Richard, this confirms what I have thought for a long time. In a Newtonian, clockwork universe I would be an atheist. In a quantum, relational universe that's not an option. Someone once said the universe is more like a great thought than an enormous machine.
The Bible does often make it sound like God is an object in the universe. And not just the Old Testament. One New Testament thing that has always made me frown in perplexity is the Ascension. Jesus rises into the atmosphere, and then...what? Lives in outer space? Floats around the universe? It makes no sense at all given what science very convincingly says about how the universe is organized. Heaven is not up above the clouds. So thank goodness for the idea that a lot of what are in the Bible are analogies that hint at truths but don't completely capture them. Will your series continue, illustrating ways we could recapture some of that wonderful Greek thinking? Though not all of it makes sense either. The criticisms that process theology and open & relational theology throw at it make a lot of sense.
When the sacrifices were made by the ‘Kohanim’ - The Chief Priests in Second Temple Judaism, the whole inner courtyard was basically filled with a thick cloud of smoke from the ‘Shechita’ sacrifices. So much so, that when the chief priest went up the 12 steps leading to the antechamber of the Holy of Holies, he appeared to disappear into the clouds. Likewise, it is possible that the ‘Ascension’ is thus so, in order to serve as a Spiritual Simulacrum of that ultimate sacrifice. Scripture and The Creeds support this. A few years back there was a film called - “Risen” released in 2016. Its Ascension scene is quite unique and more in line with physicality of the earth itself as the sun rises to a new beginning.
Assumptions about the Metaphysical, often generate the ‘Metaethics’ found in theology and philosophy. Plato’s ‘Euthyphro Dilemma’ is a good example. Where its basic proposition has been unpacked and deconstructed many times over, but the nagging persistence of its challenging conundrum remains. The prophet Amos lived centuries before Plato’s time and advocated for social justice and compassion for the earth. I think the Hebraic concepts of ‘Nacham’ and ‘Tzedakah’ were well in advance of Neoplatonic conceptions of the ‘Just’ and of the ‘Good’. So the debatable gap between the [What *Is* and the *Ought* to be] has played itself out many times over in history, as it continues to this day. It may be true that we only “exist by participation”, as Aquinas suggests, but that ‘participation’ is dynamic and ever changing as I grow, develop and evolve. I’m a little bit suspect about the hierarchical nature of angelic beings or spiritual orders though, (Yes, it’s in scripture) in that it seems to be a human cultural analogue projected into the celestial metaphysic. I do want that unity with God and to behold his divine essence and to be subsumed into the beauty of his glory and to be completely one with my Creator, but there’s also something very scary about that and as a created ‘participatory entity’, I cannot directly experience that meaningfully, if there’s still not a part of me that is independent.
I am one who has likely made this mistake and I am also one who has reaped what he has sown with his children. But was not I also raised in similar soil? My parents didn’t hardly have faith. Oh we attended church every Sunday but faith was not practiced or discussed at home hardly at all. But the one thing I received was that God was real and the Bible helped me know Him. In my home, we talked about faith, prayed at the dinner table, openly studied our Bibles, but once in their 20’s, none of my kids want to have anything to do with it. My honest perception is that it is the Church that has failed. All three found relationships within their fellowship to be negative and painful. They found better, more “faithful”, encouraging friends outside of the Church. I don’t know how to swim against that tide.
Thank you! I deeply appreciate the theological and metaphysical clarity you’ve offered here. Your reflections on the analogy of being—and the loss of participatory metaphysics—strike me as not only accurate, but urgently needed. What you’ve named is a kind of spiritual fermentation that modern containers can’t hold.
To borrow the language of Jesus: this is new wine in old wineskins. The vitality of faith—the mystery, the transcendence, the participatory depth—is still fermenting. But when we try to contain it within the rigid, literalist frameworks of modernity, especially those shaped by “Bible alone” paradigms, the wineskins burst. The wine leaks. And we’re left wondering why our children no longer drink.
It’s not that Scripture has lost its power. It’s that the soil has changed, as you rightly say. The metaphysical imagination that once allowed Scripture to root deeply and bear fruit has been eroded. Without recovering that imagination—without renewing the wineskins—we risk mistaking the wine for vinegar.
So yes, the analogy of being matters. Participatory metaphysics matters. Not as philosophical ornamentation, but as the very vessel through which faith can be received, held, and shared in a technological age that flattens mystery into mechanism.
Thank you for naming the glitch in the background code. It’s time we re-coded the wineskins.
I think there's real insight in this series. But I think the framing of "loss" _assumes_ that Platonic thinking was somehow "better" than modern thinking, without really saying why in a non-circular way. If Christianity makes less sense without Platonism, and the primary value of Platonism is that it supports Christianity, then one is left with very little defense against the suggestion to "throw them both out".
(I'm maybe colored by Karl Popper's perspective that Platonic thinking has also been fertile soil for totalitarianism.)
I think that it would be good to start with the hypothesis that Platonic thinking was not the victim of devious sabotage, but has struggled to provide answers to real and sympathetic questions raised by generations of people who have been born into a very different world. Only once we agree on what people just like us hoped to gain from that move can we rightly measure if it's worth what we've paid...
Ok, this getting good now. I deeply share your aim of Christian renewal. Your post today has a nice feisty tone. Let me match that. My previous suggestion of an alternative strategy rooted in better Bible reading did not get far with you. But I am not just a Bible nerd; I also have a strong science background, as did my graduate theology school. So, let me try a critique:
I have heard: unless we anchor God in the Neoplatonic vision of the One, Christians will collapse into imagining God as an object in the universe, like a chair or a star. The retrieval thus presents itself as a safeguard against naïve object-thinking.
But this argument is strangely anachronistic. Modern people do not think of God as a chair—indeed, they scarcely think of a chair as a chair. Chairs dissolve into wood, molecules, atoms, quarks, and finally into shifting energy fields. The entire fabric of modern knowledge destabilizes the object-world that Neoplatonism once transcended. The problem that Neoplatonism addressed in late antiquity has been dissolved by modern consciousness itself.
To import Neoplatonism into the present is therefore to offer a solution to a problem no longer pressing. Worse, it risks substituting an impersonal abstraction (“the One,” “ground of being”) for the living God of Christian confession.
I think this is where participatory metaphysics comes in. You cant participate in an abstraction, can you? The way we encounter God in creation, in Scripture, and in worship and prayer should inform our theology, and in turn our theology, deepened by a Neoplatonic framework, should shape how we encounter God.
Richard, this confirms what I have thought for a long time. In a Newtonian, clockwork universe I would be an atheist. In a quantum, relational universe that's not an option. Someone once said the universe is more like a great thought than an enormous machine.
The Bible does often make it sound like God is an object in the universe. And not just the Old Testament. One New Testament thing that has always made me frown in perplexity is the Ascension. Jesus rises into the atmosphere, and then...what? Lives in outer space? Floats around the universe? It makes no sense at all given what science very convincingly says about how the universe is organized. Heaven is not up above the clouds. So thank goodness for the idea that a lot of what are in the Bible are analogies that hint at truths but don't completely capture them. Will your series continue, illustrating ways we could recapture some of that wonderful Greek thinking? Though not all of it makes sense either. The criticisms that process theology and open & relational theology throw at it make a lot of sense.
When the sacrifices were made by the ‘Kohanim’ - The Chief Priests in Second Temple Judaism, the whole inner courtyard was basically filled with a thick cloud of smoke from the ‘Shechita’ sacrifices. So much so, that when the chief priest went up the 12 steps leading to the antechamber of the Holy of Holies, he appeared to disappear into the clouds. Likewise, it is possible that the ‘Ascension’ is thus so, in order to serve as a Spiritual Simulacrum of that ultimate sacrifice. Scripture and The Creeds support this. A few years back there was a film called - “Risen” released in 2016. Its Ascension scene is quite unique and more in line with physicality of the earth itself as the sun rises to a new beginning.
Assumptions about the Metaphysical, often generate the ‘Metaethics’ found in theology and philosophy. Plato’s ‘Euthyphro Dilemma’ is a good example. Where its basic proposition has been unpacked and deconstructed many times over, but the nagging persistence of its challenging conundrum remains. The prophet Amos lived centuries before Plato’s time and advocated for social justice and compassion for the earth. I think the Hebraic concepts of ‘Nacham’ and ‘Tzedakah’ were well in advance of Neoplatonic conceptions of the ‘Just’ and of the ‘Good’. So the debatable gap between the [What *Is* and the *Ought* to be] has played itself out many times over in history, as it continues to this day. It may be true that we only “exist by participation”, as Aquinas suggests, but that ‘participation’ is dynamic and ever changing as I grow, develop and evolve. I’m a little bit suspect about the hierarchical nature of angelic beings or spiritual orders though, (Yes, it’s in scripture) in that it seems to be a human cultural analogue projected into the celestial metaphysic. I do want that unity with God and to behold his divine essence and to be subsumed into the beauty of his glory and to be completely one with my Creator, but there’s also something very scary about that and as a created ‘participatory entity’, I cannot directly experience that meaningfully, if there’s still not a part of me that is independent.
I love Plato’s ‘Euthyphro Dilemma’.
I am one who has likely made this mistake and I am also one who has reaped what he has sown with his children. But was not I also raised in similar soil? My parents didn’t hardly have faith. Oh we attended church every Sunday but faith was not practiced or discussed at home hardly at all. But the one thing I received was that God was real and the Bible helped me know Him. In my home, we talked about faith, prayed at the dinner table, openly studied our Bibles, but once in their 20’s, none of my kids want to have anything to do with it. My honest perception is that it is the Church that has failed. All three found relationships within their fellowship to be negative and painful. They found better, more “faithful”, encouraging friends outside of the Church. I don’t know how to swim against that tide.
Thank you! I deeply appreciate the theological and metaphysical clarity you’ve offered here. Your reflections on the analogy of being—and the loss of participatory metaphysics—strike me as not only accurate, but urgently needed. What you’ve named is a kind of spiritual fermentation that modern containers can’t hold.
To borrow the language of Jesus: this is new wine in old wineskins. The vitality of faith—the mystery, the transcendence, the participatory depth—is still fermenting. But when we try to contain it within the rigid, literalist frameworks of modernity, especially those shaped by “Bible alone” paradigms, the wineskins burst. The wine leaks. And we’re left wondering why our children no longer drink.
It’s not that Scripture has lost its power. It’s that the soil has changed, as you rightly say. The metaphysical imagination that once allowed Scripture to root deeply and bear fruit has been eroded. Without recovering that imagination—without renewing the wineskins—we risk mistaking the wine for vinegar.
So yes, the analogy of being matters. Participatory metaphysics matters. Not as philosophical ornamentation, but as the very vessel through which faith can be received, held, and shared in a technological age that flattens mystery into mechanism.
Thank you for naming the glitch in the background code. It’s time we re-coded the wineskins.
I think there's real insight in this series. But I think the framing of "loss" _assumes_ that Platonic thinking was somehow "better" than modern thinking, without really saying why in a non-circular way. If Christianity makes less sense without Platonism, and the primary value of Platonism is that it supports Christianity, then one is left with very little defense against the suggestion to "throw them both out".
(I'm maybe colored by Karl Popper's perspective that Platonic thinking has also been fertile soil for totalitarianism.)
I think that it would be good to start with the hypothesis that Platonic thinking was not the victim of devious sabotage, but has struggled to provide answers to real and sympathetic questions raised by generations of people who have been born into a very different world. Only once we agree on what people just like us hoped to gain from that move can we rightly measure if it's worth what we've paid...
Ok, this getting good now. I deeply share your aim of Christian renewal. Your post today has a nice feisty tone. Let me match that. My previous suggestion of an alternative strategy rooted in better Bible reading did not get far with you. But I am not just a Bible nerd; I also have a strong science background, as did my graduate theology school. So, let me try a critique:
I have heard: unless we anchor God in the Neoplatonic vision of the One, Christians will collapse into imagining God as an object in the universe, like a chair or a star. The retrieval thus presents itself as a safeguard against naïve object-thinking.
But this argument is strangely anachronistic. Modern people do not think of God as a chair—indeed, they scarcely think of a chair as a chair. Chairs dissolve into wood, molecules, atoms, quarks, and finally into shifting energy fields. The entire fabric of modern knowledge destabilizes the object-world that Neoplatonism once transcended. The problem that Neoplatonism addressed in late antiquity has been dissolved by modern consciousness itself.
To import Neoplatonism into the present is therefore to offer a solution to a problem no longer pressing. Worse, it risks substituting an impersonal abstraction (“the One,” “ground of being”) for the living God of Christian confession.
I think this is where participatory metaphysics comes in. You cant participate in an abstraction, can you? The way we encounter God in creation, in Scripture, and in worship and prayer should inform our theology, and in turn our theology, deepened by a Neoplatonic framework, should shape how we encounter God.
So Bible thumpers, Beck says, throw out your deontology and embrace consequentialism?