Brother Juniper's Experiment: And Five Better Ways of Seeing Progress in Theology

This chapter offers an overview of the various ways in which the concepts of progress and theology can be related to each other. In doing so, like most contributions in this volume, it focuses on epistemic progress. Starting from the habitual New Atheist complaint that theology is useless since it makes no progress, the author distinguishes and explores five possible alternative answers to the question whether there is, or can be, progress in theology. These are: (1) theology does not make progress indeed, but this is for good reasons; (2) theology makes epistemic progress in the wake of the sciences; (3) theology generates epistemic progress within the sciences; (4) theology makes intra-paradigmatic progress in and of itself; and (5) theology makes progress even beyond the intra-paradigmatic level (or “trans-paradigmatic progress”). Some arguments are given for the validity of each of these answers, and it is suggested that most, if not all, of them are mutually compatible. Even though theologians often are (and should be) critical of progress as an ideal, there are various ways in which theology itself can be shown to make epistemic progress.