The meanings of ‘quest for certainty’ and ‘Cartesian anxiety’ (Richard Bernstein) are both familiar and thoroughly outdated. Recognition that the rationalities and confidences sustaining modern moral vocabularies/convictions are in ruins, presciently unveiled by Alasdair MacIntyre, now reflects common opinion. Today avant-garde French intellectuals appeal to St Paul and quest after ethical universals. Alive to the spiritual poverty of modern Western rationality, self-proclaimed atheists are writing Religion without God (Ronald Dworkin), The Faith of the Faithless (Simon Critchely) and Waking Up: Spirituality without Religion (Sam Harris).
The very meaning of rationality is currently an open question. The modern background consensus that made appeal to ontological, teleological and cosmological proofs interesting and accusations of ‘fideism’ devastating has collapsed. Insofar as mainstream modern Western rationality is intrinsically hostile to faith as reasonable, the collapse of the modern consensus is societally fraught – emotivism, stereotyping, special pleading and enthusiasm (intolerance) are widespread even in universities – even as it provides an opening and makes clear the serious need for rigorous specifications of reasonable faith. Dismissals of faith remain common among intellectual elites, but they are now rooted in caricature and moral offence (which itself remains ungrounded), and while they remain socio-politically powerful they are conceptually anaemic. The upshot is a revolutionary context for ‘rethinking the rationality of Christian faith’, to which Schumacher's Theological Philosophy makes a creative and significant contribution. (Note: Theological Philosophy builds upon Schumacher's Rationality as Virtue: Towards a Theological Philosophy (Ashgate, 2015) and anticipates a ‘Trinitarian philosophy’.)
Accepting virtue epistemology's recognition that even modern rationality, purportedly disengaged, dispassionate and value-free, surreptitiously depends upon the virtuousness of inquirers and communities of inquiry, and building upon Reformed epistemology's insistence that certain theological concepts are properly basic, Schumacher appropriates Thomas Aquinas, whose pre-modern thought is in these respects congruent with virtue ethics and Reformed epistemology, and formulates a powerful apology for faith (her goal is not to be a Thomist, but to show the contemporary relevance of Thomas’ thought – making this an interesting secondary text for courses on Aquinas).
Following Aquinas (and Aristotle) Schumacher sees us as intellectual, willing and passionate (in the sense of having desires) beings whose proper end is fully self-actualised intellectual flourishing/happiness. The greatest threat (sin) is the possibility we will confuse fleeting, temporal goods which cannot ultimately satisfy for the highest, eternal good. Orientating reflection relative to God who is sui generis (simple) forestalls this threat, but this God is utterly unknowable, so we are dependent upon divine self-communication, namely, the incarnation, for knowledge of God and the example of how to live life oriented to the highest good, which gives concreteness to the intellectual and moral virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance.
For Schumacher faith (expectant, informed, fulfilled) is a species of knowledge (‘what we assent to with our minds and what we want in our hearts’, p. 144), and Christian faith names the orientation of a person whose intellect, will and passions are properly focused upon the highest, eternal good and concretely informed by the example of Jesus Christ. Christian faith rightly orders one's will and passions as we pursue knowledge, thus ensuring one's self-actualisation/flourishing (which simultaneously ensures maximal flourishing for all) and allowing us to ‘bear things well’ (i.e. to live in the light of our focus upon the highest good, no matter the challenges we face).
The filioque is decisive for Schumacher: knowledge of God is manifest only through Jesus Christ, whose life manifests the character of the Spirit. Support for the truth of this contention is found in the robust understanding of rationality Christian faith facilitates as well as by the life of people of faith. Schumacher's understanding of Jesus Christ as the exclusive source of knowledge of God distinguishes Schumacher from those who in diverse ways ground faith in general/direct spiritual revelation (e.g. Wesley, Schleiermacher, James, Otto, Buber, Levinas, Rahner, Hick, Cobb), but in the current conceptual context her appeal to explanatory robustness and practical consequences for confirmation are as powerful as can be.
From my own neo-Levinasian perspective, Schumacher's understanding of faith as a species of knowledge and her christocentrism compromise her escape from modernity's ‘epistemology as first philosophy’ horizon and the robustness of her understanding of faith and revelation (and sit uneasily with her Rahnerian ‘open inclusivism’). But that is only to suggest an overt softening of some claims (e.g. softening ‘the most robust’ to ‘robust’; adjusting claims introduced with the curious formula, ‘seemingly necessary’) and an opening for conversation, not to detract from the significant and substantial contributions of Schumacher's Theological Philosophy.
