Vaughn at ICTHUS asks what use philosophy is for Christians. I started to type a comment, but it got so unwieldy that I thought I’d make a blog post of it instead.

Vaughn says:

…I may say that it is difficult for me to understand how philosophy can be a practice that is prior to one’s Christian convictions. For my part, I will not say with Stanley Fish that “philosophy doesn’t matter” – but rather I will make the affirmation that philosophy is indeed very important for philosophers. …

I want to be clear that I am not saying that the practice of philosophical speculation has no place in the Christian life (I’m not saying this). This would be tantamount to saying that economics has no place in the Christian life – a silly idea to be sure. But simply that philosophy is not a discourse that is prior to theology – that is, it does not set the agenda for theology. …

I for one assume that “Christian” names a people group (like the Jews) who have a particular way of being in the world (disciples of Jesus as recoded in the Gospel narratives). There are certain convictions (beliefs, if you will) that accompany the life of a disciple. For instance, I have a conviction about God’s work in the world – a conviction rooted in my practice of prayer for the world. I have certain convictions about war and abortion rooted in my community’s practice of providing economic assistance to “undesirable” people. But said convictions are not because of a prior theory about metaphysics or ethics. As I said earlier, Christians don’t need a “theory”, they need a Church.

Now, I think this is true as far as it goes, but as Camassia pointed out in a comment to Vaughn’s post:

I don’t quite see how you can have practices without some sort of theory, even if it’s a simple and largely unconscious theory. This is especially true if you’re a Protestant, and you can’t rely on the old Catholic/Orthodox “Jesus and the Church teach this, we’ve always done it, so I do it” approach. The Protestant tradition of applying personal conscience to Scripture and Tradition demands a certain amount of theorizing about it.

I can also testify from personal experience that the Hauerwas approach has limited utility when you’re talking to someone outside the faith. A couple years ago Telford was pushing this on me and I’m like, OK, that’s fine if you start out a Christian, but what about me? What reason do I have to make the leap, not just into Church as a social club, but into faith? I suspect that this problem is a lot of reason why Christian philosophy has developed in the first place.

For me, philosophy contributed to my becoming a Christian, but mostly in a negative or critical sense. That is, I had believed that there were devastating objections to Christianity (problem of evil, critiques of natural theology, Freudianism, Marxism, Nietzscheanism, etc.) and that basically no intelligent person could believe it (an interesting combination of naivete and arrogance when you think about it). But in reading Christian philosophers what I discovered was that there are rejoinders to the stock criticisms of Christianity. Now, all of those rejoinders are not necessarily cogent, but it was very helpful to me to see really smart people addressing them and to realize that these responses could not be dismissed out of hand.

A second, and related, effect was to help me see the weaknesses in a purely materialistic or naturalistic worldview. I would say C.S. Lewis was very helpful to me here – I tend to find his critiques of naturalism much more persuasive than his positive arguments for Christianity (see, e.g. his little book Miracles). I would later encounter more philosophically sophisticated versions of those arguments in the work of people like Alvin Plantinga. But in any event, philosophy helped me to see that naturalism is not obviously right or without problems.

So, I think for some people philosophy can have a preparatory function in that it can remove certain intellectual obstacles to faith. This seems to be what happened to Augustine when he encountered Platonism – it gave him the intellectual tools to shed the Manicheeism that he had adopted (of course, some would accuse Augustine of importing too much Platonism into Christianity, but that’s a separate issue). Beyond this, philosophy can help us articulate the convictions that are presupposed by the practices that Vaughn rightly sees as the heart of the Christian life. It can display their inner logic and coherence and defend them against objections (here the line between philosophy and theology becomes a bit blurry, admittedly).

I think the current emphasis on practices and the life of the church is in many ways a salutary correction to an over-intellectualized faith, but that doesn’t mean we can dispense with intellectual reflection. This has been true from the earliest days of Christianity. Paul and John engage in what looks a lot like philosophical arguments and apologetics, and the Church fathers certainly did. By meeting their interlocutors on their own terms they did, in a sense, let philosophy set their agenda.

This is not to say, of course, that philosophy can create faith. Only God can do that, or so Christians believe. But just as a persistent sin can be an obstacle to faith, a persistent misunderstanding can also keep us on the outside. If I can’t see how, for instance, Christianity can be reconciled with modern science, this may convince me that it is impossible to believe in an intellectually honest way. Philosophy can help show that what we thought was a conflict wasn’t really a conflict, or that we misunderstood what Christian belief entailed, or that we misunderstood what science entailed. That seems to me to be a valuable service.