Theology, ethics, and church growth: or, how to prove anything with statistics
It is an important part of the role of the academic, particularly the academic who chooses to comment in non-specialist arenas, to be very clear about precisely what is, and what is not, shown by a given piece of evidence. I picked up on a minor Twitter storm yesterday concerning claims and counter-claims about the linkage of church decline with a progressive/accepting stance on issues of sexuality.
Read MoreOn the verification of a proof of ‘God’s existence’
Der Spiegel online offered an eye-cathcing headline last week: ‘Computer Scientists “Prove” God Exists’ (article here). The article referred to a pre-publication report of a paper submitted to arxiv.org last month, entitled ‘Formalization, Mechanization and Automation of Gödel’s Proof of God’s Existence’ (here). Essentially, the paper claims – it is more of an abstract and statement of results – that (a form of) Kurt Gödel’s modal ontological argument had been successfully coded, and that its validity had been demonstrated using – the detail I rather liked – programs running on a MacBook. As my colleague Alan Torrance pointed out on FB, this is not surprising; there has been a fairly general acceptance of Gödel’s logic for a while now. And as Der Spiegel pointed out, the point of the research was not to prove God’s existence but to demonstrate the possibility of computerised verification of logical arguments, using an argument of some fame, and of acknowledged complexity, as a test case. That said, the statement that a proof of God’s existence has been shown to be valid is not uninteresting – and that it is a version of the (in)famous ontological argument is very pleasing to those, like me, who see a restless fascination with the ontological argument as the infallible mark of a truly philosophical mind… Attentive readers will have noted some variation in use of scare quotes in the various headlines: the original piece used none; the newspaper article suggested ‘proof’ was being used wrongly; my title suggests the issue lies with ‘God’s existence’. Obviously, I think my usage is correct, but these differences highlight what is at stake. In defence of the original authors, they were referring to ‘Gödel’s proof of God’s existence’ in the same way they might have referenced ‘Fermat’s last theorem’: it is a well-known logical conundrum of interest to logicians because it appears correct but seeming has proved difficult to demonstrate completely. Der Spiegel‘s headline (at least in translation; I could not find an easy way to navigate to a German original of the article) suggested that the ‘proof’ was dubious; this is precisely wrong; assuming the correctness of the results reported, the heart of the research findings is the fact that the proof is certain, and demonstrated to be so. But what has been proved? Deductive logic always proves the same thing: that, given a certain set of axioms and definitions, a certain set of conclusions follows from a certain set of premises. (In modal logic there is an added complication of which modal logic is in play; if you are interested in the technical details of modal logics, go and get a life the paper claims that KB is sufficient for the proof to work; S5 is not needed.) In serious logic, the axioms and definitions are necessarily seriously abstruse and formal (here, Definition 3 asserts ‘Necessary existence of an individual is the necessary exemplification of all its essences’). The precise proof is that, given five axioms and accepting three definitions, it can be shown that a ‘God-like being’ necessarily exists, where ‘God-like’ means ‘possessing all positive properties’ (this is essentially a formalisation of perfect being theology). So what hesitations might we have before claiming ‘scientists have proved that God exists?’ Two, one more (theologically) significant than the other. First, and less significant, the proof is uninteresting (except as a neat bit of demonstrated logic) if any of the axioms or definitions are dubious. The three required definitions and five stated axioms are as follows (you can look up the symbolic logic in the paper above if you are interested): D1 A ‘God-like’ being possesses all positive properties. D2 An ‘essence’ of an individual is a property possessed by it and necessarily implying any of its properties. D3 ‘Necessary existence’ of an individual is the necessary exemplification of all its essences. A1 Either a property or its negation is positive, but not both. A2 A property necessarily implied by a positive property is positive. A3 The property of being ‘God-like’ is positive. A4 Positive properties are necessarily positive. A5 Necessary existence is a positive property. Now, anyone at all familiar with debate over the ontological argument in its various forms will fairly quickly spot the first point of attack here: is the concept of ‘necessary existence’ coherent/meaningful? (And, concomitantly, is the claim that it is a positive property if coherent justified?) As the authors say in their concluding paragraph, ‘[t]he critical discussion of the underlying concepts, definitions and axioms remains a human responsibility…’ (In reading the proof, I am also struck by the unspecified value-judgement implied in the word ‘positive’; A3, A5, and probably D1 seem to me to smuggle in...
Read MoreDefining liberal Christianity
There are a number of reports on the Web reacting to last week’s ECUSA triennial convention – Mike Bird linked to one at BeliefNet and one at the WSJ; Several people on Twitter and FB pointed out Ross Douthat’s piece in the NY Times, which took the opportunity to give thought to the wider issue of the ‘collapse’ (his word) of liberal Christianity in the USA. The piece is humorous (‘Leaders of liberal churches have alternated between a Monty Python-esque “it’s just a flesh wound!” bravado and a weird self-righteousness about their looming extinction.’) and perceptive in drawing attention to a fact that is also one of the chief lessons of Goodhew’s Church Growth in Britain: there is a strong positive correlation between church growth and conservative theology, and between church decline and liberal theology. (This is not, of course, necessarily a reason to commend conservative theology – our calling is to faithfulness to the gospel, not to worldly success – but it is a reason to greet the (very regular) announcements from the more liberal denominations in both the UK and the USA that the best way to stop their decline in attendance is to become yet more liberal with something akin to a facepalm…) That said, Douthat’s piece seems to me to be built on a fundamental misapprehension; he asserts that ‘the defining idea of liberal Christianity’ is ‘that faith should spur social reform as well as personal conversion’ and laments the possible loss of this idea from American national life. As a definition of liberal Christianity, this is astonishingly misdirected; indeed, it might better serve as a definition of classical Evangelicalism, which was, and increasingly is again, precisely about the combination of personal and social transformation in the name of the gospel. Someone might attempt a historical account in which this evangelical holism was lost in both directions, with conservatives holding on to the need for personal conversion and liberals holding on to the need for social transformation, but I don’t see this as being in any way plausible; classical evangelicalism was already defined against a liberal tradition, that had its own clear intellectual position, and that in turn rejected the evangelical position. Further, it does not hold even in relatively recent history, at least in the UK (I suspect it does not in the USA either, but my knowledge of the history there is less sure): in the face of mass immigration from the West Indies in the 1950s, for instance, the mainstream liberal churches were fairly uniformly racist; the reactions of evangelical churches were mixed, but at least some did in fact open their doors and welcome their new black neighbours. What is liberal Christianity? The question is complex, of course. To give a fully adequate answer would demand reference to renewed confidence in reason, to a high estimate of the possibilities of human endeavour, married to a downplaying of the doctrine of original sin (at least as classically taught), to Biblical criticism, to the turn to history that affected theology as much as every other academic discipline in the early twentieth-century, and to other currents. That said, most of these currents coalesce in popular expressions of Christianity into a fairly unified stream. So, as a broad approximation, liberal Christianity is Christianity that is acutely alive to the challenges to belief coming from modern philosophy. Kant’s denial of knowledge of the noumenal realm apparently made traditional accounts of revelation impossible, and the more-or-less simultaneous rise of Biblical criticism made traditional accounts of revelation profoundly precarious even if possible. Of course, every intellectually serious mode of Christianity has had to respond somehow to these challenges – this was the sense of Stephen Sykes’ announcement that we are all liberals today; the particular character of liberal Christianity has been to find a response in accepting the force of the challenges and seeing a profound need for doctrinal reformulation to meet them. The greatest, and still defining, figure in the story is Schleiermacher, who attempted to refound theology on a different basis, an appeal to shared human religious experience. All religious traditions, and all systems of theology, were attempts to analyse this shared experience, and to say what must be the case concerning the divine if the experience was in fact accurate. (I am very conscious that recent scholarship on Schleiermacher has resisted this sort of foundationalist reading of his theology; if it is not accurate, then the story I am telling needs slight revision: ‘Schleiermacher was understood, wrongly, to be saying this; those who misapprehended his programme created a vibrant liberal tradition that proceeded on this basis…’) This central methodological place for human experience has...
Read MoreFoundationalist epistemology and the concern for systematic order
(A title just guaranteed to bring the readers flocking…) I have had cause to notice before, certainly in print and I think on this blog, that the older dogmaticians were not particularly interested in the order in which they treated topics. The great medieval systems tended to follow the pattern of Lombard’s Sentences, which in turn owed at least something to the shape of the creed; that this order was fairly uncontroversial and unquestioned is already indicative that they generally did not think the arrangement mattered very much. The theologians of the nascent school traditions that arose after the Reformation were faced with the same question, and with at least two reasons to take it seriously: a humanist concern for good order in writing; and the influence of the new system of logic of Peter Ramus (in addition, whilst clearly respecting and borrowing often from the pre-Reformation schools, they were also conscious of a need to do theology differently). In Ames’s Medulla, for example, there is a conscious attempt, represented by the chart, to construct theology in terms of a series of Ramist bifurcations; Perkins’s Catena, by constrast, deliberately adopts a narrative approach – again, see the chart – using salvation history to determine the order in which topics are treated. All of these decisions are essentially heuristic, however: they are attempts to find a natural and logical manner of presenting a body of material in order to help the readers’ understanding of it. Ames locates (some of) his doctrine of Scripture under the head of ‘extraordinary ministers of the church,’ taking the role of the prophets and apostles as his way in; this is one side of a discussion of the church’s ministry (the other being the ‘ordinary ministers of the church’, and an account of ecclesiology); as such it appears several divisions down, buried deep in the body of the text. Polanus started his Syntagma with (an account of theological methodology and then) a doctrine of Scripture; no reader of the day would have assumed from this that Ames thought Scripture less important or foundational than Polanus. In nineteenth-century theology, this changed. The ordering of a system was suddenly central: placing Scripture first was a claim concerning the importance of that doctrine, and the method adopted in the system that followed. Order of presentation became a clue to method and intent. This instinct shaped – and still shapes – new dogmatic writing: concern over the ordering of topics is a mark of most serious dogmatics in the last two centuries. It was also read back, unhelpfully, into the tradition, leading to claims of an old theological method that first assumed, and them built on, a doctrine of Scripture, for instance. So far I have said little new; the connection that strikes me, and that I do not recall seeing explored in the literature, is this: there is both a temporal coincidence, and a logical coherence, between the concern for systematic order and the widespread assumption of a foundationalist epistemology. The eighteenth-century quest to find an indubitable basis for human knowledge was noble in its aspirations: if we could find something on which we must all agree, then rational dialogue between human beings of different beliefs and convictions would be possible. The tragedy of modernity, which still shapes most of our discourse, is that the quest failed; there is nothing that we cannot doubt, not Descartes’ cogito, not Locke’s commitment to sense-data, not Kant’s imperative, certainly not Hegel’s speculations. Our intelligent discourse at present is sometimes tradition-specific; sometimes an attempt to propose an ethical, rather than metaphysical, shared ground (environmental concern appears the best candidate, sufficiently convincing in the last decade to have led some recent retreats from principled postmodernity); and sometimes a discussion of how to continue rational dialogue between traditions with no common basis. Whilst the quest was still live, however, it necessarily proposed the privileging of a particular epistemological scheme, these days known as foundationalism. That is, whilst we saw the fundamental problem in epistemology as being the articulation of shared basic beliefs, it was inevitable that we constructed our accounts of what truth looks like on the basis of a conviction that there are basic foundational truths, whence all other truths must be capable of derivation, to be considered as truths. Theology constructed in a foundationalist mode will be endlessly concerned with identifying the order of the doctrines – which is basic, and which is derived? Is all else proved from a doctrine of Scripture, or from a doctrine of God, or from an account of faith (Bultmann…), or …? Which claim is the foundation stone on which the system rests?...
Read MoreBeing a theologian for the church
(Phil. 3:12: ‘not that I have already achieved all this…’) Over the past week, in a variety of ways, a number of connected strands of conversation, each of which I regularly find myself overhearing or involved with, have all come to notice or prominence. All relate to the question of the connection of ‘theologians’ to the life of the church. Often there is an expressed sadness or concern that the various churches – particularly, in my hearing, the Evangelical and Baptist churches that I have the privilege to serve – are not willing, or at least not willing enough, to hear or to use the insights of theologians. As I drove back from giving a lecture in a church conference, in could see in my head a somewhat angry deconstruction of at least several of these strands, which began with the reflection that my own experience is so far from a general unwilllingness to be heard or used that I find that claim almost incomprehensible. Instead of being angry, however, I want here to attempt a constructive account of how ‘theologians’ should, ideally, be related to the life of the churches. ‘Theologians’ has been in quotation marks so far to indicate the need for a definition. Let me suggest as a first approximation, ‘those whose Christian vocation includes sustained attention to the doctrines of the faith’. considered as a Christian vocation, there are at least two appropriate strands to this: disseminating doctrine; and purifying doctrine. Dissemination is about helping the churches to access the deposit of faith, both in order to know it better, and in order to correct misapprehensions concerning it. These misapprehensions might be omissions (‘we don’t talk about this anything as much as we should, if we were being faithful to our heritage…’) or errors (‘So-and-so is wrong to claim that Baptists have always believed that…’). The proper task of the theologian here is to be a witness, as unbiased as possible, to the tradition; if I am to be the lens through which a church sees the tradition, then I have a duty (we are talking about theology as Christian vocation here, remember) to be as clear and undistorting lens as possible. Purification, by contrast, is about challenging the theological tradition: the theologian may come to the view that, in certain ways, some doctrinal positions are in fact wrong, although settled, and so stand in need of reformulation. She may campaign in various ways for such reformulation, publishing, lecturing, and arguing for a few months or for an entire career. The proper task of the theologian here is to be a passionate – and biased – advocate. This is not a ‘descriptive’ vs ‘evaluative’ distinction, as giving an account of the tradition itself demands the making of evaluative judgements. The judgements here are more nearly historical than doctrinal, but they are judgements, nonetheless. The question of the doctrinal tradition is always going to be a somewhat complex and messy one, perhaps particularly for churches which trace their heritage to the Reformation. They have their birth in a process of doctrinal correction and reformulation, and they profess to remain institutionally committed to further reform, should it appear necessary. In recent decades, the academic theology that relates to them has often suggested that some drastic reformulations are in fact needed, and some of these can seem to have attained a measure of general acceptance in academic discourse. To give an account of what is now standard theology thus requires judgements to be made about the success and importance of various proposed reformulations. To take an example, consider the question, ‘what is the gospel?’ (a query I’ve seen in several contexts recently), I have a very complex historical narrative in my head which is not easily reducible to a simple answer: differing Lutheran, Calvinist, Roman (& Anabaptist) accounts of the nature of justification; Eastern Orthodox accounts of deification, and the measure of academic interest they have attracted recently; diverse Evangelical traditions, exploring sometimes the link between social justice and salvation, whilst sometimes seeking to protect a very narrow soteriological narrative as being ‘the gospel’; recent developments in academic study of Paul, and the revisionist proposals arising from there; my own estimations of the importance or success of each of these positions; and some awareness, at least, of how my estimations on this last point might differ from the estimations of others. I also have some personal beliefs and commitments which would shape my own constructive attempts to narrate the good news adequately. I can answer the question – or any such theological question – then, in a number of ways. First, is the questioner...
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