No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 January 2008
In this essay, I defend theology against a recent argument made by Peter Byrne. According to Byrne, any discipline of thought that can be interpreted realistically shows the accumulation of reliable or widespread belief about the reality it investigates. I challenge this claim, first, by showing how theology, so construed as an exercise of ‘faith seeking understanding’, can and should be interpreted realistically, even if it does not show the accumulation of reliable or widespread belief about divine reality. Second, I give a plausible account of why theology is beset by internal disagreement and division, even if the goal of theological enquiry is to overcome such disagreement and division.
1. Peter Byrne ‘A realist interpretation of theology?’, ch. 7 of his God and Realism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 155–178, and in particular 162. All references in the text are to this chapter.
2. Byrne does consider some versions of a non-realist hermeneutic – in particular, the pragmatic, constructivist theologies advanced by Gordon Kaufman and Sallie McFague – but he finds them be unsatisfactory, insofar as they reduce the theological enterprise to a ‘grand exercise in wishful thinking’ or truth-making (172). They therefore deny what is central to ‘innocent realism’, the philosophical position that Byrne defends in his book: there is an epistemic gap separating reality, whether worldly or divine, on the one hand, from the claims we make about reality, on the other hand. Innocent realism, therefore, is compatible with a particular form of scepticism that Byrne endorses: if there is an epistemic gap separating our truth claims from the reality those claims purport to be about, then we remain open to the sceptical possibility that reality (or at least significant stretches of reality) forever remains beyond our cognitive reach.
3. See Alvin Plantinga Warranted Christian Belief (New York NY: Oxford University Press, 2000), and in particular 241–289.
4. See my ‘A realist epistemology of faith’, Religious Studies, 41 (2005), 373–393CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Aquinas's Summa Theologiae [hereafter ST], I–II.62.1, and in particular the translation provided by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York NY: Benziger Bros, 1948).
5. Aquinas writes, ‘The light of faith [lumen fidei] makes us see [videre] what we believe. For just as, by the habits of the other virtues, man sees what is becoming to him in respect of that habit, so, by the habit of faith, the human mind is directed to assent to such things as are becoming to a right faith, and not to assent to others’; ST, II–II.1.4 ad 3.
6. Hope and love are the two other theological virtues infused by grace in the will. In hope, the will is directed to God as the guarantor of a future good, everlasting life, which the will desires to acquire; in love, the will desires God for God's own sake as an intrinsic good. See ST, II–II.23.6.
7. ST, II–II.2.9 ad 3. For further explication of this point, see my ‘A realist epistemology of faith’, 385–389.
8. Aquinas writes, ‘As regards … man's assent to the things which are of faith, we may observe a twofold cause, one of external inducement, such as seeing a miracle, or being persuaded by someone to embrace the faith: neither of which is a sufficient cause, since of those who see the same miracle, or who hear the same sermon, some believe, and some do not. Hence we must assert another internal cause, which moves man inwardly to assent to matters of faith … . Since man, by assenting to matters of faith, is raised above his nature, this must needs accrue to him from some supernatural principle moving him inwardly; and this is God. Therefore faith, as regards the assent which is the chief act of faith, is from God moving man inwardly by grace’ (ST, II–II.6.1).
9. The Lutheran World Federation and the Roman Catholic Church Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 2000), section 3, no. 15. The Joint Declaration can be found online at http://www.elca.org/ecumenical/ecumenicaldialogue/romancatholic/jddj/declaration.html.
12. This method of doing theology is most often located in Anselm, although its true origins lie with Augustine. See, for example, Anselm's Proslogion (cited below) as well as some of Augustine's earlier writings, in particular De Utilitate Credendi. I locate Aquinas in this tradition of doing theology as well.
13. Note that the sort of understanding gained here is speculative and not just practical. I make this distinction because Byrne argues that philosophy (which Byrne concedes to be non-realist as well) furnishes understanding in a practical, rather than speculative or theoretical sense: philosophy constitutes a second-order activity whose chief aim ‘is to clarify and keep sharp the conceptual tools that first-order activities such, such as physics, employ’ (176). Theology, on the other hand, as I defend it, remains a first-order activity whose chief aim is to further our knowledge of God or the divinely real through faith as well as subsequent understanding.
14. See in particular ST, I.1 and ST, I.12.
15. More specifically, my move here (once again following Aquinas's lead) is to locate epistemology within eschatology: understanding how knowledge of God, from a Christian point of view, bears a distinctly eschatological mark. For further explication of this view, see my ‘The eschatological character of our knowledge of God’, Modern Theology, 22 (2006), 255–276CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16. For a more detailed examination of the noetic effects of sin, see Merold Westphal ‘Taking St. Paul seriously: sin as an epistemological category’, in Thomas P. Flint (ed.) Christian Philosophy (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 200–226; and Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 199–240.
17. See Anselm Proslogion, in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), ch. 1.
18. I would like to thank two anonymous referees, as well as the Editor of this journal, for providing helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.