Inform Your 'Faith'

  While there are those within Christendom who have mistakenly used the formulae of 'history' as a central motif  that dictates their theological postulations and presuppositional templates, (cf. Pannenberg and Cullmann) history is inarguably and unavoidably a testament to divine handiwork and prerogative.

  Recorded history, while being resplendent with static historical datum and facticity, gives credence to the reliability of  the Christian claims that Christ is the historically incarnate figure that palpably manifests and interprets GOD (John 1:18) in the spatio-temporal sphere of human existence and phenomena. This can be seen beyond the assertions of biblical nomenclature as special or particular revelation.

  Natural philosophy itself attests to the incarnational Christ event. Obviously, this would not be technically true, for none of the philosophical systems mentioned below would support such a claim. But it is actually true in that natural philosophy burgeoned and developed along historical lines in a way that necessitated the incarnation, albeit unwittingly. It was an unavoidable inevitability. The historical incarnation was the natural outcome of natural philosophies trajectory. Without being cognizant of the progressive implications of their cumulative postulations, their postulations actually presupposed the Christ event.

  Systematized philosophy finds its ostensible origin, as a deliberate discipline anyway, with the Ionians of the pre-Grecian society and cultus. The cosmology that emerged was a naturalistic one that precipitated, by and large, from the arcane and naturalistic cosmogonies that predated it. Inferences drawn from nature predominated the philosophical milieu (see the Homeric and Hesiodic cosmological landscape). As Frederick Copleston S.J. has written, "in the period of philosophy's childhood it was Nature as a whole which first occupied their attention"

  It would appear that the primary interest within the naturalistic pursuit was in ascertaining the essence of things. The early Ionians such as Thales of Miletus, Anaximander, Anaximenes were pursuant of a singular unifying 'essence'. The Pythagoreans, while personifying a distinctly scientific spirit, gave credence to a "hearth of the Universe" or an identifiable, yet, nebulous "One'. Heraclitus, who was intent on asserting the constant flux of phenomena, maintained that "Reality is One".   This unifying pursuit was a pervasive one that all philosophical schools intrepidly sought although through different methodologies..

  What is more, the Pythagoreans committed concentrated interest in and indeed popularized  the 'mystery-religion' cultus. This praxis assigned a veritable exclusivity to its claims which was bolstered by the metaphysical, immaterial or incorporeal 'essence' of whatever school of thought it espoused.  This mystery-religion dialectic was one that had been reverberating throughout  the rational thought life of the aforementioned schools and beyond their periods culminating ultimately with the Roman religious milieu.

  The naturalistic pursuit of  a metaphysical 'essence' coalesced with the "mystery religion" cultus at a nexus of historic proportion; a nexus that interestingly enough is marked by the incarnational Christ event!!   

  Stoicism was the premier philosophy during that nexus. It represented a fascination with the ethical applications of the foregoing within individual life an accordance with the "Divine Will".  This invariably gave rise to the pursuit of union with the divine 'essence' or the metaphysical "One".  Stoicism, though, had no answer for this pursuit considering that it demanded a theoretical and practical separation from the corporeal/physical while the real "Divine Will", the only 'One" (which they were seeking) was making His way into the corporeal/physical world. Moreover, the Gnostic empire, which was very much compatible with Stoicism in many respects, was also a force during that epochal landscape. 

  These later philosophical advances were outcomes of  antecedent Neo-Platonistic underpinnings. The latent Neo-Platonic thought that was still reverberating with its pursuit of an 'ecstatic union' with God dovetailed with the Stoic and Gnostic obsession with 'mystery religion

  The mytho-historical preoccupation combined with the mystical interest of naturalistic philosophy actually proved to be a catalyst of sorts for the 'super-natural' and historical incarnation.  Without realizing it exponents of natural philosophy substantiated the viability of the GOD-MAN...JESUS CHRIST through their own assertions and categories. Though that teeming philosophical landscape was not the cause of the historical self-revelation of the incarnate God-man, Jesus Christ, it certainly was not an accidental phenomena that was without Providential use. 

  In any account, what the aforementioned philosophical practitioners left to the language of myth Father God established and actualized in the language of historic fact through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The same Christ who Paul locates the 'pleroma' of Gnosticism (Col 1:19) in and who Paul locates the 'secret'  of Stoicism in (Phil.4:12). What those systems could not recognize by their own admission through their 'rational dialectic' (irrational dialectic actually) Paul was locating in Christ.