"What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?" That was the question the Church Father Tertullian asked, and ever since then Christians have been attempting to answer it. Can we use ideas taken from secular philosophy to inform our understanding of theology? Is there even a difference between philosophy and theology? Dr. Alex (Shao Kai) Tseng stops by to consider these questions and provide an overview of Christianity's interaction with philosophers from Plato to Hegel. Also in this episode: Alex describes the lengths he will go to for tamales.
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Alex's Tribute to J.I. Packer
"What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?" That was the question the Church Father Tertullian asked, and ever since then Christians have been attempting to answer it. Can we use ideas taken from secular philosophy to inform our understanding of theology? Is there even a difference between philosophy and theology? Dr. Alex (Shao Kai) Tseng stops by to consider these questions and provide an overview of Christianity's interaction with philosophers from Plato to Hegel. Also in this episode: Alex describes the lengths he will go to for tamales.
Purchase Alex's Books
Facebook Page
Alex's Tribute to J.I. Packer
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Alex Tseng:Hello and welcome to another episode of the(A)Millennial podcast. My name is Amy Mantravadi and I'll be your host until such time as I sell the film rights to my novels to a major Hollywood studio for eight figures, naturally maintaining my right to final script approval. I'd also consider a Bollywood version of The Chronicle of Maud under the right circumstances. Today, I'm going to be speaking with Dr. Alex Tseng about the use of philosophy in theology. Be advised: This episode is definitely a deep dive. Some of the terminology may be difficult for the uninitiated to understand, but if you're ready to go a bit deeper, then by all means proceed. We never learn unless we push ourselves, and the question of whether and when we can use secular philosophies to think about spiritual things is incredibly relevant, as anyone who's ended up in a social media debate about Critical Race Theory and the Church can attest. Not for the first time, it is the Apostle Paul who provides us with some of the best biblical food for thought regarding this issue. However, the picture he paints leaves room for interpretation. On the one hand, Paul makes clear that the eternal truth of God is superior to the passing philosophies of this age and divine revelation always trumps human reason. In 1st Corinthians 1:18-25. Paul writes,"For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God. For it is written,'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and the cleverness of the clever I will set aside.' Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom did not come to know God, God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. For indeed Jews, ask for signs and Greeks search for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God, because the foolishness of God is wiser than men and the weakness of God is stronger than men." Based solely on that passage, we might conclude that Paul had an entirely negative view of the so-called wisdom of the Greeks, but we must read it in the context of all of scripture. In the Book of Acts, we read about Paul's visit to the city of Athens, the center of Western philosophical thought at the time. When he had the opportunity to speak before a gathering of intellectuals, Paul did not hesitate to appeal to the writings of their own philosophers in his presentation of the gospel. Pick up at the story in Acts 17:22-33."So Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said,"Men of Athens, I observed that you are very religious in all respects, for while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this inscription:'To an unknown God.' Therefore, what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and all things in it, since he is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands, nor is he served by human hands as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all people life and breath and all things. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation, that they would seek God, if perhaps they might grope for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. For in him we live and move and exist, and even some of your own poets have said,'For we also are his children.' Being then the children of God, we ought not to think that the divine nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and thought of man. Therefore, having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent, because he has fixed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness through a man whom he has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising him from the dead.' Now, when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some began to sneer, but others said,'We shall hear you again concerning this.' So Paul went out of their midst." In that speech, Paul quoted from the writers Epimenides and Aratus, drawing upon common philosophical ground to make his point that the God who gives existence to all of us had become incarnate as a man and died and risen again. Paul made use of this common ground to bridge the gap of understanding with the Greeks, but he also stood firmly upon the revealed truth of God, even when it caused those who were supposedly wise to scoff. This example is a good one for us as we consider how to think about our faith and share the gospel with others in a world full of competing philosophies. Before ado is furthered any further, let's head to the interview.
Jon Guerra:[MUSIC PLAYS]
Alex Tseng:And I'm here with Dr. Alex Tseng, who was born in Taiwan and raised in Canada. He was educated at the University of British Columbia for his bachelor's degree, at Regent college in Vancouver for his Masters of Divinity, at Princeton Theological Seminary for his Masters of Theology, and at the University of Oxford for his Master of Studies and his Doctor of Philosophy. He is a contributor to the Oxford Handbook of 19th Century Christian thought, and he is currently the research professor in the philosophy department of Zhejiang university in Hangzhou, China. Is that anywhere close to the correct pronunciation? That's very good.
Amy Mantravadi:I tried to look it up and you know, the sad thing is I was finding conflicting pronunciations online.
Alex Tseng:Oh, don't worry about it. People across China pronounce the word differently.
Amy Mantravadi:Well, I figured that was probably part of the problem, but anyway, very, very prestigious university in China. And his published works include Karl Barth's Infralapsarian Theology, birds, and analogy of sending grace. And he's also written introductions to the thought of Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, and Karl Barth as part of Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing's Great Thinkers series. So welcome Alex. I'm so excited to be talking to you from halfway around the world.
Alex Tseng:Thank you so much for having me.
Amy Mantravadi:Yeah, absolutely. So I understand that apart from achieving great things in philosophy and theology, your career goal is to own your own Mexican restaurant so that you can have tamales for lunch every day. Could you elaborate on this further, and have you ever considered that it might be possible to have tamales for lunch without owning a Mexican restaurant?
Alex Tseng:That's possible, but the thing is, as long as I'm staying in China, I'll have to make my own tamales every day, which takes time. So I figured the easier way would be to own a Mexican restaurant and have a chef who would do that for me.
Amy Mantravadi:So yeah, really, you just need a personal chef to come and make you your tamales, but that's nice if you're already going to be paying a chef that you're going to be sharing the wonders of Mexican food with everyone else. I mean, that's very generous of you. Well, that's good. I'm glad that we got that straightened out. So getting onto what we're going to be talking about today, which is sort of the way that philosophy and different philosophical ideas have been incorporated into Christian theology, the words philosophy and theology both derive from ancient Greek, where they mean love of wisdom- that's philosophy- and words about God- theology- respectively. Based on these definitions, there are many potential ways that the two disciplines could overlap. So in your opinion, where should we be drawing the line between philosophy and theology?
Alex Tseng:Right. As my late teacher, J.I. Packer, used to say, theology is the study of God in relation to everything that is not God, and proper theology proceeds from faith to understanding of the holy one, and this understanding leads to fear of the Lord. Now, what does the Bible tell us? The Bible says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and knowledge of the holy one is understanding: Proverbs 9:10. And what's philosophy? Philosophy, as you mentioned, is composed of two Greek words meaning"the love of wisdom": philos and sophia. And if we look at it that way, theology is philosophy. Theology is the love of wisdom, wisdom as knowledge and understanding of the Lord, and in that sense philosophy is theology. Now the question is, what is wisdom according to the ancient Greek philosophers, because this term comes from Greek. Well, in the traditional of[inaudible] and Plato, philosophical wisdom is expressed supremely by a little phrase,"Know thyself." That is for mortal beings to know their place before the immortal God. So theology was, in fact, a discipline of philosophy in ancient Greece- was, in fact, the central discipline of philosophy. I have this quote in front of me from Aristotle, which reads,"There are three kinds of theoretical sciences: physics, mathematics, and theology. The class of theoretical sciences is the best, and of these themselves, the last name is best or deals with the highest of existing things. And each science is called better or worse in virtue of its proper object." That, by the way, was from Aristotle's Metaphysics, Book 11. And for Plato, the teacher of Aristotle, the task of theology is to speak of God as God truly is. Now, if we can come to understand this definition of theology this way- Plato was situated in a social setting where most people were what we would call pagans. They believed in the gods of Greek mythology. Ancient Greek paganism already taught the concept of divinity as good and wise and almighty."Only the gods are wise," the ancient Greek pagan would tell you, and by wisdom, they meant omniscience."The gods are good," they would say, that is to say, the gods are omnibenevolent and the gods are almighty. But if the kind of things that the Hellenistic deities do contradict these attributes of the concept of divinity, according to the Greek myths, then how are we to make sense of these mythologies? For example, if Zeus is almighty, why would you say that he needs Hercules to help him out to thwart the evil plot of Hades? And if Zeus is wise, how come he didn't know about Hades' plot? And if all these gods are good, why would they fight among themselves? If they're all wise, why would there be disagreements among them? If they are all wise in the sense of omniscience- that is, if they all know everything there is to rational[inaudible]- then there would never be any disagreement between them, would there? So for Plato, these mythological stories about the gods are incredible, and for him the task of philosophy is to sort out the concept of divinity scientifically, using the term science in a broader sense, that is in the sense of systematic knowledge. So what's the problem with this approach to the quest for wisdom according to Christianity? Well, Christianity teaches the transcendence of God, nd this kind of transcendence is different from the kind of transcendence that the ancient Greeks spoke of. They also knew that God is transcendent in some way, but the way they approach this understanding of transcendence is that they would first have a abstract idea of transcendence, and they would flesh out this idea with their own experiences and understandings and concepts. But the problem is, if God is truly transcendent and God is truly infinite and we finite, then that would mean that our reason cannot contain God. So there is a Latin phrase, which means in English,"The finite cannot contain the infinite," and that is what God's transcendence entails. So Christian theology emphasizes revelation. If God never revealed himself to us, then there is no way for us to know him. And so I would say that the difference between Christian theology and non-Christian theologies, or Christian philosophy and non-Christian philosophies, is that the Christian would proceed from a starting point in faith to understanding of God, and that would require that we come to know God concretely first as the God who revealed himself to Moses as the I AM, and then we come to understand from this concrete encounter between God and Moses what it means to speak of God as being. And non-Christian philosophies would proceed from an abstract notion of being and try to say,"Being is God." So we might put it this way: The Bible tells us that God is being(Exodus 3:14). Well, it doesn't really put it that way, but that's how it's been interpreted by Christian theologians and philosophers like Augustine.
Amy Mantravadi:Sure, sure.
Alex Tseng:Or how about this? The Bible tells us that,"God is love." The Bible doesn't tell us that being is God or love is God, but God is love. And this is the God who revealed himself supremely in Jesus Christ, who sacrificed himself for us, and because God loved us first in Jesus Christ, that is how we can speak of God as love. So we say God is love, and we don't proceed from an abstract concept of love and call love God, and I think that is the crucial difference between Christian and non-Christian theologies and philosophies.
Amy Mantravadi:Yeah, I think there are some good points there in that whether we're talking about Christian philosophy or theology- and just as a side note, as you mentioned, the words science and philosophy mean somewhat different things than they did back when the Greeks were using them in the ancient days. They would speak of science and probably include theology under that, whereas we would never- We think of them as being two totally different things now. But if you don't begin with the notion of one omnipotent God as Creator from whom we have wisdom revealed, and maybe we can discover that wisdom in nature, but it's coming from God as creator- If you don't begin with that, you end up with a very different system. And the Greek philosophers, because we do find a lot of God's revelation in creation, they were able to use the reason that God had given them to discover a lot of truths. But as you said, they were trying to harmonize that with a view of God that was very different in that they even had multiple gods who were contradictory with each other. So I think even right there, you just- that kind of tension between what we can incorporate and what we cannot incorporate from pagan ideas or non-Christian ideas, I think is something that will be coming up in pretty much every question we're asking today. So yeah, I think that's a good summary. So from the very beginning of Christianity in the 1st century AD/CE, there was a debate about how much Christians should rely on or be influenced by the prevailing philosophies of the day, whether those be Stoicism or Neoplatonism or Gnosticism, and a lot of these ideas were coming from what's now Greece. And the Church father Tertullian famously asked,"What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?" using the two cities as representatives of philosophy and theology. However, other Church Fathers, such as Clement of Alexandria, promoted the idea that philosophy was the handmaid of theology, so basically that it is at the service of theology for its benefit, but theology is the one that's in control. So we see the influence of Greek philosophy in certain parts of the New Testament itself and the writings of scholars like Origen and Augustan of Hippo. What were some of the prevailing opinions among Christians of this time, and how has that debate that they had continued to resonate down to the present day?
Alex Tseng:I think one specific Christian theologian worth mentioning- worth discussing is Augustine, whom you just mentioned. But all these great Christian thinkers in the patristic period, we must remember, lived under the reign of the Roman Empire, so they were struggling to witness to Jesus Christ in this context. And it's really significant that the New Testament itself[was] composed not in a vacuum. So within the very context of the Roman Empire, the Gospel of Luke tells us that Jesus, the King of Kings, was born under the reign of Caesar Augustus. That's something really significant. Augustus was the second Caesar of the Roman Empire after Rome became an empire. Before that Rome, was a republic and Julius Caesar was the first Caesar. He was assassinated and Rome basically went into anarchy and it was Octavius who united Rome once again, and he imposed himself as imperator or emperor, and he was the first ever ruler of Rome to establish himself as a deity. He called himself Augustus, and Augustus is a word that people would use on the gods, meaning august. That's the direct translation: august. And he called himself Augustus, and right after his death, he was listed among the gods. Well, so he had to die to become a god, but there was already this inherent deity or divinity within him. So the Roman Empire was deified in that way. And Augustus made this story the official narrative of the rise of Rome or the narrative that justified the power of Rome. That story is the Aeneid by the Roman poet or the Latin poet...
Amy Mantravadi:Virgil.
Alex Tseng:Virgil, yes. It's about this founding father of the Latin race. I shouldn't use the word race because race was not really a well defined concept.
Amy Mantravadi:Right, right.
Alex Tseng:But the Latin nation- how about that? He was the founder of the Latin nation and he was chosen by fate to rise as a super power to rule over the nations with divine law, so that was sort of a pagan doctrine of election. And that was doctrine created by the official narrative chosen by Caesar Augustus, and it was under his reign that Jesus was born. So we must understand that, if I may borrow a phrase from the theologian Karl Barth, you must understand world history as the outward basis of redemptive history. That's not how Barth puts it. Barth says creation is the outward basis of the covenant. And I'm not a Barthian. I identify myself as a Neocalvinist. I'm a Neocalvinist, so I talk about redemptive history as Creation, Fall, and redemption- as God's plan, which was made by an agreement between the persons of God before Creation and election. So world history is the outward basis of redemptive history, and redemptive history is the inward basis of world history. That is to say, world history is this stage on which redemptive history is enacted, and it is for the world to see. And Christians become actors in the passion of Jesus Christ in this world for the world to see. We are like actors in a theater. We become spectacles- that' s the biblical word. Now, if we are to fulfill that vocation, then we must imitate the New Testament authors as well as the Old Testament authors in using the language of the world and not the language angels or the language of a heavenly race that no one on earth understands. And that is why, as you pointed out, New Testament authors adopted Greek philosophical terms. Perhaps they didn't directly borrow it from the Greeks, but rather they borrowed it through the Hellenized Jewish philosophers. If you look at the Septuagint translation of Genesis 1, you find that that is the version that the Apostle John adopted in the Gospel of John, which speaks of the beginning and the Word,"en arche en ho logos":"arche" and"logos", these are originally Greek terms. Pretty much every Greek philosopher needed to talk about these concepts. Parmenides was one of the Greek philosophers who talked about arche and logos. Logos is sort of like the cosmic principle according to which everything operates, and arche is the origin of everything. And the Stoics also made a great deal out of these terms, and Jewish philosophers, especially those in the city of Alexandria, made use of these Greek concepts to interpret the Hebrew scriptures, and they engage with debates in Greek philosophy. For example, Creation, according to the Bible: how are we to interpret Genesis 1-2, especially Genesis 1, especially 1:1? What is the only reasonable interpretation according to what we know about God throughout the Hebrew tradition as the only God worthy of our worship? Their conclusion was that God's creation cannot be like the kind of creation that philosophers like Plato or Aristotle talked about. Creation must be creation out of nothing. The concept was actually already there, and that was used to interpret Genesis 1:1. The thing is that they didn't really develop a mature set of vocabularies, and they didn't develop a robust ontology to make sense of creation out of nothing. We have to wait until Augustine to formulate that ontology of Creation. They benefited from interacting with the Greeks, and you see traces of that in Apostle Paul's debate with the philosophers in Athens. He debated the Stoics and the Peripatetics, and he told them that God is not only the God who made the universe, but God who made the universe and everything in it. That is to say he had a concept of God, not just using pre-existing material, chaotic material to create a orderly universe, orderly cosmos, but that he created those raw materials too, so he created the universe and everything in it. So Christian philosophers and theologians, or I should just call them theologians- Christian theologians, Christian thinkers, benefited from interacting with Greek philosophy. And they took advantage of the concepts and terms developed by the Greeks, but they also realized that they held too or we as Christians hold to fundamentally different presuppositions than any school of philosophy, so those philosophical terms needs to be revised and sometimes even redefined in order that they can fit into our own system of faith, such that they can express the contents of our faith. And one example would be the development of the Trinitarian doctrine in the ante-Nicean period. That's the period leading up to the Council of Nicea. The Church Fathers were looking for the right words to express the New Testament references to God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. What do you call them? Is there a generic term that you can call Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? Now they found help from the Greeks. In Platonism, for example, there is talk about the three principle hypostases- the one, intellect, and soul- but in that terminological system the word"hypostases" is synonymous with"ousia," both meaning substance: substance as a being that is actual. So it's not something that just is as an abstract thing, but it's something that is concretely. That is what substance means. Different philosophies have different interpretations that the concept of substance, ousia or hypostases. Plato would say that true substance is not within this world that we can sense- the sensible world. True substance is beyond this world. Aristotle would say that something can be called substantial only if that thing comprises both form and matter, so they held to different theories of substance, but the concept of substance was common to all. They just made different interpretations of what substance is. And the Christian Fathers joined this debate in an attempt to talk about the substance of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and they found that Greek terminology was inadequate to express this New Testament concept, so they needed to develop another concept that is not there in Greek philosophy. So they redefined the term hypostases and gave it personal characteristics. You can think of the hypostases of God as agents of the same substance: personal agents of the same substance. So I think that is how philosophy has been a handmaid to theology, and that gives an example of why we need to continue to consult philosophical wisdom, even if this wisdom is not saving wisdom, but only general kind of wisdom, because only in that process will we be able to speak the gospel to this world. We shouldn't invent our own philosophy and our own linguistic system. We need to speak the language of the world, and perhaps not just[inaudible] philosophy, but also sociology and psychology, and perhaps even things that tend to be deemed antithetical to the Christian faith, like Critical Race Theory.
Amy Mantravadi:Well, yeah, you threw a little controversy in there at the end. I appreciate how you're describing- because especially Trinitarian theology is one area of theology where if you say,"We shouldn't use any terms that came from Greek philosophy," your Trinitarian theology starts to collapse, because the people of that time were looking for some way to describe how God can be three in one, and they made use of, like you said, the terms of ousia or hypostases- these ideas that you could have things be the same substance and yet one God and three persons, and there were huge debates over single syllables of words that they chose to use to describe that. But I also appreciate your mentioning how John and his gospel begins by talking about this concept of the logos and basically describing how this thing that Greek philosophers have kind of been seeking after is truly fulfilled in Jesus Christ: that he is the logos or the Word. And sometimes in our translations in English or whatever language would read the Bible in, if it's not ancient Greek, we don't always understand how much those ideas are coming, as you said, not necessarily directly from Greek philosophy, but the Jewish philosophers of the day had been so influenced by Greek culture. But at the same time, while they would borrow certain terms, you mentioned the fact that Plato and Aristotle don't really have a concept of creation coming out of nothing, or"ex nihilo" as we'd say in Latin. So that becomes something over the centuries that Christian theologians have to reject- that part of Greek thinking- because obviously that's a big difference with Christianity, and oftentimes the differences- Well, as we mentioned previously, it comes back to the idea that we have a specific God who's Creator and who reveals himself, and that sort of marks the boundaries of what we can and cannot use from pagan philosophy. So, yeah, I think you covered a lot of ground there and I appreciate that. So fast forwarding about a thousand years, there was another period where there was significant debate about philosophy's role in theology, and that was in Europe during the 12th and 13th centuries as the translation of many of Aristotle's works and also the importation of ideas from the Islamic world caused significant controversies at, for instance, the University of Paris, which was one of the main academic institutions at the time, and elsewhere. The most influential theologian to come out of this period was Thomas Aquinas. Thinking about Aquinas specifically, how was he shaped by the controversies of his day? And how do we see the influence of philosophy in his works, particularly the rediscovery of a lot of Aristotle's writings that had happened in the century prior to when he was writing?
Alex Tseng:Let me first say that I think Thomas Aquinas is one of the most widely misunderstood figures in modern Protestant thought. He is often taken as this Christian theologian who further Hellenized Christianity, so Augustine Hellenized Christianity with Platonism and Thomas Aquinas further Hellenized Christianity with Aristotelianism. I don't think that picture is accurate. And this goes back to our discussion of the differences between philosophy and theology, or Christian philosophies and theology and all non-Christian philosophies and theologies. Now, we talk about this central methodological notion of the incapacity of finite creatures to contain the infinite God. The Latin goes,"Finitum non capax infiniti." God is transcendent. God is infinite and we are finite creatures, so there's no way for us to know God exhaustively or comprehensively. Our knowledge of God can only be an analogy to God's self-knowledge. It cannot be, if I can use a theological term here, univocal to God's self-knowledge. That is to say, it cannot be identical with God's self-knowledge. So how are finite creatures to know the infinite God? There is this word in English that's used rather negatively in our time. The word is speculation. When we talk about speculation, we tend to think about a groundless, suspicious or that kind of connotations, but the word speculation actually comes from the Latin for mirror: speculum. So what does speculation mean? Speculation means that- It comes from Romans 13, sorry, 1 Corinthians 13. Now we are looking for a mirror. We don't look at God face-to-face. We are looking through a mirror. What we see is a mirror image. We don't see God in himself. What we see is God's image reflected through creation and reflected through redemption. John Calvin says that scripture is a mirror of God. We don't see God's essence. We see God's essence reflected through the redemption that scripture testifies to. We don't see God's glory in himself. Reformed theology distinguishes between three kinds of the divine glory: 1) God's essential glory- That's God's glory in himself. No creature can bear this glory. It's a consuming glory. So we only see God's glory reflected through creation, and that is called 2) God's manifested glory. There's a third category of God's glory called 3) God's personal glory, and that is God's glory revealed to us in the person of Jesus Christ, who is himself God. Yet that glory is hidden in humble flesh in such a way that we can only behold that glory by faith and not by sight, at least in the current stage of redemptive history. As to the ultimate future, do we see God's essential glory? The standard Reformed answer would be,"No, we still see God's glory manifested in Jesus Christ, although it's the risen Christ that we behold and the ascended Jesus Christ, and no longer a glory hidden in mortal flesh. So we don't see God's essential glory. We see God's glory as reflected through God's creation and redemption, and that leads to a theological method called speculation. We look for things that constitute mirrors of God's glory: mirrors of God's essence, God's attributes. Scripture is, of course, one of them- that's what John Calvin says- and creation is a mirror of God's glory. And Thomas Aquinas says that even in the garden of Eden, Adam could not see God's glory face to face, but could only behold God's glory in"created effects." So his theological method or his apologetical method was called an"a posteriori" method. Back in those days, or actually before the mid-18th century or so, the terms"a priori" and"a posteriori" basically meant arguments from cause to effect or from effect to cause. Now, God is the first cause of creation, so we cannot behold the first cause immediately. We can only praise the glory of the first cause from created effects, and that gave rise to Aquinas' method of speculation. This method is sometimes expressed by the phrase,"Faith seeking understanding." So from the starting point of faith, we seek to understand that which is manifested to us and make sense of the mirror image that is presented to us. And Aquinas' program is basically a faith seeking understanding program, although it might look very different from the program of say, Anselm of Canterbury. One of Aquinas's most influential arguments is the cosmological argument. He has his five ways, right? These are all arguments from effect to cause, and I think the most powerful of them is the cosmological argument. The argument was critically retrieved from Aristotle. Aristotle argued that the universe must have a Creator, and that Creator we call God. Why is it that we must acknowledge the existence of a Creator of the universe? His argument goes like this: If we look at all things that exist around us, they all exist in time, and they all have a cause of their existence in time. For Aristotle, time is a precondition of existence. Time is not something that we can call being or a thing, but it's the condition of being. So if we look at all beings, they exist in time and they all have a cause in time. Now let's think of this thing, X. It has a cause of its existence, and we call that cause A, and A needs another cause of its existence, so there's a regress of causes going on here. Now, can this regressive causation be infinite? If there's an infinite regress of causes or an infinite chain of causes before X comes into existence, that will mean that X would have needed to wait for an infinite amount of time to come into existence, because every event of causation is an event in time. So an infinite regress of causes is an infinite stretch of time. If the existence of X requires an infinite stretch of time, then X would not be able to exist and nothing would be able to exist. But the fact is that things do exist and therefore there cannot be an infinite regress of causes. There must be a first cause. That's Aristotle's argument, but there's a loophole in this argument. Aristotle believes that even God exists in time, because he cannot think of anything that does not exist in time. He thinks that time must be the precondition of existence. That was why he ridiculed Plato's theory that time is an ectype of eternity and eternity is an archetype of time, and that God doesn't exist in the same kind of time that we exist in. Aristotle ridiculed that theory, and he says that God exists in time, but what would that imply? That would imply that God waited an infinite stretch of time before he created the universe. Now, that was initially put in the form of a question. I think that question was they set forth primarily by the Epicureans. The question goes like,"What was God doing before he created the universe? We don't know what God was doing. He might be cooking, he might be eating, he might be sleeping. We don't know. But there's one thing that we can know for certain, if the universe is created and if God exists in time, and God has existed for an infinite stretch of time, then we know that God was waiting to create a universe. And how long did God have to wait? God would have to wait forever before he created universe, but the fact is that the universe exists and therefore it could not have been created by God. That question was actually set forth to Augustine as well, and Augustine's initial answer is,"What was God doing before the creation of the universe? God was creating hell for people who ask this question." But then he proceeded to answer this question patiently, and he tells us that God is timeless. Eternity is not an infinite stretch of time. Eternity is timelessness and God is the Creator of time, so God did not have to wait forever until he created the universe. Now, Thomas Aquinas took over Augustine's concept of God's eternity as timelessness, so his argument is very different from Aristotle's because he has a totally different theological ontology and he holds to completely, fundamentally different presuppositions than Aristotle. So his argument is that everything that everything that exists in time must have a cause of its existence. An infinite regress of causes is irrational. Therefore, the universe must have a first cause that is not in time, and that would be the only way to resolve the antinomy, as Kant put it, between the creation of the universe and the self-existence of the universe. Now, this cosmological argument, I would say, proceeds on the grounds of faith. For Aquinas, the timelessness of God is not something that philosophers have been able to prove with reason. It's something that you need to accept by faith. He didn't have Stephen Hawking to help him out. Stephen Hawking showed us that it's possible to prove that the first call of the universe is timeless. Hawking tells us that there must be a first cause of the universe that is timeless, and that first cause Hawking calls the laws of nature. And he says that it's not God, because when we talk about God, we have the idea of an intelligent God, and he doesn't believe God is intelligent, but that leads to all sorts of difficulties in his philosophy. And he doesn't admit that he has a philosophy, but he does. But let's not get into Stephen Hawking. Let's come back to Aquinas. So we can see that Aquinas took over this argument from Aristotle, but he reinterpreted it under the framework of the"regula fidei": the regulations of faith or the rule of faith. So I don't think that he was a thinker who Hellenized Christianity, but he was a thinker who Christianized a Hellenistic theory.
Amy Mantravadi:So that would be kind of going along with the idea that philosophy is in the service of theology and not the other way around. And yeah, it can be a little jarring for someone nowadays to go and read the Summa Theologica or one of the other writings by Aquinas. And you start seeing him refer to this Philosopher- this unnamed Philosopher, and you find out as you go along that he's talking about Aristotle. But the thing you have to understand about Aquinas's writing as well is that no one would write a book the way he does today, because he sets it up- He'll give a statement and then a counter-statement, and he'll go through this series of considering different options, and then he finally gives you the answer."Hey, this is the right answer." But through that process, it can sometimes create a little confusion for people as to what his actual opinion is, but that's coming from the scholastic method of question and answer that was very popular in his time. So yes, certainly I think because Aquinas is such an important figure that his works tend to attract the most controversy, because a lot of Protestants feel that because he was Catholic, or because maybe he used and referred a lot to Aristotle, that he's not someone we can trust and that his theology is always going to be leading us to a place that we shouldn't be going. But I think it really depends greatly on what part of his writings you're talking about, because he wrote many things. In addition to his two Summas, he wrote biblical commentaries- he wrote all kinds of things. So I think you have to always be aware of what type of work you're reading and the types of methods he would have been using. But I think if we move on to the next question I have, which kind of gets into this a bit- The Protestant Reformation brought about another debate over the incorporation of philosophy in theology, because Martin Luther was highly critical of the degree to which Aristotle's ideas had made their way into what we could call medieval Catholic thought. I guess it was just medieval Western Christian thought. But some of the later Swiss Reformers- thinking here of Calvin or Beza, people like that- they seem to have benefited from their reading of Aquinas and Aristotelian thought. So what kind of accommodation did Reformed theologians reach with philosophy during that period? Were they more optimistic about the use of philosophy or were they more pessimistic about it?
Alex Tseng:I would say that they were critically optimistic about the eclectic use of philosophy- of all kinds of wisdom that this world has to offer. They were not as pessimistic as Luther, as you point out. But one influence that they inherited from Luther was the nominalist[inaudible]. So if you think of Aquinas as a realist Aristostelian, then you would think of the Reformed as nominalist - Not Aristotelians, I'm sorry, and I shouldn't call Aquinas an Aristotelian either. But if you think of his use of Aristotle as realist, then you can think of the dominant Reformed use of Aristotle as nominalist. And one thing that they would agree with Aquinas is that we cannot gaze upon God's glory immediately. We need to look at creation as a mirror of God's creation, and that would mean that purely speculative, a posteriori arguments from cause to effect will not work. We need to use our empirical senses to behold God's manifested glory in creation. And so the 17th century Reformed theologians came up with this notion of "tabula rasa," which means blank slate. You find it in, for example, the Institutes of Elenctic Theology by Francis Turretin. He talks about the human mind as a tabula rasa at birth. All ideas inscribed on to the human mind are inscribed through experience, and we need to use experience to reflect on the glory of God. That is also the kind of theology that inspired thinkers like Francis Bacon and John Locke. John Locke was the philosopher who took over this Reformed notion of tabula rasa and developed it into a philosophical system, or empiricism. Well before him, Francis Bacon developed a modern scientific method that we call the method of induction. Induction is to gather from empirical data correlations that are regular: so regular that we are compelled to think that there must be some causation behind these correlations, so we come up with postulates to explain these correlations. That's the method of induction. And Bacon tells us that science, that is the natural sciences, has a redemptive dimension, and this is very Calvinistic. Mind you, he lived in the Elizabethan times. He was a contemporary of William Shakespeare. So the intellectual elite who went to Geneva had come back to Britain after the five year exile during Mary's reign - people like Thomas Bodley - they came back to Britain and they started teaching Calvinistic doctrines and Francis Bacon was influenced by Calvinistic thought, if we are not allowed to say that he was just a Calvinist. I think he was a Calvinist in many respects. He tells us that there is a redemptive dimension to science in that Adam lost his ability to think God's thoughts after God. That's not a phrase Bacon, by the way. That's a phrase from Johannes Kepler. But Adam lost that ability because Adam wanted the autonomy of reason. Adam ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He wanted to judge good and evil, right and wrong by himself. He didn't want God's word to help him understand the world, but God's calling for him was to study creation by naming them first. So Adam gave names to each creature, each according to its kind, and that is a kind of inductive study of nature. Adam lost that ability and Christians with a regenerate mind are able to again think God's thoughts after God and take down the idols that we have erected by the presumption of the autonomy of reason. And Bacon names these four idols, and if you look at these four idols, you see the strong influence of nominalism in there. For example, the idol of the marketplace, by which he means the idol of human language. He tells us that linguistic systems are conventional. They are our interpretations of reality, but the world of language is not reality itself, and we always need to know that within our linguistic systems, there are fictitious linguistic signs that do not correspond to reality - that these ideas are what we make up. And if we want to study God's good creation, we need to understand limitations of our language and take down all of these unnecessary terms and concepts in our language that don't correspond to God's empirically observable creation. That's sort of an Occam's Razor kind of concept. And if you look at the fourth idol, which is the idol of the theater, he compares philosophical systems to theatrical plays. They are human inventions. We can think of the decimal system, for example. We seek to understand mathematical reality by this conventional decimal system that we use, that we learn in school, but a decimal system is not the truth itself. It's only a system, a model that we develop to imitate the truth. And what Bacon is reminding us is that all our philosophical and scientific systems are merely models of reality. They are not the truth of reality itself. But he is not an agnostic or a skeptic. He does believe that we can come closer and closer to the truth of God revealed in creation. First, by taking on the glasses - Calvin calls them spectacles - of scripture. Calvin compares our fallen reason to bad eyes or bad eyesight. We have bad eyesight, and scripture is like a pair of glasses that we put on, and through scripture, we can look at the world and see God's manifested glory in the world. And in that process, we can get closer and closer to the truth by eliminating the idols that hinder us from seeing God's glory in creation. And I think that is the way Reformed theologians - Sorry, Bacon was not a Reformed theologian, but his whole system was taken from Reformed theology. And I think that is how Reformed theologians benefited from a nominalistic rendition of Aristotle.
Amy Mantravadi:Yeah. There are two concepts within Reformed theology that I think are very important here and that in some ways seem to be- they're not actually at odds with each other, but they create a kind of tension with each other. And the one is the Creator-Creature Distinction, which is the idea of this category difference between God and humanity. So as you were saying earlier, our language we use to talk about God and the knowledge we have about him is not the same as the knowledge God has about himself. Or if we say that a human being is showing love, we don't mean exactly the same thing we would mean when we say,"God is love." We have to keep always in mind that Creator-Creature Distinction and that's going to limit the kind of analogy we can have about God. But at the same time, you have this idea that creation is the theater of God's glory, and that although God's glory is most clearly revealed in scripture and in Jesus Christ as he became incarnate and came to earth and his death and resurrection and ascension, there is still a kind of glory to be seen in creation around us. And I think the idea you just shared about how we can take scripture as it were a pair of spectacles and put them on and view creation through that, that will obviously give us the best kind of knowledge and wisdom that we can have when viewing this creation, which has obviously been affected by the Fall and sin and the curse that that brings. But when we're able to view it through the lens or through the spectacles of God's Word, we're able to most clearly see the glory of God and creation. So I think definitely the Reformed thought and Protestant thought- it hasn't been in complete agreement. Always there have been differences of opinion, but I appreciate you kind of bringing that out. And it can be very confusing when we use terms like realist and nominalist that are coming out of medieval philosophy, but even though they're confusing, they've had a real effect on the way that theologians think about these things, and things that maybe we don't normally think about in terms of theology were very important to the way that they considered things. So the Enlightenment and the advent of Higher Criticism in biblical studies represented another turning point in the relationship between Christianity and philosophy. And just as an aside, this is when- when Protestants think back on history, this is when a lot of them would say things got off track. So you've written an introduction to the thought of Immanuel Kant, who was a philosophical giant of this era. And although his thought was complex and would be difficult to briefly summarize, could you mention maybe a few of his ideas that have had a major effect on how people think about religion or morality down to our present day?
Alex Tseng:There are many things we can talk about. For example, his assessment of the philosophy of Bacon and Locke, which are largely Christian, and Kant assessed that system positively. Now what he wanted to do was to sort of correct some mistakes in the system in order for it to work after it turned to subjectivism and idealism after Berkeley and Hume. I wouldn't go into that because that's a huge topic that involves some major debates in Kant studies these days. The concept of wisdom, I think, is something that's worth our discussion here, because it's really relevant to our society today, So Kant follows the broad Augustinian tradition to tell us that freedom is not a lawless equity of the will. Freedom is not to do what you will, and that goes back to the Lockean tradition. As I mentioned, he agrees with Locke on many points, and one of those points that he agrees with is that freedom- or liberty is that the word that Locke uses- liberty is not license. License as in licentiousness: license to do what you want. And Locke's theory is that liberty needs to be defined in terms of property. He has this famous line that's revised and incorporated into the US Declaration of Independence."We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and property." That's what Locke wrote, and unfortunately, in my opinion- and not just my opinion. Richard Pratt, the Reformed theologian[inaudible], Old Testament scholar says that this phrase is "the great American heresy." He turned property into "the pursuit of happiness." So how is property related to liberty in the thought of Locke? Well, Locke says that there are many kinds of properties such as land or other kinds of ownership, but there is a universal kind of property - that is, myself as my own property, and each person is her own property, and freedom or liberty is to be defined this way. I am a free human being in that I am my own property. But how can I be my own property? Who is it that gave myself to me? Well, he says it's God. Before I became my own property, I was first God's property, and I remain God's property, even though this property is entrusted to me, and therefore I am not entitled to do anything I feel good at doing. If I feel that foundation of life is painful, do I have the right to take my own life? Assisted suicide, maybe? His answer would be no, because my life is a gift of God, and it's for God to decide how long I should live. I don't get to make that decision in God's place. I am God's property before I am my property. So liberty is not to do what you will, and that is a very Christian, very Augustinian understanding of liberty. And that, I think, differs greatly from the kind of libertarian freedom that the phrase "the pursuit of happiness" has given rise to. We see the legalization of victimless crimes in the United States as a result of this kind of libertarian [inaudible]. Now, back to Kant. Kant takes over this [inaudible] freedom. And he engages with a metaphysical debate about the freedom of the will from the early modern period. The debate is between determinism and indeterminism. Different philosophers had different metaphysical theories about nature and causation. Philosophers like Spinoza would say that God is nature and nature is God. There is no intelligent God who transcends nature, and so everything that happens in nature is predetermined by the initial conditions of nature, so nothing happens by contingency. Although some things might look contingent, they are not.[NOTE: The remainder of this answer has not been edited but simply filled in by a computer.] And by the same token, we in mind look as if our whales are free in making decisions. But the fact is that all of those decisions were predetermined by complex higher costs. So he denies that there is such a thing as free will. And the opposite position is to say that the will is not constrained by the laws of nature, the moral nature or physical nature. So there's freedom that freedom is defined as lawlessness of the faculty of the will, and both sides had their arguments and shows us that this whole debate ultimately comes to the point of that internally. That is to say, both sides have equal, equal, and we basically cannot decide which one is right. We fall into this theoretical antrum and your ethical reason tries to ask what he calls transcendental freedom are human beings, presidentially free not to explain this term, transcendental that he says that the question of freedom is answerable. However, we can all simply benign presidentially that we do have free will that, how are we to make sense of freedom? We cannot make sense of it in the theoretical realm that is by asking our human beings. We can only answer this question in the practical realm. And practical reason is defined as recent, which fire sensitive question, what ought to be, or what are affirm to be. And he says that we, as human beings are endowed with a Supreme moral vocation, and that moral patient requires how we must be free human beings. And this moral vocation requires that we understand freedom in such a way that freedom should not be defined as lawlessness of the will, but rather he distinguishes between two kinds of freedom, freedom, and positive freedom or peace or not two kinds of freedom. The two dimensions of freedom, negative freedom is non coercion of the will so that the whale is not coerced to be morally good. You can choose to be morally evil. And human beings are born with an evil, a radically evil propensity, such that doing evil is almost inevitable to us. So we cannot ex extra this propensity, but then we can try to use our freedom in a positive way to outweigh this evil propensity and become a better human and hope for God's assistance in this process. And this whole philosophy has had to redefine a lot of these things, which may sound very synergistic and Christological. But then if we look at the definition of freedom itself offered by there's a lot to which first of all, freedom requires that the wheel is not coerced. So that requires respect for individual volition. I cannot impose my will on you. The government cannot impose its will on the citizen. The will has to be non course, but that is only the negative aspect of freedom. And the plus free, uh, aspect of freedom equals autonomy. Autonomy is not independence from autonomy is from normal cell wall. That is to say, we impose the law of God on ourselves and try to adopt that universal moral law as our maximum status, our principles of behavior only then do we become truly free human beings. So freedom. In other words, it's not freedom to sin that freedom from sin that is for him what positive freedom is. And that is pretty much Augustus. Definition of accustom tells us that we need Jesus Christ to receive this freedom of Florida is freedom from sin to tells us that we can't achieve that partly by ourselves with God's assistance. And I think that's where Christians have to disagree. Although there are people out there that say that he is not nearly as sinner, just pick us up. People will say yes, but I don't get into that for now.
Amy Mantravadi:Yeah, and I do find personally that this sort of era of German philosophy is one of the most difficult to get into, unless you're someone who has studied it in depth, because if you read Kant or the next person we're going to discuss- Hegel- I think it would be a much easier to read Marx or Nietzsche or someone a little more modern, or even someone perhaps farther back like Aquinas. Because even if you're fluent in German, reading Kant and understanding all the concepts he's putting forward- it can be very difficult, so that's why we're seeing people still debating exactly what he meant about some of these things. Certainly I'm not an expert on Kant, but the thing that always comes through in what I've heard about him is this idea that he certainly wasn't rejecting Christianity, but he wanted to create this concept of a morality which could be universal and which was based really heavily on human reason. And in that way, he probably had a more positive view of human reason than most Reformed thinkers would have- after the Fall, that our reason is no longer what it would've been before the introduction of sin. So, yeah. You mentioned autonomy there and this concept of,"What does it mean to be free?" is certainly very influential in Western society today, so that's probably a way that we're still seeing him influence us. You've also written an introduction to the thought of Hegel, who belonged to the generation just after Kant. So what were his unique contributions to philosophy and what effect did that have on theological practice, particularly in the universities of continental Europe at the time?
Alex Tseng:He made tremendous contributions in many different areas, but since we were talking about freedom, I thought we could continue on the same path and talk about Hegel's view of freedom. There's this fascinating little- well, also an introductory volume to Hegel's thought by Craig Mathers. The author tries to explain Hegel's notion of freedom by referring to a novel by Dostoevsky, titled Notes from the Underground. So the protagonist of this novel feels that he is unfree when he lives in a society above the ground. He has to interact with people, and interaction with people means confinement to the rules imposed on him by otherness, so he wants freedom and he moves underground to live by himself, and that was his way of establishing freedom. But then he finds out that when I am living by myself, I am not genuinely free. I am lonely. I cannot interact with people. I cannot express my will to other people and perhaps impose my will on other people, and freedom sometimes means making other people do what you want them to do. That is also a form of freedom, and that kind of freedom doesn't happen underground. So he moves to- he moves above the ground again and tries to fit into society, but then he finds that he is unfree, so he moves underground again. And that, I think, reflects an erroneous view of freedom that we hold to in our culture today: freedom as self-fulfillment. Now, people would call the freedom that is underground a subjective freedom and freedom above the ground as objective freedom. And for him, neither of these is absolute freedom. Both of them are freedom in their premature stages, or moments is the word he uses. So we need to move from a moment of subjective freedom to a moment of objective freedom, but that is not yet absolute freedom. First of all, individual freedom- that is, the freedom of the particular subject. Subjective freedom must be negated by objective freedom. We come into society and society must negate our individual freedoms, but that is not yet true freedom or absolute freedom. Absolute freedom is the reconciliation between objective and subjective freedoms, and he calls that self-actualization. And what is the entity that realizes absolute freedom in this world? For Hegel in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right, this entity, this divinely chosen entity is the modern stage. And for him, it's pretty much the German nation united as a state that is called to realize absolute freedom on earth. Now, what does his notion absolute freedom mean? Well, that is a intensely debated question in the literature. Authors like Charles Taylor and Michael Rosen would say that it's a communitarian kind of freedom that honors both the freedom of the individual and the freedom of society as a whole, or call it a general will, if you will. That is sort of the notion of Rousseau of freedom as conforming to the general will of the people, and for Rousseau, this would mean that individuals who refused to conform to the general will of the people must be forced to be free. I don't think interpreters like Rosen and Taylor would take that step and say that the government has the right to force individuals to be free without limitations, but things like taxation- the government imposes taxation on us. The government is entitled to do that, and that is a kind of forcing us to be free, and that is the kind of absolute freedom that is compatible with contemporary society. But if you look at Hegel's own theory, what he says is that the modern state is entitled not only to impose taxation on citizens, but also to exercise censorship and limit the freedom of the press. He writes that explicitly. He says that there shouldn't be a freedom of the press. Some people say that freedom is to think for oneself, and he says,"Well, that's- obviously nobody can think for other people, but that's not freedom, or that's only subjective freedom, and that must be eliminated in society so that people no longer think for themselves, but people think for society as a whole, and only in society will the individual truly thrive." This kind of approach to freedom gave rise to ideologies like National Socialism during the Third Reich and Marxism, and it gave rise to justifications for absolute powers in the name of freedom and democracy. Mind you that the official title of North Korea actually includes the word"democratic." It's a democratic...
Amy Mantravadi:Yes.
Alex Tseng:They say that they are a free society. And I, living in China, hear the word"democracy" all the time and"freedom" all the time. Freedom is an official value of the Chinese state, but what kind of freedom is it? So as a Christian, between Kant and Hegel, I would certainly choose Kant and not Hegel.
Amy Mantravadi:Yeah, I mean, these differing notions of freedom I think are really important for us to consider, because in an American context, I feel like increasingly freedom is more what you're talking about with the negative side of freedom: that no one has a right to tell me what to do or that I'm not responsible for anybody else. I'm just responsible for myself. Very anti-authoritarian, not just- I mean, anti-authoritarian can be good if you're opposing an evil regime, but if you take it to the other extreme, it turns into anarchy, right? If no one can tell you what to do, if everyone is completely free, then we can't have government. We can't have any form of society. So the way that freedom may be understood in another country, such as China, which still holds more closely to communal values, or India, or some of these other nations- We like to think that freedom is a value that all people hold dear, and I think that is true to an extent, but people may not agree on what freedom is or what kind of freedom we should be pursuing. And the biblical definition of freedom is freedom from sin, freedom to pursue the things of Christ, freedom from being under the influence of this world and the devil. So we need to be very careful before we equate American notions of freedom or European or Asian notions of freedom with the notion of freedom that's in the Bible. And you can definitely see how people like Kant or Hegel have influenced the way we think about freedom today and maybe sometimes in good ways and sometimes in bad ways, so yeah, I appreciate that. At this point in the interview, we unfortunately lost our connection and were unable to continue recording. I had planned to ask Dr. Tseng for his thoughts about the influence of Eastern philosophy on Christianity and get his take on the current debate over Critical Race Theory, but I'm sure you agree with me that we were able to have quite a substantial discussion without those additional topics. I am grateful to Alex for taking the time to speak with me.
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Amy Mantravadi:It was a pleasure to speak with Alex about the relationship between philosophy and theology. Next week, I'll be speaking with Abbey Wedgeworth about her book Held: 31 Biblical Reflections on God's Comfort and Care in the Sorrow of Miscarriage. This is an issue that has affected many people I care about, and even if you have not experienced miscarriage yourself, it may help you to think about how you can show love to others. This podcast is written and produced by yours truly. Please send all complaints by mail to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC. The music you've been listening to is from the song"Citizens" by Christian recording artist Jon Guerra off his album, Keeper of Days. Reviews and ratings are important and helping people discover new shows. If you have a moment, please leave an honest rating and review for this podcast wherever you listen to it. Also consider mentioning it to friends or sharing episodes on social media. I know your time is valuable and thank you in advance for any help you can provide. Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to make you stand in the presence of his glory, blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior through Jesus Christ our Lord be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority before all time and now and forever. Amen. Have a great week.
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