Dooyeweed among the reformed Thomists Part 2

In part 1 we looked at Fesko’s chapter on Dooyeweerd in his Reforming Apologetics: Retrieving the Classic Reformed Approach to Defending the Faith and showed that it doesn’t give an accurate account of Dooyeweerd’s thought. My hope is that reformed Thomists won’t dismiss Dooyeweerd on the basis of Fesko’s presentation. There are no doubt important areas of disagreement between Dooyeweerd and that of reformed Thomists, yet neither can benefit from misreading and dismissing each other and I believe that it is possible to learn from each other. In this post I will focus on two main claims that John Bolt makes concerning Dooyeweerd in his chapter “Doubting Reformational Anti-Thomism” in Aquinas Among the Protestants. While Bolt’s reflections on his four “doubts” get closer to issues relevant for a discussion of Dooyeweerd’s philosophy his evaluation is coloured by a serious misreading from the beginning. This means that his doubts are not as incisive as they might have been had he started with a more accurate and nuanced understanding. Concerning the misinterpretations of Aquinas held by reformational thinkers Bolts writes “This is a matter of academic integrity; followers of Jesus Christ are under an obligation to be scrupulously fair to their opponents.” (p.131). I fully agree with this principle. Reformational thinkers and reformed Thomists need to do their best to understand each other and hopefully this might even lead them to think of each other less as opponents.

The first claim that Bolt makes is that Dooyeweerd completely rejects the thought of both Aquinas and Aristotle so that nothing of value can be found in them. Bolt believes that Dooyeweerd even went as far as to hold that Aquinas’ thought was apostate. This is tied to a second view that Bolt attributes to Dooyeweerd which is that the scientific distinction between truth and falsehood is a direct result of the religious distinction between regenerate and unregenerate so that the two distinctions are collapsed. Based on this reading Bolt continually comes up against obvious fact that Dooyeweerd gives positive evaluation to many non-Christian thinkers and even incorporates some of their views into his own philosophy. On this reading Dooyeweerd is both unfairly critical of thinkers like Aquinas for incorporating ideas from non-Christian philosophers while doing exactly the same just with different non-Christian philosophers.

The first claim can easily be dealt with. Here is what Bolt writes: “According to Dooyeweerd the great medieval synthesis of Thomas and others was an illicit joining of pagan religion with biblical faith. His judgement is severe: “they were apostate in their direction” (Dooyeweerd 1979, 111)” (p.131). When we follow up the reference that Bolt gives we find that Dooyeweerd is there discussing Greek religion and not medieval thought in general or Thomas in particular. It is Greek religion that Dooyeweerd describes as “apostate in their direction”. In contrast he writes that “For its part, the Romanistic basic theme preserved at least to a degree its connection with the divine Word-revelation” (RS I, 25). Dooyeweerd certainly has his criticisms of Thomism, however he engaged in serious and friendly discussion with a number of Thomist philosophers and never dismissed Aquinas out of hand. He wrote “There is no doubt in my mind that Thomas sincerely intended to make Aristotle’s metaphysics square with the church’s doctrine of creation. The only question is whether this was possible within the framework of an accommodated Aristotelian philosophy” (RS II, 366). Nowhere does Dooyeweerd describe Aquinas’ position as a “joining of pagan religion with biblical faith”, this is simply an inaccurate presentation of Dooyeweerd.

Dooyeweed thought long and hard about the relationship between the Christian religion and the philosophical enterprise. His account of this relationship is complex, was developed over time and remains controversial even among his sympathetic readers. Even if one ends up critical of what he has to say on this topic Dooyeweerd’s positive philosophical framework is still worthy of consideration. To take one example, David Koyzis and Jonathan Chaplin (a contributor to Aquinas Among the Protestants) have argued that there are parallels and opportunity for cooperation between Thomist and reformational philosophers in the area of political philosophy.

A full answer to Bolt’s second claim about Dooyeweerd would involve a discussion of the complex issues just hinted at, however we can make considerable headway in just considering Dooyeweerd’s approach to the philosophical tradition in general. Bolt develops this second point in an indirect way through a criticism of Kuyper that Bavink makes. It involves Kuyper’s claim that there are two kinds of science, one that is based on a Christian starting point and a second, diametrically opposed, that starts from a non-Christian starting point. Bavinck’s argument is that this conflates “the scientific distinction between truth and falsehood with the personal one between regenerate and unregenerate people” and so commits “a logical fallacy”. Further “to identify the scientific work of the regenerate with truth and that of the unregenerate with lies is categorically false” (p.135). “It seems to me that Bavinck’s critique is also applicable to Dooyeweerd” (p.135). Fully in line with this interpretation Bolts writes that Dooyeweerd believed that “any observation about reality made by Aristotle would thereby, for that very reason, be rendered suspect. I cannot see how this is a fair or reasonable inference” (p.139). Bolt is absolutely right that such an inference is neither fair nor reasonable, it is also a position that Dooyeweerd would completely reject.

It is surprising that Bolt insists on such an interpretation given that he makes reference to Dooyeweerd’s article “Kuyper’s Philosophy of Science” where Dooyeweerd not only makes a number of statements to the contrary but, like any philosopher, engages in criticism and not mere dismissal, of positions he rejects. Near the start he writes “Though bordering on redundancy, because it has been said so often before: The Philosophy of the Cosmonomic Idea claims no infallibility, neither for its positive philosophical conceptions nor with regard to its critique of traditional philosophy” (p.132 of a draft translation). Dooyeweerd is clear that he offers both his positive philosophical views and his philosophical criticisms as ordinary examples of what fallible human philosophers do and so open to the same evaluation as any other philosophy. Dooyeweerd repeatedly argued against dogmatism in philosophy insisting that no philosophy should be dismissed just because of its religious background. He wanted his Christian philosophy to be taken seriously by non-Christian philosophers and equally argued that “the Christian ground-motive refuses to allow any particular philosophical movement to be excluded from the philosophical community because of its point of departure.” (RS I, 29).

A typical statement of Dooyeweerd’s found in the article cited by Bolt is “The Philosophy of the Cosmonomic Idea has never defended the view that a philosophy springing from a non-Christian root cannot contain important elements of truth” (p.134 of draft version). So it is not clear why Bolt thinks that Dooyeweerd rejects everything Aristotle says because it is a pagan author that says it. His actual method and approach to the philosophical tradition is quite different. He insists repeatedly that “it is an utter illusion to suppose that a philosophy can develop itself in isolation” (quoted in Verburg’s Herman Dooyeweerd: The life and work of a Christian philosopher p.346 compare similar statements TWT 38, NC I. 115, 117, RS II, 26-27). This leads to an approach that seeks to identify the moments of truth and insight in every philosophy. It is only in the context of identifying insights in a philosophy that criticism of that philosophy can become valid and worthwhile. Philosophical criticism involves showing how a genuine insight goes awry, the task then is to incorporate the insight within a philosophical framework that can give it more justice. This is consistent with Dooyeweerd’s understanding of Christianity in relation to the ground-motive of creation, fall and redemption. Every philosophical conception should be considered within this framework. As Robert Sweetman has put it recently: creation-fall-redemption is a spiritual impulse “in which one approaches something open to encountering it with indications of its original blessing, its marring and consequent ambiguity, and its reception of a new and redemptive meaning by which its original blessing shines forth again and becomes redolent of new possibilities.” (Tracing the lines 142-143) Dooyeweerd is happy to speak of “data” or “structural states of affairs” that any philosophy is able to recognise and must take account of within its framework. To show how this is understood by Dooyeweerd I offer the following two quotes:

“In the philosophical effort to account for [structural states of affairs] in the context of a theoretical view of totality, there may be a noble competition between all philosophical trends without discrimination. We do not claim a privileged position for the Christian philosophy of the cosmonomic Idea in this respect. For even the Christian ground-motive and the content of our transcendental ground-Idea determined by it, do not give security against fundamental mistakes in the accomplishment of our philosophical task” (NC I. 117)

“Every philosophical current may contribute to the testing of its own and other philosophical views with respect to data which, up to now, have been neglected. For the discovery of this neglected state of affairs in our experiential horizon is not the monopoly of a particular philosophical school. Thanks to common grace, relative truths are to be found in every philosophy, although the interpretation of such truths may appear to be unacceptable from the biblical standpoint insofar as the philosophical interpretation turns out to be ruled by a dialectical and apostate basic-motive. However, no philosophy can prosper in isolation.” TWT 38

Once we have taken this into account we will not be surprised to read Dooyeweerd talk about an “important element of truth” in Aristotle’s substance concept (RS II, 264). Nor that he recognises that “the distinction between potentiality and actuality in reality has undoubtedly been a brilliant and fruitful discovery. It has indeed enriched Western philosophical thinking … It is certainly not the intention of the Philosophy of the Law-Idea to reject or minimize an Aristotelian distinction that has proven fruitful.” (RS II, 290).