Did you hear about the latest power scheme? San Francisco is apparently preparing to test collection carts and biodegradable bags in a city center popular with dog walkers. The theory: dog poop could be scooped into a "methane digester," a device which uses bugs and microorganisms to convert the substance to methane. The gas would then be trapped and burned to power a turbine which produces electricity. Since dogs and cats in America produce about 10 million tons of waste a year, the possibilities are obvious. And the dogs don't seem to mind.

Like them, I have no idea how all that is possible. There is so much I don't know or understand about the world. Not long ago a friend e-mailed me with a large list of new facts. Among them:

--Money isn't made out of paper, but cotton.

--The 57 on the Heinz ketchup bottle represents the number of varieties of pickles the company once had (the number doesn't really represent anything).

--A rat can last longer without water than a camel

--Susan Lucci is the daughter of Phyllis Diller (another Urban Legend).

--A duck's quack doesn't echo. (It has been proven it does echo...it's just so quiet, it's hard to hear).

--The "spot" on the 7-Up label comes from its inventor (an albino), who had red eyes (yet another Urban Legend).

--John Wilkes Booth's brother once saved the life of Abraham Lincoln's son.

--The number of possible ways of playing the first four moves per side in a game of chess is 318,979,564,000.

--"Upper" and "lower" case letters are so named because the "upper case" letters were stored in the case on top at the printer, and the "lower case" letters in the case below it.

--There are no words in the dictionary which rhyme with "orange," "purple," and "silver."

--celery has negative calories--it takes more calories to eat a stick of celery than the celery has in it.

And the world's store of knowledge doubles every eighteen months. Who knows what we won't know then!

In this chapter I'm not going to contribute to the knowledge glut beyond what is absolutely essential. Writing what follows is painful for me, since I'm leaving out far more than I'm putting in. But since this is a survey intended to help Christians understand their faith and serve God more effectively, and not a survey of historical philosophy on its own merits, perhaps the scholars among us will forgive me.

We'll continue with Patristic philosophy (named for the "fathers" of the church through Augustine) by looking at the person who most influenced the person who most influenced us. Plotinus (AD 204-269) was the greatest Platonic philosopher after Plato. Born in Lycopolis, Egypt, he studied philosophy in Alexandria for eleven years, then established his own school in Room in 243. In 269 he died of a painful illness, probably leprosy.

His final words summarize his thought: "the divine spirit within me is departing to be united with the universal divine spirit." After his death, his disciple Porphyry revised and published his works in six Enneads (series of nine writings each).

Plotinus wanted to bring the uncharted religious ideas of his age under one unified system. He saw God as the source of all being and existence, and believed that the universe emanates from him. Thought produces soul, which produces matter. The soul "fell" into its physical state when it turned from God toward the material. Somewhere Orpheus is cheering.

Only by mystically purging ourselves from all bodily sensations and contemplating the eternal can we know God. Then our souls transcend their own thought, lose themselves in the soul of God, and become one with God.

We've heard all this before. Now comes the new (and highly significant) part. Plotinus believed that evil has no independent status or identity. Evil is the result of wrong thoughts, and only comes into material reality when we think them. And so evil is nothing of itself, literally "non-being." For reasons which make no sense just yet, this is crucial. Trust me.

Now we come to my hero among the Patristics: Augustine. He was the greatest constructive thinker and most influential teacher of the early Christian church, and a dominant force in theology and philosophy even today. His was a formative influence on Descartes and the whole development of modern philosophy. And the Protestant reformers, especially Luther and Calvin, were guided in their theological views to a great extent by his published works. Other than that, his life didn't accomplish much.

Augustine (AD 354-430) was born at Thagaste in North Africa, to a Christian mother named Monica and a pagan father named Patricius. He became a brilliant and successful rhetorician (think lawyer), practicing at Rome and Milan. In Milan he was converted to Christ in 386, and soon ordained. He became Bishop of Hippo in North Africa in 396 and remained there to his death.

The writings of this man fill 16 volumes of Migne's Patrologia Latina, in very small print--I had to translate some of them in my doctoral work and remember the experience painfully. The main bulk were very detailed explanations of the Scriptures, either as sermons he preached at Hippo or commentaries on various books of the Bible. His homilies on John's Gospel, Explanations of the Psalms, and commentaries on Genesis are of special importance. And his two most widely read works, Confessions and City of God, are the most significant and influential Christian books of all time outside of Scripture.

Let's take a brief tour of his thought. At every turn you'll say, "But that's what everyone believes." That's the point. Let's use Augustine's Latin phrases to make it.

For Augustine, God is absolute and majestic. He is eternal, transcendent, and absolutely free, holy and totally separate from evil. What he wills, he does without intermediaries of any kind (vs. Gnosticism and Plotinus).

All ideas and forms of things are grounded in God's intelligence (agreeing with Plato). He proceeded rationally in creating the world, and everything owes its existence to him (vs. Plato). He created the world ex nihilo (out of nothing). All that is, is good, since it was created by God.

All true theological thinking begins and ends with the Trinity. Augustine's work De Trinitate is the single most important writing ever produced on this crucial subject. God created mankind as Trinity, and we can approach him only as Trinity.

Augustine believed that the only knowledge worth having is knowledge of God and ourselves. All other knowledge, such as logic, metaphysics, and ethics, has value only insofar as it contributes to our knowledge of God.

It is our duty to understand what we firmly believe, to see the rational basis of our faith. And so we have a famous credo from Augustine: "Understand in order that you may believe; believe in order that you may understand." The highest function of wisdom and reason is to know God.

Truth is objective and absolute. I know that I exist, and so I know the reality of existence (Descartes would get credit for this idea 1,200 years later). The center of all thought is God. Concentration on inner spiritual reality leads to all truth.

Against Plato and with the Hebrew anthropology, Augustine believed that the body is not inherently evil. We are body and soul, but each works with the other to bring us to life's purpose.

Now things get interesting. Before the Fall we were holy and wholly innocent. After the Fall our entire being was corrupted. We were plunged into ignorance and sin, and are now utterly incapable of knowing what we should do apart from God's revelation and redemption. We were free to sin or not to sin before the Fall, but after the Fall it is impossible for us not to sin (non posse non peccare, for you intellectuals).

And so Adam's sin created hereditary sin, from which only God can reform us. The ramifications of this idea for infant baptism, sexuality, and human identity are still with us today.

As a logical result of this belief in inherited sin, Augustine argued strongly for predestination regarding salvation. He believed that every person is born with a sin nature, so that God is just in condemning us all. If anyone turns to God by faith, this is only possible by God's help, since our sinful nature makes such conversion impossible. And so God must decide who is to be saved and who is to be lost. A Calvinist before Calvin, so to speak.

Now we go from preaching to meddling. For Augustine, everything that is, is created by God and is therefore good (omnia natura bonum est--all nature is the best). How, then, did evil come to be?

By logical progression, if everything that exists is good, evil cannot "exist." Evil must be a privation or lack of the good: "nothing else than corruption, either of the measure, or the form, or the order, that belong to nature. Nature therefore which has been corrupted, is called evil" (Nature of the Good, 4).

God has given us freedom of will, so that we would choose the good (his worship). But we choose wrongly. And evil results from our wrong choices. It already existed in potential (evil as non-being, from Plotinus). And we make it a reality when we misuse our freedom.

The result is simple: evil is not God's fault but ours. This "free-will" theodicy (an explanation for evil in the light of God's goodness) is the most popular such approach in Christian history.

Augustine's theodicy drives his philosophy of history. There are two kinds of people ("cities" in his analogy): those who desire God and those who do not. The "City of God" is spiritual and eternal; the "City of the Devil" is material and temporal. They are in perpetual conflict throughout history (the "dialectical" philosophy of history, found in Rousseau, Hegel, Comte, Nietzsche, Marx, and Spengler). Only when Jesus returns will the City of God defeat finally and forever the City of the Devil, and heal the results of the Fall eternally.

No one except Paul has exerted as much philosophical and theological influence on the Church as St. Augustine. We still think his thoughts in so many ways. But as is true with all human minds, his was finite and fallen. We'll see how in the studies to come.

Now we move briefly to the "Medieval" period of Christian philosophy and history. I detest calling this the Middle Ages (did they know they were in them?), and especially detest calling them the Dark Ages. What Protestants call "Dark," Catholic historians call "Golden." History is truly perspective.

It is fair to say that not much original thinking occurred during the thousand years between Augustine and the Reformation, but that's for a reason. The Western world rediscovers Aristotle, and enters into a massive project of assimilating his thought into Christian theology and practice. For the most part, the intellectuals of the day confined themselves to relating the work of the ancients to their own faith. And they accomplished what they intended to. Be careful what you aim at, lest you hit it.

Three unusually creative people deserve our applause, however: Anselm, Abelard, and Thomas Aquinas. Let's start with Anselm of Canterbury, since he was born before the others.

Anselm (1033-1109) was Archbishop of Canterbury in England (though they forced the office on him). He was the first truly significant Medieval philosopher. for three reasons.

First, he argued for the right relationship of reason and faith: "I believe that I might understand" (Credo ut intelligam). I agree, so he must be right.

Second, he articulated a very influential theory of the atonement: the satisfaction view. In Cur Deus Homo (Why the God Man?) he suggested that Christ satisfied God at the cross, enabling a reconciliation between God and man. This theology came from the feudal society in which it was born, but that doesn't make it right.

Third, he constructed the most complicated defense of God's existence ever devised: the ontological argument. Take two aspirin and proceed:

I can conceive of a perfect being ("that than which nothing greater can be conceived").

to be perfect, something must exist.

God exists.

Philosophers are still debating. And in heaven, Anselm laughs at them all.

Anselm's philosophical sparring partner was Abelard (1079-1142). But the latter had far greater problems than the former.

Abelard wanted to follow the art of disputation, so he became the student of William of Champeaux in Paris (around 1100). But he argued against William and was invited to leave. Later he met Heloise, a niece of a high official at Notre Dame, and fell in love with her. They had a child, and wanted to be married. Heloise's father found out, and had Abelard beaten and emasculated. Abelard went to a monastery, and Heloise to a nunnery. Abelard was accused of heresy, and expelled from the monastery. He entered another monastery, but was expelled again for heresy. He died soon after. And you thought you had a tough week.

Abelard disagreed with Anselm's view of the atonement, putting forth his own "moral influence" theory. In his view, Christ's death was an expression of God's love designed to invoke a response of devotion, love, and obedience. In other words, the Father loves us because he loves us, not because his Son made him. I agree (though I think the atonement was more than an example or influence for us, being a substitutionary atonement man myself).

And Abelard disagreed with Anselm's view of reason and faith. In fact, his credo was precisely the opposite: "I understand, that I might believe." Rationalists every since have agreed. A tough life, but a good thinker.

Now we come to the highest expression of Medieval philosophy and theology: Thomas Aquinas (1225?-1274). Remarkably, the greatest thinker of the Medieval era was known as the "dumb ox" as a child, and graduated last in his class (must have been some class!). He wanted to establish the Christian faith in a world where Aristotle was influential. And so, in essence, he applied Aristotle's ideas about purpose and materialism to Christian thought. With monumental results.

Thomas used Aristotle's theories about cause and effect to promote the cosmological argument for God: if there is a creation, there must be a Creator. This is still the most popular defense of God's existence.

He made enormous advances in our understanding of language as well. He showed us that "univocal" language occurs when the words mean the same thing in every context; "equivocal" language results from words which have nothing in common in different contexts; and "analogical" language happens when words have some relationship with each other in different contexts. The theological significance here is that our language about God has some truth, by analogy, even though it describes the One who is above all description. Thomas' approach to analogical language is still the foundational understanding of theological speech today.

Thomas, following Aristotle, was also a big proponent of natural theology. He believed that God can be seen in his creation, and that faith and biblical revelation are only needed to complete what God has already revealed in nature. "Natural" revelation and "special" revelation are theological categories we get from Thomas and still use.

His view of reason and faith: "I will observe, that I might know, and when my observation reaches its limits, then I will believe." From Thomas to today, most Roman Catholic thinkers agree. And many Protestants as well.

What does it all mean for Christians seeking to serve Jesus today? Let's review:

taught the church to see God as Trinity, mankind as fallen from inherited original sin, salvation as predestined, evil as the result of misused free will, and history as a war between God and Satan.

gave us a reasonable approach to God's existence, to Jesus' death, and to faith itself.

made reason into rationalism.

And Thomas made rationalism into faith.

They were right about many things, wrong about some things, but influential about everything, as we'll see next week.

Copyright © 2006. GodIssues.org. All rights reserved.


Other segments of the "Why do we think the way we do?" series:

"Why do we think the way we think?"

"A stonecutter and the Savior"

"A broad thinker and the world he left us"

"The biological philosopher"

"So what?"