Concluding Remarks

Running through our conference has been a question about the giving of reasons: of the extent to which one community—theological ethicists for example—can or needs to explain or justify itself beyond its own borders. In some quarters, correctly in my view, we have heard caution about the recent enthusiasm in academia for ‘post-foundationalism’; whereby each community only feels responsible for articulating its own ‘practices’ or ‘grammar’. The problem with post-foundationalism is that it is still foundationalism: albeit a less reflective and more permissive variety. You can see this clearly in a thinker such as Alvin Plantinga, ¹ who criticises ‘classical foundationalism’. Classical foundationalism envisages the structure of our beliefs as an inverted pyramid, with ‘basic beliefs’—those that enjoy certainty and require no further justification—providing the foundations. The only beliefs that are allowed to count as basic, on this model, are those that are evident to the senses or logically necessary.

What does Plantinga do, when recommending his ‘reformed’ epistemology? He keeps exactly the same foundationalist structure, but has the chutzpah to slot another set of beliefs at the base of the triangle: arguing that every community is responsible for its own paradigmatic examples of what counts as basic. Plantinga at least is admirably clear—unembarrassed even—about what he is doing when moving beyond classical foundationalism: he is moving to a reformed foundationalism. And this, I think, is where we have been in the last few decades: not beyond foundationalism, but living with a plethora of foundationalisms.

Such balkanized foundationalism has had a corrosive effect on our thinking and communication. It shows in a reluctance to engage with non-theological audiences; and we have heard Raymond Guess’s powerful challenge to theology not just to unpack its own grammar. It also comes through in our own intellectual work and discernment. We have been too keen to find the single foundational grammar or practice that will provide the key to unlock the meaning of complex and nuanced realities. So when presented with an historically and conceptually rich notion such as ‘liberalism’, we are tempted to reach for the foundational premise or practice upon which everything rests. In this regard I was particularly impressed by Oliver O’Donovan’s description of the theologian as someone who should refuse the temptation of unipolar thinking, because the theological task requires obedience to complex multipolar texts and traditions.

We have an example of unipolar and covertly foundationalist thinking in the unhealthy collusion that we have seen recently between secular advocates for, and theological critics of, liberalism. How else could we have let ourselves be told by John Gray, in his earlier work, that liberalism is fundamentally Hobbesian, or by John Rawls, that it is essentially Kantian? How could we let this happen, when a range of important thinkers and influences in the liberal constitutional tradition resist such a unipolar characterisation? Burke, de Tocqueville, Matthew Arnold, T. H. Green and Hobhouse—key figures in the liberal constitutional tradition—were all variously more attuned to theological, teleological, social, ecclesial and contextual considerations. In this connection, nobody has done more than Joan and Oliver O’Donovan to bring to remembrance the patristic and medieval strands of constitutionalism.

The reductive appeal to grammar is often made in the name of Wittgenstein, but it is Wittgenstein himself who also gives us the cure: ‘don’t think, but look’, ² he says, and—Wittgenstein again—‘I’ll show you differences’. ³ This applies even to poor old Hume, who was wheeled out yesterday for some fun. The Hume we heard from was the sceptical and atheistical Hume, who uses his spokesman Philo to trounce the traditional arguments of natural theology in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. But when we look, the reality is more complex. One of his characters, Demea, demonstrates a remarkable knowledge of and fluency in scholastic theology. Philo, the ‘atheist’, ends the dialogues in Book XII by telling us that ‘all sciences almost lead us insensibly to acknowledge a first intelligent Author’, ⁴ generating an interpretative puzzle about how to construe the text as a whole. If Hume considers that religion is insufficiently grounded by reason or experience, consider the other concepts that he regards as similarly ungrounded: morality, aesthetics, causation, the self, object permanence, space and time. Hume, it seems, is not so much sceptical about religion as such, but is sceptical about the business of giving grounds. Now Hume does have some special reservations about strands of Christianity; but these are moral concerns about the ‘monkish virtues’ expounded by ‘gloomy’ and ‘hair-brained’ enthusiasts. ⁵ And this brings us back on to home turf: to a debate about theological ethics.

Through careful non-reductive scholarship, theologians will be able to cast a new light on things that are received as obvious or as common-sense. By placing a concept within its historical and theological context, we can make strange the ordinary, rendering the ‘obvious’ more visible and so more fragile. Take for example the concepts of freedom and autonomy. A highly respected Kantian such as Christine Korsgaard is able to take, as a premise for further work, the claim that ‘nothing except my own will can make a law normative for me…only those maxims shown to be necessary by the universalizability test—only those to which my own will commits me—are intrinsically normative’. ⁶ Secular Kantians are highly alert to what might be called signs of ‘metaphysical extravagance’ in Kant—where Kant seems to invoke God, realist morality, or substantive things-in-themselves. But is there not a conceptual extravagance in the assumption that in order to have meaningful freedom the human agent needs to resemble the divine subject of traditional theology, in being the normative source of the moral law? This is at least not obvious. And it is emphatically theological, in its origins, and in its bones. Theologians are perhaps particularly well placed to sniff out these small gods walking amongst us, unexamined peaks of veneration, reached by hops, if not leaps, of faith.

More positively, the theologian might be able to offer insights to others about how it is that rationality and explanations work as such. I am mindful here of Raymond Guess’s challenge to theologians to say something more intelligible to non-believers about their substantive commitments: to address the -ology in theology. The theologian—who is compelled to self-reflexive examination of the complexities of knowledge, authority, testimony, belief, assent and faith—is well placed to reflect on what it is for anything to constitute a rational explanation. Theologians are immersed in texts and traditions that shape, and are shaped by, complex historical experience and memory; they are in a position therefore to understand better than some others that theoretical convictions meet the world and experience as a whole. ⁷ As Wittgenstein put it: ‘Light dawns gradually over the whole’. ⁸ To take a concrete example: the hoary old chestnut of the problem of evil. A traditional foundationalist approach does not allow the theist to get to base camp—to belief in God—unless and until the theist dispatches the problem of how an all-powerful and benevolent God can permit evil. In the era of ‘post-foundationalism’ (in truth, balkanised foundationalism), we have the anti-theodicists refusing to engage with the problem, almost insisting that the task of theodicy is itself wicked, attempting as it does to rationalise and smooth away the horrors of suffering. But there is another way of coming at this. We can say that theology is unable to address the problem of evil and suffering unless the believer is permitted to use the full resources of the Christian tradition and world-view: including the consolations of the Holy Spirit, eschatology, resurrection and participation in God. And that this is the way in which rational belief systems always and everywhere work: by drawing on all their resources on all fronts. Theologians can make this appeal, not as a case of special pleading for religion, but because this is the way in which all world-views work, with a complex interplay between the theoretical, the experiential, the conative, practical, ethical and aesthetic.

So in summary: ‘don’t think but look’; make the ordinary strange, and ‘light dawns gradually over the whole’.