The Architecture of Theology: Structure, System, and Ratio

T H E A RC H I T E C T U R E O F T H E O LO G Y

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The Architecture of Theology Structure, System, and Ratio A. N. WILLIAMS

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp 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 in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York # A. N. Williams 2011 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2011 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, 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 book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn ISBN 978–0–19–923636–7 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

To the Memory of Francis Michael McKay, SM 12.v.1920–7.viii.1991 Doch ging sie durch alle, klein wie sie war, aus jeder Hand hinaus und in ihr Los, das, höher als die Halle, schon fertig war, und schwerer als das Haus. Rilke, ‘Die Darstellung Mariä im Tempel’

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Preface The pages that follow represent an essay in the reading of Christian theology. The reading they offer attempts to shed light on the Christian tradition by viewing it through a particular lens. All lenses have the potential to distort what they attempt to magnify or clarify, and this one does not purport to be an exception. I do not suggest this interpretation is the only way of reading Christian theology, or even the best way, but offer it only as parsing of the tradition that may account for some of its salient features in the forms it has taken down the centuries. I have attempted to illustrate this reading by reference to specific authors and texts (Chapter 3 is wholly devoted to an intensive reading of a small selection of texts). To give a fuller illustration would have been eminently possible, had space been no consideration. As it is, I have focused on a fairly small number of authors, but have within that straitened compass attempted to include authors from a variety of periods, writing in different styles, and with different theological convictions. I can only hope that readers who find some interest in the suggestions made here will be prompted to turn afresh to their own reading of theology, querying both well-known texts and new ones in light of them. My purpose is not to persuade readers of the inevitability of my own ideas, but to foster a richer dialogue between the reader and the extraordinary panoply of texts that comprise the Christian theological tradition.

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Contents Acknowledgements

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Introduction

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1. Systems and Models of Truth

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2. Warrants and Norms

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3. Mimesis

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4. Beauty and Other Seductions

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5. Theology and Transfiguration

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Select Bibliography and Works Cited Index

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Acknowledgements This book is dedicated, not to a theologian, but a teacher, literary critic, and poet. Frank McKay taught me Malory in my first degree and the English metaphysical poets in my second. Although he was gravely disappointed when I chose not to continue on to doctoral work in literature, he later enthusiastically supported my decision to begin studying theology. His constant presence in my thoughts and prayers over the years is a testimony to the transformative power of a good teacher, a power far beyond what most scholarly books will ever have. I am grateful to the New Zealand Province of the Society of Mary for allowing me to remember Frank in this volume. My thanks go also to: the British Academy, whose generous award of a research grant in the academic years 2008–10 gave me the time and tranquillity to write this book; the Faculty of Divinity of the University of Cambridge for granting funds for the compiling of the index; and Giles Waller, who compiled it. A special vote of thanks goes to John Webster, an early and constant supporter of the project, even though his views do not always concur with my own. His generosity of spirit has been a constant comfort to me in a labour that often seemed dauntingly large for my talents. As always, I am indebted to my ever-patient husband, Dale Gingrich, for suffering through the litany of woes chanted drearily through the writing of yet another book. And finally, I am thankful that the solitude in which a writer is necessarily confined was often interrupted by Pushkin and Persika, whose tails brought tidings of the world beyond my study and who provided a feline interpretative lens on the cosmos.

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Introduction When did Christian theology become systematic? The conventional answer to this question would hold that the system arose in the Middle Ages, with the school summae. To ask the question, however, begs the logically prior one of what one means by ‘systematic’. The medieval summae are systematic theologies in the sense that they present a reasonably comprehensive account of Christian theology in an orderly fashion, making their way methodically through the terrain, locus by locus. If the summae are definitive of systematic theology (and one could query the assumption that they should be), then the implied definition of systematicity they yield is a genre definition: a systematic theology in this sense is defined by its scope and the structure of the text that embodies it. This genre-based understanding of systematicity has been the dominant—if not the exclusive—one, and its hegemony has arguably obscured a deeper sense in which theology may be systematic: by exhibiting an impetus towards coherence and comprehensiveness. Theology may in this sense be said to be systematic when it traces links between discrete theological loci, or when the treatment of a single locus or issue is shaped by the awareness of its potential to interlock with other loci, indeed in some cases, its dependence on them for its own shape. Theology that is in this sense systematic may be likened to a jigsaw puzzle: even if one does not have all the pieces, the shape of any one of them reflects its orientation towards others as parts of a larger pattern. When there are enough such pieces to hand, a complete picture forms, but even in the absence of a whole, unified image, a solitary piece displays by its very shape its trajectory towards linkage. We may therefore distinguish two senses of the term ‘systematic theology’: one which uses ‘theology’ as a countable noun (one that can be preceded by an article and can be made plural); hence the phrase ‘a systematic theology’ designates a body of prose intended to give a reasonably comprehensive account of Christian doctrine, ordered locus by locus (call this Type 1 systematic theology or simply Type 1 theology). Although the exact scope and ordering of loci may vary considerably from author to author, such theologies are easily recognizable as belonging to the same genre. In the second sense,

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‘systematic theology’ is used as an uncountable noun (one needing no preceding article and not susceptible to being made plural); call this Type 2 systematic theology or Type 2 theology. In this sense, ‘systematic theology’ designates theological writing in which the treatment of any one locus indicates, at least in some measure, how it is informed by other loci or how it will itself determine the shape of others. Systematic theology in this sense implicitly assumes an oikonomia, a providentially ordered creation intended for harmony with its maker and therefore, for harmony within itself. It assumes equally a notion of ratio: of divine determination reflected in order and the human discernment of this ordering. If we accept the distinction of Type 1 and Type 2 theologies, a curious consequent emerges: the first category contains relatively little theology of enduring value, while the second category contains the majority of the theology that has stood the test of time. Once one begins to look for systematic theologies set out in the conventional way, covering the major doctrines of the Christian faith locus by locus, one begins to notice how few have lasted. From the patristic period, we might consider as a possible candidate Origen’s On First Principles, although its status as even a brief system has been denied by Origen scholars,1 and the fragmentary state of the extant texts necessarily renders any determination about it somewhat tentative. One might point to Gregory Nyssen’s Great Catechetical Oration as a miniature, though so miniature that its inclusion in the category is de facto doubtful. The strongest candidate from the period is John Damascene’s On the Orthodox Faith, although its status as a systematic theology has also been denied.2 The first thousand years of the Christian tradition thus yields no work that incontestably counts as a systematic theology. Conventional wisdom would hold that the great explosion (perhaps even the beginning) of systematic theology came in the Middle Ages, when the production of summae became something of a cottage industry, yet out of this vast quarry, only one continues to be widely read, and only one has become part of the great dialogue of voices that is the Christian tradition, Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. If we were willing to stretch the genre criteria a little, a case could be made for Anselm’s Monologion, Proslogion and Why the God-Man? which, taken together, cover most of the key loci of a system.3 Even so, their scope is scarcely greater than Origen’s On First Principles, although the texts themselves are in a more satisfactory condition.

1 Notably Crouzel 1989: 46, 168. Given that he doubts any theologian could be systematic, his denial that Origen is seems rather insignificant. 2 Louth 2002: 85. 3 Robert Sokolowski gives a reading of Anselm’s Proslogion, which plausibly stresses its inherent systematicity (1982: 8–9), but such interpretations are rare.

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The Reformation produced fewer in the way of systematic theologies, not surprisingly, given the polemical and ad hoc character of thought in the period; and the only system of enduring quality from this era comes from the pen of a second-generation reformer, Jean Calvin. More surprising is the absence of enduring systems in the post-Reformation period. Of the output of systems from Calvin to the nineteenth century, none survives as significant for Christian theology as a whole; some of the works of the writers labelled ‘the Protestant Scholastics’ continue to have some importance within particular traditions (although arguably little even within those denominational circles), but none continues to engage Christian theologians at large. From Calvin, then, we skip forward to Schleiermacher, whose system stands as the lone enduring one of the nineteenth century. Since the latter was not a great period for the production of systems, the fact that there is even one of lasting quality and wide appeal is significant, especially since a period rich in the production of systems, such as the Middle Ages, also yields only one enduring work falling clearly within the genre. The twentieth century, in contrast, saw a burst in the production of systematic theologies. While it is, of course, too soon to tell how many of those will continue to be widely read, one seems certain to do so: Barth’s Church Dogmatics (despite Barth’s own denial that it is a system, a view with which few others concur). The Church Dogmatics, however, seems the only twentieth-century system with any very strong claim to probable endurance; it seems possible that the last century, like the Middle Ages, may ultimately be characterized by a large output of ephemera. What remains at the end of this canter through twenty centuries of Christian thought are at most half-a-dozen works qualifying as Type 1 systematic theologies of enduring significance, with the status of even several of these being highly questionable on one ground or another. Even if this list has omitted a few plausible candidates, the number could not have been much greater. The paucity of influential and enduring theological systems indicates that if the first, and narrower, definition is used, we would have to conclude that systematicity is not of great importance in the Christian tradition. That conclusion is the opposite of what one reaches if one uses the second definition. The potential fertility of the second definition does not, of course, constitute a reason to employ it, but it does indicate that if systematic theology is to be considered a significant category in the Christian tradition, its claim to significance may not rest solely on the importance of a handful of illustrious works by authors such as Aquinas and Calvin, but much more on some broader and deeper tendency in Christian thought. This deeper characteristic of Christian theology is what this study seeks to explore. The intent is not to assume the desirability of seeing widespread systematicity in the discipline and then to set about finding evidence for it, but rather to probe the ways in which Christian theology could be said to be

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systematic so as to arrive at greater insight concerning both its own character and its relation to other disciplines. The intent is equally to examine the possibility that systematicity is rooted in the very nature of Christian theology. Considering the implications of this suggestion will indicate the power of systematicity, both its dangers and its fertility.

THE STRUCTURE OF SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY The difference between the senses of systematic theology distinguished earlier hinges in the first instance on the structure of a text: in the first sense, the text is characterized by its scope and the relation of loci within it. Neither of these features of such texts needs be taken as purely surface qualities, for both correspond to the more fundamental sense in which theology can be systematic. To be adequate to the subject of its discourse—God and other things as they are related to God, as Aquinas puts it (Summa theologiae I.1, 3 ad 1)—it must aspire to comprehensiveness of some variety. If all that is not the Trinity is necessarily related to the Trinity, then the scope of Christian theology cannot be less than comprehensive, and in virtue of their common relation to the Trinity, created things are necessarily related to each other in some way, just as God is related to them (although they may, of course, also have internal relations that are largely creaturely). The fact that Christianity holds that all that exists is either the Trinity or necessarily related to the Trinity grounds and precipitates systematic theology: Christian theology cannot help but trace connections, since they exist by divine will as a consequence of the very act of creation, and the connectedness that systematic theology expresses is as much its subject as the content of any discrete doctrine. Treatment of a single doctrine or aspect of a doctrine merely gestures towards comprehensiveness, but the gesturing is nevertheless visible in the theological assumptions and implications of any given doctrine’s treatment. These markers of comprehensiveness are by nature also markers of relationality; hence the two distinguishing features of systematic theology stand in a relation of mutual implication. Both additionally correlate inherently to theology’s subject matter, the divine source of all created things, with the consequent dependence of creatures on God. Explicit systematic theologies are not distinguished from implicitly systematic Type 2 theology by their achievement of comprehensiveness—for none of them, not even the longest, does treat every possible theological locus—nor by their impetus towards connectedness, for as we shall see, all Christian theology exhibits the bent for connection to some degree. The difference between the two turns, first, on the actual scope of vision in a Type 1 theology, which although limited to some degree, remains broader than that of other theologies, and second, on the explicit connections

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it is able to make between doctrines, in virtue of this scope. One way in which we immediately observe the relation of mutual dependence between the two characteristic features of a systematic theology is that when connections are explicitly expressed, more than one doctrine is necessarily considered, and some démarche therefore made in the direction of comprehensiveness. Conversely, the successive or concurrent treatments of a number of doctrines will almost inevitably entail a holistic treatment of these, if the theologian is not to fall into self-contradiction. The sometimes tacit nature of the connections of one locus to others in implicitly systematic Type 2 theology may seem to be a function of its limitation to a specific doctrinal territory: the genre simply does not afford the opportunity to make links between loci with equal explicitness. The question is whether this reduced degree of explicitness necessarily reduces the degree of systematicity. This question may be pursued at two levels: the actual and the theoretical. In the first case, one would be asking how far the articulation of a particular doctrine is informed by the shaping forces of other loci—the extent, for example, to which a doctrine of grace is worked out in relation to pneumatology or hamartiology. In practice, few loci would lend themselves to solipsistic treatment: it would be difficult to think of any Christian doctrine that could be articulated without any reference to the way it intersected with others, or without drawing on or presupposing these others. It is the theoretical reason for this perennial fact of Christian theology that this study seeks in part to explore. The issue might be stated as follows: the author of a systematic theology might have good reasons for wanting to show the connections between its various parts, a motivation which might spring from the desire to express a cohesiveness the theologian perceives or from a desire to give the work the appearance of coherence that it needs in order to argue its own intellectual plausibility. The question is whether the connections among loci exist intrinsically, or whether they are merely said to exist (or, to state the matter more bluntly, the extent to which such connections are forged by theologians for cosmetic purposes). In practice, however, it seems it would be difficult to claim a connection if there is not one there. A sacramental theology that does not rely on some model of grace, however implicitly, is hard to envisage, for example. What it might conceivably do is show one sort of implicit model at one point, but a different (and perhaps incompatible) model at another. However, to do so would betray inconsistency, which constitutes a flawed version of systematicity rather than a fabrication of it. The real issue is therefore not whether theologians might assert connections that are intrinsically lacking, but the internal consistency and coherency of a particular doctrine’s exposition. The constant latent impetus towards coherency in systematic theology signals one of its little-remarked features: its generation of an argument from within itself. Systematicity functions as a kind of theological source,

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and as such, its relation to the conventional theological warrants becomes pressing. Traditionally, the ultimate root of Christian theological reflection has been taken to be scripture. Among theological warrants, this one holds pre-eminence, both in the sense that it is rare for any other to be acknowledged as standing alongside, let alone above, it; but also in the sense that its status as a warrant is uncontested. Of the many disputes over theological norms in the Christian tradition, no one has ever questioned that scripture is one (there are vigorous disputes, of course, over its interpretation and use). On the most sanguine estimations, tradition may stand next to scripture, but not above it—and indeed, very few proponents of tradition have even been willing to go so far as to deem scripture and tradition co-equal. The other two candidates for theological warrants (reason and experience) have enjoyed much more limited support than either of the first two. We will return to warrants, their rationale and function, later in the study, but for the moment need to note what has not served, or been proposed, as a warrant: the exigencies of a theological system. In practice, nevertheless, theologians very often argue from one locus to another. A theological proposal may be deemed inadequate or undesirable because it reflects back inappropriately on the doctrine of God, or would have intolerable ecclesiological consequences, for example: these systematic considerations function for all practicable purposes just as warrants do, even though systematicity has never been acknowledged as a theological warrant as such. The reason for this blindness may lie in the strange status of reason among the warrants. The debates over reason’s status have assumed that its role in theology—whether the role it should have or the role it should not have—is formally similar to that of scripture and tradition: a source of theological information to which one resorts as an aid to resolving theological questions. The debates over reason’s status have followed from this assumption, either making the case for the employment of human reason in Christian theology (on the grounds, for example, of its status as a divine gift), or disavowing its authority (typically on the grounds of the mind’s being damaged at the Fall, or simply its inadequacy to the task of perceiving God). Both these opposing armies of proponents and critics of human reason nevertheless suppose it would be functioning as a source of information, rather than as a judge or interpreter of information—that it would be, in other words, more akin to a databank than an operating system. What is odd about this state of affairs is the disparity between the fervour of the disputes and the rarity with which reason has actually been employed as a source of theological data. It would be hard to think of any doctrine pertaining to systematic theology proper whose author claims sheer human reason as its source. The most obvious candidate for such a doctrine would be the existence of God, when asserted on the basis of some argument of natural theology. Such arguments rarely figure in Type 1 systematic theologies, however. Of those previously identified as such, only

Introduction

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Aquinas’s larger Summa proposes any such arguments, and there they are dispensed with quickly and do little work elsewhere in the system. If we take reason to be theologically normative in the sense that it functions as the criterion by which theological claims are not generated, but judged, its significance undergoes a sea change. Now, even the most vociferous critics of reason as a theological norm can be seen to make extensive appeal to it: one cannot construct a theological argument, or even advocate a particular interpretation of scripture, without recourse to human reason. One cannot read or write without reason, so for as long as theology remains a form of discourse, it must employ human reason. The attackers of reason only prove this when they appeal to notions of finitude or the sinfulness of the human mind, for in doing so, they precisely reason from theological assumptions to their logical consequents. One might, of course, maintain that theology is in the first instance not a form of discourse; one of its oldest uses, in the writings of the Fathers, designates something closer to a form of contemplation. In this sense, however, the mind is no more effaced than in the first sense, for that which we contemplate, that which engages God, is the mind. One could quarrel, of course, with the sleight-of-hand by which ‘mind’ has now been exchanged for ‘reason’, but in either case, it is either the human faculty by which we reason, or the thought which is the faculty’s product, that is in question, and the objections from the side of finitude or sin apply as much to the one as to the other. To argue from the exigencies of system is to acknowledge the role of both mind and reason in theology, and the contingency of both, for reason (let us use this as the umbrella term) is on this account generative only in a highly qualified sense. It does not immediately generate doctrines, as scripture and perhaps tradition, might be said to do, but only extrapolates from other givens and modulates the final shape of doctrines in light of their compatibility with each other. This kind of functioning is not what theologians mean when either advocating or polemicizing against reason as a warrant, but its constancy as a theological force attests to the equally perennial force of systematicity, for the latter is the potential for, or expression of, reasoned connections between doctrines, or the rational vision that sees them as constituents of a coherent whole. Systematicity cannot, however, be construed solely as the product of human reason. To understand why it cannot, it is helpful to look to the origins of appeal to systematicity in western religious thought, at its dawn in pre-Socratic philosophy, that of Xenophanes. It was Xenophanes who objected to the undignified behaviour of the gods in the primers of Greek religion, Homer and Hesiod, and in so doing, introduced a criterion that in one form or another, acknowledged or not, has stood as a powerful force in Christian theology.4 It appears explicitly in patristic and medieval theology, in appeals to The significance of Xenophanes’s fittingness criterion has not been generally acknowledged. I am not, therefore, claiming Xenophanes influenced Christian theology, merely that he seems to 4

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‘fittingness’, which was also the way in which Xenophanes invoked it: for the latter, gods should engage in appropriately godlike (and hence edifying) behaviour. Xenophanes presumably realized that the fittingness criterion could not be invoked as a control on the actions of beings more powerful than mortals, so the criterion could only be taken as a rule governing discourse about the gods, not as a limitation on their acting, and therefore their freedom. Equally, however, if the discourse aspires to be true, it must follow the outline of things as they really are. Unless Xenophanes’s criterion is to be taken as a form of prudish theological euphemism, it must mean that the gods in fact behave in ways that are godlike, and what we perceive to be godlike behaviour therefore guides the way we speak of them. Transposed into Christian terms, the insight would indicate that God behaves in accord with a divine ratio (the ratio of love, justice, and mercy, for example); we discern God’s behaviour to be divinely fitting and write theology accordingly. Clearly, there are dangers in such a theory or procedure from a Christian perspective, and it is because of legitimate worries about these that reason has received bad press as a theological warrant. These concerns basically group under the headings of ‘finitude’ and ‘sin’. Theologians who worry about the latter advert to the epistemological effects of the Fall, which results not merely in some general clouding of the mind, but specifically, damage to our capacity for communion with, and therefore knowledge of, God. If our reasoning faculty becomes the means by which we make determinations about God, and our minds are muddied and fundamentally unlike God in their absence of holiness, the human mind would not appear to be an appropriate instrument for discerning God—or, for that matter, rightly understanding itself. The problems from the side of finitude fall under two related but distinguishable headings. On one side is the sheer fact of the divine attributes’ being underwritten by infinity (or specifications of infinity: eternity, omniscience, and omnipresence all designate particular respects in which divine nature is unlimited, and thus are implicates of infinity). All other divine attributes (with the sole and notable exception of simplicity) are defined to at least some degree by infinity: thus, divine goodness, mercy, and so on must be taken as inexhaustible, unable to be surpassed, in that sense infinite. Even perfection, which might seem fundamentally at odds with infinity, can be construed as the radical absence of limitation on whatever quality is said to be perfect. Therefore, although perfection is in one sense a governing quality—one which stipulates the way in which some other attribute (such as justice or mercy) is to be understood—it is itself a precision of infinity. On this reading, then, simplicity and infinity are meta-attributes, important for the way in which they stipulate that other attributes are to be understood: be the earliest proponent in the western intellectual tradition of a principle which later became vital to Christian theology.

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in virtue of infinity, as unconditioned, and in virtue of simplicity, as distinguishable from one another only in our conception rather than existing as discrete constituents of divine nature. Here is the root problem posed by humanity’s conceiving of divinity: everything else in our experience, all that our mind can conceive, is finite and composite, so if infinity and simplicity govern all other attributes, the human mind is necessarily hampered in face of the task of conceiving of God. On this reading, simplicity and infinity are ways of specifying transcendence, which is the more traditional way of stating the issue. Neither divine transcendence, nor simplicity, nor infinity necessarily stipulates the impotence of human reason or the impropriety of appeal to it, however, for it is only in virtue of the limited human mind’s ability to apprehend the notion that there is something radically unlike itself that we are able to assert these attributes of divine nature in the first place. Likewise, if the human mind’s darkening were such as to render it theologically incompetent, it could not even understand itself as falling short of divine holiness. Finitude and sin preclude humankind’s grasp of divine nature by reason unaided, but that fact by no means stipulates jettisoning all theological employment of reason. This gap between the finite and the infinite has constituted one ground for rejecting reason as a theological warrant: even without taking into account the blindness and propensity for error that are the legacy of the Fall, the inherent limitations of human reason indicate its inadequacy in the face of a task of such magnitude, hence the necessity of getting our notions of God solely from what is divinely given, namely scripture. There are two problems involved in taking this argument as ruling out the theological employment of reason. The first is signalled in the wording above: the use of human reason is being ruled out by the very process of reasoning from the Fall. This line of reasoning, far from banishing human reason, necessarily makes use of it to secure the point—and the form of reasoning used is explicitly systematic. The second problem is the one more often invoked: that the Bible is not merely divine speech, but itself reflects the limitations, at the very least of human language, if not human conceptualities. Even the strongest versions of scriptural inspiration advanced in a Christian context (all of which fall short of claiming divine dictation) cannot escape this consideration, given the use of natural human languages. The text itself is moreover fraught with internal tensions, and even the most sanguine estimation of the possibility of resolving these must acknowledge the necessary involvement of human reason to produce an account of the Biblical witness that can be used as a basis for theology and ethics. On this account, scripture is normatively authoritative in a way reason alone cannot be, but scripture cannot stand alone, given its need for interpretation, whether in the exegesis of individual passages or in the attempt to convey the message of the Bible as a whole. The interpretation of scripture in fact very often entails more

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than the exegesis of discrete passages. Although it is not itself an act of systematic theological reasoning, such interpretation represents, in significant part, the attempt to reconcile apparent theological differences so that they can co-exist in a framework off which one can read a particular picture of divine nature, human nature, and divine dealings with humanity, a picture in which these pieces of the puzzle fit together coherently. The stronger the doctrine of Biblical inspiration, in fact, the greater the impetus there must be to seek such coherence in the Biblical message. If that doctrine of inspiration rules out, de jure, the possibility that human reason imposes this order on Creator and creation, then it must tacitly also suppose that human reason can discern it, or divine speech would be in vain. Here is the nub of the problem: disputants over the role of reason have typically assumed, on both sides, that human reason creates such order, artificially conforming an account of the Trinity and creation to merely human notions of what should be the case. If, however, one takes the order to subsist by divine desire that things be so, then it still takes rationality to perceive the order that is there. Creation reflects an order desired for it by a creative power which can itself only be understood as intelligent, and theology represents the exercise of the rational creature’s mind in following both the divine tracery and the human graffiti that partly obscure the divine intention and work. If reason is not legitimate as a theological norm, it is equally true that it is not merely an indispensable theological tool, but the tool. One can only reject Xenophanes’s insight as incompatible with Christian theology if one denies either divine or human intellect; to deny the latter flies in the face of common sense and to deny the former would entail equally denying divine wisdom and providence. Systematicity thus stipulates that theology is in some sense a rational enterprise, but if it is so, contra the proponents of sola scriptura and total depravity, then how are theologians to answer the charges from the opposite side of the ideological spectrum, from those who claim Christianity is irrational because it supposedly does not meet secular standards of rationality? Demands for this kind of rationality usually amount to a request for some kind of foundationalist structure, where propositions counting as foundational meet crieteria approved by the secular world. With surprising regularity, the authors of some systematic theologies have been blithely characterized as foundationalists (notably Aquinas), so something about the character of systematic theology may be learnt by investigating such claims: if the larger Summa is a foundationalist edifice, for example, is it so qua a theological system, or because it possesses some quality that distinguishes it from other systems? And if the latter be the case, what are those qualities exactly? These questions merit pursuit but we must not lose sight of the fact that they proceed from an assumption which itself demands investigation, namely the assumption of a necessary link between systematicity and foundationalism. One reason to

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query any agreement with the notion that systematicity necessarily implies foundationalism is the chorus in recent decades pronouncing foundationalism dead. If it is, and if the structure of systematic theology is inherently foundationalist, then systematic theology would also be dead. Perhaps it is, but the matter at least bears investigation. Quite aside from allegations regarding specific theologians, moreover, there is a question that arises naturally from the obvious similarity between the structure of systematic theologies and the structure of foundationalist epistemology. The latter, it is said, builds from propositions taken to be secure (‘foundational’ or ‘basic’), moving by a process of valid inference to others whose security is underwritten by the basic propositions. Structurally, systematic theology operates in a similar way: it builds from theological warrants to claims whose truth is underwritten by the warrants, perhaps subsequently inferring other propositions from the directly warranted claims. If structure is what makes for foundationalism, then systematic theology would seem to be inherently foundationalist. Structure alone does not, however, make for foundationalism, since the structure itself cannot guarantee what is most important to the foundationlist, namely justified belief. That justified belief arises not simply when some propositions are properly derived from others, but only when the basic propositions are deemed to be certain. Such certitude cannot be the goal of systematic theology, either from the perspective of the systematician or that of the foundationalist. In the eyes of the latter, neither the Bible nor tradition could furnish a secure starting point, one guaranteeing what a philosopher would consider justified true belief. Some reports of experience might do so (e.g. ‘all human beings make mistakes sometimes’), but there are scarcely enough of these to generate a complete theology, and some such that have been proposed (Schleiermacher’s feeling of absolute dependence, for example) would be acceptable neither to the secular epistemologist nor to many theologians. Indeed, many theologians would be wary of appealing to experience as any sort of theological warrant. Experience does not, therefore, hold great promise as a bridge between the philosophical epistemologist and the systematic theologian. What remains is reason, and as we have noted, reason has seldom really functioned as a theological warrant. The most obvious case of a proposition supposedly based on reason alone is the claim that the existence of God is based on proofs of natural theology. These ‘proofs’ have, of course, been vigorously debated. Some Christian theologians reject them out of hand, for a variety of reasons, the most significant for our purposes being their comparative lack of fecundity: even if they succeeded in establishing the existence of God (and it is far from clear they do), and even if all believers were willing to accept their legitimacy (not all are), we would still be left with little more than the notion that some sort of being created the world, and one does not get

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much theological mileage out of such a vague proposition. The theological infertility of solely rational demonstrations effectively rules out appeal to reason as a free-standing warrant, itself necessitating the requisitioning of scripture and tradition. However, the classic theological warrants on which theologians base their arguments simply do not meet the secular epistemologist’s standards for properly basic propositions, and for this reason alone, we would have to conclude that systematic theology cannot be described as foundationalist. There is a deeper reason, however, why systematic theology cannot be called foundationalist, one removed from the sense that it has simply failed by philosophical standards: systematic theology does not claim to guarantee certitude. The foundationalist’s core concern is with justified true belief, and the purpose of the foundationalist edifice is to halt the infinite regress of justificatory grounds for propositions deemed to be true. The concern about infinite regress is not one that has troubled theologians: in fact one would be hard pressed to find any theologian who has voiced concern about this issue. The reason for this insouciance lies, in all likelihood, in the differing aims of the foundationalist and the theologian. The latter inhabits a world of avowed uncertainty: the purpose of theology (even for natural theologians serenely confident of their proofs) is not to remove the mysteries of faith from the picture, for these by definition belong to our condition in this life. The theologian, indeed, regards theology’s tasks as in some sense provisional and in another, eternal: eternal in that the truths it reaches towards will eventually be known, and more, enjoyed, in the Age to Come; provisional in the sense that they are for now mere sketches, blueprints that can do no more than gesture towards their future form and are subject to final correction. Theology is not a mason’s enterprise, but an architect’s. The structural similarity between systematics and foundationalism lies athwart the essential distinction between the two, which devolves on the telos of the enterprise, this telos thus being one of the determinant characteristics of systematic theology. That telos should have such a function signals one of systematic theology’s important qualities: it is shaped not only by forces within itself, but also without. Foundationalist structures have something of this character, too, inasmuch as they reflect correspondence models of truth; the foundationalist’s account is intended to give an accurate statement of what lies outside it, providing firm and reliable report of this external world. Systematic theology, in contrast, does not seek in the first instance to provide certain knowledge of this world, but rather reliable knowledge of the state of that world’s relation to God in the language of faith, with all faith’s awareness of its own fragility. Inasmuch as what is known of God is known by faith, then what theology states of God and the relation of all else to God is also necessarily sub specie fidei. Because theology’s concern, even with the things of this world, is only with them as they relate to God, the provisionality of our knowledge of God exerts a

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force on every other doctrine. Reinhold Niebuhr reportedly once said that the Fall was the only Christian doctrine that is empirically verifiable, presumably meaning that we see ignorance, error, and moral frailty as universal and perennial qualities of human beings. That observation does not in itself constitute a doctrine of the Fall, however, for the latter asserts not only that we are such, but that the root of our warped condition is a refusal of divine wisdom and love. The secular rejector of the doctrine of the Fall presumably does not contest the universality of the human propensity for error; rather, in rejecting the doctrine, he rejects the notion that human error has anything to do with a relation to a putative God. If Christian theology is concerned with God and other things as they are related to God, then it cannot aspire to certitude, for even if God’s existence were demonstrable on purely rational grounds (and is not merely rationally plausible), most of the remainder of Christian theology is not. Its character reflects one of its tenets: that as human beings we were made for communion with something beyond ourselves and for a life beyond death, and in the interim, our knowledge is a form of clouded vision, a ‘seeing in a mirror dimly’. The guarantees that are the foundationalist’s avowed aim are precisely what the theologian necessarily renounces and in their purpose, the resultant structures accordingly differ radically. If the structure of theology differs formally (that is, with respect to its formal object) from foundationalist ones, neither does it conform to the principal alternative to foundationalism, namely coherentism. The coherentist model of knowledge seeks to underwrite the rectitude of its constituent propositions by their cohesion with each other. The standard critique of coherentism is that it is perfectly possible for a set of statements to cohere together without truth’s residing in any of them. The result would be a rationally tidy, even aesthetically pleasing, structure that bore no real relation to what is actually the case. For all its freely acknowledged willingness to trade in incertitude, theology does not purport to be an enclosed, purely self-referential system with no claims to stating truths that correspond to extra-linguistic states of affairs. Coherentists would not, of course, characterize what they are about in such terms either, but they have had difficulty in showing how they could avoid this charge. Precisely the grounds on which the foundationalist would complain of theology is the reason it sidesteps the hazards of coherentism: it never claimed its plausibility rested solely on the compatibility of propositions within a system, but only that coherence is the goal and by-product of correct interpretation of its recognized warrants. Although theology claims to speak truly of the world, at least in its relation to God, it does not claim these truths are demonstrable by the standards of the secular world: theology’s goal is distinguished from that of foundationalism only with respect to the guarantee of certitude, not in its intention to state what is true. Nevertheless, although systematic theology no more conforms to

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The Architecture of Theology

a coherentist principle than a foundationalist one, just as it bears an important resemblance in some respects to foundationalism, so in others it resembles coherentism. The coherentist assurance of the truth of propositions on the basis of their lateral relations to one another (rather than a ‘vertical’ relation to a foundational claim) rests on the assumption that the plausibility of the complex underwrites to some degree the truth of the whole, and perhaps the truth of its constituents as well. Systematic theology, as we have seen, also seeks comfort in the integrity of the whole, and in that respect resembles coherentism. Even so, an important difference remains, for the theologian’s belief that the system must exhibit coherence if it is to be true devolves on the fact that all its constituent truths derive from a single source, which is Truth ipse. Where theology’s means to the end of truth differs from those of both the foundationalist and the coherentist lies in its dependence on divine authority. The battles over the role of reason in Christian theology are fully matched in their ferocity by those over the role of scripture. For our purposes, however, we may bypass many of these simply by noting that no one has ever proposed dispensing with scripture as a theological warrant. Once we note this apparently innocuous agreement among the disputants, we may see more clearly the crucial difference between the foundationalist structure and the theological system: the first eschews authority as a basis for reaching justified true belief, while the second holds that one authority is indispensable for reaching the truth. The coherentist presumably agrees with the foundationalist in declining to seek security in authority, though the systematic theologian agrees with the coherentist that the coherence of the constituent system provides some assurance of the truth of the whole. The theologian’s system thus operates—though generally tacitly—on the basis of mutual conditioning, and in this respect, structurally resembles that of the coherentist. If foundationalists are building structures with secure stone foundations, the coherentist (it has been claimed) is building something more like a tepee, in which no single stick stands up in virtue of being planted firmly into the unmoveable ground beneath it, but rather each lends support to the others, the security of the structure being ensured by this circle of relationality. As we have seen, the systematic impetus of Christian theology indicates that whether or not propositions inhabit a Type 1 system, they spring from and incline toward other theological claims with which they exist in a state of (perhaps mutual) dependency. Thus far, systematic theology and coherentism resemble each other. Nevertheless, just as it is important to query the claims of foundationalism made on systematic theology’s behalf, it is equally vital to question whether the nature of dependency in a systematic theology implies a coherentist model of truth. The coherentist’s concern, like the foundationalist’s, pertains to the justification of propositions and of the structure itself. The systematician’s quest after coherence cannot be taken as motivated by the desire to secure certitude, given, as we have noted, theology’s departure from

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the assumption of imperfect knowledge in this life. Why then should theology be coherent? Why do theologians of all stripes assume, for example, that an anthropology should mesh with a doctrine of God; that what we say of humankind should not implicitly or explicitly contradict what we would wish to assert of humanity’s Creator? The answer must surely lie in the fact of ratio, of the way this world and what we know of it reflects a divine order, if only at times in its very rupture of what was divinely intended. The theologian’s purpose in seeking coherence differs as much from the coherentist’s as the theologian’s building of structure differs from the foundationalist’s: not a quest for certitude or justification in human terms, but a following of divine logic, expressed in human form. In these preliminary comparisons to foundationalism and coherentism, we begin to see the distinctively synthetic structure of systematic theology, a synthesis which reflects the complex nature of Christian theology’s claim to truth. It purports to speak the truth, but not to be able to prove this truth or to secure it in any degree even approaching indubitability. The reason its truths cannot be proved lies in its doubly mimetic character. In positing the Bible as authoritative, and generally as the highest authority, Christian theology purports to derive itself from the chief subject of its discourse, the divine self-discloser. From the foundationalist perspective, the reliance on authority necessarily renders the entire structure unstable, based as it is on a document that is in secular judgement an unreliable jumble of narrative, arbitrary law, poetry, judgemental diatribes, and wild-eyed eschatological prediction. If, however, one accepts (at least for the sake of argument) that theology’s proper subject is the utterly transcendent Trinity, whom the human mind cannot envisage on the basis of the created order, finite and imperfect as it is, then it is perfectly logical for theology to ground itself in the self-description of the Transcendent. The problem lies not in the appeal to authority, if one grants the existence of this Other, but in whether the Bible actually is this divine selfdisclosure (as opposed to a collection of misguided rantings), and if it is, how one is to interpret it, given its radically heterogeneous character. Moreover, to the degree that scripture accurately presents God’s own self-description, it represents a human emulation—however approximate—of the divine. To the degree that theology follows the Biblical cue, it too represents—however removed from its archetype and source—an emulation of the divine, even though it necessarily also reflects the human heart and mind, as divine truths are expressed in human speech. The Bible’s double mimesis is one root of its authority—whatever its human element, it also possesses a divine one—but equally leads to a fundamental problem in appealing to it. As a form of self-disclosure, it partakes of the character of the one who speaks in and through it. It is this assumption about the Bible’s character on which the proponents of sola scriptura base their argument against reason, but it furnishes a reasoned response to the objector

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The Architecture of Theology

to testimony as a source of knowledge. As long as the objector will allow, first, the existence of God, and second, the possibility of the Bible’s reflecting a divine account of self, then it is not only reasonable, but logical, for theology to make use of Biblical evidence as a warrant (although, of course, many objectors would not be prepared to make these concessions). Equally, however, few academic theologians today would deny that the Bible also reflects the characters of those who actually wrote the constituent texts; deny, in other words, that the Bible reflects human concerns, human perspectives, human social frameworks, and indeed, human finitude and moral failures. Theology is therefore doubly mimetic, conforming to both a divine vision of what this world should be and a divine ruing of what it is not, and to a human account of this world and the Trinity which transcends it. If, however, divine and human mimesis intertwine on the sacred page, the interpreter will always have to proceed through the thicket of language with caution, never knowing with certainty what authentically voices the divine and what bears the traces of human conventions, human prejudices, and human dimness. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that not even the most pessimistic anthropology could deem the human elements of the text necessarily false: humanity must have some capacity to heed God, or the Bible’s self-disclosure would be in vain. The interpreter’s task therefore becomes one of discernment, not simply between the divine and the human (hard enough though that would be), but between the false and the true, whether this truth is taken to be of divine or human origin. The appeals to Biblical inspiration and human fallibility cannot, as normative principles, provide a ready answer to the fundamental problems of Biblical interpretation. Once we acknowledge the double mimesis of both the Bible and theology, the issues surrounding the theological employment of reason acquire a different cast. If theology purports and attempts to make sense of the patchwork text that is the Bible, with all its discontinuities, discrepancies, and disparate genres, then it necessarily makes use of reason to do so, and ironically, some of the most rigorous protestors against reason produced theologies that are systematically highly coherent: Luther’s reading of the Bible, for instance, presents it as having a remarkably straightforward message focused on a fairly narrow set of theological themes. Given the Bible’s heterogeneity, any talk of its ‘message’, let alone its theology or ethics, presupposes the application of human reason in the interpretation of its pages. Reason in this instance is nevertheless not the rogue so feared by the proponents of Biblicism, but the servant of the sacred page. Conversely, the interpreter who accepts—perhaps approves or advocates—the use of reason must grant that if reason can make any sense of the Bible—see in it continuity as well as discontinuity, harmony as well as chaos—precisely because of the diversity of sources of the constituent texts, its order could not be attributable to human reason alone, but must subsist in a pattern and meaning that is there for the

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questioning interpreter to find. Why should this be, given the plethora of authors, editors, historical contexts, and several different source languages? The theological answer must be that the Bible displays pattern, meaning, and sense because ‘behind’ the human sources stands a divine one. If the Bible reveals, to use Barth’s phrase, ‘a strange new world’, then this world seems strange to us because of its divinely ordained character, and as such, it can challenge us with a logic we might not, for our finitude and sin, have expected, but which nevertheless finally has a logic and does not merely reflect imperiously rendered decrees or impetuous changes of mind, and is above all not ultimately rooted in something other than unqualified love, justice, mercy, and wisdom. The rational quality of theology is therefore not what the attackers of reason claim for it, a human ‘engine ’gainst the Almighty’, but if anything, the Almighty’s invitation to humanity to view the world as the exposition of ratio, the array of wisdom and love. It is rooted most essentially in divine nature. The divine Trinity—providential, wise, loving, and therefore also rational—on the scriptural account itself, created creatures who in some sense correspond to the Trinity; ‘in some sense’ because the Pentateuchal assertion of the imago Dei is one of the great interpretative cruxes of the Bible. What does it mean to be made in the image of God and how is this image affected by the Fall? To the modern systematician—perhaps sceptical in light of modern Biblical scholarship that there is any theological mileage left in the old imago Dei theology—the question is possibly best set quietly aside. Yet the Bible itself will not allow it to be set aside, for even if we surreptiously bracket this particular text as uninterpretable, the remainder of scripture still beckons the faithful, questing interpreter whose very endowment with reason and understanding is the presumption of texts which enjoin her to know God. Whichever way one turns, the exigencies of Biblical interpretation themselves proclaim divine nature as rational and demand a rational response from the human creature, however finite and fallen this creature is taken to be. Theological discourse in turn reflects these facts. It reflects in the first instance the rational creature’s attempt to make sense of what we have been invited to contemplate, the divine Other who created us for communion with the Transcendent. It reflects equally the grand design that, inexplicably—for this is perhaps the greatest mystery of all—brought independent and volatile creatures into being, giving them the means and desire to understand what was at once beyond their reach and yet the ground of all they are. Systematic theology is the product of this tussle, not a quarrel humanly picked, but an engagement divinely intended. The wrestling, it is crucial to note, is a struggle to understand; and in its very difficulties the Bible perhaps best represents the divine imperative of which we try to make sense, to discern the ratio underlying all creation, which no human action could ultimately thwart. To maintain the frailty of human reason is precisely that and no more: acknowledging

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The Architecture of Theology

fallibility does not amount to a claim that the divine design could be, not just blotted by childish carelessness or adolescent rebellion, but thwarted—which is to claim that God is not after all God. The discourse that is the Bible must therefore be taken as conditioned by both the Trinity speaking through human words and the human authors of those words, as imitating both divine and human speech. If systematic theology constitutes an attempt to see the Bible’s divine speech as a coherent whole, then its discourse, too, must be regarded as conditioned by both divine and human prompting. The notion that theology is a human enterprise and therefore necessarily reflects human tendencies ranging from error to rationality should require no pleading; to maintain it is necessarily conditioned by its chief subject does demand justification. One ground for regarding it as such is simply its self-avowed intent to draw its insight into divine nature from the Bible. Such might in fact represent no more than mimicry, a surface-structure parroting. If we take the rationality of divine nature with the seriousness with which the assertion itself demands then we must confront the possibility that systematic theology represents the attempt to trace the divine ratio subsisting within the Bible, and to the degree to which it succeeds in doing so, theology itself displays something of this ratio, and not merely of human arguments. This claim will inevitably raise some hackles, so it is well to consider what would be assumed or entailed in denying it. If systematic theology does not reflect divine nature as disclosed in scripture, then it is simply unfaithful to its primary warrant and source. No doubt some theology does fall short of fidelity to divine nature, and no doubt all theology falls short at certain points and in certain respects, but to claim some necessary global infidelity would amount to a denial of any value to Christian theology at all, in which case inquiring after its nature would be otiose. If, on the other hand, a theology does reflect the divine self-portrait of scripture, then it must portray this divine nature as rational and wise, even if divine intelligence and knowledge transcend ours: there would be little point in the Bible’s attributing wisdom and providential ordering to God if human beings lacked the necessary wit to recognize these for what they are. The notional basis for theology is therefore not only the ratio of the one revealed in the pages of scripture, but the readers who seek this ratio and attempt to render it in the discourse that is theology. It is the pattern of versicle-and-response, call-and-answer, yes-and-amen, and if this is the case, then the inner structure of Christian theology, to the extent that it is faithful to its source, mirrors (albeit imperfectly) that source. This mirroring and responding presumes divine initiative: the image can only reflect a prototype prior to it and the response, a previous call. To acknowledge this state of affairs is to name systematic theology a form of mimesis: not an original, but a reflection and echo. Like all imitations and images it is less than that which it represents, and like all imitations and images, its falling short of its archetype is a form of both deficiency and distortion. If one stresses

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the deficiency and distortion to the point of denying any truth or goodness to the mimesis, however, then one might as well not bother with theology at all— but on the same grounds, one would be obliged equally to deny the value of preaching or prayer. If human speech about God—whether theological, apologetic, homiletic, or devotional—is to any extent true, then it must reflect the intellectual character of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who created, ordered, and continually guide the oikonomia, the divine household that is the cosmos, as well as the intellectual character of those within the household who were created with the capacity to answer the divine call, to make response to the Trinity’s versicle. If intelligence is required to interpret theology’s source, if the ultimate source of scripture is the divine Intellect, if theology reflects the wondering and seeking intelligence of its human writers as well as, to any dim extent, the Intellect it seeks, then theology is human mimesis of the divine, and as such mimesis is itself conditioned by the subject of its discourse, the goal of all its questings, the resting place of all human desires. If theology is shaped by the subject of its discourse, and it represents a human desire for the divine which is no more than the awakened response of the creature for the Creator’s own desire, it nonetheless also genuinely reflects human desire and not only divine intellect. I have noted the doubly mimetic quality of theology, wanting to underline the divine initiative of the process. Emphasizing the latter may, ironically, counteract the tendency of some Christian theology to deny reason, the better to glorify God; for once it is acknowledged that human intelligence is a divine gift too durable to be wrecked by its recipients, and that only a rational being could laud divine wisdom, then it becomes clear that denigrating human rationality cannot possibly serve any doxological purpose. Construing theology as a practice of soli Deo gloria presupposes that the creature gives glory to the Trinity alone, yet with the fullness of its creaturely capacities, which for the human creature includes the mind. I nevertheless do not wish to deny the dangers of the process, though let us first note, these are dangers attendant on glorifying the Trinity; let no one imagine that in merely abasing humanity one can somehow escape the perils inherent in all gesturing towards the divine. The way in which I have been speaking of reason, ratio, divine and human intellect itself indicates what I regard as the inherent problems in much of the debate over the theological employment of reason: in its hand wringing over the supposed poverty and disease of the human intellect, it has blinded itself to the power of the divine; in its exaltation of scripture over reason, has forgotten that scripture itself requires an understanding interpreter, just as theologies which exalt reason seem to forget the human refusal of God—indeed, a human propensity to forget where one put one’s keys, which does not bode well for our ability to ‘get’ God right. The debates over reason have sometimes not risen much

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The Architecture of Theology

above this jejune for-or-against level. The real problem lies deeper and can be seen only once one has readily conceded the basic point that each side of the debate has to contribute: to allow ratio its rightful place, as this study seeks to do, does not mean ignoring the peculiar pitfalls attendant on asserting it. These belong to it by nature, rather than to its detractors howling without: they are the seductions of beauty. One need not appeal to Platonism to note the congruence of beauty and truth; these need not be linked ontologically for one to affirm a connection between them. Truth is a particular quality of rationality, rationality when it has become that to which it aspires, and this rationality is antithetical to chaos and disorder. To the extent that truth and rationality are near neighbours, so are beauty and truth, for part of what we recognize as beauty is the sheer harmony of the relation of parts to a whole. Order, due proportion, harmony, satisfy a deep human longing for sense and meaning; often what we deem as harmonious is also rational. Reasoning from harmony to rationality, beauty and truth is natural enough. The danger lies in imagining that the beautiful, because it is orderly, harmonious, and coherent is rational and therefore of God. There is no reason to deny that order and harmony may have some divine origin—to reject aesthetic appeal simply on the grounds that it is supposedly neo-Platonic, Hellenistic, and so somehow necessarily not Christian—but there are equally good reasons to beware the potential seductions of beauty. The propensity of beauty and order to attract is one way of stating both the appeal of coherentism and the complaints against it, though neither has generally been stated in aesthetic terms. The coherentist test for the rectitude of propositions is their compatibility with each other and their susceptibility of forming strata of a larger whole. The standard philosophical way of stating the matter has been in terms of the ideational compatibility of these propositions, but compatibility is a form of harmony, and once one acknowledges that fact, it becomes clearer how sheer compatibility could be intellectually attractive, even though the individually mutually compatible items are themselves questionable. There are specifically theological reasons to parse the issues in aesthetic terms: if beauty may be said to inhere in pellucid, wellformed intellectual structures and if the ultimately pellucid is the divine one (Summa theologiae I.12, 1 resp.), then beauty is on a specifically Christian account an attribute of God, as indeed the psalmist holds (27.4). The attraction of beauty may be seen not merely as deceitful seduction, but Love’s and Truth’s own wooing. The divine beauty may be understood as love, viewed not under the aspect of its self-giving impetus ad extra, but under the aspect of allure, that which draws the creature into the heart of trinitarian life. Attraction, which is one of the potentially definitive qualities of beauty is, however, in itself neutral; it can be the power to draw both towards the good and the true, and towards the only apparently true. Given the Christian

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affirmation of God as rational and wise, the architect of cosmic order and beauty, the theologian cannot avoid the problem by simple flight from beauty, by refusing to grant attraction its bona fide merits, yet the acknowledgement of the alignment of order, rationality, and truth must be acknowledged by an equal awareness of an attractive order, power to mislead. The end of the activity of perceiving and judging connections is a structure embodying truth and beauty, a composite that renders in creaturely terms both the mysterious rationality of the Trinity and, paradoxically, the simplicity of divine nature. To glimpse these, even dimly and partially, invites rest, rather than the bustling of cogitation, and when theology has attained to truth and beauty, it demands not the rational activities of perception and judgment, but the stillness of contemplation. Prima facie, it might seem that the busy rationalizing of systematic theology, with its inevitable ties to academic professionalism and career mongering, or the defensive sparring of much apologetics, is far removed from the pious practice of prayer, so often conceived in our time in explicitly anti-intellectual terms. To accept this superficial estimation, however, risks predetermining a certain purpose for systematic theology: that its task is not simply to unveil connections as an act of the wondering eye, but to forge them as an intellectual tour de force, to give an account, the purpose of whose rationality is justificatory rather than doxological. If, in contrast, one departs from the assumption that the web of connective filaments in a theological system subsists solely in virtue of the divine determining of a certain pattern of relationality which human intellect is able to perceive, then we may press further, seeking the purpose of our apprehending the pattern: why would it matter whether we do or do not discern it? The most immediate answer must be that only we could profit from doing so: the Trinity could not benefit, for to assert as much would imply a divine lack that can be filled by human endeavour. This answer only prompts a further question: how or in what way do we benefit? The answer to that question must be that we are transformed and sanctified by the act of giving praise, of which contemplation is the silent form, the point at which the voiced human response has yielded to sheer awe. Systematic theology still directs itself, nevertheless, to the world and its questions—directs itself to these because they spring from the very divine endowment given us that we may desire to draw near. To honour those questions, even those asked apparently in scorn and with the wish to see the believer stumble in answering,5 is to honour the divine desire that the creature respond, with a creaturely intellect that understands because it has been prompted first to ask. However, if the creaturely intellect is ratiocinative—given to finding answers by piecing 5

Augustine, De Trinitate I.8: charity demands we answer those who question Christian faith, even if they do so in bad faith, out of a desire to see the Christian respondent falter.

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The Architecture of Theology

together discrete items of data—it is also contemplative, for once it has found answers, it is capable of delighting in them. Contemplation therefore represents not the antithesis to intellectual inquiry, but its culmination: its sabbath from restless questioning, when there is nothing left but to repose in the enjoyment of truth and its triune source. Is that truth, however, not to be found already in the sacred page and can rest not already be found there? The answer can only be ‘yes and no’. Scripture answers, but also prompts questions, and the questions it prompts beckon beyond it. Precisely theology that springs from the sacred page is therefore necessarily in some sense speculative, a theology seeking answers that cannot be derived straightforwardly from scripture, even though scripture itself has prompted the questions. There is no mortal peril attendant on such speculation, provided that it is accompanied by an awareness of speculation’s radical provisionality, for the purpose of speculative theology is not to proclaim its own indubitable rectitude, but the opposite: to announce its own quest for a truth that lies beyond it, a quest as easily denied by the refusal to venture in faith onto uncertain ground as by the investiture of an unseemly degree of certitude in its musings. All systematic theology partakes to a certain degree of this extenuation and incertitude, for whatever stretches beyond a theologically unambiguous and self-contained Biblical dictum (of which there are in fact few) it engages in faith-filled extrapolation. This extrapolation, a turning over of the Biblical word in the creature’s mind,6 this is the prelude to contemplation, and there is accordingly a profound similarity, though there is also a falling short of identity, between contemplation and systematicity. This, then, is the terrain this study seeks to explore, a set of themes, some of the connections among which will seem rather obvious (such as the relation of systematic structures and the various theories of truth), some of which may seem less so (such as that between systematicity and aesthetics). Although it does not purport to be an examination of the role of reason in theology per se, the nature of the intellect, human and divine, as well as the necessity of, and problems attendant upon, using reason theologically, will be a persistent theme in the discussion that follows. For many readers, the jump from questions of philosophical epistemology to the consideration of contemplation will seem unexpected, perhaps bizarre and unwarranted, but it is a central concern of this study to explore the ways in which such apparently disparate themes all connect back to the systematic core of Christian theology. 6

This is akin to the ruminatio of lectio divina, and the pondering of the heart attributed to Mary (Luke 2:19).

1 Systems and Models of Truth Systematic theology, which as I have been suggesting, is Christian theology tout court, has a great deal invested in the relations of ideas to each other. It also has a great deal invested, for a variety of reasons, in the conformity of its discourse to the truth. In both respects we find some important intersections between the structure of Christian thought as it has been elaborated through the centuries and the structure of reasoning and knowledge as it has been understood and debated by secular philosophers. To note these commonalities is by no means to hold that theology must operate within the boundaries prescribed by the currently received wisdom of secular philosophy, or conform to its notions of rationality and truth. However, by observing the debates of philosophical epistemology, Christian theology has something to learn, not simply about how it might go about its tasks in the present or future, but how it has in fact operated through the centuries. The assumptions of Christian conceptions of truth and epistemology, as well as the structures of argumentation in Christian texts, resemble those of secular philosophy at some points, but diverge at others. Both the similarities and the differences can be enlightening to consider. It is especially for this illuminative purpose that we will here listen in on the dialogues of recent philosophy. The earliest sources of ancient philosophy also nourished the theological tradition from its beginnings. Although the pre-Socratic philosophers, along with Plato, made historically significant contributions to epistemology, contemporary philosophers rarely trace their own lineage much further back than Aristotle,1 and it is no coincidence that in Aristotle we find the beginnings of sustained and systematic treatment of logic. Although some theologians might be inclined to dismiss formal logic as irrelevant to their task, to the extent that logicians are concerned with valid reasoning, they are also at least tangentially or incipiently concerned with truth, and philosophical epistemology, which A different view links Plato and Kant in holding that there are three ‘necessary and jointly sufficient components’ to knowledge: justification, truth, and belief (Moser 2002: 4), Plato rather than Aristotle then being taken as central to the modern (Enlightenment and later) discussion of epistemology. This is, however, a less common reading of epistemology’s history. 1

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considers the meta-issues connected to formal logic, has been as much concerned with theories of truth as with any other issue in its purview. The connection between systematicity, coherence, truth, and logic is provocatively suggested by Quine and Ullian: ‘The importance of implication is that it transmits truth. A falsehood may imply both truth and falsehoods, but a truth implies only truths’ (1978: 40) and hence ‘implication is what makes our system of beliefs cohere’ (1978: 41). To Aristotle, historians of logic conventionally trace the formal statement of such bare bones of reasoning as the law of contradiction (or non-contradiction; confusingly, it is styled both ways). That is, the same thing cannot be both x and not-x at the same time and in the same way. Cultural anthropologists may dispute whether this notion really is an inevitable principle of human reasoning or whether it is the deliverance of particular culturally shaped mentalities, but since Christian theology has been firmly located within the sphere of Western thought, we can bracket such disputes for the moment (the cultural issue cannot be postponed indefinitely, however). We may note only that the principle of non-contradiction (whether cited out of deference to or in ignorance of Aristotle’s authority) is the tacit assumption of a great many Christian doctrines. The development of the doctrine of the Trinity, for example, can be read as a quest for appropriate terminology to express the bare insights, derived from the Biblical witness, that both ‘one’ and ‘three’ are aptly said of God, but not in the same respect, so that divine nature is one, but the hypostases or persons are three. A similar account can be given of the development of Christology: Christ is one in respect of person or hypostasis, but two in respect of nature. The search for appropriate language in which to express oneness, twoness, and threeness resulted in the church’s employment of terms that were either entirely non-Biblical (such as ‘Trinity’) or whose Biblical usage differed significantly from their theological use (such as ‘hypostasis’2) to articulate Biblical notions without self-contradiction.3 The proponents of what became the orthodox position were sometimes faulted for their recourse to non-Biblical terminology; that they nevertheless insisted on retaining it attests not only to their investment in particular theological positions, but also to their concern to avoid contradiction. In the case of both Christology and the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine in its developed form represents the determination to avoid contradiction: a single 2 On hypostasis, see, for example, Attridge 1989: 44 (on which page see also n. 113), 118, 308–10. While in some of its New Testament appearances the term has connotations derived from Stoicism (an indication of the impossibility of opposing ‘Biblical’ and ‘philosophical’ language), it nevertheless does not have the connotations in the New Testament that it comes to have in fourth-century Trinitarian theology. 3 Bernstein—who is not writing specifically about theology—uses the doctrine of the Trinity as an example of a notion that could be taken as irrational or contradictory, but is not (1983: 101).

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entity is asserted to be both x and not-x, but not in the same respect and at the same time. The development of the doctrine (whether of the Trinity or Christ’s person) reflects in large measure the search for language adequate to the task of avoiding non-contradiction. Whether or not one finds the traditional language satisfactory or the doctrines themselves convincing, the pains taken by the effort of centuries to avoid one obvious form of contradiction remains clear enough. One need not posit direct acquaintance with Aristotelian logic to account for the effort at avoidance of contradiction (though most of the Fathers probably did have at least passing acquaintance with it). Aristotle, after all, only stated an insight one could deem simple common sense, the violation of which is as apt to incur protestation or challenge from the unlettered as the highly educated. The significant point is not that the Christian tradition carefully conformed to a principle formulated by Aristotle, but that it was motivated towards internal consistency and coherence. The assumption lying behind the efforts of early Christian theologians is that the structure of Christian belief, and not just discrete propositions within it, is rationally intelligible and that an account can be given of it which eliminates apparent contradictions.4 However, although there is no reason to believe that Christian theologians of the past rejected the laws of formal logic as they had been formulated in their time, there is equally no reason to believe they accepted such principles merely because they were backed by the authority of secular philosophers. Christian appeal to logic rarely extended beyond common sense principles and theology has always had to contend with the complexity of the Biblical witness. On the one hand, that witness suggested we are to seek to know God and follow his divinely ordained ways, which implies some apprehension of divine wisdom and the providential ordering of the universe. On the other, the Bible reminds us that God’s ways are beyond our complete understanding. Something of a synthesis of these views emerges from Paul’s ‘now we see in a glass dimly’ (1 Cor. 13:12): we do see and know, but imperfectly. Because we can understand, up to a point, Christian theology cannot with a false modesty shrink from the task of reasonable explanation, any more than it claims to have found explanations which might count as final or fully adequate. Beyond the realm of logic proper, Christian theology’s notions of epistemology seemed equally independent of explicit recourse to secular categories, the supposed pervasive Platonism of the early centuries notwithstanding.5 Pace Sokolowski: ‘The councils do not merely set down verbal conventions. They allow the mystery to remain a mystery. They prevent the mystery from dissolving into coherence’ (1982: 38). The councils do set down mysteries, but struggle to present them as coherently as possible. It is far from clear that either by intention or in fact their verbal conventions remain mysterious. 5 I have argued elsewhere that the Platonism of patristic theology has been exaggerated; see Williams 2007a. The Fathers’ use of philosophical sources is eclectic and selective, as is that of the scholastics. Although it has sometimes been claimed that Western theologians made use of 4

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One immediate difference between Christian and secular accounts of epistemology (whether ancient or modern) is that the key epistemological issue for theologians was not how we know anything whatsoever, but how we know God, and know created things (that is, not-God specifically in its relation to God) and how we know the truth. These foci distinguish theological epistemology from the broader concerns of philosophical epistemology, though by no means divorcing the two entirely. Another key difference between Christian and secular-orientated accounts of reasoning and truth is that although propositional formulations of Christian belief resemble the claims with which philosophical epistemology concerns itself, many of them are historical claims, the ground for which is an inspired text: the structure of reasoning in Christian theology and much of its claim to truth rests on the basis of the Bible. Although there have been a range of estimations of the value of the natural world or the unaided human intellect as sources of knowledge of God, no Christian theologian has suggested anything other than scripture as the prime source of knowledge of God. However much some have insisted that we can know of God’s existence without scripture, not much beyond sheer knowledge of God’s existence has been proposed as derivable from reason or observation of the natural world alone, and theology cannot march far on a meagre diet consisting solely of the notion that God exists. To say anything of divine nature that could explain why God is to be worshipped, or even what content is to be given to the term ‘God’, the theologian must sooner or later turn to scripture, and probably sooner rather than later. For the ancient philosopher, in contrast, there was no equivalent to scripture. As Sokolowski notes, the stories of the gods were not fixed in the Greek tradition (1982: 13); being the production of poets, they did not have the same kind of claim to being a divine source that the Septuagint or the writings of the New Testament came to have in the eyes of Christians. Indeed, some Greek philosophers railed against these poets for their depictions of divinities unworthy of worship. Although Christian theologians sometimes felt the need to explain away Biblical texts that seemed to impugn key divine attributes, they never impugned the Bible as a source of knowledge of God per se. Athanasius, for example, seems markedly reluctant to accord ignorance to Christ: he claims Jesus does not ask questions (such as how many loaves there are among the people gathered to hear him in Mark 6:38) because he does not know the answers, but in order to test others, for example (Orations against the Arians 3.37). While Athanasius’s exegesis may at times stretch belief and his Christology seems high to the point of almost denying Jesus humanity in anything but the flesh, he continues to reason from the Biblical text. In the syllogistic reasoning, for example, the claim is scarcely tenable, unless one uses ‘syllogistic’ in such a loose sense that it could refer to any form of deductive reasoning; see Williams 1999b.

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very act of doing so, Athanasius, along with the other Fathers of the church, acknowledged the authority of the Bible. It would have been much easier to ignore scripture altogether than to produce the strained exegesis to which they at times resorted. Indeed, it was the need to grapple with tensions within the canon of sacred scripture that prompted the development of much Christian doctrine. The New Testament, for instance, provided proof texts for both Arians and the theologians of the Great Church (cp. Athanasius’s Orations against the Arians 3.26–9, to take only one example of the volley of verses). The New Testament’s witness is complex: to a Jesus who had preternatural knowledge (John 4:4–19) and claimed a unique relationship with the Father (John 6:44), but also to a Jesus who seemed very human in his ignorance and vulnerability (Mark 14:36, Matt. 24:36, Matt. 27:46). While there is no doubt that the apologists and theologians of the early church did their own share of prooftexting and explaining away of awkward texts, the Christology that emerged from the disputes of the early church did respond to the complexity of the Biblical witness, while attempting to produce an expository account of it that was coherent and free of internal contradictions. The logical principle of non-contradiction was not set over against the Biblical witness or set up as an alternative to it, but became the de facto principle guiding the interpretation of the sacred text. It could function in that way because of a principle that is itself Biblical: that God is the sole truth of the cosmos. The fact that theological epistemology centres on knowledge of God, a knowledge drawn exclusively or at least overwhelmingly from an authoritative text, differentiates it significantly from philosophical accounts of knowledge, even though the law of non-contradiction and the rejection of double truth concur with a classical and Biblical doctrine of God. Another distinguishing factor is that on the Christian account knowledge of God does not consist solely in a grasp of attributes of God (the knowledge that goodness or wisdom, for instance, is to be predicated of God) but also in that direct acquaintance which is understood on the analogy of human personal relations. Although it is not theology’s task specifically to foster such personal relations—for these can only be furthered by direct encounter, via prayer or the sacraments, for example—it must still take account of this variety of personal knowledge. No Christian account of knowledge of God could be accurate or complete without addressing its personal dimension, just as no Christian account of knowledge in general could be accurate or complete unless knowledge of God lies at its heart.6 The personal dimension of the Christian understanding of knowledge touches also the conception of the human knower. To have right knowledge of God, the self, other human beings, the purpose of the created order, and 6

Holmer is one of the few who acknowledges the significance for theology of the differences between different kinds of knowing (1978: 187).

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The Architecture of Theology

human existence, human persons must live and move and have their being in God. There is, in other words, a spiritual dimension to knowledge.7 The Christian understanding of knowledge not only includes knowledge of persons, but insists upon the relevance of the state of the knower: as the knower goes, so goes the knower’s knowing. Philosophical discussions of epistemology, in contrast, have tended to distinguish between modes of entertaining propositions: on the difference between believing something to be true and knowing it, for example.8 Philosophers have been less interested in distinctions among the objects of knowledge: they are overwhelmingly concerned with propositions and indeed, a fairly narrow range of propositions.9 Nor have philosophers shown any great interest in the condition of knowers, with the exception of the disputes between internalists and externalists, that is, between those holding the grounds for a belief must be available to the one holding it in order for it to be justified, and those holding that the justification need not be available to the believer. The moral state of the knower does not enter the discussion, although commentators concerned with the sociology of knowledge certainly raise questions about the ways in which the knower’s cultural preconceptions shape how knowledge is sought and what knowledge is obtained through this search. When philosophers have dealt with the question of personal knowledge, they have tended to do so in narrower terms than theologians do. For example, Paul Helm asks: ‘When is believing a proposition also a case of believing a person?’ (1973: 73). He likens his position to that of Russell, who distinguished ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ from ‘knowledge by description’, although by ‘acquaintance’ he meant knowledge of things which comes with sensation or memory of sensation as opposed to knowledge of logical truths (1967: 25–32). Helm notes there is dispute over what Russell really means by ‘acquaintance’ and whether the term is even appropriate for what he wants it to designate. If so, Russell may not be concerned with personal knowledge at all. Helm 7

See Williams 2007a passim, for examples from the patristic period; Louth 2002: 44 regarding Damascene; and Calvin Institutes I.i.1 and II.ii.1–2, linking knowledge to humility. 8 cf. Moser et al.: a belief that happens to be true, but lacks supporting reasons is not knowledge (1998: 15), and the conventional wisdom of the Western philosophical tradition is that propositional knowledge is, by definition, justified true belief (1998: 14). 9 See BonJour 1985: 3. For example, Moser in the Introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Epistemology, divides epistemology into inquiry into subsequent conditions or sources, the limits of knowledge, and justification. Among species of knowledge he distinguishes between propositional knowledge, non-propositional knowledge (including knowledge by acquaintance or direct awareness), empirical propositional knowledge, non-empirical propositional knowledge, and knowledge of how to do something (2002: 3); none of these categories explicitly includes knowledge of persons, although ‘non-propositional knowledge’ is sufficiently unspecific that it might conceivably include such knowledge. The very vagueness of the category, however, renders it effectively superfluous. Moser, however, earlier claimed that epistemology includes selfknowledge (Moser et al. 1998: 47), though it is not clear that self-knowledge is purely reducible to propositions.

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disputes the basis of a distinction between personal and propositional knowledge, but does so on the grounds that there can be no basis for calling knowledge by acquaintance personal and not propositional (1973: 80). Helm’s position is accurate in the sense that the way we express personal knowledge is generally propositional (‘she’s a cellist’, or ‘he has brown hair’, and suchlike). Nonetheless, personal knowledge cannot be reduced to such propositions without remainder. If I say ‘I know Mary well’, I presumably do not only mean ‘I can formulate a great many true propositions about Mary’. I might well mean, for example, ‘I doubt Mary is going to like the idea you want to propose’ and a whole host of other similarly speculative judgements based on familiarity with her general character. Knowledge of someone’s character, her tastes, virtues, and weaknesses, does not simply admit of reduction to a set of propositions. It designates, in part, shared experience and contains a fair dose of intuition. This kind of knowledge is obviously some species of mental apprehension based on evidence, but much of it will never be expressed in propositional form. Even when it is expressed in propositions, the form of the utterance may well mask an affirmation that is not purely propositional. The Christian who says ‘I know God is merciful’ does not necessarily mean ‘I know mercy is to be predicated of God’ but may well mean ‘I feel God has shown mercy to me’. Because personal knowledge amounts to more than the ability to formulate correct propositions and because the human person’s relation to God is conceived and experienced on the analogy of human interpersonal relations, theological discussion of knowledge of God has never limited such knowledge to predication of attributes. The personal dimension of knowledge of God marks one point at which theological and philosophical epistemology diverge. Another is the distinction made by philosophers between knowledge and belief. One could assume that the philosophers’ concern to distance belief from knowledge and to focus on the latter means that their insights have no bearing on theology. Although theologians have worried less about the distinction between knowledge and belief and do not exhibit the fear of ‘mere’ belief that seems to lurk behind the philosopher’s desire to distance it from knowledge, theological interest in warrant has the same common denominator: the concern that claims be grounded in something counting as evidence. Theologians may regard belief as a form of knowledge. (‘I know that my redeemer liveth’ counts as both a claim of knowledge and an expression of faith or trust). Nevertheless, they remain concerned to distinguish true or communally accepted beliefs from others. While their estimation of belief distances theologians from philosophers to a certain extent, common ground, in the form of a concern for warrant, remains. Here we see a preliminary reason to attend to philosophical epistemology, despite the differences between the broad orientation and overarching

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concerns that have been noted. Concern for warrant is by no means the sole reason, moreover. First, Christianity differs from some other religious traditions in its insistence on the significance of key propositions, both in defining the parameters of the community and in shaping the individual. What distinguishes a Christian from a non-Christian is the Christian’s willingness to assent to claims such as ‘Jesus Christ is the Son of God’ or ‘There is one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’. Traditional Christian rites of initiation require the public affirmation of such propositions, either one after another as responses to questions (as in an interrogatory creed), or as gathered together into the continuous texts that we more usually call creeds today. Although some Christian groups minimize the importance of creeds and of assent to propositions of faith, these have historically been a minority. Moreover, groups that on principle decline to accord authority to the creeds often assume the theology they embody (the orthodox doctrines of the Trinity and the person of Christ, for example). So although the Christian notion of what constitutes knowledge encompasses a broader area than generally figures in philosophical debates, it certainly includes the kind of propositional knowledge with which philosophers are concerned. Second, philosophical discussions of knowledge have been closely tied to questions and theories of truth. The claim of Christians to proclaim the truth stipulates that they must also take pains about what they claim to be true and the grounds for those claims. At one point, though, there is a significant intersecting of Christian interest in knowledge and truth that has often gone unnoticed. Just as Christian theology’s account of knowledge has an unavoidably personal dimension, so must its conception of the truth, given some of the propositional claims in its authoritative source: ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life’ (John 14:6), or the identification of the Spirit with truth (John 14:17), along with the claim that this Spirit of truth comes from the Father (John 15:26), or the psalmist’s frequent linkage of truth with God (e.g. ‘Lead me in your truth’, 25:5; cp. 43:3, 86:11, 96:13, 119:42, 119:160). Truth, on the Christian account, is both a quality of some propositions and a quality, indeed the very being, of the living God. To the extent that Christian theology is concerned with God, it must also be concerned with the nature of knowledge and truth, and theologians cannot ignore the insights and questions of secular philosophers simply because those who debate them are not Christian, or because the discussion is not carried out within a distinctly Christian framework. What secular thinkers say about truth is either correct, incorrect, or some mixture of the two. If incorrect, the theologian should be able to explain why. If correct, the theologian is, on strictly theological principle, bound to agree. There is a further significance of epistemological discussions among philosophers for the concerns of theology specifically as it is being considered here, under the rubric of systematicity. Recent philosophy has tended to divide largely between correspondence and coherence theories of truth, that is,

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between theories which hold that a statement’s truth is vouched for to the extent that it describes a state of affairs that exists ‘in reality’ or ‘externally’ to the structures of thought, and those holding that the measure of a statement’s truth is its compatibility with other propositions in a web of ideas. If truth is taken to be restricted to claims of correspondence to states of affairs in the natural world (that is, that nothing is demonstrably true that does not correspond to the observable world), then Christian theology is obviously on a collision course with the correspondence theory, since many of theology’s key assertions are metaphysical. However, it is not clear that correspondence theorists have wanted to rule out metaphysical propositions in principle; rather, their interest simply focuses on other kinds of claims. Those other claims include ones to which Christians must also attend, given their concern with both the realms of nature and of human enterprise. On the other hand, a coherence model of truth accords with the notion that what is true is so because of its relation to that divine truth that is God ipse. The recourse of all truth to this principle undergirds the relation of propositions to each other. This principle in turn indicates why theology is necessarily systematic: theology’s claims to truth are integrally linked to the notion that theological propositions subsist in webs, this structure being given by theology’s source, which binds all together in a set of relations. This relation of propositions to each other in turn indicates their truth, given their divine source. Because Christian theologians purport to speak the truth about the created order, human societies and mores, and of metaphysical claims connected to these, and because they are concerned with the coherence of the discrete claims they make, they have good reason to attend to the merits of both correspondence and coherence theories of truth. Two of the key topics of concern in philosophical debates—the structure of knowledge and justification, along with reflection on models of truth— command the theologian’s attention and promise to shed light on some of theology’s distinctive characteristics. In respect of both knowledge/justification and truth, any description of the nature of theology, and particularly its systematic character, needs to take account of these discussions outside theology’s own borders. Even those who are suspicious of the very concepts of system and systematicity must acknowledge that theology attempts to give a global account of reality—of God and the world, the relations of these entities, and the significance of their relations—an account which purports to be true. If we reject the double truth theory (the notion that the same proposition could be theologically true and philosophically false, or vice versa), theology cannot ignore the conclusions of philosophy, although it is, of course, bound to examine and test them. The notion of double truth rests on the assumption of a multiplicity of truths, some of which are, or at least seem to be, mutually self-contradictory. Christianity identifies truth with God and denies there is any truth that is apart from God: these determinations rule out in principle the possibility of mutually incompatible truths (although it could, of course, in

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practice be the case that we cannot see how particular propositions are compatible, even though they in fact are). Of the many reasons for theologians to attend to contemporary discussions of epistemology, one is that questions about the coherence of truths pertain directly to the question of theology’s systematicity and theology’s internal consistency. We begin, then, with philosophical reflection on the nature of knowledge which, as we have already noted, is principally concerned with knowledge of propositions. The question ‘What is knowledge?’ proves to be formative in significant degree of answers to questions such as ‘What justifies belief?’ and even ‘What is rationality?’ Because the concern among philosophers has been to distinguish knowledge from related cognitive states and acts, such as belief, they have been at pains to identify criteria or structures that give knowledge the stability, security, or certitude lacking in belief.10 This approach has a long and distinguished pedigree: Moser traces a line from Plato, Aristotle, and then to Kant defining propositional knowledge as justified true belief (2002: 4, 28). What distinguishes belief from knowledge, on this account, is justification, a concern not just with what we believe, but why (Haack 1993: 75). The move of linking knowledge to justification has far-reaching ramifications. First, there can be no discussion of knowledge that does not quickly broach the issue of what counts as justificatory grounds and what does not. Second, given that some propositions might be based on other justified propositions, the issue also quickly arises of how justification might be transmitted from one proposition to another, and from this concern we speedily arrive at a discussion of foundationalism, the view that some propositions receive justification from others while some are basic or foundational and not deduced from others.

THEORIES OF JUSTIFICATION: FOUNDATIONALISM The structures out of which knowledge is built and which justification supports can be modelled in various ways. The conventional way of describing the

10

However, not all philosophers share this view. Dummett, for example, argued that belief and knowledge are ineradicably vague notions (cited in Haack 1978: 7). Helm is correct in noting that Locke’s epistemology is characterized by a strong contrast between knowledge and belief (1973: 86); but Aquinas also carefully distinguishes between knowledge, belief, and opinion (Summa theologiae II-II.2, 1 resp.). The difference between the two lies not in whether such a distinction is made, but in the value attached to its terms. For Locke, mere belief is unreliable; for Aquinas, faith is a virtue and its epistemological imprecision necessary with respect to certain sorts of propositions in this life. It is not accurate to claim as Helm does that for both Aquinas and Calvin the distinction between faith and comprehension is ‘merely terminological’ (1973: 102).

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history of such structures in Western thought would be to hold that one model, foundationalism, held sway until about the middle of the twentieth century. At that point, a major shift occurred, though one could debate whether this change signalled the end of foundationalism altogether (as some detractors were swift to claim, with ill-concealed glee), or whether it simply prompted modifications of the traditional picture. Before turning to the shift, however, let us begin by sketching the standard picture. Most simply, foundationalism is the view that some propositions spring by a process of reasoning from others, and these others (which can be termed foundational or basic) are not grounded in other propositions, but are justified by being the particular kind of propositions they are.11 Not all foundationalist accounts defined the parameters of these basic propositions in the same way. In all its varieties, foundationalism included reports of the senses in this primary group. Some varieties of foundationalism included self-evident propositions or incorrigible reports of consciousness (‘I feel dizzy’ and suchlike). Regardless of what counts as a basic proposition, all varieties of foundationalism posit a structure of knowledge, the rectitude of whose conclusions is guaranteed by the assumed solidity of the starting propositions and the soundness of the reasoning from them, both of which serve to guarantee the non-basic propositions. Typically, this picture of knowledge is traced to Descartes, although some would locate it in Aristotle (Rescher 1973: 207). It has been attributed to particular theologians, such as Aquinas,12 and to Christianity in general (Russman 1988: 187). Whether or not Christian theology can be fairly described as foundationalist, much of Western philosophical epistemology until recently had this character, the clearest form of which is found in Descartes. Descartes is associated with the strong view of foundationalism, namely the notion that the basic beliefs supporting the whole structure must be certain, infallible, or indubitable, their security guaranteeing the beliefs generated from them (Moser et al. 1998: 87).13 The problems with foundationalism in this

11 This is the standard way of stating the matter. There is, however, one oddity to it, inasmuch as the foundational statements are in some sense grounded in others, namely the criteria for what counts as foundational. Arguably, however, it is those statements of criteria that should be deemed basic. I know of no account of foundationalism that accords the criteria themselves the status of basicality or even acknowledges that the criteria are logically presupposed to the basic statements themselves. 12 Audi 2001: ix (who also attributes it to Descartes); Plantinga 1993a: 68 (attribution also to Aristotle); Wolterstorff 1984: 30. Audi seems to think the fact that thinkers such as Aquinas held to some version of foundationalism lends it plausibility. For a survey of arguments in favour of Aquinas’s foundationalism and a critique of their cogency, see Williams 2010. 13 Audi takes Cartesian foundationalism to imply three major principles: (1) only beliefs that achieve epistemic certainty are appropriate for the foundational level; (2) only deductive inferences transmit justification; and (3) if one has appropriately strong foundations, one can have certainty (Audi 2001: 41–42).

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strong form are such that foundationalism attracts few contemporary supporters (Moser et al. 1998: 87). One problem with foundationalism pertains to what it posits as basic beliefs. All the grounds posited by foundationalists eventually came under attack and all are problematic in one way or another. If one accepts reports of consciousness (not all philosophers included these among the acknowledged justification-transmitting grounds) several obvious problems arise: first, there is by definition no way to establish which claims are true and which are falsely claimed by the subject. Given the object is to get to justified true belief (knowledge) these reports are inherently questionable grounds for certitude: the fact that no one can prove I am not dizzy if I say am does not indicate that my dizziness is indubitable. More importantly, even if one could be sure such claims were true, they cannot secure very much, given their personal and therefore limited character. Self-evident claims run into similar problems. Many claims that might be deemed self-evident are analytically true, that is, definitions which are of their nature tautologous (‘A bachelor is an unmarried man’). As such, they have little power to generate much in the way of new knowledge; they are useful as clarificatory devices, at most. If self-evident statements are not limited to definitions, the question remains of what makes a statement to be self-evident. Quine and Ullian note that some self-evident truths are logically true (every A that is B is an A [1978: 36]), ‘some’ implying there are other self-evident truths that are not of this purely logical variety. However, they note that ‘logic and mathematics seem to be the only domains where self-evidence manages to rise above triviality’ (1978: 48). While they acknowledge that self-evidentiality is sometimes ascribed to judgements of moral value, such determinations essentially claim no more than that a particular precept is basic and hence is ‘exempt from discussion’ (1978: 48–9). They do allow for subjectivity, moreover: ‘The trait of self-evidence is not hard and fast. Some truths may be self-evident for one person and in need of proof for another person’ (1978: 38). It is hard to see that this discussion yields any notion of self-evidentiality that could be helpful to the foundationalist cause, yet few others are willing to offer any sort of account of what constitutes self-evidentiality. Frequently though self-evidentiality is invoked, therefore, it is difficult to specify in what it consists and the very notion of self-evidentiality can be called into question (Haack 1978: 235–7). It is far from clear what definition of selfevidentiality is both tenable and extends the category beyond the tautologous; the problem is compounded by the fact that a statement’s being supposedly obvious or analytic does not preclude one’s being mistaken about it (Haack 1978: 236, 237). Given both issues, self-evident statements (if there even are any outside the realms of formal logic and mathematics) are unpromising sources of epistemological guarantees. The most significant problem with both reports of consciousness and self-evident claims is the same: neither category

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is as reliable as it might seem and neither has much power to generate new knowledge.14 This weakness does not enervate the first category of basic propositions, reports of the senses, but this has a problem of its own. While such reports might once have seemed completely secure, in philosophical circles (if not necessarily in scientific ones), the Enlightenment’s confidence in sense perception has been somewhat shaken. Philosophers of science such as Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend have argued that the natural sciences are far more vulnerable to the interposing of interpretative lenses than was once believed.15 Even if a given instance of sense perception were reliable (free from sensory illusion, for example), its significance must still be interpreted. Developments in the sociology of knowledge attest to the power of communities of knowledge seekers to shape, and even determine, the outcomes of searches by their web of assumptions. If social scientists and historians are to be believed, natural scientists are just as susceptible to captivity to socially determined assumptions that determine the outcome of their findings as any other group.16 As Rorty puts it, figures such as Kierkegaard, James, Dewey, and Wittgenstein, those on the peripheries of modern philosophy, have ‘kept alive the suggestion that, even when we have justified true belief about everything we want to know, we may have no more than conformity to the norms of the day’ (1979: 367). Those norms might be those of groups defined by language and social customs or subcultures with their own mechanisms for socialization, such as academic ‘guilds’. Both the processes of observation and interpretation (if these can even be distinguished) on which natural scientific research relies are a good deal more personal, plastic, and therefore corrigible than they are generally taken to be. Moreover, if as BonJour claims, basic beliefs are justified

14 Reports of the senses also have generative limitations. As Quine and Ullian note, ‘Observation sentences are at the bottom edge of language, where it touches experience’ (Quine and Ullian 1978: 28). 15 See Kuhn 1962 and Feyerabend 1988. Feyerabend is more blunt than Kuhn: ‘Neither science nor rationality are universal measures of excellence. They are particular traditions, unaware of their particular grounding’ and: ‘rationality is not an arbiter of traditions; it is itself a tradition’ (1988: 231, 243). What in the West is called ‘science’ tout court is in fact only one of its variants: ‘First-world science is one science among many’, a science which is simply blind to the knowledge contained in others, whether the knowledge of Native American medicinal plants or of traditional Chinese medicine (Feyerabend 1988: 3, emphasis in original). 16 Despite the epistemological problems attaching to scientific enquiry, some philosophers have looked to the natural sciences as the model of what it means to seek knowledge, and for the definition of justified true belief. The notion that models of proof and knowledge prevailing in the natural sciences should simply be adopted across the board in all human discourses is called ‘replacement naturalism’. While it may be the assumption of some scientists, and while it has had its philosophical advocates, in its pure form it has largely ceded to a more moderate naturalism which does not view the natural sciences as having usurped the place of philosophical epistemology (Moser et al. 1998: 35).

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by appeal to experience (2003: 17), then the question arises why only certain kinds of experience are licit and why others (such as religious or mystical experience) are excluded. None of the traditionally proposed categories of basic propositions is free of serious problems, then. Awareness from the outset that arguments based on reports of the senses might be unreliable has meant that the class of propositions most promising for generating knowledge turns out to be much less useful than its proponents might have wished. Furthermore, on foundationalist suppositions, if the basic propositions are less than secure, their instability would be transmitted to the rest of the structure. In addition to the difficulties attaching to every category of basic proposition that has been proposed, questions surround the claim that justification is transmitted from these to the secondary propositions in the structure. Since no satisfactory account of this process has yet come to light, it would seem the two essential guarantors of stability in the foundationalist model both fall short. Nevertheless, as we shall see, it continues to enjoy favour, albeit in modified forms. One possible reason for foundationalism’s enduring appeal is that the structure of reasoning it proposes mirrors the way much ordinary thinking proceeds: given x, then y. This model underlies much reasoning in formal arguments, as well as the thought processes we all use in daily life: if I cannot find my keys I might reason that since I drove my car to work this morning and need my keys to start the car, I cannot have left my keys at home; they must therefore be somewhere between the car and where I am now. Whatever philosophical problems attend reliance on my memory that I drove to work this morning and however little we are able to stipulate how this justifies the conclusion my keys can no longer be at home, all of us depend on this kind of reasoning in daily life, and we depend both on the soundness of our processes of reasoning and the assumed reliability of certain sorts of propositions. The common sense appeal of foundationalism is generally not acknowledged by philosophers, but may hold an important key to understanding why foundationalism continues to attract supporters, despite the trenchant criticisms that can be and have been lodged against it. If we fail to accord to this kind of reasoning any reliability, it is hard to see how we could argue or think at all. What philosophers do note as a reason for the continuing favour foundationalism enjoys is that it provides an answer to the problem of epistemic regress: at some point, there must be something capable of halting the sequence of propositions depending on others (Greco 1988: 35). Alston deems the regress argument the most important argument for foundationalism (1992: 144; cp. 1989: 26) and Haack counts it among the chief ones supporting foundationalism (1993: 21). Although not every commentator worries about the regress problem, to those who do, foundationalism is the answer to a terrible prospect. For those who do see infinite regress as epistemically

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untenable, the foundational or basic propositions are those which have this capability of halting the sequence which would otherwise drift, ad infinitum. Greco’s summary of the regress problem takes the form of a reductio, whose conclusion is that if there is an infinite number of reasons justifying something as true, human knowledge is impossible (Greco 1988: 36).17 Like Audi, however, he makes relatively modest claims on behalf of the foundational propositions: they need not be infallible or unrevisable (Greco 1988: 36; cp. Alston 1989: 62). While making no more than modest claims on behalf of the starting propositions solves some problems, it creates others, especially if the spectre of infinite regress is invoked to underwrite the need for foundationalism: how can propositions that may be no more than probable or plausible halt the regress of justification? Furthermore an in-principle objection to the regress argument can be raised: the problem is then how foundational beliefs are themselves supposed to be justified once inference from any further belief is precluded (BonJour 1985: xi). In other words, the criteria for foundational propositions are the real beginning of the chain of reasoning and these must be either acknowledged to be held merely as postulates or dogmatic assertions, or to require further justification, in which case we land back in the cycle of regress. The no-regress argument raises another difficulty, perhaps even more fundamental, which has been succinctly stated by Moser, Mulder, and Trout: ‘[The] regress argument raises the question whether, and if so how, we are justified in holding any belief about the external world on the basis of other beliefs, that is, by means of inferential justification’ (1998: 80, emphasis in original). A negative answer to that question would seem to rule out not only the majority of beliefs within a foundationalist framework, namely all those that are not foundational or basic, as well, perhaps, as many beliefs in non-foundationalist accounts of knowledge and justification. Accepting the no-regress argument without specifying how justification is transmitted would render the foundationalist account virtually nugatory, for in the end, only those propositions that rest on reports of the senses would be justified, incorrigible reports of states of consciousness or what is deemed self-evident; it would be impossible to extend the structure beyond these.18 Finally, one problem with

17

Alston also invokes foundationalism as that which can stop the regress of justification. However, he considers that only one form of it (what he calls ‘simple foundationalism’) can do this without falling into dogmatism (1989: 36). 18 A more radical critique is also possible, which points up the inevitable component of regress in a foundationalist argument. The basic beliefs, those that supposedly halt regress, themselves depend on other propositions, namely those stipulating what counts as basic. The criteria for basicality can in turn be queried: why should these be the standards of what is foundational? Presumably foundationalists have an answer to that question, but whatever it is taken to be, it, too, could be interrogated. It is not clear what, besides brute assertion, could halt this pattern.

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such an account of human knowledge is that in its concern to secure justified true belief through a small range of basic propositions, it leaves out vast areas of inquiry and concern, including any argument concerned with issues of value.

THEORIES OF JUSTIFICATION: COHERENTISM As Moser, Mulder, and Trout point out, the epistemic regress problem is a ‘resilient troublemaker’ (1998: 95). One way past it is to abandon the quest for a straight line with a definite end—the buck where justification stops—instead constructing a circle. Or in other words, one can discard a foundationalist picture of justification in favour of a coherentist one. While foundationalism counts as a model of justified belief and/or knowledge, coherentism counts both as a model of justification and as a theory of truth. As the former, coherentism offers an alternative to foundationalism, and as the latter, an alternative to correspondence theories. As BonJour points out, though, a coherence theory of justification is not necessarily tied to a coherence model of truth (1985: 88). Whether taken as an account of knowledge or of truth, coherentism seeks to ground the validity of individual claims not in their common reversion to basic beliefs, but in their relation to each other. A strict coherentist would hold that ‘the epistemic justification of an empirical belief derives entirely from its coherence with the believer’s overall system of empirical beliefs and not at all from any sort of factor outside that system’ (BonJour 1985: 101). However, BonJour, even when he counted as one of the most committed of coherentists (before abandoning coherentism altogether), proposed a modification of this strict stance, allowing input from the world outside the belief system (1985: 141–9). In the context of justification, the implication of strict coherentism seems to be (though this is rarely stated outright) that no one claim is itself necessarily better founded than any other. If a foundationalist model could be compared to a building with a stone or concrete foundation on which, say, a wooden frame rests, modified forms of the coherence model could be compared to a tepee, in which no stick receives its support solely from the ground beneath it, but rather rests against that and a number of other sticks, the security of the whole deriving significantly from their relation to each other, their capacity for mutual assurance. Coherentism avoids the main problems of foundationalism, namely the need to stipulate what sort of foundational statements are capable of securing the whole, as well as the problem of specifying how justification can be transmitted from the secure to the inferentially derived propositions.19 It has 19

BonJour in fact once claimed that the main reason for the coherence theory is the ‘untenability of foundationalism in all its forms’ (1985: 149).

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problems of its own, however, two being particularly grave. The first is that it is perfectly possible for a set of statements to cohere without their being true. A web could easily be a web of lies or mistakes. This problem has been labelled by Haack as the consistent fairy story objection (1993: 26). The second difficulty lies in specifying what it means for propositions to cohere: what is the precise content of coherence? As Audi notes, the notion of coherence is elusive and there are highly varying accounts of it (2001: 24; cp. Rescher 1973: 23 on the varieties of coherence theories of truth). These problems need not be taken as utterly intractable, however. Audi, for example, proposes integration as a kind of coherence: the unity of an entire system of propositional attributes is its coherence. He applies this notion of coherence specifically to the rationality of persons rather than the justification of propositions or any overarching question of truth. Thus he concludes that the greater the unity of a person’s belief system, the more rational the person (2001: 209). Audi contends that in the context of a person’s rationality, coherence does more normative work than in the context of the justification of belief (2001: 210), although he also holds that the rationality of beliefs is largely parallel to their justification (2001: 228). However, it is not clear why the unity of a web of beliefs should count strongly in favour of rationality but less so in favour of justification, particularly if one takes the view that the justifying propositions grounding the foundationalist structure need not be indubitable or certain. If rationality is consonant with reason rather than the simple absence of irrationality (2001: 212), then the web of beliefs belonging to a rational person must also be consonant with reason, and it is not clear why this consonance does not constitute some form of justification. The principle Audi applies to persons could with equal validity apply to propositions: the unity of a set of propositions might constitute its justification. Another approach to defining coherence would be to say the constitutive beliefs of a set do not display inconsistencies with each other and do not contradict each other. This negative criterion could yield a trivial result, namely, a set of propositions that do not contradict each other because they are utterly unrelated, for example: ‘Mary’s car is blue’, ‘Paris is the capital of France’, and ‘Snow is a form of precipitation’. The non-contradiction principle therefore requires supplementation, perhaps in the form of a stipulation that the non-contradictory constitutive propositions must intersect: each must be related to at least some others in the set so that no one proposition is without notional companions. Yet another (which could coexist alongside the former) might be to say that the web as a whole does not display inconsistencies with something external to it (or perhaps: individual propositions within it do not display such inconsistencies). This second sense of coherence bears a certain resemblance to the correspondence theory of truth. Transposed into a theological context, these notions of coherence might mean that a set of propositions concerned with significance (for example ‘What are we here

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for?’) does not conflict with a set of propositions about how we came to be here (a doctrine of creation or a theory of evolution, say). There are ways of defining coherence, then, which are at least no more problematic than descriptions of how justification is transmitted in foundationalist structures and go some way to responding to the first kind of objection to coherentism, namely the vagueness of the notion of coherence. The second kind of objection (that false propositions could cohere) has weight, but the alarm cries about consistent fairy tales are themselves far-fetched. No fiction is entirely imaginary, devoid of any reference to normal states of affairs: Cinderella’s carriage may be a magically transformed pumpkin, but in the world of the pumpkin-turned-carriage, clocks still strike midnight and there is still a day after the ball, so time seems to be operating as usual.20 Moreover, human beings seem much as usual: siblings get jealous and people fall in love. The real problem with coherentism is not that it is likely to lead to webs fabricated wholly of false or fictive propositions, but that false propositions might coexist with true ones, their capacity for coherence lulling us into belief that they are true. Coherentist accounts of epistemic justification may also fall prey to the same kind of objections to which coherentist models of truth are susceptible, namely, that they allow for little or no interaction with the world of experience beyond the belief system. This objection is closely related to the fictional world/fairy tale objection. Haack regards this objection (which she labels the ‘drunken sailors’ argument) as fatal to coherentism (1993: 27). It may be so, but only in light of one account of coherence, namely, one which rules out such interaction on principle, taking coherence to the sole source of justification. Philosophical accounts of coherence—whether of justification or of truth—focus on the coherence of beliefs in a belief-set (or, we could say, in a system). Another sense in which a belief might cohere with others would be in virtue of its compatibility with, for example, reports of experience. Such compatibility lies very close to a correspondence theory of truth, but the underlying notion of the intersection of propositions denoting states of affairs is the same in either case: they do not contradict and their non-contradiction is not solely the result of their being concerned with wholly different matters (‘Snow is a form of precipitation’, ‘Paris is the capital of France’). Christian theology has often been constructed in light of both forms of coherence. So, for example, Aquinas at the beginning of the larger Summa 20 As Haack formulates the objection, its core is that coherence cannot guarantee or even indicate the truth of propositions that cohere (1993: 26). The first objection holds rather more weight than the second: given that false propositions could easily mix with the true, coherence clearly cannot be taken as any kind of guarantor. It is not at all clear, however, why coherence could not be taken as an indicator of truth, if we assume that any web of propositions contains at least some that are true. Haack’s parsing of the issue as the guaranteeing or indicating of truth might signal she is thinking of coherence as a truth theory rather than a justification theory, but in this context she contrasts it with foundationalism, not correspondence.

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points to features of the natural world (its motion and order, for example) which are indicative of its origin in God, and in so doing, he points not only to a relation between God and the observable world, but among elements of the doctrine of God. For example, the argument from motion not only points to the motion observable in the natural world, but the need for this motion to have been set in train by an entity which is itself unmoved (so as to avoid the spectre of an infinite regress of movers). The assertion of the Unmoved Mover in the Five Ways coheres with that of the immutable God described in Summa theologiae I.9, and the assertion of immutability is part of a broader doctrine of God, some elements of which (simplicity, for example) do not correlate with anything in our experience. Similarly, Calvin in the opening of the Institutes of the Christian Religion, while denying that one can know God from creation alone, insists equally that with scripture acting as a lens, one can look at the natural world and see in it testimony to the existence and providence of God (I.vi.1). While the accounts of Aquinas and Calvin diverge with respect to their degree of insistence on the prior need for scripture in order to see any evidence of God in the natural world,21 both thinkers point to the coherence of the data of the natural world with a theological account drawn from the Bible. Each goes on to construct a theological framework that aims for internal coherence, but which also intends some measure of coherence with sensory data. In this respect, Aquinas and Calvin may anticipate an early champion of coherentism (D. Davidson) who maintained that coherence among beliefs yields correspondence with the facts (Haack 1993: 60). The difficulty with this view is that while such coherent correspondence is no doubt true some of the time, there is no reason it must be true: coherence does not necessarily lead to correspondence, nor is it any sort of guarantee of correspondence. The notion implicit in Aquinas and Calvin is not that coherence yields correspondence, but merely that doctrines which cohere with each other in a theological framework can (perhaps will) also cohere with the state of affairs obtaining externally, in the ‘real’ world. If the objection that coherentism does not allow for the belief system to interact with the world outside itself does not really hold, then coherentism seems of its nature amenable to moderation and synthesis. If taken strictu sensu, however, it is vulnerable to one final objection we will consider here. Whether coherentism is faulted for opening the door to an entire web of unjustified beliefs or only a surfeit of them, the root of the complaint is the same: insufficient rigour. Almost the opposite charge can also be laid against it, however: that it is too stringent in its requirements for justification. As Haack puts it ‘coherentism seems to entail that a subject who has inconsistent 21 Aquinas does not deny the need for scripture to make sense of the ‘book’ of nature; he simply does not insist upon it as Calvin does. The difference between them on this point is not a matter of championing natural theology versus condemning it.

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beliefs. . .is not justified in any of his beliefs’ (1993: 25). This objection, too, holds only against coherentism in its strongest form. Coherentism need not be taken as requiring that every constituent of the web be compatible with every other; a set of beliefs might include some discrepancies without these invalidating the integrity of the whole. The problem that remains is that coherentism seems to offer no certain way of distinguishing justified beliefs from the others. Like foundationalism, coherentism offers a helpful way of understanding the relation of propositions to each other, although without epistemic guarantees. Like foundationalism, coherentism is scarcely tenable in its most adamant forms, and like foundationalism, becomes much more plausible when presented in more nuanced versions. Some of these, as we have seen, blur the line between a theory of justification and a theory of truth.

THEORIES OF TRUTH: CORRESPONDENCE As BonJour points out, the idea of epistemic justification is parasitic on the notion of truth: to justify a belief is to provide some basis for thinking that it is likely to be true (1985: 163). As an account of epistemic justification, coherentism can blend into a coherence theory of truth: the statements that justify each other in virtue of their interconnectedness (their relevance to each other and cohesion with each other) indicate their truth because of the plausibility of the total picture they present. Their coherence with states of affairs beyond the web of propositions is usually termed ‘correspondence’ (although it could as easily be taken as another sense of coherence). While the correspondence theory of truth is usually taken as contrasting the coherence theory, the two could be viewed as complementary. The correspondence theory, conventionally traced back to Aristotle but also associated with Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, holds that a belief is true if there is a state of affairs corresponding to it: typically, correspondence is rendered as (for example) ‘the proposition “snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white’. The theory is therefore fundamentally concerned with the relation of propositions to non-propositional realities and this reference to the ‘real’ world is conventionally taken as its strength. Like the foundationalist account of justification, the correspondence theory of truth has a certain commonsense appeal: ‘ “Snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white’ is a fussy, but precise, way of stating the assumption on the basis of which most of us are operating most of the time. The problem is not that it is an utterly wrong-headed way to think about truth, but rather that, first, it offers little help in discerning what is true and what is not, and second, it measures truth at the bar of the sensible world. It is mute with respect to statements of morals or value and these constitute some

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of the spheres where human beings might be most concerned to know the truth. Like the foundationalist accounts of justification, the correspondence theory of truth is of its nature limited in the kind of propositions for which it can account. Is it true that human beings are entitled to equal treatment before the law? There is no fact in the external world to which such a belief could be said to correspond, except by brute assertion. Large areas of human experience and inquiry, and ones where establishing what is true are of great importance, fall outside the power of this theory to adjudicate or even to describe. This last problem is not one that is typically raised by philosophers, however. The philosophical community has worried more about the correspondence theory’s problems of definition, notably what a fact is and what it means for a belief to correspond to a state of affairs. Advocates of the correspondence approach have as yet been unable to provide satisfactory answers to the questions. Wittgenstein is sometimes cited as an instance (the sole one, it seems) of a thicker account of correspondence, via his ‘picture theory’ (1981: 2.063–3.01). While it is true that he provides some specification of the correspondence theory via glosses (terms such as ‘logical configuration’ and ‘elementary proposition’), these glosses themselves only demand further clarification. The strength of the correspondence theory of truth rests finally on the way in which it mirrors ordinary assumptions about the relation of language and the world ‘external’ to linguistic systems. When one starts to press the exact nature of that relation, or the precise meaning of the terms used to convey it, the theory flounders, however.22

THEORIES OF TRUTH: COHERENCE Just as coherence theories of justification can be viewed as ways around the problems of grounds for basicality attaching to foundationalism, so coherence models of truth may provide an answer to an insoluble quest for grounds; they have been taken as specifically opposed to foundationalism (Rescher 1973: 207). As Rescher, a notable proponent of the coherence theory of truth, notes: ‘A criterion of truth. . .definitely requires justification’ (1973: 17). The justifying grounds would, however, themselves presumably require justification and so here, as with theories of justification, some form of infinite regress seems 22

Closely related to the correspondence theory is the deflationary theory of truth (associated with Ramsey et al.), which refuses to add to the notion of truth more than the idea of formal equivalence (‘snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white). As noted, while this notion of truth is hard to quarrel with as far as it goes, its problem is precisely that it does not go very far. Tarski’s semantic theory of truth bears a resemblance to deflationary theories, but is not relevant for our purposes inasmuch as it is of doubtful applicability to natural languages (cp. Haack 1978: 99).

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inevitable, unless halted by no more than brute assertion. As foundationalism contrasts the coherence model of justification, so the correspondence theory contrasts the coherence model of truth, available in several different shades,23 associated variously with F. H. Bradley, Brand Blanshard, and Hilary Putnam, among others (although opinions differ on whether a coherence theory of truth necessarily precludes correspondence models, per Rescher 1973: 27). Some versions of the theory emphasize the coherence of propositions within a web; others stress the process of arriving at propositions held to be true, the rectitude of this process serving as their guarantor. Some models seek less than a guarantee of truth, asking instead for its authorization (Rescher 1973: 30); such models formally resemble moderate foundationalist proposals even though the latter are concerned with justification rather than truth. The varieties of the coherence theory that have attracted the most attention are those stressing, not the process for arriving at beliefs, but the relation of propositions to each other, their harmonious coexistence in a broader framework; these can be labelled ‘holistic’ and it is on these we will focus here. Coherence theories of truth are vulnerable to a number of objections and have been at various times roundly criticized: Rescher described his own task as that of ‘transforming a defunct and discredited philosophical theory into a significant instrument of epistemology’ (1973: vii). One problem is similar to that which plagues correspondence theories: how to define the key terms. What exactly does it mean for statements to cohere? Another is that statements might cohere because all of them are untrue. This latter objection is akin to the consistent fairy tale and drunken sailors objections to coherentist models of justification (see Haack 1993: 26–7). Serious though these objections to coherentism are, they do not lack for responses. One response to the definitional issue is to define coherence as logical implication: a statement coheres if it follows logically or logically implies some subset of the system (Moser et al. 1998: 69). Explanatory relations among components of the system can also be cited (Moser 2002: 5). Defining coherence in this way in some measure responds to the coherent fairy tale objection. Logical and explanatory relations are grounded in general principles of reasoning that are not specific to particular accounts of states of affairs. As noted, though, the coherence theory need not be taken as the sole guarantor of truth. At the very least, as Rescher notes, it needs to presuppose logical truth (1973: 177). As such, a web of relations necessarily has ties to something outside the system—the usual conception of cause and effect, for example. It is hard to see that a logically coherent system could be entirely false, therefore. The problem is once again, that the logicality obtaining among components of a system does not preclude some of its elements being fictional 23

Rescher provides a typology of the varying forms of the coherence theory of truth (1973: 23).

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or false, and defining coherence as logical relationality does nothing to help us in discerning the boundaries between the true, the partly true and the completely untrue. One of the earliest formulations of the coherent fairy tale scenario is that of Rousseau, even though he himself did not see it as problematic: ‘Perhaps his system is false; but developing it, he has painted himself truly.’24 This formulation points to the problem a Christian theologian might have with coherentism: what if an account is coherent, but is merely a true self-portrait of the writer? Or, to put the matter in the terms we will use in a later chapter: what if theology qua systematic is no double mimesis at all, but merely an image of the theologian constructing the system? One response to such a line of argument is to supplement ‘strict coherentism’ with appeal to data from outside the system. We shall see examples of such synthetic proposals later. Such supplementation may serve as a guard against one of the greatest dangers of coherentist models of truth: that the coherent structure might not only contain untruths, but because of its overall plausibility actively militate against the recognition of truths which challenge the structure. Contemporary philosophers have not generally made much of this problem, but philosophers of science and social scientists have pointed to the self-validating nature of communities of knowers and truth-seekers, as well as the power of paradigms to lull into ignoring evidence that counts against them. This faulty paradigm whose cracks are ignored by tacit communal agreement or wilful blindness bears a resemblance to the consistent fairy tale and drunken sailors scenarios: in each case, the mutual support the propositions lend each other creates the false (perhaps reassuring) impression of a sound structure of reasoning. One way of supplementing a coherence model of truth so as to avoid the prospect of fairy tales, drunks, and hegemonistic paradigms is to suggest that beliefs added to the belief-set be ‘filtered’ by means of a plausibility index, so the elements which cohere and lend support to each other should already have some epistemic integrity.25 This suggestion only raises the further question of the criterion for plausibility and moreover fails to consider that a belief may seem implausible because it conflicts with other available data or theories, but does so because it is true and they are not—the straw that breaks the camel’s back forces a Kuhnian paradigm shift if the existing paradigm does not succeed in keeping the straw off the camel in the first place. If the holistic form of the coherence theory is meant to guarantee truth, to the extent that it falls short of doing so, it falters or fails by its own criteria.

24 Dialogues, cited in Derrida 1974/1976: 118; Derrida does not specify where in the Dialogues this statement appears. 25 Haack claims this is Rescher’s (1973: 96) response, but she does not locate the terms ‘plausibility index’ or ‘filtered’ in Rescher’s own prose and gives no indication of where exactly Rescher elaborates these notions; I have been unable to find them in his work.

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OTHER THEORIES OF TRUTH For our purposes, it is chiefly the correspondence and coherence theories of truth that are most relevant (and these have also absorbed most of the attention of philosophers). However, we might mention briefly three other kinds of truth theories (there are more, but they have commanded even less attention). One is the verificationist, versions of which were advanced by an array of distinguished figures (Peirce, Bradley, Putnam, for example). On this account, that is true which is verifiable. This notion comes in a variety of forms. In some, verificationism is virtually a variety of coherentism: a belief is verifiable when it is part of a consistent set of beliefs (this model can be called holistic verificationism). Other forms simply ask for verification of some variety without relating this specifically to a system of beliefs. Such theories avoid the metaphysical conundrums associated with the correspondence theory; although the latter has a commonsense ring to it (true propositions reflect what is true in reality), it can be criticized for its metaphysical mysteriousness, inasmuch as its fundamental terms elude definition (Horwich 1993: 511). The verificationist theory purports in its straightforwardness to avoid such metaphysical conundrums.26 Nevertheless, like other truth theories the verificationist raises as many questions as it attempts to answer: what counts as verifying evidence and on what grounds? The prospect of infinite regress arises here, too. A second issue is that what seems to be irreproachable as evidence could nevertheless serve to verify a proposition that turned out to be false. The problem is both what counts as evidence and how evidence is seen to be related to the deductions following from it—in other words, problems formally the same as those haunting foundationalism. Although in many cases there will be a clear link between verification and truth, there is no necessary relation between them: something could be true even though there is (as yet) no evidence for it. Conversely, evidence alone cannot guarantee the truth of a proposition. The history of science provides ample evidence of both scenarios. Verificationists have not as yet found adequate responses to these problems. Another model of truth, pragmatism (variously associated with Pierce, Dewey, and James), is equally bedevilled with difficulties. On this account, true beliefs result in good action, roughly a secular version of ‘by their fruits ye shall know them’. Given that false assumptions can yield good actions (an ethical version of the Gettier problems) and true assumptions can lead to bad ones, this criterion does not seem promising as a means to identify truth. Another version of the theory contends that propositions are true if they are 26 It may not be possible to separate epistemology from metaphysics entirely, however. As Haack notes, some epistemological questions depend on answers to metaphysical questions (1978: 226).

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useful. Here, too, the history of science suggests caution. Much scientific research is concerned with the discovery of information for which there is at present no foreseeable use, at least some of which may well prove to be true. Such findings do not convert from falsehood to truth once a use is found for them. Conversely, some truths may prove to be highly inconvenient and in that sense, not useful. Those who exploited other human beings would no doubt have been gratified if it could be shown that there were races possessed of human capacities that enabled them to do work other creatures cannot do, but who could be classified as sub-human and hence enslaved. It might have been useful for slave-owners and traffickers to assert large genetic differences among human beings to justify classifying some as sub-human, but genetic differences between races have proved to be minuscule. The utility (to some) of theories of racial inferiority that were once asserted did not make them true. Pragmatism is also vulnerable to a more formal critique, charging it with confusing the definition of truth with its criterion; that is, what is in fact a test of whether a proposition is true is functioning improperly as a definition of ‘truth’. Cognitive usefulness may be important for deciding whether a belief is justified or has adequate warrant, but these conditions do not define truth (Moser et al. 1998: 72–3; cp. Haack 1978: 115, citing Popper). The situation with respect to theories of truth is formally similar to that obtaining with respect to justification: there is no philosophical account of truth that is not beset by fundamental problems, which are acknowledged as such by philosophers (cf. Horwich 1993, passim and 514). One need not appeal to the supposed ravages of postmodernism to show the frailty of contemporary epistemology. The problem lies in the first instance not in the postmodern denial that there is any such thing as truth or any standards that are not the conventions of culturally constructed groups.27 The fundamental problem is that even those who would like to establish otherwise have thus far failed to do so in even modestly successful fashion. Still, the correspondence and coherence theories have a common sense appeal: a true proposition reflects the way things actually are and true propositions do not contradict each other, because the states of affairs they reflect are coherent. Putting the matter this way is not philosophically satisfactory—no more so than any theory of truth philosophers have yet advanced—and the fact that something has common sense appeal, of course, by no means makes it right. It may be, though, that rough common sense is the best we can do at the moment.

27 These groups need not be taken solely as, for example, geographically or linguistically defined. Foucault pointed to the way in which conceptions of knowledge and rationality may be determined and enforced by power groups within a society. See, for example, his summary of the argument of Madness and Civilization in 1989: 197 and 1977: 182–3.

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The problem lies in the aspiration to guarantees. It is this problem Christian theology avoids, because of the theological suppositions in which the quest for truth is embedded. While Christian theology certainly aspires to the truth, in Christian thought, truth is in the first instance identified with God, not formulations in human languages about God. The Bible is not regarded by Christians as having been dictated by God or angels. Even the strongest Christian doctrines of inspiration do not approach the claim that the words of the scriptural languages are those directly spoken by God to an amanuensis, and scripture itself proclaims the provisionality of our current knowledge and speech (1 Cor. 13:12). Theological formulations may be true, and scriptural or credal formulations trustworthy—Christians of all varieties would ascribe a higher degree of truth to formulations that are either Biblical, credal, or conciliar than to the theologoumena of individual theologians—but the truth even of the former fall far short of the truth that is divine nature itself. Furthermore, all creeds, conciliar and theological statements represent some element of interpretation of the Biblical texts (as do translations of the Bible), and no matter what degree of authority is given to these texts, interpretation stands at one remove from that authority. Christians claim to believe the assertions of the creeds, not to know them indubitably: both the chief creeds in use today (the Nicene–Constantinopolitan and that of the Apostles) begin ‘I/we believe in God’. The primary Christian affirmation is trust in a person, rather than affirmation of a proposition as justified or as an item of knowledge. Elsewhere in the creeds, the individual believer or the community affirms propositions (‘I/we believe in the resurrection of the body’, for example), but these are claims of trust, rather than of knowledge as philosophers understand it. Trusting means one holds the proposition to be true—indeed, believing this so firmly one would be willing to stake one’s life upon it—but falls short of a claim to certain knowledge. The fact that current philosophical theories of truth are not able to specify how truth can be guaranteed indicates the wisdom of theology’s declining to locate truth exclusively in propositions.

THE CURRENT STATE OF EPISTEMOLOGY: MEDIATING PROPOSITIONS The provisionality of Christian belief does not, however, distinguish it from non-theological claims. Whatever certitude may have been accorded philosophical and scientific claims in the past, the current state of affairs in philosophical epistemology, with respect to both justification and truth, means that certitude now scarcely seems attainable. It is not surprising, therefore, that a variety of

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alternative models have arisen, some of which modify the key requirements of traditional models, others of which attempt to blend elements of models once regarded as diametrically opposed. At one level, there is nothing new about this situation, as there have always been self-avowed coherentists, for example, who were willing to envisage a less than pure form of the theory (such as Rescher). Despite this flexibility on the part of some of its proponents, coherentism is still beleaguered: some of its ardent supporters (such as BonJour) have abandoned it and on occasion it has been simply dismissed out of hand, even by those by no means countable as dogmatic foundationalists (Plantinga: ‘Coherentism is clearly mistaken’ [1993a: 80]). Foundationalism has also come under attack, though estimations of its current status vary markedly: some regard it as definitively dead, others see it as having retained the status of, if not indubitable rectitude, then at least still the most widely received view currently on offer (Fumerton 2002: 210).28 When exactly the questioning of foundationalism began is hard to establish; Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is sometimes taken as an important marker, though its chief significance may lie in having provoked broad awareness of the issues than for its originality.29 Another point of reference might be Richard Rorty’s Philosophy in the Mirror of Nature (per Haack 1993: 183–4). If these estimations are accurate, then it is significant that the challenges to an epistemological position began with either a reading of the history of natural science (Kuhn) or from the notion that knowledge has been conceived by philosophers as a representation of nature (Rorty). More recently, and within the philosophical community, some notable critics of foundationalism have been associated with a trend called Reformed Epistemology, such as Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, who write from an explicitly Christian perspective. The adjustments to foundationalism suggested by Christian thinkers nevertheless came after querying of its cogency in the context of the natural sciences. What is significant about the critiques of foundationalism is that none seems to have succeeded in unseating it altogether, although it is equally true that it seems to have no philosophical advocates in its original, rigorous forms; that is, those that considered a small set of criteria for basicality could yield structures of reasoning that guaranteed justification. In the current state of affairs in epistemology, justification is still regarded as essential for knowledge, even though contemporary epistemologists freely admit that a belief ’s being false does not entail its being unjustified (Moser et al. 1998: 60) and being unjustified by no means entails a belief ’s being false. 28 BonJour and Sosa have called the move away from internalist foundationalism as less ‘a reasoned dialectical retreat than a fashionable stampede’ (BonJour and Sosa 2003: 8). 29 Bernstein, for example, considers that Kuhn was anticipated by William James (1983: 51; cp. also 20–5.).

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Other philosophical developments quite independently challenged the notion of knowledge as justified true belief. Among these were the so-called Gettier problems. These are a set of descriptions of hypothetical circumstances under which someone is justified in believing something which nevertheless turns out to be untrue. Their precise nature need not concern us. What is significant for our purposes is that since Edmund Gettier published these in 1963, no one has succeeded in addressing them in such a way as to restore knowledge as justified true belief to its former, largely unquestioned status30 (although doubts have occasionally been voiced regarding the Gettier problems’ significance, e.g. Haack 1993: 223, n. 1). This situation leaves the old definition of knowledge relegated to the status of inadequacy, but without removing justification as an ingredient in the mix required for knowledge (Foley 2002: 178). There is no general philosophical agreement about what constitutes adequate or proper justification. So much is explicitly acknowledged; what tends to get passed over in silence is the fact that if one cannot stipulate what constitutes justifying grounds for any assertion one is scarcely in a position to fault others for the impropriety—or outright lack—of such grounds. Nevertheless, the very notion of justification implies not just that providing such grounds is a good—an epistemic counsel of perfection—but a standard, failing to meet which constitutes a deficiency. Although the concern here is not for apologetics per se, it is worth noting in passing that the travails of epistemology in general and foundationalism in particular are significant for those seeking to defend Christianity at the secular bar. In the course of the twentieth century, religious claims went from being untenable because they could not be grounded in reports of the senses or propositions derived from these, or because they are unfalsifiable,31 to occupying some ill-defined space where they appear to have less valid justification than most other claims, although there is no consensus about what constitutes valid justification. Although there seems little inclination to drop the requirement of justification, in the contemporary climate, what justifies belief could cover a much wider and looser range than it once did. BonJour claims that the concept of justification is plainly generic, ‘roughly that of a reason or warrant of some kind meeting some appropriate standard. There are many specific variations of justification actually in use and in principle as many as anyone cares to construct’ (1985: 5–6). Robert Audi for example notes that ‘there is no question that one may justify belief by arguing for it’ (2001: 14). Such arguments will not necessarily 30 Cp. Moser et al. 1998: 96: The assumption that justified true belief is sufficient as well as necessary for knowledge ‘is now a minority position, mainly because of the Gettier counterexamples’. They also note, however, that ‘a belief that happens to be true but lacks supporting reasons is not knowledge’, hence the requirement of justification, warrant or evidence (1998: 15). 31 See, for example, Antony Flew’s contribution to ‘Theology and Falsification’ in Flew and MacIntyre 1955: 96–9.

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have the logical force philosophers once demanded, and in fact, cannot have it, on Sosa’s account. He asks whether the only habits of inference that can be fundamentally justified are those that have been codified in a logical organum (such as a set of rules for inference). That would be a mistake, in his view, because there is no such simple set of rules: ‘what one is justified in believing is too holistic and context dependent a matter to be codified in any formal system’ and ‘its results, in terms of justified belief, would in any case be limited’ (2002: 283). If so, any proposition or belief for which an argument could be offered is potentially justifiable and is therefore also potentially an item of knowledge by philosophical standards. What is significant for theology is that secular philosophers now acknowledge there may be nothing more epistemically secure than a good argument, even a good argument departing from admittedly controvertible propositions. This situation has implications not only for apologetics, but also for the way we view the structures of reasoning in various disciplines. For our purposes, the significant point is not simply that philosophy can no longer, on its own account, point the way to some epistemic certitude; it is that we are all reasoning from premises we know to be controvertible, which we accept because they are deemed acceptable by some norm which cannot be justified in any universalizable fashion. One response to the problems attaching to both foundationalist and coherentist models of justification, as well as to coherence and correspondence theories of truth, is to moderate foundationalism, ratcheting down the claims that have proved problematic rather than abandoning the essential structure altogether.32 One of the proponents of such an approach, Robert Audi, terms it ‘moderate’ foundationalism. This Audi defines as the view that one must have at least one non-inferentially justified belief and that any other justified belief is justified by at least one non-inferentially justified belief (2001: 30). Audi claims that this foundationalism does not have commitments to any particular beliefs, posits only moveable foundations, and permits other factors, such as coherence, to play a significant role in justification (2001: 30). Alston takes a similar view, holding that the distinction between strong and moderate foundationalism depends on whether ‘epistemic immunities’ are required in the foundations (1992: 146).33 It is the minimal version of foundationalism which he considers to be its most defensible form (1989: 39).

32 BonJour views moderate foundationalism specifically as a foundationalist answer to the regress problem (1985: 26); as has been noted, many take the regress problem to be the fundamental epistemological issue. Russman, moreover, defines postfoundationalism as the view that there are no foundations for knowledge, although he provides no hard evidence of where any of the thinkers he identifies with this position (Rorty, Feyerabend, Wittgenstein, Sellars, Quine, Putnam, Kuhn) articulated such a view (1988: 187). 33 As Alston describes minimal foundationalism, every mediately justified belief stands at the base of a multiply branching tree structure, at the tip of each branch of which is an immediately justified belief (1989: 42).

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While some of the critics of foundationalism simply pointed to its untenability (Rorty), others, such as Plantinga, proposed modifications of it, rather more radical than those of moderate foundationalists such as Audi. Plantinga’s critique of foundationalism does not rest on pointing to the obvious flaws and limitations in arguments from reports of the senses or supposedly selfevident claims. He offers what one could term a coherentist critique of foundationalism (though he certainly does not call it that), pointing to an internal contradiction within it. If, he points out, only those propositions based on reports of the senses are justified, or are self-evident or incorrigible reports of states of consciousness, or propositions logically derived from these, then the very claim that only such propositions are justified is itself not justified.34 The central contention of foundationalism does not meet the criterion for a foundational or basic proposition, nor can it be inferred from such. It is on its own account unjustified and the foundationalist picture therefore suffers from internal inconsistency, failure by its own standard. Plantinga might have taken this incisive point to have dealt a fatal blow to foundationalism, but he did not let the matter rest there. Plantinga considered that identifying the worm in the foundationalist apple would unleash the possibility of run-away relativism: if some criterion could not be found to distinguish properly basic statements from others, any claim could count as basic (he cites ‘The Great Pumpkin returns every Hallowe’en’ as an example of the kind of claim he is concerned to disallow).35 Accordingly, he proposes a new basis for rationally justified statements: community-specific, these are sets of examples that count as incontrovertible in their particular context. For a Christian these might be ‘I feel forgiven’, ‘God made all this’, and so on. A non-Christian would deem quite different statements to be properly basic. Plantinga does not give examples of statements that might be acceptable to a non-Christian group, nor does he address the question of what for these purposes constitutes a community, the necessary adjudicating body of what count as basic propositions, nor how communities go about deciding what counts as properly basic. Plantinga’s epistemology seems to require what in a Christian context would be called an ecclesiology. It is problematic that he does not acknowledge this or suggest any means by which the necessary adjudicating groups are to be constituted, recognized, or how they are to go about the business of discernment of communally normative example sets. Moreover, not all of those concerned with epistemological questions may belong to anything resembling

34 This formulation is a capsule summary of one strand of the argument in ‘Is Belief in God Properly Basic?’ (Plantinga 1981). 35 Plantinga 1981: 48. Meynell considers that Plantinga does not succeed in averting the Great Pumpkin problem and declares ‘the only alternative to foundationalism . . .is the view that “anything goes” ’ (1993: 92).

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a self-consciously constituted community: secular philosophers are not part of a defined group with structures of authority and means of establishing communally agreed stances in the way that religious believers tend to be. (Conceivably, Plantinga could respond that it is the absence of any structured community that makes secular epistemology untenable, but there is no hint in his work of such a position, at least of which I know.) Nevertheless, Plantinga proposes that from community-specific basic propositions an edifice may be erected. The security of the structure of reasoning rests on the solidity of the starting premises, as in a foundationalist model, but the criteria governing what counts as basic are fluid, and different communities of discourse and value would not recognize each other’s basic propositions as such. Plantinga’s proposal therefore attacks one premise of foundationalism, namely the criteria for foundational propositions, and proposes a modification of this premise. What he does not do is dispute the essential structure that is characteristic of foundationalism, the distinction between a special class of propositions that are not inferentially derived and others that are deduced from the first type. Plantinga’s account simply substitutes one description of the allowable foundational statements for another. Given that this position is where Plantinga ends up in the quest to avert relativism, he could be taken as holding that a foundational structure is necessary if relativism is to be avoided. While his critique of foundationalism is important and points to a fundamental inconsistency within it, Plantinga’s alternative criterion of basicality is just as unfounded as that of classical foundationalism, the difference being solely that Plantinga acknowledges that his proposed basic statements would not count as correct by any universal or general standard. Plantinga’s objection to classical foundationalism is formally similar to that of Sellars and BonJour: the justification of foundational beliefs rests on the belief that the foundational beliefs are true, and Sellars’ and BonJour’s way of stating the matter raises the question of whether that conviction is itself a belief which cannot intrinsically possess justification.36 The absence of such justification for the putatively basic statements does not make Plantinga’s picture internally self-contradictory (as the foundationalist picture is, on his account). The difference is that Plantinga does not claim the indubitable rectitude of his starting propositions. We are still, however, left with the question of why a distinction between first- and second-order statements is needed in the first place. The structure of Plantinga’s argument certainly demonstrates that the criteria for basicality 36

BonJour gives an account of Sellars in BonJour 1985: 114–17. He summarizes his own rejection of foundationalism on grounds of the problems in justifying basic beliefs on 32. Although BonJour later abandoned the coherentist position elaborated in this volume, it is not clear whether he wishes to deny the force of this particular objection to foundationalism. He expounded a coherentist model in The Structure of Empirical Knowledge (1985), but later rejected it as ‘thoroughly untenable’ (‘The Dialectic of Foundationalism and Coherentism’, in Greco and Sosa 1999: 130).

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could be much broader than classical foundationalism took them to be, but leaves unanswered the question of why it is necessary to posit basicality at all: why not just admit that the propositions starting off the chain of reasoning have the status of sheer postulates? The real issue is not simply what should count as properly basic but why a structure of reasoning needs to accord any statement the status of basicality, given that no statements and no criteria for such statements have been proposed which are more than conventionally acceptable and given the difficulty of determining what makes a statement conventionally acceptable. When these considerations are taken into account, foundationalism looks less markedly different from coherentism. D. Z. Phillips was among those who pointed out that Reformed Epistemology, despite its overt challenge to foundationalism, remains within the foundationalist tradition (1988: xiv), given that these Reformed thinkers challenged the criteria for foundational propositions rather than the edifice erected from them.37 As Phillips points out, ‘the essence of the Reformed challenge is to accuse the foundationalist of claiming to have a criterion of rationality which, in fact, he does not possess’ (1988: 24). He continues, ‘the fundamental issue for Reformed epistemology is whether the believer is justified in placing belief in God in the foundations of his noetic structure’ (1988: 25). In this estimation, Phillips is surely correct, for judging by the arguments Plantinga offered, he seeks to place the believer’s immediate beliefs (‘God made all this’) on an equal footing with the foundationalist’s reports of the senses and self-evident propositions. While Plantinga queries the basis on which the foundationalist declares beliefs to be self-evident (1979: 21; acknowledged by Phillips 1988: 17), Phillips is correct in holding that Plantinga’s proposed revision of foundationalism challenges only the criteria for the propositions that count as foundational, rather than questioning the structure it proposes. Phillips was no admirer of foundationalism of any variety, labelling it a form of epistemic totalitarianism (1988: xiv) and advocating a more radical departure from classical foundationalism than Plantinga seems willing to countenance, one he regarded as rooted in Wittgenstein’s thought. Using categories brought to prominence by George Lindbeck, Phillips linked theological foundationalism to cognitive theories of religious belief, although in his view what Lindbeck terms experiential–expressivist accounts are equally foundationalist (1988: xvi). In other words, whether religious claims are rooted in theological or philosophical propositions or whether they purport to express experiences, what arises from the articulation of these statements is a foundationalist structure.

37 As Jesse de Boer notes, while Plantinga seems to hold that foundationalism should be abandoned, what he in fact does is add belief in God to the foundational propositions (cited in Phillips 1988: 33).

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Countering both theories, on Phillips’ account, is Wittgenstein’s proposal of calling theology a grammar.38 The guardian of grammar, according to Phillips, is the philosopher, whose task it is to ‘free us from the conceptual confusions which bewitch us’. The theologian, in contrast, is ‘the guardian of the Faith’, who has the task of ‘proclaiming his own religious and theological perspective. . .The philosopher informs, but the theologian incites’ (1988: xvi–xvii). The philosopher’s task of un-bewitching can be carried out despite a non-foundationalist epistemology and the theologian presumably does not need to argue at all, but only to inspire. However, if the difference between philosophy and theology does not lie in the security of the base from which they reason, then wherein lies philosophy’s greater capacity for clarification? If not in the matter from which one reasons, then perhaps in the mode of reasoning, the greater acuity of its deduction, or the clarity of its use of terms. If so, how exactly is theology able to ‘incite’, if it lacks accurate reasoning and transparent terminology? What enticement to faith could be irrational, or indeed, dishonest? And to what faith are we being urged? If by means of confused or irrational urging, then surely not the God of Truth or the eternal Word. What logic is it exactly that the philosopher utilizes from which the theologian is exempt, and how is such exemption from logic or ordinary patterns of reasoning to be reconciled with a doctrine of God insisting on divine ratio and an anthropology insisting on humanity’s capacity to know God? While Phillips accurately identifies the limited nature of Plantinga’s challenge to foundationalism, his (or what he considers Wittgenstein’s) alternative is equally problematic, if not more so. In proposing a fundamental difference between the methods and tasks of philosophy and theology respectively, Phillips misses the significance of late twentieth-century challenges to and modifications of foundationalism: we are all in the same epistemological boat. Phillips fails to take adequate account of the fact that Plantinga’s proposal effectively holds that a chain of inference may begin from a proposition believed to be true, even if it is itself not verifiable or acceptable to others. This point, far from distinguishing the philosopher from the theologian, places both on the same footing, for as Plantinga indicates, secular foundationalists have no better basis for their structures than does the Christian who argues from ‘I feel forgiven’. Both reason from propositions which are not merely solipsistic but would be acceptable to a broad swathe of people. However, none of these grounds is beyond dispute or rejection: both philosophers and theologians proceed by persuading rather than proving. Although Phillips is correct in pointing to the essentially foundationalist character of 38 Although Phillips’s position would seem close to that of George Lindbeck in The Nature of Doctrine, Phillips terms the cultural—linguistic approach favoured by Lindbeck a foundationalist theology and dissociates Wittgenstein from it (1988: xvi).

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Plantinga’s argument, thereby showing its weakness, his counter falls down as a constructive proposal: if foundationalism is wrong-headed, what exactly is the alternative? And if the philosopher can offer no more cogent basis for reasoning than the theologian, wherein lies the epistemic superiority of philosophy? If no more can be offered than an argument that is clear about the status of its premises and terms—especially the questionability of the former— then Phillips ends up around about where contemporary foundationalists have also landed, and where Christian theology has been for the last two millennia. In effect, what Plantinga proposes as appropriate for the Christian community has become a necessity for any moderate foundationalist. Given the absence of any defining criteria for basic propositions, any chain of argument effectively begins from propositions that may have much to commend them but fall short of demonstrable certitude. The difference between Plantinga’s proposal and that of moderate foundationalists such as Audi seems to lie in no more than Plantinga’s appeal to communal norms. While that appeal has some fundamental problems attaching to it that Plantinga does not address, his argument does show that we are all in the same epistemic position. If, as Audi contends, one form of justification is a good argument (2001: 14), then there is as little to distinguish Plantinga from the moderate foundationalists as there is to distinguish Phillips’s philosopher, the clarifier and unbewitcher, from the theologian. As Moser writes: ‘The best we can do. . .is to avail ourselves of a kind of instrumental epistemic rationality that does not pretend to escape evidential circularity’ (2002: 15).

A S YNTHETIC PROPOSAL: FOUNDHERENTISM In a world of epistemological greys it is not surprising that some explicitly mediating positions have arisen; some of these, as noted, purport to moderate existing models, whether foundationalist or coherentist. One proposal is more explicitly synthetic, Susan Haack’s ‘Foundherentism’ which, as the label implies, seeks to blend foundationalism and coherentism.39 Haack’s argument is significant, not only because of the constructive proposal she offers, but because of her acute analysis of the current state of epistemology. First, it is important Haack does not reject foundationalist positions because of any failure to distinguish between an older, or ‘classical’, foundationalism and newer, more moderate varieties. She takes ‘foundationalism’ to designate any theory of justification which requires a distinction 39

Others have followed Haack’s lead in this respect, sometimes modifying her picture (see Zeis 2005).

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among justified beliefs between the basic and the derived, such that the basic support the derived, rather than the reverse. She acknowledges, as others have done, that only some species of the theory require certainty, incorrigibility, and infallibility of the basic beliefs (1993: 14). Unlike other commentators, she notes that basic beliefs are those taken as justified, not through the support of other beliefs, but because of the subject’s experience, whether sensory or introspective (1993: 15). While this formulation accords with the substance of what foundationalists currently assert, foundationalists generally do not directly acknowledge that the key categories of basic propositions are experiential. Putting the matter as Haack does highlights the fact that the foundationalist structure is not simply based on experience, but on the privileging of certain kinds of experience; emotional or religious experience, for example, is not included and it is not clear why these forms of experience are inherently more contestable than reports of consciousness or perception such as ‘I see a tree before me’ or ‘I feel dizzy’. The issue here (though Haack does not acknowledge it) is formally similar to what Plantinga pointed out in ‘Is Belief in God Properly Basic?’: foundationalism turns on an internal inconsistency, namely the unjustifiability of its criteria for justification under the terms of those very criteria themselves. In this instance, the issue is not that the criterion itself does not fall into all of the categories it privileges, but that the criterion does not justify the narrowness (one might say arbitrariness) of its own parameters. Haack’s descriptive account of foundationalism in itself points to the need for mediating theories, for she distinguishes pure from impure foundationalism (the latter holding that derived beliefs need be only in part justified by the basic beliefs) and strong from weak foundationalism (weaker versions hold that basic beliefs are justified prima facie but defeasibly; that is, to some degree short of fully, but independently of other beliefs [1993: 16–17]). Both weak and impure foundationalists recognize degrees of justification, as the more strident foundationalists do not. The fact that the foundationalist spectrum can now be taken as including positions that tend towards either coherentism (inasmuch as they allow for partial support of basic beliefs) or incertitude, indicates the in-principle feasibility of Haack’s foundherentism, although Haack’s label for her position makes explicit its blending of positions once considered opposed; even foundationalism supposedly taken neat has in its recent versions already absorbed some of the characteristics of its foes. Essentially, Haack seeks to avoid the weakness of both foundationalism and coherentism. That negative impetus to her enterprise is telling, because she is clearer about what she rejects than about the content of the position she advocates. (This in itself may be a telling sign of the general state of contemporary epistemology.) Indeed, she frankly acknowledges her account lacks completeness and some key concepts are not explained (1993: 93). What is clear is that she wants to allow for ‘pervasive mutual support’, a model she

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bases on the crossword (1993: 81). This element of mutual support seems what she is willing to approve in coherentism. She adds to it a ‘comprehensiveness condition’, which functions negatively, stipulating that someone might be unjustified in a belief because she has failed to take account of relevant evidence (1993: 87). The resultant structure does not claim the epistemic immunities or certitudes of classical foundationalism. Rather, Haack acknowledges that there can be degrees of justification (1993: 74, 81). The resultant structure would allow for propositions of varying levels of individual justification, which intersect at many levels, explicitly attempting to take account of all relevant evidence. Haack notes that foundherentism is not the only alternative to the Scylla and Charybdis of foundationalism and coherentism; the other option is contextualism. Contextualism defines justification in terms of conformity to the standards of a particular epistemic community. (It would therefore seem to label a position such as Plantinga’s, although Haack does not say so explicitly.) Haack faults contextualism chiefly for opening the door to relativism: contextualism ‘leads in short order to the thesis that epistemic standards are not objective but conventional’ (1993: 20). This objection might be answered by pointing to the community-specific nature of all standards, the paradigmprotecting scientific communities of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, for example. The implication often taken from Kuhn’s account is that the scientific community is just as much operating with lenses tinted by communal assumptions and cherished beliefs as any other group, complete with its own mechanisms for ostracizing and punishing those failing to conform to the current orthodoxy. On this account, the scientific community’s claims to objectivity and superior epistemic standing seem little more than self-deceived bluster. Feyerabend makes a similar point but adds to his analysis insights from cultural anthropology.40 The analysis of Kuhn and Feyerabend by no means invalidates the findings or methods of the natural sciences, but Kuhn and Feyerabend indicate that even those who pride themselves on the objectivity of their observation and analysis are scarcely free from overarching assumptions that always risk determining the outcome of their investigations. Contextualism overtly acknowledges it operates within communal parameters, and this acknowledgement, far from constituting a weakness, may actually be its strength. The impetus for contextualism can be read in two related, though ultimately distinct, ways. It can be taken as little more than a description of a state of

40 Haack notes that the issue extends to formal logic as well, asking ‘is there just one correct logical system, or could there be several which are equally correct? and what would “correct” mean in this context?’ (1978: 221). Cp. Geertz: common sense is ‘an interpretation of the immediacies of experience’, a ‘cultural system’ that is ‘not very regular, not very uniform’, and that differs from place to place (1983/1993: 76–7: 11).

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affairs: judging by communities ranging from modern scientists to traditional cultures in remote pockets of the developing world, human perceptions, even of natural phenomena, are shaped by socialization. All that we call knowledge is subject to this filtering through communally tinted lenses, the answers to questions determined by the questions we think to ask, the data we consider filtered by assumptions of what constitutes relevant evidence and by what we expect to find. This form of contextualism could only be discounted by showing that it is descriptively inaccurate. The problem with Haack’s objection to contextualism on grounds that it proposes merely conventional standards is that no one has yet succeeded in showing that any epistemic standard escapes being merely conventional; in other words, she does not explain in what respect descriptive contextualism errs. Those horrified at the prospect of relativism have thus far failed to show the horror is avoidable. A second form of contextualism might be more prescriptive: epistemic standards ought to be communally specific. The argument that charges contextualism with relativism and assumes that relativism is obviously to be avoided works only against contextualism in its prescriptive form. There are not many candidates for representatives of this latter form of contextualism. Plantinga’s claim that communities regulate basic propositions may effectively constitute such a prescriptive proposal, but it is hard to think of any other option currently on offer that could count as such. Haack’s objections to contextualism seem rather futile, then: on the one hand lobbed against a constructive proposal hardly anyone is making, and on the other against a state of affairs that may not be avoidable. Indeed, one could go further, asking as Stich does, why exactly relativism is to be avoided in the first place: ‘I found it surprisingly hard to find any plausible, published arguments aimed at showing why epistemic relativism would be unwelcome’ (1991: 25). Contextualism bears a formal resemblance to coherentism, in that the crucial criterion is the compatibility of beliefs with one another, and it is vulnerable to the same kind of critique: just as a belief that coheres with others could be untrue because the whole complex of beliefs is, for example, a fictional account, so a belief that conforms to a community’s standards could be false if the standards themselves are, or the community is, collectively hopelessly selfdeceived or ill-informed. Although Haack’s critique of contextualism fails to rule it out as an alternative to foundherentism, her foundherentist proposal has much to commend it since it promises, by combining the strengths of foundationalism and coherentism, to steer clear of the pitfalls and self-deceptions of both. Whether one opts for moderate foundationalism, foundherentism, or contextualism, for practical purposes the result will be the same: one argues from principles that are less than indubitable, attempting to construct from them a coherent whole, an account with as few internal inconsistencies as possible, and one which has the capacity to give a responsible account of non-propositional reality as well. That whole, to the extent that it succeeds and

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is plausible, may seem reasonable or reliable, but it will not and cannot yield certitude. Epistemologically, we just have to learn to live with provisionality. In fact, we have been living with it; provisionality, like the infamous 600-pound gorilla, has always been around, even if no one seemed inclined to acknowledge it. Equally, though, to the extent our beliefs may be provisionally trusted, their trustworthiness seems to derive from their embedding in relational structures: the relations of propositions to each other in a system, as well as their relation to the non-propositional (‘real’) world. This element of relationality will prove highly significant for understanding Christian theology.

Rationality The moderate foundationalists (such as Audi), the ultimately less-than-radical critics of foundationalism (such as Plantinga), and the proponents of explicitly synthetic theories (such as Haack) share an underlying concern: the quest for knowledge, for belief which is justified and true, is the search for belief that meets some standard of rationality, the quest for criteria for justification and standards of rational belief. Indeed, one way of defining rationality is to equate rational and justified belief: one’s beliefs are rational insofar as they are justified, and perhaps, one is rational to the extent one holds rational, which is to say, justified, beliefs. Audi claims this is a common assumption among philosophers and that it is mistaken (2001: vii), although he considers that rationality, as applicable to beliefs, is closely connected to justification (2001: 49). Indeed, he comes close to identifying rationality and justification: ‘Justified beliefs are rational, and rational beliefs tend to be justified’ (2001: 196), although he acknowledges that rationality is ‘a more permissive and more global notion than justification’ (2001: 196). Some hold that more is required, because rationality could be regarded as requiring that one acquire and evaluate evidence appropriately (Moser et al. 1998: 124). This stipulation differs from standard requirements of justification only in that it does not specify exactly what could count as evidence. Generally, however, justifying grounds are taken as constituting evidence. One of the few respects in which they might differ is in the falsification requirement. One means of evaluating evidence is to seek the conditions under which it could be falsified. Anthony Flew, for example, faulted arguments for the existence of God for the absence of any such falsifying conditions.41 However, as Richard

41 Flew, in Flew et al. 1955. Popper is above all associated with the notion that scientific beliefs are only properly grounded if they have been subjected to experiments designed to falsify them and they emerge from these unscathed (1959, ch. 4). Kuhn (1962) is taken by Skinner as directly countering Popper (Skinner 1985: 10), but Kuhn himself addresses Popper only briefly and fairly mildly (‘I doubt the latter [falsifying experiences] exist’ 1962: 145).

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Bernstein notes, the problem is that the data do not come announcing their status as potential falsifiers: it is we who decide what counts as falsification or refutation, and this judgement is eminently fallible (1983: 71). The demand for evidence can thus be taken as posing a question, not only to those of whom the demand is made, but to those making it, for the demand itself raises questions of what constitutes a standard for acceptable evidence, how one is to weigh conflicting evidence, and how much evidence one must have to pass muster at the bar of rationality. Merely claiming some sort of evidence for one’s beliefs seems scarcely enough to guarantee rationality. The fact that I broke a leg after walking under a ladder could be cited as evidence that walking under ladders brings about catastrophe, but it is scarcely good evidence. If one equated rationality with holding justified beliefs and held to one of the traditional models of justification, there would be little room for leeway in what constituted rationality. Once the standards of justification have become more ambiguous, though, standards of rationality necessarily do so also, if these are bound up with justification. For example Audi notes: rational persons disagree about some important matters and . . .even a high degree of rationality in persons is consistent with great diversity among them.. . .An adequate theory of rationality must do justice to both the variability that marks different ranges of experience and diverse cultural settings. (2001: 9).

Although Audi does not say it specifically, the implication is that we can judge, at least to some degree, the rationality of propositions by the rationality we accord to persons. If people we otherwise deem to be rational hold differing (and, one supposes, possibly conflicting) views, then those views seem to acquire at least the potential for rational status in virtue of the rational qualities of the persons holding them. This is the epistemological equivalent of a virtue theory of ethics: we know at least something of rationality by looking at rational people. Audi’s position has an immediate plausibility, perhaps because of our experience of social existence: we tend to give the benefit of the doubt to claims expressed by those whom we generally find to be sensible. It is not without problems, nonetheless. First, he also maintains one cannot be rational without having some rational beliefs (2001: 196). The relation between beliefs and persons is therefore circular. If we can define neither what it means for a person to be rational nor what it means for a belief to be rational, then defining the two in relation to each other does little to further our understanding of either. Second, even rational people can be irrational on occasion (can leap to unwarranted conclusions when under threat, for example, or be blinded by such factors as self-interest). Third, the frank acknowledgement of conflicting rationalities, while plausible enough in itself, can function only as a caution against overly hasty determinations of what is rational; it does not actually get us any closer to discriminating between the rational, the

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irrational, and the non- or supra-rational. Audi proposes a minimal definition of rationality, what is not irrational (2001: 50), and while this minimal definition leaves room for differing rationalities, it, too, lends little assistance in determining where the boundary between the rational and the irrational lies.42 Even the allowance for culturally specific rationalities, or awareness of cultural filters that may be operative in interpreting or evaluating rationality, may not solve the problem. As Stich notes, ‘The fact that a given system of cognitive processes prevails in a culture does not even begin to show that that system is the best for that culture’ (1991: 141). No more does it show that system is true. If no consensus obtains on the criteria for justification, however, then that non-existent consensus can no more define what is rational than appeal to the rationality of persons can. The relation of justification and rationality never seems to progress beyond circularity, any more than the relation between rational beliefs and rational persons does. That circularity may be endemic: as Moser, Mulder, and Trout acknowledge, rationality is often determined relative to a worldview or ontology (1998: 179). If our notions of what it means to be rational are largely or wholly determined by a prior web of beliefs and attitudes, then it is no wonder we find it difficult to specify criteria for rationality without reference to those webs, and it may be that rationality can only be defined in relation to some notionally prior web, whether acknowledged or not. There is also a pragmatic approach to rationality: it can be taken as a goalorientated notion, so that belief ‘is rational for the individual if it is rational for the individual to believe that it will satisfy her goals’ (Foley 2002: 182). On this reasoning, it would be rational for a deluded person to leap out of a skyscraper window holding a bed-sheet if she believed this would fulfil her goal of flying: she will, after all, fly, at least briefly. This approach to rationality resembles some of the weakest arguments in favour of religious belief: believe and you will be happier, more fulfilled, and, as a bonus, have eternal life. Such approaches fall into the trap of Feuerbachian and Freudian projection, by bypassing the prime reason one would believe anything whatsoever: because one believes it is true. Perhaps we should give up on stipulating criteria for rationality altogether. Bernstein notes that the main issue is not rationality; the vital issue is the question of what is involved in understanding, interpreting, and explaining the world around us, in its inescapable otherness (and not just its rationality or lack of it): ‘How are we to do justice to the strangeness that we discover when we encounter alien types of activities, beliefs, rituals, institutions, and practices, without falsifying and distorting them?’ (1983: 28). What Bernstein delicately suggests here is that the very quest for rationality may lead us to 42 Audi also allows that criteria for rationality can be either relativistic or non-relativisic (2001: 199). At other points, he takes rationality to be consonant with reason rather than the mere absence of rationality (2001: 212).

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misconstrue data and introduce error, even as we accuse others of straying from rational reflection. We live in an inescapably pluralist world. We always have, though in other eras we in the West could fool ourselves that we had a monopoly on certain sorts of truth. To a significant degree, contemporary epistemology seems to have been driven by fear of relativism, and while relativism and pluralism cannot be simply equated, in practice objections to relativism may as often as not represent fear of pluralism. Whatever their discomfitures, it is not clear that either relativism or pluralism is avoidable. The world of the Enlightenment and of the Rationalist philosophers was largely homogeneous: it was white, male, largely oblivious or indifferent to structural injustice, and stretched little farther than the cultures of Europe, some nods in the direction of ‘Orientalism’ notwithstanding. To reflect on rationality in such circumstances was a much safer, more constrained, and in an important sense unreal enterprise, than to do so in our own confusingly polychromatic setting. The prospect of ‘anything goes’ is so horrific that the assumption seems to have arisen that there must be criteria for distinguishing true from false notions in some clear and reliable way. As Bernstein notes: ‘much of the polemic in the field of philosophy and history of science is still influenced by the dichotomy of objectivism and relativism, this dichotomy obscures the underlying coherence and common ground shared by the participants in the discussion’ (1983: 172). Both the history of science and cultural anthropology indicate how deeply perspectival the quest for knowledge might be, however.43 To object to an epistemology because it cannot ward off relativism, on the ground of relativism’s unacceptability, is akin to saying it would be unacceptable not to have a cure for every cancer. At one level, it is unacceptable, hence research continues. The fact remains, however, that the unacceptable position is where we currently find ourselves. Railing against it on grounds of unacceptability does not change the fact that we do not possess cures for every disease any more than we, at the moment, have any criteria for identifying truths that are not vulnerable to powerful criticisms. The fact that there are different conceptions of rationality, as there are differing standards of justification and differing notions of warrant, does not entail there being no means of adjudication among competing claims, however. As Feyerabend notes, it is possible to evaluate standards of rationality and improve them (1988: 248). Just so, there are better and worse arguments. The problem is that while at some common sense level we can see some arguments are weak, and while it is possible to propose criteria by which the strength of an argument may be measured, the more precisely these are 43 The structuralist anthropology of Lévi-Strauss offers a different perspective, however, inasmuch as his work can be taken as seeking to subsume cultural diversity under an account of general laws governing mental operations and thus determining beliefs (Skinner 1985: 18).

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specified, the more vulnerable they become to objections of cultural chauvinism. Evaluations of rationality are susceptible to exactly the same problems. Whatever difficulties beset the concept of rationality, however, relinquishing it altogether is scarcely an option for Christian theology, given the tradition’s insistence on the intellectual nature of both God and humankind. Derrida highlights the distinctiveness of the Christian take on rationality as he rejects it: ‘The “rationality”—but perhaps that word should be abandoned for reasons that will appear at the end of this sentence—which governs a writing thus enlarged and radicalized, no longer issues from a logos’ (1974/ 1976: 10). Presumably what Derrida means is that rationality is no longer perceived as issuing from a logos. If so, then the assumption would appear to be that the welter of clashing rationalities proves there could be no single source of rationality. That conclusion is by no means necessary, however. The cautions coming from the side of both the philosophy of science and cultural anthropology regarding the conditioned nature of any rationality actually harmonize quite well with the insights of the Christian tradition. For while that tradition claimed rationality of both God and humanity, it also insisted on the absolute transcendence of divine nature. Inasmuch as we can—indeed must—predicate rationality of divine nature, we are saying that what the word ‘rationality’ normally designates is in some sense or to some degree applicable to God. Nonetheless, divine rationality exceeds ours, to the extent that we may not always be able to ‘read’ it at all. Christians affirm divine rationality on principle (and one might say: in the trust that the Persons of the Trinity are rational) while simultaneously acknowledging that the category eludes precise definition and divine rationality cannot be entirely encapsulated by our own functional-but-faulty intellectual equipment. Our own measure of rationality allows us to apprehend and recognize it, but not finally to comprehend it; if we could, the limitations of our minds would also be the measure of the divine intellect. We can affirm the existence and importance of rationality because we are aware of it in ourselves and aware of our dependence upon it, yet our awareness of our own limitations means we are also to some degree aware of what we do not and cannot understand. The Christian conception of rationality—that which we inhabit and recognize and ourselves in some measure possess, though fail to define— bears a marked resemblance to the position contemporary secular epistemology has been forced to adopt: holding to the notion that there is something we can label ‘rationality’ without being able to define it precisely or satisfactorily. Secular thinkers seem to have been backed into this place because of the failure of viable criteria for justification and rationality, but the place they inhabit perforce is remarkably similar to the place Christian theology has lived for millennia in virtue of its anthropology and its doctrine of God.

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THE PROBABLE AND THE PLAUSIBLE One possible exit out of the apparently circular relation of justification and rationality is to focus on probability or plausibility as one’s end, rather than justified (and perhaps certain) belief. Thus Richard Fumerton, who deems the concept of justification perhaps the most fundamental in epistemology (Moser 2002: 204), claims that epistemic justification must make probable the truth of propositions believed (Moser 2002: 205). Given the weight he attaches to justification, it is significant he accords no greater force to it than the power to render probability. This cautious approach to justification befits the current situation, in which stronger claims have consistently failed, however. Alston, who insists that a minimal form of foundationalism is defensible, also argues for the reliability of a source of belief, rather than its indubitability (1989: 319; he traces the reliabilist view back to Reid [320]). Plantinga avers that he knows of no evidence against the belief that a good and omnipotent God could have created a world in which we see evil, and there is no reason to think that the existence of evil in the world, taken either by itself or in connection with other things we know, renders God’s existence improbable (1974: 194–5);44 the absence of improbability seems as far as he is willing to go in the direction of certitude. In holding so, he was perhaps anticipated by Quine and Ullian, who concluded that ‘To learn to distinguish the plausible from the implausible is to develop one part of wisdom; it leads as well as anything can toward true belief ’ (1978: 133). They are not by this remark advocating epistemological laxity, for they also maintained that ‘a healthy garden of beliefs requires well-nourished roots and tireless pruning’ (1978: 126). However, he seems to have anticipated the modest position adopted by contemporary epistemology out of necessity: the hard-line demands for justification and proof seemed to implode of their own accord. The choice we are left with seems between radical scepticism or some form of epistemology of modest trust. The state of contemporary epistemology highlights the character of Christian theology. It seeks truth, but without assurance of arriving (at least in this life) at indubitability. In this state of provisionality and corrigibility we seek for and test the truth by multiple means, reasoning from what we take to be allowable givens, and between inferences, checking that the latter follow from acceptable data and are compatible with one

44 Plantinga’s attitude to the use of argument is, however, complex. In Warranted Christian Belief he acknowledges that he knows of no argument against Christian belief that seems likely to convince anyone who does not already accept the conclusion, although he does not see this situation as counting against Christian belief. However, he declares he will argue that if Christian beliefs are true then the most satisfactory way to hold them will not be as conclusions of argument (2000: 201).

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another. Whether or not one is comfortable with the word itself, the structure of reasoning turns out to be inescapably systematic in character.

Systems Christian theology’s concern with truth, the justification of propositions claimed to be true, and with the coherence, or at least non-contradiction, of those propositions, is directly related to its systematicity. Both justification and coherence imply structure: justification implies a ‘vertical’ relation, of basic propositions to those they justify; coherence implies a set of lateral relations among propositions.45 In either case, however, the very idea (whether of justification or coherence) implies a set of propositions standing in orderly and perhaps necessary relation to one another, which we could call a system: an orderly and integrated assemblage of related items. A parallel, though looser, correlation subsists between the correspondence theory of truth and systematicity: although the notion that propositions are true when they reflect states of affairs in the natural world need not imply a system as such, it does imply relationality, and relationality is the core of systematicity.46 The systematicity of Christian theology is a function not only of the internal relations of its propositions—the way in which they tend outward from themselves toward others in the web—but also of the entities they portray. If theology’s concern is ‘God and other things as they are related to God’, then any discussion of created things necessarily implies relationality, a relation of each creature to God and relations among created things, at least in virtue of Cp. Rescher: ‘The groundwork of the coherence theory has its roots in the idea of system’ (1973: 31, 32; he traces this notion to the work of Bradley). The coherence theory is concerned with the relation of propositions to each other, not as atomistic statements (Rescher 1973: 32). 46 The reflection of the natural world in a system nevertheless constitutes an interpretation of the world, which necessarily adds something to it and cannot be only a reflection of it. This point is well brought out by Borges (1960). In his essay on the grand systematizer Wilkins, he cites a classification which Franz Kuhn attributed to a Chinese encyclopaedia, dividing animals into (a) those belonging to the Emperor; (b) those that are embalmed; (c) those that are tame; (d) suckling pigs; (e) sirens; (f) fabled ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those included in this classification; (i) those which behave as if mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) drawn with the finest camel hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those which have just broken a vase; and (n) those which from a distance look like flies. This categorization will almost certainly strike the modern Western reader as bizarre and one might attribute that reaction to simple cultural incomprehension, although Borges also cites a category system devised by the Bibliographic Institute of Brussels which parcelled the universe into 1,000 subdivisions, 262 corresponding to the Pope, 282 to the Roman Catholic church, 263 to the Day of the Lord (and so on), which seems to the modern, even Western, reader equally arbitrary (Borges 1960: 142). Borges concludes: ‘there is no classification of the universe which is not arbitrary and conjectural. The reason is very simple: we do not know what sort of thing the universe is’ (1960: 142–3). Nevertheless ‘the impossibility of penetrating the divine schema of the universe need not however dissuade us from devising human schemas, even if we know these to be provisional’ (1960: 143). 45

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their common relation to God. While it would appear possible to discuss God without reference to other things—the doctrine of divine aseity in fact claims such absolute divine independence of other things—two points mitigate against the notion that a Christian doctrine of God could be devoid of relationality. First, this doctrine must be articulated by creatures and so of necessity contains a creaturely element; it both presupposes and implies a relation between God and the creatures who engage in theological reflection. Second, inasmuch as divine nature exists nowhere but in the three Persons of the Trinity and these exist in necessary relation to each other, the divine nature which Christian theology describes is necessarily relational. To describe God and other things is to describe a set of entities that are, once any creature exists who can engage in such description, inevitably related to each other.47 Since the theology that does this describing of related entities at least aspires to coherence, it can be called systematic. Nevertheless, the term ‘system’ comes with a lot of baggage. Some objections to systems seem matched in their virulence by the vagueness of the content of their objections. Holmer, for example, deplores the ‘scandal’ of certain kinds of academic theology, whose fecundity ‘looks like speculation’ or ‘senseless system-mongering’, ‘talking without even doing the hard job of ascertaining the relevant criteria’ (1978: x).48 Sometimes those suspicious of the very notion of systematic theology are so because they associate it with the philosophical concepts of systems. Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Malebranche, Kant, and Hegel have all been linked to some notion of system49 and some theological distrust of systems seems to consist in little more than guilt by association, as if the sheer approval of some concept of system by eminent philosophers were enough to require Christian theologians to shun any version of it.50 47 This position does not, of course, imply God must create, merely that once created things exist, they are necessarily related to God, and God is de facto related to them as their creator. 48 There are analogies in other disciplines. Skinner notes the attack of C. Wright Mills on what the latter termed grand theory, ‘by which he meant the belief that the primary goal of the social disciplines should be that of seeking to construct “a systematic theory” of “the nature of man and society” ’ (1985: 3). As Skinner notes: ‘The effect of all this was to make it appear that two millennia of philosophizing about the social world had suddenly come to an end’ (1985: 4). In other words, one response to objections against systematicity is from a discipline’s traditions. The fact that the latter support some form of systematicity does not, of course, make systems or ‘system-mongering’ valid, but should act as a caution before one repudiates systems or systematicity in principle. 49 Menne 1964: 1264; Angehrn 2004: 2007–8. Suspicion of systems is also evident in some philosophers. Taylor, for example, takes Levinas as viewing Hegel’s systematic impulses as resulting in the muffling of the voice of the Other (Taylor 1987: 213). Bataille, also, refers to ‘the blind spot’ of Hegelianism as ‘the excrement of the system’ (Taylor 1987: 122). 50 Philosophers have also sometimes considered scholastic summae, notably those of Aquinas, as systematic enterprises, where this systematization represents a negative quality: ‘the ambition to totalize what human knowledge acquires. In effect, the thirteenth century is, in a manner that makes one think of Hegel, lived as much as an epoch of achieved science, as if the task were simply to put in order an acquisition that could be considered as defined and

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Let us, however, consider the possibility that the objection to systems rests on more than sheer suspicion of philosophy. Take Kant as an example: for Kant, a single unifying idea creates order among the constitutive discrete elements of a system (Critique of Pure Reason A833/B861; references to Kant hereafter are to this work) and this unity is what converts a body of knowledge into a science (A832/B860). What ensures systematic unity, on Kant’s account, is a homogeneity assured by the subjection of its elements to overarching principles and the affinity of its concepts (A657/B686). Perhaps because Kant’s notion of system depends on notions akin to order and harmony, one of the important discussions of systematicity in Kant’s oeuvre is to be found in his aesthetics, Critique of Judgement. It is Kant’s stress on the hegemony of a single idea within a system which potentially makes his conception of systematicity objectionable, especially if the dominant idea were a philosophical, or otherwise purely human, concept which would then control (and subordinate) the data of scripture and/or tradition.51 The problem with a dominant idea is, however, not simply that the data of revelation might be subordinated to an alien principle or principles. The dominant idea might as well come from scripture, in which case the selection of this idea and its coronation as the chief idea must be a human determination, since scripture itself does not contain any statement to the effect that ‘this is the most important idea herein’. Luther’s oeuvre could be taken as an example of a dominant-idea theology. Here the idea itself (justification by nearly complete.’ Thomas then becomes the name of ‘an obscure double of Descartes and Hegel’ (Taylor 1987: 221–2). Taylor is here quoting Denis Hollier, but apparently with approval. Several points are suspicious here. First, the references to Descartes and Hegel suggest a back-interpretation, whereby Aquinas is understood through the lens of later (and, one senses, to the author more familiar) philosophers. Second, the fact that both scholastic summae and Gothic cathedrals are being described in the same breath suggests a warmedover version of Erwin Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism which, in slightly less hostile terms, also sought to extract broad-brush similarities from quite different enterprises, largely by dint of sheer assertion. One could challenge such analysis on many counts; for our purposes, it is sufficient to note that Aquinas’s summae are not, and do not purport to be, global accounts of knowledge or reality. They are concerned with religion, questions pertaining to Christianity, and their ‘epistemological project’ does not extend to providing an account of all human knowledge, any more than the Gothic cathedral was designed to be anything other than a place of Christian worship. The analysis is in any case undercut by the citation of Hegel’s notion that a system cannot be unfinished (Taylor 1987: 224). If so, the Summa theologiae, the prime example of a medieval summa, is not a system. 51 In relation to this volume, the fact that Kant described systems as ‘Architektonik’ may be an indictment of undue philosophical interest, given the book’s title. For Kant, Architektonik is the art of constructing systems and consists in unifying a body of knowledge by means of an idea (A832/B60). Aside from the differences between two notions (or tropes) of architecture and the architectonic, I can only point out that Kant does not own the image and its cognates, and it does not become theologically suspect simply because a philosopher chose to employ it. A different sense of ‘architecture’ (and a different sensibility) operates here. One may be able to abstract a dominant idea out of an architectural structure, but in the end, a building stands because of the way its components relate to each other and the ground they stand on, and not to some abstract principle one can extrapolate from the structure. (An abstract principle might, of course, lend a structure an aesthetic unity, but that is a different matter.)

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grace)52 is certainly scriptural, so the usual objections to the domination of theology by philosophy do not apply. One could still object to the elevation of one scriptural principle as that which subordinates others, however, especially given Luther’s inclination to devalue those parts of the canon that do not lend themselves to harmonization with the privileged principle (the letter of James, for example). Significantly, Luther’s work is rarely, if ever, taken to be systematic,53 yet if the criteria of a system are the presence of a dominant idea and the subordination of other ideas to it (or perhaps even the exclusion of ideas not compatible with it), then one would have to conclude that Luther’s oeuvre is among the most systematic in the Christian tradition. The desirability of systematicity in this sense is questionable, given the simplification of the scriptural witness it presupposes. If what it means to be a system is for one idea to predominate over others, then there will always be a question about the legitimacy of the privileged idea’s status, but this problem cannot simply be taken as relating to the dominance of a philosophical principle. Accounts that purport to describe theological systems nevertheless often exhibit no more than minimal differences from philosophical definitions. Menne, for example, distinguishes between a system proper (defined in explicitly Kantian terms) and a systematization (Systematisierung) in which the data of a given subject are organized according to a purely external principle, as in any descriptive discipline. Thus far, it seems a theological system would differ markedly from a philosophical one. However, the note of a system proper, on this account, is deduction: its elements stand in a relation to each other marked by the dependency of some on others. The archetypal system is axiomatically or hypothetically deductive: just a few fundamental concepts (Grundbegriffe) generate the rest. The Grundbegriffe seem to function much as the dominating ideas do in a philosophical system. This schema is recognizable as a foundationalist structure, with the sole difference of the frank acknowledgement that the starting principles might be hypothetical or axiomatic (1964: 1264).54

52 One could argue that Luther’s theology is dominated by more than one idea, the set of solas, for example: sola fide, sola gratia, sola scriptura. Whether one idea or a select few, though, his theology is certainly characterized by a small set of dominating principles. 53 Barth, for example, includes it among the theologies classified as ‘irregular dogmatics’, by which he essentially means ‘non-systematic theology’ (Church Dogmatics I/1 7.2 (1932/1975: 275–80). 54 The term ‘axiom’ is bedevilled with problems. It is commonly and informally used to designate a principle taken as read or assumed (perhaps temporarily) for the sake of argument. Technically, however, an axiom is a proposition that begins a line of reasoning without itself being proven, but which will be demonstrated later in the argument, a sense quite different from its informal usage as a unproven or congenitally unprovable claim. It is not clear in exactly what sense Menne is using it.

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A system’s axioms need not be self-evident, but Menne stipulates that they not contradict each other, and that they be independent of each other. This last requirement is also problematic, for several reasons, including some that are specifically theological. First, it is far from clear what the criterion of such independence would be. In practice, it could be very hard to distinguish dependence from overlap or intersection and the last might well constitute the systematization of a set of propositions, far from counting against it. Second, theological propositions necessarily intersect, given the relations among the realities they attempt to denote and describe. For example, even to assert divine aseity entails the claim that aseity distinguishes divine nature radically from all else. In proposing aseity as an attribute, one necessarily points towards a doctrine spelling out the created order’s origin in and everlasting dependence on the divine from which it derives, qualities that distinguish creation from the Creator who is a se. Conversely, maintaining that creation is dependent on God is as much to make a claim about God as about creation. Paradoxically, to assert divine aseity is to assume relationality: God is independent of all else, but discourse about this radically transcendent one is only possible where there is a creature to grasp that aseity is a distinguishing characteristic, and to distinguish requires two or more entities among whom distinctions are made. When a theology asserts divine aseity, therefore, it deems God to need nothing that is not-God, but equally (if tacitly) proclaims the existence of not-God. Perhaps as a consequence of the requirements he has laid upon systems, Menne concludes that theology can be only partly systematic (it has ‘beschränkte Systematisierbarkeit’ 1964: 1264), because of the historical character of revelation. This comment is revealing, since its import is that Christian theology can either be Biblical or fully systematic, but not both. Presumably, the reason for this fundamental opposition is the untidiness of history, which resists incorporation into neat categories or subsumption beneath a dominating principle. Theology, however, views the unruliness of human affairs sub specie aeternitatis, and considers them ultimately to fall under the purview of divine providence. To claim theology must be disorderly or incoherent because of its human element would be to grant that element primacy over its divine element, effectively to allow that theology cannot portray a rational and benevolent God because our knowledge of the divine derives from our encounter with God in the human realm. It is also to assume that the mess humankind makes of the world is the final word, that God cannot bring good out of it, and that our disorders definitively prevent us from seeing providence at work. However, it is possible that Menne’s objection has more to do with the contestability of the starting principles of a system grounded in revelation, given the conditioned character of these. Because his account of the structure of systems is clearly foundationalist (positing some propositions which serve

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to ground others deductively, while not being so grounded themselves) he runs into the same problem as classical foundationalism, namely, finding workable criteria for the starting propositions, criteria which can ensure they are strong enough to bear the weight of the structure. Menne’s view that the appeal to history and revelation precludes theology’s being truly systematizable follows perhaps from an assumption about the nature of acceptable starting premises, an assumption no longer considered necessary (indeed possible), at least in Anglo-American epistemology. Menne’s account therefore indicates why it might be valuable for theologians to consider the philosophical developments of the last few decades, if only because these indicate that the problems facing theology are not specifically endemic to it, but challenge other disciplines as well. Systematic theology, as understood here, exhibits or aims to exhibit the same freedom from internal contradiction and use of deduction that number among the hallmarks of systems.55 The difference between theological systems and systems as Menne understands them lies first in the criteria for acceptable starting propositions, and second in Menne’s requirement that these be independent of each other. By building upward from normative propositions into webs of deduced propositions that intersect with each other, Christian theology blends elements of both foundationalism and coherentism: theological systems can be understood in light of the modifications to foundationalism that are now deemed expedient, and in light of coherentism’s insistence on the interdependence of propositions. Traces of such a mentality may be found in some Christian analysts of systematic theology. Christian Danz, for example, refers to ‘die altprot. [estantische] Theo.[logie]’ which orders the multitude of articles of belief into a ‘corpus integrum’ with a unifying thread (Leitfaden; Danz 2004: 2009). The Leitfaden may sound uncomfortably close to Kant’s domineering Vernunftsbegriff (rational principle), though depending on who exactly the ‘old Protestants’ were (presumably the scholastics), they may well have been writing before Kant in any case. Certainly, many of the others mentioned by Danz as systematicians could not have been emulating Kant. These are the usual suspects (Origen, Damascene, Aquinas) with some additions: Lombard and, 55 In railing against systematicity (though it is not clear whether the objection is to systematic theology altogether or only certain forms of it), Holmer criticizes that conception of theology as a ‘homogeneous domain in which certain relations and rules of logic would therefore hold’ (1978: 94). It is not clear what ‘homogeneous’ means in this context; it perhaps approximates to ‘coherence’. No more is it clear what work ‘certain’ is doing here. The logical relations of inference and non-contradiction, for example, are those of everyday argumentation, many examples of which can be found in the disputations of Jesus of Nazareth and the apostle Paul. Holmer contends that theology would only be viable if it purports to be systematic, if its chains of inference were relatively strict (1978: 94), but it is not clear why this should be the case, nor what would constitute acceptable ‘strictness’. Despite his railing against logic, he nevertheless insists that there is a ‘grammar and logic to faith, and theology is part of that’ (1978: 186).

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surprisingly, Irenaeus. Calvin, whom one might have taken as an important entry in the lists, is curiously not included, for reasons one can only conjecture. With the exception of those of Irenaeus, all these works have the breadth and transparent organization that lead to their being considered systems. (Irenaeus’ major work, Against Heresies, has the breadth, but rather less than transparent organization.) In other words, the genre definition seems once more to have stumbled onto the stage: the de facto or sotto voce criteria for systematic theology are scope and a locus-by-locus structuring of the text (even though the latter is not the case with Against Heresies). What is striking about Danz’s description of systematics and his lists of its exemplary practitioners is the disparity between the two: if the note of systematics is a unifying Leitfaden, it would be hard to specify what this was in relation to Origen, Damascene, Aquinas, Lombard, or Irenaeus. Certainly, Danz himself does not identify any unifying factors. Moreover, if the Leitfaden is crucial, the absence of a theologian like Luther, who has an obvious one, is puzzling. Whether one sees a Leitfaden as a positive mark of a theological system, or a Vernunftsbegriff as an unwelcome philosophical intruder, the fact remains that texts characterizable as systematic theologies seem to lack either: very few are characterizable as determined by a single idea, whether it is a governing principle or prevalent theme. If the philosophical accounts of systems unhelpfully stress a single unifying idea as the hallmark of a system, however, the theological content given to ‘system’ seems to imply no more than a treatment of a lot of doctrines within the compass of a single work. Arguably, neither definition gets to the heart of the issue. A common feature of both definitions is that, in different ways, each stresses the relations of propositions to each other within a single framework. Not all the objections to systems come from those straightforwardly characterizable as philosophers or theorists of systematic theology. Kierkegaard, for example, while classifiable as a philosopher, is just as often taken as a constructive theologian. As such, his objections to systems carry considerable weight. Kierkegaard’s complaints seem largely lodged against the Hegelian conception of a system (Concluding Unscientific Postcript, 1941: 104–5; cp.108; references to Kierkegaard’s work hereafter in this chapter are to this work). Moreover, some of his more sarcastic asides seem directed against what he takes to be the inflated regard for systems (on the part of Hegelians?), rather than against systems themselves.56 Kierkegaard makes the assumption ‘I shall be as willing as the next man to fall down in worship before the system’ (Kierkegaard 1941: 97). The sarcasm of ‘The system is almost finished, or at least under construction, and will be finished by next Sunday’ (97) seems, taken in conjunction with Kierkegaard’s insistence that systems are by definition complete, to indicate that there are in fact no systems, that those constructing them promise a completion they cannot deliver and so undermine the claim to existence of the very thing they are so busily constructing—but this point is at most implicit. One advantage of writing in a satirical mode is that one can make shadowy claims 56

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(apparently on Hegelian grounds) that there is an intrinsic connection between systems and completion: a system is by definition finished: ‘system and finality are one’ (98). If even not quite finished, then the discourse in question is an hypothesis (98). This particular position is not applicable to Christian theology: there is no theological ground on which one must claim finality or even completion as definitive of any form of theology. If finality were of the essence, there could be no theology whatsoever, for all Christian thought has an element of provisionality attaching to it: it could be correct and complete only with the benefit of knowledge not to be had in this life. As Kierkegaard notes, ‘Reflection has the remarkable property of being infinite’ (102). Furthermore, the system on Kierkegaard’s account begins with the immediate, and hence without presuppositions (101). It is not entirely clear what it means to begin from ‘the immediate’, but very clear that Christian theology cannot begin without presuppositions. Kierkegaard’s views of system, if applicable to systematic theology, would entail not only that some theology is not systematic, but that no theology—not the Summa theologiae, not the Institutes of the Christian Religion, not any of the twentieth-century works entitled ‘Systematic Theology’—is systematic. Thus far, Kierkegaard’s quarrels with systems seem directed against one quite specific notion of them. His deeper objection may be to what he sees as the opposition of the exigencies of logic and existence. He proposes two theses: ‘a logical system is possible and an existential system is impossible’ (99) and ‘nothing must be incorporated in a logical system that has any relation to existence’ (100). Several points are significant here. The first is the assumption that a logical system and existence or the existential necessarily stand in opposition to each other. This assumption makes sense from the perspective of those philosophies that see a gulf between the contingent and the necessary, but not from the perspective of Christianity, although something depends on how one takes ‘logical system’. If it denotes a formal system of logic, then while Kierkegaard may be right, his position has no bearing on the question of systematic theology. If, however, ‘logical system’ denotes any complex of interlocking notions, the relations among which could be deemed logical, then his dictum is clearly not applicable to Christian theology. Theology necessarily has a relation to existence, both in the sense that it arises from human existence coram Deo and in that it addresses the human condition. To the extent that it is faithful to its divine source, it must be logical, in the sense that it gives an account of God and other things that is free from internal contradiction and is consistent with the warrants on which it purports to

without having actually to substantiate them. It is not the most virtuous form of argumentation, and the fact that Kierkegaard chooses to prosecute his objections to systems in such fashion, at least on occasion, detracts from the cogency of his objections against them.

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draw. To be Christian theology at all, it must at least essay both existential relevance and logicality. Kierkegaard seems in at least partial agreement with the position just sketched, for although he denies that an existential system can be formulated, he is equally adamant that it does not follow that no system exists: ‘Reality itself is a system—for God; but it cannot be a system for any existing spirit’ (107). His objection to systems again stems from his assumption of their finality: because existence is opposed to finality (107), it follows that existence and systems are also opposed. Kierkegaard’s position would entail that for God, reality and existence are also opposed (if reality is for God a system, as Kierkegaard earlier claimed). It is hard to see how Kierkegaard’s position can be defended against the charge of internal self-contradiction. One might point to his stress on paradox: on his own account, he cannot fully make sense of our condition. In that case, though, there is no need to regard his assumptions about the nature of either systems or existence as correct. Other assumptions of Kierkegaard’s about systems are equally questionable; for example, the notion that the systematic Idea is the identity of subject and object, the unity of thought and being (112). Whether this contention counts for or against systems does not actually matter, given that it is by no means an indubitable assumption about systems or ‘systematic Ideas’. One senses in Kierkegaard’s polemic against systems opposition that is not simply a function of less than inevitable definitions of systems, nor merely a quarrel with Hegel or Hegelians. Long after the extended passage on systems in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, in which we find the arguments just outlined, he writes: ‘My principal thought was that in our age, because of the great increase of knowledge, we had forgotten what it means to exist and what inwardness signifies, and that the misunderstanding between speculative philosophy and Christianity was explicable on that ground’ (223, emphasis in original). Although there is no mention of systems here, it is clear that speculative philosophy and huge stores of knowledge are being viewed as separated by a vast gulf from Christianity, with its concern for human life as lived. Kierkegaard’s worry is that in the concerted pursuit of knowledge, the value of authentic existence and introspection (or perhaps, attention to the inner life) will be forgotten. He associates the first with speculative philosophy and the other two with Christianity. Again, although there is no mention of systems here, the allusions to volume and speculation suggest that he may well have Hegel and/or Hegelians in mind again. Whether or not that is the case, the contrast between vast intellectual structures and concern for the actual inner lives of individuals seems clear enough. The question is whether systematic theology, or Christian theology, in any sense or form, is not equally vulnerable to this critique. At one level, of course, it is: to the extent that theology occupies itself with questions such as the relations of the Persons of the Trinity or the nature of the church,

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it is concerned with abstract questions and the logical relations among ideas. As such, it may be, or appear to be, remote from the immediate relation of the individual to God. This objection could apply to any Christian theology, however, as well as to adjacent disciplines such as Biblical interpretation. Perhaps one could take the concern for existence and inwardness as stipulating that Christian discourse should be limited to hortatory or devotional writings (though it is by no means clear this is the conclusion Kierkegaard had in mind). Even if so, those writing in these modes would still need to learn to interpret the Bible and the Christian faith, and the catechetical task would give rise to theological writings. That is in fact how Christian theology began. The letters of Ignatius of Antioch, written in great urgency as their author was being hauled off to martyrdom in Rome, advise churches along his route, but contain the beginnings of reflection on Christology and ecclesiology. Origen’s On First Principles sprang from his work in a catechetical school. Gregory Nazianzen’s sermons in the Church of the Resurrection in Constantinople are now read not as homilies, but simply as theology (and number among the most important theology the early church ever produced), but they began as addressees to what we might today call a parish mission. Gregory Nyssen’s Great Catechetical Oration, originally written for baptizands, is likewise now read as an important landmark in patristic theology. Address people in their condition as those who need God, and you have begun theology. Answer their questions and you will almost certainly end up explaining how various doctrines fit together: answering ‘How can a good God allow evil?’, for example requires the respondent to articulate a doctrine of God, of providence, and of creation and Fall, and not simply sketch the form of each atomistically, but show how they are compatible with each other. Addressing human anguish in the Christian eventually requires the articulation of a theology of many parts, and human inquirers have a habit of wanting to know how those parts are consistent with each other. It is not only the constructors of vast systematic theologies who ask ‘But what about. . .?’ Small children can be as tenacious in the pursuit of consistency and coherence as philosophers, as any Sunday School teacher knows. Some of Kierkegaard’s doubts are mirrored in the remarks Tillich makes about systems, although Tillich notes them in the context of a work labelled a systematic theology. Like Kierkegaard, Tillich worries about the existential context in which a theological answer is given (II.3).57 The relation of the essential and the existential is not necessary (II.3), but ‘irrational’, just as the way from God to Christ is ‘paradoxical’ (II.3). Whether or not the last point is theologically inevitable or as obvious as Tillich seems to think it is, it voices a sensibility clearly in line with Kierkegaard’s. For Tillich, however, these 57

All quotations from Tillich are from the Systematic Theology. Citations are by Roman numeral for the volume, followed by Arabic numerals for the page in that volume.

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considerations do not mean there can be no systematic theology, but rather that its character must be openness (II.3). Here there is a clear breach between the two thinkers: for Kierkegaard completion is of the essence of systems. Tillich abandons this requirement and in so doing, reflects not only how Christian theology has been done in the past, but how it must be done, this side of heaven.58 If not completion and univocity, what does characterize a system, in Tillich’s view? The answer seems twofold: consistency (II.3) and correlation (II.13). The first Tillich does not elaborate, evidently taking the term to be self-explanatory enough. The second he defines as the ‘interdependence of two independent factors’ (II.13). Curiously, Tillich does not regard interdependence and consistency as allied factors, for while consistency seems of the essence of systematicity, interdependence or correlation is almost the opposite: it is the inclusion of non-systematic elements that results in the interdependence of the parts of Tillich’s theology (II.4–5). Tillich, however, clarifies that ‘non-systematic’ does not mean ‘inconsistent’, but rather ‘non-deductive’ (II.5). This last point is crucial: he is adamant that theology is not deductive. If it were, assertions would be derived from others ‘with rational necessity’ (II.3). His rejection of deductive reasoning as appropriate to theology does not seem grounded in opposition to inference so much as to the kind of necessary logic governing mathematics (II.3). If we gather these strands of an open-ended argument together, Tillich’s conception of systematic theology would seem to be of a consistent, interdependent set of notions (one senses he might reject ‘propositions’), which are nevertheless not deduced from each other in any way that could be described as necessary. What is unclear is what work ‘interdependence’ could be doing, so as not to be characterizable as deduction. Tillich offers little help in this context. What is evident enough from his remarks about method in the first volume is that the rejection of deduction, and the affirmation of paradox, is not meant (despite Tillich’s overt affirmation of irrationality, in places) to deny the rationality of theology, for theology is ‘logos, or the reasoning about theos (God and divine things)’ (I.15). Reasoning is not alien to theology, then; what seems alien is reasoning that moves in one predictable groove towards an inevitable conclusion. Theology, Tillich claims, is ‘like all enterprises of the human mind’, ambiguous (II.16). Whatever may be said for or against systems in theory, one still has to contend with the facts of the way Christian theology argues and the way those arguments are structured. If one departs from a notion of God as wise, omniscient, exercising providential governance of a universe that is entirely a divine creation, and once one posits a human creature capable of cp. ‘The answer to be given in [the fourth part of his systematics] . . .is incomplete. Life remains ambiguous as long as there is life’ (II.4). 58

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understanding God and the ways of God, one already has the basic elements of a system in place, if by ‘system’ one understands a web of inferentially related propositions. That is, to articulate a Christian doctrine of God entails a creature’s description of the divine persons, who are both utterly distinct from each other and from all that is not divine and yet willingly brought a world of creatures into being. Theology, qua creaturely description of the divine, cannot give an account of God or creation without presupposing and expressing a relation between the two. However much that relation may be disfigured by human irrationality and sin, human creatures cannot sever it. When the Bible provides examples of human irrationality and sin (rebellion against divine commands, for example) it has been taken, by both Israel and the church, as pointing to the folly of such rebellion. To give an account of sin is therefore to point, at the very least implicitly, to a right relation between God and humankind. To name something as folly or sin implies enough rationality or rectitude in the speaker and hearer that both can understand folly to be irrational and sin to be wrong. Divine forgiveness of such folly (one of the Bible’s great themes) is to the end of restoration of right relations between humanity and God. On the Christian understanding, this right relatedness is both one of mutual love, but also right reason, and Christian theology reflects this pattern. It is the pattern writ large in texts as diverse as Augustine’s De Trinitate, Damascene’s work (especially On the Orthodox Faith59) and Aquinas’s summae. If, as Teilhard de Chardin puts it: ‘To believe is to effect an intellectual synthesis’ (cited in Lubac 1967: 176), then even before theologians sit down to write theologies, belief in the triune God has already inaugurated the process of seeing ‘God and other things’ as standing in relation to one another, it is to begin to see the terrain as an integrated whole.60 59 cp. Louth: ‘John [Damascene] saw Orthodoxy as a seamless whole, the rejection of any part of which entailed destruction of the whole’ (2002: 27). Louth’s concern to distance Damascene’s work The Fountain Head of Knowledge from Western summae (he insists it is not a ‘protoscholastic summary’ [2002: 37]) stands at odds with his assertion of the seamlessness of Damascene’s thought. Moreover, if what makes Damascene’s work not to be a summa is its concern with a way of life (as Louth claims), rather than a set of beliefs, it nevertheless presents an integrated, consistent account of the latter. Western summae were in any case scarcely unconcerned with the Christian life: the bulk of Aquinas’s larger Summa (the Secunda Pars and the treatment of salvation and the sacraments in the Tertia Pars) deals with matters of ethics and spirituality. 60 Feyerabend (1988: 27) and Kelsey: ‘at the root of a theological position there is a single imaginative act in which a theologian tries to catch up in a single metaphorical judgement the full complexity of God’s presence in, through and over-against the activities comprising the church’s common life and which, in turn, both provides the discrimen against which the theology criticizes the church’s current forms of speech and life, and determines the peculiar “shape” of the “position” ’. This insight largely shapes how the theologian interprets and uses particular passages of scripture. Moreover, the theologian’s appeal, not simply to particular passages, but to the authority of the canon of scripture assumes that one part of the canon stands in some kind of determinate relation to the other parts, assumes in other words that, despite the diversity of the scriptural witness, it can be read as a coherent whole (1975: 163, 167, 197).

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The systematicity of Christian theology can thus be viewed as reflecting the persons and personal relations it attempts to describe. From another perspective, the sheer structure of theological arguments makes theology systematic. As Quine and Ullian note: ‘nearly any body of knowledge that is sufficiently organized to exhibit appropriate evidential relationships among its constituent claims has at least some claim to be seen as scientific. What makes for science is a system, whatever its subject’ (1978: 3). The evidential relationships among theological propositions themselves would make for systematicity, on this account, even if what counts as evidence is open to dispute. If theological discourse combines both foundationalist and coherentist elements, then its evidential relationships obtain both between claims supported directly by warrants and inferences drawn from them, and among inferred claims themselves. And so we come to the question of warrants.

2 Warrants and Norms Christian reflection on the structures of theological reasoning has often focused on the legitimate sources of theological claims, what are called theological warrants or norms. While there has been some discussion of the structure of arguments developed from these sources of reflection or authoritative teaching, the focus—in terms of both sheer quantity and of intensity— has been on the relative merits of these sources as warrants, and to a lesser extent, their relation to each other. It is not clear exactly when what are now regarded as the four possible warrants (scripture, tradition, reason, and experience) became a settled list, although each has a history of usage stretching back to the very beginning of Christian theology. Equally, the problems associated with appeal to each manifested themselves early on and debate ensued concerning not only the legitimacy of appeal to the norm qua norm, but also over how the norm might underwrite a theological argument.

SCRIPTURE Of the four now acknowledged as possible theological warrants, scripture occupies a unique place, inasmuch as no one contests its right to such status. That is, no one denies the propriety of theological appeal to scripture. The disputes surrounding scripture’s theological usage concerned rather what counted as scripture and what counted as legitimate interpretation of scripture and why. Those were the initial spheres of debate, followed at a much later stage by debates over how the data of scripture were to be understood in relation to the apparently conflicting witness of other warrants (the current debate over sexual ethics being a case in point), debates which showed some to be ready to set aside scriptural testimony in some instances. However, even those today who consider that scripture is corrigible, indeed wrong, on certain points, do not contest its usage in theological reasoning on other points. Charging the Bible with sexism or homophobia does not seem to preclude appeal to its upholding of the claims of the poor and the oppressed. Likewise,

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those who point to the Bible’s injunctions to women to obey their husbands do not seem greatly exercised about the Bible’s condemnation of usury. This status of scripture as both normative and contestable (or even ignoble) raises questions of its own, of course, namely how one is to determine which portions of the text are normative and which are, qua culturally conditioned, no longer so. Issues of normativity, which are related to those concerning what counts as a warrant, are thus intrinsically connected to questions of the interpretation of warrant, though this point has often not been acknowledged in discussions of theological method. The privileged position of scripture, as the sole warrant which is universally accepted as having the status of a warrant, might be taken as indicating its chronological priority over other warrants: scripture was there first, before there was any appeal to tradition, reason, or experience, so the argument has gone in scarcely less naive fashion. One of the vexatious issues relating to scripture’s normativity, however, is its origin and the relation of that origin to the community holding it to be normative. Scripture’s unique status among the warrants is conventionally related to its divine origin: it is because scripture is considered the Word of God that it, to one degree or another, escapes the charge of being merely human and on that ground suspect, even dismissible, as all the other warrants have been accused of being by at least some in the Christian tradition.1 However, Christian accounts of the exact nature of that origin differ markedly. No major Christian theologian has espoused a direct dictation theory of scriptural inspiration, but there are Christian models of scriptural inspiration so strong that they may have virtually the same effect as a dictation theory. That is, while the claim is not made that the authors of the Biblical texts heard voices and transcribed their utterances, views which insist on the sacredness and incorrigibility of the actual words of the text end up in a position which is markedly similar: precisely these words, rather than equivalents or near-equivalents, are normative. At the opposite end of the spectrum stand views of inspiration which hold merely that the text has some unspecified origin in God, but which leave a great deal of space for human mediation. That space opens the door to relativizing the authority of the text, since any part of it may be deemed as merely reflecting cultural conditioning, human error, and sin. Without criteria for distinguishing the divine word from the merely human, interpreters are always at risk of assigning to God views approximating their own and dismissing as merely human those positions they themselves dislike.

1 This position is the same as that which Pannenberg attributes to Reformation theology: ‘For Reformation theology, the authority of holy scripture is based on the fact that scripture is not a human word but God’s own Word’ (1991: 31). The sheer fact that the divine message is conveyed in the medium of human language indicates that it must be both.

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From the earliest days of the church, long before the New Testament canon had settled into place,2 these interpretative issues raised their head. The questions concerned, first, what counted as scripture, and who had the authority to make determinations of communally normative interpretation of scripture, as well as the more obvious questions that may always arise out of the interpretation of this or that particular portion of the text.3 If the Bible is theologically normative, then one must ask the questions of what counts as belonging to ‘the Bible’ and why it would count as such. In the debates over theological method those wanting to insist strongly on scripture’s status as the norm par excellence often want to insist on its being unconditioned—norma normans non normata—precisely so as to locate its authority somewhere other than in the human sphere. John Webster’s view might be taken as a contemporary example of this position: the church simply does not have the competence to confer authority on scripture (2003: 53). This position leaves unanswered the question of what stipulates the parameters of both the text itself and its legitimate interpretation, however. Whether or not the church has the competence to confer authority, the church is what has in fact recognized the authority of scripture, and it is within the church that the parameters of its legitimate interpretation for theology have been debated. In determining the answer to the first question (concerning the text’s parameters), we are hampered by a lack of data pertaining to the formation of the Biblical canon, the canon of the Old Testament as well as of the New. Although we know of some disputes over the inclusion of particular books, we know virtually nothing of the processes by which the canon as a whole was formed, let alone the reasons for the inclusion or exclusion of most books. On the basis of a strong pneumatology and ecclesiology, one could claim that the mind of the church was formed by the Holy Spirit and hence that ecclesial decisions are in fact divine, but the question of exactly how this formation occurred would still remain. Bruce Metzger formulates the issue well: it turns on whether the canon is ‘a collection of authoritative books or an authoritative collection of books’ (1987: 1). The first position locates authority in the books themselves, presumably viewing each of them individually as inspired, an inspiration recognized by the arbiters of the canon. The second locates authority in the collection as a whole and affords greater opportunity for asserting inspiration on the part of the church as the presumed compiler of the canon. As Metzger acknowledges, the silence of early Christian authors regarding the development of the 2 Here I am concurring with Campenhausen’s view that the New Testament canon did not exist in the early centuries, contra the opinion that its beginnings can be traced back to the first or early second century (1972: 103). 3 For an account of the formation of the canon and the problems attendant on this history, see Campenhausen 1972 and Metzger 1987. For a summary of how these issues bear on theological method and on the relation of scripture to tradition, see Williams 2007b.

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canon means that some questions simply cannot be answered (1987: 1).4 In the absence of adequate historical information, any view of the canon’s authority in relation to that of the church is a matter of sheer a priori principle. In this instance, it means that theological principle determines the position on canonicity and the canon affirmed by this principle then shapes the rest of the theology that follows from any appeal to scripture. The grounding hypothesis is not only an hypothesis and nothing more, but equally, an hypothesis that cannot be derived from scripture itself. That circularity does not necessarily invalidate Christian theology, but it does sit ill with a doctrine of sola scriptura. The absence of historical information better serves the cause of those wanting to assert direct divine inspiration of the canon, but since the evidence is merely negative, the point still remains a matter of sheer assertion on theological grounds. The basis on which one claims the Bible to be authoritative—whether one roots this claim in divine inspiration or communal decision— can be no more than a matter of conviction based on theological principle, and as such, scripture can only be said to function in relation to theology as a postulate.5 That is, what scripture may be said to secure depends on an a priori determination regarding its authority, a determination that cannot be grounded in more than brute assertion. As Plantinga notes: ‘I don’t know of an argument for Christian belief that seems very likely to convince one who doesn’t already accept its conclusion’ (2000: 201); he does not see this limitation of persuasive power as a weakness, however. The relation of the postulate to the claims derived from it is moreover circular. On the basis of theological principle one determines the functioning of the postulate in relation to the claims that follow, even though these are normatively underwritten by appeal to the postulate.6 That circularity need

4 He notes: ‘Nothing is more amazing in the annals of the Christian Church than the absence of detailed accounts of so significant a process’ (1987: 1). 5 I am here using ‘postulate’ to designate a starting point of a line of reasoning that is neither proven, nor self-evident, nor which will be proved in the course of the argument, a claim taken to be true, not merely for the sake of argument, but on the basis of some authority (because, for example, it is scriptural or credal). As such, my usage differs both from the informal one of everday language, which uses ‘axiom’ or ‘axiomatic’ in roughly this way, and from more formal usages, such as that of Frege, who takes a postulate to be a special case of an axiom, the latter being a claim for which no proof is given or needed, but which is true (see his 1914 essay, ‘Logic in Mathematics’ in Frege 1997: 311–13). Quine does not distinguish between axioms and postulates even to the extent that Frege does (who considers a postulate to be a particular variety of an axiom). For Quine, axioms, which generate theorems, are the chosen starting point of a theory. Quine seems to require no more of axioms than that they be starting points and that they are independent, that is, not derivable from theorems (1982: 85–6). He does not attribute truth to axioms, as does Frege. 6 Plantinga claims it is often said that the coherentist does not object to circular reasoning provided the circle is big enough. The coherentist goes further, on Plantinga’s account: ‘he revels in circular reasoning, for it is precisely in circular chains that he sees warrant as arising’ (1993a: 69, emphasis in original).

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not be a weakness of the argument, provided that the point of citing the starting claim was not to secure the indubitability of the claims extending beyond it. Now in a sense, of course, the theologian of sola scriptura proclivities wishes to do just that: only scripture, being the record of divine selfdisclosure, can ground true theological assertions and presumably to the extent that these assertions merely render divine self-disclosure in other language, they are indubitable. Nevertheless, proponents of a sola scriptura approach tend also to have a high doctrine of faith: we do not know doctrines to be correct because they have been reached by a process of correct argumentation; rather, we know teachings to be true because we have faith and in faith need holy scripture, trusting it to be the word of God.7 Faith gives assurance, but not the epistemic certitude of a proof, since the assurance of faith is precisely a form of trust. At the other end of the spectrum, the liberal who emphasizes the Bible’s historical conditioning and human mediation is certainly not well positioned to maintain the indubitability of claims following from a basis that may be no more than erroneous human supposition, although in practice, Biblical injunctions to care for the poor, for example, tend not to get questioned with the alacrity with which are statements about sexual ethics.

7 Modern proponents of a pure sola scriptura position are hard to find, although Geoffrey Bromiley comes close. Bromiley claims that the Fathers of the early church were ‘the most vociferous proponents of sola scriptura’ (1983: 210). This determination seems to follow from his notion that for the Fathers scripture and tradition were two forms of the same thing (208), a position which significantly simplifies the matter. They were regarded as equivalent in the sense that tradition was not meant to convey something other than the true meaning of scripture, but not equivalent in the sense that scripture was seen as yielding only one possible interpretation. The need to appeal to the Rule of Faith, the bishops, and the authority of the community arose from the fact—not merely the possibility—of radically different interpretations. Not scripture alone, but scripture interpreted rightly, was authoritative. Bromiley apparently wishes to foreclose the suggestions that the Fathers regarded tradition as equally authoritative as scripture. He is right that they did not see tradition as something independent of scripture (and from that fact alone, could not have regarded it as different but equal); but wrong in that he fails to see they could regard scripture as uniquely authoritative only as interpreted by the church; if scripture alone were normative, the Fathers would have had no case against the gnostics, Arians, and others who cited the same scriptures, and just as avidly as the Fathers did, though to decidedly different doctrinal ends. Bromiley’s very appeal to the Fathers moreover suggests that he acknowledges them to have some authority, as he explicitly acknowledges (1983: 212). At other points, he simply ignores historical realities: ‘The early church arose in a situation in which Holy Scripture already existed as a fact’ (1983: 199) and he holds this position even though on the very next page he acknowledges that the earliest Christian communities did not have a canon. Subsequently he claims that the church had no authority to make its own canon, but only to acknowledge a canon already there (Bromiley 1983: 202). The number of contradictions in this position—both internal and with the available historical evidence—indicates the difficulties that are met when one refuses to grapple with the very real problems arising from canonicity, problems that inevitably plague any doctrine of sola scriptura.

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TRADITION Whatever one’s view of the inspiration and normativity of scripture, virtually any scriptural text that is to underwrite a theological claim will require interpretation, and the process of interpreting the text necessitates the use of reason, as well as entailing a set of hermeneutical assumptions. Theology is, as Jenson points out, an act of interpretation (1997: 14). The first debates over scriptural interpretation in the church concerned not simply the reading of particular passages, but the basis on which right readings could be determined; they were, therefore, debates over hermeneutics proper and not solely over exegesis. A large part of the Irenaean corpus could be described as such. The hermeneutical issues were parsed in various ways, depending on who the disputants were. Nevertheless, many of the debates concerned the relation of texts and their interpretation to communities. The Marcionite controversy, for example, can be understood as a debate over the relation of Israel to the church, and so ultimately over the identity of the Christian community. Similarly, in his arguments with various gnostics, Irenaeus appealed to the authority of the community, and specifically its bishops, as grounds for the rectitude of interpretations of scripture: what made this reading superior to that was not its intrinsically greater plausibility (though he offered arguments that were essentially textual), but the acceptance of this interpretation by the church in the past and in the present. Irenaeus is sometimes taken as the first advocate of theological appeal to tradition, but he was articulating what he took to be already well established by his time.8 The writings of the New Testament themselves, with their exhortation to the fidelity to the apostles’ teaching (Acts 2:42), the foundation of the apostles and the prophets (Eph. 2:20), and the commandment given through the apostles (2 Pet. 3:2), already assume something like a tradition. These references by no means amount to a full-scale doctrine of tradition, or a methodological grounding for tradition as a warrant, but they do indicate that in the scriptural account itself, there is already a sense of both an authoritative community and a traditio, a handing on of teaching whose ultimate source is Christ. To oppose scripture and tradition therefore sits ill with scripture itself, whose authors seem to assume a community of authoritative teachers and interpreters of teachings. Tradition in this instance is, of course, not being taken as a source of knowledge or doctrine existing independently of scripture, but rather as existing in a relation of necessary dependence to it: if tradition

8 Lampe maintains that it was during the fourth century that there was a rapid development of appeal to patristic as well as apostolic tradition and credits this to the prestige of the Fathers of Nicaea, who were broadly viewed as inspired (Dillistone 1935: 48–9). According to Hanson, Clement and Origen insist that the Bible should be interpreted according to the Rule of Faith (1962: 107).

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constitutes a communally normative interpretation of writings that are open to multiple interpretations, then it is by definition not the peer, but the servant, of scripture (an image which was used at Vatican II to express the relation of magisterium to scripture9). This position was already articulated by the Fathers of the early church. Georges Florovsky cites Vincent of Lérins as an example of someone who appealed to the authority of scripture and tradition, not as if there were two sources of doctrine, but because the authority of the church was invoked to counter the divergent interpretations of individuals. Tradition, for Vincent, was ‘Scripture rightly understood’ (Florovsky 1972: 75). Florovsky attributes a similar view to Tertullian: scripture and tradition were ‘indivisibly interwined [sic.]’, ‘The Apostolic Tradition was the indispensable guide in the understanding of Scripture and the ultimate warrant of right interpretation’ (1972: 76–7). Florovsky finds the same kind of attitude in Augustine, who once wrote ‘I should not have believed the gospel if the authority of the catholic church had not moved me.’ On Florovsky’s reading, Augustine does not hereby subordinate scripture to the church, but rather stresses that the gospel must always be received in the church and cannot be separated from the church. ‘The witness of the Scripture is ultimately “self-evident”, but only . . . for those who have achieved a certain “spiritual maturity”—and this is only possible within the Church’ (1972: 92). Whether or not he is correct regarding selfevidentiality, the notion that right interpretation of scripture correlates with sanctification will be important, as we shall see. The willingness to accept as relevant data evidence that is not strictly doctrinal varies, however. Neither Harnack nor Barth, for example, was willing to acknowledge liturgy as relevant to doctrinal development and both dismissed what they called mysticism (Pelikan 1971: 65–6). One could query these views, first on the grounds that key agents in doctrinal development themselves pointed to liturgical practice: Gregory Nazianzen, for example, in making the case for the then novel idea of the Spirit’s consubstantiality with the Father, leans heavily on the practices of worship (Oration 31.12, 14, and 28). Second, discounting ‘mysticism’ is merely a way of invalidating texts and authors one finds uncongenial or inconvenient, for the term is notoriously difficult to define, especially in any way that would allow one to draw clear lines separating ‘mysticism’ from ‘theology’ in the first millennium-and-a-half of the church. Although communally regulated interpretations—those which read the New Testament as attesting to the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth, for example— are by no means uncontestable, neither are they reached arbitrarily. Those whose views were deemed to lie beyond the parameters of orthodoxy could

9

Dei Verbum (1967) ch. 2, para. 10, p. 756.

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point to passages in the gospels and epistles that challenge the interpretations now considered standard Christian belief, but the Great Church had as much textual evidence on its side and could proof-text as adeptly as its opponents. Neither side found that the writings of what is now called the New Testament provided unambiguous or unequivocal support for the views they wished to champion. The church argued not only for its accepted readings of the texts, but to them, only gradually coming to the realization of their implications; lights break upon us gradually, as Nazianzen notes (Oration 31.27). The story of the development of doctrine, which is tradition’s own story, shows key doctrines developing in significant part as the weight of traditional interpretation builds. For example, the shadowy ambiguity of references to the Spirit in the New Testament—some texts speaking of the spirit of Christ, others of the spirit of God, still others of a holy spirit, with the relation among these left unclear—created the space in which doctrinal debates flourished into the late fourth century. Scripture did not make the Spirit’s identity clear and one cannot construct any coherent pneumatology solely on the basis of the scriptural record, because that record is itself so variegated. Those who wish to resort to the plain word of scripture and insist upon its transparency have to explain the fact that Nazianzen’s advocacy of the Spirit’s full divinity was a radical position within the Church: even those who did not deem the Spirit a creature did not go so far as to call the Spirit ‘God’.10 Gregory Nazianzen argued for the Spirit’s divinity in large part because it would make no sense to baptize in the triune name if the third of those names were of a different status from the first two (Oration 31.28; cp. Oration 41.8). In this argument, scripture, tradition, and reason each plays a role. The command to baptize in the name of the Father, Son and Spirit (Matt. 28:19) ultimately derives from scripture (though the text may reflect already established communal practice based on oral tradition). However, it seems that the gospel injunction itself was not sufficient to prompt the church to assert the Spirit’s divinity, nor was its developed practice of baptism apparently sufficient for the purpose. The Spirit’s fully divine status only became a settled point of belief in the church after much theological debate, which is to say, reasoned arguments being offered on both sides. Nazianzen’s argument represents a reasoning between scripture and tradition; he points to the anomaly of baptizing in the threefold name, as scripture enjoins and as had been the church’s practice, if the writings of the New Testament are not taken as attesting the Spirit’s divinity. Scripture alone was insufficient to establish the point, since some of those who held it to be authoritative nevertheless 10 Basil the Great wrote a whole treatise on the subject (‘On the Holy Spirit’) without calling the Spirit ‘God’ and Nazianzen notes the conspicuous absence of this identification in Basil’s work (Epistle 58). Didymus the Blind notes that others, too, took a moderate position, calling the Spirit neither a creature nor God (De Trinitate 2.8, pp. 39, 607).

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reached other conclusions about its pneumatological implications. The church’s practice was equally insufficient to establish the point, since those who were reluctant to rank the Spirit with the Father and the Son were nevertheless content to baptize and bless in the triune name. The position that came ultimately to prevail was not simply that of a community or that expressed in sacred texts or oral traditions or practices of worship, but of a community reasoning about the relation of all these.

REASON Because scripture is susceptible to multiple interpretations, even by those who hold it to be authoritative, theological reasoning is inseparable from scripture, even though reason, like tradition, is logically dependent on scripture.11 That status—of the indispensable servant—is rather different from the role reason is assumed to play in theology, on the conventional accounts of method. When scripture, tradition, reason, and experience are discussed as potential candidates for theological warrants, the tacit assumption seems to be that they would each function in relation to a theological argument or conclusion in comparable ways. That is, scripture grounds claim X while reason grounds claim Y. The oddity of this assumption emerges when one begins to seek examples of reason’s deliverances: exactly where has a Christian doctrine been asserted on the basis of reason alone?12 One could take the classic arguments for the existence of God this way, but those are not really warrants for a theological position so much as arguments offered to show how it could be considered plausible. As Stout notes, no one in the Middle Ages expected people would become theists because of the testimony of miracles; they were theists as a matter of course. The same principle applies to arguments for the existence of God. An apologist looking for a medieval atheist whom 11 This is a point Nancey Murphy seriously underestimates. She maintains, for example, that argument plays a small part in Barth’s works and that his style is expository rather than logical. Barth, she claims, typically states a thesis and expounds it, without providing grounds for it (1994: 185). The grounds Barth recognizes as valid are Biblical and while one can contest his interpretation of scripture, it is a gross exaggeration to claim his theology somehow expounds scripture in a way that falls short of reasoning from it. Likewise, although his polemical determinations are often questionable, he certainly reasons in his frequent engagements with figures from the tradition. Murphy links the supposed lack of argument in Barth’s dogmatics to his notion that the task of theology is the critical evaluation of the church’s language (1994: 186), although how one can evaluate anything critically without reasoning or arguing it is mystifying. Still more puzzling is Murphy’s subsequent claim that ‘looked at “from a distance”, Barth’s theology can be seen to fall into the structure of an argument’ (1994: 187). Berkoff, whom she cites, points out that Barth brings out the ratio and coherence of revelation (Murphy 1994: 187). 12 Here I take a similar position to that of Murphy (1994: 206–8), who holds that reason is in a distinct category from the other three warrants.

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theologians intended to clobber with a proof would have had a hard time finding one. Anselm’s ontological argument supposedly addresses the fool who says in his heart ‘There is no God’, but given that he begins the treatise in which the argument is set out by noting its writing was prompted by his monastic brethren, it is scarcely plausible to interpret the argument as offered to convince the unbeliever. The fool, moreover, is the fool of the Psalms (14:1/Vulgate 13:1; 53:1/Vulgate 52:1), as any monastic who chanted the psalter would know. This dolt (stultus) is not so much a cultured despiser as simply dissolute. He is marked not so much by an intellectual position expressed by professing or rejecting particular beliefs as by his wrongdoing, a life lived in disregard of divine judgement. More importantly, proofs of God’s existence play a minor role even in the work of theologians who cite or use them. Aquinas, to take a notable example, rattles off the Five Ways at the beginning of the larger Summa—quite casually, given that the point he is supposedly proving is rather large—but thereafter makes very little reference to them. Pannenberg is therefore correct in holding that medieval scholasticism, along with older Protestant theology, accorded the principles of reason in theology only limited validity. However, he asserts that Protestant theology, in contrast to Scholasticism, favoured an instrumental, rather than normative, use for scripture (1991: 20), though he offers no evidence for this claim. Aquinas’s notions of philosophy as the dispensable servant of theology (Summa theologiae I.1, 5 ad 2) and of reason as a clarificatory, rather than probative, device (Summa theologiae I.1, 8 ad 2) call this judgement into question. Pannenberg misses the mark also in claiming that dogmatics does not make the truth claim of Christian doctrine one of its questions, but simply accepts it (1991: 49). There is a middle position which he overlooks: one may assume the truth of Christian teaching, yet ask the question how it can be true. This middle position is that of the Fathers and the medievals. This position is what Anselm indicates in the preface to the Monologion: in response to the wishes of his monastic brethren, he offers a meditation in which nothing in scripture is urged on the authority of scripture itself. This position does not entail advocating for positions not found in scripture, but rather assuming the rationality of what scripture proclaims and seeking to probe its ratio. So Pannenberg is misguided to hold that argumentation aiming merely at rational plausibility is impossible if faith is made a premise (1991: 51). The prime premise of Christian faith is a Trinity whose nature is wisdom, logos, ratio, and of Three Persons who endow human beings with the capacities for knowledge and love. To begin from that premise is to assume the faith that describes God and the world will be plausible and intelligible to rational creatures. The suspicion of reason tends to be associated either with its supposed misuse in scholasticism or in Greek thought, the latter often curiously being

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taken as somehow intrinsically opposed to what is authentically Christian. The use of reason is besmirched by an imputation of guilt by association. On the basis of the questionable assumption that Greek thought and scholasticism are fundamentally misguided, and the equally questionable assumption that the use of reason is somehow particularly associated with them, reason is deemed suspect. There are traces of such an attitude even in some defences of reason: ‘what must not continue is only the Enlightenment’s elevation of the Greek element of our own thinking to be unilateral judge of the whole, or a practice of theological that consciously or unconsciously accepts that elevation’ (Jenson 1997: 9). On this account, the use of reason is acceptable as long as it is not the Enlightenment’s use or that of a ‘Greek element’. How these differ from any use of reason whatsoever is not clear. In other arguments, reason’s role is portrayed not so much as a source as an interpretative tool. The rise in the nineteenth century of interpretations of Genesis which did not assert its literal historicity occurred in part because the literalist reading sat ill with advances in scientific knowledge. Nevertheless, the church had by no means always read Genesis literally: the Fathers who proposed allegorical readings did so because many elements in the text could not be reconciled with each other, if taken literally, and patristic interpreters in any case saw internal inconsistencies—how could there be days and nights, for example, before the sun was created?13 Patristic interpreters, ever close and questioning readers of Biblical texts, were well aware that two quite different creation narratives stood side by side in scripture.14 In the case of both liberal nineteenth-century and patristic exegetes, the need to interpret Biblical text in a way that promoted consistency—consistency of the Biblical witness with what is known of the natural world and consistency among the Biblical texts themselves—necessarily implies a role for reason, though once again, that role is as a subordinate and adjutant, a helper towards the truth of the texts, rather than an alternative to them. Reason’s interpretative role may also be conceived in even more fundamental fashion. As Austin Farrer asks, ‘unless I have some mental machinery for thinking the bare notion of God, could I recognise His revelatory action as that of God?’ (1943: 2).

E X P E RI E N C E Like reason, the fourth of the standard quartet of warrants has also suffered from misinterpretation. It is sometimes maintained that experience entered the lists as a candidate for warrant with Wesley. Wesley himself might have 13 14

Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram V.2.4. For example, Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram V.3.6.

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been surprised to hear this, for his knowledge of the Fathers would certainly have made him well aware of the appeals in theological texts to practices of the church, such as baptism and prayer. If Wesley inaugurates theological appeal to experience, then the term ‘experience’ must be being used in a quite specific sense. Herein lies a difficulty peculiarly attendant on this warrant. Much more so than even tradition (which in turn has less certain boundaries of reference than scripture), it is far from clear what ‘experience’ encompasses precisely. In interpreting the role it has played in theological arguments, much depends on what exactly one takes ‘experience’ to mean: is it the report of events or states of affairs in the lives of individuals, such as hearing voices or a feeling of inner assurance? Is it communal experience, expressed in set forms of worship, for example? Is it the testimony of the natural world, encompassing advances in the natural sciences? All of these might fall under the rubric of experience, but each would have markedly different implications if employed as a warrant. At one level, of course, to deny the role of experience would be no more than a form of self-deception; as Thomas Torrance points out, theology can never operate outside an historical situation and cannot but be conditioned by the ‘notions and tools it uses from age to age’ (1971: 4). Knowledge of God, he notes, takes place not only within rational structures, but also within personal and social structures (1971: 188); and those structures embody personal and communal experience of being touched by the divine. Another immediate problem with appeal to individual experience is that of discernment: put bluntly, how are we to know whether the experience in question is really of God and not merely the self-deceived fabrication of an unhinged hallucinator? The writings of the fourteenth-century Flemish mystical theologian, Jan van Ruusbroec, indicate the theological problems that may arise when those claiming to have religious experiences also attempt to claim some broader validity for them. The uncompromising sharpness of Ruusbroec’s rejection of the various self-appointed gurus of his time is especially significant given the intensity of his own spiritual life, which one might surmise included experiences one might call mystical, though he does not describe these or directly allude to them. His corrective to the claimants of extraordinary personal experience of his time was to appeal to the community and its shared practices: he insists not only on the teaching authority of the church, but its sacramental life as the context of theological reflection and religious formation. His theology illustrates how one kind of appeal to experience (to that of the church as a whole) can actually counter a different kind of appeal (namely, to the experience of the individual). While it might seem that this approach contrasts that of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers, the gap is really not so wide. Despite Wesley’s clash with ecclesial authority over the necessity for episcopal ordination, he certainly did not encourage religious solipsism. The origins of the Methodist movement lie in the spiritual formation group (as we would now call it) that

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Wesley belonged to and his ministry aimed at the building up of communities within which Christians could grow morally and spiritually. His frustration with the Church of England’s slowness to ordain bishops for the American colonies did not spring from a desire to be the founder of a new organization, but to further the church’s mission. He was pragmatic, not individualistic. Experience does not trump scripture in his theology; rather, religious experience is shaped precisely by encounter with scripture, and scripture read within the parameters of the church’s interpretation. Likewise, although Schleiermacher appeals to the feeling of absolute dependence—indeed accords it the status of a systematic principle from which his theology unfolds—he does not thereby claim normative status for the experience of individuals. Far from it: Schleiermacher’s argument assumes that the feeling of absolute dependence is universal, precisely its universality making it fit as a formative theological principle. Schleiermacher’s ‘feeling’, moreover, does not designate any particular emotional experience someone has had, so much as an awareness of a key element of the human condition. Where individual experiences are duplicated among members of a community, that is some grounds for seeking these as authoritative in some sense. Plantinga, for example, cites ‘God forgives me’ as a statement which can function as properly basic in a theological argument.15 This awareness of forgivenesss is shared by many, and as such is not so much dismissable as merely idiosyncratic. It could, of course, be induced by a culturally taught expectation, but the same could be said of any human experience; the problem is not one specifically related to religious claims. What Murphy views as the central problem of theological liberalism—how can human experience tell us anything of God (1990: 15) misses the point. Human experience of God tells us at least how God deals with us. To feel forgiven by God is to know that God forgives and the predicate ‘forgives’ does tell us something of the nature of its subject who acts in this way.16 The possibility of self-deception remains, of course—we might think some experience is of God when we have simply manufactured it ourselves—but this is a problem of discernment rather than a fundamental theological objection. To distrust experience of God in principle would be to deny we can have any authentic dealings with God in this life whatsoever. The use of data from the human and natural sciences presents quite a different case. To begin with, the data are of limited theological usefulness, since their domain is the created order, and as such cannot address questions lying within the doctrines of God and the Trinity, or even of humanity’s 15

Plantinga 1981: 47. Murphy later attributes, with apparent approval, just such reasoning to Jonathan Edwards (1990: 166); it is not clear how she reconciles this position with the sceptical comments she makes earlier about theological liberalism. 16

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relation to the divine. Second, where the findings of these sciences are theologically relevant, their findings may clash—either apparently or in reality—with the data of other warrants, especially those of the Bible. These clashes are sometimes generated by ways of reading the Biblical text that are in themselves hermeneutically questionable. As noted, one does not need a theory of evolution to prompt the thought that the universe was not created in seven days, since the canonical juxtaposition of two different creation narratives side by side already indicates that the Bible’s concern is not with a set of propositions about a sequence of events. The perception of a clash between the Biblical witness and the theories and data of natural science often arises from a tow-headed reading of the Bible, a failure to grasp its literary qualities—the significance of its use of narrative form and metaphor, for example. Most people can see that the parable of the good Samaritan, for instance, is not a story about a particular merchant in history and his adventures in altruism, and can also see that it does not become morally less compelling, and in that sense less true, because it is not the story of ‘real’ (that is, historical) figures. Likewise, if what the psalms say about the deafness of adders or the habitats of badgers were shown to be inaccurate by a naturalist, no one would say the message they convey via this poetic language is for that reason any less compelling. The truth of the image does not rest on the precision or accuracy of its rendition of the natural world, but its power to evoke spiritual truth, precisely the kind of truth that lies beyond the domain of the natural sciences. The apparent clash between scientific accounts of evolution and the Biblical accounts of creation are just that: not differences in the interpretation of particular writings, but differences between an account of natural processes and the exegesis of written texts. The findings of natural science have nothing to say one way or another about the relation of the natural world to God; that is, about the natural world considered as creation. The data of experience and of scripture serve differing ends. Some of the most contested uses of experience do appeal to it as a warrant, however; these fall in the realm of sexual ethics, relations between the sexes, and the role of women. Issues such as homosexuality, heterosexual activity outside marriage, and the equality of women could be settled by appeal to Biblical dicta, though the New Testament does not yield a single clear answer to the question of whether women are to be regarded as the equals of men in the home and in church, nor does it acknowledge the issue of sexual orientation, as opposed to sexual activity. Outside conservative Evangelical circles, it is increasingly the tendency not to regard Biblical dicta as the sole guide to contemporary attitudes. Even churches whose official position on these matters would count as conservative (the Roman Catholic church, for example) take account of changing societal attitudes, at least to a degree. The Vatican’s pronouncements on homosexuality, for example, while uncompromising in

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their rejection of homosexual acts, recognize the fact of sexual orientation, as the Biblical texts do not, and those on the role of women acknowledge a role for women in the workforce outside the home of which there is only the slightest glimmer in the Bible (Deborah as judge, Lydia as draper).17 What contemporary disputes over these issues indicate is twofold. First, the differences in the recognition of experience as a factor in Christian reflection does not divide along the lines of the Reformation divisions; the fissure runs between conservative Evangelicals—many of whom are not part of a broader church structure but belong to free-standing ‘community churches’—and the rest of Western Christendom. The so-called ‘mainline’ churches accept higher Biblical criticism, therefore allow for some measure of cultural conditioning of the texts, and thus place at least some limitations on their contemporary applicability. In theory, churches that do not accept the historical critical method as the lens through which the Bible is necessarily read do not limit the Bible’s applicability. In practice, the vast majority of these groups ignore its teachings on usury and the New Testament’s advocacy of sharing property— or even giving it away entirely. Everyone arguably cuts the Biblical cloth, at least in some respects, to suit the clothes they want to wear, the clothes which have been made comfortable by long cultural practice. Experience shapes most readings of the Bible, but not all readers acknowledge this. Second, although some of the issues relating to women have implications for theology proper, rather than ethics (the ordination of women entails questions of a broader sacramental theology), the issues where experience is most obviously functioning as an informant are not properly speaking theological in the strictest sense, but pertain to the realms of ethics and social roles. Now it might be objected that various forms of contextual theology do address theology at its heart, and not purely questions of how we should live in this world. Feminist theology has called attention to what it deems the feminine side of divine nature, such as tenderness and mercy (although one could query the assumption that these attributes are in fact ‘feminine’) as well as the feminine imagery used in the Bible to describe God (e.g. Matt. 23:37 par.). Here, though, experience is not being used by itself as a warrant for theological positions, so much as a spur to a more acute reading of the Biblical text. To the extent that such theologies call attention to features of the Biblical text that might otherwise be overlooked, then far from substituting experience for scripture as a warrant, they simply encourage a broader and deeper reading of the Bible. As the challenge of scientific theory in the nineteenth century prompted the church to a reading of Genesis that is arguably more faithful to the text itself, so some feminist readings of the Bible may prompt a truer 17 See the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s ‘Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons’ (1986), the Catechism of the Catholic Church 2357–9 and the Apostolic Letter ‘Mulieris Dignitatem’ (1988).

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reading of the text as a whole. One could, of course, dispute these suggestions on the grounds that the resultant readings of the Bible are simply wrong, but it is harder to rule out the possibility of the church’s continuous learning to read its primary text through the prompting of the Spirit, and theologically amiss on any account to rule out the possibility that the Spirit speaks anew to every generation, reminding it of what it has not yet had ears to hear. The challenge theology will always face is discerning between the promptings of the Spirit and those of human self-interest, discernment that cannot take place exclusively through appeal to methodological principle, but which must take account of particular cases. One does not need, however, to go so far as Ian Barbour and hold that religious ideas without an experiential basis seem abstract and irrelevant (1974: 1). In the first instance, it is not clear that any human idea could be without some experiential basis, but more importantly, it is not clear why the lack of such a basis would make an idea irrelevant— irrelevant for what purpose and to whom, exactly?

INTERPRETING THE WARRANTS What this survey of the terrain indicates is that what have been lumped together and labelled ‘theological warrants’ do not stand on a par with each other: the claims of tradition, reason, and experience to the status of freestanding warrants are exceedingly weak. They serve as interpreters of scripture, rarely as autonomous alternatives to it. The claim of scripture to be the sole warrant is equally implausible, however, and to the claims of the doctrine of sola scriptura that I now return. The first objection to the doctrine is its hermeneutical naïveté: no text can be read apart from readers. There is always a subject making something of an object, always a reader deciding what a text means, and the very act of reading introduces something into the text that exceeds what is on the page. One could counter that scripture remains the sole authoritative warrant, yet it still remains that scripture never speaks alone, but only filtered through the creaturely eye and ear. In fact, it is as hard to find a contemporary defender of the sola scriptura doctrine as it is to find an interpreter of the Reformation doctrine who takes the Reformers at their word. Robert Jenson, for example, claims the notion of sola scriptura is oxymoronic if by it is meant ‘apart from creed, teaching office or authoritative liturgy’, a view John Webster describes as ‘startling’ (Webster 2003: 63). Webster is surely correct in this estimation if what he means is that Jenson’s interpretation of the Reformation doctrine does not match what the Reformers themselves said. Jenson’s view contrasts that of George Lindbeck, who notes that the Reformers reconciled the authority they accorded to the creeds and confessions with their

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adherence to the sola scriptura principle by simply minimizing the fact that the creeds and confessions were developments (1967: 65).18 Lindbeck’s view was foreshadowed by that of Jaroslav Pelikan, editor of the English edition of Luther’s works, who summarized the findings of a World Council of Churches commission on tradition in three theses: first, that the history of theology makes the Reformation rejection of tradition obsolete; second, that historiography makes the Reformation depreciation of tradition untenable; and third, that theological historicism makes the Reformation’s affirmation of tradition impossible (World Council of Churches 1961: 36). There are two distinct, but related, issues here. One is whether the sola scriptura principle is to be taken as denying the role of tradition; the other is whether such a denial is tenable. Lindbeck and Pelikan concur in finding the denial of tradition’s role to be possible only in ignorance of the development of doctrine. Their position on this point implies a position on the first: both assume that sola scriptura was indeed intended to assert the separability of scripture from tradition, which is precisely what Jenson denies. In this instance, the history of theology tends to the same conclusion as hermeneutical principle and experience. On the basis of the latter, one would assert that there is no uninterpreted text, since the very act of reading is an act of interpretation. On the basis of the former, one could show that the Christology and the doctrine of the Trinity that the Reformers took for granted—and which they acknowledged as authoritative via their affirmation of the creeds and Reformation confessions—cannot be taken as the sole plausible reading of the Biblical texts. The church’s reading of scripture was authoritative, not because any other interpretation was absurd, but precisely because in the face of the plethora of interpretations that were advocated in the early centuries, the church had to determine and articulate what would constitute the community’s normative understanding of scripture. Nevertheless, the Reformers did not question the traditional doctrines of Christ’s person or the Trinity, even as they challenged the authority of tradition. No more does awareness of the plurivocity of the Biblical texts show in the doctrines advocated by the Reformers. The theologies they construct lead from a conviction of the Bible’s authority to positions that sometimes flatten its plurivocity, while heightening its systematicity. We could find no more trenchant case in point than the example of Luther himself. Luther would not on 18 Thus Calvin, for example, can defend the use of unscriptural terms such as ‘person’ even as he derides the Fathers for their terminological differences over hypostasis and the homoousion (Institutes I.xiii.3 and 5). He can rail against councils, insisting they are not infallible guides to truth and pointing to their inconsistencies (IV.ix.9–10, for example), yet seems to believe that the confirmation by the ‘doctors of the church’ lends weight to the doctrine of the Trinity (Institutes I.xiii.29). His claims that thinkers as early as Justin and Irenaeus articulated the same doctrine he himself undoubtedly represents an overly optimistic estimation of how early doctrine developed.

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most accounts classify as a systematic theologian. His oeuvre is polemical, ad hoc, and though voluminous, comprised of Biblical commentaries and relatively small-scale treatises rather than any extended work resembling a systematic theology. Nevertheless, his work shows a high degree of consistency in the treatment of a small set of key themes, such as justification, grace, and atonement. While his view of justification has attained the status of a nonnegotiable item of dogma in many Reformation traditions, it is by no means the sole or self-evident reading the New Testament witness on the subject. The Greek words usually translated as ‘justify’ and ‘justification’ (dikaiō, and cognates) have to do with right relationality; the verb could also mean ‘make righteous’. They do not necessarily mean ‘declare righteous’ in the forensic sense integral to Luther’s doctrine of justification. In fact, Louw and Nida doubt the propriety of such an interpretation (1988: v. 1, 452). Even more contestable is the emphasis Luther places on justification. A few passages in Galatians and Romans furnish the basis of both his doctrine and his claims of its centrality. The pattern of the gospels, in contrast, emphasizes ethics and right living far more heavily than Luther does, and the sayings and discourses of Jesus of Nazareth contain no extended discussion of justification in Luther’s sense, being more concerned with righteousness in character and behaviour; proponents of the doctrine of justification must appeal to Jesus’s willingness to break the law on occasion (and ignore his saying that not a jot or tittle of it will pass away) or his commending of faith, neither of which necessarily adds up to the doctrine of justification in its Lutheran form. Faced with the conflicting witness of the Epistle of James, Luther derided it and relegated it to the back of his translation of the New Testament. Scripture, the sole doctrinal authority on Luther’s account, was evidently not above being edited on the basis of a doctrinal agenda. None of what has just been said necessarily entails Luther’s doctrine of justification being wrong, merely that it is not the sole plausible reading of the Biblical texts. To reach a position of Luther’s consistency on the basis of a set of texts as diverse in emphasis and as variously interpretable as the writings of the New Testament requires a sharply focused doctrinal lens, and this lens is something added to the text. That lens does not necessarily misrender the text, but the reading offered distils plurivocity into something more straightforward, and in so doing, proffers systematicity. The standard Western doctrine of atonement presents a similar case. Before the second millennium, it would be hard to identify a theologian or Biblical exegete who read the New Testament, and especially its account of the passion and death of Christ, as yielding a doctrine resembling either penal satisfaction or penal substitution. This historical fact leaves open several interpretative possibilities. It is possible that for the first thousand years of Christianity no one rightly understood the significance of Christ’s death, a position which entails the view that no one in that period rightly understood the New Testament: no theologian, no exegete, no preacher humble or sophisticated, no monk

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ruminating for long hours over the text in his cell. That reading of history implies an ecclesiology and a pneumatology, as well as a theological view of the Bible. Pneumatologically, it implies the Spirit did not or could not urge the church towards truth on a highly significant doctrine for a thousand years. Ecclesiologically, it implies that the church could not only be bereft of the Spirit’s guidance in this period, but that it could function, pastorally, catechetically, homiletically, and sacramentally, without a correct understanding of redemption. Perhaps more seriously, it implies a muteness of the Biblical text itself: unable to communicate its message to clergy and laity alike, it would appear for a millennium not to have served the very purpose for which it exists. One cannot simply appeal to the supposed theological bankruptcy of the medieval church and insist on its need for reformation to escape this dilemma. Whatever corrupt practices may have arisen in the late medieval church (and no one today defends its methods of fundraising for physical plant), the theology of the Reformers on the issues of grace, justification, and atonement was overwhelmingly medieval. Luther’s doctrine of justification did not correct a faulty medieval theology; it is broadly compatible with Aquinas’s theology on this point.19 What it differs from is pre-medieval theology, the theology of the early church. Likewise, penal satisfaction is a wholly medieval doctrine; Reformation theology stands in continuity with that of the Middle Ages, and both diverge from patristic theology. The latter was overwhelmingly concerned with the regenerating effects of union with Christ, expressed in doctrines of deification. The Fathers rarely make much of Christ’s death as an isolated event; they are concerned with the redemptive and sanctifying effects of the Incarnation as a whole, from the Nativity to the Ascension. If Reformation theology was grounded on the sole foundation of scripture, and that of the schoolmen on a poisonous cocktail of tradition and human reason, it is hard to explain the marked similarities between the theology of the two periods. If the theology of the Reformers was based on the plain sense of scripture, the gospel proclaimed for all who had ears to hear, then it is hard to explain why the key features of this theology never surfaced in the mind of the church for its first thousand years. The Bible yields myriad theologies; there simply is no single ‘plain sense’ and never has been. The Biblical text spurs multiple readings and doctrinal development highlights possibilities inherent in the texts. The reports of tradition, reason, and experience are no less subject than the scriptural texts to interpretation through a lens shaped by cultural assumptions, education, and the tendency of interpreters to find what they are seeking. Eastern Orthodox theologians, for example, often assert a patristic pedigree for doctrines found in late Byzantine authors, but less clearly in earlier centuries. The patristic lineage claimed for the Palamite doctrine of a distinction between 19

Cp. Pesch 1967. He summarizes his argument on 949–56. Some crucial remarks can be found on 954.

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divine essence and energies provides an example. Orthodox theologians insist that this distinction was not novel in the late fourteenth century and trace its origins at least as far back as the fourth century, to the works of Basil the Great. While the terms ‘essence’ and ‘energies’ appear in his works, usages where the words appear close together are fleeting, and Basil makes no attempt to indicate their precise relation, much less to propose a formal distinction in the doctrine of God.20 The sheer occurrence of terms which become a contrastive pair in later theology is deemed sufficient grounds for asserting a formal distinction in Basil’s thought, even though there are few traces of this supposed distinction in patristic theology after Basil. Maximus the Confessor, for example, writing two hundred years later, seems to confine use of the term ‘energies’ to Christological contexts, to distinguish between Christ’s divine and human modes of operation, rather than using it in the context of the doctrine of God. If a distinction central to the Eastern doctrine of God had been established by a major Greek theologian in the fourth century, it is hard to account for the absence of any trace of it in the seventh. Orthodox interpreters insist on the antiquity of the doctrine; Westerners look at the same evidence and see a process of back-formation, whereby a fourthcentury text is read through the lens of a fourteenth-century development. The sheer fact that the evidence can be read in such different ways, and that interpreters divide along ecclesial lines, itself indicates that the texts themselves are not the sole source of the doctrinal conclusions in question. Of course, tendentious reading of evidence, coupled with the unexamined assumptions and brute assertion of unbiased neutrality, is by no means the sole province of theologians: the history of science furnishes some striking examples.

FROM WARRANT TO ARGUMENT The traditional theological warrants, as we have seen, do not function independently of each other; none of them, not even scripture, is self-sufficient in the sense of providing data for theological argument that by itself yields immediate or assured doctrinal conclusions. These considerations in themselves suggest that the relation of warrants to theological argument is not a straightforward process of reasoning from a proposition to its logical Papanikolaou claims ‘One cannot overemphasize the importance of this discussion [i.e. of the essence–energies distinction] in contemporary Eastern Orthodox theology, employed by most contemporary Eastern Orthodox theologians’ (2006: 25). He goes on to cite Vladimir Lossky’s reading of the Eastern tradition, as holding that the distinction was there ‘from the very beginning’ (2006: 25), without comment. It would appear that Papanikolaou himself shares this view, though he does not, any more than Lossky does, cite texts that unambiguously indicate a distinction, as opposed to the mere use of two terms. 20

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implications: sheer logical inference cannot get from warrant to the claim underwritten by the warrant when the warrant itself is highly interpretable. Indeed, the process of reasoning from a warrant to a theological argument may sometimes look like a process of straight interpretation of texts, sometimes like a logical deduction, and sometimes like a combination of the two.21 Accounts of argumentation tend to stress its deductive or inductive character, as if all arguments involved inference from data that present themselves unambiguously, without need of interpretation. The character of theological warrants indicates that such forms of strictly logical reasoning will most often not be available to the theologian, given the susceptibility of all the warrants to interpretation. To admit this point is not to place theology on a shakier basis than other disciplines. The fact that the chief of all theological warrants—the Bible—is a text means that theology has always had to wrestle with issues of hermeneutics and the practice of interpretation in a way that has at least sometimes led to honest self-scrutiny. The contribution of postmodernism; the recognition of the possibility that data flex according to the interpreter and context; the sheer lack of inevitability about many, if not most, of our determinations about ourselves and the world around us: all these may have dented the self-assurance of some disciplines only recently, but theology has always had to wrestle with these issues. The awareness—even if not always welcome—that theology’s surest base, the divine self-disclosure inscribed on the sacred page, cannot lead straightforwardly to doctrinal conclusions given its interpretability, could indicate a sober measure of epistemological modesty. Unlike the structure of thought proposed by classical foundationalism, the starting propositions of theology are not intended to yield certain, but rather trustworthy, knowledge. Faith enters the theological stage not as a substitute for reason—a reason not to reason—but as a trust in the reliability of theology’s source, a source from which theologians argue, with certain caveats. That trust does not extend to an in-principle endorsement of every conclusion drawn from the source. Barth makes this point in his discussion of Anselm: ‘Not all “speculative” theology says what is true. But even theology which does say what is true is still “speculative” theology. Theology can neither avoid nor ignore the fact of being thus conditioned; nor ought this to make it ashamed’ (Barth 1960: 30).22 Theological statements are therefore always contested, 21 Maurice Wiles polarizes the issue unduly. He maintains that if the deposit of faith is thought of as existing in propositions, one could not escape the conclusion that formulations of dogma reached by a process of deductive logic contain an element of novelty (1967: 4). Any interpretation bears the possibility that it adds something new to what it interprets, whether the object of interpretation is expressed propositionally or not, and whether or not the process of interpretation makes use of deduction. 22 Barth, however, reads Anselm as holding that a science of faith that questioned the church’s Credo would ipso facto cease to be either faithful or scientific (1960: 27), and seems to exclude from that category of interim (and therefore corrigible) statements those ‘covered’ by biblical

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‘challenged by the sheer incomparability of their object’ (1960: 30). This last claim locates the provisionality of theology not in sin, the mind’s clouding as a result of the Fall, but in the sheer and fundamental difference between divine and human nature. It is this perennial fact of creation that is also the perennial condition of theology. What Barth refers to as the speculative quality of theology might equally be described as an argument based on postulates or axioms: that is, one departs from givens whose degree of certitude is bracketed rather than established and which traces the consequences of those givens. The admittedly disputable character of the starting point means that no claim of indubitability is made on behalf of the rest of the argument.23 Nevertheless, we might consider whether the argument could gather a cumulative force after it sets out from its point of departure. That is, the argument as a whole might commend itself with greater force than one might accord to its starting principles, and the strength of the whole might then lend credibility to the starting principles: if starting from X gets us to Y and Y seems (on whatever grounds) right, then it would seem that X is at least plausible.24 As Rahner comments, the ‘relationship to God is expressed completely only in and through the whole of the Christian message’ (1989: 75). Nevertheless, if the overall plausibility of an argument lends credibility to its premises, it can only do so because at least some of the premises were correct from the start. Something is lent to the overall plausibility of the argument by its premises and some plausibility may be lent to the premises by the argument following from them. The relation between the two may well be circular to a considerable degree. A theologian of Barth’s persuasions would presumably be unhappy with this suggestion. It might be taken as implying that the truth of the Bible could be at least confirmed, at most proved, by the rationality of a human argument. That objection is valid if the starting point of the argument were the Biblical data themselves, but they rarely would be, since it will almost always be an interpreted version of the Biblical data that is functioning as the starting point for theological reasoning. Not scripture itself is being lent credibility, but a human and therefore corrigible interpretation of the Bible. The same applies, a fortiori, to other data from which a theological argument might begin: the determinations of tradition, including credal and conciliar formulations, require interpretation. What does it mean, for instance, to affirm in the twentyfirst century that the three Persons of the Trinity are ‘of one substance’?

authority (‘die biblische Autorität gedeckten Aussage’, 1960/1958: 30), whatever that means exactly (1960/1958: 31). 23 David Tracy attributes to Schleiermacher the aphorism ‘the theses of faith become the hypotheses of the theologian’ (1975: 27); unfortunately, he gives no source for this quotation. 24 As Pannenberg notes, a systematic investigation and presentation entails a specific understanding of truth: truth as coherence (1991: 21).

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One need not subscribe to the view that such formulations are impossibly outmoded and untenable to acknowledge that they admit of multiple interpretations. In this sense, although theological data may be held in faith to reliably designate what is true, anyone’s grasp of the precise content of that truth, including a community’s grasp of it, is open to correction. The human language in which propositions are couched can never be fully adequate to the divine truths it represents, nor could the human mind’s grasp of those truths ever be complete, even in the next life, when it is free from outright error, but finite nonetheless. The provisionality of theology’s data therefore resides in the first instance in the human grasp of what the propositions are intended to designate. As Walter Kasper puts it: ‘[the truth of dogma] lies precisely in that it points beyond itself’ (1967: 77). That provisionality does not impugn the reliability of divine self-disclosure or the authority of either scripture or the church’s teaching in itself. It does mean that theological arguments rarely, if ever, reason their way forward from an indubitable foundation. For two reasons, then, the starting principles of theological arguments cannot yield certain conclusions: first, because being couched in human language they do not absolutely reflect the divine realities they represent and second, because one must reason from them and in the process of so doing, there exists always the possibility of a failure of correct inference or interpretation. The relation of these theological starting points to the arguments following from them both is and is not similar to the relation of axioms or postulates to other kinds of arguments. The similarity lies in the controvertibility of the starting point and the uncertainty it thereby imparts to the argument as a whole. The dissimilarity lies in the theologian’s conviction of the utter reliability of what the propositions ultimately designate. The confidence of those who make and attend to theological arguments rests on what is unquestionably reliable, the Trinity. Trust in specific propositions of the Christian faith is more tempered, representing not absolute trust in propositions expressed in human language, but in qualified trust in the capacity of that language to communicate in some measure the truth of divine things. Two considerations are key here. The first is the point made earlier, that at least to an extent the cogency and plausibility of the whole may lend credibility to individual propositions within it.25 The second is that the point of Christian theology is not to proclaim the indubitability of certain propositions, but to proclaim the immensity of divine love for humankind and to inspire a human response in love and trust. That purpose—the fostering of a personal relation rooted in love and therefore knowledge—differs fundamentally from the purpose of secular systems of knowledge which are ordered, not to personal 25 Kelsey concludes that it is the patterns of scripture, more than its content, that make it normative for theology. He traces this view at least as far back as Athanasius (1975: 193–4; cp. 196).

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relations, but to propositions that can be defended and that can defeat other propositions in the public arena. Christianity’s purpose is not to defeat, but to woo. That wooing, nevertheless, is at least in part an activity of rational persuasion. It is, to borrow a phrase of Alasdair MacIntyre, embodied in the practices of rational enquiry (1988: 354) and as such capable of transcending differences between traditions. Although it may appeal to the mystery of the Spirit’s movements, it need not do so, as Lindbeck notes, in such a way as to ‘terminate the quest for a more mundane kind of intelligibility’ (1984: 15). Let us return to the first point, regarding the cogency of the whole scheme of Christian theology and the way in which this scheme may sustain the credibility of individual propositions within it. One way of describing such a view would be to deem it a coherentist epistemology. Unquestionably, the claims made here on behalf of Christian theology bear considerable resemblance to coherentism, but they also differ in important respects. The overall schema of Christian theology—the structure that is lending plausibility to the individual claims within it—is not simply any group of propositions or any body of knowledge whatsoever. It purports to give an account of, literally, God and the world, of the Uncreated as well as the relations among creatures, and between creatures and their creator. It claims that all that is not uncreated has its origin and sustenance in the Uncreated, coupled with the claim that the uncreated Persons of the Trinity are supreme intelligence, Logos, ratio and they therefore create with a purpose, the purpose of drawing all creation to themselves. These claims already suggest that the theological schema functions as a whole: its components are radically interdependent. That is, the propositions of Christian theology are intended to reflect a state of affairs which is itself a coherent whole, a whole comprised of a set of relations with a discernible pattern. Because the broad pattern is significant, the coherence need not be perfect: an imperfect or intermittently disrupted pattern may still be recognizable as a pattern. The coherence of theological propositions would, moreover, not in itself guarantee their truth, for the schema as a whole could make sense internally yet fail, as a whole, to render the schema of the cosmos. However, if the theological schema as a whole made no sense, then this might well be an indication that it was failing adequately to reflect that to which it purports to attest. We will take up this issue more fully later, but here may note briefly one important caveat. There could be two quite distinct grounds for asserting theology’s requirement of a structure that is coherent because what it describes is so. The first would argue that because God is thus and the world so, thusand-so must theology be also. This argument comes close to making an ontological claim: theology resembles the nature of that which it describes.26 26 Morse cites Searle’s caution against ontological conclusions from linguistic theses (1979: 132). Torrance, in contrast, seems quite content to posit an analogical relation between concepts that can be determined only by a ‘co-ordination of whole levels of conceptual relations with one

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It is possible, however, to make a more modest argument. On this line of reasoning, the structure of a theological argument reflects the character of what it posits. That is: start from this picture of God and creation, and the nature of those assertions (rather than what they designate) will impart a certain logic and structure to the whole. The first argument is material and ontological and requires the existence of that which it asserts. The second is merely formal. The first assumes a divine character of theological texts; the second assumes a logical contiguity between assertions and the structures of texts which embody them. In either case, however, we could assert a specifically theological reason for an argument from coherence, an argument which for all its resemblance to philosophical coherentism, finally differs in important ways. What needs to be noted at this point is that the theological argument for the significance of coherence is not identical to the secular–philosophical one and this difference bears import for the role of reason. If reason is the criterion against which philosophical arguments are measured, then it might seem that to appeal to coherence in a theological argument would necessarily be to subject theology to a purely secular notion of right thinking. Clearly, something counts against such a procedure, if only that the secular notion of rationality is itself less than indubitable, and the secular standard might betray the warped condition of the human mind after the Fall, a condition all the more dangerous for not being recognized as such. Those who are most suspicious of reason as a theological norm (on specifically theological grounds such as a doctrine of the Fall) ought on the same principle to be chastened by the theological argument in favour of reason, namely that is in the first instance a divine logic, the ordering principle of the cosmos and therefore underlies all creation’s relation to God. If humankind was created to know and love God, we were originally endowed with rational capacities at least sufficient to apprehend the divine Logos. Theological views differ over how much of this natural capacity was lost at the Fall, some views holding that something of our original capacities of intellect and will remain, others maintaining that virtually nothing does. It is not clear why the practice of theology would be affected by a postlapsarian condition taken at its most dire, however, for its practitioners are presumably precisely those who are the baptized recipients of grace.27 The disorders of nature—however great they are another and through the ultimate co-ordination of their basic concepts with intelligible relations in God’ (1971: 25). 27 The complexity of theological responses to this issue is illustrated by Calvin’s position. Although he maintains that nothing remains post-Fall other than what is mutilated and diseased (Institutes I.xv.4), human happiness consists in being united with God and this union entails the use of our understanding. On this basis, Calvin argues that the more anyone tries to approach God, the more one is endowed with reason (Institutes I.xv.6). This position closely resembles that of Aquinas.

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taken to be—cannot function as constraints on the use of reason in theological argument, unless one refuses to acknowledge the possibility of the mind’s transformation by grace. This transformative power has even been linked to the authoritative status of scripture. Kelsey comments that part of what it means to call a text Christian scripture is that it ‘decisively shapes persons’ identities when it is used in the context of Christian community’ (1975: 91). The godliness of human reason before the Fall can, moreover, be taken as exceeded by its godliness in a state of grace: the Incarnation and the sending of the Spirit leave us better off than we were in our prelapsarian state, at least on some accounts. Felix culpa. In fact, our very fallen condition may prompt contemplation. As Calvin notes: ‘The miserable ruin, into which the rebellion of the first man cast us, compels us to look upward’ (Institutes I.i.1). To press the coherence of theological arguments, to ask that there are no internal or logical inconsistencies, to ask that their conclusions concur with what we know of the natural world, and human nature and the complex array of Biblical evidence, is not to impose a secular norm on a divine science, but to require that science to be divine, to accord with a ratio that properly belongs to God. To do so is to be true, both to the subject of theology’s discourse and its own methodological principles. Reason, then, serves not as a warrant, nor only as a criterion, but as a structuring principle, one that allows the outward expression of the ‘inscape’ of the divine and creation. In fact, reason does not function in theological arguments as a warrant at all, in the sense in which ‘warrant’ is used by some philosophers. Alvin Plantinga’s exploration of warrants in his trilogy (1993a, 1993b, 2000) furnishes a good example of the term’s being used in a different sense from the theological one. As Plantinga notes, for the contemporary philosopher operating on internalist suppositions, warrant is really justification (1993b: v). In his own view, a belief has warrant ‘if it is produced by cognitive faculties functioning properly in a cognitive environment congenial to those faculties, according to a design plan successfully aimed at truth’ (1993b: viii-ix). While these definitions would not quite rule out a warrant appealed to solely on the basis of its juridical authority, for example, it seems fairly clear that Plantinga wants more from warrants than that. He wants a warrant to underwrite the truth of a proposition it supports not just if the warrant is true, but because it is true. Thus, in the final volume of the trilogy, Plantinga recaps: warrant is ‘that property—or better quantity—enough of which is what makes the difference between knowledge and mere true belief ’ (2000: xi). Although Plantinga says that he is concerned with ‘classical Christian belief’ (2000: vii), this notion of warrant is not one that Christian theologians have employed. If, as Calvin maintains, most of the wisdom we possess is of God and of ourselves (Institutes I.i.1), much of this knowledge is precisely a matter of belief, that is, of propositions held by faith. Even those Christian thinkers who have held that the existence and even certain attributes of God could be proved by natural

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reason have not gone so far as to claim that only those propositions that can be proved constitute knowledge of God. Plantinga’s notion of warrant does not exactly equate to proof, but if warrant secures plausibility, and moreover, plausibility recognizable as such to non-Christians, then warranted belief would need to be held on the basis of more than faith or trust in the reliability of divine authority or ecclesial tradition. The Christian tradition has not generally been concerned to distinguish between knowledge and belief: beliefs about God can be equated with one kind of knowledge of God (that knowledge which can be expressed propositionally), but the nature of what Christians purport to know indicates that this knowledge cannot be the only kind that is significant. Furthermore, knowledge of ourselves is clearly knowledge of persons and, while certainly including some propositional knowledge (we are embodied; we are plagued by disordered desires, for example), it cannot be confined to propositions, since self-knowledge includes such attitudes as humility and contrition. Knowledge of God even more obviously includes the non-propositional: in a Christian context, someone with little or no ability to articulate propositions about God (for example, by affirming and explicating traditional attributes of God) might be acknowledged as having a deeper knowledge of God than the learned manipulators of propositions: sanctity constitutes a mode of knowing. All forms of Christianity acknowledge and honour those of great faith and spiritual depth whose knowledge of God is of the kind that comes through personal encounter in prayer, for example.28 Christians of all stripes and in every century have held such persons to have true knowledge of God, even if their propositional knowledge seemed scanty or corrigible by the standards of academic theology. The notion of knowledge which Plantinga contrasts with ‘mere’ belief is a rather different concept.

THE PURPOSE OF WARRANTS The difference between Plantinga’s conception of warrant and that tacitly operative in Christian theology turns on Plantinga’s conception of a warrant’s purpose. While it seems clear enough that the enterprise of turning belief into knowledge cannot describe the role of warrants in Christian theology, ruling out one option still leaves a large range of possible functions. One question that arises is whether theological warrants function as authorities for theology. Does a theologian cite these warrants as a copy-editor appeals to a dictionary for correct orthography, for example? Such a role is scarcely imaginable for experience, at least if the latter includes more than data such as scientific 28

Pelikan notes that Prosper of Aquitaine appealed to the rule of prayer as indispensable to understanding the rule of faith (1984: 17). Pelikan, however, gives no source to support this claim.

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evidence (and scientific evidence could in any case only speak authoritatively with respect to the facts of the natural created order). The religious experience of individuals could not function as warrant for theology authoritatively, but only persuasively, while the data of communal experience (in worship, for example) are likely, once they attain to something approaching authoritative status, to fall under the rubric of tradition (as would, for example, practices of worship, whether formalized liturgically or not). Reason’s claim to status as an authority is even more shaky. Granted, a very limited role for authoritative reason could be envisaged, as a guide to sheer logic; so for instance one might appeal to the law of non-contradiction.29 (We may state the latter as the principle that the same entity cannot be both x and not-x at the same time and in the same way. The same principle is also sometimes labelled, confusingly, the law of contradiction.) In practice, even though Christian theologians have often denied philosophy any authority over theology and have sometimes railed against the use of logic, or stressed the mystery of divine transcendence, they have rarely advocated or tolerated outright logical contradiction. Indeed, key Christian doctrines in their classical formulation represent an attempt to reduce the appearance of such contradiction. Both the classical doctrines of the Trinity and the person of Christ can be viewed as attempts to state apparently mutually contradictory affirmations in a way which shows them not in fact to be contradictory and not therefore to violate the law of non-contradiction. The Trinity is three with respect to persons or hypostases, but one with respect to nature or substance. The same entity can be both x (one) and not-x (three) at the same time, but is not asserted to be so in the same respect, and hence the proposition does not violate the law of non-contradiction. In Christology, the classical formulation seeks to show that Jesus Christ can be two with respect to nature, yet one with respect to person or hypostasis: x and not-x at the same time, but not in the same way. To the extent that classical doctrines exhibit mechanisms for avoiding such contradictions, they could be viewed as acknowledging the authority of classical logic. Such an acknowledgment may manifest itself in other ways as well. Although Christian theologians have rarely acknowledged explicitly that this is what they are doing, theological literature (particularly of the patristic and Reformation periods) is littered with scathing attacks on the absurdity of other people’s arguments. One can, like Nazianzen and Athanasius, simultaneously declare one’s disdain for the arguments of one’s opponents and insist upon the limitations of human logic, even though the opponents are being chastized for the absurdity and illogicality of their arguments. Some of this polemic—which might itself be culpable on grounds of self-contradiction, not to mention 29 Pannenberg, having duly noted the Lutheran insistence on sinfulness, nevertheless acknowledges that no argumentation is possible, in theology or in any other discipline, unless there is basic recognition of the principles of identity or contradiction (1991: 21).

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hypocrisy—is attributable to the intellectual climate of its times. The culture of late antiquity was indebted both to the philosophers who first developed Western logic and to traditions of oratory that did not eschew cheap debaters’ tricks to score points off an opponent. However, similar patterns emerge at other critical junctures in the history of the Christian tradition: at times when theology becomes more polemical, so increases the phenomenon of simultaneous attacks on mere human reason and the excoriation of one’s opponents for their lapses of logic, the Reformation providing some notable examples. Calvin, meticulous in his own argumentation, nevertheless attacks the use of logic (‘deceitful subtleties’) by the scholastics (Institutes IV.xvii.13). Even the writings of the mystical tradition furnish examples of sharp rebuke for illogicality, as when Ruusbroec, for example, chastizes the advocates of individualistic experience for errors of their theological reasoning (as well as their lack of virtues).30 Although there is certainly a tension between the use of logic and the railing against it, it is hard to think of examples of enduring theology that are guilty of violating the basic principles of sound reasoning, such as the law of non-contradiction. Bad reasoning tends to yield bad theology and bad theology tends not to withstand the test of time. Nevertheless, few theologians have been willing to acknowledge their adherence to, or even explicit knowledge of, the principles of reasoning. One of the few to do so was Aquinas, and while he is regarded by some as the example par excellence of a rationalistic theologian sold out to a philosophical system, he in fact envisages a very limited role for logic. In his treatment of natural law, he allows reasoning from very broad first principles established or known by reason alone—the good is what all desire and the law of non-contradiction, for example. These allowances are extremely limited, in the sense that they are purely formal (the first is no more than a definition, so expresses an analytical truth, and the second simply identifies ways in which propositions could contradict themselves). They are, moreover, severely limited in the scope of what they can generate: one could not derive a very large set of ethical precepts and principles from them, which Aquinas himself acknowledges. The limited generative possibilities of the postulates of sheer reason indicate why positive divine law was given and why human beings need such law if they are to live rightly. In natural law, one of the areas in which a supposedly rationalistic theologian is supposedly most confident of the reach of human reason, Aquinas actually gives it a straitened role, and one which is almost entirely regulatory. It would be hard to find an example of any other Christian theologian whose role for reason as a starting point for theological reflection would be any greater than this, rather slight, one.31

30 31

Ruusbroec, The Spiritual Espousals; see, for example 1985: 139–41. For a summary see Williams 2004.

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A U T H O R I TY FO R T H E O L O G Y As generative principles, then, we are left with scripture and tradition, and as we have seen, the latter is in any case largely dependent on the former. Both could, however, be functioning as authorities in ways it would have been hard to imagine reason or experience doing, and this fact raises the question of the role of authority in Christian theology. Are warrants simply a theological way of talking about brute appeal to authority, that which is to be followed, not because its intrinsic merit commends it and invites assent, but because it is assumed to be right in virtue of its authoritative standing? This question raises the issue of what is meant by ‘authority’, for it is not easy to determine what authority is or has been in the Western religious tradition. As Kelsey notes, most doctrines of authority in scripture are misleading with respect to the sense in which scripture is authority precisely for theology (1975: 2). The problem is not only theology’s: one of the most notable studies of authority in recent decades, Jeffrey Stout’s The Flight from Authority, declines to give any positive theory of what authority is or was (1981: xi), although he argues that modern thought ‘was born in a crisis of authority, took shape in flight from authority, and aspired from the start to autonomy from all traditional influence’ (1981: 2–3). Significantly, Stout’s key examples of this stance include not only philosophers whose acceptance of Christian beliefs was minimal at best (Kant, for instance), but also communities of those who adhered to Christian belief, such as Huguenots and Jansenists, whose discursive practices did not appeal to authority (1981: 3). Although both these latter groups got into trouble with the Roman Catholic hierarchy in France and could be said to have challenged its authority, it is a stretch to say that neither group accepted authority of any kind (which is a different matter from appealing to it). The Huguenots’ interpretation of the Bible and their conviction that its authority was greater than that of the Roman hierarchy was after all what led to their persecution: their rejection of one authority was dictated by their acceptance of another. If the Jansenists fell under suspicion of the same hierarchy, they nevertheless accepted the creeds and practices of traditional catholic Christianity, such as its sacraments. Both groups challenged particular authorities of their day, but did not reject outright any form of authority whatsoever. Stout’s examples indicate a perennial truth of the Christian tradition: the issue is not whether authority is recognized, but what is deemed authoritative and on what grounds. The history of the Reformation, so often read as a religious form of rebellion against established authority, in fact represented the substitution of one set of authorities for another: the Bible, but more often, the Bible interpreted according to quite specific criteria of a particular tradition, replaced the Roman Catholic magisterium. The replacement was held by its proponents

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to be no less authoritative than the authority they rejected was held to be by its adherents.32 A Lutheran had as little option of rejecting the doctrine of justification by faith and retaining his claim to be a Lutheran as a Roman Catholic had of rejecting transubstantiation. In either case, some norm was accorded a privileged status as the starting point of doctrine. Stout charts the shift from the medieval mindset to that of the Enlightenment as a transition from an era in which faith was considered a virtue to one in which it was equated with the vices of gullibility and superstition (1981: 108). This attitudinal shift may be culturally important in some respects, but it does not necessarily reflect a change in attitude towards authority, since after the Enlightenment theories of the natural sciences were sometimes accorded equally authoritative status, with their subsequent revision or outright rejection indicating they were no less provisional than the postulates of theology. The fact that one labels other people’s views gullible does not in itself guarantee one’s own preservation from credulously dogmatic acceptance of what is in fact questionable. The real question is whether the Christian tradition ever accorded its warrants and norms the status of authorities in the sense in which Stout uses the term. The earliest centuries of the church were characterized not only by the mystery surrounding the formation of the Biblical canon, the chief of all warrants, but also disputes over the interpretation of writings whose claim to authority was recognized by all parties: various Arians, Apollinarians, and Nestorians argued from the same scriptures as the groups now considered orthodox. As Kelsey notes, appeal to scripture attempts to make the case for theology whose acceptability is actually or potentially in dispute (1975: 3) and it could only be in dispute if scripture admitted of multiple interpretations. Murphy therefore exaggerates in holding that, if scripture has to play the role of foundation, then it must have indubitable or unquestionable character (1994: 200; she makes a parallel claim for experience). Even modern foundationalists certainly do not require as much of their starting propositions. In the Christian tradition, disputes over the interpretation of the chief norm were moreover matched by disputes over other norms. So, for example, conciliar decrees which might have been expected to settle disputes often led to further disputes over the precise interpretation of the decrees. Chalcedon, which is commonly taken as having settled the basic parameters of Christology, in fact raised the question of what it meant for Christ to have two natures; the Monothelite controversy turned on precisely

32 Farley and Hodgson refer to the Lutheran and Reformed confessions as ‘an ersatz teaching authority in Protestant dress’ which acquired in their traditions ‘the character of inspired, inerrant documents’ (Farley and Hodgson 1985: 72). They express a position markedly at variance with this last when they later claim ‘The positive insight behind the assertion of sola scriptura . . . was the critical questioning of all authorities’ (1985: 72).

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this point, and for over two hundred years after Chalcedon, bitter disputes about the matter raged. Likewise one does not have to be sub-orthodox, on any account, to raise the question of what the ancient language of person, hypostasis, substance, and nature might mean in our time. Such querying may be a form of rejection of authority (for instance, the Monophysite rejection of Chalcedon); or it may represent a request for clarification of authority (such as the questioning of classical terminology by modern theologians), a request which in itself nibbles at authority’s normative status by pointing out the ambiguity of its determinations. The authority may still have authoritative status, but its decrees cannot function to regulate belief or settle disputes if they are not themselves clear. The history of Christianity has always evidenced such uncertainties. The Middle Ages is often simultaneously taken to be the age of credulous faith and unquestioning acceptance of dogma while at the same time contemptuously dismissed for its supposed preoccupation with disputes fuelled by the inadmissibly speculative application of pure reason, such as the numbers of angels dancing on pins. It is hard to see how it could be both: although no one has ever actually identified a medieval text which raises the angels-on-pins issue, the scholastics debated many other fine points of theology that rest on ultimately hard questions (as the space occupied by immaterial substances does). The mentality and culture which allowed, indeed encouraged, the pursuit of such questions was one which allowed that even if one accepts a particular theological given, it will almost inevitably lead to the raising of further questions. The work often taken as the inauguration of scholastic theology, Abelard’s Sic et Non, departs from the acknowledgement of conflicting views in patristic theology. If this work does mark the beginning of scholasticism, then medieval theology’s root assumption is of the diversity of theological views within the church. The patristic legacy of patriarchs, saints, and councils marked the beginning of tradition, not its end33 because tradition’s determinations are never the last word, doctrinally, but open out on new horizons. Theology never rests: the conjectures and solutions of one generation become the questions and disputes of another.34 Do then theological warrants function as authorities for theology? If by authority, one means a source which definitively stipulates the parameters of the permissible or a court of final adjudication of disputes, one would have to say that no warrant, including the Bible, has functioned in this way in relation to Christian theology. The Bible has more often given rise to theological 33 This may in itself be a development. Florovsky claims that the appeal to tradition in the patristic period was to the mind of the church. In Athanasius’s disputes with the Arians, for example, there is no reference to traditions in the plural, but only to the tradition; the unity of tradition was the point of the argument (1972: 83). 34 Cp. Rahner: ‘The infinite horizon of human questioning is experienced as an horizon which recedes further and further the more answers man can discover’ (1989: 32).

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disputes than ended them. There is no single Christian court of appeal on Biblical interpretation. Readings of the scriptural text differ from time to time, tradition to tradition, and considerable variation is often evident within traditions. While some have other norms—the Roman Catholic magisterium35 or the Lutheran confessions, for example—these, too, admit of some leeway in interpretation. What may seem to be watertight may not always be so. The promulgation of papal infallibility, to take a notable case, might seem to have stipulated an incontrovertible authority to adjudicate doctrinal and moral disputes. However, while the dogma makes clear that the Pope is considered infallible when speaking ex cathedra on matters of faith and morals, the Roman Catholic Church has never stipulated exactly what statements are included under the ex cathedra rubric. Some theologians and canon lawyers take the encyclical Humanae Vitae, for instance, to fall under the heading and some do not. Likewise, although the Lutheran confessions are still taken as providing a benchmark against which authentically Lutheran theology may be measured, they fall short of constituting the kind of authoritative regulator of belief that Stout seems to think existed in Christian circles. The Joint Declaration on Justification, signed by representatives of the Lutheran and Roman Catholic churches elicited an outcry from a number of prominent (mostly German) Lutheran theologians, who regarded its theology of justification as inadequate by the standards of Luther and his contemporaries and successors. Other Lutherans viewed its theology as fully in keeping with that of the confessions. Whichever side was right, the fact that both considered themselves as faithful to the confessions indicates the variety of ways in which the documents can be understood. Theological warrants resist being read as authorities, therefore, if only because all of them are radically interpretable. They function not to provide definitive settlements to disputed questions, but to provide the starting points for theological reflection. The same warrant (a passage of the Bible or a conciliar decree) might ground quite different sorts of arguments, even arguments whose conclusions oppose each other. Their capacity to support quite different arguments does not count against their construal as warrants, but it does seem in significant degree to count against their construal as authorities. Where, then, do norms enter the picture? Is a norm the same as a warrant? Is it the same as an authority? If we take ‘warrant’ in the sense in which it is used by someone like Plantinga, the question would be harder to answer, for in his view, a warrant is not only that which is cited in support of another view, but that which can in fact give what it supports the status of knowledge rather 35 It is doubtful whether the concept of magisterium is quite the same as that of warrant, but for the sake of argument, I will for the moment consider the possibility that they could be at least roughly equated.

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than belief. Theological warrants could not function in this way; if the paradigmatic warrant is the Bible, then it can only ground assertions adduced from it in the eyes of those who in any case believe it to be true. There is no point in citing the Bible to someone who believes it is incoherent drivel in the first place. In the context of Christian theology, warrant must have a weaker sense: that which can underwrite a proposition if the warrant itself is taken to be true. ‘Norm’ has a stronger sense. Norms are regulative, yet always relative. What is normal or normative in one context may not be normal or normative in another: one would not study the Bible in order to pass the theory test for a driving licence any more than one would consult the road code for guidance on sexual ethics. In a theological context, then, do warrants always function as norms, or vice versa? In the sense ‘warrant’ has been used here, there is an immediate difference between the two, inasmuch as a warrant can be any notion cited as grounds for another. In order to provide such support, the warrant must have at least a degree of plausibility in the eyes of the one citing and, to serve any persuasive purpose, also have plausibility in the eyes of those to and for whom the argument is made. Such plausibility may fall far short of normative status, however, for plausibility is a rather subjective criterion. What one person finds plausible, another may find entirely unpersuasive. The normative is not nearly so susceptible to variant status. One may reject a norm as universally valid, but it is generally harder to deny it is one for some community, if that community acknowledges it as such. I may believe it makes greater sense to drive on one side of the road than another, and in that sense, may beg to differ from the conventions of the country in which I am driving. What I cannot do is argue that the convention is other than it is, claim in other words, that it is the norm to drive on the right in Britain or on the left in the United States. The immediate difference between warrants and norms is that norms function as such in relation to communities, whether these are, say, politically defined or are communities of discourse. To be a norm, a standard must be widely acknowledged as such, so that we could say that what is not accepted as a norm is ipso facto not a norm. Warrants, because they are not necessarily regulative of communities, need not have general recognition as such (that is, such general recognition is not constitutive of warrant). Warrants do not require general recognition because they need not bear a relation to the regulation of a community’s discourse. To say they do not require it does not mean they may not in fact enjoy such recognition, and because both warrants and norms may function to shape a community’s discourse, there is an area of overlap between the two terms. In the context of Christian theology, what are called warrants may function as both warrants and norms. While a particular argument from a Biblical text may be disputed, it cannot simply be dismissed as irrelevant in a theological dispute. That is, the theologian who disagrees that the text leads to the

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conclusion claimed would have to provide an alternative reading, and probably also argue that the conclusion was improperly adduced from the evidence purporting to support it. In other cases, a theologian might argue for the superior claim of some other form of evidence in the case in question. Feminist theologians, for example, might dispute the claim of the Old Testament to stipulate the parameters of women’s activity in the twenty-first century. To do so is not, however, to deny the Bible the status of a warrant (or even a norm) in a general sense, but either to claim a limit to the extent of its authority (it speaks authoritatively in some areas but not others) or to claim that there is in this case a clash of warrants. That clash could be taken as occurring between the Bible and another warrant, such as experience, or it could be taken as a discrepancy among the Biblical writings themselves: a text or texts commonly cited in favour of a conservative reading of the role of women might be opposed to the New Testament witness, for example, Jesus of Nazareth’s recognition of their contribution. In neither case is the Bible being denied the status of a warrant in any general sense. Neither is it clear that even in these cases, it is being denied the status of a norm, however. A norm indicates what is usual and nothing about the concept requires that norms be applied in any iron-clad fashion, without exception. A police officer directing traffic at the scene of an accident may require a car temporarily to drive on the wrong side of the road, for example. Even those with the strongest doctrines of Biblical authority ignore some of the Bible’s own dicta. Christians of all stripes set aside the ceremonial law of the Old Testament; only a tiny minority obey Christ’s injunction not to swear oaths; an equally small minority require that women cover their heads in church; and despite the fact that for most of Christian history it was taken for granted that usury was prohibited, modern Christians of virtually every variety are quite happy to take out mortgages and invest in pension plans. While these examples may constitute no more than instances of hypocrisy, some may be more charitably read as indicating the flexible possibilities of an operative norm. The norm indicates what is usual and may stipulate what is required in certain cases, but does not necessarily lose its status as a norm simply because it does not or cannot legislate in every case. In general, though, a norm represents a stronger form of authority than a warrant, in significant part because of the norm’s function within a community and its ability to articulate and stipulate communal beliefs and practices. The distinction between warrants and norms correlates to a degree with that between doctrine (or dogma) and theologoumena. Since norms shape communal discourse and its theological affirmations, they necessarily relate to communal belief, and this we call doctrine, teaching with some claim to official status. Although this term is sometimes used as a synonym for theology, this usage is both inexact and unhelpful. A great deal of Christian theology, both now and in the past, is not doctrine, having no claim to even

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quasi-authoritative standing relative to some community. Much Christian theology reflects the distinctive views of a particular thinker. It may be speculative, mystical, polemical, or simply idiosyncratic. The distinction here, it is important to note, is not between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Orthodoxy encompasses a wide range of views. There is no single orthodox Christology or doctrine of the Trinity: any theology which does not specifically count as heretical is by default orthodox, even though it might differ markedly from other orthodox theologies. It can certainly be orthodox but idiosyncratic. A theology can be orthodox and ill-advised, badly argued, or even incoherent. A theology may have ample and impeccable warrants supporting it and yet not be doctrine. The boundary between theologoumena, and doctrines or dogma may, however, be hard to discern and may be disputable. Technically, a theology becomes doctrine when it attains the status of recognized teaching, but in many cases, the latter category is murkier than one might expect. Many churches do not define what counts for them as official teaching; in many, the earliest ecumenical councils and the two chief Western creeds (the Apostles’ and the Nicene) in fact function as dogma and for most Christian thinkers trace the parameters of orthodoxy, though their quietly normative function may not be proclaimed very overtly. That is, denying the divinity of Christ or the three Persons of the Trinity would be taken as sub-orthodox (at the very least), and since these doctrines cannot be retrieved straightforwardly from the New Testament, adherence to them presupposes an authoritative status for the councils of the early church, whether or not that status is explicitly acknowledged. The body of Christian doctrine is in fact quite small, if one takes ‘doctrine’ to designate what has achieved formulation in some official document or in the work of a theologian acknowledged as central to a community’s selfunderstanding. What counts as the latter varies from one ecclesial tradition to another; while most at least tacitly acknowledge the Christological and trinitarian formulae of the early church, a church may also adhere to formulae which do not enjoy similar official status in other churches (such as the Roman Catholic Marian dogmas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries); or a doctrine essentially regarded as sound by others may have a special status in one tradition (as it has sometimes been claimed by Lutherans that justification is the articulus stantis aut cadensis ecclesiae, not a status accorded it by any other tradition).36 One difficulty in determining the parameters of official teaching is that some doctrines may seem to be taken as definitive of orthodoxy, even though no official document proclaims them as such. The doctrine of atonement in its Western medieval and post-medieval forms may 36 The status of the doctrine in Lutheranism is not easy to determine, however. Some Lutheran theologians apparently assume it has this standing within the tradition, but no official document seems to pronounce on this point.

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serve as a prime example. Although it serves as a doctrinal touchstone for many Christians in Reformation traditions, Reformation confessions (for example, the Augsburg, the Westminster, and the Dordrecht) do not actually stipulate a particular version of it, penal satisfaction or penal substitution, for example. Nevertheless, disputing these particular forms of the doctrine can sometimes be met with accusations of heresy, even though these accounts of Christ’s saving work are no more inevitable interpretations of the New Testament than the traditional accounts of his person, and unlike the latter, never received conciliar or credal codification. In such cases, it may be hard to determine the parameters of doctrine; it may be that the widespread impression that a certain doctrine is definitive of orthodoxy makes it de facto doctrine for the groups in which this impression has general currency. If so, we would have to adjust the notion of what constitutes a norm. The Eastern Orthodox tradition has an analogous position with respect to the canonization of saints. Eschewing the formal procedures favoured by the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox churches recognize saints as holy people who came to be acclaimed as such by communities. Although there are some saints held to be such in every Orthodox tradition (Basil the Great, for example), others are deemed to be saints only within certain national churches, often because they became known for their holiness in a particular locality. Such sainthood by acclamation might serve as an analogy for doctrinal status by popular or general acclamation, but the implications of this method of doctrinal formulation are greater than those of sainthood. To begin with, the consequences of calling a particular person ‘saint’ has less far-reaching consequences than deeming a doctrine constitutive of orthodoxy. Second, Christians of all churches are apt to get muddled about what constitutes official teaching. Surveys of belief among laypeople have shown that even in those traditions known for their doctrinal exactitude and clarity of teaching, a substantial number unwittingly adhere to beliefs at variance with official teaching. One commonly encounters views among Christians of all stripes that evil is a substance or power, or that the devil is evil incarnate, even though these dualist views are entirely at variance with the Christian doctrines of creation and the sovereignty of the good Creator. If one judged the parameters of doctrine by the parameters of acceptance, one would find a number of views would have to be regarded as doctrines which not only fall outside the scope of what has traditionally been considered orthodox, but which are on an outright collision course with key elements of orthodoxy. This latter point marks a crucial difference between doctrine-by-acclamation and sainthood by acclamation. The body of doctrine must be internally coherent, since doctrines individually form part of a structure which reflects the divine purpose for creation, a purpose which is intelligent and intelligible, even to creatures of finite and wounded intellects. The communion of saints is of one accord in its confession and praise, but not coherent, properly speaking. Saints do not

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necessarily agree with one another and they certainly do not all exhibit holiness in the same forms. Or, to put the matter another way, there is no ratio of sanctity the way there is to doctrine. Holiness is personally specific and necessarily idiosyncratic, as doctrine cannot be. While there might be some grounds for equating that which is widely believed with doctrine, the case against doing so is stronger, and so we will here restrict ‘doctrine’ to the sense of that which has been formally acknowledged as normative teaching for some community. This sense of doctrine provides a clear and helpful contrast to theologoumena (theological views of individual thinkers which do not enjoy official recognition and which may or may not be orthodox), while the term ‘theology’ can be used to cover the whole spectrum from dogma and doctrine to theologoumena. (In principle, it could also include heretical statements, since these are by definition theological claims, albeit ones rejected by a community as constitutive of its identity; however for clarity’s sake I will not use the term in this broadest of senses). We will take ‘warrant’ to mean any assertion that provides grounds for a theological claim. In principle, there could be more warrants than the four usually identified as such, although in practice, what are cited as grounds for theological arguments generally fall into one or another of these categories. We will confine the term ‘norm’ to that which is formally acknowledged as regulating doctrine or dogma for a given community, and favour the term ‘warrant’ for designating a claim that underwrites theological arguments.

FIGURA TIVE LANGUAGE One reason to be cautious about the application of the term ‘norm’ arises from the particular character of theology’s chief warrant, scripture. The term ‘norm’ may connote regulative capacities that are greater than can reasonably be attributed to the kinds of texts in question. The reason for the variability in the regulative capacity of scriptural texts—which some might admit but regard as unfortunate and others might wish vehemently to deny—is their heterogeneous character and the prevalence in them of figurative language. Because the concern here is with warrants, we are particularly concerned with the question of how assessments of figurative language—what it is and how it works—might affect our estimation of the way in which scriptural texts underwrite theological propositions. Before we turn to the constitutent issues, a preliminary point is in order. The Bible’s figurative language is not confined to one trope, but most discussions of figurative language, whether by literary critics, philosophers, or theologians, are specifically of metaphor. In practice, this limitation has little effect on the issues at hand. Many tropes are actually sub-forms of metaphor (such as synecdoche or metonymy). Other forms, such

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as the simile, are near relations, and on some accounts not different from metaphor at all (Frye 1957: 123). Some of the narrative forms of the Bible (parables, notably) are actually extended metaphors or similes. So in considering metaphor, despite the apparent narrowness of the category, one in fact covers a great deal of the Bible’s tropical terrain. The reason theology cannot avoid the problem of trope as it weighs and considers its norms is that its norma normans is replete with them. Scriptural texts range from law to chronicles to imaginative narrative to letters and apocalyptic writings and poetry. (‘Tradition’, similarly, designates texts ranging from conciliar decrees to the creeds and liturgical texts.) Some of these genres are hard to envisage functioning as norms, and appeal to them as such varies. Few modern theologians have attempted to attach theological claims to verses of the psalms or the Song of Songs, for example, although a theological argument may incorporate such texts, weaving them into the fabric of exploration and assertion so richly that it becomes impossible to separate them out of it (as, for example, Augustine does in Confesssions XIII.13). Such usage nevertheless falls short of appeal to a warrant. It would be hard to explain why the psalter is less doctrinally apt than the letters which Paul wrote, often in haste and certainly in the midst of great turmoil and distraction, yet the Pauline corpus is in practice accorded a normative status that the psalms are not.37 This state of affairs—some books functioning as doctrinal warrants, some tacitly bypassed for such purposes—has been so taken for granted in the post-Enlightenment Christian tradition that it is hard to find examples of its being justified by argument or explanation. That it should not need justification is far from evident, given it effectively creates a canon within a canon. What gets relegated to the doctrinally insignificant canon varies: while the psalms tend to be cited more often for merely pious than doctrinal purposes, the attention accorded the apocalyptic writings varies. In some traditions, these are taken with the utmost seriousness (to the extent of providing for precise dates of events such as the final judgement), while others seem studiously to avoid any mention of them. One element of commonality between Revelation and the psalter is that both make heavy use of obviously poetic language, and indeed, poetic forms (in Revelation, in the hymnic material interspersed among the prose passages). That it should be the overtly poetic books of the Bible (the Song and Lamentations also fall into this category) that are overlooked for the purposes of theological argumentation might be taken as an indication that the problem is poetry: poetry simply is not suited to serving as a warrant in an academic argument. Although there might be something intuitively persuasive about such a view, it may rest on a questionable assumption about intention: since 37

As Metzger notes, the writers of the apostolic epistles show no awareness that their words would come to be regarded as a permanent standard of doctrine and life in the church (1987: 4).

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poems are not composed for the purposes of argument, they ought not to be used in an academic debate. Aside from the problems attending any appeal to intention, its use in arguments about the Bible is particularly odd: in most instances, we know little about the authors of Biblical texts, let alone their intentions. Furthermore many books of the Old Testament, especially, are in any case obviously not the work of a single author; they may be the product of several redactors compiling diverse texts whose authorship is beyond establishment, working over a long period of time: generalizing about those intentions is impossible. Also, the fact that authors may not foresee a particular use for their writings does not in itself render invalid the use of their writings in these unexpected ways. Perhaps most importantly, some clearly hymnic material in the New Testament has been highly significant for doctrinal purposes, the kenotic hymn of Philippians (2:6–11), for example. Moreover, the writers of the New Testament (such as Paul and the author of Hebrews) themselves routinely cite poetry (most often the psalter) to make a doctrinal point. The appeal to intention fails on several grounds, therefore. The notion that texts can be easily divided into the poetic and the nonpoetic is equally questionable. One of the great difficulties in appealing to the Bible as either a warrant or a norm is the prevalence of figurative language throughout the canon. The gospels are full of metaphorical language, including passages commonly cited in theological arguments, the Sermon on the Mount, or the farewell discourses of John, for example. The writings of the prophets of the Old Testament, important for any theological understanding of sin and repentance, as well as for any social ethic, are also replete with tropes which are not simply rhetorical flourishes that can be edited out of the text, but form part of its warp and weft. If the Bible has the status of either a theological warrant or a norm, its dependence on figurative language must therefore be faced and addressed. One of the very few theologians to take the problem of Biblical trope seriously was Aquinas, although he is often regarded as a dry philosophizing rationalist. In his treatment of sacred doctrine at the beginning of the Summa theologiae, essentially a miniature treatise on theological method, Aquinas considers the structure of theological arguments in relation to other kinds of argument. He notes that some disciplines (scientiae) argue from first principles knowable through natural intelligence (he cites geometry as an example), while others begin from a starting point established by another discipline (as music relies on arithmetic and perspective on geometry, Summa theologiae I.2, resp.). The starting discipline of sacred doctrine is the knowledge (scientia) of God and the blessed. This knowledge is more certain than any other (it is divine self-knowledge and the Trinity’s knowledge of creation), but Aquinas acknowledges that we do not have unmediated access to this most certain form of knowledge. In this life, we only know what God and the blessed know via scripture. Aquinas is sometimes taken, by sympathetic interpreters, as

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claiming a secure scriptural ground for sacred doctrine, and to be sure, he does accord the Bible a unique role in grounding theological arguments, a role which far exceeds what one would expect if one knew medieval theology only from Reformation polemic. Nevertheless, Aquinas does not claim that sacred doctrine is the most secure of all scientiae because it rests on the testimony of the Bible, which is the sure deliverer of the knowledge of God and the blessed. It is not the Bible itself which is maximally sure, but divine self-knowledge. The Bible is the medium of this knowledge, and like all media, can be difficult to disentangle from what it conveys. The tangle of knowledge and medium is distinctly tropical, on Aquinas’s account. What is overlooked by the proponents of the picture of Aquinas as Biblical theologian are the last two articles in the first question of the larger Summa, which concern metaphor in scripture. These articles are not an afterthought or an omissible appendix, as one might be led to believe, judging from the amount of attention they have received. On the contrary, they provide an essential gloss on the rest of the question. In them, Aquinas considers whether metaphor is necessary to scripture and to sacred doctrine. He argues that metaphor is necessary to both, on theological grounds. That is, he does not content himself with the pragmatic observation that scripture abounds with metaphorical usages and theologians simply have to contend with this language if they wish to ground their thought in the sacred page. Rather, he works from the anthropology he will develop later in the Summa: human beings are embodied and this embodiment has far-reaching epistemological consequences. Embodiment affects the way we make sense of the world around us, reason from the facts of our experience, and express ourselves. The refraction of all our experiences and reflection through the body means that we interpret even the immaterial in bodily terms. The Bible’s use of metaphor is therefore not decorative, but the necessary condition through which it is possible to communicate the self-disclosure of an immaterial deity to these particular recipients of that divine gift, those able to understand when the message is communicated in cognate and therefore bodily terms. Richards expresses a similar thought when he calls metaphor ‘a transaction between contexts’.38 Although Aquinas does not draw the parallel, we could say, extending his thought just a little, that the suspicion of Biblical metaphor is no less than a form of gnosticism, the notion that the spiritual truths human beings grasp and reflect upon must be stripped of all connection to the material if they are to be truly spiritual. On Aquinas’s account, theology follows the Bible’s lead, and metaphor is equally necessary to its forms of expression. So indigenous is metaphor to theology that Aquinas deems it more necessary to theology than to poetry.

38

Cited in Barbour 1974: 13.

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One significance of Aquinas’s thought on this point is that he provides an implicit answer to those suspicious of theological reasoning from the Bible’s poetry. Far from making reasoning impossibly unstable, figurative language is what renders theological reflection possible at all. Attempted flight from it is futile, since even if the Bible’s metaphors were avoided, theologians would still have to use figurative language to write theology.39 Nevertheless, the prevalence of figurative language in the Bible poses some immediate problems for those who wish to view scripture as a theological warrant, and even more so, as a norm. The chief difficulty in building a theological argument on the foundation of figurative language lies in the richness of trope, a productive ambiguity whose wealth comes with volatility. Exactly how much volatility one acknowledges depends on decisions one takes about what constitutes figurative language and how it operates.40 One significant question for theology is whether metaphor is a function of lexis (or even syntax), or a matter of linguistic usage (for some, specifically literary usage). If meaning is a function of lexis, then there can be such a thing as a ‘dead’ (or frozen, faded, or petrified) metaphor (e.g. Barfield 1928: 41; Leech 1974: 213, 227–8; Levin 1977: 9, 30). That is, usages which have become fossilized or institutionalized, such as one might find in a dictionary, are still counted as metaphors. These could be expressions such as ‘the long arm of the law’ or even ‘arm’ used of the side pieces of a chair. Such usages do not demand that the reader or hearer reflect on them or ponder their meaning; their meanings are established, fixed, and do not vary according to the whims of the speaker or the constructions which hearers place upon them. Their lack of ambiguity means they leave little or no room for interpretation. Indeed, many of these ‘dead’ metaphors are so much standard items of lexis that some would not think of them as metaphors at all. Black states bluntly, ‘A so-called dead metaphor is not a metaphor at all, but merely an expression that no longer has a pregnant metaphorical use’ (Ortony 1979/1993: 25). In English, for example, there is no other word than ‘arm’ to denote the side pieces

39 One could argue—though I am not aware anyone has—that theology should not argue from the trope-dependent or trope-infested—passages of the Bible. This strategy is not feasible, first because determining the boundary between tropical and non-tropical passages would be impossible to determine; second, because it would create a canon-within-a-canon; and third, because it would rule out key sections of the Bible—such as the gospel parables—which have always been central to Christian reasoning. 40 The Bible’s figurative language is not confined to one trope, but most of the discussions of figurative language, whether by literary critics, philosophers, or theologians, are specifically of metaphor. In practice, this issue has little effect on the issues at hand. Many tropes are actually specific subforms of metaphor (such as synecdoche or metonymy). Other forms, such as the simile, are near relations, and on some accounts, not actually different from metaphor at all (Frye 1957: 123). Some of the narrative forms of the Bible (parables, for instance) are actually extended metaphors or similes. So in considering metaphor, despite the apparent narrowness of the category, one in fact covers a great deal of the tropical terrain of the Bible.

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of a chair; ‘arm’ in this context is not some colourful turn of phrase, but the only word we have to designate the thing in question.41 However, such considerations do not deter those who see metaphor as a function of lexis. The conviction that metaphor can be lexicalized becomes an extensive principle in the theory of Lakoff and Johnson. Not only is the dictionary replete with metaphors, in their view; metaphor is a function of language and evidence of a pervasive conceptual system. Our very thought forms are fundamentally metaphorical (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 3). Leech’s view is similar: ‘Metaphor cannot be legitimately separated from a formal account of the conceptual and logical structure of meaning’ (1974: 231). Whether one takes the radical approach of Lakoff and Johnson, or the more modest one of Leech, Levin, and Barfield, the notion that metaphors and figurative language are social constructs with readily determinable meanings is a position with immediate hermeneutical consequences. On this account, figurative language is a herd animal: the meanings of many, perhaps most, tropes could be secured by comparing one usage with another. Biblical scholars in fact frequently proceed in this way, ascertaining the meaning of a word in one text by comparing it with its use in another. That procedure rests on the assumption that the writers of the Bible were drawing on vocabulary whose meanings might be various, but nevertheless essentially communal. Where the Bible makes use of figurative language, we can pin down the meaning of these figures with some precision. Such a procedure would not secure the meaning of all Biblical tropes, but it would take care of many, perhaps so many that the rest could be quietly ignored. Exit ambiguity, perhaps. Ambiguity might well be what a theologian of a certain stripe wishes at all costs to avoid, particularly where Biblical interpretation is concerned. Ambiguity does not in any case arise solely from figurative usages. The ambiguities of tropes do not constitute a special case against reasoning from figurative language. One of the particular properties of figurative language—its tendency to inhabit rhetorically heightened and poetic speech, which resists conversion into the propositional forms characteristic of theology—also characterizes narrative and the Christian tradition has always reasoned from the stories of Israel and the gospels. Perhaps this greater reliance on narrative material could be taken as historical (the history of Israel or the life of Jesus of Nazareth) or moralistic (as in the case of the gospel parables) and therefore not fictional, ‘safe’, as poetry can never be. That assumption rests in the first instance on a false distinction between fact and fiction. Poetry, if it expresses a truth of the human condition, is neither, properly speaking. Fiction is not necessarily 41 Palmer, whose examples of metaphor are primarily of the lexicalized variety (foot of a mountain, eye of needle), nevertheless claims that metaphor is ‘haphazard’, on the ground that these usages are specific to a particular language (French needles do not have eyes, for example; 1981: 103).

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untruthful and a narrative can be factual yet fall short of truthfulness, by leaving out relevant information and giving an impression which is misleading in its overall outline. Moreover, any narrative represents a perspective on a set of events and as such, cannot be straightforwardly equated with the events themselves or the truth of these events. The four gospels give different pictures of Jesus of Nazareth, even though they share a great deal of common material, yet their differences do not necessarily mean that one is more truthful than another. As Kelsey notes, the Bible includes a variety of semantic structures (1975: 188) and if so, theology must deal with this variety if it is to be faithful to the Bible and not just a highly selective canon within a canon. A further difficulty with the attempt to domesticate figurative language by characterizing it as a function of lexis is that no matter how many ‘dead’ metaphors there might be, the category of metaphor cannot be limited to such usages. The issue is not whether some of what we could label metaphors can be found in the dictionary, but whether all can. Obviously, there are metaphors that are idiosyncratic, whether the creations of poets or ordinary speakers, and given to colourful turns of phrase. Even if language is, as Barfield contends, a tissue of dead or petrified metaphors (1928: 41), the tissue retains the plasticity to create new, not yet petrified (I hesitate to say ‘un-dead’) metaphors. That plasticity is both of the essence of all not-dead/fossilized metaphors and poses a question for the theological interpretation of metaphor. If, as Wheelwright comments, ‘Poetic language generally, by reason of its openness, tends toward semantic plenitude rather than toward a cautious semantic economy’ (1962: 57), then the metaphorical quality of Biblical language will always provide an expansive ground for theology. That is, one cannot reason deductively from poetry, in the sense of establishing a single valid conclusion from a proposition or set of propositions. Even if metaphor is a function of lexis or syntax, enough of the Bible’s figures are idiosyncratic for important questions to be raised. The owl, lonely in the wilderness (Ps 102.6) or the mother hen (Mt 23.37 par.): these have connotations beyond what a dictionary could define, and their connotations are open to dispute. Does the hen, for example, connote femininity, or general solicitude? The answer one gives may revert to a prior assumption about whether solicitude is necessarily or primarily a female trait. If neither image allows us to establish a single, readily determinable meaning, however, that does not mean we cannot reason from such images at all. It simply means that we must do so with an awareness of their potential multiplicity and volatility of meaning. At the other end of the spectrum from views that emphasize metaphor as a phenomenon of lexis are those that see it as some form of decline from communal standards or convention.42 MacCormac and Levin, for example, 42

Between the two ends of the spectrum lie views such as those of Palmer (1981) and Ruhl (1989). Ruhl departs from a ‘monosemic bias’ (3–5, 234–7), the supposition that a word has a

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both view metaphor as a departure from norms. The former claims metaphors exploit semantic anomalies (1985: 34); they violate semantic rules (1985: 31), a notion parallel to Black’s claim that metaphor is not deducible from a standard lexicon (Ortony 1979/1993: 23) and its producers are ‘rule-violating’ (1979: 23).43 These views have in common that they view figurative language as a special use of words, rather than words used in their conventional, if secondary, senses. These views correlate with Wheelwright’s notion that all writing is perspectival (1962: 16). In other words, common to all these approaches to metaphor is the idea that metaphor is singular, particular to speakers and contexts, not codified or communally sanctioned, and is therefore more than ordinarily open to interpretation. On these accounts, you could not determine the meaning of any particular metaphor by looking it up in a dictionary or by comparing a use in one locus to use in others, in the conviction that the assemblage of usages would establish the meaning of each individual case. The core issue here is one suggested by Wheelwright. In his view, the perspectival quality of all writing is merely heightened in poetic language (1962: 16, 51). The difference between the clichéd and the factual, and the more radically perceptual is the difference between what has become standardized and perspectives that are fresh and individual (1962: 16). On this view, far from representing a codified, communally agreed interpretation of the world, metaphor distils the particular vision of an individual. It gives us a picture of the world seen through one pair of eyes, allowing us to glimpse the world as they see it. The corollary of this view is that metaphors not only require interpretation, but are in themselves interpretations. Not only is it impossible simply to look them up in a dictionary to determine their meaning; they will have no single meaning, at least, none one could establish with

single root meaning and all other variants of this meaning hearken back to this base. On this theory, metaphors could either be fully lexicalized or not, but idiosyncratic usages would be drawing on a word’s standard root meaning. This stance allows for both communally established and individually crafted dimensions to metaphor. Palmer views meaning as a phenomenon of lexis (1981: 105–61), related to polysemy and homonymy, but he locates meaning in sentences, rather than words (1976/1981: 103), a position which implies that metaphors, too, are defined by the context in which they occur. A metaphor represents either a variant meaning of a word (polysemy) or a meaning which is quite distinct from the word’s other meanings (homonymy). While checking a dictionary may be illuminating, the meaning of a metaphor cannot be settled solely by doing so (1976: 67): ‘meanings do not seem to be stable but to depend upon speakers, hearers and context’ (1981: 7). He is speaking of all meanings, but if he is correct, lexis itself is so plastic one might question whether there are any meanings that can be straightforwardly retrieved from dictionaries. 43 However, MacCormac also holds that metaphor is a pervasive feature of language: metaphor appears ‘so regularly a part of ordinary language that instead of contending that metaphor deviates from a normative grammar, one might better consider that any grammar which cannot account for metaphor is too limited in comprehension to be useful’ (1985: 32). MacCormac explicitly rejects the approach of Lakoff and Johnson (57).

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confidence. Although Wheelwright wrote long before the rise of the readerresponse school of literary criticism, his perspectival approach to metaphor implies that the meaning of metaphor will be determined both by its fashioners and its interpreters, speakers and hearers, writers and readers, who must make something of the perspectival and richly ambiguous use of language compressed into the metaphor, which expresses the speaker’s or writer’s perspective. As Wheelwright notes, ‘Behind every semantic situation there lies the question of “for whom”’ (1968: 8). It would also follow that metaphors have no single meaning, but potentially as many meanings as there are readers and hearers, as well as speakers and writers. Whether one sees metaphor as a communally established phenomenon of lexis or the distillation of individual vision, one can see it as functioning determinatively: the speaker or writer may choose words, but words shape the way we view the world. The view that metaphor is a lens through which we make sense of the world and communicate our picture of it lies close to the notion that metaphor actually determines our views and thought-forms. Hence Black: metaphors ‘enable us to see aspects of reality that the metaphor’s production helps to constitute’ (Ortony 1979/1993: 39), which is a way of asserting that the linguistic forms a speaker uses in turn shape the speaker’s perspectives: the lens may have initially been freely chosen, but then becomes the filter of vision.44 Likewise, in the view of Lakoff and Johnson, ‘metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language, but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system . . . is fundamentally metaphorical in nature’ (1980: 3). They speak of concepts ‘governing’ thought and ‘governing’ our everyday functioning, ‘down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around the world, and how we relate to other people’ (1980: 3). Wheelwright’s view shares something of these sensibilities; he claims poetic language partly creates and partly discloses certain hitherto unknown, unguessed aspects of ’What Is’. Every such aspect represents a perspective that is individual . . . and that is capable of eliciting a fresh response and fresh insight on the part of every attentive hearer or reader. (1962: 51).

Although the notion that metaphor shapes thought is not universally held, there are reasons for theologians to take it seriously. Whether or not linguistic uses in general do so, there can be no question that the Bible shapes the religious sensibilities and worldview of Christians. The issue here is much broader than the usual discussion of theological warrants and norms might suggest: it is not solely a matter of appealing to specific texts or passages in the Bible to underwrite specific theological propositions. Rather, to one steeped in Black also considers that metaphor works by applying to a principal subject ‘a system of “associated implications” characteristic of [a] subsidiary subject’ (1962/1993: 44). 44

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the Biblical text, its imagery provides a matrix within which all reflection and theological response takes place. Even if the metaphors of the psalms, for example, no longer furnish proof-texts from which theologians argue, they may well supply elements of the framework within which theologians think. Hans Frei’s notion of pre-Enlightenment Biblical interpretation as a process of seeing the world through the Biblical text may have vanished from the practice of Biblical scholars, but it is hard to know whether it has so utterly disappeared from the minds of theologians. Precisely because figurative language—along with narrative, allegory, poetry—may function in globally formative, indirect, even subconscious ways, its exact effect on theology is hard to estimate. David Tracy notes that the study of metaphor may provide a clue to the better understanding of what ‘culture calls religion’ (Sacks 1978: 104). Metaphor cannot be bypassed, in his view. The relative lack of concern among theologians with Biblical metaphors for God would be justified if metaphors were ‘purely and simply defined as decorative substitutions’ for literal or ideational meanings (Sacks 1979: 93). However, if it is true (as Tracy implies it is) that every religion’s vision of reality is grounded in certain root metaphors, ‘then the elimination of the metaphorical character of religious language is effectively the substitution of one set of meanings for another’ (Sacks 1978: 104). Furthermore, whether or not theologians are using metaphor in distinctive ways, it remains that theology ultimately reasons from a trope-laced text. For Ricoeur, metaphor is ‘the rhetorical process by which discourse unleashes the power that certain fictions have to redescribe reality’ (1977: 7). Many would baulk at ‘fictions’: if this statement is to tell us anything about what happens when we read the Bible, it cannot be on the basis that the Bible is ‘fictitious’. Substitute ‘fictitious’ for ‘poetic’, however, and there might be a different response. The parable of the Good Samaritan, for example (which in traditional rhetorical terms could be classified as an epic simile), clearly does not chronicle a sequence of historical events on some dusty Middle Eastern highway. There is no reason to think it is the record of any particular episode that happened to actual people. Equally, though, it describes a situation which any person, of any time, in any society, can recognize as a possible dilemma: what to do with the stranger who obviously needs help, but whose very need makes demands that are worrisome, potentially unreasonable, on the good nature of the passer-by? The story is fictitious in the sense that it does not record a particular historical event, true in the sense that it describes a situation all too recognizable. If metaphor both trades on established linguistic usages, yet extends beyond them in ways that prompt fresh understanding, then the figurative language of the Bible is both embedded in the languages, social world, cultural assumptions, and religious traditions of the ancient Near East and in the distinctive, particular, ‘counter, original, spare, strange’ perspectives of those to whom we owe scripture’s figures, from the owl, lonely in the wilderness, to the Samaritan business traveller. There can be no question, therefore, of domesticating trope

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by collapsing it into the established, the communal, and the known, without remainder, any more than we can deny the power of established linguistic usages to shape (even if not finally determine) our patterns of thought. As long as there is a remainder—deviant or impertinent predication, the strangely hued vision—then the theologian must reason from that which is volatile and imperfectly comprehensible. It follows that there can be no single theological conclusion to be extracted from many Biblical passages. What the differences between narratives indicate and what is indicated by the tropic quality of much Biblical discourse, whether narrative, rhetorical, epistolary, apocalyptic, or poetic, is the provisionality of theology based on the Bible. Aquinas obliquely suggests this provisionality when he reserves sure knowledge to God and to the blessed—that is, to human beings only in a state of glory, when the sureness of their knowledge derives from its participation in God’s own self-knowledge. The fact that in this life, theology’s surest ground, the Bible, gives us access to this knowledge only through the veil of human language, with its approximations of the immaterial in material images, means all theology in this life is provisional, awaiting both correction and fulfilment in the Age to Come. The provisionality of theology indicates something of its essential character. Does the admission of this provisionality undermine the Bible’s standing as a theological warrant? Does it render all theology fundamentally unreliable? The answer to the first question must be no, because however provisional and open to variant interpretations the Biblical text may be, it still provides the most true and sonorous treatment of the divine we shall have in this life. The second question admits of no equally ready answer, though it does not lack for an answer altogether. If by ‘reliable’ one means ‘accurate in every detail’ or ‘not susceptible of any form of misuse’ (through misinterpretation, for example), then one would have to say that theology cannot be reliable if it is based on the Bible, given the latter’s distinctive features, such as its use of figurative language and a variety of literary forms. These glosses of ‘reliable’ are, however, too stringent: ‘reliable’ surely designates some threshold lower than ‘incorrigible’. For some Christian traditions, it has, of course, been important to claim that the Bible is incorrigible, though mainstream academic theologians have not tended to do so, and a theologian who does will face some immediate difficulties arising from discrepancies in the Biblical text (two creation stories whose details differ considerably, varying accounts of how many were fed with the loaves and fishes, and so on). Those problems can be addressed by one who acknowledges the literary characteristics of the text (such as the significance of its use of narrative, which is necessarily perspectival and whose truthfulness may subsist in some mode other than the historical), but once one admits the Bible is in many parts characterized by a literary approach, one must also admit the possibility that its truthfulness is not always to be equated with historical accuracy. The difficulty with the appeal to the category of

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reliability is that one can never be entirely certain when one will run into the reliable entity’s limits of reliability. If the Bible is merely reliable, rather than incorrigible, how are we to know which details are to be taken as accurate? There is no straightforward, reassuring answer to this question, but a beginning of an answer may be sought in the process of counter-testing claims against each other. If the Bible is the record of the supreme Intelligence’s dealings with creatures bound for glory and knowledgeable love, then the pattern of the cosmos and salvation history ought to make sense as a whole.45 The interpretation of any one Biblical passage can be probed to determine how far this reading coheres with readings of other passages of the Bible. Another way of putting the last point would be to say that the chief of all theological warrants can be understood to function in relation to theological claims to some extent as a foundationalist structure does and to some extent as a coherentist one does. In both respects, the Bible’s reliability and its utility as a theological warrant depends in significant part, not on atomized propositions within it, but on the intelligibility of its patterning. When that pattern is rendered in theology, theology may be seen as logical in its linear reasoning and coherent in the relation of its constituent parts, and therefore, as systematic.

45 I thus concur in this instance with Wiles: ‘There is a complexity about the logic of doctrinal statements which means they have their meaning only in relation to a total world-view of God and his relation to the world’ (1967: 8). From this point, however, it does not follow, as Wiles claims, that the total view is ‘emphatically subject to change in differing ages’. To the extent that the world-view expresses a logic, a ratio, then it need not change in its lineaments even if it changes in points of detail.

3 Mimesis Theology, as the line of thought I have been developing indicates, can be described as discourse which proceeds deductively and inferentially, moving between propositions, some of which have a privileged status within the system. What sort of propositions are explicitly granted privileged status differs from one Christian group to the next and one individual theologian to another, though all privilege scripture in some way. The privileging of a complex written text as a warrant raises a host of questions about the nature of theology, given the distinctive features of this particular text. First, in virtue of its canonical unity it is read for theological purposes as one text, with the assumption that it witnesses throughout to one and the same God. Second, it is also acknowledged to be a collection of disparate texts, in several source languages, dating from different periods and reflecting a variety of cultural perspectives. Theology has always had to balance the notions that the Bible attests to and is inspired by one God, and the awareness of the tensions within the Biblical canon (and sometimes within individual and ostensibly unified parts of it). With the rise of the historical–critical method, the acknowledgement of discrete strands of composition has become explicit: even individual books may be compiled from diverse sources and may be the work of multiple authors. Even before the rise of modern Bibical criticism, however, no one denied that the letters of Paul were written by a first-century, Greek-speaking Christian and that the same could not be said of the book of Amos. No more could any theologian be oblivious to the differing theological emphases and at least apparent contradictions within the Biblical text. Furthermore, the Bible encompasses a huge variety of poetry, verse drama (Job), prophecy, personal exhortation, and more. This variety of modes of speech, and the figurative language that looms large in many of them, not only makes for texts that require delicacy in interpretation and yield multiple legitimate interpretations; it also indicates a fundamental fact with which theology must contend and which determines its essential character: its origin in two sources, divine and human. Theology’s divine source is a matter of sheer assertion, assertion which follows from the assertion of scripture’s origin in God. Obviously, no one need

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accept that the Bible is divinely inspired; many people do not. Christian theology does not, however, maintain this point purely as a postulate beginning a chain of reasoning, as the admittedly ungrounded proposition which grounds others, as a proposition with an understood ‘if ’ before it, from which there follows a series of ‘thens’, because from a theological perspective there is no ‘if’: faith affirms that the Bible is the word of God. For the most part, however, Christian theologians have freely acknowledged that this is an affirmation of faith and as such, not something for which a conclusive proof could be given. For the purposes of Christian theology, the chain of reasoning begins sans ‘if’; for the purposes of dialogue with the secular world, the ‘if ’ is acknowledged. The claim of the Bible’s divine inspiration functions in relation to theology as a basic or foundational proposition, but it is a postulate. It is, however, lent support by other propositions in the theological web. The notion that God creates freely, for example, indicates that creation exists by an act of will, not as a result of the involuntary overflow of divine being, and so stipulates that God desires the existence of the world of others. The others do not stand in a voluntary relation to God—they cannot, qua creatures, help but exist in this relation; but God stands in a voluntary relation to them, a relation which could be severed from the divine side at any time. Inasmuch as anything other than God exists, it exists because God wills that it does. God does not only willingly create, therefore, but willingly sustains creation and the notion of continuing divine engagement with the world in turn coheres with the notion of divine address. That is, the picture of a God who desired to create and then sustained creation is consistent with the picture of one who chooses engagement and self-disclosure. While the coherence of these claims falls short of the necessary entailment of any of them, they gain a measure of plausibility from their mutual compatibility. This compatibility obtains, moreover, not simply from claims arising from the text, but between those claims and the text’s own claim to authority. The text that is said to be the result of this self-disclosure also attests to God as creator and sustainer. In other words, the postulate that grounds recourse to the Bible as the word of God leads the believer, by virtue of inquiry of the scriptural text, to the notion that God speaks to humanity through the prophets and apostles whose writings make up the Biblical texts. The Bible itself explicitly grounds the human, as well as divine, element of its authorship. Though not all books of the Bible claim a human writer— whether the writer of a letter or the speaker of a prophecy—many do. While the authorship claimed in the text may be disputed by scholars—as is Paul’s authorship of some of the letters signed with his name—there can be no question that the text itself proclaims some human origin. In this respect, the books of both the Old and New Testaments differ fundamentally from sacred writings that purport to originate solely from a divine source: it is not

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just that the Christian tradition does not claim an exclusively divine origin for the Bible, but that the Biblical texts themselves acknowledge a human contribution. That human element seems all the more pronounced given the frequency with which the texts record their human authors’ attempts to flee the responsibility of proclamation (Moses, Jonah, Peter, to name only a few examples). The Bible not only provides texts with which its readers must wrestle; it is itself the product of divine–human wrestling. The very genres in which the books of the Bible are written underline this point. Narrative, for example, encompasses tales with no historical element (such as parables); narratives which clearly purport to be accounts of human history (such as the books of Kings, Chronicles, and Acts); narratives which could be taken as either historical or mythological (such as Genesis or Jonah); as well as accounts of a single person’s visionary experience (such as Ezekiel or Revelation). The genre therefore encompasses a variety of subgenres, and the differences between these can be highly significant for theological purposes. The common thread running through all of them, however, is time. Time is of the essence of narrative: first x happens, then y. (This pattern holds true even when the narrative does not follow the natural order of events: the narrator may relate y before x, but the narrative is still a record of first x, then y.) As temporal, narrative belongs ineluctably to creation, is rooted in its distinctive patterns. At the same time, the Biblical narratives are, with few exceptions, concerned with humanity’s relation to the Eternal and Uncreated. Even a book such as Esther, notorious for containing no mention of God, still implicitly attests to divine guidance and the survival of God’s chosen people. The Bible is then, among other things, the saga of the Eternal’s self-disclosure in time, through a medium that not only announces its divine and human authors, but attests to its rootedness in time, one of the fundamental structures of creation. It embodies the pattern and rhythm of time even as it gestures to the timeless divine nature. A similar doubly divine and human character to the text is evident in the prevalence of figurative language in it. Tropes, of a wide variety, are found not only in obviously poetic books, such as the Psalms and the Song of Songs, but throughout other texts as well. In the writings of the prophets metaphor and simile abound, as they do in the letters of the New Testament and the discourses of Jesus of Nazareth. In part, this widespread use of trope is attributable to the characteristic forms of speech of the Bible’s original languages and their cultures. There may be other factors as well, however: the difficulties inherent in using human language, a tool arising from and sharpened by its use for designating the created order, to denote and describe what does not to belong to that order. One response to this dilemma is radical apophaticism, the denial that it is impossible to speak of or conceptualize God at all. Another is moderate apophaticism, the notion that one can only describe divine nature in negatives

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(what would in Greek be alpha-privatives), stipulating what God is not (unchanging, impassible, atemporal, and so on). Such language predicates attributes of God (as radical apophaticism would not) but always does so in terms that distinguish the Uncreated from the created, and which ultimately leave divine nature undefined (though not undescribed). Whatever the merits of acknowledging the indefinability of divine nature via the use of negative attributes, neither scripture nor the Christian tradition has succeeded in limiting itself to such predicates: human beings have been perenially prompted to declare, for example, that God is good, and not simply not-bad. Moreover, the poetic language of the Bible refuses to remain within its covers: it pervades Christian theology and piety, as these echo their source. As Aquinas points out, we describe the Uncreated using the language we have to hand, whose prime referent is the created order and which itself belongs to the created order. The use of the same words for the Uncreated and created means some important caveats attend these predicates: ‘good’ in relation to God signifies absolute, unqualified goodness, as it cannot in relation to any created thing that might be said to be good. Conversely, to say ‘God is my rock’ does not mean that all the qualities of rocks (those attaching to materiality, notably) are also being predicated of God. Because theology must use a variety of predicates for God, ranging from negations to abstract concepts, to figures of speech, it can in its very terminology be said to reflect its divine and human character: theology is discourse in human language that attempts to speak truly of both the human and the divine, stretching human language beyond its customary usages. Figurative uses of language allow words which in the first instance designate the creaturely world to be pressed into rough service to denote the divine. It is the human powers of imagination and reason that allow this transference: imagination to perceive the commonality between such unlikely pairs as a lump of matter and an immaterial God, and reason to discern what sense of the trope in its usual meaning must be left to the side. The structures of human reasoning similarly attest to the Bible’s and theology’s double rootedness in divine and human nature. It is the Bible that claims logos of God, along with wisdom, providential governance, and similar attributes asserting or entailing rationality of God. It also asserts that humankind is made in the divine image and contains frequent entreaties (notably in the Psalms) that God might grant wisdom and understanding, pleas that presuppose human beings are so constituted as to receive such gifts. The theology which is an attempt to reason from the divinely inspired source incorporates that source’s insistence on divine and human rationality into its own fabric, and the warp and weft of the doctrine of God and theological anthropology. Theology itself mirrors in its structures of reasoning the assertions its source makes of humanity and attempts to witness to what its source says of God. In a variety of ways, then, theology can be viewed as discourse that attempts to embody in itself what it attests of its subjects. It is a discourse of mimesis, in

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itself a reiteration of God and humankind, as humankind is related to God. To see how this mimesis takes shape in Christian theology, we turn now to a set of case studies drawn from across the Christian tradition. This approach allows for breadth (theology of different periods, ecclesial traditions, and styles), but also for depth, by focusing on a detailed examination of small portions of text. The selection of figures is meant to be a broad sample, rather than a strictly representative one (it is not clear what would constitute a representative sample of Christian theology, given the diversity of its two thousand years). The selection includes some theologies conforming to the genre description of systematics (Aquinas’s larger Summa, Calvin’s Institutes, Tillich’s Systematic Theology), but most of the texts represented are not of this sort, in order to show that systematicity is not solely a feature of texts classifiable as systematic theologies. The need to represent non-systems explains the absence of some obvious contenders for representation. Any selection of figures would necessarily have an element of arbitrariness about it; the selection here is intended not to prove the suggestion of mimesis incontrovertibly, but merely to indicate its plausibility.

GREGORY NAZIANZEN Although Gregory Nazianzen’s theology stands as one of the most important landmarks in the development of the doctrine of the Trinity, he wrote no treatise on the doctrine as such. His theological work is in one sense not theology at all: all of it is in the form of either poems or sermons. Granted, these sermons are rather fuller and certainly more densely argued than what today passes for an address to the Christian assembly. It seems nevertheless significant that one of the most penetrating intellects and influential thinkers of the Christian tradition never wrote a treatise, choosing instead to express himself in genres closely connected to doxology. It is no surprise, therefore, that a great deal of his argumentation appeals to the practices and formulae of the church’s worship. The way he argues and his conception of what theology is reflects his doctrine of God and his anthropology, and above all, his doctrine of the Trinity. Although many of his sermons are significant for their acute theological analysis, we will here focus on the sequence of five that have come to be called the ‘theological orations’ (numbered 27 to 31 in standard editions of his works).1 1 References to the orations are by number of the oration and section. The section numbers can vary among editions. I am here following the divisions of the Sources chrétiennes edition. Translations generally follow those of Hardy (Nazianzen 1954), the most readily available English translation, though I have here and there modified them.

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Nazianzen is clear about the parameters within which the theologian must work. Not everyone is fit for the task of theology: the key requirement is not intelligence or learning (though Gregory may well be assuming these); only those being purified, who are masters of meditation should write theology (27.3). The requirement is both negative and positive: the absence of moral and spiritual vice, as well as deep experience in the practice of prayer. ‘We may philosophize on upon subjects within our reach’, he writes (27.4), and the extent of our reach is not determined chiefly by intellectual abilities. Far from entailing the abandonment of normal cognitive functioning, however, these considerations stipulate the intimate involvement of the mind, for it is reason (logismon) that keeps theology within its due limits (27.5). Like Aquinas, Nazianzen views materiality as creating some of the prime difficulties facing the theologian. The problem is not that matter, or the body, is somehow bad; the problem is one of incommensurability. We belong ineluctably to the material order; we ourselves are embodied and all our direct experience is of the material world. That which is wholly immaterial, notably divine nature, lies therefore outside our natural experience. The determinative divine attribute in this context is infinity. Divine nature is uncircumscribed: infinite, formless, intangible, and invisible (28.7). The negative predicates are not dictated by some in-principle commitment to apophaticism, per se. The problem is that matter gives perimeters to things, and human language can therefore conceptually encompass and decipher material things. Take away matter and perimeters and you thereby also take away all possibility of definition and encapsulation in human language. The issue is not that the immaterial and limitless is intrinsically beyond intellectual grasp—Nazianzen never claims this—but that it lies beyond the grasp of human minds and human language. Indeed, being indefinable is what God is, by definition. Pouring scorn on his opponents, who seem too confident of the power of human reason, Nazianzen exclaims ‘O stupidity, that a deity should possess nothing more than we do! For how is he an object of worship if he be circumscribed?’ (28.7). The governing principle of Nazianzen’s theology is doxology and from this doxological principle he deduces the only definition of God that does not circumscribe or limit—indeed, does the reverse. The withdrawal from material things that Nazianzen declares necessary (28.3) is not so because matter is bad, or even a hindrance, properly speaking, but simply because it is not like God, and therefore provides no route to God, who is what the theologian seeks. It is in this light that claims such as ‘the shadow of the body has been placed between us and God’ (28.12) must be understood. ‘Shadows’ does not imply a value judgement on the body, but a barrier to understanding what is not material. Our frame of reference and means of perception do not help us in our quest to understand what is fundamentally unlike ourselves. Even the human mind, which does resemble God to some extent, is inadequate: the divine nature cannot be apprehended

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by human reason (dianoia, 28.11), but this seems to be so because our minds are inevitably (and everlastingly) embodied. It is impossible for those who are in the body to grasp the objects of pure thought (28.12). Gregory hints this is one reason for the Incarnation. When he ascends the mount of contemplation, he says he saw the Trinity, not that one hidden ‘within the first veil’ but ‘that nature that at last reaches us’ (28.3). The point here is not just that embodied creatures can best understand divine nature when incarnate, but that what knowledge of God we have initiates on the divine side: it lies in God’s gift, not in our reach, and the gift is a gift of likeness, of divine nature likening itself to ours so that ours might understand the divine. The point is driven, not by an extended preoccupation with grace (not a term or concept to which Nazianzen often overtly appealed), but by his insistence on divine transcendence. Hence, the impetus to understand living things springs from within us (every rational nature longs for God [28.13]), because the reason implanted in us from the beginning proceeds from God (28.16), the tool with which we think theologically, preach, and contemplate is human, genuinely ours, and divine in its origin. The element of human nature that resembles God is the mind (nous, 28.17), and this likeness is therefore itself a divine gift. Nazianzen’s theology does not turn on the opposition of nature and grace, as much later theology does, so for him there is no tension in speaking of a natural gift. At other points, he clearly attributes the intellect’s right operation to grace, as when he accounts his very ability to get this theology right to the grace of the Trinity (28.31). He also stresses the specifically trinitarian structure of grace as it inspires theology in the second of the sequence of sermons known as the ‘Theological Orations’: let us now enter upon theological questions, setting at the head thereof the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, of whom we are to treat; that the Father may be well pleased, the Son may help us, and the Holy Spirit may inspire us; or rather that one illumination may come upon us from the one God, one in diversity, diverse in unity. (28.1)

For Nazianzen, it is by the Trinity we are saved, and it is therefore to the Trinity we must hold fast (29.21).2 His trinitarian emphasis is striking, given that it is the doctrine of the Trinity he is arguing for in these orations. They were delivered in the small Church of the Resurrection in Constantinople, one of the very few churches in the city that had not fallen under Arian influence. Gregory, who wanted nothing so much as to be left in the seclusion of his country estate, where he could devote himself to a life of the mind and to prayer, was reluctantly

2 ‘Hold fast’ is Hardy’s rendering. The Greek states we save ourselves by the Trinity, and Hardy’s translation may represent an attempt to save Nazianzen from an anticipated charge of Pelagianism. His version is defensible, given that in the same sentence Nazianzen claims we are saved by the Trinity.

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coaxed from retirement to preach what we would today call a parish mission. The purpose of these sermons was to articulate the anti-Arian faith of Nicaea, apparently in the hope of turning back the tide of Arianism that had overwhelmed the capital. It must have seemed a hopeless task, yet Nazianzen not only articulates a theology of the Word’s full divinity, but extends beyond Nicaea, and beyond what anyone had ever stated explicitly and fully before, in also asserting the full divinity of the Spirit. Without the latter, there can be no truly trinitarian theology, so these orations represent not only the defence of a point that was far from settled (the divinity of the Second Person), but also the development of a pneumatology that could support a full-blown doctrine of the Trinity. The trinitarian theology for which Nazianzen is arguing is presupposed to the doctrine of sanctification, which he views as the presupposition of writing any theology whatsoever. To articulate the doctrine of the Trinity is to articulate the condition of the possibility of writing any theology at all. The doctrine for which he argues designates the reality presupposed to the writing of the doctrine, indeed, to the writing of any theology whatsoever. This essential pattern underlines much of the theology of the orations, becoming only clearer as Gregory elaborates the Christology and pneumatology. The Son, he maintains, is called the Word because he is related to the Father as word (logos) to mind (nous, 30.20). A threefold logic underlies this analogy. First, the generation of the Word is passionless, as is the mind’s formulation of a word. Second, the relations Word-Father and word-mind are parallel ‘because of the union [synaphēs]’. Although he is here admittedly a bit vague, presumably he means that just as a word and the mind that forms it are one, despite their distinction (the Word cannot exist independently of the mind that entertains it, for example), so the Father and the Son are one, despite their real distinction. Third, the divine Word has a declaratory function, just as a spoken word expresses a thought. The Son, for example, makes visible the invisible divine nature, presenting it in a form that embodied rational beings can parse. The Incarnation has a further significance: Christ is called human, not only so that he may be apprehended by embodied creatures through his body, an apprehension that would otherwise be impossible because of his incomprehensible nature, but also so that he may sanctify humanity (30.21). This sanctification, on Nazianzen’s account, is also what enables the human mind to grasp the divine nature presented in the Incarnate Word. As he puts it, Christ is the Way because he leads us through himself (30.21). The doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and of sanctification interlock and all are explicitly bound up with an account of theological method. Our understanding of who God is cannot be separated from our understanding of how we go about understanding God. A similar pattern informs the pneumatology. Near the beginning of the oration on the Spirit, Nazianzen is arguing for the Spirit’s divinity, and although this is a contentious point of theology in his time, he assumes what

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he is trying to establish: ‘we have so much confidence in the deity of the Spirit whom we adore, that we will begin our teaching concerning his divine nature by offering to him the names which belong to the Trinity’ (31.3). Nazianzen could be taken as failing to understand effective argumentation: begging the question is not a promising strategy for convincing sceptics. What he is actually doing is a bit more complicated, however. He assumes the Spirit is adored and this point does not seem to be in dispute. If so, the logic of worship indicates that what is adored is either divine or not divine; if not divine, worship would be idolatrous, and if divine, then the Spirit is God (though not, of course, necessarily consubstantial with the Father). The adored one, however, inspires confidence and it is this which encourages the act of praise, praise which belongs properly to God. It is because these names are properly predicated that what is said of divine nature must equally be said of the Spirit. This last point does entail full equality of divinity, which is what consubstantiality also asserts. Because it is the Spirit in whom we worship and pray (30.12), the theological argument follows from sanctification wrought by encounter: to pray in the Spirit means to name rightly, and right naming indicates the Spirit to be of the same divine nature as the Father and the Son. We pray, however, in the mind as well as the Spirit (31.12), so that the act of adoration is not a matter of the Spirit’s speaking through the creature as through a mouthpiece, but joining with the human person. Theology is therefore a divine and human enterprise. This point correlates with the insistence that theology cannot be confined solely to negations, although Nazianzen does not himself make this causal connection. After listing a lot of negative predicates for God (28.9), he then insists that we must go beyond saying what God is not and state what he is (28.9). Nazianzen turns the full measure of his scorn on the proponents of apophaticism, saying that the one who will not describe God positively is like someone who when asked what two times five is, answers ‘not five, not twenty’ and so on, but will not answer ‘ten’ (28.9). The implication is not only that we can speak positively of God, but that there is a coyness amounting to a moral failing in declining to do so. One reason for the sharpness of Gregory’s censure might be that positive predicates lie to hand in scripture, but another could be that language well established by the church’s liturgical tradition makes liberal use of such predicates. Doxology comes of the Spirit’s union with the human person, and as such, cannot be confined to abstractions couched in alpha-privatives. Silence is however sometimes necessary, and Nazianzen stresses this point most often in relation to the Trinity, and specifically in relation to what contemporary theology terms the immanent Trinity. The begetting of God must be honoured in silence, he maintains (29.8), presumably because it occurs outside the created order and is therefore utterly beyond human experience; scripture itself is, moreover, silent on this point. This conclusion

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does not prevent Nazianzen from claiming that the Son is begotten and the Spirit emitted. He adds: ‘I do not know how this could be expressed in terms altogether excluding visible things’ (29.2). Alongside the imperative to silence, there seems to be an imperative to stipulate the distinction of origin between the Son and the Spirit, and as we do this, we inevitably express what lies beyond our experience in terms of the sensory experience of embodied creatures. Since Nazianzen does not shy away from such predication, we must assume he regards it as fitting. The result of proper predication is that those who engage in it will leave behind carnal and earthly notions and ascend, in company with divine nature, to the level of the conceptual (tois noumenois kai ginōskēis, 29.18; ironically, it is appeal to carnal metaphors, such as begetting, that allows the believer to rise above carnal doctrines). The relationship of intellectual rectitude and spiritual sanctification is reciprocal, and theology not only states this reciprocity, but is its fruit. The connection between theology rightly done and communion with God provides the context in which we may rightly understand Nazianzen’s insistence on faith, and his ostensible opposition to argument. When he declares ‘let faith lead us rather than reason’ (28.29), he might be taken as rejecting the use of reason in theology altogether, a position difficult to reconcile with his practice of close, sometimes technical, reasoning in his orations. However, he makes clear that he does not advocate abandoning reason and argumentation. Quite the reverse, in fact: ‘When we leave off believing and protect ourselves with mere strength of argument and destroy the claim the Spirit makes upon our faith by questionings, then our argument is not strong enough for the importance of the subject’ (29.21). The object is not the cessation of argument, but soundness of argument. This form of argumentation, fit for its subject matter, springs from the pursuit of questions, rather than being some form of pious credulity, and it is pursued in the Spirit. It is because of this conception of theology that Nazianzen can hold that faith is the completion or fulfilment (plērōsis) of an argument (29.21), not because faith plugs holes left by sloppy thinking, but because discourse about God, to be strong and true, requires the assistance, and we might say the very presence, of God in the enterprise. It is the Spirit whom Gregory identifies as the aider and abetter in the process of theological reasoning, so it is all the more significant that it is the Spirit’s full divinity for which Gregory is arguing in these orations. The argument can only be made through the Spirit, but it seems necessary that the one doing the arguing understand this. ‘Rank no part of the Trinity with yourself, lest you fall away from the Trinity’ (31.12), Gregory warns. The issue here is not that making a wrong theological move will result in some sort of punishment, the withdrawal of divine aid, but almost the reverse: that the theologian, in abdicating from truth, necessarily also abdicates from God. The converse implication is that right theology is a form of drawing closer to God. This is arguably why the theological orations, especially the last in the

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sequence on the Spirit, argue from and to worship. The circularity of reasoning betokens a seamlessness inherent in human existence coram Deo: our beginning, and the beginning of all we do, lies beyond ourselves. We cannot start from the beginning; we are always in medias res, glorifying the One whose very praiseworthiness we try to explain. The unity of divine nature in the three Persons is invoked (31.14), not as a nice point of academic theology, but because on it rests the Spirit’s consubstantiality and full divinity. The identity of the divine Persons’ essence and power (31.16) underwrites the Spirit’s capacity to inspire and shape theology that speaks truly of the Father and the Son. The ultimate goal of theological reflection and the Christian life is that the Trinity be worshipped (31.29). If all three Persons are not worshipped, then the practice of baptism, for example, makes no sense. Baptism, in turn, inaugurates that participation in divine life which is deification, so the beginning of sanctification is also its telos. The Spirit cannot deify in baptism if not worshipped, and if worshipped and an object of adoration, must be God (31.28). It is merely logical, therefore, that the oration which attempts to tease out the logic of the Spirit’s divinity ends with doxology (31.33). If we have followed the arguments that have developed and interlaced over the five sermons, this conclusion should seem no mere preacher’s commonplace, but precisely the conclusion of a dense, sometimes polemical, but always passionate and rational, sequence of theological argumentation. That argumentation both asserts theology’s divine and human origin, and assumes such an origin as the ground of its own existence.

PSEUDO-DIONYSIUS THE A REOPA GITE The same qualities are very much in evidence in the theology of one of Christianity’s most influential and mysterious theologians, the PseudoDionysius (hereafter Denys), whose thought saturates medieval theology, and through it, any later theology significantly in dialogue with that of the Middle Ages.3 Denys is conventionally associated with apophaticism, despite the character of his style, which is at times effuse to the point of verbosity when he extols God. The content of his theology is no more straightforwardly apophatic than his style: he gushes streams of attributes and analogies with ardent abandon. The coexistence of apophatic and cataphatic elements in his theology attests to its divine and human mimesis: through negations, he points to God’s utter transcendence, and through affirmations, to humanity’s making 3 This is a greater proportion of later theology than is sometimes acknowledged. Some of the theologians of the Reformation (Calvin, for example) are more Thomistic than is generally admitted, while others (such as Hooker) have always been described as such.

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sense of this Other in creaturely terms. In some works, notably The Celestial Hierarchy and The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, concerned with the unity of the cosmos and the divine desire to draw all creation into the heart of trinitarian life, the apophatic element recedes. Interpretations of Denys that stress his apophaticism generally draw heavily on the shorter work, The Divine Names. Despite its reputation as a manifesto of apophaticism, however, it well illustrates the principle of double mimesis, so the analysis that follows will focus on it. At several points in The Divine Names, Denys stresses the absolute transcendence of the divinity we attempt to call by name. We must not, he maintains, resort to words or conceptions (588A, C; hereafter all references are to The Divine Names). God transcends all wisdom and reason (865B), for the simple reason that what transcends Being also transcends knowledge (593A; Denys assumes, rather than argues for, the notion that God transcends Being). Denys does not expand on this last point, though it raises an important question: does this principle rule out divine self-knowledge? Aquinas, for example, was at pains to insist that God is the most intelligible entity there is, although this supreme knowability does not mean we can know God more easily than anything else (Summa theologiae 1.12, 4 resp.). Similarly, one of the reasons classical Greek philosophy did not predicate infinity of God was that if divine nature were infinite, it would be unknowable, even to itself. When early Christian theologians such as Nazianzen and Nyssen asserted infinity of God, they were defying this line of reasoning. Although Denys does not pursue the matter, or acknowledge the need to distinguish between our knowledge of God and God’s self-knowledge, it seems safe to assume that there is no intention to deny the latter. Because God utterly transcends us ontologically, we are also utterly out of our depth epistemologically. Given this emphasis on divine transcendence, it might not seem strange that Denys also stresses a scriptural basis for his apophaticism. Scripture says that God is inscrutable (588C), is not to be compared to any creature (916A), and Denys maintains its writers preferred to use negations in describing God (981B). These claims are paradoxical, both in themselves and in the context of the text as a whole. They are paradoxical in the context of The Divine Names inasmuch as at other points in the text, Denys rattles off long lists of positive predicates derived from scripture, metaphors for God whose primary referents are material things (596C). If scripture has the apophatic bias Denys claims of it, he himself points to its cataphatic element, and does so in a stream of tropes that has the character of an exultant outpouring, a reeling off of name after name, figure after figure, almost as an end in itself. This revelling in descriptions of God cautions against taking the avowed apophaticism of treatise as its sole definitive pronouncement on the matter. The citing of scriptural denials of positive predication is paradoxical in another sense, however. The book that says God is not to be compared to anything itself abounds with such comparisons, indeed contains many more tropes which in one way or another liken God to some created thing

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than it contains lofty abstractions beginning with negative prefixes, the predicates beloved of advocates of apophaticism. The book that claims God transcends wisdom and reason itself offers a rational explanation of God’s dealings with humankind, serving to explain why Israel sometimes prospered and sometimes suffered at the hands of its enemies and why Jesus of Nazareth, who boldly called God ‘Father’, nevertheless suffered and died. Denys could be taken as simply inconsistent, but for his overarching principle, cited at the beginning of the treatise: we should speak according to scripture (585B). Scripture both warns of the limitations of language, yet uses this straitened vehicle to designate what surpasses the power of human words to describe, and Denys follows suit. Were he totally committed to apophaticism, presumably he would not turn to a wordy source of information about the divine, but confine himself to wordless contemplation. No doubt he did, but he also displays a breathtakingly detailed knowledge of scripture, knowledge on display in a written text in which he verbally articulates a plethora of concepts of God. Beyond the fact that Denys respects scripture, cites it as an authority and uses it as the basis for his own theology, the theology of The Divine Names gives further reasons for thinking God can and must be described. One of Denys’s favourite predicates for God, goodness, stipulates something of the way we speak of God. Because goodness contains all within itself, it is fitting to derive praise for this goodness from the created order (597A). Creation can obviously not supply words directly applicable to God, so we use symbols and analogies (592C). In doing so, we leave behind our own notions of the divine, so presumably the symbols and analogies are not ones we ourselves invent, but which are derived from scripture. Both scripture and the created order have their origin in God, so once again, theology operates with a circular motion, moving outward from the signs given by God, back to God in the gift of praise. We name this goodness, using concepts given in scripture, not only so that we may have something to say of God, but because by invoking God, we are united to divine power (680D). Words are given us, then, not simply so that we will be able to praise God for God’s sake, but to nurture humanity’s relation to God. When Denys claims, then, that the Good draws us upward, through contemplation to participation in and likeness to it (588D), he does not refer to some general notion of sanctification, but quite specifically includes the processes of reading scripture and incorporating scripture into our own discourse. The character of human discourse reflects the nature of our minds: our intellects are such that we circle around intelligible things, seeking their truth, and this restless motion of the mind distinguishes it from ‘unified intelligences’, such as God’s (868B). Part of our difficulty in making sense of God is not simply that the object of our conceptualization is radically different from us, but that the equipment we use to do the conceptualizing is of the wrong kind for this particular task. We move from premise to inference; God,

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in contrast, does not reason through logic problems or sums. Despite this fundamental ineptitude to the task of conceiving God, the human mind can transcend its own limitations, when united to the Other which it seeks (865C). Thus far, Denys might seem to contradict himself: divine nature so far transcends us we cannot conceive of it, yet we can, apparently by human means, surmount these limitations—in which case, they scarcely seem to be limitations. The key to understanding Denys’s logic lies in his theology of sanctification and consummation. We must, he contends, be taken out of ourselves and become wholly of God (868A), and it appears this participation in divine life comes about through rightly praising God; only when we are with God will the divine gifts be poured out upon us (868A). Then we know that the wisdom we seek does not possess reason or intelligence, but is the supreme cause of all intelligence and reason, all wisdom and understanding (868A). It is not, then, that we possess a paradoxical power to transcend our own limitations, but that by rightly making use of God’s self-disclosure, by praising using the symbols and analogies given in scripture, we so inhabit divine life as in some measure to understand it rightly. The gift of self-disclosure in scripture therefore does not end with the words written on the sacred page; rather, these become a means of grace, which when appropriated by the human person, in turn become the path to union with the divine. Denys’s doctrine of God and his anthropology (the latter sketched with only the lightest lines in The Divine Names) trace the same outline as his account of human discourse, indeed human thinking, about God. Given the incommensurability of the human mind to the divine, given the utter distinction of creature from creator, theology could only be possible if underwritten from the divine side. Denys’s anthropology nonetheless stipulates the rational nature of human persons, a rationality that mirrors one of the leading notes of divine nature. Another leading trait of God is goodness, and on Denys’s account it is in the nature of the good to draw other things to itself. The process of self-disclosure and sanctification via humanity’s appropriation of the divinely-given self-description follows from Denys’s description of God. These two attributes illustrate a general tendency in his theology: human nature is the receptacle of divine gifts of self, and as such, is able to understand and praise what is essentially God’s. Denys’s theology does not merely assert these characteristics; it embodies them. Richly studded with scriptural allusion, it shows its author to have been steeped in the Bible, which he uses not so much to prove points of theology as to supply the very medium of his thought. The Bible is functioning as a warrant, but as a warrant for the very act of theological speech; it is also functioning just as much as a tradent as a warrant. Denys’s prose evinces a mind that has absorbed the Bible, certainly without concordances and probably without any complete copy; he draws on most of the books in the canon of the Hebrew Bible, several of those found only in the Septuagint canon, and

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all those of the New Testament, save Philemon. His theology represents an extraordinary act of synthetic reconstruction in which disparate segments of a complex text connect up to each other in prose that is both reasoned and ecstatic. The reason and ekstasis reflect Denys’s conviction that rationality characterizes the human writers of both theology and the Bible, as well as the God who is at once scripture’s ultimate source and theology’s end, the one moved to the acts of self-communication intelligible to the rational creature. Since theology’s prime task is to describe God and to understand creation precisely as such, God’s creature, the ecstatic quality of the text is not surprising either. For Denys, to describe God is to praise; to see creation as a divine work is to praise its maker. As we have seen, praising in the images of scripture sanctifies those who praise, drawing them into communion with the one extolled. Denys’s text thus enacts the theological principle it articulates, itself prompting sanctification through praise, as it points to the assertion of this very principle in the scriptural texts. What seems implicit in the text is that theology itself, a discourse such as The Divine Names, can function as a means of sanctification for its writer and for its readers. We know nothing of its author, beyond what is indicated by the character of the texts themselves. Modern scholars agree he was not what he was traditionally taken to be, the Dionysius of Acts 17:34. Judging from the liturgical allusions in the text, he is now thought to be a sixth-century Syrian. He apparently addresses a group of disciples, who seem in relation to their theological knowledge and the rigour of their life of prayer unlikely to be ordinary laypeople; he may therefore have been writing in the context of a quasi-monastic community. What he writes and the way he writes suggests a man steeped in the contemplation to which the text so often alludes, yet a contemplation he disrupts in order to share its fruits with others. If so, the text may not be so much a work of dogmatic theology that seeks to expound and instruct those new to theology, but a manual of meditation, spiritual fodder for rumination. The act of reading would then become, just as much as the act of writing, an offering of praise. The relational element of the text is expressed both in its relentless insistence that the subject of theology is its presupposition, and in the relation forged between writer and readers by the text’s invitation to participate in the acts of contemplation and doxology. Yet it never ceases, at the same time, to be a carefully reasoned work, one that does not simply cite scripture, but unfolds the fullness of its implications.

ANSELM Although Anselm is usually thought of as a quintessentially scholastic theologian, and although he is in some respects thoroughly medieval, his theology

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provides a crucial bridge between the patristic and medieval periods. Because of its significance as a link in the chain, it will appear here as representative, not only of early medieval theology, but specifically Augustinian theology. Augustine’s De Trinitate synthesizes earlier theologies, both Latin and Greek. It in turn became the basis for medieval Western theology and provides maps essential to grasping the major works of both Anselm and Aquinas. The De Trinitate lays out much more than a doctrine of the Trinity, for in the attempt to explain the relations of the divine Persons, Augustine resorts to the best analogy he believes there is in the created order, the human soul. In making this move, he at one stroke embarks not only on a doctrine of the Trinity, but an anthropology, and an essay in the direction of a doctrine of sanctification and consummation, given that it is on the human mind and will’s cleaving to the Three that we find our fulfilment. Aquinas takes on this incipient systematic theology in the context of an explicit system, the Summa theologiae. Anselm takes it up, however, in the context of an oeuvre rarely, if ever, considered systematic. Neither, however, is Anselm’s treatise what Augustine’s purports to be, an exploration of one doctrine (though in fact Augustine’s is much more). With the exception of the Cur Deus homo?, none of Anselm’s works comes with a label suggesting a treatment of a single doctrine, just as none comes with a label suggesting a treatment of multiple doctrines (as a summa does). Anselm’s writings, aside from the Cur Deus homo? announce themselves neither as single-subject treatises nor as systematic theologies. The Monologion nevertheless functions as a miniature systematics, covering most of the chief Christian doctrines in ordered, if brief, fashion. More importantly, the treatise’s climax comes precisely through the manifestation of these doctrines’ intersection. Although it is the treatise’s conclusion we will use here as an example of systematicity, its opening merits brief consideration, for it is here that Anselm indicates the impetus for his work, and its procedural assumptions. The writing of the treatise was not prompted by any desire of Anselm’s (so he tells us), but by his fellow monks, who pressed him to put in writing the content of what he refers to both as ‘familiar conversation [sermone colloquando]’ and ‘meditation’, the subject of these being the Being of God and ‘other topics connected with the subject’ (preface).4 In other words, the intersection of doctrines is a prime concern. It is also significant that the questions the treatise attempts to answer arise within a monastic community. It is vital to bear this context in mind when assessing the significance of the work’s prime methodological principle: ‘nothing in Scripture should be urged on the authority of Scripture itself ’. Rather, the wish is that the subject be presented ‘in unadorned style, with common proofs and with a simple 4

All quotations from Anselm hereafter refer to chapters of the Monologion.

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argument . . . briefly enforced by the cogency of reason and plainly expounded in the light of truth’ (preface). This statement could be taken as some sort of determination to exile scripture from the argument, but Anselm does not say the content of what he expounds will be unscriptural, merely that no one will be asked to accept it solely because it is in scripture and scripture is authoritative. In other words, the brethren want Anselm to show them how the doctrines he treats can be understood as standing in rational relation to one another. They assume that doctrines whose ultimate root lies in the Bible can be presented in cogent, rational fashion, as an orderly argument. That assumption bespeaks a trust that the Bible does contain the truth, even though it does not always present the truths it voices in the form of an orderly disquisition on a particular subject. (The force of ‘in an unadorned style [plano stilo]’ is not entirely clear, but might well mean that the monks recognize that the enterprise will require rendering the Bible’s story and poetry into a different kind of text, prose devoid of allusion and trope.) What is presupposed to the exposition that follows in Anselm’s treatise is Augustine’s treatise on the Trinity. Anselm declares his own treatment of the issues to be consistent with ‘the Catholic Fathers’ and especially those of Augustine. If anything seems to his readers ‘discordant with truth’, they are first to read the De Trinitate diligently and judge Anselm’s work in light of it (preface). Anselm is thus seeking to produce a coherent account of a number of Christian doctrines (notably the doctrine of God), which is consistent with scripture, though not a straightforward rehearsal of it, but which is also consistent with tradition. Furthermore, he expects this whole to commend itself to those clamouring for a straightforward rational argument. Confidence that this order can be found and rendered might be taken as hubris on Anselm’s part, but could equally well be read as confidence, not in himself, but in the intrinsic rationality of the ideas he seeks to expound. Between the preface and the treatise’s dénouement, Anselm treats divine Being, creation, essential attributes (such as justice, eternity, and omnipresence), the Persons of the Trinity, their relations. This last discussion draws heavily on Augustine’s schema in the De Trinitate, likening the Word to intellect, the Spirit to love, and the Father to memory. These (with love taken as a function of the will) comprise the three powers of the human soul, permitting those who ponder the analogy to gain some inkling, via an analogy with the created order, of how three distinct entities can be one. The analogy does more (in both Augustine’s and Anselm’s work) than offer guidance to those perplexed about the doctrine of the Trinity, however. In showing that the human mind is the image of the Trinity, Anselm also indicates that the divine Trinity’s mission ad extra as Word and Love has a fitting parallel in humankind’s turning back, with all the powers of the soul, towards the source of all truth and love. It is this turn and its consequences that preoccupy Anselm in the final chapters of the treatise (64 to 89), a section

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of the treatise that both forms a coherent unit and glosses the treatise as a whole.5 Chapter 64 opens with the claim that so sublime a subject (the divine Trinity) transcends the human intellect. In other words, Anselm is already signalling that the treatise is pointing towards transcendence, not just asserting it, but leading the reader to experience it. Given this transcendence, he admits it seems futile to explain it. If this were the case, then not only the remainder of the treatise, but also what has come before, would be pretty much pointless. Mitigating against this judgement is the fact that much of our ‘seeing’ is via images which stand in an is–is-not relation to that which they represent. Just so, divine nature is both ineffable and simultaneously an ‘inference’ which can be reached ‘by the instruction of reason [de illa ratione docente]’ in a way that, although by no means a reproduction of the original, is not necessarily false (65). The issue for Anselm is not simply to find the least misleading analogy for the Trinity among created things, but to identify that which ‘is capable of rising to the investigation of divine nature [quae ad eius investigationem assurgere valeat]’ (66). Not just a static image is needed, then, but the identification of that which is endowed with the capacity to discover (‘ad eiusdem inventionem proficere queat’, 66). It is not in sheer possession of certain powers of the soul, but in using them, that the likeness is found: the greatest endowment is being able to remember, conceive of, and love, the best and greatest of all beings (67). It follows then, that rational creatures should devote themselves ‘to the expression’, the ‘voluntary performance [per volunarium effectum exprimere]’ of this image (68): not just be something, in other words, but do something; not just possess the divine gifts of mind and will, but use them. Indeed, rational beings exist for just this purpose (68). That purpose Anselm identifies as loving the supreme Being above all other goods (68). Of these three powers of the soul, one has now been singled out as supreme. The others have not dropped from view, but are shown to be ordered to this end, for we cannot love the supreme Being without concertedly applying ourselves to the tasks of conceiving of and remembering it (68). There is a clear implication for theology here: intellectual activity is not an end in itself (though Anselm by no means disparages it, of course), but is a step along the way of love. There is an existential import as well, however: indeed this is Anselm’s prime concern, exposed with greater urgency and clarity as the treatise nears its conclusion. Because loving God is our end, we exist most truly as we are ordered to this end, and we are never deprived of life, as long as we devote 5 Anselm himself does not demarcate this section of the treatise in any way: the notion that these chapters form the work’s climax and logical conclusion (as opposed simply to its end) is entirely my own, perhaps eccentric, suggestion.

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ourselves to loving what Anselm now calls not the supreme Being but the supreme life (69). The return of our love of God lies in just this: that we may enjoy him. By loving that which is best, we are given it, so that what we now see dimly we will later see face to face (70). Conversely, the failure to love now will result in eternal misery (71). There is no doubt that Anselm is here thinking in terms of reward and punishment—do this and you will get that—in a way which for some would be uncomfortably close to assuming we are the arbiters of our own salvation. It seems, though, that Anselm is thinking more in terms of intrinsic penalties; that is, that the natural consequence of not loving God in this life, in which lies our greatest happiness, will mean that we do not have that same happiness in the next life: we will continue as we have chosen to be. As Anselm puts it ‘nothing can be more logical . . . than that the soul of man is so constituted that, if it scorns loving the supreme Being, it suffers eternal misery’ (71). We are made for love, and when we do not love the most completely lovable entity there is, the result is unhappiness. The issue is not simply that we should do this or that now in this life to make sure we escape damnation later, but that we should find fulfilment and contentment now by loving God with all our heart and soul and mind (73). The God in whom we believe is the Trinity of Father, Son, and Spirit (76), so Anselm brings the argument back to the point from which much of its reasoning sprang: the analogy between the activity of the human soul and the Trinity of divine Persons. A rational discourse has disclosed a certain relationality and its logical structure: that in which we believe is to be worshipped (79). Although Anselm does not spell out the relation of worship and everlasting life explicitly, the only thick description of heaven in the Bible—the Book of Revelation—makes clear that the activity of heaven is worship. If the end of theology is that we will rightly know God, so that we may rightly love God, and keep on loving God in saecula saeculorum, then the end of theology must also be worship. The rational activity of the mind, which seeks, like Anselm’s brethren, to understand by means of arguments in plain language and cogent reasoning, might therefore be seen as a form of worship, just as devotional acts of love are worship. It is not enough to understand that God is omnipotent or wise; God is to be worshipped in love and loved in worship (‘debet diligendo venerari et venerando diligere’, 79),6 and the logical outcome of correct understanding is worship. Worship is the only rational response to a correct apprehension of divine attributes. As Anselm earlier made clear, there can be no loving without knowing or remembering so these are bound up in, and assumed of, love. The activity of theology is therefore a human mirroring of the exchange of knowledge and love that is the divine Trinity. The Monologion itself mirrors 6

This chapter, the Monologion’s last, is numbered 79 in some editions and translations, 80 in others.

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the activities it describes, for Anselm has moved from the doctrines of God and the Trinity to an anthropology (granted, a sketchy one), and by the treatise’s end, has outlined a soteriology, doctrine of sanctification, and of consummation. The treatise ends as God intends that we should end, with the affirmation ‘Truly, therefore, he is not only God, but the only God, ineffably Three and One’, at once a Tu solus sanctus and a Gloria Patri. The text asserts the human soul’s likeness to the blessed Trinity, but it also serves to foster that intellectual relationality, culminating in adoration, which brings about likeness, even eternal union.

A QUIN AS In turning to Aquinas, we observe a similar mirroring of what is said at the level of positive theology and the way the theologian ‘does’ theology or conceives of theology, although the larger Summa is a text markedly different in its structure and scope from the Monologion. Although Aquinas’s doctrine of the Trinity has not received the barrage of interpretative attention accorded some elements of his thought, it arguably lays down a fundamental pattern that structures his longest and last work, the unfinished systematics, the Summa theologiae, so that to understand the short section of text in which he articulates this doctrine is to stand on a peak and see the landscape of the entire work. Aquinas departs from a point by his time well established, rooted in the theology of Augustine and elaborated by Anselm: the relations of the Persons of the Trinity are explored via the appropriation of intellect to the Second Person and will to the Third. No more than appropriation is envisaged here: there is no suggestion that intellect belongs to the Second Person such that the First and Third Persons are devoid of it, or that will belongs to the Third Person such that the First and Second Persons lack volition. The appropriation is not arbitrary, however: there is an intrinsic connection between the notion of Word (logos or sermo), and rationality, logic, or thought. The rationale for linking the Spirit and will is harder to see; for Augustine, the Spirit is the bond between Father and Son, the bond being love, which is in turn the expression of will. Given the purely analogous nature of the appropriations and given especially the tenuousness of the rationale for identifying the Spirit as the bond between the Father and the Son, one might wonder why the exercise would be worthwhile. For Aquinas, as for Augustine before him, the answer seems to lie in the value of the analogy as a heuristic device. In the context of the De Trinitate, the teaching was directed at the curious or even hostile unbeliever, at least in part. The larger Summa is not addressed to any such audience, and though Aquinas once claimed it was a textbook for beginners, it clearly is

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not for those new to the faith, but new to theology as an academic discipline. The purpose of the analogy therefore cannot be simply to enable the reader to gain basic knowledge of the doctrine of the Trinity—that, for example, the tradition holds there are three Persons but one divine nature—but rather to grasp the nature of the relation of the Persons, to each other and to the divine essence. It is the ratio of relationality that is in question, and both ratio and relationality lie at the heart of Aquinas’s conception of theology. The ‘treatise’ on the Trinity begins with Question 27 of the Prima Pars. (Aquinas himself did not label groups of questions as ‘treatises’, but these traditional groupings are useful for considering together a string of questions on a related issue.) In this first question on the Trinity, Aquinas immediately introduces the analogy of intellect and will, the speed with which he does so being an indication of its significance in his eyes. The emphasis here, however, is on procession. This point is crucial: Aquinas is not so much interested in identifying the Son as Intellect or the Spirit as will, so much as in using the relation of intellect and will as we know it to explain what we cannot know from experience, namely the relations of the Persons at the immanent level. The processions indicate both the relations of origin so crucial to establishing the distinction of the Persons and the unity that obtains despite these distinctions. What Aquinas seeks to establish, in the first instance, is that the distinctions of the Persons are essential: they do not come about because of creation. The appropriations aid in establishing this point because the activities of the intellect and the will are the only ones that can remain within the agent (Summa theologiae I.27, 5 resp.; all references hereafter are to the larger Summa). The relationality of the divine Persons to whom intellect and will are appropriated is thus the way God is, not simply the way creatures understand God or the way God is manifested in creation. Relationality is of the essence, then. Aquinas also makes almost this same point in another way. In the next question, he simply asserts the identity of relation in God with divine essence (I.28, 2 resp.). Both from the perspective of the processions understood via appropriation and from the perspective of the nature of divine essence, relationality is fundamental to God. It is literally in God’s nature to be relational. The processions, however, establish the distinction of the Persons, distinction which is a precondition of relationality. This theme Aquinas develops in I.28, 3, via a pair of notions that he did not derive from Augustine: relations of regard and of opposition. The very idea of relation signifies regard (respectus) of one thing to another (I.28, 3 resp.) and regard entails opposition. By opposition Aquinas does not mean hostility, but an absolute contrast: x is not y. For x and y to be related, on this reasoning, means first, that x and y are distinct, and second, that x and y are connected to each other in some way. Distinction is logically prior: things cannot be connected if they are not different; absence of differentiation implies uniformity, not relationality. If the divine essence is relational, therefore, it cannot be

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an undifferentiated monad, yet the procession that indicates distinction—and notionally secures it—cannot exist solely in creation, but must be intrinsic to who God is. The appropriations provide a model to show how this can be, linking the conception of divine essence as relational and the Persons as distinct. All Christian theology must struggle to give content to the distinctiveness of the Persons. In view of the Augustinian principle opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt, that distinctiveness cannot be understood on the basis of activities in the created order: the Father is not a creator in some way that the Son and the Spirit are not, nor even the Son a redeemer, while the Father and the Spirit are not. Nor can the Three be distinguished by attributes. The traditional answer to the dilemma created by these foreclosed options was to locate distinction in origin: the Father is unbegotten and not proceeding, the Son begotten and proceeding, and the Spirit proceeding but not begotten. Aquinas concurs, holding that the real relations in God can only be understood on the basis of the processions: paternity, filiation, spiration, and procession itself (I.28, 4), because only these can be internal and not external to God. The crucial point, as Aquinas’s exposition brings out, is that these distinctions by way of origin also articulate relationality. Relationality is the presupposition of distinction and the distinction of the Persons can only be secured by appeal to origin, which is what the processions express. The only other means of articulating the distinction of the Persons is by brute assertion. At one level, there is nothing wrong with this: what makes Mary different from Marie is not that one has, say, brown hair and the other black, or that they are different nationalities or ages, but simply that they just are not the same person. Aquinas leans heavily on the Boethian definition of person (an individual substance of a rational nature, cited in I.29, 1), which entails a person’s being distinct from other persons, simply in virtue of being a person. Equally, however, Aquinas insists that being a person entails standing in relation to other entities: ‘person’ signifies relation (I.29, 4) and relation is the same as person (I.40, 1). Both because the divine essence is relational and because the supposita (individuals) of the Trinity are specifically persons, the Trinity exists as a nexus of personal relations. The relations in God are real (I.28, 1 resp.), by which Aquinas means they are necessary and eternal. Not so the relation between God and creation: there is a real relation of creation to God, but not of God to creation (I.28, 1 ad 3). This determination stipulates that creation is a free act, and having created, God remains free of creation: creation is, in contrast, utterly dependent on God. The divine freedom in relation to creation is underlined by Aquinas’s doctrine of mission. The notion of mission is the context in which Aquinas works out the relation of his doctrine of the Trinity to the rest of his theology, in two questions (I.43 and 44), providing a map of the rest of his vast edifice, the Summa theologiae.

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Mission, for Aquinas, is the habitude of one sent to the sender (I.43, 1; it is also the habitude of one sent to the end to which this one is sent). This claim establishes relationality, both as a constant of God’s relation to creation (as implied by ‘habitude’) and a free divine impetus to creation. The figure of sending provides an ad extra parallel to the processions within. Without implying the necessary and eternal nature of the processions, the definition of mission suggests an echo of the eternal procession in a temporal and volitional manner, as well as a permanent and free self-giving of the divine Persons to human persons. ‘Sending’ in itself implies a free act (as the Platonic trope of overflow, for example, does not); but Aquinas underlines the point in one of the most startling claims in the entire work: the mission is by grace and God is in all things by essence, power, and presence (per essentiam, potentiam et praesentiam I.43, 3 resp.). The stipulation that this pervasive presence exists by grace rules out at least crude forms of pantheism, which could otherwise be taken as a possible implication of the second clause. Nevertheless, there can be no explaining away the second clause: it stipulates as strong a doctrine of divine sustenance and providence as could be articulated without lapsing into pantheism. It implies that all that exists or happens in the creaturely realm does so in the intimacy of divine presence. This doctrine potentially underwrites a theology of mimesis, of humanity’s following the tracery of the divine invitation to godliness. Because God is in all things by essence, presence, and power, and because God is essentially triune, it follows the Trinity is in all things by essence, presence, and power. Aquinas does not leave his readers to draw this conclusion for themselves, but states it explicitly: the whole Trinity dwells in the mind by sanctifying grace (I.43, 5). Why in the mind? Not only because Aquinas assumes Augustine’s point, that the mind is the seat of the image of God, the respect in which we most resemble God, but also because the mind provides an analogue to the Trinity. Grace therefore has a trinitarian structure (I.43, 6). Aquinas is very far from espousing the analogia entis of which he has sometimes been accused: he has already firmly established God’s definitive distinction from creation. The similarity between God and humanity that is the basis of his theological exploration of the doctrine of the Trinity exists by divine self-donation. Because it is a gift in the first instance to the mind, the mind’s activities must be seen as benefiting from this trinitarianly structured grace. That means that theology, too, on this reasoning must have this trinitarian structure and character. The turn to the structure of the human soul for help in understanding the Trinity is not because of any ontological continuity, but because, precisely in virtue of the vast distinction between creation and the Uncreated, we must think in the terms we have to hand, in at least somewhat plausible analogies, if we are to envisage God at all. Our nature, as Aquinas reminds us, requires that we be led to invisible things via visible ones (I.43, 7 resp.). The passive form

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and the lexical meaning of the verb here are significant: we are led (manuducatur). In other words, the theology Aquinas has been developing and will further develop is conceived not as a matter of the human mind’s overreaching beyond into fanciful speculation, but being drawn upwards by God’s own gracious urging from within. God provides for all things according to the nature of the thing (I.43, 7 resp.), and by implication, this means that the minds we have been given are a provision to enable us to attain our intended end. If we have souls so structured as to enable us to understand God, then we are so because God is the exemplar cause of being (I.44, 3 resp.), ‘exemplar’ implying an instructive pattern. God is equally the final cause of all things (I.44, 4 resp.), that towards which they should by nature grow. Traced onto what we are from the beginning, divine nature beckons us from the end. In between, of course, there are some serious obstacles, notably the fact that we are no longer what we were first intended to be. At this point in the Summa, however, Aquinas has not broached anthropology proper, much less the specific question of the Fall; he is still treating the outworking of his doctrine of the Trinity. Nevertheless, Aquinas points out that God intends to communicate perfection (communicare suam perfectionem, I.44, 4 resp.). All talk of human deficiency must be enclosed within the parameters this claim allows. To say perfection were not possible to us—no matter what state we are said to be in after the Fall—would be to say God’s design can be ultimately thwarted. Whatever obstacles arise from the creaturely side, it remains that every creature is ordered to the acquisition of its own perfection, and that this is the likeness of divine perfection (I.44, 4). What Aquinas claims of human intention must be carefully interpreted if it is not to suggest the absurd. As for Augustine, love could be (for example) of power, so that one could commit horrendous acts of hatred, yet be said to be motivated by love for something; so, on Thomas’s reasoning, a creature could conceivably intend to acquire perfection, yet aim for perfection in some unsuitable respect, thereby seeming intent on the acquisition of vice. Aquinas does not acknowledge such a possibility at this point in the Summa, but we must allow for it, if we are to foreclose the implausible prospect of a universe of human agents all intent on becoming model cosmic citizens. Aquinas’s point is not that we actually inhabit a community of such earnest seekers after the best, but that there is something within us longing to be like God, whether we ourselves know this or actively seek it in some sensible way. Aquinas’s text does not exhibit signs of being designed to foster meditation, as Denys’s and Anselm’s do, but the doctrine of the Trinity it expounds provides a blueprint for the rest of the vast edifice that is the Summa: the doctrine of creation elaborated as the Prima Pars unfolds, the extended treatment of grace, human actions, and habits that is the Secunda Pars, and the Christology and sacramental theology of the Tertia Pars. The structure of the work as a whole has sometimes been described as an exitus-reditus, the divine ekstasis of creation being mirrored in

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humankind’s graced turn towards God. The mimetic pattern Aquinas asserts of the structure of creation and redemption is reflected in the pattern of the Summa, and the latter’s structure is contained in microcosm, in its treatment of the divine processions and mission, discourse inscribing itself and that which it explicates.

LUTHER If mimesis in Aquinas’s theology correlates strongly with its systematicity, in Luther we find it in theology of a very different sort. Luther’s treatise ‘The Freedom of a Christian’ is a prime example of a free-standing treatise, not part of any oeuvre that could be described as a systematic theology, which nevertheless exhibits strongly systematic features. The title suggests the work will treat the Christian life, or the state of the individual, with concerns that are either ethical or anthropological, yet Luther quickly locates these themes within the purview of Christology, relentlessly tracing connections between the two. He departs from two propositions which he acknowledges seem flatly contradictory: the Christian is perfectly free, subject to none, yet the Christian is the servant of all, and subject to all (LW 344; WA 49).7 However, he notes that if ‘they should be found to fit together they would serve our purpose beautifully’ and that these both come from Paul (1 Cor. 9:19 and Rom.13:8). Luther therefore signals he has two reasons to want to resolve the apparent contradiction posed by these statements. First, that failure to show their compatibility would imply that the Bible is self-contradictory. Second, Luther’s own purposes (though not as yet stated) require this harmonization. Theology is meant to be based on scripture—a point on which Luther relentlessly insists. If scripture itself cannot be self-contradictory, apparent contradiction could be accounted for only as human mis-mediation of the divine word. Luther’s own convictions require the dissolving of apparent contradiction, the reading of scripture as coherent. Luther proposes to reconcile the scriptural premises from which his argument departs by appeal to a twofold quality of human nature: we are both spiritual and bodily. The spiritual he associates not only with the noncorporeal element, but with the ‘new man’, while the body is linked to both the carnal (carnalis) and the ‘old man’ (LW 344; WA 50). Paul’s dicta about the Christian’s freedom and subjection apply to each of these, the old and the new 7 References to Luther’s works in this section are to the treatise commonly known as ‘The Freedom of the Christian’, by page number to vol. 31 of Luther’s Works (LW) and Bd 7 of Martin Luthers Werke (known as the Weimarer Ausgabe, WA).

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person, so the contradiction lies not in scripture or Paul’s thinking, but within each one of us, since we are a mixture of the carnal and the spiritual, the old and the new. Whether this take on the matter represents persuasive exegesis of the Biblical passages in question, or whether one should assume that Paul could not, in letters written to different recipients at different times, contradict himself, is not our concern. Presumably Luther assumes that because both passages are contained in scripture either they express compatible views, regardless of the circumstances under which they were written, or it is possible to read them as not mutually contradictory. His position on Biblical interpretation serves a material theological purpose, namely, to highlight the condition Luther wants to claim is characteristic of humanity, of self-contradiction. The Bible, on his account, does not contradict itself, but attests to the contractions in human nature (LW 344; WA 50). Despite these contradictions within us, however, we can and do expect rational arguments. Indeed, Luther sets out to offer ‘proof ’ by means of a ‘simple argument’ that freedom and servitude, righteousness and unrighteousness are not the product of any ‘external thing’ (LW 345; WA 50). Whether or not this argument works as Luther claims it does is again for our purposes immaterial. What is significant is that he wants to offer arguments and proofs, and expects these to be understood as such, despite the deficiencies he claims in postlapsarian nature. The argument he offers departs from the assumption that only the word of God, the gospel of Christ, is necessary for Christian life, righteousness and freedom (LW 345; LW 50). Whether ‘word’ here designates scripture or the Second Person of the Trinity, is an ambiguity which is perhaps intentional; as the argument unfolds, it comes clear that Luther is thinking of both. Initially, his claim that no greater disaster can afflict the soul than a famine of the hearing of the word of God (LW 346; WA 51) indicates that he is thinking either of scripture itself or preaching based upon it. What makes the soul righteous and free, however is preaching Christ (LW 346; WA 51). The two senses of ‘word’ are therefore so closely intertwined that it is all but impossible to separate them out. Because the word can only be received by faith, the soul can only be justified by faith; if it could be justified by anything else, it would not need the word (LW 346; WA 51). This faith is the means by which the new person is born (LW 347; WA 51). Now it is clear why Luther earlier insisted on the contradictory elements of our nature: the righteous new person comes into being through faith, the other is the sinful old person. Since it is the Word that makes righteous, it follows we can do nothing to become righteous, other than to receive the principle of righteousness, which is the Word. The two verses of Paul from which Luther’s discussion begins, neither of which had anything directly to say of righteousness, justification, or works (apart from the command to love one another, Rom. 15:8) is now taken as leading back to the central theme of all Luther’s theology: justification by faith.

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The line of argument now bends back upon itself. Having established that faith is what justifies, Luther claims that as works are unnecessary for justification, so the Christian has no need of the law (LW 349; WA 53) and it is this freedom from the law that is true freedom. In this sense, the Christian is perfectly free and subject to none (the first of the two theses with which the treatise began). The principle is now extended beyond its anthropological beginnings, however: because righteousness comes to us from outside, it follows that it is to be ascribed to its giver, God. For Luther, this ascription of righteousness to God (along with truthfulness) is what worship (cultus) is (LW 350; WA 54). An anthropological principle has yielded an incipient doctrine of God and a doxological definition. The same starting principle also leads us to a Christology. One benefit of faith, according to Luther, is that by it the soul is united to Christ as a bride to a groom; they become, like a married couple, one flesh, having all in common (LW 351; WA 55). Just so, in Christ divinity and humanity coexist in one person (LW 351; WA 54). Although the drama of redemption is manifest in this one person (LW 351; WA 55), the two elements in Christ are not described as standing in contradiction to one another, even though we arrived at this point of seeing Christ’s two natures via an analysis of the two apparently contradictory scriptural principles. The reader is now brought to see that the harmony of thought is rooted in, not human ingenuity, but the unsearchable depths of divine providence, manifest in the Incarnation and the everlasting marriage of divinity and humanity in Christ. What has become of the second principle, though? In what sense are we servants, despite our liberty? Luther is at great pains to insist that works do not justify or that one can through them become righteous (LW 359, WA 60; LW 362, WA 62; LW 363, WA 63), but he also makes clear that he does not reject good works per se (LW 363; WA 63), as long as they are done out of obedience to God (LW 359; WA 60). In freedom, the believer may serve, help, and ‘in every way deal with his neighbour as he sees that God through Christ has dealt still deals with him’ (LW 366; WA 65). The servant is, therefore, subject to all in a highly qualified sense: the subjection is not, as is usually the case, enforced. Rather, the relationship of servitude is willingly undertaken (LW 367; WA 66). Christ dwells in us; this is the mirror image of the Christological principle Luther earlier articulated. Christians also, however, live in Christ, though through faith (as well as in their neighbours through love, LW 371; WA 69). The example of both faith and freely rendered service is Mary (LW 368; WA 66–67) and so Luther’s theology comes to one of the traditional intersections between anthropology and Christology: the God-bearer in whom divinity dwelt bodily (at least between the Annunciation and the Nativity). From a pair of scriptural verses apparently contradictory in their sense and remote from each other in the Biblical text, and in the compass of a rather short text, Luther has expounded a compact doctrine of God, Christology,

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soteriology, anthropology, theology of worship, and an ethic, all of it reverting to a theme that is for him the central principle of Christian theology: justification by faith. While, as noted earlier, theology can be considered systematic even if it does not revert to a single principle, or even a small set of principles, in this case it does. The deeper sense in which Luther’s theology may be said to be systematic, however, lies in its concern to expound a set of intertwined themes so as to avoid contradiction and to show their necessary relations. Whatever contradictions Luther asserts in human nature, and despite the polemic against human sophistry peppered throughout his writings, his theology represents an attempt to explain the Christian faith as a unified whole which gives glory to the divine Word. Divine and human nature do not stand in a contradictory relation in Christ’s person, and the centrality of Christology to Luther’s theology indicates that whatever the contradictions of humanity’s postlapsarian nature, theology not only attests to, but in some measure instantiates, the harmony possible through sanctification.

CALV IN Calvin’s theology is, if anything, even more strenuously dominated by considerations of the Fall and human sin than Luther’s. He begins from a point implicit in Denys, which becomes explicit in Aquinas: nearly all the wisdom we possess consists of knowledge of God and of ourselves (Institutes of the Christian Religion I.1.i; all citations of Calvin hereafter are from the Institutes). Calvin freely confesses (as Augustine does in regard to the relation of knowledge and love) that he faces a chicken-and-egg problem: it is hard to say which form of knowledge comes first (I.1.i). Calvin’s uncertainty on this point is perhaps reflected in the text in which the perplexity is voiced: his theology is strongly marked by the sense of the majesty of God, and this is doubtless its dominating principle, though in terms of sheer quantity of prose, he has much more to say of the human condition. In fact, there is no concerted treatment of the doctrine of God in the Institutes, a point surprising given the theocentric character of Calvin’s thought. Although there are fleeting treatments of some divine attributes throughout the Institutes,8 we learn of God’s identity chiefly from the Institutes’ treatment of God as creator, as triune, and in the context of Calvin’s treatment of prayer. In other words, the weight of Calvin’s doctrine of God lies on the side of divine

8 An indication of the unlocalized treatment of attributes can be seen in the index to the Library of Christian Classics translation: at ‘Goodness of God’, it reads ‘passim’. Even of this key attribute, there is no single sustained exposition.

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nature viewed relationally: in the context of the supreme relationality that is the Trinity and in relation to creation and its human suppliants. One could explain the absence of a De Deo uno in the Institutes in several ways. One possibility is that since many of the traditional attributes of God— particularly those so prevalent in the apophatic tradition—are at best implicit in scripture, and perhaps tainted by their association with philosophy, a theologian of Calvin’s bibliocentric tendencies would be unconcerned to devote much time to them. This explanation, however, fails precisely in light of the Bible, which even when it does not use metaphorical titles such as Shepherd or Rock, calls God good and wise. So does Calvin, of course, but he also appeals to philosophical predicates such as infinity. The issue is not that he privileges the Biblical titles over the philosophical predicates, but that he gives little concerted treatment to either. The more persuasive explanation for the absence of such dedicated treatment of attributes is that although Calvin’s theology tends towards theocentricism, it does so sub specie relationis: the human writers of theology necessarily view God in relation to themselves, as creator and as the Father addressed in Christian prayer and it is in this context that Calvin develops his doctrine of God. To say that the Trinitarian emphasis of Calvin’s theology—the refusal to consider divine nature aside from the three Persons—is the counterpart to the insistence on viewing God in relation to creatures is speculative, but plausible, as speculations go. The relationality of God and creatures requires, in Calvin’s view, that God be discussed first (I.i.3), so even though his doctrine of God proper is brief, he intends it to have some sort of priority. Its leading mark is infinity (I.xiii.i).9 This trait, plus the fact that divine nature is spiritual, stipulates that God cannot be envisaged in sensory terms and that we must refrain from imagining anything carnal of him (I.xiii.1). These stipulations explain why Calvin seems less inclined to wallow in Biblical images for God than does Denys. Infinity may also underwrite the claim that God is incomprehensible (I.xiii.1), though Calvin does not explicitly draw a connection between the two. This doctrine of God emphasizes the impossibility of humanity’s describing God in terms of our own devising. Surprisingly, Calvin does not stress recourse to the Bible in the face of the inadequacy of human conceptuality. In fact, he castigates those who insist that every theological term must be found explicitly in scripture and defends the use of the traditional, though non-scriptural, terminology for the doctrine of the Trinity; what matters is not proof-texting (‘interpretations patched together [consarcinatur] out of the fabric of Scripture’) but words which faithfully render scripture’s meaning (I.xiii.3). The portrait of God that derives from scripture can thus legitimately be rendered in terms found rarely or not at all in the Hebrew or Greek texts:

9

Calvin actually speaks of ‘immensa et spirituali Dei essentia’.

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infinity, omnipresence (I.xvi.3), providence (I.xvi.3–8), as well as by those that do occur, such as holiness (903), might, goodness, wisdom, righteousness, mercy, and truth (III.xx.41). This picture underlines divine transcendence and the fundamental distinction of God from creatures, especially humanity, since one of the leading traits of Calvin’s anthropology is its stress on postlapsarian nature, with all its dysfunctions and flaws. However, in Calvin’s theology, the gap between God and humankind is most often invoked in the same breath as the means to its bridging. The kind of bridging that interests Calvin indicates much of his attitude towards theology. Very early in the Institutes, Calvin tells us that ‘our miserable ruin compels us to look upwards’ (I.i.1). The Fall might have been taken as the reason to focus on humanity and its wretchedness; instead, Calvin views human selfawareness as the prompt to worship: knowledge of self leads to knowledge of God. Conversely, however, we can never attain to true knowledge of ourselves without first looking ‘on God’s face’ (I.i.2). Knowledge of God is never solely that for Calvin, therefore: properly speaking, God is not known where there is no religion or piety (I.ii.1). Really to grasp who God is cannot be a matter of simply listing attributes, given what those attributes are. To acknowledge absolute holiness as such is to worship. If our mind cannot apprehend God without honouring him (I.ii.1), then it follows that to the extent theology reflects right apprehension of God, it also reflects worship, and might even be said to be an act of worship. The human image of God is in many respects a negative: our unholiness contrasts God’s holiness, for example. Yet the deficiencies of human nature do not yield an apophatic theology in this instance: we do not look to ourselves to learn what God is not, or even to learn that God is fundamentally different from ourselves. The interplay between analysis of self and regard of God inspires the human person’s attachment to the divine in devotion. The divine Persons are not only the object of worship, but are the very mechanism by which we understand ourselves and God, for there is no drop of wisdom or light that does not flow from God (I.ii.1). God is both medium and message, source and goal, and all our reflection on the human or the divine bears the imprint of this transcendental wisdom and praiseworthy holiness. So strongly marked is Calvin’s epistemology by the tendency to see all under the aspect of worship that he posits a natural awareness of divinity in the human mind, which accounts for the universal tendency to worship, even if this is sometimes expressed in idolatry (I.iii.1). The difference between real religion and idolatry is the starting point of real religion (I.ii.2); this presumably entails correctly identifying an appropriate object of worship. Identifying the right object of worship results from making a correct theological decision: does this possible object of reverence possess the attributes of the divine? Although Calvin distinguishes between legitimate worship and idolatry and insists on a natural inclination to worship, his conviction of the ravages of the

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Fall leads him to hold that all human beings degenerate from true knowledge of God, so no real piety remains in the world (47). Idolatry, it now becomes clear, is not solely a matter of bowing before bronze statues and the like but consists in a ‘figment and a dream’ of one’s own heart (cordis sui figmentum potius ad somnium, I.iv.1). The category of idols now presumably includes not just deities obviously different from the God of the Christian Bible, but modifications of the Christian understanding of God, theology clouded by self-deception and self-interest. The self-absorption that seems to be the root of wrong-headed theology is divisive, arising when we are devoted to our own opinions, a solipsism that separates us from the true God (I.v.13). Scripture provides the corrective to this sad state of affairs. Since its authority is underwritten by the one who speaks in it (I.vii.1), it cannot mislead. It functions not only as a source of information about God and ourselves, but as a means of seeing rightly. Calvin compares it to the aid to physical vision provided by spectacles: they do not provide information that is entirely unavailable to us naturally, but correct what in our natural endowments is faulty, bringing the world into right focus (I.vi.1). With scripture, we therefore have a twofold source of knowledge of God: both scripture itself, but also the natural world we can rightly interpret as a testament to the creator, once scripture has corrected the vision damaged by the Fall. This renewal of vision yields a knowledge that is an end in itself: it is the final goal of blessed life (I.iv.4). By knowledge, however, Calvin does not seem to understand a sheer possession of data, a warehousing of items of information. A hint of what he intends emerges from his Christology, the concept of ‘word’ he articulates in the context of the brief doctrine of the Trinity articulated in I.xiii.7: When God’s word is set before us in Scripture it would be the height of absurdity to imagine a merely fleeting and vanishing utterance, which . . . projects itself outside of God. . . . Rather ‘Word’ means the everlasting Wisdom, residing with God, from which both all oracles and all prophecies go forth.

In its prime instantiation, wisdom both rests in divine nature and is communion outside itself, an impetus ad extra. The significant point is that the Word’s very identity suggests communion, if not dialogue, or at least address which is received by another. The contrast Calvin draws between the fugitive utterance which projects itself outside of God only ephemerally and the wisdom expressing itself in prophecy suggests that the significant point is not articulation ad extra in some form or another, but articulation in a form that is meaningful to the recipient. Likewise, the faithful human response to the divine word entails more than reading the Bible to glean information that can be filed away for reference. All that we are given to understand of God urges us beyond the pleasures of knowledge for its own sake towards knowledge that engages us with another. Even as we look to ourselves to make sense of our own humanity, we are to remember that there is one God who would have us worship him, and it would

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be absurd only to enjoy God’s gifts without looking to their Giver (I.v.6). This ‘looking to’ the Giver encompasses a personal relation. It is not simply a matter of grasping God’s identity as creator or of tracing the origin of creation to a divine source, but of ‘assigning the whole credit for Creation to God’ (I.xvi.1). It is a matter also of pressing the consequents of God’s identity as creator: ‘faith ought to penetrate more deeply, namely, having found him Creator of all, forthwith to conclude he is also everlasting Governor and Preserver’ (I.xvi.1). Drawing the connection between creation and sustenance means both perceiving a logical relation and a personal consequence. The logic of a Christian doctrine of creation indicates that the material world, however fragile and ephemeral in its contingency, is good because it was willed into being by a good God. That a good creator who desired the existence of the others who are creatures should then abandon them, is illogical. We therefore see the presence of divine power ‘shining as much in the continuing state of the universe as in its inception’ (I.xvi.1). The root attribute of God seems to be omnipotence, a power which is not empty or idle, but a ‘watchful effective active’ kind of power ‘engaged in ceaseless activity’ (I.xvi.3). The active nature of divine power— not an unused potentiality but an exercised force—indicates a divine gaze turned ceaselessly towards the creature. If the creature’s gaze is to turn to the Creator, it is no more than the divine response, the answer to a preceding call. Nowhere in the Institutes is this doctrine of God more clearly delineated than in the theology of prayer in Book III. However comprehensive a systematic theology might be, not all would include a treatment of prayer and not all theologians consider prayer a subject requiring theological analysis. That Calvin does so, and does so not as an afterthought, indicates how central he took prayer to be, not only to the Christian life, but to theology. Central to his analysis of prayer is his discussion of a particular prayer, the Our Father. Its opening address prompts the determination that God is of infinite greatness, incomprehensible essence, immense power, and everlasting immortality (III.xx.40). The tenderness of the prayer’s opening has here been rendered in the abstract language of theological predicates, suggesting a move from address to theological reflection. In doing so, Calvin does not diminish the intimacy of address, but indicates its extricable connection to reflection: to pray is to voice theological suppositions; to articulate theology is at least potentially, or in some instances, to pray. Because prayer is inherently dialogical—a human response to a divine address—the connection between prayer and theology intimates a dialogical quality to Calvin’s understanding of theology. That address occurs not only through the word, but through, it seems, the sheer presence of God. With perhaps surprising frequency, Calvin describes human encounter with God as contemplation. Our understanding of the Trinity, for example, comes about because God ‘offers himself ’ to be contemplated in three Persons (disincte in tribus personis considerandum proponet,

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I.xiii.2). In prayer, the mind can be called away to pure contemplation of God, lifted and carried beyond itself (III.xx.4). Contemplation begins where merely informational knowledge leaves off; it departs from a certain kind of understanding and tends toward some other kind of knowledge and reflection, though of what sort Calvin does not specify. There are hints, moreover, of a communion: our inability to help ourselves out of the piteous state in which the Fall has left us means we must go outside ourselves (III.xx.1). Perhaps by this Calvin means no more than that we must resort to scripture, but as he continues, it seems more is envisaged: ‘in Christ, [God] offers all happiness in place of our misery, all wealth in place of our neediness; . . . we may draw from [God’s bounty] as from an overflowing spring’ (III.xx.1). Calvin seems to be thinking of what the earlier tradition termed the infusion of grace (though he does not adopt that language). Contemplation requires the relationality of giving and receiving that is grace, and theology, as a form of contemplation, requires this relationality as well. The Institutes’ doctrine of God is marked by an emphasis on infinity, boundlessness, and a goodness evident in creation and providence. That portrayal is mirrored in Calvin’s conception of theology: an activity marked both by the impossibility of the finite and fallen creature’s attaining to God unaided, and the revision of vision, culminating in contemplation, that results from the generosity of divine self-giving. ‘Our thought must be raised higher when God is spoken of, lest we dream up anything earthly or physical about him, lest we measure him by our own small measure or conform his will to our emotions’ (903), Calvin writes. While there is a caution here—against theological idolatry, making God in our own image—there is equally a promise of the possibility that theology can rise above sheer self-portrayal. The kernel of that promise is that rather than describing God as a new and improved human being and so dragging the infinite down to the level of the finite, the infinite may draw the finite upward. Theology, on this account, is a mimesis of God, even as it recognizes the constraints and betrayals of its own finite authors, indeed its own finitude. The anthropology that stresses the cramped and warped state of human nature does so to honour the self-giving of the transcendent. For all its insistence on the radical distinction of holy Creator and sinful creature, Calvin’s anthropology ultimately functions as a signpost pointing to his doctrine of God. In so doing, it also reveals theology’s capacity to reflect what is itself a reflection: humankind’s likening to God at God’s own beckoning.

NEWMAN Like Kierkegaard, Newman is often taken to be a philosopher of religion rather than a theologian proper. However, the work from which we will examine a

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section, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, was the final, fully-worked out form of a line of thought begun in the Oxford University Sermons. The line between homily, theology, and philosophy is not sharply drawn or easy to discern, in this instance; in this respect, Newman’s work resembles Nazianzen’s orations. While a great deal of this work is concerned with issues that would today be considered to fall under the rubric of philosophy or philosophical theology, the section we will consider (Chapter 5 of the Essay) concerns faith in and assent to the Trinity and covers terrain that is unambiguously theological. Newman stresses that he is not debating whether there is a God or making an argument for the existence of God; his interest lies in ‘what God is’ (94). That question is most certainly theological. Most significantly for our purposes, Newman’s treatment of these issues reveals a great deal about his conception of the nature of theology. At the core of his analysis is the distinction between grasping the content of a proposition, which is an intellectual act, and giving assent to it, which engages the heart (the term he seems to prefer to ‘will’). The intellectual act he associates with theology, the volitional with religion (93). Unlike some who contrast mind and heart, Newman does not do so to the end of denigrating one or the other (it is usually the mind that comes off worse in these skirmishes). Nor does he assert the distinction to the end of making theology the province of the highly educated few. What allows us to apprehend the reality theology attempts to designate (the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, for example) is the imagination. When we believe propositions about these to be true, we use the intellect. Intellect and imagination therefore furnish the materials out of which all theology is fashioned and these are common to everyone (93). If one is religious, then one is to some degree a theologian, in Newman’s view. More controversially, he claims that no theology can even embark upon its task without ‘the abiding presence of religion’ (93). Part of the reason that this is so is that trust in the person of God is what underwrites the content of theology: we believe that God is both three and one because God says this is so (94). That God is one Newman is prepared to view as evident from nature, natural truth being the foundation of all religion (94). He never, however, claims that the doctrine of the three Persons is derivable from nature; this it seems we can only learn from revelation. Although this point is only implicit, it accords with the radical otherness Newman asserts of God: ‘[He is] like Himself, unlike all things besides Himself, which are all but his creatures; distinct from, independent of them all; One who is self-existing, absolutely infinite’ (95). Nothing in nature would therefore resemble God, which leaves little room for deriving any doctrine of God from nature. Newman’s notion of the natural, however, differs from that of the Enlightenment figures preoccupied with proving God’s existence from motion, design, and so on. It is not the material world from which we sense God’s presence, but from our innate notion of moral obligations (97). For Newman,

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conscience is the medium through which God instructs us about himself, yet far from constituting a similarity between God and humanity, conscience tells us that God is like nothing else (97), although conscience is equally a connecting principle between creature and Creator (106). Newman uses as an example of the instruction of conscience the case of a child out of favour with his parents, but able to trust in God (103). This example is probably too deeply embedded in the assumptions of Victorian England to be persuasive now, when not all children trust there is a God who listens and loves. However, even if Newman’s example will no longer work as some kind of proof or indication of the innate sense of the divine, it still indicates something important about his theology: we are so constituted as to be able to grasp God’s identity and formulate accurate propositions about it, including perhaps the most important, in Newman’s eyes, the assertion that God is utterly unlike us. Newman’s insistence on our being able to truly predicate attributes of God (for example, the list of predicates on 95), despite the fundamental difference between God and humanity, indicates the hybrid epistemology he adopts. We cannot give any finally knowledgeable and informed assent to propositions of the faith (what Newman terms ‘real assent to the mystery’ [115]), because what the discrete propositions designate is a single whole. We can entertain the propositions one by one, but ‘we cannot image them altogether’, and we cannot do so because of the radical transcendence of God, who lies beyond all our experience (115). Because we cannot take in what it means for these propositions to be linked as they are in divine nature, it is not the dogma of the Trinity as a whole that Newman takes to be the formal object of religion, and that to which we assent, but its constituent propositions, which we apprehend and to which we assent one by one (115). What we think is knowledge of God is irremediably fragmentary: ‘Not only do we see Him at best only in shadows, but we cannot even bring these shadows together’ (116). Newman claims that the ‘partial aspects’ which make up our image of God are numberless and independent of each other (116). While by this last claim he might mean these propositions are wholly discrete, his further explanation seems to indicate not their disconnectedness from each other, but our inability to see them as a whole: ‘None of them are [sic.] fully dwelt on and enjoyed, when they are viewed in combination’ (116). The reason is not that we cannot force them into some kind of synthesis, but that when we do combine them, we ‘gain nothing but a mystery’ (117). The problem with mystery is not, as one might expect, that it defeats the rational mind; rather, the difficulty is that it can be described as a notion, but not depicted ‘as an imagination’ (117). Newman’s concern about the exit of the imagination has not so much to do with his conviction that theology needs it, as that the Bible engages it: ‘the sacred book . . . is addressed far more to the imagination and affections than to the intellect’ (117). The implication is that when we succeed in creating a system of propositions about God, we enter into

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some realm far from that in which we encounter God in the sacred page. This disparity does not discredit propositional formulation but it does suggest that propositions misrepresent God, to some extent. So, of course, do images and narratives. Although Newman himself does not draw the conclusion, we might: the propositional language of formal theology is just as capable of disclosure and just as inadequate to its end as the figurative language of scripture. Both serve the purpose of mediating the divine; neither captures it. These considerations do not, however, rule out seeing theology as a whole. Newman privileges goodness among divine attributes (we can ‘contemplate these qualities and their manifestations under the common name of goodness’ [104]). Here he comes close to the position of Aquinas in Summa theologiae I.3 and I.13; the various names designating attributes of God all denote what is in fact just the simple divine nature, but Newman may be more interested in the relations of propositions to each other than is Aquinas. The one who subsumes the multitude of divine attributes under a broad heading of goodness can also think of them as ‘indivisible, correlative, supplementary of each other’ and that the more because ‘the notion of a perfection embracing all possible excellences, both moral and intellectual, is especially congenial to the mind’ (104). Even if the impetus towards synthesis carries us away from the mode in which the Bible speaks to us (and Newman never claims it takes us away from the Bible’s actual teaching), we seem to need to formulate our information about God in a way that integrates the myriad notions, not into a homogeneous monad (the propositions are correlative and supplementary to each other, hence discrete), but into a complex, interlocking whole: a system, in other words. If the system does not perfectly represent God, this inevitable deficit does not distinguish it from our representations of other things, for even the representation we make of the things perceived by the sense can be only true as far as they go, but never adequate (96). The state of our knowledge reflects our existential state, fragmented and muddled, but it also reflects the integrity of what is given from the divine side. Newman does not confine that gift to what is found in scripture. The world of nature, and our own nature, reflects truths of ‘the One Living God’, imbued in us via conscience (106). Newman expresses a complete lack of interest in sorting out the hoary problems of natural versus revealed knowledge, whether by ‘natural’ we mean notions derived from observation of the cosmos, or some sort of divine sense within us. We simply have no means of settling such questions (105–6). Whatever the provenance of our knowledge, however, we necessarily express it in propositions. Despite his insistence on the incommensurability of our conceptions of God with God ipse, Newman is equally adamant that we cannot abandon propositional formulations. Vaguely identified detractors (‘they’) object that ‘propositions are but a formal and human medium destroying all true reception of the Gospel, making religion a matter of words or of logic, rather than the heart’. He concedes ‘them’ a point: it is in

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fact possible for people to make the propositions an end in themselves; what Newman rejects is the notion that this must necessarily be the case. Propositions can serve as a means without slipping into the status of ends. Furthermore, whatever the false attractions of propositional knowledge of God, we cannot dispense with propositions: ‘they are necessary to the mind in the same way that language is ever necessary for denoting facts, both for ourselves as individuals, and for our intercourse with others’ (108–9). Human talk about God is inadequate to its object, therefore, but necessary to the discursive subject intent on reflection and communication with others. Moreover, to reject propositional knowledge on the grounds that it keeps us from the true religion of the heart is simply muddled thinking in Newman’s view, since ‘knowledge must ever precede the exercise of the affections’ (109). Our need for propositions seems linked to a fact of human nature: that we are linguistically orientated creatures. Propositions, ‘the expressions of facts’, are necessary for the mind in the same way that language is necessary for denoting facts. Because the linguistic and propositional representation of facts is crucial, not only so we can communicate with others, but for ourselves as individuals, it seems we need propositions and the language which expresses them simply in order to think. This last notion has been debated by linguists and cognitive psychologists since Newman’s time, of course, as has the question of whether words are specifically necessary to theology. Newman does not address these issues directly, but he does clearly state that theological propositions do not engage the intellect exclusively: doctrine addresses the imagination as much as the intellect (113). Specifically, words like ‘Father’ are ‘adapted to excite images’ (113). Without specifically discussing trope or metaphor, Newman has pointed to the inevitably figurative nature of much theological language, including terms (like Father) that count as technical terms. The section of the Essay examined here counts as meta-reflection on the nature of theology and as such, necessarily addresses the issue of how theology re-presents the relation of God and the world. The text does not so much enact that relationality as state it. What is striking about Newman’s account, however, is his simultaneous insistence on the otherness of God and the divine pervading of the natural order, so that the natural and the supernatural are portrayed as distinct, yet by divine desire inevitably intertwined. Newman shows us that to articulate the nature of theology is to describe not only the discourse itself, but the cosmic pattern to which the discourse testifies.

KIERKEGAARD In Kierkegaard we find a thinker who, as we observed earlier, was ostensibly hostile to systems, at least in what he took to be their Hegelian form. The lover

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of the ‘counter, original, spare, strange’,10 he perhaps would seem the perfect exception to the rule proposed here, that Christian theology is inherently systematic. Part of Kierkegaard’s contrariness lies in his unclassifiability: he could be excluded from a survey such as this on the grounds that he is a philosopher rather than a theologian (the same could be said of Newman). Whatever the philosophical qualities of his thought, though, his work was directly concerned with Christianity rather than with philosophical problems abstracted from a particular religious creed, and his has been an important voice in the Christian tradition. He is claimed by both the history of philosophy and the history of theology; his identity as a philosopher need not preclude his treatment as a theologian, although the work we will focus on here is entitled Philosophical Fragments, a paradox Kierkegaard himself might have enjoyed. The paradoxicality Kierkegaard stressed in his treatment of systems is no methodological sabre-rattling, a position taken in theory but abandoned in practice. Kierkegaard viewed Christianity as turning on paradox, paradox created by God’s dealings with humanity. God is utterly different from humanity; divine works can be done only by the god (Philosophical Fragments 42/38)11 and the god cannot be envisioned (63/60). The first thing a human being must know about God is that God is utterly different from us (46/44). In fact, we cannot even know that God is different without divine assistance; this help then enables us merely to know that God is absolutely different, nothing more (46/44). Hence the crucial irony to which Kierkegaard points: the ultimate paradox of thought is to want to discover what cannot be thought (37/34). Kierkegaard locates this vast, essential difference between God and humanity largely in sin: What is the difference, but sin?, he asks (47/44). This question seems to rule out the possibility of a fundamental difference between the Uncreated and the created, for it would mean we only differed from God after the Fall. The claim can, however, be read otherwise. Rather than claiming the sole difference between God and humanity lies in sin, Kierkegaard could be taken as asserting that sin is what we first perceive as the difference between ourselves and God, but the very selfknowledge that is awareness of sin comes about only because of humankind’s radical dependence on God, and this dependence betokens a fundamental distinction extending far beyond human sinfulness and divine holiness: ‘Just to come to know that the god is different, man needs the god and then comes to know the god is absolutely different from him’ (46/44). That there is a broader difference between God and humanity than sin alone is further suggested by the centre of gravity in the Philosophical Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Pied Beauty’. All references hereafter to Kierkegaard’s work are to the Philosophical Fragments, by page in the English translation of Howard and Edna Hong (1985) and to the Danish edition of Thulstrup. 10 11

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Fragments, the parable of the king and the maiden, and the penumbra surrounding it, of reflection on the relation of teacher and learner. The central idea of both parable and penumbra is the need for the teacher or king to come to the same level as the learner or maiden in order for what the teacher/king has to offer to be received. Kierkegaard’s choice of metaphors to convey the Incarnation is significant: neither a lover (the king) nor a teacher is in the first instance concerned with moral judgement, and certainly not with condemnation. It is the affirmation of the teacher and the king that causes the learner to learn and the maiden to feel the king’s love. Although Kierkegaard does not state the matter quite as growth in knowledge and love, that is what his images indicate, and the interplay of knowledge and love goes far back into the Christian tradition, from Augustine to Anselm, Aquinas, and Ruusbroec. Whether Kierkegaard was aware of this background does not matter; the fact is that whether by conscious agreement or inadvertently thinking along the same lines, he stands in continuity with the prior tradition. While the two images of teacher and king bear a formal similarity to each other, they cannot simply be collapsed into a single idea, so we will take them separately. Both stem from a single question: Can a historical point of departure be given for an eternal consciousness; how can such a point of departure be of more than historical interest; can an eternal happiness be built on historical knowledge?

These questions are not simply concerned with the difference between the sinner and Absolute Good, but with the apparent chasm between the eternal and the historical. While the question might seem to state a metaphysical problem, Kierkegaard quickly locates it in the realm of epistemology, turning it into ‘Can the truth be learned?’ (9/7, repeated on 13/11). More radically, he asks how we are even able to seek the truth (13/11). The reason it is hard for us to seek the truth is not simply that we are confused or have a tendency to get things wrong; the learner is untruth (Usandheden, 14/12) and untruth is not merely outside truth; it actively militates against truth (15/13), a militancy Kierkegaard understood as sin (er polemisk med Sandheden, 15/13). Although the learner must discover this truth by himself, he can only obtain it if the teacher brings it to him (14/12). Nevertheless, he has the capacity to learn the truth (which Kierkegaard calls ‘the condition [Beringelsen]’; since this cannot be, on Kierkegaard’s account, something the learner acquired for himself, it must have been given to him, and given to him by the teacher, who is the god (15/13). God therefore gives both the truth and the capacity for understanding it (15/13). The reception of the truth by no means represents a transition from ignorance to knowledge, however. Having received the truth, the learner becomes a new person (18/16), and accordingly the passage from untruth to truth is a rebirth (Gjenfdelsen, 19/17). Something is therefore implied about the teacher in this schema: no mere instructor, this teacher is a saviour, a

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saviour who specifically rescues the learner from ‘unfreedom [Ufriheden]’ and from himself (17/15). The learner is therefore radically dependent on God. The dependence does not subsist solely in the learner’s need for divine assistance to know God, for Kierkegaard insists that the passage to rebirth is not simply a new mode of existence, the transmutation of something already existing, but the passage from non-existence to existence (22/20). This interpretation of the meaning of rebirth means that Kierkegaard has now made clear the radical nature of the learner’s dependence: it is not just epistemology that is in question. The learner’s condition is fundamentally different from God’s, for God is capable of self-understanding without the pupil (24/22). God is in fact wholly unmotivated by any need whatsoever (24/22). Establishing this point not only allows Kierkegaard to underline and specify the nature of the difference between God and humankind but, equally importantly, to show that God’s action in coming to the learner is free, motivated only by love (Kjærlighed, 24/22). The weight of Kierkegaard’s analysis does not fall on human inadequacy, for positing this is not an end in itself. Rather, human dependency is asserted in order to emphasize divine generosity and love. The link between love and freedom is transparent: the notion of coerced love is absurd. Love can only be love if it is unconstrained and unrequired. Where the idea becomes distinctively Kierkegaardian is in the link he makes between God’s freedom in loving and God’s seeking equality: ‘only in love is the different made equal, and only in equality or in unity is there understanding’ (25/22). This stress on equality might seem surprising, given the pains Kierkegaard took earlier to insist on the vast and fundamental difference between teacher and learner. The newness of the insistence on equality, however, forces the recognition of the magnitude of divine love. Since equality can only come about through the divine voluntarily lowering itself to the human level, the lengths to which God goes to show love is underlined. Again, the difference between God and humanity is asserted to the end of highlighting key attributes of God. Exploration of relationality serves the purpose of the doctrine of God and is implicitly doxological: it would be a hard-hearted reader indeed who did not feel moved by Kierkegaard’s picture of the tenderly loving king and the teacher so deeply concerned for the learner. The model now mutates, as Kierkegaard leads into recounting the parable of the king and the maiden. The focus modulates from the learner’s coming to know truth, to a king’s efforts to make a lowly maiden understand how greatly he loves her. From emphasis on divine aseity, there is now a shift to a picture of a god challenged by the logic of his own creation: ‘what seems so easy— namely, that the god must be able to make himself understood—is not so easy if he is not to destroy that which is different’ (25/22–3). There must be equality without the eradication of difference, difference which is part of the divinely ordered creation: God need not have brought a world of others into being in

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the first place, after all. The fact that this world exists demonstrates the divine desire that it exist. As Kierkegaard presents the issue, it is not a matter of God’s being constrained by a logic which has usurped cosmic sovereignty, but love succeeding upon love. The free act which brings the created others into being is the same love that desires they continue in existence themselves, which means that they continue to exist as others. The equality between the king and the maiden which will permit understanding is necessary to love: if love were not disclosed it would die, yet once it is disclosed, the beloved dies (30/27). Kierkegaard does not explicate this last claim as fully as one might wish. In holding that undisclosed love must end, he presumably does not mean that self-disclosure is necessary for God to be love (so that a key divine attribute would depend on the existence of a creation to which this love could be disclosed), but rather that this love, the love of the king for the maiden or of God for humanity, cannot really be love if it remains solely within the lover. The act of loving is inherently expressive: for God to love humanity entails human beings’ knowing God’s love for them. The logic of this situation is that love demands some form of unity: for lover and beloved to become united, the lover must become like the beloved. If in the case of the learner acquisition of the truth required self-transformation, in the case of the lover and the beloved, it is the superior partner in the relation who must transform—not be transformed, but actively bring about transformation of the self for the sake of the beloved. So the god appears as a servant (31/29), coming upon earth, ‘like unto the lowliest through his omnipotent love’ (32/30). The freedom of love in this instance is for the omnipotent to appear as that which is decidedly not omnipotent, a servant. Kierkegaard, however, takes pains to make clear that the god’s coming is no mere prince-inpauper’s-clothes affair. God does not just make a show of seeming to be one with us, but actually is so. Here is where it seems the king–maiden analogy expires: ‘the god must suffer all things, endure all things’ (32/30) The entering into the world of suffering moreover now becomes not generic talk of ‘the god’, but is recognizably the story of Christ, with hungering in the desert, the endurance of every kind of agony, and being forsaken in death (32/30). Later in the text the two models Kierkegaard has been using, of teacher and suffering servant, coalesce: ‘the god has made his appearance as a teacher. He has taken the form of a servant’ (55/51). The identity as servant glosses the role as teacher: the latter is no mere instructor, exhorting the learner from a position of superiority, but one who identifies with the learner out of love, and effects transformation by uniting himself with the pupil and the beloved. The teaching God offers is not for purely intellectual apprehension. Rather, the teaching is precisely this presence, as a human being, in the form of a servant (55/52); the content of knowledge is love. Despite Kierkegaard’s frequent insistence on the paradoxical nature of the situation he describes and of the learning we must undergo in order to be

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reborn, what he proposes is actually relentlessly logical: ‘in order for the learner to be able to grasp the condition, he must be the god, and in order to put the learner in possession of it, he must be man’ (62/58). His argument is formally similar to that which Anselm presents in Cur Deus homo?: the hypostatic union is not an arbitrary or adventitious change of course on God’s part, but the only possible response to the human condition, one indicated by sheer logic, or the structure of the way things came to be in human history. Although Kierkegaard’s conception of what it means to be saved is by no means identical to Anselm’s, he shares a concern to explicate how the Incarnation was necessary and not merely desirable or beneficial. No matter how strongly Kierkegaard insists that the object of faith is itself paradoxical (62/58, for example), the formal object of faith is not a paradox, but something altogether reasonable. In Kierkegaard we have a thinker concerned to stress the paradoxicality and inexplicability of a fundamental tenet of Christianity. In expounding it, however, he shows the Incarnation and its motive, love, to be utterly logical, given certain root divine attributes. These attributes are elaborated in significant part by contrasting humanity and divinity in a series of oppositions that never linger long on the deficiencies of human nature, but spring back to illuminate the divine. The account is irrepressibly logical, but also evolves from the assumption and assertion of relationality. The ‘content’ of human nature and the narrative of creation and Fall stipulate how we are to understand God, and the doctrine of God implicitly outlined in Kierkegaard’s parables and analogies is of a God tirelessly and tenderly reaching towards the human creature. The rationality and relationality of the argument themselves reflect the rationality and relationality of both God and humankind.

NIEBUHR Reinhold Niebuhr may seem an odd choice of a figure to treat here, since he himself denied that he was any kind of theologian, let alone a systematician. He taught social ethics at Union Theological Seminary, having been barely voted a place on the faculty by his peers, perhaps because he lacked a doctorate. The latter consideration is scarcely relevant for our purposes: Nazianzen did not have one either and however little we know of Denys, he can be safely assumed to be similarly unencumbered. Whether or not Niebuhr thought of himself as a theologian, history has treated him as one, and his magnum opus, The Nature and Destiny of Man, counts as one of the most significant contributions to modern theology in the field of theological anthropology. As anthropologies go, Niebuhr’s is more focused on human sinfulness than some. At first glance, this focus would seem an indication of a significant

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disjunction between any doctrine of God (in this case, largely implicit) and the anthropology in question: stressing sin underlines the difference between God and humanity. The compatibility of a doctrine of God and an anthropology does not, however, subsist in humankind’s being portrayed as similar to God, certainly not like in every respect. For Niebuhr, humanity does in fact resemble God in some important ways. We are both strong and weak, free and bound, blind and far-seeing (The Nature and Destiny of Man I.181; references hereafter are to this work, by volume and page, unless stated otherwise). In our strength, freedom, and length of vision, we presumably reflect fundamental divine attributes (though Niebuhr does not explicitly state as much). However, like other animals, human beings are subject to necessity and contingency (I.181–2), again, as Niebuhr presumably would say God is not. What makes human creatures different from others is that we perceive our situation (I.182): ‘The abyss of meaninglessness yawns on the brink of all [human] spiritual endeavours’ (I.182), leading us to deny our finitude, and in particular, the limitations of our knowledge (I.182). On Niebuhr’s account, then, finitude causes problems for us not only because it constitutes a form of limitation, but also as such, a form of temptation to deny what we are, to escape from reality. If we are both like and unlike God, we are equally both like and unlike other creatures: like them in respect of finitude, unlike them in that we can see beyond ourselves. Our double condition of freedom and necessity therefore prompts anxiety. Although Jesus enjoins us not to be anxious, none of us succeeds in fulfilling this commandment, although our failure to do so is not a sin, since anxiety itself is not a sin (I.183). In fact, anxiety is in part created because we cannot view our achievements as perfect: the extent of our vision means that with every new achievement, higher possibilities are revealed (I.183). Knowledge, therefore, can be as painful in its consequences as ignorance, even though knowledge also beckons us beyond ourselves. Our twin condition of contingency and freedom is equally complicated in its ramifications. Although contingency is no more a sin than anxiety, when it is not accepted as an inevitable part of the human condition it can lead to sin. Denying the contingent character of our existence can result in pride and selflove (I.185), as we seek to view ourselves through the lens of self-deception. Equally, though, flight from the freedom we do have can take the form of sensuality (I.185), a refusal of the responsibility to discipline oneself in a healthful and life-giving way, and so escape from the responsibilities of selfdetermination (I.186). The fact that we are to some degree self-determining can both impel us to run from proper use of freedom and to an arrogant revelling in a degree of independence we do not in fact possess. That overweaning self-assertion is expressed not only in opposition to God, but to the rest of creation, our ‘greedy effort to overcome the insecurity of nature’s rhythms and seasons by garnering

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her stores with excessive zeal and beyond natural requirements’ (I.190–1). Here Niebuhr seems far in advance of his time, in his recognition of humanity’s capacity to soil its own nest by wreaking havoc in the natural world given to us to watch over with solicitude. Finitude per se is not per se humanity’s dilemma. The problem arises from our anxious wish to transcend it. Our imagination has infinite capacities, but we cannot but help recognize our finitude, weakness, and dependence (I.194), and the attempt to negotiate the two results in some complex forms of selfdeception, one of which is idolatry: we are led by both our greatness and weakness to make ourselves God (I.194). Nevertheless, the very factors that prompt us to this idolatry are those that equally press us towards right worship: ‘If man were not a free spirit who transcends every situation in which he is involved he would have no concern for unconditioned truth and he would not be tempted to claim absolute validity for his partial perspectives’ (I.197). Freedom, which the tradition took to be a quality pertaining to will, now becomes the prompt for the intellect’s engagement with God. As with so many human characteristics, however, Niebuhr is once again concerned to show both opportunity and risk: the impulse towards the perfect divine truth can be transmuted into a self-deceived exaltation, so that what is merely one’s own perception becomes absolutized and a human opinion receives the imprimatur of the divinely authorized. Worse, not knowing God also means not knowing one’s own sin (I.200), so one could not even see the problem for what it is. The Nature and Destiny of Man is an anthropology, neither a complete treatise on theology nor a portion of such a treatise that is orientated towards a larger whole. Nevertheless, a doctrine of God, unstated and perhaps even inchoate, is a constant presence in the text. Thus Niebuhr can write: Christianity rightly regards itself as a religion, not so much of man’s search for God, in the process of which he may make himself God; but a religion of revelation in which a holy and loving God is revealed to man as the source and end of all finite existence against whom the self-will of man is shattered and his pride abased. (I.201)

This passage is a rare one, in which Niebuhr explicitly mentions the divine attributes (holiness and love) against which humankind is measured, yet the sheer fact that his anthropology is consistently worked out in terms of humanity’s orientation to and falling short of the divine attests to the doctrine of God as the tacit but eloquent speaker in the dialogue of his theology. Since our very shortcomings are often the result of either a misguided pursuit or refusal of the divine, even the respects in which we differ from God cannot be grasped without reference to the doctrine of God, unstated though it generally is. When Niebuhr does not imply any content to the doctrine of God, he still states the necessity of understanding humanity in relation to God. For example, he defines selfishness as ‘the destruction of life’s harmony by the self ’s

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attempt to centre life around itself’ (I.228). On this reasoning, our attempt as human beings to understand ourselves apart from God leads to the sin of selfishness. It follows that no account of the human person which focuses exclusively on humanity could be true. At this point, Niebuhr’s theology points up the fundamental distinction between a Christian theological anthropology and a secular humanist account of human nature or the human condition. It does not lie solely—or even chiefly—in Christian theology’s recourse to such Biblical and traditional categories as the imago Dei or sin. In the first instance, it is a function of Christianity’s declining to write a solely human account of the human being. Theological anthropology is necessarily relational: what it means to be a human being is to stand in a certain sort of relation to God. Different anthropologies will give different content to that relation, some stressing depravity (as Niebuhr does on occasion), others insisting more strongly on humanity’s likeness to God in virtue of such faculties as intellect and will. All, however, decline to do the one thing any secular account would do, namely, treat human beings as autonomous and isolable from what is decisively not human, God. The doctrine’s necessary connecting of discourse about humanity to discourse about God reflects the Christian conviction that the human person exists only contingently in relation to this God. The systematicity of doctrine, even where the rest of the system makes itself felt only as a shadowy presence, as in Niebuhr’s anthropology, is the direct consequence and concomitant of the relations obtaining among the entities the doctrine represents. In a work written some time after The Nature and Destiny of Man, entitled Christian Realism and Political Problems, Niebuhr spells out his views of coherence, which correspond quite closely to the way he actually does theology in his anthropology. ‘The whole of reality’, he maintains, ‘is characterized by a basic coherence. Things and events are in a vast web of relationships and are known through their relations’ (175; subsequent references are to Christian Realism and Political Problems). Two points are significant here. The first is obvious: things stand in a particular set of relations. The second, less obvious but equally important, is that things are known through their relations. There is an anthropological implication here: we are so constituted that we make sense of reality by grasping its relationality. This strategy of sense making springs in part from the relationality that really obtains among things, but only partly: ‘Perceptual knowledge is possible only within a framework of conceptual images, which in some sense conforms to the structures in which reality is organized’ (175). The world is ordered and structured, and to perceive it, we must grasp the nature of its orderliness—perhaps in so doing we impose an order on it, though Niebuhr is less explicit on this point than, for example Borges. Indeed, for all his sober estimation of human capacities and human motives, Niebuhr seems less concerned about the imperialism of human thought processes than in the way patterns structure reality: ‘The world is organized or it

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could not exist’ (175). This point is, of course, highly debatable, and a contemporary natural scientist might well repudiate it vociferously. As a statement of theological intent, however, its assumption is striking: presumably a disorganized world could not exist because the world is the creation of a God who either cannot or will not create chaos. Again, a tacit doctrine of God stands behind a claim about creation. Because the only world that actually exists is ordered, ‘it must be known through the sequences, coherences, casualities [sic.], and essences’ (175). In holding to such a position, Niebuhr has not adopted an optimistic anthropology that portrays humanity as purely rational and therefore, in some important respects, good and godlike. He recognizes the problem posed by any form of advocacy of coherence: ‘The effort to establish simple coherence may misinterpret specific realities to fit them into a system’ (176); that is, one may fail to see the trees through undue interest in the wood. For this reason, Niebuhr cautions against making coherence a test of truth (176). Rejecting coherence as a test of truth means also rejecting it as any kind of guarantor of truth. Niebuhr’s position on this point—hostile to systems as others were before him—stands in tension with his assertion of the world’s systematization. Presumably he is operating with a notion of system as a human construct imposed on reality, as opposed to a map that reflects it. More starkly, however, Niebuhr’s insistence on human sin can at times lead him to virtual denial of coherence. Even the most righteous life remains in some degree of contradiction to the divine. From this theologically indisputable point, Niebuhr derives the consequent that human goodness cannot function as proof of faith. The ‘answer’ (Niebuhr’s term) to the divide between human and divine will is divine suffering and mercy, for which no reason can be given (202). Here Niebuhr seems to contradict outright his earlier claims regarding coherence. The ‘solution’ to human sin is divine self-giving, which is unaccountable. One might question whether the logic of Niebuhr’s argument really leads to this conclusion. Although as noted, he has little to say of divine attributes explicitly, he consistently assumes divine goodness. The God who is willing to suffer on behalf of those who sin could only be called surpassingly good. Such goodness, lacking the self-interest common to human beings, might not make sense by the lights of an ethic of self-interest, but that is precisely what Niebuhr has identified as the characteristic of a warped humanity. Even the warped human being can see the logic of goodness doing what is unnecessary, what is not prompted by concern for self. Divine suffering and mercy are beyond rational understanding only from the perspective of those who see no greater good than self-preservation and self-advancement. The sheer fact that Niebuhr condemns such self-absorption is proof enough that human beings have the capacity to see what is superior to the pursuit of self as an end in itself. That perspective, from which one sees a greater good than the self, is precisely the one from which mercy appears rational. ‘Faith is not reason’, Niebuhr maintains, but ‘the substance of things

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hoped for’ (202–3). Just so; faith is the reason of the realm of hope, rather than the false reason of the world of suffering caused by sin. To be able to hope in faith is to be the kind of creature that sees beyond the imperfections of the world to a grander design and a greater good. Like Kierkegaard, Niebuhr seems to insist so strongly on the defects of human nature that there would seem to be little room left for asserting the rationality of theology written by human beings or for much mirroring of divine ratio at the creaturely level. Like Kierkegaard, though, the content and structure of his theology must temper this view. The state of tension in which we live (strong and weak, free and bound) indicates both a creaturely vulnerability and limitation, and a capacity beyond that of other creatures. For all our failings, we are ordered to an end beyond ourselves and given divinely analogous gifts to speed us on our way—and we know it. Niebuhr’s theology is consistently worked out against the backdrop of that end, expressed in the doctrine of God. To the extent that it is, The Nature and Destiny of Man is in a sense not solely an anthropology. It refuses to stay within the bounds of anthropology because its subject matter— the Christian account of what it means to be human—cannot do so. Niebuhr’s theology explicitly reflects the fundamental fact of humankind’s necessary relationship to God. No matter how self-absorbed and self-deceived we are, we are capable of apprehending divine holiness, mercy, and suffering love. These are all key to the doctrine of God that emerges from Niebuhr’s analysis of human nature. If, according to him, no reason can be given for divine mercy, this only underlines the utter freedom of God’s decision to show mercy towards us. Niebuhr’s doctrine of creation is even more strongly marked by its association with the doctrine of God: the order and ratio of the world, as well as our capacity to perceive this order, reflect their relation. Our ability to perceive the orderliness of the world springs from the fact of our relation to the wellspring of all order. Theology, even as it sombrely attests to the disordered affections that are sin, attests equally to our relation to absolute holiness, the source of all ratio. If it is the Bible that allows us to recognize our failings and God’s goodness, it is the Bible that also allows us to see our shortcomings from the perspective of perfection. If coherence cannot guarantee theological truth, it seems that irrationality is self-undermining, for one can only recognize it as such from the standpoint of rationality. If perfection and goodness elude us in this life, we have nevertheless been given the wit to see them as ideals, ideals for whose realization, precisely, we hope.

TILLICH With Tillich we re-enter the world of the unambiguously, rather than implicitly, systematic. While the Summa theologiae and the Institutes of the Christian

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Religion can be considered systematic theologies on almost any possible definition of the term, neither is actually labelled as such. The twentieth century saw the production of numerous works that were explicitly labelled as systems, from authors belonging to a variety of traditions. Tillich stands at the early end of this outpouring, and his systematic theology exhibits no straightforward connection to any one strand of the Christian tradition. It represents both a systematization of Christian doctrines and a new synthesis of past approaches to doctrinal and methodological themes. The section of Tillich’s systematic theology we will examine here comes from the end of its first volume. Having discussed methodological issues (a standard beginning for any theological system), Tillich goes on to what is the most distinctive feature of his work, an analysis of being and God as the ground of being. Superficially similiar to the De Deo uno, which comes immediately after the methodological prolegomenon in a traditional theology, Tillich’s treatment of being differs in that it is emphatically not a discussion of what would traditionally be considered an attribute of God.12 It is all the more significant, then, that the analysis of God’s actuality concludes with a discussion of God as related. This discussion both elaborates a key point of divine identity, and also gathers together many strands of theology: in discussing who God is, Tillich necessarily shows the intersection of multiple strands of his theology. ‘“Relation” is a basic ontological category’ (Systematic Theology I.71; references hereafter are to volume one of this work, by page), Tillich declares, at the opening of his treatment of divine relationality. In so doing, he signals that he will not be treating relation solely sub specie Trinitatis: it is not simply a matter of the relations among the divine Persons, but a quality of divine nature itself. As being-itself, God is the ground of every relation (271). Tillich is careful to stipulate that this position does not require or imply that God must be related to something else. In other words, the assertion of divine relationality is not to be taken as compromising divine aseity (Tillich does not employ this term in this discussion). Rather, the relations in question are the ‘inner relations of the divine life’ (271). This position might be taken as an embarcation in the direction of a doctrine of the Trinity, but Tillich points it towards a key attribute of God, 12 The beginning of the De Deo uno in the Summa theologiae is also not a discussion of an attribute, properly speaking, since the question of divine simplicity (I.3) asserts the absence of distinct attributes in God: inasmuch as divine nature is not composed of discrete elements, discussion of God’s perfection or eternity and so on is simply discussion of how we are to understand divine nature, rather than any sort of enumeration of its ‘components’. Since one way of parsing divine simplicity is to view it as the absence of any distinction between essence and existence or potentiality and actuality in virtue of that absence, God can be called purus Actus, pure actuality. Actuality is also a central theme of Tillich’s treatment of God as being, one of several respects in which Tillich’s theology, surprisingly perhaps, lies close to that of Aquinas.

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holiness (271). The reasoning that grounds the link between relativity and holiness trades on a paradox: ‘holiness’ expresses ‘the unapproachable character of God, or the impossibility of having a relation with him in the proper sense of the word’ (271). It is not just that God’s relationality does not require any not-God with whom God must stand in relation, but that divine nature, although inherently relational, is also inherently such that not-God cannot straightforwardly be said to stand in relation to that nature: ‘God is essentially holy, and every relation with him involves the consciousness that it is paradoxical to be related to that which is holy’ (271). The basis for this conception of holiness is epistemological. God is not an object of our knowledge or any kind of fellow agent (271), that is, not something external to ourselves which we know as a distinct entity. Rather, God is the ground of all we know and do. Tillich draws on the tradition of mystical theology to explain; that tradition ‘speaks of God’s recognizing and loving himself through man. This means that if God becomes an object (of our hope, for example), he nevertheless remains a subject’ (271). God knows and loves himself through us, a point Tillich contends is a given of the mystical tradition (271). The danger to which Tillich points is that of numbering God as one reality among others: Jane can be in relation to John and Mary, and just so can be in relation to God, as if God were just one among a larger group of ‘others’ like John and Mary. In one sense, God is more other than anything or anyone else in our experience; in another sense, God is not other at all, but the condition of the possibility of all our experience. As Tillich puts it: ‘there is no place to which man can withdraw from the divine thou, because it includes the ego and is nearer to the ego than the ego itself ’ (271). The fact that God is neither an object of knowledge nor a partner in human action (271) has profound implications for theology, which is always ‘by its nature in the danger of drawing God into the cognitive relation of the subject– object structure of being’ (271). In other words, writing about God—which is what theology by definition is—tacitly presupposes that God can be treated as an other, which Tillich has just established is a misleading way of understanding the divine–human relation. Properly speaking, our relation to God is not a relation at all, and divine holiness requires that we bring all our relations into the sphere of the holy, which we can only do by transcending all internal and external relations (272). It would seem, then, that theology can mitigate its inbuilt tendency to distort by stressing and pressing the implications of divine holiness. The discourse that is theology has both the propensity to distort truth and an inbuilt mechanism for self-correction. That self-correction can, however, occur only when theology rightly takes account of its subject. Even this corrective can go awry, as it does on Tillich’s account, in the theology of Calvin and his followers, whose stress on divine majesty avoids a sentimental picture of divine nature, but at the expense of portraying God as a tyrant (272). The problem with the tyrant portrait is not merely

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that it is unappealing, but that it drives a wedge into the doctrine of God and ends up distorting even that which it seeks to honour: ‘An affirmation of the glory of God at the expense of the elimination of the divine love is not glorious’ (272). Whether or not Tillich’s treatment of Calvin is correct, it makes clear that holiness is a meta-attribute for Tillich: ‘that quality which qualifies all other qualities as divine’ (272). The assertion of holiness not only tells us who God is, but how discourse about God is to be structured. That discourse includes theology, but encompasses liturgical and devotional writing, in which the praise of God figures so strongly. To praise God’s glory is, moreover, to participate in it (272). Here we have a direct parallel to Tillich’s claims about being: just as God is not another being whom we can entertain as an object of the mind’s attention, but the ground of our being able to think and act at all, so to praise God is not to identify some feature of divine nature with approbation, but to become at one with it. For this reason, it is both true to say that holiness establishes a relation with God and that it requires us to transcend it. Divine holiness, strictly speaking, requires that we enter into a relation which ‘in the categorical sense of the word, is not a relation at all’ (272). Tillich’s treatment of divine omnipotence has a similar structure: it is not one attribute among many, but a governing concept that indicates how others are to be understood. Rejecting the idea that omnipotence is a form of action (of doing whatever one wants to do, for instance), Tillich instead relates it to time (in which context it is equivalent to eternity), to space (equivalent to omnipresence), and the ‘subject–object structure of being’ (omniscience, 274). Omnipotence is ‘the power of being which resists nonbeing’ and which ‘is manifest in the creative process in all its forms’ (273). This way of parsing omnipotence differs strikingly from the standard interpretations and, significantly, is motivated at least in part by concern to avoid the absurdities Tillich sees as arising from some of its conventional interpretations. At one level, the picture of a being able to do anything whatsoever, able to actualize any of innumerable possibilities, domesticates divine transcendence by seemingly making God a being among others, albeit a superior grade of being. Inevitably, the picture leads to questions about God’s power in terms of logically contrary possibilities (273); presumably Tillich is here thinking of old conundrums such as ‘Can God create a rock too heavy to lift?’ Theology has never been without answers to such questions,13 but Tillich points out they would not arise in the first place if one used a more sensible definition of omnipotence. Tillich’s approach to omnipotence turns on the avoidance of absurdity and internal self-contradiction on the one hand, and on right understanding of 13 Aquinas deals with the issue by distinguishing between logical and actual possibilities. Significantly, one of Tillich’s objections to the standard interpretation of omnipotence is that it ‘subjects God to the split between potentiality and actuality’ (273); in other words, he offers a critique couched in Thomist categories.

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God’s relation to creation on the other. As such, this element of his doctrine of God is necessarily linked to a doctrine of creation, and particularly, an anthropology: we are able to understand that nature as fundamentally different from our own, yet related to us inasmuch as it is presupposed to everything we ourselves are. The theme of relatedness is carried through into other components of the classical doctrine of God as well, in the treatment of eternity, for example. Tillich’s account departs from a standard refusal to equate eternity with endless time, but less predictably also declines to equate it with timelessness (274). What is more radical is the insistence on a connection between eternity and relation to creation; an obvious move would have been to maintain that eternity distinguishes God radically from all else. Instead, by refusing to equate eternity with timelessness, Tillich is able to hold that eternity means the power to embrace all periods of time (274); he claims this is what the Hebrew olim and Greek aiones mean (his lexicography is open to challenge). Whether or not his position is endorsed by the meanings of the relevant Greek and Hebrew words, his position does have an important antecedent in the Christian theological tradition: time is on Tillich’s account ‘created in the ground of divine life’, a position which resembles Augustine’s notion of time as a creature. This position also enables Tillich to reason that God must be essentially related to time (274). God can thus be seen both as transcending time (in the sense of not being bound within it), and yet as engaged with it in a way that the equation of eternity with timelessness does not allow. This position also makes it easier to explain how an eternal being could act in history, although this point is at most implicit in this part of the discussion. Relationality does other work in the exposition of eternity, however, for Tillich views the latter as itself a form of ‘transcendent unity of the dissected moments of existential time’ (274). Eternity therefore expresses both a way in which God and creation are related, and the relation of the discrete components of time, the sequence of moments. One consequence of Tillich’s rendition of the concepts of time and eternity is that he can reinterpret a key element of the doctrine of salvation, namely what is usually (and incorrectly) termed ‘eternal life’. On the standard definitions of eternity (timelessness), human beings could not possibly have eternal life, and older English texts (such as the Book of Common Prayer) were careful to render the idea as ‘everlasting life’. Tillich avoids the problem of predicating a divine attribute (boundlessness) of a finite creature by holding that the hope of eternal life is based on ‘participation in the eternity of the divine life’ (276). Again, the key point is relationality: analysis of a divine attribute leads to the affirmation of humanity’s connectedness to God. Tillich’s treatment of divine omnipresence operates along similar lines. God’s relation to space excludes both endless extension in space and limitation to particular spaces; it is not spacelessness (276–7). Omnipresence designates a

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qualitatively different relation to space from that of creatures, but not removal from space. Rather, everything spatial is rooted in the ground of divine life. God is not subject to space, but both transcends it and participates in it (277). The insistence on transcendence indicates God is not somehow tied to space, even as the affirmation of space as rooted in God’s life means that space is intrinsically connected to God, and lays the foundation for understanding how God can be present to spatially located creatures. This last point paves the way for a link between the doctrine of God and sacramental theology. Divine omnipresence makes the whole created world a sanctuary where we are always in the presence of God (so that there can be no border demarcating the limits of the sacred and the profane, 278). God’s presence everywhere and to all things is the basis of any sacramental presence; indeed, Tillich claims God’s sacramental presence is the consequence of omnipresence (278). Here Tillich extends a tendril creating a potential fragile and preliminary link between his doctrine of God and a sacramental theology. He maintains that God’s sacramental presence is not ‘the appearance of somebody who is ordinarily absent and occasionally comes’ (278). The large unanswered question here is how Tillich proposes to distinguish sacramental presence from this general and constant presence. At this point in the system, though, the significant issue is not the precise content of his sacramental theology—he is still delineating his doctrine of God—but that the divine act he is asserting already indicates links between various parts of the system. The systematicity of theology does not subsist in its imperviousness to questions and critique, but in the explicitness with which it presents theology as an integrated whole. The final attribute Tillich considers in the category of divine power is omniscience, and here also his analysis declines to remain within the strict parameters of the doctrine of God. His conception of transcendence reverts to the principle undergirding all his theology: because God is not a being among other beings, God also cannot be just another object of knowledge among the many such in the cosmos. Specifically, omnipresence signifies that ‘nothing falls outside the logos structure of being’ (279). One implication of this position is that God is supremely intelligible: ‘nothing is strange, dark, hidden, isolated, unapproachable . . . the abysmal quality cannot swallow the rational quality of the divine life’ (279). Tillich could be taken here as meaning that the divine Persons are completely intelligible to themselves, in which case these remarks would concern divine nature in se. However, ‘unapproachable’ makes clear he is not thinking solely of God’s self-intelligibility, but also wants to assert that divine nature is intelligible to us. ‘Unapproachable’ and ‘isolated’, which, of course, describe what God is not, also signal the connection Tillich wishes to draw between epistemology and personal relations. If the Persons of the Trinity were unknowable, he hints, we could not enter into any such relation with them. Conversely, to maintain that God is knowable is also to lay the groundwork for asserting relationality.

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Tillich makes clear, however, that he wants his doctrine of divine omniscience to do more work than solely grounding human knowledge of God; divine omniscience is the condition of the possibility of all human knowledge: ‘we know because we participate in the divine knowledge’ (279). That participation, being a participation in divine life, is also a participation in divine truth: ‘Truth is not absolutely removed from the outreach of our finite minds, since the divine life in which we are rooted embodies all truth’ (279). Our knowledge, being finite, is fragmentary, and we become aware of its limited character by grasping the perfect knowledge and perfect truth which is God’s, but even this knowledge is not grounds for despair; it is not ‘a threat against our participation in truth’ (279). Even as the contemplation of divine nature reminds us of our finitude, it also strengthens our awareness that there is such a thing as perfect truth, and we have our own share in it. Tillich’s systematics undoubtedly counts as a systematic theology in the conventional sense. However, it is worth pressing in what sense it is systematic, beyond conforming to the standard genre definition. Tillich’s insistence on particular divine attributes signals important broad structures in his theology. His emphasis on relationality obviously indicates a parallel between the substance of his doctrine of God and the formal structures of his theology, which display reasoning from one doctrine to another. What he revives (for the idea is already present in the thought of Aquinas) is the notion of divine nature as essentially relational. Tillich goes beyond Aquinas in explicitly asserting God as the ground of all relation, rather than being one other among others. This notion both posits God as the condition of the possibility of humankind’s being related and, as utterly other, the one to whom we are in one sense not related at all. Just so, divine omnipresence implies God’s relation to us, even as Tillich’s connecting of this attribute to omnipotence clearly stipulates transcendence. Although his account preserves divine distinctiveness and aseity, Tillich actually posits a more thoroughgoing divine relationality than perhaps any other theologian surveyed here.

BOFF Although Leonardo Boff ’s theolgy has at times been viewed with suspicion on account of its supposedly Marxist tendencies, we can see in it clear lines of continuity with the rest of the Christian tradition. Boff at times suggests correctives to the conventional wisdom of the past, but is on the whole respectful of it and conserves far more than he abandons. One significant point of continuity is the extent to which he views Christian discourse as directly reflecting both the divine reality it explores and celebrates, and the human subjects who engage in theological reflection.

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For Boff, encounter with divine mystery lies at the root of all doctrine (1988: 1; all quotations from Boff are to this volume, from now simply by page number14), and his theology overwhelmingly stresses the relational, both as to what the Trinity is and as to what human society is meant to be. Boff insists that the correspondence to which he relentlessly points is not a matter of convenient doctrinal fabrication: ‘the Trinity is not thought out to explain human problems. It is the revelation of God as God is’, which he takes to be, most fundamentally, unity in diversity (3), a unity found in communion (4). Perichoresis, a term traditionally only applied in the context of the doctrine of the Trinity and (though less often) Christology, is adopted by Boff to denote the ideal of a human society. It is the structuring principle of his trinitarian theology, on his own account (5). Equally, it speaks to the oppressed in their struggle for liberation, because the community that is the Trinity is the prototype of a rightly ordered human community (7). Where Boff differs from, say, Denys, is on his insistence that the doctrine of the Trinity is supposed to do more than function as an object of contemplation. For Boff, the Trinity is a mystery communicated to us for our salvation (8). By this he seems to mean not only that the three Persons save us, but that what is communicated to us about them is salvific. The stress on the practical advantage—one is saved through this knowledge—seems remote from the thought-world of Denys, for whom we are saved by the communication of grace via the sacramental hierarchy. However, Boff’s notion is in its way utterly traditional, for knowledge itself seems communicative of grace. Presumably this knowledge saves because via the doctrine we learn of the life of communion, mutual giving without domination, and justice; this life is what the Trinity is and what it models for us as the ideal of human social existence. Moreover, Boff adds that a society structured in accordance with this model could be ‘the sacrament of the Trinity’ (13). Here he stands surprisingly close to Denys: the structure of a human organization (for Denys, the church; for Boff, the just society) communicates grace, the creaturely becoming the medium through which the Trinity raises creation to itself. Boff adds a new note, however: a society can only do this because we know the doctrine on which the society is structured. Boff’s vision is arguably utopian—perhaps impossibly so—not simply because it is just, but because it is Christian in a sense scarcely any society has ever been Christian, modelled directly on one key Christian doctrine. For our purposes, what is significant is not whether we could imagine the vision being reality (Denys’s church is hardly less idealized), but that his meta-theology affirms the correspondence of his doctrine of God

14 My analysis of Boff’ s work has unfortunately not been informed by the Portuguese original, which has proved impossible for me to obtain. If the reading of his work here needs alteration in light of the original text, I welcome such correction.

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and the human world from which theology springs (at least in part) and to which it is addressed. The mimetic relationship of theology and its human authors and addressees is two-way, on Boff ’s account. Inhabiting a dysfunctional and disunited society impedes our understanding of the faith and cannot create the conditions under which an integrated expression of the mystery of the Trinity is possible (13). It seems that Boff envisages a development whereby the liturgy was the first setting in which the whole faith of the Trinity was expressed, whereas in our time just societies might also provide the matrix for such expression. Although often Boff seems to be thinking purely in terms of social justice, he makes clear that what he has in mind extends well beyond the fiscal or judiciary. In the contemporary situation, the Trinity in his view is received by most of the laity and the clergy more as a mysterium logicum than a mysterium salutis, in other words, what it could and should be, ‘the deepest source, closest inspiration and brightest illumination of the meaning of life’ (111). Human life in all its dimensions—religious, social, spiritual, ecclesial, political—does not mirror either the doctrine of the Trinity or the divine communion the doctrine seeks to render—but in Boff ’s view, it could and should. The theology of the Trinity is clearly doubly mimetic, on Boff ’s account; it gestures towards the perfect communion of the divine Three, and could provide the blueprint for a society which, shaped by the doctrine, could reflect the communion. However, in its very imperfection it also reflects the fact that human societies have fallen far short of what they should be. The failure of society to reflect doctrine itself reflects a doctrinal point: we simply do not understand the Trinity as we should, because our perspective is warped by sin. A meta-theological principle has guided a point of substance in anthropology. The wounds of the societies we inhabit need not function for us as sheer impediment: ‘In the end, we approach reality and truth not only through logos (understanding) but mainly through pathos (feeling)’ (112), Boff claims, although he seems to mean by this that theology is not only a matter of the intellect, but also of will and even passion. The world we inhabit, for all its injustice, not only hinders right understanding of the Trinity, but in some respects helps it, since in our time the sometimes-maligned term person has acquired a resonance it did not have in the earlier centuries of the Christian tradition (112). This layering of meaning is what leads some theologians to disdain the word, on account of its supposed psychological baggage. Boff effectively turns this line of reasoning on its head, seeing an advantage in what others had perceived to be a problem. Boff is nevertheless critical of the tradition’s recourse to the categories of substance and person, on the grounds that theology so grounded becomes either metaphysical or personalist (118), although he leaves unclear why these qualities are undesirable: what is wrong with being ‘metaphysical’, exactly?

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What Boff seeks to do is to set out a doctrine of the Trinity appropriate to the context in which he writes (123), a theology, that is, reflecting both the reality of the world around him and the reality that is the perfect communion of the Trinity. It is a theology that so insistently stresses the communion of the three distinct persons that it at times seems uncomfortably close to tritheism. Boff can, however, be viewed as emphasizing not threeness instead of oneness, but a relational unity over a substantial one. Rather than focusing on the simple divine nature wholly subsistent in each of the Persons, as Western theology has tended to do, he wants to stress the dynamic or perichoretic unity that subsists in the relationality of the Persons. In itself, this focus neither belongs to the prior tradition nor compromises the unity of divine substance, since Boff never disputes the latter. His quarrel with the tradition is solely on where the weight of doctrine lies. For him, stress on monarchical unity in the doctrine of the Trinity leads to unjustly ordered societies: the domination of One promotes capitalism (150). It also has questionable consequences for the church. Since Boff takes episcopal collegiality to be most appropriately based on the doctrine of the Trinity (153), one might suspect that in his view at least, some models of papal supremacy might be grounded in a doctrine of the De Deo uno that has gone too far, though for understandable reasons he refrains from saying as much outright (as far as I am aware). Boff ’s actual doctrine of the Trinity is overwhelmingly traditional; any appearance it has of departure from tradition is accountable largely to his emphasis of elements characteristic of the Eastern rather than the Western tradition (such as a tendency to privilege the distinction of Persons over the unity of divine substance). Where he does do something new—and perhaps in the view of some, something radical or dangerous—lies in the social and ecclesial consequences he draws from the doctrine. The advocacy of these consequences does not constitute a respect in which Boff differs from traditional theologies, because the latter simply did not apply the doctrine of the Trinity to questions of justice, as Boff does. Another area in which he seems to part company with tradition is method. Despite his insistence on the doctrine’s liturgical context, he seems at times almost contemptuous of doxology (‘the doxological approach is hardly theology’ [114]). In its context, however, his theology could be described as doxological, for example in its stress on the tender care of the ‘Father-andMother God’ (228–9) and the perfect communion of the Trinity. Equally, near the end of his discussion he claims, ‘The conceptual language of devout reason is not the only means of access to the mystery of the Trinity. The church has also developed the symbolic language of imagery’ (235). This symbolic language is meet for what it designates, for ‘The Holy Trinity is a sacramental mystery’ (237). The sacraments themselves are, of course, on the traditional account, signs of a particular kind (those which make present that which they represent) so to stress the symbolic character of doctrinal language is not

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thereby to declare it somehow remote from or only vaguely connected to the realities it designates. If Boff seems inclined to disparage reason, it must be borne in mind first, that he does not banish it so much as see the need to allow for something else alongside it. As in the case of Nazianzen, his relativizing of reason’s value has to be taken in the context of a work which is itself closely argued and reasoned. Boff ’s treatment of the Trinity instantiates a form of systematicity not evident in the work of other theologians surveyed here: a theology’s capacity to extend beyond the boundaries of theology proper, casting its canopy over other discourses, in this case, social ethics and political philosophy. In so doing, Boff is not less, but more, consistent with the prior tradition, even if earlier theologians did not think to make precisely the moves Boff does; for the idea that the world should mirror the inner structure of divine life accords with the notion that theology concerns itself with God and other things as they are related to God. On Boff ’s account, the intra-divine relationality becomes the extra-divine relationality. Boff ’s theology does not so much itself instantiate mimesis as hold out an ideal of a world which would itself be a grand mimesis of divine nature and divine relationality, showing how this vision of the world is theologically underwritten. No examination of small sections of text from the work of a handful of theologians could purport to prove any contention about the nature of Christian theology, diverse and complex as the tradition is. However, these theologians represent a broad swathe of periods, traditions, and styles, and the common threads observable among them suggest broader patterns in the tradition as a whole. All these texts show a drive towards coherence, the interweaving of theological ideas in a network that studiously avoids internal contradiction. Much, if not all, of this intersection at the doctrinal level arises because of what Christianity claims is true of the relation of God and not-God. The created is dependent on the Uncreated, so there can be no theology of creation without a theology of the Creator. While the Uncreated is utterly independent of creation, theology is written by creatures and it is therefore necessarily a creaturely account of the Uncreated. Both the doctrine of creation and any doctrine of God therefore presuppose the relation of creature and Creator, even as they assert the latter’s total independence of creation. Coherence implies the relation of ideas, and in Christian theology, the ideas are related because the entities they designate are so. Coherence moreover implies not just any relation of ideas but their rational relation, and this rationality also correlates with the entities that the ideas represent, for the Uncreated is on the Christian account Logos, wisdom, and truth, and those who reflect theologically and praise the Uncreated are endowed with intellects enabling them to engage in these activities. The web of notions intersecting in a rationally intelligible way can be described as a system, and all the theologies surveyed here can be described as either subsisting within an explicit system or

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as positing a particular structure to doctrines they do not treat explicitly, so as to indicate the outline of a system. These systems, implicit or explicit, rest on a mimesis that both is and is yet to come: humanity’s reflection of the divine results from a divine gift of self, the endowment of the imago Dei; this gift in turn allows humanity to know God, this knowledge being the precondition of faith and sanctification, a sanctification which increases godliness. Theology is a re-presentation of humanity’s own (though imperfect) mimesis of the divine, which in turn fosters the knowledge and adoration that make possible a yet nearer mimesis.

4 Beauty and Other Seductions The reading of the Christian tradition that has been developing up until now might be summarized as follows. Christian theology takes as the starting point of its reasoning the texts gathered together in the Bible. Diverse as these are, they are taken as giving coherent witness to divine nature and created things as they are related to the Uncreated, as well as Christian attempts to reflect this essential coherence. That theologians should attempt to draw an internally consistent message or pattern from the Biblical texts is by no means self-evident. Modern Biblical scholarship insists upon the diversity of origin of these texts: the various books of the Bible date from quite different eras and cultural contexts—indeed, are not written in a single language—and what we today think of as single books are themselves in many cases the product of editing over a period of time, perhaps by many hands. The texts, moreover, gather together a wide variety of genres and styles, a diversity observable within individual books and not only among them. There are undoubtedly differing theologies in evidence as well. These considerations would not in themselves rule out the possibility of constructing a coherent body of thought based on these texts, although they certainly indicate the difficulties attendant on doing so. The mere existence of Christian theology is therefore significant for our purposes, representing as it does an essay at coherently presenting that which, prima facie, is not coherent, not to create order out of chaos as an end in itself, but to disclose the ratio of a divine self-disclosure which, qua divine, must also be rational and intelligible. ‘Prima facie’ is important, however. One might object that Christian theology began, and went contentedly on its way, for at least a millennium-and-a-half before the rise of the historical critical method, with its discoveries about the origins and redacted nature of key books of the Bible (notably the Pentateuch and the gospels). On this line of argument, pre-nineteenth-century Christian theology’s effort to construct theology based on the Bible arose from a fatally flawed assumption about its source text: that the latter was coherent and internally consistent. Two problems immediately present themselves at this point. The first is that Christian theology continued constructing accounts of God-and-other-things which are at least by intention coherent and grounded in the Biblical witness

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even in the centuries following the rise of the historical critical method. Not all theology, of course, since some Christian traditions take a view of the Bible that sits ill, to say the least, with the conclusions and assumptions of modern Biblical scholarship. Nevertheless, enough Christian theology continues to operate much as theology always has, while taking on board the findings of historical critics, that we cannot view the tradition’s quest for coherence as founded solely on ignorance. More significant still is the fact that the pre-Enlightenment theological tradition certainly recognized and acknowledged tensions among the Biblical texts, sans enlightenment from historical critics. Patristic and medieval exegetes and theologians routinely wrestled with apparent disparities. Their methods of exegesis and of resolving the difficulties posed by apparent contradictions would not always meet with the approval of contemporary Biblical scholars, but that consideration does not alter the fact that pre-eighteenth-century theologians saw no objection to constructing harmonious theologies based on an admittedly polyphonic Biblical base. The practice of patristic and medieval exegetes cautions against assuming that Christian theology only sought to construct coherent webs of propositions based on a heterogeneous textual base out of sheer habit, a habit into which the tradition had unthinkingly fallen over time and which it then mindlessly continued: the earliest Christian theology was already proceeding in this way. Christian theology began this practice before the rise of the historical critical method, but when there was already an acute awareness of tensions within the canonical texts; it continued after it had been forced to come to terms with the texts’ reconstructed redaction history. At no time, however, has Christian theology had the luxury of being able to pretend its source text was as coherent as its own account of that text. All the more striking is early Christianity’s practice in this regard, given that it is hard to see any clear precedent for it outside the church. Jewish exegesis had a long tradition of attempting to resolve apparent conflicts between Biblical texts (though this endeavour only reached codified form in the rabbinic era, which is contemporaneous with early Christianity). Jewish exegesis remained just that, however, exegesis: the rabbinic tradition possessed nothing formally resembling the body of thought that is Christian theology. Ancient Greek philosophy certainly provides an analogy to Christian theology, in its attempt to give comprehensive and coherent sets of answers to the kinds of questions Christian theology attempts to answer. However, ancient philosophies were not answerable to an authoritative text as they did so: the Homeric epics were important to some philosophers, but to others, occasion for derision or dismay. Christian theology was unique, and its emergence unforeseeable, in its attempt to systematize the unsystematic. The quest for coherence in Christian theology cannot therefore be regarded as an accident or an impetus stemming from without (from the influence of

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philosophical models, for example); it represents neither the unthinking continuation of prior tradition, nor obliviousness to the glaring problems of giving a unified account out of a wildly heterogeneous collection of texts. Why, then, assume coherence as the constant, perhaps inevitable or constitutive, fact of theology? The suggestion offered here is as open to objection as any causal explanation, but does not become implausible simply because, like any causal explanation, it is impossible to prove. It is plausible, even if by no means indubitable: as long as Christian theology is concerned with God-andother-things-as-they-are-related-to-God, it is concerned with relationality. It is concerned with the relation obviously indicated by the definition (not-God– to-God), but also with the relationship implicit in the definition: with the relations among the not-divine entities themselves (at least in virtue of their common relation to God) and with the divine relationality (as long as we are concerned with the divine as understood by Christians, the three Persons of the Trinity). The subjects of the discourse mandate a concern with relationality. Equally, however, those subjects indicate a concern with rationality, given that the divine Persons are rational beings and humankind is created to know and love God. The divine–human relationality is necessarily concerned with rationality; theology is not only about these rational beings but about the attempt to make sense of them and their relations, just as it attempts to make sense of the scriptural texts embodying the Trinity’s self-disclosure to humanity. In exploring these rationally intelligible relations of rational entities, theology both attests to its human origins, and to that Source which surpasses them, and which surpasses theology’s attempts to describe. It attempts to render a harmony that lies beyond its powers fully to express, a harmony that has yet to be fully realized. As soon as one begins to speak of orderly relations and harmony, one has edged onto the territory of aesthetics, since aesthetics is also concerned with such matters. Aesthetics, or beauty (the two subjects are related, though by no means identical), has flickered on and off theology’s radar over the centuries, but has never consistently commanded sustained attention. Aesthetics does not figure among the standard theological loci, and is not regarded as a necessary subject for the theologian to take account of and discuss. Aesthetics counts as an optional extra suitable either for sui generis modern theologians (such as Balthasar) or older theologians whose interest in the subject can be dismissed as the unthinking continuation of some form of Platonism. To take any such attitude, to decline to consider beauty in a theological context is, however, only possible as long as one also declines to think about systematicity, for as we have noted, there is at least a formal (and probably a material) similarity between the questions posed by aesthetics and those that arise when we contemplate the relation among constituent elements of a systematic web. The parallels are there and cannot be avoided simply by averting one’s gaze. One reason to look to aesthetics is that it exposes a question that the assertion

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of systematicity cannot avoid: what if the harmony, coherence, and rationality which we assert and believe we see are the fruit of self-deception? What if the quest for coherently expressed truth constitutes in fact a seduction away from truth, the beautiful systems no more than human fabrications masquerading as divine truth? Beauty may satisfy a human yearning for harmony, form, order, but it might also constitute a deceptive veneer on untruth. The issues pertaining to beauty and aesthetics stand here as one example, a particular instance of a broader question. What if theology is mimetic, but mimics only those who write and read it? What if its claims to rationality, order, coherence, and harmony are only those of the self-deceived, who mistake their own feeble and warped reasoning for the mind of God? Because beauty, whatever else it might be, names that which attracts; it can stand as the paradigmatic case of that discernible and gratifying pattern, form, and order that satisfies where most it deceives. Because we are concerned with the implications of aesthetics for systematicity, we are not concerned with every question that might be of significance to aesthetics. We are not pursuing questions of what art is, what makes a work of art to be better or worse, nor whether art must be beautiful. Conversely, we will be concerned with a question that aesthetics has not always asked, namely the relation of beauty and rationality, beauty and truth. We are asking: what are the theological consequences of identifying beauty with God? Could, on a theological account, the appeal to beauty be the call to of the purely creaturely, tempting away from God? As the background to these questions, we may begin by glancing at what the theological tradition has had to say of beauty. Among the earliest discussions of beauty in a theological context stands that of Augustine, who also offers one of the most enduring and significant treatments of the issues. Augustine relates that he wrote a whole book on the subject of beauty (De pulchro et apto), but that he mislaid it.1 On his account, this lost work treated not only the nature of beauty and the beautiful, but the nature of attraction. This last link will prove important. Would that we had the work itself; nevertheless, even without it, we have the statement of the bare idea: ‘beauty’ names that which attracts. Running through several of Augustine’s works is the notion of beauty as measure, form, and order 2 or proportion, measure, and number,3 or balance and rhythm,4 the order of parts into an integrated whole.5 Harmony and symmetry, which entail the right relation of discrete elements of a complex whole, are also important.6 Sometimes Augustine combines measure and harmony.7 At others, the combination of elements, each of them individually 1 3 4 5 6 7

2 Confessions IV.13. De natura boni 3. De libero arbitrio II.xvi.42; De musica VI.xvii.56. De musica VI.xvii.56. City of God XIX.xiii.1; De musica VI.xiv.46, xv.47; De vera religione xli.77. De vera religione XXX.55, XXXII.59; De Genesi ad litteram III.37. Confessions II.vi.10.

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beautiful, is pronounced to be more beautiful than any of them individually because of the interrelation of those elements.8 Measure, form, order are also identified with God,9 and since these are elsewhere identified with beauty, we take only a short leap from what is stated explicitly in the individual texts to assert that Augustine saw God as beauty because of the identification of both the divine and the beautiful with measure, form, and order. Although he at times identifies beauty with qualities merely associated with God,10 at others he explicitly identifies God with intelligible beauty.11 What is clear from this strand of Augustine’s aesthetic is, first, its intellectual dimension, and second, its insistence on the relational element of beauty. The intellectual dimension is apparent both in the orderly relation of elements within the whole (which presupposes a rational being which does the ordering) and in the reception of this ordering: it is intelligible, which means its ratio is perceptible to a rational being.12 Although it is not even implicit in the texts themselves, the intelligibility of beauty indicates a relation between, not just that which is ordered and the rational being who makes this order, or between the rationally ordered work and that one who perceives and enjoys this order, but also between this maker and this perceiver, each of whom is rationally related to the work. By his contention that the ability to perceive beauty is a divine gift,13 Augustine presumably intends more than that we cannot know that x without some divinely given capacity (for we would be able to do nothing whatsoever without endowments stemming from a divine source). Presumably, he means that the ability to apprehend beauty is some specifically given capacity, that God desires us to be able particularly to know beauty for what it is. The relational element of beauty emerges also in the numbering of beauty among what would later come to be called the transcendentals. So, in the Soliloquies, for example, the Beautiful is ranked alongside the Good and the True.14 It is at this point that an objection will almost certainly erupt in some quarters: is not all this talk of beauty the sheer continuation of Platonism? The Soliloquies, for example, was the first work Augustine wrote after his ‘conversion’ (opinions differ as to whether his receiving baptism should truly be regarded as representing a conversion, as it traditionally was, but this is not our concern here). Other significant discussions of beauty also occur in early 8

Confessions XIII.xviii.43. De natura boni 3. Justice in De libero arbitrio III.xxv.77; cp. the loveliness of equity and prudence, Confessions II.vi.12. 11 Soliloquies V.11. 12 The point is also made explicitly in De vera religione 256–7: it is with the mind, not the eye, that we perceive beauty. 13 De libero arbitrio III.xiii.36. 14 I, 2. 9

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works, such as De musica and De vera religione. There are two problems with this genealogical approach: it diminishes the significance of Augustine’s discussion of aesthetics, and it impedes the integration of aesthetics into his thought as a whole by attributing the prominence of discussion of the beautiful to the continuing sway of a philosophy supposedly earlier renounced. The first problem is that Augustine’s concern with beauty extends well beyond the early works, into those of his mid- or late career: the Confessions, De libero arbitrio, the City of God, and the De Trinitate. No one dismisses these as sub-Christian or crypto-Platonic. The second problem is that the sheer fact Platonists may have traded in this currency does not make it, ipso facto, less Christian. Perhaps the most important consideration, however, is that Augustine’s notion of beauty is so thoroughly integrated into the rest of his thought. It does not sit like a barnacle on the structure, but appears when he discusses God (De Trinitate), the human person (De libero arbitrio), evil (Confessions) and virtue (Confessions, De libero arbitrio). Augustine was adamant that he turned away from Platonism because whatever truth he found in it was to be found equally in scripture, though the Platonists could not teach the virtues of charity and humility.15 If there are elements of his thought that resemble Platonic notions, they are there not because Augustine unconsciously or blithely imported them from foreign territory into Christian theology where they sit like a Trojan horse, but because he thought they were compatible with that theology, perhaps even necessary to it. If Augustine allies beauty to truth, goodness, or being itself, we would do best to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he views the relation among these as indicated by Christian theological imperatives, and it is not simply an unconsciously carried-over remnant of one of the several philosophies he dabbled in during his youth. The intellectual dimension of Augustine’s aesthetic is therefore integrated into an overall schema concerned with the relation of rational beings. More, if beauty is intrinsically (in Augustine’s eyes) related to being, truth, and goodness, it also creates relationality. The love of beauty can be shared with others;16 beauty is therefore something that has the capacity to draw people together. It is, as Denys asserts of love, a unifying force. Beauty has the power to attract, to the extent that this power of attraction is virtually equitable with beauty.17 ‘Beauty’ is one way of designating what divine nature just is, and therefore what draws us towards that nature by evoking the divine self for which we were expressly made.18 Although Augustine never wrote a sustained treatment of beauty (after the lost treatise he mentions in Confessions), his scattered remarks on the subject are remarkably consistent in identifying beauty with both order, symmetry, 15 17

16 Confessions VII.xx-xxi.26–7. Soliloquies xiii.22. 18 Confessions II.v.10. Confessions I.i.1.

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and so on, and with God. Beauty is therefore unequivocally a good. His aesthetic does not, however, lack for cautionary notes. One such caveat Augustine offers concerns rationality (or reasonableness). The beautiful cannot be identified outright with reasonableness, he points out: one does not say of a rose ‘O how reasonable it smells!’19 This point does not in itself mitigate against seeing a connection between beauty and ratio, however. First, it is significant that Augustine’s example here is olfactory: our sense of smell is probably the least amenable of all the senses to interpretation in terms of measure, harmony, form, and order, and odours defeat description, except by comparing one to another. Quite aside from the exceptional nature of Augustine’s example, though, it is important to note that he is not denying that the apprehension of ratio is an important part of our perception of beauty, merely that it may not be the first element we are aware of noticing. That does not in itself mean that the underlying ratio of something beautiful—its proportion or harmony—is not an important element of the Gestalt experience of perceiving it as beautiful, even if we are not at first aware we have noticed this order. Moreover Augustine’s doubts about the ratio of the rose do not keep him from associating God with fragrance. The heady sensuousness of the prose in Confessions encompasses numerous references to fragrance; for example, where Augustine speaks of ‘the fragrance of your perfume’,20 thereby associating the divine with sweetness of smell. There is nevertheless sometimes the sense in Augustine’s work that beauty is either in itself powerless to hold us to the ultimately good, or can even function as a distraction from it. Initially, he tells us, he was unstable in his enjoyment of God: ‘I was caught up to you by your beauty and quickly torn away from you by my weight.’21 The problem here, though, is not beauty itself, which is after all identified with God, but Augustine’s ‘weight’—sin, most certainly, but also perhaps mere distractibility. It may be the case that being drawn to God under the aspect of beauty is an especially inadequate counter to sin and distraction, but there is no indication in the text that this is so, no reason to think that being seized by the perception of God’s goodness or holiness would be any less susceptible to abandonment by a flighty and spiritually immature Christian. Elsewhere, however, Augustine more clearly indicates the specific problem with beauty: its attractions can as easily seduce towards something other than the good as draw us toward it. So he speaks of the beautiful forms which delight the eyes, and fears that these may seize hold of his soul.22 The underlying issue is that while beautiful created things are beautiful because the Author of Beauty has made them so, the human mind may lose sight of this Author, lured into enchantment by the created thing. Again, the issue is not so much a problem inherent in beautiful things, but in 19 22

De ordine II.32–5. Confessions X.xxxiv.51.

20

Confessions IX.7.16.

21

Confessions VII.17.23.

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the perceiver’s misapprehension, a point Augustine makes clear in Confessions: ‘I searched for you outside myself and disfigured as I was, I fell upon the lovely things of your creation.’23 Conversely, disfigured souls can turn anything sour, even beauty made by God. Created things can in themselves attest to their maker, as they do in the almost comic dialogue of Confessions, where Augustine asks a variety of creatures in turn if they are God and each says ‘No, God is the one who made me.’24 The propensity of created beauty to draw human persons away from God attests to the power of beauty to attract, even if it sometimes distracts from God. The overall thrust of Augustine’s work makes clear that beauty’s power to seduce lies in the perceiver’s shortcomings, not in beautiful things themselves. When human creatures are functioning as the rational, rightly willing and loving persons they were made to be, beauty stands not to their undoing, but their highest fulfilment. After Augustine, the chief contributor to the dialogue on beauty in the patristic period was Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (Denys, as he is traditionally known in English). Like Augustine, he is often labelled a NeoPlatonist in a way which ultimately dismisses both his originality and his propensity for constructing a specifically Christian fabric of thought,25 in which all the elements—those habitually deemed neo-Platonic and those that are unquestionably Biblical—form a coherent and eloquent whole. In Denys we find the same affirmations we will see in the thought of Aquinas, but with fewer qualifications and reservations. Beauty (or the beautiful) is straightforwardly a name of God, for example, in the Divine Names (701C and 704B; all references to Denys’s work hereafter are to this work). The beauty of everything that is beautiful is significant, for if Denys sometimes links it with One and Good (as in 704B), he just as easily allies it to Biblical predicates, as in the long list of titles and attributes in I.6 (596B–596C). Beauty, indeed, is singled out (along with wisdom) as an example of a predicate that applies to divine nature in its totality, and is allied with perhaps the most Christianly significant attribute of God, love (701C). Beauty is therefore no smuggled-in guest at the theological table, or surreptitious vestige of a Platonically formed subconscious. On the contrary; for Denys, beauty is a prime attribute of God, understood specifically in the Christian, an attribute ranking alongside the chief Biblical names of God. One of the particular properties of love is its capacity to effect unity, and it seems this power includes commingling the Beautiful and the Good (709D), although Denys in the same breath calls love a capacity which pre-exists through the Beautiful 23

X.xxvii.38. Confessions X.vi.9. 25 Barth calls Denys’s treatment of beauty ‘hardly veiled Platonism’ (Church Dogmatics II.1, 651). 24

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and the Good (709D). These texts raise some questions about the precise relation of the attributes and Denys’s understanding of divine simplicity. These issues need not concern us here, however, since the centrality of beauty to Denys’s doctrine of God is clear enough: it is not only that beauty is an important attribute but that it links other attributes, so leading us to grasp their interrelations. There is a commonality between Augustine and Denys in their view of beauty’s power to attract. Like the Good, the Beautiful is for Denys something to be wished and yearned for by all (713D–716A). The attractiveness of beauty does not appear, however, to mean that every creature will be drawn to it: although the angels (the ‘divine intelligences’) desire the beautiful and the good above all else (817B), the demons were capable of falling away from it (716A). If Augustine soberly points out the opportunity beauty tenders for deflection, Denys contents himself with pointing to its less-than-entirelycompelling powers of attraction. The unstated premise is that the creature remains free, and even the divine beauty does not coerce the creature’s assent or love. The danger of beauty for Denys is not so much that it will seduce the beholder away from the divine, as that it will prove a less than inevitable lure. From Denys, we jump forward to Aquinas, a leap that is in some ways not surprising, since Aquinas generally leans heavily on both Augustine and Denys and in his work we see clearly the continuation and elaboration of the patristic tradition. The work beauty does in Aquinas’s system, however, makes it different in one respect: although he undoubtedly borrows from the Platonic tradition at times, he can hardly be portrayed as the vassal of Platonism, as Augustine and Denys sometimes are. Given that his theological system draws extensively on Aristotelian categories, it would scarcely be possible for him to import Platonism unconsciously. Indeed, some elements of his thought that might have been attributed to Platonism have instead been viewed as evidence of indebtedness to Aristotle (Eco 1986: 21). The larger Summa synthesizes Platonic tendencies and Aristotelian conceptualities and as such, must be taken as in the thrall of neither. The sheer size and scope of the work, its incorporation of the diverse voices of the Bible and the theological tradition, as well as those of several ancient philosophies, suggests this portrayal of beauty may owe more to the exigencies of the system as a whole than to any single element within it, borrowed or not. Although in the larger Summa Aquinas seems to prefer a list of just three transcendentals (that is, one that does not include beauty), it is also in this, his most obviously systematic theology, that he brings together three formal criteria for beauty (I.39, 8 resp.): integrity or perfection, proportion or harmony, and brightness or clarity. All three properties are identified with the Son: as divine, as image of the Father, and as Word. Question 39, in which Aquinas articulates this notion of beauty, forms part of the Summa’s treatment of the Trinity and this doctrine, in turn, undergirds the work’s entire

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structure.26 If beauty has been quietly removed from the list of transcendentals, it has not been marginalized, but rather enshrined in the heart of the Summa’s account of Christian theology, in the doctrine of the Trinity. Of the criteria of beauty which Aquinas mentions, two (harmony and integrity) indubitably relate to form or structure. The third (clarity or brightness of colour) has little bearing on issues of structure, but it also seems the criterion that is the most exclusively visual: it is hard to see how it would apply to literature, music, or architecture, for example.27 The difficulty of fitting clarity into Aquinas’ aesthetic does not, however, detract from the fact that he unambiguously links beauty with order and proportion and in so doing he stands in the Augustinian and Dionysian tradition. The absence of beauty from lists of transcendentals in Aquinas’s systematic theology may be less significant than it seems, given his remarks in a work where he does include beauty along with other transcendentals, the De Veritate. In Question 22, he notes that if appetite terminates in good, peace, and the beautiful, this does not mean it terminates in different goods: by the very fact something tends towards the good, it thereby also tends towards the beautiful and to peace. The characteristics of the beautiful are included in the essential character of the good. Aquinas concludes: ‘Whoever tends to the good, then, by that very fact tends to the beautiful.’28 While it can be dangerous to use one work to gloss another, there is some ground for using this passage in the De Veritate to interpret the absence of beauty from the lists of transcendentals in the larger Summa, namely its concurrence with a more general, but analogous, passage in the latter. Where the De Veritate is specifically concerned with the relation of goodness, peace, and beauty, the Summa is concerned with the relation of attributes of God more generally, in its treatment of divine simplicity. The relevant question (Summa theologiae I.3) is significant in two respects. First, it establishes the absolute simplicity of divine nature, and from this point, it follows that the distinct names we apply to that nature are only different ways of labelling the same entity. I.3 is in turn glossed by the question on theological language (I.13), in which we learn that divine nature is both aptly designated by those names and yet transcends them all. Whether or not beauty is taken as one of the transcendentals, in virtue of Aquinas’s notions of divine simplicity and theological language, if it is fittingly predicated of God, then it designates what God is and therefore numbers alongside the transcendentals. The principle laid down in Summa theologiae I.1, that sacred doctrine 26

For an argument to this effect, see Williams 1999a. Eco throws up his hands as he tries to pin down a meaning for claritas in Aquinas’s work and sees it as standing in a tensive relationship—to say the least—with the other criteria of beauty, clarity being a qualitative criterion while the others are quantitative (reducing to proportion); Eco 1986: 102–8. 28 De Veritate 22, Art. 1, Answers to Difficulties 12. 27

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derives in the first instance from scripture, establishes the fittingness of predicating beauty of divine nature, inasmuch as scripture does so. The second respect in which I.3 is significant is that it is one of the taproots of the entire Summa: it is basic to the whole system, and for that reason can be assumed to underlie all that follows. Neither of these considerations, of course, establishes that beauty was an important predicate to Aquinas by the time he wrote the larger Summa, but they do indicate that the sheer absence of beauty from its lists of transcendentals cannot be taken as arguing that he regretted the significance he accorded it in earlier works. More importantly, the centrality of simplicity to Aquinas’s system means that once beauty is allowed as an attribute of God, it is identified with divine nature tout court. Although Aquinas does not make it systematically very significant in his last work, his doctrine of simplicity stipulates that beauty could never be taken as purely a lure away from the divine; it is what is divine. Secular histories of aesthetics tend to skip from the Middle Ages forwards, either to later philosophers, such as Kant and Hegel, or to Romantics, such as Coleridge. In the Christian tradition, however, two figures from the Reformed tradition of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries offer significant treatments of beauty. The first, Calvin, included no extended treatment of beauty as such in his systematic theology, but nevertheless has some significant insights to offer. The Institutes are laced with passing references to the beauty of creation, in which Calvin sees the hand of the Creator (though he does not seem to go so far as to predicate beauty of divine nature). More significant is the treatment of grace in Book III, where Calvin gives a brief glimpse of the Christian tradition in extension, for he too leans on the notion of beauty as the power of attraction. Like Aquinas, Calvin’s conception of beauty has a strongly teleological element: right use of God’s gifts means looking to the end which their ‘Author’ intended in creating them and giving them to us. God, on Calvin’s account, is no utilitarian. The beauty of the material world, its colours and its scents, for example, is not intended merely to be useful: God made it to be attractive (III.x.2). The preciousness of gold, silver, and marble does not, on this account, rest on an arbitrary assignment of value to these things by human convention; they are more precious than other metals and stones because God endowed them with loveliness. Calvin is not, of course, unaware of the potential for such things to tempt in the wrong direction, but what we are to resist, significantly, are not the lovely things themselves, but the lusts of the flesh, which (presumably) cause us to desire them wrongly (for the wrong reason or to the wrong extent). In this line of thinking, he stands firmly in the Augustinian tradition. It is not, properly speaking, beauty which can seduce away from the good, but our own disordered affections which can wreak havoc, even on the occasion of God’s good creation. On Calvin’s reasoning, if we were seduced away from truth by a

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beautifully structured argument, the problem would not lie in the inherently deceptive nature of the exquisite structure, but in some fault within ourselves. If we press the consequence, we would no more do away with the intellectually satisfying argument, on the grounds that its structure might seduce away from truth, than we would attempt to obliterate the beautiful things we see around us in creation because they are sometimes misused. Even if the argument is a human construction (as metals and stone are not), whatever aesthetic satisfactions it affords cannot be taken as intrinsically problematic. Calvin, just as Augustine and Aquinas, cautions against mistrust of aesthetic appeal solely on grounds of its supposed power to seduce. Jonathan Edwards stands in the Calvinist tradition, but extends both it and the Christian tradition more broadly. Beauty lies at the heart of Edwards’s thought, so his work presents an instance of an aesthetic which is not a pleasant afterthought to theology, but is a prime constituent of the framework within which the theologian may think through the questions of divine and human nature. In one respect, though, Edwards stands at one remove from the mainstream Christian theological tradition: direct references to the prior tradition of Western aesthetics are fleeting and sparse. Even Augustine’s theology makes no more than rare appearances in Edwards’s thought, and although Edwards’s works were published outside his own country, both in translations and in British editions, they have nevertheless had little impact beyond Reformed circles. One cannot really claim, therefore, that Edwards is a notable figure in the development of a Christian aesthetic, since he neither overtly draws on the existing tradition, nor becomes the stock on which a broad range of others draw. He may, however, express explicitly a set of notions of beauty which are hinted at or latent in the prior tradition, whether or not he developed them out of his knowledge of that tradition or arrived at them independently. The theology he articulates may hold significance, not for its influence, but for what it may suggest about the deep structure of all Christian theology, given that the analysis of beauty in his work cannot be attributed to the supposed influence of Platonism. One of the first things a reader familiar with the prior tradition will notice in Edwards is the centrality of beauty to his thought:29 beauty is, along with holiness, taken as a central attribute of God, and a prime medium of relationality. Beauty is a means of divine self-communication and a means by which God attracts us to himself. Holiness is the divine purity and beauty ‘comprehending all [God’s] moral perfections’ (1959: 255). This sensibility runs right through Edwards’s thought: beauty is a summational attribute. As such, it functions analogously to the transcendentals in various forms of Platonism. Edwards does not seem to make any explicit link between beauty’s 29

Edwards notably expounds his aesthetic in his treatises on religious affections and on virtue, which will furnish the core of the analysis here.

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summational aspect and divine attractiveness, but the implication is clear enough: if ‘beauty’ designates everything that is good in divine nature, why would we not find it, and the Trinity, attractive? What would there be not to love? Edwards is particularly insistent on the interrelation of what he considers the two chief attributes of God: beauty and holiness. Indeed, his theology could be seen as a very large explication of a single scriptural phrase, ‘the beauty of holiness’ (1 Chr. 16:29; 2 Chr. 20:21; Ps. 29:2, 96:9, AV). It is not so much that, in virtue of divine simplicity, ‘beauty’ and ‘holiness’ are simply different terms designating the same entity, but rather that Edwards does not envisage any form of holiness that is not beautiful, or any beauty devoid of holiness, for all the attributes of God imply one another, in his view (1959: 257). Beauty and holiness are distinct, at least conceptually, but stand as eternal companions. As beauty and holiness are inextricably found together in God, so ethics and aesthetics are inextricably intertwined in Edwards’s thought. The human realm reflects divine realities: ‘holiness in man is but the image of God’s holiness’ (1959: 256). The issue is not solely that by grace we are formed into the likeness of grace’s Giver, but that our perception of divine truth fosters this likeness: ‘a love to divine things for the beauty and sweetness of their moral excellency, is the first beginning and spring of all holy affections’ (1959: 253–4; he repeats this point almost verbatim on 256). The beauty of God’s holiness is the prime reason the holy person loves God (1959: 256): God’s holiness is ‘supremely amiable in itself ’ (1959: 256). Here is a hint that beauty is the quality of attractiveness: we are drawn to holiness or beauty because these just are the powers that draw or attract. To say divine nature is beauty, then, would be to say it has the power to draw all things to itself. However, when Edwards says (of holy persons) ‘they delight in every divine perfection; the contemplation of the infinite greatness, power, and knowledge, and terrible majesty of God, is pleasant to them’ (1959: 256), he is claiming more than the attractiveness of divine nature: he is asserting an intellectual and aesthetic delight in the human person who thinks of divine attributes, a delight clearly linked to contemplation. Beauty draws us to itself, in the process making us resemble God’s holiness, and draws us into the enjoyment of pondering it and relishing it with the mind. Although Edwards does not quite say it explicitly, it seems that by this enjoyment of divine beauty, we participate in it. So when he writes that holy persons’ ‘love to God for his holiness is what is most fundamental and essential to their love (1959: 256), he does not simply mean that the holy experience some sort of emotion, but that they delight in holding certain notions of divine nature in their mind’s eye. Their delight is a form of intellectual revelling. Because the divine attributes are all connected, so that thought of one leads to thought of another, to love God for the beauty of his

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moral attributes ‘leads to, and necessarily causes a delight in God for all his attributes’ (1959: 256). Divine beauty attracts, therefore, but does not terminate in itself: it leads onward to a more general delectation and contemplation. Beauty, for Edwards, is always about both love of God and, simultaneously, a purely human delighting in theological propositions, almost for their own sake: delight in the ratio of divine nature. It is perhaps for this reason that he can say that Christianity in itself is beautiful (1959: 258). For Edwards beauty not only attracts us to God and draws us into contemplation of other divine qualities; the beauty of holiness renders all other attributes ‘glorious and lovely’ to us (1959: 257). If beauty entices us to understand and enjoy theology; it also makes the objects of theological reflection seem, and actually be, desirable in themselves. The extent to which this perception is a purely intellectual matter in Edwards’s view is debatable. On the one hand, he often speaks of the intelligent beings’ perception of God; on the other, he also speaks of a ‘spiritual sense’ which perceives beauty and holiness as spiritual things (1959: 260). The two emphases need not be seen as standing at odds, though, as long as ‘spiritual’ is not equated with ‘emotional’ or ‘non-intellectual’, and ‘intellectual’ with ‘academic’ or ‘abstruse’. The important common denominator is that for Edwards, the perception of beauty is not simply a matter of perception by the physical senses. This point follows from the fact that, above all, God is beauty and the perception of beauty in God is a matter of perceiving truths of divine nature, rather than colour, form, or sound. It is a form of our own likeness to God that enables us to perceive the beauty that is divine nature: our own capacity as intelligent creatures to perceive beauty, holiness, and perfection itself mirrors the divine beauty, holiness, perfection (1959: 257). This capacity is, however, regenerated (1959: 259), so both nature and grace are part of Edwards’s aesthetic schema. Indeed, grace itself is beautiful, a bonum formosum (1959: 262). Edwards’ aesthetic nevertheless comes with some significant caveats. Beauty does not simply name a form of human likeness to God; it also distinguishes God from all else, for the divine beauty is ‘infinitely diverse from all other beauty’ (1959: 298). This claim, while stating a theologically necessary truth, does not offer obvious clues as to how it is to be reconciled with the overall pattern established in his treatise on religious affections. The treatise on true virtue clarifies some points that are implicit in the treatise on religious affections. First, although beauty and holiness belong together in God, beauty and virtue in human beings are not necessarily concomitant. Beauty that can be called virtue must have its ‘seat’ in the mind (1960: 1), and not even all intellectual beauty is virtue, for some of it is understanding or speculation (1960: 1). Virtue is associated with what Edwards calls ‘the qualities and exercises of the heart’, along with the actions that proceed from there (1960: 2) that is, it has to do with will as well as intellect. Because

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he has allied beauty to virtue in this particular way, he can claim that beauty consists in consent and agreement (1960: 4). Here his ethical take on aesthetics coincides with the conventional strands of Western aesthetics that view beauty as harmony. In Edwards’s thought, however, this accord is not merely a matter of various entities’ existing by nature in some state of alignment, but of their active desire to relate to each other. This position gives an implicit answer to the problem created by asserting a difference between divine and creaturely beauty: divine beauty is intrinsic, creaturely beauty a matter of choice. Virtue, on Edwards’s account, is beauty of mind, but the essence of this beauty lies in love (1960: 7). The virtuous mind seeks knowledge of God, the ‘view’ of God’s glory, but also union with God, conformity to him, and joy in him (1960: 25). Beauty is therefore a matter of perception of the quality discernible in another, but also that which we are drawn towards so that we may be made one with it and the very power that moves towards this union. Beauty is a key attribute of God in Edwards’s thought and a significant component of theological anthropology, but it is for him equally, if not more so, a principle articulating how God and humanity are bound together in a relation of knowledge and love. The decisive element of this kind of beauty is volitional: sheer concord, harmony, or proportion is not sufficient to define something as ‘primary beauty’. This, the highest kind of beauty, is peculiar to moral and spiritual beings, who are the raison d’être of the rest of the cosmic system (1960: 27). What Edwards calls secondary beauty equates with order, even uniformity, and can be a property of inanimate things (1960: 27–8). Although he at times refers to it as a form of ‘consent’ or agreement (1960: 28), these words are being used loosely, given that the examples he cites, such as parts of the perimeters of circles and musical tones, do not have the wherewithal to will anything, properly speaking. Although this kind of beauty is inferior to the moral or spiritual variety, it reflects the latter: ‘God has made this kind of mutual agreement of things [i.e. secondary beauty] beautiful and grateful to those intelligent beings that perceive it’ and one reason for this is that it mirrors the ‘true, spiritual, original beauty’ (1960: 30). God’s fashioning of beautiful objects therefore creates an analogy between the realm of the intelligent and the inanimate, but an analogy which is both instructive to human beings, and which it pleases God to observe (1960: 30). Human fabrication, it seems (Edwards is not quite explicit on this point), serves a similar purpose, allowing us to glimpse beauty in objects of our own fashioning, in something as ordinary as the fit of a mortice and tenon (1960: 29). The last example perfectly illustrates a persistent feature of Edwards’s aesthetic: his emphasis on relationality. In a sense, this has always been part of the Western aesthetic tradition, since any appeal to order, harmony, and suchlike, is implicitly a reference to the right relations of parts of some whole. Edwards makes a further move, however, adding to the relationality in ordered

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things themselves, a relationality which the perception of their order inspires and fosters. To perceive the beautiful, even if in something so ordinary as the fitting relation of parts in a woodworker’s join, is to grasp an analogy of the beauty that is divine nature. To understand the beauty of material things is to see their inner relations, the connections obtaining among their parts; and reflecting on these is not a merely passive process, a noting of what is the case, but an invitation actively to trace these relations, to make the connections as one element suggests another to the mind (1960: 29). The act of perception therefore nurtures the relation between the intelligent human perceiver and the Maker of all intelligence and beauty by inviting the thinker to explore those relations constitutive of beauty. Nevertheless, the mind does not perceive these relations purely by its own power: ‘they who see the beauty of true virtue do not perceive it by argumentation or its connections and consequences, but by the frame of their own minds, or a certain spiritual sense given them of God’, and this frame of mind is not given arbitrarily (1960: 99). The gift that enables us to apprehend beauty in itself instantiates the relationality it makes possible for us to perceive. Although Edwards occupies a rather anomalous position within the Christian tradition, neither drawing deeply on its past nor contributing significantly (at least in respect of his aesthetics) to its development, his thought illustrates how readily an aesthetic can be incorporated into an authentically Christian theological structure. His theology cannot be dismissed as mere Platonizing, yet for all its distinctive notes, it evidences the same broad tendencies we have seen in earlier Christian thinkers. Beauty is identified with divine nature, and with that which responds to fundamental elements of human nature: ‘beauty’ labels that which attracts because it speaks to the rational creature’s yearning for order and harmony. So strongly does Edwards identify beauty with God that he is little concerned to voice those cautions we hear from others, about beauty’s potential to distract from God. Order, it seems, is always ultimately ordered to its Source and as such, attests to both the ratio of divine nature and the ratio created things possess in virtue of their relation to their Source. From Edwards, we leap forward into the twentieth century. In between, there are figures who make important contributions to aesthetics—Hegel and Coleridge, for example—but their reflections on beauty are not integrated into a Christian theology: Hegel is only questionably a Christian theologian, and Coleridge’s musings on aesthetics are not deeply related to the specifically theological elements of his thought. It is sheer conjecture as to why the Enlightenment and nineteenth century yielded less theological reflection on beauty, but it may well be attributable to the less Biblical character of theology in this period: it is the Bible’s identification of beauty with God that has fired the minds of theologians through the centuries. Those theologians who were steeped in the sacred page and whose work is shot through, not simply with Biblical references, but with the imagery and cadences in the Bible, seem most

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deeply impressed by the notion of God as Beauty. This fact may be the last reproach to those who accuse theological aesthetics of being no more than a hastily baptized Platonism manqué. Chief among the twentieth-century theologians interested in beauty is Hans Urs von Balthasar. Balthasar unabashedly trades on the traditional transcendentals—no furtiveness about categories associated with ancient philosophy here—but he is equally engaged with the Bible, and so cannot be dismissed as purely philosophically rather than theologically oriented.30 Balthasar makes no apology for appealing to the notion of transcendentals, but notes that his intention of developing a Christian theology in light of the third (beauty) arises from the desire to complement the vision that insists on the value of the true and the good (9). Balthasar comments that Christian thought has been impoverished by the loss of attention to beauty, though it once strongly informed theology (9). The last point is debatable, but it is certainly true that Balthasar’s aesthetics continues a strand of thought that had lain dormant for some time. His reason for reviving the notion arises not simply from an interest in beauty for its own sake, but because he believed that the transcendentals are inseparable, so that neglecting one could only have a ‘devastating effect’ on the others (9). This principle could be taken as an expression of faith in the transcendentals themselves, but it equally represents an impetus towards systematicity: Balthasar is understanding key attributes of God as mutually implicative. Unlike his predecessors in the tradition, there is little sense in Seeing the Form of Balthasar’s concern for beauty’s potential to seduce or distract. However, there is definitely a subjective dimension to beauty: it is the last thing the intellect dares approach and one must possess a spiritual eye to perceive it (33). Balthasar does not, therefore, take beauty in any of the conventional senses (merely as form, symmetry, and so on), which is why he can assert that the most sublime of beauties is that which was crowned with thorns and crucified (33). On his account, a theological aesthetics which attends only to what human beings habitually regard as beautiful will sooner or later cease to be theological (38). Balthasar thus sets his aesthetics over against ‘inner-worldly’ theories of beauty (38), later citing the authority of Richard of St Victor in support of his view: the ultimate vision of God, for Richard, ‘contradicts every kind of reasoning’ (Benjamin Major 4, 8, cited on 48. Whether this citation accurately represents Richard’s overall view of reasoning is debatable, though that is not our concern here.) Balthasar 30 Balthasar himself wants to ground his thought in Biblical categories, for he claims only scripture possesses the power of pointing authentically to Christ (Balthasar 1982: 32; all references to Balthasar’s work hereafter are to this volume, by page). The Bible is not the sole authoritative root for theology, in Balthasar’s view, and therefore presumably also the warrant for the assertion of beauty’s theological significance, but also the spur to aesthetic contemplation and decision (209).

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therefore separates beauty and ratio in a way that may be justified, but sits uncomfortably with his insistence on the unity of the transcendentals. If beauty and truth are inseparably linked and human reasoning cannot perceive divine beauty, then it is not clear on what basis one would assert our ability to perceive divine truth. Nevertheless, the rationality of faith, in Balthasar’s view, ‘rests totally on the persuasive character of the revelatory signs, their power to convince man’s reason’ (148).31 There is a tension in Balthasar’s thought, then, between the acknowledgement of humanity’s rational powers (and therefore the human ability to perceive the beautiful) and his occasional vigorous rejection of a role for these faculties. Nevertheless, he claims that the central question of apologetics and fundamental theology is a question of ‘perceiving form—an aesthetic problem’ (173). Beauty and rationality are therefore connected in Balthasar’s thought, though not because he has hewn close to traditional definitions of beauty which appeal to concepts such as order, harmony, or proportion. The concerted effort to sever beauty from conventional notions of rationality, and therefore, from traditional notions of beauty, is deeply tied to the Christocentricism of Balthasar’s thought and especially its focus on the cross. In this respect, Balthasar parts company with the patristic and a good deal of the medieval tradition, neither of which singled out Christ’s death as the sole or chief theologically significant element of the Incarnation. The cross, Balthasar claims, ‘radically puts an end to all worldly aesthetics’ and this end ‘marks the decisive emergence of the divine aesthetic’ (460). This divine aesthetic encloses the cross, with its apparent ugliness, but for Balthasar, even ‘worldly aesthetics’ cannot exclude the ugly, the tragically fragmented and the demonic ‘but must come to terms with these’ (460). Balthasar may be correct in this view, although it is again a departure from the tendencies of the tradition before him. Balthasar’s focus on the cross likens him more to the Reformation theologians than to the patristic tradition, for the Fathers have little to say of the cross in isolation from the totality of the Incarnation and the resurrection. No more are the high medieval theologians focused on the cross in isolation from the whole pattern of Christ’s life, though by the late Middle Ages, piety was becoming increasingly crucicentric. Certainly, to the extent that any of the earlier theologians focused on the cross, they did not do so in conjunction with their discussions of beauty and did not claim, as Balthasar does, that reflection on beauty must include reflections on the ugly and the demonic. When Balthasar eventually arrives at the notion that beauty is an attribute of God and ‘the beauty of man’ is indeed found in God alone (477), he exacerbates the internal tensions in his thought, for this idea is hard to square with the earlier linkage of beauty to violence, ugliness, and the demonic. At 31

Cp. the claim that the act of faith does not derive its central rationality from a previous exercise of ‘naked reason’; rather, rationality emerges in the act of faith (176).

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times, he tries to reconcile all these elements, holding that, with correct vision, one will see harmony ‘on all sides’. This harmony is only evident if one’s field of view includes all the essential elements; if one element is absent—if, for example a full and orthodox Christology is lacking—then the proportions of the whole will be ‘distorted and falsified’. Fleetingly, Balthasar links this false aesthetic perception to the root of ‘the problem of heresy’ (513), the root of which is the failure accurately to perceive the relation of the parts to the whole. It seems, then, that Balthasar does want to link beauty and truth, and sees both as integrally related to harmony and comprehensiveness. To the extent that he does, he continues the prior patristic and medieval tradition. He also introduces new elements to the classical picture, however, such as the insistence on accounting for ugliness and violence and a strong form of Christocentricism that focuses on one aspect of Christ’s work. In Balthasar, we see not so much the development of the prior tradition, then, but a new picture which incorporates some elements of the older vision. Its novelty does not, of course, make it wrong or misguided, but it does mean Balthasar’s aesthetics must be considered as rather anomalous. Edwards’s thought could also be considered anomalous in certain respects; nevertheless, he is more recognizably thinking within the tradition, despite the fact that he rarely alludes to it directly. It is, moreover, difficult to reconcile the disparate tendencies in Balthasar’s work in such a way as to view it as a coherent whole. For all the architectonic appearance of his oeuvre and for all its occasional insistence on the harmonious relation of parts to a whole, it is less than systematic in its realization and in this respect, too, differs from Edwards’s, in whose thought we see fewer internal tensions. Although Edwards’s lack of concern about beauty’s potential to distract away from goodness stands at the polar opposite from Balthasar’s insistence on incorporating ugliness and violence into his account of beauty, the two share a disinclination to shrink from aesthetic concerns simply because of this possibility of temptation. Standing in marked contrast to Balthasar in many respects is Patrick Sherry, whose theological account of beauty is grounded in pneumatology. In this position, Sherry does have a root in the prior tradition: he cites Cyril of Alexandria, in whose Dialogues on the Holy Trinity it is claimed that by becoming partakers of divine nature through the Spirit, transcendent beauty is imprinted on us (1992: 8; he also cites Irenaeus as a pioneer of the pneumatological approach, 4). Sherry is here continuing a minority strand of the prior tradition—perhaps one would say reviving it—but that is one of the many legitimate ways of developing tradition. The pneumatological focus is not the only respect in which Sherry draws on the prior tradition, however. He also takes due note of the tradition’s warnings about beauty, citing Augustine on the dangers of not going beyond beauty to the beauty of God (1992: 9) and taking account of the standard criterion of beauty promoted by Aquinas: perfection, harmony, and clarity (1992: 10–11).

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Although Sherry takes issue with the view that dismisses concern for beauty as ‘a meretricious Hellenistic import’ (1992: 21), he eventually claims that the notion beauty can lead us to God has its roots in Christian Neo-Platonism (1992: 133), despite his earlier acknowledgement of its Biblical root in the Psalms (1992: 21; the ambivalence also emerges on 178). On Sherry’s interpretation, then, Christian aesthetics is indebted to an ultimately non-Christian philosophical system, as well as to the Bible and the developing Christian tradition. Thus, although he seems to agree with the idea that appeal to beauty is something of a foreign import, he disputes that its origin makes it superfluous or inherently suspect. This position would seem to entail that a notion can be imported into Christianity from elsewhere, without its foreign birth’s constituting evidence of its being necessarily extraneous to a Christian web of thought. Or in other words, not the origin of an idea, but its compatibility with the framework in which it subsists, determines its Christian authenticity. Sherry’s aesthetic therefore incorporates overt appeal to systematicity. He finds this element in prior theology, also, in Edwards’s analysis of beauty in the context of trinitarian theology, for example (1992: 13). Moreover, the principle is evident in practice, in Sherry’s location of his aesthetics in the context of pneumatology. Sherry provides an example of a thinker aware of many of the cautions against theological appeals to beauty—beauty’s potential to distract from God, aesthetics’ roots in non-Christian philosophies—but who remains sanguine about the possibility and value of theological aesthetics in the face of these difficulties. His appeal to pneumatology indicates that systematizing impulses need not result in any single structure: a Christian aesthetic might take its prime inspiration from any of several doctrines. Systematicity is not monolithicity, but creative insight into possible forms of relationality. The fertility of relationality means not only that there are many ways in which notions might be understood to be connected within the web of a given theology, but also that there are many ways in which ideas can spring from dialogue with the past. The relation of the constructive work of the present to the foundation of the past constitutes another form of coherence, another variety of harmony. Although necessarily cursory, the foregoing survey indicates a few important points. The first is that while it is true that Christian theologians have evinced only slight interest in aesthetics per se (Brown 1989: 18), it is equally true that interest in aesthetics appears curiously perennial. It appears in the work of a small number of theologians, but these include the Fathers, the medievals, the Reformers and twentieth-century theologians. Beauty, it seems, will not go away, and if it has not held attraction for the broad swathe of writers in the Christian tradition, it has prompted some of its greatest figures to creative theological reflection. Some of these can perhaps be discounted as cryptoPlatonists and their interest in beauty accordingly dismissed, but as the Fathers point out in texts interwoven with the imagery of the Bible, and as

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later writers point out simply by acknowledging the Biblical basis for the claim that God is beauty: the most authoritative texts of the church, the writings of scripture, readily assume the beauty of God and ascribe the beauty of creation to its Source in the Creator. Although the Bible knows no doctrine of divine simplicity as such, the same texts that praise the beauty of creation also extol the Creator for wisdom and providential governance (Ps. 19, to take only one example). Allusions to beauty are connected in the Bible to harmony and order, if only fleetingly, and it is therefore not necessarily an accident, or the sheer legacy of secular philosophy, that these came to be seen as the criteria of beauty by a number of writers in the Christian tradition. The chief legacy of the scriptural testimony is the identification of beauty either with God ipse or prime attributes of God, such as holiness. Two assumptions of the theological tradition then come into play: first, that it is possible to give a coherent account of the Bible’s testimony; and second, that divine nature is not a portmanteau of discrete and therefore potentially mutually hostile attributes. On both counts, beauty cannot be divorced from ratio because the Bible attests to both as attributes of God. Nevertheless, the fact that harmony, order, proportion, and therefore ratio, have been standard criteria of beauty in the Western tradition, coupled with a recurrent tendency to define beauty as the power of attraction, raises an important theological question, the question constantly hovering on the edges of the preceding discussion. Is everything that attracts attractive because we perceive in it properties such as order and harmony? Or could the power of attraction be deceptive? Could we, in other words, be attracted purely by beauty, a harmony and order uncoupled from ratio and truth? Could that attraction to beauty actually be drawing us away from ratio and truth? The real issue here is not whether beauty has the power to attract, but whether it directs the perceiver’s gaze towards truth or away from it. If we take beauty’s fundamental attraction to spring from the ratio underlying the outward forms, then we could never be seduced away from rationality and truth by a beauty in service to something else (disorder or falsehood, for example). But does beauty spring from ratio? The question could be construed as one concerning the relation of divine attributes: if they are taken as necessarily or inevitably related, then beauty could only attract towards ratio and therefore towards truth. If, on the contrary, beauty, and ratio are separable, or merely notionally similar ideas, then it is perfectly possible that the perception of harmony, for example, might induce us to take something to be true which in fact is not. The possibility of misapprehending the truth lies always to hand, of course: evidence can be badly gathered or misinterpreted, logical inferences incorrectly drawn, and prejudices of various sorts may cloud the vision. The true course of ratio does not always run smooth. The question is whether the perception of order and harmony constitute a particularly insidious lure away from truth, even as they proffer the promise of it. Or, to put the question in the

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specific form relevant here: could the very coherence and clarity of structure of systematic theology seduce away from its truth, rather than for it? Could the satisfactions of order prove so complete that we forget that the terminus ad quem of theology is not ideas about God, but God? As it happens, some of these worries press not only upon theology but upon other disciplines as well, and a brief glance at the problem in another context may prove instructive. In recent decades, the world of physics has become divided between proponents of string theory and anti-string theorists, the latter perceiving themselves to be a beleaguered minority. This is not the place to weigh the scientific evidence for and against string theory. What is significant for our purposes is the strand of debate concerned with the beauty and internal coherence of string theory. As one commentator put it: ‘String theory was too beautiful a mathematical structure to be completely irrelevant to nature’ (John Schwartz, cited in Woit 2007: 155). Several points here are worth noting. First, beauty is being tied to structure and specifically, the structure of abstract relations (in mathematics), as opposed to the kind of structures perceptible to the senses. Second, the beauty of what the mind can apprehend, rather than what attracts the senses, is taken as not ‘completely irrelevant to nature’; that is, the ratio of structures is viewed as corresponding to or reflecting the way things are in reality—perhaps one might even say, in truth. It appears that ‘nature’ is the criterion of truth, and when something is true, the beautiful cannot be remote from that truth. Precisely the same argument can be turned around and used against string theory, however. David Lindley, for example, worries that through the quest for a unified theory, such as string theory, physics will turn into ‘mythology’, while others worry that the pure mathematics basis for string theory will result in reliance on aesthetic judgements rather than empirical evidence. These accept the claim of superstring theorists that the theory is a beautiful and elegant one, but criticize this reliance on mathematical beauty as somehow keeping theorists from connecting their ideas with anything experimentally observable (Woit 2007: 264). Two distinct objections arise here: the first, the weaker, doubts that beauty in itself counts in favour of truth. The second, sharper criticism seems almost to take the beauty of string theory as counting against its truth. One important element of the debates over string theory is the worry about departure from the observable and empirically demonstrable in favour of flight into pure theory. At this point, some significant parallels to the debate over foundationalism emerge. The speculative element of string theory (a theory constructed on the basis of an assumption that x is the case [Woit 2007: 213]) likens it to coherence theories of truth: the theory proposes an internally consistent account of what-is-the-case, but one which hangs on an unproved, and perhaps untestable, assumption. If string theory fails by the falsifiability criterion (it cannot stipulate what would constitute its own

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undoing), not all scientists are necessarily prepared to dismiss it on that account, although this is clearly a concern for some (Woit 2007: 213). As Woit notes, simply taking the falsification criterion as a necessary condition of a theory’s being accorded the status of the rigorously scientific is too simplistic (Woit 2007: 213). Woit admits that science must operate on the basis of working postulates a good deal of the time, in the space of a ‘not yet’ (Woit 2007: 213). A theologian can, of course, seize on this ‘not yet’— perhaps all too readily—as a parallel to the eschatological horizon of theology, but to do so is not mere opportunism, as long as there is genuine openness to correction by evidence. There is a particular kind of falsification issue attaching to string theory, however: it cannot be falsified because it makes no predictions (Woit 2007: 212). Oddly, these tendencies in string theory are what place it in danger of becoming ‘theology’ (Woit 2007: 216), although theology can in fact supply falsification criteria for some of its key claims (for example, if Jesus of Nazareth never existed, this would falsify a great deal of Christian doctrine), and theology certainly makes predictions. Although Woit will not dismiss string theory entirely on grounds of its failure to stipulate falsification conditions or to make predictions, there does seem to be a link between the merely theoretical element of string theory and its disconnectedness from standard scientific practice (which, it seems, is equated with rationality tout court), and the purely theoretical element of string theory is also linked to its beauty and attractive power. Roger Penrose views the matter in markedly different terms. For him, mathematics is ‘crucially concerned’ with the particular ideal of truth and there are ‘remarkable interrelations between truth and beauty that both illuminate and confuse the issues of the discovery and acceptance of physical theories’ (2004: 22). Penrose cites a number of prominent scientists who ‘were guided to some considerable extent by the aesthetic attractions of the particular theoretical ideas that they put forward’. These considerations, in Penrose’s view, ‘play a fundamentally important role in the selection of plausible proposals for new theories of fundamental physics’ (2004: 1014). Penrose nevertheless retains a sober awareness of the pitfalls of appeal to aesthetics. For example, he acknowledges that mathematical coherence is ‘far from a sufficient criterion for telling us whether we are likely to be “on the right track”’, although he also affirms that beauty and coherence are closely related (2004: 1014). For Penrose, the beauty of string theory strengthens its mathematical appeal (2004: 1016), but he carefully distinguishes its mathematical plausibility from its plausibility as physics (2004: 1017). Nevertheless, Penrose claims that scientists have consistently underestimated two factors influencing theoretical research: beauty and miracles, and these two are not unconnected in his view (2004: 1038). The entry of miracles into the discussion may trigger alarm, especially its breathtakingly casual invocation, Penrose seeming oblivious to

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the nuances of definitions of the term, and the sharp history of dispute, in both theology and philosophy, over phenomena potentially describable as miracles. Appeal to ‘miracles’ notwithstanding (whatever Penrose means exactly by the term), what emerges clearly from his analysis is that the history of science is haunted by beauty: haunted, perhaps, like a family whose jilted maiden aunt walks the ramparts, officially unacknowledged but glimpsed occasionally by credulous onlookers. While Penrose’s appeal to miracles may worry scientists and theologians alike (albeit for different reasons), both this and his affirmation of the role of beauty indicate that even in scientific reasoning and research there is an element of the incalculable, the indefinable—the mysterious. Although Penrose affirms this element with some caveats, he clearly affirms it not only as a perennial fact of science, but also, perhaps, as the inevitable fact of human reflection of the real and the true. Without saying so directly, what he intimates is that beauty and logic are two sides of one coin, inseverable. Debates in the scientific community over the relation of beautiful intellectual structures and truth parallel to a surprising degree some of the concerns of the Christian tradition. Some fear the sheer attractiveness of beautiful things will lead the perceiver to accept them as valid and good for no better reason than they are beautiful, and in so doing, fall short of a real truth or a greater good. However, even in the scientific community there are some who see the possibility that beauty will necessarily correlate with truth. While the tensions in the scientific community indicate that there are non-theological grounds for concern about the potential for intellectually beautiful structures to seduce, the fact that some scientists also see the aesthetic appeal of intellectual structures as counting in favour of their truth indicates that the Christian tradition’s equation of beauty and truth cannot be dismissed simply as an outmoded philosophical legacy. Furthermore, unlike natural scientists, Christian theologians do not have the luxury of denying the goodness, even necessity, of beauty, because of the Christian doctrine of God and the way in which this doctrine is grounded in theology’s normative source. As long as the Bible asserts the beauty of God, beauty cannot be dismissed as merely, or even inherently, seductive and detrimental to the search for truth. While the Christian tradition has not tended to the conclusion that the beautiful in itself seduces away from truth, figures in it have often recognized the propensity of warped or distracted minds and hearts to forget beauty’s origin, and instead regard beautiful objects as ends in themselves. If part of beauty’s attraction is that it appeals to our sense of order, harmony, proportion, symmetry, and so on, then we are able to recognize and appreciate it because of our rational endowments. If beauty can lead us towards God, then one explanation is that our innate rational capacities respond to rationally ordered stimuli to carry us back to Logos. Beauty’s power to seduce away from

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divine things lies therefore not in the failure of rationality altogether, but the refusal to press it to its logical conclusion. The basis for both beauty’s attraction and seductive possibilities rests on the correspondence between human rational faculties and their divine Source, but also the rational ordering observable in created things. In the case of art, that ordering subsists because of the intelligence of a human maker, whose intelligence itself derives from God; in the case of natural beauty, the origin of pattern and harmony derives directly from the Creator. To see in beauty a reflection of divine ratio is to acknowledge a correspondence between the created order and the divine, a correspondence that can only exist because it is divinely intended. To reject the correspondence is to reject the divine intention behind it. That intention is, however, one we only see in light of the scriptural witness, the same divinely inspired word that identifies beauty with God and God’s created effects. Reflection on the natural world can prompt us not only to see its beauty, but to reflect that beauty in the structures that describe it (in scientific theories, for example). The theological structures that describe the grand web of relations that is God-and-other-things derive not only from observation of the world we inhabit, or our schematized interpretations of it, but from a text which attributes beauty and truth to the divine nature that theology describes. To the mind of one steeped in scripture, who then looks beyond it and sees in the world beyond the text patterns that may disclose the deep structures of revelation, the divine impetus towards relationality appears as the structure of all that is, and that perceived structure may in turn shape the discourse giving voice to the natural and the revealed. This latter way of looking at the matter would grant the possibility that something might be learnt from human reason in extension from scripture, rather than as strict deduction from its various parts or from any particular passage, while still acknowledging the primacy of scripture in the process of theological knowing and reasoning. Scripture cannot be exiled from the discussion, however, because scripture is the source that authorizes the theologian to call God, and not only created things, beautiful. Scripture exerts its force not only in the foundation of the edifice, but as a structuring principle that guides and at times limits the upper construction as well. As long as theology draws from the well of scripture, the danger that sheer aesthetics or the appeal of pure reason will lead away from the divine, miring the perceiver in the merely human, is lessened, if not completely obviated. The reason even grounding in scripture cannot entirely foreclose the possibility of theological distortion is that theology does not merely re-present scripture; it reasons from scripture. Human intellection is necessarily coloured by the situation of the thinker: time, place, social position, education, sex, race, language, and culture all play their part in shaping our notions of what is natural, right, and even rational. One can attempt to dodge the spectre of perspectivalism by appeal to both a strong notion of rationality derived from

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one or another secular discourse: the natural sciences or logic, for example. A theological counter to perspectivalism might point to the divine ratio underlying all human thought, or the divine self-disclosure of scripture. Nevertheless, both sorts of responses would seem to leave little room for the miscarriage of rationality, or a spectrum of ‘rationalities’, and both have significant vulnerabilities, largely because of their failure to allow for the possibility of problems ranging from perspectival distortion, to inadequate data, to misinterpretation (whether of natural data or Biblical texts), or just plain miscalculation and faulty logic. We can be misled not only by failures of rationality, but by the failure even to know what rationality truly is and by the failure of self-knowledge. Arguably, however, a theological framework can better incorporate objections to the assertion of sovereign rationality than many secular ones can. Theological frameworks can appeal to the human mitigation of divine rationality by noting the Rezeptionsgeschichte of the latter: if our own rational capacities image the divine mind, we nevertheless always see the divine ratio in the dim mirror of our own intellect, via the approximations of human language, beleaguered by the distortions of sin and finitude. Both finitude and sin make us vulnerable to the limitations of human reason, confusing (for example) various forms of personal and social prejudice for the purely rational, and then perhaps advocating for one’s own kind based on this misplaced confidence in soi-disant rationality. Theology, however, has resources, within its own system of discourse, for explaining the miscarriages of reason, as well as the failure even to see these miscarriages for what they are. The tradition, after all, speaks of the clouding of the mind in consequence of the Fall. Clouding is not the same as obliteration, though it does represent defection from a standard. The Christian theological tradition is therefore in a position to assert both the power and the importance of human reason: its capacity to reach towards the good and the true, even to render these with fidelity in structures of reasoning we perceive as beautiful and therefore a worthy sacrifice of praise to the divine Trinity. Theology, however, can also confess its human situatedness, including the bounds and failings of its human authors. That rootedness in the human certainly applies to the writers of theological texts, but some would also claim it applies to the human tradents of the divine word who write the texts that make up the Bible. Allowing both a divine and a human element to scripture and theology makes for messiness and prevents our reaching any easy conclusion about the absolute truthfulness of these texts. The union of divinity and humanity in Christ could, however, also be considered messy, yet this complex truth lies at the heart of all Christian faith and Christian reflection: both are based on and embody the union of divinity and humanity. What Christian theology asserts as true is not only the content of the discourse, but also furnishes the rubric for interpreting the discourse.

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To say human reason is fallible constitutes no claim that it is worthless. We may risk being seduced into a too facile confidence in reason, but just as much may risk a too quick dismissal of a faculty on which we rely, and must rely for myriad enterprises necessary to human flourishing. A theological insistence on the double nature of human capacities, of human thought and its fruits, may therefore caution against facile conclusions to one side or the other of the dispute. Absolute trust in human reason is misplaced (history and experience indicate as much, quite aside from any theological consideration), but so, equally, is fundamental scepticism of reason and the structures of thought springing from it—whether these are touted on the basis of theological or postmodern principle. We cannot in the end make any in-principle determination entirely for or against reason or the aesthetic appeal of harmoniously ordered structures. We have no choice but to make use of reason— arguments against reason employ reason to make their case—in both theological and non-theological contexts, though the wisdom of both the Christian tradition and some secular forms of thought warn us to estimate its fruits with caution. In the process of reasoning, we create structures exhibiting harmony and order, which by their very shapeliness may attract towards the ideas they express. We can follow reason’s lead to conclusions, as long as we realize that apparently impeccable logic has sometimes been known to lose its way in the process of deduction. We can admire the beauty of edifices fashioned out of such reasoning, freely acknowledging the satisfactions they afford the mind, as long as we remain aware that the beauty, proportion, symmetry that are of human making are approximate, not infallible, guides to truth. Perfect truth, on the Christian account, is to be identified with nothing other than the living God. While we can undoubtedly twist ratio to our own purposes, we cannot deny that it finally belongs to God, and whoever would desire to belong to God cannot eschew the ratio and the beauty which are God’s own. It is in cleaving to this God that we can rightly discern truth and, on the Christian account therefore, theological reasoning requires union with God. This union by grace with the Source of beauty and truth can preserve theological reasoning from going awry, but it is also what theology can help to bring about, as Edwards reminds us, by fostering that delight in the things of God, that contemplation of the divine, which is the mind’s resting on the divine Persons who draw us towards their own communion.

5 Theology and Transfiguration If theology is one of the fruits of contemplation and inclines towards contemplation, then it cannot be described solely in the categories of secular thought. It presupposes grace and may itself become a tradent of grace. Equally, though, the ratio that theology employs and to which it testifies is a divine gift bestowed on all rational creatures and the ratio of theology is not a different reasoning, a different logic, from that used in secular contexts. One of the reasons that any Christian account of the intellect’s capacities and its fruits of reasoning must attend to secular notions of such matters is that the theological account must describe the states of both nature and grace. To the extent it is possible to distinguish these, the human mind’s capacities in its natural state are the same, whatever the matters being reasoned about what and whoever is the possessor of the mind. The issue is not whether there is some sort of similarity, but the way in which theology can be said to differ, given its unfolding within the context of sanctification. The problem is a delicate one, and the effects of sanctification are treated with surprising infrequency in theological debates over the reach and uses of human reason. To begin with, the states of nature and grace prove much more difficult to separate than one might guess from the frequency with which the contrast has been evoked. All our natural endowments are freely bestowed divine gifts from God, and as such, cannot be said to stand selfsufficiently. Grace cannot be adequately defined as a gift—our very existence is a gift—but only as some kind of addition to what is already a gift, the gift of those endowments of intellect and will that enable us to know and to love. To distinguish between nature and grace is to distinguish between one kind of gift and another, or one gift and the equally generous addition to it. If it were possible, on the basis of a distinction between nature and grace, to distinguish between a secular intellect and a Christian one, or between secular reasoning and Christian reasoning, we would have to assert that Christians reason differently about non-theological matters from the way non-Christians do. Could there be a Christian chemistry, Christian engineering, Christian aeronautics? If so, presumably these would be superior, given the assistance of grace.

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The understandable reluctance of theologians to make such claims may explain why discussions of the effects of grace became increasingly focused on the moral sphere: grace helps us to do the good, perhaps to know the good; much less often has it been asserted that grace helps us to know anything whatsoever. However, if as a result of the Fall, our entire nature is wounded, then presumably the postlapsarian intellect must be weakened, as well as our wills and bodies. Patristic theology is quite clear on this point, though later theology came to focus increasingly on the Fall’s effects on the will. When combined with an insistence that we can do no good without grace, this position would seem to leave the theologian in difficulty of explaining how the secular world manages to reason rightly at all, or why Christians are not always better thinkers than others. If one is disinclined to such conclusions (and there would appear to be much experiential evidence counting against them), then one must allow for similarity between any reason one could deem secular and that which one could deem Christian—hence the propriety of attending to secular epistemologies. It is possible, however, that some distinction needs to be made, not between one reasoning agent and another, but among the ends for which we reason: our natural endowments are meet for natural ends, but supernatural assistance is needed for supernatural ones. This position essentially rests on the assumption that finitude is the root problem in theological reasoning: the telos of theological reflection lies beyond our minds, so to attain it, we need something more than our minds. Aquinas employs this argument (Summa theologiae I.12, 4–5), though does so not to deny we have a problem as a result of the Fall, but to indicate we would have had a problem even without it. The intellect’s clouding after the Fall could then be seen as affecting our ability to reason about divine things, but not as necessarily reducing our capacity to reason about others. There are problems with this hypothetical position, implying as it does a selective postlapsarian impairment, but these are not greater than those created by asserting we need a donum superadditum in order to reason cogently about any matter at all. Because of an increasing inattentiveness to the theological issues surrounding the effect of the Fall specifically on the mind, modern Christian accounts of reason have also arguably failed to take due account of the doctrine of sanctification. This shortcoming is most noticeable in the (unproductive) wars over natural theology, both sides of the debate suffering in consequence. The advocates of natural theology view God’s existence as demonstrable without recourse to revelation. Since they already have the benefit of the Bible, it is hard to understand their certainty that they would reach the same conclusions were they unaware of its contents. Revelation, while not equatable with grace tout court, may certainly be described as a divinely bestowed gift that facilitates our relation to and progress towards God. It therefore bears a close resemblance

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to grace, and could be considered one form of grace, a means by which the mind is lifted closer to God. Perhaps it is possible to prove the existence of God, for example, without the mind’s having been raised in this way, but the fact remains that those offering the ‘proofs’ have benefited from it. Just so, it is impossible to calculate the effect of grace proper on the mind that insists upon natural law ethics. If its purpose is to ground the rationality of a certain view of the good, and the God whom Christians affirm as good continuously communicates goodness to the baptized, then it is on theological grounds necessary to affirm that the baptized who make these arguments are themselves already aided by grace. (If they were operating solely on the basis of natural reason, it is, moreover, hard to understand why other apparently rational people do not reach the same conclusions about contentious moral issues.) If the advocates of natural reason often sound as though they are commending a purely human faculty that somehow operates outside of the sphere of divine influence, however, those who insist on the mind’s postlapsarian warping seem wilfully to forget that the Incarnation and the sacraments are supposed to leave our nature not only restored, but closer to God than the First Parents were. The Fall cannot be the last word in a Christian account of human nature and the theological use of reason, and anyone engaging in theological debate has already benefited from Christian teaching and the lavishing of grace by myriad means. It is one thing, however, to insist that an interpretation of theological method must take account of sanctification and to specify exactly how a doctrine of sanctification and a theological method should be related. If, in virtue of the Incarnation, the sacraments, and the gifts of grace, the mind is said to be regenerated or illuminated, it follows that theology, at least when practised by those in a state of grace, should reflect the divine gift of sanctification. Theologically necessary though this conclusion is, it raises vexatious practical questions. Are we on grounds of this consideration to assume that a theology written by an author assumed to be the beneficiary of grace (for example, in regular receipt of the sacraments) is necessarily better than the theology written by a lax Christian, or indeed, an agnostic? What if reason told us that the theology of the less- or un-sanctified is in fact better theology? On what basis would we judge between theologies of those who have equal claims to sanctification? What business do we have making any judgement about the state of someone else’s soul, anyway? Such is not the legitimate province of theology. It is arguably not the province of any Christianity. The dilemma—of how to avoid broaching inappropriate and unanswerable questions, while acknowledging the legitimately theological ones that give rise to the latter—may be avoided if one takes the view that grace is not irresistible. If this point is accepted, it becomes possible to maintain that grace makes it possible for a sanctified mind to trace the workings of the divine mind, but cannot guarantee the rectitude of any human theology, inasmuch as the

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human person can resist the intellectual workings of grace just as much as moral ones. The assertion of sanctification merely establishes the possibility that theology could have a divine contribution, and not result solely from human ingenuity. The doctrine of sanctification would then ground the assertion of double mimesis, indicating how the postlapsarian weakened human mind could nevertheless be capax Dei in this life, but also by suggesting how the divine mind might make its imprint on theology. The issue here is that if we allow the divine to permeate human discourse solely through scripture, theology would have to consist of no more than the repetition of scripture (unless it became a purely human enterprise altogether). Once theology attempts to present the narrative, the drama, the exhortation, and poetry of scripture as an orderly, internally consistent whole, showing how its constituents fit together, making sense of it as a divine discourse rather than a confused jumble, a human element enters the picture. That human element would be present even if no more than proof-texting or the production of scriptural catenas were attempted: the mere gathering of texts for a particular purpose enlists a human mind in the process, a mind with its discernment and its prejudices, its desire to find in the sacred page a meaning meet for its own sensibilities. Without some regeneration of the human mind, as well as divine aid in theological reflection, that human element could lead only to distortion of the scriptural message. This point in itself illustrates the inevitable systematicity of theology, for we are now reasoning from the doctrine of sanctification to a theory of theological method, acknowledging as we do so that neither locus is self-sufficient, but can only speak truly when due account is taken of the other. This procedure illustrates an important point regarding the nature of theology. The arrangement of a formal systematic theology (that is, one conforming to the genre definition) implies accumulation: doctrines presented earlier in the scheme generally underlie those that follow. One may be able to see this kind of building going on even in works where the author does not explicitly connect the point in hand to some earlier one. This readily observable procedure might lead to the conclusion that the movement of inference is exclusively in one direction, that earlier sections of the work imply later ones, but not the reverse. The assumption is natural enough, given the nature of reading: we assume that what we have read first is logically, and not only chronologically, prior to what we read later. Theology, however, does not conform to the simplest ordering of narrative (and, of course, not all narratives begin the tale at the beginning of the sequence of events narrated and end at the last). Although theology’s prime source consists in significant part in narratives, it is the nature of theological discourse to transmute its sources: out of narrative (as well as poetry, prophecy, and the other genres of scripture, as well as the diverse resources of tradition, from liturgy to conciliar statements to hymnody and

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canon law) emerges a new form, one grounded in history, and therefore, time, but which weaves the temporal into a web of mutually implicating relations. These relations are precisely not eternal (they are still couched in human language and still reflect human processes of thought), but neither do they reflect the temporally grounded logic of narrative. Theology, in other words, reasons both backwards and forwards, as well as sideways, laterally, diagonally. The end of a text or an argument may shape its beginning, the parts pervade the whole. A theology might take its root from a doctrine of creation or from an eschatology, from Christology, or anthropology, whether or not any of these doctrines stands at the beginning of the exposition. If theology reflects the state of affairs obtaining between God and other things, then the web of logical interrelation reflects just what is the case, not what has merely asserted to be so on the basis of human ingenuity. If a theology treats theological reasoning before sanctification in the order of prose, this does not in itself mean that method is in any sense prior to sanctification. The lines of logical implication extend in many directions within the theological web, so that the whole is always in some measure present in each of the parts. The order of reading may reflect an instructive logic (grasping one point may help in understanding the rationale for one to be presented later), but that reading order nevertheless does not imply a unidirectional logic. If a systematic theology treats theological method before sanctification, the doctrine of sanctification may nevertheless be presupposed to the conception of method. The structure of theological texts and arguments reflects the state of affairs theology describes: a relation of mutual implication, such that the Creator is prior to the creature, but the creature’s condition is prior to the attempt to name and praise the Creator. The interlacing of the strands of the cosmic web therefore indicates the nature of theological reasoning. The nature of the relations obtaining among creatures, and between the Trinity and creatures, as well as the relation of theological discourse to the realities it denotes and represents, are reflected in the structure of discourse. Reflecting on the conditions under which theology is written prompts reflection on humanity’s state, coram Deo, and on the divine Giver of salvific knowledge; reflecting on salvation prompts reflection on the saving knowledge of God revealed in scripture, a knowledge of the utterly noncontingent divine nature. The very drama of reconciliation and sanctification, and not just reflection upon these realities, forms the human persons who ponder, write, read, and interpret theology. It is not the business of theology to make adjudications regarding the spiritual state of any of those persons; it does lie within theology’s remit to state that, in principle, the redeemed and sanctified are capable of apprehending and rendering divine truth. One significance of the doctrine of sanctification for our purposes is that it grounds the possibility of any theological discourse in a postlapsarian world. It answers the question—at least in theory—of how clouded minds can

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understand divine things dressed in the simple garb of human thought and language. The assertion of regeneration and sanctification does not guarantee the rectitude of any particular theology (or theologian); it merely serves as the theoretical underpinning of the possibility that human beings who seek the truth may find it and speak it. Or to put the matter more bluntly, the effects of sin on the intellect cannot be said to invalidate the enterprise of theological reflection, because of the theological principles dictated by any Christian doctrine of sanctification, whether or not a given theology articulates these explicitly or prior to its articulation of methodological principle. The appeal to sanctification would not appear to address another crucial element of the human condition, however: finitude. Finitude does not, of course, exclusively correlate with blindness or sin. It stipulates limitation, but also particularity: theology is written by this person, in this time and place, of this temper of mind and spiritual formation. While this particularity can give rise to the shrinking of its horizon, it can equally root theology deeply in human experience, and so give it the capacity to speak profoundly to the condition of those for whom it is written. Narrowness of vision may be the price of one kind of depth. That depth may in itself witness to the doubly divine-and-human character of theology, for it attests to theology’s historicity and the indwelling of God in history. This, after all, is one of the great underlying themes of the Bible: the presence of the eternal in the midst of the temporal, the tabernacling of God among us. It is the premise of the history of Israel and of the Incarnation. Both of these in turn ground the witness of scripture, whose purpose it is to relate God’s dealings with Israel and to articulate the gospel of the Word made flesh. To object that theology must be merely human because its authors are human, or cannot constitute a form of mimesis because of its human element, is to deny the very premise of scripture: that God speaks through human agents who use human language (itself finite and therefore only partly capax Dei). One could maintain that the uniqueness of scripture stipulates that it is only God’s speech in scripture which manifests the effects of sanctification, but to do so would be to declare a limitation on the power of God. This principle is in any case not derivable from scripture itself; ironically, this kind of appeal to the uniqueness of scripture has itself no basis in scripture. What scripture does make clear is that its authors at times transcended the bounds of finitude through divine self-giving, found eloquence they did not know they had, became able to prophesy, to see what others around them could not see (whether their vision was eschatological or just clear-sightedness about present injustices). Could this kind of ekstasis, standing outside the self and its limitations, apply to theology as well as scripture, however? The theological tradition itself provides elements of an answer. Augustine’s conception of illumination, while susceptible to divergent interpretations, nevertheless clearly insists that the human mind can be lifted beyond its

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usual capacities by participation in divine light (see, for example, Epistle 120:10). In other words, one form of union with God yields epistemological consequences and this state of illumination is not specifically confined to the writers of scriptural texts. In the Eastern tradition, the doctrine of deification found in most writers similarly asserts union with God by grace, and is tied to epistemological effects via its association with contemplation.1 In the thought of one Eastern theologian, Gregory Nyssen, the doctrine of deification is specifically considered in light of the assertion of divine infinity in one of the seminal texts of patristic mystical theology, The Life of Moses. On Nyssen’s account (a view Jean Daniélou dubbed ‘epectasy’, 1995: 56–71), our progress towards God must be said to be infinite, because God is infinite: we will never ‘catch up’ to divine nature and become equal to it or identical with it.2 The consummation envisaged in the Christian tradition preserves this integrity of persons: just as there is personal distinction in the Trinity, which does not on the Christian account impair unity, so even in the state of union with God, human persons retain their personal identity. We are not simply absorbed into divine nature, any more than divine nature is modified by being united to us. We remain finite (this point is stipulated by the doctrine of the resurrection), yet participate in divine infinity. What it means to do so is that we can everlastingly grow holier, more godlike, even as we are already one with the Three. This process of continual growth has no end, because there is no end to the boundless divine nature. Although Nyssen does not explicitly draw out the epistemological consequences of this idea, we might: growth in knowledge of God accompanies (perhaps precedes, though the ordering is not important in the current context) growth in love of God and holiness. To participate in divine nature entails the finite creature’s participation, by grace, in the infinite divine knowledge. One salient feature of doctrines of deification is that they decline to make sharp distinctions between sanctification and consummation: the fullness of sanctification is not reserved exclusively for the Age to Come. The combined force of these assertions implies that it is possible for the saints in this life to participate in God’s own knowledge, a knowledge that will be extended in saecula saeculorum. Once again, the point can scarcely but remain an in-principle determination. As long as theology bears the marks of its writers—their times, their ecclesial formation, their persons—it remains in some profound sense finite. Its limitations are limitations of vision and understanding, and to the extent theology bears the marks of these limitations, it suffers also from blindness, 1

See Williams 1999a for an elaboration of this point. Life of Moses, sections 224ff in the translation of Malherbe and Ferguson, pp. 112ff in Musurillo’s edition of the Greek. 2

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prejudice, and even sin. Nevertheless, to the extent that it bears the mark of participation in divine life, it bears witness to the eternal, the absolutely good and holy, and the infinite. Though most theologies betray some sign of their author’s shortcomings, we may just as much hope that theologians will also catch and render some glimpse of holiness, beauty, and eternity. Although Nyssen uniquely takes account of divine infinity in his articulation of deification, the doctrine itself is by no means an exclusively Eastern phenomenon; it is found also in the West, in writers as diverse as Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin. If, in virtue of the assertion that by grace we become partakers of divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4), then the theologian must look to the doctrine of God for indication of what it means to be sanctified, and what is signified by consummation. All theology does this in some measure, of course, since sanctification is seen as consisting in holiness and holiness is the proper attribute of God. A strong version of sanctification in Western theology may be found in the work of John Wesley, who insisted that Jesus’s injunction to be perfect, as the Father is perfect (Matt. 5:48 par) be taken with full seriousness, instead of being cordially ignored or dismissed as mere hyperbole.3 In the face of the practical difficulty of pointing to any perfect human being (other than the person uttering the injunction), Wesley nevertheless insisted it was necessary to assert the possibility of human perfection, as a point of theology, and to determine to strive for it as attainable, on spiritual and moral principle. The difficulties raised by asserting perfection of human beings (considerable though they are) nevertheless pale in comparison with those posed by asserting infinity. Perfection can be taken in a relative sense: a perfect mouse would be tiny, largely defenceless, and unable to fly. These limitations would not constitute a defection from perfect mousehood, though, because mice are not supposed to be large, fierce, and capable of flight. ‘Perfect’ can mean (indeed, usually does mean) a perfect instance of this kind of thing, rather than ‘possessing every possible desirable attribute’. Infinity would appear to be qualitatively different. If its root meaning is taken as ‘limitless’, then it would not appear to admit of any relative interpretation. Moreover, it would not appear possible to predicate infinity of a creature, inasmuch as finitude (in contrast to sin) constitutes an essential part of our nature; it is not a consequence of the Fall, but the way God, in his infinite wisdom, made us to be. The limitations of our knowledge and understanding are therefore no more intended to be transcended than our bodies ultimately to be shed. The dual assertion of divine infinity and human participation in divine nature seems to lead, nonetheless, inexorably to the conclusion that we participate in divine infinity and epistemologically, this would mean that our knowledge of God stretches out to a horizon that is forever receding. What This notion is expounded in several of Wesley’s works, but notably in ‘Christian Perfection’ and ‘Thoughts on Christian Perfection’. 3

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there is to know of God is neverending and the quest to know God, to speak of God, is none other than the attempt to hold God before the mind, whether in deduction or questioning or contemplation, and through this steady gaze to be drawn into that ultimate relationality that is the Trinity, the communion of knowledge and love. Knowledge of God is therefore not an attained state, but part of a process of everlasting transformation. The mimesis that is theology attests to both its divine and human sources; equally, however, it manifests the complexity that is human nature, its goodness and frailty, its earth-boundedness and for-heaven-boundness. The reference in Christian epistemology to notions such as illumination sets Christian epistemologies apart from secular ones, even though, as I have been at pains to suggest, there are good reasons for theologians to attend to the debates of secular philosophers and a necessary contiguity between what the secular world asserts of human thought processes and what Christians assert. There is only one kind of human brain, and the qualities, limitations, peculiarities of this brain constrain the Christian and the non-Christian alike; the patterns of thought of human brains and, to some extent, what we recognize as logical reasoning, do not differ. There is no Christian logic which differs from secular or philosophical logic. Indeed, on the Christian account, secular logic is at best an ungrateful borrower of God’s ratio, a borrower which declines to acknowledge its indebtedness. There is, however, a difference between a Christian and a secular epistemology, inasmuch as the Christian one acknowledges not only the frailty of the human mind, but its dependence on a mind greater than its own: the divinity that not only dwarfs the discourse that seeks to represent it, but lifts those who offer the discourse beyond themselves. The foregoing considerations have formal as well as material implications. Any theological epistemology must be able to take account of the prime object of faith, the Trinity. There is a sense, though, in which that epistemology is itself the object of faith. The more radical rejections of reason on postmodernist grounds cannot be integrated into a Christian epistemology in the first instance because of the centrality of ratio to the Christian doctrine of God. An equally important consideration, however, is what the Church has always taken the content of Christian life to comprise: faith. Its conception of faith certainly included trust as a quality of personal relations, but it was never exclusively this; from the Church’s earliest beginnings, being a Christian meant affirming certain propositions to be true. Even in its most pietistic and anti-rationalistic forms, Christianity has not only included an intellectual component, but has been defined by this: a Christian is one who confesses Jesus Christ is Lord and as one with the Father and the Spirit. These are inescapably propositional claims, not solely expressions of existential attitudes. Formally, then, a theological epistemology includes not only the content of faith (theological propositions), but also expresses an at least limited and/or qualified trust in rationality itself, in the intelligibility and explicability—the

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communicability—of propositions. This state of affairs indicates that trust in reason is itself part of Christian faith, part of the act of faith a Christian makes in virtue of being a Christian. The confessional and credal components of Christianity stipulate that the Christian life includes the mind’s engagement with the things of God, since one cannot articulate a profession of faith without understanding the claims made by that profession. One could call the Christian life a meeting of minds, divine and human (as well, of course, as the meeting of wills and hearts). To the extent that it is so, it is built on the assumption that ultimate truths do exist, that human beings can know these truths to at least some extent and that knowledge of these truths is important, spiritually and existentially. The relations of the divine Persons to human persons are based in significant part on the disclosure and apprehension of truth, that divine self-impartation that is revelation, that human ‘yes’ to the divine Other that is affirmation of the propositions of the faith in both creeds and doxologies. If so, then it follows the relations of Christians with God are based on the at least tacit understanding that the divine self-disclosure is reliable and that human beings can grasp this revelation, benefit from it, indeed revel in it. Given the Christian conception of faith, with the unmistakably cognitive component of the baptismal questions and answers or confession of belief in the Trinity, all Christians effectively claim to trust in both ratio and the conveyance of divine ratio in the frail and uncertain medium of human language. Given the limitations and impairments of human reason, as well as the obliqueness and ambiguities of human language, the risk of Christian faith entails not only trust in (for example) the existence of God or the reality of the events of Christ’s earthly life, but also trust in the intelligibility of these and the possibility of their representation in human words. Again, we confront the possibility and the dangers of excess. If Christian faith can be taken as entailing trust in ratio itself, do we not risk placing blind faith in what could well be no more than fallible human reasoning? Although there can scarcely be infallible guarantees that any item of belief is free from a human admixture, theology itself provides criteria for its own assessment. The first criterion is consonance with scripture. Granted, there is disagreement among Christian groups as to whether this consonance would mean replication of some passage of scripture, mere non-contradiction of scripture, or something in between. These disagreements are for our purposes less important than the fact that all Christian theologies accept they have some accountability to the source all of them acknowledge as theologically primary: God’s self-disclosure in human history, via human language. Even the lowest level of consonance (non-contradiction) entails answerability to something that is not theology itself. Second, most varieties of Christian theology also answer to something like a sustained conversation about the implications of scripture. Some Christian

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groups call this ‘tradition’ and specifically identify it as authoritative. Groups that do not acknowledge tradition as authoritative—and which, in some cases, openly contest its authority—nevertheless in practice hew to it in one way or another. Calvin claimed councils have erred—but his own theology adheres to the Christology of the first four ecumenical councils, theology which is not entirely derivable from scripture (cp. Institutes IV.ix). A Radical Reformation group, such as the Amish, might adhere for minutest details of their lives to an Ordnung, some of whose stipulations can only questionably be derived directly from scripture. It would be hard to find a Christian group whose beliefs and practices are not significantly shaped by its own past, or in which disputes about authentic belief and practice are sometimes settled by appeal to the community’s past. So Christian theology answers not only to scripture, but to an extensive body of interpretation of scripture which is communally accepted as valid interpretation. Far from detracting from the authority of scripture or exalting human reasoning, this state of affairs does the opposite: it presupposes that no one interpreter can be trusted to render the fullness of scriptural truth and that the crucible of interpretation is also the cradle of sanctification: the church. It is the community’s collective wisdom, in precisely its diversity, to which we look to understand the Bible, precisely because of human finitude and sin. This state of affairs is not incidental, for it is within the community that Christians are sanctified, by corporate worship, by instruction, and by the sacraments. Communities are, of course, as much subject to both sin and finitude as individuals are, but some forms of finitude (the limitation of outlook precisely because of historical circumstance) are potentially corrigible if the circle of interpreters spans historical epochs. Likewise, some forms of sin (blindness caused by membership in a privileged group, for example) are also potentially corrigible if the community is willing to acknowledge a wide enough group of believers as interpreters. The diversity of perspectives in the community, in other words, can serve as a guard against the most deleterious effects of finitude and sin, even if it cannot act as an absolute guarantee of the community’s fidelity to the word of God. Diversity can, of course, lead to discord that is scarcely edifying. All traditions are querulous to some extent. To trace a community’s history is not simply to acknowledge the record of consensus, but equally, the saga of dispute. While some of the latter can be dismaying, given the community’s calling to charity as well as truth, the theological debates of the past signify the Christian tradition’s capacity for self-questioning. The dangers of trust in ratio are mitigated—though not, of course, entirely obviated—by the challenging and disputing that the tradition enfolds. As long as a tradition can tolerate such debate within its borders, it can afford to trust in ratio, knowing that this trust is not placed in any one human being, or even a single privileged group, but in a group that, at the very least, spans more than one time period and many

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cultures and contains within itself many perspectives, and a group which theology affirms as indwelt by the Holy Spirit.4 The extended conversation that is the Christian tradition (however repellent it may be in its polemical aspects) can be considered one medium of sanctification, therefore: theological dissonance and dispute is one means by which each of us is pushed to attend to the voices of others. If at times this attending has meant little more than locating something to distort so as the better to vilify, the protagonists have nevertheless had to listen in some measure to others. However unsuccessful the ecumenical movement has appeared to be, when measured by the yardstick of visible unity, the current theological climate of academic theology does not permit the kind of wilful distortion and gratuitous mudslinging that was common in the past, and the painstaking theological work of ecumenists is largely responsible for this climate. Disagreement may still be sharp, but it is generally based on a much higher level of understanding of the theology being rejected. To this degree, the ecumenical movement (and therefore theological discourse) has sanctified its participants: they at least engage more justly with one another now. The individuals concerned may thus be said to have grown in a cardinal virtue, and the Christian community (taken now as comprising all Christians, even those busy denying the reality of Christian faith in others) becomes the school which teaches such virtues. Theological discourse may be said to be a means by which we challenge and change each other, argumentation a means by which we inch, even if reluctantly, ever closer towards truth. The communion of saints is the body of those who are not only holy, but being made holier in will, and also in mind. Just as our dealings with each other in everyday life are often the means by which we learn charity, patience, and perseverance, so engagement with theology teaches justice in the judgement of ideas and of those who advance them, truthfulness in what we say of God and how we represent the thought of those who attempt to speak of God, love of the truth, and courage in speaking it. As with the sacraments, our minds are sanctified one by one, but always in the context and by the medium of the communion of saints. That community extends through time, not only in the strict sense that it has a past and is shaped by historical events and circumstances, but also in the sense that it judges history, announcing the provisionality of all human epochs and their orientation to that which transcends them all: the Age to Come. The eschatological future does not imply denigration of time and history, since 4 One could, of course, argue that until recently most Christian churches excluded women from their leadership and were therefore in fact comprised solely of a privileged group. There is some truth to this objection, but women have in fact always had a hand in shaping Christian practice, and through it, Christian belief. The Roman Catholic tradition, for example, owes a great deal to its female saints and religious and the fact that these still have no place in the hierarchy of the institutional church does not mean women have had no role in shaping tradition.

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humankind remains temporal: we are promised everlasting life, rather than atemporality, the unending succession of moments we inhabit, rather than the absence of moments that come into being and end. Moments end, but the sequence of moments does not. This everlasting time is the creaturely equivalent of divine eternity. The indefinite vista, the neverending series of horizons, was taken by Eastern theologians such as Nyssen and Nazianzen to imply neverending growth in holiness, but it could just as much be taken as neverending knowing of God and divine things. The activity by which and the state in which we grow in this knowledge was often labelled by the Eastern Fathers theōria, or contemplation, and in both the Eastern and Western mystical traditions, this contemplation was largely taken to be wordless—though not for that mindless—absorption in the divine, the stillness typically following meditation on scripture or the recitation of the psalms. This pattern is that known in the West as lectio divina: reading (lectio), followed by rumination on a text (meditatio), prayer (oratio) and finally contemplation (contemplatio).5 The mind’s engagement with God, its cleaving to and union with God, can be no less than knowledgeable adoration, adoration preceded by reflection, which is what contemplation is: to know God rightly is to love God, and to love God entails knowledge, if love is not be confused with senseless infatuation. The ‘business’ of heaven is this endless tarrying in the knowledge and love of God; the mind’s absorption in God to no end other than abiding in God. By grounding love and by drawing the human person deeper into relation with God, contemplation can be said to work sanctification. If theology can be considered a prelude to contemplation, perhaps even a form of contemplation, then it, too, may serve as the medium of sanctification. The exercise of the mind, stretching towards the things of God; the absorption of the mind, gazing on God; the union of the mind with the Trinity as it is caught up in the mutuality of regard: all these constitute the mind’s sanctification through contemplation. Theological reflection may seem to fall into the category of only the first, but this exercise has always the potential to open out into adoration, and adoration to yield to union. Indeed, it seems to have been the assumption of earlier Christian theologians that theology could and did function in this way: the first of Nazianzen’s theological orations, the opening of Augustine’s Confessions and De Trinitate, the opening of Anselm’s Monologion: all these explicitly make the connection between the acts of writing and reading theology, of thinking theologically, and the acts of meditation and contemplation. Anselm claimed he only wrote the Monologion because his monastic brethren pestered him constantly, but that he offers it as food for 5 Although this pattern is typically associated with St Benedict, it is hard to find clear evidence of it in Benedict’s Rule itself. To find it explicitly, one must go to authors such as Guigo II the Carthusian (Letter on the Contemplative Life) and Hugh of St Victor (Didascalion V).

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reflection—not debate, not instruction, and certainly not for personal glory (like Augustine, he welcomes correction), but reflection. The text represents the fruit of the author’s reflection and is in turn designed to prompt reflection on the part of the reader. That reflection may be discursive, sometimes even pugnacious, but it may, as in the manner of lectio divina, also be the meditatio that unfolds into contemplatio. What is theology? The words on the page, the reflection that preceded these words, or the reflection and perhaps wordless gazing that follows on from them? All but the last clearly fall within theology’s purview. We can only leave as a question to the reader whether there really is cogent ground to exclude the last. Old-fashioned manuals of ascetical theology in the Western tradition described various methods of meditation (the Salesian, Sulpician, Ignatian, and so on) and distinguished firmly—at times sharply—between such meditation and contemplation. While many formal ‘systems’ of meditation included an affective aspect, or concluded with an ‘act’ of will (a stated determination, as the result of meditation, to perform some act or acquire a new habit), meditators who followed the prescribed patterns would still spend more of their time on a mental tracing of the significance of Biblical episodes, or reflection on the great propositions of the faith. A certain amount of time would also be spent in extracting the significance of these events, scenes, verses, or propositions, or in other words, extrapolating from them. This extrapolation is a form of connection-making, and as such, its impulse is the same as that of systematic theology: to see individual elements of belief in relation to a greater whole. In the process of seeing the data and the wondering of faith as part of a whole, those who strive to see are themselves immersed in the larger whole. The act of gazing becomes its own end, the work of formal meditation and theology alike a means of keeping the restless mind fixed on God. Whatever distinctions were once habitually made between meditation and contemplation, the former was generally taken as presupposed to the latter. The mind’s impulse to rove faith’s terrain eventually subsides into stillness; the busy work of forging connections yields to the calm gaze that takes in the whole and rests in adoration; just so theology. To consider any one of its parts—the doctrine of God or of creation or the church—is necessarily to embark on analysis of the others, for they refuse to remain atomized. The mind that cannot help but perceive these connections—for they comprise the reality of the creatures who write theology—also to some degree perceives the whole of which the connected elements form part. That perception of the whole may consist in no more than ephemeral glimpses, but these nevertheless gesture towards the eternal. The sanctified mind that views the cosmos as a luminous fabric sees the world as a divinely spun web, and the propositions that describe it as an intricate system, its coherence a unity. To perceive and wonder at that unity, even in an imperfect

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rendering, with all its tensions and contradictions, is both to enter into theology in its deepest, self-truest, form, and to pray. If theology is systematic because it is necessarily concerned with rationality and relationality, it is also necessarily contemplative, inasmuch as it draws its writers and readers more deeply into the divine reality which the discourse, for all its frailty, mirrors.

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Index Abelard 110 Alston, William 36, 37 n.17, 65 Age to Come 12, 126, 219, 224–5 Ancient Greek philosophy 187; see also Aristotle, Plato, Platonism, Xenophanes Anghern, Emil 67 n. 50 Anselm 2, 142–7, 225–6 ontological argument 88 Apollinarius 109 apologetics 50, 51 apophaticism 130–1, 136–7, 138–40 and scripture 13–1, 140 Aquinas, Thomas 2, 4, 7, 33, 40–1, 139, 177, 194–6 and Aristotle 194 on Biblical tropes 118–20 and divine mission 149–50 Five Ways 88 on natural law 107 and reason 107 on theological language (131), on beauty (see beauty, Aquinas on) on the Trinity 147–52 Arians 109, 110 n. 33 Aristotle 23 Aristotelian logic 24, 25, 27 Athanasius 26–7, 110 n.33 atonement, doctrine of 96–7 Audi, Robert 33 n. 12, 33 n. 13 , 37, 39, 50, 51, 56, 60, 61–2 Augustine 21 n., 143, 144, 148, 218–9, 225 on beauty 189–93 on beauty as relational 190 and Platonism, see Platonism on tradition 85 Austin, J.L. 42 authority in theology 108–16, see also, warrants; norms Balthasar, Hans Urs von 188, 202–4 baptism, see liturgy Barbour, Ian 94 Barfield, Owen 120, 121, 122 Barth, Karl 3, 17, 69 n.53, 87 n. 11, 97, 100, 193 n.25 on Anselm 99 Basil the Great 98, 115 Bataille, G. 67 n. 50

beatific vision, see Age to Come Beauty Aquinas on 194–196, 204 as attraction 20, 189, 191, 192–3, 197–8, 206–7, 210 Augustine on 189–193, 196, 204 (on beauty as relational, 190) Balthasar on 202–204 Calvin on 196–197 Jonathan Edwards on 197–201, 204, 205 as harmony 188–9, 192, 194, 195, 200, 201, 204, 206, 209–10 Pseudo-Dionysius on 193–4 and ratio 20, 206–7, 210 and scripture 206, 210 Patrick Sherry on 204–205 and truth 20, 209 belief and knowledge 29, 104–5 Bernstein, Richard 61, 62–3 Bible see scripture Black, Max 120, 123, 124 de Boer, Jesse 54 n. Boethius 149 Boff, Leonardo 180–184 BonJour, Laurence 28n, 35–6, 37, 38, 42, 49, 50, 51 n.32, 53 Borges, Jorge Luis 66 n.47 Bromiley, Geoffrey 83 n. Brown, Frank Burch 205 Calvin, Jean 3, 41, 95 n, 103 n. 27, 104, 107, 155–60, 177, 196–7 on the Fall 155 on prayer 159–60 on scripture 158–9 Campenhausen, Hans von 81 n.2 Chardin, Teilhard de 77 Christology 24, 27, 106, 135, 152, 154, 211 Clement 84, n. coherence in theology, see systematicity of theology coherence theory of truth 43–5, 47 and deflationary theory of truth 43 n. coherentism and aesthetics 207–8 and Christian theology 13–15, 71, 102–3, 127, 173, 184, 187–8 objections to 39, 40–2, 44

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coherentism (cont.) as theory of epistemological justification 38–42, 49 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 201 communion of saints 115–6 conscience 161–2 contemplation 7, 21–2, 212, 214, 225, 226–7 in Calvin 160 in Gregory Nazianzen 134 in Jonathan Edwards 198, 212, 225 in Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite 140, 142 contextual theology see also Boff, Leonardo feminist theology 93–4, 113 contextualism 58–9 correspondence theory of truth 42–3, 47 creation , doctrine of 17, 158–9 Creator-creature relation 4, 70, 100, 102, 129, 140, 149, 150, 156, 157, 165, 178, 184, 217 creeds 48 Church councils 109–10 Second Vatican Council 85 Cyril of Alexandria 204 Damascene, John, see John Damascene Danz, Christian 71–2 Davidson, D. 41 deification 97, 219–20 Denys, see Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite Derrida, Jacques 64 Descartes, René 33 Divine attributes aseity 70, 180 beauty 20, 193, 198, 200, 203, see also beauty goodness 140, 163, 173 holiness 171, 174, 175–6, 177, 198 infinity 8, 133, 156 as meta-attribute 8–9 love 166–8, 171, 174, see also love of God omnipotence 177 omnipresence 178–9 omniscience 179–80 perfection 8 rationality 8, 15, 17, 64, 212, 221 relationality, see relationality simplicity 175 n., 195, 206 as meta-attribute 8 transcendence 9, 134, 138–9, 145, 157, 162, 179 unity of 175 n., 195 doctrine 113–16 development of 86, 97–8 and theologoumena 114–16

doctrine of God 171, 173, 174, 177–8, 209, 220 and sacramental theology 179 doxology 21, 133, 142, 154, 157, 177, 183 theology as 142, 167, 183 Dummett, Michael 32 n. Eastern Orthodox theology 97–8 canonization of saints in 115 ecclesiology 52 Eco, Umberto 195 ecumenism 224 Edwards, Jonathan 91 n.16, 197–201, 204, 205, 212, see also beauty, Jonathan Edwards on embodiment 119 epistemology, see also coherentism, correspondence, foundationalism and certitude 11, 12, 48, 51, 59–60 personal knowledge 27–30 and plausibility 65 and probability 65 theological and secular philosophical 27–32 eschatology, see Age to Come eternity 178 faith 12, 32 n. 10, 83, 99, 137, 173–4, 203, 221, 222 Fall, doctrine of, see sin Farley, Robert & Hodgson, Peter C. 109 n. Farrer, Austin 89 feminist theology, see contextual theology: feminist theology Feyerabend, Paul 35, 58, 63, 77 n. 61 Flew, Anthony 50, 60 Florovsky, Georges 85, 110 n.33 Foley, Robert 62 forgiveness 91 Foucault, M. 47 n. foundationalism: and Aquinas 33 and Christian theology 10–13, 71, 127 and Descartes 33 and experience 57 moderate foundationalism 51 regress problem 36 (under weaknesses/ remove ‘weaknesses’?) and self-evidentiality 34–5 and string theory 207 as theory of epistemological justification 32–8, 49, 51–56 weaknesses of 34–8 foundherentism 56–8, 59 freedom 170 Frege, Gottlob 82 n. 5

Index Frei, Hans 125 Frye, Northrop 120 n.40 Fumerton, Richard 65 Geertz, Clifford 58 n. Gettier problems 50 Gregory Nazianzen 75, 132–8, 225 Gregory Nyssen 2, 75, 219, 220, 225 grace, see sanctification Greek religion 7–8, see also Hesiod, Homer, Xenophanes Greek thought, see also Ancient Greek Philosophy, Greek religion and reason in theology 88–9 Greco, John 37 Haack, Susan 32, 36, 40, 41–2, 56–8, 59 Hanson, R.C.P. 84 n. Harnack, Adolf von 97 Hegel, G.W.F. 201 Helm, Paul 28–9 Hesiod 7 history 70 Holmer, Paul 27, 67, 71 n. Homer 8 Hooker, Richard, 138 n. Hopkins, Gerard Manley 165 Horwich, Paul 46 Huguenots 108 idolatry 157–8, 160 Ignatius of Antioch 75 imagination and intellect 161, 162–3 imago Dei 185 and reason 17, 150 Incarnation 134, 166, 168–9 and the cross 203 Irenaeus 84, 204 James, William 49 n.29 Jansenists 108 Jenson, Robert 84, 89, 94 Jewish exegesis of scripture 187 John Damascene 2, 77 justification in atonement 96 joint declaration of Roman Catholic and Lutheran Churches on (justification) 111 justification by faith 114, 153 justification in epistemology 50–2, 58, 65 and rationality 60–4 Kant, Immanuel 68, 71 Kasper, Walter 101 Kelsey, David 77 n.61, 101 n.25, 104, 108, 109, 122

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Kierkegaard, Sren 164–9 critique of systems 72–6, 165 on Hegel and Hegelians 74 Kuhn, T. 35, 49, 58, see also philosophy of science Lakoff, George & Johnson, Mark 121, 124 Lampe, Geoffrey 84 n. lectio divina 225, 226 Leech, Geoffrey 121 Levi-Strauss, Claude 63 n. Levin Samuel 121, 122 Levinas, Emmanuel 67 n.50 liberalism, theological 91 Lindbeck, George 54, 55 n, 95–6, 102 Lindley, David 207 liturgy baptism 86, 138 and doctrine 85, 86, 132 Locke, John 33 n. Lossky, Vladimir 98 n. Louth, A. 2 n.2, 28 n.7, 77 n.60, love of God 145–6 Luther, Martin 68–9, 152–5 on scripture 96–7, 152–3 Lutheran theology 111, 114 MacCormac, Earl 122, 123 n.43 MacIntyre, Alasdair 102 Magesterium of the Roman Catholic Church 85, 109, 111 Marcionite controversy 84 Mary 154 materiality 133 Maximus the Confessor 98 Menne, A. 67 n. 50, 69–71 metaphor, theories of 120–6, see also scripture: figurative language in Metzger, Bruce 81–2, 117 Meynell, Hugo 52 miracles 208–9 Monothelite controversy 109–110 Morse, Christopher 102 n. Moser, Paul 28 n., 32, 33, 34, 35 n.16, 37, 38, 44, 47, 50, 56, 60, 62, 65 Murphy, Nancy 87 n. 11, 91, 109 mysticism 85, 90 narrative, see scripture: narrative natural law 107 natural theology 6, 11–226, 41, 214 nature and grace opposition 103–4, 134, 213 Nestorius 109 Newman, John Henry 160–4 Niebuhr, Reinhold 13, 169–174

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non-contradiction principle 24, 25, 27, 39, 66, 71 n., 107, 118, 222, see also Aristotle: Aristotelian logic norms 111–16 scripture, as norma normans non normata 81 see also warrants: and norms Origen 2, 75, 84 n. Palamas 97 Palmer, F.R. 121 n, 122 n, 132 n Pannenberg, Wolfhart 88, 100 n. 24, 106 Papal infallibility 111 Papanikolaou, Aristotle 98 n. paradox in Kierkegaard 74, 165, 168–9 Saint Paul 25 perfection 220 Pelagianism 134 n. Pelikan, Jaroslav World Council of Churches commission on tradition 95 Penrose, Roger 208–9 perspectivalism 210–11 Pesch, Otto Hermann 97 n. Phillips, D.Z. 54–6 (see also, Reformed Epistemology) philosophy of science and natural sciences 35, 58, 109 natural sciences and experience 91–2 Plantinga, Alvin 49, 52–4, 55–6, 59, 65, 82, 91, 104–5 (see also, Reformed Epistemology) Plato 23 n. Platonism 20, 188, 197, 205 and Aquinas 194 and Augustine 190, 191 and Patristic theology 25 and Pseudo-Dionysius 193 pluralism 63 pneumatology 86–7, 135, 137–8 (in Nazianzen) and aesthetics 204–5 Popper, Karl 60 n. postmodernism 47, 99 pragmatist theory of truth 46–7 prayer, theology of 159–60 propositional claims in theology 105, 221–2 Newman on 162–4 Protestant Scholastics 3 provisionality of theology 12, 101, 126 Prosper of Aquitaine 105 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite 138–142, 181, 191

on beauty, see beauty, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite on identity of 142 on scripture 140–2 Quine, W.V. & Ullian, J.S. 34, 35 n.14, 65, 78, 82 n. 5 Rahner, Karl 100, 110 n. 34 ratio see reason reader-response theory 124 reason 210–12 and faith 99 and grace see sanctification as interpretative tool 6–7, 9–10, 88–9 and order 201, 212 suspicion of 88–9 as theological warrant, see warrants, reason Reformation Confessions (Augsburg, Westminster, Dordecht) 115 Reformed epistemology 49, 51 n.33, 54 (Wolterstorff, Plantinga) relationality and aesthetics 190, 200–1 in divine nature 67, 148–9, 169, 175, 178, 180, 181, 183, 188 between God and creatures 70, 172, 176, 178, 188, 210 and human society 181 in theology 4, 66–7, 164, 169, 188, 205, 210, see also systematicity relativism 52, 53, 58, 63 reliabilism 65 revelation 70, 215, 222 Rescher, Nicholas 43–4, 49, 66 Richard of St Victor 202 Ricoeur, Paul 125 Rorty, Richard 35, 49 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 45 Ruhl, Charles 122 n. Russell, Bertrand 28 Russman, Thomas 51 n.33 (see also Reformed epistemology) Ruusbroec, Jan van 90, 107 sacramental theology 179 sanctification 135, 136, 137, 140–1, 185 and interpretation of scripture 216, 218–9 and reason 103–4, 213–6, 217–21 and theology 155, 216, 217–21, 224, 225, 226–7 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 3, 91, 100 n.23 Scholasticism 88, 110, 173 and reason 89 Schwartz, John 207 Scripture

Index as authority 26–7, 108, 144, 210 canon, formation of 81–2, 109 double-rootedness in divine and human 15–17, 18, 128–32, 211, 216 divine inspiration of 48, 80, 128–32 figurative language in 116–27, 130 historical-critical scholarship 93, 128, 186–7 human authorship 128–32, 218 as incorrigible 126–7 and narrative 121,130, 216 as norm, see norms patristic exegesis of 89, 187 and sexual ethics 83, 92–3 theological use of 10, 79 as warrant, see warrants, scripture Searle 102 n.26 sexual ethics 92–3 Sherry, Patrick 204–205 sin 13, 77, 151, 169–70 epistemological effects of 6, 8, 9, 103, 182, 211, 215 in Calvin 155 in Kierkegaard 165 Skinner, Quentin 67 n.49 Sokolowski, Robert 2 n.3, 25, 26 sola scriptura principle 82, 83 n, 94–5 Sosa, Ernest 51 spiritual senses and Jonathan Edwards 199 Stich, Stephen 62 Stout, Jeffrey 87, 105, 108–9 string theory 207 systematicity of theology 5, 10, 30, 66–78, 96, 172, 180, 184–5, 187–8, 202, 205, 216 and aesthetics 188–9 and possible self-deception 188–9 as a source of theology 5–6 and systematic theology 1–4 Taylor, Mark C. 67 n. 50 Tertullian 85 Theology as divine and human 12, 15–17, 18, 19, 131–2, 136, 182, 185, 188, 211, 216, 219–20, 220–1 see also scripture: double-rootedness in divine and human theological aesthetics, see also beauty and systematicity 188–9 theological anthropology

239

in Calvin 160 and finitude 8–9, 170–1, 180, 211, 218 in Niebuhr 169–74 and sin see sin theological epistemology: and philosophical epistemology 27–30 knowledge of God 26, 27, 29, 90, 105, 134, 139, 157, 162, 217, 220–1 Tillich, Paul 174–80 on systematicity of theology 75–6, 174–5 Torrance, Thomas 90, 102 n. Tracy, David 100 n. 23, 125 tradition 108–9 as warrant see warrants: tradition as interpretation of scripture 84–7 transcendentals 190, 194, 195, 196, 197, 202, 203 Trinity, doctrine of 144–5, 146–7 in Aquinas 147–52 and logic 24–5, 106 in Gregory Nazianzen 132, 138 Trinitarian theology in Anselm 144–7 in Aquinas 150 in Boff 181–4 in Gregory of Nazianzen 134 verificationist theory of truth 46 Vincent of Lérins 85 Warrants experience as 89–94, 105–6 function of 105–8 and norms 111–16, 124–5, see also norms reason as 6, 8–9, 87–9, 106–7, reason as structuring principle 104, see also reason reasoning from 98–9 relation between 94–8 scripture as 6, 9–10, 14, 79–84, 117–8, 126–7, 141, 222 tradition as 6, 84–7, 222–4 Webster, John 81, 94 Wesley, John 89–90, 90–1, 220 Wheelwright, Philip 122, 123, 124 Wiles, Maurice 99 n.21, 127 n.45 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 43, 55 Woit, Peter 207, 208 Xenophanes as systematiser 7–8, 10