Flight From Life (Remastered)

In this opening lecture on Neoplatonism and Christianity, the speaker contrasts biblical faith with a Greek, dialectical worldview that split spirit and matter and treated the body as the source of evil, a mindset that seeped into the early church and produced extreme ascetic “sainthood” marked by self-mortification, contempt for ordinary life, and spiritual pride. Through vivid historical examples, he argues that this is not Christianity at all: Scripture teaches that the whole man (body and soul) fell into sin and the whole man is redeemed in Christ, culminating in the resurrection of the body so the problem is not matter but sin, and the Savior is not the mind but Jesus Christ and His atoning blood. He traces how Neoplatonism turns “holiness” into an upward escape from creatureliness, prayer into lofty meditation detached from real needs, and love into a sentimental substitute for truth, ultimately paving the road to humanism where man’s reason becomes the “savior” and God is rivaled or denied. The lecture closes by calling believers back to the plain corrective of God’s Word, urging them to reject this false gospel, embrace Christ’s lordship over the whole of life, and grow in grace through faithful obedience and service.