Category Archives: Ontology

Thomas Torrance V. Charles Ryrie on Biblical Inerrancy

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The following will be jolting to an Evangelical’s ear. This is Thomas Torrance’s rationale for understanding Holy Scripture to be errant; the analogy he uses, or really the ontology he uses is that of fallen humanity. He correlates humanities’ fallness, and human language as part and parcel with this; as the mode which Scripture takes as God’s redemptive and inerrant Word takes hold of human language, and in his in-spirated obedience ‘bends’ it back to find its purpose in its reality; the reality to which it points. So for Torrance, it is unthinkable to think that Scripture could be anything other than errant; only because it is this very human language that needed to be redeemed in the first place. With this as the reality, Torrance’s aversion to biblical inerrancy is not a function of holding to what Evangelicals might consider Liberalism (the kind of ‘Liberalism’ that gave rise to Christian fundamentalism and the doctrine of inerrancy in the first place); but instead Torrance’s account is situated within his Christological/soteriological frame in which Scripture—according to Torrance—ought to be situated. Here’s Thomas F. Torrance,

[T]he extraordinary fact about the Bible is that in the hands of God it is the instrument he uses to convey to us his revelation and reconciliation and yet it belongs to the very sphere where redemption is necessary. The Bible stands above us speaking to us the Word of God and yet the Bible belongs to history which comes under the judgment of God and requires the cleansing and atoning activity of the Cross. When we hear the Word of God in the Bible, therefore, we hear it in such a way that the human word of Holy Scripture bows under the divine judgment, for that is part of its function in the communication of divine revelation and reconciliation. Considered merely it in itself it is imperfect and inadequate and its text may be faulty and errant, but it is precisely in its imperfection and inadequacy and faultiness and errancy that God’s inerrant Holy Word has laid hold of it that it may serve his reconciling revelation and the inerrant communication of his Truth. Therefore the Bible has to be heard as Word of God within the ambiguity of its poverty and riches, its weakness and power, and heard in such a way that we acknowledge that in itself in its human expression, the Bible comprises the word of man with all the limitations and imperfection of human flesh, in order to allow the human expression to fulfill its divinely appointed and holy function for us, in pointing beyond itself, to what it is not in itself, but to what God has marvellously made it to be in the adoption of his Grace. The Bible itself will pass away with this world, but the Word of God which it has been inspired to convey to us does not pass away but endures for ever. [Thomas F. Torrance, Divine Meaning: Studies in Patristic Hermeneutics, 9-10]

This, then, does not represent an insensitive frontal attack on Biblical inerrancy; in fact Torrance’s project seeks to understand Scripture from within a Christically framed understanding of the relation of the divine and the human in the hypostatic union realized in Jesus Christ. Torrance’s view of Scripture is corollary with his view on the ‘kind of humanity’ that Christ assumed in the incarnation; viz. a fallen human in need of redemption (so Scripture as human language).

This kicks against the goads, as I already noted, for the American Evangelical. I would suggest though, that one of the reasons this is hard teaching for the Evangelical is because it takes Scripture and its mastery away from our control; and instead it places the control of Scripture in the hands of its reality, Jesus Christ. No longer is Scripture open for public consumption, but for Torrance the Bible is a decidedly Christian venture that requires eyes and ears of faith to see and hear God’s Word confront us through it. Here is how Charles Ryrie would respond to Torrance:

[T]he logic of some still insists that anything involving humanity has to allow for the possibility of sin. So as long as the Bible is both a divine and human Book the possibility and actuality of errors exist.

Let’s examine that premise. Is it always inevitable that sin is involved where humanity is?

If you were tempted to respond affirmatively, an exception probably came to mind almost immediately. The title of this chapter put the clue in your mind. The exception is our Lord Jesus Christ. He was the God-Man, and yet, His humanity did not involve sin. So He serves as a clear example of an exception to the logic pressed by people who believe in errancy.

The true doctrine of the God-Man states that He possessed the full and perfect divine nature and a perfect human nature and that these were united in one Person forever. His deity was not in any detail diminished; His humanity was not in any way sinful or unreal, though sinless; and in His one person His natures were without mixture, change, division, or separation.

Similarly, the Bible is a divine-human Book. Though it originated from God, it was actually written by man. It is God’s Word, conveyed through the Holy Spirit. Sinful men wrote that Word but did so without error. Just as in the Incarnation, Christ took humanity but was not tainted in any way with sin, so the production of the Bible was not tainted with any errors. [Charles C. Ryrie, Basic Theology, 83]

And Ryrie further:

[…] Even if the errors are supposedly in “minor” matters, any error opens the Bible to suspicion on other points which may not be so “minor.” If inerrancy falls, other doctrines will fall too. . . . When inerrancy is denied one may expect some serious fallout in both doctrinal and practical areas. [p. 77]

For Torrance, Scripture is in God’s hands first; for Ryrie, for Scripture to be Scripture it is in our hands first—once we’ve “proven” through scientific rigor, that Scripture is reliable, then we can approach the Bible as reliable, and in fact God’s Word to humanity. So for Ryrie it all depends upon our defense of Scripture; if we can’t prove it to be Scripture (without error), then it is no longer a reliable Word from God, and thus Christianity ought to go the way of other myths—this is the implication of Ryrie’s approach.

I could say much more, but this post just went over that magic word count number for posts on blogs (a 1000 words), and so I better stop or you won’t read.

The Bible and Science and Evangelism: A Boat Too Far and the Literality of the Biblical Stories?

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I continue to do the work of an Evangelist; it is a challenge and gift of being a Christian that I thoroughly enjoy, and from which I draw personal telos or purpose in my ongoing adventure as a Christian person soli Deo gloria!Β One of my most recent contacts has an interesting brew (if I can say it like that) of beliefs about reality and his own personal purpose in this amazing complexity known as life. An aspect that seems to bother, this my interlocutor, is what appears to him to be an over-literal reading of, for one thing in the Bible, the Genesis account of human origins and the related stories therein—namely, and particularly troubling for my friend, the story of Noah and the Ark. He cannot even begin to fathom how any rational (vs. rationalist) person could suppose to believe that any modernly informed person could take this literal—he seems to think that this is not physically possible (see how Ken Ham seeks to answer this apparent conundrum here, this seems to be a very reasonable explanation—proviso, I am not generally a fan of Ken Ham). I would like to expand this conversation out a bit, for my friend, myself, and anyone else who is reading; and I will do this by drawing our attention to a recently released book by Brazos Press entitled: Evolution of Adam, The: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say about Human Origins by Peter Enns.Β  Here is how Enns describes some of his gist in this book:

And here is how Sandra Collins of Library Journal synopsizes the general themes of the book:

“[Enns’s] basic argument is this: modern creation arguments that focus on either the literal historical truth of the Bible or evolutionary perspectives are wrong. The Bible, including its creation accounts, represents a comprehensive theological worldview. It’s neither a literal accounting nor is it science. And it was never intended to be either of these two things. . . . Academically minded Christians looking to bridge this intellectual divide will appreciate the tone and bibliographic references here.”

I have once written on this topic here; and my thesis, taken from former seminary professor Al Bayliss, sound very similar to the way that Collins describes Enns’ primary theses in his book. Yet, my sense is that my conclusions will probably end up differently than Enns; my conclusion would be informed by the idea that a ‘theological worldview’ and ‘literal reality’ correlate with each other. That there is a ratio thatΒ  inheres between the rational (and literal) uncreated reality of God, and that which has been given expression in the contingent, and ordered reality of creation itself; so created order and rationality is given its rationality by definition of its contingence upon God’s rationality that he built into creation through Divine fiat. My point, I can’t follow this dualism, that is often posited, between theological reality and created reality; if for no other reason, but because we have these two realities in the conjoined hypostatic union of the Non-contingent/contingent reality of the Divine/human in the person of Jesus Christ—or that I see all of reality conditioned by the primacy of this kind of ‘unioned’ life. I am digressing a wee bit.

So this issue of origins, and the literal nature of the Genesis account, in particular, and for my friend; the literal nature of Biblical accounting in general continues to be an ongoing issue. Enns’ latest book and the work of the foundation of which he is an integral part, Biologos, illustrates the ongoingness of this continued struggle (or not) between modern science and modern biblical and theological studies—in fact Brian LePort, a blogger here in Portland, Oregon has just recently posted on a very related question here.

I write all of the foregoing to come up against the question that prompted me to write this in the first place; do you think that evolution, one way or the other, should be an issue that hinders or in fact fosters the ‘intellectual’ space for someone to have the room to entertain a belief in Jesus Christ as the historic orthodox person of Christian proclamation? In other words, if evolution (neo-Darwinian) stands in the way, intellectually (whatever that means, theologically), of someone being able to give a hearing to Jesus, do you think we should be softer on this issue and allow for the fact that it is possible to both affirm modern scientific theories and claims, and the claims of Jesus Christ? I know of plenty of believing Christians (like Peter Enns, or even my beloved T.F. Torrance) who believe in macro-evolution, and also are thoroughgoing Christians—I shared this, briefly with my friend, I think he was encouraged by this.

Anyway, what do you think?

Torrance’s ‘Reality’ and Foundationalism again

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One of Thomas Torrance’s most basic contributions to the Christian theological landscape was to develop an epistemological approach that works from the principle that reality is a unitary whole; terminating on its ultimate source, the Triune God. Part of Torrance’s project was to undo the modern enlightenment epistemology/ontology that operated (and still does) from a dualist perspective; wherein word and concept (reality) had been decoupled one from the other so that the result becomes one where man imposes his categories of thought (abstracted from his experience of reality) upon reality and then calls that reality — this has also been called, foundationalism.

Torrance develops some of his thinking on this in his book Reality and Scientific Theology. I am going to provide a quote from him that I think is cool. The quote is in the context of Torrance talking about the possibility of Natural Theology—which he thinks is possible, but only under the constraints of his qualification that the Medieval kind of Natural Theology (amongst others) disjointed reality from word (or reality from thought) in a way that places man prior to both God and nature is not acceptable, he rejects the idea that man can create a logical bridge between human knowing and the reality that it purports to signify—Torrance, in the following quote, is in the middle of sketching and responding to Heideggar’s emphasis on ‘being and knowing’; and how Torrance believes that Heideggar was onto to something, but then misses his own point when he fails to accept that being presents us with a rational question which presupposes a rational answer. In other words, that God is the ground of all created being in His uncreated being and reality. The basic point that I want to highlight from the quote is the idea that there is an intimate relation between being and word (or knowledge); so that we cannot have one without the other. This is Torrance’s form in being-form in knowing matrix, or his epistemological inversion or tacit inferencing (borrowed from Polyani); the idea that under the weight and compulsory push provided by the reality itself—when we allow ourselves to be pushed by it—we are opened up beyond ourselves and begin to see reality as it is under its own constraints and categories of inquiry (e.g. not ones that “we” have imposed upon it through logico-deductive methods of abstraction and then induction). Enough said, here’s Torrance:

[I]t is a similar approach that is found in the thought of Martin Heideggar, who is concerned to break up the rigid structures of language and existence in order to let being itself show through in its freedom and primordial reality. Heideggar is rather more specific than Hartt [another philosopher Torrance just sketched and addressed] as to the relation between logos and physis. Logos is not itself the locus of truth, but is the manifesting of the reality of things or their “unconcealment” (aletheia). It is significant that here we do not need and do not operate with intermediary representations or sense-data [foundationalism], the sort of thing that seems forced upon us whenever we allow logos to secede from being, for what we are concerned with here is the showing of reality itself through to us. This is why Heideggar has devoted so much effort to analysing “existence” (Dasein) in order to destroy the false ontologies that keep on cropping up through the hardening of substitute-symbolisms, so that the whole focus of attention may be directed upon being in the full and proper sense (Sein). Heideggar’s own movement of thought, however, tends to be stultified and distorted, for he lowers the horizon of inquiry (Fragehorizont) in a strangely arbitrary way, so that in the last resort he is forced to break out by taking a leap into nothing, instead of letting his mind fall under the power of the inherent signification of being and its reference beyond itself. But far from opening up the reality of being, as Heideggar hoped, the leap of thought into nothing can only fall back into the relativities of existentialism.

When reality is allowed to unveil itself, however, in its own inner intelligibility, our thought is thrust up against the truth of being in such a way that it is sustained by an objective signification and does not fall back into the dark whirlpool of man’s self-understanding. Not only do we grasp the truth of intelligible being out of the depth of its own reality, but we respond to that which is not of our own making and which acts with categorical force upon our minds. Here too we find that explaining and understanding do not fall apart, as they do when logos and being become disjoined, for they operate together as we penetrate into the inner relations and significations of things and allow them to set up their own laws and meanings in our grasping of them. To express this the other way round, what we apprehend like this in the truth of its own being proves itself to us by bringing our minds under an imperative obligation which we cannot rationally resist. This is what happened, for example, when St. Anselm, breaking free from the psychologism of St. Augustine, could speak of truth not only as that which is what it is and and as it manifests itself, but as what it had to be in his understanding or conceiving of it, for he found himself together with the truth of created being under compulsion from beyond. It was in this way that the so-called “ontological argument” forced itself upon him from the side of what he had to acknowledge as the Supreme Being or Supreme Truth. That is not to be understood as the force of some logical argument or deductive or inductive train of ideas, but as the force of Reality itself (necessitas, as St. Anselm called it, its impossibility of being otherwise) in which truth and being are indissolubly one. [T. F. Torrance, Reality and Scientific Theology, 47-8]

This quote evinces some of Torrance’s own influences, both philosophical and theological. What do you think? Do you think that Torrance’s way is better than the ‘Analytic’ dualistic mode of thought that abstracts so called ‘indubitable’ principles from their experience of reality, and then seeks to correspond these categories back upon “reality?” Don’t you think it better to think from within the inner structures of reality as it is from within itself? True many would call Torrance’s approach fideistic, and maybe even philosophically naΓ―ve. But of course the ones who might ascribe this to Torrance would be, most likely, imposing their analytical modes of thought upon Torrance’s epistemological project, and thus not really ever able to grasp the reality of Torrance’s point to begin with πŸ˜‰ .

Knowing God: Being versus Faith

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I have recently been having a discussion with someone that has revolved somewhat around what has been called the analogia entis or “the analogy of being.” My book chapter for our forthcoming book also orbits around this same place of discussion. The “analogy of being” was first given cogent articulation by medieval theologian par excellence, Thomas Aquinas. Since Thomas there have been other iterations of this same basic approach to knowledge of God. In its most basic form the “analogy of being” canΒ be said to be a way of knowing God that looks to the creation for providing basic building blocks for entering into an understanding of God. In other words, reality is seen in hierarchical terms so that all of reality is interconnected in a way that allows for humanity to reason its way back or up to the “Unmoved Mover,” or God. Another way of explaining the analogy of being would be to note that it is a philosophical system of thought wherein man reasons from the effects of creation to what the cause of said effects must require in order for the cause to be the cause. In other words by a series of negations man looks at creation, reflects upon what kind of power it must have taken to accomplish the feat of creation; looks at man himself, identifies that man does not have this kind of all encompassing, power, knowledge, and foresight thus positing that what they are, the cause of creation must not be. Instead the cause of creation must be much much greater than humanity. This then provides the categories for how we ought to conceive of God (according to the analogy of being).

Karl Barth, of all people, did not agree with this approach; he was a proponent of what he appropriated as the analogia fidei or the analogy of faith. Stated simply, the analogy of faith holds that knowledge of God must proceed from God’s self-revelation; not the creation. The push back to this from those who follow the analogy of being is that creation is all that we have as humans to know God through, and thus to posit any other idea of knowing God apart from this reality is the height of naivete. They would argue that even the self-revelation of God in Christ—the Incarnation—involves creation, given the fact that Jesus assumes a real human body and nature in order to communicate God to humanity. This seems to pose a problem for those who would want to maintain the analogy of faith (like I do). Modern Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar thinks so, and he directs his concern towards Barth. Bruce McCormack doesn’t think so, and he responds, in Barth’s defense, to Balthasar’s problem with Barth by articulating how Barth avoided the analogy of being (even though Balthasar didn’t think so) in a way that elides Balthasar’s belief to the contrary. Here is McCormack and Balthasar:

In his famous 1951 book on Barth’s theology, Hans Urs von Balthasar concluded that Barth had not been able to eliminate the “analogy of being” after all; indeed, the “analogy of faith” as taught by him required an “analogy of being” to complete it.

If revelation is centered in Jesus Christ, there must be by definition a periphery to this center. Thus, as we [Roman Catholics] say, the order of the Incarnation presupposes the order of creation, which is not identical with it. And, because the order of creation is oriented to the order of the Incarnation, it is structured in view of the Incarnation; it contains images, analogies, as it were, dispositions, which in a true sense are the presuppositions for the Incarnation. For example, interhuman relationships—between man and woman or between friends—are a true presupposition for the fact that Jesus can become our brother. It is because man is a social being that he is capable in the first place of entering into a covenant with God, as God intended. And this natural order is for its part only possible on the basis of God’s interpersonal nature, his triune nature, of which the human being is a true image. [Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, 163]

Von Balthasar is right to find an “analogy of being” in Barth, but he is right for all the wrong reasons. That the order of the incarnation presupposes the order of creation, that Jesus can become our brother because human being is by nature (i.e., as created) interpersonal, and that humans are able to enter into a covenant with God only becauseΒ  of their (inherent?) sociality—-all of these claims give expression to an “analogy of being’ which remained throughout Barth’s life utterly foreign to his thinking. But there is a true “analogy of being” in Barth’s thought which was first adumbrated as the predicate of the divine act of relating to the human creature and which was then given concreteness in the doctrine of election set forth in CD II/2. “Analogy of being,” understood in Barthian terms, is an analogy between an eternal divine act of Self-determination and a historical human act of self-determination and the “being” (divine and human) which is given in each. Human being in the act of faith and obedience in response to the covenant of grace corresponds to the being of the gracious God; this is the shape of the analogy. Barth’s conflict with the Roman Catholic version was and always remained a conflict between his own covenant ontology and the essentialist ontology presupposed by the Catholic tradition, which von Balthasar’s thought continued to embody. To that extent, it was also a conflict between modern and, in its way, “historicized” mode of reflection on the being-in-act of God, on the one hand, and tradition theism, on the other. . . . [Bruce L. McCormack, Orthodox And Modern: Studies In The Theology of Karl Barth, 199-200]

Ultimately the conflict that Barth was seeking to avert was to make God’s being and persons dependentΒ upon creation. The fear, simply stated; was that if the analogy of being was given creedance, then who we know God to be is not Self-determined by Him, but instead, it would be Pre-determined by the categories man had constructed based upon man’s reflection upon creation. Barth’s genius was to conceive of a theological grammar that honors both God’s Self-determinating freedom to be who He is in Himself, and at the same time that honors man’s self-determining freedom to be who He is through Christ’s decision to be human (election). As it can be observed by McCormack’s analysis; Barth operated with an actualistic metaphysic that grounds God’s being in His choice to be man in Christ (Covenant of Grace). And it is the execution of this choice in historic time wherein the corresponding Yes to this choice (of God for man, and not God without man) by the God-Man, that the analogy of faith finds its proper orientation. In this way there is space for God to be God for creation (not because of it), and for man to know this choice through the actualisation of it in Christ. It is in this relationship that God has freely chosen to give Himself being, and in theΒ process of this giving; He has given humanity their being by electing their humanity for Himself. This is the realm wherein creation finds its taxis, and it is within this ‘order’ that knowledge of God comes to fruition; that is, by God acting on us, for us. In so doing the only ‘being’ that provides interpretive friction for knowing God, is His own being given to us in the God-Man, Jesus Christ.

The only reason I wrote this out like this, really, was to engage in an exercise that would make me articulate my own interpretation of what I just read. If this has beenΒ  helpful to you; then good! If not, sorry πŸ™ !

My Former Prof Thinks TFT Was a ‘Foundationalist’: Christian Theology or Pluralist Theology?

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I had an interesting impromptu meeting today with a former prof of mine from my undergrad days. He is in the analytic tradition, and his training is in the area of philosophy of religion. He is currently completing his PhD dissertation in the area of philosophical theology with a focus on American Theologian, Charles Hodge; in particular his methodology and epistemological commitments. Needless to say, my former prof is not a fan of what folks have called Continental Theology (this would be German, Modern, etc.); he is a true blue Analytic Theology guy (I try to not hold that against him πŸ˜‰ ). Anywho, we discussed multiple topics having to do with what else, but theology. I brought T.F. Torrance to the discussion (no, not me!) in the context of discussing foundationalism. My former prof believes that Torrance is a straight up ‘foundationalist’, without a doubt. My former prof’s working definition of ‘foundationalism’ is that “anyone who has basic foundational beliefs (a prioris) qualifies as a foundationalist.” Based on this definition I would imagine most folks would qualify as foundationalists; even if they don’t want to. When I brought up the idea that Torrance follows a certain order of knowledge; meaning that Torrance endorses the order that ‘ontology’ precedes ‘epistemology’, my former prof relativized this, and said that this is pretty much meaningless since he believes that this can go either way at either time. In other words, he believes that in order to articulate things about ontology we have already presupposed an epistemology; and in order to talk about epistemology, we have already favored an ontology. In this sense then, my formerΒ prof would seem to think that there is really nothing special about Torrance’s ordering of things, and thus Torrance’s theological science can be felled with one fail swoop.

At the moment of our impromptu discussion, I was caught off guard a bit; but since, I have had time to reflect a little further. On the first point, I don’t have any problem accepting that Torrance was a foundationalist based on my former prof’s basic definition of that. But I think technically, because Torrance rejects a univocal relation between “our” mode of thought for thinking about God, and who God is in himself; that this asymmetry disqualifies Torrance from being a foundationalist, proper. Torrance’s stratified knowledge of God in Christ is more nuanced than I think my former prof would want to concede. But again, I won’t hold that against him; too much πŸ˜‰ .

On the second point—on the order of knowledge—again I think my former prof has misappreciated the significance that this plays within T.F. Torrance’s theological realism (or critical realism). This is oneo f the more basic, and profound points that Torrance has to offer us (I think) in regards to providing a methodology to do genuinely ‘Christian Theology’. My former prof seems to think that the doing of theology needs to be able to account for the fact that we live in a pluralistic society, and thus our theological grammar needs to somehow satisfy the needs and questions that our pluralistic society presents (but this sounds more like apologetics versus the doing of theology). Torrance provides a way forward for doing Christian Theology by his kata physin (according to the nature of the thing) or ‘theological science’ approach. This is to say that the object under consideration needs to be that which provides us with the contours and categories through which we begin to apprehend the reality of the thing itself (and so this avoids the ‘foundationalist’ charge). In other words, we don’t dictate or impose our thinking upon what we are studying; but we follow the lead of whatever we are studying as it opens itself up to us through the process of on-going inquiry into its reality. Here is what Myk Habets has written about this in a guest post of his I once posted:

[T]he point was made above that epistemology is founded on or correlated with ontology.[27] This holds true throughout Torrance’s method and theology. Like Barth before him, Torrance holds that the distinctive nature of theology is determined by its object, which is defined as God revealed in Jesus Christ. Hence theology and any and every other true science, is under an intrinsic obligation to give account of reality according to its distinct nature, that is, kata physin.[28] The fundamental axiom that Torrance develops throughout his theological exploration is that β€˜We know things in accordance with their natures, or what they are in themselves; and so we let the nature of what we know determine for us the content and form of our knowledge.’[29] He goes on to argue that:

science, in every field of our human experience, is only the rigorous extension of that basic way of thinking and behaving.’[30] By natural extension, β€˜all this applies as much in our relations with God as in our relations with nature or with one another. There is no secret way of knowing either in science or theology, but there is only one basic way of knowing, which naturally develops different modes of rationality in natural science and in theological science because the nature of what we seek to know in each is different.[31]

The final application of this principle is expounded by Torrance in the following way, β€˜In each field of inquiry, then, we must be faithful to the reality we seek to know and must act and think always in a relation of relentless fidelity to that reality.’[32] In this way Torrance has expressed a fundamental and unifying method for all scientific investigation. Not least of which includes scientific theology. (taken from here)

My former prof would say, I know, that this is only to privielege such a methodology by importing already established beliefs about God (like those provided grammar through the ecumenical Church councils) into or onto our conceptions of the ontology of God. So that, again, the order of knowledge is really from the bottom up (from us up). But of course the response to that is that this is the point of the incarnation and the hypostatic union. It is through God’s accommodation to us by becoming man in Christ; that we now have the capacity to know God mediated to us through the creaturely media of Christ’s humanity for us. But this does not really cut the mustard for my former prof; remember, he thinks the conditions for doing theology is that it needs to somehow meet the constraints placed thereupon by the pluralistic society which we inhabit. But this doesn’t seem to be a methodologically ‘Christian’ way to do or think theology. This seems like apologetics. What do you think?

God’s Non-Necessity and Ockham

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Justin Stratis over at the new theoblog, Out Of Bounds, has recently thrown up a post that is quite provocative. He is thinking out loud about a thesis of his about the world and its contingency; and what this does to our knowing about God and ourselves. He writes:

For several months, I’ve been reflecting on the place where God might β€œfit” in our attempts to think about, and ultimately know, ourselves and the world. Consequently, I’ve come to believe that God is formally unnecessary to such attempts. My thesis is that because the world is a finite and contingent thing, God need not be posited in order to make sense of it. (see full post here)

Justin seems to be probing from a more Modern theological position, and I would imagine that his further thoughts on this will mostly be from this vantage point. Nevertheless, as you read what Stratis is saying in full (so follow the link I provide, and do that — read the ensuing comments too), it sounds eerily similar to the kinds of thoughts that Medieval Scholastic theologian Ockham posited; at least relative to God’s non-necessity to the world, and our relative knowledge of it. Just recently I have begun to review a text we used for my Reformation Theology class in seminary (years back), and I have just happened upon Steven Ozment’s accounting of Ockham’s approach; very similar stuff to what Justin Stratis is working through (we’re just looking back a bit further into the history than I would gather Justin is working from). Here is how Ozment describes Ockham’s approach:

Ockham thoroughly rejected the metaphysic of essences and the metacategories so popular among thirteenth-century scholastics, which he believed had entangled God, man, and the world in a great chain of presumed ontological links and forces. He described “divine ideas” as merely the knowledge God could be said to have of the particular things he had created; just as man’s ideas or concepts reflected his encounter with and ordering of the world he intuited, so God “knew” the world he created. There was no grand system of divine ideas interlocking divine, human, and physical reality as with Augustine, Aquinas, and even Scotus. “Ideas,” Ockham wrote, “are not in God really, as part of his very nature [subiective et realiter], but only as objects [in ipso objective]—as the individual things he knows.” Universals as eternal archetypes really in the mind of God and in individual things as principles of their being and intelligibility fell away. Universals were distinctly human phenomena confined to the ordinary processes of a finite mind interacting with its perceived environment. The “secularization” of the knowing process begun by Aquinas here reached a true completion.

For Ockham, traditional philosophical and theological problems no longer opened onto such vast horizons as they had done with his predecessors; Ockham forced speculation to become more modest. Theological conclusions that came easily for Aquinas became impossible in the new Ockhamist world. If one cannot believe that the particular things of the world are essentially connected with their ultimate cause, then it becomes difficult to argue confidently from finite effects to the existence of God. For Ockham, there was no more rational basis for belief in God’s existence or the immortality of the soul than there was for the existence of intelligible species and common natures. All such things become genuine matters of faith. [Steven Ozment, The Age Of Reform 1250-1550: An Intellectual And Religious History Of Late Medieval And Reformation Europe, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 60-1]

To be clear, this post is not intended to challenge or characterize what Stratis is reflecting upon. Instead, Justin’s post is simply more of a springboard that got me thinking about the issue of God’s relation to the world; which led me to consider how someone in the history had similar sentiments at play in his own reflections and constructive theologizing. Obviously Ockham has the two-wills (absoluta, ordinata) at work in his mode of thought; and Ockham had never heard of Karl Barth’s actualistic metaphysic (for lack of a better term) and a post-metaphysical approach — and my hunch is that these are the categories (Barth’s, JΓΌngel’s, and other Moderns) that Stratis will be working through. Nevertheless, it is at least interesting to note some corollaries between the kinds of Modern questions that Stratis is positing; with the Pre-Modern/Critical ones that somebody like Ockham similarly articulated. I suppose in some ways the Teacher’s dictum of “there is nothing new under the sun” is apropos (maybe its just that some ideas are closer to the sun than others πŸ˜‰ ).

I am just thinking . . .