In this paper, I argue that the primary purpose of the classical arguments in the Apologia of Aristides is not (as a number of apologetics texts assume) to prove the existence of God. The purpose is instead to demonstrate the nature of the deity that humanity should worship and then to show which people-group worships such a God. In this way, Aristides may provide an instructive model that demonstrates how classical arguments for the existence of God might be deployed in the context of other apologetics methods.
The second-century Apologia of Aristides begins with a sweeping survey of the cosmos and a cosmological argument for a particular type of deity. According to Aristides, the order and motion of the cosmos require a deity who is singular and supreme—but Aristides does not move from this point to an assertion of bare theism or even to evidential arguments for the truth of Christianity. Instead, Aristides shifts immediately from cosmology to ethnography, with a focus on the devotion and ethics of each family of humanity, with the goal of determining which people-group—barbarians, Greeks, Jews, or Christians— participates in the truth. The apology constructs, in the words of William Rutherford, “an epistemic ethnography in which various human groupings are indexed according to their participation in ‘truth’ or in ‘error.’”
From the perspective of Aristides, the arguments from order and from motion demonstrate the nature of the deity to which humanity should devote its worship. The way to determine which people-group participates in the truth is, thus, to observe which people’s devotion is directed toward a deity who possesses the attributes of the unmoved mover and singular sustainer of the cosmos. Devotion to a deity with this nature will produce a pattern of life that reflects the nature and acts of this deity. If a people-group fails to exemplify a distinctive pattern of goodness, the people’s failure is traceable to a defective object of devotion. This principle forms the framework for the entire apology and demonstrates a distinctive application of a classical argument, not as a proof of bare theism but as an index of humanity’s worship.