We convene leading thinkers in an interdisciplinary environment where theology makes an impact on global concerns, and we share our research to inform public thinking.
OUR PROGRAM Thriving in Diverse Contexts
CTI’s Director with Kathy Dy and Tom Rowe, the architects who redesigned the interior of Luce Hall, standing on the south patio in front of the new Colloquy Room for research conversations.
— FROM THE DIRECTOR —
On Being a Nonprofit
Dear Scholars and Supporters of CTI,
It was a great honor recently to be the guest of Princeton Theological Seminary at the Inauguration of its distinguished eighth President, the Rev. Dr. Jonathan Lee Walton. I was proud to represent the Center of Theological Inquiry among the institutional delegates at Dr. Walton’s joyous and inspiring installation ceremony in the cathedral-like splendor of Princeton University’s Chapel. As I lined up with the other institutional delegates in the fall sunshine, waiting to process into the Chapel, I was asked if CTI was part of the Seminary, a common misconception. The friendly question gave me the opportunity to talk of the historic and close relations between our two institutions, renewed with Dr. Walton in our warm conversations since his appointment. But it was also a moment to explain the Center’s independence as a nonprofit research institution.
In legal terms, the Center was incorporated with the State of New Jersey in 1978 to pursue its founding educational purposes. In IRS terms, CTI is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) organization, governed by a Board of Trustees and eligible to receive tax-deductible donations. Important as it is to understand the Center’s institutional independence, I want to take the opportunity of this Director’s letter to reflect with you, our scholars and supporters, on the spirit as well as the letter of being a nonprofit organization. For that I turn not to lawyers but to a remarkable nun.
A Spirit of Gratitude
The late Sister Concetta Latina was a member of a teaching order and the former Principal of the Villa Victoria Academy in Trenton, New Jersey, when I first came to CTI as director. Sr. Tina, as she was known, loved to attend the Center’s public lectures. After we met on several such occasions, she kindly invited me to lunch at her school in Trenton where she talked movingly of the importance of the Center’s mission of theological research on interdisciplinary questions. Along with her teaching vocation in schools, Sr. Tina was widely involved in the professional worlds of social work and mental health. She found CTI’s research program highly relevant to these wider concerns. I am sure she would have welcomed our current inquiry on what makes for human thriving. When I think of Sr. Tina, I think of her profound gratitude for the Center and its mission.
Nonprofits run on a particular kind of gratitude. Of course, we are grateful for what they do in the world with our support. But our deepest sense of gratitude comes from knowing we are making a difference in the world through nonprofits that are aligned with our values and advancing our goals. Sr. Tina knew the importance of CTI’s research for her own life of service to others. Her work benefitted from the kinds of intellectual inquiry and public conversation she valued at CTI.
ANNUAL GIVING
RESEARCH GRANT ENDOWMENT
A Spirit of Giving
In gratitude for our mission, Sr. Tina was also a donor to CTI, making regular gifts of up to $100. When I asked her how such generosity was possible, given her vow of poverty, Sr. Tina told me she was passing on the gifts people gave her in gratitude for her pastoral counseling. Sr. Tina taught me the true spirit of a nonprofit—the spirit of giving. In her case, all she had to give.
Regular giving to our Annual Fund Appeal is the truest expression of gratitude for our nonprofit mission. Why? As this chart makes clear, annual giving towards our yearly operating budget is one of three vital sources of income to finance CTI’s program, along with our endowment draw and funding from research grants. It is you, our donors, whose spirit of giving breathes life into the annual operation of the Center, animating the fresh thinking in our research program.
When I look at this chart, I am profoundly grateful for the major donors who give to our endowment, the current donors who help fund our annual operating budget, and the external foundations who fund key areas of our research. All of them, all of you, are giving not to meet a need at CTI but to make a difference in the world through CTI. When I look at this chart, I see the difference your giving makes to our mission, especially at this pivotal moment in CTI’s history,
As the picture of the front cover of this issue of Fresh Thinking shows, the renovation of Luce Hall, announced a year ago, is almost complete. We are poised to open for business in our new light-filled environment for fresh thinking next January. It will be the home of our dynamic new program of virtual, resident, and public inquiry on global concerns, powered by your annual gifts.
A Public Spirit
A nonprofit is an organization given the privilege of tax-exempt status because it performs a public benefit. CTI convenes exploratory research conversations across theology, the sciences, and humanities to cast light on global concerns, surely a public benefit in these turbulent times. We do so thanks to those like Sr. Tina whose lives cast light in the world, lives like yours, our scholars and supporters. Thank you for seeing CTI as your way of casting light.
And thank you in anticipation for your annual gift.
With my warm gratitude and good wishes, William Storrar
Honoring Our Donors to the 2022-23 CTI Annual Fund
Your gift powers our fresh thinking on global concerns.
Our warm thanks to all the donors named here who contributed to our Annual Fund Appeal from July 2022 to June 2023.
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Named in honor of CTI’s founder James McCord, the McCord Fellow Giving Society recognizes CTI Members, our scholars, who support the Center with a gift to the CTI Annual Fund.
Thomas Barrie
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Philip Cary
Shin Chiba
Mark Douglas
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Robert Gascoigne
James Haire
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Jan-Olav Henriksen
George Hunsberger
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Michael Lukens
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John McCarthy
Gerald McKenny
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Stephen Pope
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Paul Rorem
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Christine Schliesser
Jayakiran Sebastian
Lisa Sideris
Uwe Siemon-Netto
Devin Singh
Dirk Smit
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Hans-Martien ten Napel
Christiane Tietz
David Fergusson
Roger Trigg
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Charles Wood
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THRIVING IN DIVERSE CONTEXTS
AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL SPEZIO
Michael Spezio is Associate Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Data Science at Scripps College in Claremont, California. He is the Principal Investigator for CTI’s current inquiry on Thriving in Diverse Contexts: A Study Program on Psychological Science for Researchers in Christian Theology, funded by the John Templeton Foundation. Spezio took part in the following interview with CTI’s Associate Director, Joshua Mauldin, to discuss the goals of this cross-training program in psychological science for theologians.
MAULDIN: Let’s begin by discussing your own intellectual background, including how you came to be interested in the intersection of psychological science and theology.
SPEZIO: While studying for an M.Div. at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, I recognized that many theological claims emerge from certain conceptions of humankind, including especially human social understandings, emotion, values, and spiritual categories and practices. Hope, compassion, trust and faith, trustworthiness, friendship, love, deep reason, repentance, forgiveness, courage, and cultivating a lifeview and life that could aspire to be alternatives to dominant, narrow conceptions of the atomistic self and one’s own narrow identities, all are central themes of theology, including Christian theology. Of course in Christian theology there are also faith commitments to the centrality of Jesus Christ as the one truest human in time, true God and true human. I studied theological anthropology from that time and my thesis focused on alternative ways of engaging the imago Dei in relation to the human and more than human. I recognized that the most compelling accounts of human capacity, possibility, failure, sin, harm, repentance, and forgiveness within theology linked up with compelling accounts in empirically grounded psychological science. I also found that certain empirically supported theories and models in psychological science helped to illuminate and specify, and sometimes helpfully contradict, broader claims in theology. That is what drew me more toward psychological science, especially cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience, which I took up following my seminary training and a year in pastoral ministry.
In June 2023 we held an opening residential summer school to begin the two-year cross-training program on psychological science for theologians. What were your primary objectives for this summer school and did anything surprise you? Our primary goals for those two weeks were to cultivate a positive and supportive environment for sound and visionary theological and philosophical exploration drawing on empirically grounded theory and findings in psychological science. We wanted to convey our respect for and support of theology and philosophy as independent disciplines, with their own methods and central questions. At no point does our program aim to turn theologians into psychological scientists. At the same time, we wanted to invite a deep engagement with psychological science whenever theology addresses questions regarding the human person and person-in-community. We wanted to give the cohort of established scholars a broad survey of psychological science, along with strong guidance in how to read that science and its statistical evidence via the peer-reviewed literature. So much of theology that does engage psychological science does so via trade books. Those books are not intended for scholarly use and when theologians use them in that way they are committing a category error. In psychological science, with the exception of books published by professional guilds for audiences of scholars, we prioritize peer-reviewed journal articles over books. So our program emphasized peer-reviewed literature on topics ranging from definitions and models of human cognition to definitions and models of human wellbeing, flourishing, and thriving. Only by learning and reading peer-reviewed literature will theologians be able to recognize and draw on sound empirical work in psychological science, usually several years before that work features in books written for popular audiences. Happily, the scholars in this program are very open and curious and patient and smart, willing to try new perspectives, to venture both creative comments and critical objections. It was a good and productive two weeks together.
One of the most surprising aspects for me from the residential summer school was discovering anew just how divided and entrenched much of academia continues to be in the 21st Century, even as the complexity of the problems we face as societies and communities increases. It is almost as if our training programs and professional societies and guilds intentionally obstruct progress in overcoming the so-called Two Cultures, a topic raised by C.P. Snow in the late 1950s. Snow was incorrect in his harshly negative assessment of the British educational system’s weight given to the humane letters, given their centrality in facing societal challenges and in inspiring hope and vision for overcoming them. However, Snow was right, and continues to be right, that educational systems foster an early and ongoing divide—in some contexts as early as 12 or 13 years of age—between critical and poetic literacy and creativity via the humane letters and mathematical and scientific and technological literacy and creativity via the sciences. That the humane letters on one hand and the various sciences—mathematical, physical, social—on the other still view each other’s methods and theories with a lack of curiosity and wonder, a lack of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary rigor remains a core failing of liberal arts and university education globally. Among the many things for which I am grateful in this program, the three aspects for which I am most grateful are the standard set by and open interdisciplinary work of our cohort of theologians and philosophers, CTI’s continued stellar work in sound interdisciplinary theological engagement, and the vision and funding from the John Templeton Foundation in making the program possible.
Theologians have much to gain from studying psychological science. Moving in the other direction, are there areas where theology can contribute to psychological science?
Theology has much to contribute to psychological science, especially by learning, inquiring into, developing, and critiquing the latter’s constructs.
Theology and philosophy have unique perspectives for drawing on and addressing the conceptual definitions and practical uses of constructs in psychological science, and how they are operationalized by using language. For example, theology and philosophy have a great deal to say about the construct of human flourishing. Leading groups in psychological science who focus on wellbeing, flourishing, and thriving sometimes point to theological and philosophical antecedents, most often citing Aristotle’s conceptions of eudaimonia. When psychological scientists transform these concepts into scientific constructs, they use language to elicit responses from human participants, whether that language takes the form of specific questions or statements requiring numerical responses (e.g., Likert scales of wellbeing or moral identity) or a set of instructions for a behavioral experiment (e.g., tasks testing Delayed Reward Discounting and its relation to reasoning in action). Additionally, when theology and philosophy foreground and closely attend to phenomena of embodiment and materiality in the human and more than human, they can point out insights from and limitations in perspectives from psychological science. However, a requirement for making these contributions often goes overlooked, and that is the requirement of real interdisciplinary learning, of reading the literature that forms the communication systems of sciences as science, specifically the peer-reviewed literature, and of understanding how claims made there relate to the evidence presented. Engaging a theory in psychological science because it seems to work for one’s theological or philosophical framework is most helpful when one has the capability to evaluate that theory and its body of work, and is ready to set that scientific theory and body of work aside if the evidence for the theory comes up lacking.
What are some of some of the biggest issues in psychological science, the leading questions that we should be exploring?
This is really a question best asked of the theologians and philosophers in our cohort. Our program
seeks to enhance their full intellectual freedom to specify their questions in their own interdisciplinary explorations of psychological science.
Our program focuses on wellbeing, flourishing, and thriving. Several important areas of psychological science that I think will contribute to theological and philosophical scholarship in those topics include schema theories and their relationships to identity theories that focus on models of autonomy, moral identity, social identities, social understanding, and other regard, across a range of scales of group size, interaction, conflict, and reasoned and inclusive long-term cooperative and coordinated planning. Psychological science is developing compelling models of attention, memory (including aspirational or prospective memory), concepts and their semi-independence from language, language and its uses in metaphor, reasoning and reasoned planning via emotion and valuation, theory of mind, empathy, autonomy, cooperation and competition, and intragroup and intergroup categorization and understanding. These more basic scientific models are used in fields of applied psychological science, including psychology of religion and spirituality, psychology of law, political psychology, environmental psychology, psychology and gender, intergroup reconciliation, clinically sensitive approaches within strength-based models of neurodiversity, and approaches to human wellbeing, flourishing, and thriving. More often than not, however, the applied areas are less replicated and evidentially supported than are the basic areas of theory and models in psychological science on which they draw. So our program continues to offer support across these areas, always seeking to improve our cohort’s capabilities regarding more basic models and their evidential claims, in relation to those in more applied areas.
I also need to say, since one of my identities is a cognitive computational neuroscientist, that engaging cognitive computational models of human minds and persons and their theorized operations will be critical for future work in theology and philosophy applied to thriving. This is true especially in relation to understanding and overcoming the
novel challenges brought by machine learning and artificial intelligence, but also in regard to developing better practices for human formation and education for ethical, long-term, reasoned cooperative planning across a range of pernicious conflicts and polarizations that prevent or inhibit wellbeing, flourishing, and thriving.
Our program is focused on the theme of “thriving.” How do you approach the question of what it means for human beings to thrive, as a psychological scientist but also as someone with a deep interest in theology?
As a psychological scientist, I bring a dedication to multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary focus into my work, along with an awareness of and openness to a variety of approaches and, especially, to their evidential accounts. There is no one “psychological science of thriving” at present, though several published books will claim the contrary. There are currently a number of influential and quite different theoretical and empirical approaches to thriving within psychological science, some originating in the 1980s and 1990s and others arising as late as 2011 or so. They deeply disagree more than they agree, both about what thriving is and how to even begin assessing it in society. One older school of thought has gone so far as to publish compelling evidence in support of its claims that a more recent theoretical and empirical line in the study of wellbeing, flourishing, and thriving is largely redundant, that it duplicates work in the older school going back to the early to mid-1990s.
Beginning with our residential summer school, our program orients our cohort of scholars to these varying perspectives, with an emphasis on how each engages in three central practices: 1) thoughtful and consistent language in specifying its theory, including how it does or does not fulfill expectations in multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary scholarship; 2) consistency in specifying the operations by which it collects evidence for that theory; and 3) statistical rigor in evaluating and interpreting the evidence so collected. We have seen several examples when
thoughtful and consistent language in (1) is compromised at (2), and of course examples of incomplete theory at (1). We have seen good examples of transitions from (2) to (3), along with questionable choices in that transition. Along the way, the scholars have learned that multiple theoretical and quantitative approaches to studying thriving exist, and they have developed greater capability in evaluating the literatures supporting those approaches.
Speaking for myself, it is right to say that I have a deep interest in theology and philosophy, with graduate training in ethics, with several decades of research and publication engaging psychological science and neuroscience for questions relevant to ethics and moral philosophy and theology. In that interdisciplinary context, human flourishing and thriving begin with teaching our children and ourselves that aseity is not possible for finite organisms and their social groups, no matter how wondrous or capable the individual person or group or institution. That is a lesson that influential schools within theology and philosophy have long taught and advanced. A belief in aseity can be perhaps restated as an endorsement of radical autopoiesis, a faith or trust or certainty in the capacity of one’s own person or, especially, one’s own social identity group, to self-make and self-remake itself in its own image, in perpetuity. Autopoiesis as a methodologically limited theory, say as one may find it in the work of Francisco Varela, is not what I mean by radical autopoiesis.
Since aseity is impossible for humankind, what is left for us is to develop an authentic and autonomous recognition of limitation, giving rise to kenotic empathy, to belief in and action in accord with the value of others, and to be interpersonally open to others to the degree that one’s forming character and social embeddedness, one’s limited autonomy-in-formation, can afford, dependent upon help from others. What that looks like and how we might understand that in our embodied and finite selves and groups are aims that help shape my work in psychological science and in cognitive computational neuroscience.
COMPUTATIONAL THEOLOGY: AN INTERIM REPORT
CLIFFORD ANDERSON
In September, I attended a workshop on computational theology at FEST (Die Forschungsstätte der Evangelischen Studiengemeinschaft, the Protestant Institute for Interdisciplinary Research) in Heidelberg. Arriving at the Heidelberg Hauptbanhof on a warm fall day, I followed the route mapped out by my phone’s GPS, leading me through the marvelous Baroque edifices of the Hauptstrasse, up a steep hill past the ruined Schloss, and onto a forest path that eventually emerged at the conglomeration of buildings that house FEST. An international group of scholars gathered there to discuss “Computational Theology: Methods, Practices, and Perspectives.”
So, what were we talking about under the rubric “computational theology”? That turns out to be a difficult question to answer. Superficially, we could say that computational theology is about bringing computers and theology together. But obviously it means more than just using a word processor to compose theological articles. As with many academic topics, the labels we apply to describe discourses signal subtle commitments to research programs within those discourses. To find out what computational theology is, therefore, we need to explore some adjacent areas of conversation.
Digital Humanities
The connection between theology and computer science goes back to the origins of what was then termed “humanities computing.” While there is no single progenitor of what has since been re-branded as “digital humanities,” Roberto Busa, S.J. (1913–2011), created one of the earliest projects in the nascent field when he enlisted the support of Thomas Watson Sr. of IBM to create the Index Thomisticus, an index of Thomas Aquinas’s corpus. This groundbreaking project stretched over decades, but the amount of data that it produced was, by contemporary standards, trivial. For the past two decades, libraries have been digitizing their collections with and without corporate partners, generating massive quantities of electronic text. Among these texts are both prominent and obscure works of theological scholarship. In broad strokes, digital humanities explores the scholarly affordances made possible by the ongoing digitization of our cultural heritage.
What does digital humanities look like in practice? Among the mainstays of the digital humanities is text encoding. Starting back in the 1980s, pioneering editors created a markup language called the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) to translate printed critical editions into electronic media. At the other end of the scale, new techniques for text mining are constantly emerging, allowing scholars to search for patterns across millions of journal articles, identifying topics as they emerge and fade over time.
The digital humanities today cover a wide and at times bewildering range of topics across the humanities with significant participation from the social sciences as well as computer science. The Association of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) organizes an annual conference that moves between regions of the world. Like the American Academy of Religion or the Society of Biblical Literature, the DH Conference gathers together the luminaries of the field, all pushing the edge of possibility. But the DH Conference is not a celebration of technology for its own sake; a major strand of digital humanities research examines the sociopolitical consequences of digitization and the digital.
To complicate matters, an alternative paradigm called “computational humanities” has sprung into existence during the past decade. Its origins trace back to a Dagstuhl Seminar titled “Computational Humanities: Bridging the Gap Between Computer Science and Digital Humanities.” Harkening to the
old nomenclature, computational humanities provides a reinterpretation of the interdisciplinary field of humanities computing, evincing greater optimism about addressing and solving questions in the humanities algorithmically.
How are scholars in theology and religious studies intersecting with the digital humanities? You will find many projects from the field of religious studies when perusing the back catalogs of the DH conferences. On a personal level, I have contributed to several projects related to religious studies, including Architectura Sinica, which describes the architectural features of Chinese temples, the Slave Societies Digital Archive, which digitizes and preserves baptismal registers and other documents attesting to the forced migrations of African peoples, and Syrica.org, a project developing a gazetteer of Syrica place names, prosopography of saints of the Syriac church, and bibliographies of Syriac literature. A new series from the publisher De Gruyter titled Introductions to Digital Humanities –Religion surveys this growing subfield. If you want to gain a better sense of what digital humanities scholars in the field of theology and religious studies are working on, my contribution to the series, Digital Humanities and Libraries and Archives in Religious Studies: An Introduction is available in open access for anyone to download and read.
Digital Religion
The study of digital religion forms a different line of inquiry than the digital humanities. The goal of digital religion is, broadly speaking, to study how faith communities express their commitments through digital means and how digital media shape their understanding of those commitments. Whereas digital humanities seeks to apply computational tools to the analysis of classical questions in the humanities, the study of digital religion endeavors to understand how the digital is shaping religious experience. Digital religion falls into the domain of social science research, shaped by the sociology of religion, media studies, and cultural analytics as well as anthropology and ethnology. The study of digital religion has been brewing for many years but gained widespread exposure during the COVID-19 pandemic as churches rapidly transitioned online. At the University of Zurich, a so-called “University Research Priority Program” (URPP) is
now studying “Digital Religion(s)”; the project page lists forty-nine scholars and support staff collaborating across several research initiatives.
A compelling example of digital religion is Beth Singler’s “‘Blessed by the algorithm’: Theistic conceptions of artificial intelligence in online discourse.” Singler is an assistant professor in digital religion(s) and member of the URRP project team at the University of Zurich. In her article, she analyzes a corpus of tweets containing the phrase “Blessed by the Algorithm” (BBtA). Using a mixed methods approach, she charts the quantity of these tweets over a span of five years and then classifies these tweets according to a multidimensional typology. “On the whole,” she concludes, “the BBtA corpus of tweets considers a benevolent AI that ‘blesses,’ but perhaps with assumptions about the capriciousness of the inscrutable algorithm and with some rarer examples of people expressing that they have been ‘cursed by the algorithm’ (CBtA).” She readily admits that the writers of these tweets may be using “blessed” metaphorically, but contends that the employment of such religious metaphors influences how we conceptualize the role of the divine in our daily lives.
Digital Theology
How does theology relate to the digital humanities or digital religion? Whether you define theology as the science of God or second order reflection on the Word of God or in some other way, theology seeks to understand the relation of God, humanities, and the world. This search for divine truth differentiates theology from other fields. In line with its social scientific approach, the study of digital religion brackets the truth value of theological questions whereas digital theology leaves them open for exploration. “Although digital religion seeks to survey how religion is expressed in the digital, digital theology is also interested in where God is in all of this,” explains Peter Phillips, Research Fellow in Digital Theology at Durham University. It involves “exploring both the social phenomena that appear when religion meets new media, but also seeking understanding of digitality’s impact on us as human beings, as image bearers, as citizens of heaven.” The field of digital theology is still young, however, and definitions of the term vary from paper to paper. But, in general, digital theology differs from digital religion
in a manner roughly analogous to how theological inquiry differs from religious studies.
What kinds of theological issues does digital theology explore? Apocalypticism, transhumanism, and (digital) resurrection number among the popular topics, but given the pervasiveness of the internet and digital media, much else falls under its purview. Frederike von Oorschot, Head of the Department of Religion, Law and Culture at FEST, also emphasizes the public dimension of digital theology. Given ways that digital media are transforming our culture, she contends that “it is necessary to think about the changes in public theology in and for digital spaces, even if one’s theological thinking is not (or only partially) located in digital spaces in the narrower sense.” How do the essentially commercial and algorithmically-governed spaces of the internet shape the communication of theology to both the professional class of theologians and to ordinary members of faith communities?
Digital Science
A final conversation partner is digital science or e-science. As the field of digital humanities was blossoming, scientists also experienced a digital revolution of sorts. The revolution emerged partly from a crisis of reproducibility. In CTI’s current inquiry on Thriving in Diverse Contexts, we’ve emphasized the importance of sharing code, data, and protocols to foster reproducible research. Graduate students and postdoctoral researchers joining labs need to learn how to manage data on Github or Zenodo, program simulations in languages like R and Python, and master tools for digital publishing like RMarkdown or LaTeX. In certain fields, these researchers will interface with supercomputing systems that aggregate data from terrestrial and celestial sources on a minute-by-minute basis. As computational methods and tools become ubiquitous across the sciences, they inevitably shape the communication of science. Theologians who enter into dialogue with scientists will need to learn something about these tools as well. In our summer school this past year, we introduced our CTI cohort to the Open Science Framework (OSF), a set of tools designed to foster reproducible research in psychological science. The cohort also explored basic data analysis in JASP, which allows users
to carry out both frequentist and Bayesian statistical analyses using a graphic user interface (GUI). In line with this cross-training program as a whole, our goal was to familiarize the cohort with software for data-driven research, not to turn them into experts in their application. Over time, the digital workbench of digital science will likely become commonplace in theology, particularly in the dialogue between theology and the sciences.
So where does the emerging discipline of computational theology fall within these overlapping fields of inquiry? We will need to wait for the publication of a two volume compendium about the field that Christopher Nunn and Frederike von Oorschot are co-editing. What we can confidently say now is that the discussions in Heidelberg proved encouraging about the future of theological studies in a digital age. The contributors to the colloquy evinced strong understanding of what is at stake in these conversations. As computational methods suffuse other disciplines, we need to find connections between these emergent lines of inquiry and traditional forms of theological study. For example, how does hermeneutical thinking as exemplified by Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Gadamer and others intersect with the methods of close reading using TEI or large-scale textual analysis? As I walked down the hillside into the city of Heidelberg after the conclusion of our meeting at FEST, I looked over the other side of the Neckar river towards the Philosophers’ Walk. Conflict over methods is nothing new in the world of philosophy, and can be a driver of innovation. So it goes with the intersection of theology and the digital. We will undoubtedly find our way by exploring different paths as we assimilate the digital squarely into the research programs of theology and religious studies.
At the Center of Theological Inquiry, our aspiration is to foster fresh thinking in theology on the basis of interdisciplinary inquiry with the social and natural sciences. The emergence of these overlapping and intersecting fields of scholarship, from digital humanities to the emerging field of computation theology, indicate that theologians and scholars of religion are already integrating digital methodologies in their research, teaching, and publications. As we look to the future of interdisciplinary theological research in the coming decades, we are excited about the growing role of the digital in CTI’s program of residential, digital, and public inquiry.
Clifford Anderson is Director of Digital Research at the Center of Theological Inquiry.
WORKS CITED
Anderson, Clifford Blake. Digital Humanities and Libraries and Archives in Religious Studies: An Introduction. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022.
Biemann, Chris, Gregory R. Crane, Christiane D. Fellbaum, and Alexander Mehler. “Computational Humanities - Bridging the Gap Between Computer Science and Digital Humanities (Dagstuhl Seminar 14301).” Edited by Chris Biemann, Gregory R. Crane, Christiane D. Fellbaum, and Alexander Mehler. Dagstuhl Reports 4, no. 7 (2014): 80–111.
Campbell, Heidi A. “Surveying Theoretical Approaches Within Digital Religion Studies.” New Media & Society 19, no. 1 (January 2017): 15–24.
Jones, Steven E. Roberto Busa, S. J., and the Emergence of Humanities Computing: The Priest and the Punched Cards. New York: Routledge, 2016.
Oorschot, Frederike van. “Public Theology Facing Digital Spaces: Public Theology, Digital Theology and Changing Spaces for Theological Reasoning.” International Journal of Public Theology 16, no. 1 (March 2022): 55–73.
Phillips, Peter M. “Digital Theology and a Potential Theological Approach to a Metaphysics of Information.” Zygon 58, no. 3 (2023): 770–88.
Phillips, Peter, Kyle Schiefelbein-Guerrero, and Jonas Kurlberg. “Defining Digital Theology: Digital Humanities, Digital Religion and the Particular Work of the CODEC Research Centre and Network.” Open Theology 5, no. 1 (January 2019): 29–43.
Singler, Beth. “‘Blessed by the Algorithm’: Theistic Conceptions of Artificial Intelligence in Online Discourse.” AI & SOCIETY 35, no. 4 (December 2020): 945–55.
THE PURPOSE, IMPACT,
A Special Series of the Theology Matters Podcast
ANDREW DAVISON
Over the past year, the CTI podcast Theology Matters has featured a series on “the purpose, impact, and task of theology.” I’ve joined the regular host, CTI’s Associate Director Joshua Mauldin, to speak to theologians from a range of Christian traditions. Give it a listen. You will hear some of today’s most highly regarded Christian thinkers.
We’ve had a particular sort of theology in mind, often called systematic theology or doctrine. It’s the discipline that thinks about the major planks of Christian belief, such as God, creation, Christ, sin, salvation, the church, and the life of the world to come. We chose that topic convinced that today is a time of particular vigour and productivity in this field. My barometer is the book stall at the largest international theology conference each year: the joint meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature, which typically brings together as many as ten thousand people. At the heart of whichever conference center is our base (and there aren’t that many large enough to host it) is the book hall, stretching out like some stadium-sized arena, full of publishers’ stalls, their tables laden with new books.
AND TASK OF THEOLOGY
Over the dozen years I’ve been going, the contents of those tables have witnessed to the ever-growing liveliness in doctrine, and allied fields. (I’ll come back to that.) There are doctrine books everywhere, on innumerable fascinating topics. Several theologians have also recently written (or are writing) multi-volume works of systematic theology. That includes some of my fellow Anglicans, who used to eschew the broad, synthetic approach, preferring discrete essays on this or that.
I mentioned “allied fields.” I have philosophy, history, and biblical studies in mind. Books that address the significance of theology for philosophy, and vice versa, are a publishing phenomenon at the moment. (I’ve contributed a volume myself.) Most surprisingly, a substantial part of the more conservative Protestant world—which had spent much of the twentieth century typically hostile to philosophy (as “vain philosophy,” Greek paganism, or merely human hair splitting), pitting it against scriptural study—has made a pivot here. Among our podcast guests, Matthew Barrett and Craig Carter are leading examples of that. Their books stand among a growing number that link theology to philosophy, suggesting that we will better “take every thought captive for Christ” if we take philosophy seriously, rather than ignoring or dismissing it. Christians today are often also more confident than they used to be about what distinctively Christian traditions of philosophy bring to the table.
History is also much in evidence. “Retrieval”— writing theology for today in conversation with the theology of the past—is something of a watchword. The boundaries can be difficult to discern between historical theology (understanding what people thought in the past), doctrinal theology (articulating theology for the contemporary church), and constructive or applied theology (responding theologically to the particular challenges of the moment). Translation is also big business. One example is Eerdman’s work to bring so much into
English of the brilliant if maverick Russian theologian (eventually exiled) Sergius Bulgakov. Series of translations that might have been about to wind up have revived. For instance, the Catholic University of America Press Fathers of the Church series has given birth to both a “medieval continuation” (with sterling work by Irven Resnik, a Jewish professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga) and a paperback series of “shorter works.” The criminally neglected works of “Protestant Scholasticism” from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries are being published in new editions. There has never been a time when the business of learning from the past has been so well supported.
For much of the twentieth century, it might be surprising to hear, the relationship with biblical studies was the most strained of these partnerships. For the more conservative biblical scholar, systematics may be thought too far from the text, and perhaps in dangerous cahoots with the philosopher. For the more liberal biblical scholar, the systematic theologian may show too much allegiance to pre-modern writers, with their less “critical” view of the scriptures. Our emblematic book hall shows that those walls are starting to come down, with books that deal directly with this relationship, and an explosion of “reception history” publications: works that deal with the way in which biblical texts have been taken up into theological thinking down the centuries. That includes several commentary series that go about considering that scriptural book by scriptural book, either synthesised in the voice of the contemporary author (as with Blackwell’s “Through the Centuries” series), or as an anthology of writings from the past, presented verse by verse, chapter by chapter (as with the “Ancient” and “Reformation Commentary on Scriptures” series).
Our podcast guests demonstrate that attitudes in academic theology remain one of the best fruits of the ecumenical movement. Their Presbyterian, Lutheran, Baptist, Anglican, and Roman Catho-
lic perspectives are on display, and none of them would close itself off from the others. Also audible in these conversations is a challenge to the idea that systematic theology is cut off from the pain and struggles of everyday life. That is particularly clear in the interview with Ian McFarland. Sarah Coakley also addresses it, alongside a few other criticisms that are levelled against doctrine or systematics. In response, she and others show how much contemporary theologians are concerned and involved with the work of the church in seeking the common good. She also makes a strong case for not collapsing one into the other. Christianity can do its good work all the more effectively, with more conviction and insight, when it continues to tend its own orchard of thought, when it preserves its own wells of thinking. Douglas Ottati makes a similar point, writing from the practical and pastoral ministry of the American Presbyterian Church. A member of the CTI inquiry on astrobiology the same time as my previous visit, Ottati is such a natural podcast speaker that I would lobby for him to have a theological talk radio show of his own.
We could not have wanted a more compelling and infectious account of the joys of being a theologian than we have from Janet Soskice. Themes from her new book Naming God are much in evidence. She also embodies a response to another of the worries about systematics that Coakley discusses, namely that it is prone to trying to sew things up too neatly. That is not the sense you get from our guests, and certainly not from Soskice, who illustrates an attitude of wonder before God, and before God’s goodness and love as much as God’s intellect and truth.
With Alister McGrath we have a ringside seat on the history of theological education over the past quarter century or more. It is almost that long since I used a college book prize for success in first-year chemistry to buy a copy of the first edition of his textbook Christian Theology: An Introduction, soon
Christians today are often more confident than they used to be about what distinctively Christian traditions of philosophy bring to the table.
Andrew
Davison
to see its seventh edition. So much of what other guests say is recapitulated in this conversation: the widespread interest in systematics, its ecumenical breadth, the importance of turning to historic texts, and our inability to separate theology from the practical work of the church.
That’s the run of episodes so far. This Theology Matters podcast “mini-series” is not quite so small as we thought it might be at first, and there are other guests lined up. Stay tuned.
Andrew Davison is the Starbridge Professor in Theology and Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge.
RECOVERING THE TRADITION OF THE DIVINE NAMES
BY JOSHUA MAULDIN
Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture, by Janet Soskice. Cambridge University Press, 2023.
The eminent church historian Jaroslav Pelikan once noted that when we pray we do not address our prayers “to whom it may concern.” We pray with some divine name in mind, even if that name is simply “God.” But how can we as creatures claim the ability to name the divine, which surpasses all our understanding? Is it even possible to name the divine, and if so, how do we do so rightly?
Such questions are central to Janet Soskice’s book, Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture, published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. The book recovers the venerable tradition of the “divine names,” long central to Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thought, but in the modern period eclipsed by a focus on divine “attributes.” If the modern theological question is something like “does God exist?”, an earlier tradition of thought focused on the question, “how can we rightly name God?”, in prayer, supplication, and praise. Naming God directs our attention to this question, exploring its relevance for contemporary thought and practice.
For the forms of modern thought that arose in the wake of Descartes, one must begin by coming to an understanding of the basic nature of God, defined by divine attributes. The basic idea of what or who a “God” is must be foundational, according to this view, and grounded in reason, without relying on revelation. This leads to a number of problems in modern theology, as Soskice suggests, including that the question of how to name God is endlessly postponed, if not forgotten entirely. Reading this book, and trying to understand the issues at stake, involves temporarily bracketing questions of epistemology and turning instead to questions of meaning and semantics. As Soskice pithily puts it, while discussing Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses: “God, it seems, does not want epistemologists, but followers.” (132)
Highlighting the central problem, Gregory of Nyssa writes, “No name would have a meaning that would reach Him Whom we seek. For how can He be discovered by a name when He is beyond all names?” (134) There is a tension here between two claims that the tradition wants to uphold: (1)
God is ineffable and unknowable by creatures and therefore in some sense also unnameable; yet, (2) God can be named in the sense of being “called” on by creatures, in the way we “call” on a friend, even without fully understanding the nature of that friend. God’s nameability is, moreover, a gift that God gives us, for in scriptural revelation God has even told us what to call God, paradigmatically speaking to Moses from a burning bush in Exodus 3, and telling him that God’s own name is “I am Who I am.” Even we who are incapable of adequately understanding God are given a name by which to call on the divine. Discussing the work of Gregory of Nyssa, Soskice notes, “God is not nameable by essence but is named by those who call upon him.” (122)
The subtitle of this book mentions “addressing the divine,” but another possible subtitle would have been “being addressed by the divine.” The conversation between God and Moses in Exodus 3 (a central text for the tradition of the divine names) begins not with Moses calling out to God but with God calling out to him, “Moses, Moses,” to which Moses responds “Here I am.” Central to Soskice’s thesis is that we are able to name God, and speak to God at all, only because God has first spoken to us. Indeed, given the implications of creatio ex nihilo, another central idea in this book, our very ability to exist at all is a participation in the divine reality. We name God not as an attempt to fully define the divine essence, which would be a futile endeavor; rather, we name God because we are in relation to God as God’s creatures. We speak to God because God first speaks to us.
While most of the book’s eight chapters present a feast of learning in the long tradition of the divine names, Chapter 5 serves as a kind of philosophical way station, where we examine what it means in general to use names in our forms of speech, whether in addressing other human beings or addressing the divine. Titled “Is ‘God’ the name of God?”, Chapter 5 provides many insights that will stick with me. One interesting point Soskice makes, for example, has to do with the question of why we typically refer to God as “God,” using a generic noun, capitalized,
Naming God is a wonderful tour through the tradition of the divine names alongside a philosophical exploration of what it means to use names in our everyday speech.
rather than the Tetragrammaton, the name God gives for Godself, speaking to Moses from the burning bush. That name came to be considered unutterable in the Jewish tradition, but even beyond that, Soskice notes how in many intimate relationships it is common that we do not in fact use someone’s proper name, but rather something closer, having to do with their relationship to us. Most commonly we might think of the “Mama” and “Papa” children use for their parents, but there are many other names we use for those we love. Indeed, in many instances, to use a proper name would be oddly cold and distant. Soskice suggests that the name “God” functions in this way, as a title befitting a relationship and thus highlighting God’s closeness to us. Think here of the use of “my Lord” or “our God” in prayer and communal worship.
More central to the overall thesis of the book is the suggestion that we just don’t need a very adequate understanding of a person (or even an inanimate object) in order to use a name correctly. Consider the three-year-old child who addresses a prayer to God. The child might not possess an adequate understanding of God (which of us does?), but would we want to deny that God accepts the prayer of the three-year-old as rightly addressed to God? I think we would want to say that just as a small child can say “Mama” and “Papa” rightly without fully understanding the meaning of motherhood and fatherhood, the child can likewise address God. And those of us who are adults can do so as well, and for the same reasons.
Never attempting to hide her own Christian convictions, Soskice nonetheless ventures across the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, noting in passing how various concepts and names are deployed across the Abrahamic faiths, and usually noting their similarities and their shared usage. This is done not merely out of a multicultural concern but also because the traditions themselves can only be understood in light of their shared histories.
Thomas Aquinas, for example, deepened his understanding of creatio ex nihilo through his study of the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides. Another important thinker featured here is Philo, a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher whose thought had a profound impact on later Christian thought, not least on the topic of naming God. Also discussed is the eleventh century Muslim scholar al-Ghazali and his book, The Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God. It is true, of course, that there are also divergences and disagreements among these traditions as to how God is properly named, but Soskice does not dwell on these.
Naming God is a wonderful tour through the tradition of the divine names alongside a philosophical exploration of what it means to use names in our everyday speech. The book is an important contribution to scholarship, with learned analyses of thinkers such as Philo, Franz Rosenzweig, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas. But the book also has practical impact, not least in demonstrating that we can address God by name, even when our understanding of the divine essence falls short, as it always will.
Reading this book reminded me of another book published several years ago, titled When God Talks Back. Using ethnographic methods with exceptional rigor and sensitivity, the book was framed by the unspoken assumption that while praying to God is acceptable enough in polite society, only a rather strange group occupying the religious fringe would go so far as to believe that God actually speaks back to them. In reality, of course, the idea that God has spoken to God’s creatures is no theological outlier. As Soskice shows so well, the idea that God speaks has been foundational to the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions from the very beginning. Indeed, it would make just as much sense to publish a book titled, When Humans Talk Back. For, well before Moses spoke to God, God spoke to Moses, calling him out by name.
MEET THE BOARD CHAIR
AN INTERVIEW WITH ROY LENNOX
As an independent nonprofit organization, the Center of Theological Inquiry is governed by a Board of Trustees.
At this exciting moment in CTI’s history, as we prepare to return to a stunning new building and launch our new program at Luce Hall in Princeton, we are fortunate the Board is led by Dr. Roy Lennox, a visionary trustee with global experience who is also a scholar in his own right. Here Roy is in conversation with the Center’s Director, Will Storrar.
WILL: Roy, first tell us something of your own academic background and what led you to major in history at university and go on to do a PhD in this subject.
ROY: Since my youth, I’ve been fascinated by history, whether it be the emperors of Rome, life in the Middle Ages or the American Revolution and Civil War. As I matured, it became obvious to me that without a deep knowledge of history it is not only impossible to understand our political world today but also other vital subjects as well. For example, you really can’t grasp the meaning of the Gospels without comprehending their political, cultural, and religious context. That’s why I wrote my recently published book In the Footsteps of Jesus: Exploring the World of the Gospels.
As a Scot, I must ask you to say more about your doctoral thesis on the politics of Restoration Scotland in the later 17th century.
While a lot has been written about the Restoration of the Monarchy in England after its Civil War, very little work had been done about what happened in Scotland. Both countries shared the same king, Charles II, but they were independent countries with their own unique religious settlement, legal system, and political culture. The English Parliament succeeded in controlling royal power, but the Duke of Lauderdale, a “canny” Scot, was able to impose a more absolutist regime on the Northern Kingdom by reforming the treasury and making the Scottish monarchy financially independent. He also temporarily stymied an attempt to push through a political unification of the two nations.
What I enjoyed most about writing my dissertation was the necessity to utilize original sources and not base my conclusions on the research of other scholars. But when I received my PhD there were literally no jobs available in my field. Therefore, I returned to Columbia and completed an MBA in Finance.
History’s loss was the financial world’s gain. You entered the industry at a time of innovation. What was it like working in the world of global investment?
The 1980s marked the birth of “macro” hedge funds. We approached markets top down, using our knowledge of politics and economics to trade world currency, commodity and financial markets. I’ve often said that my PhD and not my MBA was most valuable to me. It’s not that one can literally learn from history, but rather that the study of it taught me to think outside the box, using my knowledge and imagination to make decisions based on incomplete information.
Are there life lessons from your professional career that you bring to your responsibilities as a nonprofit trustee and Board Chair?
Yes. First, you need to work well with people, realizing that a Board makes its decisions as a body and benefits from the skills of all its members. You also need to delegate and let the Director and his marvelous staff do their jobs. And finally, just like in history and finance, one should think outside the box, and help develop a vision and mission that makes CTI special.
How did you become interested in the work of CTI and what was it about CTI’s mission that drew you to serving on its Board?
I was invited to a CTI event in New York by my pastor, Fred Anderson, my predecessor as Board Chair. I had the opportunity to meet you and hear a brilliant lecture by one of our scholars, the renowned anthropologist Agustín Fuentes. He discussed the connection between evolution and theology. How can one not be fascinated by the relationship of theology with other disciplines in the sciences and humanities? It was love at first sight.
What was the Board’s thinking in commissioning the world-renowned Michael Graves architectural firm to create a new interior
within the existing red brick walls of Luce Hall, including the creation of a new floor in the former basement?
Right from the start, the Board realized that a new physical environment was needed to meet our mission of “going public” with our research in a digital age. One that nurtured a collaborative approach in a building that is digitally accessible around the world. A structure designed forty years ago just couldn’t achieve this.
We also realized that the new Luce Hall needed to be special. As Charles Wall, one of our senior trustees said, we needed our own “pyramid,” referring to the remarkable I. M. Pei entrance to the Louvre. Frankly, only a world-renowned architectural firm like Michael Graves could do the job we wanted. And to make it even better, they’re local. The Colloquy Room, hanging in free space, is our pyramid. But the whole building is innovative. It is vertically and horizontally integrated, with natural light flowing in, encouraging open collaboration between our scholars and total access to the public. Moreover, a digital studio on the new first floor provides the opportunity to project our discussions around the world. Michael Graves was asked to design a structure to reflect our goals. They have gone one step further. We now have a building that helps shape our mission.
Your new book, In the Footsteps of Jesus: Exploring the World of the Gospels, is now published by Wipf & Stock. Tell us why you wrote it, what it is about and how it will interest our CTI readers.
A couple of years ago I was asked to teach an adult education course on the Gospels at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York with our Associate Pastor Beverly Bartlett. I was looking for a book that would provide the historical and cultural framework for studying the Gospels without a theological or political axe to grind.
There was none, so I decided to write it myself. It is based on the best academic research but aimed at the general reader. I learned that the world of Jesus was incredibly dynamic and diverse on every level, politically, socially, and culturally. In a way my book reflects a journey through my own education. By understanding the context of the Gospels, I found that it not only increased my knowledge but also deepened my faith. I believe anyone interested in Jesus and his world, believer or nonbeliever, would find it interesting.
As someone who is also a generous donor to CTI, why do you give to our work and what difference do you think CTI is making in the world?
CTI is unique. One of a kind. It is an institute for advanced study promoting an intellectual dialogue between theologians and scholars from other disciplines around the world. As our founder James McCord believed, “theology matters,” and CTI epitomizes that. The topics we will address in the coming years, including the societal implications of origins of life research and the ethics of artificial intelligence, are profound, with wide public interest. With the help of our new building, I believe CTI can have a public and international influence. We can only accomplish this with generous financial support.
And as we prepare to move into our stunning new building and program facility on Stockton Street in 2024, what are your own hopes for CTI?
To meet our full potential in our beautiful new space and continue to provoke intellectual dialogue on the most important topics of our time. Theology matters!
This has been a fascinating conversation, Roy, Our new building on Stockton Street is your legacy in Board leadership, a turning point in our history. Thank you.
PHILOSOPHY MATTERS
Disagreement, Certainty, and Humility in Islamic Thought
BY KAMAL AHMED
CTI Visiting Fellow in Islamic Thought, 2023
left to right: Joshua Mauldin, Kamal Ahmed, and William Storrar
The past thirty years have witnessed a burgeoning literature on the philosophy of religion, particularly in the field of analytic philosophy of religion. While much of this literature strives to take a distinctly secular or non-scriptural approach to philosophy of religion, the more recent field of analytic theology aims to bring analytical philosophical approaches to bear on matters of theology. Philosophy of religion has been criticized for what has been perceived in some quarters as an undue focus on Christian religion, while analytic theology remains an almost exclusively Christian enterprise. It was in large part to address this imbalance that I was approached by the John Templeton Foundation to design a research project to bring Islamic thought into conversation with philosophy of religion and possibly analytic theology as well. I initially balked for two reasons.
First, I had my own reservations regarding the way the field of philosophy of religion had developed in academia. Notwithstanding many notable exceptions, a large segment of the literature was partially driven, perhaps unconsciously, by Christian theological doctrine, to the extent that some academics worried about blurred distinctions between apologetics and rigorous academic philosophy.
Second, I felt that bringing Islamic thought into conversation with analytic theology or philosophy of religion had the danger of reducing Islamic thought to a rubber stamp to broader shared Abrahamic monotheistic principles without organically exploring philosophical perspectives from the Islamic tradition. Since analytic theology developed out of analytic philosophy of religion, which situated itself strictly in the analytic tradition of philosophy, I felt it would make more sense to bring Islamic thought into conversation at the starting point of this genealogy, namely the fundamentals of metaphysics and epistemology upon which analytic philosophy is based.
With this aim in mind, I embarked on a two-anda-half year research project partnering with Andrew Chignell, a distinguished professor of philosophy, religion, and human values at Princeton University. I was based one year at the Project in Philosophy
and Religion at Princeton University, one year at the Department of Philosophy at Yale University, and six months at the Center of Theological Inquiry. Each of these was instrumental in fostering the best methodologies for interdisciplinary research engaging contemporary Anglophone philosophy and the Islamic scholarly tradition and granting access to scholarly networks where such discussions might prove fruitful.
Research Design
Philosophical ideas in Islam have almost exclusively been studied in the academy through the lens of historical context and the social formation of identities. While Islamic intellectual history correctly emphasizes how much philosophical ideas are embedded in their contexts, it overlooks the fact that many of these concepts have been of perennial interest to humanity and is unable to value Islamic philosophical perspectives as part of a wider humanities endeavor. My goal was to identify the best methodologies and topical areas for engagement between Anglophone philosophy and the Islamic scholarly tradition that would illustrate a wider humanities perspective incorporating philosophy, the study of religion, and theology. At the same time, it was imperative that I balance between text and context, historical embeddedness and timeless relevance, and the norms and practices of disciplines. Successful transdisciplinary research would require maintaining legitimacy in each of the two disciplines of philosophy and Islamic studies.
After much exploration, I decided to focus on epistemology, or the philosophy of knowledge and ways of knowing. Within Islamic thought, I concentrated on areas considered as falling under the realm of rational discernment, known as the ma’qūl As a result, my work was not motivated by any form of religious epistemology (faith, experience, mysticism, miracles, prophecy, revelation, etc.). I drew upon a set of concepts in the Islamic philosophical tradition related to rationality and epistemology that had already been internally discussed across centuries and across different Muslim schools of thought. I identified common features and con-
Iḥyāʼ ʻulūm al-dīn, al-Ghazali (1058-1111), section on Contentious Disagreement. Princeton University Special Collections, Islamic Manuscripts, Garrett no. 1051H(ii), Folio 22.
cerns in the varying ways that multiple thinkers in different genres of Islamic writing employed terms relating to what may be known rationally. These transcended historical context and ideological affinities and after being placed in conversation with each other were now aptly suited to be placed in conversation with a philosophical tradition outside Islam, namely Anglophone philosophy. Within the field of epistemology, I focused on the subfield of social epistemology in order to find topics that had a practical relevance in addition to their theoretical interest. Areas in social epistemology such as disagreement, testimony, and authority offered ways to explore more foundational issues in epistemology. Further, each of these topics had been discussed in several genres of Islamic thought, namely post-classical philosophy (ḥikmah), legal philosophy (‘uṣūl al-fiqh), and philosophical theology (kalām). Below, I offer a small glimpse into the kinds of issues examined in my research on disagreement in Islamic thought as an example of how philosophy matters for theology and the study of religion, and vice versa.
Peer Disagreement in Anglophone Philosophy
In the past twenty years, philosophers have taken great interest in considering the question of what a person should do when learning that someone they consider to be an “epistemic peer” disagrees with them. Epistemic peers are persons who deem each other to be of comparable intellectual competence, possess equal access to evidence regarding a certain proposition, and share common intellectual virtues such as honesty and humility. The central philosophical question regards the response of epistemic peers to disagreement. Specifically, to what extent should learning about peer disagreement affect one’s confidence regarding the accuracy or truth of one’s rationally held position? The answers philosophers offer to this question may be divided into two approaches. The first approach, often labeled as conciliation, is to reduce one’s confidence in one’s own opinion due to the disagreement of one’s epistemic peer. Some argue that the rational response would be to assign an “equal weight” to both your opinion and that of your peer’s and revise your confidence ac-
cordingly. For example, if I were 80% certain that P is true and my epistemic peer is 60% certain that P is true, then upon learning of our disagreement we should both revise our confidence such that we are each 70% certain that P is true.
The second approach is non-conciliatory and is sometimes referred to as the “steadfast” view of disagreement, wherein a person’s confidence in their position remains steadfast and is not reduced at all upon learning of disagreement by a peer. More refined positions are put forward by John Pittard, who advocates for a “weak” conciliationism that is significantly less than recommended by advocates of the “equal weight” view, and Lara Buchak, who suggests that one may retain one’s beliefs even if disagreement forms new evidence that does not support the beliefs one initially held.
Disagreement and Certainty in Islamic Thought
Instead of considering the accuracy or confidence of one’s peers, early Islamic thinkers focused on 1) the level of certainty about one’s own opinion, 2) the reasons for that certainty, 3) whether the matter lies in the category of things that may be known with certainty, and 4) whether that certainty is epistemically permissive or not. Epistemic permissivism is a term used in contemporary philosophy which very accurately describes a widespread phenomenon in classical and post-classical Islamic thought. This is the idea that there is more than one rational position possible on certain epistemic matters and there is not always a single answer that is uniquely true. In other words, rationality allows for a range, albeit not unrestricted, of differences of opinion regarding the same body of evidence. This approach was applied by the Islamic scholarly tradition to scripture and prophecy itself and led to a near consensus that many verses of revelation and prophetic teachings are subject to interpretation and contain multiple meanings. This in turn led to a wide spectrum of systematic disagreement between Islamic thinkers on rational matters in law and philosophy. The validity of disagreement was restricted to experts who were epistemic peers. Scholars of legal philosophy (‘uṣūl al-fiqh) listed criteria for who may be considered an expert in rational understandings of religion. These criteria are a) mastery
of Arabic language, linguistics, and hermeneutics, b) knowledge of scriptural and prophetic texts, c) knowledge of the opinions of past experts in one’s discipline, d) a high degree of intelligence coupled with advanced knowledge of logic and analogical reasoning, and e) virtues of honesty, compassion, humility, and freedom from bias. While Islamic philosophers and legal theorists considered expert rational inquiry, or ijtihād, as the highest method of acquiring knowledge, they did not always consider the certainty arrived at through such inquiry to be exclusive or incontestable.
Instead, Islamic philosophers classified rational knowledge on a scale of degrees of certainty. The highest level was that which was known to be absolutely certain without a doubt, known as the qaṭ’ ī Anything less than this level of absolute certainty was labeled as ẓannī, which is often translated as speculative but is better rendered as plausible. Within the realm of the plausible, several degrees of certainty were classified, which might be rendered in English as (1) extremely highly plausible and practically indistinguishable from certain, yet with a hypothetical chance of doubt (qaṭ’ ī ma’a shubh), (2) very highly plausible such that it is deemed preferable to other opinions (ghālib al-ẓann and rājiḥ), (3) highly plausible with equally plausible differing positions, none of which may be preferred in the first instance over any of the others (ẓannī with iḥtimāl), (4) that which is merely possible and whose plausibility has yet to be ascertained or may not be established (mumkin), (5) weakly possible and considered implausible due to being contrary to analogy or other known principles (ḍa’īf, shādh, gharīb), (6) that which is deemed to be false, whether with absolute certainty or with the possibility of it being true being so remote so as to be discounted (bāṭil and mawḍū’).
Disagreement and Fallibilism in Islamic Thought
Purely empirical matters, as is often the case in contemporary mathematics or science, would be cases where for any body of evidence, there is only one single rational response to that evidence. However, systematic disagreement between experts on rational inquiry in the areas of philosophy, theology, and law was not viewed by most Islamic thinkers to fall in this category. As mentioned above, Islamic philos-
Successful transdisciplinary research requires maintaining legitimacy in each of the two disciplines of philosophy and Islamic studies.
ophers considered such matters to be epistemically permissive and, for that reason, did not adopt a conciliatory approach in peer disagreement. It would only make sense to adjust one’s confidence in one’s position regarding a matter where there was only one possible correct answer. Since most contemporary epistemologists advocate “uniqueness” instead of “permissiveness,” the Islamic intellectual tradition has a very different understanding of peer disagreement and responses to it. Taking a “steadfast” approach to a “unique” issue would necessitate viewing one’s epistemic peer as absolutely incorrect since according to “uniqueness” there is only one rational answer. By adopting “permissivism,” Islamic philosophers were able to remain “steadfast” in their confidence on their positions without having to assert the falsehood of their expert epistemic peers who disagreed with them.
Conflicting evidence and conclusions may give rise to doubt and skepticism. As pragmatists, Islamic philosophers developed a system in which the multiplicity of meanings and the hierarchy of plausibilities could be navigated in such a way that one could rely on one’s position in the face of expert peer disagreement without 1) claiming one’s position as uniquely correct to the exclusion of others, 2) demoting the status of one’s expert epistemic peer, and 3) asserting that the differing option was rationally false. Some historians, such as George Makdisi, have suggested that this rapprochement had political and theological motives, dubbing it “the grand Sunni consensus.” While I don’t deny that social and political factors have impacted Islamic intellectual history, I have tried to demonstrate that there was also a philosophical underpinning to the acceptance of multiple views as rationally plausible.
The journey to truth is about finding the best possible approximation to certainty, of which there may be multiple candidates. The aim of certainty is not to reach a limit where only a unique answer
remains but instead to be convinced that there remains no better evidence or reasoning that would be contrary to the position one holds. Once one’s conclusions are deemed highly plausible and very probable, the grounds for certainty are attained by considering opposing evidence and reasons and reconciling them to the maximal extent with one’s own account. This may be rendered as “subjective” certainty in contrast to the “objective” certainty that results from empirical inquiries into matters that fall in the domain of uniqueness. “Subjective” certainty is the highest level that may be attained in the domain of epistemic permissiveness. While one may be subjectively certain to the maximum extent possible, that does not allow one to eliminate all positions dissenting from one’s own as one can never be objectively certain about matters in the domain of epistemic permissiveness.
The outlook of Islamic thought is closer then to fallibilism than infallibilism. Infallibilism is often the product of a scientistic understanding of rationality as leading to a unique and exclusive answer. Given the theological understanding in Islam that only God is Infallible, it is no surprise that Islamic philosophers embraced a permissivist epistemology that acknowledged the fallibilism of humanity in philosophical terms while promoting expert rational knowledge to achieve the highest level of certainty that was possible. Furthermore, as Islamic theology deems it possible for multiple truths to exist in the Knowledge of God, it was only natural that multiple understandings of truth exist in the knowledge of humanity. While the gap between the fallibilist rational knowledge of humanity and the infallible knowledge of God can never be bridged, the final frontier in Islam was not rational knowledge but rather the supra-rational knowledge of the spiritual self in experiencing the nearness and proximity to God that yielded an absolute certain conviction about God’s existence, about which ultimately there could be no disagreement.
Thanking the Luce Hall Renovation Teams
As the Luce Hall Renovation draws to a successful conclusion, CTI’s Director William Storrar hosted a lunch to thank the staff teams from the three companies that collaborated closely to complete the project on time and within budget. This is a remarkable achievement for work that began during a global pandemic which disrupted supply chains for building materials. On behalf of the Center, Dr. Storrar thanked the design team from Michael Graves Architecture and Design led by Principals Kathy Dy and Tom Rowe, the construction team from Irwin & Leighton Commercial Builders led by President Travis Gedney, and the project management team from Zubatkin Owner’s Representation led by Vice President Kate Farewell. Dr. Storrar was joined by CTI’s Associate Director Joshua Mauldin, Center Manager Michelle Tan, and Director of Operations Bob Jones as the home team who played key roles in this success, along with CTI’s Director of Digital Research, Clifford Anderson.
Cross Training in Psychological Science for Christian Theology
CTI held a two-week summer school in June 2023 for participants in its inquiry on Thriving in Diverse Contexts. Made possible through generous funding from the John Templeton Foundation, the two-year program consists of cross-training in psychological science for scholars of Christian theology. Ten scholars joined together in an intensive training program that provided them with foundational familiarity and basic expertise in a wide range of topics central to influential work in psychological science. The central aims were to provide thorough introductory psychological science training for our scholars in an environment that conveyed our respect for them as scholars and our sense of the importance of their planned work in interdisciplinary theology and philosophy engaging psychological science. These scholars traveled from across the United States and around the world to take part in an opening summer school led by Principal Investigator of the inquiry, Michael Spezio, along with Brick Johnstone, Andrew Davison, Clifford Anderson, and Joshua Mauldin.
The training program covered most topical areas of high relevance to influential, empirically grounded models in psychological science. These areas are foundational to more applied areas in psychological science, such as Psychology of Religion, Post-Traumatic Stress and Recovery, Autonomy and Self-Determination, Moral Psychology, Intergroup Reconciliation, Creativity & Insight, Music Cognition & Aesthetic Judgment, Wellbeing, and Thriving/Flourishing. The grounding provided by the summer school prepared the scholars for work in applied areas in Psychological Science that we will engage in future training sessions. The ten scholars in the program have now returned to their home institutions, where they will collaborate for remote study modules before returning to Princeton for residential workshops in fall 2024 and spring 2025.
SEATED, LEFT TO RIGHT: Clifford Anderson, Elijah Baloyi, Michael DeJonge, Barbara McClure, Nadia Marais
STANDING, LEFT TO RIGHT: Michael Spezio, Michelle Panchuk, Marion Grau, Sheryl Overmyer, Andrew Davison, Jessica Coblentz, Brick Johnstone, Andrew Shepherd, Michael Bräutigam, Joshua Mauldin
