Prolegomena

Systematic philosophical theologies are rare – at least on the contemporary scene.1 Paul Tillich’s Systematic Theology and Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Systematic Theology deserve to be called systematic philosophical theologies, heavily shaped as they are by philosophical concerns.2 Unfortunately, neither of these theologians was able to benefit from the renaissance of Christian philosophy that has transpired in Anglo‐American analytic philosophy since the late 1960s. Rather Richard Swinburne’s tetralogy in philosophical theology, coupled with his trilogy in natural theology, is representative of that tradition and is doubtless the preeminent example of systematic philosophical theology in our day.3 Many other philosophers or theologians have taken steps toward a systematic philosophical theology, even if the scope of such a project makes the goal elusive.4

1 The Renaissance of Christian Philosophy

It is precisely the renaissance of Christian philosophy in our day that makes this so opportune a time for the writing of a systematic philosophical theology.

1.1 A Look Back

In order to understand our current situation, it is helpful to understand something of where we have been. In a personal retrospective, the eminent Princeton University philosopher Paul Benacerraf describes what it was like doing philosophy at Princeton during the 1950s and 1960s. The overwhelmingly dominant mode of thinking was scientific naturalism. Physical science was taken to be the final, and really only, arbiter of truth. Metaphysics had been vanquished, expelled from philosophy like an unclean leper. “The philosophy of science,” says Benacerraf, “was the queen of all the branches” of philosophy, since “it had the tools… to address all the problems.”5 Any problem that could not be addressed by science was simply dismissed as a pseudo‐problem. If a question did not have a scientific answer, then it was not a real question – just a pseudo‐question masquerading as a real question. Indeed, part of the task of philosophy was to clean up the discipline from the mess that earlier generations had made of it by endlessly struggling with such pseudo‐questions. There was thus a certain self‐conscious, crusading zeal with which philosophers carried out their task. The reformers, says Benacerraf, “trumpeted the militant affirmation of the new faith… in which the fumbling confusions of our forerunners were to be replaced by the emerging science of philosophy. This new enlightenment would put the old metaphysical views and attitudes to rest and replace them with the new mode of doing philosophy.”6

What Benacerraf is describing is a movement known as Logical Positivism. The book Language, Truth, and Logic by the British philosopher A. J. Ayer served as a sort of manifesto for this movement. As Benacerraf says, it was “not a great book,” but it was “a wonderful exponent of the spirit of the time.”7 The principal weapon employed by Ayer in his campaign against metaphysics was the vaunted Verification Principle of Meaning. According to that Principle, which went through a number of revisions, a sentence in order to be meaningful must be capable in principle of being empirically verified. Since metaphysical statements were beyond the reach of empirical science, they could not be verified and were therefore dismissed as devoid of factual content.

Ayer was explicit about the theological implications of this Verificationism.8 Since God is a metaphysical object, Ayer says, the possibility of religious knowledge is “ruled out by our treatment of metaphysics.” Thus, there can be no knowledge of God.

Now someone might say that we can offer evidence of God’s existence. But Ayer will have none of it. If by the word “God” you mean a transcendent being, says Ayer, then the word “God” is a metaphysical term, and so “it cannot be even probable that a god exists.” He explains, “To say that ‘God exists’ is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be either true or false. And by the same criterion, no sentence which purports to describe the nature of a transcendent god can possess any literal significance.”9

Suppose a religious believer should appeal to religious experience as a means of knowledge of God. Ayer is not impressed. He would not think to deny that the religious believer has an experience, he says, any more than he would deny that someone has an experience of, say, seeing a yellow object. But, he says, “whereas the sentence ‘There exists here a yellow‐colored material thing’ expresses a genuine proposition which could be empirically verified, the sentence ‘There exists a transcendent god’ has … no literal significance” because it is not verifiable. Thus the appeal to religious experience, says Ayer, is “altogether fallacious.”10

From this perspective, statements about God do not even have the dignity of being false. Now at first blush such a perspective might seem utterly implausible. If a statement like, “God loves you” were no more meaningful than, “T’was brillig; and the slithey toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe,” then how could one even know what it was supposed to be about, so as to be able to say that statements about God are metaphysical and therefore meaningless?11 But as Nicholas Wolterstorff explains in a recent reminiscence:

By the mid‐1950s we were all aware of the fact that the term ‘meaningless’ as employed by the positivists was a term of art. It was not their view that everything that failed their test was jabberwocky – meaningless in that sense – nor was it their view that one should never make utterances that failed their test. They just meant that one had not made an assertion, a true–false claim; one’s utterance lacked assertoric meaning.12

To illustrate, questions and commands have cognitive meaning, but they are neither true nor false, since they do not make any assertions. Metaphysical and theological sentences might be useful for some purpose but not to make assertions.

It was not just metaphysical statements and, hence, theological statements that were regarded by logical positivists as void of assertoric content. Ethical statements were also declared to be meaningless because they, too, cannot be empirically verified. Such statements are simply emotional expressions of the user’s feelings. Ayer says, “if I say ‘Stealing money is wrong’ I produce a statement which has no factual meaning… . It is as if I had written, ‘Stealing money!!’ … It is clear that there is nothing said here which can be true or false.”13 So he concludes that value judgments “have no objective validity whatsoever.”14 The same goes for aesthetic statements concerning beauty and ugliness. According to Ayer, “Such aesthetic words as ‘beautiful’ and ‘hideous’ are employed…, not to make statements of fact, but simply to express certain feelings… .”15

It is sobering to realize that this was the sort of thinking that dominated the departments of philosophy at British and American universities during the last century into the 1960s.16 It was not without its impact on religious life. Under the pressure of positivism, some theologians began to advocate non‐cognitivist theories of theological language. In their view theological statements are not statements of fact at all but merely express the user’s emotions and attitudes. For example, the sentence “God created the world” does not purport to make any factual statement at all but merely is a way of expressing, say, one’s awe and wonder at the grandeur of the universe.

Gilbert Ryle poignantly described the state of philosophical‐theological dialogue in the late 1950s:

In our half‐century philosophy and theology have hardly been on speaking terms… . When theological coals were hot, the kettle of theological philosophy boiled briskly. If the kettle of theological philosophy is now not even steaming, it is because that fire has died down. Kettles cannot keep themselves on the boil. A philosopher cannot invent conceptual stresses and strains. He has to feel them if he is to be irked into dealing with them. I do not want to exaggerate. The theological fire has died down, but it has not quite gone out and the kettle of theological philosophy, though far from even simmering, is not quite stone cold.17

The low point undoubtedly came with the so‐called Death of God theology of the mid‐1960s.18 On April 8, 1966, Time magazine carried a cover which was completely black except for three words emblazoned in bright, red letters against the dark background: “Is God Dead?” And the article described the movement then current among American theologians to proclaim the death of God.

Today that movement has all but disappeared. The kettle of theological philosophy is once more boiling briskly, at least in the Anglo‐American realm. What happened?

1.2 The Collapse of Verificationism

What happened is a remarkable story. Philosophers within the analytic tradition itself exposed an incoherence which lay...