One of the most anti-philosophical statements delivered by the philosophical class was by Pascal. It was originally written down on parchment, but was discovered after his death, sewn into an article of his clothing.

“God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob … not of philosophers and scholars.”

This “god of the philosophers” has, ever since, been associated with the same Athens which Tertuallian set in opposition to Jerusalem. But what does it mean?

In some ways this fifth kind of objection is a hybrid of a few of the preceding. There is a kind of fear that the religious philosopher is looking for anything but the one true God in any place but His word. It seems also to run afoul of Paul’s dichotomy between the wisdom of God in Christ versus the wisdom of the world in 1 Corinthians 1-2.

The objection may focus on a perceived relativity or autonomy in the exercise, or else on an inevitable “static” reduction of a God who Scripture describes in much more “dynamic” ways. The first of these is typically Van Tillian and the second is typically Barthian. However, there may occasionally be overlap.

Let us introduce the two forms concisely first.

Form 1. There are as many “natural theologies” (as well as “natural laws”) as there are people, so for these to be foundational is to replace the one authoritative word of God with the innumerable mere opinions of man.

Form 2. There is an inverse relationship between a metaphysical theology and a narrative and relational theology; or, God-in-Himself is incompatible with God-in-act, still more so with God-in-the-flesh.

As Many Natural Theologies as Natural Theologians

The first form is more about the potential for pagan mischief more than the final shape it takes. Barr conceived of these kinds of criticism by means of an analogy to a camel getting into a tent.

“Once the camel gets its nose into the tent, it will soon take up all the space within. Similarly, it was said, if natural theology gets its nose into the edifice of Christian theology, it will soon occupy the entire space and be mixed up in everything, including the purest divine revelation.”1

This assumes some kind of inverse relationship between the revelatory element (natural revelation) and the interpretive element (natural theology). Moreover it assumes a naturally corrupting element—that either the sort of people philosophers are, or the sort of tools of inquiry at their disposal, will inevitably lead us astray.

It also assumes a temptation. McInerny perfectly summarizes what is behind many fideistic objections to natural theology, in discussing Kierkegaard’s reservations about the rationalistic Christian system of his day: “The question then is not so much whether or not philosophy is hospitable to natural theology, but rather what are the conditions of its hospitality.”2 Philosophy quickly morphs from servant to master.

Now if everyone is a philosopher in the same way that everyone is a theologian, at least the theologian is bound to the book that has been given to him. The philosopher is bound only to his own mind—his curiosity, even his dissatisfaction with the answers he has found so far. He is wanderer, and he is legion.

For Van Til, there was more to this objection than simply that there have been as many natural theologies as there are natural theologians. It is bound up in how autonomous reason divorces itself from the only truly unified system. Let us reduce Van Til’s thought on this to a concise principle: Autonomy begets atomism.

For the unbeliever always working from a finite reference point, truth must be always divorced from individual facts. So each “fact” must also be divorced from every other fact, as without any truth there is no unifying principle to synthesis any two or more isolated facts.3 This is not to say that this autonomous natural theology never has any unifying principle. Elsewhere Van Til wrote,

“Instead of boldly offering the idea of the self-contained God as the presupposition of the intelligent interpretation of nature, it starts with the idea of the self-contained character of nature and then argues to a god who must at best be finite in character.”4

So where there is a “universal” of sorts it is that the world is self-contained.

A simple reply may be offered to the atomism-from-autonomy criticism. This begins to sound like the Roman Catholic objection that once Christians wander from the magisterium of the Church, there will be as many interpretations of Scripture as there are interpreters. Note that the form is the same. It may be objected that the difference between the two cases favors the Van Tillian criticism, since in the case of natural theology it is precisely Scripture that is being abandoned for nature and reason. However, this does not follow. If there is an autonomous interpretation of nature, there is also an autonomous interpretation of Scripture.

As Van Tillianism confuses the order of being and the order of knowing in apologetic starting points, so it makes a similar confusion with respect to the object and subject in theological method. The pair, nature and Scripture, represent the objects of study, whereas an autonomous view into either represents the subjective approach.

We might want to consider the famous retort of the skeptic: “There are many religions, therefore—” Therefore, what? If this is a begging of the question, a non-sequitur, and a red herring rolled into one when it comes to our apologetic encounters, the Van Tillian has not made it clear how this form of argument is any less fallacious in dismissing an objective natural theology on account of the “many gods” resulting from those many natural theologians. The burden of proof is on the Van Tillian to demonstrate how a natural theology that operates from extra-biblical premises is thereby declaring independence (operating autonomously) from scriptural norm simply because many people have come to many conclusions operating from similar premises.

As to the self-contained nature dimension of the objection, this could only be an argument against extra-biblical natural theological antecedents if the extra-biblical quality of those antecedents constitute the essence of this self-contained all-controlling idea. All Christian apologists, provided they are orthodox, would simply recognize the problematic starting point here as naturalism. That is, the idea that nature is “self-contained” can mean either that nature is all there is or that, for some other reason, we cannot know anything beyond nature. Certainly nothing of supernature could be a part of the explanation for nature.

However, Van Tillians are not unique in denying this starting point. Nor is there anything incompatible with a classical approach with such a denial. Again, the burden of proof is on the Van Tillian to show that extra-biblical premises in natural theology logically imply this “self-contained nature” principle.

The Metaphysical Abstraction against the Living God in Christ

Sudduth uses Pascal’s same expression—the “god of the philosophers”—and he divides what is my second form under two heads. He calls these “incompatibilist” and “descriptive inadequacy”5 God of the philosophers objections. The first is so named because the deity in question is not compatible with the God of Scripture, the second because it at least fails to resemble that true God. On this generic level, this may seem to belong to that first class of objections containing a “bare theism.” What I have in mind is actually a claim to a very specific incompatible deity. Here it is more the final, abstract product of pagan theology in view.

Scott Swain introduces us to the field in the context of divine naming:

“Contemporary theology often treats these two modes of divine naming, which we might label the ‘metaphysical’ and the ‘personal,’ as conflicting approaches to the knowledge of God. According to McCormack, the threefold way of Pseudo-Dionysius ‘cannot yield knowledge of the true God (i.e., the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ)’ because it seeks ‘to speak of God in His otherness’ by first speaking ‘of something else,’ in this case, ‘cosmology.’”6

For Colin Gunton any talk of nature “implies corporeality and limitedness,”7 Then the ways of causation and negation relativize God to the creation, whereas the “outcome [of the narrative way] is that historical revelation and eternal being correspond to one another.”8 It turns out that, in addition to a more personal God, the modern theology promises a positive knowledge of Him, whereas the classical approach only knew God by what He is not—which according to these theologians, means nothing at all, except a projection of the creature.

For Robert Jenson, “It is precisely this distinction between the god and its revelation that the biblical critique of religion attacks. For the space normal religion leaves between revelation and deity itself is exactly the space across which we make our idolatrous projections.”9 He even develops the argument that the declaration “I am a jealous God” is aimed precisely at any naming of God beyond the self-identification in the narrative that God has chosen for Himself.10 This would seem to make not only philosophy, but any theology using too many extra-biblical concepts, a form of idolatry.

Of course the more refined version of this objection from Barth was to pit God revealed in Christ against God revealed in nature. If God was depicted in personal ways in the Old Testament narrative, much more so was this the case with the Word made flesh. Bruce McCormack summarized Barth’s reasoning,

“that if, in wishing to speak of God, one were to begin with something other than God, then at the point at which a transition is sought from that ‘something else’ to God, one would still be speaking of that ‘something else’ and not of God.”11

Barth’s Christocentric method, as an opposition to a metaphysical method, was motivated in part to free himself from having to attach his theology to this or that philosophical system.

However, even those theologians who tend to shy away from metaphysical conceptions of doing theology recognize a basic principle. Metaphysical first principles determine subsequent entailments. McCormack’s statement of this problem of inevitable distortion is telling for how he resolves the problem:

“Metaphysics has been resorted to in the ancient and modern worlds because it moves from generally-valid first principles (which should be shared by all) to the particularities of Christian belief. But the move from the general to the particulars unavoidably determines the content of the Christology which is then elaborated.”12

I am intrigued by the fact that McCormack simultaneously admits that at least some general principles “should be shared by all” and that this priority is not worth it after all because of the unavoidable tendency to draw wrong conclusions from true premises. This could really only mean one of two options: (1) McCormack agrees with some set of general truths of theism, holds that they “ought” to be determinative—so long as they are true—for subsequent Christian truths in some ideal state, but that the tradeoff is not worth it because too many distort those truths at the inferential level. Or perhaps, (2) McCormack agrees with some set of general truths of theism, but for some other reason does not hold that they ought to be determinative for subsequent Christian truths at all.

If the first, it seems that the better solution would be to identify the fault in the inference rather than to jettison the general truth. We might also ask what the loss of the general truth might entail. For instance, would we say that the general truth is not really “true” in any relevant sense to Christian theology? Perhaps when McCormack says that these general truths “should” be shared by all, that he is speaking only of the strategy (the expectation) of the classical metaphysician and not to the actual value of the truth claim. In any event, the whole thing smacks of a de jure argument against the metaphysical method rather than a de facto argument regarding its validity or soundness.

That brings us to the second possibility, that McCormack is only giving us a different way of stating the objection against metaphysical theology: which is a claim about the nature of the theological distortion per se.

Anti-metaphysical positions should not only be answered on their own terms. They should be put on the defensive. For example, the larger problem for the Barthian discovery of God in the narrative acts is the age-old philosophical problem of unity and diversity.

How exactly does one distinguish a divine act from a non-divine act without presupposing some reasoned knowledge of being via objective natures?

It may be answered that each subsequent act encountered need only presuppose that knowledge, whether of being or otherwise, gained from prior acts in the narrative, so that it will finally terminate on some first act, whether Genesis 1:1 or one to which each reader was introduced along the narrative path. But of these decisive acts (for Robert Jenson they are Exodus and Resurrection12), what difference would it make if it were YHWH who conquered Pharaoh or Christ who conquered death? What if it were Baal or Krishna? How do we know it was not them, under a Hebrew or Greek pseudonym? Whatever answer we give will finally terminate on a metaphysical assessment. One will have done his or her natural theology.

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1. James Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 151.

2. Ralph McInerny, Characters in Search of Their Author: The Gifford Lectures, 1999-2000 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 16.

3. Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2008), 138-143.

4. Van Til, “Nature and Scripture” in The Infallible Word: A Symposium by the Members of the Faculty of Westminster Theological Seminary (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2003), 283.

5. Michael Sudduth, The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2009), 186.

6. Scott Swain, “On Divine Naming” in Aquinas Among the Protestants, Manfred Svensson and David VanDrunen, ed. (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2018), 208; cf. Bruce McCormack, “Why Should Theology Be Christocentric? Christology and Metaphysics in Paul Tillich and Karl Barth,” Wesleyan Theological Journal, Vol. 45, 1 (2010), 63.

7. Colin E. Gunton, Act & Being: Towards a Theology of the Divine Attributes (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 150.

8. Gunton, Act & Being, 97.

9. Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, Volume 1: The Triune God (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997), 59.

10. Jenson, Systematic Theology, I:46-47.

11. McCormack, “Why Should Theology Be Christocentric?” 64.

12. McCormack, “Why Should Theology Be Christocentric?” 63.

13. Jenson, Systematic Theology, I:42, 44, 59, 63.