Thomas Aquinas: Talking the Trinity to Death?

I went through a good chunk of the Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas the past two weeks.

There are many admirable sections in this pivotal work, such as his discussion of faith and reason. Many topics are treated in a clear and succinct manner, neither ignoring important objectives nor belaboring his points too much.

But when Aquinas starts discussing the Trinity, it’s a different matter. I remember thinking: “OK, now he’s done with the Trinity and he’ll move on to another topic.” But no, he went on. And I felt like that over and over again.

I’m sure Aquinas thought it necessary to address what he considered various misunderstandings and wrong descriptions of the Trinity, but to me it seemed like he was talking the whole concept of the Trinity to death.

Perhaps the Eastern Orthodox Church displayed more wisdom in this regard by stressing that the Trinity is a mystery that’s supposed to move us, not an invitation for endless definitions of how exactly the three Persons of the Trinity relate to each other and what words are appropriate to describe them.

C. S. Lewis Weary of Apologetics

Many people know C. S. Lewis as probably the greatest Christian apologist to date. Fewer people know that, at least in his later years, Lewis found the whole topic of apologetics rather wearing. Said he in a letter from June 18, 1956, which I read a few weeks ago:

I envy you not having to think any more about Christian apologetics. My correspondents force the subject on me again and again. It is very wearing, and not v. good for one’s own faith. A Christian doctrine never seems less real to me than when I have just (even if successfully) been defending it. It is particularly tormenting when those who were converted by my books begin to relapse and raise new difficulties.

Angels & Demons: Science & Religion?

The Legend of the Leap of Faith

I’ve just read Is Religion Dangerous? by Keith Ward and thought it a badly-needed book for our times. There were also several passages that I found personally helpful on my journey of faith and reason, which is certainly not one without tension. Here’s a passage that is one of the best summaries of the issue of God’s existence I’ve ever read (though that might be due to where I’m at in my inner journey at the moment, and I might view the passage differently a few years down the road):

There is a particular view of the history of European philosophy that has almost become standard, but which is a misleading myth. That is that everybody used to accept that there were ‘proofs for God’. The first cause argument (the universe must have a first cause) and the argument from design (design in the universe shows that there must be a designer) were supposed to prove that there must be a God. But then along came Immanuel Kant, who disproved all these proofs. After that, belief in God had no rational basis and had to become a rationally unjustifiable leap of faith (where ‘faith’ means belief without any evidence).

This view of the history of philosophy is skewed in a number of ways. First of all, it was never generally thought that, by starting only with the observable facts of the physical world, anyone could demonstrate that there has to be an intelligent first cause outside of the universe. That would make God little more than an inference from observed facts, an absentee creator who was never actually present or experienced.

As a matter of historical fact, the main philosophical arguments derived largely from Plato and Aristotle, whose concern was not with some sort of inference from observed reality to something else. It was with the question of what the nature and character of observed reality was. In Plato’s case, his arguments (or many of them) were intended to show that the observed world can be seen by reflective enquiry to be a world of appearances. The underlying reality can be known by the mind, by intellectually investigation, and ultimately by a vision of the Good, as the true reality of which the material world is an appearance. Philosophical argument was basically ‘dialectic’ – the presentation and re-presentation of limited perspectives on the world that might lead to distinguishing reality from appearance, and discerning that the inner character of reality is mental or spiritual. Plato does not ask us to infer an unseen designer. He tries to get us, through intense reflective argument, to see the world as appearance, the manifestation, of a deeper spiritual reality that is akin to human consciousness, but of purer and more perfect goodness and beauty.

When Immanuel Kant came along, he did set out to undermine a specific set of rationalistic arguments propounded by the philosophers Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff. He did say that he set out to undermine knowledge in order to make room for ‘faith’. But his whole critical philosophy was written as an attempt to set faith a firm intellectual foundation, not to offer it as an alternative to intellectual thought.

A central part of Kant’s philosophy was the attempt to show that reason leads to unavoidable contradictions when it tries to take observed reality as the true reality, as reality-in-itself. Only when you have, in this way, pushed reason to its limits can you see that reality must be something more than the empirical and observable, more than the world of Newtonian physics.

Faith, for Kant, was practical commitment made in areas where theoretical knowledge is impossible, but where there is still a pressure to make a rational choice. To make his case, he had to show that reason has its limits, and that it is necessary to make reasonable decisions in areas that go beyond those limits. For him, faith – faith in God, in moral freedom, and in the possibility of moral fulfillment (‘happiness in accordance with virtue’) – is supremely reasonable. It is not a leap in the dark. It is the use of reason beyond the limits of empirical verification.

Kant was, in fact, not so far from Plato. Kant did not speak of a vision of the Good because he was very suspicious, unduly suspicious perhaps, of claims to personal experience of God. But Kant did say that it was not optional but absolutely necessary to posit a rational and moral basis of the world, to posit the existence of the Supreme Good.

For Kant, all ultimate worldviews (all systems of transcendent metaphysics, as he would have said) are unverifiable. Yet it is supremely reasonable to have one, for we must base our practical life-commitments on something, on the best we can manage as human beings. That best, for Kant, was the postulate of a supremely good and wise God, on whom the rationality of the world and of human thought, and the reasonableness and obligatoriness of morality, could be founded. We have to go beyond the evidence, for reason itself compels us to do so.

You might say that it is deeply rational to have an ultimate worldview, but the fundamental beliefs of a such a view cannot be based on any more basic evidence, for there is nothing more basic. How then can we choose? For Kant, we must choose the view that best supports our basic belief in the importance of reason, truth, and objective standards of beauty and goodness. This is a reasonable faith, but it is founded on a serious moral commitment that it is logically possible to reject.

So the history of European philosophy is not really a story of moving from proofs of God to irrational faith. It is rather a story of clarification of the methods and limits of science (which Plato was unclear about, and Aristotle was partly wrong about); and of the basis of our most general worldviews in the sorts of practical commitment, the ways of life and moral orientation, that make possible distinctive human activities like science, morality and religion.

Whatever all this is, it is not the ending of rational thought by blind acceptance of some absolute authority. When Kant spoke of faith, he was absolutely not thinking of blind acceptance of authority. He called that ‘heteronomy’, subjecting your will to the will of another. In its place he called for ‘autonomy’ – daring to think for yourself, even about matters said to be revealed by God. Faith was in human reason and goodness, seen as founded on an ultimate reason and goodness, rooted in the nature of things.

IS EASTER A LIE? Arguments for and against the Resurrection of Jesus Christ (Part 8 of 8)

IS EASTER A LIE? Arguments for and against the Resurrection of Jesus Christ (Part 7)

Billy Graham and C. S. Lewis: Two Different Paths to Faith and the Bible (2 of 2)

Billy Graham and C. S. Lewis: Two Different Paths to Faith and the Bible (1 of 2)

Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence

Not By Faith Alone: C. S. Lewis’ Socratic Club

C. S. Lewis is well known as the author of Narnia and popular Christian books. Fewer people know that he was also the co-founder and president of the Oxford Socratic Club.

The club met once a week in crowded rooms (“they were lucky who found seats even on the floor” ) to apply Socrates’ principle that men should “follow the argument wherever it led them.” This guiding principle the members took and applied to one topic in particular, namely Christianity. More specifically: the reasons for and against Christianity.

C. S. Lewis pointed out that, to the best of his knowledge, no society had ever before been formed for such a purpose. There had been plenty of overtly Christian groups, and there were others with a definite anti-Christian stance. A debating ground solely dedicated to the conflict between Christians and non-Christians was a novelty in Lewis’ day. And it was not, Lewis took care to point out, a disguised form of Christian propaganda. First of all, if someone had this objection to make, he would have been welcome to make an essay of it and read that paper to the Socratic itself. And second, C. S. Lewis and the committee had “with pains and toil (…) scoured Who’s Who to find intelligent atheists who had leisure or zeal to come and propagate their creed.” This means C. S. Lewis actually sought out the most intelligent and eloquent atheists of his day and exposed himself to the best shots they could give.

If C. S. Lewis had based his faith on faith alone, he would have been much more narrow-minded. And that would have made him a very different man than he was. “Faith alone” would not have gotten him very far in the Socratic Club. He would have ended up in a dead end.

C. S. Lewis believed that truth rather than the persuasiveness of a preacher ought to be the foundation of faith. Said he in a talk about Christian apologetics, “One of the great difficulties is to keep before the audience’s mind the question of Truth. They always think you are recommending Christianity not because it is true but because it is good. And in the discussion they will at every moment try to escape from the issue ‘True – or False’ …”

And yet, it is a legitimate question to ask whether truth can ever be the sole criterion when it comes to the acceptance of God or a particular religuous text. It is a wonderful ideal, but can it ever be the decisive factor? Was C. S. Lewis successful in his debating club because he had the truth or simply because he was a gifted debater? Might a gifted orator not take any point whatsoever—whether true or false—and argue his opponent into a corner? Is it not all too easy to give a rational appearance to the irrational? To make strong-sounding points for a weak case?

And, as the great Russian novelist Dostoyevsky wrote in Crime and Punishment, does the faculty of reason not suffer the weakness of seeing three possibilities where there might be millions?

These are the kinds of question marks one can put on C. S. Lewis’ approach to faith and the Bible.

Read more about C. S. Lewis’ approach to faith and the Bible in The C. S. Lewis Book on the Bible: What the Greatest Christian Writer Thought about the Greatest Book.