Reviewed by: From Plato to Christ: How Platonic Thought Shaped the Christian Faith by Louis Markos Mark Mattes From Plato to Christ: How Platonic Thought Shaped the Christian Faith. By Louis Markos. Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2021. xvi + 234 pp. This book seeks to show the impact that Plato has had on the Christian faith. It is written by an English professor at Houston Baptist University. The first six chapters interpret Plato's essential writings and the next six show his influence on Christian thinkers: Origen of Alexandria, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Palamas, Augustine, Boethius, Dante, Erasmus, Descartes, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and C. S. Lewis. This book offers no direct ties between Plato and Luther. That said, the book is valuable because it makes a strong case for how Christianity has been deeply influenced by Plato and that this has led both to Christian humanism and a Christian approach to the liberal arts. Markos knows how to hook his readers: he sees modern and contemporary philosophy prefigured in the Sophists, antagonists of Plato's mentor, Socrates. For example, the sophist Thrasymachus, an interlocuter with Socrates in the Republic, is akin to Nietzsche (29). Interestingly, against the ancient view that "humans are the measure of all things," Plato proposes instead that God is (91). Also, in the Timaeus, similar to the Bible, but unlike all other ancient views, God predates matter (102). In the same writing, Plato portrays a cosmology not like the Gnostics, often thought to be Plato's heirs. Instead, for Plato, God created the world good and the material world is no product of a Fall of spiritual reality into material things (107). Strangely, Christians may even see the suffering Christ as prefigured in Plato's exaltation of the righteous person who would rather suffer wrong, even being impaled, than prosper at others' expense as the evil would do (127). While Markos looks to Erasmus as Plato's voice in the Reformation, it would be interesting to examine just how Platonic Luther's and Calvin's views of participation in Christ are or are not. Given the case Markos has built for similarities between Plato and Christianity, the biggest difference between the two for the Reformers would be that human sinfulness is a result not of a lack of knowledge, which Plato teaches, but instead a misuse of the will, that is, [End Page 337] its revolt against God's will. In spite of Markos' failure to bring the Reformers and Plato into conversation, this book is valuable for understanding Christianity's role in the liberal arts. Mark Mattes Grand View University Des Moines, Iowa Copyright © 2022 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran Quarterly, Inc.