Philosophy of Theology

Philosophy of Theology Nicholas Adams, University of Birmingham Philosophy responds to changes. These can be described as changes in experience, or changes in expectation. Change might be a consequence of development, where a set of habits shifts, both responding to but also producing a new situation. But it might also be a consequence of encounter with other forms of life, where things are done (and thought) differently, thus stimulating questions about one‟s own arrangements or placing pressure on language that is at home describing one set of practices to do justice to how things look from a different perspective. To consider Christian theology in a Chinese university, where Christian theology is not typically studied, is just such an encounter. Changes in practices and in forms of description might require one to engage with new things not previously considered (such as the phenomenon of jetlag, which only arises when one travels across time-zones at high speed) or old things that are understood in a new way (for example the idea in a patriarchal society that authority should be exercised by women no less than men). Such changes show up in new terms (like „jetlag‟), new processes (e.g. arrangements by which positions of power are to be conferred on women), new institutions (e.g. the university), new laws (e.g. a requirement that drivers of mechanical vehicles should pass a test of competence), and so forth. They also show up in modifications to existing terms, processes, institutions and laws. Research in the university is arguably the investigation of change. To study literature (as distinct from reading it) is at first a matter of learning how to interpret texts, but as soon as this competence is acquired, it is quickly put to use in making sense of new ways of narrating life and lives, of understanding character, of discerning virtues and vices, of confronting contradictions, of rendering anxieties, hopes, and disappointments legible, of coming to terms with death and embracing new life. Questions of form and structure, or brevity and length, of division or unbroken prose, arise alongside these matters, and as a consequence of this a distinction between form and content has its uses. Such new ways are not necessarily (and perhaps less often) recent changes. They are new merely to the reader and may typically (and more often) involve investigation into the literature of the past, a past that is „new‟ only (but significantly) to the reader. As our understanding of that past changes, so our investigations into how those formerly new ways of understanding developed also change. Different things become significant or insignificant. What might have appeared marginal to a later age is revealed as central to the age in which a work was produced, and vice versa. Investigation into these questions stimulates more elemental questions. One can ask what narration is or how any of these basic categories is to be understood: life, character, virtue, contradiction, disappointment, A paper delivered at the ͚Philosophy and the Modern Time͛ conference, celebrating the 60th birthday of the School of Philosophy at Fudan University, 28 October 2016. hope. One can notice how these basic categories can become more important or almost disappear. Certain works of literature might refuse, as a matter of experiment or protest, to deal in such categories at all. Entire systems of classification mutate, new ontologies arise, rival logics confront each other. One can ask what literature is, whether and in what ways it is distinct from other disciplines like philosophy, or history, or ethnography – disciplines which, after all, also deal in the same basic categories (life, character, virtue, contradiction, disappointment, hope). An historian who does not read the literature of her period is no historian. A professor of English literature who does not read the philosophical works read by the author he is studying is no professor of English literature. Our system of classification for the modern university is itself unstable: disciplines share questions, borrow each other‟s terms of art, are dependent on each other in ways that are not accidental but lie at the core of their various enterprises. There are certainly different disciplines, but the difference is an uncertain and quickly contested matter. One can be an historian of any discipline: a historian of literature, of economics, of religions. To be an historian is to have as one‟s chief concern the question of change, and to be concerned with it in a particular set of ways. One can also be a philosopher of any discipline: a philosopher of history, of literature, of science, of religion. To be a philosopher is to concern oneself with questions of systems of classification, of fundamental ontologies, of rival logics. If physicists construct an idea of motion in order to understand the relation between space and time as expressed by objects in the world it will not be long before a philosopher is asking what space and time are, and whether they are „in the world‟ in the same way as the objects concerned. If historians appeal to cause and effect in order to make sense of the contiguity of events, as in an investigation into the causes of the Thirty Years War in the seventeenth century in Western Europe, it will not be long before a philosopher is asking what cause and effect are, and whether they can be inferred from observable contiguities. Certain questions arise almost unavoidably across different disciplines and connecting different disciplines. Questions of morality, for example, arise alike in literature, economics and religions. A crisis in these questions will provoke new works of literature, new economic proposals, new religious defences of habits previously taken for granted. It will not be long before a philosopher asks whether there is such a thing as morality or whether concerns typically handled under that heading are better treated under others, such as power or survival strategy or even „habit‟ itself. Everyday solidities like space and time, cause and effect, morality, power, and habit melt into air in the hands of philosophers and are returned, like all questions, to their proper home: the theatre of contestation. A paper delivered at the ͚Philosophy and the Modern Time͛ conference, celebrating the 60th birthday of the School of Philosophy at Fudan University, 28 October 2016. I do not hope to persuade anyone of these matters. They are the basis for what follows. I take them for granted and appeal to others who also take them for granted. I wish to outline what a philosophy of theology would look like, and argue for its significance in a Chinese context where „theology‟, as a discipline, largely does not exist. My proposals have an intellectual and an institutional dimension. Intellectually, I sketch the outlines of a philosophy of theology. This is one form – the one that I know – of a conception of philosophy that can readily be extended to other disciplines. Institutionally, I suggest that this kind of work has historically been fruitful when embedded in centres that are connected with civil society. The Intellectual Case Philosophy responds to change. It does so at varying degrees of depth, from asking typically „philosophical‟ questions about truth, goodness and beauty (for example by enquiring into the values that underpin a particular set of habits) to more fundamental questions about systems of classification and the rules which govern how terms are related to one another (in Greek terms: questions of ontology and logic). In the case of theology the role of philosophy is complicated by the existence, especially in Europe and North America, of the sub-disciplines „philosophy of religion‟ and „philosophical theology‟. These can be distinguished in various ways, but in practice it depends heavily on how a particular institution designs its courses and which figures it hires to teach them. It is tempting to think that philosophy of religion is what philosophers do when they tackle religion, and philosophical theology is what theologians do when they tackle philosophy, but there are too many awkward cases, exceptions and boundary-crossing examples for this to be satisfactory. The most significant developments in the Western Christian tradition, in the last 20 years, are arguably Radical Orthodoxy and Analytic Theology and we would be here all week if we tried to settle the question of how philosophy and theology are related in these enterprises. Likewise we could try various ways of distinguishing two works of Thomas Aquinas, the Summa Theologiae and the Summa Contra Gentiles, with their different relations to sacra doctrina. But even if we gained clarity on these European practices – older and newer – things would quickly unravel if we enquired into the relation between philosophy and theology in Al Azhar, in Cairo, in Gadjah Mada, in Yogyakarta or Fudan, here in Shanghai. Institutional considerations not only intrude upon but radically destabilise any attempts at disciplinary prescriptions. Geography spoils intellectual chauvinism. It is perhaps easier, and certainly more ethnographically manageable, to ask: what questions are posed in these institutions, and what disciplinary name is given locally to attempts to answer them? But again this will arguably yield a good deal of interesting data without generating a useful map of the terrain. A paper delivered at the ͚Philosophy and the Modern Time͛ conference, celebrating the 60th birthday of the School of Philosophy at Fudan University, 28 October 2016. I want to take a different approach and consider the philosophy of theology as a matter of gradually greater abstraction or of progressively deeper enquiry. I will take an example from Christian theology, because this is my discipline, but offer it as an illustration that might stimulate the production of other examples from other disciplines. My main example is Christology. No theological enquiry in the Christian tradition can proceed very far before needing to navigate this topic: it lies at the heart of what distinguishes Christian practices (of worship, of prayer, of thought) from those of other traditions. In Christology the fundamental questions concern the worship of Jesus, and these produce several generative topics of enquiry such as way in which the name of God is related to the name of Jesus, the significance of Jesus‟ death on the cross, and the meaning of terms such as incarnation, sacrifice, atonement, resurrection. Something similar would be true of another central doctrine – the Trinity – where the fundamental, questions concern the way in which God is three and God is one; these produce such topics as whether there is a hierarchy, what sort of relations there are, and what kind of difference there is between the three persons of Father, Son and Spirit. There is discussion in the tradition as to the meaning of terms like „substance‟ and „person‟, the unity of God‟s action, and the kinds of preposition most suitable for connecting the persons to each other and to creation: „from the Father‟, „by the Son‟, „in the Son‟, „through the Spirit‟ and so forth. The fundamental questions in relation to Christology were arguably settled many hundreds of years ago, and answers to them are found in baptismal formulae, credal statements and other „symbols‟ that function to keep Christians in communion with each other or to exclude heretical developments. The question, is Jesus divine or human? received an authoritative answer fairly early on, for example. The Council of Ephesus (431 CE) affirmed that Christ‟s divinity and humanity were united in one hypostasis (typically named the „hypostatic union‟) and the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE) answered: fully divine and fully human, one Christ „to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably‟. However, although these claims have long been part of the doctrinal fabric of the tradition (for over 1500 years indeed), they are undoubtedly odd. Nearly every student of theology discovers that although doctrinal formulae are rather simple to remember and reproduce (“inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably”) they are strangely elusive and difficult to focus on, an object in the dark that shows up clearly in peripheral vision, but becomes obscure when viewed directly. Theological study has sometimes to come at them obliquely: discovering what the questions were, why they were posed in these particular ways, and seeing the answers as settling – for now – the disagreements and uncertainties that stimulated them. It is one of the fascinations of an ancient religious tradition that „for now‟ can last many hundreds of years, long after the original questions have disappeared from view. But those answers are as vague and they are authoritative. And it was almost inevitable that they are so. Part of the function of doctrines is to keep the community A paper delivered at the ͚Philosophy and the Modern Time͛ conference, celebrating the 60th birthday of the School of Philosophy at Fudan University, 28 October 2016. together while excluding error. Doctrines are, in part, corrective: they settle a particular point of trouble, sooth a particular irritation, but leave other questions, as yet unasked, indeterminate. To do theology is to work on new questions within the frameworks of older questions and the answers given to them. Some of this work is communal and cautious, as displayed for example in joint statements between different communities (for example the famous „Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification‟ by the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church of 1999). And some of it is individual and experimental, as displayed in proposals by individual theologians working through problems in their own way. I wish to construct a model of gradually increasing abstraction or progressively deeper enquiry. At their most concrete, theological questions ask about matters of worship and prayer, especially in cases where communities develop different and perhaps conflicting practices. Is Jesus divine or human? And an answer is given: fully divine, fully human. A further question was almost inevitably asked about the relation of the divinity to the humanity. The answer was that these are two natures that are related „inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably‟. This answer was good enough „for now‟ to enable communities (although not all of them – not the oriental orthodox churches) to worship together. However, if one asks, „but what does this mean?‟ one notices that these claims are negations: not confused, not changeable, not divisible, not separable. They deny a potential error: for example, the error of thinking that they are separable. That is the extent of their function. They exclude more than they affirm. They correct more than they inform. What kind of claim is this – that they are negations, denials, exclusions, corrections? It is to draw attention to a formal quality (how the claim is constructed) more than to its meaning (what is claimed). Here, it is to identify the „not x‟ structure of certain Christological claims, but it is also to find this identification significant. The Council of Chalcedon produces a positive claim – fully divine and fully human. And then when clarifying the relation between these two terms it deals in negation – not confused, not changeable, not divisible, not separable. It is significant in so far as it reveals a certain corrective quality to doctrine, or at least this particular doctrine. One can go deeper. What kind of relation is it, if a relation is both „not confused‟ and „not separable‟? Typically, if two terms are not confused then they are separable. Oil and vinegar are not confused in a salad dressing. They can be shaken up, but they remain separable. Milk and tea – that English abomination – are not separable: they are confused as soon as the one is poured into the other. In what kinds of case are terms both not confused and not separable? One looks in vain for objects that might illustrate it. Yet the logic is not problematic: the two terms are distinct (not confused) but inherently connected (not separable). But what does it mean to be distinct yet inseparable? Are there other relations between terms of this kind? Yes, of course. But they are not objects like oil, vinegar, milk and tea. They are father and child; husband and wife; top and bottom; inside and outside. Let us simply call these „pairs‟. These are terms which are clearly distinct, but they are not separable: to A paper delivered at the ͚Philosophy and the Modern Time͛ conference, celebrating the 60th birthday of the School of Philosophy at Fudan University, 28 October 2016. consider the one as separate from the other is to cause the one to cease. Very good. Is the relation between divinity and humanity of this kind? It is not. Divinity and humanity is not like top and bottom. You cannot have a top without a bottom, but clearly you can have humanity without divinity. Indeed all instances of humanity (with the exception of Jesus) are such. So now we have a case where the logic of pairs is applied to a case where such a logic typically does not hold. What kind of logical operation is this, to apply a logic atypically? Again, one draws attention to a formal quality (this time more difficult to grasp than the quality of negation) that a doctrine (or at least this doctrine) displays. Two things are noteworthy about this discussion. First, there is no point here at which theology becomes philosophy. The thinking becomes increasingly philosophical, as it goes on, but it does not thereby become less theological. Second, it is specific to the discipline of theology. One can separate certain formal qualities (negation, pairing) from the claims in view, but they are significant precisely because they illuminate something about Christian doctrines. Of course they might well in principle illuminate something else, but to do that they would need to be specific to some other discipline. To answer the question, what is the philosophy of theology? is to point to this kind of thinking. That, in brief, is my intellectual case for the sub-discipline. The Institutional Case There have been notable cases in European philosophy where this kind of thinking – progressively more philosophical but never divorced from a specific discipline – has been done well. John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, G.W.F. Hegel, R.G. Collingwood: all did philosophy in relation to specific disciplines (politics, law, religion, history, literature). In more recent times one finds the same impulse in the Frankfurt School, where members of the Institute for Social Research (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Pollock, Fromm and others) conducted philosophy in relation to psychoanalysis, economics, political theory, literature. These notable cases are remarkable not only for the relation of philosophy to other disciplines but the relation of that philosophy to problems in society. The Institute for Social Research undertook – and continues to undertake – research into conflicts, social breakdown and civilizational failure. It is work undertaken for the public good: diagnostic, descriptive and reparative. In the contemporary university, these arrangements are uncertain. On the one hand, philosophers who practise their craft for the public good are rewarded with unusually intense recognition. It is hard to imagine a philosopher more well-known than Jürgen Habermas, for example. But at the same time, the institutional location of philosophy in a „Department of Philosophy‟ tends to inhibit this kind of public service. Most philosophy in Europe is done by philosophers for philosophers. In what might be described as „the age of impact‟ in universities there is considerable anxiety among A paper delivered at the ͚Philosophy and the Modern Time͛ conference, celebrating the 60th birthday of the School of Philosophy at Fudan University, 28 October 2016. philosophers about how this work connects with public concerns, and these sometimes show up in ways that pressure the discipline towards ethics (an area where public impact is most readily discernable). It would, however, be damagingly reductive to think that the work of the great publicspirited philosophers from Locke to Collingwood, or the work of the great publicservice institutions like the Institute for Social Research, is best described as „ethics‟. It is much better described as the philosophy of history, of literature, of politics, of economics. Ethical questions show up in a multi-dimensional way, for sure, but this is not primarily ethical research. It is primarily history, literature, politics, economics. Its public service is precisely visible because it is discipline-specific and not simply „philosophy‟. I propose the hypothesis that philosophy is more oriented to public service the more it is discipline-specific. And the reverse is also plausible: the less discipline-specific philosophy is, the less it serves the public good. The case of ethics illustrates this nicely. It is not because philosophers tackle ethical questions that they can hope to have an impact on society. It is because they tackle ethical questions in specific disciplines: like medical research, economics and the study of climate change. For philosophy to be oriented to public service, therefore, perhaps it needs to be located in institutions which embrace its need to be embedded in disciplines. This does not mean abolishing departments of philosophy. Rather, it means generating research clusters (in economics, in international relations, in law) where philosophers are core participants because they have been trained not only in philosophy but in specific disciplines to which they contribute. This used to be quite normal – one can point to the British tradition from Locke to Collingwood or the German tradition from Hegel to Honneth – with enough institutional support might it become normal again? The Philosophy of Theology I wish to return, in this final section, to the philosophy of theology. This might have appeared a rather eccentric pursuit when compared with bigger and better funded disciplines like economics or law. But theology is rarely far from these other apparently secular disciplines. If one wishes to understand Islamic banking, African Christian understandings of sexuality, burial practices in Indonesian villages, medical collaborations between religious charities in Egypt or the rise of Donald Trump in the USA, theological study is not only useful but necessary. These topics all impinge on public life in emphatic ways, for better and for worse. To understand religious conflict and religious interests is to a significant extent to understand the disagreements between religious traditions, and even more within religious traditions, over theology. My example of Christology, then, is not quite as exotic as it might first appear. If one wishes to pursue a life of philosophical public service, it is necessary to be competent in a specific discipline, whatever that might be. In Christian theology that means understanding early Church doctrines about Jesus Christ. This is a matter of A paper delivered at the ͚Philosophy and the Modern Time͛ conference, celebrating the 60th birthday of the School of Philosophy at Fudan University, 28 October 2016. apprenticeship. C.S. Peirce did not suddenly try his hand at the natural sciences: he was trained in them. The same is true for figures like Quentin Skinner in relation to history or Andrew Bowie in relation to music. In closing, I wish to repeat and extend an earlier claim: the different disciplines of the university are themselves inter-dependent: literature, history, economics, politics, law and so forth. To engage one is to engage the others, to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the topic. Many universities have recognised the intellectual damage caused by disciplinary over-specialisation and have for this reason established properly funded inter-disciplinary research centres. My own University of Birmingham has an Institute for Advanced Studies, launched in 2013, for example, and the directors of these humanities centres from universities across the world periodically meet under the aegis of the UBIAS (“University-Based Institutes for Advanced Study”) to diagnose and address challenges to inter-disciplinary work. The 2016 meeting was in fact hosted by Birmingham. Fudan University has two such centres: the National Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies and the Institute for Advanced Study in Social Sciences, founded in 2007 and 2008 respectively. There is good reason to suppose that Institutes for Advanced Studies might be the natural place to pursue a revitalisation of our disciplines of the kind I have outlined here: a philosophy for the public good. A paper delivered at the ͚Philosophy and the Modern Time͛ conference, celebrating the 60th birthday of the School of Philosophy at Fudan University, 28 October 2016.