In his book The Denial of Death Ernest Becker argued that, in the face of death, we pursue self-esteem and significance by performing within what he called a cultural "hero system." A hero system is a pathway to meaning, an arena of performance where we can earn a sense of self-esteem, the feeling that our life "matters." In The Shape of Joy I describe this as "the superhero complex."

Religion, obviously, was and remains, a huge player in these hero systems. Religion has functioned as a repository of our deepest values and as an engine of meaning-making. To return to Part 1, this is what makes religion vulnerable to idolatry. I inherit religious beliefs from my culture, stepping into a meaning-making hero system. But that hero system has been used over time to justify human projects. God, for example, prizes my race or country over others. Consequently, it takes a great deal of effort to extract oneself from this inherited idolatry. And as Jesus said, only a few find their way out.

And yet, politics has slowly taken over the role of hero system among American Christians. Politics has become the primary arena of heroic moral performance, how I make my life "matter." Christianity has suffered political capture. Politics has become the repository of our values and the focus of our concerns. 

Simply put, politics has become existentially freighted. Instead of a pragmatic pursuit of the common good, politics is where I discover, pursue, and perform my identity. 

Unfortunately, there’s a dark side to our hero systems. In Ernest Becker’s book Escape from Evil, his sequel to The Denial of Death, he describes how our hero systems become a source of social conflict. People who espouse values different from our own threaten the validity of our hero project, calling into question the metrics of our meaning. This unsettles us and makes us anxious. And in the face of that anxiety we lash out at those people who hold different values and beliefs. Psychologists call this hostility worldview defense. 

With politics now becoming our dominant hero system, the place where we strive for ultimate purpose and meaning, it is increasingly vulnerable to worldview defense, growing more tribal and hateful. This is the dark feedback loop we're witnessing all around us. The more politics matters the more violent it becomes.

So, what's our response supposed to be? If we reject politics as our hero system and re-embrace our faith, wouldn't Christianity become vulnerable to worldview defense? Aren't we just jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire? Replacing one hero system for another, each just as susceptible to worldview defense? 

The answer, to echo Part 1 again, is yes, religion is no sure protection from worldview defense. Idolatry is the default condition. But there is a sliver of hope. Jesus described it as a narrow road. And a few do find it. 

What's the hope of pulling our hero system out of politics to find it again in Christianity? The answer is: Jesus. If you're pursuing meaning from within Christianity there is a chance you'll bump into Jesus. Not the fake, idolatrous Jesus. The Jesus who legitimizes your politics. The real Jesus. The Jesus who loved his enemies. That Jesus has a chance to interrupt your idolatry. 

Plus, as I mentioned in the last post, there are the virtues of the Christian tradition. It's true that religions are vulnerable to worldview defense, but religions have virtue traditions that political parties do not. The only thing partisan politics valorizes is aggression. Political partisans do not call their people to peace-making, kindness, generosity, mercy, humility, and love. But if your hero system is pursued within Christianity you will be called to such virtues. Even fake Christians bump into the Sermon on the Mount from time to time. And that encounter can tamp down some of worst excesses of worldview defense. At least a little bit. 

My point here is that Christianity has moral resources that partisan politics lack. Consequently, while worldview defense is a chronic temptation you have a better chance of dealing with it from within Christianity than from without.

"show us favor, for we’ve had more than enough contempt"

Many scholars place the composition of Psalm 123 after Israel's exile. During her exile Israel endured the humiliation of a subjugated people. Afterwards, Israel was politically weak, diminished in the eyes of the surrounding nations and facing their scorn. Consequently, the singer looks to God--"I lift my eyes to you"--seeking relief from the social contempt:

Show us favor, Lord, show us favor,
for we’ve had more than enough contempt.
We’ve had more than enough
scorn from the arrogant
and contempt from the proud.

In The Shape of Joy I have a chapter entitled "All the Way Home" where I explore the contrast between social mattering and existential mattering. Social mattering concerns how we matter to other people. And as you would expect, social mattering is a huge factor in mental health. Knowing that you matter to others, that others value and care for you, is life-giving. Existential mattering, also called cosmic significance, is more metaphysical and ontological in nature, hence the words "cosmic" and "existential." Existential mattering is the durable conviction that your life has intrinsic value and worth no matter what. Biblically, when we describe human persons as being made in the image of God we're pointing to their existential mattering. Our value is an ontic fact. 

The point I make in The Shape of Joy is that, while both social and existential mattering are vital to well-being, existential mattering is the more robust predictor of health. In The Shape of Joy I illustrate this contrast by describing how our hearts can be broken. Our love stories can be sad and tragic. From lovers, to family, to friends. To say nothing of the epidemic of loneliness we are facing. From The Shape of Joy:

Hearts do. They crack. We are rejected, hurt, betrayed, and wounded. We can suffer abuse. We carry the scars. As I learned at an early age, falling in love is a risky and dangerous thing. The concerns here aren’t just romantic. Our families of origin are hazardous as well. The love we experience within our homes can be absent, inadequate, manipulative, or abusive. Family can mess us up in ways not easily fixed.

For my part, I’ve been lucky in love. But not everyone is. The problem with social mattering isn’t just that love is scarce, that loneliness has become an epidemic. Love itself can be the problem. The most important people in our lives can let us down, betray and hurt us. In light of this, our mattering has to dwell somewhere beyond our saddest and most tragic love stories. 

We see this play out in Psalm 123. In the midst of a catastrophe of social mattering, facing contempt, scorn, and distain, the singer looks to God as their source of existential and cosmic mattering:

"Show us favor, O Lord, for we have seen more than enough contempt." 

One of the reasons I think Christianity's relationship with politics has become so toxic and dysfunctional is because political issues have come to trump Christian virtue.

For example, on the Christian right “being a Christian” means holding certain political views—pro-gun ownership, pro-life, pro-capitalism, pro-capital punishment, against entitlements, and against affirmative action. On the Christian left “being a Christian” also means holding certain political views—pro-gun control, pro-choice, pro-socialism, against capital punishment, supportive of entitlements, and more favorable toward affirmative action.

To be sure, it's not so neat and tidy, but you get the point. The Christian "political witness" means espousing and pursuing specific policies. Being a Christian means taking a particular stance on a specific issue. And to be sure, I hold opinions about which policies I feel are closer to the witness of Jesus.

Still, it’s worth noting how little Scripture has to say about many of our modern policy debates. The reason is obvious: we’re separated from the biblical authors by two millennia. Jesus and Paul would surely lament gun violence, but it’s hard to squeeze a Second Amendment opinion out of either. And what about capitalism versus socialism? Both care deeply about justice and the poor, but perhaps they’d be less concerned with a nation’s chosen system than with whether people are treated fairly and the vulnerable are cared for.

As we know, providing Biblical warrant for specific policy stances can be tenuous, thin, and sketchy. What about affirmative action? Capital punishment? Vaccine mandates? Immigration policy? And yet, so much effort is devoted toward precisely this task, on both the right and the left. Consequently, Scripture is torn in two as Christians on the right and left engage in political and ideological combat. 

In the midst of all this conflict, however, Scripture is clear in its call to virtue. This is what makes the moral witness of Scripture so universal and timeless. No matter when or where we're living, no matter the nation state or economic system, Christian character remains a constant. And I wonder, as I said at the top, if this is what's gone wrong with Christian political engagement. By focusing so much on policy issues we've lost track of virtue. Christians are now defined by how they vote rather than by the fruit of the Spirit. We're no longer identified as being or focused upon becoming loving, joyful, peace-filled, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, and self-controlled. Rather, we've been pulled into debating issues about which the Bible has little to say and might not even care about.

What if we were to refocus upon virtue? Might that have a salutary effect upon our politics? Might it lower the temperature on our debates? Allow us to see each other as beloved siblings in the family of God rather than dehumanized enemies? 

Perhaps this has been the devil's greatest trick. Christians have exchanged virtue for a vote.

I've been ruminating, again, about faith and politics. A topic, given our times, that I come back to again and again.

In this post I want to talk about how God always gets pulled into idolatrous projects, and will be perennially pulled into idolatrous projects. But also how attempts to remove God from public life creates its own toxic and dysfunctional outcomes. In short, God always sits between nihilism and idolatry.   

The case about idolatry is easily made. Humans are religious and worshipping creatures. As James K. A. Smith puts it, we are Homo liturgicus. Paul Tillich describes how we live with a horizon of "ultimate concern." These ultimate concerns imbue life with sacred fulness, purpose, and meaning. We pursue life within an existential arena of heroic moral action. 

The trouble is that humans are also sinful and broken. Consequently, the religious and sacred is co-opted to provide divine justification for the protection and pursuit of my interests. God baptizes my way of life. God legitimizes a world that privileges and serves my needs and agendas. This happens at all different scales. At the individual level I use God to justify or rationalize selfish choices. At the group level God stands with Us over against Them. This is how God becomes pulled into racial, political, and nationalistic ideologies. 

What I'm describing isn't new. We all know that this happens. My point here is simply to say this always happens and will always happen. In fact, I'd suggest that this the default situation. I know that is a very harsh and cynical thing to say, but I don't know how an honest reading of Scripture leads to any other conclusion. Read 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, and 1 and 2 Chronicles. Idolatry was the default. Read the gospels. Jesus declared the temple in Jerusalem to be desolate. Again, idolatry was the default. Read Revelation. Idolatry is the default. I think Jesus is clear on this point: "Narrow is the way that leads to life, and few find it."

Few find it. Idolatry is the default.

If that's true, then it stands to reason that most of the "Christianity" we observe in America is false worship. "Christianity" is used, just like every religion gets uses, as divine legitimization for individual, political, and nationalistic interests. Consequently, there is nothing strange or shocking when we see Christianity being pulled into ideological movements. This is precisely what the Bible expects will happen. Again, on the pages of Scripture idolatry is the default. That holds for us. Much of the Christianity we observe in the culture will be counterfeit. Something that is true of all religions in all cultures throughout history. Our time and place is no different. 

Given this situation, how religion comes to sacralize material, political, ideological, and nationalistic self-interests, many are tempted to jettison the sacred altogether. God is just too dangerous. Transcendence is a cancer. The divine is poisonous. The safer course would seem to be to reject any role for religion in public life. God needs to be amputated from "God and Country." We need a wholly secular politics based upon liberal, humanistic, and Enlightenment ideals. 

The problem with this is that nihilism has its own toxic and dysfunctional impacts upon society. If you evacuate human life of sacred, ultimate, and transcendent significances what remains behind is a existential wasteland. Life is evacuated of heroic meaning and we are left unmoored, rudderless, and set adrift. 

On this point, Fredrik deBoer has recently argued that political violence is increasingly being produced by nihilism. Violence becomes a way to construct meaning. Here is a bit from deBoer's much commented upon piece:

This is, in fact, my overarching argument: that where we are trained to see public violence as the outcome of ideology - those anarchist assassinations, 9/11, Oklahoma City, Anders Breivik, Yukio Mishima - in the 21st century, a certain potent strain of political violence is not the product of ideology but rather an attempt to will ideology into being through violence itself. To create meaning in a culture steeped in digital meaninglessness by the most destructive means available. The 21st century school shooter (for example) does not murder children in an effort to pursue some teleological purpose; the 21st century school shooter exists in a state of deep purposelessness and, at some level and to some degree, seeks to will meaning into being through their actions. This is part of why so many of them engage in acts of abstruse symbolism and wrap their politically-incoherent violence in layers of iconography; they are engaged in cargo cult meaning-making, the pursuit of a pseudo-religion. The tail wags the dog; acts we have grown to see as expressions of meaning are in fact childish attempts to will meaning into being through violence.

I also think there's come reciprocal causation going on here. Nihilism creates a hunger for meaning, and that hunger makes people vulnerable to ideological radicalization, which has its own temptations toward violence. 

And beyond violence, there all the mental health consequences caused by nihilism and its crisis of meaning. 

The point here is that you might be afraid of God and how God is chronically used to justify bad things. And Christians are rightly demoralized by toxic manifestations of Christianity. But you should also be afraid of the Void. 

What I'm suggesting here is that human life is lived between nihilism and idolatry. Because humans are sick, sinful, and self-interested our religious beliefs tend toward the idolatrous. Much of the Christianity we behold in America is fake. And will always be fake. Again, this is the Biblical expectation. This was the explicit teaching of Jesus: "Few find it."

Beholding the political uses of sacred legitimization, many run away from God. This seems to be the safer path for our shared, public life. Christians, therefore, come to renounce Christianity. Secular elites view religion as a civic enemy, as a threat to democracy. But there is no safe harbor to be found in this direction. If you evacuate the nation of the sacred you're running headlong into the Void. 

So this is what I think. The Christian political witness is a dance between nihilism and idolatry. Our ultimate concerns will always tip toward self-interest. Idolatry will be our default state. False religion will dominate our cultural life. And since Christianity is the majority religion in America our false religion will be Christianity. There is no escaping this. And yet, efforts to address this idolatry that strip ultimate concerns from our social, political, and national life will create their own dysfunctions, ranging from nihilistic violence to mental health crises to heightened vulnerability to ideological radicalization. The Void is no answer.

Consequently, I believe the fundamental task of political theology isn't really about the shape of Christian political engagement or the content of policy debates. The fundamental task is, rather, prophetic and existential, providing us the tools necessary to navigate between nihilism and idolatry, between false religion and the Void. 

I want to end this series by sharing the insight that sent me down this nine part rabbit hole.

I've hinted at this insight in a few of these posts, but I want to conclude by bringing it fully into view.

It recently struck me, while reflecting upon the Protestant mind, that the Protestant worldview is a metaphysical vacuum, at least overtly. To be sure, Protestantism espouses a Biblical faith, but it lacks any supporting metaphysical assumptions or cosmological worldview. Rather, most Protestants implicitly default to the metaphysics of modernity--subject/object dualism, the fact/value split, the absence of teleology--which work to undermine Biblical faith. Christianity struggles in the metaphysical soil of modernity. 

In addition, a sola scriptura tradition bereft of a metaphysical or cosmological worldview is left with words on a page without a means to make sense of those words. 

Let me illustrate. 

Consider Genesis 1.1: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." These are words on the page, and Protestants believe these words. And yet, what do these words mean? A lot of Protestants default to the metaphysical assumptions of modernity. Genesis 1.1 means that, a long time ago, God created the cosmos like a watchmaker makes and winds up a watch. A deistic and mechanistic imagination sits behind this view of Genesis 1.1. God is the Watchmaker. God is the Intelligent Designer. We imagine that the natural order now exists autonomously and independently of God. Lost is the patristic understanding that creation is constant and ongoing. Gone is the recognition of our continuous ontological dependence. We have lost track of how this particular moment of existence--right here and right now--is an astonishing ontological gift.

And this isn't just a problem with our understanding of creation. It goes to how we envision God's relation to the world generally. Does God stand "at a distance"? Do we imagine that when God acts in our world that His act is an external intervention into the natural order? Is a miracle a "suspension" or "violation" of the "laws of physics," an act of ontological violence? When we imagine God at work in the world is He tinkering as one cause among many?

Here's another example. John 3.16: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." These are words on the page, and Protestant believe these words. But again, what do these words mean?

As I've described in this series, without a participatory metaphysics, our visions of "perishing" and "eternal life" default to forensic, penal, and juridical understandings. "Eternal life" means means being forgiven. Which is true, but the patristic vision of sanctification, divinization, and theosis has gone missing. 

Another example, Hebrews 11.6: "For whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists." Again, words on a page. Words we believe. But when you believe that "God exists" what are you imagining? God as an object? Is the analogy of being operative? Do you think that science could "disprove" God's existence?

I hope these examples illustrate my point. When you look behind the curtain of the Biblical text, what metaphysical imagination is at work in the background? How are words like "creation," "existence," and "salvation" being unpacked? As words on a page, creation, existence, and salvation can mean many different things. And some of these understandings aren't very good. They can be thin and impoverished. They can be antagonistic to faith. They can be wrong. 

The point, I hope you can see, is that there is a metaphysics of faith. Christianity espoused a participatory metaphysics for over a thousand years. Protestantism has lost touch with this tradition and legacy. The worldview of the patristic tradition has become a lost world. 

And in jettisoning the participatory metaphysics of the patristic tradition, Protestantism has defaulted to the metaphysics of modernity. Again, there is a metaphysics of faith. This is unavoidable. There is always more at work than reading words off the Biblical page. Protestants, by and large, are unaware of this, but probe their beliefs and assumptions about creation, existence, and salvation and you'll quickly bump into an imagination driven by modern metaphysical assumptions. This is a metaphysics of faith that leads to juridical understandings of salvation and to the disenchantment of the world.

That glitch in the background. 

Having shared the story about how Cartesian Dualism caused the loss of a participatory metaphysics, in this post I want to tell a parallel story. 

Again, the purpose of these historical narrations is to bring the metaphysical assumptions of modernity into view so that we can clearly see the metaphysical loss we have undergone and what needs to be done by way of recovery. 

I've written a lot about the origin of fact/value split. We're going to revisit that history again, but I'm going to bring in some additional material we've not covered before. We begin with Aristotle's theory of causes.

In his Physics, Aristotle describes four different causes that give us knowledge of the world. This vision of Aristotelian science was replaced by modern science during the Scientific Revolution in the 16th and 17th centuries.  

So, what were Aristotle's four causes? They were:

1. The Material Cause: What something is made of.

2. The Formal Cause: The essence of something and the blueprint, shape, or pattern that flows from and expresses that nature or identity

3. The Efficient Cause: What causes something to to come into existence.

4. The Final Cause: The purpose and goal for which something exists.

I expect that you don't want a lecture on Aristotelian science, but we need to know enough to describe how Aristotle's vision of causality was changed during the Scientific Revolution. 

As you look at Aristotle's list, two of the causes will seem quite plain and obvious to you--material and efficient causes. To know what something is made of and what caused it to come into existence is the very stuff of science. Material causality is what we mean by reductionism, breaking something down into smaller and smaller constituent parts. For example, the human person can be reduced from organs to tissues to cells to molecules to atoms to elementary particles. And each level of material reduction is its own branch of science, from biology to chemistry to physics. 

Beyond material causality, we also understand efficient causality. Causes have effects and effects have causes. Scientific investigation involves teasing out this chain of cause and effect. Where material causality creates reductionism, efficient causality creates determinism. And our mechanistic imagination of the natural world, as described in the last post, flows from a combination of the two. Reductionism + Determinism = Mechanism. 

Summarizing, modern science was created by focusing exclusively upon two of Aristotle's four causes. Science only investigates material and efficient causality. Formal and final causality were left behind.

Why was formal and final causality lost, and what was suffered with that loss?

Getting your head around formal causality can be tricky. I’m not exactly sure I have it completely down. But the basic idea, as best as I can put it, is that if you know the identity or essence of a thing, you’ll know the form it has or will take. For example, if you know that an acorn is the seed of an oak you know what form that acorn will take as it grows. The acorn's essence determines its form. The point for our purposes is that modern science abandoned the Aristotelian belief that natural things possess an inner essence or identity (“treeness” or “oakness”).

Final causality was also abandoned. This is the part of the story I’ve told before, how the loss of final causality (teleology) created the fact/value split. Specifically, if you know what something is for you can determine if something is good. But with a rejection of final causality, values were severed from facts. Normative judgments were no longer tethered to empirical observations. 

Also, by restricting itself to material and efficient causality science turned toward the past, reasoning backwards in time from effects to prior causes. This broke with how Aristotelian science faced the future in its examination of the ends to which all things were moving. And while this gave modern science great power in answering our How? and What? questions, we lost our ability to answer existential Why? questions.

In short, in rejecting final causality modern science created both moral relativism and existential nihilism. 

Now, this conversation has been about Aristotle. Where does the Neoplatonic, participatory metaphysics we've been discussing fit in? 

Again, formal causality concerns the essence of things, their form and pattern. In Neoplatonic thought, these essences and forms of things are intelligible patterns that emanate from the One and reside in the Divine Intellect. These forms serve as the archetypes of things, and the visible world reflects them as imperfect images. In Christian Neoplatonic thought, the essences and forms of created things are ideas within the Divine Logos who provides the blueprint and rational order of creation. Simply put, created things are ideas in God's Mind and these ideas give created things their identity. 

Concerning final causality, recall how Neoplatonic and Christian Neoplatonic thought described a return to the One. Human persons are moving toward their purpose and goal, which is God. Divine participation is our telos. Theosis is our end. 

Stepping back, we can see the impact of the loss of formal and final causality. We have lost the view that created things reflect and participate in the mind (Logos) or wisdom (Sophia) of God. We also have lost the view that our existence is purposive, that we have a meaningful future ahead of us. And while all this discussion about Aristotle might seem abstract and philosophical, this discussion helps us hone in on modern metaphysical assumptions that fragilize faith and promote disenchantment. Specifically, an exclusive focus upon material and efficient causality evacuates the world of sacred intelligibility, divine connection, and cosmic destiny. Given this, a recovery of a participatory metaphysics would involve two things.

First, we need to perceive created existence as reflective of and participating in the Logos. This is the vision of John 1 and Colossians 1. Through the Logos "all things were created" and in the Logos all things "hold together." From the Russian sophiological tradition, we perceive Divine Wisdom flowing through and sustaining the world. 

Second, we need to recover a teleological perspective. We aren't a cosmic accident at the end of a long chain of random causal events and facing a blank future. Rather, we are future-oriented creatures. Our existence is purposive. We are moving toward our End. We are on the journey Home.

"I will seek your good."

We continue with the Songs of Ascent here with Psalm 122. The song is a prayer for the unity, health, security, peace, and prosperity of Jerusalem. The final lines of the song:

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem:
“May they prosper who love you.
Peace be within your walls
and security within your towers.”
For the sake of my relatives and friends
I will say, “Peace be within you.”
For the sake of the house of the Lord our God,
I will seek your good.

Is there a political theology being espoused in this song? And if so, how does it apply to our time and place?

As you know, this is a pressing and contentious question. What does it mean to "seek the good" of our cities? Cities where we desire security, peace, and prosperity. 

Israel was a theocracy, faith and politics were interwoven. Just as we see in Psalm 122. By contrast, we live in a liberal democracy. Some take this situation to be an invitation to use electoral power to shift the nation toward theocracy. This agenda is pejoratively called "Christian nationalism." And yet, as my colleague Brad East has pointed out, this label is often messily and unhelpfully thrown around. For the simple reason that the values we hold, often religious values, inform how we vote, the policies we support, and the political actions we undertake. And if you're a Christian that means you're going to seek a more Christian vision of your nation, no matter if you're a Republican or a Democrat. Your vision of the good affects the sort of peace and prosperity you want the nation to pursue. To press the point, was Martin Luther King, Jr.'s vision of the "beloved community" a more Christian vision of America? I believe so. Does that make me a "Christian nationalist" if I seek and pursue that beloved community?

The response here is predictable: "You're being too precious. By 'Christian nationalism' we don't me that. You know what we mean and of whom we speak." I do know what you mean. But I'm trying to point out that our pushback to Christian nationalism isn't really about the "nationalism." It's with the "Christian" part. By this I mean both progressive and evangelical Christians pray the prayer from Psalm 122:

“May they prosper who love you.
Peace be within your walls
and security within your towers.”

We each want the nation to be prosperous, peaceful, and secure. The differences emerge with what a Christian vision of that peace, security, and prosperity might entail, along with a Christian vision of the means used to achieve these ends. The conflict is theological. Well, I'd argue the conflict is more precisely Christological. As Bonhoeffer put it, Jesus is "the man for others." So my vision of Christian nationalism is a politics that shows concern for others. Specifically those same others Israel's politics were to be concerned with, the quartet of the vulnerable: 

Do not oppress widows, orphans, foreigners, and the poor. (Zechariah 7:10)

Such commands inform the political vision of Psalm 122, giving precise definition for words like "peace" and "prosperity." And as we know, Israel's politics failed. This was the prophetic indictment Jesus leveled at his nation in Matthew 25 in the Parable of the Sheep and Goats, their failure to care for the vulnerable. Israel had not pursued the beloved community. And I believe that the judgment that befell the politics of Israel--"Away with you, you cursed ones, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his demons!"--hangs over our politics today.

Having described some of the consequences associated with the loss of a Neoplatonic, participatory metaphysics, I want to say some things about how this loss transpired.

To some, this might seem to be an irrelevant history lesson. But recounting this story is important for both diagnostic and prescriptive purposes. As I've described, we tend not to notice the implicit metaphysics of modernity. It's simply the air we breath. So if we can describe exactly what the Neoplatonic, participatory metaphysics of the Christian tradition was replaced with we'd be in a better position to both notice our metaphysical assumptions, making the implicit explicit, and be more surgical in pushing back upon the default assumptions that create such inhospitable soil for the flourishing of the Christian faith. 

So, let's tell a bit of this story. How did we come to lose the participatory metaphysics in which Biblical faith grew and thrived?

In this post, we'll focus upon the impact of René Descartes and what has been called "Cartesian Dualism."

Recall, according to the participatory metaphysics of the Christian tradition, existence was participation in Being. This participation implied a metaphysical link between creature and Creator. To be sure, as I've pointed out, in order to preserve the analogia entis this link can only be understood analogically, but there existed an ongoing and vital connection between God and the world. This meant that the spiritual and the material realm were bound together in a whole. Since all being was connected to and flowed forth from God, there existed a unity of being. 

Descartes severed this connection by positing an ontological bifurcation. Specifically, he asserted that there were two distinct substances in the cosmos, what he called res cogitans (thinking substance) and res extensa (extended substance). In separating these dual substances, Descartes made a distinction between the mental and the physical, which would go on to sever the connection between the material and the spiritual. This bifurcation would create a host of downstream problems, the most famous being what is called "the mind/body problem." How does the mind, as an immaterial and spiritual substance, interact with the physical brain? Descartes' failed answer to that question is now pejoratively called "the ghost in the machine." Having cut off the mental from the physical, Descartes couldn't put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

Importantly for our story, material existence lost contact with spiritual existence. Instead of ontological participation, an ongoing metaphysical connection with spiritual reality, we had two separate substances that couldn't be fit together. And we still don't know how link the mental and the physical. There are, in fact, very good arguments (called "the hard problem of consciousness") that the connection can never be resolved. If so, it seems reasonable to assume that Cartesian Dualism is deeply wrong about the nature of reality and has led the modern world down a metaphysical cul-de-sac. 

Crucially, Cartesian Dualism severed our ontological connection with God. The effect of this severing is the disenchantment of the material world. I share some of this story in The Shape of Joy. Metaphysically speaking, we live in our heads, as an isolated subjective consciousness, surrounded by inert material objects. Our interior world is the domain of meaning and values, and the exterior world is the domain of facts. More, as modernity has progressed the interior world of meaning and value has come to be viewed as illusory and fictional. The invisible mental stuff described by Descartes, in being invisible, isn't real. To say that something is "only in your mind" means that it doesn't really exist. The only thing that is real is the exterior world of facts. And because of this, science has increasingly became the sole arbiter of truth. 

Relatedly, upon the separation of the material world from mind, the cosmos came to be understood to function like a machine. Creation had been viewed as a theophany, as an ongoing act of divine communication. God's Mind spoke to our minds, Logos to logos. Now the world is viewed as silent and mute. Prior to modernity, our relation to God was constant and ongoing. God was present. Today we view God as absent and interventionist, a Deistic "tinkerer" with the cosmos. 

This description of mine has been told before. This story is not new. But as I mentioned above, it's important to understand how we lost a participatory metaphysics and what it was replaced with. Most modern people assume Cartesian Dualism, that there two kinds of things in the world, minds and objects, and that these things are ontologically separate. Further, they assume that if anything in the mind can't be verified by science then what is in the mind is imaginary and fictitious. Only objects are real. Only facts are true. The world is inert and is devoid of mind, best viewed as a large machine that runs independently of any sustaining or guiding intelligence. Existence is taken for granted and is no longer viewed a gift. Theophany has been replaced with an existential void. 

In the last post I turned to talk about the implications of our metaphysical loss in modernity. Specifically, with a loss of a participatory metaphysics our vision of "existence" has become reductively materialistic. Having lost the analogy of being, modern Christians tend to envision God as an object and then experience faith crises when it becomes clear that science cannot locate or detect this object. As I pointed out, this faith crisis isn't being caused by Biblical illiteracy but is, rather, due to a shift in our metaphysical assumptions. The glitch in the background. The poor soil in the new pot. Such are the metaphors I've used. 

In this post, let me turn to another effect of our metaphysical loss, how Protestantism became a juridical faith.

Again, due to the participatory metaphysics that held sway for the first millennium of the church, salvation was understood as theosis and divine union. This vision of mystical return emphasized sanctification, purification, and divinization. In modern Protestantism, these are foreign notions as salvation is primarily understood in juridical terms. Biblically speaking, there was a soteriological pivot away from sanctification toward justification. And with that pivot a loss of the contemplative, mystical, and monastic traditions. This evacuated Protestantism of any robust vision of spiritual formation, a loss many evangelicals have tried to remedy, from Richard Foster and Dallas Willard a generation ago, to John Mark Comer today. Still, as I've described before, in many sectors of evangelicalism this retrieval faces both resistance and indifference. Many evangelicals find conversations about contemplative prayer or spiritual disciplines to be exotic and "too Catholic." 

The reasons for this soteriological shift, from theosis toward a juridical vision of justification, are many. But one of the most important ones is what we've been talking about, the loss of a metaphysical vision of participation. Again, the Neoplatonic vision of "return" to the One influenced the patristic vision of theosis and divinization. The mystical and contemplative tradition of Christianity worked within this metaphysical paradigm. Spiritual practices, contemplation, ascesis, monastic discipline, and sacramental rites purified the soul and brought it into union with God, the soul becoming more and more Godlike. The famous three stages of this spiritual journey--the Purgative Way, the Illuminative Way, and the Unitive Way--concisely summarize the entire tradition. Purgation, illumination, union. A very Neoplatonic vision.  

Protestantism lost touch with this soteriology, largely because it lost the metaphysical framework that animated it. And again, to keep repeating the point, so much of this is and was happening off the pages of Scripture. As any skeptical evangelical will point out to you, there's not a lot of Biblical warrant for much of what we find in the contemplative and monastic traditions. Lent isn't in the Bible. Nor is living in the desert like a hermit. Which is precisely why so many evangelicals are skeptical of these traditions. The monastic and contemplative practices made sense primarily because of the participatory vision of salvation at work in the background. The justification for these practices and rituals, which allowed you to walk the purgative, illuminative, unitive path, was primarily metaphysical and not Biblical. Thus, when you lose those metaphysical assumptions--salvation as participation--you struggle to justify spiritual disciplines and contemplative practices wholly on Biblical grounds. 

To be sure, there many evangelicals who love and embrace this recovery of the contemplative and monastic traditions. But this evangelical appropriation can be thin, pietistic, and performative. And much of this is due to a lingering metaphysical impoverishment, trying to adopt practices that only make sense within a certain metaphysical framework. The practices get adopted--we learn to walk a labyrinth, say breath prayers, and celebrate Advent--but the adoption is superficial. It's all fun and interesting, freshens things up a bit, but the underlying soteriological metaphysics haven't been changed. Simply put, any recovery of the contemplative and monastic traditions cannot simply be a recovery of "practices" and "disciplines." The recovery has to be metaphysical as well. You need to recover an entire worldview and not just a new prayer technique. 

So, back to how the Protestant soteriological vision became juridical. 

By juridical I mean the soteriological shift from theosis to penal substitutionary atonement. When you lose a participatory metaphysics what happens to your vision of salvation? Well, you lose a robust vision of sanctification. You begin to emphasize justification. To be clear, those substitutionary images of atonement are in Scripture. Critics of penal substitutionary atonement, and I find this a bit of a head-scratcher, routinely fail to appreciate how mercy, grace, pardon, and forgiveness are integral to the gospel. The issue is one of emphasis. Due to their metaphysical assumptions and the Neoplatonic influences, the church fathers emphasized salvation as sanctification and divine union. Lose those assumptions and you begin to emphasize justification over sanctification. And that's what happened with Protestantism, a soteriological turn from theosis toward a juridical vision of salvation. 

Another reason for this development, I think, is that you really don't need much of a metaphysics to espouse a juridical vision of salvation. All you need, by way of metaphysics, is the belief in God. Here's all the metaphysics you need:

1. God exists.

2. God forgives you.

I'm being a wee bit facetious here, but not much. A juridical faith is perfectly suited for the thinned out metaphysics of modernity. Which might work okay for a bare bones soteriology, just enough to create an altar call sermon, but it evacuates the metaphysical imagination of Protestantism. Where, for example, is the celestial hierarchy assumed by Pseudo-Dionysius and Thomas Aquinas? Where has the sacramental ontology gone? Where is the analogy of being? 

As we know, due to its metaphysical impoverishment, this juridical vision of faith is thin and fragile. Which is precisely why you see the Richard Fosters, Dallas Willards, and John Mark Comers trying to recover the spiritual practices and disciplines of the tradition. And I wholly agree. May their tribe increase.

But without a deeper metaphysical recovery I fear this is lipstick on a pig.

You've endured quite a few posts filled with history and theology. You might be getting impatient, wondering if any of this matters. So, let me start pointing out some implications. 

I've argued that the Neoplatonic influence on Biblical faith has been generative. In the last few posts I've pointed to some of those theological fruits. Let me unpack one of those fruits and the impact of its loss on modern faith.

The issue is God's transcendence. To be sure, Jewish monotheism policed the ontological boundary between creature and Creator. But in its encounter with Neoplatonic metaphysics, Christian reflection upon God's transcendence was mystically explored and theologically deepened. 

One of the fruits of these reflections was the articulation of what is called "the analogy of being," the analogia entis. This something I've talked about a lot over the last few years, but a quick recap.

Simply put, God exists differently than how we exist. We can assert that God exists but we should never imagine that God exists like objects in the universe exist. The reason, again, has to do with a participatory metaphysics. God, as Existence Itself, imparts existence. Consequently, however God "exists" isn't the same as how we creatures exist. Thus, we can only speak of God's "existence" analogically. There is something similar to how God exists and we exist, but there is also a radical dissimilarity as well. Given God's transcendence, whenever we speak of God's existence we must use "the analogy of being," how God exists but exists differently. 

Now, why should any of this metaphysical speculation matter? Recall how, at the start of this series, I described how "Scripture alone" folks are going to think all this Neoplatonic mumbo jumbo is unnecessarily philosophical and extra-biblical. In this view, the first four posts in this series were a massive waste of time. 

And yet, skepticism and unbelief are on the rise. People are nonverting from their churches. Parents are struggling to impart the faith to their children. Why? What's going on? The words of the Bible haven't changed. People still know how to read. But quoting the Bible over and over isn't moving the needle. So what's changed?

What's changed are those background assumptions, many of them metaphysical. The analogy of being, for example. Most of my college students imagine God as an object that exists in the universe. A big, powerful object, but an object nonetheless. As moderns, my students don't assume a participatory metaphysics. Their default imagination is that the universe is full of objects governed by the laws of physics. They are not thinking of God's existence analogically, but literally. God exists exactly like a chair exists. Thus, many of these students are persuaded by the argument that, since science cannot "find" God in the universe, then science has proven that God doesn't exist. Or they become convinced that belief in God is committed to "God of the gaps" arguments. Or that faith can be breezily relegated to "I have no need of that hypothesis" irrelevancy.

Notice in all this how unbelief is being driven by metaphysical assumptions and not biblical illiteracy. To go back to the metaphor from my first post, the glitch is happening off the page of Scripture, in the background code. The default metaphysical assumptions of modernity, assumptions my students don't even recognize they've adopted, are destabilizing their faith. 

All that to say, to all those "Bible alone" Protestants out there, if you ignore the metaphysical loss we've undergone in modernity you'll fail to appreciate how the Bible is being read in very different soil from where it first was planted and flourished. You'll be thumping your Bible harder and harder to lesser and lesser effect.

And listen, to "Bible alone" readers, I sympathize. I know you're sad in having to talk about things like "the analogy of being." I'm aware that the words analogia entis are not found on the pages of Scripture. But if you're raising your kids to believe that God exists like a chair--and I know you are because I teach your children--well, you're going to reap what you sow.

When I was taught about Thomas Aquinas in college the story about him went something like this. Early Christian thought was Platonic. Augustine is an example. Then, in the 12th and 13th centuries, the writings of Aristotle were discovered by the Latin West. There were some worries about these newly discovered texts, but Aquinas synthesized Aristotelian philosophy with Christian faith and thereby established medieval scholasticism. 

So, a simple contrast was taught: Augustine was Platonic and Aquinas was Aristotelian.

Sadly, this contrast is overly reductionistic and wrong. 

First, as I described in Part 2, while Aristotle rejected Plato's theory of the Forms he still operated within a Platonic framework. Aristotle's philosophy was antimaterialist, antimechanistic, antinominalist, antirelativist, and antiskeptical. Consequently, pitting Plato against Aristotle in the thought of Augustine and Aquinas misses the metaphysical continuity between them.

More importantly, Thomas inherited the Neoplatonic framework of the church fathers, Augustine among them. Thomas quotes Augustine more than any other authority outside of Scripture. So while Thomas engages with Aristotle he doesn't jettison his theological inheritance wholesale. Rather, Thomas effects an integration of the Neoplatonism of the patristic tradition with Aristotelian philosophy. Basically, Aquinas is very Platonic, just as Aristotle was. 

Where do we see Neoplatonism in Thomas Aquinas?

I'm no Aquinas scholar, but let me highlight a few examples. 

First, due to the reputation of medieval scholasticism, crude presentations of Aquinas' five "proofs" for God's existence, and the analytical style of the Summa Theologica, people assume that Aquinas was a logic-chopping rationalist. But Thomas was a mystic and an important figure within the apophatic stream of Christian theology. 

You see the impact of Neoplatonic apophaticism in how Thomas treats human knowledge of God in the Summa. For example, Thomas writes:

God cannot be seen in His essence by a mere human being...the Divine essence cannot be known through the nature of material things...Hence it is impossible for the soul of man in this life to see the essence of God.

And further:

Our natural knowledge begins from sense. Hence our natural knowledge can go as far as it can be led by sensible things. But our mind cannot be led by sense so far as to see the essence of God...But because [sensible things] are His effects and depend on their cause, we can be led from them so far as to know of God whether He exists...

This is Thomas' famous distinction between God's essence and God's existence. The essence of God, what God "is," is unknowable. God's Being is shrouded in apophatic mystery. God's existence, by contrast, can be known though the effects of God, like creation, which sets up Thomas' famous proofs. Importantly, Thomas is clear in his proofs that they only point to God's existence and not God's essence. No one knows what God "is." Thomas preserves and carries forward the apophatic tradition.  

Another place where you see Thomas carry forward Neoplatonic ideas is in his use of participatory metaphysics to describe God's creation and sustaining of the world. As Thomas puts it in the Summa, "that which has existence but is not existence, is a being by participation." That is to say, since "nothing can be the sufficient cause of its own existence" things that exist are not existence itself. Existence must be given or imparted. We exist only "by participation" with something already in existence. And since this applies to everything in the world, Thomas draws the conclusion: "Therefore all beings apart from God are not their own being, but are beings by participation." And this participation, as we've seen, describes our continuous ontological dependence upon God. As Thomas describes:

God is in all things...[T]he thing moved and the mover must be joined together...God causes this effect in things not only when they first begin to be, but as long as they are preserved in being...Therefore as long as a thing has being, God must be present to it.

We also see the Neoplatonic legacy at work in Thomas' arguments for divine simplicity. In Neoplatonic thought, the One was an Absolute Unity with no internal divisions. The impact of this idea influenced the doctrine of divine simplicity, where the attributes of God are treated as identical. As Thomas describes the relation of God to divine predicates: "He must be His own Godhead, His own Life, and whatever else is thus predicated of Him." For example, in God Being and Goodness are an identity. As Thomas says, in God "Goodness and being are really the same." 

Further, we see Neoplatonic influences in how Thomas describes beings coming from God and returning to God. First, Thomas deploys Neoplatonic emanation, with the Christian ex nihilo twist, to describe the act of creation:

We must consider not only the emanation of a particular being from a particular agent, but also the emanation of all being from the universal cause, which is God; and this emanation we designate by the name of creation.

After our having been created, Thomas goes to describe how human happiness involves our return to God: "Final and perfect happiness can consist in nothing else than the vision of the Divine Essence." In the beginning stages of this journey, as described above, the soul comes to understand that God exists. But that knowledge is not enough. The soul longs to look upon God directly, not just upon God's effects. Knowing that God "exists" is thin soup. Consequently, the soul's erotic longing for God pushes on until happiness is achieved though divine union. Thomas describing the journey of the soul all the way home:

If therefore the human intellect, knowing the essence of some created effect, knows no more of God than that He is; the perfection of that intellect does not yet reach simply the First Cause, but there remains in it the natural desire to seek the cause. Wherefore it is not yet perfectly happy. Consequently, for perfect happiness the intellect needs to reach the very Essence of the First Cause. And thus it will have its perfection through union with God as with that object, in which alone man’s happiness consists...

Notice how the soteriological framework here isn't juridical, like we see in Protestantism. Salvation is the story of our journey Home, being finally united with the Source of our being. Salvation and complete happiness comes though divine union. 

Lastly, before concluding, let me also mention that Thomas talks a lot about angels in the Summa. This is another example of Neoplatonic influence. 

In its vision of creation-via-emanation, Neoplatonism posited hierarchical gradations. Metaphorically, the light was stronger the closer to the Sun (the One, the Absolute) and got weaker the further away. Beings closer to the Sun mediated the divine light to those further away, in a cascading sort of way. This idea was carried forward, but also altered and "baptized," by the Christian tradition. For example, Pseudo-Dionysius described what he called "the Celestial Hierarchy." Existing between God and humanity are orders of angelic beings who mediate God's grace from the higher to the lower. As Pseudo-Dionysius describes it:

[T[he wonderful source of all visible and invisible order and harmony supernaturally pours out in splendid revelations to the superior being the full and initial brilliance of his astounding light, and successive beings in their turn receive their share of the divine beam, through the mediation of their superiors...Hence, on each level, predecessor hands on to successor whatever of the divine light he has received and this, in providential proportion, is spread out to every being.

Of course God himself is really the source of illumination for those who are illuminated, for he is truly and really Light itself. He is the Cause of being and of seeing. But, in imitation of God, it has been established that each being is somehow superior to the one to whom he passes on the divine light...

This is a very Neoplatonic idea, successive beings passing on the divine light down through a celestial hierarchy. I expect most modern Christians would find this vision very strange and foreign. Personally, I find some significant tensions between Pseudo-Dionysius and the contention in the book of Hebrews that angelic mediation has been set aside in Jesus (see Hebrews 1-2). 

Regardless, one can see the Neoplatonic influence upon Thomas in how much attention he pays to angelic mediation in the Summa. For example, Thomas recognizes an angelic hierarchy and spends significant time describing how "inferior" and "superior" angels interact with each other in God's providential governance of the world. As Thomas describes, "One angel enlightens another" and this influence goes from superior to inferior: "the intellectual power of an inferior angel is strengthened by the superior angel turning to him." More: "Hence a superior angel knows more about the types of the Divine works than an inferior angel, and concerning these the former enlightens the latter." All this in Thomas, the Celestial Hierarchy, is very Neoplatonic. 

To conclude.

The point in digging into the Neoplatonism of Thomas Aquinas is to make this point. As I pointed out at the top, it's common to view the patristic tradition as Platonic and medieval scholasticism as Aristotelian. But such a contrast misses the deep Neoplatonism of Thomas. To be sure, the discovery of Aristotle would begin to shatter the Neoplatonic consensus that persisted from the fathers to Thomas. The Renaissance would soon arrive, followed by the Enlightenment. Each would do their work in dislodging Neoplatonic metaphysics from Christian thought. The plant of Biblical faith would be repotted in the soil of modernity. 

But our focus on Thomas has clarified this for us: Neoplatonism wasn't just an early patristic phenomenon. The Platonic influence persisted for over 1,000 years, from Origen to Aquinas. 

And then, quite rapidly, it all evaporated. 

"I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come?"

With Psalm 121 we enter into the "Songs of Ascent." Each of the Psalms from 121 through 134 begins with the Hebrew description shir hama‘alot, which is translated as "Song of Ascent" or "Song of Steps." These Psalms were believed to be songs used by pilgrims journeying to Jerusalem. And given that Jerusalem was set on a hill in the hill country of Judea, no matter your approach you always traveled "up" to Jerusalem. As pilgrims made their climb toward the city they would sing the Songs of Ascent.

It would seem, then, that the hills of the opening line of Psalm 121 are a reference to the hills surrounding Jerusalem. The pilgrim looked up to the hills in anticipation of meeting the Lord in the temple. However, some scholars view the mention of hills as an ominous sign, as a location of danger. Enemies lurked in the hills. In this view, the singer is surrounded by threats and cries out, "From where does my help come?"

This view, the hills hiding threats, fits the song well. The theme is one of protection. The Hebrew word šmr, meaning guard, protect, and keep, is used six times in the short song. The Lord is described as "your Keeper" and "your Protector." As Protector, the Lord is vigilant and watchful: "the Protector of Israel does not slumber or sleep."

One of the more delightful descriptions of this protection, in my opinion, comes from these lines:

The Lord is your keeper;
the Lord is your shade at your right hand.
The sun shall not strike you by day
nor the moon by night.

Living as I do in West Texas, I appreciate the petition for shade to avoid getting struck by the sun. But notice there's also a petition for protection from being moonstruck. As I expect you know, in the ancient imagination the full moon could cause mental derangement. It's where we get the legend of the werewolf transforming at the full moon. It's also where we get the words lunatic and lunacy. Visit with police and ER staff who work the nightshift. They talk about the effects of the full moon. I worked in an inpatient psychiatric hospital for four years. In the morning we'd come in to find that the patient board had filled up to overflowing with new admissions. "What happened last night!?" one of us would ask the nightshift crew. And an old nurse would say, "It was a full moon last night."

In his book A Secular Age, Charles Taylor describes how the self was once experienced as "porous" but that today we experience it as "buffered." As Taylor has described the change over the last 500 years:

Almost everyone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of five hundred years ago is that they lived in an “enchanted” world, and we do not; at the very least, we live in a much less “enchanted” world. We might think of this as our having “lost” a number of beliefs and the practices which they made possible. But more, the enchanted world was one in which these forces could cross a porous boundary and shape our lives, psychic and physical. One of the big differences between us and them is that we live with a much firmer sense of the boundary between self and other. We are “buffered” selves. We have changed.

He goes on to describe this in more detail:

Here is the contrast between the modern, bounded, buffered self and the porous self of the earlier enchanted world. As a bounded self I can see the boundary as a buffer, such that the things beyond don’t need to “get to me,” to use the contemporary expression. That’s the sense to my use of the term “buffered” here...

And so the boundary between agents and forces is fuzzy in the enchanted world; and the boundary between mind and world is porous...[A] similar point can be made about the relation to spirits. The porousness of the boundary emerges here in various kinds of “possession”—all the way from a full taking over of the person, as with a medium, to various kinds of domination by or partial fusion with a spirit or God. Here again, the boundary between self and other is fuzzy, porous. And this has to be seen as a fact of experience, not a matter of “theory” or “belief.”

To return to Psalm 121 and the worry over being "moonstruck." When the ancients walked at night under the gaze of the full moon they experienced vulnerability. There were powers all around that could assail them. We moderns, by contrast, don't fear being moonstruck. The moon is just a big rock. Dead and inert. The self becomes psychically buffered from, walled off from, external powers and realities. 

Now, I don't think we need to start fearing the moon. But the psychic enfoldment and enclosure of the self has had consequences. In Hunting Magic Eels I describe the spiritual impacts of this enclosement. In The Shape of Joy I describe the mental health impacts. In this, I think Hunting Magic Eels and The Shape of Joy are companion books, telling the same story from two different perspective, the spiritual and the psychological. 

Here's the point for reading Psalm 121. The experience of the self in Psalm 121 is porous and therefore vulnerable. Threats loom. So the singer cries out, "Where will my help come?" And the answer comes:

My help comes from the Lord.

In the last post we described Platonism through five negations from Lloyd Gerson. Platonism was antimaterialist, antimechanistic, antinominalist, antirelativist, and antiskeptical, and it provide nutritive metaphysical soil in which Biblical faith could grow. When we lost this soil, after the Enlightenment, the plant of faith began wither. And it's not hard to see why. Faith is going to struggle if the metaphysical assumptions of the culture, and even among Christians themselves, are materialistic, mechanistic, nominalist, relativist, and skeptical. 

That said, the five negations we explored in the last post didn't provide a positive view. We haven't specified any of the Neoplatonic vision that the church fathers found so hospitable. Plus, I've flipped between describing "Platonic" and "Neoplatonic" in this series in ways that might be confusing. In the first post I stated that Christianity was influenced by Neoplatonism. If so, what is Neoplatonism in contrast to a generic Platonism?

You don't want a long history lesson, but here's a quick gloss. 

Platonism evolved over time. Obviously, it began with Plato and his immediate followers in the 4th–3rd centuries BC. "Middle Platonism" followed in the 1st century BC to the early 3rd century AD with thinkers such as Plutarch. And then, in a third wave, Neoplatonism emerged with thinkers like Plotinus in the 3rd century AD. When I've referred to the whole of this history, like in the last post, I've said "Platonism." But in this post I want to unpack the specific beliefs of Neoplatonism, the final developments of the Platonic tradition. As you can see from the dates, the Middle and Neoplatonic philosophers were contemporaries with the church fathers. Where Middle Platonism influenced Origen, Neoplatonic philosophy came to have a strong influence upon Gregory of Nyssa, the Cappadocians, and the apophatic tradition that followed. Ideas were being cross-pollinated as pagan metaphysics was incorporated into Christianity.

Is "incorporated" too strong a word? Augustine didn't think so. Here's what Augustine said in On Christian Doctrine about how Christians should plunder the riches of Neoplatonic philosophy:

If those who are called philosophers, especially the Platonists, have said things which are indeed true and are well accommodated to our faith, they should not be feared; rather, what they have said should be taken from them as from unjust possessors and converted to our use. Just as the Egyptians had not only idols and grave burdens which the people of Israel detested and avoided, so also they had vases and ornaments of gold and silver and clothing which the Israelites took with them secretly when they fled, as if to put them to a better use.

So, yes, Christians incorporated pagan metaphysics as both "true" and "well accommodated" to the Christian faith. To be sure, Biblical faith rejected certain Neoplatonic beliefs. But much was, as Augustine says, "converted to our use." In this post I want to describe what, exactly, was carried over from Neoplatonism into Christianity. 

First, Neoplatonism's vision of God--called the One and the Absolute--emphasized God's radical transcendence from the created, material world. Obviously, this vision of transcendence highlighted the borderline between creature and Creator so vigorously policed in Jewish monotheism. But the Neoplatonic influence would push this idea further. Given the absolute ontological difference between God and the world, the One was unknowable and beyond human comprehension. This gave birth the the apophatic stream of Christian thought, from Pseudo-Dionysius to Aquinas. 

Another influence was Neoplatonism's vision of emanationism. This was an idea that Christians changed and converted to their use. Simplifying greatly and ignoring differences among various philosophers, according to Neoplatonism creation was an "emanation" from God, the "radiance" of God's being. Creation "poured forth" and "cascaded out" from God. Like light emanating from the sun. 

There were two issues, however, with emanationism. The first was the Christian commitment to creation ex nihilo, that God created the world from nothing. The theological interest here is to preserve creation as a free and spontaneous gift, that God didn't have to create the world. Emanationism could make creation seem necessary rather than gratuitous. If the Sun exists it shines, right? That's what the Sun does. Necessarily so. But that necessity jeopardizes viewing creation as a gift. 

The other concern with emanationism, light from Light, is that it could blur the ontological contrast between God's Being and created being. There is a pantheistic worry here. 

For these reasons, Christian thought modified Neoplatonic emanationism, to both preserve creation ex nihilo and police the ontological contrast between Creator/creature. But the part of emanationism that Christian thought carried forward was the belief in creation's continuous ontological dependence upon God. Theologians from Augustine to Aquinas have pointed out how if God stopped attending to creation we would cease to exist. 

The influence of Neoplatonism on this point, a baptized emanationism, is important to keep in mind. There are a lot of people who think that creation ex nihilo implies Deism. Or that Deism is implied if we adopt Big Bang cosmology. But this is a confusion. No matter what science says about the origin of the universe, we exist because being is continuously gifted to us. This vision of an ongoing and persistent ontological dependence upon God is a Neoplatonic ripple on the waters of Christian thought. And once we lost this imagination we defaulted to the mechanistic and Deistic vision of the God/world relation. Creation is imagined has happening via Newtonian cause and effect rather than through the ontological participation espoused by the church fathers. This contrast goes to the heart of this series and sits at the root of modern Christian disenchantment. Modern Christians unthinkingly assume that creation is a machine. 

A third influence of Neoplatonism was its soteriological vision of a "return" back to the One. In the Neoplatonic vision we emanate "out" from the One and then "return," via ascent, back to the One. This "return" to God becomes the soteriological vision of theosis and divinization within Christianity. Again, this metaphysical vision of salvation is something that gets lost in modernity, especially in Protestantism were salvation has become juridicial rather than participatory. 

This summary of the Neoplatonic influence upon Christianity isn't exhaustive. But for the purposes of this series I wanted to highlight some of the positive content of Neoplatonic thought so that you can trace some of its impact upon Christian belief. Transcendence. Apophaticism. Continuous ontological dependence. Theosis. Losing the metaphysical worldview that helped give birth to and sustained these theological fruits was going to have consequences. Which is precisely why some theologians have argued that a metaphysical recovery is urgently needed in order to stabilize and sustain Christian faith in the modern world.

In the last post I described how, prior to the Enlightenment, Christianity assumed a Platonic metaphysics. And how, in modernity, we've lost these assumptions. I suggested that many of Christianity's contemporary ailments have been caused by this metaphysical loss. A loss that is hard to see because it operates in the background. Consequently, these issues are hard to talk about as the conversation appears unnecessarily abstract and philosophical and doesn't seem to have much to do with the Bible. 

So, here's a metaphor. Imagine soil and a plant. The soil represents metaphysical and cosmological assumptions. A worldview. The plant represents Biblical faith. As I described in the last post, Biblical faith was planted in Platonic soil. And as pope Benedict argued, this was a providential potting. The plant grew large and healthy. Then, during the Enlightenment, the plant was uprooted and replanted in a different pot with different soil. This different metaphysical soil lacked the nutrients that had helped the plant thrive and grow. And so, the plant begins to wither and die. 

Using this metaphor, let's return to the point I made in the last post. A conversation about metaphysics might seem off-topic and unnecessarily academic. But if you're looking at a repotted plant that is dying it seems reasonable to take a look at the soil. 

I hope the soil metaphor helps a bit. If so, let's turn our attention to the soil Platonism provided for Biblical faith. What nutritive conditions for the growth Biblical faith were within this worldview? 

Last year, I shared the work of Lloyd Gerson on the history of Platonism. A review of his work will be helpful in describing what I mean by "the Platonic soil" in which Christianity grew. Gerson's work will be particularly useful in showing how we, in the modern era, hold very different metaphysical assumptions. 

As I shared last year, Gerson describes what he calls Ur-Platonism.

By Ur-Platonism Gerson means a tradition of thought larger than Plato’s particular philosophy. Plato’s philosophy, in this view, is just a particular expression of a broader metaphysical worldview. For example, Gerson argues that Aristotle can rightly be described as a Platonist. To be sure, Aristotle rejected his teacher’s theory of the Forms, but taken as a whole his philosophy still operates within a Platonic paradigm. We’ll see something similar when we turn to Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas is often described as Aristotelian, but recent scholars have come to see him as deeply Neoplatonic. And if it’s true that both Plato and Aristotle fall under the broader umbrella of Ur-Platonism, that’s exactly what we should expect. To pit Plato against Aristotle is to miss what they held in common, and it’s their shared metaphysical assumptions that concern us here. 

What, then, are the elements of Platonism? Below is Gerson's list I shared last year, with selected quotations from a chapter of his entitled "Was Plato a Platonist?":

• Antimaterialism: "the view that it is false that the only things that exist are bodies and their properties"


• Antimechanism: "the view that the only sort of explanations available in principle to a materialist are inadequate for explaining the natural order"


• Antinominalism: "the view that it is false that the only things that exist are individuals, each uniquely situated in space and time"


• Antirelativism: "the denial that...'man is the measure of all things.'"


• Antiskepticism: "the view that knowledge is possible"

Let's work again through this list.

First, the Platonic worldview is antimaterialist. Platonism assumes that truth is greater than facts, that reality includes more than the empirical. 

Platonism is also antimechanistic. As Gerson writes, "Antimechanism is the view that the only sort of explanations available in principle to a materialist are inadequate for explaining the natural order." More: "One way to understand antimechanism is as the denial of one version of what we have come to call 'the causal closure principle,' that is, the principle that physical or material causes are necessary and sufficient for all events in the physical world." Platonism rejects the view that the cosmos runs like machine, mechanically and deterministically. 

Next, Platonism is antinominalist. This really gets into the participatory metaphysics I described in the last post. Let me recap.

Nominalism was the philosophical view that came to deny universal properties and principles, the contention that only individual objects exist. For example, "redness" isn't a universal property or reality that exists independently from the collection of things that are red. "Redness" is just a name (hence the label "nominalism") for a feature (the color red) a collection of objects share.

On the surface this seems like no big deal. But the denial of universal properties has huge metaphysical implications. First, a nominalist approach to reality denies transcendentals such as the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. This isn't to say that nominalists don't have a version of the true, the beautiful, and the good. In the nominalist account of, say, the beautiful, the word/name "beautiful" is simply a word/name that describes a collection of objects we'd label "beautiful." In this nominalist account "beauty" is subjective, a word to describe our subjective judgments about what we consider beautiful. The antinominalist Platonic account of Beauty, by contrast, argues that the Beautiful exists independently of objects and our subjective judgments. Beauty is not subjective. Beauty is the Real. The same goes for the True and the Good. If so, something is called true, beautiful, or good because they participate in, are connected to, the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. Truth, Beauty, and Goodness are imparted to objects through a metaphysical connection.  

Beyond the transcendentals, there is also the question being and existence. According to nominalism, a word like "existence" is just a name for a class of individual objects. That is to say, we can gather a group of objects--a dog, a chair, an apple--and say that these things "exist." Just like a group of objects can be named "red." But according to the church fathers, given their Platonic assumptions, "existence" wasn't just a name. To be was to participate in Being. To exist was to be in relation to Existence. In short, nominalism flattens our imagination when it comes to existence. Our understanding of existence becomes literalistic. "Existence" comes to mean "physical object" rather than mystical participation in God. 

Moving on, Platonism is also antirelativist. The particular issue here is moral relativism, the view that "goodness" is a subjective opinion. According to Platonism, however, "goodness is a property of being." Platonism asserts what is called moral realism, the view that the good exists independently of human judgments. 

Finally, Platonism is antiskeptical.  According to Platonism, the world possesses an inherent rationality.  Both Greek philosophy and Christian theology call this the Logos. More, the human mind must, in its own right, image the Logos, be capable of mirroring the rationality it encounters in creation. Platonism argues that there is here a "fit" between mind and Reality. Because of this correspondence, Platonism contends that "knowledge is possible." 

Stepping back, we can appreciate how Platonism provided good soil for Biblical faith. The soil of Platonism was antimaterialist, antimechanistic, antinominalist, antirelativist, and antiskeptical. This was a nutritive environment in which faith could grow and thrive. 

By contrast, since the Enlightenment we've been trying to grow faith in metaphysical soil that is materialistic, mechanistic, nominalist, relativist, and skeptical. Consequently, when we see the plant of Biblical faith struggling to grow in this different soil it shouldn't be all that surprising.