Inter-Christian Philosophical Dialogues

Volume 4

Graham Oppy, N.N. Trakakis

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351617833
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Inter-Christian Philosophical Dialogues offers a unique approach to the philosophical exploration of Christianity. Five leading Christian philosophers of religion are brought together to engage in a spirited dialogue, debating and discussing the merits and demerits of the diverse ideas, doctrines and practices found in the Christian tradition. Participants in this dialogue represent and defend the following traditions or movements within Christianity:

• 'Naturalist' Christian theism
• Ecological Christianity
• Catholic Christianity
• (Reformed) Protestantism
• Orthodox Christianity.

This set of volumes uncovers the rich and diverse cognitive and experiential dimensions of religious belief and practice, pushing the field of philosophy of religion in bold new directions.

Position Statements

1
A ‘naturalist’ Christian theism

John Bishop

A Christian philosopher’s ‘position’

Philosophers sometimes ask each other: what is your ‘position’ on some philosophical issue–the compatibility of free will and determinism, perhaps, or the status of moral claims, or the possibility of knowledge of an ‘external’ world? A satisfactory answer expresses a particular view and the reasons for holding it, ideally situating the chosen position in the conceptual space of available alternatives and explaining its (alleged) advantages over other options. Yet with some issues (think of the question whether skepticism can be refuted, for example), some philosophers who have given the issue much thought are conscious that they do not ‘have a position’ on it and may indeed regard their holding back as a virtue. That option is presumably not available, however, to philosophers who, like myself, are confessed Christian believers–not, anyway, with respect to those issues on which being a Christian is usually assumed just to amount to holding a certain moreorless definite position. In particular, a Christian believer who is also a philosopher may be expected to ‘have a position’ on the divine. This chapter is an attempt to provide my own ‘position statement’–to articulate how I think about the divine and my own relation to it, and how that relation to the divine figures in my life.

Yet although I accept that a Christian who is a philosopher must ‘have a position’, I want to sound a note of caution about the elusiveness of that position. Philosophers often find–under questioning, and on reflection–that what they say in the attempt to express ‘their position’ is not, or not wholly, their position but needs further qualification and recasting. And that experience may be iterated, potentially without limit. This is especially the case with so vital an issue as one’s religious view of the world. The Christian stance I hold is something I am always continuing to reach for and can never wholly grasp through a transparently comprehensible and finally adequate set of propositions.

Belief ‘in’ and belief ‘that’

Having continually to put off the ambition to possess a finally adequate statement of belief would be a problem if Christian commitment just amounted to accepting in practice the truth of such a statement. But it doesn’t. Christian belief is not primarily a matter of endorsing the truth of certain propositions. It is first and foremost a matter of believing in God. We say “Credo in unum Deum…”, thereby expressing a practical commitment–and a practical commitment of an ‘allframing’ kind that constitutes the foundation of an entire way of living.

Yet Christian faith does essentially involve beliefs ‘that’. There must be commitment to the truth of claims about how the world is–in particular, to the claim that God is to be trusted in an ‘ultimate’ and ‘centred’ way, to use terms from Paul Tillich (1957). Christian commitment does entail existentially vital claims about reality, then; but there is a good deal of openended contestability about what these claims are and how to understand them.

The contestability of Christian truthclaims and the epistemology of revelation

Christians differ over whether that uncertainty and openendedness is a good thing. At their baptism, Christians promise to believe all the articles of the Christian faith as formulated in the historic creeds. That cannot mean that they promise to find them true. One can promise to believe that p only in the sense of promising to accept that p is true–to take it to be true that p in one’s practical reasoning. Many Christians do interpret the baptismal promise in that way. Other Christians, however, (and I include myself amongst them) place acceptance of the truth of the creeds at one remove, by interpreting the baptismal promise as a promise to trust that the received tradition (in creeds and scriptures) conveys divine revelation. That promise they then see as entailing an undertaking to participate in the continuing process of understanding what is revealed.

Revelation is at the heart of Christian belief. God is known only through his selfrevelation. Differing assumptions about the epistemology of revelation yield differing conclusions about the nature and status of Christian knowledge of God. I believe that the revelation of God to humanity is essentially limited, fallible and developmental–not through any lack in God but as inherent in the limitedness of the recipients of revelation. On this view the revelation of the divine is necessarily an evolutionary process: humanity does indeed experience the divine, but its understanding of God’s nature and will undergoes continuing change and development, never reaching a point from which no more development is possible. Theological epistemology thus shares the same overall fallibilist developmental profile as ‘secular’ scientific epistemology.¹

There is, admittedly, a tendency to ‘pin down’ what is revealed and pronounce anathemas against any who would add to or change authorized scriptures or creeds. Those who think as I do, however, regard that tendency as betraying false consciousness about the historicity of all formulations of ‘the revealed truth’ and a hubristic refusal to be genuinely open to the divine. The received creeds and canonical scriptures, notoriously, emerged from a ferment of controversy and were settled through alltoohuman exercises of political power. That does not disqualify them as revelatory–indeed, the evolutionist view I am sketching holds that the only vehicles of revelation to historical beings there could possibly be will inevitably have these kinds of limitations. What does get disqualified, though, is any understanding of what is revealed as both final and settled as to its true meaning beyond any legitimate contestability.

Philosophical issues: the ‘justifiability’ question and the ‘content’ question

It may be then–as Christians claim–that there is full and final revelation of the divine in Christ: my evolutionist view asserts only that, if so, there is then a process of evolutionary understanding (which continues today) of what it is that is revealed in Christ and how what is revealed counts existentially as Good News. Furthermore, I see that process as continuing, under divine providence, the process of understanding the revealed divine nature and will that characterizes the whole history of the Abrahamic faith (Christianity is unintelligible apart from its Hebrew roots). And I grant that “the Spirit blows where it wills”: the process of understanding what is revealed in Christ may belong to an altogether wider context that admits revela-tory events and progress beyond Christianity and beyond the Abrahamic traditions, and even in philosophies not usually regarded as ‘religious’. (Scientific knowledge, of course, may be understood theologically as general revelation, as contrasted with the special revelation with which my present remarks are concerned. It is important, I think, that whatever is understood as specially revealed coheres with what is generally, scientifically, ‘revealed’.)

I see myself, then, as standing in a tradition in which a specific history is understood as revealing the divine, and the task of understanding the content of revelation evolves under divine providence over many generations. Since that evolving process requires challenge and conflict and critical engagement across disagreements, the philosopher will feel at home in it. Indeed, the evolutionist perspective entails that believers (some of them, at least) have a responsibility to engage in reflective and critical philosophical activity. Philosophy thus serves theological commitment–though it is philosophy also, of course, that raises the question whether any theological commitment can be justified in the first place. How are one’s commitments as a Christian and as a philosopher related, then? My view is that critical philosophical values are values which authentic Christian commitment may understand itself, on its own terms, as seeking to honour. Christian faith may thus preserve its religious ultimacy while nevertheless being open to full philosophical critique.²

In the closing section of this chapter (see “The justifiability of Christian commitment”) I will say something about the ‘justifiability’ of Christian faith. Until then I will assume that Christian commitment is justifiable so as to concentrate on what I think I am taking to be true in committing myself to trust God. It is the answer people give to that ‘content’ question which illuminates the existential significance of their Christian belief. I will ‘narrow’ my focus–though it is only superficially a narrowing–to a discussion of my understanding of the divine, as formed through a dialectic which I will outline. As I have emphasized, though my position is held tentatively, I regard myself as keeping firmly to my promise to believe the received Christian faith.³

Understanding the nature of divinity: a dominant view and its critique

What is it, then, to believe that God exists and is worthy of ultimate trust? We Christians are not alone, of course, in holding such a belief: we hold it in common with all ‘theistic’ believers. And the first step required to explain the content of this belief reveals a wider commonality–namely, with all religious stances that take the universe (‘all that is’) to constitute a certain kind of unity. On some views, the universe’s supposed unity is itself identified as divine, but theism differentiates itself from that pantheistic identification by holding that the kind of unity the universe possesses is the unity of a creation. God is then identified as the Creator, the ultimate cause of the existence of the universe and the principle of its unity.

Classical theism–its perceived religious inadequacy

Classical theism emphasizes this distinctness of God the Creator from the creation and from any item within it. God is not temporal, not subject to change or to any kind of ‘undergoing’ (‘he’ is immutable and impassible). God is not contingent, not dependent on anything else for his existence. God is not something of a kind or species, for which its existence as an instantiation of its kind may be distinguished from the essence of what it is to be of that kind. This follows from God’s ‘simplicity’: there is no complexity or ‘composition’ in God, not even the pervasive ‘composition’ of essence and existence.

Constructing a positive metaphysics out of these classical attributes of God is problematic, however. Such a construction makes the Creator into a supernatural entity that is simple and necessary, somehow ‘existing’ outside of time and change. But the notion of an existent that is absolutely simple and necessary is of doubtful coherence: divinity so conceived may well be open to an ‘ontological disproof’ (see Findlay 1955). In any case, a simple, immutable, impassible being does not fit the God who speaks and acts decisively in human history. The thusconstructed ‘God of classical theism’, then, seems patently religiously inadequate with respect to the lived Abrahamic faiths.

Personal omniGod theism

The temptation, now, is to adjust this supposedly ‘classical’ account of the divine in an attempt to bring it into line with the God of scripture and lived religious experience. God must indeed be Creator, distinct from and other than his creation and therefore ‘supernatural’ in relation to the created natural order. But (on this adjusted view) God is a supernatural person and has the complexity required for the cognitive and conative capacities essential to personhood–that baffling divine simplicity is jettisoned. God does retain, however, the ‘omni’ properties: his agency is allpowerful (he is omnipotent), his knowledge allencompassing (he is omniscient) and his goodness supreme (he is omnibenevolent). And the necessity of God’s existence is retained: if there is such a person as God, he is a denizen of every logically possible world.

In my view, however, this adjustment rescues us from the frying pan of a problematic, positively construed, classical theistic metaphysics only to land us in the fire of ‘personal omniGod theism’–the understanding of God as “an allpowerful, allknowing, wholly good person (a person without a body) who has created us and our world” (Plantinga 2000: 3). The suggestion that this understanding of God makes things worse may be startling, since personal omniGod theism is the prevailing understanding of the divine amongst philosophers of religion in the Englishspeaking ‘analytical’ tradition. Nevertheless, there are grounds for thinking that this understanding is inadequate–and primarily religious grounds at that.

The religious critique of conceptions of God

The religious critique of personal omniGod theism arises in the following way. As I said at the outset, Christians believe in God: they practically commit themselves to trust, worship and obey God. Accordingly, the concept of God is the concept of that which plays a certain role (‘the Godrole’), for which it is essential that God be worthy of the special kind of trust, worship and obedience that constitute the commitment of faith. In Tillich’s terms, the authentic object of faith must be worthy of a believer’s “ultimate concern” in so far as “totally surrendering” to it “promises total fulfillment even if all other claims have to be subjected to it or rejected in its name” (1957: 1). Correspondingly, an adequate conception of who or what God is–of what it is that actually fills the Godrole–must be a conception of something worthy of this special kind of practical commitment.

It may thus always be questioned whether a given particular object of faithcommitment, of ultimate concern, is in fact worthy of that concern. It is all too possible for a “false ultimate” (again, a term of Tillich’s) to be trusted for the fulfillment of human existence, with disastrous, demonic, results–as was apparent, for example, in the history of the Nazi absolutizing of the German nation and the master race. Candidate objects of theistic faith, then, need to be scrutinized to ensure they are not false ultimates. But this scrutiny is not imposed on religious tradition and experience, as it were from some independent higher ethical ground: rather, it is inherently required at the core of theistic consciousness. The dynamic of the Abrahamic faith is the passionate desire to submit only to the true God. Its first imperative, therefore, is to avoid the horror of idolatry–of giving to something unworthy the commitment proper only to the true God.

Christians relate to God personally; yet God need not be understood as ‘a’ person

Any attempt, then, to specify what fills the Godrole is open to religious scrutiny lest an unworthy, idolatrous, object be smuggled into the believer’s consciousness. Could the personal omniGod be such an unworthy object? In my view, a Christian may reasonably think so. That view may at first seem preposterous. Thinking of God in personal terms is basic to Christian spirituality: Jesus himself related to God as Father, as do we whenever we pray the prayer Jesus taught us. What would be idolatrous would be ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Position Statements
• First Responses
• Second Responses
• Index