This is the first part of a question about natural theology -- What is it, and why should we care?
Jamie Dew: Yes. Hey everybody, this is Jamie Dew.
Joe Fontenot: And this is Joe Fontenot.
Jamie Dew: And welcome back one more time to our podcasts. I guess that's what this is called. Sorry, I lost my -
Joe Fontenot: This is definitely a podcast. Yeah, this is a good one.
Jamie Dew: This podcast is Towel and Basin. Welcome back.
Joe Fontenot: It's our first episode.
Jamie Dew: Right.
Joe Fontenot: Not really. All right, Jamie, I have a question for you.
Jamie Dew: Okay.
Joe Fontenot: So we know these words, natural revelation and specific revelation. These are things that come up in theology, theology class, and all these kinds of things. Tell me, what is natural theology?
Jamie Dew: Okay, so yeah, first of all, kudos to you for making that very distinction. The first two, special revelation and natural revelation, those are one category of things, namely the category of revelation. I'll come back to that. And then the other one, natural theology, is in ... even though it's related to natural revelation, natural theology is in a different category. Now the reason I like you asking the question that way is because a lot of people, they conflate these two as if they're one thing, natural revelation and natural theology. These are all [inaudible 00:01:19]. A lot of people will kind of use those two interchangeably, but they really are clearly related, but very different kinds of things. But let's talk about the regulatory category first.
Joe Fontenot: Okay.
Jamie Dew: So generally speaking, Christians have, for 2000 years ... and you even see traces of this back into Jewish philosophy and theology as well, but Christians for 2000 years have either affirmed or at least discussed three different kinds of revelation. And we're not talking about the book of Revelation here. When we talk about revelation, broadly construed, what we're talking about is God's self-disclosure of Himself. It's Him making Himself known to us in one way or the other. That's what it means for God to reveal, and we have clear indications throughout our tradition that point to this. I mean we have a Bible, for example. And so the Bible is one version of revelation. We call that special revelation. It's special for a couple of reasons. Number one, it's to a specific people, and it reveals special things. It gives us information about God that we could not otherwise get. I want to underscore that statement, because I'm sure some critics of natural theology and natural revelation that might tune into the podcast might want to pounce on certain things.
Let me reiterate this again. The Bible, special revelation, gives us information about God that we could not otherwise get. So for example, you might be able to know some things about God broadly without scripture, maybe that He exists or something, but you couldn't know Trinity, you couldn't know atonement through Jesus Christ, you couldn't know by grace through faith. You couldn't know those things. You certainly wouldn't have a sense of how God calls His people to live in community and things like that. So all of those things come to us through a form of revelation we call special revelation. It's God's disclosure of Himself about very specific things. That's what we call special revelation.
Now there's at least two other forms of revelation that we could talk about, and the next one shouldn't be disputable, and that is the revelation we have of God through the son, Jesus Christ. So we have all these indications in the New Testament that Jesus Christ is God's self-disclosure of Himself, Colossians chapter one and chapter two, "The fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily," for example, "In Jesus Christ." In John's gospel, "And the only begotten son, who was in the bosom of the father, he has declared Him to us." Jesus is revealing the Father. You have Jesus in John 14 when he's teaching about heaven, and Philip asks that question, "Show us the father and it will be sufficient for us," and Jesus says, "Have I been with you this long and you don't recognize me?" So clearly Jesus is saying here, "I am revealing." You have Hebrews one that God, who at various times and in various places through various means has revealed Himself to us through the prophets and through the law and things like that, but now Hebrews one tells us in these later times, He's revealed himself to us through His son.
So that's what we would call another form of special revelation. Jesus Christ himself is revealing God to us. Carl Bart, though not super popular in the evangelical circles, for other things ... and really the reason they're that we evangelicals have often not liked Bart is because he takes a lesser view of scripture than we do, especially as Southern Baptists, but don't differ with him on what he says about Jesus Christ. He was a huge advocate of seeing God's revelation to us through the man, Jesus Christ. And he's not wrong about that. I just think he's wrong about what he says about the Bible. There's one other form of revelation, and this is the one that is disputed. And I think Christian history here has largely been a debate of affirming this with some outliers that would disagree with this, but that is that scriptures also tell us and the tradition also tells us that God has revealed Himself, at least partially, through nature.
And so Psalm 19, for example, "The heavens declare the glory of God. The firmament that is the heavenly skies, they show forth his handiwork, day unto day utter speech." In other words, in the rhythms of life, God is revealing Himself to us, and that's all through the natural realm. In Romans chapter one, a very common popular one, it says that the invisible attributes of God are clearly seen by the things that are made. Now some people will push back and say what, "But look, nature isn't designed to reveal," and I would say to that, well sure, maybe that's not its sole purpose. Maybe its sole purpose is to give an arena for life and to express God's creation. But whether it was intended to do that or not, it does do that, and the scriptures portray this.
And so this is what we call them natural revelation. So first of all, I am getting to your question about what is natural theology, by the way, but first you've got to deal with the regulatory category, and the category of revelation, Christianity has either affirmed or at least debated three forms; natural revelation, God's self-disclosure of himself partially through the natural order. And partially here's ... again, lest any critic accuse us of saying something we're not, we're not saying ... this affirmation is not suggesting that God gives us everything we need to know through this. And I would vehemently oppose any idea that says you can get everything you need to know about God for salvation and Christian living through nature. No, not at all.
Paul says in Romans one things like his godhood and his eternal power. In other words, you can know that there's a God that's really powerful. That's about it. In order to know more, we need the revelation of Jesus Christ himself, and we certainly need the scriptures, the special revelation that unpacks this for us. Now that all, everything I've just described is in the category of revelation. Revelation is God disclosing Himself to us in one way or the other, through possibly those three forms that we just mentioned. Now, what is theology, natural theology? I like to talk about this to make this distinction. First drop the word natural for just a second. What is the difference between say revelation and theology? Those are not the same thing. They're related and one needs the other. Theology needs revelation, but they're not the same thing. Revelation is God disclosing himself to us in some way. Now as such, revelation, I say it this way, is a God product. It's something that God does. It's something that God gives. It's his activity.
Theology, by contrast, is a man product. It's us now responding to that revelation by trying to be constructive in some way. It's us wrestling with what God has revealed to us and trying to put it all together, if you will. So God reveals this in the New Testament and that in the Old Testament and this and the teachings of Paul and this in the example of Jesus Christ, and we put all that together in a practice we call systematic theology, which is where we now are responding to that revelation and trying to make sense of it all and put it all together. So I say it this way to my students; revelation is that something God does. Theology is something we do. It's our response to that revelation. Now add back that word natural. So what is natural theology? It's us theologizing about God from nature. So we're asking questions like okay, well what could we know about God from nature itself? And that's roughly speaking what we're talking about when talk about natural theology. It's us trying to make statements about God from what we see in nature.
Joe Fontenot: So it's really us ... so let me see if I can say this back to you to see if I understand this. Whereas natural revelation is God telling us things through nature, so there is order in creation, et cetera -
Jamie Dew: Only a few things.
Joe Fontenot: What's that?
Jamie Dew: Only a few things.
Joe Fontenot: Sure, right.
Jamie Dew: It's not robust.
Joe Fontenot: Right. Whereas natural theology is us looking at nature and understanding things about God.
Jamie Dew: Right, right. In short, that's correct. So for example, so take the ancient Greek world. People a lot of times asked me how did I become a philosopher? It's because these people fascinate me, in large part, and there's lots of other reasons, but take somebody like Plato, for example. I mean Saint Augustan talked about Plato in the city of God, and the question he's answering is essentially of all the ancient philosophers, who came the closest to the truth? And by truth there, of course he means Christianity, and Augustan says without any hesitation, he points to Plato. And he's not saying Plato was a Christian. He's not saying Plato when we get to heaven is going to be there or anything like that, but Augustan marvels at everything that Plato did get right. And let me just be clear to the listener, Plato does say some things that Christianity has said as well for 2000 years.
It's not that Plato is verbatim Christianity. It's not. There are definitely things we differ with Plato on, but Augustan notes that for Plato, he says Plato comes the closest to the truth of anybody, so close in fact that he even speculates at times maybe Plato had a copy of the book of Genesis, or maybe Plato had a copy of the book of Jeremiah. And then if he thinks about it for a little bit and considers where those works were circulated in the world during Plato's time, he quickly concludes no, that's not how he got it. There's no way he had a copy of the book of Genesis. It wasn't circulated into Greece during those times, or Jeremiah, same thing. So then how did he get it? And he pointed back to Romans chapter one and he says, well, Plato and his followers were able to determine certain things in the same way that Paul tells us in Romans one, because the invisible attributes of God are clearly seen by the things that are made.
So what kinds of things did Plato get right? He gets right that there's a God. I mean, against the backdrop of Greek philosophy, which was polytheistic, you had the Pantheon of the gods, you had the Homeric gods of the sun God and the moon god and all those gods. And Socrates dies because he questioned whether or not A, such God's exists, and B, was absolutely adamant that even if those gods did exist, they were insufficient as the moral bedrock for the Western world. Socrates dies for that. Plato is much smarter than Socrates in this regard. He doesn't put his cards on the table, but it's very clear in the platonic literature that he rejects the Homeric gods in favor of there being a single God. Now he had some slightly different views about God's nature in various places, but he clearly could pick up on the fact, no, there has to be one single being.
And so what you find actually in Plato's works, in Timaeus and in Laws, particularly in book 10, Plato actually makes these arguments for God's existence that are quite similar to what we would now today call cosmological arguments. And so Augustan looks back and says, "Wow, it's amazing what he could get right just by simply looking at nature." He couldn't get Trinity, he couldn't get salvation by grace through faith, he couldn't get those things, but he could put together just by looking at the fundamental nature of reality and say there has to be a God behind all these things.
Joe Fontenot: And so Plato ... is it accurate to say that Plato is essentially doing natural theology?
Jamie Dew: Absolutely. In fact, many of our contemporary arguments for God's existence ... and I'll talk about that in just a minute. Many of our contemporary arguments for God's existence do indeed have their roots all the way back in the Greek philosophers. And by the way, Islamic philosophers, especially in the medieval period, but even today also continue to make these arguments. So for example, one of the most common arguments today ... maybe we can talk about it in another podcast, the cosmological argument. The cosmological argument was sort of rediscovered and refurbished in the medieval period by the Muslims, and it's people like Thomas Aquinas and some others that pick this argument back up out from the Muslims, but the Muslims are getting it from Aristotle, who got it from Plato, who seems to have gotten it from Socrates. So yeah, these arguments, the major arguments that we utilize today, many of them have roots all the way back into the Greek world.
Joe Fontenot: Let me ask one more question about this.
Jamie Dew: Okay.
Joe Fontenot: How far can natural theology take us?
Jamie Dew: Most people within the Christian tradition would say something like this ... and I'm not inclined to disagree with them.
Joe Fontenot: Okay.
Jamie Dew: They would say that natural revelation, which could then be sort of packaged into a form of natural theology, that it is useful enough simply to show, as Paul tells us, all people that there is a God such that they are without excuse. There have been some advocates and proponents of natural theology through history that have wanted to go so far, especially in the liberal traditions, to say that, "Oh, maybe this is how we can account for people on remote deserted islands who have never heard about Jesus. We can get them all into heaven this way." No natural theologian worth his salt at any point in history would have ever said such things like that. We would have simply said, "Look, nature testifies to the existence of God and that's about it."
So to get the rest of the message and to really, I would say, get the essential of the message, one needs Jesus Christ, needs the Holy Spirit, and needs the scriptures. So it is according, I think, to the Christian tradition, while I am one to affirm the place of natural revelation and natural theology, I would be very clear and adamant that one cannot do a Christian theology and one cannot live the Christian faith without the scriptures and the Holy spirit. We absolutely have to have it. John Calvin here in particular ... and no, I'm not thought of as a Calvinist, but John Calvin in particular is very helpful here on this front, that he says in the institutes ... it's actually quite humorous at times when he describes it. As he's talking about natural revelation, he says God's existence is so clearly revealed in nature that even "unlettered and stupid folk" cannot plead the excuse of ignorance.
So in other words, God's made it clear, but [inaudible 00:15:51], he was sharply critical of any using of natural theology as the basis for faith. And I have tended throughout my career to think that Calvin's wisdom here is spot on. Let me just emphasize one other thing as we sort of wrap this up. There's also ... so that's what natural theology is. Let me end here just by simply saying, okay, but there's a broad and a more narrow sense in which we can do natural theology. One usage of natural theology today is in the larger question of, well, what is the place of science and history and philosophy in our Christian faith? Shouldn't we take the insights of science into consideration?
And actually there, while there are understandable concerns throughout the history of the church, going all the way back to Augustan and then up through the reformation, and then even in modern times, most Christian views have been somewhat open to the dialogue of insights from the other disciplines. And we can maybe talk about why in another lecture, but that's a broad sense of natural theology. A more narrowed sense of natural theology is the actual doing of argumentation. It's when one makes an argument for God's existence, be it from the existence of the universe itself, be it from some issue or a scenario of design, be it from morality. And I'd love to talk about all those things in maybe later podcasts, but when we're making arguments for God's existence, we are essentially doing natural theology.
Joe Fontenot: Interesting. I have one more question on this.
Jamie Dew: Okay.
Joe Fontenot: But it's kind of a big one. And so I think we should save it for its own podcast. So that was a -
Jamie Dew: Well throw it out there so we can bait everybody for the next one.
Joe Fontenot: We can bait them. All right. All right. All right. Here it is. Who cares? That's my question. But seriously. Seriously, it's more like this. Should we do it, natural theology? Should we go down this path? Does it really make a difference?
Jamie Dew: Okay.
Joe Fontenot: This is really kind of the essence of my question. How do we break out into life?
Jamie Dew: So basically you're telling me that my life's work has been a waste of time.
Joe Fontenot: Did I say that? Did I say that?
Jamie Dew: All right. We'll talk about it in the next one.
Joe Fontenot: All right. That sounds good. Thanks Jamie.
Jamie Dew: Yep.
Joe Fontenot: Hey everybody. This is Jamie and Joe again. If you like this podcast, would you leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts? That helps other people find it.
Jamie Dew: And if you have any questions, we'd love to hear about them. Just go to Jamiedew.com/Questions and send them in that way and we'll take a look at the most frequently asked questions and give them a shot.