Plato and Church

I took my first and last philosophy course when I was a senior in college. It was the sort of ridiculously difficult class where I understood so little of my required reading that it didn't make any difference when I stopped reading altogether and depended soley on class lectures for my understanding. My professor was a man named Smith, who fortunately had a gift for making classical philosophy accessible to non-enlightened minds.

One thing I remember is a 90-minute lecture over one Greek word that roughly translates to "it is" (this was some early scholar's entire philosophy of the universe). The other thing I remember is Plato, and more specifically, an idea of his called the Allegory of the Cave (this is found in The Republic, which I did force myself to read on principle). The allegory goes basically like this: there are prisoners who have lived thier whole lives in a cave, chained up so that they face the back wall of the cave. Behind them is a giant fire. Between the fire and the prisoners is a little platform where people put on continuous puppet shows, and the shadows are projected onto the back wall where the prisoners look.

So for these prisoners, reality is made up of these shadows. So what they know to be a chicken is not a real chicken, but a shadow of a chicken puppet. Their understanding is separated by a couple of degrees from true reality.


I thought of the allegory of the cave regarding our current situation with our church members. For many of them, church is all about the forms, to the extent that the forms have become the reality that they merely represent. All of church traditions are merely forms, or ways that men have constructed to facilitate an understanding and an encounter with God. Our belief is that many of the forms that are present in our church service are actually stumbling blocks to people who do not have sentimental attachments to them. So we've tried (slowly and tactfully, as much as we've been able) to change the forms into new forms that more closely reflect the reality that they represent.

But for people for whom forms have become reality, change of any sort is very threatening. And dialogue is impossible because there is no deeper reality than the forms themselves.

Plato's allegory concludes with one of the prisoners being set free. He escapes the cave and learns about things that are real. Filled with excitement about this knowledge, he goes back into the cave to try to convince his fellow prisoners to come into the sunlight. But the other prisoners do not want to hear what he has to say, and they try to murder him.

I hope that our story ends differently.