A Review of Searle's Freedom and Neurobiology

In this very brief book John Searle continues his project of trying to naturalize the psychological and social without doing away with either, or reducing them to the natural. Comprised of versions of two lectures he delivered at the Sorbonne in 2001, the text easily succeeds in drawing the non-specialist into the fray. The first essay, “Free Will as a Problem in Neurobiology,” addresses the putative incompatibility between the doctrine of freedom of the will and contemporary neurobiology by suggesting an account of free will that allows for an empirical, scientific solution. The second, “Social Ontology and Political Power,” argues the logical priority of language to the existence of social institutions and political power, and claims inter alia that deontic powers are ultimately grounded in social ontology. The 35 page introduction, “Philosophy and the Basic Facts,” attempts to situate the two apparently disparate lectures within Searle’s larger philosophical enterprise, though he does admit that at “the level of authorial intent, [the two original lectures] do not have any connection” (3). Common to both freedom and institutional facts is the existence of consciousness, intentionality, rationality and language.

Clearly, Searle gets the central question right: “How can we square this self-conception of ourselves as mindful, meaning-creating, free, rational, etc., agents with a universe that consists entirely of mindless, meaningless, unfree, nonrational, brute physical particles?” (5) This very old question is especially acute today because dualism no longer has plausibility in educated quarters. We simply know too much about the natural machinery of the brain to be able to ignore naturalistic explanations of mind. In our time, explanations of ourselves must be naturalistic. Accordingly, we should ask how consciousness, intentionality, language, rationality, free-will, social institutions, politics and ethics are possible in a closed, physical universe. As Searle points out, these eight notions are logically related: intentionality presupposes consciousness, language presupposes intentionality, rationality is constitutive structurally of language and intentionality, free-will is coextensive with rationality, social institutions presuppose language, and politics and ethics presuppose all the other categories.

Searle thinks one can work on some of the problems without solving all of them. Each issue must be treated naturalistically; each must be understood on the basis of the naturalistic facts, without thereby reducing to those facts. Accordingly, Searle rejects materialism and eliminativism, as well as Cartesian dualism and Popperian-Ecclesian/Fregian-Penrosian trialisms. For Searle, universals are rightfully understood as property exemplifications and numbers as properties of sets. While there is but one world, first-person accounts of it cannot be reduced to third-person accounts. While consciousness, intentionality, etc., are irreducible to the basic natural facts, their existence nonetheless does not entail the existence of a distinct ontological domain.

Why does Searle believe that the philosophical climate has changed, and that one can now escape the “Scylla of materialism and the Charybdis of dualism and trialism?” (26) He gives four reasons. Firstly, we know too much now to take seriously the skeptical claims about the material world that grounded the development of modern epistemology. Secondly, just as epistemology has been eclipsed from the center of the contemporary philosophical enterprise, so has the philosophy of language. Language is derivative upon prelinguistic, “biologically fundamental forms of intentionality.” Thirdly, with the displacement of philosophy of language from the center, there is a growing openness to do philosophy once again systematically and on a larger-scale. Finally, contemporary philosophy can no longer sharply divide conceptual and empirical issues.

In “Free-Will as a Problem in Neurobiology,” Searle attempts to resolve the traditional free will problem in such a way so that one could, in principle, open it to empirical and scientific investigation. The free-will problem is generated by claiming the following: 1) All natural events have deterministic explanations, i.e., there are sufficient causal conditions for the occurrence of each and every natural event; 2) There is some set of human behavior that is free, i.e., they do not have sufficient causal conditions; 3) This set is a subset of the set of natural events. Searle points to the experience of “volitional consciousness” where one can discern no deterministic causal chain: there is a gap between reasons and decisions, decisions and actions, and actions and their perpetuation. Searle distinguishes the event-event causality of nature (‘A causes B’) from agent-event causality (‘S performs A due to reason R’). He then offers an interesting transcendental argument (53-55) for the existence of the self on the basis of the necessity of specifying R.

Searle has now brought his readers to the point of considering a non-Humean self having consciousness and acting due to reasons. The question then arises as to the nature of consciousness. For Searle, consciousness is a higher-level, systemic property realized by the instantiation of lower-level neural properties. (He espouses naturalism, after all.) At the higher-level there is intentionality, rationality and freedom; at the lower level there are just neural firings and synapse formations. So how is higher-level freedom realized neutrally?

I greatly appreciate Searle’s clear statement of the problematic: “The thesis of determinism asserts that all actions are preceded by sufficient causal conditions that determine them. The thesis of free will asserts that some actions are not preceded by sufficient causal conditions” (47). Because Searle rightly rejects accounts of downward causation which claim causal powers at the higher levels not attributable to lower-level actualizations, he is driven to this dilemma: Either the neural events are deterministic and thus the seemingly free, non-deterministic, psychological events realized by them are deterministic and there is no real freedom, or the higher-level events really are non-deterministic and the neural events realizing them are non-deterministic as well. (Obviously, Searle has no time for compatibilism.) Since he rejects the first epiphenomenalist option because he believes it is incoherent and in violation of general evolutionary principles, he is driven to the controversial conclusion once argued by Penrose: Since the absence of causally sufficient conditions at the psychological level must be matched by the absence of such conditions at the neurophysiological level, indeterminism at the neuro-level is necessary for real first-person (psychological) freedom. The following syllogism thus holds (74-5):

1) All indeterminism in nature is quantum indeterminism.

2) Consciousness is a feature of nature that manifests indeterminism.

3) Thus, consciousness manifests quantum indeterminism.

As Searle points out, however, accepting (3) does not mean that the macro-psychological level is filled with randomness, for “randomness at the micro-level does not imply randomness at the systems level (76).” Searle acknowledges that this option is scarcely more satisfying than embracing epiphenomenalism.

The second essay asks this question: “How can there be political reality in a world of physical particles?” Searle begins by distinguishing between observer-dependent and observer-independent features. After granting that chemical bonds and gravitational attraction are observer-independent (ontologically objective), he assigns institutional features, such as property, marriage and language, to the category of the observer-dependent (ontologically subjective). He next distinguishes epistemic objectivity from epistemic subjectivity. A claim is epistemologically objective if and only if its truth or falsity is logically independent from the feelings, preferences and attitudes of the one making the claim. Given these distinctions, Searle can talk meaningfully about epistemologically objective, yet ontologically subjective features.

Searle argues that one gets from the social facts grounded in collective intentionality to institutional facts through the establishment of status functions and constitutive rules. What is needed for an institutional fact is that certain conditions are met that have this form: X counts as Y in context C. Certain features count as fact X not because of what they are intrinsically, but because there is a collective acceptance of their being properties or actions that would be an instance of X were they instantiated. Furthermore, Searle believes that it is possible that certain status functions are primitive; they do not presuppose a constitutive rule until they are regularlized. (Searle wants to escape the paradox of institutional facts presupposing constitutive rules that themselves presuppose institutional facts.) Moreover, for X to count as Y in context C presupposes that one can first represent X as being an instance of Y. But since representation presupposes language, there can be no institutional facts without language, for there can be no representation of such simple institutional facts as, ‘George Bush is President’ without language.

Searle finishes the essay with a number of claims about the logical and ontological status of political power and government. While it is not surprising to find Searle arguing that political power is linguistically constituted, some might find his final point problematic: “A monopoly on armed violence is a presupposition of government.”

Searle has succeeded in writing a very facile, succinct, and highly-readable book. What I like about Searle’s work is his dedication to thinking crucial questions through from a naturalistic perspective without simultaneously abandoning deep, widely-shared ontological intuitions. Starting with the existence of psychological states and social objects, the philosophical task is to provide an account which does not simply reduce or eliminate that which quite obviously is.

That being said, this book does not really succeed in pushing the technical discussion forward. Searle does not engage any current neuroscience. It is a straightforward philosophical text, and philosophically, there really are only so many moves to make on the chess board. Unfortunately, they have been around for quite a long time.

It is not really news to learn that nondeterminism is a necessary condition for rationality, and that since the instantiation of neurophysiological states and events is sufficient for the instantiation of psychological states and events, then since determinism at the neuro-level entails determinism at the psychological level, non-determinism at the psychological level entails non-determinism at the neuro-level. The only way out is to claim that the psychological qua psychological is capable of possessing causal power not realized at the neuro-level. But this robust emergentism comes dangerously close to dualism. (Robust downward causality reminds me now of the old vitalist/mechanist debate. One might think of “mental power” as analogous to the elan vital.) The other alternative is simply to claim that we can use the word ‘free’ meaningfully even though all of our deliberations and actions are composed of physical aggregates that themselves follow universal deterministic physical laws. But if the mental has no real causal powers, it could serve no adaptive purpose, so why did it ever evolve?

What is critically important for thinkers in the religion and science debate is to understand the very profound philosophical problems with downward causation, and thus to think deeply about what options remain. Searle’s proposal takes the possibility of quantum neural indeterminism as seriously as epiphenomenalism. This itself is of some note. (Of course, quantum indeterminacy does not a free choice make, but were God, to be involved in such indeterminacy, then the possibility of a coherent account is present.)

One can, of course, criticize Searle for not developing his arguments more or not providing full documentation on the issues, but this would be unfair. Freedom and Neurobiology is not an exhaustive tome, but a delightful read that quickly and adroitly gets to the central issue. What it perhaps most successfully teaches is this: The problem with the problem of freedom is how intractable that problem really is.

Full Response to the ELCA Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality

Joe Nelson asked for the full response, so I am giving it below. Because I believe that theology is a communal art, I invite feedback and conversation. Have fun!

The Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality: How Not to Derive “ought” from “Is”

Dennis Bielfeldt, South Dakota State University

Introduction

Since the time of David Hume (1711-76), philosophers have been struggling with the question of whether “ought” can be inferred from “is.” Famously, Hume held that it “seems altogether inconceivable how this new relation [ought] can be a deduction of others [is] which are entirely different from it.[i] For Hume, propositions of how the world is simply cannot entail statements of how it ought to be.

But naturalists of all stripes, including Hume’s contemporary Jeremy Bentham (1748 -1832), have held that a sufficiently thick description of how things are does entail how they ought to be. Famously, Bentham’s Principle of Utility “approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question.” [ii] Since the Principle of Utility supposedly does, in fact, govern human behavior, it is descriptively true that human beings ought to do that act which augments the happiness of those whose interest is in question. Likewise evolutionary ethical theory assumes licit a move from ‘is’ to ‘ought’. If human beings are instilled by the evolutionary process with a moral sense, then the fact of this sense does entail what they ought to do.

In 1903, G.E. Moore (1873-1958) launched a classic argument against any kind of ethical naturalism. In his “open question argument” Moore points out that a statement like Bentham’s ‘pleasure is good’ cannot mean that pleasure is identical to good, for if that were so, then ‘pleasure is good’ would entail ‘pleasure is pleasure’.[iii] But clearly it remains an “open question” whether or not ‘pleasure is good’. Thus, anyone asserting that pleasure is good must be “saying something more” about pleasure than that it is pleasure, and this “more” points to a non-natural property of goodness. To say ‘x is good’ or ‘S ought to do y’ is to say something that is in principle irreducible to mere descriptions of natural, social and institutional facts. Accordingly, ‘ought’ and ‘is’ are of different orders.

While philosophers since Moore’s time have been divided over the validity of the open question argument, there is no mistaking that the dominant tradition of twentieth century philosophy followed Hume in denying that ‘ought’ can be derived from ‘is’. Even if beneficent values are somehow evolutionarily loaded into human nature, the fact of these values still does not entail that one ought to act in accordance with them.

On the issue of ‘is’ and ‘ought’, I agree with the classic refutation by James and Judith Thomson of John Searle’s famous 1964 paper, “How to Derive ‘Ought’ from ‘Is’.” While Searle labors to show how institutional facts can entail evaluative statements, the Thomsons demonstrate that ‘I (Jones) hereby promise to pay you (Smith)’ does not entail ‘Jones ought to pay Smith’ because there are cases where Jones ought not to keep his promise, and there are no further institutional facts that can entail each and every putative evaluative gap.[iv] I am convinced that ‘ought’ cannot be logically derived from ‘is’, and the attempt to do so begs the question.

So why raise this old controversy in a discussion of the ELCA Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality (DSSHS)? It is because the theological structure of DSSHS does assume that ‘ought’ can be derived from ‘is’. DSSHS supposes that descriptive statements about God’s incarnation in Christ and His justification of sinful human beings entail evaluative statements about how one ought to behave sexually. By attempting to ground sexual ethics in the Second Article, DSSHS not only is unorthodox, but incoherent. The document not only fails to hold together rhetorically, but it cannot do so logically. By a thick description of what God has done for us in Christ, we simply cannot derive how we ought to act as Christians. As paradoxical as this might sound, to claim that we can do so is to confuse law and gospel. The ‘ought’ of law cannot be derived from the ‘is’ of gospel, and this not so deriving is a necessary condition for Christian freedom. To suggest otherwise is to strike out in a way that Lutheran ethicists simply cannot go.

Reading DSSHS Critically

Maybe it is unfair to read DSSHS closely and critically. After all, it is the work of 14 committee members from different walks of life, having different educational backgrounds, different theological convictions, and different views on the propriety of same-sex relationships. However, since the document purports to be important enough that the entire ELCA study it, I shall take it with the seriousness it invites.

DSSHS starts promisingly enough, quoting Jesus’ summary of the law: 1) Love God above all things, and 2) love the other person as oneself (Matt. 22:36-40). But from here things disintegrate rather quickly. As Lutherans have always confessed, no one can actually do what the law commands, i.e., love God above all things and love the neighbor as oneself. While this fundamental material content of the law is binding on all human beings, nobody can accomplish it, and thus all people have a fundamental deficiency before the law.

Unfortunately, DSSHS seeks to obscure the full realization of this deficiency. It asks, “What does it mean for us as sexual creatures to love our neighbors as ourselves and thus fulfill God’s law of love in this time and society”(13-15)? Unfortunately, the game has been lost from the outset because this question is the wrong one. A person simply cannot “fulfill God’s law of love.” To suggest it is possible mixes law and gospel.

This confusion of law and gospel is further exacerbated when, a few lines later, the ELCA is identified as “a community of moral deliberation.” The use of this definition from a 1991 ELCA social statement is unfortunate because it misunderstands the meaning of ‘church’. Why should one expect members of the ELCA to have special ethical/moral insight or special ethical/moral tools of reflection? The church is, as Luther says in the Smalcald Articles, those “little sheep who hear the voice of their shepherd.”[v] Clearly, those hearing this voice are not concerned primarily with the development of communal acumen in ethical and moral reflection, but rather with salvation. The church is a community gathered about a salvific concern (gospel), not an ethical one (law).

Another confusion emerges when DSSHS states that it wants to “speak in ways that can address both religious and secular discussions” (35-6). Accordingly, one would expect DSSHS to identify something universal in Christian and secular experience. Lutheran ethics has traditionally been able to accomplish this with its two kingdoms approach: God deals with His creation with two hands. With the gospel of His right hand, human beings live in the realm of grace and faith. However, with His left hand, humans dwell in the kingdom of law and reason. The genius of Lutheran ethics has always been that because the foundation of ethical reasoning is not grounded in the particularity of Christian soteriology, ethical reflection from a Lutheran perspective retains a universal character. There is a demanding divine left hand, not just a grace-filled right hand.

But any hope that DSSHS proceeds in this time-honored fashion is immediately crushed by this statement: “[This document] contains important introductory material designed to explain how Lutherans approach ethics in the light of God’s incarnation and our hope in God who justifies us in Christ” (45-7). With this statement, the foundation for a Lutheran contribution to a secular ethical discussion is lost. How might one find something in these two disparate discussions that is common when the putative foundation for these discussions is the reality of incarnation and justification only granted by one of the conversation partners? This profound incoherency is never addressed in DSSHS.

Another theological problem occurs when DSSHS makes this startling claim: “As Lutherans we understand ourselves . . . as simultaneously righteous (saved by God’s grace alone) and sinful (convicted by the law)” (165-66). While one might argue on the basis of the “happy exchange” between Christ and the sinner, that ‘righteousness’ just is ‘being saved by God’s grace’, any supposed claim of identity between being sinful and being convicted by the law is wrongheaded. Clearly, being sinful and being convicted by the law are logically independent notions. One is sinful from birth even if one has never been convicted by the law. To confuse the two is to mistake the reality of not conforming to the law with the apprehension of not so conforming.

DSSHS’s attempt to use Christian freedom somehow to “preserve and guide all churchly teaching” (164), is also problematic. How is it precisely that “freedom from the crushing burden of our unworthiness before the law” engenders “responsibility and humility in service to the neighbor (200)? While the document says that we are to serve others because of God’s “promises, compassion and mercy” (213), it does not show - - and indeed it cannot show - - how God’s promises, compassion and mercy fill in the contour of what we ought to do. The problem is logical: We cannot derive that we ought to be compassionate because God is compassionate, though we can conclude that we are in fact compassionate because God’s Word has awakened faith within us. DSSHS purports, however, to be an ethical document. Accordingly, it deals with what human beings ought to do, specifically, with what is sexually licit and what illicit.

One runs across ambiguous statements throughout DSSHS, of which the following is an example: “At heart, human beings are captive to sin - - needy, fearful, often misguided, and sometimes broken” (225-26). Is DSSHS suggesting that sin just is being needy, fearful, misguided and broken? But this is surely problematic; for being needy, fearful, misguided and broken is not, strictly speaking, sin. For Lutherans, sin is primarily enmity with God. Sin is a relational property, not a non-relational one. The logic of ‘sin’ is this: ‘A instances the property S of sin if and only if A has dispositions, attitudes and actions not intended by God for A’. But DSSHS seems to suggest the following: ‘A instances S if A has some cluster of non-relational properties P.’ Apparently P is what is psychologically unhealthy for A. But this is wrong, for what is psychologically healthy or unhealthy for a person is logically independent of his/her sin.

DSSHS seems to make statements that are not intended by the drafters. Surely, the committee did not mean to say that “Lutheran sexual ethics cannot suggest that sexual longing or sexual expression is sinful intrinsically” (275-76). But why should it not do this? Do we not routinely presuppose that there are classes of sexual longings or expressions that are not intended by God for human beings to have and do? For instance, is not a sexual longing or expression toward a child intrinsically sinful? Is it not also the case with a murderous heart? The confusion here is deep: Just because something may be “natural” for A to experience does not mean that God intends that what is “natural” for A to, in fact, obtain. We must distinguish God’s natural law that A instance a set of dispositions B from the natural disposition A has not to instance B. The sad fact is that humans now are not as they ought to be. Clearly, if, as Luther says, a human being “sins against God whether he eats or drinks,” then there is a large class of sexual longings and expressions that are intrinsically sinful.[vi]

As has previously been discussed, DSSHS states that “a Lutheran sexual ethic looks to the death and resurrection of Christ as the source for the values that guide it (325-26).” But the question is how does the death and resurrection of Christ guide sexual value formation? What is the specific connection?

Lamentably, no answer is provided. One can say such things as that God was so merciful that He, in Christ, went to His death on the Cross. But precisely what does this imply for sexual human beings? Are we to conclude that since Christ did not condemn (or judge) us, we ought not condemn (or judge) our brother or sister? While this is right, it tells only half the story. In reality, we are both condemned by God for our sin, and forgiven in Christ for that same sin. Lutheran ethics cannot leave out half of the story. It is because we are already condemned and lost before God that God became incarnate and justified us. Lutheran sexual ethics must not forget the reality of God’s primordial intentionality for his creation, and the deficiency of His creation in actualizing that intentionality. Living out our freedom on account of Christ does not entail a change in the identity conditions for “being lost.”

Finally, for a church defining itself as “a community of moral discernment,” the section entitled “Scripture and Moral Discernment” is a profound disappointment, for we learn very little here about how Scripture should be used to discern what God would have us do sexually. DSSHS claims that ”Scripture teaches that God’s will for humankind and creation can be comprehended only through the foolishness of the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ (405-07).” While this is, of course, true of God’s merciful will, Lutheran ethics simply cannot deny that God retains an original will for humans that they “be perfect . . . as your heavenly Father is perfect (Matt. 5:48).”

The trouble is very deep. It is as if the drafters of DSSHS had forgotten the ancient Marcionist heresy of denying the validity of the Old Testament and its teachings in favor of single-minded concentration on the merciful salvific action of the saving God. For Marcion, Christ is sent by the fully good God to rescue creation from a situation produced by a righteous, but jealous, creator God who has made rather a mess of things. Accordingly, the old laws of the Old Testament have passed away and a new era has dawned. By steadfastly refusing to go to the OT and its law for determining the intentionality of God for human sexual being, DSSHS flirts with the heresy of Marcionism.

In summary, the fundamental problem of DSSHS is that it forgets that God deals with His creation with two hands: on the left hand is law and reason, and on the right hand is gospel and faith. Lutheran theology teaches that it is one God who deals with His creation in these two ways. DSSHS consistently errs on the side of identifying God only with his right hand. But God is ambidextrous. To work out a Lutheran social ethics on sexuality demands that both hands of God be equally considered. There is a divinely-intentioned order that must be implemented along with a divinely-intentioned mercy that is freely given when that intentioned and just order is not implemented. An ethics without God’s left hand cannot be a Lutheran sexual ethics. Accordingly, DSSHS, though written by Lutherans, is not a Lutheran document.

DSSHS and the Divine “As If”

As others have pointed out, the term ‘Trinity’ occurs but once in the document, and there the three persons are not named. This is indicative of perhaps a deeper presupposition in the document: In discussing sin and law the document proceeds merely “as if” God were to exist apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language, and merely “as if” God had a definite set of attitudes towards the world. I say this “as if” pointedly because there is ample textual evidence to suggest committee members actually do not agree that God has a primal intentionality towards His creation. Instead of viewing God as a concrete divine being having particular intentions towards His creation (e.g., it is His Will that human beings do x under conditions y), God is understood as somehow having an abstract general nature that human beings must “fill in.” The result of this “filling in” is that God’s “intentionality” towards x is greatly influenced by the previous commitments of the drafters towards x, commitments not presupposing the divine at all.

As previously indicated, the nature of God and his relationship to His creation is understood in DSSHS on the basis of His merciful, incarnational sojourn and justificatory activity. But given this general nature of the divine, what specific intentions would and could this God have for His people? Surely He would bring life out of death, make new the old, and do the unexpected (like rising from the dead). Since He incarnationally dwells with us in our humanness, he is with us in our weakness and weak-willedness. Accordingly, He is always alongside us in our sexual choices and foibles. Because God loves us even in our weakness, we may love others in their weakness. But outside of general platitudes like these, what more can be specifically concluded about how humans ought to behave sexually?

Here the task becomes more difficult. While love and mercy are very good things, and while God’s gift of them to us does indeed suggest we should be honest, sincere, and non-jealous in our relationships, the fact of divine love and mercy is not capable itself of providing a foundation for the institution of marriage. On the basis of divine love and mercy, why prefer married love to lesbian love? What reasons are there favoring being loving and merciful within the context of heterosexual married love over homosexual, unmarried love? Is heterosexual love more facilely derivable from the incarnation and justification than homosexual love? If so, how is it?

The problem is that DSSHS fails to avail itself of the traditional Lutheran resources of natural law and orders of creation. By looking only at the incarnation for clues to God’s intention, DSSHS ignores what the Old Testament (and much of the New Testament) says about God’s distinctive intentionality for human life - - including human sexual life. Clearly, DSSHS does not suppose that God has a general revelation for all human beings apart from the Christ event, and that the Bible has much to say about the specifics of God’s intentionality. In fact, this fundamental question is not even asked in the document: Is homoerotic behavior in itself sinful? Is such behavior consistent with the Will of God, or does it run counter to His will? While it would seem to many Christians that one of these two alternatives must obtain, DSSHS actually allows a third option: It is neither consistent with nor inconsistent with that Will, and perhaps, to think it is, is itself profoundly wrongheaded. But to assume this is to assume that God is not the kind of being that has a definite will at all. Accordingly, the intentionality of God, while it might be an interesting theological construct, is not itself a real event or state.

DSSHS and Antinomianism

Classically, ‘antinomianism’ applies to any theological position that downgrades the authority or integrity of the law. If one were to say, like Luther’s contemporary Johann Agricola, that the law needs not to be proclaimed among Christians, then one clearly is flirting with antinomianism. The question is this: Is DSSHS antinomian?

To answer this question, one must first get an operational definition of ‘law’. I like the following: x is a law if and only if x is promulgated by an authority, x is binding upon an appropriate class, and x is in principle enforceable. Lutheran thinking has classically started with the giving of God’s law to creation. God is an authority that has a clear intent with respect to His creation, and this intent is accordingly binding upon it. Furthermore, this law is enforceable by God: violators - - all of us - - are worthy of ultimate punishment. For Luther and the classical Lutheran tradition, the ‘oughtness’ of things is grounded upon a transcendent ought-intentionality. Not only is creation bound by the ought, God has a capacity to enforce the oughtness He loads into creation.

Classical Lutheran theology does not derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. It realizes that the ‘ought’ of law can only be grounded in the transcendent ‘ought-intentionality’ of God. Sin interferes, and what ought to be, is not. The Fall is the nonconformity of ‘is’ to ‘ought’. All of creation is wayward. God’s natural law is not followed. All have fallen short of the glory of God.

Redemption in classical Christian theology is God’s arrival in His incarnation to justify, e.g., to make right, the nonconformity of creation’s ‘is’ to God’s ‘ought’. Justification, on account of Christ, occurs when God judges His wayward creation that is not what it ought to be, to be nonetheless acceptable to Him, to the One who justly must judge it as unacceptable. For Lutherans, the “happy exchange” between Christ and the sinner operates so that Christ’s gifts of conformity to the ought are given to human beings, and human deficiency in the face of this ought is given to Christ. The result is that human beings live and Christ dies in accordance with divine justice.

The profound problem with DSSHS turns out to be the ancient problem of “what has God said?” The notion of an external law claiming that human beings ought to behave in a particular way seems fundamentally out of touch with our times. While human beings have never liked oughts, our time has a special disdain for them. In vast portions of western popular culture, normative ethics simply does not play. People can make no sense out of “absolute” claims that humans ought to be different than they are. The very notion of an objective reality that human beings must conform to is anathema to us. It is, of course, the triumph of Nietzsche. The medieval transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty have been unmasked and seen to be mere projections of the human will-to-power.

Lutheran theology in the last 125 years has been strongly influenced by Nietzsche’s critique. Accordingly, there is little hope that an ELCA committee on sexuality can move beyond the dominance of the subject and return to the object, to a way of thinking that allows again for the possibility of real oughts. To return to the ought, to an honest appraisal of how God intends things to be, means that some trajectories of human action must be rejected. If man and woman ought to remain celibate outside of marriage, then that is what they ought to do, no matter how difficult that may be, and no matter how much one might not like it. That they won’t so remain is addressed by the reality of incarnation and justification. This is how it works; this is how it has always worked. But, as evidenced by DSSHS, this is no longer how it works - - at least within the ELCA institution of social statement-making .

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[i] David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1968), 469.

[ii] Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Chapter 1.

[iii] G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 6ff.

[iv] See “How not to Derive ‘Ought’ from ‘Is’, The Philosophical Review 72 (October 1964). For Searle’s article, see The Philosophical Review 73:43-58. The matter is more complicated than how I have explained it in body of this article, resting basically on the logical status of a critical ceteris paribus (all things being equal) clause. Searle claims that, in the example of Jones and Smith, the “ought” derives from the “is” all things being equal. But what are these things? The Thomsons demonstrate that the “is” is derived only when the ceteris paribus clause is given an evaluative interpretation. But if this is so, then we have an evaluative statement that has not been derived from a descriptive one, and moreover, cannot be so derived.

[v] Wengert & Kolb, The Book of Concord (Minneapolis: Fortress Press 2000), 324-25.

[vi] WA 18, 768:23: “In Deum peccat impius sive edat, sive bibat.”

Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality - - Part IV

Reading DSSHS Critically

Maybe it is, in fact, unfair to read DSSHS closely and critically. After all, it is the work of 14 committee members from different walks of life, having different educational backgrounds, different theological convictions, and different views on the propriety of same-sex relationships. However, since the document purports to be important enough that the entire ELCA study it, I shall take it with the seriousness it invites.

DSSHS starts promisingly enough, quoting Jesus’ summary of the law: 1) Love God above all things, and 2) love the other person as oneself (Matt. 22:36-40). But then things disintegrate rather quickly. As every good Lutheran knows, no one can do that, i.e., love God above all things and love the neighbor as oneself. While this fundamental material content of the law is binding on all human beings, nobody can accomplish it. Human beings have a fundamental deficiency before the law.

Unfortunately, DSSHS evades our full realization of this fundamental human deficiency. It asks, “What does it mean for us as sexual creatures to love our neighbors as ourselves and thus fulfill God’s law of love in this time and society?” (13-15) The game is lost from the outset because the question is the wrong one. A person simply cannot “fulfill God’s law of love.” The ‘thus’ in the question suggests that one could fulfill this law of love if one “as a sexual creature” did love the neighbor as oneself. But who can do this? To suggest it is possible is already to confuse law and gospel.

This confusion of law and gospel is further exacerbated when, a few lines later, the ELCA is identified as “a community of moral deliberation.” The use of this definition from a 1991 ELCA social statement is unfortunate because it confuses what the church is. Clearly, we should not expect members of the ELCA to have special ethical/moral insight or any special tools for ethical/moral reflection. The church is, as Luther says, those who hear the voice of their shepherd (Schmalkald Articles). But those hearing this voice are concerned not primarily with the development of acumen in ethical and moral reflection, but rather with salvation. They want to hear the voice and follow the shepherd, not learn how to mount ethical arguments. The church is a community gathered about a salvific concern (gospel), not an ethical one (law).

Further confusion ensues when DSSHS states that it wants to “speak in ways that can address both religious and secular discussions” (35-6). On the basis of this, one would expect DSSHS to identify something universal in Christian and secular experience. Lutheran ethics has traditionally been able to accomplish this with its two kingdoms approach: God deals with us with two hands. With the gospel of His right hand, human beings live in the realm of grace and faith. However, with His left hand, humans dwell in the kingdom of law and reason. The genius of Lutheran ethics has always been that because the foundation of ethical reasoning is not grounded in the particularity of Christian soteriology, ethical reflection from a Lutheran perspective retains a universal character.

However, any hope that DSSHS shall proceed in this time-honored fashion is immediately crushed by this: “[This document] contains important introductory material designed to explain how Lutherans approach ethics in the light of God’s incarnation and our hope in God who justifies us in Christ” (45-7). The foundation for a Lutheran contribution to a secular ethical discussion has now been lost. How might one find something in these two discussions that is common when the putative foundation for these discussions is the reality of incarnation and justification only granted by one of the conversation partners? This incoherency is never addressed in DSSHS.

Another theological problem occurs when DSSHS makes this startling claim: “As Lutherans we understand ourselves . . . as simultaneously righteous (saved by God’s grace alone) and sinful (convicted by the law)” (165-66). While one might argue on the basis of the “happy exchange” between Christ and the sinner, that ‘righteousness’ just is ‘being saved by God’s grace’, any putative identity between being sinful and being convicted by the law is wrongheaded. Being sinful and being convicted by the law are logically independent notions. One is clearly sinful from birth even if one has never been convicted by the law. To confuse the two is to mistake the reality of not conforming to the law with the experience of not so conforming.

DSSHS’s attempt to use Christian freedom somehow to “preserve and guide all churchly teaching” (164), is also problematic. How is it precisely that “freedom from the crushing burden of our unworthiness before the law” engenders “responsibility and humility in service to the neighbor (200)? While the document says that we are to serve others because of God’s “promises, compassion and mercy” (213), it does not show - - and indeed it cannot show - - how God’s promises, compassion and mercy fill in the contour of what we ought to do. The problem is logical: An ought cannot be derived from an is. We cannot derive that we ought to be compassionate because God is compassionate, though we can conclude that we are in fact compassionate because God is compassionate. DSSHS purports, however, to be an ethical document. Accordingly, it deals with what we ought to do. DSSHS clearly is concerned with what is sexually licit and what illicit.

Throughout DSSHS one runs across ambiguous statements, of which the following is an example: “At heart, human beings are captive to sin - - needy, fearful, often misguided, and sometimes broken” (225-26). Here DSSHS seemingly suggests that sin just is being needy, fearful, misguided and broken? But this is surely problematic; for being needy, fearful, misguided and broken is not, strictly speaking, sin. For Lutherans, sin is primarily enmity with God. Sin is a relational property, not a non-relational one. The logic of ‘sin’ is this: ‘A instances the property S of sin if and only if A has dispositions, attitudes and actions not intended by God for A’. But DSSHS seems to suggest the following: ‘A instances S if A has some cluster of non-relational properties P.’ Apparently, properties P are also what is psychologically unhealthy for A. But this is entirely wrongheaded, for what is psychologically healthy or unhealthy for a person is logically independent of that person’s sin.

DSSHS makes some statements that cannot truly be intended by the drafters. Surely, the committee did not mean to say that “Lutheran sexual ethics cannot suggest that sexual longing or sexual expression is sinful intrinsically” (275-76). But why can it not do this? Are we not willing any longer to say that there are classes of sexual longings or expressions that are not intended by God for human beings to have and do? Is not a sexual longing or expression toward a child intrinsically sinful? Is it not also the case with a murderous heart? The confusion here is deep: Just because something may be “natural” for A to experience does not mean that God intends that what is “natural” for A to obtain. We must distinguish God’s natural law that A instance a set of dispositions B from the natural disposition A has not instance B. The sad fact is that humans now are not as they ought to be. Clearly, if, as Luther says, “human beings sin against God whether they eat or sleep,” then there is a large class of sexual longings and expressions with are intrinsically sinful.

As has previously been discussed, DSSHS states that “a Lutheran sexual ethic looks to the death and resurrection of Christ as the source for the values that guide it (325-26).” But the question is how does the death and resurrection of Christ guide sexual value formation? What is the specific connection?

Here, lamentably, there simply is deep ambiguity. One can say such things as that God was so merciful that He, in Christ, went to His death on the Cross. But precisely what does this imply for sexual human beings? Are we to conclude that since Christ did not condemn (or judge) us, we ought not condemn (or judge) our brother or sister? While this is right, it tells only half the story. In reality, we are both condemned by God for our sin, and forgiven in Christ for that same sin. What Lutheran ethics cannot do is leave out the law. It is because we are condemned and lost before God that God became incarnate and justified us. Lutheran sexual ethics must not forget the reality of God’s primordial intentionality for his creation, and the deficiency of His creation in actualizing that intentionality. Living out our freedom on account of Christ does not entail that we can change the identity conditions for “being lost.”

Finally, for a church defining itself as “a community of moral discernment,” the section entitled “Scripture and Moral Discernment” must come as a disappointment, for in this section we learn very little about how Scripture is to be used to discern what God would have us do sexually. The focal biblical quote in the section is clearly this: “Scripture teaches that God’s will for humankind and creation can be comprehended only through the foolishness of the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ (405-07).” While this is, of course, true of God’s merciful will, Lutheran ethics simply cannot deny that God retains an original will for humans that “they be perfect as the Lord, thy God is perfect.”

The trouble here is very deep. It is as if the drafters of DSSHS have forgotten the ancient Marcionite heresy of denying the validity of the Old Testament and its teachings in favor of a single-minded concentration on the merciful salvific action of the saving God. For Marcion, Christ has come to rescue people from a situation created by a creator God who has made rather a mess of things. Accordingly, the old laws of the Old Testament have passed away and a new era has dawned. By steadfastly refusing to go to the OT and its law for determining the intentionality of God for human sexual being, DSSHS clearly flirts with the heresy of Marcionism.

As I have already said, the fundamental problem of DSSHS is that it forgets that God deals with His creation with two hands: on the left hand is law and reason, and on the right hand is gospel and faith. Lutheran theology teaches that it is one God who manifests Himself to us in these two ways. DSSHS consistently errs on the side of identifying God with only his right hand. But God is not one-handed; He is, in fact, ambidextrous. To work out a Lutheran social ethics on sexuality demands that both hands of God are equally considered. There is, on the one hand, the divinely-intentioned order that must be implemented; there is, on the other hand, the divinely-intentioned mercy that is freely given when the intentioned and just order is not implemented. An ethics without God’s left hand is cannot be a Lutheran sexual ethics. Accordingly, DSSHS, though written by Lutherans, is not a Lutheran document.

The Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality - - Part III

DSSHS and Antinomianism

Classically, ‘antinomianism’ applies to any theological position that downgrades the authority or integrity of the law. If one were to say, like Luther’s contemporary Johann Agricola, that the law needs not to be proclaimed among Christians, then one clearly is flirting with antinomianism. The question is this: Is DSSHS antinomian?

To answer this question clearly, one must first get an operating definition of law. I like the following: x is a law if and only if x is promulgated by an authority, is binding upon a class, and is in principle enforceable. Lutheran thinking has classically started with the promulgation or giving of God’s law to creation. God is an authority that has a clear intent with respect to His creation, and this intent is accordingly binding upon it. Furthermore, this law is enforceable by God: violators - - all of us - - are worthy of ultimate punishment. For Luther and the classical Lutheran tradition, the ‘oughtness’ of things is grounded upon a transcendent ought-intentionality. Oughtness is built into the very nature of things because God loads ought into creation. Not only does is creation bound by the ought, God has a capacity to enforce this oughtness He loads into creation.

The classical Lutheran story does not derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. The classical tradition realizes that the ‘ought’ of law can only be grounded in the transcendent ‘ought-intentionality’ of God. Sin, of course, interferes, and what ought to be is not. The Fall is profoundly understood as the nonconformity of ‘is’ to ‘ought’. All of creation is wayward. The natural law upon creation given by God is not followed. Human beings have turned away from God and what ought to be. While the being of Creation was designed to be in conformity with the divine ought, it is not now in conformity. All have fallen short of the glory of God.

The whole idea of redemption in classical Christian theology is that God arrives in His incarnation to justify, e.g., to make right, the nonconformity of creation’s ‘is’ to the divine ‘ought’. Justification, on the basis of Christ, occurs when God judges His wayward creation that is not what it ought to be to be, nonetheless, acceptable to Him, to the One who can only judge it as unacceptable. For Lutherans, there is a “happy exchange” between Christ and the sinner. Christ’s gifts of conformity to the ought are given to human beings, and human deficiency in the face of the ought is given to Christ. The result is that human beings live and Christ dies in accordance with God’s justice that can only properly judge nonconformity with the ought as worthy of death.

The fundamental problem with DSSHS is that a statement of what ought to be cannot be derived from a description of what is. To try to derive a prescription of how to behave sexually from a description of what God has done for us is a category mistake.

The profound problem with DSSHS turns out to be the ancient problem of “what has God said?” The notion of an external law claiming that human beings ought to behave in such and such a way seems fundamentally out of touch with our times. While human beings have never liked oughts, it seems that our time has a special disdain for them. In vast portions of western popular culture, normative ethics simply does not play. People can make no sense out of “absolute” claims that humans ought to be different than they are. The very notion of an objective reality that human beings must somehow conform to is today anathema. It is, of course, the triumph of Nietzsche. The medieval transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty have been unmasked and seen to be mere projections of the human will-to-power.

Lutheran theology in the last 125 years has strongly been influenced by Nietzsche’s critique. Accordingly, there is little hope that an ELCA committee on sexuality could move beyond the dominance of the subject and return to the object, to a way of thinking that allows again for the possibility of a real ought. To return to the ought, to an honest appraisal of how God intends things to be, means that human action will likely be curbed in particular ways. If man and woman ought to remain celibate outside of marriage, then that is what they ought to do, no matter how difficult that may be. That they won’t so remain is addressed by incarnation and justification. This is how it works; this is how it has always worked. But, as evidenced by DSSHS, this is no longer how it works.

The Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality: Part II

DSSHS and the Divine “As If”

As others have pointed out, the term ‘Trinity’ occurs but once in the document, and there the three distinctive persons are not named. This is perhaps indicative of a deeper presupposition in the document: In discussing sin and law the document proceeds “as if” God were to exist apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language, and “as if” God had a definite set of attitudes towards the world. I say this “as if” pointedly because there is ample evidence in the document to suggest committee members actually reject the idea that that God has a primal intentionality towards His creation. Instead of viewing God as an individual divine being having a particular intention towards His creation (e.g., it is His Will that human beings do x under conditions y), God is understood as somehow having a general nature that human beings must “fill in.” The result of this “filling in” is that God’s “intentionality” towards x is asserted on the basis of the previous commitment of the drafters towards x.

In DSSHS, the nature of God and his relationship to His creation is understood on the basis of His graceful and merciful incarnational sojourn and justificatory activity. Given this general nature of the divine, what specific intentions would and could this God have for His people? Surely He would bring life out of death, make new the old, and do the unexpected (like rising from the dead). Since He dwells with us in our humanness in the incarnation, he accordingly dwells with us in our weakness and our weak wills. He is alongside of us in all of our sexual choices and foibles, never abandoning us. God loves us even in our weakness, so we are to love others in their weakness. God’s love for us clearly trumps his Judgment upon us. But outside of this, what more can be said about God?

Here it becomes more difficult. While Love and mercy are very good things, and while God’s gift of them to us maybe does suggest that we should be honest, sincere, and not jealous and envious in our relationships, love and mercy are not capable of providing a foundation for institutions such as marriage - - at least a foundation that can speak of marriage qua marriage. If love and mercy constitute the divine intention towards us, then it would seem that there is no greater reason to prefer married love to lesbian love. If God came and manifested love and mercy, should we not manifest love and mercy? And if we do, what reasons are there to do that within the context of heterosexual married love over homosexual, unmarried, committed love? It seems that it is a stretch to say that heterosexual love is more facilely derivable from the incarnation and justification than homosexual love.

The problem is that DSSHS does not avail itself of traditional Lutheran resources of natural law and orders of creation. By looking only at the incarnation for clues to God’s intention, readers of DSSHS seem to ignore what the Old Testament (and much of the New Testament) say about God’s rather distinctive intentionality for human life - - including human sexual life. It is obvious that DSSHS does not suppose that God has a general revelation for all human beings apart from the Christ event, and that the Bible has much to say about the specifics of God’s primal intentionality towards His creation. In fact, the fundamental question is not even asked in the document: Is homoerotic behavior in itself sinful? Is such behavior consistent with the Will of God, or does it run counter to His will? While it would seem to many Christians that one of these two alternatives must obtain, DSSHS seems to presuppose a third option: It is neither consistent with or inconsistent with that Will, and perhaps, to think it is, is itself profoundly wrongheaded. But to assume this is to assume that God is not the kind of being that has a definite will on these matters. Accordingly, the intentionality of God, while it might be an interesting theological construct, is not itself a real event or state.

The ELCA Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality: Part I

Over the next few days I shall publish here my response to the ELCA Sexuality Statement. Below is Part I:

Since the time of David Hume (1711-76), philosophers have been struggling with the question of whether “ought” can be inferred from “is.” Famously, Hume held that it “seems altogether inconceivable how this new relation [ought] can be a deduction of others [is] which are entirely different from it.[i] Accordingly, propositions of how the world is simply cannot entail statements of how it ought to be.

Against this, naturalists of all stripes, including Hume’s contemporary Jeremy Bentham (1748 -1832) hold that how things are do entail how they ought to be. Famously, Bentham’s Principle of Utility “approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question.” [ii] Reflecting on the nature of this approval, classical utilitarianism argues that one ought to do that act which augments the happiness of those whose interest is in question. Evolutionary ethical theory thus permits a move from ‘is’ to ‘ought’. If human beings are instilled by the evolutionary process with a moral sense, then the fact of this sense does entail what they ought to do.

In 1903, G.E. Moore (1873-1958) launched a classic argument against any kind of ethical naturalism. In his “open question argument” he points out that a statement like Bentham’s ‘pleasure is good’ cannot mean that pleasure is identical to good, for if that were so, then ‘pleasure is good’ would entail ‘pleasure is pleasure’. [iii] But clearly it remains an “open question” whether or not ‘pleasure is good’, but not that 'pleasure is pleasure'. Thus, anyone asserting that pleasure is good must be “saying something more” about pleasure than that it is pleasure, and this “more” must presupposes a non-natural property of goodness. To say ‘x is good’ or ‘S ought to do y’ is to say something that is in principle irreducible to mere descriptions of natural and social facts. Accordingly, ‘ought’ is of another order than ‘is’.

While philosophers since Moore’s time have been divided over the validity of the open question argument, there is no mistaking that a very powerful tradition of twentieth century philosophical argument followed Hume in denying that ‘ought’ can be derived from ‘is’. After all, even if beneficent values were somehow evolutionarily loaded into human nature, it would still not entail that one ought to act in accordance with those values. For a number of reasons, I am convinced that Hume is essentially right, and that ‘ought’ cannot be derived from ‘is’.

So why do I raise this old controversy in this discussion of the ELCA Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality (DSSHS)? It is my contention that unknown to the committee members of the ELCA Task Force on Human Sexuality, their work actually presupposes the minority position in this philosophical debate: DSSHS assumes that descriptive statements about God’s incarnation in Christ and His justification of sinful human beings can entail a prescriptive statement about how one ought to behave sexually. By attempting to ground sexual ethics in the Second Article, DSSHS not only is unorthodox, but incoherent. It not only does not hold together rhetorically, it cannot do so logically. By analyzing what God has done for us in Christ, we cannot logically derive how we ought to act as Christians. As paradoxical as this might sound, to claim that we can do so is to confuse Law and Gospel. While from a description of what God has done for us in Christ, we can infer something of what we do in fact do as Christians, we cannot infer what we ought to do as Christians. To claim otherwise is to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’; it is to ground the Law in the Gospel; it is to strike out in a way that Lutherans simply cannot do.

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[i] David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature.

[ii] Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Chapter 1.

[iii] G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica.

Why is the "Literal Sense" so Problematic? - An Excursus on the Sexuality Issue

Believers in the pews are often bewildered how it can be that theologians and church leaders often proclaim positions at glaring odds with what they believe they read in Scripture. Why does my bishop say we should be "open and affirming" to homosexuals and my Bible say this about homosexuality at Leviticus 20:13: "If a man lies with a male as he lies with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them." (NKJV) How is this possible?

At this point historical-critical points are generally introduced, and the believer is taken back behind "God's Word" of Scripture into a world of causal explanations of Scripture, a world of socio-economic structural explanations, or perhaps of literary methodologies, or, if these don't do the trick, just plain bald assertions. (I remember debating an ELCA college religion professor who confidently told those assembled that Leviticus simply was "a weird book.")

In truth, however, the problem with "taking the Bible literally" has been around for a very long time, and it is not a problem that finally rides on historical-critical methodology or alternate socio-economic and ideological "causes" for Scriptural assertion. The problem with a literal reading of Scripture and a fortiori a sola scriptura approach is that such an approach seems to presuppose that there is not "a broad ugly ditch" (Lessing) that separates the horizon of the text and the horizon of the reader. In other words, the sola scriptura approach that holds to Luther's "literal sense of Scripture" seems to proceed blissfully unaware of the hermeneutical problem: How can one read a text and somehow apprehend the meaning of that text? If this is possible at all, what would be the conditions of this possibility? The problem with grasping the literal sense of Scripture is just part of the general problem of grasping the "literal sense" of any document. How could such a thing be possible? Where resides the meaning of the text, and how does a reader come to acquire it?

The believer attending services has, in general, no way to grasp that the difficulty in the theological community in grasping the simple, literal sense of Scripture has less to do with a wanton disregard for the specifics of the text, but rather with how one might understand Biblical authority on the other side of Gadamer. Just as there is a theological paradigm dominating in mainstream Protestant denominations that eschews theological and semantic realism and the very possibility of theophysical causation, so is there a paradigm that rejects the possibility of the text having meaning in itself. In the same way that Kant left the philosophical tradition with a dualism of the unknowable Ding-an-Sich (the noumenal) and a subjectivized Ding-für-Sich (the phenomenal), hermeneutics by the middle of the twentieth century was stuck with a dualism of the irrecoverable meaning of the text, and the subjectivized “reader response” to it. Just as Hegel tried to overcome the dualism of Kant by eschewing the very possibility of the thing-in-itself while showing the objectivity of the historicity of the thing-for-me, so did Gadamer seek to move beyond entirely the problematic of the textual meaning-in-itself, and embrace instead the objectivity of the historicized meaning-for-me.

For Gadamer, the meaning of a text arises in the back-and-forth movement of text and reader, where the horizon of the reader is figured as a historical product of the “spirit” that was itself realized in the text. The “effects of historical consciousness” are thus this: Historical movement produces cultural artifacts (texts) that effect subsequent historical movement. In any age, the spirit of its historical understanding is manifested in its texts. Texts are thus in a deep sense communal productions, with individual authors merely bespeaking the historical understanding of the age. When these texts of a previous age and community are read by later readers, the historical understandings in the text confront the later reader not as something wholly foreign, but rather as something deeply resonant to the later reader, because the historical understandings in the previous texts effect subsequent historical understandings that themselves are implicit in the later interpretive horizons.

It works like this: An earlier text (take Romans, for example) leaves an interpretative wake in the interpretive horizons of later generations. Thus, the text of Romans has formed the very interpretive equipment (my conceptual apparatus) by which I now in the early 21^st century must use in reading the earlier text (Romans). In a real sense the historical effects of Romans in my interpretive horizon are now marshaled in the attempt to read Romans. Thus, in the reading, interpretation is possible because the “meaning of the text in itself” is already historically bequeathed into the interpretive horizon of the reader such that its effects (Romans effects) thus function to read Romans. The meaning of the text thus arises in the play of the historical effects of Romans on the reader who presupposes these effects in the reading of Romans. Meaning is a back and forth, to and fro, movement between text and interpreter; it emerges as a fusion of horizons where the impossibility of the ultimate “otherness” of Scripture is displayed; Romans is not ultimately foreign, but has formed me the reader of Romans. The necessary condition of its speaking is that it is not ultimately and wholly different from the one interpreting it. This is why I can be said to have a “pre-understanding” of the text even prior to the reading of the text.

Accordingly, God cannot simply work as a wholly other One confronting us with wholly other mandates radically different from us. God’s Word in scripture is only possible because there is a pre-understanding of the text as a place where God might speak, a pre-understanding formed historically in the interpretive community by the text itself. Romans is a “classic performance” that has created a communal genre of interpretation that functions in the attentive listening to of the text. Just as we hear a classic performance of Beethoven and understand its “meaning” only if our interpretive horizon has been informed by listening to Beethoven, so do we hear the Word of God in scripture and understand its meaning only if our interpretive horizon has been informed by generations of communal experience with attentive hearing of the Romans texts as a place where God might speak.

The point in all of this is that just as there is no meaning to the music of Beethoven apart from listening to Beethoven, there is no meaning to the words of Romans apart from the history of communal experience with Romans. Just as musical meaning cannot reside anywhere but in the confrontation of the music with the listener, so too can textual meaning not reside anywhere but in the confrontation of the text with the reader. Theologians don’t so much want to “reject the literal Word of God plainly available in Scripture,” but find a way somehow to “make the literal Word of God possible.” It can only be possible in this complicated way where a historical interpretive community is dialectically related to the text, related such that the normative meaning of that text emerges on the basis of that dialectical relationship.

What church-going believers don’t realize is that the intellectual world that the theologian must inhabit makes it very difficult even to reclaim something of the horizon presupposed by much of the tradition. Gadamer, while he would appear to most non-theologians (many pastors included) as quite destructive to taking Scripture seriously, is really trying to reclaim the very possibility of taking it seriously by showing that the old dualism of textual objectivity and reader subjectivity (with the resultant “win” by the subject) can be overcome in the objectivity of the “spirit” of the text and tradition. The original Lutheran sola scriptura principle is fundamentally at odds with a Gadamerian approach unless it is reworked to show that the sola scriptura arises, and can only arise, in a communal situation presupposing tradition.

All of this is a bit complicated, and the reader of this blog might now actually know much more about about Gadamer than most ELCA pastors who don’t recognize the intellectual roots of the interpretive moves that they standardly make. Yet, these are the waters that must be swum if one is truly going to understand why “people just don’t take scripture at its clear sense when it prohibits homosexual activity.” In our present intellectual situation, we can’t think that any historical text has a clear sense without an interpretive community. If this is true of the Dialogues of Plato, it is true of Scripture as well.

There is no easy way out back to taking the text seriously. Perhaps what is needed is simply a move in the interpretive community not unlike the realist move of G.E. Moore. He said, “Instead of taking as the problematic the immediacy of the subject and the problem of the object, let us start with the immediacy of the object and see what happens.” This move put an end in philosophy to classical idealism, the "Hegelian synthesis" included. What is happening in theology is that we always assume an idealistic starting point and cannot find our way out of the subject. This is clearly true of Gadamer's hermeneutical analogue to "absolute idealism." So maybe it is time again for a new starting point. Why not simply start with the object and forgo the task of "building a bridge" to it? After all, there are only so many shots on the basketball court, and when you work yourself into the corner, the shots become very difficult indeed. If one still wants to play the game, one must find a different position on the court.