Approaches to Theology

I was planning on leaving off of theological speculation after last week's confessions, but the discussion -- and especially some thoughts provoked by Janet and Tex -- convinced me that it would be worthy to talk a little more about the broader issue of theology.

These are always contentious discussions, and partly the reason is that there are several different approaches that seem to lead to conflicting results. The first one is suggested by Janet: accept that God is so different from us that we can't really understand him at all. And yet even in that she makes some positive claims:

[W]e humans can't possibly understand God's ways. A worm understands more about your 401(k) investment strategy, than we understand about God's plan. To an unborn child, birth is a catastrophe, the end of everything he knows; but to us, we know that it's the start of something far greater, and the end of something that could not possibly go on any longer.

I would be very, very cautious about seeing "the hand of God" in anything other than your own life (and even that, mostly in retrospect). God is never doing just one thing, and further is primarily concerned with the salvation of individual souls rather than anything else.

"It's really hopeless" is not a happy claim, but it could be true without being happy. But it may not be functional even if it is true, as Kant said of determinism: even if you decide to believe that you have no free will and everything is determined by physics, the choice to make that decision about what to believe seems to be a free choice. You can't really function as someone who believes in determinism; every day you experience choices that you seem to make and need to reason about (e.g. 'should I have donuts for lunch, or something healthier?' doesn't seem to be deterministic; even if Krispy Kreme just opened across the street and makes donuts right at your lunchtime, it seems like you can at least occasionally decide to eat something else). Students and teachers like Nicholas of Cusa have gone a long way down this path of showing that God's infinity makes him fundamentally unknowable; I myself doubt whether infinity is a proper metaphor, because it seems to be a feature of creation rather than the uncreated. Still, many of Nicholas' basic points hold even if you say that infinity isn't a large enough concept, so to speak. 

Fortunately, you have another road you can choose, which is scripture. This seems to be the source of Janet's claim that God is principally interested in saving souls: it's not reasoned from nature, as we can't even prove the existence of souls from nature. Scripture provides a number of positive claims about God. For example, the prophecy of Ezekiel provides an extremely mysterious account of the chariot of God that Moses Maimonides wrote a book about interpreting. Such interpretations do tend to suggest that God takes sides for reasons of his own, as with Moses; we still may not always understand these reasons, as when he orders Joshua to engage in what seems like wholesale genocide. Sometimes people doubt at least some of the scriptures' authenticity, especially when it seems like an argument that God took one group's side over the other's; the scripture really does seem to say that, but it's out of order of deductions like those that begin the Declaration of Independence, i.e. that God loves everybody equally.

For Christians, scripture also includes an apparently easier path: Jesus as intermediary personhood, whom you can relate to directly as one human being to another (fully man and fully god, somehow). This point is raised by Tex; yet of course Jesus is not merely man, though fully man, and by nature exceptional and extraordinary, and thus a model that can't be expected to hold for the ordinary and normal. 

Still, it's attractive because then the path is not necessarily much harder than developing a relationship with another person, except that you only get to meet the person through scripture or as you imagine interactions through prayer. However, then you have the same problem as the mystic, who approaches God and knowledge of god through meditation: how much of what you are 'finding out about God' really is your imagination rather than a genuine encounter with the divine? I'm reminded of a favorite quote from the movie Ladyhawke, wherein the thief says to the knight, "Sir I talk to God all the time, and the truth is he never mentioned you." Yet at least in the movie, the thief was just trying to avoid an arduous and scary duty that really did lead to what the author depicts as prophecy and divine justice. 

You can try to test your imagination or meditations also against scripture, of course, to see that you're not getting too far astray. But we also have scriptural interactions with God the Father in the Old Testament, especially in the Book of Job. Job is actually full of a set of claims about God that I would say are characteristic of another major approach to theology, which is negative theology. Job, upset about all the misery inflicted upon him even though he has tried to live a just and faithful life, is confronted with evidence of things God is not: specifically, God does not share Job's limitations. Job can't hang the stars in the sky, or set the firmament on its foundations. We aren't really told anything about how God can do those things, so we don't really know much more about him: but we do know that there are ways in which God is different from us, and these are ways in which he lacks our limitations and instead possesses great powers. 

Job contains at least one passage, though, that suggests yet another approach to God. I have written before on several occasions about its description of the horse: 

Hast thou given the horse strength? hast thou clothed his neck with thunder? Canst thou make him afraid as a grasshopper? the glory of his nostrils is terrible. He paweth in the valley, and rejoiceth in his strength: he goeth on to meet the armed men. He mocketh at fear, and is not affrighted; neither turneth he back from the sword. The quiver rattleth against him, the glittering spear and the shield. He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage: neither believeth he that it is the sound of the trumpet. He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.

This is an interesting passage, though: because horses are like that, but only if men make them so. By pure nature, a horse will avoid any danger, and is scared like a grasshopper -- or of a grasshopper. The Lord's point in speaking to Job, if Job were the kind of man who could understand it, was that this is indeed what men do with horses.

We usually call this approach "natural theology." The basic idea is that you can learn about God from his works. It is possible to reason about the world that we do encounter, and here we find that God -- as authors of the rules of the world -- has set the basic moral structure of reality, which we can deduce. We can deduce it from the way the world works. This project was one that the Greeks were already working on when they encountered Christianity, and a lot of the machinery is Aristotelian. We can know what the virtues are because they are the qualities that fairly reliably produce good outcomes: self-discipline, mastery and moderation of appetites, courage, even justice because it helps us flourish among other people. Aristotle is clear that we should reason from what works 'always or for the most part,' because sometimes chance occurrences can create exceptions: the courageous man may usually save his life and carry the battle, but he might accidentally charge into an arrow he didn't see coming. The virtue still holds because it usually works out better for a person or a society to have it; chance is just when random things happen at the same time in a way that creates an unusual result. 

To bring this together with the horse, Aristotle argues that arts entail the perfection of what was left only partly perfected by nature. The horse's virtuous qualities that we encounter in Job are brought about by humans noticing the potential in the natural for these things, and then using art to bring them about and perfect them. In this way we are doing what J. R. R. Tolkien called subcreation: not a true act of creation of the sort that God can do, but a subordinate work on what we find in God's creation to make it a fuller realization of the qualities we have learned, also from the study of a nature that is God's creation, to be the virtuous and excellent ones. 

This creates conflicts with the other approaches. If God is so much more powerful and wise (Job), why didn't he create the things perfectly to begin with? Or perhaps he did, and we are screwing it up because our reasoning about his work is so inferior (Janet). But perhaps this is part of what God wants for us, and he does value our reasoning about his work as well as our own work; and in fact part of the point is that he wants us to do some of it (Tex).

Notice also the conflicts with reasoning from apparent miracles, which are places where what is ordinarily the usual course of actions is set aside for no obvious reason. To reason that Trump was protected by a miracle in the recent assassination attempt is to do exactly what Aristotle warned against: to reason not from what is 'always or usually' the case, i.e. where you can be reasonably sure that a Form is involved, but from wild chance exceptions. Maybe those just happen sometimes, and it is our error to find meaning in them.

Yet to bring us back around to the scriptural approach, it does seem like God gets involved sometimes, that he does take sides among men and among nations. Then miracles look like admissible evidence, if only we knew of what.