Systematic Philosophical Theology, Volume 1 E-Book

William Lane Craig

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 900

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

“the culmination of an impressive career in philosophy and theology. … Craig’s work will be highly valued and a great achievement, meriting significant attention.”
—Charles Taliaferro, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, St. Olaf College

“William Lane Craig’s landmark treatise on systematic philosophical theology is a major contribution to our understanding of the relation of philosophy and Christian doctrine and will be an essential reference point for future discussions.
—Alister McGrath, Emeritus Idreos Professor of Science and Religion, Oxford University

A transformative journey through Christian doctrine, Volume I: On Scripture, On Faith

William Lane Craig’s Systematic Philosophical Theology is a multi-volume explication of Christian doctrine in the classic Protestant tradition of the loci communes as seen through the lens of contemporary analytic philosophy. Uniquely blending the disciplines of biblical theology, historical theology, and analytic theology, these volumes aim to provide readers with a biblical and philosophically coherent articulation of a wide range of Christian doctrines.

In the first volume of the series, Prolegomena, On Scripture, On Faith, Craig begins by introducing his conception of systematic philosophical theology, describing how it relates to biblical theology, dogmatics, fundamental theology, apologetics, and especially philosophy of religion. The chapters that follow defend the divine authority of Scripture, address the nature of faith, and discuss the rational justification for Christian faith. Throughout the text, Craig tackles cutting edge philosophical questions that arise naturally from Christian doctrine, such as the compatibility of biblical inspiration and human freedom and whether faith implies belief.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication Page

Preface to Volume I

Prolegomena

1 The Renaissance of Christian Philosophy

2 Delineating the Disciplines

3 Truth in Theology

4 The Organizational Structure of

Systematic Philosophical Theology

LOCUS I: De Scriptura Sacra

1 Revelation and Scripture

2 The Nature of Scriptural Inspiration

3 Justification of Belief in Scriptural Inspiration

4 Concluding Remarks

LOCUS II: De Fide

1 The Nature of Faith

2 The Rationality of Faith

3 Concluding Remarks

Bibliography for Volume I

Scripture Index

Name and Subject Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover Page

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication Page

Preface to Volume I

Begin Reading

Bibliography for Volume I

Scripture Index

Name and Subject Index

WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT

List of Figure

Locus II: De Fide

Figure 1 Müller‐Lyer optical illusion.

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Systematic Philosophical Theology

Prolegomena, On Scripture, On Faith

Volume I

William Lane Craig

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To Jan, who inspired this monumental project and sustained me throughout.

Preface to Volume I

I.

The British divine J. I. Packer opens his wonderful book Knowing God with the following words: “As clowns yearn to play Hamlet, so I have wanted to write a treatise on God.”1 Had Packer wanted to look really foolish, he might have tried writing a systematic theology. I am convinced that such an ambition is impossible for any one person adequately to achieve. Since systematic theology draws upon biblical theology, historical theology, and philosophical theology, among other disciplines, an adequate systematic theology would require expertise in all these areas, which is impossible for anyone to achieve in this lifetime. Ideally, then, a systematic theology would be a collaborative effort, featuring the work of specialists in various areas. But it is dubious that such a joint effort could ever be consistent or harmonious. Though I dabble in biblical and historical theology, I am painfully aware of my shortcomings in those areas. So why should I undertake a project that is destined to fail?

Part of the reason is that contemporary systematic theologies tend overwhelmingly to be philosophically deficient. They are either disguised biblical theologies or dogmatic histories or speculative theologies with little input from the discipline of philosophical theology. As a result their treatment of key doctrines is often superficial and at best incomplete. Christian doctrine bristles with philosophical questions that are properly the province of the philosopher of religion or philosophical theologian. A systematic theology that focuses on such questions can help to redress the balance. For that reason I have chosen to write a systematic philosophical theology, that is to say, a systematic theology that focuses on the philosophical problems occasioned by Christian doctrine. Such a systematic theology will itself be terribly lopsided, of course, requiring the input, and perhaps correction, of specialists in other disciplines. But by focusing on the philosophical questions that arise in doing systematic theology, I hope to have some excuse for my manifest failings.

II.

My restricted focus occasions a troublesome question: who, exactly, is the intended audience of this book? My intention was to write a systematic philosophical theology that would be of interest not only to philosophers of religion but also to systematic theologians who wanted to become better acquainted with the philosophical issues arising out of Christian theology. So I take pains to explain things clearly as we proceed. But, alas, some of the philosophical discussion becomes necessarily so technical that I fear it will be simply incomprehensible to the average theologian untrained in logic and metaphysics. It is just impossible, try as I might, to explain everything necessary for an understanding of various debates. In the present volume, at least, there is not much of a technical nature in the first two loci to stymie the typical systematic theologian, though his eyes may well glaze over when he comes to the Bayesian analysis of the epistemic justification of belief in the inspiration of Scripture discussed in De Scriptura sacra. Things get much worse when we come to the locus De Deo in volume IIa, which involves very knotty questions. So I suspect that my work will mainly be read and appreciated by philosophers of religion and analytic theologians, who have the background to understand it.

III.

In the Prolegomena I delineate what I understand systematic theology to involve and how it relates to various theological disciplines. Since I take it to be part of the task of the systematic theologian to articulate a coherent theological viewpoint, it seems to me that philosophical theology, properly understood, is an inherent part of systematic theology. I shall argue that it is analytic philosophy that is most helpful in unfolding the philosophical content of Christian systematic theology. Although some theologians, acquainted with modernist philosophical thought, still distrust analytic philosophy as inimical to theology, there has fortunately been over the last century, as I shall relate, a dramatic shift in the field of philosophy away from its anti‐metaphysical bent, bringing with it a renaissance of Christian philosophy in the Anglo–American world that furnishes rich philosophical resources upon which the Christian theologian may profitably draw.

Although I am enthusiastic about the positive contribution made by analytic philosophical theology to systematic theology, I have become conscious in the course of writing this work of what William Wood has called the “deformations” of analytic philosophical theology, that is to say, defects which are corruptions of the very qualities that make the practice good in the first place.2 Wood rightly points out,

Analytic theology also has its characteristic deformations, and they too are tied to its characteristic virtues. Many of analytic theology’s characteristic virtues are also those of analytic philosophy: a concern for linguistic precision, logical rigor, and linear argument, along with a strong commitment to transparent writing. These are genuine virtues, and they are much needed in theology and the study of religion. But it is also easy to see how the same virtues could become deformed. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.3

To the philosophical theologian, everything looks like a problem to be analyzed and resolved.

Wood fears that the analytic procedure can lead to a loss of mystery and to superficiality. That, however, is not at all my fear; in fact, easy appeals to mystery are often an excuse for superficiality, whereas the resolution of mysteries may result in deeper understanding and increased awe of God’s greatness. I think rather that the deformation endemic to analytic philosophy of religion is sterility and aridity, an overly‐intellectualized faith that can result in a heart that is cold toward God.

Ironically, the showcase example that occurs to me is the same one that occurred to Wood: the doctrine of divine simplicity. Wood criticizes Alvin Plantinga for his well‐known critique of the doctrine, a critique Wood takes to be wrong‐headed because it is based upon a modern understanding of properties that is foreign to the medieval metaphysical framework. This response seems to me unfair to Plantinga. Noting that certain Fathers held God to be identical to his wisdom, goodness, power, and so forth, Plantinga observes that these are properties; but God cannot be a property. If the medieval metaphysicians denied that these are properties, so much the worse for medieval metaphysicians! For these are, in fact, properties. So the critique sticks. Affirming a doctrine as opaque and apparently incoherent as divine simplicity does nothing to make Christian theology deeper, only more obscure.

Contemporary efforts to defend divine simplicity have become increasingly desperate and far‐fetched. Bare logical coherence is purchased only at the expense of enormous implausibility. The resultant concept of God is light years away from the living God of the Bible. One philosophical theologian, reflecting on contemporary debates over divine simplicity, remarked to me, “I feel that we’re scarcely even doing Christian theology anymore.” I think he is right. The sterile abstraction that takes the place of God in the defenses of divine simplicity is hardly apt to warm the heart and prompt one to draw near to God. Contemporary philosophical theologians writing in defense of divine simplicity are doing no favor at all to Christian theology and spirituality.

Wood rightly urges analytic theologians to “think about God with an attitude of reverence and adoration.”4 Those of us who are engaged in philosophical theology need to examine ourselves to ensure that our faith does not become deformed. We need to be self‐consciously engaged in Christian spiritual disciplines like corporate worship, prayer, study of Scripture, fellowship, and evangelization, lest our faith become overly‐intellectualized and our hearts become cold.

IV.

It might be wondered whether there are any philosophical distinctives that crucially shape the theology presented in these volumes. As a matter of fact, there are. In the course of writing this work, I have been surprised how often a couple of philosophical convictions surface which decisively affect the shape of my theology. First is my rejection of a metaontological thesis of Quinean provenance, namely, a criterion of ontological commitment according to which we are committed to the reality of the values of variables bound by the existential quantifier and to the referents of singular terms in sentences we take to be true. My repudiation of such a criterion leads me, among other things, to reject the Indispensability Argument for the reality of abstract objects, as we shall see in our discussion of divine aseity. Second is my endorsement of a tensed, as opposed to tenseless, theory of time, according to which both tense and temporal becoming are objective, as opposed to merely subjective, features of reality. My deep conviction that time is tensed leads me to affirm, among other things, that God exists omnitemporally rather than timelessly, as we shall see in our discussion of divine eternity, and that certain realist defenses of the doctrine of original sin are non‐starters, as we shall see in De homine. These two philosophical issues – Quinean metaontology and a tensed vs. tenseless theory of time – are to my knowledge never identified and discussed by other contemporary systematic theologians, and yet they are watershed issues with respect to one’s theology, especially one’s doctrine of God.

V.

One of the challenges in writing a work like this is deciding how to deal with interlocutors. Traditional dogmatics tends to focus understandably upon the ageless figures of the past, such as the Church Fathers and the medieval and post‐Reformation scholastic theologians. While such an approach has the benefit of making one’s treatment timeless, it has the decided drawback of failing to profit from the cutting edge work being done in contemporary Christian philosophy. I am convinced that contemporary philosophers have not only advanced far beyond the figures of the past but have in many respects profited from and corrected their mistakes. A systematic theology that ignores contemporary philosophical contributions to the debate will be impoverished as a result.

On the other hand, extensive interaction with contemporary interlocutors is guaranteed to make one’s systematic theology soon dated. The sad fact is that most of us will no longer be read or remembered in another generation. Although contemporary philosophers still interact with Gottlob Frege’s epochal Grundlagen der Arithmetik (1884), for example, who cares about or any longer reads Frege’s interlocutors? Most of us and our interlocutors will be similarly forgotten, threatening our systematic theology with built‐in obsolescence. So what to do?

My solution to this problem is to interact principally with the positions and arguments of interlocutors in the text, while reserving personal interaction with specific interlocutors for the footnotes. As a result one will find fairly extensive footnotes discussing the views of various interlocutors alluded to in the text. This solution has the great benefit of streamlining the main text, so that the reader does not get bogged down in minutiae. I hope that the usefulness of my treatment will thereby be prolonged.

One will find few systematic theologians among my interlocutors in this book. There are two reasons for this relative absence. First, I am not greatly acquainted with the works of systematic theologians. This is embarrassing and represents a shortcoming on my part. But second, to the extent that I am familiar with the works of systematic theologians, I have not found them particularly profitable when it comes to philosophical theology, the focus of this work. This reduces the necessity of and motivation for interacting with them. Instead, what I have chosen to do is take a couple of representative tokens of systematic theologians as my interlocutors. Specifically, I have chosen the Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck, whose knowledge of dogmatics was encyclopedic, as a contemporary representative of the tradition of Protestant scholasticism and my own Doktorvater Wolfhart Pannenberg, perhaps the most rational (and, as we shall see, rationalistic!) of contemporary theologians as a representative of the best of current work in systematic theology. Interacting with them has proved interesting and, I hope, will be helpful.

VI.

Another important decision I have made was to publish the volumes of this work seriatim instead of waiting until the whole was completed. Not only is the future uncertain, but the prospect of revising the whole multi‐volume work after (God willing!) its completion is akin to “painting the Forth Bridge”: by the time the task is completed, it will be time to begin anew! On the other hand, releasing the volumes one at a time runs the risk that one may later regret what one has said in earlier volumes. Still, it seems preferrable to get what has been accomplished into print, perhaps with the possibility of later revision. One oddity of this decision is that cross‐references in earlier volumes to later loci refer for a time to nothing.

VII.

I have organized my philosophical theology along the lines of the classic loci communes, or chief topics, of Protestant scholastic theology. This rubric is not only an excellent organizational tool for doing systematic theology but has the additional benefit of relating the philosophical questions explored directly to the relevant theological topic. As an evangelical Protestant, I begin with the locus De Scriptura sacra as the basis of authority in our theologizing (and philosophizing!). Having laid the foundations, we next turn to the locus De fide to explore epistemological questions related to Christian truth claims. Then in volume II we turn to the locus De Deo, which lies at the very heart of Christian theology. This locus alone is so rich in philosophical questions that I can deal only with the coherence of theism (Attributa Dei) in volume IIa and reserve a discussion of the doctrine of the Trinity (De Trinitate), along with an Excursus on Natural Theology, for volume IIb. I shall tackle the companion loci De creatione and De homine in volume III. In volume IV I shall, God willing, handle the lociDe Christo and De gratia, and conclude our series with De ecclesia and De novissimus in volume V.

VIII.

I am grateful to my wife Jan for inspiring me to undertake this monumental project. I am also thankful to my research assistants Timothy Bayless and Hayden Stephen for their help in procuring materials. I am also indebted to Mr. Bayless for his diligent compiling of the various indices and bibliography and for putting footnotes into the house style. Acknowledgement of the helpful input from various colleagues will be found at the end of each locus.

Although I draw in this work from many previous publications, I have in every case updated and expanded my earlier discussion. Previous publications relevant to Volume I include: Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, with J. P. Moreland, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2017); “Propositional Truth—Who Needs It?” Philosophia Christi 15 (2013): 355–64; “‘Men Moved By The Holy Spirit Spoke From God’ (2 Peter 1.21): A Middle Knowledge Perspective on Biblical Inspiration,” Philosophia Christi NS 1 (1999): 45–82; Reasonable Faith, 3rd ed. rev. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008); Time and the Metaphysics of Relativity, Philosophical Studies Series 84 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001); Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom: The Coherence of Theism I: Omniscience, Studies in Intellectual History 19 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991), 43–63.

Notes

1

J. I. Packer,

Knowing God

(Downer's Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1973), 7.

2

William Wood,

Analytic Theology and the Academic Study of Religion,

Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 45–46.

3

Wood,

Analytic Theology,

45.

4

Wood,

Analytic Theology,

175.

Prolegomena

Systematic philosophical theologies are rare – at least on the contemporary scene.1 Paul Tillich’s Systematic Theology and Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Systematic Theology deserve to be called systematic philosophical theologies, heavily shaped as they are by philosophical concerns.2 Unfortunately, neither of these theologians was able to benefit from the renaissance of Christian philosophy that has transpired in Anglo‐American analytic philosophy since the late 1960s. Rather Richard Swinburne’s tetralogy in philosophical theology, coupled with his trilogy in natural theology, is representative of that tradition and is doubtless the preeminent example of systematic philosophical theology in our day.3 Many other philosophers or theologians have taken steps toward a systematic philosophical theology, even if the scope of such a project makes the goal elusive.4

1 The Renaissance of Christian Philosophy

It is precisely the renaissance of Christian philosophy in our day that makes this so opportune a time for the writing of a systematic philosophical theology.

1.1 A Look Back

In order to understand our current situation, it is helpful to understand something of where we have been. In a personal retrospective, the eminent Princeton University philosopher Paul Benacerraf describes what it was like doing philosophy at Princeton during the 1950s and 1960s. The overwhelmingly dominant mode of thinking was scientific naturalism. Physical science was taken to be the final, and really only, arbiter of truth. Metaphysics had been vanquished, expelled from philosophy like an unclean leper. “The philosophy of science,” says Benacerraf, “was the queen of all the branches” of philosophy, since “it had the tools… to address all the problems.”5 Any problem that could not be addressed by science was simply dismissed as a pseudo‐problem. If a question did not have a scientific answer, then it was not a real question – just a pseudo‐question masquerading as a real question. Indeed, part of the task of philosophy was to clean up the discipline from the mess that earlier generations had made of it by endlessly struggling with such pseudo‐questions. There was thus a certain self‐conscious, crusading zeal with which philosophers carried out their task. The reformers, says Benacerraf, “trumpeted the militant affirmation of the new faith… in which the fumbling confusions of our forerunners were to be replaced by the emerging science of philosophy. This new enlightenment would put the old metaphysical views and attitudes to rest and replace them with the new mode of doing philosophy.”6

What Benacerraf is describing is a movement known as Logical Positivism. The book Language, Truth, and Logic by the British philosopher A. J. Ayer served as a sort of manifesto for this movement. As Benacerraf says, it was “not a great book,” but it was “a wonderful exponent of the spirit of the time.”7 The principal weapon employed by Ayer in his campaign against metaphysics was the vaunted Verification Principle of Meaning. According to that Principle, which went through a number of revisions, a sentence in order to be meaningful must be capable in principle of being empirically verified. Since metaphysical statements were beyond the reach of empirical science, they could not be verified and were therefore dismissed as devoid of factual content.

Ayer was explicit about the theological implications of this Verificationism.8 Since God is a metaphysical object, Ayer says, the possibility of religious knowledge is “ruled out by our treatment of metaphysics.” Thus, there can be no knowledge of God.

Now someone might say that we can offer evidence of God’s existence. But Ayer will have none of it. If by the word “God” you mean a transcendent being, says Ayer, then the word “God” is a metaphysical term, and so “it cannot be even probable that a god exists.” He explains, “To say that ‘God exists’ is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be either true or false. And by the same criterion, no sentence which purports to describe the nature of a transcendent god can possess any literal significance.”9

Suppose a religious believer should appeal to religious experience as a means of knowledge of God. Ayer is not impressed. He would not think to deny that the religious believer has an experience, he says, any more than he would deny that someone has an experience of, say, seeing a yellow object. But, he says, “whereas the sentence ‘There exists here a yellow‐colored material thing’ expresses a genuine proposition which could be empirically verified, the sentence ‘There exists a transcendent god’ has … no literal significance” because it is not verifiable. Thus the appeal to religious experience, says Ayer, is “altogether fallacious.”10

From this perspective, statements about God do not even have the dignity of being false. Now at first blush such a perspective might seem utterly implausible. If a statement like, “God loves you” were no more meaningful than, “T’was brillig; and the slithey toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe,” then how could one even know what it was supposed to be about, so as to be able to say that statements about God are metaphysical and therefore meaningless?11 But as Nicholas Wolterstorff explains in a recent reminiscence:

By the mid‐1950s we were all aware of the fact that the term ‘meaningless’ as employed by the positivists was a term of art. It was not their view that everything that failed their test was jabberwocky – meaningless in that sense – nor was it their view that one should never make utterances that failed their test. They just meant that one had not made an assertion, a true–false claim; one’s utterance lacked assertoric meaning.12

To illustrate, questions and commands have cognitive meaning, but they are neither true nor false, since they do not make any assertions. Metaphysical and theological sentences might be useful for some purpose but not to make assertions.

It was not just metaphysical statements and, hence, theological statements that were regarded by logical positivists as void of assertoric content. Ethical statements were also declared to be meaningless because they, too, cannot be empirically verified. Such statements are simply emotional expressions of the user’s feelings. Ayer says, “if I say ‘Stealing money is wrong’ I produce a statement which has no factual meaning… . It is as if I had written, ‘Stealing money!!’ … It is clear that there is nothing said here which can be true or false.”13 So he concludes that value judgments “have no objective validity whatsoever.”14 The same goes for aesthetic statements concerning beauty and ugliness. According to Ayer, “Such aesthetic words as ‘beautiful’ and ‘hideous’ are employed…, not to make statements of fact, but simply to express certain feelings… .”15

It is sobering to realize that this was the sort of thinking that dominated the departments of philosophy at British and American universities during the last century into the 1960s.16 It was not without its impact on religious life. Under the pressure of positivism, some theologians began to advocate non‐cognitivist theories of theological language. In their view theological statements are not statements of fact at all but merely express the user’s emotions and attitudes. For example, the sentence “God created the world” does not purport to make any factual statement at all but merely is a way of expressing, say, one’s awe and wonder at the grandeur of the universe.

Gilbert Ryle poignantly described the state of philosophical‐theological dialogue in the late 1950s:

In our half‐century philosophy and theology have hardly been on speaking terms… . When theological coals were hot, the kettle of theological philosophy boiled briskly. If the kettle of theological philosophy is now not even steaming, it is because that fire has died down. Kettles cannot keep themselves on the boil. A philosopher cannot invent conceptual stresses and strains. He has to feel them if he is to be irked into dealing with them. I do not want to exaggerate. The theological fire has died down, but it has not quite gone out and the kettle of theological philosophy, though far from even simmering, is not quite stone cold.17

The low point undoubtedly came with the so‐called Death of God theology of the mid‐1960s.18 On April 8, 1966, Time magazine carried a cover which was completely black except for three words emblazoned in bright, red letters against the dark background: “Is God Dead?” And the article described the movement then current among American theologians to proclaim the death of God.

Today that movement has all but disappeared. The kettle of theological philosophy is once more boiling briskly, at least in the Anglo‐American realm. What happened?

1.2 The Collapse of Verificationism

What happened is a remarkable story. Philosophers within the analytic tradition itself exposed an incoherence which lay at the very heart of the prevailing philosophy of positivism. They began to realize that the Verification Principle would force us to dismiss not only theological statements as meaningless, but also a great many scientific statements, so that the Principle undermined the sacred cow of science at whose altar they knelt.

Contemporary physics is filled with metaphysical statements that cannot be empirically verified. When the contemporary student of physics reads the anti‐metaphysical polemics of early twentieth century scientists, he must feel as though he were peering into a different world. For it is now widely recognized that the boundaries of science are impossible to fix with precision, and during the last few decades theoretical physics has become characterized precisely by its metaphysical, speculative character. In various fields such as relativity theory, quantum mechanics, classical cosmology, and quantum cosmology, debates rage over overtly metaphysical issues.19 Take relativity theory, for example. Both special and general relativity are susceptible to radically different interpretations of the same physical phenomena and raise profound metaphysical questions about the nature of space and time. The eminent philosopher of science John Earman contends that when it comes to questions about the nature of space and time, there is simply no way to justify an empirical/philosophical dichotomy; the appropriate term for the study is the old one: Natural Philosophy.20 Or consider quantum physics. In Euan Squires’ opinion, “In an effort to understand the quantum world, we are led beyond physics, certainly into philosophy and maybe even into cosmology, psychology and theology.”21 There are at least ten different physical interpretations of the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics which are empirically equivalent and yet differ meaningfully in their respective ontologies. Or take the field of classical cosmology. “Cosmology,” says George Gale, “is science done at the limit: at the limit of our concepts, of our mathematical methods, of our instruments, indeed, of our very imaginations.”22 In an article in Astronomy, astrophysicists Tony Rothman and George Ellis pose the question, “Has astronomy become metaphysical?” and answer that it has.23 Questions which are metaphysical in character are hotly debated in astrophysical journals. Gale observes, “It is clear that metaphysics continues to play an honorable role in cosmology. And, to the extent that it is an honorable role, it is no dishonor to use metaphysics in one's cosmologizing.”24 Physics becomes most metaphysical in the budding field of quantum cosmology. Alex Vilenkin frankly characterizes his discipline as “metaphysical cosmology.”25 Metaphysical questions, hypotheses, and difficulties are abundant in these and other fields of modern physics. Philosopher of science Bas van Fraassen nicely puts it: “Do the concepts of the Trinity [and] the soul…baffle you? They pale beside the unimaginable otherness of closed space‐times, event‐horizons, EPR correlations, and bootstrap models.”26 If the ship of scientific naturalism was not to be scuttled, Verificationism had to be cut loose.

But even more fundamentally, it was also realized that the Verification Principle is self‐refuting. One has but to ask oneself, is the sentence “A meaningful sentence must be capable in principle of being empirically verified” itself capable of being empirically verified? Obviously not; no amount of empirical evidence would serve to verify its truth. The Verification Principle is therefore by its own lights a meaningless combination of words, which need hardly detain us, or at best an arbitrary definition, which we are at liberty to reject. Therefore, the Verification Principle and the theory of meaning it supported have been universally abandoned by philosophers. William Hasker observes, “Nowadays ethics, religion, metaphysics, and science all go about their business largely untroubled by the positivist assault, which is well on its way to becoming a distant memory.”27

1.3 The Advent of Postmodernism

The downfall of positivism and the reopening for discussion of virtually all the traditional problems in philosophy has been called the central philosophical event of the second half of the twentieth century.28 One result of this collapse has been the rise of Postmodernism. Scientific naturalism, originating in the Enlightenment, is characteristic of so‐called “Modernity,” or the modern age, which is dominated by science and technology. The collapse of Verificationism brought with it a sort of disillusionment with the whole Enlightenment project of scientific naturalism.

This might seem at first blush a welcome development for Christian believers, weary of attacks by Enlightenment naturalists. But Postmodernists have unfortunately tended to despair of ever finding objective truth and knowledge. After all, if science, man’s greatest intellectual achievement, cannot do so, then what hope is there? Hence, Postmodernists have tended to deny that there are universal standards of logic, rationality, and truth. This claim is obviously incompatible with the Christian idea of God, who, as the Creator and Sustainer of all things, is an objectively existing reality, and who, as an omniscient being, has a privileged perspective on the world, grasping the world as it is in the unity of his intellect. There is thus a unity and objectivity to truth which is incompatible with Postmodern relativism. Postmodernism therefore tends to be no more friendly to Christian truth claims than is Enlightenment naturalism. It reduces Christianity to but one voice in a cacophony of competing claims, none of which is objectively true.

1.4 The Rebirth of Christian Philosophy

Fortunately, Postmodernism was not the only response to the collapse of Verificationism. Since Verificationism had been the principal means of barring the door to metaphysics, the jettisoning of Verificationism meant that there was no longer anyone at the door to prevent this dreaded and unwelcome visitor from making a reappearance. So the demise of Verificationism has been accompanied by a resurgence of metaphysics in Anglo‐American philosophy, along with all the other traditional questions of philosophy which had been suppressed by the Verificationists. Along with this resurgence has come something new and altogether unanticipated: the birth of a new discipline, philosophy of religion, and a renaissance in Christian philosophy.29

Although philosophy of religion has been recognized as a delineated second‐order discipline of philosophy as far back as G. W. F. Hegel, who lectured on the subject, analytic philosophy of religion is a recent movement of the last half century or so and is one of the most exciting and burgeoning areas of contemporary Anglo‐American philosophy. Its rise was facilitated by the demise of the Verificationist theory of meaning and the rebirth of metaphysics.30

Since the late 1960s Christian philosophers have been coming out of the closet and defending the truth of the Christian worldview with philosophically sophisticated arguments in the finest scholarly journals and professional societies.31 At the same time that theologians were writing God’s obituary, a new generation of philosophers was re‐discovering his vitality. And the face of Anglo‐American philosophy has been transformed as a result. By 1980 Time found itself running another major story entitled “Modernizing the Case for God” in which it described the movement among contemporary philosophers to refurbish the traditional arguments for God’s existence. Time marveled:

In a quiet revolution in thought and argument that hardly anybody could have foreseen only two decades ago, God is making a comeback. Most intriguingly, this is happening not among theologians or ordinary believers, but in the crisp intellectual circles of academic philosophers, where the consensus had long banished the Almighty from fruitful discourse.32

According to the article, the noted American philosopher Roderick Chisholm believed that the reason that atheism was so influential in the previous generation is that the brightest philosophers were atheists; but now, he says, many of the brightest philosophers are theists, and they are using a tough‐minded intellectualism in defense of that belief that was formerly lacking on their side of the debate.

Today philosophy of religion flourishes in young journals such as the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Religious Studies, Sophia, Faith and Philosophy, Philosophia Christi, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, and other journals devoted to the discipline, not to mention the standard non‐specialist journals. Professional societies such as the Society of Christian Philosophers, the Evangelical Philosophical Society, the American Catholic Philosophical Society, not to mention other smaller groups, number thousands of members.33 Publishing in philosophy of religion is booming, as is evident from the abundance of available textbooks (also testimony to the seemingly insatiable interest among students for courses on the subject). Major publishers now include in their Companion and Handbook series of reference works volumes on philosophy of religion along with volumes on traditional areas of philosophy like metaphysics, epistemology, and so forth.34

To provide some feel for the impact of this revolution in Anglo‐American philosophy, I quote at some length an article by Quentin Smith which appeared in the fall of 2001 in the secularist journal Philo, lamenting what Smith called “the desecularization of academia that evolved in philosophy departments since the late 1960s.” Smith, himself a prominent non‐theist philosopher, writes:

By the second half of the twentieth century, universities … had become in the main secularized. The standard… position in each field… assumed or involved arguments for a naturalist world‐view; departments of theology or religion aimed to understand the meaning and origins of religious writings, not to develop arguments against naturalism. Analytic philosophers … treated theism as an anti‐realist or non‐cognitivist world‐view, requiring the reality, not of a deity, but merely of emotive expressions or certain “forms of life”….

This is not to say that none of the scholars in the various academic fields were [sic] realist theists in their “private lives”; but realist theists, for the most part, excluded their theism from their publications and teaching, in large part because theism … was mainly considered to have such a low epistemic status that it did not meet the standards of an “academically respectable” position to hold. The secularization of mainstream academia began to quickly unravel upon the publication of Plantinga’s influential book, God and Other Minds, in 1967. It became apparent to the philosophical profession that this book displayed that realist theists were not outmatched by naturalists in terms of the most valued standards of analytic philosophy: conceptual precision, rigor of argumentation, technical erudition, and an in‐depth defense of an original world‐view. This book, followed seven years later by Plantinga’s even more impressive book, The Nature of Necessity, made it manifest that a realist theist was writing at the highest qualitative level of analytic philosophy, on the same playing field as Carnap, Russell, Moore, Grünbaum, and other naturalists….

Naturalists passively watched as realist versions of theism, most influenced by Plantinga’s writings, began to sweep through the philosophical community, until today perhaps one‐quarter or one‐third of philosophy professors are theists, with most being orthodox Christians. Although many theists do not work in the area of the philosophy of religion, so many of them do work in this area that there are now over five philosophy journals devoted to theism or the philosophy of religion….

… theists in other fields tend to compartmentalize their theistic beliefs from their scholarly work; they rarely assume and never argue for theism in their scholarly work. If they did, they would be committing academic suicide or, more exactly, their articles would quickly be rejected… . But in philosophy, it became, almost overnight, ‘academically respectable’ to argue for theism, making philosophy a favored field of entry for the most intelligent and talented theists entering academia today.35

Smith concludes, “God is not ‘dead’ in academia; he returned to life in the late 1960s and is now alive and well in his last academic stronghold, philosophy departments.”36

This is the testimony of a prominent non‐theist philosopher to the transformation that has taken place before his eyes in Anglo‐American philosophy. Doubtless, Smith is exaggerating when he estimates that one‐quarter to one‐third of American philosophers are theists;37 but what his estimations do reveal is the perceived impact of Christian philosophers upon this field. The number of Christians among graduate students in philosophy is significantly higher than among current faculty, which suggests that the revolution will continue.

As a result of the work of Christian philosophers genuine advance has been made on important issues like the epistemic status of belief in God, the coherence of theism, and the problem of evil, so that questions which dominated earlier discussions have been resolved or have yielded to new questions.38 For example, along with the alleged meaninglessness of religious language, the so‐called presumption of atheism, according to which atheism is a sort of default position, which so dominated mid‐twentieth century philosophy of religion, is now a relic of the past. Similarly, few philosophers today defend the so‐called logical version of the problem of evil, which claims that God and the suffering in the world are logically incompatible. The discussion of the coherence of theism, which analyzes the principal attributes traditionally ascribed to God, such as aseity, necessity, simplicity, eternity, omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence, has been an especially fertile field of exploration by Christian philosophers, so that anti‐theistic critiques of these attributes have proved to be positively beneficial.

The renaissance of Christian philosophy has not been merely defensive, however. Rather it has also been accompanied by a resurgence of interest in natural theology, that branch of theology which seeks to prove God's existence apart from the resources of authoritative divine revelation. All of the traditional arguments for God’s existence, such as the cosmological, teleological, axiological, and ontological arguments, not to mention creative, new arguments, find intelligent and articulate defenders on the contemporary philosophical scene.39 The important Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology features lengthy defenses of the most prominent theistic arguments by leading philosophers of religion.40 Alvin Plantinga, perhaps the most important living philosopher of religion, has defended what he calls “two dozen (or so) theistic arguments.”41 Plantinga’s contribution to natural theology is now celebrated and advanced in a recent collaborative volume Two Dozen (or so) Arguments for God’s Existence.42 Of course, there are replies and counter‐replies to all of these arguments, and no one imagines that a consensus will be reached. But theists welcome this debate. For the very presence of the debate is itself a sign of how healthy and vibrant a theistic worldview is today.43

1.5 The Birth of Analytic Theology

One of the most noteworthy recent developments in philosophy of religion has been the ingress of Christian philosophers into areas normally considered the province of systematic theologians. In particular, many Christian philosophers have taken up a share of the task of formulating and defending coherent statements of Christian doctrine.44 Although in 1955 Antony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre chose “New Essays in Philosophical Theology” as the title of their collection of essays, the contributors to that volume were, in fact, largely concerned with generic philosophy of religion, rather than specific doctrines.45 William Alston could report in 1967 that “In works on the philosophy of religion one finds little discussion of relatively special doctrines that are peculiar to a given religion.”46 In 1984 Thomas Morris, reflecting on the “near total lack of any contemporary philosophical attention to the claims and commitments special to the Christian faith,” organized a conference at the University of Notre Dame to address such doctrines as the Trinity and incarnation and ideas of sin, atonement, and sanctification.47 The published papers were intended to represent “the beginnings of an exciting new direction of philosophical exploration – a careful and sustained conceptual investigation into the distinctive doctrines and concerns of the Christian faith, as expressed in its scriptures, creeds, conciliar decrees, and other seminal documents.”48 Today the most interesting and important work in exploring philosophical issues in systematic theology is being done, not by traditional theologians, but by analytic philosophers of religion.49 The ingress of Christian philosophers into systematic theology has served to spawn a new movement within Anglo‐American theology itself. Professional theologians employing the techniques of analytic philosophy have styled themselves “analytic theologians” and their field “analytic theology.”50 Only a “pipe dream” as recently as 2006, today analytic theology has become a reality, “one of the most significant developments in recent theological history.”51

It is impossible to avoid the impression that many Christian philosophers were, and are, fairly disgruntled with the state of contemporary theology and see themselves as attempting to help rectify the situation.52 Swinburne has complained:

It is one of the intellectual tragedies of our age that when philosophy in English‐speaking countries has developed high standards of argument and clear thinking, the style of theological writing has been largely influenced by the Continental philosophy of Existentialism, which despite its considerable other merits, has been distinguished by a very loose and sloppy style of argument. If argument has a place in theology, large‐scale theology needs clear and rigorous argument. The point was very well grasped by Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, by Berkeley, Butler, and Paley. It is high time for theology to return to their standards.53

Randall Rauser is, if possible, even harsher in his verdict on contemporary theology and the impotence of Continental philosophy to provide requisite guidance.54

Little wonder, then, that, as Michael Rea reported in 2009, “by and large, the established figures in both [philosophy and theology] don’t even view mutual conversation as worth pursuing. They ignore each other.”55 Even today analytic theology is pursued by a relatively small number of theologians, who seem eager to reach out to their colleagues in theology and religious studies.56

Why Continental thinkers have resisted analytic approaches to theology is a matter of discussion, but there seems to be a consensus that it due in various ways to the lingering shadow of Immanuel Kant.57 The skepticism of David Hume concerning miracles likewise continues to powerfully influence biblical and systematic theologians.58 There is an irony in this reliance upon these two philosophical figures, noted by Morris:

What is particularly interesting about the references theologians make to Kant or Hume is that most often we find the philosopher merely mentioned…, but we rarely, if ever, see an account of precisely which arguments of his are supposed to have accomplished the alleged demolition of cognitivism, and exactly how they may be supposed to have had that effect. In fact, I must confess to never having seen in the writings of any contemporary theologian the exposition of a single argument from either Hume or Kant, or any other historical figure, for that matter, which comes anywhere near to demolishing, or even irreparably damaging traditional theistic metaphysics, historical Christian doctrine, or the epistemology of what we might call ‘theological realism’, the construal of theology as a discipline whose intent is to represent religious realities as they, in fact, are.59

More generally, Wolterstorff suggests – quite plausibly it seems – that one of the reasons that philosophical theology has not flourished in the continental tradition is that “continental philosophers, unlike their analytic counterparts, are still preoccupied with the traditional question of the classical modern philosophers,” namely, “the limits of thought and judgment.”60 Continental theologians remain Kantian in their denial of knowledge of God mediated by human reason. Moreover, continental theologians and philosophers have also thought that the demise of classical foundationalism leads inevitably to a post‐modernist relativism concerning truth and knowledge.61 The latter inference, as we shall see, is just based on misunderstanding, and as for the former there are no good arguments for the Kantian denial of the knowledge of God.

Rea also seeks to identify various reasons why continental thinkers reject, not only the aims, but also the style of analytic philosophy. For example, continental thinkers complain that analytic philosophy prioritizes clarity and precision at the expense of everything else, restricting our choice of topics and encouraging the use of the wrong rhetorical tools. Analytic philosophy ignores the fact that sometimes in order to attain wisdom and understanding we have to rely substantively on metaphor and other literary tropes.62 Such a complaint betrays ignorance of analytic philosophy. To cite one example, Stephen Yablo’s figuralism is an attempt to deal with the alleged metaphysical implications of true mathematical discourse for the reality of abstract objects precisely by appeal to the use of existential metaphors.63 In order to put forth a convincing case for a metaphorical interpretation Yablo must prioritize clarity and precision, lest his figuralism be subverted by ambiguity or invalidity. Such clarity and precision come, not at the expense of everything else, but in order to justify our substantively relying on metaphor to express the truth. In philosophical theology, Richard Swinburne emphasizes the indispensability of metaphor and other forms of figurative language for understanding divine revelation, but he hardly does so at the sacrifice of clarity and precision.64

Rea also observes that some contemporary theologians object to the style of analytic philosophy because doctrinal claims do not express determinate propositions and there is no guarantee that they will do so even once they have been interpreted. A particular claim might be an evocative metaphor with very minimal, if any, propositional content.65 But such a possibility cannot serve as a general proscription of analytic philosophizing about religious subjects. Doctrinal claims will need to be examined on a case by case basis to see what, if any, propositional content they express. It was the error of the logical positivists, one will recall, to make a blanket claim that theological statements assert no propositions, and we should be foolish, indeed, to repeat their error. We shall want good arguments in every case that the doctrinal claim in question lacks propositional content, and merely raising the specter of onto‐theology will not do the trick. We may be surprised at the rich propositional content of many doctrinal claims.

Finally, Rea notes that some contemporary theologians claim that metaphysical theorizing about God is idolatrous. When we try to answer the question, “Does God exist?”, metaphysicians will inevitably analyze the concept of God in a way that illegitimately privileges some aspects of the concept over others. Talk of the God of the philosophers thus replaces talk about God. Therefore, the God of analytic metaphysical discourse is an idol.66 This objection is simplistic. Analytic philosophers of religion fully realize that God can be conceived in a variety of ways which complement one another. For example, the argument from contingency leads to a metaphysically necessary being that is the sufficient reason for the existence of everything else, the kalām cosmological argument leads to a first, uncaused, transcendent, enormously powerful, personal creator of the universe, the fine‐tuning argument leads to an incomprehensibly intelligent designer of the cosmos who established the laws of nature and set their parameters, the moral argument leads to a personal being who is the paradigm of moral goodness and the giver of the moral law, and so on. Such conceptions of God may, in fact, be much richer than the ordinary language meaning of “God” and so expand our vision of who God is. Post‐modern theology, by contrast, threatens to stunt our understanding of God.

It has been observed that never since the high Middle Ages has there been such a flourishing of philosophical theology as in our day.67 This makes the time ripe for the writing of a systematic philosophical theology.

2 Delineating the Disciplines

But what, exactly, is systematic philosophical theology, and how does it relate to the various other disciplines we have mentioned? These are questions explored by what Rea, on the analogy of metaethics or metaontology, calls metatheology, reflection on the nature and methods of theology as a discipline.68 Answering these questions will help us to set our goals more clearly.

2.1 Systematic Theology

To begin with systematic theology, the expression “systematic theology,” like “history” or “philosophy,” has various referents. In my opening paragraph of this Prolegomenon, it refers to a literary corpus, as in “Pannenberg’s 3‐volume systematic theology.” Similarly, it can refer to a theologian’s thought system, as in the sentence “Natural theology plays a significant role in Swinburne’s systematic theology.” In both of these cases systematic theology is propositional in nature, consisting of assertions or statements made by the relevant person. On the other hand, “systematic theology” may refer to an academic field or discipline, as when we say, “Gregory is studying systematic theology at Cambridge.” Such a general use of the expression does not tie systematic theology to any particular person. Sometimes “systematic theology” is used to designate a task or activity which the theologian pursues, as in “Doing systematic theology well requires not only biblical expertise but also logical training.” All of these uses of the term are common and therefore legitimate. In what follows, we shall not try to differentiate among them, since the context usually makes clear how the expression is being used.

If we think of systematic theology as an academic discipline or task, what are some of its determining characteristics? We might try to answer this question either definitionally or sociologically, that is to say, we might try to identify certain essential properties of the field or we might look to the way in which the field is commonly pursued by its practitioners.69 The problem with trying to characterize the field definitionally is that the essence of a field, if it is not to be highly controversial, will be so thin as to be largely uninformative. For example, it doubtless belongs to the essence of philosophy of religion that it involves philosophizing about religion rather than, say, chemistry, but beyond that it is difficult to say much more that will not be contestable. Characterizing a field sociologically need not make us a prisoner to faddishness, as some fear, for we may take the long view and see how theologians have pursued their field for centuries, and not merely according to current fashion. If what we are calling systematic theology does not resemble anything that has at any time been practiced by recognized systematic theologians, then we are in all likelihood pursuing a study, for example, biblical theology, which, however worthy, just is not systematic theology.

So what does systematic theology look like when pursued by professional theologians? As theology, its subject matter is God and things considered in relation to God.70 So, for example, theological anthropology, as contrasted with secular anthropology, will consider man insofar as he stands in relation to God. What, then, makes theology systematic? Four features come to mind:

It is organized or structured, typically according to certain themes.

It draws upon both authoritative Scriptures as well as all relevant secular disciplines.

It aims at completeness, enunciating at least the broad outlines of a synoptic worldview.

It offers and defends, insofar as it can, a logically coherent formulation of its worldview.

Notice that systematic theology so characterized need not be Christian. During the Middle Ages Islamic theology and philosophy were flourishing enterprises in Muslim lands, often at loggerheads with each other. Indeed, it was Islamic theology that finally vanquished philosophy from Muslim intellectual culture. Given that theology concerns first and foremost God, non‐theistic religions like Buddhism or Advaita Vedanta Hinduism may have systematic religious worldviews, but they cannot properly be labeled theology. But within the monotheistic traditions there can be non‐Christian systematic theologies. Obviously, our project is Christian systematic theology.

2.2 Systematic Philosophical Theology

So what is it for systematic theology to be systematic philosophical theology? The adjective “philosophical” serves simply as a means of emphasis, underlining the need for a logically coherent formulation and defense of its worldview. In virtually every topic area it treats, such as doctrine of God, doctrine of Christ, doctrine of creation, and so on, Christian systematic theology raises profound and often difficult philosophical questions that the systematic theologian must address. This feature serves to differentiate systematic theology from biblical theology, which does not aspire to systematicity, as characterized above.71 According to James Meade, “Biblical theology seeks to identify and understand the Bible’s theological message and themes, that is what the Bible says about God, and God’s relationship to all creation, especially to humankind.”72