Disputatio XI: De Creatione et Intellegibilitate Mundi

On the Creation and Intelligibility of the World

Quaeritur

Utrum mundus, qui per Verbum Dei creatus est, in se contineat rationem et ordinem intelligibilem non ut proprietatem naturalem aut autonomum logon, sed ut participationem ipsius rationis divinae per quam omnia facta sunt; et utrum Spiritus Sanctus sit causa per quam haec participatio in mundo manet viva et cognoscibilis.

Whether the world, created through the Word of God, contains within itself reason and intelligible order not as a natural property or autonomous logos, but as participation in the very divine reason through which all things were made; and whether the Holy Spirit is the cause by which this participation remains living and knowable within creation.

Thesis

Creation is intelligible because it proceeds from the divine Word. The order present in the world is not an autonomous rational structure nor a self sufficient logos, but a participation in the eternal Logos through whom all things were made. The Holy Spirit preserves this participation as a living relation, sustaining the correspondence between divine wisdom and creaturely understanding.

Locus classicus

Psalm 33:6
בִּדְבַר־יְהוָה שָׁמַיִם נַעֲשׂוּ
וּבְרוּחַ פִּיו כָּל־צְבָאָם

By the word of the Lord the heavens were made,
and by the breath of his mouth all their host.

John 1:3
πάντα δι’ αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο
καὶ χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἕν ὃ γέγονεν

All things came to be through him,
and without him not one thing came to be that has come to be.

These texts testify that creation is not merely effected by divine power but articulated by divine reason. Being itself is given through Logos, and life and coherence are sustained through Spirit.

Explicatio

The question of the world’s intelligibility is not secondary to theology but intrinsic to the doctrine of creation itself. To confess that the world is created through the Word is already to confess that it is ordered toward meaning. Creation is not the production of brute material later subjected to rational description. It is the emergence of being through divine intelligibility.

The Logos does not merely precede the world as an efficient cause. He is the intelligible form by which the world is constituted as knowable. To exist as a creature is therefore to stand within a relation of participation. Being and intelligibility are not separable gifts. What comes to be through the Word comes to be as meaningful.

This must be stated with care. The intelligibility of the world is not an intrinsic possession of matter, nor is it an autonomous rational principle embedded within nature. There is no self sufficient logos of the world. The order we discover in nature is derivative. It is a finite participation in divine reason, not a parallel source of intelligibility alongside it.

We may express this formally for clarity, while immediately guarding against misinterpretation.

Let C(x) signify “x is created,” and L(x) signify “x participates in the Logos.”

The claim ∀x[C(x) → L(x)] states that to be created is already to stand within the sphere of divine intelligibility. This does not identify creaturely being with divine being. Participation is not identity. It names a relation of dependence that preserves distinction.

The world is therefore intelligible not because it is divine, but because it is spoken.

This intelligibility is not static. The Logos who brings creation into being does not withdraw once creation stands. If the world is to remain intelligible, the relation of participation must be preserved. Here the role of the Holy Spirit becomes decisive.

The Spirit is not merely the giver of life in a biological sense. He is the living bond by which the rational structure of creation remains ordered toward understanding. The Spirit maintains the correspondence between divine meaning and creaturely apprehension. Without this ongoing mediation, intelligibility would collapse either into abstraction or into opacity.

This pneumatological dimension guards theology from two errors. On the one hand, it resists rationalism, which treats intelligibility as self grounding. On the other hand, it resists voluntarism, which treats order as arbitrary imposition. The Spirit does not impose meaning from without, nor does He leave creation to explain itself. He preserves intelligibility as a living relation.

It is therefore no accident that scientific inquiry presupposes the intelligibility of nature. The success of the sciences depends upon the prior givenness of order, coherence, and lawfulness. These are not conclusions of science but its conditions. Theology does not compete with scientific explanation. It accounts for the possibility of explanation itself.

Nor does the presence of disorder, entropy, or suffering negate creation’s intelligibility. Finitude includes limitation, vulnerability, and decay. Yet even these are intelligible within a teleological horizon shaped by divine wisdom. The cross remains the decisive pattern. What appears as negation or breakdown of order becomes, within divine providence, the site where deeper meaning is disclosed.

Thus creation’s intelligibility is neither naive optimism nor denial of tragedy. It is the confession that nothing stands outside the horizon of meaning established by the Word and sustained by the Spirit.

Objectiones

Ob I. If the intelligibility of the world depends upon participation in the divine Logos, then human reason appears heteronomous. Genuine autonomy in science and philosophy would be undermined.

Ob II. To claim that all intelligibility derives from the Logos risks collapsing Creator and creature into a single ontological order, thereby tending toward pantheism.

Ob III. The presence of apparent randomness, disorder, and suffering in nature contradicts the claim that the world is rationally ordered.

Ob IV. Scientific naturalism explains order through natural laws and mathematical regularities without appeal to divine speech. Theological appeals to Logos are therefore unnecessary.

Ob V. Hermeneutical skepticism holds that meaning arises from interpretation rather than from being itself. To speak of the world as “spoken” is merely metaphorical.

Responsiones

Ad I. Autonomy does not require self origination. Human reason is genuinely free precisely because it participates in divine reason rather than being isolated from it. Participation grounds freedom. It does not annul it.

Ad II. Participation preserves distinction. The Logos is present as cause, not as substance. The world reflects divine wisdom without becoming divine. Transcendence is not compromised by immanence rightly understood.

Ad III. Disorder belongs to finitude, not to meaninglessness. What appears chaotic within a limited horizon may still belong to a wider teleological order. The intelligibility of creation includes mystery, not its elimination.

Ad IV. Scientific explanation presupposes intelligibility it cannot itself generate. Theology does not replace science but accounts for the rational conditions under which science is possible.

Ad V. Meaning is not projected onto the world but received from it because the world is already articulated by divine speech. Interpretation is human, but intelligibility is given.

Nota

The doctrine of creation through the Word entails a theological epistemology. To know the world is to retrace, in finite understanding, the grammar by which God called it into being. Every act of genuine understanding is therefore participatory.

The sciences are not alien to theology. They are disciplined forms of listening. They read the grammar of creation written by the Logos. Their success testifies not to the self sufficiency of reason, but to its vocation.

The Spirit stands as the hermeneutical bond between divine wisdom and creaturely understanding. He is the one by whom the world remains readable and the intellect remains receptive. Without the Spirit, intelligibility would become either inert structure or arbitrary construction.

Creation is therefore not a completed fact but an ongoing act of divine communication. The Logos speaks. The Spirit interprets. The creature understands.

Determinatio

1. Creation is intelligible because it proceeds from the divine Word.

2. The order of the world is participatory, not autonomous.

3. The Holy Spirit preserves intelligibility as a living relation.

4. Human knowledge of creation is itself an act of participation.

5. The intelligibility of the world is the visible trace of divine speech.

Transitus ad Disputationem XII

Having established that divine causality is not a rival to creaturely agency but the very ground of its intelligibility, we must now consider how this causality persists beyond the originary act of creation. For if God is not only the one a quo all things proceed but also the one in quo they subsist, then creation cannot be understood as a completed event left to the autonomy of finite processes. Rather, it must be conceived as a continuous act, sustained at every moment by the same Word through whom all things were made.

This raises a further and more delicate question. How does divine causality operate in the ongoing order of the world without dissolving the reality of secondary causes or rendering creaturely action illusory? If God sustains all things immediately, does this leave any genuine causal efficacy to creatures? And if creatures truly act, how is their action ordered to God without collapsing into either occasionalism or a competitive dualism of causes?

The doctrine of providence thus emerges not as an appendix to creation but as its necessary explication. It concerns the continuation of divine causality through time, the mode by which God preserves, concurs with, and orders finite causes toward their ends, and the manner in which freedom and contingency are upheld within a world wholly dependent upon God. Providence names the grammar by which creation remains creation—neither autonomous nor annihilated, neither divinized nor abandoned.

Accordingly, we advance to Disputatio XII: De Providentia et Continuatione Causalitatis Divinae, where we inquire how the same Word who spoke creation into being also sustains it through every moment of its existence, and how divine causality operates within the order of secondary causes without abolishing their reality, integrity, or freedom.

Disputatio X: De Revelatione et Cognitione Dei

On Revelation and Knowledge of God

Quaeritur

Utrum cognitio Dei oriatur ex participatione in actu ipsius revelationis, ita ut Deus cognoscatur non per discursum rationis sed in ipso actu quo se revelat; et utrum hic actus revelationis sit constitutive duplex, simul exterior in Verbo proclamato et interior in Spiritu illuminante, per quos intellectus humanus capax fit veritatis divinae.

Whether knowledge of God arises through participation in the act of divine revelation itself, such that God is known not through discursive reason but within the very act by which He discloses Himself; and whether this revelatory act is constitutively twofold—external in the proclaimed Word and internal in the illuminating Spirit—by whom the human intellect is made capable of divine truth.

Thesis

True knowledge of God does not originate in human speculation. It arises only within revelation. Revelation is not chiefly the transmission of information about God but the divine self-giving through which God becomes knowable. In this act the eternal Word addresses the human intellect externally through the scriptural and proclaimed Word, while the Holy Spirit illumines the intellect internally, enabling participation in the truth revealed.

Thus theological cognition is a participatory reception of divine self-manifestation. It is neither autonomous reasoning nor passive impression. It is the Spirit-mediated union of the knower with the truth that reveals itself. In knowing God, the intellect becomes—by grace—an organ of divine manifestation.

Locus classicus

John 17:3
Haec est autem vita aeterna, ut cognoscant te, solum verum Deum, et quem misisti Iesum Christum.
“And this is eternal life, that they know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.”

1 Corinthians 2:12
Nos autem non spiritum mundi accepimus, sed Spiritum qui ex Deo est, ut sciamus quae a Deo donata sunt nobis.
“We have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand the things freely given us by God.”

Augustine, De Trinitate IX.13
Non intratur in veritatem nisi per ipsam veritatem.
“One does not enter into truth except through Truth itself.”

These witnesses articulate a single insight: revelation both discloses divine reality and creates the capacity for its reception. Knowledge of God presupposes both the presence of the revealing Word and the illumination of the Spirit.

Explicatio

The inquiry into divine revelation must begin with the recognition that God is not an object within the world whose properties may be inferred from created effects. God is known only because God gives Himself to be known. Revelation is therefore not an epistemic supplement to natural inquiry but the condition under which knowledge of God becomes possible. In revealing Himself, God not only manifests the truth but also creates the horizon within which that truth can be apprehended.

Revelation is thus a single divine act with a twofold form. Externally, the Word addresses the creature through prophetic and apostolic testimony, through preaching, and supremely in the Incarnate Son. Internally, the Spirit illumines the intellect so that what is heard may be recognized as divine truth. These two operations are inseparable. The external Word is the objective presence of revelation; the internal illumination is its subjective reception. Without the Word, illumination lacks content. Without illumination, the Word is not savingly known. Revelation occurs only in the union of these acts.

This twofold structure safeguards the intellect from both rationalism and enthusiasm. Rationalism assumes that the mind can rise to divine truth by its own power; enthusiasm imagines that divine truth can be apprehended apart from the concrete forms of God’s address. But theological cognition arises only where the Spirit joins the intellect to the proclaimed Word and thereby renders the creature capable of divine truth. This elevation does not replace natural capacities; it perfects them. The intellect does not cease to reason; rather, it reasons within a light it does not generate.

In this sense revelation is not merely epistemic but ontological. It is the act in which God is present to the creature and the creature is drawn into that presence. The intellect knows God not by forming concepts that encompass the divine essence but by participating in the self-disclosure of the One who reveals Himself. The mode of knowing corresponds to the mode of being known. Because God reveals Himself personally, the creature knows personally; because God reveals Himself freely, the creature knows by grace; because God reveals Himself truly, the creature knows in truth, though not comprehensively.

The knowledge that arises from revelation is therefore hyperintensional in character. It cannot be reduced to predicative content or inferential structure. Its meaning exceeds the natural extension of its predicates because the truths they signify are grounded in God’s own presence. To confess that Christ is Lord, or that God is Father, is to speak within a horizon opened by the Spirit’s illumination—a horizon in which the predicate receives a depth of meaning that transcends its natural usage. Revelation not only informs language; it transforms the conditions under which language signifies.

Thus theological cognition is a form of participation. The intellect does not merely receive propositions but is joined to the truth they express. This union does not dissolve the creaturely mode of knowing; it fulfills it. The intellect remains finite, yet it becomes capable of knowing the infinite according to the measure of grace. Knowledge of God is therefore neither an achievement nor an absorption. It is a gift: apprehension without comprehension, union without confusion, presence without possession.

In this way revelation gives rise to a distinctive epistemic posture: wonder before the One who reveals, receptivity to the form of His address, and obedience to the truth disclosed. The knower is not sovereign; the object is not neutral; the act of knowing is not autonomous. Each is ordered by the divine initiative. Revelation is the light in which the intellect sees, and the light by which it becomes capable of seeing. In its deepest sense, revelation is the presence of God granting Himself to be known.

Objectiones

Ob I. If theological knowledge requires interior illumination, its certainty seems to rest on a private act that cannot be publicly verified. This appears to render theology subjective.

Ob II. If the finite intellect cannot know God except through participation in revelation, natural reason appears useless for theology, contradicting the tradition that assigns reason a genuine though limited role.

Ob III. If the intellect must be elevated to know God, then its natural capacities are insufficient. This suggests that either divine knowledge is impossible for finite beings or that nature is swallowed by grace.

Ob IV. If God is known only as He reveals Himself, then God becomes both the condition and object of knowing. This unity threatens to collapse the distinction between Creator and creature.

Responsiones

Ad I. Illumination is not a private inner certainty but an ecclesial event. The Spirit illumines through the public Word, not apart from it. What is grasped inwardly corresponds to what is proclaimed outwardly. The objectivity of revelation grounds the subject’s reception.

Ad II. Reason is neither negated nor replaced. Its natural operations remain indispensable for discerning meaning, testing coherence, and receiving revelation. What reason cannot do is generate knowledge of God. Grace perfects nature; it does not annul it.

Ad III. The intellect’s elevation is not a change of essence but a participation in divine light. Nature is neither destroyed nor absorbed. It becomes proportionate to the truth it receives through a relation of communion, not through ontological fusion.

Ad IV. Revelation unites knowing and being known without collapsing them. God is both Revealer and Revealed, yet the knower remains creaturely. Participation confers intimacy, not identity.

Nota

Disputatio X marks a structural turning point. Disputatio IX showed that divine speech transforms human language by assuming it into the expressive act of the Word. Disputatio X now shows that this same divine act transforms the intellect by illuminating it with the Spirit. The possibility of theology rests on this double assumption: the Word assumes human speech, and the Spirit assumes human knowing. Revelation is thus both the manifestation of divine truth and the creation of the capacity to receive it.

This insight prepares for what follows. If knowledge of God arises in revelation, and revelation is the presence of the Revealer in the act of revealing, then the next question must concern the mode of divine presence itself.

Determinatio

1. Knowledge of God arises only within divine revelation.

2. Revelation is intrinsically twofold: the external Word and the internal illumination.

3. The intellect becomes capable of divine truth through participation in the revelatory act.

4. Theological cognition is Spirit-mediated apprehension of divine self-disclosure.

5. Reason retains its natural dignity but is perfected, not displaced, by grace.

6. To know God is to participate in His presence: apprehensio sine comprehensione, unio sine confusione.

Transitus ad Disputationem XI

If knowledge arises only where God reveals Himself, then revelation presupposes a mode of divine presence in which God is genuinely encountered within finite forms. What is this presence? How does the infinite dwell amid the finite without displacement or division?

To answer this, we proceed to Disputatio XI: De Praesentia Dei, where the ontology of divine presence will be examined.

Disputatio IX: De Nova Lingua Theologiae

On the New Language of Theology

Quaeritur

Utrum nova lingua theologiae oritur ex ipso actu Incarnationis, qua Logos aeternus non solum humanam naturam sed etiam humanam loquelam assumpsit, ita ut sermo humanus in ipsa assumptionis unitate transfiguraretur; et utrum haec lingua, Spiritu Sancto vivificata, sit forma finita veritatis infinitae per quam sermo humanus non tantum de Deo dicit sed eius praesentiam realiter participat.

Whether the new language of theology arises from the very act of the Incarnation, in which the eternal Logos assumes not only human nature but the expressive and signifying powers proper to humanity, transfiguring human discourse in the unity of that assumption; and whether this language, vivified by the Holy Spirit, constitutes a finite form of infinite truth by which human speech not only speaks of God but participates in the divine presence.

Thesis

Theology speaks in a nova lingua because the Word has entered the sphere of human signification and has taken this sphere into Himself. The Incarnation is not merely an ontological union of divine and human natures. It is also the elevation of the human capacity for meaning. Ordinary speech, in itself finite, bounded, and ordered to created realities, becomes in the Spirit the site where infinite truth can appear. The nova lingua is therefore neither an esoteric jargon nor a spontaneous invention of the religious imagination. It is the linguistic form of the Incarnation itself. Human words, assumed into the expressive act of the Word, become instruments of divine self-communication. 

Locus classicus

John 1.14
Καὶ ὁ Λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο, πλήρης χάριτος καὶ ἀληθείας.
"And the Word became flesh, full of grace and truth."

This text establishes the primitive fact from which all theological language proceeds. The Logos enters flesh and thereby the historical, symbolic, and communicative structures through which flesh signifies. The Incarnation is thus an event within being and within language. The locus of human discourse becomes the locus of divine presence.

Gregory of Nazianzus, Ep. 101
Quod non est assumptum, non est sanatum.

"What was not assumed was not healed."

If the expressive capacity by which human beings speak and understand belongs to human nature, then this capacity is assumed. If assumed, it is healed. If healed, it is elevated. Language does not remain outside salvation. It becomes one of the modalities through which salvation is communicated.

Augustine, Confessiones XI.6
Verbum tuum non praeterit, sed manet, et per quod omnia manent.

"Your Word does not pass away, but endures, and through it all things endure."

The eternal Word speaks all things into being and sustains all things in being. In the Incarnation the same Word speaks within history. The divine utterance that grounds the world becomes audible in human speech.

Jean-Louis Chrétien, L’arche de la parole
La parole humaine est ravivée par la venue de la Parole incarnée.

"Human speech is revived by the coming of the Incarnate Word."

The Incarnate Word does not merely use human language. The Word restores it to its original vocation as a medium of truth and presence.

The witnesses converge upon one insight. The Incarnation renders language permeable to the divine. Speech becomes a place where God may be encountered. 

Explicatio

The inquiry into a nova lingua theologiae does not arise from a desire to innovate in style but from the nature of revelation itself. Human speech is formed within the created order and is therefore proportioned to finite objects. Its predicates acquire their sense from the world of temporal, limited things. Left to itself, such language cannot bear the weight of divine truth. If God is to be spoken in human words, those words must become capable of signifying beyond their natural measure. This is not an aesthetic refinement but a metaphysical necessity, for revelation is not chiefly the transmission of information about God; it is God’s own self-giving. A language adequate to such self-giving must be conformed to the reality that gives itself.

Here ontology and semantics converge. The nature of the object revealed governs the form of the discourse that can truthfully speak it. One cannot speak the infinite with a grammar shaped exclusively for the finite. If the eternal Λόγος enters history, then the expressive powers native to history must be capacitated for divine use. The nova lingua is therefore not a distinct theological lexicon running alongside ordinary speech. It is a transformation of signification grounded in the Incarnation. Human grammar retains its recognizable form, yet its horizon expands. What once signified finite realities alone is taken up, redirected, and perfected so that it may signify the presence of God within the world.

This elevation of language is not the achievement of human ingenuity. It occurs only under the divine act by which the Word assumes human nature and the Spirit vivifies human speech. No linguistic creativity could produce predicates fit for God. The nova lingua is the fruit of participation rather than construction. Language becomes capable of God because God becomes present within language.

For clarity we may name the grammar of natural discourse Tₒ. Within this grammar contradiction marks error, absence denotes privation, weakness signifies limitation, and death terminates meaning. Tₒ is wholly proper to the created order and must never be despised. It orders finite speakers to finite realities and remains indispensable whenever theology speaks of the world as world. Yet Tₒ, precisely because it is finite, cannot speak the infinite except by negation or analogy. Its predicates receive their sense from the created order alone and therefore cannot disclose the God who exceeds that order.

When the Incarnate Word speaks, another grammar becomes possible—call it Tₙ. Within Tₙ, power appears in weakness, presence is encountered under forms of absence, glory is revealed in humiliation, and life arises from death. These are not poetical inversions. They belong to the very structure of divine self-revelation. The infinite discloses itself within the finite sub contrario—beneath what would naturally signify its opposite. Thus the grammar of the world is not denied; it is overcome from within by the reality it was never designed to contain.

The relation between Tₒ and Tₙ mirrors the Chalcedonian structure of the Incarnation. The grammars remain distinct yet united in the expressive act of the Word. Tₒ retains its integrity and is never swallowed by Tₙ; Tₙ never abolishes Tₒ but draws it into a broader horizon. This is the linguistic analogue of the communicatio idiomatum. Just as the human nature of Christ becomes the instrument of divine self-revelation without ceasing to be human, so the grammar of creation becomes the vessel of divine truth without ceasing to be the grammar of creation.

This incarnational structure reveals why theological language becomes hyperintensional. In ordinary discourse the meaning of predicates is bounded by their extension and by the inferential relations of Tₒ. But in the nova lingua, meaning is determined by participation in the reality signified. Words remain lexically unchanged, yet their ontological grounding shifts. They signify more than their natural extension could sustain because they are drawn into the expressive act of the Word. Hyperintensional density is therefore not a semantic anomaly; it is the imprint of the Incarnation upon human speech.

The nova lingua is thus both grammatical and miraculous. It is grammatical because it retains the structures of natural discourse; it is miraculous because its truth is governed by the Spirit who renders human predicates fit to bear divine meaning. Without grammar, theology collapses into enthusiasm. Without miracle, it collapses back into the limits of Tₒ. Only when grammar is perfected by miracle does it become capable of speaking God.

For this reason the Spirit stands at the center of theological felicity. A predicate becomes capable of divine truth not by conforming to natural rules alone but by being spoken in Spiritu. The Spirit does not merely guarantee the truth of what is said; the Spirit grounds the very possibility of its being said. Every theological predicate presupposes the pneumatological act that joins the finite word to the divine reality it signifies. This authorization is the felicity of theological speech. Without it the nova lingua would be impossible; with it, human utterance becomes a mode of divine self-communication.

Thus theological predication is neither univocal nor equivocal but participatory. The predicate signifies God not by indicating a property shared with creatures but by indicating a perfection creatures receive from God. Meaning is governed from above even when expressed from below. The Word assumes human speaking; the Spirit extends that assumption into every act of theological discourse. The result is a language that can speak more than it naturally means because its meaning is constituted not solely by lexical content or inferential structure but by the divine act that grounds its felicity.

The nova lingua is therefore the grammar of participation. It is the linguistic form of the Incarnation and the semantic structure of the Church’s life in the Spirit. In it the finite becomes the bearer of the infinite; human words—assumed, elevated, and vivified—become instruments of divine truth. This grammar is not a static system but the ongoing miracle through which God grants creatures to speak what they could never have spoken by nature. It is the restoration of language to its source, the return of speech to the One from whom all meaning proceeds and in whom all true signification finds its end.

Objectiones

Ob I. If theology requires a nova lingua in order to speak truthfully of God, then ordinary human language is insufficient for divine revelation. This implies that revelation cannot be immediately intelligible to natural reason, which contradicts the catholic conviction that God addresses Himself to all.

Ob II. The introduction of a new grammar risks confusing paradox with contradiction. If power is said to appear in weakness and life in death, one may easily mistake the collapse of rational coherence for the presence of mystery. The nova lingua therefore threatens theological discourse with irrationality.

Ob III. If divine predicates require the Spirit’s authorization to be applied felicitously, theological meaning becomes dependent upon an invisible act that cannot be verified by linguistic or logical criteria. The nova lingua thus undermines the possibility of shared, public theological argument.

Ob IV. By asserting that finite language may bear infinite truth, the nova lingua appears to bind the divine to the limitations of human forms. If the Word assumes human speech, divine truth seems to be constrained by the contingencies of grammar and history, thereby compromising God’s transcendence.

Responsiones

Ad I. The nova lingua does not render ordinary language obsolete. It assumes it. Human speech remains the medium of revelation precisely because it is taken up by the Word. The intelligibility of revelation depends not on the natural adequacy of language but on the divine act that renders language adequate. The Spirit does not bypass human understanding but elevates it. Thus revelation is intelligible to all, though it is received according to the measure of participation granted.

Ad II. The nova lingua retains the logical order proper to human discourse. Paradox does not signal a breakdown of reason but the incursion of a reality that exceeds finite categories. In Tₒ, weakness denotes limitation. In Tₙ, weakness becomes the site where divine power is made manifest. This is not contradiction but hyper-intensional elevation. The form remains, the content is enlarged. Mystery is not irrationality but a higher rationality grounded in participation in the divine.

Ad III. The Spirit’s authorization of theological predicates does not negate the public character of theology. It grounds it. For theology speaks not from private illumination but from the ecclesial life formed by the Word and Sacraments. The felicity of theological speech is therefore visible in its effects: it produces confession, repentance, consolation, and praise. The nova lingua is not private speech. It is the common language of the Church, whose public life attests the Spirit’s presence.

Ad IV. The assumption of human language does not bind God to finitude. It manifests God’s freedom. The Word takes on linguistic form not out of necessity but out of gracious condescension. By assuming language, God does not become limited; language becomes capacitated. Transcendence is not compromised but expressed in the act whereby the infinite communicates itself through the finite. The nova lingua is a sign of divine generosity, not divine restriction.

Nota

The nova lingua is the point at which the various trajectories of the preceding disputationes converge. The first disputation established the grammar of theological utterance. The second examined the structures by which theological meaning may be modeled. The third investigated the felicity conditions of theological speech. The fourth and fifth clarified the nature of theological truth. The sixth grounded meaning and truth in the causality of God. The seventh unfolded the ontology of participation. The eighth explored the mode of divine manifestation within the finite.

In this ninth disputation these strands are united. Language becomes the locus where causality, participation, manifestation, and truth converge. Finite speech becomes the arena of divine self-communication. The nova lingua is therefore not an ornamental feature of theology. It is the medium through which theology becomes possible at all.

Through the Incarnation human language receives a new vocation. It becomes capable of bearing divine truth. Through the Spirit it receives a new power. It becomes capable of speaking that truth in the Church. The nova lingua is thus the linguistic expression of the union between God and humanity that lies at the heart of Christian revelation.

Determinatio

1. The new language of theology arises from the Incarnation itself. In assuming human nature, the eternal Word also assumes the expressive capacities proper to that nature, elevating human speech within the order of signification. 
2. This nova lingua is sustained by the Holy Spirit, who renders finite predicates capable of bearing infinite meaning. The Spirit grants felicity to theological utterance and joins human words to the divine reality they signify. 
3. The new grammar, Tₙ, does not negate the old grammar, Tₒ. It fulfills it. Tₒ remains valid and operative within the horizon of creation, while Tₙ becomes necessary within the horizon of revelation.
4. The nova lingua is therefore not a replacement of natural grammar but its transfiguration. What belonged to the finite order is taken up and perfected so that it may participate in the expressive act of the Word.
5. In this new grammar the finite may speak the infinite without confusion, and the infinite may reveal itself within the finite without diminution. The nova lingua is the linguistic analogue of the hypostatic union.
6. Through this language theological predicates become instruments of divine self-communication. Human speech, assumed and vivified by the Word and Spirit, participates in the truth it proclaims.

Transitus ad Disputationem X: De Revelatione et Cognitione Dei

The nova lingua reveals that theological speech is grounded in divine causality. The Word assumes human language; the Spirit authorizes its predicates; the finite becomes capable of bearing the infinite. Yet language, however elevated, does not alone confer understanding. To speak is not yet to know. To hear the Word is not yet to comprehend it.

If the nova lingua is possible through the Incarnation, the theological intellect must be rendered capable of receiving what this language conveys. Thus we are led to inquire into the nature of revelation as an act that not only discloses divine truth but also transforms the knower. The Spirit who gives felicity to language must also give light to the intellect. We now turn to Disputatio X:  De Revelatione et Cognitione Dei.  

Model-Theoretic Considerations for Theological Semantics

I

I have for many years been convinced that the theological enterprise cannot survive in our age without affording to its language robust truth conditions.  Contemporary men and women presuppose what Jaegwon Kim once called Alexander's Dictum, that is, "to be is to have causal powers."  We don't live in the 19th century where ideas themselves are thought to have a kind of reality; we don' t live in a time in which the conceptuality of God can remain important for vast numbers of people. 

In our days, people are not generally searching to find some overarching concept or principle that grounds our rational thinking about life and existence, a notion that might somehow explain why human experience is given as it is, and accordingly, somehow ground the preciousness and value of that experience.  While Madonna once sung of a "material girl," we generally acknowledge that, even in our churches, the cultural primacy of the physical reigns.  The new atheism talks breathlessly of its discovery of a worldview without divine agency and causality -- as if such a view of things is in any way new.  There is an assumption of the causal closure of the physical among many unwashed in the complexities of the actual relations holding among experience, theory and truth, among those who simply believe that the theories of the natural and social sciences simply state the way things are.  

The idea is easy enough to grasp.  Consider this structure <{x | x is a natural event}, C>.  This is a structure consisting of the set of all natural events and a causal operator C relating members of this set of events to each other.  This structure can satisfy these two assertions:  1) For all x, there is some x (or other) that causes x, and 2) For all x, if x is caused, then it is caused by some x (or other).  What is precluded by this structure is that there is an x that can be caused by some event or agency that is outside the set {x | x is a natural event}, or that x causes some event or state of affairs outside the set {x | x is a natural event}.  Simply put, there are no non-physical events causing physical events, nor no physical events causing non-physical events.  

In addition to the causal closure of the physical assumed by many impressed with the results and progress of the natural and social sciences, it is also supposed, though not always as clearly, by the heralds of late nineteenth century radical criticism, that human beings are somehow alienated when they fail to come to terms with the physicality of their fate.  Feuerbach, Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche, all, in their own way, argued that the illusion of the traditional God connects with the fundamental alienation of men and women.  Marx, for instance, argued that human value and ideology is determined by underlying economic processes, and that the concept of God simply operates to block human beings from understanding the basic materiality of their existence.  The God concept sanctions prevailing ideology and functions to keep in place value ideologies grounded in the unequal distribution of economic materiality.  

Most people that continue to practice the Christian life believe that there is a God and that God is active in the world, i.e., they assume that "to be is to have causal powers" and that God has causal powers.  They speak about the divine design of the universe, and about the power of prayer, particularly prayers of petition.  They assume that there are things that have come about that would not have come about were there no God, and that there are events and processed that have not come about that would have come about were there no God.   

The structure they assume is perhaps this: <{x | x is an event}, g, C, D> where there is a set of natural events and there is God, and that there is a binary natural causal operator C linking natural events to other natural events, and a binary divine causal operator D, linking natural events to divine agency, e.g., 'Dgp' means God divinely produces event p, with p being a member of the set of all natural events.  

Metaphysics remains crucial in theology because claims about that beyond the physical are by nature metaphysical, and assuming God to be with causal powers means that something beyond the physical is bringing about something physical.  This is clearly a metaphysical claim. To afford to theological language robust truth conditions in an age that assumes that to be is to have causal powers means that theology must be self-consciously and boldly metaphysical.  There must be intellectual honesty here.  Either theological language is broadly expressive of the self, its experiences and existential orientations and possibilities, or it is a rule-governed customary discourse by and through which human communities function and operate in the world, or it is a type of discourse that non-subjectively donates possible ways of being, or perhaps it is realist in its motivations; it states what its utterers believe is the ultimate constitution of things.  

One needs to think through these issues very clearly.  What are either the truth or assertibility conditions of theological language if one eschews realism?  Are sentences in the language rightly assertible simply because my tribe (the theological tradition) has traditionally asserted them?  But clearly the assertibility condition cannot simply be 'x is properly assertible' if and only if x has been asserted by normative theologians of tradition T over time t.  Why? In order even to begin to evaluate that claim we must know the identity conditions of 'normative theologian' and 'tradition' and 'time'.   

Are the assertions of theology then either descriptions of the self -- its experience and existential orientations -- or are they expressions of the self?  Clearly, embracing the latter is to give up on truth,  for it entails that assertibility must be understood broadly in terms of a "boo hurrah" theory of theological language.  But the former alternative is not much better, for on its assumption the truth-makers of all theological language are not theological.  On this view, models satisfying a set of theological assertions are not theological models at all because the sets, functions and relations of the models deal with the human.  Since human dispositions, experiences, and orientations are operated upon by relations and functions, these functions and relations ultimately concern the human. The fact that such models can satisfy a class of theological statements, should give us pause about what it is we are doing when we provide theological models. 

But there is another alternative, for we might hold that theological language somehow operates to disclose truth, that language, the Word, in its wording grants world and our place within it must itself be given a theological model.  But it is to me unclear exactly how this model can be constructed coherently.  Models or structures concern domains with functions and relations drawn upon those domains. But what can be the domain of the creative Word?  Remember that revelation is not insight.  Insight concerns an intellectual grasp of that which is already present.  Revelation, on the other hand, is a daring grasp of what is not present, but which shows itself eschatologically.  There is so much that can be said here, but I cannot in this brief essay say it.  We must move to the central issue of the influence that model-theoretic arguments might have for one who in her theological semantics, is broadly speaking realist. 

II

While I could only sketch briefly in the last section my prima facie reservations with non-realist construals of theological language, I will assume in this section that the reader is sufficiently persuaded by what I have said to give theological realism a try.  Theological realism, simply put, is the view that God, and divine states of affairs generally, exist and have the particular contour they have apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language.   Theological realism is thus a species of external realism, the view the world consists of entities, properties, events, relations and states of affairs which, broadly speaking, exists independently of our human perceptual and conceptual processing, or, more to the point, apart from our epistemic structures and capabilities.   We might call this the independence thesis with regard to external realism. 

I am convinced with many others that external realism makes two other important claims as well.  The first is the correspondence thesis which claims that statements about the world are true if and only if they correspond in appropriate ways with how the world actually is. (Clarifying what 'correspondence' and 'appropriate' might mean here is notoriously difficult.)  The other thesis of external realism one can be called the Cartesian thesis which states that although our theories about the world might meet all theoretical and operational constraints of an ideal theory, we could still be wholly wrong in our theory.  Since the theory is made true (or false) by how the world is apart from us, it is always logically possible to be wrong about everything that we might say about it.  Satisfying all theoretical and operational constraints does not a theory true make.  Only the way the world is can make the theory true or false.  The external realist thus seems committed to all of these: the independence thesis, the correspondence thesis, and the Cartesian thesis.  

Hilary Putnam in his famous "Models and Reality" distinguishes among three positions in the philosophy of mathematics.  These positions deal with both truth and reference in mathematics, and are thus, for him and for us, relevant to considerations of truth and reference with respect to external realism generally.  These positions are: 

• Platonism which, according to Putnam, "posits nonnatural mental powers of directly 'grasping' the forms" (Models and Reality, p. 24). This notion of grasping is primitive and cannot be further explicated.  Those familiar with Husserl's description of phenomenological intentionality will understand this quickly.  
• Verificationalism replaces the classical Tarskian notion of truth with verificational processes or proof.  Mathematic assertions are not true in any deep sense, but they are assertible on the basis of other mathematical procedures. Verificationist proposals within the philosophy of science of the last century are connected to this. 
• Moderate Realism, for Putnam, "seeks to preserve the centrality of the classical notions of truth and reference without postulating nonnatural powers" (Ibid.).  The idea here is that mathematical assertions are true, but that their truth does not involve one in a deep process of grasping or understanding the structure of some Platonic heaven.  

Putnam believes that arguments built upon the "Skolem-Paradox" are germane to a moderate realist perspective within mathematics and the external realist perspective in metaphysics generally.  These arguments are known in the literature as "model theoretic" arguments, and they basically exploit the difference in model theory between what might be intended and what might be said.  If one is a non-naturalist when it comes to semantics -- that is, if one thinks that semantic objects, properties, relations and functions are natural objects and does not involve non-natural magic -- then one has a problem with reference, because many models can make true the very same class of sentences.  This means, that one cannot naturally fix reference, that is, what the sentences say is logically independent from what one might mean to say in their saying.  

Putnam draws conclusions from this that are quite far reaching.  For instance, he claims that metaphysical realism (external realism generally) in incoherent, and that 'brain in vat' or 'evil demon" (Descartes) scenarios cannot even be coherently stated.  Putnam throughout tries to show that, because of the problem of reference, one cannot even state the conditions necessary to formulate the brain-in-vat/evil demon hypothesis. In other words, the necessary conditions for the possibility of posing the brain-in-vat scenario cannot obtain because a certain type of reference must be had by the language in stating the scenario, and since this type of reference cannot be had, the scenario cannot be coherently stated.  In other words, while it might appear that we could be a brain in a vat, we really can't be one, for to be one demands that we can refer to being a brain in a vat, and this we cannot do.  

Putnam employs a bit of a technical branch of logic known as model theory and there are considerable arguments in the literature about the effectiveness of his employment of these resources.  There are arguments as to the number and effectiveness of distinct model-theoretic arguments that Putnam uses, and their ultimate effectiveness in attacking metaphysical realism. All of this, I will lay out at another time.  What is important for us, however, is this question: Why is any of this important for theology? 

III

I believe that theological language must be given a realist construal if we are to retain it.  Long ago, I argued that the arguments for the elimination of theological language are strong, and that only a realist interpretation of theological language will likely stem the collapse of such language into reduction and ultimate elimination.  I can't rehearse that here, but know that I believe that theological realism best coheres with the principle that to be is to have causal powers. 

Notice now that if we afford to theological language realist truth conditions we seem to be interpreting it in ways that best connect to the classical Christian tradition.  Believers throughout the centuries assumed that there is a God, that one could refer to God, and that once could talk meaningfully about God's relationship with His universe, both in terms of creation and redemption.  It is extremely difficult, I think, to argue that the horizon of the Reformation is one in which one of the three following is not presupposed: theological realism, semantic realism, and theophysical causation.  The Reformers thought that God exists apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language, that our language about God is true or false apart from the ways in which we verify or come to hold it true or false, and that God is in principle capable of causal relations with nature and the historical realities of nature.  

So on the assumption of external realism when it comes to theology, what are the repercussions of model-theoretic arguments on theological semantics?  

At this point we must appreciate how important reference is for theological language.  We are using theological words and phrases, and if we must ultimately give a realist construal to theological language then reference turns out to be the key to theological semantics generally.  'God is in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself' is true only if 'God' refers, 'Christ' refers, 'world' refers, and the relation of 'reconciling' can be drawn between the world and Christ.  But now the question, if reference is so important, why cannot it be something intended?  Why can we not simply say that intentionality fixes reference and that we don't need to worry about model-theoretic considerations at all?   Remember, Putnam had said that model-theoretic arguments really apply to the moderate realist in mathematics and the metaphysical realist; they are not aimed at one who holds that intentionality can be fixed nonnaturally by something like Husserl's "ego rays."  If one wants to hold intentionality as a nonexplicatable primitive, then can't we simply say that our intentionality determines reference in the theological order, as well as the mathematical and metaphysical orders? 

Here is the problem with this response.  While one might hold that one can intend cherries or trees by nonnaturally fixing one's gaze upon them, one cannot seem easily to do that when it comes to God or the inner workings of the Trinity.  After all, "nobody has ever seen God."  How can one intend that which has no clear content?  The theological tradition knew the apophatic nature of God-talk.  We can never be given the proper content to think God, because the content of our thoughts pertain to the finite order and God is infinite. Our thoughts of God do not thus determine our reference to God; our intentionality cannot issue in reference, because we cannot be given that by virtue of which reference is determined. Instead of intentionality granting an intensionality that determines reference, our theological language -- the language of the tradition -- speaks about God and God's relationship to His creation.  The ways of talking about God are very important indeed!  God's name is that by virtue of which reference is established, and maybe for Christians -- or perhaps all the monotheistic religions of the west -- this happened at the burning bush.  (Recall here Kripke's "initial baptism" of the tretragrammaton at the burning bush in Exodus.) 

It is important here to grasp what is at stake. If intentionality cannot fix reference to the divine, and if we don't want to give up truth to some verificationist-inspired theological position -- that is to say, if we want to be realists in theology -- then we seem to find ourselves in theology with no other option than to have to take the model-theoretic arguments seriously with regard to theological realism.  This means that not only are model-theoretic arguments relevant to theology, they might be crucial to its very future.  If model-theoretic arguments yield a knock-out blow to external realism, of which theological realism is a species, and if realism is essential in providing a defendable semantics for theology, then model-theoretic arguments may pose a much deeper threat to theological discourse than we previously might have thought. 

So what is at stake with respect to model-theoretic consideration in theological semantics?  I think it likely that the future of theology itself might be at stake. But consideration of this must await another time.  It is upon that which I am toiling a new manuscript.  

Documents Pertaining to the Founding of the Institute of Lutheran Theology: A Lutheran House of Studies

There was once an organization called the Fellowship of Confessional Lutherans (FOCL), and they had a publication which I recall was called FOCL News. I penned this article on the new "Lutheran House of Studies" for that publication in order to get the word out. I believe it was written and published sometime in the summer of or fall of 2006.  You can see that I was interested from the beginning in establishing a theological ethos at ILT, and wanted to address this question: Given the different interpretations of subsequent traditions of foundational documents, what can ILT do to vouchsafe some normative approach to interpreting those documents? Theological realism, semantic realism, and the possibility of theophysical causation are advanced as possible "grammars" by which foundational documents could be read. 

__________

A Lutheran House of Studies

Dennis Bielfeldt, Ph. D. 

WordAlone earnestly desires to establish a new confessional Lutheran theological house of studies.  But some ask, “Why?  Why does Lutheranism need another place trying to train pastors confessionally?  What is so wrong with what we have?  While things aren’t perfect, perhaps, they aren’t that bad either.  Why does WordAlone think it can establish an institution more confessional than what has already been planted in ELCA, LCMS or WELS soil?  Why does it believe that the effort and expense will bear good fruit?”

These are important questions, of course, and it seems that the so-called “Director of the WordAlone Lutheran theological house of studies” (my official title these days) should have ready answers to them.  When the WordAlone Convention in May adopted a plan for implementation of the house of studies, it voted on a report in which I spoke of several challenges facing seminary education within the ELCA.  At that time, I saw six major issues:  

• an economic challenge
• a sociological challenge
• a leadership challenge
• a theological challenge
• an authority challenge
• a rights challenge

I still believe that these identify the major difficulties facing theological education within the ELCA, and I recommend that FOCL readers examine the Report and form their own opinions as to its accuracy. This report, I believe, gives the rationale for why another Lutheran institution is necessary for the training of future pastors and teachers.    

If this list is accurate, however, and is successfully answers questions of why we need a confessional House of Studies now within the ELCA context, it does not address the further question of the general theological contour of that house of studies.  Given that the house of studies is “confessional,” what does “being confessional” mean for its curriculum and teaching?   Even more profoundly, what does “being confessional” mean within Lutheranism generally in our time?  

The easy answer to the question of what “being confessional” means is this: For an educational institution to be confessional is for it to privilege the historic confessions of its tradition such that they become foundational (and normative) for the piety, teaching and research of the institution.  

Unfortunately, this definition is inadequate.  Because our postmodern times allow (and often encourage) multiple readings of texts, two or more institutions grounded on the same confessional texts might have quite different theological trajectories.  All the ELCA seminaries can make a claim to privilege Scripture and the Lutheran confessional writings, yet it is obvious that some have departed more significantly from traditional Lutheran theological affirmations than have others.  Many celebrate this departure from the tradition as a departure entailed by the radicality of God’s love for us in Christ.  (This is clearly true with regard to the sexuality/homsexuality debate raging within the ELCA.)  

So how can this situation be fixed?  Indeed, how might one fix the interpretations of the Confessions so that they might not drift?  What kind of interpretation of Scripture can block interpretations attempting to say that Scripture itself says nothing about the sinfulness of homosexuality?  What kind of interpretation of the Confessions and the confessional tradition can block interpretations saying that the Reformers “earnestly desired” to retain Bishops in historical succession with Rome, and thus that Lutherans are mandated by their own confessions to seek visible, ecclesial unity with Rome? 

In the absence of a present normative consensus as to what the texts of the Confessions mean, it becomes important to make clear from the beginning that it is not the text itself that grounds a tradition, but rather a particular interpretation of the text.  A particular reading of the text, established in part by its situational context, functions normatively and determines, at least partially, the character of any educational institution regarding that text as foundational. 

My motivation in offering the WordAlone “fundamentals” is to try to determine if there is sufficient theological clarity in the WordAlone movement to establish normatively a range of interpretations of the Lutheran confessional documents.   Given that Lutherans holding to Scriptures and Confessions believe many different things about what Scriptures and Confessions mean and presuppose, is there sufficient clarity within WordAlone to be able to determine for these documents a range of appropriate meanings?  What “take” on Scripture and Confessions has seemed to be operating in the WordAlone movement since its inception, a “take” that might be worked up into a list of central theological affirmations or assumptions? 

My own attempt at articulating these affirmations of WordAlone appear on the WordAlone website, but I include them also below.  I believe that these assertions function as the differentia which give WordAlone its identity as a species within Lutheranism.      

• Theological statements have truth-conditions
• God is real, that is, God exists out and beyond human awareness, perception, conception and language
• God is causally related to the universe
• All temporal structures, institutions and conceptual frameworks are historically-conditioned      Nothing finite is infinite
• The true church is not visible, but remains hidden
• The Holy Spirit works monergistically, not synergistically, upon sinners effecting saving faith

While all seven statements are important, the first four are especially significant in our theological context and thus I have developed them quite extensively in a longer article that I hope to have published soon. I have space here only to touch upon the first four. 

The first assertion makes the semantic claim that what makes a theological statement true is some extra-subjective reality that is relatable to the subject.  This statement clearly denies that theological language could merely refer to the self, or to the attitudes, values and orientations of a community.  In addition, it claims that theological statements must be more than simple rules by which a community organizes its religious life together.   Theological statements function as rules, I believe, only if the community believes them true, only if it thinks these statements state what is, in fact, the case.   

The second and third assertions are ontological.  They claim that there is some reality to God that is not merely reducible to human experience.  Over and against the dominant theological tradition of the last 200 years, the third claim is that God is causally connected to the universe, that there are at least some physical events that would not have obtained had God not causally-influenced them to do so.  These two assertions are important because they bring God out of the “causal isolation” presupposed in the development of much Lutheran theology since the time of Kant in 1781.  For Kant, God could not be a substance causally-related to the universe, but was instead an “ideal of pure reason.”    

Finally, assertion four has epistemological consequences.  All objects of knowledge, and all acts or knowing, are denizens of time and are thereby limited by other events within time.  Thus, there can be no knowledge of any such objects that are not affected by history.  Every act of knowing is historically-conditioned.  We have no immediate knowledge of things as they are in themselves, no “bird’s eye view” from which to gaze out on things and know them absolutely.  This is so for all acts of knowing, even when it is the divine that is known.  This affirmation clearly admits that God is hidden, but does not thereby make a diminished ontological claim about God simply because we cannot know God as He is apart from Christ.   

So how is it that the proposed house of studies might successfully establish a normative standpoint on the Confessions such that they become the foundational documents which they must be if they are to govern the subsequent educational trajectory of the institution?  How does the WordAlone House of Studies guarantee that it will not become just another expression of a liberal Protestant ethos in North America?

The simple answer is this:  If the WordAlone Network can agree on some rather key theological issues, it can establish its house of studies upon on the ground of this consensus.  Without some normative theological underpinning, a WordAlone house of studies will drift and shift according to the prevailing theological winds of the day.  Let us examine how establishing a normative theological center might affect the house of studies.    

Lutherans within and outside the WordAlone Network will likely agree that God confronts us in Law and Gospel, and that the address of the Gospel has salvific significance for its auditors.  Lutherans within and outside WordAlone will emphasize the performative nature of first-order statements - - statements referring to the primary objects of theology - - bespeaking God’s grace in and despite human sinfulness.   But clearly a majority of folks within the ELCA see no tension between this emphasis and the practice of a mandated historic episcopate.  Thus, there is a disconnect between a lively Law/Gospel application of Scripture and “issues of church organization” like the acceptance of the historic episcopate.  The problem is a very deep one, and it goes to the very heart of some rather profound theological issues.  

I believe that a presupposition of much ELCA thinking is that second-order theological language - - statements dealing with the relationship of theological objects and the first-order sentences bespeaking them - - does not literally have truth-conditions (that is, that its statements are not literally true or false).  While all can agree on the abundance of God’s grace in the linguistic encounter in sermon and text, many will assume that further statements about God are unwarranted and even misleading.  For instance, why would one ever want to say that ‘God exists apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language’ or that ‘God is causally-related to the universe’?  Why would one need to say these things, if the reality of God’s grace is communicated through first-order language?   For many liberal Protestants, the problems begin when one begins to speak about God.  If this is true, why would one want to affirm statements about God?  

The response to this is two-fold: 1) We need second-order language about God to state what it is we actually believe, and to ground what it is we shall teach about God; and 2) What it is we actually believe about God does influence the hearer’s appropriation of the words of Law and Gospel.  

In regard to the second response, we must point out that the logic of being forgiven entails that there is one to forgive.  In like manner, the logic of living under divine wrath requires that there is a God who is righteously angry. While one might have an experience of being forgiven without there being God, or might have an experience of being under divine wrath without God, one simply cannot be forgiven by God or truly live under divine wrath unless there is a God.  Moreover, the contour of the experience of wrath and forgiveness is related to whether or not there is One whose wrath is kindled, and who nonetheless graciously and mercifully forgives.  What human beings believe about God dialectically links to howGod confronts us in Law and Gospel.  For instance, if John doesn’t believe God has a personal agency, then the experience of grace John has hearing the Gospel will surely be different than what he would have had were he to have held that God was a personal God.         

As another example of this, take the words of Scripture ‘fear not!’  In a particular situation, these words spoken can be words of Gospel and grace.  They certainly were so for people like Luther who understood the gift of God’s grace and forgiveness over and against a backdrop of divine wrath.  Luther and the reformers actually thought that God existed outside of them, and that this God could (and did) adopt particular attitudes about them.  Luther thought that God in his hiddenness was so awe-full, that he counseled others to keep their eyes riveted on the Christ.  The Words of Gospel promise are so sweet because the human condition before the inscrutable will of the hidden God is so dire.  

For Luther, the necessary condition for being a hidden God with inscrutable will that terrifies man and woman outside of Christ is that God is a real being having causal relations within the universe.  God is no mere idea of reason, no abstract thought about the unity or mystery of all things.  God is a living reality that is a threat to sinners - - and all of us are sinners.  It seems, that even though God is hidden, some reflection upon, or encounter with, God’s being is necessary if one is going to understand the situation as Luther did.  It should come as no shock that the confessional documents read in quite a different way to those who believe that God has independent existence outside the self.  At that point, all thinking about the gift of language stops and we are thrust back into the primal experience of awaiting a word of Gospel from God- - not because it is a word, but because it comes from God.  

Much more could be said about these things, but the point is clear.  If WordAlone can arrive at some consensus of theological opinion, then there is a foundation upon which to ground a Scripturally-engaged, and confessionally-grounded Lutheran theological house of studies.  If WordAlone is unable to define clearly what it is to be both Scripturally-engaged and confessionally-grounded, then its house of studies shall likely not prosper, and the critics who claim it ill-advised and wasteful to have attempted its establishment will themselves perhaps be vindicated.  As with most human endeavors, it is extremely important to start correctly.