Religion and the Social Sciences: Conversations with Robert Bellah and Christian Smith by R. R. Reno & Barbara McClay

Author:R. R. Reno & Barbara McClay [Reno, R. R. & McClay, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781498236430
Publisher: Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2015-09-01T03:00:00+00:00

1.7 Natural Theology, Revealed Theology, Liberal Theology

Edward Feser

Catholics probably quote Chesterton too frequently. But then, he is nothing if not quotable: even when he was wrong he could find the perfect aphorism to sum up an idea. He was better still when he was right, as when he wrote that “paganism was the largest thing in the world and Christianity was larger; and everything else has been comparatively small.”36 Given the theme of this symposium, we might, for “paganism,” read natural theology, as developed in Neoplatonic and Aristotelian thought. For “Christianity,” we might read Christian revealed theology, articulated in language derived from those Greek philosophical traditions—grace perfecting nature in the intellectual realm. And for “everything else” since then, we might read liberal theology.

Thomas Joseph White suggests that Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution is “arguably the greatest ever work of liberal Protestant theology.” That is no small thing, my suggested paraphrase of Chesterton notwithstanding. But the significance, and limitations, of such an achievement can properly be understood only by contrast with the other two members of our triad. Fr. White criticizes liberal Protestantism for being open to all truth “except that of divine revelation.” Yet liberal theology is not even as open as that. It has closed itself not only to revealed theology, but also to natural theology; and it has closed itself off to the former precisely because it has closed itself off to the latter.

Such a charge might seem surprising. Natural theology, after all, is the project of showing that certain fundamental truths of religion—the existence and nature of God, for example—can be established via rational arguments independently of any purported source of divine revelation. And isn’t the whole point of liberal theology to rationalize Christianity by stripping it of its allegedly revealed content? Isn’t it precisely in the business of replacing revealed theology with a purely natural theology?

It is not; or at least, it is not in the business of any sort of natural theology that would have been recognizable to such classical practitioners of the discipline as Aristotle, Plotinus, Avicenna, Maimonides, or Aquinas. These thinkers were committed to metaphysical theses that make it intelligible how the natural world points necessarily to a divine cause. For the Neoplatonist, it is because that world contains multiple things, and things which are composite, and whatever is multiple or composite must find its source in that which is absolutely One (in the sense that would come to be enshrined in the doctrine of divine simplicity). For the Aristotelian, because the world is changing, change involves the actualization of potential, and only what is a “purely actual” Unchanging Changer can ultimately account for how any potential is actualized. For the Thomist, it is because every created thing is made up of an essence distinct from its “act of existence,” and can be maintained in being only by an Uncaused Cause whose essence just is pure being or existence.

All of this metaphysical apparatus was swept aside by Descartes and the other

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