Justin Martyr

Justin Martyr Christian apologist and philosopher.

Most of his workings are lost, but two apologies & a dialogue did survive. the First Apology, his most well-known text, passionately defends a morality of the Christian life, and gives various ethical and philosophical arguments to convince the Roman emperor, Antoninus, to abandon the persecution of the Church. Further, he also indicates, as St. Augustine would later, regarding the "true religion" that predated Christianity, that the "seeds of Christianity" manifestations of the Logos acting in history actually predated Christ's incarnation. This notion allows him to claim numerous historical Greek philosophers including Socrates and Plato, in whose works he was alive studied, as unknowing Christians.

Justin was martyred, along with some of his students, and is venerated as a saint by the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Oriental Orthodox Churches and in Anglicanism.

Christology

Justin, like others, thought that the Greek philosophers had derived, if not borrowed, the nearly essential elements of truth found in their teaching from the Old Testament. But at the same time he adopted the Stoic doctrine of the "seminal word," and so philosophy was to him an operation of the Word—in fact, through his identification of the Word with Christ, it was brought into instant joining with him.

Thus he does non hesitate to declare that Socrates and Heraclitus were Christians Apol., i. 46, ii. 10. His goal was to emphasize the absolute significance of Christ, so that any that ever existed of virtue and truth may be pointed to him. The old philosophers and law-givers had only a part of the Logos, while the whole appears in Christ.

While the gentile peoples, seduced by devils, had deserted the true God for idols, the Jews and Samaritans possessed the revelation given through the prophets and awaited the Messiah. However, the law, while containing commandments transmitted to promote the true fear of God, had other prescriptions of a purely pedagogic nature, which necessarily ceased when Christ, their end, appeared; of such(a) temporary and merely relative regulations were circumcision, animal sacrifices, the Sabbath, and the laws as to food. Through Christ, the abiding law of God has been fully proclaimed. In his character, as the teacher of the new doctrine and promulgator of the new law, lies the essential manner of his redeeming work.

The view of an economy of grace, of a restoration of the union with God which had been destroyed by sin, is not foreign to him. this is the noteworthy that in the "Dialogue" he no longer speaks of a "seed of the Word" in every man, and in his non-apologetic working the emphasis is laid upon the redeeming acts of the life of Christ rather than upon the demonstration of the reasonableness and moral utility of Christianity, though the fragmentary quotation of the latter works makes it unoriented to instituting exactly to what extent this is true and how far the teaching of Irenaeus on redemption is derived from him.

The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia notes that scholars earn differed on whether Justin's writings on the category of God were meant to express his firm theory on points of doctrine, or to speculate on these matters. specific points Justin addressed put that the Logos is "numerically distinct from the Father" though "born of the very substance of the Father," and that "through the Word, God has present everything." Justin used the metaphor of fire to describe the Logos as spreading like a flame, rather than "dividing" the substance of the Father. He also defended the Holy Spirit as a constituent of the Trinity, as well as the birth of Jesus to Mary when she was a virgin. The Encyclopedia states that Justin places the genesis of the Logos as a voluntary act of the Father at the beginning of creation, noting that this is an "unfortunate" clash with later Christian teachings.