SOURCE: “Clement's Achievement,” in Clement of Alexandria, Twayne Publishers, 1974, pp. 192-94.

In the following essay, Ferguson summarizes Clement's ideas and his importance, crediting him with being the “real founder of a Christian philosophy of religion.”

In his masterly book Christ and Culture H. Richard Niebuhr identified five main attitudes which Christians have taken towards secular culture. The first emphasizes the opposition between Christ and culture. The second claims a fundamental agreement between Christ and culture. In the third (“Christ above culture”), Christ is seen as the fulfillment of cultural aspirations, at once continuous and discontinuous with the culture that has gone before. The fourth sees “Christ and Culture in Paradox,” a dualist view in which man lives in two worlds and has responsibilities to both. The final attitude is conversionist; Christ is seen as the transformer of culture. In this debate Clement clearly belongs to the third group...