People sometimes remark that I oftentimes seem to write about putative philosophical issues rather then staying directly on task and use the theological language of our great Lutheran tradition. Why would this be? Is it that I somehow am not interested deeply in the traditional objects of Lutheran theological reflection?
No, this is not true. I believe that the center of Lutheran theology is the proclamation of the free grace of Jesus Christ appropriated in faith. When serving in the parish, I preached this each and every week. I believe that the external Word interprets itself, striking the human heart both as Law and Gospel, and that through this Word we are justified and made free lords before God and dutiful servants to one another. I believe that the great ecumenical creeds of the Church make definite truth-claims, and I routinely confess their truth. I believe that Jesus Christ was true God and true man, and believe in Lutheran fashion in the genus maiestaticum, as well as the genus idiomaticum and genus apotelesmaticum. So why talk about all of the philosophical issues if this theological core of beliefs is at the center of things?
The reason I am interested in discussing philosophical issues (mostly semantic and ontological) is because while Lutherans can still say all of the right things, they don't necessarily mean by these things what Lutherans once meant.
But why should this be a problem if all the same things are confessed? Surely there can be different philosophischen Rictungen among confessing Lutherans. After all, did not Wilhelm Hermann famously argue that metaphysics (and its variations) are irrelevant to solid, Lutheran confessional theology? Did not the young Luther scholar Wilhelm Link, (who died much too soon in the war) argue that Luther claimed the same thing? Isn't the greatness of Lutheran theology found in the freedom of interpretation in one's confessions? Surely, we ought not to confuse the left hand and the right hand of God, the hand of reason, law and philosophy, and the hand of faith, grace and theology!
Luther in his various disputations would occasionally quip that what was finally important in disputing was an agreement not merely in speech, but in the things (in res). An agreement as to what is held or asserted has been crucially important in the development of doctrine generally and within the Lutheran Confessions specifically. The question is this: How does this Lutheran commitment to the truth of propositions from the tradition and the Confessions get appropriated in our time? My considered opinion is that there is a great deal of confusion here, and my fear is that this confusion could be disastrous for the future of Lutheran theology.
When one plays baseball, one plays by baseball rules. There are three outs per side, both teams batting once constitutes an inning, and there are nine innings in a game. (I am thinking about the major and minor leagues with respect to this last point.) Proper theological language has rules as well. One must know how to use the word 'Father' and the word 'Son'. Specifically, one must be able to say 'The Son is God', 'The Father is God', without saying 'The Father is the Son'. Rules permitting the right expressions in the right linguistic circumstances and prohibiting the wrong ones in the wrong circumstances are notoriously difficult to formulate, but there is little doubt that there exist some set of rules that undergird the modus loquendi theologicus.
So far so good. One could in principle formulate a theological game as well as a game of black hole theory. Within contemporary cosmological theory, certain terms occur in particular statements and not within others. Prima facie there does not seem to be much different between the formal structure of a Trinitarian language and that language of any heavily theoretical discipline. There is a proper and improper way of using terms and phrases. The question now confronts us: Are the semantics of the two games the same?
On this there is much difference of opinion, of course. Many would say that there is extra-linguistic set of referents to which the language of black holes is anchored that is not available for the theoretical language of the Trinity. But why would this be so? Why would one think there is some res that black hole theory has the theology does not have? One would not think this - - unless one had previous opinions about what is possible ontologically for the Trinity over and against black holes.
Since the time of the Enlightenment, there has been an increasing sense in the former Christian West that the language of theology does not make truth claims. While most within popular culture - - I am not talking here about philosophers of science - - would claim that there are clear truth conditions for black hole theory, they would not, if they reflected some, claim easily that there are similar truth conditions in theology. The reason, of course, is that for tens of millions of people theological language simply can't be making truth claims because such language is an expression of individual and cultural value. There simply is no realm of theological facts such that the rules of theological language can govern a linguistic usage that can bring the language into contact with a domain of extra-linguistic referents. The fact/value distinction is wholly enshrined within contemporary culture, and this descendent from the Enlightenment must be dealt with before theological language is afforded the same opportunity to refer as the language of black holes.
My claim has been and continues to be that the interpretive center has been lost within much of Lutheran theology in the first part of the twenty-first century. The problem has been that a general cultural/intellectual commitment to the Enlightenment paradigm, especially Kant, has led millions to presuppose different semantic possibilities for that language than that which generally characterized the tradition. I am not saying that much of this is explicit. (Increasingly few people even know the name 'Kant'.) But middle school children learn that science is about facts and religion is about values. They don't know the torturous intellectual history that brought civilization to this "insight." They are taught this fact/value distinction as if it fell from the heavens. It is part of the Enlightenment paradigm, a paradigm that functions as the default ontological posit of our time. What I am saying is this: To continue to divorce theology and metaphysics and to allow the fact/value distinction to stand inviolate, is to allow theological language not to be about truth, and it is thus to allow theological language to assume a different semantics than it previously had.
The Institute of Lutheran Theology is grounded in Scripture and Confessions. It holds assiduously to classical confessional Lutheran theology. Professors at ILT are passionate about their commitment to Scriptural truth and authority as it is known and understood through the hermeneutical lens of the Confessions. While students are exposed to the great Biblical exegetes and the great theologians of the tradition, they learn the most important thing, I believe, that a school of theology can impart: ILT believes that it is true that God was in Jesus Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, and that because of this truth we have good grounds to preach and teach in His Name.
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