Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

• John 14:6

For the Lord gives wisdom;
    from his mouth come knowledge and understanding.
He holds success in store for the upright,
    he is a shield to those whose walk is blameless,
for he guards the course of the just
    and protects the way of his faithful ones.
Then you will understand what is right and just
    and fair—every good path.
For wisdom will enter your heart,
    and knowledge will be pleasant to your soul.

• Proverbs 2:6-10

“These physical bodies of ours come into existence and pass away, are always imperfect, are never the same for two moments together, and are at all times highly perishable. But they are the merest and most fleeting glimpses of something that is also us and is non-material, timeless, and indestructible, something that we may refer to as the soul. These souls are our permanent Forms. The order of being that they inhabit is the timeless, spaceless one in which exist all the unchanging Forms that constitute ultimate reality.
“Readers who have been brought up in a Christian tradition will at once recognize this view as familiar. That is because the school of philosophy that was dominant in the Hellenistic world in which Christianity came on to the scene and proceeded to develop was the tradition of Platonism. The New Testament was, of course, written in Greek; and many of the deeper chinkers among the early Christians were profoundly concerned to reconcile the revelations of their religion with Plato’s main doctrines. What happened was that the most important of these doctrines became absorbed into orthodox Christian chinking. There was a time when it was quite common for people to refer to Socrates and Plato as ‘Christians before Christ.’ Many Christians seriously believed that the historic mission of those Greek thinkers had been to prepare the theoretical foundations for some important aspects of Christianity. The detailed working out of these connections was something that preoccupied many scholars during the Middle Ages.
“Plato, to state the obvious, was neither Christian nor Jew, and arrived at his conclusions in complete independence of the Judeo-Christian tradition.  In fact, he arrived at them by philosophical argument.”

• Bryan Magee, The Story of Philosophy

“Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.”

• C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Plato (427c-347BC) and Aristotle (384-322) are two of the key philosophers of ancient Greece.  You have all three if you add Plato’s teacher, Socrates.  In earlier writings on a few of these philosophers, I expressed it as a lament that they lived too soon to know Jesus, for some of their philosophy sounded like someone searching for a Truth that only Jesus could satisfy.  I did not invent any pre-Christ Christianity to hope they were saved.

Also, these two paragraphs are rather scathing against Christians, and possibly Christianity in general.  We see what side in the argument Bryan McGee would take.  I pray that he search for truth beyond the philosophical.

But Plato in his Theory of Forms, got a little carried away with his ideal Forms, and rejected the idea at one point.  So, I would definitely not call him a pre-Christ Christian.  Jesus does not let you go once you found Him.  And Plato was, as the book goes on to say, a philosopher using philosophical arguments to figure this stuff out.

But to imagine an ideal you that is not material, and an ideal of what mankind in general should be.  You are looking at the new creation that we become when Jesus enters our hearts and in Jesus Himself.

If only Plato could have understood that.  As for Aristotle, he followed the teachings of Plato, and his hands were filled with one particular student, Alexander the Great.  But while teaching, he built a library with most of his writings on papyrus scrolls.  The philosophers before Aristotle are often remembered by anecdotes in later philosophers’ writings, but Aristotle established a change in directions for documentation of philosophical thought. The photo, the cover for the present book, is a close-up of a statue of Aristotle.

If you like these Tuesday morning essays about philosophy and other “heavy topics,” but you think you missed a few, you can use this LINK. I have set up a page off the home page for links to these Tuesday morning posts. I will continue to modify the page as I add more.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.