ANAKAINOSIS: Rank and Worth

Excerpt: In this 1983 newsletter article, Al Wolters critiques the traditional Neoplatonic view in Christian theology that equates degrees of “goodness” with an ontological hierarchy, where God sits atop a scale of being that ascends from matter to spirit, implying that certain aspects of creation (like rationality) are more divine than others (like corporeality). He argues this perspective misconstrues God as a capstone of a creaturely scale and depreciates creation, particularly its physical dimensions, in a Gnostic manner. Instead, Wolters proposes that creation’s goodness is uniform, not varying by degrees, and that evil stems from religious disobedience rather than inherent ontological flaws. He introduces a key distinction between “rank” (positional differences within creation, such as between humans and animals or rationality and emotionality) and “worth” (the intrinsic, equal goodness of all creation), emphasizing that differences in rank—whether in nature, society, or human faculties—should not be mistaken for differences in worth, a confusion he sees in both Greek metaphysics and modern philosophy since Hegel and Darwin.