Is God Plato's Form of the Good?
The answer to this question, from the perspective of these writers, is a decisive no — and the reasons cut deeper than a disagreement over details. The entire philosophical enterprise of reasoning one's way to God is, they argue, incapable of arriving at what God actually is. God must be revealed, not deduced.
Philosophy Cannot Rise to God
William Kelly, commenting on Paul's encounter with the Greek philosophers at Athens (Acts 17), makes the foundational point:
William KellyPhilosophy occupies itself with phenomena, never rises above second causes, and will not bow to God's authority revealing Himself in the written word, still less in the personal Word. It is but man's mind, without real activity of conscience or the truth.
He directly addresses the schools of Plato and Aristotle alongside the Epicureans and Stoics, and presses the point that not one of them — Plato included — arrived at the true God:
For not one of their divinities claimed to be eternal, omniscient, and omnipotent in self-being. Not one of them said, I AM, or was ever said to be Light morally, or Love in the energy of his nature.
While there is in every human being a kind of God-consciousness, Kelly insists, no one could by searching find out God's nature:
And though no one could by searching find out His nature; yet when presented to man by revelation, his conscience owns that these attributes and this nature are alone worthy of Him.
And philosophy never even discovered what Genesis 1 plainly states:
Philosophy had never found out that "in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." It never learnt even that when man was made, he and every thing around him were "very good;" still less that he is fallen under sin.
God Is a Person, Not an Abstraction
The critical distinction is this: Plato's Form of the Good is an impersonal, abstract principle — the highest reality in a metaphysical hierarchy. The God of Scripture is a Person who acts, speaks, loves, and reveals Himself.
J.N. Darby argues that when Plato's philosophy was grafted onto Christianity through the Alexandrian Fathers, the result was not deeper understanding but corruption — specifically, the denial of Christ's full deity:
J.N. DarbyThe root of it was, that there was a supreme unknown God who dwelt in the depths of silence, and could have no connection with matter. Hence emanations and the Demiurge, an inferior creator, resulting in Gnosticism — the plague of the early church. Platonism, with its emanated demons and the Alexandrian philosophy, divides into the Christian and heathen parties... It resulted, in another form, in Arianism.
He traces it to its philosophical root:
The Platonic system of ideas and demons, material things being merely a representative to sense of archetypal truth. This, though Neoplatonism properly speaking, was a subsequent system, a last effort of philosophy against Christianity, reigned among the Alexandrian Fathers.
And Darby states the matter with stark directness in his critique of J.S. Mill:
Plato not only did not know God, but taught the most brutish communism, which Aristotle disapproved because, base as trade might be, selfishness was a stronger motive. The world by wisdom knew not God. It pleased God, by the foolishness of preaching, to save them that believe.
"No Idea Is Love"
Perhaps the sharpest distinction from Plato's Form of the Good comes in Darby's philosophical writings, where he argues that the category of "the Good" — or any abstract idea — is inherently incapable of expressing what God is. God is love, and love is not an idea:
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. "He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love."
For Plato, the Good is knowable through intellect — through philosophical contemplation. For these writers, God is knowable only through revelation, and specifically through the Person of Christ:
The knowledge of God — that is, the Father — and Jesus Christ whom He has sent, is eternal life. And we have fellowship with them.
Darby further presses that God's goodness is not a principle He conforms to, but the free activity of His own nature:
Law is an authoritatively imposed obligation. This cannot be God's nature and position. His liberty in love (and there is no love without, but in, liberty) is wholly set aside (that is, the whole activity of His nature, His nature itself, for He is love) if this principle be true.
The Goodness of God Is Revealed in Christ
Kelly shows how God's goodness is not a philosophical category but a lived reality, seen in Christ's actual dealings with sinners:
KellyHis goodness leads the sinner to repentance; and where shone His goodness as in Jesus? It was this that attracted the woman that was a sinner; it was this that won the hard robber to penitence and faith on the cross; it was this that overwhelmed Paul the crusader of law into the most lowly saint and sufferer for Himself.
The biblical God is emphatically not Plato's Form of the Good. The Form of the Good is impersonal, abstract, and arrived at by philosophical reasoning. The God of Scripture is personal, active, and knowable only by revelation — supremely in Christ. Where Plato's Good is a principle that explains reality from above, the God of the Bible enters reality from above — becomes man, suffers, dies, rises. That act of self-giving love is not the implication of an abstract principle; it is the revelation of a Person. As Darby put it: "no idea is love."