Peter James Causton offers a brief but brilliant article on nominalism in a symposium on Conor Cunningham’s book Darwin’s Pious Idea. Nominalism, I think, is the scourge of modern theology both on the right and left.
He notes:
That Christianity understands ultimate reality as personal is both its greatest strength and its biggest problem. A problem because it is the source of the question of evil and a strength because it has no difficulty comprehending the existence of rationality, freedom and personality in creation. The theist has a problem of evil. The atheist has a problem of good.
It would be nice to leave the story at this – juxtaposing a nihilistic materialism to a life affirming Christianity – but the reality is far messier, and Christian theology has done much more to contribute to the current climate of nihilism than many of its adherents are willing to admit.
For just as nominalism in its modern guise undermines any conception of the rational and free person, nominalism in its medieval theological guise does as well. The utterly transcendent voluntarist God is an abyss of will. A humanity made in the image of such a God is no longer defined by its rationality or its capacity for love but by its ability to will.
Predictably enough when Ockham wrote of the image of God in humanity, it was humanity’s freedom that he focused on. This turn to the will in Christian theology entered into the stream of early modern thinking and reached its apotheosis in Nietzsche’s will to power.
Indeed it easy enough to conceive Dawkins selfish gene as a brute dumb materialized version of the will to power, for both in Dawkins and Nietzsche’s accounts morality and piety are merely masks worn by an atavistic force. Though at least in Nietzsche it is force worthy of being called life.
All comprehensive systems of thought tend to hide some kind of God within them. Some principle of reality which takes on the characteristic of being unconditioned, eternal or absolute. To reverse Marx’s dictum, systems of thought usually have mystical kernels contained in their rational shells.
The real question for the Christian theologian is what kind of God they find revealed in Jesus Christ. Is it really the voluntarist God of Ockham or the absolutely sovereign God of hyper-Calvinism?
The scandal of much Christian theology is that it privileges the power of God over the love of God. Perhaps this reflects our congenital inability as fallen creatures to take the love of god seriously – to fully realize that the love of God and power of God is really the same thing. That love is not an attribute of God, but what God is.