Religion and philosophical idealism in America

John E. Smith

pp. 26-40

in: Harold Durfee, David T. Rodier (eds), Phenomenology and beyond, Berlin, Springer, 1989

Abstract

In an arresting comparison between Buddhism and Christianity, Whitehead described Buddhism as having arisen from an essentially metaphysical insight that subsequently found religious expression, whereas he envisaged Christianity as originally a religion which was in search of an appropriate metaphysics. Tidy accounts of very complex phenomena are rarely entirely correct, but Whitehead's insight is sound in its basic intention. Anyone acquainted with the long history through which Christian theology was expressed in the concepts and principles derived from the philosophical traditions of the ancient world understands the appropriateness of Whitehead's remark. There was no clear and unambigious desire on the part of all Christian thinkers to develop systems of Christian doctrine in philosophical terms. From the earliest centuries there was a fundamental difference of opinion between those, like the Christian Plantonists of Alexandria, who believed in the capacity of philosophy to express Christian faith in an intelligible way and those, like Tertullian, who accepted no philosophical mediation and saw Christianity as fundamentally opposed to all rival metaphysical positions. This opposition in outlook continued throughout the centuries and was evident first in the early medieval disputes over the legitimacy of dialectic in theology, later in the suspicion with which the Protestant Reformers viewed any theology not based solely on the Bible, and still later in the struggle between thinkers like Tillich and Barth over the issue of a philosophical theology.