Philosophy and Theology: The Notion of the “Handmaid”
Philosophy and Theology: The Notion of the “Handmaid”
One of the most interesting aspects of Christian theology is the manner in which it has interacted with various schools of philosophy throughout the two thousand years of its existence. These schools of thought have at times been seen as allies and at times enemies of the Christian faith, as we noted when considering the interaction of Christianity with classical culture (pp. 99–103).
There is a long history within Christian theology of drawing on intellectual resources outsidethe Christian tradition as a means of developing a theological vision. This approach, usually referred to using the Latin phrase ancilla theologiae, is grounded in the basic idea that philosophical systems can be a very helpful way of stimulating theological development and of enabling a dialogue to be opened up between Christian thinkers and their cultural environment. The two most important historical examples of this approach to theology are the dialogues with Platonism and Aristotelianism.
The dialogue with Platonism was of immense importance during the first five centuries of the Christian church, especially in the Greek-speaking world of the eastern Mediterranean. As Christianity expanded in that region, it encountered rival worldviews, of which Platonism was the most important. Such worldviews could be seen positively or negatively: they were an opportunity for dialogue and intellectual development but also a threat to the existence of Christianity. The task faced by writers such as Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria (c.150–c.215) was how to make use of the obvious intellectual merits of Platonism in constructing a Christian worldview, without compromising the integrity of Christianity itself. After all, despite their occasional similarities, Christianity is not Platonism.
Figure 8.2 Plato and Aristotle as depicted by Raphael (1510–11).
Source: Vatican, Stanza della Segnatura. © 2015. Photo Scala, Florence.
A new debate opened up in the thirteenth century, during the golden age of scholastic theology. The rediscovery of Aristotle by medieval writers seemed to offer new resources to help in every aspect of intellectual life, including physics, philosophy, and ethics. It was inevitable that theologians should also want to see what use they could make of Aristotelian ideas and methods in constructing a systematic theology – such as Thomas Aquinas's (c.1225–74) massive Summa theologiae (“The Totality of Theology”), widely regarded as one of the greatest works of theology ever written.
In both these cases, using another intellectual discipline as the ancilla theologiae offers opportunities and risks in about equal measure. It is clearly important to appreciate what these opportunities and risks are. The two major opportunities offered to theology by the critical appropriation of another discipline can be summarized as follows.
Yet, alongside these positive aspects of such an engagement, an obvious risk must also be noted – that ideas which are not distinctively Christian come to play a significant (perhaps even normative) role in Christian theology. For example, Aristotelian ideas about the proper manner of logical reasoning, or Cartesian ideas about the proper starting point for any intellectual discipline, might find their way into Christian theology. On some occasions, this might turn out to be a neutral development; on others, it may eventually be recognized to have negative implications, undermining the integrity of Christian theology and ultimately causing it to be distorted. Martin Luther (1483–1546), the great German reformer, argued that medieval theology had allowed a number of such distortions to arise through an excessive, and partially uncritical, use of Aristotelian ideas in the Middle Ages.
Despite these concerns, the approach continues to be widely used. Many German theologians of the nineteenth century found G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) to be helpful dialogue partners. In the twentieth century, Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) and Paul Tillich (1886–1965) both found a dialogue with existentialism to be theologically productive. The philosophy of “dialogical personalism” opens up some helpful lines of reflection on what it means to speak of God as a “person” (pp. 177–81). More recently, some theologians – such as Thomas F. Torrance (1913–2007) and the author of this volume, Alister McGrath (born 1953) – have argued that the natural sciences are an obvious and productive dialogue partner for Christian theology, helping us to understand how human language and concepts can express the nature of reality.
In what follows, we shall consider two of the most important discussions which stand at the interface of theology and philosophy, beginning with perhaps the most famous of all: can God's existence be proved?