…is the positive police patrolling your site?

You seem to set forth all the needed pieces to infer a much sounder distinction, particularly the requirement for the exegetical grounding of (sound) theology. …but then you abandon this track on account of the notion of “speculative theology” and intuition?

Puzzling.

The following article, again by Clouser, is a “Blueprint for a Non-Reductionist Theory of Reality”. It is Reformational Philosophy, and will help readers grasp how philosophy as an interpretation of general revelation, driven by reformed religion, is possible.

http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/tabid/68/id/10444/Default.aspx

I realize you qualified your initial response as a reformed one. Regardless, I’m still not convinced we can cleanly divide the disciplines along the lines of special/general revelation. I’ll look at the materials you mention, but for now I’m still with Oliphint on this one.

In all seriousness, would you say there is a ReformedChristian natural theology?

Anyway, in my proposal, as you define natural theology… it would not be a false dilemma or fail to fit. Studying created reality in order to develop a view of God would be a “philosophy of God”.

Yes, the respective methods of study in theology and philosophy differ, but so do the respective “source materials”, and this does not change when you are making conclusions about God from creation (rather than conclusions about creation from creation).

That said, even if one believes there is a ReformedChristian natural theology, and/or one believes that natural theology is not actually philosophy… then I still recommend the superiority of my proposal over one which supposes there is “significant overlap” between philosophy and theology. In the ReformedChristian sense, there is not significant overlap.

Might you consider a distinct “Reformational” approach to philosophy & the sciences, for example Clouser’s, and offer your response?

I realize the slippery-ness of the term “natural theology.” The history of theology has provided countless nuances on the subject, but generally speaking, I would define natural theology as an attempt to develop a body of knowledge of God using natural revelation (creation) as its source material.

I consider that natural revelation must be interpreted in light of special revelation. For instance, Adam was placed in the garden and given general revelation, but he would not have understood his requirements correctly until God told him not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Any natural theology that is not interpreted in light of special revelation is misguided and false as a result of the noetic effects of sin.

But my point is that even though I think the project of a natural theology apart from special revelation is fundamentally misguided, people still engage in it. And I think it is still properly termed theology.

I’m interested to hear how you would fit this definition into your suggested method above. I lean more toward Joel when he says this is a “false dilemma” though, I still think the two disciplines have different methodology.

If all the various academic fields (apart from theology) study some particular dimension of ‘secular’ reality, be it the ‘natural’ fields of the ‘hard’ sciences: physics, chemistry, biology, math, etc; or the ‘social’ and ‘human/cultural’ sciences: psychology, sociology, language, art, history, economics, law, etc; Philosophy studies the natural creation and social-cultural reality in the broader general framework in which all these particular fields hang together.

For instance, to ask “whether the norms of logic are rooted in language, or psychology, or bio-chemistry, or math, or are rather sui generis”… and to ask “how does one discover logical norms, and from what source”… these are not theological questions, and you don’t find the answers in the Bible! That is, unless you are Gordon Clark and you deny that empirical reality (general revelation) provides real knowledge and you hold that God *is* logic.

But assuming a non-g.h.clarkian orientation, philosophy and theology can indeed be distinguished according to general and special revelation; ie, the cosmos and the Bible.

For more about how Reformed religion, in a certain sense, influences a Reformational approach to philosophy & the sciences (but to which they are *not* reducible), see Roy Clouser’s essay “On the General Relation of Religion, Metaphysics and Science” [PDF]

Hope that helps.