One of the main criticisms of the emergent movement about "fundamentalists" (that includes evangelicals also, in their eyes), is that they have Platonized Christianity. They also like to talk about how we need to go back to the Old Testament Judaism as a lens to understand Christianity instead of the Greek-philosophical Platonic mind. I'm reading in the book of Hebrews this month and....oh my..... looky what I found?
Look at this passage,
Hebrews
9:23-24: So the copies of the heavenly things had to be made pure with those sacrifices. But the heavenly things themselves had to be made pure with better sacrifices. 24 Christ did not enter a sacred tent made by people. That tent was only a copy of the true one. He entered heaven itself. He did it to stand in front of God for us. He is there right now.
10:11 The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming. It is not the real things themselves.
Oh my! This looks like Plato's forms, doesn't it. So, if this is the understanding of the Jews in the Old Testament times (after Moses), then it's interesting to note that Plato lived way, way after most of the OT time of the law. In other words, "Platonism" existed in Judaism before even Plato. So much for this emergent argument.
The $1,551,466 Christian
14 hours ago
1 comments:
Clement of Alexandria, a church father from the late 2nd and early 3rd centuries, in his Exhortation to the Pagans tried to show his pagan readers that "a good part of Christian doctrine can be supported by Plato's philosophy." He was convinced that "there is only one truth, and that therefore any truth to be found in Plato can be none other than the truth that has been revealed in Jesus Christ and in scripture." (Justo Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity, Volume 1, p. 87)
Post a Comment