and Aristotle Makes Three

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek.

We have been in Greek philosophy for a while. We are going to tackle Aristotle today, but before we do that we want to just tap back to our main trunk of the tree, as it were, and orient ourselves in world history at large. Where is Israel in all of this? Why are we here? What are we doing? These are questions that are good to ask yourself now and then.

Yes, so that you see the ebb and flow and the consequences of ideas.

In Daniel 11, the revealing angel stands before Daniel and says -

Also I in the first year of Darius the Mede, even I, stood to confirm and to strengthen him. And now will I shew thee the truth. Behold, there shall stand up yet three kings in Persia, and the fourth shall be far richer than they all, and by his strength through his riches he shall stir up all against the realm of Grecia. And a mighty king shall stand up that shall rule with great dominion and do according to his will. And when he shall stand up, his kingdom shall be broken and shall be divided toward the four winds of heaven and not to his posterity, nor according to his dominion which he ruled, for his kingdom shall be plucked up, even for others beside those.

That leads us on into the Hellenistic Age, which we’ll begin next week.

This gives us not an exact timeframe, but at least it gives us some idea. Daniel is at the beginning of the Persian empire. He’s there when Cyrus the Persian, or Darius the Mede – same person – takes the kingdom from Belshazzar, and the angel says there will be three more kings in Persia, and the fourth shall be richer – so four kings that he’s going to talk about.

That doesn’t mean there’s only four kings left in the Persian empire, but these are the four that the history books usually remember, and the fourth is Xerxes, who leads the invasion of the Greek mainland. Then having brought us to Greece, we then make a temporal jump forward a number of decades to the coming of the great Grecian king – technically Macedonian, but he speaks Greek. When it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck…

And really wants to be a duck.

Yes, you call him a duck. So that’s where we are. This fellow we’re talking about right now, Aristotle, is the teacher or tutor of Alexander the Great, so that gives you some kind of timeframe.

What’s happening in Israel right now? Israel is part of the Persian empire until Alexander comes along and makes it part of his empire. Then he dies real fast, and then that’s the Hellenistic Age and that’s where we’re going, and the story then gets a lot more complicated.

We’ve passed the last of the Old Testament prophets. We’re past Nehemiah and Malachi. We’re in the so-called 400 silent years. Nothing really huge is happening in Israel at the moment that we know of, so we’re looking at Greece.

Why are we looking at Greece? Because again Western historians, philosophers, scientists, and men of letters look back to this particular time in Greek culture and Greek history and say, “That’s it. That’s the pinnacle of ancient history. That’s the Golden Age. That’s the greatest. That’s where all of our ideas come from. Man became man there,” to borrow a phrase from Edith Hamilton.

We’ve been looking at the three greatest philosophers, or at least the three that the history books generally give a nod to – Socrates, Plato, and now Aristotle. Socrates taught Plato, Plato taught Aristotle, and Aristotle taught Alexander, so if you want some kind of time sequence there you go. That’s where we are.

As a teenager, Aristotle enrolled in Plato’s school and spent a good deal of time arguing with his teacher, and went on to found his own school, a little cushier and more plush, called Lyceum. He felt free at that point to disagree with Plato left and right, and yet it was Plato he was disagreeing with, so Plato continues to form the backdrop of what people are going to say after him.

Somebody someplace said that all of the history of philosophy is a footnote to Plato. That may be an exaggeration. More probably to the point, it’s a footnote to Plato and to scripture, as people have tried to see if there was some way we could harmonize or balance these two or make them friends, and there’s not. We’re really slow on the uptake here.

Aristotle didn’t agree with Plato on everything, so tried to soften some of his views. If Plato was a generalist, for lack of a better word, Aristotle was a man who was into details. He was a botanist, a zoologist, the originator of species classification. He wrote books on poetry, on metaphysics and physics. You go down the list and there’s hardly anything he didn’t write about.

He actually looked at things. He picked up rocks and leaves and animal carcasses and looked at them and tried to learn from them, so this is not Plato anymore. There’s a difference here and we need to talk about it.

You’re both familiar, of course, with Francis Schaeffer’s introduction to Plato and Aristotle. Do one of you want to explain it for our listeners?

Are you talking about the School of Athens painting? There’s a great classical painting, The School of Athens, that portrays Plato and Aristotle walking together in the Forum in Greece. I suppose that’s where they are. Plato’s hand is pointing upward. I think he’s got one finger to point to the great unity, the forms, the ideals, and Aristotle’s hand is stretched out with his fingers spread towards the earth to emphasize the particulars, the things that are individually known, which is a good quick reference. You just can’t take that too far.

Yes, because we are dealing with the Greek worldview in general, and these are variations on it, not radical departures from it. We’re still dealing with form and matter, but whereas Plato shoved his forms, his ideals, his archetypes into some kind of transcendent reality that even he couldn’t really put a label or address on, Aristotle tried to find form in things themselves.

The best illustration I’ve seen and borrowed and used for years is that you come to a vase and you know it’s a vase because it has the shape of a vase. It literally has the form of a vase, but it’s made out of ceramic or glass or some such thing.

Aristotle would look at this and say, “I can touch this. I can feel it. I can see it. I can smell it. I could even taste it, and that all tells me something of the nature of the material substance that goes into this – the atoms if you will. But to understand that it’s a vase, having seen it, my senses have to relay to my reason, my soul, what it is I’ve come in contact with. Then my soul, having experienced vases before and now has this idea of vase-ness, these are the things that make a vase a vase as opposed to being a jar, a glass, or a cup. My reason is able to recognize that form of distinction that’s actually present, and so knowledge happens.”

Aristotle, while recognizing that unity and truth do lie in this rational dimension, has brought it, as it were, down to earth and can justify going out and looking at this rock versus that rock. This is granite. This is mica. This is feldspar, because reason is capable of gaining information from the empirical senses and comparing it to absolutes, to archetypes. “Granite in general is like this, and this meets all the qualifications for being granite, so I deduce…” and so on with this or that sort of bird or a fish or whatever.

So Aristotle was able to do justice to things in common human experience far more than Plato ever was, and write about them, keep records, begin this whole process of species classification, and become what was extremely odd in Greek culture, a working scientist.

Despite everything we’ve been told about how these philosophers were actually natural philosophers, which was the old word for scientists, they generally weren’t. They didn’t go out and look at things. They didn’t touch things. They didn’t compare things. They didn’t weigh things. They didn’t match this with that. They just thought a lot and asked a lot of questions, many of which had no answers.

Aristotle actually did something that we would look at and say, “Yeah, that’s science.” It’s the beginnings of science at least. He wasn’t always consistent. There are some things you can find in his writings, and unfortunately I didn’t write down any of them just for fun. I think one of them was that men and women have different numbers of teeth.

That’s the one I was thinking of.

It never occurred to him apparently to actually ask his wife or any other female to open her mouth so he could count them, because we’re still rationalistic. We’re working with what we assume we know, and even this great father of science couldn’t be bothered to count the teeth in a woman’s mouth. That’s what we’re dealing with here.

It’s worth noting also when it comes to physics and metaphysics that Physics is the book he wrote first, then Metaphysics is not named metaphysics because it’s about philosophy as opposed to science. Translated it means “the sequel to Physics.” These are not two separate pursuits in Aristotle’s mind.

Yes. I have his Metaphysics. I don’t recommend it to anyone in particular unless you want to be able to tell somebody, “Yeah, I’ve read Aristotle,” which may sound a little impressive to somebody someplace. But once you’ve read it I think you’ll realize it’s not that impressive.

It’s more worthwhile to read other things by Aristotle if that’s your goal, just to be able to say that you’ve read them. Pick up something else.

Yes. Poetics comes to mind.

Poetics or Politics.

So here’s Aristotle, things you should know. He’s a student of Plato and a teacher/tutor to Alexander the Great. He uses his mentor Plato as sort of a sounding board of, “He said that, but he’s wrong so let me tell you what’s right,” or “He was kind of on the right trail, but let’s see if we can’t tweak that and fix it.”

About the only other thing that comes to mind in terms of practical details is that a very, very, very long time later, medieval Christendom would hear that their Arab neighbors had discovered books by this guy Aristotle and that all the cool kids were talking about it, and they wanted to read it too and the Pope said, “No! Pagan! You should not be reading this.” But you know how it is when you tell your kids not to read books. They get their flashlights and go under the covers at night and read the books anyway.

So eventually one of the popes said, “All right, fine. We’ll sanction Aristotle for being read by people who are smart enough to do that, but we need an interpreter,” and he found this monk from the town of Aquino, a man named Thomas, who was authorized to be the official interpreter of Aristotle.

From there we move on from Aristotle was just this name and had these books out there, which were never lost in the East. The East was very familiar with them, except they were in Greek and the Western church didn’t speak Greek. Neither did the Arabs, but the Arabs got them translated, so finally they had to get translated into Latin so the West could read them and now we begin to get a number of ideas that begin to influence the church.

Some of this we will certainly come back to, probably all of this, if we ever get to the 1200s in our discussions. Right now we’re still 490 years or so before Christ.

There are two things I would like to emphasize. First, Aristotle has brought form, truth, unity, the ideal, the archetype down where we can touch them, whereas Plato locked them up where the soul perhaps could remember them, but it’s sort of an other-worldly out of body experience to do so. You have to get past your body to remember what you knew.

C.S. Lewis has a nice line in The Allegory of Love. He says, “Hence Plato, with his transcendent forms, is the doctor of Protestants. Aristotle, with his immanent forms, the doctor of Catholics.”

That may seem a little vague and high-falutin’ but what Lewis is saying that Plato emphasized ideas and the mystical and the spiritual, without any physical thing mediating it. “Descend into your soul and find God” or “Escape your body and reach out and touch the infinite.” That’s a gross misunderstanding of Plato, but at least you can see how someone who’s into Plato’s way of approaching things can end up there.

Aristotle’s approach was more like, “Go pick up this thing and experience the truth that’s in the thing.” Now, as a philosopher that doesn’t go very far, but the moment you translate that into religious or ecclesiastical categories…

Sacramentalism.

Exactly. You start finding God’s presence in things, whether it be the sacraments – the bread, the wine, the water – or whether it be in icons or in relics.

Or the crucifix. You can see how I want to say hyper-Protestant because I’m thinking of Methodism and Zwinglianism that fall into Plato’s error of there’s no physical communication between God and us, so we would say both of these are wrong.

And I think that’s what Lewis was getting at. Here’s a line from a group I know nothing about. It’s called Atomic Opera. That’s the name of this musical group apparently, and their song is called Jesus Junk. The line that I have in front of me is, “Give me a piece of the true cross, the thigh bone of a saint, I long for something holy.”

I don’t know the context of the song or how serious the author was, but taken seriously that’s a good marker of a healthy part of American Christendom. We feel closer to God when we have – Franky Schaeffer called it “praying hands and pressed muck,” but some kind of tangible thing – a cross, a picture, a necklace, a chain, an icon, a Bible verse on your tennis shoes. That somehow makes us holier.

That’s more Aristotelian. That’s bringing the holy down into things that we can touch and taste and handle, as opposed to simply finding Jesus in your heart. So we still are dealing here in America in the 21st century with two different takes on Christianity, both influenced by the Greek worldview, but one more Aristotelian and one more Platonic, to which I think the only thing you can say is, “Yay?” because as you say neither one of these is particularly Christian.

The Bible does not disdain physical things. It does give us bread and wine. Part of the American tradition is the rejection of wine in the Lord’s supper because it alters your body chemistry. It plays with your body so that your soul loses control. That’s obviously sinful, so there’s no way Jesus could have put that in the Lord’s Supper. And if for the moment we admit that we did, that’s good and all but he’s perfect and we’re not, so we need to bring this down to a level where we’re presenting a bad testimony to the world and not tempting people, because you know one drink could make you drunk or you just may be constitutionally bent that way.

Yeah, we’ve got to put a fence around this Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We shouldn’t be touching it.

Don’t even touch the thing.

I think one of the things that I’ve noticed, and often when I’ve talked about these things with my students have mentioned is that most other religions besides Christianity offer external markers for you being a part of that community. While we do have external markers in Christianity, they’re things like baptism and taking of the Lord’s Supper, those things that in a sense disappear physically after you partake in the sacrament.

You can’t tell by looking at somebody if they’ve been baptized.

Right. You don’t walk around with your eternally wet head or remnants of wine on your lips. I think there’s a tendency in our flesh to want to find ways to show off physically that we belong to Jesus, and yet simultaneously we often shy away from the actual ways we’re supposed to show that we belong to Jesus in speaking about him and living according to his ways.

Instead we want to be, as we’ve said, a silent witness, and yet we want to wear our cross and that’s how we’re going to tell people we belong. We want to hope in these physical things, but it’s really an idol because it doesn’t speak, and we aren’t speaking either.

That’s so fascinating, that tendency. Especially in the Evangelical church today there’s such a deemphasis of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, the two things that we’re supposed to be doing, and yet there’s, “Well, once you become a teenager you should probably wear a purity ring to show that you’re committed to living according to Jesus’ law in this particular aspect of your life.”

For a while there it was the WWJD bracelet.

So we come up with our own fake sacraments because we don’t want to be legalistic about the real ones or something. It just seems messed up.

I’ve been thinking about that, where when we try to be non-legalistic we end up becoming legalistic still.

About our own things.

Yes. We say, “Oh, if we get too close to the commandment we’re too likely to hurt somebody.” I’ve been thinking of it in terms of the abuse culture where it’s like you can’t even get close to saying people have to obey those in authority, because that’s too close to being abusive, so we have to build all these walls around these so the authority can’t have as much power over us to prevent abuse, but in the process we’re building our own little fences, just like the Pharisees.

Which will, in the long run, turn out to be just as abusive, because when we run from one abuser, having realized, “Wow, this is abusive. I will run over here,” – if we don’t come to terms with our own sin in the matter and our own need for Christ, we will run right into the arms of another abuser who will say, “Oh, I understand you. Yes, they’re terrible. Let me support you. Let me help you. Let me embrace you. Resistance is futile.”

And give you a whole new set of words you’re not allowed to use.

Until someone is born again and has their mindset changed radically, you run from one legalism to another. The original temptation was, “You shall be as gods, making up your own rules, deciding for yourself what good and evil are. That’s how God knows good and evil.” So if you’re not going to embrace God’s rules, given on God’s terms with God’s explanations of how those rules work, legalism is inevitable. It’s just a question of whose.

Here looking at the influence of Greek culture, are we going to tell you you must have a crucifix or a cross, and we’ll start listing what you must have? What would you have in that culture? T-shirts with Aslan or Jesus on them? We start loading people with stuff. Or do we tell them, “Food is not an issue. Sex is not an issue. Money is not an issue. How you dress is not an issue. How you behave in church physically is not an issue, as long as your heart is right with God,” and we fall into some sort of neo-Platonism or monasticism because when we reject God’s order there aren’t that many other options out there.

They’re all humanistic and it’s just a question of which side of the coin are you going to deal with. They are pretty much the same coin. It’s human autonomy. We resent God’s law because it’s obviously evil because we’ve been abused by people who believe in it. Rather than finding out what does God’s law say, we simply reject the whole thing and go run to somebody else who has their own rules and that sound good for right now. But give it a generation, or please don’t.

Sinclair Ferguson talks about this in his lecture series “The Whole Christ,” where antinomianism and legalism are the same error, which is neglecting or forgetting that God is personal, that the law is a reflection of his nature, and he personally loves us and has given these things for our good. The impersonality of God is a real problem, and we don’t solve it anywhere in Greek thought, for sure.

No, and that brings us back to the other thing I wanted to talk about. When it comes to natural theology, Aristotle again is the starting point for Rome, as for anybody else. He came up with an argument for the existence of a god or more than one god, depending on how you read it, of some sort.

Here’s the argument. Everything moves, but an infinite regress is undesirable. The Greeks were not fond of infinity. You can’t keep going “this was why this, this was why this, this was why this.” You can’t go back like that forever. There has to be a place where you stop and say, “And this is where it all started.” And then of course the 5-year-old says, “But who moved that?”

“No, you don’t understand. Nothing moved it.”

“Well, then how does it move things, because it’s moving things that it’s moving.”

“No, no, it’s an unmoved mover.”

“What?”

“Okay, this is how it works. Imagine a young lady whose husband has been serving overseas and she’s heard nothing of him and is afraid he might actually have been killed, and there she is on the couch praying and weeping, and suddenly the door throws itself open and there he is, standing there with outstretched arms, but not moving. She gets up and runs across the room and throws herself at him. See, he didn’t move – she moved – but she moved in response to him. He’s an unmoved mover.”

Except he had to move to get there.

All illustrations are limited, including this one.

A couple things here. First of all, just going with what Aristotle actually tells us, to be the original thing that starts things, the thing must be pure existence. It can’t be becoming. It can’t be matter. It has to be pure spirituality, pure rationality. That is its mind. But here’s the thing. A mind has to think about something, and for a mind to think about anything less than itself is unfitting for such mind.

The only thing really that a perfect mind can think about is perfection, and within this closed system the only perfect thing it knows is itself. So the umoved mover is sheer intelligence contemplating its own existence. That’s it.

That does not call into being anything else.

No, the universe is eternal for Aristotle. The universe is, but by being this perfect thing, other existent spirits, intelligences within the universe move in response. They’re drawn into action, as the young lady in the illustration is drawn to her husband.

The sentient universe moves, dances, spins, does something as it contemplates this perfect thing thinking about itself and basically being closed off.

If we stop there and say this is God. He’s the unmoved mover. He’s the first cause in this kind of thinking. He doesn’t communicate. He will not turn his face outward (assuming he has a face). He will not talk to lesser beings. He is not interested in prayer or worship or praise. He does not control the universe. He does not answer prayers. He doesn’t do anything except think about himself. We have words for people like that. Narcissist comes to mind. Psychopath is real close.

So we do have a sort of metaphysical distinction between the things that exist and God, but in no way is this a Creator/creature distinction because the God in this illustration cannot interact with anything outside of itself, because that would be lesser.

Yes, so there’s a question of whether it’s even aware of the rest of the universe because to take its mind off itself, even as a glance to see what’s out there, is changing, and the absolute must be changeless. This is going nowhere, and yet this has been one of the arguments that’s been used by Christian theologians and apologists to show that there are logical arguments for the existence of God.

Can we point out that part of the assumptions that make this line of reasoning “work” is the rejection of the idea of infinity. You have to assume that infinity is impossible in order to get to the point where there’s a unmoved mover. Later in philosophy, philosophers came back to this and said, “Well, it doesn’t have to be a line. It could be a circle, and just everything is causing everything else.”

If you’re a student of philosophy at any point beyond Aristotle and Aquinas, you know that this doesn’t quite answer all of the objections.

I’m just thinking of Stephen Hawking. After he wrote A Brief History of Time in which he acknowledged that a lot of people are afraid of the idea of an absolute beginning because it might suggest an absolute end, in his next book he came back and said, “Never mind. I can explain how there’s no beginning and no end, and how the universe just is. So we can do infinite regress within the system and we don’t need a beginning anymore.” This isn’t a philosopher exactly. This is a physicist and one of the most respected of the last generation.

So you’re absolutely right. Saying infinite regression is impossible, the proper response is, “Who says? And what are you assuming to pull that one off?”

“Well, I can’t figure how that would work.”

“Who made you God and judge? Just because you can’t figure it out…” Or turning to Christian apologists, “And can you exactly explain how God exists absolutely independently in and of himself, apart from all other things? Do you understand the nature of God’s existence?”

“Well, no…”

“Then really you’re undercutting paganism, which is great as far as it goes. But the same axe can go the other way at your assumptions.”

There’s more going on here and we need to have a broader perspective.

A side issue – in Metaphysics Aristotle has a chapter, and they’re numbered after the Greek alphabet so this is L (lambda), and having talked about this idea of an unmoved mover, he takes a side track and says, “Now, how many are there?”

“We thought there was just one.”

“No, actually…” and he goes on for two or three pages to explain how there might be quite a few, actually, from 47-55, one for each of the heavenly spheres.

I read through it before we started and I don’t understand all of it. He’s using vocabulary and assumptions about the cosmology of the universe that I’m not completely familiar with, but that’s not the point. He does admit that he’s not talking about necessarily a monotheistic God or even a unitarian mind. He’s willing to allow for a whole bunch of these things. Now, do they work in tandem? Are they like clocks in a clock shop where they all tick together, despite the fact they’re unconnected?

But then having done this he then immediately turns around before the chapter is over and argues, “Well, maybe there’s only one,” and he concludes with, “and that is what religion tells us, after all, isn’t it?”

Wait, what you’re describing is not the God of Greek religion, so what? For a man who is considered one of the most brilliant in the history of Western thought, he has some issues with thinking in a straight line. The translator of this particular version basically says, “It’s a little murky here, and some people think this is just an interpolation because we don’t know what in the world he’s saying and it doesn’t really seem to make any sense.”

So I think what you’re saying is that somebody else added this and snuck it into the manuscripts, which is not impossible, but I’d like a little more assurance, like maybe some manuscript evidence that actually shows that, rather than, “He’s being really dense here, so let’s just assume someone else added it afterwards.”

No, pagans can actually be stupid.

And so can Christians.

Yes, and sometimes our sin drives us to it. We walk ourselves into a box and we can’t find a way out, so we write down really stupid things. We don’t play Augustine and write our confessions and retractions. We just hope no one reads the out-of-print stuff.

So I think that’s our introduction to Aristotle.

We probably don’t want to miss though the contributions he makes to education, with the idea of the mind as the unscribed tablet, the tabula rasa. We can see connections to it in our modern public school system, but I think in general it has contributed a lot to culture in the sense that knowledge is our gateway to truth and to what has been natural law and all of this. We can, in a sense, by our reason figure things out as we experience them, which is both an important part of science but just education in general.

I was looking back through some of the books on Aristotle and Aquinas I read in college, and I don’t remember which of the two of them said it, maybe both, that it is important to have a proper education for children because that is what forms them into being proper and good adults. If they are not educated in the good, they cannot know the good and do the good.

Plato said something very similar. This is the thing. When you abandon the Christian worldview then you abandon sin, so sin can no longer be the explanation for things that go wrong. That leaves you with your environment, and that environment comes in two forms – what’s within you, often contrary to your choice, we would say genetic inheritance, and what’s without you, which you also most of the time have very little to choose.

Plato when we were looking at him last time had the code of almost all of man’s problems are the fault either of a faulty education or the other one was ignorance or something. One he ascribes to lousy parents and the other to the world around you. Yes, those are the options.

If you don’t believe in the effects of sin.

If you don’t believe that sin is a real thing, and once you eliminate a Creator God you have eliminated sin, because if there’s no Creator who owns you absolutely and can absolutely command you, then what you’re left with are mere preferences. You like grape. I don’t. You like abuse. I don’t. You like mass murder. I’m kind of not fond of it myself. But you cannot bring anything as a standard. This is just you’re chocolate, I’m vanilla.

You can say, “That’s monstrous!” Well, there you go. What’s wrong with monsters? Where are you dragging in these moral absolutes? Ethics as a category disappears.

We didn’t talk about Aristotle and ethics. We could do that too because he feels this. He’s left with, “Well, there aren’t really any rules.” Men are going to want to be happy so they’re going to pursue their happiness, and practical advice is that the more human we are, the more we understand what it means for man to be man, then making choices along those lines will probably be good. So he proposes the Golden Mean.

You don’t want to eat too much or too little. You want something in between. You don’t want to run away at the cracking of a twig, nor do you want to stand and face five dragons. There’s something in between. There’s always an in between-ness that reason, properly exercised and trained, can find for you that will make you happier. But that’s the best we’ve got here. We don’t have any kind of idea of holiness or an absolute transcendent justice. We just have, well, how do you get along in life.

Ethics has vanished and epistemology – how do you know, and how do you know you know – can’t be affected by ethics. It can simply be affected by metaphysics. What’s real? What is man? How is man made? How is he constituted? Can we change that constitution? Can we change his environment?

I suppose the other thing that we haven’t mentioned is Aristotle’s most famous quotation, “Man is by nature a political animal.” What he said is man is by nature an animal who lives in a polis, and he who by nature and not mere accident is without a polis is either above humanity or below it.

From his point of view the state is the outward form, the ideal that defines mankind. Conform to that and you will find your true happiness. If you don’t need a polis it’s either because you’re a god or you’re a beast. There are no other options, which would explain why Socrates drinks the hemlock rather than escape from Athens. Man is defined by his political environment, which is what the Republic is all about, so Aristotle has not gone very far from Plato.

Details, yes, particularly in the realm of epistemology, but in terms of education, in terms of politics, we have not moved. We are still solidly in the Greek worldview. We’re still solidly pagan, humanistic, satanic.

The current theme that I’m always harping on is that this is a man who we hold up to Christian graduate students as an example of how to think, how to find the true, the beautiful, and all that. I don’t think so, and it frightens me.

There are two things going on here. Those teachers who propose to do that have two problems. First, apparently either they cannot read and have not read Plato and Aristotle and they’re faking it – now I’m all for good fakery. I’ve been called a charlatan before and freely confess to it. But when you’re charging lots and lots of money to parents to teach Aristotle and Plato, one would think that you’ve read them with understanding.

If you did, then the other thing that you have to call into question is do you understand the Bible? Do you understand the confessions and creeds of the Church? We don’t even have to get to the confessions. Let’s just look at the creeds of the Church.

Do you understand what it means to call God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth? Do you understand what it means to say that Jesus has two natures, one human and one divine, and they are not mixed because there’s no mixing of the human and divine. Let’s just go that far. Do you get that? Do you understand the nature of sin? And if you don’t, why are you teaching at a Christian university and why is this difficult? I am concerned about these things.

One of the things I hope that comes out of this podcast is that somebody someplace, after getting angry with us or with me, will stop and say, “Wait a second. How do you put those together exactly?”

In fact, this is not that but it’s kind of an echo of that. Before I taught at my current Christian school I was at another Christian school up north and the new headmaster was very much into Americana, Founding Fathers, the Constitution and all that. He was very much a gentleman so I don’t want to disparage him. Some of his followers, not so much, or the people who were in the same movement, I should say.

I had his son in my class and I made some very biting comments about John Locke along these very lines of tabula rasa, the unscribed mind and all that, that this is what Locke said and he’s wrong. So word got about and I was asked that at the next educator’s conference I go sit in on the lecture given by a very nice lady about John Locke. She was writing a biography and I needed to go listen, because – and this was unsaid but it was implied – obviously I didn’t understand Locke well enough.

The lady was indeed writing a biography, but it was the kind of biography like, “He was born. He grew up. He wrote books on Christian stuff,” and that kind of thing. Somebody raised a hand and said something – I don’t know how it came up exactly anymore – but they said there was an article in the Chalcedon Report, back when it was called that, on John Locke’s humanism. And everyone in the room, being akin to this movement, kind of laughed and chuckled and guffawed. “John Locke a humanist? Ha ha ha. He’s our idol.” In some ways he was.

And one gentleman, who was actually the father in the musical group that was singing for this meeting, said, “I think what they’re saying is that his view of the mind as a blank tablet is contrary to the idea of total depravity,” which is exactly what they were saying. The nice sweet lady said, “Oh, really? I don’t think so. No, no, I’m sure that’s not what he would say.”

And at that point it was game, set, match. You obviously haven’t thought a thing about Locke. You’re not equipped to. You don’t understand theology, and yet here you are trying to write a book about it.

Now, I’m sure she’s a nice lady. I’ve heard about her from other sources, a sweet lady who means well, but she’s not equipped to discuss philosophy because she doesn’t understand the first thing about theology, and I kind of went home whistling my way. I didn’t have to say anything, praise God, and didn’t have to get myself in any more trouble.

I think that’s a good example where Christians are often off their guard when philosophers seem to be taking the practical logical approach, where they’re just observing the things around them and saying, “This is obviously true,” and we as Christians would say, “Yes, this is obviously true, but it’s true because God made the world to work that way and it reflects his character.” But we get pulled into that so-called neutral ground, that natural law that we can all share, which really is a false teaching we can find from Aristotle. I see that so often.

“Yeah, I know they’re pagans but they’re so logical and practical, so we can learn a ton from them,” and we miss why their foundation and worldview matters in all the things they therefore get wrong.

And why what we think they’re saying may not be at all what they’re actually saying. We are reinterpreting in terms of our categories and they may mean something very, very different. For instance, when Aristotle says God it has nothing to do with the God of the Bible, and there’s no way you can stretch it.

I was reading a book by Mortimer Adler, who wrote How to Read a Book. This was something like that with Aristotle. He said originally it was going to be a children’s guide to Aristotle or something like that, but it’s a little too sophisticated for that. But when he got to talking about Aristotle’s theology it was an interesting chapter, more or less what I’ve just said.

He summed it up well, but he tried really hard to reconcile what he knew Aristotle had said, that this god of his – and he does not admit that Aristotle allows for multiple unmoved movers; just this one god – is eternal but so is the universe, so this god isn’t a Creator unless we tweak the meaning of the word create to mean…

I had trouble following exactly what he was saying is just because something has come to exist does not mean it cannot fall out of existence, so to sustain something in existence could qualify you as a creator.

This is bending the Bible to fit Aristotle, rather than saying, “Here’s Aristotle. It’s not the Bible. What if we engage with Aristotle and compare it to the Bible.”

And then we would be able to confess with the three great religions that God is the Creator of heaven and earth, but we would mean something radically different. I don’t think that Mortimer Adler here was being vicious. It’s right out in the open. It’s not sleight of hand. It’s just, “Well, what if we did this?” It’s sort of maybe, maybe not. That’s a humanist on a good day playing nice and trying to be sweet and accommodating.

Not all philosophy teachers or historians are like that. Many of them will just swish something by you, or by your children in college, and sometimes they will do it in the name of Jesus. As Christian educators we need to start drawing those lines hard and fast and saying, “You want to start talking about Aristotle and Plato? First of all tell us everything wrong with them. Tell us which articles of faith they flatly contradict. When you’re done with that and we know that you understand theology, then if you have something you still want to tell us, maybe there’s something in there we can hear.”

But just starting with, “No, no, we’ll listen to them and learn from them, and then later we’ll critique it a bit with scripture,” no, no, no. Not on my watch. You don’t get to do that. First of all you’re going to bring these guys along – “Yeah, I brought this child molester and this pimp here to your kindergarten class and they’re going to tell you interesting things about the business world and human relations, and we’ll critique some of their practices later.” I don’t think so.

We don’t like that.

But of course I would be called harsh and judgmental and anti-intellectual for suggesting that moral confrontation takes place at the beginning, not later down the road when we maybe get around to it. So there’s my warning.

And there we have to wrap up because we are over time. But before we go let’s have some recommendations.

I’ve got one. Anytime you go more than two hours away from home, make sure you have your “go bag” with you, which contains changes of underwear, socks, a different pair of shoes, some snacks, and a charger for your phone.

It sounds like you’re speaking from recent experience. That’s the impression I’m getting.

Very much so. This kind of thing has happened before, but it happened to us a couple days ago. We took a quick break to run down to Carmel and it was a great experience, a wonderful time at the beach, came back, and our alternator went out along the way and we had not been planning for an overnight trip.

Now in my case it’s a little more serious because I have sleep apnea, which is to say I can’t sleep very well without my CPAP machine, and neither can anybody else in the room. Fortunately, we did have some earplugs in the car so I told my wife, “Before you do anything else, before we go to sleep put in the earplugs.” She tells me she didn’t hear me snore all night, so that’s good. I on the other hand had difficulty staying asleep, and woke up not feeling well, but that’s me.

Take your medications with you. Make sure you have some kind of little medical kit with you. There was a time I think in America where we did those things because highways were still poor and you didn’t know where you might end up.

There’s an old I Love Lucy episode where they decide they’re going to drive across the country to California, and the whole rest of that comedic season is set in Hollywood, but along the way maps barely existed then. This was in the ‘50s or early ‘60s. Maps were rare. The roads and highways were horrible. Phones? Huh? You sure didn’t have one with you. You were lucky if you found a phone booth. Anyone remember those?

Lucy and her friends end up at some weird little eating place that has some beds attached, and everything is just horrible. They said, “We’re not staying here,” and they go and go and finally see a sign that says, “Restaurant this way, 10 miles.” So she follows the sign and ends up in exactly the same place. They end up trying to sleep, because in those days you didn’t have all the things.

Now you carry a phone with you. We were in trouble because my wife’s phone almost ran out of power. Fortunately we had landed in a Kohl’s parking lot before they closed, and she ran in and found this little Disney nightlight phone charger and plugged into the wall. You can always power it with the car, but not when the car has no battery power.

Think ahead. It’s a good thing to have. If you’re within two hours of home you can call a friend. When it gets around four hours away, that’s four hours out to you and four hours back. You want to take eight hours out of your friend’s life? Maybe not, so be prepared.

Be like a Boy Scout or like Scar from Lion King. It’s one or the other.

Yes. Emily, your turn.

I’m struggling because the recommendation that came to mind during our conversation is one that’s definitely not for children. It’s a sci-fi TV series by Joss Whedon called Dollhouse. I don’t recommend watching it per se. I like to watch TV with a Sudoku puzzle in front of me, so a lot of visual things don’t bother me because I just don’t see them.

My wife watches with her hand up in front of her eyes.

And there’s a lot in this series that would require such measures. I “watched” it in college, so I was doing homework at the same time, which was a great blessing. But what’s so noteworthy about it is the way that Joss Whedon begins with this assumption of tabula rasa, the unscribed tablet. The idea is that people can be restored to that clean slate state, and then we have the technology to imprint a personality on them and memories on them, and we can make them whatever we want them to be and then sell them or rent them. Again, it’s not for children and not for sensitive souls, but the way the story is told over the course of the two seasons is really excellent in the way that he comes back to that assumption.

You and I would watch this show and be like, “Yeah, that tabula rasa doesn’t work, does it? So how is this going to fall apart?” Then you get halfway through the show and Joss Whedon says, “Yeah, that falls apart. Let’s look at how.”

I love that about Joss Whedon and the shows that he makes. They begin with one set of assumptions and then he comes back and challenges them himself. I think that’s really good storytelling, especially when you’re dealing with such poor assumptions, as he usually starts with.

Okay. Rachel?

Mine is mostly unrelated to what we talked about tonight, I think. I recently finished re-reading Son of Hamas with my husband David. I have recommended it to many people over the years, but I’m going to do an official recommendation here. It’s an autobiography by Mosab Hassan Yousef and it was published a little over 10 years ago, but given all of the uproar in the Israeli-Palestinian issues I think it’s a good and useful tool.

It was interesting that right after we finished the book, the back of the book has a list of names and definitions of the key players in the Palestinian-Israeli issues, and recently a primary Hamas leader was killed in Iran, and David went back to the book and looked in the back and said, “Hey, I found him right here,” demonstrating he’d been around for a long time.

The overall gist of the story is that Mosab is the oldest son of the one of the founders of the Hamas group in the 1980s, so it’s his own journey seeing life in the West Bank in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Then he gets wrapped up in espionage with the Israelis, while also trying to care for his father and seeing the horrors of Hamas. Eventually he is introduced to Christianity.

It’s a very interesting story that leads to the proper answer for the conflict. If you just try to solve it as nations with diplomacy and espionage, all of it falls apart and just keeps perpetuating the problem. They need the love of Jesus.

It’s a pretty easy book to read. I would definitely say it’s not for children because it does describe some of the horrors of Hamas, but it’s a good look into that whole situation.

Great. Thank you both so much for this conversation. It’s been a delight. A big thank you also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband, and a huge thank you to our financial supporters. Thank you for keeping the show rolling.

If you’d like to get in touch with us you can always send us an email at [email protected]. We would love to hear from you. Thanks for listening. Good night.