CHRISTIAN FAITH AND METAPHYSICS JOSEPH HAROUTUNIAN* I GOD was in Christ reconciling the world to himself" (2 Cor. 5:19). This statement of the Christian faith is not all-inclusive. But it is one that may be said to find universal assent in the church, and it will do for the purposes of this paper, which are to characterize the Christian faith and to discuss the question as to whether it can be included within a philosophical framework. We shall examine the main words contained in this sentence-"god," "Christ," "reconciling," and "the world." It must be clear that the sentence stands as a whole. All these words qualify one another. God is he who is in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Christ is he in whom God is reconciling the world to himself. Reconciling is what God in Christ does to the world. The world is that which is reconciled by God in Christ. The meaning of each word is in its relation to the others, and any meaning given to it not derived from its context in our sentence is not its proper meaning as it stands before us in Paul's statement. Now "God" is a common word. It has been included in any number of mythological and philosophical frameworks. It may refer to a mythical personage or a metaphysical entity or an object of religious attention. It may be Zeus or the creative event or the Holy One. As Zeus, * Joseph Haroutunian is professor of systematic theology at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. He is author of Piety versus Moralism, Wisdom and Folly in Religion, Lust for Power, and other volumes. The present article was read at the meeting of the American Theological Society, Midwest Branch, in Chicago on November 14, 1952. 103 God belongs to a species of divine beings. As creative event, he belongs to a philosophical framework. As the Holy One, he belongs to a class of holy objects or is a hypostasis of all that is holy. In any case, he is deus in genere. He belongs to a genus. "God in Christ" does not belong to a genus. He is not God by virtue of being creative or holy or being or process. God is God in that he was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. No appellation other than "God in Christ," whether first cause or process of integration or "lan vital, refers to God given us in Paul's statement, since these phrases do not tell us the one thing that makes God God, namely, that he was in Christ. "God" was a word used by both the Greeks and the Jews. Paul used the word because he received it from both the Jews and the Greeks. He used it rather than another word because in the Jewish faith God is he who has created the world and reigns over it as king. And Paul no doubt thought of God as the Jews did. He may have been influenced by the Stoic conception of God as Providence. But, for Paul, God is he who has in Christ reconciled the world to himself. This is the all-qualifying meaning of God to Paul. God the Creator and Providence is "God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." Paul is concerned with God's act in Christ, this act which sets God apart as God. Christ, and the act in Christ, lift, as it were, God out from the general realm of divinity and set him apart as the only living and true God. God's act of reconciling in Christ is the decisive and all-qualifying act of God.
104 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION Therefore God is thought of definitively in terms of this act. For Paul every other designation of God would have to be subsumed under "God and Father," or God who was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. God is indeed Creator, Providence, Judge, Savior; but God who is all this is "God who was in Christ." Hence, Paul's conception of God cannot be included in any general category of divinity without excluding that which makes him God. Moreover, in philosophical language, God is quo nihil majus. He is Perfect Being, Necessary Being, causa sui, the Ground of being and becoming, the Source of human good, the Principle of concretion. But God who is all this is "God in Christ." And in Christian philosophy the meanings of such expressions are conditioned by the statement of Paul given above. Philosophical language, in that it turns our attention to certain characteristics of our world and disciplines our thought, makes for fulness and rigor in Christian thought on God. "God in Christ" cannot be contingent being; he cannot be a caused cause, a second cause, finite and temporal as things in the world. He cannot be uncreative process or not the source of human good. On the other hand, he cannot be being or process comprehended through metaphysical analysis; for nature, which is the object of such analysis, is "the world" as the object of reconciliation in Christ. Metaphysical analysis by a Christian must be subject to the Gospel, and not the Gospel to analysis. The Christian thinker must philosophize, but he is not permitted to include his faith in a framework of philosophy built up apart from his faith. The Christian idea of God cannot be included in such a framework. The word "God" is a metaphor. It is suitable for Christian use because it refers to the Creator, or Deity, or the Source of human good. God in Christ is all this. But he is not to be thought of as Creator apart from his act of reconciliation in Christ. And the idea of Reconciler qualifies radically the idea of Creator. In so far as "God" is thought of as Creator apart from Reconciler, "creator" is a metaphor. The proper meaning of Creator, for a Christian, cannot be understood apart from "in Christ." Therefore, the Christian idea of God cannot be included in a philosophical framework in which creativity is a general concept. Now we turn to "in Christ." "God was in Christ" is in a way the essential confession of the Christian faith. Paul uses it, much to the discomfort of exegetes, as though it were plain as language can be. He uses it with the assurance of a man for whom to say "God" is to say "God in Christ." But surely, when one approaches the problem with certain ideas of God, whether Greek or Hebrew, one is perplexed and lost. How can Being be in a man in a unique way? How can "a personal God" be in another person, in the man Jesus? What framework are we to fit this doctrine into? The Platonic philosopher will excuse himself on the ground that Being is in all beings in so far as they have being. The Hegelian will say that the absolute is more or less involved in all things relative or that everything finite partakes of the infinite. For the idealist, Jesus may be supreme, but if he is unique, it is only as a primus inter pares. The process philosopher will insist that, the creative process being universal, where there is good, there is God. No philosophical framework formed apart from "God in Christ" can recognize a radical difference between God in Christ and God in any other human being. Jesus Christ cannot but be an embarrassment to any philosophical framework. In our text he is contemplated not
CHRISTIAN FAITH AND METAPHYSICS 105 in relation to men, or the world, but to God who reconciled men, or the world, to himself. When we say that Jesus was a rational or a social animal, we do not say what our text says about him: that God was in him. What makes him includable within humanity and the world, considered apart from God's reconciling act, is not his essential nature as seen in our text, namely, as one in whom God reconciled humanity to himself. Christ cannot be understood in terms of mankind in general; on the contrary, men are to be un- derstood through his act of reconciliation with God. The Christian understands himself through this man, and not this man through himself. The reconciling act of God in Christ is the light in which a Christian sees himself and his fellowmen. The man in whom this act is done is the definitive man. He is man and expresses human nature in its original integrity or that of a creature who is what he is by faith in God. Jesus is indeed human as we are. He is flesh and blood as we are. He was born, lived, and died as we are born, live, and die. He was tempted as we are tempted, and God hid himself from him so that he lived by his trust in God. Thus, he was our "brother." But in all this he reconciled us with God, and in so doing he taught us what it is to be human. Christian anthropology is rooted in Christology; or we know ourselves by God's act in Christ, an act of Christ who was a man.. Our knowledge of man through biology, psychology, sociology, is put in a new context by Jesus Christ. Hence he cannot be included in any context formed by these sciences-neither can man whom he revealed as sinner in the very act of grace whereby he is forgiven. If Paul had taken Greek mythology as a quasi-philosophical framework and cast his doctrine in terms of it, then we could say that we have a responsibility to cast the same doctrine in another framework. But Paul did not do this. "God in Christ" has broken through Greek mythology. The crucial act of reconciliation, in the historical "drama of redemption," was proclaimed in terms of Greek symbols, without being fitted, because it could not be so fitted, into Greek philosophical framework. "God was in Christ," therefore, was a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks. "God in Christ" meant a "new creature"; a new creature meant a new life, a new mind, a new framework. It made for Christian philosophics; it created philosophical frameworks. Christians like Augustine philosophized sub specie fidei; they did not fit their faith into a ready framework. Christian language on God, man, being, change, time, is conditioned and formed by "God was in Christ." Christianity issued in reinterpretations of metaphysics. Whenever it was "reinterpreted" within the framework of a metaphysics built up apart from it, partly or wholly, it was no longer compatible with Paul's statement. The reconciling act of God in Christ is contemplated by our text as a once-forall act. Christ, according to the Christian faith, by his death, reconciled the world with God. This act, which is of one piece with his life and resurrection and ascension, is the source of reconciliation among men. It is the process which reveals the being of God as well as the being of Christ. Without it God would not be God, Christ would not be Christ, the world would not be the world. In a sense, the word "reconciled" dominates our text. But this reconciliation is a unique event by virtue of its being the act of God in Christ. It is indeed an act, an event, a process; but it cannot therefore be included in a framework of philosophy built around the category of act, event, or process. It is God's act, not the crea-
106 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION ture's; an act for and not by man. It is an event which cannot be included in any class, physical, social, or psychical. It is a process not in the world but one that reveals the world as the object of reconciliation. There are processes of moving, living, and thinking in our world. But the process of our reconciliation with God is not analogous to any of these. We do not know this process as we know the others. We know this process by "faith," by finding ourselves in a new relation to all processes. It is a process which transforms the meanings of all other processes such as living, eating, working, and loving. When reconciliation is included in universal process, especially when subsumed under the idea of reconciliation in general, and set side by side with reconciliation among men or reconciliation with life, or destiny, the meaning of the word as we find it in our text is radically altered. Of course, the word as such, in a literal sense-that is, as used with regard to men's attitude toward other men or toward the world-belongs to a class and a framework. But the word is not used in our text literally, that is, with regard to man in relation to men or their world. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Hence, the word is used metaphorically. It is used as a symbol for an event which differs in toto from the other events which it symbolizes literally. Man shall not confront God as he confronts the creature. He does not sin against God as he sins against the creature. Hence he is reconciled with God, in a unique event. God reconciles him to himself. God reconciles him in Christ. God reconciles him as a sinner, as one in bondage to the law, sin, death, the world, the devil, and wrath, all of which derive their meaning from this act of reconciliation. All three words, as pointing to a misrelation with God, are metaphors, words lifted from a given framework and used to convey a new meaning. Even the word "process" is transformed by reconciliation. In this process, as against a "natural" process, faith plays the decisive role. It is by faith that we receive Paul's statement. Our reconciliation with God reveals our sin; sin exposes us to judgment; judgment presumes our enmity against God as an ongoing affair. Hence we do not know our reconciliation as we know any other process. This is a process in which we are apprehended, not one we apprehend. Hence even "process" is a metaphor. God does not act as the sun or fire or man act. God did not reconcile the world to himself as men who have quarrelled become reconciled. The word "reconciled" cannot be used with regard to God's act in Christ literally, that is, as it is used among men. Hence, there can be no question of including God's act in Christ in a framework of philosophy. The word is used to signify an event which is unique. Therefore it is used metaphorically. But it is quite evident that our text has no awareness of using metaphorical language! There are obvious metaphors in the Bible. But "God,""Christ,""rec- onciliation," are not among them. The Apostle uses the word reconciliation as though its primary or literal meaning is what God has done for the world in Christ Jesus. The formative and decisive experience of the Christian is what God has done in Christ. The primary meaning of "reconciliation," its initial referent, is the act of God in Christ. The reconciliation God wrought in Christ is the ground of reconciliation among men. We are not to understand what the word means in Scripture from what it means in human experience in general; on the contrary, we are to interpret reconciliation among men as the expression of the reconciliation which God wrought in Christ.
The bearing of this on our problem is as follows: The program for the inclusion of the Christian faith within a philosophical framework presupposes that the words or symbols employed in such a framework can be employed also as literal symbols of Christian doctrine. A philosophical framework must consist of literal symbols. Words like "process" and "reality" cannot act as organizing concepts of literal symbols if they themselves are metaphorical. If they are to organize experience and ideas, they must be general concepts into which we can fit our ideas of the things around us. Philosophy abhors metaphors. When philosophy uses metaphors, it does so because it is balked by the resistance of some event to inclusion in a given system of ideas. Plato, for instance, used his famous parables of the charioteer and the cave because he found that idealism did not provide him with a framework in which he might include human activity as seen from within. If one is to include the word "reconcile" in a philosophical framework, it must have the same meaning with regard to God's action as it does with regard to man's action. If so, God's action must belong to a general classification of acts signified by reconciliation. Then God must reconcile as man reconciles. Men must reconcile alongside of God and independently of him. Then, God's reconciling the world to himself is not the ground of human reconciliation. In short, God's act is not primary, and it is not unique. But all this is not to be inferred from our text. Therefore the statement "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself" cannot be included in a framework of philosophy built up without faith. Let us for a moment look at "the world." Doubtless Paul's cosmos included man and nature. It included "spiritual powers" as known in the Hellenistic CHRISTIAN FAITH AND METAPHYSICS 107 world. It was God's creation and a scene of conflict as well as sin. A number of modes of thought went into his views of "the world." But what does "the world" mean in our text? It means a creation alienated from God who was in Christ reconciling it to himself. God-Christworld constitute a complex, and it is within this complex that the world is to be understood. The world is that which is reconciled to God. The essential meaning of "the world" is not that it is physical and spiritual or a realm of matter and form, of being and change, of unity and plurality, etc. The "world" here means object of reconciliation; the scene of God's action in Christ, the locus of the manifestation of God's power in Christ; a world which has its being and destiny "in Christ." The world is not construed in terms of any metaphysics but in terms of "in Christ." The world, of course, is what our several sciences and philosophies say it is. It contains the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms. It is a cosmic, terresterial, historical process, or concatenation of processes. It reveals causality and creativity. It is intelligible and manageable. One can form coherent ideas about it, and one can understand it in terms of certain metaphysical principles. Hence, one has to be as good a metaphysician as possible. One has to understand the world in terms of the several metaphysical categories as formulated by competent philosophic thinking. A Christian who lives in a common world with non- Christians has to have as adequate a metaphysic as possible. He has to speak of the world of "matter, life, mind, spirit." He may even discuss a given philosophical problem, such as those of motion and knowledge, without reference to "God in Christ." But, a Christian is not in a position to ignore the fact of Christ in his total view of himself and his world.
108 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION As a man being reconciled to God, he cannot speak of being, event, time, change, destiny, of "man's place in nature," or of "the meaning of history," etc., apart from his faith. And he is bound to look at the world from a perspective established by "God in Christ." The world exists "in Christ," so that it is unintelligible apart from God's reconciling act in Christ. Any metaphysics which excludes this act is, for the Christian faith, misleading as to the essential nature of the world. A conception of process which ignores reconciliation cannot but be false, because it ignores the dependence of the world process upon God. In short, for the Christian faith, any metaphysic which does not envisage the world as the object of redemption "in Christ" cannot be a framework for theology. A philosophical framework must be capable of including all there is. If it cannot include life, or man, it is not only incomplete but also inadequate. This is why materialism, or idealism, is regarded as unacceptable metaphysics. But there is no philosophical framework, built up by metaphysical analysis of the contents of our world and the processes in it, that can in the nature of the case include God who is in Christ. God in Christ, is not deus sive natura, because he acts upon nature and is neither it nor an aspect of it. Since he is not nature, no metaphysical analysis can discover him except through faith-that is, unless the metaphysician is a Christian believer. Deus non est in genere. Everything in the world belongs to a genus, and the world is the sum of the beings in it. Therefore God is not the world or in the world. If not the world or in the world, he cannot be included in a philosophical framework. A man cannot understand himself except as object of divine reconciliation. But so to understand one's self is to ac- knowledge that God is neither an idea nor a thing or that he is known in the effect he produces in reconciliation. Being neither idea nor thing, he cannot be a metaphysical object. "God," "Christ," "reconciling," "world"-each one of these words as a general idea could and has been included in a metaphysic. God and world have both been included in many and diverse frameworks of philosophy. Even "Christ" as "Messiah" belongs in a Jewish scheme of the world and represents a "Savior," an ideal being, who belongs to a class. The word "reconcile," of course, is a commonplace and has found its way into metaphysics via ethics. Any friendly deity could be conceived as exercising forgiveness. But, together, these four words, as we find them in our text, constitute a complex, held together by "in Christ," which cannot be included in any philosophical framework. Any philosopher who acknowledges himself a sinner being reconciled to God in Christ comes before God not in order to fit him in a metaphysic but to subject his metaphysic to Divine criticism. Fides quaeret intellectum. Faith seeks to express itself in terms of coherent ideas. It tries to understand man and his world in the light of reconciliation. The Christian philosopher tries to think out being and process alike in the light of Christ. In the process, the process of reconciliation, his philosophical language undergoes a radical alteration, so that whatever philosophical framework may have been brought before God is transformed by faith into a structure held together not by being or process but by God. It now becomes clear that being, or cause or process, is not God but rather that God in Christ is the Ground of Being or the Uncaused Cause or Creative Process. It becomes also clear that, since they refer to
CHRISTIAN FAITH AND METAPHYSICS 109 reconciliation, such words are metaphors which cannot be turned into a framework which shall include faith. II Philosophy is the effort toward a maximum organization of ideas around a minimum of principles. The mind has a relentless impulse to bring ideas belonging to different classes into a coherent whole and to see all things in relation. Hence it seeks ideas which express the relatedness of ideas one to another and tries to achieve greatest possible inclusiveness in its operation. A philosophy is good in so far as it involves the greatest number of ideas from the most classes and in so far as it succeeds in bringing order into the manifoldness of experience. Philosophy is a perennial human activity not only because the mind seeks coherence but also because the mind is the mind of a human being whose knowledge of himself and of ideas or the things around him, cannot be separated one from the other. There is philosophy, as distinct from science, because man needs to understand himself in relation to his world. Man's knowledge of himself as changeable in an enduring world has been a mainspring of philosophic reflec- tion-so much so that all philosophy which is indifferent to human destiny is also lacking in a dimension which makes philosophy interesting and philosophers great. Spinoza, Marx, Heidegger, Dewey, who saw nothing "beyond death," were great as human beings and philosophers because they believed that their systems meant freedom from "the fear of death." Now it is quite evident that these two sides of philosophy go together. A given philosopher may emphasize the one or the other. But no philosophy can be without both; otherwise it is no longer the quest for wisdom. A given "framework of philosophy," that is, a meta- physics involving a given set of first principles, is an organization of ideas inspired at once by the ideas available and by the philosopher's quest for wisdom. The philosopher is in search of the good life, and this search qualifies his metaphysics. There never was, nor can there be, a philosophic organization of ideas or "framework of philosophy" without the philosopher's, that is, the human being's, quest for vita beata. A philosophy is an organization of ideas toward wisdom. It involves and even presupposes at any given time a notion of "the human problem." It is inspired, as an ultimate concern, by man's fate in an enduring world. Philosophers have sought either to relate man to the eternal, and thus to remove at least part of him from the realm of impermanence, or to persuade him that it is possible to live well even though life has no future. Plato represents the first type and Spinoza the latter. Hence the problems of time and eternity, of the changing and the changeless, of universals and particulars, of phenomenon and noumenon, of the one and the many, of being and nonbeing, of process and reality, have been perennial occupations of philosophers. Our philosophers have had more than intellectual curiosity in their endless disquisitions on these matters. Even at their most dispassionate, they have been moved by an eternal humanity which makes these problems matters of destiny as well as of truth. One may say that, in the last analysis, the subject matter of philosophy is the relation of being to the good; and both being and the good are matters of philosophical reflection because they are matters of human destiny. A philosophical framework is one within which a man is to find wisdom. And one cannot fit the Christian faith into such a framework, because Christianity has to do with the conversion of man after
110 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION the image of Jesus Christ. According to the Christian faith, neither the knowledge of the eternal nor the accepting of the temporal constitutes the solution of the human problem. The problem of man is posited by Jesus Christ. And in the light of this, man, the human problem, is not death as such but sin in relation to death. Jesus Christ transforms the problem of man as one of learning to die well into the problem of reconciliation with God. Indeed, reconciliation with God is the ground of the good life which is also an ability to die well. But it now appears that human misery arises not from finitude as such but from sin which moves man to rebel against finitude. In Christ, God establishes his claim to the trust and obedience of the creature before his Creator. There is no longer a simple quest for wisdom which shall enable man either to deny his finitude or to ignore it. Man is no longer free to seek rest either in the contemplation of or in the union with the eternal or to triumph over "change and decay" by acquiring a "mature mind." The Platonic or the Stoic or the Epicurean or the Spinozist or the Deweyite, or any other philosophic way, is no longer an adequate world view or a proper solution to the human problem. As a Christian, man is confronted with "the living God" first and with time and change second. Time becomes the time of God's action and change the effect of this action. Time is no longer a mere threat of nonbeing but the promise of freedom from sin and death. As the fear of time and change is overcome by Christ, eternity is construed neither as the timeless nor as the endless but as a measure of God's continued act of reconciliation. The changelessness of God, instead of revealing the misery of man, becomes man's hope for a meaningful existence. Thus faith changes the meanings of philosoph- ic language, so that every thought of man becomes subject to Jesus Christ and his work of redemption. Faith in Christ, as H. R. Niebuhr has said, means a total revolution in man, a new creation which becomes the basis for a new framework of philosophy. It gives a new orientation to our lives, a new understanding to our minds, even new meanings to our words. Words become bearers of a new awareness, and we realize that they are metaphors. We realize that our language is transformed, as we are converted, into another language which refers us to God the Father. Ordinary words like "father," "light," "truth," "life," "love," even words like "being," "cause," "time," "change," "process," refer us to "God in Christ." One cannot take a Platonic or Aristotelian system of symbols and use it to express Christian truth unless the symbols are turned into metaphors, as happened when "Messiah," ousia, persona, etc., were taken into Christian theology. The Christian faith is the great transformer of language. It changes the meanings of words. Hence it cannot be interpreted except as it interprets. III When man is defined not in terms of mind or life but as a sinner or a creature who is free not to be himself, then it is not clear as to how he can be included in a system of ideas which ignore, to begin with, his very definition as a human being. If man is himself in relation to God, who does not belong to a class of objects but is the Creator of all; if we cannot say what is essential to being human--that is, his responsibility for trust and obedience to God-without seeing him as united with the Creator, then how are we to include him in a metaphysical framework? Since man is saved by sin through the atonement (according to the Chris-
tian faith); since he is a sinner, at once in bondage and responsible or free; and since his freedom, as saved and sinner, as human and inhuman, excludes inclusion within a framework, we are unable to devise a philosophical system which shall include man. When man is understood in the light of the Christian faith, it becomes impossible to co-ordinate him within a general scheme of being. Christianity or Christ is the reality of human freedom. Hence, man cannot be interpreted within a framework of philosophy. It is of course true that man is substantial, living, rational, a caused and causing being, an event, and a process. In that he is all this, he belongs in "the system of nature." And philosophical reflection on man in terms of being and life and reason and process is a source of truth about him. Man is one and many; he changes and remains himself; he is an animal and a person. In short, everything that he is as an object has its analogies in other beings. Therefore he can and must be interpreted in terms of general or universal ideas. Jesus was a man. He belonged to the human species and to the animal kingdom and shared properties with all organisms and nonorganic beings. He can be interpreted in terms of a number of sciences and within the framework of a number of philosophies. But Jesus atoned for our sins. And we are men for whom Christ died and in whom the miracle of faith occurs. There is no word like "creativity," or "process," which gives us what is essential to the work of Christ for us and in us and what makes us human beings. Our redemption is indeed an event; but, when we say that, we do not say what is essential to it, namely, that our humanity is the work of God in Christ. We do speak of the process of our redemption or more commonly of the drama of salvation. The fact that the Chris- CHRISTIAN FAITH AND METAPHYSICS 111 tian faith is a story of the work of Christ for us and the work of the Spirit in us justifies us in speaking in terms of "process." But it also justifies the language of "reality"; of being, essence, substance. But what is crucial is that the Christian faith, and man as understood through Christ, transform the meanings of these words and press for an interpretation of truth which shall be inspired not independently of faith but as informed by it. The Christian cannot acquiesce in any metaphysic in which Jesus appears as a particular instance of a general idea. When the Christian speaks of ousia, or "process," he speaks of it "in Christ." In so doing he understands ousia, or "process," in terms of the act of God in our rehumanization. He understands "process" in terms of God's work and not conversely. He understands "process" in terms of the atonement and regeneration, not conversely. Thus ousia ceases to be essence in general, and "process" turns out to be other than a matter of natural dynamics. The Christian is not free to "interpret" his faith in the light of a given philosophy. He must, as a thinker, engage in philosophical reflection, that is, he must interpret all ideas and organizations of ideas in terms of his faith. He must know the several metaphysical systems and the problems posed by philosophical language. He must be concerned with the philosophical quest and appropriate the issues raised by the philosopher. Philosophical indifference may often be inevitable, but it never is itself a virtue. A Christian is a human being. Therefore good thinking is good for him, as for anyone else. But it is of the nature of the Christian faith that it is not open to one to be a philosopher first and a Christian second. Men like Augustine, Thomas, Edwards, Kierkegaard, Tillich, also remind
112 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION us that it is not possible for a Christian to exist apart from his intellectual situation. Every Christian exists in his world, and his world (being reconciled to God) is a cultural complex including "science and society" as well as philosophic ideas. Every responsible theologian, in fact, interprets the theology he receives in the light of his understanding of the total cultural situation. His scientific, political, or philosophical insights require constant criticism of his theological language. There is a constant debate going on between theology as a coherent language of faith and philosophy as a world view, and both are open to criticism, on the one hand, through reconciliation in Christ and, on the other, through the Christian's awareness of the world in which he lives. In this process the Christian is constantly kept aware of the battle of the metaphors (theological and philosophical) he uses. The metaphorical character of his language becomes increasingly evident, and he realizes that theological literalism is idolatrous. He finds himself criticizing his own theology because at any given time it is inadequate as both an expression of his faith and a statement of his ideas. And in this criticism faith and reason co-operate in the perennial struggle against sin and foolishness which are bedfellows. In short, a thinking Christian cannot get along without philosophy any more than he can without theology, for both are, each in its way, the criticism of his language. But, if such dynamic relation between theology and philosophy is to exist, it were fatal to "reinterpret" theology in the language of any given philosophy or to fit it into a given philosophical framework. The truth, seen historically, is that the Christian faith has meant a metanoia, a change of mind, for the philosopher. When philosophers became Christians, their framework of philosophy was changed. Rather, old words took on new meanings, or being and process were interpreted in a new light. It is true that Christian thinkers did not always have the integrity and vigor to allow their faith to qualify their philosophical ideas. So we have had men who have been Platonists or Hegelians or Whiteheadians before they have been Christians. But this is manifestly not just to "the new man" in Christ. The philosophers who realized the converting effect of the Christian faith-augustine, Anselm, Edwards, Kierkegaard, Tillich-developed Christian philosophies which were rein- terpretations of philosophical ideas in the light of the Christian faith. There are two ways open before us: We shall either reinterpret the Christian faith from within a framework of philoso- phy or reinterpret our philosophical ideas from within the Christian faith. If we are not to do away with faith, the latter is the proper way. It is also possible for Christians to repudiate philosophy and for philosophers to ignore Christianity. But these ways are not edifying.