Being and Advent
Stanislas Breton ( A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul , 56-7) observes that Plato dealt with mythology not be eliminating the gods but by taking their mythical histories as metaphor of the real, “by reading the elevating density of the intelligible in the heaviness of the sensible.” Platonic dualism thus coheres with Platonic allegory.
Biblical allegory, by contrast, is temporal, and this too implies a dualism or duality, not between sensible and intelligible but between earlier and later. This hermeneutics too has ontological/theological weight, cohering with the notion that “the ‘God who is’ . . .is also and above all the ‘God who comes.’” Advent is not just what God does but somehow also the reality of His being.
And that in turn coheres with the New Testament’s Trinitarianism, summarized in Revelation as praise as the One who “is, was, and is coming,” that is, as Father, Son, and the Spirit of arrival
Peter Leithart
Peter J. Leithart is President of Theopolis Institute. He is the author of numerous books on theology, literature, and culture, including Theopolitan, Defending Constantine, and Baptized Body.
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