Why Theology Needs Philosophy!

In 1993, Talbot School of Theology at Biola University in La Mirada California, opened its doors to the first students in its new M.A. in Philosophy of Religion and Ethics.  What was the vision that inspired and discerned more clearly the strategic role played by philosophy in the task of theological education?  Dr. William Lane Craig answers this question in the current issue of Sundoulos, the alumni magazine of Talbot (my wonderful alma mater).

Why Philosophy?

Let me suggest three reasons why philosophical study ought to play an integral part in theological training.

 

First, Christian philosophy is vital to transforming our post-Christian cultural milieu. In America we now find ourselves living in a post-Christian culture that is increasingly coarse, superficial, promiscuous, and profane. Beneath it lies the widespread conviction of religious relativism. There is no one true religion, and to assert that there is to expose oneself as arrogant, coercive—even evil. In the absence of objective truth, religious belief becomes a purely private matter of subjective feelings.

 

Such a cultural context is antagonistic to the mission of the Church. In order to speak the Gospel effectively, the Church needs an intellectual milieu where the Gospel can be heard as an objectively true alternative; otherwise it will either be dismissed as superstition or appropriated only as “true for me but not for you.”

 

The Church thus faces, as Charles Malik emphasized in his inaugural address at the Billy Graham Center in Wheaton, two tasks in our evangelism, saving the soul and saving the mind; that is to say, not only converting people spiritually but converting them intellectually as well. And the Church is lagging dangerously behind with regard to this second task. Malik declared,

 

I must be frank with you: the greatest danger confronting American evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism. The mind in its greatest and deepest reaches is not cared for enough. But intellectual nurture cannot take place apart from profound immersion for a period of years in the history of thought and the spirit. People who are in a hurry to get out of the university and start earning money or serving the church or preaching the gospel have no idea of the infinite value of spending years of leisure conversing with the greatest minds and souls of the past, ripening and sharpening and enlarging their powers of thinking. The result is that the arena of creative thinking is vacated and abdicated to the enemy. Who among evangelicals can stand up to the great secular scholars on their own terms of scholarship? Who among evangelical scholars is quoted as a normative source by the greatest secular authorities on history or philosophy or psychology or sociology or politics? Does the evangelical mode of thinking have the slightest chance of becoming the dominant mode in the great universities of Europe and America that stamp our entire civilization with their spirit and ideas? For the sake of greater effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ, as well as for their own sakes, evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence.¹

The average Christian does not realize that there is an intellectual war going on in the universities and in the professional journals and in the scholarly societies. Christianity is being attacked from all sides as bigoted or irrational, and millions of students, our future generation of leaders, have absorbed this viewpoint.

 

It is the awesome task of Christian philosophers to help turn the intellectual tide back to a milieu in which Christian faith can be regarded as an intellectually credible alternative. Since philosophy is foundational to every disciple of the university, philosophy is the most strategic discipline to be captured for Christ. Malik himself realized this. He emphasized,

 

It will take a different spirit altogether to overcome this great danger of antiintellectualism. For example, I say this different spirit, so far as philosophy alone—the most important domain for thought and intellect—is concerned, must see the tremendous value of spending an entire year doing nothing but poring intensely over the Republic or the Sophist of Plato, or two years over the Metaphysics or the Ethics of Aristotle, or three years over the City of God of Augustine.

This is not a popular message for seminaries. J. Gresham Machen in his article “Christianity and Culture” observed that “many would the seminaries combat error by attacking it as it is taught by its popular exponents” instead of confusing students “with a lot of …names unknown outside the walls of the university.” But, Machen insisted, the scholarly method of procedure

 

is based simply upon a profound belief in the pervasiveness of ideas. What is to-day matter of academic speculation begins to-morrow to move armies and pull down empires., In that second stage, it has gone too far to be combated; the time to stop it was when it was still a matter of impassionate debate. So as Christians we should try to mould the thought of the world in such a way as to make the acceptance of Christianity something more than a logical absurdity.²

Like Malik, Machen also believed that “The chief obstacle to the Christian religion to-day lies in the sphere of the intellect,” and that it must be attacked in that sphere. “The Church is perishing to-day through the lackof thinking, not through an excess of it.”

Second, Christian Philosophy is an integral part of training for Christian ministry. What is ironic about the attitude that doubts philosophy’s rightful or important place at a seminary is that it is precisely our pastors and evangelists who are in need of this training. Machen’s article was originally given as a speech entitled, “The Scientific Preparation of the Minister.” A model for us here is a man like John Wesley, who was at once a spirit-filled revivalist and an Oxford-educated scholar. In 1756 Wesley delivered “An Address to the Clergy,” which I wish all future ministers would read before commencing their seminary studies. In discussing what sort of abilities a minister ought to have, Wesley distinguished between natural gifts and acquired abilities. And it’s extremely instructive to look at the abilities which Wesley thought a minister ought to acquire. One of them is a basic grasp of philosophy. He challenged his audience to ask themselves,

 

Am I a tolerable master of the sciences? Have I gone through the very gate of them, logic? . . . . Do I understand metaphysics; if not the depths of the Schoolmen, the subtleties of Scotus or Aquinas, yet the first rudiments, the general principles, of that useful science? Have I conquered so much of it, as to clear my apprehension and range my ideas under proper heads; so much as enables me to read with ease and pleasure, as well as profit, Dr. Henry Moore’s Works, Malbranche’s “Search after Truth,” and Dr. Clarke’s “Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God?”³

Wesley’s vision of a pastor is remarkable: a gentleman, skilled in the Scriptures and conversant with history, philosophy, and the science of his day. How do the pastors graduating from our seminaries compare to this model?

I can personally testify to the immense practicality and even indispensability of philosophical training for a ministry of evangelism. My ministry involves not just scholarly work, but speaking evangelistically on university campuses with groups like Campus Crusade for Christ. Again and again, I see the practical value of my philosophical studies in reaching students for Christ. The conventional wisdom is that “You can’t use arguments to bring people to Christ.” I don’t know how many times I’ve heard this said. I suspect those who say this just don’t do a lot of campus evangelism. The fact is that there is tremendous interest out there among unbelievers in hearing a rational presentation and defense of the Gospel.

Very often I’ll be invited onto a campus where a local professor has a reputation for eating Christians for lunch in his classes, and we’ll challenge him to a public debate on some issue like “Does God Exist?” or“ Christianity vs. Humanism,” or “Who Was Jesus?” or some such topic.And I find that hundreds and sometimes even thousands of students will come out to hear these debates. Frankly, I don’t know how one could minister effectively in a public way on our university campuses without training in philosophy.”

 

Dr. Craig, we couldn’t agree more!

 

William Lane Craig (D.Theol., Ludwig-Maximilliéns-Universität Munich, Germany; Ph.D., University of Birmingham England) is Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot. Bill and his wife Jan reside in the Atlanta area, from which he carries on an incredibly productive ministry of professional and popular writing, speaking and debating around the world. He also maintains a web-based ministry, reasonablefaith.org.

Your Mind Really Matters

 Believe it or not, the development of a well-formed thought life is actually contained in the first and greatest commandment.  In Luke 10:36 (Matt. 22:37) Jesus commands us to love God with our heart, soul, strength and mind. Jesus is actually quoting the verse from Deuteronomy.

However, evangelicalism has sought to be culturally revelant and reach out to the post-modern generations, we have become over-focused on our relationship and personal experience of God.  We’ve lost the understanding of how important it is to love Him intellectually and to glorify Him through our capacity of reason. In a nutshell, in pursuit of our hearts, we’ve totally lost our heads!  

Anti-intellectualism is a serious issue in the American Church.  We must recover a more balance approach to our faith, and this ought to include the pursuit of a well-formed thought life.  Developing the skills necessary to better reason through our worldview and articulate it effectively to a lost and dying world is vital.  God gave us the capacity of reason so that we would be able to love and worship Him with our minds.  It is through ideas that we tear down falsehoods that are set up against the knowledge of God.  A well-formed thought life enables us to better understand the nature of our ideas and what consequences they may have.  

Further, and more importantly, this is the way God intended us to be. Having a well-formed thought life translates into well being because it entails thinking more accurately about ourselves, the world, and God.  Knowing Him and His will for us is the ultimate prize.

Oh…one final thing…if your mentally deranged, you’ll most likely need a different website. But feel free to poke around in the absent minded category!

Glue Dot Culture

Recently, a friend broke up with me. There was no explanation, there was no conversation.  My friend just stopped being friendly after 11 years of enjoyable and solid relationship. 

What could I have done?  What could I have said?  Alas, even after making inquiry after inquiry, I received no response to voicemails , e-mails , or Facebook messages .  I had to face it.  I’d been dumped.

It saddens me greatly to see the passive aggressivity in our culture run rampant over relationships. The entitlement issues we have with respect to how we deem we are to be treated, and what we do if we are not treated that way are at epidemic proportions.

Since I’ve been doing a bit of reading on popular culture lately, the analogy of my failed friendship that came to mind was that of a glue dot. Glue dots are quick ways to stick stuff together, they are tiny pieces of thin circular sticky rubber used in crafting to hold things in place. They are easy to use and initially very strong, but they are not permanent adhesions (over time their tackiness degrades). Introduce any stress and the things they hold together typically come apart. My friend’s sudden cessation of communication reflects this; whatever stress he experienced, it was enough in his mind to pull us apart as easily as if we had been held together with a glue dot.

The longer I pondered this, the more I thought how unconscionable it seemed to just allow ourselves to degenerate into a culture that holds this view of community. Now I don’t mean to say it’s this way everywhere, but when those we claim to care about aren’t constantly making us feel Über special or good about ourselves; when they are not totally focused on our lives (because they, in fact, have lives of their own); when a friend expresses disparate honesty that doesn’t exactly meet our incessant need for approval, then it would seem that our our commitment to a "through thick and thin" relationship proves to be ephemeral at best.

As author Dick Staub puts it, "Today’s popular culture generally reveals that humans, despite our magnificent spiritual, intellectual, and imaginative capacities, have chosen to wade in the shallow but spiritually toxic waters of superficiality." In essence, we have become a culture of glue dots.

Sadly, the consequences of this type of glue dot mentality are throwaway relationships. This is obviously most clearly seen in the popularity of social networks. We have Facebook friends, Twitter followers, & MySpace micro-celebrity, and yet how many of us can honestly say we reach out to others on these venues with much sincerity or intent of commitment? Not enjoying someone’s updates? It’s just a click away to "unfriend" them.

Perhaps this is appropriate for online interaction, but do we really want the same spilling over into our face-to-face friendships? We need not squint long to see that the result of a desire to use relationships as entertainment in today’s popular culture reflects a radical diminishment of God’s image in all of us. In so doing, we damage own souls. Staub points out that, as a result, we experience is a lack of a deep sense of self which is instead replaced by façade where our identities are formed through the attachment of purely external features much like ornaments on a Christmas tree.

How can we avoid a glue dot mentality? Well, as always I have some suggestions. First, let’s purpose to dwell on the fact that commitment to community is as vital as healthy connective tissue in the body, and that the virtue of commitment to others is deeply valuable. The Creator had specific purpose for making us communal beings. As such, we should be intentional in protecting our relationships.

Second, let’s recommit to those who have invested in us, especially in light of stress. This year, let’s tell those that care about us that we are a "through thick and thin" kinda friend. Third, let’s take some time to focus on how we are a benefit to those friendships, rather than mainly focusing on the melioration they provide us.

Finally, if you don’t think any of this applies to you, it may be helpful to ask those you feel close to if they think you sport a glue dot mentality. You might be surprised. I was.

TL

Dick Staub, The Culturally Savvy Christian