Can Modernity Make the Great Tradition Even Greater?

Some Reflections on Jordan Steffaniak’s Criticism of My Great Tradition Project

In a recent address to the 2022 National Convivium hosted at Davenant House in Landrum, SC, entitled: “Making the Great Tradition Great Again,” Jordan Steffaniak referred to me by name and criticized my criticism of modern philosophy. He argues that I am guilty of sweeping, negative, over-generalizations about modern philosophy and an uncritical rejection of every bit of philosophy done after a certain date. In contrast, he thinks we need to employ an “opportunistic eclecticism” in appropriating what is best from modern philosophy to defend classical theism. While claiming to share my concerns to defend orthodox theology proper, he thinks I am wrong not to avail myself of the resources offered by modern philosophy because philosophy in every age has something good to offer Christian theology. Thus, he seeks to defend modern philosophy against people like Matthew Barrett and I who find classical (that is, premodern) metaphysics necessary for confessing historic Christian orthodoxy.

He not only finds my anti-modernity rhetoric to be too extreme, but he also claims that I want to repristinate Thomistic philosophy. The Miriam-Webster dictionary defines “repristinate” as “to restore to an original state or condition.” Steffaniak uses the word pejoratively as if it were a bad thing to do what many in the past few decades have called “Ressourcement.” But I wonder why it should be assumed that a doctrine articulated in the fourth, thirteenth century or sixteenth century might not simply be as true today as it ever was? In that case restoring it to its original state is exactly what is needed. So repristinating false doctrines would be bad, but repristinating true ones would be good.

            I confess that I have advocated for a retrieval of patristic and medieval and post-Reformation scholasticism, and specifically for the restoration of the Augustinian-Thomist philosophical and theological tradition to the center of our thought today. The problem, as I see it, is that modern philosophy has denigrated this philosophical tradition to an unwarranted extent and modern theology has sought to revise doctrine in such a way as to accommodate itself to modern philosophy. In arguing this case I am joining Roman Catholic scholars such as Thomas Joseph White, Edward Feser, Lewis Ayres, and Michael Hanby as well as Protestants such as Carl Trueman, Steven Duby, J. V. Fesko, James Dolezal, Peter Kreeft, C. S. Lewis, and Hans Boersma. To think that the powerful critique of modern metaphysics mounted by these scholars, and many others like them, can be reduced to nothing more than reverse chronological snobbery seems incredible to me.

[Edit: A reader kindly pointed out that I put Kreeft in the Protestant list by mistake. No, it is not breaking news about his conversion - just a cut and paste error.]

What Does it Mean to Engage Modern Philosophy?

            Steffaniak advocates “engaging” both modern philosophy itself and other Christian theologians who are engaged in a revisionist project seeking to modify traditional doctrines to make them acceptable to those who take their stand within modern thought. Since he seems to think I am not doing that it seems necessary to ask what exactly I am not doing that Steffaniak wishes I would do?

            He implies that one needs to utilize analytic philosophy to be academically respectable today. So, what is “analytic philosophy”? He defines analytic philosophy very broadly as being logically precise in reasoning about philosophical matters and as something like medieval scholasticism in the modern world. But a definition this broad and vague basically tells us next to nothing about how analytic philosophy differs from other schools of philosophy.

Scholars such as Edward Feser and Eleanor Stump do analytic philosophy and take as their point of departure the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church and Thomism. Scholars such as William Lane Craig and R. T. Mullins do analytic philosophy but reject the teachings of Rome and Thomism. Scholars like Steven Duby and James Dolezal do analytic philosophy but take their point of departure from a reformed theological perspective that includes a broadly Thomistic set of doctrines on God and creation. Just as medieval scholasticism included figures who were more or less faithful to Augustine and the early fathers, as well as other figures who departed from Augustine on crucial points such as metaphysical realism and the relationship of the will and intellect, so too modern analytic philosophers include some who begin from within the orthodox Augustinian-Thomist tradition and others who work from a stance outside of it. For my part, I do not think analytic philosophy is either totally useless or the sine qua non of philosophy. I am much more historically focussed than most modern philosophers.

I do find his use of the term “opportunistic eclecticism” imprecise and worrying. From studying Barth, I know that he advocated the use of philosophy on an ad hoc basis rather than working toward the development of any sort of systematic philosophical position. I don’t have space to document it here, but my impression was that Barth used philosophy in an ad hoc way in part to avoid confronting certain fundamental problems arising from the fact that he worked within a post-Kantian, anti-metaphysical context. So, I approach the idea of “opportunistic eclecticism” somewhat warily. If it means not revising Christian doctrines to make them fit into a foreign system of philosophy, then well and good. But if it allows us to avoid certain basic problems in metaphysics, say by substituting epistemology for metaphysics, for example, then we have a problem.

When Engagement becomes Revisionism

My deepest concern with Steffaniak’s attack on my work as overly hostile to modern philosophy is that I fear that it constitutes an implicit justification for continuing the revisionist method that has characterized Evangelical theology since the rise of Neo-Evangelicalism in the 1950’s. Over the past 70 years we have witnessed a steady stream of Evangelical attempts to engage with modern thought and articulate Christian doctrine within a modern context. The whole enterprise has been driven by an apologetic concern that arises from the pragmatic, activist nature of Evangelicalism. I do not have the space here to analyze and critique this entire project, but I note a couple of examples of what I see as the rotten fruit of such engagement.

First, there has been a tendency over the past few decades to press the doctrine of the Trinity into the service of anthropology and ethics by Wayne Grudem, Bruce Ware and others in their teachings on the eternal functional subordination of the Son. For a long while this included a denial of the eternal generation of the Son, (which Grudem has now thankfully recanted). But such revisionism is highly problematic and indefensible. I would note that it arose out of a lack of sustained attention to patristic, medieval and post-Reformation theology, not out of a failure to engage modern thought with sufficient energy. This is why I think it crucial to point us back to the history of theology and philosophy and recover Nicene orthodoxy.

Second, we could cite the recent tendency to embrace some sort of “theistic mutualism” by Evangelicals, as documented by James Dolezal in his book, All That is in God. Open Theism came into existence as an attempt by certain Arminians like Clark Pinnock to “engage” process theism. They attempted to meet modern thought half-way and the result was an evangelical version of modern thought consisting of elements of process theology mashed together with theistic personalism. The Augustinian-Thomist doctrine of God was left far behind.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that the Open Theists themselves departed from orthodoxy, even some of those who attempted to correct them fell into error as well. When theologians like John Frame and Bruce Ware “engaged” the Open Theists, they ended up questioning certain divine attributes such as immutability, impassibility, and simplicity. Whether you judge them to have “modified” or “denied” these attributes, which are taught in the reformed confessions as orthodoxy, at a minimum they failed to hand on the tradition intact. They ended up proposing a soft theistic mutualism as the antidote to more extreme forms of revisionism.

 By “revisionism” I mean revising classical Christian doctrines to fit within the parameters of modern thought. Now Steffaniak says he does not want to do this, and I believe he is sincere. But I suspect that he has not thought through the issue at a deep enough level to know how to avoid falling into revisionism. My concern is heightened by the fact that I see a great deal of revisionism going on in the new school of analytic theology, which utilizes analytic philosophy in the way Steffaniak advocates. Oliver Crisp, for example, is a major figure in this movement and is usually thought of as quite sympathetic to classical orthodoxy. Crisp, however, is up to his neck in the revisionist project.

In chapter two of Crisp’s book, Analyzing Doctrine: Toward a Systematic Theology, (Baker, 2019), he defines classical Christian theism and modern theistic personalism. Then he considers theological antirealism as another option. In conclusion, he calls for a “chastened theism,” which departs in important ways from classical theism. It denies, for example, the Thomistic doctrine that God is “pure act.” It also denies that the three divine persons can be identified adequately as “subsistent relations.” Clearly, he is in no danger of repristinating classical Christian theism; he is engaged in revising doctrine in the light of modern concerns.  

Engagement without Revisionism

            Steffaniak gives the impression that I am uninterested in engaging with modern philosophy, but I do not think this is the case. We both want to engage with modern philosophy, but I want to do it in a way that excludes revisionism. A lot of the “engagement” that has been done for the past 70 years and continues to be done today looks more like revisionism than it looks like using modern philosophy to defend classical theism, which is what he claims he wants to do.

I do not claim to have all the answers, but I have at least offered a proposal for critical engagement with modern philosophy. It is at least the beginning of an attempt to provide a reasoned evaluation of what must be rejected in modernity. I have suggested that the kind of modern philosophy that Christian theologians ought to reject is the kind that rejects Ur-Platonism.

As readers of my work will know, I follow Lloyd Gerson in defining Ur-Platonism as any philosophy that can agree with the five negations he lists. Ur-Platonism is a heuristic for identifying a wide range of metaphysical positions that agree in affirming: anti-nominalism, anti-materialism, anti-mechanism, anti-relativism, and anti-skepticism. These five negations have characterized all classical metaphysics in the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition. (In the third book in the Great Tradition trilogy, I plan to supplement this heuristic with an account of metaphysical proofs for the existence of God as the basis for the metaphysical attributes, a participatory ontology rooted in the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, a doctrine of analogical language, and a teleological account of history to flesh out the metaphysics of the Great Tradition.)

But here I want to give a quick example of how this heuristic can be applied. Hume’s philosophy is nominalist and leads to relativism and skepticism. It denies the principle of causality and thus seems to undermine natural science as a source of truth about reality. So, it is clearly modern and to be rejected. Kant was quite right to be alarmed by Hume’s skepticism. But Kant’s critical philosophy fails, in my judgment, to escape relativism insofar as it refuses to return to metaphysical realism and denies that we can know the natures of things in themselves. We can call the rejection of classical metaphysical realism by Hume and Kant the critical turn.

A great deal of 19-20th century philosophy fails to challenge the critical turn but instead starts from the assumption that Hume and Kant were right in rejecting metaphysical realism. This is true, for example, of the Marxists, the logical positivists, the existentialists, the critical theorists, the pragmatists, the structuralists and the postmodernists. Most of the major schools of philosophy in the twentieth century fit into this category, so it does not seem like too much of an over-generalization to characterize “modern philosophy” as that which accepts the critical turn. Philosophers such as Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain could be said to be in modernity but not of it; they could be seen as premodern philosophers writing in the modern period or perhaps as harbingers of what comes after modernity.

Hermann Bavinck is held up in Steffaniak’s talk as the “anti-Carter.” He rejected repristination and tried to be both orthodox and modern. Steffaniak presents his thought as superior to mine because he appears to be more open to modern thought. But I think Steffaniak overstates the contrast between my project and that of Bavinck. I do not think Bavinck is open to revisionism as I define it. His style of engagement is definitely more “winsome” than mine, but it nonetheless posits classical orthodoxy as the overarching framework into which little bits of modern thought gleaned from here and there can sometimes be fitted without disturbing the premodern architecture of the Augustinian-Thomist system. Bavinck may have left the anti-modern rhetorical posturing to Kuyper, but he was not doing the kind of revisionism we have seen in Evangelical theology over the past 70 years. I suspect that this is precisely what many of us find so appealing about his Reformed Dogmatics today.

Bavinck actually is a good example of someone who fits well within the heuristic of Ur-Platonism. He rejects all five of the things Ur-Platonism is supposed to reject and he retrieves and uses classical metaphysics in his dogmatics without embarrassment. Perhaps Steffaniak is misled by Bavinck’s rhetoric about adopting what is useful from modern thinkers into thinking that he would be open to modifying the classical metaphysics of the Great Tradition.

Steffaniak also mentions neo-Aristotelianism as a contemporary movement in analytic philosophy that serves as an example of why all modern philosophy is not bad. Yet, if we look at two of the leading figures in the neo-Aristotelian revival, Edward Feser and David Oderberg, we find that although they write in the idiom of contemporary analytic philosophy, they are clearly Thomists who deny all five of the things Ur-Platonists are supposed to deny.

Oderberg says in the preface of his recently published, The Metaphysics of Good and Evil (Routledge, 2020) that he is not only working within “traditional metaphysics” but specifically within the tradition of Thomism, which he sees as containing more truth and systematicity than other scholastics such as Scotus, Ockham, and Suarez. He is defining classical theism in a Thomistic manner and seeking to defend it in the context of modern challenges. I admire Oderberg’s work, but I wonder if Steffaniak might find it insufficiently open to revision in the face of modern challenges.

Another example of a contemporary philosopher who is working within the idiom and style of analytic philosophy to defend a robust Augustinian-Thomist tradition of classical theism is Edward Feser. He interacts expertly and extensively with the neo-Aristotelian literature in several of his books, but he expresses similarly harsh criticisms of modern philosophy as mine in his book, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism (St. Augustine’s Press, 2008). If you want winsome interaction with modernity, you might want to look elsewhere!

I am not accusing Steffaniak of being a revisionist; I am only suggesting that he has not yet thought through how one engages modernity without slipping into revisionism with sufficient clarity. Until he does so, I will take his criticisms of my project with a grain of salt.