Preamble to a Phenomenology of Congregational Life

Oftentimes we don't know what we have lost until we don't have it. 

The phenomenological movement attempted to uncover the fundamental meaning of the entities, properties, and relations in which we find ourselves, in which we dwell. The idea is simple enough. We are always already within a world of meaning prior to any explicit philosophical reflection upon this world. The man at work in his workshop knows how to get around in the shop; he knows what things he needs in order to make the things he wants to make. He "knows" these things pre-reflectively. He probably has not stopped to do an explicit ontological inventory of items in his shop and the properties each has that allow them to be related to each other.  Rather he just walks his shop and gets what he needs when he needs them. 

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Jean-Paul Sartre (1985-1980),  Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) and a host of other thinkers were interested in getting to the immediate meaning of things, to their sense prior to explicit investigation. Husserl, in particular, was interested in what Frege (1848 - 1925) called Sinn, the mode of presentation of objects in the world, the that by virtue of which objects could be picked out in the world and referred to. Frege famously said that names had both sense and reference. Names refer when the sense of the name picks out an existing object.  Just because a name does not refer does not mean it has no meaning. After all, the name could have referred were there to be an object that satisfied the Sinn of the name. 

Frege's famous example was the Morning Star and Evening Star. Astronomers for centuries were able to identify the Morning Star as Morning Star and the Evening Star as Evening Star without knowing that the Morning Star is the Evening Star. The modes of presentation of Morning Star and Evening star differ, but there is identity in that to which they refer: Venus.  Accordingly, the name Morning Star refers to Venus as it presents itself as the Morning Star while the name Evening Star  refers to Venus as it presents itself as Evening Star.  Within a more comprehensive theory we identify the Morning Star and Evening Star.  So what is this world of sense by and through which we believe we have made reference to the world? 

Wilfrid Sellars (1912-1989) spoke in terms of the manifest and scientific images of the world.  He espoused a scientific naturalism that nonetheless sought to save the appearances.  In Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man, Sellars characterizes the manifest image of the world as "the framework in terms of which man came to be aware of himself as man-in-the-world," it is the framework in and through which we ordinarily observe and explain our world.  (See Willem deVries, "Wilfrid Sellars," in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.). Persons and the things meaningful to persons is what has center stage in the manifest image of the world.  

The scientific image of the world is deeper; it is that which we hold ultimately is the case despite how things appear. Sellars famously adjusted Protagoras' statement to "science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not" ("Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind).  The scientific image states what is the case, while the manifest image states what appears to be the case. Importantly, the manifest image is not merely an error.  It is a description of the place in which humans find themselves phenomenally prior to theory and experiment and the reality of how things stand in themselves.  

While Sellars held that what ultimately exists is that to which oue best scientific theories appeal in explanation and prediction, he understood that we do not and cannot live our lives merely within the conceptual categories of scientific naturalism. While neither Husserl nor Heidegger in anyway denigrate the activity of scientific theory-formation and confirmation, they really were interested in the world as it appears to and for consciousness.  (Heidegger despised the term consciousness for many reasons, but I will use it nonetheless in this context.). Husserl was so interested in what immediately appears to and for consciousness that he advocated a suspension of thinking in terms of our natural attitude of what there really is, and bid us to hold in abeyance questions of what there ultimately is apart from us and concentrate on that which is present to consciousness. His phenomenological reduction advocates that we again encounter the things themselves that give themselves to consciousness, before pressing on to the question of whether those things are real, whether they somehow track with that which ultimately is.  

Husserl believe that returning to die Sache Selbst of immediacy allow us to ground science even the more deeply. Heidegger wanted to examine the objects of our intentional acts within the meaningful context in which they dealt in order to get clarity about the nature of the world we immediately inhabit.  

While both he and Husserl were interested in the Umwelt in which we find ourselves, Husserl could never find a way ultimately out of his own transcendental image of things.  For Husserl, the transcendental ego exists as that which reaches out through its intentional "ego rays" to objects in meaningfully encounters.  Heidegger, however, had no time for such metaphysics.  What is given to consciousness is being-in-the-world.  Instead of an isolated ego related to its world of intentional objects, there is already the unitary phenomenon of hat which is phenomenologically prior to an ego and that which the ego intends. Husserl's transcendental ego becomes Heidegger's Dasein, the unitary being-in-the-world phenomenon that is clearly present in ways that a transcendental ego cannot be. 

Heidegger's emphasis was on the immediacy of that which shows itself as itself in the Lichtung (lighting up) of Dasein itself. Dasein is the "there-being" that in its being is always interested in being.  While Husserl's project was epistemological, Heidegger's became ontological. What are all those things that are, that in relating themselves to us, make us the kind of beings that have worlds?  

We are always already in a world and what it is to be me is to have a world of a definite contour. The manifest image of things, according to Heidegger, has been passed over in the history of philosophy.  It has not been deeply explored because our attention has always been drawn away from the immediacy of our life in the world to the question of what lies "present-at-hand" to us beyond that image.  We have been traditionally interested in the world of the Vorhandsein, the world of beings that are. But in concentrating on this, we have lost what is before our eyes. We have lost the very meaningful context in which we already live in all of our inquiry.  

Sellars understand that we cannot do without the manifest image of things, but he believes what ultimately is cannot be given by what phenomenally stands close by. We need to move to the deeper structural explanation of that surface the manifest image reveals.  Heidegger, however, wants us to follow Husserl and attend deeply and passionately to that which displays itself to us in all we think and do. Heidegger's interest in the immediacy of the world and the universal structures of immediacy that ground that world gives him quite a different orientation from Sellars. They latter was interested in science, but the former in religion. 

Heidegger's work at Marburg was filled with religious interest. Accordingly, Husserl had designated Heidegger to be his student that could apply the phenomenological method to religious experience and religion as such. What is the world of religion, and what are the deeper structures of religious experience and meaning as such that make possible any religious world?  Heidegger is accordingly interested in the facticity of religious life, the meaningful structures within which religious people operate and find themselves. Heidegger famously tried to understand the experience of the early Christian as being-to-the-parousia, an idea he later adjusted to Sein zum Tode, being-unto-death.  

All of this is is preamble for the topic to which I allude in the title: A phenomenology of congregational living. What is it to live congregationally?  In our penchant to treat congregational life using the tools of the social sciences we may shortchange what it is to be congregationally. Clearly, we could seek to understand congregational growth and decline by appealing to general sociological principles indexed for our particular historical-cultural standpoint. This can be extremely enlightening, of course.  But in the effort to explain and predict congregational processes, we may lose what shows itself as itself.  Were we to attend to the be-ing of congregational life we might find in the manifest image the world itself in which religions lives and moves, the world in which we finally find meaning, a salvific meaning allowing us to live unto the future.  What I am suggesting here, inter alia, that it is in the manifest image of things that we find meaning, purpose and ultimately hope.  

While the body dies and scientific naturalism finds no basis upon which survival of death is possible -- or maybe even conceivable -- within the manifest image, God is close at hand. Christ saves us and brings us into his house of many rooms. Our fundamental experience of being-in-the-world is not one where meaning is absent and must be constructed.  Our fundamental experience is filled with meaning for we are beings who in our be-ing find the question of be-ing at issue for us. As Heidegger says, the ontic superiority of Dasein is found in its ontological constitution.  As Augustine said, "our heart is not at rest until it finds its rest in you, O Lord." A thick description of the facticity of Christian being-in-the-world reveals what that life is like, and holds open the possibility that that life which is ontologically possible can be my life or your life. 

As the embers of western Christianity begin to smolder, it is important for us to know what it was for men and women to have lived this extraordinary life.  For many of us, the living of Christian life is always a living of that life within the Christian congregation.  We can perhaps remember what it was and how it was decades ago, and we can compare that living to living today.  Where was the axes of meaning then and now? What has changed? How was it that we could once recoil at the thought of touching the sky while now such touching is simply business as usual?   

In the next post I will try my hand at examining the facticity of congregational living. Perhaps we will be granted ontological insight into the preciousness of being-as-communion in Lutheran congregational life. 

Cross-Pressuring within the Congregation

Something extraordinary still happens our time, a time characterized by an intellectual and cultural horizon that seems inimical to its occurrence. All throughout North America, people still draw together into communities to worship a god who putatively creates and sustains the entire universe. This gathering together does not happen in the numbers it did in the 1950s and 1960s, but it still does occur. On any given Sunday morning millions of people are in worship.  

Charles Taylor, in his magisterial A Secular Age, adroitly interprets the cultural and intellectual horizon of our time with its attendant social imaginaries. His major question in the book is this: How is it that in the sixteenth century not believing in God was generally unthinkable, while believing today is very difficult, even for those professing such belief? What has happened? 

His answer to this is actually quite complicated, and I won't summarize it here, except to say that Taylor is no fan of subtraction theories, a view that conceives humans as being largely able to know the world in which they live and how to act within that world. Subtraction theory claims that human beings have largely not achieved their potential as responsible epistemic and moral agents because they have inter alia lost themselves in religion and have, accordingly, not developed the potential that they have had all along. According to subtraction theory, secularization is a good thing because as religion wanes, human beings are increasingly fulfilling the dream of the Enlightenment: Aude sapere ("dare to know").  It is a captivating view: we humans can finally turn away from the superstitions of the past and attain genuine positive knowledge of things.  

Taylor claims that in the North Atlantic countries (North America and Europe), secularization tends to bring with it either a closed "take" or "spin" on the universe and our place within it. A spin or take is closed when it accepts a naturalism that excludes traditional views of the transcendent; when it holds that there is nothing that "goes beyond" the immanence of this world. He distinguishes a closed "spin" from a closed "take", pointing out that while people adopting a closed take hold that rejection of traditional transcendence might be reasonable, but that it is not wholly irrational to hold otherwise, those in a closed spin assert that holding to traditional transcendence is completely irrational, and thus one's rejection of a closed view is either due to the mendacity or the irrationality of the one doing the rejecting. 

Much of the intelligentsia, argues Taylor, simply assumes a closed spin on things. Scientific theory gives us the best causal map of the universe and such theory makes no appeal to supernatural forces of gods. In the cities, the young often understand their human sojourn in this way: 

• Human beings are the products of a long evolutionary process beginning with the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago.  
• The universe came into being in an explosion from a infinitely dense point that had no magnitude. 
• The subsequent history of the universe is due to natural events and processes developing as they did out of earlier conditions of the universe. There is no supernatural agency involved in the origin and development of the universe. 
• Explanations why there was an infinitely dense point at the beginning that subsequently exploded are mostly not something that science can rightfully provide, although theories of quantum cosmology recently sketched suggest the prior existence of a multi-verse of which the particular development of our universe is one possible actualized trajectory. There is yet not a theory of why there was at the beginning a multi-verse. 
• Why deterministic processes propel the universe forward into concrete actualization, there are throughout these processes the presence of "far from equilibrium" situations that allow for the introduction of novelty. Thus, the history of the universe, while basically deterministic, has some elements of chance within it. 
• Since human life is a natural product of the natural life of the universe, it must be understood naturalistically. 
• Understanding human life naturalistically means that complicated features of human life, e.g., intentionality, reason, etc., must be understood in natural ways: What are the natural processes that drive forward the development of our species? 
• Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory has wide acceptance as providing some explanation for why our species developed as it did: Genetic features are passed down from generation to generation, and the natural characteristics of the environment in which genetic mutation happens limits or excludes the development of some genetic variations while helping the development of other genetic variations.
• Accordingly, neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory makes no appeal to purpose or teleology, for the particular genetic variations that survive for later genetic variation are clearly caused by natural features of the environment. There is thus no pull (final causality) in neo-Darwinian genetic theory, only pushes (efficient causality). 
• Since human beings are natural products of natural processes, understanding them profoundly requires the casting of natural scientific theories, e.g., human characteristics like reason, love, empathy, etc., must be explained naturalistically.  
• To understand humans naturalistically, is to understand them in ways quite different from traditional great chain of being understandings. According to the great chain of being, human beings are created lower than the angels and higher than the beasts, and thus to understand what it is to be human is to look both above and below us: What are those features of human existence that clearly fall under the category of the imago dei, and what features are due to the fall into nature and flesh of those beings initially created in the imago dei?  
• Since human beings are fully natural beings developing as they have through natural processes since the beginning of the universe, the true key to understanding their existence is found by looking below ourselves and not above ourselves, e.g., what can the sexuality of orangutans teach us about our own sexuality? 
• Trying to look above ourselves for clues to our nature is the practice of idealism, and proceeding in this way is find putative answers in our own projections. While natural science can give us insight into our causal natures, traditional religion and philosophy obviates this causal nature by appeal to non-natural or supernatural processes and entities. In the words of Feuerbach, God did not create human beings, human beings created God. 
• Since we are natural beings, our sexuality should be understood along the lines of other natural beings, and our reason and communication should be understood in the way of other natural beings. Human beings do have a capacity to reason, communicate, and form sexual alliances, but these are not causa sui. Rather, it is a matter of degree, and not ultimate of kind, that separates our experience from that of the other higher primates. 
• The young living in vast urban areas who understand themselves naturalistically have, accordingly, very little motivation to either adopt religion or be open to it. Religious belief, they think rather confidently, does not track with our actual knowledge of the natural world in which we believe. It is thus a backward-looking movement motivated by wish and not knowledge. Religious people, they think, need a crutch to live in this naturalist world that is all around us. Thus, they think, religious people project views of the gods and pray their wishes to their gods. 
• The religious person is thus maladapted to the actual existing world. They don't have the courage to live in the actual world, and thus project upon the actual world a religious worldview that makes living easier. Religious people are thus more cowardly than those understanding themselves naturalistically, but also more dangerous, because in ignoring the causalities of the natural world and embracing superstition, those who could have been helped by the knowledge of natural processes are now not treated properly. Death that might have been avoided, now befalls the befuddled religious believer or those unlucky enough to take their advice and counsel. 
• Given that there is no God who cares or no ultimate metaphysics in which meaning and purpose are ingredient, human beings must simply create their own meaning in the limited days they have to live. 
• Since there are no objective structures corresponding to the good, the beautiful, and the true, human beings are free to develop in the ways that they might find pleasurable and useful. This does not mean that they act irrationally, but rather that they must assume the mantle of having to be their own law-givers. Reality does not come with moral structures. They must be sown and cultivated by human beings, and harvested only if the present situation is illuminated by them. 

I could continue with a description of what seems plausible to the urban young. It is important to see all of this under the category of a closed spin. To many of our urban youth, what I have sketched above is simply settled. Just as it is true that the earth revolves around the sun, so is it true that human beings are natural beings who must develop their science, societies and families ultimately without appeal to heavenly beings. To give up on what I have articulated is, for them, to descend into irrationality. There simply is no other option for them not to believe this. There is a new social imaginary at work, a communal way of seeing that can imagine a fulfilling life without gods, prayers, divine laws, or even transcendence itself. While earlier generations hoped for life out beyond our physical deaths, this new way of imagining existence is one where death is not a problem. In fact, death is part of the circle of life, and this circle of life can be understood naturalistically. 

people participating in congregational life in the North Atlantic countries today are sons and daughters of their age. While they may be attending Christian congregations, their intellectual and cultural ethos is likely one wherein naturalism makes sense. They have learned from their teachers about the difference between facts and values, and they believe that natural science somehow is concerned with the facts, while perhaps their religion deals with the values of those whom are at some level aware of these facts. People in Christian congregations today in the North Atlantic countries are thus decidedly cross-pressured. They participate in Christian life, even though their deepest understanding of the world provides little rational justification for that participation. 

Preaching to men and women today must take into account the cross-pressuring felt by those in the pews. While their participation in congregational life probably points to them not holding a closed spin, such a participation is entirely congruent with them assuming a closed take. While it seems like materialism or physicalism is true, there are some features of our experience that does not fit a closed spin on the universe. Perhaps it is because of these features that certain people become congregational members. Maybe they sense that the naturalism that they ought to believe is inadequate to their experience in its totality. 

Most of the time we leading Christian congregations underestimate, I think, the cross-pressuring that our members are likely experiencing. Yes, clearly many are waiting to hear the saving Word proclaimed in the sermon and celebrated in the sacrament. But in their desire to hear that Word, they remain deeply conflicted. As twenty-first century men and women, they cannot easily affirm the views of their sixteenth century ancestors. The naturalism everywhere regnant today was not known to Luther and his contemporaries. Luther had the advantage of having a metaphysical view of things that was consonant with his theological accents and innovations. 

But this is not the case today. Contemporary Lutherans who wish to retain Luther's theology must now do so in a culture whose dominant social imaginaries reject the metaphysical underpinnings Luther simply presupposed. So how does Lutheran theology play now in congregations whose members have little understanding of how God could truly be possible and relevant? It is to this question that we shall turn in the next post. 

The Contemporary Ethos of Congregational Life in North America: What to make of Science?

In a recent series of posts, I have been reflecting about congregational life in North America and have suggested that what happens in local congregations is quite extraordinary and anomalous with respect to other human activities and endeavors. Consider for a moment what it would be to come upon congregational life from the outside, as it were, with no pre-understanding of what congregational life is all about. What would one see? 

Bob walks into a building with people he does not know, and strangers come up to him exchanging greetings or engaging in conversation with him. He sits down on a chair or long bench and remains dutifully silent while a series of non-mundane events transpire. People speak from the front, sometimes in conversational voices and other times in a very solemn way. Sometimes they read from texts for long periods of time. Someone either in the front or elsewhere in the building starts singing and others join in. Finally, a person in the front addresses those listening for 15 minutes or longer speaking of events from long ago that he or she believes have significance for today. After this, an even stranger event occurs. After some serious words, people sitting on chairs or benches rise from their seats and walk forward, gathering at a rail in the front where they are given little wafers and a sip of wine and told that these things are the Body and Blood of Christ. At other times infants or adults are splashed with water with concomitant solemn pronouncements and prayers.  

After more singing, people finally leave their seats and congregate in the back where friendly discussion ensues about divers and sundry matters. Perhaps Bob is invited to go downstairs or into another part of the building to be part of a class, or maybe he is offered coffee and donuts. Bob's experience here might be like Rita's at another time or another place, or it could be quite different. Rita might be asked to help feed people who have limited funds, or to aid in cleaning the building itself, or to bring a dessert next week. Perhaps someone asks her as to what she thought of the address that someone had given.  

Christians have been meeting in communities like this from their earliest days in the catacombs. In those days men and women listened to readings from texts and speeches about those texts. They cared for each other and oftentimes pooled their resources to help each other. With people they knew and some they just met they worshipped Jesus of Nazareth as the fulfillment of God's messianic expectation. While contemporary church buildings do not look much like the early catacombs, there remain between those days and today common practices of congregational life. 

Congregational life happened then and happens now, and people involved in that life seem to know how to participate in that life. One might say that they have an unthematized pre-understanding of the possibilities and inevitabilities of their gathering together. Congregating to worship a God, hearing speeches, singing and murmuring prayers are all activities that are quite unlike what most people do in contemporary societies of the North Atlantic countries. It is so unlike what people generally do, that one naturally wonders whether these things would be done if there was no already operating social institution for doing these things. Already established is the practice of congregational activity and participation. Without this already established practice, would it ever happen that these activities would develop to be practiced again? In other words, if congregational life were not already occurring, would it happen that it would ever come to occur? Without the reality of an historical institutional of congregational practice and participation, would there be any cultural motivation to invent congregational life again? Is there something about us as social animals that would make the development of congregational life inevitable, or is the having of it fully contingent?

I fear that the answer to the question of inevitability is likely a resounding "no." The fact that there still exist Christian congregations goes against general cultural expectations. I believe that it is because of the unlikeliness of it developing again ars nova, that congregational life is so precious now. Speaking theologically, we might say that the utter contingency of congregational existence is entirely a matter of grace. The practices of congregational living are not something that can be facilely established upon the horizon of contemporary individual piety. One might say that Christian congregations have an ecstatic existence; they live not on their own but out of the life of the Incarnate One, Jesus Christ. They are creatures of grace first, and only secondarily of law.  

In the last post I began to explore facets of the intellectual and cultural ethos of those today participating in Christian congregational life. I spoke of the general cultural default of contemporary man and woman who judge God morally and find Him lacking. As pointed out then, I follow Charles Tylor in claiming that Christianity has not been slowed in its growth primarily because of the rise of science, but rather because the traditional God of Christianity appears arbitrary, capricious and decidedly old fashioned in His choices and judgments, and thus is either widely rejected or deemed irrelevant. Accordingly, it is God's putative morality that makes His existence suspect for millions of denizens of the North Atlantic countries in the early twenty-first century.  

While all of this is true, there is also little doubt that Christianity today is simply a non-starter for many because it appears to violate the very presuppositions of science itself. Many participating in contemporary congregational life carry with them both a sense that God is morally unreasonable or suspect and that the ultimate description of reality is physical, that what ultimately exists are those entities over which our fundamental theories of physics quantify. In other words, what ultimately exists are those entities to which our fundamental physical theories refer.  Accordingly, while people might enjoy participating in congregational life, there is a sense that they actually know better, that human existence is ultimately a physical matter and that congregational life is a living as if this were not the case.

It is unfortunately characteristic of our time that people generally know little about the practices and theories of science, particularly those of natural science. Most think that science simply deals with facts, not recognizing the deeply theoretical nature of scientific research. Accordingly, some review of what we claim when we make scientific claims is perhaps useful.

Every scientific claim is theoretical. To claim that the earth revolves around the sun is to have a theory in which the terms 'sun', 'earth', and 'revolves' occur. The meaning of a set of theoretical statements is found in the models which make these statements true. 'Sun' refers to a particular entity, 'earth' refers to a particular entity as well, while 'revolves' refers to a complex set of duples or ordered pairs. Theories, no matter how simple or complex, state the way the world might be. At the risk of gross oversimplification, true theories state how the world actually is -- or alternately what is reasonable to believe about how the world is -- and false theories how the world is not -- or what is reasonable not to believe about the world. 

Theoretical claims of how the world is are tentative and provisional because we are never certain that the theory we are assuming won't finally be shown to be false by how the world ultimately turns out to be. It could take hundreds of years to disconfirm statements of scientific theory. For instance, our theory of the early universe makes theoretical statements about states of the universe in its initial nanoseconds, and these statements are presently untestable because we don't have requisite energy to recreate conditions of the early universe to confirm or disconfirm the statements.  Maybe 500 years from now we would have the technology to accelerate particles to velocities characteristic of the very early universe, and we can then claim that the theory then regnant is consistent with observations or that it has been falsified by them. 

When we construct scientific theories, we bring certain values with us as to what a good scientific theory might be. We want our theories to be simple if possible. They should be applicable to our observational experiences and adequate to them. Adequacy means that the theories can deal in principle with all the kinds of experience we have. Theories should be internally consistent and coherent. Coherency means that we should not have in them arbitrarily disconnected assumptions or that we should not appeal to different kinds of entities if explanation is possible by appeal to only one kind of entity. Simple theories that appeal to one principle are often thought to be more beautiful than those making appeal to differing fundamental principles. While there is nothing necessarily in nature that would disallow it from operating upon many different ultimate principles rather than one, human theory-making always attempts to explain experience in terms of one rather than many. Theories doing this are simply assumed by most to be more beautiful than others. Another value we want theories to have is fecundity. Can a theory sustain a hearty research program? Is it properly relatable to other theories? Theories which do not sustain interest or research are simply irrelevant, and science in general does not develop its views of the world on the basis of irrelevant and/or isolated theories. 

Scientific theory formation happens by adopting likely stories of explanation, stories which fit our already theoretical views of the world. We establish theories that try to give natural explanations for natural events. Because we assume in the practice of science a methodological naturalism, God cannot be a theoretical entity within scientific theory. It is not that science ultimately excludes God from the universe, but it is rather that the humble practice of scientific theory-building limits itself to explanation in terms of natural processes, events and laws. By its very nature, science does not and cannot appeal to non-natural explanations for natural events. Despite the final metaphysical implausibility of a particular physicalist explanation, natural science must attempt to explain why something is the case by appealing to only those natural entities and processes that can be in principle referred to by standard scientific theory.  

One can see this clearly in the way that explanation often occurs in macro-evolutionary theory. Since 'natural adaptation' is a theoretical notion it can be appealed to in explaining why this particular life form developed in this way and not another. Oftentimes 'natural adaptation' is a notion that can't be profoundly specified. One appeals to it in a way that mimics perhaps the appeal that earlier generations made to God's will. Why did x develop in a P way and not in Q way? God willed it!  

But while all would agree that God willing nature to develop in a P way rather than a Q way is not a persuasive explanation in our time, many nonetheless believe that a simple appeal to natural adaptation can explain P development rather than Q development. But when it comes to the really big issues of macro-evolutionary theory, the devil is clearly in the details. Oftentimes, mechanisms by which putative natural adaptation selects for P development rather than Q development cannot yet be specified, and one is left with a direction and a trust that someday a mature theory will be able to explain this P development. While appealing to the general direction of "nature selects it" rather than "God wills it" has greater plausibility in our time, the logic of the argument remains the same. Unless particular natural explanations can be given that explain the particulars of macro-evolutionary development plausibly no true explanation has been given. Simply put, just because "natural adaptation" is a more popular explanation today than "God wills it," does not mean that the former explanation is, or ultimately will be, more successful. 

My point here is simply to say that natural science is a deeply theoretical human activity. In casting about for a natural theory to explain some set of natural events, one must select a theory that "fits in" with the theories that one already has, and that is supported by the observational data. Scientific theory, we now know, is always underdetermined by observation and the acceptance of other theories. It is always logically possible to explain events by appealing to other sets of natural events than those assumed in one's theory, or by explaining things in terms of non-natural events. The point is, that explanation in terms of non-natural events is not the way that the institution and practice of scientific theory formation and confirmation/disconfirmation proceeds. Moreover, there is no scientific decision procedure, no algorithm, on the basis of which "correct" scientific theory is selected and "incorrect" theory rejected. Natural science, like all human activity, is messy. 

All of this is simply to say that the best explanation for why the universe bears the marks of design can be the fact that God was at work designing the universe. One can reasonably hold this while still holding that such an explanation is not scientific, for it violates the rules by which scientific theory-formation proceeds. It is not a scientific explanation because it appeals to non-natural agency, something clearly disallowed in the doing of natural science. But why think that all rational explanation must be natural scientific explanation?  

My point is that few people participating in the life of Christian congregations in these days know how theoretical and rule-governed is the activity of scientific explanation. So again, how can it be that God was involved in creation when our natural scientific models show the universe to be a broken symmetry flowing out of an infinitely dense point without extension? 

The answer is not difficult because, in truth, in any explanation we cannot avoid metaphysical models. Ought we explain the universe by making no appeal to non-natural agency? If so, why? The point is that there is nothing in the observational data that disallows a metaphysics of divine action in creation. The choice is ours: Do we want to adopt a materialist/physicalistic metaphysics or not? If so, why, and if not, why not? 

But the horizon of most in congregations is that science does explain things, and that this explanation finally does not rest in human freedom as to the adoption of a metaphysics of physicalism or that of theism. However, just because we can give physicalist explanations of most physical events does not mean that we should always do so, or even that it is rational to do so.  

In summary, the horizon of many within congregations now is that the morality of God is problematic, and that there is something in the nature of the world or natural science itself that calls for natural scientific explanations for things. I acknowledge that the first problem has no easy and quick solution, but want to point out that it is a certain misunderstanding and ignorance of the scientific process itself which makes many simply assume that science is in conflict with religious faith.  Reinvigorating congregational life in North America must deal with the fundamental assumptions of people in the pews today. Of these, two are very important: Can the nature of God be deemed consistent with Christian congregational experience and practice, and can our understanding of the divine escape from the easy physicalisms that dominate much of popular culture today?  

The Contemporary Ethos in which Congregational Life Happens: The Problem of God

We have in the last two posts been reflecting about congregational life in North America.  In the post entitled Putting the Focus Back on Congregations, I spoke of the early days of the WordAlone Network, an effort in the first decade of the twenty-first century to return the Evangelical Lutheran Church to its theological roots. I claimed that WordAlone was trying at the time to point out that Lutherans have traditionally maintained both that the Church is the Body of Christ and means of grace, and simultaneously that it is a group of particular sinners gathered around the Word and Altar.  I contended that our then critique of high church presuppositions that undergirded the Concordat and Called to Common Mission was warranted because the ELCA bureaucracy had assumed a non-dialectical understanding of Church, claiming that the baptized themselves in churchwide assembly could be identified with the activity of the Holy Spirit Itself. What was needed then was simply to say that the church is a body of very human sinners begging for morsels from the divine, that it was, accordingly, a very human institution fraught with errors, mistakes, and earthly pretensions.  

I also indicated in that first post that the WordAlone critique of a non-dialectical understanding of high church could not become the one and only ecclesiology of the Institute of Lutheran Theology, because Lutheran traditions have not been historically monolithic in their understanding of church or in all the fine points of their theology. I argued that the Institute of Lutheran Theology needed to be a place where Fordean-inspired gnesio-Lutherans, Evangelical Catholics, pietists, confessionalists and neo-confessionalists could all study their traditions, and come to fuller appreciation of the theological accents the differing Lutheran theological traditions possessed. 

At the conclusion of that first article, I spoke of what features a genuine Lutheran Center for Congregational Revitalization might have.  Accordingly, it would work to enter into formal and informal relationships with congregations to help in keeping pastors in pulpits, to aid in the funding of theological education, to explore new models of congregational ministry, and to help keep an active and creative normative Lutheran theology at work in congregations. 

In the second installment, Focussing on Congregations: Why the Decline?, I spoke about the eclipse of congregational life in North America as the congregation moved in many communities from the center of social activity and function to the periphery of community social life. I argued that while it might be tempting to say that it is a good thing to clarify what the mission of congregations really ought to be by pointing to the merely accidental nature of social life within the congregation, it is nonetheless important to understand what has been lost as such accidental congregational social life diminishes. 

What is lost, I claimed, are the occasions to hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ preached, as it were, to ears that while mostly indifferent to the proclamation, are nonetheless still in the pews to hear the proclamation. In the parable, the son comes home to the father because he is hungry and out of funds. In the humiliation of this home-coming he experiences a love that wholly transcends the situation; he experiences a prodigal love that does not return likes for likes, but by grace alone bestows more upon the son than he deserves. Congregational life for Lutherans is not the proper end of Christian life, but it is the very human social context into, and through which, the Word might speak and be heard. While God's love is every where apparent, His prodigal love perhaps is most clearly witnessed in congregational life, where sons and daughters indifferent to the Father are nonetheless loved, and despite their waywardness, counted as precious by that Father. 

So let us examine the congregational horizon more deeply. What are the assumptions of many who continue to participate in congregational life in North America? What do they imagine their life to be in this third decade of the 21st century? They attend services and have caring conversations with other congregational members. They might be motivated to engage in projects of the congregation that help the disadvantaged. Possibly, they speak even prophetic utterances to a society that has forgotten the marginalized, that too closely identifies Christian life with the life of the successful American citizen. What are the root assumptions of people in the pews these day in Lutheran congregations in North America? What do they think of God and His benevolence? What do they think about their need for God or salvation? If they are to be somehow saved by hearing and doing the Word, in what does this salvation consist? 

It is important that we don't wear blinders here. I pointed out that NFS Grundtvig liked to say "human first, then Christian," and I paraphrased this in an earlier post, exclaiming that we are "sinners first, then Christian."  If we are going to get clarity into the actual intellectual and cultural horizon presupposed by congregational participants in North America in the third decade of the 21st century, we are going to have to be brutally honest.  What is the contour of that initial horizon in which Christian life grows and develops? 

There is no doubt that there are many within Lutheran congregations that have what might be called a pre-modern understanding of the world. Such people do not really find the existence of God a problem, nor are they much bothered intellectually by the Christian story: God created a universe that is good, that somehow features of this universe created good slipped into sin (the Fall) without God actively willing it, that all who have fallen into sin will ultimately perish eternally, and that God out of His infinite mercy will save some -- through the agency of His Son, Jesus the Christ -- who otherwise would eternally die, and that He thus turns their lives around as a witness to Himself rather than allowing them to remain in a ceaseless drive to their own sinful self-aggrandizements.  

However, for many people participating in Lutheran congregational life, this view of things simply does not ring true any longer. Why is this? For many today, thinking of God in this way is simply not any longer possible. The pre-modern understanding of the Christian story presupposes there is a creator God who either does not anticipate that creation will fall into sin, or, if He does anticipate it, He does not prevent it. The so-called irrational fall from creation into sin must either be understood as an unintended consequence of creation -- a state of affairs that makes God seem to be ignorant -- or a design feature of the universe itself -- a state of affairs that makes God seem less than good. The problem of the God of the tradition for many today is that He does not seemingly act as well as He ought. If we assume He knows what He is doing, we simply cannot help questioning why He does things as He does. 

Our questioning of the goodness of God is not confined to his creation of a universe that falls into sin and death, but it also extends to God's way of redeeming things. We Lutherans who claim that "I by my own reason or strength cannot believe in the Lord Jesus Christ or come to Him," must admit that the saving of contemporary man and woman is something that God does, not something that humans accomplish. But this saving seems to many today to be arbitrary and capricious. While somebody might say with confidence and sincerity that "God saved me despite myself," this cannot be generalized by most to statements about God's general saving of humankind, a wholly external saving in which humans might be along for the ride, but are never in the situation of doing any driving on their own. Making such general statements seems to contradict the very goodness of God in Himself. 

I submit that this view of things simply does not operate for most educated people today in the North Atlantic countries. Whether they are aware of it or not, they have swam too long in the cultural waters of the west to return to the pristine pre-modern view of the 16th and 17th century Lutheran theological tradition.  For most today, there is some sense that there is a God and some sense that in congregational life perhaps some kind of connection to this God is possible. But the God presupposed in the contemporary cultural and intellectual horizon is not the God of the Christian tradition. What might be the marks of this other God? 

There is a general sense, I think, among most educated participants in congregational life that some deep facets of our experience are simply missed or ignored if we look at reality as a product of an evolutionary physicalism. Physicalism is the claim that ultimately the things that exist are those things that our fundamental theories of particle physics quantify over, or presuppose. The idea is that matter/energy is that which is, and this matter/energy has an extraordinary evolutionary history, a history that finally eventuates in the appearance of human beings on the earth, beings of such an extraordinary complexity that one most posit that it took billions of years for purely adventitious processes to produce them. Those who participate in congregational life, while maybe not self-consciously breaking with the assumptions of evolutionary physicalism, yet sense somehow that there must be more than it somehow.  This is not to say, that all would claim that there exist some deeper-level objective state of affairs by and through which the universe physically evolved. Perhaps they would say that such a view of things in not subjectively satisfying and claim that participating in congregational life somehow serves the heart if not the head.  

What I am suggesting is that active members of congregations today might say that while there is not sufficient evidence in the world to assert God's existence in an unqualified way, there is too much evidence to assert His nonexistence with confidence. Thus, while the contemporary congregational member is no longer sure of the Christian verities of the past, he or she is nonetheless a bit skeptical about contemporary claims of scientific or metaphysical materialists that the universe is as simple as they claim it to be. Having not enough evidence for the traditional Christian God, but too much evidence to be confident that the skies are empty, the contemporary participant in congregational life is exploring those non-cognitive features of experience that make life meaningful, an exploration that they sense can somehow be pursued without denying the central claims of science or the so-called scientific view of the world.  

There is much that can be said about whether the scientific view of things is an objective fact or merely an ideological commitment, and I will argue in a subsequent post that it is more like the latter than the former.  For now, however, I want to return to the question of God. Perhaps there is some "more-than-ness" to the universe to which participants in congregational life witness. How do we think this? Can this be thought about in the way of the God of the Christian tradition or does the problem of evil block that path?  At the end of the day, I agree with Charles Taylor in his epic, The Secular Age. Belief in the Christian God has diminished not primarily because of scientific challenges to religion, but more because of the human moral judgment of God. How can the God of the great Omnis -- omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, omnibenevolence, etc. -- act as the God of the tradition has reportedly acted?  While scientific evidence against God might count in the actual world, the problem of evil applied to God obtains in each and every possible world.  

We must be brutally honest today. In our teaching and preaching we encounter the default presuppositions of our contemporary cultural and intellectual horizon, the chief problematic one being the very goodness of God Himself. The question we ask is simply this: How is the goodness of God possible given the classical Christian story and our understanding of how God acts sub specie contritio? 

Any attempt to revitalize congregational life must wrestle with the presuppositions of that life, the first of which is the nature of God Himself.  As we try to understand congregational life today we must grasp the changed situation with respect to that life that has occurred in the last 500 years: Whereas people five-hundred years ago generally did not subject God's goodness to their moral judgment, they do so today, and it is not considered by most to be deeply sinful to do so. We shall return to this question in the next post, while introducing another assumption of our time: the general misunderstanding of scientific theory by most educated congregational participants.  

Focusing on Congregations: Why the Decline?

We all know that congregational life is dying. These are hard words for preachers or would-be preachers to hear, but they must be heard nonetheless. This is particularly true of Lutheran congregations in North America. It is factually accurate to assert that, for most Lutheran congregations, their days of maximum involvement and maximum relevance to their communities was sixty or more years ago. This is not to say that some Lutheran congregations have formed in the last few decades and have been quite successful. It is only to speak the obvious: In most communities in which there are Lutheran churches, there is less attendance in worship and fewer events happening at the church than was once the case. 

We can speculate as to the immediate causes of this. Clearly, school systems and sports programs do not respect the autonomy of congregational programming like they once did. We know that soccer fields on Sunday morning are filled with kids who believe they must be at the soccer field and whose grandparents recall that when they were young the expectations of being in church on a Sunday morning were as great as the coach's expectations now that the kids are on the field for practice or games. 

We can also easily point out that the local congregation once served as a place to meet neighbors and friends during an otherwise busy week. Farm life was difficult 100 years ago, and the idea that once could see friends or neighbors at church and coffee or lunch afterwards was a powerful draw for church attendance. Accordingly, the congregation once served a social function it no longer has. It is perhaps difficult for us to grasp clearly how important this social function was. At a time before the worldwide web and cellphones, there was little community outside physical community. Moreover, 100 years ago it was difficult sometimes for adults even to have physical community. Where would they go in small towns across America to meet others and talk with them about their dreams and fears? Families did not go to bars to meet others in 1924; they went to church. Their friends belonged to their congregation or another one in town, and there was sometimes visits of friends to other congregations. 

It is possible, I suppose, to say that the loss of the congregation as a center for social life is a good thing because it allows us to see clearly what it is that the congregation actually offers and has always legitimately offered. We could speak in the way of Aristotle and say that while the congregation as a center of social life is merely accidental to the being of the congregation, its function of proclaiming the Word is essential to it. The word 'accidental' simply means that the congregation can still be what it is apart from its social function; the word 'essential' claims that it is part of the very being of a congregation that it proclaim the Word of God to those who sit in its pews. 

Some thus welcome today the clarity that the loss of social function in congregations bequeaths. It is clear now, in a way that was not the case before, that the congregation exists to do something else, something quite unconnected to filling one's social calendar: The congregation exists as a place where the Word is preached to sinners, and where these sinners gather around the communion rail to eat and drink the Body and Blood of that Word incarnate, the Body and Blood of Jesus the Christ. 

I think this way of looking at things does not, however, pay adequate attention to human motivation. The son did not come home to the father because he repented, but because he spent all his money and could no longer party or even eat properly. The Father welcomed the son knowing that the son's motivations were not pure. While the Danish theologian NFS Grundtvig never tired of reminding us that we are human first and then Christian, something quite controversial in its time, I can paraphrase Grundtvig with confidence and say that we are sinners first and then Christian. Accordingly, there are all kinds of motivations why we might want to go to church on a Sunday morning, and very few of them are pure. We go to church to be seen by others, to make business contacts, to do the right thing for our children, to show solidarity with our community, to show others that we are good people who care about the community, to show our spouses that we can do what they want us to do, to display to others our new car or clothes, or to manifest clearly that we are not on the side of soccer programs on Sunday morning. The list goes on and on, and has from the first days of congregational life gone on and on. Who truly can say with confidence that their only motivation for attending church is properly to worship their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and that they have no other motivation at all other than hearing the Word?  

Congregation life in North America tacitly accepted what was obvious: People participated in the life of the congregation for many reasons, only some of which had to do with what theologians call soteriology, those matters pertaining to salvation. They came to show their new hats, but perhaps heard what Jesus said about humility. They came to connect with potential insurance clients and heard that God's grace extends even to the unlovable.  In other words, the congregation was structured the way we are structured. We are sinful and unclean and cannot free ourselves because we ourselves always get in the way of what it would be to move past ourselves. We are self-centered even in our humility. Accordingly, we know that only God's external act of grasping us can protect us from our perpetual grasp of ourselves. Christ draws us to Himself through our activity of avoiding Him and embracing ourselves. Christ chooses us; we don't choose Him. When we say we have chosen Him, we can be sure that we have chosen someone or something that is not Him.  

The same is the case within congregations. In the days of congregational social activity that often seemed far away from theological concerns, Christ showed up to claim His own while watching his own run from him in the many ways that fully social beings can. Robust congregations of yore were not filled with Christians of deeper commitments to Christ, but with more people that might hear the Word and be grasped by it. What congregations of 100 years ago had that we don't is people. Whatever the motivation might have been, there were more people in the pews to whom the Word was being preached then than there is now. That is the problem facing us, and no amount of getting clear on the "true motivations" of those now attending services will help us. Human beings run away from God; it is our wont. God through Christ turns some of our retreats around so that we might be put in a position of hearing the Word. The problem for us today is that since there are fewer people participating in congregational life, there are fewer opportunities for people to hear the Word.

So we are back where we began. As congregational life abates in North America, the chances for people to hear the life-giving Word preached in its purity and the life-giving Sacraments to be administered properly decreases. What is requisite, I believe, is to advance a program of actual congregational revitalization. Even though the death of Christendom is upon us and there no longer is the cultural momentum generally to begin or maintain Christian structures and institutions in our society, there still exist sinners who need a life-giving encounter with the Word. Congregational revitalization means that we want to build active congregations in multiple communities that maximize the possibility of encountering the Word.  

What is needed is to get clarity on what ILT qua ILT can do to help congregations be those places of possible Word encounter. We need clarity on what specific activities we might do to move congregational life forward. 

While I have no empirical studies to point to in support of this claim, I do believe that a change in our social imaginaries is making the very idea of congregational life less attractive to many.  Charles Taylor in his epic A Secular Age speaks of these imaginaries, ways that people within a community and society project as possible ways of living fully. Once upon a time in America people assumed that there was a God and that human salvation involved an embrace of transcendence, some state of being that goes beyond this life. Most often, they believed in an afterlife, and thought that their loved ones entered such an afterlife immediately upon death. But the social imaginaries of a benevolent God and future bliss beyond death no longer inform our institutional structures and, increasingly, our primary communities. I would argue that the primary impediment to congregational revitalization is not that other institutions (e.g., the schools or sports programs) are crowding out congregational life, but that participating in the life of a congregation simply makes less and less sense to people. 

It is difficult to play baseball without bats, gloves ands bases. I contend that, in the same fashion, it is difficult to participate in congregational life when the social imaginaries of a benevolent God and future bliss are absent. How does one play the game of congregational life when the very presuppositions of that game have been fundamentally shaken? This is the primary question of congregational revitalization, and it is one that I think ILT can address. In our next post we shall have more to say about the precise nature of this address, but for now I simply want to point in the general direction of that address: Our present social imaginaries are in considerable tension with some of the deepest drives of the human spirit. What is needed now is simply to subject these social imaginaries to an interrogation by that spirit. 

What does it mean to be the Christ School of Theology?

As many readers might know, the Institute of Lutheran Theology's seminary and graduate school is called the Christ School of Theology, and we are all about the accreditation of this institution. 

When checking our accreditation with the Association of Biblical Higher Education (ABHE) find us under The Institute of Lutheran Theology.  View our ABHE fact sheet here: https://app.weaveeducation.com/publicFiles/institutionprofilepdfs/Institute_of_Lutheran_Theology-ABHE_-_Association_for_Biblical_Higher_Education_Fact_Sheet.pdf.  We have been a full member of ABHE since initial accreditation in 2018.  We successfully achieved our first ten-year accreditation with ABHE at the 2023 February meeting of ABHE's Commission on Accreditation. 

When checking on us on the Association of Theological Schools (ATS) website, always look for Christ School of Theology. Christ School of Theology is the accreditable entity as for as ATS is concerned.  You can find us on the ATS website here: https://www.ats.edu/member-schools/christ-school-of-theology-of-the-institute-of-lutheran-theology.  While we have not been officially accredited by ATS's Commission on Accreditation yet, we are already Associate members of the ATS, and are engaged in many activities with them.  We are working hard to get our self-study complete this year, and anticipate an ATS visit in February of 2024.  

My thoughts in 2005-06 was that a new Lutheran House of Studies was needed that would serve all Lutherans -- especially ELCA Lutherans. This House of Studies, I argued, should be independent, autonomous and accredited, should assume the basic hermeneutic of the Lutheran Reformation on Scripture, and should be straightforwardly realist in its understanding of God and of theological language generally.  ILT, I thought, should be fully engaged with the question of truth, particularly the question of how to connect the truth of theology with the truths of the special sciences.   

ILT will begin its fifteenth year of offering classes in the fall of 2023 and, I must say, we are moving forward nicely. I always knew that ILT could produce pastors because we have from the beginning been blessed with great students and a renowned faculty. However, because we are not a LCMS, ELCA or Wisconsin Synod seminary, we don't have an already established market for students studying to be pastors. As our Wikepedia page says, we do prepare pastors for the Canadian Association of Lutheran Congregations, the Augsburg Lutheran Churches, Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (LCMC) and the North American Lutheran Church (NALC).  We are happy to have such important work to do. 

However, other seminaries compete with us, particularly within the LCMC and the NALC.  While we believe we have the deepest program for students in these two church bodies, our program is quite traditional, with heavy doses of Biblical Theology, History of Theology, Systematic and Pastoral Theology.  It takes time to achieve an ILT education and not everybody wants to take the time, or perhaps has the time, to go through a program like ours. But I believe that our age demands more deeply prepared pastors than has perhaps been the case in the past.  Accordingly, we shall always serve these constituencies, and we shall always try to grow our ministry programs.  

To really effect change in the contour of Lutheran theology in North America, we would need to train perhaps 1,000 pastors over the next 10 years. 1,000 very well-educated pastor-theologians who would take very seriously the traditional truth claims of theology would likely alter the course of the church bodies we serve and the North American Lutheran traditions from which they were born.  ILT's Christ School of Theology will always take seriously the task of raising up the next generations of Lutheran pastors, and we hope to train 1,000 pastors -- though to do so in 10 years would demand that more markets become open to us. 

From the beginning, however, ILT has had another task, a task parallel to that of raising up the next generation of Lutheran pastors.  As I wrote already in 2007, we must raise up the next generations of Lutheran professors and teachers.  We must tend to our theological traditions theologically.  We need people involved in an effort that will issue in the making of a new class of theologians, theologians who know the the great Christian deeply as it has been understood by the Lutheran Confessions, people who have a profound grasp of the contemporary cultural and intellectual horizon and who can adroitly relate this tradition to the contemporary horizon.  

From the beginning we have created opportunities in ILT for advanced study, but now we are experiencing something at ILT we could maybe not have expected 17 years ago.  Although I knew that ILT must train future theologians, I did not realize in 2005-06, the degree to which God would bless our efforts at building a real theological institute.  

The last three years have shown very strong growth in our post-M.Div programming: the STM, the Doctor of Ministry, and especially the PhD.  People are seeking us out to study because they trust us to allow them to encounter the great texts of the tradition in creative and fruitful ways.  We don't tell the students that the great texts of the tradition must be avoided because they are not sufficiently sensitive to issues of class, sex, race, orientation, etc.  We are not deeply suspicious of the western canon as some are.  Paraphrasing Barth, we believe that we should take the presuppositions of that canon at least as seriously as our own.  Since we trust the tradition, we encourage our students to engage it deeply. 

What does ILT's Christ School want to be when it grows up?  While I cannot predict exactly what the Christ School will look like in fifty years, I do hope that I know what it will mean to be the Christ School then.  To be the Christ School of theology is to take very seriously the Holy Scriptures and the traditions of interpreting those Scriptures.  To take these Scriptures seriously means that this texts are not something of the past, but living and breathing documents of today, documents which engage us and open for us possibilities of our being. God's grace is, after all, something he dispenses each and every day, even as we living within the paradigms of the contemporary intellectual and cultural horizon.  Simply put, the documents confront us with the very question of salvation, the question that separates human beings from the beasts below them and the angels above, the question that will always remain orthogonal to the concerns of AI and the "machining of our culture."  

The Christ School of Theology is growing rapidly, particularly at the D.Min and PhD levels.  How big might we be next year?  If the trends I am seeing continue, we will have between 30-35 PhD students studying in the fall of 2023,  20-25 D.Min students, and 10-15 STM students.  This means that 60-75 of our students next fall will likely be doing advanced work in theology.  

We celebrate this! It is a God thing! The students are coming from almost all of the Lutheran traditions and beyond these traditions as well.  Our ATS headcount of 96 in the fall of 2022 could see another 15% increase next fall.  We are building the Christ School of Theology not by watering down who we are, but by embracing it the more deeply.  We are not a divinity school, but a flesh-and-blood Lutheran seminary dedicated to taking seriously Lutheran truth claims.  In a time in which seminaries are shrinking, ours is growing.  

I have been discussing here our seminary and graduate school and have not addressed our undergraduate school, Christ College. Nor have I talked about ILT's library and all of the publishing planned to flow from it.  These demand separate posts.  Here I have simply wanted to remind all what it means to be the Christ School of Theology.  We live the commitment to our heritage while at the same time being wholly vulnerable to our intellectual and cultural horizon.  This way of living is, we think, what the theology of the Cross is all about.  

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

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

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

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

Compare the following: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Rabbits and Christology

The philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine schooled us on the indeterminacy of translation using the example of a tribesman speaking the unknown language Arunka employing the locution 'gavagai' whenever he saw what we might think is a rabbit.  But while we might think that 'gavagai' refers to the object rabbit, we can never know for sure what the tribesman is actually referring to when employing 'gavagai'.  There is, after all, an inscrutability of reference.  

I can imagine a culture, that does not individuate the world like my own does.  Perhaps the tribesman's culture actually has no rabbits, but does work the world up by thinking in terms of temporal rabbit stages.  Let S be a linguist from culture X and P be a tribesman from culture Y.  X sees the world as a place where there are unified rabbits while Y understands that the world is a place where there are rabbit parts, some detached and some undetached.  When P utters 'gavagai', P is referring to a set of undetached rabbit parts, but when S hears P utter 'gavagai', S thinks in terms of rabbits.  So what is there really?  Does the world come with rabbits as a basic ontological category, or is it a place where rabbit parts proliferate and where 'gavagai' refers to a collection or set of rabbit parts suitably ordered? 

Suppose Q from culture Z uses 'gavagai' only to talk about a set of temporal rabbit stages.  Culture Z is extremely time sensitive, and they "see" the world as a place where the temporal slices of things are ontologically primary. The linguist S hearing 'gavagai' could scarcely imagine that Q associates the term with a set of temporal slices of a particular kind. Again Q's culture finds temporal slices of things ontologically primary to the collections in which they are ingredient. So what is there really?  Does 'gavagai' properly refer to rabbits or to temporal rabbit stages?  Or does it rightfully refer to spatially extended, undetached rabbit parts?  

Mereology is concerned, of course, with the unities that parts comprise.  Culture X finds a unity in the rabbit which is made up of parts. But cultures Y and Z seem to find unities in the parts that comprise collections.  Our question really boils down to a question of what the proper unities there are of things, and if there are no such unities in themselves, what unities we seemingly commit ourselves to when experiencing and articulating the world. 

But there are other possibilities than those of P and Q and their cultures. What if R and his friends read so much Plato that they actually see the world as the "shadowy place" where the primary forms are dimly instantiated?  R and his culture U work the world up such that rabbithood has ontological priority over rabbits, over any concrete instantiation of that  rabbithood. But while we might say that rabbithood is instantiated in rabbits, culture U might simply say, "there is rabbitthood here."  Each and every time R uses 'gavagai', S uses 'gavagai', but they are not meaning the same thing in their using of the term.  S means rabbits, after all, while R means that rabbithood is present.  So what is there really?  Does the world come with rabbits pre-made, as it were, or is their existence ontological dependent upon something more basic: the form of rabbithood? Is the particular ontologically dependent upon the universal, or does the universal ultimately depend upon the particular?

Finally enter T of culture V who sees the world quite differently than the rest. Everything is made up of processes for the denizens of V.  Perhaps it is not the raindrops that a culture knows, but the entire process of raining.  Perhaps rain drops are ontologically dependent upon the event of rain. A fortiori, perhaps rabbits are mere distillations of rabbiting.  When T utters 'gavagai' she means that it is rabbiting.  What is there really?  Does 'gavagai' refer to rabbits, undetached rabbit parts, temporal rabbit stages, the form of rabbithood, or the event of rabbiting itself?  If people in cultures X, Y, Z, U and V use 'gavagai' in similar ways and on similar occasions, then how could we ever tell what S, P, Q, R and T really mean when employing the term?  Is there not an inscrutability of reference here? How can S ever really know what P, Q, R and T are referring to when they use 'gavagai' each and every time they are in the presence of what S assumes is a rabbit? 

Quine's indeterminacy thesis has been around for many decades. The statement of the thesis is consistent with reflection within the last seventy years on language and its relationship with the world. How does language anchor to the world?  What is the world?  Does it come as a set of self-identifying objects, properties or events?  Are there natural kinds, or do human beings gerrymander the world, imposing through their individuation their own ontological prejudices upon it?  Whose power is served by understanding the world to have rabbits at its deepest level rather than rabbithood?  Who is marginalized by seeing rabbiting instead of undetached rabbit parts?  If the world has no objective ontology, but rather receives the ontology of our prejudice, then does not ontology become a projection of our interest and power, specifically as pertains our race, sex, class, sexual orientation, etc.?  

Indeed. One might say that if the world has no ready made ontological structure, then the world is really worldless, for it becomes merely the field that the self projects.  Accordingly, the world cannot sustain an over and againstness with respect to the self to which it relates. Here, the self devours the world.  

But as the last hundred years of reflection has taught us: there is no privileged access to an objective self that can be full of itself. The self that is not full of itself, is itself a battle ground of different cultural, linguistic and conceptual ideologies.  The self is dispossessed, and the worldless world now finds itself in relation to a dispossessed self. The world and self each have lost their inseity, and must now be understood ecstatically. We now suspect that while the putative determinacy of the world rests upon the putative determinacy of the self, the putative determinacy of the self rests upon that which is not itself and can never be itself.  So in these late postmodern days there is ripening the realization that world and self, the original Dyad, has breathed illusion since the Beginning.  But I digress.  

It is important for theology to know the ontological contour of the land it must work. Theology must relate the kerygma to the concrete historical-cultural situation in which it finds itself.  Theology must concern itself with proclaiming and understanding the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth in a time of a worldless world and a dispossessed (self-less) self. Accordingly, it must understand how to do christology in this time of rabbits. 

Looking at christology in this time of the absence of presence of world and self -- this time of the indeterminacy of reference and translation -- it is clear that we are going to have to specify what we mean in ways we have never had to do before in the history of theology.  Because meaning is no longer "in the head" -- we have no immediate access to a cartesian self with pure intent -- we are only going to gain clarity as to what we mean by employing the tools of semantic modeling.  

Language is syntax and theory, and theory refers semantically to that which is not language.  There must be something that language is about if there is ever going to be the possibility of truth and objectivity.  If language is not to collapse into itself -- or into the black hole of the self -- it must specify something in the world that it means, something on the basis of which it is true or false.  As we have seen, that to which language refers can be expressed set-theoretically.  What is necessary is that we start with a domain of objects, and then define relation and function operators on this domain. In this way we, we provide the possibility of an extra-linguistic reference to language.  (At least this is the hope.  Clearly, if one holds that sets and operations are affairs of language, then we are thrust back into Derrida's position of language being an "infinite play of signifiers.). 

So what do we do with christology in a time of the relativity of rabbits?  Clearly, just as we are able to specify the salient differences between undeatached rabbit parts, temporal stages of rabbits, and the instantiation of rabbithood, we must be able to specify the differences in meanings of 'person', 'nature', 'happy exchange', 'justification' or 'theosis' when it comes to Christ.  But what are the conditions for the possibility of difference?  What makes if possible that "gavagai" could apply to such different things?  More to the point, what are the conditions for the possibility that differences of meaning of 'person' and 'nature' could obtain?  

Some theology proceeds, I think, on the assumption that if one can use language in the same way and in the same situations, then there is substantial agreement about meaning in that language.  If one can say, "it is true that Christ is one person in two natures," then do we have to say anything more about persons and natures?  Why provide some set-theoretic interpretation to theology theory, if "this game is played," that is, that the language of theology is used appropriately and consistently whether used by person S or P above?  

But this objection misses the point. That a game is consistently played does not entail that meaning is consistently had. In a time when an unbridgeable chasm has opened between what is intended and what is said, we have no choice but to provide the relevant models for christological language, pointing out that language's possible interpretations and evaluating those interpretations in terms of their overarching theological plausibility.  In this time of the worldless world and the self-less self, language itself must police itself such that the proclamation of the wording Word is pronounced with clarity.  

Doing christology in a time of rabbits demands we understand profoundly the challenges to christological reflection in the twenty first century. Our naivety is gone.  Even the stability of what Quine called "stimulus meaning" is seemingly absent for theology. While linguist S sees and understands the stability of P, Q, R, and T's occasions of uttering "gavagai' in the face of some experience which can be understood differently, what constitutes the stability in uttering 'person' christologically, an uttering that seemingly is not linked deeply to experience at all?  

There is ultimately no other choice here for finding stability in the occasions of use of 'person', than to locate that stability within the Bibical-historical tradition of the Christian community.  In this time of the worldless world, and self-less self, there can be only the linguistic event of the utterance of 'person' consistently and stably throughout the Christian tradition.  While Quine could speak of the stimulus meaning of 'gavagai' in a field of perception, christological reflection must locate a meaning of 'person' within the revelatory event of the Biblical-historical tradition itself.  Only when we can make sense of the stability of occasions of using 'person' can we begin the task of providing models for the interpretation of 'person' christologically.  

Clearly, there is a great deal of work that must be done.  However, the first step in moving forward is to no what direction is presupposed in the semantics of 'forward'.  Beginning with rabbits can help us in christology, but the path forward is not at all easy.  In fact, some of the way forward will not look like a path at all.  But this is how it must be if we are going to do christology in this time of rabbits.