Index - Christianity & Philosophy

Index - Christianity & Philosophy

The Philosophical Worlds That Shaped Christian Belief -

and the Christianity That Continues to Reimagine Its Worlds of Belief

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT

Christianity did not enter a world without philosophy.

It entered worlds already filled with understandings of

reality, humanity, divinity, life, death, and what might lie beyond them.

Every generation inherits a Christianity already interpreted -

which it interprets again within the world it has inherited.

The question is not whether Christianity will inhabit

a philosophical and cultural world,

but whether it will recognize the worlds it inhabits

and take responsibility for the Christianity

which continues to become.

- R.E. Slater & ChatGPT

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~ This project is not completed but is provided as a future series of essays

to follow the completion of the Reality & Metaphysics series currently underway

and possibly The Prehistory of the Bible and/or The Development of Early

Christianity series yet to be written ~

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Path 1 - Historical Genealogy

How did changing philosophical worlds change Christianity?

Prehistoric meaning-making → Ancient civilizations → Ancient Near East → Israel → Second Temple Judaism → Greek/Hellenistic worlds → Early Christianity → Church Fathers → Augustine → Medieval Christianity → Aquinas → Renaissance/Reformation → Descartes → Enlightenment → Modernity → Contemporary Christianity

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Path 2 - The Genealogy of Christian Beliefs

Where did the things Christians believe actually come from?

Instead of organizing primarily around eras, we could organize around major Christian ideas:

God - Creation - Human Nature - Body and Soul - Sin - Christ - Spirit - Revelation - Scripture - Providence - Freedom - Salvation - Death - Heaven - Resurrection - Eternity - Eschatology

For each concept we could trace something like:

ancient antecedents → Hebrew/Jewish forms → New Testament forms → Greek philosophical encounter → patristic development → medieval synthesis → Reformation transformation → modern reconstruction → contemporary Christianity 

 

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Path 3 - Christianity's Changing Metaphysics

What did Christians in each period assume reality was like - and how did that assumption shape what Christianity became?

This is closer to what today's R&M discussion uncovered.

Rather than tracing Christianity generally, we trace the successive pictures of reality through which Christianity interpreted itself:

Ancient cosmological worlds → Hebrew relational/embodied worlds → Greek metaphysics → Platonic Christianity → Aristotelian Christianity → Scholastic synthesis → Cartesian reality → Enlightenment reality → scientific/evolutionary reality → modern naturalism/supernaturalism → process and relational reality

 

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Path 4 - Christianity's Great Philosophical Problems

What philosophical problems has Christianity been trying to solve - sometimes without recognizing them as philosophical problems?

Instead of eras or doctrines, organize around enduring problems:

Being and Becoming
One and Many
Body and Soul
Mind and Matter
Time and Eternity
Freedom and Determinism
Good and Evil
Knowledge and Revelation
Reason and Faith
Nature and Supernature
Identity and Resurrection
History and Eschatology
God and World

Each problem could travel through the entire history of Christianity.

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Path 5 - How Philosophy Changed Christianity
& Christianity Changed Philosophy

Instead of portraying Christianity as the passive recipient of Greek philosophy, we would follow two-way transformations.

Platonism helped Christians articulate transcendence, soul, God, and eternity - but Christianity also transformed Platonism through creation, incarnation, resurrection, history, and personal divine agency.

Aristotle transformed medieval Christian thought - but medieval Christian thinkers also reconstructed Aristotle.

Modern philosophy destabilized traditional Christian epistemology - while Christian theological problems helped shape modern discussions of personhood, freedom, morality, history, and meaning.

The series becomes a history of reciprocal intellectual becoming.

This is attractive because it avoids the simplistic thesis that philosophy somehow "corrupted" an originally pure Christianity.

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Path 6 - The Philosophical Worlds That Made Christianity Possible

The Philosophical Worlds That Made Christianity Possible: Antecedents of belief before Christianity, before Israel, and before philosophy had a name.

The progression might be:

Experience → symbolic interpretation → myth → cosmology → theology → explicit philosophical reflection → systematic philosophy

We investigate ancient human meaning-making, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Canaan, Israel, wisdom traditions, apocalypticism, Second Temple Judaism, Hellenism, and only eventually Christianity.

This route would strongly connect with the future Prehistory of the Bible project, perhaps too strongly. Its danger is that Christianity might not appear until quite far into a series called Christianity and Philosophy.

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Path 7 - Philosophical Archaeology of Christianity

Here we conduct an archaeology of belief as to why contemporary Christianity holds so much eclectic behaviour and beliefs within its global church body thus necessitating our relational philosophy project that suggests recentering the Christian faith upon a holistic foundation.

We begin with Christianity as it exists now, particularly the strange mixture we noticed in contemporary evangelical and popular Christianity, and ask:

How did all of this get here?

Take contemporary assumptions and excavate their layers.

A Christian today might simultaneously believe in:

biblical creation + Greek soul + Augustinian God + medieval heaven + Reformation salvation + Cartesian mind/body + Enlightenment certainty + modern supernaturalism + nineteenth-century revivalism + twentieth-century fundamentalism.

As such, the accumulating layers of philosophical egress are peeled away one by one:

Contemporary Christianity

↓

Modernity and Fundamentalism

↓

Enlightenment

↓

Reformation

↓

Medieval Christianity

↓

Augustine and the Fathers

↓

Hellenistic Christianity

↓

Second Temple Judaism

↓

Ancient Israel

↓

Ancient Near Eastern worlds

And then perhaps travel forward again, now understanding how the pieces accumulated which could make historical sedimentation the organizing metaphor of the entire project.

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Path 8 - Developing a Hybrid Architecture

The history portion could become the spine, the philosophical problems the cross-sections, and genealogy become the method.

So we move broadly chronologically, but within every historical period ask the same recurring questions:

What is real?
What is God?
What is a human being?
What happens at death?
How can God act?
What can humans know?
What is time?
What is salvation?
What is the future?

And underneath the whole inquiry we retain our methodological sequence:

Experience → Language → Interpretation → Metaphysical Construction

followed recursively by:

Metaphysical Construction → Theology → Practice → New Experience

This would allow us to watch not only which ideas Christianity acquired, but how an interpretation eventually became a doctrine, how a doctrine became a worldview, and how a worldview subsequently shaped Christian experience itself.

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FULL PROJECT SUGGESTION

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Experience → Language → Interpretation → Metaphysical Construction → Theological Construction → Religious Practice → New Experience

Of note, there is an overlap of layers but each layer is not identical to the other:

Historical genealogy ≠ philosophical genealogy ≠ theological genealogy

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Possibly consider using each path as its own essay(s) to create a fuller series that can suggest multiple approaches and realizations the the subject matter itself... this then would create a more complete essay series rather than forcing its into one organizing principle. Christianity itself did not develop along a single intellectual trajectory, so a series examining its relationship with philosophy arguably should not pretend that one historical lens can disclose everything.

Instead, the paths that are identified above could become movements within the series, each revisiting Christianity from a different angle. The apparent repetition would not necessarily be redundancy - provided each return asks a genuinely different question. Hence, we might have an emergent architecture something like this:

Christianity and Philosophy

How Philosophy Changed Christianity - and Christianity Changed Philosophy

The Philosophical Worlds That Made Christianity Possible

Movement I - Before Christianity: Philosophy Before Philosophy Had a Name

This develops Path 6. Human experience, symbolic thought, myth, ancient cosmologies, Ancient Near Eastern worlds, Hebrew thought, Second Temple Judaism, and Hellenism. Its purpose is to establish our foundational proposition: no human religious world is philosophically innocent simply because it lacks a formal discipline called philosophy.

Movement II - A Historical Genealogy of Christianity and Philosophy

Path 1 becomes the principal historical narrative. We follow Christianity through its encounters with Hellenism, patristic thought, Augustine, Aristotle and scholasticism, Renaissance and Reformation, Descartes, Enlightenment, science, modernity, and contemporary philosophy. This answers: What happened, when, and why?

Movement III - The Philosophical Worlds Christianity Inherited

Path 3. Now we revisit that history metaphysically rather than merely chronologically. What pictures of reality were operating beneath Christian theology? Substance, participation, hierarchy, being, eternity, dualism, mechanism, natural/supernatural distinctions, historical becoming, evolution, process, relation. The question becomes: What did Christians assume reality was like?

Movement IV - The Genealogy of Christian Beliefs

Path 2. Instead of periods, we follow doctrines across periods: God, creation, human nature, body/soul, sin, incarnation, revelation, providence, salvation, death, heaven, resurrection, eternity, eschatology. This asks the wonderfully uncomfortable question: Where did the things Christians came to believe actually come from?

Movement V - Christianity's Great Philosophical Problems

Path 4. Now we abstract still further from particular doctrines and examine the persistent problems underneath them: being/becoming, one/many, body/soul, mind/matter, time/eternity, freedom/determinism, good/evil, reason/revelation, nature/supernature, identity/resurrection, history/eschatology, God/world. Here Christianity becomes a participant in philosophy's enduring questions.

Movement VI - Philosophy Changed Christianity - Christianity Changed Philosophy

Path 5. This is important because it corrects any impression created by the previous movements that Christianity merely received philosophy. Christianity also altered the philosophical worlds it entered. Creation, incarnation, resurrection, personhood, history, contingency, freedom, morality, and eschatological futurity all put pressure upon inherited philosophical categories. This becomes the explicitly reciprocal movement.

Movement VII - The Philosophical Archaeology of Christianity

Path 7. Only after we know the history do we return to contemporary Christianity and excavate it. We could take recognizable contemporary beliefs and ask which historical strata remain embedded within them. This could be especially illuminating for evangelical Christianity without making evangelicalism the sole target of the series. Catholic, Orthodox, mainline Protestant, Pentecostal, liberal, evangelical, and other Christian traditions will preserve different combinations of the sediment.

We then include the eighth movement that wasn't quite contained in our original seven paths.

Movement VIII - Christianity After Its Philosophical Archaeology

How does Christianity responsibly participate in a world containing many philosophies, sciences, cultures, religions, and ways of interpreting reality?

Path 8 - Christianity Turns Around and Looks at Itself. Having traced the philosophical worlds Christianity inherited, transformed, resisted, absorbed, and eventually came to experience as part of Christianity itself, the inquiry finally turns reflexively toward Christianity in the present. If Christianity has always interpreted its inherited traditions through changing understandings of reality, what follows from recognizing that history?

The answer cannot simply be:

Greek philosophy corrupted Christianity, so remove it.

Nor:

Classical metaphysics was Christianity's final philosophical achievement, so preserve it unchanged.

Nor even:

Relational metaphysics is correct, so replace everything with GRR.

Each response would repeat the very problem the historical inquiry has uncovered: treating one historically situated interpretation of reality as though it stood outside history and interpretation altogether.

Instead, the concluding question becomes:

If Christianity has continually interpreted its traditions through changing understandings of reality, how should it responsibly engage not only philosophy, but the varieties of pluralistic human culture now?

This widens the conversation considerably. Contemporary Christianity encounters not one philosophical world but many: naturalism, phenomenology, existentialism, process philosophy, relational philosophy, philosophy of mind, scientific realism, evolutionary biology and cosmology, historical criticism, psychology, anthropology, religious pluralism, secular humanism, and the diverse philosophical and religious traditions of a globally interconnected humanity. Christianity's contemporary interpretive environment is therefore no less historically conditioned than those through which it previously developed.

The question is consequently not whether Christianity can somehow escape philosophy, culture, history, or interpretation. Its history suggests that it never has. The more responsible question is how Christianity might become increasingly conscious of the interpretive worlds through which it understands itself, distinguishing inherited tradition from subsequent philosophical construction while remaining willing to reconsider both in continuing conversation with reality and human experience.

Generative Relational Realism may enter this final conversation, along with process and relational philosophies, but not as the predetermined winner of the historical investigation. GRR itself is another historically situated philosophical proposal and must remain subject to the same disciplines of criticism, evidence, comparison, and revision applied throughout the series. A relational theology cannot claim to have finally escaped metaphysics; it can only become more explicit about the metaphysical commitments through which it interprets Christian traditions.

Movement VIII therefore does not conclude by identifying the philosophy Christianity should adopt. It arrives instead at a posture of continuing philosophical and cultural engagement: historically conscious, interpretively self-aware, pluralistically conversant, critically discerning, and open to revision.

The series can therefore end where its investigation ultimately leads:

Christianity has never existed apart from interpretation. Its future responsibility may be not to escape the philosophical and cultural worlds in which it lives, but to become more conscious of them - and more responsible for the Christianity it continues to become.