Plato and Paul
If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness. Romans 8:10 NASB
Dead/alive – If there were ever a verse that makes Paul look like a student of Plato, this is probably it. The apparent dualism between body and spirit, dead and alive, might have been penned by Plato himself. The body (and the material world) is dead because of sin, but the spirit (the non-material world) is alive because of dikaiosýnē (for Paul, “righteousness,” for Plato “law,” i.e., right action guided by reason). Is this really Paul’s thought? Is he really the dualist that traditional theology has made him? Did he leave behind the Hebrew idea of embodied wholeness (shālôm) and adopt a form of rabbinic Hellenism? Or are we just discovering that Paul is inconsistent, a conflicted man, attempting to be a Gentile thinker to the Gentiles while claiming to be a Pharisee to the Jews?
Platonic dualism reigned supreme in Christian theology for centuries. In many doctrinal statements, it still does. But Plato’s chasm between body and soul, the material and the spiritual, also influenced Jewish thinking. You can find examples in the modern Siddur. The significance of Plato’s influence can hardly be overestimated.[1] When the early Church fathers looked at Paul, they saw a Christian Plato, and they recast all Scripture according to the Greek godfather. For us, unraveling the Platonic influence is difficult. We are quite comfortable thinking that the cosmos is made up of dualistic opposites: material/spiritual, sacred/profane, Heaven/Hell, life/death, law/grace, human/divine. We simply don’t think like Easterners where all of these ideas are viewed on a gradient rather than on a balance scale.
If Paul is just another rabbi accommodating Hellenism, then we could let this verse pass and be happy that Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin got it right. But I don’t think we can do this, despite Paul’s language. When we view Paul’s complete letters, we don’t find Hellenistic dualism. We find Hebrew organic homogenization. Yes, he uses words that sound like polar opposites to us, but that’s because we read them that way after two thousand years of Greek training. I’m not so sure the audience of the first century would have heard the same things. If you were expecting me to provide you with an alternative reading of this particular verse, I am sorry to disappoint. Just like you, I see an implicit dualism, but I recognize that I’m reading the verse like a Greek-trained philosopher. I’m not quite sure how to step outside my paradigm with this one. All I know is that there is a big red flag flying in my mental breeze. I think of Paul as an orthodox, Messianic Pharisee. But I also know that Hellenism wormed its way into rabbinic thinking. Martin Hengel convincingly showed that to be the case. Do I think Paul was not influenced by Hellenism? I’m not sure. Certainly, some of his letters demonstrate classic Hebrew Torah thinking, but then there are verses like this one. Did Paul’s thinking change over time? Possibly. Romans is the end of a long theological career. Ideas are not static. They evolve. The earlier Pauline material doesn’t always sound like the later work. Of course, neither does mine. Thinkers think and as they think, things change. I doubt Paul was a monolithic thinker. But all I have is his correspondence. It’s hard to tell.
Topical Index: dualism, Plato, Hellenism, Romans 8:10
[1] Christian assimilation of Hellenic philosophy was anticipated by Philo and other Greek-speaking Alexandrian Jews. Philo’s blend of Judaism, Platonism, and Stoicism strongly influenced Christian Alexandrian writers like Origen and Clement of Alexandria, as well as, in the Latin world, Ambrose of Milan. One early Christian writer of the 2nd and early 3rd century, Clement of Alexandria, demonstrated Greek thought in writing, “Philosophy has been given to the Greeks as their own kind of Covenant, their foundation for the philosophy of Christ … the philosophy of the Greeks … contains the basic elements of that genuine and perfect knowledge which is higher than human … even upon those spiritual objects.” (Miscellanies 6. 8) See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_and_Hellenistic_philosophy
