Indeterminate Realism versus Phenomenological Ontology

We received word late yesterday (November 15, 2018) from our accrediting agency that we could begin offering our Ph.D. at the Institute of Lutheran theology in the fall of 2019.  As the founding President of the Institute of Lutheran Theology (ILT), and having taken it from its early very tenuous years through accreditation, and now to this milestone, I wish to express my sincere thanks to all who have worked so diligently on this project.  We have always done what we do to the glory of God, because the search for truth is its own reward.

I wrote this reflection earlier this week, and offer it up now in the spirit of truth.  Clearly, blog writing is not meant to be scholarly writing with citations like one would find in a academic journal.  That being said, I do think all I say below can be supported by the appropriate texts.  As always, I am interested in any responses you might want to share on the blog.
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I remember once having a rather protracted discussion with Langdon Gilkey (1919-2004) in a Des Moines church basement sometime around 1994.  At that time, he would have been 75 years old.  Like many, I had read Naming the Whirlwind in the early1970s, and had been impressed with the issues Langdon had raised on the future possibility of God-talk.  Gilkey had given a talk reflecting on his teacher Paul Tillich that night in the church basement, and I wanted to talk to him about how I was understanding Tillich in those days.

Paul Tillich (1885-1965) wrote a number of widely-read books in the 1950s, including two that I regularly taught undergraduates, The Dynamics of Faith (1956) and The Courage to Be (1952).  (I never had undergraduates read his Systematic Theology.)  In both of those texts, Tillich had employed the notion of the "Ground of Being" in tandem with the "Power of Being," and the "depth of Being," distinguishing them all in The Dynamics of Faith from the "Structure of Being."

The Ground of Being, for Tillich in the 1950s, was the source of existential empowerment in the face of the fundamental anxieties of existence, the anxiety of fate and death, the anxiety of guilt and condemnation, and the anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness.   In those days, I admit to thinking that Tillich was committed to a phenomenological ontology, and that the Ground of Being simply could not be any "thing" at all.  It was both Ground and Abyss, the Depth of Being whose function it was to be pointed to by religious symbols, and which somehow provided the "courage to be in spite of the fact of non-being," that is, that "negation of the negation of being" that provided being (through courage) existentially in the face of the non-being of existential anxiety.  Whereas a phenomenological ontology could describe the structure of being, it could only point to that indeterminate reservoir of empowerment potential transcending that structure.

I remember talking to Langdon about this, trying to gauge what, in fact, Tillich's view on the Ground of Being was. I thought that perhaps Tillich himself knew that his phenomenological ontology pointed to a Ground of Being that could only be in and for consciousness, that as the reservoir of empowerment, it could not in any way be what it is apart from consciousness.  In other words, I thought that Tillich would have to hold that if consciousness were not present, the Ground of Being could not exist either.  I remember Gilkey listening earnestly to me and saying, "I think Tillich would never think of the Ground of Being in that way.  After all, the Ground of Being for Paul was a real thing."  He then said to me, "if you want to understand what Paul was talking about, you have to read Schelling."  Since reading Schelling seriously was not then on my immediate to-do list, I admit to continuing to think that Tillich must finally be understood in the lineage of Martin Heidegger.  Surely, his thought was not somehow indebted to one of Schelling's Five Systems.  Was he not better understood as a thinker of his own age -- at least when he was thinking clearly like he was surely doing in the last 15 years of his life?

I have been talking about realism in theology these last years because I have thought profoundly important this claim:  A thing is real if and only if that thing exists apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language.   Applied to God, this is the claim that God is not real unless God's existence is what it is apart from human existence, that is to say, if and only if the existence of human beings is logically independent of God's existence.  It thus seemed that one would have to adopt irrealism in theology if one were to ground one's theology in a phenomenological ontology.   Irrealism is the simple denial of realism, the assertion that "it is not the case that God exists apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language."

It had been clear to me for some time that that if theology was going to be about something important, i.e., about that which the tradition had assumed it was about, it would have to make causal claims about salvation, claims of the type that "X would not have been saved  -- however one construes this -- apart from the real existence and action of God."  If Bob's existential empowerment could have occurred even were it not the case that the Ground of Being existed apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language, then it could not rightly be claimed that this salvific empowerment was caused by God.  One might claim it was caused by some aspect of us, some depth of our own being with which we are not normally in contact.

It has also seemed to me for a very long time that God cannot be God if God were only a metaphysical absolute.  The God that is the God of Christianity is tied to action, I thought, to acting so as aid God's children, to, as Tillich might say, "negate the negations of being." 

This being said, ground of being theologies do have great metaphysical appeal.  Wesley Wildman rightly points to their fascination: "They deny that ultimate reality is a determinate entity, and they deny that the universe is ontologically self-explanatory" (See "Ground-of-Being Theologies," in the Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science).  My opinion is, however, that while the metaphysical absolute can be intellectually satisfying in myriad ways, if there is no salvific causal connection or metaphysical dependency relation that can be drawn from the Ground of Being to possible human transformation, then Ground of Being ontologies are not really helpful for the religious quest. 

As I was thinking about the development of post-Kantian options for theology in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, I became quite uneasy with many of the moves, because they seemed mostly to be consistent with theological irrealism.  What difference would it even make if there were a God that exists apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language if empowerment in the face of the fundamental existential anxieties did not even involve God?  What difference would it make were there to exist a God that was soteriologically inert?  God could, after all, have abstract existence, perhaps like the set of all ordered pairs, but if God were not related to the universe or people in it such that if God had not existed the salvific options of people would not be different, then in what sense is it even important to say that God is?
 
As an instance of possible irrealism, consider how it is possible that one can preach Law and Gospel, and deliver Christ in the sermon so that the grace of God is delivered in the forgiveness of sins without assuming the existence of God at all.  If one presupposes a phenomenological ontology, the forgiveness proclaimed and received in the Word can be understood in terms of a change in the ontological linguisticallity of existence.  If what it is to be is to be in a world in which one dwells in relationship to beings and values, then a linguistic event like preaching really can change one's world.  One perhaps is donated a being-in-the-world which would not have happened apart from the event of preaching.  The effects on the reader of Scripture, the hearer of the sermon, and the recipient of the sacrament could clearly be interpreted as not involving the action of some divine being.  If language itself is performative and the linguistic event empowers, then why assert some other being, disconnected from the event whose action would vouchsafe for the success of the event's reception?

But what if Langdon Gilkey is right about Tillich, and that I really should have studied more deeply Schelling, or perhaps the later works of Kant whom Fichte and Schelling wholly devoured?  While I have spent quite a bit of time in both The Critique of Pure Reason and The Critique of Practical Reason, I have never spent sufficient time with The Critique of Judgment, Kant's last great work of 1790.   I have lately decided to read the work closely, and I now see how and why it was that both Fichte, Schelling, as well as a whole host of other philosophers, believed that Kant's greatest work was, in fact, the Critique of Judgment.  The Critique of Pure Reason is very important, of course, but the options for philosophical and theological development from that work in an age threatened by mechanism were understandably limited.  However, the Critique of Judgment with its emphasis on aesthetics and purpose seemed extremely relevant to the challenges of the early 19th century: How can one find unity, purpose and meaning in a natural universe in which everything that happens seems to be the result of some congeries or concatenation of events antecedently occurring?

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant attempts to find a linkage between the mechanism resulting from the understanding's theoretical cognition of nature and freedom resulting from practical cognition of the power of desire.  The problem is the apparent antinomy between the assertion that all natural events are necessarily determined by other natural events and the claim that there are some events which are natural that are nonetheless not wholly determined by other natural events.  After all, when confronted by the decision to either go to the party of stay home, Molly is immediately aware of her freedom not to go as the very presupposition for her thinking that she ought not to go party.  Molly is a being in the world who is caused to behave as she does by her antecedent conditioning, but who nonetheless has the freedom to do other that what she did do.  But how can all natural events have a cause in nature, when Molly is a natural being involved in natural events and she sometimes acts in ways seemingly determined by no natural events at all?  How is the freedom of a human being, whose being is embodied in nature, possible?

Kant attempts to solve this antinomy by arguing that nature deals only with appearances, and so the appearance of determinism is not in conflict with the underlying freedom encountered in practical reason's grasp of its own duty.  The freedom encountered by the reason in its moral life is not a freedom, however, solely resting in the subject.  It is a freedom determined by reason's grasp of the supersensible substrate that exists both inside and outside the subject, a supersensible substrate that is indeterminate in itself, but is determined in moral experience.  For Kant, however, there is a power of judgment which operates to make determinable the indeterminate supersensible subtrate, a determinability that is possible on the side of the object, that is, a determinability applicable to the entire supersensible substrate, not just that encountered by the subject.

In an important section of the Critique of Judgment, Kant argues that the transcendental notion of purpose applied to nature is finally no mere thinking of purpose on the side of the subject when thinking nature, a thinking that would be the subject's imposition of purpose upon nature, but it is a thinking itself grounded in the indeterminate supersensible substrate, a real supersensible substrate which is what it is, and in the application of judgment to it, can allow the thinking of purpose in nature.

It is impossible, of course, to think what is indeterminate, however, Kant does laud Judgment's ability to think the world as if it were designed by God and as if this God had placed the human effort towards fulfillment of the moral law as the highest good of this creation.  While Kant knows that he cannot argue metaphysically for the real existence of this God without running into the antinomies, he does realize that human beings are allowed to think of the world of nature as if it is the result of objective purpose built into it by God, an objective purpose designed by God allowable on the basis or ground (Grund) of the supersensible substrate.  This substrate cannot be thought for there are no universals under which any supersensible intuitions might fall.  It is not able to be articulated by human beings, but it itself is that upon which analogies arise, analogies that allow human beings to think of nature as the field of moral activity without at the same time having to deny the results of the First Critique.

What does all of this mean?  Well maybe Ground of Being theologies yet hold some hope if we can connect them to a Kantian supersensible substrate.  If the Ground of Being underlying the Structure of Being is the supersensible substrate, an indeterminate noumenality that is the real reservoir of a power of being at the depth of being, a real reservoir of empowerment potential that can truly address the anxieties of fate and death, guilt and condemnation, and emptiness and meaninglessness, then perhaps we can read the entire tradition of theology based upon Kant a bit differently.  There would be, after all, a God, and that God would do stuff.  Its upon that God's basis that we could proclaim that God was indeed in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself.  It is upon that Ground that the grace of Jesus Christ would be proclaimed and it is upon that really existing being that we could proclaim forgiveness and witness transformed lives.  It is upon that Ground that the Spirit would blow when and where it wills, and that the play of the Trinitarian persons could be entertained.  It is upon that Ground of divine simplicity that we could think the great thoughts of the Trinitarian tradition, a Ground deeper than substance but which is the true cause (Grund) of all that is. Maybe such an indeterminate realism is what the apophantic tradition was after all along.