APRIL 26 2015
Who is more influential in the church: Jesus or Socrates?
When Jesus died he exclaimed: “My God, my God why have you left me all by myself?” Jesus died in agony, surrendering himself to his Father: “Into your hands I commit my spirit.”
When Socrates died, he welcomed death. In The Trials of Socrates, Plato depicts Socrates’ last moments before his death. Plato quotes Socrates: “I’ll no longer stay put, but will take my leave of you and depart for certain happy conditions of the blessed”.
Socrates is certain that he’s on the way to heaven, and even says a prayer to the gods after drinking the poison: “‘One is, I suppose, permitted to utter a prayer to the gods – and one should do so – that one’s journey from this world to the next will prove fortunate”. Socrates died to celebrate death.
Jesus saw the human body as holy, formed from the clay of the earth. Upon Jesus’ second coming his followers will be raised in perfection: no more death or disease. Jesus died to defeat death.
Both men died after a long legal process. Socrates was condemned to die because he was a bad influence on the Greek youth. Jesus died because he was a bad influence on the church of his day. Socrates gladly drank the chalice filled with deadly poison, seeing death as better than life. Jesus saw death as the ultimate enemy.
Both did not leave any personal writings: Socrates’ teachings were meticulously recorded by Plato, while we know about Jesus from the four Gospels.
Since Christianity became a global phenomenon, who has been more influential: Jesus or Socrates?
Sad to say: The Greek philosophy of heaven as the Christian’s eternal habitat has triumphed, thanks to Socrates. That’s the reason why most of Christianity – almost every expression whether that is Roman Catholic, Pentecostal, or every other denominational wing – has suffered from a form of dualism, splitting body from soul, sacred from secular. Originating in Socrates, as recorded by Plato, many ideas which were long regarded and accepted as the pure unadulterated essence of Christianity, such as the doctrine of an immortal soul, a self-denying attitude towards matters involving our body, and the view of sexuality as in itself ‘the sinful lust of the flesh’, are deeply rooted in Platonic thought.
It is evident everywhere. Look no further than the hymns we sing in church: in most of them there is a ‘heaven’ reference, and salvation only applies to men and women, never to ‘nature’, the whole creation, as plainly outlined in Romans 8: 22. I like the current Pope, but when I see him in his white robe, escorted by all male companions also immaculately dressed in identical pure habits, I see dualism at work: the church separate from society, as the priestly class represents God and his angels. Just as God is supposed to be sexless so these men are supposed to be that too. We know that reality is different. We cannot separate sex from life: denying the presence of sex is akin to denying creation.
It is no different in the Protestant wing. There may not be these elaborate ceremonial customs – still very much alive in the Anglican-Episcopalian Church and the Greek and Russian Orthodox Churches – but the essence of the message has not changed, in spite of the Reformation, 500 years ago in 1517. There still is the Sunday session in the ‘sanctuary’, centering on the sermon while the rest of the week is devoted to ‘secular’ pursuits. Public education is seen as the national shrine where God is banned and consumerism is dominant. No wonder ‘religion’ is no longer popular as the relevance of Jesus has faded while the star of Socrates is soaring. If Christianity wanted to regain its prominence then it has to make it a 365/7/24 affair, centering on ‘creation’ the cosmos God loved so much.
It is evident that every theology depends for its public expression on some sort of philosophy. Dr. Robert Heilbroner in his book The Worldly Philosophers quotes John Maynard Keynes: “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” What applies to economic matters is also true for theology. Most of what is generally considered Christianity is deeply influenced by dualistic Greek – Platonic – philosophy. The philosophy which shapes my Christian thinking is based on a line of thought by Abraham Kuyper who said, as Dr. Evan Runner put it: “All of life is Religion.” No dualism allowed.
Yes, “All of life is religion”.
It is the basis of my life. Nothing we experience falls outside our field of faith. When I run – which I do three times each week ‘religiously’ – I do so because my body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. When I grow food – which I do prayerfully – I do so because the soil on which I rely is holy soil. I see all my actions as religious.
Not so in most of North American churches, thanks to Socrates and Plato. There Gnosticism rules. The word comes from the Greek word ‘gnosis’ – no surprise as Socrates was Greek – which means “knowledge”. Harold Bloom, America’s foremost literary critic in his book The American Religion writes “The United States of America is a religion-mad and religion-soaked country. We think we are Christian. But we are not. So creedless is the American Religion that it needs to be tracked by particles rather than by principles. The American Religion is post-Christian, despite its protestations, and even that it has begun to abandon Protestant modes of thought and feeling.”
Bloom argues in his book that the American Religion, which is so prevalent among us, masks itself as Protestant Christianity, yet has ceased to be Christian. It has kept the figure of Jesus, a very solitary and personal American Jesus, who is also the resurrected Jesus rather than the crucified Jesus or the Jesus who ascended again to the Father. He quotes President Eisenhower notorious for remarking that the United States was and had to be a religious nation, and that he didn’t care what religious it had, as long as it had one. Bloom takes a sadder view: “we are, alas, the most religious of countries, and finally only varieties of the American Religion will flourish among us, whether its devotees call it Mormonism, Protestantism, Catholicism, Islam, Judaism, or what-ever-you-will. And the American Religion, for its two centuries of existence, seems to me irretrievably Gnostic. It is a knowing, by and of an uncreated self, or self-within-the-self, and the knowledge (gnosis) leads to freedom, a dangerous and doom-eager freedom, from nature, time, history, and community.”
The Late, Great Planet Earth
The Late, Great Planet Earth is a good example of American religious thinking. It outsold the Bible there. Dualistic America sees the earth, God’s pride and joy, as evil. No wonder Republican politicians, the Christian people’s representatives, have no regard for the environment and pursue warlike policies, anything that will destroy the earth and bring on Armageddon. The churches there are consumed by a premillennial eschatology. They read in the Bible that the Rapture will take place when all believers will be taken up into heaven before the great tribulation and Christ Second Coming, to establish a Thousand Year Kingdom on Earth.
The word “rapture” comes from the Latin verb ‘rapio’ which means ‘to seize in order to keep’. (Rapio, rapere, rapui, raptum= I have been seized). Our word ‘rape’ has the same root. Supposedly ‘rapture’ means that God will seize people in order to keep them in his kingdom.
Lindsey focused on key passages in the book of Daniel, Ezekiel, and Revelation, and suggested that the foundation of modern Israel in 1948 plays a pivotal event in some conservative evangelical schools of eschatological thought. He also cited that an increase in the frequency of famines, wars, and earthquakes would lead up to the end of the world.
Although Lindsey did not claim to know the dates of future events with any certainty, he suggested that Matthew 24: 32-34 indicated that Jesus’ return might be within “one generation” of the rebirth of the state of Israel, and the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple. In his 1980 work The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon, Lindsey predicted that “the decade of the 1980s could very well be the last decade of history as we know it”. Well, we are still here.
That’s why America’s supports Israel
America’s support for Israel originates with Hal Lindsey’s book. Almost half of all Americans want to support Israel even if its interests diverge from the interests of their own country. Only a minority of Americans (47 percent) say that their country should pursue their own interests over supporting Israel’s when the two choices collide.
It is inconceivable that a substantial portion of Americans would want to support any other foreign country even where doing so was contrary to U.S. interests. Only Israel commands anything near that level of devoted, self-sacrificing fervor on the part of Americans. That’s why it is certainly worth asking what accounts for this bizarre aspect of American public opinion. The answer is that all this stems from wholehearted support for the ideology of Socrates. It has nothing to do with Jesus.
There are other, even more deeply penetrating consequences of the Socrates allegiance. Isaiah (Chapter 24) foretold this long ago:
The world languishes and withers, the heavens languishes together with the earth, the earth lies polluted under its inhabitants, for they have transgressed the laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant.
René Descartes, a devout Roman Catholic scientist, famous for Cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am) wrote that “The human destiny is to be ‘masters and possessions of nature’. Animals have no feelings, could be whipped, skinned and amputated because they lacked souls.”
It seems that environmental degradation, as foretold by Isaiah, leaves many Christians indifferent. We see this now everywhere in the world, no wonder chickens and turkeys raised in inhuman conditions contract diseases and have to be slaughtered by the millions, with the possible consequences that these illnesses will be conveyed to humans.
The result of this two-minded belief sees the human being as made in God’s image while nature is different, a supporting cast for the human drama, to be exploited. Nature is no more than the sum of its parts and can be reduced to those parts for human use dominating creation.
So who is more important in the church: Jesus or Socrates?
Socrates wins hands down.
Jesus lamented whether he would find faith on earth upon his return. Of course faith will never disappear. However the prevailing faith in Christian churches is faith in the great Socrates because he was the very person who propagated the ‘heaven’ belief. On the contrary, Jesus and his teaching centering on ‘love God – that is his creation – and your neighbor as yourself’, finds very few takers in the church.
The reigning forces in society, the Capitalistic Enterprises, are making it almost impossible to “love yourself’, let alone creation and one’s neighbors. By force of the monopolistic grip on the food industry, the transportation section, the entertainment arm, all forces inspired by the dualistic Platonic religion, it is almost impossible to free ourselves from these satanically inspired influences. It takes a good deal of insight, action and especially prayer to free ourselves there.
Jesus has promised us freedom. John 8: 33, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
Jesus, unpopular as he is – witness the decline in church attendance – is nevertheless the only One who can free us from being enslaved to the Spirits of the Age. Only when we see LIFE as a unity, humanity one with land, sea, air, animal, plants, is permanent life possible. Socrates, in spite of his almost universal support, represents the forces of Dualism, separating us from the Truth and thus enslaving us, the very source of all ills, splitting us from the Source of Life.
Jesus died so that the eternal church would live. Socrates died and, by his death, corrupted creation to the core and robbed the church of its essence, the unity in
Christ and the freedom that comes with it.
Next week” We ain’t seen nothing yet.”