The Stout of Mind and Heart at MBTS Seek Historical Answers to a Big Question

A number of my students from schools in S E Asia where I have taught, through the grapevine, discovered that I was teaching a course entitled The intersection of Christian Thought with Philosophy (Malaysia Baptist Theological Seminary April, 2019). To satisfy their initial curiosity and wet their appetite peradventure I might also come to their school sometime in the future and teach such a course, I decided to post here an edited version of my course description.

The Purpose of the Course was to provide a short introduction to “Christian Philosophy”. This is what I was asked to do. But as my title suggests, for me, ” the actual existence of an item called ‘Christian Philosophy’ remains an outstanding question. Certainly one can summon a particular philosophical insight to reflect on the Church’s beliefs, or one can start a conversation between the truth that the church received, handed down by the Prophets and Apostles of old, and a given philosophical idea alive in the world, but can Christian truth be transformed or morphed into a philosophy? Or can philosophy and Christian truth become fused or synthesized? After restudying the designation assigned me, teach an introductory course on ‘Christian Philosophy,’ I decided to employ a historical method organized around one basic inquiry. This question has to do with the major twists or flirtations in the ongoing romance between the church and philosophy from then to now, i.e. from the late Apostolic period to the present. 

A primary multi-faceted metaphor is used allegorically to carry forward the question of the church’s relation to philosophical thought conceived by the unbelieving world. But of course ‘unbelieving must be qualified as more or less unbelieving because the birth of Modernity in Western Europe most certainly interacted with Christian thought and beliefs but also elevated reason above revelation and critiqued and revised revelation accordingly. The image of a father who watches over the courtship, engagement, marriage, and divorce of his daughter is the organizing device deployed to carry my discussions from one period to the next.  The father(s) or parents represent the church leaders and primary thinkers, the daughter represents the believers or members of the church and the suitor is worldly philosophical ideas connected to secular or ‘pagan’ thinkers alive and attractive in the church’s world at any given period of time. Consider how the above image is unpacked to explicate each chapter of our quest.

The discussions begin with the late apostolic period when the importation of philosophical ideas (in whole or in part dependant on ‘worldly’ non-Christian sources) first knocked on the door of the church. From there it moves through history stopping at pivotal junctures where the church’s understanding and outworking of this relation between its Christian truth and contemporary philosophy in the world underwent significant change. It is hoped that by looking backward at the changing complexion of this relationship in the past we can better understand the possibilities and limits of the church deploying reason and philosophy in shaping its witness of Christian truth to the world in the present time.

In the first Discussion, we are in the late Apostolic period. The struggle with whether the Jesus Messiah movement will remain tied to Judaism and the Law has crested, and the movement has now taken root in the Gentile world with primarily Gentile members who have been born and bred, not on a Hebrew view of reality but a Greco Roman view of reality. The propensity of converted Gentile thinkers is to integrate Christian belief with the Greco-Roman view of reality. This in a word is where our Romance novel begins. Here we discover a protective father jealously guarding his daughter against foreign suitors lest she becomes infatuated with one of them and run off and marry him and forget all that he has taught her and the way he has trained her. The ‘father(s)’ here are the Apostles John and Paul. The daughter is the church in the late apostolic period in danger (in several ecclesial settings) of becoming infatuated with and united to one of these strange suitors i.e. ‘worldly philosophies’ knocking at the church’s door. (We will briefly discuss what is going on in 1st Corinthians, 1st John and Colossians). In this setting philosophy and religion are not fully separate. 

In the second Discussion, the ‘father’ has become the Early Church Fathers and now they themselves have become enamored, more or less, with a certain one time suitor, once thought to be stranger, but now thought to be resourceful and attractive. No there is isn’t any official marriage in the making but a real engagement is entered into with confidence of a forth-coming bright future. Already the daughter’s truth treasures are being mixed and shared with her fiancé and his with her (St Augustine the premier spokesman of the Church Fathers).

By the Third Discussion, we have graduated to the medieval period. Here the church fathers that we encounter envision, not only a shift in the church’s choice of secular philosophical interests, that they choose for their daughter’s alliance, but also a change in the status of the relationship. Now marriage is boldly placed on the table. (Thomas Aquinas is the high watermark of Medieval Scholasticism and the leading advocate of this union).

In the Fourth Discussion, we discovered things are not going all that well in this marriage. The marriage between philosophy and Christian truth (the Church and its beliefs) is being tested. In this discussion, we name some of the problems and forces from the “wife’s” side that call into question the legitimacy of this marriage. But times are changing and soon the husband (philosophical reason) becomes inordinately powerful and increasingly autonomous which tempts him to become abusive and controlling so that he exploits the power afforded him by virtue of his union with the church (and its truth). He does this by raiding the truth pantry of the church and ridding it of the things that offend reason. All too much the church is suborned into helping him. This take over is so deep that she (the church) is in danger of losing her own distinctive identity. (The historical forces and personalities that arise in the late medieval period, the Reformation period,  test the medieval alliance between philosophy/reason and Christian truth. This is not what Thomas envisioned. Aquinas employed Aristotelian philosophy to serve and attests to the veracity of the church’s truth interests not to judge it and edit it of that which offended it. By the time the Enlightenment arrived in the middle to later part of the 17th Century the tables had turned, the church was progressive on the run because it was required to serve and prove its beliefs by way of the autonomy of reason.

In the Fifth Discussion, the marriage, now in the late Enlightenment period, is hanging from a thread. But luck of the draw, just when the church needed it hope for the church’s truth emerged. “Never look a gift horse in the mouth” so goes the proverb. But they should have. German Idealism came to the rescue (“any port in a storm”) and a rebirth of the marriage of Christian truth and reason occurred (i.e. reason and Christian truth reconceived on a new modern foundation). This is the birth of 19th Century European philosophy that grew out of the crisis of Cartesian rationalism and the birth of Protestant liberalism. Only briefly discussed was the influence of the outcome of the English Reformation which formally and theologically decided ( the triumph of ‘Hookerism’) that the boat called the Church of England must move through history powered by two oars – (1) the Apostolic Tradition more or less chastened by the Reformation proper    (Luther and Calvin but mostly Calvin) and (2) Reason. This brief reminder explains the English historic infatuation with natural theology persisting to this day (I hasten to add that this infatuation has yielded not a few distinguished fruitful scholars).

In the Sixth Discussion new charismatic ‘fathers’ equipped with brilliant insight emerge to the forefront. The protective ‘Fathers’ who showed their face in the late Apostolic period, like a modern Elijah come back from the dead. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. A Divorce is called for and no prenuptial agreement will be honored. Some call it an annulment, others a divorce. Either way the marriage is challenged from the mountaintops. (Soren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth call for a divorce). It would however be a massive mistake to conclude that this theological call for divorce embodied a head in the sand approach to philosophies underfoot in the unbelieving or semi-believing world. What they did was replace an immanent(al) relation between Christian truth to philosophy with a dialectical one. Truth derived via special revelation and truth quarried by reason and experience indeed could and should listen and talk to each other and even learn from each other and critique each other, but these two can never start from a common epistemology nor arrive at shared conclusions. In short, their relation is to be henceforth dialectical. The church at the end of the day had to say  (Barth would insist ) “you can’t get there from here” i.e. you can’t get to Truth with a capital T starting from human rationality nor can the former be subsumed into the latter.

In the Seventh Discussion, times pass and the rhetoric of divorce is softened. In this period among many the former impasse is interpreted as a scuffle and suggested that maybe the fathers who called for it overreacted, and maybe, albeit on chastened and weaker terms, a remarriage could be reconsidered. But now the time of love has passed. The philosophical reasoning(s) of modernity has had a change of heart. They do not love the church and its truth anymore. The autonomy of modern reason has little interest in interfacing with the church

In America, voices like Carl Henry, Alvin Planting, Ronald Nash, Gordon H Clark, and others emerge and attempt to rehabilitate reason and plant Christian truth back (more or less) on a rational foundation that commends it to worldly respect. These voices arise within the conservative Reformed branch of Protestantism. Time did not permit this discussion but to properly complete the course these voices deserve to be given a fair hearing.

The Christian Church does not fill all times and all places with one standard witness of truth to the world. It is constantly moving through time and inhabiting new places.  In these times and places, the church has to shape and reshape an apologetic witness of its truth. Time and again it has attempted to do this by interfacing its truth with philosophical currents in its world.  At other times it has refused to interface its truth with contemporary ideas and philosophies alive in the unbelieving world. But this isolation is not totally realistic.

The separation of the church from the world in the modern period is not what it was in ancient Judaism (understood as the people of God) when it enjoyed the luxury of its own land and its own temple and political autonomy. While modernity and the Baptist ( to a lesser degree the Quakers) progressively gave birth to a formal separation of church and state a deeper problem was overlooked by the church. The church and the state may enjoy being more or less formally separate but it is an entirely different question whether this disestablished church that in the West made a fledgling stand around 160, church parallel to the state and its power, has been able to maintain it salty distinctively Christian difference and resist becoming captive to modernity’s ethos and culture.  The cultural separation of the church with the world around it is not provided for by  Thomas Jefferson’s image and idea of a ‘wall’ separation between church and state. Jefferson’s metaphor was akin to Roger Williams’  metaphor of a ‘hedge’. These two images spoke to the facial problems the church had when these reforms fought their way into existence. The church (the free church movement) wanted to free itself from political intrusion and become itself, find its true self. The state in this period wanted to disestablish the church from political favor and support in its effort to govern a pluralistic society. But both of these reforms did not solve a much deeper struggle. Modernity was born with radically new ideas and values many of which were in subtle tension with the Christian vision of reality. All the church had in the modern period was a contractual distance from state power and a grant to free association and speech. All the state had was a contractual legal ground to keep religion and the church from accessing political controlling the state and society. On the other side of these reforms what was ‘fair’ game was culture. And from the side of the church, the risk was whether modernity’s values and ethos, once these came grew to fruition and a post-Christian West was born, would penetrate the church and domesticate it such that the church would become increasingly identified with modernity’s values. 

 In the modern world, there is no sociologically parallelism between church and world like there was when the Jewish ecclesia i.e. people of God drove a wedge between themselves and the world and its strange culture that had encroached upon them. To meet encroachment the Jewish ecclesia resorted to dramatic different attire, hair and beard configurations, unique head coverings, dietary taboos, and customs that forbade social fraternity with non-Jews. All of these, enforced by virtue of religiously grounded authority, brokered real sociological and cultural distance; church – world parallelism. But early on the separation of the church from the pagan unbelieving world that surrounded the Christian Gentile people of God did not enjoy such protection. The church maintained its separation from the world not sociologically but by a thin spiritual-ethical membrane empowered by a claim to revealed truth and church as a fellowship of faith, hope, and love. No thorough going externally legitimated separation of the church from the world exists in the Apostolic script given to the church.

The separation of the People of God and the world from the arrival of modernity onward is eschatological. It belongs to the future. The world itself is under the provision of prevenient grace until the times are fulfilled.  Remembering this is crucial if one is to appreciate the church’s historic engagement with secular philosophies conceived by the unbelieving world. All forms of church -world dualism are not only misguided but the seedbed for evil. Blame Paul essential he destroyed church- world parallelism and drew church and world into an inescapably close relationship.

The theme of the course can be more or less reduced to the question about the proper relation of philosophy to Christian truth and the church’s apology of its truth. To what extent is it right and good for the church to open itself to contemporary philosophies and engage in philosophical apologetics in its attempt to understand and give witness to its truth? When the church employs philosophical thought in its attempt to make an apology for its truth it is appealing to a reasoning that it believes is within the reach of the world around it or is alive in the world around it, respected more or less by the world. Philosophy signals a form of reasoning that contains within itself rational justifying warrants for its truthfulness. But the Church of Jesus Christ must openly confess that it derives the warrants for its truth from the truth passed down to it through God who worked through and communicated through the Prophets and by Apostles and the Gospel they proclaimed. These, the church confesses, were graciously given by God to the church for its life and faith and for proclamation to the world. Openly standing on this confessional foundation, seeking no synthesis or dependence on philosophical reason, no reliance on its warrants the Church can, and sometimes must, critically engage and even contribute to, the world’s philosophical struggle, to understand the great mystery of human reality. This stated time to time the church must also ask itself whether the world’s insight into the nature of human reality can in some way, some times, without adopting the world’s warrants of proof, enable it to look at its revealed truth through a new conceptual lens and thereby carry forward  Anselm’s quest – “faith seeking understanding” . 

Outstanding and Distinguished Students: Intro to Christian Philosophy 

From the Left Dr. Chu, M D, Dr. Edward, M Div Candidate, Dr. Daniel Age, Class Teacher, Eden M Div Candidate, and Andrew B A Candidate.