Prolegomena to Disputationes Theologicae III: Reference Before Proclamation

“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?

Prolegomena to Disputationes Theologicae II: Intelligibility Before Doctrine

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. The essays together 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.

Christian theology begins with revelation, but theological inquiry begins with intelligibility. Revelation gives theology its subject matter; intelligibility makes responsible theological judgment possible. Theology therefore does not seek intelligibility because intelligibility creates truth. It seeks intelligibility because finite knowers cannot responsibly affirm what they do not understand.

Much of modern theology has quietly reversed this order. It has assumed that doctrine can be defended, proclaimed, appropriated, or revised before asking whether the doctrine itself has first been rendered intelligible. The result has been a theology that often knows what it wishes to affirm while remaining uncertain about what, precisely, it is affirming.

Christian theology has often assumed that its principal task is to state the doctrines of the Christian faith correctly. The assumption is understandable. Doctrine matters because truth matters, and the Church cannot confess faithfully if it no longer knows what it is confessing.

Yet a doctrine may be repeated correctly without being understood. It may retain its inherited vocabulary while the distinctions that once gave that vocabulary meaning have disappeared. It may be defended with great conviction even though no one can say clearly what would have to be true for the doctrine itself to be true.

The problem is therefore deeper than doctrinal disagreement. Before theology can ask whether a doctrine ought to be affirmed, rejected, defended, or revised, it must ask whether the doctrine has first become intelligible.

Intelligibility comes before doctrine.

This claim does not mean that theology exists before revelation, Scripture, or confession. Christian theology receives its subject from revelation and its language through the scriptural and ecclesial traditions that bear witness to it. Nor does it mean that the theologian must first construct a neutral philosophical foundation upon which Christian doctrine may later be placed.

It means something more modest and more demanding. Before a theological judgment can be responsibly affirmed, theology must understand what is being claimed, what distinctions the claim requires, what realities its terms identify, and what would follow if the claim were true.

This methodological ordering may be expressed in a single governing principle: intelligibility is not the source of theological truth; it is the condition under which theological truth can be responsibly affirmed or denied.

Theology therefore seeks intelligibility not because revelation requires philosophical completion, but because theological judgment requires conceptual clarity concerning what revelation gives. Its task is not to supplement revelation but to understand it responsibly.

A sentence can be grammatically familiar while remaining conceptually obscure. Christians may say that God is triune, that the Word became flesh, that Christ is present in the sacrament, that God acts providentially, or that the dead will be raised. Each sentence belongs recognizably to Christian confession. Yet familiarity does not by itself secure intelligibility.

What does it mean to say that God is one and three? In what respect is God one, and in what respect three? What is meant by person and nature? What must be true if the one who suffered under Pontius Pilate is the eternal Son? What kind of presence is claimed when the Church says that Christ gives his body and blood? What relation between divine and creaturely causality is implied by providence? What makes the person raised numerically identical with the person who died?

These are not questions imposed upon doctrine from outside. They arise from doctrine itself. They are required if doctrine is to become more than the repetition of inherited expressions.

The first discipline of intelligibility is conceptual distinction. Theology must distinguish what should not be confused.

Person is not nature. Cause is not ground. Reference is not meaning. Truth is not usefulness. Divine action is not one finite cause alongside another. Presence is not necessarily spatial location. Participation is not identity. Mystery is not contradiction. Incomprehensibility is not unintelligibility.

Much theological confusion arises because one term is asked to perform the work of several. The Holy Spirit is invoked to solve a problem of reference, warrant, sanctification, ecclesial authority, or personal experience without distinguishing those questions. Participation is used to explain likeness, causality, communion, transformation, and identity as though these were one relation. Divine mystery is appealed to when an argument has merely failed to specify what it means.

Philosophical theology begins by resisting such conflations. Its first service is not invention but distinction. Before proposing new constructions, it seeks to clarify inherited judgments by identifying the conceptual boundaries within which responsible theological reasoning becomes possible.

Yet conceptual intelligibility is only one part of the matter. There is also semantic intelligibility: the question of how theological language means anything at all.

Words acquire meaning through histories of use, patterns of inference, relations of contrast, practices of correction, and the realities to which they are directed. The word “resurrection,” for example, cannot mean whatever a speaker wishes it to mean. It belongs within scriptural narratives, Jewish expectations, apostolic testimony, creedal confession, liturgical practice, and disputes concerning bodily identity and death. To redefine resurrection as the survival of influence, the persistence of memory, or the continuing significance of Jesus may preserve a religious function while changing the subject.

The same is true of “God,” “creation,” “incarnation,” “sin,” “grace,” and “judgment.” Theological terms are neither empty containers nor private symbols. They possess histories, identities, inferential commitments, and conditions of responsible use.

Semantic intelligibility therefore requires more than clarity of style. A sentence may be written plainly and still change the meaning of its central terms. Conversely, a difficult doctrine may remain intelligible even when its subject exceeds complete comprehension.

This distinction is essential. To render a doctrine intelligible is not to make it simple, obvious, or exhaustively transparent. God is not made comprehensible by being described coherently. The incarnation does not cease to be mysterious when person and nature are distinguished. Resurrection does not become empirically predictable when its identity conditions are clarified.

Intelligibility is therefore not mastery. It is the disciplined determination of what is being claimed, how the claim holds together, what it excludes, and what reality would have to be like for it to be true. Theology does not remove mystery by rendering doctrine intelligible. It distinguishes genuine mystery from conceptual confusion and thereby allows mystery to remain genuinely theological.

There is, finally, an ontological dimension of intelligibility. Theological language can be meaningful only because reality itself is sufficiently determinate to be known, identified, and judged.

If things possessed no identities, properties, relations, histories, or powers, there would be nothing for language to describe correctly or incorrectly. If Jesus Christ were merely the product of ecclesial interpretation, the Church could not be corrected by the one it confesses. If God were only a function of religious language, theology could never discover that its language had falsified its subject.

The intelligibility of theological discourse therefore presupposes that reality is not created by discourse. Language mediates our access to reality, but it does not bring its referent into existence.

This is the fundamental realist commitment of Disputationes Theologicae. Theology speaks through finite concepts, historical languages, contested traditions, and fallible judgments. Yet it speaks about realities that are not constituted by those concepts, languages, traditions, or judgments.

Theology can therefore be wrong, and that possibility is not an embarrassment to theological reasoning but one of its necessary conditions. A discourse incapable of falsehood is equally incapable of truth.

If every doctrinal formulation becomes valid merely because it functions within a community, theology has ceased to make judgments about reality and has become the description of ecclesial practice.

The demand for intelligibility is therefore also a demand for corrigibility. A doctrine must be stated clearly enough that one can identify what would count against it, what would expose an equivocation, and what would show that the subject has been changed.

This is why inherited language, however venerable, cannot be protected from analysis. The purpose of analysis is not to dissolve the confession but to determine whether the language still performs the work for which it was formed.

The doctrine of the Trinity, for example, must preserve both divine unity and irreducible personal distinction. An account that secures unity by reducing Father, Son, and Spirit to modes of appearance has not clarified the doctrine. It has changed it. An account that secures distinction by positing three independent divine beings has done the same.

The doctrine of the incarnation must preserve the identity of the one Son and the integrity of both divine and human natures. An account that protects divinity by assigning suffering to an independent human subject has changed the subject. So has an account that makes the divine nature itself passible in precisely the same respect as the humanity.

Theological intelligibility therefore has boundaries. It does not mean that every formulation is equally acceptable so long as it can be explained. It means that the reality confessed imposes constraints upon the concepts by which it is articulated.

This is also why intelligibility must precede apologetics. Theology cannot responsibly defend a doctrine it has not first understood. Nor can it translate doctrine for contemporary hearers until it knows what must survive the translation.

Much modern theology has moved too quickly from inherited doctrine to contemporary appropriation. It asks what the Trinity, incarnation, resurrection, or justification might mean for us before asking what those doctrines claim to be true. The result is often a theology rich in significance but uncertain in reference.

A doctrine may matter profoundly and still be false. It may shape identity, generate hope, sustain community, and inspire ethical action while failing to refer to the reality it names. Usefulness therefore cannot substitute for truth, and existential significance cannot substitute for intelligibility.

Theology must therefore first ask what it is saying before it asks whether what it says is true, and only then may it ask how that truth is to be proclaimed, embodied, and lived. This ordering does not diminish doctrine. It protects doctrine from becoming a formula repeated after its subject has disappeared, proclamation from becoming eloquence without reference, ecclesial practice from becoming self-authorization, and faith from being asked to trust what theology has not yet made sufficiently clear to be judged.

The first discipline of theological reason is therefore intelligibility. Its task is neither to simplify Christian doctrine nor to dissolve mystery into conceptual transparency. It seeks to determine as carefully as possible what Christian doctrine actually claims, what distinctions its truth requires, and what realities its language intends.

Theology seeks intelligibility because truth deserves to be understood.

Truth belongs to reality itself. Intelligibility belongs to our responsible apprehension and judgment of that reality. Theology therefore seeks intelligibility not because it creates truth, but because finite knowers cannot responsibly affirm what they do not understand. Only a doctrine rendered intelligible can be responsibly judged, and only what can be responsibly judged can be responsibly affirmed or denied.

The next question therefore follows necessarily:

How does theological language become genuinely about God?

What Follows from What: Authorial Intention and the Public Logic of Texts

This essay forms part of an ongoing series in philosophical theology produced through the Department of Philosophical Theology at Christ School of Theology. The series explores questions of intelligibility, reality, theological language, and the philosophical conditions for Christian belief.

One of the persistent assumptions of modern hermeneutics is that the meaning of a text ultimately resides in the intention of its author. To understand what a text means is therefore to recover, as nearly as possible, what the author meant by writing it. Whether expressed in Schleiermacher’s psychological reconstruction, Hirsch’s distinction between meaning and significance, or more recent intentionalist accounts, the governing conviction remains remarkably stable: meaning is fundamentally an event in a mind.

There is much to commend this instinct. Historical interpretation would be impossible if we ignored the circumstances in which texts were written, the linguistic conventions of their age, and the problems their authors intended to address. Yet a profound difficulty remains. An author’s intention is not itself publicly available. What is publicly available is the text. The intention is always reconstructed through the text rather than directly observed.

This distinction is more than epistemological. It concerns the very object of interpretation.

Authorial Intention as Historical Hypothesis

My recent study of Luther’s Disputatio contra scholasticam theologiam forced this question into sharper focus than I had anticipated. The ninety-seven theses repeatedly ask what follows from what. They deny certain consequences, affirm others, and expose inferential patterns they regard as theologically impossible. The most conspicuous evidence appears in the Latin itself. Thesis 8 says nec ideo sequitur; thesis 13 calls an inference absurdissima est consequentia; theses 58–60 display a chain: sequitur ex ea, ex eadem sequitur, item sequitur; thesis 61 says non sequitur; thesis 63, sed sequitur. The public object before us is therefore not an inaccessible sequence of psychological states but a structured network of assertions and inferential commitments.

What grounds the claim that this inferential vocabulary is doing serious philosophical work rather than functioning merely as rhetorical ornament? Here history becomes decisive before it becomes systematic. Luther entered the University of Erfurt in 1501, the very year in which Jodocus Trutvetter’s Summule totius logice appeared. Trutvetter defines argumentation, when the word is taken broadly, so that it is convertibiliter idem quod consequentia: discourse containing antecedent and consequent together with an affirmed sign of inference. He then calls the general rules by which consequences may be assessed the metrum et mensura omnis argumentationis—the measure and standard of all argumentation. When the 1517 theses ask what follows from what, they are not borrowing a phrase from thin air. They are operating within a logical grammar whose precise vocabulary, examples, and pressure points are documented in a text Luther would have studied at Erfurt.

This primary-source concordance changes the interpretive situation. Instead of reconstructing Luther’s “inner life” at the moment of composition—a task epistemically unavailable to us—we can compare two publicly accessible texts. The logical cluster of theses 45–53 employs suppositio, forma syllogistica, termini divini, scitus, creditus, universalia, and petere principium. These same terms, distinctions, and characteristic problem-cases appear in Trutvetter’s manual. The consequence-structure of the theses responds, point by point, to a grammar documented in a text we possess. Historical interpretation proceeds by comparing publicly available inscriptions, not by reconstructing private mental events.

From Historical Reconstruction to Formal Analysis

The historical discussion prepares the way for a more precise philosophical claim. Suppose we distinguish between a text T, an author A, and the author’s actual intention I. Traditional intentionalism is often committed, implicitly if not explicitly, to something like the following claim:

Meaning(T) = I(A,T)

The meaning of the text simply is the author’s intention in producing it.

The difficulty is immediate. The author’s actual intention is never publicly available. What interpreters possess is not I but a historically reconstructed hypothesis about I. The relation is better expressed as:

Ĩ = H(T,C)

where H is a historical reconstruction produced from the text T together with its historical context C. The reconstructed intention, however plausible, remains a hypothesis. It is defeasible, open to revision, and never simply identical with what was actually passing through the author’s mind.

Once this distinction is made, the object of interpretation changes. Instead of attempting to recover an inaccessible psychological event, interpretation asks what propositions the text publicly asserts and what follows from those assertions. If Γ denotes the propositions asserted by the text, then the primary question becomes:

Γ ⊨ φ

Does proposition φ follow from the public commitments already incurred by the text?

A text can commit an author to implications the author never consciously entertained. Anyone who has published extensively knows this from experience. Readers often discover consequences, tensions, and conceptual relations that the writer did not explicitly foresee. Sometimes they are mistaken. Sometimes they reveal something genuinely present within the public logic of the text. This is why interpretation cannot simply identify meaning with recovered intention.

The Logic of Consequence at Work

The formal account developed above becomes concrete in Luther's engagement with scholastic theology.

The will and the failed consequence. Theses 13–16 constitute a small disputation within the disputation. The scholastic inference Luther targets in thesis 13 runs: a person in error can love the creature above all things, therefore such a person can love God above all things. Luther calls this the most absurd of consequences—absurdissima est consequentia. Why? Because the move from “loves creature” to “therefore can love God” treats love of God as the natural intensification of a capacity already present in the errant will. Trutvetter’s standard for a good illative consequence is exact: the antecedent must necessarily infer the consequent, so that it is impossible for the antecedent to be true without the consequent. Here the antecedent remains true—the errant will really can love the creature—while the consequent is precisely what is in question. Nothing about loving a creature in the condition of sin makes loving God above all things possible without grace. The material consequence fails. Thesis 16 then substitutes the correct inference: a person in error can love the creature; therefore it is impossible that such a person loves God. The two theses do not display ignorance of consequence-logic. They use it against the scholastic position. The right consequence runs in the opposite direction from what the scholastic inference presupposed.

Righteousness and the reversal of predication. Thesis 40 gives the moral and soteriological inversion in compressed form: Non efficimur iusti iusta operando, sed iusti facti operamur iusta. We do not become righteous by performing righteous deeds; rather, having been made righteous, we perform deeds that can then be called righteous. The predicate iusta as applied theologically to works is not self-grounding. It presupposes the prior constitution of the agent as iustus. Righteousness is not the terminus of a morally cumulative process but a condition governing when an act may be identified as righteous before God.

The inferential point is precise. From the fact that an act conforms outwardly to what the law commands, it does not follow within the theological teleo-space—the objective order of relations within which theological predicates are properly assessed—that the act is righteous coram Deo. External conformity and theological righteousness are not interchangeable predicates, and the inference from one to the other fails for the same reason the inference in theses 13–16 fails: the antecedent can be true while the consequent remains false.

The consequence chain of theses 57–60. The most sustained piece of consequence-reasoning in the disputation occurs in the sequence running from thesis 57 through thesis 60. Thesis 57 isolates a scholastic formulation: the law commands that the commanded act be done in the grace of God. Rather than simply denying this, Luther displays the consequence-chain the formulation licenses.

Sequitur ex ea, quod gratiam Dei habere sit iam nova ultra legem exactio. It follows from it that having grace is already a new exaction beyond the law. Ex eadem sequitur quod actus praecepti possit fieri sine gratia Dei. From the same it follows that the commanded act can be performed without the grace of God. Item sequitur quod odiosior fiat gratia Dei quam fuit lex ipsa. It likewise follows that grace becomes more hateful than the law itself.

The argument is not rhetorical. If the law commands that an otherwise specifiable act be done in grace, the act has already been conceptually individuated before grace is added. Grace then becomes a supplementary requirement imposed upon an act whose identity does not depend upon grace for its definition. Once that individuating move is made, the following consequences are unavoidable. Having grace becomes an extra demand layered on top of the law. The commanded act becomes conceivable without grace, since grace entered only as a supplement to an already-identified act. And grace, now appearing as an additional burden, becomes more hateful than the law it was meant to complete. The scholastic formulation generates its own destructive consequences by smuggling a prior act-individuation into its conditional grammar. Luther’s move is to display what follows—sequitur, sequitur, sequitur—rather than simply to assert that the formulation is wrong.

This is Γ ⊨ φ in operation, with φ being a consequence the scholastic party certainly did not intend. Whether or not Luther consciously traced every step of this chain in sequence, the chain is there in the public propositions. And it is assessable without any hypothesis about what was passing through Luther’s mind in September 1517.

What Has Actually Been Established?

The historical comparison with Trutvetter has accomplished something quite specific, and it is worth stating exactly what that accomplishment is. We have not recovered Luther’s mental life. We have compared two publicly available texts and identified a detailed correspondence between a logical grammar and its critical appropriation. The consequence-structure of the 1517 theses is intelligible—and criticizable—on the basis of publicly checkable textual and logical relations. Nothing in that analysis depends upon privileged access to the interior life of a sixteenth-century monk.

An obvious objection presses at this point. Someone in the tradition of Volker Leppin might argue that “public assertion” does not float free of intentional context. To individuate which propositions the text is asserting—to determine, for instance, whether est in the Trinitarian syllogism expresses numerical identity or essential predication—already requires reconstructing the conventions, habits, and intentions of the author’s linguistic community. Conceded. Historical reconstruction remains indispensable. We should seek the most plausible account of authorial purpose, and we should reconstruct the intellectual world in which a text was written with as much care as possible.

But such reconstructions are precisely what Trutvetter’s text allows us to perform. The individuation of propositions in the 1517 theses does not require access to Luther’s private deliberations. It requires close attention to the Erfurt logical environment in which those propositions were formulated—an environment now traceable through primary sources. The interpretive claim stands on publicly accessible textual relations, not on any hypothesis about a psychological event.

Historical reconstruction therefore remains indispensable, but it no longer functions as the final court of appeal. Public assertions, logical consequence, and the reality to which those assertions refer possess an objectivity that cannot be reduced to psychological reconstruction.

The Theological Stakes

This conclusion carries direct implications for theology.

Theological truth cannot depend upon privileged access to the interior life of biblical writers, church fathers, reformers, or contemporary theologians. When Paul writes that we are justified by faith apart from works of the law, interpretation cannot content itself with asking what private conviction prompted the sentence. It must ask what follows from the proposition publicly asserted. What is ruled out by it? What is licensed by it? What consequence-chains does it permit, and which does it block? These are questions about the public inferential structure of the text, and they are in principle answerable—even if contested.

Consider what this means for biblical exegesis. When we ask whether a given reading of Romans 3 or Galatians 2 is correct, we are not asking whether it matches the neural event that occurred in Paul’s mind as he dictated. We are asking whether it makes the best sense of the publicly available sequence of propositions, the inferential commitments those propositions incur, and the theological reality to which they point. The reality—the grace of God announced in Christ—is not constituted by Paul’s psychology. It is the res to which admissible readings must answer. Historical reconstruction of Paul’s situation, his interlocutors, his linguistic conventions, his scriptural inheritance: all of this is indispensable evidence. But it functions as evidence for understanding the public logic of the text, not as a replacement for that logic.

The confessional tradition has always implicitly understood this. The Formula of Concord does not proceed by attempting to reconstruct the psychological states of Luther or Melanchthon. It proceeds by asking what follows from publicly stated propositions and which consequences are compatible with the reality the propositions intend—the grace of God in Christ. The theological question is always, at bottom, a question about what propositions warrant and what they rule out. Those are inferential questions. They are questions about Γ ⊨ φ.

None of this diminishes the importance of authors. It relocates interpretation where it has always implicitly belonged: within language, logic, and the realities to which language refers. We interpret texts because they make publicly assessable claims about the world. Those claims generate inferential commitments that can be examined, criticized, extended, or shown to be incompatible with other commitments. Authors incur those commitments by making public assertions, whether or not they consciously traced every consequence of what they said.

The real question is therefore not simply, “What did the author intend?” It is also, “What has the author publicly committed himself to by saying what he said?”

In Luther’s case, what follows from what is not merely a historical curiosity. It is the organizing question of the disputation itself—a question borrowed from the very logical grammar of his teachers and turned, with remarkable precision, against their conclusions. The measure and standard of all argumentation becomes, in the hands of the young Luther, the measure and standard by which scholastic theology is found wanting. Not by appeal to private revelation. By displaying what follows.

Dennis Bielfeldt is Chancellor and Professor of Philosophical Theology at ILT's Christ School of Theology. The argument developed here is presented in greater detail in "What Follows from What: Luther and Trutvetter," a paper to be presented at the Fifteenth International Congress for Luther Research, Aarhus, Denmark, August 2026.

When Revelation Becomes Being: Eberhard Jüngel and the Ontologization of the Linguistic Turn

This essay is part of an ongoing series in philosophical theology produced through the Department of Philosophical Theology at Christ School of Theology, Institute of Lutheran Theology. The series traces the conditions of intelligibility, theological language, and the philosophical grounds of Christian belief.

The preceding essays followed the event-character of revelation through several decisive transformations. Rudolf Bultmann relocated the meaning of divine action into the existential self-understanding awakened in the hearer. Ernst Fuchs and Gerhard Ebeling then moved the center of gravity from existence to language: proclamation became a Sprachereignis or Wortgeschehen, an event in which language opens a world and brings the hearer into a new relation to reality. Gerhard Forde received this concern for the happening of the Word but subjected it to the Lutheran distinction between Law and Gospel. The Word no longer disclosed merely an existential possibility. It accused, killed, forgave, and raised the sinner.

At each stage the theological gain was real. Christian speech was rescued from the notion that it merely conveys information about a religious past. Revelation addresses. The Gospel happens. Faith is not a human construction placed upon an inert object but the effect of a Word that comes from outside the hearer.

Yet the same question returned in increasingly refined form. What grounds the event? Does proclamation mediate an act of God that is true before and apart from its effect upon the hearer, or does divine action attain its theological actuality only in the occurrence of proclamation? Is language the creaturely medium through which God acts, or does "God" increasingly name what happens when language interrupts, transforms, and creates faith?

Eberhard Jüngel takes this question into the doctrine of God itself.

With Jüngel, the linguistic turn is no longer merely a theory of interpretation or preaching. It becomes ontology. God's being is not first conceived as a static substance that subsequently enters into relations, performs acts, and reveals itself. God's being is in becoming. More precisely in Jüngel's mature theology, God's being is in God's coming: the free movement in which God gives himself, differentiates himself, enters the history of Jesus Christ, and comes to language as the mystery of the world.

The move is audacious. Jüngel does not attempt to restore the God displaced by modern hermeneutics by placing an immobile metaphysical reality behind the event of revelation. He asks instead whether divine being itself must be understood as event. Perhaps the linguistic happening does not require an ontological ground located behind it, because the event of self-communication belongs to what God eternally is. Perhaps the opposition between being and event is itself the error. God does not merely have a history of revelation. God's being is the history of divine self-giving love.

This makes Jüngel the most formidable figure in the genealogy traced by these essays. The criticism directed against Bultmann, Fuchs, Ebeling, and even Forde cannot simply be repeated against him. He does not merely relocate God into the hearer, the language-event, or the effects of proclamation. He attempts to show that revelation corresponds to God because God is, in God's own triune life, the one who goes forth from himself, relates to another, and remains himself in this movement of self-giving. Jüngel therefore appears to restore precisely what the preceding essays have demanded: a divine reality capable of grounding the event.

But the apparent solution introduces a deeper question. If God's being is identified with God's coming, and if God's coming reaches its goal in coming to language, does the event now ground itself by being incorporated into the doctrine of God? Has Jüngel secured the ontological priority of the divine speaker, or has he made coming-to-language constitutive of what divine being means? The linguistic displacement has become an ontology of divine advent, and the question is whether the ontology overcomes the displacement or perfects it.

At the Intersection of Fuchs and Barth

Jüngel's intellectual formation placed him at the exact intersection required for such a project. Ernst Fuchs taught him to understand interpretation through the category of language-event. Gerhard Ebeling deepened the connection between hermeneutics, faith, and the happening of the Word. Karl Barth taught him that revelation must be understood as God's sovereign self-revelation rather than as an occurrence within human religious consciousness.

Fuchs and Barth might appear to pull in opposing directions. Fuchs began from the event in which language opens understanding. Barth began from the God who reveals himself and thereby creates the human capacity to receive revelation. The former threatened to make revelation dependent upon the occurrence of understanding; the latter insisted that divine objectivity precedes and grounds human subjectivity.

Jüngel's theology can be read as a sustained attempt to unite them.

His early study of Paul and Jesus already operated within the orbit of the New Hermeneutic. The relation between the proclamation of Jesus and the later apostolic kerygma could not be secured by identifying a timeless doctrinal content standing behind both. Continuity occurred as the word of Jesus became language again in the proclamation of the church. The history of Jesus was not preserved as a mute object. It was carried forward in speech.

But Jüngel did not remain satisfied with a merely hermeneutical account. The occurrence of language required a theological ground. If the kerygma is truly God's Word, then its eventfulness cannot be explained only by what language does to its hearers. The question must be asked from the side of God: what must divine being be if revelation is genuinely God's own act?

Jüngel found the resources for answering this question in Barth's doctrine of the Trinity. Barth's identification of God as revealer, revelation, and revealedness prevented revelation from becoming an external relation added to an otherwise hidden divine substance. God does not first exist in self-enclosed completeness and then decide to communicate information about himself. Revelation is divine self-revelation. The God who reveals, the content revealed, and the actuality of revelation belong together in the one triune act.

Jüngel interpreted this with the phrase that became the title of his early dogmatic work: Gottes Sein ist im Werden—God's being is in becoming.

The phrase was not intended to suggest that God develops from incompleteness toward fulfillment, as though God possessed unrealized possibilities that required history or the world for their actualization. Jüngel was not simply importing a Hegelian process into the doctrine of God. He intended to say that God's being is act rather than inertia, relation rather than isolation, self-giving rather than metaphysical immobility. God is not first a substance and only secondarily the one who reveals. God is the one whose being occurs as self-revelation.

This move gave the linguistic event an ontological depth it had lacked in Fuchs. Language does not become revelatory simply because it produces understanding. God comes to language because God is eternally the one who communicates himself.

Jüngel's synthesis can therefore be stated in a preliminary order:

1. God's triune being is self-relation and self-communication.
2. God gives himself historically in Jesus Christ.
3. This history comes to language in proclamation.
4. The language-event brings the hearer into correspondence with God's self-communication.

The sequence appears to preserve the direction of dependence demanded by theological realism. Divine being grounds revelation; revelation grounds proclamation; proclamation creates faith.

Yet Jüngel will also insist that divine being cannot be thought apart from this movement. God is not a being-in-itself located behind self-revelation. Revelation is not merely evidence from which an otherwise independent ontology may be inferred. God's being comes to speech in revelation, and that claim is both the strength and the danger of his theology.

The Death of the Necessary God

Jüngel's mature doctrine of God begins within the crisis of modern theism. The problem is not simply that modern persons have ceased to believe in God. The deeper problem is that the God whose existence modern theism attempted to establish had become unnecessary to the actual intelligibility of the world.

Classical and early modern theology often treated God as the necessary ground required to explain why anything exists, why causal series do not regress infinitely, why moral obligation possesses authority, or why the world exhibits order. God functioned as the highest explanatory term, the being whose necessity secured the contingency of everything else.

Modernity gradually learned to understand the world without this explanatory hypothesis. Nature could be interpreted through immanent causal relations. Political and moral life could be organized without appeal to divine command. Human consciousness could be explained historically, psychologically, and socially. The world no longer appeared to require God in order to function as a world.

The customary theological response was to defend God's necessity more vigorously. Arguments were refined. Gaps in natural explanation were identified. Moral and existential needs were invoked as signs that the secular world remained secretly dependent upon the God it denied.

Jüngel refused this strategy. A God who exists chiefly because the world requires an explanation is already the victim of the world's changing explanatory needs. Once the world discovers that it can explain itself without such a being, the necessary God becomes dispensable.

The triumph of atheism over this God may therefore be theologically salutary. What has died is not necessarily the God of the Gospel but the metaphysical construction that identified God with the world's highest explanatory necessity.

Jüngel does not respond by declaring God unnecessary in the sense of irrelevant. He speaks instead of God as more than necessary. God is not the final item required to complete a deficient account of the world. God comes freely. The world does not compel God's advent, and divine love does not arise from a lack within God that creation must fill.

The language is intended to protect both divine freedom and the gratuity of grace. God is not necessary in the manner of a logical premise without which a system collapses. God is more than necessary in the manner of love: not demanded, not derivable, not owed, and yet infinitely enriching the one to whom love comes.

This is one of Jüngel's most attractive insights. It prevents theology from turning God into a function of creaturely need. God does not exist because human beings require meaning, because morality needs a legislator, or because cosmology needs a first cause. God exists and comes freely. Revelation is gift rather than explanatory supplementation.

Yet the phrase "more than necessary" also alters the traditional question. Instead of asking whether God exists as the necessary ground of reality, Jüngel asks how God comes to the world as the mystery by which the world becomes newly intelligible.

The shift is not merely from one answer to another but a transformation of what it means to speak of God's reality. God is no longer principally the being whose necessary existence must be established; God is the event of advent in which reality is interrupted and reinterpreted by love. The question is whether the transformation preserves existence while correcting necessity—or whether existence itself is redescribed as event.

Mystery Rather Than Riddle

Jüngel's designation of God as the mystery of the world is central to this transformation. A mystery is not simply an unsolved riddle. A riddle disappears when the solution is found. Once the answer is known, the obscurity has been removed and the riddle ceases to exercise its power. Mystery behaves differently. Genuine disclosure does not eliminate mystery. It deepens it.

God is not mysterious because insufficient information has been supplied. Nor is divine mystery the residue left over after reason has exhausted itself. God becomes mysterious precisely in being revealed. The more fully God gives himself to be known, the more clearly the inexhaustibility of divine love becomes apparent.

This permits Jüngel to reject two inadequate alternatives. Against rationalistic theism, he denies that God becomes less mysterious as theological explanation becomes more complete, since revelation does not place the divine essence under conceptual mastery. Against an empty apophaticism, he denies that mystery means the absence of determinate knowledge. God's hiddenness is not a blank silence protected from every positive assertion. The mystery has a name and a history. God is revealed in Jesus Christ, and the cross is not an interchangeable symbol of generic transcendence.

The mystery is the crucified God.

This is why Jüngel can insist simultaneously upon divine hiddenness and divine self-disclosure. God is not hidden behind revelation, as though the revealed God were only a surface appearance concealing an inaccessible divine reality. God is hidden in revelation because the form of divine disclosure—the humanity, suffering, and death of Jesus—contradicts the ordinary expectations by which deity is recognized.

The cross reveals God under the appearance of God's opposite. Power appears as weakness, life as death, majesty as humiliation. The mystery is not an ontological reserve held back behind Christ. It is the inexhaustible depth of the God who gives himself in precisely this history.

Here Jüngel stands close to Luther's theology of the cross. God is not known by ascending from visible effects toward invisible power. God identifies himself in the crucified one. The scandal cannot be overcome by translating it into a more acceptable metaphysical principle.

But Jüngel adds a hermeneutical claim. Mystery requires language capable of preserving revelation without closing it. Literal and conceptual language tends to treat the object as already determined. Metaphor, parable, and narrative can disclose a reality while allowing it to remain inexhaustible. They do not merely ornament a prior conceptual content. They bring a new meaning into being.

The mystery comes to language in speech that makes old words new, and theology therefore requires not only correct propositions but a nova lingua capable of answering to the event in which God has come to the world.

God as a Word of Our Language

The phrase "God" belongs to human language. This fact creates a difficulty that Jüngel refuses to evade.

If God is truly transcendent, how can a creaturely word refer to God? If the word acquires its meaning through human use, history, and linguistic relations, does it not remain enclosed within the world? And if theology attempts to escape this difficulty by treating "God" as a wholly unique word without ordinary linguistic relations, has it not rendered the word meaningless?

Jüngel's answer begins from address. Human beings are linguistic creatures because they are capable of being addressed. Language is not merely an instrument through which an already complete subject expresses internal thoughts. The self comes to itself through the word of another. We become persons in relations of address and response.

Theological language intensifies this structure. Human beings can speak of God because God has first spoken to them. The word "God" is not projected from human consciousness toward an inaccessible transcendence. It enters human language through divine self-communication.

God is thinkable because God is speakable, and God is speakable because God has spoken.

This reverses the ordinary philosophical order. Theology does not first establish the concept of God and then inquire whether revelation supplies an instance corresponding to it. Revelation generates the possibility of the concept. God's coming to language determines what "God" may mean.

Anthropomorphic language is therefore not an unfortunate concession to human limitation that theology should eventually purify away. If God has become human, then human language is not extrinsic to divine self-disclosure. God has entered the relations, histories, sufferings, and speech through which human life becomes intelligible.

The humanity of theological language corresponds to the humanity of God.

Jüngel thus refuses both univocity and sheer equivocity. Human words do not apply to God in exactly the same manner in which they apply to creatures. But neither do they become empty when used theologically. Their meaning is transformed by the new context created in Jesus Christ.

"Love," "life," "death," "freedom," "fatherhood," and "sonship" acquire new meanings when they are drawn into the history of God with humanity. The words remain human words, but they are baptized into a new semantic field.

This resembles Luther's nova lingua. Old words are made new because they are placed in relations they could not have acquired through philosophical abstraction alone. Christ determines their theological meaning.

Yet Jüngel's account goes further. The new context does not merely permit human beings to speak differently about a reality that remains ontologically prior to language. The coming-to-language belongs to the event in which God comes to the world. God's advent and God's speakability are internally related, and the goal of God's coming is speech. At precisely this point, the semantic and ontological questions begin to converge.

From Becoming to Coming

The title God's Being Is in Becoming can easily mislead. "Becoming" ordinarily implies transition from one state to another. A being becomes what it was not previously. Potency is actualized; deficiency is overcome; development occurs.

Jüngel does not mean that God becomes divine by entering history. God does not depend upon the world for self-completion. Creation and incarnation do not repair a lack in God.

His mature language accordingly places increasing weight upon coming rather than becoming. God's being is in God's coming. Coming names the free advent of one who is already himself and who, without ceasing to be himself, gives himself to another.

This distinction protects Jüngel from a simplistic process theology. God does not become through the world in the sense that world history produces divine identity. God comes to the world out of divine freedom.

But coming is not external to God's being. God does not remain unchanged in a self-enclosed eternity while appearing under temporal forms that leave divine life untouched. The coming is God's own act. God is the one who goes forth from himself, enters relation, bears the history of the other, and remains himself in self-giving.

The doctrine of the Trinity supplies the ontological grammar of this movement. God is not solitary identity but differentiated unity. The Father gives himself to the Son; the Son receives and returns this life; the Spirit is the actuality of their communion. Divine being is relation without dissolution, self-differentiation without fragmentation, love without loss of identity.

Revelation corresponds to this being because God is eternally self-communicative. The movement toward the world is not an alien act contradicting an otherwise self-enclosed deity. The God who comes is the God whose being is self-giving love.

Jüngel therefore seeks to secure a strict correspondence between economic and immanent Trinity. God is not one thing eternally and another thing in revelation. The history of Jesus Christ discloses who God truly is.

This is an ontological advance over any account in which language-event is left to validate itself. The event is grounded in God's triune life.

But the correspondence raises a question of direction. Does God's eternal triune being ground the history in which it is revealed? Or is the divine being reconstructed from the history of revelation in such a way that the epistemic form of the revelation becomes constitutive of the ontology?

Jüngel intends both movements to coincide. God's being determines revelation, and revelation gives access to God's being. There is no God behind the revelation who differs from the God revealed.

The danger arises when epistemic and ontological priority are no longer distinguished.

The Cross and the History of Love

Jüngel's doctrine of God reaches its center in the cross. Christian theology cannot speak responsibly of divine being while leaving the death of Jesus external to what God is.

A traditional metaphysical account might say that the divine nature is impassible while the human nature of Christ suffers and dies. Jüngel fears that this formulation can protect an abstract divine being from the very history in which God identifies himself. The result would be a God who remains untouched while the man Jesus bears suffering alone.

Jüngel instead takes the language of the death of God with radical seriousness. God identifies himself with the crucified Jesus. The death of Jesus belongs to the history of God.

This does not mean that the divine being is annihilated. Nor does it mean that the Father is crucified in an undifferentiated manner. The death is trinitarian: the Son undergoes abandonment and death; the Father suffers the loss of the Son; the Spirit sustains and completes the unity of divine love through the differentiation.

God's relation to death reveals that divine life is not mere opposition to nonbeing. God is capable of entering the realm of death without being conquered by it. Love gives itself away, bears separation, and remains itself through this movement.

The cross therefore reveals the being of God as love. "God is love" is not one predicate among others applied to an already defined divine substance. Love identifies the manner in which God exists. Divine being is the event of self-giving, differentiation, and reunion.

This is why resurrection cannot be treated as the simple reversal of the cross. The risen one is the crucified one. God does not erase the history of death but takes it into the eternal identity of the Son. The history remains constitutive of the identity disclosed in resurrection.

Jüngel's account possesses immense theological power. It prevents the doctrine of God from becoming a metaphysical prolegomenon unaffected by Christ. It insists that Christian ontology must be cruciform. It also makes divine agency irreducibly personal: God acts as the history of self-giving love, not as an impersonal causal principle.

Yet the same strength creates a new form of the question pursued throughout this series. If God's being is identified through the narrative of cross and resurrection, what is the relation between that historical event and the divine being it reveals?

One answer is that the cross reveals what God eternally is. The history is epistemically decisive but ontologically grounded in the triune life.

Another answer is that God's eternal being includes this historical becoming in such a manner that the temporal event participates constitutively in divine identity.

Jüngel's formulations often press toward the second without abandoning the first. God is not merely represented by the history of Jesus. God's own being occurs there.

The distinction between manifestation and constitution becomes difficult to maintain.

Parable, Metaphor, and the New Context

Jüngel's treatment of metaphor and parable is essential to the connection between ontology and language.

A metaphor does not merely replace a literal term with a decorative image. It brings previously separate semantic fields into relation and thereby produces a meaning unavailable within either field alone. To say "God is my rock" does not classify God as a geological object. Nor does it merely state in figurative form a concept already fully available in literal language. The metaphor creates a new relation among stability, protection, faithfulness, creaturely vulnerability, and divine presence.

A parable works similarly on a larger scale. It draws the hearer into a narrative world in which familiar relations are reorganized. The hearer does not merely extract a proposition and leave the story behind. The story teaches the hearer how to see.

This is why Jesus is not only a speaker of parables. Jesus is himself the parable of God. His history brings God to language in a finite human life. The relation between God and Jesus is not arbitrary resemblance but a divinely instituted correspondence. The human history tells God truly because God identifies himself within it.

Jüngel's language theory therefore aims at realism of a particular kind. Metaphor is not fictional because it exceeds literal classification. It can disclose reality more adequately than concepts whose apparent precision conceals their inability to receive the new.

Theological truth requires semantic innovation because the event of Christ creates a context that did not previously exist. Words acquire new meanings in relation to this new content.

This claim bears directly upon the argument of this series. Theological language cannot be judged solely by meanings established independently of revelation. If "God," "love," "power," "death," and "life" must retain the meanings they possess in ordinary philosophical discourse, the cross will necessarily appear contradictory or meaningless.

Jüngel is therefore right that revelation determines its own semantic field. The model determines the theory; the object gives the grammar by which it is spoken.

But semantic novelty cannot by itself secure ontological truth.

A metaphor may create a new context without that context being satisfied by reality. A parable may reorganize the hearer's world while referring falsely to the world beyond the narrative. A story may disclose possibilities that never obtain.

The fact that the history of Jesus gives "God" a new meaning does not yet establish that God exists and identifies himself with Jesus. That requires more than semantic transformation. It requires the divine act that makes the new language true.

Jüngel does not deny this. He repeatedly insists that God is the agent of revelation. Yet his hermeneutical emphasis can make the coming-to-language appear to carry the ontological weight of the claim.

The new context tells us how "God" is to be understood. The satisfaction question remains: what makes the context true of God?

What Jüngel Genuinely Restores

Before pressing the criticism further, the magnitude of Jüngel's achievement must be acknowledged.

First, he restores ontology without returning to a pre-Christological metaphysics. God is not inferred as the highest member of a general order of being. The doctrine of God begins from the crucified and risen Christ.

Second, he restores divine agency without treating God as one cause among others. God's action is self-communication. Divine causality is personal, revelatory, and triune.

Third, he restores the objectivity of revelation without separating it from its eventful form. Revelation is not a timeless deposit placed behind proclamation. God acts in the address.

Fourth, he restores the unity of being and speech. The God who speaks is not ontologically distinct from the God who is. Speech is not an accidental instrument employed by a silent deity. The Logos belongs to divine life.

Fifth, he restores the cross to the doctrine of God. The suffering and death of Jesus are not merely events occurring on the creaturely side of the relation. God identifies himself with the crucified one.

These gains place Jüngel much closer to theological realism than Bultmann or a purely linguistic interpretation of the New Hermeneutic. His God is not the name for an existential possibility. Nor is God simply the depth-dimension of transformative language. God is the triune agent who comes, speaks, identifies himself, and raises the dead.

Indeed, Jüngel's phrase "revelation is God's self-interpretation" comes remarkably close to an agentive theological semantics. Interpretation is not first a human mapping of signs onto an antecedent divine object. God interprets himself. The divine act supplies both content and truth.

The difficulty is not that Jüngel lacks a divine agent but that the distinctions internal to the agent's act become obscured. Divine self-interpretation, the history of Jesus, the language-event of proclamation, and the faith of the hearer are so closely related that the explanatory order among them can become compressed. The problem is no longer displacement by subtraction; it is displacement by identification.

The Compression of Being, Revelation, and Language

Three distinctions must be preserved if Jüngel's achievement is to remain realist.

The first is the distinction between God's eternal being and God's free act toward the world. The act truly reveals God because it corresponds to God's being. Yet the world is not required for God to become who God is. God's self-giving to creatures is free because triune love is already fully actual in God.

Jüngel intends to maintain this. His description of God as more than necessary and his rejection of any divine need for the world protect divine freedom. Nevertheless, saying that God's being is in coming can blur the distinction if coming to the world is not clearly differentiated from the eternal self-relation of Father, Son, and Spirit.

The second is the distinction between the divine act in Christ and the linguistic mediation of that act. The incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection are not generated by the proclamation that narrates them. Proclamation becomes God's Word because the risen Christ acts through it. The history does not first become divine history when it comes to language.

Again, Jüngel does not simply deny the historical priority of Jesus. But his claim that God's coming reaches its goal in speech risks making linguistic occurrence the completion of the ontological event.

The third is the distinction between the truth of proclamation and the faith it creates. The Word may be resisted. Its truth does not depend upon its successful transformation of this hearer. Faith is the effect of divine address, not the condition by which the address becomes divine.

Jüngel's theology ordinarily preserves the asymmetry between Word and faith. But once revelation is understood as an event that reaches actuality in address and response, the question arises whether an unheard or unbelieved Word has fully happened as revelation.

The distinctions may be represented in the threefold order articulated in the preceding essay:

1. God acts in Christ.
2. God acts through proclamation.
3. God creates faith through hearing.

Jüngel's theology affirms all three. The question is whether his ontology of coming allows them to be distinguished as moments ordered by divine agency, or whether they become aspects of one event whose internal relations remain insufficiently differentiated. The risk is not that God disappears but that every distinction needed to identify what God does disappears into the unity of divine self-communication.

Epistemic Priority and Ontological Priority

The deepest issue can be stated as a distinction between epistemic and ontological priority.

The cross is epistemically prior for Christian theology. We do not first possess a general concept of deity and then apply it to Jesus. The crucified and risen Christ determines what Christians mean by God.

But it does not follow that the historical event is ontologically prior to God. The cross reveals who God eternally is because the God who eternally is acts in this history.

To put the matter differently: revelation determines our concept of God. It does not create its referent.

Jüngel's rejection of a God "behind" revelation is correct if "behind" means a deity differing from the Father revealed in the Son through the Spirit. There is no truer God concealed behind Jesus Christ.

But the rejection becomes problematic if it means that no distinction may be drawn between the divine being that grounds revelation and the creaturely history through which that being is revealed. Identity of agent does not abolish distinction of act, medium, and effect. The incarnate Son is God, but the humanity is not therefore the cause of the divine being; the proclamation is an act of God, but the human sentence is not therefore the ground of divine agency; faith is participation in God's truth, but the believer's response is not therefore constitutive of the truth received.

A realist account can affirm the strict correspondence Jüngel seeks without making correspondence into identity at every level. God truly gives himself in Christ. Christ truly gives himself in proclamation. The Spirit truly brings the hearer into this reality. But the order remains asymmetrical: God is not constituted by the history God freely assumes, Christ's act is not constituted by the proclamation that mediates it, and the promise is not constituted by the faith it creates. The God who comes is able to come because God is.

Divine Self-Interpretation and Constitutive Satisfaction

Jüngel brings theology closer than any preceding figure in this series to what may be called constitutive satisfaction.

Classical model theory presupposes a domain and asks whether sentences are satisfied within it. Hermeneutical theology asks whether language becomes an event of understanding. Jüngel moves behind both questions by interpreting revelation as God's own self-interpretation.

This is the right direction. The theological object is not passive. God interprets, signifies, and gives himself. Truth is grounded in personal agency.

But the agentive structure requires greater differentiation than Jüngel's language of coming-to-speech always provides.

The Logos does not first come into being when God comes to human language. The Logos is the eternal divine self-expression through whom the world and its languages become possible. Creation is already an act of divine signification before the proclamation of redemption occurs.

The incarnation is therefore not the origin of divine communicability but its climactic creaturely enactment. The eternal Word enters the world that exists through him and assumes a human nature capable of speaking, suffering, dying, and being raised.

Proclamation then participates in this act. The preacher does not reproduce the incarnation, cross, or resurrection. The Spirit authorizes finite language to refer truthfully to these acts and to deliver their promise to the hearer.

Faith is the creaturely reception of this participation. It is generated by the Spirit, but it does not complete an otherwise incomplete divine being.

Constitutive satisfaction would therefore articulate the order as follows:

1. The triune God eternally interprets and expresses himself in the Logos.
2. The Logos constitutes and sustains the created domain in which reference is possible.
3. The Logos acts historically in Jesus Christ.
4. The Spirit incorporates creaturely proclamation into this divine act.
5. Faith receives the reality given through the authorized Word.

This account preserves everything Jüngel rightly seeks: divine being as act, revelation as self-interpretation, language as event, and faith as created correspondence.

But it refuses the compression of the levels. Divine self-interpretation grounds the history; the history grounds the proclamation; the Spirit joins proclamation to history; faith is created through the joined Word. The linguistic event is constitutive of faith—it is not constitutive of God.

The Spirit and the Difference within the Event

The Holy Spirit becomes decisive precisely where Jüngel's ontology risks compression. It is insufficient to say only that God comes to speech. One must ask how divine speech and human speech are united without confusion. The Spirit is not merely the subjective actuality of revelation or the effect by which divine address becomes human faith. The Spirit is the personal agent who authorizes creaturely language to participate in the speech of the Logos, and this pneumatological mediation permits theology to affirm identity of act without identity of level. The preached Word is genuinely God's Word, but the preacher does not become the Logos. The promise genuinely forgives, but its efficacy is not generated by linguistic form. Faith genuinely knows God, but the believer's understanding does not constitute divine being. Divine act and human word remain distinct, yet the finite utterance becomes a real instrument of the infinite speaker precisely because the Spirit joins them without collapsing them.

Jüngel's trinitarian ontology contains resources for this account. The Spirit belongs to the event of divine love and makes creaturely correspondence to God possible. But the Spirit's mediating role must be made explicit if coming-to-language is not to become a self-validating linguistic occurrence. The event requires not only a history and a hearer but an agent of inclusion—the Spirit who makes the Word happen as God's Word.

The God Who Comes Because God Is

Jüngel is right to reject the choice between static being and event. The living God is not an inert substance hidden behind revelation. God acts, comes, speaks, loves, suffers, and gives life. He is also right that Christian theology cannot define God independently of Jesus Christ. The crucified one is not an illustration of a concept of deity obtained elsewhere. God identifies himself in this history. He is right, finally, that theological language must be transformed by its object. The cross generates a new semantic context, and words acquire meanings reason could not have anticipated. But the order of dependence must remain clear. God's coming does not create the God who comes. The history of Jesus does not generate the divine agent whose history it is. The coming-to-language of revelation does not make revelation true. The faith awakened by the Word does not complete the act of God.

Jüngel's great achievement is to bring ontology inside the event. His danger is to bring it so completely inside that the event appears to possess no ground other than its own occurrence. The correction is not to place a silent divine substance behind the speaking God but to identify the speaker more fully. The God who comes is the triune God whose eternal life already possesses the plenitude from which free advent proceeds. The God who speaks is the Logos through whom the world exists. The God who makes proclamation effective is the Spirit who joins creaturely language to divine action. There is, in other words, no mute God behind the Word, and no divine being indifferent to revelation—but there is a God who speaks the Word, and there is a divine being whose free self-revelation is true because the one revealed is already the one who reveals. There is no Gospel apart from its happening, but the Gospel happens because God has acted and continues to act.

Jüngel comes nearer than the preceding theologians to restoring this order because he refuses to choose between reality and event. His theology should therefore not be dismissed as the final triumph of the linguistic turn. It is better understood as the place where that turn discovers its own ontological question: Can language be event without becoming self-grounding? Can revelation correspond perfectly to God without constituting the God to whom it corresponds? Can God's being be act without making historical or linguistic occurrence necessary to divine identity? The answer requires an agentive realism in which being and Word belong together without being collapsed. God's being is not an immobile possession standing behind divine coming; it is living, triune, self-communicative act. But the act remains God's. Revelation becomes being only because divine being gives itself in revelation. The event does not become God. God gives himself in the event.

Disputationes: Essays in Philosophical Theology — On the Project

 A Project in Theological Realism, Semantic Theory, and Divine Causation

Disputationes is a sustained project in philosophical theology exploring theological realism, semantic reference, and divine causation within a model-theoretic framework. It is not a blog in the casual sense, nor a collection of occasional reflections, but a sustained and systematic project in philosophical theology. Its concern is the question of theological intelligibility: under what conditions theological language can bear truth, refer to reality, and sustain rational adjudication.

The essays gathered here proceed from the conviction that theology, if it is to speak meaningfully at all, must do so with ontological seriousness. Theological claims are not merely expressive, evocative, or regulative of practice. They purport to speak about what is the case: about God, causation, presence, and participation. If such claims are to be intelligible, they must be capable of truth and falsity, and thus must stand in a determinate relation to reality.

Disputationes therefore develops a framework in which theological discourse is treated as theory-like: possessing structure, deploying predicates, and requiring interpretation through models. Drawing upon the resources of analytic philosophy—especially model theory and the philosophy of language—while remaining deeply engaged with the classical Christian tradition, the project seeks to articulate the conditions under which theological language can genuinely refer.

Central themes include theological realism, semantic realism, and divine causation. The project argues that without a robust account of how God can be causally efficacious in the world, theological language collapses into either metaphor or projection. Conversely, where divine causation is affirmed in a disciplined and coherent manner, theological claims regain their capacity to describe, to explain, and to adjudicate.

The essays are written in the form of disputationes not as an antiquarian gesture, but as a methodological commitment to clarity, rigor, and argumentative accountability. Each piece aims to test theological claims under the pressure of contemporary philosophy while refusing the reduction of theology to that philosophy’s limits.

Disputationes thus functions as a public, ongoing corpus in philosophical theology: a place where the question of God is treated not as a matter of private meaning or cultural inheritance, but as a question concerning reality itself. For recent essays, readers are directed to the latest posts on Disputationes.