Luther and Ontology I

Metaphysics was clearly a going concern in the late Middle Ages. There was controversy of many kinds related, of course, to issues within medieval semantics. The common belief was that there must be a most general structure of the world presupposed by the categories within language itself. Important questions included the following: What is the nature of wholes and how are they related to parts (mereology)? What is the nature, and ontological status, of relations? How do essence and existence relate (especially within divine reality), and what ontological status does each have? Are there such things as universals, and, if so, in what do they consist? What is being in its most general nature? Is it univocal? Finally, and most importantly, what is the being of God? What does it mean to say that the divine has properties? Are these traditional divine properties compatible?

It would be odd to think that Luther burst on the scene in the early sixteenth century with a sophisticated theological vocabulary and theory that profoundly addressed the human existential situation and yet somehow circumvented (and was hence disconnected from) the traditional metaphysical problems. Unfortunately, although this would be odd, it is exactly what much post-Kantian Luther interpretation has seemed to assume. It has presupposed that the really interesting questions within Luther scholarship are questions as to how Luther's theological language connects to human existence lived coram deo and within the reality of God's promise. That this is important for Luther goes without saying. He did stress the power of the living Word, and emphasized what might be called the "performative" characteristics of language of the divine.

However, Luther always assumed that theological language has truth conditions, that propositions are true or false in so far as the state what is, or what is not, the case. Theological language is constative, not merely performative. God, for Luther, is really triune; there actually are two disconsonant natures within Christ; the physical Body of Christ is really present in the bread and wine at the communion table. The infinite really is somehow in the finite in such a way that the infinite remains infinite while the finite remains finite. What is more, Christ really is present in the Christian such that one can speak of "ein Kuchen." As is the case in the history of theology generally, there is a "unity" or "identity in difference" presupposed within key theological loci. While Luther understood that the assertion of the existence of such identities was justified finally on the basis of revelation, he did not skrink away from calling such such assertions true, and supposing that they are true because they state some state of affairs that actually obtains.

The question is how to conceive these identities. Clearly, Luther believed that Aristotle was a great enemy to theology, and much preferred Plato to his even more precocious student. But what metaphysics is presupposed if the substance/accident metaphysics of Aristotle is incapable of conceiving the res ineffabilis of the two natures of Christ or the three persons of the Trinity? Should one simply assume that there is no way things ultimately stand that make true dogmatic theological propositions? Would one be better off construing dogmatic theological propositions relationally, that is, as expressing or specifying human experience in relation to divine reality. If Kant is right, of course, theological expressions must finally be construed as being about human experience (thinking, feeling, or doing), and about the phenomena of "limit points" within that experience. If Kant is right, then the truth of theological expressions, for Luther, simply can't be determined by objectively existing states of affairs.

But, I would argue, Kant is precisely wrong as an interpreter of Luther. Luther must be understood within his context as an Augustinian trained in the nominalist tradition, an Augustinian knowing standard nominalist semantic theory and metaphysics, an Augustinian who, however, is so moved by the incomprehensibility and ultimate significance of the res ineffabilis that he is willing to be innovative both semantically and metaphysically. About this, I shall have much more to say in subsequent posts.

Surface Grammar and Logical Form

I am baffled by the tendency I find in theology to place “theological depth” in inverse relationship to rational clarity, consistency and coherency. This surely is not the case in other disciplines. For example, to get deeply into set theory only increases clarity, consistency and coherency. The same is true in chemistry. But, lamentably, it is clearly and consistently not true in theology.

I received an e-mail the other day that displays this theological malady of avoiding precision. The writer was taking issue with something I had written about God. I had said that God’s hiddenness does not entail the rejection of theological realism, semantic realism about God-talk, and the possibility of theophysical causation. In making my point, I had used Luther’s explanation in the Small Catechism to the first article of the Apostle’s Creed. Luther writes, “I believe that God has created me and all creatures, that he has given me my body . . . “ My point was simply that Luther presupposed a causal connection between God and the universe.

The e-mail said a rather curious thing. It claims that one ought to read the First Article in light of what it says about human beings, not what it says about God. The e-mail further suggests, I believe, that to make claims about God places human beings in a post-Enlightenment arena where we stand as neutral observers judging God.

I find this all very puzzling. Why are we Lutherans so convinced that we violate the First Commandment when we say anything about God? Of course, I agree that any attempt to map divine ontology is decidedly un-Lutheran. But this is not done, I think, when we say that God’s creating the world entails that God causes the world to be. Logically, saying that human beings have certain properties with respect to the divine entails that the divine has certain properties with respect to us.

Take the following statements:

1) Bob is a creature
2) God created Bob

Many Lutherans want to see (1) and (2) as making quite different statements. While (1) ascribes the monadic property to Bob of being a creature, (2) says that God has a relational property of causing Bob to be. (1) seems true because of deep Lutheran insights about existential-phenomenological-ontological “placedness,” that is, it is true on the basis of human experience. (2), however, seems to be a metaphysical statement about God that is wholly out of place within the Lutheran context. Many Lutherans want to regard (1) as somehow expressing the existentiality of the self, and (2) as declaring a daring metaphysical theophysical causation. (1) is thus admitted, and (2) denied.

But all of this is conceptual confusion. Take the word ‘creature’. If we are to employ the word in a way consistent with its original meaning, it entails ‘being created’. While we can, of course, change the word into meaning something else, the fact remains that the term is likethe word 'creation' in being related to that which creates. Logically, there can be no creation without a creator. In a similar way, there can be no creature without a creator. To use the word ‘creation’ to apply to things not having been created is to violate the ordinary way in which we use words. Similarly, to use ‘creature’ in such a way as not to entail ‘being created’ is to violate the ordinary usage of these terms.

In reality, (1) can be parsed as ‘Bob is one having been created.’ Since, of course, one cannot be created without there being one to create you, (1) becomes ‘Bob is created by a creator’. Since we identify the creator as God, (1) reads ‘Bob is created by God’. Now, it should be easy to see that (1) and (2) are logically equivalent. I can conceive of no possible world where Bob is created by God, and God does not create Bob, or alternately, where God creates Bob, but Bob is not created by God. In truth, (1) and (2) share the same logical form; they state the same putative fact: ‘There is Bob and God, such that God and Bob are members of the set of all ordered pairs such that the first member creates the second’. (This is the standard extensional understanding of ‘God creates Bob’.)

Now one can object, of course, claiming that one does not mean by ‘Bob is a creature’ the proposition 'he is created by God'. But if this be so, then why use the word ‘creature’? Why not use another word, a word that more precisely states what is being asserted? If the word ‘creature’ is to be applied if and only if certain existential-phenomenological conditions are met, then why not eliminate the term in favor of a precise specification of those underlying existential-phenomenological conditions? This would be far clearer for all involved, and it would avoid useless ambiguity.

Lutheran theology can be precise. The problem is that in order to escape the ontological problems posed by the Enlightenment, Lutheran theology moved to become “deeper” so that its language no longer connoted what the average pewsitter presupposed. It is all a bit disingenuous and, I believe, it is time to come clean.

Dennis Bielfeldt