On Truth-Conditions in Theology

In his influential book, The Nature of Doctrine, George Lindbeck discusses three general semantic approaches to theological and religious language. The cognitive-propositional approach assumes that theological statements have truth values because they either state what is or what is not the case. The experiential-expressivist strategy understands theological statements to be somehow expressive of human attitudes and orientations. Finally, the cultural-linguistic approach believes that theological statements are rules assumed by the theological community, rules that are themselves neither true nor false, but which ground further employment of theological and religious language. Of these three approaches, only the first grants robust truth-conditions to theological language.

Contemporary theology, of course, has deep problems with ascribing truth-conditions to its language. Ever since the days of Kant, the academic elite in Europe has been engaged in the project of doing theology without assuming God to be real - - or at least not "real" in the way that other things in the universe are real. God is either an ideal of human reason or an abstract object who is incapable of having causal relations with the universe. Tillich spoke of such a god as the "ground of being" or the "depth of being" in order to distinguish this being from any beings within the "structure of being."  Of course, causal relations hold only among beings within the structure of being.  (I will simply ignore the question here as to whether the Tillichian structure of being is a noematic structure or a structure existing apart from the noematic entirely.  As it turns out, for our question this distinction is not important.)  

Since God is not a being within the structure of being, statements about God cannot have truth-conditions in the way that statements about other objects in the universe can. If statements about such a God are to be true or false, they must somehow correspond to what is so within the structure of being, or be consistent and coherent with the language of other theories that themselves deal with the structure of being. However, if Kant is right, then God cannot be known as a member of the class of all beings, and thus a fortiori cannot be referred to by a language having definite truth-conditions. The assumption, of course, is that giving an extension to theological language involves the specification of a divine domain, divine properties, and relations (ordered n-tuples) having at least one term taking on a divine value, and the other (or others) the value of a member of the class of non-divine things. But dyadic (two-place) causal relations between God and any non-divine entity are clearly precluded by the Kantian starting point.

If theological language has no truth-conditions because it has no non-linguistic, non-mental domain to which it could refer, then it's use must serve some other function. Schleiermacher was perhaps the first clearly to grasp that theological language could be retained but assigned some other function. Instead of it having truth-conditions as if it were about something, it could be expressive or poetical, in its first-order use, and regulative and diagnostic in its second-order use. For Schleiermacher and many after him, theological language is neither true nor false, but rather expressively or regulatively adequate. Simply put, theological language is important not because of what it says about God, but what it expresses about us -- our experience and our condition. Theological language is thus not about God, but rather presents, evokes or displays the self.  Instead of theos-logos, it is anthro-logos -- albeit, in a most roundabout way.

The problem with this should be apparent. Theological language that is merely expressive of the self or human experience does not have an extension and hence cannot be semantically relatable to entities within the universe. Such language is "doing something else" than claiming an object or ordered n-tuple is a member of a set; accordingly, it is doing something else than making a claim of truth. But surely this question is crucial: Does the term 'God' refer to a divine entity or does it merely express the self, and its aptitudes and orientations?

The reason why the question is crucial is apparent.  Because human beings are beings who can pro-ject ahead of themselves various possibilities of being -- one of whose possibilities is the possibility of there being no more possibilities -- and because the referent of 'God' has traditionally been conceived to be an entity with salvific, causal power -- an entity causally-relatable to the human possibility of there being no more possibilities -- the very reason for employing 'God' is seemingly taken away when an extensionalist theological semantics is denied.  One might go so far as to declare that whatever is referred to by 'God' is not referred to properly if the entity in question has no causal power.   (On such a non-extensionalist construal, one might say that the entity in question has no causal power in each and every possible world in which it is ingredient.)

Since humans experience their death in the midst of life, the question of the reference of God is all important. Who, or what, can deliver a person from eternal death? Here the word 'deliver' has causal overtones. Only a being having causal power can liberate somebody from death.  Why? The reason rests with the meaning of 'liberate'.  For P to liberate x from y is for  P to bring about a state of affairs of x in regard to y that would not have been brought about without P.  (P cannot be said to free x from y if it were in x's power to get rid of y.)  It is precisely this notion of bringing about a state of affairs that would not have been brought about otherwise that captures the causal relation.  (Giving an analysis of 'cause' is, of course, a very difficult matter and we won't go into it here.)

A salvific, causal being is precisely the kind of being traditionally referred to by 'God'.  Since we cannot deliver themselves from death, expressions of the self are improperly employed in combatting the critical salvific issues of human being. Moreover, these expressions may violate the very logic of theological discourse.  How might this be so?

Theological language developed with a semantics that specified as its universe of discourse both worldly and divine objects, properties, relations, events and/or states of affairs.  The point of such language was to claim satisfiability of a class of ordered pairs (or ordered n-tuples) by elements of this domain.  So the question is simple:  Does the criterion of application of 'theological language' extend beyond the semantics of traditional theological language to something quite different?  I think a strong argument can be made that employment of a wholly different semantics properly precludes application of the term 'theological language' entirely.  Accordingly, whatever it is that non-cognitive, non-propositionalist theologians now do, they do not do theology.