Philosophy for Understanding Theology, Second Edition

by Diogenes Allen

Everyone needs to know some philosophy in order to understand the major doctrines of Christianity

philosophical knowledge enables one to appreciate more deeply the meaning of virtually every major doctrinal formulation and every major theologian.

The two main sources of Christian theology are the Bible and Hellenic culture, especially Greek philosophy.

Christian theology is nonetheless inherently Hellenic.

Christian theology is inherently Hellenic because it could not exist as a discipline without the kind of intellectual curiosity that was unique to ancient Greece.

we would not have the discipline of theology without the Hellenic attitude in Christians that leads them to press questions about the Bible and the relations of the Bible to other knowledge.

God's initiative. They knew God because of God's self-revelation to them.

"Could God ever have been known apart from such divine initiative?

Even should some of the proofs of God's existence be sound, they claim that the "god" whose existence is demonstrated is not the Christian God.

internal compulsion if God were inherently unstable so that creation might result from a pressure of forces within that compelled God to create,

Plotinus.

process th...

God is not a being within the world. Deity is not one among other beings but the source of all other beings.

But we do not comprehend that fullness or completeness, that is, what God is in essence, apart from the act whereby God establishes a relation.

Only in seeing God as Redeemer, indeed as Redeemer in Christ, do we realize the even greater depths of divine generosity.

For example, we can see quite a lot by means of light and know many of its properties without being able fully to comprehend what light is.

True morality is thus not the product of convention or arbitrary enactment of human will; rather, the virtuous individual is a counterpart in miniature of the order and harmony of the cosmos.

world of eternal Forms on which the physical universe is modeled,

the basis of natural law-of living in accord with nature-and has deeply influenced Christian conceptions of m...

"What is that which always is and has no becoming?"

"The father and maker of all this universe is past finding out, and even if we found him, to tell of him to all men would be impossible"

The only thing that is unchanging is what is graspable by the intellect. The physical universe, by contrast, is always changing. Nonetheless it is marvelously organized and stable in its motions. It must therefore be the result of intelligence and goodness, and its order and stability the result of being a copy of something that is unchanging, an ideal pattern that is graspable by the intellect. This pattern is Plato's famous world of Forms.

boring detail

Genesis 1 itself may also be a story of order being brought out of chaos.

"variable cause"-matter's inherent irrationality-cannot be completely overcome.

(The Bible, on the other hand, affirms the goodness of the material world.)

The soul has fallen into a sensible world, and it must return to the supersensible world

The Platonic story of the origin of the cosmos differs from the Christian view not only because it takes matter as given but also because there is a pattern from which the cosmos is copied.

Plato's Forms are not duplicates of sensible things.

It is not at all clear that there is a Form for every...

It is far nearer the mark to think of a mathematical ratio than to think of nonsens...

A Form is analogous to a mathematical ratio or function. It is not tangible or visible but something grasped by the intellect.

Mathematicals are a class of entities between sensibles and the Forms.

we are nearer the mark using a mathematical function as an analogue for the Forms than in thinking of them as immaterial duplicates of every class of thing we perceive.

Forms exist by themselves apart from a ...

source of motion. The craftsman fashions a world soul that fills the entire universe. This anima mundi is an intelligent, living creature, with the visible world as its body.

space or "the receptacle" is just a given, but time-in the sense of countable units of motion-comes to be with the visible universe

Plato did not believe that the visible world began.

hypostases

Plato's view that time is created with the universe and by Plotinus's notion that time is a mental phenomenon instead of it being primarily the motion of bodies.

Augustine points out that it is true to say that the universe began, as Genesis reveals, but the universe did not begin in time.

relation of time and eternity.

For God all things are present. In God there is nothing that passes away or comes to be.

Plato does not really have a creation story.

Genesis itself is perhaps a story about God giving order to a chaos as well, with other biblical convictions needed to yield a view of creation ex nihilo.

In Plato, the world of Forms ex...

Christian use by the identification of the Forms with the divine mind-first by the Middle Platonists

this suggests the possibility that considerable understanding about God can be gained from a study of the created universe; on the other hand, the integrity of natural things is provided for because although they reflect the mind of God, they are not part of it.

For this Plato gives a story that, according to his own distinction, is mythos, not logos.

the most important problems in the history of philosophy: the problem of the One and Many.