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?