Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality - - Part IV

Reading DSSHS Critically

Maybe it is, in fact, unfair to read DSSHS closely and critically. After all, it is the work of 14 committee members from different walks of life, having different educational backgrounds, different theological convictions, and different views on the propriety of same-sex relationships. However, since the document purports to be important enough that the entire ELCA study it, I shall take it with the seriousness it invites.

DSSHS starts promisingly enough, quoting Jesus’ summary of the law: 1) Love God above all things, and 2) love the other person as oneself (Matt. 22:36-40). But then things disintegrate rather quickly. As every good Lutheran knows, no one can do that, i.e., love God above all things and love the neighbor as oneself. While this fundamental material content of the law is binding on all human beings, nobody can accomplish it. Human beings have a fundamental deficiency before the law.

Unfortunately, DSSHS evades our full realization of this fundamental human deficiency. It asks, “What does it mean for us as sexual creatures to love our neighbors as ourselves and thus fulfill God’s law of love in this time and society?” (13-15) The game is lost from the outset because the question is the wrong one. A person simply cannot “fulfill God’s law of love.” The ‘thus’ in the question suggests that one could fulfill this law of love if one “as a sexual creature” did love the neighbor as oneself. But who can do this? To suggest it is possible is already to confuse law and gospel.

This confusion of law and gospel is further exacerbated when, a few lines later, the ELCA is identified as “a community of moral deliberation.” The use of this definition from a 1991 ELCA social statement is unfortunate because it confuses what the church is. Clearly, we should not expect members of the ELCA to have special ethical/moral insight or any special tools for ethical/moral reflection. The church is, as Luther says, those who hear the voice of their shepherd (Schmalkald Articles). But those hearing this voice are concerned not primarily with the development of acumen in ethical and moral reflection, but rather with salvation. They want to hear the voice and follow the shepherd, not learn how to mount ethical arguments. The church is a community gathered about a salvific concern (gospel), not an ethical one (law).

Further confusion ensues when DSSHS states that it wants to “speak in ways that can address both religious and secular discussions” (35-6). On the basis of this, one would expect DSSHS to identify something universal in Christian and secular experience. Lutheran ethics has traditionally been able to accomplish this with its two kingdoms approach: God deals with us with two hands. With the gospel of His right hand, human beings live in the realm of grace and faith. However, with His left hand, humans dwell in the kingdom of law and reason. The genius of Lutheran ethics has always been that because the foundation of ethical reasoning is not grounded in the particularity of Christian soteriology, ethical reflection from a Lutheran perspective retains a universal character.

However, any hope that DSSHS shall proceed in this time-honored fashion is immediately crushed by this: “[This document] contains important introductory material designed to explain how Lutherans approach ethics in the light of God’s incarnation and our hope in God who justifies us in Christ” (45-7). The foundation for a Lutheran contribution to a secular ethical discussion has now been lost. How might one find something in these two discussions that is common when the putative foundation for these discussions is the reality of incarnation and justification only granted by one of the conversation partners? This incoherency is never addressed in DSSHS.

Another theological problem occurs when DSSHS makes this startling claim: “As Lutherans we understand ourselves . . . as simultaneously righteous (saved by God’s grace alone) and sinful (convicted by the law)” (165-66). While one might argue on the basis of the “happy exchange” between Christ and the sinner, that ‘righteousness’ just is ‘being saved by God’s grace’, any putative identity between being sinful and being convicted by the law is wrongheaded. Being sinful and being convicted by the law are logically independent notions. One is clearly sinful from birth even if one has never been convicted by the law. To confuse the two is to mistake the reality of not conforming to the law with the experience of not so conforming.

DSSHS’s attempt to use Christian freedom somehow to “preserve and guide all churchly teaching” (164), is also problematic. How is it precisely that “freedom from the crushing burden of our unworthiness before the law” engenders “responsibility and humility in service to the neighbor (200)? While the document says that we are to serve others because of God’s “promises, compassion and mercy” (213), it does not show - - and indeed it cannot show - - how God’s promises, compassion and mercy fill in the contour of what we ought to do. The problem is logical: An ought cannot be derived from an is. We cannot derive that we ought to be compassionate because God is compassionate, though we can conclude that we are in fact compassionate because God is compassionate. DSSHS purports, however, to be an ethical document. Accordingly, it deals with what we ought to do. DSSHS clearly is concerned with what is sexually licit and what illicit.

Throughout DSSHS one runs across ambiguous statements, of which the following is an example: “At heart, human beings are captive to sin - - needy, fearful, often misguided, and sometimes broken” (225-26). Here DSSHS seemingly suggests that sin just is being needy, fearful, misguided and broken? But this is surely problematic; for being needy, fearful, misguided and broken is not, strictly speaking, sin. For Lutherans, sin is primarily enmity with God. Sin is a relational property, not a non-relational one. The logic of ‘sin’ is this: ‘A instances the property S of sin if and only if A has dispositions, attitudes and actions not intended by God for A’. But DSSHS seems to suggest the following: ‘A instances S if A has some cluster of non-relational properties P.’ Apparently, properties P are also what is psychologically unhealthy for A. But this is entirely wrongheaded, for what is psychologically healthy or unhealthy for a person is logically independent of that person’s sin.

DSSHS makes some statements that cannot truly be intended by the drafters. Surely, the committee did not mean to say that “Lutheran sexual ethics cannot suggest that sexual longing or sexual expression is sinful intrinsically” (275-76). But why can it not do this? Are we not willing any longer to say that there are classes of sexual longings or expressions that are not intended by God for human beings to have and do? Is not a sexual longing or expression toward a child intrinsically sinful? Is it not also the case with a murderous heart? The confusion here is deep: Just because something may be “natural” for A to experience does not mean that God intends that what is “natural” for A to obtain. We must distinguish God’s natural law that A instance a set of dispositions B from the natural disposition A has not instance B. The sad fact is that humans now are not as they ought to be. Clearly, if, as Luther says, “human beings sin against God whether they eat or sleep,” then there is a large class of sexual longings and expressions with are intrinsically sinful.

As has previously been discussed, DSSHS states that “a Lutheran sexual ethic looks to the death and resurrection of Christ as the source for the values that guide it (325-26).” But the question is how does the death and resurrection of Christ guide sexual value formation? What is the specific connection?

Here, lamentably, there simply is deep ambiguity. One can say such things as that God was so merciful that He, in Christ, went to His death on the Cross. But precisely what does this imply for sexual human beings? Are we to conclude that since Christ did not condemn (or judge) us, we ought not condemn (or judge) our brother or sister? While this is right, it tells only half the story. In reality, we are both condemned by God for our sin, and forgiven in Christ for that same sin. What Lutheran ethics cannot do is leave out the law. It is because we are condemned and lost before God that God became incarnate and justified us. Lutheran sexual ethics must not forget the reality of God’s primordial intentionality for his creation, and the deficiency of His creation in actualizing that intentionality. Living out our freedom on account of Christ does not entail that we can change the identity conditions for “being lost.”

Finally, for a church defining itself as “a community of moral discernment,” the section entitled “Scripture and Moral Discernment” must come as a disappointment, for in this section we learn very little about how Scripture is to be used to discern what God would have us do sexually. The focal biblical quote in the section is clearly this: “Scripture teaches that God’s will for humankind and creation can be comprehended only through the foolishness of the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ (405-07).” While this is, of course, true of God’s merciful will, Lutheran ethics simply cannot deny that God retains an original will for humans that “they be perfect as the Lord, thy God is perfect.”

The trouble here is very deep. It is as if the drafters of DSSHS have forgotten the ancient Marcionite heresy of denying the validity of the Old Testament and its teachings in favor of a single-minded concentration on the merciful salvific action of the saving God. For Marcion, Christ has come to rescue people from a situation created by a creator God who has made rather a mess of things. Accordingly, the old laws of the Old Testament have passed away and a new era has dawned. By steadfastly refusing to go to the OT and its law for determining the intentionality of God for human sexual being, DSSHS clearly flirts with the heresy of Marcionism.

As I have already said, the fundamental problem of DSSHS is that it forgets that God deals with His creation with two hands: on the left hand is law and reason, and on the right hand is gospel and faith. Lutheran theology teaches that it is one God who manifests Himself to us in these two ways. DSSHS consistently errs on the side of identifying God with only his right hand. But God is not one-handed; He is, in fact, ambidextrous. To work out a Lutheran social ethics on sexuality demands that both hands of God are equally considered. There is, on the one hand, the divinely-intentioned order that must be implemented; there is, on the other hand, the divinely-intentioned mercy that is freely given when the intentioned and just order is not implemented. An ethics without God’s left hand is cannot be a Lutheran sexual ethics. Accordingly, DSSHS, though written by Lutherans, is not a Lutheran document.

The Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality - - Part III

DSSHS and Antinomianism

Classically, ‘antinomianism’ applies to any theological position that downgrades the authority or integrity of the law. If one were to say, like Luther’s contemporary Johann Agricola, that the law needs not to be proclaimed among Christians, then one clearly is flirting with antinomianism. The question is this: Is DSSHS antinomian?

To answer this question clearly, one must first get an operating definition of law. I like the following: x is a law if and only if x is promulgated by an authority, is binding upon a class, and is in principle enforceable. Lutheran thinking has classically started with the promulgation or giving of God’s law to creation. God is an authority that has a clear intent with respect to His creation, and this intent is accordingly binding upon it. Furthermore, this law is enforceable by God: violators - - all of us - - are worthy of ultimate punishment. For Luther and the classical Lutheran tradition, the ‘oughtness’ of things is grounded upon a transcendent ought-intentionality. Oughtness is built into the very nature of things because God loads ought into creation. Not only does is creation bound by the ought, God has a capacity to enforce this oughtness He loads into creation.

The classical Lutheran story does not derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. The classical tradition realizes that the ‘ought’ of law can only be grounded in the transcendent ‘ought-intentionality’ of God. Sin, of course, interferes, and what ought to be is not. The Fall is profoundly understood as the nonconformity of ‘is’ to ‘ought’. All of creation is wayward. The natural law upon creation given by God is not followed. Human beings have turned away from God and what ought to be. While the being of Creation was designed to be in conformity with the divine ought, it is not now in conformity. All have fallen short of the glory of God.

The whole idea of redemption in classical Christian theology is that God arrives in His incarnation to justify, e.g., to make right, the nonconformity of creation’s ‘is’ to the divine ‘ought’. Justification, on the basis of Christ, occurs when God judges His wayward creation that is not what it ought to be to be, nonetheless, acceptable to Him, to the One who can only judge it as unacceptable. For Lutherans, there is a “happy exchange” between Christ and the sinner. Christ’s gifts of conformity to the ought are given to human beings, and human deficiency in the face of the ought is given to Christ. The result is that human beings live and Christ dies in accordance with God’s justice that can only properly judge nonconformity with the ought as worthy of death.

The fundamental problem with DSSHS is that a statement of what ought to be cannot be derived from a description of what is. To try to derive a prescription of how to behave sexually from a description of what God has done for us is a category mistake.

The profound problem with DSSHS turns out to be the ancient problem of “what has God said?” The notion of an external law claiming that human beings ought to behave in such and such a way seems fundamentally out of touch with our times. While human beings have never liked oughts, it seems that our time has a special disdain for them. In vast portions of western popular culture, normative ethics simply does not play. People can make no sense out of “absolute” claims that humans ought to be different than they are. The very notion of an objective reality that human beings must somehow conform to is today anathema. It is, of course, the triumph of Nietzsche. The medieval transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty have been unmasked and seen to be mere projections of the human will-to-power.

Lutheran theology in the last 125 years has strongly been influenced by Nietzsche’s critique. Accordingly, there is little hope that an ELCA committee on sexuality could move beyond the dominance of the subject and return to the object, to a way of thinking that allows again for the possibility of a real ought. To return to the ought, to an honest appraisal of how God intends things to be, means that human action will likely be curbed in particular ways. If man and woman ought to remain celibate outside of marriage, then that is what they ought to do, no matter how difficult that may be. That they won’t so remain is addressed by incarnation and justification. This is how it works; this is how it has always worked. But, as evidenced by DSSHS, this is no longer how it works.

The Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality: Part II

DSSHS and the Divine “As If”

As others have pointed out, the term ‘Trinity’ occurs but once in the document, and there the three distinctive persons are not named. This is perhaps indicative of a deeper presupposition in the document: In discussing sin and law the document proceeds “as if” God were to exist apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language, and “as if” God had a definite set of attitudes towards the world. I say this “as if” pointedly because there is ample evidence in the document to suggest committee members actually reject the idea that that God has a primal intentionality towards His creation. Instead of viewing God as an individual divine being having a particular intention towards His creation (e.g., it is His Will that human beings do x under conditions y), God is understood as somehow having a general nature that human beings must “fill in.” The result of this “filling in” is that God’s “intentionality” towards x is asserted on the basis of the previous commitment of the drafters towards x.

In DSSHS, the nature of God and his relationship to His creation is understood on the basis of His graceful and merciful incarnational sojourn and justificatory activity. Given this general nature of the divine, what specific intentions would and could this God have for His people? Surely He would bring life out of death, make new the old, and do the unexpected (like rising from the dead). Since He dwells with us in our humanness in the incarnation, he accordingly dwells with us in our weakness and our weak wills. He is alongside of us in all of our sexual choices and foibles, never abandoning us. God loves us even in our weakness, so we are to love others in their weakness. God’s love for us clearly trumps his Judgment upon us. But outside of this, what more can be said about God?

Here it becomes more difficult. While Love and mercy are very good things, and while God’s gift of them to us maybe does suggest that we should be honest, sincere, and not jealous and envious in our relationships, love and mercy are not capable of providing a foundation for institutions such as marriage - - at least a foundation that can speak of marriage qua marriage. If love and mercy constitute the divine intention towards us, then it would seem that there is no greater reason to prefer married love to lesbian love. If God came and manifested love and mercy, should we not manifest love and mercy? And if we do, what reasons are there to do that within the context of heterosexual married love over homosexual, unmarried, committed love? It seems that it is a stretch to say that heterosexual love is more facilely derivable from the incarnation and justification than homosexual love.

The problem is that DSSHS does not avail itself of traditional Lutheran resources of natural law and orders of creation. By looking only at the incarnation for clues to God’s intention, readers of DSSHS seem to ignore what the Old Testament (and much of the New Testament) say about God’s rather distinctive intentionality for human life - - including human sexual life. It is obvious that DSSHS does not suppose that God has a general revelation for all human beings apart from the Christ event, and that the Bible has much to say about the specifics of God’s primal intentionality towards His creation. In fact, the fundamental question is not even asked in the document: Is homoerotic behavior in itself sinful? Is such behavior consistent with the Will of God, or does it run counter to His will? While it would seem to many Christians that one of these two alternatives must obtain, DSSHS seems to presuppose a third option: It is neither consistent with or inconsistent with that Will, and perhaps, to think it is, is itself profoundly wrongheaded. But to assume this is to assume that God is not the kind of being that has a definite will on these matters. Accordingly, the intentionality of God, while it might be an interesting theological construct, is not itself a real event or state.

The ELCA Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality: Part I

Over the next few days I shall publish here my response to the ELCA Sexuality Statement. Below is Part I:

Since the time of David Hume (1711-76), philosophers have been struggling with the question of whether “ought” can be inferred from “is.” Famously, Hume held that it “seems altogether inconceivable how this new relation [ought] can be a deduction of others [is] which are entirely different from it.[i] Accordingly, propositions of how the world is simply cannot entail statements of how it ought to be.

Against this, naturalists of all stripes, including Hume’s contemporary Jeremy Bentham (1748 -1832) hold that how things are do entail how they ought to be. Famously, Bentham’s Principle of Utility “approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question.” [ii] Reflecting on the nature of this approval, classical utilitarianism argues that one ought to do that act which augments the happiness of those whose interest is in question. Evolutionary ethical theory thus permits a move from ‘is’ to ‘ought’. If human beings are instilled by the evolutionary process with a moral sense, then the fact of this sense does entail what they ought to do.

In 1903, G.E. Moore (1873-1958) launched a classic argument against any kind of ethical naturalism. In his “open question argument” he points out that a statement like Bentham’s ‘pleasure is good’ cannot mean that pleasure is identical to good, for if that were so, then ‘pleasure is good’ would entail ‘pleasure is pleasure’. [iii] But clearly it remains an “open question” whether or not ‘pleasure is good’, but not that 'pleasure is pleasure'. Thus, anyone asserting that pleasure is good must be “saying something more” about pleasure than that it is pleasure, and this “more” must presupposes a non-natural property of goodness. To say ‘x is good’ or ‘S ought to do y’ is to say something that is in principle irreducible to mere descriptions of natural and social facts. Accordingly, ‘ought’ is of another order than ‘is’.

While philosophers since Moore’s time have been divided over the validity of the open question argument, there is no mistaking that a very powerful tradition of twentieth century philosophical argument followed Hume in denying that ‘ought’ can be derived from ‘is’. After all, even if beneficent values were somehow evolutionarily loaded into human nature, it would still not entail that one ought to act in accordance with those values. For a number of reasons, I am convinced that Hume is essentially right, and that ‘ought’ cannot be derived from ‘is’.

So why do I raise this old controversy in this discussion of the ELCA Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality (DSSHS)? It is my contention that unknown to the committee members of the ELCA Task Force on Human Sexuality, their work actually presupposes the minority position in this philosophical debate: DSSHS assumes that descriptive statements about God’s incarnation in Christ and His justification of sinful human beings can entail a prescriptive statement about how one ought to behave sexually. By attempting to ground sexual ethics in the Second Article, DSSHS not only is unorthodox, but incoherent. It not only does not hold together rhetorically, it cannot do so logically. By analyzing what God has done for us in Christ, we cannot logically derive how we ought to act as Christians. As paradoxical as this might sound, to claim that we can do so is to confuse Law and Gospel. While from a description of what God has done for us in Christ, we can infer something of what we do in fact do as Christians, we cannot infer what we ought to do as Christians. To claim otherwise is to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’; it is to ground the Law in the Gospel; it is to strike out in a way that Lutherans simply cannot do.

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[i] David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature.

[ii] Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Chapter 1.

[iii] G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica.

Why is the "Literal Sense" so Problematic? - An Excursus on the Sexuality Issue

Believers in the pews are often bewildered how it can be that theologians and church leaders often proclaim positions at glaring odds with what they believe they read in Scripture. Why does my bishop say we should be "open and affirming" to homosexuals and my Bible say this about homosexuality at Leviticus 20:13: "If a man lies with a male as he lies with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them." (NKJV) How is this possible?

At this point historical-critical points are generally introduced, and the believer is taken back behind "God's Word" of Scripture into a world of causal explanations of Scripture, a world of socio-economic structural explanations, or perhaps of literary methodologies, or, if these don't do the trick, just plain bald assertions. (I remember debating an ELCA college religion professor who confidently told those assembled that Leviticus simply was "a weird book.")

In truth, however, the problem with "taking the Bible literally" has been around for a very long time, and it is not a problem that finally rides on historical-critical methodology or alternate socio-economic and ideological "causes" for Scriptural assertion. The problem with a literal reading of Scripture and a fortiori a sola scriptura approach is that such an approach seems to presuppose that there is not "a broad ugly ditch" (Lessing) that separates the horizon of the text and the horizon of the reader. In other words, the sola scriptura approach that holds to Luther's "literal sense of Scripture" seems to proceed blissfully unaware of the hermeneutical problem: How can one read a text and somehow apprehend the meaning of that text? If this is possible at all, what would be the conditions of this possibility? The problem with grasping the literal sense of Scripture is just part of the general problem of grasping the "literal sense" of any document. How could such a thing be possible? Where resides the meaning of the text, and how does a reader come to acquire it?

The believer attending services has, in general, no way to grasp that the difficulty in the theological community in grasping the simple, literal sense of Scripture has less to do with a wanton disregard for the specifics of the text, but rather with how one might understand Biblical authority on the other side of Gadamer. Just as there is a theological paradigm dominating in mainstream Protestant denominations that eschews theological and semantic realism and the very possibility of theophysical causation, so is there a paradigm that rejects the possibility of the text having meaning in itself. In the same way that Kant left the philosophical tradition with a dualism of the unknowable Ding-an-Sich (the noumenal) and a subjectivized Ding-für-Sich (the phenomenal), hermeneutics by the middle of the twentieth century was stuck with a dualism of the irrecoverable meaning of the text, and the subjectivized “reader response” to it. Just as Hegel tried to overcome the dualism of Kant by eschewing the very possibility of the thing-in-itself while showing the objectivity of the historicity of the thing-for-me, so did Gadamer seek to move beyond entirely the problematic of the textual meaning-in-itself, and embrace instead the objectivity of the historicized meaning-for-me.

For Gadamer, the meaning of a text arises in the back-and-forth movement of text and reader, where the horizon of the reader is figured as a historical product of the “spirit” that was itself realized in the text. The “effects of historical consciousness” are thus this: Historical movement produces cultural artifacts (texts) that effect subsequent historical movement. In any age, the spirit of its historical understanding is manifested in its texts. Texts are thus in a deep sense communal productions, with individual authors merely bespeaking the historical understanding of the age. When these texts of a previous age and community are read by later readers, the historical understandings in the text confront the later reader not as something wholly foreign, but rather as something deeply resonant to the later reader, because the historical understandings in the previous texts effect subsequent historical understandings that themselves are implicit in the later interpretive horizons.

It works like this: An earlier text (take Romans, for example) leaves an interpretative wake in the interpretive horizons of later generations. Thus, the text of Romans has formed the very interpretive equipment (my conceptual apparatus) by which I now in the early 21^st century must use in reading the earlier text (Romans). In a real sense the historical effects of Romans in my interpretive horizon are now marshaled in the attempt to read Romans. Thus, in the reading, interpretation is possible because the “meaning of the text in itself” is already historically bequeathed into the interpretive horizon of the reader such that its effects (Romans effects) thus function to read Romans. The meaning of the text thus arises in the play of the historical effects of Romans on the reader who presupposes these effects in the reading of Romans. Meaning is a back and forth, to and fro, movement between text and interpreter; it emerges as a fusion of horizons where the impossibility of the ultimate “otherness” of Scripture is displayed; Romans is not ultimately foreign, but has formed me the reader of Romans. The necessary condition of its speaking is that it is not ultimately and wholly different from the one interpreting it. This is why I can be said to have a “pre-understanding” of the text even prior to the reading of the text.

Accordingly, God cannot simply work as a wholly other One confronting us with wholly other mandates radically different from us. God’s Word in scripture is only possible because there is a pre-understanding of the text as a place where God might speak, a pre-understanding formed historically in the interpretive community by the text itself. Romans is a “classic performance” that has created a communal genre of interpretation that functions in the attentive listening to of the text. Just as we hear a classic performance of Beethoven and understand its “meaning” only if our interpretive horizon has been informed by listening to Beethoven, so do we hear the Word of God in scripture and understand its meaning only if our interpretive horizon has been informed by generations of communal experience with attentive hearing of the Romans texts as a place where God might speak.

The point in all of this is that just as there is no meaning to the music of Beethoven apart from listening to Beethoven, there is no meaning to the words of Romans apart from the history of communal experience with Romans. Just as musical meaning cannot reside anywhere but in the confrontation of the music with the listener, so too can textual meaning not reside anywhere but in the confrontation of the text with the reader. Theologians don’t so much want to “reject the literal Word of God plainly available in Scripture,” but find a way somehow to “make the literal Word of God possible.” It can only be possible in this complicated way where a historical interpretive community is dialectically related to the text, related such that the normative meaning of that text emerges on the basis of that dialectical relationship.

What church-going believers don’t realize is that the intellectual world that the theologian must inhabit makes it very difficult even to reclaim something of the horizon presupposed by much of the tradition. Gadamer, while he would appear to most non-theologians (many pastors included) as quite destructive to taking Scripture seriously, is really trying to reclaim the very possibility of taking it seriously by showing that the old dualism of textual objectivity and reader subjectivity (with the resultant “win” by the subject) can be overcome in the objectivity of the “spirit” of the text and tradition. The original Lutheran sola scriptura principle is fundamentally at odds with a Gadamerian approach unless it is reworked to show that the sola scriptura arises, and can only arise, in a communal situation presupposing tradition.

All of this is a bit complicated, and the reader of this blog might now actually know much more about about Gadamer than most ELCA pastors who don’t recognize the intellectual roots of the interpretive moves that they standardly make. Yet, these are the waters that must be swum if one is truly going to understand why “people just don’t take scripture at its clear sense when it prohibits homosexual activity.” In our present intellectual situation, we can’t think that any historical text has a clear sense without an interpretive community. If this is true of the Dialogues of Plato, it is true of Scripture as well.

There is no easy way out back to taking the text seriously. Perhaps what is needed is simply a move in the interpretive community not unlike the realist move of G.E. Moore. He said, “Instead of taking as the problematic the immediacy of the subject and the problem of the object, let us start with the immediacy of the object and see what happens.” This move put an end in philosophy to classical idealism, the "Hegelian synthesis" included. What is happening in theology is that we always assume an idealistic starting point and cannot find our way out of the subject. This is clearly true of Gadamer's hermeneutical analogue to "absolute idealism." So maybe it is time again for a new starting point. Why not simply start with the object and forgo the task of "building a bridge" to it? After all, there are only so many shots on the basketball court, and when you work yourself into the corner, the shots become very difficult indeed. If one still wants to play the game, one must find a different position on the court.

Thinking Hegelian Thoughts

It can happen to you anywhere, and sometimes with the least provocation. You can be having a good day, a clear day, a day when you know what you know and what you should do. It can be a day of teaching, of administrating, or of reading and studying. It can be a day like other good days. . . But then it happens: Suddenly, capriciously Hegel makes sense.

Now I don’t mean to say that one suddenly grasps the system, that one comes to clarity about how mediated immediacy works with respect to the whole of ideal and historical reality, or even that one succeeds in actually learning something more about Hegel’s thought. It is not really a greater appreciation of Hegel that one has, but rather that all of a sudden, and quite out of the blue, one discovers one is Hegelian; one grasps that what Hegel says is deeply true.

My own recent insightful moment occurred on a day like other days. I was lecturing on the problems bequeathed by Kant and was talking about how Fichte, Schelling and Hegel responded to these problems. I was talking about how, for Kant, the forms imposed by the subject on things were due to our autonomous transcendental synthesizing activity, and that Hegel believed that Kant had allowed that the particularity of the forms so imposed was ultimately inexplicable, or, in Hegel’s terms, “shot from the pistol.” Famously, Hegel had accused Kant of allowing these forms to stand in “bare externality,” and that what was thus needed was a way to show how this “moment” was itself the result of some higher movement of the Spirit, or some more lofty unpacking of the Idea. (At this point undergraduate students are generally thinking about something fun they shall be doing in the summer.) On this recent day in class, I appealed to Hegel’s implicit presupposition of the Principle of Sufficient Reason in explaining why Hegel could not leave the forms in mere bare externality and, I must admit, I was even a little proud in showing how Hegel was thusly continuing in the German rationalist tradition. But then it happened: Hegel’s solution simply seemed inescapable! Of course, one cannot merely leave the Kantian subject in externality; one must finally “take it up” in the higher movement of Spirit. If one does not do so, one is guilty of hanging the Kantian subject out to dry in the arena of the irrational; one is, in other words, condemning the Kantian subject to the abyss of Value.

The story goes like this: For many philosophers prior to Kant, the world is merely given; it is thus the subject’s obligation to conform itself to the objective structure of the world. But the skeptical trajectory culminating in Hume had shown how the objectivity of the natural sciences could not be maintained without a move to the subject. In order to ground the objectivity of experience, Kant deduced those necessary conditions for the possibility of experience. These included, as is well known, the pure a priori forms of intuition (space and time), and the pure a priori forms of understanding (quantity, quality, relation, and modality). Of these, the two most famous fall under ‘relation’, the pure a priori concepts of substance and cause. Since philosophers had shown that substance and causality were not part of the structure of the world in itself, they must be located elsewhere if they are to be retained. Kant famously located them in the autonomy of the transcendental synthesis that gives rise to the self/world structure. It is because human being in its transcendental be-ing, imposes form upon the world, that human being in its subjective be-ing can come to know the world as a formed content. Kant showed, in effect, that since the necessary forms employed in modern science could not be derived from the content of the world in itself, that they must be grounded in the synthesizing activity of the subject. The transcendental condition for the possibility of a formed world was not a world that came as formed, but a synthesis that imposed the form of the subject upon a formless world. (Theologically, one could say that without the Word there could be no World.) So Kant did not allow the world to stand in its immediacy, but rather showed that all knowledge of the world demanded a mediacy by the subject.

Now enter the heroic Hegelian solution: Instead of leaving the transcendental condition for the possibility of a formed world to be just the way things are (“shot from the pistol”), Hegel showed how this transcendental synthesizing activity was itself accounted for by the movement of Geist (Spirit) that is, by definition, no longer something that needs accounting for. Whereas the content of the world is formed by the form of transcendental synthesis, the form of that synthesis is itself the result of the content of Spirit, a formed Spirit whose content is both form and content. So it is that the abyss of Value is grounded once more in Truth.

Thinking about Hegel makes one think Trinitarian thoughts. The content of the world is the result of the form of the Word: God speaks all things into being. But this divine speaking is never something wholly external to those with eyes to see, because the One speaking is identical to the One testifying to the speaking. There is thus an identity of being and thinking.

Lutheran theology is a Trinitarian theology. Hegel is a Lutheran. And so it happens that Hegelian philosophy is profoundly Trinitarian theology.

So with the insight that Hegel is true, what does one do? One approaches with ontological humility the contour of the world; one explores with epistemological humility the contour of the self knowing the world; and one discerns with religious humility the contour of the divine upon whose absolute ground the subject knows its object.

Why Worry about Not Being Able to Do Other than What One Did Do?

So many Lutherans care so desperately about freedom that one would think it is part of our tradition.

Of course, in some sense it clearly is part of our tradition. Did not Luther talk about the freedom of the Christian believer before God? Are we not free before God so that we might become dutiful servants to our neighbors?

The word 'free' can be used in many senses and Lutherans are not immune to confusing them. On the one hand, we say that 'x is free with respect to A' if and only if 'x is not externally compelled to do A.' People marching around with signs proclaiming "Freedom Now!" are mostly concerned with this sense of freedom.

On the other hand, we can mean by 'x is free with respect to A' that x has the inner resources to do A when x has determined that A ought to be done, or that somehow the oughtness of A no longer binds the conscience of x. The freedom of a Christian seems to be freedom of this kind. Accordingly, one is given the gift of A no longer standing over and against x as something that x ought to do without x having the wherewithal to do it.

The sense of freedom that I want to briefly discuss, however, is not freedom in either of these two senses. It is instead a deeply philosophical notion of freedom. I am interested in whether or not each and every human action has sufficient causal conditions for its occurrence. Accordingly, 'x is free with respect to A' if and only if x, in doing A, could nonetheless had done ~A. The question is whether there are causally sufficient conditions which realize rather than ~A. If there are such conditions then A is determined for x by those conditions; if not then A is free for x.

It is interesting to note that most Christians in America these days seem quite interested in having freedom in the sense of the preceding paragraph. People do not want to believe that God disallows freedom in this sense. This has struck me as odd, however, because many of these people do not seem at all concerned that our basic materialist or physicalist worldview precludes such freedom. After all, if all human beings are ultimately comprised of those beings which our fundamental physical theories quantify over, then it seems that the apparent freedom we have as rational and moral agents must be ultimately explained by the motion of those fundamental particles or energies. But if freedom cannot finally be explicated in that way, and if we are confident that these fundamental particles exist, then it follows that our freedom to do other than what we did do is appearance and not reality. This seems true for both reductive and nonreductive physicalist accounts.

The general problem of trying to find a place for free rational and moral agency in a natural world has occupied philosophers for the last four centuries. The good news is that we know much more about our neurophysiology than we did in the past. We know a great deal about what brain functions or states correlate with what mental functions and states, and what changes in brain state are sufficient for bringing about certain changes in mental states. The bad news, however, is that we still don't have any real approach to the most difficult problem of modernity and post-modernity alike: Given that consciousness, intentionality, language, and even rationality can be given a naturalist explanation, how is it that freedom itself can be given such an explanation? How is decision-making realized within the physical structure of the brain? How is freedom possible in a physicalist universe?

What intrigues me theologically about this question is this: How is it that our age more-or-less gives a pass to scientists who reject the possibility of freedom of the will, but attack those who, on religious grounds, assert that the human will is captive, that is, as Luther says, is either ridden by God or the devil? In other words, why is being bound to the will of God so much harder to stomach than being bound to the seemingly capricious movement of neurophysical or microphysical processes? It seems like there is something deep at issue here: Human beings seemingly would rather be "ridden" by their molecules, than by a transcendent God. Why do Christian men and women want to be able freely to "make a decision" for Christ, when they often, in other contexts, wholly deny the freedom to "make a decision" that is not driven by their nuerophysical constitution? Why precisely is it easier to say that our deciding to do A is neuro-state x6542je than a particular volitional state in God?

The answer is easy, I think. Human beings by their nature want to be their own God. They want to own themselves. Somehow, it seems, being owned by their own microphysical processes is to be preferred over being owned by a creator God. Somehow people find it easier to be driven by their own neural events than by a transcendent God. Somehow we think we hold on better to what Kant called "the dear little self" in the former rather than the latter.

Human sin is not wanting God to be God. We run from Him in myriad and sundry ways. We do so as well, seemingly, in the choice of those things to which we ultimately allow ourselves to lose our freedom.

The "Sexuality Issue"

Members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) are confused these days about sexuality. They want to figure out if engaging in homoerotic behavior is consonant with assuming the predigtamt (preaching office) within a congregation. They also are contemplating whether pastors should be blessing same sex relationships.

The problem with talking about this issue is that few care about the arguments actually used to determine the positions adopted. People just want to know who is for and who is against it; they don't want to know why. Thus, it is with some trepidation that I offer the following analysis of the sexuality issue. Those that read this blog will know now that I am against it. I offer this analysis, however, not as an interesting psychological fact about me (e.g., that I am against it), but rather as a justification for being against it. I believe that one's justification for holding something true is much more than a fact about the speaker. It is a public argument offered in logical space, an argument that, in principle, gives others grounds for being against it. While what I say is not terribly original, the succinctness in how I have said it may well be. I offer this argument to people of reason who might want to consider these grounds in arriving at their own well-informed position:

Every human being has two mothers, the one from whose womb they emerged, and the language (mother tongue) they learned early in life, that language through and by which they structured and understood their world. The naming and predicative machinery of the mother tongue determines in large part the objects, kinds of objects, and qualities of objects one can encounter. The "immediacy" of human experience is mediated by that language by and through which it is had.

Clearly, human beings possess genetic characteristics that strongly affect their dispositions to behave. There is general agreement that early experience (and thus language) greatly influences these dispositional characteristics. However, later experience and reflection within a language also strongly influence dispositional development. The mother language in which one lives “breaks” and “orders” the world for the speaker; its conceptual machinery forms the a priori basis for the possibility of particular objects, and for general categories of objects. Consequently, one cannot be a person of a particular psychological type without first being able to conceive and order the world as a place where such types are possible. Property determination is logically prior to property instantiation.

Within oue native language there are certain communal narratives that operate to grant meaning, identity, and purpose. Some of the statements within these narratives are constative; they claim that something obtains. Further reflection and experiment can falsify or provisionally countenance the truth of these statements. However, all such statements presuppose the particularity of the conceptual equipment historically transmitted by language. The “metanarrative” of the providence of God is one in which there are putatively factual statements making claims of truth. Given our conceptual grid, statements about God can be either true or false.

In their pre-linguistic state, the behavior of human beings, like all animals, is understandable as satisfying a complex set of stimulus-response conditionals. Some humans, due to genetic and early imprinting conditions, respond to greater or lesser degrees to same-sex sexual stimulation. However, humans always need narratives in order to have meaning and identity. We humans are creatures of time in ways different from the rest of the animal world. We humans know the passing of time, and thus understand what is against the backdrop of what is not. We shall not always be, and this deep sense of not always being sends us hunting after meaning, purpose and identity.

In the late nineteenth century a narrative began to develop about homosexuality that was amplified, adjusted, and codified throughout the twentieth century, such that in the last days of the twentieth-century, people could talk confidently about the state of “being homosexual” versus “acting in homosexual ways,” and about “discovering” this homosexuality. The narrative supposed homosexuality to be a general disposition, not unlike fragility. Just as fragile things are fragile even when they don’t always break, so too, it was thought that homosexuals are homosexual even when they do not act in homosexual ways. The messiness of history was pretty much forgotten in the chase to get clear on this issue. For instance, ancient Greek culture countenanced and sometimes encouraged homosexucal behavior seemingly without regard to genetic dispositions and without having the category of "the homosexual'.

As the century developed, the myth took a new twist. The disposition of homosexuality was understood to be a primary identity of the person, and thus civil rights were brought into play. Just as minorities and women must be protected by the law, so too must homosexual people. The disanalogy between the two was not noticed. After all, homosexuality is, prima facie, nothing at all like skin color, or gender. There are no “natural boundaries” to it. What was overlooked is that doing a similar exploration and thematization of the psychological character of people could issue in the same type of narratives for different psychological features - - if there were interest to do such. For instance, one might well have isolated the dispositions to steal of certain people, made that an identity issue, and then make the possession of that disposition a natural rights issue. One could have done it with dispositions toward shyness, dispositions toward sexual promiscuity, dispositions toward niggardliness, dispositions towards prolixity, etc. That one would never do so displays the difference in meaning of these various dispositions. It is difficult to see how possessing the disposition of prolixity can grant existential identity, meaning, and destiny.

Given the socially constructed “identity” of the homosexual, the interpretive framework of that identity was used to interpret the multivariagatedness of human experience into certain patterns of sexual response, such that experience itself - -antifoundational because of language and narrative - - was misused as a foundational source for theological reflection. Thus contemporary pseudo-intellectuals could declare that “some people are just made that way” and that “the Bible does not know anything about the homosexual.” The biblical text was thus read by those occupying a hermeneutical horizon openly antipodal to the hermeneutical cradle from which the text emerged. This antithetical horizon could only judge the “immediacy of human experience” - - anything but immediate as I have argued - - as something trumping the mediated historical horizon of an alien text.

If we could see the problem clearly, we could see that the "sexuality issue" has emerged from our contemporary mythology. The “discovery of my homosexuality” is an Enlightenment-inspired myth that fills life with identity, meaning and purpose; it is a myth grounded in the fundamentality of "my experience." Theologically, of course, the problem goes back to the primitive, “did God really say that?” Are there dispositions that are not my dispositions that ought to be my dispositions? Does this question make sense for us apart from obvious utilitarian concerns? Theologically, one might claim that Luther is right. We are either ridden by God or Satan. Understanding that, however, takes a depth that most no longer have.

Perhaps the primary sin of our times is that we have sold our birthright as beings of reason. We have forgotten that reason is involved in every activity of faith. Perhaps what makes the faith of our day so underdeveloped is that our reason is so underdeveloped. There is considerable irony in this. But what is better for the Evil One than to have beings who are asleep at the wheel while they “entertain themselves to death?"

The Power of Words

lI am always am disquieted when I hear theologians talk confidently about the "power" of the Biblical word and then go on to claim that Biblical language is not referential, but rather performative. The reason for my disquiet is simply that such an understanding of language does not distinguish well between the performance itself, and the context in which that performance must perform.

Think about Julie saying to Bob, "I love you." This certainly can be said in a number of different instances. But to really empower Bob, the hearer of the word, there must be some sense in which Julie's remarks aptly display what psychological states she is in. If Julie tells Bob that she loves him, it is all-important to Bob that there is a Julie and she actually possesses the property of having love towards Bob. It is highly unlikely for Bob to be empowered by the words, 'I love you', when there is no Julie possessing an attitude of love toward Bob. There must be some basis upon which the locution empowers. It just does not make sense for human beings that performative utterances nakedly empower. A computer program spitting out 'I love you' fails to empower because we do not believe the program is an agent that could possess the relevant propositional attitudes that would make the locution even relevant.

So how can it be that so many theologians want to talk about the powerful effect of words without supposing that those words refer? The answer is quite simple. If one begins with the presupposition that God cannot be an entity causally involved in the life of the universe, then one's semantics must be adjusted accordingly. Words cannot refer because there is nothing to which those words can refer. What they can do is empower; they can free us; they can heal us; they can give us life; they can open up for us new possibilites. The theological trajectory that assumes a power in the words without a reference is a trajectory that allows for very good preaching, and a very good bedside manner.

The problem, of course, is that one cannot come clean on one's semantics to those with whom one speaks. The problem is that the man and woman in the pew are likely being empowered by the words only because they are assuming a referential, and not donational, semantics. One must have a high degree of existential sophistication, I suppose, to be empowred by a naked 'I love you' from a Julie who is not an agent and cannot have any propositional states. It may not be impossible to find some Bob so empowered, but his kind are clearly not found in abundance. In a parallel fashion, I suppose it would take a high level of theological sophistication to be empowered by 'You are saved by grace because of Christ's love,' in the absence of there being any God with a propositional attitude of wrath from whom to be saved. It is a rare bird whose existential anxieties are quelled by 'God loves you' who nonetheless believes that God is not an agent that can in principle possess a propositional attitude, or even an intent towards human beings.

Is it not time that we think deeply about these presuppositions in theology that allow us to use the language of a sacred canopy long after we have come of age to the fact that the skies are forever black? Maybe it is time to either eliminate the discourse or give it robust truth-conditions. Maybe the time is long overdo that we take God-talk very seriously.

Nomological Confusions

Lutheran theology classically distinguishes the first and second use of the law. The first use is civil. Here the law works to keep human beings from descending into lawless chaos. The law in its first use functions to order society and to establish those requisite structures that make possible human life together. While this law is a curb, the second use of the law functions as a mirror so that we can see our waywardness and be driven by this realization to the foot of the cross. This theological use of the law was clearly thematized during the Reformation.

Lately there has been confusion in some otherwise solid Lutheran quarters about how the first and second use of the law connect to one another. Some have argued that human reason alone can establish the content established by the first use of the law. They have claimed that reason can establish that both homosexuality and mendacity are wrong. This reading claims, in nfact, that some ethical theory can provide solid grounds as to what is good and bad, right and wrong. For instance, instead of looking at divine proscription, they would argue that homosexuality is wrong on either an act or rule utilitarian perspective. The argument goes this way:

1) One ought to do those actions which conduce to the greatest happiness.
2) Homosexual actions cause physical and mental pain for the participants and their families.
3) Thus, one ought not to do homosexual actions.

The thing to notice about this argument is its consequentialism. It is, of course, the nature of a consequentialist argument to disagree about what consequences will likely follow from an act. To say that a homosexual act is wrong because it has a greater likelihood of causing medical problems in the participants, that it comcomittantly places a greater strain on medical resources, and that those so inclined to homosexual action would suffer more pain from engaging in the action than not engaging is to take part in a thoroughgoingly hermeneutical task. It is a question of the horizon of one's interpretation. Two intelligent people, equally well-trained in philosophy could disagree as to the extent that homosexual actions cause physical and mental pain. In such a case, as is well known, one's motivation for finding things to be a certain way can determine the way that one finds thing. Interpretations, after all, are entirely human matters. An interpretation is, in fact, in many ways like an artefact: One's motive partially manufactures it. An interpretation does not depend upon that which lies outside the self, rather it is autonomously produced by the self.

Now the rub comes. If an interpretation is a human artefact, and interpretations can be changed by the interpretants, then the material content of the first use of the law is determined by human reason. But how can that which is identified (and constructed) by human reason ever drive someone to the foot of the cross? Surely, to be driven to the foot of the cross presupposes that one is not who one ultimately should be, and that someone in power is upset by this. It seems to me that only if one deeply knows that he is not whom he should be could he ever be driven to the foot of the cross. Thus arises repentance and contrition, and the perceived need for the saving grace of the gospel.

Making the material content of the first use depend upon human autonomy, and the material content of the second upon divine heteronomy, clearly destroys the unity of the law and leads to nomological confusions. Within the context of such confusion, the old temptation of antinomianism flourishes alive and well.

The Authority of Scripture

Many people are concerned about the problem of the authority of scripture. But how can the Bible have such authority when seeming textual authority has been undermined by various methods that penetrate beyond the text and claim to recover deeper meaning? Moreover, how is scriptural authority possible when the homogeneity of hermeneutical method and stance has been broken?

In the early Christian tradition monks slavishly labored to copy perfectly Holy Scripture so as to preserve its syntax. Not always knowledgable about the truth and meaning of the text, these scribes were interested in preserving the text's form and structure. Developing normative canons for syntactic probity, it was relatively easy to diagnose deviant syntactic trajectories. Authority could be defined structurally in terms of proper and improper strings.

But the authority of syntax has never been as important in Christianity as semantic authority. What the text means is what is important, and for many this textual meaning is thought to be as objective as the syntax which mediates and carries this meaning. Identifying deviant semantic trajectories is thus a task of reporting the willful waywardness of deviant interpreters. What the Bible says is clear, it is thought; what is at issue is the interpretation of what it says.

But we postmoderns are not comfortable asserting an objective or normative semantic configuration tied intrinsically to the text. There is no intrisicality to semantics, we think. The idea that semantics supervenes on syntax - - any two worlds indiscernible with respect to their syntactic distributions are indiscernible with respect to their semantic distributions - - is problematic. Any supervenience of semantics upon syntax must presuppose an extrisnsicality of the former not needed for the latter. But when such semantic extrinsicality is admitted, then what becomes of textual authority? Does it finally not devolve to the relatum of textual extrinsicality, to the interpreter himself/herself? But if this is so, then is it not merely an instance of power? The text has a particular semantic normativity because there is a capriousness and arbitrariness of interpretation powerfully supported by the community. The text is given a particular normative semantic interpretation because of the power of the community to enforce its reading. Normativity of interpretation thus becomes a function of communal sanction.

All of this just points out the problem if Scriptural authority somehow gets conceived as a relationship of text to semantic interpretation, or text to that interpretation which is related to community enforcement. Clearly, scriptural authority must finally become merely a projection of a community's will to power. The authority of Scripture is reduced to the authority of the community to whom the text is authoratative. Those wanting to argue divine scriptural authority are marginalized because they do not know the true springs of that authority: human community.

If we are to make progress on the problem of Scriptural authority, we cannot start within the problematic of an innocuous intrinsicality hiding a nefarious extrinsicality. What is needed, of course, is recourse to the benign extrinsicality of the Holy Spirit. The Bible must interpret itself, and the wings of that interpretation must be the activity of the Holy Spirit. Just as postmodernity recognizes that the power of human community drives the semantics of the Biblical text, so too must it recognize that the power of the Holy Spirit also drives the interpretation of the text. The extrinsic moment within the dynamics of interpretation is God's own!

Thus, I do not see how Scriptural authority can be grounded apart from the activity of the Spirit. It is this divine breath of God that determines the contour of scriptural semantics, and ultimately the authority of Scripture itself.

On Semantics in Theology

I am convinced that the mainline denominations are dying because they have violated semantic probity. While there seems to be some prima facie absurdity in this, I think that it is so. I believe that people who are profoundly interested in Christianity think that the language of Christianity somehow makes truth claims. That is not to say that every interested Christian is a naive realist. It is to say, however, that an understanding of religious and theological language that construes the specificity of that language as due entirely to human experience is problematic. The crucial realist question is simply this: If there were no human sentience, could one still affirm, in principle, the reality of God? Does it make sense to speak about God's existence apart from the human self/world structure? If there is no possible world - - no self-consistent description of how the world could have gone - - in which God is apart from human conciousness, then God must be causally inert.

The causal impotence of God is related to the internal relatedness of God to the world. If the concept of God is such that God must be related to that which is not God in order for God to be God, then we cannot affirm an intrinsicality to God that could, in principle, retain causal powers. But a God without robust causal powers simply cannot be God - - or so I would argue. The reason is simply that conceptually God must be construed as that which none greater can be thought. But clearly a God with causal power is greater than a God without it. Thus, in order for God to be God, God must have causal power. This is such a basic insight, that I am surprised many theologians no longer find it important to even ask the question of divine causality. For many, in fact, the notion that God can cause anything is taken to be a category mistake, like saying, with Ryle, that she left in a sedan and came home in a rage. This is unfortunate, and tips the theological hat since Kant in a decidedly Platonic direction, though most have not seen this. Just as Plato believed that coneptual analysis in the order of being gets at knowledge more than an examination of cause and effect within the spatio-temporal order, so too have theologians since Kant assumed that thinking about God, or reporting the experience of the divine aims at truth more than examining how God might actually causally relate to the word.

The problem for the last 200+ years is that the use of religious and theological language has continued unabated and that most outside the initiate have no idea that when the preacher uses theological and religious language, he or she does not mean what the unitiate think is meant. Because of this "semantic shift" in religious and theological language, even the "cultured despisers" of religion are put out of work. One does not know what precisely is meant by the language; one can specify no states of affairs making the putative assertions false. How can one talk meaningfully about what cannot be unambiguously and clearly stated?

On Contra-Causal Freedom to Accept of Reject Grace

I received a very thought-provoking response which asked me to rethink my "Fundamental Seven" (http://www.wordalone.org/docs/wa-fundamentals.shtml) saying that "The Holy Spirit works monergistically, not synergistically, upon sinners effecting saving grace." The response said that I had perhaps been not as precisely confessional as I should have been because my description of this tends to deemphasize the role of human acceptance and denial of grace, something that Lutherans have traditionally understood as important. I am quoting my reply to this response below because I think it gets at a very important issue:

"The material question you ask is a very important one. Know that I readily affirm that human beings cooperate with grace. This is done, of course, out of their own phenomenological freedom. The question is, of course, whether human beings have any contra-causal agency with respect to the divine. That is to say, do human beings qua human beings have an intrinsic causal power to accept grace were it not for the agency of the divine already at work in that acceptance? The test for ascertaining contra-causal agency is this: X is contra-causally efficacious in producing Y if and only if in an exactly similar causal situation where X had not occurred, then Y would not have occurred either. Thus, human free-will is causally efficacious in the reception of grace if and only if, in an exactly similar causal situation, were human free-will not to have been present in receiving grace, grace would not have been received. When I speak of ‘an exactly similar causal situation’ I mean that the descriptions of the two situations are exactly the same (including the same state of divine grace, and the same state of all causal features external to the putative human free-will). [I shall leave open for now the question whether or not the human act of free-will is realized by underlying neurophysiological causal forces sufficient for producing the allegedly free act.] I think we agree on these matters, so, as you say, it is a question of a possible misunderstanding of the fundamental to mean that salvation is wholly external and finally magical. Luther always rejected ex opere operatum accounts of grace, and would surely reject Fundamental Seven if he thought it would me misunderstood as compatible with such an account."

In my opinion, Lutherans have not been as courageously clear as they should be about the causal situation with respect to salvation. While Luther follows Augustine on operant grace, does he follow him on cooperant grace? Is there some power in human beings to either accept or reject the grace available to human beings in Christ?

A close reading of Luther and the Confessions convinces me that there is no efficacious causal power in the human such that divine grace can be accepted. While we might say that the human will is causally relevant in accepting grace, we must deny that it is causally efficacious in accepting grace. One could say that human free-will would not accept grace unless the human being is regenerated by the Holy Spirit. This would be to say, 'If the Holy Spirit had not been regenerated by the Holy Spirit, the human free-will would not accept grace'. This is also to say, 'If the free-will accepts grace, the human being has been regenerated by the Holy Spirit'. Accordingly, one might claim that because the free-will accepting grace is sufficient for the human being being regenerate by the Holy Spirit, the free-will accepting grace is causally relevant for the mediation of such grace. But while 'causal relevance' is grounded in conceptual linkages, 'causal efficacy' depends upon the actual causal situation. While much more work needs to be done to clarify above the notion of 'causal situation', I think we are on the right track to use that concept in understanding divine causal efficacy.

Theological Doctrine as Grammar: The Meaning as Use Ruse

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to assert the great doctrines of the Church without having actually to violate one’s ontological scruples about there being states of affairs referred to by these doctrines? What if one were to claim that the Lutherans and the Catholics actually pretty much agree on justification, as the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification declared, without either party actually having to change its very different understanding of the notion, an understanding that has separated the two groups for almost five centuries? What if one were to claim that there is an identity in difference, an identity sufficient for ecumenical agreement even when the groups have understood themselves in the difference? What if one could claim a unity without a change in the interpretation either side gives to its language? Would this not be too good to be true for proponents of contemporary ecumenicity?

Take the following sentence: ‘We are justified by grace alone through faith.” As it stands, it has an everyday meaning due to inchoate interpretations used both by Catholics and Lutherans. For Lutherans, the sentence has been regarded as true; for Catholics, it is false. It is true for Lutherans because God is the agent by which grace is given to the believer in faith. The Christian who is justified in faith automatically acts out of that faith, for a good tree must bear good fruit. In the Catholic tradition, faith must be formed by love; one is justified by grace through faith issuing in works of love. Catholics and Lutherans could disagree about how ‘faith’ connects to love. Lutherans tend to regard love as analytically entailed by faith, while Catholics deny this. (I am being very general here.)

One could, I suppose, count agreement between Lutherans and Catholics if the same sentence were uttered by each in relevant contexts with suitable linguistic cues. In other words, one could understand the sentence behaviorally. The sentence has the same meaning for two users if and only if the proclivity to utter it is similar given suitably similar linguistic cues. One might even claim that because the sentence is used the same way by the two different communities, thus the two theological communities assign to it the same meaning.

But this is, of course, a deeply unsatisfactory way for two different linguistic communities to affirm the same statement. After all, it is not the use to which it is put that gives the sentence the same meaning, but it is rather that both have a common meaning, and thus the sentences are used in similar ways. Clearly, in order for Catholics and Lutherans to agree on the statement, something more than merely uttering the statement in similar linguistic contexts is necessary.

It is standard in logic and semantics that an interpretation be assigned individuals and predicates of the language (non-logical terms) so that it can be determined what models of a sentence or groups of sentences satisfy them. See how this clarifies statements like ‘S is justified by grace through faith’ and ‘S is justified by grace through faith issuing in acts of love’. The first could be rendered as follows ‘(some x)(some y)[(Gx & Fy) & Jsxy]’ read as ‘there is something which is grace, and something which is faith, such that s is justified by that which is grace through that which is faith’. However, given that love issues from faith, we might add, ‘(some x)(some y){(Gx & Fy) & (Ly & Jsxy)]’ read as ‘there is something that is grace, and something that is faith issuing in love, such that s is justified by that which is grace through that which is faith’. Now notice that the same string can be used to capture the Catholic view, that we are justified by grace, through faith issuing in love. Clearly, both have the same model, {(some x) is a member of {x : x has G}, (some y) is a member of [{y : y has faith} intersects {y : y issues in love}], (s, some x, some y) is a member of {(x, y, z) : x is justified by y through z}}. The two sentences are not only compatible by having a common model, they are equivalent because they are satisfied by exactly the same set of models. They have a common model-structure.

Ecumenical conversations would be greatly improved, in my opinion, if the dialogue partners were to pay profound attention to what is meant by the phrases they use. If both sides were disciplined in providing formal interpretations for their statements, it would become quite clear what, if anything, are the significant differences of meaning between the two.

Theological Semantics and the Problem of Interpretation

The sentence 'the cat is on the mat' is meaningless until it has been given an interpretation. We define a function from the sentence to objects within a domain. Standardly, we should say that 'cat' refers to {x: x is a cat}, 'mat' refers to the {x: x is a mat} and 'is on' refers to { (x, y) : x is on y} . Thus, we say that there is some member of the first set a, some member of the second set b, such that is a member of { (x, y) : x is on y}. To give an interpretation is to define a function from relevant linguistic units in the language to things in the world, such that the objects in the world form a functional image f* of the language. Thus, 'the cat is on the mat' is given by f*(cat), f*(mat), and f*(cat, mat) is a member of {(x, y) : x is on y}.

Now imagine providing such an interpretation for Trinitarian discourse. 'God is the Father', 'God is the Son', and 'God is the Holy Spirit', 'the Father generates the Son', and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son'. One could say that f*(Father) is a member of f*(God), f*(Son) is a member of f*(God), f*(Holy Spirit) is a member of f*(God), and that {x : x is God} has one member g. Thus f*(Father) = f*(Son) = f*(Holy Spirit) = g. 'The Father generates the Son' is thus f*(Father, Son) is a member of f*{(x, y) : x generates y}. Accordingly, 'The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and Son' is given by f*(Father, Holy Spirit) and f*(Son, Holy Spirit) is a member of {(x, y) : x proceeds y}. What follows, of course, is that it is a member of {(x, y) : x generates y}.

Now, taking 'G' to be "generates", we have that Ggg. Lombard and the Fourth Lateran Council reject Ggg because ascribing the reflexivity of generation to the individual g seems to deny simplicity, for there seems to be no possible world in which something can generate itself without dividing itself. (Notice how one can know oneself or think oneself without dividing oneself - - if one has intuitive, nondiscursive knowledge as has traditionally been thought to be true of God.)

Martin Luther, however, had no problem affirming the propriety of "the divine essence generates the divine essence'. When he said this, he meant that the Father generates the Son. If the Father is the divine essence, and the Son is the divine essence, and the Father generates the Son, then the divine essence generates itself, Ggg. He seems to have no problems with this because if Plato is a man, and Aristotle is a man, and Plato is a teacher of Aristotle, then it is proper to say that man is a teacher of man. Of course, the set M = {x : x is a man} is not a singleton set as is D = {x : x is God}. D has one member g, but M has billions of members.

When thinking the divine essence, one must not only subscribe to it a as a general essence, but one must claim a single instantiation, for if there was more than one instantiation, there would be a compromise of monotheism.

In order to make progress on the various claims in the late medieval period, we must be able to state clearly the ontological situation of the Trinity in the most perspicuous language we possess: first-order predicate logic with identity.

On the Theological Equivalency of East/West Trinitarin Models

Theologians are oftentimes too lax in getting clear on the types of claims they make. Take, for instance, the claim that the East and West made theologically equivalent claims about the Trinity, although they divided philosophically in their conceptuality about universals: The East assuming that a universal could be numerically one and multiply instantiatable, and the West denying this. Is it indeed true that the East and West make equivalent trinitarian claims?

Theoretical equivalency is understood differently on syntactical and semantic approaches. According to syntactical approaches, theories T1 and T2 are equivalent if they have, as their extension, the same or equivalent set of models. This syntactical approach to understanding theories and their equivalency was dominant through much of the twentieth century, and is oftentimes referred to as "the classical view" or "the received view." On this approach, a theory is a set of uninterpreted axioms in a specified formal language using a set of correspondence rules that provide a partial empirical interpretation to the theory by linking observable entities and processes to particular non-logical terms. A theory is true just in case its interpreted axioms are all true.

The semantic approach to understanding theories and their equivalency has developed over the last four decades. While syntactic approaches are interested in deducibility from axioms, semantic approaches focus upon the notion of "satisfaction." Objects which satisfy the axioms are models of those axioms. According to the semantic approach, the axioms comprise part of a theoretical definition. Whether or not such a definition is true of the world depends upon theoretical hypotheses. A theory is true just in case all of its associated hypotheses are true. In the words of F. Suppe, the semantic view "construes theories as what their formulations refer to when the formulations are given a formal (semantic) interpretation" (Suppe, The Semantic Conception of Theories and Scientific Realism, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, p. 4). This model-theoretic view identifies theories with the set of models that satisfies the theoretical laws of the theories. The models can be understood as being a pure structure: abstract entities and relations. Theories T1 and T2 are equivalent if and only if they are satisfied by sets if models M1 and M2 respectively, such that M1 and M2 are isomorphic to each other.

Applying this to the Trinitarian question, we might say that sentence "God is both one and three" is satisfied by two different sets of models, one employing a multiply instantiable universal, the other a property particular overlapping the compresent bundles of properties constituting the persons. If two separate sets of model structures satisfy the same set of Trinitarian propositions, these structures are equivalent and they are isomorphic with respect to each other.

It is ironic to find that East and West Trinitarian controversies may have been argued by people holding equivalent or almost equivalent Trinitarian views. Perhaps one is not making a different theological claim at all when "starting with the persons" or "starting with the essence." Maybe, in fact, the new social Trinitarianism is finally equivalent to older, more traditional Trinitarian positions.

Trinitarian Confusions between East and West?

Richard Cross has argued that the East and West do not really "adopt radically divergent accounts of the Trinity" (Richard Cross, "Two Models of the Trinity," HeyJ XLIII (2002) 275-294). I believe Cross is fundamentally correct, though I do have some observations.

It is often claimed that the Eastern view (following the Cappadocian Fathers) starts from the diversity of the persons and then moves to account for the unity of the essence, while the Western view (following Augustine) starts from the unity of the divine essence and then attempts to account for the diversity of the persons. Clearly, much has been made of this distinction in the secondary literature. One finds characterizations of the difference between East and West such as the following: The Thomistic tradition originating in Augustine assumes this order of logical priority: Relation, Person, and the Processions; the Cappodocian tradition understands the logical priority this way: Processions, Person, the Relations. (e.g., See Knuuttila & Saarinen, "Innertrinitarishe Theologie in der Scholastik und bei Luther, " pp. 243-264, Caritas Dei: Beitraege zum Verstaendnis Luthers und der gegenwaertigen Oekumene.) Cross argues persuasively that the difference between the Eastern and Western traditions has little to do with theology, but everything to do with different philosophical assumptions operating in the East and West. "The Eastern view does, and the Western view does not, generally accept a sense in which the divine essence is a shared universal" (275). Gregory of Nyssa, for instance, claims that the divine essence is a singular multiply-instantiatable universal; Augustine denies this.

Cross begins his analysis by giving the standard metaphysical options on universals and particulars. He first distinguishes the substrate/property view of the constitution of substance from that of a congeries of properties having what Russell called "compresence." Secondly, he distinguishes properties as particulars from properties as universals. Accordingly, if properties are particulars, then the indiscernible properties of numerically distinct substances are themselves numerically distinct. However, if properties are universals, then the indiscernible properties of numerically distinct substances are identical (and thus by Leibniz's law) the same property. If two particulars have the same shade of blue and if these shades of blue are particulars - - one shade of blue is exactly like the other - - , then the shades of blue are numerically diverse. However, if the two particulars have the same shade of blue and the shades of blue are literally the same shade, then the blue is a universal. A universal is, by definition, a property that can be a constituent in more than one substance. Particular properties, by definition, cannot be constituents in more than one substance. Accordingly, the only real metaphysical possibility for overlapping substances on a bundle theory (the view that a substance is a compresence of properties) is that there are universal properties that are ingredient in each and every compresence.

This insight is crucial for understanding the putative divergence between the Eastern and Western views. For purposes of analysis, allow 'substance', 'hypostasis' and 'person' to be used interchangeably, and futher assume that 'divine essence' is an overlapping property (a property common to the three substances), and must thus be, on the previous analyis, a universal. This divine essence is termed the 'ousia' by the East. As to the question of whether this divine essence is one simple universal property, or a bundle of such properties, Cross follows Augustine: "God however is indeed called in multiple ways great, good, wise, blessed, true and anything else that seems not to be unworthy of him; but his greatness is identical with his wisdom . . . and his goodness is identical with his wisdom and greatness, and his truth is identical with them all; and with him being blessed is not one thing, and being great or wise or true or good, or just simply being (esse), another" (Trin. 6.7.8 CCSI., I, 237).

Gregory of Nyssa clearly articulates the view that the universal divine essene (ousia) is a unviversal that is multiply instantiated in the three divine persons:

"If now of two or more who are [man] in the same way, like Paul and Silas and Timothy an account of the ousia of men is sought, one will not give on account of the ousia of Paul, another one of Silas andd again another one of Timothy; but by whatever terms the ousia of Paul is shown, these same will fit the others as well. And those are homoousioi to each other, who are described by the same fomular of being" ("Human Nature in Gregy of Nyssa: Philosophical Background and Theological Singnificance," Supplements to Vigilae Christianae, 46, p. 709, p. 70).

The universal which is the divine essence is clearly numerically singular:

"But the nature is one, united to itself and a precisely undivided unit (monas), not increased through addition, not decreased through subtraction, but being and remaining one (even if it were to appear in a multitude), undivided, continuous, perfect, and not divided by the individuals who participate in it" (Gregory, Abl. GNO, III/I, 40.24-41.7).

Cross points out, however, that Gregory's universal is not ante rem. The divine essence does not exist uninstantiated, but is rather immanent in the persons; it is that "of which" the persons are (Cross, 281). The divine essence is shared by the persons, but the divine persons as overlapping bundles of properties do not share their own personal properties.

According to Cross, the Western theologians implicitly accept the view of the shareability of the divine essence by the persons even though they explicitly criticize this position. The western theologians deny that the divine essence is a universal "in the sense of 'universal' accepted by the West, not the sense accepted by the East" (Cross, 281). Though they deny this, they accept that the essence is shared by the persons. Augustine writes:

"In the simple Trinity one is as much as three are together, and two are not more than one, and in themselves they are infinite. So they are each in each and all in each, and each in all and all in all, and all are one" (Trin. 6.10.12, CCSL, L, 243).

Over eight centuries later, Aquinas echoes Augustine:

"In God, the essence is really identical with a [viz., each] person, even though the persons are really distinct from each other" (ST 1.39.1, c).

Yet the western theologians explicitly reject Nyssa's view on universals. Quoting Augustine again:

"If essence is species, like man, and those which we call substances or persons are three, then they have the same species in common, as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob have in common the species which is called 'man'; and if while man can be subdivided into Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, it does not mean that one man can be subdivided into several single men - - obviously he cannot, because one man is already a single man - - then how can one essence be subdivided into three substances or persons? For if essence, like man, is a species, then one essence is like one man" (Trin. 7.6.11, CSSL, L, 236).

Augustine's criticism assumes that if the divine essence is a species, and if a species is divisible, then the divine essence is divisible. But since this cannot be so, he concludes that the divine essence is not a species. But if it is not a species, then it is not a universal at all. Cross believes that Augustine holds that a universal (species) is divisible because he assumes that Neoplatonic notion of in re universals. Neoplatonists are nominalists here; they claim that universals (species) are merely aggregates of particulars.

Although Aquinas is not a Neoplatonic nominalist, his Aristotelian realism agrees on this point: "No universal is numerically the same in the things beneath it" (Scriptum super Libros Sententiarum 1.19.4.2). Cross concludes: "Unlike the Eastern tradition, . . . the Western tradition accepts - - as a matter of philosophical fact - - that universals, even in re universals, are not such that they are numerically identical in each exemplification" (Cross, 284). Thus, while the Cappadocians assumed that all universals, not just the divine essence, "are numerically singular, and . . . the particulars are collections of such universals" the Western tradition rejected the claim of the numerical singularity of universals and the consitution of particulars from universals (ibid.). While both the East and the West claimed that the divine essence is a singular property formed by the intersection of the properties of the persons, the West disagreed with the East in claiming that this intersection could be accounted for by claiming the existence of a numerically identical universal. The divine essence as a universal in re is not logically or metaphysically prior to the persons, but dependent and posterior to the persons. Yet, this essence is something more than its instantiations in the persons; for this essence is what makes possible the identity of these persons.

To the objection that Eastern and Western views must be theologically distinct because social trinitarian views can be grounded in the former and not via the latter, Cross claims that such views actually cannot be grounded in one tradition more properly than the other. It is just not the case that the Western view adopts a Trinity of subsistent relations between persons disallowing a social trinitarian approach, and the East a theory of personal processions completely compatible with a robust social trinitarianism.

The Western notion of subsistent relations claims that the persons are individuated with respect to dyadic relations holding between the persons. These dyadic relations are not constitutive of the persons themselves; they do not inhere in things, but somehow "hang between" their relata. Aquinas writes:

"Distinction in God arieses only through relations of origin . . . But a relation in God is not like an accident inherent in a subject, but is the divine essence itself. So it is subsistent just as the divine essence is subsistent. Just as, therefore, the Godhead is God, so the divine paternity is God the Father, who is a divine person. Therefore 'divine persons' signifies a relation as subsistent" (ST 1.28.1, c).

Cross points to Augustine as the source of this view, for it was Augustine who denied that God can be a subject for accidents, and thus rejecting accidents, identifies relations as the non-inherent "things" whose distinction does not entail a distinction in substance: "What is stated relationally does not designate substance. So although begotten differs from unbegotten, it does not indicate a different substance" (Trin. 5.5.6, CCSL., I, 210). Because accidents require a substrate, and because the presence of a substrate is incompatible with simplicity, the assertion of simplicity requires a denial of accidental personal properties. However, "a divine person can include a relation without that relation thereby entailing composition" (287). Thus, for the West, the divine persons cannot be pyschological subjects, for such psychological subjects are necessarily individuated by their non-relational properties.

Cross believes that Gregory of Nyssa effectively also embraced the category of subsistent relations. In the following quote, the distinguishing features of the persons are clearly the causal relations they possess with respect to each other:

"While confessing that the nature is undifferentiated, we do not deny a distinction in causality, by which alone we seize the distinction of the one from the other: that is, by believing that one is the cuse and the other is from the cause. There is the one which depends on the first, and there is that one which is through that which depends on the first" (Abl. GNO, III/I, 55.24 - 56.6).

So, as it turns out, the East is close to a doctrine of subsistent relations, and the West assumes that the divine essence is shareable among the three persons. Accordingly, both East and West deny social trinitarian accounts which hold the three persons as distinct pyschological subjects. While Eastern and Western views are consistent with social accounts of the Trinity - - a shareable divine essence among persons clearly allows for pyschologically distinct subjects - - both reject those accounts because of the need to individuate persons on the basis of something other than the accidental (non-relational) properties of the persons (Cross, 288).

What is to be said of this analysis? Clearly Cross has clarified matters greatly. That God is one and three, does seem to entail that the divine essence can be shared by persons. The Western view, that this essence is a numerically singular property shared by the persons, is not at all incompatible with the Eastern view that this essence is a universal that, while it is immanent in the persons, is none the less numerically one and multiply instantiatable in them. If this is so, then the unity from which the West begins is just the shareable property/universal. While the West might ground their talk of personal diversity upon the ground of divine unity, the shareable property of divine unity is nontheless dependent upon the bundled properties constituting the persons. Alternately, while the East might ground their talk of divine unity upon the grounds personal distinctiveness, this unity clearly, like the West, remains dependent upon the existence of the persons.

Cross's analysis, if true, suggests that while the Eastern and Western views have their own metaphysical models, each satisfies the same set of theological propositions. If this is so, then there is no theological differences between the two.