Peter,

I don't mean to be a pedant, but it was Jaroslav Pelikan, not Stanley Hauerwas, who wrote the first volume in the Brazos Press series to which you refer. Pelikan wrote on Acts, and Peter Leithart wrote on 1 & 2 Kings, before Hauerwas' volume on Matthew was released.

Foyle and (especially) Jon J,

The Archbishop of Canterbury gave a lecture on Faith and Science during Holy Week that might be of some help here. During the Q and A period, he was asked the following question:

"Does religion have a methodology for finding answers or establishing what is real or truth? If you agree that religion has a methodology would you mind sharing your own personal experience of how you find answers or truth?"

His answer:

"There is I suppose no such thing as religion in general. People are educated and nourished in traditions of understanding and they, if you like, they receive these as proposed, and test them for truth. They may test them for truth at a number of levels. They may test the truth of historical assertions. I'll be back to that on Wednesday. They may test their adequacy to the human condition in its complexity. You may for example find that you don't want to stick with some kinds of religious belief because frankly they don't correspond with the kind of humanity you sense your humanity to be, and other peoples' humanity to be. People do, don't they, grow out of certain kinds of religion because they feel it is not talking about them; the kind of humanity they understand. So that testing for truth is never simply an objective - here's the language, there's the reality. It's that lengthy process by which, I suppose, we establish the truth or adequacy of certain things about our personal commitments, our loyalties, our love, our imagination; much more at that level than the simply scientific."

In light of this, to claim that theology has no subject, or that theology does not make empirically testable claims, is perhaps to both misunderstand the nature of theology, and to ignore the nuances of what empirical tests and verifiability outside the science laboratory might look like.

Jon J,
I had to wait for 24 hours, and in the meantime waterboy answered, I think satisfactorily, your question. Nevertheless, here is my original reply:

What you refer to is mostly applied mathematics, much of it previously (18th-19th century) regarded as pure, speculative, mathematics, i.e. mathematics studied just for its own sake. Contemporary pure mathematics finds its applications in string theory and other models in nuclear physics and cosmology, that are also dismissed by some.

When Eugene Wigner spoke of "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" he had apparently in mind the fact that pure mathematical constructs very often find applications in science, notably physics. You are right, you do not have this "unreasonable effectiveness" of theology, or philosophy, or linguistics, anthropology, arts, etc. Nevertheless, they are part of our culture. There are some people who dismiss any philosophy, and today many more reject any metaphysics or theology, just because no "empirical results have been achieved through the study" of them.

Research (or speculations if you like) in pure mathematics or theology are seldom as weird as speculations "what would the West be like if history skipped the Middle Ages", when philosophy and theology were not yet clearly separated allowing people to consider one but not the other as serious intellectual endeavors. (Yes, I know of Charles Freeman‘s “Closing of the Western Mind”, and no, I have not read it). So perhaps the "empirical result" of Christian theology can be seen in its contribution to Western culture as a thesis that created its own antithesis (Enlightenment) leading to a synthesis, a hopefully more tolerant world, accepted from both the inside as well as the outside of a religious frame of mind.

I am afraid this will not convince you. Of course, one can be an educated person without knowing anything about homological algebra or about the meaning of dogmatic theology. I only think that in both cases one should accept that these are parts of our cultural heritage, and that there are people for whom these things make perfect sense, and who can see how they are related to reality.

Sells,
You are so right when you say that the meaning of the word “dogmatic” has become pejorative. This explains much of the misunderstandings we get in these discussions. One cannot seriously argue a philosophical point using popularized meanings of technical terms; for instance, like when one says "illogical" meaning just "against common sense".

Your "fixed points" of dogmatic theology (that Jesus is God incarnate, that God reveals himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit), provide a nice example of the axiomatic foundations of dogmatic theology, where the terms used are undefined and undefinable. Something like you do not define the terms "set" or "element of" when listing the axioms of (some) set theory. Or you do not define the terms "point", "line" etc. (though you can point to what they usually mean in everyday life, to make it easier to understand what it is all about) when listing the axioms of Euclidean (or non-Euclidean) geometry. You cannot argue about dogmatic theology, about set theory or Euclidean geometry with somebody who has problems with accepting these undefinable initial concepts.

As I understand theology, one has to distinguish between dogmatic or fundamental (a mathematician might be tempted to call it axiomatic) theology and systematic theology. It is true that philosophy is more relevant to systematic theology. Paul Tillich, whom I would prefer to Karl Barth, calls the former the content and the latter the form of theology. You refer approvingly to the Pope's Regensburg lecture, where he emphasized, as I understood him, the systematic approach by talking "about the rationality of faith being derived from the Greeks". On the other hands, he once implicitly criticised Tillich for not paying enough attention to dogmatic theology in his trilogy Systematic Theology (c.f. http://www.crossroadsinitiative.com/library_article/548/Biblical_Interpretation_in_Crisis__Joseph_Ratzinger.html).

PNJ, thanks for the very interesting quote by the Archbishop of Canterbury. “Testing for truth” is a complicated enough philosphy of science problem; it is much more complicated when the human condition and religion are involved.

Sells

As you might have guessed I am somewhat ambivalent wrt the ‘givens’ of theology. I think the analogy with mathematics eventually proves to be ambiguous and misleading. Strict insistence on the axioms of Euclidean geometry would have kept the fascinating field of non-Euclidean geometry hidden from us along with all the discoveries that flowed from it. Some of science’s great discoveries turned on the point of a challenged axiom. It turned out, for example that Newton’s results were useful rather than being strictly correct.
Certainly the givens you accept and upon which you and your Anglican colleagues build you theology are givens to you. Equally obviously my Jewish friends do not share all of your givens and yet worship the same God, find meaning for life etc. As a matter of observable fact Churches, Communities and whole societies are consructed upon givens other than yours.
To construct your theology upon certain ‘givens’ is entirely reasonable. To insist, however, upon the rightness of your givens over my givens is the point at which you drift from dogmatics into dogma.
Having said that I would make the point that Christian theology built on the givens you have outlined has been remarkably productive and has given us many of the core values that underpin our society even as it becomes increasingly secular. It has provided the language that has supported a conversation that has lasted two thousand years and promises to continue for some time to come. It has been absolutely formative of the world as you and I know it. Given all this it is surely a thing to be studied, understood and sometimes even honoured. It is a mighty work still in the making but will cease to have any more than historical interest if its givens have become its idols.

waterboy,
“analogy with mathematics eventually proves to be ambiguous and misleading”
Any analogy can be ambiguous, if wrongly applied, and misleading if carried too far. The analogy I had in mind concerned only the corresponding rational structures, which in case of maths is more or less all that there is, whereas in case of theology it is only its bare, rational, skeleton.

“Strict insistence on the axioms of Euclidean geometry would have kept the fascinating field of non-Euclidean geometry hidden...”
Strict insistence or not, people suspected that the fifth axiom was not really an axiom, that it could by derived from the other four, until Lobachevski and Bolyai showed its independence by constructing a model where only the first four did hold. Allegedly Gauss himself had similar thoughts but considered them too weird, and did not publish them.

Well, if that is true, Gauss was probably afraid of being ridiculed for daring to think beyond the boundaries of the “only true” Euclidean geometry, not burned at stakes as heretics were centuries before him for daring to think beyond the boundaries of the “only true“ Mediaeval version of Christianity. This difference, is somehow related to the fact that nobody emotionally “insists upon the rightness of one set of givens over another set of givens“ when talking about axioms of geometry, because no personal existential questions are involved when choosing this or that set of axioms (givens, if you like).

However, Euclidean geometry was not “abolished”, neither was the Medieval vision (model) of Christianity. Both are now understood (interpreted) within a wider context. In case of geometry this context is the Klein’s Erlangen Program (1872), in case of theology there is no fixed “program” accepted by all involved, but rather a whole network of various theologies, based on - all or some - traditional dogmas, i.e. religious axioms that are not falsifiable through observations/experiments, and refer to undefinable initial concepts. The “rightness of your givens over my givens“ is a question of faith and tolerance, and as such is irrelevant to the analogy with strictly axiomatic systems like in mathematics.