Is God Plato's Form of the Good?
Plato's Form of the Good is the highest reality in his system: a perfect, impersonal principle that everything good only imitates. The question is whether the God of the Bible is that idea — and the writers in this collection answer by drawing a hard line between an idea the mind reaches up to and a Person who comes down.
One who alone is good
Scripture does say that goodness belongs to God alone, and it says so in the mouth of Jesus. But the setting matters: He refused the title "good" from a man who saw Him as nothing more than a fine teacher.
William KellyAs man's nature is defiled and sinful, the God whom we know by faith, and with whom grace has given us the nearest relationship, is good. He cannot be tempted by evil and tempts none in this way. He is so absolutely good that our Lord laid down that none is good except one, God — not, of course, disclaiming it Himself if He were owned as God, but refusing it from a man who saw no more than humanity in Him.
So the "absolutely good" of the Bible is not a standard hanging above the world. It is someone you can be brought into relationship with.
Where the search by thinking ended
Plato is not treated here as a villain, but as the best example of a method that failed. The failure was not stupidity; it was the wrong faculty.
Numerical Bible NotesMan had sought wisdom in self-exaltation, so that he might be as God; and the philosopher still thinks he can find Him with his mind, instead of with his conscience. The world is full of the strange and fantastic shapes he has conjured up this way, but he has no gospel until it is revealed to him — he knows neither God nor himself.
The verdict is put even more sharply elsewhere: it was not by ignorance but "by wisdom" that the world did not come to know God.
An idea cannot love
This is the sharpest objection to identifying God with a Form. A Form is a thought-object. It can be contemplated. It cannot act.
J. N. DarbyIn religion, if true, God is revealed in His absolute nature... He is light — He is love; Christ is the perfect revelation of Him. It does not satisfy philosophy, because philosophy has nothing to do with it — it has only ideas, and no idea is love. "Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love."
The same writer draws the line another way: reasoning "can only conclude what must be, never what is," while truth "is the declaration of what is." A perfect Good that the mind deduces is still only a conclusion in the mind.
What philosophy reached for, and what came
Plato's language did travel. Later thinkers blended it with fragments of the Hebrew Scriptures, and out of that came talk of a Word standing between God and the world. But the writers say the borrowing lost the very thing it was reaching for.
J. N. DarbyGentiles had traditions; Alexandrian philosophy had shreds of Judaism; but God was lost... The Word was introduced by Platonic Jews in Alexandria, because God could have nothing to say to a mere creature; and the Word might form others, but remained alone in His own nature. For John, the Word is God, who Himself becomes flesh. The cravings which philosophy had made a false system out of, not knowing God, are met by the revelation of God Himself — the truth of all they sought, and the perfect grace they needed.
Note the reversal. Plato's Good is untouchable by definition. The Word is God who becomes flesh.
Goodness shown, not defined
If God were the Form of the Good, He would be known by definition. The claim here is that He chose a different method entirely.
J. G. BellettWhat a proof that God reveals Himself in action and in personality, and not by theological descriptions or commentary — the incarnation, with everything it led to in the life of Jesus... What a witness all this leaves to the great truth that God will be known by showing Himself, and not by descriptions; that He has not entrusted the revelation of what He is, and who He is, even to the pen of inspired description, but has chosen to be His own Revealer, in living personal action.
And His goodness is not established by argument. Darby contrasts the Christian, who sees God come down into human misery at cost to Himself, with the man who "does not rationally suppose God is good, because, in cold philosophy, man's sorrows are necessary to his moral perfecting."
The danger in defining Him ourselves
Once God has made Himself known, building our own concept of Him is not neutral.
The Bible TreasuryNow that the true God is revealed, let no thought of Him, no reasoning about Him, no conclusions of our own wisdom and theology arise independently in the heart. All this will only end in idolatry — refined, it may be, speculative and philosophical, but still idolatry.
Summary
- Yes, one Good. Scripture agrees that goodness belongs to God alone — but as the character of a Person, not a principle above persons.
- The mind's limit. Philosophy tried to find God with the intellect instead of the conscience, and the result was that the world "by wisdom" did not know Him.
- The fatal gap. Ideas can be thought about; they cannot love. "No idea is love" — and God is love.
- The reversal. Plato's Word had to stay untouched by creation; John's Word became flesh, meeting the very hunger philosophy had turned into a system.
- The method. God does not hand us a definition to contemplate; He shows Himself in living action, and every self-made concept of Him slides back toward idolatry, however refined.