When Theology Cannot Mean: Realism, Irrealism, and the Crisis of Theological Language

This essay arises from the work of the Department of Philosophical Theology at ILT’s Christ School of Theology, where the central task is to clarify the conditions for the possibility of theological meaning, intelligibility, and truth in a post-Christendom context.

The question of theological meaning can no longer be approached as though its conditions were secure. The difficulty is not first that theological claims are disputed, nor that their truth is contested, but that what it would mean for such claims to mean at all has become unclear. The language of God, grace, redemption, and divine action continues to be employed, yet the relation between this language and any domain to which it might answer has been fundamentally destabilized.

This instability is not unique to theology. It arises wherever theoretical discourse is pressed to clarify the relation between its formal structure and the reality it purports to describe. A theory may be syntactically well-formed, inferentially rich, and pragmatically effective while remaining semantically indeterminate unless interpreted. Syntax alone does not yield reference. Nor does disciplined use by itself secure truth. The question is therefore unavoidable: what must be the case for a theory to be about anything at all?

Once this question is posed, the classical opposition between realism and its rivals must be reformulated with greater precision. The issue is not simply whether one affirms or denies the reality of a domain, but how the quantificational structure of a theory is to be understood with respect to that domain. Realism affirms that the entities over which a theory quantifies are real in the relevant sense. Irrealism denies that such commitment obtains universally. Antirealism replaces it with a universal denial. These positions do not merely differ in degree of confidence. They differ in the conditions they assign to meaning itself.

Theology cannot evade this problem. For theological discourse is theory-like: it quantifies, predicates, distinguishes, and orders claims concerning God and God’s relation to the world. If its syntax is to be meaningful, it must be interpreted. The decisive question is therefore not whether theology speaks, but what its speaking is taken to be about.

Realism, Irrealism, and Antirealism: A Logical Clarification

Let D be the domain over which a theory quantifies, and let R(x) signify that x is real in the sense required by the successful interpretation of the theory.

Realism affirms that for all x in D, R(x). If the entities quantified over are real, then the relations and functions defined over that domain are likewise taken to answer to reality. A realist construal of theory therefore holds that its models disclose, however fallibly, a genuinely mind-independent structure.

Irrealism is weaker. It denies that this universal claim obtains. It holds only that it is not the case that all members of the domain are real in the relevant sense. Some elements of the domain may be real, others not; some aspects of the theory may be referential, others merely heuristic, symbolic, or projected.

Antirealism is stronger. It claims that for all x in D, it is not the case that R(x). The discourse may remain coherent, useful, and even indispensable, but the entities over which it quantifies are not taken to belong to a mind-independent domain answering to the theory in the relevant way.

Schematically:

Realism: (x∈D)Rx
Irrealism: ~(x∈D)Rx
Antirealism: (x∈D)~Rx

The logical relation among these positions parallels the familiar distinction between reflexive, nonreflexive, and irreflexive relations. Realism affirms universal ontological commitment; irrealism denies that such universal commitment obtains; antirealism replaces it with a universal denial. The distinction is elementary, but its consequences are substantial.

The Semantic View of Theory

A theory is not best understood simply as a set of sentences or axioms, but as a structured family of models. Syntax alone does not yet yield meaning. A formal language may be internally coherent and inferentially rich while remaining semantically indeterminate unless interpreted.

Meaning arises from the relation between formal structure and interpreted structure. A model supplies a domain, assigns referents, and specifies relations and functions. The philosophical question is therefore not merely whether a theory is consistent or useful, but what kind of interpretation its models license.

This is where realism, irrealism, and antirealism emerge as competing construals of the relation between syntax, model, and world. A theory may function successfully while differing radically in what its success is taken to imply about the reality of the domain it describes.

From Scientific Theory to Theological Theory

Theological discourse belongs within this discussion more fully than is often recognized. It possesses theoretical form. It advances claims, deploys predicates, orders concepts, and licenses inferences. It speaks of God, creation, incarnation, grace, and redemption in ways that exhibit recognizable logical relations.

If this is so, then theological language too possesses a syntax in need of interpretation. The decisive question is therefore unavoidable: what sort of models render theological discourse meaningful?

A theological realist will answer that theological language is answerable to a reality independent of the discourse itself. A theological antirealist will preserve the discourse while redescribing its truth in terms of internal practice, communal rule, or warranted use. A theological irrealist will deny the universality of realist commitment, allowing a mixed or partial ontology.

Realism, Irrealism, and Antirealism in Theology

Theological realism affirms that the central terms of theological discourse answer to a reality independent of the discourse itself. God is not merely a name internal to a practice, nor a symbolic condensation of human aspiration. God is. Theological predicates therefore aim at truth in the strong sense.

Theological irrealism denies that such commitment holds across the entire domain. Some claims may be taken realistically, others symbolically or expressively. The result is a mixed and often unstable semantics.

Theological antirealism goes further. It denies that the entities over which theological discourse quantifies are real in the relevant sense at all. The discourse may remain meaningful within practice, but its function is no longer referential in the strong sense.

The Conditions of Theological Meaning

Theological meaning cannot be reduced either to formalism or to pragmatics. Syntax secures internal order but not reference. Practice secures use but not ontological answerability.

Theological meaning in its richest sense requires three moments:

• a syntax capable of disciplined articulation
• a semantic interpretation through models
• a domain with respect to which such interpretations may be true

Remove the third, and theology may retain significance, but it loses the realist truth-conditions by which it could speak of God as independently real.

Realism therefore does not add an optional metaphysical surplus. It secures the condition under which theological discourse can be about God rather than merely about itself.

Conclusion

The question is not whether theology may continue to speak under antirealist or irrealist construals. It plainly may. The question is what such speech is taken to be.

If theology is not answerable to a reality that is not constituted by its own discourse, then its claims no longer bear truth in the sense theology has historically intended. Realism does not remove mystery, nor does it resolve the limits of creaturely speech before God. But without it, theology’s language no longer reaches beyond itself.

With it, theology may yet speak of God as God is, and not merely of the uses of God-language within human life.

Why Congregations No Longer Make Sense: The Ontology of Christian Life after Christendom

This essay arises from the work of the Center for Congregational Revitalization (CCR) at ILT’s Christ School of Theology, which investigates the conditions under which congregations can hear, speak, and live the Christian faith intelligibly in a post-Christendom context.

The present inquiry concerns the conditions under which congregational life is intelligible at all in the early twenty-first century. What follows is not a programmatic proposal, nor a set of strategies for institutional renewal, but a more basic investigation. It asks what a congregation must be if it is to be recognized as a site of Christian life rather than as one more voluntary association among others.

The crisis now facing congregations is widely acknowledged, but it is rarely described with sufficient precision. It is said that attendance is down, that engagement is weak, that younger generations are absent, and that cultural conditions have shifted. All of this is true. Yet none of it reaches the heart of the matter. These phenomena are not the problem itself, but the surface manifestations of a deeper dislocation. The more fundamental issue is that congregational life increasingly takes place under conditions in which its central claims are no longer stably intelligible as referring to what is real.

To state the matter more directly: the difficulty is not simply that fewer people believe, but that what it would mean to believe is no longer clear. The language of God, grace, sin, redemption, and resurrection continues to be used, but its referential force has become unstable. It is heard, at times, as expressive, at times as symbolic, at times as ethically suggestive, but only intermittently as naming what is the case. Where this instability takes hold, congregational life becomes ontologically thin. It persists as form, but its substance is no longer secure.

It is at precisely this point that many contemporary responses go astray. Efforts at revitalization frequently assume that the underlying problem is one of execution: that congregations need better leadership, clearer vision, more compelling communication, or more effective programming. Such efforts are not without value, but they presuppose what is no longer given. They assume that the congregation already exists as a coherent site of meaning and that the task is to make that meaning more accessible or more attractive. But if the conditions under which that meaning is intelligible have themselves been eroded, then no amount of strategic refinement can restore what is absent. Strategy cannot generate ontology.

The question, therefore, must be pressed at a deeper level. What is a congregation? Not in sociological terms, nor in institutional terms, but in ontological and semantic terms. What must be the case for a gathering of persons to count as a congregation in the full theological sense?

A first approximation may be offered as follows. A congregation is a community constituted by practices in which the Word of God is not merely spoken, but is understood as referring to and effecting what is real. This definition is deliberately modest, yet it carries significant weight. It does not require uniformity of experience, nor does it deny the presence of doubt, struggle, or partial understanding. What it does require is that the practices of the community presuppose that the language they employ is truth-apt and world-disclosing. The Word is not merely meaningful; it is about something, and that something is the living God.

From this, several consequences follow. First, the reality of God cannot be treated as an optional background assumption. It must function as a constitutive presupposition of congregational life. Where God is tacitly bracketed, treated as a hypothesis, or reduced to a projection of communal meaning, the congregation ceases to be intelligible as a congregation in the theological sense. It becomes instead a community organized around shared values, narratives, or practices, but no longer a site of divine address and action.

Second, the language of the congregation must retain its referential integrity. The words of proclamation, prayer, and catechesis must be capable of referring beyond themselves. If they are heard only as expressions of human interiority or as symbolic gestures within a closed system of meaning, then their theological function collapses. Semantic realism is not an optional philosophical addendum to congregational life; it is one of its conditions of possibility.

Third, the practices of the congregation must be understood as participatory rather than merely expressive. In proclamation, something is said that is not reducible to the speaker’s intention. In the sacraments, something is given that is not exhausted by communal recognition. In catechesis, something is learned that is not constructed by the learner. These practices presuppose that reality exceeds the subject and that the congregation is addressed by, and drawn into, that excess.

It is here that a decisive distinction must be made between two kinds of congregational existence that are often outwardly indistinguishable. There are congregations that are formally Christian but ontologically thin. They retain the language, the structures, and even many of the practices of the tradition, yet these no longer function as disclosures of what is real. Alongside these are congregations that are ontologically thick, in which the same practices are inhabited as sites of divine presence and action. The difference between them is not primarily one of style, size, or even doctrinal precision. It is a difference in the mode of being.

If this is correct, then the task of revitalization must be reconceived. It is not first a matter of innovation, but of recovery. Not the recovery of past forms as such, but the recovery of the conditions under which those forms were intelligible as bearing truth. The question is not simply how to make congregations more effective, but how to restore them as places in which the Word of God can again be heard as referring to and effecting what is real.

This shifts the entire horizon of the discussion. Leadership, programming, and strategy remain important, but they must be subordinated to a more basic task: the cultivation of an ecclesial life in which the reality of God is presupposed, the language of faith is truth-apt, and the practices of the church are inhabited as participations in what exceeds them. Without this, revitalization will remain a matter of surface adjustment. With it, even small and fragile congregations may become again what they are called to be.

Subsequent reflections will seek to draw out the implications of this account for the concrete practices of congregational life, including proclamation, catechesis, and leadership. For the moment, it is enough to have clarified the point at which the problem must be engaged. The crisis of the congregation is, at its core, a crisis of intelligibility. And the renewal of congregational life will require nothing less than the recovery of its ontology.

Work of the Center for Congregational Revitalization (CCR), ILT’s Christ School of Theology.

Why the Emerging Church Cannot Restore Meaning: From Deconstruction to Intelligibility

This essay arises from the work of the Center for Congregational Revitalization (CCR) at ILT’s Christ School of Theology, which investigates the conditions under which congregations can hear, speak, and live the Christian faith intelligibly in a post-Christendom context.

I. The Misdiagnosis of Decline

Across the contemporary ecclesial landscape, a common narrative has taken hold. Congregations are declining. Participation is weakening. Institutional Christianity is losing its cultural and social centrality. In response, a wide range of proposals has emerged, many of which seek to reimagine the church in more flexible, adaptive, and contextually sensitive forms.

Among the most influential of these responses has been what is often called the “Emerging Church.” It presents itself not as a programmatic reform but as a reorientation of Christian existence. Its proponents speak of conversation rather than proclamation, community rather than institution, authenticity rather than authority. They seek to create spaces in which individuals may renegotiate inherited beliefs and practices in light of contemporary experience.

There is, at first glance, something compelling in this effort. It recognizes that the problem facing the church is not merely organizational. It acknowledges that the conditions under which Christian language is heard and understood have changed. It senses that what once could be assumed can no longer be presumed.

Yet for all this, the movement remains fundamentally misdirected, for it does not address the deepest level of the crisis.

The central issue is not that the church has failed to adapt its forms. It is that the conditions that once made theological language intelligible have been eroded. The problem is not first institutional. It is semantic and ontological.

Until this is seen, all attempts at revitalization—no matter how creative—remain superficial.

II. Deconstruction as Religious Orientation

The Emerging Church is best understood not as a coherent movement with defined doctrines, but as a shared orientation. Its unifying feature is not what it affirms, but what it resists. It resists institutional authority, doctrinal fixity, and the perceived rigidity of inherited forms of Christianity. In their place, it elevates openness, plurality, and ongoing reinterpretation.

At the heart of this orientation lies a continual practice of deconstruction. Beliefs are not received as given but treated as material for revision. Practices are not normative but experimental. Identity is not stable but negotiated. The church itself is not a fixed reality but an evolving network of relationships, conversations, and experiences.

This deconstructive posture is not accidental. It arises from a broader cultural situation in which claims to truth are met with suspicion, and where meaning is understood to be constructed rather than given. Within this horizon, the task of theology is no longer to articulate what is the case, but to facilitate processes by which individuals may find what is meaningful for them.

Thus faith becomes conversation. Doctrine becomes narrative. Proclamation becomes performance.

What is lost in this shift is not merely clarity, but reference.

III. The Loss of Theological Reference

The decisive weakness of the Emerging Church lies here: it cannot secure the referential status of its own language.

To speak theologically is to intend something. It is to say not merely what is meaningful, but what is the case. It is to speak of God, not as a projection of human discourse, but as that which stands over against and addresses the human subject. Without this referential orientation, theological language collapses into expressive activity.

The Emerging Church, however, systematically suspends this question.

It does not deny reference outright. Rather, it relocates it. Truth is no longer understood as correspondence to reality, but as the outcome of communal discourse. What is “true” is what can be sustained within the conversation. The criterion is no longer adequation to what is, but coherence within what is said.

This shift has profound consequences.

If theological claims do not refer beyond the practices that sustain them, then they cannot bind. If they cannot bind, they cannot command belief. If they cannot command belief, they cannot form a community ordered toward truth.

What remains is a space of negotiated meaning, in which individuals are affirmed but not adjudicated, included but not instructed, accompanied but not addressed.

Such a space may be psychologically appealing. It may even sustain a certain kind of communal life for a time. But it cannot sustain a congregation as congregation.

For a congregation is not merely a gathering of individuals in conversation. It is a community constituted by its relation to what is proclaimed as true.

IV. The Instability of Deconstructive Ecclesial Forms

The practical consequences of this failure are already visible.

Communities shaped by deconstructive orientations tend toward instability. Their structures remain informal, their commitments provisional, their practices continually subject to revision. Participation is often intense but transient. Leadership is diffuse. Institutional continuity is difficult to maintain.

This is not simply the result of poor organization. It is the natural outcome of the underlying orientation.

Where no claim is permitted to stand with normative authority, no structure can endure. Where all forms are subject to continual renegotiation, no form can stabilize. Where the individual is the final arbiter of meaning, communal coherence becomes fragile.

It is therefore not surprising that many such communities function as transitional spaces. They provide a context for those disillusioned with more traditional forms of Christianity, offering a place in which inherited beliefs may be questioned and reconfigured. But they rarely provide a durable framework for sustained ecclesial life.

They are, in this sense, parasitic upon the very traditions they critique. They draw their energy from the deconstruction of inherited forms, yet lack the resources to generate new forms capable of enduring beyond that deconstruction.

V. The Category Error: Adaptation Without Ground

The fundamental error of the Emerging Church lies in its attempt to solve a problem of intelligibility through adaptation of form.

It assumes that if the church becomes more conversational, more inclusive, more flexible, it will once again become meaningful. But meaning does not arise from form alone. It arises from the relation between language and reality.

One may alter the setting of proclamation, soften its tone, or multiply its modes of expression. But if what is said is no longer heard as referring to what is real, these changes do not restore intelligibility. They merely obscure its absence.

The result is a subtle but decisive displacement. The focus shifts from what is said to the conditions under which it is said. The success of theological language is measured not by its truth, but by its capacity to generate engagement.

This is not revitalization. It is accommodation to the loss of intelligibility.

VI. Toward a Different Diagnosis

If the analysis offered here is correct, then the path forward cannot consist in further experimentation with ecclesial forms. Nor can it rest content with the multiplication of conversational spaces.

What is required is a recovery of the conditions under which theological language can once again function as language that refers.

This requires, at minimum, the reassertion of three claims.

• First, that God is not a function of discourse but the ground of it. Theological language does not create its object but responds to it.
• Second, that theological statements are truth-apt. They are not merely expressive or performative, but capable of being true or false.
• Third, that the congregation is constituted by its relation to this truth. It exists not simply as a community of shared experience, but as a community addressed by what it confesses.

These claims do not solve the problem. But without them, the problem cannot even be properly posed.

VII. Conclusion: Beyond Deconstruction

The Emerging Church has performed a valuable service. It has exposed the inadequacy of merely institutional solutions to the contemporary crisis of the church. It has shown that inherited forms can no longer be assumed to carry their own intelligibility. It has made visible the depth of dislocation experienced by many within contemporary Christianity.

But it has mistaken the nature of the problem. By treating the crisis as one of form rather than of intelligibility, it has directed its energies toward continual deconstruction and reconstruction of ecclesial practices. In doing so, it has produced spaces that are open but unstable, creative but indeterminate, hospitable but unable to bind.

What it cannot do is restore the conditions under which theological language is heard as referring to what is real.

Until that task is undertaken, the revitalization of the congregation will remain beyond reach.

Work of the Center for Congregational Revitalization (CCR), ILT’s Christ School of Theology.

Catechesis after Christendom: Reclaiming the Intelligibility of the Faith

This essay arises from the work of the Center for Congregational Revitalization (CCR) at ILT’s Christ School of Theology, which investigates the conditions under which congregations can hear, speak, and live the Christian faith intelligibly in a post-Christendom context. under which the claims of the Christian faith may be received as referring to what is real.

I. The Catechetical Situation

Catechesis has always been a quiet but decisive work of the church. It does not carry the immediacy of preaching, nor the visibility of public worship, yet it is the means by which the language of the faith is actually learned, retained, and inhabited. In the Lutheran tradition, this task achieved a remarkable clarity in Luther's Small Catechism. Its structure is not merely pedagogical but theological. It orders the Christian life: existence under God’s command, trust in God’s promise, address to God in prayer, and reception of God’s gifts.

For a long time, catechesis could proceed with a certain confidence. The language it employed, though requiring explanation, was heard within a horizon that rendered it broadly intelligible. One might struggle with particular claims, but the claims themselves were not heard as unintelligible or referentially void. The catechetical task was thus largely one of instruction within an already functioning world of meaning.

That situation has changed.

II. The Loss of Intelligibility

The present difficulty is not first a matter of declining knowledge, though that is real enough. It is a matter of intelligibility. The language of the catechism is no longer reliably heard as referring to what is real. Its words remain, but their ontological weight has thinned.

This shift is often obscured because the vocabulary persists. One can still speak of “God,” “sin,” “grace,” and “forgiveness.” Yet these terms are now frequently received in ways that alter their function. They are heard as expressions of human experience, as symbolic articulations of value, or as markers of communal identity. What is no longer assumed is that they name realities that exist independently of such expression.

The result is a subtle but decisive transformation. Catechesis continues, but it increasingly operates within a framework in which its own claims are not taken to be straightforwardly about what is the case. It teaches a language whose referential status is uncertain.

III. From Instruction to Reestablishment

Under these conditions, catechesis cannot remain merely instructional. It must take on a more fundamental role: the reestablishment of intelligibility.

In an earlier setting, catechesis could presuppose that its claims were, in principle, understandable as true or false. Today, that presupposition must itself be addressed. The task is no longer only to teach what the catechism says, but to make possible an understanding of how what it says can be heard as referring to reality.

This does not entail a turn to abstraction for its own sake. It entails a renewed attentiveness to the conditions under which theological language functions as more than expression. Without such attentiveness, catechesis risks becoming either rote repetition or symbolic formation. In neither case does it form believers in the classical sense.

IV. The Catechism as Grammar of Reality

A helpful way to recover the depth of the catechetical task is to understand the catechism as a grammar rather than merely a summary.

• The Commandments articulate the structure of creaturely life before the Creator.
• The Creed names the reality of God’s action—past, present, and ongoing.
• The Lord’s Prayer presupposes that God hears and responds.
• The Sacraments enact the presence and promise of God in concrete form.

Each of these does more than convey information. Each presupposes a world in which God is an acting subject and in which human life is constituted in relation to that action. To teach the catechism is therefore to induct persons into a way of speaking that is ordered toward reality.

Yet such induction now requires more than repetition. The grammar must be shown to be responsive to what is. Without this, it may be learned formally while remaining uninhabited existentially.

V. The Question of Reference

At the center of the catechetical crisis lies the question of reference.

Traditional catechesis assumed that theological language refers. When one speaks of God, one speaks of God. When one speaks of forgiveness, one speaks of an act that occurs. This assumption did not require constant defense because it was supported by a broader cultural and conceptual framework.

That framework has weakened. Theological language is now often interpreted within models that do not support reference in this sense. It becomes expressive, performative, or communal, but not truth-apt in relation to an independent reality.

Catechesis must therefore proceed with an awareness of this shift. It must not only use theological language but help restore the conditions under which that language can be heard as referring. This is not an optional supplement. It is now intrinsic to the task.

If the difficulty lies not merely in usage but in the very possibility of reference itself, then the question of the ontological ground of intelligibility cannot be avoided. For a fuller account of the conditions under which theological language can be heard as referring to what is real, see my Nota Trinitaria on Teleo-Spaces: Intelligibility, Normativity, and the Limits of Subjectivity. 

VI. The Pastor as Interpreter of Intelligibility

This altered situation places a new weight upon the pastoral office.

The pastor remains a teacher, but not only a teacher of content. The pastor must also function as an interpreter of intelligibility. He or she must be able to discern how the language of the faith is being heard and where its referential force is being diminished or lost.

At times this will require explicit clarification. At other times it will require a more patient form of guidance, in which assumptions are brought into view and gently corrected. In either case, the aim is not to win arguments, but to make it possible for the language of the faith to be heard as meaningful in the fullest sense.

Without such work, catechesis risks speaking past its hearers. With it, catechesis can again form persons who understand what they confess.

VII. Practice and Understanding

Catechesis is not exhausted by explanation. It is sustained and deepened through practice.

Prayer, confession, and participation in the sacramental life are not adjuncts to catechesis but integral to it. They provide the lived context in which the language of the faith is enacted. In them, what is taught is also performed.

Yet practice alone cannot secure intelligibility. Where the conceptual conditions of understanding have eroded, practice can persist without clarity. It may be maintained as habit, even as its meaning becomes uncertain.

The task, therefore, is not to choose between practice and understanding, but to hold them together. Catechesis must teach and form, clarify and enact. Only in this integration can the language of the faith be both learned and inhabited.

VIII. Toward Catechetical Renewal

The renewal of catechesis will not be achieved through novelty alone. It will come through a reorientation of the task.

Catechesis must again proceed with patience, allowing its claims to unfold over time. It must be attentive to the conceptual situation of its hearers, neither assuming too much nor conceding too quickly. Above all, it must retain confidence in its own subject matter—that it speaks not merely of human possibility, but of divine reality.

Such catechesis may appear slower than what contemporary expectations demand. Yet it is precisely this slowness that allows depth to emerge. It forms not only familiarity with the language of the faith, but understanding of what that language intends.

IX. Conclusion

The catechetical challenge of the present moment is not merely pedagogical. It is ontological and semantic. It concerns the relation between language and reality, between what is said and what is.

If the church is to remain the church, it must form persons who can confess the faith with the understanding that such confession is about what is real. This cannot be assumed. It must be cultivated.

Catechesis is the place where this cultivation occurs.

In a time when the intelligibility of the faith is no longer given, catechesis becomes again what it has always, at its best, been: the patient formation of persons into a way of speaking and living in which God is not an idea, but the living One who addresses, judges, forgives, and gives life.

Congregational Life after Christendom: A Diagnostic Framework for Revitalization

This essay arises from the work of the Center for Congregational Revitalization (CCR) at ILT’s Christ School of Theology, which investigates the conditions under which congregations can hear, speak, and live the Christian faith intelligibly in a post-Christendom context.

The difficulty facing congregations today is not adequately described by decline.

Decline is real. Attendance has diminished, participation has weakened, and many congregations face uncertain futures. Yet these phenomena are better understood as symptoms than as causes. They are visible expressions of a deeper transformation, one that concerns the conditions under which congregational life can be understood at all.

The problem, more precisely, is one of intelligibility.

Congregations do not persist simply because they are well organized or effectively led. They persist when participation in their life can be recognized as fitting within the broader horizon in which individuals live. Where that horizon supports the claims of the congregation, participation appears natural, even necessary. Where it does not, participation becomes unstable, optional, and eventually difficult to sustain in any enduring way.

The present moment is marked by precisely this kind of shift. What has changed is not only how many people attend, but how congregational life is understood. The question is no longer simply whether individuals will participate. It is whether participation itself makes sense.

To address this, we must move from symptoms to structures, from observable decline to the underlying framework within which congregational life is interpreted. What follows is a brief account of five interrelated developments that, taken together, help to define that framework.

First, congregations have lost much of their social gravity. They no longer function as central gathering places within the lives of most people. Where congregational life once intersected naturally with patterns of work, family, and community, it now competes with a wide range of alternative structures. The result is not simply that people are less committed, but that fewer come into contact with congregational life in any sustained way.

Second, congregations have lost their normative status. Participation is no longer assumed as a basic feature of life. It has become one option among many and must now be justified. This shift is subtle but far reaching. Where participation was once taken for granted, it must now be explained, defended, and chosen. What is optional is always fragile.

Third, individuals increasingly inhabit what may be described as a condition of cross pressure. They live within multiple and often competing frameworks of meaning. They may affirm the language of the Christian tradition while simultaneously operating within accounts of reality that sit uneasily alongside it. The result is not straightforward unbelief, but fragmentation. The same individual may speak of God in one context and interpret the world in entirely different terms in another.

Fourth, a moral reversal has taken place in the way God is understood. In earlier contexts, the goodness of God was generally presupposed. Today, God is often evaluated according to moral intuitions formed independently of the tradition. Questions of suffering, justice, and fairness are no longer addressed within a framework that assumes divine goodness. They are brought to bear upon that assumption itself. The result is a growing instability in how central theological claims are received.

Fifth, a broadly naturalistic understanding of reality has become pervasive. The success of the natural sciences has contributed to a default framework in which events are explained in terms of natural causes and processes. This does not always take the form of an explicit denial of divine action. More often, it results in a situation in which such action no longer appears necessary for explaining what occurs. God is not so much rejected as displaced.

Each of these developments is significant in its own right. Their full force, however, lies in their convergence. Together, they alter the horizon within which congregational life is lived.

The most important consequence of this convergence is not simply decline, but the fragmentation of meaning within congregational life itself. The language of the church persists, but it no longer functions within a shared framework. Terms such as God, grace, and salvation are used, but they are heard in different and sometimes incompatible ways. The same practices are enacted, yet their significance is less stable. The same sermon is preached, yet it may be received as a claim about reality, as a symbolic narrative, or as a form of moral reflection, depending upon the framework within which it is heard.

This fragmentation is often not immediately visible. Congregations can continue to function with a considerable degree of outward continuity. Yet beneath this continuity lies a growing divergence in how what is said and done is understood.

It is at this point that the limitations of many contemporary approaches to congregational renewal become apparent. Much of the existing literature assumes that the basic intelligibility of congregational life remains intact and that the task is to increase participation through improved strategy. Better leadership, clearer communication, and more effective programming are all taken to be central.

Such efforts are not without value. But they presuppose precisely what is now in question.

If the framework within which congregational life once made sense has shifted, then strategy alone cannot resolve the problem. It can refine what is already understood. It cannot restore understanding where it has weakened. One cannot optimize what no longer makes sense.

If this diagnosis is correct, then the work before us must be reoriented. The task is not simply to improve congregational performance. It is to clarify and, where necessary, rearticulate the framework within which congregational life is understood.

This line of argument has been developed in greater detail across the essays mentioned above, all of which are available on Academia.edu. Readers may consult Congregations after Christendom, The Decline of the Church Is Not the Problem, Cross-Pressure and the Fragmentation of Belief, The Problem of God, and What Are We to Make of Science? for fuller treatments of each dimension. A more extended and integrated account is also available in the longer paper Congregational Life after Christendom: A Diagnostic Framework for Revitalization, which gathers these threads into a single argument.

What is now required is a second phase of work.

If the difficulty lies at the level of intelligibility, then the question of its ontological ground cannot be avoided. For a fuller account of the conditions under which intelligibility itself is possible, see my “Nota Trinitaria on Teleo-Spaces: Intelligibility, Normativity, and the Limits of Subjectivity.”

If the difficulty lies at the level of intelligibility, then the task is not only diagnostic but constructive. We must ask how proclamation, teaching, pastoral care, and congregational form can function under these altered conditions. This includes, in particular, a renewed attention to theological language, the reconstruction of plausibility, and the formation of persons capable of inhabiting the life of the church with understanding.

The next set of essays will take up these questions directly. The first of these, Proclamation under Conditions of Fragmented Meaning, examines the situation of preaching when the language of the church no longer carries a stable reference across hearers. Subsequent essays will address catechesis, pastoral care, and forms of congregational life in similar fashion.

The aim is not simply to reverse decline. It is to render congregational life intelligible again.

Where that occurs, renewal becomes possible. Where it does not, no strategy will suffice.

Readers who wish to explore the argument in greater detail may consult the individual essays available on Academia.edu: 

• Congregations after Christendom: Why the Focus Must Return to the Local Church , 
• The Decline of the Church Is Not the Problem 
• Cross-Pressure and the Fragmentation of Belief 
• The Problem of God: Moral Reversal and Theological Instability 
• What Are We to Make of Science? 

A more extended and integrated presentation of the full argument is given in Congregational Life after Christendom: A Diagnostic Framework for Revitalization, which gathers these analyses into a single framework and situates them within the work of the Center for Congregational Revitalization.

Preaching When Meaning Has Fragmented: The Crisis of Proclamation Today

This essay arises from the work of the Center for Congregational Revitalization (CCR) at ILT’s Christ School of Theology, which investigates the conditions under which congregations can hear, speak, and live the Christian faith intelligibly in a post-Christendom context.

Introduction: The Question of Preaching Today

Preaching has always stood at the center of congregational life. It is the primary means through which the Word is proclaimed, the place where the promises of God are spoken into the concrete circumstances of human existence. For much of the church’s history, the task of preaching, while never simple, was sustained by a relatively stable horizon of understanding. The preacher could assume that the language of the sermon, though requiring explanation and application, was heard within a framework that rendered it broadly intelligible. Lamentably, that assumption can no longer be maintained.

The difficulty facing preaching today is not only that fewer people are present, nor that attention is more difficult to sustain, nor even that cultural expectations have shifted. These factors are real, but they do not reach the heart of the matter. The more fundamental issue is that preaching now takes place within a context in which the meaning of its central claims is no longer stable.

The problem is not simply that the sermon must be made more engaging. It is that what the sermon says is not consistently heard as referring to what is real.

I. The Fragmentation of Hearing

Under contemporary conditions, the same sermon can be heard in multiple and divergent ways. The preacher may speak of God’s action, of sin and forgiveness, of judgment and grace, yet these terms do not arrive in the hearer as they once did. They are received within a plurality of interpretive frameworks that shape their meaning in advance.

For one hearer, to say that God acts may still be heard as a claim about divine agency in the world. For another, it may be understood as a way of expressing personal meaning or communal identity. For a third, it may be received with hesitation, as language that gestures toward something no longer clearly affirmed. These differences are not always explicit. They often remain unspoken, yet they structure the act of hearing.

The result is that the apparent unity of proclamation conceals a divergence in understanding. The same words are spoken, but they do not always say the same thing.

This condition is intensified by the fact that many hearers inhabit more than one framework at once. Within the liturgical setting, theological language may be affirmed in its traditional sense. Outside that setting, the same individual may interpret events in terms that leave little room for divine agency. The sermon is thus received not within a single, coherent horizon, but within a field of competing possibilities.

Preaching, in this context, does not address a unified act of hearing. It addresses a fragmented one.

II. The Weakening of Referential Force

The central consequence of this fragmentation is a weakening of the referential force of theological language. Statements that once functioned as claims about what is the case are now frequently received as expressions of meaning, orientation, or value.

To say that God forgives may be heard as describing an act of divine mercy, but it may also be heard as encouraging a posture of acceptance. To proclaim that Christ is risen may be received as a claim about an event in reality, or as a symbolic affirmation of hope. To speak of sin may be understood as naming a condition before God, or as referring to patterns of human brokenness. In each case, the linguistic form remains intact, but the mode of reference shifts.

This does not necessarily produce immediate resistance. The hearer may continue to participate, to assent, and even to be moved by what is said. Yet the relation between language and reality becomes less determinate. The sermon risks being heard not as proclamation, but as interpretation.

Where this occurs, the preacher faces a difficulty that cannot be resolved by rhetorical skill alone. One cannot simply make the language more vivid or more accessible. The issue lies not primarily in expression, but in reception.

III. The Limits of Adaptation

Faced with these challenges, it is understandable that preachers might seek to adapt their language. Terms that appear difficult or unfamiliar are replaced with more accessible ones. Doctrinal formulations are translated into contemporary idioms. The aim is to bridge the gap between the language of the tradition and the experience of the hearer.

Such adaptation has a legitimate place. Preaching has always involved the careful ordering of language so that it may be heard. Yet adaptation alone cannot resolve the present difficulty.

If the underlying issue is that theological language is no longer heard as referring to what is real, then the substitution of more familiar terms does not address the problem. It may reduce resistance, but it may also reinforce the tendency to hear the sermon within a non-referential framework. The language becomes more accessible, but its claim upon reality may be further attenuated.

The difficulty is therefore not that the tradition’s language is too complex. It is that the framework within which that language once functioned has been altered.

To adapt language without attending to this framework is to risk speaking more clearly while saying less.

IV. The Task of Rearticulation

If preaching is to retain its character as proclamation, then the task before the preacher is not merely one of translation or adaptation. It is one of rearticulation.

By rearticulation we do not mean the invention of new content, nor the abandonment of the language of the tradition. We mean the careful speaking of that language in such a way that its referential claim can once again be recognized. The aim is not simply that the hearer understand the words, but that the hearer grasp what those words are about.

This requires a heightened level of theological attention. The preacher must be aware not only of what is being said, but of how it is likely to be heard. This does not entail tailoring the sermon to each possible interpretation. It entails speaking with sufficient clarity that the claim being made is not easily reduced to something else.

In practice, this means that proclamation must resist the drift toward purely expressive or symbolic hearing. It must continue to speak of God as acting, of Christ as present, of forgiveness as given, in a manner that signals that these are not merely ways of speaking, but claims about reality.

Such speech will not always be immediately received. It may encounter resistance or confusion. Yet without it, preaching risks losing its distinctive character.

V. Preaching as the Formation of Hearing

Under these conditions, preaching must also be understood as participating in the formation of the hearer’s capacity to hear.

The sermon does not simply communicate content to an already stable act of understanding. It addresses and, over time, reshapes the frameworks within which understanding occurs. This has always been the case, but it takes on renewed significance where those frameworks are contested. To preach is therefore to engage not only in proclamation, but in formation.

This formation is not accomplished in a single sermon. It is the cumulative effect of sustained proclamation over time. Through repetition, clarification, and patient instruction, the hearer may come to recognize the coherence of the language of faith and the reality to which it refers. The aim is not to eliminate all tension or difficulty, but to render the act of hearing more stable.

This requires patience on the part of both preacher and congregation. It also requires a willingness to acknowledge that misunderstanding is not an occasional obstacle, but a persistent feature of the present context.

VI. The Responsibility of the Preacher

The responsibility of the preacher, under these conditions, is both more complex and more demanding than in earlier periods. It is no longer sufficient to assume that the language of the sermon will be heard within a shared framework. That framework must, in part, be reestablished through the act of preaching itself.

This does not mean that the preacher bears this responsibility alone. The work of teaching, catechesis, and congregational life more broadly all contribute to the formation of understanding. Yet preaching remains central, because it is the place where the Word is publicly spoken and where the congregation is gathered to hear.

To preach, then, is to speak within a fractured horizon without conceding that fracture as final. It is to proclaim in such a way that what is said may once again be heard as true in a robust sense, even where that hearing is not immediate or complete.

Conclusion: Proclamation and Reality

The challenge facing preaching today is not merely one of communication. It is a question of reality.

If the language of the sermon is no longer heard as referring to what is the case, then preaching risks becoming one voice among others, offering interpretation without making a claim upon the world. If, however, the preacher continues to speak in a way that holds together clarity of expression and referential intent, then preaching may still function as proclamation, even under altered conditions.

The task is therefore not to abandon the language of the tradition, nor to rely upon it uncritically. It is to speak it with a clarity that takes seriously the context in which it is heard.

Only in this way can preaching continue to be what it is called to be: the public speaking of the Word through which God addresses the world.

Identity, Unity, and the Ontology of the Individual

This essay arises from the work of the Department of Philosophical Theology at ILT’s Christ School of Theology, where the central task is to clarify the conditions for the possibility of theological meaning, intelligibility, and truth in a post-Christendom context.

What is the relationship between identity and unity? The two notions are often run together, but they are not the same. Identity concerns sameness, while unity concerns togetherness. Identity asks whether this is the same as that. Unity asks whether these features, moments, or parts belong to one whole. The difference is not trivial. One is concerned with identity when claiming that this chicken is the one that produces the most eggs. One is concerned with unity when pointing out that the chicken’s feathers form part of the unity of the chicken, while the nest in which she lays her eggs does not. The nest may stand in important relations to the chicken, but it does not belong to the chicken as constitutive of what the chicken is. An individual, then, is not merely something identifiable; it is a unity that can be distinguished from other unities by the properties it instantiates.

This distinction matters because a great deal of metaphysical confusion arises when identity is treated as though it could do the work of unity, or when unity is treated as though it were merely a disguised form of identity. Neither reduction succeeds. To say that something is identical with itself is not yet to say what makes it one. And to say that various features belong to one whole is not yet to say how that whole may be identified as the same across differing conditions of appearance or differing acts of reference. The two notions are thus internally related but not reducible to one another: unity concerns the ontological togetherness of a thing, while identity concerns the sameness of that one thing across differing acts of manifestation, description, or reference.

In logic, identity is treated as an equivalence relation. An equivalence relation holds over a domain just in case reflexivity, symmetry, and transitivity obtain. Thus if identity is symbolized by “=”, then for every element a in a domain, a = a; if a = b, then b = a; and if a = b and b = c, then a = c. At this level, identity is formal. It concerns the basic structure of sameness within a domain of discourse. Such formal treatment is indispensable, but it tells us very little by itself. It tells us how identity behaves, but not yet what identity amounts to in the world.

For that reason it is useful to distinguish between trivial self-identity and informative identity. That a = a is formally necessary and utterly unremarkable. It is not the kind of statement by which one learns anything substantive about the world. But a = b is often quite different. Frege’s famous example remains instructive. “The Morning Star is the Evening Star” is informative in a way that “The Morning Star is the Morning Star” is not. The former can extend knowledge. The latter cannot. Both are identity statements, yet only one seems to disclose something.

Why? Clearly not because “Morning Star” and “Evening Star” are the same expression. They are not. Nor is the point merely that they are two arbitrary labels later discovered to designate the same object. Frege’s great insight was that identity statements of this sort are informative because the same object may be given under different modes of presentation. The Morning Star and the Evening Star are not two different entities that happen to collapse into one. They are one and the same object, Venus, presented under different conditions of appearance and recognized under different descriptive routes. Identity here therefore concerns the sameness of what is referred to across a difference in how it is given.

This means that informative identity already presupposes more than logic alone can furnish. It presupposes phenomenological difference. We do not generate informative identity statements merely because we possess two names. We generate them because the object is encountered under different phenomenal or epistemic conditions. “Morning Star” and “Evening Star” are not simply linguistically different. They emerge from different appearances, different orientations, different conditions of observation. To learn that the Morning Star is the Evening Star is not merely to learn a fact about language. It is to learn that what appeared under distinct conditions is nonetheless one and the same being.

At this point Panayot Butchvarov’s distinction between objects and entities becomes helpful. Objects are what are given within experience, within the manifold of appearing. Entities are what ultimately are. One need not accept every feature of that distinction to grasp its usefulness here. The object Morning Star and the object Evening Star are differently given. Yet the entity referred to in each case is one. Identity judgments of the informative sort thus move from difference in givenness toward sameness in being. That is why they are significant. They do not merely register synonymy. They disclose ontological sameness across phenomenological difference.

But identity is still not unity. Even if one grants that a single entity may be given under multiple modes of presentation, one has not yet said what it is for that entity to be one. The problem of unity is distinct. Unity concerns the internal togetherness of a whole. Which features belong to the whole as constitutive of it, and which do not? Which moments are internal to the being of the thing, and which are merely externally related? This is not yet a question of whether one referring expression picks out the same item as another. It is a question of the ontological constitution of the thing itself.

The distinction can be put simply. Identity answers the question of sameness across reference or appearance. Unity answers the question of belonging within a whole. The chicken may be identified as the same chicken across different descriptions, times, and relations. But the unity of the chicken concerns something else entirely: that its feathers, bones, organs, and life-processes belong together as one living being, while the nest, the barn, and the farmer do not, however closely related they may be. The chicken and the nest may enter into a wide range of real relations, but they do not thereby form one individual substance.

This means that unity cannot be reduced to aggregation. A heap has plurality, but not genuine unity. A list has members, but not an internal principle of togetherness. A thing possesses unity when its features belong together as moments, aspects, or parts of one being. This is why unity is always a deeper metaphysical notion than mere collection. If identity concerns sameness, unity concerns the ontological “one” in virtue of which a thing is not merely many. The two notions are therefore linked but distinct. One may identify a heap, but that does not make it a unified individual. One may recognize a unity, but that does not yet settle every question of its identity across changing conditions of manifestation.

To put the point differently, identity without unity is thin. Unity without identity is mute. Identity without unity yields only the formal possibility that something is the same as itself or the same as that which is differently named. It does not yet tell us what kind of whole the thing is. Unity without identity may give us a togetherness of parts or moments, but without criteria of sameness it cannot explain how that one persists, is recognized, or is referred to across differing conditions. An ontology of the individual therefore requires both.

This brings us to individuation. What is an individual? It is not merely an instance of a universal, though it may instantiate universals. Nor is it merely a bundle of properties, though it has properties. Nor, I would argue, is it merely a formally self-identical item standing beneath predicates. An individual is a unity capable of identity across multiple acts of reference, description, and manifestation. That is to say, it is a concrete one whose togetherness is not reducible to its conceptual description, but which can nonetheless be identified as the same through differing modes of givenness.

This point is crucial. If one begins only with identity, one is tempted to think of the individual as that which remains the same under redescriptions. But that picture risks making the individual too thin. It becomes little more than a point of reference for varying predicates. If one begins only with unity, one is tempted to think of the individual as a whole without asking how that whole is encountered, intended, and recognized across different situations. But that too is inadequate. The individual must be both one and identifiable, both unified and selfsame across differing manifestations.

The problem becomes even more pressing when one asks what grounds this unity. It will not do merely to say that certain parts belong together. That is true, but insufficient. One wants to know what kind of belonging is at issue. Some relations are external. The nest is externally related to the chicken. Other relations are internal. The organs of the chicken belong to the chicken in a way the nest does not. Unity therefore concerns more than spatial proximity or causal interaction. It concerns ontological constitution. The features that belong to the unity of a thing are not simply attached to it from without; they are bound up with what the thing is.

This is one reason why I have become increasingly dissatisfied with any account that preserves individuality only as a bare point beneath qualities. Such views often understand identity well enough, in the sense that they secure numerical distinctness. But they do less well with unity. They can tell us that this is this one and not that one. They are less able to tell us what makes this one a concrete whole rather than a mere peg beneath predicates. Identity is secured, but unity remains underdescribed.

The more adequate path, it seems to me, is to say that an individual is a non-substitutable locus of unity capable of manifestation under differing conditions. That formulation tries to preserve both sides. The individual is non-substitutable: it is this one and not another. But it is also a locus of unity: its features belong together in a way that makes it a whole rather than a mere aggregate. And it is capable of manifestation under differing conditions: it may be referred to, described, and encountered through multiple modes of presentation without ceasing to be the same one.

Here one can see why identity statements of the Fregean kind matter. They remind us that sameness does not eliminate difference in givenness. The same thing may appear differently. But one can also now see why unity is deeper than identity alone. Unless there is already some ontological togetherness to the thing, there would be nothing there to be identified across those differences. Identity presupposes unity, even though unity is not reducible to identity. One identifies as the same only that which is already somehow one.

That point, I think, has broader implications. It bears on metaphysics, because it reminds us that sameness and wholeness are distinct categories. It bears on phenomenology, because it shows that identity judgments are rooted in differing conditions of givenness. It bears on ontology, because it presses us to ask what sort of being a whole must have in order to sustain identity across manifestation. And it bears on theology, because any serious account of personhood, hypostasis, incarnation, or sacramental presence will have to negotiate precisely these distinctions: sameness without collapse, unity without aggregation, manifestation without reduction.

The central claim may now be stated plainly. Identity concerns the sameness of what is referred to across difference in manifestation or description. Unity concerns the belonging-together of what constitutes one concrete whole. The individual requires both. It must be a unity in itself, and it must be capable of identity across acts of reference and conditions of appearance. Any account that ignores either side will remain incomplete.

Thus the ontology of the individual cannot begin with formal identity alone, nor with mere aggregation, nor with an unexamined appeal to “the same thing.” It must ask how a being can be one, how it can be given under differing conditions, and how it can remain itself throughout. Only then do we begin to approach the deeper metaphysical question: not merely whether something is the same, but what kind of one it must be in order to be the same at all.

That is where the real work begins.