Classical Theism: a Counternarrative for the Underground Church ?

                                                                                                                 Marc Chagall, 'Moses and the Burning Bush' (detail)



‘If they say to me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?’


  I sometimes wonder why Moses needed to ask this question. It isn’t as if the sacred Name hadn’t appeared before in the narrative of the Pentateuch, whose narrator explicitly identifies the ‘maker of heaven and earth’ with the YWHW of the Book of Exodus from the very beginning (Gen 2:4). More than this, Moses’ forefathers in the faith – Noah, Abraham, Jacob – are frequently shown to ‘call upon’ (e.g. Gen 13:4) or simply refer to the Name. The reader is led to infer that the encounter on Mount Horeb did not simply involve a discovery of the true identity of the God of Israel, but rather a recovery of a precious truth, lost after centuries in a foreign land under a foreign yoke.


  Christian thinkers have historically regarded the Name as a ‘window’ of sorts into the nature of God, and indeed of reality itself. Since ‘YWHW’ roughly means ‘he is’ or ‘he will be’, many suspected that the concept of God must be closely connected to that of existence, or being. God could not relate to his being in the way that we relate to ours, i.e. as something which we have, and may lose. Rather, God simply is his being. Or, to use the familiar medieval phrase, God is not merely a being among beings, but ipsum esse, Being itself. Non-divine things exist only insofar as they ‘participate’ in Being, which is God. The Summa of St Thomas Aquinas offers a useful analogy:

"just as that which has fire, but is not itself fire, is on fire by participation; so that which has existence but is not existence, is a being by participation"

  This understanding of God as Being itself is the core of what now goes by ‘classical theism’, and underlies its other tenets. Thus, Being itself cannot have any kind of inner complexity, because this would imply that it owes its existence to constituting parts, which is absurd – hence, God must be absolutely simple. And God cannot change in any respect, because this would involve acquiring or losing some property, which an absolutely simple being logically cannot do – hence, God must be absolutely immutable and impassible.

  Classical theism has fallen on hard times. Churches, including conservative ones, do not insist on it, and are sometimes dismissive of it. The loudest voices in the world of religious scepticism seem utterly unaware of its existence, as the philosopher Ed Feser has artfully shown (cf. his The Last Superstition). Funnily enough, some of my undergraduate students commented that it ‘sounds like Buddhism’ when I explained it to them last term. I imagine that I would get similar reactions from more than a few church-goers.

  Understandably perhaps, critics question whether the abstruse concerns of philosophical theologians should have any bearing on the everyday lives of flesh-and-blood believers.

  But for better or worse, the world-views developed by intellectuals in their so-called ivory towers percolate to wider society and shape the thoughts, attitudes and behaviours of individuals, whether they realise or not, as the last five years or so have made abundantly clear. In different terms, if Joe’s mind isn’t being moulded by classical theism, it’s at least possible that it’s being moulded by something else, something uglier.

  This isn’t quite to say that we must all choose between classical theism and the postmodern pseudo-religion that currently colonise our academic institutions. But I would like to suggest that if the Church is to go underground in the near future, she would do well to take her classical theistic inheritance more seriously. Just as Israel needed to recover the God of its ancestors before it could resist Pharaoh’s tyranny, perhaps we also have some recovering to do, if we are to make it through the soft-totalitarian winter. Here are some reasons to think as much.


First, a Church that is steeped in its history and tradition will be more difficult to uproot. Totalitarian ideologies gain ground by erasing the cultural memories of dissident communities, be it by manipulating school curricula, banning books or destroying relics of the past. Christians should fight back by revering our spiritual fathers and mothers who contended for the faith, drinking deeply from the well of their lives and teachings. Classical theism is the fruit of centuries of rigorous, prayerful reflection on the words of Scripture, passed on from generation to generation. While thoughtful critique has its place, it seems reckless to cast aside the near-unanimous witness of the historic Church, let alone ignore it altogether.


Secondly, classical theism yields a special kind of certainty that I have yet to see in other theological approaches. If God is Being itself, then to be just is to participate in God, and to assert atheism while affirming one’s own existence is not only false, but simply meaningless. The natural order isn’t some scientific datum which the God-hypothesis might well explain but which could in principle exist without God: its radical dependence on God is part of its very essence. Upon realising this, one just sees that God must exist, which is worlds apart from merely believing that He does on the authority of some clever scientific argument (remember how it felt like to just ‘see’ the solution to a maths problem in class). Though totalitarian regimes take an evil pleasure in ‘deconstruction’, i.e. the vilification of a culture’s values and beliefs dressed up as honest criticism, they will not capture those souls whose eyes can just see the Truth.


Thirdly, I should say something about the staggering beauty of classical theism – which it derives, not by painting an illusory picture of a bland ‘real world’, but by shining a light into the Beauty that lies at the heart of all things. Reflecting on Being itself blurs the boundaries between philosophy and mysticism, reason and faith, thought and worship. Dostoevsky’s quip that ‘Man can live without science, and even without bread but not without beauty’ rings true in a world where science is supreme and bread is abundant. The more beauty you see in something, the more you will be willing to sacrifice for that thing. Perhaps this is why totalitarian ideologues have always tried to keep an especially tight grip on the arts. By the look of things, the years ahead will be a long, hard slog for the Church. We will struggle less if the beauty of the Lord spurs us on.


Fourthly and finally, the precepts of classical theism could not be more at odds with those touted by the neo-postmodernists. Where the latter tell us that the ‘good’ and the ‘just’ are fabrications which serve the interests of dominant groups, the former proclaim that Goodness itself, which just is Being itself, is more real than anything else. Where we are told that reason and objectivity are tools of oppression, we ought to respond that reason, while fallible, enables us to see the Truth more clearly than any ‘lived experience’ ever could. Where they assure us that all language constructs Being, let us recommend that they speak for themselves, and their own language – as for us, let our speech express Being instead.


  I could go on. For these reasons and many more, classical theism is a powerful counter-narrative to the rising postmodern hegemony. Why not make it our own?