Analyzing the Analysts: A Review Essay on Recent Work in Analytic Theology

For about a decade and a half, one of the most vibrant and controversial movements at the intersection of theology and philosophy has been known as “Analytic Theology” (AT). Formally launched in 2009 with the manifesto volume edited by its two primary founders, Oliver D. Crisp (a British theologian previously at Bristol and Fuller Theological Seminary and currently at St. Andrews) and Michael C. Rea (an American philosopher at the University of Notre Dame), it has since expanded to include a monograph series with Oxford University Press, an online journal hosted by Baylor University, and a lively presence at conferences and in journals, books, and various other academic symposia. ¹ While earlier such movements like Yale School postliberalism and Cambridge Radical Orthodoxy continue to command attention and draw adherents, AT has now been added to the mix of contemporary theological methodologies and sensibilities. The methodology draws primarily from Anglo-American analytic philosophy and the sensibility is largely traditional and even conservative, often of an Evangelical Protestant variety, although as I will explain further below the movement is now self-consciously seeking to push beyond its original boundaries. The five books under review—three monographs and two essay collections—represent the “second generation” of AT in that they introduce, consolidate, interrogate, and expand upon the foundational writings.

As many commentators have noted, while AT formally began in 2009, it drew upon several decades of groundbreaking work in Christian analytic philosophy of religion on both sides of the Atlantic, exemplified by figures such as Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, William Alston, Robert Merrihew Adams, Marilyn McCord Adams, Peter van Inwagen, Eleonore Stump, Thomas Morris, Basil Mitchell, Richard Swinburne, and David Brown, among others. The crucial shift made by some of these philosophers was to focus their attention away from previously-approved “safe” topics such as arguments for the existence of God, standard divine attributes like omniscience and omnipotence, the meaningfulness of religious language, and the reliability of religious experience, on to specifically Christian doctrines such as the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Atonement. And they did so from an analytic approach rather than the Continental modes of existentialism, phenomenology, critical theory, or deconstructionism, or from other influential methods such as pragmatism, process thought, or inspiration from the later Wittgenstein. ² This analytic “trespassing” into doctrinal loci was met with dismay or derision by many theologians, but some found this work exciting and generative. So while AT very much began on the philosophical side, the movement did not take off until a sufficient number of theologians started to take the analytic approach seriously enough for a genuine two-way conversation to develop. However, an ongoing debate is whether AT is still “really” analytic philosophy of religion focused on doctrinal topics or whether it can now be considered as a legitimate form of theology. The very term “analytic theology,” and how it might relate to more familiar descriptions such as “systematic,” “dogmatic,” “fundamental,” and “constructive” theology, thus remains both ambiguous and contested.

McCall’s volume is a useful introduction to this background as well as to where the conversation had developed by 2015. As a professional theologian rather than a philosopher, McCall represents those theologians who found the analytic work compelling and who began to let it shape their own research and writing. He thus seeks not only to introduce but to commend the movement, and his own academic background, institutional location, theological assumptions, and the volume’s publisher all bear witness to the significant Evangelical Protestant stream within AT. After chapters on the nature of AT, its relation to Scripture and the history of doctrine, and the way it can mediate between the church and the wider world, McCall concludes with a chapter in which he challenges analytic theologians to be more open to learn from specifically theological sources rather than assuming that their competence in formal logic and confirmation theory is sufficient to answer all questions: “Theology needs the resources of the analytic tradition . . . But analytic theology also needs to be theology; it needs to be grounded in Scripture, informed by the Christian tradition and alert to its ecclesial and cultural contexts” (p. 178, original emphasis).

As noted above, Oliver Crisp is one of the founders of AT. As the subtitle of Analyzing Doctrine: Toward a Systematic Theology indicates, here he provides a more systematic approach to Christian theological loci than AT had been previously known for, seeking not just to summarize past work but to bring the primary doctrines together in a somewhat coherent whole without as yet offering a complete systematic treatment. This book is thus more of a constructive effort than McCall’s comparatively brief invitation. After two opening chapters focused on method, Crisp discusses divine simplicity, the Trinity, election, the Incarnation, original sin, the Virgin Birth, dyothelitism (the doctrine that Jesus had two wills, one human and one divine), salvation, and bodily resurrection. Crisp stands in the Reformed tradition and those confessional parameters inflect his treatment of these doctrines, defending more-or-less orthodox positions on each of them, and yet he also exhibits an appealing theoretical modesty. For example, he respects the incomprehensible mystery at the heart of the Trinity and offers what he calls a “parsimonious” model of divine simplicity, which preserves what he regards as the key insight of this metaphysical claim (namely that God’s nature is not composed of more basic “parts”) without falling into the incoherencies that some defenders of it have accepted. By contrast, I found myself bemused by his defense of dyothelitism, or at least by his motivation for doing so. Crisp admits that the already puzzling doctrine became more difficult to make sense of once we started to understand the human will as a faculty within individual persons rather than something located within a generic nature. So if Christ is one person with two natures, human and divine (as Chalcedon established), then Christ should only have one will. But the ancient understanding in fact located the will within the nature rather than the person, and so if Christ has two natures, then he has two wills. Dyothelitism was consequently “canonized at the Third Council of Constantinople in AD 681” (p. 179, and see pp. 180–81 for the full context)—that is, at the fifth of the seven ecumenical councils. Striving to be faithful to the council, Crisp struggles to defend the doctrine, for he says: “It seems to me extremely implausible that God would allow the vast majority of the church to be led into error on a matter central to the faith” (p. 191). Leaving aside that perhaps questionable providential confidence, is the obscure and technical doctrine that Christ had two wills, whether true or not, actually central to the faith? For Anglicans, moreover, only the first four councils are canonically determinative for doctrine, and so for us, dyothelitism can stand or fall according to its biblical, theological, philosophical, and psychological plausibility, not its creedal status. Nevertheless, Crisp’s book is a stimulating tour through the doctrinal landscape of recent philosophical theology.

The next two volumes are included in the series “Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology,” coedited by Crisp and Rea. Rather than McCall’s introduction and Crisp’s constructive effort, and without either of their overtly confessional agendas, Wood’s Analytic Theology and the Academic Study of Religion is a provocative exercise in interdisciplinary “bridge-building” (p. v) as he seeks to explain analytic philosophers and theologians to philosophers and theologians with different methodological assumptions, and vice versa; as well as to bring all of these philosophers and theologians into conversation with representatives of the discipline of religious studies, and again vice versa. So the focus here is really on academic method and how these various approaches to the study of religious belief might learn from one another—no easy task given the walls of mutual incomprehension and even hostility. But in this book, the three fields of philosophy, theology, and religious studies are all brought together in an unusually clear and harmonious manner, with their different nuances nicely articulated, which is a considerable achievement. Wood writes as an American theologian (PhD, Chicago) with postdoctoral studies in philosophy (Notre Dame) who now teaches theology in the United Kingdom (at Oxford), and so as someone who himself straddles these different discourses and communities. While clearly sympathetic to AT, Wood maintains sufficient critical distance to represent more than one constituency, which adds to the volume’s value. It is an important and insightful contribution to (in the words of the second half of his title) the academic study of religion which should be widely read.

As noted above, the first phase of AT was largely associated with a traditional and even conservative agenda, often expressed through the idioms of Evangelical or Reformed Protestantism, although Roman Catholic and other traditions are certainly present. But all this naturally enough means that, especially compared with more contextual theological projects such as feminist, black, liberation or queer theology, AT has been predominately male, white, heterosexual, cisgendered, and so on. Panchuk and Rea’s edited volume, Voices from the Edge: Centering Marginalized Perspectives in Analytic Theology, does exactly what it says. The authors are far more diverse than in a typical AT publication, and rather than a primary concern with defending traditional Christian doctrines, most of the essays consider topics such as conceptual disagreement, liberation, gender, trauma, shame, sexuality, and disability. While written more-or-less in an analytic mode, or at least in conversation with analytic literature, many of the essays are also highly critical of the ways in which AT has avoided engaging with these topics until now. Some of them also seek to break AT from a default Christian theological framework. For example, Blake Hereth’s fascinating “The Shape of Trans Afterlife Justice” (pp. 185–206) applies the moral intuitions of reparative justice in order to imagine what a suitable heaven would be like for a transgender person whose deepest desires were largely thwarted in this world. However, in Hereth’s view it turns out that such an afterlife is, at least initially, just another version of this one except that things work out better. And yet one need not appeal to Christian doctrine to suspect that there will be a substantial discontinuity between earthly life and any potential life after death (as with the familiar natural analogy of the caterpillar and butterfly) and that regardless of one’s gender identity (etc.) what we might value in such an afterlife would be radically different as well.

Finally, the T&T Handbook of Analytic Theology is a massive and comprehensive volume of thirty-seven chapters divided into six parts: (I) Methods and Sources, (II) Doctrine of God, (III) Person and Work of Christ, (IV) Pneumatology, (V) Creation and Humans, and (VI) Experiences and Practices, followed by an extensive thematic bibliography. It is a useful resource with much valuable material, some of which breaks new ground, but it also manifests the ongoing tension in AT noted above. Namely, while the fifth and sixth parts (which together constitute 40% of the volume) include some of the perspectives and topics surfaced in Voices from the Edge, often treated with great energy and creativity, these are not integrated into the prolegomenal and doctrinal material in the previous sections. For example, Sameer Yadav contributed a chapter on liberation theology to Voices from the Edge and a chapter on race to the handbook, but these concerns do not appear in the handbook’s treatment of the doctrines of God or Christ or Atonement. To that extent, the handbook captures this moment of transition in Analytic Theology, as well as both its strengths and weaknesses. In my view, among other pertinent challenges noted above, Analytic Theology has yet to reckon with the late William J. Abraham’s astute observation that analytic philosophy is itself a more diverse phenomenon than most analytic theologians have been willing to acknowledge. ³ It remains to be seen how the movement will develop further.

ROBERT MACSWAINThe School of Theology, The University of the South, Sewanee, TN, USA