Plunder and Captivity: Philosophy in Christian Theology

 

Finis Jennings Dake had a proof text for every body part he gave God.¹ Richard Howe uses him to make a point most of us grant in the abstract and dodge in practice. Once the verses are all on the table, the argument that remains is about which of them to read literally. Howe's test case is Genesis 3:8. Ask a friend whether God has legs, given that he walks in the garden, and the friend says no and cites John 4:24, that God is spirit. Ask why John 4 gets to be the literal text and Genesis 3 the figure, and the friend has run out of Scripture and started doing philosophy. Every systematic theologian makes that move daily, usually without announcing it. The open question is whether the theory of predication doing the work has ever been examined.

Paul warns the Colossians against being taken captive through philosophy and empty deception (Col. 2:8, LSB), and Christians have read that as a ban for most of two thousand years. Howe follows Alford and Peake on the grammar. The missing article before the second noun makes the conjunction explanatory, so Paul means the philosophy that is empty deception, a particular teaching at Colossae, and Josephus had already called the Pharisees and Sadducees philosophies.² Tertullian came to his own mistrust by watching heretics borrow Aristotle's dialectic, and he asked what Athens has to do with Jerusalem (Quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis?).³ Then he wrote against Praxeas in the philosophical Latin of substantia and trinitas, and the West still speaks that way.⁴ Holmes, in 1959, traces what became of the slogan attached to his name: I believe because it is absurd (credo quia absurdum est).⁵ Those are not Tertullian's words. On the Flesh of Christ says the death of God's Son is credible because it is foolish (credibile est quia ineptum est), a remark about the scandal of the cross.⁶ Kierkegaard carried the same instinct forward, and through him existential theology, where Holmes quotes Brunner's claim that inconsistency marks every authentic statement of faith.⁷ The strand protects something real. The cross cannot be derived from premises, and Tertullian knew a proud rationalist when he saw one. But Brunner's sentence is a thesis about logic, and a theologian who accepts it has resigned from systematic theology the day he begins.

The other tradition starts with Clement of Alexandria, who called philosophy a spark stolen like Prometheus's fire. It passes through Augustine's Egyptian gold (Exod. 12:35–36) and arrives at Calvin, who said the ancients on nature could not be read without the highest admiration.⁸ The spoils image has a defect. Plunder is safe only for a people who can tell gold from idols, and the standard for telling does not come out of Egypt. Holmes named the habit in 1968: theology has at times mistreated biblical religion by adopting, uncritically, the rationalism of writers from Aquinas to Hegel.⁹ The charge against Aquinas is contestable, but the habit it describes is not. Two cases make the abuse plain. Holmes says Tillich's Ground of Being fits so loosely that it could interpret naturalistic humanism as readily as biblical theism.¹⁰ Bultmann took the existential analysis of Heidegger's Being and Time as the frame for hearing the New Testament, and the resurrection stopped being an event in Joseph's tomb and became the rise of faith in the preaching.¹¹ Both men were serious and learned. Each let a borrowed category decide what Scripture was permitted to say, which is the abuse in its simplest form.

Poythress gives a clear recent statement of the wary position, and it deserves a hearing before it is answered. He locates the trouble in autonomy, which he glosses as self-law: the Greek philosophers wanted reasoning independent of the gods, and that ambition runs through most of Western philosophy. He also grants that unbelieving philosophy contains good insights by common grace, and he does his own philosophy with Scripture as instructor, on subjects as small as an apple and a bookmark.¹² The diagnosis is sound as far as it goes. The trouble starts with the remedy. He calls the modern convention that philosophers argue without appealing to Scripture a ground rule of "disastrous rebellion."¹³ A convention about which premises a conversation shares is a different kind of thing from a doctrine about what reason is, and a Christian physicist who reports her data without citing Genesis has not declared independence. The definition he borrows from Frame, that Christian philosophy is a subdivision of theology and on a broader reading identical with it, costs the discipline its power to question a system from outside.¹⁴ Dake's system was airtight from the inside, which is what outside questions are for. Part 6 of the book files Kant, Husserl, and analytic philosophy under "Defective Philosophies," and Husserl gets five pages.¹⁵ A trained phenomenologist will wonder whether five pages can settle it. The epoché suspends theories to attend to how things show themselves in experience, and a method of disciplined description belongs in a different category from a worldview. Husserl's transcendental idealism is a thesis a Christian can refuse without discarding the method that produced it. The method resembles what Holmes praised in ordinary language analysis, where the philosopher's task is to describe how language actually works.¹⁶ Poythress's own account of existentialist ethics, systems that begin with the primacy of the individual's will and decisions, fits Sartre well and Merleau-Ponty poorly, since for Merleau-Ponty the lived body one is given precedes anything one chooses.¹⁷

Existentialism entered evangelical theology early and left a mark. Holmes said in 1959 that its influence had pervaded evangelical apologetics, and his example was Edward Carnell's Christian Commitment, which traded common rational ground with the unbeliever for knowledge won by moral self-acceptance, truth in the heart in place of truth in the head.¹⁸ By 1970 Clark Pinnock was warning against retreat into "some existential version of faith in faith."¹⁹ Holmes added a qualification the whole discussion needs: existentialism has contributed real insights to Christian thought, and his warning was against blanket acceptance of either rationalism or existentialism.²⁰ The insights are easy to locate. Kierkegaard describes despair as a self that will not rest transparently in the power that established it, which is hamartiology in philosophical dress.²¹ Heidegger's analyses of anxiety and being-toward-death describe what Hebrews 2:15 calls slavery through fear of death more exactly than most sermons manage.²² The borrowing has a limit. His answer to dread is anticipatory resoluteness, a resolute owning of one's own finitude, while the gospel names death the last enemy (1 Cor. 15:26) and promises its abolition. A theologian can take the description and decline the prescription.

Philosophy has also been aimed at theology from outside. In 1936 A. J. Ayer ruled theological sentences meaningless, a worse verdict than false.²³ By 1968 Holmes could write that the verifiability theory behind that ruling had been weakened beyond effectiveness, and he drew a lesson from the episode: theology should decline to be poured into a rationalistic or scientistic mold.²⁴ The positivist challenge left a residue inside the church all the same. Whenever a theologian says God-talk is merely symbolic, or that it points toward a reality it cannot state, the positivist's charge has been conceded in advance. The defense that holds is the classical doctrine of analogy, and Holmes, an evangelical philosopher wary of tying theology to Aristotle, judged that the medievals were not altogether wrong to develop a logic of it.²⁵ Analogy says our words reach God truly and never exhaustively.²⁶ That is a doctrine about predication, and it exists to protect Scripture's claim to say something true about Yahweh. If philosophy in Christian hands has a clean example of good use, this is it.

A systematic theologian has to choose a philosophy before the first locus is written, and the honest course is to say which. Holmes proposed in 1968 a third logic for theology besides deduction and induction, which he called adduction: models drawn from Scripture, Father and King among them, explored for their family resemblances, never flattened into literal claims, and handled with care when a model comes from outside the canon.²⁷ Howe shows how much rides on the choice. Perfect-being theology reasons from greatness to attributes, and William Lane Craig grants that the biblical data underdetermine the concept of God. That leaves the philosopher wide latitude and leads most Christian philosophers, Craig says, to deny simplicity, immutability, and impassibility in any unrestricted sense.²⁸ Classical theism reasons from the first cause. Howe is an Existential Thomist and says so, and his either-or is drawn by a man who has already chosen a side.²⁹ A confessional Baptist cannot stay neutral. The Second London Confession says God is "without body, parts, or passions," which answers Dake in five words and was written in a vocabulary perfect-being theologians now decline.³⁰ Its authors did their philosophy in the open and bound it to Scripture with proof texts in the margin. Colossians 2:8 speaks of being taken captive, and captivity needs a captor with an agenda. A church needs someone who can recognize the captors, which is the work of Howe's infectious-disease friend, who spent a career studying what kills.³¹

Notes

1. Richard G. Howe, "Defending the Handmaid: How Theology Needs Philosophy," Journal for Baptist Theology & Ministry 21, no. 1 (Spring 2024): 106, 108–9.
2. Howe, "Defending the Handmaid," 101n3, citing Henry Alford and A. S. Peake.
3. Tertullian, The Prescription against Heretics 7.
4. Tertullian, Against Praxeas 2–3.
5. Arthur F. Holmes, "The Nature of Theistic Apologetics," Bulletin of the Evangelical Theological Society 2, no. 2 (Spring 1959): 3.
6. Tertullian, On the Flesh of Christ 5.
7. Holmes, "Nature," 3, quoting Emil Brunner, The Philosophy of Religion (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1939), 55, as cited by Holmes.
8. Howe, "Defending the Handmaid," 103–5, citing Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 1.17; Augustine, On Christian Doctrine 2.40.60; and John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 2.2.15–16.
9. Arthur F. Holmes, "Ordinary Language Analysis and Theological Method," Bulletin of the Evangelical Theological Society 11, no. 3 (Summer 1968): 131.
10. Holmes, "Ordinary Language Analysis," 137.
11. Rudolf Bultmann, "New Testament and Mythology," in Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, ed. Hans Werner Bartsch, trans. Reginald H. Fuller (London: SPCK, 1953), 1–44.
12. Vern S. Poythress, Redeeming Philosophy: A God-Centered Approach to the Big Questions (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014), 22, 27, 137–58, 174–78.
13. Poythress, Redeeming Philosophy, 28.
14. Poythress, Redeeming Philosophy, 32, quoting John M. Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1987), 85.
15. Poythress, Redeeming Philosophy, 237, 248–52.
16. Holmes, "Ordinary Language Analysis," 132.
17. Poythress, Redeeming Philosophy, 67–68; cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), pt. 1.
18. Holmes, "Nature," 3.
19. Clark H. Pinnock, "Cultural Apologetics: An Evangelical Standpoint," Bibliotheca Sacra 127, no. 505 (January 1970): 58.
20. Holmes, "Nature," 3–4.
21. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 13–14.
22. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), §§40, 46–53, 62.
23. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936), chap. 6.
24. Holmes, "Ordinary Language Analysis," 131.
25. Holmes, "Ordinary Language Analysis," 134–35.
26. J. Neil Daniels, "Not Merely Jabberwocky: The Meaningfulness of Theological Language and the Doctrine of Analogy" (unpublished manuscript, n.d.), sec. V.
27. Holmes, "Ordinary Language Analysis," 133–36.
28. Howe, "Defending the Handmaid," 110–11, 111n26, quoting William Lane Craig, "Theistic Critiques of Atheism," in The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, ed. Michael Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 71–72.
29. Howe, "Defending the Handmaid," 110n25.
30. The Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689, chap. 2, par. 1.
31. Howe, "Defending the Handmaid," 102.