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Australian eJournal of Theology 18.3 (December 2011)

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Analytic Theology as Contextual Theology

Edward F. Tverdek

Abstract: This essay argues that what some scholars describe as analytic theology can serve a vital practical role in pastoral settings. In the course of developing this point, it examines what if anything renders analytic theology a unique discipline, and whether it carries any of the benefits or baggage of its precursor in analytic philosophy. While it may seem counterintuitive that a field inheriting a legacy of thought seemingly cut off from history and culture could penetrate the nuances of different faith contexts, the argument here suggests an appropriately modest aim: analytic theology, understood generally as the progeny of analytic philosophy by virtue of a more or less common commitment to evidentialism, can be a particularly useful approach in those cultures indebted to Enlightenment rationality.

Key Words: analytic philosophy; analytic theology; contextual theology; metaphysics; language; reason

GOD AND ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY

ow do you know,” queried a joke that circulated among my colleagues in graduate school, “when you’re doing analytic philosophy?”1 Answer: Nobody gives a damn

what you’re saying, but they understand every word of it. Analytic philosophers, the punch line affirms, tend to harbor a certain complex about the esteem of their methods in the eyes of others, and it’s a bit of a paradoxical complex to boot. On the one hand, they recognize and repeatedly boast that “Anglo‐American Analytic Philosophy,” as it is called, is the dominant brand of philosophy taught at most major universities in the English‐speaking world. On the other hand, they marvel at the fact that the actual methods, scope, and practices of analytic philosophy are roundly derided as “narrow” and insufficient for the task of examining broad, meaningful questions (and further at the fact that others become increasingly impatient if one indeed does try to argue carefully and “analytically” on behalf of, say, some topical issue in politics or culture). The philosophic tradition from the ancients to the medievals to the Early Moderns, critics of the analytic schools claim, is better sustained by what are called the “continental” schools of philosophy (referring to the European mainland rather than the British Isles): existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, critical theory and, more recently, postmodernism.

There is some superficial rationale for this claim that analytic philosophy is ill‐equipped to tackle what we loosely think of as “big questions of great meaning”: the field was premised upon the dismissal of such questions, their “great meaning” thought to be

1 I am grateful to Stephen Bevans, Marya Schechtman, and two anonymous referees for their helpful, constructive comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

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entirely illusory. The Vienna Circle’s Logical Positivism of the 1930s – the presumed incubator of modern analytic philosophy – famously rejected metaphysics, morality, and God as hopelessly inexpressible in our limited language and impervious to empirical verification. It wasn’t until the 1970s that P.F. Strawson would make analytic philosophy safe for the things that are said to really matter in our lives, and faith is no exception.2 In the last five years, no fewer than three polygraphs have been published documenting and evaluating the influence of analytic philosophy on the philosophy of religion – an influence that has culminated, as one of those volume’s title indicates, in a distinct field of Analytic Theology.3

There is, however, much ambiguity packed into this term influence. What exactly are we saying when we suggest that analytic theology is the theoretical offspring of analytic philosophy? Even if we put aside the question of just how philosophy as such relates to theology as such (e.g., is one a parent of the other?; do they share objectives?), there are myriad characteristics of analytic philosophy we might point to that could be said to “survive” in analytic theology, and none of them is an obvious candidate for primacy. Indeed, given that analytic philosophy, despite having overcome its anti‐metaphysical origins, still retains a reputation as hostile to those “big questions of great meaning,” analytic theology would seem to have a dilemma in pinning down its provenance in analytic philosophy: either analytic theology inherits the perceived “limited” scope of analytic philosophy by virtue of inheriting its substantive philosophical commitments, or it merely applies the stylistic and rhetorical techniques and professional standards of analytic philosophy to questions of theological import – in which case it fails to register as a unique theology with any particular content, further suggesting that there really is no analytic theology but rather more or less “analytical” ways of doing traditional theology, contextual theology, feminist theology, etc. Could this be why so seemingly few theologians will admit to doing something like analytic theology?

It is my aim in this essay to suggest that this dilemma is a false one. Specifically, I will argue that an evaluation of analytic theology’s merits that begins with an attempt to capture the substantive or methodological “essence” of analytic philosophy or to reconcile its perceived ancestral conflicts with the aims of theology will eventually prove unfruitful. Rather, I suggest, a fairly innocuous brand of evidentialism that might agreeably be said to characterize most of what we think of as “analytic philosophy” can also agreeably be said to be a useful trait of analytic theology. It is this commitment to evidentialism, I further suggest, that renders analytic theology of particular pastoral use in those contexts from which it emerged – our own post‐Enlightenment, post‐industrial, and relentlessly “postmodern” west, where “Truth” is wielded like a truncheon by some and consequently rejected as inherently oppressive (if not entirely illusory) by others.

2 See Hans‐Johann Glock, What is Analytic Philosophy? (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2008), especially Chapter Two, for a concise survey of the twentieth‐century history of analytic philosophy. 3 See Oliver D. Crisp and Michael C. Rea, eds, Analytic Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology, 1st ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), Oliver D. Crisp, ed., Reader in Contemporary Philosophical Theology (London: T&T Clark International, 2009), and Harriet A. Harris and Christopher J. Insole, Faith And Philosophical Analysis: The Impact of Analytical Philosophy on the Philosophy of Religion (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2005). Brian Hebblethwaite’s Philosophical Theology and Christian Doctrine (Malden, MA: Wiley‐Blackwell, 2005) might also be considered an indispensible introduction to the field.


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DISARMING ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY FOR THEOLOGIANS

Imagine a social organization that is, on paper at least, open to anyone who wishes to join, but is populated only by men of Czechoslovakian descent between the ages of 45 and 55. The organization purports to hold a variety of events, fundraising drives, and the like – none of which sees the participation of women, young people, or anyone of non‐Czech heritage. We would no doubt feel justified in referring to it as a “club for middle‐aged Czech men,” despite the fact that there is clearly no overt discrimination going on and nothing we can point to in the organization’s charter that would appear to counsel the exclusion of applicants for the organization who don’t meet the middle‐aged‐Czech‐man profile. And members of the organization may well express their own bafflement at the group’s seeming lack of diversity: “We don’t do anything that’s particularly middle‐aged‐Czech‐guy friendly, and the stuff we do we would have thought would sound interesting to a much wider swath of people. Hell, we do stuff we think just about anyone would want to do.” Our question for them would be, no doubt, “what, specifically, do you do?”

Such is the question as we might put it to self‐described analytic theologians. If analytic theology is indeed rooted in what few would deny is one of the more prominent movements in philosophy for the past century, and if even fewer would deny that theology and philosophy share large portions of their tool kits, why is it that relatively few theologians seem to want to acknowledge the label or the methods they might think it implies? Why, for example, has contextual theology, perhaps the branch of the discipline most open to the findings of the social sciences and other contemporary methods of understanding the world, apparently found no particular use for analytic methods while the footprints of continental philosophy are readily evident in its various works? Why is that, as R.R. Reno puts it, the “overwhelming majority of theologians today sift through Heidegger and his philosophical children and grandchildren to try to find useable material”?4 Doesn’t analytic philosophy purport to do what we all say we want to do – think and write clearly about things important to us? Don’t theologians and their students – in many cases, budding clerics – want to do these things too? Are pastors and ministers in Santiago, Chile or Passaic, New Jersey finding themselves cornered by parishioners who want to sort out whether or not their faith amounts to one of Jean‐Francois Lyotard’s metanarratives? Why, to put it bluntly, does analytic theology remain largely a club of particularly philosophically schooled men and, very occasionally, women?

Some of the disdain contemporary theologians may hold for the analytic tradition must certainly stem from what they believe to be that tradition’s stylistic excesses and technical pretenses. Reno himself admits that once we concede the

verbal aggressiveness characteristic of analytic philosophers, an intellectual arrogance that quickly dismisses as fools those uninitiated into the specialized vocabulary, and, let’s be honest, the natural human impatience with technical arguments (that old “empty formalism” complaint) … it’s easy to see why modern theology would turn elsewhere. 5

More likely, though, the resistance to the analytic tradition is thought to be on substantive grounds: despite the fact that analytic philosophy had early on abandoned its

4 R. R. Reno, “Theology’s continental captivity,” First Things, no. 162 (April 1, 2006): 26‐33. 5 Ibid., 31.


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initial contempt for intangibles such as metaphysics, ethics, and God, it retains to this day the stain of small mindedness, eschewing the “big questions of great import” for tidy, technical, and easily managed pieces. Oliver Crisp confesses that analytic theology is “[t]oo often … identified with that mid‐twentieth century phase of [the analytic tradition’s] life that was largely inhospitable to theology (and metaphysics and ethics).”6 Michael Rea admits in his introductory remarks for the volume he co‐edited with Crisp that the theologian’s fear is that the adherent to the analytic tradition “will miss out on the pursuit of wisdom simply by ignoring rich and messy topics in favour of ones that admit of neat, precise, and literal discussion.”7

Such fears are, for many analytic theologians, unwarranted, and we find many of those scholars hastening to reassure us that analytic theology need not be weighed down by any distasteful baggage inherited from that analytic philosophy tradition. A virtual chorus of recent commentary suggests that analytic theology preserves at most some of the stylistic and formalistic earmarks of modern analytic philosophy. Rea, for example, finds in the analytic tradition nothing less innocuous than a “particular rhetorical style, some common ambitions, an evolving technical vocabulary, and a tendency to pursue projects in dialogue with a certain evolving body of literature.”8 Similarly, Harris and Insole, in the counterpart introductory remarks to their volume on the influence of the analytic tradition in theology, tell us that it amounts to no more than “a commitment to conceptual clarity, rigour and transparency in argument, as well as by a respect for the discoveries of contemporary science.”9 Lest we think that analytic theology might take the ball and run with it, exploring territories and making assertions beyond those in which its analytic philosophical forbearers might indulge, Crisp reassures us that this nascent theological school is simply “about redeploying tools already in the service of philosophy to a theological end.”10 And for William Abraham, analytic theology is little more than “systematic theology attuned to the deployment of the skills, resources, and virtues of analytic philosophy.”11 “Thus construed,” Rea concludes, “it is hard to imagine how anyone could sensibly object.”12

In addition to these efforts to render analytic methods stylistically safe for theology, we find numerous attempts to disarm the substantive implications of analytic philosophy. If, as Reno caricatured them, analytic philosophers have earned for themselves the reputation of the schoolyard bully, forcing a particularly thin metaphysical program on the quiet continental kids and other unwary students by way of their flashy arguments and fancy symbolic notation, analytic theologians, we are to believe, will have none of it. Crisp, for example, notes that analytical methods may involve both procedural and substantive uses of reason, the former carrying no particular assumptions about the nature of reality. Analytic theology as such, he suggests, shares only a singular commitment to the procedural use of reason with its philosophical predecessors; different analytic

6 Oliver D. Crisp, “Introduction,” in Crisp, 3. 7 Michael C. Rea, “Introduction,” in Crisp and Rea Analytic Theology, 19. 8 Ibid., 3. 9 Harriet A. Harris and Christopher J. Insole, “Verdicts on Analytical Philosophy of Religion,” in Harris and Insole, Faith and Philosophical Analysis, 3‐4. 10 Oliver D. Crisp, “On Analytic Theology,” in Crisp and Rea, Analytic Theology 38. 11 William J. Abraham, “Systematic Theology as Analytic Theology,” in Crisp and Rea Analytic Theology, 54. 12 Rea, “Introduction,” 6.


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theologians may adhere to different substantive uses of reason and still be considered “analytic,” but even this work is consistent “with a range of theories of truth.”13 Rea, moreover, traces this substantive metaphysical pluralism all the way back to its ancestors in analytic philosophy. He dissects the claim that the field is steeped in epistemic foundationalism, noting that such foundationalism can be of different forms. Doxastic foundationalism, Rea suggests, is merely the assertion that some of the beliefs we have are properly basic in the sense that we don’t seek justification for them by other beliefs. Source foundationalism, on the other hand, attempts to offer some substantive grounding for all beliefs, and the two forms of source foundationalism prominent in philosophy since the Early Modern period – rationalism and empiricism – aren’t especially hospitable to religious faith of any sort, much less to theology. Analytic philosophers, and certainly analytic theologians, Rea contends, are not committed to anything more than the “commonsense” doxastic foundationalism.

Nor are they committed to any brand of metaphysical realism or moral or metaphysical absolutism. In fact, so far as I can tell, there is no substantive philosophical thesis that separates analytic philosophers from their rivals.14

To hear some of its practitioners defend it, one might conclude that analytic theology and philosophy are conducted largely by plebiscite.

WHENCE ANALYTIC?

Rea’s rendering of analytical philosophy points to a larger issue we shouldn’t ignore here. A key problem underlying each of these attempts to portray analytic theology as substantively friendlier to the “big questions of great import” than its ancestral philosophy is that there is little consensus on just what distinguishes analytic philosophy itself as a unique, integrated field of inquiry. Hans‐Johann Glock’s 2008 volume What is Analytic Philosophy?, as its title implies, is an attempt to do just that, and Glock admits some difficulty. He notes that geographic (Anglo‐American, with some Austrian roots) and historical (twentieth‐century, perhaps with origins of early British Empiricism) criteria come up short in that they will encompass philosophers that no one would take to be “analytic” in their orientation and exclude some that are thought to be unambiguously part of the tradition. He concludes that analytic philosophy as a school of thought can be best described as a collection of family resemblances – overlapping differentia that apply to some philosophers described (by themselves or others) as “analytic philosophers,” with no particular characteristic common to all such philosophers or their work.15

More interesting, however, are the concessions that Glock makes regarding the methodological, stylistic, and rhetorical commitments that are typically thought to be endemic to analytic philosophy. Those various elements often attributed to analytic philosophy’s mode of expression – an emulation of scientific discourse; the breaking down of large problems into manageable, smaller ones; the modesty of aims; the seemingly gracious raising of potential objections and counterexamples from a hypothetical interlocutor; the use of often bizarre, abstract test cases and imaginary examples (starring

13 Crisp, “On Analytic Theology,” 46‐47. 14 Rea, “Introduction,” 6. See 12‐14 for his discussion of doxastic‐ and source foundationalism. 15 See Glock What is Analytic Philosophy?, Chapter Eight.


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what Eleonore Stump wryly calls “the philosophical crash‐dummies Smith and Jones”16); even analytic philosophy’s ostensible preoccupation with conceptual clarity and rigor of argument – Glock finds to be true of other philosophical schools and often lacking in what no one would dispute in calling “analytic philosophy.”17 Rational argument is, of course, thought to be the hallmark of philosophy as such, and has distinguished the field since ancient Athens. Even Martin Heidegger, Logical Positivism’s favored punching bag, could and did describe his broad, dense philosophical project as somehow constituting “analysis.” And even if contemporary continental philosophy is more or less united in its suspicions regarding the modern scientific enterprise, its commitment to more “literary” approaches to philosophy are punctuated with traces of analysis – to the point that continental postmodernists may be virtually “scientific” in their deconstruction of the sciences (witness Michel Foucault’s orientation throughout his The Archeology of Knowledge18). At the same time, the excessive technicality indulged in by much of contemporary analytic philosophy has often rendered it as difficult to scale as the most challenging edifices of its continental counterparts. As Glock confesses, “If a stylistic feature separates continental and analytic philosophy at present, it is rather a different kind of obscurantism.”19

SITUATING THE ANALYTIC IN ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY

If my aim in this essay is, in part at least, to identify just what this field of analytic theology might offer to those who theologize, I’ve arguably moved us in the wrong direction – outward one level of abstraction – in considering the question of whether its presumed progenitor, analytic philosophy, is itself a uniquely identifiable school of thought. Before we can remedy this, I wish to move us up yet one more level of abstraction and further away from our very practical stated goal to ask an even more general question: what exactly are we doing when we try to capture and pin down a particular “school of thought,” be it of philosophy or theology or whatever? In doing so, I think we will be better able to see that our chain of inquiry – what if anything does analytic theology inherit from analytic philosophy?; and, subsequently, just what unique traits does analytic philosophy have to pass on to its progeny? – is the wrong route to take if we are to determine whether analytic theology is a unique, viable discipline worth engaging.

Note, however, the peculiarly self‐defeating nature of any attempt to define a “school” of philosophy: to do so presupposes that one already accepts the notion of “schools of philosophy” and that one is already subscribing to one. Yet how can one then impartially evaluate the criteria used to distinguish “schools” of philosophy themselves?

Glock concedes that some philosophers – most notably, Gilbert Ryle – have escaped this conundrum by denying that there are indeed distinct “schools” of philosophy or valid sub‐disciplines of this or that “‐ism”; there is only philosophy and non‐philosophy. Glock’s solution is somewhat more hospitable to the fact that, in the real world, philosophers

16 Eleonore Stump, “The Problem of Evil: Analytic Philosophy and Narrative,” in Crisp and Rea, Analytic Theology, 253. 17 See Glock What is Analytic Philosophy?, Chapter Six. 18 See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language (New York, NY: Vintage, 1982). 19 Glock What is Analytic Philosophy?, 18.


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certainly seem to act as if they are guided by the first principles assumptions of a particular approach, be it a specifically named “school” or a loose set of common foundational beliefs. He argues more or less for a philosophical exceptionalism: it is, in fact, a characteristic unique to philosophy that the attempt to define its proper nature, scope, and methods is itself an example of doing philosophy – a self‐employment not true of other disciplines. Sub‐distinctions are thus inevitable when various approaches vie for unique rights to the label “philosophy,” and each approach may be valid in its own way and on its own terms. “The very nature of philosophy” Glock tells us, “is itself a philosophically contested issue, and views about this issue are philosophically controversial.”20

Glock is surely on to something here. Intellectual disciplines other than philosophy might require a meta‐discipline in order to arbitrate disputes over just what are the discipline’s proper aims and methods, and that meta‐discipline is not properly thought of as the domain of the discipline itself. When we, for example, debate whether modern political science should be caught up in the statistical and mathematical arcana of economics or more prone to imitate sociology – or whether it should take neither as its model – we are not necessarily doing political science; rather, we are engaging in some broader field that speaks to political science’s attributes and its purposes – perhaps the philosophy of social science. But this example, to the extent that it illustrates Glock’s point, demonstrates that his pronouncement on “the nature of philosophy” to be a “philosophically contested issue” is largely an arbitrary one; the phrase “philosophically contested” merely begs the question. Is it indeed to do philosophy to dispute its proper aims and methods? From what philosophical perspective do we speak when we suggest that the “analytic” and “continental” traditions both have legitimate claims to the title philosophy, and that they may thus contest each other in a philosophical forum to see which survives as the winner? What are the ground rules for that forum, i.e., the rules of inference and justification, if indeed rules of inference and justification are to be the nature of the criteria agreed upon? Are there any criteria that are likely to be acceptable to all participants? If there are, what are those participants disputing in the first place other than their stylistic applications and matters of professional taste?

Glock is also undeniably on the right track in observing what so‐called analytical philosophers actually do rather than stipulating what our measuring stick tells us they ought to be doing if they are truly to be considered “analytic.” But even this approach is largely ahistorical and acontextual, privileging what so‐called analytic philosophers claim to be doing (or what their peers believe them to be doing) over the actual circumstances of their thinking and the historical and cultural context in which they practice philosophy. What matters is not so much whether analytic philosophers maintain a commitment to certain epistemic doctrines or to clarity or to rationality but whether and how they maintain such commitments in light of the alternatives available to them in their place and historical situation. Certainly, many philosophers outside of analytic philosophy do “analysis” at some point in their work or are committed to linguistic or logical clarity, but “analytic philosophers” are arguably different to the extent they consciously choose these methods despite or because of what else counts as “philosophy” in their milieu. Thus it may seem reasonable to some to describe Descartes’ philosophy as “analytic” and thereby

20 Glock What is Analytic Philosophy?, 6.


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stretch the definition over centuries. But Descartes’ elaborate philosophy was conceived largely in response to Scholasticism – a school no less “analytical” by such a broad understanding of “analytic.” Practitioners of twentieth‐century “analytic philosophy” on the other hand, sought to restore a rigor and clarity they perceived to have been abandoned by their recent predecessors and contemporaries.

Many of these practitioners of analytic philosophy might, of course, shun a conception or their discipline that effectively “historicized” it, for fear that this would historicize the content of what it might tell us about the world. Such a fear is warrantless. To situate analytic philosophy (and, as we’ll see by implication, analytic theology) historically – to understand how and why it emerged as an intellectual possibility at the time and place it did – is not to undermine the truths it might reveal or to deny it any substantive claims. Marxism, for example, has famously told the story of how and why historical materialism (the formal name for Marx’s method of analysis) came to be in a particular place and time,21 and the ability to articulate that story – to render Marxism itself an historically contingent phenomenon – does little to cast doubt upon any truths that Marxist analysis may tell us about the world which we inhabit now. Analytic philosophy has no such story about itself. It doesn’t preclude that story, but it has habitually ignored the task of writing it.

EVIDENTIALISM AND ANALYTIC THEOLOGY

Could it be that the desire to lasso analytic philosophy and its theological offspring within a single substantive metaphysical or epistemological rope has historically been thwarted only because what groups them, if only loosely, is a normative characteristic? I think this is a distinct possibility, and I’ll go so far as to propose a particular characteristic – one that would require a far more exhaustive comparative examination to demonstrate it as genuinely unique and specific to analytic theology but which, I think, bears a certain prima facie plausibility that can be outlined here: analytic theology is fairly unique among theological methods insofar as analytic theologians adhere, consciously or not, to evidentialism. It’s a characteristic arguably true of many if not most of analytic theology’s philosophical ancestors (though, as we’ve seen, it’s possible that no single characteristic ever defined analytic philosophy as such), and it’s a characteristic that can provide a unique deliberative and probative potential to what we might call analytic theology.

Evidentialism – roughly conceived, a commitment to the demonstrative and persuasive power of evidence – is, as I’ve suggested above, not a strictly descriptive theory of epistemology. It does not assert anything particular about the truth of beliefs which have good reasons or evidence on their behalf. Rather, it is a theory of normative epistemology, one that contends we have a duty to hold beliefs that are supported by what strikes us as the best evidence and, in turn, a duty to reject those beliefs which are not supported by available evidence or which are less supported by the evidence than other,

21 Few people have put this point as eloquently as the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács: “It is therefore no accident … that historical materialism evolved into a scientific method around the middle of the nineteenth century. It is not the result of chance that social truths are found when the soul of an age is revealed in them; the age in which the reality corresponding to the method becomes incarnate. For, as we have already explained, historical materialism is simply the self‐knowledge of capitalist society.” See Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972), 231.


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competing claims. It is, in other words, a philosophical proposition that we do not have the right to ignore the “deliverances of reason,” as analytical philosophers are disposed to call them; whether or not we act according to what we believe to be true (a separate normative question), we are not entitled to disbelieve something we understand to be true and justifiable, be it for the sake of superstition, overriding personal interests, or even the demands of faith.22

I think it can be argued that a shared commitment to evidentialism is what unites analytic theologians and what makes analytic theology a substantively unique approach to theologizing.23 The question is, of course: Even if it could be demonstrated that analytic theologians embrace the normatively compelling qualities of argumentative evidence, how unique could this be? Wouldn’t all theologians who share any respect for philosophical methods assent to the evidentialist principle? For that matter, don’t we all pretty much abide by the tenets of evidentialism in our everyday lives, accepting that evidence matters and that our beliefs should be supported by it if they are to be considered sound?

Much as we might think evidentialism to be “the people’s epistemology” – the boilerplate story of why we believe or reject anything in our “sophisticated” Western cultures (“just look at the evidence”) – I think there’s ample reason to concede that this isn’t, in fact, true in all circumstances, even in those Western cultures weaned on Enlightenment thought. And one of the most prominent examples of where we might feel we have a duty to hold beliefs in spite of evidence comes, for better or for worse, in the form of religious faith. Even when we paint the epistemic contrasts of theology with coarse textures rather than with a fine grain, those broad, enduring distinctions such as that between natural and revealed theology or between rationalism and fideism suggest that there remains a certain moral imperative to reject the evidence of the senses and the “deliverances of reason” and embrace faith on strictly personal, idiosyncratic, or impressionistic grounds – as if Pascal’s “god of the philosophers” were unworthy of our devotion.

22 Evidentialism’s origins, though “evident” as early as the writings of John Locke, are often traced to the germinal 1879 lecture “The Ethics of Belief” by W.K. Clifford; see William Kingdon Clifford The Ethics Of Belief and Other Essays (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2008), 70‐96. Much of the field since then has been taken up with the question of “doxastic voluntarism” – i.e., the question of whether we have sufficient control over our beliefs to be morally “responsible” for them, or whether we simply “believe what we believe.” G.E. Moore would later seed a fertile discussion of what has come to be known as Moore’s Paradox: the fact that it is logically coherent to assert the truth of a proposition without actually believing it ( “p but I don’t believe p”). For interesting analyses of the “doxastic voluntarism” question, see Jonathan E. Adler, Belief’s Own Ethics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), and Matthias Steup, Knowledge, Truth, and Duty: Essays on Epistemic Justification, Responsibility, and Virtue (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), On the corollary question of “culpable ignorance,” see Owen Anderson, The Clarity of God’s Existence: The Ethics of Belief After the Enlightenment (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2008). 23 Readers familiar with the corpus of work we have inherited from Alvin Plantinga might point out here that Plantinga, widely considered a practitioner of the “analytic” methods of theology and philosophy of religion, has spent much of his career arguing that belief in God is itself properly basic and thus without need of evidence (cf., Rea, footnote 14 above). Pivotal as this notion may be to Plantinga’s so–called reformed epistemology, we should note that, to the extent that he is indeed an example of analytic theology in practice, Plantinga takes great pains to provide evidence for his belief that we don’t rely on evidence for theism. His commitment, moreover, to “properly basic” beliefs in God need not entail that he has no use for evidence regarding other theological claims. Indeed, to read Plantinga – whether one agrees or disagrees with his conclusions – is to appreciate the beauty of rational argumentation in modern theological discourse.


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This is especially true in Christianity, where we are taught that we have an obligation to hold certain creedal beliefs about God, the Trinity, the virgin birth, etc., for purposes of fidelity to the faith and for purposes of our own salvation. If those duties are inconsistent with the duty to believe what we find evidence for in our daily lives and our reasoned theological reflection, the conflict might be troubling. This wouldn’t by itself defeat other forms of knowledge of God – most notably revelation and personal, mystical experience. But the fact remains that, in assessing and evaluating that knowledge and what it means ecclesiastically for the Church as a whole, we must rely on the propositional knowledge of what is publicly accessible to all. Richard Swinburne, perhaps the prototypical analytic theologian, sums this up aptly, noting that this is all that natural theology has ever sought to achieve – not a displacement of revelation, but a meaningful expression of it in a wider forum where our duties to rational belief can be made explicit:

Not that any of the natural theologians thought that people had to believe as a result of considering arguments. The existence of God might be accepted on authority or as a result of religious experience. But, the claim was, the evidence for the existence of God is publicly available, and so atheists and pagans were not (objectively) justified in their disbelief. And natural theology could show that they were not justified.24

If, in short, we have an obligation to direct our minds to assent to those things which evidence supports (and we seem to find this an acceptable duty for most of our beliefs), and if we have as Christians the duty to assent to particular creedal principles, it would be unwarranted for us to set these things at odds (since, as seems reasonable, it would be wrong to knowingly subject others to conflicting moral duties). Analytic theology is thus merely the attempt, under present circumstances, to reconcile these epistemic duties.

ANALYTIC THEOLOGY IN CONTEXT

I wish to close this discussion by raising and, I hope, disarming what I take to be an obvious and important potential objection to the way I’ve characterized analytic theology here and to what I have in effect advocated regarding its use. Doesn’t all of this, we might respond, pretty much exalt the Eurocentric, Western rationalism that is thought by many to be the modern vehicle of cultural imperialism? Christianity alone – not to say a host of other faiths that flourish by way of theological reflection and teaching – inhabits almost innumerable cultures around the world, and all but the most ultramontane of Catholics accept that God may speak through those local dialects and idioms. Doesn’t analytic theology just take the milieu that spawned it – white men in suits in philosophy departments at prestigious universities – and makes this the universal standard for theologizing?

The short answer is, well, yes, of course it does. What this means, though, needs some unpacking.

Steve Bevans has in his work been a major proponent of what is now called contextual theology. Bevans emphasizes repeatedly that a one‐size‐fits‐all approach to theology (perhaps to any intellectual discipline for that matter) ultimately defeats one’s purposes in taking up theological reflection, insofar as it leads us to a one‐size‐fits‐all,

24 Richard Swinburne, “The Value and Christian Roots of Analytic Philosophy of Religion,” in Harris and Insole, 42.


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nondescript God. In his Models of Contextual Theology,25 as well as in digested form in his An Introduction to Theology in Global Perspective,26 Bevans outlines the specific methods and tools used in the practice of contextual theology, situating them in what initially appears to be a diachronic timeline: where the locii theologicus of previous methods were Scripture and tradition, “modern” contextual methods consider ordinary human experience – both past and present – as an invaluable resource for theologizing. Bevans cautions the reader, however, against thinking of the contextual embrace of human experience as simply a “late” addition to the locii theologicus. Rather, he notes, contextual theologians point to the presence of contextual sensibilities throughout history, noting its elements in the writings of the Church fathers and its legacy of theological thought. In lieu of an “old: bad” versus “new: good” portrait of the long line of theological practice up to the present day, Bevans suggests that the distinction between methods which ignore human experience and those which harness it has survived throughout Christendom’s past and present – more of a “good/better” distinction over time.

It’s largely this relative blend of the Scripture/tradition nexus with the culture/experience nexus that delineates, for Bevans, the various models of contextual theology, and varying degrees of emphasis on one or the other comprise the poles of a sort of continuum of these models. At one end lies the anthropological model which seeks to find God in the already‐existing culture and extract God’s message as reflected through cultural practice. Scripture and tradition play a role in this insofar as they are ideal types that help to identify when and where God is speaking through a culture. Toward the other end of the spectrum, however, lies what Bevans describes as the countercultural or contrast model of contextual theology. Here what we typically think of as the enduring truths of Scripture and tradition carry more weight, and the relative influence of culture and human experience is more subdued than it is in the anthropological model. The truth of Scripture and tradition may, in other words, run strongly counter to prevailing culture.

Perhaps more important for our purposes in this discussion, the countercultural model of contextual theology also appears to imply a normative evaluation of local cultures that models situated toward the anthropological end do not imply. If the anthropological model suggests that we take culture at face value and look for evidence of Scripture and tradition already alive within it, the countercultural model must inevitably judge the culture at hand to be somehow lacking in the truths provided by Scripture and tradition, since it seeks to interpret that culture and determine when and where those truths may be best sown. This would seem to be a ripe opportunity for contextual theology itself to engage in cultural imperialism, granting the influence of local practice and personal experience but deeming it an obstacle to be overcome rather than a resource to be harnessed.

This might be true if all models of contextual theology were intended to be wielded in all cultures. They’re not, of course, and where and when particular models might be appropriate rests largely on the theologian’s ability to discriminate among them and select the most appropriate for the given context. And where might, Bevans suggests, countercultural forms of contextual theology be most effective? Precisely in those

25 Stephen B. Bevans, Models of Contextual Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002). 26 Stephen B. Bevans, An Introduction to Theology in Global Perspective, First Edition. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2009), Chapter Eight.


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Western, developed, countries where English or other European languages are spoken and where analytic philosophy and, later, theology were cultivated.27 Analytic theology is, or, at least, could be, our own culture’s theological self‐awareness. Yes, it seeks “universal” truths, but it seeks them for those particular cultures that have acquired the hubris to treat universals as a license for swagger or to deny they exist at all. This is contextual theology for the regions of the world that have fed off of the Enlightenment. Indeed, it is the Enlightenment turned back upon itself. The commitment to reason in our culture has been credited both with the triumph of intellectual atheism and religious attrition on the one hand and the retreat to fideistic, fundamentalist religious zealotry on the other. Analytic theology – itself a product of that same Enlightenment – seeks to remedy both of these.

This is, arguably, something very close to what Pope John Paul II had in mind in the promulgation of Fides et ratio.28 Philip Egan observes a poignant difference between Dei Filius, the Catholic Church’s previous statement on the place of rationality in relation to faith, and its counterpart over a century later in Fides et ratio. Where Dei Filius sought to combat what the participants in Vatican I saw as the threat of modern reason to faith, John Paul II, under very different circumstances, sought to reassure the Church of the place of philosophical reason in the face of what he understood to be its abandonment to postmodern relativism.29 The same rational faculties that seemed menacing to faith in the nineteenth century were resuscitated and restored to their role as the foundation of faith at the end of the twentieth century and, more timely, the dawn of Christianity’s third millennium.

Bishop Allen Vigneron, in his comments on Fides et ratio, sees this as the aim of “the new evangelization” called for by John Paul II – “to identify and purify the semina verbi [seeds of the word] of our culture’s fundamental attitudes, beliefs, and values.” And it is, for Bishop Vigneron, the special role of theologian and philosopher as teacher to form those who will carry out this task:

[I]t is at this juncture that our work of teaching philosophy becomes so important: the Church cannot succeed in this audacious project of the new evangelization without leaders – both clergy and lay. And they will be incapable of that leading unless we give them, while they are our students, a sound philosophical training, one that particularly equips them for the part the pope is calling them to play in the new evangelization of culture.30

This can, of course, be attempted without the aid of analytic theology. But given its heritage, one might wonder if excluding analytic theology would make the task more difficult than it already is.

27 See Bevans, An Introduction, 185. 28 Pope John Paul II, Fides et Ratio/On the Relationship between Faith and Reason, 1st ed. (Pauline Books & Media, 1998). 29 Philip A. Egan, Philosophy and Catholic Theology: A Primer (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2009). 30 Bishop Allen Vigneron, “The New Evangelization and the Teaching of Philosophy, in David R. Foster and Joseph W. Koterski, The Two Wings of Catholic Thought: Essays on Fides et Ratio (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2003), 96.


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CONCLUSION: TO MAKE THE WORLD (A FEW LITTLE CORNERS OF IT, AT LEAST) THEOLOGICAL

Catholic author, spiritual director, and my dear friend Judy Logue often reminds me that “you can’t teach theology at a funeral.” Her meaning, of course, is that the immediate pastoral needs of people beset by tragedy, loss, or even the joy of nuptial bonds or the creation of a new life rarely involve the heady sorts of discourse found in the seminary classroom. The assumption is that we subject the seminarian to scholarly rigor so that he or she may draw on the experience to better counsel and shepherd the person in the pews. We have them rehearse Aquinas and Anselm so that doubts of God’s existence among the faithful can be disarmed; we school them in the abstract dilemmas of moral theology so that they may address tangible dilemmas in the lives of real believers; we immerse them in thoughtful theological and spiritual writers so that the flocks don’t have to trouble themselves.

But this model presupposes a separation of the ordained and the professed religious from the rest of us. It constructs class of individuals steeped in the complexities of faith who can digest it for common folks.

If there are practical consequences to what I’ve argued here, they would involve a model quite different from this – one that I believe would be more egalitarian and consistent with the aims of Vatican II. Whether we like it or not, we have, in Western “post‐industrial” societies, inherited the legacy of the Enlightenment. That legacy is at its worst (as Foucault would remind us) a potential dystopia of regimen and self‐repression, and at its best (as its proponents in the Early Modern period would tell us) a liberation from the fetters of ignorance and despotism.31 But it is a legacy we live with however we may wish to characterize it. And it is a legacy that asks us, whatever else it may do, to think and feel for ourselves, to use our own sense of reason in peaceful communion with others, to discern our place in the universe and, perhaps with the aid of divine providence, our role in the design of a Creator. This is what we in the West have grown up with, and this can be fertile ground for an approach to theology that cultivates reason and discernment in all believers – perhaps even the sort of reason and discernment that might have at one time been considered too “sophisticated” for the hoi polloi.

The philosopher and Vienna Circle co‐founder Moritz Schlick once pined for the day when there would be no more books written about philosophy, but when every book would be written philosophically. Many aims and tenets of the Vienna Circle and Logical Positivism in general have since been rightly discredited, but Schlick’s sentiment remains, I think, quite noble in a culture where scholarly excess and obscurantism maintain a class of “in‐the‐know” academics lording over students hungry for acceptance in the same societies: the aim of philosophy is ultimately to annihilate itself as a discipline – to make the world philosophical such that the “expert” is no longer required. Theological fields prone to similar indulgences in obscurantism and the intellectual hierarchy it breeds might distil something, if only this one residue, from the cauldrons of analytic philosophy.

31 We now have Charles Taylor to thank for pointing out in painstaking detail that these polar interpretations set up a false dichotomy that misunderstands the history of theistic faith, if not human ideals in general. See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2007).


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Author: Edward Tverdek is a Franciscan postulant in the Order of Friars Minor (OFM), Sacred Heart Province of the U.S. His writings cover areas from Marxist theory and political economy to environmentalism, terrorist profiling, and the privacy and other moral implications of data technology, and have appeared in publications such as Science and Society and Public Affairs Quarterly. He has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Email: [email protected]

© Edward Tverdek 2011

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