Good night, Plato

It's time to say good night to Plato. I knew it had to be when I read 1 Peter 1:22:

"Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart."

Plato just rolled over in his grave. For the ancient Greeks, truth was something "out there"; it was not something to be obeyed. The two concepts just aren't the same categories of things. To mix truth and obedience is, for an ancient Greek, to mix apples and oranges. (Not quite: At least apples and oranges belong to the same dimension, the phenomenal world.) "Truth" is something you know, and "obedience" is something you do.

Now here's Peter coming out with the statement saying that we Christians "obey" the "truth." Is he displaying his intellectual ignorance? Perhaps he is taking liberties with language? Or must we believe this fisherman when he says that truth and obedience do not lie across a great metaphysical divide, but are inseparable to authentic Christian living?

In a quick history of Western philosophy, Dr. Esther Meek (assistant professor of philosophy at Geneva College) explains that Plato, the disciple of Socrates, tried to combat the skepticism of his day by contending that what makes knowledge knowledge is that it has an object-something out there! Something outside ourselves! In the "forms"!

That was all well and good for keeping us from falling off the donkey on the side of subjectivism, but it came with other problems. One was that we got saddled with a legacy that couldn't imagine knowledge as having anything to do with obedience, or will, or submission, or anything related to human action. A star or blueberry muffin exists whether we obey it or not.

The apostle John, like Peter, was evidently absent that day in class: "I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth" (3 John 1:4). Can truth be something you "obey," and "walk in"? Is this just a quaint expression, not to be interpreted too rigorously? Or is it a revolution in Western thinking? And what is the implication-that if we are not "obeying" the truth, and "walking in" the truth, then maybe we are not safely in the truth at all?

Meek writes: "Bottom line, assessing the truth of a claim takes personally getting inside the statement to live it. . . ."

So good night, Plato.

"The traditional model . . . misleads us about key dimensions essential to knowing. . . . The act of knowing involves the knower's active and responsible submission to reality. . . . It calls for courageous resolve. . . . I simply cannot know Him if I refuse to submit in reverence to Him. The Bible makes it plain that obedience leads a person further into truth. . . . I can give you one guaranteed way to know God-obey him."

Listen to commentaries by Andrée Seu.