Worlds and Difference: Theology in an Ecstatic Age?

I. When the World Was What it Was

Once upon a time in the west we believed that there was a world that existed apart from us.  There were many versions of how this was so, but the paradigm was clear: Entities and the properties that they instance are what they are apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language.  

Aristotle (384-322 BCE) spoke of primary substances as the basic building blocks of the world. These substances have properties that are either present in them or can be said of them.  Those properties that are present in the primary substances are called accidents.  They inhere in primary substances, and constitute the way that the substances can be modified.  Accidents are always parasitic on substances; they cannot obtain other than being in a primary substance.  Aristotle identified nine accidents that primary substances could have: quantity, quality, relation, habit (state), time, location, position, action and passion.  

Primary substances and their nine accidents constitute the ten categories Aristotle discusses in his book, The Categories.  The important point is that the accidents do not individuate one substance from another.  Rather, individuation of substances happens at an ontological level prior to accidents.  Substances come already individuated, and these already individuated substances sustain accidents that that modify it; they constitute at any time how the substance is being the substance that it is. 

For Aristotle, however, substances are more than their mere accidental properties.  Certain things can be said of these primary substances, and that which can be said of primary substances are not accidental to these substances.  For instance, 'man' can be said of Socrates, and the predication of 'man' to 'Socrates' is not an accident of Socrates, because while Socrates could presumably be Socrates and not have his snub nose, Socrates cannot be Socrates without being a man.  In The Categories, Aristotle asserts that the secondary substance man is said of the primary substance Socrates.  This said of relation concerns what is essential to Socrates, that without which Socrates could not be Socrates.  

Secondary substances in Aristotle are clearly a reworking of Plato's notion of the forms.  For Plato, the form man is instantiated at the location of Socrates and is accordingly that which is known when one knows Socrates as a man.  Plato famously gives ontological priority to the forms (universals) over the concrete particulars that instantiate them. Aristotle's secondary substances, however, do not have the ontological priority Plato had given to the forms. For Aristotle, concrete primary substances are more real than the abstract secondary substances that can be said of them.  Accordingly, the world for Aristotle is comprised of concrete primary substances having essential properties by virtue of the said of relation and accidental properties by virtue of the present in relation. 

This basic way of seeing the world in terms of substances and properties was firmly in place by the thirteenth century with its so-called "rediscovery of Aristotle", and it survived throughout the Reformation and the trajectories of theological development arising immediately from it. The idea of substances possessing properties formed the basic metaphysical background on which both the physical world and the world of the divine rested.  While it was always problematic in the theological tradition simply to think of God as a substance having properties, the idea that God is some thing existing on its own apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language seemed clear enough.  While it might stretch language to call God a 'substance', God nevertheless does, like any substance, exist on its own and is individuated in itself. Accordingly, the world comes ready-made, both with respect to primary physical substances and the most important entity of all: God. Things are what they are apart from human beings.  The ontological order is thus independent from the human epistemological activity of knowing it.  

Aristotle and the tradition prior to the Enlightenment was thus realist with respect to its understanding of substances and the properties they might have.  This realism extended to the notion of causality as well.  Aristotle famously gave a four-fold analysis of causality, citing a material, formal, efficient and final cause for why a substance can give up some of its properties while assuming new ones.  The idea is that any substance is what it is by virtue of it being "formed matter," or "actualized potentiality."  Any object that is, is what it is by virtue of its individuating form which makes it a particular substance.  Aristotle's hylomorphism claims that all substances are constituted by particular actualizations of that which could have been actualized in a different ways.  A substance's nature constitutes the whatness by virtue of which an object is that which it is.  

Change happens in two basic ways. If one substance is to cease and another substance begin, there must be a change in that substance's form.  If a substance is to be modified some of its accidental properties must cease and others must rise.  In both instances, the substances already posses the possibility of these transformations.  What is needed is an efficient cause to collapse the possibility of this transformation into a determinate actualization.  The substance water is potentially ice, but this potentiality is actualized when. temperatures reach a particular level.  

Aristotle, however, saw the universe teleologically, and thus added a fourth cause to the material, formal and efficient causes.  Trajectories of transformation must ultimately be explained in terms of purpose or final cause. The final cause of the acorn is an oak tree, and this cause operates in selecting among efficient causes to actualize substances in particular ways over time. The point of all of this is that Aristotle saw causality as built into the nature of things.  For him, both substances and the causal connections in which they are ingredient have a determinate trajectory apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language.  

While the language of substances, properties and causality seemed suited for conceiving the natural world, medieval thinkers knew that problems arose in using the Aristotelian categories to understand the divine.  God clearly exists apart from us, but His having of properties is not like our having of properties, and any changes that might be attributed to Him cannot be the result of external efficient causality.  

Of course, the tradition held that the perfection of God entailed his immutability.  Were God to change, God would need to move from one state to another. But if God is perfect, God cannot move from one state to another because either God would have to move from a state of lesser perfection to a state of perfection -- and thus not be perfect -- or move from a state of perfection to a state of lesser perfection -- and thus not be perfect. 

 Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) following much of the tradition famously argued for the divine simplicity of God by claiming property-talk of God does not pick out in God some properties that God may or may not have, but such talk merely is a way of characterizing, picking out, or referring to the divinely simple substance that is God.  Accordingly, 'God is good' cannot mean that the substance God has the property of goodness, but is a picking out of some being without parts, a being of which one might attribute goodness merely analogically.  Whatever God is in se, God is more like a being to which we might customarily attribute goodness than to a being to which we might customarily attribute evil.  

When it came to Christology in the age of when the world was what it was, Christ had to be understood to be some kind of substance or person who had its own principle of individuality and who is what He is apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language.  Such a person has natures or batches of properties, some of which are essential and some accidental for Christ being the person He is.  The Trinity and incarnation must be understood realistically.  Just as the world is what it is apart from us, so is Christ and his Trinitarian and incarnational relationships what they are apart from us.  Human salvation too must be understood realistically.  The believer is a person who is who she is, and Christ who is who He is apart from her (and us) effects a transformation of the believer (either intrinsically or extrinsically) such that the properties that the person has are themselves changed.  All of this could be talked about through Aristotelian notions of causality.  On the basis of a final cause, there is an efficient cause that collapses potentiality into actuality; indeterminate matter is formed.  Accordingly, the real ontic unity of theosis must be understood metaphysically.  There are properties of believer and properties of Christ such that parts of the believer change and the believer is not that which the believer once was.  

Since what I am attempting here is merely a sketch of that time when the world was what it was, I will not develop further here a fully metaphysical Christology except to say that Christology had to be understood metaphysically at this time.  This is not to say that this metaphysical understanding was all that there was to Christology.  The relation of sin, justification, faith, and regeneration is complex, and, as Luther taught us, metaphysical categories strain to express the reality of God and his relationship to us.  

II. When the World was What it was For Us 

Kant (1724-1804) famously argued that we have no immediate experience to thing-in-themselves, but only things in so far as they already are for us.  Kant argued that the realm of the thing-in-itself was supersensible because no human senses could put us into touch with this realm.  Knowledge of the world we experience proceeds, for Kant, through our encounter with objects already constituted by us. Conception without perception if void and perception without conception is blind.  

Kant's solution to the problem that had beset Descartes (1596-1650) and had become acute in the British empiricists -- the problem of the external world -- was that while we do not have immediate access to the external world apart from us, we do encounter the external world as already organized by us.  This means inter alia the the "externality of the world," the contour of the world as it is presumably apart from us is already a product of us.  We have mediated access to the external world. Accordingly, when we know the external world, we know our representation (organization) of it. While the realm of experience may be a "joint product" of mind and external world, we only have access to that which is already organized by the mind.  Accordingly, knowing the other -- the otherness of the world -- is to know ourselves profoundly, for we are the ones organizing the world of experience.   

Kant inaugurated the tradition of transcendental reflection: What are the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience itself? Kant argued plausibly that the contingency of the world is grounded both in the necessary structures by which we organize percepts in space and time and those necessary concepts that function as rules by which the manifold of perception is united. 

After Kant the world was not the same. The world does not come as it is in itself, a world so metaphysically regular that we can find general categories by which to comprehend it, rather the world comes bearing the marks of the determining judgments of the human understanding by which objects take on the general features they do.  Famously, the world is not in itself an arena in which self-determining substances are what they are while being causally connected one to the other.  Rather the world reflects the very order we put upon it.  Just as we are autonomous with respect to morality, so are we with respect to the external world. We are the law-makers of each realm!  Since we are law-makers of the moral and worldly, we gain insight into ourselves when we know the world.  Knowing the other happens only in and through knowing ourselves, our capacities and proclivities of organization.  While the world apart from us -- the supersensible realm -- remains hidden in itself, we know something about it by examining the capacities we have to reflect it. 

Kant, and not Fichte, was in many ways the author of German idealism.  Kant knew that the world was reflected in our activity of reflecting upon our own reflecting.  The transcendental world is not like the old world-in-itself.  In the transcendental world, we find not things in the world, but rather things as they show themselves in their aboutness of the world in us.  While the older Aristotelian way of thinking posits primary substances existing on their own, Kant's objects are those by concepts of which the manifold of experience is united.  Transcendental questions don't deal with the world, but the conditions by which the world is the world.  To explore the transcendental horizon is to dig deeper than the world in order to find those structures which make the world possible.  The world as world is made possible by that transcendental unity of apperception by and through which the world in its particularity is birthed.  

The story after Kant is so well known that it scarcely needs repeating.  Fichte denied the cut between the world in itself and the world for us, and thus ridded philosophy of that which cannot be accessed and is not needed to explain the particularity of the world.  Accordingly, when it comes to the world, the spade does not need to stop somewhere in some dull non-conscious things existing somewhere outside us waiting to be known.  For Fichte, all that is necessary is that one thinks, and in one's thinking the world in its particularity is born.  

Fichte's take on Kant motivated subsequent thinkers like Shelling and Hegel to reflect upon their acts of reflection,  an act they called "speculation" from the Latin word for mirror, speculum.  To reflect on reflecting is no longer to access things, but to reflect on those conditions by and through which things are organized before us.   

Kant, Fichte, Shelling and Hegel together constitute a trajectory of thinking that denies the immediacy of the world.  The world is not what it is apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language, and there can be no immediate apprehension of it.  Instead our apprehension of the world is mediated by the particularity of our perceptual and conceptual organizing activity.  But while all of these thinkers knew that knowing the world is mediated by the particularity of that by which the world is known -- the human epistemic apparatus --- they nonetheless followed Descartes in assuming that they can directly know themselves.  We have access to our own ideas, after all!  While our ideas or "representations" constitute a screen through which the world is known, there is no screen at all between us and our ideas.   

Descartes had argued that while I can conceive of a scenario in which my seeming knowledge of the world is not genuine knowledge, I cannot conceive of a scenario in which my seeming knowledge of myself is not genuine knowledge. Since the condition of doubt is that there exists one who doubts, the condition for doubting the immediacy of the world is the immediacy of the self doubting.  While critical thought can dislodge the immediacy of the world in its doubting the world, it cannot dislodge the immediacy of the self as the transcendental condition for the possibility of doubting the world. 

Accordingly, while Kant is wary of trusting that the world really is in se what it appears to be pro nobis, he seemingly gives transcendental reflection a complete pass.  There is a transcendental unity of apperception that makes possible the unity of our experience, and while we can legitimately question whether the unity of our experience rests upon how the world might be apart from us, we cannot question what the transcendental unity of apperception might be apart from our apprehension of it.  Clearly, the game has changed. There is no longer a world that is what it is apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language.  Human beings give natural laws to the order of nature.  However, the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience as such are what they are apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language.  In transcendental reflection we reach an arena of objectivity. While the world is mediately known, we have an immediate apprehension in transcendental reflection of that by which the world is mediately known. 

By the time of Hegel (1770-1831), however, problems with this picture are emerging.  Hegel knew that the categories by which the world is known are not simply objectively present and ready for the fateful gaze of transcendental reflection. They are not simply "shot from the pistol," but are themselves dynamic and in play historically.  Hegel recognized that the subject's grasp of its own self through its categories were at issue if one could not explain how the dynamism of the categories is itself objective.  Accordingly, Hegel's move to absolute knowledge is a move by which the immediacy of the categories could be restored.  

If knowledge is at all to be possible, there must be a perspective that gets to the thing itself.  If this is not the world, then it must be those transcendental conditions by which the world becomes world.  Since the immediacy of those transcendental conditions cannot be vouchsafed any longer by the subject, these conditions must be guaranteed by the Absolute that "takes up" all conditioned finite perspectives, whose taking up itself is necessary for the writing of books about the "taking up."  The Absolute Idea unfolds through concepts allowing the grasping of transcendental content, a historically mediated grasping that grants an immediacy to that which would otherwise remain wholly mediated. 

Notice that as the world became what it is for us, the world of as it is for us was true both of the manifest image of the world as well as its scientific image (Sellars). The manifest image of the world is clearly not the world as it is in itself. The scientific image which tries to explain those mechanisms by virtue of which the world is manifest, however, is often assumed to be what ultimately is the case.  However, it is clear that if there is no immediate access to the world in itself as the manifest world, there can be no such access to the world in itself as the scientific world of mechanisms by virtue of which the world is manifest.  The scientific world with all of its objective structures is a world that cannot be more immediate than the manifest world.  Accordingly, it is a world for us.  The manifest image of the world and the scientific image of it do not deal with the world as it is apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language. Simply put, the world bears the marks of that for whom it is a world.  

Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel had theological aspirations, of course.  While much has been written about the the changed metaphysical climate after Kant, not as much has been written about the relevance of this changed climate for theology.  If we cannot know the supersensible world -- if the very notion of the supersensuous drives us beyond the bounds of all possible experience -- we cannot also know any regions of that supersensuous realm, e.g., theology.  Kant, of course, recognized this and claimed that he "had done away with knowledge of God to make room for faith." 

Kant had argued that the categories of substance and causality cannot apply to objects outside the realm of the phenomena.  This means, inter alia, that one cannot apply 'substance' or 'causality' to God.  God cannot be a substance bearing causal relations to other substances because there are no precepts being united to organize experience into one in which there are gods.  Gods do not exist in the phenomenal, and there are no metaphysical arguments showing conclusively that God must exist.  One might believe in the realm of the supersensible, but one cannot ever know those supersensible substances putatively causally connected to other supersensible entities or entities in the world.  

While knowing the external world occurs when we know the ways we have organized that external world -- when we know ourselves properly! -- knowing the supersensible world is not possible even though we are again thinking about our thinking.  Thinking about our thinking with regard to the phenomenal gives discrete knowable experience.  Thinking about our thinking with regard to the noumenal does not issue in any knowable experience, but rather can only put us in touch with our way of thinking.  Theology does not give experience, but it does constitute a way of thinking.  

So how must Christology proceed on the other side of Kant?  Given that we have no epistemic right to claim that we know the divine/human constitution -- nor the causality through which the divine person in Jesus of Nazereth effects salavation -- what do we do when doing theology and thinking our philosophy rightly?  What ought be the ways forward in Christology on the other side of Kant? What does theology become when its world is a world that is only for us?  

Since concepts are rules of possible syntheses, relating concepts in Christology must be a relating of ways in which such syntheses might relate to each other.  What can "two natures in one person" mean in the non-metaphysics of post-Kantian reflection?  After all, to speak of divine and human nature is to speak of that which lies beyond human experience.  Add the notion of 'person' to the mix and we are talking about the ordering of our ideas and not about the synthesis of experience.  Our ideas do not constitute experience, but they are important in how we must think aspects of our experience.  

Kant famously saw Christology as flowing from morality, and understood that human beings are unavoidably in the middle of moral life, even though moral life is not one of experience. There will be much more exploration of this in later posts, but for now we must continue our story beyond when the world was what is was for us to when the world turned ceased to be for us at all.  We must examine what happens when the world becomes worldless.  

III. Beyond the World as it was For Us

When the world was what it was, the world was in itself what it was.  The trajectory of thinking inaugurated by Kant gave a world no longer in itself, but a world now merely for us.  When the world was in itself, the world was known in its immediacy.  When the world became what it is for us, the world was known in its mediacy.  Both the in itself and the for itself of the world nonetheless presupposes that there was an immediacy to that by which the world is known in itself and for itself.  

Transcendental reflection that had dislodged the immediacy of the world nonetheless presupposed its immediate graspability. While Hegel increasingly realized that no Archimedean standpoint for transcendental reflection existed, his creative attempt to understand the various limited standpoints of transcendental reflection as manifestations of an unconditioned Absolute transcendental perspective that yet united the limited, conditioned, historically-mediated acts of transcendental reflection, kept at bay for a time the dawning realization that our acts of reflection are mediated as well, that is to say, there is no immediate access to ourselves.  Our putative privileged access to the contents of our own mind is a chimera.  While Descartes was often deluded about his access to the external world, we thinkers after Kant have been deluded about our access to our own thinking.  

The age that dawned after the age of the world as it is for us, is an age that increasingly took seriously that by virtue of which we thought we knew ourselves: it took seriously the language by and through which we thought we had found ourselves. This attention to language occurred both in the Anglo-American and the Continental expressions of philosophy, though in different ways.  The story here is complex and filled with surprising turns in trajectory.  Simply put, the twentieth century was an age that increasingly came to recognize that our capacities of self-representation are dependent upon others in surprising ways: our concepts, language and values are not our possessions by which we can objectively explore both the world and our own exploration of the world, but are themselves historically-conditioned social products.  

The words we use we did not create, and the concepts by which we think, we have learned from others -- mostly through the words that we did not create.  Every act of thinking employs concepts that have been bequeathed to us by tradition.  The days of thinking of language as a "tool kit" to grasp the objectivity of meaning are long gone.  We know too much.  Our so-called transcendental horizon is not the "unvarnished good news" that Quine once called the "myth of the given."  Just as there is no givenness to experience apart from our historically-conditioned conceptuality by and through which such experience arises, there is no givenness either to transcendental structures of reflection.  Transcendental reflection cannot escape the historicity of experience itself, a historicity that grasps the impossibility of reflecting objectively upon the conditions of reflection itself.  Just as "looks red" presupposes "is red" (Sellars), so does the apprehension of transcendental structures presuppose the conceptuality of such structures, a conceptuality given through language socially.  

Heidegger (1889-1976) famously uncovered the living and breathing ontology through and by which human beings make and live meaning.  We are creatures of meaning embedded within worlds of meaning that we did not construct. We who in our being ask the question of the meaning of being, necessarily ask the question within the historically messy process of the history of being.  Ultimately, Heidegger claimed, our takes on being are themselves a working out of be-ing as it is in and through our thinking.  But, for Heidegger, this Be-ing in its history is no Absolute that can in Hegelian fashion "take up" various understandings of be-ing and somehow come to itself deeply in its own thinking.  The history of Be-ing cannot be the God of the tradition of the Absolute of Hegel, this Be-ing in its history is nowhere and no place, and it cannot be accessed by itself.  It is deeply and necessarily so hidden that Heidegger in speaking it must use the language of "the last God."  

We live in the world beyond the world as it was for us.  This world is not in itself, not for itself, and definitely not in and for itself.  This world is, in fact, worldless.  It is a world suspicious of meta-narratives (Lyotard), of comprehensive attempts to find in the world discrete trajectories of rationality or progress.  

Once there was the a world that really was in itself.  After the death of this world, there was a self that really was in itself.  Post-modernity is the celebration of both the death of the world and the self, a celebration that must be in a certain sense ecstatic because there is no longer a self-possessed self through and by which the self can clearly conceive and pronounce its own death.   Our current time is an age where the screens have overwhelmed the capacity of either the world or the self to manifest themselves clearly upon them. We are without foundations; it is turtles all the way down.  

Living beyond the world in itself is difficult for theology.  God understood along the lines of world or self, could be a God that is still somehow understood.  But when the self lives ecstatically on the basis of concepts and language that are not its own, then there are no places any longer for God to lay His head.  After all, God is by definition incapable of ecstatic existence.  God cannot be carried along or constituted upon differential fields that somehow account for intermittent manifestations of identity.  If anything is, it would seem, God is.  There are no parts to God.  God is that identity by and through which all difference is ultimately understood.  

So what does one do with Christology in an age beyond the age of the world for us?  In our age where all immediacy is blocked, everything that seemingly is, is dependent upon something that it is not.  Just as the identity of the world turned out to be dependent upon that which is different from the world -- its putative transcendental structures -- and the identity of the self turned out to be dependent upon that which is different from the self -- the concepts and language of historically-conditioned social communities -- so too do our fleeting perspectives arising out of particular historically-conditioned social communities find a deeper difference out of which language and thought emerges, a difference that is Other than the historically-conditioned linguistically bequeathed by culture and tradition, a difference that must ultimately be Other than the world and all its putative foundations.  We are very close now to the beginnings of our tradition, a tradition claiming that out of nothing comes something.  

What is needed is to think Christology radically after not only the deconstruction of onto-theology (Heidegger), but the de-structuring itself of that deconstruction.  Thinking Christology beyond the phenomenological presencing that putatively once gave rise to onto-theology, is to bring into focus clearly the Abyss that is either unsupported and provides no support, or unsupported that provides support, or somehow itself supported.  What is Christ in such a situation, and what could a real ontic unity between Christ and the Christian be? But the development of these ideas must await another time.  What is needed is a Christology in a time when the world is not.  

Theology and Metaphysics

Theology and philosophy have always been deeply related, though each has often tried to disown the other.  The ways in which they have related to each other are often overlooked by those believing they already know what the relationship is or ought to be.  

We hear much these days about the destruction of the history of onto-theology.  Theology, we are told, must move forward without the help of metaphysics.  The story is that metaphysics is bad, that metaphyscis is, in the words of one Christian theologian, "death dealing."  But why the rancor against metaphysics?  

The story of the exclusion of metaphysics from theology is a long and complicated one, a story whose tellers carry presuppositions about which they are often unaware.  I tell the story in the following paragraphs.   

Once upon a time 2,400 years ago, Greek philosophers, thinking deeply about things, recognized that there were certain problems connected with knowing the world and our way around in that world.  If everything that is, is in process (Heraclitus), then how could it be that there is anything stable in the world to know.  If one can never step into the same river twice -- that is, if the matter of the river is alway changing -- then how can one speak meaningfully about a river at all? But we do speak meaningfully about rivers.  Thus, there must be something stable about which we speak when we talk about things in the world, especially when we talk about how things in the world change.  It seems that the condition for the possibility of change is that there is something stable and enduring to which change might be attributed.  After all, it is the same sheep in the field, though this ewe no longer has wool.  

I marvel at the work of Plato and Aristotle in their attempt to give an account of how knowledge is possible and how change is possible.  Plato, of course, advocated that there must be some stable and enduring forms which we know and about which our talk is about.  The form sheep, instantiated in this object before me, allows me to speak truly the statement, 'this sheep has lost its wool.'  

Aristotle gave us a metaphysics of primary substances, accidents and secondary substances that allowed us to make sense of our world.  There are basic unities called substances, of which certain can be "said of", and of which certain things are "present in."  The primary substance is this sheep, and the whiteness of its wool is "present in" this sheep.  However, 'sheep' can be 'said of' this sheep, and so can 'mammal' and 'animal'.  

Plato and Aristotle knew that before we can go about clearly investigating the natural world around us, and the complexity of ourselves, we needed language to do that investigating, language presupposing categories by which anything as such is know, and through which anything as such is.  A world in which there is only becoming would be a world unknown to us.  What was needed is the logos, the permanent possibilities by and through which things become.  

Christian theology found the work of Plato and Aristotle very handy when it came to talk about the divine.  Just as becoming needed forms by which the becoming my be and be known, it seemedthat God  was in need of such forms as well.  Without such forms, it would seem we could no more utter a word about God as we might utter a word about ceaseless becoming.   

But talk about God appears quite different than talk about the world of becoming all around us.  After all, we can see, hear, touch, smell and taste the world around us, but this seems not to be true of the divine.  God is supersensible; the divine is beyond all sensible finite being.  Categories by which we might know the world are categories we use when talking about God.  Metaphysics is born again in its attempt to take the categories that apply to the temporal and finite and use them to speak of the eternal and infinite. This seems quite reasonable because the categories themselves in their universal applicability seem to suggest the eternal, immutable and infinite.  The categories are not themselves comprised of the material becomings to which they apply.  If they were so comprised, they would not be categories, and the problem of stability and change would come back upon us again in full force.  

Medieval thinkers knew their metaphysics, and realized that reason itself dictates the use of metaphysical categories if there was to be anything stable about God and his mighty deeds that they human mind might know and that human language might speak.  Seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophers often divided on where to put their attention, with Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz arguing passionately that rationality itself connects to the forms by which reality is grasped, a connecting that concerns the supersensible.  These great "continental rationalists" thought that proper application of reason could eventuate in knowledge of the supersensible, and ultimately through this, knowledge of the sensible itself could occur.  

Christian theology from the fourth century onward had linked itself arm and arm with the metaphysical.  And why not?  God as the eternal, immutable, impassible, infinite being is a denizen -- one might say the paradigmatic denizen -- of the realm of the supersensible itself.  No matter how large the field of the supersensible, God fills it, and even, at times, seems to strain against the borders.  After all, God as "that which none greater can be thought" must occupy the highest region of Being, though one must allow that God could at any time go to live in another realm entirely. 

God as the highest being quite naturally assumed the Grund (ground) role within all of being. While all beings in the supersensible have some reason to be that appeals to something outside themselves, God's raison d'etre must be included within Himself alone.  God is the uncaused cause, the unmoved mover, the necessary being grounding all contingency, the perfection of the medieval transcendentals of goodness, beauty and truth, and that by virtue of which the world has a consistency and stability allowing for human life.  

God as the ineffable, impassible, uncaused causer is the condition for His own actuality as well as the actuality of the world as such.  Why is there being and not nothing?  There is being because there is God and God is the one activity of being in all activities of being and the highest being.  Because there is God, there is metaphysical and physical order.  God has more being than His angels, who have more being than human beings, who themselves have more being than the animals, plants and minerals.  The "Great Chain of Being" determines the hierarchy of being, and every being on that hierarchy.  

The metaphysical realm of the supersensible is closed to all human sensing, but not to human thinking.  One can know something about supersensible hierarchies through reason, and through the reason-transcending showings of the supersensibe to human beings.  In the tradition, revelation stands on the side of reason and not on the side of the empirical.  Revelation and reason deal with the eternal verities, while the senses concern the temporal.  The first deal with Plato's realm of Being, the second with his realm of Becoming.  

Kant famously argued that the traditional province of human thinking, the realm of metaphysics itself, was epistemically inaccessible to human thinking. What can be known are those determinate perceptions (intuitions) that have been synthesized by our concepts into determinate objects of experience.  Human thinking as such could proceed in orders of conditioned and that which conditions, but such thinking does not access the supersensible it itself.  It does not carve the beast of reality at its joints. Such thinking is regulative; it is how human beings must think something, but there is no justified reason to think that how we must think something is the way that the supersensible thing to be thought is.  The transcendental subreption occurs when we confuse the necessity of our thinking with any necessity that the thing thought might have. 

With one fell swoop, Kant seemingly broke up the 14 century long marriage between theology and metaphysics.  "Doing away with knowledge to make room for faith" sounded good to many people in the day, but the pesky problem since the time of Kant has concerned what exactly does one have faith in?  

Fichte, Shelling, Coleridge, Schleiermacher, Hegel, and many others scavenged about for ways to think God beyond traditional supersensible formulations.  Perhaps one might think God as the whence of the human feeling of absolute dependence.  Perhaps God is found in the dynamism of the ego as it creates and surpasses the forms by which the world is known.  Perhaps God can be identified as the human effort to know the world through history, a knowing that is absolute when all that has been and can be known is known, a knowing that is simultaneously God reaching complete self-consciousness. 

But metaphysical ways die hard, and the post-metaphysical ways to think God suddenly seemed to be thinking God all over again through a new type of metaphysics. To think God as the transcendental field allowing knowledge to happen as a "laying out" or interpretation of God simply moves that which ultimately is from the prohibited traditional metaphysical transcendent to the newly permitted transcendentally unconditioned.  As that which ultimately conditions all knowledge, God is now thought as unconditioned conditioned, a step away from the uncaused causer, as it were, but a step that appeared to many to be not far enough.  

So it was the young Heidegger, reading the young Luther, who came to the conclusion that all of metaphysics, transcendent or transcendental, merely occludes that be-ing which is closest to us and in which we unavoidably dwell.  Heidegger declared that metaphysics is a practice in the "forgetfulness" of being because metaphysics simply lays out ultimate things with putative objectivity (present-at-hand being) while occluding the (ready-to-hand) practical fields of being in which human ultimately dwell.  Later Heidegger develops a radical critique of the "onto-theological tradition" of thinking God through derivative categories that ignore the factic life of Christians living always already ahead of themselves in anticipating the Second Coming of Christ.  One might say that onto-theology is the problem that has beset Christianity from its beginning and continually derails theology, which itself must ultimately concern human existence as they are "placed" or as the "find themselves" before God.  

This is the story of the great divorce between theology and metaphysics, a story that leaves Christian theology in the uncomfortable position of having to say something about God without using metaphysical categories.  But what can we say about God without metaphysical categories?  Although many books deal with this topic, It is actually quite difficult to answer this question.  If we don't talk about God then don't we fall into the black hole of apophatic theology?  This will be my topic in a later post.

Thoughts on Stewardship and Sorge

Stewardship is about care, and Heidegger showed us that Sorge (care) is the way in which Dasein exists. To be Dasein is to be a creature, and Sorge is the sine qua non of Dasein. This seemingly puts Sorge squarely in the order of creation.

Since the care of Dasein is an existential-ontological state tied to temporality, our creaturely stewardship in time is seemingly grounded in the temporality of care, and Dasein's "running ahead" (Vorlaufen) to the possibility of there being no more possibilities for it (death).

But for the Christian, care of the other cannot be simply one ontic possibility among others grounded in something more fundamental, the condition of our possibilities. It is commanded, after all, and the otherness of the command is constitutive of the creature in a way that an ontology making possible mere ontic possibilities is not. The problem is that transcendental subjectivity finally makes the Other merely a pole within the subject. But it is precisely because stewardship is not a possibility for Dasein that entails that the ex-stasis of its acts must be grounded in the Other. What is more Other than the Cross? Where better to encounter la differance upon which human existence ultimately and uneasily rests?

Christian "existence" is ex-static, grounded not in that which makes the everyday possible, but in that which reveals this ground as ungrounded. Revelation can never be a move within transcendental subjectivity nor of the Being within which such subjectivity hides and finds itself. It is the knife that pierces the veil, the veil constituted in the ease of our temporal exstasis, the veil finally blotting out the orthogonal. It is as if moving right or left with dispatch and profundity could move one up or down even a bit.

What if we took seriously the Otherness of God, an inescapable otherness of which the face holds no trace? What if existence itself is constituted upon an Abyss not synonymous with a Ground? What if to talk of this is not to domesticate it, that is, it is not to find a place for it in the Temple of the transcendental subject? What if we have mis-identified the non-being at the heart of our dis-ease?

Limits in theology do not work like in mathematics. We cannot get close to the former as we do the latter. Think a limit that is infinitely qualitatively different than anything most proximate to it. And so we have an analogy to God and Being.

On Theoretical Entities and Causality in Theology

In Chapter Seven of De prescriptione haereticorum, Tertullian declares, "What indeed has Athens to to with Jerusalem?  What concord is there between the Academy and the Church?  What between heretics and Christians?"

Tertullian is not saying that philosophy should be silent when it comes to things theological, or that philosophy and theology are about different subject areas, or that philosophy and theology somehow constitute incommensurate forms of discourse.  He is saying that we should reject attempts to produce what he calls, "a mottled Christianity of Platonic, Stoic and dialectic composition."

In the following reflection I take Tertullian's intent to heart.  I will not thereby produce a mottled Christianity.  It does not follow, however, that not producing a mottled Christianity entails that philosophy has nothing to do with theology.  In fact, philosophy has a great deal of relevance for theology, particularly as both disciplines were classically conceived and practiced.  Since the time of Plato, western philosophy has been profoundly concerned with questions of semantics, with the meaning and truth of its expressions.  Since the time of Aristotle, philosophy has been deeply concerned with logic, with entailments, compatibility and modality, that is, with what propositions follow from others, what propositions can be jointly true, and in what way these propositions are true.  From both men philosophy learned about metaphysics; it learned to reflect upon being and to distinguish the different ways that something can be said to be.  Clearly, talk of God presupposes positions in semantics, logic and metaphysics -- even if these views are not explicitly held or asserted.

Consider the following expressions comprising a primitive theological theory:

1. God is incorporeal
2. God is eternal 
3. God created the universe
4. God has three persons 
5. God through Christ redeems fallen creation 

For many Christians these expressions are prima facie quite simple and plainly true.  It seems, in fact, that there is no particular problem with their meaning, truth and entailments, or even the being of those entities and properties referred to.   But looks can be deceiving.   

Think of the term 'God' and compare it with other terms you might use, e.g., 'block', 'bird', 'slab', etc.  Notice that while 'block' and 'God' both are nouns and presumably name some entity, the way in which they do so is markedly different.  Presumably, 'block' picks out a member of a class of particular empirical objects, while 'God' does not.  (Specifying the necessary and sufficient conditions for a particular object to be a member of the class of blocks turns out to be a surprisingly difficult matter.  As Wittgenstein pointed out, there seems not to be definite criteria of application for the word 'block', but rather the members of the class seem to bear some not quite specifiable "family resemblance" to one another.)  The point is that 'block' does seem to refer to an observable object, while the term 'God' does not seem so to refer.  

Once upon a time in the philosophy of science people believed that there was a pretty clear distinction between observational terms and theoretical terms.  The referents of the first could be encountered through sense perception, while those of the second could not.   Unfortunately, the distinction between the two could not be easily maintained.  In what sense is an object observable to sense perception -- with the naked eye or through an electron telescope?  Are the bubbles in a bubble chamber an observation of a moving electron, or a phenomenal event that through suitable "bridge laws" biconditionally ties to a theoretical electron?  

Perhaps it is not the observational/theoretical distinction that separates 'block' and 'God', but a semantic difference having to do with whether or not the term in question has its meaning determined through the axioms of the theory, that is to say, the meaning of a theoretical term depends upon how that term is incorporated into an overall theory.  In a scientific theory, the laws of the theory are essential for determining the extension of the theory's terms.  This means that the meaning of individual terms in the theory are determined within the theory's overall context.   Holger Andreas writes: 

The contextual theory of meaning, therefore, makes intelligible how students in a scientific discipline and scientists grasp the meaning, or sense, of scientific terms.  On this account, understanding the meaning of a term is knowing how to determine its referent, or extension, at least in part.  (See "Theoretical Terms in Science," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2013), Edward N. Zalta, (ed.) URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2013/entries/theoretical-terms-science/>.  

When thinking of theology, it is clear that it too is a theory of a particular kind with some terms that are quite theoretical and some less so.  For instance, the term 'human being' used in theology seems to make easy reference to the world, while the term 'creation' is more problematic.  The first seemingly has a common reference in theology and sociology.  The word 'creation', however, apparently refers to the universe as such within an overarching theological theory, but makes no reference at all within sociology -- unless it perhaps refers to the manuscript the sociologist is writing.

The term 'God' seems to have meaning within a particular theological theory.  In (1) above, 'God' is predicated by 'incorporeal'.  Is incorporeality "present in" God or "said of" God?   If the former, then the being which is God has the property of not having a body in the actual world, but could have a body in another possible world.  If the latter, then it is not possible that any being which is God could have a body.

From the standpoint of the philosophy of science, 'God' is a theoretical term naming a theoretical entity, a term that seemingly has incorporeality as part of its very meaning.  Just as a bachelor is an unmarried male, so too is God incorporeal.

The same might be said about God's eternity.  Perhaps it is essential for God to be eternal, that is, nothing that is God can fail to be eternal.  If both eternity and incorporeality refer to God, then we might speak of a "conceptual tie or law": For any x, if x is God then x is eternal and incorporeal.  But this is not a paradigmatic bridge law because it is not a biconditional; it does state in addition that for all x if x is eternal and incorporeal, then x is God.  In addition, it does not "bridge" from observation events to the exemplification of a property by a theoretical entity.

If we do not, however, think of theological theory as having any bridge laws in the classic sense, but rather as constituted by a group of propositions having terms, many of which appear in a number of the propositions, we can speak of a term's meaning being a function of the way in which it appears in the other propositions in the theory.  (What is predicated of the term and what the term is predicated of.)  This implicit definition of the term then determines its extension.

Within our primitive theory, (1) and (2) presumably has a distribution of predication that differs from (3), for while predication of 'eternal' and 'incorporeal' in the theory does not allow for an x that is God to be predicated by 'not eternal' or 'corporeal', the x that is God can be predicated by 'creates the universe' or 'does not create the universe' because while one can have as a statement in the theory, 'did not create the universe at time t',  one cannot have 'is not eternal at time t'.  That the truth value of 'creates the universe' differs as a function of its temporal index, while the truth value 'is eternal' does not so differ, clearly shows that 'is eternal' means something quite different than 'creates the universe'.

Now consider the predicate in (4), 'has three persons'.  To say that the x that is God has three persons is quite different than saying that the x that is a small company has three persons.  Why?  Because one rarely if ever would say that an x that is a causal agent -- like in (3) -- could ever have three persons.  While a company could be said to be a group of people exhibiting certain relationships among them, God cannot be said to be a group in any sense, for the three persons having relationships among themselves is the simplicity of the one God.

Proposition (5) asserts that the x that is God causes it to be the case that the domain that God creates is now redeemed.  This analysis of 'redeems the world' can be given a temporal characterization like 'creates the world', thus showing that these terms must have different meanings than terms like 'incorporeal' and 'eternal'.  The phrase 'through Christ' adds further complication because it raises the question of whether 'God redeems' if and only if 'God through Christ redeems', and, if so, what does 'through Christ' add in meaning to 'God'.  To show that 'through Christ' has a different meaning, one needs to show that 'God' and 'God through Christ' cannot be substituted with each other salve veritate throughout the entire theological theory.

What I am suggesting here is neither terribly original nor novel.  I am merely suggesting that it might be instructive to look at theological theory with its theoretical entities in ways similar to how we might look at a physical theory having such entities.  We might do this simply to get clear on the semantics of our theological language.   What exactly is meant by a term appearing within a theological theory of a particular kind over and against a term appearing within a theory of another kind?  Since we have fewer empirical moorings in theology than physics, it is useful perhaps to focus more deeply on what it is we might be meaning when employing language of the first kind.

On the Logical Priority of Logos

Theology's function is to interpret the kerygma into the context.   This much has always been clear to me.   But what are the limits of this interpretation?  What norms sort theological attempts between success and failure?   And what are the proper words to use here?   Ought we to speak of true theological statements over and against false ones?    Are theological claims made in this interpretation better thought to be felicitous or infelicitous?   Are some more fecund than others, and, if so, what are the marks of this fecundity?

Over three decades ago I decided that I wanted to do theology seriously.  But over the decades I have been paralyzed by the Herculean effort seemingly needed to make any true theological advance in our time.   I knew that I could not simply parrot putative truths of another time as if they were truths of our time, yet I did not want to say that the truth-values of theological statements were simply and facilely indexed to time.  I have watched contemporary theology (and theologians) come and go and I have marveled at how little their passage on the theological stage seemingly depends upon the strength of their arguments.  I have always assumed that the acceptance of theological positions ought not be like that of political ones.   Theology, the grand discipline of the west, could not be simply a matter of fad, whim, and immediate political, economic and social cash value.   It simply has to be something more, I have hoped.

The proclamation of the life, suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ has to be the starting point of theology.  The source of theology must be the Cross.  Of this, I have never had doubt.   An analysis of the cultural and intellectual horizon is necessary to the task of theology and, in some way, this horizon is itself a source of theological reflection.   However, this source is not of the same type as the other source.  While one has particular insight into the horizon, and while the horizon is something we "bump up against" in all experience, the horizon is not revealed.   The kerygma is revealed and the horizon is not.

Yet the two are given in a different way than our interpretative activity of unpacking the poles of kerygma and horizon, and carefully and patiently laying out, uncovering, or constructively articulating the relationships holding between those poles.  Our language, culture, philosophical assumptions, conceptual schemes, and own existences (including the socio-political) are the media by which the poles are refracted.  The hard task of locating the poles with respect to each other by specifying their connections is, of course, what the method of correlation is all about.   This creative, interpretive act of correlation is built upon previous acts of interpretation.   There is a hermeneutic of kerygma, a hermeneutic of horizon, and a hermeneutic correlating the deliverances of the first two hermeneutics.   Since the hermeneutical act is historically, culturally, conceptually influenced - - the product of the hermeneutic seems destined to be a here today, gone tomorrow, Johnny one-hit phenomenon.  Or so it seems on first reflection.

But perhaps we theologians spend too much creative energy wallowing in the quagmire of the seeming relativism based upon historical, cultural, and conceptual dynamism.  After all, it is not that the hermeneutical task - - and the hermeneutical circle and its effects - - infect what we do alone.   All intellectual activity proceeds by interpreting one thing, then interpreting another thing, and finally interpreting how those things fit, or don't fit, together.  It is what human beings do, and it is what we have always done.   Yet, there was once a time - - and there is in many other disciplines still a time - - when truth claims were/are vigorously asserted, supported, denied and repudiated on the basis of criteria that are abiding even within the flux of history, language, and culture.  It is not that everything is a Heraclitian flux only.  There is, after all, logos in the flux; there is order and reason.  We theologians have tended to concentrate so much upon the flux that we miss the order.   We tend to forget that the very categories we use in thinking and communicating the historical flux of thought are, in some sense stable categories.   In fact, the necessary condition for communicating flux is an ordered, coherent structure of thinking and being.  One cannot state change without perdurance.   This very old thought is either true or false, and I believe there are very good reasons to think it true - - Gorgias aside.  

What we theologians need again is a healthy dose of the reality of logos.  Our task is not dissimilar to Descartes'.   We must assume the worse-case scenario for theological knowledge, and try to uncover those stable structures presupposed by that worse case.  We must again learn to employ principle of contradiction:  If a theological position, or a hermeneutical interpretation of the hermeneutical situation ramifies a contradiction, then we must learn again to state clearly that the denial of that position is at least possible.  Moreover, we must learn again to think deeply enough theologically to spot the ways in which theological discourse is not generally a discourse of the contingent, and be able to conclude appropriately from this how the possible thus relates to the actual.  This is not easy work, but it is the work before us.

Just as flux presupposes logos, so does the historicity of the hermeneutical situation presuppose a metaphysics, that ontological correlate to the stable structural categories necessary even to state a non-completable hermeneutical dynamism.  It is precisely this metaphysics that theology has forgotten about, and it is precisely this that must be investigated again.   My hope is to begin this investigation soon.