The Philosophical Commitments of ILT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Propositional Content, Truth-Conditions and Existential Empowerment

For a very long time I have puzzled over the relationship within theology among the notions of syntax, semantics and existential empowerment.  A proposition is uttered and has meaning.  A person hears it and orients himself in a different direction in the hearing.  The pastor utters, "Christ is risen." The parishioner hears the assertion and is seemingly empowered by it: She feels otherwise than she likely would have felt, thinks otherwise than she likely would have thought, and behaves differently than she otherwise would have behaved.  While all this seems clear, it is not.  In this brief article, I want to reflect upon this unclarity.

Preachers proclaiming the Word of God to hearers say such things as, "You are forgiven," "Christ died for you," "God hears your prayers," "God knows everything in your heart," "God demands that you help the poor," "God wants you to love your neighbor even as Christ has loved you," "The Holy Spirit in you is praying through you," and "God's gracious love makes all things new."  Obviously, in the course of any sermon, a preacher utters many statements like these.  As you look closely at them, it is clear that many really do prima facie have the form of statements; they seem to be claims about God, God's will for us, and God's gracious love of us.

If such statements were made in the presence of philosophers, there might erupt a discussion as to the truth-conditions (or lack of the same) of such statements.   What makes true the statements, 'Christ died for you', or 'God's gracious love makes all things new'?  What precisely must be the case for the statement 'Christ died for you' to be asserted as true?  Is it made true by the psychological properties of the utterer?  Is it made true by some set of events, entities, properties or states of affairs, the presence of which determines the statement's truth and the absence of which determines its falsity?

Or is the statement not true at all?  Perhaps it is a saying of the group that one must say to be part of a group.  Or perhaps it is merely an expression of one's own subjectivity, one's feelings and existential orientations.  Maybe the statements are really not statements at all, but rather pseudo-statements masquerading as statements with truth values.  Without a truth-value, a sentence cannot be a statement, it cannot state rightly or wrongly what is in fact the case.   It can, of course, be language that is nonetheless doing something.  For instance, it might make a promise or a command, express a feeling or hope, or give thanks or praise.  But without a truth-value, the statement cannot in principle make a claim rightly or wrongly about the way that things are.

Theologians, particularly Lutheran theologians, have recently displayed a penchant for disparaging ontology.  ('Recent' here connotes the last 225 years or so.)  They seemingly assume that the discipline having to do with being is not a discipline properly relatable to theology, the discipline having to do with logos or Word.  Perhaps they believe, or are somewhere on the trajectory of believing, with the Neo-Kantians that while the categories of 'being' and 'cause' are  appropriate for die Natur, they are out of place in the realm of der Geist (spirit), the region pertaining to 'value'.  Accordingly, theological ontology is misguided because it is an investigation which would locate God in an inappropriate region.  God would be, at best, a being among other beings -- albeit the highest of those beings.  But how could a being among beings be a being that fulfills the primal condition of God being God: the condition that God is infinitely qualitative different than creation, that God is totaliter aliter than all that is?

Maybe they simply think that ontology is metaphysics and that interest in metaphysics is symptomatic of a theology of glory.  Instead of God revealing Himself in weakness and vulnerability on the Cross, human beings search for God on the basis of the created order, locating God at the apex of truth, goodness and beauty.  But is not such a metaphysical inquiry an attempt to build a bridge to the infinite by standing in the finite?  Is not that attempt a proud seeking after the glory of God in strength and impassibility?  "We must search for God where is revealed," they say, "We must find it in is in His Word, not search to unmask the hidden God!"

But these ways of thinking are simply confusions, most often perpetrated by those who have imperfect understandings of what ontology is and does.  Ontology is concerned with truth-conditions, with those conditions that must obtain to make true those statements we regard as such.  Whatever events, objects, properties and states of affairs which make such statements true are precisely those events, object, properties and states of affairs we hold exist.  Simply put, all of our statement utterings have ontological commitments.  Just as some state of affairs makes true the statement 'the cat is on the mat' -- presumably the existence of a cat, a mat, and a particular dyadic relation of "onto" such that the cat is onto the mat -- so some state of affairs would make true the statements 'Christ is resurrected from the dead', and 'Because Christ lives, you shall live also'.  But what might these be?

Now enters the traditional problem of religious language.  What exactly does 'Christ lives' mean and what would 'I live' mean in its wake? Clearly, we know what it is for something to live.  A being lives if it fulfills certain biological conditions.  But would Christ's living fulfill those conditions?  Perhaps, if we are thinking about Christ's living alongside Peter's living.  But is the Christ who lives alongside Paul's living a Christ who lives in the same way that Christ lived alongside of Peter's living?  What would a post-resurrected living be?  A fortiori what would a post-Ascension living entail?  Would a human living that is not a biological living be a living?  Perhaps one says, "yes," but it is not altogether clear what one is saying when saying it.

Everything I have said so far connects to the problem of the assertion of propositional content and the effect of such asserting on existential empowerment.  Pastor Roy goes to see parishioner Mary who has been battling cancer, and now appears to be rapidly losing the battle.  The doctors say she may have only weeks to live.  Pastor Roy says to Mary that death has not ultimate victory over her because Christ has conquered death and through His resurrection, she will be resurrected as well.  Mary thinks about this a moment and says, "Pastor, is that true, or are you just saying that to make me feel better."  Pastor Roy considers her statement and replies, "It is true, Mary, you will be resurrected with Christ."  Mary, always the skeptic, follows up, "But in what sense will I be resurrected?  Will I have a body and will I know myself to be the same person I was before I died?"  Pastor Roy deliberates a moment and then hazards the following: "Mary, I don't know if you will have a body that is like the body you now have, nor a psychology like that which you now have, I just know that you will be resurrected."  Mary is silent a moment and then returns to her original statement, "Pastor, is that true, or are you just saying that to make me feel better?"

Mary is concerned with the semantics of Pastor Roy's assertions.  What do the statements he is proclaiming mean, and are they true?  To know if they are true it seems, she must know what they mean.  But Mary knows that locating meaning logically prior to truth cannot ultimately explain what it is that 'meaning' means.  Mary grasps that for a statement to mean x rather than y, one must know the conditions under which x is true and y not.  Whatever these truth-conditions are, are what makes an assertion's meaning mean.  She knows that when Pastor Roy says to her, "Death does not have ultimate victory over you because Christ has conquered death and through His resurrection, you will be resurrected as well," it makes all the difference in the world to the assertion's meaning what must obtain in order for the sentence to be true.   What makes true Christ's conquering death and being resurrected such that she will be resurrected as well?  Moreover, is it not clear that whatever makes that true makes all the difference in the world as to how she feels, thinks and behaves in the hearing, over and against how she otherwise would have felt, thought and behaved?

A theological statement's semantics, its truth-conditions and truth, is intimately related to its ability to existentially empower.  What I am saying is that it makes a deep existential difference to most people in the face of impending death what it is about which they might legitimately hope.  But is this not merely a baseless assertion?  Why think that Mary's empowerment in the face of death depends upon some fact of the matter about Christ's life after death?  Is not the Word enough?  Is not the proclamation of the Word enough to empower?  Why get into semantics and philosophical discussion when none is clearly needed?

But it is clearly needed; this is the point.  The mere uttering of words cannot empowerment produce.  But is not the Word external?  Is that not enough?  It is only enough, I would say, if one were Zoroastrian and had to have all of the words right in order to produce the correct result.  It is enough only if one believes that words are magical bringing about effects without means.   Lutherans believe in the real presence, after all.  For the external Word to be really present demands that the Word appear in, under, around and beyond the words which bear it.  But in order for the Word to be present, it must mean.  Without meaning the Word remains in bare externality; it remains incapable of connection to fallen structures in need of salvation.  Blessed are they that know their need of God.

What I am suggesting is that a mature Lutheran theology of the Word can indeed connect to truth-conditions.  They are the means by which our hopes are fanned and fears quelled.  While the argument is difficult, is it not self-evident that Mary's fears about death and her hopes for a future beyond it are linked inextricably to what she thinks really is the case with regards to these things?  The Holy Spirit is carried by the Word and is ever related to the Word, and the Holy Spirit works through means.  Is not the Spirit's ability to deliver the Word through human words related to the empowerment of the hearer of the Word, an empowerment that depends upon the hearer knowing the meaning and truth of what is said?  Perhaps one might even say the Spirit forms the link between the proclamation of words, and the Wording of the Word in the salvation of its hearer.

So Mary went out and listened to the voice of Pastor Roy and her spirit was calmed, for Pastor Roy spoke a truth that she could not invent.  To have understood Roy in the flesh would have meant that she understand his remarks figuratively, for denizens of nature can only speak the spirit as an as if.  But because of God's Spirit she did not need to spiritualize the brutal facts of nature. Because of His Spirit, she knew in her spirit that Nature was a far bigger thing than ever she had realized.

A Question

The question that has always interested me is not merely whether God exists and has a determinate contour apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language, but whether or not it is ultimately meaningful to make such a claim.  Simply put, what would the truth conditions be of the claim that God exists and has a definite contour apart from awareness, perception, conception and language?  That God exists and has a definite contour apart from awareness, perception, conception and language?  But what is this?   "Not words," you say, "but the reality of that existence and contour apart from awareness, perception, conception and language. . ."  But what is that?

When thinking about truth conditions one wants to think about entities, properties, and relations apart from words.  But how precisely do we think of such things?  How do we think of that which makes true divine existence and contour apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language?  What is it precisely that makes true this and does not make true a divine existence and contour that is, but is not apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language?

Transcendentality

I must admit that I have always rather liked the transcendental option.   When the skies seem especially dark, it is tempting to think of divine presence on the transcendental horizon of our own experience.   This way of proceeding supposedly avoids the problems of subjectivism and pyschologism without committing one to finding God as an object among objects in the world and history, or looking for Him in some supernatural transcendent dimension lying out beyond the world and history.

I admit that I have not thought much about the transcendental starting point in recent years.   Instead I have been pondering how it is that in order to avoid an eliminativism of the theological, one must ascribe to it a robust semantics, one that is realist in its orientation. 

I want to relfect here a bit upon transcendentality and the semantic questions that arise when trying to articulate the position.   While the transcendental starting point is prima facie promising in trying to locate a place for God, the position requires a type of realist semantics that is difficult to formulate.   I will try to lay this out nascently below.

Transcendental Thomism was part of a general effort within mid-twentieth century Roman Catholicism to read Aquinas in ways that were not Neo-Scholastic in orientation.    The idea was to retrieve the Augustinian element in Thomas' thinking which would allow God to be found grounding the activity of human intentionality itself. 

Reflect for a moment on the grasping of any being.   The necessary condition for grasping determinate being is, for Karl Rahner - -  the most famous of the Transcendental Thomists - - that one have a pre-understanding, or a fore-grasping of Being in itself.   In every act of knowing any object, there is a transcendental condition consisting in the a horizon of pure being.   This horizon is the term of the Vorgriff, the end point of any fore-grasping.   The idea is very simple and maybe an analogy helps.  In order for a person to know that she is incarcerated in a particular cell, she must grasp beyond the cell to know what area she could be occupying if she were not limited by the cell wall to be in the particular cell she is in.  Without a fore-grasping of the "beyond," the incarcerated one would not know themselves as incarcerated at all.   Whereas Heidegger said that projecting into no-thing was the necessary condition for the thing to be thing - - and hence "nothingness is the face of being" - - Karl Rahner claimed that the totality of Being is the face of being.

The transcendental starting point fits nicely within the Augustinian key, within the general orientation of "the ontological thirst," that is, the thematization of the assertion that "my heart is not at rest until it finds its rest in Thee, O Lord."   Human beings are a dynamism towards Being.   This dynamism towards Being is the transcendental condition for the possibility of grasping the realm of determinate beings.

Very important in this approach is the overcoming of Neo-Scholastic dualisms between nature and supernature, the finite and infinite,  and nature and grace.   The transcendental horizon making possible human knowledge is not merely a thing of nature, nor merely a thing of grace, but it is a horizon of a continuum of nature and grace, a continuum where natural human striving gives way to the grace of God as pure Being, as that which is the authentic end of human striving.   For Rahner and followers nature is already graced; God is always already related to nature.  Grace thus is ingredient in the transcendental constitution of natural human striving; there is no authentic nature without grace.

Now the question I wish to entertain pertains to the semantics of the language I have just used to articulate the position in the previous three paragraphs.   What are the conditions for the possibility of meaning and truth of that language used to articulate the structure of the transcendental horizon of human natural being? 

This is a very difficult question, of course; one that seems far more difficult than articulating the conditions for the possibility of the meaningfulness of language referring to the world of nature and history, or a putative transcendent realm existing beyond nature and history. 

I have argued that we must adopt semantic realism in theology for three reasons: 1) If our time is to take the truth claims of theology seriously again, theology must make serious truth claims; 2) If theology is a discipline that is so important that one's very being and the meaning of one's being is at issue in it, then we should work with a view of theological language that makes the most robust theological assertions; 3) It turns out to be very difficult to give theological language a self-consistent semantic interpretation that is finally not realist - - at least if one wants to retain theological language.  Because semantic realism seems best for referring to God in the world and beyond it, it is tempting to think that semantic realism is the best construal of language about the transcendental horizon as well.   However, for reasons soon apparent it proves to be very difficult indeed to provide such a semantics.  Why?

Imagine language L having a standard intension and extension such that the intension of a name is its sense and its extension is its reference, the intension of a monadic predicate is a property and its extension a set of objects satisfying that property, that the intension of a polyadic predicate is a relation and its extension the set of ordered n-tuples satisfying this relation, and the intension of a sentence is the proposition expressed and the extension its truth-value.   Now assume the L is going to articulate the transcendental horizon T. 

The first question to ask is what are the names that refer to objects and entities, and what are the predicates that refer to classes of objects and entities?   Whereas a particular being is an object, it is not clear that the horizon of being is itself an entity or object.   But what is it?   Is it precisely that which is forgotten in any predicate of the predicate to the name?   This sounds sufficiently profound, but what could be actually said by saying that there is something that is not a being or thing but still nevertheless is somehow, and that this which is but is not any particular being is that which is forgotten in the very semantics of L? 

Now one might say that the particular dynamism toward Being itself is a series of events that could be specified in principle by names, and that the property of "driving beyond" refers to the class of those events comprising the dynamism.   On this construal, the dynamism and its salient properties could be in principle referred to by L,  But notice what can't be referred to?   It is precisely the term of the Vorgriff, the end or being towards which the dynamism flows. 

But I hear the objection.   Have you not in this proto-analysis presupposed a dualism between self and other, with the otherness of Being Itself now somehow existing outside the dynamnism as that to which the dynamism flows?   Don't you realize that it is precisely, as you earlier said, a continuum that exists between the dynamism and its terms, and thus between nature and grace?   But unfortunately pointing this out is no ultimate help at all to the semantic task.   Why?

The reason why is analogous to the problem Wittgenstein had in the Tractatus.   After he pointed out that language can have sense only when it refers to objects in the world, he raised the question of the meaningfulness of the assertions which themselves refer to the relation between language and world.   Obviously, they must be senseless.   Wittgenstein thus concludes the Tractatus with the suggestion that the propositions of the Tractatus are elucidations, that they are like the rungs on the ladder, the entire ladder of which must be thrown away when the relationship between world and language is rightly grasped.

Analogically here, the transcendental horizon of the graced natural dynamism towards being (T) grounds the very possibility of the language used to talk about that transcendental horizon.  In the human dynamism towards Being in its totality, the transcendental horizon T is known in the surpassing towards being.   However, since Being in its totality cannot be an other to the subject of the transcendental dynamism, Being in its totality becomes the face of Being in its totality, that is, the articulating of the transcendental structure presupposes the transcendental structure.   Language about being which grasps determinate being having the transcendental horizon as a condition cannot itself grasp indeterminate being, that is, it cannot grasp the transcendental structure having as its ultimate term the totality of being.

Nothing what I have said here should be deeply surprising.   Why would one expect language to be able to refer to something as inchoate an unthematic as the transcendental horizon of being?   My embryonic point here is simply this: If transcendentality is the ultimate location of God, then the infinite regress of transcendentality in knowing transcendentality is a problem for any language that attempts to state this.  Clearly, language L is not adequate to the task of referring to the transcendental horizon.   If this is so - - and I do know that much more argument is needed - - then hopes appear dim for a semantic realism with regard to transcendentality, and accordingly, for the robust truth of the existence and contour of transcendentality itself. 

Can a Lutheran Semantics be Recovered?

For some time now I have been interested in theological semantics. Reading Wittgenstein's Tractatus thirty years ago, made me acutely aware of the problems we encounter when we try to talk about extra-worldly" things. (I include any talk about a talking about extra-worldly things as itself an extra-worldly thing.) Wittgenstein's distinction among propositions having Sinn (sense), those that are sinnlos (senseless), and those having nicht Sinn (nonsense), was for me very convincing that theology encounters significant problems in its speaking. Because I thought in those days that getting clear on semantics could be done independently from affirming or presupposing a metaphysic, I thought that there was some global problem with theological semantics. The language simply could not refer properly, it could not clearly affirm a state of affairs that one could falsify. Because I was hoping to become a theologian, the idea that the language of the trade was strictly speaking nonsense, caused me considerable discomfort.

While I am still somewhat uncomfortable with the general problem of theological language, over the the years I have gradually come to understand that a deep relationship exists between semantics and metaphysics and/or ontology. There simply are no semantic facts and judgments that can be made (or presupposed) independently of what one believes is that case. For the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, a metaphysical atomism nicely accompanies his semantic nominalism. If it is true that facts comprise the world - - "Die Welt ist die Gesamtheit der Tatsache, nicht der Dingen - - and if there are not ethical, philosophical, aesthetic and theological facts, then the propositions purporting to talk about these things must be "pseudo-propositions." They look like they are making factual claims, but are finally not doing so.

Because of the press of many matters, I have not developed adequately what I regard to be the case: The Lutheran Reformers were unreflective theological realists and the presupposition of such a realism made them theological semantic realists as well. For those who wrote, read, debated, and signed the various confessional documents, there was simply no question that the language of the documents referred to divine entities, properties, events and states of affairs. Furthermore, because they believed that a divine realm exists outside of human awareness, perception, conception and language, the language could rather unproblematically connect to it, and state what is the case (or not the case) with respect to it. Confessions-talk is thus talk "in the material mode;" for the Reformers it made truth-claims of the world, for the world of the Reformers was filled with facts about which Wittgenstein would be astonished. His judgment that human language was unable to picture in logical space the transcendent was simply an admission of what philosophers since the Enlightenment presupposed: Talk of the divine was, in general, on very problematic epistemological footing.

This epistemic liability is related to ontology: One either says that we cannot affirm p because we cannot know that p is, or that we can affirm p even though we don't know for sure that p is - -or perhaps that our criterion of "for sure" has changed. In the Reformation period, when what it meant to know "for sure" was different than the Enlightenment, one could reasonably hold metaphysical facts that later became quite unreasonable. As it goes with metaphysics, so it goes with semantics. If it is unreasonable to hold a particular metaphysics, then it is reasonable to revise our language or, like Wittgenstein, claim that there is something about our natural language that makes it the case that it naturally can refer to states of affairs of a materialist or physicalist nature, but cannot picture a theological order at all.

We theologians who learned that the theological task must go through Kant learned to neglect certain questions and to prioritize others. The possibility of theological semantics (including theological truth) had to begin with a rejection of the very possibility of theological and semantic realism. Trained in the post-Kantian theological tradition, we looked at the texts of the Lutheran Confessions with quite different eyes than those who formulated, debated, and signed them. The questions that were of interest to us were naturally about things that could be of interest to us.

None of this is, of course, necessarilya bad thing. Classic texts have a deep fecundity; their history of interpretation takes them sometimes far from the contexts in which they are written. However, when the Churches of the Augsburg Confession find themselves no longer able deeply to recognize each other, then the question arises: When has the interpretation ceased any claim to normativity? How does one determine what is normative about such normativity in this case? Is there a set of presuppositions or affirmations that grounds a normative stance on the Confessions?

My sense is that Lutherans will continue to talk past each other as long as they are unwilling to articulate their ontologies. We live in a far different context than that of Wilhelm Hermann who claimed the independence of theological assertion from metaphysics. In a time where society and culture no longer grant a continuity of theological practice and expression (through a difference of ontological interpretation), people are searching again for authentic claims. They are not looking to find some way to justify the continued use of a theological language in the face of modern philosophical and scientific developments, but rather they search for a ground or reason to employ such language at all. As it was in the beginning of the Christian tradition, so it is now: The only reason to employ the language is that we Christians regard something to be true that non-Christians do not so regard. But the question of truth is always connected to the question of being. So it is that we Lutheran Christians must ask, "What is it that we hold to be so that others don't so hold, that is what it is apart from us, and that we sense the need to tell others about? What is this thing?

The Reformers could not have entertained this question without presupposing a rather explicit theological realism. The question for us is simply this: Can we? I used to think we could, but I no longer believe this. If Christ has not risen from the dead, than we Christians are the most to be pitied.

Singular Divine Causal Statements

To say that 'John wrecked the car' is to make a causal statement. It is to say that 'John caused the wrecking of the car'. To make such causal statements truthfully demands that there is some state of affairs (or some states of affairs), on the basis of which, it is true that 'John caused the wrecking of the car.' So what is the "stuff" that makes true the statement? What are the truth-conditions of 'John caused the wrecking of the car'?

One answer is to say that there is a substance (object or entity) John who has a particular set of properties necessary (or necessary and sufficient) for the existence of the set of properties the car has. Here the basic ontological category is that of substance, with the change of properties that substances have being causally determined by the properties other substances possess. The properties of the relevant entities can include times and places such that 'A causes B' is true on the basis of some substance S having property set P - - picked out by 'A' - - being necessary and sufficient for some substance S* having property set P* - - picked out by 'B'.

An alternate analysis construes the basic ontological facts of causation as a relation of events. On this view 'John causes the wrecking of the car' is really elliptical for something like 'John doing x causes the wrecking of the car'. Accordingly there is event E (John doing x) and event E* (the car wrecking) such that E causes E*.

One of the problems of understanding causality has been our infatuation with the Humean account of causation and the "covering law" models that derive from him. Famously, Hume argued that a statement like 'John doing x caused the wrecking of the car' must be analyzed in this way: i) John doing x temporally proceeded the wrecking of the car; ii) John doing x is contiguous with the wrecking of the car; iii) and events (or substances having properties) like John doing x are constantly conjoined with events (or substances having properties) like the car wrecking. This regularity theory of causation was regnant through much of the last century, giving rise to the notion of "covering laws." Accordingly E causes E* if and only if there is a universal generalization to the effect that 'for all y if y instantiates E then y instantiates E*. This cannot merely be an accidental universal generalization, however. It must be a nomic regularity. It must carry the force of necessity of a particular kind.

Ignoring all the important details, one might claim that the analysis of a singular causal statement presupposes universal hypotheticals, on the basis of which the singular causal statement is true. Accordingly, singular statement S is true if and only if S can somehow be seen as an instance of L: S is true by virtue of L. Of course, the standard Humean regularity theorist wants to go no further than the existence of the regularity. It is unexceptional that force between two objects equals the gravitational constant times the product of the mass of those objects over the square of their distance. This is a bare fact about the universe. That in some particular instance referred to by singular causal statement S, the mass of the two objects times the gravitation constant over the square of their distance gives the observed force is not surprising because, of course, this happens all of the time and this situation is an instance of what happens all of the time.

There are many problems with Humean accounts, but they are still held in favor by very empirically-minded philosophers who are not wont to ascribe ontological status to those entities quantified over in their theories. Anti-realists here can simply point to the fact that "this happens." This is the way that things are, and while we can have theories that might explain how those things are, those things will finally reference other "brute facts" about the way that things are. Of course, any one seriously interested in allowing 'God' to be a term in a singular causal statement cannot subscribe to a Humean or neo-Humean position on causation. If it is true that 'God caused the universe to be', this is a singular event. There is no covering law that this statement can instance. When it comes to talking about God and God's relationship to the world, we must - - if we allow truth-conditions at all to such statements - - understand the statements as both irreducibly singular and causal.

So to say that 'God's word caused the universe to be' is to claim that some state of affairs exists such that that statement is true. This state of affairs seems, plausibly, either to have to be the existence of a divine substance with properties, or an irreducible event. But clearly, God speaking cannot be ingredient in an event, if we mean by 'event' what is standardly meant by 'event'. Presumably, time began with the creation of the universe. Accordingly, so did events. Before time there could not have been events - - whatever could be meant here by 'before' - - for the precondition for eventhood was not present. Thus, it seems, we must give an analysis of the divine in terms of substance and properties. There seems to be no other way than this to proceed.

So to say that 'God spoke the universe into being' is to say that 'God's speaking caused the universe to be', and this is to presuppose as truth-conditions a substance God having the property of speaking - - whatever might be meant by that - - the existence of which is both necessary and sufficient for the world to be. This view nicely supports the counterfactual that if there were not a universe, God would not have spoken it into being.

Of course, in the contemporary theological discussion, few want any longer to analyze the semantic conditions of 'God created the heavens and the earth' in the way I have just suggested. While many would talk about the meaningfulness of the statement, they would have difficulty in specifying precisely the conditions that would make it true or false. But meaning and truth stand together. One can't have one without the other, it seems. To the degree that theologians have divorced the two, to that degree the language of theology has become, to use Wittgenstein's phrase - - a "wheel idly turning.'

The necessary condition of theological language not becoming moribund is for it to reassert its traditional commitment to truth-conditions. Such a recommitment to truth presupposes a determinate ontological situation, and it is this situation that must be investigated. What I have suggested here is very simple: To claim that "God created the heavens and the earth' is true is to claim that there is some being God exhibiting certain properties on the basis of which the universe, which might have not existed, does indeed exist. But making assertions like this takes considerable courage. Lamentably, there has been far too little courage in recent decades on the part of those within the theological guild.

Why the ILT Theological Commitments are Important for the Parish

This address was given at the ILT Theological Conference at Mt. Carmel on June 7 - 10.

Introduction

I want to say something today about the theological direction of the Institute of Lutheran Theology, and how that direction relates to preaching and teaching in the parish. This is a very important issue for those, like me, who still believe that seminary and graduate theological education should be effective in making students better teachers and preachers. Accordingly, I will begin by describing briefly what has now become the five theological emphases of the Institute. I will then relate these principles to what I take to be the “hermeneutical horizon” of those we shall likely encounter within the pews of North American churches in this early part of the twenty-first century. I use the term “hermeneutical horizon” to describe the set of interpretive presuppositions and principles of these early twenty-first century Americans and Canadians who are listening to sermons, participating in liturgies, and attending theological educational opportunities in their congregations.

The Five Theological Tenants of ILT

A few years ago I put together a list of what I believed were fundamental theological assertions or claims for the future of a robust Lutheran theology. The list included a number of assertions about the nature of church, the relation of the infinite and the finite, and the sufficiency of the agency of the Holy Spirit in the process of salvation. Since that time, however, it has become increasingly apparent to me that the first three claims that are not strictly speaking theological are nonetheless the most important of the claims for our time. The first speaks of the reality of God, the second about how we might objectively talk about God, and the third pertains to the nature of God’s relation to the universe. Since those first days of what was called then “the fundamentals,” I have had discussions with numerous people - - including the very able staff of the Institute of Lutheran Theology - - and I have accordingly refined the list to five. I offer the following as critical assertions for a robust Lutheran theology:

•Theological Realism. This is the assertion that God does exist and has a particular, determinate nature apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language. While it may be surprising to some that a theologian would have to specify a commitment to theological realism rather than merely presuppose it, the truth is that theological realism is by no means any longer assumed within mainline Protestant theology. The explanation for this takes a bit of time to develop, and its full development is unfortunately beyond what I can do here today. However, I should say that I did do a Ph.D. in Contemporary Theology and Theological Thinking at the University of Iowa in the 1980s, and I found very few theological realists in those days either in the theological books I read and reflected upon, or the students, faculty, and professional theologians with whom I had the opportunity to work and speak.

•Semantic Realism. This asserts that our language about God has truth-conditions, that is, that there are features about the world, or more generally about what ultimately is, that make our language about God true or false. While it may be again surprising that theologians would not simply presuppose semantic realism, there are a host of very technical reasons - - some of which are scarcely understood by the theologians themselves - - why semantic realism is not widely subscribed to within leadership circles of faith communities within mainline Protestant denominationalism. Semantic realism claims the possibility of evidence transcending truth conditions, that is, it claims that language about God and God’s being is either true or false regardless of whether or not divine being is perceptually and publicly manifestable to us. This is widely assumed to be a very controversial philosophical claim. There are several alternatives to semantic realism, some of which claim that our talk of God is entirely in error, meaningless, or ultimately about features of ourselves or the world, features of which many users of the language are not aware. It is my contention that most theological education in the last fifty years has either explicitly or implicitly rejected the very possibility of semantic realism.

•Theophysical causation. This asserts that God can actually do things in the world. Beginning with the assumption that “to be real is to have causal powers” theophysical causation states that God’s actions must be understood causally, and that God’s agency is involved in causal relations. For instance, to say ‘God creates the universe’ is to assert a causal relation between God and the universe; it is to say, minimally, that the universe would not have come about as it did were it not for the activity of God. Moreover, to claim that “God redeems His creation” or that “God sustains His creation” is to say that creation would not have been redeemed without God’s action, nor would it have been sustained. Talking about theophyiscal causation, however, involves us in a very tricky matter: We have to be able to assert some kind of relationship between the infinite and the finite, between eternity and termporality, between the nonphysical and physical. Clarifying the nature of such a relationship is enormously difficult and fraught with numerous philosophical problems. For instance, how can something nonphysical be said to cause a change in the physical when the causal chains of the physical do not terminate in the nonphysical?

•A Lutheran Theology of Nature. This asserts that Lutheran theology, if it is to be sufficiently robust to survive within future generations, must reclaim a strong connection to daily life and living. The days of philosophical idealism are over. While previous generations of Lutherans may have rested content in the assumption that their theology and physics did not mix - - and were confident that such a non-mixing was good for theology - - I believe that this is no longer the case. We live in a time dominated primarily by physicalist assumptions. We believe, after all, that all things are made of atoms, and that such atoms are themselves very complex wholes whose parts are leptons and hadrons, etc. While we admit that the quantum world is quirky, we are not ready to admit that it is spiritual, that it is finally somehow mind. In such a world as ours, separating the actions of God from nature leaves people confused. How can one talk about the mighty acts of God without talking about the mighty acts of God in nature? The problem, of course, is that we Lutherans, along with many within mainline Protestantism, have been quite successful in talking about God without talking about nature. The notion of God, we have intoned, is after all finally something that connects to the realm of human value, not the world of physical and metaphysical fact. It is my contention that our slavish commitment to the fact/value distinction has marginalized theology and its language; it has made such language basically language about the self and what it values, rather than language about the world and what ultimately obtains.

•The Clarity of Scripture. This asserts that Lutheran theology must again return to a robust understanding of sola scriptura. Luther and the reformers presupposed that the Bible had a clarity making possible the apprehension of its content without the need of sophisticated and profoundly scholarly methods of ascertaining it. After all, Luther criticized the tradition’s four-fold method of Biblical interpretation, whereby all of Scripture was thought to carry a literal/historical sense, a hidden allegorical sense, a morally-relevant tropological sense, and finally an eschatological anagogical sense. Luther and kin realized that having such a method virtually guarantees that the Bible can mean anything that the interpreter wants it to mean, that is, that the sense of Scripture is merely a projection of the human interpreter upon the text. Such a view of things, of course, undercuts the very authority of Scripture. Accordingly, it is not Scripture that has the authority, but the various human readings of Scripture that has it. Luther and the Reformers also spoke of the internal clarity of Scripture, the clarity that Scripture had for the hearts of men and women in bondage to sin and not able to free themselves. The external clarity of Scripture grounds and internal apprehension by the faithful, an activity that presupposes the movement of the Holy Spirit.

Why Not the Classic Lutheran Tenants?

These fundamental assertions have been sometimes attacked because they do not seemingly talk about what is essential for Lutheran theology, that is, the centrality of Christ, the distinction between law and gospel, the theology of the cross, the simul iustus et peccator, the finite bearing the infinite, etc. But this is an unfortunate misunderstanding of these assertions. I have stated clearly and repeatedly from the beginning that our theology presupposes and affirms these traditional Lutheran motifs, as well as traditional Christian motifs generally. The reason that this set of assertions is highlighted is precisely because the fissure in the modern theological context is not primarily on the question of the putative centrality of Christ in salvation, but rather pertains to the reality of Christ Himself. Granted that Christ is central in salvation, the critical question is whether it is our idea of Christ, or the culturally-transmitted symbol of, or language about, the Christ that is central, or Christ Himself. Is Christ a real being that can sustain causal relationships with other beings in the universe, or is it merely a question of our ideas about Christ that are causally efficacious - - if ideas can be efficacious at all?

Lamentably, in this lecture today, we can only deal with the first three issues. I want to claim that the notions of theological realism, semantic realism, and theophysical causation are central and crucial to life in the parish. I want further to suggest that committed lay people have, in general, always had the good common sense to affirm these notions. The problem has been, I believe, in the educational system that produces pastors and teachers in the mainline Protestant denominations: These people have not been trained in ways that are sympathetic to these three affirmations. Instead much theological training has assumed theological irrealism, semantic expressivism, and the causal impotence of the divine. There is, accordingly, a theological disconnect between those who teach and preach in mainline Protestant denominations and the committed lay people within them.

But another disconnect arises as well. While committed lay people often simply regard theological realism, semantic realism, and theophysical causation as entailments of the Christian tradition generally, the dominant “cultural default” position within North America is not a position that supposes any of these to be true - - or, at least, does not suppose them to be true in any profound sense. The situation within mainline Protestantism whereby pastors and teachers not espousing theological and semantic realism are supposed to evangelize a group of people themselves not holding such realisms is not a happy one for the perpetuation of the Protestant tradition. While there does not exist a profound presuppositional disconnect between the horizon of leadership and the group to be evangelized on issues of theological and semantic realism, the tacit agreement of horizons between the two groups unfortunately offers no real reason for those to be evangelized to become committed lay people living out their faith within Protestant denominations throughout North America.

Why Theological Realism is Important in the Parish

The classical model of God in the western tradition presupposes certain Greek notions about perfection. In Greek thought influenced by Plato - - Whitehead has said that “all of philosophy is a footnote on Plato” - - God is figured as timelessly eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent, simple, and impassible. God is, as Anselm was to say centuries later, “that which none greater can be thought.” God is accordingly regarded to be a necessary being, a being that does not merely happen to exist, but one who could not have not existed. Such a being is thought to exist apart from human being; indeed God has never not existed. This means, of course, that God existed for eternity before His creation of the world. The Triune God exists for eternity within the immanent Trinity prior to God’s expression into that which was other than He. What is important to see is that on the classical model the order of being (ontology) is unaffected by the order of knowing (epistemology). According to the classical view, God’s determinate being is what it is apart from our ability to perceive, conceive and understand it. God exists determinately before all worlds. The traditional view of God thus presupposes that ontology is logically prior to epistemology.

The Kantian revolution of the late 18th century radically transformed thinking about God. Because the notion of God has no “empirical intuitions” falling under it, Kant regarded it not to be the kind of being that could either be a substance nor could be known to be causally related to anything else that is a substance. Kant thereby relegated God to the status as merely an ideal of pure reason. Accordingly, God has in principle no causal efficacy, nor can He be said to exist apart from human awareness.

After Kant, theologians had to work out various “post-Kantian options for doing theology.” Instead of God-language being about some reality existing over and apart from human being, such language must ultimately be cognized as relatable to the self and its experience. With Kant, epistemology takes primacy over ontology. Accordingly, Schleiermacher identifies God not as a being existing external to human being, but rather “the whence of the feeling of absolute dependence.” Within the nineteenth century, we see various attempts to think God anew. For Schleiermacher, God is somehow reducible to, or identifiable with, the human feeling of absolute dependence. For Kant himself, and certainly his disciple Fichte, God becomes reducible to, or identifiable with, the human moral drive generally. For Hegel, God is somehow reducible to, or identifiable with, human reflection upon reflection, that is, with human thinking generally. Accordingly, as human beings progressively understand the historical identity of being and their thinking of being, they grasp that their thinking of being is itself the thinking of God as God comes to know Himself historically and temporally.

Later post-Kantian options turned more existential in their orientations. Barth and Tillich could both hold basic Kantian presuppositions, yet talk a great deal about God not being a mere idea. The trick here was to regard God relationally as the other of a human encounter, an encounter with a phenomenon that is not of their own conjuring or projection. Yet Barth’s commitment to the eschatological breaking into history of a reality that could not be part of history made it the case that God’s “mighty acts in history” could not be “mighty acts within nature.” Moreover, Tillich’s radical separation between God as the ground and depth of being and the human structure of being made it the case that, for Tillich, God’s existence could not mean that God was simply a member of the domain of existing things, that is, that an “ontological inventory” would include within it that being we call “God.”

Interestingly enough, people in the pews - - and I would say even mainline Protestant pews - - have never really made the Kantian turn fully. They seem yet to believe that to be real is to have causal powers. I would argue that in the present context, with so many options for belief, most people find that there are really no compelling reasons to attend church simply to remember or venerate an idea, ideal, or any other abstract object - - no matter how lofty that idea or object might be. One can, after all, venerate an idea or attune oneself to an abstract object without being in church. For the great numbers of people presupposing that the notion of God somehow clarifies the highest and noblest sentiments of human being, attending church services often grants no profound utility. Reading and discussing one’s noble sentiments is probably more useful than going to a church service where one’s sentiments are only obliquely referenced.

I think that the “cultural default” position on God in modern North American culture is probably not far from what Christian Smith has recently called “Moral Therapeutic deism”. In his recent Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Life of American Teenagers, he offers the following summary of this view:

• A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.
• God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
• The central goal of life is to be happy and feel good about oneself.
• God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when he is needed to resolve a problem.
• Good people go to heaven when they die.

It is important to analyze this a bit, for on first blush it would appear that this cultural default view suggests theological realism after all. As Smith and company point out, the teenagers they have interviewed do mostly hold that a God does exist outside human awareness. Indeed, they espouse a rather vaguely platonic belief that they have a soul and it goes somewhere good when they die. After this, however, things get complex in a hurry. God is not thought to be causally active in the world, and theological language is not thought to be capable of sustaining truth-conditions. The idea is that people use the language that they have inherited, and somehow this language helps in being both moral, and in achieving some peace and happiness in one’s life.

In analyzing this view, it is important to note that those holding it have not, in general, thought deeply enough about it to assure any kind of theological coherency. While the first tenet of “moral therapeutic deism” suggests theological realism, I am not sure most holding this view would want to assert that some determinate divine being exists apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language. To claim that ‘God exists and watches over the world’ is consistent with the great religious traditions of the world, is clearly to deny the Triunity of God. A general God cannot both exist and watch over the world and a specific Triune God also so exist. Moreover, it cannot be the case that both ‘God is not particularly involved with one’s life’ (as moral therapeutic deism asserts) and that God is triunely active in quickening the hearts of dead sinners. The two cannot exist simultaneously.

Even if one could somehow assert that moral therapeutic deism does presuppose theological realism, it is simply not the case that such a realism would be a Christian realism. The critical claim for Christians is that Christ has been resurrected, and that somehow that resurrected Christ now exists independently of human awareness, perception, conception and language.

It seems to me all important that the Christian theological realist assert the reality of Christ apart from human being. In the absence of such a realism, language of Christ merely becomes symbolic language of empowerment, language that helps the person achieve greater moral direction and existential peace. But, of course, this moral therapeutic deistic trajectory is completely consistent with the Kantian turn in theology: The idea of God functions importantly to ameliorate human life. God is somehow identified with human moral striving and human existential health. God’s being is not a being that is prior to human being, but God’s being is only assertible on the grounds of human being. For moral therapeutic deism, epistemology is prior to ontology.

It is obvious that Christian discipleship is very difficult on such a view. While God is thought to exist apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language, the Triune God is not. This means, of course, that Christ is not important in and of Himself as He whom one must follow. While talk of Christ is fine within a tradition of reflection on the problem of human being, fear of committing to Christian exclusivism makes even putatively committed Christians not want to be realists with respect to the second person of the Trinity. Of course, Christ has always been a stumbling block.

Why Semantic Realism is Important

Traditional theological language was truth-conditional, and robustly so. While the tradition always understood that one could perhaps not know what it is that one was talking about when talking theologically, the specificity of the talk was deemed nonetheless crucial in order to refer properly to the divine. Specific Trinitarian formulas were necessary to state the truth about the Trinity. It was not merely a game of having to say the same things as the rest of the tribe, it was rather the assertion that these things were true, and because they were true the whole tribe should say them. Traditional theological language held to the possibility of evidence transcendent truth-conditions. Language about God and God’s relationship to human beings is true or false because of the nature of God and His relationship to human beings. Such language while said by human beings, is not thought to be true because of human beings and the way in which such language is said.

There has been, however, quite a revolution in our thinking about theological language. This is an area where there is perhaps the most profound disconnect between the presuppositions of mainline Protestant pastors and teachers, and the presuppositions of committed lay people. It is an area where there is perhaps the deepest sharing of presuppositions between the “cultural default” view and the horizons of pastors and teachers.

Revisionist views of theological language assume that semantic realism can either not be defended in theology, or if defended, that the assertions of theology must be reduced to the assertions of some other area of discourse entirely. Opponents of theological semantic realism have various options. One can be a semantic realist and claim that no states of affairs exist which make true the sentences of theology. Such opponents say that semantic realism is committed to error theory, to a view of things that simply does not obtain.

Other detractors of semantic realism include semantic expressivism, the view that all language about the divine really is a projection or an expression of the self. This view is quite widely accepted, I believe, and often accompanies the moral therapeutic deism previously mentioned. That God wants humans to be happy and peaceful is perhaps best understood as an expression of the self upon the world. If God is not causally engaged in the world, what is the best analysis of the assertion that “God wants humans to be happy?” I would argue that it is best seen as a mere projection upon the cosmos of our own desire to be happy.

Other options for opponents of theological semantic realism include reductionisms of various stripes. Maybe talk about God really just is talk about the self, as Feuerbach claimed. Maybe all such talk is either semantically or theoretically reducible to psychology, economics, or sociology. It should be obvious that the rejection of semantic realism is consistent with, and probably entailed by, a rejection of Christian exclusivism.

If language about the divine is not really about the divine over and apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language, then such language is really culture-bound and its “truth” must be asserted in ways that are quite different from the the truth-conditions of the tradition. For instance, one might assert that the various religious languages of the differing traditions are true in that they express or empower human beings in various ways. Statements about Christ thus are true because of the effect of the symbol, language, or concept of Christ within human experience generally.

It should be obvious that pastors and teachers presupposing this view of things do not really have a reason to evangelize the masses who are already accepting the “cultural default” view. What is it about the particularity of Christian claims that makes it the case that one would want others to adopt them? The tradition said that such claims were true, but in the absence of clear truth conditions, this assertion devolves merely to an assertion that such language is effective in the moral and existential lives of human beings.
Why Theophysical Causation is Important

The tradition assumed that God really does create, redeem and sustain the world. While there was much reflection on the relationship between the being of God and the being of contingent being, there was never a denial of God’s actions as somehow causing the distribution of natural events. The whole premise of the supernatural/natural distinction is that God can and does work in the world, whether through divine primary causality coursing through all things, or via special interventionist causal action.

However, since the time of Kant, the effort has been to think of God primarily in noncausal terms. God is not the kind of being that can be appealed to as the terminus of any causal chain. God’s being is not like contingent being, so whatever contingent causality is, it is not divine causality. As I pointed out previously, in periods deeply in debt to idealism, this is not as profoundly problematic as it is in our time, a time governed by physicalistic assumptions, a time where people widely regard it to be the case that “to be real is to have causal powers.” In our time, when people do decreasingly come to worship out of cultural inertia, there has to be some compelling reason to do so. If pastors and teachers suppose that God is not real in the sense of being causally efficacious in one’s life, then they can finally only offer God as a great idea, as the embodiment of justice, goodness, power, etc. But it is difficult to see why one would go to church to encounter such a God unless the pastor or teacher can say things that ultimately make the church-goer happy or more at peace. But this puts the pastor or teacher in the same business as the counselor or the writer of self-help books.
On the issue of divine causality, there exists again the profound disconnect between the loyal lay people who regularly pray to God and expect God to do things in the world and the pastors and teachers who know that God is not the kind of thing that can be in principle a being that can do things in the world. Here the pastors and teachers have to teach and preach in such ways that do not cause the really committed to leave the faith community. Yet, in their preaching and teaching, they are to preach and teach to an audience that does not believe that God is causally efficacious but somehow still desperately wishes it were so.

The question of the causal efficacy of the divine is, in my opinion, the fundamental fissure between Christian Protestant expressions. While we can argue the fine points of theology among Reformed, Lutheran, Tudor, and Anabaptist traditions, the question of whether or not God is the kind of being that can in principle change the distribution of worldly events and properties is far more fundamental. It is, after all, quite difficult to frame a non-causal account of divine redemption. If Christ does not exist over and apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language, and if divine things are in principle not able to be causally linked to worldly things, then in what sense can Christ “save” us? That we have been able to proceed for so many years within mainline Protestantism as if this were not a deep and significant question merely shows the theological bankruptcy of our time.

Conclusion & Summary

There was once an emperor who was convinced that he had clothes though no one else saw them. All except the most unsophisticated were able to affirm that the naked emperor had clothes, but not so the children.

When I was a child I marveled at the world and asked questions about how there might be a God that somehow hooked up to it. After six years of Ph.D. work in theology, I was ready to put away childish things and do real theology. But I know now that some questions from children our childish and some quite profound. I think that the question of whether or not the emperor has clothes is the profound question of a child. Jesus told us to be as little children. So that is why I am here today. I believe that the emperor is naked; I cannot find a stitch of clothing on him. I can’t see a way ahead theologically without first coming to terms with the nakedness of the emperor.

The Institute of Lutheran theology thinks the emperor is naked as well. It steadfastly and boldly asserts that God is real, that our language about God is true, and that God really does create and redeem His world. The Institute believes that these commitments are of fundamental importance in the parish. The pastor and teacher must, after all, have a good reason to evangelize. If her God is real, her God causally active, and her language about God true, she has every reason to evangelize. If this is not the case, then things are much more complicated. In fact, if not, one would expect to see a rather confusing situation in parishes across North America; one would, in fact, expect to see the situation we are in fact witnessing today.

Prolegomena to a Robust Lutheran Theology - - Introduction

Lutheran theology is in a sorry state. There are reasons why it is in a sorry state, and there are ways we might address the state.

It is my conviction that Lutheran theology shall survive only if it reclaims some of the original presuppositions upon which it grew. Specifically, I argue that Lutheran theology needs now to embrace the following five theses:

· Theological Realism
· Semantic Realism
· Theophysical Causation
· A Lutheran Theology of Nature
· The Internal Clarity of Scripture

In the following group of blogs entries, I shall point to what I believe the problem is, and show how each of these help to address that problem.

As always I welcome all comments. I believe that theology must be worked out in conversation and dialogue. Unfortunately, those that might be interested in this discussion are few and they are often separated by great geographical differences. Through the gift of new technologies, however, we can achieve real theological conversation

Types of Theological Non-Realism

Clearly, the question of realism is hotly debated in philosophy, forming one of the standard lines of inquiry in the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of language and logic, and the philosophy of religion. One can be a global or local realist, that is, one can be a non-realist with respect to all subject matters, or merely non-realist with respect to some, while remaining realist with respect to others. For instance, one could be realist about the things talked about in astronomy and non-realist about those specified in ethics and morality. Furthermore, one can be realist or non-realist with respect to degree. There are many ways to be realist and anti-realist, and clearly some views are more robustly realist (or non-realist) than others. Discussing theological realism demands we first get clear on realism in general. Let us call the following position generic realism.

Object a is real if and only if a exists and has the properties it has (call them P) apart from human awareness, perception, conceptual schemes, beliefs, and linguistic practices.

Given this characterization, the first distinction that must be made is between an object, property, or event’s existence from its independence. One might, after all, simply claim that a does not exist. An example of this is the nominalist who denies the existence of platonic universals. All statements presupposing or asserting the existence of a universal would be false because such things simply do not exist.

One might, however, allow the existence of a, yet deny its independence. For example, the transcendental idealist might claim that the object exists apart from us, by that all of its features are dependent upon us, that is, the properties are dependent of their being experienced by the subject. With respect to the question of God, one might therefore reject theological realism by denying the existence of God, or one might merely deny the independence of the divine properties from their being perceived or conceived by human beings.

If one claims that God does not exist, or that God does not instantiate the properties attributed to Him, then all of the theory that talks about God (theology) must be an extended error. Philosophers call accounts putatively referring to domains of non-existing objects, properties or events error theories. For instance, if mathematical objects do not exist, then accounts referring to them are clearly in error; statements within such theories are false. Similarly, if there are no ethical or moral properties, then one might claim that theories about such things also constitute error accounts. So the first question for theology has been, and must always be, is theology itself an error theory? Are any statements of theology true, or are such statements false, just like all statements referring to such questionable entities as ghosts, goblins, and ghouls.

At this point, however, things can get complicated. What do we do with matters of reduction? Do those objects, properties or events exist for which a reduction is possible? Prima facie, we might want to say that all statements about the reductandum (that to be reduced) are false when we can specify the reductantes(those things doing the reducing) necessary and sufficient for the existence of those things to be reduced. For instance, if God is instantiated if and only if the “whence” of the feeling of absolute dependence (Schleiermacher) is instantiated, then one might claim that God just is the whence of this feeling of absolute dependence, that there is nothing more to God than this ”whence” of absolute dependence.

Notice, however, that reductions of this type do not formally entail non-realism with respect to the class of objects in question. Water is instantiated just in case H20 is instantiated, but this does not mean that water is not real. One might say that the existence of H20 actually vindicates the existence of water. On the other hand, when we learned that “polywater” is instantiated if and only if water with impurities from improperly washed glassware is instantiate, we thus eliminate polywater from the world of existing objects.

Thus, reductions can be either vindicative or eliminative. If we find that some disjunction of neurophysical properties are instantiated if and only if a particular mental state is instantiated, then do we claim that the mental states have no ontological status, or do we point out that the existence of the neuro-realizers actually makes mental causation possible, and consequently, that mental properties can be said to exist after all?

It seems to me that whether or not a reduction is vindicative or eliminative depends a great deal upon our expectations. If we are expecting mental phenomenon to have ontological status in the way a Cartesian dualist might think about it, then obviously the reduction might lead us to deny ontological status to the mental. However, if our expectations are that the mental is really epiphenomenal, that such properties are in principle unable to enter into causal relations, then the reduction of them to disjunctions of causal neural-realizers might vindicate the existence of the mental to us. Formally, just as thinking of a golden mountain in France is a mental state instantiated if and only some causally efficacious disjunction of neuro-configurations are instantiated , so too is water instantiated if and only if H20 is instantiated.

This question is obviously important for theology and, to my mind, has again much to do with expectation. If we expect that God is a being who has the kind of causal powers that would allow for the answering of prayer and the resurrection of the dead, then we are likely to think that the Schleiermacherian reduction eliminates use of the word ‘God’, for there is no referent to ‘God’ in the way that the language has been traditionally understood. However, if we believe that God-talk already makes no sense whatsoever, finding a reference to ‘God’ as the whence of the feeling of absolute dependence may actually vindicate the term’s use. We might accordingly ascribe ontological status to God, though we are not meaning by ‘God’ what was meant by the term during most of the western theological tradition. So the statements of theology could all be false because the objects, properties, events, and states of affairs referred to by the language of theology do not exist, and yet the putative reductions of the theological to human experience do not entail that theology itself constitutes an error theory. If theology is an error-theory, reduction alone does not entail it to be such.

In addition to the assertion that theology is an error-theory by being comprised of statements that are truth-apt, but nonetheless false, we might want to deny realism in theology be claiming that the language of theology is not truth-apt at all. Perhaps theological language mimics the role of language once widely ascribed to ethical and moral discourse; perhaps theological language is expressivist, and makes no factual claim whatsoever?

Expressivism in theology constitutes itself in parallel fashion to its ethical counterpart. Instead of the putative statements of ethics referring to an objective moral reality, or to subjective but determinate states, ethical sentences merely express emotions of approbation or disapprobation with respect to a particular agent or act. Saying that ‘John is wrong to steal the candy’ thus is analyzed into “‘John stealing candy’, boo!” Ethical sentences merely express one’s emotional response to an ethical situation. They make no more of a truth claim than someone crying.

Pure expressionism in theology is difficult to find in the recent literature for a number of reasons - - one may be courage - - but clearly much theological discussion merely evinces the speaker’s feelings about a particular thing. In liberationist theologies of all kinds, oftentimes it seems that the writer is quite unconcerned with the factuality of the divine, and quite concerned with persuading people about his social/political/economic/cultural agenda. An expressionist account may be the most plausible to offer in such situations.

But what about discourse that is truth-apt, but nevertheless does make claims about the divine - - not all of which are false? Interestingly enough, theological discourse of this type seemingly need not be realist; while one might grant existence to divine entities and properties, one still might deny that such things have independence apart from human perception, conceptual schemes and linguistic practice.

Bishop Berkeley is famous, of course, for his denial that matter exists apart from mind. Although, as he says, “we must talk like the vulgar and think like the wise,” it is nonetheless true that “all the choir of heaven and the furniture of earth, in a word all those bodies that compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind” (Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge, 1710). Although our statements about matter and its relationships are either true or false apart from us, matter is wholly dependent upon human being; the contour of matter is clearly dependent upon human perceptual experience. With respect to theology, God may not be independent of human experience, yet sentences about God might still be true or false. Accordingly, one can be an anti-realist with respect to the domain of the divine if one holds that statements about this domain are true or false, but that the entire domain is somehow dependent upon human cognition.

So what are the options for the anti-realist theist who denies expressivism and error theory? In parallel with the contemporary discussion in the philosophy of science, it seems one might hold that postulation of the divine realm, though not independent of human experience, still is needed to account for human experience. This type of argument basically proceeds as an “inference to the best explanation” argument: One asserts that there is a divine being having such and such a nature because the assertion of such a being best explains the kind of experience we have and the kind of world we seem to have. Another possibility is to argue that the consensus of theological opinion is not extension-reflecting of the references of theological language, but rather extension-determining, that is, agreed upon theological statements act to determine the very reality they report. The objects, properties, events and states of affairs of theological theory are judgment-dependent, not judgment-independent.

So what are our options in theology with respect to the issue of realism?

1) One might say that the statements of theology are truth-apt, but because no divine reality exists, they are all false and thus theology constitutes an error theory. Clearly, this view is not an option for a theist engaged in the theological task.

2) might say that the statements of theology are not truth-apt; they are merely expressions of human emotion, value, or orientations. While this view may be an improvement over the previous, it is not a very promising way to proceed theologically. After all, while one seems more or less stuck with ethical language because of the nature of human relationships, this seems not to be true of theological language. This language seems more prone to elimination than the former kind.

3) One might say that the statements of language are truth-apt and not globally false. Simply put, one might say that divine reality exists in some way, yet deny the independence of this reality from human awareness, perception, conception and language. On this view, one could claim that the assertion of the existence of divine reality is justified on the basis of an inference to the best explanation or on the basis a theological consensus that somehow determines theological extension itself. While (3) is more promising than (1) and (2), they run into real difficulties in explaining the truth of discourse about the person and work of the Christ. Does the salvific work of Christ constitute the best explanation of our human experience? It seems unlikely. In fact, scripture and tradition have referred to Christ as a “stumbling block” for human reason. And as regards to any theological consensus, it is precisely at the point of our discourse about Christ that we lose consensus, or at least enough consensus to derail any anti-realist effort presupposing a uniformity of theological opinion.

So what is left? It seems to me that what is left is theological realism, the assertion that God exists and has His nature apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language. The assertion of such a God and descriptions of His nature seem to be clearly evidence-transcending. Human beings simply cannot be in relevant perceptual causal connections to those divine states of affairs that make assertions of the Trinity true. This being said, however, there is another kind of way that such statements might be justified. If these statements’ causal history includes the activity of the Holy Spirit, one might hold that they make claims about the reality of the divine without be wholly evidence transcendent. If the theologian can be a semantic realist without having to assert an extreme position with regard to evidence-transcendence, there may be no good reason fro the theologian not to be a semantic realist. This question is important, I think, and we shall explore it in the next post on semantic realism.