Current Issue
Vol 23 Num 1 - Summer 2021
Vol. 23, No. 1 features a variety of articles, philosophical notes, and book reviews, including a worthwhile symposium (edited by Christopher Woznicki) on Oliver Crisp’s Analyzing Doctrine. Become a member of the Evangelical Philosophical Society and enjoy an annual print subscription to Philosophia Christi as part of your membership!
Ross D. Inman
Editor’s Introduction
Among its articles and philosophical notes, the issue showcases work on a wide variety of topics as diverse as a theistic analysis of logical consequence, a Berkeleyan idealist perspective on abstract objects, an exchange on the perils and prospects of a physicalist Christology, an exploration of whether the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent life would defeat Christian belief in any sense, a critique of Swinburne’s ontology of the human soul, an in-depth review of recent analytic philosophical and theological work on the virtue of humility, and much more.
SYMPOSIUM ON ANALYZING DOCTRINE
Christopher Woznicki
Analyzing Doctrine: A Précis
In this précis I introduce the topic of the symposium, namely, Oliver D. Crisp’s book, Analyzing Doctrine: Toward a Systematic Theology. I discuss the impetus behind the symposium, provide a précis of Analyzing Doctrine, and preview the various responses to the book given by his interlocutors. I conclude by highlighting some possible new directions for analytic theology.
William Lane Craig
On Systematic Philosophical Theology
The disciplines of systematic theology, dogmatic theology, fundamental theology, philosophical theology, and philosophy of religion are characterized and their relations to one another are discussed.
Steven Nemes
God Is Not Chastened - Response to Crisp vis-a-vis Theological Nonrealism
Oliver Crisp proposes “chastened theism” as a theologically realist alternative to classical theism and theistic personalism. I critique his chastened theism and propose the alternative of Christian Pure Act theism, a “chastened” version of theological nonrealism.
N. Gray Sutanto
On Maximal Simplicity
This essay engages with Oliver D. Crisp’s parsimonious model of divine simplicity while offering a defense of a maximal account of simplicity. Specifically, I clarify (1) the way in with Reformed orthodox theologians, like Gisbertus Voetius, anticipate something like Crisp’s model, (2) that pure actuality is an explication, rather than an entailment, of the doctrine of simplicity, and (3) that the doctrine of simplicity remains consistent with epistemic modesty in relation to theological matters.
Jordan Wessling
Crisp on Conciliar Authority - A Response to Analyzing Doctrine
In Analyzing Doctrine: Toward a Systematic Theology, Oliver Crisp infers from a general principle concerning God’s providential care for the church that it is implausible that God would allow substantial error on the central theological promulgations of an ecumenical council. is conclusion is then used specifically against contemporary neo-monothelites, who consciously contravene the dyothelite teachings of the third Council of Constantinople. In this paper, I raise several doubts about the inference utilized by Crisp against these neo-monothelites, and I seek to point to a more promising manner of upholding the deliverances of the ecumenical councils.
Joanna Leidenhag
Pneumatology, Participation, and Load-Bearing Structures - A Response to Oliver D. Crisp’s Analyzing Doctrine
As Oliver D. Crisp’s Analyzing Doctrine sets out the major moves of a future analytic systematic theology, this response worries about the lack of close attention to work of the Holy Spirit. It is argued that this generates an unhelpful (and unintended) tendency for key theological concepts to collapse into one another. First, the concepts of theosis, participation, union, conformity, and sanctification appear indistinguishable. Second, Crisp portrays monofocal attention to the union of incarnation, without equal concern for that additional complementary way that humanity is united to God, namely, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
Oliver D. Crisp
Response to My Interlocutors
In this essay I respond to my interlocutors in the symposium on my monograph, Analyzing Doctrine. Addressing each of them in the order in which their essays are printed, I consider and reply to comments by William Lane Craig, Steven Nemes, N. Gray Sutanto, Jordan Wessling and Joanna Leidenhag.
ARTICLES
Walter J. Schultz
Genuine Logical Consequence
Our pretheoretic sense of the relation of logical consequence arises from our experience of deductive inference. By ignoring the priority of inference and failing to provide an account of the ontological grounds of the conceptual experience and of the modal and truth elements in the statement of our pretheoretical sense, informal and technical accounts are at best partial. This paper proposes an ontological analysis of both elements which accounts for our conceptual experience and differentiates genuine from ersatz logical consequence.
C. A. McIntosh; Tyler Dalton McNabb
Houston, Do We Have a Problem? - Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life and Christian Belief
Would the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent life (ETI) conflict in any way with Christian belief? We identify six areas of potential conflict. If there be no conflict in any of these areas—and we argue ultimately there is not—we are confident in declaring that there is no conflict, period. This conclusion underwrites the integrity of theological explorations into the existence of ETI, which has become a topic of increasing interest among theologians in recent years.
Leo K. C. Cheung
On William Rowe’s Evidential Arguments from Evil
William Rowe has put forward four popular evidential arguments from evil. I argue that there was already a prominent distinction between logical and evidential arguments from evil—the IN-IM-distinction, and that its adoption leads to two important results. First, all three non-Bayesian evidential arguments are actually not evidential but logical, while the Bayesian evidential argument is genuinely evidential. Second, and most importantly, Rowe’s Bayesian evidential argument is redundant, in the sense that it has the same difficulties his three non-Bayesian arguments have. His move from the three earlier non-Bayesian arguments to the Bayesian argument is futile.
Travis Dumsday
Platonism about Abstracta - Supporting Theism or Naturalism or Neither?
I present a new argument to the effect that platonism about abstract entities (at least when combined with a specific understanding of the abstract / concrete distinction) undermines metaphysical naturalism and provides some support to theism. I further suggest that there are ways of extending this line of reasoning to point toward one or another more specific varieties of Christian theism.
William Hasker
The Need for Thisnesses - Swinburne on Souls
Richard Swinburne is an emergent dualist. One feature of his view is the need for a “thisness” or haecceity that makes each soul the soul that it is, distinct from other souls that may be indistinguishable from it in all qualitative respects. I argue that there is no need for thisnesses.
Steven B. Cowan
Or Abstractum - Idealism and Abstract Objects
George Berkeley is famous for the metaphysical principle esse is percipi or percipere (“to be is to be perceived or to be a perceiver”). Many Berkeleyan idealists take this principle to be incompatible with Platonic realism about abstract objects, and thus opt either for nominalism or divine conceptualism on which they are construed as divine ideas. In this paper, I argue that Berkeleyan idealism is consistent with a Platonic realism in which abstracta exist outside the divine mind. This allows the Berkeleyan to expand Berkeley’s principle to read: esse is percipi or percipere or abstractum.
J. P. Moreland
The Epistemic Advantage of Lost Autographic Tokens of the Bible
I address an epistemic and related ontological difficulty with the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. The ontological problem: If biblical inerrancy applies to the original autographs, why would God allow these to disappear from the scene? The epistemological problem: Given that the original autographs are gone, we lack a way to know exactly what the original writings were. The first problem is solved by distinguishing text types and tokens, and claiming that semantic meaning and inerrancy are underivative features types. The second is resolved by claiming that in the actual world, we are epistemically better off with the original tokens gone.
Keith Hess
Physicalism and the Incarnation - A Reply to Mullins
Trenton Merricks holds to a physicalist view of the Incarnation according to which the Son transformed into a physical object (the body of Jesus) at the Incarnation. R. T. Mullins, in “Physicalist Christology and the Two Sons Worry,” claims that Merricks’s account is Nestorian since it entails that it is metaphysically possible for the human nature of Christ to be a person independently of the Son’s incarnation. While I am not a physicalist, in this essay I defend Merricks’s view against Mullins’s claim. I argue that if the Son is numerically identical to the body of Jesus, then it is not possible for the body of Jesus to exist independently of the Son’s incarnation.
R. T. Mullins
Physicalism and the Incarnation Once More - A Response to Keith Hess
In a previous publication, I offered a novel argument against physicalist approaches to the Incarnation called “the Two Sons Worry.” In brief, I argued that a physicalist who is committed to the ecumenical teachings about the Incarnation cannot easily escape the worry that there are two persons in Jesus Christ. Keith Hess has recently pointed out a flaw in the argument that I present. In this paper, I offer a reply that fixes the argument, thus leaving the problem for the physicalist intact.
BOOK REVIEWS
Wes Morriston
Explaining Evil: Four Views, W. Paul Franks, ed.
Wilson Jeremiah
Aquinas, Original Sin, and the Challenge of Evolution, Daniel W. Houck
Keith Hess
Personal Identity and Applied Ethics: A Historical and Philosophical Introduction, Andrea Sauchelli
