Christian Philosophy: Conceptions, Continuations, and Challenges 2018950872, 9780198834106

Table of contents :
Cover
Christian Philosophy: Conceptions, Continuations, and Challenges
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword
WORKS CITED
Acknowledgments
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Why This? Why Now?
WHY THIS BOOK?
SO, WHY ANOTHER VOLUME ON CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY?
ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES?
ON THE ORIGINS AND AIMS OF THIS VOLUME
WORKS CITED
Part I: Conceptions
1: Advice to Christian Philosophers
INTRODUCTION
THEISM AND VERIFIABILITY
THEISM AND THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE
THEISM AND PERSONS
WORKS CITED
2: “Christian Philosophy”: Hermeneutic or Heuristic?
WORKS CITED
3: Christian Philosophy and the Christian Life
AUTONOMY AND ARTICULACY
INARTICULATE AUTONOMY
CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY AS A WAY OF LIFE
WORKS CITED
4: Taking Plantinga Seriously: Advice to Christian Philosophers
WORKS CITED
5: The Two-Fold Task of Christian Philosophy of Religion
INTRODUCTION
PHILOSOPHY AS A WAY OF LIFE
APR AND CPR ON THAUMAZEIN
APR AND CPR ON THE TWO-FOLD TASK
WORKS CITED
6: Christian Phenomenology
WORKS CITED
Part II: Continuations
7: On Divine Dedication: Philosophical Theology with Jeremy Taylor
DEDICATIONS AND DEDICATORY GOODS
DEDICATIONS IN THE CONTEXT OF THE DIVINE
TEMPORAL AND ETERNAL GOODS
WORKS CITED
8: Discerning the Spirit: The Task of Christian Philosophy
DEFINING “SPIRIT”
A SPIRIT-UAL ANTHROPOLOGY
DISCERNING THE “SPIRITS OF THE AGE”
THE CULTURAL VALUE OF PHILOSOPHY
CONCLUSION
WORKS CITED
9: Christian Philosophy and Disability Advocacy
BIOGRAPHICAL BACKSTORY
NORMATIVITY
SITUATED
DEVELOPMENTAL
COMMUNAL
CONCLUSION
WORKS CITED
10: Teaching Evil
EASY QUESTIONS WITH TOUGH ANSWERS
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL AS A DIALECTICAL MISMATCH?
METHODISM AND PARTICULARISM IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
PARTICULARISM AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
ON PROFESSING WHILE BEING A PROFESSOR
WORKS CITED
11: Advice for Analytic Theologians: Faith-Guided Scholarship
INTRODUCTION
ADVICE #1: DON’T WORRY ABOUT WHAT ANALYTIC THEOLOGY IS, JUST DO IT
ADVICE #2: DON’T BE INTIMIDATED BY BULLIES
ADVICE #3: DO ANALYTIC THEOLOGY WHEREVER YOU ARE
ADVICE #4: STAY CURRENT
ADVICE #5: STAY SHARP
ADVICE #6: AVOID FADS (MOSTLY)
ADVICE #7: KNOW YOUR HISTORY
ADVICE #8: THICKEN IT UP
CONCLUSION
WORKS CITED
Part III: Challenges
12: The Strategies of Christian Philosophy
THE SITUATION AND STABILITY OF CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY
THE STRATEGIES OF CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY
WORKS CITED
13: Christian Philosophy and Christ Crucified: Fragmentary Theory in Scandalous Power
INTRODUCTION
CHRIST IN CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY
PAUL’S PERSONALISM
SCANDALOUS EVIDENCE
APPROPRIATING SCANDALOUS EVIDENCE
CONTRA RESURRECTIONITIS
WHITHER CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY?
WORKS CITED
14: Is Plantinga-Style Christian Philosophy Really Philosophy?
REFORMED CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY
THE COMMUNAL CONDITION
CONSEQUENCES OF THE COMMUNAL CONDITION
WHY “REFORMED CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY” IS NOT PHILOSOPHY
OTHER OBJECTIONS TO THE ARGUMENT
IS PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION A SPECIAL CASE?
THEOLOGY, NOT PHILOSOPHY
WHY IT MATTERS
WORKS CITED
15: Philosophy, Religion, and Worldview
THE TRIUMPHALIST NARRATIVE
SOME RELEVANT DATA
THE CORRELATIVE ADVICE
CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY
WORKS CITED
16: Beyond Two-Valued Logics: A Jewish Philosopher’s Take on Recent Trends in Christian Philosophy
WARMING UP
APPLICATIONS
Conventional Discourse, “Language Orthodoxy”
Exceptions within Everyday Conventions, for example, Conversational Implicature
When Two Valued-Models No Longer Apply within the Everyday
References to the Future: The Sea Fight Tomorrow and Beyond
Prayer and Poetry
Various Degrees of Socio-Linguistic Interruption, Break-Down, Change, and Repair
MULTIVALUED MODELS
Quantum Mechanics: Implications for Logic
Quantum Measurement: “Black Body” Radiation and the Photoelectric Effect
Wave–Particle Duality
What Lessons to Draw from Quantum Logic?
BEYOND TWO-VALUED LOGIC: IMPLICATIONS FOR CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY
APPENDIX: MULTIVALUED SEMIOTIC MODELS OF INTER-ABRAHAMIC SCRIPTURAL REASONING
WORKS CITED
17: Responding to Challenges
RESPONSE TO OCHS
THE SURGE
RESPONSE TO OPPY
RESPONSE TO SCHELLENBERG
RESPONSE TO MOSER
RESPONSE TO SIMMONS
SUMMATION
WORKS CITED
Index

Citation preview

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CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY

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Christian Philosophy Conceptions, Continuations, and Challenges

Edited by

J. A A R O N S I M M O N S

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2019 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2019 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2018950872 ISBN 978–0–19–883410–6 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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In memory of David Kangas

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Foreword Nicholas Wolterstorff When one speaks of philosophy one might have either of two quite different things in mind: one might have in mind the social practice of philosophy, or one might have in mind the thought and texts produced by those who engage in that practice. So, too, when one speaks specifically of Christian philosophy one might have in mind either a certain social practice or the thought and texts produced by those who engage in that practice. When reflecting on Christian philosophy, I think it is best to begin with the practice. What is that practice? It’s the practice of Christian philosophy, of course. But to describe it thus can easily prove misleading, misleading in the same way that it can prove misleading to speak of the practice of naturalist philosophy. Christians and naturalists engage together in the shared practice of philosophy. Some of those who are Christians do so as Christians, qua Christians; some of those who are naturalists, probably most, do so as naturalists, qua naturalists. To engage in the social practice of Christian philosophy is to engage in the shared social practice of philosophy as a Christian. What is it to engage in the shared social practice of philosophy as a Christian? The answer one gives to that question depends, in good measure, on how one understands Christianity. Some writers on these matters understand Christianity to be a certain worldview; they think of it as belonging to the same genus as, for example, Kantianism and contemporary naturalism. To be a Christian is to embrace a Christian worldview. On this understanding, to engage in the shared social practice of philosophy as a Christian is to allow the Christian worldview to contribute to shaping, in one way or another, one’s practice of the discipline. To my mind this is much too intellectualistic a way of thinking of Christianity. I think of it as do Kyla Ebels-Duggan and Bruce Ellis Benson in their essays in this collection, namely, as a way of life of a certain sort; to be a Christian is to be committed to a Christian way of life. It’s more like ancient Stoicism than like contemporary naturalism. There is, of course, enormous variation among discernibly Christian ways of life; so, let me speak of what I see as typical. A Christian way of life typically does include a Christian worldview. But ordinarily, it includes a good deal more. It includes certain views as to what has transpired in history. It includes participation in certain practices—such as worship—and convictions as to the importance of such participation. It includes particular moral commitments. It includes specific judgments as to what is good and what is not good, what

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is more important and what is less important. It includes certain virtues. It includes regarding some texts as canonical and authoritative. It includes what can best be described as key sensibilities. On this understanding of Christianity, to engage in the shared social practice of philosophy as a Christian is to allow one’s Christian way of life to contribute to shaping, in one way or another, one’s participation in the discipline. Importantly, I say, “contribute to shaping.” A philosopher’s commitment to a Christian way of life is by no means the only thing that shapes her participation in the discipline of philosophy. Questions being raised and claims being made by other philosophers contribute to shaping her mode of participation, issues arising in the culture contribute, developments in science contribute, etc. At some points the shaping by her commitment to a Christian way of life may be minimal, or even non-existent. Sometimes her Christian way of life will lead her to discuss topics of interest to Christians and nonChristians alike. Sometimes it will lead her to discuss topics of interest mainly to her fellow Christians; for example, philosophical reflections on the Trinity. There is a long and venerable tradition of Christian philosophizing, so understood. Aquinas is an example of such an approach. Aquinas drew the distinction between philosophy and theology more sharply than anyone before him. Philosophy, he said, appeals solely to the deliverances of the senses and “natural reason”; theology appeals, in addition, to the deliverances of revelation. By this criterion, Aquinas’s two summae, Summa contra gentiles and Summa theologiae are clearly works of theology. Within them, however, there are extensive passages that, by his criterion, are philosophy rather than theology—for example, the opening discussion in both summae concerning the existence and nature of God. But though Aquinas does not, in these opening discussions, appeal to the deliverances of revelation, his choice of questions to address and of texts to engage clearly indicate that he was engaging in philosophy as a Christian. The history of modern philosophy is customarily taught as if the tradition of Christian philosophizing ended with Descartes and Malebranche. But not so. When one looks, for example, at John Locke’s work as a whole and not just at selected passages that are of interest to present-day philosophers, it becomes clear that Locke engaged in philosophy as a Christian.¹ By the mid-twentieth century the tradition of Christian philosophizing was moribund, both in the analytic tradition and in the continental. The popularity of logical positivism in the analytic tradition was certainly one cause of the near-death of the tradition. But positivism proved to be a flash-in-the-pan. I judge that the principal causes of its near-death were the ¹ See my contribution to The Persistence of the Sacred in Modern Thought (Wolterstorff 2012). Other essays in that collection make clear the persistence of Christian philosophizing in other early modern philosophers.

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prominence in the modern and contemporary period of evidentialism concerning religious beliefs, and the prominence of a certain view as to how philosophy is properly practiced. Evidentialism concerning religious belief is the thesis that one is entitled to hold some religious belief only if one holds it on the basis of proper propositional evidence. All by itself that doesn’t say much; one has to be told what constitutes proper propositional evidence. John Locke, who has title to being regarded as the father of modern-day evidentialism, was of the view that proper propositional evidence consists of propositions that are certain for one. Probably most adherents of evidentialism have worked with a less stringent view of proper evidence than that; but it’s hard to tell, since most writers don’t explain what they take to be proper evidence. Explaining evidentialism was easy. It’s less easy to explain the view as to how philosophy is properly practiced that I judge to have been prominent in the modern and contemporary periods. The core idea is that philosophy, when properly practiced, aims at a certain kind of consensus. Late in The Critique of Pure Reason Kant drew a distinction between what he called revelational theology (theologia revelata) and what he called rational theology (A631/B659). Rational theology, he says, is based “solely upon reason.” Though he does not explain what it is for a theology to be based solely upon reason, from his subsequent identification and description of various forms of theology that he regards as so based, in contrast to those not so based, I think we can make a reliable inference. Theology is based solely upon reason, and is thus rational theology, just in case it is based solely on premises and inferences that all cognitively competent adult human beings would accept if those premises and reasons were presented to them, if they understood them, if they possessed the relevant background information, and if they freely reflected on them at sufficient length. (What constitutes sufficient length is, of course, a nice question.) For the sake of convenience, let me call this sort of rationality, Kant-rationality. Though I have extracted the idea of Kant-rationality from the passage in the Pure Critique in which Kant distinguishes various kinds of theology, it’s obvious that the idea has application to the academic disciplines in general; in particular, it has application to philosophy. A body of philosophical thought, then, possesses Kant-rationality just in case it is based solely on premises and inferences that all cognitively competent adult human beings would accept if those premises and reasons were presented to them, if they understood them, if they possessed the relevant background information, and if they freely reflected on them at sufficient length. I judge that a prominent view among philosophers in the modern and contemporary periods has been that philosophers should aim at Kantrationality in their practice of philosophy, and that this aim is more or less achievable. We should not expect that it will ever be fully achieved; but aiming at it is not like banging one’s head against a wall.

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It’s obvious—no need to argue the point—that the combination of evidentialism concerning religious beliefs with the conviction that philosophers should aim at Kant-rationality places severe strictures on engaging in philosophy as a Christian. It does not make it impossible, however. One’s judgments as to which questions are important to address might still be shaped by one’s Christian way of life. Aquinas’s view as to how philosophy is properly practiced is a variant on the view that philosophers should aim at Kantrationality; and as we saw a few paragraphs back, Aquinas’s Christian convictions clearly did shape his judgments concerning which questions to address. After a period of near-death, suddenly in the 1970s Christian philosophizing began once again to flourish, in part, no doubt, as the result of the attack on evidentialism concerning religious beliefs by the so-called Reformed epistemologists. Alvin Plantinga’s inaugural address of 1983, “Advice to Christian Philosophers,” was a manifesto for this resurgence. The essays in this present volume are reflections on the state of Christian philosophizing after Plantinga’s issuance of his manifesto. Rather than summarizing those reflections, let me briefly offer a few of my own. Plantinga’s address implied the rejection of the ideal of Kant-rationality. He did not identify the ideal as such and subject it to criticism; he simply took for granted that it should be rejected. I share the view that it should be rejected. I think it is an illusion to suppose that Kant-rationality is achievable for any substantial body of philosophical thought; over and over it turns out that philosophers who are fully rational find themselves in deep disagreement. It is my impression that the ideal of Kant-rationality is widely rejected by philosophers nowadays. Of course, it is not rejected by all. I interpret Jürgen Habermas, for example, as continuing to embrace the ideal (see Wolterstorff 2013); and it may be that some of the contributors to this volume continue to embrace it in various ways. But it is not uncommon nowadays for a philosopher to declare openly that he is thinking within the context of a certain worldview that he knows is not shared by all of his fellow philosophers. One enters philosophy as who one is, committed as one is committed, believing what one does believe on matters religious and otherwise. Moreover, one participates in the philosophical dialogue taking place from the basis of those commitments and beliefs. The secular humanist participates as secular humanist, the Jewish person as Jewish, the secular naturalist as secular naturalist, the Christian as Christian. One listens carefully to one’s fellow philosophers who argue that one’s commitments are misguided, one’s beliefs defective, one’s philosophical conclusions mistaken. On some matters, large or small, one may find their arguments cogent; on other matters, large or small, one will not. One then retains the commitments, beliefs, and conclusions one had, perhaps refined by the fuller’s fire through which they have gone. What else is one to do? One can’t just choose no longer to believe what one does believe. And to those fellow philosophers whose commitments

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one finds misguided, whose beliefs one finds defective, whose philosophical conclusions one finds mistaken, one offers them arguments to that effect. One hopes that they will find those arguments compelling. But one expects that often they will not. And so it goes, back and forth. So what does one say to the philosopher who has listened carefully to the arguments and counter-arguments and remains, or becomes, a convinced secular naturalist? What else can one say but to your deepest commitments and convictions be true as you engage in dialogue with your fellow philosophers on philosophical issues? Be a naturalist philosopher. Show the rest of us where naturalist thinking goes. Perhaps something will turn up that we can appropriate in our own way. And what does one say to the philosopher who has listened carefully to the arguments and counter-arguments and remains, or becomes, a convinced Christian? What else can one say but to your deepest commitments and convictions be true as you engage in dialogue with your fellow philosophers on philosophical issues? Be a Christian philosopher. Show those of other persuasions where Christian thinking goes. Perhaps something will turn up that they can appropriate in their own way. If the philosophical enterprise, on this way of thinking of it, does not aim at Kant-rationality, what does it aim at? It aims at what one might call dialogic rationality. Since I have worked this idea out elsewhere (see Wolterstorff 2011), on this occasion I will make no attempt to spell out what that is. One of the contributors to this present volume criticizes Christian analytic philosophers after Plantinga’s manifesto for what he calls their “self-certainty.” It’s not clear to me what he has in mind by this term; but perhaps what he has in mind is that these philosophers are not willing to open themselves up to critique of their Christian orientation. Declaring, to use words attributed to Luther, “Here I stand; I can do no other,” they freely employ their own Christian orientation to criticize other philosophers but are not willing to listen to the critique by others of their orientation. Perhaps there are some present-day Christian philosophers to whom this charge sticks—I’m not sure. But in any case, such a stance is not faithful to the dialogic understanding of the practice of philosophy that I have just now advocated. In true dialogue, each party listens seriously to what other parties say by way of critique of one’s position. A well-known part of Plantinga’s advice to Christian philosophers is that they should set their own agenda rather than allowing others to set their agenda for them. As Plantinga knows, I have never been happy with this advice. When the Christian philosopher engages as a Christian in the shared human practice of philosophy, does he set his own agenda? Yes and No. He will make his own judgments about which issues it is important to address and how to address them; only philosophy grad students and those who are completely cowed do otherwise. But he will make those judgments not only in the light of his Christian way of life but in the light of what is happening in

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the discipline of philosophy generally, what is happening in society, what is happening in other academic disciplines, and so forth. Several contributors to this present volume comment critically on the relatively narrow range of topics discussed by Christian analytic philosophers after Plantinga’s manifesto. I share that criticism. Apart from a good deal of writing about ethics, I would say that the main topics dealt with have been the epistemology of religious belief, the nature of God, the problem of evil, and mystical experience. What strikes me about these four topics is two things. First, they all fall within the subdiscipline of philosophy of religion; apart from ethics, recent Christian philosophy has mainly been Christian philosophy of religion. Remarkably little has been written by way of a Christian approach to politics, by way of a Christian approach to art, and so forth. Second, what strikes me is that these four topics are focused entirely on the epistemic status and content of religious belief and on religious experience. If someone who knew nothing about religion read this literature, she would come away with the impression that, apart from the mystical experiences of a few people, religion consists mainly of believing things about God. That present-day Christian philosophers have chosen these topics for extensive discussion can be explained historically. The epistemology of religious belief was placed on our agenda by John Locke and has remained on our agenda ever since; the religious pluralism of our societies makes the topic inescapable. The nature of God was placed on our agenda by the confrontation of Christianity with ancient Greek and Roman religious thought. The problem of evil goes back into both Jewish and pagan antiquity. And issues raised by mystical and other forms of religious experience go back, I would say, to Schleiermacher and his fellow Romantics. In short, it’s easy to explain why recent Christian philosophy of religion has chosen those four topics for extensive discussion. What I find inexplicable is why it has focused almost exclusively on those four topics. Prominent in the lives of most adherents of most religions, including the lives of most adherents of Christianity, is participation in the liturgies or rituals of one’s religion. Why has recent Christian philosophy of religion paid almost no attention to liturgy? And why, in spite of the centrality of text-interpretation in lived Christianity, has so little been written by analytic philosophers about the reading and interpretation of religious texts? Whatever the cause, there is a serious misfit between lived religion and the preoccupation of analytic philosophers of religion in general, and of Christian analytic philosophers of religion in particular. It is my judgment that enormous strides have been made, since Plantinga issued his manifesto, in philosophical theology and the epistemology of religious belief. My hope for the future of Christian philosophy is that it will break out of its near-myopic preoccupation with ethics and philosophy of

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religion. And my hope for Christian philosophy of religion is that it will break out of its narrow confines and reflect not just on religious belief and experience but on lived religion generally. In particular, it is my hope that there will be a flowering of philosophical reflections on liturgy.

WORKS CITED Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 2011. “Then, Now, and Al.” Faith and Philosophy 28, no. 3: 253–66. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 2012. “God in Locke’s Philosophy.” In The Persistence of the Sacred in Modern Thought. Ed. Chris L. Firestone and Nathan A. Jacobs. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 112–48. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 2013. “An Engagement with Jürgen Habermas on Postmetaphysical Philosophy, Religion, and Political Dialogue.” In Habermas on Religion. Ed. Craig Calhoun, Eduardo Mendieta, and Jonathan van Antwerpen. Malden, MA: Polity Press, pp. 92–111.

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Acknowledgments First and foremost, this volume began due to the work of Stephen Lake and Aron Reppmann, who organized a joint meeting of the Society of Christian Philosophers and the Society of Continental Philosophy and Theology at Trinity Christian College in March 2014. I want to express my deep appreciation to them for their vision for that conference, which eventually led to the possibility of this volume. Let me also say thank you to the individual contributors for being part of this project, to Tom Perridge at Oxford University Press for supporting it, and to the excellent production team that brought it to completion. There are always numerous other people who are also instrumental in the work that goes into a project such as this. So, at risk of leaving out more than I mention, let me say thank you to Brandon Inabinet, Bryan Bibb, David Fink, Kevin Carnahan, Kevin Schilbrack, Mark Stone, Erik Anderson, John Sanders, John Caputo, Terry Cross, Charles Davis, Martin Kavka, David Wood, Jeffrey Tlumak, Robert Talisse, Scott Aikin, Fred Ablondi, Stephen Minister, Drew Dalton, Jeffrey Hanson, Mike Kelly, Brian Harding, Ken Haynes, Christy Flanagan-Feddon, and Brett Land for conversations throughout the years on topics that are considered here. Were it not for their engagement and encouragement, I am sure that my own interest in these debates would not have developed as it has. A very special thank you to Sandi Annone for the tireless support on some of the tasks involved in reprinting previously published essays. Also, Randall Childree has been a tremendous resource and friend through the process and has helped me to track down many of the original sources cited in the volume and advised me on various technical issues that have arisen. As always, I am more deeply indebted than words can say to my wife, Vanessa, and my son, Atticus. I appreciate their patience during my late nights at the office, their understanding when I missed tennis matches and basketball games, and their tireless support in continuing to encourage me to think, write, and speak about things that matter. Finally, I want to express my gratitude to the editors at Faith and Philosophy and Fordham University Press for allowing me to include the following essays, which are reprinted here with permission (the essays have been slightly altered to correct typos in the original publications, update the information for the new volume, and adopt Oxford University Press style guidelines): • Chapter 1—Alvin Plantinga, “Advice to Christian Philosophers”—Originally published in Faith and Philosophy 1, no. 3 (1984): 253–71. This essay was initially delivered November 4, 1983, as Plantinga’s inaugural address

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as the John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. • Chapter 2—Jean-Luc Marion, “Christian Philosophy: Hermeneutic or Heuristic”—English translation as published in Jean-Luc Marion, The Visible and the Revealed, trans. Christina M. Gschwandtner and others (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2008), pp. 66–79, 167–69; original translator of the essay itself is unknown. • Chapter 4—Merold Westphal, “Taking Plantinga Seriously”—Originally published in Faith and Philosophy 16, no. 2 (1999): 173–81. • Chapter 5—Bruce Ellis Benson, “The Two-Fold Task of Christian Philosophy of Religion”—Originally published in Faith and Philosophy 32, no. 5 (2015): 371–90.

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Notes on Contributors

Introduction: Why This? Why Now? J. Aaron Simmons

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PART I. CONCEPTIONS 1. Advice to Christian Philosophers Alvin Plantinga

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2. “Christian Philosophy”: Hermeneutic or Heuristic? Jean-Luc Marion

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3. Christian Philosophy and the Christian Life Kyla Ebels-Duggan

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4. Taking Plantinga Seriously: Advice to Christian Philosophers Merold Westphal

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5. The Two-Fold Task of Christian Philosophy of Religion Bruce Ellis Benson

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6. Christian Phenomenology Kevin Hart

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PART II. CONTINUATIONS 7. On Divine Dedication: Philosophical Theology with Jeremy Taylor Charles Taliaferro

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8. Discerning the Spirit: The Task of Christian Philosophy Neal DeRoo

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9. Christian Philosophy and Disability Advocacy Kevin Timpe

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10. Teaching Evil Meghan Sullivan

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11. Advice for Analytic Theologians: Faith-Guided Scholarship Trent Dougherty

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Contents PART III. CHALLENGES

12. The Strategies of Christian Philosophy J. Aaron Simmons 13. Christian Philosophy and Christ Crucified: Fragmentary Theory in Scandalous Power Paul K. Moser

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14. Is Plantinga-Style Christian Philosophy Really Philosophy? J. L. Schellenberg

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15. Philosophy, Religion, and Worldview Graham Oppy

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16. Beyond Two-Valued Logics: A Jewish Philosopher’s Take on Recent Trends in Christian Philosophy Peter Ochs

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17. Responding to Challenges William Hasker

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Index

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Notes on Contributors Bruce Ellis Benson is Senior Research Fellow, Logos Institute for Analytic and Exegetical Theology, University of St Andrews. He serves as the Executive Director of the Society for Continental Philosophy and Theology. He has been Visiting Professor at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and was Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College. He is the author or editor of twelve books, including The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music (Cambridge University Press), the award-winning Pious Nietzsche: Decadence and Dionysian Faith (Indiana University Press), and (with J. Aaron Simmons) The New Phenomenology: A Philosophical Introduction (Bloomsbury). He has published more than ninety book chapters, articles, and reviews. Neal DeRoo is Canada Research Chair in Phenomenology and Philosophy of Religion at The King’s University in Edmonton, Alberta. He is the author of Futurity in Phenomenology: Promise and Method in Husserl, Levinas and Derrida (Fordham University Press), and has co-edited several books in phenomenology and philosophy of religion, including Phenomenology and Eschatology: Not Yet in the Now (Routledge), Cross and Khora: Deconstruction and Christianity in the work of John D. Caputo (Wipf and Stock), and Merleau-Ponty at the Limits of Art, Religion, and Perception (Bloomsbury). He served previously as the Director of the Andreas Center for Reformed Scholarship and Service and is the Founding Editor of In All Things. Trent Dougherty (Ph.D. Rochester) is Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department and a fellow of the Honors College at Baylor University. He publishes and presents regularly in Epistemology, Philosophy of Religion, and Philosophy of Language. He is the author of The Problem of Animal Pain: A Theodicy for All Creatures Great and Small (Palgrave Macmillan). He is the editor of Evidentialism and Its Discontents (Oxford University Press), the co-editor (with Justin McBrayer) of Skeptical Theism: New Essays (Oxford University Press), and author of numerous essays, reviews, and reference works in his areas including the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and Oxford Bibliographies. He tries to bring non-binary perspectives to all his work. When not writing or on the lecture circuit, he enjoys gravity sports, gardening, and gourmet cooking with his wife and four children. Kyla Ebels-Duggan is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University. She specializes in moral and political philosophy and their history working in a broadly Kantian tradition. She has written on the reason-giving

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authority that one person’s ends or values have for others, both in political contexts and in interpersonal relationships and on moral education, including the implications of our dependence on upbringing for personal responsibility and the appropriate role and limits of the state in forming children’s worldviews. She is working on a book exploring the central role that experiences of value play in grounding our normative commitments. She has held fellowships with the Experience Project funded by the John Templeton Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and Princeton University’s Center for Human Values. Her work has appeared in Ethics, The Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Studies, and Philosophers’ Imprint. Ebels-Duggan received her BA from the University of Michigan in 1998 and her Ph.D. from Harvard in 2007. Kevin Hart holds the Edwin B. Kyle Chair of Christian Thought in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia where he also holds Courtesy Professorships in the Departments of English and French. His most recent publications include Kingdoms of God (Indiana University Press) and Poetry and Revelation: For a Phenomenology of Religious Poetry (Bloomsbury). He is the editor of The Essential Writings of Jean-Luc Marion (Fordham University Press). His poetry is collected in Wild Track: New and Selected Poems (Notre Dame University Press) and Barefoot (Notre Dame University Press). William Hasker is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Huntington University, where he taught from 1966 until 2000. He was the editor of Christian Scholar’s Review from 1985 to 1994, and the editor of Faith and Philosophy from 2000 until 2007. He has contributed numerous articles to journals and reference works, and is the author of Metaphysics (InterVarsity), God, Time, and Knowledge (Cornell University Press), The Emergent Self (Cornell University Press), Providence, Evil, and the Openness of God (Routledge), The Triumph of God Over Evil (InterVarsity), and Metaphysics and the Tri-Personal God (Oxford University Press). Jean-Luc Marion is Professor Emeritus at Université Paris-IV (Sorbonne) and the Greeley Professor of Catholic Studies and Professor of the Philosophy of Religions and Theology at The University of Chicago. He works primarily in the history of modern philosophy and contemporary phenomenology. Among his numerous books are God without Being (University of Chicago Press), Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology (Northwestern University Press), Prolegomena to Charity (Fordham University Press), The Crossing of the Visible (Stanford University Press), On the Ego and God (Fordham University Press), The Visible and the Revealed (Fordham University Press), Negative Certainties (University of Chicago Press), and Givenness and Revelation (Oxford University Press).

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Paul K. Moser is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. He is the author of The God Relationship (Cambridge University Press), The Severity of God (Cambridge University Press), The Evidence for God (Darton, Longman and Todd), The Elusive God (Cambridge University Press), Philosophy after Objectivity (Oxford University Press), and Knowledge and Evidence (Cambridge University Press). He is co-author of Theory of Knowledge (Oxford University Press), and editor of Jesus and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press), The Oxford Handbook of Epistemology (Oxford University Press), and A Priori Knowledge (Oxford University Press). He is co-editor of Human Knowledge, 3rd Ed. (Oxford University Press), and The Testimony of the Spirit (Oxford University Press), among other books. He has published articles on religious epistemology in such journals as Religious Studies and The Expository Times, and he is past Editor of the American Philosophical Quarterly. Peter Ochs is Edgar Bronfman Professor of Modern Judaic Studies at the University of Virginia, where he directs the UVA Research Initiative on Religion, Politics, and Conflict. Ochs co-founded the Society for Textual Reasoning and The Society for Scriptural Reasoning; and is a senior editor of the Stanford University Press book series “Encountering Traditions.” Among his publications are 200 essays in the areas of Jewish philosophy and theology, pragmatism and semiotics, the logic of Scripture, religion and conflict, comparative Abrahamic scriptural traditions, and Jewish-Christian theological dialogue. Among his books are Religion Without Violence: Teaching and Learning Scriptural Reasoning (in press), Another Reformation: Postliberal Christianity and the Jews (Brazos), The Free Church and Israel’s Covenant (Mennonite Press), Wording a Radiance: Parting Conversations on God and the Church by Daniel Hardy with D. H. Ford, P. Ochs, and D. Ford (SCM), Breaking the Tablets: Jewish Theology After Shoah, by David Halivni with P. Ochs (Rowman & Littlefield), Peirce, Pragmatism and the Logic of Scripture (Cambridge University Press), and Reasoning after Revelation: Dialogues in Postmodern Jewish Philosophy with R. Gibbs and S. Kepnes (Westview). He is the editor or co-editor of The Return to Scripture in Judaism and Christianity (Paulist), Understanding the Rabbinic Mind (Scholar’s Press), Christianity in Jewish Terms (Westview), and Textual Reasonings: Jewish Philosophy and Text Study (Eerdmans). Graham Oppy is Professor of Philosophy at Monash University. His authored books in philosophy of religion include Ontological Arguments and Belief in God (Cambridge University Press), Arguing about Gods (Cambridge University Press), Philosophical Perspectives on Infinity (Cambridge University Press), Reading Philosophy of Religion (Blackwell, with Michael Scott), The

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Best Argument against God (Palgrave Macmillan), Reinventing Philosophy of Religion (Palgrave Macmillan), and Describing Gods (Cambridge University Press). His edited books in philosophy of religion include The History of Western Philosophy of Religion (Acumen and Oxford University Press, with Nick Trakakis), and Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion (Routledge). Forthcoming authored works include: Naturalism and Religion (Routledge), Atheism and Agnosticism (Cambridge University Press), and Atheism: The Basics (Routledge). Forthcoming edited works include: InterReligious Philosophical Dialogues (Routledge, co-edited with Nick Trakakis), Ontological Arguments (Cambridge University Press), and Companion to Atheism and Philosophy (Routledge). Alvin Plantinga is John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame. Among his many books are God and Other Minds (Cornell University Press), The Nature of Necessity (Oxford University Press), Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford University Press), Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Oxford University Press), and Knowledge and Christian Belief (Eerdmans). He is also a 2017 Templeton Prize Laureate. J. L. Schellenberg is Professor of Philosophy at Mount Saint Vincent University and Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Graduate Studies at Dalhousie University. Published in 1993, his Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (Cornell University Press) introduced a new argument for atheism and started a debate that continues. In 2015 Oxford University Press published a shorter book by Schellenberg about the debate called The Hiddenness Argument: Philosophy’s New Challenge to Belief in God. But most of Schellenberg’s research goes beyond theism/atheism discussions and into more fundamental investigations in philosophy of religion. The main result is a set of three books that make a trilogy: Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Religion, The Wisdom to Doubt: A Justification of Religious Skepticism, and The Will to Imagine: A Justification of Skeptical Religion, all published by Cornell University Press. A recent short book from Oxford University Press, Evolutionary Religion, aims to make the ideas of the trilogy easily accessible for a general audience, placing them into an evolutionary framework. J. Aaron Simmons is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Furman University. Working primarily in philosophy of religion and political philosophy, Simmons has published widely on issues concerning phenomenology, existentialism, religious existence, and democratic society. Simmons is the author of God and the Other: Ethics and Politics After the Theological Turn (Indiana University Press), co-author (with Bruce Ellis Benson) of The New Phenomenology: A Philosophical Introduction (Bloomsbury), and co-editor of Kierkegaard’s God and the Good Life (Indiana University Press; with Michael Strawser and

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Stephen Minister), Contemporary Debates in Negative Theology and Philosophy (Palgrave Macmillan; with Nahum Brown), Phenomenology for the TwentyFirst Century (Palgrave Macmillan; with J. Edward Hackett), Reexamining Deconstruction and Determinate Religion (Duquesne University Press; with Stephen Minister), and Kierkegaard and Levinas: Ethics, Politics, and Religion (Indiana University Press; with David Wood). Meghan Sullivan is the O’Brien Collegiate Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame and the Director of the University Philosophy Requirement. She teaches courses at all levels, including large introductory courses in philosophy of religion and ethics and specialized graduate seminars on metaphysics, philosophical logic, and rationality. Sullivan’s research tends to focus on philosophical problems concerning time, modality, rational planning, and religious belief (but rarely all four at once). Sullivan is the author of Time Biases (Oxford University Press) and has published work in many of the leading generalist philosophy journals, including Noûs, Ethics, and Philosophical Studies. Charles Taliaferro is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. He is the author or editor of over twenty-five books, one of the latest being The Image in Mind: Theism, Naturalism, and the Imagination co-authored with Jil Evans (Continuum). He is the Editor-in-chief of Open Theology, and serves on the editorial boards of Religious Studies, Philosophy Compass, and Sophia. Kevin Timpe presently holds the William Harry Jellema Chair in Christian Philosophy at Calvin College, and is a former Templeton Research Fellow at St Peter’s College, Oxford University. His research focuses primarily on the metaphysics of agency, virtue ethics, philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of disability. He is the author of Free Will in Philosophical Theology (Bloomsbury) and Free Will: Sourcehood and Its Alternatives, 2nd Ed. (Bloomsbury). He has edited a number of volumes, including The Routledge Companion to Free Will (Routledge), Virtues and their Vices (Oxford University Press), and Free Will and Theism: Connections, Contingencies, and Concerns (Oxford University Press). He has published articles in The Journal of Ethics, Philosophical Studies, American Philosophical Quarterly, Res Philosophica, Religious Studies, and Faith and Philosophy. Merold Westphal is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Fordham University. His bachelor’s degree is from Wheaton (Illinois) and his doctorate from Yale. He has held regular appointments at Yale University, Hope College, and Fordham University, with visiting positions at Juniata, Loyola (Maryland), Villanova, Fuller Seminary, and Harvard Divinity School. He has served as President of the Hegel Society of America and the Søren Kierkegaard Society, and as Executive Co-Director of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP). He has lectured widely

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in the United States and Europe as well as in China and Brazil. He is editor of the Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion. He has authored thirteen books as well as scores of articles and book chapters. His most recent books are Kierkegaard’s Concept of Faith (Eerdmans) and In Praise of Heteronomy: Making Room for Revelation (Indiana University Press). Nicholas Wolterstorff is Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology at Yale University, Senior Research Fellow in the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, and Honorary Professor of Australian Catholic University. He graduated from Calvin College in 1953 and received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University in 1956. He taught philosophy at Calvin College from 1959 to 1989, and then joined the faculty of Yale Divinity School, with adjunct appointments in the Yale philosophy department and religious studies department. He retired at the end of 2001. During leaves of absence he has taught at the Free University of Amsterdam, Princeton University, and the University of Notre Dame. He has been President of the American Philosophical Association (Central Division) and President of the Society of Christian Philosophers. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among the named lectures he has given are the Wilde Lectures at Oxford, the Gifford Lectures at St Andrews, and the Taylor Lectures at Yale. His publications include Art in Action (Eerdmans), Lament for a Son (Eerdmans), Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton University Press), Justice in Love (Eerdmans), Journey toward Justice (Baker), The God We Worship (Eerdmans), Art Rethought (Oxford University Press), and Acting Liturgically (Oxford University Press).

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Introduction Why This? Why Now? J. Aaron Simmons

W H Y T H I S BOOK? Although it might seem that the topic of Christian philosophy should only be of interest to Christian philosophers, or alternatively perhaps to atheist philosophers who are intent on showing the falsity of the beliefs affirmed within the Christian tradition, this is far from the case. When understood as raising a variety of important meta-philosophical questions, the topic of Christian philosophy presents much more than an in-group debate among those who find themselves within the same religious or philosophical “family,” as it were. Instead, the very idea of Christian philosophy requires us to reflect both on the nature of philosophizing itself as a human practice and also on the epistemic ramifications of the evidential commitments allowed to operate therein. The notion of Christian philosophy is simply one instance of a wide variety of different types of philosophies that could be presented for our consideration: Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, etc. Moreover, and this is important, the possibilities for such determinate philosophies reach far beyond frameworks that have traditionally been termed “religious.” It is common to find discussions of different geographic contexts in relation to philosophical discourse: Irish philosophy, American philosophy, Australian philosophy, Chinese philosophy, etc. Additionally, we often see labels referring to particular belief commitments attending to one’s identity: Feminist philosophy, African American philosophy, Queer theory, etc. And we could take things even further in a variety of directions. For example, as someone who was born and raised in the American Southeast, I have long wondered about the possibility of “Southern philosophy,” or as a fan of the Florida State University Seminoles, what about “FSU Lovers Philosophy”?

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Before rejecting such ideas out of hand as a ridiculous overreach, consider that in relation to the last suggestion, in particular, scholars of religion have frequently offered collegiate sports (especially football in the American South) as a possible contender for what might be viewed as counting as a “religion” in many of the respects usually offered as definitive of the category. The point is that asking into any sort of determinate adjectivally constructed philosophical discourse requires us to take stands on what sorts of descriptors are or are not appropriate modifiers of something generally termed “philosophy.” Drawing on Jacques Maritain, we might say that “ . . . we must distinguish between the nature of philosophy, or what it is in itself, and the state in which it exists in real fact, historically, in the human subject, and which pertains to its concrete conditions of existence and exercise” (Maritain 1955, pp. 11–12). Although I would take issue with the disciplinary essentialism that Maritain seems to encourage, his idea that philosophy is the underlying category being described, such that “Christian,” or “Jewish,” or “Analytic,” or “Southern,” etc., would be different historical “states” in which this category can be/has been deployed as an historical project, is a helpful framework for our discussion here. What makes this consideration of the appropriate contours of philosophical discourse so difficult is that it often depends on prior conceptual demarcations that are, themselves, at stake and yet at use in the very discussion. In other words, what counts as philosophy’s “nature” is itself precisely something that has already been articulated by some prior adjectivally demarcated community. So, even though it seems that “Christian philosophy” is immediately more plausible than “FSU Lovers philosophy,” it is not obvious why this is the case. Indeed, both would be defined by an historical community that consists of determinate commitments (“God loves me”; “FSU is better than Alabama”), by propositional beliefs (“Jesus died for our sins”; “Bobby Bowden is the best coach in history”), by enacted rituals (liturgical practice or the understanding of sacraments; the “chop” or Chief Osceola and Renegade dropping the spear at midfield), and by insider vocabularies (“In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit”; “The Choke in Doak” or “Wide Right”). One might object at this point that, especially in light of Maritain’s distinction, the key difference is not so much a matter of content, but of history. In this way, FSU Lovers philosophy might be like Alvin Plantinga’s (1998, pp. 149–52; see Chapter 1 of the present volume) example of “The Great Pumpkin” such that the lack of an historical community committed deeply enough to the idea to turn it into a philosophical subcategory is why it gains no traction in our current context. Perhaps. But, if this is right, then are we really willing, in principle, to allow that there are no constraints on philosophical methodology, assumptions, and collective identity? Even if there is no extrasocial essence to philosophy’s “nature,” that doesn’t entail that philosophy can mean just whatever one wants it to mean. As Jacques Derrida indicates at various points in his authorship, being invested in the debate about what

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counts as philosophy is probably one of the best indicators of one’s being a philosopher. That said, are we really prepared to admit of an equivalency between Christian philosophy and Toyota Truck Drivers philosophy, say? Or, should we draw a line of legitimacy between Chinese philosophy and Metalhead philosophy, for example? As a Toyota truck driver, a lover of extreme heavy metal, and also a professional philosopher, I might fit into these unlikely groups and yet such ideas give me significant pause. But why? Would simply being a philosopher who also loves FSU make me, by default, a practitioner of FSU Lovers philosophy in the way that some have suggested that Christian philosophy is not a distinct sort of philosophy, but more a recognition of a distinctive characteristic of the philosophers doing it? Otherwise asked, would any philosopher who drives a Toyota truck and is a metalhead foster immediate identities in these other groups? Even if that were the case, we would immediately face problems of ranking our own self-identifications. Consider, here, that Plantinga (1998) suggests that Christianity, and a Christian’s loyalty to the Christian community, should take precedence over other options, in particular one’s loyalty to the “secular” philosophical community. Despite his account on this front, though, there are good reasons not to be immediately convinced he is right about this. Namely, if I self-select to allow my being a metalhead or a truck driver to be maximally definitive of how I self-identify, then are there really no necessary conditions to be articulated regarding the philosophical import of such orientations? We must ask, again, then, can just anything count as a reasonable subcategory of philosophical discourse? Should any assumption whatsoever be allowed as an acceptable premise so long as there are enough other folks to agree with you? Someone like Richard Rorty might provide good reasons to think that perhaps such community definition is the right way to go, but specifying the rationale for why or why not, and the conditions under which some sort of threshold could be articulated is not clear cut. Indeed, lines might be needed not in order to exclude others from participation in one’s own philosophical community, but to foster coherence in the philosophical community, as such. Whether siding with Rorty or not, if we return to Maritain’s distinction between nature and state, we can still rightly admit that regardless of the adjectival descriptor, and irrespective of the social implications of such descriptors, the primary thing that unites all such possibilities for philosophical categorization is that they are all presenting themselves as instances of philosophy. Maybe I am overstating the complexity of such issues, however. One could rightly point out that, importantly, not all adjectival descriptions are indicators of the same sort of community allegiance. Surely being a metalhead and being a Christian are not the same sort of existential identity markers—regardless of the degree to which one identifies with them. Alternatively, identifying as a

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particular gender or as from a distinct nationality, say, and identifying as an FSU lover don’t seem to involve the same sort of ideological framework and certainly don’t all face the same sort of social ramifications. So, am I guilty of an equivocation here? Well, if so, then it could be due to the suggestion that “religious” philosophies are distinct, and perhaps legitimate, in ways these other examples are not, precisely because “religion” is rightly considered as singularly different from other sorts of cultural beliefs, identities, and practices. Yet, were philosophers more often to read work occurring in critical theory of religion, for example, the assumption that the category of “religion” is stable enough to allow for such easy demarcation would likely be quickly challenged. Scholars such as Jonathan Z. Smith (1982, 2004), Russell McCutcheon (1997, 2003), Timothy Fitzgerald (2000), and Tomoko Masuzawa (2005), just to name a few, have all offered important critiques of the very idea that the category of “religion” is a helpful social designator for discrete phenomena. Alternatively, even for those who do think that the category of “religion” does important scholarly work as a social marker within broadly “realist” frameworks, as I am inclined to do (see Simmons 2018), the specific way of conceiving that category so that such critical work could be done remains a matter of substantive debate (see Schilbrack 2014). I readily admit that we are not going to settle these definitional issues regarding “religion” here, and the success of this volume does not hang on being able to do so. Nonetheless, it is sensible to try to distinguish between philosophies that are organized around different methodologies—e.g., process, phenomenological, existential, feminist, queer theoretical, logical positivist, etc.—and those that are defined by prior evidential authorities (such as the Church, Revelation, or sacred texts) as seems to be the case with many “religious” approaches. And yet, despite being a reasonable, and perhaps necessary, way to understand things, it also appears to be the case that some of what distinguishes these various methodologies is a disagreement about what deeply held assumptions get to count as immediately authoritatively/ evidentially legitimate within a broader community of inquiry (e.g., what sorts of experience, what voices, what perspectives, what sorts of understandings of what counts as good, just, legitimate, etc., are already operative within such spaces). In this way, Merold Westphal (2009) rightly presents the questions “Whose community? Which interpretation?” as crucial not only for figuring out how to move forward in conversation with others, but also for finding out where it is that we already are ourselves. That said, I do think that distinctions can be drawn between more and less legitimate starting points for philosophy, and I contend that it is philosophically important to do so. My point is simply that there is nothing obvious about how one does this and this difficulty is at stake in the idea of Christian philosophy as a discursive and disciplinary possibility.

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Ultimately, then, the idea of any particular adjectivally determinate philosophical community/approach confronts us as a decision regarding the task of philosophy more broadly, on the one hand, and the specific content that should be allowed to operate as evidentially authoritative for it, on the other hand. Because Christianity, in particular, does so prominently get considered as definitionally significant in distinct ways, indeed, in many ways it is this cultural judgment that underwrites Plantinga’s prioritizing of Christian identity, then we who find ourselves within the cultural tradition informed by such a judgment are faced with a decision regarding the idea of Christian philosophy. Étienne Gilson nicely expresses the historical contingency of this situation: All love of wisdom so understood is philosophy. There are, therefore, a great many different ways of philosophizing, and many of them are unrelated to Christianity. This simply is a fact. The whole body of Greek philosophical speculation, from the fourth century B.C. to the beginning of the Christian era, came too soon to be able to see the world in light of the Christian revelation. In our own day, a great many men choose to philosophize, as they say, in the light of natural reason alone, unaided by any sort of religious belief or revelation. The ancient Greeks had no choice, so that problem does not arise in so far as they are concerned; today we do have a choice, and there is for us a problem that deserves to be investigated. (Gilson 1957, p. 177)

For Gilson, like Maritain, a specifically Christian philosophy is a product of a specifically Christian history. Without this determinate revelational context, this particular possibility for philosophizing would not arise. In this sense, we can see that other philosophies are in similar situations: feminist philosophy occurs as a result of a history of patriarchy, queer theory occurs in the context of heteronormative culture, African American philosophy and critical race theory depend on a history of racial marginalization, and even more straightforwardly methodological approaches, such as phenomenological philosophy, operate in relation to those who have been historically named as significant by that methodological approach (e.g., to do phenomenology is always to work in the light of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, etc.). Such historical location is, importantly, the case regardless of where one comes down in relation to a specific tradition itself. Even a critic of phenomenology, for example, would have to be working in light of the tradition as operative in ways such that critique of it would be possible (for more on such issues, see Simmons and Benson 2013; see also Simmons and Hackett 2016). As trivial as it is to say this, often philosophers need to be reminded that no determinate philosophical practice occurs outside of a social context in which that practice is situated and framed as meaningful. Simply put, decisions are never absolutely naïve. As Nicholas Wolterstorff notes, “we are all profoundly historical creatures” (1984, p. 97). As such, our intellectual activities will always

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reflect those histories. In this sense, following Jean-Luc Marion’s (2002) account of the “givenness” of reality, we might say that all inquiry occurs in light of a specific revelational, or epistemic, context in which the world is presented, interpreted, and engaged. Nothing about this conception of “revelation” needs to be interpreted as determinately “religious,” but simply as a fact about the epistemic dimensions of our social location as human inquirers. As just one example, consider that within the United States, the Trump presidency seems to expose not so much different social approaches to specific policies, but instead fundamentally different conceptions of reality. Indeed, both his supporters and his critics often seem to claim that their positions should be obvious to any rational person. Yet, as Heidegger’s own life demonstrated in problematic detail, hermeneutic circles are not politically innocuous. Just because a particular tradition is only ever historically available as situated in a specific revelational/epistemic context, as it were, this does not mean that there should be a philosophy associated with it as a legitimate option for professional discourse. Whatever the specifics of the case, arguments are needed to justify starting in one place rather than in another. Indeed, even the “Reformed epistemological” approach, say, which suggests basic beliefs in God can operate immediately within one’s philosophical life without additional reasons, still requires an argument that such immediacy is appropriate in relation to “proper basicality.” Plantinga’s (1967) analogy argument provided in God and Other Minds or William Alston’s (1991) work drawing similarities between perceptional perception and Christian perception are both examples of the argumentative requirements that might attend any potentially legitimate starting point for philosophical inquiry. Using a different example, we might note that fideism regarding religious belief, whether in its strong or weak varieties, may eschew giving reasons for those specific beliefs, but as a methodological commitment, it still requires some sort of evidentialist support in order to stand as a serious contender for how philosophically to view the epistemic requirements of religious belief in the first place. Alternatively, an outright rejection of evidentialism, in order not to be absolutely groundless—such that it amounts to not much more than an expression of the same sort of preference that one would offer when recommending a particular sort of jam for one’s toast—still demands some sort of evidential support. Accordingly, wherever one comes down on the idea of Christian philosophy, and crucially the contributors to this volume offer a variety of views on this, it is important that one be able to give an account of why that view, rather than some other view, is the best alternative. In this way, regardless of our other self-identifying category commitments (I am a Christian, a Toyota truck driver, a metalhead, a Southerner, and much more), philosophers at least owe each other argumentative support for how they begin, and how they move forward, in the name of philosophy. It is in this way that what counts as “philosophy” continues to get worked out, stabilized,

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challenged, and revised in the course of our activities doing what has traditionally been called “philosophy.” According to Gilson, the idea of “loving wisdom” is perhaps the only nonargumentative default-setting in relation to philosophy. For him, all other assumptions seem to require evidential support (“I am able to assume x because of y”), or conditional deployment (“if x is the case, then what follows?”). Nonetheless, merely to start with x because one is an x-lover seems problematic, and yet specifying exactly why and in what cases this is more of a problem than in others requires that we are somehow already doing philosophy in asking the question of what counts as philosophy. Indeed, even the idea of “loving wisdom” only signifies due to a particular conception of love and of wisdom that we have largely inherited from a specifically Greek framework. What Gianni Vattimo says regarding religious belief, we should say about philosophical inquiry more broadly: none of us starts from zero (see Vattimo 1999, 2002). As a Sartrean might say, we are always already embarked. But, just because we find ourselves already at sea doesn’t mean that we must, necessarily, continue to sail in the current direction. We can always change course. C. S. Lewis was right to contend that sometimes the quickest way to correct an error is to return to where you are confident about your direction and then proceed differently from there. Interestingly, this is a basic view that cuts across traditional philosophical oppositions. It can be found in Heidegger’s (2010) attempt to return to the Greeks in the effort to rethink Western ontology, Derrida’s (1978, 1982) account of deconstructing the metaphysics of presence in order to figure out where we already find ourselves, as well as Plantinga’s (1982) critique of the legacy of Kantian anti-realism, and Marilyn McCord Adams’s (1999) encouragement that all philosophers be historians. It is worth noting, here, as an important indication that historical continental and analytic separations need not characterize contemporary philosophy of religion, that Adams even mentions Heidegger in this regard: “To paraphrase Heidegger, Christian philosophers who engage in but do not study the history of Christian theology and philosophy are bound to repeat it!” (McCord Adams 1999, p. 51). As it concerns Christian philosophy, McCord Adams’s (and Heidegger’s) basic insight speaks to the fact that even though the energy in recent years seems to be clearly in favor of a deepening and expansion of Christian philosophy, we would do well, as philosophers, but also for many of us as Christians!, not to be too quickly swept up in the currents pulling at us. Accordingly, from its inception, I have never understood the present volume to be targeted at a particularly Christian audience (although some of the individual essays are directed primarily to such readers), but instead as aimed at all philosophers invested in careful reflection about the historical context in which their philosophical activities not only occur, but also are judged to be meaningful or not. In light of the increasingly subdivided

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categorization of philosophical practice and the proliferation of adjectivally determinate approaches to that practice, often with deleterious results in an increasingly splintered philosophical community, I find this book to be much needed indeed. The goal is not to find some sort of unifying commitment among Christian philosophers, or about Christian philosophy by all philosophers, but to realize that the questions that underlie much of the divisions on this topic are themselves largely shared within the philosophical community— regardless of philosophical tradition, methodological approach, religious identity, or political orientation.

SO, WHY ANOTHER VOLUME ON CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY? A significant amount of work has historically been done in the direction of meta-philosophical reflection about fundamental philosophical commitments, assumptions, and loyalties under the guise of discussions regarding the task and stakes of “Christian philosophy” (e.g., see Morris 1988; Vesey 1989; Beaty 1990; Ambrosio 1999). When taken alongside the increasing prominence of Christian philosophy as a guiding rubric for so much work occurring in philosophy of religion, epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, etc., it is worth wrestling with the current state of Christian philosophy as a striking example both of an historically determinate community, and also of the potential dangers of allowing an adjectivally determinate descriptor to become taken for granted within the play of historical contingency. Even though there have always been critics of Christian philosophy, from both inside the Christian community and also from outside of it (see Owens 1990; Sweeney 1997), the influence of such movements as “analytic theology,” groups such as the Society of Christian Philosophers, and journals such as Faith and Philosophy has entirely changed the situation faced by those who would defend Christian philosophy as a determinate and distinct philosophical practice and identity. No longer is Christian philosophy under attack and facing widespread exclusion, as is often presented as having been the case during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Consider Thomas V. Morris’s comment in 1988: “Little more than a decade ago, philosophy of religion was a backwater. Moreover, you could count the number of known or suspected Christian philosophers at the cutting edge of philosophical research on one hand” (Morris 1988, p. ix). Today, however, as Plantinga himself admits, Christian philosophy has become so prominent that “a potential danger that it now faces is triumphalism” (Plantinga 2011, p. 268). This new situation demands a new consideration of the tendencies of our professional

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practice. As I suggest elsewhere, what was appropriate in one’s youth may not be similarly appropriate in one’s middle age (see Simmons 2017). The history of recent Christian philosophy is well known and often recounted and so going into detail on this point is unnecessary here. But, to situate the present volume, a brief account of some of the highlights of that narrative might be helpful. Despite a long series of historical debates in this area prominently featuring such thinkers as Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Peter Damien, and many, many others (for a brief recounting of many moves in this tradition, see Lynch 1968), perhaps we can identify three key moments in the modern manifestation of this discussion. First, we could stress the importance of the publication of Aeterni Patris in 1879 by Pope Leo XIII in bringing the idea of Christian philosophy back to prominence among Catholic philosophers and historians. Second, Émile Bréhier’s 1928 lectures in Brussels, “Y-a-t-il une philosophie chrétienne” (cited as Bréhier 1931; see also Lynch 1968, p. 25), along with important responses by Gilson and Maritain, among many others throughout the 1930s, served to lay out the key alternative views of Christian philosophy that have largely remained the main options in play today (see Sadler 2011). As just one example of the way in which Christian philosophy was generally in the air at this time, consider that Leonard Hodgson (cited as 1969) published Essays in Christian Philosophy in 1930 and presents the idea as if it were not entirely out of step with the general philosophical discourse of the time. Third, in many ways, the contemporary era of Christian philosophy can date its origin to the 1983 presentation of Plantinga’s field-defining essay, “Advice to Christian Philosophers” (see Chapter 1 of the present volume), which served as his inaugural address on being appointed the John A. O’Brien Chair of Philosophy at Notre Dame. Importantly, none of these events can be considered in isolation. They are all part of broader trends and other important events that would take us too far afield to survey here. Nonetheless, Plantinga’s “Advice” is of special note because, according to his account, the situation in philosophy in the middle of the twentieth century was such that the long shadows of classical foundationalism, logical positivism, and strict evidentialism combined to make the notion of confessional theological starting points for philosophical reflection an untenable idea. Due to the work of thinkers affiliated with “Reformed epistemology,” however, the period from the 1960s through the early 1980s witnessed significant and sustained criticisms of these roadblocks to the academic respectability of Christian philosophy as a distinct project. As a result of the work of William Alston, Wolterstorff, Plantinga, and others, things had begun to change such that Plantinga could deliver his “Advice” in 1983 as a call to a generation of young philosophers not to hide their Christian light under the bushel of philosophical legitimacy, but instead to realize that they were well within their “epistemic rights” to inhabit their confessional identity as a proper starting point for philosophical

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reflection. Not unimportantly, he offered this call upon being appointed to an endowed chair in philosophy. The symbolic status of making such a proclamation in that particular disciplinary context, and in light of Notre Dame’s institutional history and religious tradition, should not be overlooked. Even if no one had paid attention to what Plantinga said, that he said what he said there and then is crucial. Importantly, though, people did pay attention to what he said and that single essay, though certainly couched within Plantinga’s overall influential authorship, has deeply marked the received history of Christian philosophy as no longer being something for which one must contend due to a perceived existential threat from the philosophical establishment. As testament to the sort of impact that this generally Reformed approach has had in philosophy of religion generally, consider Wolterstorff ’s claim that: Nowadays students in introductory philosophy of religion courses toss about with great facility the terms ‘evidentialism’ and ‘properly basic,’ often to the puzzlement of those outside the field; the terms now belong to the patois of the discipline. It was not so before the early 1980s. (Wolterstorff 2011, p. 258)

Clearly, things have changed significantly between the 1950s when Plantinga was in graduate school and the 1980s when he wrote that “we who are Christians and propose to be philosophers” must not “rest content with being philosophers who happen, incidentally, to be Christians,” but instead to “strive to be Christian philosophers” who operate with “integrity, independence, and Christian boldness” (Plantinga 1998, p. 315). Although having received serious criticism, Plantinga’s approach to Christian philosophy remains the keystone to how the debates in this area are framed and considered. At least two generations of philosophers have subsequently inherited the above narrative of Plantinga’s importance and of the resurgence of Christian philosophy, so the potential triumphalism about which Plantinga worries is, in many respects, a result of the fact that his own account of Christian philosophy has been taken for granted by so many. Maybe it has won the day, and maybe it should have. Yet, finding ourselves more than thirty years after Plantinga’s “Advice,” we would do well to revisit the central questions that animated the debates regarding Christian philosophy long before Plantinga’s own intervention—indeed, his own account in many ways repeats the main points of Gilson’s account of Christian philosophy over against Bréhier’s, or alternatively we might say that Plantinga sides with Augustine and Anselm rather than Aquinas regarding the porous distinction between philosophy and theology. So, in the attempt to engage important meta-philosophical questions about the idea of specific revelational/epistemic contexts as informing general philosophical practice, the present volume is also devoted to exploring the state of Christian philosophy today in light of where Christianity has been and philosophy should go.

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ALTERNATIVE A PPROACHES? Alternatives abound regarding what sort of “advice” one should follow regarding the idea of Christian philosophy. Importantly, the history of recent Christian philosophy of religion could look very differently were we to consider alternatives such as those offered by Jean-Luc Marion in his essay, “Christian Philosophy: Hermeneutic or Heuristic,” which was presented at Georgetown University as part of a conference on “The Question of Christian Philosophy Today” (originally presented in 1993, cited as in Marion 2008, and included in the present volume as Chapter 2; for the volume emerging out of that conference, see Ambrosio 1999). Or, as other options, we might consider Merold Westphal’s (1973) “Prolegomena to any Future Philosophy of Religion that Will Come Forth as Prophecy,” which predates Plantinga’s essay by a decade, or D. Z. Phillips’s (1988) own “Advice to Philosophers who are Christians.” Drawing heavily on Kierkegaard and phenomenology, respectively, Westphal and Marion offer alternative visions for how to situate confessional identities in academic philosophy. Yet, those texts have largely been overlooked by the Christian (analytic) philosophy establishment. Similarly, Phillips’s “advice” tracks more with Bréhier/Aquinas than with Gilson and yet has not gained nearly the traction that Plantinga’s more Gilsonian/Anselmian account has. However, like many other things, histories are most substantive when contested. Maybe things could be otherwise than they are now? Perhaps they should be? Asking such questions requires appreciating where one is—as Heidegger suggests, it is important to catch up to where we are already so that, if need be, we can go forward differently. So, here we are, more than thirty years after Plantinga offered his “advice,” nearly 100 years since the Bréhier/Gilson debates, and many centuries after the medieval discussions that serve as the background for all of the contemporary discussion. The situation has indeed changed as time has passed. A narrative of exclusion in the 1950s has given way to a narrative of triumph in the 2000s. Whereas in the early 1980s being a confessional Christian might have been viewed as a liability in one’s philosophical career, which again speaks to the importance of Plantinga’s own boldness, now it can sometimes seem to be a requirement for those who would work primarily in academic philosophy of religion. Whether this change of fortunes should be viewed as a positive development or not depends on who you ask. Although Christian philosophers find themselves empowered within academic philosophy, at what cost does such empowerment occur? Even if Christian philosophy is no longer easily viewed as non-philosophy, exactly how it is distinct from Christian theology is often difficult to tell. Indeed, recent trends in Analytic Theology have not only further blurred the line between philosophy and theology, but also further entrenched analytic philosophy as the primary mode in which Christian philosophy is understood to

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occur (and perhaps ought to occur) (see, for example, Chapter 11 in the present volume). Yet, this is a strikingly odd reality for those familiar with continental traditions (especially existentialism and phenomenology) that are often rich archives of Christian intellectual work.¹ But this general point reaches far beyond a mere analytic/continental “divide.” At present, one is hard pressed to find alternative philosophical traditions (phenomenology, deconstruction, critical theory, pragmatism, process, etc.) on prominent display in the main journals in philosophy of religion or on the conference programs for Society of Christian Philosophers meetings. Such lack may or may not represent any vice, but could be merely a matter of diverse streams of thought occurring separately. Indeed, the Society for Continental Philosophy and Theology (SCPT), for example, offers sustained and significant opportunity for doing philosophy of religion in a more continental philosophical framework. And yet, many members of the SCPT are confessional Christians and so might be expected to be as active in the SCP as their analytic colleagues, yet this is not the case with any regularity. Moreover, the current situation is one in which not only analytic philosophy is taken as normative for Christian philosophy, but also one in which “Christianity” is understood rather narrowly and primarily assumes Reformed or Catholic conceptions of confessional identity. Christian traditions such as Pentecostalism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and those on display in global Liberationist communities are infrequent participants in the main debates in what is considered to be mainstream Christian philosophy (see Chapters 8 and 12 in the present volume). Further, with some exceptions, engagement between Christian philosophy and non-Christian religious traditions is surprisingly rare within the philosophical literature. For example, although some philosophy of religion textbooks do have chapters devoted to a variety of the world’s religious traditions, usually these are separated out as surveys of those religions. Rarely is there a straightforward consideration of a philosophical issue that draws on, or makes productive comparison among, religious traditions. Indeed, usually the coin of the realm, as it were, are the assumptions attending to classical theism as presented in the historical monotheisms. Although some philosophical texts do at least take some steps in the direction of comparative religious studies (see especially Bilimoria and Irvine 2009; Wildman 2010; Knepper 2013; and Schilbrack 2014; see also, Meister and Copan 2007; Eshleman 2008; Taliaferro, Draper, and Quinn 2010), overall, one finds that the debates

¹ For a general survey of the philosophical possibilities of such work, see Simmons and Benson (2013). As just a few examples of continentally-oriented Christian approaches to philosophical topics in this area, see Alcoff and Caputo (2011); Chrétien (2015); and Wells (2017). As in analytic thought, critiques of such work also abound. As just one especially productive critical reading, see Schrijvers (2016).

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are primarily dominated by analytic defenses and critiques of classical theism understood according to only a few particular Christian expressions. Given this situation, although Christian philosophy seems no longer to be under existential threat, it is in need of careful self-reflection about the threat it potentially poses to alternative strains in philosophy of religion that might otherwise be able to flourish without the potentially problematic hegemony that Christian philosophy can reasonably be understood to have cultivated. The present volume attempts to engage in such self-reflection by inviting scholars to think about the task and idea of Christian philosophy, today, and the promising possibilities and dangerous temptations that await it, tomorrow. Accordingly, the guiding questions that were put to the contributors to this volume are: “What is Christian philosophy?” and “What should Christian philosophy become?” Answers to both questions are wide-ranging and importantly divergent from each other. Thus, this volume demonstrates that these questions are still very much alive in contemporary philosophy despite the tendency toward “triumphalism” about which Plantinga rightly worries.

ON THE ORIGINS AND AIMS OF THIS VO LUME This volume emerged out of a very successful conference that was held in March 2014 at Trinity Christian College. The conference was a joint meeting of the Society of Christian Philosophers and the Society of Continental Philosophy and Theology and organized by Stephen Lake and Aron Reppmann. Were it not for the work of Lake and Reppmann, that conference and, subsequently, this volume would never have happened. Focused on the question “What is Christian Philosophy?” the conference marked the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Alvin Plantinga’s “Advice to Christian Philosophers.” Importantly, though, this event was not merely a matter of looking back, but of looking forward by taking stock of where we are as philosophers and, for many though certainly not all participants in the conference, also as Christians. Unsurprisingly, at the conference, there was quite a bit of constructive, while critical, conversation about what it even means to be a “Christian philosopher,” whether such an adjectival determinate community even makes sense, and how Christians ought to practice philosophy moving forward in light of these debates. Hence, the question “What is Christian philosophy?” was answered in a variety of ways and yielded a range of different visions for what Christian philosophy is and might need to become. The event was remarkable in the way that it fostered conversation across philosophical traditions, methodologies, and cultural frames. This volume aims to do something similar for a larger audience.

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In summary, then, the broad aims of this volume are two-fold: (1) To survey where Christian philosophy has been and what it has become in the contemporary philosophical landscape; (2) To consider what Christian philosophy should be and what role it should play in the future of philosophical inquiry. In order to recognize the diversity of possible views on both the identity and future of Christian philosophy, the contributors are scholars from a wide range of backgrounds and orientations. Contributors include non-Christians as well as Christians (including a broad range of Christian identities), women as well as men, established as well as emerging scholars, and analytic as well as continental philosophers. The volume as a whole takes no unified stance on methodology or outcome, but merely on the importance of critical reflection on the identity and task of Christian philosophy in the contemporary world. The volume proceeds in three movements, which are reflected in its subtitle: Conceptions, Continuations, and Challenges. First, in Part I, “Conceptions,” Alvin Plantinga, Jean-Luc Marion, Kyla Ebels-Duggan, Merold Westphal, Bruce Ellis Benson, and Kevin Hart all offer reflections on what Christian philosophy has historically been and, in its best instantiations, should be. The specifics of such conceptions are wide-ranging, but all speak to the important dialogical task of philosophy as inspired by one’s existential identity. The first part, thus, collectively offers an important reminder that Christian philosophy should never become so concerned with “objectivity” that it forgets that Christianity is not simply about propositional affirmation, but also a matter of lived trust. In Part II, “Continuations,” Charles Taliaferro, Neal DeRoo, Kevin Timpe, Meghan Sullivan, and Trent Dougherty all offer accounts of possible futures for Christian philosophy in response to particular concerns—namely, the idea of dedication, postmodern culture, disability studies, virtuous pedagogy, and specific questions opened by analytic theology. Part III, “Challenges,” features essays by J. Aaron Simmons, Paul K. Moser, J. L. Schellenberg, Graham Oppy, and Peter Ochs. The challenges presented by each of the essays in this final section are different in each case and respond to specific worries about the state of contemporary Christian philosophy from a variety of philosophical methodologies and religious orientations. In particular, the challenges stem from attending to the responsibilities of power, the implications of Christocentric existence, the importance of delineating boundaries of disciplinary discourse, the specific historical identity of philosophical inquiry, and the temptation to self-certainty. The volume concludes with a response to these critical chapters in Part III by William Hasker. It is quite plausible that what critical theorists of religion have said of religion, more broadly, ought to be said of Christian philosophy more specifically. Namely, perhaps there is no stable thing that Christian philosophy is and no single future for Christian philosophy. Maybe Maritain was wrong to

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suggest that philosophy has a “nature” and that Christian philosophy is a particularly productive “state” in which that nature can then play out. Alternatively, perhaps Plantinga has been so widely embraced precisely because he was right about things. Only time will tell, but we philosophers have a responsibility not to be passive in relation to that time, but actively to invest ourselves in offering good reasons that it should unfold in one direction rather than in another. All of the essays in this volume support the idea that Christian philosophy reflects a plural conception that can invite a variety of possible interpretations. Nonetheless, considering such dynamism offers important resources and can stand as impetus for better understanding Christian philosophy here and now. Whether or not one identifies as a Christian, this volume undertakes the task of envisioning the philosophical stakes of starting with different historical frameworks, revelational/epistemic contexts, and community identities as we all somehow engage in the shared practice of what has been called “philosophy.”

WORKS CITED Alcoff, Linda Martín and John D. Caputo, eds. 2011. Feminism, Sexuality, and the Return of Religion. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Alston, William P. 1991. Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Ambrosio, Francis J., ed. 1999. The Question of Christian Philosophy Today. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Beaty, Michael D., ed. 1990. Christian Theism and the Problems of Philosophy. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Bilimoria, Purushottama and Andrew Irvine, eds. 2009. Postcolonial Philosophy of Religion. Dordrecht: Springer. Bréhier, Émile. 1931. “Y-a-t-il une philosophie chrétienne.” Revue de Métaphysique et la Morale 38, no. 2: 133–62. Chrétien, Jean-Louis. 2015. Under the Gaze of the Bible. Trans. John Marson Dunaway. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1982. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. Eshleman, Andrew, ed. 2008. Readings in Philosophy of Religion: East Meets West. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Fitzgerald, Timothy. 2000. The Ideology of Religious Studies. New York, NY and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gilson, Étienne. 1957. A Gilson Reader. Ed. Anton C. Pegis. Garden City, NY: Hanover House.

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Heidegger, Martin. 2010. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh, with revisions by Dennis J. Schmidt. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Hodgson, Leonard. 1969 (originally published in 1930). Essays in Christian Philosophy. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press. Knepper, Timothy D. 2013. The Ends of Philosophy of Religion: Terminus and Telos. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Lynch, Lawrence E. 1968. A Christian Philosophy. New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons. McCord Adams, Marilyn. 1999. “History of Philosophy as Tutor of Christian Philosophy.” In The Question of Christian Philosophy Today. Ed. Francis J. Ambrosio. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, pp. 37–60. McCutcheon, Russell T. 1997. Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. McCutcheon, Russell T. 2003. Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2002. Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2008. The Visible and the Revealed. Trans. Christina M. Gschwandtner and others. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Maritain, Jacques. 1955. An Essay on Christian Philosophy. Trans. Edward H. Flannery. New York, NY: Philosophical Library. Masuzawa, Tomoko. 2005. The Invention of World Religions. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. Meister, Chad and Paul Copan, eds. 2007. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion. London and New York, NY: Routledge. Morris, Thomas V., ed. 1988. Philosophy and the Christian Faith. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Owens, Joseph. 1990. Towards a Christian Philosophy. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. Phillips, D. Z. 1988. “Advice to Philosophers who are Christians.” Blackfriars 69, no. 820: 416–30. Plantinga, Alvin. 1967. God and Other Minds: A Study of the Rational Justification of Belief in God. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Plantinga, Alvin. 1982. “How to be an Anti-Realist.” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 56, no. 1 (September): 47–70. Plantinga, Alvin. 1998. The Analytic Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader. Ed. James F. Sennett. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans. Plantinga, Alvin. 2011. “Response to Nick Wolterstorff.” Faith and Philosophy 28, no. 3 (July): 267–8. Sadler, Gregory B., ed. and trans. 2011. Reason Fulfilled by Revelation: The 1930s Christian Philosophy Debates in France. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. Schilbrack, Kevin. 2014. Philosophy and the Study of Religions: A Manifesto. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Schrijvers, Joeri. 2016. Between Faith and Belief: Toward a Contemporary Phenomenology of Religious Life. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

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Simmons, J. Aaron. 2017. “Cheaper than a Corvette: The Relevance of Phenomenology for Contemporary Philosophy of Religion.” Sophia 56, no. 1 (April): 33–44. Simmons, J. Aaron. 2018. “Vagueness and Its Virtues: A Proposal for Renewing Philosophy of Religion.” In Philosophy of Religion After Religion. Ed. Michael Rogers and Richard Amesbury. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, pp. 45–70. Simmons, J. Aaron and Bruce Ellis Benson. 2013. The New Phenomenology: A Philosophical Introduction. London: Bloomsbury. Simmons, J. Aaron and J. Edward Hackett, eds. 2016. Phenomenology for the TwentyFirst Century. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Smith, Jonathan Z. 1982. Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Jonathan Z. 2004. Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. Sweeney, Leo, S.J. 1997. Christian Philosophy: Greek, Medieval, Contemporary Reflections. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Taliaferro, Charles, Paul Draper, and Philip L. Quinn, eds. 2010. A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, 2nd Ed. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Vattimo, Gianni. 1999. Belief. Trans. Luca D’Isanto and David Webb. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Vattimo, Gianni. 2002. After Christianity. Trans. Luca D’Isanto. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Vesey, Godfrey, ed. 1989. The Philosophy in Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wells, Adam Y., ed. 2017. Phenomenologies of Scripture. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Westphal, Merold. 1973. “Prolegomena to any Future Philosophy of Religion which will be able to Come Forth as Prophecy.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 4, no. 3: 129–50. Westphal, Merold. 2009. Whose Community? Which Interpretation? Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. Wildman, Wesley J. 2010. Religious Philosophy as Multidisciplinary Comparative Inquiry: Envisioning a Future for the Philosophy of Religion. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 1984. Reason Within the Bounds of Religion, 2nd Ed. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 2011. “Then, Now, and Al.” Faith and Philosophy 28, no. 3 (July): 253–66.

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Part I Conceptions

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1 Advice to Christian Philosophers Alvin Plantinga

I N T R O D U C TI O N Christianity, these days, and in our part of the world, is on the move. There are many signs pointing in this direction: the growth of Christian schools, of the serious conservative Christian denominations, the furor over prayer in public schools, the creationism/evolution controversy, and others. There is also powerful evidence for this contention in philosophy. Thirty or thirty-five years ago, the public temper of mainline establishment philosophy in the English speaking world was deeply non-Christian. Few establishment philosophers were Christian; even fewer were willing to admit in public that they were, and still fewer thought of their being Christian as making a real difference to their practice as philosophers. The most popular question of philosophical theology, at that time, was not whether Christianity or theism is true; the question, instead, was whether it even makes sense to say that there is such a person as God. According to the logical positivism then running riot, the sentence “there is such a person as God” literally makes no sense; it is disguised nonsense; it altogether fails to express a thought or a proposition. The central question wasn’t whether theism is true; it was whether there is such a thing as theism—a genuine factual claim that is either true or false—at all. But things have changed. There are now many more Christians and many more unabashed Christians in the professional mainstream of American philosophical life. For example, the foundation of the Society for Christian Philosophers, an organization to promote fellowship and exchange of ideas among Christian philosophers, is both an evidence and a consequence of that fact. Founded [in 1978], it is now a thriving organization with regional meetings in every part of the country; its members are deeply involved in American professional philosophical life. So Christianity is on the move, and on the move in philosophy, as well as in other areas of intellectual life.

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But even if Christianity is on the move, it has taken only a few brief steps and it is marching through largely alien territory. For the intellectual culture of our day is for the most part profoundly nontheistic and hence non-Christian— more than that, it is anti-theistic. Most of the so-called human sciences, much of the non-human sciences, most of the non-scientific intellectual endeavor and even a good bit of allegedly Christian theology is animated by a spirit wholly foreign to that of Christian theism. I don’t have the space here to elaborate and develop this point; but I don’t have to, for it is familiar to you all. To return to philosophy: most of the major philosophy departments in America have next to nothing to offer the student intent on coming to see how to be a Christian in philosophy—how to assess and develop the bearing of Christianity on matters of current philosophical concern, and how to think about those philosophical matters of interest to the Christian community. In the typical graduate philosophy department there will be little more, along these lines, than a course in philosophy of religion in which it is suggested that the evidence for the existence of God—the classical theistic proofs, say—is at least counterbalanced by the evidence against the existence of God—the problem of evil, perhaps; and it may then be added that the wisest course, in view of such maxims as Ockham’s Razor, is to dispense with the whole idea of God, at least for philosophical purposes. My aim, in this talk, is to give some advice to philosophers who are Christians. And although my advice is directed specifically to Christian philosophers, it is relevant to all philosophers who believe in God, whether Christian, Jewish, or Moslem. I propose to give some advice to the Christian or theistic philosophical community: some advice relevant to the situation in which in fact we find ourselves. “Who are you,” you say, “to give the rest of us advice?” That’s a good question. I shall deal with it as one properly deals with good questions to which one doesn’t know the answer: I shall ignore it. My counsel can be summed up on two connected suggestions, along with a codicil. First, Christian philosophers and Christian intellectuals generally must display more autonomy—more independence of the rest of the philosophical world. Second, Christian philosophers must display more integrity—integrity in the sense of integral wholeness, or oneness, or unity, being all of one piece. Perhaps “integrality” would be the better word here. And necessary to these two is a third: Christian courage, or boldness, or strength, or perhaps Christian self-confidence. We Christian philosophers must display more faith, more trust in the Lord; we must put on the whole armor of God. Let me explain in a brief and preliminary way what I have in mind; then I shall go on to consider some examples in more detail. Consider a Christian college student—from Grand Rapids, Michigan, say, or Arkadelphia, Arkansas—who decides philosophy is the subject for her. Naturally enough, she will go to graduate school to learn how to become a philosopher. Perhaps she goes to Princeton, or Berkeley, or Pittsburgh, or

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Arizona; it doesn’t much matter which. There she learns how philosophy is presently practiced. The burning questions of the day are such topics as the new theory of reference; the realism/anti-realism controversy; the problems with probability; Quine’s claims about the radical indeterminacy of translation; Rawls on justice; the causal theory of knowledge; Gettier problems; the artificial intelligence model for the understanding of what it is to be a person; the question of the ontological status of unobservable entities in science; whether there is genuine objectivity in science or anywhere else; whether mathematics can be reduced to set theory and whether abstract entities generally—numbers, propositions, properties—can be, as we quaintly say, “dispensed with”; whether possible worlds are abstract or concrete; whether our assertions are best seen as mere moves in a language game or as attempts to state the sober truth about the world; whether the rational egoist can be shown to be irrational, and all the rest. It is then natural for her, after she gets her Ph.D., to continue to think about and work on these topics. And it is natural, furthermore, for her to work on them in the way she was taught to, thinking about them in the light of the assumptions made by her mentors and in terms of currently accepted ideas as to what a philosopher should start from or take for granted, what requires argument and defense, and what a satisfying philosophical explanation or a proper resolution to a philosophical question is like. She will be uneasy about departing widely from these topics and assumptions, feeling instinctively that any such departures are at best marginally respectable. Philosophy is a social enterprise; and our standards and assumptions—the parameters within which we practice our craft—are set by our mentors and by the great contemporary centers of philosophy. From one point of view this is natural and proper; from another, however, it is profoundly unsatisfactory. The questions I mentioned are important and interesting. Christian philosophers, however, are the philosophers of the Christian community; and it is part of their task as Christian philosophers to serve the Christian community. But the Christian community has its own questions, its own concerns, its own topics for investigation, its own agenda and its own research program. Christian philosophers ought not merely take their inspiration from what’s going on at Princeton or Berkeley or Harvard, attractive and scintillating as that may be; for perhaps those questions and topics are not the ones, or not the only ones, they should be thinking about as the philosophers of the Christian community. There are other philosophical topics the Christian community must work at, and other topics the Christian community must work at philosophically. And obviously, Christian philosophers are the ones who must do the philosophical work involved. If they devote their best efforts to the topics fashionable in the non-Christian philosophical world, they will neglect a crucial and central part of their task as Christian philosophers. What is needed here is more independence, more autonomy with respect to the projects and concerns of the non-theistic philosophical world.

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But something else is at least as important here. Suppose the student I mentioned above goes to Harvard; she studies with Willard van Orman Quine. She finds herself attracted to Quine’s programs and procedures: his radical empiricism, his allegiance to natural science, his inclination towards behaviorism, his uncompromising naturalism, and his taste for desert landscapes and ontological parsimony. It would be wholly natural for her to become totally involved in these projects and programs, to come to think of fruitful and worthwhile philosophy as substantially circumscribed by them. Of course she will note certain tensions between her Christian belief and her way of practicing philosophy; and she may then bend her efforts to putting the two together, to harmonizing them. She may devote her time and energy to seeing how one might understand or reinterpret Christian belief in such a way as to be palatable to the Quinian. One philosopher I know, embarking on just such a project, suggested that Christians should think of God as a set (Quine is prepared to countenance sets): the set of all true propositions, perhaps, or the set of right actions, or the union of those sets, or perhaps their Cartesian product. This is understandable; but it is also profoundly misdirected. Quine is a marvelously gifted philosopher: a subtle, original, and powerful philosophical force. But his fundamental commitments, his fundamental projects and concerns, are wholly different from those of the Christian community—wholly different and, indeed, antithetical to them. And the result of attempting to graft Christian thought onto his basic view of the world will be at best an unintegral pastiche; at worst it will seriously compromise, or distort, or trivialize the claims of Christian theism. What is needed here is more wholeness, more integrality. So the Christian philosopher has his own topics and projects to think about; and when he thinks about the topics of current concern in the broader philosophical world, he will think about them in his own way, which may be a different way. He may have to reject certain currently fashionable assumptions about the philosophic enterprise—he may have to reject widely accepted assumptions as to what are the proper starting points and procedures for philosophical endeavor. And—and this is crucially important—the Christian philosopher has a perfect right to the point of view and pre-philosophical assumptions he brings to philosophic work; the fact that these are not widely shared outside the Christian or theistic community is interesting but fundamentally irrelevant. I can best explain what I mean by way of example; so I shall descend from the level of lofty generality to specific examples.

THEISM AND VERIFIABILITY First, the dreaded “Verifiability Criterion of Meaning.” During the palmy days of logical positivism, some thirty or forty years ago, the positivists claimed that

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most of the sentences Christians characteristically utter—“God loves us,” for example, or “God created the heavens and the earth”—don’t even have the grace to be false; they are, said the positivists, literally meaningless. It is not that they express false propositions; they don’t express any propositions at all. Like that lovely line from Alice in Wonderland, “T’was brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gymbol in the wabe,” they say nothing false, but only because they say nothing at all; they are “cognitively meaningless,” to use the positivist’s charming phrase. The sorts of things theists and others had been saying for centuries, they said, were now shown to be without sense; we theists had all been the victims, it seems, of a cruel hoax—perpetrated, perhaps, by ambitious priests and foisted upon us by our own credulous natures. Now if this is true, it is indeed important. How had the positivists come by this startling piece of intelligence? They inferred it from the Verifiability Criterion of Meaning, which said, roughly, that a sentence is meaningful only if either it is analytic, or its truth or falsehood can be determined by empirical or scientific investigation—by the methods of the empirical sciences. On these grounds not only theism and theology, but most of traditional metaphysics and philosophy and much else besides was declared nonsense, without any literal sense at all. Some positivists conceded that metaphysics and theology, though strictly meaningless, might still have a certain limited value. Carnap, for example, thought they might be a kind of music. It isn’t known whether he expected theology and metaphysics to supplant Bach and Mozart, or even Wagner; I myself, however, think they could nicely supersede rock. Hegel could take the place of The Talking Heads; Immanuel Kant could replace The Beach Boys; and instead of The Grateful Dead we could have, say, Arthur Schopenhauer. Positivism had a delicious air of being avant garde and with-it; and many philosophers found it extremely attractive. Furthermore, many who didn’t endorse it nonetheless entertained it with great hospitality as at the least extremely plausible. As a consequence many philosophers—both Christians and non-Christians—saw here a real challenge and an important danger to Christianity: “The main danger to theism today,” said J. J. C. Smart in 1955, “comes from people who want to say that ‘God exists’ and ‘God does not exist’ are equally absurd.” In 1955 New Essays in Philosophical Theology appeared, a volume of essays that was to set the tone and topics for philosophy of religion for the next decade or more; and most of this volume was given over to a discussion of the impact of Verificationism on theism. Many philosophically inclined Christians were disturbed and perplexed and felt deeply threatened; could it really be true that linguistic philosophers had somehow discovered that the Christian’s most cherished convictions were, in fact, just meaningless? There was a great deal of anxious hand wringing among philosophers, either themselves theists or sympathetic to theism. Some suggested, in the face of positivistic onslaught, that the thing for the Christian community to do was to

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fold up its tents and silently slink away, admitting that the verifiability criterion was probably true. Others conceded that strictly speaking, theism really is nonsense, but is important nonsense. Still others suggested that the sentences in question should be reinterpreted in such a way as not to give offense to the positivists; someone seriously suggested, for example, that Christians resolve, henceforth, to use the sentence “God exists” to mean “some men and women have had, and all may have, experiences called ‘meeting God’”; he added that when we say “God created the world from nothing” what we should mean is “everything we call ‘material’ can be used in such a way that it contributes to the well-being of men.” In a different context but the same spirit, Rudolph Bultmann embarked upon his program of demythologizing Christianity. Traditional supernaturalistic Christian belief, he said, is “impossible in this age of electric light and the wireless.” (One can perhaps imagine an earlier village skeptic taking a similar view of, say, the tallow candle and the printing press, or perhaps the pine torch and the papyrus scroll.) By now, of course, Verificationism has retreated into the obscurity it so richly deserves; but the moral remains. This hand wringing and those attempts to accommodate the positivist were wholly inappropriate. I realize that hindsight is clearer than foresight and I do not recount this bit of recent intellectual history in order to be critical of my elders or to claim that we are wiser than our fathers: what I want to point out is that we can learn something from the whole nasty incident. For Christian philosophers should have adopted a quite different attitude towards positivism and its verifiability criterion. What they should have said to the positivists is: “Your criterion is mistaken: for such statements as ‘God loves us’ and ‘God created the heavens and the earth’ are clearly meaningful; so if they aren’t verifiable in your sense, then it is false that all and only statements verifiable in that sense are meaningful.” What was needed here was less accommodation to current fashion and more Christian self-confidence: Christian theism is true; if Christian theism is true, then the verifiability criterion is false; so the verifiability criterion is false. Of course, if the Verificationists had given cogent arguments for their criterion, from premises that had some legitimate claim on Christian or theistic thinkers, then perhaps there would have been a problem here for the Christian philosopher; then we would have been obliged either to agree that Christian theism is cognitively meaningless, or else revise or reject those premises. But the Verificationists never gave any cogent arguments; indeed, they seldom gave any arguments at all. Some simply trumpeted this principle as a great discovery, and when challenged, repeated it loudly and slowly; but why should that disturb anyone? Others proposed it as a definition—a definition of the term “meaningful.” Now of course the positivists had a right to use this term in any way they chose; it’s a free country. But how could their decision to use that term in a particular way show anything so momentous as that all those who took themselves to be believers in God were wholly deluded? If I propose to

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use the term “Democrat” to mean “unmitigated scoundrel,” would it follow that Democrats everywhere should hang their heads in shame? And my point, to repeat myself, is that Christian philosophers should have displayed more integrity, more independence, less readiness to trim their sails to the prevailing philosophical winds of doctrine, and more Christian self-confidence.

THEISM AND THEORY OF K NOWLEDGE I can best approach my second example by indirection. Many philosophers have claimed to find a serious problem for theism in the existence of evil, or of the amount and kinds of evil we do in fact find. Many who claim to find a problem here for theists have urged the deductive argument from evil: they have claimed that the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good God is logically incompatible with the presence of evil in the world—a presence conceded and indeed insisted upon by Christian theists. For their part, theists have argued that there is no inconsistency here. I think the present consensus, even among those who urge some form of the argument from evil, is that the deductive form of the argument from evil is unsuccessful. More recently, philosophers have claimed that the existence of God, while perhaps not actually inconsistent with the existence of the amount and kinds of evil we do in fact find, is at any rate unlikely or improbable with respect to it; that is, the probability of the existence of God with respect to the evil we find, is less than the probability, with respect to that same evidence, that there is no God—no omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good Creator. Hence the existence of God is improbable with respect to what we know. But if theistic belief is improbable with respect to what we know, then, so goes the claim, it is irrational or in any event intellectually second rate to accept it. Now suppose we briefly examine this claim. The objector holds that (1)

God is omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good creator of the world

is improbable or unlikely with respect to (2)

There are 10¹³ turps of evil

(where the turp is the basic unit of evil). I’ve argued elsewhere (see Plantinga 1979) that enormous difficulties beset the claim that (1) is unlikely or improbable given (2). Call that response “the low road reply.” Here I want to pursue what I shall call the high road reply. Suppose we stipulate, for purposes of argument, that (1) is, in fact, improbable on (2). Let’s agree that it is unlikely, given the existence of 10¹³ turps of evil, that the world has been created by a God who is perfect in power, knowledge, and goodness. What is supposed to follow from that? How is that to be

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construed as an objection to theistic belief? How does the objector’s argument go from there? It doesn’t follow, of course, that theism is false. Nor does it follow that one who accepts both (1) and (2) (and let’s add, recognizes that (1) is improbable with respect to (2)) has an irrational system of beliefs or is in any way guilty of noetic impropriety; obviously there might be pairs of propositions A and B, such that we know both A and B, despite the fact that A is improbable on B. I might know, for example, both that Feike is a Frisian and 9 out of 10 Frisians can’t swim, and also that Feike can swim; then I am obviously within my intellectual rights in accepting both these propositions, even though the latter is improbable with respect to the former. So even if it were a fact that (1) is improbable with respect to (2), that fact, so far, wouldn’t be of much consequence. How, therefore, can this objection be developed? Presumably what the objector means to hold is that (1) is improbable, not just on (2) but on some appropriate body of total evidence—perhaps all the evidence the theist has, or perhaps the body of evidence he is rationally obliged to have. The objector must be supposing that the theist has a relevant body of total evidence here, a body of evidence that includes (2); and his claim is that (1) is improbable with respect to this relevant body of total evidence. Suppose we say that Ts is the relevant body of total evidence for a given theist T; and suppose we agree that a belief is rationally acceptable for him only if it is not improbable with respect to Ts. Now what sorts of propositions are to be found in Ts? Perhaps the propositions he knows to be true, or perhaps the largest subset of his beliefs that he can rationally accept without evidence from other propositions, or perhaps the propositions he knows immediately—knows, but does not know on the basis of other propositions. However exactly we characterize this set Ts, the question I mean to press is this: why can’t belief in God be itself a member of Ts? Perhaps for the theist—for many theists, at any rate—belief in God is a member of Ts, in which case it obviously won’t be improbable with respect to Ts. Perhaps the theist has a right to start from belief in God, taking that proposition to be one of the ones probability with respect to which determines the rational propriety of other beliefs he holds. But if so, then the Christian philosopher is entirely within his rights in starting from belief in God to his philosophizing. He has a right to take the existence of God for granted and go on from there in his philosophical work—just as other philosophers take for granted the existence of the past, say, or of other persons, or the basic claims of contemporary physics. And this leads me to my point here. Many Christian philosophers appear to think of themselves qua philosophers as engaged with the atheist and agnostic philosopher in a common search for the correct philosophical position vis-àvis the question whether there is such a person as God. Of course the Christian philosopher will have his own private conviction on the point; he will believe, of course, that indeed there is such a person as God. But he will think, or be inclined to think, or half inclined to think that as a philosopher he has no right

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to this position unless he is able to show that it follows from, or is probable, or justified with respect to premises accepted by all parties to the discussion— theist, agnostic, and atheist alike. Furthermore, he will be half inclined to think he has no right, as a philosopher, to positions that presuppose the existence of God, if he can’t show that belief to be justified in this way. What I want to urge is that the Christian philosophical community ought not to think of itself as engaged in this common effort to determine the probability or philosophical plausibility of belief in God. The Christian philosopher quite properly starts from the existence of God, and presupposes it in philosophical work, whether or not he can show it to be probable or plausible with respect to premises accepted by all philosophers, or most philosophers, or most philosophers at the great contemporary centers of philosophy. Taking it for granted, for example, that there is such a person as God and that we are indeed within our epistemic rights (are in that sense justified) in believing that there is, the Christian epistemologist might ask what it is that confers justification here: by virtue of what is the theist justified? Perhaps there are several sensible responses. One answer he might give and try to develop is that of John Calvin (and before him, of the Augustinian, Anselmian, Bonaventurian tradition of the Middle Ages): God, said Calvin, has implanted in humankind a tendency or nisus or disposition to believe in him: “There is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity.” This we take to be beyond controversy. To prevent anyone from taking refuge in the pretense of ignorance, God himself has implanted in all men a certain understanding of his divine majesty. . . . Therefore, since from the beginning of the world there has been no region, no city, in short, no household, that could do without religion, there lies in this a tacit confession of a sense of deity inscribed in the hearts of all. (Calvin 1960, Bk. I, Chap. III, pp. 43–4)

Calvin’s claim, then, is that God has so created us that we have by nature a strong tendency or inclination or disposition towards belief in him. Although this disposition to believe in God has been in part smothered or suppressed by sin, it is nevertheless universally present. And it is triggered or actuated by widely realized conditions: Lest anyone, then, be excluded from access to happiness, he not only sowed in men’s minds that seed of religion of which we have spoken, but revealed himself and daily disclosed himself in the whole workmanship of the universe. As a consequence, men cannot open their eyes without being compelled to see him. (Calvin 1960, p. 51)

Like Kant, Calvin is especially impressed in this connection, by the marvelous compages of the starry heavens above: Even the common folk and the most untutored, who have been taught only by the aid of the eyes, cannot be unaware of the excellence of divine art, for it reveals

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itself in this innumerable and yet distinct and well-ordered variety of the heavenly host. (Calvin 1960, p. 52)

And now what Calvin says suggests that one who accedes to this tendency and in these circumstances accepts the belief that God has created the world— perhaps upon beholding the starry heavens, or the splendid majesty of the mountains, or the intricate, articulate beauty of a tiny flower—is quite as rational and quite as justified as one who believes that he sees a tree upon having that characteristic being-appeared-to-treely kind of experience. No doubt this suggestion won’t convince the skeptic; taken as an attempt to convince the skeptic it is circular. My point is just this: the Christian has his own questions to answer, and his own projects; these projects may not mesh with those of the skeptical or unbelieving philosopher. He has his own questions and his own starting point in investigating these questions. Of course, I don’t mean to suggest that the Christian philosopher must accept Calvin’s answer to the question I mentioned above; but I do say it is entirely fitting for him to give to this question an answer that presupposes precisely that of which the skeptic is skeptical—even if this skepticism is nearly unanimous in most of the prestigious philosophy departments of our day. The Christian philosopher does indeed have a responsibility to the philosophical world at large; but his fundamental responsibility is to the Christian community, and finally to God. Again, a Christian philosopher may be interested in the relation between faith and reason, and faith and knowledge: granted that we hold some things by faith and know other things; granted that we believe that there is such a person as God and that this belief is true; do we also know that God exists? Do we accept this belief by faith or by reason? A theist may be inclined towards a reliabilist theory of knowledge; he may be inclined to think that a true belief constitutes knowledge if it is produced by a reliable belief producing mechanism. (There are hard problems here, but suppose for now we ignore them.) If the theist thinks God has created us with the sensus divinitatis Calvin speaks of, he will hold that indeed there is a reliable belief producing mechanism that produces theistic belief; he will thus hold that we know that God exists. One who follows Calvin here will also hold that a capacity to apprehend God’s existence is as much part of our natural noetic or intellectual equipment as is the capacity to apprehend truths of logic, perceptual truths, truths about the past, and truths about other minds. Belief in the existence of God is then in the same boat as belief in truths of logic, other minds, the past, and perceptual objects; in each case God has so constructed us that in the right circumstances we acquire the belief in question. But then the belief that there is such a person as God is as much among the deliverances of our natural noetic faculties as are those other beliefs. Hence we know that there is such a person as God, and don’t merely believe it; and it isn’t by faith that we apprehend the existence of God, but by reason; and this whether or not any of the classical theistic arguments is successful.

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Now my point is not that Christian philosophers must follow Calvin here. My point is that the Christian philosopher has a right (I should say a duty) to work at his own projects—projects set by the beliefs of the Christian community of which he is a part. The Christian philosophical community must work out the answers to its questions; and both the questions and the appropriate ways of working out their answers may presuppose beliefs rejected at most of the leading centers of philosophy. But the Christian is proceeding quite properly in starting from these beliefs, even if they are so rejected. He is under no obligation to confine his research projects to those pursued at those centers, or to pursue his own projects on the basis of the assumptions that prevail there. Perhaps I can clarify what I want to say by contrasting it with a wholly different view. According to the theologian David Tracy, In fact the modern Christian theologian cannot ethically do other than challenge the traditional self-understanding of the theologian. He no longer sees his task as a simple defense of or even as an orthodox reinterpretation of traditional belief. Rather, he finds that his ethical commitment to the morality of scientific knowledge forces him to assume a critical posture towards his own and his tradition’s beliefs . . . In principle, the fundamental loyalty of the theologian qua theologian is to that morality of scientific knowledge which he shares with his colleagues, the philosophers, historians and social sciences. No more than they can he allow his own—or his tradition’s—beliefs to serve as warrants for his arguments. In fact, in all properly theological inquiry, the analysis should be characterized by those same ethical stances of autonomous judgment, critical judgment and properly skeptical hard-mindedness that characterize analysis in other fields. (Tracy 1978, p. 7)

Furthermore, this “morality of scientific knowledge insists that each inquirer start with the present methods and knowledge of the field in question, unless one has evidence of the same logical type for rejecting those methods and that knowledge.” Still further, “for the new scientific morality, one’s fundamental loyalty as an analyst of any and all cognitive claims is solely to those methodological procedures which the particular scientific community in question has developed” (Tracy 1978, p. 6). I say caveat lector. I’m prepared to bet that this “new scientific morality” is like the Holy Roman Empire: it is neither new nor scientific nor morally obligatory. Furthermore the “new scientific morality” looks to me to be monumentally inauspicious as a stance for a Christian theologian, modern or otherwise. Even if there were a set of methodological procedures held in common by most philosophers, historians, and social scientists, or most secular philosophers, historians, and social scientists, why should a Christian theologian give ultimate allegiance to them rather than, say, to God, or to the fundamental truths of Christianity? Tracy’s suggestion as to how Christian theologians should proceed seems at best wholly unpromising. Of course I am only a philosopher, not a modern theologian; no doubt I am venturing beyond

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my depths. So I don’t presume to speak for modern theologians; but however things stand for them, the modern Christian philosopher has a perfect right, as a philosopher, to start from his belief in God. He has a right to assume it, take it for granted, in his philosophical work—whether or not he can convince his unbelieving colleagues either that this belief is true or that it is sanctioned by those “methodological procedures” Tracy mentions. And the Christian philosophical community ought to get on with the philosophical questions of importance to the Christian community. It ought to get on with the project of exploring and developing the implications of Christian theism for the whole range of questions philosophers ask and answer. It ought to do this whether or not it can convince the philosophical community at large either that there really is such a person as God, or that it is rational or reasonable to believe that there is. Perhaps the Christian philosopher can convince the skeptic or the unbelieving philosopher that indeed there is such a person as God. Perhaps this is possible in at least some instances. In other instances, of course, it may be impossible; even if the skeptic in fact accepts premises from which theistic belief follows by argument forms he also accepts, he may, when apprised of this situation, give up those premises rather than his unbelief. (In this way it is possible to reduce someone from knowledge to ignorance by giving him an argument he sees to be valid from premises he knows to be true.) But whether or not this is possible, the Christian philosopher has other fish to fry and other questions to think about. Of course he must listen to, understand, and learn from the broader philosophical community and he must take his place in it; but his work as a philosopher is not circumscribed by what either the skeptic or the rest of the philosophical world thinks of theism. Justifying or trying to justify theistic belief in the eyes of the broader philosophical community is not the only task of the Christian philosophical community; perhaps it isn’t even among its most important tasks. Philosophy is a communal enterprise. The Christian philosopher who looks exclusively to the philosophical world at large, who thinks of himself as belonging primarily to that world, runs a twofold risk. He may neglect an essential part of his task as a Christian philosopher; and he may find himself adopting principles and procedures that don’t comport well with his beliefs as a Christian. What is needed, once more, is autonomy and integrality.

THEISM AND PERSONS My third example has to do with philosophical anthropology: how should we think about human persons? What sorts of things, fundamentally, are they? What is it to be a person, what is it to be a human person, and how shall we

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think about personhood? How, in particular, should Christians, Christian philosophers, think about these things? The first point to note is that on the Christian scheme of things, God is the premier person, the first and chief exemplar of personhood. God, furthermore, has created man in his own image; we men and women are image bearers of God, and the properties most important for an understanding of our personhood are properties we share with him. How we think about God, then, will have an immediate and direct bearing on how we think about humankind. Of course we learn much about ourselves from other sources—from everyday observation, from introspection and self-observation, from scientific investigation and the like. But it is also perfectly proper to start from what we know as Christians. It is not the case that rationality, or proper philosophical method, or intellectual responsibility, or the new scientific morality, or whatever, require that we start from beliefs we share with everyone else—what common sense and current science teach, e.g.—and attempt to reason to or justify those beliefs we hold as Christians. In trying to give a satisfying philosophical account of some area or phenomenon, we may properly appeal, in our account or explanation, to anything else we already rationally believe—whether it be current science or Christian doctrine. Let me proceed again to specific examples. There is a fundamental watershed, in philosophical anthropology, between those who think of human beings as free—free in the libertarian sense—and those who espouse determinism. According to determinists, every human action is a consequence of initial conditions outside our control by way of causal laws that are also outside our control. Sometimes underlying this claim is a picture of the universe as a vast machine where, at any rate at the macroscopic level, all events, including human actions, are determined by previous events and causal laws. On this view every action I have in fact performed was such that it wasn’t within my power to refrain from performing it; and if, on a given occasion I did not perform a given action, then it wasn’t then within my power to perform it. If I now raise my arm, then, on the view in question, it wasn’t within my power just then not to raise it. Now the Christian thinker has a stake in this controversy just by virtue of being a Christian. For she will no doubt believe that God holds us human beings responsible for much of what we do—responsible, and thus properly subject to praise or blame, approval or disapproval. But how can I be responsible for my actions, if it was never within my power to perform any action I didn’t in fact perform, and never within my power to refrain from performing any I did perform? If my actions are thus determined, then I am not rightly or justly held accountable for them; but God does nothing improper or unjust, and he holds me accountable for some of my actions; hence it is not the case that all of my actions are thus determined. The Christian has an initially strong reason to reject the claim that all of our actions are causally determined—a reason much stronger than the meager

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and anemic arguments the determinist can muster on the other side. Of course if there were powerful arguments on the other side, then there might be a problem here. But there aren’t; so there isn’t. Now the determinist may reply that freedom and causal determinism are, contrary to initial appearances, in fact compatible. He may argue that my being free with respect to an action I performed at a time t, for example, doesn’t entail that it was then within my power to refrain from performing it, but only something weaker—perhaps something like if I had chosen not to perform it, I would not have performed it. Indeed, the clearheaded compatibilist will go further. He will maintain, not merely that freedom is compatible with determinism, but that freedom requires determinism. He will hold with Hume that the proposition S is free with respect to action A or S does A freely entails that S is causally determined with respect to A—that there are causal laws and antecedent conditions that together entail either that S performs A or that S does not perform A. And he will back up this claim by insisting that if S is not thus determined with respect to A, then it’s merely a matter of chance— due, perhaps, to quantum effects in S’s brain—that S does A. But if it is just a matter of chance that S does A, then either S doesn’t really do A at all, or at any rate S is not responsible for doing A. If S’s doing A is just a matter of chance, then S’s doing A is something that just happens to him; but then it is not really the case that he performs A—at any rate it is not the case that he is responsible for performing A. And hence freedom, in the sense that is required for responsibility, itself requires determinism. But the Christian thinker will find this claim monumentally implausible. Presumably the determinist means to hold that what he says characterizes actions generally, not just those of human beings. He will hold that it is a necessary truth that if an agent isn’t caused to perform an action then it is a mere matter of chance that the agent in question performs the action in question. From a Christian perspective, however, this is wholly incredible. For God performs actions, and performs free actions; and surely it is not the case that there are causal laws and antecedent conditions outside his control that determine what he does. On the contrary: God is the author of the causal laws that do in fact obtain; indeed, perhaps the best way to think of these causal laws is as records of the ways in which God ordinarily treats the beings he has created. But of course it is not simply a matter of chance that God does what he does—creates and upholds the world, let’s say, and offers redemption and renewal to his children. So a Christian philosopher has an extremely good reason for rejecting this premise, along with the determinism and compatibilism it supports. What is really at stake in this discussion is the notion of agent causation: the notion of a person as an ultimate source of action. According to the friends of agent causation, some events are caused, not by other events, but by substances, objects—typically personal agents. And at least since the time of

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David Hume, the idea of agent causation has been languishing. It is fair to say, I think, that most contemporary philosophers who work in this area either reject agent causation outright or are at the least extremely suspicious of it. They see causation as a relation among events; they can understand how one event can cause another event, or how events of one kind can cause events of another kind. But the idea of a person, say, causing an event, seems to them unintelligible, unless it can be analyzed, somehow, in terms of event causation. It is this devotion to event causation, of course, that explains the claim that if you perform an action but are not caused to do so, then your performing that action is a matter of chance. For if I hold that all causation is ultimately event causation, then I will suppose that if you perform an action but are not caused to do so by previous events, then your performing that action isn’t caused at all and is therefore a mere matter of chance. The devotee of event causation, furthermore, will perhaps argue for his position as follows. If such agents as persons cause effects that take place in the physical world—my body’s moving in a certain way, for example—then these effects must ultimately be caused by volitions or undertakings—which, apparently, are immaterial, unphysical events. He will then claim that the idea of an immaterial event’s having causal efficacy in the physical world is puzzling or dubious or worse. But a Christian philosopher will find this argument unimpressive and this devotion to event causation uncongenial. As for the argument, the Christian already and independently believes that acts of volition have causal efficacy; he believes indeed, that the physical universe owes its very existence to just such volitional acts—God’s undertaking to create it. And as for the devotion to event causation, the Christian will be, initially, at any rate, strongly inclined to reject the idea that event causation is primary and agent causation to be explained in terms of it. For he believes that God does and has done many things: he has created the world; he sustains it in being; he communicates with his children. But it is extraordinarily hard to see how these truths can be analyzed in terms of causal relations among events. What events could possibly cause God’s creating the world or his undertaking to create the world? God himself institutes or establishes the causal laws that do in fact hold; how, then, can we see all the events constituted by his actions as related by causal laws to earlier events? How could it be that propositions ascribing actions to him are to be explained in terms of event causation? Some theistic thinkers have noted this problem and reacted by soft pedaling God’s causal activity, or by impetuously following Kant in declaring that it is of a wholly different order from that in which we engage, an order beyond our comprehension. I believe this is the wrong response. Why should a Christian philosopher join in the general obeisance to event causation? It is not as if there are cogent arguments here. The real force behind this claim is a certain philosophical way of looking at persons and the world; but this view has no

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initial plausibility from a Christian perspective and no compelling argument in its favor. So on all these disputed points in philosophical anthropology the theist will have a strong initial predilection for resolving the dispute in one way rather than another. He will be inclined to reject compatibilism, to hold that event causation (if indeed there is such a thing) is to be explained in terms of agent causation, to reject the idea that if an event isn’t caused by other events then its occurrence is a matter of chance, and to reject the idea that events in the physical world can’t be caused by an agent’s undertaking to do something. And my point here is this. The Christian philosopher is within his right in holding these positions, whether or not he can convince the rest of a philosophical world and whatever the current philosophical consensus is, if there is a consensus. But isn’t such an appeal to God and his properties, in this philosophical context, a shameless appeal to a deus ex machina? Surely not. “Philosophy,” as Hegel once exclaimed in a rare fit of lucidity, “is thinking things over.” Philosophy is in large part a clarification, systematization, articulation, relating and deepening of pre-philosophical opinion. We come to philosophy with a range of opinions about the world and humankind and the place of the latter in the former; and in philosophy we think about these matters, systematically articulate our views, put together and relate our views on diverse topics, and deepen our views by finding unexpected interconnections and by discovering and answering unanticipated questions. Of course we may come to change our minds by virtue of philosophical endeavor; we may discover incompatibilities or other infelicities. But we come to philosophy with pre-philosophical opinions; we can do no other. And the point is: the Christian has as much right to his pre-philosophical opinions as others have to theirs. He needn’t try first to “prove” them from propositions accepted by, say, the bulk of the non-Christian philosophical community; and if they are widely rejected as naïve, or pre-scientific, or primitive, or unworthy of “man come of age,” that is nothing whatever against them. Of course if there were genuine and substantial arguments against them from premises that have some legitimate claim on the Christian philosopher, then he would have a problem; he would have to make some kind of change somewhere. But in the absence of such arguments—and the absence of such arguments is evident—the Christian philosophical community, quite properly starts, in philosophy, from what it believes. But this means that the Christian philosophical community need not devote all of its efforts to attempting to refute opposing claims and/or to arguing for its own claims, in each case from premises accepted by the bulk of the philosophical community at large. It ought to do this, indeed, but it ought to do more. For if it does only this, it will neglect a pressing philosophical task: systematizing, deepening, clarifying Christian thought on these topics. So here again: my plea is for the Christian philosopher, the Christian philosophical

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community, to display, first, more independence and autonomy: we needn’t take as our research projects just those projects that currently enjoy widespread popularity; we have our own questions to think about. Secondly, we must display more integrity. We must not automatically assimilate what is current or fashionable or popular by way of philosophical opinion and procedures; for much of it comports ill with Christian ways of thinking. And finally, we must display more Christian self-confidence or courage or boldness. We have a perfect right to our pre-philosophical views: why, therefore, should we be intimidated by what the rest of the philosophical world thinks plausible or implausible? These, then, are my examples; I could have chosen others. In ethics, for example: perhaps the chief theoretical concern, from the theistic perspective, is the question how are right and wrong, good and bad, duty, permission, and obligation related to God and to his will and to his creative activity? This question doesn’t arise, naturally enough, from a non-theistic perspective; and so, naturally enough, non-theist ethicists do not address it. But it is perhaps the most important question for a Christian ethicist to tackle. I have already spoken about epistemology; let me mention another example from this area. Epistemologists sometimes worry about the confluence or lack thereof of epistemic justification, on the one hand, and truth, or reliability, on the other. Suppose we do the best that can be expected of us, noetically speaking; suppose we do our intellectual duties and satisfy our intellectual obligations: what guarantee is there that in so doing we shall arrive at the truth? Is there even any reason for supposing that if we thus satisfy our obligations, we shall have a better chance of arriving at the truth than if we brazenly flout them? And where do these intellectual obligations come from? How does it happen that we have them? Here the theist has, if not a clear set of answers, at any rate clear suggestions towards a set of answers. Another example: creative antirealism is presently popular among philosophers; this is the view that it is human behavior—in particular, human thought and language—that is somehow responsible for the fundamental structure of the world and for the fundamental kinds of entities there are. From a theistic point of view, however, universal creative anti-realism is at best a mere impertinence, a piece of laughable bravado. For God, of course, owes neither his existence nor his properties to us and our ways of thinking; the truth is just the reverse. And so far as the created universe is concerned, while it indeed owes its existence and character to activity on the part of a person, that person is certainly not a human person. One final example, this time from philosophy of mathematics. Many who think about sets and their nature are inclined to accept the following ideas. First, no set is a member of itself. Second, whereas a property has its extension contingently, a set has its membership essentially. This means that no set could have existed if one of its members had not, and that no set could have

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had fewer or different members from the ones it in fact has. It means, furthermore, that sets are contingent beings; if Ronald Reagan had not existed, then his unit set would not have existed. And thirdly, sets form a sort of iterated structure: at the first level there are sets whose members are non-sets, at the second level sets whose members are non-sets or first level sets; at the third level, sets whose members are non-sets or sets of the first two levels, and so on. Many are also inclined, with Georg Cantor, to regard sets as collections—as objects whose existence is dependent upon a certain sort of intellectual activity—a collecting or “thinking together” as Cantor put it. If sets were collections of this sort, that would explain their displaying the first three features I mentioned. But if the collecting or thinking together had to be done by human thinkers, or any finite thinkers, there wouldn’t be nearly enough sets—not nearly as many as we think in fact there are. From a theistic point of view, the natural conclusion is that sets owe their existence to God’s thinking things together. The natural explanation of those three features is just that sets are indeed collections—collections collected by God; they are or result from God’s thinking things together. This idea may not be popular at contemporary centers of set theoretical activity; but that is neither here nor there. Christians, theists, ought to understand sets from a Christian and theistic point of view. What they believe as theists affords a resource for understanding sets not available to the non-theist; and why shouldn’t they employ it? Perhaps here we could proceed without appealing to what we believe as theists; but why should we, if these beliefs are useful and explanatory? I could probably get home this evening by hopping on one leg; and conceivably I could climb Devil’s Tower with my feet tied together. But why should I want to? The Christian or theistic philosopher, therefore, has his own way of working at his craft. In some cases there are items on his agenda—pressing items—not to be found on the agenda of the non-theistic philosophical community. In others, items that are currently fashionable appear of relatively minor interest from a Christian perspective. In still others, the theist will reject common assumptions and views about how to start, how to proceed, and what constitutes a good or satisfying answer. In still others the Christian will take for granted and will start from assumptions and premises rejected by the philosophical community at large. Of course I don’t mean for a moment to suggest that Christian philosophers have nothing to learn from their non-Christian and non-theist colleagues: that would be a piece of foolish arrogance, utterly belied by the facts of the matter. Nor do I mean to suggest that Christian philosophers should retreat into their own isolated enclave, having as little as possible to do with non-theistic philosophers. Of course not! Christians have much to learn and much of enormous importance to learn by way of dialogue and discussion with their non-theistic colleagues. Christian philosophers must be intimately involved in the professional life of the philosophical community at large, both because of what they can learn and because of what they can

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contribute. Furthermore, while Christian philosophers need not and ought not to see themselves as involved, for example, in a common effort to determine whether there is such a person as God, we are all, theist and non-theist alike, engaged in the common human project of understanding ourselves and the world in which we find ourselves. If the Christian philosophical community is doing its job properly, it will be engaged in a complicated, many-sided dialectical discussion, making its own contribution to that common human project. It must pay careful attention to other contributions; it must gain a deep understanding of them; it must learn what it can from them and it must take unbelief with profound seriousness. All of this is true and all of this is important; but none of it runs counter to what I have been saying. Philosophy is many things. I said earlier that it is a matter of systematizing, developing, and deepening one’s pre-philosophical opinions. It is that; but it is also an arena for the articulation and interplay of commitments and allegiances fundamentally religious in nature; it is an expression of deep and fundamental perspectives, ways of viewing ourselves and the world and God. The Christian philosophical community, by virtue of being Christian, is committed to a broad but specific way of looking at humankind and the world and God. Among its most important and pressing projects are systematizing, deepening, exploring, articulating this perspective, and exploring its bearing on the rest of what we think and do. But then the Christian philosophical community has its own agenda; it need not and should not automatically take its projects from the list of those currently in favor at the leading contemporary centers of philosophy. Furthermore, Christian philosophers must be wary about assimilating or accepting presently popular philosophical ideas and procedures; for many of these have roots that are deeply anti-Christian. And finally the Christian philosophical community has a right to its perspectives; it is under no obligation first to show that this perspective is plausible with respect to what is taken for granted by all philosophers, or most philosophers, or the leading philosophers of our day. In sum, we who are Christians and propose to be philosophers must not rest content with being philosophers who happen, incidentally, to be Christians; we must strive to be Christian philosophers. We must therefore pursue our projects with integrity, independence, and Christian boldness.

WORKS CITED Calvin, John. 1960. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Trans. Ford Lewis Battles. Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press. Plantinga, Alvin. 1979. “The Probabilistic Argument from Evil.” Philosophical Studies 35: 1–53. Tracy, David. 1978. Blessed Rage for Order. New York, NY: Seabury Press.

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2 “Christian Philosophy” Hermeneutic or Heuristic? Jean-Luc Marion

Concepts are mortal too. They can die of insignificance or at least become pure aporias. Is the concept of “Christian philosophy” not undergoing this fate today, pointing only to a way that no longer leads anywhere, an abandoned yard, a dead discipline? But do we have to renounce “Christian philosophy” on the simple pretext that we can no longer think it? Should we not, instead, increase our efforts to think it anew? Before I go any further, let me recall the principal aporia that still characterizes “Christian philosophy” today. It appeared during a debate provoked between 1927 and 1931 by the position taken by the excellent French historian and philosopher Émile Bréhier (1931). His thesis can be summarized as follows: Christianity has often used very diverse philosophies, but has never created or assimilated any of them, because there is an “incompatibility,” or at least a radical “separation,” between clear and distinct reason and the mystery of a relationship between God and the human person.¹ Both excessive and provocative, this position nonetheless legitimately once again required clarification of the relation between philosophy and Christian theology—is it an incompatibility, a partial stand-off, or a continuity? One might have expected that Catholics (if not all Christians) would uphold the theoretical legitimacy and historical reality of such a “Christian philosophy” against Bréhier, leaving the task of challenging it to non-believers. Yet the distribution of roles was more complex. Some Catholics held that, “in the sense in which we usually understand it, there is no Catholic philosophy, any more than there is a

¹ A first discussion appeared in the Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie (1932). See also the brilliant summary of this debate by Henri de Lubac (1936/1992).

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Catholic science” (de Wulf 1904);² this thesis (which was typical of the school of Louvain, for whom Aristotelian Thomism imposes itself on Catholics not because of its Christianity but because of its strict truth) recalled Jacques Maritain’s initial position, that only an extrinsic relation exists between the faith and the philosophy of a Christian thinker.³ Even better, this position also agrees with Maurice Blondel’s non-Thomistic and non-Scholastic thought: “this term ‘Christian philosophy’ does not exist any more than Christian physics does” (Blondel 1896, p. 34).⁴ In this way Catholic thinkers managed to reject “Christian philosophy” by using the argument of its non-Christian opponents, from Feuerbach to Heidegger: this is a contradictory syntagma, a “square circle,” an “iron-wood.”⁵ From this it follows that the concept of “Christian philosophy” can appear as problematic to believers (non-Thomistic as well as Thomistic) as to non-believers. The question remains entirely open, because the responses do not depend on the theological options. Should one give it up? These uncertainties notwithstanding, one formal definition upheld the use of this concept, due to Étienne Gilson’s almost solitary initiative: “I call ‘Christian philosophy’ all philosophy that, while formally distinguishing between the two orders, considers Christian revelation to be an indispensable auxiliary of reason” (1932, p. 33).⁶ This definition can be understood to have two meanings. Gilson, for his part, often explained that “Christian philosophy” exists whenever revelation makes suggestions to reason, without substituting itself for reason or modifying reason’s requirements, in order to broach themes rationally that reason could not handle by itself or even suspect. He gave the concept of creation as an example. Yet from this point of view one might as well have suggested the concepts of the Eucharist, which became a philosophical theme for Descartes and Leibniz, of grace for Malebranche or Leibniz, of the inspiration of the Scriptures for Spinoza, or of Christology as a whole for Hegel and Schelling. Even more, should one not also qualify as “Christian philosophy” any philosophy that opposes itself to Christian revelation yet does not stop calling upon revelation as upon an “indispensable auxiliary of reason” precisely in order to criticize it in detail? Is this not essentially the case with Feuerbach and

² This passage is cited in an excellent anthology of the present positions by Étienne Gilson, as an appendix to his first contribution to the debate (Gilson 1932, p. 430). ³ See Bréhier’s discussion in the Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie (Gilson et al. 1931, p. 59). ⁴ It is true that Blondel’s thinking on this topic evolved, as it did for others. ⁵ See Feuerbach (1903, pp. 58ff.); Heidegger (1986, 48:162). See also Marion (1982, pp. 91ff.; in English: Marion 1991, pp. 61ff.). There is also Husserl’s way of putting God “out of circulation” (Ideen §58; see Husserl 1983). This thesis was prolonged until recently, e.g., in Beaufret (1973), or Beaufret (1980). ⁶ This is a formula repeated and defended again in Gilson (1949, p. 138).

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Nietzsche, who at least methodologically are no different from the medievals, insofar as they apply reason to the given that is revealed? It is clear that Gilson intended his definition to have a much more restricted meaning: Christian revelation intervenes as an “auxiliary,” not because it would offer themes to reason that otherwise would be unreachable, but because it offers a radically original interpretation of them, that of the revelation of Christ. In other words: in Gilson’s best-known thesis, “the metaphysics of Exodus,” “Christian philosophy” contends that the quasi-Aristotelian concept of actus purus essendi is equivalent to a purely theological and biblical statement, Sum qui sum (Exod. 3:14). Let me admit this equivalence as a hypothesis. Yet allow me to question the operation that is accomplished by “Christian philosophy” in this very privileged case. It consists in interpreting a philosopheme as a divine name (and as the first). Yet this philosopheme would remain intelligible, and endowed with its meaning, even if it were not interpreted as an equivalent to such a theological theme. It would be possible for actus purus essendi not to interpret the God of Exodus, and it has indeed not denoted it for all non-Thomistic Aristotelians, whether medieval or modern. Inversely, “Christian philosophy” also could not interpret the esse as the first of divine names (and replace it with a simple concept, as Scotus did), or privilege other transcendentals, such as the bonum (according to the prevalent tradition until St. Bonaventure). In short, the assistance from which “Christian philosophy” benefits consists in a theological interpretation of purely philosophical concepts, an interpretation that is possible but not necessary. Of course, there are plenty of examples of this kind of “Christian philosophy” that originate in a Christian interpretation of philosophical theses: St. Augustine built his entire doctrine of the images of the Trinity within us on the possibility of interpreting the faculties of the soul, memoria/intellectus/ amor, as Trinitarian indications. To support the vision of ideas in the Word, Malebranche interprets Cartesian innation in theological terms as innation in the Creator. The Christian interpretations of Platonism, stoicism, skepticism, and even Epicureanism are sufficiently well known to make it unnecessary to demonstrate how the Gilsonian definition of “Christian philosophy” also applies to them. Depending on the talent of the interpreter, the preparatio evangelica, initially reserved for Platonism, can be generalized to all philosophy. Such has historically been the case. Maurice Blondel must be regarded as one of the most perfect examples of this process when he claims always to be able to read transcendence within immanence (“the immanent affirmation of transcendence” (Blondel 1956, p. 40)) and to extricate the supernatural “necessarily” from nature: “I feel more and more drawn toward the design of showing . . . the natural necessity of the supernatural and the supernatural reality of the natural itself” (Blondel 1961, pp. 52ff.). Furthermore, theology itself made the method of immanence its own in one of the richest trends of

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this century and hence appropriated the hermeneutics that defines “Christian philosophy” according to Gilson. Indeed, this was at least the tacit presupposition of the dispute about Henri de Lubac’s Supernatural (Should natural desire be interpreted as a real capacity to see God?), of analogy according to Erich Przywara (Should the analogia entis be interpreted as a Trinitarian determination?), and, above all, of Karl Rahner’s theology (Should the passage from finite being to infinite being be interpreted as the theoretical place of Christology? Should the non-believer be interpreted as “anonymous Christian”? Does the evolution of “terrestrial realities” allow their interpretation as “signs of the times,” heralding the coming of the kingdom of God?). If we retain Gilson’s definition that “all philosophy that, while formally distinguishing the two orders, considers Christian revelation as an indispensable auxiliary of reason,” these few quickly enumerated but very significant examples show sufficiently that “Christian philosophy” is neither fragile nor marginal in our century. On the contrary, it appears to be the privileged method of a dominant part of Christian and Catholic thought. From de Lubac to Rahner, from Gilson to Blondel, up to Lonergan and Moltmann, Mascall and Tracy, even Ricœur— [the twentieth] century has been that of “Christian philosophy” as hermeneutic par excellence. * * * As impressive as its partisans are, as important as its results may appear, and as venerable as the method of preparatio evangelica, which it continues, remains, this definition of “Christian philosophy” as hermeneutical nevertheless remains highly controversial. I see at least three arguments that bring it into question. (1) If from the point of view of the revelation of concepts and thus of (supposed) realities already acquired by strict philosophy, “Christian philosophy” can be reduced to a hermeneutic, then it remains secondary, derivative, even elective in comparison with one instance, philosophy, the only original and inventive one. Actus purus essendi can also be thought without its interpretation as Sum qui sum, since that was the way Aristotle thought it. The triad memoria/intellectus/amor can be thought without its Trinitarian interpretation, since that was the way Plotinus thought it. The strictly interpretative definition of “Christian philosophy,” therefore, responds to Bréhier’s objection only by conceding the essential to it. This supposed “philosophy” limits itself to commentary and merely repeats the results of strict philosophy, which is not Christian. To reduce “Christian philosophy” to a hermeneutic amounts to denying it the level of philosophy. (2) If, even (and mainly) from the point of view of Christian revelation, “Christian philosophy” is limited to a hermeneutic, it becomes subject to the suspicions that weigh on all hermeneutics. Two principles are involved. (a) Why privilege the interpretation based on Christian revelation, when others

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are possible? Marx made this point brutally and forcefully: poverty can be interpreted as an evangelical virtue, but also as an economic phenomenon linked to the capitalist conditions of production. Why select one interpretation over the other? Why deny the second in the name of the first? The objection is so strong that a good part of Christian theology and the accompanying “Christian philosophy” are still in the process of responding to it a century after Marx. (b) Why take the interpretation based on Christian revelation for what it pretends to be? Every interpretation obeys reasons that differ or may differ in an essential way from those it invokes knowingly. These masked reasons for the interpretation may be due to unconscious desire (Freud), from the “will to truth,” that is, the “will to power” (Nietzsche), ideology (Marx), etc. Only the result is important: an interpretation cannot be justified by what it says about itself, but usually by what it does not say. Nietzsche summarized this suspicion in the following principle: “There are no moral phenomena, there is only a moral interpretation of these phenomena” (Nietzsche 1999, §108, p. 92; in English 1966, §108, p. 85). This applies to the hermeneutics of “Christian philosophy” in the sense that there is no Christian philosophy, merely a Christian interpretation of philosophy, which then has to justify itself, not because of what it says about itself, but because of what it does not say. Through this a counter-hermeneutics becomes possible, which reverses the hermeneutics of “Christian philosophy” point by point. Two examples will suffice: (a) The philosophical definition of “God” as “moral God” (Kant, Fichte) can be interpreted as an image of the Christian God or, on the contrary, as what leads to the “death of God” (which is the way Feuerbach, Bauer, Marx, and Nietzsche understood it). (b) The definition of “God” as causa sui (Descartes) can be interpreted as an image of the Christian God or, on the contrary, as his metaphysical idol par excellence (Heidegger). Such a counter-hermeneutics results directly from the modern critique of all hermeneutics, on the one hand, and, on the other, from the definition of “Christian philosophy” as one hermeneutic among others. As a result, the “auxiliary” of revelation is no longer insurmountable. In other words, reducing “Christian philosophy” to a hermeneutic leads to branding it as arbitrary. (3) According to Gilson, the hermeneutic definition of “Christian philosophy” must “formally distinguish the two orders” of philosophy and theology, of nature and grace, the known and the revealed. But can it do this? For the interpretation of one in the light of the other to remain possible, must one not already suppose that certain specifically Christian truths are at least already powerfully and in nuce within the statements of strict philosophy (or are “natural,” if one can use that term)? How far can this pre-established affinity go? Throughout the history of philosophy, the quarrel about the supernatural has never ceased to reappear every time the hermeneutic of “Christian philosophy” succeeds too well: on the topic of double beatitude, the rectitude of free will, the disinterested love of God, the intelligibility of divine ends, the

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meaning of history, etc. In each case, the danger consisted in taking revelation to be a simple implication of nature and thus of philosophy. To reduce “Christian philosophy” to a hermeneutic thus exposes it to missing the specificity of creation and no less that of revelation—by locking faith in its preambula. This triple result does not automatically lead to a renunciation of all of “Christian philosophy,” not even to the definition proposed by Gilson, but it does force us to dispute that “Christian philosophy” be defined exclusively as a hermeneutic. * * * How else can one define it? When taking more precisely into account the “auxiliary” that distinguishes it absolutely from any other kind of philosophy, Gilson without further precision calls it “Christian revelation.” Yet this revelation is summarized in Christ. Now by his teaching and finally by his judgment (“He interpreted to them the things about himself in all the Scriptures [διερμήνευσεν αὐτοῖς ἐν πάσαις ταῖς γραφαῖς τὰ περὶ ἑαυτοῦ.]”; Luke 24:27), Christ exercises a hermeneutic on the world and its wisdom. But he accomplishes it only because of an entirely different characteristic: its radical newness, its unsurpassable innovation. “He introduced all newness by introducing himself [Omnem novitatem attulit, seipsum afferens].”⁷ If Christ reveals what has always been hidden (the mystery of God) and makes all things new (“Now I am making the whole of creation new”; Revelation 21:5), it is because he himself constitutes all newness, because he comes from God’s bosom, from absolutely beyond the world, which for that very reason “did not know him” (John 1:10). His revelation introduced realities and phenomena into the world that never had been seen or known there before him. Without his newness even the sketches of the Old Covenant would have remained unintelligible—sanctity, forgiveness, resurrection, communion, etc. With Christ, a newness lives in the world that is not of the world—“the new heavens and the new earth” (2 Peter 3:13). Revelation interprets only in the context of Christ’s Trinitarian innovation. In what does Christ’s innovation consist? He makes manifest that “God is love” (1 John 4:18). This opening, absolutely without parallel among previous representations of divinity, determines charity as the domain of theology. Charity deploys itself immediately in the character of Christ, where it appears carnally, mediately in the Trinity, from which it deduces its interpersonal depth, and as a derivative in the Church, where the Son of the Father recapitulates human beings in the Spirit as his adopted brothers and sisters. These are revelata in the strict sense, which belong only to theology and which philosophy need not discuss, even when it is supposed to be “Christian.” ⁷ Irenaeus of Lyon, Contra Haereses 4.34.1.

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However, apart from its theological use, charity has purely theoretical effects on the horizon of rationality. As a new theoretical continent to be explored, it opens up what Pascal called the “order of charity” (Pascal 1973, §306), in opposition to the order of “carnal grandeurs” (all the powers of bodies, politics, economics, the imagination, etc.). The order of charity, which concerns love in all its facets, dominates the other two and for that reason remains less visible and less known than they do. Indeed, according to an essential paradox, no order can know or see a superior order (even if an order knows itself and can see all inferior orders). Charity, the supreme order, thus remains invisible to the flesh and to the spirit, to powers and to sciences. The result is that charity opens a field of new phenomena to knowledge, but this field remains invisible to natural reason alone. That is why philosophy needs the “indispensable auxiliary” of revelation in order to gain access to it: because it is revelation, as the revelation of charity, that offers perfectly rational phenomena to philosophy, although they belong to charity and are as new as it is. One finds here again Gilson’s definition of “Christian philosophy,” but with a radically new meaning: all philosophy that, while formally distinguishing the differences between the orders (in Pascal’s sense), considers Christian Revelation (understood as revelation of charity, thus the third order) to be an indispensable auxiliary of reason. But from now on, the “auxiliary” brought by Revelation not only assists in providing a new interpretation of phenomena that are already visible but also makes visible phenomena that would have remained invisible without it. “Christian philosophy” is not practiced as a simple, possibly ideological, hermeneutic of a natural “given” already accessible to rationality without Revelation, in short, as an interpretative supplement under strange command. It offers entirely new natural phenomena to reason, which reason discovers because Revelation invents them for it and shows them to it. Reason is therefore practiced as heuristic. Gilson’s proposed definition of “Christian philosophy” thus can be understood a second time not only as hermeneutic but as heuristic. And, because Gilson did not clearly distinguish the two possible meanings of his thesis or their profound difference, I will suppose that in going from one to the other I will remain under the patronage of this great philosopher. *

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As a matter of fact, the heuristic definition of “Christian philosophy” brings up a difficulty that Gilson often discussed: that Revelation—that is, the revelation of charity—would contribute to the appearance of phenomena, which are new and visible only through charity, thus invisible without it. Charity nevertheless would entrust them not only to theology (the science of the revelata), but also to a philosophy, that is, to knowledge ruled only by natural light. In short, the heuristic of charity would provide phenomena uncovered by Revelation to a purely natural philosophy. In consequence, between theology (supernatural)

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and philosophy (natural), “Christian philosophy” would introduce a mix: a knowledge that would discuss with natural light facts discovered under supernatural light. All the difficulties of this paradox are concentrated into one: the mix of natural and supernatural, or of revelation and philosophy, does not respect the distinction between the orders. “Christian philosophy” compromises theology as much as it does philosophy, because its concept is in the end contradictory. It is, of course, impossible here to give a complete response, but it is possible to give a few examples. Because the question of entitlement to the borders between the disciplines may be reduced to questions of rights regarding the real objects of these disciplines, can one justify “Christian philosophy” by its formal object? One would be able to do so if one were to succeed in describing one or several phenomena given in natural experience and not by it, but by the “order of charity” or its revelation. The most convincing example relates not to God or the world but to the human person—in other words, the phenomenon of the human being, that is, of human natural visibility, which is concentrated in the face. One would not deny that this is a phenomenon in its own right, accessible by natural experience to natural reason. But it is not sufficient merely to look at a face in order to see the other who is exposed in it, since one can see the face of a slave without being able to recognize the other in his or her own right. One can also face another face and coldly kill it; we can use our own faces to dissimulate ourselves under masks and hide them from visibility; we even can expose our faces only to lie, hurt, or destroy. In short, the face can objectivize itself, hide itself, or not appear. This is why it was not sufficient for ancient thought to settle on the (theatrical or juridical) term persona in order to obtain access to the concept of person: In this particular case it lacked the discovery of the primacy of relation over substantiality, as only Trinitarian theology captured it. The face really becomes the phenomenon of a human being when it makes a person appear who is essentially defined as the crux and the origin of his or her relationships. If seeing a face implies reading a net of relationships in it, I will see it only if I experience “an idea of the infinite” (Levinas), that is, this center of relationships, which cannot be objectivized or reduced to me. Experiencing the infinite in the face of the other cannot be expressed in a formula. It is a behavior that is experimentally verifiable: facing a face disfigured (by poverty, sickness, pain, etc.) or reduced to its extreme shapes (prenatal life, coma, agony, etc.), I either cannot see it or am no longer able to recognize another for myself in it and continue on my way. Or I still can see in it what I do not see in it naturally—the absolute phenomenon of another center in the world, where my lookalike lives and whose look upon me allows me to live, thanks to him or her. But in this case, to see this invisible face, I must love it. Love, however, comes from charity. In consequence, one must hold that the natural phenomenon of the face of the other cannot be discovered except through the light of charity, that is, through

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the “auxiliary” of Revelation. Without the revelation of the transcendence of love, the phenomenon of the face, and thus of the other, simply cannot be seen. This is an exemplary case of “Christian philosophy.” In this way, I have attempted to justify the paradox of “Christian philosophy” through its formal object, one of its own phenomena, in order to solve through a factual answer a question of right (the possibility of an intermediary between philosophy and theology). It is conceivable that the legitimacy of such a “Christian philosophy” will be guaranteed only by the new phenomena that it would, all by itself, be able to add to the phenomena already treated in philosophy. In consequence, “Christian philosophy” would remain acceptable only so long as it invents—in the sense of both discovering and constructing— heretofore unseen phenomena. In short, “Christian philosophy” dies if it repeats, defends, and preserves something acquired that is already known, and remains alive only if it discovers what would remain hidden in philosophy without it. * * * Even if one admits that only a heuristic theory of charity can invent concepts such as “person” or “face,” one must still examine several legitimate objections to this image of “Christian philosophy.” I do not intend to resolve them thoroughly in this essay, but I will at least identify them and outline some responses. First objection: the above example of “person” or “face” does not prove anything more than a simple tautology. The heuristic that starts with charity of course discovers some phenomena of charity; but charity only keeps finding itself under other names, and this is why the distance between charity and love matters very little. The heuristic of charity would arrive at real philosophical validity only if it were to produce concepts of phenomena other than itself. This objection deserves all the more attention when we consider that the response allows us to confirm the heuristic scope of charity. To do this, let me examine three of the many concepts and phenomena that charity has invented in philosophy. (a) First, history, that is to say, not only linear and non-repetitive temporality, which innovates continually by determining irremediable facts forever, but also a temporality free from any fate, where every individual or collective action makes manifest the will of its actor, who thus judges him- or herself in the face of his or her time, the future, and God. Understood in this way, one can venture to say that history is born as a concept through St. Augustine, who discovers a history in the non-Christian world that until then had been ignored by philosophy and was unthought as such by starting from the history of salvation of Christian revelation. (b) Second, the icon, starting with the revelation of Christ as “icon of the invisible God [εἰκὼν τοῦ Θεοῦ τοῦ ἀοράτου]” (Col. 1:15), and by derivation the

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methods Western as well as Eastern painters and sculptors used to represent his elaborated face. By beginning with this icon, the Christian tradition attempted to think and show the paradox of a gaze, in itself as invisible as any gaze, which would not be reduced to the level of an observed object but would in turn envisage the one looking at him or her. This dialogue of two invisible gazes in the visible allows us, then, not only to see prayer but to enter into it. At issue is hence the experience of a counter-gaze crossing mine. By beginning with this paradigm, I was able to introduce a concept into phenomenology that was as unknown to Husserl as it was to Heidegger and whose absence precludes the phenomenology of intersubjectivity or of counterintentionality almost entirely. The intentionality of the I can only know objects and objectivize the other, thus missing him or her. In order for the other to appear as other, that is to say, as a non-object, the other must be seen as another intentionality, weighing on me. And this counter-intentionality is thought from the icon, the only concept we have to define it. The icon of the gaze of the other thus becomes an intelligible phenomenon starting with the invention of Christ as icon. (c) As a final example for a heuristic of charity, I shall rely on the authority of Kant, uncontested on the matter of rationalism. Defining belief (Glaube) as “the moral way of thinking of reason in its assent to what is inaccessible to theoretical knowledge,” in this case, belief in “what it is necessary to presuppose as a condition for the possibility of the final supreme goal,” he adds a note: The word fides expresses this already; but the introduction of this expression and this particular idea in moral philosophy could seem suspect, because they were first introduced by Christianity, and to imitate them could seem to be a flattering imitation of its language. But this is not a unique case, because this beautiful religion, in the supreme simplicity of its style, has enriched philosophy with moral concepts much more determined and much purer than those that [philosophy] had been able to produce until then; and these concepts, since they are there now, are freely approved by reason and admitted as concepts that it could have and should have discovered and introduced by itself. (Kant 1902–10, §91, ad n. 4)⁸

Nothing needs to be added to this admirable text except to correct its last sentence: it is exactly because it “should have” rather than “could have” invented these concepts that philosophy had to receive them from the Christian religion, through the intermediary of what I dare to call a heuristic of charity.

⁸ I owe this reference to de Lubac (1936/1992, p. 481), which refers to L. Brunschvicg (1939, p. 166).

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Second objection: On the supposition that certain phenomena and concepts become accessible to reason only through the “indispensable auxiliary” of Revelation, do they really belong to philosophy, or rather to Revelation? The response is obvious: concepts and phenomena obtained in the light of Revelation remain acquired by philosophy in the strict sense to the extent that once they have been discovered they are accessible to reason as such. The concepts of “face,” “person,” “history,” “faith,” etc. function philosophically even without the Christian convictions of their user. And this is why they may find themselves turned against their origin by non-Christian thoughts. The heuristic of charity itself is charitable: what it finds, it gives without reserve. And in this sense, the whole of philosophy could be called “Christian philosophy,” so much is it saturated with concepts and phenomena that directly or indirectly were introduced in it by revelation. In this sense, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Marx, and Feuerbach practice “Christian philosophy” as much as Leibniz, Hegel, Schelling, and Husserl do. Recognizing the imprint of Christian revelation on philosophy, and thus the heuristic function of “Christian philosophy” in it, does not depend on a subjective believing or atheistic conviction: it is about facts that any competent historian of philosophy knows thoroughly. One could almost sustain the paradox that the possibility of a “Christian philosophy” almost comes naturally, while a philosophy that has absolutely no connection to Christian revelation seems highly problematic in our historical situation. In short, how could a philosopher who really thinks about the major problems of philosophy not practice “Christian philosophy” (if only to criticize it)? Third objection: How does this new situation given to “Christian philosophy” respect the formal distinction between natural and supernatural orders? The first answer is that the Incarnation questions this distinction, which henceforth becomes more abstract than real. Yet the distinction must be maintained, at least in regard to the disciplines. Here no confusion is possible. (a) Theology deploys the discourse of charity from and about the revelata in the strict sense, that is, truths that only faith can reach. (b) Philosophy discusses facts, phenomena, and statements accessible to reason and its workings. (c) “Christian philosophy” (or whatever one wants to call it) finds and invents, in the natural sphere ruled by reason, phenomena and concepts that fall within the order of charity and that simple reason cannot see or discover. After having formalized them, “Christian philosophy” introduces them into philosophy and abandons them to it. This distinction between the roles demands only one presupposition: that charity, as grace, could be at the same time both natural (created) and supernatural (uncreated). Theologians accept this presupposition, whereas pure philosophy cannot forbid a priori what may be proven experimentally. Fourth objection: Does the heuristic determination of “Christian philosophy” reject its more common hermeneutic definition entirely? At this point

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one sees very clearly that the two are not opposed to each other; on the contrary, the heuristic definition often legitimizes the hermeneutic one. Indeed, the major objection to the hermeneutic definition stems from the fact that the proposed Christian interpretation of “terrestrial realities” is arbitrary: Why give them a Christian meaning rather than any other? The heuristic definition, by contrast, makes possible this response: giving a meaning to “terrestrial realities” through charity is justified because charity discovers and introduces new phenomena into the world itself and into the conceptual universe that are saturated with meaning and glory, which order and possibly save this world. Charity does not interpret through and as an ideology, because it gives to the world greater reality and grandeur than the world claims to have by itself. Gilson’s statement can be recovered here precisely, but by basing it on a more complete determination of revelation as charity that invents, discovers, works. Thus, it becomes clear that this double function of charity (hermeneutic and heuristic) presumes its most radical execution: charity first must give in order to give to reflection. This implies doing charitable work and contemplating charity in prayer. It is only in this sense that “Christian philosophy” presupposes faith in Christ. These answers to a few objections of course cannot suffice to establish a definition of “Christian philosophy” as a heuristic of charity. In this discussion it was my modest intention merely to contribute a new meditation on Gilson’s formula. It is possible that another point of departure may be preferable—even if this one has the advantage of linking to a discussion that in its time was very widespread and serious (and still is today). It is possible that the term Christian philosophy may turn out to be more of a handicap than an opportunity in the current state of the debate. In conclusion, I would like to suggest two arguments that seem to me to argue in favor of its maintenance. As I understand it, “Christian philosophy” is done by introducing concepts and discovering phenomena that come from charity, inasmuch as charity comes from revelation but inscribes itself in creation. “Ever since the creation of the world God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made” (Romans 1:20). Consequently, “Christian philosophy” contends that, in a mode not directly theological, philosophy relates to charity, which will from now on be considered as an order, a sphere, or a supplementary (and superior) level of things, and thus of rationality. The world can be read in terms of extension (matter, etc.), of spirit (essence, sciences, logic, etc.), and also of charity (love, grace, and their negative correlatives). Supposing one accepts this situation of “Christian philosophy,” what would be its relationship in the dominant and traditional definition of philosophy as metaphysics (science of being as being), or even as phenomenology of being as such, after the “destruction of the history of ontology” undertaken by Heidegger? Of course, “Christian philosophy” does not at all subscribe to metaphysics, or not entirely (in the case of the

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Thomists). But this irreducibility should not be considered an aberration or weakness, since nowadays metaphysics recognizes its limits by undergoing the “end of metaphysics,” while phenomenology claims to manifest the “other than being” (“autrement qu’être”) in its multiple modes. By privileging charity beyond being as the final scene, where the most decisive phenomena manifest themselves, “Christian philosophy” not only could be inscribed in the most renovating developments of contemporary philosophy but could also contribute in a decisive fashion to the overcoming of the end of metaphysics and to the deployment of phenomenology as such.⁹ A second argument comes from the age and rigor of the purely Christian uses of the term philosophy. Indeed, the Pauline mistrust—“Make sure that no one traps you and deprives you of your freedom by some secondhand, empty, rational philosophy based on the principles of this world instead of on Christ [φιλοσοφίας καὶ κενῆς ἀπάτης]” (Col. 2:8)—has prevented neither the most ancient Christian authors (Tatian, Clement of Alexandria, Justin “philosopher and martyr”) nor more recent ones (from Gregory of Nyssa to Erasmus) from strongly claiming this term and even the consecrated syntagma “Christian philosophy.” Of course, their interpretation was very different from that of modern authors: it is not about a science of the world (not even from the Christian point of view) but about the wisdom that Christ gives by means of a life radically different from the wisdom of the world, namely, attaining life in God. Among many examples, Justin says: “Philosophy is really a great thing to possess and the most precious for God, God toward whom it alone leads us and with whom it unites us; and those who apply their spirit to philosophy are in reality saints.”¹⁰ In this sense, “philosophy” unites with Christ and sanctifies. Without a doubt, this salvific ambition attributed to philosophy in a Christian context finds no echo in recent uses of the term. It is not, however, disqualified, because it is one of the most evident shortcomings of modern philosophy to have lost almost completely one of the original dimensions of ancient pagan philosophy, from Socrates to Iamblichus. One ought to do philosophy in order to attain the highest good, beatitude, even the immortality of the gods. Except for some rare exceptions, metaphysics has renounced this ambition, at the risk of losing one of the primordial justifications for philosophy. When “Christian philosophy” restores the principle that it knows not only from Christ but also in order to attain him and beatitude, rather than turn away from philosophy as it has done, it rediscovers, after the long meandering of metaphysics, the awareness that original philosophy had of its purpose. At a time of nihilism, “Christian philosophy,” taken as a heuristic of charity, would call any thought that would want to constitute itself as philosophy back to its ⁹ I refer here to my previous work: Marion (1982, particularly chaps. 3–4); Marion (1985); Marion (1986); and Marion (1989). ¹⁰ Justin, Dialogue with Trypho II, Patrologia Graeca 6.475B.

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forgotten ambition of loving wisdom. Beyond other arguments, it is for these two reasons that I would suggest that the concept of “Christian philosophy” today may be neither obsolete nor contradictory—nor without a future.¹¹

WORKS CITED Beaufret, Jean. 1973. “La philosophie chrétienne.” In Dialogue avec Heidegger II. Paris: Minuit. Beaufret, Jean. 1980. “Heidegger et la théologie.” In Heidegger et la question de Dieu. Ed. Richard Kearney and Joseph Stephen O’Leary. Paris: Grasset, pp. 19–36. Blondel, Maurice. 1896. “Les exigences rationnelles de la pensée contemporaine en matière d’apologétique et la méthode de la philosophie dans l’étude du problème religieux.” Annales de philosophie chrétienne (May). Blondel, Maurice. 1956. Lettre sur les exigences de la pensée contemporaine en matière d’apologétique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Blondel, Maurice. 1961. Carnets intimes. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Bréhier, Émile. 1931. “Y-a-t-il une philosophie chrétienne?” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (April): 133–62. Brunschvicg, Léon. 1939. La raison et la religion. Paris: F. Alcan. de Lubac, Henri. 1936. “Sur la philosophie chrétienne.” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 63, no. 3 (March): 225–53. In English as “Retrieving the Tradition: On Christian Philosophy.” Communio 19, no. 3 (Fall 1992): 478–506. de Wulf, Maurice. 1904. Introduction à la philosophie néo-scolastique. Louvain: Institut Supérieur de Philosophie. Deleuze, Gilles. 1993. Critique et clinique. Paris: Minuit. Feuerbach, Ludwig. 1903. Sämtliche Werke, vol. 8, Vorlesungen über das Wesen der Religion. Ed. Wilhelm Bollin, Friedrich Jodl, and Hans-Marin Sass. Stuttgart: Fromann. Gilson, Étienne. 1932. L’esprit de la philosophie médiévale. Paris: Vrin. Gilson, Étienne. 1949. Christianisme et philosophie. Paris: Vrin. Gilson, Étienne, Émile Bréhier, Léon Brunschvicg, Raymond Lenoir, Xavier Léon, Edouard Le Roy, Jacques Maritain, Maurice Blondel, and Jacques Chevalier. 1931. “La notion de philosophie chrétienne.” Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie 31, no. 2. Heidegger, Martin. 1986. Nietzsche: Der europäische Nihilismus—II. Abt. Vorlesungen 1919–1944, Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Husserl, Edmund. 1983. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book. Trans. F. Kersten. The Hague: Kluwer. Justin, Dialogue with Trypho II. Patrologia Graeca 6. Ed. J.-P. Migne. 162 vols. 1857–86. ¹¹ Thus Gilles Deleuze: “On the minor question of a Christian philosophy: yes, there is a Christian philosophy, not as much according to belief, but since judgment is considered an autonomous faculty, requiring therefore God’s system and guarantee” (1993, p. 55).

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Kant, Immanuel. 1902–10. Kritik der Urteilskraft. Kants Gesammelte Schriften, Akademie Ausgabe. Berlin: Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften. In English as Critique of Judgment. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987. Marion, Jean-Luc. 1982. Dieu sans l’être. Paris: Arthème Fayard. In English as God Without Being. Trans. Thomas A. Carlson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Marion, Jean-Luc. 1985. “De la mort de la ‘mort de Dieu’ aux noms divins.” Laval théologiques et philosophiques 41, no. 1: 25–42. Marion, Jean-Luc. 1986. “La fin de la fin de la métaphysique.” Laval théologiques et philosophiques 42, no. 1: 23–33. Marion, Jean-Luc. 1989. Réduction et donation: Recherches sur Husserl, Heidegger et la phénoménologie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. In English as Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology. Trans. Thomas A. Carlson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1999. Jenseits von Gut und Böse: Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft. In Kritische Studienausgabe. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Massimo Montinari. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. In English as Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York, NY: Random House, 1966. Pascal, Blaise. 1973. Pensées. Paris: Garnier/Flammarion.

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3 Christian Philosophy and the Christian Life Kyla Ebels-Duggan

Philosophers of Christian commitment must regard the question, “What is Christian philosophy?” as an important and pressing one. Here, I suggest understanding the question of what Christian philosophy is as a question about which questions Christian philosophers ought to be asking. The answer I put forward in this chapter is this: Christian philosophy, rightly understood and rightly executed, is part of one way of living a distinctively Christian life, so the questions that we ask ought to arise from, and be continuous with, the living of such a life. Much of what I say here is an attempt to clarify what I mean by this, largely by contrasting it with other ways of thinking of philosophy in general and Christian philosophy in particular. I take as my starting point Alvin Plantinga’s well-known “Advice to Christian Philosophers” (Plantinga 1984). Plantinga’s advice falls into two parts, a negative part, in which he commends autonomy, and a positive part in which he commends integrity. The first half of this chapter will dwell on the negative part, exploring what might be meant by autonomy in this context, and defending the view from the charge of dogmatism. In the second half, I turn to the positive part of the advice, and make an attempt to advance our understanding of what integrity would here require.

AUTONOMY AND ARTICULACY As I understand it, Plantinga’s central counsel in “Advice to Christian Philosophers” is just this: Ask your own questions. The two directives—to strive for autonomy and to strive for integrity—are the negative and positive side, respectively, of a single insight: that the questions Christian philosophers

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spend our time and energies considering and trying to answer should not be someone else’s questions, but instead should be our own. This is excellent advice, not just for Christian philosophers, but for all philosophers. I am persuaded that asking the right questions is at least as important to the practice and value of philosophy as arriving at accurate answers. And it is excellent advice not just for Christian philosophers, but for Christians generally. It is, for example, exactly the same as the counsel Marilynne Robinson gives us, through the voice of her splendid character Rev. John Ames. In Robinson’s novel, Gilead, Ames writes most immediately to his son, but also to all readers of the book, saying: In the matter of belief, I have always found that defenses have the same irrelevance about them as the criticisms they are meant to answer. I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things . . . So my advice is—don’t look for proofs. Don’t bother with them at all. They are never sufficient to the question, and they are always a little impertinent I think, because they claim for God a place within our conceptual grasp. And they will likely sound wrong to you, even if you convince someone else with them. That’s very unsettling over the long term . . . I’m not saying never doubt or question. The Lord gave you a mind so that you would make honest use of it. I’m saying you must be sure that the doubts and questions are your own, not, so to speak, the mustache and walking stick that happens to be the fashion at any particular moment. (Robinson 2004, pp. 178–9; emphasis added)¹

Another way to put the negative part of Plantinga’s—and Robinson’s—advice is this: don’t inadvertently take on the assumptions of others. Be alert to the natural human tendency to assimilate, unreflectively, the opinions of those around you, to pick them up as one would a contagion. In particular be alert to the tendency to assimilate opinions about which claims may be taken for granted and correlatively, which should be called into question, or again, which questions are worth asking. It is striking that Plantinga chooses the term “autonomy” to name this aspect of the ideal that he commends, but I think that the choice is a good one. It’s striking because it’s not atypical to find those whose pressures Plantinga encourages Christian philosophers to resist lauding the philosophical ideal in just the same terms, claiming that we should all strive to be autonomous thinkers, rather than merely unreflectively taking on the opinions of others. And it is not rare for those who talk in these terms to cite those with traditional religious commitments as paradigmatic violators, and sometimes even as explicit enemies, of this ideal. ¹ Plantinga would probably not endorse the first part of this, the advice about not looking for proofs, but I include it because it strikes me as both right and important. What follows the second ellipsis looks to be the same as the content of Plantinga’s advice.

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This negative characterization of religious commitment is closely connected to a familiar objection to Plantinga’s advice: Plantinga tells Christians that we are rationally permitted, perhaps even obligated, to take the doctrines of Christianity as the starting point for philosophical reflection. Some contend that this amounts to commending an irresponsible dogmatism, the very opposite of autonomy. These objectors accuse Plantinga, and those who share his outlook, of propagating a fundamentally anti-philosophical attitude. They interpret him as telling people not to think for themselves, but instead to take their opinions from others, from religious authorities or purportedly authoritative texts. It’s worth stopping to ask what is going on here. The imperative: “be autonomous” is apparently being applied to diametrically opposed directives. On what deserves to be called “the standard view,” autonomy requires rejecting, or at a minimum holding at arm’s length or questioning, traditional religious commitments. But on Plantinga’s view, the Christian philosopher who takes herself to be entitled to begin her philosophical inquiry from her religious commitments is the very model of autonomy. One might, at first, suspect that this is merely a rhetorical struggle over ownership of a particular laudatory word, but I think that something deeper is at issue. There is, in fact, an ideal shared in common here. And then there is a substantive normative disagreement about what it takes to live up to that ideal. In order to make progress on that disagreement, we need to become more articulate about what the common ideal in question is. In other work I’ve considered several candidate conceptions of the ideal of autonomy, and I’ve argued that on any plausible way of construing this ideal we run up against substantive, normative questions and disagreements about how to instantiate it (Ebels-Duggan 2014).² I won’t try to reproduce all of that here, but instead will focus on just one plausible way of articulating the shared ideal, and trace out the implications of doing so. I’ll argue that there is a stronger and a weaker way to take the ideal so construed, that the stronger way is not attractive and ought to be rejected by anyone, and that the weaker way is not only compatible with Plantinga’s advice, but—as he claims—modeled by the person who follows it. At a first approximation, I would articulate the shared ideal this way: Being autonomous means thinking for one’s self. The thinker who is not autonomous is the one who lets someone else do her thinking for her. But this is just a first approximation. We need to say more. The basis of the accusation of dogmatism against Plantinga is his recommendation that the Christian philosopher should begin reasoning from within her religious convictions, rather than taking these as needing a defense of their own. I take it that this is thought to be suspect because it is supposedly an

² See also Ebels-Duggan (2013, 2015).

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instance of embracing undefended assumptions. If that’s right, the objector seems to be committed to the view that you don’t count as autonomous, as thinking for yourself, unless you are able to give a defense of each of your assumptions. The ideal of autonomy is that of being able to provide an argument for each of one’s commitments, or to have no commitment that one cannot defend with rational argument. Presumably, these arguments can’t themselves contain premises that amount to undefended assumptions. So they must be arguments that anyone, regardless of her starting points, would be rationally compelled to accept. This, then, is the strong reading of the ideal of autonomy, and it is very strong indeed. We can also put this strong view in terms of an attitude towards skepticism or skeptical challenges, and a corresponding view about which questions one ought to ask. In answer to the question which questions are worth asking or worthy of philosophical attention? the defender of strong autonomy must reply: all of the questions. According to this view, we must take seriously any skeptical challenge that can be meaningfully formulated. Every skeptic is owed a reply, one that will satisfy him—or at least ought to satisfy him—by his own lights. If one is not able to give such a reply, then not only can one not expect to move the skeptic, but one is also not entitled to persist in one’s own convictions. To maintain autonomy, one would have to give them up. This is a recognizably Kantian ideal, on which Reason seeks the condition, and ultimately the unconditioned condition, of all of its commitments (Kant 1998a, A322–3/B378–9). The proponent of the ideal is, it seems, committed to a radical optimism about the powers of human reason. The optimism comes through most strongly on a constructivist reading of Kant’s project. On this reading, Kant holds that the autonomous thinker affirms only those commitments that her own Reason is capable of defending, and that this strong demand can be met because reflection on the mere form of reasoning will yield substantive commitments (see O’Neill 1989; Korsgaard 1996a, 1996b, 2008).³ There is no doubt something exhilarating about this picture, and it has inspired a great deal of interesting philosophical work. But equally indubitable is this: the ideal it puts forward is extraordinarily ambitious. The bar is set astoundingly high. I regularly encounter a must less sophisticated version of this hyperrationalist attitude when I teach any sort of moral philosophy classes, especially at the introductory level. Faced with even the most innocuous normative claim, e.g. it is wrong to torture someone just for fun, some student will demand a compelling line of reasoning before giving assent. Such demands presuppose that one is entitled to a position only if one can give a complete defense, a defense ³ See also Korsgaard’s introduction to Kant (1998b). For a summary of constructivist interpretations of Kant’s practical philosophy, and contrasts with realist approaches see EbelsDuggan (2012).

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that would—or at least should—convince a skeptic.⁴ It is not at all clear that any commitments—perhaps especially any normative commitments—will be able to meet this standard. Indeed it is often not even clear what would count as meeting it. To what premises could one appeal more secure than the conclusion sought? If the imagined skeptic is willing to reject the claim that it’s wrong to torture for fun, what is he willing to accept? As far as I can see, successful execution of the most ambitious program of Kantian constructivism would be the only fully satisfying response to this sort of demand.⁵ Some great minds are at work on that sort of response. Here is Christine Korsgaard’s description of the strategy: I think that the most powerful way of establishing a normative claim often takes this form: You show your audience that because of some circumstance they are in, they have a certain normative problem, that is, they need a principle; and then you show them that something is the best or the only solution to that problem, and then they are committed to that solution. And the solution is the normative principle. (Korsgaard 2002, pp. 51–2)

In fact, Korsgaard believes that a fully successful constructivist program would go one important step beyond this. It would derive the substance or content of the normative principles that it looks to vindicate from the form of the problems they are meant to answer. This is how one goes about showing that a solution to a normative problem is, indeed, “the best or only” one (Korsgaard 2008). If we could do this, I think that we would have met the strong standard for autonomy. But supposing that we don’t think that that project has yet been successfully executed. What should we think in the meantime? Should the default position really be skepticism or nihilism? It seems like this is what the ideal of autonomy, in the strong sense that we are now considering, would recommend. It’s not an impossible view to defend, but neither is it very attractive. In

⁴ For an example of this rationalist talk see Nussbaum (1997, pp. 9, 33, 35ff.). Though I am not sure how strong Nussbaum means her rationalism to be in the end, the things that she says here suggest that one should endorse only those positions for which one can offer rational justification. For an alternative model of philosophical thought and dialog see Wolterstorff (2008, xi). ⁵ Someone might argue that we can make do with a more substantive view of what counts as a good reason. Maybe, but on the very strong version of autonomy under consideration, any such view will need to include some argument vindicating its claims about which considerations may figure as reasons. And these arguments must, themselves, appeal to no undefended premises. Thus a regress threatens, one that can plausibly be stopped only when we reach the unconditioned condition of our commitments, the point at which it is, as Korsgaard puts it “unnecessary, incoherent, or impossible” to ask further (Korsgaard 1996a, p. 164). Similarly, though it may seem that some version of coherentism will suffice, skeptical questions can arise with respect to any such view. In any case, it’s not at all clear why the person who follows Plantinga’s advice need reject coherentism and she will also be able to affirm a substantive view of which considerations are properly cited as reasons.

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particular, it’s not at all clear that those who object that Plantinga’s advice amounts to an endorsement of dogmatism would really want to commit to a choice between the realization of this ambitious philosophical program and a collapse into skepticism. The strong interpretation of the ideal of thinking for one’s self, on which the autonomous thinker maintains no conviction that she cannot fully defend against skeptical challenges, gets traction from the suppressed presupposition that it represents the only alternative to dogmatism. But this presupposition is false. Let’s provisionally take “dogmatism” to name the phenomenon of believing something merely because someone told you to, without any thought or reflection of your own.⁶ Dogmatism of this sort is not the same as a lack of the full articulacy about our reasons for our convictions. It is quite possible, in fact absolutely ordinary, to have given adequate thought to a matter, and to have completely sufficient reasons for one’s commitments concerning it, while being inarticulate about what these reasons are (cf. Brewer 2009). Again, this shows up especially clearly, or in an especially interesting way, in the case of normative commitments. Here’s the sort of thing that I have in mind: you might, on the one hand, believe that Mozart is a great composer because someone told you so. Obviously one can form this belief on the basis of testimony, it’s almost certainly true, and it may well amount to knowledge. But contrast that case with the conviction of Mozart’s greatness that one can come to when and because one is fully engaged in appreciation of his works. Commitment of the latter sort is surely not well described as having accepted that Mozart is a great composer dogmatically or just because someone told you to. But neither is there reason to suppose that such active appreciation will yield an ability to state the reasons for valuing the music, much less state them in the form of a sound argument capable of persuading the Mozart skeptic. Maybe you can say something about what’s so compelling about the music, and maybe you can’t. But generally appreciation of the music will both precede and outstrip an ability to talk about it. Standardly, the latter is something into which we need to be educated, if it can be achieved at all. I suggest that the central convictions that direct our lives, the kinds of commitments on which Plantinga is telling us to draw, are normally much more like the second case of coming to normatively significant conviction than they are like the first. Love of another person normally has this structure. The lover is deeply convicted of the value of beloved, not dogmatically as if based

⁶ If dogmatism is meant to be something that we should always avoid, this isn’t quite right. In some cases it is perfectly acceptable to believe something just because someone told you to, and with no additional reflection of your own. In fact in Ebels-Duggan (2014) I argue that no formal characterization of an attitude towards our convictions is likely to turn out to be both always objectionable and sufficient to guide us. I repeat some of the considerations advanced there later in this chapter.

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merely on someone’s report, and also not on the basis of statable reasons that could be put together into a valid argument, but rather because of her appreciative experience of this very value (cf. Velleman 2006). The fact that we can be so sure of the beloved’s value, while also being inarticulate about its justifying grounds, has led some philosophers to regard interpersonal love as philosophically puzzling. I think that it should, rather, cause us to question the philosophical ideal of autonomous justification that suggests that there is some puzzle here. Religious commitment also might often be, and arguably should be, like this, commitment that arises out of experiences of value about which we are not standardly fully articulate. It would be inaccurate to classify commitment of this kind as dogmatism in the sense defined above. Could it count as autonomous? Not on the strong interpretation of autonomy under consideration, on which the threat to, or contrary of, autonomy is inarticulacy, not being able to say what our reasons are. If autonomy, thinking for one’s self, really did demand the wherewithal to state reasons that would persuade a skeptic, then religious commitment of this kind would fall short. So, too, would my appreciation of Mozart and my love for my children. I am not able to argue doubters into accepting these values either. I conclude that, assuming that we want to treat autonomy as an ideal, we ought to reject the strong construal of what it requires.

INARTICULATE AUTONOMY Suppose that we do reject the strong, hyper-rationalistic version, of autonomy. How then should we interpret this ideal? In pursuit of an answer, let’s return to the agreed upon concept of thinking for one’s self. On the strong version, the threat to autonomy was just inarticulacy about reasons, whatever the cause of this inarticulacy: If one can’t justify one’s convictions with argument, then one isn’t thinking for one’s self. On a weaker version the threat might instead be a specific range of temptations to take on opinions in ways that couldn’t be thought to justify them. To give in to these temptations is, on this view, what failure to think for one’s self amounts to. It’s temptations like these that Plantinga warns us against, and I suggest that resistance to them is indeed the better way of filling out the ideal of autonomy. Consider, then, the particular temptations to take on opinions that we face as professional philosophers. I’ll mention one to set it aside. This is the temptation to tractability, to take up some philosophical questions rather than others simply because these are easier, or those we feel more capable of answering, and not because they seem—on reflection—more pressing or important than alternatives. I think that that’s a real temptation, one against

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which we ought guard, but for the moment I’m more interested in a second, distinct, phenomenon. The temptation that I want to think about is the temptation to status or professional respectability. Powerful social pressures exert this temptation. Sometimes—pulling against the first—they lead us to focus on questions that are difficult, or at least seen as difficult, as a way of demonstrating our superior intelligence. They can also lead us to privilege whatever questions are currently designated as lying in the “core” of philosophy by opinion-makers, rather than pause to determine whether those are indeed questions to which we require answers, questions that lie at the core of our own concerns. These arational social forces make it difficult for us to think for ourselves and easy to take on the opinions of our surrounding social group. To yield to this temptation is to display the heteronomy against which Plantinga is most concerned to caution us. On this view then, heteronomy is a matter of taking on the opinions of one’s social group—or its most influential members—unreflectively and letting these set the agenda for the questions that one asks. The heteronomous philosopher proceeds as if, if academic philosophers generally, or the philosophical opinion-makers in particular, treat a certain view as obvious, then one need give no defense. One need not raise the question of why one should accept it. And if they think a certain view is obviously to be rejected, then likewise, we need not ask why anyone might think that it might be so. If they think that a certain question is open, such that reasonable or rational people might disagree about it, then we have grist for the philosophical mill. Like the view that any meaningful question deserves address, this view, once formulated, has little attraction. But the pressure to this sort of heteronomy is nevertheless familiar to anyone who has spent any significant amount of time in academia. While the stated ideal of inquiry, the official view, at least among philosophers, often looks to be along the lines of the hyper-rationalist approach that we considered first, the reality is quite different. The philosophical agenda is always at risk of being set by arational social pressures and forces of personality. Plantinga’s original address contains several examples of precisely this phenomenon. My own favorite examples come from the first chapter of G. A. Cohen’s book, If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?, in which he reflects on the causes of his own belief in the analytic/synthetic distinction (Cohen 2000).⁷ It does not strike me as at all tendentious to call effective resistance to these temptations an exercise of autonomy. We should not take on the opinions of our social group, our fellow academic

⁷ It bears notice that in the years since Plantinga formulated his advice, these pressures are increasingly both homogenized and amplified by social media and other aspects of information technology.

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philosophers, as if a contagion. We should, instead, think for ourselves, think autonomously, about which questions we regard as settled, which open, and— again—which worth asking. Suppose we asked the opinion-makers of the profession why the particular questions they regard as open are rightly so regarded, while others are not. I doubt that they would be able to supply a general answer to this query. So long as self-awareness attends this inability, it provides no grounds for criticism. There are some things that seem clear to each of us, and some that seem clear to most of us. It is unsurprising that, in some cases, our convictions about something that could stand as the conclusion of a philosophical argument outstrip our confidence in any particular argument for it. The opinion-makers are entitled to have such convictions too. But this reveals that the question, “Which questions are genuinely open?”—which is closely related to the question, “Which questions are worth asking?”—is itself an open question. It is open in the sense that reasonable, thoughtful, reflective people of good will are apt to give different answers. I think that it is open in a further sense too: any reasonable, thoughtful person of good will would recognize its difficulty, and so would regard any particular answer as provisional. If the hyper-rationalist view were successful, there would be a formal feature of questions that commended them to us, namely their intelligibility. Having rejected this answer, we might have tried hunting for an alternative formal feature, that is a way of picking out the worthwhile questions that does not depend on making judgments about the importance of their content. For example, we might say that the questions that are open are those on which people disagree. But people have all sorts of wild ideas, so this standard won’t rule much out. We could then try backing off to: the open questions are those on which reasonable people, or thoughtful reasonable people, or thoughtful reasonable people of good will disagree. We’re getting closer, but I conjecture that we will never be able to characterize the relevant class of people in a way that allows a non-circular resolution to our question.⁸ Any plausible way of picking people out as reasonable, thoughtful, and of good will, will make reference to the content of their commitments. These speculations don’t, by themselves, amount to an argument that no formal way of picking out the questions worth thinking about could possibly work. But I am, myself, convinced that this is true. There is no formal way to determine in advance which questions deserve attention. That question is a substantive one that we’ll need to ask about particular candidate questions as

⁸ This parallels a well-known threat of circularity in the commitments of political liberals. See, especially, Rawls (1993). I try to make some progress on this problem in Ebels-Duggan (2010).

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they arise. To put that same thought another way, it is a substantive normative question what commitments an autonomous person ought to have, and which skeptical challenges she ought to take seriously. Settling on an answer to this question will always require judgment about what is trustworthy and what dubious, and also about what is of significance, and what trivial or distracting. Now these are questions to which, at least at a first approximation, Christians have answers. We have a view about what is true, what is good, what is worthy of our trust. Why should reliance on these convictions impugn us as falling short of some philosophical ideal? In any case, reliance on some such convictions is a state in which we have a lot of company. In this first half of the chapter, I hope that I have accomplished three things. My narrower goal has been to defend Plantinga’s advice against the charge that it amounts to an objectionable dogmatism. My broader goal has been to say something about how we should understand the ideal of autonomy. Finally, I’ve been arguing that there’s no short cut to determining which questions we ought to take seriously. Regarding a question as deserving of the time and energy that philosophical reflection takes expresses a substantive normative judgment. It indicates high regard for the question in question. In the next section I will try to say something positive about which questions Christian philosophers ought to honor in this way.

CHRISTIAN P HILOSOPHY AS A WAY OF L IFE So far I’ve been trying to interpret and defend what I’ve characterized as the negative part of Plantinga’s advice. We know now not to ask questions simply because they are easy or simply because they are hard. We know not to ask questions just because they are intelligible, or because they are on a philosophical agenda that someone else has set. But how are we to know, or even begin to think about, which questions are worth asking? The beginning of the answer lies in the positive part of Plantinga’s advice, which he advances under the heading of seeking integrity. On the flip side of the question about which questions we should ask lies the question: Which assumptions should we accept? It may seem obvious that, in the first instance, both of these are questions that belong to epistemology. Answers seem to depend on a theory of justified or warranted belief. I have often wondered whether the late twentieth-century flourishing of a distinctively Christian—indeed distinctively Reformed—epistemology unaccompanied by similar developments in other subfields was a historical accident, a result of the particular interests that Plantinga and a handful of other Christian philosophers happened to have, or whether there is some deeper reason that that should have been the site of a reemergence of distinctively

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Christian thought in the discipline.⁹ One reason to think the latter is just this: what sets Christians apart from non-Christians, it might be thought, is our distinctive beliefs or doctrines. So it is no surprise that distinctively Christian philosophers should turn their energies to developing theories that support, justify, warrant, or vindicate these distinctive beliefs, and these will be epistemic theories. While this doesn’t seem wrong, there is another way of thinking about the matter of question selection that I find at least equally illuminating. Asking and seeking to answer questions is something that we do, indeed it might well be called the characteristic activity of philosophers. So determining which questions we ought to take seriously is a practical matter; it is a matter of action. Moreover, while it’s true that one thing that sets Christians apart from others is what we believe, another thing—we may hope—is how we live. If that’s right, then we, Christian philosophers, should also undertake our philosophical inquiry as part of a distinctively Christian way of living. This understanding of what we are doing philosophically ought to guide our question selection. The idea here is continuous with Nicholas Wolterstorff ’s admonition about how to understand the ideal of Christian education (Wolterstorff, Stronks, and Joldersma 2002). According to Wolterstorff, Christian education should be conceived as preparation for a Christian life, and its content should be guided by this conception. So the notion of a distinctively Christian life, rather than the notion of distinctively Christian belief, is primary, and provides positive guidance for thinking about how to answer the question what Christian education should be like.¹⁰ I am suggesting that, similarly, we ought to take the notion of a Christian life as prior to, and allow it to provide positive guidance for answering, our question about which philosophical questions are worth asking. Philosophy, for the Christian, ought to take its point of departure from a conviction that we are called to live a distinctively Christian life. This is the idea that I want to explore in the remainder of this chapter. It may help to contrast this with a different view. In the elaboration of the positive part of the advice, Plantinga suggests that we ought to take our questions from the Church or Christian community. Christian philosophers he says are “the philosophers of the Christian community,” and the idea seems

⁹ Reformed epistemology is, of course, best represented by Plantinga himself, paradigmatically in his Warrant trilogy (Plantinga 1993a, 1993b, 2000). See also Plantinga and Wolterstorff (1983). ¹⁰ Cf. Smith (2009). His concerns about the emphasis on “worldview” in a certain strain of Christian thought, especially about education, is a version of this same idea: practices—and habits and loves—matter at least as much as belief. But, given Wolterstorff ’s earlier writings, Smith’s characterization of the tradition that he critiques may not appreciate the full range of its resources.

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to be that we thus owe as a service to the Church consideration of questions of a philosophical nature that the Church may face. Though I’m quite sure that he doesn’t intend it, someone might read this part of the advice as if it commended a sort of pro bono work attitude towards the Church’s questions. It is as if the Christian philosopher will often be about her ordinary business of pursuing a research agenda the contours of which may be largely shaped by trends in the discipline. But, from time to time, she should take some time out from this to address a question or questions that the wider Christian community may be feeling acutely. Again, this is not my own reading of Plantinga’s view. I think that he would agree that it does not go far enough towards his ideal of integrating our Christian commitments and our philosophical undertakings. It doesn’t make the Christian philosopher’s task, as such, an integral part of her Christian life. Rather, it has her taking time out from that task to do things that are connected with the Christian life, albeit things informed by the insights and skills that she has gained as a philosopher. The more ambitious ideal of doing Christian philosophy as the enactment of a Christian way of life might be seen as the Christian reception of an idea, traceable all the way back to the ancient Greeks, that philosophy itself should be understood as a way of life. It is not just one possible activity among others, something that we might do during discrete periods of time, for fun or for profit, but rather a distinct way of life. John Cooper has recently elaborated the ancient Greek approaches to philosophy as a way of life in illuminating detail (Cooper 2012). On this view, the life of the philosopher is incompatible with alternatives, because it is based on ideals that compete with the ideals that inform those alternatives. The potential competitors include hedonic ideals that commend a life of pleasure, social ideals that commend a political life, ideals of honor commending a military life, and economic ideals commending a life of productive work or moneymaking. One can easily identify contemporary versions of all of these. Importantly for our purposes, Cooper holds that the philosophical ideal and way of life also competes with religious alternatives, an idea to which I will return shortly. Cooper contrasts the idea of philosophy as a way of life with that of philosophy as a merely intellectual pursuit. There are, and have long been, institutional pressures towards thinking of philosophy in the latter way. These pressures arise from the fact that we have located philosophy in colleges and universities, alongside other academic disciplines, such as psychology, biology, and physics. But there is, arguably, a difference in kind between philosophy and these other disciplines (cf. Brewer 2009, pp. 286–327; 2014). The latter seem to be areas of possible expertise in a straightforward and nonproblematic way. Relatedly, they are areas in which truths are discovered, and thus knowledge is produced. This knowledge can be communicated to those outside the discipline, so that the results of the inquiry are made available for use by the wider society.

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On a certain view, philosophy is different. It does not admit of expertise in the same way. It does not make progress by discovering previously unknown truths that can then be communicated to, and made available for use by, the surrounding society. Rather the point and value of philosophy lies in the insight gained through the doing of the activity itself. One may be helped along in the activity by texts and conversations that expose one to the insights of others. In fact, such interaction may even be essential to the activity. But it is not possible to realize the value of these sorts of insights without thinking them through for one’s self. And to do that just is to do philosophy. This isn’t true of chemistry, for example. I can perfectly well make use of and so realize the value of the results of chemical research, acting on my belief that this pill will ease my headache, without thereby doing chemistry. This contrast may be most clearly exemplified by ethics or moral philosophy. Cooper seems to think so, at any rate. Moral philosophy seeks to answer questions like: How should we live? What should we do? What kind of people should we be? How should we regard and treat others? What activities are worthwhile? What is of value? Supposing that there are correct answers to such questions, it seems that they could, in principle, be discovered and reported by the moral philosopher. And surely there could be very few discoveries more important to society than these. But there is something suspect about the very possibility of this scenario. It’s not only that the questions are so difficult, and so the chance of success seems remote. Surely that much is also true of various questions in chemistry. It’s rather because it’s hard to imagine anyone feeling properly settled about these questions based just on the report of the philosophers. What I’m suggesting is that the reason this is hard to imagine lies in the nature of the subject. To feel settled about these questions we would need not only to believe the truth about their answers but also to fully appreciate these truths, or the reasons for which they are true (cf. Hills 2009). But to attempt to appreciate, and then to articulate, those reasons just is to do moral philosophy. No mere report of the conclusions can suffice.¹¹ That, I believe, is why the idea of moral experts or a high view of the powers of moral testimony make us uncomfortable, while the idea of experts in the natural sciences, who communicate knowledge by reporting their conclusions, seems so much less problematic. Above I acknowledged the institutional pressures to practice philosophy in a way that fits the model of other academic disciplines. These pressures are, if anything, increasingly intense in this age in which assignments of scarce ¹¹ However, thoughtful approaches to moral education can do the work. On this view, recognizably Aristotelian, moral education consists in helping the student towards an appreciation of value. This raises important questions about the relationship between moral philosophy and moral education that I hope to explore further in later work. See Burnyeat (1981).

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resources are increasingly guided by quantifiable results. These are pressures that Christian philosophers are under no less than others. There is a way of doing philosophy that at least purports to fit this model: the production of articles, articulating new positions, and purporting to progress. Operating on this model can help us get jobs, gain tenure, and win us respectability with our deans and in the discipline. And moreover, philosophy pursued as a series of intellectual puzzles to be solved can be great fun. It’s challenging, and the honing and employing of the highly developed skills that it takes to do it can be exhilarating. Should Christian philosophers have a view about these two approaches to philosophy, philosophy as a way of life on the one hand, and philosophy as an intellectual challenge capable of producing new knowledge on the other? I rather think that we should. Those of us making a career of philosophy are spending a great deal of time and talent on this enterprise, and I’ve claimed that we ought therefore be concerned to do it in a way that makes it not only consistent with, but an integral part of, our response to our call to live Christian lives. Perhaps there is a way that the productive, puzzle solving, model of philosophy could come to that. But the model of philosophy as a way of life seems more promising. On the former view, it seems, what commends a question is that it is difficult enough that no one has yet solved it, but tractable enough that we may feel capable of doing so ourselves. These conditions don’t strike me as anywhere near sufficient to establish that serious consideration of a question could be an important part of a distinctively Christian life. On the latter view, whether such consideration could figure this way—whether thinking about a question could be responsive to the Christian call—is the standard by which it is to be assessed. So far I’ve been trying to make some progress on the positive side of Plantinga’s advice, the admonishment towards integrity, by commending a version of the view that Cooper attributes to the ancients, and locating this view in the context of our Christian commitments. The idea is that we should determine which questions to take seriously with reference to the demands of a distinctively Christian life. Questions and reflections that arise within, or are continuous with, our best understanding of such a life are the questions that we should regard as our own. Asking these questions, rather than some others, is constitutive of integrity for the Christian philosopher. But might one worry that there is a tension between a distinctively philosophical way of life and a distinctively Christian way of life? This, as I mentioned above, is Cooper’s own view. He believes, indeed it is one brief of his book to argue, that the philosophical life stands in contrast to, and is in certain fundamental ways incompatible with, a religious way of life in general and the Christian way of life in particular. Indeed, following Pierre Hadot, Cooper argues that it was the rise of Christianity and especially its spread among the Greek and Roman intellectual elite that crowded out the idea of

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philosophy as a way of life, and led eventually to the treatment of philosophy as instead merely one among many academic disciplines. This should give Christian philosophers pause. We need to consider why one might find the view that the philosophical and Christian life are at odds plausible, and how Christian philosophers should respond. As Cooper sees it, the Greek philosophers advanced the philosophical life in contrast to alternatives on offer at the time. The characteristic ideal of the philosophical life, on his view, is that of Reason. The philosopher is characterized by his commitment to following Reason where it leads and embracing the conclusions of the strongest arguments. Cooper contrasts the distinctively philosophical way of life, so understood, with religious alternatives available in Socrates’ day and in ours. An important intellectual target of his book is the view that Greek philosophy was one among other religious outlooks of the day, characterized by mysticism and occult practice. He believes that this gets it entirely wrong. The philosophers, according to Cooper, reject a religious path to salvation. They believe that, instead, through the use of Reason philosophy will lead us to knowledge, and that “Knowledge . . . will save our lives, and nothing else could reliably do so” (Cooper 2012, p. 38 and cf. p. 14). If that conviction really were central to philosophy as a way of life, then philosophy would be a life that the Christian must reject. It is our profession that it is God’s action through Christ that saves us, and no other means will suffice. Cooper opposes the view that ancient philosophies were just versions of ancient religions, denying that practitioners faced an “existentialist” choice which of the many philosophies to pursue. Instead, he claims, each alternative philosophical outlook gives arguments for its own position, and asks to be accepted on that basis only. However, he acknowledges that there remains the one “existentialist” commitment: to follow Reason where it leads. We’ve already dealt with a similar idea under the heading of autonomy. We could understand the conclusion of the first part of the chapter as holding that, all on its own, Reason doesn’t lead anywhere in particular. We could even put that conclusion this way: Reason itself leads us to the conclusion that there are rather strict limits on what Reason, left to its own devices, could deliver. This is a recognizable and, if contestable, certainly respectable philosophical position, also notably associated with Kant. If it is correct, then the ideal of following Reason where it leads turns out to be in a certain way self-undermining, or at least self-limiting. This should make us doubt that Cooper’s philosophical ideal is well defined enough to amount to a genuine, distinct way of life. Even so, it is interesting to consider the argument that Cooper gives in support of the philosophical ideal, the view that the life of the philosopher is to be preferred to all alternatives. That argument runs like this: the philosophical life seeks and promises to lead towards wisdom. Wisdom is knowledge of the good. It consists in getting it right about what is of value, why these things are

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of value, and what the appropriate responses to this value are. To get it right about all of these things—to rightly identify the things worth valuing and to respond appropriately—is to live a good, worthy, or eudaemon life. And there could be nothing more worth seeking than that. Now the importance of wisdom, so understood, is something that we should affirm, at least in general terms. Correlatively, we might endorse a conception of philosophy that takes the pursuit of wisdom as its aim. But the argument still doesn’t support Cooper’s idolatrous conclusion that only Reason will save us. We would need one more premise in order to conclude that we should follow Reason where it leads, or make the philosophical life, so understood, our guiding ideal. We would need to think that following Reason where it leads is the best or only path to wisdom. But that’s a claim that we’ve seen reason to doubt. It’s not that reason has no place. Used properly, reason is a perfectly good tool in the pursuit of wisdom. The philosophical methods of clarification and argumentation are far from worthless. But they are not always the best tools. Progress towards wisdom makes use of other tools as well, including art and literature and—perhaps most importantly—the difficult work of interpersonal relationships, with our fellow human beings in friendships, in families, and in the Church, and with God. We can productively bring what we learn from such sources to philosophy, and perhaps thereby learn more. But the tools of philosophy are not capable of generating wisdom by themselves. We can’t expect philosophy, understood as just following Reason, to bring us to wisdom if we don’t approach it with wisdom drawn from another source. The Psalmist recommends that we begin with the fear of the Lord (Psalm 111:10). We were meant to be filling in the positive part of the advice, the commendation of integrity, and the directive to ask our own questions. Have we made progress? I think that maybe we have made at least a little, and since we’re here limited to the tools of philosophy it may be that we’ve made all that we can. I have suggested that philosophy construed as a way of life ought to take the pursuit of wisdom, rather than a narrower commitment to reason, as its guiding ideal. Wisdom here amounts to rightly identifying and properly responding to what is truly important, truly of value. At a high level of generality, that seems to me to be a description of the Christian life as well. So understood then, Christians can and should take up philosophy as a way of life, and this important point of contact makes possible the integrity of which Plantinga speaks. The life of the professional philosopher is marked by a special focus on bringing the tools of reasoning and argumentation to bear on the pursuit of wisdom. This is worth doing, because these tools can indeed play a role in that pursuit. But we should not forget that they are by themselves insufficient to it. They are not the only means we have, nor are they at every moment the best means.

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We are left with a view about, on the one hand, the limits of the methods of philosophy, and, on the other, a corresponding confidence that there’s nothing suspect about drawing content for our commitments from beyond those limits. Qua Christians we bring to our practice of philosophy important, central, organizing convictions about what things are of greatest import. These are the commitments to which we should be alert as we select our philosophical questions. We should ask towards which questions these commitments direct us. We should inquire whether answering such questions would be a step towards greater wisdom. It is, after all, wisdom, not reason, that the philosopher claims to love.

WORKS CITED Brewer, Talbot. 2009. The Retrieval of Ethics. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Brewer, Talbot. 2014. “The Coup That Failed: How the Near-Sacking of a University President Exposed the Fault Lines of American Higher Education.” The Hedgehog Review 16, no. 2 (Summer): 65–83. Burnyeat, M. F. 1981. “Aristotle on Learning to Be Good.” In Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics. Ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 69–92. Cohen, G. A. 2000. If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cooper, John. 2012. Pursuits of Wisdom: Ancient Philosophies as Ways of Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ebels-Duggan, Kyla. 2010. “The Beginning of Community: Politics in the Face of Disagreement.” Philosophical Quarterly 60, no. 238: 50–71. Ebels-Duggan, Kyla. 2012. “Kantian Ethics.” In Continuum Companion to Ethics. Ed. Christian Miller. New York, NY: Continuum, pp. 168–89. Ebels-Duggan, Kyla. 2013. “Moral Education in the Liberal State.” Journal of Practical Ethics 1, no. 2: 34–63. Ebels-Duggan, Kyla. 2014. “Educating for Autonomy: An Old-Fashioned View.” Social Philosophy and Policy 31, no. 1 (Fall): 257–75. Ebels-Duggan, Kyla. 2015. “Autonomy as Intellectual Virtue.” In The Aims of Higher Education: Problems of Morality and Justice. Ed. Harry Brighouse and Michael MacPherson. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 74–90. Hills, Alison. 2009. “Moral Testimony and Moral Epistemology.” Ethics 120: 94–127. Kant, Immanuel. 1998a. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1998b. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. Mary J. Gregor. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Korsgaard, Christine M. 1996a. Creating the Kingdom of Ends. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Korsgaard, Christine M. 1996b. The Sources of Normativity. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

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Korsgaard, Christine M. 2002. “Christine M. Korsgaard: Internalism and the Sources of Normativity.” In Constructions of Practical Reason: Interviews on Moral and Political Philosophy. Ed. Herlinde Pauer-Studer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 50–78. Korsgaard, Christine M. 2008. “Realism and Constructivism in Twentieth-Century Moral Philosophy.” In The Constitution of Agency. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, pp. 302–26. Nussbaum, Martha. 1997. Cultivating Humanity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. O’Neill, Onora. 1989. Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Plantinga, Alvin. 1984. “Advice to Christian Philosophers.” Faith and Philosophy 1, no. 3: 253–71. Plantinga, Alvin. 1993a. Warrant and Proper Function. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Plantinga, Alvin. 1993b. Warrant: The Current Debate. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Plantinga, Alvin. 2000. Warranted Christian Belief. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Plantinga, Alvin and Nicolas Wolterstorff, eds. 1983. Faith and Rationality. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Rawls, John. 1993. Political Liberalism. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Robinson, Marilynne. 2004. Gilead. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Smith, James K. A. 2009. Desiring the Kingdom. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. Velleman, David. 2006. “Love as a Moral Emotion.” In Self to Self. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, pp. 70–109. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 2008. Justice: Rights and Wrongs. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wolterstorff, Nicholas, Gloria Goris Stronks, and Clarence W. Joldersma. 2002. Educating for Life: Reflections on Christian Teaching and Learning. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic.

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4 Taking Plantinga Seriously Advice to Christian Philosophers Merold Westphal

Looking back from the 1980s to the 1940s and 1950s, Alvin Plantinga, in his Notre Dame inaugural address, described how “deeply non-Christian” the philosophical mainstream was in the English-speaking world. “Few establishment philosophers were Christian; even fewer were willing to admit in public that they were, and still fewer thought of their being Christian as making a real difference to their practice as philosophers” (Plantinga 1984, p. 253). Noting the change that had occurred in three or three and a half decades, he noted that there were in 1983 “many more Christians and many more unabashed Christians in the professional mainstream of American philosophical life” (Plantinga 1984, p. 253). I assume that by “unabashed” Christian philosophers he means those who were both willing to admit they were Christian and who thought that their being so made a difference to their philosophical practice. The change over the past thirty years has not been nearly so dramatic. Yet it has been real, and I think no careful observer would deny that we live in a renaissance of unabashed Christian philosophizing. Unfriendly observers might be tempted, in the words of that great metaphysician, Howard Cosell, to complain about a “veritable plethora” of Christian philosophers on the scene. I did hear a Jewish philosopher once complain about the “Christian mafia” in the APA. I think we should take that comment both as a warning against tendencies toward triumphalist attitudes (remembering how frequently throughout history groups that gain a measure of recognition and power after being suppressed or oppressed misuse their new status) and as a compliment. Recently, Plantinga (2011) himself has worried about such triumphalism as a danger to Christian philosophy. Nonetheless, the presence of Christian philosophers in positions of leadership and responsibility in the APA, both at the divisional and national levels, is one, but only one sign of the vitality of Christian philosophizing today.

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I, for one, am grateful to God for this flourishing. But I would also like to use this occasion to express my gratitude to two quite extraordinary servants of God to whom all of us in the Society of Christian Philosophers are indebted. One is Al Plantinga. The combination of his “Advice to Christian Philosophers” and the way he has served as a role model of what it would be like to follow that advice, has played a crucial role in getting us to where we are today. The other is Art Holmes. The annual Wheaton College Philosophy Conference, whose moving spirit he was for decades, was probably the most important single precursor of our Society, the place where Christian philosophers from all over could gather together to encourage and exhort one another in Christian philosophizing by simply doing it. (It is Art, by the way, whose willingness to speak of Christian philosophers but not of Christian philosophy, as if some system or style had a unique privilege from the standpoint of faith, is responsible for my avoiding the term “Christian philosophy” and using the less than elegant phrase, “Christian philosophizing,” in its place.) In singling out two of our leaders for special mention, I do not in the least intend to slight the invaluable contributions of so many others. As they say in post-game interviews, “It was a real team effort.” But that sort of past tense talk is not appropriate for us, if for no other reason than that the game is not over. I am glad for this opportunity to look back in gratitude for what had happened by 1983 and what has happened in the decades since then. But surely this is even more importantly a time to look forward and to ask how we can best build on the foundation that has been laid, on the inheritance we have received. For the tasks of the Christian philosopher are never finished in this life. So I, too, shall offer some advice to Christian philosophers, including myself. Put in its most general terms, my advice is that we look back at Al’s own advice from 1983 and try to take it even more seriously than we have to this point. I refer to two reminders and an exhortation. First, there is the reminder that we belong to the Church as well as to the academy. Second comes the reminder that by virtue of the former affiliation we have our own agenda (Plantinga 1984, p. 255) and our own assumptions (p. 256). Finally there is the exhortation to greater autonomy vis-à-vis other agendas and assumptions, greater “integrality” in relation to our own, and greater courage, boldness, strength, and self-confidence in pursuing this autonomy and this integrality (p. 254). Three observations to begin with. First, what I call the two hats thesis suggests that we have two audiences as well as two allegiances. We are the philosophers of the Christian community. But most members of the Church are not members of the academy; and that suggests that we may need to become more popular and less technical in some of our writing. Taking Dewey or Emerson as our models rather than, say, Quine or Husserl, we may need to reach out to a wider audience more frequently than we are accustomed to doing. And perhaps we need to do this in cooperation with one another.

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Beyond the occasional essay or even monograph we write for an audience outside the guild, we might think about joint volumes or conferences aimed both at bringing our expertise to bear on issues we think the Church should be thinking about and at learning from the wider church what topics we should be addressing. Needless to say, in making this suggestion I am not advocating that we abandon our responsibilities and our opportunities within the academy and its often esoteric languages, though even there I think we should be known for our lucidity and not our density. “Behold how they love one another” might have a corollary, “Behold how they love their readers,” which, being translated, is, “Behold how accessibly they write (within the limits of the subject matter).” Second, I cannot omit noting the formal similarity between Al’s call for greater autonomy, integrality, and self-confidence and the advice given to feminist philosophers by their leaders. I think we would do well to think a bit about the ways in which, at this stage of the game, the community of feminist philosophers and the community of Christian philosophers are similar and different, recognizing, of course, that some individuals are members of both. A woman with official responsibilities in the American Academy of Religion once complained to me that the hardest part of the job was dealing with the evangelicals and the feminists, adding that the meetings of the latter group often seemed to her more like camp meetings than anything else. Third, Plantinga writes that “the Christian philosopher has a perfect right to the point of view and pre-philosophical assumptions he brings to philosophic work; the fact that these are not widely shared outside the Christian or theistic community is interesting but fundamentally irrelevant” (1984, p. 256). Paraphrasing Richard Nixon’s “We’re all Keynesians now,” I am tempted to respond, “We are all Gadamerians now.” Not that Plantinga derived his insight from Gadamer’s attack on the prejudice against prejudice (pre-judgment), or that he should do penance for failing to do so—no, the point is rather that the sea change signified, however imprecisely, by talk about the collapse of foundationalism or of the Enlightenment project, means that in the abandonment of the ideal of philosophy as presuppositionless science, philosophers from “analytic,” “continental,” and American pragmatist traditions, have more common ground than their vocabularies or habits of reading and conversation might suggest. No doubt philosophical ecumenism is no more easily achieved than its ecclesiastical counterpart, but perhaps the possibilities are greater now than they have been for a long time. Now that the search for truth “after Babel” has replaced the presumption of “the view from nowhere,” we can be more honest and less guilty about the fact that our transcendental egos are quite concrete, quite particular, quite laden with presuppositions derived from our belonging to various traditions. But it does not follow that it is “fundamentally irrelevant” that our assumptions “are not widely shared outside the Christian or theistic community . . . ” This fact

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may be irrelevant as to where we begin, but not to how we proceed. For the change that no longer requires us to check our concrete identities at the door in order to pretend to be impersonal thinking machines means we may have to rethink the nature of philosophical dialogue with those whose starting points are diametrically opposed to our own. If we cannot presuppose neutral common ground and if method is reduced to something like the search for reflective equilibrium, what are the implications of this for conversations that do not begin with a fairly broad overlapping consensus? In what ways and to what degree does the emphasis shift from the logic of debate to its ethics and even its rhetoric? We will need to go beyond insisting on our right to be ourselves, as fundamental and indispensable as that is, to fresh reflection about the possibilities and the proprieties of debating with those who are very different from ourselves. Whether or not we like what Habermas, or Gadamer, or MacIntyre, or Rorty, for example, have said about these matters, we will need to join this conversation about the possibilities and proprieties of conversation. This will mean going beyond questions of deontological rationality, warrant, entitlement, and the like, which for the most part presuppose a monological conception of reason, to a more dialogical interpretation of reason, as Nick Wolterstorff suggests in his Foreword to this volume. Otherwise we may be subject to something like the objection raised by an unsympathetic observer of an increasingly influential circle of British philosopher-theologians. He recently said to me, “They think the collapse of foundationalism is just an excuse to go on being conservative!” I want now to look more closely at a crucial claim Plantinga makes just before insisting that we have a perfect right to our own pre-philosophical assumptions. The Christian philosopher, he tells us, “has his own topics and projects to think about; and when he thinks about the topics of current concern in the broader philosophical world, he will think about them in his own way, which may be a different way. He may have to reject certain currently fashionable assumptions about the philosophic enterprise—he may have to reject widely accepted assumptions as to what are the proper starting points and procedures for philosophical endeavor” (1984, p. 256). Just as Plantinga proceeded to address several specific themes in the light of these claims, so I want to suggest several reasons for Christian philosophers to part company with one “currently fashionable assumption about the philosophical enterprise.” It is the belief in propositions, or, to be a bit more precise, the assumption that propositions are the coin of the realm in which we carry out our philosophical business. That seems like a harmless enough assumption, but the fact that it is rarely articulated as an assumption, and even more rarely defended, does not mean that questions are not begged when it is made. Whether this is so and whether it should be of concern to Christian philosophers as such is the question I wish to explore.

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Strictly speaking, propositions differ from sentences and statements in that the latter belong to some natural language while the former do not. When we say, for example, that “It is raining” and “Es regnet” are sentences in English and German, respectively, that express the same proposition, we make it clear that the proposition in question is neither in English nor in German, and not because it is in French. But this is to presuppose the highly controversial philosophical claim that meaning is independent of language, that natural languages are externally related to the meanings they convey. This is a much stronger claim than the one that in natural languages signs (graphemes and phonemes) are arbitrarily related to the meanings they signify; for meanings could easily be a function of the language games in which they are embedded (as Wittgensteinians, Heideggerians, structuralists, and post-structuralists agree) without disturbing the arbitrary relation of signs to meanings. The English word for rain could easily enough have been sain or rian. So the arbitrariness thesis does not entail the externality thesis. Nor does the latter follow from the fact that we recognize “It is raining” as a good translation of “Es regnet” and vice versa. It is a fact that we can translate from one natural language into another (and from one sentence in English to its equivalent, e.g., from “It’s raining hard” to “It’s pouring”) and that we can discriminate better and worse translations. But the externality thesis and the accompanying belief that we speak the heavenly language of propositions is not required by those facts. They belong to a particular theory about translation, and a highly controversial one at that. We should be clear that the issue here is not some nominalist anxiety about overpopulating the world with abstract entities. I for one have no such anxieties and take the types, as distinct from tokens, of both sentences and statements to be abstract entities. It is just that these abstract entities, like the tokens to which they are internally related, belong to some natural language or another. Their natural habitat is the cave. Propositions, by contrast, are more ethereal. And it is just for this reason that I think Christian philosophers would do well to forswear the proposition presupposition. For it encourages us to think that at the moment we begin to philosophize, we have already transcended the cave and ascended to a realm where our meanings, untouched, as it were by human hands (read traditions, practices) have an unchanging stability and clarity fit for the gods of Pure Reason. For if our meanings are free from embeddedness in the traditions and practices that make up natural language games, why should we not think them free from all the contingencies and particularities that make up the cave. Plato, and such notable Platonists as Husserl or Russell and Whitehead, thought it to be no small task to escape the cave into such a semantic empyrean. The language game of proposition talk presupposes, with Descartes, and Locke, and sense data theorists, I think, that we begin in the ether of Pure Meaning and that the only task is to distinguish true propositions from false ones.

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In addition to the reasons our secular colleagues might give for resisting the temptation of this all too easy Platonism, it seems to me that Christian philosophers have a special reason. It consists in the importance of preserving the difference between God and ourselves, in this instance not confusing the human intellect with the divine. The assumption that our truth is God’s Truth strikes me as dangerous, both spiritually and politically, and this, it seems to me, is the claim we make whenever we claim to be in possession of true propositions. There is a close link, I suspect, between the proposition presupposition and the assumption that Christian philosophers have a special and proper propensity toward realism or even that Christianity stands or falls with realism. Since the realist sets herself off from Kantian idealism and all its anti-realistic variations, she must say more than that the real is and is what it is independently of what and how we think. For Kant says that; that’s what the thing in itself and the noumenal are all about. To distance oneself from all forms of transcendental idealism, one must also claim that we (sometimes) know the real as it truly is, as it is in itself, as it is independently of human modes of apprehensions. But for the theist, the thing in itself, the thing as it truly is, can only be the thing as God sees and knows it to be. Kant knew this well, and for that reason identified the thing in itself with the thing as it would appear to a creative, divine intellect that knew by means of intellectual intuition. But this means that the (Christian) theist who wants to be a realist (but why?) needs to claim that we know things as God knows them. Of course, there will be the quantitative disclaimer. God knows many propositions to be true that we do not know to be true. And, of course, some that we think are true are in fact not. But when we do know a proposition to be true, that piece of our knowledge is fully on a par with God’s knowledge of the same proposition. Would we not be more consistent theists if we acknowledged that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, not just occasionally, when we are ignorant or in error, but all the time—that the infinite qualitative difference between God and ourselves also means, as Kant claimed, that God’s thought is systematically different from ours? Is not the proposition presupposition the cornerstone of the tower of Babel where we chant as we climb, “I will ascend into heaven . . . I will be like the most High” (Isaiah 14:13–14)? “But,” someone may respond, “the ‘propositions’ we talk about are almost always English sentences; we speak loosely and do not mean to imply by our proposition talk that we have transcended the cave of sentences and statements.” No doubt this is often true, though where it is not explicitly emphasized a preoccupation with propositions stands as an open invitation to be taken at face value. We can easily mislead both our readers and ourselves. But even if we avoid this danger, there is another closely related danger lying nearby. If with speech act or discourse theory we speak of statements

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rather than propositions (and remember that statements are made with sentences in one language or another), we will be reminded that making assertions of fact (uttering a constative statement) is just one of the many things we can do with words. This will help us to remember that when God speaks to us we are more likely to be dealing with promises, warnings, commands and the like than with mere assertions of fact. And we will be reminded that our own God talk should not primarily consist in asserting true “propositions” about God but in speaking to God in prayer, in praise, in confession, in gratitude, and so forth. In short, the primacy of theoretical reason will be challenged, along with the corollary that our chief end is to collect a pocket full of true propositions about God. I sometimes refer to this as the King Midas theory of truth; a long chain of Christian traditions puts the point by saying the goal of theology is to be sapientia and not merely scientia, that metaphysics must always be in the service of spirituality. One of the dangers of proposition talk, even when it is not the Babelian claim to have transcended the cave, is that it encourages us to focus our attention too narrowly on asserting facts, on theoretical reason, on scientia. Philosophers have not always been to blame, by any means, for the times when the Church has allowed the quest for orthodoxy to be separated from the quest for orthopraxy, at the expense of the latter. But it seems to me that as the philosophers of the Christian Church, we should resist the assumptions and practices of our guild when they encourage us to be part of the problem rather than a thoughtful resistance to it. Even as classical foundationalism and evidentialism bite the dust, we may need to be more autonomous vis-à-vis the theoretical bias derived, not from biblical faith but from modern science and the epistemological preoccupation of modern philosophy. Closely related to this problem is another, one which contributes to both of the problems already mentioned: the tendency to marginalize practical reason in relation to theoretical reason and the tendency, embodied in anti-antirealism, to overvalue our theoretical achievements in relation to the divine knowledge that for theists is the measure of Truth. (Of course, there can be truth which falls short of God’s knowledge, but Kant acknowledges that!) Proposition talk suggests that the unit of meaning is not the term but the judgment, whether we call the judgment a sentence, a statement, or a proposition. But is not this too atomistic a theory of meaning? Is this not to deny or ignore a double embeddedness of our sentences and statements that calls for a double holism? First there is semantic holism. Just as terms do not mean by themselves but only in the context of judgments, so judgments do not mean by themselves but only in the context of the networks and systems of judgments to which they belong. When Quine, drawing on Carnap and Duhem, insists that “our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not

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individually but only as a corporate body” (Quine 1961, p. 41), one chief reason is that they have the meaning they have “not individually but only as a corporate body.” The attempt to defend realism in the face of theism depends, as described above, on a semantic atomism that assumes we can deal with “propositions” one at a time and in isolation from each other. Semantic holism makes it easier to see how our thoughts are not God’s thoughts but differ wholesale, if for no other reason than that, as theistic realists readily admit, God sees the whole picture while we do not. So our meanings cannot be the same as God’s, and a fortiori, neither can our knowledge. But there is a practical or pragmatic holism that takes us beyond this merely semantic holism. Our judgments are not only embedded in chains and chiasms of other judgments; they are embedded in the practices that make up the various language games we play. If merely semantic holism calls attention to the contingency, particularity, and irreducible plurality of our natural languages and, a fortiori, of the conceptual schemes or paradigms we construct within them, practical or pragmatic holism makes even clearer how deeply, yes, even essentially we are cave-men-and-women. For the Christian to acknowledge this double embeddedness of our meanings in one or another cave culture is to adopt a theistic anti-realism in place of the realism that claims we can know things as they really are, that is, as God knows them. Just as Aristotle insists against Plato that our souls are essentially embodied (and not divine), so pragmatic holism insists, against Platonic semantics, that our meanings are essentially embedded (and not divine). Christian thinkers often prefer the externality thesis to the embeddedness thesis out of fear of the historical relativism implicit in semantic-pragmatic holism. But it seems to me that we are committed to the claim that only God is absolute and that everything else is relative. So if one way our knowledge turns out to be finite is that it is relative, first to our being in the cave to begin with and then to our more specific location within the cave, that is not a discovery to be refuted in the name of faith. Here it is not that as Christians we have a “perfect right” to our own “pre-philosophical assumptions,” even when this means we “may have to reject certain currently fashionable assumptions about the philosophic enterprise” (Plantinga 1984, p. 256); in this case we may well have a perfect duty to reject the currently fashionable assumption that the human intellect (at its best) is the highest standard of truth, even if we are so deeply embedded in the philosophical culture of our times (the latest footnotes to Plato) that the assumption in question is embedded in our philosophical muscles. If I seem to dwell on the realism/anti-realism issue it is because I remain deeply puzzled why some of the finest Christian philosophers remain so deeply committed to realism. It is not because I think that is the most important issue raised by holistic resistance to proposition talk. For I take

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the challenge to the primacy of theoretical reason to be even more important. Pragmatic holism calls attention to the embeddedness of our meanings and truths not only at the point of input but also at the point of output. By that I mean that practices not only play a constitutive role in generating our meanings and truths, but that our cognitions feed back into our practices as well. When, in our preoccupation with propositions, we abstract from the role of practices in forming beliefs, we are all too likely at the same time to abstract from the role of beliefs in shaping practices (and attitudes or emotions as well— the correlate to practices in an Aristotelian ethics of embedded persons). One way to express the change which Al’s inaugural lecture served both to express and to evoke, is to say that for Christian philosophers, the gap between philosophy and theology has been dramatically reduced, or perhaps deliberately fuzzied. What I am suggesting is that, building on this substantial accomplishment, which puts us back in touch with a variety of premodern traditions, we need to close the gap between metaphysics and spirituality and between metaphysics and politics. There has been no shortage of work in metaphysics by Christian philosophers, seeking to spell out as carefully as possible the picture of reality presupposed by Christian faith. But it seems to me that this has primarily been metaphysics as speculative theory. I am not suggesting that now we turn to the task of applying our metaphysical discoveries to practical life but rather adumbrating a different way of doing metaphysics, one in which metaphysical reflection grows so directly out of practices of prayer and public action that the language of applying true beliefs to right practices will seem quite inept for describing the relation of reflection to action and attitude. In drawing the distinction between spirituality and politics as two modes of practice, I do not mean to suggest the difference between inwardness and outwardness. There is, of course, a personal and private dimension to any true Christian spirituality, but there is also a public dimension in liturgy and worship. In calling for a Christian philosophizing more overtly oriented toward practice in these senses, I am suggesting a priestly role for the philosopher. Correspondingly, in calling for a Christian philosophizing more overly oriented toward political practice, in the broadest sense of the term, I am suggesting a prophetic role (and most assuredly not calling for philosopher kings). I am not suggesting that there is something inappropriate about the role of philosopher as apologist, only that we have other tasks we ought not to neglect. For example, elsewhere I have tried to think through the appropriate correlation between transcendence and self-transcendence (see Westphal 2004). In that other book, I attempted to rethink the meaning of divine transcendence by seeing what forms of human self-transcendence manifest themselves in calling and leading us away from our natural preoccupation with ourselves, individual and corporate. My suggestion is that the practices of

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divine transcendence go beyond the prayer, “Lord I thank Thee that I am not a pantheist.” I do not offer this work as a model, but only as a hint. But there are models from whom we can learn. In bringing metaphysics into closer touch with spirituality, there is a variety of traditions on which to draw, patristic, Augustinian, Franciscan, and even, if I may say so, Kierkegaardian. And, in seeking to link our God talk to public practices in society at large, we might do well to pay more attention to the liberation thinkers of our time. Perhaps, by God’s grace, we might even be able to develop new models.

WORKS CITED Plantinga, Alvin. 1984. “Advice to Christian Philosophers.” Faith and Philosophy 1, no. 3: 253–71. Plantinga, Alvin. 2011. “Response to Nick Wolterstorff.” Faith and Philosophy 28, no. 3: 267–8. Quine, W. V. O. 1961. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” In From a Logical Point of View, 2nd Ed. rev. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Westphal, Merold. 2004. Transcendence and Self-Transcendence: On God and the Soul. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press.

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5 The Two-Fold Task of Christian Philosophy of Religion Bruce Ellis Benson

I N T R O D U C TI O N In an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education with the somewhat menacing title “Making Philosophy Matter—Or Else,” Lee McIntyre argues that we philosophers have not always made it clear why what we do matters, and that recent threatened closures and actual closures of philosophy departments should encourage us to think more about how to demonstrate that we do something of great importance (McIntyre 2011). Now I am utterly convinced that our philosophical work does matter; I think what we do has deep implications for how we live life. But it is less clear to me exactly how best to articulate what it means for philosophy to matter. More important, my concern is particularly how Christian philosophy matters, and to whom it matters. In what follows, I want to argue that Christian philosophy has a two-fold task. On the one hand, philosophy is rightly thought of as first and foremost practical: this is true of all philosophy and it should be particularly true of Christian philosophy. It is not just that our philosophy should have an effect on our lives; it is also the case that philosophy grows out of our lives in the first place. By “practical,” I simply mean: “concerned with action.” On the other hand, this emphasis on practical philosophy is in no way incompatible with what we might call “theoretical philosophy.” By “theoretical,” I mean: “concerned with thinking.” I will be working with these rather rough and ready definitions throughout this chapter, but it will become apparent by the end that they are not quite as clear as they might seem to be. In any case, while it is true that theoretical philosophy can become (and sometimes does become) “academic” in the worst sense of that term—remote, obscure, and hermetic—it too can be seen as having the goal of living well. This is what I mean by the two-fold task of philosophy as a practical pursuit and as a theoretical pursuit; it is one task that takes two forms. However, even these forms are such that

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they are not exclusive. Since it is well beyond the scope of this chapter to consider philosophy broadly construed, I will work this out in regard to philosophy of religion. More specifically, in the second and third sections, I want to consider three criticisms of analytic philosophy of religion (APR) made by John D. Caputo, Richard Messer, and Nick Trakakis. These criticisms are: (1) that APR makes God into a definable object; (2) that APR is concerned with cognitive certainty; and (3) that APR is overly theoretical. The questions that I will ask are: First, are these claims correct and, if so, to what extent? Second, if there is some truth to these claims (particularly the last one), are APR and CPR (continental philosophy of religion) simply engaged in different tasks? Ultimately, my claim will be that practitioners of APR and CPR are actually engaged in one task that is two-fold. Let me turn here to my first section “Philosophy as a Way of Life.”

PHILOSOPHY AS A WAY OF LIFE Before we can talk specifically about Christian philosophy, we need to consider how philosophy emerges. Socrates claims that philosophy begins in thaumazein—awe or wonder: “This sense of wonder [thaumazein] is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin” (Plato 1961, Theaetetus 155d). It is a pity that the English term “awe” has, through colloquial overuse, lost so much of its force. For, right before this passage, Theaetetus has just said: “By the gods, Socrates, I am lost in wonder [thaumazô] when I think of all these things, and sometimes when I regard them it really makes my head swim” (Plato 1961, Theaetetus 155c; quoted in Desjardins 1990, p. 189). Aristotle says the following: “For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about the greater matters, e.g. about the phenomena of the moon and those of the sun and the stars, and about the genesis of the universe. And a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant” (Aristotle 1984, Metaphysics 982b 12–17). In the second section of this chapter, I will turn to the question of the extent to which philosophy remains in thaumazein, as opposed to simply finding answers so that wonder ceases. For the moment, let us consider what wonder causes us to do. I think it’s safe to say: ask questions. What sorts of questions are these? They are first and foremost questions about living life. Pierre Hadot (in such texts as Philosophy as a Way of Life and What Is Ancient Philosophy?) has argued that ancient philosophers saw what they were doing as a complete way of life. More recently, John M. Cooper (in Pursuits of Wisdom) has taken up the same thesis and considerably broadened it. Both build what I take to be a convincing

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case that is was not just ethics and politics that were seen as “practical” for the ancients but that metaphysics, epistemology, logic, and physics were designed to be practical too. Consider what Plutarch says about philosophy as something one does: Most people imagine that philosophy consists in delivering discourses from the heights of a chair, and in giving classes based on texts. But what these people utterly miss is the uninterrupted philosophy which we see being practiced every day in a way which is perfectly equal to itself. . . . Socrates did not set up a grandstand for his audience and did not sit upon a professorial chair; he had no fixed timetable for talking and walking with his friends. Rather, he did philosophy sometimes by joking with them, or by drinking or going to war or to the market with them, and finally by going to prison and drinking poison. He was the first to show that at all times and in every place, in everything that happens to us, daily life gives us the opportunity to do philosophy. (Plutarch, Whether a Man Should Engage in Politics When He is Old; quoted in Hadot 2002, p. 38)

The love of “sophia,” then, is not some kind of theoretical love, but a practical one. Philosophy is an activity in which we are constantly engaged. It does not end when we leave our offices at the end of the day. How might we define this activity? Plato defines philosophy as training for death. He writes: “Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing for dying and death” (Plato 1961, Phaedo 62a). Similarly, Montaigne famously writes “that to philosophize is to learn to die” (Montaigne 1958, chap. 20). One aspect of this training is that one is preparing for one’s own death. We might put this as follows: on your deathbed, what do you want your life to have looked like? Will you be able to say: “I have no regrets”? While the Christian view of the afterlife significantly re-contextualizes this insight, it in no way negates it: as one Christian monk noted, “since the beginning of our conversation, we have come closer to death. Let us be vigilant while we still have the time” (Hadot 1995, p. 68). Yet this “death” can be taken in another way. Thaumazein opens our minds in such a way that we realize our own ignorance. When we are thus humbled—when we have “died” to intellectual pride—we are able to learn. We are no longer complacent. Of course, one might well ask at this point: if I am working on a technical argument or doing a careful investigation of, say, Book I of Plato’s Republic, in what sense am I training for death? My response: in both ways. First, doing something more “technical” in nature is also part of living well, even if it simply expands one’s mind and gives one a better understanding of the nature of reality. Second, working on an argument usually is humbling, for it tends to involve frustration with initial attempts and it may require the “death” of giving up cherished beliefs. Nicholas Wolterstorff puts this as follows: The scholar never fully knows in advance where his line of thought will lead him. For the Christian to undertake scholarship is to undertake a course of action that

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may lead him into the painful process of revising his actual Christian commitment, sorting through his beliefs, and discarding some from a position where they can any longer function as control [beliefs]. (Wolterstorff 1984, p. 96)

While Wolterstorff is specifically talking about research that may disturb Christian beliefs, there are many other beliefs that our work as philosophers may disturb. Now, if we combine this idea of training for death with dying with Christ— so not just a literal death but also death to our sinful selves—the idea becomes even more profound. In Mark 8:35, Jesus tells us that “those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and the sake of the gospel, will save it.” Paul talks about being dead to sin (Rom. 6:2) and being dead to one’s sinful self (Gal. 2:20). The Christian notion of “conversion” [metanoia] is that of a fundamental, 180-degree reorientation of the self. It is nothing short of a movement in which we become different persons and thus die to self. Something like this idea of conversion is actually to be found in ancient philosophy. Hadot reminds us of the prominent place that askēsis plays in ancient philosophy. While the term askēsis is often rendered as “asceticism,” it is much better rendered as “spiritual exercises” that concern both body and soul. They are designed so that we (to quote Hadot) “let ourselves be changed, in our point of view, attitudes, and convictions. This means that we must dialogue with ourselves, hence do battle with ourselves” (Hadot 1995, p. 91). According to Hadot, the goal of askēsis is to bring about “a conversion which turns our entire life upside down, changing the life of the person who goes through it” (Hadot 1995, p. 83). So metanoia and askēsis end up being remarkably similar, with one important caveat: metanoia is not something that we can accomplish by ourselves. Of course, exactly how one works this out is going to depend on one’s theology of the Holy Spirit. And this project of dying to a certain self is one that can be found, for instance, in Nietzsche, who takes philosophy to be fundamentally about self-overcoming. Specifically, he speaks of “life that cuts into life” (Nietzsche 1954, II.8). Nietzsche’s philosophy, then, should be read as part of the ascetic tradition (see Benson 2008, chap. 9). In this sense, Nietzsche is engaged in dying to self, in ways that are both Socratic and Pauline, even though I think it is ultimately a failed project. While Christians tend to think that spiritual exercises or disciplines are something unique to Christianity, the reality is that such disciplines long predate its advent. Thus, early Christians imported such disciplines from pagan philosophy and Judaism, adapting them for distinctively Christian ends. Further, as Christianity was trying to find its own identity, secondcentury Apologists such as Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria explicitly positioned Christianity as a competing philosophy—not just any philosophy but the true philosophy that had been prefigured by earlier philosophers. And

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that emphasis continued with such thinkers as Origen and the Cappodocian Fathers, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory Nazianzen, and Gregory of Nyssa. It is also to be found in John Chrysostom, who works out askēsis in the following way: he encourages those wishing to follow the way of Christian faith to consider their souls to be like paintings or pieces of sculpture. We are the works of art that God has created, though God gives us the great honor of further fashioning ourselves. Of course, we do not do so all by ourselves; indeed, Saint Chrysostom exhorts parents to be part of the process with their children. By extension, all of us in Christian community are part of helping fashion one another to become beautiful works of art. Practically, though, what does the askēsis that develops us as living works of art involve? Consider the following list of activities that Hadot provides: research, investigation, reading, listening, attention, and self-mastery (Hadot 1995, p. 84). The most important of these categories is that of “attention” or self-awareness. What the Stoics called “prosoche” [attention] “supposes that, at each instant, we renew our choice of life . . . and that we keep constantly present in our minds the rules of life which express that choice” (Hadot 2002, p. 193). The goal here is to be aware of what one is doing—one’s actions, one’s thoughts, one’s motivations—and thus constantly aware of whom one is becoming. Given that Paul exhorts us not to be “conformed to this world” but instead to “be transformed” (Rom. 12:2), such attention is surely appropriate. Under the category of listening, we could place both prayer and meditation. When we engage in meditation, we allow God to speak to us, as well as to ruminate upon Christian teachings about how we ought to live. For the Stoics, meditation involves remembering and even memorizing key maxims, dwelling upon them, and seeing how they can be put into practice. The point of meditation is to transform both thinking and practice. Indeed, Saint Paul calls us to think on those things that will lift up our gaze and our lives: “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Ph. 4:8). Then he goes on to connect these meditations to practice: “Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you” (Ph. 4:9). Research, investigation, and reading all involve immersing ourselves in the truths of the Christian faith and considering how those truths should practically be expressed. Reading Scripture is clearly central to a distinctively Christian askēsis, but so is reading theology or classic Christian texts. But this is also what philosophers do: we read philosophical texts, we advance arguments, and we give papers at conferences. This is all part of our philosophical askēsis. Hadot reminds us that these spiritual exercises are not merely personal. The Socratic dialogues are about putting the interlocutors through a rigorous examination. In other words, the topic is not merely some point of belief

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(though it is certainly that too); it is also the very interlocutors themselves. Consider Socrates’ rebuke to the Athenian senate: My very good friend, you are an Athenian and belong to a city which is the greatest and most famous in the world for its wisdom and strength. Are you not ashamed that you give your attention to acquiring as much money as possible, and similarly with reputation and honour, and give no attention or thought to truth [aletheia] and understanding [phronesis] and the perfection of your soul? (Plato 1961, Apology 29d–e)

One could easily imagine such a claim from a Christian theologian or someone writing on living the Christian life. Socrates makes a claim about what is really important in life that is remarkably similar to what Christians would say. Of course, I could also imagine someone at this point wondering if the way I’ve been describing ancient philosophy is almost the kind of thing you’d find in the “Self-Help” section of your local bookstore (if you’re lucky enough to still have one). Where, one might ask, is the philosophy—or the “beef,” if you’re old enough to remember that ad campaign? I think there are two responses. One goes as follows: precisely because we have generally lost sight of this vision of what philosophy looks like, we may be inclined to think something along the lines of “but this isn’t real philosophy.” That is, we are largely conditioned to think that philosophy is a kind of scientific endeavor. In contrast, what we’ve been looking at seems more like an artistic endeavor. But, again, that kind of response is very much conditioned by a certain viewpoint that has developed in contemporary philosophy. At the beginning of Hadot’s What Is Ancient Philosophy?, he quotes Kant who writes: “The ancient Greek philosophers, such as Epicurus, Zeno, and Socrates, remained more faithful to the Idea of the philosopher than their modern counterparts have done. ‘When will you finally begin to live virtuously’, said Plato to an old man who told him he was attending classes on virtue. The point is not always to speculate, but also ultimately to think about applying our knowledge” (Kant 1980, Bd. 29, Abt. 4.1.1). Here Kant recognizes that, already in his time, this idea of the philosopher (that is, the one who applies her knowledge) had been lost—or nearly so. But another way of responding to the objection that this is not real philosophy is by pointing to centrality of argument and reason within this tradition, albeit with a twist. In The Therapy of Desire, Martha Nussbaum writes that: Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics—all conceived of philosophy as a way of addressing the most painful problems of human life. They saw the philosopher as a compassionate physician whose arts could heal many pervasive types of human suffering. They practiced philosophy not as a detached intellectual technique dedicated to the display of cleverness but as an immersed and worldly art of grappling with human misery.

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She goes on to say: These philosophers were still very much philosophers—dedicated to the careful argumentation, the explicitness, the comprehensiveness, and the rigor that have usually been sought by philosophy, in the tradition of ethical reflection that takes its start (in the west) with Socrates . . . .On the other hand, their intense focus on the state of desire and thought in the pupil made them seek a newly complex understanding of human psychology, and led them to adopt complex strategies— interactive, rhetorical, literary—designed to enable them to grapple more effectively with what they had understood. In the process they forge new conceptions of what philosophical rigor and precision require. In these ways Hellenistic ethics is unlike the more detached and academic philosophy that has sometimes been practiced in the Western tradition. (Nussbaum 1994, pp. 3–4)

But here we see that things get complicated. On the one hand, the Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics are still engaging in philosophy and operating according to standards of rigor and precision. They are philosophers, after all. On the other hand, their very practical concerns mean that philosophy for them is not narrowly conceived. It also uses techniques that seem (at least to many of us) more artistic than scientific. Nussbaum fleshes out these differences by examining what she terms “the medical model of philosophizing.” Since the Hellenistic philosophers are concerned with health of the soul, they realize that the entire enterprise is person-related. Whereas physics might perhaps proceed in a purely detached manner (and this is surely a contestable claim), ethics cannot. We are not interested in (as she puts it), “standing on the rim of heaven” to find out about the truths of one’s life. At this point, we can make what I take to be an important connection between these Hellenistic philosophers and Aristotle. Consider what Epicurus says: “Philosophy is an activity that secures the flourishing [eudaimōn] life by arguments and reasonings” (Sextus Empiricus, Adversus mathematicos 11:169; quoted in Nussbaum 1994, p. 15). Clearly, the kinds of arguments and reasonings that Epicurus has in mind are more concerned with practical wisdom, the usual translation of phronesis in Aristotle. And here it is helpful to consider Aristotle’s distinction between, on the one hand, phronesis or praxis and, on the other hand, sophia or theoria. Phronesis is three-fold for Aristotle. It is the ability (1) to know what is important, (2) to know how to bring that important thing about, and (3) actually to do so. Anything short of right action is not true phronesis. Given this emphasis on action, phronesis is concerned with specific and concrete truths. For instance, in the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle talks about “what is fitting . . . in relation to the agent, and to the circumstances and the object” (Aristotle 1984, Nicomachean Ethics 1122a 25–6). How should I live my life? While there is a universal and unchanging component in the answer to this question (for Aristotle is going

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to say that the virtues of temperance and courage do not change), they still need to be concretized not only in a specific person’s life but also in a specific person’s action. By way of phronesis, we are able to acquire moral virtue, which Aristotle ultimately thinks is closely connected to political knowledge (Cooper 2012, p. 72). In contrast, sophia—theoretical reason—is not necessarily connected with action. What sophia gets us, instead, is knowledge of that which does not change, universal truths. It arrives at something we normally call “science.” But here is where things start to get interesting. For Aristotle complicates the sophia/phronesis distinction in (at least) two ways. First, while it is clear that the intellectual virtues are ultimately higher than the practical virtues, the practical ones are needed as part of the whole package. A way of putting this is that the intellectual virtues and the moral virtues complement one another, so that they are both needed for one to be truly virtuous. A more powerful way of putting it, though, is by saying that wisdom and happiness of the highest sort requires both, since phronesis is more basic and so is indispensable to sophia. This is an insight that turns out to be key for Martin Heidegger, and it is connected to his study of Aristotle. On the way to Being and Time, Heidegger lectured repeatedly on Aristotle while at the University of Marburg. In a course on Plato’s Sophist, Heidegger devotes a large portion of his lectures to book six of the Nichomachean Ethics, paying special attention to phronesis (Heidegger 1997, chap. 1). By the time of Being and Time, he writes that “knowing the world” (which Heidegger equates with the “knowing” of the natural sciences) is a “founded mode” of our relation to the world (Heidegger 1962, §13). In other words, we first encounter the world in the practical way of “living in it” and then we theorize about the world. Phronesis provides us with the “for which” and “the how.” While Heidegger never uses the term phronesis, one can find this idea in his uses of Umsicht [circumspection], Verstehen [understanding], Entschlossenheit [resoluteness], and Gewissen [conscience] (for more on this point, see Bernasconi 1989). So phronesis is central to the most basic form of human existence, which means that theoria is dependent upon it. We find a similar idea in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception: namely, that our everyday, practical embodiment in the world is the basis for any scientific or philosophical claims. There is a second complication. Cooper speaks of “philosophy as two ways of life” in regard to Aristotle. On the one hand, it is clear that the happiest life for Aristotle is the contemplative one. Of course, Cooper makes the point that I made earlier, namely that even contemplatives are engaging in the practical virtues in their daily lives. But then he goes on to say that “this life [the contemplative life] also includes the best and most end-like virtues, the virtues of theoretical wisdom and understanding, together with the active employment of these virtues on the highest and best objects of knowledge, the divine entities that are the first principles of all reality” (Cooper 2012, p. 138). So that

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is one way of life that suits the philosopher: the life of contemplation. In contrast, the second kind of philosopher is actively engaged in human affairs. For Aristotle, this person may be involved in politics or may be simply an ordinary person. What distinguishes these folks is that (again, to cite Cooper) “their philosophy consists in practical understanding and knowing, and the proper exercise of that philosophical knowledge is in the discriminating evaluative thinking that goes into and informs each and every virtuous action making up their fully virtuous lives” (Cooper 2012, p. 143). In other words, one can do philosophy by engaging in daily affairs in a philosophically thoughtful way, even though there may well be some contemplation in this philosophical way of life too.¹ As we will see moving forward, it may well be the case that only by integrating both of these dimensions to philosophy can Christian philosophy be fully Christian.

APR AND CPR O N THAUMAZEIN So far, we have talked about thaumazein and the differences between practical and theoretical philosophy. In this section, I want to consider how APR and CPR relate to thaumazein; in the next section, I will consider how they relate to practical and theoretical philosophy. Earlier, we noted that philosophy begins in awe or wonder. As such, it generates—at least for Socrates—aporia. At one point, Meno accuses Socrates of being like a stingray by perplexing his interlocutors. Socrates responds by saying: “It isn’t that, knowing the answers myself, I perplex other people. The truth is rather that I infect them also with the perplexity I feel myself. So it is with virtue now. I don’t know what it is” (Plato 1961, Meno 80c). Elsewhere, Socrates describes himself precisely in terms of perplexity: he says, “I am utterly disturbing [atopos] and I create only perplexity [aporia]” (Theaetetus 149a).² To be atopos is literally to be “out of place.” And this is what Socrates is in Athens: he is “strange, extravagant, absurd, unclassifiable, and disconcerting” (Hadot 1995, p. 158). Yet achieving this state of being atopos and having a sense of aporia is part of the very point of the dialogues. It is not the only point—for one wants to actually reach knowledge—but it is not simply accidental either.

¹ Aristotle makes it clear that the statesman also engages in theoria. ² This is Hadot’s translation. For comparison, John McDowell translates this as: “What they do say is that I’m very odd, and that I make people feel difficulties.” Cornford translates it as: “the ignorant world describes me in other terms as an eccentric person who reduces people to hopeless perplexity.”

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What I am suggesting here is that philosophy is a way of life that works by way of an askēsis that leads us both to knowledge and to aporia. Aporia is central to the idea of Socratic ignorance. If we assume that we already know something, it is impossible to learn it: for we already know. In contrast, to ask is to admit that one does not know. As Hans-Georg Gadamer puts it, “discourse that is intended to reveal something requires that that thing be broken open by the question . . . .To ask a question means to bring into the open” (Gadamer 1989, p. 363). So no new knowledge is possible if we insist that we already know. And learning to see our blind spots is actually quite difficult: it is part of the askēsis of knowing and questioning ourselves, and it involves a kind of dying to self. Of course, it is not as if philosophy—or any other kind of thinking, for that matter—simply leads us onward and upward to ever more knowledge. Here we need to be quite clear about what this aporia really is. The Greek word poros means “a way,” either literally or figuratively. With the addition of the alpha privative, it means simply “without a way.” In other words, to reach a point of aporia is to be at a point where it seems like one can go no further. This can be worked out in two different ways. One is simply that we cannot go any further. Christian philosophers may not always agree as to exactly where this point lies, but the nature of God and the fact that we are created, finite beings mean that there are such limits in talking about God. Or to put this problem in a more general way: we always recognize—or at least we do if we are paying attention—that our attempts to answer questions are imperfect and incomplete. The more we understand the issue, the more we come to see our limitations. What is at issue here is the possibility of “getting things right.” Richard Rorty infamously said that we should abandon the project of “getting things right,” but I think most analytic and continental philosophers agree that we cannot and ought not to give up on this project. Even Nietzsche does not give up on this project. Although he is often cited as some sort of “relativistic perspectivist,” this is a significant misunderstanding. While Nietzsche realizes that we all have hermeneutical lenses, he thinks that some perspectives are actually truer than others (precisely in terms of “getting things right”). Nietzsche can correctly be said to have given up seeking for the view from nowhere, but I take it that most philosophers have given that project up by now. As Merold Westphal points out, “we are all postmoderns now” (Westphal 2014, p. 711).³ I could work this out in various ways, but let me limit myself to the notion of “violence.” Emmanuel Levinas, for instance, worries that our efforts to do justice to the Other—whether human or divine—are inadequate. To put this as simply as possible: Levinas believes that, despite our best efforts

³ This is Westphal’s reworking of Robert Brandom’s claim that “we are all Gadamerians now.”

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to understand the Other aright, we do violence to the Other by reducing her to categories of our own making. For Levinas, this is a general concern, but let me give a specific example of what Levinas is worried about—namely, what I am doing right now in this chapter. I am trying to speak meaningfully of APR and CPR, but my efforts (even with appropriate qualifications) are inevitably going to fall short. For neither is a monolithic whole, and so even talking about them as “tendencies” or “general ways of operating” is still problematic. But I don’t know how else to present this chapter about general tendencies in APR and CPR without doing a certain kind of violence to each. This concern for doing violence to the Other is central to much of contemporary CPR, and for good reason. For CPR, as it currently stands, has been deeply shaped by the critique of onto-theology. What is onto-theology? Succinctly put, it is a form of metaphysics that allows God to be possible only according to the conceptual claims of philosophical discourse. The god of onto-theology is a philosophical creation aka the causa sui, the ens realissimum, or “the god of the philosophers.” Heidegger puts this as follows: “metaphysics is theology, a statement about God, because the deity enters into philosophy” (Heidegger 1969, p. 65). But one might ask: what’s wrong with that? The problem is that (again to cite Heidegger) “the deity [as causa sui] can come into philosophy only insofar as philosophy, of its own accord and by its own nature, requires and determines that and how the deity enters into it” (Heidgger 1969, p. 56). The result is that the “god” of onto-theology is no more than an idol, a creation of human thought used for our own purposes. Heidegger points out that “before the causa sui, man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this god” (Heidegger 1969, p. 56). Assuming one believes that onto-theology really is a problem—which is a typical belief among practitioners of CPR—one can proceed in different ways. Jean-Luc Marion clearly thinks it is and employs at least three strategies to escape. First, he affirms Nietzsche’s death of god, arguing that the god who dies for Nietzsche is actually “the god of the philosophers” and not “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” Second, drawing on Christian apophatic traditions (which emphasize what we cannot say about God), he suggests that we think of God as “beyond being” (Marion 1991). Third, he describes Christ as the “saturated phenomenon,” whose appearance to us is like that in Luke 9:29 in which Peter, James, and John see Christ in his glory and are overwhelmed. A somewhat different strategy can be found in Merold Westphal, who claims that the difference is not so much about whether we can say anything about God but one of how one says it. He claims that onto-theology “does not discredit theistic discourse as such . . . .It only discredits certain forms that discourse can/has take(n)” (Westphal 2001, p. 22). I believe that Westphal is right on this matter.

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But this raises a question: are practitioners of CPR really more attuned to violence done, say, to the idea of God than are practitioners of APR? Here’s one answer to this question. In his book Does God’s Existence Need Proof? Richard Messer claims that Richard Swinburne’s conception of God “is the dominant conception of God in traditional philosophy of religion.” Indeed, he goes on to say that this conception “is one which could be found with few variations in almost any introductory text in the philosophy of religion written in the recent Anglo-American academic environment” (Messer 1993, p. 18). Messer claims that this conception includes such aspects that (1) God is definable; (2) God is an object; and (3) God is comprehensible. For this first point, he cites Swinburne as saying that God is “something like a ‘person without a body (i.e. a spirit) who is eternal, free, able to do anything, knows everything, is perfectly good, is the proper object of human worship and obedience, the creator and sustainer of the universe’” (Swinburne 1977, p. 1). For the second point, he cites Swinburne as saying that “God is something of which properties are true, which causally interacts with other recognizable observable objects . . . and therefore on any natural meaning of ‘object’, God is an object” (Messer 1993, p. 21n54). As to the third point, Messer does not cite Swinburne specifically to say that God is comprehensible, but thinks that this point in Swinburne is clear enough. It is important to note that Messer is not a practitioner of CPR but is instead a follower D. Z. Philips, a follower of Wittgenstein. In opposition to this conception of God, Messer argues that God is inexpressible, is not a being, and is not an object. Although Messer does not use this language, the charge is essentially that Swinburne puts forth a conception of God that sounds very onto-theological. It is also a conception that Messer thinks is closely connected to proofs for God’s existence. Nick Trakakis explicitly picks up on this critique and, following Messer, argues that (1) God is wholly other; (2) God is not a being; and (3) God is “a concrete, not abstract, reality” (Trakakis 2008, pp. 63–5). In describing God in this fashion, Trakakis is explicitly following John D. Caputo, who likewise (as we will see shortly) thinks there is no place for proofs for God’s existence.⁴ Assuming that Messer gets Swinburne right,⁵ to what extent is Messer’s claim that Swinburne’s view of God is the predominant view in APR true? Here things get complicated. For we can probably say that there are practitioners of APR who have a view like or similar to that of Swinburne. However, APR is simply too varied to conclude that Swinburne’s view is true of all of ⁴ I am not interested in taking a stand one way or the other on this matter. In other words, Messer could be right about Swinburne and yet, if Westphal is right about onto-theology, the apologetic enterprise might be misguided, but not necessarily because it affirms false claims about God. ⁵ I am assuming here that Messer’s read of Swinburne is correct and that many practitioners of APR would likewise agree. Whether his read may be too narrow or in some other way problematic is a question I set to the side.

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APR or even paradigmatic for APR. Moreover, even these designations used by Trakakis are not completely clear on their own. I assume that practitioners of APR and CPR can agree that God is not a being in the sense that humans are beings. In other words, even if we can say that God is some sort of being, it is surely clear that God’s “beingness” is quite significantly different from the “beingness” of other beings. Yet, if God is really wholly other, then one wonders what can be said of God at all. Let me leave this question at this point and move to what I think is at stake here. Wherever one stands on what can be said of God, it has much to do with the extent to which philosophy remains connected to thaumazein, as opposed to wonder simply disappearing. Aristotle claims that, while theoria begins with awe, it “must end in something which is the opposite of our original inquiries” (Aristotle 1984, Metaphysics 93a). So the goal is to do away with thaumazein and replace it with theoria. We no longer wonder once we are able to explain phenomena in terms of first principles and highest causes, since to comprehend something’s archē and to possess its aitia is to be able to explain it. To what extent philosophers can know anything in this way is certainly up for debate. But, clearly, Christian philosophers cannot and should not claim to possess such absolute knowledge about God. In Rom. 11:33–6, Paul writes: O the depths of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! “For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?” “Or who has given a gift to him, to receive a gift in return?” For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory for ever. Amen.

Of course, merely quoting this piece of Scripture hardly solves anything. For we can agree that God cannot be fully known and still disagree (quite strongly) as to how just how far our knowledge of God actually goes. After all, the Christian tradition has hardly been unified over the past two millennia on this point. In The New Phenomenology, J. Aaron Simmons and I speak of two tendencies, kataphatic excess and apophatic excess. On the one hand, practitioners of CPR are sometimes (maybe often—I leave this question open) too deflationary about what can be said of God. The worry here is that we become so obsessed with the limits of human reason, the fact that we are historically and culturally situated, and the overwhelming nature of God that we reduce discourse about God to the barest minimum. With this worry in mind, we proclaim that God cannot be properly known by human beings and thus we must say very little about God. This is the tendency of the apophatic tradition in theology and philosophy. On the other hand, practitioners of APR sometimes/maybe often (again, I leave this open) claim more about God than can rightly be maintained given human finitude and divine infinitude and, more important, the

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utter difference between creator and creation. Swinburne, again, is probably an example of this trend. We can become very confident in the powers of human reason, which leads to a strong kataphatic tradition that is overly confident about the ability of God-talk to map onto who God truly is. This latter tendency is often correlated with modernity, which generally exalts the powers of human reason (despite Kant’s project of Kritik); the former tendency is often correlated with postmodernity, which tends to see the modern project (assuming one can even speak in such a way) as both hubristic and a failure. Either way, though, there is room for arrogance both in claiming too much about God and also in claiming that “those other people” are claiming too much. We might call these tendencies, respectively, “inflationary arrogance” and “deflationary arrogance.” As it turns out, arrogance is an equal opportunity employer. We could lament this situation, or we could see it for the blessing that it really is. If I am correct that APR and CPR represent tendencies toward inflation and deflation, respectively, then they can actually be seen as complementary and part of the two-fold task of philosophy. It is certainly important for philosophers to make claims about God, but it is equally important for philosophers to challenge those claims. For lack of better terminology, we might say that we need both “constructive” and “critical” philosophy. Both have their value; both are dangerous if left unchecked by the other. The first can end up creating cults; the second can bring about a dangerous skepticism. Perhaps it goes without saying that, if you tend toward being a constructor, you will think that critical philosophers are particularly dangerous. But those who tend toward critical philosophy will think that engaging exclusively in constructive philosophy is likewise dangerous.

APR AND CPR ON THE TWO-FOLD TASK For reasons of simplicity and clarity, I have put my comments on how one’s take on thaumazein affects one’s philosophy in the previous section. (Just to be clear, one does not have to know that “one has a take on thaumazein” in order to have one.) Here I want to address the two-fold task of philosophy in regard to Aristotle’s two ways of philosophical life—the contemplative and the active. Let me begin with the second of these ways of life: the life of the active philosopher. In 1973, over a decade before Plantinga published his “Advice to Christian Philosophers,” Westphal published an essay aimed at giving advice specifically to Christian philosophers of religion. Obviously, Westphal could not have read Plantinga’s essay; I don’t know if Plantinga had read Westphal’s essay when he published his own. In any case, Westphal’s essay has not received

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nearly the attention that it deserves. It is titled (and this is quite a mouthful) “Prolegomena to any Future Philosophy of Religion which will be able to Come Forth as Prophecy.” There he speculates (it was 1973, of course) that philosophy of religion should become “prophetic” in nature, by which he means it should be “personal, untimely, political, and eschatological ” (Westphal 1973, p. 141). By eschatological, he means that it should point to the future. By political, he means that it should not be afraid to confront political structures. By untimely, he means the following: “Prophetic speech is conspicuously out of step with the spirit of the times. It is always minority speech.” By personal, he means that it is not like scientific discourse, for “it comes in the mode of direct address” (Westphal 1973, pp. 144, 141). I think we can say that CPR is often written in these ways. Certainly Westphal’s own work takes this form. This commitment to praxis would mean that subjectivity is essential to philosophical discourse. That would be the personal quality that Westphal mentions. For reasons of space, I will consider this personal aspect and how it connects to the untimely aspect, leaving the other two for another occasion. So to what extent does CPR exhibit these personal and untimely qualities? There are different places where one could begin to mount such a case. One could start with Kierkegaard. Whatever else Kierkegaard’s writings are, they are clearly personal in the sense of being edifying. Kierkegaard actually has a text titled Edifying [or Upbuilding] Discourses, but his entire corpus is really about edification. He writes on love, religious belief, sin, character development, and other phenomena that get right to the heart of daily human existence. Kierkegaard is very clear that he wants the reader to be changed by his texts. He does not simply want a change of mind, but a change of heart and a change in one’s action. It is not insignificant that he believes the classic proofs for God’s existence do not lead to belief in God and instead inspire doubt. His work is also untimely. One can point to the fact that he was not all that well received in his lifetime and, even today, he still is somewhat of an “outsider” in philosophy in the sense that many philosophers do not know quite what to make of him (I borrow this notion of “outsider” from Allen 1983). His “existential” argument for belief in God is highly convincing to some, but perplexing to others. We could make the same kind of case with Nietzsche. Although Nietzsche is usually read as an atheist, I have argued elsewhere that I think he is a kind of Dionysian theist. In any case, Nietzsche is also an edifying philosopher. Perhaps his works are not as “upbuilding” as those of Kierkegaard, but they are certainly life changing. As to his work being untimely, I think this is so obvious as to need no further clarification. While Nietzsche may have won a spot in the standard ethical theory course, his arguments still come across to many as, one might say, unusual. And I think one could—mutatis mutandis— make a similar case for the likes of Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, Marion, and Jean-Louis Chrétien. Their writing is, in my estimation, moving and personal,

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even when it is sometimes written in a very difficult fashion. Further, having taught texts by these authors for over twenty years, I have watched as students have been transformed not just in their minds but in their behavior by reading them. Even if one ultimately comes to disagree with, say, Levinas, it is hard to have gone through the experience of reading his texts without becoming more concerned for the Other. And, without going into detail here, I think it would not be difficult to make the case that each has been “untimely” in significant ways. The appearance of Being and Time came as a shock to the way philosophy was then being done in Germany. Philosophers in France did not know what to make of Levinas. Derrida never received the honor of teaching at the Sorbonne (though he did teach at the still quite prestigious École Normale Supérieur) and his reception in the English-speaking world has been primarily in departments other than philosophy. Marion is probably the leading philosopher in France today, but his Christian commitment is in stark contrast to the general atheistic cultural atmosphere in France. And Chrétien, who became a Christian after taking up his post at the Sorbonne, writes in a way that is hard to classify as offering a “philosophical argument.” This idea that philosophy of religion should be prophetic is taken up by Caputo, who tells us that “the poetics of the Kingdom is prophetic—a diction of contradiction and interdiction—that ‘calls for’ (prophetein) the rule of God, calls for things to happen in God’s way, not the world’s” (Caputo 2002b, p. 45). I have no idea if Caputo had read Westphal’s essay and said “by golly, that’s it” (or, more likely, “oui, oui, amen”). I think it is safe to say that Caputo understands philosophy as a way of life. But I think it is instructive to see what this means for him and his vision of CPR: The talk about God and religion in contemporary continental philosophy bears almost no resemblance to what passes for traditional “philosophy of religion.” The latter has typically concerned itself with offering proofs for the immortality of the soul and for the existence of God, and with identifying and analyzing the divine attributes. This tradition, which goes back to the scholastic debates of the high middle ages, is largely perpetuated today in the works of contemporary Anglo-American philosophers, who offer the old wine of metaphysical theology in the new bottles of analytic philosophy. Richard Swinburne alone can fill a blackboard with the symbolic logic of his proofs. All over Anglo-America, logicians and epistemologists, from the Dutch Reformed to the Roman Catholic confessions, hasten to stretch a net of argumentation under faith in the divine being, lest the leap of faith end up falling to the floor in a great crash. (Caputo 2002a, p. 2)

The reference to Swinburne is clear enough. The mention of the Dutch Reformed could refer to a number of people, though Alvin Plantinga is a probable candidate. As to “the Roman Catholic confessions,” it’s really hard to know exactly who is being included. However, I think we can safely say that

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APR has put considerably more emphasis on arguments for God’s existence than has CPR. One reason for this is that continental philosophy in general has been less concerned about certainty and proof than has analytic philosophy. A good example of what I mean is Gadamer’s Truth and Method. Instead of asking whether we can know (or how can we know that we know?), Gadamer simply assumes that we can know and then asks: how does this take place? Both are epistemological concerns, but the emphasis is different. Further, it’s true that APR has been concerned with considering the attributes of God, but I think one can argue that Marion is doing something like this in God without Being (albeit in a rather modest way) and that Jean-Louis Chrétien considers the nature of God, for instance by way of the call and response. Before responding any further to Caputo, let us consider what he thinks differentiates CPR from APR: We on the continental side of this divide have sworn off that sort of thing and taken our stand with the equally traditional objection to the ontotheological tradition, voiced in a prophetic counter-tradition that stretches from Paul to Pascal and Luther, and from Kierkegaard to the present . . . .The objectifying tendencies, the preoccupation with cognitive certainty, the confusion of the religious life with assenting to certain propositions, prove to be almost completely irrelevant to anyone with the least experience of religious matters, which beg to be treated differently and on their own terms . . . .The God of the traditional philosophy of religion is a philosopher’s God explicating a philosopher’s faith, to be found, if anywhere, only on the pages of philosophy journals, not in the hearts of believers or the practice of faith. (Caputo 2002a, pp. 2–3)

I think these passages can be explicated by focusing on three aspects: The first is one that I dealt with in the previous section on thaumazein: namely, “objectifying tendencies” and “cognitive certainty.” I take it that most philosophers have sworn off of the foundationalist project (or whatever one would like to call it), so apodictic certainty is off the table for both APR and CPR. Where exactly one lands after giving up absolute certainty is going to be a matter of disagreement. I do not intend to adjudicate this debate here, but I will note that there is nothing like a consensus among practitioners of APR or CPR on this matter. The same goes with objectifying tendencies: how cut and dried we think phenomena are—how well they can be reduced to logical propositions in the early Wittgensteinian sense—is again going to be a matter of some disagreement among practitioners of both APR and CPR. It is not clear to me that simply because one uses numbered propositions or symbolic logic that one has thereby objectified God. The second point—that the God found “in the hearts of believers” is not the God found in the pages of philosophy journals—is less easy to dispatch. Caputo is clearly trading on the distinction between the “god of the philosophers” and “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob”—or the God of faith.

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But what really is the charge here? Certainly it can’t simply be that practitioners of APR write journal articles and practitioners of CPR do not. Instead, I think it has to be that the God of CPR is concrete and found “in the hearts of believers,” whereas the God of APR is not. But is this really true? Here the real issue is whether practitioners of APR are speaking to believers or writing for academic professionals. As for CPR, it is not very difficult to make the case that practitioners of CPR tend to write in ways—and on topics—that are seen by readers as having a purchase on their personal lives. Earlier, we saw that Nussbaum points out that the therapeutic strategies of the Hellenistic philosophers are indeed philosophical arguments which have a certain sort of rigor. If we take Kierkegaard’s existential argument for the existence of God and the truth of Christianity, many people think that it has a certain kind of force. Depending on what one thinks of the value of the traditional proofs for God, one might find Kierkegaard’s argument much more convincing. But one does so in an existential way that is certainly rational (I don’t want to say it is something other than “reason” at work here), but not rational in the sense of theoria but phronesis. It appeals to us in the sense of practical wisdom as in “you’d be a fool not to believe in God.” Actually, this is not too far from the argument that Pascal makes, but I’ll leave that point aside. In such a case, no small part of that convincing nature would be that it is a person-related argument in that it has a personal rather than merely theoretical force.⁶ Yet here we come to a significant problem. I cannot speak for practitioners of APR, but presumably they find the kinds of arguments that Caputo says that CPR has “sworn off” significant. As it turns out, in many cases practitioners of APR are writing for fellow academics who are also believers. Of course, the extent to which their own belief is based on those kinds of arguments is somewhat more difficult to discern. Once, when a student was visiting my class, I made a joke about Billy Graham not having used the ontological argument in his crusades. She immediately replied that a friend of hers had become a Christian precisely because of the ontological argument. I responded: “well, then you have a really weird friend, for most people do not become Christians by reading the ontological argument.” I may simply be wrong here, of course. Perhaps there are far more people whose faith is based on the classic arguments than I imagine. But, if that is the case, then Caputo is not quite correct, which opens up the possibility that perhaps the classic arguments, the objections to evil, and the analysis of the divine attributes can be therapeutic after all. Whether they serve to bring people to the faith is something I will leave as an open question. But perhaps they have very significant therapeutic effects for those who are already believers and find that their faith is strengthened. Or perhaps we might better say that, for many

⁶ For a more extended discussion of this subject, see Simmons and Benson (2013, chap. 7).

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in APR, their belief would be weakened if they found the classic arguments of no value, for instance.⁷ Of course, these therapeutic effects may be limited to some degree. Plantinga notes that “neither a Free Will Defense nor a Free Will Theodicy is designed to be of much help or comfort to one suffering from such a storm in the soul” but then concludes that “neither is intended for that purpose” (Plantinga 1998, p. 26). Yet one can come at this from another angle. While there are philosophers who have been particularly successful at speaking personally and to a broad audience (Cornel West comes to mind), it is not as if “serious” analytic philosophers cannot speak in personal and therapeutic ways. Let me provide a couple of examples. Looking through one of the “standard anthologies” on philosophy of religion (the ones that Messer takes to be thoroughly Swinburnean), one finds a chapter on “Faith, Hope, and Doubt” by Jay Wood and another on “Prayer” by Charles Taliaferro. I could cite more chapters like these, but I think these are enough evidence that APR is not necessarily about some “abstract God” (Meister and Copan 2013). Or, for another example, consider what Plantinga says in Warranted Christian Belief: he speaks of the “testimonial model,” in which faith is the result of the Holy Spirit at work in believers’ hearts. He specifically contrasts the “belief” of the demons (James 2:19) with that of Christian believers. Plantinga points out that the difference between a demon and a believer is one’s affections. It is not insignificant that he also cites Luther as being on his side (Plantinga 2000, chap. 9). I could go on, but I think the point is clear enough. And that leads me to my conclusion. Given the trajectory of my remarks about the two ways of being a philosopher in Aristotle, perhaps these two ways themselves need to be examined more closely. We have seen that Aristotle distinguishes between two ways of being a philosopher. One way is more contemplative. The contemplative philosopher is particularly concerned with the intellectual virtues and with theoria. Such a philosopher is inclined, on Aristotle’s view, to work on questions of physics, logic, and what we today call epistemology and metaphysics. Not surprisingly, such work tends to be theoretical. This is true for Aristotle’s work in these areas and has been, at least on the whole, true for the tradition of Western philosophy. The other way of doing philosophy tends much more toward matters of practice. But we have already seen that the interpenetration of theoria with phronesis makes any simple distinction here untenable. Perhaps, then, these two ways of being a philosopher could actually be borne out in the same person. That is not to say that some philosophers are going to be more like the classic contemplatives and others are going to be active—perhaps even “activists”—but there need be no clear division between them. If that is the case, the worst that we can say

⁷ I am indebted to Thomas Flint for this point.

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about the distinction between APR and CPR is that it represents a different division of labor. The one is not more important than the other (even if each “side” tends to think this way regarding itself). But that is the worst-case scenario. A better vision would be that we are engaged in a common project to which we are all contributors in different ways. And, if I’m right about APR and CPR, this engagement is not only important to the philosophical way of life but to Christian identity and calling.

WORKS CITED Allen, Diogenes. 1983. Three Outsiders: Pascal, Kierkegaard, Simone Weil. Cambridge, MA: Cowley. Aristotle. 1984. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Trans. W. D. Ross, revised by J. O. Urmson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Benson, Bruce Ellis. 2008. Pious Nietzsche: Decadence and Dionysian Faith. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Bernasconi, Robert. 1989. “Heidegger’s Destruction of Phronesis.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 29: 127–47. Caputo, John D. 2002a. “Introduction: Who Comes After the God of Metaphysics?” In The Religious. Ed. John D. Caputo. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 1–22. Caputo, John D. 2002b. “The Poetics of the Impossible and the Kingdom of God.” In Rethinking Philosophy of Religion: Approaches from Continental Philosophy. Ed. Philip Goodchild. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, pp. 43–58. Cooper, John. 2012. Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Desjardins, Rosemary. 1990. The Rational Enterprise: Logos in Plato’s Theaetetus. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1989. Truth and Method, 2nd Rev Ed. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York, NY: Continuum. Hadot, Pierre. 1995. Philosophy as a Way of Life. Ed. Arnold I. Davidson. Oxford: Blackwell. Hadot, Pierre. 2002. What Is Ancient Philosophy? Trans. Michael Chase. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Heidegger, Martin. 1969. “The Onto-Theological Constitution of Metaphysics.” In Identity and Difference. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Heidegger, Martin. 1997. Plato’s Sophist. Trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1980. Lectures on the Philosophical Encyclopedia. Kants Gesammelte Schriften, Vorlesungen. Kleine Vorlesungen und Ergaenzungen. Berlin: de Gruyter. McIntyre, Lee. 2011. “Making Philosophy Matter—Or Else.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (December 11). Available at: https://www.chronicle.com/article/MakingPhilosophy-Matter-or/130029 (accessed April 24, 2018).

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Marion, Jean-Luc. 1991. God without Being. Trans. Thomas A. Carlson. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Meister, Chad and Paul Copan, eds. 2013. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion, 2nd Ed. Abingdon: Routledge. Messer, Richard. 1993. Does God’s Existence Need Proof? Oxford: Clarendon Press. Montaigne, Michel de. 1958. The Complete Essays of Montaigne. Trans. Donald M. Frame. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1954. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In The Portable Nietzsche. Ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York, NY: Viking. Nussbaum, Martha. 1994. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Plantinga, Alvin. 1998. The Analytic Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader. Ed. James F. Sennett. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Plantinga, Alvin. 2000. Warranted Christian Belief. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Plato. 1961. The Collected Dialogues. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Simmons, J. Aaron and Bruce Ellis Benson. 2013. The New Phenomenology: A Philosophical Introduction. London: Bloomsbury. Swinburne, Richard. 1977. The Coherence of Theism. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Trakakis, Nick. 2008. The End of Philosophy. London: Continuum. Westphal, Merold. 1973. “Prolegomena to any Future Philosophy of Religion which will be able to Come Forth as Prophecy.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 4, no. 3: 129–50. Westphal, Merold. 2001. Overcoming Onto-Theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Westphal, Merold. 2014. “Must Phenomenology and Theology Make Two? A Response to Trakakis and Simmons.” Heythrop Journal 55: 711–17. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 1984. Reason within the Bounds of Religion Alone, 2nd Ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

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6 Christian Phenomenology Kevin Hart

If one looks at the expression “Christian philosophy” with a magnifying glass, one sees an immense cliff face in which various strata, many of them dislocated by intense intellectual and spiritual upheavals, are still visible. At the very bottom one discerns Christian φιλοσοφία, the practice of the love of wisdom in the context of the Gospel; it calls for a retreat from the world, for prayer (especially contemplation), and for scholars it also calls for reflection on God and the proper ordering of the Church. The Greeks and Romans may have found Christians repellent, but they saw nothing peculiar, let alone selfcontradictory, about them practicing φιλοσοφία, which, after Justin Martyr, Christians themselves recognized as the fulfillment of its pagan mode. For Clement of Alexandria, φιλοσοφία is actually given to us by God (Clement of Alexandria 2012, VI. viii). From within the Jesus movement, however, there was also unease: were there not dangers in accommodating Christ to pagan ways of thinking? Tertullian thought so, and he could draw on Paul (Col. 2:8, for example); even so, he had no time for θεολογία, which for the early Church was a storehouse of pagan mythology. Yet φιλοσοφία, inevitably transformed into philosophia, remained a strong impulse in Latin Christianity. If for the pagan Romans philosophia was figured as leisure activity, for Christians it could still permeate the whole of life understood as living coram deo. Boethius wrote De consolatione philosophiæ—not De consolatione theologiæ, note—in the early sixth century and its influence on Christianity stretched deep into the Middle Ages. Only with the establishment of the University of Paris in the twelfth century was a firm institutional distinction between philosophy and theology drawn. As ancilla theologiæ, philosophy would bring to the higher discipline whatever it needed from pagan learning; it had been licensed to do so since Origen. But was there also a philosophy, working with sound assumptions and valid reasoning, which came to conclusions other than those affirmed by revelation? Doubtless so: cases were made for the eternity of matter and for the one

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intellective soul, and, far from being “Christian philosophy,” this thinking not only had roots in Aristotle and Averroës but also seemed to Étienne Tempier, Bishop of Paris from 1268 to 1279, to run counter to the truths of sacra doctrina. (Robert Kilwardby, Archbishop of Canterbury, was less harsh; he merely prohibited the teaching at Oxford of what he took to be incorrect philosophical positions derived from Aristotle.) It fell to the high Scholastics, especially Aquinas, to fold pagan philosophy satisfactorily into an overarching Christian vision; but the great summæ of the Middle Ages could not prevent nominalism from corroding what they had built, and the specter of “double truth” returned. It frightened Luther not because of the power of reason to assert its independence with respect to doctrine but because reason could strangle faith in the very pride it took in its achievements. The biblical verse “And the Word became flesh” (John 1:14) divides faith from reason, Luther insisted, and he dismissed Aristotle as Narristotle (from ein Narr: a fool), telling advocates of “Christian philosophy” that they placed their faith in that whore, Reason, not in Scripture. Looking further up the cliff face, one sees bold attempts to use philosophy, now a self-assured modern academic discipline, to make one’s faith reasonable, untouched by Schwarmerei. Revelation, the tightly guarded preserve of clerics, must be brought within the smaller circle of a pure moral religion, Kant argued, yet once there it was subject to the authority of universalization: the small circle turns out to be able to extend itself massively and to have great powers of containment. While university theologians have the right to interpret Scripture in accord with ecclesial norms, philosophers in the lower faculty retain the socially important task of rational criticism. “Christian philosophy,” in its Kantian moment, would require believers to acknowledge the juridical authority of philosophy, and in return they will be saved from the uncertainties of church dogma and be given firm assurance about freedom, immortality, and God. If with Kant philosophy gained confidence with regard to its dealings with Christianity, that confidence expanded greatly in the register of speculation with Hegel. There is a sense in which Hegel makes all philosophy Christian, not only his own thought but also, since he seeks to direct all currents of Western thought to his own ends, philosophy as such. By the same token, one might say that Hegel also makes all Christianity into philosophy. Pre-philosophical commitments to Scripture or doctrine are transformed by following the passage of Geist through the dialectical lives of logic and history alike. Hegel as Midas: everything he touched turned to philosophy! Such was the initial move of a new subdiscipline, “The Philosophy of Religion,” first taught by Hegel in 1821. Notice, though, that the focus of philosophical attention has shifted from God, as it had been even for Kant, to religion: God is to be analyzed in relation with society. Inevitably, a reaction would come to the vast expansion of philosophy’s role with respect to Christianity, and it is most clearly seen with

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Kierkegaard. “Is that not what philosophers are for—to make supernatural things ordinary and trivial?,” his pseudonym Johannes Climacus fumed in a biting allusion to Shakespeare (Kierkegaard 1985, p. 53). He rejected the Danish Hegelians who confuse the identity of God and human beings with the identity of God and one human being, Jesus, and he rethought what “Christian philosophy” can be. It can be a philosophy of existence, lived by appropriating the Gospel for oneself in a fresh manner, which cannot occur if one merely regards being a Christian as belonging to a state church. After Hegel and Kierkegaard, one can trace separate and entangled paths of “Christian philosophy” and the philosophy of religion. The former becomes the subject of debate, signally in the early 1930s under the auspices of the Société Française de Philosophie; it becomes discredited by Heidegger in 1935 as “a round square” (Heidegger 1961, p. 6). Yet it is taken up, almost invisibly and in quite different ways, in the theologies of Tillich, Rahner, and Pannenberg, as well as in papal encyclicals from Aeterni patris (1879) to Fides et ratio (1998), which promote Aquinas as the normative thinker of the Church. If the former motif, declared or not, is commonly traversed by theological themes and procedures, philosophical protocols become entrenched in the latter, especially after the Second World War when analytic philosophy became a dominant voice. Recent decades have seen analytic philosophy of religion both at its most inventive and in danger of becoming a new scholasticism. Argumentation has been used not to sheer away people’s religious views (as the logical positivists tried to do in the 1930s) or to transform one’s prephilosophical religious commitments so that they might have philosophical dignity and precision (as one finds in Ricœur and Tilliette, for example) but to buttress those same commitments; and at times a gulf between impressive surgical technique and theological or exegetical naïveté becomes apparent. So nowadays one finds some analytic philosophy of religion that can readily be called “Christian philosophy” because of its apologetic thrust. Nonetheless, its evangelical and reformed practitioners, in particular, remain aloof from theologies that have absorbed earlier, often continental, philosophies, and that can also be called “Christian philosophy” in a quite different sense of the noun. Of course, one finds other philosophers of religion, oriented to European philosophy, who are taken, not always correctly, to have apologetic edge in their writing: Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Yves Lacoste, for example. Europeans and others who practice continental philosophy vary in the breadth and depth of their theological knowledge. Lacoste and Marion are intimate with it, while Michel Henry, who proposes a “philosophy of Christianity,” is far less so (Henry 2003). In general, the continental school of “Christian philosophy,” in whatever sense, tends to be sympathetic to theology, even if most of its practitioners seldom have detailed intelligence about contemporary biblical studies or even much sympathy with its more historicist aims and methods.

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* * * “Christian philosophy” is more than one phenomenon, then, each of which has various sediments, and each of which is marked by passive constitution. Not to know the genesis of a Christian philosophy one espouses or rejects is to walk in danger of sliding into a crevasse. Whether the strongest version of “Christian philosophy” has a pure heritage, a mixed one, or a legitimate claim to be de novo, might be debated. Much depends on what one takes “philosophy” to be. Is it a mode of criticism, Wissenschaft, analysis, contestation, or contemplation? Or might it contain moments of several? The style of philosophizing I practice, phenomenology, is finally contemplative in its purpose, which does not prevent it from analyzing claims and from delving into its past along the way. Philosophical contemplation, as I use the expression, draws from the conflicting accounts of θεωρία offered by Plato and Aristotle, the former of which is taken to giddy heights by Plotinus; but one should not presume that it is “theory” in the current sense of the word in reflexive philosophy. For although classical phenomenology maintains that phenomena have both genitive and dative moments, it does not presume a hardened division between subject and object. An intentional object is irreell, and the “subject” is so far from being determined by a separate substance, as the Cartesian cogito is, that Husserl figures the transcendental ego as a flux without beginning or end. Nor is classical phenomenology divorced from hermeneutics, although it does not affirm interpretation (by way of recollection or suspicion) as a later redaction of it seeks to do (Ricœur 1981). Instead, it offers a contemplative hermeneutics, which is concerned with a vigilant vision of things, each in its proper region of being. The contemplation of which I am speaking is philosophical, not religious or aesthetic, although this distinction should not be drawn too tightly. The open, steady attention that we call contemplation is always infused with love but not always with ἀγάπη, which characterizes the Christian’s fundamental orientation to life. Before going any further, it must be stressed that phenomenology is strictly neutral with respect to the claims of Christianity or those of any other positive religion. No assumption is made about the existence of God, the truth of dogmas, and so on. An atheist or an agnostic can investigate God in order to see in what way or ways he would disclose himself if the Christian understanding of him is in any way correct. So there is no “Christian phenomenology” practiced in philosophy. Yet this claim does not preclude the possibility that the religion is itself phenomenological in one or more sense, and that knowing some philosophy helps one to see this. To my mind, Christianity has its origin in a unique mode of phenomenology, a conversion of the gaze [Blickwendung] that Jesus performs in his preaching, and that also generates a particular sense of contemplation as part of its response to the conversion, one that has, as I have mentioned, a hermeneutic dimension.

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This “conversion” is less to do with the inward turn to find truth that Augustine commends than with accepting a claim made on us by the Father since before the creation of the world (Augustine 1953, 39:72). In the light of this event, contemplation is not to be figured simply as the gaze turned toward the deity, something that presumes an emptying of the heart and the mind (as Evagrius Ponticus taught, for example); instead, it is a gaze turned toward the manner in which the deity is taken to manifest himself, in the very Kingdom of God [βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ] that John the Baptist and Jesus proclaimed to be breaking into human life. To explicate these two connected things—Jesus as phenomenologist, and the style of contemplative hermeneutics that is consequent on his preaching—is a contribution to what we might call “Christian phenomenology,” understood as an impulse within Christianity rather than philosophy. It is not the whole of the topic, not by a long shot, but it will be my sole concern here. *

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In the Gospel we read, “For nothing is hid that shall not be made manifest [φανερὸν], nor anything secret that shall not be known and come to light [φανερὸν]” (Luke 8:17). The remark comes after the parable of the sower, the parable about parables. Jesus reveals to his disciples, those committed to him and not those onlookers who are merely curious about him, the eschatological life of the Gospel, while also saying that in time it will be generally manifest how the Word has been spread and with what results. Indeed, we may also hear, if we have ears to hear, that it will also be revealed that Jesus is the Christ, the anointed one, and that he will come again in glory as judge. The apocalypse is a disclosure [ἀποκάλυψις] of how things are. Jesus mostly teaches by parables. He does not speak of God’s being, neither his existence nor his essence. In a people that believes itself to be chosen by God only the fool has said in his heart, “There is no God” (Psalms 14:1), and the Jews know that God abides in darkness (Psalms 18:11) and that it is therefore pointless to speculate about the divine essence. Instead of philosophizing about God, Jesus speaks of the proper relations we may have with God and with one another; and he does so through those metaphorically charged stories we call parables. As a thought experiment, we might ask ourselves why philosophy would have been of no use to Jesus, and so come to a better appreciation of what he actually does in his preaching. God, considered philosophically, does not offer his εἶδος for inspection, nor is it possible to perform the phenomenological reduction on him: his mode of transcendence is such that it cannot be led back to a state of immanence in human consciousness. So God, if there is a God, does not allow himself to become an item of certain knowledge. In phenomenological terms, there cannot be a noeticnoematic correlation that yields God as an irreell moment and that can be repeated in time. Husserl was right to say that, if phenomenology, regarded as

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a philosophical mode of inquiry, wishes to talk about God it must presume that he is always and already in consciousness: transcendence would be in immanence (Husserl 1998, pp. 116–17). In a way, Husserl opens the way for phenomenology to ponder its own version of the ontological argument; and it would be no surprise to learn that it looks back to Descartes rather than to Anselm. Actually, it goes all the way to Augustine, although in a quite different form there: in De Trinitate the saint descries the image of the Trinity in our souls (Augustine 1991, XI. 26). Like other rabbis of the day, Jesus often taught by way of mashalim, which center on parables, and his stories largely attend, directly or obliquely, to what he calls the Kingdom of God, a notion he probably derived from the Targum Jonathan to the Prophets. No one parable can yield the εἶδος of the Kingdom; perhaps not even a million parables could do so. Even before venturing outside the biblical canon, we have forty-six parables in the Gospels, and each gives the Kingdom in a particular way. We grasp a profile, not the whole, yet each profile presumes the whole. Matthew takes the parables he records as fulfilling Psalms 78:2: “I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter things hidden since the creation of the world [ἐρεύξομαι κεκρυμμένα ἀπὸ καταβολῆς κόσμου]” (Matthew 13:35). So Jesus’s parabolic speech is held to manifest something of the divine not revealed to the patriarchs and prophets. What does it make manifest? How does it do so? In order to make some headway with these questions, let us do something that is rarely done in the philosophy of religion: let us read a parable. The parable I have chosen is very well known, the story of the lost sheep (Matthew 18:12–14), which occurs also in Luke and Q. I will not concern myself with transmission analysis here, however. As Matthew situates it in his testimony about Jesus, it comes in the context of illuminating the Kingdom of Heaven [βασιλείαν τῶν οὐρανῶν], a more reserved phrase, characteristic of this author, for the Kingdom of God: 18:12: What do you think? If a man [ἄνθρωπος] has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? 18:13: And if he finds it, truly, I say to you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. 18:14: So it is not the will of my Father [τοῦ πατρὸς] who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish. (RSV)

Jesus’s original audience would have heard shepherds frequently evoked in Synagogue and would have known that, especially before the Egyptian captivity, they were viewed positively in their Scriptures: Abraham and Jacob both tended sheep, David was a shepherd, the Psalmists praised shepherds (Psalms 23:1–4, 119:176), and the prophets not infrequently compared God with a shepherd (Isaiah 40:10–11, Ezekiel 34:4). Amos had been a shepherd (Amos 1:1).

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These images form the ground against which Jesus cuts his figure, and to understand it we need to recognize that, in his day, shepherds were of very low social status, no better than tax collectors and sweepers of dung. Hired shepherds were regarded as thieves, largely because sheep and goats could not be tethered and could easily “disappear,” and so their word could not be trusted. (Notice that the word “shepherd” does not appear in the parable: it is simply a man who owns the sheep.) The author of the fourth gospel makes this plain when he has Jesus call himself “the good shepherd” (John 10:11): he is unlike the shepherds of the day but is like God. This structure of “like-unlike” is characteristic of the parables that Jesus tells. God is like a shepherd but unlike any shepherd ever encountered. The shepherd of Matthew 18:12–14 does something that no earthly person would do: leave ninety-nine untethered animals, his entire livelihood and reputation, prey to thieves and wolves and go in search of just one lost animal the whereabouts of which he has no idea and which, in all likelihood, is already dead. If this is a good shepherd, then the meaning of “good” differs widely from how we generally use the adjective; his care for a single lost sheep is extraordinary. We need not worry about the safety of the ninety-nine sheep, or whether they are looked after by an under-shepherd, for we are reading a parable, not an allegory. It is concerned to show that God identifies himself first with the Israel of the patriarchs and prophets, second with the despised, not the socially acceptable, and third with the one in trouble, not the many who are already safely in his care. Notice that God does not manifest himself as eternal being but as a shepherd and who Jesus then says, changing the metaphor once he is outside the narrative frame, is our Father. This second metaphor supervenes with respect to the first, and it is worth reflecting on it for a moment. God, for Jesus, is not a war god or a storm god, but Abba, the intimate name in Aramaic for one’s father, whether one is a child or an adult. We cannot choose to be in relation with this Father, for a son or a daughter is always and already in relation with him. What we can do, however, is recognize that relationship, nurture it, and not deny it by word or deed. In the parable, then, God is no longer abstract, as would happen in a philosophical discussion of his existence or essence; he is concrete, which is to say that “God” becomes meaningful in terms of the metaphors of shepherd and Father, figures of care. By telling a parable Jesus has bracketed the world around him and his audience, and the story itself performs a strange reduction; it leads those who listen to it back to what is anterior to “the world.” To live in a state in which we are either safe or will be looked for if we become lost is one profile of the Kingdom. A parable, as told by Jesus, takes us from world to Kingdom. It begins with the audience in a context characterized by calculation, economy, prudence, and labor, a world narrowly or distantly informed by the sense of κόσμος as an ordered state and permeated by the Roman imperium. And it

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ends with a passage opened to a new way of being so that one is, first and foremost, in a close and respectful relation to God as a child is to his or her father. It follows of course that one’s relations with other people, family or not, are as to other children of the same Father. The world is not denied; it remains. But it fades in significance as regards embodying the meaning of life. In passing from world to Kingdom one is somewhat freed from worldly relations and free to acknowledge a more intimate sense of divine ones. This possibility of new life is what has been hidden since the creation of the world, not because it is an esoteric teaching, to be kept only between initiates of a sect, such as the Essenes, but because the followers of Jesus saw a fresh understanding of God as Father that was disclosed in his teaching and his embodiment of it to the point of self-sacrifice. The cross and the resurrection are the lenses by which his teaching is grasped. At issue, then, is not whether the Jews of the prophetic era called God “Father,” as they certainly did, or whether the same was done generally in the early Tannaitic period, as it surely was. Rather, Christians came to hold that God is truly our Father only if we confess Jesus to be the Messiah. As Paul wrote, “in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith” (Galatians 3:26). At issue is less the parables that Jesus taught than the Christological claims that are made of the teacher. It is the intimacy of Jesus and God the Father that enables the Kingdom to be preached with authority, for us to see the difference between world and Kingdom. Not that Matthew 18:12–14 tells us all that we need to know about the Kingdom. It does not and it cannot because the Kingdom is a multi-stable phenomenon the profiles of which do not always cohere—it is here yet to come, within yet without, and so on—and so it eschews the possibility of being fully described in the way one might depict a particular space, event, or model. Only if we hear other parables can we see that the King is manifest only in the Kingdom, in and through relationships with him and others; only if we immerse ourselves in those parables can we make out the right relationship of forgiveness and justice, for example (Hart 2014, chapters 6, 7). The kind of reduction that Jesus performs differs markedly from the one that Husserl advocates. We do not move inward to consciousness, not even to find God always and already there; rather, we are invited to recognize an absolute claim made on us, which precedes our conception and our accommodations to the world. Yet Husserl’s late, generative phenomenology gives us a way to talk a little more clearly about our experience of the Kingdom. We do not move, in Husserl’s terms, simply from a home world [Heimwelt] to an alien world [Fremdwelt]. Certainly “the world,” as we experience it, consists of customs, traditions, and values; it is what is near to us, already shared with others, though usually by way of family, nation, work, and religious group (Pharisees and Sadduccees, for instance, in Jesus’s day). And it is always sensitive to the relative presence or absence of the alien: we need think only of the Romans and the Samaritans. The passage to the Kingdom is at heart a

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movement from seeing the world as pre-given, something into which we are born and with which we become habituated, to seeing it as given. In philosophical phenomenology, givenness [Gegebenheit] does not presume someone who gives; it is an exterior thing, transcendent, that has been brought by intentionality to the immanence of consciousness. In Christian phenomenology, however, there is someone who gives: the Father. Givenness and gift are one and the same. God is always God-for-us, and what we have been given is the possibility of realizing and deepening a relationship with him and, through that, to enable richer relations with one another, a deeper sense of sharing with others. So we do not enter a Kingdom that is purely alien; we recognize it, even if we find it strange at first and thereafter a perpetual challenge. It is the mixture of metaphor and narrative in parable that prompts reduction from our pre-given ways of seeing, coded as they are with assumptions about reality, sometimes to the point of becoming ideologies (including religious ideologies), to the place where we can make out the Kingdom. And this is because each of metaphor and narrative has the ability to say, “Imagine life like this!” The brevity of a parable tends to make it almost all prompt; we do not become entranced in another fictional world, as happens when reading a novel or watching a play. Notice, too, that a parable does not give us any first-order advice how to live; it is a formal indication of how to live so that one may please God. We are led to the border of the Kingdom, as it were, which can be crossed by anyone, but whether to enter the Kingdom is one’s own decision. Finally, notice as well that parables do not give us even moderate levels of Evidenz with respect to reference; we cannot look out the window of our house or office and see a world transformed by love, not if we lived in Calvin’s Geneva or have lived at any historical period in the Vatican. Yet, because their intentional rapport with things is traversed by the imagination rather than by perception, parables give us very high levels of Evidenz with regards to meaning: we see how we should live, even if our enthrallment with “the world,” its injustices as well as its satisfactions, makes it hard to do so. To summarize: unlike most versions of Christian philosophy, Christian phenomenology begins with the testimony of Scripture; it attends to Jesus’s preaching of a peculiar phenomenon he calls the Kingdom. This preaching is a mode of reduction that has not been recognized within philosophy, certainly not by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Marion, or anyone working in phenomenology as a philosophical method, however generously conceived. We are not led within ourselves to find the truth, as Augustine urged in the context of Neo-Platonism and as Husserl commended when distinguishing himself from Neo-Kantianism (Husserl 1977, p. 157); we are invited to turn around and see what is absolutely anterior to our earthly lives: the possibility of living as a true son or daughter of the Father in and through Jesus. (An interior change will surely be required of us, but not a discovery of something

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abiding in consciousness.) We shift from undue attachment to the world to making out the possibilities of new life in the Kingdom. To extend and clarify what has already been said. First, we do not slip from the natural attitude to something we might call “the supernatural attitude” in which the divine abides in a higher world that nonetheless mirrors our own. The King gives himself “in” the Kingdom, as a possible relationship, but not as a person in a place. His mode of being cannot be ascertained by human consciousness; he is absolutely singular and therefore falls outside concepts. The King does not appear to the senses or to the “spiritual senses.” This Basilaic reduction is also reductio in mysterium, though it does not call for a long-lasting closing of the eyes or the lips. In the view of Christianity I am proposing, faith is not a mode of knowledge of God in the narrow sense of a series of propositions that might seem unjustified to agnostics and atheists but that is held to be invulnerable to falsification by believers. Faith does not make God present to you or to me, either epistemologically or ontologically; rather, it is trust that we are present to God, that he will never forget us, much as a good shepherd does not forget even one sheep. Second, when we call Jesus the Christ, and even more when we acclaim him as the only begotten son of the Father, we testify that in the context of Judeo-Christianity only he can make manifest the Kingdom and that, because of Jesus, the King is also our Father. To draw close to the Father of Jesus, one must follow Jesus’s teaching, which in part means to love one’s neighbor as oneself, which does not mean offering an interested love, in which everything returns to the self, but a disinterested love, in which care for the neighbor dominates. The King is invisibly present in that love, as its fons et origo, and the Kingdom is the very means of human θέωσις. It is in loving others as God loves us that we can come to enjoy the vision of God. When we reflect that the Father raises Jesus from the dead, we also realize that the Kingdom, held up to ridicule when Jesus is on the cross, is raised with him. Easter Sunday shows that it is not just one view of life among others, it is the one of which God approves by his decisive act after the horror of the crucifixion. We recognize that Jesus is the necessary dative for the full phenomenon “God-as-Father,” and thus Christology begins its arduous path of development. We begin to understand the phenomenality of God, how he appears in the world, when we see that he manifests himself both in the Kingdom and in Jesus. Third, Christian phenomenology is irreducible to philosophical phenomenology. In the latter, intuition and intentionality are basic; reduction is a latecomer in the account. Not so with the former. Here intuition is useless in the desire for God, as are eidetic and phenomenological reductions; and acts of reasoning get us only so far with regard to him: they lead us to the point where we must decide whether or not to love him. This is not romance; it is commandment to change one’s life so that one can be a person who loves God and neighbor. In

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Christian phenomenology basilaic reduction and intentionality, especially love, are primary. If we love God, it is because we have converted our gaze, and we allow the conversion to begin because we vaguely apprehend that the meaning of life is love, not success or wealth or anything of the sort. It seldom happens once and for all time: basilaic reduction needs practice, although some people—we call them “saints”—seem to live almost always in the Kingdom. Their very lives are parables. For most of us, it approaches and withdraws, upsets our world but declines to stay in focus no matter how well we perform basilaic reduction. The act of conversion, in the sense I am using the word, begins with κένωσις, emptying out or limiting enthrallment to the world, and continues with ἐπέκτασις, a perpetual stretching out into the Kingdom. It is not “progress” because we almost never receive clear signs we can interpret in the present of advancing towards God. Human beings find it hard to read our disappointments and periods of aridity, our pains and our sorrows, as signs of spiritual development. To stretch into the Kingdom, with all its risks of humiliation as well as joy, is to love in the Christian sense of ἀγάπη. Fourth, God gives himself in reason, though only barely, and if we limit our response to reason we receive him as an idol rather than a divine reality. Chiefly he gives himself in love, that is, unconditioned care that goes to the point of self-sacrifice, and what he gives is love: himself. Put one way or another, it is an idea that goes back to Augustine (Augustine 2007, 32:18). Love leads to knowledge. As Aquinas contends, we can grow in knowledge of God through the gifts of the Holy Spirit, but this “knowledge” is a perfecting of the human mind by the Spirit so that it is more amenable to promptings of the divine; it is not an imparting of justified true beliefs by supernatural means (Aquinas 1973, q. 68 art. 5 ad 1). “O taste and see,” we read (Psalms 34:8), which has long been glossed as the triumph of the non-theoretical senses over the theoretical senses when it comes to our experience of God. Any vision we may have of the deity is sequestered to the ἔσχατον; here and now we can only have faith that it will come if we stay the course, a faith that is sustained and deepened by prayer. * * * It has been common from patristic times to distinguish verbal prayer from contemplative prayer. The former, whether liturgical or personal, consists of reciting or extemporizing prayers of adoration, confession, sacrifice and petition; and the latter, always personal, turns on sustaining a loving, attentive gaze on the divine. Unlike verbal prayer, contemplation draws from Greek thought, θεωρία; it has little or no Hebrew patrimony. Perhaps the closest that Hebrew comes to Greek is in the verbs siach and hagah, “to muse” and “to meditate” respectively. Siach is attuned to study: “May my meditation be pleasing to him, for I rejoice in the LORD” (Psalms 104:34) and “Oh, how I love thy law! It is my meditation all the day” (Psalms 119:97). Hagah is also

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oriented to study. The Psalmist speaks of the blessed man: “his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night” (Psalms 1:2). Hagah often alludes to wordless sounds, like a lion’s growl or a human groan, and its association with meditation probably comes from the way in which someone brooding on a passage of Scripture will mumble its words over and over. So Hebrew meditation is oriented to sacred texts, while Greek θεωρία is attuned to a gaze on all that is, right up to the divine. There can be no denying the importance of what is sometimes called mental prayer in Christianity, whether as θεωρία, contemplatio, “centering prayer,” or any other way. Yet the precise nature of Christian contemplation is not always fathomed. To begin to see what it is, we need to distinguish philosophical contemplation from its Christian counterpart. I bypass the specific uses of contemplation with respect to beauty that Schiller evokes (Schiller 1967, Letter XXV). Beauty cannot be excluded from Christian contemplation, as von Balthasar has rightly emphasized, but it is not my primary concern here (von Balthasar 1982). Instead, I turn to Husserl who supplies a modern version of philosophical contemplation. His aim is to cultivate a purer form of intuition, one with as little reliance on interpretation as possible, so that we may see phenomena exactly as they give themselves to us (in anticipation, recollection, desire, perception, imagination, and so on). We do not posit the existence of things; instead, we bring them into the immanence of consciousness and then “we contemplate them” (Husserl 1998, p. 220), and this attention to them does not presume prior positive interest or affection (Husserl 2005, pp. 167–9). Put more dramatically, we annihilate the world, Husserl says in Ideas I § 49, in order to gain absolute consciousness, by which he means that in imaginatively bracketing all transcendent items we recognize that we constitute their being. Consciousness supplies a necessary condition (the dative) for something to appear. Matters are different in Christian phenomenology, for there we parenthesize the world’s allure, along with the old self (“Adam”), in order to gain God as made manifest in Christ (“New Adam”). The Father is not revealed in consciousness but only in the uncovering of new life in the Kingdom. We contemplate God in and through his loving care for all of us. The aim, then, is not to purify the gaze so that we see God now, which would be an impatient eschatology, but to live in the Kingdom in order to see the Father in his relations with us. The templum is not drawn in the sky; it is reached by basilaic reduction. It is the Kingdom insofar as it is on earth, one with the Kingdom to come, and the call to live there precedes life itself. We touch upon mystery, then, but it does not leave us silent; not only do we hear the preaching of the Kingdom but also we are commanded to continue it. This is significant. There is no “ethics” in Christian phenomenology, only religious ethics: mitzvah, commandment. “To see” in Christian contemplation is not simple perception; it is perception enabled by faith as I have described it, less “theory” than θεωρία, and less a

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gaze of the eye than a relation cœur à cœur; it is trust that we are eternally present to the Good Shepherd as brought into focus by Jesus. It is also perception enabled by anticipation of the Kingdom in its fullness, by recollection of what we have been told of Creation, and imagination of how to act so as to glorify God and help the neighbor. This faith is no changeless state; it relies on the ceaseless rhythm of κένωσις and ἐπέκτασις, and therefore can deepen and lighten over the course of a person’s life. Christian contemplation is a studied intensification of this faith, an emptying of the enticement of the world in order to stretch into the Kingdom so that one might encounter there, always hidden and always elusive, the King who is our Father. We can get closer to an understanding of what Christian phenomenology proposes with respect to contemplation by recalling Richard of St Victor’s The Mystical Ark, perhaps the most highly developed schema in which θεωρία is inflected in a Christian manner. Richard tells us that contemplation is higher than thinking and meditating because it allows one freely to stay on the wing, as it were, and that we can contemplate reality in its various levels, beginning with the imagination, passing to reason, and then exceeding reason (Richard of St Victor 1979, p. 156). For Richard, we ascend from contemplating a physical thing to contemplating its rational structure, and successively rise ever higher until we contemplate it as created and finally we may behold even the triune nature of the Creator. (One might pause at Richard’s confidence that one will actually ascend; modern readers will ponder the examples of such different contemplators of nature as Rousseau and John Stuart Mill who happily remained on this level (Rousseau 2000, p. 130; Mill 1972, pp. 1548–9).) The Richardian schema, inherited from Neo-Platonism, is of various levels of being. Christian phenomenology thinks the same thing otherwise, in terms of regions of being, the ways in which phenomena manifest themselves. We seek to see something exactly as it is given in an intentional relation. How something is given in anticipation, the imagination, or perception will differ from how it is given in love, for example; and the Christian who has educated his or her heart through life in the Kingdom will seek to see things in what Augustine called “morning knowledge,” that is, so that we do not simply see a thing but see it suffused with divine love (Augustine 1991, IV. xxiii). Plato construes θεωρία as the contemplation of the Forms that will sustain the philosopher in his return to the πόλις to educate his fellow citizens in the nature of reality; it is the burden of the allegory of the Cave (Republic, 514a– 520a). Aristotle, on the other hand, figures θεωρία, contemplation of the structures of reality, as the highest activity a human being can perform; it serves no social purpose but its enjoyment comes as a reward for the philosopher and the statesman for work well done (Nicomachean Ethics, 10:7–8). Christian contemplation draws from both classical sources, and in doing so redirects Jewish attention to sacred texts. A spectrum emerges with lectio

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divina at one end, which certainly draws from Jewish practice, meditation (with respect to sacred images, far from Jewish practice) in the middle, and contemplation at the other. The hyphen in Judeo-Christianity, we might say, is Greek. Yet even if Christian contemplation is distant in orientation and ambition from Jewish meditation on holy texts, it is almost never a purely mental practice, abstracted from space and time, as is sometimes imagined; it calls for discipline of the body, is lived in the flesh, and remains concrete. We could talk, to some extent and with reservations, of a hermeneutics of the body (Falque 2013, §§ 7–9). Contemplation presumes a regulated rhythm of breath, which is something the poets have also known. Yeats expresses it beautifully: “The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation, by hushing us with an alluring monotony, while it holds us waking by variety, to keep us in that state of perhaps real trance, in which the mind liberated from the pressure of the will is unfolded in symbols” (Yeats 2007, p. 117). The attention that is trained does not presume interest or pleasure in mundane things, and may be aroused at the same time that one feels a disinclination or even distaste for them. Yet Christian contemplation is not neutral; it can conclude in joy. Contemplation, for a Christian who marinates himself or herself in its practice, is able to hold both classical inspirations in tension because the Kingdom is both here and now and also to come; it precedes Creation and succeeds it. The Christian contemplates earthly life through the lens of the Kingdom, and sees more clearly how to act with respect to his or her neighbors as well as himself or herself. At the same time, the Christian is able to contemplate the divine life in and through the Kingdom, passing endlessly from the here and now to eternity. If I contemplate the Kingdom, I find God already in relation with others and myself: he is never “my Father” and always “our Father” (Hart 2014, chap. 13). If I contemplate God, I find him only in the horizon of the Kingdom: I cannot gaze directly and solely on him. Cloistered religious orders, such as the Carthusians and the Cistercians, sequester themselves from society not in order to devote themselves to a vision of God that is utterly separate from the world but so that, in seeking the King in the Kingdom, and in properly grasping creation as gift, their prayer might, through Grace, help in transforming the world into the Kingdom. * * * Is what I have sketched here “Christian philosophy” or even “philosophy of religion”? In one clear sense, no, not at all. It does not use philosophical concepts in order to analyze or criticize religion, even just the one religion, Christianity, and to bring its claim to the tribunal of secular reason. Rather than leading religion into the circle of philosophy, it seeks to do the exact opposite, not in order to evade the claims that reason makes upon us but in

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order to expose and clarify the reasons immanent to religious belief. Christian phenomenology takes its cue from phenomenology as elaborated by Husserl, Heidegger, and those who have followed them; yet it recognizes that Christianity has its own phenomenological structures that differ from phenomenology presented as a methodology based on the primacy of intuition and intentionality. Christian phenomenology requires basilaic reduction to discern being in relation with the Father and to see how to pray deeply. Only after reduction can we truly love God. Analytic philosophy can be remarkably self-assured whether it seeks to eliminate religious language as nonsensical (Ayer) or present it as coherent (Alston), to argue for the existence of God (Plantinga) or against it (Oppy), to justify specific claims, such as the resurrection of Jesus (Swinburne) or argue against it and all miracles (Hume and his modern followers), to bolster theodicy (Stump) or to oppose it (Betenson). It is not surprising then that it can easily give the impression of being a series of sharp tools that can make anything or destroy anything. Analytic philosophy of religion lays claim to very high standards of clarity and rigor, much like the natural sciences; yet, unlike the sciences, it reaches no conclusions about substantive issues that are widely held by its own community. It is science without scientific achievement, and the further one stands away from its theater of clever debate the more surely it seems to be ultimately oriented to skepticism or even nihilism. Usually, but certainly not always, the views in play in analytic philosophy of religion are informed neither by theology nor by biblical criticism; often they do not pay sufficient attention to Christianity as a concrete practice. By contrast, the Christian phenomenology I propose begins by drawing from Scripture, seeks concretion rather than abstraction, and is grounded in the preaching of Jesus and testimony about him. Its context is theology, rather than philosophy; it is an art and does not seek to ape the sciences; and yet it could not begin or develop without continual study of the phenomenological tradition within philosophy.

WORKS CITED Aquinas, Thomas. 1973. Summa theologiæ, 1a2æ. Vol. 24: The Gifts of the Spirit. Blackfriars edition. Trans. Edward D. O’Connor. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Augustine. 1953. “Of True Religion.” In Earlier Writings. Ed., trans., and intro. J. H. S. Burleigh. London: SCM Press. Augustine. 1991. The Trinity. The Works of Saint Augustine 1/5. Intro., trans., and notes Edmund Hill. New York, NY: New City Press. Augustine. 2007. Answer to Faustus, a Manichean. The Works of Saint Augustine 1/20. Intro., trans., and notes Roland Teske. New York, NY: New City Press.

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Balthasar, Hans Urs von. 1982. The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. I, Seeing the Form. Trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis. Ed. Joseph Fessio and John Riches. Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark. Clement of Alexandria. 2012. “Stromata.” In Selected Works. Ed. Paul A. Boer Sr. N.p.: Create Space Independent Publishing Platform. Falque, Emmanuel. 2013. Passer le Rubicon: Philosophie et théologie, Essai sur les frontières. Brussels: Lessius. Hart, Kevin. 2014. Kingdoms of God. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1961. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New York, NY: Anchor Books. Henry, Michel. 2003. I am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity. Trans. Susan Emmanuel. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1977. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Trans. Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund. 1998. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, vol. I, General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. Trans. Fred Kersten. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Husserl, Edmund. 2005. Wahrnehmung und Aufmerksamkeit. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1893–1912). Ed. Thomas Vongehr and Regula Giuliani. Husserliana XXXVIII. New York, NY: Springer. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1985. Philosophical Fragments. Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mill, John Stuart. 1972. Collected Works, 33 vols., vol. XVII, The Later Letters, 1848–1873. Ed. Francis E. Mineka and Dwight N. Lindley. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Richard of St Victor. 1979. The Twelve Patriarchs, The Mystical Ark, Book Three of the Trinity. Trans. and intro. Grover A. Zinn. Preface Jean Châtillon. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York, NY: Paulist Press. Ricœur, Paul. 1981. “Phenomenology and Hermeneutics.” In Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation. Ed. and trans. John B. Thompson. Cambridge and Paris: Cambridge University Press/Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, pp. 101–28. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 2000. The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Botanical Writings, and Letters to Franquières. Collected Writings of Rousseau, VIII. Trans. Charles E. Butterworth et al. Ed. Christopher Kelly. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Schiller, Friedrich. 1967. On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. Ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Yeats, W. B. 2007. “The Symbolism of Poetry.” In Early Essays. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, IV. Ed. George Bornstein and Richard J. Finneran. New York, NY: Scribner.

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Part II Continuations

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7 On Divine Dedication Philosophical Theology with Jeremy Taylor Charles Taliaferro

In recent decades we have seen important, fruitful philosophical work in the Anglophone world on abundant topics of central interest to Christian tradition: the Trinity, the Incarnation, the atonement, the sacraments, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, theosis, prayer, providence, Christian conceptions of life after life. This has been part of what Alvin Plantinga has encouraged in his seminal advice: Christian philosophers should not have their work be so limited by a secular philosophical agenda that they neglect the philosophical exploration of themes that matter very much to those who are Christian philosophers (or who are philosophers who are Christians). This chapter is intended to extend the list of themes covered in Christian philosophy (in the broadly analytic tradition) to include the nature, value, and scope of dedications. Dedications play an important role for many of us independent of religious practices; we dedicate articles, books, performances, buildings, and so on. The chapter begins with a general philosophy of dedication. The second part explores the Christian practice of dedications. I employ some biblical sources, but I then draw on the work of the seventeenth-century Anglican theologian, Jeremy Taylor, whose elegant, literary style earned him the reputation for being the “Shakespeare of Divines.” Taylor’s classic works The Rule and Exercise of Holy Living and The Rule and Exercise of Holy Dying (1651) are among the first in English to address the practice of dedicating one’s living and dying to God (there were, of course, texts on this topic in Latin and other non-English languages).¹ These texts received some notoriety from ¹ It is in the seventeenth century that we first come to have philosophy practiced in sustained ways in English. The Cambridge Platonists (especially Ralph Cudworth and Henry More) produced much of the themes and terminology that we come to use in today’s philosophy of religion such as “theism” and “consciousness.”

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the British Romantic poet John Keats who requested he be read these works as he lay dying in Rome in December 1820 until his death in January 1821 (Bates 1963, p. 691). I suggest that in Taylor we find an interesting insight on how the dedication of some length of time to God in prayerful, meditative reflection can make that time a site in which one experiences what may be called the eternal.

DEDICATIONS AND DEDICATORY GOODS Despite the fact that philosophers dedicate books (and sometimes articles or talks) to persons, the memory of persons, or institutions, it is odd that there has been little work on the philosophy of dedications.² I propose that a dedication (quite independent of philosophy of religion or theology) is an intentional, purposive act falling under the more general act type of honoring or revering. Ideally, it occurs when a person honors or reveres the recipient with something of value. Dedications go wrong when the valuable thing that is dedicated (the ostensible dedicatory good) is not really valuable or not recognized as valuable by either the giver or recipient. Dedications that are deemed admirable often involve cases in which the dedicatory good was achieved at some non-trivial cost to the dedicator. Well-written books or articles, intense athletic competitions, and so on, are difficult to create or participate in, and so they are more fitting dedicatory goods than poorly written works or desultory athletic events. Admirable dedications also seem to require sincerity, for some dedications lose their value (or turn out to be wrongful acts of dedication) if they are insincere, as in a case when I insincerely and wrongly dedicated a book to a society in which I thanked them for their hospitality whereas in fact the society treated me with contemptuous hostility (perhaps well-deserved on my part).³ Dedications are different from acknowledgments and devotion. The dedications that we know of must have been acknowledged (or discovered), but not every acknowledgment of gratitude is a dedication. You might acknowledge in a book your indebtedness to your teachers, students, or peers, but that is not the same thing as dedicating the book to anyone. Similarly, you may be devoted to some person or thing, and yet due to any number of reasons this is not a dedication (or it is at least not a central, clear case of dedication). Someone may devote her life to the love of wisdom, and yet, perhaps out of

² For an exception to this trend, see Decker and Taliaferro (2011). ³ Sadly, I confess that my dedication to the Society of C. S. Lewis of a book, Praying with C. S. Lewis (Taliaferro 1998), was completely insincere.

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humility or lack of self-awareness and deliberation, this does not rise to the level of dedication. Some of the norms that control the practice of dedicating things to persons seem part of the general norms that govern conversational exchanges. It would be just as odd for me to dedicate one word of this chapter to you as it would be for me to talk about how the Lune is Minnesota’s state bird when you have asked me (with some urgency) about whether the pope is in Rome. Moreover, dedications are built on a proper understanding of entitlements over the dedicatory good (that which is dedicated). Insofar as I do not have some proprietary claim on some good, I cannot dedicate it to you. The stated object of a dedication may be subject to different interpretations that can be disambiguated, if there is an opportunity. For example, I find puzzling dedications to the memory of an author’s parents. Presumably these dedications occur when the parents have died. Maybe these dedicators believe that death involves annihilation and she can no longer dedicate a good to persons who have ceased to be. I suggest this rests on a mistake about meaning and reference, as well as contrary to common practice and inquiry. Historians would be rather hampered if they could not refer to persons they believe have ceased to be, and many persons would find it quite peculiar if they were told that (due to some evident principle in the philosophy of meaning and reference) they can no longer love a friend after the friend has died. Speaking personally, I have dedicated a book to my parents (postmortem) with love. I am only dedicated to my memory of them because I love my parents and because I think my memories are reliable; I do not love the memories for their own sake. Dedication to the memory of someone might, however, be a dedication to the reputation of a person. This is perhaps likely in Gustav Bergmann’s 1967 book Realism: A Critique of Brentano and Meinong in which there is this dedication: “To the Glorious Memory of Alexius Meinong.”⁴ Let us next consider what the goods involved in dedications are. Surely not all dedications are good (as when persons dedicate themselves or sites or any object to bad or evil events). However, let us assume that the donor is sincere and intends to honor or revere a recipient with a dedicatory good—that is, something that is actually good, which the donor has the right to dedicate, and which is recognized to be good by both the donor and the recipient. Let us further assume that the dedicatory good and the dedication do not violate the customary norms and expectations of common sense. (That is, let us set aside deviant cases as when I might seek to dedicate half of a joke in a stand-up routine to a bloke I just met, etc.) I suggest that in a proper dedication, goods ⁴ Bergmann’s attitude toward the passing away of great philosophers may be a bit ambivalent, given his citation of a rather grim passage from the work of Max Beerbohm at the outset of his book on the title page of Book One: “How I wish I could keep up with the leaders of modern thought as they pass by into oblivion” (Bergmann 1967).

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accrue to the donor, the recipient, and the dedicatory good itself. Let’s use an instance in which the dedicatory good is a book you wrote and dedicated to your former professor Margaret Miles, who responds to the dedication with gratitude. In this case, there is an interesting case of gift giving and receiving. You still retain authorship and so the book has not become Miles’s as its cocreator. And yet by dedicating it to her you have in some respect humbled your role as sole author or creator; you have relinquished (to some extent) being the sole proprietor of the book. In this case, the value of the dedicatory good has been enhanced, for (assuming it is an excellent book) the book retains its innate excellence and yet becomes an offering or donation. The effect of the donation may be in the exchange of pleasure in the gift giving and receiving between donor and recipient, but it may also enhance the legacy, reputation, or identity of both donor and recipient. In the latter case, she may be praised for having mentored a student who became a gracious, mature scholar. In the humanities, this kind of enhanced good can be especially apparent in the practice of composing and offering a Festschrift to an esteemed scholar. Let us now turn to dedications from the perspective of Christian philosophy (or philosophy, from a Christian point of view).

DEDICATION S IN THE CONTEXT OF THE DIVINE In Christian dedication, the dedicatory acts run from creature to Creator and, supremely, in the Incarnation when Jesus Christ’s life becomes understood as the dedication of the second member of the Trinity to the redemption of the world. There are various acts and rites that are conceptually close to the idea of dedication that I will not comment on here; these include consecrations, anointing, various forms of blessings, and baptism. The latter is especially tempting to engage (historically there is controversy over the difference, if any, between child-dedications, as in I Samuel 1:28, and child-baptisms), but some temptations (contrary to Oscar Wilde’s assertion) really should be resisted (in light of the length of this chapter).⁵ Dedications in a Christian context seem to be in accord with our earlier analysis of the concept of dedication. Persons and places are dedicated or called to be dedicated to God in which these acts are understood to involve intentional, purposive ways of honoring or revering God. The dedicatory goods themselves are understood to be valuable to both the donor and recipient. The celebrations that surround acts of dedication are indications ⁵ As an aside, I believe that the evident legitimacy of child dedications in Scripture makes any biblical case against infant baptism an uphill battle.

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that the acts and dedicatory goods are of great value (Nehemiah 12:27–43). The sincerity of a dedication is of paramount importance (as we can see in the case of Ananias and Sapphira in chapter five of the Book of Acts). The central importance of the dedication of the Temple to God (Ezra 6:17) is carried over in the Christian community as the importance of dedicating one’s life as a temple to God (I Corinthians 3:16–17). The invocation to dedicating one’s life to God is perhaps clearest in Romans 12:1–2, an invocation that is featured in the Book of Common Prayer as a summoning verse: we are to become “a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” In these dedications, there is an enhancement of the good that is being dedicated. A person dedicated to the supremely, abundantly good God is valuable prior to the dedication, but now comes to be understood in a divine relationship. In the Old Testament, a building and table become, through dedication, a temple and an altar, a meeting place between God and creatures. A traditional Christian will see the Jesus of Scripture dedicating himself to ushering in the Kingdom of Heaven and in various messianic roles, but for those of us with a high Christology it is difficult to avoid recognizing Jesus’s revelation of his unity with the Father in a Trinitarian context in the Gospel of John. At the Feast of the Dedication (sometimes called the Feast of the Maccabees) Jesus declares, “The Father and I are one” (John 10:30). In these settings, it is natural to see Jesus’s dedication as part of the glory of the Incarnation (a magnification of the good of God being incarnate) and to see how the hallowing of human life in Christ involves the enhancing or enlarging of the goods available to the creation.⁶ I now turn to Jeremy Taylor’s idea that dedication of time can provide us with an experience of the eternal.

TEMPORAL AND E TERNAL GOODS Taylor offers a robust understanding of the theistic divine attributes: There is in God an infinite nature, immensity or vastness without extension or limit, immutability, eternity, omnipotence, omniscience, holiness, dominion,

⁶ I am assuming here the general philosophical Platonic Christian tradition that runs from the New Testament through the Alexandrians through Augustine, Aquinas, the Cambridge Platonists including Jeremy Taylor, to today’s representatives, whom I have sought to valorize in The Golden Cord: A Short Book on the Sacred and the Secular (Taliaferro 2013). In other words, I am assuming a tradition within Christianity that avoids theistic voluntarism and advances a theology of grace, according to which grace perfects rather than destroys nature (in the traditional phrase, Gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit).

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providence, bounty, mercy, justice, perfection in Himself, and the end to which all things and all actions must be directed, and will at last arrive. (Taylor 1990, p. 453)

God is omnipresent metaphysically, and yet there are degrees or there is a specificity to God’s special presence insofar as persons are receptive to and reciprocate love. Taylor explains, “God is wholly in every place, included in no place; not bound with cords except those of love; not divided into part, nor changeable into several shapes” (Taylor 1990, p. 445). And: “God is especially present in the hearts of His people” (Taylor 1990, p. 447). Taylor’s work on holy living and dying involves the nature of dedicating one’s life as a whole to God, as well as setting aside and dedicating parts of one’s life, such as his invocation to his readers to dedicate their dying to God. This call is based on claims of creation and redemption: “As every man is wholly God’s own portion by the title of creation, so all our labours and care, all our powers and faculties must be fully employed in the service of God” (Taylor 1990, p. 440). Of special concern for Taylor is our use of time: But from the few hours we spend in prayer and the exercises of a pious life the return is great and profitable; and what we sow in the minutes and spare portions of a few years, grows up to crown and scepters in a happy and a glorious eternity. Therefore, first, although it cannot be enjoined that the greatest part of our time be spent in the direct actions of devotion and religion, yet it will become not only a duty but also a great providence, to lay aside for the services of God and the businesses of the Spirit as much as we can; because God rewards our minutes with long and eternal happiness; and the greater portion of our time we give to God, the more we treasure up for ourselves. (Taylor 1990, p. 440)

It is possible that Taylor is working with a mundane treatment of time: give God two minutes of attention on earth in exchange for a hundred years in paradise after death. But this seems too simplistic and does not speak to the value of what dedicating time to God might involve. After all, if there is no value in itself to dedicating time to God, why do it so that you can experience more of it? First a word on what dedicating to God in special acts may involve. These dedicatory goods could involve engagement with others, seeking social justice, and undertaking what used to be called corporeal acts of mercy (concrete, physical ways of doing good for others). But I believe that what Taylor may have in mind is the kind of rhythmic, cycle of prayer that we find in the Book of Common Prayer, though of course earlier and contemporary Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and other cycles of prayer will achieve similar results (in the different breviaries, the Rule of St. Benedict, et al.). Arguably, in such dedicatory times, persons come to occupy a different time frame than in secular time. Perhaps the best way to get at this proposal is to draw on Peter

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Berger’s (1970) extraordinary book A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural. Berger offers an insightful analysis of how when we play, we seem to construct and inhabit a time that is different from ordinary time: Play sets up a separate universe of discourse, with its own rules, which suspends, “for the duration,” the rules and general assumptions of the “serious” world. One of the most important assumptions thus suspended is the time structure of ordinary social life. When one is playing, one is on a different time, no longer measured by the standard units of the larger society, but rather by the peculiar ones of the game in question. In the “serious” world it may be 11 A.M., on such and such a day, month, and year. But in the universe in which one is playing it may be the third round, the fourth act, the allegro movement, or the second kiss. In playing, one steps out of one time into another. (Berger 1970, p. 58)

Ultimately Berger contends that our experience of play is a pointer to the transcendent realm in a way that anticipates some of C. Stephen Evans’s (2010) work on natural signs pointing to God. Berger is quite aware of how there can be menacing ways in which our practices achieve a distinct timeline, but one that is wicked. However, he instead focuses on when play is conjoined to joy: Play always constructs an enclave within the “serious” world of everyday social life, and an enclave within the latter’s chronology as well. This is also true of play that creates pain rather than joy. It may be 11 A.M., say, but in the universe of the torturer it will be thumbscrews time and again. Nevertheless one of the most pervasive features of play is that it is usually a joyful activity. Indeed, when it ceases to be joyful and becomes misery or even indifferent routine, we tend to think of this as a perversion of its intrinsic character. Joy is play’s intention. When this intention is actually realized in joyful play, the time structure of the playful universe takes on a very specific quality—namely, it becomes eternity. (Berger 1970, p. 58)

Straightaway I wish to distance the proposal here with the philosophical literature on God and time in which there is immense conflict. This is not a matter to be settled when arguing over the superiority of the A or B theory of time. We might, however, playfully refer to it as the C theory. According to the C theory of time, those involved in dedicating their time to cycles of prayers can experience a partial, transcendent experience of temporality in which their experienced relationship with God is not subject to the metric system of time. Persons in this state do not become immutable or not subject to temporal processes (they get hungry or sleepy and so on) and they may remain very much engaged in the world. Jeremy Taylor saw some of the worst historical moments of the English Civil Wars and was jailed due to his Royalist duties (as chaplain to the king and martyr Charles I). But, according to the C theory of time, there is still a partial transcendence over ordinary time

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in which one may experientially enjoy (whether in communal, common prayer or individual mediation) a sense of the living God. Elsewhere, in the Golden Cord, I have contended that the philosophical literature on God and time has focused on the metaphysics of time at the expense of appreciating the experiential testimony of those who experience God as eternal (Taliaferro 2013). In that book, I defend the idea that experiencing God as eternal involves apprehending what I refer to as the subordination of temporal to eternal goods (that is, a realization of the passing comparative insignificance of seeking personal glory and reputation as opposed to devoting oneself to the enduring goods in Christian axiology), the realization that the very essence of God is life itself (an awareness of God as the God of life and resurrection), and the hallowing of domestic goods (experience of our ordinary duties and relations as divinely blessed). I refer you to The Golden Cord for a further explication of these goods. But I cite here A. E. Taylor’s description of the kind of alternative sense of time that I believe Jeremy Taylor and Berger point us to: At a higher level than that of mere animal enjoyment, such as we may get from basking before a good fire, or giving ourselves up to the delight of a hot bath, we know how curiously the consciousness of past and future falls away, when we are, for example, spending an evening of prolonged enjoyment in the company of wholly congenial friends. The past may be represented for us, if we stay to think of it at all, by whatever happened before the party began, the future—but when we are truly enjoying ourselves we do not anticipate it—by what will happen when the gathering is over. The enjoyment of the social evening has, of course, before and after within itself; the party may last two or three hours. But while it lasts and while our enjoyment of it is steady and at the full, the first half-hour is not envisaged as past, nor the third as future, while the second is going on. It is from timepieces, or from the information of others, who were not entering into our enjoyment, that we discover this single “sensible present” had duration as well as order. (A. E. Taylor 1951, pp. 94–5)

This experiential state is not exclusive to the religious life, let alone Christianity, and a secularist may have better skills in achieving or stimulating it. My goal in this chapter could not possibly involve my providing all the reasons I suggest show secularism to be unreasonable and Christianity (especially in the Platonic tradition which I seek to contribute to) reasonable. But, in closing, what I hope to have identified is how time itself can be a dedicatory good and that using it in dedicated, meditative, prayerful ways can set up a separable time frame as distinct from the many goods we may aspire to in ordinary temporality.⁷ ⁷ In the Golden Cord I contrast various secular portraits of time which may be of interest. For example, I compare the contemplative approach to time that we see in Taylor and other Christian authors (from Augustine to the British poet W. H. Auden) with Marlowe, Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, and others.

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To summarize this chapter: I have offered an analysis or philosophy of dedications in a free-for-all context involving intentional, purposive offerings and have identified some of the important goods in the activity of making donations and how this impacts the donor, recipient, and the donated object. I then went on to provide some reflections on donation in a Christian context. In the final section I offered some philosophical suggestions about how time itself can be a dedicatory good and that its use may generate a highly valuable, limited transcendent (or eternal) good in a person’s relationship with God.⁸

WORKS CITED Bates, W. J. 1963. John Keats. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berger, Peter. 1970. A Rumor of Angels. New York, NY: Doubleday. Bergmann, Gustav. 1967. Realism. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Decker, Jason and Charles Taliaferro. 2011. “On Dedications.” Analysis 71, no. 4: 620–7. Evans, C. Stephen. 2010. Natural Signs and Knowledge of God. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taliaferro, Charles. 1998. Praying with C. S. Lewis. Winona, MN: Saint Mary’s Press. Taliaferro, Charles. 2013. The Golden Cord: A Short Book on the Sacred and the Secular. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Taylor, A. E. 1951. The Faith of a Moralist, vol. 1. London: Macmillan. Taylor, Jeremy. 1990. Selected Works. Ed. T. K. Carroll. New York, NY: Paulist Press.

⁸ I dedicate this chapter to Chad Meister, excellent philosopher, collaborator, and friend.

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8 Discerning the Spirit The Task of Christian Philosophy Neal DeRoo

The notion of “Christian philosophy” enjoyed a renaissance after the publication of Alvin Plantinga’s “Advice to Christian Philosophers.” In that work, Plantinga laid out two pressing tasks for philosophy: systematizing, deepening, and clarifying Christian thought on key philosophical topics (Plantinga 1984, p. 16), and exploring how the result of such clarification bears on the rest of what we think and do (Plantinga 1984, p. 18). For Plantinga, this dual task arises because philosophy provides “an arena for the articulation and interplay of commitments and allegiances fundamentally religious in nature; it is an expression of deep and fundamental perspectives, ways of viewing ourselves and the world and God” (Plantinga 1984, p. 18). But a gap exists between the dual task and the description of the arena of philosophy described above. While the task focuses mainly on clarifying, articulating, and then applying Christian thought, the arena of philosophy encompasses a variety of religious commitments and perspectives, not merely rational ones. This is to say, as long as one concedes that people’s “ways of viewing ourselves and the world and God” are not exclusively rational, then “systematizing, deepening, and clarifying Christian” thought is a necessary, but not sufficient, engagement with the arena of philosophy. In what follows, I will make a case that Christian philosophy must view itself, not merely as a rational activity, but also as a spiritual one. This means not only that we must be aware of our religious commitments while theorizing, but also that we recognize that theorizing is only a small part of a broader spirituality that is expressed in human living—and that the philosophical task is to examine and clarify that very spirituality itself, not merely one of its particular expressions. Put more succinctly, I will argue that the primary task of Christian philosophy should be discerning the “spirits” of the age.

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To do this, I will begin by articulating the notion of “spirit” that I will be working with in this chapter. Then I will articulate a philosophical anthropology that makes clear how such “spirit” is pre-theoretically operative as a dynamic, religious force in all human action. Next, I will argue that discerning, articulating, and clarifying the nature of this “spirit” as it functions in a particular culture or community is the task of Christian philosophy. I will end by showing how diagnosing these spirits of the age is not only an intellectual project, but enables the Christian philosopher to provide a concrete service to the broader Christian community—something that Plantinga describes as a “crucial and central part” of Christian philosophy (Plantinga 1984, p. 4).

D E F I N I N G “ S PI R I T” For many sober-minded philosophers, the invocation of spirituality is altogether too mystical to be at home in philosophical discourse. But Plantinga invokes this language when he claims that “[m]ost of the so-called human sciences, much of the non-human sciences, most of non-scientific intellectual endeavor and even a good bit of allegedly Christian theology is animated by a spirit wholly foreign to that of Christian theism” (Plantinga 1984, p. 3; emphasis added). Plantinga then goes on to add that he does not “have the space here to elaborate and develop this point” (Plantinga 1984, p. 3). The present chapter is an initial attempt to do just that—and to think seriously of the consequences developing this point has on the task of Christian philosophy. How are we to understand this notion of the scientific enterprise being “animated by a spirit,” then? It is highly unlikely that we are to think of this along the lines of supernatural possession, as if a distinct immaterial entity somehow occupies and controls the scientific enterprise, or the participants in it. But if it’s not Casper the unfriendly ghost, then what are we dealing with here? The work of Edmund Husserl provides a helpful place to turn to try to understand the notion of a spirit that animates the scientific enterprise.¹ In a 1935 lecture delivered in Vienna, Husserl seeks to describe what he calls the “spirit of Europe” and the role it plays in the European “crisis” of the 1930s.² The first step in his articulation of this “spirit” is to: turn our attention from the human body to the human spirit, the subject matter

¹ My claim here is that Husserl helps us understand the notion of spirit in a way relevant to the current discussion, and not necessarily that he helps us understand Plantinga’s use of the term “spirit.” About the latter point, I will not venture an opinion. ² A crisis that Husserl shows is intimately tied to science in Husserl (1970).

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of the so-called humanist disciplines. Here theoretical interest is directed at human beings exclusively as persons, at their personal life and accomplishments, and correlatively at the products of such accomplishments. (Husserl 1970, p. 270)

In good German fashion, then, “spirit,” is not used to refer to a supernatural entity, but rather to the life, accomplishments, and products of human living. Such “spirit” is therefore personal (insofar as it pertains to persons), but also communal: “Personal life means living communalized as ‘I’ and ‘we’ within a community-horizon” (Husserl 1970, p. 270). Husserl is adamant that this personal, communal spirit is not merely reducible to the physiological lives of individual human bodies (even as it is not entirely separable from those, either). The notion of a “communityhorizon” mentioned above already points in this direction, and Husserl fleshes it out further with the notion of a “surrounding world” in which we, as humans, always live. Such a surrounding world “is the locus of all our cares and endeavors,” and as such “is a spiritual structure in us and in our historical life” (Husserl 1970, p. 272). This is to say at least two things: first, that the spiritual is not merely produced by us, but is also in us, constituting us even as it is constituted by us;³ and second, that the spiritual is not merely a secondary add-on to our lives, but is its very driving force, that which determines both what we care about and what we do. Through the spirit, “character is given to the persons” (Husserl 1970, p. 273). This “character” is not merely a set of personal character traits, moods, or dispositions. It is the outgrowth of a spiritual teleology (Husserl 1970, p. 273), the acting-out of an inherent entelechy⁴ that actively guides development “toward an ideal shape of life” (Husserl 1970, p. 275). In this way, it is analogous to an Idea in the Kantian sense⁵—an infinite regulative ideal that “has [not] ever been reached or could be reached,” but rather provides “an infinite idea toward which, in concealment, the whole spiritual becoming aims, so to speak” (Husserl 1970, p. 275). The two, seemingly parenthetical, insertions in the last quote cannot be overlooked or dismissed if we are to properly grasp the notion of spirit at stake here: first, this spirit, while deeply constitutive of persons in their personal and communal life, operates in “concealment,”⁶ which is to say, at least in part, ³ Those interested in a deeper understanding of what I mean by the phenomenological subject as constituting and constituted should consult: in relation to Husserl specifically, DeRoo (2013a); in relation to phenomenology more broadly, DeRoo (2010b) and DeRoo (2013b). ⁴ The intensive interest in modern philosophy at work in other parts of Husserl (1970) suggests that “entelechy” should here likely be read more in its Leibnizian than in a strictly Aristotelian sense. Such a reading further reinforces the vitality and relation to life that are characteristic of spirit, in its Husserlian sense. ⁵ For more on the use of the Kantian Idea in the work of the later Husserl, see Derrida (1989). ⁶ There are clear resonances with the Heideggerian notion of “concealment” elaborated in Being and Time (Heidegger 1996); see Marion (1998).

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that it operates without the persons in whom it is operative being aware that it is operating; second, describing this spirit as an “idea” toward which something “aims” is merely a figure of speech, and is not to be taken literally. Spirit is not primarily rational, and it is not a goal toward which one strives. It does not merely provide us a utopian ideal or a desired end-point—it is a dynamic, motivating force, a power that simultaneously is “living in finitude…toward poles of infinity” (Husserl 1970, p. 277), which is also to say that, while “every spiritual shape…has its history” (Husserl 1970, p. 274), it inhabits this history, or is inhabited by this history, in a way that “bears within itself the futurehorizon of infinity” (Husserl 1970, p. 277).⁷ Husserl summarizes this account of spirit by referring to it as a “vital presentiment” (Husserl 1970, p. 275). This highlights two key elements of the account of spirit developed here: first, spirit is essentially living, that is, tied to life—though the “word life here does not have a physiological sense; it signifies purposeful life accomplishing spiritual products: in the broadest sense, creating culture in the unity of a historical development” (Husserl 1970, p. 270).⁸ This is to say that spirit is, as mentioned above, a dynamic force and not merely a concept, position, or goal. Spirit is affective, not merely effected: people “themselves also change as persons” as a result of the effect of spirit on the life-world, “taking on new habitual properties” and new ways of intuiting (and therefore interacting with) the world.⁹ That is to say that spirit moves people, shaping the very way they engage with the world around them in profound and innumerable ways—including in the formation of their “‘innate’ character”—while at the same time being constituted in or by the (surrounding) world(s) in which it finds itself.¹⁰ This is the “vital” part of spirit as a “vital presentiment”. Secondly, in calling spirit a “presentiment,” Husserl means much more than just that spirit causes us to feel a certain way. Rather, building on the notion of horizons already mentioned, Husserl’s invocation of “presentiment” here is meant to indicate that spirit provides the very basis of sense itself: presentiment is an “intentional guide for seeing…significant interconnections” (Husserl 1970, pp. 275–6). In pursuing these connections, we are able to confirm for ourselves these presentiments, and so establish “confirmed certainty” (Husserl 1970, p. 276). In saying this, Husserl is placing spirit at the core of his entire epistemology. Central to that epistemology, founded as it is upon the relationship between intentionality and intuition, is the notion of fulfillment. Without taking us too

⁷ For a more thorough account of this complex temporality and its implications for philosophical investigation, see DeRoo (2013a). ⁸ For more on Husserl’s use of “life” as a philosophical trope, see Derrida (2010). ⁹ Husserl (1999, p. 135). ¹⁰ Husserl (1999, pp. 135–6).

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far afield here,¹¹ one can say that fulfillment is what ultimately makes possible not only the apprehension of an object, but also the apprehension of it as both this or that particular object and as this or that particular object of my experience. That is, fulfillment is what enables us to synthesize our various perceptions of an object into a single experience of a single object. This synthetic unity is only possible because of a distinction in modes of bringing to intuition. The first of these modes seeks to clarify, picture, or prefigure the intended objective sense (Husserl 2001, pp. 79–80). This “clarifying” mode of bringing to intuition helps narrow the range of possibilities via the horizon of expectations out of which we operate. By filling some of the emptiness of the intended object, the clarifying mode enables the intended object to coincide with a confirming-fulfilling intuition in a synthesis. The second mode of bringing to intuition, then, is “the specific fulfillment of intuition” that is the “synthesis with an appropriate perception” (Husserl 2001, p. 79). Here, “the merely expected object is identified with the actually arriving object, as fulfilling the expectation” (Husserl 2001, p. 79). It is in this fulfilled expectation that the object is not only constituted as an object, but is constituted as this particular object of my experience: in fulfillment, I encounter this thing before me as a desk that, like other desks I’ve previously encountered, I am able to work at, place things upon, etc.¹² It is in the first of these modes of bringing to intuition, the clarifying mode, that we see the epistemological significance of pre-figuring or of presentiment, which, as pre-objective [Gegenstandlich; see Husserl 2001, § 28 and Husserl 1969, p. 69], is a precondition of rational or theoretical thought and is therefore more felt than thought, more a product of passive synthesis than active synthesis (Husserl 2001). In calling spirit a “vital presentiment,” then, Husserl is saying that spirit is an active, dynamic force that shapes how we bring the world to intuition. One could say that it shapes our imagination (Smith 2009), our social imaginary (Taylor 2003), or our plausibility structures (Taylor 2007) in such a way as to make experience possible. This possibility of experience always occurs in a horizon of expectations that is not always

¹¹ I explore the relationship between fulfillment, intentionality, and intuition in Husserl’s thought in much more detail in DeRoo (2010a) and DeRoo (2013a). ¹² This is doubly true when we account for the temporal nature of my experience, which Husserl explicates in part through his notion of double-intentionality, i.e., as both transverse and horizontal. This double-intentionality is essential to Husserl’s notion of “absolute consciousness,” and hence to his entire phenomenological approach to philosophy (see Husserl 1991, pp. 380–1; Kortooms 2002). And the notion of fulfillment is what makes possible that doubleintentionality: in fulfillment, what I expect is simultaneously experienced as itself and as what was expected (or what disappointed the expectation, etc.), thereby uniting the stream of experienced objects with the stream of temporal experience. And this fulfillment is only possible with the two modes of bringing to intuition discussed above: the clarifying and the confirming; see DeRoo (2010a). Hence we see the significance of describing spirit as a “presentiment” for the whole of Husserl’s project.

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confirmed, but that is always operative in any and all experience. Without such pre-figured expectations, experience would simply not be possible. Hence, “presentiment is the felt signpost for all discoveries” (Husserl 1970, p. 276), and spirit, as “vital presentiment,” is a necessary element of any and all experience. In summary, to say that there is a “spirit animating the sciences” is to claim that there is a dynamic, vital force that shapes our pre-theoretical horizons in a way that is both necessary for scientific experiences themselves, but of which we may not be consciously aware, even as we are being guided by it. There are similarities here to the notion of “worldview” prevalent in much of the Christian philosophical discourse of the last few decades, but where I think invoking “spirit” is helpful in going beyond the “worldview” discourse¹³ is in the emphasis it places on the dynamic nature of these spirits, not just as changing or changeable, but more importantly as forces (in Deleuze’s sense), rather than merely concepts. That is, “spirit” helps us remember that our everyday horizons are shaped by affective forces that are pre- or supra-rational (see Dooyeweerd 1953, p. 70).

A S PIRIT-UAL ANTHROPOLOGY Such a notion of spirit inspires in the Christian philosopher two potential problems: first, how such an account of spirit remains consistent with traditional Christian understandings of the same; and second, how such an account of spirit might operate within a broader theory of human nature and cultural activity. In keeping with the focus of a volume on Christian philosophy, let me avoid, for the time being, the theological dimensions of these questions, and pursue them here primarily philosophically. Doing so requires an anthropology that is consistent with both this view of spirit and traditional Christian teaching. Such an anthropology can be found in the work of Herman Dooyeweerd and some of his followers, most notably James H. Olthuis (1993, 2001). Without attempting to describe the entirety of the Dooyeweerdian system,¹⁴ let alone prove its veracity, I will here attempt only to briefly sketch this anthropology, demonstrating how it operates with a notion of spirit like the one outlined above and is consistent with traditional Christian teachings. This will set the stage for us to evaluate the role philosophy could play in discerning such “spirits” in the next section. ¹³ For a critique of “worldview” talk, see the introduction to Smith (2009). ¹⁴ See Kalsbeek (1975) and Troost (2012) for summaries of that system. For the most systematic elaboration of that system, see Dooyeweerd (1953–7).

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Rooted in the Reformed tradition of Christianity, Dooyeweerd begins with the assumption of a radical distinction between Creator and creature, such that the latter can never be a miniaturized version of the former. In the Dooyeweerdian system, this implies that humanity is not an image-bearer of God in the sense of exhibiting a similar property in a similar way to God.¹⁵ That is, we do not bear God’s image because we have the capacity for reason, loving, creative activity, free will, or any other property or capacity that is shared by both God and humanity. Indeed, being an image-bearer of God is not a property of humanity at all, but is rather its essential definition: humanity is image-bearing-ness itself and not merely a thing that happens, accidentally, to bear the image of God in some or other particular things it does. That is to say, bearing God’s image to creation is not a part of human activity, but is in fact the totality of it: everything that humanity does bears the imprint of the God who created it—or the image of something else functioning as if it were God. Central to this anthropology is the notion of the “heart” as the spiritual center and integral whole of humankind (Dooyeweerd 1953, p. 65), the center from which the entirety of human living flows (Dooyeweerd 2011, pp. 143–5; Dooyeweerd 2013, p. 160; Dooyeweerd 1953, p. 31).¹⁶ A key metaphor in understanding this notion of the heart is that of light shining through a prism (Dooyeweerd 1953, pp. 99–107): just like light is a solid beam of white light on one side of the prism but is refracted into the many colors of the rainbow on the other side of the prism, so too, the heart is like a prism through which the creative spirit of God shines and is refracted, in temporal (creaturely) life, as all the various types of creaturely interaction.¹⁷ On one “side” of the heart is the unrefracted spirit of God, and on the other (temporal) “side” of the heart are the multiple aspects of human existence, which are nothing but the spirit of God refracted and expressed in particular temporal circumstances. The heart is therefore not a “part” of the human being, but is rather the essential condition of humanity: we do not have a heart, we are heart-ed. As heart-ed creatures, we cannot help but reflect some type of spirit¹⁸ in all that we do,

¹⁵ Which seems to go against Plantinga’s claims; Plantinga (1984, p. 12). ¹⁶ Such a notion is also central to the work of Abraham Kuyper, and likely John Calvin as well; see Dooyeweerd (2013). ¹⁷ This is not to conflate human existence with the temporal order, but rather to posit the supra-temporal nature of the heart as fundamental to refraction. Of course, the heart cannot be the only principle of refraction, or the entire system of modal aspects becomes relativized to human experience, rather than being constitutive of the temporal order of creation itself. Still, in human existence, it is in “the religious concentration of the radix of our existence” that “we transcend cosmic time”—something that is only possible because eternity is “set in [our] heart”; Dooyeweerd (1953, p. 31n1). ¹⁸ I acknowledge that, where previously I had referred to the Spirit of God as what is refracted through human being, I now refer instead to “some type of spirit.” I will make the case later that this is not a harmful equivocation, but is consistent both philosophically and theologically.

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since it is our very natures to do so: all of human action is a refraction of the spirit flowing through our hearts. On this anthropology, human living is essentially spiritual, insofar as everything we do is a refraction of the spirit flowing through the human heart. This spirit (Dooyeweerd will sometimes refer to it as a dynamis (Dooyeweerd 1953) or a ground motive (Dooyeweerd 1979)) is picked up from, and is expressed within, creation. Because the spirit is expressed through every human action, other creatures can pick up that spirit from human actions. Human action therefore functions as a sort of transmitter that spreads that spirit to other creatures. As creatures ourselves, humans also receive the spirit expressed in the work of other humans. And as the uniquely imagebearing creature, this spirit drives and animates human action, and so is expressed in that action. Through all of our actions, then, humans not only express the spirit that is at work in their heart, but also receive the spirit that is to be expressed. Other people’s expressions of the spirit become the fodder for our own expressions of the spirit, and vice versa. The spirit is therefore an essentially communal endeavor (Dooyeweerd 1953, pp. 59–61; Troost 2012, p. 209), insofar as it is received and expressed in the interaction between human beings. This communal spirit is therefore an affective force which may or may not be a distinct entity. As an affective force, it drives (or animates) a course of human action, but is not expressed solely in one or another element of human living. Rather, the spiritual driving force is expressed in every facet of human interaction with the world, each of which, like the colors of the rainbow, is distinct and unique while remaining necessarily integrally connected to the others (since they are all expressions of one and the same spirit or beam of light). Indeed, this integral connection is the primary way we experience or encounter the world. We do not directly experience the world as biotic and mathematical and lingual and social, etc. Rather, we experience the world as the world—an inherent totality that is inscribed as meaningful throughout (Dooyeweerd 1953, pp. 4, 33–4). Via theoretical reflection, however, we are able to isolate these various elements of our naïve experience (Dooyeweerd 1953, pp. 39–40). These are not theoretical speculations, but rather theoretical abstractions—we take the totality of our experience, and isolate out one or another particular element of that experience, and treat it as the particular object of our theoretical gaze. In doing so, we (temporarily) isolate that element from the other elements with which it is integrally connected, so as to better understand (theoretically) the nature of that element and the role it plays in our experience of the world. In seeking to understand the world mathematically, for example, we don’t merely enumerate the various objects we see before us. We also mathematicize (cf. Husserl 1970, pp. 22ff.) the regularity with which we see our world operate: our experience of being held

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to the earth is expressed as the mathematical formula F = G*((m sub 1*m sub 2)/r^2). This is not to say that gravity merely is the mathematical formula, but rather that our experience of gravity can be understood mathematically as F = G*((m sub 1*m sub 2)/r^2)—though it can certainly also be experienced and understood in other ways (as the friction of my feet moving upon the ground, for example, or the feeling of being pulled down when I fall off a ladder). Theoretical thought, then, in its various disciplinary guises, enables us to clarify and evaluate multiple modes of relating (logical, historical/formative, linguistic, social, etc.),¹⁹ which are the basic elements of human experience.²⁰ That experience itself is expressive of the spirit that is operative in our personal experience (where personal “means living communalized as ‘I’ and ‘we’ within a community-horizon”; Husserl 1970, p. 270). As such, no theoretical thought is spiritually neutral, but rather all theoretical thought is, by dint of being the product of human action, essentially expressive of a spiritual force that drives it. An argument of this type is entirely consistent with much of contemporary Christian scholarship, with its focus on worldviews, as well as with much of the more narrowly defined Christian philosophy, especially when it focused on presuppositions, properly basic beliefs, etc. But I have been trying to argue that this focus on the “religious” nature of theoretical thought is only a small part of the puzzle of Christian philosophy. The reason for this can be distilled from the previous explanation: while theoretical thought, as the process of abstracting particular elements of our naïve experience and investigating them in that abstraction, is spiritual insofar as it is the product of human action, it is human action and experience itself that is inherently spiritual, not merely its expression in theoretical thought. As such, while no theoretical thought can be spiritually neutral, neither can any expression of human experience be spiritually neutral, whether that expression is linguistic, psychological, or biological. That is, it is not merely biology that expresses some spirit or other, but the very biotic element of human experience itself that is spiritually expressive. Biology is the attempt to articulate that biotic element theoretically, and spirituality is inherent in the lived experience itself, not merely added to it in the theorization. It is naïve experience itself that is spiritually expressive, not just how we “think” about it via our theorization. Reflecting on the spiritual and religious significance of our process of theorization is a necessary part of reflecting on our spiritual condition—but it is not sufficient. We must also reflect on the spiritual and religious significance of all human experience itself. ¹⁹ For an enumeration and description of the fifteen unique, irreducible aspects or modes of creaturely relationship in Dooyeweerd, see Kalsbeek (1975, pp. 100–3). ²⁰ Again, this is not to claim that the modal aspects are merely elements of human experience, but to acknowledge: (a) that they are elements of human experience qua creaturely experience; and (b) that human creaturely existence actualizes several of the later aspects in a way that alters all creaturely relationships.

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Before we move on to discuss why discerning the spirit at work in all human experience (and not merely reflecting on the process of theorization) is or ought to be part of the task of Christian philosophy, let me pause to address a concern that may have already arisen in the reader’s mind: how does my use of spirit in this chapter relate to the notion of the Spirit of God that was at work in the early stages of the elaboration of a spirit-ual anthropology? This potential ambiguity is two-fold: first, as captured in the move from the spirit of God to “some type of spirit” as what is refracted through human being; and second, in the use of spirit as it is applied to the spirit of God and as it is applied in its Husserlian sense. At stake in both prongs of the ambiguity is both the philosophical and the theological consistency of this project. If I take the two prongs in turn, the first ambiguity concerns the move from the “Spirit of God” to “some type of spirit” as what is refracted through human existence. While this ambiguity is primarily theological, it has philosophical implications as well, largely pertaining to the second prong of the ambiguity. The potentially theological problem with this first prong can be laid to rest if one invokes the pre- and post-lapsarian conditions of humanity, a move that is heavily emphasized in the Reformed tradition of Christianity from which this anthropology first arises. That is to say, when humanity was originally created, it perfectly bore the image of God because the spirit of God was the only spirit at work in creation, and hence the only spirit that could be refracted in and through heart-ed humanity. After the fall into sin, however, humankind became spiritually distorted. As a result, distortions of that original spirit of God were now at work in the human heart, and therefore were expressed in human living, and so were then “picked up” by other humans and the rest of creation and transmitted spiritually. With the fall, other religious and spiritual options became available beyond that of pure obedience to God, and therefore the spirit of God no longer shone perfectly through the human heart: where once humanity was whole-heartedly devoted to God, other spirits now came into play for human religious expression (Dooyeweerd 1979). However, this defense begs the question: are the competing spirits ontologically of the same type as the spirit of God? This brings us to the second prong of the ambiguity. Traditionally, Christianity has considered the spirit of God to be a personal entity, most specifically the third person of the Trinity: the Holy Ghost. However, in our (Husserlian) definition of spirit, spirit is not (necessarily) a personal entity, but rather a dynamic, vital force that shapes our pre-theoretical horizons. There is nothing in this definition that entails that this vital force cannot be a personal entity—though in our development of this definition through Husserl, it was explicitly stated above that “spirit” is not used to refer to a supernatural entity, but rather to the life, accomplishments, and products of human living. Is this merely a case of secularization, that is, of an incidental immanentizing of a concept that can just as coherently be used to apply to a transcendent or supernatural entity? Is the difference here simply

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ascribable to whether the person using the concept believes in the existence of personal spiritual entities or not? This theological dimension to the question is certainly present, but it is not the only dimension at stake and, given our focus here primarily on the philosophical dimensions of the problem, it is not the one that is primarily of interest to us. Philosophically, what is of interest is whether our use of the concept at any point entails either that it must be usable in reference to a supernatural entity or that it cannot be so usable. While one’s answer to this philosophical question is likely to be influenced by one’s answer to the theological dimension of the ambiguity, let us do our best to treat the question philosophically. To do so, let us review the essential elements of spirit as we are using it, so that we can then evaluate whether such elements are consistent with traditional understandings of the Holy Spirit or not. The essential elements of our definition were summarized in the phrase “vital presentiment.” Vital means both affective (i.e., that it acts upon the world in such a way that things are affected by its presence or absence) and living (in a non-physiological sense of living, that is, as something that constitutes us even as it arises within our “communal-horizons” or our “surrounding world”). Presentiment, as we saw, meant that spirit plays an essential role in fulfillment, and therefore in the subject’s constitution of its own experience, though this role is itself pre-objective and pre-theoretical. If we are to be using spirit univocally when it is applied to the spirit of God, then, we seem to be claiming that the Holy Spirit:²¹ (a) acts upon the world in such a way that things are affected by its presence or absence; (b) constitutes us, even as it arises within our “communal-horizons” or “surrounding world”; and (c) is itself constitutive of that “communal-horizon” or “surroundingworld” insofar as it plays an essential role in (pre-objectively and pretheoretically) clarifying our possible experiences. (a) seems wholly unproblematic to me, and (c) seems probably unproblematic, though likely in need of further elaboration of how the Holy Spirit might play such a role.²² It is in (b), I think, where problems might exist, and specifically with the suggestion that the Holy Spirit “arises” within our world or horizons. However, I do not believe there is any philosophical reason to necessitate that “arise” be taken ontologically here (though it certainly could be). That is, I believe what is essential to the use of “arises” in (b) (as it pertains to our use of spirit) is not ²¹ It has been pointed out to me that there is some debate among biblical scholars whether the spirit of God (e.g., as that which is at work in Moses, David, Elijah, or certain of the other prophets) is the same as the Holy Spirit sent at Pentecost. If there is a distinction to be made here (though my personal predilection at this point is to think that there is not), then this would obviously alleviate some of the concerns here, though I think the alleviated concerns would be more theological than philosophical. For an introduction to this debate see Levison (2002) and Levison (2009). ²² Smith may gesture in the direction of one such possible elaboration in Smith (2014).

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the origin of the spirit, but rather the provenance of our experience of it: we must encounter the spirit in our world and in our horizons, though it need not necessarily be the case that the spirit itself is created by or within our world or our horizons. In this case, I see neither a philosophical incoherence nor a theological conflict in our use of spirit to apply also to the spirit of God, which we would certainly claim to encounter in our experiences, and hence within our world and our horizons. The fact that some spirits are understood as being created by or within our world, while the Holy Spirit is not understood to be so created, is not, I believe, philosophically or theologically inconsistent with our use of the term spirit.

DISCERNIN G THE “ SP IRITS OF THE AGE ” So far, I have tried to establish that the idea that there are dynamic, vital forces (called spirits) that shape our pre-theoretical horizons in a way that is both pre-theoretical and necessary for experience is both philosophically coherent and consistently Christian. In doing so, I have suggested that these spirits are expressed in all facets of human action and experience. Now, I will argue that the task of philosophy, and especially Christian philosophy, is to discern the nature of these spirits as they are operative in human action, and try to clarify and articulate these spirits in a theoretical and systematic fashion. Doing so would be both theoretically rigorous (as we’ll discuss presently), and communally enlightening and helpful (as we’ll discuss in the next section). All human actions are expressive of a spirit that is at work in the human heart. This spirit is communal, rather than individual—it is expressed in, and received from, human interaction with other creatures (especially other humans), and functions, at least in part, by shaping the communal-horizons and surrounding worlds of a particular community. As such, certain communities will have a consistent “spiritual” vision vis-à-vis other communities, insofar as different spirits are animating each, and thereby shaping the experiences of those inhabiting each community. While these different spirits will be expressed through concrete human actions, there is no guarantee that the spirits themselves are rationally or consciously known to the people within the communities they are animating. That is to say, because these spirits work directly on the heart, they work on a register that is pre-theoretical, and so may work in a way that is totally unknown to those expressing that spirit. So, while I cannot help but express the spirit at work in the heart, there is no guarantee that I realize I am doing so. And because these spirits are so integral to human living, their influence is massive, whether we realize this or not. As such, we might like the opportunity to think more carefully about the spirits animating us and our communities,

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both to determine what spirit drives us, and whether we are alright with that spirit or not. What is required, then, is a way of distilling (or discerning) from human actions the spirit(s) that animate or propel those actions. Indeed, such a discerning of spirits is a primary religious and spiritual task, insofar as these spirits determine the religious and spiritual direction of a community. I would like to argue here that philosophy has a unique role to play in this discerning process.²³ Where each discipline is tasked with investigating a particular aspect of creation (or, rather, is tasked with investigating creation from the viewpoint of a particular aspect: biology from the biotic aspect, psychology from the psychic aspect, etc.), philosophy is tasked with investigating the integrity of creation: how do the different aspects and different disciplines (i.e., the different ways of investigating the world theoretically) hang together? Philosophical conceptions of ontology, anthropology, and epistemology deal with these larger questions, and so are in a unique position to articulate and systematically clarify the larger forces operating within and upon multiple disciplines, multiple aspects. But we must remember, as we use our philosophical conceptions and resources, that what we are seeking to clarify is how things are in the “world,” where the latter is understood precisely in the sense of a surrounding or environing world already under discussion. That is, the object of philosophical inquiry is the world as it functions in and for some particular community or other: we are not interested in how things are from a “God’s eye perspective,”²⁴ but rather how things are, given this or that set of “commitments and allegiances fundamentally religious in nature” (Plantinga 1984, p. 18). To acknowledge that philosophy seeks to articulate “expression[s] of deep and fundamental perspectives, ways of viewing ourselves and the world and God” (Plantinga 1984, p. 18), is to acknowledge that what we are after, in our philosophical pursuit, is to make clear the spirit that is operative within, that shapes and constitutes those living within, a particular set of communalhorizons, a particular world. Christian philosophy, therefore, need not be exclusively concerned with ensuring that philosophical understandings of the world are consistent with theism, or with the account of the world articulated in the Bible. It should also, and perhaps primarily, be concerned with articulating the spirits that are being expressed (often without the

²³ Though not necessarily an exclusive role. Other things (e.g., art) can also help bring to the surface the spirits that are being expressed in and through human actions and cultural products. However, their mode of “bringing to the surface,” as well as the “surface” to which they bring things, would differ from philosophy. Philosophy is tasked with discerning, clarifying, and articulating the spirit in a systematic and theoretical fashion that is obviously different from the way, e.g., art, discerns or articulates the spirit of the age. ²⁴ This is doubly true for those committed to the sharp distinction between Creator and creature, who thereby recognize that, as creatures, we can never see things the way God sees them: the finite can never understand from an infinite point of view.

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knowledge of the person expressing it) in some particular action, experience, or cultural product. Only after such an articulation is it possible to begin to evaluate those spirits and their relation to each other, to other claims made by the community in which those spirits are operative, and to other communities. This is not to say that Christian philosophers cannot concern themselves with investigating the coherence of a particular claim vis-à-vis other claims, either those made by the speaker of the initial claim or those of the Christian community. Obviously, such a project is something that Christian philosophers can, and indeed should, do. However, this is not the sum total of Christian philosophy. We cannot remain content with merely evaluating particular claims vis-à-vis other claims. We must also rise to the more pressing cultural challenge of evaluating claims vis-à-vis other “commitments and allegiances fundamentally religious in nature” (Plantinga 1984, p. 18). These religious commitments—in this chapter, I have been referring to them as “spiritual” commitments—are not merely theoretical or propositional, and so philosophical investigation cannot remain only in the realm of the theoretical or propositional. Investigating the very spirits themselves is part of the task of philosophy, and perhaps of Christian philosophy even more so. But does such an understanding of philosophy not undergird the very possibility of truth itself? Are we not treading too deeply in the waters of relativism? This is why the task of discerning spirits requires rigorous philosophical investigations of various types.²⁵ Properly contextualizing the differences of understanding between different communities is not only an inherently philosophical question impacting issues of epistemology and ontology, but it is also something that a deep appreciation of pragmatism can assist with (Smith 2014). Without adequate philosophical understanding, the expressive work of spirits can be seen as disallowing the very possibility of truth or knowledge claims at all. In such an environment, the religious and cultural importance of the spirits might cause the task of discerning those spirits to be subordinated to political or social pressures, rather than pursuing true characterizations of those spirits. That is, without adequate theoretical guidelines in place, the discerning of spirits could become little more than another salvo in the ongoing culture wars, not just within the United States, but between, e.g., the West and Islam, the global North and the global South, and/or the 1 percent and the 99 percent. Without sophisticated philosophical tools such as those developed in phenomenology and pragmatism, the entire task of discerning cultural spirits threatens to miss the mark. Similarly, without properly understanding the relationship between our experience and our theorization of that experience, we are unable to properly ²⁵ Though it may also require other types of theoretical investigation as well, philosophy must be part of these “inter-disciplinary” investigations. For a justification of this claim, at least in regards to phenomenological philosophy, see DeRoo (2015a).

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understand the spirit itself on the basis of its expression in our particular actions and experiences and in our theorizations of those actions and experiences. Clearly understanding the complex reciprocal relationship between naïve experience and theoretical explanations of that experience requires, or at least is greatly aided by, a clear understanding of the phenomenological reduction and the methodology that follows from it, so as to avoid the pitfalls of either naïve realism or speculative idealism (Marion 1998, 2002; DeRoo 2013a). To draw on but one crucial theme, the precise nature of the term “expression” when we talk of the relationship between the spirit and the actions and experiences that express that spirit, is absolutely central to a proper discerning of the spirits of our age. Yet to operate as if spiritual or religious expression is simply equivalent to linguistic expression threatens a linguistic reductionism that, at best, puts all religion at the service of human language (thereby limiting the possibility and efficacy of divine intervention) and at worst casts religion as just another way of speaking about our unconscious desires. What is needed is a broader, more integral and philosophical understanding of expression, one that recognizes that “sense” is not merely a linguistic phenomenon any more than expression is. Robert Brandom points in the direction of such an account with his idea that expression is the act of “making explicit what is implicit” (Brandom 2000, p. 8). But his account of “making explicit” remains heavily indebted to linguistic expression, and so can easily be dismissed as overly rational (e.g., “Expressing something is conceptualizing it”; Brandom 2000, p. 16) if one does not pay attention to the full breadth of what it means for something to be both done implicitly and made explicit. Making such a holistic account of implicit and explicit sense is a primary task of much of phenomenology. For example, Merleau-Ponty’s account of the central role of the body and of cultural sedimentation in both implicit and explicit forms of knowing provides a deep, clear, and articulate system of thought that would be helpful in assessing and evaluating what it means, and by what epistemological and ontological means, sense is enacted implicitly and explicitly in human experience and activity.²⁶ This account, in turn, should be supplemented by Deleuze’s efforts to situate human experience and activity within a wider metaphysics of affective forces, which helps us further think more carefully about sense (Deleuze 1990) and expression (Deleuze 1992). These forays into pragmatism, philosophy of language, phenomenology, epistemology, ontology, and metaphysics are all necessary to properly understand the notion of ²⁶ Smith begins to examine the religious significance of this, drawing explicitly on MerleauPonty (among others) to do so, in Smith (2013). Lacoste’s liturgical phenomenology or “liturgical existentialism” (Rivera 2013) provides another attempt to philosophically examine the religious significance of human action (Lacoste 2004, 2005).

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expression at work in the idea that human experience and action is “expressive” of a religious spirit at its core. Without such philosophical insights, the task of theoretically articulating and clarifying the spirits at work in our communities would be impossible to do well. To speak of the task of Christian philosophy as discerning the spirits of our age is not, therefore, an excuse to abandon rigor, clarity, or intellectual effort in favor of vague allusions, unfounded assumptions, or mystical speculations. Rather, it is to open the work of philosophy in its various traditions to a task that can perhaps unite them all together in service of a common goal: a more integrated, holistic understanding of the world(s) in which we live (see Plantinga 1984, p. 5).

THE C ULTURAL VALUE OF PHILOSOPHY Even as it is tasked with discerning the spirits of the age, philosophy must therefore remain a theoretical and academic venture. But for Christian philosophers, the academic venture of philosophy must, ultimately, be in service of the pursuit of the wisdom that requires a discerning of the spirits that animate us: if “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom,” then determining whether I am guided by the spirit of God or some other spirit is of paramount importance for philo-sophia, the love of wisdom. And while the whole of the Western philosophical enterprise might not agree with this understanding of wisdom, Professor Plantinga would be the first to remind us that, as Christian philosophers, we need not let our conception of philosophy, its tasks and problems, be defined by the broader academy. Rather we should be primarily shaped by our Christian commitments, and seek primarily to serve our Christian community (Plantinga 1984, p. 4). Serving the Christian community does not merely involve reconciling our Christian commitments with the mores, moods, and mediums of our discipline. Doing that is largely a service I render to myself, to ensure that I need not be upset that my everyday work is somehow at odds with my religious faith. To serve the Christian community we must acknowledge that “the Christian community has its own questions, its own concerns, its own topics for investigation, its own agenda and its own research program” (Plantinga 1984, p. 4). Dealing with these questions and concerns will require dealing with philosophical questions at times, and at other times will involve dealing with certain questions philosophically. To serve the Christian community, Christian philosophers must acknowledge that “Christian philosophers are the ones who must do the philosophical work involved” with pursuing the Christian community’s questions and concerns (Plantinga 1984, p. 4).

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So, does discerning the spirits of our age fit this bill? Is it part of the Christian community’s agenda or research program? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that the Christian community is (or ought to be) concerned primarily with God’s grace and will for our lives. As it comes to understand the issue of idolatry in a more holistic fashion (see Keller 2011; Idleman 2013), the Christian community is coming to realize that worshipping idols is about more than whether I go to church or profess certain doctrines or decrees—it is about what grips my heart, determines my desires, and so shapes my life (Smith 2016). In this regard, discerning the spirits of our age—and especially discerning the spirits of our communities—provides analysis and information directly relevant to the most basic of Christian concerns: “Choose this day whom you will serve.” Yet the task of discerning spirits—of articulating and clarifying the vital forces that shape our communal-horizons and help constitute our surrounding worlds—is not likely to be listed among the primary concerns of the Christian community by most Christians. To say otherwise may seem like we are merely playing fast and loose with the word “spirit” so as to appear more religiously helpful than we in fact are. I have already stated above why I don’t think this is the case, but it bears repeating here: to use the notion of spirit at work in this chapter of the spirit of God is to remind us that the Holy Spirit is (or ought to be) a dynamic force whose presence or absence in the world makes a difference, not in some vague sense nor in the sense of seemingly magical interventions into the otherwise “normal” operation of the world. Rather, the spirit operative in our community is precisely the one which dictates what counts as normal, and so sets our expectations not just for the life hereafter, but for our everyday lives here and now as well. Philosophy enables us to discern, clarify, and articulate a theoretical understanding of the “normal” operation of our world. This claim may strike some as surprising, as it is likely said much easier of the natural sciences than of philosophy, but it is true nonetheless. Philosophy enables us to articulate the metaphysical, epistemological, linguistic, and ontological structures at work in our everyday experiences of the world. These structures often operate unacknowledged, which is to say that we often act unreflectively in regards to these structures. But we act in regards to them nonetheless, and as with other things we do, it would probably be good to, at least from time to time, be able to reflect on those actions and determine whether we are content with them or not. To do this, these implicit, unacknowledged structures must be discerned, articulated, and clarified, so that they can be brought to reflective consideration.²⁷ ²⁷ Carrying out this reflective consideration is not the task of philosophers alone. This entails that, while rigorous academic philosophy is necessary for the process of discerning, articulating, and clarifying the spirits of our age, to be of utmost service to our community, the outcome of

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This task, useful to the Christian community as a whole, is something that I am arguing philosophers are uniquely qualified to do. At times, this task may take on a prophetic quality, if the structures we bring to light turn out to be antithetical to other commitments the community has for itself. Other times, the task may occasion more priestly responses, if reflecting on the structures philosophy brings to light provides an easy occasion for the community to reaffirm its commitment to God. It may be tempting for Christian philosophers to seek to uncover only those structures that allow them to play the role they prefer to play (be that prophet, priest, or (philosopher-)king), but we ought not allow such desires to influence our service to the community. We are called to discern, clarify, and articulate the vital presentiments that shape our communal-horizons, so that the community as a whole can evaluate its present actions and experiences in light of its religious commitments. This is a genuine service we can offer to the Christian community as Christian philosophers.

CO NCLUSION I have tried to show, then, that the task of Christian philosophy cannot be confined to systematizing, deepening, and clarifying Christian thought. That thought is but one expression of a deeper spiritual impulse that must be discerned, clarified, and articulated so that we can evaluate all of our actions and experiences in light of our fundamental, religious commitments. Philosophy is uniquely positioned to help with that process of spiritual discernment, clarification, and articulation, and Christian philosophers ought to do so in service to the Christian community. Hence, we cannot content ourselves merely with offering rational defenses of theism, or trying to square contemporary insights with traditional theistic belief. Rather, we must take up the task of discerning the spirits of our age, a task that, as I hope is now clear, is rigorously philosophical and thoroughly religious.²⁸

that process must be clarified not just for other philosophers, but for the Christian community more broadly. This need not mean that all Christian philosophers should be “popularizers”—but it would seem to imply that Christian philosophers should recognize the value of those popularizers, even if the broader philosophical discipline may not. ²⁸ I’d like to offer my thanks to the many people who offered comments and feedback on various earlier versions of this paper, as they were presented at the “What is Christian Philosophy?” conference co-hosted by the Society for Continental Philosophy and Theology and the Society of Christian Philosophers at Trinity Christian College in 2014, and published in DeRoo (2015b) and DeRoo (2014).

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Brandom, Robert. 2000. Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. Ed. Constantin Boundas. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York, NY: Zone Books. DeRoo, Neal. 2010a. “A Positive Account of Protention and its Implications for Internal Time-Consciousness.” In Epistemology, Archaeology, Ethics: Current Investigations of Husserl’s Corpus. Ed. Pol Vandevelde and Sebastian Luft. London: Continuum, pp. 102–19. DeRoo, Neal. 2010b. “Re-Constituting Phenomenology: Continuity in Levinas’ Accounts of Time and Ethics.” Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review 49, no. 2: 223–43. DeRoo, Neal. 2013a. Futurity in Phenomenology: Promise and Method in Husserl, Levinas and Derrida. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. DeRoo, Neal. 2013b. “Phenomenological Insights into Oppression: Passive Synthesis and Personal Responsibility.” Janus Head 13, no. 2: 81–99. DeRoo, Neal. 2014. “From Defending Theism to Discerning Spirits: Reconceiving the Task of Christian Philosophy.” Pro Rege 42, no. 4: 1–5. DeRoo, Neal. 2015a. “Facticity and Transcendence Across the Disciplines: Phenomenology and the Promise.” Schutzian Research 7: 89–103. DeRoo, Neal. 2015b. “Rethinking the Task of Christian Philosophy.” Common Ground 21, no. 2: 50–4. Derrida, Jacques. 1989. Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction. Trans. John P. Leavey. Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2010. Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Trans. Leonard Lawlor. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Dooyeweerd, Herman. 1953. A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, Volume 1: The Necessary Presuppositions of Philosophy. Trans. David H. Freeman and William S. Young. Philadelphia, PA: The Reformed and Presbyterian Publishing Company. Dooyeweerd, Herman. 1953–7. A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, 3 vols. Trans. David H. Freeman, William S. Young, and Henry de Jongste. Philadelphia, PA: The Reformed and Presbyterian Publishing Company. Dooyeweerd, Herman. 1979. Roots of Western Culture: Pagan, Secular, and Christian Options. Trans. John Kraay. Ed. Mark Vander Vennen and Bernard Zylstra. Toronto: Wedge Publishing Foundation. Dooyeweerd, Herman. 2011. Reformation and Scholasticism in Philosophy, Volume 3: Philosophy of Nature and Philosophical Anthropology. The Collected Works of Herman Dooyeweerd, Series A Volume 7. Trans. Magnus Verbrugge and D. F. M. Strauss. Ed. D. F. M. Strauss, Harry Van Dyke, and Willem Ouweneel. Grand Rapids, MI: Paideia Press. Dooyeweerd, Herman. 2013. “Kuyper’s Philosophy of Science.” Trans. D. F. M. Strauss. Ed. John H. Kok. In On Kuyper: A Collection of Readings on the

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Life, Work & Legacy of Abraham Kuyper. Ed. Stephen Bishop and John H. Kok. Sioux Center, IA: Dordt College Press, pp. 153–78. Heidegger, Martin. 1996. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1969. Formal and Transcendental Logic. Trans. Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Trans. David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1991. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time. Trans. John Barnett Brough. Dordrecht, Boston, MA, and London: Kluwer Academic. Husserl, Edmund. 1999. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Husserliana Band I. Trans. D. Cairns. Dordrecht, Boston, MA, and London: Springer. Husserl, Edmund. 2001. Analyses concerning Active and Passive Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic. Trans. Anthony J. Steinbock. Dordrecht, Boston, MA, and London: Kluwer Academic. Idleman, Kyle. 2013. Gods at War: Defeating the Idols that Battle for your Heart. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. Kalsbeek, L. 1975. Contours of a Christian Philosophy: An Introduction to Herman Dooyeweerd’s Thought. Toronto: Wedge Publishing Foundation. Keller, Timothy. 2011. Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex and Power, and the only Hope that Matters. New York, NY: Riverhead Books. Kortooms, Toine. 2002. Phenomenology of Time: Edmund Husserl’s Analysis of TimeConsciousness. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. Lacoste, Jean-Yves. 2004. Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man. Trans. Mark Raftery-Skehan. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Lacoste, Jean-Yves. 2005. “Liturgy and Coaffection.” Trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky. In The Experience of God: A Postmodern Response. Ed. Kevin Hart and Barbara Wall. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, pp. 93–103. Levison, John R. 2002. The Spirit in First-Century Judaism. Leiden: Brill. Levison, John R. 2009. “Holy Spirit.” In The New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, Volume 2. Ed. Katharine Doob Sakenfeld. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, pp. 859–79. Marion, Jean-Luc. 1998. Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger and Phenomenology. Trans. Thomas A. Carlson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2002. Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Olthuis, James H. 1993. “Be(com)ing: Humankind as Gift and Call.” Philosophia Reformata 58: 153–72. Olthuis, James H. 2001. The Beautiful Risk: A New Psychology of Loving and Being Loved. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. Plantinga, Alvin. 1984. “Advice to Christian Philosophers.” Faith and Philosophy 1, no. 3: 253–71. Accessed online in altered form, including new Preface by the author:

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http://www.calvin.edu/academic/philosophy/virtual_library/articles/plantinga_alvin/ advice_to_christian_philosophers.pdf, pp. 1–19. Rivera, Joseph. 2013. “Toward a Liturgical Existentialism.” New Blackfriars 94: 79–96. Smith, James K. A. 2009. Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview and Cultural Formation. Cultural Liturgies Volume 1. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker. Smith, James K. A. 2013. Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works. Cultural Liturgies Volume 2. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker. Smith, James K. A. 2014. Who’s Afraid of Relativism? Community, Contingency and Creaturehood. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker. Smith, James K. A. 2016. You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos. Taylor, Charles. 2003. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Troost, Andree. 2012. What is Reformational Philosophy? An Introduction to the Cosmonomic Philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd. Trans. Anthony Runia. Ed. Harry van Dyke. Grand Rapids, MI: Paideia Books.

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9 Christian Philosophy and Disability Advocacy Kevin Timpe

At my previous institution, there was a quotation on my office door from Parker Palmer’s The Courage to Teach: “we teach who we are” (Palmer 2007, p. 1). I think that there’s something importantly right about this statement. We teach—or at least, this is what we do when we’re at our best—what we’re passionate about, what we think can make a difference in the lives of our students, what has made a difference in our own lives. But I don’t think that this quotation applies only to our pedagogical role as faculty. I think it equally applies to our role as scholars. So to Palmer’s original claim I want to add another: “we research who we are.” Palmer continues: “teaching, like any truly human activity, emerges from one’s inwardness, for better or worse. As I teach [and as I write], I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together” (Palmer 2007, p. 2). It used to be that those topics and issues I taught and focused my scholarly attention on were those issues that inspired me to pursue philosophy in the first place. One of the first philosophy texts I remember reading in my own undergraduate Introduction to Philosophy course was Alvin Plantinga’s God, Freedom, and Evil (1994). In it, I encountered the invitation to think long and hard about human freedom, our relationship with our creator, and our misuse of the creator’s good gifts.¹ In fact, I still own the copy I purchased in 1994 as a college sophomore. I taught this book so regularly at a previous institution that I was asked by the press to write a blurb for the back cover of a more recent edition. And during my first semester on the faculty at Calvin College, I worked ¹ One of the things I appreciate about the Reformed tradition of Christian philosophy (though this quality is by no means found only in that tradition) is the way in which it views scholarship as falling under God’s sovereignty: “It is a basic Reformed tenet that all of life must be lived from the perspective of Christianity; in particular, then, our scholarly life must be so lived” (Plantinga 1990, p. 5).

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through it with the students in my Intro to Philosophy course here, the very same college where it was written by Plantinga, who also happens to be the previous holder of the Jellema Chair that I currently am entrusted with. Much of my scholarly work to date can be seen as an extension of these topics that first got me interested in philosophy. I’ve written and edited a number of books on free will and its intersection with issues in philosophy of religion.² But there’s a more recent way in which “I research who I am.” Ultimately, I want to draw some parallels between this development and Christian philosophy as practiced in the long and storied history of Calvin College. But getting to those parallels will require some autobiographical backstory first.

BIOGRAPHICAL BA CKSTORY My wife and I have three lovely—though tiring—children.³ When our oldest, our son Jameson, was about six months old, we realized that he has a number of chromosomal abnormalities that cause him to have multiple disabilities. He’s one of currently just under fifty worldwide documented cases of 2p1516.1 Microdeletion Syndrome—he’s missing a small bit of genetic material on the short (p) arm of one copy of his second chromosome.⁴ The first few years of Jameson’s life were especially rough because while we knew what he had, we didn’t know what it meant. We had a diagnosis, but no prognosis—since at the time of his diagnosis in 2008, we could find no medical literature dealing with his condition. We had lots of support and encouragement—from our friends, from our church, from local and state agencies. We figured how to muddle along in a way that worked for our then growing family. But shortly after he started first grade, lots of things changed. My wife went with a friend, whose son has Down Syndrome, to a meeting about special education hosted by the local Down Syndrome society. And we learned just how horrible our son’s school was at even trying to provide for his education in the way that state and federal law requires. We got angry. And then we got involved. To make what’s a fairly long story short, we became advocates. We read up on the law. We learned about best practices. We went to school board ² For just a few representative samples, see Timpe, Griffith, and Levy (2017); Timpe and Speak (2016); and Timpe (2009, 2013). ³ As of the time that this volume is going to press, Jameson is 10, Emmaline is 8, and Magdalen is 5. ⁴ For an overview of 2p15-16.1 Microdeletion Syndrome, see the summary provided by Unique at http://www.rarechromo.org/information/Chromosome%20%202/2p15p16.1% 20microdeletion%20syndrome%20FTNW.pdf. For a discussion of his condition in light of some of my philosophical work on agency, see Timpe (2016).

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meetings and met with trustees. We documented ways our son’s education was in violation of laws, in part because we knew more about IDEA (the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) than did the special education staff in the district. We made the district some offers they couldn’t refuse. As I said, we became advocates. But not just for Jameson. Soon we were also advocates for some of Jameson’s friends. And for some of our friends’ kids. Ultimately for other children with disabilities at his school, other schools in the district, and even other nearby school districts. As our advocacy efforts expanded over the course of about a year, we started an advocacy company: 22 Advocacy.⁵ During the spring of 2015, I had my first ever sabbatical, which I devoted to reading and starting to write about the philosophy of disability. Issues in the philosophy of disability, including how various disabilities affect agency, are at the heart of a lot of my current writing projects. Having that background—which I hope gives you some small sense of who I am and where my reflections on Christian philosophy to follow are coming from—I now want to turn to the main focus of this chapter. And that is some important parallels that I see between how Christian philosophy has been done, particularly in the tradition I’ve inherited at Calvin College as best as I understand that tradition, and the kind of advocacy that we’ve been involved in. It is, in part, these parallels with the kind of advocacy that is so close to my own heart that drew me to join the philosophy department at Calvin. And they are parallels that I hope will continue in coming years, and that I hope to encourage during my time in the Jellema Chair. Though there are other parallels, I want to focus on four in particular. Both Christian philosophy and advocacy are: normative, hermeneutically situated, developmental, and communal.

NORMATIVITY For the Christian, our understanding of the world is not normatively neutral. Christianity contains within it a range of claims about (among other things) truth, the good life, the extent and source of value. To be a Christian is to seek to promote and foster a certain kind of life, one that involves (again, among other things) certain religious commitments, both in terms of beliefs and in terms of practices. The Reformed tradition in particular has long emphasized the transformational nature of the Christian faith. We are called, both individually and collectively, to become a certain kind of people—and to help ⁵ For some of the company’s advocacy resources, see http://kevintimpe.com/22advocacy. html. The logo for 22 Advocacy, which can be seen at the website mentioned, is designed to reflect the missing part of one copy of Jameson’s second chromosome.

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others do so as well. The history of Calvin College—both the philosophy department in particular and also the institution as a whole—is a history of thinking normatively about all aspects of life.⁶ Professor Jellema’s own involvement with education and educational policy at both Calvin College and Grand Valley State University can be understood as a kind of activist involvement working to bring about a certain kind of shaping or molding of students. And as those who were shaped by his teaching will attest, he succeeded.⁷ This rich vision of the Christian life can also be seen in Jellema’s students. Alvin Plantinga was perhaps Jellema’s best-known student and assumed his position in the philosophy department when the latter retired. In his widely influential “Advice to Christian Philosophers,” originally given at his inauguration into the John A. O’Brien Chair at the University of Notre Dame, Plantinga writes: “it is part of their task as [specifically] Christian philosophers to serve the Christian community. But the Christian community has its own questions, its own concerns, its own topics for investigation, its own agenda” (Plantinga 1998, p. 298). And that agenda, like the Christian faith itself, is not neutral; it’s normatively loaded.⁸ Christian philosophy presupposes a picture of what matters. And, as part of its agenda, it seeks to help us realize that picture—to transform what we are into what we should be. Related here is a point that one finds in both Nick Wolterstorff ’s recent book The God We Worship and Jamie Smith’s You Are What You Love. In his treatment of the nature of liturgy, Wolterstorff writes that “there is more to liturgy than proclamation” (Wolterstorff 2015, p. 2). The “content” of liturgy matters; but liturgy is not just about the content of claims made in its proclamation. It’s about formation. Similarly, a central theme in one of Jamie Smith’s recent books is that Christianity is not just, or perhaps even primarily, about what we know. It’s about what we love (Smith 2016). Now, for both Wolterstorff and Smith, the content—the propositions we affirm in our worship and in our lives—shapes the formative element. And our formation in turn shapes the content of our beliefs. (For a related discussion, see Timpe 2017.) ⁶ As my colleague James K. A. Smith puts it, “to be human is to be animated and oriented by some vision of the good life, some picture of what we think counts as ‘flourishing’ . . . Every approach to discipleship and Christian formation assumes an implicit model of what human beings are. While these assumptions usually remain unarticulated, we nonetheless work with some fundamental (though unstated) assumptions about what sorts of creatures we are” (Smith 2016, pp. 11 and 2f.). These assumptions can also be problematic, as are John Calvin’s which led him to deny the Eucharist to individuals with cognitive disabilities. One of the things we can and should do, in Nick Wolterstorff ’s words, is to “make the implicit explicit” (Wolterstorff 2015, p. 12). ⁷ His success can be seen in the student protests consequent on his leaving Calvin, due to a conflict with the then college president Dr. Ralph Stob; see Ryskamp (2000, pp. 103f.). ⁸ Plantinga’s own work has focused more on how Christian philosophy is not metaphysically neutral, though I also think that it’s not ethically neutral.

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The connection between this characteristic of Christian philosophy and advocacy for those with disabilities should, I think, be obvious. To advocate for something is to work on behalf of an individual or a community.⁹ When I advocate for the inclusion of individuals with disabilities into the wider educational environment, it’s because I think that their being there is good for them—and good for their typical peers. Inclusion is valuable for the community as a whole, even if it’s hard. And so we made sure—sometimes through legal pressure—that our normative vision about the kind of educational access and opportunities students with disabilities deserved was realized in our school district to the best of our ability. (Like Oskar Schindler in Schindler’s List, even my best efforts are accompanied by a confession that “I could have done more.”) Our efforts sought to transform not just the children on whose behalf we worked, but their families, the school district, and the wider community and culture that these children were a part of. We seek to pull down oppressive structures, to create in their place communities that we think are worth emulating. We seek to create a culture where, in the words of theologian Amos Yong, “people with disabilities are . . . accepted, included, and valued members of the human family regardless of how they measure up to our economic, social, and political conventions” (Yong 2007, p. 182).

SI TUATED Second, Christian philosophy is hermeneutically situated. I confess that I used to think that one could—and should—do philosophy from a God’s-eye perspective, from what Thomas Nagel has called “the view from nowhere” (Nagel 1989). But over the past few years, I’ve realized that this is neither possible nor desirable. We don’t philosophize from behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance. Not only do we come to Christian philosophy (indeed, all philosophy) with a normative agenda, but we also come to it with a historical context that shapes our projects, our language, and our interlocutors. The claims we make and the positions we hold—what we advocate for—are informed by time and place. And, I’ve come to accept, it’s also informed by our own personal commitments. As I said before, “we research who we are.” We’re personally committed; we’re invested. I’ve also come to see that it’s often appropriate for us to be emotionally committed, to be caught up in the vision that we’re committed to. And when that vision isn’t realized, when it’s frustrated by outside pressures that, in our admittedly fallible view, are unjust then we can get angry. And sometimes that anger is appropriate. I wrote about this on a blog that I help ⁹ The disjunction is always inclusive.

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administer in which I reflected on the proper role of moral outrage in our philosophical theorizing about disability: What I found pretty quickly, however, upon digging into the disability literature is that I become outraged by some of the views I encounter. These views aren’t just (in my view) wrong, but [are] (again, in my view) morally offensive. To hear individuals claim, for instance, that my son has no moral standing at all (despite never having met him); to ask, apparently in all honesty, if the severely disabled have a right not to be eaten; to discover sterilization of some individuals with disabilities is not only legal but mandatory in some states in some conditions— these, and other views, provoke a very strong visceral reaction.¹⁰

Mostly from reading feminist and disability studies literatures, but also from continental philosophy of religion, I’ve learned that it’s permissible to be non-neutral—to accept the lenses we read and think through because of our personal situatedness. As J. Aaron Simmons and John Sanders explain: The theology of absence correctly understands the importance of emphasizing the contingency and contextualism of all human discourse and the importance of viewing religious belief and practice as a risky investment made by existing individuals. (Simmons and Sanders 2015, p. 44)

Though less common among analytic authors, this point can sometimes be found there as well. Consider, for instance, the following from Oliver Crisp: Often our own thinking is skewed by the time in which we live. We have cultural blinders on, which prevents us from seeing certain things that would have been obvious to people of an earlier generation. Sometimes it is easy to be critical of the views of writers of a bygone era, because we can now see so clearly what they could not. But that works both ways. (Crisp 2016, p. 15)

One of my favorite articles on the philosophy of disability is Eva Feder Kittay’s “The Personal is Philosophical is Political.” The article is good for a number of reasons, one of which is the title. The personal is the philosophical is the political. The article’s subtitle describes it as “notes from the battlefield.” Kittay has an adult child, Sesha, who has a cognitive disability and on whose behalf Eva has had to advocate for over the course of decades. Kittay documents and reflects on a conference on cognitive disability and philosophy that she helped organize at Stony Brook, and particularly a heated exchange during the last session of the conference that she had with Peter Singer and Jeff McMahan, philosophers who don’t share her normative views about the value of those with disabilities. Kittay writes of her philosophical work on disability as full of “emotional turmoil” (Kittay 2010, p. 395) and her experiences engaging existing work on ¹⁰ http://philosophycommons.typepad.com/disability_and_disadvanta/2015/01/moral-outrage. html.

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the subject as causing “anger and revulsion” (Kittay 2010, p. 398). Philosophy, we are often told, is dispassionate. “A purely rational endeavor unclouded by messy things like emotions” (Barnes 2016, p. ix). But it needn’t be so, and perhaps shouldn’t be so. One of the things that I appreciate about Elizabeth Barnes’s wonderful book The Minority Body is how the preface begins: “This book is personal” (Barnes 2016, ix). She elaborates: I used to think I couldn’t philosophize about disability precisely because the topic is so personal. But on reflection, that’s absurd. Disability is a topic that’s personal for everyone. The last time I checked, most non-disabled people are pretty personally invested in being non-disabled. The fact that this sort of personal investment is so easy to ignore is one of the more pernicious aspects of philosophy’s obsession with objective neutrality. It’s easy to confuse the view from normal with the view from nowhere. And then it’s uniquely the minority voices which we single out as biased or lacking objectivity. When it comes to disability, I’m not objective. And neither are you. And that’s true whether you’re disabled or (temporarily) non-disabled. (Barnes 2016, p. ix)

Barnes’s point can be broadened to the claim that we are all invested, though admittedly to varying degrees, in our philosophical views. Objective neutrality is elusive, if ever we manage to grasp it at all. Our philosophical reflections— whether they’re about disability or the nature of Christian belief or something else altogether—are informed by time and place. We thus need to be aware of our own limitations and biases, those assumptions and presuppositions we often can’t see simply because they’re ours. The anger that motivates can also blind. (For a good discussion of both virtuous and vicious expressions of anger, see Cogley 2014 and DeYoung n.d.) I think everyone I know that’s become an advocate has done so because of a personal connection with what they’re advocating for. Advocacy, like philosophy, doesn’t happen from a veil of ignorance. We get involved because we see an injustice that we think needs to be addressed. Being engaged with disability—either by having one or seeing it in the lives of those we’re close to or advocating on behalf of those who have them—shapes our hermeneutic, our way of seeking and interpreting the whole of human experience (see Hull 2014, pp. 58–60). But those who don’t share our situatedness may not see the lacunas in their thinking that we do. Our job—well, part of our job—is to help them. Eva Kittay’s response to Peter Singer’s comparing the cognitively disabled with animals was to invite him to visit the facility her daughter lives in: “I want you to see some of these people that you are talking about . . . How much you see is also what you bring to the situation” (Kittay 2010, pp. 404f). How much we see—some of what we’re even capable of seeing—depends on what we and our histories bring to the situation, what those histories bring

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to us. Christian philosophers should be helping others—whether that be the general public, other philosophers, or other Christian philosophers—see their own lacunas, see where their situatedness shapes, and perhaps misleads, in ways they don’t notice.

DEVELOPMENTAL In virtue of their hermeneutical situatedness, both Christian philosophy and advocacy are also developmental. By this I mean that the particular normative agenda changes as the context develops. Our hermeneutic changes over time. The developmental nature of disability advocacy is clear from even a passing familiarity. US immigration law no longer allows us to keep races out of the US because of a fear of their becoming disabled, as was true in the nineteenth century. The laws from the early twentieth century in Chicago, San Francisco, and other cities that prohibited those with disabilities or other “mutilated or deformed bodies” from even being in public have been removed from the books. Forced sterilizations of the disabled are no longer performed regularly (though the Buck v. Bell decision that allowed for such is, lamentably, still part of federal law). Drawing on the civil rights and women’s rights movements, disability advocates were able to achieve very substantial legal ground for the disabled in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. “The [disabilities rights] movement focused on legal efforts to prohibit discrimination in employment and education, access to public spaces and public transportation, and on institutional transformations that better enabled the self-determination of those with disabilities” (Nielsen 2012, p. 161; see also Shapiro 1993). The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is probably the piece of federal legislation which most changed the legal environment, and wouldn’t have happened without substantial advocacy. And, closer to my own family’s history, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) has provided educational access and opportunities to thousands of disabled children. The fight for such laws no longer dominates advocacy efforts; they now focus on other issues (such as how to best make sure that local school districts actually follow IDEA, in part because many parents, especially disadvantaged parents, don’t know how to insist on the rights of their children—see Timpe forthcoming). In fact, I think that philosophical reflection on disability is presently experiencing its own developmental uncertainty, in part as the movement seeks to expand to equally incorporate cognitive disabilities as well as physical. The developmental nature of Christian philosophy has been documented in a number of places (see, especially, Swinburne 2005 and Wolterstorff 2009). Christian philosophy is not focused on the same issues as it was in the early days of the Society of Christian Philosophers. This isn’t to say that those earlier

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issues—the rationality of religious belief, for instance, or how to understand various divine attributes and the relationship between them—are no longer an issue that Christian philosophers are thinking and writing about. Some are. But the collective focus is now much broader. Because of its historical nature, the agenda changes over time. The founding agenda of the Society of Christian Philosophers is no longer our agenda. While in response to the positivism of the middle of the last century Christian philosophy focused on the rationality of religious belief, today it’s much, much broader. Even just within that pocket of Christian philosophy marked out by my current colleagues at Calvin College, they’re doing work—good and important work—on gender, on aesthetics, on nature, on liturgy, on the connections between virtues and politics, on postmodern culture, on colonialism, on mysticism, on urbanism. We have inherited a seat at the philosophical table that others previously had to struggle for. And as a result of our inheritance, we’re now privileged to address a much broader range of important issues. This is an inheritance we should not take for granted. We have been given much. And to whom much is given, much is required. So in one way, Christian philosophy is reactionary. We react to time and place and personal experience. But the normative vision helps keep it from being just reactionary. Unfortunately, Christian philosophy has sometimes been slower to develop than the larger philosophical culture. (And remember, I don’t think development is a bad thing—it’s a necessary consequence of the situatedness. The question isn’t if it’s going to develop—the question is how it’s going to develop.) Questions about social oppression, about gender, about philosophy of race, about disability, about important truths we can learn from the great Chinese and Indian philosophical traditions—these are questions where Christian philosophy might be lagging behind other aspects of the philosophical community rather than being a part of the vanguard. We need to be willing to engage every issue, to shirk from no conversation, to fear no truth. We shouldn’t leave power structures as they are—we can change the discipline, change the Church, change the culture.

COMMUNAL Finally, both Christian philosophy and advocacy are inherently communal. If the vision that I’ve cast for Christian philosophy in this chapter, if advocating for the disabled, were something that each of us—something that I—had to do alone, my response would, to be honest, probably be despair. (For excellent discussion of the social nature of the theological virtue of hope as a corrective to despair, see Cobb and Green 2017.) Fortunately, both projects are ones that

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are communal by nature. By this I mean at least two things: these projects are done communally, and they have communal effects. First, consider the way in which both projects proceed communally. Christian philosophy is easily communal within this volume. As Plantinga correctly notes, “scholarship is an intensely social activity; we learn our craft from our elders and mentors” (Plantinga 1990, p. 63). I have colleagues whose work I’ve taught; colleagues I’ve received grants with; colleagues who have contributed to books I’ve edited; colleagues whose arguments have changed my own views. Advocacy is inherently communal as well. The ADA and IDEA were passed because of thousands of people taking to the streets and demanding equality for those with disabilities, because of lawmakers taking on unpopular issues because they saw those issues as good for the disenfranchised, good for the community. And advocacy is communal on a smaller scale—when a mother’s concerns are taken more seriously simply because she shows up to an IEP meeting with someone, an advocate, on her side. Sometimes all one has to do to empower others is to sit beside them and show that they’re not on their own. Both Christian philosophy and advocacy also have communal—or political in Aristotle’s sense of that term—effects. I’ve already touched on how the work of previous Christian philosophers has opened up the space for some of the projects that many of us are now working on. But this work also has impacts on the community—the polis—that is the Church. I’m fortunate, both at Calvin and at my previous university, to have colleagues who explicitly aim to address the general public and individuals in local churches, rather than simply taking the academic guild as their only audience. Similarly, every act of disability advocacy is an act by which we shape the community that those individuals with disability that we love inhabit. It’s also worth noting that this formative element is not just individual—it’s communal. In shaping individuals we shape the social structures that they’re a part of. And the social structures in turn shape the individuals they govern. There’s no separating individuals from their communities. To once again reference her work on behalf of her daughter Sesha, Eva Kittay holds that we’re engaged in acts of political formation: “In addition, in carrying out this public form of personal caring I am engaged in an act with potential political consequences—attempting to secure for my daughter just treatment and moral protection” (Kittay 2010, p. 411). And as this example of political formation makes clear, the four points of comparison I’ve highlighted here are not ultimately separable. We have a communal—a political—vision that is inherently normative that we, as part of a community, are trying to realize for that community. And what we need to do to help realize that vision is shaped by our context, by our hermeneutic, and by those that have gone before us and make possible the position from which we begin.

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CO NCLUSION In closing, I want to note one final similarity between Christian philosophy and disability advocacy—one that I’ve not talked about, but I hope that I’ve illustrated. Christian philosophy and advocacy are not just about arguments or truth claims (though they are about those); they’re about crafting and living out a vision that invites others to participate with us. Our proclamation can be a kind of speech act whereby we help realize our vision by the utterance of it. When one can stand in front of a school staff at a child’s IEP and say what everyone in the room knows—that this child deserves a free and appropriate public education as guaranteed by state and federal law—such an act can demonstrate the worth and moral value of that child. And sometimes a district realizes that if the child is worth that kind of advocacy, they’re worth the school’s best rather than easiest effort. The best Christian philosophy and the most inspiring acts of advocacy are those that make others—and make me— want to be a part of that vision. May those who call themselves Christian philosophers live up to that calling.¹¹

WORKS CITED Barnes, Elizabeth. 2016. The Minority Body. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cobb, Aaron D. and Adam Green. 2017. “The Theological Virtue of Hope as a Social Virtue.” Journal of Analytic Theology 5, no. 1: 230–50. Cogley, Zac. 2014. “A Study of Virtuous and Vicious Anger.” In Virtues and Their Vices. Ed. Kevin Timpe and Craig A. Boyd. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 199–214. Crisp, Oliver D. 2016. Saving Calvinism. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. DeYoung, Rebecca Konyndyk. N.d. “Anger and Virtuous Responses to Persistent Injustice.” Unpublished manuscript. Hull, John M. 2014. Disability: The Inclusive Church Resource. London: Darton, Longman, & Todd. Kittay, Eva Feder. 2010. “The Personal is Philosophical is Political.” In Cognitive Disability and its Challenge to Moral Philosophy. Ed. Eva Feder Kittay and Licia Carlson. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 393–413. Nagel, Thomas. 1989. The View from Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

¹¹ This paper originally began as the inaugural address of my stint in the William Harry Jellema Chair in Philosophy of Religion at Calvin College, given on November 10, 2016. The paper bears marks of this origin in two ways. First, stylistically, this paper retains more of the conversational and informal style of its origin than most of my professional writing. Second, on that occasion I sought to locate my own work within the history of Christian philosophy as it has been practiced at Calvin College. While I know that there are other approaches to Christian philosophy, including many that I’m sympathetic with, the present paper still bears the imprint of this context.

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Nielsen, Kim E. 2012. A Disability History of the United States. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Palmer, Parker. 2007. The Courage to Teach. 10th Anniversary Ed. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons. Plantinga, Alvin. 1990. The Twin Pillars of Christian Scholarship. Grand Rapids, MI: Calvin College and Seminary. Plantinga, Alvin. 1994. God, Freedom, and Evil. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Plantinga, Alvin. 1998. “Advice to Christian Philosophers.” Reprinted in The Analytic Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader. Ed. James F. Sennett. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, pp. 296–315. Ryskamp, Henry. 2000. Offering Hearts, Shaping Lives: A History of Calvin College 1976–1966. Grand Rapids, MI: Calvin Press. Shapiro, Joseph P. 1993. No Pity: People With Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement. New York, NY: Random House. Simmons, J. Aaron and John Sanders. 2015. “A Goldilocks God: Open Theism as a Feuerbachian Alternative?” Element 6, no. 2: 33–53. Smith, James K. A. 2016. You Are What You Love. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press. Swinburne, Richard. 2005. “The Value and Christian Roots of Analytical Philosophy of Religion.” In Faith and Philosophical Analysis: The Impact of Analytical Philosophy on the Philosophy of Religion. Ed. Harriet A. Harris and Christopher J. Insole. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, pp. 33–45. Timpe, Kevin, ed. 2009. Arguing about Religion. New York, NY: Routledge. Timpe, Kevin. 2013. Free Will in Philosophical Theology. London: Bloomsbury. Timpe, Kevin. 2016. “Executive Function, Disability, and Agency.” Res Philosophica 93, no. 4: 767–96. Timpe, Kevin. 2017. “Freedom as Sensitive to Reasons, Habits, and Character.” In Habits in Mind. Ed. Gregory R. Peterson, James A. Van Slyke, Michael L. Spezio, and Kevin S. Reimer. Leiden: Brill, pp. 196–212. Timpe, Kevin. Forthcoming. “Public Policy and the Institutional Evil of Special Education.” In The Palgrave Handbook on Philosophy and Public Policy. Ed. David Boonin. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Timpe, Kevin, Meghan Griffith, and Neil Levy, eds. 2017. The Routledge Companion to Free Will. New York, NY: Routledge. Timpe, Kevin and Daniel Speak, eds. 2016. Free Will and Theism: Connections, Contingencies, and Concerns. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 2009. “How Philosophical Theology Became Possible within the Analytic Tradition of Philosophy.” In Analytic Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology. Ed. Oliver D. Crisp and Michael C. Rea. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 155–68. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 2015. The God We Worship: An Exploration of Liturgical Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Yong, Amos. 2007. Theology and Down Syndrome: Reimaging Disability in Late Modernity. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press.

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10 Teaching Evil Meghan Sullivan

I teach a large introduction to philosophy course each year at Notre Dame. We look at each question from multiple angles. Our classroom culture celebrates taking a stance, and I’m open with my students about my particular views (and thrilled to dialogue about our differences). For example, I tell them that I lean toward Aristotle when we run through our moral theory unit. I reveal that I don’t think there are substantive criteria for personal identity over time. I propose that the argument from evil is a model for a successful philosophical argument. And I share that I am a theist of a particularly orthodox (i.e., Roman Catholic) variety. The last two disclosures inevitably provoke debate. How can you think there is a logically valid argument for P, think all of the premises are clear and plausible-looking, but nevertheless persist in believing not-P? Isn’t there something incoherent or intellectually dishonest about doing this? To make matters worse, I often make a big production of intellectual integrity in my class. I think philosophy can and should teach us how to live. I think the second-best argument we study in our course is Peter Singer’s moral demandingness argument. Briefly: if we can substantially improve someone’s life without sacrificing anything of comparative value to ourselves, we ought to do it. We could substantially improve someone’s life by sacrificing luxury goods, which lack comparative value. So we ought to sacrifice luxury goods (or at least sacrifice a lot more than we currently do). When my Starbucks-sipping students admit that they see no plausible counterexamples to the reasoning, I accuse them of being weak of will. Philosophy (as Plato tells us in the Republic) is a matter of following the argument where it blows, even when the destination is strange and challenging. Is my stance on the problem of evil similarly akratic? Am I intellectually committed to atheism but simply unwilling to quit my Mass-attending ways? I don’t think my stance is akratic, and in this chapter, I will offer a theory of why theists should find the problem of evil so difficult to respond to. I’ll

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describe two approaches to the epistemology of theism—one which insists that answers to challenges be as neutral as possible and one which insists that we are rationally justified in appealing to particular faith commitments when answering challenges. I will defend the latter approach from some objections. And I will argue that taking this approach seriously motivates a more confessional approach to teaching the problem of evil (and other, non-religious philosophical puzzles as well).

EASY QUESTIONS WITH TOUGH ANSWERS The “best” debates in a philosophy classroom proceed like an orderly game— each side laying out her position plausibly and succinctly with minimal fluff. Other sides offer objections. Objections are themselves met with plausible and succinct replies. Distinctions are drawn when necessary. At the end of the tournament the costs are tallied and one side is favored over the other. For example, the utilitarian proposes that the way happiness is distributed across persons makes no moral difference—we should simply maximize overall happiness. Her opponent objects that this could recommend promoting a world with a vast number of barely happy people over a world with a small number of very happy people. The utilitarian answers the objection by either (1) amending her theory to take distributional facts into account, (2) explaining why we should value a world with multitudes of mediocre lives, or (3) demonstrating that this is not a consequence of her view. The steps are clear, and each side understands what drives the other. The whole debate can unfold in one tidy class period. But philosophical inquiry is not always so orderly. Sometimes the sides in a philosophical dispute are dialectically mismatched. A dialectical mismatch occurs when one side of the debate is able to state her argument in a short, plausible-seeming and logically valid argument. But to refute any particular premise of the argument, the other side must appeal to a complex theory with difficult-to-transmit evidence. Dialectical mismatches happen in philosophy. For instance, in Book II of the Republic, Glaucon poses a very simple argument to Socrates for the view that justice is only instrumentally good for a person. Stated succinctly: If justice were non-instrumentally good for a person, then she would still have some motivation to be just even if everyone thought she was unjust. But we have no such motivation. So justice is only instrumentally good. As readers of the Republic know, answering Glaucon’s challenge and vindicating the intrinsic value of justice requires eight more chapters, a staggeringly complicated theory of cities and souls, and a metaphysics of Forms. It’s a good thing Glaucon and Adeimantus had no pressing obligations and were able to wait

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for Socrates’ response. Partisans in the debate over the value of justice are dialectically mismatched. Dialectical mismatch also occurs in the debate over bivalence in logic. The supporter of bivalence claims every sentence is either true or false. The critic argues as follows: “This sentence is false” is a sentence. It cannot be true, since if it were true it would be false. It cannot be false, since if it were false it would be true. So bivalence fails. Few of us encounter the Liar paradox and immediately drop bivalence. Rather we pursue increasingly complicated logics and semantics in an attempt to save bivalence or excluded middle (or at least some of their close relatives). We investigate paracomplete and paraconsistent logics. We adopt more complex, Tarski-inspired theories of truth. At each turn our answer gets more expansive. Why is this? Why don’t we typically take Glaucon’s challenge and the Liar argument to be decisive victories for instrumentalism about justice or nonclassical logic? I don’t think it is because we are akratic. Rather, it is because we expect a bit of complexity in a theory of the nature of justice or a theory of the nature of truth. And as we investigate the details in the more complex responses, we observe systems that are beautiful and enlightening.

THE P ROBLEM OF EVIL AS A DIALECTICAL M IS MA T C H ? There are costs to finding yourself on the wrong side of such mismatches. Interlocutors get impatient. Moreover, there is a strong presumption in favor of simplicity in philosophical theorizing—the simplest explanation is the one most likely to be true. So in dialectical mismatches, one party finds herself with a theory that already exhibits a substantial vice. This must be outweighed by the beauty and power of the correspondingly complex theory. I think theists are in a dialectical mismatch when it comes to the problem of evil, and this explains why it is such a difficult topic to teach and a perennial burden for those of us who would defend the rationality of theistic belief. There are many versions of the problem of evil. The most devilishly simple version is just two premises: 1. If an omnipotent, morally perfect God exists, then there would be no pointless evils. 2. There are pointless evils. C. So no such God exists. A “pointless evil” here just means an instance of suffering with no outweighing good. Examples include catastrophic and existentially threatening

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events like the Holocaust. Or the suffering of isolated animals. Or systematic structural injustices. Or even just the daily headaches and tribulations that afflict us in unproductive ways and to arbitrary degrees. We typically spend two weeks in our introductory course discussing moves the theist might make to try to refute the argument from evil head-on. For instance, the theist might pursue a free will defense, insisting that premise 1 is false because God might allow pointless evils out of respect for human freedom. The atheist then responds that there are too many pointless evils for this to make sense, too many evils totally divorced from the free activity of humans, an overvaluation of freedom, and an inconsistency with other parts of Christian belief that downplay the importance of libertarian freedom. The theist might instead go after premise 2, offering a theory for why it only seems as though there are pointless evils (when in fact God is bringing some great good out of each of them). The theist can appeal to God’s transcendence or reframe the concept of moral goodness. The atheist responds that this approach leads to some objectionable form of moral skepticism. Once again we are off to the races. I can’t speak for other believers, but I became a Christian in part because I observed that there was a lot of seemingly pointless suffering in the world. I found that the Church helped me start to make sense of it in a morally serious way. The Church gave me confidence in my moral judgment. A version of Christianity that is “saved” from the problem of evil by esoteric morality is no Christianity I care to practice. But where does this leave us vis-à-vis the rationality of faith? Is the theist destined to lose the debate every time the argument from evil surfaces? What would it mean to “win”?

M E T H O D I S M AN D P ARTI C U LARI S M I N PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION We should distinguish two broad approaches to seeking justification for your philosophical beliefs. According to methodism, you cannot know some claim P unless you know how you know it. Unlike Wesley’s Methodism, this kind comes to us from twentieth-century philosopher Roderick Chisholm (1982), by way of Descartes and the Pyrrhonian skeptics. According to the methodists, we cannot know what we know until we know that the method by which we know it is a good one. So, for instance, I cannot know there is a computer monitor before me unless I also know that my perceptual faculties are operating correctly. Methodism seems plausible enough, especially for philosophers with more foundationalist tastes. But prioritizing the “how do I know” question can quickly lead to broad-spectrum skepticism.

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In contrast, particularists think we can have knowledge even if the question of our method for arriving at that knowledge is yet unresolved. For particularists, the “what do I know” question can be raised before the “how do I know” question. One famous example of particularism is G. E. Moore’s “hand argument” for rational belief in an external world. Posed with Kant’s version of the skeptical challenge, Moore responds that he is more confident in the belief that he has a hand (indeed, two hands) than he is in any epistemic principle put forward by the methodists. And if he has a hand, then that entails there is an external world. Being immersed in Catholicism (or any of the major world religions) means finding yourself with a vast array of highly specific moral, metaphysical, and historical beliefs. It means finding yourself engaged in practices that presuppose a certain degree of confidence in those beliefs, even if doubt is also ever-present. This confidence comes from a variety of sources—religious experience, trust in institutions, trust in the testimony of others, and inference to the best explanation, among others. In many cases the beliefs are working hypotheses for living our lives. Asked why you are so confident that certain individuals lived in Israel two thousand years ago, or that persons are not identical to their present bodies, or that we are enjoined to love our enemies, the best answer might not be some neat demonstration from first principles. The most intellectually honest approach is just to gesture at your entire messy system of belief of which those claims are a part. You are entitled to beliefs that come from a combination of religious experience, trust, testimony, and inference to the best explanation even if you cannot explain how exactly these sources of justification are working for you. Call this view of justification particularism for religious belief.

P A R T I C U L A R I S M A N D TH E P R O BL E M OF E V I L The particularist for religious belief has the resources for a novel response to the problem of evil, one that is distinctly theological. Why does an omnipotent, morally perfect God permit seemingly pointless evils? Part of the story might be a respect for human freedom. But a central part of it is also the great good of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. How does the Atonement and Resurrection provide justification for evils? Surely a central part of this defense requires not only intellectually understanding the (complex) theology behind the Christian tradition. It also requires an emotional engagement with the tradition, an insight from cultivated faith that sees our suffering as always juxtaposed with God’s suffering, a confidence that the reasons for our suffering will be eventually made even more clear to us, and a

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conviction that though the injustice we suffer seems permanent, it can somehow be reversed.¹ All of this sounds very poetical and unphilosophical. It seems like, as a response to the philosophical problem of evil, it is cheating. The theist is not entitled to defend her claim that there are no permanently pointless evils (or that a good God would allow them) by bringing up Christ, hope, the lens of faith, or the eschaton. At least she cannot bring up these concepts without also demonstrating their moral, historical, and metaphysical justification. And in any event, it seems inappropriate to bring up messiahs, ancient Rome, and the Church in the context of a philosophical debate. But why specifically is this cheating? How is bringing up theological details in a debate about evil any different from Moore bringing up details about his hands in a debate about the external world? One thought is that the theist should be trying to convince the atheist that the argument from evil is a failure. But the atheist has no reason whatsoever to believe any of these messy and highly theological claims. And they are not “commonsense” in the way that claims about forelimbs are commonsense. Particularists have a ready response to this challenge. Particularists are not in the business of conversion by philosophy. At least, we need not be saddled with the burden of giving an argument from a completely neutral starting point demonstrating how our beliefs are justified. Consider for instance a debate between you and someone who was skeptical about whether you were conscious. You might be justified in believing you have an internal world on the basis of your special access to your own mental states. You are under no obligation to be able to share this access with others (you can’t). And the fact that you are conscious need not be an article of “commonsense,” in the sense that most everyone sees that it is true. We can treat our most important beliefs as innocent until proven guilty (in this case, incoherent as a system). And the theist can be justified in her theological defense to the problem of evil even if she cannot transmit this justification to others who don’t share her starting points.² Another thought is this response to the problem of evil is too partisan. It only works for a particular type of orthodox Christian, and therefore is of limited interest and practical use. We shouldn’t want our philosophical theories to be so partisan or to only benefit small communities. But Christian particularism is not the only kind of particularism on offer. Indeed, the fact of suffering is no surprise to any of the major world religions. Different varieties of Judaism and Islam have their own theologically rich, particularist defenses of monotheism. While this particular response to the

¹ For another, more sophisticated version of this strategy see McCord Adams (1999). ² I explore this in greater detail in Sullivan (2015).

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problem of evil seems only available to Christians, the general strategy is repeatable across traditions. Still another worry about this response to the problem of evil is that it is uncritical. A theist who defers to theology in this way is unlikely to change her mind in response to philosophical arguments, to make important distinctions or to root out her false beliefs. You can propose counterexamples to broad moral principles. For instance, theists interested in the free will defense often suggest that love always requires a free choice on the part of the beloved. The atheist responds that children can be loved even before they are aware of any choice to accept or reject it. The debate makes progress by distinguishing forms of love. The theist may even change her view of love as a result of the exchange. But it seems offensive or simply impossible to have exchanges like this when it comes to matters of deep theology. The Christian theist proposes that God became man, died, and was resurrected. The atheist cannot fruitfully engage with these claims, at least not without understanding the theology alien to her own views. And the Christian theist cannot make any progress in her beliefs without subjecting them to public criticism. The theist might likewise worry that she is taking sacred spiritual truths and dragging them into the profane domain of philosophical combat. For these reasons we ought to keep these debates on a more neutral philosophical plane. I doubt there is any sharp or principled boundary between the theological and philosophical. And particularists should be especially wary of cordoning off beliefs based on how they are known. Moore’s belief that he has hands (anatomical belief) is on the same footing as his belief that having hands entails the existence of an external world (metaphysical belief). Still there is some truth in the objection, at least insofar as it reflects a rhetorical problem facing the particularist. The theologically rich response to the problem of evil is only admissible as a response if the theist is willing to subject her theological views to scrutiny. As a matter of course, respect for religious faith in philosophy is often understood to mean we should avoid discussing theological details at the risk of excluding participants from different traditions or appearing to proselytize. The theist who wants to pursue this strategy must also be careful that the audience understands she is arguing for the justification of her theological views without trying to argue that others should (on that basis) agree with her theology.

ON PROFESSING WHILE BEING A P ROFESSOR This brings us back to the difficulty of teaching the problem of evil, especially for those of us who think the sides are dialectically mismatched and the theist’s

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best hope for responding to the argument from evil may come from theology. If we took the theological options seriously, how might we change our teaching? First, we should encourage students to distinguish two aims philosophers have. One is the public pursuit of the truth—offering arguments that convince other rational agents or demonstrate how packages of claims are (or are not) consistent. Another is the aim of personal self-examination—interrogating your own views, deciding which to keep and which to jettison, and determining whether your intellectual life is flourishing. The latter aim is harder to grade, but no less important a skill we cultivate in our students. Second, faculty who would teach the problem of evil well need to get more comfortable with theological discussion in the classroom. Students from a Christian background should be free (indeed encouraged) to discuss whether key Christian commitments inform their understanding of suffering. This likewise holds for Muslim and Jewish students . . . and students from any faith. Or from any atheistic tradition, for that matter. Faculty should be just as free to equip students to discuss theological positions as they are to discuss objections to libertarian free will. Such discussions should proceed with respect and with open acknowledgment of the difficulty of sharing theological justification. But criticism and confusion should be allowed as well. No student should be graded on her creed, but just because we cannot judge a student on a topic doesn’t mean it cannot be introduced in intellectual debate. Finally, the problem of evil is the overwhelmingly popular “philosophy of religion” topic in mainstream introduction to philosophy texts. But to my knowledge, few of these texts include theologically rich theodicies from Christian, Jewish, or Muslim sources. I can’t speak confidently for my Jewish and Muslim students, but many of my Christian students are not aware of key points of doctrine and (even if they are informed) never consider bringing up such doctrines in philosophy class. We’d give them better resources for selfexamination and better hope of living out their philosophical commitments if we also gave them access to a wider variety of resources for understanding God’s relationship to suffering.

WORKS CITED Chisholm, Roderick. 1982. “The Problem of The Criterion.” In The Foundations of Knowing. Brighton: Harvester Press, pp. 61–75. McCord Adams, Marilyn. 1999. Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Sullivan, Meghan. 2015. “The Semantic Problem of Hiddenness.” In Hidden Divinity and Religious Belief. Ed. Adam Green and Eleonore Stump. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 35–52.

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11 Advice for Analytic Theologians Faith-Guided Scholarship Trent Dougherty

I N T R O D U C TI O N Thirty or thirty-five years ago,¹ Alvin Plantinga opened his “Advice to Christian Philosophers” with these words: Thirty or thirty-five years ago, the public temper of mainline establishment philosophy in the English speaking world was deeply non-Christian. Few establishment philosophers were Christian; even fewer were willing to admit in public that they were, and still fewer thought of their being Christian as making a real difference to their practice as philosophers. The most popular question of philosophical theology, at that time, was not whether Christianity or theism is true; the question, instead, was whether it even makes sense to say that there is such a person as god . . . The central question wasn’t whether theism is true; it was whether there is such a thing as theism—a genuine factual claim that is either true or false—at all. But things have changed . . . (Plantinga, 1984, p. 253)

Things have changed. While the “temper of mainline establishment philosophy in the English speaking world” is still “deeply non-Christian,” all the other things have changed, to at least some degree. There are now at least some “establishment” philosophers who self-identify as Christian. Few Christian philosophers today hide the fact that they are Christians (though they tend to fly a bit under the radar, just to be safe, especially graduate students), and for many (though far from all) their faith makes a real difference to their practice as philosophers. And today, we can take for granted that the main questions of philosophical theology are sensible questions. Things have, indeed, changed.

¹ The address was given at Notre Dame in 1983 and printed in Faith and Philosophy in 1984. I write in 2015 with an expected publication date of 2018.

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There remains, however, much unfinished in the project Plantinga projected. We can begin to get a grip on that unfinished business by thinking about this other passage from Plantinga’s advisory missive. My point is that the Christian philosopher has a right (I should say a duty) to work at his own projects—projects set by the beliefs of the Christian community of which he is a part. The Christian philosophical community must work out the answers to its questions; and both the questions and the appropriate ways of working out their answers may presuppose beliefs rejected at most of the leading centers of philosophy. (Plantinga, 1984, p. 263)

For the most part, “successful” (by standard disciplinary standards) Christian philosophers these days primarily focus on secular projects. I am the first to commend “art for art’s sake” to a reasonable degree, but I do think that Plantinga’s claim about a duty is well-placed. For almost a decade after “Advice” was issued, there was a steady stream of anthologies collecting work on specifically Christian themes, but then, in the mid-1990s it slowed to a relative trickle. In this chapter, I will describe some of the Christian’s community-specific projects that stand in need of attention, and issue a call to Christians—of all stations of academic rank—to attend to these problems. Because of the nascent nature of analytic theology as it exists today as a manifestation of specifically Christian philosophical theology—as will become more clear as we go along— my audience for this essay is quite varied. There are very few people with fulltime academic appointments focused in analytic theology or anything very much like it. But there are many students engaging in academic training with a large focus in analytic theology. Many will end up with non-academic appointments (in some cases this is unfortunate, in others fortunate). I therefore have especially in mind those students of analytic theology for whom there is a considerable probability that their future careers will not focus on analytic theology, at least in their teaching, and may not even find themselves with full-time academic appointments.

ADVICE #1: DON’ T WORRY ABOUT W HAT ANALYTIC THEOLOGY IS, JUST DO IT I know from experience that one question many readers will have concerns the difference between the Christian philosopher—Plantinga’s ostensible audience—and the analytic theologian²—my audience. The first thing to ² I will for the most part restrict myself to specifically Christian analytic theology for ease of exposition and because it is the tradition I know best, but as far as I can tell, everything I say applies to analytic theology from any tradition, and clearly to Judaism and Islam.

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note is that at the level of individuals, as Aristotle points out in the beginning of the Nichomachean Ethics, people wear many different hats. I am a son, a brother, a father, a colleague, a citizen, a parishioner, and more. For any given pair of roles, some are more closely and explicitly related than others. Yet it is I myself who play all the roles, often simultaneously (perhaps always simultaneously in some way). Likewise, any given individual might play the role of Christian philosopher, analytic theologian, and, for example, pastor. Furthermore, these roles might be tightly interrelated. How do we tell which hat an individual is wearing at a given time (here, for better or worse, the metaphor requires we envision people wearing multiple hats at the same time. I myself have in fact worn three literal hats at once in public, but that’s another story)? It might be hard to state precisely where astrology differs from astronomy, but we know the difference when we see it. The distinction between astronomy and astrophysics, on the other hand, is not as easy to spot. Even the distinction between alchemy and chemistry is not always so obvious to the student of the relevant history. Along the lines of this reflection, a recent popular metaphysics textbook comes to the following conclusion when addressing the question “What is metaphysics?” Metaphysics is what metaphysicians do! In the end, there may not be any absolute essence to analytic theology that could be used to construct a satisfying answer to a Socratic request for universal definition. However, if you rub shoulders with selfprofessed analytic theologians or read, say, the Journal of Analytic Theology (Hear! Hear!), you will start to see a family resemblance among works at the core of the genre. They will not be utterly dissimilar to their philosophy of religion cousins, but there is a different vector there, and you’ll be able to feel it if you try. Unsurprisingly, there will be a spectrum of content and subject matter connecting paradigm instances of philosophy of religion to paradigm instances of analytic theology. Somewhere along this pair-wise kind-indistinguishable sequence will be cases that are not clearly one or the other. I am fine with saying there is no fact of the matter as to the citizenship of the occupants of these hinterlands. I can’t see why it should matter. What this does not place in doubt is that there are paradigm instances of the practice of analytic theology that differ markedly from paradigm instances of philosophy of religion. These instances will be the mainstay of analytic theology, though the analytic theologian will make forays into the grey area and most likely over the border. The following helps somewhat identify paradigmatic instances of analytic theology. Features of scholarly work that (especially when combined) tend (“tend,” I say) to move it down the spectrum toward paradigmatic analytic theology: • Soteriological subject matter • Addressing historical treatments of trinity and incarnation

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Trent Dougherty Examining the role of revelation How the divine may be spoken of How a sacred text is to be read Detailed engagement with a historical figure Detailed engagement with historical controversies/creeds

I recognize that it is possible for this list of subject matters and questions to share a degree of overlap with other scholarly approaches to theology. However, I take for granted that the analytic theologian (as opposed to, say, a continental theologian) is pursuing them via an analytic methodology. Accordingly, it is well that I should say a few words about what that methodology consists in. First and foremost—in order of importance—the analytic method is humble. The humble scholar is well aware of her limitations. She never loses sight of the fact that she could be mistaken in her theorizing. The possibility of error is ever salient. She thus wishes to test her thinking against the community of scholars by publishing material that lays bare her reasoning, its foundations, and, very importantly, its greatest liabilities. Thus, in the service of humility, she is honest. Analytic scholarship well done conforms to a pattern that involves explicitly weighing the greatest strengths and weaknesses of a thesis. Theses are stated clearly, so their truth-conditions are clearly discernible by the reader. Theses are not hidden deep in the middle of a huge paragraph in the middle of a huge paper. They are not stated in obscure language so as to hide them out in the open. Analytic scholarship may well avail itself of technical language. This might make it seem obscure at first, but the difference is that there is a cipher. Furthermore, the cipher is easy to come by. Greater than 95 percent of analytic theology doesn’t assume any more technical prowess than a high-school algebra class. And there are dozens of easily available introductions in print and on the Internet whereby almost anyone with access and desire may obtain the ciphers, which primarily consist in introductory logic texts. But it is rare that analytic theology is this technical. When it is, the language is never more specialized than, say, any historical text that uses language specific to its time or contemporary mainline systematic theology that uses an abundance of German, Greek, and other terms untranslated. The honesty required for this humility has as a result clarity. When an author is successful in their endeavor to reveal to the reader exactly what they wish to say and also successful in their endeavor to reveal to the reader the chief strengths and weaknesses of their argument, clarity of exposition is a natural byproduct. Unclear scholarship either fails to aim for humility-directed honesty or fails to achieve the goal. Analytic theology treats the above and related subject matters with the humility due to a person speaking of the divine.

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ADV ICE #2: DON’ T BE INTIMIDATED BY BULLIES I have seen on a number of occasions senior mainstream theologians bully graduate students working in analytic theology. There is no shortage of bullies in academia, and one of their preferred methods is to question the importance of what their target cares about. This is one of the modes of attack I have seen. That is, I have seen senior mainstream theologians call into question the value of the inquiry of young analytic theologians in quite explicit terms. It is easy to see how young scholars could be influenced by this treatment to abandon their analytic pursuits for topics more acceptable to mainstream theologians, ones for which they will not be subject to bullying. Or, if analytic theology is the way they see best to pursue theology, it is easy to see how they could be influenced to leave the academic study of theology altogether. While this is understandable, I hope that those who wish to pursue analytic theology will refuse to be bullied either by standing up for themselves and letting the chips fall where they may or by silently enduring it but then going about their analytic business unperturbed. I also issue a call to senior scholars not to tolerate this kind of bullying when they see it, but to come to the defense of younger or marginalized scholars. This may include explicitly calling out bullies for what they are. But to those who, understandably, are forced out of the field or who choose not to pursue full-time academic employment, I offer the following advice.

ADVICE #3: DO ANALYTIC THEOLOGY W H E RE V E R Y O U AR E The previous advice is unfortunate in at least this respect: it is easy for me to give from my office at a leading university where I am employed doing exactly what I want to do and receiving (overmuch) appreciation for it. Still, I have hope that if analytic theologians stay the course, many will eventually find suitable employment in academia and momentum will build. At present, however, it is proving very hard for (publicly professing) analytic theologians to obtain suitable employment in academia. A considerable number of young analytic theologians I’ve known have ended up taking jobs in ministry, ether by preference or necessity. I want to strongly affirm the value of analytic theology for people going into ministry. All those analytic theologians I know personally who went into ministry appear to be well-suited to the task, and the ministry option was early on the table. It is shameful that their deviation from the norm of mainstream theology played the role it did; however it is well that

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the tradition of the scholar-cleric could be revived by these theologians entering ministry. Though it has fallen on hard times since late modernity, the tradition of the scholar-cleric is deeply entrenched in both Catholic and classical Protestant traditions. There is a sense in which it is, mostly laudably, in my opinion, even present in evangelicalism among pastors who are wellversed in apologetics, the contemporary descendant of natural theology. I urge analytic theologians going into ministry to look to the history of the scholarcleric and proudly represent that tradition. There are several ways in which one could fruitfully pursue analytic theology in ministry in addition to apologetics. First, part of ministry is teaching doctrine—it is one of the “spiritual acts of mercy” in the Catholic tradition. Though analytic theologians use advanced logical tools and theoretical notions, their rigor yields an ability to state doctrines precisely and succinctly. This skill is much in need and short in supply among ministers these days. Analytic theologians can help fill this gap. Second, analytic theologians employed in ministry can continue to read, write, and publish works of analytic theology and attend conferences where analytic theology is practiced. Ministers have countless responsibilities and obligations and few funds for traveling. This must be acknowledged. Yet all this is also true of academics at schools that focus on their teaching mission. Scholars in each of these two situations are at a disadvantage with respect to participation in the academic discussion of analytic theology. Yet scholars in each of these situations have managed, over the course of their careers, to become solid participants in the literature concerning the matters they study. They have the right to take great pride in their accomplishment, given their burdens. Churches and other non-academic organizations must be urged to provide sabbatical funds and educational funds for theologicallyminded ministers. The first two ways in which analytic theology can be practiced by those in ministry involve the direct practice of analytic theology. But there is a quite general way in which analytic theology can be incorporated into ministry. Analytic theology, as a rigorous academic discipline requiring the use of analytic tools, disciplines the life of the mind. There are myriad practical problems facing ministers from all sides in churches today that are largely due to undisciplined thinking. Both the minister’s training in analytic theology and their continued reading of analytic theology when they have time will decrease the probability of practical problems arising from unclear thinking. What I say here of analytic theologians in ministry can be applied to analytic theologians employed in other areas outside of academia as well, at least by degrees. It would be a challenge, but a useful practice, to try to extend my argument to those employed in the manual arts, but at the same time I think we should not lose sight of the fact that the life of the mind is a good for all humans just in virtue of being humans. Just as in some religions and some

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countries all adherents or citizens spend time (usually two years) in (compulsory) religious or military service/training, so it seems to me to be a great good to spend some time in (non-compulsory) theological training regardless of what one goes on to do. I think it especially important for those going into Law and Medicine, since those two disciplines connect in deep ways to primordial spiritual concerns. So I wish to be explicit that I don’t think the academic study of theology requires vocational justification. There is, so I am told, a flourishing and refreshing world outside of Academe.

ADVICE #4: S TAY CURRENT Advances in theology typically happen slowly, though there are important exceptions. Progress is for the most part laid down in very thin layers. Though there are eddies and dead ends, I am assuming that the main flow of scholarship advances toward greater understanding of God and his ways with humankind. Thus staying current is a way to be carried forward toward these goods. But there are many goods in life, and many responsibilities to match them, so one must balance the value of incremental progress against other goods in one’s life. Just take the dog for a walk, why don’t you? And for goodness’ sake read the kids a story. There is a steady trickle to a mild flow rather than a torrent of publishing in analytic theology. There is only one journal—the aptly-named Journal of Analytic Theology—dedicated to analytic theology, but there is currently a book series, an annual lecture at the American Academy of Religion, and the annual Logos conference at Notre Dame. Therefore, each year provides ample new material for reflection in analytic theology without making it incredibly hard to keep up with what is going on. New advances in methods and topics relevant to analytic theology will occur at a greater pace with a greater volume. Thus, choices must be made, especially for the analytic theologian practicing the craft from outside the realm of a formal academic setting. Still, it’s a small world and one should not despair keeping up on the discussions within it one is most interested in.

ADVICE #5: S TAY S HARP The quality of one’s own contribution to the ongoing dialogue in analytic theology—whatever form it takes—will in part depend on one’s ability to negotiate the requisite material with facility. One of the best ways to stay sharp is to keep up with current literature. The reasons are clear but worth

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stating. First, since good scholarship situates itself within the broader dialogue, when one reads good scholarship, one gains another’s perspective on the broader subject. This can confirm or challenge one’s take on that subject. Also, good scholarship clarifies issues, proposes new solutions, introduces new concepts, and in myriad other ways makes some small advance over the previous literature. This often requires great subtlety. Thus, assimilating this material requires one to match the subtlety of the author and advance, in at least some small degree, one’s grasp of the issue. This is so whether one agrees with the author or not. In assessing whether one agrees with the author, one frequently thereby exceeds the author’s subtlety and yet further advances one’s grasp of the issues at hand.

ADVICE #6: AVOID F ADS (MOSTLY) While staying current is a great way to stay sharp, staying current is not an end in itself. I mentioned just above that the flow sometimes peters out or runs backwards. Therefore, trends should not be chased just because others are paying attention to them. Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between a fad and a helpful innovation, especially when the fad is very sophisticated and the attention is coming from nearly everywhere. Even fads are not total timewasters, because often uncovering that the fad is a dead end requires better understanding of the concepts involved, which can lead to a better understanding of the truth. And many fads involve some bad perspective on something otherwise important. Still, be on the lookout for fads, and don’t get too caught up in them. How do you spot a fad? Well, it’s certainly not always obvious, but the following strike me as some positive indicators. Naturally, they indicate most strongly when found together. The first sign is that the fad is very clearly associated with a prime “font” in a highly-placed individual who is treated as something of a guru. This person will certainly be clever, but they will begin to take on authority outside their main field. Second, when X has become a fad you will see a lot of papers at conferences and in journals where authors try to explicate some traditional topics U, V, and W by means of X in papers called “X and U,” “X and V,” “X and W.” Many of these will feel forced. Third, you will find that devotees of X’s guru will express frustration at objections to X. They may or may not offer or even attempt to offer plausible lines of reply or positive reasons for X, but whether they do or not, it will frequently be attended by a sense of annoyance. The point is to march forward under the X banner bringing everything under its auspices. Fourth, you will see very good objections to X quickly brushed aside or ignored without due consideration. X will take on the character of a juggernaut. These are some signs that

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X is a fad, and, as I say, they carry greatest force when they are found together. Again, my advice is not to totally ignore apparent fads, for the appearance might be deceiving. Also, you can learn things even from fads. Still, don’t value them overmuch, as they’ll pass on soon enough.

ADVICE #7: KNOW YO UR HISTORY C. S. Lewis (1970) in his excellent essay “On the Reading of Old Books” says that the value of reading old books is not so much that bygone thinkers are more likely to get it right but rather that they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction as modern thinkers. To take a contemporary example, consider the rancor present in American politics between Democrats and Republicans. Measured by the vitriol you would think they represented diametrically opposed ideologies. However, they merely represent two points on a narrow spectrum of liberal democracy. Both would abhor the suggestion of a return to divine right monarchy. So even though they seem to us—we who have grown up and been educated in approximately the same era—that they are worlds apart, the fact is they share a common worldview they don’t even question. Sometimes this might represent genuine progress. However, sometimes it merely represents conceptual blindness. Therefore, one reason to know one’s history is to be preserved from the inevitable conceptual blindness shared by even apparently quite divergent parties in our field. Another reason is that sometimes historical figures really are much smarter than us and anyone of our day. Intelligence and other intellectual virtues are natural properties and can be expected to be distributed about a normal curve. Just as great floods are called by the intervals they measure—“Hundred Year Flood,” “Thousand Year Flood”—so there will inevitably be individuals of great genius that occur at most a few times per millennia. Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas are of a very rare caliber. These great minds turned their attention with great care to fundamental issues in theology. Therefore, it would be great folly not to begin study of a subject without consulting their works. This is not to say we cannot sometimes spot their errors. In accordance with the old idea that we are dwarves on the shoulders of giants, we can sometimes see farther without claiming to be greater. But even where we think they are wrong in the end, we can learn from their discussion. Between ourselves and these luminaries there will be a host of their contemporaries and proximate successors who have discussed their thought in detail. From these, too, we should learn. Some of them will be lost to history for a time. The rediscovery of such individuals is an excellent task for the scholar. In such activity we become part of a Great Conversation. Every

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right-minded student knows that excellent conversations are the best vehicles of learning. And the best conversations take place when bright minds with rightly disposed hearts pay careful attention to a subject. This last point should not be passed over without reflection. For a sad fact about our day is that all kinds of distractions keep all but the most conscientious scholars from devoting the time and attention to the study of theology that were common in earlier eras. We should all give some kind of deference to those who have spent more time in study than ourselves. Again, it is folly to pursue a course of study without consulting them. For all these reasons the analytic theologian should know her history well. The love of truth and proper epistemic humility demand it.

ADVICE #8: THICKEN I T UP In the first item of advice I listed some characteristics that help define paradigmatic analytic theology. While there is certainly nothing wrong with treating the perennial issues that mark the border lands between philosophy of religion and analytic theology, it is also important that analytic theologians ply their trade in ways that engage them with issues unique to their confessional tradition. This means, among other things, richer engagement both with Sacred Scripture and with the scholarly literature of scripture studies. For Christian analytic theologians, say, we should see analytic biblical theology. Additionally, other subdisciplines that should emerge in this tradition are analytic ecclesiology, analytic liturgiology, and analytic pneumatology. This will require the analytic theologian to engage fields of study relatively untouched by analytic philosophers at present. For I do not have in mind merely commenting on the field of biblical studies nor acting as an interloper. Rather what I have in mind is analytic thinkers becoming active participants in the field of biblical studies in ways that engage the mainstream from the inside rather than from the outside. Such scholars must add to their repertoire excellence in biblical languages, knowledge of the history of biblical studies, and knowledge of the contemporary scene.

CONCLUSIO N The twentieth century saw rigorous, careful pursuit of thick theological investigation in the Anglophone world go from academic persona non grata to burgeoning academic discipline. Whether that turns out to be an anomalous moment or the beginning of a new era depends on what religious thinkers of

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the twenty-first century do now. My bottom line advice is to be one of the active individuals who forge the future of analytic theology.³

WORKS CITED Lewis, C. S. 1970. “On the Reading of Old Books.” In God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Plantinga, Alvin. 1984. “Advice to Christian Philosophers.” Faith and Philosophy 1, no. 3: 253–71.

³ My thanks for comments by the Analytic Theology Reading Group at Fuller Seminary.

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Part III Challenges

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12 The Strategies of Christian Philosophy J. Aaron Simmons

In Alvin Plantinga’s famous “Advice to Christian Philosophers” (1984; cited as appearing in Plantinga 1998), he proposes the following hypothetical situation— I will quote it at length since it bears heavily on what follows: Consider a Christian college student—from Grand Rapids, Michigan, say, or Arkadelphia, Arkansas—who decides philosophy is the subject for her. Naturally enough she will go to graduate school to learn how to become a philosopher. Perhaps she goes to Princeton, or Berkeley, or Pittsburgh, or Arizona; it doesn’t much matter which. Here she learns how philosophy is presently practiced. . . . It is then natural for her, after she gets her Ph.D., to continue to think about and work on these topics. And it is natural, furthermore, for her to work on them in the way she was taught to, thinking about them in the light of the assumptions made by her mentors and in terms of currently accepted ideas as to what a philosopher should start from or take for granted . . . She will be uneasy about departing widely from these topics and assumptions . . . From one point of view this is natural and proper; from another, however, it is profoundly unsatisfactory. Christian philosophers . . . are the philosophers of the Christian community; and it is part of their task as Christian philosophers to serve the Christian community. But the Christian community has its own questions, its own concerns, its own topics for investigation, its own agenda, and its own research program. Christian philosophers ought not merely take their inspiration from what’s going on at Princeton or Berkeley or Harvard . . . for perhaps those questions and topics are not the ones, or not the only one, they should be thinking about as the philosophers of the Christian community. (Plantinga 1998, p. 298)

Plantinga then goes on to consider the situation for that student if she were to go to Harvard and study with Quine. Ultimately, Plantinga suggests, the student will likely attempt to harmonize “her Christian belief and her way of practicing philosophy,” but will eventually realize that Quine’s “fundamental commitments, his fundamental projects and concerns, are wholly different from those of the Christian community—wholly different and, indeed, antithetical to them” (Plantinga 1998, p. 299). Rather than accommodation and

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compromise, Plantinga encourages “more [Christian] wholeness, more integrality” (Plantinga 1998, p. 299). All contemporary Christian philosophers likely know the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey would say. Rather than simply being Christians who do philosophy, or philosophers who happen to be Christians, Plantinga encourages us all to be Christian philosophers doing Christian philosophy and answer to the Christian community first and foremost and only to the philosophical community secondarily (Plantinga 1998, p. 352). As a way of critically engaging Plantinga’s argument for Christian philosophy, let me adjust his example a bit to reflect a very plausible contemporary scenario (indeed, it is my own story): Consider a Christian college student—from Cleveland, Tennessee—who decides philosophy is the subject for him. Naturally enough, he will go to graduate school to learn how to become a philosopher. In this case, let’s say that he goes to Vanderbilt University and learns how philosophy is presently practiced. While there he studies deconstruction and phenomenology with David Wood. Deciding to specialize in deconstructive philosophy of religion, this student ends up working extremely closely with Wood and eventually publishes a book with him. Given that Wood follows in Jacques Derrida’s footsteps in “rightly passing as an atheist,” and that he might be understood as thinking in a trajectory mapped out by Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, Wood defends a robust perspectivalism in his epistemology, resists engaging in traditional metaphysical speculation, argues for a post-humanist notion of ethics in the name of animal others, and understands hermeneutic analysis always to reflect one’s historical location. It would be wholly natural for the grad student working with Wood to become totally involved in these projects and programs, to come to think of fruitful and worthwhile philosophy as substantially circumscribed by them. So far so good—perhaps Plantinga is right. And yet . . . It is not necessarily the case that this young philosopher will be uneasy about departing widely from these topics and assumptions, feeling instinctively that any such departures are at best marginally respectable. It all depends upon what he takes to be the best arguments and best way forward in light of what he initially found to be compelling about such views and positions. Indeed, he did not only study with Wood, but with a variety of philosophers representing a variety of views and commitments. Additionally, though he studied philosophy at Vanderbilt and learned quite a bit there, he also attended numerous conferences and so is well aware that there is no single “way that philosophy is practiced.” Instead, he realizes that what he has learned is how philosophy is practiced at Vanderbilt and by particular philosophers, etc. Moreover, it is not necessarily the case that he will note certain tensions between his Christian belief and his way of practicing philosophy. It all

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depends upon what his Christian belief and practice involve relative to the specific ways his philosophical endeavors begin to shake out as he moves forward in his career. He may or may not end up deciding that Wood’s fundamental commitments, projects, and concerns are wholly different from those of his own Christian community—and though it is possible, it is quite unlikely that he will find Wood’s positions to be antithetical to his own Christian views. It all depends on what he takes the Christian community and the views articulated therein to be. In the first place, then, his training will likely allow him to challenge the notion that there is a single thing that philosophy looks like and a stable way to engage in it—even if he does take some basic assumptions generally to operate within the philosophical community as historically articulated best practices for philosophical inquiry. In the second place, his training will also likely allow him to recognize the complexities and multiplicities already operative in his understanding of Christianity itself. Accordingly, this student is likely to be suspicious of references to “the Christian community,” in the singular, and subsequent suggestions that philosophy is a unified practice that is for the most part opposed to Christianity. Indeed, although working primarily in the deconstructive vein with Wood, this student could quite plausibly find himself affirming deconstructionism because of his Christianity, rather than rejecting Christianity because of his newly adopted deconstructive views or rejecting deconstructionism because it is fundamentally at odds with his Christianity. It might be that the generally continental tradition in which he is trained lends flexibility and openness in his own relationship to the complexity of Christianity. Indeed, perhaps he finds significant resources within such philosophical traditions for undertaking the task of working out his salvation “with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12). Importantly, this all might be the case for him regardless of whether most continental philosophers are, personally, open to Christian truth. Moreover, on the basis of his own Christian background, let’s say he was raised as a Pentecostal, he might end up finding Kierkegaard’s notion of paradox more compelling than the apologetics of Richard Swinburne. He might find his own experiences of participating in communion, baptism, and petitionary prayer to resonate more with the new phenomenology of Michel Henry and Jean-Louis Chrétien than with the debates about God’s existence occurring in contemporary philosophy of religion journals. Let’s go even further and assume that this student is the grandson of a Pentecostal pastor and that he grew up playing drums during multi-hour altar calls in which the Holy Spirit was manifest in experiential, and embodied, celebration rather than in evidentiary witness to this or that particular propositionally expressed truth-claim about the divine life. Perhaps, then, he might find the quasi-poetic style of Richard Kearney and John Caputo to be valuable as a challenge to the primary mode of presentation found in the work of Edward

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Wierenga, Jonathan Kvanvig, and Linda Zagzebski—even if he reads and draws deeply upon them all. Further, his own Pentecostal background might make the generally Neo-Calvinist views operative so frequently in much of Christian philosophy to be less convincing than the views proposed by Open theists like William Hasker, John Sanders, and Clark Pinnock. Additionally, he might take Jean-Luc Marion’s account of God as love to be a better starting point for theological and philosophical reflection than the classical theist assertion of the primacy of a necessary being. Importantly, though, this student’s pluralist philosophical training has allowed him to see the problems with narrowly circumscribing either Christianity or philosophy in singular ways reflecting one particular historical conception of them. Accordingly, he reads widely in both Christian theology and the history of philosophy in order not to assume that his own continental training and open theist Pentecostal identity are obviously the only way to understand things. It seems quite likely that he would begin to realize that the poetics of Caputo needs to be supplemented and critiqued by the propositional rigor of Zagzebski. Similarly, he will probably find the phenomenology of Marion and Henry to resonate quite well with the discussions of religious experience in William Alston and divine relationality in Marilyn Adams. And, since he has been trained as a good philosopher and yet takes seriously his own Christianity, he will likely begin to realize that the Reformed perspective of Nicholas Wolterstorff, say, might be quite compatible with the openness theology that he finds so compelling. The point is that the particular ways in which this student eventually comes to understand himself as a philosopher and as a Christian depend on how he chooses to look at these categories and what he chooses to emphasize as the key aspects of a tradition, a thinker, or a methodology. Moreover, these choices are not made in a vacuum, but in the context of his lived experience, which may or may not be identical to the experiences of many other Christian philosophers. As I noted previously, this student’s experience is my own experience. My experience does not lead me to conclude in favor of the oppositional necessity that Plantinga and many other Christian philosophers seem to locate between something called “the philosophical community” and something called “the Christian community.” I am unconvinced that either of these communities are singular and stable enough to allow for such opposition to emerge as anything more than a historical contingency that lasts for a period of time rather than being a perennial disagreement about truth, reality, selfhood, and God. That said, I can imagine that one would object here that I have emptied the ideas of Christianity and philosophy of all content such that words and concepts now can mean whatever one wants them to mean. In response to such an objection, let me also be clear that I am not saying that Christianity can just be whatever we want it to be (as is often seemingly the case for many

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“postmodern” conceptions of Christianity). Moreover, I strongly reject notions of philosophy as simply being the whim of a social community (as is often seemingly the case for many “postmodern” conceptions of philosophy). My point is simply that truth happens in discursive spaces in which truth itself is taken up as a contested notion. I do think that there are important boundaries beyond which something called “Christianity” or “philosophy” would no longer be recognizable by those of us self-identifying with those descriptions. But, the views we hold about exactly where those boundaries should be placed are themselves products of the reception history of the concepts in question—and in which our lived experiences have occurred such that identifying as a “Christian” or as a “philosopher” is possible at all for us here and now. Hermeneutic awareness does not threaten mindindependent truth-makers, but instead simply reminds us of the historical process in which such truth-makers are understood in particular ways. Indeed, postmodern, broadly continental approaches do not have to be understood as threats to Christian philosophy, but in fact can stand as profound resources for rethinking such philosophy in a contemporary context. With my own example as something of an illustrative case study, in this chapter I will argue that we now find ourselves in a situation where continuing to engage in Christian philosophy, in the technical sense as laid out by Plantinga, is likely to be a problematic strategy. I think that this problematic strategy emerges on three fronts: philosophical, theological, and social. Philosophically, it is problematic because it can close down potential lines of inquiry that might profitably be pursued and, thereby, lead to a problematic professional insularity. Theologically, it is problematic because it can lead to theological triumphalism and arrogance that cut against the humility and invitation of the example of Christ. And socially, it is problematic because it can foster extremism at the level of one’s justificatory appeals. Importantly, my argument is not that Christian philosophy does lead to insularity, arrogance, and extremism, but that it can and so we should work hard to overcome temptations in these directions. Moreover, I am not going to claim that Christian philosophy is unphilosophical, as some critics suggest, but simply that, as presently understood, it may not be the sort of philosophy in which Christian philosophers must or even ought primarily to engage. Ultimately, I will offer reasons to think that the historical situation has changed enough to motivate a rethinking of the strategy of Christian philosophy in the contemporary world. As an alternative conception of philosophy of religion that I think is more compelling, and which would be compatible with a postmodern approach to religious philosophy (whether Christian, Jewish, Islamic, or whatever), I will look to the account offered by Merold Westphal in his underappreciated essay from 1973 entitled “Prolegomena to any Future Philosophy of Religion that will be able to Come Forth as Prophecy.” As I see it, Westphal offers a model of dialogical invitation rather than one of

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oppositional challenge. Accordingly, he allows philosophy of religion to be personal, without being confessional in the problematic ways that characterize much of contemporary Christian philosophy. At risk of seeming like an Evangelical pastor who can’t outline a sermon except through alliteration, I will move forward here by addressing the situation, stability, strategies, and significance of Christian philosophy.

THE S ITUATION AND S TABILITY OF CHRISTIAN P H I LO S O P H Y For Plantinga, Christian philosophy is fundamentally defined by an essential opposition, which he claims to have been understood since Augustine, between the “Civitas Dei, on the one hand, and the Civitas Mundi on the other” (Plantinga 1998, p. 330). The Civitas Mundi is not unified in its opposition to Christianity, however. Rather, there are two primary “dukedoms.” In an essay titled “Christian Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century” (1995; cited as appearing in Plantinga 1998), Plantinga outlines these two dukedoms and the challenge that they offer to Christianity. The first challenge is what he terms “perennial naturalism” (Plantinga 1998, p. 330). Locating naturalist approaches to a variety of issues in the twentieth century as “increasingly aggressive and explicit” forms of this view, Plantinga defines naturalism broadly as, perhaps the dominant perspective or picture among contemporary Western intellectuals; its central tenet is that there is no God and nothing beyond nature. Human beings, therefore, must be understood, not in terms of their being image bearers of God, but in terms of their commonality with the rest of nature, i.e., nonhuman nature. (1998, p. 330)

Nowadays one might point to the “new atheism” as a contemporary face of this perennial view. Since Plantinga claims that naturalism is a view that is “quite opposed to Christian ways of thinking,” we might conclude from this account that Christian philosophers must reject naturalism because Christianity affirms: 1. There is a God and so at least one thing that is beyond nature. 2. Human beings should be understood as being image bearers of God, rather than in terms of their commonality with the rest of nature. Even though these might seem like fairly uncontroversial tenets of Christianity, many eco-theologians might raise serious criticisms of the second claim insofar as it seems to set at odds the fact of “being an image bearer of God” and the “commonality with the rest of nature.” A lot depends on how

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one cashes out the notion of being an “image bearer of God.” There is certainly no single interpretation here, but instead there exists a history of vigorous debate within those communities identifying themselves with the person and narrative of Christ. Moreover, even the first claim about the existence of God is not entirely without controversy within Christian history. Within some varieties of Native American Christianity, African Christianity, and Asian Christianity, as well as American process theology, the integration of God and nature is stressed more than an absolute ontological division. Such diversity need not mean that God is not beyond nature, but simply that the distinction between God and nature is not as hard and fast within Christianity as Plantinga’s account seems to indicate. The point here is not that Christians should affirm such alternative theologies or even that Christianity is compatible with such alternatives, but simply that there are numerous self-identifying Christian thinkers who would challenge Plantinga’s characterization. Accordingly, to articulate “Christian philosophy” as a single, unified thing opposed to perennial naturalism is problematic because it simply serves to raise new questions about which understanding of Christianity one allows to operate in one’s philosophical account. Plantinga might be right about the conflict between particular interpretations, but more needs to be said regarding why those interpretations ought to be the ones that are operative in our philosophical discourse and religious lives. As Merold Westphal (2009) notes, when we refer to “Christianity” we always need to recognize that hermeneutic decisions have already been made such that we should immediately ask with “whose [Christian] community” and with “which interpretation” of it are we working? One doesn’t need to be a religious pluralist in order to realize that “Christianity” is already a plural term—even if it is ontologically a rigid designator, it certainly is not one sociologically, historically, or ecclesially. Again, my point about the dynamism in Christian history does not entail that “Christianity” is a slippery, or even non-existent, ontological referent, but simply that the linguistic signifier of “Christianity” is not historically stable enough to allow for it to be deployed as hermeneutically obvious. By recognizing the plurality on display within “the Christian community,” I do not mean to affirm any particular theological view one way or another. Rather, I just want to question the ease with which Plantinga would suggest that “the Christian community” is defined by and required to respond to the challenge of perennial naturalism. Interrogating such assumptions can occur even if one continues to agree with Plantinga about what Christianity should, in the end, be understood to mean. In order to try and meet head-on any objections that I am engaging in alltoo-common postmodern equivocation, let me explain things a bit further here. I have very determinate views of what I think Christian truth is. But, the determinacy of those views is not necessarily challenged by recognizing that many other people who identify as “Christians” disagree with me. Instead,

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such historical diversity merely stands as a strong reason to display epistemic humility while holding those views—though not immediately as a reason to change them. To conclude that Christianity doesn’t mean anything, or that it can mean anything, because it has historically meant different things are nonsequiturs that must be resisted. Plantinga’s account of the second “dukedom” illustrates the plurality of Christianity even more vividly. “The second head of that post-positivistic hydra is connected with the second precinct of the Civitas Mundi,” Plantinga claims. Referring to this “precinct” as “creative anti-realism,” Plantinga defines this idea as follows: Here the basic claim or idea is not that we human beings are just one more kind of animal with a rather unusual means of survival, but that we are actually responsible for the basic lineaments, the fundamental structure and framework of the world itself. (Plantinga 1998, p. 330)

Creative anti-realism began, Plantinga suggests, with Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason when Kant suggests that we actively construct the phenomenal world of our experience. “I believe,” Plantinga claims, “that the thought of the first Critique . . . is incompatible with Christianity . . . [because] from this perspective . . . it is not God who has created the heavens and the earth, but we ourselves—or at any rate God could not have done it without our help” (Plantinga 1998, p. 331). Here Plantinga appears to give in to an epistemic non-sequitur by seemingly suggesting that if I am unable to escape my own perspective on reality, then there are no non-perspectival accounts of reality, as such. Alternatively, he seems to give in to a metaphysical nonsequitur by indicating that because my conceptual apparatus, historical understanding, and embodied experience make possible the account of the world that I affirm, then there is nothing that exists apart from my concepts, history, and embodiment. Drawing on a little bit of philosophical hermeneutics (in line with Gadamer and Ricœur) and existential phenomenology (following after Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Beauvoir) would go a long way toward helping us to see that epistemic anti-realism (viz., we always inquire from where we are and so all accounts of reality for humans are perspectival) is not the same thing as metaphysical anti-realism (viz., there is no mind-independent reality to articulate in the first place). Or, if one were hesitant to appropriate such explicitly postmodern accounts, Arthur F. Holmes’s (1983) notion of how worldviews function in belief formation and Wolterstorff ’s (1984) reference to the “profoundly historical” reality of control beliefs also illustrate this basic idea (for other options, see also Evans and Westphal 1993). Occasionally, Plantinga appears to conflate these two versions of anti-realism, which is unfortunate because otherwise he might be more sympathetic to the suggestion that his own account of Christian philosophy depends upon epistemic anti-realism insofar as it says that there is no neutral starting point for inquiry—indeed, we are always

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already committed and only then ask questions about our commitments. I don’t want to miss the chance to mention that Plantinga is not alone in this seeming conflation. Jacques Derrida, John Caputo, and many others in continental philosophy of religion also often fail to distinguish clearly enough between these different notions of anti-realism (see Simmons and Sanders 2015). To suggest that creative anti-realism is clearly “incompatible” with Christianity is, then, as much an overstatement on Plantinga’s part as are claims about the immediate incompatibility of postmodernism and traditional notions of Christian theism on the part of Derrida and Caputo (see Simmons 2012). Though I have indicated one overriding way in which Kantian, epistemic antirealism need not entail the metaphysical anti-realism about which Plantinga quite rightly worries, one could go much further in this direction. Merold Westphal convincingly argues that “there are four fundamentally different kinds of Kantianism, and that only one of these merits the negative characterization Plantinga gives to creative antirealism in general” (Westphal 1993, p. 163). Westphal continues on to demonstrate that “the Kantian version of creative antirealism, so far from being one of the major modern threats to Christian theism, is itself an essentially theistic theory” (Westphal 1993, p. 167). My aim here is not to argue in favor of the theistic possibilities for creative epistemic anti-realism, though I have done so elsewhere (see Simmons 2012). Rather, I simply want to point out that the oppositional necessity that Plantinga suggests between the Christian community and the philosophical community as a result of the latter’s general endorsement of creative anti-realism is unsustainable. If for no other reason, it is unsustainable because of the personal example of Westphal’s own self-understanding as a Christian philosopher who finds creative anti-realism to be a resource for Christian thought. Yet, one might also look to Søren Kierkegaard, who suggests that even if existence is a system for God, it cannot be for an existing individual (Kierkegaard 1992, p. 118; see also Westphal 1991, p. 37). Or, consider Jean-Louis Chrétien’s (2004) account of the singularity of the call/response structure by which subjectivity is theologically constituted in ways that would invite epistemic anti-realist approaches to religious understanding. So, either one must argue that Westphal, Kierkegaard, and Chrétien are not Christians, or that they are profoundly mistaken about what Christianity is. Although both of these options are possible, it seems much more sensible simply to say that creative anti-realism is not necessarily opposed to Christianity and then allow inquiry to continue regarding the specific forms of anti-realism in relation to specific forms of Christianity. But, this would require a serious revision to the frame according to which Christian philosophy is formulated by Plantinga. Perhaps Plantinga might rightly suggest that affirming a foundational role for the Sensus Divinitatus is the proper Christian response to all such creative anti-realisms. Yet, this would then assume that not only does Christian

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philosophy assume both epistemic realism and metaphysical realism, but that it also assumes very particular theological doctrines. Yet, neither perennial naturalism nor creative anti-realism is necessarily opposed to Christianity, as such, but only to individual Christians who define themselves in opposition to such ideas. Now, if such naturalism and/or anti-realism are reductively understood as necessarily entailing a full-throated atheism, say, then a broader conflict with Christianity, more generally, might be plausible, but according to the definitions that Plantinga has provided, neither seem necessarily to require such a view. Ultimately, then, although narrow notions of Christianity and reductive definitions of naturalism and anti-realism are not implausible, we should not assume that they are the only game in town. For my own part, and in light of my own experience, I find Westphal’s epistemic anti-realist theism to be much more consistent with my Christian beliefs than Plantinga’s theistic rejection of creative anti-realism. Additionally, as someone who actively participates in Christian environmental activism, the idea that Christian theism would challenge the essential connectivity of persons and nature rings hollow in comparison to an idea of Christian theism that incorporates the best insights of those Christian traditions that resonate quite deeply with some aspects of naturalism while articulating such aspects internal to a narrative of divine love and incarnational relationality. Again, a lot depends on what version of “naturalism” one uses and what one takes to be essential to the notion of being created “Imago Dei.” Hermeneutics is everywhere. Wolterstorff is right to say that we are “profoundly historical” creatures. Ultimately, then, although I consider myself a Christian philosopher, I do not fit within Plantinga’s account because I do not see the threat to be located where he situates it. Rather, I find that the situation regarding the lack of stability within contemporary Christian philosophy should call for a reassessment of the strategy by which Christian philosophy is understood and engaged. It may be that the primary threat to Christian philosophy today does not come from particular notions of anti-realism or naturalism, but instead from the emergence of potential hegemonic privilege and hermeneutic amnesia within contemporary Christian philosophy itself.

THE S TRATEGIES OF CHRISTIAN P HILOSOPHY In a 2011 response to Nicholas Wolterstorff ’s celebratory essay “Then, Now, and Al,” Plantinga makes an important admission: And what to say about the prospects for Christian and theistic philosophy? A danger we now face, perhaps, is triumphalism. Philosophy, as Quentin Smith

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lamented, may have become desecularized; it is now possible for Christian philosophers to work together and publish on topics that would have been beyond the pale forty years ago; there are an increasing number of Christian philosophers at American universities. But of course the truth is the contemporary philosophical world, like that of western academia generally, is for the most part hostile or indifferent to the concerns of Christian and theistic philosophers. . . . Of course only God knows the future . . . and, as I say, we must reject triumphalism; nonetheless the number and quality of young Christian and theistic philosophers is wonderfully heartening, and an occasion of joy and thanksgiving. (Plantinga 2011, p. 268)

I share Plantinga’s joy and thanksgiving that young women and men are able to pursue philosophical training in a space that does not require them to abandon their religious identities. And, let me be clear, my appreciation for the work and example of Alvin Plantinga (and others such as Wolterstorff, William Alston, Eleonore Stump, George Mavrodes, Richard Swinburne, Peter Van Inwagen, William Hasker, Linda Zagzebski, and many more) cannot be overstated. Yet, I think it is worth spending some time addressing what Plantinga himself notes as a “danger”—the triumphalism that might begin to emerge within Christian philosophy if it allows itself to become philosophically insular, theologically arrogant, and even potentially socially extremist. If a community is defined by an essential opposition, then when that opposition is eliminated it seems that the community’s identity would similarly be eliminated. As Eric Hoffer claims, “mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil” (Hoffer 1951, section 65). The triumphalism about which Plantinga rightly warns might emerge in a variety of ways, but underlying all of them, as I see it, is the idea of a dichotomy that presents “them” (naturalists, atheists, secularists, anti-realists, postmodernists, etc.) as a threat to “us” (Christian philosophers). When it comes to philosophical discourse, it is not clear what a “threat” would mean except a challenge to one’s own views. Yet, as all philosophers should know, avoiding challenge is not compatible with a philosophical way of life. Plantinga himself notes in “Advice” that Christian philosophers should be deeply engaged with non-Christian philosophers: Of course I don’t mean for a moment to suggest that Christian philosophers have nothing to learn from their non-Christian and non-theist colleagues: that would be a piece of foolish arrogance, utterly belied by the fact of the matter. Nor do I mean to suggest that Christian philosophers should retreat into their own isolated enclave, having as little as possible to do with non-theistic philosophers. Of course not! (Plantinga 1998, p. 314)

Plantinga continues on to suggest that “if the Christian philosophical community is doing its job properly, it will be engaged in a complicated, many-sided

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dialectical discussion, making its own contribution to that common human project” “of understanding ourselves and the world in which we find ourselves” (Plantinga 1998, p. 314). I agree with Plantinga’s basic claim here, but worry that referring to “the Christian community” in the singular, and to “its own agenda” (Plantinga 1998, p. 315) as distinguished from that of the secular philosophical community serves to invite the very insularity and triumphalism that Plantinga rightly resists. Again, whose Christian community? Which interpretation of philosophical practice? The critique of classical foundationalism that underlies Plantinga’s defense of Christian philosophy is one that rejects an objective and neutral starting point from which philosophical inquiry could commence. Accordingly, we always start thinking from somewhere and those starting points always already reflect the historical context in which lived engagement and cognitive investment occur. In this way, I take Plantinga’s account to be quite close to Martin Heidegger’s idea of the “thrownness” that announces the inescapability of the hermeneutic circle, and to Jean-Paul Sartre’s metaphor of existence as a ship that has always already embarked upon its journey. From this basic insight of contextual location and hermeneutic necessity, affirmed by continental and analytic philosophers alike, Plantinga argues that we Christian philosophers are “within our epistemic rights” to start from Christian belief and then engage in philosophy from there (Plantinga 1998, p. 304; see also pp. 307, 311, 312). I grant the philosophical and, specifically, epistemic legitimacy of Plantinga’s argument here. Moreover, in the context of the lingering effects of positivism on professional philosophy occurring in the late 1960s and the political impacts that continued into the 1970s and 1980s, it is entirely understandable that Plantinga would argue for the need for Christian philosophy to emerge with autonomy, integrity, and courage. Simply put, the historical situation was such that, without such appeals to being within their “epistemic rights,” Christian philosophers might have remained marginalized within the normative epistemic assumptions operative in much of mainstream philosophical discourse. However, as is indicated in Plantinga’s worry about “triumphalism,” the situation has most definitely changed over the past forty years. Christian philosophers are not now widely excluded from privileged positions within the philosophical establishment. Yet, it is perhaps the case that non-Christians have now become marginalized, to some degree, within mainstream philosophy of religion (the same might be said for Christians who do not work within Reformed or Catholic traditions, or Reformed or Catholic Christians who work primarily in continental philosophy of religion, etc.). In other words, the very success of Christian philosophy in encouraging such autonomy, integrity, and courage has, perhaps, led to a situation in which appeals to being within one’s “epistemic rights” serves not only to justify that one can start with one’s religious beliefs in philosophical inquiry, but also to undergird a very

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particular set of Christian assumptions as normatively operative in philosophy of religion more broadly. For example, one would be hard pressed to find many examples of nonChristian and especially non-theistic religious perspectives as fundamental voices in the main textbooks in philosophy of religion. When other religious traditions are considered it is frequently done as an add-on to the book (and in a stand-alone section) rather than a constitutive aspect of the various questions being asked throughout it.¹ Moreover, even the basic questions that are presented as central to philosophy of religion assume a decidedly doxastic conception of religion, which many scholars working within religious studies and the subfield of “theories of religion” would rightly challenge as already reflecting a very particular account of religion (reflecting very determinate decisions about what does and does not count as religious).² But, asking questions about what counts as “religion” should be part of what philosophers of religion consider. Assuming a set of definitions, categories, and questions as those “of the Christian community,” as Plantinga repeatedly suggests, is truth-functionally plausible, but potentially discursively dangerous since it can allow one’s “epistemic rights” to become a default setting regarding the “right epistemics,” as it were, for all who would now attempt to engage in philosophy of religion. The situation that Christian philosophy now faces is not one of widespread threat, but of widespread influence (see Simmons 2017a). As such, I think that there are good reasons to think that the strategy of Christian philosophy likely needs to change. The strategy of contending for the “epistemic right” to start with one’s Christian commitments is no longer something that requires such a robust defense. This is the case, in part, because postmodernism has largely taken for granted that one engages in philosophy from where one finds oneself and with the thick identities out of which we live. As Westphal (2014) says, “we are all postmoderns now.” Ironically, in this way postmodernism can be appropriated as a significant resource for Christian philosophy even though many Christian philosophers, including Plantinga, have offered significant resistance to what they term “postmodernism.” Like the variety of realisms, anti-realisms, and naturalisms that we have already mentioned, there are various ways to understand postmodernism. Rather than starting with a definition that is oppositionally framed, I think it is better strategy to try to

¹ There are some books that do better than others on this front. For example, see Meister and Copan (2007); Eshleman (2008); Hinnells (2010). For sustained defenses of the importance of a more global approach to philosophy of religion, see Wildman (2010); Schilbrack (2014). For a general consideration of the assumptions operative in philosophy of religion textbooks, see Loewen (2015). ² I have tried to bring these discourses together more directly elsewhere. See Simmons (2018). See also Schilbrack (2014) for a defense of the value of such engagement. Moreover, as examples of why the historical stakes of defining religion in particular ways are high indeed, see Smith (1982, 2004); McCutcheon (1997); Fitzgerald (2000); Masuzawa (2005).

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figure out how compatibilities might be possible if more charitable interpretations are offered—this provides the opportunity for a more substantive critique of those versions that are less philosophically defensible. I propose that what is needed in the current situation is an approach that primarily understands philosophy of religion as an attempt to foster expanded dialogue and relational engagement beyond any overly narrow construal of Christianity or philosophy. In order to move forward with such a task, we must come to a better recognition of the plurality of Christianity itself, the important sites of mutual benefit occurring between Christian and non-Christian conceptions of religious existence, and the discursive promise that comes from various methodologies and even different disciplinary perspectives all finding traction in contemporary philosophy of religion. Such a conception of philosophy of religion would not eliminate the possibility of doing Christian philosophy as it has been done, but would situate it as one option among many approaches to religious philosophy. But, in such a situation a genuine dialogue can occur in which arguments can be presented for understanding Christian philosophy one way as opposed to another, rather than simply drawing rigid lines between Christian philosophy and everything else as the condition for argumentative engagement. If Christian philosophy continues to understand itself as singular and oppositional, it is difficult to see how the future of Christian philosophy will be as bright as Plantinga envisions. Consider the following hypothetical question: Would someone who draws heavily on continental philosophy be likely to be viewed as equally competitive for a job in philosophy of religion as someone who works exclusively within analytic philosophy? Moreover, would someone who approaches philosophy of religion from a Jewish, Islamic, or Buddhist perspective, say, be competitive for a job in philosophy of religion, or only for jobs in Jewish philosophy, Islamic philosophy, or Comparative philosophy? While one could surely provide an anecdotal example in opposition to such general trends, the fact that such trends are the case is what matters. The situation has changed from when Christians had to fight to be taken seriously, as such, within philosophical discourse. Today contemporary Christian philosophy is no longer the excluded community within the philosophical mainstream, but instead is now in the position of potentially excluding those who don’t fit into its own self-conception—either of proper Christianity or proper philosophy. With this reversal of fortunes in mind, consider the following passage where Plantinga intends to encourage Christian boldness, but perhaps ends up fostering the very insularity and triumphalism about which he now warns: For a Christian philosopher is first of all a Christian and only secondarily a philosopher. Her philosophy is her specific way of working out her vocation as a Christian; but then to be a proper Christian philosopher, she must be a proper Christian. This means that all of her thought and activity will be shaped and

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formed by the traditional ways in which we Christians try to make progress in the Christian life: prayer, Bible reading, taking part in the sacraments, associating with other Christians for fellowship and edification. Those who neglect these things are cutting off the source and root of their being as Christian philosophers. (Plantinga 1998, p. 352)

While it is entirely sensible to suggest that Christians (whether philosophers or not) should participate in the practices of their religious communities, it seems deeply problematic to suggest that unless one engage in these things one would fail to be a Christian philosopher. Again, it all depends on how one understands such practices in relation to one’s religious beliefs and identity and the role that such practices play in the community in which one finds oneself. Further, and perhaps more troublingly, if one believes that “all truth is God’s truth,” and the way in which one discovers such truth is “first of all” by being “a proper Christian,” then it is not a stretch to suggest that if one disagrees about how one would “make progress in the Christian life,” then one is cut off from being “a proper Christian” and, hence, we might say is also cut off from being a proper philosopher. As such, challenging a Christian philosopher on her Christianity can quickly become tantamount to challenging her philosophical ability. Yet it is entirely plausible to think that a progressive, postmodern Christian who draws deeply upon the liberation theology of James Cone in her own religious self-conception, say, would understand “making progress in the Christian life” very differently than a Calvinist who draws deeply upon the Reformed theology of John Piper, for example. For the former, associating with Christians might be significantly less important to Christian life than associating with the poor. Or, engaging in acts such as prayer and reading the Bible might be less central than acts of charity and social activism. This is not even to mention how one might approach such “progress” from within Eastern Orthodoxy or Korean Pentecostalism, which expands things even further. The “traditional ways” to which Plantinga refers, though certainly not invisible in the tradition, are not the only ways to understand things. If we fall prey to hermeneutic amnesia, then it becomes tempting to see one’s own way of being Christian as simply what it is to be a Christian. As such, theological correctness can quickly emerge as the criterion for philosophical legitimacy. One might object here that surely we should cut Plantinga some slack because he is not a theologian after all, right? Well, in light of recent trends in “analytic theology,” we should attend to Plantinga’s statement that, Some theologians seem to harbor the impression that philosophical theology as pursued by contemporary philosophers is often unduly ahistorical and uncontextual. Sometimes this arises from the thought that any concern with [such topics as God’s action in the world and the central doctrines of Original Sin,

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Incarnation, and Atonement] is ahistorical; those topics belong to another age and can’t properly be discussed now. That seems to me historicism run amok; but no doubt some of this work could profit from closer contact with what theologians know. Still, the theologians don’t seem to be doing the work in question. I therefore hope I will not be accused of interdisciplinary chauvinism if I point out that the best work in philosophical theology—in the English-speaking world and over the last quarter century—has been done not by theologians but by philosophers. (Plantinga 1998, p. 341)

I do not wish to accuse Plantinga of disciplinary chauvinism, but I do want to note that the theologian’s worry about ahistoricism to which Plantinga refers can be recast as a philosophical concern about hermeneutic forgetfulness. When we take our way to be “the way”—in this case the analytic method of philosophical inquiry to be the way of philosophy—then it is a short step to thinking that our way—analytic philosophy—is the way for all others. Theology, then, is not surprisingly viewed as best done when done in the mode of analytic philosophy. In light of Plantinga’s suggestion about “the best work in philosophical theology,” it is perhaps not difficult to understand why analytic theology has been met with some suspicion by some theologians. Yet, and this is what most concerns me here, it should also be met with some suspicion by philosophers. On the one hand, non-Christian philosophers might worry about the fact that now much of contemporary philosophy of religion has entirely given way to confessional Christian theology. Of course, one might respond that “analytic theology” is not a problem at all because at least now these Christian philosophers are finally admitting that they are really doing theology rather than philosophy. On the other hand, Christian philosophers might worry about the fact that engaging in Christian philosophy requires engaging in determinate theological inquiry, which may or may not be their view of how philosophy should function. As someone who attempts to draw upon both analytic and continental resources in doing (what I term “mashup”) philosophy of religion (see Simmons 2015), I find Plantinga’s account of Christian philosophy decidedly to lay the groundwork for and directly anticipate the developments in analytic theology. I worry that this trend of analytic philosophy of religion toward being confessional Christian philosophical theology ends up, perhaps unintentionally, making any attempt to understand alternative approaches to philosophy of religion very difficult. Indeed, the suspicion of many in continental philosophy, for example, that all philosophy of religion is really just confessional Christian theology might thus seem to have been confirmed. Here one might productively consider the work of Dominique Janicaud (2000) and his worries about a “theological turn” in recent French phenomenology (see Simmons and Benson 2013). If hermeneutical amnesia can quickly lead to hegemonic privilege (both theologically and philosophically), which, in turn, leads to the narrowing of

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one’s professional community according to normative criteria stipulated by the operative hegemony, then the temptations of philosophical insularity, theological arrogance, and social extremism seem to be not far off. Let me repeat, I am not suggesting that Christian philosophy has given in to these temptations, but indications are such that the situation of Christian philosophy has changed over the past forty years to such a degree that what was formerly powerless has now become part of the very philosophical powerstructure itself. In such a situation, the strategy of Christian philosophy that worked previously will likely be less successful now—what made sense in one’s twenties doesn’t work as easily in one’s forties, and even less so in one’s sixties. What was originally a virtuous and much needed strategy meant to encourage the stability of a unified and threatened community, now potentially threatens to become a strategy of finding opposition where there might be sites of resonance, of finding enemies where there might be a more complicated and nuanced sense of self-understanding, and of finding insular thinking where there might be an enriched and expanded notion of inquiry.

THE S IGNIFICANCE OF CHRISTIAN P HILOSOPHY My critical interrogation of the strategies of Christian philosophy should not be understood as a rejection of the idea of Christian philosophy as such, but merely a challenge to the temptations to which “Christian philosophy” might succumb if it is allowed to persist in ways that would foster definitional narrowness within a largely hegemonic discourse. Again, I take the initial critique of classical foundationalism that underlies Plantinga’s account to be quite right. The modest foundationalist approach that is then deployed, whereby one’s Christian beliefs, practices, and experiences can function as non-inferential starting points for philosophical inquiry is well worth defending. Yet, this approach is far more productively appropriated, I have suggested, if understood as consistent with creative epistemic anti-realism rather than at odds with it. Accordingly, what might such a modest foundational, creative anti-realist, and decidedly personal account of philosophy of religion (whether Christian or not) look like? Let me propose Merold Westphal’s (1973) account of “prophetic philosophy of religion” as a productive model upon which we might begin to draw more deeply in the contemporary debates. For Westphal, the task is not to make philosophy safe for Christianity, or Christianity courageous enough to stand up to the assault of philosophical engagement. Instead, drawing on Kierkegaard, Westphal suggests that philosophers of religion should abandon the idea that “philosophy can be or should try to be scientific” (Westphal 1991, p. 2). The problem with such a scientific goal is that it takes a very specific sense of objectivity to be normatively

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appropriate for philosophical inquiry. Yet, Westphal contends, such objectivity is not promising in philosophy of religion because of the fundamental subjectivity of religious existence itself. Rather than looking to the scientist as the model for philosophy of religion, Westphal suggests a new exemplar: the Hebrew prophet (Westphal 1991, p. 11). Westphal rightly claims that there are likely to be significant differences in what counts as evidence for the prophet as opposed to counting as evidence for the philosopher. Accordingly, Westphal makes clear that he is not calling for philosophers to be prophets, but instead for philosophy of religion to be “personal, untimely, political, and eschatological” and to come forth in the “mode of direct address” (Westphal 1991, p. 12). Although I have considered the specifics of Westphal’s account in detail elsewhere (see Simmons 2017b), what matters for our purposes here is that his account is not one that allows the confessional starting points of the prophet to stand as epistemic evidence for philosophical inquiry. Again, philosophers are not meant to become prophets. Instead, his aim is to shift philosophy of religion away from any encouragement to strip away one’s personality and one’s singular lived experience in the name of increasing the proximity between philosophy and scientific objectivity. In this way, Westphal and Plantinga are largely in agreement regarding the existential starting points that serve as modest foundations for inquiry (see Westphal’s chapter in the present volume for more sites of possible resonance). Importantly asking why objectivist scientific criteria should function within the philosophical study of religion, Westphal can be viewed as reframing the “boldness” that Plantinga calls for as the hermeneutic courage to speak from where one finds oneself. Westphal’s account is personal, but not (strictly speaking) confessional. When it comes to such difficult ideas as religion, faith, and God, Westphal offers good reasons to think that we are on better phenomenological footing by approaching the ideas from within our lived existence, rather than trying to escape our lived existence to see things “objectively.” For Westphal, following Kierkegaard, philosophy of religion can appropriately be oriented toward figuring out what counts as religious understanding, rather than simply an understanding of something called “religion.” With this very brief synopsis of Westphal’s account in place, let me offer three reasons why I think it offers a productive model for contemporary philosophy of religion: 1. It allows for philosophy and theology to be distinguished in ways that contemporary Christian philosophy (following Plantinga) does not. Simply put, Westphal’s understanding still admits of evidentiary sources functioning differently in different communities of discourse—indeed, part of what determines a community is the way in which they allow various authorities to count immediately as evidence. I see this playing out such that Christian philosophers engage in conditional argumentation about their Christian beliefs, practices, and identities (i.e., if such and

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such is true, then what would follow?) rather than directly metaphysical speculation about such beliefs, practices, and identities (i.e., given that such and such is true, then this or that follows). 2. It necessarily pays attention to the situation in which any philosophy of religion finds itself, rather than assuming that Christian philosophy is essentially defined in opposition to a stable set of views. The benefit of this historical awareness is that it also fosters hermeneutic sensitivity to the plurality of Christianity, the contested status of “religion” itself, and the problems that can attend assuming ontological and theological stability where there might only be contingent stability as concerns the examples one considers as relevant to one’s own self-understanding. 3. It does not prescribe or proscribe particular commitments for community participation and, accordingly, more effectively resists insularity, arrogance, and extremism. Indeed, drawing on the Hebrew prophet as a resource for contemporary philosophy of religion helps to remind all philosophers that critical awareness about one’s own assumptions is crucial for remaining open to where discourse is going rather than only allowing discourse to remain where it has largely already been. This is important for both philosophical and theological reasons. Philosophically, this openness interrupts the professional privilege that can serve to reinforce the power-structures already in existence. Theologically, this openness would remind us that God does not act in history according to our philosophical categories, but instead serves to challenge the onto-theological arrogance that can occur when we assume that theological truth requires philosophical foundations. As Westphal notes: By interpreting the present in terms of the future instead of the past, it becomes possible to see the present in bold new ways. Instead of seeing change as an aberration in a fixed order due to bad luck or poor strategy, it becomes possible to see it as the harbinger of new saving acts that God is about to perform. This makes it possible to prepare for God’s future instead of being overwhelmed by it. (Westphal 1991, p. 18)

Westphal admits that it is not clear where such a prophetic approach to philosophy of religion will take us, but that seems to be one of its most striking advantages over the way that contemporary Christian philosophy is primarily understood and practiced. As Christians, I think that we should affirm that the divine novelty of God’s creative love is something that should continue to inspire awe and intellectual curiosity. As I see it, Anselm was right to call for “faith seeking understanding,” but we should be wary lest our conception of faith be reduced to a narrow understanding of that faith itself. If “Christian philosophy” names the attempt to make sense of reality and our place in it as existing individuals attempting daily to be Christ followers, then I am on board. But, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1959) reminds us, to follow

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Christ is to follow him to the Cross. Accordingly, I think Christian conceptions of reality should reflect that self-denial that plays out as an essential invitation to the Other. Even if philosophically legitimate, to begin a conversation by appealing to one’s “epistemic rights” is hardly an invitational gesture. Here we might draw on Jacques Derrida’s notion of hospitality (see Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000). Being hospitable requires having a home into which to invite others. When Plantinga originally published “Advice to Christian Philosophers,” it was unclear that Christian philosophers had or would ever have such a philosophical home given the situation in which they found themselves. Today, largely due to the impact that Plantinga has had on it, the house of mainstream philosophy of religion is, for better or worse, primarily a Christian one. Accordingly, the responsibility for taking care of that home and inviting others into it has changed. Hopefully, the table fellowship offered by Christian philosophers in their professional practice will emulate the invitational example of Jesus who reaches out to not only the widow, the orphan, and the stranger, but all those who are not seen as legitimate according to the social standards of the day. The triumphalism that threatens Christian philosophy can quickly become the new standard for exclusion within philosophical discourse. Affirming the need for a different approach to Christian philosophy, in particular, and philosophy of religion, more broadly, does not mean that one ignores or dismisses the importance of the historical context in which such approaches will be articulated. Accordingly, I think that the future of Christian philosophy is something to be most optimistic about when we no longer concern ourselves about Christian philosophy, specifically, but instead devote our energies, as philosophers, to living into a future for philosophy of religion that does not replicate the difficulties of its often confessionally rigid past. What is needed now, I believe, is not Christian boldness, but philosophical maturity as we collectively live into the privilege that allows for kenotic hospitality maximally to be shown to those who now find themselves fighting for the status that we have achieved. That said, I consider Plantinga’s own example of philosophical excellence to be a model upon which we can draw in order to challenge the specifics of the discourse of Christian philosophy that he has so deeply influenced.

WORKS CITED Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. 1959. The Cost of Discipleship. New York, NY: Touchstone. Chrétien, Jean-Louis. 2004. The Call and the Response. Trans. Anne A. Davenport. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Derrida, Jacques and Anne Dufourmantelle. 2000. Of Hospitality. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Eshleman, Andrew, ed. 2008. Readings in Philosophy of Religion: East Meets West. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. Evans, C. Stephen and Merold Westphal, eds. 1993. Christian Perspectives on Religious Knowledge. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Fitzgerald, Timothy. 2000. The Ideology of Religious Studies. New York, NY and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hinnells, John, ed. 2010. The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion, 2nd Ed. London and New York, NY: Routledge. Hoffer, Eric. 1951. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Holmes, Arthur F. 1983. Contours of a World View. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Janicaud, Dominique. 2000. “The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology.” Trans. Bernard G. Prusak. In Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, pp. 16–103. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1992. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, Volume I. Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Loewen, Nathan R. B. 2015. “Prolegomena to Any Future Mashups with Philosophy of Religion.” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 14, no. 2: 266–77. Masuzawa, Tomoko. 2005. The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. McCutcheon, Russell T. 1997. Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. New York, NY and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Meister, Chad and Paul Copan, eds. 2007. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion. London and New York, NY: Routledge. Plantinga, Alvin. 1984. “Advice to Christian Philosophers.” Faith and Philosophy 1, no. 3: 253–71. Plantinga, Alvin. 1995. “Christian Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century.” In Christian Philosophy at the Close of the Twentieth Century. Ed. Sander Griffioen and Bert Balk. Kampen: Kok, pp. 29–53. Plantinga, Alvin. 1998. The Analytic Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader. Ed. James F. Sennett. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Plantinga, Alvin. 2011. “Response to Nick Wolterstorff.” Faith and Philosophy 28, no. 3: 267–8. Schilbrack, Kevin. 2014. Philosophy and the Study of Religions: A Manifesto. Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Simmons, J. Aaron. 2012. “Apologetics After Objectivity.” In Reexamining Deconstruction and Determinate Religion: Toward a Religion with Religion. Ed. J. Aaron Simmons and Stephen Minister. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Simmons, J. Aaron. 2015. “The Dialogical Promise of Mashups.” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 14, no. 2: 204–10. Simmons, J. Aaron. 2017a. “Cheaper than a Corvette: The Relevance of Phenomenology for Contemporary Philosophy of Religion.” Sophia 56, no. 1: 33–44.

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Simmons, J. Aaron. 2017b. “Continental Philosophy of Religion in a Kenotic Tone.” In Renewing Philosophy of Religion. Ed. John Schellenberg and Paul Draper. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 154–73. Simmons, J. Aaron. 2018. “Vagueness and Its Virtues: A Proposal for Renewing Philosophy of Religion.” In Philosophy of Religion After Religion. Ed. Richard Amesbury and Michael Rodgers. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, pp. 45–70. Simmons, J. Aaron and Bruce Ellis Benson. 2013. The New Phenomenology: A Philosophical Introduction. London: Bloomsbury. Simmons, J. Aaron and John Sanders. 2015. “A Goldilocks God: Open Theism as a Feuerbachian Alternative.” Element 6, no. 2: 33–53. Smith, Jonathan Z. 1982. Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Jonathan Z. 2004. Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. Westphal, Merold. 1973. “Prolegomena to any Future Philosophy of Religion which will be able to Come Forth as Prophecy.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 4, no. 3: 129–50. Westphal, Merold. 1991. Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Westphal, Merold. 1993. “Christian Philosophers and the Copernican Revolution.” In Christian Perspectives on Religious Knowledge. Ed. C. Stephen Evans and Merold Westphal. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, pp. 161–79. Westphal, Merold. 2009. Whose Community? Which Interpretation? Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. Westphal, Merold. 2014. “Must Phenomenology and Theology Make Two? A Response to Trakakis and Simmons.” The Heythrop Journal 55, no. 4: 711–17. Wildman, Wesley J. 2010. Religious Philosophy as Multidisciplinary Comparative Inquiry: Envisioning a Future for the Philosophy of Religion. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 1984. Reason within the Bounds of Religion, 2nd Ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

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13 Christian Philosophy and Christ Crucified Fragmentary Theory in Scandalous Power Paul K. Moser

“A philosophy can bring us to no security of a revelation; but a revelation develops a philosophy.” —P. T. Forsyth (1909, p. 170)

I N T R O D U C TI O N Philosophy under Socrates and Plato sought to identify ultimate wisdom for humans, the kind of wisdom worth living and dying for. Christian philosophy should do at least the same, given that ultimate Christian wisdom should be worth living and dying for. Ultimate wisdom, in any case, sets priorities for one’s existence and action, thus yielding a normative framework for one’s life. This essay identifies the scandalous and fragmentary but powerful nature of philosophy and wisdom conformed to the Jewish-Christian God. This nature stems from the striking intentional ways of this God and the absence of a fully satisfactory human explanation or understanding of God’s ways, including a full theodicy. Antecedents of the perspective to be offered appear in the apostle Paul, Kierkegaard (1846, 1850), and Reinhold Niebuhr (1949), but my aim is more thematic than historical.¹ The key idea is that the Jewish-Christian God, being set on what is morally best for humans, would not want to be approached in a triumphant or complacent human attitude, including one of intellectual and explanatory success from human philosophy and wisdom. Instead, this God would have humans approach in the intellectual and explanatory brokenness and ¹ Thanks to Linda Moser, Ben Nasmith, and Aaron Simmons for helpful comments.

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limitation of the scandalous cross of Christ. Philosophers would be no exception. God thus would want people to approach him out of a felt need for good life. The approach via the crucified Christ invites and promotes the unique righteous agapē characteristic of God, which is foreign, and even scandalous, to typical philosophical inquiry. It brings the importance of such agapē into human inquiry about God, in a manner widely neglected in Christian philosophy. The result deflates a tendency to boasting or being complacent in Christian philosophy or wisdom. It promotes attention to typical human motives in pursuing such philosophy, in contrast with divine agapē-oriented motives. The importance of this result stems from what would be God’s aim to counter human self-boasting or complacency with deepening faithful obedience toward God, in fellowship with God. Any discussion near the topic of God should clarify its answer to this question: Which god is under discussion? Otherwise, we will wander in the dark, in need of illumination. Even worse, we may be taken in by a counterfeit god, and thus misled in inquiry and theory. I suggest that Christian philosophy is misled by a counterfeit god whenever it promotes approaching God without the crucified Christ. If one’s god omits a crucial role of mediator and savior for Christ crucified, this is not the Christian God. The role of the crucified Christ thus offers an indication of which god one values, and it could be a god other than the God and Father of the crucified Christ. I shall suggest that some so-called “Christian philosophy” is merely so-called.

CH R I S T I N C H R I STI AN P HI LOS OP HY Contemporary advocates of Christian philosophy tend to omit the crucified Christ, as an actual person, from their philosophy, despite the indispensable role of the term “Christ” in the term “Christian,” and despite the indispensable role of the crucified Christ in the Christian gospel message. Following various New Testament writers, we may assume that talk of the crucified Christ is also talk of the risen Lord. This Christ, then, is no mere principle or idea, but is an intentional agent vindicated by God upon complete obedience to God. Some proponents of Christian philosophy offer “Advice to Christian Philosophers,” but make no mention of Jesus, Christ, savior, redeemer, mediator, the cross, crucifixion, atonement, forgiveness, salvation, or reconciliation. (See, for instance, this book’s opening essay.) Strikingly, we find no definite role for the crucified Christ as God’s supreme mediator and savior for humans in their “advice.” So, we seem to be left with some kind of “mere theism” that falls short of being “Christian.” What explains the glaring omission of Christ crucified from typical “Christian philosophy” these days? Perhaps the explanation involves a failure among many advocates of Christian philosophy to

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understand an important role for the crucified Christ in Christian philosophy and wisdom. Perhaps it also would identify some academic embarrassment in acknowledging a role for the crucified Christ in a philosophy. This may result from what Martin Luther (in his Heidelberg Disputation of 1518) called “a theology of glory” that fails to acknowledge the fundamental nature of God in Christ crucified. In addition, traditional Western philosophy since the time of Socrates and Plato has not made a personal agent broadly normative for philosophy. Instead, non-personal ideas, values, principles, and truths are normative in traditional Western philosophy, and none of them has intentions or purposes toward humans and their destiny. The Christian message identifies God’s signature intervention in terms of a person, and this person is Christ crucified. If we omit this person, according to the Christian message, we omit the unique manifestation of God’s character and the most profound representation of God’s redemptive purpose toward humans. A personal agent is an intentional power-center, owing to his or her power of intentional action, and only such an agent could represent the kind of intentional power-center God is, namely a morally perfect actor with a redemptive purpose. A mere principle or idea does not capture such a powercenter; only a genuine person can. The crucified Christ, we shall see, is a nuisance for any discipline assuming that the main task for inquirers is intellectual, that is, to think hard in a certain way for the sake of satisfactory understanding. Instead, the main task may be inherently moral in a distinctive way, in relation to God and God’s chosen representative for humans. This would make sense if God’s aim is to reconcile wayward humans to God in an ongoing morally good relationship, and not just to give them evidence, beliefs, or understanding regarding God’s existence. The reconciliation sought by a morally perfect God would engage and challenge people as moral agents, and not just as thinkers. It would seek to encourage people to be conformed to God’s moral character in an interactive relationship, for the sake of their deepening reconciliation to God. We shall see what this kind of reconciliation entails, in the hope of illuminating Paul’s insight: “In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us” (2 Cor. 5:19; NRSV here and in subsequent biblical translations). Given this insight, we can set aside any bad theology implying that God punished Jesus on the cross. (For a correction to the latter mistake, in Moltmann 1974 and others, see Boff 1987, pp. 104–16.) A straightforward way to put the person of Christ at the center of Christian philosophy is to make such philosophy “Christ-shaped” in its content and mode. That would be to make the ultimate “wisdom” of philosophy likewise Christ-shaped, and any knowledge of God involved in such wisdom would be similarly Christ-shaped. Being Christ-shaped would have two distinctive

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features: It would have at its center a filial relationship of fellowship with a personal God (the divine Father of Jesus), and this relationship would be crosscentered after the Gethsemane obedience exemplified by the historic Jesus Christ. Jesus thus becomes the personal standard—the Lord—for philosophy, in his personal character, his distinctive actions, and his teaching content. His lordship, we shall see, bears on the content and the mode of Christian philosophy. We will clarify this lesson, in order to identify how Christian philosophy and wisdom are scandalous power but fragmentary in their theoretical reach. We thus shall see how Christian philosophy can avoid the mere theism offered by various advocates and advisors for Christian philosophy. In the Christian message, Jesus Christ is the supreme mediator and savior from God for humans; he is the perfect self-expression of God in relation to humans. Only a personal mediator who shares God’s personal moral character could adequately represent this personal God for the sake of relating to humans. Only a personal mediator could adequately show God’s moral character as worthy of worship and thus as perfectly loving toward other personal agents, including enemies of God. In addition, God would need to rely on a personal mediator if God wants the mediator to have and to exhibit intentional power, particularly the intentional power representing God’s character of moral perfection and gracious love. A failure to represent such power would be a failure to represent God as worthy of worship. Worthiness of worship requires having morally impeccable intentions in action. The personal character of a morally perfect God would be defined by agapē as unselfish self-sacrificial love for the good of others. This is the kind of righteous love motivating the crucified Christ in yielding to rejection and death at the hands of humans. He manifests the character of his divine Father in this regard. P. T. Forsyth remarks: The Stoic death was self-inflicted in moral pride; Christ’s life was laid down in spiritual humility [before God]. The one was self-asserting its power and freedom to destroy self, the other was self-bowing to the will of God and finding a new self. There is a whole spiritual world between the self-sacrifice of Christ and the selfslaughter of the Stoic—as much as between the heroic suicide of the Stoic and the cowardly suicide of the debauchee. (1904, p. 125)

Paul puts the matter bluntly, in terms of divine love: “God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). Under divine authority, Christ’s self-giving agapē aims for the good of others, but it looks weak, vulnerable, offensive, and even pathetic by the standard of worldly power as domination and control. In contrast with that standard, the crucified Christ fails to represent a god who always triumphs in domination, and thus fails to underwrite a theology of glory. People routinely assume that an all-powerful God would prevail with dominating power over challengers, but a mediator and savior who yields to

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crucifixion and death by humans would contradict that assumption. Such a mediator and savior would be offensive, even scandalous, relative to that common assumption. In the Corinthian correspondence of Paul, we find affirmation of the divine scandal of weakness in the redemption of humans via the crucified Christ. If Christian philosophy ignores this scandal, it will miss out on the divine wisdom hidden but present in the crucified Christ. (On the pertinent kind of hiddenness, see Moser 2017, chapter 3.) We can benefit from attention to Paul’s distinctive perspective on Christian wisdom, as a means to illuminating Christian philosophy. (On the role of scandal in the New Testament gospels, and in Kierkegaard, see McCracken 1994; more generally on Jesus and wisdom, see Witherington 1994.)

PAUL ’S P E R S O N A L I S M Personalism about wisdom entails that wisdom is inherently a personal, intentional agent, and not just a body of information, rules, or guidelines. Such personalism accommodates interpersonal filial wisdom of the kind found in Jesus Christ as he relates to his divine Father. Paul endorses personalism about wisdom in his referring to “Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:24) and to “Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God” (1 Cor. 1:30). What does Paul mean in calling a person, the person Jesus Christ, “the wisdom of God”? Marcus Dods comments on Paul’s view of wisdom from God in Christ: The very fact that it was a Person, not a system of philosophy, that Paul proclaimed was sufficient proof that he was not anxious to become the founder of a school or the head of a party. It was to another Person, not to himself, he directed the attention and faith of his hearers. And that which permanently distinguishes Christianity from all philosophies is that it presents to men, not a system of truth to be understood, but a Person to be relied upon. Christianity is not the bringing of new truth to us so much as the bringing of a new Person to us. The manifestation of God in Christ is in harmony with all truth; but we are not required to perceive and understand that harmony, but to believe in Christ. (1891, p. 53)

Paul’s message, following the central Christian message, focuses on a person from God, a purposive agent who, with intentional power from God, perfectly represents God as mediator and savior for humans. In identifying this person, the person of Christ, with wisdom from God, Paul weds intentional power to Christian wisdom. He thereby contrasts it with the wisdom offered by humans, including the wisdom of philosophers. The latter wisdom, with its focus on ideas and principles, is more convenient and less challenging for humans than wisdom anchored in a scandalous intentional agent. Such an agent can

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probe more deeply in human experience and conscience than any mere idea or principle. This explains the widespread aversion of many philosophers and others to distinctively Christian, person-centered wisdom. Paul thinks of the person of Christ as God’s wisdom for humans, because Christ, as an intentional agent, gives humans lasting good life from and with God. He is and offers the kind of life sought, at least in the abstract, by Socrates and Plato: life worth living and dying for. It is worth living and dying for, because it is life from and with God, the one who alone supplies and sustains lasting good life. No mere principle or idea could give humans lasting good life with God, because neither a principle nor an idea gives life to humans, even if it gives a notion or a theory of life. Much of Christian philosophy proceeds as if reconciled life with God is irrelevant or at best a side-show for divine wisdom for humans. It thus risks becoming irrelevant to people interested in a lasting good life. Christ crucified, in Paul’s understanding, links God with a scandal of “foolishness” and even “weakness” (1 Cor. 1:23, 25, 18). The underlying issue is: What kind of God would have and allow God’s supreme representative to undergo torture and death by crucifixion at the hands of humans? In that scenario, human power defeats divine power, and this entails a God who is foolish and weak. Perhaps this result explains the typical absence of the crucified Christ from so-called “Christian philosophy” and from familiar “advice” for Christian philosophers. It seems less embarrassing to defend the reasonableness of mere theism, without involving the crucified Christ (see Rom. 1:16). God’s supreme agent, in typical human thinking, should not suffer and die under human power, because God is more powerful than any power from humans. This assumption would fit with a theology of glory and contradict Paul’s theology of the cross. The Christian scandal of foolishness and weakness emerges not just from an event, but primarily from a scandalous person, the person of Christ crucified. He is a scandalous intentional power-center, owing to the divine intentional power characteristic of him. Dods comments on this offensive power: [The people around Jesus] could not understand that to remain on the Cross was the true proof of Divinity. The Cross seemed to them a confession of weakness. They sought a demonstration that the power of God was in Christ, and they were pointed to the Cross. But to them the Cross was a stumbling block they could not get over. And yet in it was the whole power of God for the salvation of the world. All the power that dwells in God to draw men out of sin to holiness and to Himself was actually in the Cross. For the power of God that is required to draw men to Himself is not power to alter the course of rivers or change the site of mountains, but power to sympathize, to make men’s sorrows His own, to sacrifice self, to give all for the needs of His creatures. To them that believe in the God there revealed, the Cross is the power of God. It is [the] love of God. (1891, pp. 55–6)

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God’s love (agapē), then, is an intentional power for action, but it is a scandalous power alien to the human power of domination. Its scandal comes from God and God’s supreme mediator who enact, for human benefit, the power of self-sacrificial love instead of domination toward wayward humans. That power is no mere supplement to characteristic human power, but is a replacement of it. As a result, it is scandalous for humans set on their own characteristic power. The divine scandal in Christ is not just the surprise that God is self-giving in love toward undeserving humans. It goes deeper. We humans do not fully, or even adequately, understand the self-giving love of God in Christ crucified, particularly with regard to the severity of what Christ experienced. H. R. Mackintosh explains: The great reason why we fail to understand Calvary is not merely that we are not profound enough, it is that we are not good enough. It is because we are such strangers to sacrifice that God’s sacrifice leaves us bewildered. It is because we love so little that His love is mysterious. We have never forgiven anybody at such a cost as His. We have never taken the initiative in putting a quarrel right with His kind of unreserved willingness to suffer. It is our unlikeness to God that hangs as an obscuring screen impeding our view, and we see the Atonement [in Christ] so often through the frosted glass of our own lovelessness. (1938, pp. 176–7; cf. Glover 1917, p. 182)

Our inadequate understanding of Christ crucified stems from our being strangers to lived self-sacrifice out of unselfish agapē for the good of others. Even if we have a sketchy intellectual understanding, we lack a felt understanding that bears on our will and affections. We tend to be like the apostle Peter, who advises Jesus not to go to Jerusalem to be crucified (Mark 8:32, Matt. 16:22). Jesus responds by indicating that Peter’s advice is that of an adversary, even Satan, and not a supporter. According to Mark’s gospel, “he rebuked Peter and said, ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things’” (Mark 8:33). Here we find a clear protest against separating Jesus from his crucifixion. Advice to Christian philosophers should accommodate this protest, for the sake of attending to the genuine Christ and thereby moving beyond mere theism to Christian theism. We can go a bit deeper into the redemptive scandal in Christ crucified. Why would God appear to add insult to injury in allowing for Jesus’s tortured cry of dereliction on the cross? According to Mark’s Gospel: “At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’” (Mark 15:34; cf. Matt. 27:46). Why, specifically, is God’s redemptive high-point so severe for Christ, leading to what looks like (at least felt) child abandonment, if only for a time? One might invoke a need for divine self-identification with humans in their

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suffering. Why, however, should God allow in the first place for the severity of human experience that calls for a needed divine response to felt abandonment? We lack not only a full but also a satisfactory answer to this question. As a result, our best explanation of the suffering of the crucified Christ, and of many other humans, is at best fragmentary and less than satisfactory. (For discussion of this matter in relation to the absence of a full theodicy, see Moser 2018a; on divine severity, see Moser 2013.) The explanatory value of the Christian message is not just incomplete but notably unsatisfactory in various areas. (This allows, of course, for its nonetheless being more satisfactory than various competitors.) The area of extreme unjust suffering is particularly difficult for its serving as or yielding a satisfactory explanation. One thus will be offended, scandalized, in expecting God to supply a worldview with impeccable explanatory value; God has not done so. This consideration bears on evidence and epistemology regarding God. It suggests that the Christian message is not ultimately an impeccable explanation of the world at large; nor does this message figure in a larger worldview that yields an impeccable explanation of relevant data. Dods comments: “If we believe in Christianity because it approves itself to our judgment as the best solution of the problems of life, that is well; but still, if that be all that draws us to Christ, our faith stands in the wisdom of men rather than in the power of God . . . Have we allowed the Cross of Christ to make its peculiar impression upon us?” (1891, p. 60). We diminish the power of Christ crucified when we put its focus on its intellectual or explanatory payoff for us. Instead, the cross of Christ is an interpersonal place for our meeting a scandalous personal God of agapē, who loves even his enemies. The Christian message is more about God’s meeting us in our self-surrender than our impeccably explaining the world with acknowledgment of God. A Christian philosophy that neglects this fact distorts the character of the Christian message. Indeed, a philosophy, even under the name of “Christian philosophy” can get in the way of one’s meeting and knowing God. It can obstruct, including with arguments and principles, a direct self-manifestation of God in conscience, thereby creating distance from God’s unique power and thus from God. It can do so by putting the project of theory and explanation, sometimes as an endless preliminary, ahead of the opportunity for meeting God in Christ. Arguments and principles should promote, rather than delay, the latter opportunity. In the end, God’s interpersonal power does the convicting and converting of receptive people; arguments and principles lack the needed intentional power. Philosophical apologetics, however well intentioned, sometimes neglects this important fact (see Moser and Neptune 2017). Advice to Christian philosophers should offer a definite reminder of this consideration.

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SCANDALOUS EVIDENCE God’s distinctive power in Christ crucified yields scandalous evidence of God and a scandalous epistemology for knowing God. This results from the offensive power motivating the divine redemption of humans via Christ crucified. Christian philosophy suffers from a widespread neglect of the distinctive kind of power central to the evidence and epistemology in question, owing to its neglect of the key role of the crucified Christ. We have noted a symptom of this neglect in connection with “Advice to Christian Philosophers,” which leaves one without a basis for a robust Christian philosophy grounded in Christ, God’s supreme revelation, mediator, and savior. Paul saw the crucial role for power from Christ crucified in the evidential basis of faith in God. He writes: “My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God” (1 Cor. 2:4–5). Given that Paul understands the power of God in terms of Christ crucified, he has in mind faith resting on (the evidence from) the power of Christ crucified, that is, the power of a scandalous intentional agent who is severely self-giving for the good of others. The key foundational evidence and power are in a person, and not in an idea or a principle; they thus are irreducible to the ideas and principles of a human philosophy. As a result, Paul contrasts this evidence and power with “human wisdom,” including the wisdom from human philosophy. God would want to be known, and to have his reality known, on the basis of his unique personal power, and not mainly by his theoretical (e.g., explanatory) effects or benefits. This would stem from the fact that God’s unique power would be inherently personal and redemptive toward humans. Paul recommends his personalist approach to evidence for God as follows: “Since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through [its] wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe” (1 Cor. 1:21). Paul notes that the world did not “know God” through its wisdom, including the wisdom of the world’s philosophers. His understanding of “knowing God” goes beyond mere factual knowledge that God exists, the latter knowledge being compatible with hating God (see James 2:19). Paul has in mind something more directly interpersonal, along the lines of what has come to be called “I–Thou” knowledge of God, in the wake of Kierkegaard (1846) and Buber (1958 [1923]). Such knowledge requires some kind of direct acquaintance with the person known, even if the knowledge is partial rather than comprehensive. The direct acquaintance with God would stem from what Paul, following Isaiah, thought of as God’s “self-manifestation” to humans (Rom. 10:20). God’s unique personal and moral character would set his distinctive epistemic standards

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and self-evidence for humans. Aiming at redemptive self-manifestation for humans, God would self-reveal this character to humans somehow in their experience. Paul finds this self-manifestation on two fronts, one public and the other inward: in the historical episode of the crucified Christ (1 Cor. 1:18, 24, 2:2), and in one’s current personal experience, in one’s “heart.” Regarding the inward front, Paul remarks: “Hope [in God] does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Rom 5:5; cf. Rom. 8:14–16). Divine self-manifestation fits with the biblical theme of God as sui generis and thus swearing by himself alone instead of by some lesser figure (Heb. 6:13). This kind of self-evidencing and self-authenticating on God’s part would invite people to adjust to divine evidence rather than to have God conform to human expectations for divine evidence. This order of epistemological priority will be offensive for many inquirers, particularly those who put human expectations first, before divine expectations. It seems to offend even many advocates of “Christian” philosophy who prefer to approach God via some approach other than Christ crucified. This may explain the widespread neglect of divine self-evidencing in such philosophy. P. T. Forsyth comments on the relevant inward experience as irreducibly interpersonal: Our experience of Christ is thus quite different from our experience of an objective world. Our moral sense of an agent, and that agent a Redeemer, is a different thing from the inference or postulate of an objective world behind sense to account for our impressions. That may be a cause but this is a Creator. When the objective announces itself as a heart and will, which not only chooses, or influences, me, but saves me, then the response of my active will, of myself as a person, is a different thing from the common sense that instinctively places an object behind passive sensation. The relation of a cause to a sensation is not analogous to the relation of a person to a person. (1909, pp. 47–8)

As an intentional agent seeking human redemption, God would be after the (uncoercive) conviction of humans toward cooperation with God’s selfmanifested will. The experienced content of this effort would not be passive or static, but would be active in human conscience, at least if humans do not ignore or suppress their conscience. It would indicate an intentional agent at work in conscience, seeking to convict humans in the direction of what they most need. It would include a kind of intentional leading toward God’s moral character whereby one could say: “All who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God” (Rom. 8:14). (For more on the inward experience of divine conviction and leading, see Moser 2017, 2018b, 2018c.) Forsyth remarks on a typical depersonalizing approach to human knowledge of God: “The common vice of [many] imperfect forms of religion is that they treat God as an object of knowledge more or less theoretic, instead of treating him

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as the subject of a knowledge, which is inceptive and creative [and] searching” (1913, p. 151). The same vice applies to many forms of philosophy, including Christian philosophy. It is a serious vice because it neglects God’s inherently intentional, and thus personal, character, as self-manifested and active toward humans. Part of the correction would acknowledge that divine evidence and wisdom for humans are ultimately self-revealed by God, and not argued to by humans (see 1 Cor. 2:9–10, 12–13). The correction also would include a distinctive interpersonal role for God in human experience, such as the experience in morally challenging conscience. God supplies the evidence of God needed by humans; they cannot supply it themselves via argument or philosophy. In divine self-revelation, we have a basis for a sharp contrast between a gift and a source of human self-boasting. As a result, Paul asks: “What do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?” (1 Cor. 4:7). His questions concern a range of gifts from God, but include, in particular, an evidential gift of the experienced power of agapē in divine self-manifestation. This is cognitive grace at work in human experience. (On the broader notion of grace in Paul, see Barclay 2015.) Much philosophy, including much Christian philosophy, diminishes the primary role of divine self-revelation and personal power in God’s relating to humans. It does so by assuming a need for a human contribution to evidence of God that leads to human boasting in something other than God and God’s revelation in Christ (see 1 Cor. 1:28–9, 31, 3:21). The latter boasting yields factions of the kind seen widely in philosophy and religion. Many theorists, however, favor such a contribution over the offense of a simple gift from God that removes human self-credit and boasting. God would prefer to offer a gift of self-revelation, in Paul’s language, in order to shame the wise and powerful among humans (1 Cor. 1:27). The shaming would be a redemptive challenge to acknowledge the inferiority of human wisdom to God’s wisdom. Philosophical sophistication, in any case, would be no requirement or automatic benefit for receiving the gift of God’s self-revelation. The epistemological scandal is that God’s ultimate evidence for selfrevelation to humans does not rely on human arguments or any other source of human self-boasting or self-credit. The relevant evidence from God’s selfrevelation removes the basis for human self-credit and thus offends humans with a tendency to self-boasting. This is not a ground for the monergism of Calvinism, because it allows for the role of an independent human will in receiving God’s gift. (For some problems with monergism, see Moser 2018d.) The latter role concerns the reception of a gift, and does not entail earning or meriting the gift. As a result, one cannot take credit for the gift’s being offered to one, and it would be perverse indeed to take credit for merely receiving a gift offered without human merit. A divine gift of self-revelation thus can leave humans responsible for receiving the gift in the manner intended by God.

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C. K. Barrett comments on familiar religious and intellectual egocentricity: Religious egocentricity will inevitably find Christ crucified . . . a scandal (something that trips men up), for in the cross God does precisely the opposite of what he is expected to do; the intellectual egocentricity of wisdom-seeking Gentiles finds the same theme folly, because incarnation, crystallized in crucifixion, means not that man has speculated his way up to God but that God has come down to man where man is. (1968, p. 55)

Speculating “our way up to God” might include our arguing our way up to God, as some philosophers have been known to try. Robert Nozick (1981, pp. 4–7) has identified the use of arguments by various philosophers to dominate and coerce the thinking of others in various areas. This mode of using evidence, however, has no foothold in our evidence from God. The latter evidence does not (aim to) coerce human wills, but is rejectable by humans. This feature is typical of a gift offered to humans, and it removes a basis for human self-credit. The removal of human pride here creates an opportunity for human yielding to God with due humility and teachableness. It counters the “intellectual egocentricity” that easily takes credit where credit is not due. A noteworthy problem stems from an observation of Cicero on the arguments used by Stoic philosophers: “Their meagre little syllogisms are mere pin-pricks; they may convince the intellect, but they cannot convert the heart, and the hearer goes away no better than he came” (1914, iv. 31). Evidence from an intentional agent’s self-manifestation, in contrast, can convict and convert a person. It can do so because it can manifest a moral character that sets a contrasting standard in one’s felt experience, thereby calling one up short at a level of moral depth. This can occur in conscience, where the power of moral conviction is widely experienced by humans. Arguments, in any case, are not the best kind of evidence in this area. Divine character-manifestation would be more effective for any needed conviction and conversion of humans. How, then, is evidence from God to be appropriated by humans? The short but severe answer: by dying to one’s selfishness by living for something (better, someone) else. The answer is thus in embraced lordship of the one who perfectly manifests divine self-giving for others. Neglect of this lordship will block a philosophy from being distinctively Christian.

APPROPRIATING S CANDALOUS EVIDENCE Paul offers a distinctive way of knowing a person, beyond “a human point of view.” It includes a special way of appropriating evidence regarding a person: The love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no

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longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them. From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! (2 Cor. 5:14–17)

The needed appropriation of the scandalous evidence of Christ crucified is indicated in this remark: “he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died . . . ” It is appropriation by living not selfishly but for the self-giving one who died for us, out of divine agapē. This amounts to appropriation as Gethsemane-style obedience to God, the kind of obedience Paul cites as the motivation for Jesus himself in yielding to crucifixion by humans (Phil. 2:8). Jesus exemplifies such obedience in his Gethsemane prayer: “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want” (Mark 14:36). Gethsemane-style appropriation of evidence fits with Jesus’s injunction to “take up one’s cross” (Matt. 16:24, Luke 9:23) and Paul’s injunction to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 13:14). In thus obeying, one can reflect the divine self-giving power of the crucified Christ, where divine “power is made perfect in [human] weakness” (2 Cor 12:9). Paul thus thinks of a Christian as one who is co-crucified with Christ (see Gal. 2:20, 6:14, 2 Cor. 4:10). We thus might say that appropriation of the scandalous evidence is itself Christ-shaped in relying on imitatio Christi, which in turn is imitatio Dei. Such appropriation makes the cross of Christ contemporaneous with the life of a disciple, rather than a mere historical artifact. The process of appropriating the scandalous evidence is inherently interpersonal. Forsyth remarks: “As Revelation is God disposing of His personality to us in grace, faith, if we are to answer in kind, can only answer by disposing of our personality to Him. We do not respond according to an irresistible law of our nature, but according to a free choice of our will” (1913, p. 163). So, the process is not coercive, but it does demand a full personal commitment to God in Christ, as a life-priority. It does not allow for mere intellectual acceptance, but calls for sincere volitional resolve in its favor. In this regard, it is irreducibly personal, in response to irreducible personal evidence. The process is person-forming and character-defining in a manner more challenging than a mere intellectual commitment. The evidence in question does not leave one with wishful thinking. Leander Keck explains Paul’s position: Those who believe this word of the cross know it as both the power of God and the wisdom of God. How will they know this? In a word, they have experienced the rectitude of God as rectification, the holiness of God as sanctification and the power of God as redemption because in believing the word of the cross they know that God made Christ ‘our wisdom, our righteousness and sanctification and redemption’, as 1 Cor. 1:30 puts it. (1983, p. 153)

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It would be more accurate to speak of those who believe in the God of the word of the cross, because merely believing a word can be just intellectual, and not receptive of divine power. Even so, one’s actual experience of divine rectitude (or goodness) would include the experience of God’s agapē (as noted in connection with Romans 5:5), and this includes divine forgiveness. This experience is interpersonal in a way that undermines the parading of it as a mere commodity for human exploitation. Why is this perspective on distinctively Christian evidence and wisdom, in terms of Christ crucified, a best kept secret, even in Christian circles? The answer is that a certain disease, which we may call resurrectionitis, figures in the misguided secrecy. We need to disable it, for the sake of a Christ-shaped philosophy and its unique wisdom.

CONTRA RESURRECTIONITIS Christian philosophy, like the Christian church in general, has suffered from the disease of resurrectionitis. This disease includes the valuing of resurrection results without due valuing of the moral character and power of the crucified Christ who was resurrected by God. It focuses on triumphal power, including triumphal intellectual power, without due focus on the self-giving power of the crucified Christ. It neglects the one who was raised by God in approval and vindication of his cross-shaped moral character before God. (We have noted this neglect in connection with “Advice to Christian Philosophers.”) Christ’s scandalous but impeccable moral character prioritizes Gethsemane obedience to God’s command to show self-giving agapē to God’s enemies, that is, typical humans. It counters the boasting and pride characteristic of triumphal human power, including intellectual power, and manifests instead God’s selfsacrificial power for the good of others. The resurrection of Jesus is the divine vindication or approval of the crucified Christ, and cannot be properly understood without the Christ whose Gethsemane obedience to God led to his crucifixion and death. Resurrection then, as noted by Georges Casalis “is not a victory over the cross; it is the victory of the cross . . . The reason why the cross is a victory is that it has opened a breach, once for all, in the prison wall of the selfish will to power” (1984, pp. 75, 74). This cross-centered understanding of resurrection counters what Douglas John Hall calls “resurrectionism,” that is, “a blend of cultic-folkloric heroism, New World optimism, and religious triumphalism” (1993, p. 96). Resurrectionitis as just characterized can be motivated by such resurrectionism, to the detriment of the Christian message of the crucified Christ, but it also can stem from other motivations among humans, such as selfishness and self-promotion.

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The Christian message ceases to be Christian if it omits the central role of Christ crucified. The same is true for Christian philosophy, or anything Christian, for that matter. Keck observes: “For Paul, [the Christian message of] the gospel does not merely have its origin in the event which the cross epitomizes, but has its permanent criterion and center in the cross, so that the word of the cross is the means by which that event reaches hearers as a revelation [from God] which redeems” (1983, p. 147). If, for explicit clarification, we replace “the cross” here with “Christ crucified,” we have an important lesson that can guard against the corrosive effects of resurrectionitis. It counsels against removing Christ crucified from our thinking and talking of divine resurrection. It thereby keeps the Gethsemane obedience of Christ, and in turn of his disciples, front and center in Christian thinking and acting. In doing so, it safeguards the divine power available to humans from its many counterfeits, including intellectual triumphalism in philosophy and elsewhere. Resurrectionitis is an old problem among Christians, including Christian intellectuals. We find it in the earliest church at Corinth, founded by Paul himself. It led to Paul’s clear reminder to the Corinthian Christians: “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). Paul, of course, had in mind the Christ raised from the dead by God, but his point is that this Christ is inextricably the crucified Christ. Omitting the crucified Christ leaves no one worthy of resurrection by God, including God’s supreme mediator and savior, and thus drains resurrection of its moral power in human history. Resurrection then becomes something morally defective, and invites the infamous moral problems haunting the earliest church at Corinth, complete with intellectual/religious factions and sexual immorality. Such problems are, obviously, still with us today. Ernst Käsemann gets Paul right: “By declaring that he had ‘decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified’ (1 Cor. 2:2), Paul emphasizes that the core of his doctrine of resurrection remains the cross. The point is that the resurrection is one aspect of the message of the cross, not that the cross is simply one chapter in a book of resurrection dogmatics” (1969, pp. 67–8). He elaborates: Christian existence thrives only under the cross. If it breaks away from that place, even by a very little, if it is wearing a halo that keeps the shadow from being seen, then that life is not Christian . . . We can remain under the power of the resurrection, and in the real hope of being ourselves raised again, only when the crucified Christ rules over us and is glorified through us. (1969, pp. 71–2)

The point is really about which of the many alleged christs in circulation is actually one’s Lord. Paul assumes as much in announcing: “We do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’s sake” (2 Cor. 4:5, italics added; see Savage 1996, pp. 154–7). Of course, Paul has in mind the crucified Jesus Christ as Lord.

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A choice remains to be made about lordship by each person able to inquire, inside or outside philosophy. This choice rarely emerges clearly in philosophy as commonly practiced, including Christian philosophy. This philosophical blind spot only hinders candid inquiry, and it leaves Christian philosophy without its needed focus and normative framework. At some point, Christian philosophy should point to the crucified Christ, in order to clarify which lord is operative for it. Otherwise, it may be only nominally Christian. If our preferred Christ is not the crucified Christ, we do not have God’s approved Christ or God’s corresponding resurrection power. We do not then have the genuine Christian article. The reason is clear: Divine power for humans is not in human triumph, including intellectual triumph, but in human self-surrender to and cooperation with God’s power in the crucified, self-giving Christ. Resurrectionitis, then, is a counterfeit of Christian truth. Its god is not the God and Father of the crucified Christ. It rests on a disease of misplaced human self-assertion over divine power. It calls for a cure, and not an endorsement. The cure is only in the divine power it diminishes for the sake of misplaced human self-assertion. In the end, humans are themselves responsible for discerning and embracing the curative power needed, to the exclusion of contrary powers.

WH ITHER CHRISTIAN PHILOSO PH Y? Divine power is not adequately captured in our intellectual abilities to explain, question, and solve problems. These abilities are, at their very best, fragmentary and broken, as our limits in accounting for unjust suffering, including that of the crucified Christ, show clearly. These limits undermine any boasting in Christian philosophy as offering a satisfactory account of the overall human predicament. It does not offer such an account if the latter requires a satisfactory account of the unjust suffering among us. At best, we “know in part” and “see through a lens dimly,” as candor in the face of unjust suffering makes undeniable. Where do our obvious intellectual limits leave Christian philosophy? In fragments, in the best scenario. Even so, our intellectual fragments do not undermine our meeting God in scandalous divine power, the signature power of Christ crucified. They do not defeat the unique evidence from divine selfmanifestation in human conscience. God’s salient power and self-evidence can emerge in our experience without our having a satisfactory explanation of our world at large. God, then, can work in and around our intellectual fragments, even redemptively. In our fragments, we lack an adequate base to approach God with human triumph, whether intellectual or otherwise. Instead, we should approach with

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due modesty and submission, as modeled by Christ in Gethsemane. We should approach God after and with the crucified Christ, the one who first approached with Gethsemane submission to please God for our sake. In his Gethsemane mode and power, we approach God and appropriate God’s unique power, not with our satisfactory theories, but in an interpersonal, I–Thou meeting. Christian philosophy should make room for this vital meeting, and embrace without shame the vital significance of this meeting for humans, even for philosophers. Perhaps shame persists among some Christian philosophers, relative to the key role of Christ crucified, as a result of their failure to embrace the reality or the value of this meeting. We now can see the bearing of Christ crucified on any Christian philosophy worthy of the name. Of course, people can use the term “Christian philosophy” however they wish (and its uses are wildly diverse), but if we want to accommodate the historic Christ, we face definite limits. In particular, we face the scandalous limit of the crucified Christ in his supreme revelation of God. Specifically, Christian philosophy may not proceed without its defining anchor in the crucified Christ. Otherwise, it is not Christian in its message. This Christ is central to any distinctively Christian message, including that of any Christian philosophy. Any advice to Christian philosophers should follow suit. As an intentional agent, the crucified Christ manifests a moral personal character, distinctive actions, and teaching content. These set the core personal standard, a normative framework, for the central content and mode of Christian philosophy. This is a standard for the lordship of the crucified Christ, even over Christian philosophy and Christian philosophers. It includes two important priorities for Christian philosophy and Christian philosophers. First, this personal standard in Christ gives priority to the divine wisdom that seeks the reconciliation of all humans to God in the crucified Christ, including their Gethsemane-based fellowship with God as personal agents. This is part of the “great commission” announced by Jesus in Matthew 28:16–20. Christian philosophy should not proceed as if this charge has nothing to do with Christian philosophers. Second, the personal standard in Christ gives priority to a mode of interpersonal exchange that manifests his self-giving moral character for others. This will remove boasting, arrogance, and rudeness from the practice of Christian philosophy. We can allow a Christian philosopher to make an implicitly Christian contribution at times, but that is not definitive of what Christian philosophy is. (For discussion of an implicit, merely kingdom-enhancing contribution, see Moser 2017, chapter 4.) We have seen that Christ crucified has a role definitive of what Christian philosophy is. A noteworthy result of this role is that in Christian philosophy some intellectual pursuits need to be made subsidiary or postponed relative to the priority found in the personal standard of Christ. Many philosophers find this result scandalous, as expected, but this indicates a

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matter of lordship for a person. If the crucified Christ is Lord, we have a standard that sets a priority for content and mode in Christian philosophy. We will choose whether to embrace such lordship. We should say of philosophy what Käsemann has said of theology: “No theology that does not lead us to [the crucified] Jesus deserves the term ‘Christian,’ however interesting it may otherwise be. A theology . . . that does not become a theology of the cross is bound to lead, as the Corinthian example shows, to wrong-headed enthusiasm” (1969, p. 82). Correspondingly, no philosophy that does not lead us to the crucified Jesus Christ deserves the term “Christian,” however much “advice” its advocates offer to Christian philosophers. A philosophy that does not offer a philosophy of the cross is bound to lead away from the heart of the Christian God and message: the crucified Christ. The result will be, at best, a counterfeit of the real article. We can make this point without collapsing Christian philosophy into Christian theology, given the wider scope of philosophy. Even so, Christian philosophy owes its existence and value to divine revelation in Christ crucified. The Christian antidote to counterfeits of the true God is not a mere principle or idea, but a person who seeks interpersonal meeting: Christ crucified. This person, God’s supreme mediator and savior, offers Christian philosophy a needed focus, guide, and Lord. His moral character will give needed moral character to the pursuit of Christian philosophy, courtesy of imitatio Christi. Christian philosophy under his lordship will become Christ-shaped, in content and in mode. It thereby will lead to its Lord and thus to its God, if indirectly at times. As a result, it will be irreducible to any philosophical alternative to Christian philosophy under Christ crucified. This lesson holds even if we now lack a recipe that yields all of the ingredients of a Christian philosophy. We can start with the center, Christ crucified, and allow his lordship, in an interpersonal I–Thou meeting, to lead an inquirer in matters of detail. This will sound foolish from the standpoint of much philosophy, but we have been prepared for that scandalous result. We now have the benefit, in all situations, of the unmatched moral character of Christ crucified, as portrayed in 1 Corinthians 13, and this living character bears directly on Christian philosophy and Christian philosophers: If I . . . understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way . . . it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. We know only in part . . . but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. Now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

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WORKS CITED Barclay, John M. G. 2015. Paul and the Gift. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Barrett, C. K. 1968. A Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians. New York: Harper & Row. Boff, Leonardo. 1987. Passion of Christ, Passion of the World. Trans. R. R. Barr. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Buber, Martin. 1958 [1923]. I and Thou. Trans. R. G. Smith. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Casalis, Georges. 1984. “Jesus—Neither Abject Lord nor Heavenly Monarch.” In Faces of Jesus. Ed. Jose Bonino. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, pp. 72–6. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. 1914. De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum. Trans. H. Rackham (Loeb Classical Library). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dods, Marcus. 1891. The First Epistle to the Corinthians (The Expositor’s Bible). London: Hodder & Stoughton. Forsyth, P. T. 1904. “The Paradox of Christ.” London Quarterly Review 102: 111–38. Forsyth, P. T. 1909. Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, 2nd Ed. London: Independent Press. Forsyth, P. T. 1913. The Principle of Authority. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Glover, T. R. 1917. The Jesus of History. London: Association Press. Hall, Douglas John. 1993. Professing the Faith. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Käsemann, Ernst. 1969. “For and Against a Theology of Resurrection.” In Jesus Means Freedom. Trans. Frank Clarke. London: SCM Press, pp. 59–84. Keck, Leander. 1983. “Biblical Preaching as Divine Wisdom.” In A New Look at Preaching. Ed. John Burke. Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, pp. 137–56. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1846. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. Trans. and ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1850. Practice in Christianity. Trans. and ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. McCracken, David. 1994. The Scandal of the Gospels. New York: Oxford University Press. Mackintosh, H. R. 1938. “An Indisputable Argument.” In Sermons. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, pp. 171–9. Moltmann, Jürgen. 1974. The Crucified God. Trans. R. A. Wilson and John Bowden. New York: Harper & Row. Moser, Paul K. 2013. The Severity of God. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moser, Paul K. 2017. The God Relationship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moser, Paul K. 2018a. “Theodicy, Christology, and Divine Hiding: Neutralizing the Problem of Evil.” Expository Times 129: 191–200. Available at: http://journals. sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0014524617743183. Moser, Paul K. 2018b. “Convictional Knowledge, Science, and the Spirit of Christ.” In Christ and the Created Order. Ed. Andrew Torrance and Tom McCall. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Academic/Harper, pp. 197–213. Moser, Paul K. 2018c. “Divine Hiddenness, Agapē Conviction, and Spiritual Discernment.” In Sensing Things Divine: Towards a Constructive Account of Spiritual

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Perception. Ed. Paul Gavrilyuk and Frederick Aquino. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moser, Paul K. 2018d. “Pascal’s Wager and the Ethics for Inquiry about God.” In Pascal’s Wager. Ed. Paul Bartha and Lawrence Pasternack. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 64–83. Moser, Paul K. and Clinton Neptune. 2017. “Is Traditional Natural Theology Cognitively Presumptuous?” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 9: 213–22. Niebuhr, Reinhold. 1949. Faith and History. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Nozick, Robert. 1981. Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Savage, Timothy. 1996. Power through Weakness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Witherington, Ben. 1994. Jesus the Sage. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.

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14 Is Plantinga-Style Christian Philosophy Really Philosophy? J. L. Schellenberg

Many different sorts of intellectual activity have won the label “Christian philosophy.” One of the most influential—certainly in recent years—is that associated with Alvin Plantinga and his friends and associates. It will be my focus in this chapter. Like Plantinga himself, many practitioners of Christian philosophy identify with the Reformed tradition of Protestant Christianity and accept the basic ideas of what has come to be known as “Reformed epistemology.” So one would not go far wrong in thinking of the variety of Christian philosophy to be discussed here as Reformed Christian philosophy (RCP). That is how I will characterize it. RCP has won many adherents and looks set to win many more. Not surprisingly, given its name, it has filled many pages confidently put forward and serenely accepted as containing the results of philosophy. Here it is apt to note that the journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers, Faith and Philosophy, which provides a home for RCP, is regularly characterized both by Christians and by others as one of the foremost journals in philosophy of religion. But what if RCP, so widely regarded as a form of philosophy, isn’t properly regarded as such? What if we shouldn’t think of it as being philosophy at all? This idea may seem shocking initially, but it becomes much less so on reflection. In this chapter I will defend the proposal that this idea is true.

REFORMED CHRISTIAN P HILOSOPHY First, however, we need to clarify how RCP is to be understood. Plantinga’s account of Christian philosophy begins with philosophical theology, characterized as follows: “Philosophical theology is a matter of thinking about central

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doctrines of the Christian faith from a philosophical perspective; it is a matter of employing the resources of philosophy to deepen our grasp and understanding of them” (Plantinga 1998, p. 340). Plantinga then distinguishes between philosophical theology and what he calls Christian philosophy, which includes philosophical theology as he understands it but also includes apologetics (both negative and positive), philosophically developed critiques of culture, and constructive Christian philosophy: the attempt to address philosophy’s problems Christianly (Plantinga 1998, p. 335). RCP, I judge, should be regarded as including everything listed here except for positive apologetics, which Plantinga in the same piece actually critiques from a Reformed perspective. The Reformed epistemological view he has developed, central to RCP, maintains that the fundamental beliefs of Christians should have Christian sources, which, instead of arguments, prominently include an experiential sense of the divine. But even without positive apologetics, the task RCP sets for itself is clearly an ambitious and comprehensive one. Some of Plantinga’s friends and associates, including Nicholas Wolterstorff and Michael Rea, speak more of philosophical theology than of Christian philosophy. But since both are adherents of RCP, and seem to regard philosophical theology as something that RCP should concern itself with, we can gain further insight into what RCP is about from what they have to say. In his essay “How Philosophical Theology Became Possible Within the Analytic Tradition of Philosophy,” Wolterstorff speaks of philosophical theologians addressing “such topics as the relation of God to evil, the precise nature of God’s omnipotence, whether God knows what persons will freely do, whether or not God is eternal, impassible, simple, and so forth” (Wolterstorff 2009, p. 155). Although he never attempts a general definition of philosophical theology, Wolterstorff ’s way of assuming that readers will know what he’s talking about, something he regards as renewing the work of medieval Christian thinkers, and his close association with Plantinga, comport well with the thought that what he is describing as “possible within the analytic tradition of philosophy” finds a home within the recent resurgence of Christian thought stimulated by Plantinga’s work. Michael Rea, in the opening pages of The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology, which he edited with Thomas Flint, says that philosophical theology is “aimed primarily at theoretical understanding of the nature and attributes of God, and God’s relationship to the world and things in the world” (Flint and Rea 2009, p. 4). That this includes all of the main Christian themes and everything one might try to do with them in inquiry across a very wide range of problems, employing the resources of philosophy, is evident when one scans the book and its table of contents, noticing discussions of the authority of Scripture, trinity, incarnation, atonement, divine providence and human freedom, divine revelation, the resurrection of the dead, prayer, original sin, and so on.

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Recently, Rea has been advocating the idea of “analytic theology,” but as far as I can tell this is just philosophical theology, as he conceives it, under another name, and promoted in such a way as to attract the interest and presumably the active participation of Christian theologians—it is analytic philosophical theology. Furthermore it seems clear that the Christian philosopher who engages in it from an RCP perspective may still, as Rea sees it, be regarded as doing philosophy. Suppose, however, that I am mistaken about this, and that Rea regards analytic theology as distinct from philosophical theology. Still there would be for Rea, and for many like-minded Christian philosophers, a practice fundamentally like that described by Plantinga, which adherents of RCP may engage in as philosophers doing philosophy. And given what we have found to be the comprehensiveness and ambitiousness of RCP’s vision, this practice has to be regarded as involving the production of answers to many philosophical questions and solutions to philosophical problems (both large and small)— answers and solutions that, in the nature of the case, involve or presuppose the truth of one or more Christian claims.

THE COMMUNAL CONDITION So much for what RCP is, and some of what comes with RCPers saying that it is a way of doing philosophy. But here’s my question: as philosophers, should we say this? I will argue that we should not. My argument for this proposal hinges on (i) a condition that, so I propose, should be accepted as needing to be satisfied if a working out of solutions to philosophical problems or answers to philosophical problems is to count as philosophy—I call it the Communal Condition—and on (ii) the failure of RCP to satisfy this condition, due to its failure to deliver, for the benefit of the broader philosophical community, more than hypothetical results. In this section I develop and defend the Communal Condition.¹ There are many forms of human inquiry, and whatever else philosophy may be, it is one of these. A form of inquiry involves a distinctively inquisitive way of being exhibited in a shared form of life or practice embracing characteristic desires, emotions, and intentions, as well as corresponding action dispositions, primarily but not exclusively involving thought. Philosophy as inquiry has of

¹ In “Continental Philosophy of Religion in a Kenotic Tone”, J. Aaron Simmons (2017) independently makes some similar points about what’s required to be doing philosophy and what Plantinga-style Christian philosophy is in a position to deliver. His view and mine diverge, however, on whether what such intellectual activity delivers is sufficient to make it philosophy.

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course spawned various institutional realities, but the conjunction of such things I would regard as only secondarily deserving the label “philosophy.” It is up to us as human beings to decide how forms of inquiry should be differentiated, and what are the conditions of engaging in one or another of them. It follows that it is up to us as human beings to decide what we will call philosophy. There is of course considerable disagreement on this matter. If there is unanimity on anything relevant at all, it is on the very general idea that philosophy, as a practice of inquiry, is aimed at solving problems whose distinctiveness comes from their being (or their being rooted in problems that are) more fundamental than the problems that tend to be addressed through other disciplines. Philosophy, accordingly, is widely acknowledged to be very hard, and many despair of this area of human inquiry ever progressing very far. This agreed feature of philosophy already shows the plausibility of my proposal: The Communal Condition: to be doing philosophy one must aim not just to solve certain fundamental problems, or contribute thereto, but to do so together with like-minded others in a shared enterprise leading to informed consensus.² To count as doing philosophy one has to consciously be a member of the human philosophical community and functioning as such in the manner indicated. Without acceptance of the Communal Condition we could hardly possess a proper appreciation of what inquiry is or of what “fundamental” signifies in a human context of inquiry (in part, great difficulty), or be putting forward a sufficiently demanding criterion (consensus) for full satisfaction that such difficult problems have indeed been solved. The proposal of this Communal Condition for philosophy will, I expect, seem quite modest and intuitive to many. Perhaps this is because its central idea is taken for granted in other areas of inquiry, particularly in science. As indicated, that idea seems, if anything, even more appropriate given the sorts of problems with which philosophy is concerned. But philosophers can be quite individualistic, focused on developing a vision they can regard as authentically their own. So some who hear my proposal may be inclined to resist its communitarian thrust. Why shouldn’t someone who doesn’t consciously identify with, and function as a member of, the wider human philosophical community in the ways I’ve outlined still count as engaging in the practice of philosophy, so long as she is actively working on philosophical problems?

² “Like-minded,” to exclude the possibility of non-relevant partners, and “informed,” to exclude non-relevant causes for consensus.

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Well, I have given reasons stemming from the nature and needs of inquiry, which anyone concerned about such problems should be able to recognize, provided that they possess even a touch of humility. Here we might also apply moral reasoning that objects to the sort of self-centeredness evinced by noncommunitarian philosophers. But another, and perhaps more illuminating, approach will question whether the philosophical individualist can escape my suggested inflection of the philosophical aim as easily as is here suggested. In crafting her own vision, won’t she be availing herself of the resources and tools thrown up by generations of philosophizing by others, and depending most on those that have won consensus? Won’t she want to see consensus in the future, if only on the view that her own ideas are correct? Alternatively, as a philosopher, mustn’t she care whether her ideas are true, and take consensus on them as at any rate increasing the likelihood that this is the case? If each answer here is “no” then I would surmise that we have another reason for saying that our individualist isn’t doing philosophy, a more fundamental one: namely, in the development of her own vision she isn’t really engaged in inquiry at all, but rather in a non-investigative form of art or of personal therapy or some such thing.³ In any case, as I’ve noted it is up to us as humans to decide how we will understand philosophy, and to that end—as a contribution to inquiry about this matter—I have put forward and justified my proposal. Let’s consider now its implications.

CONSEQUENCES OF THE COMMUNAL CONDITION The Communal Condition has consequences. Consider first that one could hardly be functioning consciously as a member of the human philosophical community in the manner indicated if one were not seeking solutions to philosophical problems that others in the community too would regard as such when informed of them. This is because of the goal of achieving consensus within that community.⁴ Given the Communal Condition, if at ³ My point here may seem opposed to the work of Pierre Hadot (1995), who in Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, and elsewhere, argues that philosophy in the West, as originally practiced, can be seen as a form of therapy. But either such therapy—if that’s what it is—is rooted in inquiry and its appropriate effects on one’s way of life, or it is not. If the former (and this seems to be Hadot’s view), then what I say in the text is not opposed to it. If the latter, then, as indicated earlier, I would not call it philosophy. ⁴ This goal may seem over-ambitious, but to have it one need not hold the view that consensus will be achieved—only that this is (epistemically) possible. The situation here is much like the one we’re in if, as philosophers do, we make it our goal to solve philosophical problems.

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a time one isn’t seeking solutions that others in the community too would regard as such when informed of them, one has in effect, at least for the moment, removed oneself from philosophical activity and its goals—and so there is reason to regard one as not then functioning as a member of the philosophical community. From here it is easy to see that, to be functioning as a member of this community in the manner indicated, one’s proposed solution to a philosophical problem—if one has such a thing as a result of philosophical activity and is proposing it in one’s capacity as a philosopher—must be shareable within the philosophical community. More precisely, it has to be the case that, in principle at least, anyone else in the community could assimilate the intellectual results that are put forward and get to the conclusion that the problem has been solved. More precisely still (and with special attention to that word “could”), a reason or set of reasons to accept the proposed solution is needed, for the understanding of which and appreciation of whose force no capacities are required, and no conditions need to be satisfied, beyond those possessed and satisfied by everyone in the community. Of course, whether others in the community do accept one’s reasons depends on whether they are found forceful. A capacity to accept does not require actual acceptance. And the understanding, the assimilation, of some reasons may be a difficult business, taking a long time. Assimilability does not entail immediate or swift understanding. In an extreme case it might even, due to the length of time required, not be practically possible. But it must in principle be possible. Furthermore, it should be noted that nothing in what I have said commits me to the view that solutions to problems must in fact be shared. To be shareable they need not be shared. Perhaps life—or death— interferes in a way that prevents this. Why is shareability so significant here? Well, suppose that in this or that case special conditions do need to be satisfied. Someone announces results but with the proviso that to understand them or to accept them, being a member of the philosophical community, with what is available to its members, is not enough. Then whoever it is to whom the results are being announced, it cannot be the philosophical community! It cannot be with the aim of contributing to consensus in this community that the purported solution was developed and is now announced. And so what one is doing, even if philosophical skills are exhibited and philosophical resources are drawn upon when doing it, and even if one is a philosopher, is not philosophy. (The apparent oddness of this thought will recede if one reflects on how philosophers might use philosophical tools and resources and exercise philosophical skills in many non-philosophical contexts—e.g., when discussing a law case with other jurors or, in the midst of disagreement with a spouse, defending a lie or engaging in evasion.)

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These various consequences of the Communal Condition, and particularly the need for shareability, have the further consequence that RCP should be regarded as not really being philosophy, as we will now see.

WHY “ REFORMED CHRISTIAN P HILOSOPHY” IS NOT PHILOSOPHY The central argument can be stated quite briefly. Among those in the human philosophical community are many non-Christians. So if the results of RCP involving a purported solution to a philosophical problem are to be shareable, it has to be the case that non-Christians could, at least in principle, use what is put forward by RCP to get to the conclusion that the problem has been solved. But that is not the case. The most that adherents of RCP can really share with these others takes the form of a hypothetical: if Christian claim c (perhaps buttressed by one or another interpretation of that claim, i) is accepted, then a solution to this or that philosophical problem can be reached. If Christian Scripture is accepted as authoritative and interpreted thus, if the doctrine of atonement is accepted and interpreted thus, if the resurrection of the dead is accepted and interpreted thus (and so on), then a solution to problems about human fulfillment individually and in relationship, about the deepest moral truths, about personal identity (and so on), can be achieved. The actual solution proposed by RCP in such a case isn’t shareable unless adherents of RCP give a reason that can be shared with the wider community for accepting not just the hypothetical but also its antecedent. Quite obviously, we need a shareable reason for propositions of the form (c&i). But such a reason RCP, because of its epistemological stance, refuses to provide. Now without shareability, RCP cannot satisfy the Communal Condition. And without satisfying the Communal Condition, RCP should be regarded as not being philosophy. Therefore, RCP should be regarded as not being philosophy. (For some it will be instructive to note that the Christian philosophy of philosophers such as Richard Swinburne, by replacing Plantinga’s Reformed epistemology with natural theology, differs precisely here and so may not be subject to this argument.) Now it looks as though RCP must really be philosophy because its purveyors are philosophers located in philosophy departments, who use philosophical tools and resources, and who want to know how philosophical problems are to be solved. But there’s a hitch: Reformed Christian philosophers like Plantinga only want to know how those problems are to be solved given that Christianity is true. They really are just seeking to determine how Christians should think philosophy’s problems are to be solved. Their work is intended to contribute to the successful intellectual development and defense of a Christian worldview,

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of what we might naturally call a Christian philosophy (which, note carefully, is something that it doesn’t take the activity of philosophy to produce). As we’ll see a bit later, such activity might count as theology—even very good theology—but it is not philosophy. Its work is done for the community of Christians, not for the community of philosophers.⁵

O TH E R OB J E C T I O N S T O T H E A RG U M E N T Earlier I dealt with one or two initial objections to my case. Here I intend to show that other apparent worries and counter-moves can also be dealt with. Objection 1: “Even if Plantinga & Co. don’t make the antecedents of such conditionals as you’ve mentioned shareable, other Christian philosophers might do so (e.g., Swinburne, as you yourself suggest). So it’s not the case that the whole Christian philosophical solution to this or that problem cannot be shared. Indeed, by hitching their wagon to that of other Christian thinkers, Christian philosophers impressed with Plantinga-style work could right now produce an entire solution that is shareable.” Quite so. But it doesn’t follow that what adherents of RCP put forward as a solution, purportedly in their capacity as philosophers, is shareable. So whatever they’re doing, it isn’t philosophy, because it doesn’t satisfy the Communal Condition. You’re thinking about how someone else might defend the antecedent of one of those conditionals using shareable considerations RCP does not employ, and if this occurred, he or she might indeed be doing philosophy. But, as can be seen, this point is a red herring in the present context. Notice that, given other religious intellectual commitments influencing them, Plantinga types are quite opposed to the idea that any such thing needs to be done (or would even be appropriate to do) in order to solve philosophical problems. They think their “solutions” count as philosophically complete, just as they are, and that the activity involved in producing them counts as philosophy, just as it is. And it is these ideas that my proposal resists. Objection 2: “Perhaps we could think of the situation temporally: what RCP contributes and makes shareable is, for now, a hypothetical, and it can be left to the future to add the rest of what is needed to make the solution complete. It’s already useful to know that if Christian claims are true, we can do so much with them philosophically. RCP can be seen as having taken on the limited task of exploring this Christian option, and adding it to other ideas that are presently available in philosophy and on which, in the future, philosophers ⁵ That this is how Christian philosophers should conceive their task is Plantinga’s (1984) first main suggestion in his well-known essay “Advice to Christian Philosophers.”

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might build. Precisely because philosophy is hard, we must make room for such limited contributions as well as for more thoroughgoing ones.” Here I would first note that the implications of Christian claims for philosophical problems have been explored exhaustively over many centuries, so it’s not as though that particular data base in philosophy is especially lacking, or as though RCP can be seen as explicitly motivated by the need to fill any lacunae here for the benefit of the wider philosophical community. But set that aside. The main problem is similar to the previous one: advocates of RCP think that in their capacity as philosophers they are producing complete solutions, not just partial ones. So if someone wants to treat what they have contributed to philosophy as partial in the manner indicated, it won’t be someone from the RCP camp. Maybe if someone did proceed in this more limited way, they could be seen as doing philosophy, but it doesn’t follow that advocates of RCP can legitimately be seen thus. Here note also that even if there are bits and pieces of RCP work that find their way into philosophy and prove useful there, it still doesn’t follow that what RCPers were doing when producing them was philosophy, any more than it follows from the fact that some of what academics in sociology or biology or comparative religion have done finds its way into philosophy, and proves useful there, that those academics were doing philosophy when producing it. Objection 3: “Many of the solutions to philosophical problems—for example, in epistemology or metaphysics—put forward by Christian philosophers such as Plantinga don’t depend on Christian claims and so can be put forward non-hypothetically. Take, for example, Plantinga’s work on warrant and proper functionalism. So clearly Plantinga types are often functioning as philosophers.” Nothing in my argument suggests otherwise, and it is important to see this. Though it may be tempting to deplore my reasoning on the grounds that Plantinga is turned by it into something other than a philosopher, when he manifestly is a philosopher, that temptation should be resisted. Evidently, philosophers may not always function as philosophers, and all my argument adds to this obvious point is that they may not be functioning as philosophers even when using philosophical tools and resources, etc. This too should be obvious—some examples were supplied earlier in the chapter. Plantinga has done much admirable work as a philosopher, and he has also done much academic work (particularly in connection with his more recent explicit advocacy for RCP) that shouldn’t count as philosophy, for the reasons I have given. Objection 4: “Your argument runs into a problem suggested by Wolterstorff. After the breakdown of classical foundationalism, he says, analytic philosophers today find themselves working in a situation of ‘dialogic pluralism,’ in which the idea of ‘public philosophical reason’ (‘a body of principles that all philosophers do or should accept’) no longer persuades and in which

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‘the philosopher employs whatever considerations he finds true and relevant.’ The voice of the philosophical theologian, Wolterstorff claims, is just one more voice in this pluralistic mix (Wolterstorff 2009, pp. 164–6).” Suppose Wolterstorff is right. This poses no problem for my argument. Though it may appear otherwise, my argument does not accept or presuppose the Enlightenment idea of a shared starting point or shared stock of premises in philosophy. Even if it oversimplifies, we might say: “shared premises” are needed not to get started but to get finished in philosophy. They come to be emphasized in my argument not as some general requirement imposed from the outset but rather in connection with the satisfaction of the Communal Condition, and here only as something that must potentially be achievable through reasons and reasoning that can be shared with others. Objection 5: “What about the implications of your argument for other sorts of work in the philosophical community—feminist philosophy, Marxist philosophy, and so on—that we should all regard as real philosophy? Since your argument says otherwise, that’s a problem.” I don’t think my argument has undesirable implications here. That portion of the activity of feminists and Marxists and other similar types which we should be most inclined to call philosophy depends upon ideas that can be shared. Feminists, for example, say not only that if you adopt a feminist lens, such-and-such results are achieved, but also argue that the feminist lens allows us to see truths. And they often do so in ways that are indeed shareable, even if their work does not always lead to wide agreement. (Actually achieved consensus is not an implication of shareability.) Where this is not the case, we have a reason to deny that that discourse is an instance of engaging in the discipline or practice of philosophy. And note that it would not be surprising were this sometimes not the case. On hot matters of social oppression and politics, just as on hot matters of religion, it is easy for human beings to veer into ideological expression or advocacy or activism, even when employing intellectual instruments such as those made available in philosophy, and it is important for us to be sensitive to this possibility.

IS PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION A S PEC IAL CASE? For a last objection, more space is required. I will devote this section to it. On the view to be answered here, it should be obvious that at least in philosophy of religion, RCP has a home. Even if its solutions to the great questions of philosophy don’t always contribute in the right way to general philosophical discussion of those questions, surely what it has to say specifically on religious matters—all its detailed and sophisticated arguments about such things— should count as philosophical work.

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But appearances are deceiving. Insofar as it is RCP that is being done, as distinct from work that doesn’t depend on Christian assumptions (and RCPers may sometimes do such work, even if not in their capacity as RCPers), we shouldn’t call efforts on matters religious by Christian philosophers philosophy of religion. The appearance that, even given acceptance of the Communal Condition, things are otherwise is, I surmise, generated at least in part by Christianity’s influence in the wider culture. The many philosophers who don’t care enough about religion to participate in philosophy of religion nonetheless often assume that “it’s either naturalism or Christianity,” and so are not motivated to protest against the claim of Plantinga and his acolytes when they say they too are doing philosophy of religion. (If “Christianity” seems too narrow here, substitute “biblical religion.”) And one finds even nonChristian philosophers far too easily accepting Christian assumptions about God. Even non-Christian philosophers of religion easily accept, for example, that a Divine reality would be a personal being with fairly pronounced masculine tendencies, that a personal God would create other things, that what God creates would be physical and unfold through evolutionary processes, that if God creates persons, they will be (or be like) human beings, that God would create persons with libertarian free will, that if a full revelation of God to human persons were made available, it would be to humans as little advanced in their evolutionary career as we are, and so on. And thus it can come to seem that Christians whose arguments presuppose one or another of these ideas when suggesting a solution to problems in philosophy of religion are really offering a solution to the field rather than just delivering a hypothetical. But that is not the case. If one wishes without special Christian (or other religious) influence to apply metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and so on to truly fundamental religious questions, and to deliver back to those areas of philosophy the results of one’s investigations, as philosophers of religion should be doing, then a much greater openness to unfamiliar ideas is needed and all those Christian assumptions I’ve listed should start to appear seriously questionable. Then we should ask for arguments justifying them. Why, for example, with such openness and without the special influence of Western religion, would we make the idea of a personal God the central religious idea in our philosophical reflections, thus assuming that an ultimate divine reality would have to be exclusively personal? Why would we treat this idea as most fundamental when it so clearly is a variation on a broader theme, variously construable, whose other variations cry out for discovery and explication? Why, even if we’re focusing on God, would we assume that a God would create a physical world rather than a purely spiritual one, or human persons rather than any number of other things, including persons of other sorts?

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The lack of such openness, and the factors (probably including broader cultural influences) which prevent it, mean that RCP and its products have impacted philosophy of religion far more strongly than they should have. We have allowed work that isn’t really philosophy to shape the contours of the field far more than it ought to have done. All that RCP can really contribute in philosophy of religion, for example on the problem of evil or the hiddenness problem, even where the existence of God is not assumed, again takes the form of a hypothetical: if we agree to think of God Christianly, in the way that commends itself to RCPers, then the problem of evil or the hiddenness problem can be solved. But even this possible relevance is not enough to make the activity of RCP philosophy. Here there is instead a “missing step” that urgently needs to be drawn to the attention of the broader community of philosophers of religion. RCP needs to be able to argue that its understanding of God represents how we should think about God. (As it happens, other forms of Christian philosophy, including Swinburne’s, are allowed to get away with far too thin an argumentative justification.) And RCP has shown itself to be uninterested in doing so in ways that are shareable across the full range of philosophers who might be expected to consider fundamental questions about religion. Thus, even in connection with philosophy of religion, RCP should not be regarded as really amounting to philosophy.

THEOLOGY, NOT PHILOSO PHY So if RCP isn’t philosophy, what is it? In a word: theology. Consider how snugly what’s said about the form of inquiry going by that name fits RCP. As David Tracy puts it in a paper called “Theological Method,” theologians make up “a community of inquiry grounded in a community of commitment” (Tracy 1985, pp. 57–8). And this commitment of course includes a commitment to seeing the world in a particular religious way. As countless introductory theology textbooks will tell you by page 2, theology is faith seeking understanding—or at any rate a deeper or more precise understanding. What motivates the features of RCP that distinguish its work from philosophy is therefore at the same time the essential starting point of theology. As Plantinga himself has said, what the RCPer is doing “is a specific way of working out her vocation as a Christian” (Plantinga 1998, p. 352). He of course still wants to call it philosophy, because the RCPer is working out solutions to philosophical problems. But, as we have seen, even so, it should not be identified thus. And now we can also see that, since this “specific way of working out her vocation as a Christian,” using philosophical resources and techniques and aimed at philosophical questions, is part of the project of faith

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seeking understanding, it ought to be seen as theology. Michael Rea and other advocates of analytic theology basically have the right idea. It’s just that as well as including in this activity theologians who are not philosophers but who may learn to apply analytic techniques, they ought to include philosophers such as themselves who have long been doing theology using analytic techniques. And they ought to realize that while behaving thus they have not been doing philosophy. As suggested earlier, one might also call what they’re doing philosophical theology, but since it is occurring as part of this other quite non-philosophical form of inquiry, which has its own community, it isn’t properly called philosophy. Indeed, the above points about theology give us another reason to say so. It will be good here to emphasize that those who accept this view need not take it to show up a defect or fatal flaw in theology, as so many of its sneering critics from Bertrand Russell and Walter Kaufmann to Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne have done.⁶ Theology and philosophy are just different animals, and someone with intellectual gifts whose primary reflective commitment is to God and her community of faith might well be irresponsible if she did not become a theologian. (I will, of course, reserve the right to disagree with her about the existence of God; I will take issue with her religious beliefs at the level of type even if not at the level of token.) It follows that by reconceiving what she is doing as belonging to theology and not to philosophy, even though she herself is a philosopher, the philosophical theologian can be justified in proceeding confidently, without defensiveness or fear of reproach. In his paper on philosophical theology mentioned earlier, Nicholas Wolterstorff alludes to a common criticism, namely, that the philosophical theologian lacks the “critical spirit of the true philosopher.” Those who make it he regards as trying to “belittle” philosophical theology (Wolterstorff 2009, p. 156). Well, there’s a win-win solution here where Wolterstorff recognizes that he’s not exercising the critical spirit of the true philosopher in relation to religion, and where the critic recognizes that this is not a defect but rather a choice Wolterstorff has made in order to pursue the alternative form of inquiry we call theology. At the end of that paper, Wolterstorff briefly raises the question whether philosophical theology (what he has in mind appears to be RCP) is philosophy or theology. “Is it philosophy or is it theology?,” he says, and then he responds to his own question: “what difference does it make . . . ? Call it what you will” (Wolterstorff 2009, p. 168). The case here concluded suggests that it makes a great difference, and that we should learn to call RCP theology, full stop.

⁶ See, for example, Coyne’s appeal to Kaufmann, here: http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress. com/2013/01/15/quote‐of‐the‐walter‐kaufmann‐defines‐theology/.

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WHY I T MATTERS But is it really so great a difference—in ways that truly matter? It may seem to some that I am hung up on a fairly trivial distinction, and that the conceptual points I have been pressing don’t, even if right, allow us to make much headway in philosophy. I don’t think this is true, and in this concluding section will make the point in relation to philosophy of religion. If the case I have made were accepted, then we would look at philosophy of religion very differently, and, considering it thus, would be in a position to make serious progress with it—serious progress that is now being held back precisely by the influence of RCP. Indeed, if I’m right, then we should conclude that a great deal of what today and yesterday has gone by the name of philosophy of religion, in particular many of the religious intellectual activities of Christian philosophers, should be counted as theology (even if philosophical theology) instead. And this means that the great resurgence of philosophy of religion that everyone talks about hasn’t yet happened, for that alleged resurgence, as we all know, is associated primarily with Christian philosophers such as Plantinga. Directions very different from some commonly taken today may need to be taken if we want to provide for philosophy of religion a new birth in our time. And perhaps they soon will be taken. Now such ideas might at first seem disillusioning and perhaps disheartening to some in philosophy of religion who accept them, but I think a more considered view will find them exciting and liberating—an invitation to the imagination. Philosophy of religion, genuinely resurgent, would express, in fundamental matters concerning religion, a kind of unbounded intellectual curiosity and drive to understand—a curiosity unbounded in respect of which religious ideas and ideas about religion provoke its interest; how deeply and charitably it will want to understand them; and how widely it will spread its net in trawling for candidate understandings. It would be ethics and epistemology and metaphysics and logic as well as philosophy of religion. It would be grounded in a wide acquaintance with the religious traditions of the world but would also exercise imagination in pursuit of brand new religious conceptions and attitudes. It would certainly want to make effective use of analytical tools, but it would not sneer at the continentals or ignore the history of philosophy. There would be room in it for pragmatist and Wittgensteinian and feminist and many other proposals (and do remember that I too have offered nothing more than a proposal!), though expressions and defenses of private conviction it would shun. It would certainly not be seen as practiced when, because of the influence of religious purposes, people enter a discussion of arguments opposed to religious belief with the aim of defeating them and without openness to having their minds changed. And in all this philosophy of religion would be supported by what can be learned from science: the overlooked insight that we exist at what may be the very beginning of an enormously long search for the

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deepest and most powerful intellectual and spiritual insights. We are working on profound matters with primitive minds.⁷ Suppose that philosophy of religion thus (re)oriented begins to take shape. Then we will see the significance of accepting my case. For then the in-boxes of philosophers of religion will be stuffed with a great deal more than the arguments of RCP and similarly influenced forms of Christian philosophy, however analytically sharp they can be made to be. Who knows what conclusions will appear to be supported then, all things considered? Call the form of inquiry I have described Exploratory Philosophy of Religion. Exploratory philosophy of religion has not yet found a clear place in the annals of human investigation. (When it has, we can go back to speaking simply of “philosophy of religion.”) In our own time and place, real or exploratory philosophy of religion has been held back, in part, because of our tendency to conflate philosophy of religion and the sort of work done by RCP. We should distinguish those two, and so bring philosophy of religion—and philosophy of religion—more fully into being.

WORKS CITED Flint, Thomas P. and Michael C. Rea, eds. 2009. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Hadot, Pierre. 1995. Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Ed. Arnold I. Davidson. Trans. Michael Chase. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Plantinga, Alvin. 1984. “Advice to Christian Philosophers.” Faith and Philosophy 1, no. 3: 253–71. Plantinga, Alvin. 1998. “Christian Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century.” In The Analytical Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader. Ed. James F. Sennett. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Schellenberg, J. L. 2015. “A Shallow Species in Deep Time: Modernism, Postmodernism, and Our Place in the Potential History of Inquiry.” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 14, no. 2: 211–25. Simmons, J. Aaron. 2017. “Continental Philosophy of Religion in a Kenotic Tone.” In Renewing Philosophy of Religion: Exploratory Essays. Ed. Paul Draper and J. L. Schellenberg. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 154–73. Tracy, David, 1985. “Theological Method.” In Christian Theology: An Introduction to its Traditions and Tasks, 2nd Ed. Ed. Peter C. Hodgson and Robert H. King. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press. Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 2009. “How Philosophical Theology Became Possible Within the Analytic Tradition of Philosophy.” In Analytic Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology. Ed. Oliver D. Crisp and Michael C. Rea. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 155–68. ⁷ I have developed this idea in various places. See, for example, Schellenberg (2015).

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15 Philosophy, Religion, and Worldview Graham Oppy

This chapter consists of a series of reflections on widely endorsed claims about Christian philosophy and, in particular, Christian philosophy of religion. It begins with consideration of some claims about how (Christian) philosophy of religion currently is, and then moves on to consideration of some claims about how (Christian) philosophy of religion ought to be.

T H E T R I U M P H A L I S T NA R R A T I V E An oft-told triumphalist narrative holds that we are currently in a golden age for Christian philosophy of religion. While the details of the narrative vary, the central thread is that the bad old days have been replaced by good times. In the bad old days, philosophy of religion was in the doldrums, Christian philosophers were not pursuing philosophy of religion, Christian philosophers were hiding their Christian credentials under a bushel, Christian philosophers were held in contempt by “establishment” philosophers, philosophy of religion had low status, philosophy of religion was not published in high-status generalist journals, philosophy of religion had no presence in major philosophy conferences, major presses were not taking on books in philosophy of religion, and philosophy of religion was not being taught in the higher education sector. But good times have returned: philosophy of religion is booming, Christian philosophers are pursuing Christian philosophy of religion, Christian philosophers are proudly proclaiming their Christianity to the academy and the world at large, philosophy of religion has high status, philosophy of religion is published in high-status generalist journals, philosophy of religion has a significant presence in major philosophy conferences, major presses are

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publishing loads of books in philosophy of religion, and philosophy of religion is widely taught in the higher education sector. Dating of the bad old days varies. For some, it is the period between the cessation of hostilities in the Second World War and the end of the baby boom. For others, it is a period of indeterminate commencement that ends with the 1950s, or the 1960s, or the 1970s, or the 1980s. Some take particular events to mark the ending of the bad old days: the publication of Plantinga’s God and Other Minds (1967); the formation of the Society for Christian Philosophers (1978); the giving of Plantinga’s “Advice to Christian Philosophers” (1983). Diagnosis of what caused the bad old days to be bad also varies. Some take it to be the baleful influence of the Vienna Circle’s logical positivism, and, in particular, widespread acceptance of verificationism. Some take a longer perspective, attributing the badness to the widening entrenchment of materialism, empiricism, scientism, and naturalism in the academy. Others point the finger at trends and developments in theology in the twentieth century. Craig (n.d.) provides a representative narrative. He starts with a quote from Plantinga (1990): “The contemporary western intellectual world . . . is . . . an arena in which rages a battle for men’s souls.” Craig then says: In recent times, the battlelines have dramatically shifted. . . . Undoubtedly the most important philosophical event of the twentieth century was the collapse of the verificationism that lay at the heart of scientific naturalism. . . . The collapse of verificationism brought with it a . . . disillusionment with the whole Enlightenment project of scientific naturalism. . . . In philosophy the demise of verificationism has been accompanied by a resurgence of metaphysics, . . . the birth of a new discipline, philosophy of religion, and a renaissance in Christian philosophy. . . . Since the late 1960s, Christian philosophers have been out of the closet and defending the truth of the Christian worldview with philosophically sophisticated arguments in the finest scholarly journals and professional societies. . . . Today, philosophy of religion flourishes in young journals . . . not to mention the standard non-specialist journals. . . . Philosophy departments are a beachhead from which operations can be launched to impact other disciplines at the university for Christ. (Craig, n.d.)

Plantinga’s “Advice to Christian Philosophers” begins with a very similar account: Christianity, these days, and in our part of the world, is on the move. . . . Thirty, or thirty-five years ago, the public temper of mainline establishment philosophy in the English speaking world was deeply non-Christian. Few establishment philosophers were Christian. . . . There are now many more Christians, and many more unabashed Christians in the professional mainstream of American philosophical life. For example, the foundation of the Society for Christian Philosophers . . . is both an evidence and a consequence of that fact. (Plantinga 1984, p. 254)

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Although this narrative is oft-told, I am skeptical that it stands up to scrutiny.¹ In particular, I suspect that this narrative is written without sufficient consideration being given to what the world was actually like in “the bad old days” and how it has changed since then. Plantinga’s “thirty to thirty-five years” identifies the period 1948–53. What was the state of the world in 1948–53, and how does it compare with, say, 2008–13? What was the state of academic philosophy in 1948–53, and how does it compare with, say, 2008–13?

SOME RELEVANT DATA In 1953, 91 percent of Americans were Christians; in 2015, 70 percent of Americans are Christians. In 1953, a negligible percentage of Americans were religiously unaffiliated; in 2015, 23 percent of Americans are religiously unaffiliated, and 7 percent of them are atheists or agnostics. In 1953, Eisenhower joined the Presbyterian church, not because he was himself a religious believer, but because he held that some form of piety was appropriate in a President. In 1954, “Under God” was added to the pledge of allegiance. Eisenhower said: “Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith—and I don’t care what it is” (Henry 1981, p. 41). The 1950s saw a marked increase in church membership: only 49 percent of Americans were church members in 1950, while 69 percent of Americans were church members in 1960. Since 1960, church membership in the United States has been in steady decline. These observations and figures alone suggest that it is pretty implausible to suppose that Christians have made significant gains in academic philosophy in the United States in the period from 1950 to the present. In the period from 1948 to 2015, the US population has more than doubled: 151 million in 1950, and 308 million in 2010. Moreover, in that same period, there has been a four-fold increase in undergraduate participation, and a tenfold increase in postgraduate participation. Specifically in higher education, in 1950, there were 432,000 BAs and 6,600 PhDs; in 2010, there were 1,600,000 BAs and 67,000 PhDs. In 2015, there are around 400 universities and colleges— 20 percent of the total—that have religious affiliations; and there are a further 200 seminaries in which philosophers are employed to teach philosophy. I have

¹ Here are some more examples of the narrative. Long (2000, p. 2): “The climate has changed considerably since mid-century. Philosophy of religion is widely considered to be a flourishing field.” Duncan (2007, p. 7): “The dramatic story of the revival of theism in the philosophy of religion, one that brought theism from the brink of intellectual annihilation to something approaching intellectual respectability in the space of a single generation.” Smith (2001, p. 196): “Naturalists passively watched . . . until today . . . one third of philosophy professors are theists.”

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been unable to find corresponding figures for 1950, but you can be sure that there were many fewer universities and colleges—and you can also be pretty sure that the percentage with religious affiliations was not any lower. These figures indicate—what was anyway obvious—that, in the United States, population, access to higher education, employment opportunities in universities, and so forth have grown at a much faster rate than the decline in participation in the Christian religion. In absolute terms, by a very considerable margin, there are more Christians in the academy now than there were in 1950, even though, in relative terms, there are fewer Christians in the academy now than there were in 1950. According to Gross and Simmons (2008)—who conducted a large-scale survey of academics by discipline (but not including philosophers)—20 percent of academics are agnostics or atheists (but 36.6 percent of academics in “elite doctoral universities” are agnostics or atheists); 35.7 percent of academics have no doubt that God exists (but only 20.4 percent of academics in “elite doctoral universities” have no doubt that God exists); 61 percent of biologists are atheists or agnostics; 63 percent of accountants have no doubt that God exists; 33 percent of believers are “born again,” and most of those are politically conservative. According to the PhilPapers survey of academic philosophers— which is not as methodologically rigorous as the survey conducted by Gross and Simmons—62 percent are atheists, 11 percent lean towards atheism, and 5 percent are agnostic.² While there is clearly room for a methodologically rigorous study that includes philosophers, it is worth noting that there is nothing in the data that we do have that suggests that philosophy has been transformed into a stronghold for Christians in the academy. Membership in the American Philosophical Association has grown exponentially. In 1920, the APA had 260 members; in 1960, it had 1,500 members; in 1990, it had more than 8,000 members. In 1920, one in 407,000 Americans was a member of the APA; in 2000, one in 31,000 Americans was a member of the APA. There has been a similar growth in the introduction of new journals (in the UK, the US, and Canada) in philosophy. In the period from 1900 to 1950, there were 30 new journals; between 1950 and 1960, there were 15; between 1960 and 1970, there were 44, and between 1970 and 1990, there were 120. In the period between 1953 and 2013, there were dramatic improvements in travel and communication. In 1953, it was not possible for any academic philosopher to attend very many conferences, and rates of communication between academic philosophers were set by postal services; in 2013, cheap air travel, the Internet, mobile phone technology, and a host of other innovations enabled academic philosophers to attend lots of conferences and workshops, and facilitated instant group conversations between philosophers in all parts

² See: https://philpapers.org/surveys/.

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of the planet. Given all of these developments—and given the absolute increase in numbers of Christian philosophers in the United States—it would be astonishing if Christian philosophers in the United States had not managed to establish some new societies, found some new journals, and run some new conferences and workshops in that period. Craig gives an indicative list of the “young journals” in which he claims that philosophy of religion is flourishing: the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Religious Studies, Sophia, Faith and Philosophy, Philosophia Christi, and the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly. It is worth considering a longer list, with information about start and end dates. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly was launched in 1927 as New Scholasticism, and was rebadged in 1990. Modern Schoolman first appeared in 1925, and was rebadged as the generalist Res Philosophica in 2013. Thought was published between 1926 and 1992. Tulane Studies in Philosophy appeared between 1952 and 1987. The Philosopher was launched in 1949, and folded in 1972. The Thomist was introduced in 1939. The Heythrop Journal first appeared in 1960. Sophia was launched in 1962. Religious Studies was inaugurated in 1966. The first issue of the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion appeared in 1970. Since then, we have witnessed the introduction of Faith and Philosophy (1984), Philosophia Christi (1999), and Ars Disputandi (2001, rebadged in 2013 as the International Journal of Philosophy and Theology). Given the runaway explosion of philosophy journals in the second half of the twentieth century, the history of specialist journals in philosophy of religion is nothing to write home about—and, in any case, the dates of the various comings and goings do nothing to support the triumphalist narrative. Has philosophy of religion come to flourish in the “standard specialist journals”? Let’s consider the journal, Mind. In 1948, Mind ran to 544 pages; by 1953, it had grown to 576 pages. In 2008, Mind ran to 1,168 pages; by 2013, it had grown to 1,248 pages. A search on the Mind website for articles that mention both God and religion returns 15 articles and 16 book reviews in the period 1948–53, and 6 articles and 33 book reviews in the period 2008–13. Given that there are now twice as many pages in the journal, a doubling in the number of book reviews is no more than maintenance of the status quo. And, more importantly, a reduction from 15 to 6 in the number of articles that mention both God and religion is hardly what the triumphalist narrative ought to lead one to expect. Of course, I have only provided a single datum here; it would be good to have a much more detailed examination of Mind, as well as such important journals as Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Review, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, among others. But I do not think that there is any doubt what such an examination would show. How do “establishment” universities compare across the two time periods? Consider Princeton, for example. In the period 1948–53, Faculty at Princeton

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included: Jacques Maritain, Walter T. Stace, Walter Kaufmann, Robert Scoon, James Ward Smith, John Rawls, and Ledger Wood. (Theodore M. Greene departed in 1946, to go to Yale.) Of these, Maritain, Stace, and Kaufmann were all major figures in philosophy of religion (as was Greene), and Scoon lectured regularly on Aquinas. Maritain published Approaches to God in 1953; Stace published Religion and the Modern Mind and Time and Eternity in 1952; Greene published “Christianity and its Secular Alternatives” in 1946; Kaufmann—who was born Lutheran and converted to Judaism at age 11—lost his own faith at the beginning of the Second World War, but published many books about religion in the 1960s and 1970s. Smith co-edited, with A. Leland Jamison, a four-volume work on Religion in American Life. I have been unable to learn anything about Wood’s views on religion but, even if he had no interest in religion, the department would still have had a very strong focus on philosophy of religion. Not so today. While there has been some very recent work in philosophy of religion— e.g. Mark Johnston’s Saving God (2009)—and some appointments of Christian philosophers, there is no way that Christianity and philosophy of religion were more strongly represented in philosophy at Princeton in the period 2008–13 than they were in the period 1948–53. I have already mentioned that Greene left Princeton for Yale in 1946. Did matters stand differently there? The period 1948–53 preceded the “war of methodology” that plagued the Yale department of philosophy (see Allen 1998). Leading figures at Yale in this period included John E. Smith, Brand Blanshard, and Paul Weiss. All three were sympathetic to theism; all three wrote extensively on, and were major figures in, philosophy of religion. Smith, in particular, maintained close ties with prominent members of the Yale School of Divinity, including Richard Niebuhr and Robert Calhoun. Collectively, the Yale philosophy department in this period was noted for its inclusive treatment of the various established traditions in American philosophy: idealism, pragmatism, process philosophy, and realism. In 2015, despite the fact the department of philosophy is much larger, it is arguable that there is less philosophy of religion than there was in the period 1948–53, and it is quite clear that there is a smaller concentration of specialization in philosophy of religion across the members of the department. Perhaps there are more Christian philosophers in 2015—I couldn’t find enough data to decide that question—but, even if so, Yale is no more a center for Christian philosophy in 2015 than it was in the period between 1948 and 1953. What about Harvard? In the period 1948–53, it is hard to find much interest in philosophy of religion—or much evidence of Christian belief—among the big names at Harvard: Willard Quine, Henry Aiken, Donald Williams, Raphael Demos, Morton White, and their ilk. Then again, in 2015, there is no mention of philosophy of religion on the page that lists the areas of specialization of current Harvard Faculty.

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There is a task here for anyone who wants to undertake it. In principle, it is possible to collect data about areas of specialization, areas of interest, fields of publication, and fields of teaching in US philosophy departments in the periods 1948–53 and 2008–13. That data could be broken down to paint a picture of how things stood in “establishment” universities (whatever they might be), “prestigious graduate-degree conferring” universities (again, whatever they might be), other universities and colleges, state universities and colleges, universities with religious affiliations, seminaries, and so forth. In the absence of that detailed data, I see no reason at all for anyone to accept the claim that philosophy has been transformed from a post-war haven for atheists to a contemporary stronghold for Christian philosophy.³ So far, we have only considered the United States. But, of course, Anglophone philosophy has been practiced in many other parts of the world: the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, etc. It might be worth giving some attention to the question whether we can find support for the triumphalist narrative in data that derives from outside the United States. At Federation in 1901, Australia implemented the White Australia Policy. In 1911, 96 percent of Australians were Christians. In 2011, 61 percent of Australians were Christians, 22.3 percent had no religion, and 9.4 percent were not prepared to disclose any information about their religious beliefs. In the period 1948–53, there were 8 universities in Australia, with 32,000 students. In the period 2008–13, there were 41 universities in Australia, with 1.3 million students. As in the US, the demographic data alone suggest that, while the absolute number of Christians in the Australian academy has increased significantly, the relative number of Christians in the Australian academy has declined across the selected time periods. I have been unable to find historical data about the distribution of religious belief in the Australian academy and, in particular, in Australian departments of philosophy. I turn instead to anecdote. In 1952, Sydney Sparkes Orr was appointed to the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Tasmania, from a field that included Kurt Baier and John Mackie, because the Vice-Chancellor, John Morris “wanted a sound Christian fellow who would speak out against communism and take a stand on moral issues in the community” (Pybus 1993, p. 204). Even allowing for the fact that there are three recently established universities in Australia that have religious affiliations, I think that it is Paris to a peanut on that there was a higher percentage of Christians in departments of philosophy in Australia in the period 1948–53 than there was in the period 2008–13. How have things changed at Oxford? Some of the biggest names at Oxford in the period 1948–53—Alfred Ayer, Gilbert Ryle, John Austin—were not ³ Some further relevant considerations may be found in Aiello (2005), Herberg (1955), Murray (1960), and Schrum (2007).

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much interested in philosophy of religion. But there were other very wellrespected philosophers at Oxford at this time—e.g., Elizabeth Anscombe and Michael Dummett—who were well known for their public defense of Christian belief. While I do not have to hand a careful comparison of Oxford philosophy in the two periods of interest, I am reasonably sure that there has been no dramatic upsurge in interest in philosophy of religion or explicit commitment to Christian doctrine among Oxford philosophers. Again, there is a task here for anyone willing to undertake it. What we need is data about areas of specialization, areas of interest, fields of publication, fields of teaching, and so forth, in Anglophone philosophy departments across the globe in the periods 1948–53 and 2008–13. In the absence of that data— but given everything else that we know about those periods, and given the piecemeal and anecdotal evidence that is already available—there is no reason at all for anyone to accept the claim that philosophy has been transformed from a post-war haven for atheists to a contemporary stronghold for Christian philosophy across significant portions of the globe.⁴ Of course, even if I am right that the triumphalist narrative is greatly overstated, it hardly follows that there is nothing for some Christian philosophers to cherish in the post-war trajectory of philosophy. The Society for Christian Philosophers is a significant organization that has played an important role in bringing some kinds of Christian philosophers together. Faith and Philosophy is a very good journal that has enabled quality publication by some kinds of Christian philosophers; Templeton funding has had a galvanizing effect on research for some kinds of Christian philosophy of religion; greater visibility in the American Philosophical Association has brought some power and influence to some kinds of Christian philosophers; and so on. That the demographic and other data lead one to expect these kinds of developments does not diminish the achievements of those who participated in bringing them about in the form that they actually took.

THE CORRELATIVE ADVICE In 1983, when the triumphalist narrative was just beginning to gain a foothold, Plantinga gave the following advice to Christian philosophers: Do not rest content with being philosophers who happen, incidentally, to be Christians. . . . Strive to be Christian philosophers [who operate with] integrity, independence, and Christian boldness. . . . The Christian philosopher has a right ⁴ For some relevant considerations, see Field (2015), Flew and MacIntyre (1955), Harris and Insole (2005), Kasulis and Neville (1997), and Kuklick (2006).

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(I should say a duty) to work at his own projects—projects set by the beliefs of the Christian community of which he is a part. The Christian philosophical community must work out the answers to its questions; and both the questions and the appropriate ways of working out their answers may presuppose beliefs rejected at most of the leading centers of philosophy. (Plantinga 1984, pp. 271, 263)

In the present volume, with the triumphalist narrative much more firmly entrenched, Trent Dougherty emphasizes the continuing relevance of the given advice: [T]he “temper of mainline establishment philosophy in the English speaking world” is still “deeply non-Christian” . . . [but] there are now at least some “establishment” philosophers who self-identify as Christian. Few Christian philosophers today hide the fact that they are Christians (though they tend to fly a bit under the radar, just to be safe, especially graduate students), and for many (though far from all) their faith makes a real difference to their practice as philosophers . . . . [But] for the most part, “successful” (by standard disciplinary standards) Christian philosophers these days primarily focus on secular projects. I am the first to commend “arts for art’s sake” to a reasonable degree, but I do think that Plantinga’s claim about a duty is well-placed. For almost a decade after “Advice” was issued, there was a steady stream of anthologies collecting work on specifically Christian themes, but then, in the mid-1990s it slowed to a relative trickle.

In both cases, the giving of the advice is interwoven with fragments of the triumphalist narrative: “beliefs rejected at most of the leading centers of philosophy”; “now at least some ‘establishment’ philosophers self-identify as Christian”; etc. I propose to focus on the advice, and leave the interwoven elements of the triumphalist narrative to one side.⁵ In order to bring the advice into focus, it may help to reimagine it as advice to naturalist philosophers, or Atheist philosophers, or perhaps even to philosophers in general. Here, for example, is a substantial part of the advice that is contained in Plantinga’s talk rewritten so that it is simply advice to philosophers at large: Every philosopher quite properly starts from his or her own pre-philosophical beliefs, and presupposes them in his or her philosophical work, even if those beliefs cannot be shown to be probable or plausible with respect to premises

⁵ It is perhaps worth noting the dates of publication of some of Richard Swinburne’s books: Miracles (1989), Responsibility and Atonement (1991), Revelation (1991), The Christian God (1994), Providence and the Problem of Evil (1998), The Resurrection of God Incarnate (2003). Manifestly, Swinburne’s work on “specifically Christian themes” did not “slow to a relative trickle in the early-to-mid-1990s.” There are plenty of other works from this period that take up specifically Christian themes: consider, for example, Morris (1994). In 1989, at the beginning of The Nature of God: An Inquiry into Divine Attributes, Ed Wierenga wrote: “The historical references I cite are mainly to the work of Christian authors. But I hope that this does not limit the interest of what follows only to Christians or only to those who take an interest in the ‘philosophical credentials of the Christian faith’ ” (pp. 1–2). Could it be that investigating the philosophical credentials of the Christian faith was just as much a thing at that time?

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accepted by all philosophers or most philosophers at the great contemporary centers of philosophy. Each philosopher has his or her own questions to answer, and his or her own projects; these projects may not mesh with those of other philosophers. Each philosopher has his or her own questions, and his or her own starting point in investigating those questions. A philosopher is under no obligation to confine his or her research projects to those pursued at leading centers of philosophy, or to pursue his or her own projects on the basis of the assumptions that prevail there. A philosopher has as much right to his or her pre-philosophical opinion as other philosophers have to theirs. Of course, if there were genuine and substantial arguments against the opinions of a given philosopher from premises that have some claim on that philosopher, then that philosopher would have a problem. But, in the absence of such arguments—and the absence of such arguments is typically evident—each philosopher quite properly starts from what they prephilosophically believe. Of course, a philosopher does have a responsibility to the philosophical world at large. He or she must listen to, understand, and learn from the broader philosophical community, and he or she must take his or her place in it; but his or her work as a philosopher is not circumscribed by what the rest of the philosophical world thinks of his or her opinions. I do not mean for a moment to suggest that a given philosopher has nothing to learn from philosophers who do not share his or her pre-philosophical opinions: that would be foolish arrogance, utterly belied by the facts of the matter. Nor do I mean to suggest that philosophers should retreat into isolated enclaves, having as little as possible to do with philosophers who do not share their pre-philosophical beliefs. Of course not! Philosophers have much to learn from dialogue and discussion with dissenting colleagues. All philosophers are engaged in the common human project of understanding ourselves and the world in which we find ourselves. If a philosopher is doing his or her job properly, he or she is engaged in a complicated, many-sided dialectical discussion, making his or her own contribution to that common human project. Strive to be philosophers who operate with integrity, independence, and boldness. A philosopher has a right (I should say a duty) to work on his or her own projects—projects set by the pre-philosophical beliefs and values that he or she has and which, perhaps, he or she shares with a wider community. A philosopher must try to work out the answers to his or her own philosophical questions; and both the questions and the appropriate ways of working out their answers may presuppose beliefs and values rejected at most of the leading centers of philosophy. (“revised version” of Plantinga 1984)

The core of this advice, it seems to me, is that you should be authentic: you should embody your deepest values and convictions in the life that you lead. Of course, the advice does not suppose that authenticity is the only virtue; and nor does it suppose that you cannot revise your deepest values and convictions. What the advice does quite properly suppose is that inauthenticity is a strike against flourishing: if you are failing to live out your deepest values and convictions, then you are not leading a fully flourishing life.

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One strand of this advice to philosophers is that the projects that you choose to pursue should sit well with your deepest values and convictions: you should be taking on projects that can be viewed as embodiments of your deepest values and convictions. On this strand of the advice, you should not take on projects merely because pursuit of those projects is currently fashionable or well-funded, if pursuit of those projects does not embody your deepest values and convictions. This strand of the advice seems plausible to me. Pursuit of philosophical projects typically requires an investment that will not be sustained by such superficial motives. Perhaps the demands of academic life require the occasional compromise. But, if you only ever take on philosophical projects simply because they are fashionable or well-funded, you will end up very dissatisfied with your lot. Another strand of this advice to philosophers is that the projects that you choose to pursue should have their subject matter fixed by your deepest values and convictions, perhaps even to the extent that the projects that you choose to pursue are about your deepest values and convictions. On this strand of the advice, sometimes—or perhaps even always—you should be working on projects that systematize, or extend, or explain, or defend, your deepest values and convictions. This strand of the advice seems less plausible to me. I do not deny that it is possible for philosophers to end up working on worthwhile projects that systematise, or extend, or explain, or defend, their deepest values and convictions. But it seems to me to be no more plausible to suppose that philosophers must work on projects that systematize, or extend, or explain, or defend, their deepest values and convictions than it is to suppose that mathematicians—or physicists, or chemists, or biologists, and so on—must work on projects that systematize, or extend, or explain, or defend, their deepest values and convictions. If I devote my working life to pure mathematics, it need not be the case that the theorems that I derive are systematizations, or extensions, or explanations, or defenses of my deepest values and convictions; indeed, it is more or less impossible to see how they could be. Rather, the most that is required is that my devotion of my working life to pure mathematics is an embodiment or expression of my deepest values and convictions. If I suppose that devoting my working life to pure mathematics is not a way for me to genuinely flourish, then I have the best of reasons to be looking for something else to do with my working life. Even if you agree with me that much—though perhaps not all—of what Plantinga says can be successfully reinterpreted as good advice to philosophers in general, you may still think that there is something important that goes missing under this reinterpretation. Dougherty and Plantinga both suggest that Christian philosophers have a duty to contribute to Christian philosophy, i.e., to working on “specifically Christian themes” and “projects set by the beliefs of the Christian community.” While the reinterpretation allows that a philosopher’s projects might be set by pre-philosophical beliefs and values that

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he or she shares with a wider community, it is the pre-philosophical beliefs and values that are of primary significance: that those pre-philosophical beliefs and values are shared with a wider community is not essential to the philosophical task. What the philosopher really has a duty to do is to try to work out the answers to his or her own philosophical questions; it is just good fortune if those philosophical questions turn out to be shared with others.

CHRISTIAN P HILOSOPHY In order to think about what “Christian philosophy” might be, it will help to start by thinking about what philosophy is. In my view, philosophy is primarily a domain of inquiry or discipline: philosophy is the domain of inquiry or discipline that addresses questions for which we do not yet know how to produce—and perhaps cannot even imagine how to produce—consensus answers among experts using methods more or less universally agreed by experts. All disciplines started out as philosophy: for example, much that now belongs to physics once belonged to philosophy. Moreover, all disciplines shade into philosophy: for all disciplines, there are borderline questions for which it is not currently clear whether those questions will, in time, come to have consensus answers among experts arrived at through the use of methods more or less universally agreed by experts. Some domains that have been subject to investigation for thousands of years—metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy, and so forth—remain resolutely philosophical: in these domains, there are no agreed answers to the questions that are addressed, and no agreed methods for resolving enduring disagreements about the answers to these questions. Given this characterization of philosophy, there is one obvious way to understand what “Christian philosophy” might be: Christian philosophy could be an attempt to address questions about Christianity for which we do not yet know how to produce agreed answers using any of the other disciplines that might be used in studying Christianity: sociology, demography, anthropology, archaeology, history, human geography, religious studies, and so forth. However, I do not think that this is a good candidate for the kinds of investigations that Plantinga and Dougherty endorse: there is no particularly good reason to think that Christians are uniquely well-placed to address questions about Christianity for which we do not yet know how to produce agreed expert answers using any of the other disciplines that might be used in studying Christianity. We may get closer to what Dougherty and Plantinga have in mind if we consider a domain of inquiry in which a range of Christian doctrines are

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presupposed by all of the participants in the domain of inquiry: various Christian doctrines are lodged on the “conversational scoreboard,” and no participants in the domain of inquiry challenge the location of these claims on the “conversational scoreboard.” It seems clear enough that the “beliefs of the Christian community” could give rise to questions about Christianity that members of the Christian community do not yet know how to produce agreed answers to using any of the other disciplines with which they are familiar; and those questions would also appear to be good candidates to be questions that belong to “Christian philosophy.” Perhaps, however, this suggestion runs afoul of other things that Plantinga and Dougherty say. Remember, in particular, that Plantinga says: [I do not] mean to suggest that Christian philosophers should retreat into isolated enclaves, having as little as possible to do with philosophers who do not share their pre-philosophical beliefs. . . . Christian philosophers have much to learn from dialogue and discussion with dissenting colleagues. (Plantinga 1984, p. 270)

But a domain of inquiry in which a range of Christian doctrines are presupposed by all of the participants in the domain of inquiry is precisely a domain of inquiry that belongs to an isolated enclave: if only those who presuppose the given range of Christian doctrines are participants in the domain of inquiry, then there is no engagement with those who do not share those presuppositions in that domain of inquiry. Would we do better to consider a domain of inquiry in which a range of Christian doctrines are taken as antecedents in the conditional questions that frame that domain of inquiry? Clearly, we do not have the same worry about isolated enclaves in this case: anyone with appropriate interests can participate in a domain of inquiry in which a range of Christian doctrines are taken as antecedents in the conditional questions that frame that domain of inquiry. But, if it is true that “philosophers have much to learn from dialogue and discussion with dissenting colleagues,” then, if there is an expectation that non-Christians have a useful contribution to make in dialogue and discussion with Christians when a range of Christian doctrines are taken as antecedents in the conditional questions that frame the domain of inquiry, there is plainly a similar expectation that Christians have a useful contribution to make in dialogue and discussion with non-Christians when a range of non-Christian doctrines are taken as antecedents in the conditional questions that frame a corresponding domain of inquiry. If “Christian philosophy” is not to be the preserve of an isolated enclave, then Christian philosophers have an obligation to be “dissenting colleagues” when it comes to “naturalist philosophy,” “atheist philosophy,” and the like. If Christian philosophers are to fulfill the obligation to be “dissenting colleagues” when it comes to naturalist philosophy or atheist philosophy, they cannot discharge that obligation merely by X-splaining naturalism and

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atheism to naturalists and atheists. (Equally, of course, naturalist and atheist philosophy cannot discharge their obligation to be “dissenting colleagues” for Christian philosophers by ’splaining Christian belief to them.) Suppose that a Christian philosopher and a naturalist philosopher are engaged in “the common human project of understanding ourselves and the world in which we find ourselves.” The Christian philosopher embodies a Christian worldview WC; the naturalist philosopher embodies a naturalist worldview WN. WC and WN share many propositions in common; but there are also many propositions on which WC and WN diverge. One important part of “the common human project of understanding ourselves and the world in which we find ourselves” is trying to figure out whether one of the worldviews in question is superior to the other. One worldview is superior to another just in case the one worldview is more theoretically virtuous than the other, i.e., just in case, given that neither worldview lapses into some kind of inconsistency, the one worldview makes a better trade-off of explanatory breadth and depth against theoretical—ontological, ideological, nomological— commitment than is made by the other worldview. Making an evaluative comparison of worldviews is a very demanding project. First, we need to have articulations of the two worldviews to the same level of detail and with the same level of accuracy. Second, we need to determine whether either of the worldviews fails on its own terms, because it lapses into some kind of inconsistency. Third, if both worldviews survive internal scrutiny, we need to determine whether one of the worldviews is more virtuous than the other. Because the articulation of worldviews is always incomplete, the comparison of worldviews not shown to lapse into some kind of inconsistency is always provisional. Moreover, when worldviews are shown to lapse into inconsistency, the conclusions to be drawn are typically very modest: the most that is likely to be mandated is some minor tinkering (involving a few relatively peripheral propositions). There are various contributions that a “dissenting colleague” can make to the development of the worldviews of those with whom he or she disagrees. A “dissenting colleague” may find hitherto undetected consequences of a worldview. (Worldviews—like commitments, but unlike beliefs—are closed under logical consequence.) A “dissenting colleague” may find that a worldview lapses into inconsistency. A “dissenting colleague” may note areas where a worldview makes a sub-optimal trade-off between theoretical commitment and explanatory breadth and depth. The overwhelmingly likely outcome of any of these contributions is to improve the worldviews under examination: the goal of having everyone believe the best—one true—worldview is extremely remote because we are so far away from being in possession of any serious candidates for best—one true—worldview. “The common human project of understanding ourselves and the world in which we find ourselves” involves much more than the evaluation

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of Christian, naturalist, and atheist worldviews. While there are many different Christian, naturalist, and atheist worldviews, there are also many different Jewish worldviews, Buddhist worldviews, Muslim worldviews, Hindu worldviews, Jain worldviews, Shinto worldviews, Confucian worldviews, Daoist worldviews, indigenous worldviews, and so on. Fulfilling one’s obligation to be a “dissenting colleague” requires a preparedness to be a “dissenting colleague” for proponents of a very wide range of worldviews. One very good reason for thinking that philosophy of religion is not in a good state at present is that so little of this range of worldviews gets so much as a look in. If philosophers of religion were currently making an adequate fist of their role as “dissenting colleagues,” there would be much wider discussion of the full sweep of religious worldviews in philosophy of religion than is currently the case. I do not think that there is any reason for anyone to look askance at a domain of inquiry in which a range of Christian doctrines are taken as antecedents in the conditional questions that frame that domain of inquiry: for the investigation of those conditional questions to be philosophical, all that is required is that we do not yet know how to produce—and perhaps cannot even imagine how to produce—consensus answers to those conditional questions among experts using methods more or less universally agreed by experts. But, as I have noted, there is no reason to single out Christian doctrines for special attention: for every worldview, there is a domain of inquiry in which a range of doctrines proper to that worldview are taken as antecedents in the conditional questions that frame that domain of inquiry. And, if we think that there is “a common human project of understanding ourselves and the world in which we find ourselves,” then, collectively, we have an obligation to act as “dissenting colleagues” across the full range of these domains of inquiry.

WORKS CITED Aiello, Thomas. 2005 “Constructing ‘Godless Communism’: Religion, Politics and Popular Culture, 1954–1960.” Americana 4. http://www.americanpopularculture. com/journal/articles/spring_2005/aiello. Allen, Charlotte. 1998. “As Bad as it Gets: Three Dark Tales from the Annals of Academic Receivership.” Lingua Franca 98. http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/ 9803/asbad.html. Craig, William Lane. n.d. “The Revolution in Anglo-American Philosophy.” http:// www.reasonablefaith.org/the-revolution-in-anglo-american-philosophy. Duncan, Steven. 2007. Analytic Philosophy of Religion: Its History since 1955. Tirril: Humanities Ebooks. Field, Clive. 2015. Britain’s Last Religious Revival? Quantifying Belonging, Behaving and Believing in the Long 1950s. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Flew, Antony and Alasdair MacIntyre. 1955. New Essays in Philosophical Theology. London: SCM Press. Gross, Neil and Solon Simmons. 2008. “The Religious Convictions of College and University Professors.” In The American University in a Postsecular Age. Ed. Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Jacobsen. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, pp. 19–29. Harris, Harriet and Christopher Insole. 2005. Faith and Philosophical Analysis: The Impact of Analytical Philosophy of Religion. Aldershot: Ashgate. Henry, Patrick. 1981. “ ‘And I Don’t Care What It Is’: The Tradition-History of a Civil Religion Proof-Text.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 49: 35–47. Herberg, Will. 1955. Protestant, Catholic, Jew. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kasulis, Thomas and Robert Neville. 1997. The Recovery of Philosophy in America. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Kuklick, Bruce. 2006. “Philosophy and Inclusion in the United States, 1929–2001.” In The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion since World War II. Ed. David Hellinger. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 159–88. Long, Eugene. 2000. Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Religion 1900–2000. Dordrecht: Springer. Morris, Thomas, ed. 1994. God and the Philosophers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murray, John. 1960. We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition. New York, NY: Sheed & Ward. Plantinga, Alvin. 1984. “Advice to Christian Philosophers.” Faith and Philosophy 1, no. 3: 253–71. Plantinga, Alvin. 1990. The Twin Pillars of Christian Scholarship. Grand Rapids, MI: Calvin College & Seminary. Pybus, Cassandra. 1993. Gross Moral Turpitude: The Orr Case Reconsidered. Sydney: Heinemann. Schrum, Ethan. 2007. “Establishing a Democratic Religion: Metaphysics and Democracy in Debates over the President’s Commission on Higher Education.” History of Education Quarterly 47: 277–301. Smith, Quentin. 2001. “The Metaphilosophy of Naturalism.” Philo 4: 195–215. Wierenga, Edward. 1989. The Nature of God: An Inquiry into Divine Attributes. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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16 Beyond Two-Valued Logics A Jewish Philosopher’s Take on Recent Trends in Christian Philosophy Peter Ochs

For this Jewish philosopher, the turn to Christian philosophy, stimulated by Alvin Plantinga and others, was a welcome event. It marked a break in the hegemony of a particular model of rationality whose advocates advertised it as no mere model but rather a window to the character and reality of reason itself. Proponents of other models often found themselves addressed, not as competitors, but as advocates of unreality, illusion, or at least irrationality. In the context of Western colonialism, such epithets could be read as warrants for political control. The turn to Christian philosophy was thus a turn toward the legitimation of a set of competing models of rationality, including models associated with Christianity and potentially, therefore, of other scriptural traditions and also other religions. More than twenty years later, I remain hopeful about the turn to Christian philosophy, but I am also disappointed. I am hopeful because this turn has generated a considerable following and has encouraged turns to other streams/traditions of rationality as well, including and not at all limited to Jewish philosophy. I am disappointed, because the largest sub-society of Christian philosophers has tended, significantly more than I would have originally expected, to uphold the hegemony of the modern model of logic and reasoning: practicing and promoting types of two-valued, propositional logic as the standard model of rationality even when applied to subjects toward which Christianity has privileged access. While my appreciation for the turn to Christian philosophy is stronger than my disappointments, I limit this chapter to the latter alone, so that, with limited space, I can address these more fully.

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WA RM IN G UP Let me begin by saying what I mean by two-valued models of reason: Consider these examples from Plantinga’s writings: each case displaying a choice to frame theses of Christian philosophy in ways that can be mapped in terms of two-valued, propositional logics, in each case deferring to laws of identity, excluded middle, and of non-contradiction.¹ First, consider the following from The Nature of Necessity: I have argued that there are possible worlds, that objects have both essential and accidental properties as well as essences, and that the same object typically exists in different possible worlds. Socrates, for example, exists in this world and in many others. (Plantinga 1979, p. 121)

Defending the argument against Quine and others, Plantinga cites and criticizes Quine’s claim, in From a Logical Point of View, that: It becomes folly to seek a boundary between synthetic statements, which hold contingently on experience, and analytic statements which hold come what may. Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system. . . . Revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics; and what difference is there in principle between such a shift and the shift whereby Kepler superseded Ptolemy, or Einstein, Newton, or Darwin Aristotle? (Quine 1961, p. 43)

In response to Quine, Plantinga writes: Giving up a truth of logic—modus ponens, let us say—in order to simplify physical theory may strike us as like giving up a truth of arithmetic in order to simplify the Doctrine of the Trinity. In any event, Quine’s point is that no statement is immune from revision; for each there are circumstances under which . . . we should give it up, and do so properly. Here Quine may or may not be right. But suppose we temporarily and irenically concede that every statement, modus ponens included, is subject to revision. Are we then obliged to follow those who conclude that there are no genuinely necessary propositions? No. (Plantinga 1979, p. 3)

All Plantinga’s arguments for the reality of non-existent possibilities preclude the possibility of entertaining multivalued truth conditions. The arguments therefore appeal only to philosophers for whom two-valued truth-tables are axiomatic, and they beg the question when offered, for example, in response

¹ In sum, I label Plantinga’s sentences “two-valued” (or bivalent), because I can map them adequately in a two-valued propositional logic, for which the following axioms hold: “identity” (p = p); “excluded middle” (p V ~p); “non-contradiction” (~ (p • ~p)); and that the truth conditions for any judgment p = “x is y” are strictly T or F.

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to Quine, who argues that certain evidence can be measured only with respect to multivalued truth-tables. Plantinga appeals to the judgments of readers for whom failing to adopt certain axioms disqualifies Quine’s argumentation before the fact. Second, consider Plantinga’s claim, also from The Nature of Necessity, regarding an argument on behalf of model semantics. Arguing for the reasonableness of his possible world realism, Plantinga writes: More recently, the idea that there are possible but nonexistent objects has been endorsed or taken seriously by Leibniz, Brentano, Meinong, Russell, G. E. Moore, and many others. . . . This question, therefore, has had a distinguished career. But it receives renewed impetus from important recent developments in the philosophy of logic, especially the semantics of quantified modal logic and allied semantical studies. Of course more than one semantical system has been offered for quantified modal logic, and these systems differ significantly among themselves. For the sake of definiteness, therefore, I shall focus attention upon Saul Kripke’s 1963 Acta Philosophica Fennica systems; most other recent systems do not differ from this one in respects relevant to what I wish to say. To spare the reader a trip to the library, I shall give a brief account of Kripke’s semantics. (Plantinga 1979, p. 123)

Plantinga then offers technical details on how Kripke’s “pure and applied semantics” works: What is offered in the Kripke system, strictly speaking, is a formal or pure semantics. A model structure, for example, is a purely set theoretical construction that as such has no obvious connection with modal notions; it is just any ordered triple (G, K, R) where K is a set of which G is a member and on which R is a reflexive relation. K could be, for example, a set of chessmen with G the king and R the relation is at least as large as. A quantified model structure, again, is just an ordered pair whose first member is a model structure, the second being a function ψ(W) assigning to each member W of K a set of individuals—a set of marbles, for example. Then & Uscr; is just the set-theoretical union of the sets assigned to the members of K by ψ(W). If K is the set of prime numbers, for example, and ψ(W) assigns to W the set of integers W exceeds, then & Uscr; is the set of integers. To accept the pure semantics, therefore, is not, as such, to acquiesce in any philosophical doctrine at all. The pure semantics commits itself to little more than a fragment of set theory. (Plantinga 1979, pp. 126–7)²

² He continues: It is clear, then, that quantification is over existing members of U; that is, a universally quantified formula of the form (x)F¹x is true with respect to a given world W if and only if every object in the domain of individuals of W is assigned to F¹ in W; the fact, if it is a fact, that there are other objects from & Uscr;— objects not in the domain of W—that are not assigned to F¹ in W in no way compromises its truth . . . (Plantinga 1979, pp. 123–4)

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Plantinga thereby displays, by example, how a celebrated logician like Kripke could construct a well-formed system of model semantics. Plantinga’s implication is that such a system could do the job of providing logical conditions for mapping a well-formed theory of non-existent real possibilities. But this begs Quine’s question once again, since Plantinga’s semanticism will appeal only to readers who dismiss the possibility of multivalued truth-tables. Plantinga’s claim appears analogous to the claims of some philosophy departments, selfdescribed as “strictly analytic,” who disallow their students’ investigating philosophic practices that are conditioned by axioms other than those selfselected by the faculty. Among such departments, for example, there are those that are not interested in hiring logicians who specialize in anything other than modern systems of two-valued logic. In Plantinga’s case, one may question the warrant for disapproving of Christian philosophers who might investigate applications of multivalued norms of inquiry to the investigation of Christian specific doctrines and theologoumena. This question is warranted by Plantinga’s own celebrated claim in Faith and Philosophy:³ Christians must display autonomy and integrality. If contemporary mechanistic biology really has no place for human freedom, then something other than contemporary mechanistic biology is called for; and the Christian community must develop it. If contemporary psychology is fundamentally naturalist, then it is up to Christian psychologists to develop an alternative that fits well with Christian supernaturalism—one that takes its start from such scientifically seminal truths as that God has created humankind in his own image. (Plantinga 1984, as taken from the “New Preface”) First, Christian philosophers and Christian intellectuals generally must display more autonomy—more independence of the rest of philosophical world. Second, Christian philosophers must display more integrity—integrity in the sense of integral wholeness, or oneness, or unity, being all of one piece. Perhaps “integrality” would be the better word here. And necessary to these two is a third: Christian courage, or boldness, or strength, or perhaps Christian self-confidence. We Christian philosophers must display more faith, more trust in the Lord; we must put on the whole armor of God . . . (Plantinga 1984, p. 254)

Plantinga’s desire here is what gave me hope so many years ago. But I am perplexed by his evident assumption that strict obedience to the axioms of modern philosophy’s two-valued logic is a display of the “autonomy and integrality” of philosophers devoted to Christianity. I see no evidence, for example, that Paul’s writings necessarily obey such axioms or that, as I have examined in more disciplined fashion, the theological and semiotic arguments of, for example, Origen and Augustine obey such axioms (see Ochs 2003, 2009).

³ http://www.faithandphilosophy.com/article_advice.php.

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APPLICATIONS

Conventional Discourse, “Language Orthodoxy” As linguistic utterances, Plantinga’s sentences appeal to what I will call the language conventions of everyday English discourse, the same conventions operating at a dinner table when someone asks for “the salt” assuming that all guests around the table share the speaker’s grammar, syntax, and semantics, so that it is obvious to all that the request refers precisely to “this salt shaker” and neither to that “pepper shaker” nor to “some grains of salt lying on the table,” nor to anything else visible to the guests. In other words, Plantinga does not specify a particular subset of English speakers who alone would understand his utterances.⁴ Like the dinner table guests, Plantinga offers his claims with respect specifically to two-valued truth conditions. Another epithet I would apply to this kind of discourse is “linguistic orthodoxy,” where a speech community can assume that, unless special instructions are offered, speakers and listeners receive spoken words as virtually direct windows to the world of their assumed references. Listeners do not wonder about “the particular way that person uttered the word ‘salt’”; instead, when they hear “salt,” their first reaction is typically either to look straightaway for this saltshaker or to glance at a mental image of “saltshaker.”

Exceptions within Everyday Conventions, for example, Conversational Implicature In the terms I am using, speakers who share a linguistic orthodoxy may also recognize exceptions to conventional utterances, such as the exceptions Paul Grice (1981) associates with “conversational implicature.” According to Grice, speech communities and sub-communities recognize the verbal cues of a speaker’s intention to communicate a message according to rules that purposely flout the community’s conventions of meaning. A speaker might make an observation that only a few participants in a conversation would recognize as purposely ironic: for example, appearing to say the right thing while signaling to some closer friends something quite critical—uttering “oh what an unusual saltshaker,” with the overt implication that it is unusual in a good way, but with the conversational implicature, known to some, that “unusual” here means “pretty awful.” I am illustrating only the simplest case from Grice’s elaborate account, but it should be sufficient to mark implicature as ⁴ For the same token, I would classify his speech as “conventional discourse,” even if he claimed to direct his arguments specifically to the subset of speakers who are trained in Western philosophy and Christian theology.

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illustrating exceptions within the rules of sophisticated language orthodoxies. Such cases mark temporary suspensions of the two-valued norm of conventional language use; they do not in my estimation constitute an outright break with the conventions of the linguistic orthodoxy. Plantinga’s discourse remains consistent with such a linguistic orthodoxy.

When Two Valued-Models No Longer Apply within the Everyday The overall argument of this chapter stands or falls on my empirical claim that there are significant occasions of language use that do not merely suspend but also abrogate the two-valued norm of conventional language use. These are occasions that accompany exceptional dimensions of everyday language use, such as prayer, poetry, and references to future probabilities. There are also occasions when the norms of everyday language use are simply interrupted, for example, by war or other severe societal conflict, migration, social dislocation, emigration, and other occasions of radical cultural change. My argument is that judgments offered on these occasions are truth functional only with respect to multivalued logics or norms of reasoning, so that claims in the form “x is y” may be T, F, or a third option such as “T v F,” “maybe,” and so on. There is a variety of warrants for my claim.

References to the Future: The Sea Fight Tomorrow and Beyond Some claims are multiple because they address conditions that will be determined only in the future. If, for example, I want to predict the outcome of the next presidential election, there is insufficient evidence available now (summer 2016) to falsify any number of predictions. It would be more reasonable to assign some range of probability to any prediction I might make: probabilities are a variety of multivalued claims. Aristotle anticipated this challenge, recognizing that judgments about the future (such as the sea fight tomorrow) were outside the bounds of his two-valued propositional logic, although he chose to devote his analytic only to two-valued logic.

Prayer and Poetry Do verses of prayer, as of poetry, display rational discourse? For some it will be commonplace to answer “No” and to defend the answer by showing how futile it is to try to diagram such verses within the terms of a two-valued propositional logic. But what of multivalued logics? Examining, for example, the verse of rabbinic Morning Prayer that blesses the one “who everyday continually

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renews the order of creation,”⁵ I would not want to claim that such a predication has no truth-value or is simply non-falsifiable. I would, instead, prefer rational inquiries that sought to identify the possible set of communities that assign the predicate “who daily renews . . . ” to “God,” the possible set that assigns the predicate to “superstition,” the possible set that assigns it to “religious beliefs,” and so on. I would then prefer inquiries that sought to measure the probability that members of the first set would identify the predicate with a given number of meanings (such as “continual creation,” “the big bang,” “the divine presence throughout time,” “occasionalism,” and so on); the probability that members of the second set identified it with another number of meanings, and so on. Such an inquiry would not evaluate the truth functionality of a verse of prayer—or poetry—by examining whether or not the verse corresponded to some singular state of affairs. Instead, it would evaluate a different category of truth functionality: the probability that, of a given range of possible meanings and performative effects of the verse, a given meaning or effect would be realized/embodied among members of a given reading community in a given place and time.

Various Degrees of Socio-Linguistic Interruption, Break-Down, Change, and Repair Interruptions in conventional language habits represent the most important exceptions to the presumption of conventional discourse. In small subtle ways, such interruptions pepper everyday life: when the key I normally use to open the door doesn’t work anymore and I can’t figure out for a while how to get out; when a child leaves home and the remaining family relations are re-formed; when, God forbid, the child is very ill—or a spouse or parent or close friend—and, even though traditional religious discourses already anticipate the moment, we don’t know what or how to speak to one another or even to ourselves about what to do in this world; when war or flood uproots thousands or even more from their homes, and the social order is atomized into surviving fragments moving across borders, and the societal disruption is manifest in linguistic disruption—when vocabularies have to expand in unexpected ways, when accepting some other lexicon and grammar is the only route to survival, and when in transit elemental value predicates seem to miss their usual subjects and then even their usual meanings. In such settings, conventional discourse remains, but it is interrupted in unexpected ways, from lexicon to grammar and syntax to pragmatics (our ways of recognizing customary rules of performance and performative meaning). In such contexts, ⁵ For more detail on this approach to Morning Prayer, see Ochs (2006).

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interruption is as much the rule as is convention, which means that there are times when what we say maps out very well according to standard propositional logics, but also times when what we want to say doesn’t map out. If, at such moments, we rely only on the two-valued rules of convention, then the meaning of each interruption is “non-meaning” and the rule of thumb for getting out of the mess we’re in is “no rule at all.” But there is life after loss, after wound and disruption, migration and even death, which means there is meaning, which also means that there are most likely rules of a kind that carry us from the time before interruption to the time after us. We who inherit traditions of revealed Scripture perhaps know best of all that these moments of interruption are not at all without rule; they are the very occasions when we ask to have faith that our Redeemer lives. For rabbinic tradition, these are the times of which the ultimate prototype is Galut, exile, and Chorban, destruction (as in the Destruction of the Temple). For the church, is this not Golgotha? And is the very meaning of our corporate lives in the scriptural traditions not defined by such times? This theme of life after loss belongs, theologically, to soteriology, but philosophically to what I call “the logics of repair.” I move to “repair,” because the logics of interruption, per se, remain the logics of convention, since, in logical terms, an interruption in socio-linguistic habits does no more than mark an as yet unidentified rule, habit, or cluster of habits as non-operative. For individual human beings, this mark usually appears as pain; for social groups, there is a range of marks, from a given pattern of pain among group members to the cessation of certain societal actions to various forms of societal disruption, unrest, conflict. But what interrupted habits? What specific societal dysfunction? These questions do not belong to the point of interruption but only to a societal response to the interruption. The question is, what habits inform this response? In many writings, I argue that, if the response proves to be reparative, then it proves to have been guided by habits other than those of the socio-linguistic conventions (see Ochs 1998, pp. 94–104, 20ff., 61ff., etc.; see also Ochs 2010).

MULTIVALUED M ODELS Here are examples of what I mean by multivalued models. The Stoics introduced the frame for a three-valued logic, since they allowed that the judgment “I see the black cat” would refer (dynamically) to “the name-bearer” (tugkainon), or the external object that stimulates the judgment, and also to the “actual state of affairs (pragma) revealed by an utterance” (Sextus Empiricus 1949, 8.11–12), which various members of our community might judge (immediately) as “black cat,” “grey cat,” “black furry something,” and so on.

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With respect to such polysemy, my judgment “The cat is black” is T/F with respect to the conditions of my own judgment; with respect to the namebearer it is T/F/W (as noted earlier, this condition may be “T v F,” and so on). As I have argued in several places (see Ochs 1990, 2009), Augustine adopts and transforms Stoic logic as the prime instrument for diagramming a logic of scriptural interpretation and a logic of Trinitarian reasoning. With Augustine scholar Robert Markus (1972), I claim that, to display the rationality and logic intrinsic to sacred Scripture, Augustine transformed Stoic logic into a semiotic that anticipates Charles Peirce’s (1848–1914) triadic and three-valued semiotics. While scholars typically turn to de Doctrina Christiana to see this semiotic at work, I argue that the most developed form of the semiotic appears in de Trinitate. In the latter, the semiotic is not named as such but operates fluidly in the pattern of reasoning through which Augustine articulates the triune life in its embodied forms in the world, in particular the processes of human memory, thought, charity, love, and prayer.⁶ As Markus reads him, Augustine attempts to say what Peirce will later say: that a sign is a thing that “stands for something to somebody” (Markus 1972, p. 74.) Thus, in de trin. XIII, Augustine claims a word is a word only if it means something. Words do not, therefore, stand for things, but only for their intended meanings (de trin. XV), while signs in general will have meaning to the interpreter for whom there is a meaning convention. Of symbols, then, we may distinguish the signifier (signatum); the intended meaning or object (significatum); and “the subject to whom the sign stands for the object signified” (Markus 1972, p. 74). Markus claims explicitly, in fact, that Augustine anticipates Peirce’s conception of a triadic semiosis (Markus, 1972, p. 75).⁷ For both Aristotle and the Stoa, a given logic can be articulated either in propositional form (such as Aristotle’s “S is P”) or in semiotic form (in the Prior Analytics II.27, Aristotle defines a sign, semeion, as “a demonstrative proposition necessary or generally approved”; as noted above, the Stoa expanded this definition). In the case of the Augustinian cum Peircean semiotic (where x refers ⁶ See Teubner (2016). The ms. of this book offered a fine resource for deepening my claims about de trin. ⁷ For Markus, Peirce’s definition of “symbol” applies to Augustine’s signa data: “A symbol is a sign which refers to an object by virtue of a law, usually an association of general ideas, which operates to cause the symbol to be interpreted as referring to that object.” The philosopher John Deely offers a complementary reading. He claims, first, that “It was Augustine who first proposed a ‘general semiotics’—that is, the general ‘science’ or ‘doctrine’ of science, where sign becomes the genus of which words (ὀνόματά) and a theory of signs (σημεῖa) are alike equally species.” And he claims, second, that defects in Augustine’s semiotics were not fully repaired until the semiotics of Charles Peirce (although Deely adds that the semiotic of John of Poinsot both anticipates Peirce’s achievement and offers considerable more detail with respect to the semiotics of language, of the analogy of being, and, of course, of Christian theology). See Deely (2001, p. 217, passim).

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to y for some particular condition of knowing, z), the propositional-like form is diagrammed in a “logic of relations” as “aRb.”⁸ Werner Heisenberg referred to Peirce’s logic as somehow anticipating fifty years earlier what Heisenberg and his colleagues called “quantum logic” (to which I will return later in this chapter). My claim is that Augustine and Peirce’s relative or triadic semiotics served also as ways of mapping the logic of what I have termed reparative reason, which is homologous with soteriological reasoning. The “reparative” character of such reasoning need not be evident in the formal semiotic or logic; it displays its contribution to reparative work only in the socio-linguistic context of that work. As displayed in the rabbinic example introduced earlier, rabbinic midrash after the Destruction of the Temple offers reasoning that could be diagrammed in several ways: (1) Discovery of a contradiction between scriptural promises and what appears to be existential reality: in more general terms, contradictions between deep societal expectations and the emergence of existential conditions that appear to contradict that expectation. A classic example is found in Mishnah Sanhedrin X:1, which begins with a biblical citation that appears utterly counterfactual to the sages who witnessed the Destruction of the Second Temple and Exile: “As it is written, ‘your people shall all be righteous, they shall possess the land forever; they are a shoot of My planting, the work of My hands in whom I shall be glorified’” (Isaiah 60:21). (2) Discovery (technically “abduction”⁹) of an alternative interpretive possibility: that what Scripture names “the Temple” may be identified, polysemically, with any member of a series of spatio-temporally specific embodiments (such as Solomon’s Temple, Herod’s Temple, Temple of the Heart, the Synagogue), or in more general terms, that an apparent contradiction between expectation and existential reality may be reinterpreted as a painful but ultimately tolerable transition from one embodiment of societal habits, laws, or beliefs to another embodiment, each embodiment specific to some existential context. In this case, our Mishnah appends this rabbinic phrase to Isaiah’s words: “All Israel have a portion in the world-to-come, as it is written . . . ”—suggesting, we may imagine, that there is that place where the prophecy is fulfilled.

⁸ Peirce’s extensive work in logic and semiotics is devoted primarily to modeling the rationality and the science of multivalued judgments: from the logic of relations and logic of vagueness to various predicate calculi to existential graphs and to the mathematics of probability. ⁹ See the discussion on the notion of “abduction” in Coleridge, Hardy, and Peirce later in this chapter.

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(3) A decision to test the discovery by framing and applying ways of enacting that new possibility: as displayed, for example in the Mishnah, in decades-long experiments in the generation of new or highly revised practices of prayer enacted in new or highly revised places of prayer and so on. (4) Evaluation, over considerable time, of the consequence of the experiment: in the rabbinic case, a gradual decision to institutionalize and authorize certain practices and places of prayer and so on: in more general terms the institutionalization of new conventions of practice.¹⁰ Peirce diagrams sequences of reparative practice like this as what, if a given logician found it helpful, could be displayed as a cycle of “abductive,” “deductive,” and “inductive” syllogisms: in brief, reasonings through which repairs are proposed/hypothesized; through which experimental implications of those proposals are framed, and through which the implications are tested and evaluated. If the evaluation is negative, the process repeats; otherwise the process of reasoning is completed, replaced by the new convention of practice. The reader may ask, however, if each stage of this process could be diagrammed in terms of two-valued propositional logic. Or a comparable predicate calculus? With limited space, I’ll offer only a brief response: No, that would leave us with a series of binary options, no one of which would entertain the truth functionality of a series of alternative claims about a given habit— that it could truly be enacted this way or that way. Readers may retort that, once a given way is chosen for a given context, then that way is true and another false. My response is: No, because we have no reason to exclude the possibility that there is more than one adequate way of enacting the same habit in the same place. More recently, Christian theologians that I like to label “post-liberals” engage in practices of religious reasoning that cannot be mapped in terms of two-valued logics (see Ochs 2011). The challenge for my thesis is, however, that these post-liberals tend to shy away from disciplined philosophical work. The reason for this shyness is that they tend to identify “philosophy,” even “Christian philosophy,” with the strictly two-valued model that typifies the modern philosophic enterprise, whether extra-religious or Christian. To this extent, part of my argument is with them: namely, they should not share in the error of assuming that something like “formal reasoning itself” is necessarily two-valued. Instead they should recognize that, at a certain stage of its development, European/Western civilization found it expedient to adopt what is basically the logic of everyday conventional discourse as the rational foundation for constructing post-feudal systems of economy, government, and science/inquiry. Our judgment about the value of the modern model ¹⁰ The example here is drawn from Ochs (2003).

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should itself avoid binary alternatives: it is not that “either modern logic or not,” but that, according to the model of aRb, the dominant model of modern logic is appropriate to certain contexts, ab, and not others. As I have noted above, these contexts include physics within the bounds of everyday experience (Newtonian science), conventional social discourse and so on, but I hope post-liberal theologians would recognize that their own work could be better disciplined by the introduction of Christian philosophic practices guided by multivalued or other forms of non-binary logics. Does this imply that something like “post-liberal Christian philosophy” would represent just another, albeit “more sophisticated,” intrusion of Western or secular rationality into the sanctum or sources of scripturally/Christologically grounded discourses, beliefs, and doctrines? The argument that concludes this chapter is: No, a significant set of multivalued logics may owe their abductive origins to rabbinic and patristic and Muslim reflections on scripturally specific practices of reading, reasoning, and acting. Before concluding, however, let me turn to one more technical exemplum of contemporary multivalued logic: quantum physics.

Quantum Mechanics: Implications for Logic Even before the Copenhagen school of Bohr, Heisenberg, and others, late nineteenth-century Western physicists began to disconfirm the applicability of Newtonian laws of physics beyond the range of everyday, macroscopic human experience. The claim was not that Newton’s laws were false, but that they were overgeneralized: not precisely applicable at the very small range of subatomic particles. Within the terms of Newton’s laws, observers might initially claim that the behavior of subatomic particles fell outside the range of science, “behaving according to mere chance.” But by the time of Bohr and Heisenberg, theoretical frameworks had been set for another response: that the behavior of such particles is to be identified according to the sciences of statistics and probability. For example, an electron cloud could be examined, not as if its elements were discrete objects located in a particular point in space time, but as if it represented a probability function with respect to which, given certain conditions, behaviors could be anticipated with great accuracy. Quantum theory is no longer the new kid on the block; recent college physics textbooks may devote half their pages to various aspects and implications of quantum measurement. Omitting technical details, let me illustrate three of the discoveries that moved twentieth-century scientists away from Newtonian models for phenomena outside the range of everyday human experience. After that, I will suggest how the turn to post-Newtonian sciences leads away from the two-valued standard for logic of science and, finally, what the implications might be for Christian and other scripturally based philosophies.

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Quantum Measurement: “Black Body” Radiation and the Photoelectric Effect What physicists call a “black body” is an idealized model according to which a material object that would ideally absorb all of the radiation falling on it would, according to classical physics, re-emit all of it. The movement of radiation in and out of the black body would illustrate the laws of thermodynamics, in particular the “conservation of energy.” In 1900, Lord Rayleigh and Sir James Jeans formulated a complex equation to account for black body radiation at low frequencies. But experiments performed repeatedly during the next decade indicated unexpected fluctuations near the ultraviolet frequencies, a result physicists came to call “the ultraviolet catastrophe.” It was a catastrophe, because it contradicted the prime assumption in classical physics: that the laws of physics apply universally and continuously. Rayleigh and Jeans made the assumption that energy is continuous, but Max “Planck made a contrary proposal, suggesting that radiation was emitted or absorbed from time to time in packets of energy of a definite size, [where] the energy content of . . . these quanta (as the packets were called) would be proportional to the frequency of . . . radiation. The constant of proportionality was taken to be a universal constant of nature, now known as Planck’s constant, h” (Polkinghorne 2002, pp. 7–8). Regarding the photoelectric effect, we can turn to Polkinghorne again: This is the phenomenon in which a beam of light ejects electrons from within a metal. Metals contain electrons that are able to move around within their interior (their flow is what generates an electric current), but which do not have enough energy to escape from the metal entirely. That the photoelectric effect happened was not at all surprising. The radiation transfers energy to electrons trapped inside the metal and, if the gain is sufficient, an electron can then escape from the forces that constrain it. On a classical way of thinking, the electrons would be agitated by the ‘swell’ of the light waves and some could be sufficiently disturbed to shake loose from the metal. According to this picture, the degree to which this happened would be expected to depend upon the intensity of the beam . . . In actual fact, the experiments showed exactly the reverse behaviour. Below a certain critical frequency, no electrons were emitted, however intense the beam might be; above that frequency, even a weak beam could eject some electrons. Einstein saw that this puzzling behaviour became instantly intelligible if one considered the beam of light as a stream of persisting quanta. An electron would be ejected because one of these quanta had collided with it and given up all its energy. The amount of energy in that quantum, according to Planck, was directly proportional to the frequency . . . Taking seriously the existence of quanta of light (they came to be called ‘photons’), explained the mystery of the photoelectric effect. (Polkinghorne 2002, p. 9)

The results of the ultraviolet catastrophe and the photoelectric effect led to a series of related theories and discoveries, which, for our purposes, I will list only briefly.

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Wave–Particle Duality Through a series of stunning experiments, physicists discovered that light energy behaves in what initially appears to be contradictory fashion. When light is passed through a double slit-screen onto a detector, it leaves patterns of marks on the detector that display features, at once, of particles or quanta and of waves, or probable distributions. Extending the earlier work of Einstein and others, Niels Bohr theorized that the behavior of light was not contradictory but dual, displaying either of two contrary properties depending on the mode of measurement introduced. Paul Dirac (Polkinghorne’s mentor) derived from this the principle of superposition: that the particle- and wave-like measurements of subatomic behavior could be treated as additive rather than contradictory. This means that information could be gathered from heterogeneous sources of experimental evidence. One consequence is that the behavior of subatomic particles could not be predicted in a linear fashion, since there would be only a probable likelihood that the behavior would display one state rather than another. Subatomic behavior would indeed be measurable but only through statistical measures of probability. Polkinghorne observes: Classical logic, as conceived of by Aristotle and the man on the Clapham omnibus, is based on the distributive law of logic. If I tell you that Bill has red hair and he is either at home or at the pub, you will expect either to find a redhaired Bill at home or a red-haired Bill at the pub. It seems a pretty harmless conclusion to draw, and formally it depends upon the Aristotelian law of the excluded middle: there is no middle term between ‘at home’ and ‘not at home’. In the 1930s, people began to realize that matters were different in the quantum world. An electron can not only be ‘here’ and ‘not here’, but also in any number of other states that are superpositions of ‘here’ and ‘not here’. That constitutes a middle term undreamed of by Aristotle. The consequence is that there is a special form of logic, called quantum logic, whose details were worked out by Garret Birkhoff and John von Neumann. It is sometimes called three-valued logic, because in addition to ‘true’ and ‘false’ it countenances the probabilistic answer ‘maybe’, an idea that philosophers have toyed with independently. (Polkinghorne 2002, pp. 36–7) Probabilities also arise in classical physics, where their origin lies in ignorance of some of the detail of what is going on. The paradigm example is the tossing of a coin. If one asks for the probability of throwing either a 1 or a 2, one simply adds the separate probabilities together to give 1/3. This addition rule holds because the processes of throwing that lead to 1 or to 2 are distinct and independent of each other . . . Yet in the quantum world things are different . . . because of the superposition principle permitting an electron . . . [to display either of two contrary states]. What classically were mutually distinct possibilities are entangled with each other quantum mechanically . . . [resulting in different laws for combining probabilities] . . . In the everyday world, to get the probability of a final result you simply add together the probabilities of independent intermediate

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possibilities. In the quantum world, the combination of intermediate possibilities that are not directly observed takes place in a more subtle and sophisticated way. (Polkinghorne 2002, pp. 39–41)

What Lessons to Draw from Quantum Logic? The first lesson is that quantum logic is a species of non-two-valued logic, just as much as quantum physics is a species of non-Newtonian physics. Neither “non-” implies “anti-” or “wholly superseding,” but only “not always” or “not universally.” The quantum turn simply relativizes Newtonian physics and two-valued logics to certain realms of human experience. A second lesson is that quantum logic offers the most serious challenge to modern Western civilization’s preoccupation with single models, norms, and directives for rationality itself and thus for each class of behaviors designated as appropriate to disciplined rational inquiry, from natural science to philosophy to the social sciences to text-historical science to ethics. Unlike postmodern criticism, the quantum alternative to modern, two-valued models is additive rather than substitutionary. For this reason, it would not lend itself to the intellectually reactionary movements that have insulated some recent academic disciplines from challenges to the hegemony of two-valued positivisms. Multivalued and probabilistic forms of reasoning fulfill the fundamental modern requisites for disciplined science, including experimental science. They challenge only the modern academy’s tendency to overgeneralize these requisites as if they defined rationality per se, meriting, for example, Wittgenstein’s critique of “foundationalism,” Peirce’s critique of “intuitionism,” Dewey’s critique of misdirected “quests for certainty,” Gödel’s critique of presumptions of “completeness,” and so on. For over a century now, natural scientists from many subdisciplines have tested and confirmed the scientific reliability of quantum logics and quantum mechanical models of mathematics. One consequence is that philosophers ought to show more confidence in the applicability of probabilistic practices of reasoning to many areas of inquiry that disappoint expectations of all-ornothing certainty.¹¹ Polkinghorne writes, “Classical physics describes a world that is clear and determinate. Quantum physics describes a world that is cloudy and fitful” (Polkinghorne 2002, p. 43),¹² where “observables come in ¹¹ Bearing in mind that “probability” refers here to quantum probability, not to the linear models of probability that serve two-valued practices of statistics. ¹² He notes, “In terms of the . . . mathematical expression of the theory, we have seen that these properties arise from the fact that the quantum superposition principle permits the mixing together of states that classically would be strictly immiscible. This simple principle of counterintuitive additivity finds a natural form of mathematical expression in terms of what are called vector spaces” (Polkinghorne 2002, p. 26).

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pairs that epistemologically exclude each other” (Polkinghorne 2002, p. 26). But quantum physics has by now a long history of successfully drawing highly useful, practicable knowledge out of observations of such phenomena, a result that should attract the attention of Christian philosophers seeking ways of clarifying accounts of Christological mysteries. Polkinghorne adds that: An everyday example of this behaviour can be given in musical terms. It is not possible both to assign a precise instant to when a note was sounded and to know precisely what its pitch was. This is because determining the pitch of a note requires analysing the frequency of the sound and this requires listening to a note for a period lasting several oscillations before an accurate estimate can be made. It is the wave nature of sound that imposes this restriction, and if the measurement questions of quantum theory are discussed from the point of view of wave mechanics, exactly similar considerations lead back to the uncertainty principle. (Polkinghorne 2002, p. 33)

Polkinghorne refers here to what Heisenberg dubbed the “uncertainty principle,” that, for example, physicists cannot simultaneously pinpoint both the location and velocity of subatomic particles. The tools of measurement required to pinpoint one criterion proportionately reduce the applicability of tools required to pinpoint the other criterion. This principle might attract the interest of Christian philosophers who might, for example, seek to clarify relations between pneumatological and Christological accounts of different divine persons, or accounts of attributes of “what is fully divine” and “what is fully human.”

BEYOND TWO-VALUED LOG IC: IMPLICATIONS F O R CH R I ST I A N P HI LOS OP HY We turn, finally, to the purpose of this entire essay: to recommend the reasonableness of Christian philosophers’ availing themselves of more than two-valued, propositional logics. I shall articulate several recommendations: (1) If Christian philosophers “must display more faith” and “more integrality,” then we should expect them to adopt whatever logical frames are most appropriate to their formal analyses of, for example, the plain sense of Scripture, or of Patristic and later scriptural interpretation, or of Augustinian and other theological reflections on the doctrine of Trinity, and so on. If Christian philosophic analyses of such subjects were framed strictly by twovalued logics, then there is sufficient evidence that these analyses would, without warrant, pre-designate significant dimensions of Christian religious theology and religious practice as beyond the pale of philosophic study.

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I would submit, for example, the previously mentioned evidence of Robert Markus’s framing Augustine’s de trin. within the terms of a triadic semiotics. For an additional example, consider theologian Ben Quash’s (2013) “abductive” study of pneumatology in Found Theology, History, Imagination and the Holy Spirit. Applying the logical models of Charles Peirce to analyze the late Daniel Hardy’s pneumatology, Quash introduces Peirce’s models of abductive as well as inductive and deductive modes of reasoning. For Peirce, abduction is the mode of inference through which one introduces hypotheses to account for observations of unexpected patterns of behavior; scientific hypotheses are one product of abductive inference. According to Hardy, Peirce probably drew the term “abduction” from the writings of Samuel Coleridge, for whom only “influx from the Light [Logos] with the Spirit” enables frustrated cognition to consider, per hypothesis, possible accounts of new phenomena that it had not previously considered (Coleridge 2002, pp. 327–32; as quoted in Quash 2013, p. 269). For Hardy, Coleridge thereby traces the movement by which human beings are illuminated in reason and directed in love, [which movement] is also the “true center of all” upon which all else depends (Hardy 2006, p. 51). For Quash, Hardy/Coleridge give insight into the abductive character of the work of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament. Thus “the disciples to whom Jesus says farewell on the night of his betrayal go on to receive what was promised to them then: a spirit who will lead them from moment to moment of the difficult challenges that lie ahead. This Spirit does not deliver a single, all-purpose message for them to pack up and take with them on their various missions as they proclaim the good news. On the contrary, the Spirit waits for them up ahead, in the many different contexts to which they will go; their job is to be ready to find the Spirit there with just what that moment requires: “When they bring you to trial and hand you over, do not worry beforehand about what you are to say; but say whatever is given you at that time, for it is not you who speak, but the Holy Spirit” (Mark 13:11). For Quash, Coleridge’s account of abduction is an account of knowledge through which “the self is abducted” by the Spirit, in the same way that “This Spirit searches our depth as the Spirit searches God’s depths (1 Cor. 2:9–13), and brings them into the deepest relation. Human understanding is transformed in this process, losing its conventional moorings and having to abandon its normal strategies of comprehension and mental containment” (Quash 2013, pp. 278–9). Introducing this pneumatology by way of an account of Peirce’s logic of abduction, Quash joins Hardy and Coleridge in seeing the work of the Spirit manifest in the abduction that fosters paradigm-change in natural science as well as in religious understanding. I bring this example of Quash’s analysis as evidence that there are good reasons for engaging in multivalued practices on the grounds of “good faith and integrality” and that there is reason to question efforts to exclude such practices from Christian philosophy.

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(2) Following Merold Westphal, there is good reason to respect “the importance of preserving the difference between God and ourselves, in this instance not confusing the human intellect with the divine.” (Westphal, in this volume) Westphal’s contribution to this volume offers an additional reason for questioning efforts to limit Christian philosophy to two-valued logics: “The assumption that our truth is God’s Truth strikes me as dangerous, both spiritually and politically, and this, it seems to me, is the claim we make whenever we claim to be in possession of true propositions” (Westphal, in this volume). Within the terms of this chapter, I read my category of “conventional discourse” as isomorphic with the category we might call “specifically human discourse.” If, within the terms of a doctrine of creation, we identify “natural languages” as creatures of the divine, then we may identify “specifically human discourse” with the visible effects of societal uses and transformations of natural languages: visible, for example, to the sciences of language that offer taxonomies of language families, theories of the evolution of languages, and accounts of the emergence of local dialects and other forms of language change. It is best not to construct a single name for the set of all possible cases of non-conventional discourse. There is room here for surprise, contingency, discovery. To this extent there is room here for the “unknowing” that Westphal urges us to acknowledge. At the same time, I do not presume that Westphal’s approach precludes kataphasis. My own practice is to distinguish the revealed Word of Scripture from specifically human discourse by distinguishing between the uninterpreted graphemes of Hebrew Bible and any reading of these graphemes according to conventions we might attribute to any dialect of Biblical Hebrew or to any language of any community of readers and interpreters. I understand all the latter to fall within the category of societal responses to Scripture, including obedient responses to divine command, but not at all representative of divine speech itself. On one level, this is an apophatic practice. On another level, it introduces the conditions for kataphasis outside the bounds of conventional language use and thus outside the domain of what can be measured by twovalued logics. As may be evident from the argument of this chapter, I do not presume that “language” or “meaningful discourse” falls only within these bounds. I ask, instead, what we might learn if we were to suppose that Scripture reveals its Word through certain transformations of each language convention through which it is received. Such transformations would appear as patterns of linguistic performance (examined for example through a form of pragmatics) rather than of linguistic meaning (examined through a form of semantics). They would appear through patterns of language change (or of changes in habits of language use), not from one convention to another, but from any given convention to something else, where the “something else” were displayed by

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way of relations among conventional terms (conventions of syntax, semantics and so forth), but irreducible to those terms. One might suggest, for example, that George Lindbeck’s account of “doctrine” would be compatible with my thought-game: where doctrines of “Trinity” or “Incarnation” are revealed through Scripture but not through any conventional reading of Scripture. The pneumatological claims of Coleridge, Daniel Hardy, and Ben Quash might also be warranted as “abductions” of meta-conventional patterns of relation. The “theo-semiotics”¹³ of Augustine, Poinsot, and Peirce might also merit comparable warrants: in this case, modes of multivalued logic identified, abductively, with certain patterns of relation among elements of Scripture but not by way of any conventional readings of Scripture. These forms of theo-semiotics/theo-logic would serve, in addition, as instruments for modeling the meta-conventional abductions offered by other theologians and religious philosophers. In the Appendix, I illustrate one way of modeling such abductions (in this case, as displayed in “scriptural reasoning”), but there is no room to illustrate more of the potential consequences of my practice. Without presuming that Westphal would endorse my practice, I do take courage from his words: Would we not be more consistent theists if we acknowledged that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, not just occasionally, when we are ignorant or in error, but all the time—that the infinite qualitative difference between God and ourselves also means, as Kant claimed, that God’s thought is systematically different from ours? Is not the proposition the cornerstone of the tower of Babel where we chant as we climb, “I will ascend into heaven . . . I will be like the most High” (Isaiah 14:13–14) (Westphal, in this volume)

The kataphatic step I take is to entertain the possibility of divine–human engagement through the realm of meta-conventional discourse. I believe Christian doctrine and the rabbis’ halakhic and aggadic midrash illustrate the consequences of such a step. Should Westphal challenge me to show how this step preserves the divine–human difference, I would offer these two concluding disclaimers: • Offered to those who might fear our possible dogmatism: Our theosemiotic claims remain abductions, which appear strictly as “unknowing” only when measured bivalently, but which appear in our multivalued measures as indefinite/vague claims or positive claims of some degree of probability. We may know God in such abductions as we know God in prayer: neither not-knowing nor knowing with a given clarity, distinctness, and certainty.

¹³ A term coined in Raposa (1989).

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• Offered to those who might fear our possible relativism: Our theosemiotic claims do not operate within the bivalent terms that may generate such a fear. The “certainty” we seek is not comparable to “sense-certainty” but to “faith,” which I understand as a mode of trusting relationship (emunah) rather than a bivalent act of perceptual-like judgment. Abductions are fruits of cognition performed within the context of long-term trusting relations with the Creator/Revealer/Redeemer. If measured by itself, each act of this kind of cognition would display some mode and degree of probability. In the modestly long run, a line of cognition might fade away (as falsified) or receive refinements and gain in strength (probability). In the longer run, it might fade away again or gain all the more strength, while remaining to some degree falsifiable. God may not offer us more assurance than this within this world.

A P P E N D I X : M U L T I V A LU ED SE M I O T I C MODELS OF INTER-ABRAHAMIC S CRIPTURAL REASONING Some readers may be interested to see a sample of a more technical philosophical modeling of scriptural logic. I excerpt the following from my semiotic study of practices of inter-Abrahamic scriptural study among members of the Society for Scriptural Reasoning.¹⁴ Society members identify canons of scripture as tradition- and community-specific receptions of the divine word, the performative force of which word is disclosed within tradition-specific practices of reading and interpretation. But Society members also recognize the fruitfulness of occasional events of study across the borders of scriptural traditions, not to peer into the performative force of the revealed word but, for a moment, to enjoy the company of deep readers from other canonical traditions and the company of other hermeneutical styles of reception. Curious about the patterns of reading and logics of reading I have observed over numerous sessions of this kind, I sought to fashion some models of reading/ reasoning across canonical borders. To do this, I found it helpful to fashion a general formula for what I dubbed a “Relational Semiotics” and then to modify the formula to generate usable models for the primary patterns/logics of reading/reasoning I had observed. I offer here just a few samples: not enough for an adequate account, just enough to offer a taste of how multivalued logics may be applied to help identify the reasonings that are indigenous to scriptural ¹⁴ See http://jsrforum.lib.virginia.edu/; http://www.interfaith.cam.ac.uk/sr; http://www.pbs. org/wnet/religionandethics/2007/10/12/october-12-2007-scriptural-reasoning/3118/.

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traditions or also cross-traditional practices.¹⁵ In this case, I offer a coherent system for modeling both “Textual Reasoning” (TR: our term for intratraditional reading and reasoning) and “Scriptural Reasoning” (SR: our term for cross-traditional reading and reasoning). The single goal of this Appendix is to illustrate how one may begin to construct a non-semantic system for modeling multivalent processes of reasoning. Elements of Intra-Traditional Reading (TR) and Cross-Traditional Reading (SR) Modeled through a Relational Semiotics (RS) Formula 1: S!O│I [a Sign Vehicle refers to its Object with respect to conditions or rules of Signification provided by its Interpretant.]¹⁶ Formula 1.1: S = (Sic, Sin, Ssy) [The Sign Vehicle includes Icons, Indices, Symbols.] Formula 1.1.1: Sic ! --- │Iic [An icon refers to a rheme, or possible characterization of something somewhere. A rheme is always an Immediate Object (IO), which means the sense of some sign.] Formula 1.1.2: Sin ! • │Iin [An index refers to an existent, or something somewhere. An existent is always a Dynamical Object (DO), which means the referent of some sign.] Formula 1.1.3: Ssy ! --- • │Isy [A symbol refers to some rule of relation (or “rule”) according to which something somewhere could be characterized in some manner, that is, some rheme might be predicated of some object. A rule may be IO or DO.] Formula 1.1.4: (Ssy = --- + • +│Isy) [A symbol may be atomized, in which case any element of a symbol may also be read as a symbol, including icons and indices functioning now as symbols.]

¹⁵ For the complete exercise, see Ochs (2013). ¹⁶ This is the elemental axiom of Peirce’s semiotics. A sign displays no less than three components: the sign-vehicle (a thing that refers to another thing); its meaning or object; and its Interpretant, or those conditions of signification with respect to which, alone, the sign-vehicle refers to that meaning. Note that Peirce does not claim that one must ask for whom or for what purpose a sign has some meaning. He claims that a sign is an activity that includes the “for whom” within itself, along with the sign-vehicle and its meaning for whom. Of the different types of sign-vehicle, our exercise focuses on Symbols, which Peirce also calls “legi-signs” or signs that do not merely point but also appoint the sign-user as agent of some rule of meaning. The exercise focuses on what Peirce calls semantic rules, which define the relation of a sign-vehicle to its object. My major concern is the distinction between monovalent and polyvalent semantic rules. A monovalent rule assigns only one possible meaning for a given symbol (treating objects like qualities of a sign, monovalence adheres strictly to the law of excluded middle). A polyvalent rule assigns symbols more than one possible meaning (treating objects like things and hence independent of the law of excluded middle).

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Formula 1.1.5: Sm!Om│Isy, where O = --- • and where Om V ~ Om [Symbols may be read monovalently when their Interpretant assigns them only one possible meaning. Two types of formula are provided here, including one that atomizes the object into rheme + index; there are sub-cases for which the monovalence applies only to rheme or only to index.] P Formula 1.1.6: Ssy! ₁n Oy│Isy, where ~ (Oy V ~ Oy) [Symbols may be read polyvalently when their Interpretant assigns them more than one possible meaning (reference to meaning is not strictly limited by the law of excluded middle).] Formula 1.2: Osy = (DO, IO) [The Object of a symbol includes Dynamical Objects (referents) and Immediate Objects (senses).] P S! --- │I [The Interpretant as “mind” includes Formula 1.3.1: │Im = the sum of all possible predicates of a sign vehicle in some sign system that includes that sign vehicle.] P Formula 1.3.2: │Il = aRb│I [The Interpretant as “language system” includes the sum of all rules of relation (aRb) available in that system.] P Formula 1.3.3: │Ic = │Ic [The Interpretant as “community of interpreters” names the societal actors and relations with respect to which a sign vehicle would be referred to its possible objects. Here, the Interpretant functions as a “communal Interpretant,” Ic.] P Formula 1.3.4: │Ip = e [The Interpretant as “pragmatic condition” names conditions of error/disruption (“a problematic situation”) with respect to which a sign vehicle refers both to failed rules of relation in some system and to reparative rules according to which the conditions of disruption could possibly be repaired. Such conditions are correctly “read” or identified by a pragmatic Interpretant, Ip.] Say, for example, a communal Interpretant is itself problematic (it produces problematic interpretations). In this case, the problematic Interpretant functions as a problematic symbol in need of a particular repair. To repair an Interpretant is to direct a community to re-read it as determining some symbol to mean X whereas it previously meant Y (noting that X or Y could include forms of recommended behavior as well as objects of cognition). The P formula for this repair is: (S₁!Oe) ! (S₁!Oe │ Ie) ! [(│Ie) ! (S₁!Or│Ir)│IP], where Oe=problematic interpretation; Ie=problematic Interpretant; Or = repaired interpretation. P Formula 2.1: T = Ssy = (S₁, S₂, . . . Sn) [Texts are collections of signvehicles, functioning primarily as symbols (that can be atomized as well into icons and indices). These collections may be read as ordered or nonordered, as aggregated or as atomized into any kinds of element (letter, word, verse, pericope, etc.) depending on the operative Interpretants.]

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Illustration: Bible = (“In the beginning of God’s creating heaven and earth . . . ”) + (“heaven,” + Exodus . . . ). P Formula 2.2: T = (Ssy = ---•) = (Ssy1 = ---•1, Ssy2 = ---•2, . . . Ssyn = ---•n) [Texts may be interpreted as collections of objects, in so far as any symbol may also be read as the object of another sign.] Illustration: According to the rabbinic midrash, Genesis Rabba, “‘In the beginning’ names the principle of life” (treating the first word as an object of meaning). P Formula 2.3: T = (Ssy =│I) = (Ssy =│ I₁, Ssy =│I₂ . . . Ssy = In) [Texts may be interpreted as Interpretants and as collections of Interpretants, insofar as any symbol may be read as defining the rule of mind and language according to which another sign is interpreted.] Illustration: According to the medieval commentator Rashi’s summary of rabbinic readings, Genesis teaches in its plain sense that light was created first, not heaven and earth, since the opening word, “In the beginning of” is grammatically in a construct form, referring to the beginning of God’s creating . . . , when He created light. Here, the correct, grammatical reading of the first word is the Interpretant of Rashi’s reading. P Formula 2.4: T = (Ssy ! --- •│Ic) = (S₁ ! --- •, Ss2 ! --- •, . . . Sn ! --- •) [Texts may be interpreted as collections of propositions or truth claims. Here, a set of words constitutes a symbol only when the immediate object of that set is a proposition.] Illustration: This approach is illustrated by any reading of the first chapter of Genesis as containing a series of self-evident truth claims, such as, “First God created heaven and earth. The earth was unformed.” And so on. Formula 2.5: T = Sm ! Om│Ic, where Om = --- •, and where Om V ~ Om. [Texts may be read monovalently when their Interpretant assigns each symbol in a text only one possible meaning.] P Pn . Sy! n₁. Oy│Ic where ~ (Oy V ~ Oy) [Texts may be Formula 2.6: T = 1sy read polyvalently when their Interpretant assigns each symbol in a text more than one possible meaning.] Formula 3: Strictly for the sake of TR and SR, Scripture may be defined semiotically as a text that, for its communal Interpretant, Ic, is (or tends to be) read in both of the following ways: (a) In different contexts, it is read either monovalently or polyvalently: FormulaP 3.1: Tscr = (Ssy! On │Ic, where O = — • and where On V ~ On) V (Sy! n₁. Oy│Ic, where ~ (Oy V ~ Oy)) (b) It includes symbols that are read according to the communal Interpretants as symbols of a Meta-Interpretant (Meta-I), which is an Interpretant with respect to which all other Interpretants in a given religion may be lent

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or denied authority and may be revised and repaired. The Meta-I functions as a pragmatic Interpretant, Ip, with respect to which a community’s set of different Interpretants (Ic1–n) operate in different ways within a single community of interpretation: Pn Formula 3.2: │Ip = ₁ (│Ic)│([Sm!Om1│Ic1], [Sm!Om2│Ic2], . . . . [Sm!Omn│Icn]) Formula 4: Strictly for the sake of TR and SR, a Scriptural Religion may be modeled semiotically by that unlimited collection of possible symbols whose communal Interpretants are lent or denied authority, and may be revised and repaired, by a Meta-Interpretant whose existence is the Dynamic (or indexical) Object of the Religion’s Scriptures (or symbols contained in them) and whose effects on communal interpretation constitute the Immediate (or rhematic) Object of these Scriptures (or symbols contained in them). A Scriptural Religion is served by a Commentarial (or interpretive) Literature, comprised of a potentially unlimited set of Commentarial Texts, each of which tends to introduce Interpretants that render the meaning of scriptural symbols at least one degree less polyvalent than they may otherwise appear to be. Commentary tends toward monovalence in order to answer questions of some existential urgency to the commentarial community. These Interpretants (which I label IT for “text-specific Interpretant”) usually belong to a set of communal Interpretants whose Meta-I may be associated with some social and hermeneutical moment in the reception history of the Scriptural Religion: (a) The Meta-I (│Ip, defined here as a pragmatic Interpretant) is distributed over a set of different communal Interpretants (Ic), which appear in the following formula as the Interpretants with respect to which text-specific symbols acquire meaning:

P P P Formula 4.1: Rscr = ₁n T│Ip = ( n1sy. Ssy1! --- •│It1), ( n1sy. Ssy1! --- •│It2), . . . Pn Pn ( 1sy. Ssy1! --- •│Itn), where T₁ = 1sy. (Ssy1! --- •│It1)

(b) The reading of Commentarial Texts of a Scriptural Religion may be said, in some sense, to reverse the relation of Meta-I and IT in a community’s reading of Scripture. Commentarial texts (collections of commentarial symbols, Scomm) introduce text-specific Interpretants, IT, according to which Scriptural symbols (Sscr) are read in ways that refine or (if one might say) “repair” certain features of those symbols as read according to the communal Interpretants (and, by implication, the Meta-I) of Scripture in its plain sense or its sensus communis. These features may include apparent polyvalence, vagueness, or contradiction. Formula 4.2: Given that, within Rscr, [(Sscr1 ! --- •│It1) │Ip], then, within the commentarial community, Scomm ! [(Sscr1 ! --- •│Ic) ! Ocomm1]│It.

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Coleridge, S. T. 2002. Opus Maximum vol. 15. Ed. T. McFarland and N. Nalmi. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Deely, John. 2001. Four Ages of Understanding: The First Postmodern Survey of Philosophy from Ancient Times to the Turn of the Twenty-First Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Grice, Paul. 1981. “Presupposition and Conversational Implicature.” In Radical Pragmatics. Ed. P. Cole. New York, NY: Academic Press, pp. 183–98. Hardy, Daniel. 2006. “Harmony and Mutual Implication in the Opus Maximum.” In Coleridge’s Assertion of Religion: Essays on the Opus Maximum. Ed. J. W. Barbeau. Leuven: Peeters, pp. 33–52. Markus, Robert A. 1972. “St. Augustine on Signs.” In Augustine. Garden City, NJ: Anchor Books, pp. 61–91. Ochs, Peter. 1990. “Hellenistic (Patristic/Rabbinic) Prototypes of Peirce’s Pragmatic Semeiotic.” A presentation to the Center of Theological Inquiry (October). Available at: https://www.academia.edu/8141733/Hellenistic_Prototypes_of_Peirces_Pragmatic_ Semeiotic. Ochs, Peter. 1998. Peirce, Pragmatism, and the Logic of Scripture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ochs, Peter. 2003. “Recovering the God of History: Scriptural Life after Death in Judaism and Christianity.” In Jews and Christians, People of God. Ed. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, pp. 114–47. Ochs, Peter. 2006. “Morning Prayer as Redemptive Thinking.” In Liturgy, Time, and the Politics of Redemption. Ed. Chad Pecknold and Randi Rashkover. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, pp. 50–90. Ochs, Peter. 2009. “Reparative Reasoning: From Peirce’s Pragmatism to Augustine’s Scriptural Semiotic.” Modern Theology 25, no. 2: 187–215. Ochs, Peter. 2010. “Scriptural Pragmatism: A Response to the ‘Roots and Hopes of Scriptural Reasoning’.” Journal of Scriptural Reasoning 9, no. 1. Available at: http:// jsr.shanti.virginia.edu/back-issues/vol-9-no-1-december-2010-the-fruits-of-scripturalreasoning/scriptural-pragmatism-a-response-to-the-roots-and-hopes-of-scripturalreasoning/. Ochs, Peter. 2011. Another Reformation: Postliberal Christianity and the Jews. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press. Ochs, Peter. 2013. “A Relational (Non-Binary) Semeiotic for Scriptural Reasoning.” Scriptural Reasoning and Comparative Studies, Proceedings of the XXth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association (Paris). Plantinga, Alvin. 1979. The Nature of Necessity. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Plantinga, Alvin. 1984. “Advice to Christian Philosophers.” Faith and Philosophy 1, no. 3: 253–71. Available with a new preface at http://www.faithandphilosophy.com/ article_advice.php. Polkinghorne, John. 2002. Quantum Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Quash, Ben. 2013. Found Theology: History, Imagination and the Holy Spirit. London: Bloomsbury.

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Quine, W. V. O. 1961. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” In From a Logical Point of View, 2nd Ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 20–43. Raposa, Michael. 1989. Peirce’s Philosophy of Religion. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Sextus Empiricus. 1949. Against the Professors. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Teubner, Jonathan. 2016. Prayer after Augustine: A Study in the Development of the Latin Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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17 Responding to Challenges William Hasker

Flourishing philosophical movements are inevitably met with challenges. Some challenges are relatively benign, such as a suggestion of a topic or problem the movement needs to address. At the other extreme, there are challenges alleging that the entire movement is based on a mistake. A healthy response is to welcome the challenges, and to respond where this is feasible and appropriate. Christian philosophy is no exception to these generalizations. My task in this chapter is to respond to some of the challenges that occur in the last section of this volume. I will then conclude with some brief reflections of my own on the theme of Christian philosophy.

RESPON SE TO OCHS I begin with a few comments on Peter Ochs’s interesting and carefully crafted paper. The remarks are brief, because the challenge he presents does not offer a serious threat to Christian philosophy. The challenge is of the first sort noted above, and consists of an argument that Christian philosophers ought to be more willing to explore the resources of multivalued logics as applied to religious topics. To this, the appropriate reply is, “Well and good! Carry on with your work!” To be sure, Ochs is not and cannot be a Christian philosopher. But Christian philosophers are generally happy to welcome theists of other stripes as co-workers on topics of mutual interest. Indeed, Ochs seems to regard himself in this light, even suggesting applications of his proposals to specific Christian doctrines such as the Trinity and Incarnation. Having said this, I add a small caveat. It might seem that a number of the examples he presents fail to offer a serious threat to the adequacy of standard two-valued logics. That words change their meanings—that particular linguistic formulations mean different things to different communities or at different

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times—is a fact beyond dispute. Most logicians are content to analyze the reasoning which occurs after key terms have stabilized their meanings, and would see little reason to elaborate formal systems describing how the changes occur. Ochs, however, argues that there is value in the attempt to do this, and his contentions deserve serious consideration. Furthermore, both quantum physics and the theological doctrine of an “open future” present situations which may reveal the limitations of a two-valued logic. There is much to ponder in Ochs’s arguments, but I will say no more about them here.

T H E SU R G E Since the “surge” in Christian philosophy is a major, and recurring, theme of this volume, it should be no surprise that the surge is challenged, in different ways, by several of the essays in this section. With apologies for oversimplification, one might cite Graham Oppy as arguing that the surge is more a myth than a reality. Paul Moser thinks that, insofar as there has been something of a surge, the philosophy produced falls short of being properly Christian. John Schellenberg’s view is even more ominous: the result of the surge is something that is not really philosophy at all; in a sense, then, the surge in Christian philosophy has resulted in the abolition of Christian philosophy, among the relevant segment of philosophers! Aaron Simmons, on the other hand, accepts that a surge in Christian philosophy has occurred: he worries that it may lead to both exclusivism and triumphalism among the philosophers involved in it. But all this needs to be spelled out more carefully.

RESPONSE TO O PPY Graham Oppy presents himself as a “surge skeptic.” He asks, concerning the “bad old days” for philosophy of religion before the surge, “How bad were they?” And concerning the “good new days” in which we now live, “How much better are they?” His answer, in both cases, is “Not very much.” He cites some assertions made by William Craig, and also quotes Alvin Plantinga’s description of the surge from his “Advice” lecture. He responds, “Although this narrative is oft-told, I am skeptical that it stands up to scrutiny.”¹ To this ¹ It is sometimes difficult to determine exactly what Oppy objects to in the surge narrative. He undoubtedly rejects Craig’s assertion that “Philosophy departments are a beachhead from which operations can be launched to impact other disciplines at the university for Christ” (quoted on p. 245). Later, however, he cites as (presumably objectionable) “fragments of the triumphalist

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one might be tempted to reply, “Plantinga was there, and Oppy wasn’t.” Oppy’s career began much later (he received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1990 vs. Plantinga who received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1958), and most of it has been spent in Australia, where philosophy remains more thoroughly secular than in the United States. (The surge of Christian philosophy mostly fizzled out while crossing the Pacific Ocean.) But Oppy presents some empirical data in support of his skepticism, and this must be attended to. I have to say that I am underwhelmed by Oppy’s appeal to demographic data. To be sure, in a situation where there are very few Christians, one would expect there to be few, if any, Christian philosophers. Beyond this, however, I know of no particular reason to expect the percentage of Christian philosophers to track the percentage of Christians in the overall population. (If this correlation did hold, there should be many more Christian philosophers than there are.)² Oppy does produce an impressive roster of philosophers of religion (or philosophers interested in religion) at Princeton and Yale during 1948–53. I suspect that it would be difficult to show that these philosophers were part of a relatively unified and coherent research program, such as has developed in analytic philosophy of religion beginning in the 1960s and continuing until the present. Oppy also casts doubt on the claim that philosophy of religion plays a greater role today in major, non-specialist philosophy journals than has been the case in the past. (He does not consider book publication; to be sure, there has been an explosion in this regard in all areas of philosophy.) On the whole, the data that Oppy has presented seem to underdetermine the conclusion that he reaches about the surge hypothesis. They may contradict some of the more extravagant claims made by Craig, but they are not inconsistent with Plantinga’s more restrained (but still enthusiastic) estimate. Perhaps the real question here is, “When is a surge a surge?” Oppy acknowledges that there is something “for some Christian philosophers to cherish in the post-war trajectory of philosophy.” I believe we can go further and affirm that the status and influence within the profession of Christian philosophy are significantly higher than was the case in, say, 1955. If this is so, it seems appropriate to describe the process by which this came about as a surge. It certainly has seemed like that to many of us who have observed the process unfolding. Indeed, it seems implausible to attribute the widespread impression narrative” Plantinga’s reference to “beliefs rejected at most of the leading centers of philosophy,” and Dougherty’s assertion that “now at least some ‘establishment’ philosophers self-identify as Christians” (p. 252). Could it be that Oppy objects not only to the movement’s triumphalism but also to its militancy? ² There seems to be an element here of “heads-I-win-tails-you-lose.” Demographic data are cited to argue that the surge hypothesis is implausible. But insofar as certain favorable trends are evident, they are accounted for by more demographic data, as seen in the increase in absolute numbers of students, institutions, and faculty.

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that a surge has occurred to a collective delusion among a considerable number of philosophers, some of whom are far from welcoming the phenomenon. But Oppy’s arguments may guard us from becoming overly triumphalist— and this may be a benefit, not only from the standpoint of objective historiography. In addition to his surge skepticism, Oppy considers the advice, originally by Plantinga and seconded in this volume by Trent Dougherty, that Christian philosophers should devote themselves to “projects set by the beliefs of the Christian community.” He seems worried that they are recommending that Christian philosophers should devote themselves exclusively to such projects, but he eventually recognizes that this is not their intention. He notes that, when conducting investigations into the implications of Christian beliefs, Plantinga welcomes interaction with “dissenting colleagues,” and points out that this implies an obligation for Christian philosophers to be themselves dissenting colleagues interacting with proponents of other worldviews. This situation naturally leads to a project of the comparative evaluation of worldviews. He notes, however, that there are a large number of worldviews alternative to Christian theism, and “One very good reason for thinking that philosophy of religion is not in a good state at present is that so little of this range of worldviews gets so much as a look in.” Christian philosophers will recognize the comparative evaluation of worldviews as an important philosophical project. I note, however, a couple of reasons that might lead us to a more restrained enthusiasm for this project than is indicated by Oppy. First, there is the matter of which worldviews represent “live options” for a given philosopher and his or her audience. If for a given person a particular worldview is in no way a live option, that person will be unlikely to present it to best advantage in a project of evaluation. A second, and related, point is the need for interlocutors. An evaluation of worldview X is far more likely to produce useful results if there is an actual, living, advocate of X with whom to conduct a dialogue. But with these qualifications, Oppy’s proposal here represents a valid challenge of the first sort noted above—viz., the challenge for a philosophical movement to engage with a question (or group of questions) that are of importance for the movement but are not receiving adequate attention.

RESPON SE TO SCH ELLENBERG John Schellenberg’s charmingly provocative essay argues that “Plantinga-Style Christian Philosophy” isn’t really philosophy. To understand what is going on here, we need to see what “Plantinga-Style Christian Philosophy” amounts to, and what test it fails that causes it to be expelled from the domain of real

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philosophy. The brand of philosophy in question features philosophers who “identify with the Reformed tradition of Protestant Christianity and accept the basic ideas of what has come to be known as ‘Reformed epistemology.’” Schellenberg proposes that we characterize it as “Reformed Christian philosophy (RCP).” (As we shall see, the reference to Reformed epistemology in this connection is important.) The requirement that RCP cannot successfully meet is what Schellenberg terms The Communal Condition: to be doing philosophy one must aim not just to solve certain fundamental problems, or contribute thereto, but to do so together with like-minded others in a shared enterprise leading to informed consensus.

Why can’t RCP meet the Communal Condition? The answer is simple: The solutions to philosophical problems offered by RCP essentially involve assuming the truth of various Christian doctrines. “[I]f the resurrection of the dead is accepted and interpreted thus…then a solution to problems about human fulfillment individually and in relationship…can be achieved.” This solution, however, is available only to those who do subscribe to the Christian doctrine in question. Reformed epistemology, however, is notorious for its refusal to offer positive reasons for accepting the Christian worldview, claiming instead that, for many Christians, the existence of God and other core truths of Christianity are “properly basic” beliefs and not in need of argumentative support. But for many in the philosophical community, and in the broader human community, these Christian doctrines not only are not basic beliefs but are not believed at all, so the procedures of RCP could not, even in principle, lead to informed consensus. It follows that RCP is not philosophy; what it is, instead, is theology. It is evident from this why Reformed epistemology is a crucial ingredient for RCP as Schellenberg conceives of it. If on the other hand a Christian philosopher offers positive reasons for the truth of Christianity, those reasons might in principle lead to the kind of consensus that is sought according to the Communal Condition. In practice, of course, consensus might very well fail to emerge, but success in producing actual consensus is not required by the Communal Condition. In view of this Schellenberg acknowledges (a bit grudgingly, to be sure) that his argument may not apply to Richard Swinburne, because of Swinburne’s deployment of natural theology to provide warrant for the Christian beliefs espoused in his multi-volume exposition and defense of a Christian worldview. By way of evaluation, we need to examine more closely the question as to which philosophers are disqualified as such by their failure to meet the Communal Condition. We have already seen the importance here of Reformed epistemology; practitioners of natural theology readily escape Schellenberg’s critique. (The arguments actually offered may fail to impress Schellenberg, but that doesn’t matter; it can’t be a requirement for proper philosophy that one’s

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arguments are successful in persuading one’s opponents.) I suspect, however, that Schellenberg is overestimating the prevalence of Reformed epistemology among the current generation of Christian philosophers. He has referred to Swinburne, but the fact is that quite a number of Christian philosophers are taking an active interest in natural theology. Consider, for example, The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology (Manning 2015) and The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (Craig and Moreland 2012). Philosophers who contribute to volumes such as these are automatically exempt from having their work disqualified by Schellenberg’s Condition. Schellenberg may also have overlooked the fact that adherence to Reformed epistemology by a philosopher does not automatically entail that the philosopher regards all natural theological arguments as being without merit. Suppose, for example, a Reformed epistemologist were to say that arguments for the truth of Christian belief “can be extremely useful, and in at least four different ways. They can confirm and support belief reached in other ways; they may move fence-sitters closer to Christian belief; they can function as defeater-defeaters; and they can reveal interesting and important connections.” Such a philosopher has affirmed that there are good evidential arguments leading to theistic conclusions—arguments that could, in principle, contribute to informed consensus as required by the Communal Condition. As it happens, the author of the sentiment quoted above is Alvin Plantinga (Plantinga 2001, p. 267). Plantinga has himself published an article entitled “Two Dozen (or so) Theistic Arguments” (Plantinga 2007). But a Reformed epistemologist need not actually publish arguments of this sort in order to satisfy the Condition: it is enough to endorse such arguments as produced by others, as part of a common enterprise.³ It might be objected that such a Reformed epistemologist does not really expect the arguments to lead to consensus; this shows that he or she is not sincerely seeking consensus, and so the work produced does not properly qualify as philosophy. Such a response would be misguided. In remaining skeptical about the success of the arguments in converting philosophical opponents, the Reformed epistemologist is demonstrating prudence based on long experience. And on the other hand, arguments do sometimes produce results one would not antecedently have expected. (One philosopher informed Plantinga that he had come to believe in God as a result of Plantinga’s ontological argument.) It is enough that the argument put forward is regarded as sound and as lacking faults (such as circularity) that would disqualify it as a contribution to the philosophical dialectic.

³ In his lecture “Christian Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century,” Plantinga cites a “whole host of good theistic arguments, all patiently waiting to be developed in penetrating and profound detail” (Plantinga 1998, p. 339n).

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It has now become apparent that Schellenberg’s argument is effective only against the strictest sect of Reformed epistemologists, philosophers who regard theistic arguments as entirely lacking in merit and perhaps actually pernicious. But at this point we have an anomalous situation. Suppose we have two articles on some topic in philosophy of religion—one written by a “purist” Reformed epistemologist, and the other by an adherent of the more moderate view endorsed by Plantinga. The articles can be as similar as one could wish in premises, argumentation, and conclusion, yet one article counts as philosophy and the other is excluded from that honor. Isn’t this a paradoxical situation? I trust that most readers will share my opinion that whether a particular argument counts as philosophy should not be decided by the author’s beliefs concerning some question that is logically unconnected with the argument itself! So far we have been considering the implications of the Communal Condition, but now we need to examine the status of the Condition itself. It is not put forward as a formal definition of philosophy, but it states a necessary condition that will place strong constraints on such a definition. It cannot be a universal, impersonal truth which is wholly independent of human belief and consent; this is shown by Schellenberg’s remark that “it is up to us as human beings to decide what we will call philosophy.” Nor, however, can it be merely a report of current usage: this is shown by the fact that the Condition is used to correct current usage, namely the usage that describes RCP as philosophy. The quoted remark might suggest that Schellenberg is proposing a stipulative definition that he personally favors. But in that case, there would not be any particular reason for anyone who does not favor the criterion to take it seriously or to conform their own usage to the constraint it imposes. There is, however, one other possibility. Suppose the Condition is put forward as the best, or at least the best available, way of understanding what philosophy amounts to—best, perhaps, because it fits best with what are generally acknowledged to be the objectives of philosophical activity. This claim, if adequately supported, would endow the criterion with a degree of interpersonal authority, without denying that what is to count as philosophy is a human decision. In light of the lack of other good candidates, I shall assume that this is the claim that is being made. The question as to what range of human activities are to count as philosophy is itself obviously a philosophical question. What is the present status of this question? A clue to the answer to this can be found in Schellenberg’s remark that only consensus would constitute “a sufficiently demanding criterion…for full satisfaction that philosophical problems have indeed been solved.” Now, I am sure that Schellenberg would admit that, with regard to the nature of philosophy, consensus has so far eluded us, so we are unable to have “full satisfaction” that the Condition is correct. But perhaps something less than this can provide what we need for the time being. If the Condition is such that, upon adequate consideration, a large proportion of well-qualified

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philosophers (even though not all of them) would agree that it is the best available proposal, we might be able to proceed with a degree of confidence (if not “full satisfaction”) that we are on the right track. Unfortunately, this is far from being the case, or so I will maintain. Consider Oppy’s assertion, “philosophy is the domain of inquiry or discipline that addresses questions for which we do not yet know how to produce—and perhaps cannot even imagine how to produce—consensus answers among experts using methods more or less universally agreed among experts.” This definition draws upon the widely acknowledged fact that the “special sciences” have become separated from philosophy precisely by arriving at effective methods that are agreed upon by experts. This is perhaps not logically inconsistent with the Communal Condition, but it does not fit very comfortably with that Condition. Given the lack of consensus that presently characterizes the most important philosophical problems, the “informed consensus” which is the objective of the Condition may elude us for a very long time, perhaps indefinitely. Or if it is ever reached, the discipline through which this occurs may be very different from philosophy as we know it today. If this is the case, it is not very plausible to make belief in the achievability, sometime in the indefinite future, of such consensus mandatory for a person to qualify as a philosopher. Yet another way of looking at the matter is that the concept of philosophy is an essentially contested concept, the concept of a form of human activity which has sufficient internal diversity that an agreed, precise notion of what constitutes that activity will continue to elude us. The search for a “demarcation criterion” for natural science is widely acknowledged to have ended in failure, and similar frustration arguably occurs also in such domains as art and religion, as well as in philosophy. I suspect that this sort of view is widely accepted in practice among philosophers, even if it is not explicitly affirmed. More examples could undoubtedly be produced. But I think what we have here is sufficient to make a convincing case that we not only have not achieved, but are nowhere close to achieving, sufficient agreement to establish the Communal Condition as a necessary condition for anyone’s qualifying as a philosopher. To be sure, Schellenberg himself, and others who find his proposal attractive, are welcome to stipulate the Condition and to see what follows from its adoption. But those of us not inclined to agree with them need have no concern that our own status as philosophers is imperiled.

RESPONSE TO M OSER It could reasonably be said that both Oppy and Schellenberg are critical of the present state of philosophy of religion because it is too Christian. The heavy

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emphasis on Christian concepts and beliefs tends to de-emphasize other sorts of philosophical activity they think more promising—in Schellenberg’s case, free-flowing, imaginative religious exploration untrammeled by previous human history; for Oppy, the study and comparative evaluation of a very large number of alternative worldviews. Paul Moser, in contrast, objects to the present state of the discipline because it is not Christian enough. Much of it is only marginally Christian, or even idolatrous and therefore not Christian at all. He complains: Some proponents of Christian philosophy offer “Advice to Christian Philosophers,” but make no mention of Jesus, Christ, savior, redeemer, mediator, the cross, crucifixion, atonement, forgiveness, salvation, or reconciliation.…Strikingly, we find no role for the crucified Christ as God’s supreme mediator and savior for humans in their “advice.”

A pretty transparent reference, one would think. But Moser goes on: Perhaps the explanation involves a failure among many advocates of Christian philosophy even to understand an important role for the crucified Christ in Christian philosophy and wisdom. Perhaps it also would identify some academic embarrassment in acknowledging a role for the crucified Christ in a philosophy.

By this time, philosophers acquainted with Alvin Plantinga will be laughing out loud, at the thought of Al suffering from such “academic embarrassment.” But the complaint raises an interesting question: Is the thought here that no single writing by a philosopher who is properly Christian may omit specific reference to Jesus? That would made sense in the light of what is said about the “Advice” lecture, but fits poorly with Moser’s citation of Kierkegaard, the author of many books that do not have such a Christological focus. Or is it merely that one’s authorship as a whole must contain a meaningful witness to the crucified and risen Christ? In that case I would recommend to Moser that (among other examples) he consult the references in the index of Warranted Christian Belief (Plantinga 2000) to “the great things of the Gospel.” After this opening, Moser launches into an exposition of the essential truths which are neglected by (so-called) “Christian philosophy.” Only a brief summary will be provided here, mostly in Moser’s own words; readers who desire more can simply turn back a few pages and revisit his full statement on the subject. Very briefly: According to the Christian message, God intervenes in human life by means of a person, the crucified Christ, and not by a mere principle or idea. Thus: A straightforward way to put the person of Christ at the center of Christian philosophy is to make such philosophy “Christ-shaped” in its content and mode. That would be to make the ultimate “wisdom” of philosophy likewise Christshaped, and any knowledge of God involved in such wisdom would be similarly Christ-shaped. Being Christ-shaped would have two distinctive features: It would

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have at its center a filial relationship of fellowship with a personal God (the divine Father of Jesus), and this relationship would be cross-centered after the Gethsemane obedience exemplified by the historic Jesus Christ. Jesus thus becomes the personal standard—the Lord—for philosophy, in his personal character, his distinctive actions, and his teaching content. His lordship, we shall see, bears on the content and the mode of Christian philosophy.

Furthermore: The personal character of a morally perfect God would be defined by agapē as unselfish self-sacrificial love for the good of others. This is the kind of righteous love motivating the crucified Christ in yielding to rejection and death at the hands of humans. In the Corinthian correspondence of Paul, we find affirmation of the divine scandal of weakness in the redemption of humans via the crucified Christ. If Christian philosophy ignores this scandal, it will miss out on the divine wisdom hidden but present in the crucified Christ.…We can benefit from attention to Paul’s distinctive perspective on Christian wisdom, as a means to illuminating Christian philosophy. In identifying this person, the person of Christ, with wisdom from God, Paul weds intentional power to Christian wisdom. He thereby contrasts it with the wisdom offered by humans, including the wisdom of philosophers. The underlying issue is: What kind of God would have and allow God’s appointed representative to undergo torture and death by crucifixion at the hands of humans? In that scenario, human power defeats divine power, and this entails a God who is foolish and weak. Perhaps this result explains the typical absence of the crucified Christ from so-called “Christian philosophy” and from familiar “advice” for Christian philosophers. Indeed, a philosophy, even under the name of “Christian philosophy” can get in the way of one’s meeting and knowing God. It can obstruct, including with arguments and principles, a direct self-manifestation of God in conscience, thereby creating distance from God’s unique power and thus from God. It can do so by putting the project of theory and explanation, sometimes as an endless preliminary, ahead of the opportunity for meeting God in Christ. Arguments and principles should promote, rather than delay, the latter opportunity. In the end, God’s interpersonal power does the convicting and converting of receptive people; arguments and principles lack the needed intentional power. Philosophical apologetics, however well-intentioned, sometimes neglects this important fact. The epistemological scandal is that God’s ultimate evidence for self-revelation to humans does not rely on human arguments or any other source of human selfboasting or self-credit. The relevant evidence from God’s self-revelation removes the basis for human self-credit and thus offends humans with a tendency to selfboasting.

According to Moser, the source of the failure of Christian philosophy, and the Christian church, to appropriate God’s self-revelation in the needed way is a widespread, yet little acknowledged, spiritual disease known as resurrectionitis.

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“This disease includes the valuing of resurrection results without due valuing of the moral character and power of the crucified Christ who was resurrected by God. It focuses on triumphal power, including triumphal intellectual power, without due focus on the cruciform self-giving power of the crucified Christ.…The Christian message ceases to be Christian if it omits the central role of Christ crucified. The same is true for Christian philosophy, or anything Christian, for that matter.” One cannot deny that the themes cited by Moser constitute an aspect of the Christian message of redemption in Christ. Whether Moser’s emphasis on this aspect is a bit one-sided and imbalanced is, as we say, “above my pay grade” to decide as a mere philosopher. What I do notice, however, is the absence, in these quotations, of any substantive discussion of philosophy as such, beyond the fact that it needs to incorporate this aspect of the divine message and to abjure any claim to understanding, wisdom, or power that would presume to compete with the divine wisdom personified in Jesus. This, however, is advice that could equally well be given to any theologian, to a minister in a church, or to an individual Christian. Beyond this, no positive role for philosophy is suggested. (These pages contain a number of quotations from theologians and biblical scholars, but very few from philosophers.) Moser, I think, recognizes this lack, and attempts to address it in his final section, “Whither Christian Philosophy?” To a large extent, however, this final section offers little more than the same strictures as before, against human thinking that approaches God in a triumphalist manner that does not respect the centrality of the cross of Christ. We are still waiting for any illuminating positive account of what Christian philosophy might actually amount to. But we wait in vain. With a concluding flourish, Moser states: Christian philosophy under [Christ’s] lordship will become Christ-shaped, in content and in mode. It thereby will lead to its Lord and thus to its God, if indirectly at times. As a result, it will be irreducible to any philosophical alternative to Christian philosophy under Christ crucified. This lesson holds even if we now lack a recipe that yields all of the ingredients of a Christian philosophy. We can start with the center, Christ crucified, and allow his lordship, in an interpersonal I–Thou meeting, to lead an inquirer in matters of detail. This will sound foolish from the standpoint of much philosophy, but we have been prepared for that scandalous result.

Stripping off the rhetoric, this says in effect, “We don’t know what Christian philosophy would actually be, but if we are faithful to the Lord he will show us what to do.” Indeed—may it so happen. But until it does, we really do not know what Christian philosophy according to Moser might amount to. One thing that has distressed me in earlier writings of Moser on this topic is his apparent lack of appreciation for the work of other contemporary Christian philosophers. One will look hard, and with little success, for any suggestion that

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work done by other Christian philosophers has merit or makes a contribution on some topic of special interest to Christians. The even more sharply oppositional stance he assumes in the present essay throws additional light on this subject. He is unable to applaud the work of other Christian philosophers because that work hardly qualifies as Christian at all; indeed much of it is actually idolatrous. His epistemic humility apparently does not extend to entertaining the supposition that some of their work may have value that he has been unable to discern. Instead of joining with them in common cause, he aspires to create a new discipline, or subdiscipline, of his own, one that he is as yet unable to describe in any positive fashion, except that it will not suffer from the defects that mar Christian philosophy as it now exists. Now, if at some point he is successful in doing this, it will then be appropriate to consider whether this new discipline should be thought of as a kind of philosophy, or as theology, or as something else as yet unknown. In the meantime, his stance is one of opposition to all the varieties of Christian philosophy discussed elsewhere in the present volume.

RESPONSE TO S IMMON S In the Introduction to this volume, Aaron Simmons gave a broad overview of the problems surrounding the idea of a Christian philosophy. His essay in this section gives us his own assessment of the current situation. He addresses a great many different topics; for the purposes of this reply I shall focus on three interrelated strands in this discussion. One strand is the surge narrative. Unlike Oppy, he has no doubt that a surge has occurred. And unlike Schellenberg and Moser, he regards its effects so far as generally beneficial. But he is apprehensive that success may hold within it the seeds of failure: continuing on the lines followed so far could lead to undesirable outcomes. A second strand is a running dialogue with some of Plantinga’s pronouncements about Christian philosophy, beginning with the “Advice” lecture but also including his 1995 lecture, “Christian Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century.” Growing out of this is an opposition between Plantinga’s view and a moderate postmodernism, largely inspired by the views of Merold Westphal, which Simmons sees as more promising for achieving the long-term objectives of Christian philosophy. My approach in this response will be to discuss, and to some extent contest, some of the criticisms of Plantinga’s approach found in Simmons’s essay. I do not aspire to “settle” the divide between analytic and postmodern approaches: I am not up to accomplishing that task, and it might not even be desirable to do so. But some aspects of that opposition will inevitably come up in the discussion. My goal is not to identify a “winner” and a “loser,” but

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to show that the two approaches are not as sharply opposed as Simmons sometimes seems to suppose. First, however, I want to make some general points about the way I understand Plantinga’s pronouncements, points that will be significant in what follows. To begin with, I believe it is correct to say that Plantinga has in effect assumed the role of a prophet in his advocacy of Christian philosophy, even though he has never (to my knowledge) applied that label to himself. He is personally deeply committed to Christian philosophy as he understands it, and also strongly motivated to engage other Christian philosophers in the enterprise. As I see it, this has several consequences. For one thing, it sometimes leads him to take a “broad brush” approach in characterizing various groupings of philosophers, both those who agree with this undertaking and those who are opposed to it. This may seem objectionable to those who wish to make finer distinctions, but from the standpoint of his objective it is quite understandable. (Even a superficial reading of the biblical prophets will show that fine conceptual distinctions are not characteristic of the way they present their message.) A related point: as he pursues his advocacy, Plantinga often requires examples of Christian philosophy, and these examples tend to be taken from his own work. This is altogether natural: this is work that he fully understands and to which, understandably, he enthusiastically subscribes. However, these examples do not thereby become canonical or essential to Christian philosophy as such. Not only is it true in principle that Christian philosophers need not agree with all Plantinga’s views, but philosophers influenced by him often implement this point in practice by contesting various of his positions. (There are too many examples to enumerate here.) What follows from this is that disagreement with one or another of Plantinga’s views does not necessarily constitute a reason to object to his idea of Christian philosophy. What is essential to Christian philosophy, as I understand it, is that the person in question be a qualified and skillful philosopher, a believing Christian of some broadly orthodox variety, committed to practicing the Christian faith in his or her own life, who both identifies in professional life as a Christian and commits significant time and effort to issues of special significance to the Christian community. It is this last point, clearly, that Plantinga is most concerned to drive home to his fellow Christian philosophers. Now we progress to the back-and-forth discussion of Simmons’s and Plantinga’s views. Sometimes I will present Simmons’ objections in his own words, other times by way of paraphrase, but I trust that the views will be recognizable as being implied by his statements. My replies on behalf of Plantinga are of course my own responsibility. Simmons’s Objection One: It is simplistic and misleading to contrast, as Plantinga does, “the Christian community” and “the philosophical

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community.” Both Christianity and philosophy are too pluralistic, and too variable, for this way of identifying distinct communities to be helpful. Response: Without doubt, we have here a case of the “broad-brush” phenomenon. Still, it is unlikely that Plantinga has failed to notice that there are many different centers of philosophical endeavor, and that they are not all carbon copies of each other. I presume that “the philosophical community” he describes is a rough composite of what goes on in the places he perceives as being the leading centers of contemporary philosophy. But do you really disagree that, as he says, the worldviews most commonly held and defended in these centers are at odds with the ways Christians believe the world to be? The statistics cited by Oppy would tend to show that Plantinga is right about this—and you yourself have implied that most of the leading lights of contemporary postmodernism are not open to the truths of Christianity. It is also not credible that Plantinga has failed to notice that there is quite a bit of variety among various groups that call themselves Christians. I don’t think, however, that Christians should hold that Christianity is plural in such a way that there is no such thing as a continuing core of faith shared by many persons in different times, places, nationalities, and so on. I would like to add here a personal observation: It has been deeply gratifying to me that the Society of Christian Philosophers is so remarkably free of denominational tension between the philosophers that compose it. Protestants know they are Protestants, of various sorts, and Catholics know they are Catholic, and occasionally (but not terribly often) they address issues that are peculiar to one communion or another. But very seldom does the opposition between different communions become anything like a bone of contention. Simmons’s Objection Two: The contrast between the Civitas Dei and the Civitas Mundi is excessively oppositional. Furthermore, the two philosophical “dukedoms” of the Civitas Mundi, “perennial naturalism” and “creative anti-realism,” are not characterized in a way that places them in necessary opposition to Christianity, as advertised. Response: Again, there is some broad brushwork here. But the idea of such a fundamental opposition was not invented by Augustine, let alone Plantinga. Consider the opposition between “the world” and Christ’s disciples in the Johannine literature of the New Testament. Admittedly, such oppositional language needs to be used with care. But your characterizations of the two dukedoms are unfair and distort Plantinga’s meaning. No doubt “naturalist” is a term having many meanings, but Plantinga can’t have meant to oppose everything bearing that label. (I doubt very much that he deplores the efforts of individuals who spend time closely observing the natural world, in order to enhance our understanding and enjoyment thereof.) Anyone who is at all familiar with contemporary philosophy will understand the use of the term as

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explained by Plantinga, as well as the fact that naturalism so understood is strongly opposed to religious belief. Neither Native American Christianity nor process theology is naturalist in this sense; to suggest that they are is to invite confusion. And Plantinga’s saying that for naturalism “Human beings…must be understood, not in terms of their being image bearers of God, but in terms of their commonality with the rest of nature” (Plantinga 1998, p. 330) in no way implies that for Christianity “Human beings should be understood as image bearers of God rather than in terms of their commonality with the rest of nature” (Simmons, emphasis added). The term, “creative anti-realism” is perhaps not so well entrenched in philosophical usage as is “naturalism,” and it may well be that there are views appropriately so labeled that are compatible with Christianity. The important thing to notice is, however, that Plantinga implicitly recognizes this possibility. He writes, “I believe that the thought of the first Critique, at least as characterized above, is incompatible with Christianity” (Plantinga 1998, p. 331, emphasis added). He thereby acknowledges that there are other ways of reading the first Critique (as indeed there are), and that some of these may not be incompatible with Christianity. (Need I point out that quoting this dictum without the italicized qualification is highly misleading?) Again, he writes that “Creative anti-realism, taken neat and globally, is clearly incompatible with Christianity” (Plantinga 1998, p. 332, emphasis added). Again, this implicitly concedes that there may be versions of creative antirealism that are not, or not clearly, incompatible with Christianity. Now, proponents of “Christian creative anti-realism,” such as Westphal and Simmons, may still feel aggrieved that their options are not explicitly recognized by Plantinga, let alone given adequate discussion. But he clearly is not guilty of asserting, falsely, that all forms of creative anti-realism are inconsistent with the Christian faith. We may also observe that specific examples Plantinga mentions, such as Rorty and Derrida, clearly are opposed to Christian faith. Is this worth mentioning? Well, I refuse to believe that Simmons has failed to notice in his teaching experience the pervasive influence of relativism among students, even Christian students whom one would think ought to know better. Combating this attitude surely needs to be a priority for Christian philosophers— indeed, for any philosophers worth their salt. Simmons’s Objection Three: “I think it is worth spending some time addressing what Plantinga himself notes as a ‘danger’—the triumphalism that might begin to emerge within Christian philosophy if it allows itself to become philosophically insular, theologically arrogant, and even potentially socially extremist.” Response: These are indeed serious faults, and worth being concerned about. However, you have conceded that these trends have not, so far, become

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especially evident within Christian philosophy. Certainly I see little sign of any of these things in Plantinga himself. (Some may at times find him theologically a bit naïve, but hardly arrogant.) So the fact that a movement might have such consequences, though it has not done so over its first forty years or so, is hardly a heavy charge against the movement itself.⁴ Indeed, even if the movement had in fact produced such results, that would call for corrective measures but not necessarily for the abandonment of the project in which the movement consists. (Trent Dougherty has informed us that analytic theologians face obstacles in gaining employment in theology departments. If so, should the theological methods employed in these departments—most likely some version of postmodernism—be abandoned because of this exclusiveness?) I believe that these or similar dangers will likely exist for any reasonably successful movement in philosophy or theology: they reflect our fallen condition more than the specifics of this or that system of belief. As remedies, I suggest two things: First, a careful attention to the limitations of what has in fact been achieved—in this case, the statistics presented by Graham Oppy may be a help. But second, a thankful appreciation that everything good in our lives, including our professional achievements, is due to God’s work in and through us. Simmons’s Objection Four: Plantinga’s emphasis on our “epistemic rights” as Christian philosophers creates an overly oppositional situation which threatens to deter philosophical interchange with other philosophers as well as depreciating the work of Christian philosophers who do not follow Plantinga’s example in various ways. Response: There are several issues here that need to be addressed. First, the fundamental opposition is not between philosophical systems as such; rather, it is between the Christian community as the people of God, and the “world” or world-system which does not recognize God. This opposition is enacted in philosophy in the opposition between the Christian faith and philosophical systems (such as naturalism and radical postmodernism) that are antithetical to that faith. This does not exclude there being a lot of commonality in many different respects, as well as warm and positive personal relationships, between Christian philosophers and philosophers who do not share their Christian commitment. The epistemic “right” emphasized by Plantinga is at bottom the claim that Christian philosophers are (or at least can be) rational in philosophizing in a way that takes certain Christian convictions as part of their starting point. This

⁴ I must confess that I fail to understand the nature of “social extremism” here. Elsewhere this is said to be “problematic because it can foster extremism at the level of one’s justificatory appeals” (p. 191). This certainly sounds like something problematic, but beyond that I am in the dark.

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is a claim that Simmons endorses, but he also points out that the need to emphasize it may be different at different times. It is fair to say that this right, or this rationality, has been a major theme of Plantinga’s philosophical endeavors, from the early book God and Other Minds to the magnificent three-volume series on Warrant. If there is now no longer any need for such an emphasis, that is in effect to say that Plantinga’s endeavor has succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. I, for one, am not convinced that the need has entirely passed (see Schellenberg’s essay in this section), but without doubt the situation has changed, very much for the better, over the past half-century. Philosophers who do not see that need as important at present, or who seek to meet it in another way, may not be followers of Reformed epistemology. But contrary to what Simmons seems to assume, Plantinga in no way seeks to exclude such persons from the ranks of Christian philosophers. Neither Westphal, nor Swinburne, nor Philip Quinn are Reformed epistemologists, but in his interactions with them Plantinga has never, to my knowledge, raised any question as to whether any of the three may not be a “proper” Christian philosopher. The same point applies to what Simmons sees as Plantinga’s overly narrow conception of what is involved in living a Christian life. Plantinga, wishing to make clear that being Christian involves more than holding certain beliefs, mentions certain practices that come readily to his mind as part and parcel of the Christian life—prayer, Bible reading, participation in worship and sacraments, and the like. It is entirely open for Simmons and others to point out that there are other things involved practically in “being a Christian,” and that some of them may be equal or even greater in importance than the ones mentioned by Plantinga. Well and good; Plantinga is not seeking to draw a line of exclusion, but to drive home the point that to be a Christian philosopher, one must be a Christian, and that being a Christian is not merely a matter of assenting to certain propositions. (I very much doubt, by the way, that John Piper is one of Plantinga’s favorite authors. Plantinga, after all, is a Calvinist (!?) who thinks that the wrong side emerged victorious from the Synod of Dort!) Simmons has other valuable things to say, but pursuing all of them might lengthen this response in a way that would incur the displeasure of the editor (!). The upshot of this discussion is that Simmons has read into “Christian philosophy” too much of what is distinctive of Plantinga’s own philosophical work, and thus sees an antithesis to his own, continental-inspired approach where no such antithesis need be found. Ironically, then, while promoting an open, invitational style of philosophy of religion he has in fact erected unnecessary barriers! To be sure, eliminating those barriers still leaves for discussion the main issues Simmons is raising in his essay, about the best way for Christians to pursue philosophy of religion in the contemporary situation (if there is a best way). But that is as it should be.

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SUMMATION Much of what I would like to say by way of summation has been anticipated earlier in this response essay. I do believe there has been a notable surge, both in the philosophy of religion and in Christian philosophy. The supposition that the widespread belief in a surge is the product of a collective delusion strikes me as extremely implausible. There has been advance, not only in the numbers and influence of Christian philosophers, but also in the content of the discipline. That advance is nicely illustrated by something I once heard Keith Yandell say. He was speaking about the time, during his graduate school days, when he came upon the recently published New Essays in Philosophical Theology, edited by Flew and MacIntyre (1955). Reading those essays, Yandell said, “they seemed wonderfully thick and rich.” Few today would so describe that volume; certainly not Yandell. The difference in “thickness and richness” between those essays and much that is being produced today is a measure of the development of the discipline in the intervening years. I claim to have shown that Schellenberg’s attempt to disqualify much recent philosophy of religion as “mere theology” is unsuccessful. Nevertheless, some of what goes on in the name of “philosophical theology” and “analytic theology” may well fit more comfortably into the domain of theology than of philosophy. If so, what of it? In many areas of academic endeavor interdisciplinary work is applauded; why should it be different here? The questions being addressed in this work are questions with which some thinkers are deeply engaged; philosophers who find them uninteresting will find in recent philosophy of religion much other work whose status as philosophy cannot be questioned. The healthiest future for Christian philosophy, as I see it, would be one in which there are a considerable number of skillful, well-trained philosophers who are serious, practicing Christians and who devote some of their research effort (but in most cases not all) to topics of special interest to the Christian community. They will philosophize using the styles and methods which each of them finds most congenial—analytic, postmodern, phenomenological, and so on—but will also devote serious attention to the work of other philosophers who employ different methods, expecting to learn from them and perhaps to combine some of those methods with their own. I believe, in fact, that this is very much the sort of future Aaron Simmons has in mind; I have tried to show that such a future is not threatened by “Christian philosophy” as conceived by Plantinga. I have promised not to settle the analytic vs. continental question, and I intend to keep that promise. However, I am unable to resist the temptation to quote something I wrote on this topic a dozen years ago: [A]nalytic philosophy of religion…offers the best means yet available for clarifying the meaning of religious claims and for assessing the reasons for and against the

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truth of those claims. Those who are uninterested in clarity and truth as applied to religious assertions will naturally find this style of philosophizing uncongenial. Those who do care about such matters may well find it indispensable. (Hasker 2005, p. 443)

I still stand by those words. But I happily admit that the clarity and truth of religious beliefs is very far from being all that religion, in particular Christianity, is about. And some of those other matters may be most helpfully addressed with philosophical methods other than those favored by “analytic theists.” There is no call here for philosophical exclusivism or imperialism.

WORKS CITED Craig, William Lane and J. P. Moreland. 2012. The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology. Oxford: Blackwell. Flew, Antony and Alasdair MacIntyre, eds. 1955. New Essays in Philosophical Theology. New York: Macmillan. Hasker, William. 2005. “Analytic Philosophy of Religion.” In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion. Ed. William Wainwright. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 421–46. Manning, Russell, ed. 2015. The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Plantinga, Alvin. 1998 (orig. pub. 1995). “Christian Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century.” In The Analytic Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader. Ed. James F. Sennett. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, pp. 328–58. Plantinga, Alvin. 2000. Warranted Christian Belief. New York, NY and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Plantinga, Alvin. 2001. “Rationality and Public Evidence: A Reply to Richard Swinburne.” Religious Studies 37: 267–8. Plantinga, Alvin. 2007. “Two Dozen (or so) Theistic Arguments.” In Alvin Plantinga. Ed. Dean-Peter Baker. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 203–28.

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Index Adams, Marilyn McCord 7, 170n1, 190 advocacy 155, 159–63, 237–8, 298 aesthetics 161, 255 agapē 210, 212, 215–16, 219, 221–2, 295 Aiken, Henry 249 Alston, William 6, 9, 118, 190, 197 American Philosophical Association 247, 252 Analytic Theology 8, 11, 14, 174–83, 201–2, 231–41, 303 Anscombe, Elizabeth 251 anthropology 255 philosophical 32–3, 36 spiritual 133, 137–9, 141, 144 antirealism, see realism apologetics 94n4, 106, 178, 189, 216, 230, 295 Aquinas, St. Thomas viii, x, 9–10, 105–6, 114, 181, 249; see also Thomism Aristotle 43, 80, 84, 89–91, 95–6, 101, 105, 107, 116, 162, 165, 175, 261, 265, 268, 273 art (artistic) 88–9 askêsis 86–7, 92 atheism (atheist, atheistic) 1, 28, 50, 97–8, 107, 113, 165, 168, 170–2, 188, 192, 196–7, 246–7, 250–2, 256–8; see also Dawkins, Richard Augustine, St. 9–10, 42, 48, 108–9, 112, 114, 116, 127n6, 130n7, 181, 192, 263, 268–9, 276, 278, 299 Austin J. L. 250 autonomy 22–3, 32, 37, 55–64, 69, 74–5, 198, 263 Ayer, A. J. 118, 250 Baier, Kurt 250 Barnes, Elizabeth 159 Barrett, C. K. 220 Berger, Peter 129–30 Blanshard, Brand 247 Blondel, Maurice 41–3 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 205 Brandom, Robert 92n3, 146 Bréhier, Émile 9–11, 40–3 Buber, Martin 217 “I–Thou” 217, 225–6, 296 Bultmann, Rudolph 26

Caputo, John D. 84, 94, 98–100, 189–90, 195 Cartesianism (Cartesian) 24, 42, 107; see also Descartes, René Catholic (Catholicism) 9, 12, 40–3, 98, 128, 165, 169, 178, 198, 248, 299 charity 45–52, 201, 268 Chrétien, Jean-Louis 12n1, 97–9, 189, 195 Christ, see Cross; Jesus Christianity as a way of life vii–viii, x–xi, 66–8 Christian community 3, 8, 22–5, 30–2, 65–6, 74, 87, 127, 133, 145, 147–9, 156, 174, 187–90, 193, 195, 198–9, 252, 254, 256, 263, 289, 298, 301, 303; see also community see also Evangelicalism; Jesus; orthodoxy; Pentecostalism; revelation; salvation; soteriology; theology church 4, 45, 55–65, 70, 74–5, 79, 104–6, 148, 154, 161–2, 168, 170, 178, 222–3, 246, 267, 295–6 Cicero 220 Cohen, G. A. 62 coherentism 59n5 commitment vii–viii, x–xi, 6, 8, 24, 31, 39, 55–71, 86, 97–8, 102, 105–6, 132, 144–9, 155, 157, 166, 172, 187–9, 195, 199, 205, 221, 236, 240–1, 251, 257, 301 community (communal) 2–5, 8, 12–13, 15, 22–5, 29–32, 35–9, 45, 65–7, 74–5, 87, 118, 127, 130, 133–4, 139–49, 155–7, 161–2, 170, 174, 176, 187–205, 231–41, 247, 250, 252–6, 263–7, 277, 279, 281–3, 286, 289–93, 298–301, 303; see also Christianity; philosophy compatibilism (compatibilist) 34–6 conscience 90, 214, 216, 218–20, 224, 295 constructivism (constructivist) 58–9 Cooper, John 66–70, 84, 90–1 Coyne, Jerry 241 Craig, William Lane 245, 248, 287–8, 291 Crisp, Oliver 158 Cross (of Christ) 111, 113, 206, 210–16, 220–3, 226, 230, 294–6 Crucifixion 113, 210, 213–15, 220–2, 294–5

Calhoun, Robert 249 Calvin, John (Calvinist, Calvinism) 29–31, 112, 138n16, 156n6, 190, 201, 219, 302

Damien, Peter 9 Dawkins, Richard 241; see also atheism Deleuze, Gilles 53n11, 137, 146

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Index

Demos, Raphael 249 Derrida, Jacques 2, 7, 97–8, 134n5, 135n8, 188, 195, 206, 300 Descartes, René viii, 41, 44, 77, 109, 168; see also Cartesianism determinism (determinist) 33–4 disability 14, 153–63 Dods, Marcus 213–14, 216 dogmaticism (dogmatic, dogmatics) 60, 223 Dooyeweerd, Herman 137–41 Dummett, Michael 251

Freud, Sigmund 44 fulfillment 135–6, 142, 235, 290

education 65–7, 154–7, 160, 163, 178, 244–7 Eisenhower, Dwight 246 emotion (emotional, emotions) 81, 157–9, 169, 231 epistemology 8, 37, 64, 85, 101, 135, 144–6, 188, 237, 239, 242, 255 of religious belief xii, 166, 216–17 Reformed x, 6, 9–10, 64, 65n9, 229, 235, 290–2, 302 ethics (ethical) xii, 8, 31, 37, 67, 76, 81, 85, 89–90, 97, 115–16, 156n8, 175, 188, 239, 242, 255, 274 Eucharist 41, 156n6 Evangelicalism 75, 106, 178, 192 Evans, C. Stephen 129, 194 evidence ix, 1, 4–7, 21–2, 27–8, 31, 112, 166, 189, 204, 211, 216–24, 245, 249, 251, 262–3, 273, 276, 291, 295 evidentialism ix–x, 6, 9–10, 79 scandalous 217–21 evil xii, 22, 27, 100, 125, 165–72, 230, 240; see also hiddenness; theodicy experience 4, 30, 47, 49, 61, 79, 98, 111, 124, 129, 136–49, 159, 161, 189, 194, 204, 214–24, 261, 271, 274, 291 religious xii–xiii, 26, 99, 114, 127–30, 169, 190, 203

Habermas, Jürgen x, 76 Hadot, Pierre 68, 84–8, 91, 233n3 Hegel, G. W. F. 25, 36, 41, 50, 105–6 Heidegger, Martin 5–7, 11, 41, 44, 49–51, 77, 90, 93, 97, 106, 112, 118, 134n6, 188, 194, 198 Henry, Michel 106, 189–90 hermeneutics (hermeneutical) 6, 43–6, 50–1, 92, 107–8, 117, 155, 157, 159–60, 162, 188, 191, 193–4, 196, 198, 201–5, 279, 283 heteronomy 62 hiddenness 213, 240; see also evil; theodicy holism 79–81 Holmes, Arthur 74, 194 horizon 46, 117, 134–7, 140–4, 148–9 Hume, David 34–5, 118 humility 125, 176, 182, 191, 194, 212, 220, 233, 297 Husserl, Edmund 5, 41n5, 49–50, 74, 77, 107–12, 115, 118, 133–7, 139–41

faith (faithful) 22, 30, 41, 50–1, 74, 79–81, 87–8, 98–101, 105, 111, 113–16, 147, 155–6, 166, 168–72, 204–5, 210, 213, 216–17, 221, 226, 230, 240–1, 246, 248–52, 263, 267, 275–6, 279, 296, 298–301 Faith and Philosophy 8, 229, 248, 251, 263; see also Society of Christian Philosophers feminism, see gender; philosophy Feuerbach, Ludwig 41, 44, 50 Flew, Antony 251n4, 303 Flint, Thomas 101n7, 230 Forsyth, P. T. 209, 212, 218, 221 foundationalism (foundationalist) 9, 75–6, 79, 99, 168, 198, 203, 237, 274

Gadamer, Hans-Georg 75–6, 92, 99, 194 gender 4, 161; see also feminism Gethsemane 212, 221–5, 295 Gilson, Étienne 5, 7, 9–11, 41–6, 51 Glaucon 166–7; see also Plato; Socrates grace 41, 50–1, 82, 117, 127n6, 148, 219, 221 Greene, Theodore 249 Gross, Neil 247

idol (idolatrous, idolatry) 44, 70, 93, 114, 148, 294, 297 imagination 46, 112, 115–16, 136, 242 Imago Dei 196 integrity 10, 22, 27, 37, 39, 55, 64, 68, 70, 144, 165, 198, 251, 253, 263 intentionality 49, 112–14, 118, 135, 136n11 intuition 78, 113, 115, 118, 135–6, 274 Jamison, A. Leland 249 Jesus 2, 86, 104, 106–13, 116, 118, 126–7, 206, 210–15, 221–6, 276, 294–6 Christ-shaped 211, 221–2, 226, 294, 296 imitatio Christi 217, 226 see also resurrection Johnston, Mark 249 justification 29, 37, 52, 59n4, 61, 168–72, 179, 240 Kant, Immanuel (Kantian) vii, ix–xi, 7, 25, 29, 35, 44, 49, 58–9, 69, 78–9, 88, 96, 105, 112, 134, 169, 194–5, 278; see also rationality

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Index Käsemann, Ernst 223, 226 Kaufmann, Walter 241, 249 Keats, John 124 Keck, Leander 221, 223 Kierkegaard, Søren (Kierkegaardian) 11, 82, 97–100, 106, 189, 195, 203–4, 209, 213, 217, 294 Kittay, Eva Feder 158–9, 162 knowledge 23, 27–32, 46–9, 60, 66–9, 78–80, 88, 90–2, 95, 106, 108, 113–16, 145, 169, 172, 182, 211, 217–19, 226, 275, 294 Korsgaard, Christine M. 58–9 Kvanvig, Jonathan 190 Lacoste, Jean-Yves 106, 146n26 language 37, 49, 75, 77–81, 94, 118, 123, 133, 146, 157, 176, 182, 219, 264–8, 277, 281–2, 299 games 23, 77, 80 see also philosophy Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 41, 50, 134n4, 262 Levinas, Emmanuel (Levinasian) 47, 92–3, 97–8 Lewis, C. S. 7, 124n3, 181 liturgy xii–xiii, 2, 81, 114, 146n26, 156, 161, 182; see also worship Locke, John viii, ix, xiii, 77 love 51, 60–1, 65n10, 71, 75, 85, 97, 104, 107, 112–18, 125, 128, 156, 162, 169, 171, 182, 226, 268, 276 God’s love 24–5, 44–8, 190, 196, 205, 212–20, 295 of wisdom 5, 7, 69–71, 104, 124, 147, 209–10; see also philosophy Lubac, Henri de 40n1, 43, 49n8 Luther, Martin xi, 99, 101, 105, 211, 249 MacIntyre, Alisdair 76, 251n4, 303 Mackie, John 250 Malebranche, Nicolas viii, 41–2 Marion, Jean-Luc 6, 11, 14, 93, 97–9, 106, 112, 134n6, 146, 190 Maritain, Jacques 2–3, 5, 9, 14, 41, 249 Marx, Karl (Marxist) 44, 50, 238 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 5, 90, 112, 146, 194 Messer, Richard 84, 94, 101 metanoia 86 method (methodology) 2, 4, 5–6, 8, 13–14, 25, 31–3, 42–3, 49, 70–1, 76, 99, 106, 112, 118, 146, 168–9, 176–9, 190, 200, 202, 240, 247, 249, 255, 258, 293, 301, 303–4 methodism and particularism, see philosophy philosophical 2, 14, 33, 70, 112, 304 ministry 177–8

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Montaigne, Michel de 85 Moore, G. E. 169–71, 262 Morris, John 250 Morris, Thomas V. 8, 252n5 mystery 40, 45, 115, 272 mysticism (mystical) xii, 69, 116, 133, 147, 161 naturalism (naturalist) vii, x–xi, 24, 26, 192–3, 196–7, 199, 239, 245–6, 252, 256–8, 263, 299–301 Niebuhr, Reinhold 209, 249 Nietzsche, Friedrich 42, 44, 50, 86, 92–3, 97, 188 nihilism (nihilist) 52, 59, 118 normativity (normative) 5, 12, 57–60, 64, 106, 155–62, 198–9, 203, 209, 211, 224–5 Nussbaum, Martha 59n4, 88–9, 100 Olthuis, James H. 137 ontology 7, 23–4, 51, 76, 100, 109, 113, 141–8, 193, 205, 257, 291 onto-theology 93–4 open theism 190 Origen 87, 104, 263 orthodoxy 31, 79, 128, 165, 170, 201, 264–5, 298 Eastern Orthodox 12, 128, 201 Palmer, Parker 153 Particularism, see philosophy Pascal, Blaise 46, 99–100 Paul, St. 52, 86–7, 95, 99, 104, 111, 209, 211, 214, 217–23, 263–4, 295 Pentecostalism (Pentecost) 12, 142n21, 189, 190, 201 phenomenology 5, 11–12, 49, 51–2, 90, 95, 107–18, 134n3, 145–6, 188–90, 194, 202 philosophy as a way of life 64–70, 84–91, 98, 233n3 feminist 1, 4–5, 75, 158, 238, 242 of language 146, 255 of religion vii–viii, 7–13, 22, 25, 84, 94, 97–9, 101, 105–6, 109, 117–18, 123n1, 124, 154, 158, 172, 175, 182, 188–92, 195, 198–200, 202–6, 229, 231n1, 238–43, 244–51, 258, 287–9, 292–3, 302–4 Continental philosophy of religion 84, 91–102, 158, 195, 198, 231n1 methodism and particularism in 168–72 meta-philosophy 1, 8, 10 philosophical community 3, 5, 8, 22, 29, 31–2, 36, 38–9, 161, 174, 188–90, 195, 197–8, 231–8, 252–3, 290, 299

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Index

philosophy (cont.) political philosophy 255 see also aesthetics; ethics; love; method; theology phronesis 88–90, 100–1 Pinnock, Clark 190 Plantinga, Alvin x–xi, 2–15, 61–70, 73–82, 96–8, 101, 118, 123, 132–3, 138n15, 144–7, 153–6, 162, 173–4, 187–206, 229–31, 235–43, 245–6, 251–6, 260–5, 287–94, 297–303 “Advice to Christian Philosophers” x–xi, 9–11, 13, 55–7, 60, 62n7, 64, 68, 70, 74–5, 96, 123, 132, 156, 173, 187–90, 197, 206, 210, 214–17, 222, 236n5, 245, 251–3, 287, 289, 294–7 Plato (Platonism, Platonic) 42, 77–8, 80, 84–5, 88, 90–1, 107, 112, 116, 123n1, 127n6, 130, 165, 209, 211, 214; see also Glaucon; Socrates Plutarch 85 Pneumatology 182, 275–8 politics (political) xii, 6, 8, 46, 63n8, 66, 78, 81, 85, 90–1, 97, 145, 157–8, 161–2, 181, 198, 204, 238, 247, 255, 260, 277 positivism viii, 4, 9, 21, 24–6, 106, 161, 194, 198, 245, 274 postmodernism (postmodern, postmodernity, postmodernist) 92, 96, 161, 191–201, 274, 297, 299, 301, 303 pragmatism 12, 75, 80–1, 145–6, 242, 249 prayer 21, 49, 51, 79, 81–2, 87, 101, 104, 114–17, 123–4, 127–30, 189, 201, 221, 230, 265–8, 270, 278, 302 prophecy (prophet, prophetic) 11, 81, 97–9, 109–11, 142n21, 149, 191, 203–5, 269, 298 Protestantism 178, 229, 290, 299 Pybus, Cassandra 250 Quine, W. V. O. 23–4, 74, 79–80, 187, 249, 261–3 rationality 33, 46, 51, 76, 161, 167–8, 260, 268, 271, 274, 302 “dialogic rationality” x–xi “Kant-rationality” ix–xi; see also Kant, Immanuel Rawls, John 23, 63, 157, 247 Rea, Michael 230, 241 realism (realist) 4, 23, 58n3, 78–80, 125, 146, 162, 196–9, 249 anti-realism, 7, 37, 78–80, 194–9, 203, 299–300

Reformed (Reformation) 12, 98, 106, 138, 141, 153n1, 155, 190, 198, 201, 229–30, 235, 290–1 epistemology, see epistemology, Reformed resurrection 45, 111, 118, 130, 169, 222–4, 230, 235, 290, 295–6 revelation viii, ix, 4–6, 10, 15, 41–51, 104–5, 127, 176, 209, 217, 219, 221, 223, 225–6, 230, 239, 295 Robinson, Marilynne 56 Rorty, Richard 3, 76, 92, 300 Russell, Bertrand 77, 241, 262 Ryle, Gilbert 250 salvation 48, 69, 189, 210, 214, 294 Sanders, John 158, 190 Sartre, Jean-Paul 7, 198 Schleiermacher, Friedrich xii Scripture 41, 45, 87, 95, 105, 109, 112, 115, 118, 126n5, 127, 182, 230, 235, 267–9, 275, 277–83 sensus divinitatis 30, 195 skepticism 30, 58–60, 96, 118, 168, 288–9 Smith, James K. A. 65n10, 136, 137n13, 142n22, 145, 146n26, 148, 156 Society of Christian Philosophers 8, 12–13, 74, 149n28, 160–1, 229, 260, 299; see also Faith and Philosophy Socrates 52, 69, 84–5, 88–91, 166–7, 209, 211, 214, 261; see also Glaucon; Plato soteriology 175, 267, 269; see also salvation Spirit (spirituality) 79, 81–2, 132–3, 140 Holy Spirit 2, 86, 101, 114, 123, 142–3, 148, 189, 218, 276 of God 138, 141–3, 147–8, 218 Stoicism vii, 42, 87–9, 212, 220, 267–8 Swinburne, Richard 94, 96, 98, 101, 118, 160, 189, 197, 235–6, 240, 252, 290–1, 302 Taylor, A. E. 130 Taylor, Charles. 136 Taylor, Jeremy 123–31 testimony 60, 67, 101, 109, 112, 118, 130, 169 thaumazein 84–5, 91, 95–6, 99 theodicy 101, 118, 172, 209, 216; see also evil theology natural 178, 235, 290–1 philosophical xii, 21, 25, 173–4, 201–2, 229–31, 241–3, 303 Thomism (Thomist, Thomistic) 41–2, 52, 248 Tracy, David 31–2 Trakakis, Nick 84, 94–5 translation 23, 77, 89, 91n2, 211 triumphalism 8, 10, 13, 73, 191, 196–8, 200, 206, 222–3, 244, 248, 250–2, 287–9, 296, 300

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Index Vattimo, Gianni 7 verificationism 25–6, 245 Westphal, Merold 4, 11, 14, 92–4, 96–7, 191, 193–6, 199, 203–5, 277–8, 297, 300, 302 White Australia Policy 250 Wierenga, Edward 190, 252n5 Wolterstorff, Nicholas 5, 9–10, 59n4, 65, 76, 85–6, 156, 160, 190, 194, 196–7, 230, 237–8, 241 Wood, David 188–9

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world philosophical 22–4, 30, 32, 36–7, 76, 197, 253, 263 possible worlds 23, 261–2 religions 4, 12, 145, 169–70, 199n1 worldview vii, x, 65n9, 137, 140, 181, 194, 216, 235, 245, 257–8, 289–90, 294, 299 worship vii, 81, 94, 127, 148, 156, 212, 302; see also liturgy Zagzebski, Linda 190, 197