Does Theology need Philosophy?

One of the great and very rapid changes that has happened since the mid twentieth century has been the move away from a classically informed general education. It is no longer the case that pupils will routinely have studied Latin from the age of seven and leave school with a general awareness of the course of history and literature from the time of ancient Greece and Rome down to the present day.  

This shift is having vast consequences for how people in our society place themselves in the great scheme of things that is history, and upon the intellectual framework we instinctively bring to life and the world we experience.  There has then been a further shift when it comes to theological education of the clergy specifically since, again, at one time a familiarity with the languages and thought of the ancient world could simply be taken as a given, while a great many went on to study Classics at university for their first degree before they began any study of theology.

This pattern was widely present across the English speaking world and carried with it two valuable things that quietly informed the characteristic emphases of Anglican theology, namely a ready engagement with the early church fathers, and secondly a significant engagement with philosophy and the thought of Plato and Aristotle in particular.

It cannot be over emphasised how important a prior background in philosophy is to the way in which one will “do” theology and the modern Roman Catholic Church is much to be praised for requiring two years of undergraduate philosophy to be studied by all seminarians (even if the quality of that is likely be highly varied inevitably). 

And here it is also worth noting the difference that will follow from whether one comes to theology via the Analytical tradition which has for a long time been predominant in the English speaking world or the very different Continental tradition – for it is the latter which has informed a great deal of modern theology.  This again makes clear just how much prior philosophy shapes later theology and the inevitability of this as it supplies the theologian’s operative understanding  of reality and our access (or lack of access) to it in the most fundamental ways, as it is reflected in the operative and presupposed understanding of knowledge, language, causality, personhood, and the limits of human thought. 

This is not changed by the fact that revelation is viewed as normative and of primary doctrinal significance within Christian theology, but that revelation has always to be received, interpreted, and articulated through conceptual frameworks already formed by prior philosophical commitments.

This reference to revelation should make clear that to say all this is very much not to say that every theological doctrine can be deduced from prior metaphysics and philosophy. Rather it is to acknowledge the fact that philosophical formation establishes the grounds of possibility and thus in due course the questions theologian address. How they do respond in terms of the intellectual steps thought legitimate, and the kinds of answers that can be deemed as coherent are all entailed by prior philosophical presumptions.

Our approach to the doctrine of God can be illustrative. 

An Aristotelian-Thomist metaphysics tends to ask how God is ipsum esse subsistens, pure act, first cause, and final end. A Kantian or post-Kantian theology more readily asks how God is given within the conditions of human subjectivity, freedom, experience, and history. And a phenomenological theology might ask instead, how divine transcendence manifests itself without becoming an object under human conceptual control. 

In each case, the resulting account will be Christian, but the conceptual grammar, apologetic stance and the implications claimed to be adduced will be very different. And there is a sense in which the very long Christian tradition of engaging thus, offers us a degree of reassurance in itself, since theology’s relation to philosophy has varied quite deeply over the millennia. Yet the constant has remained: that Christian thinkers always use philosophical concepts to clarify doctrines even where the doctrines themselves, by virtue of being held to be revealed, can be deemed to go beyond what human reason unaided by God can show of itself.

It is interesting that it has often been supposed that the magisterial Reformers were suspicious of philosophy as introducing worldly and merely human elements that could only cloud our apprehension of divine revelation. But Calvin and the creedaly orthodox Reformers nonetheless relied heavily upon the philosophical tools into which they had been long educated—often  indeed Aristotelian and scholastic ones– no matter their frequent rhetorical criticisms of that tradition. But what was characteristic was a very firm emphasis upon subordinating reason to Scripture and to a strong Augustinian account of sin, grace, and creaturely dependence on God for right illumination by means of which to be able to see the truth. The later Reformed scholasticism has been described as in fact “pervasively scholastic and often Thomistic” in method and terminology, even though it deployed these resources in a distinctively Protestant dogmatic framework. And it is interesting to see that this Protestant scholasticism is enjoying something of a renaissance at the moment. 

Calvin’s himself established from the outset (in his Institutes)  an epistemological and theological reciprocity wherein, “our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.” This clearly reflects a prior Augustinian conviction that self-knowledge is inseparable from knowledge of God the Creator and Judge, and that fallen self-love disorders both kinds of knowledge. Where things become complicated is just how to work this out in terms of when and where the corruption in our reasoning entailed by the Fall applies (if it is not impose a self-defeating character upon its proponents.) 

Though Calvin also seems to treat the natural awareness of God to which he allows we can reason as of no salvational importance –except in the negative sense that it leaves us condemned for failing in the light of this natural knowledge to worship God as we ought, 

The stress upon the fact that sin can turn knowledge into idolatry and self-deception is pressed very hard, but with arguably too little attention the implicit presumption that we must have sufficiently uncorrupt faculties left for us even to be able to reason adequately enough to see this (and indeed we must presume Calvin thought himself able to reason without serious defect in his many works of theology too)!  Nonetheless, there is a clearly defining view here that Scripture becomes, in Calvin’s  familiar image, the spectacles through which fallen persons rightly read the world.

All of this brings out how much an interplay between prior philosophical presumptions and later truths of which it is taken to be a given that they were revealed –shaped the ultimate epistemic and not merely theological conclusions of the Reformers, including the claims that

• Knowledge of God is real but cannot be accessed by autonomous reason independence of the special power that is Grace
• General revelation (such as mere human reason can attain on its own unaided by God) merely  renders human beings accountable and culpable,  but can never rise to the level of the saving knowledge we actually need in order to enjoy eternal life — that can only be vouchsafed by God’s gracious self-disclosure which will only be conferred according to his inscrutable will. 
• The blessing of assurance which the Reformed tradition tended to emphasise rests ultimately upon God’s Word and the Holy Spirit’s inward testimony and not upon philosophical demonstration alone (with the perverse consequence that what we can reason to is only sufficient to leave us condemned for failing to respond God as we ought upon apprehending his existence. With the obvious problem then being how is it that we can be blameworthy if advancing to the higher knowledge that is the stuff of faith is contingent upon grace which we cannot ourselves secure and is only given for reasons veiled to our sight. How could a just all knowing and benevolent creator God establish such an epistemic world ?

In such a framework, Divine sovereignty is certainly assured and there is also a humbling metaphysic that makes clear our radical creaturely contingency in the midst of an anthropology of dependence, but is all this just? If we can in this analysis be denied what we legitimately and sincerely seek, how is this coherent with understanding God as wholly good and benevolent?

Amidst the powerful and characteristically Calvinist and indeed Lutheran polemic against idolatry, there is certainly in the background an Augustinian philosophical theology of disordered love and impaired knowing, but the hard edged conclusions of Calvin were not those of Augustine himself. 

So what about other approaches and those of Anglicans in particular?

Eastern Orthodox theology at times can seem to echo the epistemic concerns of the Reformers when it warns against allowing philosophical systems to dominate                                    or somehow seek precedence over revelation or spiritual experience. Yet in fact ,Orthodox theologians have never theologized without philosophical grammar. 

Once again, it is a characteristic pattern that asserts here. Thus we find a patristic inheritance that includes Platonism and neo-Platonism, as well as Aristotelian terminology, but especially the Dionysian tradition of negative theology.

Vladimir Lossky would be a modern example of one who follows this pattern –with a  theology, built around the Greek Fathers, that gives special prominence to the Trinity, theosis, and the apophatic union with God. 

And this latter apophaticism, it is important to note, is not mere negative agnosticism, for it is conjoined with a spiritual and epistemic discipline that allows the disparate elements of thought to be held together in tension. Thus, while it is very clear on this account that God’s essence cannot be comprehended or enclosed within a creaturely concept, nonetheless  God is understood as truly giving himself to be known both in revelation and through the theology of participation. In Lossky’s words,  apophaticism is “an attitude of mind which refuses to form concepts about God.” 

The somewhat paradoxical result is an understanding that does not at all preclude doctrine (which accords with the fact that Eastern Orthodoxy is decisively dogmatic about the Trinity and Christology). Rather what is meant is that dogmatic language guards mystery rather than exhausts it.  In other words, positive statements about God are to understood as true, but they are inadequate if treated as exhaustive definitions of divine reality. 

To illustrate the Orthodox approach further:

• the distinction between God’s unknowable essence and his communicable energies protects both transcendence and real participation;
• Salvation is understood pre-eminently as deification rather than chiefly as a juridical change of status;
• Theology is understood as something to be lived out and thus existentially not an abstract things but something best understood as inseparable from the lifetime task of sanctification — of purification, contemplation, worship, and ecclesial life.

It is at this point that the contrast with a more Western Aristotelian and Thomist account can be illuminating. 

While both traditions affirm divine transcendence, grace, and participation, the depth of the Eastern Orthodox preference for apophatic and participatory grammar, makes divine incomprehensibility and deifying communion especially central organizing theological principles, while also vesting them deeply with the character of mystery –which should not (beyond a certain level) in this life presume articulate. 

This makes it apposite to turn to the Western Roman Catholic approach.

While very heavily informed by Aristotle’s philosophy,  Thomist theology is not reducible to Aristotle,  for the Scriptures, the Fathers, liturgy, and ecclesial doctrine are all deployed as constitutive elements. Nevertheless, Aristotelian metaphysics does supply a powerful conceptual architecture underpinning what and how we can speak about God, creation, causality, virtue, sacraments, beatitude and so much more.

The Thomist maxim, that, ”grace does not destroy nature but perfects it” (“gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit“) is useful here, as it points to the view that while nature is not self-sufficient, it is real, intelligible, and can rightly be understood as ordered to ends. Grace does not compete with created causality as though God and creature occupied the same causal plane; it heals, elevates, and fulfils creatures according to their divinely given form.

God is not one being among others, but the source of being itself and this entails that creaturely predicates apply to God analogically rather than univocally or equivocally.

Natural reason can attain limited knowledge of God from the effects in creation, even though the deeper truths that are the mysteries of the Trinity and Incarnation could only have been disclosed to us through revelation.

Sacraments can be understood as instrumental causes of grace rather than merely as subjective signs of religious commitment.

Moral theology can employ natural law because human goods and ends are not arbitrary projections of will but accessible through discursive reason

And it is interesting that the modern Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rhaner , while respecting Thomism as normative,  otherwise takes approaches only intelligible in the light of adopting elements of Continental  thought ranging from Kant, on to Maréchal, and Heidegger. This has at times the disconcerting effect of his seeking a fundamental recasting of all the terrain of philosophical anthropology and metaphysics in a transcendental key, before developing a transcendental theology. 

Thus for Rahner  “What has God revealed?” becomes more a matter of asking, “What are the transcendental conditions under which a finite spirit is always already open to God’s self-communication?” a shift that had large consequences for his account of grace, revelation, religious experience, and the “supernatural existential.”

All of which brings us (in this somewhat breathless overview which it will be necessary to unpack rather further in times ahead) to  the distinctives of Anglican theology in contrast to all the foregoing.

For present purposes Richard Hooker can serve here to provide a particularly clear English and Anglican illustration of the way philosophical assumptions shape ecclesiology and moral theology. Hooker was neither simply “anti-Puritan” and nor some proto-liberal defender of human reason above all else. 

Richard Hooker operated within a broad Christian-Aristotelian framework in which law is held to be intelligible, creation is ordered toward ends, and reason is a genuine divine gift—in constructive elucidatory relation Scripture enabled by grace.

Hooker’s philosophical account deploys in his unique way the concept of law to undergird his theological account of right ecclesial polity. In his Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, he identifies law with divine Wisdom, and as presenting a cosmic order within which eternal law, natural law, human law, and ecclesiastical law have differentiated but related authority.

This way of framing things made intelligible why and how he could resist the stultifying Puritan claim that every church belief and practice must be explicitly rooted in Scripture. For Hooker, whilst Scripture is always sufficient for salvation (as is the characteristic Anglican claim); it does not therefore exhaust every prudential judgment that is meet and right for the Church’s ordered common life: “What Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that the first place both of credit and obedience is due; the next whereunto is whatsoever any man can necessarily conclude by force of reason; after these the voice of the Church succeedeth.” 

This famous formulation is indeed both compelling and nonetheless subtle in that it captures a sense of hierarchy but without collapsing the component elements.  This is why incidentally it does not equate to the all too popular alleged slogan of a “three-legged stool,” for what it proposes is the more demanding and more authentic account of ordered theological judgment that is the true Anglican perspective and project, One which deploys a multifold deposit of faith in Scripture ultimately,  but also our formularies and the Prayer Book tradition and liturgy. 

In arriving at this stance,  there are many debts to the long prior history of church thought going all the way back to Aristotelian teleology, natural law, patristic participation and St Augistine in particular. Yet there is present in Hooker too the Renaissance  and an important debt to St Thomas Aquinas. This made it possible for him to argue too that grace heals and elevates nature rather than abolishing it. 

All of which leaves us with much more to consider about the distinctive nature of the Anglican path,  but also in regard to  each of the other Christian traditions here touched upon.

But for the moment,  the key point here is simply that in each case,  the prior role of philosophy in framing what was claimed and in establishing how it was deemed possible to access and express it , should at least by this point be evident !