Category: Theology

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.

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]

 

In my previous post I used the strange term “ontotheology.”  This is a mash-up of “ontology” – the study of being – and theology.  So what’s the problem with suggesting that “theology” is concerned with ontology?

To be more precise, the concern is not over “being” in general, but over the “being” of God.  Ontotheology is a way of speaking and thinking about God by which God is reduced to the same kind of being as other things in the universe.  In this framework, it is as though God is a sort of superhero – a person like human persons, but with super-powers and abilities.  This sort of conception of God is often evident in modern “first mover” arguments.  This sort of argument, in the way modern people often think of it, suggests that the development of the universe since the big bang is like a row of dominoes.  There must have been a giant finger, so to speak, that tipped over the first domino and got things going.  Not only is this picture wrong concerning how physical causes work, more importantly, it is wrong concerning God.  It makes God into just another physical cause, and it is vulnerable to the famous “but who made God” retort.

We must be careful to remember that God is absolutely, infinitely beyond anything in the universe.  God is in fact not “in” the universe in the sense of derivation, containment, or limitations.  Rather, God is transcendent over the universe.  The universe is contingent on God, but God is not at all contingent on the universe. The universe depends utterly on God for its existence, but God depends on nothing.  The character of the universe is determined by God, but God is determined by nothing.[1]  The universe is circumscribed by God, but God is circumscribed by nothing outside Himself.

We must also be careful to remember that God is not part of the order of creation.  Among created things, we can speak of first-order causal relations, progressions, hierarchies, levels of being, emergence, and evolution.  A single strand of DNA, for example, is a chemical molecule.  It possesses a potential to become part of something more, but on its own it is just a molecule.  A strand of DNA, combined with other molecules in the nucleus of a mammalian egg cell, comprises an egg cell.  It, too, possesses a potential to become part of something more, but on its own it is just an egg cell.  The fusion of an egg cell with a sperm cell produces another level of being, with far greater potentialities.  A grown shrew, the fruit of that fusion of egg and sperm, has yet greater potentialities, and a group of shrews living in proximity to each other and to other animals and plants in a biosphere far greater than a single shrew.  At each increasing level of complexity, the potentiality of the system increases.  The distant evolutionary descendants of that shrew may become human beings who can build universities and study their own evolutionary past.  But the egg cell may die, the shrew may be eaten by a raptor, or the shrew’s biosphere may collapse in a volcanic eruption, and the potential for human beings may never be realized.  This realization of this potentiality is precarious.

God is not like this.  God does not emerge from lower orders of organization, because He is simple, without parts.  God does not develop into something “more,” because He is perfect.  God does not change over time, because He is timeless.  God does not evolve, because He is absolute.  In His freedom and grace God relates to His creatures, but He does not depend on those relations to become what He could be.  Nothing can frustrate God’s potentialities, which for God’s-self are always already realized and thus are always actualities.  The eschatological future in which “God will be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28) is certain because it is proleptically present to God, who transcends categories such as “past” and “future.”  God eternally is fully Himself.

All of this means that God simply cannot be an actor in a courtroom drama.  As I noted in my first post, courts are concerned with limited kinds of claims relating to particular kinds of causes and relations.  When a homicide is tried in court, for example, the jury is asked to draw on common experience of the created world to reach a verdict.  Does the forensic evidence prove that the defendant’s gun discharged the fatal bullet?  Does the convenience store’s video surveillance footage clearly show the defendant pulling the trigger and running away?  Did the money in the defendant’s pocket when he was apprehended approximate the amount missing from the store’s cash register?  Does a DNA test on hair samples found at the scene match the defendant’s DNA profile?

If all of these facts line up, the jury can reasonably conclude that the defendant is culpable for the homicide.  It is no defense to argue that the victim’s death was “God’s will.”  As a theological claim, such a statement might in some sense be true.  From the perspective of Christian theology, it is correct to state that nothing can happen outside of God’s providence.  Theologians could debate the fine points of whether God ordained or merely permitted the homicide, the problem and nature of evil, and the relation between God’s providence and human agency, but if God is God, then the homicide is not outside the bounds of His providence.  Nevertheless, the mystery of God’s providence simply is not an appropriate subject for a courtroom.  God’s providential governance of creation is not a causal relation on the same order as the perpetrator’s pulling of the trigger to discharge the bullet that killed the victim.  The courtroom deals entirely with immanent things.  It cannot judge transcendence.

At this point, a devoted materialist might say, “quite right – and let’s not bother with the ephemeral wisps of transcendence when our hands are already full trying to clear the docket of immanent claims.”  But that will not do, at least not if we truly wish to understand phenomena such as homicides.  Reducing the phenomenon of homicide to purely immanent, material causes ends up rendering the phenomenon meaningless:  it is nothing but the outworking of physical laws and molecules.  We can’t begin to speak of the moral and social meaning of homicide without reference to transcendentals such as goodness, beauty, peace, order, and love, which homicides erode.

The same is true for philosophical proofs of God derived only from observation of creation.  As attractive as it seems to suggest that the big bang shows the universe had a beginning and that the “bang” must have been set off by God, it is bad theology – it is ontotheology.  Likewise, proofs based on supposed bottlenecks in biological evolution, such as apparently irreducibly complex chemical processes or structures, require a God who periodically literally reassembles things, as though he were driving a molecular bulldozer through natural history.  The God who is the transcendent creator of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions does not need such flimsy arguments.  In all of its majesty and power, the entire creation already declares His glory (Psalm 19).  Indeed, the material creation points beyond itself, towards a majesty, power, wisdom and beauty so great as to be literally inconceivable.  That is the best original understanding of “natural theology,” a fundamentally apophatic approach utterly at odds with ontotheology and the self-righteous rhetoric of the courtroom lawyer.

Further Reading:

Merold Westphal, Overcoming Ontotheology:  Toward a Post-Modern Christian Faith (Fordham Univ. Press 2001).

David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite:  The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Eerdmans 2003).

 

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.