Deleting Theology: Examining a Curious Historiographical Phenomenon (Conclusion)

Conclusions?

Myth stubbornly haunts the assertions of history, and history continually challenges the veracity of myth. 

                                    Edward Peters, Inquisition[1]

What are we to make of all of this? I want to suggest a few tentative conclusions. First, continuing to reexamine how we tell history in the light of theology can be an exciting, and until recently it seems to me largely underexplored, avenue for igniting aspects of theological education. While many theologians, philosophers, and apologists today rightly talk about how everyone is a theologian, and about the theological presuppositions that play into a host of thoughts and opinions (e.g. overcoming naturalism for example) if this is the case it should be historically demonstrable that certain positions, opinions, and practices only came about in association with theological ideas (good or bad). While we have to be extremely careful how the complexities of histories are utilized, there is a sense in which a sort of baseline demonstration on the presence and effect of theology of all sorts is a helpful primer for many who do not think theology has anything to say to us today.

Second,it helps us complicate any straightforward “secularization” or even “death of God” thesis when it is seen how specific forms of theology previously overlooked were at play.

[Andrew Dixon White and John William Draper’s] preconception that, as science has advanced, phenomena once considered supernatural have yielded to naturalistic explanation, is not without support. But it assumes a dichotomy between nature and supernature that oversimplifies the theologies of the past. If a supernatural power was envisaged as working through, as distinct from interfering with, nature, the antithesis [between science and theology] would partially collapse. … The significance given to explanations in terms of natural causes depends on higher-level assumptions embedded in a broader cultural framework. In the history of Western culture, it has not simply been a case of nature swallowing supernature. Something had to happen to change the higher-level assumptions if the conflict between science and religion was to achieve the self-evident status proclaimed by Draper, White, and their successors.[2]

When Pierre Simon de la Place (supposedly) said to Napolean when asked about the place of God in his cosmological system that “I have no need of that hypothesis,” which God was he rejecting? Certainly not the God of Augustine, or Maximus the Confessor, or Aquinas. Rather specifically he was rejecting the vision of God Isaac Newton had put forward, a God who had to occasionally adjust the orbits, and who was it seems, directly responsible for gravity. In other words, the obsolescence of God (or other theological categories) can be traced to specific locations and permutations in theological history, rather than seen as the necessary culmination of the emergence of humankind “come of age” or other stories. Earlier Leibniz had famously rejected this picture as well in his correspondences with Newton’s protege Samuel Clark, and this on theological grounds that would have been familiar to Aquinas (if not quite in his theological idiom)—namely, in essence, to evacuate secondary causes of their efficiency by demanding the direct intervention of God impugns the dignity of God as creator.

Even the so-called “mechanical” picture of the universe that is so often touted as putting the God-of-the-gaps out of business was first theorized, promoted, and given prestige under theological terms and conditions. And this was not just by more “fringe” figures in terms of orthodoxy like Descartes, but often by impeccably “orthodox” theologians who used various philosophical systems to bolster their claims.[3]That the mechanical picture eventually turned against the specific theologies that spawned and perpetuated it is no simple “science vs. Christianity” picture. Rather, by reinserting theology into the history of ideas and practices we see again that specific permutations of theology are what is at stake, hardly theology or Christianity tout court. As T.F. Torrance for example is at pains to emphasize, the very dichotomy of nature and supernature as somehow indicating an “inside/outside” component of a container-like universe that God has to enter and displace things to modify is exactly the picture that pro-Nicene Trinitarian theology (and other related doctrines like creation from nothing)[4]overcame.[5]

Third, and the other half of the same coin as we just spoke of in the previous point, reinserting theology into the entire course of how we tell histories allows us as well to recognize how “the religious” and “the theological” cannot in turn be isolated from a bigger picture. Natural theology and the so-called “argument from design” that dominated Victorian natural theology, for example, are too often seen merely in the context of the rise of Darwinism and the crisis of faith caused by a now jobless designer God. What is missed when the discussion is framed this way is that a major aspect of the theological crisis, where it did occur, came about in part as an undue amount of emphasis had been placed on design arguments because they both embodied and in turn justified a particular socio-economic ordering in terms of natural theology. This ordering, conversely, gave increased plausibility to design arguments by embedding them within practices that continued to give them an immediate sense.[6]When Darwinism came on the scene, a major source of its disruption of design arguments was not just that it pushed against this theology, but that it threatened to explode an entire social order.

Fourth these histories show us the many numerous, complex, and often surprising ways Christian theology, community, and practice related to the adventure of human knowing. While we may not continue many of these practices, others will no doubt also inspire us to explore new avenues of finding Christ in the world.

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[1]Edward Peters, Inquisition (New York: The Free Press, 1988), 263.

[2]Brooke, Science and Religion, 47-48.

[3]Aza Gourdriaan, Reformed Orthodoxy and Philosophy 1625-1750 (Boston: Brill, 2006); J.A. van Ruler, The Crisis of Causality: Voetius and Descartes on God, Nature, and Change (Boston: Brill, 1995). A hearty word of thanks goes to Joseph Minich, for bringing these works to my attention.

[4]Gerhard May, Creation Ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of ‘Creation out of Nothing’ in Early Christian Thought (New York: T&T Clark, 1994); Gary A. Anderson and Markus Bockmuehl, eds.,Creation ‘Ex Nihilo’: Origins, Development, and Contemporary Challenges (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017).

[5]T.F. Torrance, Space, Time, and Incarnation (New York: T&T Clark, 2005); Idem., Space, Time, and Resurrection (New York: T&T Clark, 2000); Idem, Divine and Contingent Order (New York: T&T Clark, 2005).

[6]Frank M. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. 101-131; On the variety of aspects that come into play when considering natural theology, see Brooke and Cantor, Reconstructing Nature, 141-246; Brooke, Science and Religion, 192-226.