Saturday, March 20, 2010

"Signum Philosophicum est Nota Absentis Rei, Signum Theologicum est Nota Praesentis Rei."

The words mean "the philosophical sign is a mark of an absent thing; the theological sign is a mark of a present thing." The proposition is recorded in the Tischreden of Luther (WATR 4.6666.8f), and it is used by Oswald Bayer (Martin Luther's Theology: A Contemporary Introduction to state a general principle in Luther's semantics: "The signum itself is already the res; the linguistic sign is already the matter itself (52). For Bayer, the promissio that is the center of Luther's theology is unpacked by equating the word in language with the reality itself. In promises, words are not given either extensional (or even intensional) interpretations, but themselves are their own reality. This view of things - - which I have elsewhere termed the donational view of language - - is thought by Bayer to be the deepest presupposition of Luther's theological semantics, a view which Bayer claims is akin to the view countenanced by Austin in his 1955 Harvard lectures later published as How to Do Things with Words: the notion of performative language. Bayer writes:

"In contrast to every metaphysical set of statements that teach about the deity, this assertion [e.g. "To you is born this day a Savior"] declares that God's truth and will are not abstract entities, but are directed verbally and publicly as a concrete promise to a particular hearer in a specific situation. 'God' is apprehended as the one who makes a promise to a human being in such a way that the person who hears it can have full confidence in it" (53).

In evaluating this we must remember, of course, that it has proven difficult in practice actually to distinguish clearly performative and constative assertions. Bayer's position, however, supposes they can be compartmentalized. He goes on to say, in fact, that the performative sentences of promissio, for Luther, must be sharply distinguished either from the descriptive or the imperative. Quoting again:

" . . . one cannot take the promise, which is not a descriptive statement, and transform it into a descriptive statement. Secondly, one cannot take the promise, which is not in the form of a statement that shows how something ought to be done, and transform it into an imperative. . . . the truth of the promise . . . .is to be determined only at the very place that the promise was concluded; more accurately, where it was constituted. This means it is located within the relationship of the one who is speaking . . . . and the one who hears. . . . If it is correct that the one individual is in the position of hearer in the relationship that is constituted by this promise, and if that is verified, it excludes the possibility that he himself can verify the promise. . . . To seek to verify this oneself would be atheism; it would be no different than for me to try to verify myself in my own subjective piety or if I would seek to verify myself by means of a defined atheism. In such situations a human being wants to speak his own truth about himself, but he makes God into a liar in the process" (54-55).

There are a number of claims made here that must carefully be distinguished and examined. That there are such statements as "I promise to pay you $1000" is, of course, true. That such statements cannot be fully analyzed into a set of descriptive statements is true as well. Reporting is a different linguistic activity than promising. And that such statements are not themselves reductively analyzable into a set of imperative statements is true also. However, one must distinguish between a reduction of the performative to the descriptive and the imperative, and an unpacking of the palpable presuppositions that the performative has, presuppositions that are statable in terms of the descriptive and imperative.

In "I promise to pay $1000", the following statements are putatively presupposed: "I exist," "you exist," "$1000 exists," "I ought to pay you $1000." The first three sentences are descriptive, and the fourth imperative. Now notice that here the verba of the sentence do not themselves constitute the rem, but presuppose definite res: the existence of two agents, and the taking on of an obligation. This is not to say that 'x promises z to y' can be reduced to the existence of x, y and z, and a set of imperative statements concerning the three. There is more to promising than the taking on of an obligation. However, an obligation is nonetheless presupposed in the promising.

With regard to the promise of salvation "to me," it would seem that the same structure of presuppositions obtain: God exists, I exist, and some state of affairs to which 'salvation' properly applies exists (at least in a possible world) such that God is under obligation to bring about salvation to me. (This is rather jarring, of course, to think of God being under obligation, but it does seem like promising demands it. Maybe it is "analogical obligation" . . . . It seems that if God were to retain impassibility, promising could maybe not be attributed to God at all.)

But let us examine more close what Bayer has to say about truth and verification. He claims that the "truth of the promise is determined where it is constituted," in the one speaking and hearing. But what exactly, is this to mean? Clearly, Bayer here is not talking about a correspondence, coherence, or even pragmatic notion of truth. In fact, we are told, that the individual cannot verify the truth of the promise. To do so, moreover, would involve one in atheism. This claim demands analysis.

If 'Bob promises to pay me $1000 on April 1' and does not do so, he has broken his promise. This much is clear. Moreover, we would not normally say that his promise is true or false. It was, to use Austin's language, an "infelicitous' performative utterance, but it was not false. Truth or falsity does not append to promises qua promises. So it is not clear what the "truth of the promise" is supposed to mean. One could say that the promise was made, the promised being kept presupposed some state of affairs S, such that if S does not obtain then the promise is broken. Or alternately, one might say that the descriptively-stated presupposition for the keeping of the promise did not obtain such that that statement is not true. But this is not to say that the promise was false; it merely was not broken. One could then state whether it was true that the promise was broken. Such statements about promises have definite truth conditions; we can easily verify when they might be true or false. Bayer does not seem interested, however, in the truth-value of statements about felicitous performative promise statements, but rather about promises themselves.

Bayer's discussion of verification is quite an independent issue from putative presuppositions of promise-making. It might be atheism, I suppose, to claim that we can verify the truth of the descriptive statements that state of affairs S obtains such that S makes true the truth of the statement, 'God has kept promise P'. But I am not sure anything could finally count against the claim that God's promises are kept. One might, in fact, claim this as an analytical truth, or better, a rule by which we play the language-game of the Christian God. Clearly, there are a number of issues that Bayer needs to clarify.

Personally, I have always been chary of the move to an exclusive analysis of fundamental theological assertions in terms of performative utterances, a move that does not presuppose metaphysical and philosophical assertions like these:

  • There is a God
  • This God has intentionality towards His creation
  • One attitude of divine intentionality is promising, and promising keeping
  • Agents exist who are so constituted as to be cable of being promised to by God.
  • The ontological and semantic situations are different than epistemological one: Truth is logically distinct from verification
I invite others to post comments on this issue. I want someone to give me an example of a performative utterance that presupposes neither descriptive nor imperative utterances. It seems like this is necessary before one gets too excited about an analysis Austin gave for certain kind of utterances in 1955.

What Luther was talking about in the Tischreden concerns the ontological situation, not the semantic one. Luther knows that the language of theology must always refer to that which is present because, God truly is ubiquitously present in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself. Later in the text, Bayer makes clear, for Luther, that philosophy knows neither the efficient or final cause of this world. Perhaps Luther's statement quoted at the beginning of this post has more to do with this, than a general denial of extra-linguistic signification in the primary assertions of theology.

Sunday, March 14, 2010

On the Performative, the Constative, and a Peculiar Move within Lutheran Theology

It has become commonplace within Lutheran theology to downplay the notion and use of descriptive true/false statements. While it is true that in natural languages we regularly assign both intensions and extensions to account for meaning and truth-conditions, there is a strong recent tradition in Lutheran theology that does not want to do this. Here we are told confidently that much of the language of Scripture is playing quite a different kind of game entirely, quite a different kind of game than uttering statements having truth-conditions. Citing How to do Things with Words, John Austin' text from over 60 years ago, some theologians find in performative utterances the key to unlock what it is that theology is doing when it is doing what it is doing most fundamentally.

The idea is simple enough: Constative utterances say something and performative utterances do something. Theological utterances are uttered between the demand of the law and grace of the gospel in the concrete existential situation of the believer before God. Thus, instead of the language about God being about truth and falsity, it is at best "felicitous or infelicitous.' For Austin, the marks of felicitous performative utterances include:

  • The existence of conventional procedure governing the utterance of certain words in certain situations;
  • The situations being appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked;
  • The procedure being executable by the participants correctly and completely;
  • Where to inaugurate the procedure depends upon the person inaugurating it to have certain thoughts and feelings, the person so inaugurating it must have certain thoughts and feelings, and all the participants involved must have the appropriate thoughts and feelings;
  • The participants conducting themselves accordingly.
If one or more of these conditions are not met. The performative utterance will be unhappy. Austin makes use of some examples:

  • 'I do' - - as in the course of a marriage ceremony.
  • 'I name the ship the Queen Elizabeth' - - as uttered when smashing the bottle against the hull.
  • 'I give and bequeath my watch to my brother' - - as occurring in a will.
  • 'I bet you a sixpence if it will rain tomorrow.'
For Austin, it is not merely the words themselves, but the words in the appropriate circumstances, with appropriate motivations, and appropriate conventions that bring about the happy performance. Presumably, the same is to obtain in theology as well - - though the conditions are not explicitly worked out.

Of course, Austin himself knew that the distinction between the constative and performative was difficult to maintain. Take for instance the claim, 'there is a dangerous animal here.' While it seems structured as a constative, in certain circumstances is it not elliptical for the putative performances: 'I bet there is a dangerous animal here'; 'I guarantee that there is a dangerous animal here'; or 'I warn you that there is a dangerous animal here'?

Because of this problem, Austin was working at his death upon clarifying the distinction between the locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary as a substitute for the previous distinction. In stating what is by means of a locution, one is doing so with illocutionary force, that is, one is normally assuring, or warning, or ordering, or expressing an intention. The perlocutionary subsequently deals with the effects of the illocution in the feelings, thinkings, or actions of the audience, speaker, or other person.

We could at this point talk about how Searle revised his teacher's theory, but for our purposes what is important is to see that illuctionary acts make use of locutions in order to bring about a perlocution. That is to say - - using the early vocabulary - - a performative utterance has propositional content, an intensional or extensional meaning. Furthermore, the utterance presupposes facts and conventions, many of which can be explicated if one were to take the time. For instance, to say 'I bequeath my watch to my brother' with sincerity, presupposes that I have a watch, that I have a brother, that I intend a situation of my brother having a watch, and that there is a social convention whereby of bequeathing such that the state of affairs of my having my watch will give way to my brother legally possessing it.

Within some of these quarters of Lutheran theology an explication of religious and theological statements is given in terms of performative utterances in order, I believe, to escape the thorny question of truth. Thus, to say that "I declare unto you the entire forgiveness of all of your sins in the name of Christ Jesus' is not thus to commit oneself to any specifiable ontological situation involving divine states of affairs, relations, properties, and events. It is rather a performance that, to use Austin's later terminology, has a perlocution. The hope is that the utterances can existentially empower without suggesting any "death-dealing metaphysics."

But a moment's reflection shows how wrong-headed it is to think that perlocutions are somehow psychologically independent of what is being asserted. If one has a social convention of bequeathal, it makes all the difference in the world to the perlocutions generated in the inheriting brother by this illocutionary act, whether he does have, in fact, a brother, and whether or not the brother has something to bequeath.

Analogously, having one's feeling and emotions affected by the declaration of forgiveness of sins has everything to do with whether one believes one has sins, and whether or not Christ is thought to be the kind of being that could in principle forgive them.

While Scripture is filled with what Austin would have at one time called performative utterances, this does not mean that one can escape the truth game. Truth pro me is still truth. I will be dealing with some concrete texts in coming posts. My purposes are entirely constructive. We must as theologians grasp the contemporary philosophical situation with respect to the philosophy of language, if we are going to be making moves in the philosophy of language that are to accomplish such heavy theological work.

Saturday, February 27, 2010

'God', Descriptivism, and Reference

In the last two blog posts, I have discussed some possible advantages to understanding 'God' as used by Christians as a rigid designator. Spurning the descriptivist view that 'God' just means 'aliquid quo nihil maius cogitare possit', I have suggested we might move forward theologically by delimiting the semantic content of the term. In this post, I want to discuss the descriptivist theory of naming generally and some of its well-known flaws. After briefly discussing the causal theory of reference, I will describe problems arising when when 'God' is regarded as a disguised definite description. Finally, I will discuss how it might be semantically fruitful causally to fix the reference of 'God' over various possible worlds.

When considering phrases like 'Frege is the author of the Begriffschrift', we can distinguish among the following:

  • The mechanism by which the word 'Frege' might attach to a particular object in the world.
  • The meaning of the term - - either construed as the mechanism by which reference is established or perhaps as the reference of the term.
  • The relation between the mechanism by which reference is established, or perhaps reference, and the truth-conditions of assertive sentences containing the term.
The question is this: How do singular terms, particularly proper names refer? What is the mechanism by which 'God' refers; what meaning does the term have, and how might assertions containing the term be either true or false?

Descriptivist theories of proper names claim a proper name like 'Frege' has an associated description - - which can vary from speaker to speaker and over time - - by which reference is accomplished. The mechanism on the basis of which reference is fixed forms, on the descriptivist theory, the meaning of the term or expression at hand.

Descriptivist views developed in opposition to Millian theories of naming, whereby the name was regarded to have no semantic content. Frege famously argued that 'The Morning Star is the Evening Star' gives informative content. Accordingly, material identity statements seem to cry out for an analysis in terms of descriptive content. 'Morning Star' and 'Evening Star' seem to mean different things, though they have a common reference. If the meaning of a term were simply its reference, then an informative identity statement is seemingly impossible. But it seems that informative identity statements are possible, therefore, by modus tollens, the meaning of a term cannot be its reference.

Or take 'Fred Flintstone does not exist'. If the meaning of 'Fred Flintstone' is its referent, than how can 'Fred Flintstone does not exist' have meaning, for the necessary condition for meaningfulness clearly does not obtain?

Or take 'Janet believes that Melanchthon, but not the author of the 1521 Loci Communes, wrote on rhetoric'. If 'Melanchthon' and 'the author of the 1521 Loci Communes' have the same referent, how can Janet, a supposed rational agent, hold the statement to be true?

On a descriptivist view, these problems seem to dissolve. For instance, it is different semantic content that makes 'The Morning Star is the Evening Star' informative. In 'Fred Flintstone does not exist', 'Fred Flintstone functions as a description that is not satisfied. In 'Janet believes that Melanchthon wrote on rhetoric, but not the author of the 1521 Loci Communes', it is because Janet associates different semantic content to each of the terms that the statement is true.

But Ruth Barcan Marcus, and later Saul Kripke, argue subsequently (and persuasively) that names do not have semantic content after all, and thus are not semantically equivalent to any description. For both thinkers, proper names refer directly without mediation of an associated description. For Kripke, not only proper names, but also definite descriptions and natural kind terms (e.g., sheep) rigidly designate their bearers. Kripke points to three problems with descriptivist views: the epistemic problem, the modal problem, and the semantic problem.

The epistemic problem is the problem of unwanted necessity. Suppose that Bob knows that the Morning Star is the Evening Star because he knows they refer to the same thing. Then to Bob, adjusting his associated descriptions, it would seem that 'Morning Star is Evening Star' is necessary. But clearly this is not necessary, thus a descriptivist account is false.

The modal problem arises when the application of descriptive content to names produces absurdities in counterfactual situations. Imagine that to the word 'Fred Flintstone' we associate the greatest cartoon figure of the 1960s. Then were Fred Flintstone not to have been invented, 'Popeye the sailor lived in Bedrock' would be true - - if the description 'greatest cartoon figure of the 1960s were now satisfied by Popeye the sailor.

The semantic problem emerges when a description is falsely associated with a name. Take, for instance, the description 'the author of the Speculative Grammar'. Tradition has it that Duns Scotus was the author. But it may have been Thomas Bradwardine. Thus, if one were to say 'Duns Scotus died in 1308' and have as the associated description 'the author of the Speculative grammar', then the statement would be false because Thomas Bradwardine died in 1349.

The fact that names have no semantic content is consistent with a causal theory of reference, a theory that allows for a neo-Millian approach to proper names. According to the theory, in a reference-fixing event there is a dubbing of a name to a bearer, a relationship that is then causally transmitted linguistically. 'Aristotle' thus names the individual writing the Metaphysics in this world, while it names the same person in other possible worlds who did not write the Metaphysics. Instead of demanding a criterion of transworld identification that would pick out the same individual in different possible worlds, the proper name rigidly designates the same individual in all possible worlds - - not by virtue of a description, but through causal reference.

How does the descriptivist account fare with respect to the term 'God'? Plausibly, we might claim an associated description of 'God' as the sum total of all positive properties to the infinite degree. Accordingly, 'God' would pick out in each and every world that being that has the available properties and degrees instantiatable in that world. Obviously, a world in which there is neither goodness, love, nor even thought would have a very different being satisfying the description 'God'. To say, 'God could have created a world without goodness' demands that this God is instantiated in possible worlds without goodness, not simply that some being or other fulfills the suitable description in other possible worlds - - some without either matter or thought.

Of course, the idea that 'God' names the same being in all possible worlds in which He exists suggests that there is some ontological contour to God, a contour projectible across possible worlds. While this individual divine essence cannot be wholly specified, the fact that one names this God rather than that one suggests an ontological contour to the divine. More to the point, to say that 'God is good' is to say that the individual referred to by 'God' in all possible worlds in which that individual exists is identical to the instantiation of goodness - - whatever "the instantiation of goodness" quite means. All properties of God are accordingly essential to God, and they apply to God necessarily.

It is critically important to disambiguate logical, conceptual and metaphysical necessity here. While the freedom of God implies that God could have done other than what God did in fact do (and thus that 'God is good' is neither a logical nor conceptual truth), the way that God is constitutes God's essence in this world and in every world where this God is. Given the choice God has made for human beings, God's contour is metaphysically necessary for God to be God. From the standpoint of the reference of 'God', God could still have been other than good, for it is logically possible for God to have done other that what God did. While human beings generally know God as 'aliquid quo nihil maius cogitare possit', in salvation history the reference of 'God' is accordingly fixed such that it is now metaphysically necessary for God to be good. This necessity, however, is intraworldly, it applies to those world's in which the conditional 'God established covenant x' is true.

Another way of saying this is that God is identical to love and goodness in all metaphysically possible worlds, but not so in all logically or conceptually possible worlds. The set of metaphysically necessary worlds is a subset of the set of logically necessary worlds. There are worlds in which God could do x that are not metaphysically accessible by the God who is who He is, and will be who He will be. The question concerns now the "bare particularity" of the divine, the One who in being other than who He is, could have still be somehow still Himself.

Friday, February 26, 2010

Luther, Ontology and Rigid Designation

I had a conversation yesterday with someone following this blog about whether or not yesterday's post Luther, God, and Rigid Designation, somehow was in conflict with the things I have earlier said about Luther and ontology. I want to clarify. Italic

To say that the locution 'aliquid quo nihil maius cogitare possit' fails to conform to the semantic situation presupposed by the potentia dei absoluta, is not to argue a different metaphysical or ontological point than I have previously made. We must distinguish from divine states of affairs and how they states of affairs are referred to or picked out. My point was that 'aliquid quo nihil maius cogitare possit' fails to allow projections of this God of Christianity into counterfactual situations like the following: 'God might have not willed theft to be a sin'. Clearly, the Nominalist insight is that it is of the nature of God that He could have done other than what He in fact did do. Accordingly, it is not necessary that God would have established a covenant with his Chosen People. It is precisely this radical contingency within the deus nudus that forms part of the experience, I think, of the deus absconditus. God in his awe-full majesty is at work in the apparent contingency of the world. The contour of His unbridled, but hidden will, cannot be domesticated by human thought and rationality.

This being said, God has from among possible worlds actualized this world, a world in which He is present in Christ as provident and beneficient. It is in this world that God is known to be constituted as Trinity. But once this fact is known, we can claim that this God is a Trinitarian God in all possible worlds. While 'that which none greater can be thought' picks out the Trinitarian God contingently, the locution does not constitute the essence of this God. Analogous to Kripke on the essence of water, we might say that the essence of God is to be Trinitarian, and mean by that that in possible worlds where Trinity is not established, neither is God, that is to say, in all possible worlds, the Trinity is instantiated if and only if God is instantiated.

None of what I say here undercuts that claim that God has a particular nature, an ontological contour, and that the truth-conditions of theological language, with appropriate qualification, allow for this contour either to be rightly or wrongly stated. In other words, the notion that 'God' could be understood as a rigid designator is fully consonant with the assertion that Luther was both a theological and semantic realist, that he held that God exists apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language, and that language about this God is in principle capable of being true or false. What is lost in the semantic content of rigid designation is, in fact, gained in the metaphysical situation. Ontologically, one can be as robust as one wants, as long as 'necessity' as applied to God is not understood as logical or conceptual necessity, but as an intraworldly metaphysical necessity.

In other words, what I was trying to suggest in Luther, God and Rigid Designation is that the semantic notion of a rigid designator might be helpful in thinking through the radical freedom of God presupposed in late medieval Nominalism, and insofar as that divine freedom was, in fact, presupposed by Luther. I still claim that Luther is not a radical nominalist when it comes to his thinking about God, particularly his Christological thinking. Here, it does seem to me, that he needs to grant ontological status to natures, and cannot merely reduce them adverbially to ways in which the one divine-human entity is constituted or behaves.

I hope this clarifies the matter.


Thursday, February 25, 2010

Luther, God, and Rigid Designation

Famously, Luther differed from Thomas in holding that God's power extended over the laws of logic. Thus, while Thomas could claim that not even God could make a square circle, Luther denied this, holding that if God truly is an infinite being with infinite power, the laws of logic cannot dictate what God can do, or how God might be. Here Luther shows his indebtedness to late Medieval nominalism. That tradition had distinguished between the potentia dei absoluta and the potentia dei ordinata, between God considered with regard to his absolute power, and God considered in so far as he has covenanted to relate to human beings in certain ways. While Anselm had confidently defined (or described) God as "aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit" ("that which none greater can be thought") the nominalists of the via moderna understood that this view necessarily limits the being and action of God to that which human must think when thinking God. Why indeed must God be the way humans think God? Do we not limit God's being when we think the Being of God must be the way that humans think God?

Luther follows the nominalists here in understanding that God is not merely an abstract entity. While it is characteristic of abstract entities to have the being that they have for human thinking, it is not so for living, concrete entities. Take, for example, the number '3'. If Russell is correct, and '3' really is 'the set of all triples', then the essence of '3' has been clearly, statically, and eternally been discerned and asserted. (Please excuse the use of 'essence' talk here!) In the same key, to say that 'God' just means 'aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit' is to clearly, statically and eternally uncover the essentiality of God in God's very Being. The problem, of course, is that God is unlike the number '3' in being alive: God is a dynamic, living, causally-efficacious being. To have causal powers, to enter into causal relations, and to actually live in time suggests a disanalogy with an a priori essentialist account of God. (Luther seems to follow the tradition in holding that all of time is eternally present in God.)

To say that there is a potentia dei absoluta is to say that there are things about God that might not neatly fall under the description aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit. If God is God, after all, God's being is logically prior to our thinking of God. This means, among other things, that God possesses a fundamental freedom that might not be able to be rationally described by human beings. A fundamental commitment to this voluntaristic insight underlies Luther's thinking on God. If God is God, then God is free to be whoever God wants to be. God's freedom is not found, pace Spinoza, in His necessary conformity to His divine essence, but in His will. It is the nature of divine will to be radically free, for if God is omnipotent, God can do whatever God wants to do whenever God wants to do it. Accordingly, to reidentify God across possible worlds cannot be grounded upon what God happens to do in any actual world. God's power and freedom strips away the logic of perfection advocated by Anselm and presupposed by Thomas. All such attempts at a "divine grammar" must be viewed only in regard to how actually God has chosen to act with respect to His creation. A logic of perfection must be a conditional logic, one granting the antecedent, "Since God has shown himself to be X, then we can conclude . . . " It is, of course, a ramification of the hiddeness of God that no conceptualist transworld identity is possible.

So how does one refer to the Deus Absconditus, the God hidden whom courses through all things, and without which things would not be as they are? What semantic and metaphysical theory of the divine is actually consistent with what Luther says in The Bondage of the Will and other places; what metaphysics of God conforms to the demands of the deus absconditus, the hidden God?

Many Lutherans have simply rejected thinking about the hiddenness of God because Luther has advised that one must keep one's eyes upon the deus revelatus, the God revealed in Christ, and that reflection on the hiddenness of God will necessarily take one's eyes off of the Sache, off of the wonderful gift that God has given His people in Christ. While properly theologically motivated, the problem with this approach is that for many today it is precisely the hiddenness of God that must be thought in order for it to be understood to be a good thing to avert one's eyes from this God. The locution 'hiddenness of God' is not merely metaphorical, but it is a description of a reality, the reality of a God who can do other than what he does, and who apparently often acts in ways dissonant from what a human logic of perfection would predict. In other words, God does not behave in ways seemingly in accord with what a confident unpacking of His divine nature would assume. (It is characteristic of living beings to be this way, I think.) So how to think about this hiddenness of God?

I think it plausible here to use the notion of rigid designation in referring to a God who in His absolute power has taken very different attitudes towards us in other possible worlds. The idea would be this. The ancient Jews encountered a God through an initial baptism in experiences like the burning bush. This God of the "I am who I am" was the God that brought them out of the House of Egypt, who gave them Torah, who spoke through their prophets. This God whom they encountered is not a God for whom a criterion of transworld individuation could easily have been given. The ancient Israelites were waiting to see how this God who was would be toward them; they were waiting for his revelation of himself to them.

It is this God whom Jesus called "my Father," and it is this God then who is named by the Triune formula. However, just as water was water before its essence was known to be H2O, and just as it is now impossible to identify water apart from its identification with H2O, so was God, truly God prior to it being known that God is the Father of Christ - - even though it is now not possible to identify God apart from his identification as the Father of Jesus Christ. God being the Father of Christ is an a posteriori necessity in the same sense as 'water is H2O'. Just as 'water' and 'H2O' rigidly identify in all possible worlds such that 'water is H2O' is a necessary identity statement, so do 'God' and 'the Father of Christ' rigidly designate in all possible worlds such that there is no world where the identity 'God is the Father of Christ' does not hold. In the same way it might seem counterintuitive the water must be H2O, so does it seem counterintuitive to hold that God must be the Father of Christ. But the counterintuitivity abates when one realizes that in one cannot meaningfully claim that 'water is not H2O' because then water would, of course, not be water. The same is true of God.

The upshot of all of this is that if one is to think about the essence of God at all, this essence is not going to be found in filling in 'that which none greater can be thought'. (This God would be pretty average anyway in ontologically impoverished worlds.) Rather, God's essence is to be the Father of Jesus the Christ. Now making this identification does not compromise the potentia dei absoluta because the Triune God could not have not been identified as the Father of Christ. If God is triune, then not being the Father of Christ is not an option in any possible world.

This God that is essentially Triune is not reidentifiable by a description or a cluster of concepts applied from world to world. This God is ontologically prior to description, because all description presupposes the conceptual machinery of this world and cannot describe or apply to the Being of God in God's self, that Being that is within God's power alone, a power that extends beyond the language and categories humans have to think it.

Experience of the hidden God presupposes that humans can refer to such a God. Understanding 'God' as a rigid designator makes such reference possible.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

On Identity and God

We often make identity statements where those things seemingly identified could have existed without being so identified. A putative example is 'The Morning Star is the Evening Star'. Presumably the identity here is contingent; while it is true that 'Morning Star' and 'Evening Star' pick out the same object, this is only contingently so. Presumably, there are possible worlds where 'Morning Star' picks out another object than Venus, and thus cannot be a co-referential expression with 'Evening Star'.

As is well-known, Saul Kripke argued four decades ago that we must in situations like this disentangle the relevant epistemic, metaphysical and semantic notions. Starting from the simple metaphysical and logical truth that identity is reflexive - - each and ever object and each and every term is identical to itself - - he argued that necessity applies to identity in the nature of the case. Each thing that is is necessarily identical to itself. I can imagine no possible word in which an object is not itself. I can not imagine a kind of thing not being the kind of thing it is, and I cannot imagine an individual thing not being the individual thing that it is.

Famously, Kripke argued that terms are "initially baptized" such as to apply to objects. Sometimes realization of this baptism takes time. 'Morning Star' was baptized to apply to the object in the sky that turned out to be Venus. The same is the case with "Evening Star'. So the truth of 'The Morning Star is the Evening Star" has the same logical and metaphysical status as the truth 'Venus is Venus'. Because of this, the two statements have the same modality; both statements are necessary.

Kripke terms words that pick out the same object in all possible worlds "rigid designators." Names are, accordingly, rigid designators. This is true of proper names like 'Hesperus' as well as common names like 'heat' or 'mean molecular kinetic energy'. Because 'heat' rigidly designates the same objective state of affairs as 'mean molecular kinetic motion', the statement that 'heat is mean molecular kinetic energy' has the same modal status as the statement 'the state of affairs designated both by 'heat' and 'mean molecular kinetic motion' is identical to itself'. While 'heat is mean molecular kinetic energy' is true in all possible worlds, it is not true that P's sensation of heat is identical to mean moleuclar kinetic energy. How heat is sensed is merely a contingent matter. Heat could have been sensed in such a way as not to feel hot, to feel loud, or not to be felt at all. Sensing by contingent beings does not change the objective reality of heat, or the objective fact that it is just mean molecular kinetic motion.

Kripke argues quite plausibly that if theoretical reductions like 'heat is mean molecular kinetic energy' are necessarily identical, if they are identical at all, then any putative theoretical reduction of pain to a particular brain state would involve a necessary, not merely contingent identity statement. Pain of type x would be thus be necessarily identical to neurophysiological actualization of type C. Moreover, it would seem, that the tokening of type x would be necessarily identical to the tokening of type C. Because the instantiation of the pain state x essentially involves its sensation, identities between pain and brain states are disanalogous to other kinds of theoretical identities. Whereas one can distinguish the sensation of heat from heat, one cannot distinguish the sensation of pain from pain. While it is a contingent fact that the sensation of heat has been correlated with heat by human percipients, there is no possibility of any contingency between the sensation of pain and pain. While the seeming contingency of statements like 'heat is mean molecular kinetic motion' can be explained by the fact that heat and the sensation of heat are only contingently correlated, there is no analogous method allowing identification of pain and the sensation of pain. In sum, to say that 'pain x' is brain-state y' is to utter a statement that we have no explanation whatsoever of how we could have failed to know it!

The question for the theologian is, of course, is the term 'God' a definite description like 'the inventor of bifocals' and thus something that picks out different objects in different worlds, or is 'God' a rigid designator? Do we not want to say that 'God' must be distinguished from our experience of God and surely the conceptual machinery we employ in picking out God? Has not the tradition's emphasis on the incomprehensibility of God presupposed that we are yet talking about something even when we have only a very inadequate conception of what it is that we are talking about?

It seems that we must perhaps claim an initial baptism of 'God' with that being who did a number of salvific things for His people, including being the Father of Jesus the Christ. Making this identification rigidly means that 'God is the Father of Jesus the Christ' is necessarily true in the same way the 'Morning Star is the Evening Star' is necessarily true. The question of human experience of God, and even the human conceptual apparatus to identify God - - I am thinking here about 'that which none greater can be thought' - - is a question that involves contingency. It is perhaps contingently true that 'God is that which none greater can be thought'. It is perhaps necessarily true that 'God is the Father of Jesus the Christ'. This is an interesting way to think about old terrain that all of us have felt has been well-established for a very long time indeed.

Monday, February 15, 2010

On the Existence of God

One can talk about many things without claiming that those things exist. For instance, one can speak about imagined things (e.g., unicorns), fictitious characters (e.g, Sherlock Holmes), or even theoretical entities (e.g., charmed quarks). One can also talk about things that exist, but not in the way we might say other things exist (e.g., the set of all triples, the average American taxpayer, or the spirit of the Renaissance.)

In theology, it has become quite common to speak about God, or the being of God, without claiming that there is a being, God, that is. Theologians are quite adept, as it turns out, in talking about God - - even if they are not always able to specify what exactly they are speaking about in such talking. This has been true of philosophers as well, and was clearly true of that philosopher who in many ways set the stage for modern philosophy, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679).

It is clearly true that the secondary literature has been divided on whether or not Hobbes believed that God exists. While some see him as a defender of Orthodox Christianity, others find him to be the consummate atheist. In reading Hobbes, one often wonders if many doing constructive work in theology would actually disagree with much of what he says.

Like many theologians, Hobbes admits that theology deals with things "outside philosophy" and thus with things outside the realm of causal explanation. Moreover, he claims repeatedly that of such a God, we can have no conception, for the only way to have a conception of a thing is to first have empirical impressions of it, impressions from which there is a decaying sense of imagination, and upon which conception is built.

As with many theologians, Hobbes believes that supposed revelatory experience is not caused by an divine object. In fact, in The Leviathan he seemingly grants no possibility that such visionary experience can be in principle veridical of something external to the experiencer. Speaking of that to which the name 'religion' applies, Hobbes writes:

"'Fear' of power invisible, feigned by the mind or imagined from tales publicly allowed, [is called] 'religion', not allowed, 'superstition'. "

He points out that dreams in stressful circumstances, when one is sleeping briefly, are visions - - whether they be visions of ghosts, goblins, or God. Hobbes further writes:

"To say he [God] hath spoken to him in a dream is no more than to say that he dreamed God spake to him, which is not of force to win belief from any man that knows dreams are for the most part natural and may proceed from former thoughts … To say he hath seen a vision, or heard a voice, is to say that he hath dreamed between sleeping and waking; for in such a manner a man doth many times naturally take his dream for a vision, as not having well observed his own slumbering" (Leviathan 32.6).

The important point, of course, is that Hobbes is offering a natural causal explanation for the existence of putative divine encounter. The supposed vision is, at root, the causal effect of antecedent and concurrent mechanical motions. While there could still be a God that one's putative knowledge could be about, this supposed act of knowing can trace no causal sequence back to an object that the supposed knowing purports to be about.

There could also be a God, even though Hobbes gives solid grounds upon which to base a causal story of why men and women are religious. In Leviathan Chapter XII (On Religion), Hobbes makes the following claims:
  1. Human beings are naturally inquisitive into the causes of things.
  2. We naturally assume something like the principle of sufficient reason, for anything that is, there must be some cause why that thing is.
  3. But humans cannot discern what are the causes of those most important things of life, thus they concoct such causes of them "as their fancy suggests," or as they find that other men and women suggest, who are deemed to be "wiser than [they] themselves."
  4. Men and women are thus in a state of perpetual anxiety in trying to figure a way to avoid the evils (that which they do not desire), and acquire goods (that which they do desire).
  5. The fear that men and women have because of their ignorance of the causes of things has driven them to embrace the ultimate object of fear: God.
  6. However, in Christianity it has not just been fear that has driven human beings to God, but also the desire to know the causes of "natural bodies, their virtues and operations." This has driven men and women to assert that "there must be . . . one first mover, that is, a first and an eternal cause of all things, which is that which men mean by the name of 'God'. . .
  7. The "spirit incorporeal" that human beings claim as the cause of things, about that they can form no image. The very incomprehensibility of the notion has led them not to reject the notion as unintelligible, but rather to worship it.
  8. This incorporeal substance, which men and women cannot think, has subsequently been borrowed in conceiving their own souls.
  9. Religion has emerged because of natural human ignorance of what causes things most important to human beings, from devotion to what is ultimately feared, and from a natural tendency to project causal connection improperly upon the universe, a projection that gives rise to putative prognostication.
While natural science explains and predicts quotidian phenomena properly and rightly, religion explains and predicts the most important and significant phenomena of human life improperly, and wrongly.

I have labored a bit to present Hobbes' views simply because they are not something that many theologians would reject, though they may not be comfortable in speaking as forthrightly as Hobbes. Theologians often begin their work not with a rejection of the prophets of post-modernity (Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud), but with a tacit acceptance of their central argument. Human beings project the notion of God on the cosmos in order to buttress themselves in the face of their radical ontological insecurities. The radical contingency of human existence leads humans to search for religion as a way to either deny or cover-up this basic existential insecurity. Constructive theologians then move to embrace an assertion of God consistent with an underlying commitment to the causal closure of the physical, to the assertion that for all x, if x is a natural event, then there was some y, such that y is a natural event causing y, and that for all natural events x, if x is to cause any other event, that event caused must itself be a natural event.

I think that commitment to an underlying naturalism while yet espousing the power of the Word to save and transform is finally a commitment to an unintelligible intellectual position. It may be that Hobbes was no more bloated in his ontological inventory of the divine than many contemporary theological thinkers. Perhaps he just was more honest.

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Certain Confusions Concerning Faith

To the question, "How do I know that my Redeemer lives?" some facilely respond "by faith." But what is this "by faith" whereby they know that there Redeemer lives? This is a question perhaps we have not explored deeply enough - - or at least not deeply enough in those areas which are by nature rather deep.

Lamentably, those responding to the question often make a fundamental kind of error, somehow believing that faith itself forms some perceptual-revelatory content whereby they are put in touch with the objectivity of the Word. The Word is imagined to be a content for thinking, willing, and doing, a content that faith somehow displays. Lutherans, of course, have always stressed the externality of the Word over and against its subjective appropriation. Because the Lutheran theological tradition has thematized externality, one would think it difficult were it to cast its eyes upon those having faith, were it to look upon the contour of faith rather than what faith is about. Clearly, for Lutherans, the reification of faith must be averted.

For this reason, believe, is perhaps helpful to think of faith adverbially. Like the adverbial theory of perception, an adverbial theory of faith would understand its subject as a way of being given, rather than as a content of givenness. In order to see this, let us review the distinction between the phenomenological experience of the subject's sense-data, and the way that the subject might know objects in the world.

Classically, sense-datum theorists claimed that there was something definite that was known perceptually, a phenomenological content that then could be judged as to how it related to the world. Accordingly, the world is conceived to have a definiteness to which the sense datum is related. Sometimes called an "act-object" theory of perception, the problem easily became how how to connect the givenness of the object of the act of givenness to the external world. It seems, in fact, that a type of perceptual dualism can easily arise, a dualism that holds between the sense-datum objects, and the putative mind-independent objects somehow causing them.

Adverbial theorists, however, take another avenue entirely. Instead of claiming that there are mind-dependent sense-datum objects interposed between the act of perception and the mind-independent external order, the adverbial theory declares that perception is of the external world, and that the thing putatively experienced, according to the sense-datum view, is merely a way in which the mind-independent world is experienced. It is not the experience of X that is present for an act of cognition or perception, but that the act of cognition or perception is a way of experiencing the world in a X-ly fashion.

An example might be helpful. According to a sense-datum theory, I can be given a red spot - - whether or not there is such a spot in the world. What appears to me is a red spot. The adverbial theory, alternatively, claims that I am experiencing the external world in a red-spottedly way, that is to say, I am being appeared to red-spottedly. While the theory successively opposes ontologizing perceptual content, it unfortunately does not adequately deal with the what exactly it is to be appeared to red-spottedly. While there is now no mystery how to get to the mind-independent world from an act of consciousness, there is great mystery in knowing precisely what the act of consciousness is by which one knows the world.

While neither the sense-datum and adverbial theories are cutting-edge these days in the philosophy of perception. their existence is useful for thinking through the nature of faith.

One might claim that faith provides a content in being "interposed" between the Word grasped and the subject grasping the Word. Accordingly, faith has a content that can be encountered, a content present to the subject that is in some way "caused" by the Word. Just as the mind-independent external object causes the putative sense-datum that is itself the object of the act of percepient's perceptual act, so too does the Word cause the content of faith, a content that is itself the object of the believer's act. Accordingly, there is an ontological priority to the Word over what the Word creates: the believer's faith. On this view, faith is made a substance, it is ontologized to become a thing existing between the believer and the Word.

But Lutherans would do best not to go down this track. Instead, it is far better to think of faith as a "way-of-being" the believer, as the way that Word is grasped by the believer. The Word is not available to us as a perceptual/conceptual content of the act of the believer's consciousness, but rather we are appeared to Word-ly. Faith is not an apprehension of the Word, but rather the Word's apprehension in us. Through faith we are appeared to Word-ly. Our experience of the Word is not a state in us that we can know, but rather is that by which the Word is itself known. Faith is not a theological reality, but the way in which theological reality is grasped. Accordingly, we are justified by grace not because of faith, but because our justification by grace happens faithfully. We are justified propter Christum, not propter fidem - - less anyone should grow confused.

Saturday, February 13, 2010

On Identity and the Mind/Body Problem

For a time 50 years ago the contingent identity thesis was all the rage in the philosophy of mind. The idea was simple. While mental terms and physical terms (brain language) did not mean the same thing, mental and brain language could still refer to the same thing. Just as 'Morning Star' and 'Evening Star' mean something different - - they have different modes of presentation according to Frege - - and yet nonetheless refer to the same object Venus, so could a mental term (e.g., 'headache') and a brain term (e.g., 'C-fiber stimulation of such-and-such a variety) mean something quite different, yet refer to the same physical state of affairs. The idea was that just as there are possible worlds where water is not H2O, there are possible worlds where pain is not C-fiber stimulation. (This world is apparently the actual world. I use 'C-fiber stimulation' here because this is what was used in the literature.)

According to the contingent identity thesis, as I read it, there must be some criterion of trans-world individuation for, respectively, water, lightning, and pain states that does not include, respectively, H2O, electrical discharge, and brain states. One is left to puzzle out exactly what this might be, the contour of the "is of definition," but this much is clear: If it only happens to be the case that water is H2O, then being H2O is only accidental to water. There must be something about water that allows projection across possible worlds, something that makes water water in all of these worlds --whether or not these worlds even have molecules at all. A fortiori, there must be something about the phenomenological state of pain that makes pain pain, regardless of how that pain is realized in neurostates - - or even if it is realized in neurostates. (I can clearly make sense of the notion of an angel being in pain, yet angels by their nature are incorporeal, and thus could not have brain states at all.)

The contingent identity thesis seemed to be committed to a Lockian view of secondary qualities. Heat is whatever is in the object that, in the presence of a suitable percipient, would cause the sensation of heat in the subject. The thesis thus presupposes a distinction between heat, the experience of heat, and the atomic facts which are identical to the heat in the object. The important point here is that heat is an objective property; its criterion of transworld individuation is not subjective, but rather an objective fact about the thing which has the power to produce an experience of an appropriate kind in the subject. On this view, heat just is that power in the object capable of producing the sensation of heat in the subject, and it is this power that is contingently identical to mean molecular kinetic energy.

This view rather nicely deflated phenomenological ontology, according to its advocates; the experience of heat was not a thing that was being experienced, but rather the experiencing of the thing. Adherance to the adverbial theory of perception was celebrated, for one did not wish to reify phenomenological content, but rather to speak about the thing that was experienced phenomenologically. Heat is in the thing, and the phenomenon of heat is just my experiencing of heat in such-and-such a phenomenological way.

The problem was, of course, what to do with putative phenomenological objects that seemed to have being apart from any external situation. What about an after-image? If I see a green after-image, I am not seeing that power in the object capable of producing an experience in me of a particular type, but rather am just seemingly experiencing the phenomenological object itself. The question is this: What is the being of an after-image? The answer that Smart and Place gave was that an after-image just is a brain process of a certain way. A green after-image is the experience of something that would be normally associated with the experience of a green object. Green, like heat, is a power in the thing which can produce an experience in us. A green after-image is the experience normally associated with the presence of a green object.

The problem with the contingent identity thesis, among other things, was and is that there are no contingent identities. As Saul Kripke argued so forcefully in Naming and Necessity, all identities are necessary. If a =b, then a just does not happen to be b, a is b. There are no possible worlds in which a thing is not identical to itself. If the Morning Star is the Evening Star, and both 'Morning Star' and 'Evening Star' designate Venus, then because 'Venus = Venus' and there is no possibility that 'Venus is not Venus', then 'Morning Star is Evening Star' is true in all possible worlds. The idea here is that names and expressions form rigid designators. Transworld identification is not done on the basis conceptual content, but by the initial baptism of the name to the thing. Once we discover that the Morning Star = Venus = the Evening Star, then we cannot think the Morning Star not being the Evening Star, because to think such a thing is not to think of the Morning Star at all. (It would be to think of something very much like the Morning Star' except for it not being the Evening Star.)

According to Kripke the apparent contingency of 'heat = mean molecular kinetic energy' is due to the fact that we think that it could have been otherwise. We did not know the heat is mean molecular kinetic energy so we naturally think there are possible worlds in which it is not. But obviously, if this is what heat is, then heat could not have been something other than mean molecular kinetic energy. This is not an example of what Place called the "is of constitution," but rather of what he called the "is of definition." The human race simply did not know for most of its history what heat was, but that does not mean that it was somehow not necessary that heat was mean molecular kinetic energy. One's epistemic limitations with respect to necessary truths do not infect the modal status of those truths.

Kripke thus distinguishes, like the materialists, from among the heat, the molecular realization of the heat and the experience of heat. There are qualitatively indistinct experiences that are experiences of different things. The contingency comes in the relationship between the percipient and the thing with heat, not in the relationship between heat and what heat ultimately is. Similarly, green just is a certain range in the electromagnetic wave spectrum, although we might have an experience of that which is qualitatively indistinct from it but not yet be an experience of green. (Presumably, this is the experience of a green after-image.)

What Kripke forcefully points out, however, is that the materialists are simply wrong if they believe that a mental state just is a brain state. The mental state of experiencing green cannot simply be a brain state as they argued, for there is a fundamental disanalogy between the example of 'lightning is an electrical discharge' and 'pain is C-fiber stimulation of such-and-such variety. In the first we can distinguish the lightning, the electrical discharge and are experience of lightning. There is a contingency between the experience of lightning and the lightning that just is not present between the pain and the experience of pain. If the lightning is necessarily identical to electrical discharge, our explanation for not knowing that is our failure to have gotten clear on whether our experience of lightning was actually of lightning. If we have the presence of lightning, we have the presence of electrical discharge in all possible worlds. The explanation of why we did not always know this, is that we were not clear on the identification of lightning.

This explanation is not, as Kripke points out, available to the one seeking to identify pain with C-fiber stimulation. The reason for this is that there is no meaningful distinction between pain and our experience of pain. If pain is necessarily C-fiber stimulation, then we have no way to explain the apparent contingency between pain and such stimulation. While we can imagine possible worlds in which we could have an experience of heat that is not mean molecular kinetic energy - - because our experience of heat is turns out not to be of heat - - we cannot imagine possible worlds in which we have an experience of pain that is not mean molecular kinetic energy. We accordingly should not be able to entertain the possibility of types or tokens of mental states that are not types or tokens of physical states and, alternatively, types or tokens of brain states that are not types or token of mental states. But we can, as Descartes has shown us, easily think the possibility. If the only identity available between mental states and brain states is necessary identity, then it seems that Descartes' argument has new legs.

Start from the indiscernibility of identicals, the assertion that anything identical to itself has all properties in common. If pain states and brain states do not have all properties in common - - do they have anything in common except temporal position? - - then they simply can't be the same thing. If there is no possiblity that the terms can mean something different yet be the same thing, then there is no possibility that the mental and the physical are the same thing.

Now Kripke is not a Cartesian substance dualist, and he wants very much to protect himself from the application of such an appellation. However, it is true that his work on the nature of identity continues to give ammunition to those uneasy with facilely naturalizing the mind. This is especially true when it comes to the qualia of the mental, the raw feels of color and pain experience. How can it be true that pain is identical to some brain state or other, if the identity for the person is necessary? How finally does the intuitive counterfactual that "I could experience this even after death" get answered if the 'this experienced' is supposed finally to be necessarily identical to some brain state or other? This question remains, and it is not without theological significance.

There is no reason why Lutheran theology should not be interested in such questions as these. I continue to believe that tacit philosophical assumptions must be coaxed out and explored, if theology is profitably to address the questions of the contemporary intellectual horizon. I can see no more pressing question than that of the ontological status of mind.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Towards a New Lutheran Graduate School

It has been far too long since I have posted. What is the reason for this delay? It is, of course, that the Institute of Lutheran Theology has taken up far too much of my time. But what is this Institute of Lutheran Theology and why would I let it take up so much time? 

 I have been graced to be able to lead this new Lutheran theological educational project, a project that attempts to analyze the current intellectual and cultural waters, to chart a theological course through them, and to train the next generation of Lutheran pastors and church leaders in these navigational techniques. We are uncompromisingly committed to thinking through the philosophical presuppositions that have determined, (and will continue to determine) the theological moves that are available in our context. We believe that the intellectual and cultural situation is sufficiently complicated today as to demand a rather deep pastoral preparation - - if pastors are today to function as theologians, as those who have been called to preach the kerygma of the life, death and resurrection of the Christ to a world which has forgotten why it is that such a Christ is necessary. 

In his Kingdom of God in America, the American theologian, Richard Niebuhr wrote: "A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross." 

 His words remain profoundly a propos today. A necessary condition for the possibility of divine wrath is otherness, it is the possibility of confrontation from that which is other than what one is. When God remains a noble sentiment for us, He/She/It still is our sentiment. A God without distance cannot be a God who drives one to the Cross. The Institute of Lutheran Theology knows well that it must recover and teach the alterity of the divine. Such alterity is, of course, connected to the ontology of sin. If sin is not to degenerate into a moral notion, then it must continue to connect conceptually to the distance between God and human beings. Divine judgment of human being is a judgment of this distance, of the infinite qualitative fissure that has opened between the infinite and the finite. The necessary condition of human sin and divine judgment is thus the wrath of God; it is, finally, the ontological rift that opens between divinity and mortality. It is the Cross that finally reconciles the two irreconcilable orders. 

 The truth of this Cross must, moreover, be communicable and relatable to other truths, otherwise the truth of the Cross becomes the experience of the Cross, and theology gets locked up again within the province of the subject. The Institute of Lutheran Theology presupposes that God has wrath, that human beings have sin, that God's kingdom includes judgment, and that Christ is not Christ without a Cross. Moreover, it proclaims that the divine is real, that are assertions about the divine make truth-claims, that the divine is not causally disconnected from His creation, that the divine is at work not only at the level of the subject and in idea, but also within the objectivity of the world itself! Finally, it claims that the Scriptural witness has something very clear to say about the sojourn of the Divine within time. 

 Please visit us at www.instituteoflutherantheology.org. We want students willing to think with us what an engaged Lutheran theology must look like in the early 21st century!

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Why the ILT Theological Commitments are Important for the Parish

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

Introduction

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

The Five Theological Tenants of ILT

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Not the Classic Lutheran Tenants?

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

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

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

Why Theological Realism is Important in the Parish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Semantic Realism is Important

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion & Summary

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

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

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