From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Christian philosophy is a term to describe the
fusion of various fields of philosophy with the theological doctrines of Christianity.
Reconciling
Christianity with philosophy
As with any fusion of religion and philosophy, the attempt to reconcile
Christianity with certain philosophies is difficult. Classical
philosophers start with no preconditions for which conclusions they
must reach in their investigation. Classical religious believers
have a set of religious principles of faith that they hold one must
believe. Because of these divergent goals and views, some hold that
one cannot simultaneously be a philosopher and a true adherent of a
revealed religion. In
this view, all attempts at synthesis ultimately fail.
Others hold that a synthesis between the two is possible. One
way to find a synthesis is to use philosophical arguments to prove
that one's preset religious principles are true. This is known as
apologetics and is a
common technique found in the writings of many religious
traditions, including Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Another way
to find a synthesis is to abstain from holding as true any
religious principles of one's faith at all, unless one
independently comes to those conclusions from a philosophical
analysis. However, this is not generally accepted as being faithful
to one's religion by adherents of that religion. A third, rarer and
more difficult path is to apply analytical philosophy to one's own
religion; In this case a religious person would also be a
philosopher.
The above outlines how some Christian philosophies conceive
their task. Others do not conceive the task of Christian philosophy
in this way. For instance, some think that proving the existence of
God is a meaningless endeavor since God's existence is not put in
question by Christian faith, but assumed. A Christian philosophy
which does not seek to prove the existence of God, but assumes it
as an ultimate out of which it forms its specific logic and
interest, is more apt to address a far different set of tasks in
order to reflect on the God-provided creation structures of
existence in their diachronic processes of change over time. For
such Christian philosophies, most of the questions above belong
instead to theology (if legitimate at all), whether the subdivision
of theology involved is philosophical theology or apologetics. Neither of
these are disciplines of philosophy proper, even though they may
borrow methods from outside theology as such. Those Christian
philosophies that prioritize creaturely existence with its
God-lawed modalities and societal spheres for daily life, do not
accept the idea of separate fields "religion" vs "philosophy" that
then must be "reconciled." On this alternative view of the
Christian philosophical task, philosophy is just one activity among
many in a differentiated society, an activity that is entirely
appropriate to creaturely human existence, and it may be pursued
directly out of the depth of the Christian religion without the
mediation of some extraneous reference. All religions, including
the atheisms, have ultimate values and therefore a religious
depth-dimension of their own. The problem of philosophy arises for
them as something other than a task given by God in Christ to
humanity, and so theirs is the problem of reconciling their
activity as a deontological imperative insofar as they deny that
philosophy is inherent in the creational ensemble as one
task-activity among the many given by God.
Interaction
between Christian and non-Christian philosophers
There has been considerable interaction between Christian
philosophy, Jewish philosophy and Islamic
philosophy. Many Christian philosophers are well read in the
works of their Jewish and Islamic counterparts, and arguments
developed in one faith often make their way into the arguments of
another faith. For example, Christian philosopher William Lane
Craig is a popular proponent of the Islamic Kalam cosmological argument
for the existence of God.
Some modern day Islamic philosophers explore issues in common
with modern Catholic philosophers. Reformational philosophy
dialogues across acknowledged differences with many other
approaches to philosophizing—with Christian synthetist views of
many kinds, also with some Jewish schools of philosophical thought,
as well as some secular philosophies such as Neo-Marxism along with
other atheist philosophical schools; whereas the dialogue with
Islamic philosophies is just beginning.
It's important to note there is not one single philosophy
embraced by all philosophers in any of the great religious
traditions, not all are dialogical, and atheist-humanist schools
are as much in conflict among themselves as are Christian and other
self-acknowledged religious schools of philosophizing.
Origins of Christian
philosophy
In the case of Reformational philosophy the
law-idea of Creation in relation to Fall and Redemption clarifies
the understanding of the exceptional role of Jesus the Christ in
Creation through the law-modalities that set the conditions of
existence for all creatures. There is no record of any writing by
Jesus, nor of any systematic philosophy or theology in the formal
sense. Several accounts of his life and many of his teachings are
recorded in the New
Testament, and form the basis for some Christian
philosophies.
- St. Paul:
Saul of Tarsus was a Jew who persecuted the early Christian church
and who helped to facilitate the martyrdom of St Stephen, a
Greek-speaking Jewish-Christian. Saul underwent a dramatic
conversion. He became a Christian leader who wrote a number of epistles, or letters, to early
churches, in which he taught doctrine and theology. In some ways he
functioned in the manner of the popular marketplace philosophers of
his day (Cynics, Skeptics, and some Stoics). A number of his
speeches and debates with Greek philosophers are recorded in the
Biblical book of Acts. His letters became a significant source for
later Christian philosophies. See also Paul of Tarsus and
Judaism.
Hellenistic Christian
philosophers
Hellenism is the
traditional designation for the Greek culture of the Roman Empire
in the days of Jesus, Paul, and for centuries after. Classical
philosophies of the Greeks had already expired and diluted beyond
recognition except for small bands of continuators of the
traditions of the Pythagoreans, of Plato, and Aristotle (whose
library was lost for centuries). The new philosophies of the
Hellenistic world were those of the Cynics, Skeptics, and
increasingly the Stoics; it's these thinkers and ranters who bring
us into the world of Hellenistic philosophy. Slowly, a more
integral and rounded tendency emerged within Hellenism, but also in
certain respects in opposition at times to it in regard to one
philosophical problem or another, or an ensemble of problems. Here
are some of those thinkers most closely associated with Hellenistic
Christian philosophies, listed more or less in chronological
order:
- Tertullian:
Tertullian was a philosopher before he converted to Christ; after
that change of direction he remained a prolific writer in the
second century A.D., and is commonly called the "Father of the
Western Church." He developed the doctrine of traducianism, or the
idea that the soul was inherited from the parents, the idea that
God had corporeal (although not fleshly) existence, and the
doctrine of the authority of the gospels. He fought voraciously
against Marcionism,
and considered Greek philosophy to be incompatible with Christian
wisdom. Toward the end of his life, he joined the heterodox sect of
Montanism, and thus has
not been canonized by the Catholic Church.
- Irenaeus of Lyons: Irenaeus is best known
for his writings arguing for the unity of God, and against Gnosticism. He argued
that original sin
is latent in humanity, and that it was by Jesus' incarnation as a
man that he "undid" the original sin of Adam, thus sanctifying life
for all mankind. Irenaeus maintained the view that Christ is the
Teacher of the human race through whom wisdom would be made
accessible to all.
- Clement of Alexandria
- Origen: Origen was
influential in integrating elements of Platonism into Christianity. He incorporated Platonic idealism into his conceptions
of the Logos, and the two
churches, one ideal and one real. He also held a strongly Platonic
view of God, describing him as the perfect, incorporeal ideal. He
was later declared a heretic for subscribing to the "too
Platonistic" doctrine of the preexistence of the soul.
- Augustine of Hippo: Augustine
developed classical Christian philosophy, and the whole of Western
thought, largely by synthesizing Hebrew and Greek thought. He
drew particularly from Plato,
the Neoplatonism
of Plotinus, and Stoicism, which he altered
and refined in light of divine revelation
of Christian teaching and the Scriptures. Augustine wrote
extensively on many religious and philosophical topics; he employed
an allegorical method of reading the Bible, further developed the
doctrine of hell as endless
punishment, original
sin as inherited guilt, divine grace as the necessary remedy for
original sin, baptismal regeneration and
consequently infant baptism, inner experience and the
concept of "self," the moral
necessity of human free
will, and individual election to
salvation by eternal predestination. He was a key influence
in the development of Western Catholic theology as well as Protestant Reformed
theology, particularly that of French theologian, John Calvin.
- St. Athanasius of Alexandria:
father of trinitarian orthodoxy involved in the formation of the Nicene Creed, who
vehemently opposed Arius, the unitarian bishop of
Alexandria, and his following.
- St. John
Chrysostom
- The Cappadocian Fathers: Gregory of
Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Basil the Great.
Medieval Christian
philosophers
- Anselm of Canterbury: Anselm is
best known for the Ontological
Argument for God's existence, i.e.: God is that than which
nothing greater can be conceived. But to exist is greater than not
to exist. If God does not exist then he wouldn't be "that than
which nothing greater can be conceived." Therefore, God exists.
Anselm was one of the first western thinkers to directly engage the
reintroduction of Aristotle to the West. However, he didn't have
all of Aristotle's works and those he had access to were from the
Arabic translations.
- Thomas
Aquinas: Aquinas was the student of Albert the Great,
a brilliant Dominican experimentalist, much like the Franciscan, Roger Bacon of Oxford
in the 13th century. Aquinas reintroduced Aristotelian philosophy
to Christianity. He believed that there was no contradiction
between faith and secular reason. He believed that Aristotle had
achieved the pinnacle in the human striving for truth and thus
adopted Aristotle's philosophy as a framework in constructing his
theological and philosophical outlook. He was a professor at the
prestigious University of Paris. Thomas Aquinas
was a contemporary of St Bonaventure, a
Franciscan Professor at the University of Paris whose approach
differed significantly from Aquinas'.
- John Duns Scotus: John Duns Scotus is known
as the "subtle doctor" whose hair-splitting distinctions were
important contributions in scholastic thought and the modern
development of logic. Scotus was also a Professor at the University
of Paris, but not at the same time as Aquinas. Along with Aquinas,
he is one of the two giants of Scholastic
philosophy which led to:
- William
of Ockham
Renaissance
and Reformation Christian philosophers
- Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536,
originally of Rotterdam, Netherlands) was not a philosopher
strictly speaking. Indeed, he wrote excoriatingly about the whole
span of them. He consolidated the space of "Humanist" in the late
Medieval scholarship of letters, and came to represent the acme of
such writing and scholarship up to his time. Thus, it's better to
say he was a leader of the development of the humanities, which
became a full-fledged department of European scholarly activities.
As such he bent his studies to profound recovery and exegesis of
the Hebrew Bible's ancient language/s and began building the first
critical text, as well as of the Greek sources upon which the New
Testament became also a formal scholarly text. He wrote astutely
about a number of vital issues relevant to the squalor of the
Church and its ignorance. He spent six years in an Augustinian
monastery; he was a joyful satirist; and became most famous for his
book The Praise of Folly.
- Martin
Luther (1483-1546, Augustinian monk, later of Wittenburg) --
nor was Martin Luther a philosopher, altho he knew something of
Occam and his Razor ("I'm of Ockham's school" of nominalist
epistemology), from an earlier era of European thawt. He also had
studied some philosophical materials of Saint Augustine, and did
not follow Saint Thomas with whom the Church had largely displaced
Augustine. More importantly, Luther followed Erasmus in developing
a critical text of the Biblical manuscripts. He deserves the
career-appellation of "Humanist" just as much as his mentor (who
broke with Luther over the project of the Reformation, choosing to
remain Catholic, but only succeeded in becoming Roman Catholic with
the majority of the church). Luther went a step beyond Erasmus in
actually translating the entire Christian Bible into the vernacular
of his time and location, for the people. His next step was to
encourage universal literacy in the Lutheran kingdoms. Luther's
German Bible had a tremendous impact on the development of the
German language and its literature.
- John Calvin
(1509-1564, the year William Shakespeare is said
to have been born; Paris, Strasbourg, Geneva). Le pasteur
grise was not a philosopher; he was a dogmatician (systematic
theology) as exhibited in his Institutes (several
original editions were published before his death), and an exegete
who over time translated all the Bible from the "original
languages" in the form of his grand series of
Commentaries on all but one of its Books (the
Book of Revelation which provided a problem to him
in its metaphory, not yielding robustly to his formula of letter
and spirit (for Calvin this phrase was a logical binomial:
either literal, or figurative).
He courageously tried to avoid allegorizing, which had had, of
course, a long history ever since the Jew of Alexandria,
Philo, had interpreted "The Book of Moses"
(Pentateuch) in much of an allegorical fashion that
de-literalized and over-metaphorized (into symbolic systems) many
passages of the ancient manuscripts of the Bible (now and
developingly a critical text itself). Calvin tried to
distance himself from the allegorical method that had played such a
strong role across the whole history of Christian interpretation of
the Bible, attempted distance certainly from the method's primacy,
while constantly having to face in the Gospel's "the parabolic
message of the Cross" (Leon Morris, etc). Certainly, Jean
Cauvin was one of the most celebrated Reformers, even 500
years later (2009). But, again, Calvin was no philosopher.
Nevertheless, he did have a unique impact on the quest for a
Protestant philosophy (see Jacob Klapwijk, "John Calvin" in the
volume he edited with Griffioen and Groenewoud, Bringing
into Captivity Every Thought (Eng trans 1991; pp 241-266).
The considerations set forth by Klapwijk establish a
non-philosopher's quest for and impact upon later philosophy, of a
kind the Roman Cathlic Church and its antecedants had suppressed.
Cauvin's was perhaps a proto-philosophy that had to survive Roman
Catholic philosophy, Protestant reversionist philosophy to
Scholasticism, and the Enl+tenment's attempt to drown out the
emergence of all particularist philosophies that openly presuppose
some religious stance . This has since proven to be
faux-universalism of the Kantian kind. And despite Richard
Rorty's recidivism, a new day has dawned in philosophy. Among other
matters, Cauvin's seed begat a Protestant philosophy 450 years
after he planted. It is alive and well.
- Huldrych
Zwingli (1484-1531, Zurich), likewise, was no philosopher, but
was indeed a leading Reformer who was influenced by a party in his
church congregation to most-radically de-metaphorize the
understanding of the Lord's Supper into a memorial only (no real
presence, and no communion of saints, therefore no eschatological
community of saints composed of the believers at the Communion
Table).
Of course, it is possible for a trained philosopher with much
historical acumen to go thru the works of all these scholars to
pick out scraps of philosophical quotes and scribbles; but this
does not make the authorities thus cited into philosophers. In most
cases, the writers are referencing something in some philosopher
somewhere before them, but they are adding nothing creative to the
ongoing problem-historical shape of Western philosophical
knowledge.
Two later Dutch Protestants are mistakenly put in the foregoing
philosophical "era" by some historically ignorant contributor to
this page. Neither belong to this era. One was a stock-market
speculator on ships' voyages to the Dutch West Indies, and led in
the disruption of the Reformed Church of the Netherlands over an
inflated and misformulated Protestant Neo-Scholastic theory of
"free will" that produced as its counterpoint the reactionary
Canons of Dordt (Arminius became part of the sect
called "the Remonstrants"). The other belonged
ruffly and belatedly to the same school but remained nominally
Reformed, while producing a great body of scholarship on
International Law, his writings ironically
becoming influential in the predestinarian Scholastic circles of
Scotland. But these were neither Reformers nor philosophers.
There's a tremendous diachronic difference in the last of the
dates above (Calvin, really Jean Cauvin,
died in 1564), and the first of the dates below
(Arminius, whose real name was Jacob Harmenszoon, born
1560, only four years before Cauvin's death). This amount of
chronicle time can constitute a huge differential in philosophical
historiography. What historians of philosophy must deal with is a
Post-Reformation philosophical development among Protestant
thinkers of, strictly speaking, what is not Reformational
philosophy but Protestant Scholasticism gerrymandered from various
locii and authorities of the Western Middle Ages. It begins already
with Luther's colleague, Philip Melancthon who blatantly turned
from Luther's sola Scriptura to Aristotle >
Aquinas > "Lutheran" philosophical theology; but Protestant
Scholasticism's Reformed variants are much more variant among one
another. And there were no real alternatives until Herman
Dooyeweerd and D T Th Vollenhoven in the
last century critiqued the Scholastic concept of "substance" and
the Scholastic problem of "the physical" vs "the spiritual." In
short the series on the epochs of Western philosophy, needs to cut
the false tie-in of Renaissance with that of
Reformation. And Erasmus can be treated as the
pivotal figure of transition between the two epochs. Unfortunately,
the state of the art on these topics has not yet been translated
into English, altho a critical text has been produced in Dutch by
K.A. Bril and P.J. Boonstra: D.H.Th. Vollenhoven,
Schematische Kaarten (De Zaak Haes, Amstelveen; isbn
90-805180-2-6).
- Jacobus
Arminius (1560-1609, the Netherlands). A preacher, theologian,
and church court operative.
- Hugo Grotius
(1583-1645, the Netherlands). It coud be said of Grotius that he
somewhat philosophized a discipline. But there's a world of
difference in the West between philosophy and the philosophy of a
discipline, which latter may have a certain purity of philosophical
presupposition and yet not itself constitute a philosophy as such.
His early work on the law of the seas was outdistanced by
On the law of war and peace (1625).
Even more serious a problem in this history of philosophy
section, erroneously entitled "Renaissance and Reformation
Christian Philosophy" is the lumping together of the Renaissance
with the Reformation. This lumpen-historiography of philosophy has
no place in the historical evaluation of Western philosophy's
periods, continuities, discontinuities, re-emergences, twists,
turns, and recurring problems traceable to a finite original number
(Vollenhoven, Wolters), that arguably have simply exfloriated over
the centuries. There were many Renaissance thinkers of importance,
some definitely philosophers, who are not mentioned at all by
previous contributors to this page. Absolutely inexcusable. So, the
erroneous heading itself obscures epochal differences
(Vollenhoven), while at the same time Desiderius Erasmus
Roteradamus is never branched off from the Renaissance thawt to his
own lone stance of textual critique and satire of church, state,
and ranks of society; but it was he, if any one person, who
moderated between the two conflated zeitgeists, and synchronic but
alternative types of Christian philosophy. Yet was himself no
philosopher.
Modern and
Contemporary Christian philosophers
An alphabetical listing:
- Karl Barth: A
Swiss theologian, he wrote the massive Church Dogmatics
(German, Kirchliche Dogmatik)—unfinished at about six
million words by his death in 1968. Barth emphasized the
distinction between human thought and divine reality, and that
while humans may attempt to understand the divine, our concepts of
the divine are never precisely aligned from the divine reality
itself, although God reveals his reality in part through human
language and culture. Barth strenuously disavowed being a
philosopher; he considered himself a dogmatician of the Church and
a preacher.
- Joseph
Butler
- John D. Caputo: American Catholic
deconstructionist theologian.
- G. K.
Chesterton: A British Catholic author, he applied Christian
thought in the form of non-fiction, fiction, and poems addressing a
variety of theological, moral, political, and economic issues,
particularly the importance of seeking truth, distributism, and
opposition to eugenics.
- Gordon Clark:
American Calvinist philosopher and defender of
Platonic realism. He developed one variety of philosophical
apologetics known as presuppositional
apologetics.
- William Lane Craig
- Herman
Dooyeweerd, who wrote the monumental trilogy, A New
Critique of Theoretical Thought
- Mary Baker
Eddy: Author of Science and
Health with Key to the Scriptures. Eddy's "Christian
Science" teaching is described in the Cambridge Dictionary of
Philosophy as a renewal of ancient Oriental panpsychism, the most
radical form of philosophical idealism.
- Jacques
Ellul
- John Frame:
American Calvinist philosopher in epistemology and ethics
- Etienne Gilson, who wrote The Spirit of
Medieval Philosophy, The Spirit of Thomism, Being
and Some Philosophers, and many other works. In the field of
Thomism he is considered one of the main figures credited with
starting the movement within Thomism known as Existential Thomism,
which emphasis the primacy of the act of Being (Esse) in
understanding everything else that is.
- Luigi
Giussani, an Italian priest of 1922-2005, who wrote the Why
the Church?
- Francis Hutcheson
- Immanuel
Kant
- Søren Kierkegaard, the father of existentialist
philosophy and particularly the school of Christian
existentialism.
- Peter Kreeft,
at Boston College
- C. S. Lewis, a
literary critic of the first order, a mythographer in his
children's fantasies, and an apologist for the Christian faith to
which he adhered in the latter half of his life. He claimed not to
be a philosopher, but his apologetics are foundational to the
formation of a Christian worldview for many modern readers.
- Knud Ejler Løgstrup
- Bernard
Lonergan: He was a Canadian Jesuit. Lonergan
Institute is a center specializing in his works.
- Gabriel
Marcel
- Jacques
Maritain
- John
Henry Newman
- Pope
John Paul II, who wrote Fides et Ratio
- Josef Pieper,
a German Roman Catholic philosopher orientated particularly on
Plato and Thomas Aquinas
- Alvin
Plantinga. one of the key figures in the movement of Reformed
Epistemology, which synthesizes Analytical Philosophy and Christian
philosophical concerns. He teaches at Notre Dame University.
- Egbert
Schuurman, the leading philosopher of technology who actively
espouses a Christian philosophical approach
- Melville Y. Stewart, editor, author
of books in philosophy of religion, and a Series on Science and
Religion 科学与宗教 (5-volume Series in Chinese, and 2-volume Series in
English). Visiting Philosopher at various universities in
China.
- Paul Tillich
Rather than beginning his philosophical work with questions of God
or gods, Tillich began with a "phenomenology of the Holy." His
basic thesis is that religion is Ultimate Concern. What a
person is Ultimately Concerned with in regard to their Ultimate
meaning and being can be understood as religion because, "There is
nobody to whom nothing is sacred because no one can rid themselves
of their humanity no matter how desperately they may try" (Young-Ho
Chun, Tillich and Religion, 1998, pg. 14.
- Richard
Swinburne
- Peter
van Inwagen, who is one of the leading figures in contemporary
philosophy of religion
- Cornelius Van Til: Dutch-American
philosopher, who contributed especially in epistemology and
developed one variety of philosophical apologetics known as presuppositional
apologetics.
- D. H. Th. Vollenhoven:
Vollenhoven's Calvinism and the Reformation of Philosophy
(Dutch, 1933) launched a philosophical movement that, after the
massive re-inforcing effect of his brother-in-law Herman
Dooyeweerd's first trilogy, Philosophy of the Law-Idea
(1935-36), led to the formation of the Association for Calvinist
Philosophy in 1936. For decades, Vollenhoven served as president of
the aforementioned association, which has become the Association for
Reformational Philosophy / Vereniging voor Reformatorische
Wijsbegeerte (VRW), still based in the Netherlands but with
ever-enlarging interest in the rest of the world. It can be debated
whether Vollenhoven's, his colleague Herman Dooyeweerd's, and many
among the subsequent generations of philosophers in the Reformational philosophy
movement are best described as "modern" or "postmodern," since they
anticipated numerous themes that resurfaced in postmodernism, yet
remain steadfastly and would-be distinctively Christian and
non-Roman.
- Ravi
Zacharias: He is one of the more prolific Christian apologists,
with many years on record. He is currently the president of Ravi
Zacharias International Ministries, an apologetic evangelistic
ministry that reaches out mainly to intellectuals and university
students. His method is mildly presuppositional, his style
conversational.
- Dallas
Willard: Notable Christian philosopher at the University of
Southern California. Willard has written extensively in philosophy
but also in practical Christian theology with an emphasis in
Christian spiritual formation.
See also
References
- Baird, Forrest E.; Walter Kaufmann
(2008). From Plato to Derrida. Upper Saddle River, New
Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall. ISBN
0-13-158591-6.
External
links
Top topics
Wikis
Quiz
Map
Search