Clarity with Respect to Realism

The issue of realism seems to me to be at the center of the entire question of theology. Traditionally, of course, realism was unproblematically presupposed in theology - - just as it was rather unproblematically presupposed in philosophy generally. But this is no longer the case.

In getting at the issue of realism we need, of course, to clear up a possible confusion. Theology students are often introduced to the medieval question of realism and nominalism as it developed out of the options on universals put forward by Boethius. To be a realist was to assert that universals like 'whiteness' had being either apart from their instantiations in white things (the platonic view), or had being not fully accounted for by their instantiation in white things, but not yet having being apart from their instantiations (the Aristotelian view). To be an extreme realist like William of Chaupeaux was to hold a robust Platonic view; to be a moderate realist like Thomas was to hold an Aristotelian view. To be an extreme nominalist like Roscelin was to hold that general terms did not refer to universals, but simply were different names for the particulars of which they might be predicated. For a nominalist like Ockham, all that exists are particular entities having particular qualities. Realism was thought very important by many because if 'sin' and 'human nature' referred to universals, then Christ's assumption of human nature and his conquering of sin was an assumption of the same human nature that medieval man and women possessed and a conquering of the same sinful nature that they inherited. These issues are still potentially interesting in theology, but few talk of them today. There are, after all, more fundamental issues at state for contemporary man and woman. In an age where the existence of God is problematic at best, more of the hard theology work must be directed to that problematic.

In our age the conflict is not between realism and nominalism, but rather between realism and nonrealism and/or antirealism. I take the thesis of realism to be the assertion that for some putative class of entities T, all x in T exists apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language. Nonrealism with respect to T would claim that it is not the case that for all x in T, x exists apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language. Antirealism with respect to T declares that for all x in T, x does not exist apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language. The question then is this: Can we be realists with regard to class T, the set of putative theological entities and their qualities? Or perhaps more to the point, can we be a realist with respect to the putative entity God? Is God real in that God has existence apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language? Would God exist having basically the properties he is said to have apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language?

But now the question pertains to the locution 'what He is said to have'. What could we even mean by the divine predicates? To say that God is omnibenevolent is one thing, but to try to specify that set of properties necessary and sufficient for omnibenevolence is quite another. Accordingly, one could be a theological realist without being a metaphysical realist. One could deny that there is some set of self-identifying properties comprising God that exists apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language, and still hold that there is some being to God that in confrontation with human cognitive equipment makes it be the case that God has the property of omnibenevolence, or omnipotence, or any other of the divine properties. Hilary Putnam's internal realism is still a realism, but we are now moving more towards nonrealism: While God would still exist apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language, God only has those properties that identify Him in all possible worlds if there is human awareness, perception, conception and language. Though God exists, what God is in God's own self cannot be known or even thought.

I believe that the question of theological realism is very important because I think that if there is no being to God apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language, then clearly to the degree that we talk about God we are talking about a projection of the self. Just as there is no beauty in itself apart from human sentiment, so there is no God in Himself apart from human sentiment. While we might talk about the quasi-reality of God - - the "as if" character of God's existence - - clearly there is no divine realm if there are no human beings. Just as human consciousness is the necessary condition for beauty, so too is it the necessary condition for the divine. In my opinion, unless we can finally claim the reality of God, there is no reason to continue to talk about God in more than a historical way. Clearly, the God-thought has been a productive and heady thought to think, but at the end of the day, a thought is not a thing. Laypeople know implicitly that a God that has only ideal reality is not a God that shall have much staying power. There simply is no need to go to church and do the kinds of sacrificial things Christians used to do if it is the case that God does not exist apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language.

This brings us to another kind of realism, that which concerns our language about God. The problem with the contemporary scene is not just that we are confused about whether or not God has been apart from us, the problem runs much deeper and concerns whether or not language about God has any truth-conditions whatsoever anymore. Are our statements about God capable of really being true or false? Now we are dealing with the distinction between semantic realism and irrealism, a distinction nicely given in the following passage from Michael Dummett, himself no friend of realism:

“Realism I characterize as the belief that the statements of the disputed class possess an objective truth-value, independently of our means of knowing it: they are true or false in virtue of a reality existing independently of us. The anti-realist opposes to this the view that statements of the disputed class are to be understood only by reference to the sort of thing which we count as evidence for a statement of that class . . . The dispute thus concerns the notion of truth appropriate for statements of the disputed class; and this means that it is a dispute concerning the kind of meaning which these statements have” (Dummett, “Realism,” p. 146, reprinted in TRUTH AND OTHER ENIGMAS).

The class of theological statements is, of course, “the disputed class” in question. Of concern for any realist is how to answer the objections put forward in the “acquisition argument” and the “manifestation argument.” The first asks how we can know that a statement is true or false if truth or falsity is contingent upon states of affairs obtaining that are in principle undetectable. The second concerns the question of meaning. If a statements meaning is tied to the possession of states of affairs that we cannot detect, then how can we really ever know what a statement means? How can we know what ‘God the Father has begotten the Son eternally” means when we have no access even in principle to what those states of affairs which would make the statement true?

For theological language particularly the question of the possibility of evidence-transcendent truth conditions arises very acutely. Much theological language deals directly with the question of putative states of affairs that are incapable of detection by human perceptual equipment. Because of the challenge of making sense of evidence-transcendent truth conditions, much theology has simply given up the assertion of these putative states of affairs and have accepted either projectivist or quasi-realist solutions to the problem. Accordingly, theological language is either a projection of human emotion, wish, or hope upon the universe, or that the class of theological statements behaves like realist statements because of some consistent method by which human projections are made. The point is this: Without human beings there would be no states of affairs about God and thus no truth.

Semantic realism must deny all of these facile solutions to the thorny problem of theological language. Whether the semantic realist theory can be satisfactorily worked out is really secondary at this point to seeing deeply the problem. There is, however, much in the literature that would give semantic realists courage in the face of the acquisition and manifestation challenges.

Towards a Lutheran Theological Semantics III

Imagine two theories T1 and T2 indiscernible with respect to their syntax. To give an interpretation to this syntax is to define an ordered pair <I, n> such that I specifies a domain D of entities named by the individual constants of the theory, some Fx specifies a subset of D, and Fx . . . k specifies a k-ary Cartesian product in D. Let n now designate a naming function from names in the language to D, monadic predicates to subsets of D, and k-ary predicates to k-tuples in D. The function thus assigns for each and every nonlogical symbol an extension in D. What we are doing here is assigning a semantics to our language. Obviously, if both T1 and Ts use the same >, they will mean the same thing. Two theories indiscernible with respect to syntax and having the same interpretation have the same model. We say that M models a theory T if and only if all the sentences of the theory are true given the projection of the language onto the model. Obviously, if M models T1, and T1 and T2 have the same interpretation and mapping function n, then M shall model T2 as well.

Within the practice of science, the syntax of theories change as a function of new empircal data and concomittant theory adjustment. In science generally, the method of projection of the syntax of the theory upon a model is for the most part invariant, and it is this invariancy that makes possible scientific progress generally. Words like 'electron', 'boson', and 'p orbital' retain their interpretation (reference) across different theories generally. (We might say that in a situation of revolutionary change in paradigm, new interpretations and naming functions might arise.)

However, within the practice of theology, things are far different. Scripture and theological tradition has worked to produce a rather loose 'theological theory' whose syntax does not in general change. But as times change, the syntax of this theological theory takes on a new interpretation. Imagine T1 being classical christological formutions at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and T2 be the same classical christological formulations said by Paul Tillich in 1957. Here it is obvious that while the syntax of T1 and T2 remains the same, there is a change of the mode of projection of the syntax upon its model. Because T1 and T2 are both regarded as true, there are distinct models M1 and M2 that model the same syntax. The same syntax is modeled both by M1 and M2, or alternatively, M1 and M2 both model the same theory T1. (Remember that T1 = T2 syntactically.) The situation now is that we have two distinct models for the same syntax, two distinct ways that the world might be ordered that would make possible the truth of T1 = T2.

The question is this: What is the theological theory T1 and is it different then from T2 after all? The answer is, of course, that we do not regard scientific theory as mere syntax, but as syntax + an interpretation. Similarly, I aver, we ought not to regard theological theory as mere syntax but syntax + an interpretation. How can it be then that many today in theology, particularly in ecumenical theology, think that syntax alone does a theology make? How can it be that the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification can claim agreement on 'justification' because the syntax of the language is similar between Lutherans and Rome?

We should remember that Luther said he was not interested in agreement in words (verbis) but in things (in rebus). Although Luther was not using the language, he was, of course, interested in the disparate models the same theological syntax could sustain. When one thinks about it, this is how it has always been in theology. Was this not precisely what happened after Ephesus (431) that two sides used the same words while allowing different interpretations of the same language?

A theology that has lost interest in its interpretation and naming function, is a theology that has lost interest in truth, because only with the assignment of models is truth put in play. While sytax deals with form and structure, semantics deals with truth and meaning. Theology has always been about the latter. It is a mark of the recent theological poverty of our time that we could have been so bewitched for so long, and have not even noticed.

Towards a Lutheran Theological Semantics II

Being realist with regard to a class of theological statements does not mean one has to commit to metaphysical realism, to a claim that there are self-identifying theological objects, properties, relations, events or states of affairs that obtain apart from human awareness, conceptualization and language. One might allow some ontological contribution on the part of the subject, and still claim that the principle of bivalence holds for theological assertions, that these assertions are either true or false (but not both), and that their truth-conditions are evidence transcendent, i.e., that although, in principle, adequate evidence cannot be found for the truth of statements like 'God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself', such statements are true or false solely on the basis of whether the conditions do in fact obtain.

But the question immediately arises, can Lutheran theology be realist in this sense? Is not Lutheran theology committed to a bundle of paradoxes that become problematic if theological statements are interpreted in a realist way? Can a Lutheran who wants to assert that humans are justified and sinful simultaneously, that the bread really is bread but is the body at the same time, that God is both love and wrath simultaneiously honestly embrace semantic realism. If theological statements are either true or false, then A has a definite truth value (true or false), and if ~A is simultaneously asserted, then A & ~A hold simultaneously, and from a contradiction anything follows whatsover. So is not semantic realism incompatible with Lutheran theological assertion? Must not the assertions of theology be given a different analysis, perhaps as projetions of human emotion, disposition, or existential orientation? If Lutheran theology is commited to paradoxical claims, must it not reject semantic realism, for to accept it is itself incompatible with the assertion of those paradoxical claims?

This question goes to the heart of the problem. If there are paradoxes that must be asserted, and such paradoxes are vicious in and for any ontic divine domain, then to assert those paradoxes must entail that the assertions are not really assertions about an ontic divine domain; they are expressions of, or assertions about, that region of being for which the law of excluded middle is relaxed: human being. Human being is a paradoxical reality, it seems, because it is a being, who in its being has its be-ing at issue, a be-ing where both the projective possibilities of the future, and the remembered facticities of the past are simultaneously consistutive of its present. If I am both who I am (because of who I was), and who I am (because of who I might be) then I am both who I am and who I might be. Since I might be different than I was, then I am both A & ~A simultaneously. From the fact that my present is constituted by both my past and future, I am both who I am (I was) and who I am not (who I might be who is not who I was). The fact that I am both simultaneously gives the Lutheran hope, it seems, to think the simul eschatologically. I really am sinful because I have always been so. At the same time, I am justified because the possibility of being no longer sinful is my possibilty given the life, death and resurrection of the Christ. I am thus both who I am (sinful) and who I am not (sinless on account of Christ) at the same time. Similar moves must be made for the other Lutheran paradoxes; language about objective paradoxes must be traced back to the existentiality of the subject, to the being of that being who lives simultaneously as thrown pro-ject. It is no small wonder why Lutheran theology should find solace in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger. It seems, to paraphrase Tillich, that existentialism really is the good luck of Lutheran theology.

But much is lost with this approach. To justify paradox in theology by tracing the paradoxes back to the subject makes theological assertions essentially autobiographical. Talking about God cannot, as Barth said, be achieved by talking about ourselves in a loud voice. Giving a semantic realist construal to theological statements is to assert again what Luther and the Reformers presupposed: that God existed independently of us, and that statements about God are true or false if the truth-conditions of those statements are met. 'God is in Christ reconciling the world to Himself' if and only if God is in Christ reconciling the world to Himself'. The meaning of the statement is given by its truth-conditions, by specifying those things that must be so if the statement is true. So how can Lutheran theology embrace seeming paradox and still accept semantic realism? The answer to this question, I believe, drives Lutheran theology back into its Catholic origins. Lutheran theology did not spring forth from Catholicism as a separate theological school with its fundamental terms and statements logically disconnected from, or (worse yet) incommensurable with, the fundamental terms and statements of late medieval scholasticism. Lutheran theology is Catholic theology with a few twists. It emerged and grew in the waters of a late medieval scholasticism that was nominalist in its ontology and realist in its semantics. But that the Lutherans could argue that a justified person can remain sinful suggested that something quite ontologically different was at work in Lutheran theological thinking than had been thought before. Coming to an honest appraisal of this difference can help us, I think, in our quest for answering the question: How is a Lutheran realist semantics possible?

Towards a Lutheran Theological Semantics I

While syntax deals with the form and structure of a language, semantics deals with its meaning and truth. When considering the general question of the semantics of a language, one must get clear on the meaning of the terms of that language, and the meaning and truth of sentences comprised of those terms. Terms having meaning apart from other linguistic units were called by the medievals categorematic terms. Terms not possessing meaning on their own (e.g, 'is', 'of') were called syncategorematic terms. In establishing the semantics of a language, one has to specify the meaning of a class of primative terms, and then show how the meaning of those terms contribute to the meaning of sentences in which those terms are ingredient.

In ascribing a semantics to theological sentences, one routinely examines their truth-conditions. The truth-conditions of a statement are those conditions which must obtain if the statement is to be true. For instance, the truth conditions of 'the cat is on the map' are those conditions which must obtain if 'the cat is on the mat' is true. These conditions simply are the state of affairs of there being a cat, a mat, and the relation of the cat being on the mat. Simply put, 'the cat is on the mat' is true if and only if the cat is on the mat.

Now in considering these truth-conditions, the question arises as whether or not one can specify evidence transcending truth-conditions. While it is in principle possible to have a perceptual causal connection to cats sitting on mats such that one can truly know when or if the requisite conditions are fulfilled such that 'the cat is on the mat' is true, this is not so with regard to most theological statements. What causal connection can one have to states of affairs like 'there are three distinct persons united in one divine being or essence'? How could one ever be said to know this is the case? Those who for this reason reject the possibility of evidence transcending truth-conditions are antirealist with respect particular classes of statements. While language like 'there are three distinct persons in one divine being or essence' are perhaps warrantably assertible, they have no truth-conditions, for the condition for the possibility of truth-conditions cannot be met. To accept the possibilty of evidence transcending truth-conditions for a class of statements is to be realist with regard to that class of statements. The question is this: Should Lutherans accept a realist construal for their theological language? Over the last 200 years Lutherans have progressively become less and less sanguine that theological language has truth-conditions, and that is thus can be given a realist construal.

Towards Theological Sanity

Ever since the time of Kant, theologians having been playing a certain kind of game. It has been, by all accounts, a pretty successful game. Theologians have taught pastors this game, and these pastors have in turn preached sermons to millions of folks while presupposing it. What the folks in the pews did not know is something rather basic to traditional theology. These folks did not know that their pastors were no longer presupposing semantic realism in their use of theological language; they did not know that that their pastors either did not hold, or had never thought seriously about, this rather commonsense view: Theological statements 1) conform to the principle of bivalence - - the statements are either true or false - - and 2) they are potentially recognition-transcendent, that is, they have evidence-transcendent truth conditions.

Kant had famously taught that knowledge of God is impossible, because knowledge depends upon applying the categories of the understanding to the manifold of sense perception. He claimed, in fact, that the two crucially important categories of substance and causality could only properly apply to the manifold of sense perception; they could not be so applied to that which lies beyond the bounds of possible sense experience, e.g., they could not be applied to God. But if the categories of substance and causality could not be applied to God, what is God? If God is not an entity causally related to other entities, what is God?

The theological tradition of the nineteenth century was anxious to explore various post-Kantian theological options. If God is not a real entity, then what can be said of Him? Schleiermacher labored to show that God was properly conceived to be the "whence" of the feeling of absolute dependence. God is not a real being, but that towards which a profound feeling in human beings flows. Moreover, God is not causally connected to anything else; He cannot be so connected even in principle because the category of cause only relates objects which are themselves syntheses of sense perception. Although Schleiermacher uses causal language in talking about God, he clearly is not supposing that there exists some being having divine powers, a being who has the causal power to change the distribution of natural properties in the universe.

Many later thinkers followed either Schleiermacher or Hegel in thinking about God. While Schleiermacher thought that God was the whence of the feeling of absolute dependence, Hegel thought the reflexivity of human thought itself was a manifestation of divine self-conciousness. The upstart of all of this talk about God was that a special theological way of thinking about God sprung up among theologians. This way of thinking supposes what semantic realism denies, that theological statements are either true or false, and that their truth of falsity depends upon how the world is. Instead of semantic realism, the late nineteenth century and twentieth century often assumed that theological language was neither true nor false, and that the statements of theology have no objective truth-conditions. This is to say, they assumed that it makes no sense to talk about mind-independent states of affairs making true (or false) theological statements if these states of affairs were in principle not able to be encountered. The traditional statements of theology thus acquired a new interpretation, a new semantics allowed the syntax of the statement to remain the same, even if the statement's meaning changed. God was understood as noncausally-relatable to the universe, even as the terms 'create', 'redeem' and 'sanctify' were predicated of Him. The problem was to give an account of creation, redemption and sanctification that did not presuppose the category of causality.

For a whole host of reasons, the general post-Kantian attempt to retain theological language must be seen as a dead end. Some of the problem is simply that human beings in the early twenty-first century are looking for something far more causally-robust in God than their late nineteenth century counterparts. How can a divine entity be germane to human existence if that entity cannot affect human beings, nor be affected by them? How is grace possible if it is in principle impossible to state that God can cause anything? Clearly, God cannot really be at work through Christ to reconcile the world unto Himself.

It is time to return to theological sanity and adopt the basic view that our language about God is true or false dependent upon the way that the divine is structured and acts. While we may have no epistemic access to the being of God, and can thus not provide proper evidence for accepting or asserting some theological proposition as true, it does not follow that there is no way that the divine already is, an ontological way that makes our language about God true even if we don't know that it is! It is time to quit playing the two century old game, and replace it again by one much more ancient - - and successful.

What is needed is a return to theological sanity. I shall be arguing that theological language is ultimately incoherent and marginalized if it does not presuppose semantic realism. We shall be examining this thesis in future posts.

The Power of Words

lI am always am disquieted when I hear theologians talk confidently about the "power" of the Biblical word and then go on to claim that Biblical language is not referential, but rather performative. The reason for my disquiet is simply that such an understanding of language does not distinguish well between the performance itself, and the context in which that performance must perform.

Think about Julie saying to Bob, "I love you." This certainly can be said in a number of different instances. But to really empower Bob, the hearer of the word, there must be some sense in which Julie's remarks aptly display what psychological states she is in. If Julie tells Bob that she loves him, it is all-important to Bob that there is a Julie and she actually possesses the property of having love towards Bob. It is highly unlikely for Bob to be empowered by the words, 'I love you', when there is no Julie possessing an attitude of love toward Bob. There must be some basis upon which the locution empowers. It just does not make sense for human beings that performative utterances nakedly empower. A computer program spitting out 'I love you' fails to empower because we do not believe the program is an agent that could possess the relevant propositional attitudes that would make the locution even relevant.

So how can it be that so many theologians want to talk about the powerful effect of words without supposing that those words refer? The answer is quite simple. If one begins with the presupposition that God cannot be an entity causally involved in the life of the universe, then one's semantics must be adjusted accordingly. Words cannot refer because there is nothing to which those words can refer. What they can do is empower; they can free us; they can heal us; they can give us life; they can open up for us new possibilites. The theological trajectory that assumes a power in the words without a reference is a trajectory that allows for very good preaching, and a very good bedside manner.

The problem, of course, is that one cannot come clean on one's semantics to those with whom one speaks. The problem is that the man and woman in the pew are likely being empowered by the words only because they are assuming a referential, and not donational, semantics. One must have a high degree of existential sophistication, I suppose, to be empowred by a naked 'I love you' from a Julie who is not an agent and cannot have any propositional states. It may not be impossible to find some Bob so empowered, but his kind are clearly not found in abundance. In a parallel fashion, I suppose it would take a high level of theological sophistication to be empowered by 'You are saved by grace because of Christ's love,' in the absence of there being any God with a propositional attitude of wrath from whom to be saved. It is a rare bird whose existential anxieties are quelled by 'God loves you' who nonetheless believes that God is not an agent that can in principle possess a propositional attitude, or even an intent towards human beings.

Is it not time that we think deeply about these presuppositions in theology that allow us to use the language of a sacred canopy long after we have come of age to the fact that the skies are forever black? Maybe it is time to either eliminate the discourse or give it robust truth-conditions. Maybe the time is long overdo that we take God-talk very seriously.

The Authority of Scripture

Many people are concerned about the problem of the authority of scripture. But how can the Bible have such authority when seeming textual authority has been undermined by various methods that penetrate beyond the text and claim to recover deeper meaning? Moreover, how is scriptural authority possible when the homogeneity of hermeneutical method and stance has been broken?

In the early Christian tradition monks slavishly labored to copy perfectly Holy Scripture so as to preserve its syntax. Not always knowledgable about the truth and meaning of the text, these scribes were interested in preserving the text's form and structure. Developing normative canons for syntactic probity, it was relatively easy to diagnose deviant syntactic trajectories. Authority could be defined structurally in terms of proper and improper strings.

But the authority of syntax has never been as important in Christianity as semantic authority. What the text means is what is important, and for many this textual meaning is thought to be as objective as the syntax which mediates and carries this meaning. Identifying deviant semantic trajectories is thus a task of reporting the willful waywardness of deviant interpreters. What the Bible says is clear, it is thought; what is at issue is the interpretation of what it says.

But we postmoderns are not comfortable asserting an objective or normative semantic configuration tied intrinsically to the text. There is no intrisicality to semantics, we think. The idea that semantics supervenes on syntax - - any two worlds indiscernible with respect to their syntactic distributions are indiscernible with respect to their semantic distributions - - is problematic. Any supervenience of semantics upon syntax must presuppose an extrisnsicality of the former not needed for the latter. But when such semantic extrinsicality is admitted, then what becomes of textual authority? Does it finally not devolve to the relatum of textual extrinsicality, to the interpreter himself/herself? But if this is so, then is it not merely an instance of power? The text has a particular semantic normativity because there is a capriousness and arbitrariness of interpretation powerfully supported by the community. The text is given a particular normative semantic interpretation because of the power of the community to enforce its reading. Normativity of interpretation thus becomes a function of communal sanction.

All of this just points out the problem if Scriptural authority somehow gets conceived as a relationship of text to semantic interpretation, or text to that interpretation which is related to community enforcement. Clearly, scriptural authority must finally become merely a projection of a community's will to power. The authority of Scripture is reduced to the authority of the community to whom the text is authoratative. Those wanting to argue divine scriptural authority are marginalized because they do not know the true springs of that authority: human community.

If we are to make progress on the problem of Scriptural authority, we cannot start within the problematic of an innocuous intrinsicality hiding a nefarious extrinsicality. What is needed, of course, is recourse to the benign extrinsicality of the Holy Spirit. The Bible must interpret itself, and the wings of that interpretation must be the activity of the Holy Spirit. Just as postmodernity recognizes that the power of human community drives the semantics of the Biblical text, so too must it recognize that the power of the Holy Spirit also drives the interpretation of the text. The extrinsic moment within the dynamics of interpretation is God's own!

Thus, I do not see how Scriptural authority can be grounded apart from the activity of the Spirit. It is this divine breath of God that determines the contour of scriptural semantics, and ultimately the authority of Scripture itself.

On Semantics in Theology

I am convinced that the mainline denominations are dying because they have violated semantic probity. While there seems to be some prima facie absurdity in this, I think that it is so. I believe that people who are profoundly interested in Christianity think that the language of Christianity somehow makes truth claims. That is not to say that every interested Christian is a naive realist. It is to say, however, that an understanding of religious and theological language that construes the specificity of that language as due entirely to human experience is problematic. The crucial realist question is simply this: If there were no human sentience, could one still affirm, in principle, the reality of God? Does it make sense to speak about God's existence apart from the human self/world structure? If there is no possible world - - no self-consistent description of how the world could have gone - - in which God is apart from human conciousness, then God must be causally inert.

The causal impotence of God is related to the internal relatedness of God to the world. If the concept of God is such that God must be related to that which is not God in order for God to be God, then we cannot affirm an intrinsicality to God that could, in principle, retain causal powers. But a God without robust causal powers simply cannot be God - - or so I would argue. The reason is simply that conceptually God must be construed as that which none greater can be thought. But clearly a God with causal power is greater than a God without it. Thus, in order for God to be God, God must have causal power. This is such a basic insight, that I am surprised many theologians no longer find it important to even ask the question of divine causality. For many, in fact, the notion that God can cause anything is taken to be a category mistake, like saying, with Ryle, that she left in a sedan and came home in a rage. This is unfortunate, and tips the theological hat since Kant in a decidedly Platonic direction, though most have not seen this. Just as Plato believed that coneptual analysis in the order of being gets at knowledge more than an examination of cause and effect within the spatio-temporal order, so too have theologians since Kant assumed that thinking about God, or reporting the experience of the divine aims at truth more than examining how God might actually causally relate to the word.

The problem for the last 200+ years is that the use of religious and theological language has continued unabated and that most outside the initiate have no idea that when the preacher uses theological and religious language, he or she does not mean what the unitiate think is meant. Because of this "semantic shift" in religious and theological language, even the "cultured despisers" of religion are put out of work. One does not know what precisely is meant by the language; one can specify no states of affairs making the putative assertions false. How can one talk meaningfully about what cannot be unambiguously and clearly stated?

On the Theological Equivalency of East/West Trinitarin Models

Theologians are oftentimes too lax in getting clear on the types of claims they make. Take, for instance, the claim that the East and West made theologically equivalent claims about the Trinity, although they divided philosophically in their conceptuality about universals: The East assuming that a universal could be numerically one and multiply instantiatable, and the West denying this. Is it indeed true that the East and West make equivalent trinitarian claims?

Theoretical equivalency is understood differently on syntactical and semantic approaches. According to syntactical approaches, theories T1 and T2 are equivalent if they have, as their extension, the same or equivalent set of models. This syntactical approach to understanding theories and their equivalency was dominant through much of the twentieth century, and is oftentimes referred to as "the classical view" or "the received view." On this approach, a theory is a set of uninterpreted axioms in a specified formal language using a set of correspondence rules that provide a partial empirical interpretation to the theory by linking observable entities and processes to particular non-logical terms. A theory is true just in case its interpreted axioms are all true.

The semantic approach to understanding theories and their equivalency has developed over the last four decades. While syntactic approaches are interested in deducibility from axioms, semantic approaches focus upon the notion of "satisfaction." Objects which satisfy the axioms are models of those axioms. According to the semantic approach, the axioms comprise part of a theoretical definition. Whether or not such a definition is true of the world depends upon theoretical hypotheses. A theory is true just in case all of its associated hypotheses are true. In the words of F. Suppe, the semantic view "construes theories as what their formulations refer to when the formulations are given a formal (semantic) interpretation" (Suppe, The Semantic Conception of Theories and Scientific Realism, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, p. 4). This model-theoretic view identifies theories with the set of models that satisfies the theoretical laws of the theories. The models can be understood as being a pure structure: abstract entities and relations. Theories T1 and T2 are equivalent if and only if they are satisfied by sets if models M1 and M2 respectively, such that M1 and M2 are isomorphic to each other.

Applying this to the Trinitarian question, we might say that sentence "God is both one and three" is satisfied by two different sets of models, one employing a multiply instantiable universal, the other a property particular overlapping the compresent bundles of properties constituting the persons. If two separate sets of model structures satisfy the same set of Trinitarian propositions, these structures are equivalent and they are isomorphic with respect to each other.

It is ironic to find that East and West Trinitarian controversies may have been argued by people holding equivalent or almost equivalent Trinitarian views. Perhaps one is not making a different theological claim at all when "starting with the persons" or "starting with the essence." Maybe, in fact, the new social Trinitarianism is finally equivalent to older, more traditional Trinitarian positions.

Confusing the Epistemic and Semantic Primacy of Christ

As some may know, I am the author of the so-called “WordAlone Fundamentals,” a set of affirmations that I think get at the heart of some basic agreements and differences within contemporary Lutheran theology (http://www.wordalone.org/docs/wa-fundamentals.shtml). I conceive these “fundamentals” really as proto-principles for Lutheran theological engagement. Given the centrality of the cross within Lutheran theology - - and the accents of law/gospel, the theology of the cross, the simul iustus et peccato, and the infinite being carried by the finite - - why is there such a plethora of methods and approaches (even real differences) within contemporary Lutheran theology? Why is the “real working theology” of the LCMS so very different from that of the ELCA? How does the working theology of the WordAlone Network differ from that encountered within many ELCA churches?

The “fundamentals” acknowledge a real parting of the ways within the Lutheran theological ethos, and locate that parting with respect to the following assertions:

1) Theological Realism: God exists and His existence and nature are logically independent from human awareness, perception, conception and language.

2) Semantic Realism: Assertions about the divine have definite truth-conditions. Language about the divine is not merely expressive of the individual uttering it, or merely rule-governed linguistic customs of a community.

3) Theophysical Causation: There is a causal connection between God and the universe. It is logically and metaphysically possible for God to bring about an event in the universe that would not have occurred had God not brought it about.

It is important to note that the tradition of theological reflection beginning with Kant, if consistent, must deny all three of these assertions. For Kant, God is an idea of human reason, and not an “empirical concept of the understanding.” Accordingly, God cannot be conceived as a substance sustaining causal connections with events within the universe. Post-Kantian options within theology begin with the assumption that theological language cannot have truth-conditions where God is figured as a substance sustaining properties, some of which are relational causal properties. Accordingly, theological language must be “doing something else.” It must be a discourse expressive or disclosive of human feeling (Schleiermacher), thinking (Hegel), or doing (late 19th century Protestantism).

To speak of these “fundamentals” as fundamental assertions within a Lutheran context, however, immediately brings charges that one has become “un-Lutheran.” A recent e-mail says that I have committed the cardinal transgression of not beginning my theology with the revealed God - - Jesus Christ. It says that if one starts with the existence of God without clarifying the nature of God, then one might end up with a “definition of God that then shapes what we can say about Christ.” It goes on to declare that things should be the other way around: Christ should determine “what we can know and say about God.” We must start theology where God wants himself to be known: the revelation of Jesus Christ.

In responding to this charge it is critically important to distinguish ontology, epistemology and semantics. I agree with the claim that Lutheran theology must begin with God as revealed in Christ. No Lutheran would want to deny Luther’s contention in The Bondage of the Will that God remains hidden in His aseity and that human beings gazing upon this deus absconditus shall be deeply perplexed and thrown into despair.

Yet this epistemic priority of Christ ought not be confused with ontological priority. Luther’s Trinitarian thought is continuous with that of western theology generally; he holds timeless eternity of the three persons within the inner-Trinity. Christ has epistemic priority for the believer, even though Christ does not have ontological priority with respect to God Himself.

Moreover, this epistemic priority of Christ must not be confused with a semantic priority. I deny any “theological atomism” which can find isolate meaning in the Christ event disconnected entirely from the semantic context within which that event arose. Years ago Pannenberg, in Jesus, God and Man, detailed the importance of the horizon of late Jewish apocalyptic thinking for the original understanding of who Christ was. The original event of Christ took place over and against a background of beliefs and values making possible the identification of Jesus with the Christ. (I speak here of necessary, not sufficient conditions for the identification.) Clearly, the epistemic priority of Christ is compatible with a semantic dependency upon context.

My claim is that, for Luther, Christ has epistemic primacy even though the identity of Christ is dialectically relatable to the hidden God whom Christ reveals. For Luther, what Christ means is conceptually linked to the God that stands over and against him, the God whom he fears. Luther’s question is this: How can I find a gracious God? That this God is revealed in Christ in no way undercuts the claim that there is first presupposed a meaningful category of ‘gracious God” conceptually linked to God as transcendent of human finitude.

Imagine what it would be like were Christ to have both semantic and epistemic priority. Presumably, humans confronting Christ would for the first time think about the dialectic of time and eternity, i.e., the very notion of the dialectic of time and eternity would flow from the encounter with Christ. Moreover, the notion that God is hidden in His aseity would have to arise, as would all thoughts of the divine, in the existential encounter with Jesus the Christ. But this would be to entirely reject any category of general revelation in Luther. There would be no human experience of order, history, goodness or beauty that would allow formation of the “God concept” independently of encounter with Christ. Furthermore, were this true, the witness of the various religious traditions with respect to the finite and infinite would have somehow themselves to be grounded in the revelation of Christ. (This would make the very notion of theism somehow dependent upon the revelation of Christ. But this is a falsifiable position because theism was around long before Christ was revealed.)

The assertion of theological realism and theophysical causation are meant only to recover the “God concept” Luther presupposed in his assertion of the epistemic primacy of Christ. Knowing a thing to be is quite a different thing than to have the semantic capacity to know the thing to be. My claim is this: There has been a gradual shift over the last two centuries in the concept of God, in the very meaning of ‘God’. This change has brought with it a shift in the underlying implicit “theory” upon which the discovery of Christ as Savior is possible. For moderns and postmoderns, Christ does not, and cannot mean the same thing as was meant in Luther’s time. (I speak of the meaning of Christ, but should this be problematic, one can easily construe it as the meaning of statements about Christ.) The upshot of all of this is that we now say the same things about Christ, but really mean quite different things about Him. In other words, our ontological claims are a function of the semantic fields we inhabit when making these claims. This state of affairs is fully compatible with the assertion of the epistemic primacy of Christ.

So why is it that the ELCA and LCMS divide when they seemingly make the same confession? Why is WordAlone theology “different” than that currently regnant within the ELCA? My claim is that different notions of God, of time and eternity, lurk in the background, determining the content (Gehalt) of Christ as “that which shows itself as itself.” Simply put, the identity conditions of Christ are not wholly established by the phenomenon of Christ Himself, but are partly determined by the background theory upon which the “observation” of Christ occurs. The “fundamentals” humbly wish to bring to the light this background theory so that there can be some continuity within Lutheran theology as to the most important thing: the reality of Christ and Him Crucified.

On Truth-Conditions in Theology

In his influential book, The Nature of Doctrine, George Lindbeck discusses three general semantic approaches to theological and religious language. The cognitive-propositional approach assumes that theological statements have truth values because they either state what is or what is not the case. The experiential-expressivist strategy understands theological statements to be somehow expressive of human attitudes and orientations. Finally, the cultural-linguistic approach believes that theological statements are rules assumed by the theological community, rules that are themselves neither true nor false, but which ground further employment of theological and religious language. Of these three approaches, only the first grants robust truth-conditions to theological language.

Contemporary theology, of course, has deep problems with ascribing truth-conditions to its language. Ever since the days of Kant, the academic elite in Europe has been engaged in the project of doing theology without assuming God to be real - - or at least not "real" in the way that other things in the universe are real. God is either an ideal of human reason or an abstract object who is incapable of having causal relations with the universe. Tillich spoke of such a god as the "ground of being" or the "depth of being" in order to distinguish this being from any beings within the "structure of being."  Of course, causal relations hold only among beings within the structure of being.  (I will simply ignore the question here as to whether the Tillichian structure of being is a noematic structure or a structure existing apart from the noematic entirely.  As it turns out, for our question this distinction is not important.)  

Since God is not a being within the structure of being, statements about God cannot have truth-conditions in the way that statements about other objects in the universe can. If statements about such a God are to be true or false, they must somehow correspond to what is so within the structure of being, or be consistent and coherent with the language of other theories that themselves deal with the structure of being. However, if Kant is right, then God cannot be known as a member of the class of all beings, and thus a fortiori cannot be referred to by a language having definite truth-conditions. The assumption, of course, is that giving an extension to theological language involves the specification of a divine domain, divine properties, and relations (ordered n-tuples) having at least one term taking on a divine value, and the other (or others) the value of a member of the class of non-divine things. But dyadic (two-place) causal relations between God and any non-divine entity are clearly precluded by the Kantian starting point.

If theological language has no truth-conditions because it has no non-linguistic, non-mental domain to which it could refer, then it's use must serve some other function. Schleiermacher was perhaps the first clearly to grasp that theological language could be retained but assigned some other function. Instead of it having truth-conditions as if it were about something, it could be expressive or poetical, in its first-order use, and regulative and diagnostic in its second-order use. For Schleiermacher and many after him, theological language is neither true nor false, but rather expressively or regulatively adequate. Simply put, theological language is important not because of what it says about God, but what it expresses about us -- our experience and our condition. Theological language is thus not about God, but rather presents, evokes or displays the self.  Instead of theos-logos, it is anthro-logos -- albeit, in a most roundabout way.

The problem with this should be apparent. Theological language that is merely expressive of the self or human experience does not have an extension and hence cannot be semantically relatable to entities within the universe. Such language is "doing something else" than claiming an object or ordered n-tuple is a member of a set; accordingly, it is doing something else than making a claim of truth. But surely this question is crucial: Does the term 'God' refer to a divine entity or does it merely express the self, and its aptitudes and orientations?

The reason why the question is crucial is apparent.  Because human beings are beings who can pro-ject ahead of themselves various possibilities of being -- one of whose possibilities is the possibility of there being no more possibilities -- and because the referent of 'God' has traditionally been conceived to be an entity with salvific, causal power -- an entity causally-relatable to the human possibility of there being no more possibilities -- the very reason for employing 'God' is seemingly taken away when an extensionalist theological semantics is denied.  One might go so far as to declare that whatever is referred to by 'God' is not referred to properly if the entity in question has no causal power.   (On such a non-extensionalist construal, one might say that the entity in question has no causal power in each and every possible world in which it is ingredient.)

Since humans experience their death in the midst of life, the question of the reference of God is all important. Who, or what, can deliver a person from eternal death? Here the word 'deliver' has causal overtones. Only a being having causal power can liberate somebody from death.  Why? The reason rests with the meaning of 'liberate'.  For P to liberate x from y is for  P to bring about a state of affairs of x in regard to y that would not have been brought about without P.  (P cannot be said to free x from y if it were in x's power to get rid of y.)  It is precisely this notion of bringing about a state of affairs that would not have been brought about otherwise that captures the causal relation.  (Giving an analysis of 'cause' is, of course, a very difficult matter and we won't go into it here.)

A salvific, causal being is precisely the kind of being traditionally referred to by 'God'.  Since we cannot deliver themselves from death, expressions of the self are improperly employed in combatting the critical salvific issues of human being. Moreover, these expressions may violate the very logic of theological discourse.  How might this be so?

Theological language developed with a semantics that specified as its universe of discourse both worldly and divine objects, properties, relations, events and/or states of affairs.  The point of such language was to claim satisfiability of a class of ordered pairs (or ordered n-tuples) by elements of this domain.  So the question is simple:  Does the criterion of application of 'theological language' extend beyond the semantics of traditional theological language to something quite different?  I think a strong argument can be made that employment of a wholly different semantics properly precludes application of the term 'theological language' entirely.  Accordingly, whatever it is that non-cognitive, non-propositionalist theologians now do, they do not do theology.    

Realism in Theology

Every discipline has its fundamental assertions and assumptions, those principles without which the discipline cannot proceed as the discipline it is. This is true as well for theology. We find, in fact, that particular fundamental assertions demarcate trajectories of the theological tradition. This is clearly true of what I call the realist fundamental: "God exists independent of human awareness, perception, conception and language." Whether or not one accedes to this fundamental determines the meaning of an entire matrix of theological assertions. Theology can proceed whether or not one postulates the realist fundamental. The point is that the ontologies of realist and antirealist theologies are quite different, even if they both proclaim similar religious and theological statments.

Since the time of Kant, the theological penchant has been towards antirealism generally. Kant famously held that God is merely a regulative ideal of human reason. While thinking God is perhaps inescapable, and while God can function as a postulate of pure practical reason (guaranteeing happiness to the one who does his/her duty), God cannot be a substance entering into causal relations with any other objects in the universe. Kant only grants substance status to those objects which have concomittant sense impressions; he only allows causal relations to hold among substances. Because God is not the kind of object having sense impressions, then God is not a substance causally relatable to entities within the universe, or the universe generally.

The problem for theology after Kant was to try to provide a meaningful account of theological assertions when that referred to by 'God' was not a substance, and that referred to by 'creates' was not a causal relation. Although the theological tradition was not always consistent, it basically asserted that talk of God must be parsed in terms of something besides divine objects, properties, events or states of affairs. Schleiermacher, for instance, spoke of God as the whence of the feeling of absolute dependence. Hegel located God in the reflexivity of human thinking. Later liberal Protestantism found God talk most germane to the arena of ethics, of human doing. Even the twentieth-century backlash to liberal theology worked with a basic antirealist notion of God. While theologians talked a great deal about God's "mighty acts in history," God remained unable to causally interact with nature. But how is action in history possible without action in nature?

While neo-reformational theology "preached well," it, and later theological developments, have proved unable to assert robust causal connections between God and the universe. The result has been lamentable for theology, for a causally impotent God is clearly irrelevant for most postmodern men and women. What kind of question is the Christ the answer for when the God, to whom Christ reconciled the world, is causally inert? If God is not connectable to the universe, then Christ becomes merely a symbol for the liberation of human beings from anxiety, despair, and ultimate suffering. Antirealist assumptions lead one into a basic projectionist strategy. The universe is presumably what it is apart from us, but God is "put" into the universe because of human value and interest. Finally, Feurbach is correct at this point: We project God onto the universe. Therefore, God is internally related to us; His being is determined by the relation we assume towards Him. Antirealism is a definite trajectory of theology thinking, a trajectory that has been, in my opinion, the dominant motif in academic theology.

But how different it all becomes if one asserts that there is some being, such that that being has robust divine properties, properties not affected by the relationship humans have towards that God! On the realist assumption, causality is put back on the table. Now one can speak again about God actually creating, actually acting such that something came into being that would not have come into being without that acting. Now one can speak again about real redemption and real sanctification. Now one can speak again about the possibility that God really can act to answer prayer. That the evangelical tradition has tended toward realism, does not mean, of course, that realism entails other evangelical positions. Conversely, while the Lutheran tradition has tended toward antirealism, this does not mean that antirealism entails other Lutheran positions. Of this we shall have much more to say later.

Dennis Bielfeldt