My wife and I have recently been having a long-running dialog on the nature and application of prayer. So it was with great interest that I read Lauren Winner's review of two books on prayer in the latest issue of Books & Culture . (The review is available on the B&C website.)
A quote from the second book reviewed specifically caught my attention. The book is Knocking on Heaven's Door, written by a prof at Calvin College named David Crump. In it, Crump examines the New Testament's statements on petitionary prayer. Of specific concern for Crump is the recognition of God's personal immanence in prayer. So as Winner writes:
Crump insists that God is "personally available to hear and to respond to each individual's requests in a two-way relationship of personal give and take." Those who charge that such a view somehow undoes God's sovereignty are themselves, says Crump, captive to a "Neoplatonic theological prejudice that substitutes … philosophical smoke and mirrors for the truth plainly revealed in Scripture."
While I fully agree with the underlying point Crump is making, his reference to Neoplatonism caught me somewhat off guard, though on further reflection it made sense.
The metaphorical cities of Athens and Jerusalem have often been found in discord, and I've observed a recent tendency for some of the more erudite denizens of Jerusalem to pick a fight with that section of Athens under the inspiration of Plato. I understand some of the skepticism that many Christian intellectuals have had over the influence of Platonism on Christian thought; after all, the Platonic tradition is certainly not identical to Christian revelation.
However, I think it somewhat ironic that Crump, like many other Christian intellectuals, chooses Neoplatonism as his philosophical "whipping boy" in identifying the enemy of an understanding of an immanent, personal God. To explain why, I would first ask: do we really want a God who is near?
The revealed scriptures of the Old and New Testament allow us to say yes to that question. But it's worth a pause to consider that the immanence of God was certainly not a self-evident good in antiquity.
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