Philosophical Theology

Definition

Philosophical theology is the use of philosophy’s concepts, arguments, and methods in the study, clarification, and defense of Christian doctrine. Reformed theology has classically treated this relationship as one of service rather than partnership: theology rules over philosophy, and philosophy acts as its handmaid, useful for expounding Scripture’s teaching and drawing out its implications, but never supplying doctrine’s actual content or standing in judgment over revelation.¹ It is closely related to, but distinguished from, natural theology, which is one particular philosophical resource theology puts to this same subordinate use.

Historical Development

Apostolic and Patristic Engagement

When Paul addressed the philosophers of the Areopagus in Athens (Acts 17:22-31), he worked with, rather than only against, the vocabulary of Greek philosophical theology. Paul discerns within the Greeks’ own, flawed philosophical theology “elements of truth that can be isolated by a Christian believer and then affirmed and appropriated in Christian preaching,” even while rejecting its idolatrous content outright, the claim that there are many gods and that they can be identified with created things.² The same pattern, borrowing philosophical vocabulary while purging its errors, recurs through the patristic and medieval periods as theologians engaged first Platonist and then Aristotelian philosophy.

Reformed Scholastic Method

The Reformed scholastics inherited this borrowing relationship and gave it a formal name: philosophy is theology’s handmaid. Francis Turretin stated the rule plainly: “Theology rules over philosophy, and this latter acts as a handmaid to and serves the former.”¹ Metaphysics and natural theology could be put to the same use, on the same condition, subordinate to the theology they served, never supplying its content independently.

Petrus van Mastricht applied the same rule as a caution against two opposite errors. He judged the medieval Scholastics guilty of excess for loving Aristotle’s philosophical method to the point of distraction, and the Anabaptists and other enthusiasts guilty of the opposite deficiency, rejecting theological method altogether out of a hatred of philosophy. Against both, Mastricht argued that the Reformed should demand a method for theology, but not, strictly speaking, a philosophical one: a method natural to theological matters themselves, rather than one borrowed wholesale from a philosophical school.³

The Enlightenment Turn

That balance shifted after Kant. Once Kant had denied that God could be known, “reason and natural theology were substituted for divine revelation,” and the prolegomena to theology, its introductory discussion of theological method, grew in size and influence until it began to overshadow theology’s own doctrinal content.⁴ Where the older Reformed handmaid relationship had used philosophy to expound and defend revealed doctrine, this newer arrangement let philosophy determine in advance what kind of doctrine revelation could be permitted to contain.

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t philosophical theology’s use of a general concept like “being,” applied to both God and creatures, blur the Creator-creature distinction Reformed theology insists on? Duby raises this worry about certain modes of discourse in contemporary philosophical theology, which “presume a common structure of being in which God and the creature are both situated.”⁵ His answer distinguishes two things that can travel under the name “metaphysics.” Taken in the sense the objection targets, letting a generic concept of being determine what God is, the worry is legitimate, and nothing in the older Reformed handmaid relationship licenses it. But metaphysics can also name a narrower, non-pejorative practice: the causal analysis of created being that yields limited knowledge of God as its cause, by way of the same natural theology the Reformed scholastics already treated as philosophy’s proper contribution to theology. On this narrower use, “metaphysics properly speaking does not deliver the content of theology at all,” even though the natural theology it supports offers real, if limited, knowledge of God, to be reoriented and corrected by Christian dogmatics rather than substituted for it.⁵

Related Doctrines

• Natural Theology
• Theology
• Systematic Theology
• Philosophy of Religion
• Doctrine

References

1. Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology 1.13.2, quoted in Alex Charles Tibbott, “Turretin and Theological Method,” in “De Impassibilitate Et Satisfactione: An Examination of the Methodological Implications of Trinitarian Classical Theism for the Doctrine of the Atonement” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2024), 60-93: “Theology rules over philosophy, and this latter acts as a handmaid to and serves the former.” ↩ ↩²

2. Steven J. Duby, God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian Theology, Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), chap. 2, “Preparation for the School of Grace,” 66: “Paul discerns within the Greeks’ flawed philosophical theology elements of truth that can be isolated by a Christian believer and then affirmed and appropriated in Christian preaching.” ↩

3. Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 1, Prolegomena, trans. Todd M. Rester, ed. Joel R. Beeke (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2018), chap. 1, “The Nature of Theology,” 173. ↩

4. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 1, “Dogmatic Theology as a Science”: “Since Kant declared God to be unknowable, reason and natural theology were substituted for divine revelation.” ↩

5. Duby, God in Himself, chap. 4, “Theology and Metaphysics Revisited,” 209: “It may be worth asking whether certain modes of discourse in contemporary philosophical theology presume a common structure of being in which God and the creature are both situated… Metaphysics properly speaking does not deliver the content of theology at all.” ↩ ↩²