Pulse
02 Mar 2026
In the last few decades, there has been a significant and exciting resurgence of philosophical theology, especially within analytic philosophy. Several reasons can be attributed to this phenomenon, including the collapse of logical positivism in the 1970s and the renewed interest in metaphysics.
Contributing to this development are the works of eminent Christian philosophers such as Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, Eleonore Stump and Marilyn McCord Adams, Oliver Crisp and William Lane Craig. These writers have addressed topics such as epistemology, the problem of evil, divine action and atonement.
The resurgence of philosophical theology has brought to life fundamental questions about the relationship between theology and philosophy. These questions must be revisited in light of the different methodologies and emphases that philosophical and analytical theologians have adopted, and the role they have assigned to philosophy.
Alongside this revival of philosophical theology, there is also a renewed interest in natural theology, which seeks to understand God through reason and the observation of the natural world, independent of special revelation. For example, there is a revitalisation of the arguments for the existence of God such as the Kalam cosmological argument championed by Craig and the fine-tuning argument proposed by Swinburne.
These arguments are often made remoto Christo – ‘apart from Christ’, that is, detached from divine revelation. Again, this raises the issue about the relationship between theology and philosophy.
To clarify the relationship between the two disciplines, it is helpful to describe – albeit very broadly – what they are about and what their fundamental focuses might be.
Theology may be described as the Church’s understanding and speech about God which is grounded in the revelation of God in the Incarnation and witnessed in Scripture. Theological discourse must not be confined to the learned treatises of theologians, both ancient and modern. It is also found in the worship of the Church – its hymns, prayers, liturgies, and sermons.
Theology can be regarded as an academic discipline – as a science, as Barth and others have proposed – but it can never be reduced to it. Theology has to do with this Christian vision of God. It is caught up in Christian practice, and in the Christian way of being in the world, both as individual believers as well as the community of the Spirit, the Body of Christ.
Philosophy is best defined by taking the literal sense of the two conjoined Greek words (phileo=love, and sophia= wisdom) as ‘the love of wisdom.’ Put differently, philosophy may be described as a search for and an attempt to describe ultimate reality.
The Nigerian philosopher, Ejeh Paulinus C. has helpfully described philosophy thus:
[P]hilosophy is a rational, critical, organised, and systematic discipline which seeks to provide solutions to the basic questions about the ultimate meaning of reality as a whole and human life in particular. Thus, philosophy is a search, a continuous search for meaning, for intelligibility and for answers. It is a search that never ends, for by its nature, philosophy is always on the way and never arrives at its destination.
It is quite clear that the questions that philosophy is burdened with overlap with the concerns of theology as well. Furthermore, philosophy is able to grasp some tracings of the truth through its reflection of the empirical world that is shot through by the general revelation of God.
Theologians such as Thomas Aquinas therefore regard philosophy as the preamble of the Christian faith (praeambula fidei). In his Summa Theologiae, Thomas famously explains that
… the existence of God and other like truths about God, which can be known by natural reason, are not articles of faith but are preamble to the articles; for faith presupposes natural knowledge, even as grace presupposes nature.
Apart from its role as the preamble of faith, philosophy is also helpful for the Church’s articulation of the faith in a variety of ways.
Theological discourse must be conducted with sufficient or reasonable clarity and philosophy has always been used as a tool for expounding or defending the Christian faith.
This is evident in the writings of the early fathers of the Church who commandeered philosophical concepts such as ousia (substance) to expound the doctrine of the Trinity. It is also evident in the work of medieval theologians such as Aquinas and Bonaventure who quarried Aristotelian philosophy for the conceptual tools to develop their theological arguments.
Philosophy has supplied several important concepts that have helped theology to explicate the revelation of God in Scripture including essence, being, omnipotence, omnipresence and eternity.
In all of this, philosophy has served as a very important handmaiden to theology. It has helped theology to articulate the faith with precision, clarity and compelling logic.
However, theologians must always remember that philosophy is merely a handmaiden, whose purpose is to assist theology to do its proper work. This means that the conceptual and logical tools that philosophy provides must be used as an aid to expound the Christian faith – it must not be allowed to shape the contents of the faith.
As the Methodist theologian, Alan Padgett, rightly cautions:
Theology must use philosophical ideas, but critically. The criterion of this critique is the revelation of God in Christ Jesus. No system of philosophy, no metaphysical analysis, can be accepted as the only proper Christian view. Theology uses philosophy, but it should do so with a light touch, always seeking to ground itself in divine revelation rather than merely human wisdom.
This warning is especially pertinent to Christian analytic philosophers with an inadequate or selective grasp of dogmatics and the history of theology. Philosophical concepts and logic must never be allowed to create a Procrustean bed which trims away all the bits of Christian doctrine that fail to fit into it.
Recent years have witnessed a number of doctrines such as divine simplicity, divine impassability, and divine immutability being jettisoned by some Christian philosophers and theologians because they do not fit a particular logical framework.
Returning to Aquinas’ view that philosophy is the preamble of the faith, we must stress once again – even at the risk of belabouring the point – that philosophy does not provide faith with its substance. The content of the faith is provided by God through the Incarnation of the Son and the inspiration of Scripture. It is received, understood and lived by that worshipping community, the Church, which is united with Christ by the Holy Spirit.
This emphasis must be made again and again in the wake of the current renaissance of natural theology. Here, the clear warning from the Swiss-German theologian of the last century, Karl Barth, must be revisited and taken seriously.
Natural theology must never seek to present itself as theology or seek to replace revelation in its attempt to talk about God remoto Christo. Padgett has ably articulated the essence of Barth’s concerns and its pertinence in the modern resurgence of natural theology:
To avoid the Barthian objection, natural theology must keep its place within a strictly philosophical domain. It cannot and should not become a kind of substitute for revelation – a more acceptable means (to the arrogance of Enlightenment rationalism) of the knowledge of God, a means independent of, and laying the foundations for, the word of God. That humans can know God through nature, reason, and philosophy is not in question. Whether such a god is Yahweh or Baal is the real theological point in Barth’s objection.
In a passage from his great 1998 encyclical Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason), John Paul II provides an apt summary of the issues that this article has been exploring. It succinctly delineates the role that philosophy plays in theological reflection and discourse.
Theology’s source and starting-point must always be the word of God revealed in history, while its final goal will be an understanding of that word which increases with each passing generation. Yet, since God’s word is Truth (John 17:17), the human search for truth – philosophy, pursued in keeping its own rules – can only help to understand God’s word better.
Dr Roland Chia is Chew Hock Hin Professor at Trinity Theological College (Singapore) and Theological and Research Advisor of the Ethos Institute for Public Christianity.