Philosophical Theology

What it asks

Philosophy of religion asks whether there is a God. Philosophical theology assumes an answer and asks about the details - and the details are where the hardest logical problems are.

Christian doctrine holds that God is three persons and one being, and that one person is fully divine and fully human. Both look contradictory on their face, and stating them in a way that is not contradictory without emptying them of content is a genuine technical problem that has occupied first-rate minds for eighteen centuries.

The same structure appears elsewhere. Islamic theology worked for centuries on whether the divine attributes are distinct from the divine essence. Jewish philosophers asked what can be truthfully said of a being wholly unlike anything else.

The recurring problems

Divine simplicity. The classical position holds that God has no parts and no distinct attributes - God's goodness IS God. It follows from taking divine transcendence seriously and it makes it very hard to say anything informative, since every predicate says the same thing.

Religious language. If God is unlike created things, terms drawn from created things cannot apply literally. The doctrine of analogy holds that they apply neither literally nor equivocally but by proportion - a subtle position that many find is either literal after all or says nothing.

Foreknowledge and freedom. If God knows now what you will freely do tomorrow, it is hard to see how you could do otherwise. Solutions include placing God outside time and positing knowledge of what free agents would do in any circumstance, and each has costs.

Whether coherence is the right test. Apophatic traditions hold that the failure of language about God is the point, not a problem to be solved - and that a doctrine successfully made tidy has been made into something else.

How it developed

The pattern is set in late antiquity, when Greek philosophical vocabulary was used to state doctrines that had been expressed in narrative and liturgical terms. That translation created the problems: substance and person are philosophers' terms, and the puzzles follow from them.

The medieval period is the high point, and it was genuinely international. Islamic kalam developed sophisticated positions on the divine attributes and on whether the world had a beginning. Maimonides argued that only negative statements about God are strictly true. Aquinas built the most complete synthesis, and Anselm's method of reasoning from the concept of a greatest possible being is still in use.

The Reformation and the Enlightenment separated the enterprise from philosophy, and for a long period theology and philosophy proceeded with little contact.

Analytic theology since the 1990s has brought the tools of analytic philosophy back to doctrine, which has produced precise work and the objection that precision of that kind distorts what it clarifies.

The positions within it

Classical theism with simplicity and impassibility; theistic personalism, which treats God as a person in a fuller sense; open theism, which limits foreknowledge to preserve freedom; apophatic or negative theology; process theology. All are in the Schools section.

Where it stands now

Analytic theology is the most active area and the most contested methodologically, since the charge that it treats God as one object among others is not easy to dismiss.

The most valuable current work is comparative, because the problems recur across traditions with different vocabularies and different solutions - and a difficulty that looked like a peculiarity of one doctrine often turns out to be a general problem about speaking of what exceeds description.