“Humbled Apologetics” Objections
In the Christian’s exhaustion with all of the challenges to natural theology, he may choose to amend its alleged boasts. He may be motivated to tone down what many perceive as excessive talk of “proof,” often associated with a general form of rationalism, or with false Christianities rooting temporal power in a universal nature, or with an abstract and impersonal theism detachment from history. This brings us to more “humble apologetics” models. The objections are simply a way of summarizing the critical backdrop that paves the way for those proposals.
I will cite Alister McGrath as a representative of the first form, Stanley Hauerwas of the second, and N. T. Wright of the third.1
Form 1. Humility beyond proof. “Demonstrative natural theology is rooted in modernist reaction and unjustifiable epistemological claims.”
Form 2. Humility beyond power. “Natural theology that begins in ‘the nature of things’ is a baptism of present power structures in the way that God has made the world.”
Form 3. Humility via historical involvement. “Demonstrative natural theology was speculative, static, and far removed from both history and humanity. A workable natural theology should follow the narrative flow of the Bible, the old creation being filled with signposts to the new creation.”
The reader will notice overlap and shared sympathies between all three authors. This will be true about three main commonalities: (1) a historical narrative that conflates classical and Enlightenment distinctives, (2) an antipathy toward objective and demonstrative speech especially those proposing to be foundational truths, and (3) an almost inevitable link between metaphysical approaches to Christian truth and apathetic (or even authoritarian) tendencies in ethics.
Humility Beyond Proof
Let us begin the first form of this objection with the perceived problem of proof itself. Charles Taliaferro writes that, “philosophers rarely advance what they describe as proof or disproof of the existence of God; in fact, philosophers rarely use the language of ‘proof’ in almost any domain of philosophy outside of formal logic. Instead, chastened by centuries of criticism, philosophers now are more ready to refer to good (or cogent or persuasive or sound) arguments or arguments that are poor or weak.”2
As with the following two forms, there is a historical narrative of the transition from natural theological humility to arrogance. What we will see here is a conflation between distinctives of classical Christian theology and those of the Enlightenment. This was common fare in the heyday of Emergent Church theology, as it brought postmodern ideas into the Evangelical mainstream between 2000 and 2010. Titles like “Humble Apologetics” and “Humble Orthodoxy” graced the shelves of the Christian bookstore. As the author’s axe swung back at the tree of the Enlightenment, it did not take long for the discerning reader to notice strike after strike going all the way down to the root of objective truth itself.
McGrath’s book on natural theology, The Open Secret (2008) was written in that context. There he wrote,
“the ‘Age of Reason’ gave rise to a family of approaches to natural theology which asserted its capacity to demonstrate the existence of God without recourse to any religious beliefs or presuppositions. This development, which reflects the Enlightenment’s emphasis upon the autonomy and sovereignty of unaided human reason, had had a highly significant impact on shaping Christian attitudes to natural theology.”3
The first thing to notice is the genealogical claim. Natural theology that begins with premises in common notions is a product of the Enlightenment. This would have surprised Augustine, Anselm, and Thomas Aquinas. But then again, these same authors will tell us that their first premises were actually within the context of faith—which, as I have written about elsewhere, can mean several different things.
For McGrath, this claim to proof assumed a “universal natural theology, based on common human reason and experience of nature.”4 This he calls “rationalist,” insofar as it is an “objective natural realm, open to public scrutiny and interpretation.”5 It has been similarly argued, by David Fergusson in a few of his books, that creation and providence were annexed by rationalism, so that the medieval contentment with mystery and miracle became objectified—more easily explained (and exploited) by man, yet more closed to a personal God.6
Scholarship in the post-war era, McGrath argues, chastens such rationalism. We now know that ‘Nature’ is essentially a constructed concept, yet rather than see it as inevitably the construct of ideology or other cultural forces, McGrath would put forth a Christian framework of nature.7 The first thing this rules out is a starting point in “pure reason,”8 although nature itself is ambiguous.9
Less controversial to the Christian, naturalism must also be ruled out such that physical phenomena is not the only legitimate ground of experience. Our very natural sense of transcendence was illegitimately overruled by modernity, and McGrath works on several threads toward “deconstruction of such modern interests.”10
The natural knowledge of God is an “open secret”—open because it is “a publicly accessible entity,” yet secret because its “true meaning is known only from the standpoint of the Christian faith.”11
A confluence of critical realism and the psychology of perception land McGrath in the observation that we are “not detached observers of nature,”12 hinting that the passive element of classical thinking was Gnostic, revelation having to meet the intellectual on that objective field—i.e., one free from historical, cultural factors.13
In evaluation of this “more humble” natural theology that replaces demonstration with a Christian lens toward nature, we should first address the question of method. McGrath argues in some places that nature is a gateway to a Christian interpretation (the open element), and that its true meaning requires a Christian framework (the secret element).14
Any tension here is resolved by an intentionally abductive approach in which one’s framework is informed, develops, and spirals back again to interpret facts with a wider, clearer lens of presuppositions.15 This is not intrinsically problematic. Its proposed advance in humility is rooted in Jesus’ own teaching. Inching closer to Wright’s thesis, which I will come to, “Jesus … appeals to the world of nature as a means of disclosing the kingdom of God.”16 In the parables and other teachings in the Gospels, we do indeed witness natural theology; but as to how this overcomes the alleged ambiguity of nature in a way that will differ fundamentally from classical approaches, McGrath does not successfully articulate.17
Moreover, how the initial facts—those that formed the preliminary lens—may be epistemically justified circles back to the debate over whether there is something like what critics of modernity calls a “universal reason” or an “objective nature.”18 The fallacies of equivocation, begging the question, and whole-to-part are all in play by insisting that, “the key to proper interpretation is not given in the natural order itself.”19
How “proper” a tool is for a job seems to depend on the nature of the job and the corresponding role of the exact part of the job for which the tool is immediately applied. Again, salvation and spiritual edification from Scripture are not “the jobs” of natural theology. If proper interpretation of nature is limited to building those initial premises to natural theological arguments, then the criticism is of no effect.
Humility Beyond Power
Of the second form, Stanley Hauerwas is an able representative, crediting both Barth’s reflections on natural theology and the explanations of the transition from the medieval to the modern thought world given by the likes of Alasdair McIntyre, John Milbank and Michael Buckley.20 Let us begin with his historical deconstruction of classical natural theology. Two main assumptions were pride and reaction.
Beginning with the pride element, Hauerwas laments standard accounts of modern decline from the medieval worldview as models in which “Christians ‘got it right’” before. Here is where postmodern ideas make their clearest mark on the objection. Demonstrative speech is imperialistic. Systematic speech expands that verbal rule to the outermost. This was another feature of “post-evangelical” authors during that decade, such as Stanley Grenz and John Franke, namely that before might ever makes right, right makes might. For Hauerwas, demonstrative foundations testifies to a Christianity having acted as a “civilizational religion.”21
This is an additional element to the ethical case against natural theology that the one made by Karl Barth. But it is crucial to catch. The link is simply between being right, metaphysically, and being in the right, morally. Hauerwas traces the next step from pride to reaction, that,
“in some ways modernity is an appropriate protest against Christian presumption. The protest against God in the name of humanity was and continues to be a tragic and misguided, but perhaps necessary, attempt to humble Christians whose lives have been constituted by pride incompatible with the humility that should come from the worship of a crucified God. One of the forms of the price we pay for that protest is called natural theology.”22
While, at the end of the narrative, natural theology in its demonstrative form shows up as a modern reactionary phenomenon, there were late medieval roots. Whereas Thomas’s five ways were “in the service of theology,”23—that is the common academic sidestepping of Thomistic natural theology that is unhelpfully repeated even by conservative theologians—Duns Scotus’s univocal predication of metaphysical being to that being contemplated by theology is the real culprit in advancing the modern natural theological categories. In short, Hauerwas was influenced by the Radical Orthodoxy thesis about Scotus and univocity. The same forces that led to modern thought in general led to an anxious, reactive construct of natural theology. He wrote that,
“The god that various Gifford lecturers have shown to exist or not to exist is a god that bears the burden of proof. In short, the god of the Gifford Lectures is usually a god with a problem.”24
Without the mythical secular, there would be no sustained cultural atheism. That was the case before the Enlightenment. Consequently, once upon a time, “there was no atheism with the correlative demand to develop a response called natural theology.”25 He even speaks of “those who think we must first ‘prove’ the existence of god before we can say anything else about god,” adding an element of the warranted belief objection.26 This was an arrogance issue because it made natural theological demonstrations “a necessary prolegomenon to test the rationality of theology proper.”27
Hauerwas must show a connection between this kind of pride, which might well remain privatized, and the more sweeping claims of Barth that natural theology is joined at the hip to certain authoritarian tendencies. One route is to see the “god of Nature” as an object of allegiance in competition with allegiance to God. Which source one derives revelation from is one’s ultimate authority. But apologists of Barth would point to development in his thought, in which nature was not the final culprit.
Hauerwas channels John Howard Yoder to insist “that people who wear crowns and who claim to foster justice by the sword are not as strong as they think ... It is that people who bear crosses are working with the grain of the universe.”28 Hence the title to his book.
Clearly Hauerwas, like Yoder and Barth, conceived of those who rationally demonstrate and those who wield the sword as both alike battling “for the control of one’s own corner of the fallen world.”29 If we consider the opening words of the Barmen Declaration, there is the rejection of “the false doctrine, as though the Church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and beside this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation.”
Hauerwas reports with approval that, “For Barth, the denial of natural theology as well as the discovery of the Christological center in theology were of a piece with his opposition to Hitler.”30 “Constantinianism,” of which natural theology is the apologetics arm, “is the attempt to make Christianity necessary, to make the church at home in the world, in a manner that witness is no longer required.”31
A response to this second form is difficult in one sense because a summary of it is difficult. Without a development of the background of Barth, the movement from natural theology’s more immediate difficulties to how it allegedly undermines an ethic of cross-centered love seems like a tremendous leap. In another sense, a response can be simplified by placing the burden of proof on the critic. More specifically, we might point to a correlation-equals-causation fallacy. Even if one can show some proximity between a classical natural theological context and a declension of the church’s witness, the burden is on the critic to show how the demonstrative form of such brief literary units could foster so much of an authoritarian personality. Beyond that, whatever natural theology was upheld by the liberal theology that led up to the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century bore no resemblance to classical brands.
Humility Via Historical Involvement
For the third form of the objection we may turn to N. T. Wright, specifically his book that grew out of the Gifford Lectures, History and Eschatology (2019). History is to be the field of natural theology; yet “history” itself has several meanings.32 This involves a clarification, an implication, and an accusation.
First, as a clarification, Wright wants to assure the reader that he is not re-opening the case for an evidentialist apologetic moving from the historicity of Jesus, and the case for the resurrection, on outward to Christian theism and back to all that Scripture says.33
Second, in one implication of the resurrection, Wright wants to return to the theme of his other books concerning Easter as the beginning of the new world (the kingdom of God).34 This would be “neither a mere adjustment within the present world nor the totally new replacement of the present world with something quite different.”35 In other words, neither Gnostic escapism, nor liberalized Hegelianism.
Third, there is a not so subtle accusation that in classical natural theology, a focus on “the god of ‘perfect being’” is simply “theology without history.”36 This was natural theology before Lisbon,37 conceived in the same way as a theology before the Holocaust, or before any other number of events revealing some dynamic or tragic earthiness that the older models could not have anticipated.
It was especially in the intersection of natural theology and the problem of evil that we see how Anglo-centric Wright’s conception of “classical natural theology” is. Without utilizing the word “classical” or even really “metaphysical,” Wright joins the demonstrative form to the hip of modernity. This was the playbook from the turn of the century in virtually all areas of theology before the retrieval movement came around—conflate classical metaphysical commitments with Enlightenment hubris. An audience not well versed in basic history, much less the history of ideas, was ready to lap it up.
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Nature was the standard before the problem of evil took center stage. Wright compares those dethroned early modern arguments to a “shrine.”38 The notion that the world around us mirrored God and heaven, so that even the Deistic framework could not overthrow the content of special revelation, was suspect of being insensitively optimistic.
“By the same token, the need to explain ‘natural evil’ is reduced. This world is a mere vale of tears; we should have never expected it to be pleasant; the sooner we escape it the better.”39
Overlapping with the social implications drawn forth by Hauerwas, Wright sees the older natural theological expressions as excuses for an elitism that is simultaneously arrogant and aloof. What is unique to Wright’s emphasis is specifically that history is the realm of humility, though he also goes further than McGrath and Hauerwas in reducing most natural theology to the “left-brained,” speculative, Western mode of knowledge.40
The purpose here is not to evaluate Wright’s positive model, but only the way in which he contributes to this species of objection. I would begin by challenging the historiography again.41 As with so many other critics of classical theology, Wright can show great awareness of the naïveté of modern narratives of progress,42 and yet proceed from portions of that same narrative’s rationale for having dispensed with more permanent things.
One useful example of this is an otherwise commendable focus on what is defective in the world, pointing forward to the perfect. There is much potential here. I take issue, however, with the notion that one can point forward to a perfect without also pointing upward.
To point “up,” that is, to that which transcends the contingent and mutable, is a metaphysical gesture. For all of his escape from modernity, there is something subtly Hegelian about pointing only forward for some telos to animate history.43 How does one know that this future Absolute (even if one wants to unashamedly call it the Kingdom of Christ) is indeed also the Kingdom of the one true God apart from metaphysical evaluations about that which is timeless?
As to classical natural theology being abstract or aloof, all of the same replies given to McGrath and to Hauerwas would apply here as well. One near example is Augustine’s City of God. It is treated with a passing remark in Wright’s section on various kinds of historicism. While taking care not to make the specific application to him—after all, who wants to pick a fight with Augustine in front of his reader if he doesn’t have to?—he says, “Writing like that drew neither on Jewish nor on New Testament theology.” Just as careful to fast-forward back to the Enlightenment, he adds that “modern attempts to sidestep the actual historical task” are comparable to “the Petrine temptation: to protect Jesus against his own vocation.”44
A charge Wright draws out more in The Challenge of Jesus, the Western church in between the time of the ecumenical creeds down through modernity has often featured at least a practical docetism.45
This is the link between history and humanity. What classical natural theology does in its method, Western Christology has done with Jesus. Wright is ready to label as a “historicism” any metaphysical approach that reasons: Since God is x, and since Jesus is God, therefore y must be the case in history.46
This simply does not follow. Metaphysics and historical method are distinct in a similar way to metaphysics and exegesis being distinct. A classical view only insists that the fundamental metaphysical questions are resolved to give reasonable shape to our investigation of history or the text. That natural theological demonstrations should bear the weight of bringing God into history, answer the whole problem of evil, and light an ethical fire in Christians is a puzzling expectation; and if such is not the expectation, then the burden remains (circling back to the objection 1) to show how Christians who have been helped by this or that argument cannot then move on to embrace this fuller historical faith.
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1. Alister McGrath, The Reenchantment of Nature (New York: Doubleday, 2002); The Open Secret: A New Vision for Natural Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008); Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2001); N. T. Wright, History and Eschatology: Jesus and the Promise of Natural Theology (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2019).
2. Charles Taliaferro, “A Contemporary View,” in Natural Theology: Five Views, 15.
3. McGrath, The Open Secret, 3-4.
4. McGrath, The Open Secret, 4.
5. McGrath, The Open Secret, 8.
6. David Fergusson gives this sense of the objection in several of his books, combining Barthian elements with open theist elements—cf. Faith and its Critics: A Conversation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Creation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014); The Providence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
7. McGrath, The Open Secret, 9, 12-14.
8. McGrath, The Open Secret, 5.
9. McGrath, The Open Secret, 116.
10. McGrath, The Open Secret, 46.
11. McGrath, The Open Secret, 16; cf. 125.
12. McGrath, The Open Secret, 106.
13. McGrath, The Open Secret, 105-08.
14. As to the nature-as-gateway side, Iris Murdoch’s concept of “the Good” and Roy Bhaskar’s “cosmic envelope” are potential paths for McGrath in spite of their intentional lack of reference to God (The Open Secret, 47, 52); and even the reluctant witness of John Dewey is “more nuanced” that typical accounts in which ideas are only ever pragmatic tools in a closed experience of nature. “The transcendent may not be ‘given’ in nature, as some kind of fixed, constituted element. Yet the notion may emerge through goal-directed human activity” (56).
15. Taliaferro describes the abductive approach as comparing “promising worldviews,” so as to “evaluate their internal coherence and their explanatory power.” Natural Theology: Five Views, 16.
16. McGrath, The Open Secret, 118.
17. There is one way that McGrath could distance himself from any classical metaphysical model in this respect. A hint comes in his pondering whether Jesus intended any “deeper rationale” in using natural illustrations, where he at least concludes: “Jesus’s preaching of the kingdom of God rests upon the capacity of nature, when properly interpreted, to disclose the things of God” (124). That clause, “when properly interpreted,” could make the difference if he wanted to go in a more Van Tillian direction. But that would make his objection fundamentally different, borrowing from the noetic effects of sin. That is not his emphasis. He also borrows from Gerard Manley Hopkins to propose what amounts to a false dichotomy in moving “away from rational analysis to the development of ‘seeing’ as an instrument of aesthetic discernment” (134).
18. cf. McGrath, The Open Secret, 125, concerning his summary of the “natural philosophy” of the Enlightenment.
19. McGrath, The Open Secret, 139.
20. Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, 18-25, 31-37.
21. Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, 32.
22. Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, 33.
23. Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, 33.
24. Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, 15.
25. Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, 33.
26. Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, 15.
27. Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, 26.
28. Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, 17.
29. Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, 17.
30. Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, 170.
31. Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, 221.
32. Wright, History and Eschatology, 73-89.
33. Wright, History and Eschatology, xiii.
34. His proposed model might even claim some elements of C. S. Lewis. Think for example of his category, “miracles of the old creation,” which are essentially grace perfecting nature in sudden bursts. Lewis wrote, “Each miracle writes for us in small letters something that God has already written, or will write, in letters almost too large to be noticed, across the whole canvas of Nature.” Miracles (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 177. But lest anyone think that this is a rehashing of the deist “Christianity as old as creation,” of Matthew Tindal or other such hints that Scripture is a mere republication of what was already there in nature, the signposts Wright wants to highlight are specifically broken signposts to the new world— History and Eschatology, 217-49; cf. Broken Signposts: How Christianity Makes Sense of the World (New York: HarperOne, 2020).
35. Wright, History and Eschatology, xiii.
36. Wright, History and Eschatology, xv.
37. Wright, History and Eschatology, 5-6.
38. Wright, History and Eschatology, 11.
39. Wright, History and Eschatology, 34.
40. Wright, History and Eschatology, 188.
41. As one example, the dualism of God in Himself versus God in history prefigured “Lessing’s point in a different register,” which Wright characterizes as “Epicureanism” (31), though we get a sense of his use, as it is later repeated in terms of naturalistic resistance to even considering the resurrection (191). Even if it is a workable analogy, since there are better words and much potential for false analogy mixed in, it is anachronistic.
42. As Fergusson does in his Providence of God, so Wright insightfully deconstructs the Enlightenment’s habit of hijacking Christian principles and virtues for secular use: History and Eschatology, 16-29.
43. Wright shuns Hegel’s system and shuns Rudolph Bultmann’s use of “eschatology” as being interchangeable with existential categories and with a program that winds up looking too much like Hegel, who Bultmann also criticized (History and Eschatology, 90-95, 112). If I am correct, then one lesson may be that there are countless roads to something like a Hegelian dialectic.
44. Wright, History and Eschatology, 116.
45. Wright, The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999)
46. Wright, History and Eschatology, 124-25.
