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Evangelicalism and Philosophy
By Richard J. Mouw

Evangelical scholarship has begun to come into its own in recent decades. An obvious example in this regard can be seen among the evangelical philosophers. A number of philosophers of evangelical persuasion occupy prestigious university teaching posts and function as leaders in the philosophical profession. In 1978, a group of evangelical philosophers joined some Roman Catholic colleagues in founding the Society of Christian Philosophers. This organization, which now has approximately 800 members continent-wide, is an important forum for dialogue and collegial scholarship among philosophers representing a broad spectrum of confessional communities: Reformed, Roman Catholic, Anglo-American evangelical, Anglo-Catholic, Lutheran, and others.

An informal but growing philosophical coalition of this sort--especially among Anglo-American evangelicals, Dutch Calvinists, and Roman Catholics--is perhaps an especially significant, and uniquely North American, phenomenon. Philosophers from these communities have much in common. George Marsden has proposed the intriguing thesis that for Anglo-American evangelicals the transition from nineteenth century America, when they had held a position of cultural domination, to a strongly secularist twentieth century was very much like an immigration experience¹. The resultant sense of cultural alienation, which characterized the evangelical presence for several decades in this century, was not unlike the experiences of Dutch-Americans and Italian-Americans and Polish-Americans--groups who were immigrants in the more accepted sense of the term-during a similar time-span.

The more recent dissolution of the strong sense of cultural alienation among evangelicals and their fellow travellers in other conservative Protestant communities (Missouri Synod Lutherans, Christian Reformed, Pentecostals) has resulted in a mood much like the aggiornamento spirit of post-Vatican II Catholicism in the United States. Philosophers representing these various traditions have much to talk about together, and they have indeed been busy pursuing those conversations.

Richard J. Mouw is Professor of Philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary. He has also taught at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, and is the author of Called to Holy Worldliness (1980) and Politics and the Biblical Drama (1983).

¹George M. Marsden, "From Fundamentalism to Evangelicalism: A Historical Analysis," in The Evangelicals: What They Believe, Who They Are, Where They Are Changing, eds., David F. Wells and John D. Woodbridge (Nashville: Abingdon, 1975), pp. 129ff.

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I

Seminary philosophical teaching and scholarship, as I see it, should focus much more than has been the case in the past on that area of discussion that Arthur Holmes refers to as "world-viewish philosophy." Holmes introduces this notion toward the beginning of his book, Contours of a World View, in the course of discussing the contributions that both theology and philosophy could make to the shaping of an explicitly Christian world view. He distinguishes "theologians' theology" from "world-viewish theology," and then goes on to draw a parallel distinction with reference to philosophy.²

Like theologians' theology, philosophers' philosophy is a conversation in which professional scholars address other professional scholars. Refined methodologies and vocabularies are employed in dealing with questions and problems that arise out of very technical investigations. "World-viewish" modes of address deal with issues having to do with the forming and evaluating of worldviews, and with specific questions that arise within attempts to articulate a worldview. World-viewish versions of both theology and philosophy deal with issues that are basic to a proper understanding of work, leisure, technology, sexuality, friendship, institutions, the marketplace, therapy, and so on.

A distinction of this sort easily lends itself to being used as a means of disparaging the "abstract" nature of "Professional" theological and philosophical discussion. But Holmes obviously does not intend to reinforce such attitudes. Nor do I mean to do so in endorsing his promotion of "world-viewish" investigations. As difficult as the conversations of professional philosophers are for the uninitiated, they are nonetheless of crucial importance. The technical tone of much professional philosophical discussion often masks the fact that the issues being debated deal with questions about basic features of the human condition. And often the professional insistence that these matters do get discussed in terms of a technical vocabulary and in a dispassionate manner has been a strategy that has helped in achieving clarity.

Nor should Holmes' distinction between professional and worldviewish discussion be used to disparage world-viewish investigations that go beyond the borders of accepted professional attention. It would be a mistake, I think, to construe Holmes' distinction as pointing to "hard" versus "easy," or "careful" versus "mushy" philosophy. The distinction is most helpful if we think of it primarily in terms of the choice of agenda. World-viewish philosophy allows the questions that will be subjected to philosophical scrutiny to be presented by a broader audience than professional philosophy. Similarly, the specific proposals I will make all require a more inclusive agenda-setting process for philosophy in a seminary context.

A convincing case for a broader philosophical agenda in the context of

²Arthur F. Holmes, Contours of a World View (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), pp. 34-40.

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seminary education can be made apart from an appeal for more world-viewish sensitivities. The kind of philosophical investigation that has occurred in the context of theological education has often been much too narrowly focused on what we might think of as "the philosophy of God." Metaphysical discussions have often been preoccupied with the divine attributes, and epistemological explorations have typically featured topics having to do with belief in God, as in the traditional "faith and reason" discussions. The philosopher's role in a seminary context has regularly been viewed primarily as that of an adjunct to the systematic theologian's work, dealing exclusively with the metaphysical and epistemological prologomena to dogmatic theology.

It is possible to conceive of a broader role for philosophy simply by attending to the larger scope of traditional theological curricula. There certainly are good reasons for giving a place not only to philosophical theology, narrowly conceived, but also to philosophical anthropology, philosophical psychology, philosophy of history, philosophy of language, philosophy of education, and moral philosophy.

Many of the emphases I will mention in briefly formulating my more specific proposals could be implemented under these traditional rubrics. But my hunch is that this way of stating the case-appealing to a broader match-up between traditional areas of theological education and traditional areas of philosophical discussion-is not the best approach for promoting enthusiasm for philosophy in the present context of theological education. The world-viewish orientation is at least a more "marketable" approach. But I am also convinced that it is the wiser course to pursue.

II

In many ways, the problems of shaping more philosophically conscious seminaries are similar to those raised by Plato when he thought about the need for philosopher-kings. Plato's basic strategy for dealing with the need for philosophically sensitive rulers in the world of sights and sounds is suggestive for our own situation. He made the wise observation that if we are ever to develop philosophical rulers it will be because one of two things happened. Either philosophers will have become rulers or rulers will have become philosophers. Analogously, if we are ever to have more philosophically self-conscious seminaries, it will either be because seminaries have become more philosophical or because philosophers have become more seminary-ish. Or both, of course. And I think that this might happen if both seminaries and philosophers would become more world-viewish in their interests.

Something very much like this is happening on the seminary side of the process. People who are involved in the task of theological education-as students, teachers, and administrators-are more sensitive to world-viewish concerns these days than they often have been in the past. Let me offer one example of the way in which this sensitivity is manifested.

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When I embarked upon my teaching career in the late 1960s, the discussions of how Christians were to relate to the larger intellectual, and even larger cultural, dialogues were still very much framed by the categories that had been laid out in H. Richard Niebuhr's 1951 book, Christ and Culture. This was true of discussions in the evangelical community as well as in the broader ecumenical environment. For example, the intensive evangelical discussion of political witness that followed in the wake of the appearance of The Post-American magazine (now Sojourners) in the late 1960s and the 1973 Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concerns initially made much use of the Niebuhrian categories, with Anabaptists being characterized as being "against culture," the Reformed being in favor of "transforming culture," and so on.

More recently, there has been a discernible shift away from this reliance on the "Christ and culture" scheme that Niebuhr formulated. We are less inclined these days-not just evangelicals, but all of us in the Christian community-to talk about "culture" in an unqualified sense, as if there were a homogenous entity or commodity produced by human beings that can be labelled, simply, "culture," and which Jesus either likes or doesn't like, or feels identified with or above, or which makes him feel paradoxical whenever he encounters it.

We are much more inclined these days to think in terms of Christ and the cultures. We spend a lot of time talking about diverse cultural contexts and bow cultural "place" influences the ways in which we think and speak about the basic issues of life, even about the most basic issues of the Christian life. For example, we are exploring some new versions of what Roman Catholics are fond of calling "the problem of God." We have become more self-conscious about the ways in which our primary images of God have been, in many of our cultural and sub-cultural groupings, much too Anglo-Saxon or North Atlantic or capitalist or male.

There is a parallel here, of course, to a significant shift of focus in professional philosophical discussion. Many philosophers today have become very interested in the "hermeneutical question," which is, in Diogenes Allen's apt characterization, "the question of how to understand or to interpret texts from periods and cultures that are not our own."³ This fascination with-or agonizing over-the rule of culture and temporal situatedness in grasping the basic issues of life is even prevalent in circles where the names of Gadamer and Derrida are never invoked. For many of us, both non-evangelical and evangelical, the questions arise in poignant ways when we struggle to be obedient, as women and men in Christian community today, to an infallible Word whose human authors were selected and empowered by the Holy Spirit in an ancient setting that was pervasively patriarchal.

³Diogenes Allen, Philosophy for Understanding Theology (Atlanta: John Knox, 1986), p. 272.

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Such discussions have done much to stimulate interest in world-viewish issues in the Christian educational community. And for evangelicals, at least, this has brought about much improvement in the tone and focus of theological discussion. Evangelical Christians have always been very self-conscious about the role of basic presuppositions and assumptions in theoretical investigation. It is no accident, for example, that Kuhnian and post-Kuhnian philosophy of science has given new life to the efforts of so-called "creation science" advocates, since conservative Protestants were making Kuhnian-type noises-even if they were rather crude noises at times-long before the appearance of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

But the presuppositionalist proclivities of conservative Protestants seemed, for a long time, to be frozen at the apologetic stage. Evangelicals made much of the fact that one's basic presuppositions played an important role in shaping one's scholarly programs; but they did not do much to demonstrate that fact by actually pursuing scholarly programs. In theology proper, this meant that evangelicals compulsively talked about the importance of having a clear view of biblical authority in doing theology, but they have done little to exhibit what a healthy theology, along the lines they were articulating, would look like.

I have much sympathy for those evangelicals of the past who were caught up in the kind of defensive, apologetic mood that I have been describing. They were, I think, rightly protesting the uncritical acceptance of Enlightenment notions of scientific "objectivity" and rational "neutrality" that were widespread in the larger community of Christian scholarship. But now the Enlightenment project has become a subject for widespread and detailed critical scrutiny-a very welcome development, indeed, from an evangelical point of view. In an important sense, this frees all of us for getting beyond some of the older debates to a new and very exciting agenda of theological issues. I am convinced that philosophy has a crucial role to play in dealing with this newer agenda.

III

How can philosophers best respond to the emerging world-viewish sensitivities in theological discussion and in theological education? How might we effectively address this newer agenda of issues in the context of theological curriculum?

Holmes employs the term "worldview" to refer to the basis on which people establish the patterns of interrelatedness in their lived-worlds. People manifest, he argues, a deep impulse to integrate various aspects of their lives. There is a four-fold human need for such an integrating frame of reference: "the need to unify thought and life; the need to define the good life and find hope and meaning in life; the need to guide thought; the need to guide action"⁴

My own hunch is that Holmes may be overrating the felt need for a

⁴Holmes, Contours, pp. 3-5.

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unifying vision of reality. It may be that we have become quite polytheistic in a very fundamental way, so that we are now quite capable of moving back and forth between diverse, and inconsistent, worldviews with little regard for the question of what it is that ultimately unifies our cultural worlds. If the Bellah team's quadratic typology for sorting out contemporary North American "habits of the heart" can rightly be viewed as an analysis of four dominant world views-and I think it can-then there seems to be some evidence that people are in fact engaged in rather constant trans-world-view traffic.

In their analysis of worldviews, Brian Walsh and Richard Middleton suggest that a person's worldview will address four questions: Who am I? Where am I? What's wrong? What is the remedy?⁵ This set of questions corresponds almost exactly to the four components of a well-informed theory of human nature as set out by Leslie Stevenson in his much-used textbook, Seven Theories of Human Nature. Stevenson analyzes various accounts of human nature according to their general conceptions of the universe, their understandings of essential humanness, their diagnoses of what is presently wrong with human beings, and their prescriptions for correcting these defects.⁶

To analyze worldviews, then, is to deal with some crucial areas of investigation that are located at the intersections of philosophical and theological thought: general metaphysics, anthropology, hamartiology, and soteriology. These are areas, I suggest, that can be fruitfully explored in a world-viewish manner with philosophical sensitivity by theological educators.

These areas of concern certainly need to be dealt with in the course of evangelical theological education. This means, I think, that evangelicalism must encourage seminary-ish philosophers to assist the evangelical community in wrestling with the questions and answers posed by both traditional and contemporary philosophical and world-viewish explorations.

Let me put the mandate in more theological terms. Philosophers have an important role to play in enabling the Christian community to develop the critical-intellectual dimensions of the charism of discernment. Where critical-intellectual discernment is a developed gift-and it has typically been underdeveloped in North American evangelicalism-Christians will be encouraged to think about the ways in which philosophical reflection can strengthen the Christian community in its life and witness. Christians will ask how wrestling seriously with past and present accounts of the nature of reality, of human uniqueness, of human brokenness, and of the possibilities of restoration can promote more effective and obedient patterns of discipleship. Let us explore the practical possibilities for this sort of philosophical pedagogy by looking at four important aspects of the Christian community's life and witness,

⁵Brian J. Walsh and J. Richard Middleton, The Transforming Vision: Shaping a Christian World View (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1984), p. 35.

⁶Leslie Stevenson, Seven Theories of Human Nature (New York: Oxford, 1974), pp. 4-5.

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aspects to which I will refer (for lack of a more adequate labelling system) as the pastoral, the evangelistic, the praxical, and the ecumenical.

IV

The pastoral is that aspect of Christian communal life which has to do with the "shepherding" of the Christian community. There is an important network of "internal" structures and ministries that characterizes the communal life of the disciples of Jesus. We teach each other, celebrate the eucharistic meal together, promote patterns of spiritual formation, tell the stories of Jesus to our children, counsel the confused, comfort those who mourn, and so on.

What does philosophical reflection have to contribute to these patterns of communal shepherding? I must confess that I find that to be a very provocative question, especially as I think of various specifications of the question. What does philosophy have to say to questions about the ways in which Christian parents attempt to pass on the stories and practices and experiences of the faith to their children? In what ways are these parenting tasks made difficult today by those attributes and beliefs associated with "secular humanism," which many Christians claim is the dominant pedagogical philosophy of our culture?

Or, what does Christian philosophy have to say to people who are seeking deeper and more mature patterns of "spirituality"? Evangelicals, as heirs to the pietistic tradition, have always been interested in "a personal walk with the Lord." This emphasis--one that I think to be a key strength of evangelical Christianity-is being greatly enriched these days by a growing evangelical openness to the "spiritual disciplines" of Anglo- and Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Many evangelicals have, for example, been stretched in their understanding of spirituality by the writings of, say, Richard Foster and Henri Nouwen.

More recently, Dave Hunt and T. A. McMahon have warned evangelicals, in their popular book The Seduction of Christianity, of the ways in which some practices associated with these spiritual disciplines, for example, "creative visualization," can lead us into "shamanistic" and "occult" patterns.⁷ There is much that is silly in the Hunt-McMahon tract. But there is also much that invites serious philosophical clarification. The theological seminary seems to me to be an excellent environment for serious discussion of the philosophy of spirituality, with special attention to metaphysical, epistemological, and anthropological themes that are at work in this area.

Second, the evangelistic. How can philosophy assist us in discerning the issues and patterns that are crucial for the disciplined and faithful presentation of the Gospel to those who have not yet named Jesus as Savior and Lord? The need for more "evangelistic" sensitivities in my philosophical pedagogy was brought home to me in a poignant manner a

⁷Dave Hunt and T. A. McMahon, The Seduction of Christianity: Spiritual Discernment in the Last Days (Eugene: Harvest House, 1985), ch. 9.

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few years ago in a conversation with a former student who was serving as a missionary in a third world country. He was telling me about the culture shock he experienced when he suddenly found himself in a context where people thought of themselves as living in a world that was highly populated with evil spirits. "I had taken your introduction to philosophy course at Calvin College," he said, "and I remember spending a lot of time talking about evil in that course. We read David Hume, and I found the whole topic very stimulating. But none of that gave me any help in understanding the world of people who constantly confront the power of evil spirits in their lives in very existential and pervasive ways."

I must confess that that conversation was for me a turning point in my thinking about philosophical pedagogy. Not that I think it is wrong to assign Hume's Dialogues to students. But this conversation with my former student made me realize that I really had been operating with the assumption that in addressing the Humean agenda I was philosophizing about the "problem of evil." In assuming this, I was totally ignoring the questions and answers about the reality of evil that were the daily concern of millions of people for whom Christ died. I see no reason why this area-having to do with a philosophy of evil as experienced and understood in the contexts of primal religions-cannot be the subject of careful metaphysical and epistemological investigation.

This topic is just one important case in point for a broader agenda having to do with cross-cultural issues. And many of these cross-cultural topics, and related issues of inter-faith dialogue, are moving very close to home with the influx of new immigrant groups and the contemporary fascination with "New Age" religions and neo-paganism in Yuppiedom. These issues ought not to be ignored in theological education. Philosophers have an important role to play in the business of dealing with them properly.

These first two aspects-the pastoral and the evangelistic-have been strong points of emphasis in the evangelical community, with its deep desire to promote "the fellowship of the saints" and to invite others to accept the gospel as a saving and transforming power in human life. To insist upon the importance of philosophy for these aspects of the church's life and mission is to ask for an intellectual strengthening of what is already deemed important. The next two areas-the praxical and the ecumenical-are not, by contrast, obvious areas of evangelical strength.

By "praxical" I mean the ways in which Christians act in the polis, the patterns of our involvement in the social, political, and economic structures of human life. Needless to say, these topics are getting much discussed these days in theological institutions, even in many evangelical seminaries. But there isn't much philosophical discipline exhibited in these discussions. There is considerable traffic between the philosophical and theological discussion of ethical issues. The situation has greatly improved since my graduate school days at the University of Chicago, when those of us in the philosophy department could not figure out what

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the Divinity School ethics people were talking about, and vice versa. But the discussions of political thought seem to be lagging behind in this process of rapproachement. Not that there is a total absence of common ground: for example, Paul Ramsey on Just War doctrine is always appropriate fodder for discussion in both seminaries and philosophy departments. But when one focuses on the basic patterns of discussion, the perspectival settings, in each area, the distances seem quite significant. For many of us trained in Anglo-American political philosophy, the questions and answers bandied about in the study of people like Hobbes, Rousseau, Rawls, and Nozick are usually very different from those that set the agenda of seminary social ethics courses.

My own sense is that the traffic lanes need to be opened up here. For one thing, while many provocative themes and emphases have come our way from, say, third world theological discussion, these materials need to be subject to philosophical clarification and amplification. Many of the Latin American treatments of, say, "truth and praxis" and "knowing and doing" are much in need of further epistemological development. The need for this kind of careful analysis is especially crucial in an evangelical setting, where such discussions are either quickly dismissed because of obviously inadequate formulations or are embraced enthusiastically in a manner that reinforces typical evangelical patterns of anti-intellectual pragmatism.

Finally, the issue of ecumenism. We evangelicals have often been suspicious and unfriendly people in our relationships with other groups in the larger Christian community. Philosophy will not itself solve our problems in this area. But this is a dimension of our life and witness where we very much need all the help we can get in sharpening the tools of critical discernment. And discernment is a crucial factor here. Evangelical Christians must ask where we have correctly discerned what it is that others have been saying and doing, and where we have watched and listened in an undiscerning manner, thereby running the very real risk of bearing false witness against our Christian neighbors.

Philosophers have no messianic role to play in this area. But there can be no doubt that at least some of the items that have divided evangelicals from other Protestants, and from our spiritual siblings in the Roman and Eastern churches, have either been non-philosophical issues in philosophical disguise or philosophical issues in non-philosophical disguise.

A new atmosphere for discussion holds out the hope that we can begin to make serious progress in overcoming past misunderstandings. That will necessarily involve, or so I think, the careful telling of our communal stories with special attention to the ways in which our intellectual-and in some cases, anti-intellectual-pilgrimages have unfolded. This kind of careful narration has begun to take place among evangelicals in recent years, with historians and philosophers taking the initiative. It is time now for the evangelical seminaries to claim ownership, or at least a legitimate stake, in that new narrative enterprise. One way to do this is to insist that philosophy occupy an important place in theological education. There is much that is at stake in this for all of us.