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

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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

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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.”

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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”
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

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”

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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)

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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

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

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

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

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.”

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

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.


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

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


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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


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

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
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






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”

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








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

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