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[MUSIC PLAYS]

0:28

Hello and welcome to another episode of the (A)Millennial

0:30

podcast. My name is Amy Mantravadi

0:33

and I'll be your host until such time as I sell

0:35

the film rights to my novels to a major Hollywood

0:37

studio for eight figures, naturally

0:39

maintaining my right to final script approval.

0:42

I'd also consider a Bollywood version of The Chronicle

0:44

of Maud under the right circumstances. Today,

0:47

I'm going to be speaking with Dr. Alex Tseng about

0:49

the use of philosophy in theology. Be

0:52

advised: This episode is definitely

0:54

a deep dive. Some of the terminology

0:56

may be difficult for the uninitiated to understand,

0:59

but if you're ready to go a bit deeper, then by all

1:01

means proceed. We never learn

1:03

unless we push ourselves, and the question of

1:05

whether and when we can use secular philosophies

1:08

to think about spiritual things is incredibly

1:10

relevant, as anyone who's ended up

1:12

in a social media debate about Critical Race

1:14

Theory and the Church can attest. Not

1:16

for the first time, it is the Apostle Paul

1:19

who provides us with some of the best biblical

1:21

food for thought regarding this issue. However,

1:23

the picture he paints leaves room for interpretation.

1:26

On the one hand, Paul makes clear that the

1:28

eternal truth of God is superior to

1:31

the passing philosophies of this age and

1:33

divine revelation always trumps human

1:35

reason. In 1st Corinthians

1:37

1:18-25. Paul

1:39

writes, "For the word of the cross

1:42

is foolishness to those who are perishing,

1:44

but to us who are being saved, it is the power

1:46

of God. For it is written, 'I

1:48

will destroy the wisdom of the wise and the

1:50

cleverness of the clever I will set aside.' Where

1:53

is the wise man? Where is the scribe?

1:55

Where is the debater of this age ? Has

1:58

not God made foolish the wisdom

2:00

of the world? For since in the wisdom

2:02

of God, the world through its wisdom did

2:04

not come to know God, God was

2:07

well-pleased through the foolishness of the message

2:09

preached to save those who believe. For

2:11

indeed Jews, ask for signs and

2:13

Greeks search for wisdom, but we

2:16

preach Christ crucified, to Jews

2:18

a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness, but

2:21

to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks,

2:23

Christ the power of God and the wisdom of

2:25

God, because the foolishness of God

2:28

is wiser than men and the weakness

2:30

of God is stronger than men." Based

2:33

solely on that passage, we might conclude that

2:35

Paul had an entirely negative view of

2:37

the so-called wisdom of the Greeks, but

2:39

we must read it in the context of all of scripture.

2:42

In the Book of Acts, we read about Paul's

2:44

visit to the city of Athens, the center

2:46

of Western philosophical thought at the time.

2:49

When he had the opportunity to speak before

2:51

a gathering of intellectuals, Paul

2:53

did not hesitate to appeal to the writings

2:55

of their own philosophers in his presentation

2:57

of the gospel. Pick up at the story

3:00

in Acts 17:22-33. "So

3:04

Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and

3:07

said, "Men of Athens, I observed

3:09

that you are very religious in all respects,

3:11

for while I was passing through and examining

3:13

the objects of your worship, I also

3:15

found an altar with this inscription: 'To

3:18

an unknown God.' Therefore,

3:20

what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim

3:22

to you. The God who made the world

3:24

and all things in it, since he is Lord

3:26

of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples

3:29

made with hands, nor is he served

3:31

by human hands as though he needed anything, since

3:34

he himself gives to all people life

3:36

and breath and all things. And he made

3:38

from one man every nation of mankind

3:41

to live on all the face of the earth, having

3:43

determined their appointed times and the boundaries

3:45

of their habitation, that they would seek

3:47

God, if perhaps they might grope for

3:49

him and find him, though he is not far

3:51

from each one of us. For in him we

3:53

live and move and exist, and even

3:56

some of your own poets have said, 'For

3:58

we also are his children.' Being

4:01

then the children of God, we ought not

4:03

to think that the divine nature is like gold

4:05

or silver or stone, an image formed

4:07

by the art and thought of man. Therefore, having

4:10

overlooked the times of ignorance, God

4:12

is now declaring to men that all people everywhere

4:14

should repent, because he has fixed a day

4:17

in which he will judge the world in righteousness

4:19

through a man whom he has appointed, having

4:21

furnished proof to all men by raising him from

4:23

the dead.' Now, when they heard of the resurrection

4:26

of the dead, some began to sneer, but others

4:28

said, 'We shall hear you again concerning

4:30

this.' So Paul went out of their midst."

4:34

In that speech, Paul quoted from the writers

4:36

Epimenides and Aratus, drawing

4:38

upon common philosophical ground to

4:40

make his point that the God who gives existence

4:43

to all of us had become incarnate as

4:45

a man and died and risen again. Paul

4:48

made use of this common ground to bridge

4:50

the gap of understanding with the Greeks, but

4:52

he also stood firmly upon the revealed

4:55

truth of God, even when it caused those

4:57

who were supposedly wise to scoff. This

4:59

example is a good one for us as

5:01

we consider how to think about our faith and share

5:04

the gospel with others in a world full of

5:06

competing philosophies. Before

5:08

ado is furthered any further, let's head to

5:10

the interview.

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[MUSIC PLAYS]

5:22

And I'm here with Dr. Alex Tseng,

5:24

who was born in Taiwan and raised

5:26

in Canada. He was educated

5:28

at the University of British Columbia

5:30

for his bachelor's degree, at Regent

5:32

college in Vancouver for his Masters of Divinity,

5:35

at Princeton Theological Seminary for

5:37

his Masters of Theology, and at the

5:39

University of Oxford for his Master of Studies

5:42

and his Doctor of Philosophy. He is

5:44

a contributor to the Oxford Handbook

5:46

of 19th Century Christian thought, and he

5:48

is currently the research professor in

5:50

the philosophy department of Zhejiang

5:53

university in Hangzhou, China.

5:55

Is that anywhere close to the

5:57

correct pronunciation? That's

6:00

very good .

6:00

I tried to look it up and you know,

6:02

the sad thing is I was finding conflicting

6:05

pronunciations online.

6:07

Oh, don't worry about it. People across

6:09

China pronounce the word differently.

6:12

Well, I figured that was probably part of the problem,

6:14

but anyway, very, very prestigious

6:17

university in China. And his published

6:19

works include Karl Barth's Infralapsarian Theology,

6:23

birds , and analogy of sending grace. And

6:26

he's also written introductions to the thought of

6:28

Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel,

6:31

and Karl Barth as part of Presbyterian

6:33

and Reformed Publishing's Great Thinkers series.

6:36

So welcome Alex.

6:38

I'm so excited to be talking to you from

6:40

halfway around the world.

6:42

Thank you so much for having me.

6:44

Yeah, absolutely. So

6:47

I understand that apart

6:49

from achieving great things in

6:51

philosophy and theology, your

6:53

career goal is to own

6:55

your own Mexican restaurant so that

6:57

you can have tamales for lunch

7:00

every day. Could you elaborate

7:01

on this further, and have

7:03

you ever considered that it might be possible

7:06

to have tamales for lunch without

7:08

owning a Mexican restaurant?

7:11

That's possible, but the thing

7:13

is, as long as I'm staying

7:15

in China, I'll have to make my own

7:17

tamales every day, which

7:20

takes time. So I

7:22

figured the easier way would be to own

7:24

a Mexican restaurant and have a

7:26

chef who would do that for me.

7:29

So yeah, really, you just need a personal

7:31

chef to come and make you your tamales, but

7:35

that's nice if you're already

7:37

going to be paying a chef that you're going to be sharing

7:40

the wonders of Mexican food with everyone

7:42

else. I mean, that's very generous

7:44

of you. Well

7:47

, that's good. I'm glad that we got that straightened out.

7:50

So getting onto what we're going to be talking

7:52

about today, which is sort of the way that

7:54

philosophy and different philosophical

7:56

ideas have been incorporated into Christian

7:59

theology, the words philosophy

8:01

and theology both derive from ancient

8:04

Greek, where they mean love

8:06

of wisdom - that's philosophy - and

8:08

words about God - theology - respectively.

8:12

Based on these definitions, there are

8:14

many potential ways that the two disciplines

8:16

could overlap. So in your

8:18

opinion, where should we be drawing the line

8:20

between philosophy and theology?

8:24

Right. As my late teacher, J.I. Packer, used

8:26

to say, theology is the study

8:29

of God in relation to everything that

8:31

is not God, and

8:33

proper theology proceeds from faith

8:35

to understanding of the holy one, and

8:37

this understanding leads to fear of the Lord

8:40

. Now , what does the Bible

8:42

tell us? The Bible says the fear of the Lord

8:44

is the beginning of wisdom and knowledge

8:46

of the holy one is understanding: Proverbs 9:10. And

8:50

what's philosophy? Philosophy, as you mentioned,

8:53

is composed of two Greek words meaning "the love of wisdom":

8:55

philos and sophia.

8:58

And if we look at it that way,

9:00

theology is philosophy. Theology

9:04

is the love of wisdom, wisdom

9:08

as knowledge and understanding of

9:10

the Lord, and in

9:12

that sense philosophy is theology. Now

9:16

the question is, what is wisdom according to

9:19

the ancient Greek philosophers, because this term comes

9:21

from Greek. Well, in

9:24

the traditional of [inaudible] and Plato,

9:25

philosophical wisdom is

9:28

expressed supremely by a little

9:30

phrase, "Know thyself." That

9:34

is for mortal beings

9:36

to know their place before the immortal

9:38

God . So theology was, in

9:40

fact, a discipline of philosophy

9:42

in ancient Greece - was, in fact, the

9:45

central discipline of philosophy . I

9:48

have this quote in front of me from Aristotle,

9:51

which reads, "There are three kinds

9:53

of theoretical sciences: physics, mathematics,

9:58

and theology. The class

10:00

of theoretical sciences is the best,

10:02

and of these themselves, the last name

10:04

is best or deals with

10:06

the highest of existing things

10:09

. And each science is called better

10:11

or worse in virtue of its

10:13

proper object." That, by

10:16

the way, was from Aristotle's Metaphysics,

10:18

Book 11. And

10:21

for Plato, the teacher of Aristotle,

10:23

the task of theology is to speak

10:26

of God as God truly is.

10:29

Now, if we can come to understand this

10:31

definition of theology this way - Plato

10:35

was situated in a

10:38

social setting

10:40

where most people were what we would call pagans.

10:44

They believed in the gods of Greek

10:46

mythology. Ancient Greek

10:48

paganism already taught the concept

10:50

of divinity as good and wise

10:53

and almighty. "Only the

10:55

gods are wise," the ancient Greek pagan would tell you, and

10:58

by wisdom, they meant omniscience. "The gods

11:02

are good," they would say, that is

11:04

to say, the gods are omnibenevolent and

11:07

the gods are almighty. But if the kind

11:09

of things that the Hellenistic deities

11:12

do contradict these attributes

11:15

of the concept of divinity, according

11:17

to the Greek myths, then

11:19

how are we to make sense of these mythologies

11:22

? For example, if Zeus is almighty, why

11:25

would you say that he

11:28

needs Hercules to help him

11:30

out to thwart the evil plot of Hades? And

11:34

if Zeus is wise, how come he didn't

11:36

know about Hades' plot? And if

11:39

all these gods are good, why

11:41

would they fight among themselves? If

11:43

they're all wise, why would

11:45

there be disagreements among them? If

11:48

they are all wise in

11:52

the sense of omniscience

11:55

- that is, if they all

11:57

know everything there is to

12:00

rational [inaudible] - then there would never

12:03

be any disagreement between

12:06

them, would there? So for

12:08

Plato , these mythological stories about

12:10

the gods are incredible, and for

12:13

him the task of philosophy is to sort

12:15

out the concept of divinity scientifically,

12:18

using the term science in a broader sense,

12:21

that is in the sense of systematic

12:23

knowledge. So what's

12:27

the problem with this approach to

12:29

the quest for wisdom according to

12:32

Christianity? Well, Christianity

12:35

teaches the transcendence of God, nd

12:38

this kind of transcendence is different

12:41

from the kind of transcendence that the ancient

12:44

Greeks spoke of. They also knew

12:46

that God is transcendent

12:48

in some way, but the way they approach

12:51

this understanding of transcendence is that

12:53

they would first have a abstract

12:56

idea of transcendence, and they

12:58

would flesh out this idea

13:00

with their own experiences and

13:02

understandings and concepts. But

13:06

the problem is, if God is truly transcendent and

13:08

God is truly infinite and we

13:10

finite, then that

13:12

would mean that our reason

13:14

cannot contain God. So

13:16

there is a Latin phrase, which

13:19

means in English, "The

13:21

finite cannot contain

13:23

the infinite," and

13:25

that is what God's transcendence entails.

13:28

So Christian theology emphasizes

13:31

revelation. If God

13:33

never revealed himself to

13:36

us, then there is no way for

13:38

us to know him. And so

13:40

I would say that the difference between

13:43

Christian theology and non-Christian

13:46

theologies, or Christian philosophy

13:48

and non-Christian philosophies,

13:50

is that the Christian

13:53

would proceed from a starting

13:55

point in faith to understanding

13:59

of God, and that would require

14:01

that we come to know God

14:03

concretely first as the

14:06

God who revealed himself

14:08

to Moses as the

14:10

I AM, and then we

14:12

come to understand from

14:14

this concrete encounter between God

14:17

and Moses what it means

14:19

to speak of God as

14:21

being. And non-Christian

14:24

philosophies would proceed

14:26

from an abstract notion of being

14:29

and try to say, "Being is God

14:31

." So we might put

14:34

it this way: The Bible tells us that

14:36

God is being (Exodus

14:39

3:14). Well, it

14:41

doesn't really put it that way, but that's how

14:43

it's been interpreted by Christian

14:45

theologians and philosophers like Augustine.

14:45

Sure, sure.

14:49

Or how about this? The Bible tells us that, "God is

14:51

love." The Bible doesn't tell

14:53

us that being is God or love

14:56

is God, but God is love. And this

14:58

is the God who revealed himself

15:01

supremely in Jesus Christ, who sacrificed

15:04

himself for us, and because

15:07

God loved us first in Jesus

15:09

Christ, that is how we can speak of God as love. So

15:12

we say God is love, and we don't proceed

15:14

from an abstract concept of love and

15:17

call love God, and I

15:20

think that is the crucial difference

15:22

between Christian and non-Christian

15:25

theologies and philosophies.

15:27

Yeah, I think there are some good points

15:30

there in that whether

15:33

we're talking about Christian philosophy

15:35

or theology - and just as

15:37

a side note, as you mentioned , the

15:39

words science and philosophy mean

15:42

somewhat different things than they did

15:44

back when the Greeks were using them in the ancient

15:45

days. They would speak of science

15:48

and probably include theology under that, whereas

15:50

we would never - We think of them as being two totally

15:53

different things now. But if

15:55

you don't begin with the

15:57

notion of one omnipotent God

16:01

as Creator from whom

16:03

we have wisdom revealed,

16:06

and maybe we can discover that wisdom

16:08

in nature, but it's

16:10

coming from God as creator - If

16:12

you don't begin with that,

16:15

you end up with a very different system.

16:18

And the Greek philosophers,

16:21

because we do

16:24

find a lot of God's revelation

16:26

in creation, they were able

16:28

to use the reason that God

16:30

had given them to discover

16:33

a lot of truths. But

16:35

as you said, they were trying

16:37

to harmonize that with

16:40

a view of God that was very different

16:42

in that they even had multiple gods who

16:45

were contradictory with each other. So

16:47

I think even right there, you just - that

16:50

kind of tension between

16:53

what we can incorporate

16:55

and what we cannot incorporate from

16:58

pagan ideas or non-Christian ideas,

17:00

I think is something that will be coming up in pretty

17:02

much every question we're asking today. So

17:05

yeah, I think that's a good summary. So

17:08

from the very beginning of Christianity

17:10

in the 1st century AD/CE, there

17:14

was a debate about how much Christians

17:16

should rely on or be influenced by

17:18

the prevailing philosophies of the day , whether

17:21

those be Stoicism or

17:23

Neoplatonism or Gnosticism, and

17:26

a lot of these ideas were coming from what's

17:28

now Greece. And the

17:30

Church father Tertullian famously

17:32

asked, "What does Athens have to do

17:34

with Jerusalem?" using the two

17:37

cities as representatives of

17:39

philosophy and theology.

17:41

However, other Church Fathers, such

17:44

as Clement of Alexandria, promoted

17:46

the idea that philosophy was the handmaid of theology,

17:48

so basically

17:50

that it is at the service of

17:52

theology for its benefit, but

17:55

theology is the one that's in control.

17:57

So we see the influence of Greek

17:59

philosophy in certain parts of the New

18:01

Testament itself and the writings of scholars

18:04

like Origen and Augustan of Hippo.

18:07

What were some of the prevailing

18:09

opinions among Christians of this

18:11

time, and how has that

18:13

debate that they had continued to resonate

18:15

down to the present day?

18:18

I think one specific

18:21

Christian theologian worth mentioning

18:23

- worth discussing

18:26

is Augustine, whom you just mentioned. But all

18:29

these great Christian thinkers

18:31

in the patristic period, we must

18:33

remember, lived under

18:35

the reign of the Roman Empire, so

18:39

they were struggling to witness

18:41

to Jesus Christ in this context.

18:44

And it's really significant

18:47

that the New Testament itself

18:50

[was] composed not in a vacuum. So

18:53

within the very context of the

18:56

Roman Empire, the Gospel of Luke tells

18:59

us that Jesus, the King of Kings, was born

19:03

under the reign of Caesar

19:05

Augustus. That's something

19:07

really significant. Augustus

19:09

was the second Caesar

19:12

of the Roman Empire after Rome

19:14

became an empire. Before that

19:16

Rome, was a republic and

19:19

Julius Caesar was the first Caesar.

19:22

He was assassinated and Rome

19:25

basically went into anarchy

19:27

and it was Octavius

19:29

who united Rome once again, and

19:32

he imposed himself as imperator

19:36

or emperor, and he

19:38

was the first ever ruler

19:40

of Rome to establish himself as a deity. He

19:43

called himself Augustus, and Augustus

19:46

is a word that people

19:47

would use on the gods,

19:49

meaning august.

19:51

That's the direct translation: august. And

19:57

he called himself Augustus, and

19:59

right after his death, he was

20:01

listed among the gods . Well,

20:03

so he had to die to become

20:06

a god, but there was already

20:08

this inherent deity or divinity

20:10

within him. So

20:12

the Roman Empire was deified in

20:14

that way. And Augustus made

20:18

this story the official

20:21

narrative of the rise of Rome

20:23

or the narrative that justified

20:26

the power of Rome. That story

20:28

is the Aeneid by the

20:33

Roman poet or the Latin poet...

20:35

Virgil.

20:35

Virgil, yes. It's

20:39

about this founding father

20:41

of the Latin race. I

20:44

shouldn't use the word race because

20:46

race was not really a well

20:49

defined concept.

20:49

Right, right.

20:52

But the Latin nation - how about that? He was

20:55

the founder of the Latin nation and

20:57

he was chosen by fate to

20:59

rise as a super

21:02

power to rule over the nations

21:04

with divine law, so that

21:07

was sort of a pagan doctrine of election.

21:11

And that was doctrine created by

21:13

the official narrative chosen

21:16

by Caesar Augustus, and it

21:18

was under his reign that Jesus was born

21:20

. So we must understand

21:22

that, if I may borrow a phrase

21:24

from the theologian Karl Barth, you

21:26

must understand world history

21:29

as the outward basis

21:32

of redemptive history. That's

21:34

not how Barth puts it. Barth says creation is

21:37

the outward basis of the

21:39

covenant. And I'm not

21:41

a Barthian. I identify

21:43

myself as a Neocalvinist. I'm

21:46

a Neocalvinist, so I

21:48

talk about redemptive history as Creation, Fall, and redemption -

21:52

as God's plan, which was

21:54

made by an agreement between the

21:56

persons of God before Creation and election.

21:59

So world

22:02

history is the outward basis of

22:04

redemptive history, and redemptive history is

22:07

the inward basis of world

22:10

history. That is to say, world

22:12

history is this stage on which

22:15

redemptive history is enacted, and it

22:19

is for the world to see. And

22:21

Christians become

22:24

actors in the passion of Jesus Christ in

22:26

this world for the world to see.

22:30

We are like actors in a theater.

22:31

We become spectacles - that' s the biblical word. Now, if we are to fulfill that vocation, then

22:42

we must imitate the New

22:44

Testament authors as well as the

22:46

Old Testament authors in using

22:49

the language of the world

22:51

and not the language angels

22:54

or the language of a heavenly

22:56

race that no one on earth understands.

22:59

And that is why, as you pointed out,

23:02

New Testament authors adopted Greek philosophical terms. Perhaps

23:06

they didn't directly

23:09

borrow it from the Greeks, but rather they borrowed

23:12

it through the Hellenized

23:14

Jewish philosophers. If

23:16

you look at the Septuagint translation

23:20

of Genesis 1, you

23:22

find that that is the version

23:24

that the Apostle John adopted

23:27

in the Gospel of John, which

23:29

speaks of the beginning and the Word,

23:31

"en arche en ho logos": "arche"

23:35

and "logos", these are originally Greek terms

23:38

. Pretty much every Greek philosopher

23:40

needed to talk about these concepts.

23:43

Parmenides was one of the Greek philosophers

23:46

who talked about arche and logos. Logos is

23:49

sort of like the cosmic principle according

23:52

to which everything operates, and arche is the

23:55

origin of everything. And

23:58

the Stoics also made

24:00

a great deal out of these terms,

24:03

and Jewish philosophers,

24:06

especially those in the city of Alexandria,

24:09

made use of these Greek concepts

24:11

to interpret the Hebrew

24:14

scriptures, and they

24:16

engage with debates in

24:18

Greek philosophy. For example, Creation,

24:21

according to the Bible: how are we to interpret Genesis 1-2,

24:23

especially Genesis 1, especially 1:1? What

24:29

is the only reasonable interpretation according

24:32

to what we know about

24:35

God throughout the Hebrew

24:37

tradition as the only God

24:39

worthy of our worship? Their

24:42

conclusion was that God's

24:44

creation cannot be like the kind

24:46

of creation that philosophers like

24:48

Plato or Aristotle talked about. Creation

24:52

must be creation out of nothing

24:54

. The concept was actually already

24:56

there, and that was used

24:58

to interpret Genesis 1:1. The

25:01

thing is that they didn't really develop

25:03

a mature set of vocabularies,

25:06

and they didn't develop a

25:09

robust ontology to make sense

25:11

of creation out of nothing. We

25:14

have to wait until Augustine to

25:16

formulate that ontology of Creation.

25:19

They benefited from interacting with

25:21

the Greeks, and you see traces

25:24

of that in Apostle Paul's debate

25:27

with the philosophers

25:28

in Athens. He debated the Stoics and

25:33

the Peripatetics, and he told

25:35

them that God is not only the

25:38

God who made the universe, but God

25:41

who made the universe and everything in it.

25:44

That is to say he had

25:46

a concept of God, not

25:49

just using pre-existing material,

25:51

chaotic material to create

25:54

a orderly universe, orderly cosmos,

25:57

but that he created those

25:59

raw materials too, so he

26:01

created the universe and everything in it . So

26:04

Christian philosophers and theologians,

26:07

or I should just call them theologians - Christian theologians, Christian thinkers,

26:12

benefited from interacting with Greek philosophy.

26:15

And they took advantage of

26:17

the concepts and terms developed

26:19

by the Greeks, but they also realized

26:22

that they held too or we as Christians hold to fundamentally

26:27

different presuppositions than

26:30

any school of philosophy, so those

26:33

philosophical terms

26:35

needs to be revised

26:37

and sometimes even redefined in

26:40

order that they can fit into our

26:42

own system of faith, such that

26:45

they can express the contents

26:47

of our faith. And one example

26:50

would be the development of the Trinitarian

26:52

doctrine in the ante-Nicean period.

26:55

That's the period leading up to

26:58

the Council of Nicea. The

27:00

Church Fathers were looking for

27:02

the right words to express

27:05

the New Testament references to

27:07

God as Father, Son, and Holy

27:09

Spirit. What do you call them

27:11

? Is there a generic term

27:13

that you can call Father, Son,

27:15

and Holy Spirit? Now

27:17

they found help from the Greeks. In

27:19

Platonism, for example, there is

27:23

talk about the three principle

27:26

hypostases - the one, intellect, and soul

27:28

- but in that terminological

27:30

system the word

27:32

"hypostases" is synonymous

27:35

with "ousia," both meaning

27:37

substance: substance as

27:39

a being that is actual.

27:42

So it's not something that just is

27:44

as an abstract thing, but it's something

27:47

that is concretely. That

27:49

is what substance means. Different

27:51

philosophies have different interpretations

27:54

that the concept of substance, ousia or hypostases. Plato would

27:58

say that true substance is not

28:00

within this world that

28:02

we can sense - the sensible world. True

28:04

substance is beyond this world.

28:06

Aristotle would say

28:08

that something can be called

28:10

substantial only if

28:12

that thing comprises both

28:15

form and matter, so they

28:17

held to different theories of substance, but the

28:20

concept of substance was common to

28:22

all. They just made different interpretations

28:24

of what substance is. And

28:27

the Christian Fathers joined this debate in

28:31

an attempt to talk about the substance

28:33

of God as Father, Son,

28:35

and Holy Spirit, and they

28:37

found that Greek terminology was inadequate

28:40

to express this New Testament

28:41

concept, so they

28:43

needed to develop another

28:46

concept that is not there in

28:48

Greek philosophy. So they redefined the term hypostases and

28:51

gave it personal

28:53

characteristics. You can

28:55

think of the hypostases of God

28:58

as agents of the same

29:00

substance: personal agents

29:03

of the same substance. So

29:05

I think that is how philosophy

29:07

has been a handmaid to

29:09

theology, and that gives

29:11

an example of why we need to

29:13

continue to consult philosophical

29:15

wisdom, even if this

29:18

wisdom is not saving

29:20

wisdom, but only general kind of wisdom, because only

29:24

in that process will we be

29:26

able to speak the gospel

29:29

to this world. We shouldn't invent

29:31

our own philosophy and our own

29:34

linguistic system. We need to speak the language

29:36

of the world, and perhaps not just

29:40

[inaudible] philosophy, but also sociology and psychology, and

29:43

perhaps even things that tend

29:45

to be deemed antithetical to the Christian faith, like Critical

29:49

Race Theory.

29:54

Well, yeah, you threw a little controversy

29:56

in there at the end. I appreciate

29:59

how you're describing - because

30:02

especially Trinitarian theology is

30:06

one area of theology where if

30:08

you say, "We

30:10

shouldn't use any terms that

30:12

came from Greek philosophy,"

30:15

your Trinitarian theology starts to collapse,

30:18

because the people of that time

30:21

were looking for some way to describe

30:23

how God can be three in one, and

30:26

they made use of, like you said, the terms

30:28

of ousia or hypostases - these

30:31

ideas that you could

30:34

have things be the same substance

30:37

and yet one God and three

30:39

persons, and there

30:41

were huge debates over single

30:44

syllables of words that they chose

30:46

to use to describe that. But

30:49

I also appreciate your mentioning how

30:53

John and his gospel begins

30:56

by talking about this concept of the

30:58

logos and basically

31:00

describing how this thing

31:03

that Greek philosophers have kind of been

31:05

seeking after is truly fulfilled

31:08

in Jesus Christ: that he is the logos

31:11

or the Word. And sometimes

31:13

in our translations in English

31:15

or whatever language would read the Bible in,

31:18

if it's not ancient Greek, we don't always

31:20

understand how much those ideas

31:22

are coming, as you said, not necessarily directly

31:25

from Greek philosophy, but the

31:27

Jewish philosophers of the day had been

31:29

so influenced by Greek

31:31

culture. But at

31:33

the same time, while they would borrow certain

31:35

terms, you mentioned the fact

31:38

that Plato and Aristotle don't

31:40

really have a concept of creation

31:42

coming out of nothing, or "ex nihilo" as

31:45

we'd say in Latin. So

31:48

that becomes something

31:50

over the centuries that Christian

31:52

theologians have to reject - that part

31:54

of Greek thinking - because obviously

31:56

that's a big difference with Christianity,

31:58

and oftentimes the differences

32:00

- Well, as we mentioned previously,

32:03

it comes back to the idea

32:05

that we have a specific God

32:07

who's Creator and who reveals himself, and

32:09

that sort of marks the boundaries

32:12

of what we can and cannot

32:14

use from pagan philosophy.

32:17

So, yeah, I think you covered

32:19

a lot of ground there and I appreciate that.

32:21

So fast forwarding about

32:24

a thousand years, there was another

32:26

period where there was significant debate

32:29

about philosophy's role in theology, and

32:31

that was in Europe during the 12th

32:33

and 13th centuries as

32:35

the translation of many of Aristotle's

32:37

works and also

32:39

the importation of ideas from the Islamic

32:41

world caused significant controversies

32:44

at, for instance, the University of Paris,

32:46

which was one of the main academic institutions at

32:50

the time, and elsewhere. The most

32:52

influential theologian to come out of this period

32:55

was Thomas Aquinas. Thinking

32:57

about Aquinas specifically, how

32:59

was he shaped by the controversies

33:02

of his day? And how do we see

33:04

the influence of philosophy in his works,

33:06

particularly the rediscovery

33:08

of a lot of Aristotle's writings

33:10

that had happened in the century prior

33:12

to when he was writing?

33:15

Let me first say that I think Thomas Aquinas is

33:19

one of the most widely

33:21

misunderstood figures in

33:24

modern Protestant thought.

33:26

He is often taken as

33:28

this Christian theologian

33:30

who further Hellenized Christianity, so

33:34

Augustine Hellenized Christianity with Platonism and

33:38

Thomas Aquinas further Hellenized

33:40

Christianity with Aristotelianism.

33:43

I don't think that picture is accurate.

33:46

And this goes back to our discussion

33:49

of the differences between philosophy and theology,

33:52

or Christian philosophies and theology

33:54

and all non-Christian philosophies and theologies.

33:59

Now, we talk about this central

34:03

methodological notion of the incapacity

34:06

of finite creatures to contain the infinite God. The

34:10

Latin goes, "Finitum

34:15

non capax infiniti." God is transcendent. God is infinite and we are finite creatures, so

34:18

there's no way for us to know God

34:21

exhaustively or comprehensively. Our knowledge

34:23

of God can only be an analogy

34:26

to God's self-knowledge. It

34:29

cannot be, if I can use

34:31

a theological term here, univocal to

34:33

God's self-knowledge. That is to

34:35

say, it cannot be identical

34:37

with God's self-knowledge. So how

34:40

are finite creatures to

34:42

know the infinite God? There

34:44

is this word in English that's

34:46

used rather negatively

34:49

in our time. The word is speculation.

34:52

When we talk about speculation, we tend to think about a groundless, suspicious

34:58

or that kind of connotations,

35:01

but the word speculation actually comes

35:03

from the Latin for mirror: speculum.

35:06

So what does speculation mean? Speculation

35:10

means that - It comes from

35:13

Romans 13, sorry, 1

35:15

Corinthians 13. Now

35:17

we are looking for a mirror. We don't

35:20

look at God face-to-face. We are looking

35:22

through a mirror. What we see is a mirror image.

35:25

We don't see God in himself.

35:28

What we see is God's image reflected through creation

35:32

and reflected through redemption.

35:34

John Calvin says

35:37

that scripture is a mirror

35:39

of God. We don't see God's essence.

35:42

We see God's essence reflected

35:44

through the redemption that scripture

35:47

testifies to. We don't see

35:50

God's glory in himself.

35:51

Reformed theology

35:54

distinguishes between three kinds

35:56

of the divine glory: 1) God's essential

35:58

glory - That's God's glory

36:00

in himself. No creature can

36:03

bear this glory. It's a consuming

36:06

glory. So we only see God's

36:08

glory reflected through creation, and

36:11

that is called 2) God's manifested

36:14

glory. There's a third category

36:17

of God's glory called 3) God's personal

36:18

glory, and that is God's

36:21

glory revealed to us in the person

36:23

of Jesus Christ, who is himself

36:25

God. Yet that glory is hidden

36:28

in humble flesh in such

36:30

a way that we can only

36:32

behold that glory by faith

36:35

and not by sight, at least

36:37

in the current stage

36:39

of redemptive history. As

36:41

to the ultimate future, do we see

36:44

God's essential glory? The standard

36:45

Reformed answer

36:47

would be, "No, we still see

36:50

God's glory manifested in Jesus

36:51

Christ, although it's the risen

36:54

Christ that we behold and the

36:56

ascended Jesus Christ, and no longer

36:59

a glory hidden in

37:02

mortal flesh. So we don't see God's essential glory.

37:05

We see God's glory as reflected

37:08

through God's creation and redemption, and

37:12

that leads to a theological method called speculation.

37:16

We look for things that constitute

37:19

mirrors of God's glory:

37:21

mirrors of God's essence, God's attributes.

37:25

Scripture is, of course, one of them - that's

37:27

what John Calvin says - and

37:30

creation is a mirror of God's

37:32

glory. And Thomas Aquinas

37:34

says that even in the

37:36

garden of Eden, Adam could not

37:39

see God's glory face to face

37:41

, but could only behold God's glory

37:44

in "created effects."

37:47

So his theological method

37:49

or his apologetical method was

37:51

called an "a posteriori" method.

37:55

Back in those days, or actually before

37:57

the mid-18th

38:00

century or so, the terms

38:02

"a priori" and "a posteriori" basically

38:04

meant arguments from cause

38:07

to effect or from effect to cause. Now,

38:10

God is the first cause of creation, so

38:12

we cannot behold the first cause

38:15

immediately. We can only

38:17

praise the glory of the first cause

38:19

from created effects, and that

38:22

gave rise to Aquinas' method of

38:25

speculation. This method

38:27

is sometimes expressed by the phrase,

38:29

"Faith seeking understanding."

38:33

So from the starting point

38:35

of faith, we seek to understand

38:38

that which is manifested to us

38:41

and make sense of the mirror

38:43

image that is presented to us.

38:45

And Aquinas' program

38:48

is basically a faith seeking understanding

38:50

program, although it

38:52

might look very different from the program

38:54

of say, Anselm of Canterbury. One of

38:59

Aquinas's most influential

39:01

arguments is the cosmological

39:04

argument. He has his five

39:06

ways, right? These are all arguments

39:09

from effect to cause, and I think the most

39:12

powerful of them is the cosmological

39:14

argument. The argument was

39:16

critically retrieved from Aristotle.

39:19

Aristotle argued that

39:21

the universe must have a Creator, and

39:24

that Creator we call God. Why

39:27

is it that we must acknowledge

39:29

the existence of a Creator of the universe?

39:32

His argument goes like this: If

39:34

we look at all things that

39:36

exist around us, they

39:38

all exist in time, and

39:41

they all have a cause of

39:43

their existence in time.

39:46

For Aristotle, time is a precondition

39:49

of existence. Time is not something

39:52

that we can call being or a thing, but

39:54

it's the condition of being. So

39:57

if we look at all beings, they exist

39:59

in time and they all have a cause

40:01

in time. Now let's

40:04

think of this thing, X. It

40:06

has a cause of its existence,

40:09

and we call that cause A, and

40:12

A needs another cause of its existence, so

40:15

there's a regress of causes going on here. Now, can this regressive causation be infinite? If there's an infinite regress of causes or an infinite chain of causes before X comes into existence, that will mean that X would have needed to wait for an infinite amount of time to come into existence, because every event of causation is an event in time. So an infinite regress of causes is an infinite stretch of time. If the existence of X requires an infinite stretch of time, then X would not be able to exist and nothing would be able to exist. But the fact is that things do exist and therefore there cannot be an infinite regress of causes . There must be a first cause. That's Aristotle's argument, but there's a loophole in this argument. Aristotle believes that even God exists in time, because he cannot think of anything that does not exist in time. He thinks that time must be the precondition of existence. That was why he ridiculed Plato's theory that time is an ectype of eternity and eternity is an archetype of time, and that God doesn't exist in the same kind of time that we exist in. Aristotle ridiculed that theory, and he says that God exists in time, but what would that imply ? That would imply that God waited an infinite stretch of time before he created the universe. Now, that was initially put in the form of a question. I think that question was they set forth primarily by the Epicureans. The question goes like, "What was God doing before he created the universe? We don't know what God was doing. He might be cooking, he might be eating, he might be sleeping. We don't know. But there's one thing that we can know for certain, if the universe is created and if God exists in time, and God has existed for an infinite stretch of time , then we know that God was waiting to create a universe. And how long did God have to wait? God would have to wait forever before he created universe, but the fact is that the universe exists and therefore it could not have been created by God. That question was actually set forth to Augustine as well, and Augustine's initial answer is, "What was God doing before the creation of the universe? God was creating hell for people who ask this question." But then he proceeded to answer this question patiently, and he tells us that God is timeless. Eternity is not an infinite stretch of time. Eternity is timelessness and God is the Creator of time, so God did not have to wait forever until he created the universe. Now, Thomas Aquinas took over Augustine's concept of God's eternity as timelessness, so his argument is very different from Aristotle's because he has a totally different theological ontology and he holds to completely, fundamentally different presuppositions than Aristotle. So his argument is that everything that everything that exists in time must have a cause of its existence. An infinite regress of causes is irrational. Therefore, the universe must have a first cause that is not in time, and that would be the only way to resolve the antinomy, as Kant put it, between the creation of the universe and the self-existence of the universe. Now, this cosmological argument, I would say, proceeds on the grounds of faith. For Aquinas, the timelessness of God is not something that philosophers have been able to prove with reason. It's something that you need to accept by faith . He didn't have Stephen Hawking to help him out. Stephen Hawking showed us that it's possible to prove that the first call of the universe is timeless. Hawking tells us that there must be a first cause of the universe that is timeless, and that first cause Hawking calls the laws of nature. And he says that it's not God , because when we talk about God, we have the idea of an intelligent God, and he doesn't believe God is intelligent, but that leads to all sorts of difficulties in his philosophy. And he doesn't admit that he has a philosophy, but he does. But let's not get into Stephen Hawking. Let's come back to Aquinas. So we can see that Aquinas took over this argument from Aristotle, but he reinterpreted it under the framework of the "regula fidei": the regulations of faith or the rule of faith. So I don't think that he was a thinker who Hellenized Christianity, but he was a thinker who Christianized a Hellenistic theory.

45:35

So that would be

45:37

kind of going along with the

45:39

idea that philosophy

45:42

is in the service of theology

45:44

and not the other way around. And yeah,

45:48

it can be a little jarring

45:50

for someone nowadays

45:52

to go and read the Summa

45:55

Theologica or one of the other

45:57

writings by Aquinas.

46:00

And you start seeing him refer to this

46:03

Philosopher - this unnamed Philosopher, and

46:06

you find out as you go along that he's

46:08

talking about Aristotle. But the

46:12

thing you have to understand about Aquinas's writing

46:14

as well is that no

46:16

one would write a book the way

46:18

he does today, because he sets it

46:20

up - He'll give a statement

46:23

and then a counter-statement, and

46:26

he'll go through this series of considering

46:28

different options, and then he finally gives you the

46:30

answer. "Hey, this is the right answer."

46:33

But through that process, it can

46:35

sometimes create a little

46:37

confusion for people as to what his actual

46:39

opinion is, but that's

46:41

coming from the scholastic method

46:44

of question and answer that was very popular

46:46

in his time. So

46:48

yes , certainly I think because Aquinas

46:51

is such an important figure

46:53

that his works tend to

46:55

attract the most controversy, because

46:57

a lot of Protestants feel that because

47:00

he was Catholic, or

47:02

because maybe he

47:05

used and referred a lot to

47:07

Aristotle, that he's

47:09

not someone we can trust and that his

47:12

theology is always going to be leading us

47:14

to a place that we shouldn't be going. But

47:17

I think it really depends

47:19

greatly on what part of his writings you're

47:21

talking about, because he wrote

47:23

many things. In addition to his two

47:26

Summas, he wrote biblical commentaries

47:28

- he wrote all kinds of things.

47:30

So I think you have to always be aware

47:32

of what type of

47:35

work you're reading and

47:37

the types of methods he would have been using.

47:39

But I think if we move

47:42

on to the next question I have, which kind of

47:44

gets into this a bit - The Protestant

47:46

Reformation brought about another debate

47:48

over the incorporation of philosophy in theology,

47:51

because Martin Luther was highly

47:53

critical of the degree to which Aristotle's

47:56

ideas had made their way into

47:58

what we could call medieval Catholic

48:01

thought. I guess it was just medieval Western

48:03

Christian thought. But some of the later

48:05

Swiss Reformers - thinking here of Calvin or Beza,

48:10

people like that - they seem to have benefited

48:13

from their reading of Aquinas

48:15

and Aristotelian thought . So

48:17

what kind of accommodation

48:20

did Reformed theologians reach with

48:22

philosophy during that period? Were they

48:24

more optimistic about the use of

48:26

philosophy or were they more pessimistic

48:28

about it?

48:30

I would say that they were critically

48:33

optimistic about the eclectic

48:37

use of philosophy - of

48:39

all kinds of wisdom

48:41

that this world has to offer. They

48:44

were not as pessimistic as Luther, as you point out. But

48:49

one influence that they

48:51

inherited from Luther

48:54

was the nominalist [inaudible]. So if you think of Aquinas as a realist Aristostelian, then you would think of the Reformed as nominalist - Not Aristotelians, I'm sorry, and I shouldn't call Aquinas an Aristotelian either. But if you think of his use of Aristotle as realist, then you can think of the dominant Reformed use of Aristotle as nominalist. And one thing that they would agree with Aquinas is that we cannot gaze upon God's glory immediately. We need to look at creation as a mirror of God's creation, and that would mean that purely speculative, a posteriori arguments from cause to effect will not work. We need to use our empirical senses to behold God's manifested glory in creation. And so the 17th century Reformed theologians came up with this notion of "tabula rasa," which means blank slate. You find it in, for example, the Institutes of Elenctic Theology by Francis Turretin. He talks about the human mind as a tabula rasa at birth. All ideas inscribed on to the human mind are inscribed through experience, and we need to use experience to reflect on the glory of God. That is also the kind of theology that inspired thinkers like Francis Bacon and John Locke. John Locke was the philosopher who took over this Reformed notion of tabula rasa and developed it into a philosophical system, or empiricism. Well before him, Francis Bacon developed a modern scientific method that we call the method of induction. Induction is to gather from empirical data correlations that are regular: so regular that we are compelled to think that there must be some causation behind these correlations, so we come up with postulates to explain these correlations. That's the method of induction. And Bacon tells us that science , that is the natural sciences, has a redemptive dimension, and this is very Calvinistic. Mind you, he lived in the Elizabethan times. He was a contemporary of William Shakespeare. So the intellectual elite who went to Geneva had come back to Britain after the five year exile during Mary's reign - people like Thomas Bodley - they came back to Britain and they started teaching Calvinistic doctrines and Francis Bacon was influenced by Calvinistic thought, if we are not allowed to say that he was just a Calvinist. I think he was a Calvinist in many respects. He tells us that there is a redemptive dimension to science in that Adam lost his ability to think God's thoughts after God. That's not a phrase Bacon, by the way. That's a phrase from Johannes Kepler. But Adam lost that ability because Adam wanted the autonomy of reason. Adam ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He wanted to judge good and evil, right and wrong by himself. He didn't want God's word to help him understand the world, but God's calling for him was to study creation by naming them first. So Adam gave names to each creature, each according to its kind, and that is a kind of inductive study of nature. Adam lost that ability and Christians with a regenerate mind are able to again think God's thoughts after God and take down the idols that we have erected by the presumption of the autonomy of reason. And Bacon names these four idols, and if you look at these four idols, you see the strong influence of nominalism in there . For example, the idol of the marketplace, by which he means the idol of human language. He tells us that linguistic systems are conventional. They are our interpretations of reality, but the world of language is not reality itself, and we always need to know that within our linguistic systems, there are fictitious linguistic signs that do not correspond to reality - that these ideas are what we make up. And if we want to study God's good creation, we need to understand limitations of our language and take down all of these unnecessary terms and concepts in our language that don't correspond to God's empirically observable creation. That's sort of an Occam's Razor kind of concept. And if you look at the fourth idol, which is the idol of the theater , he compares philosophical systems to theatrical plays. They are human inventions . We can think of the decimal system, for example. We seek to understand mathematical reality by this conventional decimal system that we use, that we learn in school, but a decimal system is not the truth itself. It's only a system, a model that we develop to imitate the truth. And what Bacon is reminding us is that all our philosophical and scientific systems are merely models of reality. They are not the truth of reality itself. But he is not an agnostic or a skeptic. He does believe that we can come closer and closer to the truth of God revealed in creation. First, by taking on the glasses - Calvin calls them spectacles - of scripture. Calvin compares our fallen reason to bad eyes or bad eyesight. We have bad eyesight, and scripture is like a pair of glasses that we put on, and through scripture, we can look at the world and see God's manifested glory in the world. And in that process, we can get closer and closer to the truth by eliminating the idols that hinder us from seeing God's glory in creation. And I think that is the way Reformed theologians - Sorry, Bacon was not a Reformed theologian, but his whole system was taken from Reformed theology. And I think that is how Reformed theologians benefited from a nominalistic rendition of Aristotle.

56:04

Yeah. There are two concepts

56:07

within Reformed theology that

56:10

I think are very important here and that in

56:12

some ways seem to be - they're

56:14

not actually at odds with each other, but they

56:16

create a kind of tension with each other. And

56:19

the one is the Creator-Creature

56:22

Distinction, which is the idea

56:24

of this category difference

56:27

between God and humanity.

56:29

So as you were saying earlier,

56:32

our language we use to talk about God and the

56:34

knowledge we have about him is not the same

56:36

as the knowledge God has about himself.

56:39

Or if we say that a human being

56:41

is showing love,

56:44

we don't mean exactly the same thing

56:46

we would mean when we say, "God is love."

56:49

We have to keep always in mind that Creator-Creature

56:51

Distinction and that's going to limit

56:53

the kind of analogy we can have about God . But

56:56

at the same time, you have this idea

56:58

that creation is the theater

57:00

of God's glory, and that

57:03

although God's glory is most

57:05

clearly revealed in scripture

57:07

and in Jesus Christ as he

57:11

became incarnate and came to earth and

57:13

his death and resurrection and ascension,

57:16

there is still a kind

57:19

of glory to be seen in creation

57:22

around us. And I think the idea you just

57:24

shared about how we can take scripture

57:26

as it were a pair of spectacles and put

57:29

them on and view creation through

57:31

that, that will obviously give

57:33

us the best kind of knowledge

57:35

and wisdom that we can have when

57:38

viewing this creation, which has obviously

57:40

been affected by the Fall

57:42

and sin and the curse that that brings.

57:45

But when we're able to view it through

57:47

the lens or through the spectacles

57:49

of God's Word, we're able

57:51

to most clearly see

57:53

the glory of God and creation.

57:56

So I think definitely

57:58

the Reformed thought and Protestant

58:00

thought - it hasn't been in

58:02

complete agreement. Always there have been

58:04

differences of opinion, but I

58:07

appreciate you kind of bringing that out. And

58:10

it can be very confusing when we use

58:12

terms like realist and

58:14

nominalist that are coming out of medieval

58:15

philosophy, but even

58:18

though they're confusing, they've had a real effect

58:20

on the way that theologians think about

58:22

these things, and things that maybe

58:25

we don't normally think about in terms of theology

58:28

were very important to the way that they considered

58:30

things. So the Enlightenment

58:33

and the advent of Higher Criticism

58:36

in biblical studies represented another turning

58:38

point in the relationship between Christianity

58:41

and philosophy. And just as

58:43

an aside, this is when - when Protestants

58:45

think back on history, this is when a lot of them

58:47

would say things got off track. So

58:51

you've written an introduction to the thought

58:53

of Immanuel Kant, who

58:55

was a philosophical giant

58:57

of this era. And although his

58:59

thought was complex and

59:01

would be difficult to briefly summarize, could

59:05

you mention maybe a few of his

59:07

ideas that have had a major

59:09

effect on how people think about religion

59:12

or morality down

59:14

to our present day?

59:21

There are many things we can talk about. For example, his assessment of the philosophy of Bacon

59:23

and Locke, which are largely

59:28

Christian, and Kant assessed that system positively.

59:30

Now what he wanted

59:32

to do was to sort

59:35

of correct some mistakes

59:37

in the system in order for it to

59:39

work after it turned

59:41

to subjectivism and idealism after

59:45

Berkeley and Hume. I

59:47

wouldn't go into that because that's a huge

59:50

topic that involves some major debates in Kant studies these days.

59:55

The concept of wisdom, I think, is something that's worth our discussion here , because it's really relevant to our society today, So Kant follows the broad Augustinian tradition to tell us that freedom is not a lawless equity of the will. Freedom is not to do what you will, and that goes back to the Lockean tradition. As I mentioned, he agrees with Locke on many points, and one of those points that he agrees with is that freedom - or liberty is that the word that Locke uses - liberty is not license. License as in licentiousness: license to do what you want. And Locke's theory is that liberty needs to be defined in terms of property. He has this famous line that's revised and incorporated into the US Declaration of Independence. "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and property." That's what Locke wrote, and unfortunately, in my opinion - and not just my opinion. Richard Pratt, the Reformed theologian [inaudible], Old Testament scholar says that this phrase is "the great American heresy." He turned property into "the pursuit of happiness." So how is property related to liberty in the thought of Locke? Well, Locke says that there are many kinds of properties such as land or other kinds of ownership, but there is a universal kind of property - that is, myself as my own property, and each person is her own property, and freedom or liberty is to be defined this way . I am a free human being in that I am my own property. But how can I be my own property? Who is it that gave myself to me? Well, he says it's God. Before I became my own property, I was first God's property, and I remain God's property, even though this property is entrusted to me, and therefore I am not entitled to do anything I feel good at doing. If I feel that foundation of life is painful, do I have the right to take my own life? Assisted suicide, maybe? His answer would be no , because my life is a gift of God, and it's for God to decide how long I should live . I don't get to make that decision in God's place. I am God's property before I am my property. So liberty is not to do what you will, and that is a very Christian, very Augustinian understanding of liberty. And that, I think, differs greatly from the kind of libertarian freedom that the phrase "the pursuit of happiness" has given rise to. We see the legalization of victimless crimes in the United States as a result of this kind of libertarian [inaudible]. Now, back to Kant. Kant takes over this [inaudible] freedom. And he engages with a metaphysical debate about the freedom of the will from the early modern period. The debate is between determinism and indeterminism. Different philosophers had different metaphysical theories about nature and causation. Philosophers like Spinoza would say that God is nature and nature is God. There is no intelligent God who transcends nature, and so everything that happens in nature is predetermined by the initial conditions of nature, so nothing happens by contingency. Although some things might look contingent, they are not. [NOTE: The remainder of this answer has not been edited but simply filled in by a computer.] And by the same token, we in mind look as if our whales are free in making decisions. But the fact is that all of those decisions were predetermined by complex higher costs . So he denies that there is such a thing as free will. And the opposite position is to say that the will is not constrained by the laws of nature, the moral nature or physical nature. So there's freedom that freedom is defined as lawlessness of the faculty of the will , and both sides had their arguments and shows us that this whole debate ultimately comes to the point of that internally . That is to say, both sides have equal, equal, and we basically cannot decide which one is right. We fall into this theoretical antrum and your ethical reason tries to ask what he calls transcendental freedom are human beings, presidentially free not to explain this term, transcendental that he says that the question of freedom is answerable. However, we can all simply benign presidentially that we do have free will that , how are we to make sense of freedom? We cannot make sense of it in the theoretical realm that is by asking our human beings. We can only answer this question in the practical realm. And practical reason is defined as recent, which fire sensitive question, what ought to be, or what are affirm to be. And he says that we , as human beings are endowed with a Supreme moral vocation, and that moral patient requires how we must be free human beings. And this moral vocation requires that we understand freedom in such a way that freedom should not be defined as lawlessness of the will , but rather he distinguishes between two kinds of freedom, freedom, and positive freedom or peace or not two kinds of freedom. The two dimensions of freedom, negative freedom is non coercion of the will so that the whale is not coerced to be morally good . You can choose to be morally evil. And human beings are born with an evil, a radically evil propensity, such that doing evil is almost inevitable to us. So we cannot ex extra this propensity, but then we can try to use our freedom in a positive way to outweigh this evil propensity and become a better human and hope for God's assistance in this process. And this whole philosophy has had to redefine a lot of these things, which may sound very synergistic and Christological. But then if we look at the definition of freedom itself offered by there's a lot to which first of all, freedom requires that the wheel is not coerced . So that requires respect for individual volition . I cannot impose my will on you. The government cannot impose its will on the citizen. The will has to be non course , but that is only the negative aspect of freedom. And the plus free , uh , aspect of freedom equals autonomy. Autonomy is not independence from autonomy is from normal cell wall. That is to say, we impose the law of God on ourselves and try to adopt that universal moral law as our maximum status, our principles of behavior only then do we become truly free human beings. So freedom. In other words, it's not freedom to sin that freedom from sin that is for him what positive freedom is. And that is pretty much Augustus . Definition of accustom tells us that we need Jesus Christ to receive this freedom of Florida is freedom from sin to tells us that we can't achieve that partly by ourselves with God's assistance. And I think that's where Christians have to disagree. Although there are people out there that say that he is not nearly as sinner , just pick us up. People will say yes, but I don't get into that for now.

1:08:48

Yeah, and I do find

1:08:50

personally that this

1:08:52

sort of era of German philosophy

1:08:55

is one of the most difficult

1:08:57

to get into, unless

1:09:00

you're someone who has studied it in

1:09:02

depth, because if

1:09:04

you read Kant or the next

1:09:06

person we're going to discuss - Hegel - I

1:09:08

think it would be a much easier to read Marx

1:09:11

or Nietzsche or someone a little more

1:09:14

modern, or even someone perhaps

1:09:16

farther back like Aquinas. Because even

1:09:19

if you're fluent in German, reading

1:09:22

Kant and understanding all the concepts

1:09:24

he's putting forward - it can be very difficult, so

1:09:27

that's why we're seeing people still debating

1:09:29

exactly what he meant about some of

1:09:31

these things. Certainly I'm

1:09:35

not an expert on Kant, but the

1:09:37

thing that always comes through in what

1:09:39

I've heard about him is this

1:09:41

idea that he certainly

1:09:43

wasn't rejecting Christianity,

1:09:45

but he wanted to create this concept

1:09:48

of a morality which could

1:09:50

be universal and

1:09:52

which was based really

1:09:55

heavily on human reason. And

1:09:58

in that way, he probably

1:10:00

had a more positive view

1:10:02

of human reason than most Reformed thinkers

1:10:05

would have - after the

1:10:07

Fall, that our reason is

1:10:10

no longer what it would've been before

1:10:12

the introduction of sin. So,

1:10:14

yeah. You mentioned

1:10:17

autonomy there and this concept

1:10:20

of, "What does it mean to be free?" is certainly

1:10:23

very influential in

1:10:26

Western society today, so that's

1:10:28

probably a way that we're still seeing him

1:10:31

influence us. You've also

1:10:33

written an introduction to the thought of Hegel,

1:10:36

who belonged to the generation just after

1:10:38

Kant. So what were his unique

1:10:40

contributions to philosophy and

1:10:43

what effect did that have on theological practice,

1:10:45

particularly in the universities

1:10:47

of continental Europe at

1:10:50

the time?

1:10:51

He made tremendous contributions

1:10:54

in many different areas, but since we

1:10:56

were talking about freedom, I thought we could

1:10:59

continue on the same path and talk about Hegel's view of freedom. There's

1:11:04

this fascinating little - well, also

1:11:06

an introductory volume to Hegel's thought by Craig Mathers. The

1:11:11

author tries to explain Hegel's notion of freedom

1:11:15

by referring to a novel by Dostoevsky,

1:11:18

titled Notes from the Underground. So

1:11:21

the protagonist of this

1:11:23

novel feels that he is

1:11:26

unfree when he lives in

1:11:28

a society above the ground. He

1:11:30

has to interact with people, and interaction

1:11:33

with people means confinement

1:11:36

to the rules imposed

1:11:39

on him by otherness, so

1:11:43

he wants freedom and he moves underground

1:11:44

to live by himself, and

1:11:47

that was his way of establishing freedom. But

1:11:50

then he finds out that when I am living

1:11:53

by myself, I am not genuinely

1:11:56

free . I am lonely. I cannot

1:11:58

interact with people. I cannot

1:12:01

express my will to

1:12:04

other people and perhaps impose

1:12:06

my will on other people, and freedom

1:12:08

sometimes means making other people

1:12:10

do what you want them to do. That is

1:12:12

also a form of freedom, and

1:12:14

that kind of freedom doesn't happen underground

1:12:17

. So he moves to - he

1:12:20

moves above the ground again and tries

1:12:22

to fit into society, but then he finds that he is unfree, so he moves underground again. And that,

1:12:29

I think, reflects an erroneous view of

1:12:33

freedom that we hold to in our

1:12:35

culture today: freedom as self-fulfillment.

1:12:40

Now, people would call the freedom

1:12:42

that is underground a subjective

1:12:45

freedom and freedom above

1:12:47

the ground as objective freedom. And

1:12:49

for him, neither of these is

1:12:52

absolute freedom. Both

1:12:54

of them are freedom in their

1:12:58

premature stages, or

1:13:00

moments is the word he uses.

1:13:03

So we need to move from a moment

1:13:05

of subjective freedom to a moment

1:13:08

of objective freedom, but

1:13:10

that is not yet absolute freedom.

1:13:14

First of all, individual freedom - that is,

1:13:16

the freedom of the particular

1:13:18

subject. Subjective freedom must

1:13:20

be negated by objective freedom.

1:13:23

We come into society and

1:13:25

society must negate our

1:13:27

individual freedoms, but that

1:13:29

is not yet true freedom

1:13:31

or absolute freedom. Absolute

1:13:34

freedom is the reconciliation between

1:13:37

objective and subjective freedoms, and

1:13:40

he calls that self-actualization. And

1:13:44

what is the entity that

1:13:46

realizes absolute freedom in this world? For

1:13:50

Hegel in his Elements

1:13:53

of the Philosophy of Right, this

1:13:55

entity, this divinely chosen entity

1:13:57

is the modern stage.

1:14:00

And for him, it's pretty

1:14:02

much the German nation united

1:14:04

as a state that is called to realize

1:14:07

absolute freedom on earth. Now , what

1:14:10

does his notion absolute freedom

1:14:12

mean ? Well, that is a intensely

1:14:15

debated question in the literature. Authors

1:14:19

like Charles Taylor and Michael Rosen

1:14:21

would say that it's a communitarian

1:14:24

kind of freedom that honors

1:14:26

both the freedom of the individual

1:14:29

and the freedom of society

1:14:32

as a whole, or call it a general

1:14:33

will, if you will. That is

1:14:36

sort of the notion of Rousseau

1:14:39

of freedom as conforming

1:14:41

to the general will of

1:14:43

the people, and for Rousseau, this

1:14:46

would mean that individuals who

1:14:49

refused to conform to the general will

1:14:52

of the people must be forced

1:14:54

to be free. I don't

1:14:56

think interpreters like Rosen and

1:14:59

Taylor would take that step and say

1:15:01

that the government has the right to force

1:15:04

individuals to be free without limitations,

1:15:07

but things like taxation - the government

1:15:11

imposes taxation on us. The government

1:15:14

is entitled to do that, and that is a

1:15:17

kind of forcing us to be free, and that

1:15:19

is the kind of absolute freedom

1:15:22

that is compatible with contemporary

1:15:25

society. But if you look

1:15:27

at Hegel's own theory, what

1:15:29

he says is that the modern

1:15:31

state is entitled not only

1:15:34

to impose taxation on citizens,

1:15:36

but also to exercise

1:15:39

censorship and limit

1:15:41

the freedom of the press. He

1:15:43

writes that explicitly. He says

1:15:45

that there shouldn't be a freedom of the press.

1:15:47

Some people say

1:15:50

that freedom is to think for

1:15:51

oneself, and he says,

1:15:54

"Well, that's - obviously nobody can think

1:15:56

for other people, but that's not freedom, or

1:15:58

that's only subjective freedom, and that

1:16:00

must be eliminated in society

1:16:03

so that people no longer think for themselves, but

1:16:06

people think for society

1:16:08

as a whole, and only

1:16:10

in society will the individual truly thrive." This

1:16:15

kind of approach to

1:16:17

freedom gave rise to ideologies

1:16:20

like National Socialism during

1:16:22

the Third Reich and Marxism, and it

1:16:25

gave rise to justifications

1:16:28

for absolute powers in the name

1:16:30

of freedom and democracy. Mind you that

1:16:33

the official title of

1:16:35

North Korea actually includes the

1:16:37

word "democratic." It's

1:16:39

a democratic...

1:16:40

Yes.

1:16:40

They say that they are

1:16:43

a free society. And

1:16:45

I, living in China, hear

1:16:48

the word "democracy" all

1:16:50

the time and "freedom" all the time.

1:16:53

Freedom is an official value

1:16:55

of the Chinese state, but what kind of freedom

1:16:57

is it? So

1:17:00

as a Christian, between Kant

1:17:02

and Hegel, I would certainly choose Kant

1:17:04

and not Hegel.

1:17:06

Yeah, I mean, these differing

1:17:08

notions of freedom I think

1:17:10

are really important for us to consider, because

1:17:13

in an American context, I

1:17:15

feel like increasingly freedom is

1:17:18

more what you're talking about with the negative

1:17:20

side of freedom: that no one has

1:17:23

a right to tell me what to do or

1:17:25

that I'm not

1:17:28

responsible for anybody else.

1:17:30

I'm just responsible for myself. Very anti-authoritarian,

1:17:37

not just - I mean, anti-authoritarian can

1:17:40

be good if you're opposing an

1:17:42

evil regime, but

1:17:44

if you take it to the other extreme , it turns into

1:17:46

anarchy, right? If no one can tell you what

1:17:49

to do , if everyone is

1:17:51

completely free, then we can't

1:17:53

have government. We can't have any form of society.

1:17:56

So the way that

1:17:58

freedom may be understood in another country,

1:18:01

such as China, which still holds

1:18:04

more closely to communal values,

1:18:07

or India, or

1:18:10

some of these other nations - We like

1:18:13

to think that freedom is a value that all people

1:18:15

hold dear, and I think that is true to

1:18:17

an extent, but people may not agree on what

1:18:19

freedom is or what kind of freedom

1:18:21

we should be pursuing. And

1:18:24

the biblical definition of freedom

1:18:26

is freedom from sin, freedom

1:18:28

to pursue the things of Christ,

1:18:30

freedom from being under the influence

1:18:33

of this world and the devil. So we

1:18:35

need to be very careful before

1:18:37

we equate American

1:18:39

notions of freedom or

1:18:42

European or Asian notions of freedom

1:18:45

with the notion of freedom that's in

1:18:47

the Bible. And you can definitely

1:18:49

see how people

1:18:51

like Kant or Hegel have influenced

1:18:53

the way we think about freedom today

1:18:56

and maybe sometimes

1:18:59

in good ways and sometimes in bad ways, so yeah, I

1:19:02

appreciate that. At

1:19:05

this point in the interview, we unfortunately

1:19:07

lost our connection and were unable to continue

1:19:09

recording. I had planned to ask Dr.

1:19:12

Tseng for his thoughts about the influence of Eastern

1:19:14

philosophy on Christianity and get

1:19:16

his take on the current debate over Critical Race

1:19:18

Theory, but I'm sure you agree

1:19:20

with me that we were able to have quite a substantial

1:19:22

discussion without those additional topics.

1:19:25

I am grateful to Alex for taking the time to

1:19:27

speak with me.

1:19:44

[MUSIC PLAYS]

1:19:55

It was a pleasure to speak with Alex about the relationship

1:19:58

between philosophy and theology. Next

1:20:00

week, I'll be speaking with Abbey Wedgeworth about

1:20:02

her book Held: 31 Biblical

1:20:05

Reflections on God's Comfort and

1:20:07

Care in the Sorrow of Miscarriage. This

1:20:09

is an issue that has affected many people I care

1:20:11

about, and even if you have not experienced

1:20:13

miscarriage yourself, it may help you to think

1:20:16

about how you can show love to others. This

1:20:18

podcast is written and produced by yours truly.

1:20:21

Please send all complaints by mail to 1600

1:20:24

Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC.

1:20:26

The music you've been listening to is from the song

1:20:28

"Citizens" by Christian recording artist

1:20:30

Jon Guerra off his album, Keeper

1:20:32

of Days. Reviews and ratings

1:20:35

are important and helping people discover new shows.

1:20:37

If you have a moment, please leave an honest

1:20:40

rating and review for this podcast wherever you

1:20:42

listen to it. Also consider mentioning

1:20:44

it to friends or sharing episodes on social

1:20:46

media. I know your time is valuable

1:20:49

and thank you in advance for any help you can provide.

1:20:52

Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling

1:20:54

and to make you stand in the presence of his glory,

1:20:57

blameless with great joy, to the only

1:20:59

God our Savior through Jesus Christ our Lord

1:21:02

be glory, majesty, dominion,

1:21:04

and authority before all time and

1:21:06

now and forever. Amen. Have

1:21:08

a great week.

1:21:10

[MUSIC PLAYS]