Plato’s Paradigm

Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? Romans 7:24  NASB

Wretched – According to Christian thinking, Paul was “saved” from his wretchedness by his belief in Jesus.  He expressed this transition from emotional and mental agony to blessed salvation in the famous passages of his letter to the Romans.  Augustine taught that this particular chapter was really Paul’s personal testimony—and therefore the implicit testimony of every convert.  Rescued from the corruption of the world, including the inherited guilt of bodily existence, every saved person leaps from the fallen world to the eternal, incorruptible realm of Heaven by the power of Jesus’ voluntary sacrifice.  Behind this theology lies a very deep paradigm, the Platonic separation of the created world from the pure world of heaven.  Between the two is an unbridgeable gap.  Only Jesus can safely escort you across.

Since the creation is corrupted, temporal, and inherently evil, the only solution to Man’s dilemma is a “leap of faith,” that is, a non-rational, deliberate choice to embrace the agony of existence as a sign of trust that God will redeem.  Kierkegaard famously coined the phrase “leap of faith” in his attempt to distance himself from the overzealous rationality of systematic theology.  It seemed to him that God was calling the faithful to a life of suffering in order to be qualified for the heavenly realm.  In fact, this seemed to Kierkegaard to be exactly what God asked of Abraham in the famous story of the Akedah.  But, as Heschel points out, sometimes similarities don’t lead to the same conclusions:

The concept of faith as a leap, which the Kotzker and Kierkegaard shared, can have different connotations.  Predicated upon the ultimate repudiation of reason, the leap of faith causes mental offense and suffering, according to Kierkegaard.  Yet the Kotzker never taught that the burden of faith caused suffering, stressing the contrary, the joy of faith.  Kierkegaard regarded suffering as the prerequisite for Christian existence.  One could become a Christian only by experiencing acute consciousness of sin and remain one through constant penitence. The central object of Christian faith was not God in Himself but God in human form.  This was absolute paradox and therefore an enduring stumbling block and an offense to the human mind. . .  To be a Christian, then, meant to take up the cross and accept persecution, imitatio Christi.  This does not mean merely enduring the trials that face all men; the prerequisite intrinsic to true Christianity was to be found only in the suffering a man voluntarily took upon himself.  To be a Christian meant nothing less than being a martyr.[1]

Is it any wonder that Christian theology viewed Paul’s statement as the existential description of every man beforeChristian conversion?  Plato’s world offered no hope, no relief, no expiation.  Anyone in that world felt the broken weight of the cosmos crushing him.  Just to be alive was an affront to God, a validation of the sin of being born.  No one thought that Paul was writing as a Jew.  Paul was a now-converted Christian Greek.  The answer to his pitiful existence was the hope of escape.

So who is this wretched man?  It’s not Paul in a pre-Christian state.  It’s the straw man of Paul’s argument that the world without the God of Israel is a foreboding, hopeless place without an answer to the question, “Who am I?”

Paul’s response to that question is “Look to the Messiah!  Your identity is tied to his life as a servant of God.  Follow him!”

Topical Index: wretched, Plato, Kierkegaard, leap of faith, suffering, Romans 7:24

[1] Abrahm Heschel, A Passion for Truth, p. 250.