Prooemium ad Partem I: De Intelligibilitate et Participatione; Disputatio I: De Expressionibus Theologicis ut Syntacticis

Prooemium ad Disputationes Theologicas

Why the Scholastic Form Is Employed

The scholastic disputation is retrieved here not from nostalgia but from theological necessity. Its form—thesis, locus classicus, explicatio, objectiones, responsiones, nota, determinatio—exposes the ordered movement by which theology advances from confession to understanding. The disputation never replaces revelation. It receives revelation in the only manner proper to finite reason: through articulated structure. The form refuses both the spontaneity that mistakes immediacy for truth and the skepticism that dissolves language into indeterminacy.

The grammar of the disputation mirrors the polarity of revelation itself. Divine truth appears as verbum incarnatum, at once hidden and manifest, transcendent and given. The structure of assertion, challenge, and resolution reflects this pattern. Contradiction is not suppressed but taken up into higher clarity. The method resonates with the ontology presupposed throughout these disputations, namely that truth is participation in God’s own act of self-communication. Because divine truth gives form, theology must receive that form in an ordered manner.

The disputatio is therefore both rigorous and contemplative. It is rigorous because it holds every claim accountable to logic and coherence. It is contemplative because every resolution gestures beyond itself to the mystery that grounds understanding. Within a model-theoretic theology, where T denotes the language of faith and its ordered expressions, the disputation provides the visible structure of theology’s movement from syntactical integrity to semantic interpretation and finally to truth. Its parts guide the mind toward the intelligibility that revelation both grants and commands.

Praefatio ad Partem I: De Intelligibilitate et Participatione

Deus loquitur, et fit veritas

Theology begins with divine speech. When God speaks, the world becomes intelligible, and the human being is summoned into understanding. This first part investigates how the rational order of creatures participates in the light of the Word, and how the intelligibility of creation becomes the primordial witness to divine presence. This is not a matter of analogy between finite thought and divine ideas; it is the communication of light itself, the light that shines in the darkness and renders both knowledge and faith possible.

Accordingly, theology must first ask how mind and world are ordered to the divine utterance. Without this ontological participation, neither human discourse nor human truth can endure before God. Part I therefore lays the foundation for all that follows, showing that intelligibility itself is a gift of participation in the Word who speaks creation into being.

Concerning the Expressions of Theology as Syntactical

Quaeritur

Utrum theologia, secundum rationem syntacticam considerata, in ipsa structura locutionis veritatem suam formet, ita ut ordo sermonis sit forma interna veritatis quae posteriorem interpretationem fundat.

Whether theology, considered under its syntactical aspect, forms an inner structure of truth in its very mode of utterance, such that the order of discourse becomes the internal form upon which interpretation depends.

Thesis

Theological expressions, denoted T, the total language of faith as spoken, written, and confessed, must first be regarded as syntactical. They are governed by rules of formation and inference that secure coherence prior to questions of meaning or truth. Only when this linguistic system is interpreted within a model—related to what is real—do meaning and truth properly emerge.

Locus classicus

1. Scriptura Sacra — Hebrews 4:12 (NA28)
Ζῶν γὰρ ὁ λόγος τοῦ Θεοῦ καὶ ἐνεργὴς… κριτικὸς ἐνθυμήσεων καὶ ἐννοιῶν καρδίας.
For the word of God is living and active… discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

2. Scriptura Sacra — Isaiah 55:11 (MT)
כֵּן יִהְיֶה דְבָרִי בַּאֲשֶׁר יֵצֵא מִפִּי… וְהִצְלִיחַ אֲשֶׁר שְׁלַחְתִּיו
So shall my Word be that goes forth from my mouth… it shall accomplish that which I purpose.

3. Augustinus — Confessiones XIII.12.13
Loquitur Verbum tuum nobis in libro tuo…
Thy Word speaks to us in Thy Book…

4. Luther — WA 39/I, 175.12–15
Das Wort Gottes ist nicht stumm, sondern lebendig und kräftig.
The Word of God is not mute, but living and mighty.

5. Thomas Aquinas — ST I, q. 34, a. 1 ad 3
Verbum importat ordinem ad id quod per ipsum manifestatur.
The Word implies an order toward that which is manifested through it.

Together these witnesses affirm that divine speech is ordered, intelligible, and life-giving. Theology begins not in silence but in structured hearing, where divine form enters human words.

Explicatio

Before theology may speak truthfully, it must speak coherently. Every theological utterance belongs to the larger body of discourse that constitutes the lingua fidei, designated T. As in logic, syntax concerns the structure of expressions, the rules by which sentences are formed, related, and inferred. Theological syntax orders the words of revelation prior to their interpretation. Within this initial horizon the question is not truth or falsity but whether a sentence may be rightly spoken at all.

To say “Christ is truly present in the Eucharist” is not yet to advance a metaphysical account of presence. It is to give voice to a confession that stands within a network of scriptural, creedal, and liturgical statements. Detached from that network, the assertion loses its felicity—its Spirit-given rightness or authorization. The first task of theology is therefore grammatical: to preserve the coherence of divine speech once it has entered human language. Only then may theology inquire into meaning, reference, and truth.

Objectiones

Ob I. Barth holds that revelation precedes all linguistic form; syntax makes divine address dependent on human categories.

Ob II. Wittgenstein argues that meaning is use within a communal practice; formal syntax abstracts theological speech from the Church’s form of life.

Ob III. Derrida contends that signs are marked by indeterminacy; a fixed divine grammar reinstates metaphysics of presence.

Ob IV. Schleiermacher claims that religion arises from inner feeling and precedes propositional articulation; grammatical form distorts this immediacy.

Ob V. Empiricists argue that theological statements lack empirical content; to ascribe logical syntax is to treat them as propositions when they are not.

Responsiones

Ad I. Revelation indeed precedes human form, yet it comes clothed in words. Syntax does not construct revelation; it receives the order in which revelation becomes communicable. The Spirit who grants the Word grants also the grammar by which the Church speaks it intelligibly.

Ad II. Theology agrees that language is rule-governed, but the rules of the lingua fidei are Spirit-given rather than conventionally negotiated. Formal clarification does not abstract from the Church’s life; it renders explicit the structures that sustain it across ages and cultures.

Ad III. Deconstruction uncovers the instability of self-grounded signs. Theology does not claim such autonomy. Its signs refer because the Logos grounds signification. Grammar here is not metaphysics of presence but participation in the divine act that makes meaning possible.

Ad IV. Experience without grammar dissolves into private intuition. The Spirit orders confession as well as ignites faith. Syntax renders the truth communicable and guards the unity of the Church’s speech.

Ad V. Verification is not the limit of meaning. Theological sentences belong to a different order of reference, one determined by divine address rather than sensory data. Syntax marks the structure of this order.

Nota

Attention to theological syntax is foundational for the renewal of Christian speech. Where grammar erodes, proclamation withers into sentiment and doctrine into opinion. Communities of faith therefore require institutions that teach precision in sacred terms, churches that guard the patterns of sound words, and scholars who articulate the faith without compromising its form. To forget the grammar of belief is to lose the idiom in which the gospel may be heard.

Determinatio

It is determined that:

1. Theological discourse T is syntactical before it is semantical.

2. The Spirit grants a rule-governed language whose coherence must be secured prior to interpretation.

3. The felicity of T, denoted FT, is the Spirit-given integrity of speech.

4. Truth conditions arise only when T is placed within a model of reality: TC = FT + Modeling.

5. Theology’s autonomy from empirical reduction is preserved, even as its dependence on divine address is affirmed.

To speak theologically is to inhabit a grammar constituted by God’s self-communication and to let that grammar guide every truthful word.

Transitus ad Disputationem II: De Theologia ut Systemate Modelorum

In this first disputation theology has been examined in its syntactical aspect. The structure of discourse was shown to be the internal form by which divine speech becomes intelligible in human words. Yet syntax alone cannot yield truth. It orders expression but does not determine its relation to what is real. If theology is to speak truthfully about God and creation, its language must be joined to an ontology that gives the world its structure.

Hence the next question arises naturally: how does T, the language of faith, touch reality? If divine speech grounds both meaning and being, then theological discourse must be interpreted within a system of models that reflect the order God establishes. Theologia non est mera locutio; est interpretatio verbi ad mundum. We therefore proceed to Disputatio II: De Theologia ut Systemate Modelorum, where the relation between divine language and created being will be examined.