Yesterday, I posted a talk answering some questions on classical education—what is classical curriculum, and so on. You can see that talk published on March 20. In the midst of that talk, toward the end actually, I discussed a topic that I think is pretty important, and I even received some feedback on that part of the talk. I think it would be worthwhile to devote an entire talk just to that topic: the difference between philosophy and theology.
Table of contents
The Problem in Modern Christian Thinking
This is an issue that really highlights the problem in modern Christian thinking. The abandonment of the classical liberal arts and classical education has created a Christian mind that can’t function outside of a Christian context, and there’s a real problem with that.
As I mentioned in that talk yesterday, the mission of the Christian church is not to simply know God. The mission of the Christian church is not to sit and contemplate and think religious thoughts. The Christian church is to go out into the world, make disciples, baptize them in the name of the Trinity, and teach them to observe all that Christ has commanded.
As we read through the New Testament, we learn that it’s the responsibility of Christians to go into the world, to interact with unbelievers, to defend the teachings of the Christian faith, and to seek to teach and instruct the ignorant, which is a work of mercy. We are to preach the gospel, to help men and women sort through the questions and confusion that they have, and lead them to the truth.
Two Modes of Communication
Because Christians are not called out of the world to isolate themselves, but are actually sent into the world, we must think about how that interaction with the world is to be conducted. If we look through church history, we find that there are two different levels on which Christians communicate with the world.
On a human level, as rational creatures, we communicate in rational terms. But on another level, as rational creatures who are the recipients of the grace of faith, we communicate among people of faith differently than we communicate with people outside the faith. There are two different modes of communication that require two different ways of thinking or two different methods of investigation.
Christians, if they’re going to be wise and capable of communicating effectively, need to be skilled in both. We live these two different lives, as it were, which come together in the Christian life. But as we interact with different people, we must have the discretion to know what message or methods are appropriate for different people. We must respect our audience and observe the golden rule in communication: do to others what we would have them do to us.
Let me give an illustration to help make this point. If you were a blind person, born blind, you would not like it if people who could see came up to you and spoke to you in terms that assumed you were able to see. You wouldn’t appreciate people talking about color or light or how beautiful something was. You would like for them to adapt their message to your capacities. You would like them maybe to talk about something you could hear or smell or feel, but you wouldn’t want them speaking to you in terms of sight.
That’s what we do when we talk to unbelievers with language that is appropriate for one who has faith, but is not appropriate for one who doesn’t. It’s simply a matter of applying the golden rule to communication.
Faith is a theological virtue. It’s a grace. God infuses the virtue of faith into the human soul as an act of grace. The reason why I believe the articles of the faith, which we find expressed in the Apostles’ Creed, is because God’s grace has enabled me to do so.
Remember when Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do men say that I am?” and then asks, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter answers and says, “You are the Christ, the Son of God.” Jesus responds and says, “Blessed are you, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father, who is in heaven, He has revealed this to you.”
We see that Peter’s confession was a sign of God’s grace at work in him, and our Lord was able to recognize that because it’s impossible for men to confess that Jesus is the Son of God unless they’re moved to do so by the Spirit of God.
The Christian faith requires grace to be received. This is why in John chapter one, we read that “to as many as received Him, He gave the power to become sons of God to those who believe in his name.” That’s what it means to be justified by faith. But that’s a grace. It goes on to say that such men who receive Jesus, who believe in his name, are not born by human reproduction, nor by the will of man, but they are born of God. This is what Jesus means when he talks about the need to be born again, which is signified and actualized through the sacrament of baptism.
Two Different Audiences
We see that distinction made between men, and we know what this feels like. We know what it’s like to talk to an audience that is filled with faith, where we can make assumptions about religious truths that they don’t need us to prove, beyond saying that God has revealed this or that. We also know what it’s like to talk to other people who don’t have faith and struggle to assent to anything that’s been revealed by God.
The solution to that is to be able to communicate as much of the truth as possible by means of two different ways of communication: first, by reason to those who do not believe, and to those who do believe. So to everyone by reason, and by faith to those who believe.
Defining Philosophy
Now, the difference between philosophy and theology is that they relate to these different modes of communication, different modes of learning and understanding.
Philosophy is the knowledge of the truth that is obtained by means of human reason alone.
Included in human reason would be human observation, so the use of the senses would be included in reason. Philosophy is the knowledge of the truth that is obtained by means of natural human learning capacities—by reason and the senses.
If we ask a question like, “What’s the purpose of our life? Why are we here? What should we do? What is our end?”—if we were to provide a philosophical answer to that question, we would find the answer that Aristotle presents in his Nicomachean Ethics, a philosophical answer based on reason alone.
How does Aristotle go about this? He doesn’t start quoting the gods and goddesses of the ancient world. What Aristotle does, because he’s the philosopher, is he begins to comment on observations that are plain to everyone. He starts out in the Ethics, and he says, “Well, you know, if we look around, if we observe human activity, we can see that human beings have will. They do things with an intention, and they do all kinds of different things. But when they do these things, they do them in pursuit of some certain ends.”
For example, if we see a man going out and preparing a field, and we were to ask him, “What are you doing? Why are you doing this?” He would say, “I’m preparing the soil because I’m going to plant a crop that I can harvest in the fall.” If we ask, “Well, what are you planting?” and he tells us, we could ask, “Well, why are you planting that? Why not something else?” We could go on investigating, asking, “Why, why, why?” We would continue to move through this hierarchy of ends or purposes until we finally got to the last answer, beyond which there would be no other answer—no other “why”—the final and ultimate end.
Aristotle said, “We can all see that. We can all see that those questions about the reason for doing things or the goal in human actions lead through a hierarchy and must lead to some ultimate purpose. So we know that there is an ultimate purpose.”
Then Aristotle asks, “Well, what would we determine that purpose to be?” He continues to reason through this, and he says, “What’s obvious is that in everything that people do, whether they think through that whole hierarchy or just short-sightedly focus on an immediate end before them, we’re all seeking one thing. If we had to give that one thing a name, it would be happiness. We’re all seeking happiness. We all have a common end in what we do.”
But the problem is that we would define that differently, so we need to establish the best possible definition. Aristotle goes through an examination of a number of different possible definitions or descriptions of happiness, and he shows that this one is not acceptable, this one doesn’t pass any tests, and this one proves to be insufficient. But there’s only one that’s left that’s worthy of human nature.
He says that true human happiness consists in a contemplative life, where a man seeks the enjoyment of virtuous habits. In other words, he says that human happiness consists in simply being good. Being good is what makes man happy.
But Aristotle goes further than that, and he says, “We’ll find that our own goodness and our own happiness is unsatisfying, because that goodness that we seek will also lead us to consider the happiness of all those around us. We will not be content with just our own happiness in the presence of all kinds of misery. We’ll also desire for our neighbors to be happy.”
So the chief good of human life is not merely to seek his own happiness, but to seek the happiness of all of those around him. Aristotle says this pursuit of the happiness of all men, or at least all men in a certain community, is pursued through political science or the science of the common good.
So Aristotle gets to this very highly developed answer to the question, “What is the purpose of our life?” And he does so by reason and observation alone. There’s no talk of religion. There’s no divine revelation. He never says “God says.” He never quotes any religious texts. He simply reasons, and that’s philosophy.
When we answer the question according to human reason and observation, we’re doing the work of philosophy.
Now, in the ancient world, not everyone was a philosopher. There were theologians. In the ancient world, we can see this, for example, in the writings of Homer or in the writings of Hesiod. When they were asked questions like, “Why is this like this? What’s the purpose of this? Why is this the way it is?” they answered those questions with religious answers. They would say, “Oh, well, you see, the god so-and-so saw that men would do this, and so he did this. And that’s the reason why this is the way it is.”
That was ancient theology, where there was a divine answer to important questions. But philosophy abandoned that, or avoided that, and answered the questions in ways that every human being could see the truth.
Philosophy is far more valuable than that kind of theological reasoning, because anyone with senses, anyone with reason, can follow the line of arguments, follow the demonstration that’s provided by the philosopher, and come to the conclusion. This is what ancient philosophers did.
It’s important to understand what philosophy is. Philosophy is the pursuit of the truth by means of human reason, and it’s extremely important because it allows human beings to know a great deal of truth about the world, about themselves, and even possibly about God once we define him philosophically. Much of this knowledge has been lost in modern society, and that causes all kinds of problems.
Philosophy provides a foundation for human knowledge. Without it, for all of the religious talk that may sound good on the surface, imagining that all human learning should be dependent on theology is like telling blind people that all human learning depends on seeing. It’s the same kind of error, and it’s very common today.
The Protestant Abandonment of Philosophy
It’s been very common among Christians since the Protestant Reformation to abandon philosophical learning, abandon the philosophical sciences, and imagine that all we need is the Bible, or all we need is divine revelation. You’ll see Christians who attempt to answer every question in life from the Bible. You can get into a fundamentalist Christian community where they’ve got an entire rule of life, whether it’s actually published or just understood in their community, where everything they do, they will attempt to justify with Bible verses. They imagine that that’s the height of learning, but it’s actually an error.
The reason why is because the knowledge of God certainly depends upon divine revelation. But when God reveals Himself, when divine revelation is given, it’s given to creatures that God created with reason, with senses. There is no reason why God would reveal things that are accessible to men through ordinary, natural means of learning—through their senses, through reasoning, and so on.
It is not reasonable to expect that every kind of knowledge would be provided by means of divine revelation. That whole worldview is itself unreasonable, and we shouldn’t be surprised to find people attracted to it and promoting it who themselves don’t know philosophy.
That should give you a good sense of what philosophy is. The definition we might use is: Philosophy is the pursuit of the truth by means of human reasoning.
I think we can trace a definition similar to that back through all of the ancient philosophers. Pythagoras, for example, one of the earliest and most famous Western philosophers, said that philosophy is the pursuit of the truth in real things. If you want to dig into that, I recommend you study the art of arithmetic. Remember, Pythagoras was a mathematical philosopher who worked in the quadrivium. If you study the Introduction to Arithmetic by Nicomachus, you’ll find the Pythagorean system of philosophy explained, and you’ll see treatment of Pythagoras’ explanation of what philosophy is, which is very interesting.
But anyway, I think that’s all we need to say for now about philosophy.
Defining Theology
So what is theology? Well, theology, like philosophy, is the pursuit of the knowledge of the truth, but by different means—by means of divine revelation.
Theology is the pursuit of the truth by means of divine revelation.
The reason why these two subjects need to be kept separate is because the mode of reception of these two different kinds of knowledge are different. Philosophy, as I said, is received by reason. Theology, on the other hand, is received by faith. You must have faith to receive what is made known by divine revelation.
The modes of reception of these two different kinds of information are different. We receive divine revelation by faith.
Now this is also reasonable. It’s reasonable to expect that there would be truth made known by divine revelation. There are obviously things that we cannot know, that human beings cannot know. We cannot know, for example, what took place before the first human beings existed. Information about the origin of the world is unknown to us.
We can reason from visible things backwards and make guesses—intelligent, rational guesses or hypotheses—about what might have happened before man existed. But in seeking the knowledge of the truth, we don’t want knowledge that’s merely probable. We want knowledge that’s absolutely certain.
If someone is going to hold a gun to my head and threaten to kill me if I believe this or that, I really don’t want to be living in a world of probability. I would like to know with certainty whether it’s worth taking a bullet for or not. By God’s grace, we have knowledge with certainty about religious truths—about truths that are impossible for us or extremely difficult for us to know with certainty and accuracy—and we have that by means of divine revelation.
Two Kinds of Revealed Truths
What St. Thomas explains in the Summa, where this is all articulated beautifully, is that there are two different kinds of truths which theology deals with.
The first kind are things that could not possibly be known to men, things that men could not possibly know. An example of this, I think, would be the Trinity. There would be no way for us to ever reason that God must be three persons in one divine being. There is no way that we could reach that conclusion or that truth by means of human reason. It’s impossible to know. It’s a total mystery, but God Himself revealed it to us.
Think of how he revealed it to us, because this is reasonable. He did not say in the sacred scriptures, “I am a trinity. I am three persons in one being.” That’s not how he revealed himself as Trinity to man, because it wasn’t necessary to do so, nor was it necessarily good to do so.
What God did was reveal things to rational creatures that, when contemplated, when reflected on, would necessarily lead to the knowledge of the doctrine of the Trinity. We see a couple examples of this in the New Testament. First of all, note that these are mysteries that the church leads us to meditate on in the Rosary.
The first is at the baptism of Our Lord, where our Lord is baptized by John in the River Jordan. Jesus is standing there in the water, and God the Father speaks and says, “This is my beloved son. Listen to him.” So we’ve got now the Son, and we’ve got the Father. Then the Holy Spirit descends in that same scene, coming down upon him in the form of a dove. So we’ve got this mysterious presentation of three different characters, as it were, or persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
It’s worth noting that saying “This is my son” was understood by the Jewish people to mean that Christ is in some way equal with God. When he was referred to later as the Son of God, they threatened to kill Him because He made Himself equal with God. So there was significance to that statement, that voice speaking from heaven.
We see there not an explicit revelation of the doctrine of the Trinity, but we see the revelation of truth or of events that are sufficient for a rational man to draw the conclusion. Without that revelation, it would have been impossible.
The Second Kind of Revealed Truth
But there’s another kind that St. Thomas refers to, and it’s truth that wise men like Aristotle, through their many years of contemplation, debating, thinking, writing, and studying, could come to by means of reason alone.
Men could come to the knowledge of certain things by means of reason alone, but it would take a very long time. We have this image of the wise man as this old, white-haired man, because the knowledge of the more profound truths would only be possible after long years of study, experience, and contemplation.
Even then, St. Thomas says that even after those long years of reflection and study, they might come to a knowledge of these truths, but it would be imperfect. It would be mixed up with error. It wouldn’t be pure. It wouldn’t be perfectly true. So it would take a long time, and it would be imperfect, and it would only be possible for a very small number of men.
The problem with that is that this knowledge of these kinds of truths—these very profound, hidden, mysterious truths—they are necessary for man’s salvation. Because they are necessary for man’s salvation, and only a few would ever know them, and even those who did come to the knowledge of them would know them imperfectly, with lots of false ideas mixed into them, God, in His mercy, revealed those truths so that they could be immediately accessible to all men for the sake of their salvation.
God Reveals to Rational Creatures
So there are two different kinds of truths that are revealed by God: truths that are completely beyond the reach of philosophy, and truths that are within the reach of philosophy, but only to a very small number after long years of investigation and mixed with error.
But remember, God is revealing these truths to rational creatures that he created in His own image. He is not revealing them to idiots. He is not revealing them to crazy people. He is not revealing them to irrational people. He’s revealing the truth to intelligent creatures.
Note also things that Jesus says that reveals to us the mind of God. Jesus tells us in the gospel, he tells his disciples, “Do not cast your pearls before swine. Do not cast your pearls before swine.”
When he says that, what he is saying is that you should not take things that are profound or things that are mysterious and publish them to irrational or immoral men. Things that are holy, things that are mysterious and profound, should be kept among people who are rational and reverent towards spiritual things.
So he says, “Do not cast your pearls before swine,” and that gives us an insight into the way that God thinks about revelation. He reveals things to rational men. He reveals things to sincere seekers. He doesn’t require that one be a profound old philosopher to attain them, but he will require that they study and pray and reflect and live an obedient life to gain the assistance of experience to understand them.
Throughout Christ’s life, he talks about the fact that he reveals things in parables, so that some will understand while others will not. He talks about this ability to see and understand, and he tells the hypocrites that they will not be capable of understanding the things that he reveals, whereas the humble and obedient people will understand.
We see the method behind God’s revelation and how that works. It’s not this simple, explicit, literal revelation.
When people say, like Unitarians who said that the word “trinity” is never in Scripture, therefore that proves that God did not reveal the doctrine of the Trinity—that’s an irrational argument. God doesn’t need to reveal something in its complete form to sufficiently reveal it to rational creatures.
When Protestants argue that no one prays to Mary in the New Testament, therefore that is false—that’s an irrational argument.
Let me back up a second. For something to be rational means that if two premises are true, a third necessarily exists. That word “necessarily” is important. In other words, if I reveal two things, the third truth may be necessarily contained with those two things.
For example, and this is the common logical example that’s always used: if I say “all men are mortal,” and then I say “Socrates is a man,” and I stop, and someone raises his hand and says, “If those two statements are true, then it must necessarily be true that Socrates is mortal, because you said that all men are mortal, and you said that Socrates is a man, therefore it’s necessary that Socrates is mortal.”
Even though I revealed only two assertions, the third was necessarily included with the other two. That would continue to multiply as that conclusion was joined with other premises that led to other necessary conclusions and so on. That’s how reason works.
So to reveal the truth to us, God does not have to tell us the conclusion directly. God can supply us with one of the necessary premises or both of the necessary premises, and leave us to draw the conclusion for ourselves.
It would make sense that we would find many truths revealed not explicitly in divine revelation, but revealed incompletely, leaving the completion of that revelation to the work of reason. But nevertheless, those conclusions having four premises—truths revealed by God—would be theological conclusions that would depend on faith.
Now, the reasoning of them, or the logic of them, would not be dependent on faith. But the soundness of the argument or the truth of the conclusion would be dependent on the belief that the premises were, in fact, true.
That’s how divine revelation operates, and that’s the difference between theological knowledge and philosophical knowledge.
Errors in Communication
Now, when we’re not careful to keep these separate, we begin talking to unbelievers in the language of believers. That’s not a sign that we’re faithful. That’s not a sign that we’re lovers of God. That’s a sign that we’re irrational. That’s a sign that we’re not thoughtful, that we’re not sincere, that we’re not doing to others what we would have them do to us.
It’s something that should embarrass us, and it causes Christianity to look ridiculous to the world, because our arguments to unbelievers appear fallacious.
Make sure you get that: when a Christian presents an argument to an unbeliever, and that argument includes a premise that is received by faith, that makes the argument appear to be fallacious. The argument becomes a circular argument, or an argument in which we’re begging the question.
For example, let’s take the abortion debate—whether abortion should be criminalized in American society. A Christian will stand up in the American democratic, secular political environment and say, “Abortion is evil.” An unbeliever will ask, “How can you say that abortion is evil?” The answer from the Christian is, “God says you shall not kill.”
Then all the Christians start high-fiving each other as if they’ve won the day. The unbelievers look at the Christians and say, “These people are seriously crazy. They don’t have the self-awareness to see that they’re actually using their conclusions and the beliefs of their religion as the premises of their political arguments. These people are really crazy. They are irrational, crazy people.”
That judgment from the unbeliever is true. That Christian person making an argument in a secular environment that assumes a premise that depends on faith is irrational.
This is what we see all through American society. This is what I call Christian arrogance—acting as if all of these things are clear, acting as if these arguments are stupid that unbelievers come up with, dismissing their questions or responding to them with circular arguments. This is not a sign of faithfulness or being logical. It is a sign of being crazy and not understanding how reasoning works.
The unbelievers are right, and they don’t trust the Christians, because they see that the Christians are not reasonable. They assume their beliefs in their premises and then pretend to draw conclusions, when all they do is repeat their beliefs.
This is why anti-Christian ideas, anti-Christian activity, is so successful in modern secular politics. The Christians, by abandoning philosophy, have become irrational to unbelievers.
If someone was to ask Aristotle whether abortion should be permitted by law, I trust that he would say, “No, abortion should be illegal.” If you were to ask why abortion should be illegal, he wouldn’t say, “Because God says so.”
Aristotle would appeal to reason and experience to argue why abortion should not be legal. He would likely make an argument from nature. If he found himself unable to assume any premises with his audience, he would let them speak first, and he would use the Socratic method to show that their arguments can’t be sustained without contradiction. He would use dialectical reasoning if they wouldn’t concede any premises to him, and he would prove to them that their arguments, when examined, are impossible to sustain, that they lead to humiliating conclusions that no one would be willing to defend.
He would argue from philosophy in a secular environment. Thomas Aquinas would do the same thing. If Thomas Aquinas was surrounded by unbelievers, he would make the same arguments from nature, or he would turn to dialectical reasoning to simply refute their views. But he would never introduce religious truths and take them for granted when speaking to irreligious people.
Modern Christians do that, and that’s why modern Christianity has become a circus, why modern Christianity has become mocked in public discourse. Unbelievers will ask a question and then watch as a Christian responds like a crazy person, and they’ll laugh at the Christian. The Christians imagine that they’re being persecuted, when in fact, what’s being laughed at is their irrational behavior.
Christians have developed this martyr personality, where they think that every time someone criticizes them, they’re being persecuted for being wise and faithful. When in fact, they’re often being made fun of for being irrational and crazy.
What’s even worse about this modern irrational Christianity is that people who are legitimately crazy begin asserting all kinds of signs of craziness, and they appeal to divine revelation. “The Lord said to me. I was reading the Bible the other day, and the Lord placed it on my heart. The Lord said to me. The Lord showed me that.”
Now we’ve come to have this culture where every person who identifies as a Christian imagines himself to be some kind of prophet or apostle. These appeals to divine revelation can’t be discerned. They can’t be appraised, because we’ve accepted this irrational, crazy view of divine revelation that allows any wacko who buys a Bible at Walmart to now become a prophet through whom God is speaking to the world.
You get a Bible, and you create a free YouTube channel with a Gmail account, and you are a prophet. What allows that culture to exist is this abandonment of philosophy.
Protestantism introduced all of this by subjecting the interpretation of Sacred Scripture not to reason, not to philosophy and experience or to authority, but to human judgment, to private interpretation. We now live in a culture where there is so much wackiness in the name of Christianity that there is no getting around it. There is no way to get around it.
There is so much craziness. You have professional athletes who are celebrating that God enabled them to hit a home run to win a game against a team full of Christians who are also praying that God would allow them to hit a home run. You just have these unbelievers watching this ridiculous mockery of religion on television, thinking these people are crazy people.
It’s like they can’t even reason to think about what the obvious impossibility of this worldview might be. They’re crazy people. This makes religion not seem to become something attractive, but something ridiculous.
Anything you decide to do now becomes the spearhead of the divine plan in the world, and it’s you and God going out into the world to make this thing work. You imagine that your thoughts are divine revelation. Just think how crazy that is—to think that your thoughts are God’s revelation, or your feelings, things that you feel are the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
You become a crazy person when theology is separated from philosophy. That’s why they both need to be maintained.
The Catholic Tradition
Now, when we go back through Catholic church history, thank God that has always been maintained. The Catholic Church has always maintained both philosophy and theology as distinct sciences. True interpretation of divine revelation has always been pursued with the assistance of philosophical learning. That’s what has led in history to Scholastic theology.
But once the Protestants in the 1500s started this new road down the path of a world of theology without philosophy, all of the insanity has entered in. Pentecostals dancing around and barking like dogs in their churches, calling that Christianity, pointing to verses in the Bible and saying that this is what it means—in Acts chapter one, that they spoke in tongues, it meant that they started saying “UBI gabby gooby, gabby gooby.” They’re crazy people.
But without accountability to philosophy, there can be no objection. If you do object, you just leave that church and go to another church until you finally find a place that you feel comfortable. They imagine that that’s how Christ intended his church to operate. It’s just theology separated from philosophy.
On the opposite extreme, you would have philosophy that rejects divine revelation. There you would have imperfect philosophy, imperfect human learning.
So if there was a Stoic, for example, who lived in the time of Christ and the apostles, who heard the gospel and rejected it, he would be left with his philosophy, which would not be capable of leading him to salvation.
It’s worth noting, if you read the book of Acts carefully, that we find St. Paul in Acts chapter 17, preaching to Stoic and Epicurean philosophers. You can read St. Paul’s message to the Stoics and Epicureans in Acts 17, and see how a wise man like St. Paul, who was likely classically educated, would speak about Christ in such a place and time.
You can see also St. Peter speaking to the Roman Cornelius and his family earlier in the book of Acts. I’m off the top of my head guessing Acts chapter 10, something like that. Again, you can see Peter speaking to a Gentile in terms that he would not use if he was speaking to a Jew.
It’s important for us to see those examples in the apostles, because we see that they didn’t just go out and throw Bible verses at people like Protestants do. They went out with both philosophical understanding and theological understanding, and could adapt their communication to different audiences.
We need both of those things. We need both philosophical learning and theological learning in order to rightly receive all of the Christian faith and be able to serve the mission of the church in the world. This mission is not just to believe in what has been revealed, but to also go and preach and reason and refute and exhort in whatever environment we find ourselves in.
We must know what to say, when to say it, to whom, and where. We must know what not to say, when, and where. All of that is the discretion with which this ministry of the Christian church is to be carried out.
What makes it possible for us to do that is to pursue both the knowledge of true philosophy and true theology.
- Philosophy is the knowledge of the truth by means of human reason, where the premises will all be different.
- Theology is the knowledge of the truth by means of divine revelation, where the premises will often be divinely revealed truths that we accept as absolutely certain because God has revealed them.
Conclusion
I hope that that’s helpful. If you’d like to pursue this kind of study, this is what we do in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy. You’ll find an entire philosophy curriculum. You’ll find an entire separate theology curriculum, in addition to the seven liberal arts.
This is the form of education that was developed, studied, taught, and recommended by the doctors of the church like St. Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, St. Ignatius of Loyola, and so on.
If you’d like to pursue this kind of education, join us in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy. Visit classicalliberalarts.com and get in touch with us. Let me know you are listening to this talk on philosophy and theology and you’d like to get started with studies, and I’ll help you to get started.
If you’re tight on money, don’t worry about it. I’m more concerned that you get to enjoy these studies than that we get every dollar and penny taken care of. So get in touch and let’s study these things together and fix these problems in modern Christian circles.
I hope that’s helpful. God bless you.
Mr. William C. Michael, O.P.
Headmaster
Classical Liberal Arts Academy
