Louis Markos From Plato to Christ: How Platonic Thought Shaped the Christian Faith Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2021. Louis Markos has composed a terrific introduction to Plato for Christians with a view to showing how Platonism and Christian theology coalesces and the latter often builds on the former. I think it was Nietzsche who derisively called Christianity “Platonism for the masses.”
NT Wright is kind of a hater on Plato and Platonism in Christianity, saying it takes us away from the true context of the NT and therefore leads to misinterpretation. Is there a way to reconcile this view with the one presented in the book you have reviewed?
Idealism as presented by Plato gives birth to the other idealist including Christian fundamentalism. Without doubt, idealism has impacted the worldview of the western world. The impact has been so significant as to effect language, worldviews, and the translators of English versions of the Bible through redefining Hebrew words and ideas with Platonic definitions. H. Wheeler Robinson's New Testament commentary on Romans rejects the Greek philosophy for a biblical Hebrew one. Significant to the issue is the composition of man as body, soul, and spirit that is immortal as compared to a biblical one of man as a body with the divine breath or life spirit that whose existence is mortal. Man depends on the divine creative act of resurrection into a spiritual body. Seventy souls in Jacob's family went to Egypt. Plato would have had them leaving their bodies behind.
NT Wright is kind of a hater on Plato and Platonism in Christianity, saying it takes us away from the true context of the NT and therefore leads to misinterpretation. Is there a way to reconcile this view with the one presented in the book you have reviewed?
Idealism as presented by Plato gives birth to the other idealist including Christian fundamentalism. Without doubt, idealism has impacted the worldview of the western world. The impact has been so significant as to effect language, worldviews, and the translators of English versions of the Bible through redefining Hebrew words and ideas with Platonic definitions. H. Wheeler Robinson's New Testament commentary on Romans rejects the Greek philosophy for a biblical Hebrew one. Significant to the issue is the composition of man as body, soul, and spirit that is immortal as compared to a biblical one of man as a body with the divine breath or life spirit that whose existence is mortal. Man depends on the divine creative act of resurrection into a spiritual body. Seventy souls in Jacob's family went to Egypt. Plato would have had them leaving their bodies behind.