What Should We Do in the Face of the Eclipse of Intelligibility?

This essay forms part of an ongoing series in philosophical theology produced through the Department of Philosophical Theology at Christ School of Theology. The series explores the conditions of intelligibility, reality, theological language, and the philosophical foundations of Christian belief. It proceeds from the conviction that theology exists because these questions exist and that theology's first responsibility is to render Christian doctrine intelligible without diminishing, translating away, or replacing the reality to which it refers.

Try asking someone this question: 

Why should anyone devote a life to understanding reality?

Not What should I believe? Not Does God exist? Just that.

Why spend a lifetime trying to understand what is ultimately real?

Watch what happens.

Most people won't argue with you. They simply aren't sure why you're asking. The question doesn't quite register as a genuine question. It sounds a little abstract, perhaps a bit impractical, the sort of thing discussed in seminars but having little to do with ordinary life.

That response has begun to fascinate me.

For many years I believed that the central question of my work concerned the intelligibility of Christian theology. I still believe that theology must once again become intelligible as genuine discourse about reality. Increasingly, however, I have come to suspect that this is not the deepest problem.

Theology's difficulty may itself be only one expression of a much larger cultural development.

There was a time when philosophers, theologians, scientists, poets, and artists alike assumed that reality itself was worthy of lifelong attention. The theologian seeking to understand God and the theoretical physicist seeking to understand quantum reality shared something fundamental. Their objects differed, but their vocation did not. Both believed that reality possessed depths worthy of patient, disciplined, and sometimes lifelong contemplation.

Today I am less certain that our culture recognizes that vocation.

Notice that I am not speaking first about religious belief. I am asking something prior to belief.

Why has the vocation of intelligibility itself become unintelligible?

But there is an even stranger question.

Why has asking that question itself become strange?

We have not merely lost confidence in theology, philosophy, or metaphysics. We seem increasingly to have lost curiosity about why the pursuit of reality itself no longer commands our attention. We have forgotten—and, more remarkably, we have largely forgotten that we have forgotten.

That strikes me as one of the defining characteristics of our age.

One can see a small but revealing example in the way we speak about freedom and choice.

"It is my choice."

Conversation over.

Rarely does anyone ask the obvious follow-up question:

What makes a choice worth making?

Or:

What makes freedom meaningful?

Those questions often create discomfort, not because people have carefully considered them and rejected them, but because they scarcely register as questions requiring thought. We defend freedom passionately while rarely asking what freedom is for. Detached from any prior answerability to reality, choice quietly becomes self-justifying simply because it is ours.

Yet there is no enduring depth to such choice.

Reality must once again become something to which we are answerable before it becomes something about which we merely have opinions.

Seen in this light, theology's predicament may not be primarily theological at all. It may be anthropological. Before people can hear talk of God as talk about reality, they must once again experience reality itself as worthy of a lifetime's attention.

Perhaps this is why theology has become increasingly difficult to hear. It has not merely lost arguments. It speaks into a culture that no longer finds the pursuit of ultimate reality an obvious human vocation.

This is not a criticism of individuals, nor is it a lament for some imagined golden age. It is an attempt to understand the horizon within which we now live.

Charles Taylor has taught us much about the rise of the secular social imaginary. Others have illuminated the historical, political, and cultural transformations that have shaped late modernity. Yet I increasingly suspect that an even deeper question remains before us.

What cultural conditions have rendered the vocation of intelligibility itself unintelligible?

Until we can answer that question, we may continue addressing symptoms while leaving the underlying condition untouched.

These reflections are exploratory. They arise from the growing conviction that my own work has been moving toward this question for many years without my recognizing it in its full clarity. I do not yet know where this inquiry will lead. I have become convinced, however, that Christian theology cannot recover its public intelligibility unless we first recover something even more fundamental: the human vocation of becoming answerable to reality.

That, it seems to me, is a conversation worth beginning.