TM16. 16 February 2006.
Copyright © 2006 by Kevin Sharpe. All rights reserved.
Submitted for publication.

Truth Constricted:
The Theological Methods of Philip Clayton, Wentzel van Huyssteen, Nancey Murphy, and Alister McGrath

Kevin Sharpe

Graduate College, Union Institute & University, Cincinnati, Ohio
Harris Manchester College, Oxford University

10 Shirelake Close, Oxford OX1 1SN, United Kingdom
ksharpe@ksharpe.com
www.ksharpe.com

ABSTRACT.

Since modern western society often sees science as the exemplar of knowing, recent explorations of the nature of theological method often call upon the philosophy of science as their dialogue partner. How close or parallel can theological knowing be to scientific knowing? Can theological knowing claim authenticity when it operates as does scientific knowing? How and to what extent might the two differ? Yet to use scientific methodology in this way suggests it has a claim over theological method as far as its access to truth is concerned, however ‘truth’ be conceived. This paper looks at four recent science-oriented methodology proposals for theology – those of Philip Clayton, Wentzel van Huyssteen, Nancey Murphy, and Alister McGrath – with regard to how seriously they take the implications of this realization for their proposals and how well they might therefore serve social needs. They all place subservience to the church and its claims above the search for truth.

KEY WORDS.

Philip Clayton, Alister McGrath, Nancey Murphy, philosophy of science, theological method, Wentzel van Huyssteen.

CONTENTS.

Philip Clayton. 2

Assessment of Clayton’s Proposal 2

Wentzel van Huyssteen. 2

The Scientific Method. 2

Answering Standard Questions. 2

Truth. 2

Conceptual Relativism.. 2

Referent for ‘God’ 2

The Observable and Objective in Theology. 2

Van Huysteen’s Starting Point 2

Nancey Murphy. 2

Alister McGrath. 2

Assessment of McGrath’s Proposal 2

McGrath and Openness. 2

Conclusions. 2

Notes. 2

References. 2

A number of theological methods have surfaced over the last decade from the perspective of the method of science. This paper looks at four of them: those from Philip Clayton, Wentzel van Huyssteen, Nancey Murphy, and Alister McGrath. They all differ. So, apart from issues of internal consistency, on what basis might one judge between them or evaluate them?

The fact that all these proposals deliberately engage or refer to scientific method suggests that it and the place of science in contemporary culture might lead to criteria. The following, therefore, seem appropriate:

1. The methods must open themselves to exploring for truth, however they conceive this yet in line with the practice of science. All theories in science lie open to testing and potential change. This suggests theology cannot confine truth to certain supposed written expressions of it. To explore for truth, theology needs room for changing received beliefs and doctrines.

2. Theologies have primarily to do with God (however they conceive of God), and God at least creates or created the universe. This suggests that everything – every thing and every event – potentially has to do with God and therefore could offer data for theology. In particular, theology need not restrict its data to religious experience. Besides logical criteria, any data might in principle adjudicate between theological ideas, data that theology might also use as its given to try to explain.

3. Modern western society needs general moral universals whose applications require working out in each situation. To function effectively, society must have these with a strength behind them so they seem a right way to go. That strength entails certainty, but a certainty that coheres with modernity. Solutions to the current religious challenge, including those for theological methodology, must therefore play thoroughly and completely in tune with life and modern knowledge, including science’s.[1]

These three criteria – that theology explores for truth wherever it may find it, that everything offers potential data for theology, and that theology coheres with modern knowledge and life – offer, along with logical factors, ways to judge the adequacy of the methodological proposals of Clayton, van Huyssteen, Murphy, and McGrath.

Philip Clayton

Chapter Six of Clayton’s book, Explanation from Physics to Theology, provides his understanding of theological method, especially for theology seen as a science.[2] Theology, he says, has two ‘publics’ to which it is responsible, and these lead it to have two levels. The first comprises the activity and idea world of the religious believer, the church. Theology considers its responsibilities to and place within the religious community, and so constitutes a science about the Christian tradition’s beliefs concerning the world (including humans and God). For the second public, what Clayton calls the ‘academy,’ theology considers its academic status, its goals and characteristics as a science, and issues like the nature of its explanations and the criteria involved in its rationality. Theology thus distances itself a little from beliefs as stated in their religious context; it describes and clarifies how these first level statements function, what they say, and how they fit together to form a system. Theology’s explanations try continually to insure the tradition’s relevance to contemporary issues.[3]

Clayton can then list what theology must consider when spelling out its rationality:

1. the relationship between its statements and those of the first level;

2. its criteria as they stem from its two publics; and

3. issues arising from comparing it with other fields of study.[4]

He expands his third aspect of theological rationality – plus the second aspect as it applies to the academic public – with his understanding of theology as a science. Theology must:

· formulate its explanations to make them open to criticism;

· accept relevant research from other disciplines;

· provide warrant for the truth of its basic beliefs in the milieu of explanations that those scholars who dispute them might accept; and

· take its claims on the academic level as hypothetical with no assurance of finality.[5]

What do the data of theology comprise? Theological inquiry takes as its initial and primary data, Clayton writes, the church’s beliefs.[6]

What do theology’s criteria from levels one and two comprise (Clayton’s second numbered point above)? Basic criteria for theology as rational and explanatory (the second level) include: ‘the free and public exchange of ideas, use and acknowledgement of sources, reasoned and criticizable discussions of others’ ideas, and the ideals of clarity, objectivity, and criticizability.’ Satisfying the church (the first level) defines the primary criterion, however. Clayton wants the theologian to assess theological proposals already deemed adequate in a formal way (consistency, coherence, sufficiently comprehensive) against religious beliefs: they must cohere with the practices and beliefs of religion, and correspond with tradition. Here appears, Clayton says, the crux of calling theology ‘a faith science,’ ‘the science of God,’ or ‘the science of Christianity’: theology serves and remains bound to the church.[7]

Assessment of Clayton’s Proposal

Clayton has gone someway toward making theology a science, but not far enough. Why should he restrict the data of theology to church doctrine and not take all of reality, all experience, as theology’s potential data? Why should one agree with Clayton’s giving the power he does to the beliefs the church holds? He gives them a far greater role than any others by requiring adherence to them, period. ‘Systematic theology is the essence of the very same truths of religion’ that the Bible contains, he quotes from G. J. Planck.[8] What room then remains for theology to challenge or steer the beliefs of the church? What happens when knowledge of life and the universe as the academy discerns it (for example, evolution, the biological basis of subjective and mental phenomena, or the relationship of the earth to the sun) conflicts with church promulgated beliefs? Despite his assertions that in principle anyone can participate in theology, that no privileged premises can ground any solution, that theology cannot bracket questions of truth, that theology has to open itself to insights from discussion and research, and that theistic beliefs involve ‘truth claims about the way things are,’ Clayton has the Christian church’s religion – not all or any other part of experience – doing the real arbitration.[9] This stymies the search for truth. Theological method must allow theology an openness to pursue the truth (even perspectives on new truths) in equal partnership with the other disciplines of the academy, and not merely to give this lip service.

An alternative might have level-one beliefs offering potential models for exploration and the theologian perhaps including adherence to them as a criterion to satisfy along with others. These might conflict with it, however, and hence the need for discussion among the scholars and a decision about the relative weights of the criteria. This alternative would thereby follow Clayton’s dictate – to which he fails to adhere – that probably the explanation most likely true is the one best approximating an ideal scientific one.[10] To make a science out of theology requires not only its accessibility in principle to all people, but also its testability by all people, including those out of the church.

Clayton’s more recent book, God and Contemporary Science, uses a supposedly scientific idea to understand God’s working within the world.[11] This approach develops Arthur Peacocke’s lead by promoting the philosophy of emergence and downward causation (whole-part emergent action and properties).[12] Unfortunately, like his understanding of theological method as following science’s, this proposal of Clayton may not lie open to the actual process and findings of science. Science does not yet understand how wholes act on their parts over-and-above what the behavior of the parts can explain. Clayton’s holism argument – a modern form of the God-of-the-gaps – will therefore find itself more and more isolated as science fills in spaces it has yet to explain. Clayton thinks his idea scientific but, being far more speculative, it does not achieve his aim. He glues himself to a questionable form of holism and, through it, can import many metaphysical notions without empirical testing.[13]

Clayton agrees with other writers that no foreign authority (such as logical positivism) should randomly sift through a theological tradition’s beliefs, rejecting those for which it finds insufficient evidence; it is inappropriate to demand point-by-point verification of the assertions a theology might make. This does not excuse theology from standards as evidenced in science, he adds, but it does ‘soften and contextualize the standards that remain.’[14] The critical question concerns the amount of softness and contextualization: how far can the theologian step away from the usual image of science, let alone the usual doing of science before theology ceases to operate as a science? Theologians cannot so soften and contextualize the requirement for factual meaningfulness that they can make any factual assertion they or their church traditions like, and so create a dual standard for inquiry and verification.

Wentzel van Huyssteen

Van Huyssteen asks how people might hang on to religious faith amidst the confusion of the modern age. In a postmodern context that celebrates cultural and religious pluralism, how can believers speak with deep conviction or passionate commitment? Van Huyssteen answers this by exploring how theological reflection relates to other modes of intellectual inquiry, especially to scientific knowledge.

The Scientific Method

The scientific method, he thinks, derives from the same foundation as does rationality in general, and relates to the form of reasoning that underlies most goal-directed actions of humans. Both rationalities focus on the individual knower in the context of community. Thus, he says, ‘no sharp line’ can demarcate scientific rationality from other types. He aims, however, to capture the features of science that make it the rational enterprise par excellence.[15]

His position develops using insights from Nicholas Rescher. All types of knowledge depend on three broad aspects of rationality: ‘the cognitive, the evaluative, and the pragmatic.’ With these, the knower deploys good reasons for, or tries to find the strongest and best reasons for, respectively, ‘hanging on to certain beliefs,…making certain moral choices, and…acting in certain ways.’ ‘The pull of purpose,’ as van Huyssteen words it, constrains the inquirer. These three dimensions merge seamlessly as a whole when engaged together to understand the best a knower can.[16] Then rational behavior occurs.

The writings of Harold Brown emphasize similar aspects of rationality, highlighting the role of critical and responsible judgment in human cognition: the rational individual has the ability, without following prescribed rules, to evaluate a situation, to assess the available evidence, and then to reach a reasonable decision. This requires acute self-awareness and the command of a body of appropriate information. Note that the rational agent can form judgments in situations that lack rules for determining a definitive outcome. This requires social mediation in the making of rational decisions, the scholar’s embeddedness in and conscious commitment to living and concrete traditions and their various cultures, worldviews, strategies for reasoning, and values (like coherence, intelligibility (the most important one), predictive accuracy, and simplicity, plus more philosophical ones like empiricism, feminism, naturalism, and pragmatism). The holder usually holds such extra-empirical influences tacitly as standards implicit in her or his self-awareness and self-conception.[17]

Unlike the position of Thomas Kuhn, in which a rational decision occurs when most scientists in a community agree, Brown only requires that agents submit their decisions to their peers (those sharing relevant expertise) for evaluation, and that they seriously consider the evaluation. (However, does not the community eventually ‘agree,’ not in the sense of consciously forming a consensus, but in that some theories do not survive while others, the successful ones, continue, even if altered from how originally proposed? Kuhn may have meant this.) Brown’s argument acknowledges the influence of the community on the individual scholar. It also highlights the other direction of feedback, from self-aware individuals to their social contexts, especially their contribution to changing the community.[18] Rationality or the continuing process of shared assessment does not require a common voice that silences a particular rational agent. Neither need a community fully represent an agent’s vision of it in the present or the future.[19] Communal rationality thus has its limits.[20]

In summary, rationality involves an agent’s:

1. making the best judgments possible in a particular context and community;

2. remaining open to error and change that context-dependent decision making requires;

3. awareness of the interpretive and experiential dimensions of decisions; and

4. recognizing the lack of impervious foundations.[21]

Science and theology share this common rationality.[22]

The greater subjectivity often found in theology than in science does not imply its lesser degree of rationality, van Huyssteen argues, but rather its particular focus epistemologically and its broader scope experientially. The doing of theology depends on an overlapping but different set of values to science’s. This occurs because theology’s actual and reflective practice focuses in a religious community and grows from the way Christians live their lives of faith. It acknowledges that ritual and story focus the religious lives of these people, and it takes to heart that noncognitive aspects of religious language often evoke adherents’ attitudes and encourage their personal transformation.[23]

Answering Standard Questions

Van Huyssteen can now answer several challenges to any account of rationality and in particular that for theology.

Truth

How does rationality relate to truth? Rescher argues, and van Huyssteen argrees, that physical reality exists independent of minds and that humans can gain information about it.[24] Scientific inquiries presuppose this realism. However, knowledge – including that of science – can never be perfect or complete; more to reality exists than humans can know. Thus van Huyssteen sees rational inquiry not approximating truth, but estimating it. Scientific theories have to settle for a better approximation to truth rather than a closer one, because no way exists to monitor a measure for ‘closer.’ On the other hand, what defines ‘better’ as in ‘a better approximation to truth’? Van Huyssteen answers: the theory built on fuller information and exhibiting fewer deficits.[25] An inference to the best explanation, this long-term process of theory building requires scholars to estimate or judge as best or as rationally as they currently can.[26] This then gauges the explanatory progress of a theory.

Conceptual Relativism

Does van Huyssteen dodge conceptual relativism, the giving of equal weight to various supposed truths? To answer, he refers to Brown. First, to claim a belief is rational does not mean claiming it is true. Conceptual systems of equal rationality may not hold equal truth status. Second, while rationally to accept a claim requires assessing evidence for it, some types of evidence more strongly warrant belief than do others.[27] One conceptual scheme may lie closer to the truth than does another. These two points, van Huyssteen implies, rule out conceptual relativism.

These two points, however, lead to other questions. What defines reasons as stronger?[28] What warrants the superiority of one person’s versus another person’s decision as to the forms of evidence that give stronger warrant? No clear, non-circular answers stand out. Van Huyssteen does not provide adequate grounds for negating conceptual relativism.

As an alternative, does the solution to conceptual relativism require rooting theories in the given that most people would acknowledge? If so, then maybe science does have a stronger warrant for belief than does the theology van Huyssteen envisions.

Referent for ‘God’

Does a referent exist for the word ‘God’? Does ‘God’ only offer a hope or an assumption, a solution to experiential issues or to conceptual problems based on religious experience? Alternatively, can objective reference, reality depiction, and cognitive claims occur in the theories of theology with their open-ended and flexible networks of metaphors, without an exhaustive or definite prior understanding or description of the referent? Van Huyssteen, as an advocate of critical realism, answers in the positive. Theology can depict reality, he thinks, because the theological speaker belongs to a linguistic community that has handed on the factual meaning of the person or event, generation to generation, right back to the original.[29]

He spells out this chain of contextual and historical communication:

First, the Bible…has survived as a religious text and as a book of faith in a long and remarkable interpretative tradition of an ongoing faith context. Second, it is supported by the reality of ongoing faith experiences that this text has evoked through centuries of belief in God….Of these experiences,…[which the faithful believe God causes,] theological theorizing provides interpretation and reinterpretation on the basis of the central metaphors of this text….A third factor…[derives from] the metaphorical structure of biblical language, and the continuity of reference this has creatively given to religious and theological language through the ages…going back to the initiating events when [believers first introduced]…these metaphorical terms…[and fixed their referents].…Those metaphoric and interpreted expressions around which the language of the Christian religion clusters…justified themselves as meaningful and referential to vast numbers of people throughout the centuries and across cultures. It is this kind of experiential adequacy, and not a justified certainty, that makes a belief a responsible belief.[30]

The tradition of Kai Nielsen asks questions of van Huyssteen’s deriving the statements of theology from a chain communicating interpreted religious experience.[31] What establishes the factual reliability of this chain? The same questions of factual meaningfulness as arise now for claims about God also arise for the meaning or significance initially given to the person or event, and for every step in the chain. Van Huyssteen’s argument also ignores dramatic changes in the meaning of words and cultures over thousands of years. The same argument would conclude, moreover, the reality depiction of the religious language of Muslims and Hindus, Jainists and voodoo cultists, Christian fundamentalists and Mormons; many of these conflict. Van Huyssteen’s case for the reality depiction of theological language therefore does not stand.

Van Huyssteen appears to react to the extremism of logical positivism (which, he says, fixes reference with unrevisable description),[32] a straw opponent both when he wrote and now. He would serve theology better by pouring his energy into an adequate answer to the secular challenge that led to the logical positivist critique (for example, by showing the factual meaningfulness of religious language). This would achieve more for society than trying to justify liberal theology’s realism by downplaying the observable in theology with the tools of Rescher and Brown. A coherent and direct response to the challenge requires stepping back from the dogma of both logical positivism and traditional theology.

The Observable and Objective in Theology

Van Huyssteen asks his central question: ‘Does theology exhibit a rationality comparable to the rationality of science, and how plausible can an explanatory justification of the cognitive claims of theology be?’[33] A general form of the rationality of science applies, he suggests, not only to science but also to other investigations, including theology. How might the observable and the objective, obviously important in science, work in theology? This involves issues of data and criteria.

Van Hyssteen says that, with his model of rationality, different claims rely on different sources for their evidence. What sort of evidence or data, then, is appropriate for theology? Theology, van Huyssteen writes, ‘makes claims ultimately related to and based on the interpreted religious experience of a broad, complex, and pluralist Christian tradition.’[34] This position overlooks the long identified circularity of using religious experience as the data for theology; natural and reasonable explanations exist for religious experience, and theologies based on it assume the theological and religious explanations whose veracity they seek to justify with the experience.[35] Religious experience is too thwart with difficulties to offer theology its data.

Turning to criteria for explanations, van Huyssteen notes that each paradigm has its own set. The uniqueness of those for theology and religion (though this also applies to metaphysical and some types of philosophical explanation) lies, he continues, in their making sense of all of experience and in their speaking to the profoundly personal. Theology’s explanations make those who commit themselves to God feel secure. Theology thus judges proposed explanations better the more they solve issues from life and the religious experience that founds the community. It fulfills these functions and thereby its criteria, he says, by answering ‘vague and elusive questions’ about ultimate meaning.[36]

The roots and rationality of theological knowledge – involving a greater degree of interpretation and experience than do those of science with its mostly empirical foundations – involve more breadth and complexity than do those of science. Science cannot answer matters of personal commitment and experience because it lacks the qualifications to answer people’s deepest religious issues.[37] He spells this out:

Science can [say]…little or nothing about [the human]…experience of subjectivity, about the astonishing emergence of human consciousness and personhood, and about why [humans] have an intelligible universe….Christian believers give [the name ‘God’] to the best available explanation of all that is.[38]

The criteria for theology, as van Huyssteen perceives them, differ from those of science.

On the other hand, science does say something about subjectivity (for example, psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology), about the emergence of consciousness and personhood (for example, archaeology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary biology), and about the existence of an intelligible universe (for example, evolutionary psychology). The science of the future may say a lot more about these subjects as well. Further, the ‘best available explanation,’ as van Hussteen would call God, appears a biased judgment that already committed believers previously make.[39] It is not a hypothesis offered as a potential explanation. The difference van Huyssteen portrays between the criteria of theology and science do not hold up.

He also writes that theology should pursue a knowledge as secure as possible, a knowledge that produces maximal understanding of what Christian believers commit themselves to in faith. He says that, more than anything else, this goal determines the rationality of theology. Yet, should not this ‘secure knowledge’ fundamentally involve the observable? Van Huyssteen thinks not: intelligibility above all other values determines rationality in both science and theology. ‘What is real for theology and for science is not the observable but the intellgibile.’[40] This cannot be correct. Systems of meaning of exceedingly warped but brilliant minds can seem quite intelligible, but not fully rational; deprecating the observable in theology promotes the specter of irrationality. In science, despite van Huyssteen’s wishes, the observable plays the paramount role in intelligibility – and so it should in theology.

Van Huyssteen’s understanding of rational thinking in the sciences and theology involves three things: it is never purely objective; its context influences its theory building and interpretation; and, at any point in time, it allows only a partially evaluation of research programs and their explanations. These do not mean the theologian can throw out the objective or the observable and thus allow almost anything in religion and theology to stand. Neither do they justify van Huyssteen’s claim that theology cannot resemble the natural sciences and study its subjects objectively because it does not ontologically have the requisite status.[41] He appears to validate theology’s cognitive claims by inappropriately and dangerously underplaying the observable and overplaying the subjective and the communal in the parallel knowing structures of science and theology. Theology’s doctrines or theories still must claim factual meaningfulness and truth, and therefore must subject themselves to accepted general procedures for the same.

Van Huysteen’s Starting Point

Van Huyssteen wants close similarities between theology and science, plus he wants significant differences in their ‘epistemological [foci], experiential scope, and heuristic structures.’[42] The similarities in method, however, place requirements on theology that, as seen above, conflict with the significant differences he sees. He does not resolve this confusion. Why does he want to push the difference to the extreme he does? Why does he blow his philosophical smoke to try to hide the real challenge of modernity to theology?

His reasons appear when he writes:

Religion and religious faith (and theological reflection, in spite of important epistemological overlaps with scientific reflection)…in many ways [do not resemble]…science at all: for the adherents of many religious traditions, faith involves not just a way of looking at the world, but also a personal trust in God. An ultimate faith commitment to God [resembles]…, in this respect,…trust in a friend or a spouse [more] than…belief in a scientific theory….On this very personal level, theology and science indeed seem…very different kinds of activities, each with their own rules in their own domains….[This thus frees] the theologian…to speak and reflect from within a personal faith commitment, and in cross-disciplinary conversation with the scientist, to discover patterns [potentially]…consonant with the Christian worldview.[43]

Van Huyssteen thinks theology and its method derive, not so much from the search for truth (reality viewed theologically), but from ‘the realist assumptions and faith commitments of experienced Christian faith.’[44] He seeks to serve orthodox liberal beliefs and church structures, seeing theology from the tradition of emphasizing religious experience as the basic data. In this, he seems to assume a rather western, even protestant, individualized and doctrine-commitment view of religion. (Note the ‘personal faith commitment’ in the above indented quote. Note also the denial of the experience of a major portion of humanity’s religious traditions with his statement that ‘an undeniable religious dimension to human experience’ exists, the understanding of which requires ‘reference to God or a transcendent being.’[45]) In other words, van Huyssteen attempts to justify his branch of theology as it stands, with all the assumptions it makes, as a valid way of knowing truth.

He adheres to a dualism, which becomes especially apparent when he approvingly quotes from Ernan McMullin: ‘Science has no access to God in its explanations: theology has nothing to say about the specifics of the world.’ The two may overlap at the level of epistemology.[46] He presumably intends with this reference to McMullin for science and theology not to overlap on the knowledge itself. However, if relevance (factual meaningfulness with respect to claims for what actually occurs) makes an important requirement – and it does – van Huyssteen’s dualistic scheme does not suffice. The overlap in method must generate overlap in the content of the two systems of thought.

Does theology wish to move closer to truth or does it wish rationally more and more to refine church doctrines once given, always to support them and never to remove or replace them with more truthful insights? Is its main intent apologetics, trying to justify its doctrines with ideas from modern science? Van Huysteen’s feels like a last ditch attempt to save Christian theology in the face of science and secularity. He needs to emerge further from the security of his fideist cave.

As a matter of the relevance of theology for contemporary western society, it does not suffice just to voice theological liberalism. The success of fundamentalist and other conservative forms of religion suggests they have something that more adequately meets people’s needs than does the liberal option. That something probably has to do with certainty, which involves an empirical expectation (‘prove it’) and experiential support (‘it works; I feel it’).[47] Liberal theology cannot call upon this strength. Neither can it support, with van Huyssteen’s ploy, believers’ speaking in a postmodern context with passionate commitment and the certainty of faith.

Van Huyssteen ignores the strengths of the scientific method and hence pretends that current liberal theology can mirror science methodologically.

From Clayton and van Huysteen, both of whom appear liberals, the discussion turns to the conservative evangelicals, Murphy and McGrath.

Nancey Murphy

Murphy’s most important book on theological method is Theology in the Age of Scientific Reasoning.[48] Basing her analysis on Imre Lakatos’s theories in the philosophy of science, she portrays theologies as research traditions that history judges, parallel to particular research traditions in science.[49] Her work here, however, does not speak in depth about how one ought to do theology. Rather, she orients her study historically, showing that theologies employ methods that Lakatos would portray as scientific.

Another of her books, Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism: How Modern and Postmodern Philosophy Set the Theological Agenda, more directly discusses the actual method of theology.[50] Asked if theology is a science, she says yes, it is. Theology comprises ‘referential’ theories as opposed to purely ‘expressivist’ or ‘experiential’ ones, an opposition she uses to differentiate, respectively, ‘conservative’ from ‘liberal’ religious positions. The conservative refer to objectively existing things, and the liberal refer to experiences or express attitudes and values (hence the difference between her’s and van Huyssteen’s approaches). In particular, she says, theology (the referential, conservative type) follows the hypothetico-deductive form of reasoning where the theologian forms hypotheses to explain facts or observations. She continues by construing church doctrines as theories that explain the facts of Christians’ lives, facts whose status closely resembles those in science. The theologian rationally proposes and tries to justify reformulations of these doctrines. Various sorts of evidence or data can support such conclusions, including historical events (such as those in the Bible, including Jesus’ resurrection and sayings) and church practice (such as its worship and moral life) – both of which theory and society condition, as they also do with science’s facts. Such data do differ in type from those the sciences use, but then, she adds, each science chooses its own type of data.[51]

Why might biblical texts count as data, given the circularity involved? Murphy calls on the theological theory of revelation or inspiration to explain this: the Bible comes from God and, as such, theologians can depend on its truth. (She classifies this theory as one ‘of instrumentation,’ parallel, she says, to how theories in a science justify the use of its data.)[52] Christian discernment also sifts potential data from church practice and interpretation of history to make sure they really concern God:

the Christian community, in virtue of the presence of the Holy Spirit, has the ability to judge whether or not practices, teachings, and prophecies [come from]…the Spirit of Jesus. Christians possess an inner witness regarding what is or is not of God, as well as public criteria to test these judgments….[This explains] why the judgments church members make together in prayer should…tell…something about the will of God and not merely about the church.[53]

God, through such discernment, can substantiate data from the Bible, church practice, and history.

Murphy’s initial question asks how theology might make valid empirical claims. The parallels she draws between theology’s and science’s methods start by making sense (calling on the hypothetico-deductive form of reasoning) but, when spelled out, depend on the prior acceptance of theological theories and religious beliefs, and therefore make sense only for the insider. The idea of discernment, for instance, requires many ideas about God and how God acts in the world; these tell Murphy that she should trust church doctrines and biblical texts as data. She then takes them as providing the theologian with the knowledge of God from which she builds her idea of discernment.

Murphy would counter by saying the data of the sciences also depend on their theories. They do to some extent, but not so much as in Murphy’s account. Her type of move would probably justify most forms of discourse as truth, even such irrationalities as flat-earth theories, and such morally irresponsible ones as Nazism. As with Clayton’s account, theologians cannot so soften and contextualize Nielsen’s requirement for factual meaningfulness that they can claim as truth any factual assertion they or their church traditions like. Murphy’s fideist proposal does not justify her calling theology a science in the sense of modern empirical science.[54] It does not shield its putative factual talk of God from outside questions of truth and meaning.

Alister McGrath

The discussion above moved from Clayton to van Huyssteen to Murphy, and now reaches McGrath, the four in roughly increasing order of conservativism. As van Huyssteen represents orthodox Christian liberalism, so McGrath represents orthodox Christian evangelicalism.

McGrath’s The Science of God, and his trilogy, A Scientific Theology, spell out his theological method by following a logical course of argument.[55] More than Murphy, he clearly proclaims his beginning point: ‘The roots of scientific theology are thoroughly evangelical, resting on a deep and passionate conviction’ that the scriptures have to ‘nourish and govern’ theology at every point. Theology tries to provide a coherent and faithful account of what it reads in the Bible. His version of scientific theology, he claims, neither fundamentally disagrees nor finds difficulty with the core doctrines of Christianity, for example as the Nicene Creed sets them out. In fact, he says, his scientific theology confirms traditional Christian orthodoxy.[56]

McGrath calls the Christian foundation he assumes a ‘tradition-mediated rationality,’ and considers it an appropriate universal assumption, a rationality that applies across disciplines. It therefore can justifiably ground every aspect of his approach to theology and all other knowledge. As Jonathan Wilson writes, ‘McGrath seeks an account of theological method that privileges the “great tradition” of Christianity and brings it to bear on the sciences and the place of the sciences in contemporary culture.’[57] McGrath thinks this because his Christian story offers, he says, a logic that fundamentally grounds and organizes it, accounting not only for its own existence, but also for those of its competitors.[58]

In addition to this fundamental in his approach to scientific theology, only a few other important aspects need mentioning here:

· The ontology of something (the way it is) determines its epistemology (the way humans know it). The nature of the reality of a particular thing requires that people can know it only in certain ways and to a certain extent. Humans do not have the option to decide whether and how they may know things; the things decide that themselves. This echoes Thomas Torrance’s point in which theology and other sciences each have ‘their own distinctive subject-matters and means of investigation appropriate to that subject.’[59]

This idea shows up as an assumption in the version of critical realism that McGrath promotes, namely the one of Roy Bhaskar.[60] Ian Barbour’s often quoted version does not specifically include this idea, nor does it necessarily follow from Barbour’s.[61]

· The second aspect of Bhaskar’s critical realism that McGrath applauds (and that differs from the critical realism espoused in the development of key-theology) promotes the idea of different levels, what McGrath calls ‘the stratification of reality.’[62] Clayton also uses this idea.

The two bulleted points above, along with the fundamental assumption of traditional Christian orthodoxy, allow McGrath to extrapolate the ontology of traditional Christian orthodoxy to mean:

· (the Christian) God exists independent of human knowing;

· God has a particular overarching level ontologically (the spiritual); and

· epistemologically, the spiritual requires a specific way of knowing (namely, Christian theology).

Assessment of McGrath’s Proposal

McGrath’s proposed method shows several weaknesses.

The levels idea – while claiming that the method of theology parallels science’s in particular ways (for example, in their use of analogies) – promotes a dualism which holds as disparate the findings of science and those of theology. It can thus justify theology going about its way of knowing the way it does, accountable only to its Christian community.[63] The same point arose with van Huyssteen’s account of theological method.

A second weakness in McGrath’s proposal relates to the assumption that ontology determines epistemology. Besides its anthropomorphism (attributing agency to the thing humans attempt to know), how does McGrath know first the ontology and then the appropriate epistemology? Knowing the ontology requires either an assumption or an epistemology. This applies to all fields of knowledge. To recognize this weakness in McGrath’s approach need not mean falling into what Bhaskar calls the ‘epistemic fallacy’ in which the existence of something depends on humans actually or potentially observing it.[64] Neither need it mean rejecting, as a rejoinder might claim, the existence of things humans have not observed or cannot observe, nor the necessity of making assumptions before knowing. The issue at stake is really what assumptions the scholar needs to make, and why.

McGrath’s idea of method deriving from context (epistemology from ontology) is also inappropriate if he lays claim to truth in the same way as he thinks science rightly may. He cannot have it both ways. Theology cannot see itself validly or honestly on a continuum with science methodologically, or with respect to its results, if it will not subject itself as science does to factual meaningfulness.

The major weakness in McGrath’s proposal, however, lies in his initial assumption from Christian evangelicalism.

Like Torrance’s and others’, McGrath’s assumption of a starting point determines his method and much of his outcome. It assumes something as the truth and therefore finds it again at the end as its truth. This does not produce a let alone the ‘science of God,’ in the usual understanding of science as an open investigation, but rather ‘a Christian evangelical science of a Christian evangelical view of God.’

To start with a particular understanding of God and God’s relationship with humanity assumes there exists only one way to know or understand God, one way to truth, and method must begin there. Many understandings of God and approaches to understanding God, however, lie in the same religious tradition, or even in the evangelical Christian approach within which McGrath’s neo-orthodoxy lies. Some assume the factual inerrancy of the Bible, for instance, while others accept a metaphorical not a scientific meaning of the biblical accounts of creation. The same starting point can therefore lead to conflicting putative truths.

The theologian should not accept McGrath’s base as universal. This conclusion fits well with his statement that no universally accepted criteria exist to adjudicate cleanly between fundamental assumptions. He sees the statement as implying the need to accept beliefs (namely, he says, orthodox Christian doctrines) as the base but, of course, this need not follow.[65] How can one judge between fundamental assumptions? Coherence and other logical criteria do find their place in any proposed set of criteria for making this adjudication, even conformity with what they consider their data does as well, but the relative order of importance of the criteria in each system of thought defies universalizing. Hence, criteria cannot act as the final arbiters. Perhaps the happy and just lives of an assumption’s adherents may help decide its merit, but this too lies open to relative judgments. These and similar ways do help adjudicate between fundamental assumptions, but not firmly or cleanly.

This leads to the question: To what is Christian theology responsible? What adjudicates its merit? Here a split will arise. If responsible to the Christian tradition currently represented by evangelicalism, the answer is God or the Christian Bible and orthodoxy as that tradition interprets them. If responsible to (western) society, then different issues arise involving personal and societal factors, which may end up as relative. If responsible to society, religious tradition, and to reality independent of human knowing, then another set of questions arise, related to the first two. It seeks to move beyond the confines of the others into something responsible also to the objective beyond the human.

McGrath and Openness

McGrath feels strongly about the evils of logical positivism, but he preaches his own form of triumphal Christian positivism. His approach represents a dangerous trend in religions. The beginning of his book, The Science of God, comments on his prior publications: ‘The publication of the three volumes of A Scientific Theology (2001-3) has generated a high degree of interest in its themes and distinctive approach. It is already being described as “one of the best systematic theologies in recent years.”’[66] Fred Sanders and Kirk Wegter-McNelly comment on this type of statement in another of McGrath’s books: this ‘self-congratualtory tone…make[s] him appear desperate for credibility’; since he need not go to these lengths to establish his authority, why does he behave this way?[67] His self-aggrandizement – both personal (the beginning of The Science of God just quoted) and intellectually (for example, calling his book The Science of God) – especially when claiming the authority of God, can allow fanatics to take his words and promote universalism and imperialism. This may produce surety but, in certain hands, it also creates destructive confidence.

Too huge and too many differences separate the religious traditions, all claiming truth, for one to hold it and the others not to. Modern western life must accept such pluralisms and try to live successfully in them; it needs to maintain them and to grow within them. This cannot involve dictatorship. McGrath and the rest of contemporary society must similarly live within secularism, learning from it and the pluralisms, and appreciating their plenitude.

On the other hand, western society needs general moral universals whose applications require working out in each situation. Society must have these with a strength behind them. That strength entails certainty – factual and experiential (the needs that fundamentalism highlights) – but a certainty that coheres with modernity. The solution to the current religious challenge must play thoroughly and completely in tune with modern knowledge and life.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century and its conservatism, McGrath represents a considerable challenge. Nevertheless, potency lies not in the brute force of the dinosaurs, but in the markedly human trait of adaptability. It comes from caring and humility, not from violence; it rests on the time-honored search for truth (not on claims to have it) and the need for happiness and justice for all people. Theologians need another approach that will more adequately meet these aims than can sword-swinging, God-claiming backward lookingness.

Conclusions

Major current voices in theological method (Clayton, van Huyssteen, Murphy, and McGrath) draw to some extent on versions of contemporary philosophy of science, which they weight and from which they make significant leaps. They end with the theology with which they started. Their work thus forms apologetics. They do not take science seriously enough or answer social or secular critiques adequately, only sincerely taking into account how they already conceive their religious traditions.

Their work – both evangelical and liberal – parallels in important respects fundamentalism and its sibling ideology, creationism. They all believe in certain immutable truths whose expression and amplification in different cultural and historical circumstances can vary only a little. Science ought merely to substantiate or elaborate the beliefs and, when it opposes the beliefs, needs opposing, ignoring, or so qualifying to emasculate it. Edward Wilson speaks both correctly and incorrectly when he writes:

The inexorable growth of [biology]…continues to widen, not to close, the tectonic gap between science and faith-based religion. Rapprochement may be neither possible nor desirable. There is something deep in religious belief that divides people and amplifies societal conflict. The toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternative view, that humanism based on science is the effective antidote, the light and the way at last placed before us.[68]

Wilson is right in saying the gap continues to widen and rapprochement may not be possible between science and faith-based religion. The emphasis here lies on faith-based religion because the humanism he offers as an alternative itself represents a form of religion. He is wrong because another alternative may emerge, one that allows humanity to grow in its theological knowledge.

The alternative will recognize with van Huyssteen the limits of scientific knowing, but it will not degenerate into justifying the current status and content of theology. It will find religious experience too fickle as data (since this probably comprises ‘secular’ experience interpreted as religious) and instead will take all experience as potential data for theology. Its criteria, moreover, will aim at truth over and above service or subservience to the or a church and its doctrine. Objective data already exist for it that make it more than just rational in the sense of coherent. They may also help provide it with a certainty.[69]

To lay open genuinely to what humans can learn about God requires opening all beliefs to empirical examination, and learning from what science and other experience offer.

Truth Constricted: The Theological Methods of Philip Clayton, Wentzel van Huyssteen, Nancey Murphy, and Alister McGrath

Truth Constricted:
The Theological Methods of Philip Clayton, Wentzel van Huyssteen, Nancey Murphy, and Alister McGrath