DIVINE PLAN/ECONOMY: FROM SUNSET TO SUNRISE; THE SWEET DANGER OF DECISION

Clement's Exhortation to the Greeks is a lyrical work beginning with a description of the gospel as the new cosmic song which supplants the old songs of the Greeks and which can turn stones into men. The new song overcomes the dullness of those whose hearts are petrified against truth. The exhortation culminates in an offer of salvation. Salvation is the greatest good, which brings man into a relation with God, where, as a friend of God, he shares in a renewed universe of good things. Clement restates Paul's theme of the righteousness of God which spreads salvation through a new creation.

The beginning of Clement's thought, as for other second-century theologians, is the primitive Christian kerygma, which speaks of a good and only God, and of his plan of salvation, which comes to perfection in Christ and may be received by all. Clement is so remarkable for his philosophical accounts of God that his devotion to the kerygma is commonly overlooked. Yet, like Irenaeus, he had only one gospel to proclaim: the goodness of God from the beginning to the end, God's saving concern for humankind and the centrality of his act in Jesus Christ. This message emerges at the beginning of the Protrepticus (prot 4.59.2).