Plato has had a large influence on the history of Christian thought. Some of it has been good, and some of it has not. Plato is known for his search for universals. He came up with a theory of Forms, and these forms were universal in nature, and the things we experience in our everyday lives are simply temporal and limited instances of these eternal forms. For Plato, the temporal and immediate bodily experience of things is inferior to these eternal forms, and the influence that Platonism has had on Christianity is to emphasize the importance of the soul to the exclusion of the body. According to a Plato-influenced Christianity, the body is bad, and we long to escape it, so that we can live eternity as our perfected souls. The immaterial superior to the material. True Christianity, of course, recognizes the corruption of the body, but our hope is for a resurrected body like Jesus' resurrection body. Heaven is not meant to be immaterial but a rescue of our material world gone bad.
I am not a philosopher, and I am sure the preceding paragraph includes some bad philosophy and gross oversimplifications. Nevertheless, I have noticed a Platonistic tendency within myself, and I have noticed this as I have come to see the differences between my wife and I. Let me explain what I mean.
In marriage two people come together as one. It is an awesome and a scary thing. I commend it. No two people are going to be alike, and I think especially in the beginning months and probably years, those two people begin to see their differences. You see the other person more clearly, and as you come to understand that person, you also come to understand yourself better, even and especially through your differences.
Nicole and I are different. I think part of that certainly is that I am a man, and she is a woman, and by virtue of God's creative plan, we are different in distinctive ways. Some of our differences are due to this gender difference, and some is due simply to the specifics of who we were created to be as different individuals. What are some of these differences?
Let me describe myself. In describing myself and what makes me tick, I do not mean to say that Nicole is disinterested in these things - only that they do not necessarily drive her in the same ways they drive me. I believe I am driven by a search for universals, a sort of Platonism. What are my passions? First, I am a math teacher, and I am passionate about math. I like the logic of it, and I like the way the whole structure of math can be reasoned forth from a few elementary self-evident assumptions. Euclid's Elements are beautiful. The structure of math is really beautiful to me because I believe it is describes something true about the universe, something that existed before man was around, and something that will exist after the world is over. Two plus two equals four, and the same would be true for aliens, even if they used different symbols or language to describe this underlying truth. In doing math, I am grasping for one of these universal Forms.
I enjoy physics for the same reasons; I am not as good at it. I enjoy chemistry a little less. I enjoy biology least of all the sciences probably. I do not enjoy memorizing data. I think I enjoy physics because it seeks to boil down physical reality to its most basic causes, and it gets the nearest to basic Forms. I am not a materialist; however, I think my mind does work like a scientist and engineer. There is a beauty in the idea that you can keep boiling things down to smaller and smaller constituent pieces. Take an animal. You can boil down the animal and what it does to billions of chemical reactions happening in its body and in its brain. And those chemical processes can be boiled down into smaller processes, and if you get small enough you get down to the level of atoms.
In a sense, biology sits atop chemistry sits atop physics sits atop math. Using math, physics holds out the hope of unification. There are basic forces, such as gravity and electromagnetism, and there is a sort of universal elegance to the way math can help explain the world. Along this spectrum, I have noticed in myself a draw to what seems more universal, the math and the physics, and I am not as interested in what seems so particular, such as the biology of how a caterpillar turns into a butterfly. Part of this (slight) aversion to chemistry and biology is that as we move into these particulars, there is a ton more specific and seemingly arbitrary information to know, and it is simply more attractive to describe it in simpler terms if possible, even if we are describing more general (or universal) principles.
I enjoy doing traditional manly things, like playing and watching sports, but unlike many, I have absolutely no interest in their statistics. In a sense, the sport itself is more of a universal, and the specific histories of people playing them are arbitrary manifestations of those universals. These histories are literally trivial to me. I get caught up in sports, though. But the part I actually get caught up in is the story of pursuit and triumph and sometimes redemption. I get caught up the story that is being told through the sports. But I believe these stories are pieces and echoes of a bigger Story. I feel and root for the characters in the story, but after the game, I will soon forget what happened in the bottom of the fifth inning or what happened on the 17th green. Who won the NCAA tournament the last few years. I honestly don't remember, but I watched them all.
I enjoy reading a lot. I used to read fiction, but my tastes have changed over time. I still do read some fiction, but I now read things to help me understand the Bible better. I love the gospel story. I believe that we ought not to waste our lives, and there is an eternity waiting, so everything I do I want to count in light of eternity. Therefore, I have less and less interest in fictions, and I want to improve my mind in things that will last. The gospel will last, and God's truth will last; therefore, I am interested in improving my mind in pondering those truths. A very, very regrettable side effect of this pursuit of eternal Truth in relation to the Bible is that I attempt too much to systematize and boil down to more basic truths. Instead of reading the Bible, sometimes I read others' organizing interpretations of the Bible. I am much more ignorant of the Old Testament than I need to be because it seems so full of what seems to be the arbitrary particulars of the lives of different people. I feel more at home in the logic of Paul than I do in the stories of the kings in the OT.
That is a lot of self-description, and I apologize. I just want to convey the sense I feel of this search for universals as opposed to particulars within myself. Nicole is different. Certainly not in the sense that she does not care for truth. On the contrary! Instead, she finds it more readily than I do in the particulars of life. While I spend my time pondering deep universal truths and searching more deeply the nature of the Gospel, she is showing practical giving and love to those who are near to her, giving hands and feet to the Gospel. She cares deeply for her mother, her father, and her Mamaw. She loves more freely and deeply than I do. What does she like to do? What gets her wheels turning? Arts and crafts and decorations! She is very good at that sort of thing, and I am definitely not. Crafts was my least favorite Vacation Bible School station. In my mind, all of that is arbitrary material stuff, and it isn't going to last into eternity, so I am not as interested in it. Like Plato, I tend to skip over the particulars for the universals.
Nicole also gets into stories more emotionally and deeply than I do. She likes to watch television and read stories, probably more than I do. And she gets much more involved with the characters. She empathizes with them more. Not just in fiction, but in real life, too. While I am loving the theoretical people I don't know in a foreign nation I haven't been to, she is helping and loving and sharing her particular creativity with people who need love right around her.
I want to conclude and bring these together. The Lord Jesus Christ is God over all. This includes the universals and the particulars. Christianity should not be filtered through the lens of Plato. Rather, Plato should be filtered through the lens of Christ's supremacy over all. I think that Nicole and I both have pieces of the puzzle, and that part of God's sovereign plan was to bring us together to complement each other and help each other grow. We both have much to learn from God and from each other.
Christmas is here, and the miracle of the incarnation shakes me out of some of this Platonic trance. It humbles me, that a God so great would stoop down into the dirty particularity of a single life. Jesus, eternal and universal, stoops down to take flesh and blood, humanity, parents, aches and pains, a Jewish identity, a single mother, and a road to a bloody cross. We see stories in the gospels, not just an emotionless force walking around spouting universal truths. We see particularity. We see deep love for us in God's sovereign particularity. Though we do not see his face today, we unmistakably know that God became a man and had a face. Though we do not hear his laugh, we know he had one. Though we know so little of his childhood, we know he had one. From my point of view, I tend to focus on the divinity of Christ, his eternality, but this is lopsided if I do not also see his humanity. In Christmas, the Universal becomes particular in a manger.
Every single topic and every single thing has significance because it is in God's world. Everything is meant to glorify God. This does not flatten out our choices into insignificance, but it is true nevertheless. I think each of our prayers should be that God would open our eyes to our own blindspots. How is God at work to glorify himself in the things that are not naturally as interesting to me? God, please help me. God, please give me the grace to listen and learn. Jesus, may my mind and heart exult in the amazing unity of things as I ponder your eternal purposes, but may that worship of you work itself out into practical love in the amazing complexity of your creation, especially those in need around me. Most assuredly, Soli deo Gloria!
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