"What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?"

National Endowment for the Humanities

"I think [Athens and Jerusalem] are ultimately not compatible, if you rightly distinguish the two points of departure: wonder seeking its replacement by knowledge, which makes the perplexities go away, on the side of Athens, versus, on the side of Jerusalem, the fear or reverence for the Lord, which is only the beginning of wisdom but which is never superseded by a kind of full understanding or by comfort in the sufficiency of one’s own powers. The spirit of these two points of departure is very different. Moreover, the wisdom of Jerusalem makes extraordinary demands on how you are to live. What begins with the fear and reverence of the Lord soon issues in a long list of commandments about how to live your life. By contrast, the pursuit of wisdom in the manner of Plato and Aristotle, following the model of Socrates, produces no obligations to community or family, and it seems that the highest kind of life is a private life of self-fulfillment through the pursuit of wisdom and reflection. That is a very different view of the good life from the one that is held up by the bible, i.e. the life in community in pursuit of justice, holiness, and love of the neighbor. . . .  these two wisdoms are at odds with one another; the demands they make upon us are not easily harmonized. . . .
     "The statement 'The unexamined life is not worth living' (the Socratic model, if you will) is very different from 'it has been shown to you, o man, what the Lord doth require of you.' . . .  [F]rom a biblical point of view the answer to the question of what is the human good is not an object of one of the human sciences, to be found by our own lights. In fact the bible in part begins by holding up a mirror in which we see the insufficiency of our intellect and the muteness of that upon which we exercise our mind (mainly the natural world and the world of our experience) for giving the proper instruction with respect to the human good. For years and years and years, I read that passage in Aristotle and used to say, 'of course, it’s an object of inquiry,' but the way of the bible does not say that how to live your life is an object of inquiry. . . .  [T]here is something radically different between a view of life in which nothing is immune to critical examination and a view of life that makes demands in both truth and practice, which you don’t regard as the fruits of an inquiry."

     Leon Kass, "Athens, Jerusalem, and modern science:  an interview with Leon Kass, Amy Apfel Kass, and Francis Oakley," The cresset:  a review of literature, the arts, and public affairs 72, no. 1 (Michaelmas 2008):  27-33.  Headline from, of course, Tertullian, Prescription against heretics 7.