Plato or Jesus?
Posted on November 25, 2011 -written by Richard Rohr, on his blog
I remember when our church history prof, the last day of four years of classes, said walking out of the classroom in 1970: "When all is said and done, the church has been much more influenced by Plato than by Jesus!" We were stunned, but knew it was true: We had been given a world of universal truths and forms that had to be protected by the priestly class, and body and soul were enemies, not friends. This is Plato's world of inexorable laws, not Jesus' world of freedom and grace.
Jesus, the consummate Jew, saw his God as personal, intimate, and conversational. The beauty of Jesus' "Father" was that he could adjust to circumstances, forgive, show mercy, and change the rules for the sake of the relationship itself. Divine union itself was the goal, not private moral perfection. Life was not a courtroom for Jesus, but a living room, kitchen, and bedroom. Whatever worked to bring us to relationship was to be used, and Jesus used it-because he knew God did the same. Jesus made human life a dialogue with the divine, whereas Plato made it a monologue from on high. Jesus was concerned with particulars and persons, Plato with universals and ideas.
For Jesus body and soul were not enemies, and body and Spirit were not enemies either; but both worked together as friends and partners. People were one united whole at their best. Jesus relocalized truth and morality in the heart, while not excluding the head. But we moved it back into the head where there was hardly any room for the heart or the body, God's heart or our own. Christian civilization, and Western politics, has been much the worse for it.
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