God in a Single Vision

Integrating Philosophy and Theology

David Brown, Christopher R. Brewer, Robert MacSwain, Christopher R. Brewer, Robert MacSwain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317126638
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In the ancient conversation between Western philosophy and Christian theology, powerful contemporary voices are arguing for monologue rather than dialogue. Instead of these two disciplines learning from and mutually informing each other, both philosophers and theologians are increasingly disconnected from, and thus unable to hear, what the other is saying, especially in Anglo-American scholarship. Some Christian philosophers are now found claiming methodological authority over doctrine, while some Christian theologians even deny that philosophy has its own integrity as a separate discipline. Against these trends, David Brown has argued over the past thirty years that philosophy and theology are both necessary in order to grapple with the reality of divine mystery and Christian faith. Neither discipline can be reduced to the other, and each has its own contribution to make for a full understanding of what Brown describes as 'a single vision' of God. In this volume, Brown addresses some key topics in philosophical theology, including the created order, experience and revelation, incarnation and redemption, and heaven and our communal destiny. Combining analytic clarity, doctrinal substance, and historical depth, this volume exemplifies Brown's project of truly integrating philosophy and theology. It thus provides an ideal introduction to this vital conversation for undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as a connected argument of interest to specialists in both disciplines.

Part I

The Created Order

Introduction

This volume would not have emerged at all had it not been for the insistence of the volume’s editors, two former research students of mine, who volunteered to facilitate the process; and for all the work they subsequently expended on the project I am profoundly grateful. Perhaps inevitably, somewhat different visions emerged. Should a collection of essays that touched on philosophical concerns freeze the point at which I had reached, ‘greatest hits’ so far, as one of them put it? Or should it also address some obvious gaps, as the other editor suggested? Or should there perhaps be some attempt to produce a connected volume, one in which one essay flowed naturally on from its predecessor (my own preference)? The resultant compromise has attempted to achieve all three objectives, and so what follows does tell a story, with offerings both from the distant and more immediate past.

Overall, as is indicated by the volume’s title, God in a Single Vision: Integrating Philosophy and Theology, my concern over the years has been to value the contribution of both disciplines. Historically, demarcation lines were once clear, with philosophy of religion a matter of arguments for and against the existence of God, the coherence of the classical divine attributes, and so forth, with theology then taking over to treat of the deliveries of revelation. However, as I began my teaching career in the 1970s, analytic philosophy began to spread its net more widely, and indeed one of my own books, The Divine Trinity (1985), could be seen as part of that process of encroachment on theology. Although many theologians regarded the results with suspicion, my own view was that the boundaries between natural and revealed theology were to a great extent artificial in any case, and so such cross-disciplinary fertilization could be immensely fruitful. However, a word of caution needs to be sounded, and that is reflected in this volume, for just as it is implausible to claim that Christian revelation can be understood apart from the wider culture into which it was once delivered and within which it is now set, so philosophers could not assume either an unchanging deposit in the nature of the Christian faith nor that their own discipline was not subject to the possibility of various potential distortions of Christianity as a result of the more common contexts in which it was deployed. There is not the space to develop such themes here; a few examples must suffice. As I indicate in the essays on Scripture, there is a worrying tendency for analytic philosophers to assume a simplicity to the text that in my view cannot be sustained, and that in turn leads them to deploy understandings of the incarnation that are no longer historically defensible. Then, on the question of potential distortions from the discipline itself, I would cite the desire for clear-cut arguments that dispense with the complexities of figurative language, including the full richness of metaphor and analogy. This is not to deny the presence of excellent books on such subjects,¹ but it is to suggest that the full implications are seldom drawn, as I attempt to indicate here when writing in detail about the atonement and en passant on the Trinity. It is surely after all no accident that theologians have invariably opted to express their ideas about the human condition in the language of continental philosophy, and not in that deriving from the English tradition. Phenomenology and existentialism, and even deconstructionism, offered avenues of exploration and questioning that were less readily available within analytic philosophy.²

More immediately, some of these points can be observed in the three chapters that follow in this Part. Thus in the first chapter, ‘Why a World at All?’, answers from both philosophy and theology are considered but in a way that takes very seriously the fact that ‘creates’ is itself a metaphor. Much twentieth-century theology rightly sought to make us more aware of the subtleties of the image of God as Father and its potential dangers. Yet even as deep a thinker as Karl Barth could go badly wrong, and so it is important to recognize that while the qualification ‘ex nihilo’ (‘out of nothing’) protects the term from any suggestion of the use of antecedently existing material – which many (including myself) would see as fundamental to what we mean by God: the source of all that is, itself, dependent on nothing (technically known as divine aseity) – there are deeper questions that also need to be faced.³ ‘Create’ after all remains very much an anthropomorphic image, suggesting the need for decision, application, and effort, none of which can be made to yield sense in relation to an almighty or omnipotent deity. More pertinent is the way the image suggests some interest in what emerges, some connection with what is created, as is true in every human act of creativity. It is the nature of that interest that is pursued in the first of the chapters that follow, in which the legitimacy of the question is accepted at the same time as the constraints imposed by aseity.

God as Creator is such a fundamental article of the Creeds and of Christian doctrine that it is all too easy to suppose the implications of the term self-evident and as such necessarily in conflict with alternative ways of expressing the divine’s relation to the world. In pursuing that question in the next chapter, ‘Creation and its Alternatives’, it is noted how many of the apparently different approaches depicting that relation are not necessarily as far apart as is usually supposed, at least once they too are also seen to involve metaphors. Thus with terms such as emanation, pantheism, panentheism, and transcendence it is more a matter of how precisely these images are applied rather than their basic meaning as such which will determine how distant or close particular conceptions or interpretations are to the orthodoxies of Christian doctrine. So, for example, in practice some versions of pantheism do succeed in retaining a strong sense of divine independence from the world (contrast Stoicism and Process Theology),⁴ while to use the metaphor of all things flowing out of God as in emanation need not necessarily lead either to an exaggerated sense of the divine character of the world nor to a turning away from divine transcendence (witness Neo-Platonism).⁵ Although I have most to say about how these terms have been used in the western tradition, it is worth noting that greater conceptual clarity on such matters could have important implications for inter-faith dialogue and perhaps also allow greater flexibility in the re-conceptualization of the divine relation to the world within Christianity itself.

Then, in the final chapter, I turn to the problem of evil in the world, or theodicy, as it is sometimes more technically known. Here, my aim was to integrate philosophical and theological considerations, as well as their location in historical context. My suggestion is that the typical philosopher and theologian of the present day are alike both wrong: the theologian in denying that there is any fundamental logical challenge that needs to be answered; the philosopher in supposing that answering that challenge can ever constitute a complete response in itself. The term ‘solution’ is not, therefore, wrong on the lips of the philosopher, but its limited applicability must be acknowledged. Equally, the theologian must avoid appearing to suggest that an adequate response lies solely in the cross of Christ. Rather, such an appeal can only be seen to be of help if it is allowed to work indirectly through being brought alongside other cases of suffering, to illumine how God as creator and Saviour responds to issues of the quantity of suffering and the unique particularity of each individual.

Notes

1Janet Martin Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985) has rightly acquired a definitive place in reading on the topic, while Martha Nussbaum through several books, including Love’s Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) has done much to broaden analytic philosophy’s horizons.

2For a much-praised example of the use of deconstructionism, see Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

3In Credo the meaning of Father is virtually identified with power: (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1964), 19–27, esp. 19, 22. So it comes as no surprise that in the Church Dogmatics creation and fatherhood are seen as a single revelation: (Edinburgh: T & T, Clark, 1975), I/1, 390–391. But what such footwork ignores is that both terms have a range of antecedent meanings. Thus, so far from escaping natural theology, all Barth is in effect doing is accepting one cultural understanding of ‘father’ to which questions of power are central over against other meanings that in more recent times have assumed greater prominence, for example love.

4Although Process Theologians in general identify the divine with the mental aspect of the world, it is an aspect that is profoundly affected by the material. Indeed, that vision of interaction and interdependency is often viewed as one of Process Theology’s great strengths. While by contrast there is within Stoicism no element that is not material, the divine creative Fire (or the later Spirit of Chrysippus) is portrayed as inherently directive rather than dependent or interdependent on other forms of matter. See further M. Lapidge, ‘Stoic Cosmology’, in The Stoics, ed. John M. Rist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 161–185.

5Although some contemporary commentators such as Lloyd Gerson want to downplay the importance of Plotinus’s mystical experiences, the more common view remains that, while asserting divine immanence in the world, it is experience of the One as transcendent to that world which brings us closest to understanding the nature of divinity. See Lloyd P. Gerson, Plotinus (London: Routledge, 1994), 218–224; for a contrary view, A. Hilary Armstrong, ‘The Apprehension of Divinity in the Self and Cosmos in Plotinus’, Plotinian and Christian Studies, ed. A. Hilary Armstrong (London: Variorum Reprints, 1979), XVIII, 187–198.

1Why a World at All?

Though my title may suggest yet another re-run of the cosmological argument, what I want to consider in this chapter is the reasons that have been adduced within the Christian tradition for God creating the world, and their relative plausibility. Five principal categories may be distinguished, and so we shall examine each of these in turn. These five are: (i) a biblically or experientially based argument that it is inappropriate to look for a reason; (ii) the suggestion that it is to be found in an act of pure divine will; (iii) that it is a matter of divine need, for instance a need for, or to give, love; (iv) that it is part of the meaning of divine goodness, and (v) an aesthetic variant, that creativity is natural to God. I shall argue that the last two present the least difficulties. None the less, it is instructive to consider, if only to reject, the earlier possibilities because of what they tell us about the nature of theological argumentation.

Reasons as Inappropriate

First then, the argument that it is wrong to seek for such a reason. Both Schleiermacher and Barth take such a view, but for very different motives. For Schleiermacher theology has no proper basis other than in experience and so to ask a question about God that steps beyond our experience is to violate the Kantian limits to our knowledge: it is to ask a transcendental question that in the nature of the case can have no answer. Indeed that is why for Schleiermacher the heart of the doctrine is not some original act of creation of which we can have no knowledge, but the experiential certainty of our preservation and that of the world in existence at this and every particular moment of our lives, our feeling of absolute dependence for our existence on something other than ourselves.¹

By contrast, Barth seeks to justify his own rejection of this search for an ultimate reason, not in the limits of experience but on the alleged constraints he finds in the biblical witness. For him covenant is the central biblical category and creation is only to be interpreted in its light. While unlike Schleiermacher he thinks that this allows him to pronounce at length on the subject of creation (much space is devoted to the doctrine in his Church Dogmatics),² he remains adamant that all this is to be inferred from the covenant and that nothing can be said apart from that context. Thus, when in the following quotation Barth speaks of the creation being for our benefit one should not think of him as giving God’s ultimate reason but only the reason to be inferred from t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Editor’s Introduction
• Part I The Created Order
• Part II Experience and Revelation
• Part III Incarnation, Trinity, and Redemption
• Part IV Heaven and our Communal Destiny
• Index