Towards a Lutheran Theological Semantics III

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

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

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

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

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

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

Towards a Lutheran Theological Semantics II

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

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

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

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

Towards a Lutheran Theological Semantics I

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

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

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

Logic and Semantics in Theology

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

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

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

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

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

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

Towards Theological Sanity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Review of Searle's Freedom and Neurobiology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1) All indeterminism in nature is quantum indeterminism.

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

3) Thus, consciousness manifests quantum indeterminism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Full Response to the ELCA Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality

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

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

Dennis Bielfeldt, South Dakota State University

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading DSSHS Critically

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DSSHS and the Divine “As If”

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

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

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

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

DSSHS and Antinomianism

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality - - Part IV

Reading DSSHS Critically

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality - - Part III

DSSHS and Antinomianism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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