I'm not certain if this will interest my readers, but it is of great interest to me, and that seems to be what a blog is supposed to be all about.
I have recently been studying the impact of Plato and Aristotle on the development of classical and contemporary Christian theology. It began as part of a class, but once I got the big picture of the impact these two men have had, it made me hungry to learn more. I can't say that I have learned a lot more yet, but I am going to be working my way through Plato's dialogues and other works to get a sense for the way he viewed the world.
From what I know thus far--from the class, so I'm largely parroting secondary sources, not primary--Plato viewed the world dualistically. Maybe you've heard of his analogy of the Cave? The way the Cave works is to imagine a person strapped in place inside a cave. That person is not able to move or even turn his head to see behind him. On the wall of the cave in front of him are a number of shadows cast from a light source somewhere behind him, presumably from the mouth or opening of the cave. Plato apparently reasoned that we are the man in the cave: all the world around us is impermanent and ultimate not real in the true sense of reality. The things outside in the light that are casting shadows are, by contrast, true reality, and they are just as incapable of entering the cave as the man in the cave is incapable of leaving. Thus, at the very best, there is a sort of murky interplay between the two realities which are ultimately immiscible, much like oil and water.
The cave would then be 'nature' and the outside world of light would be 'supernature'. Now Plato was not a Christian. He lived several centuries before Jesus Christ was born. As such, he was not writing his philosophy to be interpreted through a Christian-shaded pair of glasses. He was simply looking at the world around him and trying to reason his way to something that makes sense. He saw things around him that defied his ability to explain, and many of these things seemed to be organized in logical, efficient systems implying that there must necessarily have been some kind of higher authority governing everything. Moreover, his people did believe in a pantheon of gods, and so it was in this context that he tried to understand reality.
The final conclusion was that there definitely is a god, but that he/it/she is ineffably and immeasurably beyond realty, so much so that time and space themselves do not exist for this being. Why not? Because nature, in Plato's mind, is characterized by temporality: time passes and it ravages all things. Ostensiby, given enough time, even the mountains themselves would be reduced to rubble. Plato had the simple concept in mind that that which is greater is not impacted by such trivialities as time. Thus, for god to be higher, he must have been outside the scope of time. If god has no time, then he is not able to change. Thus, reasoned Plato, god must be completely perfect (or it may have been the other way around: god is completely perfect because he/it/she is god, therefore there must be no passage of time as time means the erosion and decay of all things, hence god would cease to be perfect).
The basic notion of perfection, in Plato's mind, is possessing everything and lacking nothing. But it was more than this, too. It also meant that god did not possess emotions, because emotions were thought to be the result of eros, which is 'desirous love'. Since god was thought to possess everything, there would be not impetus for it to have eros, as there would be nothing further for it to desire or try to obtain. Thus, god was 100% completely immovable, stoic, and impassable. Nothing effected him, but at the same time he could not effect anything temporal, because to do so would require him to have time, which would require him to experience decay, which would lead to his having emotions, which would essentially reduce him to humanity. Indeed, many of the early Greek authors portray such petty gods which are forever bickering, warring with one another, etc. From what I can parse, it doesn't seem that Plato thought of the gods/god in this matter. Rather, he felt that ultimately god would have no spatial dimension at all because he must be simple.
Why does this matter, David? Excellent question!
You know how the New Testament was written in Greek (if you didn't before, now you do!)? Well that's because Greek was the lingua franca of the day and age of Jesus. It's roughly synonymous to how most of the western world speaks English in addition to whatever their mother tongue is, because until very recently, English has been the 'way we do business' throughout most of the world. Not only was the Greek language en vogue at the time of Christ, but so was Greek culture. This is known as the Hellenistic period, and it is primarily responsible for the Greek Old Testament (a translation from the original Hebrew and Aramaic into Koine Greek). During the 400 years or so between the testaments (between the book of Malachi and the book of Matthew) many Jews fled Israel due to the constant bickering between the Ptolemies and the Antiochuses (rulers of Egypt and Syria, respectively). They fled to Alexandria, Egypt en masse (not all did, but many did), resulting in a sizable Jewish population in that city. Why Alexandria? Apparently the Ptolemies were relatively tolerant of the Jewish religion and culture whereas the Antiochuses were not so much.
Alexandria was named after Alexander the Great, one of the greatest leaders of the Greek civilization ever to arise. Indeed, it was his lightning fast blitz from Greece eastward into the Indian sub-continent that paved the way for much of the known world to share the Greek language and Greek mythology and culture. While in Alexandria, the Jewish refugees largely forgot their mother culture, which was cause for great alarm among the Jewish Rabbis. So great was the assimilation of Greek culture that the old Hebrew scriptures were no longer accessible as most young Jews did not speak or read Hebrew. Thus, there was a hustle to produce a Greek manuscript known today as the Septuagint (or the LXX).
The point of all of this is that Greek culture was en vogue, and so was Greek philosophy. Interject into the midst of this a radical event: God set aside His deity and created Himself into an incarnation, a little baby growing in the womb of Mary. He was born in obscurity, but lived life as a firebrand, challenging the status quo of religiosity of the day (and still doing so today, I might add!). Christ was teaching His parables in the midst of a culture whose higher thinkers were enamored of Greek philosophy.
Thus, it isn't really surprising that within a few centuries after His death, most of the Christian church fathers were trying to figure out a way to get the teachings of Jesus to sync up with the teachings of Plato. Indeed, Philo, a famous Alexandrian Jew and contemporary of Jesus Christ, went through the whole Torah and tried to explain how much of what was written was an allegory because he made the same assumptions about reality as Plato did: i.e. God was timeless and dimensionless, and totally incapable of speaking face to face with Moses as the Bible claims.
Thus it was that by the 4th century when Augustine came along, it wasn't a big logical jump to just assume that none of the Bible is truly inspired (because how could a timeless God interact in any way with a temporal mortal man to inspire him to do anything?), and that it was therefore just a collection of wise writings and effective traditions compiled over generations by noble Jewish scholars. Even the New Testament, it was reasoned, was tradition.
There were a number of heresies that circulated in the early days of the Christian church. Some said that Jesus never really existed as a mortal man, but that He had a spirit body and it was merely an illusion that He died on the cross. Others said He wasn't truly fully divine, but that He was the Logos. The Logos is a Greek philosophical concept. The idea goes like this: originally all of reality was timeless in the way God is. Every spirit spent eternity contemplating God. Then some spirits started to look away from God (how this happens if they are timeless is not explained, apparently), and in doing so, they were snared by time. Having fallen into time, they became mortal and sundered. Gnosticism is the process whereby people who believe in this theory of ontology attempt to access secret knowledge that is meant to elevate their souls back to the level of contemplating God, thereby freeing them from the fallen awfulness of temporal reality.
The point is, all of this assumes a Platonic structure to reality. Plato is not necessarily correct. Indeed, if we drop these presuppositions of Platonism and simply come to the Bible with as little bias as absolutely possible (i.e. we don't assume anything) and we read the Bible and take it at face value about what it says, then we come up with a vastly different ontology and cosmology.
The Bible says specifically and pointedly that God is temporal. He experiences time just like we do. It says specifically that He does have emotions: He is angry with the wicked, He loves those who seek mercy and compassion. He rejoices along with His angels when a wicked person decides to stop being wicked and give their life to Christ.
So what? Well, just about all of the modern top misconceptions and maledictions concerning God stem from the false interpretation of the Bible through a Platonic bias. For example, people may ask "How could anyone be happy in heaven while we are back here suffering on earth?" Excellent question. The Bible says quite clearly that the dead are sleeping, awaiting the judgment, and that they are not, in fact, in heaven. Thus the simple Biblical answer is: they couldn't be happy in heaven. But classical theology has always held that there is an immediate reward for the righteous and punishment for the wicked at death.
Catholic thinktanks throughout the Medieval era teased this concept of instant payback at death into a two-part system. They reasoned that Jesus was able to pardon people from the ETERNAL consequences of sin, thereby saving them from hell, but that there still had to be a temporal penalty for their transgression, which meant Purgatory for a good long while to suffer and think about what you have done. Yikes! No such concept is found anywhere in Scripture; it is the tradition of men being held up as equivalent to the words of sacred Scripture that has led to people thinking of a Purgatory.
Moreover, the concept of an eternal burning hell where the wicked are tortured with fire and red-hot devil pokers is also, ultimately, the product of Platonist thought applied to the Bible. Someone thinking in terms of God's realm being timeless would look at texts in the Bible where it talks about "the smoke of their torment ascending forever" and "their worm dying not" and say "Ah, here we have a prime example of how the Bible is pointing us to timelessness in God's realm, because the burning of hell is eternal and going on forever. Thus the wicked never cease to experience their punishment." It's a horrible monstrosity. In fact, a Biblical approach to reading the Bible allows us to let the Bible interpret itself, and sure enough such texts as these are making explicit reference to Sodom and Gomorrah which were judged to be filled with nothing but wickedness day and night and were destroyed. The Bible says they, too, burn with eternal fire. Are they still burning today? No. Clearly this is metaphoric language suggesting that the result of the burning is eternal: they will never exist again.
Thus, many of the biggest issues causing people to hate God and hate Christianity today are the result of taking a mode of thinking predating Christ by 5 centuries or more, and applying it to the whole of the Bible, which was never even remotely intended to be Greek in culture or philosophy and was only Greek in language as the result of the events in the New Testament happening to transpire during the time that Greek was the common tongue.
There are many more examples of how Plato has impacted Christian theology, but I feel this will suffice for now. If there is interest in greater study, I will be writing a magazine article for Amazing Discoveries. I just have to read a metric ton of Plato's writing first so that I can establish my assertions with direct quotations from primary sources! Wish me luck and please pray for my success and my time management abilities!
My best,
David Stratton
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