The Internal Clarity of Scriptture

I

I want to talk this evening about a very important notion in the Lutheran Reformation, the idea of the internal clarity of scripture. It is important to discuss this because we live in a time of great hermeneutical confusion, that is, we live in a time where a plethora of divergent methods and approaches to scripture all claim to ascertain the real meaning of the Biblical text. As a result, scripture seems to sustain a different meaning as a function of the exegetical and interpretive method employed in its reading.

What I shall do tonight is briefly review some of these contemporary hermeneutical strategies, compare them with the traditional approaches inherited by Luther and the Reformers in the sixteenth century, and show how the internal clarity of scripture provided the Reformation with the resources to deal with the confusion of hermeneutical trajectories that infected much of the tradition. I will then suggest that just as notion of the internal clarity of scripture operated in the sixteenth century to quell hermeneutical license, so it must be used today by Lutherans, if Lutheranism is to have any response to the contemporary hermeneutical quagmire.

II

In the United States, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is trying mightily to get clear on what it calls, “the Church’s teaching on homosexuality.” People are particularly interested in whether or not those engaged in homoerotic behavior in the context of a “committed relationship” - - whatever that might precisely mean - - ought to be allowed to serve as “rostered leaders,” that is, as pastors or associates in ministry, etc. Connected with this is the issue of whether or not two people of the same sex should be allowed to receive some type of liturgical “blessing,” a blessing analogous to that given to heterosexual couples who are wedding.

It is not my intention tonight to discuss the homosexuality issue except to make these two general comments:

· It is true that there has been great consensus within Christianity the past twenty centuries about the intrinsic sinfulness of homosexual behavior. In particular, within the Catholic theological tradition that has assumed the existence of natural law, homosexual acts were routinely considered to be deviant from that which ought to obtain, were thought to be not in conformity with God’s primary intentionality for human beings, and were therefore regarded to be sinful.

· It is also true that the theological tradition thought it could find biblical justification for their views on homosexuality. Since the 16^th century onward, most Protestant Christians have regarded homosexuality as sinful on the basis of the authority of scripture. Scripture was thought to be clear on the matter of whether or not God’s intention for His creation precluded homosexual behavior.

It is obvious, however, that many mainline Protestants no longer believe that there are clear biblical injunctions against homosexual behavior. Accordingly, if scripture is properly interpreted, then passages putatively debarring homosexual acts are found to do no such thing. By reaching back to recover the original meaning of these passages, interpreters believe they can somehow access the original semantic horizon of the text, a horizon that can be separated from the tradition of its interpretation. In doing so they say that there is nothing in the bible that would entail that homosexual activity is intrinsically wrong.

(I should like to note in passing how the sola scriptura principle gets perverted in this effort. At the time of the Reformation, sola scriptura was used as the primary authority that grounds theological orthodoxy. However, in our day a slavish Protestant adherence to sola scriptura, coupled with hermeneutical license, catapults the interpreter across nineteen centuries of Christian witness and attempts to connect the interpreter’s question to a text whose meaning is no longer clear and whose authority is suspect. I always wonder why it would be important for Christian piety to discern what the bible originally meant if the book is not essentially authoritative, that is, if it is in no way an effect of divine self-communication to us. What fundamental difference should the biblical text make if it is no longer caused by the divine? If it is just a book among books that is accidentally the founding document of the Christian tradition, then why does it matter today what it says in the seven problematic passages putatively prohibiting homosexual behavior?)

III

When looking at the contemporary hermeneutical landscape, we note the following general interpretative strategies.

Traditionalist approaches: This group of time-honored approaches claims that the text does indeed make particular truth-claims about God and God’s relation to human beings. While there may be internecine conflicts within this class of approaches pertaining to which parts of scripture are metaphorical and/or allegorical, they assume that clear and literal truth claims are made throughout scripture. These strategies are objectivist in spirit, claiming textual objectivity for all readers at all times. Although some of these approaches hold to a verbal plenary theory of biblical inspiration and authority, one need not claim the Holy Spirit as a divine amanuensis to hold that scripture has an objective meaning, and that one can apprehend this meaning by reading it. Traditionalist approaches assume a present objectivity, a present semantic discreteness.

Contextualist approaches: Contextualist proposals seek to ascertain the meaning of the text upon the horizon of its origination, that is, synchronically by comparing it to other documents within the region at the time, and diachronically by comparing it to other texts within the general history of similar documents. Contextualist approaches use various historical-critical methodologies to attempt to find out what the texts meant within the context of their emergence. We might think of these as objectivist as well, but here the objectivity is tied to the original meaning of the text in the context of its origination, and not a present objectivity.

Reader Response: Reader response approaches downplay the importance of what the text may once have meant, in favor of what the text now means for the reader in her reading. Bracketing questions of origination and authorial intent, this approach can be linked to an “enthusiastic approach” generally: the text means what it means to me now as the Holy Spirit guides me in the present. Whereas the traditionalist and the contextual approaches presuppose textual objectivity, the reader response proposal is a subjectivist approach. (I want to qualify this to an “enthusiasm” that, as Luther says, “swallows the Holy Spirit feathers and all.”) This interpretive strategy presupposes that there is no discernible meaning in the text apart from the act of interpretation, that the meaning of the text is constructed in its act of interpretation.

Fusion of Horizons Approaches: Based in post-Gadamerian hermeneutical theory, this way of approaching the text claims that while the text’s meaning is not merely my interpretation of the text (as in reader response), it is nonetheless impossible to ever have an objective reading of the text (as in either the contextual or traditional approach). On this view, the meaning of the text emerges in the back and forth movement between the horizon of the text and the horizon of the interpreter. Because of the “effects of historical consciousness” - - because the horizon of the text has formed historically the interpreter’s own horizon by which she interprets the text (Gadamer) - -, the text’s horizon can be interpreted by the interpreter. The fusion of horizons approach mediates the immediacy of the reader response position by contrasting it with a mediate objectivist interpretation (e.g., the traditionalist and contextualist approaches), such that both are synthesized or “taken up” (Aufgehebung) in a mediated immediacy.

Except for strands within the traditionalist approach, the problem with all of these is that no matter how objective they might pretend to be, they end up looking pretty subjective. Once the text is treated as a document beside other documents, a fissure invariably opens between the text and its interpretation. Unlike some other classic texts, the text of Scripture has sustained widely-divergent interpretations, particularly after it is unhinged from its community of interpretation - - the Catholic Church. In the Reformation, the cry of sola scriptura suggested to many that one could leap frog beyond the tradition and go to scripture for all truth. While this worked when there remained a shared set of interpretive values, after this common ethos faded, the text became helpless in the face of radically different interpretations.

Terry Fretheim, a Professor of OT at Luther Seminary sums up the problem with our present plethora of interpretive methods. He makes the following points in a 2006 Word and World article (26:4):

— “The Bible is the Word of God” in that it has a formative and constitutive role through the Holy Spirit, and that it is foundational for shaping and maintaining Christian self-identity. “

— People using the same historical-critical methods on the text come to different conclusions.

— Authority has often been given to particular interpretations of the text. (This correlates to the traditional hermeneutic on Scripture, I suppose.)

— “Hence, we must make a clean distinction between the text and our own interpretation of the text, for whatever we say about a Bible passage is never the same as what the Bible itself says.”

— Against the traditional Lutheran view of the internal clarity of Scripture, Fretheim asserts,“ The Bible itself often makes interpretation difficult and contributes to the problem of its own authority. It has been said that the Bible is its own worst enemy.”

— “There is . . . no sure move from the “objective” exegesis of the text to its meaning; contemporary issues are in the room at every stage of the process. The effects of our experience upon our study of the Bible mean that readers do not have direct, unmediated access to meanings the author may have intended or to “naked” meanings of the text itself. Recognizing that, we can make no clean distinction between “what the text meant” and “what the text means, . . .”

I have used Fretheim because he speaks this so very clearly. He knows the methods of the academy and knows how to apply them to the text. In doing so, Fretheim notices something that others see as well: the interpretive methods applied to the text not surprisingly determine what meaning the text has. Fretheim’s views are not idiosyncratic, but are fairly standard among reflective ELCA scripture professors.

IV

As is well-known the theological tradition at the eve of the Reformation had in place the “four-fold method of biblical interpretation.” It was thought that all of scripture could be read in four distinctive ways, that is, there were four different senses to scriptural expressions: the literal, allegorical, troplogical, and anagogical. These four senses are summed up in this Latin expression: “Littera gesta docet; quid credas allegoria, moralis quid agas; quo tendas anagogia.,” (“The letter teaches what happened; the allegorical what you should believe, the moral what you must do; the anagogical where you are going.”) For instance, in a literal sense Jerusalem is the city of David in Judea; allegorically, it is the church; tropologically it is the just and righteous soul; anagogically it is the heavenly city to which the righteous are heading.

Starting with the school of Alexandria, the tradition assumed that literality of the words of Scripture must be transcended in order to encounter the spiritual truths standing behind the words. For instance, Augustine claims that in the parable of the loaves and fishes, the five loaves refer to the five books of Moses; the two fishes refer to the Priest and King pointing to Christ. Further, he claims that the multiplication into many loaves represents the multiplication of the five books of Moses into many volumes; the fragments left over refer to the deep truths that the many could not receive and were thus left for the twelve disciples.

Over and against such fanciful hermeneutics, Luther says that there is but one sense of Scripture, and it can strike us both as law and as gospel. The law is demand, showing us what we have not done or been in the sight of God; the gospel is promise, showing us what God has done and what He is for us.

In offering his “new hermeneutics,” Luther clearly realizes that according to the fourfold method, Scripture can mean almost anything that the interpreter wants it to mean, and that thus, the interpreter becomes lord over God’s Word rather than the Word becoming lord over the interpreter. Therefore, Luther claimed that no external exegetical method can be applied to Scripture in discerning the meaning of the text. In order to make Scripture lord over its interpreter, one must submit to its “clear sense.” This sense establishes what Scripture is about. Here Luther presupposes an internalist interpretive method.

V

Luther and the Reformers assume that Scripture attests to itself, that it interprets itself. Because of this, it is internally clear. All of the parts of Scripture testify to Christ, and Christ is found in all the parts of Scripture. Just as there is a hermeneutical circle with the parts of Scripture testifying to the whole, and the whole of Scripture illuminating the parts, so too is the Holy Spirit at work in a hermeneutical circle: The Word carries the Spirit who Himself interprets the Word. Luther also calls this clarity a sinceritas or simplicitas.

However, this internal clarity is consonant with Scripture’s apparent obscurity. Human beings are in bondage to sin and cannot free themselves. This sinfulness affects one’s standpoint on Scripture; One cannot access Scripture except from the standpoint of one in bondage to sin, one who does not want to let God be God, who does not want anyone to be lord except the self. This perceived scriptural obscurity is fully compatible with Scripture’s internal clarity.

Speaking of these things, Luther writes:

“For what still sublimer thing can remain in the scriptures, now that the seals have been broken, the stone rolled from the door of the sepulcher, and the supreme mystery brought to light, namely, that Christ the Son of God has been made man, that God is three in one, that Christ has suffered for us and is to reign eternally? Are not these things known and sung even in the highways and byways? Take Christ out of the scriptures and what will you find left in them? The subject matter of the scriptures, therefore, is all quite accessible, even though some texts are still obscure owing to our ignorance of their terms.” (Bondage of the Will, LW 33:25-26)

”If you speak of the internal clarity, no man perceives one iota of what is in the scriptures unless he has the Spirit of God. All men have a darkened heart, so that they can recite everything in scripture, and know how to quote it, yet they apprehend and truly understand nothing of it. They neither believe in God, nor that they themselves are creatures of God.” (Bondage of the Will, LW 33:28)

It is my contention that the notion of the internal clarity or perspicuity of scripture must be regarded as a primitive assertion within Lutheran theology generally. While it cannot itself be proved, its assertion is necessary for Lutheran theology to function properly. If one is to leapfrog back across centuries of tradition to find authority in a single text, then it is requisite that the text is clear. The alternative is to find the authority of the tradition in the development of the tradition itself, i.e., in the development of the church - - something Luther staunchly rejected. It is important to grasp the Catholic counterargument to the perspicuity of scripture.

The argument claims that, from the beginning, the Catholic tradition realized that the biblical texts harmonized only imperfectly. The tradition thus intuitively recognized that the development of doctrine is essential to understanding what scripture means. Accordingly, since there is no fundamental fissure between Scripture and tradition, the tradition thus determines the shape of the canon itself. Moreover, because of the fundamental obscurity of Scripture, a teaching magisterium is necessary to interpret it correctly. This magisterial office functions to interpret questions properly in the light of church teaching, a teaching itself founded in scripture and tradition. While having such a magisterium is a profoundly anti-democratic way of proceeding, such a hermeneutical elitism makes good sense if scripture is not internally clear.

VI

By advocating the internal clarity of scripture, however, Luther and the Reformers put an end to the fanciful interpretations of the tradition, a tradition in which those “in the know” could always claim to discern a specialist-like deeper “spiritual truth” behind the shallow vulgar letter of the biblical text.

Lutherans face a similar situation today. The fissure between the text and its interpretation seemingly guarantees that text will always be spun by the interpreter. As in the sixteenth century, so today, the Lutheran response to the notion that there is a yawning abyss between the text and its interpretation must be the assertion of the perspicuity of scripture. Listen again to the voices of our Lutheran theological ancestors, people who understood how anti-elitist and democratic Lutheran hermeneutics is:

“But the articles of faith and the moral precepts are taught in scripture in their proper places, not in obscure and ambiguous words, but in such as are fitted to them, and free from all ambiguity, so that every diligent reader of scripture who reads it devoutly and piously, can understand them” [Quenstedt (1617-88), Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, 81].

This clarity is, of course, always related to the Holy Spirit which, while carried on the wings of the Word, is nevertheless necessary for understanding that Word:

“If you speak of the internal clearness, no man understands a single iota of the scriptures by the natural powers of his own mind, unless he have the Spirit of God; all have obscure hearts. The Holy Spirit is required for the understanding of the whole of Scripture and all of its parts” [Gerhard (1582-1637), DTELC, 83-4].

At work in this interpretation is the “hermeneutical circle” where the parts interpret the whole and the whole interprets the parts:

“The more obscure passages, which need explanation, can and should be explained by other passages that are more clear, and thus the scripture itself furnishes an interpretation of the more obscure expression when a comparison of these is made with those that are more clear; so the Scripture is explained by Scripture” (Quenstedt, 86).

But, this hermeneutical circle presupposes the agency of the Holy Spirit:

“For no other source than the sacred scriptures themselves can a certain and infallible interpretation of scripture be known. For scripture itself, or rather the Holy Spirit speaking in scriptures or through it, is the legitimate and independent interpreter of itself” (Quenstedt, DTELC, 86).

As in the sixteenth century, so in our day, the only way to claim that we are not guilty of finally constructing the text which supposedly presences the Word that saves us, is to assert that there is an objectivity to the text over and apart from human being, an objectivity which is an artifact of the divine, an objectivity that controls its own interpretation. This is the barely-remembered doctrine of the internal clarity of scripture.

Towards a Lutheran Theological Semantics III

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

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

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

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

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

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

Towards a Lutheran Theological Semantics II

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

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

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

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

Towards a Lutheran Theological Semantics I

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

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

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

Logic and Semantics in Theology

In the medieval university the study of logic and semantics was part of an education eventuating in the Master of Arts degree. Students studying for their Doctor of Theology learned their craft after having already mastered these important fields. In medieval disputations participants knew the rules of inference and could easily spot logical infractions. Moreover, they knew that words had both a signifcatio (signification) and a suppositio (reference), and they could unpack the meaning of theological sentences on the basis of this distinction. The educational horizon of the budding medieval theologian included profound training in the art of inference and the nature of meaning.

At the dawn of the Reformation, theologians like Luther who would become important purveyors of the new theology at Wittenberg, could also claim a deep education in logic and semantics. Luther participated in faculty disputations throughout his life and he clearly knew how to chop logic with the best of his peers. His training at Erfurt with the nominalists Trutvetter and Unsinn prepared him to understand deeply the truth-conditions of theological language, an understanding thought necessary for theological precision. Disputants were concerned with the question of which theological statements were true and which false. In a time in which it was salvifically important what one believed to be true theologically, sustained effort was made to give students the requisite tools to grasp the truth value of theological statements.

We Lutherans living almost 500 years after the Reformation find ourselves in a context quite unlike that of the Reformers. While for them the critical questions concerned the truth value of particular theological statements, for us the crucial theological questions don't seem any longer to be about truth. It is as if many Lutheran theologians and pastors have outgrown a robust sense of truth. Of course, they might say, theological statements are in some sense true, but this does not mean that there is some theological states of affairs existing independently from consciousness making those statements true. Such statements are true for other reasons, it seems. Theological statements may express or address the human existential situation such that their meaning and truth are thus connectable to human experience in a very profound sense. Or perhaps such statements are best understood as linguistic customs of a Lutheran community, meta-rules regulating how that community employs other theological statements.

In an age where one cannot claim another's religion false without thereby somehow denigrating the other person or his/her culture, it is difficult to claim that the truth of one's statements have any ontological backing. The reason is obvious: If one's theological statements are true because of some objective feature of the divine and its relationship to the world, then the statements of other religions not referring to these objective features must be false. But these statements cannot be false without denigrating the other person's cutlure and since to denigrate another's culture is wrong, then these statements cannot be false, and if they cannot be false, then one's own theological statements cannot be true. This is how it works logically.

So theology today passes without robust truth conditions. Theology becomes a discourse about the self, about the self within a communal context, about power relationships and marginalization, about racial or patriarchal oppression, about the individual's will-to-power, about almost anything but a divine being existing over and apart from human beings, a divine being who acts on behalf of human beings. Moreover, the purveyors of contemporary theology seem not even to know how differently from previous generations they understand theological terms. In addition, they do not know how deeply problematic contemporary theological semantics has become, a semantics that seems not cable of allowing for standard logical derivations at all.

In this time when theological language seems to have adopted multiple semantic structures, and theological argument has been debased to mere assertion, perhaps it is time again to return to a former time, a time when agreement on semantics and logic allowed for reasoned theological argument and objective truth and meaning. Perhaps if theologians and pastors could again agree on the rules of thought and the nature of meaning, discourse about God could become again a deeply pertinent discourse seeking to discern truth - - a truth that we have not constructed, but rather found, a truth not of our making, but God's.

Towards Theological Sanity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.