Alister McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction

Chapter 8Philosophy and Theology:

Dialogue and Debate

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Introduction

• Relationship between Christian theology and secular philosophy– Tertullian: What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?– Augustine: critical appropriation– John Paul II: enriching dialogue

• Philosophical systems– Platonism– Aristotelianism– Ramism– Cartesianism– Kantianism– Hegelianism– Existentialism

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Philosophy and Theology: The Notion of the “Handmaid”

• Ancilla theologiae• Platonism

– Plato (427-347 BC)– Theory of “Forms”– Christ and the logos

• Aristotelianism– Aristotle (384-322 BC)– Impact on Christian thought, western culture, Islamic scholarship– Study of the natural world

• Verification and falsification: can Christian ideas be proved?– Logical positivism– Karl Popper– Athony Flew

• Realism: to what do theological statements refer?– Critical realism– Nonrealism (Don Cupitt)

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Can God’s Existence Be Proved?

• Anselm of Canterbury’s ontological argument– God is “that than which no greater thing can be conceived”

• God is the greatest possible being.• God exists in the human mind or understanding.• A being who exists only as a mental notion is not so great as a being who exists in

reality, and not merely as a mental idea.• If God exists only in the human mind, then God is not the greatest possible being.• It therefore follows that God must exist in reality, as well as an idea in the mind.

– Gaunilo– Immanuel Kant

• Thomas Aquinas’s “Five Ways”– Motion and change: God as unmoved prime mover– Causation– Existence of contingent and necessary beings– Origin of human values (truth, goodness, nobility, etc.)– The teleological argument/argument from design

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• The kalam argument– Everything which has a beginning must have a cause.– The universe began to exist.– Therefore, the beginning of the existence of the universe must

have been caused by something.– The only such cause can be God.

• A classic argument from design: William Paley– Fifth of Aquinas’s “Five Ways”– William Paley (1743-1805), Natural Theology; or Evidence of the

Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature

– God as watchmaker– David Hume’s criticisms

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The Nature of Theological Language

• Apophatic and kataphatic approaches– Apophatic (apophatikos, negative)– Kataphatic (kataphatikos, positive)

• Analogy– Principle of analogy: continuity between God and the world– E.g., “God is love”– E.g., Jesus’ death as a “ransom” for sinners

• Metaphor– Both similarity and dissimilarity– Open-ended– Emotional overtones

• Accommodation– John Calvin

• A case study: the Copernican debateWiley-Blackwell 2010