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Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is the production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu. This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of Blueprint 1543. For more information, visit blueprint1543.org.
Oliver Crisp: I tend to think that people in the theological community like myself don't have anything to fear from the sciences if we think that theology is a truth apt and truth aimed discipline as I do. I think that theology is truth apt and truth aimed, and so it seems to me that all truth is God's truth. If there is a God, then the truth that we find in theology should match up with the truth that we find in other sorts of intellectual disciplines.
It should be kind of tapestry knowledge, and we often end up knocking heads over another and failing to do what we ought to be doing. We ought to be reaching out across disciplines and having these kinds of discussions, and rather than fearing those we should welcome, because I think it can be very fruitful and it can spark all kinds of new lines of thinking.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Questions about faith and reason or religion and science can sometimes end in a zero sum game.
You can see how it might go both ways. On one hand, science might grab for all the authority through reductive materialism, questions of purpose, culture, meaning, human personality. Those might reduce to psychology. And then psychology reduces to biology, and biology reduces to chemistry, and chemistry reduces to physics until you're left with a suggestion that everything there is can be explained, at least in theory, by atomic relations.
But on the other hand, if theology is queen of the sciences, how vast is her dominion? On this side, some folks might think that there aren't any nontheological questions. So what if we ditched the reductivist zero sum game and instead envisioned a tapestry of knowledge all aimed at the truth? Yes, God's truth, but a truth that's still being woven and only comes into its fullness when the threads of theology and science are tied together.
Today we're continuing our series on bringing psychology to theology with a theologian's perspective on the goods psychological science might bring to theological reflection. We began a series with experimental psychologist Justin Barrett's suggestion that to build your cathedral of theology, you need the tools of psychological science. Then, developmental psychologist Pamela King offered a vision of thriving that expresses the dynamic human telos, or purpose, throughout our lifespan. Research psychologist Julie Exline followed with a psychological exploration of spiritual struggle and one of the most embattled and suppressed of human emotions: anger at God. Then Elizabeth Hall offered psychologically grounded guidance for inhabiting a flexible, resilient, and relationally grounded faith, tolerant of ambiguity and adaptive and secure amidst all our whims of doupt.
Today, theologian Oliver Crisp and I discussed how a truth apt and truth aimed theology might work together with psychological science to advance human knowledge. Oliver is the principal of St. Mary's College, head of the School of Divinity, professor of analytic theology and Director of the Logos Institute at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He's written or edited numerous books, including The Word and Fleshed, Participation and Atonement, Analyzing Doctrine, Deviant Calvinism, and Jonathan Edwards Among the Theologians.
Our conversation covered both the purpose and future prospects of theology if it were to take on the empirical and experimental. And how science, philosophy and theology can work together to help us understand human uniqueness. But we started with the question of theology's authority among other intellectual pursuits. Specifically, I asked him, "are there any nontheological questions?"
Oliver Crisp: I suppose you might think of theology as one subject amongst a number of other subjects, disciplines. Then the discussion is about something like, "are there ways in which the kind of conceptual questions or theological questions they have in this domain over here, the theological domain, resonate with certain things in this other domain over here? Are there ways we can bring those into conversation? Maybe there's ways in which they overlap and we're just not cognizant of that." And so that's one way of thinking about it.
On the other hand, you might think of it more like theology is sort of not just one discipline amongst many, but raises certain fundamental questions that inform every other sort of discipline in a sense that you find reflecting , let's say, Kuyperian reformed thought, right?
You've got a Christian worldview and so then you look at every other discipline in light of this overarching Christian worldview that obviously carries theological freight. Your biology in light of that, you do mathematics in light that, your music and whatever other disciplines you might be thinking about. Obviously some have got more obvious connections than others, but that's the, in principle, idea.
I'm sympathetic to the latter of those two. I'm not against the form of those two, but I'm not necessarily committed to claim that theology is this kind of baseline and you plug and play various different other disciplines as they relate to the theology.
I think I'm more of the view that there are, there's a theological domain and this theological set of questions, and then there are other domains that aren't necessarily asking directly theological questions. But to the extent that they connect up with theological questions, there are interesting things to be said.
Evan Rosa: Is there an example of a nontheological question? You might say there is such a thing as a nontheological, direct question, but indirectly you might, I mean, if it's truly queen of the sciences, just how far does that dominion spread?
Oliver Crisp: Yeah. Yeah. That's a, that's a good question. I mean, I suppose someone might say, well, look, is the number of metatarsals that human beings have a theological question?
It doesn't look like it's obviously a theological question, but I suppose you might say, well, if it, even if it's not at face value, a theological question, there are theological questions that are very nearby in the neighborhood, right? To do with being creatures made by a creator and those sorts of things.
But it wouldn't seem to me to be obviously inappropriate for someone who's a physiologist to be asking about why it is that we've evolved in this way and we've got a certain number of metatarsals, not more or less, without necessarily then invoking further theological layer of explanation. That seems for me to be an appropriate question in and of itself.
Right. And to have a kind of coherence and appropriateness relative to that particular discipline, you wouldn't necessarily have to ask the further question to get useful answers. I was originally gonna say, well, maybe you know, a question about, you know, for example, are there such things as numbers? Or what do we think of the status of numbers? Or something like that.
But then that seems to me it's a little bit closer to the theology, right? Because then you might want to ask all sorts of questions about the existence of abstract objects and whether, as soon as you start asking that sort of question, you are really very close to questions about, are they uncreate or created?
Are they necessary beings? Are they related to some creator? And so on and so forth. So, I mean, being a theologian, I'm sympathetic to them, to the idea that very close to a lot of the sorts of intellectual questions that we have are theological questions. I'm just not sure whether the non theological questions that we have collapsed into theological questions every single time.
Evan Rosa: That's right. And especially in the minds of the asker. So physiologist concerned with metatarsals is clearly not asking what she takes to be theological question. Right? But this is, I think perhaps one of the concerns about even the very notion that theology is the queen of the sciences is how easily a theologian can adopt certain questions like that.
And then you might imagine other physiological questions related to the brain that all of a sudden become a lot more interesting to the theologian. And yet it's still a physiological question about the organism. And the other side of this coin is gonna be, are there any non psychological questions? Because I think the suggestion is submit your theological conclusions to psychological evidence.
Oliver Crisp: Right. I think that's an interesting idea that there might be ways in which psychology can help us think through certain theological claims or the implications of certain theological claims or test certain theological claims.
And in some respects, that's for me at least, perhaps a newer question than a more traditional sort of question about the relationship between faith and reason or philosophy and theology. Here's a way in which another discipline, that's neither of those things, neither philosophy in or theology may well bear in important respects upon theological questions, in ways that perhaps until relatively recently, theologians and philosophers haven't been paying as much attention to as they ought to. So I'm very sympathetic to that and I think this opens up the potential for all sorts of really interesting future conversations between psychologists and theologians and philosophers on areas of common interest.
And I certainly think this scope for discussion of theological claims that might well yield the sorts of results or at least have certain consequences or certain implications that fall within the purview of the psychologist. But I think in many ways we may be at the beginnings of something. We may be at the beginnings of a really interesting discussion.
Evan Rosa: So I wonder if you might comment on the possibility of a defensiveness on the part of the theologian. And I wonder if you might speak a little bit to that. Like what is the emotionality tied to, psychology wants some play here. They don't just want a little bit of play. They want the kind of confirming or disconfirming play.
But you make your theological claim. But you may have made it prematurely. It turns out. Because you may have made it prior to consulting psychological evidence.
Oliver Crisp: I think fundamentally that's a worry about the kind encroachment of the sciences, the fact that the sciences, particularly the natural sciences have been incredibly successful in the modern world and generated all sorts of new knowledge and new technologies and various things that have transformed our lives.
And so naturally, a lot of people in the humanities and the arts feel on the backfoot cause they feel like, well, that's not, we're doing something different. And what we're doing is not valued in the same way that these other things are. And to some extent that's true, both in society in general, I think, and also, you know, administrators of universities and things like that, funders of programs, those sorts of things.
So I think inevitably people in those sorts of disciplines in the humanities and the arts feel a little bit on the back foot as a consequence of that and feel somewhat challenged and defensive for their own discipline. And I can understand that as a kind of cultural artifact, that's just the way, the lie of the land.
That's way things tend to be. However, I tend to think that you can look at these issues in one of two ways. Either as a set of problems or as an opportunity. It's an opportunity for us to build bridges and to have conversations that might be not just a one way street where we can learn from a psychologist, but might generate other things that the psychologists might find interesting themselves.
So I tend to think that people in the theological community like myself, don't have anything to fear from the sciences. If we think that theology is a truth apt and truth aimed discipline as I do, I think that theology is truth apt and truth aimed, and so it seems to me that all truth is God's truth.
If there is a God, then the truth that we find in theology should match up with the truth that we find in other sorts of intellectual disciplines. It should be a kind of tapestry of knowledge that we're each picking our way at and trying to make some sense of, and hopefully, ultimately, in the kind of idealized version of this one, would have a sort of coherent picture of. Of course, we're stumbling in our little corners of this imaginary tapestry to fill in the bits that we're supposed to be doing. And we often end up knocking heads with another and failing to do what we ought to be doing. But I do think that that's what we ought to be trying to do. We ought to be reaching out cross disciplines and having these kinds of discussions and rather than fearing those, we should welcome them. Because I think it can be very fruitful and it can spark all kinds of new lines of thinking and people can go away thinking, Hey, that's really interesting, I didn't even think that this was something that would yield the sorts of discussions that we've had or would open up the sorts of conversations that we've been having. And turns out that's been very fruitful and very useful.
Evan Rosa: Have you been thinking at all about the ways in which your own research programming may be affected?
Oliver Crisp: Absolutely. Some of the stuff that I've worked on in the last 10, 15 years have to do with the incarnation, the atonement, so the person work of Christ. But also things like original sin and human personhood, the image of God. And I think all of those things are in important ways affected by the sorts of conversations that, that various aspects of psychology are throwing up. I mean, I think some of the stuff we've been thinking about in terms of cognitive science and work that's being done in that neighborhood about, the way in which experimental philosophy may have a bearing on theological questions, which of course is drawing on certain sort of psychological approaches and ways of testing empirical questions or questions like empirical used in philosophy.
Questions about whether, for example, intuitions turn out to be stable across different cultures and different contexts, intuitions that philosophers use as kind of raw for premises, for arguments. So there's another way in which one could end up with a kind of experimental theology perhaps, which might, who knows?
It might turn out to generate really interesting questions that are empirically testable, or at least are susceptible to empirical evidence in various ways.
Evan Rosa: Let's talk a little bit about the image of God. Where do you see specifically in the doctrine of Imago Dei psychology coming in with something useful and well, what have you been noticing about like the psychological literature that can provide some framing for that confirming or disconfirming?
Oliver Crisp: I think there's all sorts of interesting Christians about human uniqueness and what it is. Whether there is, you know, whether there are certain things that mark humans out as unique amongst all sorts of creatures in the world. What those markers might be that some of the work in psychology has a direct bearing on, and that would be theologically and philosophically salient as well, particularly theologically for the doctor of the image of God.
Of course, it to some extent, it depends on how you construe the image of God, right? I mean, there's a tradition of thinking of the image of God as something substantive about human beings as something like our reasoning faculty or something like that. That makes us something distinction in some sense, echoes God.
Evan Rosa: Or intellectual, I mean there's a long tradition of just placing it entirely in the intellectual.
Oliver Crisp: Absolutely. And that's fallen on hard times recently for various sort of counters that are often raised against it. But then you've got those who think of it in more functional terms in terms of this. Maybe it's something to do with the way in which we act, function as, God's regents on, earth, performing certain sorts of functions that make us the images of God in that we're little idols. Now, both of those ways of thinking could feed into this discussion. I mean, maybe there are other ways of thinking about the image of God as well as these two sorts of general streams.
I mean, my own thinking about the image of God has been largely conditioned by Christology and thinking in terms of crisis on kind of prototypical human and us imaging God to the extent that we image Christ in some sense. So of course you can find something like that in some of the New Testament texts about Christ, the image, the invisible God.
Yeah. But I think, it seems to me that the psychological material that bears on this has to do with asking these empirically testable questions being what is it about human beings that makes us distinct? And when you ask those questions and you have a look at that literature and you see some of the lines of argument, well that does have a bearing on which, if any of these kind of traditional theological streams of thought about the God really seems to have value or seems to hold water.
I mean, I think there's a clear way in which what the literature that psychologists are generating, the issues that they're asking about, what makes humans humans, what makes them uniquely human rather than something else, that will clearly factor into what we want to say about the image of God from a theological point of view, may well mean that certain lines of theological argument turn out to be less useful, less helpful.
Than others. I don't think that's because it will turn out that theology in the backseat and that psychology's in the driving seat necessarily, I think it's more of a case of into conversation the theological questions with some of the psychological findings. So I'm not particularly worried about ending out with something like God of the gaps, where, you know, science is doing all the thinking and the theologians are just paying lip service to the science and bringing it into a theological domain. I'm thinking more in terms of having a real discussion between those sorts of two disciplines and how they're approaching or converging perhaps on similar sorts of issues from different perspectives.
Evan Rosa: Do you think that the Imago Dei has to be something that's actually unique or can the image of God be present in another species?
Oliver Crisp: That's a tricky question. That's a tricky question. I mean, it seems to me that in terms of what little material we have in the biblical tradition, of course there's not actually a lot of stuff in the Bible about the image of God, but what little we have in the biblical tradition seems to be focused on human beings.
It's not clear to me that it would implies or requires one to think that the image of God is only had by human beings. That would be a further and stronger theological, and I'm sure many the would want endorse that further and stronger theological claim. But, maybe that's not the case. Maybe, the image of God can be had by other entities than human beings.
These days, I mean, there would be questions about, well, what happens if we find sentient life elsewhere in the cosmos? Or, you know, even if there was other sorts of life, like human beings, would they share in the image of God? There are more traditional theological questions that bear on this, for example, but onward make of say, angels and demons and whether they bear the image of God since they're also rational things like humans.
And I suppose in terms of recent theological developments in sort of animal theology, you might ask the question, are there grounds for thinking that human beings are unique amongst the other animals that we happen to know about? Or would, is it possible or is, is it conceivable that there'd be situation in which down the line some other species evolves to a point where they're capable of
bearing something like a divine image as well. I think to some extent these are open questions, kinda speculative theological questions, but they're also very interesting questions cause they're testing what we think of as a sort of fairly stable theological concept.
Evan Rosa: So as you say, we have precious little of the imago dei in terms of like the quantity of scripture, right? To explain it? We have a lot more theology about it, but further still, we have even more content around personhood and selfhood. Do you make distinctions between Igo and personhood and selfhood?
Oliver Crisp: I think you certainly could. You could make that distinction. You could say, for example, there are different sorts of persons or different sorts of entities that count as persons. Not all of which may be bear the divine image in the way that we talk about the image of God rising from the biblical and theological traditions.
Evan Rosa: Not least God. God doesn't have the image of God.
Oliver Crisp: Right, exactly. Exactly. Not least God. So there's that, right? I suppose you think that, for example, angels don't bear the divine image in the same way that human beings do.
And there might be reasons for thinking that. For example, you might think that angels are purely intellectual beings. They don't have corporeal bodies. In that case, they're not sort of metaphysically amphibious like human beings are, who are both, at least traditionally understood, are both material and body plus soul.
Maybe there's something about being meta amphibious that marks us out theologically speaking. And that means that we would be persons and angels would be persons, but we might be image bearers , of God in a way that angels can't be in virtue of the way that they're kinda made up. Maybe that's true, but then that would still leave other sorts of entities that are created, entities like us who are, who at least have a material part, you know, other creatures in the world, other, you know, maybe other simian creatures or other mammals or something like that, as well as putitive extraterrastrial entities that, that may fall into that category and then you could ask that question of them, you know, to what extent would image language bear upon them if we thought it were possible for either some existing creatures to evolve to a point where they became persons or we were to encounter other life from other worlds where it was clear from our interactions with these entities that they counted as persons as much as you know.
That's leaving aside other sorts of worries to do with things like AI and, you know, persons that are composed not of matter like you and I are, but of a digital life or something like that.
Evan Rosa: On the fallen side of the equation, the extent to which an image can be a fallen thing right? Or an image can be marred, or I realize we're using some metaphorical language here, that image is, it becomes more difficult to recognize, but it's not entirely wiped away. So I'm wondering, how do you regard the language around talking about an the Imago Dei as created and fallen? And if that's just good marketing copy, like no problem. But I think what's interesting for more broad application is, how do we continue to think about the Imago Dei, whether it's metaphysical or functional.
In a way that whatever it is, it specializes human being as a category, at least insofar as the scriptures are concerned. So, and here I'm thinking about the possibility that it's a way of retaining dignity even amidst a world of sin. It's a way of recognizing commonality within the species and it's a way of recognizing the importance of the relation between God and image bearers.
So I'm wondering if we could just wrap up with some of that and spend a few minutes thinking about, what is this thing that, that is created and now fallen and will one day be restored.
Oliver Crisp: Well, suppose you think that the fall, as a theological category involves some sort of substantial or significant change to human beings. At least some kind of loss, whether that's cognitive, spiritual, maybe it's both of those things. Maybe it's other things, cognitive. Or has those sorts of effects perhaps so that, however we make sense of that in terms of a kind of evolutionary human development, there's some notion that human beings are, in some sense alienated from their creator, and that's something fallen and I think that would, maybe that's not the whole of what fallenness is.
But it seems to me that many theologians would, would be willing to sign on to at least that, right? Well, yes, there's some sense in which being fallen means we're alienated from garden and need to, that needs to somehow be made, right. If we think of falleness in terms of relational alienation, it may be that there are ways that could be brought into conversation with psychology, which much of which, you know, tests various sorts of relational capacities that human beings have, and context in which various traits that human beings use with in order to relate to one another played out, so that it might be that theological discussion could really be enriched by appealing to the psychological literature on some of these things. What does it mean, for example, for human beings to be alienated from one another in relationship or for relationships to fail?
What are the common characteristics that, that we see in such situations is the reason to think that those sorts of things bear upon this broader theological canvas where we talk about our early nation from the one who's created us. It seems to me that that could be quite fruitful, and it might also take us in directions that we hadn't anticipated.
So I think the discussion about falleness really, really hooks up with these, these larger theological categories about what it's to be human, what it's to be made in the image of our creator and then somehow fail to live up to that or, or have a image of God. Now, of course, that to some extent metaphorical language, but claims about relationality and relation to God seem to be susceptible to tests of an empirical thought that the psychologist may have something to say about.
Evan Rosa: I have one more question. Within the world of analytic theology there's attention to clarity, but theologians get called for bullshit a lot. And I wonder if bringing more of a scientific testability to certain claims is not all that thinly veiled effort to clean up some of the bullshit.
And I'm thinking of it in as constructive a way as possible in order to, as you say, to show theology to be truth apt and truth seeking.
Oliver Crisp: Yeah, I think there's certainly a need for what my colleague Alan Torrance calls a kind of semantic hygiene that in, in much theological discussion and perhaps that also includes a certain kind of conceptual hygiene as well.
And more of that would be useful I think. And you know, bringing the psychologists into that kinda discussion will force theologians to examine the extent to which arguments and their claims are susceptible to, you know, the data where they're empirically, where they've run up or against things that are empirically testified.
That's, that's a good thing it seems to me because it'll keep us honest in the sort of claims that we make. And that's not a bad thing. I suppose one could take a step back from that though, and say, well, even to be in that kind of position, one has to have a conception of the nature of the theological task that makes us susceptible to that kind of treatment by those outside of theology, like the psychologists. And you have to think of theology as something that's the sort of discipline that generates findings that are truth apt and truth aimed. And I think some of the worry here is just that for some theologians, that's the wrong way to think about the nature of theology.
Theology is just not that kind a thing. It's something else entirely so that's what we might call a anti-real way of thinking about theology. For those of us who are theological realists and think that theology is truth aimed and truth apt, it's talking about a mind independent entity, God. If you're in that kind of ballpark, then I suppose you have very good reasons, reasons having to do with these assumptions that you make right at the outset for thinking that it's worth having conversations with people like psychologists and other people in other sciences.
You're concerned about those sorts of questions. And you think not only are you concerned about these questions, but you think that they're salient for theology, right? Because I suppose you could be a, the theological activist and you're concerned about truth questions. It's just you don't think they apply to theology anymore you might think they apply to poetry. So I'm the kind of person who thinks that theology is truth apt and truth aimed. And so for me, this kind of discussion with the psychologists is a really potentially fruitful and important one. Because there are gonna be ways in which they're gonna help me as a theologian stay intellectually honest, and as I said earlier, I don't think that's something that theologians should be afraid of.
I think it's something that we should look forward to and engage in, and I don't think it's a one way street either. I, I do think that when you are dealing with psychologists who have serious theological interests as well, they're the kind of people who can see the value of these theological questions and can see ways in which that could enrich their research programs as much as the psychological questions being asked of me as a theologian can enrich my theological program. And I think a lot of the time we can have these worries about other disciplines in the abstract as it were. And when you actually sit down and talk to, socialized with people of these other disciplines you find are all sort of interesting ways in which you're sparking interesting intellectual questions come to mind and you can discuss them and suddenly the worries about the bogeyman go away.
Evan Rosa: We've talked a lot about what theology can take from psychology, but I wonder what else you think that psychology can take from theology and if there's methodological virtues of the discipline that you think are important takeaways that might be gaps in certain psychological circles. Or if not, the questions themselves. I'd say like just something about the method, the attitudes or virtues that ought to come along with doing good theology.
Oliver Crisp: That's an interesting question. I think it's one of these things where if we are at the sort of beginnings of that kinda discussion, it needs further discussion for areas to be uncovered where the psychologists will say, oh wow, I didn't think of it like that.
It turns out that's a really interesting question that you're raising there that I can really run with as a psychologist and test in various ways that I hadn't considered before having that discussion with you as a theologian. And I could see that happening in other sorts of, Trial areas in a way that has been demonstrated for us today in terms of the image of God.
I mean, there may also be ways in which certain intellectual virtues that that theology prizes could be taken up by those in psychology. But some of those virtues, it seems to me, are intellectual virtues that ought to be adopted across disciplines anyway, like intellectual humility. Nevertheless, there may be ways in which theology can factor into that.
Evan Rosa: One thing that I'm suspicious about, I don't know what to say about it, is the sense in which the theologian is concerned with transcendent matters. And I wondered to what extent can a psychologist be concerned with those kinds of questions? And is it profitable for the psychologist . And the spirit behind this question is really like, what sort of mutuality is possible here?
Oliver Crisp: We've been hearing a little bit about what psychologists think of his theory of mind this week, which is obviously different from the philosophy of mind and perhaps also different again from the way that theologians think about minds in some respects. But maybe there's one way in which how psychologists think about human beings conceiving of other minds, and that the kind of conceptual frameworks that they bring to that, how we think about other people thinking and how we think about other people thinking about us. And those sorts of things, those questions might be salient here, might be relevant and might bring a slightly different perspective from the sorts of fairly traditional ways in which these things are talked about in both theology and philosophy.
And it seems to me that there's much less conversation in theology anyway about the way in which psychology bears in important respects on that sort of issue, which has all kinds of theological implications, right, in terms of human interaction with other humans and, and how humans think about other human beings, but also in transcendent terms about how we conceive of the divine mind.
If we think of God as mind or mind-like, sufficiently mindlike, so there are all sorts of ways in which I think that might be theologically fruit.
Thanks, Alan. That's fine.
Yes, indeed. Good to chat. My pleasure.
For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured theologian Oliver Crisp. Production Assistance by Macie Bridge and Kaylen Yun. Special thanks to Justin Barrett and our friends at Blueprint 1543 for making this series possible.
I'm Evan Rosa and I edited and produced the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu. There you can find past episodes, articles, books, and other educational resources that help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity. And now that it's the end of the show, you have the question, what to do next?
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