On Christian philosophy

*I’m still working on this, especially with edits after reading more of our Bible. At this point, to keep things true to Scripture, I’m putting citations from the Word in bold. I’ll be satisfied when every section has a little bit of bold in it.

Who is the Christian Philosopher?

Christian philosophy is righteous historical thinking receptive of the Word. In this essay, I will draw primarily from philosopher of history, R.G. Collingwood, essayist George Steiner, philosopher-theologians Gabriel Marcel and Gerhard Ebeling, and various others whom I’ll cite along the way. Each of these thinkers has played a crucial role in giving my thesis its epistemological framework, its theological content, or its ethical implications.

This paper is divided into the following five parts:

Part I: What troubles all philosophers?

Part II: Who is the Christian philosopher?

Part III: Repentance and receptivity

Part IV: The Christian philosopher is an historian

Part V: The Word creates the Christian philosopher and makes him righteous

In the concluding remarks, I will synthesize the preceding sections in order to argue for a particular definition of the Christian philosopher as historian receptive of the gospel word.

Part I. What troubles philosophers?

What causes philosophers to despair is their own cynicism about Christian togetherness with others in the body of Christ. Without Christ — the only Source of truly binding, everlasting love — non-Christian philosophers turn inward for a meager sense of security and wholeness but only find more fracturing.

When wisdom-lovers do not accept truth, they become wise in their own eyes by making themselves the objects of their own inquiries into truth. “Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes, and shrewd in their own sight!” (Isaiah 5:21). Their viciously-curious minds turn on themselves with legion probing questions and they end up taking a defensive posture to this onslaught, which in turn tends to create a habit of vainglory. The vainglorious undoing is fueled by the fact that language is broadly acknowledged to be imperfect as a vehicle of meaning, and eventually, every eidetic structure comes apart under skepticism’s solvent.

It isn’t, however, just a question of the words we use to speak of God that troubles philosophers — it’s the very sense of Him. When Christians say that God holds everything in existence, for example, what precisely is he sustaining? When a plant or animal dies, how is it then sustained? To despair at such questions is painful but it is also effortless. Given these risks, as they walk the lighted path, Christian philosophers must learn to keep their thoughts tightly-ordered; if they don’t, the meaning of life itself risks slipping into entropic chaos. Delirious without wisdom to hold them in shape, the plaintive howls of every despairingly cynical philosopher are the din of their own self-wrought destruction, like whining ship hulls breaking.

Another temptation of intellectually-gifted seekers is to dig for Cartesian bedrock and plunder every library stocked with academic theological or philosophical tomes. Perhaps they’ll thirst for a more comprehensive knowledge of good and evil than has been given to them and, reasoning from what they see in the natural world, they’ll pluck the fruit of diseased trees and fall ill. Nothing on earth, after all, suggests to such dying sinners that the dead can have new life except the Word of God. As things pass away, we may wonder whether we ought not, in every fleeting moment of good health, draw whatever goodness can still be milked from our retreating lives before goodness itself is consumed by decay. It wouldn’t be surprising should the very idea of God disappear into the chasm of despair.

Philosophers, especially of the analytic variety, can be tempted to endlessly prepare themselves to receive truth. The utility of their work isn’t necessarily zero; yet such things are only infinitesimally valuable, like numbering the regions of an infinite space or like synchronized swimming in a tsunami—the latter being an impressive feat of dexterity that would not only be imperceptible but tragicomically insensitive to anyone near enough to see it done.

By naming what plagues cynical minds, my intention has been to convince the reader that the author has understood and properly diagnosed a disease of the spirit which ails many of us: Philosophical, historical, reflective man is tempted to reason his way through dizzying theories about the natural world as though he were not in the midst of their very corruption. The philosophical mind is quick to find absurdity and futility in all things after the summaries of provisional scientific categories—but does he not know that, in fact, all of these things are debris in an already long-raging storm?

*Nota bene : The universality of the sin-experience is precisely as unknowable as the crux theologorum of Lutheranism because it is not given to us to know what only the vice of curiosity would lead us to seek. Should we seek in such a spirit of vain curiosity we will have regretfully left the lighted path which is itself the concern of this essay.

Part II. Who is the Christian philosopher?

Now that I have described some of the challenges all philosophers face, I will illustrate what the Christian philosopher stands to receive and how he receives it, making occasional references to other thinkers as I gather material to flesh-out my thesis that Christianity is an historical and communal faith receptive to a life-giving Word.

Christian philosophers are alone with God yet together with fellow Christian pilgrims. Christian philosophers seek and find relief in order to share it with other sufferers because they recognize that the pain all creatures suffer is essentially contiguous with their own suffering. At the same time, however, Christians acknowledge their aloneness before God because Christianity is essentially communal in the body of Christ; though they share the gift of an always-increasing relief, they also resist the communitarian temptation to smother every ember-glow of individual life by reference to some sort of categorically universalized spiritual experience (e.g., that sense of relief), thereby making a law or requirement of the gospel.

Life is in the blood, and in periods of bone-dryness, Christian lives are threatened by disintegration, which begins with distraction from God and from lack of hearing his life-giving Word. For the Christian philosopher, this can happen when speculation-weeds begin to choke the sanctified life out of him. Such weeds are at the borders of everything knowable about Christian belief, siphoning-away the believer’s life-blood. To change metaphors, they sometimes take the form of intellectual problems that present as knotty tangles to be undone; every single node of doubt’s aching strands reaches all the way down in their souls. For relief, the philosopher can sometimes find them and massage-out a loose end.

At the heart of every relationship is God or self, giving or taking, gratitude or unconsciousness. Atheistic relationships can have an effect of turning people into pleasure-sponges, the way some drug users turn inward to the degree that, even if she fools herself into believing that her drug of choice makes her ‘peaceful,’ it’s the harmlessness of the utterly alone—like the gambling addict who’s kind to people as long as he can take his pleasures hunched over his favorite slot-machine. Drugs, gambling, and other self-medications, put a happy-sweet glaze on the bitter roots we’re fed which still bite the flesh, but rather than turning the spirit toward God, drive Him away as if to say, “No, not now—this is not the time to harry me.” This blocks joy, too, substituting it for mere fleshly pleasure.

The problem at hand which was stated before is that, as sinners, we are takers, grasping for and appropriating what would be handed-down to us; whereas, in Christ, philosophers learn to receive passively as we are made anew by God to flourish by taking a receptive stance. As Christian philosophers choose hope rather than despair, they are wont to receive, preserve, and pass-on their memories of the good, the true, and the beautiful as they encounter them. Consider a man who presses a flower’s severed glory into the pages of his diaries with the hopes that a woman flipping through them years-on might imagine the author had an inner life of love that ran as deep as love has ever run through her own heart. That isn't necessarily true, given only what she knows from experience; even so, the discoverer might look at the care taken to pass on a thoughtful token of love, embodied in desiccated petals, and she might resolve to herself that it must have been true, regardless of experience.

This is how Christian philosophy is handed-down, too. Christian philosophers hand-down their memories as historical beings wanting to connect with others in order to share the good, the true, and the beautiful things in their lives. Nostalgia, in turn, is what is felt in the nostalgic doubt that anyone else could ever fully know what they’ve known. To love one’s memories in a way that delivers peace, instead of nostalgia, is to see and love the beauty which remains even in lamentations, and to trust that it can be shared even across millennia.

One task is to return to those memories which provoke nostalgia, to abstract the good shining from them, and to forgive what is grievous by discerning what to ignore or forget (in the French sense of ignorer). Encumbered by cluttering attachments to infinitely-multiplying memories that can’t be sorted, philosophers are perennially tempted to discard too much, desperate to strip down to pure naked Truth. As it’s written in Leviticus 26:36-37, “The sound of a driven leaf shall put them to flight, and they shall flee as one flees from the sword, and they shall fall when none pursues. They shall stumble over one another, as if to escape a sword, though none pursues.” In Christ, such unhealthy minimalist fantasies of a clutter-free existence fade and the despair at death’s presence gives way to peace despite the grave that awaits all. The Christian philosopher begins to see that God raises goodness from evil and life from death. He discovers that, paradoxically, those knots tied through suffering a different life than the life he’d hoped for are undone precisely by not trying to untie them.

God’s love is known only as gift—like a warmly-lit path sudden to appear to guide a lost and haunted soul. Each philosopher must choose whether to walk that path or turn from it and despair. The Christian philosopher seeks to avoid all pitfalls by following their well-maintained hiking trail, trusting their moral compass to keep on the path of wisdom, but also trusting that those who cleared the path before have already avoided certain obstacles. She will discover herself accompanied by such wise fellow wayfarers on the path to bypass radical cynicism, and she will see history, both personal and global, in terms of relatedness to other minds, to the rest of creation, and to God—rather than in terms of rupture from them. I am reminded Albert Camus’ Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in which he disabuses the artists of the world of his own time of any notions that being inward and disconnected from one’s fellow man is noble.

To identify with those in the Church we have to be like them in a relevant way, and all Christians of all time periods (including the first believers in the New Testament) sought to be conformed by wisdom as its work was recorded in the Bible. All Christians agree that the Bible is at least a primary resource to that end. The question of whether the Bible is the only resource for attaining to wisdom risks distracting us from the truth that we all ultimately draw from the same wisdom-well. Insight into one’s relationship with God involves, or accompanies, biblical wisdom. The more conformed to biblical wisdom—the more sanctified the reasoning—the more clarity about the nature of wisdom itself. Importantly, this clarity about God, the self, one’s relationship to God, and clarity about what it means to be in the Church, all accompany knowledge of salvation—as the God of the Bible is the God who saves his Church. If the philosopher aims for God’s wisdom before answering any other ancillary questions, his rightly-ordered pursuits will lead him into identity with, and of the same mind as, the Church as she always was.

Part III. Repentance and receptivity

Repentance. I’m currently working on a section for repentance here. It was absurd that repentance didn’t figure into this portrait of the Christian philosopher when it is the way of his salvation. Check back for updates (7/27/2022).

The Christian imagination is bound by what one is willing to receive into one’s thought-world. Pascal wrote that "le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ignore,” and that is to say that, fortunately, we know when we’re in love. The importance of acknowledging a certain passivity in being the willing, receptive, objects of God’s love can be encapsulated by the following: we received life before we asked for it. Openness to truth in all things is the fruit of the Spirit.

Henri de Lubac cites Augustine in the following: “Augustine went so far as to say: ‘Fides, si non cogitator, nulla est’. The human mind is made in such a way that it cannot hold to a truth, cannot maintain it, unless it seeks and seeks continually. Calling a halt to thought would mean death.”

Christian philosophers stand to receive and they don’t deconstruct all things handed-on, but trust instead the insightful men and women of faith who came before them—those whose theological speculation is a creative function which they do not receive only to cynically eschew as piddling inwardness. The good they receive they meet instead with awe at the confessional intimacy it recounts of experiences, thoughts, doubts, fears, and hopes which continue echoing across so many generations of one body in Christ. Christian philosophers therefore go about their daily lives with their doors and windows wide-open; God delivers the gratitude and the prayers for every relationship, such that there is no need to go and sit by their window, so to speak, as if anxiously watching for signs outside and replaying the instructions for proper door-and-window-opening over again in their heads.

It is possible for Christians to be wise. This is a startling assertion for many Lutheran theologians who cut off their noses by constructing an entire worldview on a foundational axiom that philosophy is the problem. Philosophy, in my view, can be called good reasoning—and is that intrinsically in competition with faith? Of course it isn’t; it is, however, commonly made to be competitive, which is why so many treat it with such disdain. When Christian philosophers are good reasoners—that is, when Christian philosophers are wise, there occurs in them a qualitative change in their very identities. This is a phenomenological mark of credibility in the shared project of historical-theological, consciousness, a change commonly called « sanctification ». Sanctification takes time. Jesus Christ came into a world of time and space, and it takes time and space to become like him. All of the philosophical, hermeneutical, or theological church traditions that have been handed-down, have been passed by sinners at various stages of sanctification, and the Christian philosopher does not despair at the turbulence sinners cause in the flow of human history. No matter how one defines the boundaries of the Church, it is undeniable that the Church has been scattered across time and space since its founding. This is not a point to despair in search of cohesion. Human beings cannot off-load their deepest longings or the faith in their eventual fulfillment onto someone else who might know better, or onto some collective whole church.

A common Christian experience of sanctification is such that it’s as though they are against the world in Christ observing it, yet also in the world suffering in inexplicable love for it. Where these meet—where this love and suffering already met in history—is in Christ. They recall his history and their own. All Christians come to know Christ not only through what is revealed in Scripture, but through direct, personal, experience. In their reflections, it is as though Golgotha were a crimson watershed where every experience of ignorance, hate, suffering, and alienation mixed with a desire for peace, truth, love, and atonement; the latter ring more loudly in Christian ears as they're sanctified.

Christians have handed-down to us prayers of supplication so that, in our suffering, we might be drawn nearer to our Father in faith. Perhaps the most obvious reason for a prayer of supplication is upon one’s acute awareness of death. Let’s consider briefly what good Christian philosophers might be able to abstract from reflecting upon our deaths.

For age is opportunity no less
Than youth itself, though in another dress,
And as the evening twilight fades away
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.

Longfellow

First, Christians gain in wisdom and knowledge of the Lord through suffering old age and death. The inevitability of death (which is not to call it ‘natural,’ but that’s another matter) spurs the Christian philosopher on to reflect upon human nature, upon God, and upon our relationship to Him. In his reflections, the Christian learns that he cannot reach God through his sinful nature by any other way except by first dying; and on his way to that end, he has in the words of Scripture insights far more comforting than those elegies which despairing, atheistic, cynics play into a lifeless void when they’re asked to wax eloquent on death and dying. God’s hopeful words of comfort and joy echo down the corridors of Christian history where generation after generation of Christian philosophers continue to draw from them.

Secondly, Christians may consider the wisdom attained from aging and death as being a sort of concentration of lasting qualities—like that aforementioned dried flower pressed into living memory between the pages of a diary. I’m referring here to the sort of wisdom that gives anyone who reflects upon Christ a hope that they, too, will see themselves transformed into something more truly human like Him; they will experience love welling-up within them, spilling-over and washing-away the salt-stains that marked their periods of spiritual bone-dryness.

Thirdly, when the Christian philosopher reflects upon death, he may discover the senselessness of the particular sort of cynicism about Christian faith, hope, or charity which stems from reflecting upon evil and determining that there is too much of it for there to be an ultimately good purpose. This is a common refrain among the cynics of every age and it is senseless because it is an argument from the gratuitousness of evil, which is a subjective sense of proportionality with no rightful application to the things of a limitless God. This same notion of gratuitousness is at work when the philosopher considers the size of the universe and the minimal part he is to play in it. The cynic lives in awe at the dark matters of the universe, submitting to its hopelessly untamed complexity, dazzled and struck dumb by the spectacle of every event.

Though non-Christian philosophers may strive to pull back luminous curtains and glimpse infinitesimal data points arranged into a few meaningful constellations, their motivation is despair, and the rule is always despair in, despair out. They wonder at the overwhelming vastness and forget that the wise do not measure grandeur or glory in physical distances, in temperature, brightness, or time elapsed—but in the qualities which evoke the Creator: truth, goodness, and beauty. To put it differently, just because we are small compared to stars doesn’t mean they are more important; mutatis mutandis, just because there are apparently innumerable avoidable catastrophes doesn’t mean there are one too many for this world to be the work of an all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing God (and on that note, it can’t be emphasized enough that no sinners see things exactly as they are).

Although the meditation on what we experience in life means meditation on loss, nevertheless the necessary pains of loss don’t have their meaning composed with any final epistemic certainty—not, at least, until we no longer experience losses. Stated differently, there is essentially no finality to the meaning of loss, insofar as its meaning would be defined by our continuing experiences in continuing history. We can cast upon history itself the same paradoxical, perhaps even ambivalent, light. All of the love in the world has apparent suffering, apparent absurdity, and apparent chaos already mixed into it, disguising whatever life’s blessings may be.

Even the most idyllic childhood is full of suffering. Is human history a record of loss or of gain? Both. Consider our understanding of pain as being of a piece with how we ought to think of our history. When we tell each other that “certainly all pain is bad,” if we reconsider this assertion in light of the fact that nothing in our lives is static, then we ought to realize that the disorientation of movement, and the loss of the old which we experience as pain, are both necessary to the movement of history itself. We are thusly mid-conversation about every experience (e.g., about pain), the final word not having been spoken on the subject.

To close this section on how the Christian philosopher might reflect upon the problem of suffering and death, let’s consider a helpful literary trope that goes like this: The only way out of this trouble we’re in is to go through it. The only way out of the problem of suffering is not a ratiocination about the universality of entropic demise; it is an existential confrontation with sin but with heart and mind sanctified—softened—by looking to Christ. The only way out of the intellectual problem of evil is therefore to go through it; and philosophers go through its darkness with a light: we go through the darkness of the ignorance we have about human history, through the darker passages of the Scripture, and through death itself with the same light. Should we ask whether we ought to resist suffering if it is God’s will that we suffer is to conflate punishment with chastening; it’s like trying to pull back the curtains to see the inner operations or logic of God’s Providence. It is infinitely preferable to recognize that Christians are alive and imperishable in Christ; our whole selves—inner and outer—remain hopeful that our outer-selves, our ‘clay jar’ selves, will be openly declared just and made new creations.

In the next section, I will define history and argue that the Christian philosopher is essentially a historian. This essay will end with my conclusion that man’s work to compose history, united to mystery though it may be, is not sufficient to resolve all of the anxieties that characterize the life of a cynical mind. I will borrow from Gerhard Ebeling’s philosophy of language to show how the word of God breaks into creation and creates life in response to the traditional Christian pleas for help through suffering; moreover, it is this in-breaking Word that gives philosophers their hope-filled identity as Christians.

Part IV. Christian philosophers are historians

I have claimed that Christian philosophers are historians, and I will now begin to explain what I mean by that by appealing to the works of several philosophical thinkers whose ideas have influenced my own.

We can begin by noting that the philosopher is always reflecting from within a setting—a Sitz im Leben—both spatial and temporal, with infinite objects for his attention to seize upon and analyze. The task to define scientific categories for every mental object necessarily depends on the will to choose (i.e., there is a primacy of the will in discernment). If the philosopher intends holiness, he will see—he will receive—God’s purpose being worked-out in all things and he will reject the notion of seeking comprehensive knowledge, the system-builder’s idol.

Philosophy is always taking into account not only the object that provoked a reflection but the person doing the thinking as well. R.G. Collingwood wrote extensively on what it means for philosophy to be a reflective activity. His descriptions, besides being uncanny in their resonance with the notes I am striking in my own profile of the Christian philosopher, are also going to be well-complemented by the ideas left to us by what are perhaps entirely unlikely pairings such as Gabriel Marcel, Gerhard Ebeling (et al.), as we will see further below.

Collingwood writes, “Philosophy is reflective. The philosophizing mind never simply thinks about an object, it always, while thinking about any object, thinks also about its own thought about that object. Philosophy may thus be called thought of the second degree, thought about thought. … Philosophy is never concerned with thought by itself; it is always concerned with its relation to its object, and is therefore concerned with the object just as much as with the thought. …the historian must re-enact the past in his own mind. … When a man thinks historically, he has before him certain documents or relics of the past. His business is to discover what the past was which has left these relics behind it. For example, the relics are certain written words; and in that case he has to discover what the person who wrote those words meant by them. This means discovering the thought (in the widest sense of that word: we shall look into its more precise meaning soon) which he expressed by them. To discover what this thought was, the historian must think it again for himself. …suppose he is reading a passage of an ancient philosopher. Once more, he must know the language in a philological sense and be able to construe; but by doing that he has not yet understood the passage as an historian of philosophy must understand it. In order to do that, he must see what the philosophical problem was, of which his author is here stating his solution. He must think that problem out for himself, see what possible solutions of it might be offered, and see why this particular philosopher chose that solution instead of another. This means re-thinking for himself the thought of his author, and nothing short of that will make him the historian of that author’s philosophy.” The passage of time is what makes Collingwood’s conception of re-enactment history rather than being something else (e.g., thought about eternal principles or other Platonic objects outside of time and space). Philological knowledge per se, then is not historical knowledge; it must become reflective in order to become historical (which, in turn, is prerequisite to theological reflection).

Gabriel Marcel states the matter this way:

“The distinctive note of philosophic thought, at least according to my conception of it and I have many authorities for that conception, is that not only does it move towards the object whose nature it seeks to discover, but at the same time it is alert for a certain music that arises from its own inner nature if it is succeeding in carrying out its task. We have already said that the point about philosophic thought is that it is reflective…”

Gerhard Ebeling also wrote amply on the difference between philological knowledge and philosophy proper by indicating time as a key to understanding the full import of a word that goes beyond its consideration as a mere sign or vehicle of limited meaning. Here’s Ebeling: “The prevailing view of language is oriented towards the significatory function of words. The word is regarded as the sign—the spoken or written sign—with a concrete referent. … To regard language exclusively as a technical instrument is to cut it off from that which its the constant source of its life—namely, the element of time. Time, the very factor which is constitutive for the living event of language, is of secondary importance for the significatory understanding of language. … Word as spoken is always temporal word. … It is solely through language that I can have a relation of past and future, that past and future are present to me, that I can go back behind my present and stretch out ahead of it.”

Before moving on to the ethical questions, I will invoke the voice of the philosopher and literary critic, George Steiner, and say something more about the importance of time for our subject matter. In our historical thought, philosophers connect past events to present realities. By making this connection, we wager on being able to report truths about the nature of reality, of our condition, of God’s own designs. George Steiner argues that “any coherent understanding of what language is and how language performs, that any coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is, in the final analysis, underwritten by the assumption of God’s presence. … the wager on the meaning of meaning, on the potential of insight and response when one human voice addresses another, when we come face to face with the text and work of art or music, which is to say when we encounter the other in its condition of freedom, is a wager on transcendence. This wager – it is that of Descartes, of Kant and of every poet, artist, composer of whom we have explicit record – predicates the presence of a realness, of a ‘substantiation’ (the theological reach of this word is obvious) within language and form. It supposes a passage, beyond the fictive or the purely pragmatic, from meaning to meaningfulness. The conjecture is that ‘God’ is, not because our grammar is outworn; but that grammar lives and generates worlds because there is the wager on God.”

None of us is equipped to know that anything is absurd. Christian philosophers make this wager in their search for peace: they order the cacophonous into a cohesive history which reveals reasons for what should otherwise appear absurd. In that way, God’s story becomes their story—material history like a mirror image of nature as seen and told by them as they spin webs so as to spell it all out in silk. Knowing history is knowing there is a larger story, a bigger picture. Our individual stories, every event or experience, and every person or relationship, contributes to the larger story of which the Bible is more than an example or blueprint but the origin.

There are ethical implications flowing from all of the preceding ideas about the Christian philosopher’s role as historian within a community of co-sufferers. The Christian philosopher is not agnostic about the moral import of history; the moral law is more than a compendium of competing systems for philosophers to analyze and either reject or embrace them. We cannot grant the atheistic philosopher the territory of philosophy rather than taking philosophy to be the regenerate mind’s morally good reasoning about God’s wisdom instead. Do Christians never think well about any fundamental subjects of philosophical discourse (viz., Goodness, Beauty, Truth?) If we do not take Christians at their words, we will have given-up the ghost; Christians would be just another clan of apes using language as a means to simian ends.

Gerhard Ebeling also wrote about the moral responsibility involved with being creatures so dependent upon language: “Language is much more than a system of words and grammatical rules. Moreover, differentiation of language extends much further than division into different national languages. There are connections which cut across such divisions. The language of science is not the language of love. … we live on the reality that is disclosed to us by language, and on the immense wealth that is handed down to us, and on which our speech draws. Language opens up the space to us in which the event of the word can take place. So we carry responsibility for language in what we say. And when the event of the word is an extraordinary one, it is creative of language, that is, it creates new possibilities of addressing and understanding the reality which approaches us, and becomes the source of light which can again and again lighten up the darkness of existence. This is the direction indicated for us in God’s Word, ‘Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light to my path’ (Psalm 119.105).”

Given this responsibility to handle the creative function of language, the Christian philosopher shares the light of God’s wisdom on the path she walks. Gabriel Marcel describes sharing the wisdom in different terms but the meaning is the same. The idea, to Marcel, is that philosophers do not so much answer with single, pointed, solutions; rather they move in a certain direction as we’re spiritually illuminated. “It might be said that the true questions are those which point, not to anything resembling the solution of an enigma, but rather to a line of direction along which we must move. As we move along the line, we get more and more chances of being visited by a sort of spiritual illumination; for we shall have to acknowledge that Truth can be considered only in this way, as a spirit, as a light.” The task of the Christian philosopher, then, is to follow a path with the Light. So concludes what a Lutheran might characterize as the “Law” section of the paper, and we move now to the “Gospel” section.

Part V. The Word creates the Christian philosopher

The most essential truth in everything we are and in every one of our experiences is the truth of our origins; a search for truth is a search for origins. Christians have their origin in the new Adam, Jesus Christ. This origin is essentially relational—trinitarian—by which fact we must infer, because of transitivity, a moral dimension to everything we know and experience. What we know is therefore never morally neutral: no cracking tree limb heard outside our window, no bead of sweat on our brow, no flock of migrating birds glimpsed overhead, no nostalgic thought of home, is without moral importance (our ignorance of that moral import notwithstanding). We are to know these things as new creatures in Christ.

This idea that origins are ultimately important to the Christian philosopher is kept in check by Bornkamm, in Luther’s World of Thought, who writes, “The fact that our attempt to apprehend God in nature and in history as the totality of life leads us into a blind alley need not be fruitless. If this quest carried us adrift, then the mistake did not occur at the end but at the beginning. We must retrace our steps and seek a correct starting point. Did we actually look for God when we sought Him in the aggregate of life? Or were we not groping rather for a concept of the ultimate unity of the world? To find the coherent elements of the world is the never-ending task of the philosopher, but this is not the core of the question concerning God. To trace the living world to its ultimate cause and to deduce a philosophical system from this, and to believe in God, are two radically different matters. The former stems from our strong urge and thirst for knowledge and cognition. But the result of this philosophical investigation still has no bearing on my attitude and my conduct of life. One may have the most varying views on this primary unity in all life; one may speak about God or about a primal power, the universe, fate, primal substance, primal spirit—all this is immaterial to, and without any effect on, our heart, our conscience, and our conduct in daily life. On the other hand, everything in life does depend on the question whether I truly believe in God. A genuine faith in God must transform me into another man. The real question concerning God is not only a question asked by us but also one addressed to us. The one is a question of cognition; the other, a question of life. The two can become one only if I know both. Here true faith in God is greater than any power of human thinking. In faith an answer to the question about the ultimate cause and origin of the world is also included; but the philosophical concept of origin contains no answer for my conduct of life, no duties and obligations, no help, and no comfort. Therefore we must learn to formulate the question concerning God correctly (p.58).” In faith, writes Bornkamm, an answer to the question about the origin of the world is included. Christian faith grasps the means of our renewal, that we might know and experience the world in Christ.

To have the Word of God is to have an always-full well to drawn from when addressing atheists who are dismayed to find the world full of inauthentic words. For the godless, language is an endless shell game; the words they use are strewn like empty carapaces merely suggesting they were once the protective attachments to life—though they’ve been here longer as signposts to nihilism. By doing philosophy from within a Christian mode of reflectiveness—what Steiner calls our wager on God—we find these words suffused with meaningfulness that extends into mystery. That language fails to be what it communicates seems like a truism—of course the image is not the thing itself, and the map is not the territory. This can be a real concern to Christian philosophers, too, because no matter what one may think coheres philosophically within the abstract systems which philosophers conjure, what must continually resound in a Christian tradition is that no philosopher thinks perfectly clearly about anything at all, but always conceives somewhat fragmented and sin-sickened thoughts. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). “Out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks” (Luke 6:45).

God’s Word, on the other hand, is creative, and it does not fail.

“so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it. For you shall go out in joy
and be led forth in peace” (Isaiah 55:11-12).

When God speaks, He is creative—the Word does convey what it communicates. What was already recorded by witnesses to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ also creates faith in us, even now, millennia later. No words about the past, the present, or the future can be combined to mend a broken relationship with God — but the Word spoken into the present will never fail to do this work. Although the failures of speech tempt us to despair, we need not despair, because the Word has the power to give us life despite the imprecision of language. Christian philosophers do more than to describe, categorize, and quietly despair at the ambiguities and imprecisions of language (and the same is true of what we say to one another about history). Ebeling puts it this way: “For it is the pure Word in this sense, that it expects faith, that faith which relies on the promise alone. On what promise? The promise of God. A promise means a pledge from one to another regarding the future. … God comes to the one addressed and is with him, and the one addressed is with God. All talk of God in which this does not happen would not be real talk of God. The Word receives the most explicit character of a promise when the future of the one addressed is involved, and the speaker himself does not promise this or that, but himself, pledges himself and his own future for the future of the other, gives him his word in the full sense of giving a share in himself. And here is the reason for the ultimate failure of the Word among men. For what happens when one man promises himself to the other? For the most part the Word becomes the bearer and mediator of egotism, inner emptiness, or lies. Yet even at his best man cannot promise true future, that is, salvation, to the other. Only the Word by which God comes to man, and promises himself, is able to do this. That this Word has happened, and can therefore be spoken again and again, that a man can therefore promise God to another as the One who promises himself—this is the certainty of Christian faith. And this is the true and fulfilled event of the Word, when space is made among men for this promise, this Word of God.”

Speech is the artful expression of discovery, and it’s up to the listener to make that discovery for himself or herself in what’s said by re-enacting it in their own minds. If we eschew the words of Christian philosophy then we will have nothing to say about the world as rediscovered by the reborn Christian. If we forget wisdom then we’ll choke on the smoke of doubt that rises from the essentially unregenerate and hell-bound mind.

We share these discoveries because it is in our Christian nature to share; Christianity is communal. As noted above, Christian philosophers share the light that is given to them. Herbert McCabe, OP, tells us that “Christ is present to us in so far as we are present to each other. We are born with a constitutional inability to live together in love; we achieve a precarious unity only with great difficulty and for a short time; there is a flaw in the very flesh we have inherited which makes for division between us. The very thing that should make us one, the fact that we come into existence as members of one family, is the source of our isolation. The nature in which we are born is twisted and tends to alienate us from each other. Whatever community we try to set up by purely human means, whether it be the family or the political community, we fail to reach real unity. This is the story of Babel; in the city built by men to reach to the heavens, the tongues of men are confused and they fail to understand one another.”

I conclude with a challenge that prompts me to reconsider all that I’ve written thus far in a new light: McCabe (who invokes Thomas) also says that, “whereas men can talk only with words and gestures, God can talk with the course of history itself. He can guide the course of events in such a way as to give them a significance which reveals him to us.”

God’s holiness is a mark of his Church and we recognize his holiness in the wisdom which has always shaped Christian lives across our shared history. Christians are keen to identify with the human authors of the Bible who, collectively, composed the Church of their own times, and who themselves demonstrated the desire to attain to the same holy wisdom which also came to them through the word of God. In short, where there is the Word speaking life into the dead, there is the Church. Everything that’s true isn’t gospel true. The Christian philosopher is especially willing to hear the gospel truth as it reverberates in the re-enacted histories carried from one generation to the next.