Sensus Divinitatis

“I learned how to live with integrity within the tradition, within any tradition: how to discern and embrace its fundamental contours while treating its details as matters of indifference; how to appropriate what in the tradition is capable of nourishing life in one’s own day while leaving the rest behind; how to criticize the tradition from within, expand its scope, celebrate its accomplishments, empathize with its anxieties and its memories of suffering.” (52)

The book had been sitting on my shelf for a few years, and I just picked it up for summer reading. What a delightful book to read about a scholars faith-filled life! Nicolas Wolterstorff’s In This World of Wonders: Memoir of a Life in Learning (Eerdmans 2019) is a warm and inspiring read of an important Christian philosopher’s journey in life, scholarship, and faith. It’s not a strict intellectual biography, but it does summarize a number of his books and the context in which they were written. Yet there is more: his scholarship comes carried within a life woven into institutions, some of which he helped found and nurture. In this way, it is not just a monument to his individual legacy: it is also a colourful catalogue of friendships forged through travel and cooperative thinking and living. You might call it covenantal philosophizing.

Wolterstorff’s accolades are many, and I won’t list them all here. I’ve followed his writing somewhat over the decades, as he was a celebrated scholar at my alma mater, Calvin University. Some of his books have meant a great deal to me because of the depth and credibility of his philosophical arguments–like Reason Within the Bounds of Religion (Eerdmans 1988), where he turns Immanuel Kant’s Religion Within the Bounds of Bare Reason (1793) on its head. This was so important to me as a campus minister in the 1990s. He came to speak at one of our campus ministry conferences and it felt like his lecture gave me ground to walk on, words for my witness, and proper confidence for my ministry in the public university. Those lectures became his book Religion in the University (Yale 2019), published the same year as this memoir. There he argues the goal of the university should be dialogical pluralism, and that in our postmodern moment, we all ought to recognize that faith perspectives, like feminism, critical race theory, and neo-Marxist takes–all have good reason to be at the academic table (see my full review here and more mention here).

He, of course, was not my sole source of philosophical nurture, but he was one person I returned to again and again. Call him a mentor of sorts–from a distance.

Reformed Epistemology

What is behind Wolterstorff’s thought is what has come to be called “Reformed Epistemology.” In contrast to more foundationalist or evidentialist positions, Wolterstorff and Alvin Plantinga (and others) have said religious people don’t need evidence in order to be rational about their faith. He says, “it is not true, in general, that to properly hold beliefs about God, one must hold them on the basis of other beliefs that constitute good evidence for them” (179). To experience God can be like other sensory experiences, and you don’t need a philosophical argument to prove your belief has some warrant. Belief in God is properly basic as a belief.

To be sure, arguments that act as a way to defend the faith or give evidence for God’s presence in the world are not lacking value. There is a time to get philosophical about our faith and push back on atheistic or relativistic critiques. In fact, Reformed Epistemology is itself a justification of belief. It is a justification of belief that demonstrates belief in God need not be justified. But it is also a comforting philosophy, and I mean it is a robust philosophical theology that is non-anxious about faith in the public square. It doesn’t feel the need to prove itself, and it makes room for other religious types to be at the table, too. We belong here, just as much as any ideologue, secularist, or member of any other philosophical school of thought. We are all traditioned, testimony-trusting liturgical creatures. That is what all humans are; and in the university, you have to learn to explain yourself well, but you don’t have to measure up to someone else’s Reason to walk on campus.

Although I’m a sociologist and practical theologian, this philosophical scholarship has been a great boon to my academic journey and ministry in university contexts. It builds on the more fideistic legacy of John Calvin and Dutch theologians like Herman Bavinck without turning its nose up to philosophy and the gift of reason. But reason serves within the bounds of certain control beliefs about the world in which we live, certain presuppositions built into a worldview we inherit and cultivate in community. Reason is not an independent, neutral, or objective part of human culture.

A Practical Philosopher

Wolterstorff was not a philosopher lost in abstractions, living in his head and unable to connect to the real human world. He did begin in metaphysics, but since then his goal has been “to illuminate the specific and the concrete”: many of his books have focused on such things as justice, the arts, and liturgy. He discusses these projects at length, and for non-philosophers like myself, the brief and contextualized summaries of such work are potentially more compelling than the books they became. Maybe its because he grew up on a farm among very practical people with very practical needs, but he always gravitated to the needs of the world–something not unlike what they call “community-based research” today.

He certainly was not locked in a musty office with books every day. He helped start a Reformed journal, a Christian Reformed church congregation, and a Christian philosophical society. This memoir includes a raft of pages on his garden (a hundred varieties of hostas!), the architectural design of his house in Grand Rapids, his Wengler chair collection, his Russian matryoshka doll collection, and collections of art prints and ceramics. He has many interests beyond the purely academic.

Few would mention Wolterstorff’s life and work without mentioning the tragic death of his son. Just in his twenties, and a promising academic himself, Eric fell off a mountainside while climbing in Austria. Wolterstorff’s raw grief was documented in his small book Lament for a Son (Eerdmans 1987), and he describes the context of it here. In 1983 he received a phone call “that shattered my comfortable life and divided it into before and after” (195). Eric was gone, and his death was an evil that has left a deep gap in his life. Grief, he explains, “is wanting with all your heart what you know or believe is impossible. The more intense the wanting, the more intense the grief… Grief is banging your head against the wall” (204).

I distinctly remember reading an essay he wrote shortly after on the “suffering love” of God, which critiqued some classical notions of God as “unmoved” or “impassive.” I knew my Calvinism enough to know that God is sovereign over all–every cubic centimetre of life. But that God suffers in love for his creation–that was a deeply inspiring addition. I was in my twenties at the time and at times very lonely as a single campus minister. It moved me. I don’t think Wolterstorff would have written such an article had he not lost a son a few years earlier. Philosophy is generated by experience as much as logical argument.

On the last pages of the book Wolterstorff recalls “the most moving teaching experience of my entire life” (310). Not at Calvin, Yale, U Virginia or the Free University in Amsterdam, but in Handlon State Prison. Calvin University has a class on the prison grounds and they offer courses and a degree to qualified prisoners. One of Wolterstorff’s colleagues, Kevin Corcoran, was teaching intro to philosophy and using Lament for a Son as a text. They asked Wolterstorff to come in and dialogue with them after they read it.

This was not an academic discussion, as all these men “were themselves in grief–most of them not over the death of a child but over the ruin they had wreaked on their own lives and the lives of others. They were reading the book not so much as my expression of my grief but as an expression of their grief, similar to the way in which we use the words of the Psalms to pray our own prayers.” Wolterstorff says they told him about the lives and relationships they had destroyed, and the deep loss they felt. He connected with them in a way he did not connect with his other students through the years. “I was the student that day,” he concluded. “They had honoured me.”

Friendships that Make all the Difference in the World

Now in his nineties, Wolterstorff has flourished as a scholar through many decades. To what might we attribute his academic fruitfulness? I’m sure he has some raw talent, as there is a gift of grace that has endowed him with some rare abilities to explain, argue, and write (“I did not choose philosophy,” he writes. “Philosophy chose me”) (51). He has his critics (some don’t like his focus on rights, others find his view of the university impractical, and his view of God gets push back, etc) but he is not known as a controversial figure; he seems rather irenic to me.

In fact, what struck me throughout the book was phrases like this, after naming some couple they spent time with: “We had wonderful times with them and came to love them all dearly” (299). Time and time again, on not just a few pages, he mentions the friendships he and his wife Claire enjoyed through the decades across many countries and institutions. He also spends many paragraphs describing his kids and grandkids and their gifts.

Some autobiographies are written to trumpet accomplishments or settle old scores; this is an account of a scholar servant who honours those he met along the way. I will end where this review began: it is a testimony of a scholarly life lived in covenant with colleagues, colleges, friends, and family. He’s a great example of a Christian professor, and his memoir is a great read. “For me, being boring is an unforgivable sin,” he writes.

Wolterstorff’s life began with the death of his mother–when he was 3 years old, shortly after she gave birth to his twin siblings. Yet this memoir ends with Wolterstorff recognizing his privileged life in a world of many sorrows. The last words are terms of gratitude: “I have been graced.”

And thank you, Dr. Wolterstorff.

“What you have as heritage,
take now as task;
For thus you will make it your own.”
– Goethe Faust

Selected Bibliography (from Wikipedia)

• On Universals: An Essay in Ontology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1970.
• Reason within the Bounds of Religion. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 1976. 2nd ed. 1984
• Works and Worlds of Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1980.
• Art in Action: Toward a Christian Aesthetic. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 1980. 2nd ed. 1995
• Educating for Responsible Action. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 1980.
• Until Justice and Peace Embrace. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. 1983. 2nd ed. 1994.
• Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God (ed. with Alvin Plantinga). Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 1984.
• Lament for a Son. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 1987.
• “Suffering Love” in Philosophy and the Christian Faith (ed.Thomas V. Morris). Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 1988.
• Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim That God Speaks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1995.
• John Locke and the Ethics of Belief. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1996.
• Religion in the Public Square (with Robert Audi). Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. 1997.
• Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2001.
• Educating for Life: Reflections on Christian Teaching and Learning. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. 2002.
• “An Engagement with Rorty” in The Journal of Religious Ethics, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Spring, 2003), pp. 129–139.
• Educating for Shalom: Essays on Christian Higher Education. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 2004.
• Justice: Rights and Wrongs. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2008.
• Inquiring about God: Selected Essays, Volume I (ed. Terence Cuneo). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2009.
• Practices of Belief: Selected Essays, Volume II (ed. Terence Cuneo). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2009.
• Hearing the Call: Liturgy, Justice, Church, and World . William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 2011.
• The Mighty and the Almighty: An Essay in Political Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2012.
• Journey toward Justice: Personal Encounters in the Global South. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. 2013.
• Understanding Liberal Democracy: Essays in Political Philosophy (ed. Terence Cuneo). Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2012.
• Art Rethought: The Social Practices of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2015.
• Justice in Love. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 2015.
• The God We Worship: An Exploration of Liturgical Theology. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 2015.
• Acting Liturgically: Philosophical Reflections on Religious Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2018. 
• In This World of Wonders: Memoir of a Life in Learning. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 2019.
• United in Love: Essays on Justice, Art, and Liturgy. (ed. Joshua Cockayne and Jonathan Rutledge). Eugene, OR: Cascade, Wipf & Stock. 2021.
• Religion in the University. Yale, 2019.