Why I'm Getting a PhD in Philosophy, Not Theology

Do I just want to perpetuate the evangelical discourse? Or do I want to go to another discipline, bring its resources, and intervene into the debates of evangelical theology?

Hello, readers! The last several weeks, I’ve been deep in work on my Ph.D. dissertation. I’m excited to share some of the fruits of that research here. I’ll begin with my reflections on why I’m getting a Ph.D. in philosophy in the first place. Thanks for reading.

Hey, I’m Joel Carini, the Natural Theologian.

And in this post, I’m going to talk about why I’m getting a PhD in philosophy and not theology.

1. Biblical Exegesis Is Not Enough

My first intellectual love has been theology, the study of Christian doctrine and what the faith teaches. That led me to take an interest in studying at seminary where we would study the sources of Christian theology in the Bible and the history of Christian interpretation of the Bible and the systematization of that into systematic theology. A whole coalition of disciplines that explore the contours of what Christianity teaches. And by attending seminary, you become competent. You can learn the original languages of the Bible. You can learn how to use the Bible in theological debate, what are the main arguments for and against different positions, and how to ground one's own position in those texts.

(For background, see my post, “Why You Shouldn’t Go to Seminary.”)

But what I realized over the course of my seminary studies was that the resources of biblical exegesis alone are not enough to do Christian theology.

I noticed this in each of the main evangelical debates.

Take the debate over complementarianism and egalitarianism, the relationship between men and women in the home and the church.

Now both of these arguments were presented as if they were purely exegetical arguments. They rested on the meanings of certain Greek words like kephalé, for head, the husband is the head of the wife (Eph 5:23). What does this mean, authority, source, or what? The “helpmeet,” the “companion” in the book of Genesis (Gen 2:18). These Hebrew and Greek words were supposed to be the linchpin of theological arguments.

Yet it wasn’t plausible to me that biblical exegesis alone was even the reason people held the positions they held. Did the evangelical feminist really hold their view just because of a dictionary definition of kephalé? Or was something more going on? (And the same applied to the complementarians, by the way.)

No, I started to think people get their ideas from outside the Bible. They’re shaped by the Bible, but their reading of the Bible is also shaped by what they already think.

And so we’re kind of thrown back on ourselves to actually examine the fundamental assumptions that we hold and the reasons for and against those, in conversation with the Bible, but not with the Bible alone.

Specifically, I started to see the way that different theological debates reduced down to philosophical debates.

The feminist one remains a simple example. If someone thinks that the reason churches, certain churches, ordain only men and not women is because of the patriarchy, we’re not dealing with a specifically Christian argument. That’s not a knock against it, but it is to say that this is an argument that shows up elsewhere.

To actually understand the merits of a key feminist argument like that, you have to go into feminist philosophy, look at the history of that argument. What is the sociological evidence for it? What is the philosophical grounding of it? And what are the contrary claims of the other side? Well, this would enmesh you in philosophy, that universal human discipline, rather than the parochial Christian theology of adherence of the Christian faith.

And so, I began to think in that, as in so many other debates, what we really need to do is get down to the philosophical arguments that are at the heart of things.

And this just dovetailed with the fact that, as many people criticize evangelicals for, debating from Bible verses actually doesn’t solve our problems. There are contested interpretations. There are different interpretations on completely opposite sides. There are views on completely opposite sides that both claim a basis in the Bible.

Now, this isn’t to say that there’s no way to read the Bible aright, but it is to say that the idea that you can do it all from the Bible is a bit shallow and narrow.

2. Attending to Reality

Now another reason to go outside the Bible in order to understand Christian teaching is because the message of the Bible is actually about those things themselves. It’s a message to human beings about human beings. It addresses the various aspects of their lives. It addresses the world, the natural world, the human world.

And if you don’t understand those things on their own terms, as it were, you're liable to ignore them or misunderstand them or not even to comprehend how the Christian faith speaks to them. If you try to speak about those things just from the Bible and theology, you’re likely to be missing a lot of the relevant information.

An obvious one is politics. Whoever claims that their view of politics comes directly from the Bible immediately invites suspicion. Because there are people who can argue the exact contrary position and claim that it’s from the Bible.

And more importantly, because politics is a complex and messy subject in the real world. We have to use our eyes and our senses to gather empirical information about how the world works. And this is done in political science, political philosophy, sociology, history, and many other disciplines. The idea that we can do this from the Bible alone, get that sort of magic shortcut to the right answers, is deeply misguided.

There are other areas as well. Broadly, we could think about anthropology, the study of human beings. Can human beings be understood through science? Can we understand ourselves through the disciplines of psychology? What are the limits of that scientific understanding? Are there ways that human beings cannot be reduced to their scientific and natural substrate?

We see debates about counseling and psychology and their legitimacy for Christians. Can we use this information that’s gathered, not from the Bible, but by secular study and by secular psychotherapy to understand the human mind, to help people? Can we differentiate spiritual problems from psychological problems and properly relate these? Again, you can’t do that if you just say everything's going to come from the Bible, as some do. You’re liable to to mistake psychological problems for spiritual ones. (See “Are Thoughts Sin?” by

Anna Carini

and myself.)

If the Bible is to help human beings live human lives, we actually have to pay attention to human beings, how they work, how their minds work. We can’t just look at the Bible.

Now that’s not to say that the Bible can’t correct secular understandings. It’s not to say that the Bible can’t, for instance, emphasize human responsibility in ways that a kind of determinist psychology ignores. We should emphasize human moral responsibility. In fact, when you don't people become helpless, and science can even confirm that. (See discussion of “learned helplessness.”) But you need a healthy discussion and dialogue between between faith and science to even get that right.

There are other areas. In the church, when we try to reduce everything to theology, we often ignore power dynamics, ways that people are driven by narcissism or fame, psychological motivations. If we understand the church as another human institution, trying to exemplify something greater, but still subject to those infirmities and patterns, we're going to be on a lot better footing.

We can pay attention to how social media is shaping the Christian life, shaping online Christian personalities. We get a better sense of what’s really going on.

Example: Homosexual Orientation

Maybe more controversially, same-sex attraction is an important topic for the contemporary church. It’s where the church is frequently accused of homophobia, of misunderstanding and lacking sympathy with one particular human experience. And the church can easily do this. We can say, we’ve got our answers straight from the Bible. There's no mention of a homosexual orientation. Our desires are themselves sin. We can make these blanket proclamations.

This is an area of theology where I think the church needs to really grapple with reality that we can learn through philosophy and empirical science. We can learn from people’s experience and from scientific study that some people have a sexual orientation that is ordered contrary to how the Bible says we ought to direct our sexual activity. (See my “Sexual Orientation Is Not a Social Construct.”)

If that’s the case, that presents a real obstacle to just stating the Christian truth simply.

If there’s a fact that some people are same-sex attracted or gay, then we cannot simply assume that every desire is sin. We cannot simply assume that the Christian message of sexual fidelity in male-female marriage is easy for everyone. We must understand that it is more costly for some than others because of the way some people’s nature has been made, even though that's affected by the fall.

Empirical reality, things that are known from outside the Bible have to be allowed in if we are to be sympathetic to human nature, to the human beings that are around us as we know that Jesus Christ himself is.

3. Openness to Experience and Thought

We’ve moved further afield than just philosophy. Why does this explain that I'm getting a philosophy Ph.D. instead of a theology Ph.D.?

Well, it's because of this openness to other fields of learning. Now, philosophy itself acts as a kind of bridge between all these fields. It’s been remarked before that philosophy doesn't really have its own subject area. It studies all phenomena. There’s a philosophy of biology. There’s a philosophy of language. There’s a philosophy of man, and so on.

Philosophy stands at the boundary of these disciplines and often adjudicates how they are related. With respect to theology, philosophy has been called the handmaiden of theology because it helps theology understand the phenomena it’s working with. And that’s the role that philosophy has taken on for me.

Philosophy also uses tools other than the appeal to authoritative texts. That’s essentially what doing theology by biblical exegesis is. Now there was a time when the authoritative texts were not the Bible only. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, would use a statement of Aristotle almost as authoritatively as a scriptural text. Not actually as unquestionably authoritative, but there were many people thought to be trusted sources, who could quote from.

But when you engage in philosophy, you have to use a different mode of reasoning. You have to offer all the reasons for and against. You have to answer all the counterexamples. You have to answer the objections. And there’s a thorough plumbing of the depths of a certain phenomena that is so important to be able to do.

It’s one thing to have all the Christian Bible arguments for and against. It’s another to answer the objection of the non-Christian. It’s another to answer the objection of empirical evidence and to say, wait a second, that looks contrary. How does it fit? And philosophy equips one to begin to address all of this.

4. Philosophy Before Theology

Now, I’ve come to think even more that philosophy is actually at the intellectual foundation of theology. This is backwards from how most Christians would want me to frame this. But what I mean is this:

Take an argument in theology, for example, about whether we can interpret the Bible directly or do we need a sort of magisterial authority to adjudicate interpretations. Is it possible to read the Bible and honestly discover what it says? Or are we going to be projecting our subjective interpretation onto it?

Well, as you may recognize, this is not just a Christian debate. This is the core debate of the disciplines of hermeneutics and of kind metaphysical realism. Do we all project, in a neo-Kantian way, our concepts onto the world, or can we receive the world without a veil of interpretation?

This is a philosophical debate fundamentally. There’s not a specifically Christian way to go about this. There are arguments for and against this that have been offered by continental and analytic philosophers.

And so if I want to deal with this argument faithfully, I actually need to look into, Gadamer on the one hand as the founder of the discipline of hermeneutics, or the philosophers of language over an analytic philosophy like Frege, Russell, Kaplan, Strawson, and so on. I need to deal with the phenomena of language.

How does language refer to the world? Do we project our concepts onto reality? Do our concepts get their content from our own definitions of words or from the things in the world?

These are debates in philosophy and their outcome determines whether the argument that we only know things through an interpretation holds water. As I've come to think it doesn't.

But the question for me in all this is:

Do I just want to perpetuate the evangelical discourse? People on one side have their Bible verses; people on the other side have their Bible verses. We just throw back and forth the Bible verses, and the same tired old positions get hashed out again and again and again.

Or do I want to go to another discipline, bring its resources, and intervene into the debates of evangelical theology?

I’d rather do the latter. I’d rather bring something new. I’d rather show how we’ve been arguing on this level, but there’s something down here that we’ve totally missed. And so that’s what I’m hoping to do in getting a philosophy PhD, even as someone who calls himself, and aspires to be, a theologian.

5. Communicating to Non-Christians

There’s a last, perhaps obvious reason why I would get a philosophy PhD instead of a theology one. And that is that I don’t just want to talk to other Christians. I don’t just want to communicate the Christian faith to people who already believe it and argue within the sort of circular argument of its beliefs.

No, I’d like to become equipped in universal human language reasons for and against different beliefs. I’d like to be able to articulate Christian beliefs in ways that are accessible broadly. And I’d like to be able to offer reasons to believe this or that doctrine of the Christian faith independently of scripture. equips a person to do that in a way that biblical and Christian theology just doesn’t.

And so, in getting a philosophy PhD, I’m really trying to not just be Christian, but to be human.

I’m trying to admit that the way we get our beliefs isn’t just by downloading them from the Bible. Evidence, human experience, philosophical assumptions, and even philosophical argument persuade us as often as do appeals to texts we believe authoritative.

And I want to communicate these things in ways that are accessible to all people, whether they believe what I believe, something else, or nothing at all.

And after all, that’s what I’m up to here at The Natural Theologian.

So thank you for watching and listening. I’m Joel Carini. Until next time.

---

Watch the Video: