Gold From Egypt
Augustine of Hippo is probably one of the most well known early church fathers and philosophers in Christian history. He was the bishop of Hippo Regius in the 4th century, and was probably one of the most influential theologians and philosophers of his time. He formulated doctrines such as original sin, the doctrines of grace, and many others that the church holds today.
Among his many other contributions to the Church, he also dabbled in apologetics. One such argument is now commonly called “gold from Egypt.” Augustine recounted the story of the children of Israel as they came out of Egypt. God commanded them to take with them the gold rings, earrings and bracelets of their masters as they departed. Augustine reasoned that while the gold came from a wicked source, their slave masters and captors, it was still gold. Likewise, he applied this same principle to knowledge and reason. Since God is the source of all truth, he then concluded, wherever we find truth it is God’s truth. Whether the source be pagan philosophers, science, or the Bible.
Before we go any further with this, allow me to clarify a few things. We live in a world today where truth is thought to be relative to the individual. This concept was foreign to Augustine, and should remain so to the Christian today, or any thinking person for that matter. Truth is absolute. It’s absurd to confuse two people believing opposites to be true with two opposites actually being true.
A second pitfall we should avoid is thinking that we have it all figured out. Not everything we may commonly hold to be true, whether it be taught from science or the church is necessarily so. Both have developed and grown over the years and had to change positions on various subjects, whether it be that frogs spawn from mud or that the earth is flat. In short, when I say that “all truth is God’s truth,” I mean that anything that is genuinely true is only true because God has made it to be so.
Why the history lesson? Well, we are about to dive into some apologetics in our Wednesday night Bible studies. Lee Strobel does an excellent job in apologetics, and I trust you will all enjoy the study. I have noticed a trend in apologetics that I’m not particularly fond of however, that I think we should be all aware of in any study we do. We tend to compartmentalize different “evidences” into categories that I believe ultimately undermine the faith we seek to defend (i.e. this fossil is “Christian evidence” and this other one is “evolutionary evidence”, or whatever the subject may be).
I encourage you to instead look at it as Augustine might. There is no such thing as “Christian evidence” and “non-Christian evidence”. There is just “evidence”. Anything that is genuinely true is true only because God made it to be so. We aren’t fighting over who has the most evidence, but who has a better explanation of all the evidence God has given us. And we can trust that He will guide us in His truth.
-Pastor John