Preface
The meaning of ‘talk about God’ remains the first and most fundamental
issue facing philosophers and theologians in the modern age. This study
concerns the analogies needed to make sense of that talk: images, ripe with
poetic intensity, borrowed from the language and practice of faith; from the
splicing together of lives, human and divine. It concerns, moreover, the
reinvestment of those images in the structures of human personality, their role
in the development of a renewed metaphysic of the human spirit, aspirationally
divine or ‘upwardly’ oriented.
Such concerns have, in recent years, gained still
greater urgency as a popular and aggressive ‘evangelical atheism’ has come to
dominate religious discourse, threatening to obscure the human truth of
religious language. The challenge is a familiar one; its polemic deeply
indebted to British Empiricism and, perhaps, especially the Logical Positivism
of the last century. It seems that those who put their faith in post-modern
theories of language to silence the likes of Ayer and Russell spoke too soon.
In response, theism has retreated from empiricist
attack into a new-found realism. Championed by the likes of Peter Byrne,
William Alston, and of course, Richard Swinburne, neo-realist metaphysics has,
ostensibly, steeped itself in classical philosophy. Amid the search for reason
and necessity, the God of grace and providence, of ordinary belief, has been
forced to yield to ‘Perfect Being’ thinking, Absolute Being ontology, and other
forms of untenable metaphysics, with few alternatives on the margins of
relevance. The God of the philosophers may have the virtue of necessity, but
this Being’s temperament remains essentially anti-social. With God successfully
held in logical quarantine, we may well wonder whether ‘God-talk’ means
anything at all.
To close the breach and realign finite with
Infinite, philosophical faith with practical piety, has become the most
pressing problem in contemporary philosophical theology. Undoubtedly, Whitehead
and his neo-classical followers have been quick to learn the lessons of British
Empiricism. If anything, however, they learned them too well, placing the religious emphasis almost exclusively on
natural, physical forces. So seamless an alignment of God with Creation can be
of little comfort to the ordinary believer.
Caught between inflationary transcendence and
reductive empiricism, the ‘gap’ between theological speculation and religious
belief has widened until neither side seems very concerned with the other.
Cleaving to ‘first principles’ and other metaphysical abstractions, both
classical and neo-classical theologians have disenfranchised the faithful,
putting faith on a trajectory for atheism.
To steer a course between such extremes, I want to
return to an earlier tradition; to a metaphysic of persons exemplified in the
practice of faith. Doing so draws upon the logic of personal identity: what it
means to be, or rather, to become,
a person.
This is the practical application of a cutting-edge
theology, progeny of one of the twentieth century’s last great metaphysical
minds. Almost fifty years after his death, Austin Farrer remains in the
vanguard of modern theology, his vital grasp of faith and philosophy
unequalled and unrivalled. Farrer first defended theology against the excesses
of positivist and then process reduction but he used them to drive his own
retreat from the scholastic tradition. This was analysed at great length by
Charles Conti in Metaphysical
Personalism.
Locating the means and motive for revision in the
experience and expressions of lived faith, Farrer supplied the vital
corrective; there is nothing more one can say about such an overweening
impersonalism which describes God as Ens
per se, so cuts its own throat by depersonalising the cosmological
connection.
It is my supposition, on Farrer’s behalf, that
person-concepts meet the pragmatic demands of both metaphysical theism and
realistic belief. So doing, they open up a more fertile route between orthodox
and ‘process’ mythologies. Following that route, I begin with the incoherence
of philosophical realism and its ruinous application to theism. From there, we
journey backwards into neo-classical and neo-Thomist thinkers who themselves
attempted to overcome realist abstractions. Our destination lies in a
Feuerbachian anthropology of theology or ‘anthropotheism’. Like Farrer, Ludwig
Feuerbach used the language of the believer to relocate theology and
philosophy within a
framework which makes fertile use of anthropomorphic personifications to
‘think’ God.
Ultimately, revisiting the personalist
presuppositions of metaphysics in this way throws light on questions of
personal identity, which is to describe the nature of an ‘overview’
existence directly related
to or experienced in ourselves. This is to ‘draw’ reality on a grand-scale and,
most importantly, locate our place within that image. Doing theology
dynamically, or psychologically informed – as both Farrer and Feuerbach
insisted we must – means recognising the constitutive role projections play in self-construction.
Without conscious, active, or intentional participation in our projects, we
cannot become persons at all. This returns us to the practice of faith wherein
Feuerbach’s anthropology is reconstructed as applied theology, thus completing the personalist metaphysics perpetuated
by Farrer as initially developed by the Biblical faith in a Godly person. And
what greater challenge can religious philosophy respond to today?
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