Reformers,
Philosophers, Kierkegaard and the Akedah
Yitzakh
Professor
Victor A. Shepherd
Tyndale
University
College
& Seminary
I:
-- Whether
or not philosophy and theology are deemed irreconcilable appears to
depend on where one stands in the theological spectrum.
The Papal encyclical, Fides Et Ratio, promulgated by the late John Paul II on
14 September 1998
, stated unambiguously the relationship between philosophy and theology
that John Paul himself upheld and expected others in his denomination to
uphold as well. As
a student of the Magisterial Reformation, on the other hand, I am aware
that the Reformers regarded philosophy – by which they frequently
meant Mediaeval scholasticism – as an encroachment upon theology that
denied the gospel’s inherent integrity, militancy and efficacy.
Martin Luther, for instance, voiced this notion as nascent
Reformer. In early autumn
1517 (perhaps earlier even than his putative nailing of the Ninety-Five
Theses to the door of the Schlosskirche
in
Wittenberg
on
31st October 1517
) he published the ninety-seven theses of his Disputation
Against Scholastic Theology. The
anti-scholastic, anti-philosophic tone is unmistakable.
Discussing the understanding of the human will that mediaeval
philosophers typically advanced, Luther writes “We are not masters of
our actions, from beginning to end, but servants.
This in opposition to the philosophers.” [1]
The Disputation is
replete with similar references. Consider
the following. “Virtually the entire Ethics of Aristotle is the worst enemy of grace.
This in opposition to the scholastics.”[2]
“It is an error to say that no man can become a theologian
without Aristotle. This in
opposition to common opinion.”[3]
“The whole Aristotle is to theology as darkness is to light.
This in opposition to the scholastics.”[4]
Lest we think that Luther has targeted Aristotle only, we should
hear Luther on someone in the tradition of Plato.
“It would have been far better for the church if Porphyry
(233-303) … had not been born for the use of theologians.”[5]
(“Better…if [he] …had not been born” points unambiguously
to the biblical reference to Judas; Porphyry is no less spiritually
treacherous, with his philosophically compromised theology, than the one
Christian tradition deems arch-traitor.
Philosophy is no little threat to faith in the gospel.)
Luther concludes his 1517 Disputation,
“In these statements we wanted to say and believe we have said nothing
that is not in agreement with the Catholic church and the teachers of
the church.”[6]
Soon Luther rendered more specific his objection to philosophy as
he developed his Theologia Crucis or
“Theology of the Cross” in the years that remained to him.
Since Luther wrote no systematic theology, his Theologia
Crucis is found in no single place but rather recrudesces in
fragments throughout his work.[7]
Luther developed his Theologia Crucis
in
opposition to a Theologia Gloriae
in its many forms. One form
of it was the attempt at reading the truth and nature of God off the
face of world-occurrence, off the face of history.
Another form was the attempt at arguing for the truth and nature
of God from nature. Another
form, perhaps more subtle, was the church’s triumphalistic
self-promotion (which is to say, the church’s persecution of others)
inasmuch as the church confused its triumphalism with the triumph or
victory of the crucified one, the church having forgotten that the
crucified one is raised crucified, with wounds still gaping.
When the church confuses its triumphalism with the victory of its
Lord who suffers still, the resurrection ceases to be the effectiveness
of the cross; instead the resurrection becomes the supersession of the
cross, matched by the church’s superiority to its crossbearing.
While this distortion was a matter of ecclesiology, Luther
insisted that ecclesiology is a predicate of Christology, and a
distorted ecclesiology could therefore be traced to a Christology warped
by philosophy.
All of which brings us to the last form of Theologia
Gloriae, the identification of God with metaphysical speculation.
Here Luther has two principal objections in mind.
One objection is his insistence that the Holy One of Israel is
qualitatively distinct from the God of the philosophers: being,
being-itself, “ground of being”, etc.
The living God is to be understood not as the ens realissimum of the philosophers, the static “that which is”,
but rather in terms of the dynamic personalism of the Hebrew bible: God
is He who acts. (Thomas
Aquinas’ reading of Exodus 3:14, where Moses asks for God’s
‘name’ and God replies “I shall be who I shall be”; Aquinas’
reading of this text as declaring the aseity or self-existence of God
the Reformers found utterly wide of the mark and an instance of
philosophical corruption.)
The second objection is Luther’s insistence that the God who
acts is not the only actor; Satan acts too.
God, however, defines himself at the cross, and only at the
cross. For this reason
Luther maintained that apart from the cross God is indistinguishable
from the devil.[8]
On
account of its espousal of metaphysics, philosophy remains wedded to the
Theologia Gloriae.
Metaphysical speculation never terminates in the God who humbles
himself in the manger and humiliates himself at the cross.
Philosophy forever remains an aspect of that ‘wisdom of the
world’ that the gospel has inverted.
Consider the discussion of power, including omnipotence.
At the cross God not only acts most characteristically (he loves
to the uttermost, love exhausting his nature); at the cross God also
acts most effectively (he reconciles a wayward world to himself.)
To say that the cross, therefore, is God’s mightiest work is to
say that the cross alone determines the meaning of “almighty” or
“omnipotent.” Since
power is the capacity to achieve purpose, God acts “almightily” when
he overcomes all impediments to the fulfilment of his purpose, and does
so precisely where, from a human standpoint, he cannot do anything.
God’s power can never be understood by means of an argument
that begins with finite, creaturely power and concludes with infinite,
divine power. No
philosophical argument for God – let alone for God’s omnipotence –
terminates in the God-forsakenness of a bedraggled Jew (someone the
world loves to hate) executed at a city garbage dump.
Luther has spoken.
What about John Calvin? Calvin,
to say the least, is cautious concerning the theologian’s deployment
of philosophy. In the course
of expounding the doctrine of the Trinity he writes laconically,
“Here, indeed, if anywhere in the secret mysteries of Scripture, we
ought to play the philosopher soberly and with great moderation…..For
how can the human mind measure off the measureless essence of God
according to its own little measure….Indeed, how can the mind by its
own leading come to search out God’s essence…?”[9]
More characteristically, however, Calvin speaks critically of the
“Sophists”, scholastic writers whose hybrid theology has
accommodated philosophy so as to distort the biblical message.
In this regard, when Calvin discusses the will of God (which for
him is the will of God made manifest in Jesus Christ), Calvin contrasts
this with “that absolute will of which the Sophists babble.”[10]
Not every philosophical predecessor is equally evil, however.
Calvin thought more highly of the “Schoolmen”, the older,
more notable mediaeval thinkers, than he did of theological opponents
temporally proximate to him. In
his assessment of the distinction between operative grace and
co-operative grace, for instance, Calvin writes “how far I disagree
with the sounder Schoolmen [note that regardless of how sound these
thinkers may be, Calvin still finds ample scope for disagreement] I
differ with the more recent Sophists to an even greater extent, as they
are farther removed from antiquity.”[11]
He has in mind here principally Ockham and
Biel
.
Regardless of Calvin’s approach to philosophy, and particularly
Aristotle, the fact is that Scholastic theology never disappeared in the
Reformation era. Alongside
the Humanist flowering, which flowering had no little effect on most
Magisterial Reformers (here we need only recall that Calvin’s first
published work was a commentary on Seneca’s De
Misericordia), Scholastic theology thrived in the “old church”
even as Reformers denounced it. It
was soon to thrive in the “new church” too as both Lutheran and
Reformed Orthodoxy soon wrote theology in a scholastic mode.
It triumphed in the work of Jacob Arminius, the Remonstrant in
whom philosophy looms much larger than his followers appear to
appreciate. Indeed it is no
exaggeration to say that Arminius is chiefly a philosopher whose
Thomistic theology (Aquinas is the most frequently quoted thinker in
Arminius’ work) happens to use a Protestant vocabulary.
And of course the English Puritans returned to a use of
philosophy that was more than merely illustrative.
Jonathan Edwards, New-World Puritan theologian, remained the
ablest philosopher in
America
until the advent of Charles Sanders Peirce.
Over the centuries the relationship between philosophy and
theology has varied in the details of the respective disciplines, even
as the disciplines sometimes appeared to wed each other, at other times
act as necessary foil to each other (and therefore still need each
other.) If theology
announced itself divorced from philosophy, the divorce appeared not to
last.
Hegel
In Hegel there occurred what may be regarded as one of
philosophy’s larger-scale “takeover bids” of theology; namely,
Hegel’s notion of the Absolute or Mind or Spirit.
Ultimate reality is Spirit, but such Spirit is not an exclusive
or monistic claim to reality. Neither
is Spirit that God of scripture whose Being is utterly distinct
ontically from the being of the world, Creator and creation being linked
only by grace. Spirit is not
that God whose infinite self-transcendence is categorically distinct
from the self-transcendence of philosophical thought.
Hegel maintains that it is possible, by means of philosophical
thought, to rise to the Absolute Standpoint where the distinction
between subject and object is overcome and the thinker becomes one with
cosmic Mind, which Mind is nothing other than self-thinking thought, or
Mind thinking itself. Mind
thinking itself, it must be remembered, is not some sort of flight into
solipsism or fantasy, let alone the self-referential world of the
deranged. Mind thinking
itself is the philosopher’s ascent to that standpoint, that of the
Absolute or the Idea or God, in which all the dichotomies of the
universe are acknowledged to be non-imaginary yet are overcome in a
higher synthesis. Since
philosophy aims at a rational apprehension of reality as a whole (and in
Hegel’s opinion, his own philosophy has succeeded at this), evil, and
that aspect of evil which is sin, have to be seen as aspects of or
stages on the way towards that mediation which overcomes the ontic
distance between God and humankind.
(In other words, evil has been denatured as evil; radical evil
– evil for the sake of evil, evil subserving no good whatsoever,
rendered inherently impossible.) The
God of biblical faith who utterly
transcends the creation is manifestly penultimately “God”, since
such a deity is necessarily limited by what it precludes.
According to Hegel, then, God is most profoundly that which
gathers up in a higher ontic unity what has heretofore been regarded as
ontically distinct. In
connection with this notion Hegel speaks of two forms of the infinite,
one adequate and the other inadequate.
The inadequate infinite is simply the non-finite.
If the infinite is defined as the non-finite, however, then the
infinite is limited by what it is not, and to this extent is not
infinite at all. Then the
adequate infinite must be that infinite which includes
both the finite and the
infinite.
Where has this development been illustrated?
(Note that the question is not “Where has this occurred?”)
It has been illustrated in the Incarnation, where the God who up
to that time had been viewed as transcendent only – albeit infinite
– is now acknowledged to include precisely what it had previously
excluded. The infinite, in
short, is the sum of infinite plus finite.
Who needs the illustration? Hegel
maintains that Christianity is the pictorial representation of truth
helpful for those who cannot, or to date have not, risen philosophically
to the Absolute Standpoint. Hegel
intends no disparagement. At
the same time, what is depicted as biblically substantive –
Incarnation, atonement, resurrection, Spirit-suffusion – are
philosophically less than ultimate.
They remain pictorial representations of a reality that has moved
beyond them even as it includes them.
Kierkegaard
Kierkegaard objects. He
denies that there can ever be mediation of Hegel’s sort between God
and humankind. He denies
that the Absolute’s knowledge of itself and humankind’s knowledge of
the Absolute are two aspects of the same reality.
He denies that the creature (if such a word is still appropriate)
can rise by means of philosophical thought to the standpoint of the
Absolute so as to render human self-consciousness ultimately the same as
God’s self-consciousness. He
insists that there is an “infinite qualitative distinction” between
God and humankind that cannot be overcome.
The God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob is never to be
confused with Hegel’s Spirit or Absolute.
We may encounter the God who forever remains GOD, but we are
never ontically “one with” that God.
Whereas Hegel insists that “The Truth is the Whole”,
Kierkegaard maintains that “Truth is subjectivity.”
This assertion, of course, has nothing to do with subjectivism
or make-believe or even post-modernism’s denial of truth.
“Truth is subjectivity” means that the real is the
relational. Whereas Hegel
had insisted “The Real is the rational and the rational is the real”
(presupposing his own carefully delineated sense of “rational”),
Kierkegaard anticipates Martin Buber’s notion that the real is the
“between”; the real is the existent’s encounter with, engagement
with, the God who infinitely transcends us yet who accommodates himself
to us and therefore whom we may meet and know.
To exist, insists Kierkegaard, is qualitatively different from to
think – however pregnant Hegel’s notion of thinking may be and
regardless of what it may include. For
this reason, Kierkegaard does not hesitate to say “Existence cannot be
thought.” Rejecting the
“thought experiments” of metaphysicians as the approach to truth,
Kierkegaard insists that the real is apprehended only by means of a
commitment that forsakes all earthly securities and “leaps” in faith
at incalculable risk.
The paradigm of such commitment is Kierkegaard’s “knight of
faith”, Abraham of old; and the story concerning Abraham that
overwhelms Kierkegaard is the Akedah,
the “binding” of Isaac as Abraham offers up his son, his only son,
in obedience to God’s command.
Abraham
and Isaac
Abraham, the prototype of the person of faith, has been promised
spiritual descendants as numerous as the sand on the seashore.
If the promise is to be fulfilled, two conditions must be met:
Abraham must persevere in faith (or else he cannot be the foreparent of
descendants-in-faith), and
Isaac must survive (or else
there will no descendants-in-faith.)
The dilemma is plain: If Abraham obeys God and offers up his son,
then God’s promise is null and void, since Isaac has not survived; on
the other hand, if Abraham second-guesses (i.e., disobeys) God and
preserves Isaac, then God’s promise is null and void, since
Abraham’s disobedience exemplifies unfaith.
In short, Abraham’s obedience and his disobedience nullify the
promise alike. What is he to
do? Abraham decides to stake
everything on obeying God’s command,
trusting God to fulfill God’s promise
in ways that Abraham cannot foresee or even imagine.
He will obey God even though such obedience, from a human
perspective, ensures the non-fulfillment of the promise.
Precisely at the moment of the knife’s descent God forbids the
dreaded act. God’s
unaffected awareness and candid acknowledgement, “Now
I know that you fear God” (
22:12
), dovetails exactly with Abraham’s utter surprise at the provision of
the ram. Abraham’s
surprise is no more feigned than his intent to obey God at any cost.
Both dimensions must be underscored: it is true simultaneously
that Abraham never doubts that “God will provide” (or else he has
abandoned faith’s trust in the promise-fulfilling God) and
that he is genuinely astounded at the appearance of the ram (or else the
trial of faith was no trial at all, trial presupposing the inability to
foresee in any way how promise can be fulfilled when faith must heed a
command that guarantees cancellation of the promise.)
Kierkegaard
and Hegel
Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling targets Hegel unambiguously.
Hegel’s understanding of religion, of course, includes his
understanding of faith. And
since philosophy “goes further” than religion, philosophy
necessarily goes further than faith – only, says Kierkegaard, to turn
wine into water.[12]
Philosophy, meanwhile, is not aware that it denatures faith, for
philosophy insists that it comprehends faith even as it supersedes
faith. In all of this, says
Kierkegaard, theology is seemingly unaware that its mandate is theos,
God. The result is that
theology, or what’s left of it, “sits all rouged and powdered in the
window and courts its favours, offers its charms to philosophy.”[13]
Theology has prostituted itself to philosophy while preening
itself on an intellectual sophistication superior to the crudeness of
Abraham and Isaac. After
all, “it is supposed to be difficult to understand Hegel, but to
understand Abraham is a small matter.”[14]
With mordant irony Kierkegaard turns the vocabulary of
“further” back upon his opponent: overwhelmed at Abraham,
Kierkegaard glories in the fact that in 130 years the patriarch “got
no further than faith.”[15]
While “got no further” waggishly suggests that Abraham was
stalled, Kierkegaard knows that Abraham, not the philosophical
speculators, had alone moved ahead to existence.
Existence cannot be gained or entered upon by means of the
“thought experiments” of the metaphysicians, but only as the
detachment of “worldly understanding” is left behind in favour of
radical commitment.[16]
The radical commitment is to God; not the “God” of
philosophical constructs but the One who summons every would-be believer
to Abraham trial. Such trial
consists in enduring, in utter anguish, the contradiction between
promise and command. This
contradiction is nothing less than “absurd.”
As faith paradoxically embraces the absurd (in all of this the
“this-worldliness” of Isaac and promised blessing must be kept in
mind), faith is vindicated and confirmed not in an ethereal eternal but
in the temporal. By way of
reminder of the link between the absurd and the temporal Kierkegaard
adds, “Only he who draws the knife gets Isaac.”[17]
Needless to say the loneliness of Abraham (and therefore of any
believer) is his inability to make any of this understandable to even
one other human being. Since
no one can foster the understanding requisite for faith, no believer can
help someone else into faith:
“either the single individual himself becomes the knight of faith by
accepting the paradox or he never becomes one.”[18]
In light of philosophy’s non-comprehension of all that
Kierkegaard has said, together with the human horror that surrounds the
particular absurdity pertaining to Isaac, he does not hesitate to say
that not only is Abraham’s life the most paradoxical that can be
thought; it is so paradoxical that it cannot
be thought.[19]
Still, the foregoing must never be regarded as unique to Abraham.
He is prototype, to be sure, but as such is always to be imitated
by those who have never settled for the cheap edition of him that the
church is forever trying to sell. He
remains the “guiding star that saves the anguished.”[20]
Kierkegaard’s point is that Hegel’s category of
self-consciousness, even a self-consciousness that is one with an
eternal self-consciousness is still only consciousness;
it is not yet existence.
Faith alone embraces existence, and does so only by means of a
“leap.” Such a radical
commitment is always a qualitative transition that nothing can
precipitate or effect incrementally.
The single individual knows that we can be saved only as faith,
itself a paradox, grasps the absurd.
Such faith is forever the antithesis of the detachment of
philosophy and forever the antithesis of the immediacy of the heart’s
spontaneous inclination.[21]
Such faith is always the paradox of existence.
In light of all that has been said concerning the absurd,
paradox, leap, existence – together with the fact that the single
individual can be neither understood nor admired – Kierkegaard is
correct when he contends that the believer is finally a witness, not a
teacher.[22]
A teacher, after all, teaches what others with the requisite
philosophical equipment can understand.
A witness, on the other hand, attests precisely what is found in
common with nothing else. Existence,
contra Hegel, is indeed “beyond” all philosophical
thought-experiments.
A
Reprise
And yet it appears philosophy will always be necessary – at
least if theological impasses are to be dealt with.
One such impasse was the Christological dispute between Arius and
Athanasius in the Fourth Century. In
his understanding of Jesus Christ Arius had managed to combine the worst
of two heresies, Ebionitism and Docetism.
While his Christology never hesitated to speak of Jesus as the
Son of God, his “Son of God” was a tertium quid, something that was neither divine nor human.
For if the Son of God is less than God in any sense, then the Son
is not God. And if the Son
of God is more than human, then neither is the Son human.
When Athanasius attempted to rebut Arius he realized that both he
and Arius were using the same biblical expression, “Son of God,” but
were ascribing antithetical meanings to it.
Athanasius insisted that nothing less than the gospel was at
stake here. While Arius
insisted that the Son was homoiousios
with the Father – of similar substance, Athanasius insisted that Son
and Father were homoousios
– of the same or identical substance.
The difference between homoousios
and homoiousios is an
iota, the smallest letter of the Greek alphabet (in Greek it lacks even
a dot), and subscript as well. (How
much hangs on such a distinction is indicated in English by the
difference between asking someone to run your business and asking her to
ruin it.) Athanasius
understood that if the crucial difference between him and Arius was to
be identified, he would have to resort to non-biblical, philosophical
language. Homoousios is not a biblical word.
Athanasius defended his use of it by insisting that it exuded the
spirit of scripture; in other words, homoousios
locates the meanings of biblical words and the realities to which they
point.[23]
What did Athanasius do for the church through his deployment of a
non-biblical, philosophical expression?
No less a figure than Karl Barth maintained that the Athanasian homoousios
was the most significant theological statement since the apostles.
It is not difficult to multiply instances where philosophical
concepts and vocabulary are crucial in theological articulation.
Despite Calvin’s protestations against the divagations of
schoolmen and sophists whose Aristotelian encroachment upon theology
Calvin finds objectionable, Calvin resorts to Aristotle in expounding
his understanding of justification.[24]
Concerning Romans 3:24, “[All who believe] … are justified by
his [God’s] grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ
Jesus.” (RSV) Calvin
maintains this verse to be “perhaps the most remarkable place in the
whole of Scripture for explaining and magnifying the force of this
righteousness.”[25]
Here Calvin writes, “He [Paul] shows that the mercy of God is
the efficient cause; that Christ, with his blood, is the material; that
the formal, or instrumental, is faith conceived from the Word; and the
final is the glory of the divine righteousness and goodness.”[26]
Elsewhere Calvin readily acknowledges philosophy as servant of Christian
understanding: “…we see that there was good ground for the
distinction which the schoolmen made between necessity, secundum
quid, and necessity absolute, also between the necessity of
consequent and of consequence.”[27]
In none of the above is it suggested that the substance of
philosophy determines the substance of theology.
It is to say, however, that theology appears to need philosophy
– or at least to find it highly useful – to deploy philosophical
concepts in theological exposition.
Karl Barth makes this point in his exposition of the doctrine of
the Trinity. Barth regards
as short-sighted those who are impatient with the doctrine on the
grounds that it appears to rely for its articulation on the philosophy
current at the time of the Council of Nicaea (ca. 325.) Barth
acknowledges the
…indisputable
connexion of the dogma [of the Trinity] with the philosophy of the age.
By proving philosophical involvement we can reject the
confessions and theology of any age and school, and we can do his more
effectively the less we see the beam in our own eye.
For linguistically theologians have always depended on some
philosophy and linguistically they always will.
But instead of getting Pharisaically (sic)
indignant about this and consigning whole periods to the limbo of a
philosophy that is supposed to deny the gospel – simply because our
own philosophy is different – it is better to stick strictly to the
one question what the theologians of the earlier period were really
trying to say in the vocabulary of their philosophy.[28]
Theology cannot be articulated apart from philosophical concepts
and vocabulary. At the same
time, the content of philosophy and theology are not identical.
Therefore theology must adapt its proper content to the forms of
discourse in its immediate environment.
If theology fails to adapt then it speaks to no one, however rich
its content may be. On the
other hand, if in seeking to adapt, theology adopts the substance
described by the forms of discourse in its immediate environment, it
will find that however well it communicates it has nothing to say,
theology now being able to do no more than reflect the world back to the
world.
The line between “adapt” and “adopt” is finer than a hair
and harder than diamond. In
truth, most of the time Christian witness finds itself now on one side
of the line and then on the other, trusting that on balance it tiptoes
down the boundary. The
option that theology never has is to “play it safe” and make no
effort at adapting for fear of adopting, for to “play it safe” is to
guarantee the disappearance of witness.
Kierkegaard knew as much. While
remaining an unrelenting foe of philosophy’s disdain for Abraham who,
unfortunately, “got no further than faith,” Kierkegaard concludes
his criticism of Hegel and Hegel’s “Absolute” by conscripting
Hegel as Kierkegaard tells the reader that Abraham – everywhere the
prototype of philosophy-defying faith – is lost unless “…the
single individual as the single individual stands in an absolute
relation to the absolute.”[29]
Since it appears philosophy will always be essential to theology,
is the difference between philosophy and theology an irreconcilable
difference? In some respects
there may continue to be an irreconcilable difference.
Years ago my chief philosophical mentor, Emil Fackenheim,
commented to me that radical evil, evil for the sake of evil, evil
enacted for no other reason than perverse delight in evil, is precisely
that surd over which metaphysics finally stumbles – “surd”, in
mathematical parlance, being that which can never be made to fit an
expression that is mathematically elegant.
At the same time, within the realm of truth or reality that theology acknowledges,
might there be room for philosophy in the form of a re-formulated
natural theology? Within this realm cannot philosophy argue from the creaturely order
to its “silent cry” for a sufficient reason?
This is not a philosophical attempt at supplanting, for instance,
redemption as the content of revelation.
But it is to argue, from within the realm established by
revelation; it is to argue philosophically that the truth of theology is
not inherently philosophically impossible.[30]
In this light Hans Urs von Balthasar, in discussing the relation
between philosophy and faith, appears to grasp the challenge that has
convened this colloquium when he writes
…Ought
one not … to say that the Christian, as proclaimer of God’s glory
… takes upon himself – whether he wants to or not – the burden of
metaphysics?[31]
Victor
A. Shepherd March 2007
