Theology Is A Subcategory Of Philosophy

The idea that theology is not a subset of philosophy, which itself is far broader, more precise, and more foundational than just theology could ever be, is a misconception that anyone could refute within five seconds if they looked past words to ideas and saw that philosophy encompasses everything: every part of reality and every worldview or concept is philosophical in nature.  Emphasizing that theology is one part of philosophy would never need to be specifically focused in the sense that it needs to be now if people understood the actual nature of philosophy better.  Likewise, no one would ever need to specifically emphasize that men or women are all humans except in the context of forsaking sexist delusions or reacting to asinine cultural norms.

In their persistent misunderstandings of the Bible and broader philosophy, some Christians--evangelicals, of course--actually insist that the Bible and Christianity are somehow not philosophical.  This would be like saying that the Quran is not a book or that documentaries are not movies just because the Quran and documentaries are specific examples within a much larger category of things.  Of course the Bible is philosophical because everything is philosophical, but there is also the fact that the Bible very overtly makes claims, which are either true or false, about everything from the existence of nature to moral obligations to the character of God to the purpose of humanity.

One could recognize the terms for some of these philosophical categories, like ethics (which addresses moral ideas) or metaphysics (which addresses what exists and what the nature of reality is), but one does not at all need to be familiar with the language of any culture to see that the Bible is deeply, inescapably philosophical--in part because nothing is not.  The irony of the kind of Christian who thinks the content of the Bible is not philosophical in nature is even more apparent when they constantly cite the Bible as a reaction to philosophical questions, albeit as presuppositionalists who stand on nothing but random assumptions they have never even seriously thought about, much less exchanged for logical proof.

The Bible is a philosophical text, as it, like everyone and every book, makes claims about the nature of reality.  Indeed, there is no such thing as any person or writing that is not philosophical because every aspect of reality and every belief or idea, whether it is true or false, is philosophical.  If the Bible is true, Christianity is correct philosophy, but still not the whole of correct philosophy (rationalism, introspection, and other things still underpin it, go alongside it, or go beyond its tenets).  If the Bible is false, Christianity is incorrect philosophy, but it is still a philosophical system that is a subcategory of other philosophical frameworks that are by necessity either true or false.  The thing that is impossible is the Bible being outside of philosophy.

Why evangelicals embrace lie after lie, assumption after assumption, and heresy after heresy is a matter of personal reluctance to embrace reason or to even understand the Bible itself.  Whatever their exact ideological or subjective motivation for rejecting obvious but vital philosophical truths, it is a sign of cultural stupidity that they have become wrongly regarded as the face of Christianity when they cannot even consistently admit that theology is philosophy (though not all philosophy is theology).  A person who genuinely thought that green is not a color or that children are not people would be deeply irrational, even if not as much as those who literally deny logical axioms.  Someone who thinks theology is not philosophy makes the same type of conceptual classification error.