Philosophical Presuppositions and Teachings about God

In some of my research for my dissertation, I've come across the idea of the presuppositions contained in each religion. Any system of belief, whether it be a religious belief of empirical scientific belief, forms the basis of what each person considers knowledge. Of course, if the belief is warranted or not, and thus counts as knowledge or not, is another matter. But I'm not dealing here with the question of whether the belief is warranted or not. Perhaps I'll save that for another post.

Anyway, the idea is that since each religion has these philosophical presuppositions about the nature of reality, the nature of knowledge, and the existence and nature of divine being(s), a religion is built upon the foundation of a philosophical worldview. That's nothing surprising, since all opinions are so – everything we think, we get from our philosophical worldview, the system that we build all of our new ideas out of, and into which we integrate new knowledge.

Josef Seifert is of the opinion, at least, that this means you can't separate the philosophical teaching about God (assuming you accept there is one) from the revealed teaching about God in the religion which builds upon the particular philosophical teaching – and vice versa, that if you follow a given philosophical teaching to its conclusion, and if it implies a religious teaching, you're intellectually obligated to follow through, as the teachings aren't really teaching different things.

Theologically seen, it's kind of like the idea of general revelation leading to specific revelation. The breaking point is usually that many Christian theologians would say that you can't jump the gap between the two, even if they do teach the same thing. There's no way of proving that they are, in fact, the same understanding of God. Some would even claim that they're not (but that's another post).

Is there a philosophical necessity that a given worldview must end in revealed religion? Given that there's absolute truth, is this the roots of an argument for exclusive religion based on which revealed religion fits the philosophical nature of the world best (well, an idea world in which we could all agree about the nature of it even outside of religious dispute)?

This seems to not only give us grounds for comparative theology outside of self-justifying claims of exclusivity in a religious doctrine, but also gives a pretty sharp impetus to take a long, hard look at the implicit epistemology and ontology of the West – because materialistic naturalism lives on borrowed foundations, and it borrows those foundations, along with its epistemic certainty, from Christian Theism. (I argue this second assertion in a forthcoming [hopefully] article, an update regarding the when and where will be posted assuming it gets published)

Comparative theology – not very politically correct, but obligatory?

Missiology and Ecclesiology

Last night I was talking with an acquaintance of mine, and in the course of the discussion, we got on to both the topic of missionary/evangelistic activity and the liturgy of the church. He's a Catholic, and he happened to mention that he had read somewhere that even if the Bible were to disappear, in theory, the liturgy of the Catholic church retained everything necessary for faith. It's apparently supposed to present the Gospel in both an outreach and proclamation manner, thus fulfilling the idea of the constant calling to repentance and the proclamation of the Gospel to believers.

Now, I'm not about to become Catholic by any means, and he even admitted that the reality rarely matched the ideal, but it got me thinking. To what extent can we say that about our ecclesiology, and the method in which we worship? If we're not to make the Bible into our God, and set the written scripture above the message of God, would we still be able to say that we are proclaiming the Gospel even when we don't quote it?

I think this is maybe connected to the idea of "lifestyle evangelism" popular in evangelical churches, but I mean more than that. I'm not just talking about evangelism, for one – I'm also meaning the general proclamation of the Gospel for its value even to the believer. And I'm not saying it's just a personal thing. It's very much a corporate thing, the how we do church.

I seem to remember Karl Barth writing something about missions being the assignment of the church. John Flett notes that missionary societies arose because the ecclesiologies weren't sufficient. There's a pretty good consensus, as far as I've read, that missions are supposed to happen within the context of the church. Does how we do church play a role in that (obviously, but I mean more than cultural expression vs. exporting western styles)? Do we "do missions" by "doing church?" If we do, are we proclaiming the Gospel in how we "do church?" In what a church is? In the liturgy and forms we choose?

I don't know enough about the topic to say definitively, but I would tentatively say, probably yes. What it means to "be church" and "do church" isn't the most popular field of study in modern times, but I think it's something we might need to focus a bit more on, if we're living out the theology we claim to believe.

Maybe, if I have time, and can figure out the right resources, this will become an article at some point, but for now, it's just my questioning out there.