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Theology and Philosophy In Dialogue
By David R. Crownfield

"The current theological scene . . . represents an attempt to reopen commerce between theology and philosophy without having dealt effectively with the standing theological objections to that commerce, and without having set out an independent alternative foundation for the theological task. . . . A central issue for the current discussion, then, should be to determine the nature and limits of interaction between philosophers and theologians in the context of a Christological conception of theology."

SOME problems have a way of recurring in theology in spite of many attempts to resolve them. The question of the role of philosophy in theology, and the different but frequently associated question of the status of theology in the eyes of the philosopher, are among these. Currently, while no one seems ready to attack directly Karl Barth's attempt of thirty years ago to demonstrate that the theologian can allow neither constitutive nor normative functions to the philosopher in theology,¹ renewed attempts to give theology an ontological, an empirical, or a general linguistic basis are to be found in several quarters. Heinrich Ott, in fact, argues that Barth's criticism of Thomistic ontology is not applicable to his own Heideggerian ontology; but he does not face Barth's more general arguments concerning the autonomy of theology.² Paul van Buren attempts a linguistic analysis of theological language which he intends to be cognizant of Barth's concerns; but he shows

A graduate of Harvard, Dr. Crownfield has taught at Middlebury and Alma Colleges and is at present Assistant Professor of Religious Literature and Philosophy, the University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, Iowa.
¹ Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, esp. I/1, ## 2, 6 and I/2, ## 13, 23, 24.
² Heinrich Ott, Denken und Sein, pp. 138-146.

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far greater confidence in his secular, quasi-empirical intellectum than he does in the fides quarens.³ Other contemporary attempts to reopen the question similarly exhibit the very sorts of relations between the two disciplines which Barth has criticized, without effectively dealing with the principal force of that criticism itself.

Essentially, Barth's argument is as follows. Jesus Christ has occurred, and has as reconciling and therefore revealing Word of God elected, reconciled, and called us. It is because this has occurred that we are believers, and theologians, at all. Any attempt to establish the possibility of such an occurrence on any other basis than acknowledgment of its actuality (e.g., any attempt to establish it on an ontological, or merely phenomenological or existential, analysis of possibilities) tacitly assumes that the occurrence is doubtful and in need of external support. It is, in a literal and ordinary sense, a form of not believing. And the proper remedy for not believing, says Barth, is the renewed hearing of the Word of God's good pleasure, rather than a seeking for outside assistance. Similarly, any attempt to judge the adequacy, the meaningfulness, even the logic, of the language of theology on general philosophical grounds would be an attempt to determine whether the theologian speaks rightly without taking note of what he is talking about, and can thus be of no normative significance. The norm of theological language is its object, what it is about, the living Word of God, and not any general principle or criterion of right speaking.⁴ Thus Barth holds that, both substantively and formally, theology must and can be independent of philosophical support.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's vivid evocation of the secular and positively Godless character of modern man can not properly be understood as an alternative to Barth's position here. For Bonhoeffer, too, worked with a Christological actualism. and refused to seek justification or critical principles outside the particular context thus established. The basis for his secularism is theological and Christological, and would in fact be undermined if faith were to seek understanding (and security) through a general grounding or a critical vindication from philosophy.⁵ Bonhoeffer's differences from Barth have to do

³ Paul van Buren, The Secular Meaning of The Gospel, esp. Introduction, pp. 13-20.
⁴ Barth, loco cit.; also I/1, #5.
⁵ Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison. The letters of April 30, May 5, June 8, etc., in which the "religionless Christianity" theme is developed, abound in Christological references. See also Gerhard Ebeling's interpretation of Bonhoeffer, Word and Faith, pp. 98-161.

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largely with style; it is the confidence and exhaustiveness of Barth's dogmatic program, and not his Christological foundations, from which Bonhoeffer dissents.

The current theological scene, then, represents an attempt to reopen commerce between theology and philosophy without having dealt effectively with the standing theological objections to that commerce, and without having set out an independent alternative foundation for the theological task. Indeed, much of the current discussion, including the work of Ott and Van Buren (and in considerable measure also of Ebeling), assumes a conception of theology itself which is largely shaped by Barth, even as it undertakes this commerce which Barth supposes his conception of theology to have precluded. In my judgment, this situation has both a positive and a negative aspect. Positively, it recognizes that a total negative by theology toward philosophy is not viable (contrary to the opinion of some enthusiastic Barthians). Negatively, it fails to establish how commerce between the two disciplines is possible without compromising the integrity of theology (and of faith). A central issue for the current discussion, then, should be to determine the nature and limits of interaction between philosophers and theologians in the context of a Christological conception of theology. The remainder of this article will attempt to develop some aspects of this question.

I

The theologian as Christian believer has discovered himself justified by Jesus Christ, and he need not and must not adopt a defensive position, as if this decisive justification itself had to be justified by a demonstration to the non-believer that on his grounds, too, Christianity is legitimate. Further, the theologian also finds his linguistic and conceptual materials in the speaking and listening about Jesus Christ in the community of believers (in the same affirmations and conversations in which he has come to know the object of his faith). He need not and must not allow anyone not participating in that speaking and listening to set limits to what that language or his reflections may do. We are now to determine how, on such grounds, the philosopher and the theologian can have anything to say to each other. The theologian may not, on this view, give up the undeniable particularity and contingency of his position; the philosopher must, here as everywhere, insist on the universally accessible and

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the universally valid. Whatever basis of conversation is established must respect these limits. The tendency of some theologians to reject philosophy, and of quite a number of others to reject this conception of theology (without criticism of its intrinsic merits), may reflect the conclusion that the limits just specified preclude all conversation. I shall argue that this is an incorrect conclusion, and that in fact this conception of the nature of theology makes it possible both to maintain conversation and to respect the integrities of the parties to it, in a more adequate way than is made possible by alternative views. The theoretical basis of this argument rests, first, on the recognition that the universality claimed by the philosopher is secured by the public accessibility of his methods and the adequacy of his conclusions to cover what they claim to cover. If he has something to say which is of significance to the theologian (for example, the demonstration of a logical contradiction), the theologian may, with the same logical rules but a better knowledge of the connotations and denotations of his language, look and see, and determine for himself whether what the philosopher says is in fact the case (whether, for example, the doctrine of the Trinity is self-contradictory, or whether that impression rests on a misunderstanding of what the doctrine has to say).⁶ The philosopher's claim to adequacy also provides a basis in principle for conversation. If what the theologian affirms has in fact occurred, a philosophy which ignores it is not only incomplete in theory but likely to misconstrue particular phenomena through neglect of those important contexts and relations of principal interest to the theologian. This neglect may seen to be required of the philosopher by his rules, but what has revelatory character for the theologian might be allowed at least illustrative or suggestive power by the philosopher. The theologian, for example, cannot require of the philosopher that his conception of language include more than empirical, logical, and emotive functions, or that his analysis of existence allow structural centrality to coexistence with another; but he may, aided by his specific perspective, point out to the philosopher phenomena, humanly accessible to them both, which seem to lead in such directions.

⁶ It might, in fact, occur that the theologian would acknowledge the contradiction, but, like early quantum physicists, insist that the way things are requires this sort of statement anyway. In the case of the physicist, at least, the resulting problem was accepted and reflected on by both parties; I see no reason in principle why this should not occur with theological paradoxes.

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The second theoretical basis for conversation, already partly anticipated, lies in the Christian affirmation of the inclusiveness of the work of God in Christ, the sovereignty of God in Christ over all human history. This no more justifies theological totalitarianism than the methodological universality of the philosopher justifies philosophical totalitarianism. On the contrary, it involves the affirmation that in the world which the philosopher studies, the history of Jesus Christ has actually occurred and is the decisive indication and determination of the way things are, the decisive context for the interpretation of human living, knowing, and speaking. There is no intrinsic impossibility in any man seeing the way things are; on the contrary, any failure to see the way things are in the world is a human failure-in the present case, a philosophical failure-and can be examined and possibly corrected as such. The theologian criticizes philosophical errors not on behalf of theology, which should be undisturbed by them, but on behalf of a really human and really universal philosophy.⁷

I am making the present points in conscious analogy to Karl Barth's conception of the state in Christian Community and Civil Community and elsewhere.⁸ Barth there argues that the work of God is a political work, and that the state in its formal universality and the church in its material openness, the state with its witness to the form of justice and the church with its witness to the content of justification, require one another. The state is unable, except contingently, to recognize the special perspective of the church; what the church in fact requires of the state is rather that it maintain its quest for justice and security. The state affirms the extent and authority of the human community (which God has established in Christ); within it the church witnesses to the content of that community as one of reconciliation and sanctification. Similarly, the public and universal character of philosophy witnesses to the universal extent and impartial authority of truth in a way which the theologian cannot; the theologian witnesses to the character of truth as grace and to its affirmation, rather than neglect, of the concrete and contingent identity of each man, in a way which the philosopher cannot.

⁷ The point is made for theological and philosophical ethics in Paul Lehmann, Ethics in a Christian Context, pp. 275-276; the present argument generalizes his observations.
⁸ Karl Barth, Community, State, and Church, pp. 149 ff.

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It is in principle possible and appropriate, then, for philosopher and theologian to find occasion for conversation, without the theologian ceding either the basis of his justification or the criteria of his truthfulness and meaning to the philosopher. It remains to be seen what specific sorts of things might be involved in such a conversation.

II

Prevailing philosophical fashions both in Anglo-American and Continental circles claim for their discipline a strictly explicative, indicative, analytic function. Even the ontological projects of some phenomenologists and the neo-metaphysical enterprises of some of the analysts are restricted to an account of patterns disclosed in the phenomena (for the analyst, the language-phenomena). The theologian can only rejoice at any elucidation or clarification of any phenomena whatever. He must determine for himself, and on theological grounds, the status of the phenomena in relation to Jesus Christ, but he may accept the assistance of the philosopher as well as that of the oculist in his effort to see what there is to be seen.

Thomas Aquinas offers a historical example here. While the Christological theologian cannot regard Thomas' proofs of God's existence as relevant to the central theological issues, even were they cogent, he can recognize in Thomas' analysis of the contingency of change, causality, existence, and value a genuine explication of some fundamental limits of finite existence, and at least a partial and approximate indication of possible ranges of use of the term "God." (This is less than Thomas claims, of course, but it is none the less a positive accomplishment of his arguments.) The demonstration by Hume and Kant, that an attempt to secure the existence of God as a being both knowable and beyond the limits of our knowledge, is self-contradictory, prevents an overestimate of Thomas's arguments, but does not undermine this indicative function. Indeed, the philosophers' destruction of the case for a theoretically knowable God is another positive service to theology, in rescuing it from a false trail (for which seventeenth- and eighteenth-century apologists and metaphysicians were more responsible than Aquinas) at the end of which lay an abstract and graceless deity to whom Jesus Christ would ultimately prove as irrelevant as the rest of us.

In contemporary philosophical discussion, Heidegger's analyses of the historical nature of understanding and of the existential charac-

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ter of history have been extensively exploited by theologians (though sometimes with too much attempt to find justification in this analysis, or to give it a normative role for theology). The significance of his analysis of the constitution of the world and his critique of Descartes' res extensa, which provide an opportunity for liberation of the theological discussion of creation from bondage to a static and external cosmology (a res creata, as it were), has not been given comparable attention.

On the analytic side, the problem of what we mean, or are trying to do, when we say something or other, has generated considerable discussion. Unfortunately, theologians have sometimes appeared to panic before the question, and cast about for something to mean by, or do with, what they say (or even to look for something to say of which they can give the philosophers a better account than they could give of what they had been saying before). This philosophical question will be a service to the theologians when the latter calmly accept it, knowing that they have in fact had something to say, and something which the philosopher quite naturally doesn't make sense of, since he is unacquainted with what it is about. We may then attempt to make as good sense to the philosophers as the difference of perspective allows, and give as clear an account of what theological speaking is doing as our knowledge of its content and our understanding of the philosopher's question enable us to do.

This kind of contingent critical clarification is a constant contribution of the philosopher to the theological task. There is, indeed, much more to be done now than current fads recognize. There are many issues in Heidegger and Wittgenstein that their theological enthusiasts have not explored. Phenomenological philosophy is much involved these days with the later work of Husserl and with Merleau-Ponty; Ricoeur and Gusdorf also call for examination. In still another quarter, Whitehead (not just Hartshorne) has a good deal more to say than has yet been generally recognized. It can be predicted that they will not justify theology, and that to make them normative for it will violate its content and integrity; but it can also be predicted that a contingent critical dialogue with them will contribute new resources and insights.

The great advantage of the indicative, non-normative character of both phenomenology and language-analysis is that their claims are to be validated by seeing what they have to say, and seeing the way

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things are. They cannot, and do not claim toy define the way things are in a heteronomous way, but to show the way things are to anyone (even a theologian) who accepts the discipline of critical examination; their validity depends on achieving recognition. The difference, that the theologian is unwilling to lose sight of Jesus Christ in looking at the ways things are, maintains a tension in the dialogue which cannot be resolved in principle. But the common concern for truly seeing and saying the way things are makes it possible to maintain the dialogue in this unresolved tension (though it may in practice be insufficient to overcome mutual suspicion).

III

Theology is critical reflection on the hearing and speaking of the gospel in the community of response to it; it has no direct bearing on philosophical tasks at all. The philosopher may find theology an object of his curiosity, and he may choose to make it an object of philosophical reflection in the hope of making some sense out of it alongside other human speaking; but he has no obligation to take the theologian into account except as one among all the other human phenomena. The theologian can no more sit in judgment on the philosopher (or condescend to justify him, at least in part) than he can allow the philosopher to judge him. If the theologian is to have anything to say, for his part, to the philosopher, it must have the same sort of contingent, descriptive character as the philosophical contributions to his own work, and must be dependent on the same contingent assent.

The Christian theologian knows that in this actual world Jesus occurred; the church, its doctrine, and its preaching occurred; and faith, including his own faith, has occurred and will occur again. It is for this reason that he does not permit all the central questions about human existence and language, all ontological and hermeneutical and epistemological questions, to be decided and closed on a basis of neutrality (i.e., ignorance of the reality and character of these occurrences). But it follows from this also that the theologian affirms that what is seen in relation to Jesus is truly seen, and he can appeal directly to the philosopher for recognition of the truth of what he sees. So long as the Christological context is neglected, this recognition remains contingent and partial, but it is by no means without significance. just as a political decision, with no direct

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Christological foundation, may be a positive human accomplishment though only a partial and contingent one; and a psychotherapeutic insight, riot describable in any obvious sense as restoration through the work of Christ, may be of great human value without being salvation; so philosophical clarifications of aspects of human existence and language may have substantial positive import though not drawn from a conception of the Word of God or of man as Jesus' fellow man. Indeed, in the philosophical case as in the political and psychiatric, the specific problems have technical aspects that are normally confused rather than clarified by the intervention of the theologian as amateur. The theologian has here an interrogative and indicative role only. Jesus Christ does not give us licenses to practice psychiatry or politics or philosophy, though he may help us to see things worth our secular colleagues' seeing as well.

It is impossible to determine theologically how the theologian might be of this sort of contingent, indicative help to the philosopher. This can only come clear in a conversation characterized by mutual respect and willingness to hear and be heard. There are, however, several points that come to mind as possible starting points for such conversations. In Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, for example, the notion that "meaning" is to be understood in terms of use is developed in relation to specific communities speaking in connection with specific activities; indeed, he characterizes language as a "form of life." The conceptions of community, use, and life involved in this analysis appear to be of more significance than most discussions of the Investigations reflect. The theologian, knowing as he does from another context how great importance these issues are for an understanding of language, might well ask his colleague for discussion and clarification. Or in the "other" philosophical camp, the theologian observes in Heidegger, for example, a neglect of the problem of body, and a curiously unsatisfactory recognition of the structural significance of coexistence with another for the constitution of existence. To some considerable degree, the work of Merleau-Ponty, among others, has filled in these gaps. But the decisive structure, temporality, in Heidegger, is developed on a disembodied and isolated basis, and it does not appear to me that the structure of temporality, and that of historicity which is so closely connected with it and of such interest to theologians, has been reexamined, after the gaps were filled, in such a

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way as to take account of the constitutive role of the other person and of body in the temporal structure of existence. The theologian is alerted to this issue by the significance of Jesus Christ for men's time. He is anxious to pursue it with the philosopher, on strictly phenomenological grounds, because the recognition of the significance and interconnection of these structures is important for any affirmation of the reality and importance of concrete human existence.

IV

Where conversations might lead which could begin at these points could not be determined in advance. The philosopher must look, openly and critically, at the phenomena to see what he sees. From his point of view the theologian will always be overestimating the importance of a small set of phenomena out of their context in the whole, just as to the theologian the philosopher is always abstracting phenomena from their context in the world of Jesus Christ and thus seeing them in a spurious isolation and ambiguity. What is important is to see that this difference of perspective is not a basis for disqualifying any insight in advance, but in fact is the occasion for a fruitful dialogue of indications and questions, never completely resolved and never in principle irrelevant.

The analysis must, however, be carried one step further. The issues on which philosopher and theologian differ have to do with the status of the particular concrete persons in dialogue, and with the ultimately affirmative verdict of God on the human existence and identity of these persons. The theologian knows too well his own and his neighbor's tendency to seek escape in the secure anonymity of generality and abstraction. He must not, in dialogue with his philosophical colleague, indulge in this escape. And he must be prepared to find that the root of the difference of the philosopher from Christian faith lies precisely in his unwillingness to accept God's affirmative verdict. The difference between the theologian and the philosopher may thus be, at bottom, a disagreement over the human worth of the philosopher. Philosophy must not exercise a justifying or normative role in the dialogue with the theologian, lest, the theologian abandon the freedom to reject the ultimately destructive self-judgment which all of us persistently substitute for God's mercy. The implicitly ambiguous and isolated character of

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philosophy can be a symptom of the human depersonalization and isolation of the man who is thinking. That cannot be accepted or compromised with.

Dialogue of theologian and philosopher is thus possible without violating the integrity and autonomy of either, provided both the quest for self-justification and the use of the imperative mood are renounced. The possibility rests on the convergence of the philosopher's claim to universality and adequacy with the theologian's affirmation of the inclusiveness and human relevance of the gospel. It is limited by the irreducible tension between the philosopher's methodological neutrality and the theologian's insistence on the decisiveness of a contingent history. But the dialogue must be maintained, for the sake of contingent mutual assistance and clarification. And it may ultimately center on, and must never lose sight of, the human needs and human worth of the participants.