What if I told you that if you deny Christian Platonism you:
- Oppose philosophy itself,[1]
- Set yourself in opposition to reason, the moral law, and natural science,[2]
- Forfeit the basis for orthodox Christian theology,
- Abandon the proper interpretive lens required to uphold Scripture’s teaching,[3] and
- Disparage that which makes it possible to behold Christ in the Old Testament.
1. Carter, Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition: Recovering the Genius of Premodern Exegesis (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018), 82.
2. Carter, Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition, 82.
3. See chapter two entitled “No Plato, No Scripture” in Hans Boersma, Five Things Theologians Wish Biblical Scholars Knew (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2021).
How would you respond?
My guess is, you might say something like: “This sounds serious! I don’t want to fall prey to these things. I need to be a Christian Platonist! But what in the world is Christian Platonism?”
Indeed! While these are serious claims made by those advocating Christian Platonism, we need to step back and define terms, evaluate these claims, and weigh our options. Is being a Christian Platonist the only way to be a faithful Christian or Christian theologian? I think not.
The purpose of this essay is to answer that one question: what is Christian Platonism?[4] To do this, I’ll work through three stages to offer a charitable description of this movement by showing: (1) a basic definition of Christian Platonism, (2) the narrative that undergirds Christian Platonism, and (3) three signature doctrines of Christian Platonism. In a follow-up essay, I’ll offer my preliminary critique. Let’s dive in.
4. This essay primarily has the Christian Platonism of Hans Boersma and Craig Carter in mind, though it is also largely descriptive of other Christian Platonist proposals. See Christian Platonism: A History, ed. Alexander J. B. Hampton and John Peter Kenney (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2021) and Paul Gould, “Christian Metaphysics and Platonism,” in Four View on Christian Metaphysics, ed. Timothy M. Mosteller (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2022).
A Basic Definition
To grease the wheels, we need a basic definition of Christian Platonism. For this, we turn to Craig Carter, who defines Christian Platonism as the “theological metaphysics of the Great Tradition.”[5]
5. Carter, Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition, 66.
This is simple, yet it may not be clear to some what this means. So, let’s dissect the two elements of this definition.
First, Christian Platonism is a theological metaphysic.
If you often scrounge around at Half Price Books, you may have noticed a “Metaphysics” section right next to the “Theology” shelf. It’s a doozy—full of Wiccan manuals and Deepak Chopra titles. Indeed, it’s a contrast that would make even Joel Osteen blush! So if you’ve seen that too, you may be thinking: “Theological metaphysics? What a horrifying pair!” Indeed, that would be. But rest assured: the metaphysics that Christian Platonism has in view is not that kind of metaphysics.
Metaphysics, as a branch of philosophy, aims “to identify the nature and structure of all that there is.” It tries to “understand the fundamental nature of reality.”[6] And while its name was coined after one of Aristotle’s works, the aim itself has characterized philosophical reflection since the dawn of time.
6. Stephen Mumford, Metaphysics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 104.
Now, by stating the aim of metaphysics, the Christian’s antenna should go off. Given the questions that metaphysics asks, there is no way to answer them without grappling with Scripture. This is where the modifier theological comes in. According to Carter: “Metaphysics is theological when it allows biblical revelation to determine the true ontological nature of reality as it contemplates the biblical teaching on God and all things in relation to God.”[7]
7. Carter, Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition, 63. Ontology (ontos + logos = “the study of being”) is generally seen as a subset of metaphysics, specifically investigating “what exists” or “the nature of being,” but it is frequently also used as a synonym for metaphysics. Metaphysics can technically include an even broader scope of study beyond being, such as time, space, causation, etc.
Thus, “theological metaphysics” is one way to designate the legitimate pursuit of a metaphysics—understanding the nature and structure of everything—informed by and grounded in Christian theology. Such a proposal should be uncontroversial to any Christian seeking to live under the Lordship of Christ.
Second, Christian Platonism is the theological metaphysic of the Great Tradition.
The Great Tradition, according to Christian Platonists, is the “true, biblical, orthodox faith,”[8] constituted by “the broad consensus of the [early church] fathers and the Middle Ages.”[9] It refers to pro-Nicene and Chalcedonian theology, specifically in the classical articulations of the Trinity and the two natures of Christ, as found in the Nicene Creed and Chalcedonian Definition.
8. Carter, Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition, 84.
9. Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2011), 15.
The theology forged in these earlier centuries provided the basis for a particular theological metaphysic. Christian Platonism—it is claimed—constitutes the theological metaphysic that grows out of the Great Tradition. It was forged in the fire of Nicaea. According to Christian Platonists, there was a sober-minded give-and-take between biblical revelation, tradition, and Greek philosophy. While certainly governed by Scripture, the theological claims about the nature of God in his oneness and triunity and questions of humanity’s nature and personhood were nonetheless revised, clarified, and finally articulated according to plausible metaphysical notions of Christian Platonism.
So, to reiterate the preliminary definition: Christian Platonism is the theological metaphysics of the Great Tradition. It is an understanding of the nature and structure of everything in creation according to the Bible and early Christianity.
Now, let us carry on to some finer points. Assuming we understand the Christian part—namely, what theological metaphysics is and how the Great Tradition is conceived by today’s popularizers—why, we must ask, do they identify their metaphysics as Christian Platonism? To find this out, I will first tell you a story.
The Tragic Decline of Platonic Metaphysics
Today, our western culture has lost its sense of transcendence. We have traded a worldview of divine majesty and mystery for secular mudpies. Contra Paul’s exhortation, we have utterly fixed our eyes upon “earthly things” (Col. 3:2) with no regard for things that are above. Shamefully, our society is, as Søren Kierkegaard said, “not satisfied with faith, and not even with the miracle of changing water into wine,” instead we “go right on changing wine into water.”
Theories of how we became so secular abound. Yet, one theory in particular has captured the attention of contemporary Christian Platonists. We might call this story the “tragic decline of Platonic metaphysics.” It is a historical narrative which functions as an “organizing center” for most of today’s Christian Platonists.[10] To grasp this story is to grasp what makes this theological metaphysic’s heart beat, as well as what makes its blood boil. Allow me to spin you a yarn.
10. The idea of an “organizing center” I took from David Well’s in No Place for Truth, 66. If you pick up almost anyone advocating Christian Platonism today—from John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, to Hans Boersma and Craig Carter—you will find a clear unity around this particular historical narrative—the decline of Platonic metaphysics and our great need for retrieval. See Carter, Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition, 84-91 and Boersma, Heavenly Participation, 68–83. We even find this narrative in Matthew Levering Participatory Biblical Exegesis: A Theology of Biblical Interpretation (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2008), 17–35. A scholarly treatment can be found in Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
Plato (427–348 BC) was a pioneer in philosophy. Before him, the pre-Socratic philosophers were preoccupied with discovering the fundamental principle of all things. Was it water (Thales)? Air (Anaximenes)? Atoms (Democritus)? Fire (Heraclitus)? Or being (Parmenides)?[11] Interestingly, all of these metaphysical proposals used natural phenomena to explain their various viewpoints. Thus, in a very real sense, Plato’s metaphysics rose above these materialistic views. He postulated that reality has two kinds of things in two different realms—(1) the eternal, immaterial forms in the unchangeable realm of the forms (e.g., the ideal form of a man, woman, horse, Beauty, Justice, etc.) and (2) the material, sensible objects we live among in the ever-changing physical universe (e.g., particular men, women, horses, beautiful architecture, just laws, etc.). These two realms relate to one another through “participation.” Your dog, Frodo, and your mom’s dog, Lola, are instantiations of the perfect form of Dog and therefore participate in the perfect form of Dog, or Dog-ness. To put it simply: Plato offered a compelling picture of how both universals (immaterial forms) and particulars (material things) objectively exist, as well as how they might relate to one another.
11. For an accessible introduction to these various philosophers, see R. C. Sproul, The Consequences of Ideas: Understanding the Concepts That Shape Our World (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018).
Plato’s groundbreaking philosophy went through various iterations after his death. The final and most significant version was Neoplatonism. The most preeminent figure of that school was Plotinus, who held to a doctrine of the forms that had a serious religious flavor to it. This made Platonism all the more amenable to early Christian thought.
While there were serious flaws in Neoplatonism—for example, the denigration of the body, the eternality of matter, and the necessity of creation (hence a denial of creation “out of nothing”)—there were natural truths recognized by this Greek philosophical tradition that could be whole-heartedly embraced by Christians: the reality of a spiritual or eternal realm, the existence of universals (immaterial things), the Good as the perfect and unchangeable source of all things, and most significantly: the participation of creation in the forms/universals. In fact, it was this very synthesis of Christianity and Platonist metaphysics (i.e., Christian Platonism) that eventually arose as the major paradigm of Western world as it undergirded the Great Tradition.
But in the Middle Ages everything changed. William of Ockham (1287–1347 AD) and John Duns Scotus (1265/66–1308 AD) began menacing the status quo and tinkering with the Great Tradition, as the story is told. Together, by way of replacing Plato’s realism with something called nominalism (see below), they would set in motion the collapse of Christian Platonism. In particular, here are three aspects of their alternative metaphysic.
- Univocity – Scotus blurred (some even say destroyed) the distinction between the Creator and creature by embracing something called the “univocity of being.” This is opposed to analogy of being, most famously articulated by Thomas Aquinas, which states that the being of God and the being of man, while undeniably related, are still used in different ways, since God and man are not in the same category.[12] According to the story, Scotus believed that “being is an objective, neutral category and that God’s being and created being are identical in kind.”[13]
- Voluntarism – If univocity of being is true, then the “created order claims radical independence” from God.[14] For if being itself is common and essential to both God and man, “it opens up the possibility of considering being without God.”[15] How then can the old, “participatory” connection between God and man—the view that creation by nature depends upon and share in God’s being—be maintained? For Scotus, simply by the sheer power of God’s will (voluntas).[16]
- Nominalism – In addition to univocity of being and voluntarism, Nominalism, more than any other idea, has led undiscerning Christians to the height of philosophical heresy. Ockham was a Nominalist, which means he denied that universals have real existence. Therefore, instead of possessing a real existence in the mind of God, in which all of creation participates and depends upon, “universals were simply names (nomina) that we apply to individual objects that happen to look alike.”[17]
12. See Edward Feser, Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (Editiones Scholasticae, 2014), 329-338. Kindle Edition. He explains analogy this way: “Thomists argue…the analogical use of terms. When I say ‘This wine is still good’ and ‘George is a good man,’ I am not using the term ‘good’ in exactly the same sense, since the goodness of wine is a very different thing from the goodness of a man, but the two uses are not utterly different and unrelated either. The goodness of the one is analogous to that of the other, even if it is not exactly the same thing” (329).
13. Boersma, Heavenly Participation, 74 (emphasis mine). Christian Platonists, especially Catherine Pickstock, have utterly raked Scotus over the coals for this. See her essay, Catherine Pickstock, “Duns Scotus: His Historical and Contemporary Significance,” Modern Theology 21, no. 4 (2005): 543–574, as well as John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 2nd Edition (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 305–306. For the record, there are alternative opinions. See Thomas Williams, “The Doctrine of Univocity is True and Salutary,” Modern Theology 21, no. 4 (2005): 575–585 and Thomas Ward, Ordered by Love: An Introduction to John Duns Scotus (Brooklyn, NY: Angelico Press, 2022).
14. Boersma, Heavenly Participation, 76.
15. Pickstock, “Duns Scotus: His Historical and Contemporary Significance,” 548.
16. For more on voluntarism and its effects, see Boersma, Heavenly Participation, 76–79.
17. Boersma, Heavenly Participation, 80.
Together, these ideas fueled the ultimate renunciation of Christian Platonism and the embrace of modernism, specifically as they served to cut the participatory connection that all of creation has with God. Once this theological metaphysic was infected with (1) the diminishment of the Creator-creature distinction, (2) the arbitrariness of the divine will, and (3) the rejection of universals, there was no stopping the various forms of atheism, pantheism, and panentheism that would inevitably emerge. Why? Because now man had a philosophical excuse to think independently, will independently, and love independently.
To this very day, the prevailing scientific naturalism—and even the self-defining gender madness, for instance—is nothing but the full flowering of the exaltation of creaturely beings and the embrace of radical nominalism. Over seven centuries later—among the ashes of a Christian-Platonist worldview—we are, quite literally, back at square one, being lectured by the new intellectual elites, who are nothing more than Heraclitus with a Macbook.[18]
Three Signature Doctrines of Christian Platonism
Immersing ourselves in this tragic narrative, we can see hints of what are now the signature doctrines of contemporary Christian Platonism. This relatively new move to Christian Platonism is, therefore, fundamentally a retrieval effort—seeking to recover a pre-modern worldview for the Church and society today. What then are its signature doctrines? I’ll cover three that get to the very heart of what makes Christian Platonism, well…Platonism: (1) Ur-Platonism, (2) Sacramental Ontology, and (3) Allegorical Interpretation of Scripture.
Just one more note before we dive in: definitions of Christian Platonism vary (maybe almost as much as the definitions of Platonism itself).[19] As I see it, the particular version of Christian Platonism we are working through here—the kind advocated stridently by Craig Carter and Hans Boersma—has two sides to it. On the one hand, they embrace Platonism by negation. On the other hand, they espouse Platonism by affirmation. While this sounds contradictory, you’ll see what I mean in just a minute. We will begin by discussing the first signature doctrine, Ur-Platonism or “Platonism by negation.” After that, we will discuss two signature doctrines of affirmative Christian Platonism.
18. Heraclitus lived before Plato and was famous for proposing fire (a code word for constant change and conflict) as the fundamental principle of all reality. This resulted in ethical relativism, as he noted: “To God all things are fair and good and right, but men hold some things wrong and some right” (Fragment 102). Thus, he resembles today’s intellectual and political class who call evil good, good evil, and exchange the light for darkness (Isa. 5:20). Ultimately, his ethical relativism and metaphysic of conflict and change earned him the affection of Friedrich Nietzsche, who said he felt “warmer and more at ease than anywhere else” when he was in the presence of Heraclitus! See Nietzsche, Ecco Homo trans. Anthony M. Ludovici (London: T.N. Foulis, 1911), 72–73.
19. For a taxonomy of Platonism from a viewpoint opposing Christian Platonism, see James K. A. Smith, “Will the Real Plato Please Stand Up? Participation versus Incarnation,” in Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition: Creation, Covenant, and Participation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005), 61-72.
1. Ur-Platonism: Platonism by Negation
The first signature doctrine of contemporary Christian Platonism is Ur-Platonism.
A scholar of ancient philosophy, Lloyd Gerson (b. 1948), developed Ur-Platonism (“Ur” as in “primitive” or “original”) after pondering a simple question: How can we define Platonism in such a way that it includes the complex philosophical tradition that stems from Plato through Neoplatonism (even including Aristotle)? For Gerson, even though there are significant differences between thinkers in the “Platonic” tradition, he is convinced there is a unifying framework. He outlined this framework of Ur-Platonism by offering five “anti” statements that essentially negate the prevailing philosophies of the time (I’ve put the positive statements in parentheses):[20]
- Anti-materialism – It is false to say that there are no entities that exist beyond the physical, material world (i.e., non-material entities actually do exist)
- Anti-mechanism – It is false to say that the operation of the physical universe can only be accounted for by physical causes (i.e., non-physical operations influence the physical universe)
- Anti-nominalism – It is false to say that the only things that exist are individuals, or particulars (i.e., universals do actually exist)
- Anti-relativism – It is false to say that the phrase “man is the measure of all things” is both epistemologically and ethically true[21] (i.e., It is ethically and epistemologically false to say that “Man is the measure of all things”)
- Anti-skepticism – It is false to say that knowledge is impossible (i.e., to have true knowledge is in fact possible)
20. Lloyd P. Gerson, From Plato to Platonism (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 2013), 10–14.
21. Epistemology is the “theory of how and what we know.”
Think of these five “anti” statements, or negations, as five necessary minerals of healthy metaphysical and epistemological soil. The ideas they reject (and consequently, the positive ideas they entail) provide the common substrate from which the metaphysics of Plato, Aristotle, all the way up to Plotinus drew their nourishment. Thus, these anti-s, according to Gerson, are the essential markers of anything worthy of the name “Platonism.” And there is even one way, he suggests, that we can summarize these five: anti-naturalism.
Now, no Christian would deny any of those five negations. Craig Carter and Hans Boersma, as well as Matt Barrett, have explicitly appropriated Gerson’s philosophical heuristic for the Christian Platonism project.[22] At times, in their writings, they so closely identify Ur-Platonism with the theological metaphysics of Christian Platonism that it is difficult to distinguish between the two. So this is often where they start, essentially saying: “Just look: at the foundation of these philosophies, both (Ur-) Platonism and Christianity whole-heartedly agree on these five essential truths.” In some sense then, Christian doctrine—the Great Tradition itself—is itself nourished in this very soil.
22. Again, I refer you to chapter two in Hans Boersma, Five Things Theologians Wish Biblical Scholars Knew, entitled “No Plato, No Scripture,” as well as Craig Carter, Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition 79–82 and Matthew Barrett, “First Principles,” Credo 12, no. 1 (2022).
But, just like the quarter in your pocket doesn’t have only one side, neither does Christian Platonism. No philosophical system worth its salt can remain in a purely critical posture (only known for what it is against), at least as long as it desires to exert any influence. So, let’s flip the coin and evaluate the affirmative side of Christian Platonism. Here, there are at least two signature areas that have multifaceted and serious theological importance: the notion of a (1) sacramental ontology and (2) allegorical interpretation.
2. Sacramental Ontology
The second signature doctrine of contemporary Christian Platonism is sacramental ontology.
Hans Boersma is well-known for calling on the Church to rediscover “a resacramentalized Christian ontology.”[23] His call is finally starting to catch on. For one of contemporary Christian Platonism’s signature efforts is to insist that Great Tradition was fundamentally sacramental, or participatory—and Boersma would say that it’s time to heed the siren call of the narrative recited earlier and get to the work of retrieving this fruitful doctrine.
23. Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry, 20.
The words “sacramental” and “participatory” resemble phrases we use like a la carte or déjà vu. We know how to employ these French phrases in appropriate contexts, but we may not know their precise translation. I’m afraid this might also be true of metaphysical jargon. So in this section, I want to offer a translation of “sacramental” or “participatory ontology” by way of a two part definition:
Sacramental ontology claims that (1) every created thing and every historical reality participates in God and thereby (2) is a sign, or sacrament, that points back to God.
First, participation maintains that all created things share in God’s being.
Participation is the word used to signify how universals (immaterial things) relate to particulars (material things); or, in the case of Christian Platonism, how creaturely being is related to God.[24] Plato wrote, “[N]othing else makes [a beautiful thing] beautiful other than the presence of, or the sharing in, or however you may describe its relationship to that Beautiful we mentioned, for I will not insist on the precise nature of the relationship, but that all beautiful things are beautiful by the Beautiful.”[25] Plato had this right, but there’s more to it. While not known fully by Plato, divine revelation opens up new vistas of reality. True Beauty is the personal and triune God himself, upon whom we gaze and inquire in his temple (Ps. 27:4). And he is not just beauty; preeminent goodness, righteousness, love, life, and blessedness are his. Therefore, any shadow or glimmers of these attributes in the created order must participate, or partake, in his divine being (2 Pet. 1:4). For “in him,” Paul said, quoting a Greek poet, “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).
24. For example, all the circles in the world (your kids’ hula-hoop, the moon, or your car’s steering wheel, etc.) are really imperfect images or models of a true “Circle,” or circularity, which really does exist, but only in the realm of Forms, inaccessible to us. The circles we see are particular circles, the Circle we know they all have in common is a universal, immaterial thing.
25. Plato, Phaedo, 100d.
Second, all that participates in God points back to him.
While “participation” names the connection between God and a created thing, “things that participate” in God are called sacraments. To say that something is a sacrament, then, is to say that it has a real connection with some greater reality, rather than a symbolic, or nominal, connection. In the case of Christian Platonism, of course, this greater reality is the triune God and his Son, the Christ. But this is not all. Sacraments simultaneously contain hidden pointers to the reality they participate in. This provides the impetus and justification for the possibility of natural theology and natural law.[26] If all of creation and historical realities are sacraments that point back to their Creator, we can faithfully use our reason to rationally investigate the pointers hidden in the sacrament back to Who it participates in.
26. To put it simply: natural theology is the knowledge of God found in nature, while natural law is the knowledge of the moral order found in nature. Each requires the exercise of human reason discover its respective object of knowledge, apart from special revelation.
While strongly affirming the Creator-creature distinction, the Great Tradition affirmed sacramental ontology without hesitation, for they knew that “the created order was more than an external or nominal symbol.” For “it was a sign (signum) that pointed to and participated in a greater reality (res).”[27] Therefore, Christian Platonists today, as those eagerly seeking to retrieve the sacramental ontology of the Great Tradition, strongly affirm a (1) the existence of universals (in the mind of God), (2) a share, or participation, in God’s nature/being, and (3) the sacramental nature of created things and historical realities. For Christian Platonists, the loss of this sacramental ontology in the Middle Ages was, in part, what initiated the tragic cultural decline. So, if we retrieve it—so the argument goes—not only would the culture benefit, but the Church would regain proper worship, natural theology, apologetics, even faithful biblical interpretation. And as our third and final signature doctrine of Christian Platonism, we now turn to biblical interpretation.
27. Boersma, Heavenly Participation, 23–24.
3. Allegorical Interpretation
The third signature doctrine of contemporary Christian Platonism is allegorical interpretation of Scripture.
If all created beings and historical realities are sacraments, then so too is the Bible. This raises a curious question: if theological metaphysics impacts even our doctrine of Scripture, how then might it impact how we interpret Scripture?[28] Here are three things a contemporary Christian Platonist would suggest you keep in mind as you read your Bible.
28. See the in-depth look at the interpretive method of Christian Platonism by Knox Brown later this month at Christ Over All.
First, Scripture participates in Christ. Both Hans Boersma and Craig Carter, who have written books on biblical interpretation informed by a Christian Platonist metaphysic, have drawn inspiration from the accomplished Roman Catholic scholar Matthew Levering, who is deeply influenced by the thirtheeenth-century Roman Catholic thinker Thomas Aquinas. Boersma and Carter specifically appreciate Levering’s book Participatory Biblical Exegesis: A Theology of Biblical Interpretation. Levering emphasizes that both (1) linear-historical (archaeology, philology, etc.) and (2) participatory (reading through doctrinal and metaphysical lenses) tools must be employed for proper biblical interpretation.[29] These two tools ensure that the two dimensions of the text—its vertical, participatory dimension and its horizontal, historical dimension—are accounted for.
29. Matthew Levering, Participatory Biblical Exegesis: A Theology of Biblical Interpretation (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2008), 1–2.
Second, since Scripture is participatory it is a sacrament. This means that even beyond the letters on the page there are hidden pointers to Christ. We modern Christians don’t need any extra training with our “linear-historical tools.” In fact, we are too preoccupied with discovering the historical context, original audience, and a single teaching of any given text. Instead, we need to dust off some tools on our exegetical bench, namely the participatory tools. The great need of the church today is to attend to the meanings and signs hidden beneath the text, while anchored to the literal sense. For there is not simply a single meaning of a text, but as a sacrament it possesses many meanings.
Third, we need allegorical interpretation to access the biblical text in order to encounter the presence of Christ and preserve the Great Tradition. According to Boersma, “Allegory, it turns out, is a sacramental kind of interpretation that looks for the deeper, hidden meaning beneath the literal, or historical, meaning of the text.”[30] Thus, allegory reaches down to unbury the sacrament hidden in the text, which is Christ. This is a kind of spiritual interpretation that even has clear predecessors in Platonism, and it is contrasted with the allegedly cold historical critical method of modernism.[31] And that’s not all: it is through allegory that the early church fathers read Scripture. Therefore, not only then are spiritual encounters with Christ mediated through allegorical interpretation, but, as many Christian Platonists are fond of saying: “You cannot have patristic dogma without patristic exegesis; you cannot have the creed without allegory.”[32]
30. Boersma, Heavenly Participation, 140. Boearsma acknowledges that allegorical interpretation was already a part of the Greek (and Platonic) environment of the early church. See Boersma, Heavenly Participation, 151.
31. Christian Platonism is not completely unified in method of allegorical interpretation. Carter and those associated with him tend to emphasize allegorical interpretation tied to the literal sense, while Boersma does not seem as concerned to maintain that tie.
32. Jason Byassee. Praise Seeking Understanding: Reading the Psalms with Augustine (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 2007), 16.
Conclusion
In conclusion, we have worked our way through a threefold description of Christian Platonism. First, we established that Christian Platonism understands itself to be the theological metaphysics of the Great Tradition. Second, we discussed the unifying narrative of Christian Platonism, which is the movement’s major impetus for retrieving this theological metaphysic for the present-day Church and culture. And third, we discussed three signature doctrines of Christian Platonism: Ur-Platonism, sacramental ontology, and allegorical interpretation.
Now, then, having worked through this descriptive endeavor, can you see why purveyors of this view find the embrace of Christian Platonism to be so imperative? If Christian Platonism presents us with an accurate portrayal of history and represents faithful biblical metaphysics and hermeneutics, then their zealous exhortations should persuade us, right? Well, not so fast. There is more to this story and its metaphysical commitments, and we shall tackle these elements in part two of this essay.
