“Theological language cannot proclaim what it has first failed to name.”
This essay forms part of Prolegomena to Disputationes Theologicae, a series in philosophical theology produced through the Department of Philosophical Theology at Christ School of Theology. Together these essays articulate the methodological foundations of the larger Disputationes Theologicae project by recovering the proper order of theological inquiry. The series proceeds from the conviction that theology exists because these questions exist and that theology's first responsibility is to render Christian doctrine intelligible without diminishing, translating away, or replacing the reality to which it refers. Having argued that theology must first render its judgments intelligible, the present essay asks the next necessary question: How does theological language genuinely refer to God? Only language that truly refers can be truthfully proclaimed.
This essay is the third of six Prolegomena to Disputationes Theologicae, a series in philosophical theology produced through the Department of Philosophical Theology at Christ School of Theology. Together, these essays articulate the methodological foundations of the larger Disputationes Theologicae project by recovering the proper order of theological inquiry. They proceed from the conviction that theology exists because these questions exist and that theology’s first responsibility is to render Christian doctrine intelligible without diminishing, translating away, or replacing the reality to which it refers.
The preceding essay argued that intelligibility is not the source of theological truth but a condition under which theological claims may be responsibly affirmed or denied. Theology therefore seeks conceptual clarity before it renders judgment. Yet intelligibility alone cannot complete theology’s task. One may understand perfectly well what a sentence means while remaining uncertain whether it is about anything at all.
The next question therefore arises necessarily:
How does theological language become genuinely about God?
This question is prior to proclamation. The priority at issue is not necessarily temporal. The preacher need not first complete a philosophical theory of reference before proclaiming the gospel. The priority is logical and theological. Proclamation cannot create its own referent. It cannot make itself speech about God merely through rhetorical power, ecclesial authorization, existential effect, or the sincerity of the one who speaks.
One cannot proclaim what one’s language has failed to identify.
A sermon may be rhetorically compelling, existentially arresting, ecclesially sanctioned, and even morally transformative while remaining uncertain in its reference. Before theology asks whether proclamation is faithful, effective, or life-giving, it must ask whether the language of proclamation continues to name the reality of which prophetic and apostolic testimony speaks.
Theological language therefore requires more than intelligibility.
It requires reference.
Reference is among the most neglected questions in modern theology. Enormous attention has been given to meaning, interpretation, narrative, language games, performative utterance, communal practice, existential appropriation, and rhetorical effect. These inquiries have often been illuminating. Language does form communities, shape perception, order practices, and open possibilities of existence. The question, however, is whether the reality about which theology speaks is constituted by these linguistic and communal activities or whether those activities remain answerable to a reality they did not create.
The decisive question is simple:
What makes theological discourse about God rather than merely about religion?
Theology does not merely analyze religious consciousness. It does not merely describe ecclesial practices, preserve inherited vocabularies, narrate communal identities, or interpret human experiences of ultimacy. It claims to speak about God: the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the Father of Jesus Christ; the God who creates, judges, reconciles, raises the dead, and promises the consummation of creation.
Unless these claims genuinely refer beyond the linguistic practices in which they are expressed, theology has exchanged its subject matter for its own discourse. It may continue to use the word ‘God,’ but the word may now designate only a moral ideal, a communal self-understanding, an existential possibility, a cultural memory, or the symbolic horizon of human meaning. The vocabulary remains, while the subject has quietly changed.
Reference must therefore be distinguished from several closely related notions.
Reference is not meaning. A sentence may be intelligible even when its principal terms fail to identify anything real.
Reference is not truth. A statement may successfully identify its subject while predicating something false of it. Reference makes truth and falsity possible; it does not by itself determine which obtains.
Reference is not warrant. A person may possess reasons for believing a claim even though the terms employed in that claim do not refer as the speaker assumes.
Reference is not exhaustive understanding. Speakers frequently refer successfully while possessing incomplete, confused, or partially mistaken conceptions of that to which they refer. Referential success does not require conceptual mastery.
Nor is reference identical with existential appropriation, ecclesial participation, or performative effect. These may accompany successful reference, and proclamation may indeed become a means through which God addresses the hearer. Yet neither personal transformation nor communal use can by itself guarantee that the language employed remains about the God whom Christian witness claims to name.
Theology therefore requires a distinct account of reference.
The Christian answer does not begin with the human capacity to reach God through description, inference, religious experience, or conceptual construction. It begins with God’s capacity to identify himself. God does not first become the referent of theological discourse when human beings devise a sufficiently adequate name. God gives himself to be named.
Israel does not invent the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The Church does not construct the Father of Jesus Christ by adopting a distinctive religious vocabulary. God publicly identifies himself through acts and words: in the calling of Israel, the prophetic witness, the incarnation of the Word, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the apostolic testimony, and the scriptural form in which this testimony is normatively received.
Human language refers because human beings have first been addressed.
Reference is therefore receptive before it is expressive.
This ordering distinguishes Christian theology from theories that construe theological language primarily as the projection of religious consciousness, the grammar of ecclesial life, or the symbolic articulation of human existence. Theology speaks because it has first been spoken to. It names because God has first made himself identifiable.
Yet revelation does not eliminate philosophical questions concerning reference. It creates them. Once God has acted and spoken, theology must ask how names, predicates, narratives, metaphors, and doctrines continue to refer to the God who has revealed himself. It must ask how reference remains stable through historical distance, linguistic change, doctrinal development, cultural translation, and the inevitable partiality of human understanding.
Divine self-disclosure is therefore the ground of theological reference, but it is not a substitute for theological discipline.
The problem is not merely whether the Church has retained the same words. The same expression may be preserved while its referent is altered. Nor does referential continuity require that every generation possess precisely the same descriptions or conceptual schemes. Different descriptions may identify the same reality, while identical descriptions may be employed within fundamentally different ontologies.
Theology must therefore distinguish continuity of vocabulary from continuity of reference.
This is also why theological interpretation cannot terminate in textual analysis alone. Texts possess linguistic forms, historical settings, and authorial intentions. These are indispensable to interpretation. Yet prophetic and apostolic authors do not finally intend only their own acts of writing. They intend realities. They bear witness to what God has done, whom God has identified himself to be, and what God has promised.
Theological interpretation consequently asks not only what a text meant within its first historical context, but what reality the text identifies and whether contemporary theological speech remains answerable to that same reality.
The order is therefore theological before it is hermeneutical:
God acts and speaks.
Prophetic and apostolic witnesses identify the one who has acted.
Scripture normatively bears this witness.
The Church receives, interprets, and confesses Scripture.
Doctrine tests whether the Church’s speech preserves the identity of the one witnessed to.
Proclamation addresses the hearer in the name of this same God.
The legitimacy of proclamation depends upon preserving rather than replacing this referential order. Proclamation does not establish the identity of God by its own occurrence. It becomes genuine proclamation when the God who has identified himself in Israel and in the crucified and risen Jesus Christ remains the one about whom—and through whose agency—the proclamation speaks.
The claim that reference precedes proclamation therefore does not deny that God acts through proclamation. It identifies the condition under which such a claim is intelligible. God may address the hearer through the proclaimed Word because the proclaimed Word does not invent the one who speaks through it. Its authority is derivative. Its referent is antecedent. Its efficacy, when granted, is divine.
This also explains why philosophical theology remains indispensable. Philosophy does not discover or manufacture the referent of Christian theology independently of revelation. Revelation has already identified the one about whom theology speaks. Philosophical theology clarifies the logical, semantic, and ontological conditions under which theological language may continue to refer faithfully to this God.
It distinguishes naming from description, reference from predication, identity from attributed properties, and continuity of terminology from continuity of subject matter. It asks how speakers may successfully refer under conditions of partial understanding, how descriptions may change without changing the referent, and how apparently identical theological expressions may conceal incompatible accounts of reality.
These distinctions are not external constraints imposed upon theology. They are instruments of theological accountability. Without them, theology may preserve traditional vocabulary while replacing its subject with something conceptually more manageable.
Reference is therefore neither a merely linguistic achievement nor a merely historical inheritance. It is the continuing discipline of remaining answerable to the God whose self-disclosure first made theological language possible. It is the refusal to allow the Church’s words, practices, experiences, or conceptual systems to become substitutes for the reality to which they are ordered.
Theology may revise its descriptions.
It may refine its concepts.
It may correct its inherited models.
It may discover that some of its predicates were confused, inadequate, or false.
What it may not do is quietly change the subject while continuing to speak as though nothing decisive has happened.
Reference precedes proclamation because proclamation can proclaim as gospel only what it has first received as God’s self-identification. Where reference fails, proclamation becomes religious speech about the community’s own meanings. Where reference is preserved, proclamation may remain answerable to the God who acts, speaks, judges, reconciles, and promises.
Only once the referent has been identified does the question of predication properly arise. We may then ask not merely whether theological language is about God, but whether what it says about God is true.
The next question therefore follows necessarily:
Under what conditions can theological judgments be true?
