Category: Theology & Faith

This meme asking for nominations for the best contemporary (=published in the last 25 years) theology books has been making the rounds of many of the blogs I read regularly.

I’m not learned enough in theology to nominate books that are, objectively speaking, the best theology or the most influential, but I’ll mention some books that have had a big impact on the way I think about theology. (Not coincidentally, these tend to be on the more “popular” side of the ledger rather than strict academic theology):

1. William Placher, The Domestication of Transcendence. Placher attempts to retrieve a premodern understanding of God by means of a re-examination of the thought of Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin, and argues that many contemporary criticisms of “classical theism” such as those made by process thought or deconstructionism simply miss the mark. He also shows how grace is radically subversive of our constant attempts to contain it in some kind of moralism or pietism. Also worthy of note is his Jesus the Savior, a kind of Christology for laypeople. Placher is a model of clear theological writing for the church rather than for the academic guild.

2. Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus. Not only is this a brilliant polemic against the “historical Jesus” industry, Johnson’s book shows how the living Jesus is presented to us in the Gospel accounts, the NT letters, and the ongoing life of the church. His follow-up book, Living Jesus is a worthy successor in exploring how Christians live into the mind of Christ.

3. Andrew Linzey, Animal Theology. People are probably sick of me flogging this book, but I think in many ways Christians have just begun to scratch the surface in thinking about our fellow creatures. Even a lot of liberal and progressive theology remains steadfastly anthropocentric. Bonus Linzey book: Animal Gospel.

Chapters 3 and 4 are compact but rich summaries of the heart of Augustine’s metaphysics. He deals here with God, creation, the goodness of created things and the problem of evil. It’s surely one of Augustine’s great accomplishments as a thinker to clearly establish the basic outline of a sound Christian metaphysics.

While Augustine clearly remains influenced by neo-Platonism, he sharpens its metaphysics and brings it into closer conformity with biblical religion. The primary metaphysical distinction for Augustine isn’t between sensible and intelligible being or mind and body, but between created and uncreated being. God is uncreated being and everything else is created being. It’s not necessary, he says, for Christians to be expertly versed in philosophy or natural science, but it is necessary for them to grasp this elemental truth:

For the Christian, it is enough to believe that the cause of all created things, whether in heaven or on earth, whether visible or invisible, is nothing other than the goodness of the Creator, who is the one and the true God. Further, the Christian believes that nothing exists save God himself and what comes from him; and he believes that God is triune, i.e., the Father, and the Son begotten of the Father, and the Holy Spirit proceeding from the same Father, but one and the same Spirit of the Father and the Son.

This statement is an implicit rebuke to the various forms of gnosticism and manicheism floating around, which Augustine was all too familiar with, that held the material world to be the product of an evil force or lesser deity. But it also stakes out a position against a kind of neo-Platonic view that sees creation as “emanating” from God as a kind of effulgence rather than as the result of God’s gracious will.

Having established that creation is the product of a good God, he moves on to the affirmation of the goodness of creation itself:

By this Trinity, supremely and equally and immutably good, were all things created. But they were not created supremely, equally, nor immutably good. Still, each single created thing is good, and taken as a whole they are very good, because together they constitute a universe of admirable beauty.

This is a clear and beautiful summary of the Christian doctrine of creation. Creation is the gratuitous gift of a supremely good Creator and is itself a real, though lesser, good. It’s good because it is the handiwork of the Supreme Good.

But of course this leads ineluctably to the problem of evil. If creation is the good creation of a supremely good Creator, whence evil? “For the Omnipotent God, whom even the heathen acknowledge as the Supreme Power over all, would not allow any evil in his works, unless in his omnipotence and goodness, as the Supreme Good, he is able to bring forth good out of evil.”

Here we get Augustine’s justly famous doctrine of evil as privation. That is, considered in itself, evil is no-thing, but a lack or corruption in a being which is essentially good:

All of nature, therefore, is good, since the Creator of all nature is supremely good. But nature is not supremely and immutably good as is the Creator of it. Thus the good in created things can be diminished and augmented. For good to be diminished is evil; still, however much it is diminished, something must remain of its original nature as long as it exists at all. For no matter what kind or however insignificant a thing may be, the good which is its “nature” cannot be destroyed without the thing itself being destroyed.

This implies that, as good as creation is, it has an inherent vulnerability to evil. This is because created things are changeable, and therefore their goodness can be diminished. Only God is entirely impervious to evil. But that doesn’t change the fact that every being, no matter how corrupted it may become, remains good considered in itself as an entity. Augustine’s dictum that “every being, in so far as it is a being, is good” is a watchword for this metaphysic. “Nothing evil exists in itself, but only as an evil aspect of some actual entity. Therefore, there can be nothing evil except something good. Absurd as this sounds, nevertheless the logical connections of the argument compel us to it as inevitable.”

However, we still don’t know how, if creation is a real, though lesser, good, how evil arises in the first place. Augustine contends that only an evil will, itself the product of a good nature, whether human or angelic, can be the source of evil.

From a human nature there can spring forth either a good or an evil will. There was no other place from whence evil could have arisen in the first place except from the nature–good in itself–of an angel or a man. This is what our Lord himself most clearly shows in the passage about the trees and the fruits, for he said: “Make the tree good and the fruits will be good, or make the tree bad and its fruits will be bad.” This is warning enough that bad fruit cannot grow on a good tree nor good fruit on a bad one. Yet from that same earth to which he was referring, both sorts of trees can grow.

This leads to Augustine’s difficult doctrine of the Fall, which will come up in later chapters. For now, I just want to point out that what seems to be implied by his view of creation is that the evil will, at least in the beginning, is a kind of radical disruption of the good creation. And it’s something that seems radically undetermined by the nature of the being who posseses it, whether that’s a human being or an angel. Augustine has to hold this in order to be consistent with his view that the natures of created things are good in themselves. Otherwise, evil gets a kind of ontological foothold in creation.

In chapter 2 Augustine discusses faith, hope, and love in the light of the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostle’s Creed. “In these two we have the three theological virtues working together: faith believes; hope and love pray. Yet without faith nothing else is possible; thus faith prays too.”

Faith is here defined by Augustine as belief in the truths of the Christian religion. There are certain facts concerning, say, the death of Christ, his resurrection and ascension which faith, or belief has as its objects. And it can pertain with matters of the past, present, or future. It’s proper to say, for instance, that Christians have faith that Christ will return in glory.

Hope, while it regards matters to take place in the future, has an evaluative component that faith (understood as belief) seems to lack. “[H]ope deals only with good things, and only with those which lie in the future, and which pertain to the man who cherishes the hope.” We only hope for that which is desirable.

Faith and hope are united, however, in that their objects are unseen, though Augustine allows that there are cases where one can be said to believe in something that is the object of one’s present experience. Presumably the apostles who witnessed the risen Christ could be said to believe or have faith in what they had seen. However, this seems for Augustine to be the exception, and as a general rule faith is in what is not seen. Hope, meanwhile, is by definition in the unseen because what is future obviously can’t be seen. “When, therefore, our good is believed to be future, this is the same thing as hoping for it.”

And hope can’t exist without love. For to have hope is to believe that the future holds that which we regard as good. The faith commended by Paul (contrary to the faith of “the demons” mentioned by James) can’t exist without hope and love. That which Christians believe in, Christ, is also the object of our love and our hope. “Thus it is that love is not without hope, hope is not without love, and neither hope nor love are without faith.”

There seems, then, to be a certain ambiguity in the notion of faith that Augustine sketches here. There is faith understood simply as belief in certain facts, and there is the faith that is inseparable from love and hope. Is the difference determined by a quality in the believer or a quality in that which is believed in? Is faith the root of love and hope, or is the quality of faith determined by them?

Partly inspired by Derek’s post on first steps with the fathers, and partly out of a desire to get back to basics, I’ve decided to inagurate this blog with a series on Augustine’s Enchiridion, or “handbook on faith, hope, and love.” This very brief text was written as a response to one of Augustine’s correspondents who had asked for a brief summary of the Christian faith. My edition clocks in at about 70 pages and consists of fourteen chapters, each dealing with a major area of the faith.

In Chapter 1, “The Occasion and Purpose of this ‘Manual,’” Augustine sets the agenda for what’s to come. His correspondent, “Laurence” had asked for “a brief summary or short treatise on the proper mode of worshipping God.” Augustine here identifies the worship and service of God with wisdom. This may be a way of establishing this work in the tradition of ancient philosophy which, far from being pure speculation, was understood as a way of life aimed at transforming the self in light of some great good, often involving ascetic and ethical practice in addition to theoretical understanding. It was common for the Fathers to argue that Christianity was the “true philosophy.”

Augustine asks what true wisdom consists in and answers that it consists in piety, or the service of God (theosebeia). And to serve God is the same as to worship God. So wisdom is the worship of God.

But how is God to be worshipped? “In faith, hope, and love” is Augustine’s reply, and his handbook will be a brief explication of “What should be believed, what should be hoped for and what should be loved.” These are “the chief things–indeed the only things–to seek for in religion.”

For Augustine we must begin with faith because we can’t attain certain understanding of “matters that pass beyond the scope of the physical senses” by reason alone. Instead, we must believe the witness of the biblical writers. However, faith, working by love, leads to sight. We may, over the course of our lives, come to “catch glimpses of that ineffable beauty whose full vision is our highest happiness.” This sounds a bit like Anselm’s “I believe so that I may understand”: faith is the initial step down a path that will ultimately result in understanding, even if complete understanding and knowledge of God won’t be ours until the next life. As Augustine writes, “We begin in faith, we are perfected in sight.”