Transcript 007 Distorted Reality
Slide 1
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 2
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 3
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 4
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 5
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 6
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 7
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 8
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 9
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 10
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 11
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 12
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 13
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 14
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 15
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 16
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 17
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 18
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 2
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 3
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 4
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 5
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 6
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 7
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 8
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 9
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 10
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 11
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 12
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 13
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 14
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 15
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 16
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 17
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Slide 18
007 Distorted Realities
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the
gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet
succeed only in winning a straggler here or there, if we permit the
whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled
by ideas which by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity
from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.
- J. Gresham Machen
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Philosophical dualism plagued the church
Arose from the early beginnings of the church
Early church was a small group of mostly unlearned
believers surrounded by an alien culture
There were language differences along with all of
the cultural differences: literature, government,
traditions
The culture of the day was dominated by Greek
Thought
How could the early church maintain and defend its
faith against the great Greek thinkers?
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The names of the great Greek thinkers are still
familiar to us today
Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
All spoke in some way to the rational order of
the universe
Inspired the development of modern science
Rational order of the universe was the foundation
of their philosophy
These four promoted the eternal ideals of
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
They stood against the materialism and
hedonism of their day
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Early Christian Fathers adopted the thoughts and philosophies
of these famous Greek thinkers to express their biblical faith
For the early church Greek philosophy gave them tools, a
“conceptual language” with which to explain their beliefs to a
sophisticated and educated world
Francis Schaeffer identifies the problem that arose from
borrowing of a Greek philosophical framework by early
Christian thinkers as the “two-story view”
Greeks divide reality in 2 mutually exclusive spheres of matter and
spirit
Physical world was less than the spiritual world and seen as evil
Salvation in the church came to be understood as determining
how best to liberate “the spirit from the material world so that
it could ascend to God
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The philosophy of Plato had the greatest impact on
Christian thinkers through the Middle Ages
Plato’s view of the world saw everything as being
composed of what he identified as “Matter and
Form” or the raw material of the world molded or
ordered by rational ideas
Before your eyes start to bleed let me borrow the
illustration used by Nancy Pearcey to explain
“Think of a statue: It consists of marble crafted into a
beautiful shape according to a design or blueprint in the
artist’s mind. Matter on its own was regarded as
disordered and chaotic. The Forms were rational and
good, bringing about order and harmony.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The realm of Form was more real than the realm of the Material
The realm of Form was immaterial and it held those things of
the highest good: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
The material world(realm) was filled with error and illusions
Man’s goal to achieve true knowledge –
Man had to free himself from his “bodily senses,”
Must overcome the physical realm so that he could gain
understanding in the realm of the spirit or “forms”
Plato believed that Matter was preexisting from all eternity
The role of the creator was to simply impose Form upon it
If Matter was preexistent then it must have properties the
creator could not control
The creator was never completely successful in forcing Matter into
the mold of the Forms
For Plato this explained the “chaos, disorder, and irrationality
present in the world”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Plato’s philosophy was
based on a dualism
between Form and
Matter
Form
Eternal
Reason
Both of these were
understood as being
eternal
Form stood for reason
and all that was
rational in the world
“Matter was inherently
evil and chaotic”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Matter
Eternal
Formless
Flux
PLATO WORLDVIEW
Creation has two eternal
parts – Matter(chaotic or
evil) & Form (Reason or
spiritual)
Man’s problem
“metaphysical”
All matter is evil
Man’s goal to escape the
material and move to
Reason(spiritual)
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW
Only God is eternal
God created matter, has
absolute control over it and
it was good (creation ex
nihilo)
Man’s problem is sin
Evil is attached to sin and
sin distorts God’s creation
Man’s goal to restore his
relationship with God
Augustine as a Manicheist – believed in two gods, one
good, one evil – later as a Platonist – Forms: Spiritual and
Material
Augustine as a Christian kept the influences of his earlier
beliefs
He taught that “God first made the Platonic intelligible Forms, and
afterward made the material world in imitation of the Forms
He ends up with a view of creation that is similar to Plato’s
Immaterial world / the Sensible world and Intellect / Senses
To reach the higher world one had to reject the lower one
Augustinianism influences most of the Christian writers in
the Middle Ages
Boethius, John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Bonaventure
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
In mid-twelfth century under the cloak of the Dark Ages
Muslims, Jews and Christians Scholars translate Aristotle’s great
works from Arabic into Latin
Common goal: Resurrect the teachings of Aristotle, despite the
opposition and fear of the Catholic Church
Many religious scholars from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian worlds
examined and embraced these “new” concepts
Many of these ideas challenged the Catholic Church
The re-discovery of Aristotle brought with it a new birth of ideas and
possibilities that literally changed the face history
This controversial event caused riots at major European
universities
Introduced a whole new concept of the natural world and the soul
of man
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
His philosophies addressed the way the world works, cause and
effect, and the emphasis on reason over faith
A comprehensive system: Ethics, science, aesthetics, politics as well as
philosophy
Teaches that the world is eternal
Western religious tradition adapts Aristotle to fit its needs
Thomas Aquinas bases his arguments for the existence of God on
Aristotle’s concepts of an Unmoved Mover and First Cause
It is difficult to grasp the depth of Aristotle’s influence on Western
religions
Some are aware of the effects of Aristotle’s works on Christianity
Few are aware of the that all three Western religions were impacted and
challenged by the writings of the fourth-century B.C. philosopher
Today’s religions still bear the effects of Aristotle’s teachings and their
incorporation into doctrines
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but not much of one, to suggest that without
the Aristotle we could still be living “in some very dark ages.”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Attempts to “Christianize” Aristotle’s philosophy
Rejected what was unscriptural and tried to interpret the rest
to be compatible with Christianity (As we saw with Plato)
Keeps a dualistic framework- uses nature/grace
Uses Aristotle’s definition of nature which is teleological, or
all natural processes tend to move toward a purpose of a goal
This counters Plato’s idea that the material world is
inferior
Aquinas argues that creation (nature) is good because it
is “the handiwork of a good creator”
This denies the need for asceticism so common at the
time.
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s definition of nature creates problems
If the nature of things-their goal or purpose-was inherent, then
there was no need for God
The world was fully capable of reaching its purpose without God
For mankind this meant that we could reach our purpose by using
only our natural abilities - without God
The Bible’s primary theme is about relationships, especially
that between God and man
Aquinas dealt with this problem by developing the dichotomy
of nature/Grace
“In the state of pure nature man needs a power added to his
natural power by grace . . . in order to do and to will
supernatural good”
This led to the idea that there were two distinct ends or goals;
and earthly one and a heavenly one
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Aquinas’ dichotomy split man in half, allowing man to
follow after two masters: the church and the state
The dichotomy of nature/grace evolved the concept of
spiritual dualism
Common man could only achieve natural or earthly ends
Religious ‘elites,” the professionals, were capable of
achieving spiritual perfection
The religious professionals took over the spiritual duties
that lay people were unable to perform
Prayers, leading masses, pilgrimages, doing and
leading acts of charity – all done on behalf of the
common folk
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers strive to overcome medieval dualism
They want “to recover the unity of life and knowledge under the
authority of God’s word”
Argue that the scholastics had placed to much emphasis on reason
apart from divine revelation
Reformers reject the spiritual elitism implied by the nature/grace
dualism
Priesthood of all believers (1 Pe 2.9)
Rejected monasticism – we are not called to a life of separation from
participation in the creation order of family and work but rather we
are embedded in the creation order
Martin Luther’s use of the term vocation to level the playing field,
includes all workers – even laborers
All occupations were seen as ways of obeying the Cultural Mandate –
participating in God’s work in maintaining and caring for His creation
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
Reformers reject Aquinas’s definition of grace as something that was
added to nature
The Reformers understood grace to be not something added to
human nature but rather that it was as God’s “merciful acceptance of
sinners, whereby He redeems and restores them to their original
perfect state”
The Reformers “restored spiritual significance to the activities of
ordinary life, performed in obedience to the Cultural Mandate
Contrast of “the monastic call “from the world” with the biblical call
“into the world”
Calvin’s Protestant Work Ethic
“The individual believer has a vocation to serve God in the world-in every
sphere of human existence
Elevated ordinary work and gave the worker a new dignity
Christ is to be served in every part of creation and this is also true “in our
everyday work”
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities
The Reformers rejection of the dichotomy of
nature/grace didn’t last
The Reformers were unable to develop a new
terminology to express their theological truths
Without a new vocabulary they were left without a way
to defend their beliefs against attack
Much of the world withdrew back into the safe womb of
scholastic dualism
Educators continued to teach Aristotle’s logic and
metaphysics
Dualism continued to contaminate much of Christianity
and its traditions – even up until today
In our next session we will look at how Christianity
came to escape from dualism
Church & Culture
007 Distorted Realities