Rod Dreher has been getting deeper and deeper into the theological weeds these days, clearing the ground no doubt for his forthcoming magnum opus on the Benedict Option.* I’m not complaining; I personally enjoy expeditions into the theological weeds. But the thing about traipsing through the weeds is that sometimes you either get lost or you get bitten, stung, or otherwise ambushed by something you hadn’t foreseen.
Rod Dreher is convinced that Christians starting losing their way hundreds of years ago when they abandoned metaphysical realism for the snake oil of Nominalism.1 This claim has been made by others, including Brad Gregory and Richard Weaver, both of whom Dreher cites in the course of bemoaning the wrong turn that has led us to liberalism, Moral Therapeutic Deism, and same-sex marriage.
Dreher does his best to explain what happened:
It’s a complicated story, and to greatly simplify it, the Nominalists contended that God existed as a category of Being, versus the older idea that God was Being itself. The Nominalists taught that things just were, that there were no such things as ideal forms. When we talk about the “Supreme Being,” we are accepting Nominalist thought…[Indeed,] the nature of language itself, including the religious language used by believers to talk about God, veers by default in a univocal and nominalist direction, as if “God” were the name of a thing, an ens, an entity within the totality of being. It requires a concerted effort linked to a traditional metaphysics of creation to see that “the king reigns at court and throughout his kingdom” and “God reigns in heaven and throughout his creation” are not the same kind of statement. But if God is thought to be a “highest being” within the universe, they are.
Dreher’s claim—a claim also made by eminent theologians like David Bentley Hart and David Schindler—is that it is a misunderstanding of basic Christian doctrine, belief, and metaphysics to posit God as the “Supreme Being”. Dreher et al would have us believe that Christians, before Nominalism overtook them, understood God as “Being itself” or as “the Ground of all being” rather than as the “highest being” of all.
Those are interesting claims, not to say controversial ones, given that one of the most famous names in the history of Christian apologetics, Anselm of Canterbury, phrased (in 1078, three hundred years before Bill Occam came along) his famous “Ontological Argument for God’s Existence” this way:
1. It is a conceptual truth (or, so to speak, true by definition) that God is a being than which none greater can be imagined (that is, the greatest possible being that can be imagined).
2. God exists as an idea in the mind.
3. A being that exists as an idea in the mind and in reality is, other things being equal, greater than a being that exists only as an idea in the mind.
4. Thus, if God exists only as an idea in the mind, then we can imagine something that is greater than God (that is, a greatest possible being that does exist).
5. But we cannot imagine something that is greater than God (for it is a contradiction to suppose that we can imagine a being greater than the greatest possible being that can be imagined.)
6. Therefore, God exists. 2
Now, I have absolutely no truck with what I consider Anselm’s specious “proof”; I cite it only to make the point that he clearly conceived of God very much as a Supreme Being, or at least offered that conception as the basis of his argument. I can't say what "ordinary" Christians believed about God back in Anselm's day, but given that most people in any age are not inclined to metaphysics, I'd wager it was more along the lines of "Supreme Being" than not. Dreher et al are free to disagree with Anselm, as they are to disagree with Nominalism; but to pretend that Christians, pre-Nominalism, never considered God to be the “Supreme Being”—or, in Anselm’s formulation, “a being than which none greater can be imagined”—is either willfully or woefully ignorant.
If I were Rod Dreher, I'd be a little more careful there in the weeds.
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*In a recent post on that very subject—the Benedict Option—Mr. Dreher tried to clarify what he meant. In the process, he authored this entertaining and even charming self-description: “I am basically a Byzantine hobbit who lives by a Christianity that both fasts and feasts, and that sings psalms, and says the knots on a prayer rope, and lights candles, and makes prostrations during Lent, and on and on.” It’s almost enough to make you like the guy, were it not for his constant whining, melodramatics, and hysterics about the Gay Mafia etc.
1 http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/christian-radicals-seeing-to-the-roots
2 http://www.iep.utm.edu/ont-arg/#SH2a (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
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