The Dilemmas of a Secular Age

I am privileged to teach the first course of the Doctor of Ministry program at the Institute of Lutheran Theology entitled, "The Secular Age."  Our D. Min. wants students to be deeply aware of the intellectual and cultural horizon into which they must proclaim the gospel, an intellectual and cultural horizon that is by no means as simple and unambiguous as the secularists believe.  

The text used in this course is Charles Taylor's 2007 book,  A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).  In this massive tome, Taylor challenges denizens of the North Atlantic world seriously to consider this question: "Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable" (25)? 

While Taylor devotes 871 pages attempting to answer this question, commentators over the last ten years have authored many more pages describing, analyzing, acclaiming and critiquing what Taylor wrote then, and what he has been writing in response to those who have written about what he wrote then.

I want today to discuss the dilemmas Taylor discusses in chapters 17 and 18 of A Secular Age as to their apologetic effectiveness.  Does he manage to point to an Anknuepfungspunkt ("point of contact") for those seeking to proclaim the gospel into the post-modern context?  Do these chapters succeed in uncovering a possible ground upon which an open hearing of the gospel is made more likely?  Is it possible that Taylor has articulated something the could remove an "obstacle to faith?"  In order to understand what Taylor is doing in these chapters, however, I will first have to say something about what had happened in the six hundred pages prior to Taylor's discussion of these dilemmas.

The Narrative

Taylor addresses the question as to why belief in God is now so difficult by providing a grand narrative.  The first 14 chapters -- four of the five main sections of the book -- tell the story of how it came to be that belief in God "seems" now implausible to a great many.  Taylor's story shows how "exclusive humanism" became an of option for a full human life.

Taylor's tale departs from what many expect, the story that as science waxes, religion wanes. He argues against "subtraction theories," views suggesting that the positive aspects of modernity emerge only after religious belief is jettisoned.  Taylor believes that the often intolerant, modern secularist world-view presupposes all of the following:

• The success of science in explaining that which religion fails to explain
• The psychological and moral maturity of modern man and women over the childishness of viewing the world religiously
• The ethical and moral inferiority of religion in its misanthropy and resistance to human self-actualization 

Taylor's tale starts with the story of disenchantment: the early modern rejection of the traditional porous cosmos in which good and evil reside in regions beyond the human heart, and its affirmation of a world of individual buffered selves affecting and being affected by the external world and other buffered agents outside the self and in that world.  Taylor refers to this process as the "great disembedding," a process that undercuts the previous embedding of human agents within society, a society which itself is embedded in a cosmos ultimately grounded in God (152).  In this disembedding, society is refigured, it is now seen as a collection of individuals, each with interests, one of which is happiness.   

In this world of buffered selves the notion of autonomous moral agency develops.  Taylor dedicates chunks of his text to the rise of reform movements beginning five hundred years ago.  It is part of disenchantment to reform the world and the self in conformity with the putative will of God.  

By the time of the Enlightenment, a "providential deism" is in the air, an affirmation of the divine in which God increasingly functions to support human happiness, particularly a this-worldly nurturing of family life.  However, as the implications of the buffered self and its autonomous moral agency become apparent, Enlightenment men and women begin to sense that their disembedded, disenchanted existence is one of isolated human agency within an impersonal natural order.  

Throughout this narrative, Taylor is less interested in describing historical theories and ideas than in discussing the background conditions making doctrinal theories and practical piety possible.  These conditions he labels "social imaginaries," the set of pre-ontic dealings buffered selves have with each other and the objects in their environment.  Such pre-ontic dealings constitute the pre-articulated phenomenological world we all inhabit.  This world was once one where it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, and now is one where it is inescapably easy not to believe.  Although Taylor does not use the term, he is engaged in genetic phenomenology, a description of the genesis of the meaning of things, in "laying bare" that world in which we now find ourselves in our judging, affirming and denying. 

As denizens of an impersonal natural order, we are not long content.  With Christian belief no longer a live option for the intelligentsia, new ways of seeking "fullness" arise in the nineteenth century.  Romanticism and its search for beauty plays prominently in various nineteenth century trajectories seeking fullness in non-explicitly Christian ways.  

Taylor seemingly employs the term 'fullness' salvifically.  Human beings have a drive to lives of fullness, a fullness thatTaylor often connects to agape love.  He suggests that fullness is an experience of the conveying of what matters most in life in a complete and perfect way (600-601).  Accordingly, such fullness could be grounded in a deep structure within us, e.g., reason, or it might perhaps be graced by the divine.  

The search for fullness, while once tethered for Christian to ends outside life, becomes in the 18th and 19th centuries increasingly connected to an "exclusive humanism," to a this-worldly ordering of society and culture for mutual benefit.  Such humanism espouses a benevolence motivated either by Enlightenment reason or the natural "fellow feeling" (Hume) men and women have for each other.  Exclusive humanism develops, providing an alternative to faith in God, miracles and mystery.  Positively, because of the development of dignity, freedom and discipline, exclusive humanism grants to buffered selves an expanded sense of self-worth.  Negatively, it displays to them their own limitations and inculcates within them a sense of alienation and emptiness.  

What follows is the "nova effect," an explosion of religious and spiritual options, a "galloping pluralism on the spiritual plane."  This intensifies into the current "age of authenticity," the growth of a widespread "expressive individualism" focusing on fashion, style and individual rights.  While traditional objects of religious devotion and belief have been marginalized in this age, new kinds of spiritualities and new places of the sacred have arisen to take their place.  Even Christian belief gets a new lease on life, for though Christendom is no longer, new Christian spirituality allows for a "believing without belonging" (528). In this age of authenticity religious searching continues as numbers of people still look for religious answers to the question of the meaning of life. 

I have said a few words about Taylor's narrative to contextualize and set up the last section of his text, the last five chapters which provide a structural analysis of our present age, an age where men and women are seeming haunted by a transcendence that they cannot quite affirm.  It is in this section that we finally turnTaylor's dilemmas, the primary focus of my remarks.  It also is in this section that we find Taylor taking up the apologetic task, not one that demonstrates the truth of the Christian faith, but rather one that attempts to point to and undercut the smug and confident secularist construal of things.  

The Analysis

We dwell today within the "immanent frame," that space that has resulted from our disenchantment from the cosmos and the emergence of the buffered self, a self which is individual, private and disciplined, a self that has set out to reform the world, a world vanquished from higher time, a world living the banality of homogenous "lower" time.  This immanent frame is a "natural order" rather than a "supernatural" one, a self-sufficient world we all inhabit pre-reflectively, a frame "common to all of us in the modern west" (543).  Moreover, this immanent frame can either be open to the transcendent or closed to it.  However, Taylor emphasizes that both of these possibilities step "beyond available reasons" into a state of "anticipatory confidence" or faith (550).  The immanent frame is given to us phenomenologically and pre-reflectively; it is the primordial world in which we dwell, a world prior to reason-giving, a realm prior to normative evaluation.  

Within the immanent frame both closed and open "spins" and "takes" are possible.  While a "take" in the immanent frame affirms either immanence or transcendence while remaining open to the disjunct it does not affirm, a "spin" does not recognize itself as an interpretation of the cross-pressuring within the immanent frame towards either immanence or transcendence, and accordingly denies plausibility to the disjunct it does not affirm.  Simply put, a "spin," unlike a "take," does not know itself to be simply a way of seeing things; it thinks it stands on the facts.

Taylor believes that in the immanent frame, genuine "Jamesian space" exists towards the possibility of transcendence.  (In the seemingness of immanence, there is a haunting of transcendence, a haunting that might give one reason ultimately to adopt a position of openness towards transcendence.)  While Taylor makes passing reference to religious fundamentalism as a spin in the immanent frame towards transcendence that cannot grasp how one could not discern transcendence, it is the academy and its intolerance to the very possibility of transcendence that is his real interest.  The "fundamentalism" of the academy mistakes its way of seeing things with fact.  Taylor wishes to contest the "spin of closure which is hegemonic in the Academy" (549).  In so doing, he searches for the motivation behind closed spins which inter alia identifies openness to the transcendent as wishful thinking. 

There exist "closed world structures," all of which function as "unchallenged axioms" by believers both secular and religious (590). The philosophical picture undergirding closed world structures is foundationalist epistemology, specifically the internalist epistemological project stretching back to Descartes.  Accordingly, we have representations of a basic nature that are sense impressions, copies of sense impressions, and (for the rationalists) innate ideas.  From these basic epistemological building blocks, we build up our world.  What is closer to the foundations is more certain; what farther away more conjectural.  Obviously, any putative transcendent is disenfranchised by this starting point in "the given" because there are no foundations from which the complex idea of the transcendent can be properly derived.

Taylor argues that the foundationalist story is not a discovery of how thing are, but rather a new interpretation constructed by the buffered self.  He writes that this new story is a "stance which requires courage, the refusal of the easy comforts of conformity to authority, of the consolations of an enchanted world, of the surrender to the promptings of the senses" (560).

Although Taylor does not explicitly say it, closed world structures are the way in which we dwell with, or reside in involvement with, entities (objects and persons) within our world.  Like a Heideggerian existentiale, closed world structures are distinctive ways in which our care and concern about the world in which we dwell present themselves.  (See James Smith, How (Not) to be Secular, Eerdmans, 97.)  The secularist spin on the immanent frame is a way in which humans comport themselves in the world, a way which occludes God.  What is this way?

The way of closed spin is a way of dwelling in a world of "there is this and no more" (my phrase).  The tug of the Augustinian "my heart is not at rest until it finds its rest in Thee, O Lord," is now phenomenologically given not as a tug to deeper truth, but as temptation and distraction away from the only truth there is (563), the truth of "there is this and no more."  The way of being-in-the-world without God is not a discovery given to us by science, but a way in which we now comport ourselves with entities in our world as we now do science.  We dwell in the world as ones who are alone, who without God and pre-established purpose must make up a story for ourselves, a story of courage to appreciate and affirm our aloneness.  Dwelling alone in the world, we understand that our norms and values are the only ones that actually exist.  In our being-in-the-world we pre-understand that our moral autonomy gives us the only dignity we can possess, a dignity that has now come to maturity.  We are no longer children; we see the world as it is.  We reside in our world in a "there is this and no more" way.  Any attempt to affirm differently is wishful thinking and a mark of immaturity and/or childishness.  Clearly, Taylor is pointing to a powerful image and a heady dwelling -- this way of seeing the immanent as if it were not possible to see more than the "there is this and no more."

Despite the hegemonic closed spin in the academy and vast sections of culture, "cross-pressuring" abounds, that is, conflict between "the draw of narratives of closed immanence on one side, and the sense of their inadequacy on the other," the memory of transcendence and its enlightened rejection, conflict arises between old destabilized beliefs and emerging new ones (595). Taylor believes that from the tension of cross-pressuring new spiritual possibilities can arise. 

The cross-pressuring between our drive towards fullness -- even exclusive humanists locked in the immanent frame cannot wholly abjure it! --  and our current naturalistic, materialistic, and reductionistic account of the world and how it operates, creates a tension that infects various "fields" of existence.  With respect to agency, we shrink from our own determination, and instead affirm ourselves as "active, building, creating, shaping agents."  With respect to ethics, we affirm "higher ethical/spiritual motives" that are irreducible to biological instincts.  Finally, in aesthetics we affirm meanings and purpose that "are not just differential responses to pleasure" (596). 

The Dilemmas

In Chapter 17 and 18 Taylor explicitly discusses the dilemmas produced by the cross pressures.  While these are dilemmas for Christianity, Taylor believes that they also are problematic for exclusive humanism. 

Taylor begins by pointing to the growing penchant to flatten out spiritual struggles by appealing to therapy.  If human beings desire existential wholeness, and religion and its struggles of the spirit do not produce such wholeness, then perhaps therapy can.  On the therapeutic model, "healing doesn't involve conversion" (619).  In fact, spiritual struggle and conversion is a fundamental culprit making achievement of wholeness difficult.  The therapeutic revolution assumes that spiritual insight and concern for the transcendent is itself a motive for existential disorder.  Our lives, haunted by the memory of transcendence and characterized by a lack of fullness, are now to be addressed by a therapy that regards such transcendence and fullness as a pathology.  (Much of what Taylor discusses in this section I first encountered reading Brave New World and Lord of the Flies.) 

Taylor believes, however, that there are significant problems with the therapeutic program.  It turns out that the guilt associated with the spiritual life is now transferred to the therapeutic life.  Did I get the right treatment?  To what degree was I effective in overcoming the spiritual?  Moreover, to call the disordered interactions of the spiritual life pathological, would suggest that much of our everyday non-spiritual disordered lives are pathological as well. 

But there are other problems that surface for religion:

• Religion in general (and Christianity in particular) asks us to transcend our humanity in moving to embrace the higher.  This, however, mutilates us by asking us to repress what is really human (623).  
• Religion in general (and Christianity in particular) often proclaims that the world could be other than it is.  Such a hope tends to "bowdlerize" reality, downplaying the difficult aspects of nature we all face.  

Religion's preoccupation with the ideal and transcendent denies what is deeply human in the here and now.  (It is as if the world is condemned by the divine Law.)  Moreover, preoccupation with divine promise and transformation (grace?) fails to take the here and now seriously.  (It is as if one asserts that after grace, the Law no longer applies.)  Either there is two much law or not enough.  This is a dilemma with Christian faith: "It seems hard to avoid one of these criticisms without impaling oneself on the other" (624).   

Taylor does, however, explore ways out of the dilemma.  What if we lower the bar as to what counts as transcendence, and embrace what Martha Nussbaum calls "internal transcendence," a transcendence that does not deny natural drives and passions? 

Now Taylor employs the strategy of what is good for the goose is good for the gander.  He believes that it will not work simply to make Christianity not deny human natural drives and desires, for the Enlightenment universalism ingredient in exclusive humanism also represses some of our basic human drives and passions.  In fact, exclusive humanism seems to be in no better position than Christianity when it comes to the project of leveling out the natural instincts, drives and passions of human beings in the name of good order.  (Does not the current PC movement sometimes effect a type of mutilation of the natural?)  The problem of mutilation infects both religion and exclusive humanism.  It is against both the mutilations of Christianity and exclusive humanism that the Nietzschean anti-humanist critique emerged. 

Taylor adroitly carries on a dialogue between the three partners: religious people committed to transcendence, exclusive humanists committed to the "modern moral order" of organizing society for mutual benefit, and neo-Nietzschean anti-humanists who reject both transcendence and the entire project of organizing society for mutual benefit.  On many issues, two of the partners agree over and against the third.  While the anti-humanists attack Christianity and exclusive humanism for their mutilation of the natural drives and passions of humanity, the anti-humanists and exclusive humanists stand together in attacking Christianity because of its commitment to transcendence.  Moreover, Christianity and anti-humanism seem somehow to agree about "the valorization of death and sometimes violence" over and against exclusive humanism (638). 

All of this brings us to a discussion of what Taylor calls the maximal demand: "How to define our highest spiritual and moral aspirations for human beings, while showing a path to the transformation involved which doesn't crush, mutilate, or deny what is essential to our humanity" (639-640).  Here it seems that we are faced with a dilemma: we must either adjust down our moral aspirations so that our ordinary human life might flourish, or we must abandon some of our human flourishing in order to achieve our highest ideals.  Taylor argues that the dilemma of either having to adjust down our moral aspirations or our human drives and passions applies to both exclusive humanism and Christianity.  But while the grace of the eschaton is available to Christians failing the maximal demand, it is not so for exclusive humanists.   (Taylor attempts throughout this section to evaluate Christian trajectories on their basis of how they meet the maximal demand.  Unfortunately, he does not sufficiently clarify the criteria upon which to affirm or deny particular Christian belief and practice as having met that demand.)

Taylor indicates that there are other problems with which Christianity must deal.  Christianity has been deeply influenced by Platonism and its other-wordly emphasis.  So how can one square the hyper-reality of the transcendent light with the shadow (and unreality) of human drives and passions?  From the platonic perspective the "maximal demand" is really beside the point.  Moreover, how do Christian notions of sacrifice, suffering, punishment, atonement and violence survive the maximal demand to not mutilate our drives and passions?  How does an authentic Christian transcendence avoid that of Platonism, the latter of which, when conjoined to Christianity, seems to have provided profound meaning and purpose to countless through the centuries? 

The point of the dilemmas Taylor uncovers is to show that both Christianity and exclusive humanism are challenged by them.  This is particularly true of violence.  Christianity, anti-humanism and exclusive humanism all are confronted with the problem of violence, and all have difficulty coming to terms with it.  Exclusive humanism misses the deeper non-biological roots of violence while anti-humanism decouples morality from it.  But while only Christianity has the resources to think it profoundly -- and while only it believes it can be overcome -- the mere existence of the violence challenges notions of a beneficient God engaged in divine pedagogy of His children.   For Christianity, as well as exclusive and anti-humanism, there is "a fundamental ambivalence of human reality" (673). 

The question of profound meaning poses more problems.  From where comes our motivation for spiritual commitment or doing good?  Upon what "transcendence" is it based?  We deal with the experience of evil in two basic ways: Either ignore it and believe that there is nothing ultimately wrong, or address it by trying to heal and correct it.  Throughout this section, Taylor labors to show that Christianity is perhaps more open (and honest) with respect both to the recognition of evil and the attempt to ameliorate it.  He opines that exclusive humanism does not have adequate moral sources to undergird its commitment to human rights, and to treat properly the least advantaged in our society. The philanthropy of the exclusive humanist often becomes a misanthropy because those whom she helps often fail to appreciate both the gifts given and the highly developed moral nature of the giver. 

Whatever one might say about the specifics of these dilemmas, the strategy Taylor employs is important.  In doing apologetics in our postmodern, post-Christian context, one must identify the dilemmas facing both Christianity and exclusive humanism, point to the inadequacies of exclusive humanism in trying to address these dilemmas, and sketch the resources that Christianity has in addressing these dilemmas in a more profound way than exclusive humanism. 

The goal is first to get the person to see that their commitment to exclusive humanism is a take and not a spin.  This is crucial, because if the secular, the religious and the anti-humanist positions are all stories we tell ourselves, all ultimately alternate existentiales or ways of being in the world, all profoundly faith positions underdetermined by the data, then it is unreasonable to claim that one's closed take is a spin, that it is the way that things are apart from our awareness, perception, conception, interests and language.  If it is unreasonable to have a closed spin on the immanent frame, then a very significant obstacle to faith has been removed. 

Pascal once concluded that in the face of a possible infinite pay out of glory and bliss, it is unreasonable not to wager one's finite life.  Pascal knew that his wager never could bring one to faith, because that is in God's hands.  His wager was only meant to remove some obstacles to faith.  It was an Anknuepfungsspunkt whose establishment in no way undermines the gratuity of grace.

Perhaps Taylor is best read in this light.  If our closed spin is unreasonable, then perhaps we should pull back to a more defendable position, the field of takes rather than spins.  Notice that the area of either the open or closed take on the immanent is one probably more likely to hear the Word, a Word whose heard utterance rests only on the anti-foundations of the gratuity of grace.  The removal of an obstacle does not an affirmation make.  However, the honest affirmation of Christ does entail the removal of an obstacle to faith, the immanent spin on our present immanent frame.  

Musings on Causality, Divinity and Resurrection

It took a very long time before I could see things clearly.  

Growing up, I contemplated both God and science.   They always seemed in tension.  It did not help, of course, that my eighth grade confirmation pastor made me recite Luther's explanation to the First Article in from of the church with the prefix added, "In defiance of the theory of evolution, I believe that God has created me and all creatures . . . "

Although I did not know it at the time, I was already struggling with some pretty deep issues in the logic of explanation.   If one could explain why something was the case by pointing to laws and antecedent physical events and processes, what exactly was there left for God to do?  If I explained x both by divine intentionality D and some set of physical events E coupled with physical laws L, then in what sense is D, or perhaps E and L superfluous?  If x would not have happened without D, then surely E and L cannot form a complete explanation of x.   But E and L do form a complete explanation of x, therefore by modus tollens, x would have happened without D, and thus D is causally irrelevant.

The general problem is one of causal overdetermination, and confronts us as well in the philosophy of mind.  If mental event M1 explains M2, and M1 is physically realized by a set of brain events P1, and P1 causes a set of brain events P2, and P2 is the physical realization of M2, then in what sense is M1 qua M1 -- that is, M1 in so far as it is M1 -- causally efficacious in producing M2?  Does not the mental become merely epiphenomenal on neurophysiology, a "wheel idly turning" (Wittgenstein) as it were?  Is this not clearly a situation in which mental explanation fails to articulate the deepest causal map of the universe, and thus is in principle reducible to brain explanation or, better yet, can be eliminated in favor of the latter?

Consider the healing of Mary from stage four liver cancer.  This event -- let's call it m -- is supposedly effected by God's intentionality and power D.  If God healed Mary, then clearly D causally produces m.  But Mary's healing is physically realized as some set of micro-physical actualizations S.   While there was once a time -- e.g., in pre-physicalist ages -- when one might have said that D causally produces S without means, that option is not available to most people today.   Our time assumes the principle of the causal closure of the physical,  for each and every physical event p, there is some set of physical events E that causally produces p, and for each and every physical event p, p cannot and does not produce events that are not physical.  But if D does not produce m without means, then there is some set of physical events that is the physical realization of D such that these events cause m.  

It has been axiomatic in theology since the late Enlightenment to conceive God-talk non-causally.   What I mean by this, is that the giving of an interpretation to theological language such as 'God creates the universe' does not involve one in the drawing of a causal relation across the disparate ontological domains of supernature and nature.  The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America slogan, "God's work, our hands," nicely captures the situation:  Divine agency is physically realizable!   God's working of Y is realizable through the means of some set of individuals P acting in particular ways -- let's say that the set of individuals P instantiates a complex set of relations Q.   Thus, when P instantiates Q -- or perhaps when P acts Q-ly -- then Y obtains.   But the question is obvious: How is Y qua Y a divine act when it is physically realizable as P acting Q-ly?   More simply put, how is divine agency possible in means, when causal explanations in terms of the means is sufficient?   Do we not have a case of causal overdetermination here when allowing the divine explanation to track alongside the physical?  

The solution to all of this is to offer a model of theological language in which prima facie causal terms are given a non-causal analysis.  This worked very well in ages dominated by idealist pre-suppositions.  Accordingly, 'God creates' is a way of talking about some reality deeper than the causal.  Perhaps there is a reality of "Being-itself" that is deeper than the realm of particular beings, a realm that is somehow more profound than the causal, an ontological depth of being presupposed by the ontic structure of being in which beings are causally related to other beings.  Maybe although causal talk here is in some sense misapplied, the language of the causal somehow illuminates the depth dimension of the human such that the language is nonetheless theologically vindicated.  Thus, while God does not really cause the bringing about of Mary's healing, the saying of 'God healed Mary' does illuminate or make sense out of one's existential situation and the seeming mystery of grace, the getting of that which one is ultimately not earned or deserved.   Saying that 'God healed Mary' seems to say more than there is some set of physical events that occurred -- though they cannot be fully specified -- that when instantiated brought about some set of physical events in Mary such that the term 'healed' could be applied to her.

One might, of course, complain that my concerns with 'God heals Mary' are somehow merely a problem for the philosopher.  While philosophers are concerned with semantics, the meaning of terms and the truth-values of the propositions comprised by them, semantics is not a problem for the believer reading the Bible.  Why allow the abstractions of fundamental theology (proto-theology), a theology that is most immediately relatable to First Article concerns, to transgress upon the hallowed domain of Christology and the proclamation of Christ's life giving death and resurrection?   Why not simply preach Christ and let semantics take care of itself?

Imagine listenting to preacher Pete proclaim that Christ is risen from the dead and that because of this the future has been conquered and that salvation is at hand.   One could, I suppose, simply listen to Pete and not think deeply about what his pronouncements mean and what the truth-conditions of the propositions he utters are.  (The truth-conditions of a proposition are those which must obtain in order for the proposition to be true.)  One might somehow be able to say, "OK, I don't know exactly what Pete's meaning when he talks of Christ's resurrection, but I will regard the resurrection to be true."  But this strategy does not work well when Molly asks what is meant by 'resurrection'.   At this point, one must either give some truth-condition for 'Christ is resurrected', or simply say that one does not know.  But if the latter, then Molly will say, "If you don't know what is meant by 'Christ is resurrected', then you don't know what it would mean for Christ not to be resurrected, and if you don't know that, then clearly to say "'Christ is resurrected' is true" is to say nothing at all."

To this, one simply has to change the subject.   While one might hope that one is meaning something even if one is not sure what one is meaning, there is no basis for the hope: Without knowing precisely what situation must obtain for 'Christ is resurrected' to be false, one knows not what 'Christ is resurrected' means.  Therefore, despite emotions to the contrary, to be told 'Christ is resurrected' is not to be told anything in particular -- and thus a fortiori not anything at all.  Sometimes for the sake of the Gospel one must say things as they are.  What is at stake is too important to do otherwise.

In the early days of Christianity, disciples knew that Christ's resurrection was tied to an empty tomb.  'Christ is resurrected' is false if the tomb is not empty.  The assertion had falsifiability conditions.   While the tomb being empty is not sufficient for Christ's resurrection, it is nonetheless necessary for it.  Christ's resurrection thus had a physical realization, and because that resurrection was tied to both the future and salvation, there was a physical dimension to both the future and salvation as well.   Just as Jesus Christ was physically raised from the dead, so too will all who sleep in the Lord be physically resurrected as well.   The coherence of soteriology depended up the physical realization of salvation.  While death was real, Christ's resurrected life could conquer it.

What I am saying is something quite sensible: Christ's physical resurrection and God's causal action producing it was itself understood in the tradition as causally-productive of human salvation.   Human salvation was an effect of divine agency, a causal action drawn across disparate ontological domains.  After all, there is no physical realization of 'Molly is dead' that in itself can causally produce 'Molly is alive'.  While 'God's work' can be realized perhaps in the work of human hands, 'Molly is being raised from the dead' has no known physical realization.

Simply put, while 'God creates the heavens and the earth' can be given a non-causal analysis it is not clear that a similar non-causal strategy can be given for 'God resurrects Jesus'.  The latter connects with the notion of salvation in a very intimate way -- as long as salvation is thought to be physically realized.  Of course, we are living in a time in which people are increasingly thinking that death is not an enemy.  If 'death' and 'life' are taken as descriptions of how we live rather than the fact that we live, then there may come a time when 'Mary's salvation' in no way depends upon the fact that she will live.  That time, which is increasingly our time, does truly recall the time of the Gnostics and their heresies.  

The first step in seeking treatment is realizing that one is sick.  If we do not realize the importance of semantics in theology, we shall not grasp the important theological work that must now be done.  It is irrational to hope for something of which it can be said that one does not know if one has it.

The Philosophical Commitments of ILT

As some of you know, I have been at work on the problem of building the Institute of Lutheran Theology (ILT) these last ten years.  It has been an amazing journey, and I marvel at times how we have gotten to where we now find ourselves.

It began as an effort to take seriously again both the Bible and the Lutheran Confessional documents -- as collected in the Book of Concord.  "Taking these documents seriously" can mean, however, a great number of things.  One can take these them seriously by unpacking what it is they meant in the context of which they originated -- the objectivist, archeological project -- what it is that they might mean for me today in my life -- the subjectivist, "reader response" approach, or what it is that the documents truly mean in our time: what do they say and claim of us within our current cultural-historical horizon?   The early ILT attempt to articulate general philosophical lenses to read properly Bible, Confessions and tradition are attempts to uncovering this latter kind of meaning.

About fifteen years ago I came to the conviction that theology was in danger of losing its very language.  Consider the situation in the philosophy of mind with beliefs/desire explanations for human behavior.  What is the best explanation for Bob driving to the airport on April 14th?  A standard philosophical response is that Bob drove to the airport on that date because he believed that Mary was coming in on a plane at the appointed time, believed that his driving to the airport would allow him to see Mary, and desired to see Mary.  The philosophical problem with this standard view is simply that there are neuro-realizers of believings and desirings, brain actualizations that are sufficient for these believings and desirings.  But if particular brain actualizations are sufficient for these believings and desirings, then it is plausible to claim that the deepest explanation of Bob driving to the airport is not found in his beliefs or desires, but rather in the particular neuro-events upon which his beliefs and desires metaphysically depend.

So what of the language of beliefs and desires?  What do belief and desire terms name, and how do these named things relate to the neuro-events that putatively realize them?  There are these general options:

• Belief and desire terms name incorporeal thoughts or mental events which, though ontologically different from their putative neuro-realizers, are nonetheless correlated with these realizers.  One could say either that mental substances are ontologically distinct from neural substances or that mental properties are distinct from neural properties.  Accordingly, one asserts either substance or property dualism. 

• While belief and desire terms refer neither to mental events nor physical events, such terms are applied if and only if certain behavior conditions obtain.  Accordingly, there is a semantic tie such that belief B obtains if and only if some set of complex stimulus-response conditionals hold.  Mental terms thus do not name mental events, but are applied on the basis of the instantiation of some set of dispositions to behave.  Since we can analyze the mental in terms of dispositions to behave, belief and desire terms simply mean this dispositional set.  We might call this a semantic reduction of the mental to the behavioral.  

• Belief and desire terms name types of putative mental properties which obtain just in case some    type of neural properties obtain.  One might say that the mental just is the physical, and claim a type identity between the mental and physical or a reduction of the mental to the physical.  

• Belief and desire terms name instances of putative mental properties which obtain if some disjunction of physical property instances obtain.  One might claims that there is a token identity between the tokening of a mental property and some tokening (or other) of a physical property. We might speak here of the weak supervenience of the mental onto the physical, or the physical realization of the mental.  The point is that a type of mental event is multiply realizable in some set of physical events or other.  

Of what relevance are these arcane reflections in the philosophy of mind to our topic?  As it turns out, the philosophy of mind discussion has relevance for what it is we are doing when using theological language.  Since the time of Kant, it has been widely assumed that neither the category of substance nor cause can apply to God.  Why?  Because both are pure concepts of the understanding that are involved in the organization of our phenomenal experience.  When we apply substance and cause beyond the bounds of all possible experience, we commit the transcendental subruption and mistake the regulative operations of reason with an actual cognition of a supersensible world.  From the standpoint of Kant's first critique, God cannot be known; we are unjustified in making epistemically-motivated claims of the divine.  While we can in our practical life assume there is a God that rewards our duty-doing with happiness, there are no epistemic grounds that would legitimate this.

For the subsequent theological tradition convinced by Kant's argument, the task was to think God on the other side of critique, that is, one had to make sense somehow of theological language without asserting that God is a substance causally-relatable to other substances.  They had to think God without asserting that God is an entity having causal powers.  There are many trajectories of post-Kantian theological options, the most famous advocated by Schleiermacher, where God is understood as the whence of Das Gefuehl des schlichthinniges Abhaengikeit (the feeling of absolute dependence).  Somehow, thought Schleiermacher, God language could be applied in the expression of our own piety.  (The problem that individuating piety states, such that what might be called "piety conditions" had to be met before the assertion of particular theological language, seemed not deeply to concern him.)

There were reactions, of course, to the adoption in academic theology of "the Kantian paradigm."  For over a century Roman Catholic theology generally dismissed the Kantian starting point as being inimical to theology.  Thomism was realist in its outlook: The divine exists apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language.  Lutheran thinkers like Harms, Hengstenberg, Loehe, and Vilmar rejected the Kantian paradigm as well, with Hengstenberg trying to repristinate 17th century Lutheran scholasticism.  However, these movements while interesting, did not derail the hegemonic Kantian synthesis in theology.  It was alive an well in the liberal theology of Ritschl, Harnack and Hermann, in the birth of dialectical theology with Barth, Bultmann and Gogarten, in the Luther Renaissance, and in the development of hermeneutical theology generally.

It seems to me that the theological tradition in the North Atlantic countries is more dependent upon 19th century philosophy than is perhaps warranted.  Kantian philosophy is studied in the history of philosophy, but transcendental idealism and neo-Kantianism in general does not currently enjoy heavy subscription within the contemporary philosophical world.  That there is a healthy Kantian influence within the philosophical community is, of course, undoubted.  (One thinks here of Hilary Putnam's "internal realism.")

There is, however, no general consensus against realism -- metaphysical or otherwise -- within the contemporary philosophical discussion.  Realism of various stripes is widely and intensely discussed.  One can be an informed modal realist, a moral realist, an aesthetic realist, a metaphysical realist, an epistemological realist, a mathematical realist, a scientific realist, a naive or critical or representative realist, a semantic realist, a causal realist, or a Platonic or moderate realist.  If all of this is possible, why can one not be an informed theological realist?  The Institute of Lutheran Theology's three philosophical commitments to theological realism, semantic realism and theophysical causation manifest the institution's wariness of an in toto subscription to the Kantian paradigm as a presupposition for its theological work.  It does not specify the determinate contour of the realism thereby asserted.

My own reflections on the current discussion in the philosophy of mind has brought me to the point of thinking that granting to the mental in se causal properties entails that a mental event does not mean a set of dispositional properties, that it cannot be reduced to some set of neural-realizers, and that it cannot either strongly or even weakly supervene on neurophysiological actualizations.   This position betrays my own conviction to a general truth of reductionism: If a domain A is reduced to domain B, then the causal connections within domain A are realized by the causal connections within domain B.  That is to say, the ultimate causal map is drawn within domain B rather than domain A.  In the philosophy of mind, this means that the neural processes realizing mental events are the real causal drivers in mental processes.   While A events can be causally relevant in A-explanations, A events are not causally effective in A-explanations.  (Causal stories can refer to higher-level causal powers without the higher-level events having in se causal powers.  Explanations are intentional, but causes are extensional.)  

So what precisely do these positions in the philosophy of mind have to do with theological realism?

Imagine there exists a divine domain.  What is its ontological status?  Is it something other than nature broadly conceived, that is, the sum total of all physical entities, events, properties and relations?  Most honestly doing theology would answer, "yes."  But is this an affirmation of the existence of a realm beyond nature, a supernatural order?  Most doing theology in the Kantian paradigm would say, "no."  While religion is vitally at the heart of what it is to be human, religious claims, and theological assertions explicating those claims, do not have truth-conditions satisfied by the determinate contour of some supersensible, non-natural reality.  So what options remain?

Analogous to positions in the philosophy of mind, we could assert these:

• Strictly speaking, theological terms refer neither to divine nor micro-physical entities, properties or events.  Rather, such terms are applied if and only if certain macro states of affairs occur in the world.  Accordingly, there is a semantic tie such that theological proposition P obtains if and only if some set of macro-world dispositions obtain.  Theological terms thus do not name theological events, but are applied on the basis of the instantiation of some set of macro physical dispositions.  Since we can analyze the theological in terms of macro physical dispositions, theological terms simply mean this dispositional set.  We might call this a semantic reduction of the theological to the macro-physical.   (I know of nobody who would actually hold this view, but simply provide it here as a logical possibility.)  

• Theological terms name types of putative theological properties which obtain just in case a determinate type of physical, psychological, sociological or economic properties obtain.  One might say that the domain of the theological just is the physical, psychological, sociological or economic and claim a type identity between the theological and the physical, psychological, sociological or economic, or a reduction of the theological to the physical, psychological, sociological or economic.  (While I cannot think of a strong reductive program of the theological to the physical, one might claim that Schleiermacher and/or Feuerbach hints that a particular theological term is applied if and only if a determinate psychological state obtains.  Durkheim might be said to strongly reduce the theological to the sociological while Marx does the same for economics.  For a number of reasons, however, the strong reduction of the theological to any of these domains is implausible.)  

• Theological terms name instances of putative physical, psychological, sociological or economics properties which obtain if some disjunction of physical, psychological, sociological or economic property instances obtain.  One might claim that there is a token identity between the tokening of theological property and some tokening (or other) of a physical, psychological, sociological or economic property. We might speak here of the weak supervenience of the theological onto the physical, psychological, sociological or economic, or the physical, psychological, sociological or economic realization of the theological.  The point is that a type of theological event or property is multiply realizable in some set of lower-level properties.  (This view might better describe the general, though not explicitly or deeply-articulated views of Schleiermacher, Feuerbach, Freud, Durkheim and Marx.  While more needs to be said about this, I cannot say it here.)  

But who cares about the critiques of Marx, Freud, and Durkheim about Christianity?  Was I not speaking of the subsequent theological tradition within the Kantian paradigm, the putative "post-Kantian theological options?"  Why am I not dealing explicitly with theologians and not those wanting to "explain away" the religious by showing that it is really about some other domain entirely?  

Perhaps the reason is because their Kantian starting points do not eventuate in a clear theological explication consistent with those starting points.  Talk of God and God's "mighty acts" on a Kantian horizon demands an explication of the semantic possibilities of that talk.  It is not clear what it is that we are referring to if we deny the existence of a domain of divine entities, properties, events and states of affairs.  (We must be referring elliptically to human thinking, willing or doing, for those seem to be the only options of reference.)  We can use the talk (and might even walk the walk) while nonetheless failing to clearly mean much at all.   

The philosophical commitments of ILT assert that the truth-conditions of theological language demand taking seriously the domain of the divine, ascribing to it ontological status, and granting its denizen explicit causal power.   

God and Inferences to the Best Explanation

I

Pascal famously stitched a dictum in his coat sleeve declaring, "FIRE.  God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of philosophers and scholars.  Certitude, heartfelt joy, peace.  God of Jesus Christ."  

Clearly, it is a long way from the God of the philosophers to the God of Jesus Christ.  This distance has for many simply meant that when speaking about these two gods, one is speaking about two different matters entirely. The God of the philosophers is a projection of our own best moral and rational characteristics; the God of Jesus Christ is other than this, a God forever tied to the phenomenon of salvation freely given by the Other to unworthy men and women.  

Theologians have often assumed that the identity conditions for gods are found in the meanings that these gods have for those thinking them.  The idealist penchant in theology is a very long and rich.  Phenomenological theological starting points which trace to the zu den Dingen selbst understand the "thing" as a noema, a content intended by the noetic act of the agent.  Accordingly, the god of philosophy apprehended in such-and-such a way is a different noema than the God of Jesus Christ given in such-and-such a way.  There are different identity conditions for different things thought about, and so the identity conditions of the God of Jesus Christ are simply different than those for the god of the philosophers.  

We have been idealist so long in our theology that we don't understand the relevance Frege's seminal "On Sense and Reference" should have for theology.  Frege understood his notion of Sinn (sense) to be of a kind with Husserl's noema, and argued persuasively that two different senses can be simply different "modes of presentation" of the same thing.  Famously, the Evening Star has a different sense the does the Morning Star, yet Frege realized that 'Evening Star' and 'Morning Star' are, nonetheless, coreferential expressions picking out the same planet Venus. They are not, however, simply different names, but instead constitute different senses with their own unique identity conditions, senses which nonetheless are able to pick out the same object in the actual world.  

Applying this insight to the situation of Pascal's two gods, one might claim that 'god of Jesus Christ' and 'god of the philosophers' are neither simply two different objects or entities nor merely different names of one individual God (with a big 'G'), but rather they name different senses picking out that same God.  We ought not simply assume that because 'god of the philosophers' has a different sense than 'god of Jesus Christ', these senses can't be referring to the same God.  Simply put, why assume that the sense of God encountered in the philosophical enterprise does not pick out the same individual as the sense of god encountered in theology?  Why think that when one apprehends God philosophically, one is not referring to the very same God one apprehends theologically?  

I have never been wary of using the tools of philosophy within theology because I am both a theological realist as well as a monotheist.  As a realist, I assume that theology is talking about something that is God and that philosophy is talking about something that is God.  As a monotheist, I reject the claim that there is more than one god. It follows from this, of course, that philosophy and theology must be talking about the same thing, though in radically different ways.  Although the experience, the "mode of presentation" and the conceptuality of the two may differ markedly, the reference is the same.  While one linguistic description may be far more accurate than the other -- 'God of Jesus Christ' may describe God more deeply -- this does not entail that the other expression, 'God of the philosophers' does not refer.   It is in the spirit of 'God of the philosophers' referring that I offer the following brief reflection.

II

If we step back from the methodological exclusion of God as a causally relevant entity within naturalistic scientific theory, and consider an inference to the best metaphysical explanation of why there is a universe at all with the cosmological constants necessary to support life -- and why there is self-organizing life of sufficient complexity to develop human consciousness -- we are faced with the following question: What is the probability of there being Reason (a Designing Agent or God) present prior to the emergence of the universe? 

Bayes Theorem (derivable in standard probability theory) states that the probability of the occurrence of a state of affairs or event S given a particular set of experiences (or other states of affairs or events) E is equal to the product of probability of E on the hypothesis of S and the probability of S, over the product of probability of E given S and the probability of S plus the product of the probability of E given ~S and the probability of ~S. 

Consider then that the "forward" probability of a Designing Agent's existence is .1% (S). Now what are rational assignments of probabilities to the following?

1. What is the probability that a universe would exist tuned for development of human beings with the complexity of consciousness on the supposition that a Designing Agent exists? (It seems that were there to be a Designing Agent, it is highly likely that a universe like ours would exist with the complexities of human consciousness. Let us set this at 99% 
2. What is the probability that a universe would exist seemingly tuned for the development of human beings with the complexity of consciousness on the supposition that a Designing Agent does not exist? (If the authors of the "multiverse" solution to the existence of the universe are to be trusted, our universe is highly unlikely, much greater than the order of .000001%.) 

Now do the calculation: .99 x .001 = .00099/[.00099 + (.00000001 x .99 = .0000000099)]. Thus we obtain .00099 over (.00099 + .0000000099) or .00099/.0009900099 = .99999900001 or 99.99%. The probability that a Designing Agent exists given the state of the universe and its development to the complexities of human consciousness is 99.99% even though the forward probability of that Agent's existence is only .001 or .1%. 

We realize that the plausibility of the multiverse hypothesis in quantum cosmology is based on an admission of the overwhelming unlikely odds of the universe existing with the features its has. Admitting this, drives the inference to the best metaphysical explanation for there to be a Designing Agent/Reason (God). The only way to avoid this conclusion is to claim that the existence of God in itself is almost as unlikely as a forward probability as is the conditional probability of the existence of the universe with features making possible the complexity of human life on the supposition that God does not exist. But why would any rational agent believe that the existence of God as the supreme rational agent is almost as unlikely as the universe developing into the order it has on the supposition of there being no supreme rational agent at all? 

It appears that someone claiming that a multiverse is needed to explain the universe must either be irrationally prejudiced against the forward probability of God's existence or be unable or unwilling to do the simple calculations in basic probability theory. 

Does this reflection prove somehow the God of Jesus Christ?  Of course not!  Does it make more plausible the existence of the God of the philosophers?  One might readily affirm it is so.  But if the rumination in Section I is plausible and the 'God of Jesus Christ' has the same referent as the 'God of the philosophers', then the claim that the God of Jesus Christ exists is strengthened by the rumination of Section II.  Advances in theology may be possible if we have the courage to do things differently.  

God as an Agent of Theophysical Causation

I. Introduction to the Problem

At first glance, the phrase ‘theophysical causation’ seems a bit abstruse, and the appending of the term ‘agent’ only makes matters worse. Sometimes people criticize me for using locutions not often found in Lutheran theology. There is some justification for that, of course, if one were only wanting to plow the same field. Why use different equipment if one knows one can get the field plowed with what one already has?

What I want to do, however, is not do the same thing that so many capable Lutheran theologians have already done. I want to ask some questions and make some observations that come from a position inside Lutheran theology that nonetheless takes seriously the concerns of philosophy: especially semantics and ontology. The first deals with questions of meaning and truth, while the second is concerned with the question of being. Our first order today is to address the first semantic issue. What is it that we are talking about when speaking about “theophysical causation.”

The phrase ‘theophysical causation’ connotes the putative causal relationship holding between God and the physical universe. A causal relationship is one in which one of the terms in the relation is said to produce, generate, or otherwise bring about the other term in the relation. Moreover, it claims that the second would not have happened had the first not occurred.

Thinking about causality immediately involves one in a complex set of issues, most of which we cannot attend to today. It is important to see at least one thing: Causality is likely a modal relationship. If ‘A causes B’, it is likely that B obtaining just in case A does is not merely contingent, that is, that it just happens to be the case. Rather A has suitable power to produce B in a set of conditions. All of these conditions being the same, A must deliver B. Accordingly, if A were to happen, B would happen, and were A not to happen, B would not have happened.

To say that God creates, redeems and sustains the universe prima facie to use straightforward causal language. To create the universe is to bring about a state of affairs (the universe) that would not have been brought about were God not so to have created. The same causal power is loaded into phrases like ‘redeems’, ‘saves’, and ‘sustains’ and even ‘inspires’. Anything that God really does - - that is any effect of God that is not merely metaphorical - - must putatively be given a causal analysis. Accordingly, to say that God in Christ reconciles the universe unto Himself, is to say that God causally brings about a state of affairs of the universe having the relational property of ‘being reconciled by God’. Simply put, God causes it to be the case that the universe, once unreconciled with God, is now reconciled with Him.

But what does any of this have to do with the question of preaching Christ, the theme of our conference? Clearly, in preaching it seems that we do not attend to metaphysical notions of causality. Why talk about causality here. Cannot we simply preach Christ and allow the Holy Spirit to do the rest?

Of course, we must preach Christ, and surely we say that the Holy Spirit works faith in the believer. But I want to ask a question not asked by Lutherans as directly as I will do so today: Is this true? Does the Holy Spirit do anything at all when He is at work? In other words, does the Holy Spirit truly possess theophysical causal agency? If not, then the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, could not thus bring it about that the sinner hears and does the Word of God as it is proclaimed by fallible lips.

The question of theophysical causality in Lutheran theology has been safely tucked away since the late 18th century. It simply has not been an important question for Lutherans concerned with the theology of the cross and justification by grace through faith. Lutherans have talked a great deal about the salvific significance of Christ without talking much about how God causally brings about this salvation.

Today I want to argue that we Lutherans can no longer afford to keep the causal question at bay, but that we Lutherans clearly have a challenge in articulating a notion of divine causality that is up to the task of undergirding claims of the Holy Spirit’s work and Christ’s real presence in the justification and sanctification of the believer. Before I can specifically address these two issues, however, it is important for us to get clearer on the notion and putative problem of divine causality. In order to do this, I will briefly discuss the so-called mind/body problem as it emerged in the early Enlightenment and developed in the western tradition. This problem, I believe, helps us understand the problem of theophysical causality.

II. The Problem of Theophysical Causation

It is indeed instructive to look to the mind/body problem in order to find an analogue to the problem of theophysical causation. Famously, Descartes (1596-1650) held that there is a domain of physical substance and a domain of mental substance, and that changes of physical substances are caused by physical alterations, and changes of mental substance are caused by mental alterations. For Descartes, the question of how a physical event causes a mental event, or vice versa, is a particularly difficult one.

The problem is that all of nature acts in a deterministic way according to mechanical laws, and that this seemingly leaves no room for the human soul or mind. Descartes wanted to assert that there was such a soul or mind, but that it is not physical. The problem therefore is simply this: How is spiritual human freedom possible in a physical mechanical universe? While Descartes brilliantly laid out the mind/body problem, his “solution” is not persuasive. Descartes claimed that the physical and the spiritual came together at one point; he held that the causal joint between the physical and spiritual was the pineal gland.

His dualism is simple enough. The domain of the physical -- the set of all physical objects, properties, events, relations and states of affairs – is closed, and that of the mental –the set of all mental states, properties, events, experiences, and relations – is also closed except for somewhere in the region of the brain where the mental and physical meet. This is the place where human willing causally affects the movement of the body, and blows to the body are experienced as pain.

While Descartes “solution” eventuated in more problems than it solved, his statement of the problem remains classic. The body (including the brain) is a different thing than the mind (our thoughts and experiences). While the former is public, outer, subject to mechanical laws, the latter is private, inner, and subject only to psychological laws. Because the problem of the causal joint connecting the mental and physical is so intractable, various trajectories of solution were attempted after Descartes.

Leibniz (1646-1716) argued that there could be no causal connection between the inner and outer, and that God was necessary to correlate the experiences of windowless monads. Malebranche (1638-1715) argued that the experience of mental pain was the occasion for God to will the movement of a physical part. Spinoza (1632-1677) claimed that there was a neutral substance (God) that could be understood according to two aspects, or His two attributes: mind and body. For Spinoza, the same event can be described either physically or mentally. The three positions of dualism were known as the theory of pre-established harmony, Occasionalism, and identity or “two aspects” theory.

While Descartes and the subsequent tradition were busy trying to work out the problems of dualism, the German philosopher Kant (1724-1804) made a startling claim that had a very powerful effect on the subsequent tradition. Kant argued that the categories of substance and causality are ways that the mind in a rule-oriented fashion gives definite shape to the world. While there is a realm of the noumenal, such “things-in-themselves” are not knowable as substances causally connected with other substances. While empirical experience is made up of sensibility organized by concepts, putative metaphysical reality has no empirical intuitions attending it that can be organized. Hence reflection on such reality, which takes us beyond the bounds of possible experience, can never give theoretical knowledge. We can know nothing of the noumenal, though we can think regularly and cogently about it. Mental substance, as Descartes conceived it, cannot be known for Kant, because there is no experience of the substance of the “I’. While we have an awareness of a succession of awarenesses, and can thus posit what Kant called the “bare I think,” such a transcendental subject can never be known. The concept of the soul becomes, for Kant, a mere regulative ideal of pure reason.

The problem of mental causation takes a rather interesting form in Kant. While from the standpoint of pure theoretical reason, each and every publicly observable situation can be understood deterministically in terms of previous physical states and events, the same is not true of the mental. Here the categories of substance and causality do not directly apply. Accordingly, one can posit freedom from the standpoint of the noumenal, even though there is determinism from the standpoint of the phenomenal. Human beings are accordingly both free and determined.

While vague dualistic notions survived throughout the nineteenth century, in the twentieth century considerable more clarity was given to the mind/body problem. Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976) argued about 60 years ago that talk of the mental and talk of the physical had definite criteria, and the criteria is behavioral. Accordingly, ‘Sally has a keen mind’ is true if and only if when Sally is stimulated in particular ways, she will respond in “keenly” appropriate ways. The attempt therefore was to reduce talk of the mind to sets of stimulus-response conditionals. For Ryle, mental causation is not a metaphysical fact, but rather a way of speaking based upon a set of behaviors. Ryle effectively reduced mental talk to talk of behavioral dispositions.

After Ryle, it became quite fashionable not to be a mind/body dualist. Most theorists chose the road of physicalism. All that exists are physical objects. Eliminativists thought it best to get rid of mental talk altogether if all that exists is the physical. Most physicalists, however, were less demanding. Talk of the mental was useful, and some could even countenance mental properties. Many of these held that the mental supervened on the physical, but was nevertheless not reducible to it. The essential idea is that supervenience offers a constraint in how mental properties are distributed. Two molecule-by-molecule replica brains will be in the same mental state, though the same mental state could be multiply realized in different brain states. There were also identity theorists who held that the brain happening, no matter how described, just is the mental happening, no matter how described. Such identity theorists survive now as advocates of non-reductive physicalism, the thesis that each and every mental event just is some physical event or other, but that the complexity of the mental web cannot be reduced to some set of physical entities.

Advocates of mind/body supervenience oftentimes speak of “downward causation,” the notion that a mental event qua mental event can be said to downwardly cause a physical event or a set of physical actualizations. Much here depends upon one’s views of mereology, that discipline dealing with the relationship between parts and wholes. Just as the whole tornado causes the physical actualizations of its swirling parts, so does a mental state or set of states cause neurophysical actualizations in the brain. Critically important is what is meant by the phrase, “mental state qua mental state.” How is it that a mental event in so far as it is a mental event can cause physical actualizations? This way of putting things does sound dualistic, and if the mind qua mind is supposed to cause the distribution of properties in the brain qua brain, then we seem to be back to the problem of the causal nexus between disparate domains of being. But this is not how theorists in the twentieth century hoped that the discussion would proceed.

The upshot of this is that we have a trajectory of reflection that wants to take seriously the thesis of physicalism and yet find room for a free mind in this physical universe. If this mind is not to be merely epiphenomenal, a set of experiences caused by the physical but not causally able to affect the physical, then it seems like we have to give a coherent analysis of mental causation. But this is much more difficult than it may have first appeared.

It is now time to turn our attention to the main problem, the connection between the divine and the non-divine. As we reflect upon the nature of this putative connection, it should become apparent how helpful our mind/body reflections have been.

III. The God/Universe problem, Causality and the Problem of Divine Causation

Classical theism, like Cartesian dualism, claims that there exist two disparate ontological regions: God and that which is not God. Whereas the problem in mind/body dualism is how the mental can causally affect the physical, and vice versa, the problem in traditional theism is how it is possible for God causally to affect the universe. Where is the causal nexus?

Is it not the case that the universe is causally closed, that is, for each and every event in the universe, it is caused by other events in the universe, and for all events in the universe they cause only other events in the universe? Just as the problem of the conservation of energy and the problem of causal overdetermination - - the problem of claiming that there is a concurrent cause of an event when only one cause is needed to explain it -- arises for Cartesian dualism, so too do both problems arise for classical theism. If the universe is causally closed, no energy seeps in or seeps out of it. But without energy there can be no causal connection. Moreover, each and every event in the universe is causally explained by other events in the universe. How can one hold that God is causing anything in the universe, if other events in the universe explain the event completely?

Spinoza, who, as we have seen, held to the two aspect view on the mind/body problem, advocated a similar view with respect to God and the universe. For Spinoza, God just is the universe, and the universe just is God. However, there are two quite different descriptions of this one thing. Spinoza’s pantheism was clearly not a road that many Christian theologians wished to take, though his work profoundly influenced the great German theologian and philosopher, Hegel (1770-1831).

Hegel assumed Kant’s view that one could not ever know that God is a substance that causally affects other substances in the universe. While Kant had claimed that the noumenal thing-in-itself cannot be known behind the phenomenon, Hegel averred that Kant should give up on the thing-in-itself entirely since it was in principle unknowable. Accordingly, Hegel rejected dualism entirely. Echoing Spinoza, Hegel argued that God was profoundly and intimately connected with the world. However, this connection was not causal. For Hegel, there was nothing in the world that was not God, thought God nonetheless was more than the sum total of the world. This position known as panentheism is not new in the history of theology, and rightly claims that the Neo-Platonic notion that mind, world-soul and the universe emanate from the One is the ultimate precursor to Hegel.

But just as post-Kantian developments in thinking about mind tended towards a rejection of dualism - - even though dualism nonetheless emerged as the default position by the end of the nineteen century - - post-Kantian developments in reflecting upon God issued in non-dualist theological positions that nonetheless by the end of the nineteenth century still found dualism ensconced as the “received view.” With theism, just as with mind/body dualism, the problem of the causal joint arises. How is it possible to connect to disparate ontological domains? Is the connection of the nature of one of the domains, of the nature of the other, or is it constituted as some ontological mixture of the two? How is a causal connection between the divine and the non-divine possible without violating causal closure principles? How is it possible not to commit the fallacy of causal overdetermination?

Contemporary thinking on the problem of the relation of God and the universe oftentimes follow routes eerily similar to Descartes’ positing the pineal gland as connecting brain and mind. The suggestions have not been too promising.

· Perhaps God’s causal activity effects the collapse of the Schödinger wave equation of probabilities into a concrete quantum occasion. This would not violate the determinism of the wave equation but still allow for divine influence at the level of particular concretions. But how would this be possible without introducing energy at the quantum level?

· Perhaps God’s causal activity is found in his effects at the time of the conception of new life. There is, in fact, not a set of deterministic equations that can predict what will be the properties of a baby given knowledge of the relevant properties of the parents. Maybe the seeming element of freedom here is due to God’s introduction of new information. But this limits God’s causal hand to a very limited area of physical reality.

· Finally, one might argue that God can adjust the “boundary conditions” in a system such that a different system trajectory ensues that would not have happened absent the divine’s action. But again it is difficult to see how God can produce a change in boundary conditions without introducing information into the system.

Of course, there remains that hallowed effort of Aquinas and much of the tradition to distinguish primary and secondary causality, and argue that God is the primary cause of everything that is caused, but that God’s causality is mediated by secondary causes. Hence, while it appears that the swinging of the ax caused the vase to break, God’s productive agency is in the axe’s swing, as it is in everything else. The problem with this is that of overdetermination. What added causal power does God’s putative primary causality afford over the swinging of the ax? While it is not inconsistent to say that God’s power is involved in each and every thing, it is incoherent and seeming violates the principle of parsimony: If x can be explained by y, then why explain it by y and z?

We see now the basic outline of the theophysical causal problem. How can an immaterial, non-physical being causally produce event within physical reality without violating conservation and causal closure principles? But there is an even greater problem for a Christian theologian. How is it possible for the Triune God causally to affect the universe? How is this possible when incarnation is central to who God is?

If God is truly three in one, and is present as the transcendent and providential Father, the proximate and historical Son, and the Spirit of subjective agency within all Christians, then God’s causal joint will need to be manifest in three distinctive ways. As the providential Father, God’s causal agency creates the universe and sustains it in being. As the proximate Son, God’s causal agency has saved human beings by bringing about both a change in the Heart of God and an elevation of human existence generally. As the Spirit of subjective agency, God’s causal agency has indwelled within the hearts of human beings and has generated faith in the hearts of man and woman.

In the next sections we will forego investigating the Father’s causal nexus with creation. The causal question, when it arises, does so normally with respect to the order of creation. In what follows, I concern myself much more with the order of redemption. How is divine causal agency possible for the Son and the Holy Spirit?

IV. Preaching Christ and the Problem of the Incurvatus in se

Preaching has always been of critical importance in the Lutheran theological tradition, particularly law and gospel preaching. This has been so in the Lutheran Confessions and in the subsequent tradition.

On one level law and gospel preaching is not difficult to grasp. The presupposed ontology of law and gospel preaching in the sixteenth century include the truth of the following.

· There is a God.

· There is a sinful universe.

· God loves the sinful universe so much that He wants to reconcile it to Him.

· God sends part of Himself, his Son, to effect a “happy exchange:” the sins of the whole world are put on Christ, and the sinlessness of Christ is communicated to everyone in the world.

· God’s law is an original divine intentionality that shows human beings what ought to be the case.

· God’s wrath is a direct response of there existing in the universe that which ought not to be: human sin.

· The gospel is effected by God’s love, a gospel that reconciles human beings to God.

Notice what is presupposed: God exists; God has intentionality; God brings it about that human beings are reconciled with God. Indeed, the sixteenth century theologians would have no problems saying that there is some being referred to by ‘God’, and that this being causally brings it about that human beings are reconciled with God. What they presupposed is that there is a God and that God is causally active in the world.

If both the law and the gospel presuppose the existence of God and His causal efficacy, why are those who would talk about theophysical causality theologically suspect? Why do so many lovers of the traditional distinction between law and gospel have so little time for philosophers and philosophical categories? If proper understanding of law and gospel presuppose a particular kind of ontology, then why do Lutherans not speak openly about this ontology?

The problem, not surprisingly, goes again back to Kant. As we have already seen, Kant holds that we have no epistemic justification to suppose that the categories of substance and causality properly apply to God. Post-Kantian options thus tried to speak of God in non-ontological and non-causal ways. For Schleiermacher, God is the whence of the feeling of absolute dependence. Hegel believes that God is being God where thought is thinking itself. Ritschl and Hermann understood that talk of God is ultimately about the moral dimension of human beings. But what happens to the understanding of law and gospel in these post-Kantian developments? It seems that it is expunged in the face of good moral and ethical teaching.

After the time of Ritschl and his School, the work of Heidegger (1888-1976) and later Gadamer (1900 – 2002) provided a philosophical foundation for a new theological direction. The idea was simple enough: Human be-ing is a particular ontological structure that is filled in ontically for each person. (Ontology deals with the form or structure of human existence, its significance, while the ontic concerns the content or that which is specifiable within human existence.) Heidegger famously argued that humans already find themselves ontologically already in a world, a “structure of significances.” Humans have a particular way of dwelling with their world because human being is being-unto-death. In being being-unto-death, human being can either hide freedom and live according to “the dictatorship of das Man,” of can take hold of being, making decisions freely, and living authentically and anxiously with the results of those decisions.

Heidegger was interested in the phenomenon of the “forgetfulness of being,” and how to live authentically in the face of that phenomenon by “owning” one’s existence. What passes as “salvation,” for Heidegger, is an anxious walk into the future, resolutely holding on to one’s free choices and in this way becoming who one deeply is in the face of the anxiety of death. While there is a type of “fall” and a type of “saving” in Heidegger’s work, he cannot be interpreted generally as offering a Christian problem with a Christian solution. For that we need to turn to the work of Bultmann.

Within the context of his time and culture Bultmann was not a radical theologian. Learning his theology from the great liberal theologians, and thus heavily influenced by Kant, Bultmann searched for a way to give an intellectual undergirding to the preaching of Jesus the Christ. His so-called program of demythologization was not particularly new in Germany. In many ways his was a very confessionally orthodox and conservative program. Turning his back on the moralisms of Ritschl and his School, Bultmann wanted to return to the Reformation’s understanding of the proclamation of the Gospel as offering saving significance. Heidegger’s philosophical analysis of human existence seemed to provide just the ticket. For Bultman, the problem of life is not the “forgetfulness of being” but rather sin, a curvature back in upon oneself that denies the possibility of faith and a future with hope. Preaching the gospel for Bultmann effects a liberation from such sin, and a turning with openness towards God and the future. The preaching of the gospel thus empowers and saves instead of uplifts or instructs.

Bultmann could assume that human existence is indeed constituted by structures of significance that are oriented towards death and determination rather than God and freedom. Living “according to the flesh” is a living incurvatus; living “according to the Sprit” is an ecstatic living outside oneself in freedom and possibility. In the proclamation of the Word something truly happens. The particular content of meanings that is one’s existence shifts. One finds oneself no longer controlled by the past, but now open to faith and future. Gospel proclamation transforms existentiell living.

With this work from Bultmann, the movement towards hermeneutical theology is established. The latter claimed that Bultmann was not concerned enough about history. Hermeneutical theology emphasized that human existence is always situated such that the proclamation of grace from the outside must already have a pre-understanding of being upon which to be understood. While the specifics of how this works takes us outside the scope of this paper, the fundamental focus of hermeneutical theology is this: The Word goes forth in the preaching event, and human beings respond to that Word.

Although German theologians did not make this move at the time, one might call locutions of the preached Word, locutions that do not state what is the case, but rather bring about some effect, perlocutionary or performative utterances. John Austin (1911-1960) very famously used the term - - though he seems to abandon it later on.

Christian theologians who wish to privilege preaching have a penchant to speak of performative utterances. Oswald Bayer’s 2008 book, Martin Luther: A Contemporary Interpretation, makes much of performative utterances, saying that proclamation in this way is at the root of Luther’s theology. The idea is simply this:

1) ‘The cat is on the mat’ states what is the case. It is a constative judgment.

2) “I now pronounce you man and wife’ brings a new reality into being. It is a performative utterance.

While Austin and his student John Searle did not argue the point clearly and consistently, one might hold that performative utterances somehow are of a different order of speaking entirely, an order where, unlike with constative judgments, truth is not an issue. But as I have argued elsewhere, this is chimerical.[1]

It is important to note that while a performative judgment can be felicitous, according to Austin, it cannot be true. Constative propositions can be true, but performative utterances cannot be. Why? Performative utterances do not state what is the case, but brings about the case in their speaking. But here the problem becomes very acute. How can theology survive without stating the truth? How did it ever spread without proclaiming the truth? In an effort to save theological judgments from criticism of the special sciences, the language of theology gets insulated from the entire question of truth. This has had, as we all know, disastrous consequences.

The idea, however, is clear enough: Preaching effects performances that change the life-world of the listener. The person hearing is changed in the hearing not because he or she hears and recognizes the propositions spoken as true, but simply because the proclamations become true for the hearer in the hearing. This way of proceeding presupposes a phenomenology of truth as disclosure or “un-concealing.” When language is spoken, something comes out of the darkness and shows itself in the light. The proclaimed gospel “lights up” our being and changes us as the content of our significations are themselves changed. Preaching effects a transformation of the context of significances that constitute our “world.”

In this way of going about things, the incurvatus spoken about by the Reformers is read phenomenologically. One’s experience is to be turned back upon the self, and not oriented towards God and His grace. What is important to see, however, is that while the Reformers could talk about a unexperienced incurvatus, this makes no sense for twentieth century phenomenological thinking. The incurvatus is finally constituted phenomenologically. There can thus be no incurvatus without human beings experiencing themselves in an incurvatus way.

V. The Problem of an Existential/Phenomenological Understanding of the incurvatus in the Post-modern Context

We live in a time of radical pluralism. Competing religions, value systems, worldviews and even different approaches to truth characterize our time. While philosophers opine that truth has a definite structure and criteria, many simply operate as if truth is simply what people regard to be so. When I began teaching 25 years ago I asked my students three questions:

· If two people disagree on what is beautiful, must one be wrong?

· If two people disagree on what is good, must one be wrong?

· If two people disagree on what is true, must one be wrong?

In the early days, almost all students would claim “no” to the first, about 67% “no” to the second, and maybe a handful “no” to the last. In other words, most of my students in 1987 were relativists (and subjectivists) about aesthetics, about 33% were relativists on ethics, and almost all believed in objective truth. While beauty was in the eye of the behold in 1987, truth was not.

By the time I finished university teaching in 2010, things had changed. Almost all students still denied any type of aesthetic objectivism, of course. But now 85% or more denied ethical objectivity, and almost two out of three denied any objectivity to truth. What happened?

There are many reasons for this, and we can’t enter into the complex issues involved in this paper. Know, however, that the general influence of phenomenology and the social sciences has been important. Heidegger’s phenomenological trajectory began with the assumption that truth is fundamentally an experience, a bringing of something out of concealment. Obviously if A and B have different truth experiences, different things can be true for them. A can have a phenomenological experience of truth with regard to X, but B fails to have it. Thus X is “true for” A, but not for B.

From a sociological point of view, moreover, something can be regarded by a culture as true, but not so regarded by another culture. Thus, two people disagreeing about what is true must not each both be wrong.

We live in a time of confusion with respect to truth, and for many, what truth is simply is what one’s culture or experience say it is. It was Protagoras (480-411 BC) who reportedly said, “Man is the measure of all things; of the things that are, that they are, of the things that are not, that they are not.” What is lost in this, of course, is the classical distinction between appearance and reality, the distinction enshrined in western philosophy a century after Protagoras wrote. Just because P appears to be true for A, it does not follow that A is true. But notice that the phenomenological starting point collapses the distinction: Whatever appears to be true simply is true. The same happens with the sociological starting point. What a culture takes to be true at a time really is true at that time. Accordingly, it was true that the sun went around the earth in the Middle Ages, but not true later on.

Join these confusions about truth with our general pragmatic orientation and all kinds of problems arise. For the pragmatist, truth is “what works.” If a theory has great explanatory and predictive power, if it is useful for human beings in relevant ways, then the theory can be regarded as true. Notice what happens when this orientation is linked to an existential-ontological horizon? What becomes true is what works for the individual at the horizon of his or her existence. If the individual is freed or liberated from the fallenness of his/her existence - - however, such fallenness is defined - - then that which frees the individual becomes “true” for him or her.

Paul Tillich (1885-1965) very famously argued that religious symbols are true to the degree that they existentially empower; they are true when they appropriately determine one’s being or non-being. When one is granted “being and the meaning of being” by a religious symbol, that symbol is true. ‘Jesus is the Christ’ is true in that it existentially empowers the individual in the face of existence.

As I have suggested, good preaching can pass the “truth test” when these underlying assumptions are in play. Accordingly, to say that Christ forgives is not to appeal to any causal agency in Christ, but merely to say that Christ is a symbol that existentially empowers. After Kant, divine agency was figured in such a way as not to assert there is a substance existing apart from us having causal powers. Kant taught us that causality is always a for us affair. Reflecting upon this a moment, one understands that there can be no divine causality without human existence.

Now there is no doubt that the last two hundred years has been dominated by the Kantian paradigm in theology. Within that general paradigm some very good theology has been done. However, for many reasons, both philosophical and theological, I believe that this paradigm is dying. Unfortunately, I cannot address the philosophical problems with the paradigm today.

Theologically, however, it was always problematic to begin with anthropological facts about us, and move to what is possible with respect to God based upon that anthropological/epistemological framework. It is far more in keeping with the Christian tradition to begin with the assertion that there is God, and then to think through human options on the basis of this divine reality. Far too, we have tried to make sense of God on the basis of what we know about ourselves. But what if we were to break through the paradigm and begin with the reality of God, the reality of the Triune God, and then seek to make sense of ourselves on the basis of the reality of that truth?

God is Triune; three persons in one Being. As we have already alluded to, all three persons of the Trinity prima facie have causal powers. God the Father creates, Christ the Son redeems, and the Holy Spirit calls, gathers, enlightens and sanctifies. These are all causal terms. While one could read them metaphorically, there seem to be very good reasons not to. What are they?

With respect to mental causation Jaegwon Kim has appealed to Samuel Alexander’s dismissal of epiphenomenalism in this trenchant phrase he terms “Alexander’s Dictum:” To be is to have causal powers. If a mental state has no causal power then it is not really real. To state that something is, it must make a difference to what happens in the universe. While the nineteenth century’s penchant for idealism would allow thinkers to give ontological status to non-causally real things, this is not possible in the twentieth century. Oddly, the same culture that is pluralistic on truth, believes nonetheless in science, and is quite interested in thinking through causal questions. The natural sciences have given us wonderful causal maps.

As it turns out, people of religious leaning are concerned about causality as well. Indeed, those who are yearning for a Savior are interested in finding a casually efficacious Savior, a Savior who make something the case that would not have been the case without Him so making.

VI. The Importance of Causation in Theology

There simply is no salvation without causation! When one backs up and removes the Kantian lens, it is clearly apparent that this is true. How can one be “saved” from the powers of sin, death and the power of the devil unless there is some be-ing happening that is causally efficacious?

While the causal question in the sciences has always been at the fore, for a very long time in theology -- because of the distinction in Neo-Kantianism between scientific judgments and “value judgments” - - the area of value, which includes the domain of theology, was insulated from the causal questions of the sciences. Jesus’ teachings in Ritschl’s school were certainly worthy of emulation, but the question of the real causal power of the Christ remained marginal and underdeveloped.

However, if we leave behind the landscape of idealism and engage the world as realists - - those who would say that entities, events and causal relations exist outside of us - - we understand that we can no longer regard the symbol of ‘the power of God’ simply as a symbol the can inculcate existential/phenomenological power. So let us return now to the question of preaching Christ: Can one effectively preach Christ without assuming causal agency?

In answering this, we are inexorably driven to ask the question of grounds. When I hear in the preacher’s mouth that my sins are forgiven for Christ’s sake, I ask myself, “But is it so?” Now, there are many who would say that this is the wrong response. If I had actually heard the proclamation, I need not ask for grounds. The Word its reality; it donates what is. Moses convicts me of my failings and Christ announces his blessings. It is all first order proclamation. Years ago Robert Schlarleman compared the first-person gospel address to the phrase, ‘Take heart’. This utterance is clearly performative. It liberates and makes free. Is not the desire to seek grounds misguided and ultimately indicative of a loss of faith?

But here is the problem. For many denizens of the early 21st century, one simply cannot hear the pure gospel proclamation without asking the question of truth. In a world of vastly conflicting claims to truth, those truly serious about salvation today are not that much different than their counterparts in late antiquity. Which of the available competing religious claims is true? Which one is worthy upon which to stake one’s life?

But how could one ever know which is true? We could claim that there is a domain of written revelation to which we can appeal that guarantees truth. But this way is not the way of those who have learned, understood and applied the historical-critical methodology. One could simply say that we have an experience of the risen Christ in the preaching, and this experience itself vouchsafes the truthfulness of the proclamation. In doing this, however, we have a problem, for if the proclamation eventuates in a certain experience for A but not for B, we really have no grounds to say that a particular experience should have happened for B as well. If the proclamation strikes one, then it is gospel; if not, then it is not.[2]

It is instructive, I think, to reflect upon the likely causal map that many would draw concerning the claim that the reality of the preached Christ determines the normativity of the attesting text. One drawing such a map would merely point out that person A has a particular genetic temperament that in conjunction with his past experiences has eventuated in him being in a particular causal situation such that the proclamation or declamation of a particular phrase or set of phrases with a particular inflection causally produces a mental state and an appropriate behavioral trajectory in the hearer. That is to say, A stimulated X-ly by words of Scripture or sermon brings it about that were A would respond Y-ly in particular situations. Though theology oftentimes runs from such reductionism, thinking reductionistic thoughts can help theology clarify what claims are actually being made. In the example just given, it would seem that all of the causal action could in principle be specified at the behavioral, mental and finally neural levels.

Now what happens when A becomes aware of this fact, of the fact that the causal chain that can be drawn is a physical one? Would A respond in the same way were he to know that this could be causally explained physically, and that we need not appeal to divine causation? Would A regard the proclamation of Christ as true were he to be able in principle causally to explain his affective and behavioral response to the sermon? What happens to A when hearing the gospel proclamation knowing that the only causal chain at work is a natural one? Does not the realization by A that there is no causal agency outside physical agency change how A reacts to the causal stimulation?

Consider this example: Bob is suffering from terminal illness and hears the pastor proclaim at the bedside that he (Bob) will be resurrected in the flesh just as Jesus was. Bob’s immediate response is an experience of peace in the face of death. But would not the contour of this experience change if Bob were to think through the cause of his experience and conclude that there is only a physical chain of causality here? How could this knowledge not change the contour of Bob’s response?

Lutheran theology since the time of Kant has prided itself in overcoming the dualism of nature and supernature. Compare now the natural causal chain in the above example with the classical, pre-Kantian Lutheran account. The preacher preaches the Gospel and the Word proclaimed. The Holy Spirit causally brings it about that the believer truly hears the Gospel and actually responds in way she would not have done were it not for the case that the Spirit was at work. The Spirit’s causal activity is part of the works of the Holy Trinity outside itself. The effect of this causal activity is that the proclaimed Word produces faith. The Holy Spirit brings it about the hearer of the Word believes the Gospel, the Gospel that claims that Christ has truly bought about the forgiveness of sins through his death and resurrection.

Moreover, this Christ, the eternal second Person of the Trinity, lives even now. This Christ has an existence outside of human awareness, perception, conception and language. If we follow Luther and much of the Lutheran tradition, this Christ is now present in the believer. The Holy Spirit thus causally brings it about that Christ is present in the believer. God’s spiritual agency causally brings it about that a different state of affairs obtains in the hearer than would have obtained without His causality.

If we take very seriously the causal question, then we have to say that the effect of preaching is a divine effect, that the physical causal chain does not determine wholly the state of affairs that obtains. There is no causal closure of the natural when it comes to the work of the Holy Spirit. Some account of supernatural agency is finally necessary. While the divine Word is carried on the wings of the human word, the perlocution wrought must make reference to divine causal agency.

VII. A Tale of Three Causal Chains and a Brief Conclusion

A number of years ago Daniel Dennett wrote an article in which he talked about three levels of description in computer systems. He spoke of a physical stance, a design stance and an intentional stance. Different statements are true given different stances - - for instance, we can say that the computer is “thinking” or “wants to do” something - - even though a computer’s deepest causal map is at the physical level. Using mental talk is possible when describing computer behavior, but no “minds” interfere with ultimate microphysical determination. Is this way of looking at things useful when considering the question of preaching?

Accordingly, on one level we could draw a causal map in preaching at the physico-behavioral level. This description would be strongly reductionistic and claim that there is no interruption of causal determination at this level.

On the next level of description, we could talk about the effects of particular language upon the linguistic-phenomenological horizon of the individual. This level would is that which is assumed in hermeneutical theology. One does not do a reduction to the physico-behavioral, but rather speaks broadly as language as the house of being, and the uttering of particular language being capable of changing being.

Finally, one might articulate the highest level of description as the “divine level.” Here the theologian would talk analogously to how computer programmers talk. Theologians would use locutions like “the Holy Spirit calls, gathers, and enlightens” just as computer programmers would speak of the computer “thinking” or “wanting” to move to the next state. Each would claim that the deepest causal map is at the lowest level, but each would simultaneously countenance genuine higher-level talk, and would be able even to make true statements at these highest levels. What do we make of this putative analogy?

I began this article by talking about the relationship of God and the universe in a dualistic fashion. The divine is the divine and not the universe, and the universe is the universe but not divine. This all seems very good when talking about God’s providential activity. But in thinking about the Holy Spirit, things get much more difficult. This is true for thinking through such Lutheran notions as the ubiquitas Christi as well. In thinking through these issues, it seems like the metaphor of “layers” prevails over disparate “domains.” Does Dennet’s analogy have service in theology?

No. For reasons already alluded to, this analogy cannot work. Why? Ultimately theological assertions cannot be a higher-level description of underlying natural and anthropological processes because the very raison d’etre of theology is soteriological. There is no salvation without causation. The Word is causal. The agency of the Spirit in this “Wording of the Word” is causal. Closing the causal loop at the natural level does not realize theological truth, but contradicts it. Divine causation must, of necessity, have as its relata a divine and non-divine term. I don’t see how divine causation is possible ultimately without drawing a relation between nature and supernature.

This does not mean that when it comes to thinking the causal activity of the Son and Holy Spirit, we would need necessarily to begin with the analogy of mind/body dualism, and try to understand divine causal agency analogously to the pineal gland. This may be the best way to think through the Father’s creation and provident care for the world, but it is not optimal for thinking about the Trinity and incarnation. Once God is incarnated in his Son that is ever present in the world, and once the Holy Spirit carried by the Word is forever working in the hearts of believers attesting to the Word, then we must make sense of the divine bringing about states of affairs in and through the finite. I think the situation here is better conceived through the notion of downward causation. But, as we have seen, the causal map of downward causation is not clear, and it may even finally presuppose the dualism advocates were hoping to escape!

We have traversed much ground in this paper and asked many questions. We have argued that the category of divine causality must be recovered if we are to think through cogently God’s real presence and activity in the world. This is true as well when considering how it is that talk of the Holy Spirit’s activity in preaching is itself true. While we do not yet have an adequate explanatory model how it might be possible for God to be at work in his work in the Trinity through preaching and believing, I have today argued that pursuit of such a model is crucial for a robust theology proclaiming that ‘Christ is the way, the truth and the life’ is true.

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[1] Bayer writes: “In contrast to every metaphysical set of statements that teach about the deity, this assertion [e.g. "To you is born this day a Savior"] declares that God's truth and will are not abstract entities, but are directed verbally and publicly as a concrete promise to a particular hearer in a specific situation. 'God' is apprehended as the one who makes a promise to a human being in such a way that the person who hears it can have full confidence in it" [Martin Luther’s Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation.  By Oswald Bayer.  Translated by Thomas Trapp.  (Grand Rapids, MI.  Eerdmans,  2008), p. 53.]

Bayer clearly supposes that there exists a firm distinction among performative utterances like promise-making, constative utterances which describe or report states of affairs that can be true or false, and imperative utterances.  He further explains:   " . . . one cannot take the promise, which is not a descriptive statement, and transform it into a descriptive statement. Secondly, one cannot take the promise, which is not in the form of a statement that shows how something ought to be done, and transform it into an imperative. . . . The truth of the promise . . . is to be determined only at the very place that the promise was . . . constituted. This means it is located within the relationship of the one who is speaking . . . and the one who hears. . . . If it is correct that the one individual is in the position of hearer in the relationship that is constituted by this promise, and if that is verified, it excludes the possibility that he himself can verify the promise. . . . To seek to verify this oneself would be atheism . . ." (54-55).

It is true, of course, that there are statements such as "I promise to pay you $1000,” and that such statements cannot be given a complete analysis in terms of a set of descriptive statements.  Reporting is a different linguistic activity than promising.  It is also true that such statements cannot be reductively analyzable into a set of imperative statements.    However, one must distinguish between a reduction of the performative and a delineation of its palpable presuppositions, presuppositions that can be stated in terms of the descriptive and imperative.

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

In the divine promise of salvation it would seem that the same structure obtains: God exists, I exist, some state of affairs to which 'salvation' properly applies exists, and God is under obligation to bring about salvation to me. (Admittedly, it is rather jarring to think of God being under obligation, but the logic of promising seems to demand it.)  

Bayer further claims that the "truth of the promise is determined where it is constituted," that is, in the one speaking and hearing. But what exactly is this to mean? Clearly, Bayer is not talking about a correspondence, coherence, or even pragmatic notion of truth. We are told, in fact, that the individual cannot verify the truth of the promise, for to do so would involve one in atheism.  

If 'Bob promises to pay me $1000 on April 1 and does not do so, he has broken his promise.  We would not normally say, however, that his promise is true or false.  A broken promise is, to use Austin's language, an "infelicitous' performative utterance.  Since on Austinian grounds, truth and falsity are not properties of promises qua promises, it is not clear what Bayer means by a promise’s truth.  One might say, I suppose, that some descriptively-stated presupposition for the keeping of the promise did not obtain and thus that statement is not true.  Yet this is not to say that the promise is false, but merely that the falsity of the promise’s presupposition makes it true that the promise is infelicitous.  Statements about promises have definite truth conditions even if the promises do not. 

[2] One must distinguish between the purely descriptive truth that the Bible and many other books can and do strike readers with existential truth, and the normative claim that the Bible ought so to do so.  Until we can give an analysis of why the Bible ought to strike one as salvific truth, we have not engaged the issue which the claim of the formal norm in Lutheran Orthodoxy was trying to answer.
Imagine a time where the Bible does not strike people as giving life-saving existential truth. (This time has already happened in much of the first world.)  In the absence of a formal norm - - either the text bears an artifact/artificer relationship to God or the Holy Spirit causally operates only upon it - - what position is left for the theologian?  Would he not have to say that the Bible is not the Holy Scriptures any longer, for it no longer salvifically empowers us?