Excerpt from Robert Sokolowsky, The God of Faith and Reason: Foundations of Christian Theology (CUA Press, 1995), pp 45-46.

Theological reflection on creation has to become engaged with philosophical reflection on the world or the whole. What philosophy has to say about the whole and its necessities is the province of the first, or ultimate, philosophy, and it might seem undesirable to have to relate theological thinking to such distant and “airy” speculation. But the issue of the whole is not as distant and idle as it might seem; even in ordinary understanding we all have opinions about the whole. They might be an extrapolation of some form of “science,” as science is institutionalized in our world, or they might be a “world-view” we have from our upbringing, our religion, and our culture. Such views about the whole, and on being human as a special part of the whole, are notoriously vague and ambiguous, and philosophy is the attempt to think as explicitly and appropriately as we can about the whole. In pagan philosophy and religion the world is there as the matrix and setting for all the particular issues that more directly engage our attention. Christian belief in creation makes the world or the whole explicitly thematic because it urges a special kind of negation of the world or the whole; it urges a distinction between the whole and God.

One danger in this is that the world might lose its character as a matrix and ultimate setting and begin to look like a large thing, a global object, instead of being taken as a setting for things and objects; this would occur if the distinction between God and the world is misread as one of the distinctions we naturally and spontaneously make between things within the world. This misunderstanding of both the world and God, this taking of both of them as new kinds of objects, can be prevented by a proper emphasis on the philosophical inquiry into the whole and its necessities; by an awareness of the special sense of God as ipsum esse subsistens and the special transformation of language that occurs when we begin to speak, religiously and theologically, about God; and by an explicit study of the unusual character of the distinction between the whole and God. But despite the danger of misunderstanding, Christian theology inevitably engages philosophy, the study of the whole, by virtue of the special kind of distinction, negation, or separation that Christian belief executes in regard to being and the whole. The unsettled and unsettling relationship between theology and philosophy—and philosophy itself is a kind of extreme and unsettling human preoccupation—has been one of the major causes of motion in Western civilization.

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Return to Lesson 15: What is God’s Role in Ordering the Physical World?