The Bible looks askance at philosophy, since its deliverances are often at odds with Scripture, and it typically relies on human reason independent of (though not necessarily opposed to) divine revelation. You recall (in the old KJV) Colossian 2:8: “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ”; and Acts 17:18, where at least Paul got a hearing, but no converts: “Then certain philosophers of the Epicureans, and of the Stoicks, encountered him. And some said, What will this babbler say? other some, He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods: because he preached unto them Jesus, and the resurrection.” In the Bible, all sorts of occupations get better “press” than this, whether through Bezalel the artisan (Exodus 31:1-6), Amos the sycamore-fig cultivator (Amos 7:14), or the common soldiers who approached John the Baptist for guidance (Luke 3:14).

So what do nice Christian kids think they’re doing when they study or go into philosophy? Is it like gapers block at the site of a wreck or an attempt at inoculation, getting a little of the secular bug so as to build up defenses? Or is it a means of insight? I’d suggest it’s all of these things. First, the Bible doesn’t directly address a lot of matters with which we must concern ourselves—preferred forms of government, whether democracy or monarchy; the choice of artistic styles, whether abstract or naturalistic, for a municipal sculpture garden; the choice between a flat tax and a progressive tax; and criteria for sizing up scientific theories, as between Newtonian and quantum mechanics. For another, it urges us, “Come, let us reason together” and not just “Parrot what you hear and say no more.” Philosophy is a dialogical disciple, and dialogue (but not capitulation to anti-biblical notions) is acceptable for Christians.

I’ve found it to be so on many levels, and not just acceptable, but also fruitful. In that connection, I decided to field a web site deploying some of my philosophical thinking, working under the name, ‘Philosophipotamus.’ It’s built on the Greek words for river (‘potamus,’ as in ‘hippopotamus’/ “river horse,” and ‘Mesopotamia’/ “between the rivers”) and the love of wisdom (‘philia’ + ‘sophia’ = “philosophy”), and is roughly translated, “River of Philosophy.”  

For a “logo,” I asked SBTS student Chad Nuss to do something with a river, a hippo, and some of my favorite philosophers, and you see here what he came up with, very artfully. The philosophers pictured on the hippo, most of them Christian, represent my perspectival and stylistic druthers. I could have chosen an additional ten, but even hippos have their load bearing limits. (I’ve used only departed souls to skirt the diplomatic challenge of not offending the living.) I could talk at length on each (even to the extent of offering full courses on a single one, as I have with Plato), but I’ll stick with these brief notes here. To match them up with the images, go left to right on row one, and then left to right on row two.

Socrates was a dogged, daring, dialogical truth-pursuer, setting the table for a great range of philosophical inquiry with his “What is it?” questions—on justice, friendship, love, courage, knowledge, righteousness, etc.  He gave us, for instance, the Euthyphro Question (“Is something good because God approves or does he approve because it’s good?”), which has occupied ethical theorists since his day. And, in the Theaetetus, devoted to epistemology, he gave us a definition of knowledge—“justified true belief”—which has served the test of time. 

Joseph Butler was a “bi-vocational pastor,” as was I, who found time to bishop and to draw thoughtful distinctions in ethics, as in his sermon/essay, “Upon Resentment.” In this piece, he argued for a retributive view of punishment, brushing aside the argument that it was a surly, vengeful response to wrongdoing. Granting that men could operate on this low level, he noted that there was a higher sentiment—indignation/resentment—over evil deeds, and that this was a God-given attitude, strengthening us to carry through with the demands of justice.

George Berkeley was another ministerial philosopher who pressed the worthy empirical imperatives, “Cash it in!” and “Don’t talk nonsense!” By this standard, he found the Catholic Eucharist, with its doctrine of transubstantiation, to be nonsense. If the elements look, smell, taste, feel, and sound like bread and wine, then they’re bread and wine.

Soren Kierkegaard insisted and demonstrated that religion and philosophy were not academic games but enterprises going to the gut, putting you on the spot in the most crucial ways. In his Fear and Trembling, he posits Abraham’s radical faith in proceeding to sacrifice Isaac as the Christian ideal, far beyond the domesticated, safe version that passes for respectable in modern Western culture.

C.S. Lewis was a cornucopia of Christian insight and apologetics, with a powerful and engaging style sorely absent in most philosophical discourse. Whether through his books, Miracles and The Problem of Pain, or through the dozens of essays and sermons gathered in God in the Dock, he wields the sword of effectual Christian thinking as he takes on secularists who’ve lost their way in the jungle of their own vain thinking on moral and religious matters.  

Thomas Aquinas, though not an evangelical, has much to teach us evangelicals about appropriating truth wherever we find it, about admiring the created order, and about wading into whatever topics might intrigue and confront the church and culture. He picked up on the considerable (though limited and sometimes flawed) wisdom of Aristotle and showed how clear, natural-law thinking was compatible with scripture. For instance, homosexuality is revealed as wrong both in the Bible (e.g., Leviticus and Romans) and in the design of mankind, whereby we see that healthy sex occurs only properly in a “procreative” context.

Blaise Pascal was an eloquent and winsome vessel of life-important inquiry. Like Michelangelo, he was wide ranging in competencies and interests, from inventing a prototype computer to framing a “wager” to demonstrate the rationality of belief in the God of the Bible to writing a moving testimony of his conversion. (That conversion so struck him on the night of November 23, 1654, that he wrote down his experience and then sewed the paper into his coat for a continual reminder and symbol of his rebirth. It read, “"Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars..." and concluded by quoting Psalm 119:16: "I will not forget thy word. Amen.")

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz did big, bold, brilliant, and faithful metaphysical thinking, whatever the snarky Voltaire (with his Candide dig against Dr. Pangloss [representing Leibniz], who maintained in the face of natural disasters that this was “the best of all possible worlds”). Such was Leibniz’s faith in the morally perfect sovereignty of God. On the side, he invented calculus simultaneously with Isaac Newton.

Thomas Reid was a devotee of God-engineered common sense, typically in short supply in professional philosophy. Though Descartes ended his famous cogito-ergo-sum (“I think, therefore, I am”) argument by demonstrating the existence of God, the Frenchmen introduced systematic doubt as a gateway to wisdom (finding certainly only at the point of his own act of doubting). The skepticism part of Descartes’ program became quite the philosophical fashion, perfected by the Scotsman, David Hume. Reid argued that this was a stupid place to start and that we knew a lot of stuff with enough confidence to live our lives in good and justifiable order.

William James wrote sublimely, crisply, and accessibly, and with an admirable pragmatic agenda, inviting us philosophers to take seriously the questions, “Who cares?” and “What does it matter?” Though James was not a Christian, I was taken by the thoughtfulness and clarity of his reasoning, wherein he picked up on the empiricists’ insistence of experiential “cash value” in our statements, extending the meaning to include the human activity involved in generating that cash. In the same grad school pragmatism course where I dove deeper into James, I met C. S. Peirce and C. I. Lewis, who also developed forms of pragmatism. Regarding the latter, I ended up doing my dissertation in his tradition of “conceptual pragmatism.” As for James, he commended belief in God on grounds that it involved a live, forced, and momentous option—an inescapable and vital either/or choice—whose best path was manifest. And his characterization of philosophy an “an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly” commends the enterprise to us all.

As for the philosophipotamus.com web site, it’s still there, but only as a pilot light. I stripped many of the images and much of the material to help build my book, Cases and Maps: A Christian Introduction to Philosophy, noted in the books section of the web site you’re now visiting.