Plato: A Key Contributor to Modern Christianity
Did you know that the main inspiration for one of modern Christianity’s foundational assumptions is Plato?
You heard that right.
It isn’t the Bible, Jesus, the early Christians, or even first century Judaism. It was the Greek philosopher Plato. And that certainly doesn’t bode well, because Plato was a complete nutball.
It’s from Plato that we get the idea of the Philosopher-King as the perfect government man could have. In other words, he was an advocate of tyranny and dictatorship. Plato, like most politicians today, thought that nearly everyone (except himself, of course) was a complete and total moron and therefore didn’t know how to take care of himself.
To add to the list of bad ideas, he proposed the idea of fiat currency, saying that the money used by the state should be “of no worth amongst the rest of mankind.” We can see how well funny money is working out for the United States.
He also liked the idea of limiting freedom by outlawing the private ownership of gold and silver. FDR, an enlightened individual himself, took a nice cue from his fellow elitist and decided to enforce similar lunacy almost as soon as he took office.
Plato’s ideas have infected much of our modern era. But what crazy idea of Plato’s has contributed (infected) Christianity?
Our whole concept of heaven.
The idea that this world doesn’t matter, and is ultimately transient. That the only thing of any real eternal significance is our souls that will live on in eternity in some kind of disembodied, postmortem bliss. This current life is only a practice run for the real one after we die. This world is corrupt and horrible.
And since this second life is the better one, a true paradise, death is to be welcomed.
According to Plato, we are all part of the same one being who exists in this other dimension we will return to when we die. We should long to return to this state of being.
This is what most pagans believed before and during the first few centuries AD, based on the teachings and traditions passed down by Plato, Homer, and other writers.
So we must ask ourselves why the Christians were persecuted if they believed essentially the same thing as everybody else. The most likely answer, of course, is that they did not believe as everyone else, but held to drastic, fundamental world-view changing beliefs. And these beliefs had very little to with the “soul”, which is an almost foreign concept (in the way we moderns think about it) throughout the Bible.
As NT Wright so eloquently puts it, to the first-century Jews who made up the majority of the early Christians, such a concept would have made as much sense as a “Cadillac in a camel train.”
On the contrary, the Bible continually stresses the importance and inherent goodness of creation. God made it after all. And while currently it has been corrupted, it will one day be redeemed.
Death is not to be welcomed or colluded with. It it the key enemy of creation, of life itself, the ultimate corrupter.
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I am interested on your take of Paul in Philippians 1:21-24 when he says his desire is to depart and be with Christ.
Philippians 1:21-24 is, along with 2 Corinthians 5:6, is one of the few places where Paul hints at an intermediary stage. But, death is not the end. Being with the Lord in some kind of disembodiment is not the end.
The Resurrection is still to come. So going to be with the Lord is not the ultimate goal.
Also, in Philippians, Paul is writing from prison and very likely is facing eminent death yet again, so he is showing the Philippians the confidence a Christian should have that death is not the end. It’s sting has been taken away.
Yeah, pretty much your description of Plato’s beliefs is that of modern day Leftists. There is no Jewish concept of the soul — and Jesus talked of resurrection of the body. The Hebrew word translated as “Hell” in the Old Testament is more accurately translated as “Grave” — which has some pretty important implications.
Absolutely!
And when Jesus’ words are translated as hell, he’s really saying “Gehenna”, which also has some pretty important implications.
Hasn’t anybody heard of the parable of ‘The Rich Man and Lazarus’? Jesus didn’t just tell his story in a figurative matter. They were the Truth because He is the Living Word. Heaven and hell do exist, and our spirit goes to one or the other after earthly death. Resurrection is referring to when our physical bodies will be rejoined with our spirits, and we don’t have to worry if our bodies were cremated or by some cruel act hacked to pieces. Anyways, no matter if the view that we ’sleep’ until our bodies are revived might be true, the outcome is still the same so I don’t think there is really anything to worry about as far as that goes. There are in fact two books that I found at Wal-Mart that tell the story of one person that was literally taken to Heaven and saw everything and then God sent him back to write about what he saw. The other book was about an experience in which a man went down and witnessed Hell first-hand and was also brought back to his earthly life to write a book about it to tell others. I haven’t had a chance to research either of them, so I can’t say for sure the exact details, but maybe it would be something that others would want to look into.
Thinking that heaven is the ultimate destination has severe implications to how Christians act in the here and now. We have already seen it in our retreat in the culture. We throw up our hands and say “To hell with this world, we’re just going to heaven anyway”.
The scriptures say otherwise.
The antidote to Plato is Aristotle.
Amen to that!