Theological Negotiations

Proposals in Soteriology and Anthropology

Farrow, Douglas

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781493415823
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

One of today's leading theologians tackles some of the most significant themes in contemporary theology. Douglas Farrow explores key theological loci such as nature and grace and justification and sanctification; introduces theological giants such as Anselm, Aquinas, Luther, and Barth; and examines contemporary questions about sacraments and unity. Throughout his explorations, Farrow invites readers to consider how to negotiate controversy in Christian theology, especially between Catholics and Protestants, arguing that theology does its best work at the intersection of topics in dispute.

1
Theology and Philosophy

Recovering the Pax Thomistica

The theology included in holy teaching is different in kind from that theology that is part of philosophy.

Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1.1.1

For as soon as we allow two different callings to combine and run together, we can form no clear notion of the characteristic that distinguishes each by itself.

Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties I.1.A

However legitimate or possible this other task may be, the task of dogmatics is set aside when it is pursued.

Barth, Church Dogmatics 1.1 §2

With these opening aphorisms—the apparent agreement of which masks still more fundamental disagreements—I may be suspected of stacking the deck, having surrounded an eminent philosopher with two eminent theologians, one on each side; but one of the latter is also an eminent philosopher, and the latter in any case do not see eye to eye on the relation between theology and philosophy. By considering the view of each, I hope to clarify my own view just a little and perhaps yours as well, whatever disagreements we shall discover between ourselves. I hope at all events that you will not have occasion to think (as Kant might) that I have leapt, “like Romulus’s brother, over the wall of ecclesiastical faith” by meddling in reason; or indeed that I have only “meddled” with reason.1

If we mean to speak of the relation between theology and philosophy, however, we should begin with some highly provisional attempt at definition—highly provisional because nothing stacks the decks like definition! Philosophy, of course, is notoriously difficult to define, and its literal meaning does not suffice to distinguish it from theology. As a working definition I will offer this, cribbed in part from our philosophy department’s website: Philosophy is the pursuit of clarity about ourselves, our world, and our place in it, for the sake of the good life;2 in its academic dimension it involves inter alia the study of logic, epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics.

Of theology I will say: It is discourse about deity, and the creature in relation to deity, that is disciplined by metaphysics—this is so-called natural or philosophical theology, “in which divine things are considered not as the subject of the science but as principles of the subject,” as Thomas has it—and/or by Scripture, liturgy, and dogma—this is revealed theology, in which divine things are themselves the subject.3 In its academic dimension revealed theology demands, in addition to philosophical and cultural studies, careful study of what is contained in the sources of revelation.

Both natural and revealed theology aim at establishing sound speech about God (what Plato calls οἱ τύποι περὶ θεολογίας, Republic 379a), but the one works with what can be known of God by way of divine effects in creation, and the other devotes itself to the whole knowledge and counsel of God, as disclosed especially in God’s redemptive self-manifestation.4 Which is to say, revealed theology also pursues clarity about ourselves, our world, and our place in it, and does so precisely for the sake of the good life; but it knows quite concretely, from its own sources, what natural theology, on some accounts, also has an inkling of, namely, that “humanity is directed towards God as to an end that surpasses the grasp of its reason” and that the good life lies in the direction of God, who is goodness itself.5 It knows this with a definiteness and a detail that natural theology lacks, and it speaks of God with a directness proper to itself.

I say “on some accounts” because of course this basically Thomist view is not everyone’s view. Kant and Barth, for example, do not share it. Kant denies revealed theology both the independence and the superiority that Thomas ascribes to it while at the same time severely restricting the natural theology that Thomas inherited from Greek and Christian sources. Barth not only restricts natural theology but also denies its validity. He emphasizes the grandeur of revealed theology but thinks that grandeur greatly imperiled by natural theology:

Of all disciplines theology is the fairest, the one that moves the head and heart most fully, the one that comes closest to human reality, the one that gives the clearest perspective on the truth which every discipline seeks. It is a landscape like of those of Umbria and Tuscany with views which are distant and yet clear, a work of art which is as well-planned and as bizarre as the cathedrals of Cologne or Milan. . . . But of all disciplines theology is also the most difficult and the most dangerous, the one in which a man is most likely to end in despair, or—and this almost worse—in arrogance. Theology can float off into thin air or turn to stone, and worst of all it can become a caricature of itself.6

It is most likely to do so, according to Barth, where it follows the path of those who “think first of cause and effect, of the infinite and the finite, of eternity and time, of idea and phenomenon,” rather than of the self-determination of God for man in the person of Jesus Christ.7 Natural theology, if by that we mean right reason and true speech about God based on something other than God’s self-revelation in Christ, is beyond the capacity of fallen man and a repudiation of divine grace.

Thomas, for his part, was resident on both sides of the border between philosophy and theology, inhabiting the borderlands as one who sought consistency and coherence between their respective attempts to speak of God. If this distinguishes him from Barth and Kant, how much more from those who, at some distant extreme, shrink altogether either from philosophy, as Barth did not, or from theology, as Kant did not (or not quite)? The pax Thomistica, as we might call it, both respects the border and regards it as a friendly one. But let us look at Kant, then at Barth—for otherwise we cannot understand Barth—before returning to Thomas.

Kant’s Philosophical Imperialism

We ought really to look first at the Franciscans; that is, at Ockham and the nominalist philosophers who set out on the trail that eventually led around to Kant.8 But for brevity’s sake we go directly to Kant, the mature Kant at that—the Kant who waited out King Frederick William II before issuing The Conflict of the Faculties, in which he tried to put these disciplines in their proper places.

Kant, as you know, drew certain distinctions between the higher faculties (medicine, law, and theology in ascending order) and the lower (philosophy). The former, in which people train for professions, are statute or canon based, while the latter is truth based. The former are regulated by the government with a view to generating effective public servants; the latter is free and self-regulating, insofar as it pursues truth for its own sake. The higher faculties must be scrutinized by the lower, then, as regards truth; but the lower is not scrutinized by the higher. With the help of the lower, the higher faculties can learn to interpret and deploy their respective canons to the maximum benefit of society by approximating more closely a rational view of their own subject matter. The professionals they train will in turn influence for the better the government that regulates them. Some day the government may even come to recognize that the lower faculty, by virtue of this role, is the higher, that its free and dispassionate counsel is most to be prized.9

On this scenario the biblical theologian (the one, that is, who deals with revealed theology or theologia empirica) must be contrasted sharply with the rational theologian (whose efforts are devoted to natural theology or theologia rationalis).10 Likewise, “ecclesiastical faith,” which expounds Scripture dogmatically, must be contrasted with the “pure religious faith” that is the product of natural reason. The one, as we know already from Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, is the sum of “certain teachings regarded as divine revelations”; the other, “the sum of all our duties regarded as divine commands.”11 The one may vary from community to community or from culture to culture; the other, precisely as “a purely rational affair,” is universal. Which is to say: there may be many churches or systems of worship, each more or less adequate in its way as a medium of the moral truth that underlies them all. But it is the typical mistake of the theology faculty, and of the biblical theologian, to suppose that the historical particularities to which it professes allegiance (or at least devotes scholarly attention) are somehow essential to pure religious faith. And it is philosophy’s task to expose this error, as Kant himself sets out to do.12

Kant, in other words, reduces the study of revealed theology to a professional discipline in the service of public morality. He does not deny that it is scholarly; indeed, he allows that as an empirical study it is scholarly in a way that natural or rational theology (quite deliberately) is not.13 He does not deny either its utility or the loftiness of its aims. After all, it deals not merely with the body or the body politic (these belong to the faculties of medicine and law respectively) but with the citizen himself and his character, and may come even to a consideration of eternal life. But the biblical theologian must be made to understand that “the moral improvement of the human being is the sole condition of eternal life.” Moreover, he must be made to understand that Scripture is at best an indirect guide to moral improvement and eternal life; indeed, that “the only way we can find eternal life in any Scripture whatsoever is by putting it there.”14 He must learn to discover the abiding rational kernel of morality (the true substance of religion) beneath the transitory historical husk (the accidents of tradition). He must recognize that faith invested in the historical particulars themselves, or in the dogmas that arise from those particulars, is irrational. Faith is a posture that reason may produce and adopt for itself in recognition of the limits of human conformity to reason and of reason’s own limits; but this remains faith in reason. It invests nothing in supposed historical manifestations of the supernatural.15

Now for Kant the opposition between the higher and lower faculties is dialectical, inasmuch as they share a “final end” in the public good.16 That opposition must therefore be adjudicated. But it is the lower faculty itself that will do the adjudicating, producing concordia from discordia, since it is the lower that is characterized by freedom and truth.

Where theology is concerned, a major conflict arises with philosophy over the public interpretation of Scripture; this above all must be adjudicated. Kant lays down firm gr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1. Theology and Philosophy
• 2. Thinking with Aquinas about Nature and Grace
• 3. Thinking with Luther about Justification and Sanctification
• 4. Satisfaction and Punishment
• 5. Whose Offering?
• 6. Transubstantiation
• 7. Autonomy
• 8. For the Jew First
• 9. The Gift of Fear
• Index
• Back Cover