Providence and the Martyrs

The Second Apology presses the hardest question raised by the persecution: if the Christian God is good and almighty, why does he let his faithful be slandered, condemned, and killed? Justin’s answer weaves together a theology of the demons who incite the persecution, a doctrine of human freedom and just judgment, the conviction that the world is preserved for the sake of the Christians, and a careful explanation of why Christians do not seek death by their own hand though they do not fear it. This file treats Justin’s theodicy and his theology of martyrdom.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Why the Righteous Suffer

Justin does not pretend that the suffering of the innocent is easy to justify, but he refuses to let it count against God’s goodness. The persecution, he argues, is the work of the demons, who from of old have hated and warred against those who strive to live by reason and righteousness — they moved the world against Socrates in his day, and they move it against the Christians now (Second Apology 7–8; ANF 1, where the chapter division varies by edition). The hostility the Christian meets is therefore not a sign of God’s absence but the predictable malice of the powers that the gospel exposes and defeats. God permits it because he has made rational creatures free, and freedom is the condition both of virtue and of the wickedness that persecutes virtue; a world without the possibility of the persecutor would be a world without the possibility of the saint. Justin’s theodicy is thus rooted in human freedom and the reality of moral evil, not in any flaw in providence (Second Apology 7; ANF 1; Barnard, Justin Martyr, ch. 9).

The World Preserved for the Christians

One of Justin’s most striking claims is that the very continuance of the world is bound up with the Christians. God delays the final conflagration and judgment — Justin expects the world to end in fire — for the sake of “the seed of the Christians, whom they know to be the cause of preservation in nature” (Second Apology 7; ANF 1). Were it not for the Christians and those yet to be saved, the demons and the wicked would already have brought the consummation. The persecuted minority, despised and condemned, is in truth the reason the world still stands: God holds back the end so that the full number of the saved may be gathered. This reverses the persecutors’ valuation entirely. The Christians are not the enemies of the social order whose removal would secure the world; they are the unseen pillar on whose account the world is spared. The suffering of the righteous, far from proving God’s neglect, is the visible edge of a hidden mercy keeping the whole creation in being.

Why Not Simply Die?

The persecutors had a taunt: if you Christians so despise death and long for God, why not kill yourselves and be done, instead of forcing us to do it? Justin answers it with care, and the answer is important for the Orthodox theology of martyrdom. Christians do not seek death by their own hand, he says, because to do so would be to oppose the purpose of God who made them and keeps them in the world for a reason; suicide would be a kind of impiety and a fighting against the divine will (Second Apology 4; ANF 1). The Christian neither courts death nor flees the witness when it is required: he stays alive as long as God wills, to serve and to testify, and he accepts death when it is laid on him rather than deny the truth. This is the narrow path the later Church would mark out precisely — martyrdom is to be received, not provoked; the voluntary rushing-forward to death is not the Church’s counsel, even as steadfastness under death is its glory. Justin’s own end was of the received kind: he did not seek the prefect’s tribunal, but when brought before it he would not deny Christ (see The Trial Before Rusticus).

Suffering and the End of the World

Justin’s theology of providence is set within an eschatological horizon that gives the present suffering its meaning. He expects the world to end in a great conflagration — a Christian reading of the cosmic fire that the Stoics also taught, but transformed: not an endless cycle of burning and renewal, but a final judgment in which the righteous will be raised and rewarded and the wicked punished (First Apology 20, 60; Second Apology 7; ANF 1). The persecution of the righteous is therefore not the last word; it is a passing trial within a history that is moving toward vindication. God delays the end, as we have seen, for the sake of the Christians yet to be gathered, so that the very patience that prolongs the time of suffering is also the mercy that widens the door of salvation (Second Apology 7; ANF 1). The martyr who dies under the demons’ malice dies in the confidence of resurrection and reward — exactly the confidence Justin would voice at his own trial, “I do not suppose it, but I know and am fully persuaded of it” (see The Trial Before Rusticus). The theology of providence and the theology of martyrdom thus meet in the same hope: that the God who permits the present suffering will, at the end, raise and vindicate those who endured it, and that the world is held in being meanwhile precisely so that the full number of the saved may be brought in.

The Martyrs as Argument

For Justin the constancy of the martyrs is not only a trial to be explained but a proof to be wielded. He had himself, before his conversion, watched Christians go fearlessly to their deaths and concluded that men who could die so calmly could not be the vice-ridden criminals they were accused of being — the courage of the dying had been part of what drew him to the faith (Second Apology 12; ANF 1; see The Conversion). He turns this into an apologetic principle: the willingness of Christians to die rather than deny Christ, or rather than purchase life by a pinch of incense, is evidence of the truth and power of what they believe, for no one dies gladly for what he knows to be a lie. The martyr is thus both the supreme test of providence and the supreme demonstration of it — the place where the demons’ malice is most evident and where God’s victory over the fear of death is most visible. That Justin would soon make this argument with his own blood gives the Second Apology a weight few apologies carry.

Freedom Against the Astrologers

Justin’s theodicy rests on a doctrine of human freedom that he defends against two opposite errors: the fatalism of the astrologers, who made human acts the products of the stars, and any notion that God’s foreknowledge necessitates what it foresees. He insists that human beings act “by free choice” and are therefore justly rewarded or punished; were our deeds fixed by fate, virtue and vice would be meaningless words, and praise, blame, law, and judgment would all be unjust (Second Apology 7; First Apology 43–44; ANF 1). God foreknows what each will freely do, and arranges rewards and punishments accordingly, but the foreknowledge does not compel the act. This defense of freedom is the keystone of his answer to the problem of suffering: God permits the wicked to persecute the righteous because he has made rational creatures genuinely free, and a world with real freedom is a world in which real evil — and so real martyrdom — is possible. The dignity of the human person as a free moral agent, capable of either the demons’ malice or the martyr’s constancy, is for Justin worth the cost of a world in which the innocent can suffer. This conviction — that freedom is the ground of both virtue and the evil that assaults it — runs through the whole later Orthodox treatment of theodicy and the permission of evil.

Providence and the Logos

Underlying the whole is Justin’s conviction that the same Logos who governs the cosmos and sows truth in all rational creatures is the one who orders the history of persecution and salvation toward a good end (see The Logos Spermatikos). The demons can rage and the magistrates can kill, but they operate within a providence they cannot finally thwart; the judgment is coming, the righteous will be vindicated, and the world is preserved meanwhile for the gathering of the saved. Justin’s theodicy is not a tidy solution to the problem of evil — he leaves the mystery of permitted suffering genuinely open — but it refuses despair, sets the suffering of the saints within the economy of a wise and patient God, and finds in the martyrs not a scandal but a sign. It is the theology of a man who believed what he wrote enough to die for it.

References

Justin, Second Apology 4, 7–8, 12. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1; and Minns & Parvis, Apologies (OECT, 2009).
Barnard, L. W. Justin Martyr: His Life and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967.
Minns, Denis, and Paul Parvis. Justin, Philosopher and Martyr: Apologies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.