Q&A Session | On Systematic Philosophical Theology | Talbot

[Music] you know dr craig of course needs no introduction to to you all but um just as a bit of a reminder um dr craig did his first phd in philosophy and he finished it in 1977 the second one in theology in 1984 and of course the philosophy work the early work was on the kalam and in in philosophy and in theology he'd uh his dissertation on the resurrection of jesus and he's been doing academic research and writing and ministry in various forms for gosh around 50 years i guess does that sound about right dr craig yeah i suppose so it's amazing how the time flies so it's it's been a long time and of course he's published you know more books than i can count basically or research articles than that so i'm sure you all are very familiar with um with his work and we're so glad that you're here dr craig we're grateful that you've taken the model for friday afternoon to be with us and engage with our students and um i wanted to give you a chance to maybe frame our time together by just telling us a little bit about the project you've shared with us in the lecture and anything you'd like us to know about the work that you're up to the talk that i presented is an abbreviation of some of the material in the prologue that i wrote to a projected systematic philosophical theology i'm attempting to draw together the threads of my life's work into a systematic form and this occasion the question is to what exactly systematic philosophical theology is and in particular how does it differ from philosophy of religion and so in the paper that i presented i basically argued that these are really the same thing they have the same methods they cover the same subject matter the only difference that i could discern was that philosophy of religion will often shoulder a burden of proof that i do not think properly belongs to the systematic theologian it seems to me that the primary task of the systematic theologian is descriptive to articulate and formulate a body of christian doctrine that is philosophically coherent and and plausible and that is biblically consistent uh but he doesn't need to prove positively the truth of these christian doctrines and often the philosopher of religion will shoulder that responsibility but apart from that it seems to me that the uh disciplines are basically the same and i think that has tremendous implications for our colleagues who are doing systematic theology as well as for those of us who are doing uh philosophy of religion um so jane has a question in the chat box so jane is asking um or i'm just gonna read this so she's i perceive that you see a problem with the siloing within the field of theology between systematic theology and philosophy religion that's led to a less robust field in either discipline that could be helped from animated philosophy so this is also a problem with within the fields of science like astrophysics and biochemistry what has been the response to your viscense of proposal within the theological community should we jettison spiritual information as an outcome at least from this enterprise and then she says i personally worship god in great measure with my mind having great thoughts of god through both disciplines and then let's see there's one more bit here i know most of the time we're opposing materialism in our philosophy but currently epistemology of both science and philosophy is being attacked by post-modern critical theory particularly standpoint theory this is creeping into the evangelical church at an alarming rate do you see any joining of materialists and christian philosophers in regards to having an impact in academia and culture regarding these problems i think it was quite a mouthful that's great why don't you go back to the beginning and read the first couple sentences of that again sure so the first part was about siloing between theology and philosophy religion and then she brings up um the the similar siloing within different scientific communities well let me say that i i am very concerned about this uh and i like that metaphor obviously a lot of contemporary theology has been done in ignorance and even defiance of analytic philosophy i have been at conferences where theologians have been very hostile to the input and influence of christian philosophers there's a uh sometimes just a real visceral reaction to this and i think it's to their detriment fortunately that is really changing as a result of the efforts of people like mike ray at notre dame and oliver crisp who are spearheading this uh movement of analytic theology and so that has really begun to change and i find that very encouraging but i am very concerned that many christian philosophers are doing their work in ignorance of biblical theology and systematic theology this first became evident to me years and years ago when i was doing my work on divine omniscience particularly on the question of divine foreknowledge and human freedom and i remember talking with timothy o'connor at a meeting we were at together and i said to tim how can christian philosophers deny that god has foreknowledge of future contingents the greek new testament has the vocabulary of foreknowledge in a prognosis for knowledge prognose go to four no and he laughed and he said to me bill you know that christian philosophers don't care what the bible says and we had a good laugh at it but i think that remark was more serious than he intended where this recently has come up again is in work on the atonement and developing atonement theory the atonement theories that are out there today among christian philosophers are basically developed on the grounds of the models secular models of reconciliation between human beings who have um been offended and who need to be brought together again and so the models of people like richard swinburne and eleanor stump are predicated upon how reconciliation is typically achieved between two friends who have had a falling out and then this is applied uncritically to divine human relationships and it seems to me that this is far too quick um not only is the difference between a god-human relationship vastly different than human-to-human relationships but this threatens to develop the theory of the atonement that is unbiblical and most of these are theories of the atonement really have nothing to do with atonement in the biblical sense of that word and therefore i think are are quite inadequate and in the next talk that you're going to be viewing for this series uh next week uh again this same siloing occurs there's a burgeoning literature among christian philosophers on the nature of faith and the way this typically proceeds is you take secular examples of faith for example i have faith in my dentist or i have faith that my son will come home from afghanistan and then these secular models of faith are analyzed and then the conclusions transferred uncritically to christian faith and even saving faith and i believe again this is this is just all too quick because there may be conditions for saving faith that god has set down that are not characteristic of the sort of generic faith that often uh occurs in secular context and so the ignorance of christian philosophers of these biblical materials can lead to views of faith that i think are not merely erroneous but positively dangerous as i say at the end of my talk for next week and this does present a real problem for the christian philosopher and i think this is one of the great advantages of a program like talbot school of theology you have the opportunity there to to not only do work in philosophy but to get your training in theology even in say new testament greek and so i want to encourage all of you to take advantage of the fact that this philosophy program is at a divinity school of all things a school of theology uh and therefore affords you the opportunity to have this sort of integration and avoid this kind of siloing uh that janus described now you also mentioned james that this can occur in the sciences and there i think what you have would not be so much a sequestration of science from theology as from philosophy and i mentioned this in today's paper that philosophy of science tends to be the heir to quine's naturalized epistemology and in my work on philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of time i ran into this over and over again that your metaphysics is supposed to be an extension of natural science and if something is not warranted through the physical sciences then it can be ignored as part of an alienated epistemology and not taken seriously and i fundamentally disagree with that it seems to me that metaphysical views about god make a determinative difference to philosophy of mathematics and to philosophy of time as well and so this kind of siloing as jane puts it is i think detrimental to doing good philosophy of science too so there was another aspect of james's question dr craig which was about um i i think if i'm if i'm understanding her correctly she she was talking about opposing material but then there's this current movement and epistemology toward a kind of post-modern critical theory and the standpoint theory stuff and so she was asking if she sees if you see any joining of of sort of forces as it were between materialists and christian philosophers with regards to those kinds of issues there jane i'm not familiar with that literature enough to make any sort of intelligent statement as i indicated i find the philosophy that is most useful for doing philosophy of religion and systematic theology to be the mainstream analytic tradition and not sort of post-modernist continental uh currents of philosophy and so frankly i just tend to ignore these and to do work using the tools of analytic philosophy all right thanks greg um just for those of you who maybe have come in a little late um if you have a question just flag that in the chat box and i'm moving through those in order that they appear so next up i think jacob hulls you had a question for dr craig yes um first i wanted to say thank you my interest in philosophy sort of come came from reading your work when i was in high school so it's really great to ask you a question um so my question was kind of similar to james um last question i was just curious what you think about critical race theory sort of being popular in philosophy departments now and how we might interact with that as uh christian philosophers yeah that is an area that i am not very interested in and certainly not uh well read in we all have to specialize if we're going to make a contribution and so that hasn't been one of the areas that i have worked on i've had some interesting conversations with scott waller in the political science department at biola and scott has argued that critical race theory is fundamentally neo-marxist in its uh world view it's not traditional classical marxism because it's not um opposing the bourgeoisie to the proletariat but it is neo-marxist in that it sees the society is basically an expression of the struggle for power and the will to power and now the bifurcation is between white and black a male and female heterosexual and homosexual um and that you have the same sort of analysis of society in terms of this power hierarchy and what scott pointed out to me is that this kind of neo-marxist analysis is fundamentally anti-christian because on a christian view god relates to us in a power hierarchy he is vastly more powerful than we are and yet he does not therefore treat us with exploitation violence uh dominance and so forth on the contrary god's relationship to us is one of love and good will and to help us to become all that we should be and so this analysis of um reality in terms of the the will to power and the struggle for power does seem to be very deeply anti-christian um given that we do not see an inherent opposition between uh power and those who are subordinate thanks dr craig um anthony rhoden i believe is up next union himself and go ahead now thanks dr craig for your lecture and um i appreciated you mentioning uh dr liz jackson as well and um we had her very recently on as a guest speaker for some of our talbot students as well as andrew oh great yeah they've been sharing some of their work so it's nice to see scholars interact and hear from each other so um my question had to do with um kind of philosophical theology and i know in a lot of your your talks and lectures you often mention kind of the explosion of philosophy that's been going on in christian circles and i wanted to kind of get your perspective on the expansion of that do you see um that expanding further to other um like philosophical reasoning and that sort of rigor in analytic philosophy expanding to other religions or more kind of diversity in that sense so that it's uh a lot more arguments and things like that coming from different faith traditions as well well that's a very interesting question and i have to say that the only place well apart from judaism of course there are jewish philosophers of religion and and they've been involved in this current movement right from the start but i am seeing increasingly muslim involvement um the templeton foundation in particular has been funding efforts to promote uh inter uh sectarian conferences between muslim and christian philosophers uh kelly clark the former secretary of the society of christian philosophers recently had me speak to a group of turkish students online um and in germany as well i know there are muslim philosophers who are engaging with analytic philosophy so there has definitely been a uh a spark in um muslim academia toward being involved in this sort of analytic philosophizing i frankly think that the defense and prominence of the kalam cosmological argument has drawn in a lot of muslims they have been drawn to the defense of this argument by a christian philosopher and i think it begun to be interested in these sorts of topics and to exploit the resources that are available in the history of uh islamic intellectual thought all right next up is i believe joshua jones go ahead joshua hi dr craig thanks for joining us um you made a comment in your lecture that each generation needs to do systematic theology and you made an interesting comment on the section discussing uh the work done in what you called fundamental theology during the enlightenment which engaged with deists and you commented that there wasn't much discussion of argumentation for god's existence which would make good sense if you're going up against a deist that already sees that point um so i'm curious for your project and for our generation if there are certain topics or um certain aspects of theology that you would envision yourself engaging with or you think ought to be done maybe in areas where there were people are questioning things in our time that weren't being questioned in particular i think of things like you know with moral relativism and gender and sexuality issues i'm curious with your anthropology section of your of your work do you anticipate engaging at all and that those topics you know quite honestly i i guess i don't as i indicated in response to the question about critical theory it's just not an area of specialization for me and so what i'm interested in are these sort of traditional questions of the doctrine of god and of christ for example and i do think that even these kinds of topics though very traditional do confront new challenges um in philosophy and in science uh and and particularly i think the integration of one's theology and contemporary science is important and so i have tried to make something of an avocation of understanding the modern scientific view of the world particularly in physics in order to see how that is best integrated with our theology so even in these very traditional areas it's not a matter of just repeating old theology it does need to be updated every generation in light of developments in philosophy and science but certainly those other areas would be important for philosophers to work on who do feel called to that sort of specialization great thank you next up um let me ask a ques may i ask a question do you tim as a faculty member find that students at talbot in the program are increasingly interested more in these questions of social philosophy or political philosophy uh as opposed to the sort of old-line topics like existence of god and arguments for god attributes of god and his nature religious epistemology and so forth do you see changes in that way well i i mean a good question i i think of late it feels as though yes there's been a bit of a shift and and that's not actually all that surprising just given what has had been happening kind of in the sort of broader societal movements of the last five or so years i i think where it strikes me that some of them what would have what maybe could have felt like abstruse philosophical subjects in for example critical theory or or the the issues about gender and sexuality those maybe felt a little less profoundly now it makes sense that that they weren't really having a profound influence on the way that we lived our ordinary lives on our politics and those kinds of things even if they were actually having that i think the relationship between those things and contemporary high-level conversations that are broad in scope not just isolated to kind of ivory tower things i think we've seen the ways that those show up a little bit more overtly of late and so for example the interesting critical theory has really ramped up recently and that's not all that surprising we have a lot of authors right now who are appealing directly to those kinds of issues in order to deal with questions of theological interest about reconciliation and politics and you know those kinds of things so i think just in the last few years i think it's really um increased the interest level yeah that's very interesting but i would say but you know as far as our curriculum goes of course we're interested in trying to lay the relevant foundational philosophical material in order for people to then go on to think about those questions from that kind of platform right which is what we've always been wanting to do yeah and that's really important i think is to have those foundational issues in place yeah i agree yeah oh good uh there's a lot of people have uh flagged questions uh coming in here so steph you were gonna you were gonna ask something before dr craig so rudely interrupted you stuff um yeah so i was thinking i mean i obviously appreciate analytic philosophy and i'm sure everyone in this program does or we wouldn't be in this program um and i think that logical rigor definitely brings something the theology that's needed and i'm wondering if there's any bits of a systematic theology that you think would be beyond the scope of analytical philosophy um oh and if there are what would be the means to bridge that and if not how could analytic philosophy encompass all of theology i i honestly don't see that there is any area handled by the systematic theologian that would be impervious to the tools of analytic philosophy i do think there are areas of theology that are not part of systematic theology such as historical theology biblical theology moral theology would be another example that is usually classed apart but even there i would say the tools of analytic philosophy can be useful but i just wouldn't see those as part of the enterprise of systematic theology which is what i'm interested in if you don't mind can i ask a quick follow-up so um i'm i'm currently teaching a class that um steph and some others in the scholar and on stumps eleanor stumps wandering in darkness and she makes a lot of the sort of second personal kinds of knowledge i don't know if you're familiar with her work i imagine you are because of your attention to the atonement recently and so on but i i wonder if i i don't know what um where steph was coming from in particular but the the the ways that stump talks about franciscan forms of knowing and so on do you see that playing a role at all in the systematic theological task or is that something separate yeah i do think it is something separate tim and that was the point that someone referred to earlier of my thinking of systematic theology as a vicin shaft i first encountered this question in talking with german students of theology and this particular german student was just really really exercised by the question is theology a vicin shock and we americans didn't even understand what he was talking about we just didn't have a conception of what it meant for theology to be a vicin shock but as i've thought about it over the years it seems to me that it is and that therefore the proximate purpose of theology the immediate purpose of it is not to have personal knowledge of god in the way that i think eleanor has said uh but rather it is to provide theoretical knowledge of god and that this will have down the um uh in the long run it will have definitely application to one's worship of god as jane said and practical application but the immediate purpose of systematic theology i think is theoretical and viscense not personal yeah thank you scott olson up next yeah um so one of the things that drew me to talbot was the emphasis on integrating the spiritual life with our academic life i think that's pretty important and so i guess my question as it relates to systematic philosophical theology um does it like what does the holy spirit have a role in in the way we do this and how should we understand the role because it feels weird to be like god please give me the answer to you know this particular theological question but i think it'd be also wrong to say there's just there's nothing that the holy spirit contributes to it so i'm just wondering if you thought of how that might look um as you'll see in the talk for next week i am a proponent of so-called reformed epistemology where through the inner testimony of the holy spirit we have beliefs of the great truths of the gospel which are properly basic with respect to both justification and warrant and so for me the holy spirit plays a vital role in epistemology uh in fact i i go so far as to defend the view that the witness of the holy spirit is an intrinsic defeater defeater that even a christian confronted with defeaters that he cannot answer is warranted in his christian belief because the warrant afforded his beliefs by the witness of the holy spirit overwhelms the warrant of these defeaters opposed to it and so it intrinsically defeats the defeaters brought against it for him who attends to it and doesn't grieve or quench the holy spirit so the holy spirit plays a very vital role i think in religious epistemology but even that role is theoretical you're describing a theory of religious knowledge in which the holy spirit plays a role in in actually doing theology i tend to agree i think with what you said that i don't think the holy spirit is going to lead you to your conclusions there are just too many godly men who differ theologically to think that if we pray hard enough and walk with the lord that he's going to guide us theologically it seems to me that he's given us the scriptures as our rule of faith and that the scriptures make reasonably clear the central truths of the christian faith and that the rest is just um secondary um and so i trust the holy spirit to give me the energy each day the drive the motivation the stick-to-itiveness to keep on plotting and and not give up and and to have the desire to honor him in all that i do and so my prayer for my work is that the lord will use it to his glory that it will honor him and it can do that even if he doesn't lead me to particular philosophical conclusions i think i've got to come to those on my own but i i do think i can pray with confidence lord use this work for your glory and the extension of your kingdom does that answer the question okay next up matt and hey uh hey dr craig um hello tim uh do i have do i have time for two-part questions or should i just throw one out you do you matt all right all right thank you um yeah so i guess so yeah i have two questions then um so one was just uh i know so we're saying that you don't see a distinction between christian philosophy or religion and systematic theology in both its subject matter its methods uh you know and anything like that but i'm wondering if you see maybe a distinction of uh maybe and maybe this gets to more the sociological descriptions of it like you were talking about but you see a distinction maybe an emphasis or focus for people in these respective disciplines perhaps maybe the systematic theologian may be giving more emphasis in their study to the biblical material and the philosopher religion focusing more on the direct yes that's that's very clear i think that when you read the work of systematic theologians they do even those who are not conservatives lay a strong emphasis on divine revelation as a basic source of knowledge uh for their discipline they're not just spinning webs out of thin air through philosophical conjecture there is a strong emphasis on the um essential role played by divine revelation and scripture um so that that is clearly an emphasis whereas the philosophers will not tend to have that emphasis so much when i read philosophers of religion even on topics like faith as i've said what they generally will do is develop their theory and then at the end go back to scripture and look for a few proof texts to support the conclusions that they've already arrived at it's not a genuine exegesis it's more of an isages where they're reading into scripture the theory that they've arrived at independently and so part of my goal in doing this systematic deal theology is to redress that imbalance i want to have work that is respectable exegetically and biblically but then also respectable philosophically and my work on the atonement recently or on divine a saity would be i hope showcase examples of this kind of integrative engagement thank you yeah unfortunately before you ask the second part unfortunately as as i indicated before there's not a whole lot of christian philosophers who have the training to do this kind of work exceptions would include people like the late marilyn adams uh who had degrees in theology and philosophy robert adams her husband as well um eleanor stump actually has a master's degree in biblical studies remarkably stephen davis is also trained in theology and philosophy so those would be some standout examples of folks who are equipped to work in both areas integratively thank you yeah um yeah my second question was just uh how do you see the role i guess of historical theology fitting into systematic theology like what kind of weight and how do you how do you factor in the weight of tradition and so into your systematic theology as an evangelical who is committed to sola scriptura as the rule of faith i don't place a whole lot of authority on church tradition quite frankly i think even the creeds the ecumenical creeds need to be brought before the bar of scripture in order to weigh their truth and adequacy i'm confronting this problem right now in the section i'm writing on divine simplicity i hate to admit it but it is true that the doctrine of divine simplicity has been part of mainstream christian theology going back prior to augustine even now simplicity has often been understood in different ways by theologians but nevertheless there has been a strong commitment to the doctrine of divine simplicity and yet i am persuaded as are i think most analytic philosophies philosophers of religion that this is an incoherent doctrine uh that in a strong form at least is untenable and should not be embraced and so there i am definitely bucking the historical tradition having said that though i think it's very important to be aware of and engage these great figures of the past like augustine gregory of nissa of course thomas aquinas you can't ignore these folks you've got to read them and when you disagree with them explain why and offer good arguments as to why you think they're they're wrong so i this is a tremendous challenge one that i do not feel adequate to frankly i mean i read a systematic theologian or dogmatician like herman bovink for example the great dutch reformed theologian his knowledge of historical theology is just encyclopedic and it would take a lifetime to have a knowledge just of historical theology and all i can do is hit a few mountain peaks along the way some of the most prominent so i i have a deep sense of my own inadequacy uh in this area but nevertheless recognize that if my work is to be adequate i have to take some cognizance of the major figures and trends in historical theology especially if i'm going to disagree thank you just uh for for what it's worth dr greg first of all i'm not sure that you are inadequate to that task but um regardless of that i i think it just in my experience um and maybe you've experienced this too and talking with theologians about these kinds of questions and about analytic theology one of the things that they really have trouble with is the lack of attention to the historical tradition and a lot of theologians are very frustrated by the kind of a historical approach and it kind of makes sense when you think about it i mean thomas was a really smart guy if he was writing today everyone would read everything that he wrote so why would we ignore uh why would we ignore his work when we're trying to figure out what the truth is you know and yeah um so anyway um just to add that little that little piece i think next up um is lumba david go ahead lumber all right good can you guys hear me yes can you hear me all right great how are you dr craig i'm well thank you good i have a two-part question as well i'm going to try to be brief um i like i've watched many of your lectures people like dr john lennox dr frank turek um and so i always think because the the end of all we do well it's philosophy theology in the christian realm it is to bring people to christ um so one of my questions is what is the impact of what you've done in terms of um seeing people either converted or at least uh opening up their minds to maybe changing what they currently believe outside of the people that should like that you are um having a dialogue what the discourse with because i think their minds are already made up and i mean i think it'd be incredible if they do change their minds um but i i look at it as you're probably trying to reach people that are on the fence or that or have some great areas that need to be filled in so i mean what is the impact you've seen in terms of people actually either coming to faith or whether it's a muslim or a buddhist or whatever they are saying you know what maybe i need to recheck or rethink um the the the beliefs are currently espoused now yeah i would just issue a small correction to what you said while i think that evangelism and the desire to bring people to christ is really important i think the overriding aim of our work is to bring glory to god and one of the ways we bring glory to god is by bringing people to a personal knowledge of god and so one of the central purposes of the ministry i have reasonable faith is evangelistic to bring people to christ and i have been thrilled uh at the number of people who have uh written uh expressing how they have either come to faith in christ or come back to faith in christ after a period of falling away through seeing a debate or hearing a talk or watching a video um and if you'd like to see some of these heartwarming testimonials there's a section on our reasonablefaith.org website called testimonials and there you can find these testimonials that come in every week week after week uh telling of how god has used this material to change their lives so it is really encouraging to see that the lord is using this to bring people to a knowledge of himself thank you did you have another question you said it was a two-part question was that the only was that no no i'm gonna i'm gonna stop there i want other people to have a chance to okay thank you we have some time later maybe i'll ask i i'll i'll keep you in the queue um adam priestly hello dr craig uh hello you're working your ministry and uh i enjoyed the uh the video lecture um uh we've kind of skated around this topic a little bit so i thought i'd i'd ask you you mentioned how uh analytic philosophy would be really useful and i know you've had some debates with some domestic philosophers i'm thinking of brian huffling and richard howell who were both my previous teachers at the school that i left and uh i'm curious why domestic philosophers are so against analytic philosophy and if you had any thoughts on that uh it seems like and what analytic philosophy is uh something that's bashed uh among two mystic philosophers so i'm kind of curious if you had any thoughts about that well i i think that may be a peculiarity at southern evangelical seminary rather than in general because most analytic philosophers think that thomas was an analytic philosopher and most of the contemporary thomas that i read are fully engaged with analytic philosophy i mentioned that i'm working right now on the doctrine of divine simplicity and this has been the subject of article after article and book after book by people employing the methods of analytic philosophy and i don't sense any sort of rejection of the methods of analytic philosophy on the part of thomas rather what i find there is an emphasis that thomas is working with a very different metaphysical framework than what is current in modern philosophy and that therefore if we're to understand him we need to engage or enter into his horizons and to understand his defense of divine simplicity within the aristotelian neoplatonic metaphysical framework that he was working in and that's quite correct that's just a matter of doing good historical uh philosophy but it's not a rejection of analytic philosophy as such but just saying be sensitive to the metaphysical assumptions of the historical figure that you're engaging with otherwise you might really distort what he is actually saying yeah i think actually at one point you distinguished between analytic philosophy as a kind of tradition of knowledge or or set of views versus analytic philosophy as a kind of toolkit and i wonder if sometimes what's happening in those conversations is that folks are thinking about analytic philosophy as a set of commitments to particular claims about epistemology or metaphysics or whatever and then of course i mean a lot of analytic philosophers reject those things so that's not really a great way to think about anything i think you're probably absolutely right about that tim they look at modern analytic philosophy and they see that they think of properties as abstract platonic objects to which particular stand in a relation of exemplification and so when it's said that uh god is identical with all of his perfections i think that means god is identical with an abstract object and that's absurd and what they'll say is you've got to understand thomas's metaphysical framework which is very different and that's a an important point to make and not to identify analytic philosophy with this set of theses as opposed to the toolkit so i think that's a good admonition i mean one way even to think about analytic theology is a kind of retrieval of scholastic theology i mean there's a sort of just stylistically it would make a lot of sense but okay mark stanley i think um you haven't asked a question i don't think mark have you because we're circling back around to people that have and we only have a few minutes left so go ahead mark okay thank you i i want to ask a humble question i i hope i'm not simply misunderstanding something but um i i want to touch on uh dr craig um your understanding of how christian philosophy and christian theology touch because it sounds like what you're how they touch right right how they touch because it sounds like really what you're saying is that both christian philosophy and theology have the same sources of knowledge and the goals and so and that goal will be articulating a christian worldview and so it sounds like really what you're saying is that you're proposing a strong integration between the two and so if you could start your own seminary or your own academy or or you were king of the world or whatever would you always want to teach philosophy and theology together uh what what's what's the dividing line there that you think might separate those well as it's it's more than integration the way i see them they're basically the same discipline they they overlap almost completely so that it's not so much a matter of integration it's just doing the job well and i think that many people don't do the job well because they do it in a lopsided manner so i would found a program like the one at talbot school of theology i think having this philosophy program at a divinity school is a stroke of genius because you can get not only your philosophical training but you can do courses in systematic theology and some of you i think to your credit even do new testament greek and so come away from your training at talbot well-equipped to do the kind of integrative work that i'm suggesting needs to be done so that's what i would envision would be a program like talbots well that'll make a great ad we'll clip that yeah there you go but we didn't plan that all right so i think we have one more uh person who hasn't asked a question yet and then um i think we're going to transition to the other part of our time so sean you're gonna have the last the last question here hello dr craig nice to meet you hello um you said at the beginning of this talk that to be a christian philosopher you should really find a place to specialize in so you can contribute to the conversation somewhere how did you discover where your place was in this conversation and is there any suggestions that you can give us of how to go about that well let me just share with you my own personal uh story i have never sought to work on topics that are deemed relevant or important which is probably why i don't work on gender theory or critical race theory or things of this sort i i've just not let that motivate me at all rather and i haven't even worked on topics that are important to the discipline rather instead the way i have chosen my topics is based upon what i'm passionate about what do i really care about what lights up my board and the advantage of working that way i have to tell you is that it enables you to endure the long slog that is often necessary to complete say a doctoral dissertation or a book um i've talked to some guys who at the end of their doctoral dissertation they say i'm so sick of this topic i never want to look at it again man i don't feel that way at all i'm so passionate about these subjects that i just keep working on them my whole life um and so i don't know if you can do that yourself but i i i'll just say that it's worked for me and that the great advantage of is that it is energizing it is inspiring and it gives you the endurance to complete the task so as you're thinking about what you want to specialize in i would encourage simply to say what am i really passionate about what do i really care about and make that your area of specialization and then let the chips fall where they may that's fantastic so um i just want to pause for a second and just say thank you dr craig for uh taking all of these questions about this project they gave them um we've been at this for about an hour now so i think what we're going to do is transition and of course um sean you just asked a question that i was going to ask and i can't believe you would do that to me okay um you have really segue i know he has this disarming accent and then he just goes and steals your questions from you you know um anyway so um dr craig i guess what how i'd like to spend the last little bit of our time um is just in in a little bit more of the space that that sean just introduced us to um and i just have some questions for you about uh just looking back on these 40 50 years of of work and ministry um and so i'm just kind of curious to to get us started you think about all of the projects that you've engaged in all of the books that you've written all the papers that you've written how would you kind of group the major topics so let me just give you an example of the sort of thing i had in mind you've talked both about the nature of time and so on and about divine eternity so would you put one of those projects under the umbrella of another um is there some sort of way that you've kind of imagined this is what i'm working on now and this is what i'm working on now can you describe those kind of major movements in your work for us a little bit yes i can because it was very deliberate when i finished my doctoral work and began teaching at trinity evangelical divinity school in the m.a program in philosophy there i thought well now what am i going to specialize in as a christian philosopher what should be my research program and i thought i'll tackle the coherence of theism anthony kenny's little book the god of the philosophers really impressed me and so i thought i'll take on as a kind of long-term research program a philosophical analysis of the attributes of god well i never realized how much i had bitten off i spent the first seven years working full-time on the attribute of divine omniscience and particularly god's foreknowledge of future contingents i then turned to divine eternity and spent the next 11 years working full-time on the subject of god's relationship to time which took me deeply into the philosophy of time then thirdly i tackle divine a saity and i spent 13 years full time working on this question of god's relationship to abstract objects and how could god be the soul ultimate reality the creator of everything outside of himself well that's only three of the divine attributes that i had gotten through and that brings us up to just a few years ago so it became pretty clear to me that i would never be able to finish my project but nevertheless that is how i conceive my life's work is being under the umbrella of the coherence of theism now my wife jan and several others have been urging me for a number of years to write a systematic philosophical theology and i realized that in order to do this i would have to bone up on certain areas of theology in which i was weak one of these was the doctrine of the atonement for many years i had been deeply dissatisfied with the atonement theories that my colleagues i mean christian philosophers i don't mean my talbot colleagues had offered and i kept waiting for someone to step up to the plate and offer a robust defense of a reformation theory of the atonement and just nobody seemed to do so so i i finally decided i'm going to have to tackle this myself and so i spent about two years working on the doctrine of the atonement and in two years obviously i couldn't master the literature either the contemporary literature or the historical literature in the way that i had for say god and time or god and abstract objects but nevertheless i felt that it was sufficient for me to come to some studied solid views on an adequate atonement theory the other area then was anthropology and i thought i have got to come to some kind of a resolution about the question of the historical atom and so for the last two years i've worked on the question of the historical atom and this was a work that was both heavily exegetical took me into old testament uh studies as well as new testament and then heavily scientific i learned so much about contemporary paleoanthropology and the wide diversity of scientific theories involved in the study of ancient man and again i couldn't hope couldn't hope to master the literature but nevertheless i was able to come to i think some solid defensible positions on that and so that work is forthcoming should be out this year uh called in quest of the historical atom and with those behind me then i felt i was now ready to tackle this systematic philosophical theology and so for the last 10 months i have been engaged in working on this systematic philosophical theology so that's how my research has unfolded over the years that's really helpful so what i'm hearing you say is that we can look forward to seeing your systematic philosophical theology in about 67 years if it takes the same amount of time i i'm hoping i am hoping to complete it in five to ten years that's my goal so i'm i'm hoping that the lord will grant me to live that long and uh that i will be able to bring it to completion well i'm excited to see it uh dr craig i think that's i think it's going to be really an important work yeah yeah you know the second question i was going to ask you was about whether there was a through line in your work and it sounds like you've already answered that because it's the coherence of theism up until just a few years ago yeah it was the main sort of through line um yeah that's a really interesting way to think about those other big projects as well so i'm curious though do you have a favorite when you think about all the projects that you've engaged in is there one that you think that was the one that i really just enjoyed the most or maybe it's the most important or something like that oh okay now that's a little bit different i believed him that for the the church and for theology my most important work has been this recent work on the atonement because the doctrine of the atonement lies at the very heart of the christian faith and so i really believe that more than the cosmological argument more than divine society the work that the the lord will use in the life of the church um will be this work on the atonement now apart from that i really enjoyed the work on divine saity and the work on god and time i think that probably my two best books would be the book time and eternity uh which is a semi-popular version of the book the work on god and time and then the other one would be god over all which is a semi-popular version of the work on divine society both of those are works that i'm proud of i'm curious how you think about the popular level work that you've done as well do you um when you think about things that are sort of important in the life of the church and so on do you tend to think first about the academic work or do you look more to the the more popular level work that you've done i do look more to the academic work tim i think in the long run that's the work that will make a difference think of people like augustine and thomas aquinas and the lasting influence i want to produce a body of work that will still be read in a couple of centuries by future christian philosophers so the popular level work i think is fleeting and transitory but i'm praying and hoping that the scholarly work will have an enduring value my perspective is the long run perspective yeah yeah that's that's really interesting actually because i think sometimes our temptation is to think the other way you know it's yeah academic work but you know jp and i have thrashed this uh together in conversation uh about which is really the most influential and important because undoubtedly the the popular work has tremendous influence in inspiring students to do study themselves in philosophy or philosophical theology and affects the life of the church i mean look at the contemporary movement in apologetics that has been birthed by the revolution in christian philosophy that has taken place it's it really has changed the church and it's changing it in internationally as well so there is great influence there there's no doubt about that and and it is an issue that i think each one of us has to wrestle with and come to terms with but here's the good thing they don't have to be mutually exclusive my strategy as you probably noticed is that i write a scholarly level book and then i write a popular level distillation of the same thing the same material so i've got the kalam cosmological argument but then i've got the existence of god in the beginning of the universe i've got the problem of divine foreknowledge and future contingents from aristotle to suarez and then i've got the only wise god i've got assessing the new testament evidence for the historicity of the resurrection of jesus and then i've got the sun rises you know so my my inspiration was emanuel kant kant wrote the critique of pure reason which nobody could understand and so he wrote this little distillation of it called prolagominon to any future metaphysics and i thought why can't i do the same thing i can write popular level versions of the same material and that way you get double mileage out of the same work and you reach completely different audiences at least i thought i thought i would i've been surprised at the number of philosophers who have read my popular little books um it's because the academic ones are so expensive bill that's true sadly that is that that's a big drawback but um but anyway it's not mutually exclusive and then you just let the chips fall where they may which one god chooses to use it's up to him yeah that's interesting um here's a here's kind of a relationship have you ever started a project and not finished have you ever had something that just sort of didn't work out you know you started thinking about something and then you just decided to abandon it uh part way through has that happened no no i don't think so i i know i i haven't everything that i've put my hand to i've completed and that's probably related to that criterion i use for picking my projects namely things i'm passionate about yeah so how do you think of success for these projects like what what is what's goal that you have so you know i mean i can imagine if you had some criteria of success and you're halfway through a project you might imagine this just isn't working it's not going in the direction that i want how do you judge whether you've succeeded in completing a problem well um one would be whether or not i have dealt with the literature on that subject fairly is there important literature that i've neglected or overlooked or have i mastered the important literature on this topic and interacted with the arguments and what i found tim in say working on divine society for 13 years is that after several years you've really mastered the important literature and what happens is the rest of it becomes repetitive and people just are repeating over and over again the things that others have said in more influential and important works and i wanted to take cognizance of those because i wanted to master the literature but in all honesty the project could have been completed earlier and that's why i didn't feel bad about cutting short the work on the atonement or on the historical atom after just say two years on each project because i felt i had mastered the important literature and the arguments and if then i feel that i have come to some reasoned position that is well argued and takes account of the views of my opponents fairly then i feel like i've been a success um and i don't worry about book sales or things like that that kind of success isn't important it's more academic success have i made a contribution to scholarship and that would be based upon the worth and completeness of the arguments that i offer in the book you just ignore external metrics entirely like do you ever look and see how many citations you had or anything like that or is that something that you just ignore i ignore that um i mean i do get royalty statements from the publishers but they're generally so paltry i don't even look at how many copies have actually sold because they're so few it would be embarrassing you know so i just take the check and jan deposits it and we just go on you know so um i mean i i it would be disingenuous to say that i take no cognizance of it i mean in fact it was frustration with the fact tim that i felt that for 25 years i had been working in this area and yet i felt like it was done in a corner that nobody was taking any cognizance of it nobody was paying attention to it it was because of that that i started reasonable faith reasonable faith was founded in order to be a megaphone for my ministry my work it would be a way of disseminating the material via the internet um that would reach people that i wouldn't come into contact with personally or wouldn't have read my books what i did not realize when we founded reasonable faith was the degree to which youtube would become the primary means of disseminating my material what we found was that there were these pirated videos of my debates that other people were posting on the internet had completely unauthorized and they were getting thousands and thousands of views well we eventually realized we've got to start doing this ourselves and so we started a couple of youtube channels and one of these fellas dr craig videos it was called he said the stress was killing him so he just donated the channel to us he gave it to us but i've seen that channel dr craig that's not that wasn't a reasonable faith channel at first this was some guy i don't even know his name he wanted to remain anonymous because he was getting all these awful atheistic attacks and he was really stressed out and so he said look i'll just give you this youtube channel and so we're grateful to this fellow for doing it and uh and so as i say i would be disingenuous if i were to say i don't pay attention to or i'm unconcerned about how many people i i'm reaching we obviously are um and so we're trying to exploit as many media as we can print media internet personal contacts in order to get the material out there i'm i'm sure at some point that's that's a hard thing to balance right because there's there's a way of approaching that sort of task that can lead you to sort of value things that you know you shouldn't value have you how have you tried to manage that is it just is it just jan there in your ear telling you you know don't don't go that route you know or how what what sorts of support systems have you had that have allowed you to to not go too far down the road of valuing those yeah she she is a big help in that regard she says i don't want to be famous she said i value our private lives that nobody knows about and is obscure she values that obscurity so when we started reasonable faith we made it very clear that this would not be done at the sacrifice of my scholarly integrity that what i would continue to do would be to continue to write research produce material and then we would have others who would be in charge of running the website and running the youtube channels and so forth so when we started this we talked to curt swindoll who is a kind of consultant and kurt said you're going to need to raise about a hundred thousand dollars to start a website and hire a webmaster who can do this and i said all right we can do this we'll trust god for a hundred thousand dollars and so we went out and appealed to friends and acquaintances and so forth we raised this hundred thousand hired a webmaster and others and launched this ministry called reasonable faith and since then we have a full-time executive director now michael lepine apart from jan and me he's the only full-time employee of the ministry and michael runs things and he carries the burden for me so that i can devote myself to a life of scholarship and michael runs reasonable faith yeah that's that's really interesting um and so i i think we can sort of wrap this up a little bit i i so appreciate you dr craig being willing to sort of share some of your thoughts and and i know that that's a kind of intimate thing to be sharing with us and i just want to express my appreciation for that i do have one more question for you okay and it's just this why in the world did you ever shave off that magnificent beard of yours i mean what what possessed you to do that horrific act of self mutilation yeah you've got you've got a fine beard um i originally grew the beard to look older when i applied to the alexander von humboldt foundation for a grant to go to germany and do this doctoral study under volvo pollen bar i looked so young and you know went behind the ears that i thought i'll grow this beard and this will give me a little gravitas you know and so i wore a beard for many years but then pretty soon it started making me look older than i wanted to look uh so by the time i was 50 i thought i don't want to look any older than 50 it's time to shave it off and it was starting to turn gray anyway and so that was when i shed my beard was on my 50th birthday and our my little daughter charity who had never known me any other way i i never realized the impact it would have on her she said i want my daddy back she was like i was a different person and so uh yeah that's why i did it and uh man if i were to grow it back now it would be totally gray i would look so old and haggard you know i i just i don't want to do that well you were talking earlier about how you want to be anonymous and not be noticed you know you can just grow some kind of scraggly beard and just wander around atlanta under the streets oh my goodness all right well on that note sorry to make you go there um i don't you know this is on zoom so we can't really give you a round of applause or anything but again we just want to express our appreciation to you for being here and and we're so grateful that you're a part of our community and and are willing to take the time we're looking forward to next friday as well so um thanks for doing this today uh dr craig and we appreciate you and we'll we'll see you next week okay okay thank you tim my pleasure to do this today i love the talbot community and uh you students who are there are privileged to be a part of this fine community uh may god really uh bless you and equip you for a life of service [Music]

Channel: ReasonableFaithOrg

Views: 5,651

Keywords: William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith, God, Jesus, Christ, Apologetics, Christianity, Theology, Philosophy, Religion, Existence of God, Theism, Atheism, Arguments, Logic, Reason, Time, Beginning, Universe, Talbot, Systematic Theology

Id: Zgp2O_UlNv0

Length: 76min 41sec (4601 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 28 2021