While there are many forces driving pop culture towards antirealist views, the driving force behind the movement of the theological community to antirealism is quite easy to discern. Theological antirealism emerged in its present form because of the adoption by the intellectual world of the argument and results of the Immanuel Kant’s epochal 1781 Critique of Pure Reason. In this most important and influential philosophical work since the days of Plato and Aristotle, Kant argued that the necessary condition for something being a substance, is that human beings can have sense perception of it. The mind, as it turns out, is always organizing experience, and that the experience of any substance is the result of the mind’s organization of sense particulars. Kant advocated a paradigm shift in philosophy: instead of thinking that the being of objects are what they are on their own, and the human mind revolves around them - - this is the traditional assertion of the order of being itself being externally related to the knower - - Kant advocated a “Copernican Revolution” where the being of objects are what they are because they revolve around the human knower - - the assertion of their internal relatedness to the subject.
Kant claimed that space and time were “pure forms of sensibility,” the a priori grid upon which sense particulars were possible. Moreover, he claimed that the “empirical concepts of the understanding” made possible the reality of empirical objects. Accordingly, an object was “that by concept of which the manifold of sense is united.” The rabbit object is constituted by the empirical concept of rabbit uniting and synthesizing both synchronically and diachronically sense particulars. Substance and causality for Kant were conceived as categories of synthesis. Empirical objects “fell under” these pure concepts of the understanding. All empirical objects were substances because of the fundamental way in which they were synthesized. Only substances could causally relate to other substances, because the mind worked to synthesize substances as so causally-relatable. Just as ideas organize thoughts, substances organize sense perception.
Kant’s profoundly important gift and curse to theology was his conviction that God is not a substance. Because there can be no “sense intuitions” (perceptions) falling under the concept ‘God’, God cannot be a substance. The ramifications for this are far-reaching: This meant that God cannot be an entity, that God cannot be a being among other existing beings. Rather, for Kant, God becomes a mere regulative ideal of human reason, a notion necessary to think when we are organizing our thoughts, but not a notion that can refer to a being within the universe of beings that can in principle be causally related to any of those beings. For Kant, God becomes an idea!
While this Kantian conclusion may seem to be a very bad thing for theology, it was embraced by many in the academic theological community as a way ahead. After all, the Enlightenment criticisms of theology were leading many to think that there was no room at all in the universe for God, that assertions of God’s being were not justified. Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion clearly shows that there is nothing necessary or universal in the assertion of God’s putative designing activity. The universe perhaps didn’t even need a clockmaker!
After Kant, academic theology struggled to give an account of theological language that did not commit it to violating Kant’s relegation of God to the status of a regulative ideal of human reason.
We discern this particularly in Schleiermacher’s relegation of God to the “whence of the feeling of absolute dependence.” But we also find it in Hegel’s notion of the Absolute, and later in the phenomenological theology used by Bultmann and carried later into hermeneutical theology. Tillich’s contention that God is not a being within the structure of being, but being-itself at the depth of being, is another example of Kantian-inspired theology presupposing antirealism.
It is time to reclaim theological realism. Lutheran theology must again work out of a paradigm presupposed by the Christian tradition, a paradigm of theological realism. After all, the Reformers assumed such a realism. To reclaim the tradition is to reject the Kantian antirealist paradigm that has dominated theology for the last two hundred years.
Lutheran theology must again proclaim a theological realism that asserts that God is real if and only if God exists and has the properties God has (call them P) apart from human awareness, perception, conceptual schemes, beliefs, and linguistic practices. We must distinguish, however, the existence of God and divine properties P apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language, and the independence of God and P apart from these things. While God either exists or does not, the independence of His being apart from human awareness is a matter of degree. Realists come in many varieties, and there is little reason to think that the options for antirealism (and realism) are any less for theologians than thinkers in any other discipline.
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