HTCG 01c

We continue with Chapter 1, section A.

Part 5: The Dynamic Character of the World

Here I am compelled to reflect upon rather than interpret what Boman says. He points out that a major reason the Hebrews consider the earth so dynamic is that God made it and can change it dramatically at His whim. It’s substance and structure depends wholly and by the moment upon God holding it all together. This has always been a major difference between the ANE versus the West. The latter places a great trust in what they can perceive and use, and mountains look pretty solid in the flesh. Western minds put an awful lot of faith in such things. In the Hebrew mind, the confidence is in the God who made them.

Section B: Static Being

Part 1: The Eleatics and Heraclitus

The Greek philosophers focused on questions of being versus non-being. Rather than dig too deeply into the history of this, Boman selects the big three representatives: Eleatics, Heraclitus and Plato. If we consider the Hebrew image of being as a matter of dynamism, the Eleatics are emphatically the opposite. If it moves and changes, it’s not real for them. Only what is static is real.

Heraclitus was less dogmatic, and indeed, an outlier among Greek philosophers. He’s the one who gave us, “No man steps in the same stream twice.” It’s quite the dynamism. And it is readily apparent that the Greek language was not formed to carry across the ideas of Heraclitus. Even Plato said (in the mouth of Socrates) that this was a major problem for that school of philosophy.

Then again, Heraclitus was from Ephesus, where the ancient cultural background is distinctly more eastern than western. Plato despaired of being able to discuss this philosophy very much. It’s not that Heraclitus didn’t grasp the nature of Greek epistemology; he sees the issues from a Greek frame of reference. He did embrace the Greek rejection of Creation and a sense of purpose in history. However, it was almost as if he abused Greek language to push it into a different shape.

Part 2: Plato

Between those two extremes stood Plato himself. Oddly, Boman shows his own western bias in suggesting, of all things, that Plato is closer to the Bible than most other Greek philosophers. He sees Plato as fundamentally religious in his approach. I frankly chuckled when Boman opined that the early church scholars were mostly Platonic, and that their descent into the Dark Ages coincided with the rise of Aristotelian influence. He’s right, of course, about how quickly the early church abandoned the Hebrew thought for Plato, but the huge difference is that I don’t approve, while Boman rejoices.

He somehow avoids common academic talk about Plato, finding other ways to tell us that it’s all about the real versus the ideal. The real is transitory; things pass away, as our senses tell us. However, once you engage reason and logic, you arrive at ideals that can stand forever. This is “spiritual” and “eternal” for Plato. There’s a further distinction between math as the lower level (mere facts), and a higher level of ideas that reflect something of the nature of truth itself.

Moreover, reality is not the source. Rather, truth or ideas are the “spiritual” reality on which factual reality depends. God is not a living person, but the combined goodness of static ideas. Boman tries to keep God existing in this philosophy, but it doesn’t work. At any rate, it’s the old “what is true, good and beautiful” displaces God. On a sliding scale, whatever is more good-true-beautiful is also more trustworthy. Boman tries again to convince his readers that a synthesis is possible between Hebrew and Greek via Plato. I’m not buying it.

Side note: As clearly as I can recall, all the way back to the first stirrings of my academic studies back in the 1970s, and reading materials going back as far as the Second Temple literature, I cannot recall a single professor or scholar who didn’t prefer some flavor of western epistemology over the Hebrew. It’s bad enough that only a few of them actually understood the Hebrew approach, but not a single one of them favored it.

It seems to me this is fundamental to fallen human nature. It goes all the way back to the Jewish rabbis. The moment they were exposed to Greek philosophy, it seized their human pride and they couldn’t seem to shake the monkey off their backs. I honestly have not run across anyone who has published a preference for the Hebrew epistemology. It’s been pretty lonely.