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Sometimes the destination is unknown in the creative practice of theology, but it’s enough to be headed in the right direction. The signposts for this healthy spiritual trajectory are questions like, “Am I drawing the ire of arch-traditionalists?” and “Are we becoming more loving toward our enemies?” That first question is how I concluded I was headed in the right direction about jettisoning classical theism. At first it made me uneasy, but my soul experienced a great deal of peace when I found out dehellenization was a favorite whipping boy of Pope Benedict XVI.1
Quite early on Jesus followers were culturally Hellenized. As this happened, Christian thought evolved away from its Ancient Near Eastern origins and toward Ancient Greco-Roman norms. Within a few centuries everything was being interpreted through an unquestionable Greek philosophical lens. Instead of poetically describing God with open-ended metaphors like a rock, Jesus followers began to systematically define God with close-ended literal prose like immutable. It’s almost like early Christians came to believe that Jesus is God and Plato was His prophet.
A pillar of Platonic thought is this notion of taking things to their (supposed) logical conclusion.2 It’s about taking attributes and extrapolating them out to the Nth degree. For example, if a person is able to be good, powerful, and live a long time, then god must be the entity that’s the best, all-powerful, and lasts forever. Thus Christianity took on the presuppositions of classical theism that God is the absolute metaphysically ultimate being along with all the fancy vocab: eternal, immutable, impassible, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.3
Century after century, Christians keep reading Scripture through this Hellenized interpretive lens because early Jesus followers syncretized their faith with their culture. The precedent stuck.4 That’s a problem. I reject the premise that Platonic thought finalized a perfect understanding of God. Sure, it was culturally incarnational and intellectually impressive in its time and place, but I don’t feel obliged to accept that framework as the everlasting theological standard. I’m content to humbly learn from Greek philosophy without spiritually bending the knee to classical theism.5
The original beatniks valued ongoing dialogue. They weren’t trying to nail everything down for all time but instead presumed each generation should learn from history while wrestling with the questions anew in their own context. That seems like a pretty decent template to follow. With a sacred cow like Greek classical theism, then, I wouldn’t say beatnik Christianity is for or against it. Rather I’d suggest 1) there’s plenty of room for healthy, ongoing dialogue on this issue and 2) we need to be mindful and discerning about the interpretive lens through which we read Scripture.
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According to Wikipedia, “Dehellenization is a term used in Catholicism to refer to the idea that Christianity should be divorced from its roots in ancient Greek philosophical thought.” Joseph Ratzinger was its foremost opponent.↩
It’s based on Plato’s whole idea of forms. If something is red, its ultimate essence derives from the form “redness.” If something is a chair, then it’s from the form of “chairness.” This world is but an echo of these transcendent realities.↩
For the record, classical theism exists nowhere in the three historic creeds. Classical theism is 100% not a part of creedal orthodoxy and its conceptions are largely foreign to Scripture, so don’t go telling me I’m a heretic for not affirming that philosophical interpretive lens. That argument is untenable and fallacious.↩
The practical result is that the Ancient Near Eastern God revealed in the Scriptures has looked awfully dang Greco-Roman ever since. Most Christians fail to realize this worldview would’ve been quite foreign to the Ancient Near Eastern thought processes of most of the biblical authors and editors.↩
By the way, under the big umbrella of Greek philosophy, why did Christian thought get so Platonic? It makes we wonder how Christian theology would’ve evolved if it had instead moved Aristotelian.↩
