I think that the discipline of philosophy can be of service to the church in a number
of ways.
One of the most important will be in the area of apologetics.
Philosophy can help to construct arguments for the existence of God that are quite independent
of appeal to the Bible as the word of God.
There are arguments like the cosmological, the teleological, the axiological, the ontological
argument for God's existence.
These are philosophical arguments that I think make it plausible to believe in a perfectly
good creator and designer of the universe.
Moreover, there are philosophical objections that have been raised against the Christian
faith that need to be answered.
Preeminently among these would be the problem of evil and suffering.
We cannot simply stick our heads in the sand and ignore these sorts of objections and challenges,
and being trained in philosophy will help to answer these philosophical objections.
So one way in which philosophy is very helpful to the church is in the area of apologetics.
Another respect in which philosophy is I think vitally important to the church is in doing
systematic theology.
I would differentiate between biblical theology and systematic theology.
Biblical theology will simply be the theology of the biblical authors themselves.
And here you would talk, for example, about Paul's doctrine of justification by faith,
and that might be different from what John has to say or James has to say or Luke's theology
in his gospel and the book of Acts.
That would be biblical theology, which simply seeks to unpack the theology of the various
biblical authors.
But systematic theology takes it a step further and tries to construct a worldview based upon
what the Bible teaches that will address all of the various aspects of theology, like the
existence of God, the nature of humanity, the doctrine of creation, the person of Christ,
the church, the last things, the doctrine of Scripture; and when you do systematic theology,
philosophy is going to be the handmaid of theology that will enable you to do good systematics.
Great illustrations of this would be the doctrine of the Trinity or the doctrine of the two
natures of Christ.What the Bible teaches is that Jesus Christ is God, that the Father
is God, that the Holy Spirit is God, and yet there is only one God.
Now how do you put that together? Well that's where philosophy has aided the church in formulating
the doctrine of the Trinity.
Or similarly, the New Testament seems to teach that Jesus Christ is truly human, and yet
at the same time it affirms that he is truly God.
Now, if anything looks like a contradiction surely that's it; how do you put this together
to say that this one person was truly God and truly man?
Well this is where philosophy can help by differentiating between the person of Christ
and the two natures of Christ, his human nature and his divine nature. So historically, philosophy
has been vital in the task of doing systematic theology and I find that it continues to make
a crucial contribution today.
In understanding the attributes of God, for example, God's eternity and his relationship
to time, or understanding God's omniscience and what he knows, or understanding God's
omnipotence, what he's capable of doing, in all of these areas, philosophy will be vital
in helping the systematic theologian to craft a biblically adequate but logically coherent
doctrine of God.
So that would be a second way in which philosophy I think is really important to the church
in doing good systematic theology.