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God of the Philosophers

Fri, 01 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0400

In his much discussed lecture at Regensburg University on September 12, 2006, Pope Benedict underscored the crucial importance of Hellenistic philosophy in the development of early Christian theology. That engagement with philosophy is indeed of lasting importance for Christian theology. It is grounded not only in the teaching about the universal logos found in the Gospel of John, which was rightly emphasized by Benedict, but also in the thought of the apostle Paul. It is true that Paul had harsh words for the “worldly wisdom” that rejected the message of the crucified and risen Son of God. But he also affirmed that, by the exercise of clear reason, human beings know of the one God”the one God who is creator of the world and who revealed himself in Jesus Christ, as proclaimed by the apostles. (See Romans 1 and 2, and Acts 17.)

Greek philosophy was in search of the true nature of the divine, which led to the conclusion that there can be only one God. The one God of the People of Israel, however, who was also the God of Jesus and the early Christians, was viewed by the Greeks as an alien deity of an alien people and so could not command their allegiance. It was therefore necessary to make the argument that the God of Israel is, in fact, the one God conceived by the philosophers. This contention was essential to the plausibility of both Jewish and Christian witness in the Hellenic world.

For Christian theology, making this claim about the identity of the one God was not just an early instance of cultural adaptation”a cultural adaptation that could, in different times and different places, be succeeded and replaced by other forms of “inculturation.” The affirmation that the God of Israel and the God of the philosophers is the one and same God”an affirmation that entails the reception by Christian theology of the philosophical argument for the one true God”is a constitutive and permanent feature of Christian faith.

This is by no means a peculiarly Roman Catholic understanding. In his large catechism, Martin Luther says that God the Father, as proclaimed by Jesus, is the only true God “because nobody else could create heaven and earth.” In this he is entirely in accord with early Christian thinkers and their use of philosophical theology. To be sure, Luther was sharply critical of what he viewed as the dominance of Aristotle in Scholastic theology, but he did not reject the entire tradition of Christianity’s incorporation of Greek philosophy. He did not, for instance, reject Platonism, which, we do well to remember, had been the primary influence in Christian theology until the thirteenth century and again since the Renaissance. Luther was not alone in questioning whether the Aristotelian metaphysics mediated through Muslim commentators such as Averroës could be reconciled with a Christian understanding of God the creator. That question was much disputed prior to Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas and would be disputed again after the death of Thomas in 1274.

Recall, too, that the earlier Augustinian tradition of Scholastic theology was no less committed to a positive engagement with philosophical reasoning than was the Aristotelian. Moreover, in later Protestant theology, largely due to the influence of Philip Melanchthon, Luther’s closest collaborator, the use of Aristotelian metaphysics was restored and had an important place until the early eighteenth century. Nor did the rise of modern philosophy lead to the abandonment of the synthesis of philosophical and theological thought, at least not in all cases. Schelling and Hegel, for instance, were notable advocates of the substantial unity of faith and reason.

The call for the “dehellenizing” of Christian theology, which Pope Benedict so sharply criticizes, arose in Protestant theology toward the end of the nineteenth century as part of a broader campaign against “metaphysics.” Metaphysics was depicted as philosophical baggage from the past that must now give way to “positive science.” It was with Albrecht Ritschl (1822-1889) and his school that the cause of dehellenizing Christianity appeared, and it was later given powerful support by the historian Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930).

Viewed in perspective, however, the program of dehellenizing Christian thought was not a lasting movement in modern Protestant theology. Aristotle may not have fared well, but the Platonic-Augustinian tradition remains strong. As for the larger question of the relationship between faith and reason, the philosophical and theological connections were hardly abandoned after the impact of Cartesianism. One thinks, for instance, of British empiricism in the line of John Locke, of German idealism in its several expressions, of American projects aimed at the development of an evolutionary theology, of the experimentalism of William James, and of the school of process theology associated with the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead.

As for metaphysics itself, the claim that it has been rejected by modern thought has come in for increasing criticism. When did the supposed end of metaphysics occur? Auguste Comte (1798-1857), who coined the term sociology, confidently declared that metaphysics died with the rise of natural science. Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), on the other hand, contended that the modern sense of history killed metaphysics. An awareness of historical contingencies and the relativity of our own ways of reasoning, he and others claimed, precluded metaphysical claims to absolute and definitive truth. What most attacks on metaphysics had in common was the rejection of rational theology.

Closer to our own time, Martin Heidegger also proclaimed the death of metaphysics, arguing that it happened not with the rise of modern science, nor with the appearance of modern historical consciousness, but with his own critique of the equation of the act of being with the existence of beings. In the entire course of philosophical history, according to Heidegger, being itself, the very act of being, was mistaken for, or attributed to, a particular being, most notably the highest being. With Heidegger, this error has been corrected. Even Friedrich Nietzsche, in this view, had to be seen as a metaphysical thinker. True, he was an atheist, but he still believed in a highest being, namely, the will to power. The difficulty”the irony, if you will”in Heidegger’s position is that in the Aristotelian tradition it was precisely being as such , not the highest being, that was the proper subject of metaphysics. In fact, Heidegger excluded philosophical theology but not metaphysics. Nothing could be more metaphysical than Heidegger’s doctrine of being.

Oddly enough, it may well turn out that it is not philosophical theology but the idea of being as such that is obsolete. The idea of being as such would seem to require that general concepts be interpreted as realities rather than as creations of the human mind in the process of ordering the content of experience. In the Aristotelian tradition, the concept of being is simply the most general of general concepts. Since William of Ockham in the fourteenth century and the subsequent rise of modern empiricist philosophy, universal concepts are no longer taken to be realities. As Immanuel Kant argued in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), the original function of the word being is to be found in our judgments about whether something is or is not . It was in the hypostasizing of being that can be traced from Parmenides through Plato that being was thought of as true or absolute being.

In modern philosophical theology after Descartes and especially after Kant, the concept of being lost the fundamental importance it had in medieval philosophy. The traditional philosophical “demonstrations” of the existence of God as first cause of the universe and therefore as first being were replaced over time by the idea of God as the presupposition of human subjectivity and of its intellectual and ethical functions. The idea of God as first cause of the universe was not abandoned, but it was approached by another line of argument. In Hegel’s rehabilitation of the traditional demonstrations of God’s existence, in response to Kant’s powerful critique, the arguments were recast in terms of the rise of the human mind beyond finite reality to the idea of the infinite.

In this understanding, the idea of the infinite is the prior condition for perceiving the finite. Finite beings are conceived”as Descartes had already argued in Meditations (1641)”by being delimited by the infinite, which therefore is prior to anything finite, including even the human subject itself. Rising beyond the finite to the idea of the infinite belongs to the very nature of the human intellect. This, it was said, is evident historically in the fact of religion and is expressed theoretically in the rational arguments for the existence of God.

Friedrich Schleiermacher’s speeches of 1799 developed this line of argument with respect to the fact of religion. Religion expresses the human sense of the infinite as the prior condition for conceiving anything finite. In Hegel, too, the idea of the infinite replaces the concept of being or of the highest being as that concept functioned in medieval philosophical theology. This new approach to philosophical theology, however, did not abandon the conception of God as first cause of the universe, the creator of everything. What was changed was the way of reaching that conception.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, philosophical theology fell on hard times. The intellectual climate turned against the metaphysical and, as noted, Protestant theologians turned to the task of dehellenizing Christian thought. Karl Barth’s great Nein! to natural theology and its replacement by a neo-orthodox theology of revelation alone was of enormous influence. Nor can we underestimate the role of Rudolf Bultmann and his program of demythologizing aimed at purging Christian theology of what he viewed as its philosophical accretions.

Meanwhile, after the battle against modernism initiated by Pius X, Neoscholasticism dominated Roman Catholic theology until the Second Vatican Council. Only a few Catholic theologians, Karl Rahner being notable among them, appropriated the approach of modern philosophical theology in conceiving God from the perspective of human subjectivity. Among Protestants, William Temple in Britain and, most influentially, Paul Tillich, at first in Germany and later in America, developed philosophical theology as a clear alternative to Barth. Employing the modern approach of human subjectivity, Tillich proposed the idea of God as being itself ”not a being, not even the supreme being, but being itself. In this, Tillich’s proposal was similar to that of Heidegger’s.

At the same time, other American thinkers engaged philosophical theology on the basis of Whitehead’s process philosophy. While the school of process theology is still with us, it has never been able to overcome the difficulty that, in Whitehead’s thought, God is only one factor among others in explaining the real world of human experience. It is far from clear how this God can be the biblical creator of heaven and earth. Which, one must add, is not to deny that process philosophy has been helpful in the dialogue between religion and science and in exploring the relationship between faith and reason.

As in the apostolic era and through the centuries, the crucial issue is how to conceive of the one God, creator of all that is. For philosophical theology, different cultural situations require different arguments. Today, for instance, we must address the arguments of modern atheism. Moreover, it is necessary to show how God can be conceived of as the creator of the universe as that universe is described by natural science. This does not necessarily mean that the existence of a creator can be demonstrated by means of natural science, as was thought in medieval and early modern philosophy. Rational argument in philosophy is different from rational argument in science. But a philosophical or theological conception of God as creator must be compatible with the universe as described by science.

We do well to remember that the biblical account of creation employed the natural science of that time, most notably Babylonian cosmology. So also will a contemporary account of creation employ contemporary science, including modern cosmology and theories about the evolution of life. Employing such resources today is in continuity with the methods employed by the writers of the Genesis accounts of creation.

There is yet another factor that is crucially important in this consideration of philosophical theology. Theology that is distinctively Christian will attribute the creation to the trinitarian God”Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In Christian theology, there is no room for a pre-trinitarian monotheism of the one God. In our time of intense interreligious discussion, Christians cannot compromise the truth that the trinitarian conception of God is not simply a Christian addition to a monotheism that we otherwise share with others. The Christian insistence is that God as such is to be understood as a differentiated unity. An un differentiated unity means unity opposed to the many. Unity that is opposed to the many presupposes and therefore is conditioned by that opposition. Precisely because that is a conditioned unity, it cannot be the absolute unity that is before and above the many. Only the triune God, as differentiated unity, is absolutely and unconditionally the one God. It follows that true monotheism is trinitarian.

In the teaching of Jesus, the name of the one God is Father. This is no mere metaphor but the name of God. As Athanasius insisted, God as Father cannot be conceived apart from a Son. Thus the Son is the eternal correlate of God the Father and is identical with the Logos (Word) of God by which all things were created, both Father and Son being united in eternal communion with the Spirit. This trinitarian understanding of the one God is one of the most important developments of Christian theology in the past century, with both Karl Barth and Karl Rahner playing a leading role in underscoring its importance. It has contributed immeasurably to our understanding of what it means to say that trinitarian faith is monotheistic.

Also important is the deeper appreciation of the roots of this understanding in the Old Testament.

The Hebrew Bible speaks of the one God as Father; and the king, the successor of David, is called his son (Ps. 2:7, 2 Sam. 7:14). The entire people of Israel is also called his son (Hosea 11:1). So the idea of the “son of God” does not occur first with Jesus, although the New Testament understands Jesus to be the definitive manifestation of the eternal Word, the incarnate Son of the Father. Moreover, it is promised that those who believe are incorporated into the Son’s relationship with the Father. The nature of this relationship is manifested in the Son’s obedience to the Father in fulfilling the mission received from the Father, which mission the Father confirmed by raising Jesus from the dead (Rom. 1:4).

This trinitarian understanding of God is crucial to what Christians claim about the unity of faith and reason. Without compromising the transcendence of God, it enables Christians to affirm the presence of the one God in his creation and in the history of his creation. This view allows for, and even requires, a historical interpretation of the biblical texts. They are understood as expressing the mind of the human authors while, at the same time, respecting the Bible’s divine authority as inspired testimony to the action and word of God. The human nature of the biblical writings makes room for the possibility of their including legendary materials, a possibility that is suggested by literary criteria.

At the same time, reported events are not to be declared legendary simply because they are unusual. Reports of the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead, to cite a crucial instance, are not legendary in character. There is absolutely no textual evidence to suggest that they are legendary. If the belief in God as creator and lord of history is not excluded, there is no reason for the exegete not to understand the biblical accounts of the Resurrection to be reporting an actual event in human history. Here again, faith and reason are not in conflict.

The real conflict in our day is over the nature of reason. A secularist concept of rationality that is widely accepted today simply precludes the possibility of a historical event such as the Resurrection of Jesus, just as it precludes the reality of a creator God and his presence and actions in the world of his creation. But this is not, first of all, a disagreement about the truth of such claims. Rather, it is a disagreement about the nature of reason. While there is no conflict in principle between reason and faith, Christian faith is in conflict with a truncated concept of reason that is itself not warranted by reason. Christian intellectuals need to more accurately locate the point of conflict with contemporary deformations of rationality, and more effectively contend for preserving and advancing a history of thought marked by greater confidence in the capacities and imperatives of reason itself.

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Letter from Germany

Sat, 01 Mar 2003 00:00:00 -0500

There is no denying that German“U.S. relations were ruffled, if not rocked, by last September’s election. During the summer, polls indicated that the Social Democratic Party and its leader, Gerhard Schröder, would lose because of popular anxiety about the economy, especially unemployment. Four years earlier, when Schröder was first elected chancellor, he declared that he would be unworthy of reelection if the number of unemployed, then four million, was not dramatically reduced. Last summer, however, the figure had risen to almost ten percent of the work force. Schröder was saved by the disastrous flooding of the Elbe River. He was very visibly everywhere, comforting victims and promising all kinds of government assistance. It was a compassionate and caring role that only the chancellor could play, putting his Christian Democrat challenger at a distinct disadvantage. Schröder appeared as the man in charge, and his polling numbers rose accordingly. The public had always been more receptive to his personal charms than to his party, and Schröder played his part to the hilt.

Then, just before the election, Schröder seized on the issue of Iraq. Since World War II, and for understandable reasons, Germans have been frightened by the prospect of involvement in another war, any war. They were most particularly frightened by the idea of a preventive or “preemptive” war, the kind of warfare Germany had practiced in the last century with catastrophic consequences. Schröder played skillfully on this anxiety, declaring that under his leadership Germany would have no part of what was depicted as reckless U.S. belligerence toward Iraq. Many Germans viewed his position as the mark of strong and trustworthy leadership, while others thought it irresponsible and self“serving. His Christian Democrat opponent was hardly more eager to go for war but addressed the question in more balanced terms, accusing Schröder of jeopardizing relations with America, a crucial and long“standing ally.

Yet the more nuanced language of Edmund Stoiber gave the impression that he was irresolute and wavering. While Schröder’s talk about a “German way” of doing things alarmed foreign observers, it went down well with most Germans. It seems unlikely that Schröder intended to mobilize anti“American sentiment among Germans, for, in fact, such sentiment is relatively weak. The academic and media left notwithstanding, there are few nations in the world less anti“American than Germany. Schröder’s purpose was to project an image of strong and decisive leadership, and in that he succeeded.

Keep in mind that Germany is securely integrated into, and is one of the most fervent advocates of, the European Union. Germans are keenly aware that German nationalism has been tried and found disastrously wanting. There is no doubt that Germany has benefited economically from the EU, even if there is unhappiness about its having to bear a disproportionate financial burden in support of EU structures. Germany strongly backs the inclusion of Central and Eastern European countries in the EU, and cherishes the particular hope that within a few years relations between Germany and Poland will be as uncomplicated and amicable as its present relations with France, which was for centuries the “archenemy.”

The present economic weakness of the country is a new experience after decades of prosperity, which helps explain why it played such a large part in the 2002 election campaign. Germany is accustomed to thinking of itself as the motor force of European recovery, not the laggard that it has become. The main problem, in the view of most observers, is the overregulation of the labor market with its excessive protection of workers that makes it prohibitively expensive to create new jobs. Wages and social security entitlements are among the highest in the world, and powerful unions, integrated across the lines of various industries, pose a formidable obstacle to change.

Of course, the economic problems are related as well to the worldwide recession, and a general recovery would no doubt significantly improve the situation. There is another factor, however: the long“term economic burden resulting from the reunification of Germany in 1989. The magnitude of this burden was at first greatly underestimated. The total breakdown of the socialist economies of Eastern Europe, on which East Germany was almost entirely dependent, occurred with startling rapidity. More than a decade later, and despite the equivalent of hundreds of billions of dollars from the former West Germany, the East is far from achieving the levels of employment and affluence to which West Germans have long been accustomed.

Economics, however, is not the most important burden resulting from the reunification of Germany. Forty years of Communist rule devastated the East culturally. This is true in education and also”more than in other Communist“dominated countries”in religion. In the former heartland of the Lutheran Reformation, Protestant Christianity is now a small minority. While dechristianization is massively evident in the East, the situation is not all that different in Western Germany. Since the 1960s, both Protestant and Catholic churches have been steadily declining in membership and influence. This is in sharp contrast to the first two decades after the war, when Germany was eager to reclaim its place in Western culture and to distance itself from the ruins of Nazism. Cultural reclamation included affirming Germany’s specifically Christian heritage, which was helped by the fact that the churches had been less morally compromised than other institutions during the Third Reich. In the years immediately after the war, there was a strong sense of Christian renewal.

But that changed abruptly toward the end of the sixties, when the American“inspired protest against the Vietnam War swept Europe and produced the student revolution. Especially in France and Germany, that movement was powerfully influenced by neo“Marxist ideas, and in Germany by the “Frankfurt school””led by such as Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Jürgen Habermas”which largely framed the public debate. The German student movement really was a cultural revolution directed against all forms of “repressive” authority”primarily the educational system, but also moral values rooted in Christianity, and emphatically the “authoritarian” family structure. The cultural revolution, including a new wave of sexual “liberation,” was at first seen as a youthful phenomenon that would soon pass, but its deep and lasting consequences are now obvious. The traditional system of higher education has been dramatically changed in most of the country. The classics, including the classical languages, survive only at the margins; the leading figures of the student revolution, now in their sixties, are predominant in the media, the universities, and the courts.

The traditional understanding of the family has taken severe hits. Article 6 of the Constitution provided very particular protections for marriage and family life, but last year the highest court declined to overrule new legislation that gives equal status to alternative forms of living together. Government“funded day care is explicitly promoted as a way of ending the family’s “supremacy over children’s beds.” The language of “cultural revolution” is employed not only by the critics of these changes but also by the proponents. They leave no doubt that cultural revolution is exactly what they have in mind.

Whether they will succeed is another matter. While many marriages end in divorce, and many people live together and have children without benefit of civil or ecclesial rites, the ideal held by young people is still that of a lifelong union of man and woman within the institution of marriage. The churches have a deep stake in supporting that ideal, which is grounded in Christian understandings and practices that have no real parallel in other cultures. The sociologist Helmut Schelsky predicted decades ago that”despite social convulsions and the high incidence of divorce”most people would still be attracted to the model of marriage as the lifelong union of man and woman, seeing it as the most likely route to personal fulfillment. In this, he seems to have been vindicated. After the secularization of the state, the institution of marriage and family holds the most secure promise for the religious socialization of future generations. Not for nothing do those who are most determined to effect a complete break between society and religion focus on undermining the legal and social status of marriage and family.

Despite that campaign, young people evidence a renewed appreciation of marriage and family. A greater challenge may be posed by demographic developments. There are fewer and fewer young people. In Germany, as in Western Europe generally and in Italy most particularly, people are not having babies. These countries would be on a trajectory of decreasing population were it not for immigrants from Muslim countries. There are no doubt many reasons why the original German population is not reproducing, including the secular individualism nurtured by affluent societies and the attitudes and practices associated with what John Paul II calls “the culture of death.” Having children is no longer considered a duty owed the future but is viewed as one of many possibilities to be taken into account in calculating personal satisfaction and securing one’s preferred way of life. To that end, contraception is assumed, with abortion as a backstop. Since the liberalizing of the law, there are in Germany more than 300,000 abortions per year.

The other side of the declining number of children and young people is, of course, the increasing number of old people. The decrease in population, some contend, could be compensated for by increased immigration. This assumes that immigrants will be fully integrated into German and European culture, which assumes, in turn, that we have a clear and confident sense of cultural identity. It is no secret, however, that over recent decades a large number of immigrants came not in order to be part of German society nor even to find work but to benefit from our social security and health services. Their self“interest is perfectly understandable. Many are not interested in learning the German language, and those from Muslim countries tend to live in ghetto“like quarters of the cities. At present, there are about three million Muslim immigrants in Germany, mainly from Turkey, while in France and Italy the Muslim immigrants come chiefly from North Africa. Moreover, since Islam entails also a different system of law, there are difficulties in accepting the secular order of law based on the German Constitution, especially since many Muslims are taught in the mosques that Islamic law is superior.

Public expressions of concern about Muslim immigration are often dismissed as evidence of a “right“wing” phobia, and the concern can no doubt be exploited by extremists. But among thoughtful Germans and Europeans more generally there is a deep and haunting, although often unspoken, anxiety that increased Muslim immigration, combined with the higher birth rates of immigrants, is working fundamental changes in our societies. It is foreseeable in the not too distant future, for instance, that in some of our larger cities Muslims will no longer be a tolerated minority but a majority, and will make political claims consonant with their majority status. It is in this connection that one must understand the nervousness of German and other European leaders when it comes to granting Turkey full membership in the EU. With full membership comes the right to work and live in any of the member states, and the prospect of even more massive Muslim immigration. Both Europe and America have economic, political, and security reasons for cultivating close cooperation with Turkey, but it would seem that full membership in the EU is unlikely in the near future. In addition to the worries about immigration, there is the problem of Cyprus and, more important, the need to bring Turkey’s economic and legal system into line with European standards, including respect for human rights and, most particularly, for religious freedom, as witness the treatment of the dwindling Greek Orthodox community in that country.

The great challenge for Germany and Europe is the recovery of a culture rooted in Christianity. Without that, it is fair to say, there is no future for a united Europe. John Paul II made this point with marvelous clarity in his address to the Italian parliament last November. For the flourishing of an EU that is both European and a real union, economics is not enough. Yet, despite the urgings of the Pope and the demands of many Christian politicians, there seems to be little chance at this point that the EU Constitution will make explicit reference to God or the continent’s Christian heritage. The preamble of the German Constitution of 1949 contains such a reference, although it is doubtful that even the Germans would support that today. But the strongest opposition to such a reference in the European Constitution comes, not surprisingly, from the French, who are attached to that country’s still powerful laicist tradition.

Neutrality toward religion does not have the same meaning in some European countries, and increasingly in Germany, that it has in the U.S. It does not mean that the state should not favor one church or religious association over another, but that the state should not recognize the religious dimension of culture at all. The unembarrassed way in which American Presidents and other political leaders refer to God and invoke the religious dimensions of culture is hardly imaginable in Germany or France. The public silence about religion reinforces popular ignorance or indifference with respect to Europe’s cultural origins and their continuing importance.

It must be admitted that the churches themselves bear a large responsibility for this unhappy circumstance. Church leaders and Christian thinkers are still captive to the idea that Christianity must be made relevant by adapting its message to the assumptions and sensibilities of a secular culture. One might argue that almost the opposite is required. An unabashed proclamation of the cross and resurrection, of hope for eternal life, and of divine judgment might again make Christianity interesting, challenging, and something of a redemptive scandal. Christian preachers and writers might even find the nerve to speak of something so outré as obedience to moral truth. That Christianity proposes a different way of living, a different understanding of freedom and fulfillment, was in the early church one of its chief attractions. That could happen again, if Christian leaders have the nerve, the intelligence, and the faith for it. The alternative is more of the same: the false freedom of undirected choice, the futile efforts to satisfy insatiable appetites, the blunting of the human capacity for truth and transcendence. The alternative, in short, is the culture of death. And with that, the continuing perception that Christianity is simply irrelevant.

There is, I believe, no danger of an anti“American insurgency in Germany. More pressing problems have to do with economic stagnation and the still uncompleted tasks of reunification with the East. Those problems are generally recognized. More controversial is the discussion of the continuing march of the cultural revolution through German institutions, including marriage and the family, and the ominous implications of demographic decline combined with massive Muslim immigration. What does it mean to be German? What does it mean to be European? All the countries of the EU, including those now being admitted to membership, are being forced to ask the hard questions of cultural identity.

Whatever its economic benefits, the EU is presumably more than an economic union. Whether the EU is to be formed above cultural identities, or through cultural identities, or somehow around cultural identities, what Germany and the other member nations bring to the EU are cultural identities inseparable from their Christian origins and continuing influence. At present, that influence appears to be in decline, and some are clearly betting that it will, in time, disappear altogether. If they get their way, we face the possibility of an EU divorced from what is culturally identifiable as Europe. Many Europeans, including many Germans, are deeply and, I believe, rightly worried about that prospect.

Wolfhart Pannenberg is Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Munich and founding director of the Institute of Ecumenical Theology.

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Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries

Thu, 01 Aug 2002 00:00:00 -0400

While his professional work is primarily in elementary particle physics, Steven Weinberg became widely known to the general public with the publication of a book on cosmology, The First Three Minutes (1977), which presented a lucid and fascinating story of the early development of the universe with style and elegance. His new book, Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries , which consists of a collection of twenty-three equally well-written essays, documents the personal commitment of the author to promoting and defending his scientific views. Weinberg captures the interest of his readers by combining balanced judgments and modest claims about current scientific theory with a passionate defense of reductionism.

While Weinberg defends reductionism, he is careful to distinguish it both from what he calls “positivism,” which he understands to be a narrow empiricism, and from “petty reductionism,” which seeks to reduce everything to elementary particles. The reductionism Weinberg advocates is the program of reductive explanation of physical phenomena by recourse to ever more fundamental and simple laws that are supposed to account for the unity of the universe. He shows that this was already Newton’s vision and continued to be the driving force behind the great theories of the last century, those of General Relativity and the standard quantum field theory. Going further, he predicts that such reductionism will one day produce a “final” theory that can account for the unity of the universe.

Up to this point, Weinberg’s defense of reductionism makes considerable sense. Yet the question remains as to whether explanation by laws provides the only or the ultimate explanation for the unity of the universe. The concept of law involves abstraction from particularities, but those particularities have to be taken into consideration when those laws are applied to the course of natural events. With regard to the history of the universe, Weinberg himself speaks of “historical contingencies” in the history of the solar system and in the development of life. He also acknowledges the idea of an “emergence” of forms of higher organization from increasingly complicated systems. But doesn’t that suggest that the unity of the universe is finally a unity of history, which is different from the generality of laws? And history is always a sequence of contingent events, regardless of the laws that may prevail within the flow of those events. Perhaps, then, the modesty of the scientist might properly be applied to his larger project of subsuming the universe as a whole under a universal concept of law. Such a modest approach might have to give up the quest for the ultimate and most comprehensive description of the nature of the universe. But it would make room for some additional, philosophical reflection on the reality of nature.

One of the most important contributions of Weinberg’s book is his ongoing argument against the “social constructionists” who question the truth claims of science. This is an issue of very general importance, far beyond the philosophy of science. With every assertive sentence, we raise truth claims that cannot be reduced to social conventions. Science is only a particularly obvious case. Weinberg acknowledges the influence of social and cultural conditions in the history of science. But these influences do not weaken the truth claims of scientific theories. The same is true of any other truth claims we raise in everyday life or in other fields of culture. The “realism” of science, which Weinberg advocates, might serve as an example and antidote against the excesses of postmodernism.

The “cultural adversaries” of science to whom Weinberg refers in his title are those social constructionists who tend to relativize the truth claims of scientific theories. But even worse than these academic theorists would be an alliance between the “antiscientific intelligentsia inside the universities” and “the enormous force of religious belief.” Here, apparently, he has in mind the religious fundamentalism of the creationists. But could such an alliance pose a real threat to the cultural acceptance of science? Is not science pampered by the political establishment in Western societies like no other intellectual discipline? Among the general public, scientists are highly regarded, and most religious people share in that positive appreciation of science, since they do not believe that science and religion are opposed to one another.

While in the course of modern history there have been occasions when science has opposed religious teaching as well as other traditional ways of looking at the world, the most creative scientists have far more often been motivated by religious inspiration. Moreover, Christian theologians and churchmen have frequently and gratefully received the new perspectives offered by scientific discoveries. This is true even in the case of Darwinism, which was one of a number of evolutionary theories proposed in the nineteenth century, many of which arose from religious reflection. At the present moment, when the number of institutions that seek to foster dialogue between religion and science continues to grow, most religious people view science as a positive pursuit that at the deepest level harmonizes with their faith.

In fact, such a positive attitude is arguably easier to maintain at the present moment than it was in earlier centuries, since Big Bang cosmology removes the apparent contradiction between the biblical doctrine of creation and the belief in a temporal and spatial infinity of the world that had been taken for granted during two centuries of scientific exploration. Of course, the assumption of an origin of the universe at some finite point in the past does not “prove” the biblical doctrine of creation, but it is “consonant” with it, to invoke the useful term of Ernan McMullin.

The same applies to the idea of God as creator. Weinberg takes a skeptical position on this matter, and some of his arguments are not without plausibility. He dealt with this issue more extensively in his earlier book Dreams of a Final Theory ý(1993), in which he devoted an entire chapter to “the question of God.” Even a Christian theologian can share Weinberg’s reservations concerning the stronger versions of the anthropic principle and the related idea of a “designer God.” The idea of a designer sounds rather anthropomorphic, and it is often presented in forms that are hardly consonant with God’s infinity and eternity. In the Bible, the contingency of finite reality, of each event and even of the world as a whole, including the element of order within it, is far more important in expressing its dependence upon God the creator.

Weinberg has little to say on this issue, which is decisive for those who maintain the rationality of belief in a creator God. The element of design enters the picture only as an implication that follows from the act of creation and God’s ongoing relation to the universe as a whole—a whole within which every part has its proper place. Of course, such a view culminates in the problems of theodicy, and here the Christian has to join Weinberg in affirming that all of our knowledge is approximation, even our theology. Not until the eschatological consummation of history will we know even as we are known by God (1 Corinthians 13:12).

Wolfhart Pannenberg is Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology at the University of Munich and founding director of the Institute of Ecumenical Theology.

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Systematic Theology: Volumes I & II

Mon, 01 May 2000 00:00:00 -0400

It is remarkable, at least to a foreign observer of the American theological scene, that a theologian of the stature of Robert W. Jenson has not been accorded a place at the center of the American academic establishment. Since the 1960s, his books on the concept of God, on eschatological theology, on the Trinity, and on ecumenism have established him as one of the most original and knowledgeable theologians of our time. Jenson is a distinctively American voice in the worldwide endeavor to retrieve and reformulate a trinitarian theology. In pursuing this vision he started, as others did, from Karl Rahner’s rule that the “immanent” and the “economic” Trinity”the eternal God and His activity in the history of salvation”are one. This led him to a “futurist option” for theology by conceiving of the kingdom of God and the Holy Spirit in terms of the future of God Himself.

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When Everything is Permitted

Sun, 01 Feb 1998 00:00:00 -0500

It is a striking oddity of our modern circumstance that the subject of morality and ethics is assumed to be a matter of public significance, while the subject of God is thought to be an esoteric matter of interest to theologians and “people who go in for that sort of thing.” It was not always so, and it is very much worth asking how we arrived at this present circumstance, and what might be done about it.

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The Pope in Germany

Sun, 01 Dec 1996 00:00:00 -0500

This was the third pastoral visit of John Paul II to Germany. When he first came in 1980, the ecumenical question moved to a place of prominence, and continues there today. A little background may be helpful. In 1980 the Pope met at Mainz with a number of Protestant bishops”including the leading bishop of the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland (EKD), Eduard Lohse”who pressed him on the urgency of alleviating ecumenical tensions in the land where the Reformation began and where the population is now almost evenly divided between Protestants and Catholics. Lohse specifically urged ecumenical worship on Sundays, shared pastoral care for people in confessionally mixed marriages, and joint hospitality at the eucharist. Because of the number of people involved in mixed marriages, the second issue was then and is now particularly important.

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How to Think About Secularism

Sat, 01 Jun 1996 00:00:00 -0400

Whatever is meant by secularization, few will dispute that in this century the public culture has become less religious. This is not, as some suggest, simply the result of the separation of church and state that first happened some two centuries earlier. Such separation did not then entail the alienation of culture from its religious roots. In America, for instance, the end of state-established religion did not mean the end of the predominantly Christian and Protestant character of American culture. In other Western societies, the linkage between the state and one or another Christian church continued to be effective well into this century. Yet in these societies, too, we see evidence of secularization, typically much further advanced than in the United States. Secularization is not caused by the separation of church and state. The roots of the process of secularization, resulting in the present alienation of public culture from religion, and especially from Christianity, are planted in the seventeenth century.

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Christianity and the West

Thu, 01 Dec 1994 00:00:00 -0500

The importance of Christianity in the formation of Western civilization can hardly be denied. That importance is not simply a matter of the past. In the process of secularization Western culture did emancipate itself from its religious roots, but that emancipation was by no means complete. A complete break from Christianity was not intended in the seventeenth century by those who wanted to put the public culture on an anthropological rather than religious foundation. The issue at that time was not a revolt against the Christian religion, nor even against its influence on the culture. Rather, there was an urgently felt need to get beyond the confessional antagonisms and religious warfare that had disrupted the peace of Europe for more than a century. The turn away from Christianity as the basis of public culture was not, at least in the first instance, caused by alienation from the Christian religion, although that turn may have produced alienation in the long run. Beginning with the eighteenth century, however, the humanistic values associated with modernity were viewed as being completely independent from the Christian religion, and even antithetical to it. In our century the circumstance is again different. Today, familiarity with Christian teaching has faded; biblical narratives and the vocabulary of Christian faith are no longer common cultural currency.

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The Present and Future Church

Fri, 01 Nov 1991 00:00:00 -0500

At the dawning of this century, Christians in Europe and North America harbored great expectations. Many leaders confidently looked forward to completing a mission that was nothing less than the Christianization of the world. For us at the end of the century it is easy, it is all too easy, to dismiss such expectations as “triumphalism.” Those who succumb to that temptation often seem to be dismissing the Christian missionary mandate itself. Was, for example, the Apostle Paul guilty of triumphalism?

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The Christian West?

Thu, 01 Nov 1990 00:00:00 -0500

Richard John Neuhaus:

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