Wouldn’t You Love to Know?: Trinitarian Epistemology and Pedagogy

By Ian W. Payne

With all the jumble of human disagreements, how can we know? Can the Christian church think coherently about knowledge? Can it regain confidence in teaching what it knows? In an increasingly divided and pessimistic postmodern world this book offers a theology for epistemology and for pedagogy that aims to be faithful and fruitful.

Building on Karl Barth, it argues that God's knowing guides how humans know. We should imitate God's epistemic stance--his love--for that is the best model for knowing anything. The Trinitarian theme in Barth identifies three key concepts: committedness, openness, and relationality. These mean being committed and open towards what we wish to know. Relational open committedness also profoundly clarifies and shapes what love means in knowing and in teaching. This book unpacks an epistemology and pedagogy of love. Wouldn't you love to know?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Aug 8, 2014
• ISBN: 9781630874827

Ian W. Payne

Ian Payne is the Principal and Head of Theology at South Asia Institute of Advanced Christian Studies (SAIACS) at Bangalore, India.

Book preview

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Wouldn’t You Love to Know?

Trinitarian Epistemology and Pedagogy

Ian W. Payne

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Wouldn’t You Love to Know?

Trinitarian Epistemology and Pedagogy

Copyright © 2014 Ian W. Payne. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Figures 4.13, 4.16, 5.6a and 5.6b are adapted from Ian W. Payne, Reproducing Leaders through Mentoring, Journal of Christian Education 52, no. 2 (2009) 51–65; also published as a chapter in Tending the Seedbeds, Educational Perspectives on Theological Education in Asia, edited by Alan Harkness, 167–91. Asia Theological Association, 2010. Used by permission.

Pickwick Publications

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

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ISBN 13: 978-1-62564-077-2

EISBN 13: 978-1-63087-482-7

Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Payne, Ian W.

Wouldn’t you love to know? : trinitarian epistemology and pedagogy / Ian W. Payne

xii + 254 pp. ; 23 cm. Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 13: 978-1-62564-077-2

1. Trinity 2. Epistemology 3. Pedagogy I. Title

BT115. P39 2014

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

This work is dedicated to

my dear wife

Judith

true friend and lover.

Illustrations

Figure 1.1 Augustine’s synthesis

Figure 1.2 Thomas Aquinas’s synthesis

Figure 1.3 The Neo-Scholastic two-storeyed synthesis

Figure 1.4 Locke’s epistemology

Figure 1.5 Van Til’s epistemology

Figure 2.1 The Doctrine of God in his Revelation

Figure 2.2 The Doctrine of God at Work; see CD 3, 4, (5)

Figure 2.3 The Doctrine of God’s Perfections

Figure 2.4 Propositional model of God’s Revelation

Figure 2.5 Non-Propositional model of God’s Revelation

Figure 2.6 The Doctrine of Humanity

Figure 3.1 The Character of God’s Revelation showing Barth’s teleologically ordered dialectical motif of unveiling, veiling and mystery

Figure 3.2 Human Experience of God’s Revelation: The Character of Acknowledgement

Figure 3.3 The Fulfilment of the Knowledge of God with the first level of the dialectical motif in §25

Figure 3.4 The Fulfilment of the Knowledge of God with the second level of the dialectical motif in §25

Figure 3.5 The Character of the Covenant, showing Barth’s covenantal motif of promise, command and their unity

Figure 3.6 The Threefold Form of God’s Reconciliation, showing Barth’s Chalcedonian pattern

Figure 3.7 The Character of Our Conversion, showing Barth’s dialectical motif of faith, love and hope

Figure 3.8 The Limits of the Knowledge of God

Figure 3.9 Barth’s Hermeneutics157

Figure 4.1 Doctrine of God in His Revelation163

Figure 4.2 Doctrine of the Word of God

Figure 4.3 Doctrine of God at Work

Figure 4.4 Doctrine of Humanity

Figure 4.5 Doctrine of the Creature

Figure 4.6 Doctrine of God’s Revelation

Figure 4.7 Doctrine of Experience of Revelation

Figure 4.8 Doctrine of God’s Covenant

Figure 4.9 Doctrine of God’s Reconciliation in Christ

Figure 4.10 Doctrine of Human Experience of Reconciliation

Figure 4.11 Doctrine of Real Knowledge of God

Figure 4.12 God’s Epistemic Stance

Figure 4.13 Our Optimal Epistemic Stance towards God

Figure 4.14 A Trinitarian Ontology of Human Knowledge

Figure 4.15 A Trinitarian Epistemology

Figure 4.16 Our Optimal Epistemic Stance towards Any Object

Figure 5.1 A Trinitarian Ontology of Education

Figure 5.2 God’s Pedagogical Stance towards the Learner

Figure 5.3 A Trinitarian Pedagogy

Figure 5.4 Our Optimal Pedagogical Stance towards the Learner

Figure 5.5 Three Modes of Education in the Old Testament

Figure 5.6a Three educational approaches and their distinctive emphases on students’ committedness or openness

Figure 5.7 Optimal Relationship Between Christian Beliefs and any Discipline in Curriculum Planning

Figure 5.8 God as the Pedagogical Center

Figure 5.9 Optimal Pedagogical Stance towards the Learner in Teaching about God

Figure 5.10 The Subject as the Pedagogical Center

Figure 5.11 Optimal Pedagogical Stance towards the Learner in Teaching Any Subject

Figure 5.12 Optimal Rhythm of a Learning Event

Figure 5.13 Scaffolding as an Illustration of Love in Teaching

Acknowledgments

I wish to gratefully acknowledge the encouragement of friends and colleagues at the South Asia Institute of Advanced Christian Studies (SAIACS) (Bangalore), the Stapleford Centre (Nottingham), Laidlaw College (Auckland), the J. W. Laing Trust, the John Baldwin Memorial Scholarship Fund, Dr John Webster, Dr Alan Torrance, my examiners, and my PhD mentor, Dr Francesca Aran Murphy, of the University of Aberdeen.

Abbreviations

TNDT: Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. Ed. Gerhard Kittel. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965.

NIDNTT: The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology. Ed. Colin Brown. Carlisle: Paternoster, 1986.

KB’s CRDT: Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936. Bruce Lindley McCormack. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.

Chapter 1

Epistemology in Context

"

Wouldn’t you love to

know! On a school playground the words might be a rebuff—a message that you won’t be told the secret. But as a straight question it evokes a deeper universal human longing. Wouldn’t you love to know?" Yes, we would. We want to know some things. We want a handle on our world, we want a grasp of the way things are or ought to be. Pessimism about knowing leads to confusion, fear, depression, anarchy and nihilism. Knowing opens the door to confidence, wisdom, truth, beauty, and meaning. The question is How?

Wouldn’t you love to know? As we shall see, the word that turns out to be crucial is the word love.

The question of knowledge has always fascinated humans. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil was fascinating for Adam and Eve and the author(s) of Genesis. Civilizations have long debated the concepts of belief, doubt, confidence, evidence, certainty, and faith. One mark of the strength of a civilization is its self-confidence. Though it has seen itself as the torchbearer of advancement for the last 250 years, modern Western civilization appears to be faltering. Chinese philosopher, Carver Yu, observed that modernity is characterized by technological optimism and literary despair.¹ The grand promises of technology are wearing thin. Knowing how to doesn’t seem important if one doesn’t know what for. A significant dimension of this crisis is epistemological. Can there be a consensus on truth today?

Some Dilemmas in Epistemology

To understand today’s crisis we need to briefly describe views of knowledge from a historical perspective. The dilemmas will emerge as we do so. We will consider Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, Cornelius Van Til, and then in more depth, Bruce Marshall.

One of the first historians of philosophy, Diogenes Laertius, classified philosophers into two types: dogmatists and skeptics. The dogmatists were ‘those who make assertions about things assuming that they can be known.’ The skeptics included ‘all who suspend their judgment on the ground that things are unknowable.’² This tension between optimistic and pessimistic epistemologies has characterized philosophical debate ever since. At its heart, this tension represents differing judgments made about how well belief and reason go together in the enterprise of knowing. Skeptics settled for uncertainty; others entered on a quest for greater adequacy; some even aimed at certainty. We will characterize this quest in terms of the polarity between foundationalism and nonfoundationalism.

Foundationalism holds that mediately justified beliefs require epistemic support for their validity in immediately justified beliefs.³ In other words, for any discipline, knowledge must rest on foundational first principles which are understood to be self-evident. So, our reason tells us, we can build on these sure foundations. Foundationalism is similar to evidentialism. An evidentialist maintains that a belief is rational for a person only if that person has sufficient evidence or arguments or reasons for that belief.⁴ Far more than just a failure to benefit ordered thinking, an evidentialist sees failure to proportion belief to evidence as jeopardizing human rationality itself. John Locke is a foundationalist.

Nonfoundationalism is defined in opposition to foundationalism. It includes all sorts of philosophical views that judge foundationalism to be untenable. Nonfoundationalism rejects the exclusive ruling role of reason in justifying knowledge. As for self-evident foundations, it maintains the impossibility of a human knower holding no presuppositions,⁵ or even just neutral ones. It contends everyone holds presuppositions that cannot be proved by reason and their influence on (subsequent) reasoning is pervasive. Nonfoundationalism includes such views as anti-foundationalism,⁶ coherentism,⁷ fideism,⁸ and critical fiduciarism.⁹ Van Til is a fideist; Marshall is a weak coherentist.

Complicating this picture is another simultaneous but subsidiary tension regarding the source of knowledge. Does our knowledge come from ideas or experience? This tension between idealists and empiricists is most observable in foundationalism and was a major focus of philosophy in the modern era.¹⁰ Nevertheless non-foundational epistemologies have many similarities.

Our five historical figures are representative of important alternatives in Christian epistemology. The survey, which discloses a complementarity rather than linear development, must begin with the mediaeval scene.

Augustine of Hippo: A Pre-Modern Personalist Synthesis

The two greatest ancient Greek philosophers were Plato and Aristotle. Plato, 469–399 BC, was greatly influenced by his teacher, Socrates, whose adherence to his convictions about the truth led directly to his death at the hands of the city rulers. So Plato learned that truth was worth dying for and that justice could not be expected from demagogues in power. Plato’s philosophy is idealist. He taught the best government would come when philosophers were kings and kings were philosophers. Following on Socrates’ method of questioning, he believed false knowledge should be exposed and true knowledge sought for. Plato believed people did not directly perceive what things truly are. The world was more than appearances. Behind each individual thing was an idea or form, which was ultimately real. A particular chair, for instance, only participated in the form of a chair, which was ultimately real. His parable of the people in the cave, who see not the sun’s light, only shadows, expresses this view. Since each form was related to the highest form, the Form of the Good, human knowledge of the forms, he believed, was guaranteed to be authentic and intelligible.

Aristotle (384–322 BC) was a pupil in Plato’s Academy, but developed his thinking in reaction to Plato. Perhaps it began from a personal preference for biology as against the Academy’s emphasis on mathematics or perhaps it was a more positive view of the material world. Aristotle rejected Plato’s doctrine of forms and emphasized empirical observations and rational reflection on them. Aristotle wrote Platonic dialogues, but these are lost. What have survived are lecture notes preserved by students of his Peripatetic School. His systematic studies of logic, ethics, natural sciences, and philosophy have been influential. He has been seen as the founder of natural science and metaphysics. Like Plato, Aristotle saw humans as part of the cosmos, a harmonious all-inclusive whole consisting of the transcendent realm, human life, and physical world. Unlike Plato, he approached knowledge from the world not from the mind. Aristotle’s influence was initially small, became significant among Arabs after the seventh century arrival of Islam to North Africa and grew strong in the West after the twelfth century following the rediscovery of his major works; Platonism on the other hand came to permeate the classical Hellenistic world.

Platonism affected Augustine of Hippo, (354–430). His works influenced the philosophy and theology of the West for a millennium. Turning away from Manichean dualism, Augustine was first attracted by Neoplatonic teachings but then by the preaching of St. Ambrose. His Confessions tells of the inward struggle of his conversion when aged thirty-three. Hearing the gospel, his worldly ambitions and his difficulties over chastity initially prevented him from accepting the faith. Finally he was convinced that only in God would he be truly happy; our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.¹¹ Only by God’s grace could he obtain the power to resist temptation. In a strikingly personal way, Augustine tells how he has been drawn to love God and so receive the power he needs: O Charity, my God, set me on fire with your love! You command me to be continent. Give me the grace to do as you command, and command me to do what you will.¹² It is this sense of the experience of God’s grace meeting humankind’s dire need that pervades Augustine’s thought.

Book X of the Confessions illustrates how it permeates his epistemology. Characteristically, he prays, Physician of my soul, make me see clearly.¹³ He acknowledges God knows all that is within us; our present knowledge of ourselves is confused. Augustine longingly awaits the noonday clarity of being in God’s presence. Beginning with introspection, Augustine seeks to rise by stages towards the God who made me,¹⁴ examining in turn the usefulness of sense perception, memory, and desire. While our reason can sift the evidence relayed to [us] by the senses, our moral frailty dogs our steps: Man . . . is able to catch sight of God’s invisible nature through his creatures, but his love of these material things is too great.¹⁵ True happiness, he says, is to rejoice in the truth, for to rejoice in the truth is to rejoice in you, O God, who are the truth. But our selfishness means men . . . love the truth when it bathes them in its light: they hate it when it reveals that they are wrong.¹⁶ Evans notes that, despite his indebtedness to Platonism, Augustine argued that perceptions of the senses, though bodily, are a God-given aid to the soul’s understanding, and a means by which it may ascend towards the knowledge of God himself.¹⁷ More important, however, in Augustine’s eyes, is the role of Christ, the true Mediator,¹⁸ who has effected the needed reconciliation between God and man. For Augustine, soteriology radically affects epistemology; we need God’s medicine in Christ to be able to see God (and, by implication, all things) clearly. You know how weak I am and how inadequate is my knowledge: teach me and heal my frailty.¹⁹ Taking the place of the Platonic forms, for Augustine, Christ is the interior Teacher and Physician.

The importance of grace for knowing the truth, the recognition of human frailty, and the correlation of salvation and knowledge are also important themes in Augustine’s second major work, The City of God. Its twenty volumes were written in response to the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410AD—how could Christianity be true if its greatest city had fallen? When he speaks of the pursuit of the aim the City of God, a society of justice and peace contrasted with the City of man, the necessary guidance and help are never far from Augustine’s mind. If we are to know the truth, we need divine law and grace. [I]f the infirmity of his human mind is not to bring him [humankind] in his pursuit of knowledge to some deadly error, he needs divine authority to give secure guidance, and divine help so that he may be unhampered in following the guidance given.²⁰

In City of God, salvation and epistemology are linked in an eschatological history. Sense perception may provide slender grasp of truth, for, he says, we know in part,²¹ but we await the day the saved will drink from the source, God’s wisdom.²² There is also a moral link: What we see . . . is that two societies have issued from two kinds of love. Worldly society has flowered from a selfish love which dared to despise even God, whereas the communion of saints is rooted in a love of God that is ready to trample on self.²³ Both salvation and knowledge find their source and goal in loving God. Indeed, Augustine could commend Plato for being a true philosopher: one who knows, loves and imitates the God in whom he finds his happiness.²⁴

Augustine’s epistemology is a personalist synthesis which involves holding together both belief and reason, in the context of prayerful personal relationship with God.²⁵ Our neediness and dependence on God’s grace means belief must be primary. He could write in his commentary on the Gospel of John, Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore seek not to understand in order that you may believe, but believe in order that you may understand.²⁶ This does not mean belief is sufficient for the dull, and only the intelligent can advance to understanding.²⁷ Rather, by keeping us in touch with God’s grace, our believing clarifies our reasoning. Anselm (1033–1109) was echoing Augustine in his formula: credo ut intelligam—I believe that I may understand.²⁸

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An example of Augustine’s approach is how he viewed philosophy. Not clearly distinguishing between them, he saw theology as philosophy at its highest, a synthesis in which Christian principles ruled. Theology is the true philosophy. Refer to figure 1.1.

He regarded the best of philosophers as friends to the Christian cause, because by the light of reason they had understood, at least in principle, some of Christianity’s fundamental truths. He says that Christians may therefore ‘spoil the Egyptians’ with a clear conscience.²⁹ He does not see himself as a philosopher indifferent to Christianity, nor as a Christian indifferent to philosophy, but as a Christian who judges and, if necessary, reshapes its elements in the light of faith.³⁰ For Augustine, truth is normed by the Christian revelation and shaped by the Christian vision of history that The City of God expounds.

Most who came after Augustine were more wary of philosophy than he was. This is because there is another stream of Christian thought, stemming from Tertullian (160/70–215/20), in which theology and philosophy are opposed.³¹ During the early Middle Ages, Christian thinkers had no live non-Christian philosophers to interact with. Nevertheless there was debate (for instance, by Gilbert Crispin and Peter Abelard) on whether or not theological truths could be justified by philosophical methods, that is, by human reason alone. Evans sums up the situation: If—as conservative opinion always stoutly held—theological truths could not ultimately be so established, there remained the question as to how far philosophical arguments might still be useful as corroborative or supportive means of presenting truths of faith.³² With the rediscovery of the impressive reason in Aristotle’s works (from 1130), the question became urgent and so we turn to Thomas Aquinas.

Thomas Aquinas: A Pre-Modern Compatibilist Synthesis

Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), the greatest theologian of the Middle Ages, was a Dominican and lecturer at the University of Paris. He was embroiled in controversy with Franciscan theologians, who condemned him as too Aristotelian, and the so-called Latin Averroists in the secular faculty, who thought him not Aristotelian enough.

Many major philosophical works of classical Greek thinkers, especially Aristotle, had surfaced in the twelfth century through interaction with Islamic scholars. This rediscovery precipitated for Christian thinkers a conflict which no preceding century had fully known or experienced, the conflict between Hellenism and Christianity. A sophisticated Greek reason, . . . which could not but be attractive because of its brilliance, . . . dangerous because of its errors.³³

The Christian world had to learn the philosophers, but more—they had to learn to be philosophers themselves. What was needed was a universal Christian synthesis that recognized the natural wisdom of the ancients, but controversy raged over how it should be done. Aquinas was the most influential thinker to respond.

In Aristotelian thought, knowledge as a discipline (scientia) proceeds from first principles. We naturally think of first principles as purely mental propositions, but to Aristotle they are in the mind and in the world. Scientia also has to reckon with things having purpose (though not intended by a person). "Both things and thoughts, for Aristotle, are on the way from something to something, and the whole journey hangs together . . . The beginning is a first principle (archê), the end is a final principle (telos), and the way in between is an inner principle, or form (morphê)."³⁴

A fundamental step in Aquinas’ project of incorporating Aristotle is to treat theology as a scientia—with God as its object. Thomas makes at least three corrections of the Aristotelian scheme. Theology’s first principles are located beyond the world. Instead of teleology without intention, theology insists the world is imbued with God’s purpose. Thirdly, in place of the Aristotelian unity of knower with the known, Thomas limits natural knowledge of God. He stops with us knowing whether God is. With these corrections of Aristotle, Aquinas could project a Christian view of all reality as come from God, meant for God and on its way to God. "The Summa represents an essay to co-opt Aristotelian scientia for the interests and purposes of sacred doctrine."³⁵

Aquinas’ two great works of theology, Summa Contra Gentiles and Summa Theologica, have similar outlines. They begin by describing truths that can be known of God by human reason. Then they tackle truths that are beyond reason’s capacity to know; including the Trinity, the incarnation and eschatology. One goal of the arrangement is to demonstrate that Christian philosophy can match Aristotle (by incorporating his best and correcting his errors) and outstrip him.

Like Augustine, Aquinas believed that sacred science is established on principles revealed by God and that theology makes use of [the philosophical sciences] as of the lesser, and as handmaidens.³⁶ Sufficient motive for faith comes from the authority of Divine teaching, . . . and . . . the inward instinct of the Divine invitation.³⁷ Here is an echo of Augustine’s emphasis on the need for God’s grace. Another similarity is the vision of growth in knowledge being an advance towards God. Like Augustine, Aquinas saw an analogy between the Trinity and the human mind. Now since the rational creature also exhibits a word procession as regards the intelligence and a love procession as regards the will, it can be said to contain an image of the uncreated Trinity by a sort of portraiture in kind.³⁸ This is an intriguing claim that the mind works trinitarianly—an idea to which we shall return.

Unlike Augustine, however, Aquinas more strongly distinguished philosophy from—or, more accurately, within—theology. He commended reason as an independent exercise within the purview of revelation. Because he stressed the distinctness of the processes of belief and reason, his synthesis might be called a synaesthesis.³⁹ Refer to figure 1.2.

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How can reason be an independent act within theology? How can independence and subservience cohere? Aquinas’ answer would be along two lines. Firstly, theology can judge philosophy. Whatsoever is found in other sciences contrary to any truth of this science, must be condemned as false.⁴⁰ The principles of revelation, then, have the epistemic priority.

Secondly, their compatible independence depends on a crucial distinction, inherited from Aristotle, between belief and knowledge. Things that are of faith are not the object of perception, whereas what is an object of science is the object of perception. Therefore there can be no faith about things which are an object of science . . . Consequently faith and science are not about the same things.⁴¹ Aquinas distinguishes three states of the intellect: doubt, opinion and certitude.⁴² Certitude is where the intellect is so determined that it adheres to one member without reservation. Now, the intellect, he says, can be moved either by the will, in which case belief is the result, or by an intelligible object, in which case knowledge is the result. In the latter case, some intelligible objects work immediately, that is, we grasp them as principles, and some work mediately, which means there is a process of discursive reasoning as in science. What we have then are two distinct species of knowledge: seeing/knowing and believing.⁴³

This dichotomy helps understand Aquinas’ distinction between preambles of faith and articles of faith.⁴⁴ The preambles have been understood as truths one must acquire before the act of believing and so, some have assumed, Aquinas is adopting a two-step process in presenting the case for Christianity.⁴⁵ However, he explicitly denies this.⁴⁶ Aquinas is distinguishing those truths that only some people can come to understand from those all people ought to believe. The preambles then are necessary to the content of faith (and happen to be provable by philosophy) but not necessary to the act of believing.

We can now look at Aquinas’ natural theology, especially his five ways⁴⁷ of proving the existence of God. What can the natural man know of God? Firstly, he says we have an indistinct implanted knowledge: To know that God exists in a general and confused way is implanted in us by nature.⁴⁸

Secondly, Aquinas argues, the existence of God, in so far as it is not self-evident to us, can be demonstrated from . . . His effects.⁴⁹ The five arguments typically conclude with a phrase such as, and this being we call God. For all the brevity of the arguments,⁵⁰ Aquinas clearly believes that their conclusions really refer (however vaguely) to the Triune God.⁵¹

But thirdly, Aquinas is conscious the five ways are limited. Their achievement is modest,⁵² he would say, because beyond knowing whether something exists, there remains the question of the manner of its existence. Importantly Aquinas states in the preface to the question immediately following the discussion on the five ways, Now, because we cannot know what God is, but rather what He is not, we have no means for considering how God is, but rather how He is not.⁵³ In what follows in questions 3 through 11, Aquinas takes his disclaimer seriously. God transcends his creatures and their language. Nevertheless, Aquinas believed natural reason could successfully address God’s simplicity, perfection, infinity, immutability and unity.

The purpose of the Five Ways is controversial. The problem in Aquinas’ time was not really to persuade people to believe in God, but to help them to relate their belief in God to the nature and conditions of the world.⁵⁴ Rogers is right to argue that they are caused to assert the unGod-forsakenness of nature under conditions short of the will’s assent to God.⁵⁵ While these overarching considerations are valuable, nevertheless, I believe Aquinas saw the Five Ways as helping those who accept his premises see that God exists.

Aquinas’ natural theology has been criticized. It has been seen as over-optimistic regarding natural reasoning. Specifically, critics have pointed out that the God the five ways arrives at is not fully recognizable as the Christian God.⁵⁶ They do not necessarily prove one God. Nor do they disprove the possibility of infinite regress (of finite causes, for instance). They also do not prove that the likeness of cause to effect applies successfully across the Creator/creature divide. Even more than to Aquinas, these objections cogently apply to later neo-scholastic thinkers.

How does Aquinas’ thought relate to that of the Enlightenment? To apply anachronistic terms loosely, to the extent that he makes truths of theology, which are not self-evident but revealed, normative, he is non-foundationalist. But, in regard to sciences (including natural theology), to the extent that they display the results of reason as an independent process involving discursive thought dependent on self-evident first principles, Aquinas is foundationalist.

So, with Aquinas a new foundationalist element begins to enter Christian theology. Every discipline, he thought, could be systematized and, in each, some propositions would be fundamental. We find in him the foundationalist vision of grounding one’s knowledge in certitude, but, as Wolterstorff has noted, in Aquinas such grounding was a condition of authentic science, [not] of rationality.⁵⁷ Aquinas’ project was not motivated by a desire to provide an evidentialist apologetic to justify belief in God, but to encourage believers to advance in (and towards) seeing God.

Aquinas’ sharp distinction between belief and knowledge prepared the way for modern foundationalism. The distinction is too tidy.⁵⁸ It obscures the possibility that all knowledge remains belief in a measure. It permitted the sidelining of faith during the Enlightenment and the development of the belief that scientific knowledge was certain while faith was not;⁵⁹ that autonomous reason could be relied upon while dependence on authorities was unnecessary.

The development has been gradual. Some later Thomists and much of the Protestant tradition⁶⁰ mistakenly understood Aquinas as construing the sphere of all that we can know as two-storeyed—the upper realm apprehensible only to faith and the lower by reason (and in principle reason alone). Refer figure 1.3. The 14th century theologian, Jean Gerson, for instance, could say: theology proceeds in the most orderly and economical way . . . if she builds her inferences upon the foundation of philosophy.⁶¹ We will see that in modernist foundationalism the allure of demonstrable certainty based on human reason alone has led to evaporation of the upper storey.

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Similarly, Aquinas’ dictum that grace presupposes nature⁶² has been understood to mean grace is added to nature and therefore grace is ultimately superfluous. The parallel, explicit in Aquinas, runs: faith presupposes natural knowledge. This has been taken to mean reason could dispense with faith. Aquinas does not see nature as self-sufficient; rather it needs grace too. Nature is teleologically ordered towards its consummation in grace.⁶³ Nevertheless, driving Aquinas’ wedge further, later thinkers eagerly mistrusted faith and increasingly emphasized reason.

Beyond the link with foundationalism, there is a second connection to later thought: the negative reaction of the Enlightenment and the Reformation to religious authority. Aquinas himself recognized the differing status of the canonical Scriptures (which give incontrovertible proof) and the authority of the doctors of the Church (which may properly be used, yet merely as probable.)⁶⁴ But he believed in the infallible authority of the teaching office of the church. The universal Church cannot err, he said. Its creedal summaries contain nothing defective.⁶⁵ In particular he does not seem to distinguish between Scriptural authority and the church’s ability to grasp it rightly.⁶⁶ Aquinas readily says the investigation of human reason for the most part has falsity present within it, but as Wolterstorff points out, that we can think that God has revealed something that he has not and that he has not revealed something that he has . . . Aquinas is strikingly reluctant to admit.⁶⁷ This amounts to a lack of recognition that the teaching authority of the church is fallible. The church’s lengthy dominance over society was increasingly being seen as overbearing. Within 30 years of Aquinas’ death Boniface VIII had promulgated the Unam Sanctum, which affirmed that there was no salvation outside the church thus requiring submission to the pope as part of salvation. The Reformation and Enlightenment were a rebellion against that unquestionable authority and this had its epistemological aspect: pre-modern epistemology was rejected because it failed to sufficiently question fallible authorities.

So growing confidence in autonomous reason and growing distrust of authority were factors in preparing for the transition to modernity’s foundationalism.⁶⁸

We have observed in Aquinas the partial prising apart of faith and reason. In the modern period the break is made complete. Philosophy’s compatible independence within theology has become autonomy; the handmaid has taken over the throne. The old authorities have lost their credibility and winds of change are blowing. The Age of Reason has dawned.

John Locke: Modernist Foundationalist

The Protestant Reformation was primarily a movement that sought religious renewal, protesting against widespread clerical abuse of authority and importantly the marginalization of God. Luther’s discovery was revolutionary: God’s righteousness was what made humans righteous. It was God who gave salvation; not humans who earned it, nor the Church that dispensed it. Justification was by grace, through faith in Christ’s work on the cross.

Beginning with Petrarch (d. 1374), renewal of interest in the study of the classics sparked what is called humanism. Rejecting the medieval focus on God and the future world, humanism focused on humankind and the present world. Christian humanists such as Erasmus (d. 1536) applied humanist values to the question of the reform of the church.

René Descartes (1596–1650) was a significant influence on Locke. Distressed by the enormous disagreement in religion and philosophy and seeing that as evidence that error permeated thinking, Descartes determined to solve the problem: he would start over. Rejecting everything that was not certain, he would rebuild knowledge on the basis of what he felt is certain. At bottom that was the proposition: cogito ergo sum—I think therefore I am.

John Locke (1632–1704) lived during a time of political and religious ferment. He lived under five monarchs plus Oliver Cromwell. For a period—when his patron was out of favour with the king—he was a political refugee in Holland. In his treatises on government, Locke promoted a civil society, arguing the state’s power was limited by a contract recognizing rights and liberties of individuals. In his Letter concerning Toleration, he argued for tolerance of religious diversity on the epistemological grounds: that it was each individual’s responsibility to form their religious beliefs and that coercion destroyed any authentic belief formation.⁶⁹

Like Descartes, John Locke was disturbed by the conflicting opinions. In his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he describes a meeting of several friends to discuss an issue.⁷⁰ The group quickly found themselves in difficulties and perplexity, whereupon Locke proposed he investigate "our own abilities, and see what objects our understandings were, or were not, fitted to deal with."⁷¹ While the project that led to his influential book is similar to Descartes,’ Locke differs regarding the source of knowledge. He looked to experience rather than innate ideas. So Locke’s thought is both foundationalist and empiricist.

Book I of the Essay inveighs against the idea that humans have innate notions. Book II deals with ideas and their origin in sensation or reflection on sensation. He says, "Let us then suppose the mind to be . . . white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas;