Disputatio III: On Felicity Conditions and Theological Language

Thesis 

Expressions are either included or excluded from T based upon their felicity conditions.

Explicatio

Theological language T is not a neutral or unrestricted field of human expression. Its boundaries are determined by felicity conditions—those circumstances under which an utterance can be rightly and meaningfully spoken in the Spirit.

To speak theologically is not first to describe divine realities but to participate in a Spirit-authorized act of speech through which divine reality becomes linguistically present. The Spirit is the primary condition of this possibility; the Church, through its scriptural, confessional, and liturgical life, mediates the grammar by which this felicity is recognized and preserved.

Hence, an expression is included in T when it satisfies these pneumatological and grammatical conditions, when it can be properly uttered within the life of faith. It is excluded when it violates those same conditions, whether by contradicting the grammar of divine address, denying Christological referentiality, or speaking outside the sphere of the Spirit’s authorization.

In a way of speaking, we might say that theology possesses an internal criterion of truth: felicity. Accordingly, to say that an utterance is “true” within theology is to say that it can be spoken in faith, in the Spirit, and in conformity to the rule of confession. But to say proposition p is "true" within T is not to say it is true of the world. Saying "true within T" is merely a way of speaking about optimal felicity conditions. The external truth of p—its adequacy to divine reality as interpreted—belongs to the reflective and interpretive act of theology considered as science.

Objectiones

Obiectio I: If theological expressions are governed by felicity rather than correspondence, theology risks reducing divine reference to pragmatic or communal performance, with meaning determined by use alone.

Obiectio II: If the Spirit’s authorization of speech is itself discerned only within T, the account becomes circular. The community claims that the Spirit authorizes what the community itself declares authorized.

Obiectio III: If felicity, not correspondence, governs inclusion in T, there appears to be no criterion for theological error. Any expression deemed “felicitous” by the community could be taken as true, eliminating dogmatic boundaries.

Responsiones

Ad I: The felicity of theological discourse is not sociological but pneumatological. The Spirit, as divine enabling condition, secures the referential transcendence of theological speech. The community’s role is receptive, not constitutive; it discerns what the Spirit authorizes rather than inventing the authorization.

Ad II: The apparent circularity disappears once felicity is recognized as a transcendental condition, not an empirical rule. Just as transcendental philosophy presupposes the unity of apperception without demonstrating it empirically, theology presupposes the Spirit’s enabling presence as the precondition of any meaningful God-talk. The Church’s confession reflects, but does not create, this condition.

Ad III: Felicity establishes a domain of possible theological error precisely by marking what cannot be said in the Spirit. Heresy consists in failed felicity, uttering what cannot bear the divine Name, what negates the reality it purports to confess. The boundaries of orthodoxy are the historical traces of this discernment.

Nota

The distinction between felicity and correspondence mirrors the deeper theological polarity between internal and external truth. Internally, theology is governed by the Spirit’s authorization—its truth is felicitous speech. Externally, theology as reflective science tests the adequacy of this speech to the divine reality it names. Christ, the Incarnate Word, unites these two orders of truth: He is both the condition of divine self-speech and the reality to which that speech corresponds.

Through the doctrine of felicity, theology avoids reduction either to positivist description or to cultural-linguistic relativism. It becomes, instead, a Spirit-formed language of participation, in which divine and human communicability converge.

Determinatio

From the foregoing it is determined that T, the language of theology, is not an arbitrary or open system but a Spirit-delimited field of discourse. Entry into T depends upon the fulfillment of felicity conditions that are at once grammatical, confessional, and pneumatological.

This entails:

1. That theology possesses its own felicity conditions, distinct from the truth-conditionality of its models. 
2. These felicity conditions -- sometimes spoken as "theological truth" -- arise through divine authorization rather than human convention.
3. That the possibility of the inadmissibility of a theological expression into T, spoken loosely as "theological falsehood" remains, but only within the horizon of Spirit-enabled speech, where failure to speak rightly is failure of felicity, not of syntax alone. 

Thus, theology is neither a pragmatic social game, nor an empirical or metaphysical discipline, but a divinely constituted form of language in which the Spirit renders speech capable of bearing divine meaning loosely considered. It cannot, of course, bear divine meaning properly considered since model-theoretic theology understands that meaning and truth are semantic notions, and that extensional meaning is thus a function of modeling, not of the felicity of T alone.