Theory Construction in Theology

For sometime now I have had the reoccurring thought that theology employs theories in much the same way as the natural sciences. Of course, with the natural sciences, theory construction and disconfirmation is patent. We know that if theory T has as a logical consequence P, and if ~P actually turns out true empirically, then there is something wrong with theory T. (Assuming, of course, that one's inferences are in fact deducible theorems of T.) It is all rather straightforward for the scientist - - or at least it seems prima facie so.

A number of years ago I was excited by some of the similarities I found between scientific theory construction and theological construction. It was to me then rather exciting to think that somehow theology uses theories. (I confess to having a bit of the natural theologian in me in those days.) But something has happened. While it is true that I am no longer much excited by the similarities between scientific and theological theory construction, it is not because the seeming similarities have faded for me. No - - it is because it seems to me now patently obvious, and not at all surprising, that theological theory and scientific theory have the same structure. The excitement has faded because there is no longer anything creative in the thought. They just are of the same kind. Let me explain with an example that is not that of natural theology at all.

I am rereading some of the Finnish work on Luther in teaching 'Luther, Justification and Deification' in the Institute of Lutheran Theology Masters of Theology program. Among the many claims made by the Finns is that Luther employs the notion of theosis as a central motif within his theology, that his notion of justification presupposes the unio cum Christo. The way that this is argued is to take a number of themes in Luther, chart the interrelationship between these themes, and then go to the Luther texts to see if perusal experience is consistent with the theory built out of the interrelationship of these themes.

For instance, they argue that the inhabitatio Christi grounds both forensic and effective justification, that the imputational notion of justification is the divine favor or gratia, while the effective notion is the divine donum or gift. While the favor of God addresses the wrath of God, the gift of God pertains to the corruption of our natures. Just as favor of God undergirds the gift of God, so the gift of God grounds the favor of God. For Luther, justification is a unitary process that includes what is often regarded by the Reformation traditions to be sanctification. God gives Himself to His creation in love, and thus all of creation is butressed by the indwelling God. But fallen creation groans in travail for salvation. This salvation is available through the gift of divine love which is the presence of Christ in the believer grasped through faith. Thus, 'x has faith' and 'x has the presence of Christ' are materially equivalent. (I thought about claiming that they were conceptually equivalent, but I can imagine x having faith without x having the presence of Christ. How is this possible? It seems that much of Lutheran Orthodoxy was quite capable of asserting the truth of the former without asserting the truth of the latter.)

Now these general assertions could be clearly stated as propositions of a theory. One would start with some statement such as 'x has the indwelling of Christ if and only if Christ gives himself to x'. One might say then that 'for any divine property P had by D, if x has P, then x has D itself''. After such definitions, one might declare as theoretical postulates that 'for any x, if x has the presence of Christ, then x is justified', and 'for all x, if x is justified, then x is both declared righteous by divine favor, and made righteous by divine gift'. That this would be tedious work, is readily granted; that it would succeed in laying bare the structure of a class of theoretical assertions is only hoped for.

Given that a theory could be structured in which the logical and conceptual relationships between the assertions of the theory were aptly displayed, the question arises as to the applicability. Is this theory applicable to theological reality itself? Is it applicable to a class of texts written within a tradition, or written by a single author? Is it applicable to the Luther texts? Here is seems that what the theory would have to have besides the internal marks of consistency and coherency, are the external characteristics of applicability, adequacy, and fecundity. I shall treat each in turn.

Theory T would be applicable to a class of texts C if and only if it were not disconfirmed by any particular assertions found within C. Theory T would be adequate to a class of texts C if there were not assertions of C that T could not in principle handle. Theory T would be fecund with respect to C if it generated a continuing program of fruitful and creative insights concerning the relationship of T to other theories.

What is different between scientific theory construction and this theological theory construction is what Heidegger called the Befragte, that which is asked questions on the basis of the theory. In natural science theory construction, nature is the Befragte; in theological theory construction it is most often a class of texts that are questioned. To find out what view Luther held, one must be content to advance theoretical models, some of which are contradicted by the texts and some of which are not, some which fit nicely into other overarching theories, and some which do not. Just as we cannot know the Ding an Sich in nature, but must model nature and build a sustainable "take" on nature given our experience with it, so too in theology, we cannot know the mens auctoritatis (mind of the author), but content ourselves with sustainable "reads" on the basis of the Luther texts themselves. Moreover, just as traditional scientific theory must not be easily discarded in favor of newer scientific theory, but generally regarded as authoritative unless directly contradicted by new empirical evidence, so too should newer theological theory not supplant traditional readings unless there is a compelling reason to do so - - a reason arising from a straightforward experience with the Luther texts themselves.

So I find these days in theology that some statements are "more theoretical" and some "less theoretical" on the basis of whether the first are "further removed" from the primary literary experience of reading the text. So too are some theological terms "more concrete" or "less concrete" as to how they cash on the basis of the particular texts. Accordingly, oftentimes the most "theoretical" of terms are those that are presupposed everywhere in our perusal experience without being asserted directly very many times at all! It is of this latter nature, it seems, that the Finnish Lutheran notion of divinization participates.

Luther: Justification and/or Deification?

In 1988 I attended my first Luther Congress. We met in Oslo, Norway. While there I met a young Finn named Risto Saarinen who gave me a copy of the book Thesarus Lutheri. Later I was given a copy of Luther und Theosis and I began to read.

In the early 1990s, I became quite interested in whether or not Luther was a theologian of theosis (or deification). I remember standing up at the Lutheran gathering at the American Academy of Religion one year, and talking about the new Finnish research. It was new and exciting research in America. At the next Luther Congress in St. Paul in 1993, I was in Mannermaa's seminar. I found him to be an immensely likable man, someone who was willing to question his own research, someone who would genuinely dialogue. I got to know some of the other young scholars in Mannermaa's group. They were intensely interested in theological conversation.

When working through Simo Peura's Mehr als ein Mensch, my uneasiness with the way that the Finns were reading Luther grew. It seemed to me that so much of the thesis of deification depended upon a rather small group of passages, and these mostly from the early Luther. Moreover, as I read a bit more of Augustine (and those that know Augustine), it seemed to me that deification imagery was palpable in the Augustinian tradition. I concluded that in order to show that Luther was a theologian of deification, one would have thereby to establish that he was using the imagery of deification differently from how it was employed by theologians who have generally been thought to uphold justification, not deification, as their central salvific notion.

As I considered the historical question of Luther's adherence to deification, I quickly determined that I would need to know what deification is if I were to be able to determine whether Luther held to it. I looked at the question of what deification is both semantically and ontologically. Firstly, I wanted to know the identity conditions of 'deification' so that the term could be properly applied. Secondly, I wanted to know what state of affairs would make true the claim that deification was present.

My contribution to the Mannermaa Festschrift in 1997 considered the ontology of deification. What claim could we be making about the divine/human reltionship when asserting that person p is deified? While the essay was itself speculative and inconclusive, the exercise was useful to me, for I found how little textual evidence there was to adjudicate among senses of 'deification', and I discerned that some notions of justification were not entirely unlike some notions of deification. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like the boundary between 'justification' and 'deification' was becoming porous. What began as a seemingly firm distinction dissolved upon deeper reflection.

Beginning in two weeks, I will present a course entitled 'Luther: Justification and/or Deification'. The course will, as the title suggests, try to get clear on the claim that Luther is a theologian of theosis, by getting clear about what state of affairs would make true a statement about the deification of a person. Accordingly, we shall start in the course by understanding justification in the tradition generally, and the late medieval options on justification. After this we shall read some of what the Finns claim about deification. Looking specifically at the Luther texts, we shall try to answer this question: Was Luther, as Mannermaa has suggested, a theologian of theosis? Please visit the Institute of Lutheran Theology web page at www.ilt.org for details. The course is in the new ILT Masters of Theology program. This degree is designed for those wishing to study theology beyond the M. Div. level. All are welcome. Any takers?

An Evaluation of Bayer's Luther Book

Oswald Bayer's Martin Luther's Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation is must reading for anyone interested in Luther and Lutheran theology generally. Ably translated by Thomas Trapp, this work was originally 30 hours of lectures for a general studies course at the University of Tuebingen in the Winter Semester 2001/2002. Bayer compares his work to a documentary film drawing on a deep repository of archival footage to present a topic from multiple perspectives. Like all documentaries, sustained scholarly examination must sometimes be sacrificed to achieve an orderly, organic presentation.

Bayer claims that he is bringing Luther into a conversation with other truth-seekers, e.g., Kant, Hegel and Schleiermacher (xx); he declares he is asking the questions: "What is true? Likewise: What has enduring value within the river of historical change? (xix) Accordingly, "his contemporary interpretation" is a "re-presentation in the double sense of the phrase." Firstly, the "historical subject matter,"which has determined the modern consciousness, must be brought again into modern consciousness; secondly, this subject matter must be examined from the perspective of its truth. Bayer's exploration relies upon over forty years of research into Luther texts of various genres: "sermons, treatises, written polemics, table talks, lectures and dispositions; predominant are the three genres of catechisms, prefaces to biblical books, and hymns" (xix). As expected, Bayer does not disappoint: his work with Luther is masterful, and his systematic theological emphasis is everywhere apparent. Moreover, the book is highly engaging; easily readable by those who read neither Luther monographs are systematic theology tomes for a living!

Bayer divides his presentation into an Introduction presenting the "Rupture between Ages" of the old and new eon, a four chapter presentation on Basic Themes (e.g., Luther's understanding of theology, his understanding of the sinful human before the justifying God, the Reformational turning point in his theology, his understanding of the authority of the Holy Scriptures), and finally 12 chapters dealing with Individual Themes (e.g., creation, human being, sin, Christ, Holy Spirit, church, faith, the two realms, eschatology). Everywhere Bayer emphasizes the divine promissio, the promise made and kept by God, and the content and contour of private and corporate life lived on the basis of that promise.

There is so much to be praised in this book, and I am sure that most readers will be as thrilled by its publication as the both Mark Mattes and Steven Paulson are, both of whom are capable theologians contributing endorsements on the text's back cover. I enjoyed reading the book, and I learned from it as well. Bayer does succeed, I think, in combining sound Luther research with systematic theological investigation. But frankly Bayer's own question haunted me in the reading of the text: Is his interpretation true? What of sixteenth century are we leaving behind in finding that of "enduring value within historical change"? Moreover, is Bayer's own systematic program true? Is it internally coherent and consistent, externally applicable and adequate, and sufficiently fruitful for further research? I have lately been quite fascinated by the realization of the dissimilarity between the ontological and semantic presuppositions of theology in Luther's time, and the ontological and semantic presuppositions of interpreters of Luther's theology in our own time. I believe, in fact, that the emergence of the Kantian paradigm in theology over the last two centuries has made it difficult sometimes to understand Luther's theological work on its own terms. More importantly, however, the hegemony of that paradigm has made it difficult for contemporary theologians to engage deeply the fundamental questions of theology, questions that go to the heart of the question of whether or not theological language has truth-conditions.

With respect to this text, I wish to offer constructively four questions, questions that arise for most Christian believers today who have not learned the standard theological moves routinely practiced by theological practitioners downstream in the Kantian tradition. The four are these:

• Is it possible to build systematic theology and a Luther interpretation on the basis of the primary use of theological language being performative?
• Is it possible to account for the authority of Holy Scriptures in terms of the existential effect the texts have upon their readers?
• Is it possible to deal with creation, either systematically or in Luther interpretation, without raising explicitly the causal question?
• Is it possible to have Christian faith, (e.g., the faith of Luther), in the absence of explicit metaphysical commitments?

All of these questions are weighty, challenging, and clearly take us beyond what would normally be discussed in a review. However, each is incredibly important to evaluating the ultimate success of Bayer's Luther interpretation. If, as Bayer and many assume, existence is linguistically-constituted, then divine promises make all the difference in the world, not only to who we ultimately are, but to whom God ultimately is. If the being of the Word is a function of what the Word does, then one needs to be excruciatingly clear about the identity conditions of what the Word does, and those conditions that merely accompany, but do not determine, what the Word does. But seemingly, what the Word does is deeply dependent upon the cultural horizon of the time, a horizon itself constitute by presuppostional ontological, semantic and epistemological commitments. It is simply obvious that the Word will strike the heart differently if the auditor believes that there is actually a God that exists apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language, a God who cares, who loves, and who ultimately is causally efficacious in salvation.

Perhaps this is enough said for now. I whole-heartedly recommend Bayer's book for general reading, and for use both at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Bayer on What Makes the Bible become Holy Scripture

Bayer believes that Luther's foundational thesis, Sacra scriptura "sui ipsius interpres," is not primarily a claim of the hermeneutical circle: the parts interpret the whole, and the whole interprets the parts. It is instead a statement of the effect the text has on one reading, hearing and interpreting it. Bayer, in fact, the text is best translated as, "the text itself causes one to pay attention" (Bayer, Martin Luther's Theology: A Contemporary Introduction, p. 68). Bayer writes:

"The authority of Scripture is not formal but is highly material and is content driven. It is the voice of its author, who gives; who allows for astonishment, lament, and praise; who demands and fulfills. Scripture can in no wise be confirmed as having formal authority in advance, so that the content becomes important only as a second stage of the process. The text in its many different forms - - particularly in the law's demand and the gospel's promises - - uses this material way of doing business to validate its authority" (69).

This statement accords well, of course, with Bayer's claim that the Word is what it does. Bayer is stating that which to many contemporary theologians is obvious: There are no properties of the text that establish its reliability outside of the meaning of the text. That is to say, there are not syntactical or causal facts about the text considered apart from its meaning, that would properly dispose one to believe that what the text announces is true.

Bayer labors, of course, to defend the text's autonomy. The meaning of the text is not established or constituted in the act of interpreting it. The external meaning of the text confronts the reader and transforms her. The Bible is the Holy Scripture because of the power the Bible has to, as Luther says, "draw the individual into itself, and into its own power" (71).

Bayer thus makes the following claims:

1. The authority of the text is wholly constituted in the meaning the text has with respect to my life.
2. The meaning of the text is objective; it exists apart from my act of interpretation.
3. The Spirit is involved in the delivery of the meaning of the text to me.

Notger Slenczka sums it up very well when talking about the normativity of the text: "The normative function of Scripture demonstrates its claim to be normative by basing it on the way it is existentially verified when it interprets itself, in the way Scripture conveys its own intended meanings" (quoted in Bayer, 77).

Generally, I am sympathetic with what Bayer, Slenzka, and many contemporary theologians suppose: The authority of the text is established by its effect on its reader. I am sympathetic because I know the problems of trying to argue for an artificer/artifact causal relationship between God and the text. However, if one could trace some kind of causal chain back from the text to God, as was done in former years, then some type of authority would be established such that the text's claims might be deemed reliable. When I say 'reliable' I am not claiming that each and every proposition of Scripture is timelessly true - - however, we might want to unpack that - - but simply that there is some epistemic warrant for regarding the text as saying what is generally the case with respect to the divine and God's relationship to human beings. My reflections often take me in this direction:

Imagine two texts s and p. (We shall allow s to be the bible and p to be some other text.) Now imagine cultural context c, such that s in c is part of a sufficient condition for bringing about existential meaning m, meaning that is of a life and death matter to me. (We can surely admit that the Holy Spirit does most of the causal lifting in this.) Now imagine p in c*. Clearly, there is no reason that p should not form part of a sufficient condition for m apart from the de facto non-operation of the Holy Spirit. It seems, thus, that Bayer's position, and that of all who suppose this way of moving forward, presupposes that as a matter of fact, the Holy Spirit will not provide casual input for p, even if He does so for s. The reason that the Bible is the Holy Scriptures, instead of some other book, is that the Holy Spirit is effective in it for realizing m, but not for the other book.

When one thinks somewhat carefully about these matters, one must thus distinguish between the descriptive observation that the Bible, and many other books, can strike readers with existential truth, and the prescriptive claim that the Bible ought so to strike one as having existential truth. Until we can give an analysis of why the Bible ought so to strike one as donating being and the meaning of one's being, we have not engaged the issue of what the claim to formal authority was trying to answer.

I can well imagine a time where the Bible does not strike many people as giving existential truth. This time has indeed happened in much of the first world. In what position is then the theologian left who has rejected all claims to establish the text's normative status solely in its effects upon people? Theologically, one must then say that the Bible is not the Holy Scriptures any longer, that it no longer has a normative claim upon us. One must wait then for new books that can engage the salvific situation of humankind. Those books, like those before, will be evaluated by their effects upon us, and thus new truths - - whatever we might now mean - - will be laid before us.

It is a tough time to be a theologian. It is important that we always realize how much is lost when we move forward in ways meant to avoid the problematics of Modernity.

"Signum Philosophicum est Nota Absentis Rei, Signum Theologicum est Nota Praesentis Rei."

The words mean "the philosophical sign is a mark of an absent thing; the theological sign is a mark of a present thing." The proposition is recorded in the Tischreden of Luther (WATR 4.6666.8f), and it is used by Oswald Bayer (Martin Luther's Theology: A Contemporary Introduction to state a general principle in Luther's semantics: "The signum itself is already the res; the linguistic sign is already the matter itself (52). For Bayer, the promissio that is the center of Luther's theology is unpacked by equating the word in language with the reality itself. In promises, words are not given either extensional (or even intensional) interpretations, but themselves are their own reality. This view of things - - which I have elsewhere termed the donational view of language - - is thought by Bayer to be the deepest presupposition of Luther's theological semantics, a view which Bayer claims is akin to the view countenanced by Austin in his 1955 Harvard lectures later published as How to Do Things with Words: the notion of performative language. Bayer writes:

"In contrast to every metaphysical set of statements that teach about the deity, this assertion [e.g. "To you is born this day a Savior"] declares that God's truth and will are not abstract entities, but are directed verbally and publicly as a concrete promise to a particular hearer in a specific situation. 'God' is apprehended as the one who makes a promise to a human being in such a way that the person who hears it can have full confidence in it" (53).

In evaluating this we must remember, of course, that it has proven difficult in practice actually to distinguish clearly performative and constative assertions. Bayer's position, however, supposes they can be compartmentalized. He goes on to say, in fact, that the performative sentences of promissio, for Luther, must be sharply distinguished either from the descriptive or the imperative. Quoting again:

" . . . one cannot take the promise, which is not a descriptive statement, and transform it into a descriptive statement. Secondly, one cannot take the promise, which is not in the form of a statement that shows how something ought to be done, and transform it into an imperative. . . . the truth of the promise . . . .is to be determined only at the very place that the promise was concluded; more accurately, where it was constituted. This means it is located within the relationship of the one who is speaking . . . . and the one who hears. . . . If it is correct that the one individual is in the position of hearer in the relationship that is constituted by this promise, and if that is verified, it excludes the possibility that he himself can verify the promise. . . . To seek to verify this oneself would be atheism; it would be no different than for me to try to verify myself in my own subjective piety or if I would seek to verify myself by means of a defined atheism. In such situations a human being wants to speak his own truth about himself, but he makes God into a liar in the process" (54-55).

There are a number of claims made here that must carefully be distinguished and examined. That there are such statements as "I promise to pay you $1000" is, of course, true. That such statements cannot be fully analyzed into a set of descriptive statements is true as well. Reporting is a different linguistic activity than promising. And that such statements are not themselves reductively analyzable into a set of imperative statements is true also. However, one must distinguish between a reduction of the performative to the descriptive and the imperative, and an unpacking of the palpable presuppositions that the performative has, presuppositions that are statable in terms of the descriptive and imperative.

In "I promise to pay $1000", the following statements are putatively presupposed: "I exist," "you exist," "$1000 exists," "I ought to pay you $1000." The first three sentences are descriptive, and the fourth imperative. Now notice that here the verba of the sentence do not themselves constitute the rem, but presuppose definite res: the existence of two agents, and the taking on of an obligation. This is not to say that 'x promises z to y' can be reduced to the existence of x, y and z, and a set of imperative statements concerning the three. There is more to promising than the taking on of an obligation. However, an obligation is nonetheless presupposed in the promising.

With regard to the promise of salvation "to me," it would seem that the same structure of presuppositions obtain: God exists, I exist, and some state of affairs to which 'salvation' properly applies exists (at least in a possible world) such that God is under obligation to bring about salvation to me. (This is rather jarring, of course, to think of God being under obligation, but it does seem like promising demands it. Maybe it is "analogical obligation" . . . . It seems that if God were to retain impassibility, promising could maybe not be attributed to God at all.)

But let us examine more close what Bayer has to say about truth and verification. He claims that the "truth of the promise is determined where it is constituted," in the one speaking and hearing. But what exactly, is this to mean? Clearly, Bayer here is not talking about a correspondence, coherence, or even pragmatic notion of truth. In fact, we are told, that the individual cannot verify the truth of the promise. To do so, moreover, would involve one in atheism. This claim demands analysis.

If 'Bob promises to pay me $1000 on April 1' and does not do so, he has broken his promise. This much is clear. Moreover, we would not normally say that his promise is true or false. It was, to use Austin's language, an "infelicitous' performative utterance, but it was not false. Truth or falsity does not append to promises qua promises. So it is not clear what the "truth of the promise" is supposed to mean. One could say that the promise was made, the promised being kept presupposed some state of affairs S, such that if S does not obtain then the promise is broken. Or alternately, one might say that the descriptively-stated presupposition for the keeping of the promise did not obtain such that that statement is not true. But this is not to say that the promise was false; it merely was not broken. One could then state whether it was true that the promise was broken. Such statements about promises have definite truth conditions; we can easily verify when they might be true or false. Bayer does not seem interested, however, in the truth-value of statements about felicitous performative promise statements, but rather about promises themselves.

Bayer's discussion of verification is quite an independent issue from putative presuppositions of promise-making. It might be atheism, I suppose, to claim that we can verify the truth of the descriptive statements that state of affairs S obtains such that S makes true the truth of the statement, 'God has kept promise P'. But I am not sure anything could finally count against the claim that God's promises are kept. One might, in fact, claim this as an analytical truth, or better, a rule by which we play the language-game of the Christian God. Clearly, there are a number of issues that Bayer needs to clarify.

Personally, I have always been chary of the move to an exclusive analysis of fundamental theological assertions in terms of performative utterances, a move that does not presuppose metaphysical and philosophical assertions like these:

• There is a God
• This God has intentionality towards His creation
• One attitude of divine intentionality is promising, and promising keeping
• Agents exist who are so constituted as to be cable of being promised to by God.
  
• The ontological and semantic situations are different than epistemological one: Truth is logically distinct from verification
  

I invite others to post comments on this issue. I want someone to give me an example of a performative utterance that presupposes neither descriptive nor imperative utterances. It seems like this is necessary before one gets too excited about an analysis Austin gave for certain kind of utterances in 1955.

What Luther was talking about in the Tischreden concerns the ontological situation, not the semantic one. Luther knows that the language of theology must always refer to that which is present because, God truly is ubiquitously present in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself. Later in the text, Bayer makes clear, for Luther, that philosophy knows neither the efficient or final cause of this world. Perhaps Luther's statement quoted at the beginning of this post has more to do with this, than a general denial of extra-linguistic signification in the primary assertions of theology.

Luther, God, and Rigid Designation

Famously, Luther differed from Thomas in holding that God's power extended over the laws of logic. Thus, while Thomas could claim that not even God could make a square circle, Luther denied this, holding that if God truly is an infinite being with infinite power, the laws of logic cannot dictate what God can do, or how God might be. Here Luther shows his indebtedness to late Medieval nominalism. That tradition had distinguished between the potentia dei absoluta and the potentia dei ordinata, between God considered with regard to his absolute power, and God considered in so far as he has covenanted to relate to human beings in certain ways. While Anselm had confidently defined (or described) God as "aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit" ("that which none greater can be thought") the nominalists of the via moderna understood that this view necessarily limits the being and action of God to that which human must think when thinking God. Why indeed must God be the way humans think God? Do we not limit God's being when we think the Being of God must be the way that humans think God?

Luther follows the nominalists here in understanding that God is not merely an abstract entity. While it is characteristic of abstract entities to have the being that they have for human thinking, it is not so for living, concrete entities. Take, for example, the number '3'. If Russell is correct, and '3' really is 'the set of all triples', then the essence of '3' has been clearly, statically, and eternally been discerned and asserted. (Please excuse the use of 'essence' talk here!) In the same key, to say that 'God' just means 'aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit' is to clearly, statically and eternally uncover the essentiality of God in God's very Being. The problem, of course, is that God is unlike the number '3' in being alive: God is a dynamic, living, causally-efficacious being. To have causal powers, to enter into causal relations, and to actually live in time suggests a disanalogy with an a priori essentialist account of God. (Luther seems to follow the tradition in holding that all of time is eternally present in God.)

To say that there is a potentia dei absoluta is to say that there are things about God that might not neatly fall under the description aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit. If God is God, after all, God's being is logically prior to our thinking of God. This means, among other things, that God possesses a fundamental freedom that might not be able to be rationally described by human beings. A fundamental commitment to this voluntaristic insight underlies Luther's thinking on God. If God is God, then God is free to be whoever God wants to be. God's freedom is not found, pace Spinoza, in His necessary conformity to His divine essence, but in His will. It is the nature of divine will to be radically free, for if God is omnipotent, God can do whatever God wants to do whenever God wants to do it. Accordingly, to reidentify God across possible worlds cannot be grounded upon what God happens to do in any actual world. God's power and freedom strips away the logic of perfection advocated by Anselm and presupposed by Thomas. All such attempts at a "divine grammar" must be viewed only in regard to how actually God has chosen to act with respect to His creation. A logic of perfection must be a conditional logic, one granting the antecedent, "Since God has shown himself to be X, then we can conclude . . . " It is, of course, a ramification of the hiddeness of God that no conceptualist transworld identity is possible.

So how does one refer to the Deus Absconditus, the God hidden whom courses through all things, and without which things would not be as they are? What semantic and metaphysical theory of the divine is actually consistent with what Luther says in The Bondage of the Will and other places; what metaphysics of God conforms to the demands of the deus absconditus, the hidden God?

Many Lutherans have simply rejected thinking about the hiddenness of God because Luther has advised that one must keep one's eyes upon the deus revelatus, the God revealed in Christ, and that reflection on the hiddenness of God will necessarily take one's eyes off of the Sache, off of the wonderful gift that God has given His people in Christ. While properly theologically motivated, the problem with this approach is that for many today it is precisely the hiddenness of God that must be thought in order for it to be understood to be a good thing to avert one's eyes from this God. The locution 'hiddenness of God' is not merely metaphorical, but it is a description of a reality, the reality of a God who can do other than what he does, and who apparently often acts in ways dissonant from what a human logic of perfection would predict. In other words, God does not behave in ways seemingly in accord with what a confident unpacking of His divine nature would assume. (It is characteristic of living beings to be this way, I think.) So how to think about this hiddenness of God?

I think it plausible here to use the notion of rigid designation in referring to a God who in His absolute power has taken very different attitudes towards us in other possible worlds. The idea would be this. The ancient Jews encountered a God through an initial baptism in experiences like the burning bush. This God of the "I am who I am" was the God that brought them out of the House of Egypt, who gave them Torah, who spoke through their prophets. This God whom they encountered is not a God for whom a criterion of transworld individuation could easily have been given. The ancient Israelites were waiting to see how this God who was would be toward them; they were waiting for his revelation of himself to them.

It is this God whom Jesus called "my Father," and it is this God then who is named by the Triune formula. However, just as water was water before its essence was known to be H2O, and just as it is now impossible to identify water apart from its identification with H2O, so was God, truly God prior to it being known that God is the Father of Christ - - even though it is now not possible to identify God apart from his identification as the Father of Jesus Christ. God being the Father of Christ is an a posteriori necessity in the same sense as 'water is H2O'. Just as 'water' and 'H2O' rigidly identify in all possible worlds such that 'water is H2O' is a necessary identity statement, so do 'God' and 'the Father of Christ' rigidly designate in all possible worlds such that there is no world where the identity 'God is the Father of Christ' does not hold. In the same way it might seem counterintuitive the water must be H2O, so does it seem counterintuitive to hold that God must be the Father of Christ. But the counterintuitivity abates when one realizes that in one cannot meaningfully claim that 'water is not H2O' because then water would, of course, not be water. The same is true of God.

The upshot of all of this is that if one is to think about the essence of God at all, this essence is not going to be found in filling in 'that which none greater can be thought'. (This God would be pretty average anyway in ontologically impoverished worlds.) Rather, God's essence is to be the Father of Jesus the Christ. Now making this identification does not compromise the potentia dei absoluta because the Triune God could not have not been identified as the Father of Christ. If God is triune, then not being the Father of Christ is not an option in any possible world.

This God that is essentially Triune is not reidentifiable by a description or a cluster of concepts applied from world to world. This God is ontologically prior to description, because all description presupposes the conceptual machinery of this world and cannot describe or apply to the Being of God in God's self, that Being that is within God's power alone, a power that extends beyond the language and categories humans have to think it.

Experience of the hidden God presupposes that humans can refer to such a God. Understanding 'God' as a rigid designator makes such reference possible.

On Looking Above and Below - - Clarifications on Reform

Martin Luther always said that if the church is to be reformed, human beings cannot do it, for only God can reform his church. In order to think about this clearly, one must understand what 'church' means and what 'reform' means. One must also get clear on the impossibility that Luther finds that human beings have with respect to 'reforming the church'. I wish to explore these matters a bit below, seeking at all times to think through these themes from a perspective that is ruthlessly Lutheran.

'Church' means primarily, for Lutherans, the 'association of those with faith and Holy Spirit in the heart' (Apology, Article IV). As such this church is that to which the four Nicene predicates apply. 'One' is predicable of it because it is a set of those having the same attributes. 'Holy' is predicable of the church because those in which faith and the Holy Spirit reside may be called holy. 'Catholic' can be predicated of the church because it is everywhere, that is, there is no place where those with faith and the Holy Spirit are not. Finally, 'apostolic' can be predicated of the church because those with faith and Holy Spirit in the heart are those who have a successio fidei reaching back to apostolic times. This is the way that these predicates were standardly applied during Lutheran Orthodoxy.

The first thing to realize about construing 'church' in this way is that it seems not in need of being re-formed at all. The hidden church, what Melanchthon calls "the true church" is not the kind of thing that can be reformed, because if faith is not present in a person putatively in the church, the person is not actually in the church. The church has definite boundaries; it is a binary or digital phenomenon. There are no grades of this church; it simply is - - or is not.

So when Luther said that God is in the process of reforming his church, it may seem that he is not primarily interested in the hidden church, but rather the hidden church as it is revealed around Word and Sacrament. This church, of which the hidden church is a subset, is visible, and because of the presence of the hidden church within can be called by synechdoche 'church' as well. This visible church, which is not the true church, can be either purely formed or better formed. A felicitous forming would be one in which the gospel would regularly be preached in its purity and the sacrament rightly administered. An infelicitous ordering would be one in which it was difficult for the gospel to be proclaimed in its purity and the sacrament rightly administered. So the question is this: can this church only be reformed through divine causal power? Luther seems to say "yes".

But before we decide this easily in the affirmative, it is important to distinguish what powers human beings really have. In The Bondage of the Will, Luther decries any who, like Erasmus, would claim that human beings have a free will. But what is this claim to mean? What is meant by 'free will' and how does the presence or lack of free will relate to the issue of the reform of the church?

Luther does understand freedom of the will not primarily along the lines of being able to do other than what one did do, but more along the line of being able to do what one wants or rationally decides to do. Luther claims in the Bondage of the Will that one has no free will with respect to actualizing the desire or decision to be closer to God, to move toward God. While human beings are free with respect to "those things below them," they are not free with respect to those above them. A person can plant corn if they desire or rationally decide to do so. A person can build a house using asphalt or steel shingles. These things a person can do. What a person cannot do is move closer toward, or gain the favor or gifts of God; one cannot change the situation with respect to God by one's own efforts. The will is bound never so to properly relate to God. A human being cannot be his/her own reason or strenght believe in the Lord Jesus Christ or come to Him.

So how do these ruminations relate to the issue of the visible church? Luther says only God can reform it, not human beings. So what is the visible church, a thing above or a thing below human reason. Do human beings have power to affect the contour of the visible church?

The short answer to this must be that the visible church, in so far as it is an earthly institution, is truly a thing below human reason. As a thing below human reason, human beings can affect its structure such that felicitous attributes that get the gospel properly preached are either augmented or diminished. To reform the church in this way is something that human beings have the causal power to accomplish. One can either augment or diminish the tendency of the earthly insitution to proclaim purely the gospel and administer rightly the sacrament. Accordingly, human causal powers can affect the state of the visible church. Why is this? The answer is simple: The visible church, considered as an association of people gathered around Word and sacrament, is simply a temporal organization that either is properly ordered or imporoperly ordered to get the josb done: preach the gospel in its purity and administer the sacrament with propriety. So considered, human beings can affect the visible church.

However, human beings can make no headway in changing the breath of the hidden church. With respect to the divine, human beings are powerless. Human beings, no matter how properly they order the visible church for gospel purity, cannot increase nor decrease membership in set of all of those with faith and Holy Spirit in the heart. Only God can do this; only God can form again the hidden church he once brought into being. Just as human beings can do nothing to increase their own salvation, so can they do nothing to augment the boundaries of God's Church. Only God can do that.

So what have we learned? When Luther said that only God can reform his Church, he meant that only God can form again the boundaries of that hidden Church. The class of all those with faith and the Holy Spirit in the heart is homogenous. There exist no density points, no "closer thans" or "further froms" within the true church. Only God sets the boundaries of that church. But of the empirical church within which both the hidden church and "tares" reside, that church is a human, temporal organization and as such can be affected by the causal powers of human agents. Man and woman have freedom of the will with respect to the empirical church considered as a historical reality. They do not have freedom of the will with respect to the extension of the hidden church. The hidden church is a thing above human beings; the visibile church in which it resides is clearly a thing below human beings. Confusion abounds when these things are not clearly thought.

So against our first judgments we must hold that the church Luther is thinking only God can reform is the hidden church., and the church we see around us is fully susceptible for reform by exertion of human causal power and agency.

Science, Natural Theology and the Internal Clarity of Scripture I

I

On the surface, it seems that science and the internal clarity of Scripture have not much to do with each other. How does science, that activity whereby humans build theories to explain and predict natural and social phenomena, connect to the theological notion that Scripture is clear in and of itself? How does science link to Scriptural perspicuity, to the notion that while we may not deeply understand Scripture, it nonetheless retains an objectively understandable meaning? To connect the previously unconnectable is always dangerous, for there are reasons why they have not previously been linked.

Yet in the spirit of exploration, I wish today briefly to think their linking; I wish to suggest that they can be connected, and that linking them entails a rather robust Trinitarian perspective. Before setting about exploring the being of their linking, however, we must understand what it is that we are trying to connect. This demands we say something both about the nature of science and Scriptural perspicuity. We shall deal with the latter first, consider the former second, and conclude by connecting the former to the latter.

II

The locus classicus for thinking Scriptural perspicuity is Martin Luther’s 1526 Bondage of the Will. Here Luther counters Erasmus by arguing both that Scripture has a discernible clarity that human beings don’t immediately grasp, and that it has both internal and external clarity. Luther acknowledges that many things in Scripture seem obscure:(1)

"I admit, of course, that there are many texts in the Scriptures that are obscure and abstruse, not because of the majesty of their subject matter, but because of our ignorance of their vocabulary and grammar; but these texts in no way hinder a knowledge of all the subject matter of Scripture."

Accordingly, while we may be ignorant of the vocabulary and grammar of Scripture, knowledge of Scripture’s subject matter is possible, e.g, knowledge of the Trinity, the incarnation, and the work of Christ. “The subject matter of the Scriptures, therefore, is all quite accessible, even though some texts are still obscure owing to our ignorance of their terms.”(2) Luther goes further, claiming of those who do not grasp Scripture’s clarity that a “veil lies over their minds.” The problem is the stubbornness of the interpreter:

"With similar temerity a man might veil his own eyes or go out of the light into the darkness and hide himself, and then blame the sun and the day for being obscure. Let miserable men, therefore, stop imputing with blasphemous perversity the darkness and obscurity of their own hearts to the wholly clear Scriptures of God."(3)

The clarity of Scripture does not entail we know the nature of divine things and how it is that they are the way they are; it only entails that we know divine things are in a particular way: “Scripture simply confesses the trinity of God and the humanity of Christ and the unforgivable sin, and there is nothing here of obscurity or ambiguity. But how these things can be, Scripture does not say (as you imagine), nor is it necessary to know.”(4)

Luther has made a couple of important distinctions in these passages. Firstly, he apparently wants to distinguish the sentences of theological language from the propositions expressed by those sentences. While the words and grammar of the language can be obscure, what is stated by it is clear - - if one approaches the text with sincerity.

For Luther, inheriting the semantic theory of the late middle ages, words and sentences signify, that is, they cause the mind to think about certain things. Luther is merely claiming that there is no ambiguity in what the sentences of Scripture cause the mind to think about.

Secondly, Luther appears to distinguish the clarity of the propositions from the putative states of affairs to which these propositions refer. While one might know what is asserted by the proposition, one cannot know exactly how it is that what is asserted obtains or can obtain. In the semantic theory of the day, Luther is claiming that while the supposition of Scriptural language makes true that language, it is not easy to grasp how what is supposited can obtain. For instance, while the statement ‘God is Triune’ has a clearly signified sense and a definite reference making it true - - ‘God is Triune’ is true if and only that which is signified by ‘God’ is a member of the class of all things signified by ‘Triune’ - - it is not routinely possible to picture or grasp the natures of these objects signified by ‘God’ and ‘Triune’.

Finally, Luther distinguishes external obscurity and clarity from internal obscurity and clarity. The first pertains to the external ministry of the Word; the second concerns the understanding of the heart. Concerning the latter Luther writes:

"If you speak of the internal clarity, no man perceives one iota of what is in the Scriptures unless he has the Spirit of God. All men have a darkened heart, so that even if they can recite everything in Scripture, and know how to quote it, yet they apprehend and truly understand nothing of it. They neither believe in God, nor that they themselves are creatures of God, nor anything else . . ."(5)

The “internal clarity” of Scripture is concerned with the salvific significance of those things signified and it is given only via the Holy Spirit. Luther distinguishes this internal understanding from the external clarity:

"For the Spirit is required for the understanding of Scripture, both as a whole and in any part of it. If, on the other hand, you speak of the external clarity, nothing at all is left obscure or ambiguous, but everything there is in the Scriptures has been brought out by the Word into the most definite light, and published to all the world."(6)

A century later and in words deeply reminiscent of Luther, the great Lutheran dogmatician Johann Gerhard writes:

"If you speak of the internal clearness, no man understands a single iota of the scriptures by the natural powers of his own mind, unless he have the Spirit of God; all have obscure hearts. The Holy Spirit is required for the understanding of the whole of Scripture and all of its parts."(7)

Externally Scripture is clear, though human beings often (maybe mostly) find it obscure; inwardly it is obscure unless the Holy Spirit “lifts the veil” and facilitates its apprehension. The external Word is thus a necessary condition for the text’s external clarity, while the presence of the Holy Spirit is the necessary condition for its internal clarity.

At play in this tradition of reflection Scriptural clarity is the notion of the “hermeneutical circle” where the parts interpret the whole and the whole interprets the parts. The 17th century dogmatician Quenstedt writes:

"The more obscure passages, which need explanation, can and should be explained by other passages that are more clear, and thus the scripture itself furnishes an interpretation of the more obscure expression when a comparison of these is made with those that are more clear; so the Scripture is explained by Scripture."(8)

But, this hermeneutical circle again presupposes the agency of the Holy Spirit:

"From no other source than the sacred scriptures themselves can a certain and infallible interpretation of scripture be known. For scripture itself, or rather the Holy Spirit speaking in scriptures or through it, is the legitimate and independent interpreter of itself."(9)

The internal clarity of Scripture is thus supposed to steer between the Scylla of the external authority of a teaching magisterium and the Charybdis of internal private “enthusiasm.” By asserting it, Luther and the Reformers put an end to the fanciful interpretations of both the tradition’s fourfold method of scriptural interpretation and the privately “enthused” interpreter. The problem is that both alternatives could always claim to discern a deeper “spiritual truth” behind the shallow vulgar letter of the biblical text, a “truth” that Luther and his colleagues recognized is likely merely the result of the wishful projection of sinful man and woman.

In conclusion, we must point out that the internal clarity of Scripture is profoundly tied to the notion of objectivity: Indeed, the necessary condition of Scriptural clarity is semantic objectivity. While we can perhaps model the sentences of Scripture, we cannot grasp how these models correspond to the actual divine world. For this the Holy Spirit is needed, for it is His presence that makes possible understanding what is clearly asserted in the text. The Word of the text, externally clear and objective, becomes internally clear as well when the Holy Spirit grants internal appropriation of that external Word. In other words, the model of the sentences of Scripture is now grasped as characteristic of how the divine is, especially how the divine is with respect to us.

_________________________

(1) Luther, Martin: Pelikan, Jaroslav Jan (Hrsg.) ; Oswald, Hilton C. (Hrsg.) ; Lehmann, Helmut T. (Hrsg.): Luther's Works, Vol. 33 : Career of the Reformer III. Philadelphia : Fortress Press, 1999, c1972 (Luther's Works 33), S. 33:25. Compare the following from Quenstedt: “But the articles of faith and the moral precepts are taught in scripture in their proper places, not in obscure and ambiguous words, but in such as are fitted to them, and free from all ambiguity, so that every diligent reader of scripture who reads it devoutly and piously, can understand them” [Quenstedt (1617-88), Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, 81].

(2) LW 33:26

(3) LW 33:27

(4) LW 33:28

(5) LW 33:28

(6) LW 33:28

(7) Quoted in Schmid, The Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, 83-4.

(8) Ibid., 86.

(9) Ibid.

Pre-understanding Scripture

Imagine how it must have once been. Imagine what it would have been like to have read Scripture thinking it clear, thinking that it gave perspicuous answers to questions. Imagine what it must have been like in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries during the development of Lutheran and Reformed orthodoxies. These theologians understood what the Biblical text meant within their cultural worlds and within the horizon of their experience; they knew that they could trust Scripture because it had authority.

Things are different now. Oh yes, we denizens of the early 21st century can still talk about the importance of Bible reading, of going to church, of participating in a community of faith. But things are different. We find the Bible today still to be a pretty important book to know something about; we think that reading it might help us. We might even think that if we read it enough, we might believe it. Yet for many, at least, there is a fissure between the text and our interpretation of it. We know that we have a wonderful text that has been handed down to us, but we are not at all sure how trustworthy at is - - well, at least on the details, and . . . well, even thought we can't agree exactly on what is a detail and what is not. It is obvious that Scripture no longer is trusted like it once was.

Every interpretation of something presupposes a pre-understanding of it. One cannot unpack the meaning of something if one does not already have some clue to what the thing is. This is true for books, for nature, and for people. I know, for instance, that Paul is in pain because I have experienced pain: I have a pre-understanding of what it is to be a person, to emit sounds, and to speak in certain ways. I, in fact, live my life pre-understanding what my life is all about. To use a famous example from Heidegger, I can tell what a hammer means in my life because I have a pre-understanding of how it connects to other things in life. There is a context of significances in which I live, and the hammer, its relation to nails, lumber, a roof, and to me, are all part of that context. Most of the time I do not think deeply about my dwelling pre-understandingly in my world.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries men and women pre-understood what the Bible meant. They knew it to be a text that one could trust, that had authority, that spoke the Word of God. Accordingly, one can speak about their ontological understanding of Scripture. It meant then, for many people, that upon which the ultimate signifincance for one's life was known. Thus, one was always already related to Scripture because Scripture always displayed itself as that upon which the proclamation of the meaning of our being depended. Given such a pre-understanding of being, it made sense lovingly to collect passages from the text which displayed truth. In those ages, truth came with a capital 'T' and Scripture was pre-understood as that which could proclaim this truth. It was within the pre-understanding of the be-ing of Scripture that the internal clarity of Scripture arose.

Things are quite different today. The pre-understanding of the text is not, for many, a pre-understanding that regards the text as authoritive, that allows that the text can judge the reader much more profoundly than the reader the text. Our pre-understanding regards the text within the context of texts arising from a particular region from which other texts emerged. The text is already known to be a document upon which the application of historical methods are fruitful. While there is a sense that the text has functional authority within certain religious traditions, it is not a document that can reach across these traditions and provide me with answers about my being and the meaning of my being. The text is therefore not understood as the kind of thing that could in principle give rise to the internal clarity of Scripture. There is no reason for the Scripture to be clear because it is not the kind of thing for which clarity is at issue.

The last five centuries have seen a fundamental shift in our pre-understandings of the Biblical text. These pre-understandings are not themselves the kind of thing that can be changed by evidence. In our day, as in former ones, pre-understandings are gifts to enjoy; they cannot be engineered; they cannot be worked up through our own piety or spirituality.

Luther said that we are ridden either by the devil or the Christ. Maybe this is true for pre-understandings. Of course, for Luther, the Word proclaimed brought the agency of the Holy Spirit into action. This agency, of course, could modify or transform the context of pre-understandings. Simply put, for the Reformers, there was always the sense that the Word of God could be spoken, that it could be found in the text, and that it was vouchsafed by the tradition. It is this pre-understanding that is no longer present in our day.

So how can we jump start an ontology of Scripture and Word when that ontology is no longer present? Does saying, "the Word is sufficient unto itself and unto its own interpretation" help us when there is no longer any pre-understanding of a Word that could be sufficient unto its own interpretation? Lutherans must always, of course, come back to the Word. This is true. But what happens when the lights go out on the context upon which the Word qua Word emerges? What happens then?

Here the answer must be firm and unwavering: the hermeneutical helplessness is itself a riding of the horse. No neutrality is possible here. The first question of the temptor, "did God say?" is also the last. We either find the Word or don't. The only thing that changes is where or where not we either find the Word or don't.

Staying Relevant - - Why What is Old is New Today.

I

There is a popular story that goes like this:

Once upon a time about 500 years ago there was a sincere, superstitious monk who was so overcome by guilt before God that he fell into extended bouts of despair. In the depths of his despair the young man glimpsed the mercy and forgiveness of God. He realized that righteousness is not a property that God has intrinsically, but rather a property God continually gives away to believers. Luther’s spiritual tussle in the monastery eventuated in his ultimate departure and decision to take a university position as a professor. Later this renegade monk married, had children, and led a movement that changed history.

Luther was very disappointed with the Catholic Church of his time, particularly its leadership. He was so dismayed about this that he referred to the pope as the “antichrist,” hardly a term of endearment. A group of people gathered around Luther and together they helped set the theological trajectory of the Reformation. While Luther was a tremendous religious genius, these people were less creative, less spiritual, and zealously interested in getting all the theological facts right. Theological squabbles erupted within Lutheranism, eventuating in the Formula of Agreement, a document putatively quelling the disputes between the “gnesio-Lutherans” and the “Phillipists.” The emergence of this Formula was the ground upon which later Lutheran thinkers attempted to “get it right.” Thinkers like Gerhard, Baier, Hutter, Quenstedt, and Hollazius codified the teachings of the Formula and advanced it in a series of books whose appearance was in profound tension with the new currents of Enlightenment thought emerging. These practitioners of “Lutheran Orthodoxy” became so concerned about the letter of doctrine, that they forgot the living reality of the spirit out of which the Reformation was born. These thinkers wrote books that were heavily read for some years, but then fell into disuse as Enlightenment thought reached dominance. While Lutheran emigrants fleeing Europe sought to read these books in North America, for the most part these books of Lutheran Orthodoxy were considered to be old, out-of-date, and definitely out-of-step with the times.

II

The first thing to realize about this story is how pervasive it is. Today these books are considered so out-of-date that most students at Lutheran seminaries have never heard of their writers, let alone ever read anything by them. Most Lutheran faculty don’t read them either. Why would anyone read them today? After all, they trifle about things that are quite disconnected from contemporary life and experience. Why would anyone seeking to be Lutheran in our postmodern age want to read those who slavishly wanted to get it right? Don’t Lutherans in the pews today know that there have been thousands of religions in the world, that the veracity of religious claims cannot be proved, and thus that they clearly cannot prove our own? Don’t they know that religious claims are not factual, but rather valuational, that they do not inform us about how the world is, but seek to express something about our self-understanding and religious practice within a community of faith? God-talk talks not about God, but about us. We are religious, this is true, but our religion is only our projected “map against time,” a map that is different for different peoples. We are religious cartographers, unsure of whether our maps are accurate or whether it even makes sense to talk of accuracy. So it is in our age. The voices of the old are irrelevant, while the voices of the new echo about without place.

III

The story above is how we Lutheran Christians are represented by others. It is the hand we are dealt. How do we with this hand tell again our story? How do we tell a story for today about God’s love for us in Christ when we suspect that the story we tell may be just that, a story? How can we who live on the other side of the Enlightenment and its criticism tell the story with the same vitality that animated those old Lutheran church fathers in their studies, cranking out there compendia and loci?

In addressing this tonight, I want to ask you to do an experiment. Ask yourself this: “What if this Christian stuff is true? What if it is true that there is a God who created the universe, and filled it with all types of living beings? (Set aside questions, for the moment, as to how it is true.) What if it is true that man and woman really are the apex of God’s creation, that they who were given so much have mysteriously, inexplicably, and somehow from their own freedom turned from God? What if it is true that God is just and must distribute justice according to merit? What if it is true that human beings deserve nothing but eternal abandonment from God, an abandonment that is horrible and loveless? What if it is true that the only way for humans to be saved from what they deserve is for God to rescue them? What if it is true that God is so merciful that he abandoned part of Himself, his Son to death so that we might live abundantly now and forever? What if all of this is true?”

I hear the answer: “We believe that already. We already believe these things. Although we have no certain knowledge; we have faith. We believe these things even though others believe other things.”

But I want again to challenge: Do you really believe these things? Socrates taught that a person will do what is right if she knows what is right. Writing five centuries before the western world knew anything of original sin, Plato claims that human beings do bad things because of ignorance: they just do not viscerally know what they sometimes say they know. Analogously, are we sometimes guilty of thinking we believe when we don’t? Do we sometimes just give lip service to believing?

Imagine, if you will, the days of the early church when there were persecutions and martyrs. Or think about the Reformers, about how they spirited Luther about in disguise to avoid detection and death. Or think about those dusty old men in their old studies writing page upon page, documenting the truth of the faith. Do we do anything similar? Would we? Or are we playing a different game? Do we really believe that the story is more than story; do we believe that it denotes events that God has done as well as donates to us a new understanding, a new way of looking at the world, a new sense of what is possible for us?

IV

There are many who talk these days about the virtues of faith without claiming that faith supposes that something is so. They claim that one can have faith in God the creator, redeemer and sustainer without necessarily believing that God creates, redeems or sustains. In other words, many no longer think that ‘believing in’ entails ‘believing that’. They no longer think that trusting in something presupposes a definite ontological contour of that which is to be trusted. But think of how odd it would be to trust in a friend without believing anything definite upon which that trust is based. To trust in a friend clearly presupposes that the friend has certain properties, characteristics on the basis of which the friend is worthy of trust. How could one trust in God if God had no definite contour, if one thought that God possessed no properties on the basis of which He is worthy of trust?

The reason why many want to allow trust without definite belief is that our theological and religious language has been given an interpretation that is noncausal in character. We want to trust in God’s creativity without saying that God actually creates, without saying that things would not have been the way they were without divine causal input. This hits home with the intelligent design issue. While folks in very conservative traditions want to hold on to six day creation, many mainline Protestant folks (including Lutherans) want to allow that assertions about God’s existence and presence are somehow consistent with a denial of intelligent design generally. They want to claim that the universe is not teleological in its constitution, that is, that neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory does describe the causal mechanism of the universe, and that no divine input is necessary to bring the universe into the state it is. But what is meant by ‘creates’ if there is no being having a teleological connection to his artifacts?

V

Those claiming the demise of religion are continually disappointed because it does not seem like religion goes away. The reason for this, I believe, is that there are certain fundamental structures of human existence which call for religion, in whatever guise. I have always liked the phrase of Mircea Eliade: “Religion is a factor within the structure of consciousness, not a stage in the history of consciousness.” Religion does not go away because humans are who they are: anxious beings struggling within the field of time. Religion does not go away because the fundamental anxieties of human existence do not go away: We are anxious in the face of death, in the face of guilt, and in the face of meaninglessness. The fifth century theologian Augustine summed up this basic human deficiency: “My heart is not at rest until it finds its rest in you, O Lord.”

Now the problem over the last two centuries is that our old story of Jesus and his love for creation has been given an interpretation that no longer fully addresses these anxieties. By saying that the divine story is only a story, we have found ourselves stuck. The anxieties remain and are factual, but the response to these anxieties is not: While Jesus’ resurrection did not bring his corpse back to life, proclaiming his resurrection supposedly quickens us in the face of death. Although God has no a wrathful intent towards human beings on the basis of which He would ever abandon them, proclaiming divine forgiveness somehow still makes life better when we feel guilty. While God really does not exist as a being in the world creating and sustaining the universe, proclaiming God’s continuing love supposedly make us feel less empty, less not-at-home in a lonely and foreign universe.

But consider this: What if the factuality of the existential question were answered by the factuality of a Christian response? What if we claimed that the profound existential problems with life could only be adequately addressed by a historically-based response, that is, a response asserting that there was once a God who took on the nature of human being in order to transform human beings into new creatures?

VI

And so we come full circle. What is the relevance of Christ for us today? Christ has the same relevance He always has had because human beings have the same structure of existence they always have had. Admittedly, somehow over the years the relevance of Christ has seemed to abate. I believe that this abatement has been, and is, inversely proportional to the degree that we think the Jesus story true, that is, to the degree that we think it more than a story.

Now you might wonder at this point how early 21^st century people could believe in the old, old story when they live in a world that has come of age? Did not even Bultmann ask how contemporary man and woman could believe in Christianity now that there was the wireless? (He asked this about 80 years ago.) The answer is simple: This is how it always has been. When Christianity burst upon the ancient world, it had to establish its plausibility on an intellectual horizon where many thought it preposterous and crude. Christianity found few supporters in the five great schools of philosophical antiquity: The Academy founded by Plato, the Lyceum founded by Aristotle, the school of Stoicism, the Epicurean school, and the skeptical school of Sextus Empiricus. Yet Christianity has always made proselytes out of its critics. From the early days of intellectual rejection, there ensued a long development of intellectual acceptance, an acceptance that gave rise to the universities of Europe.

And how was it that this scandal of a religion could have done such a thing? This answer Lutherans know very well: “I believe by my own reason or strength, I cannot believe in the Lord Jesus Christ or come to him, but the Holy Spirit has called me by his gospel, enlightened me with his gifts, and sanctified me in the one true life, even as he calls, gathers, and enlightens the whole Christian church on earth.”

The good news is that we don’t have to believe in things that are incredible or work up faith for things we can’t regard as true. This is God’s work. Our belief is His gift; our faith is His work, and the truth of the gospel is His truth.

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