Category: Science and Religion

In my first post in this series on “courtroom” apologetics, I mentioned an order of truth:  God, theology, proclamation, reason, and apologia.  In this post, I’ll explore that order in more detail.  We’ll return to the courtroom in the next post.  For now, let’s dig deeper into our theological and philosophical soil.

The ordering of the categories of theology, proclamation, reason and apologia suggests that these categories are not analytically distinct, but in fact participate in each other.  There is no apologia without theology.  Indeed, properly understood, apologia is a form of public theology.

Apologetic arguments therefore do not prepare the ground for theology, as though there is a neutral form of reason prior to theology.  Rather, apologetic arguments are (or ought to be) a category of theology, which seeks to represent (re-present) the truths of Christian theology in public, beyond and in concert with Church proclamation, in ways that cohere with the reason Christian theology already proclaims is embedded in the human soul and in all of creation.

Notice the subsidiary role of our theology, proclamation, reason and apologia to the reality of the Triune God and the Gospel.  We may do a very good job of proclaiming the Gospel and describing its reason, or we may do a poor job.  Either way, the job is never complete because the Gospel is a dynamic, unfolding reality that flows from the relational life of the Triune God.  The full implications of the proclamation that “God was in the world in Christ Jesus reconciling all things to Himself” (2 Cor. 5:19) remain to be seen and can never be fully explained.  The character of our proclamation is bold and certain insofar as its core is the living Triune God, yet it is careful and provisional insofar as it embodies the limits of human thought and human speech about God.

Another comparison between Karl Barth and John Paul II is helpful here.  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.[1]

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.[2]

Barth’s concern throughout his discussion of the Word in Volume I of the Church Dogmatics is 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.

John Paul II also recognized the limits of human understanding in Fides et Ratio.  Having asserted that all human beings are capable of exercising reason to learn about things within the order of natural reason, John Paul II offered a cautionary note:

It should nonetheless be kept in mind that Revelation remains charged with mystery. It is true that Jesus, with his entire life, revealed the countenance of the Father, for he came to teach the secret things of God.  But our vision of the face of God is always fragmentary and impaired by the limits of our understanding.  Faith alone makes it possible to penetrate the mystery in a way that allows us to understand it coherently.[3]

Certainly John Paul II assigned a higher value to reason and philosophy than Barth.  Nevertheless, for John Paul II as well as for Barth, the task of “faith seeking understanding” is never complete.  We can never know, or say, all there is to know and say about God, and we can never come to a “coherent” understanding of God without faith.

Both Barth and John Paul II recognized these limits because they were steeped in the scriptures and the Church Fathers.  The recognition of human limitations was a key theme for the Church Fathers and for the great Medieval Scholastics such as Thomas Aquinas.  The Fathers understood that limits of human thought and speech in relation to God meant that theology always proceeds by way of analogy or negation.  St. Augustine, one of the Church’s great synthesizers of faith and reason, once said “If you understood him, it would not be God.”[4]  Augustine was not suggesting we can know nothing of God.  Augustine clearly held that God reveals Himself in both the book of nature and the book of scripture.  But Augustine was making emphatically clear that we can never understand God in the sense of having God neatly figured out and contained.  The Catechism of the Catholic Church summarizes this beautifully:  “Even when he reveals himself, God remains a mystery beyond words.”[5]

Our human limitations mean that we are simply incapable of speaking directly about God.  Our propositions never correspond directly to God in esse because God, by definition, is wholly other than us mere creatures.  Yet we can speak faithfully of God by analogy, and we can say what God is not by negation.

Consider again the first line of the Apostle’s Creed:  “I believe in God, the Father almighty…..”  Our term “Father” does not apply directly to God.  Every other “father” we know of is finite, fallible, flesh-and-blood.  Every other “father” we know of became a “father” by a sexual act with a woman, or in relatively rare circumstances, by the use of reproductive technologies uniting sperm and egg cells, or by force of law (legal adoption).  None of these characteristics could apply to God as “Father.”  Even the case of adoption, a metaphor often used in scripture, is only an analogy:  there is no law above God Himself that could determine the conditions for our adoption by God.  Nevertheless, there are things about the term “Father” – generativity, compassion, direction, care – that communicate in human concepts who God declares and shows Himself to be.  These are analogical categories that scripture and the Church have given us as a good way of speaking, which provides confidence and certainty concerning their propriety.  Yet we must never confuse the analogy with God in esse, in His essence, which transcends all created things.

The analogical speech in the first line of the Creed also suggests a way of apophatic, or negative speech about God.  If we say God is the “Father almighty,” we can clearly identify things God is not, such as finite, fallible, or flesh-and-blood.  Yet, again, we must never confuse the ability to negate certain kinds of speech about God with the ability to capture or define God in esse.  A god who is susceptible to captivity by human speech and reason would not be the God of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures – indeed, such a thing would be merely a human idea and not a god at all.

Since theology must always proceed only by analogy and negation, and since all apologetics is public theology, it follows that a Christian apologia cannot finally accept any supposedly neutral ground rules for philosophy apart from theology.  A strong foundationalist epistemology is an un-Christian epistemology.

Analytic philosophy and logical-grammatical rules, to be sure, can represent important tools for apologia.  If the creation bears the Divine logos, there is inherent in it a beauty and order that is to some degree susceptible to logical-grammatical analysis.  Even Barth employed the rules of grammar and logic in his fideistic-sounding Dogmatics.   And Christian theology tells us – by way of analogy and negation, of course — that God in His simplicity and perfections does not contradict Himself.  To use John Paul II’s framework, various forms of philosophy, including analytic philosophy, can achieve knowledge appropriate to the subject of philosophy, but this does not mean philosophy stands independent of “faith.”

Therefore, we rightly expect Christian reason to exhibit principles of non-contradiction, correspondence, coherence, and symmetry.  Where our apologia confronts un-reason, we rightly refer to these principles.  But if Christian theology is the truth of the universe, we must recognize the limits of our words and our thoughts, and we must never confuse human attempts at explanation with God Himself.  God is the three-in-one, who created the world from love and became incarnate in Christ to redeem the world.  He is not, finally, an equation of formal logic.

In my next post, I’ll explore the notion of “ontotheology” – the perverse idea that God can be studied just as anything in nature can be studied.  We will begin to see that courtroom apologetics are a form of ontotheology that reduces God to the sort of object suitable for adjudication under the limited rationality of the courthouse.

Further Reading:

Andrew Davidson, ed., Imaginative Apologetics:  Theology, Philosophy, and the Catholic Tradition (Baker Academic 2012).

Pope John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio, September 14, 1998.

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I.1.3 §5 (“The Nature of the Word of God”).

(Part 2 of the essay I’m working on)

In my first post, I argued that, for Christians, theology must retain its title as Queen of the sciences.  A courtroom, of course, is no place for theology.  A first and basic problem with courtroom apologetics, therefore, is the relation of theology to other kinds of argument.  In the history of Christian thought, this problem has been discussed as the relation between faith and philosophy.  The mainstream of the Christian tradition has always held that philosophy cannot substitute for or rival faith.  Faith either eliminates philosophy or provides the ground for philosophy.  In either case, faith takes priority.

The great Swiss theologian Karl Barth recognized this priority.  His indictment of philosophy was unrelenting:

No matter how philosophers may or may not reach an understanding on these matters, they will do so as philosophers and not as theologians.  That is, they will not do so out of any responsible regard for the theme of theology.  Hence theology cannot learn anything from them and ought not to do so, unless it is ready to let them intrude a philosophical theme instead of its own, as has always happened when it has accepted material instruction from any philosophy.[1]

Because of his theology of the immanence of the Word, Barth rejected apologetic efforts in general:  “the world,” he said, “cannot evolve into agreement with God’s Word on its own initiative nor can the Church achieve this by its work in and on the world.”[2]  “The Church is the Church,” Barth said, “as it believes and proclaims that prior to all secular developments and prior to all its own work the decisive word has in fact been spoken already regarding both itself and the world.  The world no longer exists in isolation or neutrality vis-à-vis revelation, the Bible, and proclamation.”[3]

Barth was surely right about the priority of theology over philosophy.  His insistence on this priority is a tonic for the rationalism inherent in “courtroom” apologetics.  But did Barth miss the realization that philosophy – reason – is itself properly a product of theology?

Pope John Paul II’s 1998 Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio offers a helpful comparison to Barth’s apparent blanket dismissal of philosophy.  This encyclical stands as one of the finest discussions of faith and reason in recent Christian literature.

In his introductory discussion of the relation between theology and philosophy, 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).” [4]   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”.[5]

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.”[6]

Therefore there is no question, as Barth feared, 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).[7]

Contrary to Barth, then, John Paul II 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 – a notion Barth rejected.  Whether one sides with Barth or John Paul II on the question of “philosophy” and the role of “natural reason,” however, these great Christian thinkers hold one thing in common with the historic Christian tradition:  they recognize that the final ground of truth resides in God Himself and not in merely human structures of reason or speech.  For John Paul II, 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.

We confess in the Creed that we “believe in God, the Father almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth.”   This means there is nothing apart from God that is not God’s creation.  With this confession, there is no sense in which we as Christians could proclaim anything, provide any reasons, or offer any public apologia, without first acknowledging the Triune God revealed in Christ.  Any effort to offer a Christian apologia that does not operate within the framework of a confession of the Triune God revealed in Christ before proceeding to offer reasons for that confession is a corruption of Christian theology that finally is a kind of a-theism.  In my next post, I’ll begin to unpack this relationship between God, theology, proclamation, reason, and apologia.

Further Reading:

Andrew Davidson, ed., Imaginative Apologetics:  Theology, Philosophy, and the Catholic Tradition (Baker Academic 2012).

Pope John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio, September 14, 1998.

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I.1.3 §5.

 

 

(This is Part 1 of an essay I’m working on.)

The courtroom is a powerful symbol in our popular culture.  The phrase “the verdict is in…” appears in settings ranging from advertising comparisons of different kinds of shampoo to opinion polls on political issues to arguments for and against God.  As a practicing lawyer, law professor, and theology student, I find this use of courtroom metaphors fascinating and sometimes troubling.  In particular, I worry that the popularity of courtroom apologetics, particularly in the conversation over faith and science, belies some deep theological and philosophical misconceptions, and that these theological and philosophical misconceptions can hinder both our joy in seeking God’s truth and our faithfulness in witnessing to that truth in the world.

Let me begin with a story.

Some years ago I appeared in the U.S. Federal District Court for the District of New Jersey for a routine settlement conference in a contract dispute.  Both of the parties to the suit were small businesses.  My client had entered into a service contract with the plaintiff.  The plaintiff, according to my client, did not deliver all the services under the contract, and my client withheld payment.  The plaintiff alleged that it had, in fact, performed as required by the contract and that payment was due.  The amount at stake was about $250,000 – small potatoes for a Federal lawsuit, but significant to these small businesses.  State and Federal courts around the U.S. handle many thousands of similar cases every year.

In most Federal civil trial courts, settlement conferences are conducted by a Magistrate Judge.  Typically the Judge meets with counsel and the parties together in chambers to review the case.  Often the Judge will then meet with each party separately to conduct a kind of shuttle diplomacy.  Sometimes, while the Judge meets with one party in chambers, the other party waits in the empty courtroom, with subdued lighting, heavy drapery, and the great seal of the court positioned over the Judge’s bench.  There is an aspect of theatrical performance to this process.  The Judge tries to impress on the litigants the risks of litigation and the potential weaknesses in their respective cases in order to resolve the case and clear his or her docket.  Experienced counsel is wise to this game put tacitly participates in the ritual.  Trials are risky and clients sometimes harbor grossly unrealistic expectations about the results a trial might produce.

In the contract dispute I mentioned, the owner of the company I represented was shrewd businessman.  He and I both thought we had a good chance of winning at trial.  However, given the risks and costs, we were willing to offer about half of the claimed payment due in settlement.  We communicated this to the Judge during our private meeting, and the Judge agreed that this was a wise course of action.  The Judge had us leave chambers and called in the other party.  For an experienced litigator, this represents the moment when a case starts to move and settlement seems likely.

The owner of the plaintiff corporation, however, was not so objective.  For him, this litigation was about JUSTICE (he tended to speak about this in all caps).  He rejected our offer and insisted that he would take the case to trial and achieve justice, even if it took until his dying breath.

The Judge dismissed the plaintiff and called me and my client back into chambers.  He communicated to us the plaintiff’s position, and added the following astute judicial commentary:  “What a F—ing idiot!”   Some months later, after some costly and time-consuming discovery and motion practice, the case finally settled, at a value close to what we originally had offered.  Perhaps the plaintiff’s accountants realized the costs of justice.

I recount this story at the outset of this series because it illustrates the reality of the legal process.  In the popular imagination, the court room is the place in which lies are exposed and truth revealed.  Our iconic cultural moment for the judicial process is Tom Cruise cross-examining Jack Nicholson until Nicholson finally cracks and shouts “You want the truth?  You can’t handle the truth!” before admitting Cruise was right about everything all along.  The reality is that the judicial process is not set up to find the exhaustive and final truth of a matter.  It is set up to resolve disputes as pragmatically and efficiently as possible so that the business of society can keep moving on.

The rules of evidence and procedure that govern trials – in the very, very small percentage of cases that ever go to trial – reflect this pragmatic orientation.  Trials do not go on forever, the parties cannot call every conceivable witness or offer every possible scrap of evidence, and the standards of judgment are flexible.  In civil cases, the standard of proof typically is “a preponderance of evidence” – meaning that the scales must tip only ever so slightly to one side or the other.  Mistakes of law are often reviewable by appellate courts de novo – from the beginning, with fresh eyes – but alleged mistakes of fact are usually reviewable only for an abuse of discretion – a standard that is rarely met.  And very seldom does a witness utterly crumble under cross examination and admit the other side is completely right.  In fact, in most cases that don’t settle early on, the “right” outcome generally is ambiguous.  Both parties usually can make out a viable case under the existing law and available facts.

I think all of this makes the courtroom an inapt metaphor for Christian apologetics.  We imagine some sort of Tom Cruise meets Jack Nicholson moment in which the world crumbles on the stand and acknowledges that we Christians are right about everything after all.  Real court rooms don’t work that way, and neither does real, authentic witness to the Gospel.

It’s not just a matter of making the courtroom appear overly dramatic.  In litigation, the court is a neutral authority capable of making a binding decision about the merits of the dispute.  The settlement conference procedure I mentioned above tends to work in most cases because the parties come to realize that the process, at least as applied to their specific case, isn’t about “justice” in any absolute sense at all.  The process is about resolving disputes and moving on.  It’s entirely possible that the court might reach an unfavorable conclusion simply because of the inherent constraints intentionally built into the process.  In the broadest sense, the parties agree to a social contract in which the court, whether it turns out to be right or wrong, has authority to decide the case.  And the realization that the court could get it wrong, or simply that the process might drag on for long time and cost substantial legal fees, almost always eventually moves the parties to compromise.

We who are part of the Kingdom inaugurated by Jesus, however, could never enter into any such social contract concerning the truth of the Gospel.  As far as we’re concerned, there is no neutral third party, no judicial body, capable of adjudicating the claim that Jesus is Lord and that his peaceable Kingdom has come through his death and resurrection.  To submit the Lordship of Christ before any such judicial bar would constitute blasphemy.  We do not seek or even demand a verdict from anyone about this.  Rather, we proclaim that it is so, and announce that it judges all other presumptive authorities.

Yet, we do publicly proclaim that it is so.  A public proclamation is always a form of apologia.  It is a giving of reasons why we as the Church seek to live and worship in certain ways.  And it is an effort to describe as fully and richly as possible all the implications of what we proclaim.  Not the least of those implications is that the God who created the world created it good, that He imbued creation with His own beauty and reason, and that of all His creatures His love for humans is particularly shown in our share of that reason.  So our public proclamation, our apologia for this good news, includes our effort to express the coherence, explanatory power, aesthetics, and moral force – the fullness of reason – inherent in it.

Notice the priority in this order.  It is not that reason establishes the validity of the proclamation.  It is that the proclamation establishes the validity of reason.  The Gospel does not make sense in the light of reason.  Reason only finally makes sense in the light of the Gospel.

This sense of priority suggests an order of truth:  God, theology, proclamation, reason, and apologia.  From a Christian perspective, the first order of truth must always be God, and the second order must be theology.  Since God is in essence ineffable, our primary mode of speech about God’s truth must be theology.  Proclamation, reason, and apologia follow from theology.  Theology was once the “queen of the sciences.”  For Christians, theology must yet hold this title.  In my next post, I’ll begin to unpack this claim by exploring the relationship between faith and philosophy.