Diputatio IV: On Truth and Theological Felicity

Thesis

Theological truth is constituted internally as Spirit-felicity (that is, optimal felicity) and externally as interpretive adequacy to divine reality.

Explicatio

Theological discourse T possesses a distinctive mode of truth that cannot be reduced to empirical correspondence or logical coherence. For within T, utterances are not descriptive propositions about God but Spirit-empowered acts of confession, invocation, and proclamation.

Hence, the “truth” of such utterances must be understood analogically—as the Spirit’s realization of their felicity. When we speak here of internal truth, we mean optimal felicity: the point at which theological speech perfectly fulfills the conditions of Spirit-authorized utterance.

Accordingly, theology’s twofold truth may be expressed as follows:

1. Internal Truth (Optimal Felicity). Within T, truth signifies felicity brought to its fullness. A statement is “true” when it can be rightly and fittingly spoken in the Spirit—when divine authorization, confessional form, and ecclesial context coincide. Truth here is performative, not predicative; it marks the Spirit’s act of making language correspond to divine presence, not to empirical fact.

2. External Truth (Interpretive Adequacy). From outside T, theology as reflective science considers whether its felicitous speech acts are adequate to divine reality—whether the language that the Spirit enables indeed corresponds to what God is. This is theology’s interpretive, ontological, and metaphysical dimension.

The distinction between internal and external truth thus corresponds to two levels of theological activity: confessional performance and reflective interpretation.
Christ unites them. In Him, divine and human speech coincide; He is both the fountain of felicity and the measure of adequacy.

Objectiones

1. Obiectio I: If internal truth means only “optimal felicity,” theology risks reducing truth to linguistic success or communal coherence.

2. Obiectio II: Distinguishing internal and external truth introduces two truths—one for worship, another for metaphysics—thus dividing theology.

3. Obiectio III: External adequacy presupposes metaphysical access to divine reality, which finite human language cannot claim.

Responsiones

1. Ad I: Internal truth (optimal felicity) is not pragmatic success but Spirit-effected participation in divine reality. The felicity of theological speech is itself a divine event: the Spirit causes the utterance to bear truth ontologically. Thus, the “truth” of T in se is not human performance but divine presence within linguistic act.

2. Ad II: Internal and external truth are not dual but ordered. Internal truth names the Spirit’s fulfillment of felicity; external truth names human reflection on that fulfillment’s adequacy to being. They relate as form and interpretation, united in the Word made flesh.

3. Ad III: The Spirit who authorizes theological language is the same Spirit who unites human understanding to divine being. Hence, theology’s external adequacy is not metaphysical intrusion but participatory adequation: finite reason is drawn into divine light through the same Spirit who makes language felicitous.

Nota

We retain the term “internal truth” because theology’s felicity is not merely linguistic success but a manifestation of truth itself—truth not as correspondence but as communion.  Yet it must always be read as shorthand for optimal felicity—the condition under which divine presence is perfectly realized in speech.

The internal “truth” of T is thus not propositional but performative: to say “Jesus is Lord” in the Spirit is not to report a fact but to participate in the fact’s reality. Truth here is an event—the Spirit’s actualization of divine meaning within human language.

Excursus A: On Lindbeck, Blackburn, and the Limits of Non-Realist Semantics

The analogy between internal truth and felicity clarifies theology’s position relative to modern theories of meaning without truth conditions.

1. Lindbeck. George Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic model correctly recognized that meaning in theology is governed by the Church’s grammar. Yet without a pneumatological ground, Lindbeck’s model risks cultural relativism: “truth” becomes what the community sanctions as valid speech.

2. Blackburn. Simon Blackburn’s assertibility semantics offers a secular parallel: expressions mean what can be properly asserted within a linguistic community. Blackburn’s framework captures the structure of felicity but lacks the metaphysical depth to account for divine authorization.

3. Theological Advance. Theology surpasses both by positing the Spirit as the ground of felicity. The Spirit—not communal convention—renders theological assertions capable of bearing divine truth. Internal truth thus retains the structure of assertibility but re-centers it on pneumatological causality.

Hence, theology’s “truth” is neither mere coherence nor linguistic custom. It is felicity raised to truth by the Spirit’s act.

Excursus B: On Felicity and Causality

If felicity becomes truth through divine action, what grounds that action’s efficacy?

Following Aquinas, we can describe the relation between divine and human causes as primary and secondary causality.

• The Spirit is the causa principalis, the primary cause enabling theological speech to exist and act.

• The believer, speaking in faith, is the causa instrumentalis—a genuine but dependent cause, whose act derives its being from the Spirit’s primary causation.

Thus, theological utterances are not merely permitted by the Spirit but caused in their being. Their felicity is ontologically real because the divine cause constitutes them in esse.

To deny this metaphysical foundation would leave felicity groundless, turning authorization into arbitrary stipulation. Even physicalist accounts of causality, if pressed, presuppose such in esse grounding. Hence theology’s claim that the Spirit’s authorization is causal is not an appeal to mystery but a transcendental necessity for intelligible causation itself.

Determinatio

From the foregoing it is determined that theological truth exists in two interrelated forms:

• Internal truth, that is, optimal felicity, marking the Spirit’s perfect authorization of speech within T.

• External truth, the interpretive adequacy of that felicity to divine being.

Both together manifest theology’s realism: language in the Spirit is not self-referential but participates in divine act. Internal truth expresses God’s self-presence in utterance; external truth interprets that presence as ontological adequacy.

The Spirit thus transforms felicity into truth—not propositional truth but participatory truth, wherein divine and human language meet. This prepares the way for Disputatio V, which will articulate how divine causality grounds the being of theological language itself.

Disputatio III: On Felicity Conditions and Theological Language

Thesis 

Expressions are either included or excluded from T based upon their felicity conditions.

Explicatio

Theological language T is not a neutral or unrestricted field of human expression. Its boundaries are determined by felicity conditions—those circumstances under which an utterance can be rightly and meaningfully spoken in the Spirit.

To speak theologically is not first to describe divine realities but to participate in a Spirit-authorized act of speech through which divine reality becomes linguistically present. The Spirit is the primary condition of this possibility; the Church, through its scriptural, confessional, and liturgical life, mediates the grammar by which this felicity is recognized and preserved.

Hence, an expression is included in T when it satisfies these pneumatological and grammatical conditions, when it can be properly uttered within the life of faith. It is excluded when it violates those same conditions, whether by contradicting the grammar of divine address, denying Christological referentiality, or speaking outside the sphere of the Spirit’s authorization.

In a way of speaking, we might say that theology possesses an internal criterion of truth: felicity. Accordingly, to say that an utterance is “true” within theology is to say that it can be spoken in faith, in the Spirit, and in conformity to the rule of confession. But to say proposition p is "true" within T is not to say it is true of the world. Saying "true within T" is merely a way of speaking about optimal felicity conditions. The external truth of p—its adequacy to divine reality as interpreted—belongs to the reflective and interpretive act of theology considered as science.

Objectiones

Obiectio I: If theological expressions are governed by felicity rather than correspondence, theology risks reducing divine reference to pragmatic or communal performance, with meaning determined by use alone.

Obiectio II: If the Spirit’s authorization of speech is itself discerned only within T, the account becomes circular. The community claims that the Spirit authorizes what the community itself declares authorized.

Obiectio III: If felicity, not correspondence, governs inclusion in T, there appears to be no criterion for theological error. Any expression deemed “felicitous” by the community could be taken as true, eliminating dogmatic boundaries.

Responsiones

Ad I: The felicity of theological discourse is not sociological but pneumatological. The Spirit, as divine enabling condition, secures the referential transcendence of theological speech. The community’s role is receptive, not constitutive; it discerns what the Spirit authorizes rather than inventing the authorization.

Ad II: The apparent circularity disappears once felicity is recognized as a transcendental condition, not an empirical rule. Just as transcendental philosophy presupposes the unity of apperception without demonstrating it empirically, theology presupposes the Spirit’s enabling presence as the precondition of any meaningful God-talk. The Church’s confession reflects, but does not create, this condition.

Ad III: Felicity establishes a domain of possible theological error precisely by marking what cannot be said in the Spirit. Heresy consists in failed felicity, uttering what cannot bear the divine Name, what negates the reality it purports to confess. The boundaries of orthodoxy are the historical traces of this discernment.

Nota

The distinction between felicity and correspondence mirrors the deeper theological polarity between internal and external truth. Internally, theology is governed by the Spirit’s authorization—its truth is felicitous speech. Externally, theology as reflective science tests the adequacy of this speech to the divine reality it names. Christ, the Incarnate Word, unites these two orders of truth: He is both the condition of divine self-speech and the reality to which that speech corresponds.

Through the doctrine of felicity, theology avoids reduction either to positivist description or to cultural-linguistic relativism. It becomes, instead, a Spirit-formed language of participation, in which divine and human communicability converge.

Determinatio

From the foregoing it is determined that T, the language of theology, is not an arbitrary or open system but a Spirit-delimited field of discourse. Entry into T depends upon the fulfillment of felicity conditions that are at once grammatical, confessional, and pneumatological.

This entails:

1. That theology possesses its own felicity conditions, distinct from the truth-conditionality of its models. 
2. These felicity conditions -- sometimes spoken as "theological truth" -- arise through divine authorization rather than human convention.
3. That the possibility of the inadmissibility of a theological expression into T, spoken loosely as "theological falsehood" remains, but only within the horizon of Spirit-enabled speech, where failure to speak rightly is failure of felicity, not of syntax alone. 

Thus, theology is neither a pragmatic social game, nor an empirical or metaphysical discipline, but a divinely constituted form of language in which the Spirit renders speech capable of bearing divine meaning loosely considered. It cannot, of course, bear divine meaning properly considered since model-theoretic theology understands that meaning and truth are semantic notions, and that extensional meaning is thus a function of modeling, not of the felicity of T alone.