On the Logical Priority of Logos

Theology's function is to interpret the kerygma into the context.   This much has always been clear to me.   But what are the limits of this interpretation?  What norms sort theological attempts between success and failure?   And what are the proper words to use here?   Ought we to speak of true theological statements over and against false ones?    Are theological claims made in this interpretation better thought to be felicitous or infelicitous?   Are some more fecund than others, and, if so, what are the marks of this fecundity?

Over three decades ago I decided that I wanted to do theology seriously.  But over the decades I have been paralyzed by the Herculean effort seemingly needed to make any true theological advance in our time.   I knew that I could not simply parrot putative truths of another time as if they were truths of our time, yet I did not want to say that the truth-values of theological statements were simply and facilely indexed to time.  I have watched contemporary theology (and theologians) come and go and I have marveled at how little their passage on the theological stage seemingly depends upon the strength of their arguments.  I have always assumed that the acceptance of theological positions ought not be like that of political ones.   Theology, the grand discipline of the west, could not be simply a matter of fad, whim, and immediate political, economic and social cash value.   It simply has to be something more, I have hoped.

The proclamation of the life, suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ has to be the starting point of theology.  The source of theology must be the Cross.  Of this, I have never had doubt.   An analysis of the cultural and intellectual horizon is necessary to the task of theology and, in some way, this horizon is itself a source of theological reflection.   However, this source is not of the same type as the other source.  While one has particular insight into the horizon, and while the horizon is something we "bump up against" in all experience, the horizon is not revealed.   The kerygma is revealed and the horizon is not.

Yet the two are given in a different way than our interpretative activity of unpacking the poles of kerygma and horizon, and carefully and patiently laying out, uncovering, or constructively articulating the relationships holding between those poles.  Our language, culture, philosophical assumptions, conceptual schemes, and own existences (including the socio-political) are the media by which the poles are refracted.  The hard task of locating the poles with respect to each other by specifying their connections is, of course, what the method of correlation is all about.   This creative, interpretive act of correlation is built upon previous acts of interpretation.   There is a hermeneutic of kerygma, a hermeneutic of horizon, and a hermeneutic correlating the deliverances of the first two hermeneutics.   Since the hermeneutical act is historically, culturally, conceptually influenced - - the product of the hermeneutic seems destined to be a here today, gone tomorrow, Johnny one-hit phenomenon.  Or so it seems on first reflection.

But perhaps we theologians spend too much creative energy wallowing in the quagmire of the seeming relativism based upon historical, cultural, and conceptual dynamism.  After all, it is not that the hermeneutical task - - and the hermeneutical circle and its effects - - infect what we do alone.   All intellectual activity proceeds by interpreting one thing, then interpreting another thing, and finally interpreting how those things fit, or don't fit, together.  It is what human beings do, and it is what we have always done.   Yet, there was once a time - - and there is in many other disciplines still a time - - when truth claims were/are vigorously asserted, supported, denied and repudiated on the basis of criteria that are abiding even within the flux of history, language, and culture.  It is not that everything is a Heraclitian flux only.  There is, after all, logos in the flux; there is order and reason.  We theologians have tended to concentrate so much upon the flux that we miss the order.   We tend to forget that the very categories we use in thinking and communicating the historical flux of thought are, in some sense stable categories.   In fact, the necessary condition for communicating flux is an ordered, coherent structure of thinking and being.  One cannot state change without perdurance.   This very old thought is either true or false, and I believe there are very good reasons to think it true - - Gorgias aside.  

What we theologians need again is a healthy dose of the reality of logos.  Our task is not dissimilar to Descartes'.   We must assume the worse-case scenario for theological knowledge, and try to uncover those stable structures presupposed by that worse case.  We must again learn to employ principle of contradiction:  If a theological position, or a hermeneutical interpretation of the hermeneutical situation ramifies a contradiction, then we must learn again to state clearly that the denial of that position is at least possible.  Moreover, we must learn again to think deeply enough theologically to spot the ways in which theological discourse is not generally a discourse of the contingent, and be able to conclude appropriately from this how the possible thus relates to the actual.  This is not easy work, but it is the work before us.

Just as flux presupposes logos, so does the historicity of the hermeneutical situation presuppose a metaphysics, that ontological correlate to the stable structural categories necessary even to state a non-completable hermeneutical dynamism.  It is precisely this metaphysics that theology has forgotten about, and it is precisely this that must be investigated again.   My hope is to begin this investigation soon.    

Reflections on Teleology in Theology

When I was young I captivated by the natural sciences - - particularly physics.   Now this should not be taken to mean that I actually knew a great deal of physics.   The specifics of physics aside, I loved the idea of physics, that idea that one could describe the initial state of a system, apply the relevant laws of nature, and calculate with certainty the position of the system at a later time.   

It always seemed to me that physics was like logic.   The initial state of the system corresponds to the axiom set, the laws of nature to the transformation rules or allowable logical operations, and subsequent states of the system to theorems.  Just as one can continue to derive theorems in the propositional logic, so can one continue to calculate  future states of a physical system.   The major disanalogy pertains to time.  While it is needed to actualize subsequent states of the physical system, it is irrelevant to logical derivation.   God could, after all, intuit all theorems of a logical system simultaneously because all theorems of a logical system obtain simultaneously.  Things are different in physics.  God could foreknow future states of the system, but there is a sense in which these states are not yet present.   (For purposes of the illustration let us not assume Boethius' view that eternity, for God, is the "whole simultaneous and perfect possession of unbounded life," and thus, for the divine, the future states of any physical system already hold in the fullness of the unbounded present.)  

When I was young it seemed to me that the more mathematics one knew, and the more one knew about the structure of scientific theory, the more one might hope in principle to know something definite about the world.   The world was the kind of thing that could be captured in scientific theory that makes appeal to nothing more than the regularities of nature and the category of efficient causality.   While it has proven very difficult to give an analysis of 'cause' that stands philosophical scrutiny, scientists do seem to make good use of the category and we humans seem to presuppose it in our dealings with the world.  (OK . . . I admit that Kant always seemed right on this point.)    I admit always being tempted to thinking of cause in terms of Mackie's INUS condition:  A causes B if and only if A is an insufficient but necessary part of a unnecessary but sufficient condition.  While I shall spare you the specifics of his account, the idea is simple enough: The short-circuit causes the fire because it is an indispensable part of a complex situation which, together with the short-circuit, causally produces the fire.  

I talk about causality because it is a basic metaphysical building block of what we think the world is.   Whether we think causes are events, facts, features or states of affairs, we think there are  such things.  Our view of the world is one in which there are things (e.g., events) causally related to one another.  Accordingly, one event is said to cause another when it is sufficient to produce it, and, in some sense, when the second event would not have happened were the first not to have happened.  Understood in this way, the causal relation is the metaphysical glue of the universe; it is what gives our experience cohesion and stability.   Chairs simply do not pop in and out of existence in my room because there is no causal mechanism sufficient and necessary for these events to occur.   

Some time ago I simply started paying attention to nature.   Not the nature that I learned about in the physics laboratory, but the nature that I saw all around me as a child on an Iowa farm but somehow had systematically blocked out.   I was watching a swallow  build a nest and thought about giving a nice causal explanation of its movements in the building of this nest.   Now this is not a particularly deep thought.   We all observe nature and we all know that it seems to be purposeful. Watching the activity of the swallow building her nest is that which seems filled with purpose, but if we really know that the causal map of the universe is finally an efficient causal one, this nest-building activity should give a naturalist at least some pause.   How could it be that the swallow goes and searches for mud and straw and seems to stitch them together into a nest to birth and then nurse her young?   

Aristotle would have no problem with this, of course, and most of us never really think twice about the situation.   We know that it is instinct after all that pushes the swallow forward in this way.   Perhaps the possession of genetic information coupled with  rudimentary antecedent conditioning nicely explains this.   It is not that such explanations cannot be given, after all.  How could anyone have a problem somehow thinking that nest-building is irreducibly teleological or purposeful?   All of this is very clear.   

And the clear story proceeds to sketch a view wherein supervenient layers of entities, properties, events and/or states of affairs having putative teleological properties are somehow asymmetrically determined by subvenient layers that finally terminate in a most basic microphysical description that is not teleological at all.   Somehow the higher levels of a system - - the swallow and its nest building, for example - - are realized by a set of microphysical actualizations, the presence of which, metaphysically determines the determinate contour of the swallow's nest building.   The story goes on to say that this swallow's nest building could have obtained were another set of microphysical actualizations present, that, in fact, the swallow's nest building is multiply realizable microphysically.   This is important, as it turns out, because one would not want to reduce the type of swallow nest-building to some particular actualization of the microphsyical.  Reduction, after all, is decidedly out of favor.   While there can be no old-style reduction in this matter, one can simply say that some microphysical actualization or other realizes the swallow's nest-building and seemingly skip merrily home. 

So as I look at the swallow building its nest, I am evidently to cheer because its seemingly purposeful activity is not reducible to the microphysical, but somehow simply realizable by it.  Presumably two atom-by-atom microphysical replicas within a region will yield two replicas of the swallow and its nest building within that region.   There can be no swallow nest-building difference without a microphysical difference!   

But the thought that struck me that day is that just as one can't pull a rabbit out of a hat, one cannot pull macrophysical purpose out of microphysical efficient causal determination.  This thought, which is clearly a thought that most in the western philosophical tradition have had, is not a thought that prohibits our time from such tryings.  We are, after all, physicalists at heart:  We believe that what ultimately exists are those entities which are fated to be quantified over by our final fundamental particle theory.   We know this so deeply, that we simply must start with this and then try, through philosophical reflection (or lack thereof), to provide an account whereby the apparent purposefulness of nature can be made compatible with this deeply-held physicalism.   We thus specify teleonomic laws and give functionalist explanations that work in their own region of explanation, knowing that somehow all of this is realized by microphysical systems far removed from purpose.  We know that philosophy has a humble task, that it probably can't explain or give an adequate account of downward causality - - the notion that the distribution of properties within   lower levels is causally affected by actualization at the upper levels - - but that we can only ask so much of philosophy.   We must keep at the task!!  

Watching the bird make its nest I thought about what it would be like to think our thoughts again for the first time, to roll back the clock, as it were, and see the world without deep physicalist assumptions.  What could be clearer than that the swallow is acting purposefully, that it has a goal it wants to reach and that it has a nicely programmed set of objectives by which to reach that goal!  (Some of you may be groaning at this anthropomorphism.)   The activity of the swallow is best understood by knowing what it is that the swallow is attempting to do.  Maybe the category of  final causality, that most unscientific of all categories of thinking, simply is the best way to explain  why the physical system of the swallow's nest-building has been actualized.  

I like to dream and I started to dream about purpose.   What if many things in nature actually do have a purpose, that is, that their purpose is as objective as the efficient causal chain that produced them?  What if we humans really had such purpose?   What if the universe had such purpose?  What if we went back to Plato and Socrates and started with a macro-world of purpose instead of to Leucippus and Democritus and began with a micro-world of determinacy?   What if instead of making the problem how to get apparent purpose out of an underlying causal mechanism, we made the problem how to get underlying causal determinacy out of a universe clearly filled with purpose?   

Lutheran theology for many reasons has not cared deeply about teleology for the past 200 years.   Granting the truth of Kant's First Critique, and never clearly understanding the subtlety of his Third Critique, we Lutherans have made a cottage industry out of adjusting our semantic fields to make the language of Lutheran theology play in a world without purpose.   Survey the tradition and think about this.   What did Ritschl and his School assume about the metaphysical constitution of the world?  How about Bultmann, Gogarten, and Ebeling?   For these great men, whether the world ultimately had purpose was somehow irrelevant to doing Lutheran theology, to preaching Law and Gospel, to proclaiming the forgiveness of sins in Christ Jesus.  One could have highly nuanced and sophisticated theological argumentation without thereby resorting to teleology - - at least teleology in the grand old tradition.  Ritschl simply moved theology to the realm of value, and while his Lotze-inspired understanding of value is not that of today's advocates of understanding theology and religion valuationally, the central move was clear enough.   And if anybody has missed it, here is the central move.  

Theology is unredeemably teleological.   Since the days of Kant, constructive Lutheran theology has attempted to do theology in a way that is indifferent to questions of metaphysical teleology.  It has consistently reminded us to look at Christ and not at the world with its metaphysical questions. But in so doing, the very semantic field of Lutheran theology has changed.  'Creates,' 'redeems' and 'sustains' no longer connote causal production, because there is no divine being existing apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language that has a particular intentionality for the world.  Creation is not a purposeful act of God, but is a natural process that can, in theology, be understood as if it were a purposeful act of the divine.  The meaning of many of the central theological terms have shifted.  This has happened so gradually, that users and hearers of the language have not understood the changes.   

My sense is that we may never get clear on theology again if we don't get clear on teleology.   I have not had time to argue all of that directly here, but will try to do so at a later time.          

  

The Christ School of Theology

As many of you know, I have been heading an effort these last six years to build an independent, autonomous, and fully-accredited graduate school of theology and seminary.   The name we have used since the very early days is 'The Institute of Lutheran Theology' (ILT).   Some of you know as well that over the last five years we have referred to the Institute of Lutheran Theology's graduate school specifically as the 'Christ School of Theology'.  

The Christ School of Theology (CST) has been growing nicely and I am happy to report that we easily shattered this semester our old enrollment records.  Many of you realize we have stellar names teaching at CST, e.g., Paul Hinlicky, Bob Benne, Jonathan Sorum, David Yeago, etc.   Since the beginning we have had on our Board Professor Hans Hillerbrand, one of the top names in Reformation scholarship and the former President of the American Academy of Religion.  Our Masters of Sacred Theology (STM) program is growing nicely and we look forward to announcing soon our course offerings for this fall. Stay tuned!      

Students and faculty of CST know that we deliver our courses in a fully interactive video platform that allows each student to see and interact with each other student as well as the professor.   This has worked very well these last five years, but we realize that we need to be able to deliver content in parts of the world where bandwidth does not exist for fully interactive video yet.  We also know that some students actually prefer asynchronous delivery of course content to the interactive approach we routinely employ.  Such asynchronous delivery works nicely for independent study options.  Because of these demands, ILT is beginning work to produce  usable video products that can be delivered by DVD or directly through satellite download.   While most of this content will be password-protected, we shall be broadcasting some on-demand content in the clear.

While we are in the first stages of this, some content is already available.  I am the guinea pig for this ILT "beta project."   If you are interested in lecture content from my "Faith, Knowledge and Reason" course about how philosophy connects to (and has connected with) philosophy, visit either our ILT Christ School of Theology Ustream or YouTube channels.   You can find the latest lecture on Ustream here or on YouTube here.   Four to five lectures are going up each week on these CST channels, as well as Word at Work content for congregations here, or our daily chapel archive here. We are also working to make available some of the last lectures from my "Doktor Vater," George Forell.   I will update you on this project as it progresses.  

What would it have been like to watch the lectures of Walther, Chemnitz, Luther, Thomas or Aristotle?   While we shall never know this, folks at the Christ School of Theology do hope someday to capture and archive quality content from significant Lutheran theological voices.  In doing this, ILT will be doing what it has always done: seek humbly to perpetuate the Lutheran tradition by connecting  the most able and curious of students with the most knowledgeable and experienced of professors.  

Seven Years Ago

About two months ago someone sent me this article I had written in late 2005 and that was subsequently published on the  WordAlone website in January of 2006.  The article talks about the need of a Lutheran House of Studies.   What is interesting about the article is the degree of continuity we have been able to achieve from the initial diagnosis of the problems to the establishment of the Institute of Lutheran Theology.   I submit it to readers of this blog who perhaps have never seen it.   Frankly, I had forgotten I had written it.   

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A wise person once said that wisdom is the gift of understanding the obvious. I have talked with many Lutherans who are concerned about the future of theological education in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Congregations sense that newly ordained pastors often think quite differently than those joining the clergy rosters 40 years ago. But granting this is so, why is it so? What understanding of this problem is available to us?

I recall three recent conversations that exemplify the problem.

In the first, a woman was talking to me about the sexuality issue confronting the ELCA, "How can my pastor be for allowing someone engaged in homosexual behavior to be a pastor? Doesn't it say in the Bible that we aren't supposed to do that, and hasn't Christianity always taught that?" I remember trying to explain to her how it had come about that Bible and tradition were no longer thought to clearly decide the issue. She was not impressed with my reply.

In another conversation a man said to me, "Why is everyone coming out of the seminary these days so politically correct? It seems like they care more about fixing society than they do about preaching the faith." When I told him about the justice perspective of the prophetic Biblical faith, he responded, "I am not against talking some politics in church, I just want to make sure we also talk about church in church, because we don't talk about that anywhere else."

Finally, I recall the words of an older gentleman who remarked, "When I was young, the pastor definitely had authority in our congregation. It was not just his word against ours. But when pastors get all agitated about stuff they don't know about—our last pastor was convinced that large, multi-national agribusiness was the work of the devil—then it makes us think they maybe don't know as much about what we are paying them to know about." I didn't know what to say to that because I remembered my own synod's passing a resolution directed against Cargill even though members of the economics faculty at our state university claimed those voting hadn't a clue as to what they were voting about.

The three conversations clearly display the problem. As a church what is our authority? If it is no longer Scripture and tradition, then what is it? As a church what is the focus of our message? If it is not the crucified Christ, then what is it? As a church what is our competence? If it is not the proclamation of the revealed Word into the concrete situation, then what is it?

It is obvious that things have changed in Lutheran theological education in America. Precisely what have changed, I think, are the teachable assumptions about authority, message and competence. Underlying these is an even more fundamental presupposition that confessional theological statements cannot be true—at least not in the way we had previously believed.

WordAlone, along with many other Lutheran reform movements, perceives that the classical loci of the Lutheran tradition have been de-emphasized within ELCA seminaries over the past 40 years. The following are my speculations as to why it is that we find ourselves in the current situation. Hopefully, there will be some gift of wisdom in my attempt to understand what, to many, is obvious.

One cause of the problem is economic. We must recognize that ELCA funding for its seminaries is much lower than the funding of the previous Lutheran bodies towards their seminaries. This change in economic policy has had tremendous repercussions. In order to survive and prosper, the seminaries have had to become more autonomous in their self-understanding than previously had been so, and they have thus had to offer curricula that can appeal to a broad range of students seeking theological education. As the de facto mission of the seminaries changed from the "in house" task of preparing Lutheran students for Lutheran ministry to the more general task of providing academic theological education to a broader constituency, the explicitly confessional nature of theological education was accordingly de-emphasized. (I am not claiming that anyone set out intending to do this.) The result has been that the ethos of Lutheran identity and confession no longer prevails in the student body of the seminaries. Many students today neither know the Lutheran tradition nor wish to adopt and advocate for it. This state of affairs is simply an unarguable fact about our current context and the economic realities that underlie it.

Secondly, the decline in teaching classical Lutheran theology is attributable in part to a change in the theological direction of ELCA leadership and significant numbers of the ELCA rank-and-file.

We live in a time in which the "truth-conditions" for theological language are routinely considered to be problematic. In an age of cultural relativism that often breeds ethical relativism, there is a profound awareness of the multiplicity of religious options and a sincere desire on the part of many not to be ethnocentric with respect to their own fundamental beliefs and world views. This awareness has tended to conflict with the prima facie particularity of Christian confession. While in previous times one could say "confessional proposition x is true because the state of affairs denoted by x obtains external to human awareness, perception, conception and language," this option seems to many today to be provincial, parochial, naïve and misguided. How can one's own confessions be true in this way without saying at the same time that everyone else's are wrong?

The result of this has been a general movement away from understanding confessional assertions realistically, and instead understanding them as mere expressions of one's own cultural values. Thus, a "theological irrealism" has taken up residency within the ELCA. Of course, to claim that such an irrealism is the only alternative to the robust realism of earlier generations is itself to commit the fallacy of false dichotomy. The denial of one simply does not entail the truth of the other, even though it may often seem that way to people in the pews. (The problem bequeathed by the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant was to try to give theological language truth-conditions without having to understand them realistically. The next 150 years of theological development tried to grant objectivity to theological propositions without making them about metaphysical objects. The problem today is that there has been a general loss of confidence in this entire project. Objectivity itself has become subjectivized, and normativity is customarily regarded as an expression of the self embedded in its immediate cultural context.)

Thirdly, with the loss of particular truth-conditions to theological language, there has resurfaced in our time the problem of authority.

While Lutherans once believed that Scripture itself could adjudicate conflicting claims, contemporary Biblical scholarship assumes that the sensus of Scripture is not easily located. Given the conflicting claims in Biblical scholarship about the real meaning of particular texts, a retreat to the letter and authority of the confessional documents has also seemed wrongheaded. Moreover, the real meanings of these documents are themselves open for scholarly debate. Given this present vacuum of authority, it is small wonder that voices have emerged urging a ratcheting up of the authority of the Church. When Scripture and Confession can no longer function to grant authority to the particularity of Lutheran theological affirmations, then something else is requisite, and that hoped for "something else" is identified by many as "the Church."

The paradox of the present ELCA participation in the ecumenical movement is this: Lutheranism began in the particularity of its theological affirmations over and against Catholic, Reformed and Anabaptist theology. Now, the ELCA is putatively, or supposedly, to "get over" these particularist affirmations in order to find unity with others within the Church catholic. Those holding to the particularity of these former affirmations are understood by many as undermining the unity of the Church. In a time when form prevails over substance, unity smells sweeter than truth.

There is a final point worth mentioning. There has been a widespread attenuation, or lessening, of emphasis on the scandal of the Cross in favor of a preoccupation with social justice issues.

The reason for this is not difficult to ascertain. Citizens of America generally embrace the traditional American values of individual rights and dignities. Advocating for social justice and individual dignity, while part of the Biblical prophetic tradition, is thus clearly consonant with the prevailing ethos of American culture. To speak for peace and justice is to state the deepest and noblest values of our civilization. But proclaiming the foolishness of the Cross is irreducibly counter-cultural. Advocating an ultimate eschatological, or end times, empowerment before God that does not entail immediate temporal empowerment is a position that has been, and will continue to be, criticized by enlightened, cultured despisers of religion. But Lutheranism must always find its center in the second article of the creeds, the scandal of the Cross.

The WordAlone Network's House of Studies project wishes to establish a structure for theological education that assumes the following:

• The authority of Scripture and Confessions
• The centrality of the scandal of the Cross
• The truth and particularity of traditional Lutheran affirmations
• The notion that the Church is primarily the hidden gathering of the faithful and not a visible means of divine grace
• The value of theological competence and student mastery of Scripture and other primary texts of the Lutheran theological tradition

We are at a crossroads. The WordAlone Network wishes to establish and implement structures that can perpetuate Lutheran confessional teaching in the face of contemporary social, cultural and theological resistance. The structural shape of the Lutheran House of Studies has not been determined. We remain at the preliminary stage of seeking input and interest in such a project. While we do not know the "hardware" particulars of the House of Studies, we do, however, have an idea of the "software" we wish to create. In creating the "software," we wish to begin with its critical component: good faculty willing to teach in the House of Studies and an attainable vision. Because we believe that good software can run in different hardware environments, we shall begin our efforts by identifying faculty and planning curriculum. 

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The Institute of Lutheran Theology, consisting in its graduate school called the Christ School of Theology and its various lay programming, is the fruition of what in 2006 was called a "House of Studies."  It exists to perpetuate the teaching of good Lutheran theology to those of any tradition called to preach and teach the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  While we are now are getting clarity on the hardware, the software has never been in doubt.   

Justifying the Individual

Though I have never posted a sermon before, I decided to post this one. It was preached at the Institute of Lutheran Theology shortly after the election. The text was Hebrews 10:11-25. Readers might think it wrong-headed, but as always I enjoy feedback and discussion.

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We had an election here in America.   Some say that it was the most important election of our lifetimes.   There is in America a fundamental parting of ways for those who deeply embrace the ideology of their parties.   Does one want smaller government with an emphasis on individual responsibility and innovation, or does one want larger government with an emphasis on what the power of the State can build and do?  One side concentrates upon the horizon of the individual, the other on the fabric of the community.  

Pundits and preachers on both sides proclaim the virtues of what we might call social/cultural atomism over and against social/cultural holism.  The first claims that the basic reality is that of individuality and groups are collections of individuals.  The second argues that the fundamental reality is community, and that individuals are merely the ways that communities have their being in a particular location.  Red states tend to reduce the behavior of wholes to the collection of the behavior of parts; blue states tend to claim that the behavior of the part is, in some sense, an abstraction from the behavior of the whole.  

Thus, when one claims, “it takes a village,” one is espousing a particular ontology about the logical priority of wholes and parts.   Since the study of wholes and parts is called “mereology,” to claim, “it takes a village,” is to adopt a particular “mereological ontology.”  So, you see, one can say a great many complex-sounding things about something that is really quite simple. 

But why would one say complex-sounding things about what is quite simple?  And, more to the point, why would one talk about parts and whole, red states and blue states?

Well, think about it for a moment.   Think about the great Christian narrative of creation, fall and redemption.  God made the universe good; the universe fell into being not-good and thus into being not-itself; and the universe through Christ became again what it is - - though it still retained the flavor of what it is not.  The process of the universe becoming again what it once most profoundly was is called in the tradition, “justification.”   We are made right again; like a well-tempered clavier, we are justified, rightly tuned again through the blood of Jesus. 

Traditional Catholic theology disagreed on many things, but one thing it mostly agreed upon was that ‘justified’ and ‘not-justified’ are antonyms.  The more just one is, the less unjust he or she can be.  If we are justified by Christ’s action, then we are not the unjust beings we were through the Fall.   Redemption brings forth a return to Paradise, a Return to Forever, a return to the time before time, the primal time of all Beginning, the state prior to the disruption, decay, and, in some sense, existence itself.  

Look at the text from Hebrews.   Christ has “perfected for all time those who are sanctified.”   This is the time of the forgiveness of sins, a time of sprinkling clean the conscience and ritually purifying the body, a time of promise and faith, of provocation to love and goodness, a time of the approaching Day. 

But attention to the text shows something quite complex happening.   While the Day of paradise has dawned in one sense, the habits of the old age remain.  This is why this is an approaching Day, and not a Day already attained.   The Day is dawning; Paradise is returning; the Old is passing away and the New is taking its place.   There is in this time of approaching Paradise, a time of perfection in that which is still not perfect.   While most of Catholic theology in one way or the other claimed that the more just was the New Day the less unjust was the Old Day, Luther and his Circle read Scripture and tradition in a way that allowed them to say that the New Day was totally present while the Old Day remained completely.   Lutheran theology claims thus that we sinners are wholly justified while remaining completely sinful: simul iustus et peccator.  

So have we got all of that clear?    - - I would think that most listening to this sermon would say, “Tell us something we don’t know.  We know that the Council of Trent condemned Luther for saying that sin remained after justification.  We know that we are simul iustus et peccator.”

Please bear with me if you know this already, and if my saying it again does not make it a clearer or a more effective Word for you.   What I have said so far is just setting the table for making the fundamental point.  I must now relate what I just said to what I said earlier.  Teachers and preachers are supposed to do that, after all, and because I am both, I will attempt to do it now. 

Justification for Lutherans brings back the Before in the not-Before.   It brings back Paradise outside of Paradise.  But what is the being of that which is not-Before and is now Before, of that which is not-Paradise but is now Paradise?  Is this being a being of individuals comprising groups, or is it the groups from which individuals are abstracted? 

You might think this a deeply irrelevant and tangential question.  What difference could this possibly make?

The difference, I aver, is profound and has everything to do with why Lutherans have split up and misunderstood each other so profoundly.   You see, Lutheran theology has always privileged the individual as the locus of justification.   I remember my old teacher, Dr. George Forell, would say there are no Christian institutions, only institutions in which there are Christians.   The term ‘Christian’ can accordingly only properly apply to individuals and not groups.   Individuals are justified by grace through faith, not groups.   Justification is the process of the individual becoming right with God, while his or her living out of that rightness is the Christian community or Church.  

But times are a changing.   In the nineteenth century the idea of a social group with a Geist or “spirit” gained ascendency.   With eyes on this world rather than the next, thinkers downplayed the idea of personal immortality in favor of the notion of achieving lasting being within the context of the group.  New eyes on the Old Testament thematized the notion of the Chosen People as a community of the faithful.  Justification increasingly became associated with a transition from social disorder to a melioration of that order.   This is, of course, exactly what one would think if one were to hold that the primary bearer of being is the community and not the individual. 

Time does not permit me to trace the subtle ways that this changed ontology changed Lutheran preaching.  In the Institute of Lutheran Theology, we explore these matters quite deeply.   The take-away, however, is that if primary being rests with the community, then the hearing of the Word must be a doing of the Word, for only in this way are communities changed.   Whereas in earlier times one could talk meaningfully about an “inner transformation” of the person, this is what is precluded in an ontology that takes the “inner” to be a mere abstraction of the real being of social order and community.  

The ELCA, the denominational body to which many of us previously belonged, privileged in their working theology an ontology of community.  Very subtly and gradually, sin became social fragmentation and justification become social integration.   Notions of individual resurrection were replaced by the idea of a resurrected community.   But the people of the pews did not abandon their previous ontology.   The blue state church, filled with individuals having red state commitments, imploded.   And here is where we find ourselves today. 

It is time today to understand what has gone wrong and return to a deep presupposition of Christianity itself:  We stand alone before a God that knows our every thought and breath; we stand naked underneath His eternal and wrathful divine gaze. 

Yet in the midst of this reality of being forever shut out of Paradise, a Word comes from God that is Himself God.   This Word claims us upon the horizon of our own being; He claims us not primarily as a people, but as me.   Listen!  You, yes, you yourself, are grasped eternally by the God whose justice can only reject you.  You, eternally have been grabbed and are being drug back to paradise.   God has a preferential option for you, not the social orders and structures you inhabit.   This is good news, exceedingly good news.   You yourself are precious and you yourself is where Christ is present! 

Had we remembered this, we would never have lost our way so deeply.  

Getting Clear on the Nature of Law

Lutherans have always argued about the law.  Is there only a first and second use, or is there also a third use?  Does the law go away when grace arrives?  Is the law eternal?   Is there sin prior to law, or  is law only possible on the basis of sin?  Is living out "the form of the Gospel" a living according to the law or not?   Moreover, are good works necessary for salvation, and, if so, how can there doing not be legalistic?

Lutherans have tried mightily to say precisely what separates law and gospel, and what makes Christian living free, that is, what makes it not living underneath the law.  While I will not answer all the questions above, I want to offer a fairly commonsense way of looking at things that might help us address these questions.

I like sometimes to step away from the particularity of Christian language and describe situations using another vocabulary.  The reason for this is that we can sometimes can get more clear on what we are asserting when we employ a vocabulary that is not that to which we are accustomed.   I will proceed in this way in the remainder of this reflection.

Broadly conceived, the Christian story is one supposing that the way that things are simply is not the way things are supposed to be.   God created the universe good, but it is no longer so.   How this came to be is, of course, a matter that is not altogether clear.   How precisely is a wholly good creation nevertheless one in which elements of it become disoriented from the good?   But the mystery of the Fall is not my concern here.    I am interested merely in the distinction between the "is" and "ought."   The world is a particular way, but it ought to be a different way.

Theories of atonement specify how it is that the way things are, but are not supposed to be, nonetheless becomes again the way things are supposed to be.   In traditional language, God who is displeased with the world, nonetheless comes to accept the world.   That which is displeasing becomes pleasing to Him.

Law in Christian theology is tied to ought.   God intends the world to proceed X-ly, but the world does not proceed in this way.   The "is" of the world does not correspond to its "ought."  In a late medieval sense, law is that which is reasonable, promulgated by a competent authority, and capable of being enforced.   The contour of the world which is, is not that which is reasonable, promulgated by God, and capable of being enforced by Him.

When talking about law in the first and second senses, Lutheran theology clearly wants to address the "supposed to be-ness" of things.   We might use a semantics of possible worlds in discussing this.   Because we are speaking of conformity with God's will, we should probably avoid "deontologically possible worlds" (or some such jargon) in favor of speaking about worlds varying in conformity with divine intent.   A world fully in accordance with divine intent would thus be very distant from us, while one wholly not in accordance with this intent would be proximal to the actual world.

What I am thinking of is conceiving a World set S with the actual world and a set of worlds w1, w2, w3, etc., where the higher number indicates greater conformity with God's will and greater distance from w0, the actual world.   The first and second uses of the law can thus be analyzed as follows:  God demands x, is to say that there is some world w such that w is not the actual world and that w is, in fact, suitably distant from the actual world, and that x is in w, though x is not in the actual world.   To say that God wills x is simply to say that x is in every world w in S.  In other worlds, the w containing x is now actual.

What about the third use of the law?   Is it also to be analyzed in this way?

I think that we must make a distinction here between two senses of 'law'.  The sense which I have alluded to above clearly carries the weight of the "ought."   Traditional Christian natural law theory evinced this sense.   There was a "way that things are supposed to go" to things, even if things did not go that way.   The way that things were supposed to go was a simple as 'bodies ought to fall'.

But at the birth of modern science the old "way that things are supposed to go" of things, the teleological sense of things was lost and replaced by "the way things inexorably do go" of things.  Laws that once spoke of the divine ought were replaced by universal regularities that were, in some sense, necessary.  That two objects attract each other directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them is not the way things ought to be, but merely the way that things are.   Laws of motion express how things simply are.  With respect to physical actualizations, there are no worlds other than the actual world that could be different than the actual world.

If we understand the third use of the law descriptively in this fashion, then we are simply saying that the actual world with its particular contour could not have been other than it was given certain conditions.   What I am saying is that the particular contour of the Christian life is free because it simply could not be other than it is; its freedom is found in its necessity.   We are freed by Christ and as free men and women in Christ we are what we are given the conditions that God has wrought in Christ.

When listening to Christian preaching, one must ask if the preacher is advocating that a world that is not the actual world should be the actual world.   If she or he is advocating this, the law is being preached.   On the other hand, if the preacher is describing what is the case and cannot be other than the case for the one graced by the Living Christ, then the "form of the gospel" is being described, and there is occasion for the law's "third use" - - which is not the law at all.   Law avers that a world that is not the actual one should replace the actual one.  The Gospel discomfits this way of proceeding, claiming that the actual world needs no replacement.

More needs to be said to justify the claim that the actual world is necessary when the Gospel is preached and lived.   Surely there are physically different actualizations of the preached and lived Gospel!

But what I am claiming is that the Gospel is necessary in the sense that there is no longer any set of worlds, w1, w2, w3, etc., such that there is nomological distance between these worlds and the actual one.   All of this can and should be made more clear, but the general point should be apparent.

Thinking Truth Non-Propositionally

"I am the Way and the Truth and the Life."

I regard the statement as true.  As such, it is a  propositional truth.   Precisely how a  statement is a propositional truth is a matter of considerable debate, of course.   Some say it is true because regarding it so issues in desirable effects.  "Truth is what works," declares the confident pragmatist.

Others say it is true because it coheres appropriately with a wider class of statements.  It is consistent  with them, and it, and the wider class of statements, mutually presuppose each other so that there are no arbitrary and disconnected statements from which the statement is deducible.   Getting clear on the coherence theory of truth is never easy because it is not perspicuous what the precise boundaries of coherence are.  

Many say that the statement is propositionally true because it appropriately states what is the case.   Getting precision on what is the case apart from the statement, and what the appropriate way is in which the statement and the extra-linguistic states of affairs relate, is not altogether facile.  What constitutes the criterion by which to adjudicate when a statement appropriately states the case?  If there is an isomorphism between statement and the reality it depicts?  If so, what are the relata of the relations isomorphically obtaining?

In the absence of clear criteria which unfailingly picks out the truth of a putative propositional truth, some claim that the truth of propositional truth is primitive.  One need not have some elaborate theory of meaning which, when appropriately satisfied, delivers truth.   One could start with truth and discern that  meaning in some way is derivative upon that.

Whatever be one's theory, the notion that truth is propositional is standard fare in philosophical thinking.   A philosopher can give alternative accounts of how the truth of "I am the Way and the Truth and the Life" is true.  This much is certain.   But the philosopher runs into a brick wall when trying to think the content of the proposition in which  utterer is identified with Truth itself.  What could this mean?   How could truth be non-propositional?   How can truth be non-linguistic?  What does it mean to say that 'Jesus' is 'Truth'?

One might at this point say that 'truth' just means 'reality', and that Jesus is thus 'real'.   But this way of proceeding is fraught with much difficulty because to say 'Jesus is Truth' is clearly intended to say more than 'Jesus is real', for one would quite glibly say 'the ball is real', but never aver 'the ball is truth'.

There are two more promising steps forward, one Hegelian and one Heideggerian.   Hegel famously claimed, "Diese Gegenstaende sind wahr, wenn sie das sind, was sie sein sollen, d.h. wenn ihre Realitaet ihrem Begriff entspricht" ("Objects are true if they are as they ought to be, that is, when their reality corresponds to their notion."). [Enzyklopaedie, Wissenschaft der Logik (1830), 213, n. 127] Accordingly, Jesus is 'truth' in that he corresponds fully to the concept of what it is to be the God-man.  But is this "correspondence" really non-propositional?   Think what it would be to specify how a thing corresponds without using concepts expressible in language.  How could one thing not be another thing in the absence of that which differentiates?   And how can that which differentiates not finally be expressible in language?

Another way forward is Heideggerian.  Famously Heidegger argued that alethia (truth) is a unconcealing (Unverborgenheit) or as an Entbergung or "unveiling."   Early on Heidegger found the phenomenon of unveiling as the ontological ground for the possibility of truth.  However, later Heidegger admitted that die Frage nach der Unverborgenheit als solcher ist nicht die Frage nach die Wahrheit.  (Maybe he realized that if truth needed an ontological ground in unconcealing, falsity needed one in concealing.)   Whatever might be thought of Heidegger's turn away from truth as unconcealing in his Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens, he remained convinced that truth had something to do with correctness, and that correctness had everything to do with unveiling.  But how can one claim that the experience of unveiling ontologically grounds truth when this experience could as easily be described as truth's effect?

Given what has been said, how is it unquestionably possible for Jesus to be 'the Truth'?   Moreover, if Jesus is identified with God's self-revelation, then how can that revelation be true?   The standard move here is to distinguish between the objective, historical process of revelation and the subjective interpretation of that revelation.  (One might claim a la Pannenberg that a distinction holds between the "outer revelation" and the "inspiration" as the interpretation of these events in the Biblical witnesses.)  While the first is putatively non-propositional, the second is not.  But what is it to be a manifestation of God in and through historical events, that is, in and through particular things?  Furthermore, how could such a manifestation be non-linguistic?  If Stacia is a "true friend," but Bob is not, then what is it about Stacia that distinguishes her over and against Bob; what is that "it" that is not in principle capturable by language?

Twentieth century theology, in its effort to escape the "propositional theory of truth" with respect to divine revelation - - the generally-regarded spurious claim that divine revelation is an impartation of information -- seems to lurch into a semantic crevasse of vanquished lucidity.   Simply put, one  does not know what one is talking about when discoursing about a revelation that is in principle non-propositional.   That God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself could, after all, be true, but what is true is the fact that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.  A revelation that cannot be expressed as fact is finally too amorphous to be revelatory; such a revelation is ultimately a night in which all cows are black.  

The Ruins of Christendom

The Institute of Lutheran Theology will sponsor a theological conference on October 23-24 at its administrative offices located at The Old Sanctuary in Brookings, South Dakota, called "The Ruins of Christendom."

The conference description reads:  "Like post-modernity, this post-Christian era features a retreat into the self, a retreat from objective truth, and a retreat from the objective reality of God as distinct and separate from the self.  This conference will explore how the preaching of God's Word as Law and Gospel breaks through the curvatus in se, establishes Christ as the Way, as the Truth and the Life; and reveals the one true God as an objective reality capable of theophysical causality."

ILT faculty members Dr. Jonathan Sorum, Dr. Jack Kilcrease, Dr. Mark Hillmer, Dr. Dan Lioy, Dr. Dennis Bielfeldt and Dr. George Tsakiridas will offer papers, and there is ample opportunity for discussion.    

At a time when the scandal of the Cross has become for many theologically supine, this ILT conference seeks to return to the pith of Christianity itself: the truth of the Divine's incursion into time, His diremption into suffering and death, and His reconciliation of the world unto Himself. This is all scandalous, of course.  How is it that a particular, concrete historical man suffered, died, was buried and then was resurrected, and that this particular One carries universality?   How does preaching Law and Gospel to our ontologically feckless and insouciant generation discomfit the refractory self?  How does the "wording of the Word" finally avoid theological irrealism?  All and more will be discussed.  Come and join us here!
  

Thinking about Causation

I have recently written a paper entitled 'Creatio ex Nihilo in Luther's Genesis Commentary and the Causal Question'.  The paper argues, inter alia, that the most straightforward way of reading Luther in the Genesis Commentary is to claim that he holds: 'God causally brought about the creation of matter from nothing'. 

In itself this does not seem a particularly controversial claim.  However, when understood within the dominant theological paradigm since Kant, this statement seems highly suspect.   "Of course," the paradigm claims, "God created the heavens and the earth.  Everyone believes that.  It is just that God did not cause the earth to be.  To claim that would be a pernicious category mistake!"

But why should this be?  Why would it be problematical to claim that God causally brought about the universe from nothing?   Is this not straightforward?

It is only straightforward, it seems, if one does not think too deeply about the notion of causality.  Prior to the Enlightenement, it seems, philosophers often mistook reasons and causes.   Within and after the Enlightenment, philosophers have tended to understand causality empirically.  Physical things causally bring about other physical things.  This is the causal game properly played.   To say that the game itself was caused is to violate the rules of the game.  

Thinking about causality has tended to cluster around three views:  1)  Regular theories of causation, 2) Subjunctive and countracausal theories of causation, and 3) Intrinsic relational theories of causation. 

Accordingly, (1) claims 'A causes B' is analyzable into 'A precedes B', 'A-things are constantly conjoined to B-things' and some other conditions about which there is disagreement.  (2) holds that 'A causes B' is analyzable into 'if A were not to occur, B would not occur', or many other candidates.   Finally, (3) holds that there is some intrisic connection between A and B such B is directly produced from A.  (Let us not attend to the air of circularity at this point.) 

Clearly, if one were to want to claim that the universe was brought about by God, they could not hold a regularity theory of divine causation because the production of the universe is a singular event.  This leaves only option (2), (3) or some hybrid thereof.   Now the question arises as to what general tactic is better:  Is divine creatio ex nihilo best understood counterfactually or intrinsically?   My purpose in this blog is to explore a bit the notion of an intrinsic causal relation and ask whether it is possible for it to be utilized as the best analysis of divine causality creatio ex nihilo.  I will leave discussion of counterfactual divine causation to another time. 

The notion of an intrinsic causal relation takes aim at any Humean account of causation claiming that causality must be understood in terms of constant conjunction, temporal priority and spatio contiguity.   Accordingly, such an "externalist" account presupposes a widespread patterns of occurances.  In contravention to this, an intrinsic view of causality holds that cause is an intrinsic relation of power, energy or necessary connection.  I believe that the distinction between intrinsic/extrinsic relationality matter maps well to the distinction between singular causal statements versus "non-singularist" proposals.

According to a singularist approach the truthmaker for a single causal claim is a local relation holding between singular instances.   On this reading, the causal relation does not depend upon occurence of events in the neighborhood of the event in question; the causal relation is intrinsic to the relata and their connecting processes.  Instead of regularities as the truth makers of singular causal statements, local connections are.

The critical point in thinking about an intrinsic relation is this:  'A is intrinsically related to B' if and only if 'the relation is wholly determined by A and B'.   Over and against accounts that would unpack a relationship between A and B as determined by the regularities among a wide set of events and processes, the intrinsic connection of A and B supposes that there is something in A and something in B such that 'A causes B' cannot help but obtain.  

But now let us think about 'God causally brings about the existence of the universe'.   What properties of God and the universe obtain such that it is indeed necessary that 'God causally produces the universe'?

The obvious answer, of course, is that God has as God's very nature -- one might say His natural property -- a production of initial matter/energy and the subsequent formation thereof.  One might then say of the universe that is has its natural property of being produced by divine agency.   Accordingly, 'God creates the universe' is true because there is a being that is God whose nature it is to create, and a universe whose nature it is to be created.  To claim that 'God creates the universe ex nihilo' is simply to claim that there is a being that is God whose nature it is to create all things from absolute nothing, and a universe whose nature it is to be causally produced by the divine from absolute nothing. 

Now all this at one level might seem trivial.   Have we not simply performed some crude semantic joke?  Is it not the cause that we simply have moved the causal problem of divine/universe interaction from relations and placed it in entities having properties? 

At this point one must remember what the point is.   The point is to try to give an account of causality that is philosophically defensible.   Clearly if cause is an extrinsic relation, then we cannot give an account of the singular causal statement 'God creates the universe.'   What I have suggested is that this singular causal statement is captured by appeal to an intrinsic relation which itself is captured by the natural properties of the relata.  

The question whether or not their are any philosophical grounds for asserting the truth of the single causal statement is not one I wish to entertain here.   I take it that theology has always claimed that 'God creates the heavens and the earth'.  My point here is simply to show that it is conceptually coherent to think such divine/universe causality.   As it turns out, it is no category mistake.  

Masters of Arts Degrees from the Institute of Lutheran Theology

Readers of this blog know about the Institute of Lutheran Theology, its theological commitments, and its STM and M. Div. programs.   Readers may have missed, however, our recent announcement of three new Master of Arts programs, one in Biblical Studies, one in Theology and another in Religion.   Please indulge me as I briefly address these new ILT programs.

All three degree programs are designed for those students already having a B. A. or B. S. who want to study classical theology and seek a real intellectual challenge.   The degrees are profitably pursued by those wanting a M. A. to bolster their present teaching position, for those church leaders seeking more education, and for those intellectually curious who realize that the attainment of  knowledge is itself an intrinsic end.   All three are non-thesis degrees requiring the successful completion of 33 hours of graduate credit.

The Masters of Arts in Biblical Studies (MABS) offers the following curriculum:


Required Courses:  Total Credits = 33
Core Courses (9 Credits)

• BT299: Introduction to Greek (0 cr.)
• BT 300: New Testament Greek (3 cr.)
• BT 310: Biblical Hebrew (3 cr.)
• BT 301: Lutheran Biblical Interp. (3 cr.)

Exegetical Courses (24 Credits)

Old Testament (12 Credits)

• BT 401: The Pentateuch & Writings (3 cr.)
• BT 402: Wisdom & The Prophets (3 cr.)
• BT 490: Topics in Old Testament (6 cr.)

New Testament (12 Credits)

• BT 450: The Gospels (3 cr.)
• BT 451: Paul & His Legacy (3 cr.)
• BT 452: Epistles & Formation of the New Testament (3 cr.)
• BT 491: Topics in New Testament (6 cr.)

The Masters of Arts in Theology (MAT) lists the following requirements:


Program Requirements: Total Credits = 33

• BT 301: Lutheran Biblical Interpretation (3 Credits)
• EPR 301: Faith, Knowledge, and Reason (3 Credits)
• EPR: 302: God, Logic, & Semantics (3 Credits)
• HST 301: History of Christian Thought I: Origins to 1500 (3 Credits)
• HST 302: History of Christian Thought II: The Reformation (3 Credits)
• HST 303: History of Christian Thought III: 1700-1900 (3 Credits)
• HST 304: Twentieth Century Theology (3 Credits)
• HST 351: The Lutheran Confessions in Context (3 Credits)
• HST 401: Creation & The Triune God (3 Credits)
• HST 402: Christology (3 Credits)
• HST 403: Church, Spirit, & The Two Kingdoms (3 Credits)

Finally, the Masters of Arts in Religion (MAR) offers this curriculum: 

Program Requirements:  Total Credits = 33

• BT 301: Lutheran Biblical Interpretation (3 Credits)
• EPR 301: Faith, Knowledge, and Reason (3 Credits)

6 credits in Biblical Studies: (courses with a BT prefix)

6 credits in Church History: (HST 301-304, 310, 350, 351)

6 credits in Theology, Ethics, or Philosophy of Religion: (HST 401-3, 450 courses with an EPR prefix)

9 credits in one of the three areas of specialization:

• Biblical Studies
• Theology and Church History
• Ethics & Philosophy of Religion

All courses are delivered in real-time using video-streaming technology that allows students to see and interact with the professor and with each other.   ILT permanent teaching faculty include Dr. Robert Benne, Dr. Dennis Bielfeldt, Dr. Mark Hillmer, Dr. Paul Hinlicky, Rev. Timothy Rynearson, and Dr. Jonathan Sorum.  Please check the Institute of Lutheran Theology website for more details on our programs!    

Acting in Conformity with the Law versus Acting From or Because of the Law

When Lutherans come to think about God's Law, they sometimes think and say some rather confusing things.   Oftentimes this confusion reigns because they don't properly distinguish from among the nature of law, its motivation and its effects.    

Properly speaking, the law is that which ought to be the case, as it is commanded and enforced by a proper authority: God.  While the law is not a description of what actually happens, it is the real reality of what should happen: That which ought to be is as that which ought to be.  Accordingly, Lutherans should be nomological realists; they should hold that the  law is something objectively present outside of human awareness, perception, conception and language.  Thinking of such a law is, however, prone to abstraction.

Over the last centuries, Lutherans have been busy trying to follow Luther's lead in not thinking about the law abstractly, but rather considering it concretely.  Accordingly, the law is not simply an eternal set of prescriptions, but is itself a power.  The law, in fact, accuses.  It kills.

But the question arises: In what sense can the law accuse and kill?   Even asking this question seems misguided to Lutheran insiders.   How could a Lutheran theologian seriously suggest that he knows not the sense in which the law accuses and kills?   Does he not get even the basics of Lutheran theology?

Seemingly straightforward questions that somehow get asked anyway generally suggest that there has been some adjustment in the underlying set of assumptions or paradigm.   If one starts with the reality of human existence and the human Urerlebnis of being held fully responsible for not being able to do what one ought (Elert), then indeed asking in what sense the law accuses and kills is like asking in what sense water is wet.   However, if one is serious about theological realism, then things change a bit.  The law gains an ontological vitality not entailed by its phenomenological contour.   Now the law is because God is.  The law becomes an expression of what God is in and through creation.   A divine nomological ontology now sharply distinguishes the law in se from its effects pro nobis, and from our own motivations to do the law.

Kant famously distinguished acting because of or from duty from merely acting in accordance with duty.  For Kant, the motivation for doing an action is what is at issue morally.  I can save the old lady about to be hit by the truck for a number of reasons, some quite selfish or misguided.   (Maybe I don't like to see the hoods of trucks dented or dirtied.)   To act solely on the basis that saving her is the right thing to do is to act morally for the right reason.   (Kant used the example of the shopkeeper who acted merely in accordance with duty - - and not from duty - - in not duping his customer because the shopkeeper wants to build a good reputation and a better business.)

The distinction between acting in accordance with a rule or acting from, because or due to a rule is helpful, I think, in getting clear on how the law accuses and kills.

God wills x but Bob cannot seemingly or easily do x.   This willing of x by God is real: it exists apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language.   Now Bob can live "according to the law" by so acting with respect to x because of, from or due to x.  Such life under the law is itself a fundamental existential response to the reality of the law.   One can attempt to be moral and do what it is that one ought to do out of  proper motivation: One acts solely because this action is commanded by God.   While acting from the law is good for Kant, it is bad for Luther (and all of us generally) because to act because of the law is to prioritize, reify, and focus upon the fact of x.  Such prioritizing, reifying and focusing upon x can only push one further away from the author of x.

Fortunately, what is bad of Kant is good for Luther (and all of us generally).   While to act merely in accordance with duty is, for Kant, not really to be acting in a morally manifest way - -though he clearly says that such acting can be wholly appropriate - - acting in accordance with the law can be for Christians a highly laudable state.   (One should act so that one's right-hand does not know what one's left-hand is doing.)  Grace is eschewing a life lived "according to the law" so that one can "act in accordance with the law" and not due to the law.  Acting merely in accordance with the law is what grace accomplishes.   The law is taken up, not abolished.   What is abolished is acting from the law; what remains is acting in accordance with the law from proper inclination (spontaneous thankfulness) and not from the demands of the law itself.   Such an acting is neither accusatory nor nefarious; it simply is on the basis of He who is.

If we keep with the central story of Christianity - - there is a God and this God has a definite intentionality for His creation - - then the Lutheran focus on Law and Gospel is properly understood as a pertaining not primarily to the order of things, but mainly to the order of the human heart with respect to things.  (I am not wholly denying here that nature is out of conformity with the law under the conditions of the Fall, but simply not thematizing it here.)   Is the primal ought manifest to human beings as accusation or gift?   Is it finally that which kills or that which makes alive?   It all goes back to the motivation of the human heart, and with respect to the importance of motivation Kant was fully in accord with Luther.  What is different is the nature of motivation.   Luther knew what Paul proclaimed:  To act due to the law was to live according to the flesh.   But to be gifted to act freely merely in accordance with the law is the most blessed life available to all; it is to live in the dynamics of the Spirit.

Why Meaning Matters

A number of years ago when the MacNiel/Lehrer Report still appeared on PBS, there was an economist who answered a particular question using some of the technical language of his discipline.   The response from the other guest was instructive.   Listening to what the economist had offered, he remonstrated, "Why, that's just theological."  

The economist had clearly taken a heavy hit.  Calling his language theological in that context was to suggest a number of things:  1) His language was not clear, 2) His language was ambiguous, 3) His language made only dubious claims to truth, 4) His language was needlessly complex, 5) His language was useless. 

I have from the beginning of my time in theology sought a particular precision.  The reason for this is simply that very early on I learned how captivating theological language could be.   It seemed to me that one could enter another world by using such language.   When I was young it was great fun to read theology, to envision new possibilities, and to address theological problems.   But something happened to me on my way to a Ph. D.   

I began to realize that everything I was thinking when I was thinking theologically was comprised of propositions comprised of terms and predications of identity and attribution.  I began to think that if what I was thinking was to be true, I must get very clear on what it was precisely that I was thinking so I knew what it precisely was that was to be true.   This meant that I must analyze the language of my theological thinking to see what precisely it meant.  

But when I began to explore what it is precisely that theological language meant, I ran up against a host of problems.  Though I could use theological language correctly, - - I could use it in such ways that fit the linguistic situation (one might say, I could satisfy the appropriate stimulus/response conditionals theologically) - - I did not know exactly how my theological language related to other kinds of discourse.   When talking to people who did not know how to employ theological language like I thought I then did, I started to realize that I did not always know how to translate what I was saying theologically into types of language that they grasped, language that related to the world in which both they and I lived.  In this way, I began to worry about what precise claims I was making theologically and whether there was evidence to support those claims I was making.  

Long ago I concluded that the more one likely agonizes over what precisely one means when doing theology, the less theology one is likely to do.  Wonderful, learned and deeply evocative theology can be written without one knowing precisely what one means in the writing.  This is, of course, to a degree true of all disciplines.   Does one know the precise identity conditions of each term one uses in fundamental particle physics?   While the answer to this is perhaps, "no," there is a difference.   One has a public, objective semantic yardstick in fundamental particle physics that one does not possess in theology.   This is why one can look up the precise meaning of a term in the first context but not the second.   In theology, the meaning of terms and phrases depends deeply on who is employing them.  In theology it is fundamentally meaning  that matters.

The Institute of Lutheran Theology believes that it is critically important to grasp the semantic question in theology.   We in the developed countries of the West live at a time in which great numbers of people are abandoing the use of theological language.   The reason, in my opinion, is that far too many now think the language is not clear and unambiguous, that it makes dubious claims, and that is is complex and useless. For many people, in fact, the clearer the language becomes - - I am thinking now of some expressions of Evangelical theology - - the less likely many think it is to be true, and the more likely it is to be true, the less clear they believe it is.   Somehow in theology, meaning and truth, the twin pillars of semantics, have become inversely proportional.  

I have been posting this week about the Institute of Lutheran Theology.   At ILT we are serious about studying theology seriously.   This means, among other things, that not only God and his work in Jesus Christ is at issue for us, but also the meaning of God working in Jesus Christ.  The reason meaning matters is that it is necessary for truth, and when the truth at issue is the Truth, then the meaning that matters is that which really matters.