What Theology Can Bring to the Table

Several years ago, a philosopher friend asked me about what, if anything, Christian theology might contribute materially to philosophical thought. My friend doubted that theology could actually contribute anything of real significance to a wider contemporary intellectual conversation, especially with respect to understanding the human phenomenon. He thought that he had stumped me with his challenge. With theologians like Augustine, Calvin, and Kierkegaard in the back of my mind, I replied that the Christian doctrine of sin contributes a necessary reality principle for thinking about all things human, something of real value even for philosophers. In marked contrast to naturalistic views of humanity—whether of philosophical or scientific origin—a Christian way of thinking about the nature of human nature assumes factors like self-interest, self-sabotage, jealousy, woundedness, hatred, violence, contradiction, irrationality, and absurdity in human life and history. Held together with a profound appreciation for the beauty, order, and complexity of human existence in its individual and collective dimensions, the Christian doctrine of sin can provide a portrait of our species that takes into account all the facts of human life, not just those things that make us look good, free, and capable. It always strikes me as a bit odd that the problem as to why human self-understanding presents such perpetual fascination and perplexing challenge—the fact of which, upon due reflection, may be telling in and of itself—rarely seems to help secular or naturalistic thinkers come to a realistically complex view of what it means to be human.

While I still stand by the response I gave to my friend the philosopher, I would today offer an additional line of argument concerning what Christian theology can contribute to thought more broadly. Today, I would add that differentiated unity is the norm of personhood. Arising from reflection on the concept of imago Dei seen in the light of the distinctive Christian teaching about God as Trinity, theologians can offer a profound corrective to the modern or Enlightenment anthropology of the isolated subject for whom relationships are secondary and optional. In this view, a person is a dynamic activity of simultaneous delimitation from and integral connection with other persons.

In teaching UCLA professor of psychiatry Daniel Siegel’s second edition of The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are this past spring, I was struck by one of his key insights:

Integration requires that elements retain their individual uniqueness while simultaneously linking to other components of a system. The key is balance of differentiation and linkage … Integration is both a functional process (the linkage of differentiated elements) and also a structural feature of the nervous system and relationships. ¹

In a similar vein, Siegel maintains that this sort of dynamic integration provides the norm for healthy human life: “Healthy emotional development does not move us from dependence to independence; instead, we move from dependence and care receiving to interdependence and the capacity to be both a care receiver and a care giver … Integration is the essence of health.” ²

The norm for optimal development of personhood, then, involves the achievement of a pattern of differentiated unity or integration in which one has a clearly established identity while and through engaging in dynamic relationships with others. Conversely, “blocked integration and impaired development” ³ give rise to various forms of dysfunction. Too much differentiation leads to a state of functioning in which one is locked up inside of one’s own subjectivity, being disconnected with other people, and unable to form meaningful emotional attachments to them. At the other end of the dysfunction spectrum, too much enmeshment in relationships with other people leads to inability to establish a clear sense of personhood and a perpetual dependency orientation.

At the various points in his book when Siegel argues for the norm of optimal human functioning as an ideal balance differentiation and connection, he speaks in halting tones. He seems to need a richer vocabulary and range with which to speak about the complex norm of mature personhood pointed to by his research. As I read through Siegel’s remarkable material, I kept thinking that he could benefit from dialogue with some theologians who have expertise in trinitarian and christological doctrine. Theologians who work regularly with notions of differentiated personhood, perichoresis, hypostatic union, and the like could enrich and further stimulate Siegel’s work, and others like him, on human development by providing useful concepts and language for the complex and sometimes paradoxical realities of human existence.

Theologians who work on the doctrines of the trinity and of christology have much to offer scientists like Siegel and philosophers like my skeptical friend. Mainly, perhaps, they can offer a rich and complex—not to mention paradoxical—pattern of thinking as well as a vocabulary for conceptualizing what it is to be human. Insights like differentiated unity and hypostatic union afforded by theology can provide profound insight and offer ways to make a certain kind of larger interpretive sense out of scientific research and philosophical reflection on the human phenomenon. Without the perspectives offered by theologians, scientists and philosophers might miss out on some key frameworks for understanding and might, consequently, miss ways to push their work even farther forward.

I am not suggesting here that we roll back the clock to an earlier era in which theology claimed to be the “queen of the sciences.” I am suggesting, instead, that theologians should engage in widespread interdisciplinary conversation with confidence that they can contribute something of real value to the conversation, while also receiving tremendous benefits from the work of thinkers in non-theological fields like neuroscience and psychiatry. A conversation has to be a genuine interchange of ideas between parties holding different points of view on a subject. I know that there are some instances in which robust conversation between theologians and secular philosophers and empirically oriented scientists actually take place. I think that there should be much more of this sort of thing going today, particularly if theology wants to play a role in contemporary society beyond the walls of the church. Theologians should enter into such interdisciplinary conversations with the confidence that they have something of value to bring to the table.