Monday, January 08, 2007

Confusing the Epistemic and Semantic Primacy of Christ

As some may know, I am the author of the so-called “WordAlone Fundamentals,” a set of affirmations that I think get at the heart of some basic agreements and differences within contemporary Lutheran theology (http://www.wordalone.org/docs/wa-fundamentals.shtml). I conceive these “fundamentals” really as proto-principles for Lutheran theological engagement. Given the centrality of the cross within Lutheran theology - - and the accents of law/gospel, the theology of the cross, the simul iustus et peccato, and the infinite being carried by the finite - - why is there such a plethora of methods and approaches (even real differences) within contemporary Lutheran theology? Why is the “real working theology” of the LCMS so very different from that of the ELCA? How does the working theology of the WordAlone Network differ from that encountered within many ELCA churches?

The “fundamentals” acknowledge a real parting of the ways within the Lutheran theological ethos, and locate that parting with respect to the following assertions:

1) Theological Realism: God exists and His existence and nature are logically independent from human awareness, perception, conception and language.

2) Semantic Realism: Assertions about the divine have definite truth-conditions. Language about the divine is not merely expressive of the individual uttering it, or merely rule-governed linguistic customs of a community.

3) Theophysical Causation: There is a causal connection between God and the universe. It is logically and metaphysically possible for God to bring about an event in the universe that would not have occurred had God not brought it about.

It is important to note that the tradition of theological reflection beginning with Kant, if consistent, must deny all three of these assertions. For Kant, God is an idea of human reason, and not an “empirical concept of the understanding.” Accordingly, God cannot be conceived as a substance sustaining causal connections with events within the universe. Post-Kantian options within theology begin with the assumption that theological language cannot have truth-conditions where God is figured as a substance sustaining properties, some of which are relational causal properties. Accordingly, theological language must be “doing something else.” It must be a discourse expressive or disclosive of human feeling (Schleiermacher), thinking (Hegel), or doing (late 19th century Protestantism).

To speak of these “fundamentals” as fundamental assertions within a Lutheran context, however, immediately brings charges that one has become “un-Lutheran.” A recent e-mail says that I have committed the cardinal transgression of not beginning my theology with the revealed God - - Jesus Christ. It says that if one starts with the existence of God without clarifying the nature of God, then one might end up with a “definition of God that then shapes what we can say about Christ.” It goes on to declare that things should be the other way around: Christ should determine “what we can know and say about God.” We must start theology where God wants himself to be known: the revelation of Jesus Christ.

In responding to this charge it is critically important to distinguish ontology, epistemology and semantics. I agree with the claim that Lutheran theology must begin with God as revealed in Christ. No Lutheran would want to deny Luther’s contention in The Bondage of the Will that God remains hidden in His aseity and that human beings gazing upon this deus absconditus shall be deeply perplexed and thrown into despair.

Yet this epistemic priority of Christ ought not be confused with ontological priority. Luther’s Trinitarian thought is continuous with that of western theology generally; he holds timeless eternity of the three persons within the inner-Trinity. Christ has epistemic priority for the believer, even though Christ does not have ontological priority with respect to God Himself.

Moreover, this epistemic priority of Christ must not be confused with a semantic priority. I deny any “theological atomism” which can find isolate meaning in the Christ event disconnected entirely from the semantic context within which that event arose. Years ago Pannenberg, in Jesus, God and Man, detailed the importance of the horizon of late Jewish apocalyptic thinking for the original understanding of who Christ was. The original event of Christ took place over and against a background of beliefs and values making possible the identification of Jesus with the Christ. (I speak here of necessary, not sufficient conditions for the identification.) Clearly, the epistemic priority of Christ is compatible with a semantic dependency upon context.

My claim is that, for Luther, Christ has epistemic primacy even though the identity of Christ is dialectically relatable to the hidden God whom Christ reveals. For Luther, what Christ means is conceptually linked to the God that stands over and against him, the God whom he fears. Luther’s question is this: How can I find a gracious God? That this God is revealed in Christ in no way undercuts the claim that there is first presupposed a meaningful category of ‘gracious God” conceptually linked to God as transcendent of human finitude.

Imagine what it would be like were Christ to have both semantic and epistemic priority. Presumably, humans confronting Christ would for the first time think about the dialectic of time and eternity, i.e., the very notion of the dialectic of time and eternity would flow from the encounter with Christ. Moreover, the notion that God is hidden in His aseity would have to arise, as would all thoughts of the divine, in the existential encounter with Jesus the Christ. But this would be to entirely reject any category of general revelation in Luther. There would be no human experience of order, history, goodness or beauty that would allow formation of the “God concept” independently of encounter with Christ. Furthermore, were this true, the witness of the various religious traditions with respect to the finite and infinite would have somehow themselves to be grounded in the revelation of Christ. (This would make the very notion of theism somehow dependent upon the revelation of Christ. But this is a falsifiable position because theism was around long before Christ was revealed.)

The assertion of theological realism and theophysical causation are meant only to recover the “God concept” Luther presupposed in his assertion of the epistemic primacy of Christ. Knowing a thing to be is quite a different thing than to have the semantic capacity to know the thing to be. My claim is this: There has been a gradual shift over the last two centuries in the concept of God, in the very meaning of ‘God’. This change has brought with it a shift in the underlying implicit “theory” upon which the discovery of Christ as Savior is possible. For moderns and postmoderns, Christ does not, and cannot mean the same thing as was meant in Luther’s time. (I speak of the meaning of Christ, but should this be problematic, one can easily construe it as the meaning of statements about Christ.) The upshot of all of this is that we now say the same things about Christ, but really mean quite different things about Him. In other words, our ontological claims are a function of the semantic fields we inhabit when making these claims. This state of affairs is fully compatible with the assertion of the epistemic primacy of Christ.

So why is it that the ELCA and LCMS divide when they seemingly make the same confession? Why is WordAlone theology “different” than that currently regnant within the ELCA? My claim is that different notions of God, of time and eternity, lurk in the background, determining the content (Gehalt) of Christ as “that which shows itself as itself.” Simply put, the identity conditions of Christ are not wholly established by the phenomenon of Christ Himself, but are partly determined by the background theory upon which the “observation” of Christ occurs. The “fundamentals” humbly wish to bring to the light this background theory so that there can be some continuity within Lutheran theology as to the most important thing: the reality of Christ and Him Crucified.

7 comments:

  1. One wonders how the Lutheran seminaries are dealing with the Kantian and Enlightenemnt erosion of the truth conditions of classical Lutheran Chrisitanity. If God as a being separate from and independent of human beings that creates and causes things to happen is a strange and perplexing concept to seminarians, then they are oblivious to how their thinking has been influenced by the Enlightenment and this slippery thing called post modernism. Shouldn't Christianity's relation to the philosophical movements of the last 300 years be taught at seminaries. Of courxse that would require a teacher who clearly sees the problem as well as Dennis does. One alos wonders if an ELCA seminary will care about it as problem or evn be able to indentify it.

    Mark Jamison

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  2. Anonymous7:59 PM

    I'd be interested to hear Dennis, what you consider to be the different approaches to semantic realism in the ELCA today. As I see it there are three main approaches. The radical Lutherans (among whom I would personally number myself) would insist on semantic realism on the basis of the priority of the proclaimed Word and its certainty. The generic liberals, as I would call them, would be harder to place. Many of them seem to very sincerely believe that they are making realistic semantic claims about God's reality, yet possess very little epistemic basis to do so(in my seminary classes, profs. or students would often just sort of 'decide' that God should be like such and such as I remember it). The anti-realists are definitely at work though, mostly the liberationist types that dominate alot of the liberal art colleges in the ELCA. The Evangelical Catholics I think are semantic realists as well, but in sort of a strange way. Jenson just had an article published in Concordia Ft. Wayne's journal (of all places) were he argues for the Trinity being a Biblical doctrine, not just in the New, but in the Old Testament. I suspect that most the LCMS people who read the article didn't pick up on his underlining assumptions about how hermeneutics and doctrinal claims work. My reading of him, based on my reading of his Systematic theology, is that since linguistic meaning derives from communal use, the Bible means what it means because the ecclesial community uses it in a certain manner. This could mean relativism, but for Jenson the visible Church is the prolongation of the incarnation, therefore its use and communal strutures are absolutized because they are something like temporal representation of the God's dynamic being (hence the obsession with universal representational strucutures to 'correspond' to God's eternal being of music-like harmony and unity in difference). Therefore, the Trinity is the Old Testament because the Church uses the Bible in such a way that it is there. So, semantic realism appears to be preserved, but at the expense of creating a horrific theology of glory. In my view, the LCMS has sort of the same problem with their naive realist approach to the confessions and scripture, and their rather mechnical conception of revelation, i.e. verbal inspiration. Do you think this is an accurate description or not?

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  3. You are entirely correct, Mark. I don't understand why there are no minimal philosophy requirements at the ELCA seminaries. How can one understand the history of doctrine, if they don't have a working knowledge of Plato, Aristotle, Stoicism, and Neo-Platonism? How can it be that students can become pastors and never think in more than in a merely trifling way about the current penchant for the relativity of goodness and truth? How can one not see what is given up when God becomes merely an idea or an abstract (causally quarantined) entity? It is strange time in which we live.

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  4. Jack,

    I think you pretty much nail it. Your interpretation of Jenson is correct, in my opinion. In addition, I suppose, one could say, for Jensen, that theological language is formally adequate to assert the divine because it is a language developed and nutured in the Church. So if one starts by assuming the theo-ontological reality of Church, then certain Hegelian-type moves are unavoidable. Language itself develops within the womb of the Absolute, and its conceptual adequacy is part of the life of the Absolute; it is the Absolute with respect to the Idea. Whether Jenson would admit this, I am not sure. It does remind me of a late night conversation with a well-known Evangelical Catholic - - as well-known anyone gets in this business anyway - - who told me with a straight face that if at the end of history the Church is not visibily universal, then the Christian message will have been wrong. (I said it could all end in a whimper, and it could still have been right.) I believe that he drew the right implications from how many EC now think about Church.

    I agree that many within the liberal camp are anti-realist, but because it takse some reflection to be an anti-realist, some seem to assume a kind of realism. I suppose if one has never thought seriously about the ontological status of the domain upon which one is reflecting, one might think it has being when there are no grounds for regarding it to have such.

    Great post, Jack. I want to do some more thinking about this.

    Dennis

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  5. Anonymous6:51 AM

    Dennis, that's a very helpful explanation of Jenson's position. Though I had generally recognized the Hegalian chracter of his theology, it hadn't occured to me that the Evangelical Catholics so blatantly identified the universal church with the sittlichkeit (I'm probably spelling this wrong) community. It just reminds me how much I need to read Hegel. The "Phenomenology of the Spirit" ever stares at me from my book shelf. It also explains why Yeago wrote his dissertation on Von Balthasar, who does similar things in Theo-Drama, but mainly utilizing a Christologically based concept of the analogy of being.

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  6. Jack,

    Well, I don't want to put words into Jenson's mouth, but I believe he has that tendency. I read more than a little Hegel at one time in my life, and tend to see him lurking in the wings of various theological positions.

    There are only a couple of ways to go. One can claim the infinite and the finite as an exclusive disjunction, or say that the finite is "included within" the infinite in some way. If the former, then the problem of "the bad infinite" arises whereby the infinite seemingly has boundaries so is not "in-finitus" at all. If the latter, then the finite becomes a moment within the movement of the infinite, and all finite things must be ultimately "taken up" into the life of the infinite (God).

    Dennis

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  7. Anonymous6:29 PM

    Christian Smith discerns in his book: "Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers," that traditional Christianity is being taken over by "moralistic, therapeutic deism (MTD)"--colonized I believe is one of the words he used. MTD has the following as the dominant points of its creed:

    1. A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.

    2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.

    3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.

    4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when he is needed to resolve a problem.

    5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

    Have you read of this research?
    Does it ring true as the post modern world is encountered?

    I admit to many conversations in which "sincerity" was the chief expression of faith for those conversing with me. MTD does not seem such a far stretch to describe those participants' creed, though most were regular worshippers.

    And, if MTD is the new religion, one can find examples of it everywhere, from Hallmark cards to church bulletin boards--and I bet, from seminary classrooms and christian pulpits. There's a cacphony of voices shouting this message into the social milieu.

    To declare, like Paul, "to know nothing among you except Christ, and him crucified," is a lonely and largely ingnored message.

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