{"id":5847,"date":"2014-01-23T22:15:48","date_gmt":"2014-01-24T03:15:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/?p=5847"},"modified":"2015-02-15T05:59:22","modified_gmt":"2015-02-15T10:59:22","slug":"against-despising-analytic-theologians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/against-despising-analytic-theologians\/","title":{"rendered":"against despising analytic theologians"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft  wp-image-5849\" src=\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/fingers-of-accusation.jpg\" alt=\"fingers of accusation\" width=\"502\" height=\"318\" srcset=\"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/fingers-of-accusation.jpg 1000w, https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/fingers-of-accusation-300x190.jpg 300w, https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/fingers-of-accusation-420x266.jpg 420w, https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/fingers-of-accusation-460x292.jpg 460w, https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/fingers-of-accusation-90x57.jpg 90w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 502px) 100vw, 502px\" \/>I recently read this somewhat<strong> <a title=\"post on analytic philosophers\" href=\"http:\/\/afkimel.wordpress.com\/2013\/12\/30\/can-analytic-philosophers-be-saved\/\" target=\"_blank\">disturbing post<\/a><\/strong> by our friend Fr. Aiden Kimel. Though he lightens things up with humor a couple of times, it is a pretty thorough condemnation of analytic theologians. A charge he makes by implication against analytic theologians (i.e. those trained in analytic philosophy who work on topics in Christian theology) is that like the &#8220;Arians&#8221; of old, we suffer from<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8230;a <strong>triumphant rationalism<\/strong> antithetical to piety and the authentic exposition of Christian doctrine<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Sorry, I just don&#8217;t see it at all. I see both deep and sincere piety and intense concern with being faithful to true tradition in all the analytic theologians I&#8217;ve known and\/or studied. Surely, there are bad apples among us&#8230; but the same is true with other theologians. Keep in mind that I&#8217;m an anomaly; most analytic theoligans are more catholic than I am, indeed, being full and longstanding members of e.g. Anglican, Roman Catholic, Reformed, Orthodox, pentecostal, Baptist, or non-denominational evangelical churches.<\/p>\n<p>As to &#8220;<strong>rationalism<\/strong>,&#8221; this is not a description really, but a term of abuse, meaning something like, prideful overconfidence in one&#8217;s own reasoning powers. This would seem a fitting charge against, say, Spinoza, or Hegel, or Swedenborg. But against Swinburne? Davis? Craig? Crisp? Brower? Anderson? Pawl? Zagzebski? I just don&#8217;t see it. There certainly <em>are<\/em> arrogant people in philosophy, but these ain&#8217;t them.<\/p>\n<p>I note there&#8217;s a kind of <strong>over-heated rhetoric<\/strong> here, in a patristic mode:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The God of the Scriptures transcends definition and categorization; his divine nature exceeds all human comprehension. \u201cTo tell of God is not possible,\u201d declares the Theologian, \u201cbut to know him is even less possible\u201d (Or. 28.4). And again: &#8220;Our starting point must be the fact that God cannot be named.&#8221;\u00a0 (Or. 30.17)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This strikes me as bluster.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>God. There, I just named God. I&#8217;ll do it again: Yahweh. So much for his being unnameable.<\/li>\n<li>Can he be categorized? Seemingly, yes: divine being. God. Perfect being. Ultimate source of all else. Creator. Non-created. There are five or six categorizations, all true. So much for the claim that he&#8217;s uncategorizable.<\/li>\n<li>Does his nature exceed all human comprehension? If that means humans completely understanding God, then trivially, yes. Of course, no non-omniscient being can fully comprehend an omniscient one. But if it means that no human can understand God to any degree, this is obviously ruled out by the Bible. We can understand that God is good, loving, and powerful, and is much like a perfect human Father. Jesus is the revelation of God &#8211; if you&#8217;ve seen him, so to speak, you&#8217;ve seen the Father.<\/li>\n<li>Needless to say, I&#8217;ve just been &#8220;telling of&#8221; (i.e. talking about) God. So, it is false that &#8220;To tell of God is not possible.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>While there could be philosophical assumptions at play on which I&#8217;m missing the point four times here, I&#8217;m <em>guessing<\/em> that none of this rhetoric is being asserted as literally true. <strong>Why use it then?<\/strong> What is its function? I believe its function is just to silence, or at least denounce, people who are thought to be out of line, because they are not simply repeating the traditional words.<\/p>\n<p>Fr. Aiden says,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>When I read discussions of the trinitarian doctrine by analytic philosophers, I immediately note the <strong>confidence<\/strong> with which they write\u2014confidence in their methods, confidence in their logic, confidence in their conceptualizations. But they neither begin nor end with mystery. They are consumed with dialectics and problem-solving. One would never guess that the doctrine of the Trinity is driven by the spiritual and liturgical experience of the Church catholic.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&#8220;they <strong>neither begin nor end with mystery<\/strong>&#8221; This is patently untrue. Analytic theologians often begin with the seemingly contradictory statements (mystery) of the &#8220;Athanasian creed&#8221; or somesuch. And they frequently emphasize that they haven&#8217;t rendered trinitarianism mystery-free. (Off the top of my head, see recent pieces by Hasker, Leftow, Senor, Rea, van Inwagen.)\u00a0 They are often, even usually, working with an <strong>apologetic motive<\/strong>, to defend mainstream Christianity against the charge of teaching patent contradictions. Is this not part of the life of the Church? Their arrogance, I think, is mostly if not all projected onto them by those who don&#8217;t understand what they&#8217;re doing. That they seem <strong>over-confident<\/strong> is, I think, caused by their not constantly hedging their claims, as is customary in recent theology, and in other fields. Very often they emphasize that their understanding of the Trinity is but a suggestion. Philosophers habitually assert, but are also (ideally, but also often: really) willing to have their points refuted.<\/p>\n<p>Do they use <strong>logic<\/strong>? Do they go on at length? Do they make distinctions, and aim to be precise? Yes. But only in people&#8217;s imaginations are most of them &#8220;consumed with dialectics and problem-solving.&#8221; That&#8217;s an unkind charicature. Frankly, I&#8217;ve found them to be deadly <strong>serious<\/strong> about it all, and not simply focused on &#8220;winning,&#8221; showing their own cleverness, and so on. Keep in mind that many of these Christian philosophers work at secular schools, and all of them would like to be respected by their non-Christian peers, and it is <strong>not cool<\/strong> (in the wider philosophical community) to work on the Trinity.<\/p>\n<p>What they&#8217;re doing, is <strong>taking traditional Christian claims seriously<\/strong>, <em>trying<\/em> to understand them as self-consistent. Why? Because they think traditional Christian claims are all true, since they know that contradictions are all false. This, to me, is the true way of humility. It shows love of truth, and clarity means that one opens one&#8217;s reasoning up to refutation. Unclarity is a way to make onself unrefutable, while to be clear is to take a risk. Also, until it is clear what these creedal claims are, we will be unable to search for evidence for them in the scriptures. (Evidence <em>for what<\/em>?) They know these are supposed to be <strong>truths<\/strong> to be believed, not merely words to be parroted. But: <em>which<\/em> truths, exactly?<\/p>\n<p>And again, as catholic, the majority are <strong>loathe to depart from catholic tradition<\/strong>, esp. 4th-5th c., unless compelled by the strongest reasons. A well-known patristic scholar once remarked to me that he was pleasantly surprised to find that analytic theologians were <em>more<\/em> concerned to remain orthdox (catholic) than other theologians. For all I know, that&#8217;s true; it fits my evidence. They are generally conservative, and very hard to pull away by fads and specious arguments.<\/p>\n<p>In Fr. Aiden&#8217;s view, the ancient &#8220;fathers&#8221;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>dared to write on the Trinity only with <strong>fear and trembling<\/strong>, fully aware of their inability to bring to accurate speech the holy mystery.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Yeah, they use that rhetoric often enough, but they seem <em>very<\/em> confident to me, <em>at least as<\/em> self-confident as most present-day analytic theologians. Hear them <strong>thunder condemnation<\/strong> and insults at their opponents, certain in their philosophical speculations &#8211; the ancient bishops, I mean. Present day analytic theologians &#8211; I have never seen a single one of them condemn people in any way for not engaging in analytic theology, or for disagreeing with their favored theories. They are merely <a title=\"Advice to Christian Philosophers\" href=\"http:\/\/www.calvin.edu\/academic\/philosophy\/virtual_library\/articles\/plantinga_alvin\/advice_to_christian_philosophers.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">trying to serve<\/a> the wider Christian public, whoever can benefit from their work, and they&#8217;re sticking out their necks to do it.<\/p>\n<p>Fr. Aiden continues,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is not <strong>an intellectual conundrum that we can solve<\/strong>, if only we would bring to bear upon it our most sophisticated philosophical analysis, nor is the doctrine in any way discredited by the acknowledgement that the Triune God eludes our attempts to comprehend the divine reality revealed in the Scriptures. We can identify the boundaries asserted by the trinitarian dogma, beyond which there is heresy. We can state the grammatical rules that govern churchly discourse on God. But ultimately all we can rightly do\u2014and surely this is more than sufficient\u2014is glorify the Mystery who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>He asserts here that intellectual work, attempt to clarify or understand &#8220;the&#8221; doctrine of the Trinity is <strong>utterly useless, hopeless<\/strong>. On what grounds, I wonder? It is best, he tells us, to merely worship the Trinity, and not try to theorize about it.<\/p>\n<p>Well, we don&#8217;t see any conflict between the two. We are trying <strong>to love God<\/strong> with our minds. We worship God <em>by<\/em> trying to think carfully about him. You can opine that this is useless, but we feel that at bare minimum, we&#8217;re getting clearer on what the options are, on how to think about God, and ruling out certain dead-ends. Also, one can&#8217;t even understand the theology of the ancient &#8220;fathers&#8221; without some philosophizing. We also aim<strong> to love our neighbor<\/strong> by disentangling confusions, and so helping her to find her way around the issues at hand. Of course, not all our neighbors will desire this help!<\/p>\n<p>For my part, I&#8217;m <strong>eternally grateful<\/strong> to analytic theologians for helping me to see some conflicts between the Bible and later catholic traditions. I have only respect for their long, difficult work in thinking through the contents of divine revelation. I don&#8217;t despise their despisers, but I ask them to reconsider. Analytic philosophers are <strong>not trampling holy things<\/strong>. Rather, they&#8217;re focusing careful, trained gazes upon them, for sustained periods. They speak about what they think they see, but don&#8217;t claim to be either prophets or gods. This much is true &#8211; few if any of them settle for only, or mainly <a title=\"Negative Mysterianism explained\" href=\"http:\/\/plato.stanford.edu\/entries\/trinity\/#NegMys\" target=\"_blank\">negative mysterian haze<\/a>. But none claims 20\/20 vision.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I recently read this somewhat disturbing post by our friend Fr. Aiden Kimel. Though he lightens things up with humor a couple of times, it is a pretty thorough condemnation of analytic theologians. A charge he makes by implication against analytic theologians (i.e. those trained in analytic philosophy who work on topics in Christian theology)&hellip;&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/against-despising-analytic-theologians\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">Read More &raquo;<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">against despising analytic theologians<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5849,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[37,6,58,14,8,20,9,7,13,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-apologetics","category-complaints","category-creeds","category-history","category-linkage","category-mystery","category-philosophy","category-quotes","category-theologians","category-theories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5847"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5847\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34752,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5847\/revisions\/34752"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}