On Greek and Hebrew Thought....

The Greeks and the Hebrews had very different ways of looking at life and how a thing can be known. This is a concept that I have had thrown at me in Torrey and have been trying to wade through in the midst of reading Plato and other Greek books. For the Greeks, you can only know something once you have fully reasoned it out and comprehended it completely . Knowledge and wisdom are gained through reason and the intellect, the mind is glorified as the only way to truth. While there is great merit to the way the Greeks view the world (certainly I would not be in a school that so exalts it if I did not believe that we ought to understand and use this worldview) the Greek view of knowledge is not the Biblical one.

The Bible is written from a Hebrew worldview and therefore contains a very different view of knowing. For the Hebrew mind, the spirit/soul is the essence of knowing something. If a person can place an idea or a truth into their hearts and truly live it out, then they know it. If that knowledge is not transforming your heart, then you don't truly know it. This is important because the reason can never understand the fullness of God. He is too great, too all-inclusive to be understood by something so small human reason.

It seems then that this view is in sharp contradiction to the Greek worldview. The Hebrew mind uses reason, but not as the ultimate means for knowledge, while the Greeks worship reason as the source of all knowledge if not even human goodness. The Bible calls us to pursue transformation, not just information. God wants us to have changed and transformed hearts, not intellectual trophies. However, Greek thought does have its place. The training of the mind is vital to our spiritual growth. As we learn to discipline out minds we can then apply similar principles to other parts of our lives. Also, God has given us the gifts of reason and intellect, it would be a slap in the face of our creator not to use them to the full potential for which God gave them to us.

So where, then, does this leave us? Which worldview do we choose? I would suggest that there is not actually a choice to be made. I believe that we need to adopt an overarching Hebrew mindset and seek not just information but transformation. Yet in the midst of this way of thinking, we need to apply Greek thought to certain areas of our lives and then apply the truths we learn through reason to our lives and hide them in our hearts so that God can use them to change our lives.