Reading “Pre-understanding Scripture” (2008): Then and Now

In November 2008 I published a short reflection on this blog titled “Pre-understanding Scripture.” It was not technical. It did not speak of teleo-spaces, determinability, or the excess of meaning over form. It was an attempt to name something that many pastors and thoughtful Christians were feeling but struggling to articulate: the sense that Scripture no longer appeared with the ontological confidence it once had.

Over the last twelve months that small piece has received nearly 1,000 reads.

That fact alone is worth reflection.

In that 2008 post, I argued that what had shifted was not merely interpretation but pre-understanding. The Bible had ceased, for many, to be pre-understood as that upon which the ultimate significance of one’s being depended. It had become one important text among others—valuable, even cherished—but no longer ontologically decisive. The internal clarity of Scripture could not arise because Scripture was no longer encountered as the kind of thing for which clarity was at issue.

I leaned heavily then on Heidegger’s account of pre-understanding. We dwell within contexts of significance. We do not construct them at will. The Reformers inhabited a world in which Scripture was already trusted as authoritative and therefore could display itself as internally clear. Our world does not share that pre-understanding. I ended starkly: hermeneutical helplessness is not neutrality.

Reading that post now, nearly two decades later, I recognize both its strength and its incompleteness.

Its strength was phenomenological honesty. It named the fissure between text and trust. It recognized that pre-understandings are not engineered by evidence or intensified by technique. It sensed that the question of Scripture’s clarity is inseparable from the ontological horizon within which Scripture appears at all.

But it did not yet provide a full ontological account of that horizon.

In 2008 I could describe the loss of ontological confidence, but I had not yet articulated what must be the case for Word to count as Word. I had not yet developed the distinction between formal derivability and semantic satisfaction. I had not yet argued that intelligibility itself is real, irreducible, and not constituted by subjectivity. I had not yet named the teleological space within which determinate claims can appear as meaningful rather than merely asserted.

In short, I had diagnosed the darkness without yet offering a disciplined account of light.

The work of the past years has been an attempt to do precisely that. What ontological conditions must obtain for Scripture to bear meaning that is not reducible to historical reconstruction or communal projection? Why is intelligibility not simply a product of interpretive communities? Why can clarity not be manufactured, and yet not be merely nostalgic?

The older post remains relevant because the problem it names has not disappeared. We still inhabit a cultural world in which Scripture often appears as one document among many, where authority is functional rather than ontological, and where clarity seems implausible because trust seems implausible.

But the answer cannot be exhortation. It cannot be the repetition of slogans about sufficiency. Nor can it be engineered by spiritual technique.

The task is deeper. It is to clarify the conditions under which clarity is even possible.

If “Pre-understanding Scripture” continues to find readers, perhaps it is because it touched the right question, even if it did not yet have the full conceptual architecture to answer it. The thread is continuous. The early reflection named the fracture. The later work seeks to articulate the ontological ground that makes Word possible at all.

The problem has not changed. The tools have.

And perhaps that is why a short piece from 2008 still quietly circulates.

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.

Why Theosis is Nothing to Fear: A Patient Lesson in Logic, Participation, and Peace of Mind

From the earliest centuries of Christian theology, believers have spoken with remarkable boldness about salvation. Few statements are bolder than the one found in Irenaeus of Lyons and later given its most famous expression by Athanasius of Alexandria:

αὐτὸς γὰρ ἐνηνθρώπησεν, ἵνα ἡμεῖς θεοποιηθῶμεν

"He became human, so that we might be made godlike."

From the beginning, however, this claim was never intended as a denial of the Creator–creature distinction. It was a disciplined way of speaking about the depth of salvation rather than its confusion.

For many modern readers—especially within Protestant traditions—the sentence can nevertheless trigger immediate alarm. It sounds as though something essential has been crossed. Are we saying that human beings become divine? Does the line between Creator and creature dissolve? Has Christian theology slipped into myth, mysticism, or, some fear, even blasphemy?

Historically, such reactions have been intense. In the late nineteenth century, Adolf von Harnack recoiled from the language of deification, convinced that it represented a corruption of Christianity by Greek metaphysics or mystery religions. Much later, similar anxiety resurfaced in German reactions to the Finnish Luther research associated with Tuomo Mannermaa. The response was often emotional, even fearful. Something, it was thought, was about to collapse.

That fear is understandable. We can make no progress in understanding God’s grace and the justification of the sinner if we lose what Luther presupposed: the infinite qualitative distinction between the divine and the human. If that distinction collapses, grace ceases to be grace.

But the fear ultimately rests on a confusion—one that can be removed once we slow down and attend carefully to what is actually being claimed.

The Christian tradition never meant the crude slogan, “God became human so that humans might stop being human.” What it consistently meant was something far more careful, and far more faithful:

God became human while remaining God, so that the human might become godlike while remaining human.

The question, then, is not whether the claims of theosis are dangerous. Claims that salvation involves human beings becoming, in some sense, godlike are not in themselves dangerous. The real question is whether we understand the logic of the relations involved—and therefore why these claims do not threaten the faith.

To see why these fears arise, and why they are unnecessary, we need to pause and learn a few very simple but powerful logical distinctions.

Step One: What Is a Relation?

A relation tells us how things are connected. “Is taller than,” “is the parent of,” “is identical with,” and “depends upon” are all relations. Theology uses relations constantly, often without noticing that it is doing so.

What matters is that different relations behave differently. Once we fail to notice how a relation behaves, we begin drawing conclusions that do not actually follow.

Step Two: Four Basic Logical Features

A relation is reflexive if everything in a domain is related to itself. Identity is reflexive: I am identical to myself. Participation is not reflexive. Nothing participates in itself.

A relation is symmetric if it runs both directions. “Is married to” is symmetric. If A is married to B, then B is married to A. Participation is not symmetric. If a creature participates in God, God does not participate in the creature.

A relation is transitive if it carries across chains. “Is taller than” is transitive. Some relations behave this way; others do not.

A relation is connected if everything can be compared with everything else. A total ranking—such as the natural numbers—is connected. Many relations are not. Some things are simply incomparable. Consider the British constitution, the feeling of remorse, and the number 1729 with respect to the relation “higher than.” Nothing follows.

These features determine what follows from what. Most theological anxiety arises when one of them is silently assumed where it does not belong.

In particular, trouble arises when reflexivity, symmetry, and transitivity are combined into what logicians call an equivalence relation. Equivalence relations divide reality into mutually exclusive regions. Identity is the clearest example.

What critics of theosis often fear is precisely this: that the divine and the human are being identified—placed in the same ontological region. This is what is meant by ontological collapse, and conscientious theologians are right to reject it.

Step Three: Why Theosis Has Frightened People

Historically, fear surrounding theosis has taken four recurring forms:

• If creatures participate in God, then creatures must become divine.

• If divine attributes relate to one another, they must collapse into one another.

• If union with Christ is real, it must be an emanation of divine being.

• If justification is participatory, it must become hierarchical.

Each of these outcomes would indeed be disastrous.

But each rests on the same mistake: smuggling into the relation logical features that it does not, in fact, possess.

Step Four: Three Distinct Senses of Participation

Here is the crucial point. Participation does not name a single relation. At least three distinct senses are at work in the tradition.

Platonic participation describes the relation between a particular and what gives it form. A table participates in tableness. This relation is not reflexive, not symmetric, and not transitive. It does not rank beings or place them on a ladder. Nothing here threatens the Creator–creature distinction.

Neoplatonic participation introduces hierarchy. Higher realities flow into lower ones. This relation is transitive and often treated as connected. Everything lines up on a single scale. This is the metaphysical background of the “great chain of being.” If this were the logic of theosis, fear would be justified.

Constitutive participation is the relation that actually matters for theology. One reality grounds another without absorbing it. A foundation supports a house without becoming the house. A promise establishes a relationship without erasing the persons involved.

Logically, this relation is not reflexive, not symmetric, is transitive, and—crucially—not connected. There is direction without hierarchy. Dependence without ranking.

This is the logical space in which strong theological claims can be made without ontological collapse.

Step Five: Hearing Theosis Calmly

Once these distinctions are in place, the classic affirmations of theosis no longer sound reckless. They sound precise.

• Creatures participate in God without becoming divine, because participation is not identity.

• Divine attributes determine one another without collapsing into one another, because determination is not equivalence.

• Union with Christ is real without being emanative, because grounding is not a flow of substance.

• Justification is decisive without being hierarchical, because not all relations form ladders.

The fear that has haunted theosis has always been the fear of collapse. That fear dissolves when our logic is disciplined.

Properly understood, theosis is not speculative excess. It is a careful confession of grace. And grace—when spoken carefully—never abolishes what God has made.

The Scandal of the Theology of the Cross

I

The cross has been a scandal in every age.  It subverts our dreams and overturns our idealisms.  Human nobility and spirituality die upon this cross.[1]  It stands in opposition to the values of the world, the values summed up in the expression “theology of glory.”  Because, as Luther says, “Crux sola est nostra theologia” (“the cross alone is our theology”), it follows that the cross is opposed to all theologies of glory.[2]  But what is a theology of glory, and how must it be understood over and against a theology of the cross?

As soon as we reflect upon this, other questions naturally arise.  What is the best in man?   What is it that makes human beings noble?  What gives men and women dignity?  In answering this, we might start with the following catalog of human virtues, those characteristics seemingly separating us from the other primates.  Human beings:

·        have an eternal soul.

·        are bearers of reason.

·        possess free will and inhabit a moral order.

·        can actualize their potentiality.

·        have a taste for the Infinite.

·        can know the truth, do the good, and appreciate beauty.

·        understand justice and law as their highest good.

·        know God to be the foundation of truth, goodness and beauty. 

Theologies of glory understand that human and divine being stand on a continuum with human being either participating in divine being, or instantiating properties normally associated with the divine.  Theologies of glory can be stronger or weaker to the degree to which they instantiate divine being or divine attributes.  My favorite expression of a theology of glory comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson whose poem “Worship” has these memorable lines:

This is [He], who, deaf to prayers,

Floods with blessings unawares.

Draw, if thou canst, the mystic line,

Severing rightly his from thine,

Which is human, which divine.

The line between the two is difficult to draw because human beings are the embodiment of the highest aim of God, and God is the projection of the highest sentiments of humanity.  Thus, it is a challenge to know where the one leaves off and the other begins.  

Human beings are created in imago dei and, although this divine image is now tarnished by the waywardness of sin, it still shines forth weakly within human hearts.  Accordingly, human beings, through greater or lesser degrees of effort and divine succor, must work to polish up that which is now tarnished.     

An historically important theology of glory was bequeathed to us by a famous philosopher living over 400 years before Christ. The Greek philosopher Plato claimed that while the human soul bears the marks of the divine world from which it fell, e.g., indestructibility, simplicity and eternity, and while its essence is to be without a body, it has unfortunately been joined to matter in the veil of tears of this life.  At death, however, the sickness of the soul’s involvement with the body is healed as it sheds the corporeal forever and lives in eternity beyond the temporal.   Throughout the ancient world, the Greek idea of the immortal soul formed the intellectual backdrop on which Christ’s death and resurrection were understood. 

While time does not permit me to sketch out representative theologies of glory in the western tradition, one must at least point to a dominant early one: Neo-Platonism.  This philosophy held that all things are ultimately ONE and that this ONE in the course of history flows out of itself into Nous, then into the World-Soul, and finally into the alienated world of matter. Salvation demands that material men and women become more spiritual as they are freed from the corruption of the flesh and returned to the ONE from which they have been separated but to which they essentially belong.  Christian variations emphasized that God sends grace which is infused in believers so that they might become more spiritual and return to God.   

By the sixteenth century, Neo-Platonism had waned, but the impulse of the theologian of glory remained. The idea was that God gives human beings particular laws and that humans must act in accordance with those laws in order to be close to God.  To act in accordance is to be just; to not act in accordance is to be unjust.  In Luther’s time it was widely thought that as a person is just when he acts in accordance with divine law, so is God just when he rewards likes for likes.  God’s justice demands He punish sin and save the sinless. 

However, because humanity is not sinless, God had to give grace that either makes the believer sinless enough for God not to punish, or which “covers” sinners such that if somebody makes some small effort towards God, an effort within the power of the person (‘fac quod in se ipsum’), God does not deny His grace (‘facienti quod in se est Deus non denegat gratiam’).  God justly acts to reward the sinner who has worked merit congruent with his or her ability (meritum de congruo) as if he or she had actually worked a merit worthy of salvation itself (meritum de condigno).  Because of Christ, the wretched faltering steps towards God the believer makes in this life are regarded by God to be as if they were worthy of salvation.    

It is not important that we follow all the specifics here. The theological tradition is rich in reflection on the nature of justification.  Suffice it to say that, for Lutherans, a person’s justification and salvation are coninstantiated.  Conceptually, it is impossible for one to be justified and not saved, or for one to be saved and not justified.  Accordingly, it is a necessary truth that ‘x is justified just in case x is saved’.  A theology of glory understands that proximity to God is a function of the worldly instantiation of properties that perfectly and properly apply to God.  

II

What then is a theology of the cross?  While a theology of glory understands the presence of God as a worldly manifestation of properties like those of God, a theology of the cross finds the divine presented sub specie contrario, that is, underneath its contrary.  Thus, a theology of the cross finds God where one least expects to find God: in weakness, in suffering, in death, in finitude.  Whereas the theologian of glory locates God in the divine apathei of detachment, peace and impassibility, the theologian of the cross finds God in despair, suffering, and emotional turmoil.  

In 1518, 35 year-old Martin Luther gave a presentation at the Augustinian monastery in Heidelberg in which he provided a classic distinction between a theologian of glory and a theologian of the cross.    

(19) Non ille digne theologus dicitur, qui invisibilia Dei per ea, quae facta sunt, intellecta conspicit.  (20) Sed qui visibilia et posteriori Dei per passiones et crucem conspecta intelligit.   [(19) That person is not worthy to be called a theologian who perceives the invisible things of God as understood through things that have occurred.  (20) But who understands the visible and “back side” of God through the perception of his passion and cross.]³ 

The theologian of glory in thesis 19 is one who looks at how the world is in order to get a clue about how God is. Since God is like the world in that both are measured by goodness, the better the world is, the better or closer the divine source and goal of existence itself is. This theologian expects to find God where there is maximum goodness.  Luther says that this theologian of glory is not worthy to be called a theologian. 

Rather, the one worthy to be called a theologian is he or she who understands that what can be known of God is available only by looking at the cross.  The theologian of the cross finds God precisely where one would not expect Him to be found: in His ignoble suffering and death on the cross.    

The ancient notion of the anologia entis claims that there is an analogy between the being of God and the being of the world.  When the world is a particular way, then God must be a particular way.  But the one who searches for God in this way always misses Him, says Luther.  Instead of moving from how the world is to how God is, the theologian of the cross finds God in how the world is not.  She finds God in how Christ is!  God is not discerned by looking lovingly at the world, but by looking at the One who, by his crucifixion and death, looked lovingly at us.  God is found in Jesus Christ and only there, and this is precisely not where we would expect to find him. Luther says it clearly in thesis 21:

 (21) Theologus gloriae dicit malum bonum et bonum malum, Theologus crucis dicit id quod res est.  [The theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil; the theologian of the cross calls a thing what it is.]⁴   

While the theologian of glory sees through creation and finds God at the ground or source of it, the theologian of the cross finds God revealed in the desolation of the cross.  While the theologian of glory uses analogy in order to reason to what God is like, the theologian of the cross admits that God remains hidden in his worldly actions, and that He reveals Himself only when and where he wills it: on the cross and in the proclamation of that cross. The theologian of the cross proclaims God’s presence in the midst of His apparent absence.  

Instead of the soul being liberated by divine grace to fly closer to God, the theologian of the cross declares the death of the soul and the dissolution of the self.  While the theologian of glory assumes some continuity between the divine and human, the theologian of the cross exploits their discontinuity.  The old being dies and the new rises and takes its place.  It is not that the eternal essence of a man needs readjustment, it is rather that the old Adam in us is put to death and the New man in Christ is constituted in his stead.  There is no perdurance of individual substance across the domains of the old and new.  

III

So we have now sketched the salient difference between the theology of the cross and the theology of glory.  What is the problem?   Clearly, the cross is unpopular and does not fit well into the intellectual and cultural horizon of our time. Could we not say, in fact, that there is a “crisis of the cross” in our time?  Few any longer understand this distinction.  Theologians who should know better tacitly yet assume a profound relation between moral goodness and the divine.  It is as if one climbs up one’s own ladder high enough one can jump over to heaven itself!  Why is it that we find theologies of glory plausible?  Is it that we no longer understand the distinction between the theology of the cross and that of glory?

I don’t believe that the crisis is found in our not seeming to understand this crucial distinction. Lutherans from many different theological trajectories seem to grasp it. The problem, I shall argue, is that certain moves within Lutheran theology have made it difficult to state meaningfully the truth-conditions upon which the distinction between the theology of the cross and the theology of glory must ultimately be grounded.  How is it that this is possible? 

Theology is a discourse, and like other kinds of discourses, it is concerned with meaning and truth, the realm of semantics.  Classically, the semantics of theological propositions was assumed to be more or less realist. Terms like ‘God’ were thought to refer to a determinate being, while relational terms like ‘creates’ referred to a relational property of that divine determinate being by which that being brought that complex state of affairs referred to by ‘world’ into being.   Prima facie, to say that a person does not deserve to be called a theologian who “looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were perceptible in those things that have actually happened," is to deny the statement claiming that there is some divine being such that humans perceive something of the existence and properties of that being by perceiving some set of events within the universe.  

At this point it is necessary to make things very precise.  The theologian of the glory palpably holds that there is a divine being, and there is a universe that is not divine but created by that divine being, and there are sentient human beings such that these beings can perceive some set of events in the universe, and their perception of this class of events within the universe rationally justifies these human beings to hold that a particular set of properties is instantiated by that divine being.  I shall term this the epistemic formulation of the theology of glory because it refers both to events and the perception or the knowing of those events.   Let us make this even more perspicuous: 

(1)  There is some x such that x is divine, and some y such that y is the universe, and x is not y, and there are some z such that z perceive events E in y, and z are rationally justified to hold that x has property set S on the basis of z’s perception of E in y.   

Those holding to (1) are theologians of glory, while those denying (1) are not.  This much is clear.  Luther would hold that theologians of glory and theologians of the Cross constitute an exclusive disjunction.  Accordingly, not to be theologian of glory is to be a theologian of the cross, and vice versa.  This epistemological formulation concerns states of knowing and is a weaker formulation of the theology of glory than the following: 

(1’) There is a divine being and a universe distinct from that being, such that a particular class of events within the universe is manifest if and only if a particular cluster of properties is present within the divine being. 

This ontological formulation of the theology of glory can be clarified as follows:  

(2)  There is an x such that x is divine and a y such that y is the universe, and x is not y, such that property set P obtains in y if and only if property set S obtains in x.  

It is this stronger ontological formulation of which I am most interested.  It is crucial now to notice that the theologian of the cross can deny (2) in either of two ways I will call (3) and (3’). 

(3)  It is not the case that there is an x such that x is divine and a y such that y is the universe, and x is not y, such that property set P obtains in y if and only if property set S obtains in x.  

(3') There is an x such that x is divine and a y such that y is the universe and x is not y, such that it is not the case that property set P obtains in y if and only if property set S obtains in x.  

Clearly, (3’) does not simply deny the entire ontological formulation, but rather a part of it.  Accordingly, one affirming (3’) would claim:

(4) There is a divine being and a universe distinct from that being, such that it is false that a particular class of events within the universe is manifest if and only if a particular cluster of properties is instantiated by that divine being. 

The theologian of the cross affirms the existence of God and a universe distinct from God, but nonetheless denies the analogy of being, that is, that the presence of a set of events in the universe is tied to the instantiation of divine properties.  Any covariance in property distributions across the temporal and eternal is denied.  A world of perfect moral order does not a better God make, nor does a perfect God make a better world.  The cross forever undercuts the natural human proclivity to identify God as the mathematical limit of the maximization of the Good, the True and the Beautiful. 

At this point a dizzying variety of senses of the epistemological and ontological formulations might be investigated as to their meaning in order to make possible precise senses undergirding Luther’s thesis 19.  However, this is not the issue about which I am concerned.  What I am concerned with is that my semantic formulation here presupposes a particular ontological contour, a contour that much of Lutheran theology no longer assumes. 

IV

Since the time of Kant academic theology on Lutheran soil has denied both the epistemological formulations and ontological formulations of theology of the cross.  Why is this?  I believe it is because it has assumed that God is not a substance that in principle can possess properties or be engaged in important kinds of relations – particularly the relation of causality.  But if God is not a being having properties, then what is God? 

Schleiermacher famously claimed that God is the whence of the feeling of absolute dependence.  Fichte talked of God as the infinite striving of the ego in positing the non-ego, and ultimately the world as the backdrop of moral striving.  Hegel understood God to be the Absolute Spirit coming to consciousness of Godself in time through human consciousness: God is God in Spirit coming to consciousness of itself through relating to what is seemingly other to it.  Ritschl and his school downplayed metaphysical assertions about God and spoke only of the effect of that which is other than the world.  Barth was strongly opposed to the liberal theology of Ritschl, Harnack and company, and spoke of God as the totaliter aliter, the “wholly other” of human experience.   God is thus “wholly other” than being, just as He is “wholly other” than non-being.  Other theologians have spoken of God in such ways as the infinite fore-grasp of the illimitability of Being in every act of thinking particular being (Rahner), or as a type of being of God such that God is not being God (Scharleman), or as a primal matrix (Reuther).  

The problem here is that even if one could clarify what it is that one is meaning by “God being God only when God is not being God” or God as Henry Nelson Wieman’s “primal event,” it is not clear why such diverse referents should be called by the same name, nor is it clear what exactly could be meant by Luther’s thesis 19 when the referent of ‘God’ changes so radically under different interpretations. 

The problem here is that theologians have not paid sufficient attention to the “depth grammar” of their statements.   ‘Jack fishes from a bank’ means quite different things when ‘bank’ means ‘an institution allowing the deposit of money’ on the one hand, and ‘that which abuts a creek’ on the other hand.   While the surface grammar of ‘God is in Christ reconciling the world to Himself’ can be held constant in various languages in which the locution is used, the depth grammar, the propositions actually expressed or the states of affairs actually named vary greatly across theological schools. 

What I am talking about is the need to specify clearly semantic models for theological statements.  Such models would include the domain of those entities about which we are speaking, and predicates which clearly delineate to which entities they properly apply. What theological model is specifiable either for the ontological interpretation of the theology of glory or its theology of the cross denial if God is not a substance – that is, a being that perdures through time – and God cannot be causally related to any entities within the universe? 

V

Imagine a Bultmannian view of things where there is no being having divine properties or attributes and no being that is the second person of the Trinity that actually has the properties of divinity and humanity.  Further imagine a Bultmannian view of things in which the proclamation of certain locutions is itself a performative use of language in which existential empowerment can occur in the listener.  On this view of things, the semantics of the statement ‘Christ is raised from the dead’ does not refer to a state of affairs in which there is a particular being such that this being had the property of death then afterward life.  The semantics instead has meaning on the basis of transformed existential horizons in its hearing.  

While Bultmann could speak of a theology of the Cross, and could even accept Luther’s thesis 19, he would not be meaning by that either the epistemic or ontological formulations given above.  He would be meaning by it something quite complicated pertaining to horizons of expectation and empowerment in a succession of historical beings having particular existential constitutions.  Perhaps we might rework (3’) into (3’’) as follows:

(3'’) Although there is no x such that x is divine and a y such that y is the universe and x is not y, one can use locutions like ‘God’s power is found in weakness’ in order to effect a particular existential empowerment, or ground a use of proclamation language to effect existential empowerment, in some sentient hearer S, such that S is empowered in the face of fundamental anxieties to still discern some future open for S, that is that S’s facticity is not wholly determinative of S’s being. 

The attempt to specify the distinction between the theologian of glory and the theologian of the cross is not easy at all for the Bultmannian who has abandoned traditional semantic theological models. 

We have no time here to work any of this out, but the point should be clear enough. In the absence of a traditional, realist semantics of theological language, it is very difficult to state clearly the distinction between the theologian of the cross and the theologian of glory.  However, the last 200 years of academic theology has tended not to work with a realist semantics for theological language.  It has indeed tacitly rejected semantic realism, the assertion that theological statements have truth values even when we are in no position evidentially to ascertain their truth.  On the rejection of a semantics that talks about states of affairs and property instantiation, then how might one characterize what a theology of the cross is?  Is it merely an expression of existential orientations or psychological attitudes?  Does it not then merely reduce to human expressions of engineering our futures or allowing our future to bestow itself graciously upon us?

Much more needs to be said to establish this clearly, but maybe this can get the ball rolling.  My contention is that the distinction between the theology of the cross and the theology of glory cannot be sustained if a realist semantics is not presupposed.  However, for almost 200 years a realist semantics has not been presupposed.  Therefore, the distinction is no longer clear to us.  This is the scandal of the theology of the cross.  It is a formal, not a material scandal.  The necessary condition for the latter scandal is for the former scandal to be assuaged.  Since I believe in the theological importance of the material scandal, my hope is ultimately to undercut the ground on which the formal scandal appears to rest. 

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[1] ‘Cross’ here means the entire narrative of the crucified and risen Jesus.   See Gerhard Forde, On Being a Theologian of the Cross (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 1997), 1.  

[2] WA 5, 176:32 (Operationes).  

[3] WA 1, 350:17-20. 

[4] WA 1, 350: 21-22. 

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Lutheran Presuppositions

The old joke is that if you put three serious Lutherans in a room together, you will discover three distinct, and clearly defendable, theological traditions.  (Some say that you will find four or more traditions.)  The story illustrates a truth about Lutherans in North America: They have often not played well together!

While the disputes are many, I believe they have to do today primarily with hermeneutics, the locus of authority, and the ontology of the divine, justification and ecclesiology. I believe that the deepest issues confronting (and sometimes separating Lutherans) are oftentimes not how the issues present themselves at the congregational level.  Issues of women's ordination, the blessing of same sex relationships and marrying of same sex couples, human rights and social justice proclamations, closed communion, infant baptism, contemporary worship and use of early church liturgies, Biblical reliability concerning scientific and historical fact, etc., all do divide rank and file Lutherans and Lutheran congregations.   Some of the issues still remain quite venomous, notably differences on closed/open communion, women's ordination and LBGT issues.   Some issues of disagreement seem no longer rancorous.  (The truth of young earth creationism seems not to inculcate much disagreement these days in the lives of most Lutheran congregations.)

In this brief article, my concern is neither to do a careful historical reading of Lutheran traditions to uncover salient differences among them, nor to construct a typology which would list the necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of any of these terms: "Evangelical Catholic," "midwestern pietist" or "Lutheran pietism," "radical Lutheranism," "Lutheran repristination," "Lutheran renewal," "Lutheran fundamentalism," "Lutheran high church movement," etc.  All could be precisely defined, but any prescription of proper application will likely nonetheless be violated in practice. (Lutheran theologians have not always been charitable in the application of such terms to their Lutheran brothers and sisters.)

What I want to do is to go to the deeper level and explore the presuppositions that make it possible for Lutherans often simply to talk past one another.  Acceptance of presuppositions as fact or "just the way things are" produce theological "spins" making it difficult for Lutherans of one persuasion to ascribe rationality, good intentions or sometimes basic comity to those with whom they disagree.  The problem is that the discussion of the issues remains unsatisfying and superficial when the contour of deeper presuppositions is ignored. 

In what follows, I am sacrificing scholarly precision and sourcing for boldness.  (I figure that at some point in life, one must get bolder and I have endeavored to do so in recent years.)  Part of being bold, is leaving the safe harbor of proper theological speaking in order to make broader points. Perhaps what I am doing here is "proto-theological."

Below is my list of the profound presuppositions or "pictures" (Wittgenstein) that do divide Lutherans.  While each of these have theological ramifications, often the presupposition itself has little to do with theology.  At the end of this reflection, I want to tie these presuppositions together somewhat.  So what is my list of presupposition within early 21st century Lutheran theology?

• The Relationship of the Meaningful Content of Scripture and the Historical Conditions from which it Arose.  Lutherans of all persuasions declare that the Scriptures are the norm and source of faith, life (and theology).  They differ markedly, however, on what exactly constitutes the meaningful content of Scripture.  Is the meaning of Scripture found in the Biblical text itself, in the interaction of the Biblical text with the reader (informed by the Holy Spirit), or in the Biblical text as it is understood in the context of its formation, original audience, and transmission?  Simply put, to what degree does historical criticism (textual, source, form, redaction, etc.) and literary criticism help uncover the proper meaning of the text?  Differences of opinion about putative Biblical injunctions against homoerotic behavior, the role of women in leading worship, and the practice of closed communion pertain to the issue of how knowledge of the wider religio-historical context (both diachronic and synchronic), and knowledge of textual formation and intentionality affect the actual meaning of the text.  Lutherans in the pews saying "their Bible says this" have often been astounded to find their theologians saying that it really says something quite different if one has the requisite ability to penetrate back beyond the text into the horizon of its formation and original reception.  

• The Question of Proper Authority in Theological Adjudication and Communal Practice.  While all Lutherans speak of Scripture as properly norming faith, they disagree as to the authority of the norm.  Traditional Catholic theology understood Scripture to be of sufficient complexity that it was unlikely that non-learned readings could successfully interpret Scripture correctly.  A teaching magisterium was needed to guarantee proper interpretation of the text.  Rejecting this, Lutherans argued that the Scripture alone was the proper norm and the sole authority for faith and life.  But this works only if Scripture has external perspicuity, that it's meaning is sufficiently lucid that it can, in principle, work to adjudicate theological issues.  An objectivity of the text is presupposed as the sine qua non of effective norming.  However, if the very meaning of the text is at issue and its meaning oftentimes identified (discovered?, constructed?) on the basis  of theological (or other) criteria, then the danger is that the real authority in textual meaning is the interpreter.   But if the text's objectivity is determined by the subjectivity of the interpreter (and the interpretive community in which that interpreter stands), then the putative externality of the Word of God can become the mere documentation of the subject's hermeneutical virtuosity.  (None of this would have surprised the Catholic theological faculty at Tuebingen in the mid-nineteenth century.)  Adding the Holy Spirit to the mix does not seem to overcome this basic problem, for the activity of the Holy Spirit in making external clarity internal nonetheless presupposes the moment of external perspicuity.  

• The Ontology of the Divine.  Most Lutherans do not realize that their commitment to presuppositions of ontological and epistemological realism concerning the divine determine what they think is possible in theology.  Does God (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) exist apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language?  Does human confrontation with divine determine the ontic contour of the divine?  Does God bring about causally that which would not have happened were He not to have willed it?  Simply put, is our language about God, His properties, and His causal relations with the universe and His children within it simply a language that clarifies human religious experience (feeling, willing, knowing, doing)?   If it does nevertheless refer to God, does it refer to the divine realm symbolically, such that the affirmation of divine qualities and causal powers point to the depth of being, a region in principle incapable of sustaining causal relations with ontic reality?   Clearly, if one believes that there is a God who exists on His own apart from human consciousness -- a God that has a primal intent upon creation -- then questions about "God changing His mind" will be understood in a far different way than if reference to God is conceived as a way of clarifying (or pointing to the limits of) human experience.  If one regards theo-physical causality as possible, then one will find it difficult to move from the methodology of scientific naturalism to a full-fledge metaphysic of scientific naturalism and the concomitant causal closure of the physical.  Moreover, if one believes God is not the kind of being who can in principle have causal power -- maybe God is like the set of all sets -- then one's views about the events of the early universe and macro neo-Darwinian evolution will likely be much different than one who does assert divine causality.   Clearly, the clear contour of Scripture's meaningful content will likely be different for the one holding the causal closure of the physical and the one rejecting it.  

• The Ontology of Justification.  Does justification constitute an actual transformation of human life, or is it merely a change in divine judgment about the conditions of that life?   (I don't want to engage the distinction between justification and sanctification, or weigh in here on whether "sanctification is merely getting used to justification.")  If there exists divine causality -- if the Holy Spirit is causally involved in human life -- then God's just-making and sanctifying does bring about some state of affairs that would not have happened otherwise.  (Some claim that religion at its depth is a path of transformation.)   Forensic justification can be understood causally as well, of course, for if God really exists, and really does divinely impute sinlessness to the sinner, than some state of salvific affairs is brought about that would not have happened otherwise.  However, if God does not exist apart from human awareness, perception, conception or language, and if God thereby has no causal powers, then justification seemingly must be construed finally subjectively; it pertains to the psychology of the "believer." 

• The Ontology of the Church.  What is the church?  Is it an association of individuals receiving the gifts of God, or is it somehow the Body of Christ effective in bestowing these gifts upon its members and the world?  One's views about the contour of ecclesial being will be determined in part by the one's views about divine reality itself.  If one believes there is a divine being with divine properties and divine causal powers, then one's view of the Church will likely be far different than if one believes there is no such being.  On the former, the Church can have a mystical, sacramental reality, but on the latter it must be finally understood on the basis of human community.  On the former, the authority of Law is grounded in the reality of God, on the latter it emerges out of the life of the community itself, and can be changed as communal life changes.  Obviously, one's views of LBGT issues will likely be quite different if one thinks there is an entity with divine properties and causal powers authorizing divine Law rather than the divine Law being an expression of, or somehow supervening upon, the life of the community.  

What is important here is to recognize that the questions of the ontology of the divine and the normativity and authority of the Biblical text finally come together.  If Holy Scriptures are reliable, normative and have proper authority, then they witness to a God with divine properties and causal powers.   The move to afford ontological status to the divine thus seemingly rests on one's view about the perspicuity and epistemological reliability of the Biblical texts.  Conversely, if one is convinced that the Enlightenment critique of the divine -- particularly in its Kantian form -- requires one to become an irrealist with respect to the divine and divine causal power, then one will likely be committed to a closed naturalistic metaphysic that makes it much more likely that one must interpret the meaningful content of the Biblical texts in light of the historico-politico-sociologico-economico interests and context in which they emerged.   

So underneath the difference among Lutheran is a very simply difference in presuppositions.  One presupposition is that God is real and language about God says what is true or false about the divine.  Another presupposition is that God's being is of an ideal or linguistic order, that it is forever related to human awareness, perception, conception and language.  Those holding the first view are more apt to hold a very high view of Scripture, believing that there is an objectivity to the meaningful content of Scripture -- even if this objectivity does utilize much of the machinery of the historical-critical method.  Scripture has authority because it reveals most reliable truths about the real God. Those holding to the ideality or linguisticality of God, are more apt to emphasize the historical conditions from which Scripture emerged.  Here the authority of Scripture tends to rest more in the traditions of its employment, and its place within the life of the Church generally.   Clearly, what is permissible hermeneutically is quite different on the first view than the second. 

Blog posts are supposed to be short, and I will endeavor not to violate that expectation.  What I am suggesting in this brief post is something quite simple, that is, that a high-view -- one might say a "non-natural" view -- of Scriptural authority and normativity links nicely with the notion that God is ultimately non-natural, having, as it were, sufficient non-natural causal power to affect the natural order.  Alternately, a natural view of Scripture -- a causal story of how Scripture arose out of community stories written down for community purposes -- connects with an irrealist view of God and the concomitant position that the myths and rituals of this God emerged in the evolution of human life, and that while this God may be the most noble and lofty idea of the human life, it nonetheless remains causally inert with respect to the central problem of human life: How can I be saved?   Clearly, it is reasonable to expect the practice of hermeneutics under the first picture to be far different than one finds it practiced under the second.