I often rail against natural theology; I think some wonder why. In a very basic way, natural theology operates off of the premise that we live in a graced creation which is open for our at will discovery of God and His ‘attributes’ (Rom 1.18-20). This presupposes upon a particular theological anthropology that entails the belief that human agents have a latent or remaining capacity (post fall) to accurately access the realities of who God is by simply peering out at the created order and identifying who God must be by a series of negations (via negativa). In other words, it operates off the premise that we can work from our finitude (effects) to God’s ultimate infinitude (cause) and surmise godness from this sort of discursive practice. Or it looks at our finitude, negates it, and arrives at God’s infinitude; or it looks at the trees, the mountains, the lakes, the stars and posits that the power it took to create such monuments must be of a factor ultimately greater than any power we have as humans to create within the realm of our own dominion.

The problem with this, if you haven’t noticed, is that this procedure always comes back to us as regulative, or more strongly, determinative, in regard to the parameters that we feel comfortable with when thinking God. What isn’t present, in this approach, is a principled groundedness in God’s Self-revelation in Christ as the fundamentum of what and who gets to determine what godness entails at a basic level. Yes, proponents of Christian natural theology will argue that they are first committed to faith and that revelation prior to a commitment to natural theology as the basis for their conniving of God. But when you look at how they actually operate, what stands at base isn’t God’s revelation, but instead the philosopher’s machinations in regard to ultimacy and godness (ie Aristotle, Plato, et al.)

This is why I think natural theology sucks, at the very least. It says it’s doing one thing (being shaped by revelation), when in fact it’s doing the other (allowing the philosophers to present us with the categories of godness — and to do so from their unregenerate wits). If God is fundamentally Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, then to attempt to think God, definitionally, from any other basis can only be an adjunct of our own self-projections. The Bible knows of no general conception of God, and just because the monad of the philosophers seems to have certain correlations with the One God of Israel/One God of Christ, this does not mean these correlations are univocal or even analogical; instead they are equivocal from the very start. If we cannot know who or what God is apart from being able to say ‘He is Lord by the Spirit,’ then we cannot say He is God by appealing to the philosophers who have not the Spirit.

More to say (writing this one on my phone in a siding out on the rail). It isn’t that I haven’t iterated these things before, but I thought reiterating would be good to do once again.