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Join us as we dive into the rich intersection of classical philosophy and Christian thought with Louis Markos, Ph.D.

In this episode, we explore how ancient Greek thinkers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle contributed to understanding divine truth through general revelation. Markos illuminates fascinating connections between classical wisdom and Christian theology, discussing how these philosophers approached concepts of goodness, truth, and justice in ways that surprisingly align with biblical principles.

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode for better readability.

Marlin Detweiler:

Hello again and welcome to another episode of Veritas Vox. The voice of classical Christian education. Today we have with us Louis Markos. Louis, welcome.

Louis Markos:

Hey, thanks for having me on, Marlin.

Marlin Detweiler:

As we get further into some of these things. Louis is a professor at Houston Christian, formerly Houston Baptist, naturally in Houston, Texas, and has gotten really involved in classical ed. We'll hear a little bit more about that, I'm sure. But before we get started, tell us about your family, your education, and your career.

Louis Markos:

Well, Marlin, I had to join this whole classical Christian family because all four of my grandparents were actually born in Greece, and they all emigrated to America about 1930. So the Markos clan has been here almost a century now. I grew up reading the Iliad and the Odyssey, reading Plato fairly early on, not only because I'm a man of the West and a lover of the great books, but because I'm actually Greek.

I grew up in New Jersey, went to Colgate in upstate New York, majored in English and history. Then I went to the University of Michigan for the master's and PhD, focusing on English literature. My specialties are really the Romantics and the Victorians. But I also do anything with ancient Greece and Rome and, increasingly, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien.

I graduated in 91, and I have been teaching at Houston Christian for 33 years. I love the place. What's wonderful about it is that we are committed to bringing Athens and Jerusalem together, which is one of the major themes in my writing and speaking.

Marlin Detweiler:

After that, a little bit good.

Louis Markos:

Oh, good. We'll get into that. That's something that undergirds much of what I write and, of course, undergirds much of what C.S. Lewis wrote as well. You know, Marlin, every Christian these days, especially evangelicals, C.S. Lewis is one of our role models. But he gets to be a double role model for me because he was an English professor.

He also loved mythology and wrote things like that. So again, I've been teaching. Right now I'm the faculty sponsor for Wrestle Christi, which is an apologetics group. I grew up not even knowing what Christian education was, and then I slowly learned about it. I met homeschoolers. Those were what Marlin would.

You meet a homeschool girl English major, you swear you're talking to a character out of a Jane Austen novel. That's when I knew there was something to this whole thing. What really started it is when I published a book almost 20 years ago now called *From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics*. It covers the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, and the Greek tragedies.

That's really the book that ushered me into this world. I'll tell you one last thing, Marlin. When I was speaking for these schools, I would bring my kids with me whenever I could. My son is now in his ninth year teaching at the Geneva School of Burney, Texas, right next to San Antonio, a classical Christian school where he teaches history.

My daughter teaches at a classical charter school in the Dallas area called Founder's. She teaches music. By coming with me to the schools, both of my children saw the love, the joy, the wonder, the camaraderie. It excited them. They saw that these are teachers who don't burn out. You know, Marlin, in these polarized days, a lot of people are very, very depressed.

I am not depressed because I speak at classical Christian schools all over the country. Wherever I go, the same joy, the same gratitude, the same wonder, the same hope. This is still a Christian country at its heart. But you have to go to these schools.

Marlin Detweiler:

You can only get a chance to experience what I get to enjoy as well. That's watching the kids that use our curriculum and are in our online school and how they're coming up in wonderful ways that defy what most of the country sometimes espouses. We're seeing something very different and very wonderful.

Louis Markos:

It is. I think it's the hope of the future right now. Luckily, the arc of classical Christian education has not reached its summit yet. I don't know if that's a mixed metaphor, but it hasn't quite got to the top. It's still growing. It's still exciting. There's excitement. Covid taught people what was really going on in our public schools, and they're hungry.

People also homeschool the university model. There's a lot of choices now, right? But look, Marlin, you know, the Bible says Jesus wept. Nowhere does it say Jesus laughed. But I will prove to you that God has a sense of humor. God is going to preserve the pagan classics by the least likely people imaginable. All of this started with homeschoolers who were Bible-only people, right?

All of a sudden, as the so-called Ivy leagues are throwing out Homer, Virgil, and Dante, we are embracing it and finding the general revelation that points to the special revelation.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, our omnibus curriculum, which is our great books curriculum. Students are reading so much of this that I cannot tell you how much we hear about how enjoyable it is to really understand and to think biblically about these things. Ultimately, in a program like that, people ask, what's the value of that sort of thing? My answer is very simple. It teaches you to think biblically about everything it does.

Louis Markos:

It creates virtuous, morally self-regulating citizens. That's what we need right now more than anything. If our experiment in democracy is to survive, that is what we need. I'll tell you one other thing. You heard about the Good Soil survey that was done.

Marlin Detweiler:

I shared it with many people uninitiated with classical education because it is proof positive that what we're doing is working.

Louis Markos:
And you know what? The thing that stuck out to me were two statistics. Number one, classical Christian educated students were more likely to be opposed to gay marriage than anybody else, but more likely to have a gay friend than anyone else. And Marlin, that's how we change the world. We stand for truth, but with compassion. Because we know that when you live in accordance with God's goodness, truth, and beauty, you have a better life.

It's not self-destructive. That is, those at our best. Those are the students we are forming. They are the truth. Yeah. The gospel at work. Yeah. You know, it's love and action.

Marlin Detweiler:
Well, I've been intrigued by some things that you've said and written and in preparation for this, learned a little bit about your talking about Socrates. You wrote a book called The Myth Made Fact from Plato to Christ. What were you trying to accomplish with that? Well, probably trying to solve in writing that.

Louis Markos:
Those are actually two different books. One is the made, in fact, reading Greek and Roman mythology through Christianize. And the second, when they came about very close, is Plato to Christ. Okay, so Platonic thought shaped the Christian faith. That's from InterVarsity. And both of them are the same basic thesis as from Achilles to Christ and from Aristotle.

The Christ comes out next year. It is an attempt to understand the difference between general revelation and special revelation. General revelation is the way God speaks to all people through our conscience, through creation, through reason, even through imagination. Special revelation is when God speaks directly through the prophets, through the scriptures, supremely through Christ. And if we take the best of general revelation, I believe that it will point to special revelation.

Because, look, Marlin, none of this bothers you. When you were a young Christian, are you telling me that before Jesus came, God ignored 99% of humanity? Well, only to the Jews did he speak directly by his first name, if you will, Yahweh. But he didn't ignore everybody else. He spoke in their desires and their yearnings. Now, again, a lot of the myths are very violent and crazy and all that sort of stuff, because it's look, the Bible says we see dimly in a mirror sometimes the pagans saw very dimly in a dirty mirror, but they saw and they yearned.

And what they expressed in their greatest literature, history, and philosophy, I believe, points towards the truth. Yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:
Well, if I got it right, Socrates lived about 400 BC, which was about the time that the Old Testament canon was being closed. There was a 400-year period before the New Testament writings began. And so we have this what's called inter-testament period. It happens about the time that Socrates is on the earth with influence. Is there any connection there? Do you see any?

Louis Markos:
It is interesting. I mean, you know, some people call it the Axial Age between about 500 BC and about 600 A.D. when you have all the major religious thinkers from, you know, Buddha and, what's it, Zoroaster. And, and, and of course, Socrates all the way down. Of course, Muhammad is 600 A.D., all these major periods and stuff like that.

So Socrates is a fifth-century figure. He dies in 399 BC. He's living during what's called the Golden Age of Athens. That was begun when the Athenians, with the Spartans and others defeated the Persians. Right. Linking us together with biblical history as well. Xerxes, the same person who almost destroys the Jews and is stopped by his wife, Esther.

That's the same Xerxes of the famous battle of the 300 Spartans. Right. So we see the coming together there and then. Socrates had a pupil. They, Plato and Plato straddles the fifth century, in the fourth century BC, and then Aristotle, his student, is a fully fourth-century BC character. Now, this is a major age of literature and history and philosophy, because, as it says in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, everything is Greek, right?

They invented everything. But what's interesting is they were defeated by Sparta in the disastrous Peloponnesian War, leading up to Socrates being executed in 399 BC. And what's interesting is we might have lost a lot of that Greek wisdom, the birthplace of humanism. But about 100 years later, something happens in literally the boondocks Hillbillies of northern Greece, Macedonia, Alexander the Great conquers the world.

Now the world he conquered was actually not Europe. It was Asia. The only part of his empire in Europe was Greece. He was the one who conquered what we today would call Turkey, Iraq, Iran, the Middle East, Egypt, all the way down to North India, Pakistan today. And he spread Hellenism, a Greek culture, a more universal Greek culture, and he spread it throughout the Mediterranean.

But he learned his culture from his tutor, Aristotle, who learned from Plato, who learned from Socrates. So there is a through line here. But I really historical through line.

Marlin Detweiler:
And again.

Louis Markos:
And with Aristotle, when, Alexander the Great died, he gave a he his empire was split. Eventually it was split into three of the one side. But the Ptolemy took over Egypt and solutions took all over Asia and inter who is and Tigris Epiphanies, who almost destroyed the temple and gives us the Hanukkah, which is part of what we call the Apocrypha in the Apocrypha, not in the canonical of Old Testament.

But what I'm getting at is that Alexander the Great laid the foundation for the city of Alexandria and North Egypt, one of the great cities of all history. And it's there that they not only, edited the Iliad, the Odyssey, it's also there maybe about 250 BC, that the Hebrew Old Testament was translated into Greek. And that's the New Testament that's clearly being used by Paul and others because when Paul quotes, he's generally quoting the Septuagint, the Greek translation, rather than directly going back to the Hebrew.

That's why there seems to be discrepancies between Paul, the Old Testament, but that culture and that language is called Koine. It's a common version of Greek. That is what united the world. Now, Marlin, we all know as Christians that Jesus came in the fullness of times. A lot of people understand that to mean partly Rome had civilize the world, made it peaceful, made the roads and the waterways safe so that Paul could spread the gospel.

But I only believe that's half of fullness. And the other half is Greek culture, which included Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. This was also in the air, and a lot of the early people used words like logos and fields. Now they didn't use Zeus because that was too corrupted, but they were able to use some of the concepts that Socrates, Plato and Aristotle got right because of general revelation.

Marlin, one of the best things people know about Plato and Socrates is the idea of the forms that what we have on earth is a sort of imitation of the perfect ideas in the heavens. Well guess what? Read Hebrews, where Paul or whoever wrote it. Hebrews tells us that the earthly tabernacle, the temple, is a shadow of the throne room of God.

So Plato got something right. And of course, what the great Augustine did is he took Plato's forms and put them in the mind of God, which is where I believe they are. And again, that doesn't mean they got everything right. But they were, I mean, let's talk about this. Okay? Was Socrates a muddled theist? Okay.

He does not know Yahweh. But when you read especially the Apollo he gave, which I recently wrote an essay about, when you read the apology, he is clearly moving towards monotheism in the sense that it's clear to him if there is a God, that God must be the standard of goodness and truth and beauty and justice. In fact, that this is no joke.

If you read Justin Martyr, Justin Martyr's not only one of the early martyrs, he's one of the early Christian apologists in the early second century, many of whom actually spoke before Roman emperors. And if you read Justin Martyr, Ascend to Glorious Hippolytus, this whole bunch of these early second-century apologists, most of them consider Socrates to be one of the first martyrs for monotheism.

They did not believe that he knew Yahweh. He did not read the Old Testament, but he was moving by way of general revelation toward an understanding of what we would call absolute truth, and in a sense, was willing to die for that. Yeah. And that made him a martyr.

Marlin Detweiler:
But if you believe that Socrates had significant exposure to the God of the Old Testament.

Louis Markos:
I don't. I don't think I don't see evidence for any direct exposure. It is also, you know, you know what it's like, Marlin, a lot of people get some people get a little nervous about general revelation going too far, especially good Calvinists get a little bit nervous sometimes. And so I love reading people who say the major must have read something that was passed down by Daniel.

Maybe, but there's no reason to theorize that their general revelation showed them that there was a wonder in the sky that they followed, and it led them to question.

Marlin Detweiler:
This is hardly proof, is it?

Louis Markos:
Yeah. I, you know, I, it's possible, but I don't think it's necessary. I mean, you read Virgil's Aeneid. Virgil has what Christians would call an eschatological view of history as having a beginning, a middle and an end and moving towards a good end. And I don't see any evidence that he read the Old Testament. Theoretically, he could have got a hold of the Septuagint, maybe, but we don't need that because God has written eternity in the hearts of men.

Right? Oh, Lord, what did Augustine say? Oh, Lord, our hearts are restless. Oh, Lord, you made us for yourself. And our hearts are restless until they rest in thee. The God-shaped vacuum that Pascal talks about. So I don't think I don't see any evidence. I will tell you, Marlin, that some of those early apologists wanting to get in good with their audience would suggest that the Greeks learned everything from Moses, but they certainly had no evidence for that, except for the fact that Socrates was moving and also Plato towards something that is at least closer to maybe absolute truth, that there's something beyond. And it's ironic, Marlin, because the people

that put Socrates on trial in 399 BC accused him of teaching foreign gods. Okay. And, well, no, he was trying to get to the god that's behind the gods. And, you know, when Plato wrote his Republic, people still give him grief because he had censorship. Well, what do you mean by censorship? He thinks that young kids should not read about gods raping and killing and meddling with people.

Well, you know, it's like, what's his name? DeSantis. He's not. It's not censorship. It's young kids should not be reading pornographic stuff. That's all it is. It's not. We're getting rid of the Iliad and the Odyssey or difference.

Marlin Detweiler:
Between censorship and sensible.

Louis Markos:
Oh, that's a good way to put it. But yeah, that's what we're talking about. And that's really what Plato's talking about. Because he's trying to form the virtuous care. I mean, look, would you take your seven-year-old and read him the last chapter of the Book of Judges? Really? Is that what he needs to hear at the age of seven?

I mean, come on. So again, I like that common sense. That's what it is. Yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:
Just, it's notable this is not entirely germane to the vein that we're in, but I just want to make sure that our audience knows this. As you refer between Socrates and Plato, that Socrates never really got anything down. And what we know about Socrates, we learned from Plato primarily. Or are there any other sources for learning about celebrities there?

Louis Markos:
Are there another source? And that's Xenophon, who was, he's most famous for writing a book called The Anabasis. He actually, he actually wrote his own apology. The apology is the defense that Socrates made before the jury. And he did do a very good job because they put him to death. Yeah. So Xenophon talks about it also, the great Greek comic playwright Aristophanes, that kind of makes fun of Socrates in one of his plays.

It's called The Clouds. And so, I mean, he is a historical figure that. But he didn't write. I mean, oddly enough, Jesus didn't write anything except whatever he was writing on the ground because.

Marlin Detweiler:
It, you know, usual. I simply wanted it to be noted for our audience. But those that may not know that. What is it about Socrates that has captured your imagination?

Louis Markos:
You know, I remember when I was in high school and I was in whatever gifted and talented whatever we called it back then, and I had to fill out a form to apply to be in it. And one of the questions was, whose face would you put on a stamp? And I remember back then, whenever I was 16 or something, I remember saying, the person that belongs in a stamp who embodies democracy was Socrates.

And I talked about his great apology and defense. And, you know, the people of Athens would have been happy if he just escaped and left. But he said, I'm not going to escape. I am a member of the Athenian democracy. I've agreed to its rules, and I will stay here. Right. And I will. I will continue to be like to call himself a gadfly.

And Martin Luther King borrowed that same exact image in his letter from the Birmingham jail. I'm a gadfly that the state is like a horse that's gotten lethargic and I need to stick it. It's a horsefly basically what I need a stinger and wake it up and force it to deal with what it's trying to sweep under the rug.

So Martin Luther King says, I'm not causing racial tension. I'm trying to expose the tension that's already there. By forcing people to ask questions, to define things properly. I mean, there's a wonderful moment. You know, the apology is one of the great pieces of rhetoric, but it's again, it's not a good thing if you're trying to save your life, because one of the reasons they put him up there is because the people were tired of how Socrates kept asking people questions, but they wanted to just stop worrying about justice and be happy with their expediency.

And to show them his teaching, he calls forward Miletus, who was one of his accusers. And he says, Miletus. Okay. He was accused of three things teaching foreign gods, making the weaker argument, the stronger and corrupting the youth. And so Socrates said, Miletus, since you believe that I corrupt the youth, it is clear to me that you understand fully what it is that benefits the youth.

So tell us, Miletus, what is it in our great democracy that benefits the youth? And of course, he's never thought about that because he doesn't care. He's a politician. And he says, well, well, tell me, what about the judges to the judges benefiting? Oh, yes. Socrates. Well, what about the jury? Yeah. Well, what about this? And after a while, he gets the man to admit that every single person in the Athenian democracy benefits the youth except Socrates.

Oh, how wonderful that would be if only one man. And we call that a reductio ad absurdum. Classical Christian education. Kids learn about those things. But it's wonderful. But all it does is get people more mad at Socrates and more afraid that he's going to turn his dialectic against them. So Socrates is going to stand for the truth, is going to stand for his city that he loves, even compares himself to Achilles, the great hero who was then his friend Patroclus.

Even though he knew it would lead to his death, he stayed true to his loyalty. And that's what Socrates embodies a kind of courage tied together with a little bit of wit. Okay, that says, look, I have been put at a post just like a soldier. I have been put in a post, and I'm not going to abandon this post, because if you kill me, you're not going to find another gadfly who cares and loves you as much as I do.

And yet they put him to death. He was 70 years old. They said you should have left me a little more time. Yeah, I would enjoy playing golf a little while, but.

Marlin Detweiler:
But we. What we have in Socrates has some modern parallels, and I really appreciated. I didn't know how you would answer the question of what, what God Socrates referred to when he referred to the name of God. And it's interesting that you say it wasn't Yahweh, but it was some maybe that unnamed god that Paul refers to.

Yes. And the god behind any belief in gods at all. But here, let's bring this conversation into things that are significant and relevant today. The learning from the past is such a tremendous benefit to how we should then live now as, to misquote, Francis Schaefer. But what are some of the misconceptions that we deal with today about antiquity, about the classics, about the times that we call the Golden Age.

In the classical periods, we have been inclined to one or the other extreme, taking too much from them, believing that they have things, you know, some sort of homogeneity with regard or discounting them in some fundamentalist way, saying they're not out of the Bible. We should have nothing to do with them. What is a good balance?

Louis Markos:
And I think a good balance is that you're not.

Marlin Detweiler:
Requiring now because people are involved in classical education or already imbibing and embracing that kind of thinking, but help us think more and better about it.

Louis Markos:
The best way I can do it, this is sort of my metaphor for life is that Christianity is not the only truth. Oh my gosh, Merlin, I just said that on your show, Christianity is not the only truth, but it is the only complete truth. Let me explain what I mean. That if I say.

Marlin Detweiler:
Like natural revelation.

Louis Markos:
Again. Yeah, there we go. That's right. Yeah, they. Hey, what? One thing that Calvin and Thomas Aquinas agreed on was senses Divinity is we all have a sense of the divine. Also, if you read the institutes, the institute begins by distinguishing between general revelation and special revelation. And you know what else begins that way? The Calvinist Bible. Marlin, do you know what the Calvinist Bible is?

It's Paul's epistle to the Romans and a few other books thrown in. So Romans one and two, I never heard it.

Marlin Detweiler:
Referred to that way. Pretty funny. Hey, and what's?

Louis Markos:
With all these reformed churches I've spoken to? I've had to come up with a whole, you know, battery of good jokes. One of my favorite jokes I tell is here's the Calvinist pick-up line. You're a boy. You see a pretty girl, you go up to her and you say your name must be Grace because you're irresistible.

So anyway, I've got my battery Calvinist. But yes, when you read Romans chapter one. Right. Paul says the pagans are without excuse. How can they be without excuse? They don't have the Bible. They're without excuse because God's glory and power are written in creation. That's the first element of general revelation, creation. That book and chapter two of Romans says that the Gentiles who are without the law are a law unto themselves because it's written on their conscience now, approving, now condemning them.

Right. So those are the two most important elements of general revelation, creation and conscience. But I would also include reason, imagination, and other things and whatnot. So if we say Christianity is the only truth, it's like we're dropping a wall and everything that is not truth is complete error. But that's not the world that we live in.

Marlin Detweiler:
No, it's not that. It's part two black and white, and the world is not that way.

Louis Markos:
You know, morally, it is kind of an irony that really the classic modern classical Christian movement has come out of these sort of reformed, Presbyterian and Calvinist churches because when I was growing up, there was great misunderstanding as to what total depravity means. Total depravity means that every part of the person has been subjected to the fall. But there are so many people growing up who basically thought it meant utter depravity.

Marlin Detweiler:
Everything is as bad as it could possibly be.

Louis Markos:
I mean, this is America. People like Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, they don't know Christ, but they understand total depravity. Right. But interesting grace. And we are totally different. We're not utterly depraved. We are. This way to put it. We have not lost the imago dei. We have not lost the image of God. God has written eternity in the hearts of men.

Look, when I go to Plato to learn something, I am like Moses going to my pagan father-in-law Jethro and saying, what do I do, man? These people are killing me and Jethro gives me unbelievably good administrative advice. Or I'm like Moses, who was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, as was Joseph before, as Daniel was educated in the wisdom of Babylon and Persia.

It is we. You're probably familiar with this, Marlin. The early fathers always pointed to, Exodus when it says they despoiled or plundered the Egyptians. Right. Remember? Now, let's be careful.

Marlin Detweiler:
There's still the classical educators have enjoyed embracing. Oh, yeah. Giftedness is what we do when we take secular material. You learn Christian thinking from it.

Louis Markos:
Then we have to be careful because some of that gold that they plundered, they used to make the golden calf, but others of it they used for the temple to glorify God, or the tabernacle and the temple to glorify God. So we have to be discerning and, of course, we can't, because we have a touchstone called the Bible of Christ, both of whom are the Word of God.

We have that touchstone, but we need to learn. I mean, you know, there are examples in Scripture. I mean, look at the noble Centurion Cornelius in Acts chapter ten, right here is a man, and he's a God-fearing Gentile, but he can't be saved on his own. Right. Peter has to come and present the gospel.

He can't. You we cannot save ourselves on our own. But this is a shocking thing to say. But when I read acts nine and ten, that's ten. It says to me that God, Yahweh, was pleased by Cornelius' good acts towards his people. That doesn't mean the good acts saved him, right? But I mean, look, you remember there's only two places in the Gospels where it says Jesus was shocked and awed and amazed.

One was when he was shocked by the unbelief of his fellow Nazareth people. Right? The other one was when he was shocked by the unbelievable belief of the pagan centurion. By the way, I think that the Greeks and Romans rather, educated their centurions. Well, because every time we meet a centurion in Luke or Acts, they're noble people. It's unbelievable how often there are. So, you know, there's virtue as well.

Marlin Detweiler:
Wonderful. I know we can go on for hours. But we've run out of time. We should probably do this again.

Louis Markos:
Oh, definitely. Well, you know, it's Socrates who taught us that we should follow the argument wherever it leads. Yeah. And that is what we've been doing this afternoon.

Marlin Detweiler:
Amen. Louis, thank you so much. And, folks, thank you again for joining us on another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education.

Louis Markos:
Oberlin, you should mention that in, April, InterVarsity press is publishing my book, Passing the Torch An Apology for Classical Christian Education.

Marlin Detweiler:
So that's like a good thing.

Louis Markos:
Highly academic. So I'm excited.

Marlin Detweiler:
Next time when it's coming out, let me know. We'll get you like yes, and people will be ready for it for having heard it here.

Louis Markos:
Good.

Marlin Detweiler:
Thank you, thank you. Bye bye.