The Ontological Priority of Law and Gospel: Why Reality is Not about Being Human

Intelligibility and the Ontological Priority of Law and Gospel

Modern theology habitually begins with the self. Law and Gospel are therefore read first as modes of human experience, as the ways in which God confronts consciousness. The Law accuses, the Gospel consoles. Within this horizon they function as psychological or existential dispositions, structures of address within the drama of conscience. There is truth here, but it is only a derivative truth.

What if this familiar orientation were reversed? What if Law and Gospel were not first about how human beings experience God, but about how reality itself is rendered intelligible before God? What if they name not anthropological postures, but ontological structures? What if they belong not merely to theology’s linguistic grammar, but to the grammar of being itself?

This is the wager of the reflection that follows.

The inquiry does not begin with salvation, piety, or the psychology of faith. It begins with intelligibility itself, with the question of what must be the case for finite being to be knowable at all. If intelligibility is real and not merely projected by human cognition, then it must exhibit distinct and irreducible modes. Finite being is intelligible either as grounded in itself or as grounded in another. There is no tertium quid.

This fundamental differentiation yields the primal metaphysical distinction between necessity and contingency. What is necessary is intelligible in virtue of itself. What is contingent is intelligible only by reference to another. Yet necessity and contingency cannot stand as isolated poles. Contingency must be intelligible as received rather than arbitrary, as given rather than brute. At this juncture possibility emerges, not as a merely logical modality, but as ontological openness, the teleological space within which being can be bestowed, received, and sustained.

Intelligibility therefore exhibits a twofold structure. There is intelligibility in se, in which being is measured by what it must be in virtue of itself, and intelligibility ab alio, in which being is constituted by what it receives from another. These are not optional perspectives. They are the only two ways in which finite being can stand as intelligible at all.

At this level, what theology will later name Law and Gospel are already operative as the two basic structures of intelligibility. Law names the mode of necessity, that which is self-measured and self-grounded. Gospel names the mode of donation, that which lives from another and by gift. These are not affective states, moral descriptions, or linguistic conventions. They are ontological modalities of intelligibility itself.

To collapse one into the other is not a minor theological error. To moralize the Gospel is to convert gift into requirement. To reduce the Law to description is to evacuate necessity of its binding force. In either case, the architecture of intelligibility is destroyed.

Only on this basis can Luther’s distinction be properly understood. The polarity of Law and Gospel is not a pastoral invention, nor a merely rhetorical contrast within preaching. It is a faithful theological articulation of a metaphysical differentiation already inscribed into being itself. The Word of Law and the Word of Gospel do not merely address human consciousness in different ways. They disclose different modes of being and therefore different structures of understanding. Human beings do not generate this polarity. They find themselves always already located within it.

The priority of Law and Gospel is therefore neither chronological nor epistemic. It is ontological. They name the two fundamental ways in which finite being stands before God, either under the intelligibility of self grounded necessity, which is Law, or under the intelligibility of gifted contingency, which is Gospel.

Theology does not invent this distinction. It confesses it. For when reality is pressed for intelligibility, it yields nothing else.

Law and Gospel Are Older Than We Are

The claim is simple to state and difficult to absorb. Law and Gospel are ontological before they are experiential. They do not arise from moral reflection, religious sentiment, or linguistic convention. They are not products of human awareness. They are conditions that make awareness itself possible. They name two real and irreducible ways in which intelligibility is given.

Law names the order of intelligibility grounded in itself. It designates the mode in which what is stands under necessity, coherence, and closure. In the Law, reality is intelligible as that which must be so. This is not moralism but metaphysics. It names the structure of being that is self measured, self contained, and internally determined. In this mode, being is intelligible because it conforms to its own necessity.

Gospel, by contrast, names the order of intelligibility grounded in another. It designates the mode in which what is stands as gift, as reception, as donation. In the Gospel, reality is intelligible not as what must be, but as what is given. This too is not sentiment but ontology. It names the structure by which being receives itself from beyond itself. In this mode, what is depends upon generosity rather than necessity, upon grace rather than self-sufficiency.

Law and Gospel are therefore not two competing interpretations of a neutral world. They are not alternative descriptions imposed upon the same reality. They are the two real modes in which reality itself can stand as intelligible. One names necessity. The other names gift. One is self-grounding. The other is received.

Human beings do not invent these structures. We discover and inhabit them. We find ourselves always already located within their tension, already addressed by their grammar. To exist at all is to dwell within the polarity of Law and Gospel, to live between the closure of necessity and the openness of donation.

To say that Law and Gospel are older than we are is to recognize that they belong to the constitution of creation itself. They are woven into the fabric of reality, into the rhythm of being’s self coherence and being’s givenness. They are not doctrines imposed upon the world from without. They are the world’s own ways of standing before God, the measure of what must be and the gift of what is.

Why Speak of Intelligibility at All?

A fair question arises at this point. In speaking of Law and Gospel, why turn to intelligibility at all? Why not remain with Scripture, proclamation, or experience? Why introduce a term that sounds abstract, philosophical, perhaps remote from the concrete life of faith?

The answer is unavoidable. Theology already presupposes intelligibility. The only question is whether this presupposition will be acknowledged or left unexamined. To speak of God, to confess Christ, to distinguish Law and Gospel, to proclaim grace, to discern truth from falsehood, already assumes that reality can be understood. Theology does not create intelligibility. It depends upon it. The task is therefore not to stipulate that the world is intelligible, but to ask what must be true of reality for theology to be possible at all.

Modern thought has trained us to assume that intelligibility is something we supply. Meaning is said to arise from the subject, from cognition, language, or social practice. When meaning becomes difficult to ground, it is psychologized, reduced to experience. Or it is linguisticized, reduced to use. Or it is proceduralized, reduced to rule following. Despite their differences, these strategies share a single conviction: intelligibility is derivative of human activity.

What if this conviction were mistaken? What if intelligibility were not the product of thought, but its precondition? What if intelligibility were ontologically prior to perception, judgment, language, and will? On this account, human understanding does not generate meaning but participates in it. We do not first think and then discover a meaningful world. We awaken within a world that already gives itself as capable of being understood.

For this reason, intelligibility must be addressed as such. If it is not, it will be quietly replaced by something else, by consciousness, discourse, power, or will. When this substitution occurs, theology is forced to speak of God within a framework that God did not give.

Once intelligibility is acknowledged as real and prior, several consequences follow.

First, Law and Gospel can no longer be treated as human reactions to divine address. They are not psychological responses but ontological orders. Law names intelligibility closed upon itself and grounded in necessity. Gospel names intelligibility opened as gift and grounded in another. They are not rhetorical tools of preaching but conditions that make preaching truthful.

Second, grace can be conceived without arbitrariness. Grace is not a rupture in an otherwise self-sufficient system. It is the manifestation of how reality itself is constituted, as reception rather than possession, as givenness rather than achievement. What metaphysics names possibility, theology encounters as the work of the Spirit.

Third, truth itself must be rethought. Truth is not merely the correspondence of language to fact. It is participation in the Logos through whom being and meaning coinhere. To inquire into intelligibility is to ask after the deepest grammar of truth.

In this light, the question of intelligibility is not a speculative luxury. It is a theological responsibility. It is the refusal to allow theology to borrow its foundations from accounts of reality that cannot sustain them. The move is bold because it reverses the settled habits of modern thought. Instead of asking how human beings make sense of God, it asks about the conditions under which anything can make sense at all.

When intelligibility is once again recognized as a real feature of creation, the Lutheran distinction between Law and Gospel is freed from the confines of psychology and proclamation. It appears instead as something far more basic: a differentiation woven into the very fabric of reality itself.

Why the Modern Turn Went Wrong

Much of modern thought has operated with a single, rarely questioned assumption: if intelligibility exists, it must be grounded in the subject. Kant’s so-called "Copernican Revolution" marks the decisive articulation of this conviction. When it became untenable to anchor meaning directly in the empirical self, Kant reconstituted the self as transcendental, assigning it the task of supplying the conditions under which anything could appear as meaningful at all. The move was extraordinary in its rigor and fertility. It yielded lasting insights into cognition, judgment, freedom, and normativity. Yet it carried a cost that has only gradually become visible.

Necessity was relocated into the structures of experience itself. What must be so was no longer a feature of reality but a function of the mind’s synthesizing activity. Contingency was displaced into the realm of practical reason. Teleology was retained only in attenuated form, as purposiveness without purpose. Nature no longer possessed an end of its own. Intelligibility ceased to be something reality had and became instead a heuristic imposed upon it. Meaning survived, but only as method.

The outcome of this shift was not atheism but anthropocentrism. Reality increasingly appeared as a mirror reflecting our own operations back to us. Theology, often without realizing it, absorbed this posture. Law and Gospel were reinterpreted as expressions of conscience, existential moods, or linguistic practices. The deeper question was quietly abandoned: What must reality itself be like for Law and Gospel to be true? Once that question falls away, theology becomes commentary on experience rather than confession of what is.

Luther stands on the far side of this modern reversal. For him, the human being is not an origin but a site. The spirit is not sovereign but inhabited. His unsettling image remains decisive: the human being is like a beast that is ridden, either by God or by the devil. This is not a piece of religious psychology. It is an ontological claim about how intelligibility is borne.

To live curvatus in se ipsum is not merely to feel guilt or anxiety. It is to exist under a false grounding, to live as though intelligibility could be secured by the self. The Law exposes this condition and kills precisely because it names what is. It strips away the illusion that being can justify itself from within.

To live by the Gospel is not to adopt a new affective posture or a more hopeful interpretation of existence. It is to be re-grounded in reality itself, to exist as gift rather than possession. The Gospel does not negate the Law. It relocates intelligibility. What was falsely assumed to be self-grounded is revealed to live from another.

At this point the governing metaphysical problem comes fully into view. How can necessity and contingency both be real without collapsing into determinism on the one hand or arbitrariness on the other? The answer is possibility, understood not as unrealized potential but as the ontological openness of intelligibility itself. Possibility names the space in which contingency can be received rather than forced, and necessity can give without coercion.

What metaphysics names possibility, theology encounters as grace. Grace arises necessarily from God, who is love, yet it is received contingently by creatures. This contingency is not a defect. It is the very form divine love takes in time. The Holy Spirit is not an addition to this structure but its living enactment, the divine act by which eternal necessity becomes temporal gift. Grace is not God’s response to us. It is the continual donation of reality itself anew.

This same structure extends into the nature of truth. Theology cannot rest content with defining truth as correspondence between propositions and an already settled world. That account presupposes what it cannot explain. Christian theology confesses something deeper. The Logos gives being and meaning together. Reality is intelligible because it is spoken.

Truth, therefore, is not merely descriptive. It is participatory. We do not stand outside the world and measure it. We are drawn into the act by which reality becomes intelligible at all. Law, Gospel, grace, and truth are not late theological overlays. They belong to the primal order of creation, to the rhythm by which being is both coherent and given.

None of this requires the rejection of modern philosophy, nor does it indulge nostalgia for a pre modern certainty. Kant’s detour was illuminating. Existentialism disclosed genuine anxiety. The linguistic turn taught us to attend to the density of speech. But the time has come to recover what these movements forgot. Reality does not depend on being human. Humanity depends on reality.

Law and Gospel do not arise from within us. They name the way the world itself stands before God. Only because this is so can preaching still kill and make alive, grace still arrive as surprise, and truth still exceed the mirror of our own reflection.

This is not an argument for demolition but an invitation. It is an invitation to leave the playground of self-enclosed thought and return to the open field of reality itself. At this point one may cautiously recover Luther’s language of the Left and Right Hands of God, provided it is properly understood. Law and Gospel are not two competing principles, nor are they reconciled by a higher synthesis. They arise from a single ground of intelligibility, the teleological space in which reality stands before God. As the Left and Right Hands are united in the one God without confusion of their work, so Law and Gospel are united in their ground without collapse of their modes. The unity is ontological, not dialectical. The distinction remains irreducible. The Law still kills. The Gospel still makes alive. And precisely because their unity does not neutralize their opposition, preaching can still strike reality itself rather than merely reflect our own thought back to us.

Disputatio XLVIIIa: De Lege et Evangelio ut Structuris Intelligibilitatis

 On Law and Gospel as Structures of Intelligibility

Quaeritur

Utrum distinctio inter Legem et Evangelium sit tantum ordo sermonis divini ad conscientiam humanam, an potius structura ontologica intelligibilitatis ipsius, prior omni perceptione, cognitione, et agentia humana; et utrum haec distinctio radicetur in ipso Logō, per quem omnia facta sunt.

Whether the distinction between Law and Gospel is merely an order of divine speech addressed to human consciousness, or rather an ontological structure of intelligibility itself, prior to all perception, cognition, and human agency; and whether this distinction is rooted in the Logos through whom all things are made.

Thesis

The distinction between Law and Gospel is not first a distinction within human consciousness, moral experience, or religious language, but a real differentiation within intelligibility itself. Law names intelligibility grounded in se, closure upon necessity; Gospel names intelligibility grounded in alio, openness as gift. Both precede human awareness and agency. The human subject does not constitute this distinction but inhabits it. Law and Gospel are thus not psychological states, existential possibilities, or homiletical strategies, but ontological structures grounded in the Logos, who is the unity of necessity and contingency without their collapse.

Locus Classicus

Lex iram operatur.
— Romans 4:15
“The law brings about wrath.”

Quod impossibile erat legi, in quo infirmabatur per carnem, Deus misit Filium suum.
— Romans 8:3
“What the law could not do, weakened as it was through the flesh, God did by sending His own Son.”

Πάντα δι’ αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο.
— John 1:3
“All things came to be through Him.”

Θεὸς γάρ ἐστιν ὁ ἐνεργῶν ἐν ὑμῖν καὶ τὸ θέλειν καὶ τὸ ἐνεργεῖν.
— Philippians 2:13
“For it is God who works in you both to will and to work.”

Homo est sicut iumentum, quod equitatur a Deo aut a diabolo.
— Martin Luther, paraphrasing De Servo Arbitrio
“The human being is like a beast that is ridden either by God or by the devil.”

These witnesses converge upon a single claim: Law and Gospel do not originate in human self-relation but in the way intelligibility itself is ordered and inhabited.

Explicatio

Modern theology has largely treated Law and Gospel as modes of address: words spoken to human subjects, experiences within conscience, or existential postures toward God. Such construals are not false, but they are secondary. They presuppose precisely what must be explained.

The distinction between Law and Gospel does not arise because human beings reflect upon themselves, experience guilt, or seek meaning. Rather, these phenomena arise because intelligibility itself is differentiated in a way that precedes all subjectivity.

Law names intelligibility as self-grounding. It is the structure in which what is stands under necessity, coherence, and closure. In Law, being is intelligible as that which must be so. This is not moralism. It is ontology. Law is the grammar of necessity.

Gospel names intelligibility as gift-grounded. It is the structure in which what is stands not by self-sufficiency but by donation. In Gospel, being is intelligible as received. This too is not sentiment. It is ontology. Gospel is the grammar of contingency redeemed.

These are not two interpretations of one neutral world. They are two real modes in which intelligibility itself is given. The human being does not generate them. The human being finds itself within them.

Here the anti-existentialist force of the claim must be stated without apology. Law and Gospel are not responses to anxiety, finitude, or absurdity. They are not horizons of meaning projected by a suffering subject. They are ontological realities that make suffering, finitude, and meaning possible at all.

The Enlightenment reversal, paradigmatically expressed in Kant, attempted to relocate these primal differentiations within the subject. The empirical subject was transmogrified into the transcendental subject and charged with supplying the conditions of intelligibility that creation itself already bore. Necessity was grounded in the algorithm of experience; contingency was relocated to practical reason. In the Critique of Judgment, teleology itself was reduced to purposiveness without purpose. Nature lost its end. Intelligibility became heuristic rather than real.

This was a brilliant detour. It was also a decisive displacement.

Reflective judgment did not recover ontology but replaced it with methodological reconciliation. The move was no longer “this is how reality is,” but “we might think of it this way.” The bomb had already fallen. The playgrounds of modern Europe were rearranged, not rebuilt.

Luther stands on the other side of this move. For him, the spirit is not an origin but a space of inhabitation. The human being is not a sovereign agent but a site of grounding. One is always ridden. The only question is by whom.

Thus curvatus in se ipsum is not a psychological pathology but an ontological posture: intelligibility falsely grounded in the self. And to be opened by the Gospel is not to adopt a new perspective but to be re-grounded in reality itself.

The Holy Spirit is not merely the subjective appropriation of this distinction. The Spirit is the divine act by which the openness of intelligibility is inhabited by God rather than by a false ground. What metaphysics names possibility, theology here names Spirit.

Law and Gospel are therefore not reconciled by dialectic, synthesis, or historical progress. They are united in the Logos, who is not an algorithm but living intelligibility itself, in whom necessity and contingency coincide without confusion.

This is not a return behind Kant but a movement beyond him. The Copernican Revolution was instructive. It is no longer determinative. It is time to return to serious work.

Objectiones

Ob. I. Law and Gospel arise only where there is conscience. Without human awareness, the distinction has no meaning.

Ob. II. To ontologize Law and Gospel risks collapsing theology into metaphysics and losing the evangelical character of proclamation.

Ob. III. This account reintroduces a Manichaean dualism by granting ontological reality to false grounding.

Ob. IV. Scripture treats Law and Gospel as words spoken in history, not as structures of being.

Responsiones

Ad I. Conscience presupposes intelligibility; intelligibility does not presuppose conscience. Law and Gospel become experienced in conscience because they are already real.

Ad II. Ontological grounding does not negate proclamation; it makes it intelligible. The Word does not create Law and Gospel but reveals and enacts them.

Ad III. False grounding is real but derivative. The devil is always God’s devil. There is no rival ground of being, only parasitic mis-inhabitation of intelligibility.

Ad IV. Scripture speaks historically because history is the arena in which ontological truth becomes manifest. The economy presupposes ontology.

Nota

The so-called “two hands of God” name the same differentiation here articulated as Law and Gospel. The left hand corresponds to intelligibility ordered by necessity; the right hand to intelligibility given as gift. These are not two divine wills but two modes of divine giving, unified in the Logos and enacted through the Spirit.

Determinatio

1. Law and Gospel are ontological structures of intelligibility, not human constructions.
2. Law names intelligibility grounded in itself and ordered by necessity.
3. Gospel names intelligibility grounded in another and received as gift.
4. Both precede human perception, cognition, language, and agency.
5. The human spirit inhabits this distinction; it does not generate it.
6. The Holy Spirit is the divine inhabitation of intelligibility as gift.
7. In the Logos, necessity and contingency are united without collapse.
8. Therefore, Law and Gospel belong to the very fabric of reality and find their unity not in the subject, but in God.

Transitus ad Disputationem XLIX

If Law and Gospel are structures of intelligibility, then creation itself must be ordered toward a final unity in which gift is not annulled by necessity nor freedom by law. The question of final cause now presses with full force.

Accordingly, we proceed to Disputationem XLIX: De Fine Creationis et Gloria Dei, wherein it shall be asked how the intelligibility differentiated as Law and Gospel is gathered into its ultimate end, and how the glory of God names the consummation of intelligibility itself.

Extensionality, Description and the Question of Good Works: Towards An Anomalous Monergism?

 The great American philosopher Donald Davidson (1917-2003) wrote the following about causality:

The salient point that emerges so far is that we must distinguish firmly between causes and the features we hit upon for describing them, and hence between the question whether a statement says truly that one event caused another and the further question of whether the events are characterized in such a way that we can deduce, or otherwise infer, from laws or other causal lore, that the relation was causal ("Causal Relations," The Journal of Philosophy, 64 (1967), 691-703).  

Davidson's point in this famous article is that causality has an extensional nature.  If a causes b, it is, in fact, the event a that causes b to obtain, and this is a causal relation that obtains apart from however a and b might be described.   

Compare the following: 

1. Jack fell down and broke his crown.
2. That Jack fell down explains the fact that Jack broke his crown. 

Clearly, (1) bespeaks extensionality and (2) intensionality.  Very simply put, extensionality concerns what there is, while intensionality deals with how we might pick out or refer to what there is.  For example, in f(x) = y +2 for natural numbers N where 1< y < 5, the intension is the rule 'y +2' applied to either 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5, while the proposition's extension is {<1, 3>, <2, 4>, <3, 5>, <4, 6>, <5, 7>}. 

What is there a difference between (1) and (2) above?  (2) is concerned with the relation between two descriptions, 'Jack fell down' and 'Jack broke his crown'. These two sentences are related by the operation of causally explaining.  Notice, however, that (1) does not connect to descriptions at all, for the 'and' in (1) is concerned with the actual events of Jack falling down and Jack breaking his crown.  

Assume that d is the event of Jack falling down and c is the event of Jack breaking his crown. Notice that event d  may cause event c without any recourse to modal terms.  Clearly, the singular event d and the singular event c, both denizens of the extensional, cannot be connected by a modal operator, for modality applies to events only in so far as they are properly described.  Modality is de dicto and not de re.  In Humean terms, it concerns the relations of ideas, not the matters of fact.  

One could, I suppose, have a general law claiming that for all x, if x falls down then x breaks x's crown.  Such an occurrence may be so regular that one might, I suppose, claim that it is necessarily the case, that for all x, if x falls down then x breaks x's crown. But this modal operator which concerns relations between ideas (or language) might be replaced by a far more modest operator in intensional contexts, the causal explanation operator.  We have our stories about the world and the behavior of objects within it.  We know that there are features instanced in Jack's falling down and Jack's breaking his crown, such that the features of the first causally explains the features of the second.  Thus, it is true that Jack's falling down causally explains the breaking of Jack's crown.  

But Jack is the man most to be pitied on Beecher Street, and while his falling down is the most unfortunate event of his lifetime,  his breaking of his crown is that that issued in his wife leaving him. Does causal explanation still work as we substitute descriptions for singular events salve veritate?

3. That the man most to be pitied on Beecher Street suffered the most unfortunate event of his lifetime causally explains the fact that his wife left him. 

Clearly, any law connecting fallings and breakings is now no longer at issue. Here the connection is between unfortunate events happening to guys on Beecher Street and their wives abandoning them.  While one might think the causal explanation operator in (2) is apt, its use in (3) seems much more problematic.  But how can causal relations depend upon the descriptions of d and c?  Is it not simply about the relations between these two events however they might be described? 

Davidson developed a theory of token identity in the philosophy of mind that exploits the difference between causal relations and causal explanation.  Imagine that there is some event e such that it can be given both a neuro-physical and psychological description.  The neural event that e is is presumably related to other neural events, but the mental description of that event -- perhaps a particular thinking of one's particular mother when she was 36 -- cannot seemingly be relatable to other mental events causally in the same way.  After all, neural events do not swim in the waters of the normative.  My thinking of my mother when she was 36 might be followed by a particular thought of the appropriateness of my love for her, and this is clearly a matter of normativity.  One ought to love one's mother, after all; it is right to do so.  

One might generalize from these reflections into the philosophy of action.  What is the best explanation why Bob gets in his vehicle and drives the 25 miles to the airport at 4:50 p.m. on April 23?  It is that Bob believes that his wife Jan is flying home on the 6:00 p.m. plane from Chicago, and that Bob has a desire to see her.  Causal explanations for why we do what we do our routinely cast in the language of beliefs and desires, and not in the language of neural states.  It would be odd, after all, to say that Bob is getting in his vehicle at 4:50 on April 23 because Bob's neurophysiological states coupled with appropriate external sensations caused it to be so. What kind of causal explanation for Bob's behavior refers simply to brain states and perceptual inputs?  How could knowing the neural events of Bob causally explain the purpose he had when entering his auto? 

Davidson's token identity theory of the mental and physical simply points out that our mental life with its complexities of purpose in beliefs in desires is physically realized, that is to say, that some set of neuro-events realizes our mental states.  Davidson is not a substance dualist, after all, claiming that there is an ontic realm of mental events, entities, properties, relations or functions that can exist on its own, and whose processes are simply coordinated with physical events, entities, properties, relations of functions in the brain, and that, in principle, one might be able to draw causal connections between the mental and the physical.  By claiming a token identity between mental states and some brain states or other realizing these mental states, Davidson believes he can protect the anomalousness of the mental while not acquiescing to dualism.  His position is appropriately called anomalous monism.  The point is that one event can have different descriptions, and that there is a certain irreducibility of the mental to the physical.  Accordingly, the complexities of our mental life cannot be either explained or predicted by pointing to the existence of strict scientific law -- if there actually is such -- at the neuro-level.  

Whether or not Davidson's position of anomalous monism is finally defensible is not my concern here.  I advert to this only because I want to show again the importance of description when it comes to events. Causal explanation is possible because of the descriptions we give to a particular event.  Causal explanation involves language, in our use of language to highlight features of events we want to explain.  Causal relations, however, are ultimately extensional, they are drawn between events however they might be described.  That event e causes event e', is a feature of the world, not a feature of our description of the world -- or so one might argue.   But what might any of this have to do with theology? 

In the Lutheran tradition there has been since the beginning profound controversy about the status of good works in salvation.  Classically, one might ask, "are good works necessary for salvation?"  An unreflective quick response is simply "no!"  "Good works do not save us before God, so good works are not necessary for salvation."  It is perhaps a response like this that underlies the suggestion by Amsdorf and others that good works might even be harmful for salvation. 

But reflecting on the logical form of the statement, 'Good works are necessary for salvation' does not mean 'if good works, then salvation'.  If 'if A then B' obtains, then A is sufficient for B, and B is necessary for A.  The proper translation of 'good works are necessary for salvation' is 'if salvation, then good works', that is, 'if not good works, then no salvation'. Those claiming that good works are necessary for salvation are clearly not claiming that by doing good works, one might be saved; they are not saying that good works are sufficient for salvation.  Good trees bear good fruit.  If God makes the tree good, then good fruit will follow.  Therefore, good works are necessary for salvation. 

But merely pointing to the logic, does not seemingly solve the controversy.  Those espousing monergism, that we are saved wholly by God apart from our own agency, want to protect divine autonomy.  They are deeply suspicious of language having to do with human working and doing, of language having to do with human discipling, for such language suggests human agency; the language itself suggests synergism.  Luther was profoundly critical of the category of created grace, the notion that God through his agency might create in human beings ontologically-extended dispositions to behave, and thus that there might be something in human beings on the basis of which the divine imputation of righteousness rests.  Luther accordingly rejects the notion that human beings have been made right, and on that basis, they are pronounced right; the Gerechtmachung grounds the Gerechtsprechung.  But if this were so, were we given such goods, then why and how could we who have benefitted so deeply utter as did Luther in his final hours, "Wir sind bettler, hoc est verum?"  

There are standard moves in this debate, a debate that is connected to the so-called "third use of the law." My purpose here is not to get into the debate and follow the lines of reasoning that have a certain plausibility no matter upon which side one finds oneself.  My purpose here is simply to propose something new that might move the conversation forward.  

What if we took seriously the distinction between the event of the person doing a good work and its description?  Let me be more clear, what if we took seriously the distinction between d, the event of a person behaving in a particular way, with its description as to what the person was doing in that event d?  After all, Paul's ingredience in d could be described as both the doing of a good deed through Paul's own agency or as a divinely-gifted doing where it is no longer I who live but He who lives in me.  The point is this, the same event d is multiply describable. It can be described on the basis of a human agent believing that he must do the act and desiring so to do it, or it can be described as a behavioristic input/output function, or it can be described as wholly caused by the Holy Spirit. Our background assumptions and theories deeply influence how the event might be described.  The same event can be given a description in terms of beliefs and desires and the intent by the person to "do what is within them."  It can be described, solely in monergistic terms; the event is that work that is worked by God in us propter Christum and by grace through faith; or the event could be described perhaps without averting to so-called "folk psychological ascriptions" at all.  If we were to give a neuro-description to the event, it would make no sense in giving a casual explanation to the event to speak of the Holy Spirit's causality or the desire to be saved and the belief that that a particular doing, a suitable description of d, motivates the doing.  

The language of discipleship -- what is it to be a fisherman that follows -- is clearly a different language than the language of apostolicity -- what heralds does God establish in His Wording of the world.  Both languages can be developed quite thickly, with language available to speak of all sorts of events, and both languages can provide causal explanations.  This being said, however, there still is some underlying events that are what they are because of causal relations they sustain with other events. The fact that no language can mime the contour of these causal relations does not tell against their presence.  The extensionality of causal relations of such d doings by Paul might not be able to be articulated in the languages by which events like d are described.  Here we are talking about propositional attitudes, about the believings of people doing d.  Here we are at the level of the intensional.  

Although I have not defended anamolous monism, in closing I want to open up the possibility of an anamolous monergism.  What if Davidson is right, and that there are simply causal relations at the neuro-level that support mental descriptions where causal explanation is possible?  What if one could be a nonreductive physicalist of such a kind?  Does this have relevance for the theological issue at hand? 

Imagine that the Holy Spirit has a causality such that some human events are caused by the Holy Spirit.  After all, maybe Luther is right in that we are either ridden by the devil or Christ.  If the Holy Spirit causes that event we might describe as a good work, then clearly no human agency is determinative in its doing.  Clearly, this is an embrace of monergism.  But what about our description, our own self-understanding of that event?   

Surely, we could causally explain that act in terms of beliefs and desires.  We could have an intent to do what God would have us do, and we could believe that that doing is meritorious somehow before God.  We live lives that are thus pleasing to God, and we try in all we do to keep God's commandments.  We learn more about God and we attempt to follow Christ in all we do.  All of this description of our life of faith, as thick or thin as we might want, could be seen as realizable within the underlying divine causality upon human events. Clearly, the language of belief, desire, intentionality, and following is not reducible to the language that describes the Holy Spirit's causality upon our behavior.  From the standpoint of the extensional, God authors are events, but from the standpoint of the intensional, are doings realized by those events can be explained in therms of the motivations of living the Christian life.  

What I am suggesting here is an anamolous monergism that neither undercuts the reality of monergism, nor does it downplay the complex experience of living out the Christian life. There are deep philosophical and theological objections to this view, of course, but I do think that the main point might be defendable: The penchant to good works is a way of talking or describing Christian lived existence, and this way of talking or describing does not have to contradict the reality that I cannot cause that event that might be described as a Christian following.  Similarly, third use of the law talk need not contradict the reality that there are only two proper uses.  But this topic must await a later treatment.   

Grounding Ethical Vision and Mission Statements

Some of us at the Institute of Lutheran Theology will soon be engaged in consulting work to institutions and businesses to aid them in casting their own ethical mission and vision statements. The increasing use of sophisticated algorithms by companies and institutions have created new situations in which the institution or business ends up treating managers, employees and customers in new ways, yet ways that are not the result of individual people making decisions to treat these managers, employees and customers in new ways. 

People who write computer code construct algorithms that function as decision procedures. For instance, in writing an algorithm for a self-steering car, the coder has to program the car to do certain things given certain inputs. The idea is that the program will give an output as a function of the present state of the machine and relevant inputs it has while in this state. The car would not presumably move to crash into the motorcycle to its left, if it had not already been in states of danger for some time, and if this option had not been coded in as the best response to a certain sequence of danger states given some new driving inputs.   

It is very clear to me that thinking about helping businesses and institutions do ethics on the ground is a different activity than teaching ethics to students at the university. In some ways, it is much more challenging because we deal here not with hypothetical scenarios, but with real flesh and blood human beings. 

When teaching ethics at the university, I always tried to deal with the standard normative ethical theories and the meta-ethical challenges to those theories. This meant that I always dealt with Aristotelian-inspired virtue theory, utilitarianism, Kantian-inspired deontological theory, and divine command or divine will theory.  

Standardly, I treated as well the meta-ethical challenges to normative ethics: ethical subjectivism, ethical emotivism, psychological egoism, and ethical relativism. I introduced ethical intuitionism in light of the Open Question argument proffered by G.E. Moore, and discussed the non-natural intuition of the good in Moore and the non-natural intuition of the right in Ross. There is not much time in one ethics course to do all of this, however, so I made sure to cover the standard four normative ethical approaches.   

Aristotelian-inspired virtue theory is an ethics of self-actualization or realization which attempts to understand the excellence of human beings in terms of human dispositions to behave, that is human habits. In a society like ancient Athens where there was deep agreement on what the good is, there was agreement on what traits or characteristics human beings ought to have to be good. If the telos of human beings is their happiness, that is their "total human flourishing," then one should seek to cultivate those intellectual and moral virtues, that is, those "powers of the soul" whereby human beings together can profoundly flourish. To grow the intellectual and moral virtues is to increase in human excellence and to realize the good.   

Utilitarianism espouses a consequentialism; it claims that the goodness or badness of an act is a function of its likely consequences. There are many kinds of utilitarians. One can be a hedonistic utilitarian who understands the good in terms of crude pleasure, or perhaps a eudaimonian utilitarian identification ing the good with higher human values.  Accordingly, the good is not simply pleasure, but the happiness of human flourishing in general. One can be a global or universal utilitarian claiming that the act should bring about the greatest happiness for everyone in general, or could be a regional or local utilitarian claiming that the utilitarian calculation should privilege some particular group or community. One must also distinguish between an act and a rule utilitarian in that while the first holds that the direct consequences of the particular concrete act are what is ethically relevant, the second argues that it is the rule that the particular act falls under that ultimately determines its goodness or badness.  

The deontological perspective claims that acts or good and bad of themselves apart from their consequences. Kant most famously argued for the categorical imperative, a formal principle by which an act's moral properties obtain apart from any hypothetical antecedents. Kant claimed two subjective maxims of this categorical imperative: 1) so act such that your act could in principle be universalized, and 2) so act such that you always treat the other as an end-in-themselves and not as a means to your end.  

Finally, divine command or divine will ethics claims divine primal intentionality determines the rectitude of an act. It is incumbent on S to do P if and only if God wills P (to be done be S). Divine will ethical theories must then give an account both of the nature of the divine will itself and of our epistemic access to it.  

But none of these normative theories work very well in our present context actually to inform ethical decision-making. The problem is that people disagree rather profoundly on the presuppositions upon which such theories are based. 

For instance, the plausibility of virtue ethics famously depends upon a basic agreement in the community about what the good life is.  Aristotle said that a good person is one that does the good and that the good is that which good people do. This makes sense if there are not competing moral visions within a society. Notice, however, that even if their is near unanimity about what the good is, the theory does seem prone always to the critique launched by Luther and others. Focussing on virtue-building places the action on the self. Cultivating our moral virtues as part of self-realization towards maximal human excellence puts the action on the side of the subject. She or he must train themselves to evince the suitable dispositions to behave, and such training is ultimately the result of what James once called "the dull heave of the will." 

But part of what it is to live morally, it seems, is to be not reflecting upon oneself all of the time.  Yet the ethic of self-realization places the focus of the self on the self as that self endeavors to cultivate the proper dispositions that constitute character,  those general habitualizations that constitute our moral excellence.  

There are deep problems with utilitarianism as well. As it turns out, calculating likely consequences from an act or rule utilitarian perspective makes many positions questionable because we really don't know what the real consequences of our actions are. Claiming that it is probable that act X issues in consequences P is not granular enough it seems.  Would we not need to know precisely what that probability is in order to do the utilitarian calculus rightly?  Moreover, discriminating what the good is, e.g., pleasure, cultivation of virtue, human flourishing, is itself not amenable to utilitarian calculation.

Recall that Bentham claimed that the Principle of Utility need not be argued for because, as it turns out, the principle objectively obtains, and that we humans simply do act in accordance with it. While this is plausible if one is a universal hedonistic act utilitarian perhaps, it is not the case if one is a regional eudaemonistic act or rule utilitarian.  We need some independent philosophical argument, it seems, to say with Mill against Bentham that it is better to be a dissatisfied human being than a sated pig.  Moreover, while the move to rule utilitarianism seems to protect utilitarianism in general from crude counterexamples, it might be asked whether rule utilitarianism does not abandon utilitarianism altogether.  Clearly, the claim that S ought to do act X if and only if X were in accordance with rule R that, if it itself were universally instantiated, would conduce to the maximum distribution of happiness is itself consistent with act X itself causing great pain or unhappiness to S. But this seems like an abandonment of utilitarianism entirely.  

Notice as well that utilitarian calculations place the moral action in our own reasoning. We must calculate the likely consequences of an act or rule, and only after such calculation can we determine how to treat the person standing in front of us. Again, it seems like this kind of moral reflection places the action within the echo chamber of our subjectivity. We do X because we have done the suitable calculus and, on the basis of the kind of utilitarian we are, we can determine that it is rational to do X.  How my doing X impacts Bob who stands before me, is relevant only insofar as I can describe the doing of X in ways that take into consideration the consequences for Bob of my doing of X. 

Our friend Kant gets us to consider the noumenality of duty, and asks us if we can conceive that one ought to do X in the absence of one's freedom to do other than X. We are then told that we should treat others as ends in themselves and not as means because others are denizens of the same kingdom of ends we ourselves occupy. He argues that we must not act in ways that end in moral contradiction. For instance, if I were knowingly to lie, then I must accede that it might be a general moral law that people could lie. But if this were a general moral law, then dissimulation itself could not be specified, because there would be no institution of truth-telling from which lying diverges. This is all pretty heavy stuff, but it is what pure reason does when it is concerned with the practical.  Pure practical reason is human reason set free to investigate what we ought to do mostly unimpeded by historical and cultural conditions.  

Finally, there is divine will theory of either the static or dynamic variety.  Since the latter is demonstrably incoherent, this leaves the former, and clearly it is a matter of reason to discern what the divine command is, and whether we have a duty to do it. One cannot in our post-Christian context simply assume that there is a divine being whose primal intentionality on creation is objectively the case, and whose intentional objectivity is epistemically accessible to human beings.  

In other words, if we want to cast ethical mission and vision statements in the business world by getting people to affirm the objective reality of the ethical and getting them to see that it is rational to accept that they have epistemic access to it, then we shall have a very steep hill to climb in accomplishing our ethical work. 

In Lutheran fashion, one might think that ethical theory provides the light by which the law confronts us as a curb on what we would otherwise want to do, a mirror by which to apprehend our own moral inadequacies, and a guide as to how we should comport ourselves. The light clearly is where the action is. In classical theology it is the primordial divine intentionality manifesting itself in the eternal law, the light of the universe itself. One can connect this light to Wisdom as it was prior to the creation of the world and ultimately to the logos.  

When I was a graduate student, I studied meta-ethics because I already did not believe one could do normative ethics without first getting clear on the sources, grounds, and methods of ethical adjudication.  My meta-ethics class one summer was with an excellent professor whose constructive contribution to the course was to point out that the only motive one could possibly have to do X from a meta-ethical standpoint was that the doing of X was conceptually tied to the desire to do X. From the standpoint of analytical ethics, he might be right. In other words, we are left with a psychological egoism functioning underneath meta-ethical reflection.  

I think I was a pretty good ethics teacher for undergraduate students because I could generate scenarios quite easily on the spot and I was able to keep their attention. The problem, of course, was that normative ethics is unfortunately today in many respects a fool's game. I don't mean that the theories are necessarily wrong, but rather they are all inadequate either when confronting complicated ethical situations we presently face or when they are placed against our moral intuitions. The longer I taught ethics, I found myself actually asking students to consult their moral intuitions as a way to test the normative theories we introduced. I straightforwardly suggested to them that their moral intuitions should function as data for ethical theory-making.  

But I knew that this gets it all wrong. Isn't normative ethics supposed to tell us what is the case? Ought it not trump moral intuitions altogether? Should it not function pedagogically to teach us what moral intuitions are worth having?  We don't form ethical theories in order to be applicable and adequate to ethical data, but rather to give us the principles by which we might act and value.  

Towards the end of my teaching of ethics I developed a rather elaborate way to think about normative ethics, replete with suitable defeaters. Additionally, I would argue that when there was a conflict between utilitarian and deontological perspectives, one had to go outside theory and evaluate the situation from a standpoint external to either theory.  Of course, here one could not help but privilege one's own moral intuitions again. If such a view from above the normative ethical conflicts is not to be a view from nowhere, then that view must be informed by something concrete.  But what could this be if not our moral intuitions? 

Often in teaching ethics, I would discuss G.E. Moore's famous Open Question argument that purports to show that any analysis of the good in terms of natural properties -- actually any properties -- leaves us in the situation of asking with sense if it is good that the good is so analyzed.  G. E. Moore was an ethical intuitionist because of this argument, and I do confess to believing that his comparing the instrinsicality of yellow with the the intrinsicality of the good a first-rate philosophical move. Just as we can identify yellow without conceptually stating its necessary and sufficient conditions, so we might identify the good without being able to give an analysis of it in terms of something more basic.  

It strikes me today that a new approach is needed if we are ever going to get outside of the philosophy classroom when contemplating the ultimate grounds for corporate ethical vision and mission statements. Emmanuel Levinas' notion of the immediacy (and transcendence) of the Other, despite its philosophical complexity, might actually be able to be explained simply to people today-- people within institutions and corporations alike -- who have lost their way among the endeavor to justify what it is that is good and right.  Most of the people we shall speak with in framing corporate ethical vision and mission statements will not seriously ask for the philosophical grounds why the torturing of children is wrong. They will already know it wrong.

Levinas' notion of the exteriority of the ethical, the demand of the Other upon us through the immediacy of the face can provide a way to adjudicate simple ethical questions like the torture of innocent children. Looking into the face of a child and torturing him or her is for most people simply unthinkable. One does not need to plunge into one's own subjectivity -- Levinas called the self and its ontology the realm of the same, the realm of totality -- to ground a demand not to torture. The demand needs no grounding in ethical principles that themselves presuppose ontology, rather the demand is simply given in the face and eyes of the Other.  

Maybe the light we seek in the doing of ethics can be found in the face of the Other, the face which places a demand upon all of us, including managers of algorithms and writers of code. Maybe we don't have to get much deeper than that with people with whom we work. If pushed we can say we are committed to the view that the social situation with its concomitant primacy of ethical demand needs no further justification.  Wittgenstein said, of course, that the spade must stop somewhere.

We can use Levinas' starting point and build defendable, albeit somewhat superficial, but ultimately communicable ethical positions for institutions and businesses. In certain contexts we can do what Levinas does: connect the face of the Other with God through the notion of a trace.  We can always say we could go deeper if we have to. By emphasizing the exteriority of ethics we guard ourselves from falling into some totalizing project of justifying the very nature of ethics to ourselves or whoever might listen before we can deal with the concrete person standing before us. This will get us to the practical much more quickly, and give our audiences a sense that we know what we are doing as consultants without taking them through a 300 level class in philosophical ethics.  

At the end of the day in phenomenology generally one either sees the phenomena described or one does not. If the face of the child before us does not move us out of our own freedom to a position of responsibility for that child, then it is doubtful that an appeal to normative ethical theory will do so. At the end of the day, it seems, the demand of the Other upon us cannot be given an analysis in terms of some set of necessary and sufficient conditions.  While the word 'Infinite' would not have been used by Moore to characterize this non-natural intuition of the good, his claim of the irreducibility of the Good is of the same spirit as Levinas.  Both were, after all, inspired by Plato, whose Good was the presupposition both of the forms and our access to them.  

Plato's Good constitutes, with Levinas, the priority of metaphysics over ontology. The latter is ultimately an affair of the self, but the former points away from the self and towards the divine.  Levinas and Plato document that "invisible desire" towards that which is other than the self, a desire not born of a need or lack within the self, but an ecstatic desire to transcend entirely the self and its machinations. Ultimately, both knew that salvation consists not in a being otherwise, but rather in that which is otherwise than being. 

Curb, Mirror and Light

I

Lutheran theology has always been interested in the usus legis ("uses of the law"), and has argued passionately as to whether there are two usus legis or three.  

Luther oftentimes limits the law to two uses, its civil use in curbing sin, and its theological use in showing one's sinfulness and driving one to Christ.  In later Lutheran theology a third use was highlighted, a use consonant with some of what Luther sometimes said about the law.  In the second edition (1535) of his Loci, Melanchthon explicitly suggests a third use, one that functions as norming the contour of the believer's sanctified life.  

But while what I have thus far said sums up what many say about Luther and Melanchthon on the uses, neither theologian actually standardly employs the terminology of usus, preferring instead to use other phrases, e.g., Luther's use of officium legis in the 1537 Smalcald Articles connoting "office" or "function."  As a matter of fact, it was only in the wake of the Formula of Concord that usus legis became standard language in Lutheran theology.  Generations of theology students, both Reformed and Lutheran, have since learned the usus legis in this tripartite way: The one law functions in three ways: (1) to curb sin within civil society, (2) to mirror to us our sinfulness before God, and (3) to light our way in living out the sanctified life. 

Controversy about the putative "third use of the law" within Lutheran theology has centered on the issue of whether the law whose essence it is to accuse can remain law while yet being being properly employed as a guide. If the law as God's left hand always accuses, then how can it function in the grace of God's right hand to guide Christian living. One can freely adopt rules of thumb for Christian living consonant with Gospel proclamation, but these rules are not the law qua law.  

While the controversy between two or three uses of the law in Lutheran theology seemingly continues unabated, it is not my desire here to engage the historical issue further. I am rather interested in appropriating  the metaphors of curb, mirror and light spawned in the usus legis discussion for use in the context of establishing and justifying ethical standards and positions.  

II

Imagine a scenario in which Doctor Jack must make the decision as to whether to disconnect his patient Bob from life support.  Jack knows that Bob's recovery is unlikely, and realizes that as a rule of thumb, the hospital could likely not afford to keep patients like Bob on life support when the chances of recovery are so dismal.  Still Jack is reluctant to unhook Bob.  Why? 

When Fred later asked Jack why he did not unhook Bob, Jack grew pensive a moment and said the he was guided by the Hippocratic Oath and its admonition to do no harm to the patient. Since unhooking Bob seemed to Jack as an effecting of harm on Bob, Jack allowed Bob to remain connected.  He was surprised two days later to learn that, against all odds, Bob's condition had improved and he would likely survive. Dr. Jack was happy that he had not unhooked Bob, glad that he took the Hippocratic oath seriously, and relieved that Bob's condition did not simply worsen as anyone familiar with the relevant medical literature would have predicted.  Indeed, Jack felt like he had dodged a bullet, and the he himself was no less fortunate than Bob. 

III

The example illustrates the position that we often find ourselves within when reflecting about morality and ethics. In the concrete ethical situation we often find that we do start with some moral or ethical principles seemingly incumbent upon us even when we don't reflect upon them. These unthought principles do often strike us as something true to which we must conform. One might say that they strike us immediately as a curb upon are possible action.  

Jack unthinkingly affirmed keeping Bob hooked to life support, and only later in conversation with Fred tried to clarify why.  That which ought to be done simply confronted Jack, and Jack's actions were clearly curbed by that which stood over and against him.  While Doctor Jack is no philosopher, he experienced the principle of "do not harm the other" as something real, as something given to him and not constructed by him.  The principle not to harm came upon him in its otherness as law. Accordingly, one can imagine a code of such laws defining what is permissible, prohibited or obliged for a set of people in similar concrete ethical situations.  Moral and ethical codes do often successfully curb behavior. Social contexts in which they are present often appear better ordered and more efficient than when they are absent. 

But the immediacy of the encounter with this ethical other does not sustain itself over time. The curbing function of the code pushes in upon the self, exposing to the self that it has chosen the curb that curbs.  When this happens the curb becomes a mirror, a reflector of the self.    

In standing over and against the curb, the one curbed comes to know herself as part and parcel of establishing and sustaining the curb.  The curb for others becomes a mirror to the self; one recognizes one's own hand in the establishment of the curb and its perpetuation. After all, how could a curb be a curb if it is not permitted to be so? 

Clearly, one must afford recognition to the curb as Other in order for one to be curbed by it.  But in reflecting upon the putative alterity of the curb, one notices that the curb qua curb wears a human face.  Just as there are no self-identifying objects, properties, relations, events or states of affairs apart from human consciousness, neither are there self-identifying ethical norms governing our behavior without our cooperation and tacit agreement.  On closer reflection, the heternomony of the curb reveals itself as a posit of our own autonomy!  It is we after all who project curbs into nature. In staring at the face of this putative external curb, we come to recognize our face in the curb. Unfortunately, when we recognize the curb to be a projection of our own subjectivity, the power of the curb to curb is undercut. That which appeared to be objective has now become subjective, and with this we touch our own freedom. It is we who create the ethical world in which we live; it is we who are the rule makers.  The law in its externality has now become an expression of our own subjective desire, and the problem presses down upon us: How could that which we create come to judge the one who creates it?  

All of us implicitly realize that the efficiencies produced in codes that curb can last only as long as people grant the possibility that the curbing code is not merely an arbitrary and capricious projection of some arbitrary and capricious subject or subjects. 

IV

When the immediacy of the curb has been broken by the mediacy of the mirror, one is left with the question regnant in our time: How is it possible to use terms like 'good', 'evil', 'right', and 'wrong' without admitting that these appellations are deployed on the basis of my own desires, my own pleasure, and my own happiness?  How can saying 'John is bad' mean something more that I disapprove of John? 

It is here that the metaphor of light is necessary. Once one realizes that ethical properties are not baked into the universe in the same way that chemical interactions, one has a choice: Either admit that the subject devours any putative objectivity of ethics, or look for those deeper conditions that give rise to ethical predicates in the first place.  The metaphor of light points to the back-and-forth movement of reflection that is ultimately responsible both for the curbs and the mirroring that exposes such curbs as subjective.  The light of ethical reflection drives more deeply into the ultimate grounds for the law that binds.  It recognizes that the recognition of this law as driven by the subject is itself short-lived and ultimately irrational.  How indeed could it be that that ethical reality that seems so close to me, that reality that governs my behavior with respect to others, simply is a projection of me? 

After the heteronomy of the code is seen to rest in the autonomy of the subject, the subject realizes finally that there is no longer otherness, that the ought has been vanquished, and accordingly, that the deepest experience of human beings being confronted by what they ought to do -- and their not living up that ought -- is wholly counterfeit. What an irrational world the projecting self inhabits! The very experience of ought that seemingly separates human beings from the higher beasts is itself grounded upon nothing.  It tokens nothing deeper.  It is simply an unfortunate result of not taking mirroring seriously enough.  \While men and women can reason from what they want to how to get it, reason does not operate at all in establishing what they ought to want.

But here again the light shines forth. It is a light that takes up the immediate code and its negation into a higher synthesis.  It is a light that allows reason to operate not as a cipher of the self's desires, but as the logos speaking a divine order.  The light draws us more deeply into conversation.  It makes us ask how parts of the code fit together and for whom parts of the code are privileged. It asks us questions of moral theory and ethics. It distinguishes types of consequentialism and compares these types with deontological perspectives. The light seeks a comprehensive theory to stand behind the curb, a theory which points to the incapacity of the self to account ultimately for the experience of the curb. 

In the reflection of the light, we are drawn into the deeper questions of morality and ethics, questions that drive us to admit that we are not who we ought to be, and that we are not ultimately who we now are -- questions that cannot be entertained without entering deeply into the tragedy of our current situation of not being able to affirm deeply that Ground and Abyss that we cannot finally deny.  '

Human beings find themselves in fields of meaning, purpose and value that point to the Divine deeply hidden within the fissures of broken experience itself.  The light which lightens the curb and its mirror is a light whose reason is ultimately ontological, it pertains to the Being of the hidden God whose absence is present in a forgotten Cross on a lonely hill, a Cross in which time itself briefly nested.  And so it is that Curb and Mirror unite in that light that shows itself as Word.  The heteronomous and autonomous have both been cancelled yet preserved in a uneasy theonomy.  Ultimately, the Curb and Mirror must be understood from the standpoint of the Light, a light forever constituting itself as the divine in, under, around and beyond human life itself.

Sin Essential and Contingent

I must admit that I have always thought Augustine fundamentally correct when saying, "My heart is not at rest until it finds its rest in thee, O Lord."  We denizens of the finite are not completed by the finite.  We search inescapably for "more-than-ness."  The problem is that while we search for this "something more than the finite," we look for it in the only place seemingly we can look: in the finite.  So we arrive at the dilemma of human being: An inhabitant of the finite looks for the infinite, but can only apprehend the finite.  Such a situation in which an infinite grasping connects to a finite object or meaning -- "connects" in being prima facie satisfied -- produces the phenomenon of sin.  And so Calvin could claim that the human mind is a factory of idols, for it is of the very being of our being, it seems, to "elevate the conditioned to the level of the unconditioned," to use Tillich's trenchant phrase.

Now all of this is pretty standard fare for the theologian, particularly the Lutheran theologian.  We know that the human mind is a factory of idols -- though we Lutherans don't often employ these words -- and that it is of the nature of human beings that we turn away from God in unbelief, pride, idolatry and concupiscence.  While we have an "ontological thirst" towards God, towards that Infinite which can only satisfy our thirsting after completion, we find ourselves a'whoring (using the traditional language) after false gods, after those seemings within the finite that seemingly satisfy.  In so doing we turn away from the horizon of the infinite, believing that a finite bird in the hand is worth the entire bevy of the infinite.  This is unbelief.  As we turn towards the finite, we realize that the turning is ours.  It is a matter now of our identification of that within the finite that can satisfy our ontological search.  This identification is pride.  That which is not infinite, but is now to satisfy the drive towards the infinite is an idol; it is something conditional now elevated to the level of the unconditional.  And the a'whoring is something done with an almost infinite zest, an excitement of the finite beyond what the finite can support.  Such an excitement is concupiscence, a desire to devour and dominate the infinite as one's own religious and erotic ecstasy.

I have always been fairly comfortable claiming that this is the basic condition of human being.  Although I have read many things about our getting over of transcendence -- Bonhoeffer probably first -- I never seriously thought human beings could or would do it.  The imprint was just too strong. "We are but a little lower than the angels," I thought, "and surely the complexity of our consciousness, of its hopes, aspirations, motivations, reasonings, rationalizations, fears, etc., witnesses deeply to this."  As the years have churned by, it seems, I have not really lost the sense of the striking difference between human self-consciousness and the consciousness of animals.  "There is something different," I tell myself, "and this something different is the divine imprint."  But lately I have been wondering if what I tell myself is accurate, or even of much significance.  Charles Taylor's A Secular Age lays out our western plight pretty well, and there is nothing in the macros of his diagnosis of the human problem that seems to me fundamentally inaccurate.

It seems like human beings in the old North Atlantic world just are quite different now.  Many I meet appear not at all to have an ontological thirst.  While I can always satisfy myself with the hope that they do retain this nonetheless -- even though they don't know it -- this interpretation is getting more difficult to sustain.  When people look with blank eyes when one attempts to uncover the hidden religious dimension of their secularity and/or atheism, the philosopher must take a step back and at least question his assumption.  What if these people don't have an ontological thirst at all?  What if they don't try to satisfy it in all of the wrong places?  What if their seeming drive for pleasure is not prideful concupiscence grounded in idolatry, but merely a drive for pleasure?  What if human beings aren't who we theologians have always assumed them to be?  What then? 

Charles Taylor attempts to show that the ambiguity of our present situation -- there still is some haunting of transcendence, after all -- can strike a significant counterpoise to exclusive humanism, that reveling in the immanent as if the question of transcendence could be jettisoned completely.  He tries to display how certain trajectories within the immanent are cross-pressured by the question of transcendence, though now of a post-modern and "excarnational" type.  So for him, at least, the ontological thirst is still somehow present, though perhaps not directly experienced as thirst.  It is as if one had a physical malady that disallowed the experience of thirst, so that one would identify one's states by certain of one's actions.  So the traditional strategy is not fundamentally different for Taylor.  One still has the condition, after all, even if one is not experiencing it.  So we are left with the question:  What if there is no ontological thirst at all?  What if the having of it was merely a stage in the history of consciousness, and not an element in the structure of consciousness?

I am enough of a philosopher to know that I can't really pull a rabbit out of the hat.  If there is no ontological thirst as an element in the structure of consciousness, then the transcendent fall into sin is problematic.  If this is the case, then the paradise story is not an exemplification of a timeless condition, a story that is true because it states in narrative form what deeply is: We temporal voyagers are existentially not somehow who we essentially are, and the gap between our existence and our essence is manifest as sin.  If there is no universal ontological thirst, even an unexperienced universal ontological thirst, then our sin and salvation, our capacity to thirst, to wander into idolatry, unbelief, pride and concupiscence, is a thoroughgoingly contingent, historical-conditioned state of affairs.  It does not have to be that way, and, indeed, it is becoming less so.  So what then?

At this time all that is left is preaching.  Preaching does not uncover the structures of consciousness so that they are accordingly recognized, but changes the contour of consciousness.  It creates.  Verbum dei manet in aeternum not because of the underlying structures it brings to expression, but because of the new realities it creates, realities of sin and salvation.  Accordingly, preaching the law really does create sin -- or at least what we denizens of the North Atlantic countries have traditionally identified as sin.  (There is much that needs to be said here, but I am not saying it now.)  That there are very sizable tensions here with traditional theological assertions goes without saying.  But theological tensions are nothing new.  Since the time of the Enlightenment, it has been extraordinarily difficult to provide a coherent theological account of God and world.  Tensions abound; it is a question for the theologian of what one can live with.  If one wants to take seriously the possibility that exclusive humanism may become the dominant ethos in our part of the world, and that this humanism is not delusionally occluding a more profound ontological structure, then we have to talk seriously about the contingency of that which we once thought essential.  That this places even more importance on the reality of the preached Word both in law and gospel is not something that Lutheran theologians will find surprising.