In 2019 I responded to an article I read in the Evangelical Philosophical Journal. I found the email of the author and wrote him a note.
I just tracked down the email and confirmed it was Myron Penner.
So I have it in Penner’s own words:
“I heartily agree with your statement regarding philosophy (traditionally understood) not being able to answer those sort of questions.”
Which were in response to me writing:
“You had a very nice article in the EPS journal and I was able to identify meaningful similarities to my approach of showing how reason proves an ‘unknown’ mover. While I often use the cosmological argument, I will quickly admit that it does not prove whether the uncaused cause is aware of its action. Which is ultimately, I think, a question of theism and solipsism. Neither can this question be answered using philosophy.”
So cool! One wonders if Penner is still giving interviews or how all this stuff has played out for him now in the intervening years. But I feel like I still need to come up to speed with his “2013 life and work” before I’m ready to dive into all the reactions to such work.
Sacred cows aren’t for questioning, they’re for milking … but only after you’ve made sure your hands are clean and warm, not forgetting to say please before and thank you after goes without saying.
“Andrew Shephardson contends in Who’s Afraid of the Unmoved Mover that the combined postmodern objections of Carl A. Raschke, James K. A. Smith, and me, to natural theology, fail. Here I focus only on the issue of idolatry and natural theology, as one way of demonstrating a fundamental inadequacy characteristic of Shephardson’s rebuttal of postmodern challenges to evangelical appropriations of natural theology. I argue that contrary to Shephardson’s contention, Acts 17 does not support evangelical appropriations of natural theology, but operates with a view of reason consistent with my postmodern one and opens postmodern possibilities for understanding natural revelation.”
(and, in fact, does) position Christian faith as a form of “philosophy,” but he
does so by effectively subsuming pagan philosophical wisdom into the biblical story. He confronts the philosophers of the Aeropagus with a paradigm shift a change of allegiances, a call to a new way of living. In keeping with his times (per Pierre Hadot’s thesis), Paul does not think of philosophy as a theoretical inquiry, whose interest is “an encyclopedic knowledge in the form of a system of propositions and of concepts that would reflect, more or less
well, the system of the world,”but as a way of life, an art of living, a practical and spiritual activity aimed at personal transformation so that one lives well. Now this tact might just sell.
Edited to say I have no idea why all those little pictures were injected into the text. Maybe to prevent excerpting?
I have thought of this discussion of Paul’s as a likely example of the difference in ways of approaching apologetics, but honestly didn’t have the confidence to bring it up. There are other NT examples of apostles telling about Jesus as well. None of them resemble what I am familiar with as apologetics today.
However, I don’t think that lifting the text from the NT discourses as a script would work very well in our world today, either. We have developed within the intellectual soup of modernism and still swim in it. A premodern approach without modification would make no sense.
Thanks for that. If it was posted earlier in this thread, I missed it. It saves me the heartache of reading his book, at best, and provides me with a brief Intro if I try to anyway.
I don’t see a magic bullet or more dreadfully
a canned approach for doing evangelism.
The church would do well to model and adapt NT examples, but how far, how far have we failed to model love, while understanding that there’s nothing in the NT to justify civil authority in the hands of church elders.
I wasn’t trying to put you or anyone on the spot or quiz you. I’m genuinely curious - and have read enough of Penner by now that I forget where he might have addressed this.
But I can speculate for myself I guess, here and just subject my speculation to correction and comparison with what you have in mind.
Just based on the phrases themselves, it seems like “natural revelation” would be whatever it is that we should be able to see of or about God by attending to God’s creation (in the Spirit of Psalm 19 and such). Whereas “natural theology” sounds to me like the larger system of thought (cue the modern context for it - and perhaps where it was birthed - making it the only context it has ever existed in?) … natural theology would be the whole edifice of theism and what that has come to entail for believers now - but only insofar as it can trace its roots back to “natural revelation” as it would always attempt to do. Which prevents it from become any specific sort of theism such as Christianity, thus rendering such a thing nonexistent as Penner would have it - you can’t go to a zoo and find “an animal”. You can see an elephant or a bear or a zebra - but there is no generic “animal” creature. All creatures will be something specific that fall within an “animal” category that we create later.
Okay - that turned into a ramble. But - was I close? If you have an idea about where Penner addressed it - well I guess I could always try the pdf word search for myself. But much more interesting to interact about it and hear other thoughts instead.
I’m a little late to the party and not caught up on all the comments, so it might have been covered (although there are no other replies to this), but “arguments for God’s existence… from within a specific set of assumptions… and beliefs of community of faith” seems a little self-contradictory. How do you argue for the existence of God to an unbeliever that way? “This is why I believe but I have no reason to expect you to because I’m arguing from within a specific set of assumptions that I have no reason to expect you to hold”? This is natural theology and pre-modern?
Seriously, thanks for the question, and sorry for throwing you off a little bit. I don’t know if he makes the distinction in his book, but that came from the synopsis he wrote for his response to Shepardson’s book.
I like this. It’s a good point. It seems related to the analogical use of language or the question of what is a “chair”.
I could mixup the terms natural theology and natural revelation, as I have distinguished natural theology from metaphysics.
As Penner is using natural theology, I suspect he is referring to metaphysics or philosophical theology.
