Author: David Opderbeck

Categories
Biblical Studies Scripture Spirituality Theological Hermeneutics

Job: "Behold, These are the Fringes of His Ways"

M82, IMG SRC= http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/galaxy/pr2001008e/Chapters 26 and 27 of the book of Job provide a sort of pivot in the text.  In his responses to his friends, Job’s sense of God’s ineffability seems to expand, while his sense of his ability to demand answers from God seems to shrink.  Job continues to maintain his righteousness, to be sure, and in Chapter 27, he even seems to echo the retribution theology of his friends.[1] But in Chapter 26, Job confronts his friends with the vastness of God’s creation:

He stretches out the north over empty space
And hangs the earth on nothing.
He wraps up the waters in His clouds,
And the cloud does not burst under them.
He obscures the face of the full moon
And spreads His cloud over it.
He has inscribed a circle on the surface of
the waters
At the boundary of light and darkness.  (Job 26:7-10 NASB)

Even these wonders, however, only hint at God’s greatness:  “Behold,” Job says,

these are the fringes of His ways;
And how faint a word we hear of Him!
But His mighty thunder, who can
understand?  (Job 26:14)

The picture above is of Messier 82, a galaxy in Ursa Major.  I’ve observed it through my big telescope in a dark sky, and it appears much like the picture — a long, thin, fuzzy patch of light.  M82 is a “starburst” galaxy, meaning it contains regions that produce new stars.  In fact, M82 contains 197 different star-forming regions, each of which is as massive as 200,000 of our Suns.  At the center of this galaxy, there is a black hole that is as massive as 30 million of our Suns.  It also contains an object that seems to move at four times the speed of light and that sends out radio waves unlike anything else ever discovered in the universe, which scientists remain unable to identify.

So that fuzzy patch of light in the telescope is a galaxy of billions of stars, that is actively spewing out millions of new stars, with a gaping black hole at its center and a warp-speed unidentified object traversing its bounds.  And all of that is just a small part of “the fringes of His ways.”  I look at the Hubble photograph or through my telescope and it is as though I’m the sick, bleeding woman who reached out to touch the fringe of Jesus’ robe in the hope she would be healed (see Matthew 9:20).

The “fringe” in Matthew 9 refers to tassels that Jewish men wore to remind them of the Torah.   The word used in Job 26:14 is ketzot, which refers to the edge or far end of a thing.  The “tassels” in Numbers 15:38 are tzitzit, an unrelated term, so there is no direct linguistic parallel.  Still, I like the parallel concept of the “fringe” or “far end” as a reminder of God’s distance.  It is an infinite distance that God nevertheless allows us to glimpse and touch, if only at the fringe, through His creation, His Law, and His incarnation in Christ.  Just that glimpse and touch are enough to settle the mind and stop the bleeding, even if — or maybe because — we know that what is glimpsed and touched is just a distant, unformed edge that recedes towards a horizon beyond comprehending.

 

 

____________

[1]  The text of these chapters is difficult to reconstruct, and some scholars think portions of these speeches in fact belong to Job’s friends and not to Job.  But in canonical context, these chapters are assigned to Job, and we can read as though Job is the speaker as a form of theological hermeneutic.

 

Categories
Cosmos Science and Religion Theology

Methodology in Theology and Science: Radical Orthodoxy, Part III

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But now was turning my desire and will, Even as a wheel that equally is moved, The Love which moves the sun and the other stars. — Dante, Divine Comedy

This is a continuation of my discussion of methodology in theology and science.  Here is Part III of my consideration of Radical Orthodoxy’s contribution to the question.

Cunningham’s reading is powerful and his use of Patristic sources to narrate the Christian vision as it is both protologically and eschatologically centered in Christ is compelling.  There is some ambiguity, however, in the shape Cunningham provides that narrative.  Most of his Patristic sources of Biblical interpretation are Eastern, and most of the contemporary interpreters of those sources upon whom he draws are Eastern Orthodox.[1]  Indeed, he quotes Orthodox scholar Peter Bouteneff, who argues (along with many contemporary historical-critical exegetes of all theological stripes) that “[n]either in Paul nor in the rest of the Bible is there a doctrine of original guilt, wherein all are proleptically guilty in Adam.”[2]  This seems a bit tendentious, as the understanding of “original sin” – and the reception of Augustine, notably in regard to “original sin” – remains one of the key sticking points between the Christian East and West. 

Cunningham makes an oblique reference to this difference in a footnote:  “Yes, in the West, Fathers such as Augustine seem to emphasize the Fall, the advent of evil, and so on.”[3]  However, says Cunningham, “it is important to realize that Augustine, for example, developed his notion of original sin in a very particular context, namely, the Donatist controversy, and the Pelagian one.  So it was to this degree polemical.”[4]  But it is unclear whether this contextualization of Augustine can do all the work Cunningham assigns to it.  As late as 1950, Pope Pius XII’s Encyclical Humani Generis responded to the developing science of human evolution with an insistence on a literal individual Adam, tied to an Augustinian doctrine of original sin:

For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.[5]

 Pope Pius seemed to tie this conclusion to what sounds like a fundamentalist-creationist reading of scripture:

To return, however, to the new opinions mentioned above, a number of things are proposed or suggested by some even against the divine authorship of Sacred Scripture. For some go so far as to pervert the sense of the Vatican Council’s definition that God is the author of Holy Scripture, and they put forward again the opinion, already often condemned, which asserts that immunity from error extends only to those parts of the Bible that treat of God or of moral and religious matters. They even wrongly speak of a human sense of the Scriptures, beneath which a divine sense, which they say is the only infallible meaning, lies hidden….. 

Further, according to their fictitious opinions, the literal sense of Holy Scripture and its explanation, carefully worked out under the Church’s vigilance by so many great exegetes, should yield now to a new exegesis, which they are pleased to call symbolic or spiritual. By means of this new exegesis of the Old Testament, which today in the Church is a sealed book, would finally be thrown open to all the faithful. By this method, they say, all difficulties vanish, difficulties which hinder only those who adhere to the literal meaning of the Scriptures.[6]

To be sure, the Catholic Catechism after the Second Vatican Council seems to sound a more cautious note concerning the different senses of scripture and its interpretation.[7]  Pope Benedict XVI, in a set of homilies on the Biblical creation texts, agrees with the Patristic sources cited by Cunningham that “the biblical creation narratives represent another way of speaking about reality than that with which we are familiar from physics and biology.”[8]  These texts, Pope Benedict says, “do not depict the process of becoming or the mathematical structure of matter; instead, they say in different ways that there is only one God and that the universe is not the scene of a struggle among dark forces but rather the creation of his Word.”[9]  Concerning “original sin,” Benedict takes a “relational” approach to the doctrine.[10]  For Benedict,

[t]o be truly a human being means to be related in love, to be of and be for.  But sin means the damaging or destruction of relationality.  Sin is a rejection of relationality because it wants to make the human being a god.  Sin is loss of relationship, disturbance of relationship, and therefore it is not restricted to the individual.  When I destroy a relationship then this event – sin – touches the other person involved in the relationship.  Consequently sin is always an offense that touches others, that alters the world and damages it.  To the extent that is true, when the network of human relationships is damaged from the very beginning, then every human being enters into a world that is marked by relational damage.[11]

 This approach to original sin seems a far cry from the seeming Biblical fundamentalism and Augustinian realism of Humani Generis.  Nevertheless, the Catechism continues to affirm that the Fall and original sin have a historical referent in time:  “The account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man. Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents.”[12]  The Catechism further refers to the transmission of original sin by propagation: 

the transmission of original sin is a mystery that we cannot fully understand. But we do know by Revelation that Adam had received original holiness and justice not for himself alone, but for all human nature. By yielding to the tempter, Adam and Eve committed a personal sin, but this sin affected the human nature that they would then transmit in a fallen state.  It is a sin which will be transmitted by propagation to all mankind, that is, by the transmission of a human nature deprived of original holiness and justice. And that is why original sin is called “sin” only in an analogical sense: it is a sin “contracted” and not “committed” – a state and not an act.[13]

Thus, it is unclear whether Cunningham’s implicit methodology of out-narrating both the ultra-Darwinists and the creationists succeeds.  Perhaps it succeeds if one opts for an Eastern Orthodox account of the Fall and original sin that draws primarily on some of the Eastern Fathers.  But, it seems, the scientific understanding of biological evolution does, in fact, seem to stand in considerable tension with the Western-Augustinian Christian tradition, as evidenced in documents such as Humani Generis and the Catholic Catechism.

Perhaps, however, another of Cunningham’s comments towards the end of the final chapter of DPI hints at a solution, or at least at a way of managing some of these tensions:  “We all stand before the law; such is the lot of man.”[14]  As Cunningham notes, “even if we know of laws, we don’t think they are the Law but are rather somewhat arbitrary – cultural products, or fruits of evolution, and therefore relative.”[15]  Indeed, “in the Judeo-Christian tradition there was a time before the Law of Moses, a time before the Decalogue.”[16]   Yet, he continues, “from the time of Adam, there was prohibition.”[17]  Perhaps “the Law” is the “missing link” between Origen, Nyssa, and Augustine, the methodological basis for narrating the true harmony of “faith” and “science.”  As Pope Benedict suggests, perhaps the loss of relational friendship occasioned by the Fall is precisely the loss of the Law; and perhaps Christ’s fulfillment of the Law is what enables us to overcome the ban of exclusion from our humanity and recover our participation in the law of love.  “Law” might be the thread by which Christian theology “out-narrates” reductive naturalism in a rich tapestry of human culture that participates in God’s gracious gift of creation and redemption.

 

[1] In particular, Peter Bouteneff, Beginnings:  Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives (Baker Academic 2008); John Behr, The Mystery of Christ:  Life in Death (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press 2006); David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite:  The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Eerdman’s 2004).

[2] Id., at p. 383, quoting Bouteneff, Beginnings, at p. 41.

[3] Id., at p. 513, Note 38.

[4] Id.

[5] Encyclical Humani Generis of the Holy Father Pius XII, August 12, 1950, 37, available at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xii/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_12081950_humani-generis_en.html.

[6] Id., ¶¶22-23.

[7] See Catechism of the Catholic Church, ¶¶101-141. 

[8] Pope Benedict XVI, ‘In the Beginning:’  A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Eerdmans 1990), at p. 25.

[9] Id.

[10] Id., at p. 73.

[11] Id., at p. 73.

[12] Catechism of the Catholic Church, ¶390.

[13] Id., ¶404.

[14] DPI, at p. 414.

[15] Id.

[16] Id.

[17] Id.

Categories
Cosmos Science and Religion Theology

Methodology for Faith and Science: Radical Orthodoxy, Part II

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But now was turning my desire and will, Even as a wheel that equally is moved, The Love which moves the sun and the other stars. — Dante, Divine Comedy

This continues my series on “method” in theology and science.  This is Part II of the discussion of Radical Orthodoxy.

A more sustained effort to address the natural sciences from a theologian associated with Radical Orthodoxy is Conor Cunningham’s Darwin’s Pious Idea (“DPI”).[1] 

Cunningham does not offer an explicit methodology for “faith and science” in DPI.   DPI is primarily a critique of materialism and the extreme naturalism of contemporary ultra-Darwinists, blended with a critique of scientific creationism and Intelligent Design theory.[2]  Cunningham seeks to demonstrate that each of these positions – materialism, extreme naturalism, scientific creationism and ID theory – encode common philosophical presumptions that undermine belief not only in the God of traditional Christian theology, but also in the ability of human beings to conduct an enterprise such as “science.”[3]  In fact, Cunningham argues, materialism and extreme naturalism make it impossible to believe in “human beings” or even in “evolution” itself.[4]  In contrast, Cunningham argues, “orthodox Christianity can offer an account of life and of nature that avoids such contemporary nihilism, and in so doing restore our commonsense world, and thus with it the possibility of beauty, truth, goodness, and lastly, our belief in evolution.”[5]  Thus Cunningham’s implicit method is similar to Milbank’s:  he offers a genealogy of reductive natural science which shows it to be a descendant of twisted theologies, particularly nominalism; and he adopts a narratival and phenomenological stance that seeks to demonstrate how Christianity “out narrates” materialism and naturalism even with respect to the nature and meaning of biological evolution.[6]

Cunningham’s argument in DPI is “theological” throughout, but in the book’s final chapter he makes a sustained move towards what the mainstream theology and science literature might call “integration.”[7]  In that chapter, he tackles what many consider to be the central challenge proposed by biological evolution to Christianity:  the meaning of “Adam” and the Fall.  For Christian scholars interested in relating some account of Adam and the Fall to evolutionary biology, the most common approach is towards a neo-orthodox reading of the Biblical text:  the Biblical story of Adam has no referent in natural history and is rather a story of “everyman.”[8] 

Cunningham seems to make a similar move at the outset of this chapter:  he notes that “[m]any people believe there has been a cosmic Fall as a result of the ‘sin’ of the first humans, and death was a consequence of this supposed Fall.”[9]  Cunningham refers to Patristic exegesis of the Genesis creation accounts, which was far more sophisticated than contemporary “creationist” readings, and which emphasized the typological and allegorical senses of the text.[10]  In this reading, the Biblical story of Adam and the Fall is in fact the story not of a discrete moment in time that concerned a historical ancient human being who sinned, but rather it is the story of Christ.[11]  The account of the “Garden” is not of a literal ideal state existing in the past, but rather is a form of eschatology as protology:  human beings are made for union with God, yet we each experience disunion in our concrete circumstances.  As Cunningham argues,

Salvation is therefore true hominization, and thus real humanism:  man becomes man only in Christ.

A logical but sometimes overlooked consequence of this is that there is, in truth, only one Adam.  By contrast, the entire idea of the Fall (original sin, etc.) is premised by the assumption that there could be more than one Adam.  Yet Christ himself is the two trees in the Garden of Eden, while our sin and fallenness consist in every attempt, even as a possibility, to be human outside Christ.  Genesis, we contend, is nothing less than a prophecy of the incarnation and passion of the Christ.[12]

The Fall, then, is felix culpa:  “[y]es, creation was intended to be perfect, and this eternal intention is its true nature; but God’s foreknowledge of man’s sin eschatologically ordered creation toward Christ and thus to perfection.”[13]

Although this reading sounds neo-orthodox on the surface, Cunningham resists that kind of dualism that would render “Adam” and “the Fall” merely in nominalist or Pelagian terms for a passing emotion that might be overcome through education or effort.  The problem with such nominalist or Pelagian renderings is that they posit a stark dualism between “nature” and “grace” that cannot be maintained.[14]  Following Henri de Lubac, Cunningham argues that there is no pure nature (natura pura), no space in which “nature” is not also already given as “grace.”[15]  Thus each “natural” human being also already participates in grace, in the “supernatural.”  And thus the participation of the entire human family in the sin of Adam, as well as the universal efficacy of the salvation made possible in Christ, are not merely individual instances of isolated experience, but involve the transcendence of human nature, which is given in creation.[16]  And the apex of creation, the concrete realization of nature-and-grace and natural-and-supernatural is Christ.[17]  It is only, then, in Christ that we are even capable of seeing “Adam.”[18]

 

[1] Conor Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious Idea:  Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get it Wrong (Eerdman’s  2010). 

[2] See id. at p. xix.

[3] See id.

[4] Id.

[5] Id.

[6] Cunningham’s references to nominalism in DPI are somewhat scattered and indirect.  For example:  “Why were they so against group selection?  One can speculate that it was probably because it went against nominalist ontology.”  Id., at p. 40.  It might be difficult for a reader not familiar with theological debates over nominalism to catch some of these references.  They are far more direct and clear in Cunningham’s Genealogy of Nihilism.  See Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism:  Philosophies of Nothing and the Difference of Theology (Routledge 2002), Chapters 1 and 2.

[7] See DPI, Chapter Seven.

[8] See, e.g., Daniel Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding:  An Introduction to Christian Theology (Eerdmans 2004), at pp. 149-1544; Peter Enns, The Evolution of Adam:  What the Bible Says and Doesn’t Say About Human Origins (Brazos Press 2012).

[9] DPI, at p. 377.

[10] Id., at pp. 377-400.

[11] Id.

[12] Id., at p. 392.

[13] Id., at p. 399.

[14] Id., at pp.

[15] Id.

[16] See id.

[17] See id.

[18] See id.

 

Categories
Cosmos Science and Religion

Methodology for Faith and Science: Radical Orthodoxy, Part I

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But now was turning my desire and will, Even as a wheel that equally is moved, The Love which moves the sun and the other stars. — Dante, Divine Comedy

This continues my series on “method” in theology and science.  In this post I begin to discuss what contribution, if any, “radical orthodoxy” might make to the conversation.

Radical Orthodoxy occupies a curious, and perhaps ill-defined, space in this matrix.  The founding charter for Radical Orthodoxy is John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory (“TST”), which is a sustained critique of the presumed neutrality of the modern social sciences.[1]  In a chapter on “Science, Power, and Reality,” Milbank attempts to distinguish social science, which describes human behavior, from natural science.[2]  Social science, Milbank argues, differs from natural science in that “human interaction in all its variety can only be narrated, and not explained / understood after the manner of natural science.”[3]  Here Milbank’s critique of social science sounds like the longstanding argument in the broader academy about whether disciplines such as sociology, political science, economics and psychology can truly be considered “scientific.”[4]  Milbank accepts a phenomenological / narratival perspective on persons and cultures:  “’Narrating,’” he says ,”turns out to be a more basic category than either explanation or understanding:  unlike either of these it does not assume particular facts or discrete meanings.  Neither is it concerned with universal laws, nor universal truths of the spirit.”[5]  Narrative “is the final mode of comprehension of human society,” and “[t]o understand or explain a social phenomenon is simply to narrate it….”[6] 

But this does not only apply to the social sciences.  Even for the natural sciences, Milbank argues, “[a]s the phrase ‘natural history’ suggests, natural science does not rid itself of narrative, and indeed, it is just as possible to tell a story in which the characters are atoms, plants, animals, or quasars, as one where they are human beings.”[7]  The modern natural sciences have largely lost this sense of narrative because of the influence of reductive positivism.[8]  Citing Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method, Milbank notes that the observation of “data” is never a merely neutral activity because the act of constructing the context of an observation already requires a theoretical structure.[9]  All data is interpreted and there is no method without theory. 

Therefore, for Milbank, scientific investigation always involves narrative.  Milbank can then set aside as pretentious the claim of the modern social sciences to provide an objective, “scientific” account of society that atomizes social relations into discrete quantities, which always in the end implies relationships of competition and violence.[10]   And, following Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of traditioned inquiry, Milbank can offer an alternative narrative, that of Christian charity, in which human society is encompassed in an ontology of relational peace that begins with the ecstatic plenitude of the Triune God’s self-giving in creation.[11]

It is unclear precisely how Milbank’s account of the natural sciences in TST contrasts with McGrath’s critical realism.  Milbank’s references to the philosophy of science literature are extremely limited – in addition to Feyerabend, he refers only to Descartes, Kant, Whewell, Mill, Popper and Lakatos (and that all in one sentence!).[12]  Much of what Milbank says in TST about the social and pre-empirical theoretical basis for the conduct and interpretation of experiments is entirely consistent with Polanyi’s critically realist personalism, which Polanyi fleshes out it much greater detail.  Perhaps there are two basic differences:  (1) Milbank’s narratival approach does not accord the sciences a methodologically separate space from theology even at a pre-integrative level; and (2) Milbank’s approach makes less space – although some space does seem to be given – for the alteration of the Christian theological narrative at a higher level of integration with discrete truths gleaned from the sciences.  At a basic level, it is a difference between an analytic (critical realism) and phenomenological (narrative) frame of reference.

Milbank’s approach is attractive for a number of reasons.  First, it deflates the presumed historic warfare between “faith” and “science” by offering a holistic account of “reason” that is already embedded in the Christian tradition.  There is no possibility of “conflict” between “faith” and “science” here because those terms simply have no meaning in isolation.  There is, rather, a grand narrative of God’s self-giving creative love, which allows for human beings as creatures to observe and study and delight in the creation.  Second, it exposes the pretentions of reductive positivistic “science” as itself a kind of a-theology, with pre-empirical theoretical commitments not derived from its own supposedly objective methods.  Finally, it points toward a different form of apologetic in which the Christian narrative is offered in the robust sense of a true apologia rather than as an “apology” before the bar of a totalizing modernity.[13]

A potential problem with Milbank’s approach is evident in his reference to Feyerabend.  Like other constructivist philosophers of science, Feyerabend was an anti-realist and a nominalist.[14]  Milbank’s theological project and the broader “Radical Orthodoxy,” movement it spawned, of course, involves a sustained historical critique of the univocity of being, nominalism, and voluntarism.[15]  While postmodern philosophers of science such as Feyerabend and Thomas Kuhn offer helpful resources concerning the social context of the natural sciences, their conclusions are finally incompatible with a realist participatory ontology grounded in the Christian doctrine of creation.  It remains unclear how Milbank’s “narrative” construal of the natural sciences in TST can cohere with his and Radical Orthodoxy’s other broad commitments.


[1] John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory:  Beyond Secular Reason (Blackwell 2d ed. 2006).

[2] Id., at pp. 259-277.

[3] Id., at p. 259.

[4] See Kevin A. Clarke and David M. Primo, “Overcoming Physics Envy,” The New York Times, March 30, 2012, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/opinion/sunday/the-social-sciences-physics-envy.html?_r=0; Gary Gutting, “How Reliable are the Social Sciences,” New York Times Opinionator Blog, May 17, 2012, available at  http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/how-reliable-are-the-social-sciences/.  In general, the analytic social sciences focus on the statistical analysis of quantitative “variables” as a mode of “scientific” analysis.  See Christian Smith, What is a Person (Univ. Chicago Press 2010), Chapter Five.  See also Gary King, Robert O. Keohan, and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry:  Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton Univ. Press 1994).

[5] TST, at p. 267.

[6] Id.

[7] Id., at p. 269.

[8] Id., at p. 270.

[9] Id., at pp. 270-271, and Note 13.

[10] Id.

[11] See id., Chapters 11, 12, 13.

[12] Id., at pp. 270-271.

[13] This apologetic theme is developed in Milbank’s Foreward to Andrew Davidson, Imaginative Apologetics:  Theology, Philosophy, and the Catholic Tradition (Baker 2012).  Interestingly, the chapter on faith and science in that volume was written by Alister McGrath.  Id., Chapter 10.

[14] See Eric Oberheim, Feyerabend’s Philosophy (Walter de Gruyter 2006), at pp. 74-76 (noting that “Feyerabend’s nominalism is a form of anti-realism about natural kinds”).

[15] See, e.g., TST, at pp. 13-18; see also Catherine Pickstock, “Duns Scotus:  His Historical and Contemporary Significance,” in John Milbank and Simon Oliver, eds., The Radical Orthodoxy Reader (Routledge 2009), at pp. 116-148.

Categories
Cosmos Science and Religion

Methodology for Fatih and Science: Catholic Perspectives, Part II

But now was turning my desire and will, Even as a wheel that equally is moved, The Love which moves the sun and the other stars. — Dante, Divine Comedy

This continues my series on “method” in faith and science.  This is Part II of a section on Roman Catholic perspectives.

The Catholic “dialogue” approach, at least on some readings of it, already assumes that all investigation of truth is theological.  The possibility of “natural reason” is given precisely because of prior theological claims about the gift of created human nature and its capacity to participate in the truth of God.  In his introductory discussion of the relation between theology and philosophy, in Fides et Ratio, for example, Pope John Paul II states that all knowledge, whether derived from philosophy or faith, depends first on God, who makes knowledge possible by grace.  “Underlying all the Church’s thinking,” John Paul II said, “is the awareness that she is the bearer of a message which has its origin in God himself (cf. 2 Cor 4:1-2).” [1]   The Church did not receive this message through its own power or abilities, nor was the message communicated through abstract intellectual means.  Rather, John Paul II said, it stems from a personal encounter with God in Christ:

At the origin of our life of faith there is an encounter, unique in kind, which discloses a mystery hidden for long ages (cf. 1 Cor 2:7; Rom 16:25-26) but which is now revealed:   “In his goodness and wisdom, God chose to reveal himself and to make known to us the hidden purpose of his will (cf. Eph 1:9), by which, through Christ, the Word made flesh, man has access to the Father in the Holy Spirit and comes to share in the divine nature”.[2] 

Further, God’s self-revelation in Christ was entirely a free act of grace:  “[t]is initiative is utterly gratuitous, moving from God to men and women in order to bring them to salvation.   As the source of love, God desires to make himself known; and the knowledge which the human being has of God perfects all that the human mind can know of the meaning of life.”[3]

Therefore there is no question of philosophy superseding faith.  There is no sharp division, in Fides et Ratio, between “nature” and “grace”:  all that pertains to “nature,” to God’s creative design, is also the gift of “grace,” of God’s ecstatic, self-giving love.  Nevertheless, for John Paul II, “nature” involves empirical realities that are susceptible to human knowledge through a form of reasoning appropriate to the object.  “Philosophy” therefore possesses an inherent integrity, structure, and grammar.  “The truth attained by philosophy and the truth of Revelation,” John Paul II said, “are neither identical nor mutually exclusive”:  

There exists a twofold order of knowledge, distinct not only as regards their source, but also as regards their object….  Based upon God’s testimony and enjoying the supernatural assistance of grace, faith is of an order other than philosophical knowledge which depends upon sense perception and experience and which advances by the light of the intellect alone.  Philosophy and the sciences function within the order of natural reason; while faith, enlightened and guided by the Spirit, recognizes in the message of salvation the “fullness of grace and truth” (cf. Jn 1:14) which God has willed to reveal in history and definitively through his Son, Jesus Christ (cf. 1 Jn 5:9; Jn 5:31-32).[4]

John Paul II therefore sees a positive role for “philosophy” as a complement to “faith.”   Indeed, for John Paul II, “natural reason,” apart from revelation, is capable of showing that there is a God who created the universe.  Nevertheless, it is finally our faith in God’s creative goodness that establishes confidence in the capacities of “natural reason” to comprehend creation, and it is our faith in God’s transcendence that establishes the proper bounds of reason.   These themes of transcendence and participation as applied to the relation between theology and science are perhaps reflected more clearly in an introduction John Paul II wrote for a 2004 Pontifical Academy of Sciences report in the Academy’s four hundredth anniversary, where he stated

I am more and more convinced that scientific truth, which is itself a participation in divine Truth, can help philosophy and theology to understand ever more fully the human person and God’s Revelation about man, a Revelation that is completed and perfected in Jesus Christ. For this important mutual enrichment in the search for the truth and the benefit of mankind, I am, with the whole Church, profoundly grateful.[5]

The subtle difference between this Catholic vision as expressed by John Paul II and McGrath’s critical realism mirrors, in interesting ways, the dialogue between the two great Swiss theologians who continue to inform many of the differences between broadly Catholic and broadly Protestant approaches to natural theology:  Barth and Balthasar.[6]  The modified, qualified critically realist natural theology of Protestant thinkers such as T.F. Torrance and McGrath, who take their initial cues from Barth, is perhaps more cautious about the analogia entis , and therefore ends up with an integration of faith and reason only after a somewhat prolonged process of methodological separation.   A Catholic thinker such as John Paul II might more readily see analogical correspondences between God and nature. 

Nevertheless, for a Catholic thinker such as John Paul II, even if, as Balthasaar argued, “[n]ature cannot include grace at one moment and then exclude it the next,” grace cannot be “necessarily derived” from nature, and the use of Aristotelian terminology to describe movement of the creature towards the goal of the beatific vision as a sort of “natural” movement is only analogical.[7]  Balthasaar went so far as to argue that Barth’s rejection of natural theology and the analogia entis, if properly understood, was consistent with the decrees of the First Vatican Council on natural knowledge of God, again if properly understood.[8]  And, similarly, the Protestant critical realist McGrath approvingly refers to Erich Przywara’s concept of the analogia entis as a model for the construction of natural theology.[9]  If there are differences between critical realist and specifically Catholic models for the interaction between theology and science, in many cases those differences may be passingly small.


[1] Fides et Ratio, 7.

[2] Id.

[3] Id.

[4] Fides et Ratio, 9.

[5] Address of John Paul II to the Members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, The Pontifical Academy of Sciences, ACTA 17, The Four Hundredth Anniversary of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (Vatican City 2004), at pp. 14-15.

[6] See Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth (Communio Books 1992).

[7] Balthasaar, The Theology of Karl Barth, at pp. 267-275. 

[8] Id., at pp. 309 (stating that “[i]t is really not possible to construct any genuine contradiction between Barth’s statements in his anthropology about the capacity of human nature to know God within the concrete order of revelation (in all its conditions) and the statements of Vatican I.”).

[9] McGrath, The Open Secret, at p. 189.

 

Categories
Church Epistemology Law and Policy Missiology Political Theology Spirit

Atheists, Christians, the Pope, and Doing Good

The headline of a recent Huffington Post article caught my eye:  “Pope Francis Says Atheists Who Do Good are Redeemed, Not Just Catholics.”  Another HuffPo article notes that “Atheists Like What They See in Pope Francis’ New Openness.”  What’s going on here?  Good things, I think.

We need to dig a bit into the homily delivered by the Pope for the Feast of Santa Rita – Patron Saint of impossible things – to understand the theological undercurrents of these remarks.

The cornerstone of the Pope’s homily is a concept of natural law:

The Lord created us in His image and likeness, and we are the image of the Lord, and He does good and all of us have this commandment at heart:  do good and do not do evil.  All of us.  ‘But, Father, this is not Catholic!  He cannot do good.’  Yes, he can.  He must.  Not can:  must!  Because he has this commandment within him.

This is not a new teaching.  Some notion of natural law has been part of Christian theology from the first century New Testament writings until today (see, for example, Romans 1:20, the locus classicus for Christian natural law thinking).  Atheists, of course, will reject the concept of a natural law implanted in universal human nature by God.  They will offer other reasons for the good that they do.  But Christian theology has always held that all human beings in their created humanness bear the image of God and have a “natural” sense of what is good.

Christian theologians, however, have often disagreed about how or whether or to what extent sinful human beings can follow the natural law.  The key question here is the effect of sin on human nature and the accessibility of God’s grace to sinful humans (again, a locus classicus is Romans 1).  We can illustrate this through two historically important Christian thinkers:  Pelagius and Martin Luther.  Pelagius held that even after sin, a human being could theoretically follow his or her created nature and obtain perfection through the natural law alone.  One of Pelagius’ concerns was to preserve human freedom to follow or not follow God.  Luther, in contrast, wrote a tract titled “On the Bondage of the Will” in which he argued that sin has erased human freedom.  A sinful human person always does evil.

Both Pelagius and Luther were more complex as thinkers than this sketch suggests.  Just as some sense of natural law has always been a part of Christian thought, so has Christian thought always recognized the weight and tragedy and depth of human sin and the utter dependence of human beings on God’s grace.  Both Pelagius and Luther – as well as St. Paul and Athanasius and Augustine and Aquinas and Calvin and Barth and many other great Christian thinkers throughout history – have wrestled with this tension.  As is always the case, distortions (“heresies,” in the historically freighted lingo) crop up when one node of a tensioned web of thought is amplified so that the web snaps. 

In this case, the nodes are human freedom and human bondage to sin.  Or, stated in more common theological terms, the nodes are “nature” and “grace.”   The tensioned web of robust Christian thought (“orthodoxy”) holds that all human beings are both (1) created morally free and accountable and (2) thoroughly sinful and utterly in need of God’s grace.

At the equilibrium point of this tension we find another passage in Pope Francis’ homily that caught the attention of the HuffPo headline writers:

The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ:  all of us, not just Catholics.  Everyone!  ‘Father, the atheists?’  Even the atheists.  Everyone!  And this Blood makes us children of God of the first class!  We are created children in the likeness of God and the Blood of Christ has redeemed us all!  And we all have a duty to do good.

For a journalist unacquainted with Christian theology, as well as for many Protestant evangelicals, a statement like this sounds like bland universalism.  Many of us from evangelical backgrounds are trained to think of “redemption” as something utterly separate from our created selves that only becomes part of our experience when we forcibly take hold of it.  That is, we completely sever “nature” and “grace.”

A more careful account is that sin’s corruption of human “nature” in fact makes us into something “un-natural.”  We are not now as we are created to be.  This is one of the essential points of the Biblical story of Adam and Eve and Eden.  The literary genre of that story surely is not “literal history” (whatever that would mean), but it tells a basic truth.  We cannot, because of sin, be or become what we truly are, without God’s help.  But the help – the grace – God gives us does not erase or replace “nature.”  “Nature” is already grace-shaped.  “Nature anticipates grace,” as Aquinas said, and grace perfects nature.  Redemption, then, is not alien to who we are in our created humanity.  What is “alien,” in fact, is the separation and death and emptiness of sin.

We – evangelicals and Americans more broadly – also are accustomed to think of “redemption” to mean “who goes to heaven.”  It’s as though redemption were a magic potion on a store shelf.  We might be directed to the correct aisle and grab the bottle of potion and force the potion down our throats, or we might not.  Even if the bottle is in theory universally accessible to every shopper – indeed even if there is a voice on the PA system announcing “attention shoppers, Redemption Potion is in the bottles in aisle four” — not many find it or grab it or swallow the bitter draught.  Some in very severe Reformed traditions might even say the bottle is hidden behind other things and is only made accessible to a chosen few.  Maybe a clerk whispers in the ears of those who are chosen – “psst, check out aisle four….”  In any event, it’s all about this magic potion, which instantly transforms those who drink it from “unredeemed” to “redeemed.”

I think the Pope had a different notion of “redemption” in mind in this quote.  I think he had in mind the redemption of all creation, including human nature as something universal in which all particular human beings share.  In this sense, all human beings are already redeemed by the blood of Christ.  The defects of universal human nature were assumed by Christ and are healed in Christ.  All particular human beings are capable of doing good, since all particular humans participate in universal human nature, which Christ has healed.  And to the extent any particular human is doing good, he or she is already in some fashion participating in the new humanity, the new Adam, brought about by the faithfulness of Christ. 

This concept is of course contrary to hard-line Reformed theologies that suggest the “good” done by non-Christians is only a sort of “civil good” and not genuine good.  But it is, I believe, thoroughly consistent with scripture and the broad Christian tradition, and it is a truth recognized by most Protestants today outside some narrow circles.  At the very least, God’s prevenient grace allows every human being to know and do the good to some extent.   Those of us within the Church, in fact, ought to be the first to acknowledge how far we regularly fall short in doing good, even with the benefits of regular Christian worship and sacramental life.

Does this mean that every particular human being is “going to heaven?”  No.  The freedom available to us because of Christ’s victory over sin and death remains contingent on our participation by faith.  We are free to reject the freedom of Christ and to accept instead the bondage of sin.  And in Catholic theology, along with the broad tradition of Christian thought, it is clear that this centrally involves the freedom to respond or not respond to the gospel of Jesus Christ as it is made known to us.  But, broadly speaking, Catholic theology is much more reticent to claim knowledge of precisely how God reveals Himself to others and precisely how others are or are not responding to God’s grace.  It may be that every atheist is beginning to respond and will finally respond “yes” to Christ, or it may not.  It may be that every professing Christian has expressed and will express a fundamental “yes” to Christ, or it may not.  Scripture suggests that only God finally knows the wheat from the tares, the sheep from the goats.

Does this then mean that anyone can “earn” heaven by “doing good?”  Again, no – and I don’t think the Pope would say so.  We are “justified” by faith, not by works.  Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant, this is a basic and beautiful truth of the Gospel.  But the scriptural content of “justification” involves being made “just” – not only in name or by judicial declaration, but in fact.  We are made just only as a free gift of God’s grace made available to us by the faithfulness of Christ in his death and resurrection.  To accept that gift means, by the power of the Holy Spirit, gradually being made into a person more like Christ.  It means “abiding” in Christ, like a branch on a vine (John 15).  It means participating in the loving life of the Triune God.

The Pope’s conclusion is also important because it reflects this holistic notion of justification and redemption:

And this commandment for everyone to do good, I think, is a beautiful path towards peace. If we, each doing our own part, if we do good to others, if we meet there, doing good, and we go slowly, gently, little by little, we will make that culture of encounter: we need that so much. We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good:  we will meet one another there.

Notice that “redemption” in this picture is about making culture and meeting one another – starting here and now!  It is not only about getting to heaven someday.  And notice that this redemptive construction of culture does not, and cannot, happen all at once.  I love the notion of creating culture “gently, little by little.”  How often I fail that ideal!  In a world where grave violence persists, it is not always possible to go “gently” (I am thinking at the moment of efforts to combat human trafficking and child pornography).  Nor does going “gently” mean avoiding clear articulation of differences or eschewing evangelism.  But in this process of recognizing the genuine “good” done by the other, maybe this gift of gentleness – which, after all, is among the particular fruits of the Holy Spirit (Gal. 5:23) – can be realized.

Categories
Biblical Studies Spirit

Job, Tragedy, Natural Disasters, Lament

Tragedy in America brings a predictable set of cultural responses, a sort of cathartic theater.  News channels offer breathless on-scene reports, with helicopter shots of the devastation and interviews with survivors and family members of victims.  Celebrities send shout-outs of support on Facebook and Twitter.  Government and law enforcement officials make measured public statements about the recovery and restoration of order.  Hotlines allow those distant from the devastation to call or text in donations to the Red Cross.  And a group of usual suspects from the chattering class of preachers remark on the tragedy’s connection to God’s providence and justice, and hint at or identify some sin in the community.  They may even vividly describe the tornado, flood, hurricane, bomb, bullets, or other agent of destruction as God’s own hand tearing apart a seemingly peaceable landscape corrupted by sin.

These preachers are like the Greek chorus that never enters the drama directly but proceeds through the strophe across the stage chanting its knowing exposition at the main characters.  From the perspective of the suffering victim, there is only one response to these preachers:

I have heard many such things;
Sorry comforters are you all.
Is there no limit to windy words?
Or what plagues you that you answer?
I too could speak like you,
If I were in your place.
I could compose words against you
And shake my head at you. 

This was Job’s response to his friends, who wrongly assumed his suffering traced to some hidden sin.  (Job 16:2-4 (NASB)).  Job’s friends thought they were defending God by blaming Job.  In fact, their claims would make God’s defense of Job before the satan into a lie (See Job 1:8).[1]  The satan at least accepted that Job acted righteously in good times, even if the satan’s function was to peel away the security of prosperity and test Job’s character in adversity, perhaps with a cynical eye towards Job’s inner nature.  Job’s friends should have known better.  The satan at least faithfully performed his role as an inquisitor.  Job’s friends failed in their role as comforters.  One of the main threads of wisdom in the book of Job is that self-righteousness is never a faithful response to another person’s suffering.

There is another theological lesson in the book of Job about providence, causation, and suffering.  God sets things in motion by first mentioning Job’s righteousness to the satan (Job 1:8; 2:3), and God gives the satan permission to afflict Job and sets limits to that affliction (Job 1:12; 2:6).   By mentioning Job’s righteousness to the satan, it seems that God knew the satan would take the bait. 

But the satan is pictured as a genuine agency, not merely as an impersonal puppet.  The text states that the satan is the immediate agent of Job’s suffering.  Job’s family and possessions are put into the power of the satan.  (Job 1:12).  It is the satan who “smote Job with sore boils from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head.”  (Job 2:7).  It seems clear that God is the king within the heavenly court, but the satan freely roamed the earth, and periodically, along with the other “sons of God” (“heavenly beings”) appeared at court to report on his work (Job 1:6-7; 2:1-2). 

The sense here is that of the Assyrian, Babylonian or Semitic court politics with which the redactors of the canonical text of Job must have been familiar.  If, as some scholars believe, the scenes in the heavenly court originated with a folktale or play, we could easily imagine the performative nature of these tropes, staged like an ancient King Lear or a Semitic Prometheus Bound.  The book of Job does not offer a neat and tidy picture of a God who, solely by His own implacable will, directly orders everything to some particular, identifiable, dualistic outcome of judgment or blessing.  It dramatizes, at the very least, a God who gives initiative to agents within creation and allows some things to happen for reasons that ordinary commoners outside the heavenly court could never hope to comprehend – indeed, for reasons that don’t seem like “reasons” at all.

It is impossible to discern all of God’s specific “reasons” for something like the Oklahoma tornadoes, and it is foolish to personify those tornadoes as God Himself acting directly in the world for some simple and evident reason.  Weather patterns have a causal integrity of their own.  That causal integrity is statistically stochastic and a contingent feature of the sort of universe and planet we inhabit.  In their own causal integrity the weather patterns do not compromise God’s sovereignty as creator, nor does God’s sovereignty as creator diminish the causal integrity of forces, elements and agents within creation.  Within the group of people immediately affected by the tornadoes, there are thousands of detailed life narratives, set within webs of thousands upon thousands of related life narratives of friends, relatives, ancestors, and so-on, implicating myriad upon myriad of choices by interacting human agents set within uncountable multitudes upon uncountable multitudes of events in “natural” history.  No ordinary human being can presume to suss out the depth of God’s counsel over all of these variables.

Yet we can hope for something glimpsed only darkly even in the face of tragedy.  At times, in the poetic portions of the book, Job seems to see this as well.  Human beings, in Job’s theology, die and are no more.  There is no redemption in their suffering, and the best they can hope for is the abyss of death, which ends everything. (See Job 14:1-6, 13; 17:13-16).  Job says that trees are therefore in a better position than humans,

For this is hope for a tree,
When it is cut down, that it will sprout
again,
And its shoots will not fail.
Though its roots grow old in the ground
And its stump dies in the dry soil,
at the scent of water it will flourish
And put forth sprigs like a plant.
But man dies and lies prostrate.
Man expires, and where is he?
As water evaporates from the sea,
And a river becomes parched and dried up,
So man lies down and does not rise.
Until the heavens are no longer,
He will not awake nor be aroused out of his sleep.   (Job 14:7-12.)

Job has no theology of resurrection, but here he seems to grasp at the idea of new life coming from death in a way that wants to transform the “hope” of the tree into a human hope.  The text of Job will not finally offer this as a firm hope.  As Christian readers of the text, we may take it to hint at what is made more explicit in the death and resurrection of Jesus:  that all of creation will one day be renewed and will find its final end in God (see, e.g., 1 Cor. 15:28).  Even for us as Christian readers, we glimpse this only “through a glass darkly” (1 Cor. 13:12).  It is a hopeful glimpse, even if still tensioned by the reality of sin and death. 

Even in the storm, these three, faith, hope, and love, remain (1 Cor. 13:13).  And the greatest of these is love (id.).  The response of love to another person’s suffering and loss is lament.  Faith and hope only come slowly, after lament.  Job’s friends were true “friends” when they sat with him in mourning on the trash heap (Job 2:11-13).  The lessons of lament should have tempered their subsequent advice.


[1] The satan, most scholars agree, is not the figure of “Satan” as presented in the New Testament.  The satan – more literally, the “Accuser” – likely is intended as a faithful member of the heavenly court, whose role is to act as a prosecutor who tests the integrity of God’s creation.  It may also be that the satan is intended as a regular interloper into court life, or even that the satan is a sort of Divine alter ego that expresses God’s own unspoken doubts about creation.  In any event, it is a genre mistake to read these narratives as if they are providing “factual” information about spiritual warfare.

Categories
Cosmos Science and Religion

Method in Theology and Science: A Catholic Model

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But now was turning my desire and will, Even as a wheel that equally is moved, The Love which moves the sun and the other stars. — Dante, Divine Comedy

This continues my series on “method” in theology in science.  The next two posts will discuss Catholic approaches.

The Roman Catholic approach, exemplified in the Pontifical Academy of the Sciences, is also sometimes said to represent a “dialogue” approach.[1]  There is of course not only one “Roman Catholic approach” to the relation between theology and science, and many Catholics working in this field would identify themselves as critical realists or assume the posture of critical realism without identifying it.[2]  Indeed, Pope John Paul II famously stated that “[s]cience can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.  Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.”[3] 

This oft-quoted statement of John Paul II was part of a longer letter to Jerry Coyne, Director of the Vatican Observatory, in preparation for a study week celebrating the three hundredth anniversary of Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica.[4]  The Pope stressed in that letter that the model he envisioned was one of dialogue rather than integration:

By encouraging openness between the Church and the scientific communities, we are not envisioning a disciplinary unity between theology and science like that which exists within a given scientific field or within theology proper. As dialogue and common searching continue, there will be grow towards mutual understanding and a gradual uncovering of common concerns which will provide the basis for further research and discussion. Exactly what form that will take must be left to the future. What is important, as we have already stressed, is that the dialogue should continue and grow in depth and scope. In the process we must overcome every regressive tendency to a unilateral reductionism, to fear, and to self-imposed isolation. What is critically important is that each discipline should continue to enrich, nourish and challenge the other to be more fully what it can be and to contribute to our vision of who we are and who we are becoming.[5]

Theologians, the Pope noted, can utilize the best science of their times to help them understand and articulate theological truths, but science cannot simply dictate terms to theology:

Now this is a point of delicate importance, and it has to be carefully qualified. Theology is not to incorporate indifferently each new philosophical or scientific theory. As these findings become part of the intellectual culture of the time, however, theologians must understand them and test their value in bringing out from Christian belief some of the possibilities which have not yet been realized. The hylomorphism of Aristotelian natural philosophy, for example, was adopted by the medieval theologians to help them explore the nature of the sacraments and the hypostatic union. This did not mean that the Church adjudicated the truth or falsity of the Aristotelian insight, since that is not her concern. It did mean that this was one of the rich insights offered by Greek culture, that it needed to be understood and taken seriously and tested for its value in illuminating various areas of theology. Theologians might well ask, with respect to contemporary science, philosophy and the other areas of human knowing, if they have accomplished this extraordinarily difficult process as well as did these medieval masters.[6]

Likewise, the Pope stated, the practice of natural science is neither to be equated with theology nor isolated from it:

For science develops best when its concepts and conclusions are integrated into the broader human culture and its concerns for ultimate meaning and value. Scientists cannot, therefore, hold themselves entirely aloof from the sorts of issues dealt with by philosophers and theologians. By devoting to these issues something of the energy and care they give to their research in science, they can help others realize more fully the human potentialities of their discoveries. They can also come to appreciate for themselves that these discoveries cannot be a genuine substitute for knowledge of the truly ultimate.[7]

 

[1] See McGrath, at p. 47-48; Pontifical Academy of the Sciences website, available at http://www.casinapioiv.va/content/accademia/en.html.

[2] See, e.g., John F. Haught, Making Sense of Evolution:  Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life (Westminster John Knox 2010); Michael Heller, Creative Tension:  Essays on Science and Religion (Templeton Foundation Press 2003).  Haught argues as follows: 

Christian theology, I firmly believe, cannot responsibly take refuge in pre-Darwinian understandings of these concepts [of design, descent, and diversity].  Instead, it must look for theological reflection broad enough to assimilate all that is new in scientific research without in any way abandoning the substance of Christian teaching.  This theological task requires a deep respect for traditional creeds and biblical texts, but it also assumes that in the light of new experience and scientific research, constant reinterpretation of fundamental beliefs is essential to keep any religion alive and honest.  This is especially the case with Christianity after Darwin.

Haught, Making Sense of Evolution, at p. xvii.

[3] Letter of His Holiness John Paul II to Rev. George V. Coyne, S.J. Director of the Vatican Observatory, June 1, 1988, available at  http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/letters/1988/documents/hf_jp-ii_let_19880601_padre-coyne_en.html

[4] Id.

[5] Letter of His Holiness John Paul II to Rev. George V. Coyne, S.J. Director of the Vatican Observatory, June 1, 1988, available at  http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/letters/1988/documents/hf_jp-ii_let_19880601_padre-coyne_en.html

[6] Id.

[7] Id.

Categories
Cosmos Science and Religion

Theology and Science: Critical Realism, Part B

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But now was turning my desire and will, Even as a wheel that equally is moved, The Love which moves the sun and the other stars. — Dante, Divine Comedy

This continues my series on “method” in theology and science.  This is the second part of my discussion of critical realism.

Critical Realism, Part B

This emphasis on the event of revelation in Christ among many Christian critical realists is not surprising, as many of them (including, notably, Alister McGrath), are connected to Barth through the work of Thomas Torrance.[1]  Barth, consistent with his understanding of revelation and philosophy, resisted any systematic definition of God:

The equation of God’s Word and God’s Son makes it radically impossible to say anything doctrinaire in understanding the Word of God.  In this equation, and in it alone, a real and effective barrier is set up against what is made of proclamation according to the Roman Catholic view and of Holy Scripture according to the later form of older Protestantism, namely, a fixed sum of revealed propositions which can be systematized like the sections of a corpus of law.  The only system in Holy Scripture and proclamation is revelation, i.e., Jesus Christ.[2]

But Barth – who, after all, over the course of thirty-five years wrote a Church Dogmatics comprised of about six million words of dense text – did not mean we can say nothing truthful about God.  After resisting what he understood as the Catholic and Scholastic Reformation’s too-neat methods of systematization, Barth emphasized the importance of words and speech:

Now the converse is also true, of course, namely that God’s Son is God’s Word.  Thus God does reveal Himself in statements, through the medium of speech, and indeed of human speech.  His word is always this or that word spoken by the prophets and apostles and proclaimed in the Church.  The personal character of God’s Word is not, then, to be played off against its verbal or spiritual character.  It is not at all true that this second aspect under which we must understand it implies its irrationality and thus cancels out the first aspect under which we must understand it.[3]

Barth’s concern throughout his discussion of the Word in Volume I of the Church Dogmatics was to preserve the freedom and integrity of theology against Enlightenment rationalism.  Barth was particularly concerned with the way rationalism gave rise to nineteenth century liberal demythologizing Protestant thought.  Barth also resisted how rationalism underwrote both Protestant fundamentalism and the Scholastic Thomism of much Catholic nineteenth century Catholic thought.  Torrance worked from these basic Barthian premises to modify Barth’s famous “nein” to natural theology with a qualified “yes.”

The critical realist approach to theology and science results in a paradigm in which the disciplines of theology and natural science remain distinct but can contribute to each other at higher levels.  McGrath summarizes his version of this program as follows:

  1. The natural sciences and the religions are quite distinct in terms of their methodologies and subject matters.  It is quite improper to attempt to limit them, for example by suggesting that the sciences have to do with the physical world and the religions with a distinct spiritual world.  The distinction between ‘science’ and ‘religion’ concerns more than subject-matter.
  2. At points, despite their clear differences, those working in the fields of science and religion find themselves facing similar issues, expecially in relation to issues of representation and conceptualization.  At point after point, those interested in science and religion find themselves facing very similar questions, and even adopting similar approaches in the answers which they offer.
  3. At points of major importance, the methods and theories of the natural sciences are genuinely illuminating to those concerned with religious matters.  Equally, there are points where religious beliefs and approaches cast considerable light on issues of scientific method.  The investigation of these convergences is mutually enlightening and significant.[4]

Critical realism as a model for interaction between theology and science seems promising.  Unlike NOMA approaches, critical realism does not hermetically seal the boundary between “science” and “religion.”  Critical realism does not represent a Kantian move in which religious or moral feeling is cordoned off from “pure reason,” and this is a genuine advance over the Kantian bent of much of the modern scientific establishment – as evidenced, for example, in the National Academies of Science statement quoted previously.  Moreover, critical realism creates genuine space for theological reform and development when certain theological claims plainly clash with reality.  Without some space in which the observations of the natural sciences can influence theology, it is impossible to avoid the intellectual and moral disaster of fundamentalist systems such as young earth creationism.  Certainly, if we seek to be faithful to the spirit of the Church Fathers, we will want to do theology with a keen eye towards the creation as it is given to us.[5]

However, within critical realism, the interaction between the two disciplines of science and theology tends to be pictured as happening only at a higher level of integration.  In this way, a kind of modest foundationalism underpins the entire project, even though many critical realists, including McGrath, strongly eschew foundationalism.  This hidden modest foundationalism establishes the boundaries in which the theological and scientific disciplines do their own original work and in which any integrative or work happens.  But if the Christian confession truly is “realist,” then there can be no autonomous space for a “science” that is not already “theological” in what it presumes about the nature of the universe, and there can be no neutral rule of correspondence that would adjudicate “between” theology and science.

Indeed, McGrath’s own effort at constructing a natural theology is expressly non-foundationalist and presumes as a first principle “that the logos through which the world was created is embedded in the structures of the created order, above all the human person, and incarnated in Christ.”[6]  Natural theology, for McGrath, is not an effort to obtain neutrally rational “proofs” of God’s existence, but rather to demonstrate “that there is an accumulation of considerations which, though not constituting logical proof (how could experience prove anything in such a way?), is at the very least consistent with the existence of a creator God.”[7]  Nevertheless, two basic questions lingers:  (1) from the perspective of Christian theology itself, does critical realism envision a sufficiently theological account of “reason” that enables “natural science” in the first instance?; and (2) does critical realism propose an understanding of “nature” that resembles a kind of natura pura – a realm of pure nature that is not also already a realm of grace?


[1] See McGrath, The Foundations of Science & Religion, at p. 34 (citing Thomas F. Torrance, Theological Science (Oxford Univ. Press 1969)).

[2] CD I.1.§5.2.

[3] Id.

[4]  McGrath.

[5] For a discussion of how some of the Fathers interpreted Biblical texts concerning creation, see Peter Bouteneff, Beginnings:  Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives (Baker Academic 2008).

[6] Alister McGrath, The Open Secret:  A New Vision for Natural Theology (Blackwell 2008).

[7] Id.

Categories
Cosmos Science and Religion

Method in Theology and Science Part 3A: Critical Realism

Dialogue and Critical Realism:  Part A

This continues my series on “method” in theology and science.  Here I begin to discuss “critical realism.”  It will take a few more posts, but I’ll suggest that while critical realism is a helpful framework, it also entails limitations as a result of separating science “and” theology.

Many proponents of “dialogue” models between science and religion identify themselves as “critical realists,” and this may be the dominant paradigm in the contemporary “religion and science” literature.[1]  A critical realist approach recognizes that all human knowing is mediated through human thought and language forms, including both scientific and theological knowing – and thus it is “critical.”[2]  Nevertheless, critical realists assert that there is a reality extrinsic to human thought and language that is capable of sustained investigation, and that human beings are capable of making progress towards fuller understanding of that extrinsic reality.[3]  The theological realities that theologians attempt to investigate and the natural realities that scientists attempt to investigate must each be approached with tools appropriate to their respective domains.[4]  As Alister McGrath argues, “[b]oth the scientific and religious communities can be thought of as attempting to wrestle with the ambiguities of experience, and offering what are accepted as the ‘best possible explanations’ for what is observed.”[5] 

McGrath develops his model of critical realism in science and theology in significant part from the philosophical contributions of Roy Bhaskar and Michael Polanyi.[6]  For critical realists in the tradition of Bhaskar, society is both a preexisting given and a product of human activity.[7] Individuals do not create society, but they do continually reproduce and transform society.[8] Society is neither a reified structure that exists apart from human activity nor an entirely voluntary creation of individuals.[9] Bhaskar likens this “transformational model of social activity” to a sculptor who creates something out of the materials and tools available to her.[10] The result is that society emerges from, but is not reducible to, the choices of individuals.[11] Society is “a complex totality subject to change both in its components and their interrelations.”[12]

Critical realists recognize that knowledge has both social and physical dimensions.[13] There is a reality external to human perception, language, and cognition.[14] Human perception, language, and cognition, however, limit our direct epistemic access to reality.[15] Human perception of reality is a “transitive” dimension because it is subject to change based on human language, history, and culture.[16] Reality itself, however, is “intransitive.”[17] According to Roy Bhaskar, reality is stratified and can be conceived as three layered: empirical (observable by human), actual (existing in time and space), and real (“transfactual and enduring more than our perception of it”).[18]

Bhaskar thus emphasized the social aspects of human knowing—of information—without reducing all of reality to a human construction. An important aspect of Bhaskar’s social theory of knowledge is his rejection of “methodological individualism”—the notion that societies are reducible to individuals.[19] A “social atomism” in which the analysis of societies can be reduced to the preferences of individuals will never adequately explain social action.[20] But neither is society merely the result of collective pressures on individuals, or a simple dialectic between these two poles.[21] Rather, society has a dual character: social groups provide the ground through which individuals reproduce and sometimes transform society.[22] A level of reality can emerge from a more basic level without being reducible to the more basic level.[23]

Like Bhaskar, Michael Polanyi sought to mitigate the destructive tendencies of positivism without destroying the normativity of science. One of Polanyi’s primary concerns was the danger of authoritarian control over science extant in the then communist East. [24] Polanyi was keen to demonstrate that science is an inherently social enterprise just like any other human project, and that as a social enterprise science must be subject to democratic control.[25] Also like Bhaskar, Polanyi recognized that reality is stratified.[26] Each level of reality operates under the ‘marginal control’ of higher levels, but the higher levels are not reducible to the lower.[27]

Polanyi recognized that positivism fails because it relies on some unverifiable foundations. As Polanyi noted, “It is indeed logically impossible for the human mind to divest itself of all uncritically acquired foundations. For our minds cannot unfold at all except by embracing a definite idiom of beliefs, which will determine the scope of our entire subsequent fiducial development.”[28] The notion of positivism itself, then, depends on an idiomatic structure that is neither verifiable nor self-evident.

Polanyi also emphasized the communal nature of scientific practice and the “tacit” knowledge involved in such communal information transfers. As he noted, “[t]he transmission of beliefs in society is mostly not by precept, but by example . . . [t]he whole practice of research and verification is transmitted by example and its standards are upheld by a continuous interplay with criticism within the scientific community.”[29] Thus, scientific knowledge is a set of socially constructed analogical models that are developed through practices acquired and implemented in unique social networks.

Finally, Polanyi realized that the social networks through which scientific practices are transferred, like all social networks, incorporate elements of social control. One of the principal means of control over scientific information networks is peer review. Polanyi observed that scientific journal referees “are the chief Influentials, the unofficial governors of the scientific community. By their advice they can either delay or accelerate the growth of a new line of research.”[30]  Nevertheless, within this social matrix, science can make genuine progress in understanding.

Similarly, theology, critical realists argue, seeks to interpret experienced reality within the context of a traditioned community.[31]  In this respect, many critical realists are sympathetic to Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of the role of community and tradition in the shaping of philosophical inquiry.[32]  For Christians, of course, the central experienced reality that requires theological interpretation is the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ, and the interpretive community is the Church.[33]  Christian theology and doctrine develop as the Christian community reflects on this central experience.  Just as in the natural sciences, massive paradigm shifts in the understanding of theology and doctrine should be rare, but some degree of revision must always remain a possibility because the reality that lies behind the experience is only ever partially understood.

 

[1] See, e.g., McGrath, Science & Religion, at pp. 78-79, 82-82.  McGrath identifies Thomas Torrance, Ian Barbour, Arthur Peacocke, and John Polkinghorne, as well as himself, as critical realists.  Id., at p. 82-83.

[2] See id.

[3] Id.

[4] See 2 Alister McGrath, A Scientific Theology: Reality at 226 (2002).

[5] Alister McGrath, The Foundations of Dialogue in Science & Religion (Blackwell 1988).

[6] 2 Alister McGrath, A Scientific Theology: Reality at 226 (2002).

[7] See generally Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences (Routledge 3d ed. 1998) (1979).

[8] Id. at 36.

[9] Id. at 39 (stating that “society must be regarded as an ensemble of structures, practices and conventions which individuals reproduce or transform, but which would not exist unless they did so.”).

[10] Id. at 37.

[11] Id. at 37–44.

[12] Id. at 41. In many respects, critical realism’s transformational model of society sounds like the New Chicago School’s model of law and norms. The difference is that for cyberlaw scholars in the New Chicago School tradition, the architectural “code” that makes up online spaces is entirely socially constructed—whether code-infrastructure is “open” or “closed” is entirely contingent on the individuals who participate in the digital commons. See Part II, supra. In contrast, in the critical realist view, “culture,” “code” and “infrastructure” are not entirely the voluntary creations of autonomous individuals. Bhakar’s treatment of language and grammar is intriguing here. The rules of grammar, Bhaskar observes, are not infinitely malleable—they impose real, given limits on our speech. Bhaskar, supra note 65 at 36. The rules of grammar, however, do not determine what we say; meaning is not reducible to the rules of grammar. Id.

[13] Roy Bhaskar, a germinal critical realist philosopher, states that

Any adequate philosophy of science must find a way of grappling with this central paradox of science: that men in their social activity produce knowledge which is a social product much like any other, which is no more independent of its production and the men who produce it than motor cars, armchairs or books, which has its own craftsmen, technicians, publicists, standards and skills and which is no less subject to change than any other commodity. This is one side of ‘knowledge’. The other is that knowledge is ‘of’ things which are not produced by men at all: the specific gravity of mercury, the process of electrolysis, the mechanism of light propagation. None of these ‘objects of knowledge’ depend on human activity. If men ceased to exist sound would continue to travel and heavy bodies fall to the earth in exactly the same way, though ex hypothesi there would be no-one to know it.

Bhaskar, at 21.

[14]  See Critical Realism: Essential Readings ix–xiii (Margaret Archer, et al. eds., 1998) (noting that “critical realism claims to be able to combine and reconcile ontological realism, epistemological relativism, and judgmental rationality.”) (emphasis in original).

[15]  Bhaskar, at 21.

[16]  Id.

[17]  Id.

[18] Id. at 21–62.

[19] Id.

[20] Id.

[21] Id.

[22] Id.

[23] Id. at 113 (stating that “the operations of the higher level cannot be accounted for solely by the laws governing the lower-order level in which we might say the higher-order level is ‘rooted’ and from which we might say it was ‘emergent.’”).

[24] Polanyi explains this concern at the beginning of one of his key works, The Tacit Dimension. Describing the denial of independent science under communism, Polanyi says “I was struck by the fact that this denial of the very existence of independent scientific thought came from a socialist theory which derived its tremendous persuasive power from its claim to scientific certainty. The scientific outlook appeared to have produced a mechanical conception of man and history in which there was no place for science itself.” Id. at 3. Polanyi’s views, of course, were not entirely unique; they fit nicely into a constellation of contemporary philosophers of science who deconstructed the positivism that emerged following the collapse of Baconian science, including figures such as Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, and to some extent Paul Feyerabend. See, e.g., Kuhn; Imre Lakatos, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (Cambridge Univ. Press 1978); Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (Verso 3d ed. 1993) (1975).

[25]  Polanyi, at p. 3.

[26] Polanyi.

[27] Id. For a discussion of how Polanyi’s thought might relate to Bhaskar’s on this point, see 2 Alister McGrath, A Scientific Theology: Reality at 226 (2002). Interestingly, the stratification of reality can also be observed in Thomas Aquinas’ approach to law. See William S. Brewbaker II, Thomas Aquinas and the Metaphysics of Law, 58 Ala. L. Rev. 575, 600–02 (2007). It is noted that “Thomas assumes that a single scientific method is insufficient to enable investigation of all types of reality, and this assumption affects his account of law.” Id. at 600.

[28] Michael Polanyi, Scientific Thought and Social Reality 76 (Fred Schwartz ed., International University Press 1974).

[29] Id. at 61.

[30] Id. at 20. Polanyi stated that:

The referees advising scientific journals may also encourage those lines of research which they consider to be particularly promising, while discouraging other lines of which they have a low opinion. The dominant powers in this respect are, however, exercised by referees advising on scientific appointments, on the allocation of special subsidies, and on the award of distinctions. Advice on these points, which often involve major issues of the policy of science, is usually asked from and tendered by a small number of senior scientists who are universally recognized as being the most eminent in a particular branch. They are the chief Influentials, the unofficial governors of the scientific community. By their advice they can either delay or accelerate the growth of a new line of research.

Id. Cf. Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Happens Next (Houghton Mifflin Company 2006).

[31] McGrath, The Foundations of Science & Religion, at pp. 160-64.

[32] See id., citing Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice?  Which Rationality? (Duckworth 1988).

[33] See T.F. Torrance, Reality & Evangelical Theology:  The Realism of Christian Revelation (InterVarsity Press 1999), at pp.  84-120.