Ever since the time of Kant, theologians having been playing a certain kind of game. It has been, by all accounts, a pretty successful game. Theologians have taught pastors this game, and these pastors have in turn preached sermons to millions of folks while presupposing it. What the folks in the pews did not know is something rather basic to traditional theology. These folks did not know that their pastors were no longer presupposing semantic realism in their use of theological language; they did not know that that their pastors either did not hold, or had never thought seriously about, this rather commonsense view: Theological statements 1) conform to the principle of bivalence - - the statements are either true or false - - and 2) they are potentially recognition-transcendent, that is, they have evidence-transcendent truth conditions.
Kant had famously taught that knowledge of God is impossible, because knowledge depends upon applying the categories of the understanding to the manifold of sense perception. He claimed, in fact, that the two crucially important categories of substance and causality could only properly apply to the manifold of sense perception; they could not be so applied to that which lies beyond the bounds of possible sense experience, e.g., they could not be applied to God. But if the categories of substance and causality could not be applied to God, what is God? If God is not an entity causally related to other entities, what is God?
The theological tradition of the nineteenth century was anxious to explore various post-Kantian theological options. If God is not a real entity, then what can be said of Him? Schleiermacher labored to show that God was properly conceived to be the "whence" of the feeling of absolute dependence. God is not a real being, but that towards which a profound feeling in human beings flows. Moreover, God is not causally connected to anything else; He cannot be so connected even in principle because the category of cause only relates objects which are themselves syntheses of sense perception. Although Schleiermacher uses causal language in talking about God, he clearly is not supposing that there exists some being having divine powers, a being who has the causal power to change the distribution of natural properties in the universe.
Many later thinkers followed either Schleiermacher or Hegel in thinking about God. While Schleiermacher thought that God was the whence of the feeling of absolute dependence, Hegel thought the reflexivity of human thought itself was a manifestation of divine self-conciousness. The upstart of all of this talk about God was that a special theological way of thinking about God sprung up among theologians. This way of thinking supposes what semantic realism denies, that theological statements are either true or false, and that their truth of falsity depends upon how the world is. Instead of semantic realism, the late nineteenth century and twentieth century often assumed that theological language was neither true nor false, and that the statements of theology have no objective truth-conditions. This is to say, they assumed that it makes no sense to talk about mind-independent states of affairs making true (or false) theological statements if these states of affairs were in principle not able to be encountered. The traditional statements of theology thus acquired a new interpretation, a new semantics allowed the syntax of the statement to remain the same, even if the statement's meaning changed. God was understood as noncausally-relatable to the universe, even as the terms 'create', 'redeem' and 'sanctify' were predicated of Him. The problem was to give an account of creation, redemption and sanctification that did not presuppose the category of causality.
For a whole host of reasons, the general post-Kantian attempt to retain theological language must be seen as a dead end. Some of the problem is simply that human beings in the early twenty-first century are looking for something far more causally-robust in God than their late nineteenth century counterparts. How can a divine entity be germane to human existence if that entity cannot affect human beings, nor be affected by them? How is grace possible if it is in principle impossible to state that God can cause anything? Clearly, God cannot really be at work through Christ to reconcile the world unto Himself.
It is time to return to theological sanity and adopt the basic view that our language about God is true or false dependent upon the way that the divine is structured and acts. While we may have no epistemic access to the being of God, and can thus not provide proper evidence for accepting or asserting some theological proposition as true, it does not follow that there is no way that the divine already is, an ontological way that makes our language about God true even if we don't know that it is! It is time to quit playing the two century old game, and replace it again by one much more ancient - - and successful.
What is needed is a return to theological sanity. I shall be arguing that theological language is ultimately incoherent and marginalized if it does not presuppose semantic realism. We shall be examining this thesis in future posts.
Dennis, if we were to go pre-Kantian in our examination of theological language - and pre-Kantian in our assertions regarding God's Word of law and Gospel - is there any theological "school" in the present tense that pre-supposes an ontological foundation of the law (similar to or simply parroting the onotlogical foundation of the law as proposed by medieval realism)?
ReplyDeletePlaying off of your blog post, do "we" in the church who weekly take to the pulpit commonly accept the pre-supposition that the law is valid for human be-ing because it does NOT rest on a universal and eternal order within something but rather locates its source in the will of God?
I believe, thinking historically, that the primary problem has been and continues to be, the split that took place between the two Reformation "camps" claiming theological fealty to the teachings of Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon.
Melanchthon I believe, accepted the law as an eternal and universally valid and objective order (lex aeterna) which certainly, later in Melanchthon's career, more and more, resembled the medieval Thomistic position which is no surprise considering Melanchthon's appreciation and acceptance of Aristotelian philsophy into his theological suppositions.
On the other hand, as Laurie Haikola asserts, Luther is much more consistently Nominalistic; the law does not represent an eternal, immovable order from which eternally valid material norms can be derived.
That is, God's will is certainly expressed in God's Word of Law, however, God's will can never be expressed in the form of a few absolute and eternally valid rules.
Since you brought up Kant, it seems that in the present tense, our pulpits are suffering from the proliferation of theological science-fiction because we have little to no appreciation and understanding of "the Law" as God's Word which precedes the Gospel, just as the Old Testament precedes the New Testament, and just as the Old Adam must be put to death (in fact) in order to make way for the New Christ.
Finally, the basic presupposition about the Law - especially when we begin speaking about Kant's influence regarding our theological suppositions about the law in the present tense - will influence and determine our "use" of theological language - as you assert in your blog post - especially how we make the distinction and transition from second to first order discourse in preaching justification by faith alone im christ alone apart from the law.
To co-opt a line from John McCain, our fundamentals regarding the law (and as a result, the Gospel) are NOT strong and therefore, our understanding and use of theological language suffers uncritical, or perhaps better, "post-critical," exploitation and abuse.