How has Greek philosophy influenced Christian thinking about God?
This text is an extract from a transcript of a Q&A session given by David Gooding entitled ‘The Glorious Gospel of the Blessed God’ (1995).
In the early days when people began to get converted to Christianity there were not many Christians that were well educated. But by the third century there were Greek Christians who were sizeably intellectual and educated in the philosophy of the day. When they tried to engage in preaching the Christian gospel and apologetics with their fellow citizens who were also intellectuals, they frequently used the categories of Greek thought and philosophy in order to explain their beliefs. That happened, notoriously so, in the attempts of the church fathers to explain how Jesus could be both man and God simultaneously. If you look at the explanations they give and the terms they use, they are the terms borrowed from Aristotelian philosophy and so forth. They were the only categories of thought open to them at the time, if they wanted to be philosophical.
Some of the Greek philosophers were fatalists, the Stoics for instance. Stoicism commended itself to many, and to Romans in particular, as being a manly faith. They couldn't accept Epicureanism, which, among other things, made the whole universe—man included—depend upon chance. Stoics were more fatalists. It is not surprising, therefore, that medieval schoolmen and even the Reformers (whose education was firstly in classical philosophies and classical languages, and then in theology) took some of their concepts of God from Greek philosophy. Some of the fatalism that lies behind extreme forms of Calvinism owes a tremendous lot, in my humble estimation, to the influence of the fatalism of Greek philosophy on men like Calvin, who were first students of Greek philosophy before they became believers and then theologians.
If you want a clear example of that kind of thing, you could take the question whether it is possible for God to suffer. It has only been comparatively recently—within my lifetime—that Christian theologians have been willing to admit that God the Father can suffer. They held steadfastly over many centuries that God was impassible, meaning that God can't suffer. They argued, therefore, that God experiences no emotion, because emotion implies change, and God is utterly unchangeable. He is, they said, supreme perfection. If he changed for the better he wasn't perfect to start with; if he changed for the worse he was no longer perfect. And since emotions imply a change in you, from being calm to being emotional, God cannot experience emotion. And it went down the centuries, until recent times, in Christian theology that God cannot suffer, and you would be told it would be wrong to say that at Calvary the Father suffered anything. Only Jesus could suffer, because he was human.
I don't know how Christian theologians could ever have thought that was true, when they had the whole of the Old Testament saying the very opposite: 'God is angry with sinners every day' (Psalm 7:11); 'In all their affliction he was afflicted' (Isaiah 63:9). The God of the Old Testament is no Aristotelian god of Greek philosophy. He happens to be the true God. You don't suppose that when God the Father saw his son hanging upon Calvary he sat upon his throne unmoved, do you? Greek philosophy has so influenced Christian theologians that, for many centuries, they held that God was utterly impassible. We now see, of course, that is wrong.
If we have studied a great deal of Greek philosophy, we need to make sure that the God we worship is not one described in terms of Greek philosophy. The God we serve is, excuse the term, a Christian God. If you want to know what God is like, God is like Jesus Christ, his Son.
