice the measure of truth, or the popular cults of celebrities or consumerism, these are as much under the judgment of the God of sacrificial love as the ideology of Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia.

Likewise, the Church is always under judgment, for its compromises, its human weakness, and its failure to live out more plainly the deep compassion of Christ. But the saving grace is that at the heart of the Church’s life is the penitent knowledge of its weakness and failure and of the healing that can transfigure and transform it. The saints have always known themselves to be sinners in need of redemption, and have rejoiced in the love and grace which comes down to the lowest part of their need.

Christians live always as those looking up to the Ascended Christ, to the love that reigns victorious, and as those who know that love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit He has given to us. To live by that knowledge and vision is to live for that Christian culture and society, in which values, choices and judgments are shaped by likeness to Christ.

The Right Rev Geoffrey Rowell is Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe.