By Mike Ivaska, Associate Pastor
I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately. Here’s a book report.
Western thought is essentially the product of ancient Greek thought. The ancient Greeks, influenced primarily by the philosopher Plato, were dualists. They distinguished sharply between matter and spirit (or “form”). For Plato, the physical world we see and feel and touch and smell is the world of matter. It is transient and temporary. It is always changing and corruptible. The non-physical world is the world of forms, or ideas. For everything in the physical, non-eternal world there is a perfect “form” or “idea” that is eternal. We can see a chair in front of us and know it is a chair because of a vague memory within us that knows the perfect form or idea that is Chair. The thing in our living room is an imperfect copy of a perfect, eternal Form. Also for Plato, this world, with its corruption and physicality, is also marred by its plurality. The physical world is not one, but many. Everything in my living room is not united as one thing, but is a bunch of separate things. In the eternal world of Forms, everything is one and ultimately goes back to the One, the Good, which for Plato was God.
When the Romans conquered the Greeks militarily, the Greeks conquered the Romans culturally. Roman philosophy was Greek philosophy. After the fall of the empire and throughout the Dark Ages, Christian monks preserved not only their own scriptures, but classical works of history, philosophy, and science. When Europe emerged as a unified entity under the Holy Roman Empire, the monasteries were not only religious centers but were also the intellectual centers of Europe. The dualism of the Greeks continued to divide reality into Eternal Forms and the non-eternal physical world – and the Romans Catholic Church stood as the gate-keepers to eternity.
The rise of humanism in turn gave rise to the Protestant Reformation. After the Reformation came the terrible wars of religion. Through disgust and exhaustion, European intellectuals sought something more universal which could tie men together the way religion obviously could not. They landed with confidence upon Reason, and thus the Enlightenment was born – with a duality of its own.
Everything now had to be tested in the courts of Reason. Doubt, not belief, became the path to knowledge and understanding. Plato’s duality was maintained, but flipped on its head. Claims had to be challenged, had to prove themselves, and had to run the gauntlet of experience. The scientific method was the way to truth. What could be seen and experienced and proven was Fact, everything else was Value and Belief. Eventually, however, it began to dawn on people that everything could be doubted. Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am,” meant that the only thing he could be sure of was his own existence as a thinking entity. Nothing else was certain. Others found different points of “certainty,” and often rejected Descartes’ own version of certainty as subjectivism. Nietzsche, following these lines, drew the conclusion that the individual may as well seek pleasure and power, since objective facts give no meaning to life and subjective values (particularly religious ones) cannot be proven true.
Today, as “postmoderns” and “post-postmoderns,” we are still dualists. There are Facts (which we get from science) and there are Values (which we get from who knows where). “The earth is round” is a fact-statement. “The earth is good” is a value-statement. “Babies are small humans” is a fact. “Babies should be loved” is a value statement. Most of us think that life has meaning, but really we can’t prove it. Any meaning we give it cannot be a fact. Some of us go the spiritual route, flip Plato’s dualism right side up again, and seek value in eternity or in spirituality. Some of us live for now, for the moment, and run around like little nihilists. Even facts are losing their strength. How many times have you heard on the news of the conflicting results scientists get, and how what was once scientific fact is now an amusing outdated belief? Our personal sense of security now has to come from our values – religion, spirituality, politics, family, romance, and even cynicism.
Plato’s “God” was simply the Good, the Source, the ultimate Form. Throughout history and up through the middle-ages, this Form was equated with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – the God of the Bible. When authoritarian religion was overthrown by the Enlightenment, Plato’s Forms became values and transient matter became the stuff of Facts. When even the facts began letting us down, Western humanity joined the rest of the world in the return to Values – even if the value chosen was often cynicism. Facts, as scientific propositions, have not given us meaning.
The God of the Bible is not Plato’s God. God is not the ultimate Value who has come along, or been invented, to make life more meaningful. God is not the temporary answer to questions science hasn’t gotten to yet. Plato’s Ultimate Form is a philosophical dot on the horizon. Most people’s “God” is a warm place in their heart that makes them feel better, or a dark place in their mind that they hate. The God of the Bible is a person, in fact a Trinity of Persons. While you and I were looking up, looking down, or looking within for life to mean something, the God of the Bible became one of us, lived among us, and died on a cross to reconcile believers to himself. “God” is not a working hypothesis or an imaginary friend, but a Person who has stepped into the room and spoken.