On Pluhar's Solution to Certain Problems of Uniting the Three Kantian Critiques: Part I & II

I

Werner Pluhar "Translator's Introduction" to Kant's Critique of Judgment is not simply a brief summary of the main results of Kant's final critique, but it is rather an attempt to make plausible the unity of Kant's critical philosophy, a unity for which the power of judgment plays a central role. Pluhar writes: 

. . . it is the power of judgment that mediates the transition from the completely indeterminate supersensible as substrate of nature to the morally determined supersensible, and hence from the realm of nature of the first Critique to the realm of freedom of the second Critique . . .The power of judgment, especially the aesthetic power of judgment . . .  performs the mediation by means of its indeterminate concept of nature's subjective purposiveness, as equivalent to the indeterminate concept of the supersensible basis of this purposiveness . . . It thereby unites the three Critiques in a system (Pluhar, lxxxv). 

What is going on here?  Far from understanding the Critique of Judgment as a work of aesthetics in Kant's declining declining years, Pluhar sees the work as Kant did, a work that is supposed to somehow bridge the fissure between the first two Critiques.  Kant is quite clear in both of his Introductions to the Critique of Judgment about the task given to the Critique of Judgment.  In Section III of the Second Introduction to the Critique of Judgment -- the one published during Kant's lifetime -- the philosopher writes: 

The concepts of nature, which contain a priori the basis for all theoretical cognition, were found to rest on the legislation of the understanding.  The concept of freedom was found to contain a priori the basis for all practical precepts that are unconditioned by the sensible, and to rest on the legislation of reason (Kant, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar edition, 16). 

But how might these two connect?  Kant in the Third Antinomy of Pure Reason discussed the tension between physical human beings who fall under the mechanistic determinism of the First Critique and these same beings simultaneously acting out of duty for the sake of the moral law falling under freedom in the Second Critique.  How is this possible? Kant explains: 

Therefore, both these powers, apart from being applicable in terms of logical form to principles of whatever origin, have in addition a legislation of their own in terms of content which is not subject to any other (a priori) legislation, and hence this justifies the division of philosophy into theoretical and practical (CJ, 16).

Kant is claiming that while the Understanding legislates over the realm of nature and Reason (practically considered) over the realm of morality, and while the two must remain in their own spheres, there is nonetheless a way to connect these legislations, a way not subject to the a priori legislations of either, a way that grants some unity to philosophy in both its theoretical and practical uses.  What is this way? 

Kant argues that there is a mediating link between understanding and reason, and this link is judgment.  He writes: 

And yet the family of our higher cognitive powers also includes a mediating link between understanding and reason. This is judgment, about which we have cause to suppose, by analogy, that it too may contain a priori, if not a legislation of its own, then at least a principle of its own, perhaps a merely subjective one, by which to search for laws. Even though such a principle would lack a realm of objects as its own domain, it might sill have some territory, and this territory might be of such a character that none but this very principle might hold in it (CJ, 16).  

Judgment does not legislate a priori as do the understanding through pure concepts and practical reason through the determination of the will by the moral law, but it nonetheless does something.  It is, in fact, an a priori subjective principle that has a territory, though not a domain. It is concerned with coherence and systematicity, with the unity of our a priori legislative endeavors.  Kant declares that judgment used in such a mediation of understanding and reason pertains to an "ordering of our presentational powers, an ordering that seems even more important than the one involving judgment's kinship with the family of cognitive powers" (Ibid.).  Given that Kant spends considerable time in the Critique of Pure Reason reflecting upon, clarifying and developing the notion of judgment employed there, the assertion that the notion of judgment developed in this Third Critique is "even more important" is almost shocking.  Kant explains how judgment so conceived relates to understanding and reason. 

For all of the souls' powers or capacities can be reduced to three that can't be derived further from a common basis: the cognitive power, the feeling of pleasure and displeasure, and the power of desire. The understanding alone legislates for the cognitive power when this power is referred to nature, namely, as a power of theoretical cognition . . . for only with respect to nature (as appearance) is it possible for us to give laws by means of a priori concepts of nature, which are actually pure concepts of the understanding.  For the power of desire, considered as a higher power governed by the concept of freedom, only reason (which alone contains that concept) legislates a priori.  Now between the cognitive power and the power of desire lies the feeling of pleasure, just as judgment lies between understanding and reason. Hence we must suppose . . .  that judgment contains an a priori principle of its own, and also suppose that since the power of desire is necessarily connected with pleasure or displeasure, . . . judgment will bring about a transition from the pure cognitive power, i.e., from the domain of the concepts of nature, to the domain of the concept of freedom, just as in its logical use it makes possible the transition from understanding to reason (CJ, 16-8).  

The problem is that the legislations of the understanding on nature and reason on the will are fundamentally heterogeneous. One might recall the problem of Descartes. How is the freedom of an immortal soul possible in a fully deterministic, mechanistic universe?  Descartes' dualistic causal interactionism was not able to bridge the disparate notice domains of res extensa and res cogitans.  

Kant has the same problem, it appears, but in a decidedly Kantian way. Instead of two ontically disparate domains, Kant gives us two different legislations, two different givings of laws: one to that which gives rise to the determination of nature, the other to that which gives rise to the determination of the will. But the determinations of nature and the determinations of the will are quite different: the former is a mechanistic, deterministic-type determination, the latter a free, practical reason-type determination.  Both are autonomous human activities; the former theoretical and the latter practical.  As a result of our legislation there are two domains, but these domains follow the legislation, they are not prior to it.  Kant says all of this quite clearly in Section 9:  

The understanding legislates a priori for nature, as object of sense, in order to give rise to theoretical cognition of nature in a possible experience.  Reason legislates a priori for freedom and for freedom's own causality, on other words, for the supersensible in the subject, in order to give rise to unconditioned practical cognition (CJ, 35)

But these legislations for the sake of nature and freedom do not integrally connect to each other. There is a disconnect.  Kant explains: 

The great gulf that separates the supersensible from appearances completely cuts off the domain of the concept of nature under the one legislation, and the domain of the concept of freedom under the other legislation, from any influence that each (according to is own basic laws) might have had on the other.  The concept of freedom determines nothing with regard to our theoretical cognition of nature, just as the concept of nature determines nothing with regard to the practical laws of freedom; and to this extent it is not possible to throw a bridge from one domain to the other (CJ, 35-6).  

There is nothing in nature that can support freedom in the moral order. The sensible cannot, for Kant, determine the supersensible, but it is possible that the latter can determine the former. Freedom really can manifest itself in nature! 

. . . though the bases that determine the causality governed by the concept of freedom . . . do not lie in nature, and even though the sensible cannot determine the supersensible in the subject, yet the reverse is possible . . . and this possibility is contained in the very concept of a causality through freedom, whose effect is to be brought about in the world (but in conformity with the laws of freedom). It is true that when we use the word cause with regard to the supersensible, we mean only the basis that determines natural things to exercise their causality to produce an effect in conformity with natural laws proper to that causality, yet in accordance with the formal principle of the laws of reason as well (CJ, 36). 

Kant did, of course, use the term affection to talk about the relationship between the things-in-themselves and empirical objects.  There is something in the supersensible that constrains how empirical objects are constituted.  While human beings legislate nature, they do not fully construct it because nature (and its empirical objects) is a joint product between human cognizing activity and the thing-in-itself.  But in the passage above he uses the term cause, a term that in the First Critique is explicitly tied to application of the pure concepts of the understanding to spatialized-temporalized intuitions.  In fact, he uses cause in the way that the older metaphysicians did.  The cause of any determination is the logical ground of that determination.  The supersensible "grounds" causality in accordance with natural laws, while also "grounding" reason's freedom in its encounter with the moral law.  Kant is searching for unity.  But by what right does one say there is such unity? What is the grounding of this grounding?  \ Is the supersensible grounding a deliverance of metaphysical reason or a result of the understanding's application of its pure concepts? If neither, what is it? Kant elaborates:

It is judgment that presupposes this condition a priori, and without regard to the practical, [so that] this power provides us with the concept that mediates between the concepts of nature and the concept of freedom: the concept of a purposiveness of nature, which makes possible the transition from pure practical lawfulness, from lawfulness in terms of nature to the final purpose set by the concept of freedom.  For it is through this concept that we cognize the possibility of [achieving] the final purpose, which can be actualized only in nature and in accordance with its laws (CJ, 36-7).  

Judgment unifies the legislations of understanding and reason. It grants a determinability to the supersensible substrate, and thus mediates between it's undetermined nature from the standpoint of the understanding, and its determined nature from that of reason. 

The understanding . . . points to the supersensible substrate of nature; but it leaves this substrate wholly undetermined.  Judgment, through its a priori principle of judging nature in terms of possible particular laws of nature, provides nature's supersensible substrate (within as well as outside us) with determinability by the intellectual power.  But reason, through its practical law, gives this substrate determination.  This judgment makes possible the transition from the domain of the concept of nature to that of the concept of freedom (CJ, 37).  

Judgment grants the supersensible substrate of nature -- both outside and inside us! -- determinability, i.e. the possibility of determination.  Kant continues to explain how it is that judgment mediates between understanding and reason by appealing to the differing powers of each. 

Regarding the powers of the soul . . . , for the power of cognition . . .  the constitutive a priori principles lie in the understanding; for the feeling of pleasure and displeasure, they lie in judgment, [as far as it is] independent of concepts and sensations, which might have to do with determining the power of desire and hence be directly practical; for the power of desire, they lie in reason, which is practical without the mediation of any pleasure whatsoever, regardless of origin, and which determines of r this power . . . the final purpose that also carries with it pure intellectual liking for its object.  Judgment's concept of a purposiveness of nature still belongs to the concepts of nature, but only as a regulative principle of the cognitive power, even though the aesthetic judgment about certain objects (of nature or of art) that prompts this concept of purposiveness is a constitutive principle with regard to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure (CJ, 37).   

But what is this pleasure and displeasure of which Kant speaks?  It is of a distinctly intellectual kind. 

The spontaneity in the play of the cognitive powers, whose harmony with each other contains the basis of this pleasure, makes the concept of purposiveness suitable for mediating the connection of the domain of the concept of nature with that of the concept of freedom, as regards freedom's consequences, inasmuch as this harmony also promotes the mind's receptivity to moral feeling (CJ, 37-8).  

Kant argues that the transcendental condition for the possibility of the universality of judgment of taste is found in the way that beautiful objects incite in us a "free play" in the understanding and imagination, a harmony or "proportioned attunement" with respect to which the object is judged prior to the production of pleasure in us. The idea is that the general cognitive features of human beings include a reciprocal harmony between imagination and understanding. While judgments of taste make use of no determinate concepts, they nevertheless have a conceptual nature, and are accordingly reflective.  

Thus it is, for Kant, that the reciprocal harmony between understanding and imagination that is a feature of subjectivity within cognition in general also pertains to judgments of taste.  A judging of the object prior to the experience of pleasure occurs, and this judging consists in the recognition of the object engendering a harmony of imagination and understanding.  Upon this basis a judgment of taste can follow the subject's feeling of pleasure, a judgment which declares the judgment of taste universally valid.

In order to get maximum clarity on Kant's attempt to mediate understanding and reason by judgment, it is necessary to get very clear on what kind of judgment Kant is considering.  To this we now turn. 

II

For Kant, die Urteilskraft is the power "for thinking the particular under the universal." He distinguishes two kinds of judgments in the Critique of Judgment: determining judgments (die bestimmende Urteile) and reflecting judgments (die reflecterende Urteile).  

Determining judgments subsume given particulars under general concepts or universals already given. Kant makes extended use of determining judgments in the First Critique in synthesizing the manifold of intuition and in the act of imagination in "schematizing" its concepts. Judgment in both cases is governed by the categories of the understanding.

Reflecting judgments, on the other hand, are those which locate or find a universal for a given particular.  Kant assigns such reflecting judgments different roles in his system. The fact that there exist such reflecting judgments seems a primary motivation for Kant writing the Critique of Judgment.  

Kant believes reflecting judgments can be associated with empirical science, for such science presupposes one has the requisite ability to classify natural things into genera and species, and this ability demands reflecting judgment.  Moreover, the construction of systematic explanatory theories demands reflecting judgment.  Such judgments allow us to form empirical concepts and thus regard nature as empirically lawlike. 

But there are other important uses for reflectierende Urteile: They are used both in aesthetic and teleological judgments.  Kant believes reflecting judgments are most purely grasped in judgments about the beauty of nature. It is because of reflecting judgments that we can have a feeling of intellectual pleasure when encountering a beautiful object. Kant makes explicit appeal to the notion of reflecting judgment in his Deduction of Taste, where the principle of taste is identified with the "subjective principle of judgment in general."

Kant scholarship often treats the notion of judgment almost entirely as it appears in the Critique of Pure Reason, where it is involved with the pure concepts of the understanding and is accordingly cognitive in nature. More recent scholarship, however, has attempted to understand the notion of judgment employed in the earlier Critique on the basis of the notion of a reflecting judgment in the Critique of Judgment.  One might argue that reflecting judgments finally ground comparison and abstraction, both of which are necessary for the formation of empirical concepts.  It is these concepts, not treated in detail in the Critique of Pure Reason, that are nonetheless necessary for the application of the pure concepts of the understanding to intuition. 

So how is empirical knowledge truly possible for Kant?  Does he claim that empirical reality can be known solely on the basis of application of the pure concepts of the understanding to the realm of appearances?  It is this question that Kant is concerned with in the Critique of Judgment.  The particularity of empirical law demands not only constitutive legislation, but also empirical generalization.  Given that the cases are particular, Kant is interested in the universal that applies to them. What might we freely think that could account for the subsumption of individual cases under the universal?

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant deals with judgments of taste, judgments of teleology, and scientific induction generally.  Anybody studying the history and/or philosophy of science realize that human beings have, in fact, made sense of the world in different ways. Though nature's particulars are given contingently, human beings are free to think a universal that might account for the particulars, a universal that endeavors to understand these particulars in terms of a greater lawlike structure, i.e., a theory. 

The universal of which Kant is herein interested is not, however, that of the a priori which is necessary for the possibility of cognition as such. This universal is not legislated into nature, nor can it be deductively derived from nature's particulars. Kant is rather interested in the multiplicity of empirical forms. But how does this multiplicity of forms get unified? How can a random collection of phenomena not be a "rhapsody," but rather be seen in terms of the unity of nature? Simply put, how is coherent and unitary experience possible in nature's empirical, contingent manifestations? 

Since the faculty of judgment is  "thinking the particular as contained in the universal," the universal must apply to the particular, and the particular must instance the universal. Judgment connects particular cases to laws that apply to those cases; it connects universal laws with particular cases instantiating those laws.

In a reflecting judgment only the particular is given, and judgment must "find" the universal for the particular instance. Since this task must occur before any further operation of judgment, it is judgment's primary task. Unlike a determining judgment, there is no determination of objects in this judgment; it is merely reflective.  While in the Critique of Pure Reason, judgment "gives law" to the particular, in a reflective judgment, judgment searches for laws which can cover the particular.  Kant points out that since reflecting judgments do not legislate over an objective order, they actually apply properly only to themselves.  They are heuristic, not constitutive.  Such judgments nonetheless find the correct universal required by the specific empirical case.  One might say they are concerned with proper inductions.  

Reflecting judgments are heuristic. While they deal with subsumption, there is no general rule determining that judgment subsumes correctly.  Accordingly, reflecting judgment seems to have a precarious existence. Is the faculty of reflecting judgment simply a natural talent that some have, or can a priori principles be specified?  Kant's task in the Critique of Judgment is to isolate the a priori principles whereby proper subsumption occur.  Reflecting judgments naturally connect to judgments of taste because in these there is a universal rule that cannot be stated, but which is nonetheless connectable with the sensus communis of taste itself.

A primary aim of natural science is to offer a causal account of why things happen as they do.  In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant is concerned with the objective validity of the universal order which governs the physical world; he is dealing with nature in general. But the world of nature in its empirical specificity is not finally determinable by application of the pure concepts of understanding alone. Something more is needed, something that can mediate between the universal, empirical laws of nature and particular instances of them. He believes that the faculty of judgment provides this mediation. 

Kant points out that the manifold, empirical forms of nature are left indeterminate after application of determining judgments. The pure concepts of the understanding do not and cannot explain empirical diversity among the sciences.  The only way that particular empirical forms can be determinate is through reflecting judgment.  Such judgments are necessary to have a unified, meaningful experience of the manifold empirical forms left indeterminate by application of the pure concepts of the understanding. 

In Section V of the First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, Kant reflects in a sustained way on reflecting judgment in general.  He declares: 

To  reflect . . . is to hold given presentations up to, and compare them with, either other presentations or one's cognitive power [itself], in reference to a concept that this [comparison] makes possible (CJ, 400).  

Reflection demands a principle, says Kant, a transcendent principle.

Yet [reflecting judgment] which seeks concepts even for empirical presentations, qua empirical, must make for this [end] this further assumption: it must assume that nature, with its boundless diversity has hit upon a division of this diversity into genera and species that enables our judgment to find accordance among the natural forms it compares, and [so] enables it to arrive at empirical concepts, as well as at coherence among these by ascending to concepts that are more general [though] also empirical.  In other words, judgment presupposes a system of nature even in terms of empirical laws, and it does so a priori and hence be means of a transcendental principle (CJ, 400, fn. 21).  

 Kant claims that we must presuppose that nature displays particular forms that we can cognize "in terms of universal laws" (CJ, 400).  Not to presuppose this would mean that "all our reflection would be performed merely haphazardly and blindly" (CJ, 401).  He points out that with respect to determining judgments, judgment requires no special principle by which to reflect.  But for reflecting judgments, this is not the case. Indeed, "judgment needs for it's reflection a principle of its own, a principle that is also transcendental" (CJ, 401).  So what is presupposed "whenever we compare empirical presentations in order to cognize . . . empirical laws and specific forms that conform to them?" (CJ, 401).  Kant responds: 

What is presupposed is that nature, even in its empirical laws, has adhered to a certain parsimony suitable for our judgment, and adhered to a uniformity we can grasp: and this presupposition must precede all comparison, as a priori principle of judgment (CJ, 401). 

And what does this suggest about a reflecting judgment and how it might differ from the seeming algorithms by which the pure concepts of the understanding order nature? 

It does not deal with them [natural things] mechanically . . . like an instrument, guided by the understanding and the senses; it deals with them artistically, in terms of a principle that is universal but also indeterminate: the principle of a purposive arrangement of nature in a system -- an arrangement [made], as it were, for the benefit of our judgment -- by which the particular natural laws (about which the understanding says nothing) are [made] suitable for the possibility of experience as a system, as we must presuppose if we are to have any hope of finding our way in [the] labyrinth [resulting] form the diversity of possible particular laws (CJ, 402).  

While reflecting judgments have their origin in a transcendental principle, Kant claims that it is a principle merely for "the logical use of judgment" (CJ, 402).  This use consists in classifying the diverse: 

[We must] compare several classes, each falling under a definite concept; and when these classes are completely [enumerated] in terms of their common characteristic, we must subsume them under higher classes (genera), until we reach the concept containing the principle of the entire classification (and constituting the highest genus) (CJ, 402).  

In so doing, Kant says, we "make the universal concept specific by indicate the diverse [that falls] under it" (CJ, 403).  Kant is dealing here with the universal problem of the assumed homomorphism between the structure of knowing and the structure of being, a homomorphism making possible the knowing of that being.  Kant continues: 

It is clear that reflecting judgment . . . cannot undertake to classify all of nature in terms of its empirical variety unless it presupposes that nature itself makes its transcendental laws specific in terms of some principle.  Now this principle can only by that of [nature's] appropriateness for the power of judgment itself . . . to find among things . . sufficient kinship to be able to bring them under empirical concepts (classes), and bring these under more general laws (higher genera), and so arrive at an empirical system of nature. Now this kind of classification is not [derived from] ordinary empirical cognition, but is artificial:  . . . so far as we think of nature as making itself specific in terms of such a principle, we regard nature as art. . . Hence judgment's own principle is: Nature, for the sake of the power of judgment, makes its universal laws specific [and] into empirical ones, according to the form of a logical system (CJ, 403-04).  

It is now time to talk of nature's Zweckmaessigkeit (purposiveness).  Purposiveness, for Kant, belongs not to reason, but to reflective judgment.  Reason would determinately judge purpose to be in the thing-in-itself.  But reason's powers are not up to this task.  Any talk of purposiveness must relate to reflecting judgment. "It is posited sole in the subject: in the subject's mere power to reflect" (CJ, 404).  

For we call something purposive if its existence seems to presuppose a presentation of that same thing; [and] natural laws are constituted, and related to one another, as if judgment had designed them for its own need[s] are [indeed] similar to [the cases where] the possibility of [certain] things presupposes that these things are based on a presentation of them. Hence judgment, by means of its principle, things of nature as purposive, in [the way] nature makes its forms specific through empirical laws (CJ, 404).  

Reflecting judgment does not "carve the beast of reality at its joints" (Plato), nor lay down algorithmically the rules by which nature must operate.  Rather such judgment allows us to think nature as purposive, not in terms of the purpose of each natural object, but rather in regard to "their relation to one another," that is in so far as "the suitability which, despite their great diversity, they have for a logical system of empirical concepts" (CJ, 404).   

The point is that nature is present to us in a manifold manner, but determine judgments and the pure concepts of the understanding cannot think the manifold with respect to its empirical specificity. Thus, a different principle of the unity of the manifold  must determine their necessity. This principle which concerns the unity of the empirical manifold must be the principle of reflecting judgment.  

Since this faculty does not concern the understanding and its laws, it must display its own principle. The principle of the unity of the empirical manifold just is the principle of the reflective faculty of judgment. Recall this passage from the Critique of Pure Reason.   

However exaggerated and absurd it may sound to say that the understanding is itself the source of the laws of nature, and so of its formal unity, such an assertion in nonetheless correct and is in keeping with the object to which it refers, namely experience. Certainly, empirical laws as such can never derive their origin from the pure understanding. That is as little possible as to conceive completely the inexhaustible multiplicity of appearances merely by reference to the pure form of sensible intuition. But all empirical laws are only special determinations of the pure laws of the understanding, under which, and according to the norm of which, they first become possible (A127-8).  

The empirical laws are "special determinations" of the universal laws of the understanding. The latter make the former possible. In the footnote to Section 2 of the First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, Kant is clearly aware of the problem of connecting these two.  

The possibility of an experience in general is the possibility of empirical cognitions as synthetic judgments. Hence this possibility cannot be derived analytically from a mere comparison of perceptions . . . for the connection of two different perceptions in the concept of an object (to yield a cognition of it) is a synthesis, and the only way in which this synthesis makes empirical cognition, i.e., experience, possible is through principles [(Prinzipien)] of the synthetic unity of appearances, i.e., through principles [(Grundsätze)] by which they are brought under the categories. Now these empirical cognitions do form an analytic unity of all experience according to that which they necessarily have in common (namely those transcendental laws of nature), but they do not form that synthetic unity of experience as a system that connects the empirical laws even according to that in which they differ (and where their diversity can be infinite) (CJ, 393, fn. 2). 

In the Critique of Pure Reason, application of the understanding to appearances resulted in a synthetic unity of apperception such that the understanding legislated the general laws of nature.  Kant here calls this "analytic" by virtue of their transcendental nature in our empirical cognition of nature. It is with regard to the further problem of the unity of the manifold of nature's empirical forms they are analytical because they deal with what all experiences have in common. Since they cannot speak to how different empirical laws actually differ, they cannot ground the synthetic unity of the empirical laws of nature. 

Universal laws tell us what empirical objects have in common. But the homogeneous nature of this domain cannot account for the heterogeneous nature of the actual empirical world. Universal principles do not allow exploration of the particularity and the concreteness of empirical experience.  The Critique of Judgment is interested in the synthetic unity of the empirical laws in so far as these laws or heterogeneous.  There are, after all, many more conditions to empirical objects other than simply being in time and space and subject to universal laws of synthesis.  Kant knows that "specifically different natures, apart from what they have in common as belonging to nature in general, can still be causes in an infinite variety of ways."  

Kant understands that the universal laws of nature legislated by understanding, while granting explanation in nature in terms of universal laws of motion, nonetheless are inadequate in connecting the heterogeneity of nature.  For this we need principles allowing systematicity. Since systematicity presupposes "purposiveness" (Zweckmaessigkeit), we must have recourse to the latter category in order for nature not to be utterly chaotic. 

 Kant claimed in the Critique of Pure Reason that were there no pure concepts of understanding, there would be only a "rhapsody of perceptions."  But Kant is dealing with a similar problem of rhapsody with respect to reflecting judgment.  If we did not assume an a priori principle regulating the synthetic unity of particular forms in the manifold experience of nature, we could not connect these particular forms.  But this a priori of reflecting judgment is not the a priori of the understanding, but rather one that is merely regular, heuristic, and subjectively necessary.  

For Kant, "nature specifies its universal laws according to the principle of purposiveness for our cognitive faculty."  Through reflecting judgment our empirical cognitions can be placed into a coherent unity.  Such reflecting judgments form the transcendental ground common to both our aesthetic and teleological experience of nature in the manifold of particular forms. Such judgments mediating understanding and reason, finally account for the overall unity of our cognitive and moral lives.  

One might also think of things this way: Given our experience of the world and apparent teleological systems we find in it, e.g., biological organisms or human psychology, how can we think such teleology?  How can we think purpose? It is excluded, after all, from the domain of nature resulting from our legislation of the pure concepts of understanding.  Where might it be?  It cannot be asserted of things in themselves, because such a metaphysical assertion would be a "transcendental illusion." We may encounter purpose practically in our moral lives, but how does that practical encounter relate to our theories?  So how can we account for the purpose we find in biology and the purpose we find in ourselves and our moral lives if we cannot find purpose through our legislations of understanding and reason?  Kant believes reflecting judgments make purposiveness possible.  We shall now turn explicitly to Pluhar's argument to see whether Kant has succeeded in his efforts to find in reflecting judgment the mediator of understanding and reason.  

Documents Pertaining to the Founding of the Institute of Lutheran Theology: A Lutheran House of Studies

There was once an organization called the Fellowship of Confessional Lutherans (FOCL), and they had a publication which I recall was called FOCL News. I penned this article on the new "Lutheran House of Studies" for that publication in order to get the word out. I believe it was written and published sometime in the summer of or fall of 2006.  You can see that I was interested from the beginning in establishing a theological ethos at ILT, and wanted to address this question: Given the different interpretations of subsequent traditions of foundational documents, what can ILT do to vouchsafe some normative approach to interpreting those documents? Theological realism, semantic realism, and the possibility of theophysical causation are advanced as possible "grammars" by which foundational documents could be read. 

__________

A Lutheran House of Studies

Dennis Bielfeldt, Ph. D. 

WordAlone earnestly desires to establish a new confessional Lutheran theological house of studies.  But some ask, “Why?  Why does Lutheranism need another place trying to train pastors confessionally?  What is so wrong with what we have?  While things aren’t perfect, perhaps, they aren’t that bad either.  Why does WordAlone think it can establish an institution more confessional than what has already been planted in ELCA, LCMS or WELS soil?  Why does it believe that the effort and expense will bear good fruit?”

These are important questions, of course, and it seems that the so-called “Director of the WordAlone Lutheran theological house of studies” (my official title these days) should have ready answers to them.  When the WordAlone Convention in May adopted a plan for implementation of the house of studies, it voted on a report in which I spoke of several challenges facing seminary education within the ELCA.  At that time, I saw six major issues:  

• an economic challenge
• a sociological challenge
• a leadership challenge
• a theological challenge
• an authority challenge
• a rights challenge

I still believe that these identify the major difficulties facing theological education within the ELCA, and I recommend that FOCL readers examine the Report and form their own opinions as to its accuracy. This report, I believe, gives the rationale for why another Lutheran institution is necessary for the training of future pastors and teachers.    

If this list is accurate, however, and is successfully answers questions of why we need a confessional House of Studies now within the ELCA context, it does not address the further question of the general theological contour of that house of studies.  Given that the house of studies is “confessional,” what does “being confessional” mean for its curriculum and teaching?   Even more profoundly, what does “being confessional” mean within Lutheranism generally in our time?  

The easy answer to the question of what “being confessional” means is this: For an educational institution to be confessional is for it to privilege the historic confessions of its tradition such that they become foundational (and normative) for the piety, teaching and research of the institution.  

Unfortunately, this definition is inadequate.  Because our postmodern times allow (and often encourage) multiple readings of texts, two or more institutions grounded on the same confessional texts might have quite different theological trajectories.  All the ELCA seminaries can make a claim to privilege Scripture and the Lutheran confessional writings, yet it is obvious that some have departed more significantly from traditional Lutheran theological affirmations than have others.  Many celebrate this departure from the tradition as a departure entailed by the radicality of God’s love for us in Christ.  (This is clearly true with regard to the sexuality/homsexuality debate raging within the ELCA.)  

So how can this situation be fixed?  Indeed, how might one fix the interpretations of the Confessions so that they might not drift?  What kind of interpretation of Scripture can block interpretations attempting to say that Scripture itself says nothing about the sinfulness of homosexuality?  What kind of interpretation of the Confessions and the confessional tradition can block interpretations saying that the Reformers “earnestly desired” to retain Bishops in historical succession with Rome, and thus that Lutherans are mandated by their own confessions to seek visible, ecclesial unity with Rome? 

In the absence of a present normative consensus as to what the texts of the Confessions mean, it becomes important to make clear from the beginning that it is not the text itself that grounds a tradition, but rather a particular interpretation of the text.  A particular reading of the text, established in part by its situational context, functions normatively and determines, at least partially, the character of any educational institution regarding that text as foundational. 

My motivation in offering the WordAlone “fundamentals” is to try to determine if there is sufficient theological clarity in the WordAlone movement to establish normatively a range of interpretations of the Lutheran confessional documents.   Given that Lutherans holding to Scriptures and Confessions believe many different things about what Scriptures and Confessions mean and presuppose, is there sufficient clarity within WordAlone to be able to determine for these documents a range of appropriate meanings?  What “take” on Scripture and Confessions has seemed to be operating in the WordAlone movement since its inception, a “take” that might be worked up into a list of central theological affirmations or assumptions? 

My own attempt at articulating these affirmations of WordAlone appear on the WordAlone website, but I include them also below.  I believe that these assertions function as the differentia which give WordAlone its identity as a species within Lutheranism.      

• Theological statements have truth-conditions
• God is real, that is, God exists out and beyond human awareness, perception, conception and language
• God is causally related to the universe
• All temporal structures, institutions and conceptual frameworks are historically-conditioned      Nothing finite is infinite
• The true church is not visible, but remains hidden
• The Holy Spirit works monergistically, not synergistically, upon sinners effecting saving faith

While all seven statements are important, the first four are especially significant in our theological context and thus I have developed them quite extensively in a longer article that I hope to have published soon. I have space here only to touch upon the first four. 

The first assertion makes the semantic claim that what makes a theological statement true is some extra-subjective reality that is relatable to the subject.  This statement clearly denies that theological language could merely refer to the self, or to the attitudes, values and orientations of a community.  In addition, it claims that theological statements must be more than simple rules by which a community organizes its religious life together.   Theological statements function as rules, I believe, only if the community believes them true, only if it thinks these statements state what is, in fact, the case.   

The second and third assertions are ontological.  They claim that there is some reality to God that is not merely reducible to human experience.  Over and against the dominant theological tradition of the last 200 years, the third claim is that God is causally connected to the universe, that there are at least some physical events that would not have obtained had God not causally-influenced them to do so.  These two assertions are important because they bring God out of the “causal isolation” presupposed in the development of much Lutheran theology since the time of Kant in 1781.  For Kant, God could not be a substance causally-related to the universe, but was instead an “ideal of pure reason.”    

Finally, assertion four has epistemological consequences.  All objects of knowledge, and all acts or knowing, are denizens of time and are thereby limited by other events within time.  Thus, there can be no knowledge of any such objects that are not affected by history.  Every act of knowing is historically-conditioned.  We have no immediate knowledge of things as they are in themselves, no “bird’s eye view” from which to gaze out on things and know them absolutely.  This is so for all acts of knowing, even when it is the divine that is known.  This affirmation clearly admits that God is hidden, but does not thereby make a diminished ontological claim about God simply because we cannot know God as He is apart from Christ.   

So how is it that the proposed house of studies might successfully establish a normative standpoint on the Confessions such that they become the foundational documents which they must be if they are to govern the subsequent educational trajectory of the institution?  How does the WordAlone House of Studies guarantee that it will not become just another expression of a liberal Protestant ethos in North America?

The simple answer is this:  If the WordAlone Network can agree on some rather key theological issues, it can establish its house of studies upon on the ground of this consensus.  Without some normative theological underpinning, a WordAlone house of studies will drift and shift according to the prevailing theological winds of the day.  Let us examine how establishing a normative theological center might affect the house of studies.    

Lutherans within and outside the WordAlone Network will likely agree that God confronts us in Law and Gospel, and that the address of the Gospel has salvific significance for its auditors.  Lutherans within and outside WordAlone will emphasize the performative nature of first-order statements - - statements referring to the primary objects of theology - - bespeaking God’s grace in and despite human sinfulness.   But clearly a majority of folks within the ELCA see no tension between this emphasis and the practice of a mandated historic episcopate.  Thus, there is a disconnect between a lively Law/Gospel application of Scripture and “issues of church organization” like the acceptance of the historic episcopate.  The problem is a very deep one, and it goes to the very heart of some rather profound theological issues.  

I believe that a presupposition of much ELCA thinking is that second-order theological language - - statements dealing with the relationship of theological objects and the first-order sentences bespeaking them - - does not literally have truth-conditions (that is, that its statements are not literally true or false).  While all can agree on the abundance of God’s grace in the linguistic encounter in sermon and text, many will assume that further statements about God are unwarranted and even misleading.  For instance, why would one ever want to say that ‘God exists apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language’ or that ‘God is causally-related to the universe’?  Why would one need to say these things, if the reality of God’s grace is communicated through first-order language?   For many liberal Protestants, the problems begin when one begins to speak about God.  If this is true, why would one want to affirm statements about God?  

The response to this is two-fold: 1) We need second-order language about God to state what it is we actually believe, and to ground what it is we shall teach about God; and 2) What it is we actually believe about God does influence the hearer’s appropriation of the words of Law and Gospel.  

In regard to the second response, we must point out that the logic of being forgiven entails that there is one to forgive.  In like manner, the logic of living under divine wrath requires that there is a God who is righteously angry. While one might have an experience of being forgiven without there being God, or might have an experience of being under divine wrath without God, one simply cannot be forgiven by God or truly live under divine wrath unless there is a God.  Moreover, the contour of the experience of wrath and forgiveness is related to whether or not there is One whose wrath is kindled, and who nonetheless graciously and mercifully forgives.  What human beings believe about God dialectically links to howGod confronts us in Law and Gospel.  For instance, if John doesn’t believe God has a personal agency, then the experience of grace John has hearing the Gospel will surely be different than what he would have had were he to have held that God was a personal God.         

As another example of this, take the words of Scripture ‘fear not!’  In a particular situation, these words spoken can be words of Gospel and grace.  They certainly were so for people like Luther who understood the gift of God’s grace and forgiveness over and against a backdrop of divine wrath.  Luther and the reformers actually thought that God existed outside of them, and that this God could (and did) adopt particular attitudes about them.  Luther thought that God in his hiddenness was so awe-full, that he counseled others to keep their eyes riveted on the Christ.  The Words of Gospel promise are so sweet because the human condition before the inscrutable will of the hidden God is so dire.  

For Luther, the necessary condition for being a hidden God with inscrutable will that terrifies man and woman outside of Christ is that God is a real being having causal relations within the universe.  God is no mere idea of reason, no abstract thought about the unity or mystery of all things.  God is a living reality that is a threat to sinners - - and all of us are sinners.  It seems, that even though God is hidden, some reflection upon, or encounter with, God’s being is necessary if one is going to understand the situation as Luther did.  It should come as no shock that the confessional documents read in quite a different way to those who believe that God has independent existence outside the self.  At that point, all thinking about the gift of language stops and we are thrust back into the primal experience of awaiting a word of Gospel from God- - not because it is a word, but because it comes from God.  

Much more could be said about these things, but the point is clear.  If WordAlone can arrive at some consensus of theological opinion, then there is a foundation upon which to ground a Scripturally-engaged, and confessionally-grounded Lutheran theological house of studies.  If WordAlone is unable to define clearly what it is to be both Scripturally-engaged and confessionally-grounded, then its house of studies shall likely not prosper, and the critics who claim it ill-advised and wasteful to have attempted its establishment will themselves perhaps be vindicated.  As with most human endeavors, it is extremely important to start correctly.  

Early Documents Pertaining to the Founding of the Institute of Lutheran Theology: Proposal of the Lutheran Theological House of Studies Task Force

I would love to tell you that the 15-year old document below really was a "committee document" of a functioning task force. While I had many conversations with people, at the end of the day I simply had to write a proposal that I thought made good sense. This "Report" had weaknesses and was much too brief to establish the points I was trying to make.  However, it had to be presented at the 2006 WordAlone Annual Convention with the hope of getting the requisite votes to move forward. As I recall, the motion carried with about 87% voting the affirmative. 

__________ 

Proposal of the Lutheran Theological House of Studies Task Force

By Dr. Dennis Bielfeldt, Chair of HOS Task Force Subcommittee

Minneapolis, April 2006

Preamble

In its 2005 Annual Convention, the members of the WordAlone Network directed the “WordAlone Board to appoint a Task force to develop a plan and proposal to establish a ‘Lutheran Theological House of Studies’ using the gifts of theological teachers employing the scriptural hermeneutic of the Lutheran Reformation.”  I was charged to head this effort with an initial task force consisting of President Jaynan Clark Egland, Board Chair John Beem, Director Mark Chavez, and the Rev. Randy Freund.  Later, Treasurer Irv Aal joined the group. 

Over the last year members of the task force have had conversations with numerous people interested in establishing this house of studies.  We have talked to potential teachers, administrators of potential sites, potential supporters, and the WordAlone constituency.  We have visited with the Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (LCMC) Board about their hopes for a Lutheran house of studies, and had subsequent discussion with key leaders of that group.  We viewed some potential sites.  Although we have not yet listened to all of the possibilities, we are reasonably confident that we have had sufficient conversation and reflection now to bring forward to this 2006 WordAlone Convention a preliminary house of studies model that we believe has the best chance of perpetuating a Lutheran confessional witness in North America.

Options

Selecting which house of studies model to implement demands we first know the plethora of options consistent with the initial charge to “establish a Lutheran Theological House of Studies using the gifts of theological teachers employing the scriptural hermeneutic of the Lutheran Reformation.”  Should the house of studies be a small group of professors that semi-formally or formally pledges a commitment to solid Reformation teaching wherever they might be, or should it be a faculty with a specific geographical location?  Should it be autonomous with respect to a host institution or be freestanding?  Should it be a virtual house offering most of its courses on-line or should it be geographically located while yet having an on-line option?  If geographically located, should it use single or multiple point delivery (satellites)?  Should a house of studies be located at an ELCA seminary?  Should the house of studies offer a certification option accepted by the ELCA?  Should it offer academic degrees?  If so, how might this be done?  What should the house of studies’ task fundamentally be?  Should it exist basically to train new pastors or rostered lay leaders, to deepen the theological apprehension and acumen of existing pastors, to provide theological programs for interested laity, or to educate future teachers in the ELCA and LCMC by delivering quality graduate education?  The possibilities are really quite overwhelming.

In ordering the available options, the task force tried to determine what were really the most significant questions for building the house of studies.  We isolated the following:

• Should the house of studies seek accreditation from the Association of Theological Schools (ATS), the agency accrediting 250 graduate schools offering post-baccalaureate education in the United States and Canada?
• Should the house of studies have a geographical center, a place of location symbolizing its continuing existence as an option for post-baccalaureate theological education within North American Lutheranism?
• Should the house of studies be housed at an ELCA Seminary?
• Should we seek ELCA approval for graduates of the house of studies, i.e., should we ask the ELCA to certify or accept our graduates into its candidacy process?
• What is a realistic price tag for building such a house of studies?

Why a House of Studies?

The first step in determining the proper house of studies model is to grasp fully the present context to which the house of studies is to respond.  What is the current situation of theological education within the ELCA driving the WordAlone desire to establish a house of studies?  We believe that there are economic, sociological, leadership, and theological challenges confronting the ELCA and its seminaries, challenges so profound that we think it necessary to develop and implement a bold house of studies initiative.

The Economic Challenge

Because ELCA funding of seminaries continues to decline, seminaries must increasingly rely upon tuitional dollars to fund their educational programs.  This economic fact must not be ignored.  Seminaries today must offer programs that attract a broader range of students than was necessary in previous generations because attracting these students is requisite financially for seminaries to survive and offer any program at all.  This appeal to new constituencies has resulted in a gradual broadening of mission away from the narrow specialty task of training Lutheran pastors and lay leaders, to the broader task of offering graduate theological education to many different kinds of students, some of whom will be Lutheran pastors and rostered lay leaders.  This subtle augmentation of mission and constituency has forced seminaries to broaden beyond their traditionally focused and solidly confessional center.  Given this context, it is important that our Lutheran house of studies intentionally constitute itself to stay narrowly focused and solidly confessional in all that it does.

The Sociological Challenge

Two generations ago students matriculating at Lutheran seminaries were 22-26 year old males seeking to become Lutheran pastors.  This situation has changed dramatically.  Increasing numbers of nontraditional, second-career students, male and female, now attend seminary, many of which already have families, and many who find it exceedingly difficult to give up their occupations and move to an ELCA seminary to study.  In addition to having to pay for the majority of their seminary education, these families find that they sometimes have to live in expensive areas of the country in order to acquire this education.  As many have pointed out, the cost of seminary education is very high relative to the expected financial rewards of becoming a pastor or rostered lay leader.  Our Lutheran house of studies must address this problem of high-cost resident theological education by offering flexibility through multi-site delivery options.

The Leadership Challenge

Present leadership throughout most of the ELCA and its educational institutions came of age in the late sixties and early seventies, at a time in our nation’s history where the practical political and social demands of ending civil rights injustices and the war in Viet Nam seemed to trump deep theoretical concerns.  ELCA leadership even today tends to privilege praxis over theory, and concrete action over profound reflection.  The prospect of effecting political and social change seems, among many, to generate more excitement than penetrating theological reflection and analysis.  In a leadership ethos privileging praxis over theory, confessional particularity is correspondingly de-emphasized.  Leadership is concerned with “practical” issues of political and ecclesiastical policy rather than confessional specifics.  But our Lutheran theological house of studies must take its confessions very seriously, and it must know that responsible concrete political and social action is ultimately grounded in our confessional substance.

The Theological Challenge

The ELCA Bishop Mark Hanson affirmed last year Dr. Craig Nessan’s assertion that there were two irreconcilable yet valid ways of interpreting Scripture in the ELCA, one traditional and the other contextual.  There is great irony in his comment, for the necessary condition for saying that there are two equally valid ways to interpret Scripture is to say that the traditional way that sought in Scripture the norm and rule of faith and life cannot be sustained.  Clearly, if autonomous human reason has determined that there are two equally valid ways, it has already stepped outside the traditional reformation hermeneutic on Scripture, a hermeneutic that denied that human reason could autonomously apply external hermeneutical forms to Scriptural substance.

If, in fact, Hanson and Nessan are correct and human reason can properly apply different methods to the reading of Scripture in order to get different results, then we are in a position not unlike that of the late Middle Ages when Luther criticized the fourfold method of Biblical interpretation.  According to that method, all of Scripture can be read for its literal/historical, allegorical, tropological and anagogical senses.  Luther criticized this because it made human beings master over Scripture; it made it the work of human beings determine what a passage really meant or ought to mean.  By eliminating all other senses than the literal/historical, Luther allowed Scripture to be its own interpreter.  Human beings do not control what Scripture means, only Scripture does.  Scripture interprets itself.  The Word of God in Scripture is sufficient for its own interpretation through the activity of the Holy Spirit carried upon the wings of this external Word.  To the degree to which revisionist ways of appropriating Scripture reject the internal clarity of Scripture, they must be rejected as inconsistent with the hermeneutic of the Lutheran Reformation.  Our Lutheran theological house of studies must assume the Reformation hermeneutic of the internal clarity of Scripture, believing that the Word alone is sufficient for its own interpretation.

Concomitant with autonomous reason’s adoption of a revisionist hermeneutic on Scripture, there is a general tendency within the ELCA and its educational institutions to downplay the notion that theological language has truth-conditions, i.e., that it makes definite statements, some of which are true and others false.  The dominant theological agenda over the past two hundred years has tried to offer an analysis of theological language that does not assume a realist view of God and God’s relationship to the universe.  Oftentimes theological language has been taken to be merely expressive of the utterer or his or her cultural values.  Remember, however, that the great theologian Karl Barth once said that one cannot talk about God by talking about man in a loud voice.  Our Lutheran theological house of studies must dare to be realist with respect to the semantics of God-talk, and realist with respect to the ontology of the divine.

The Authority Challenge

A related challenge concerns the nature and foundation of authority.  Every religious tradition presupposes authority, for without such authority no tradition can survive.  Within Christianity historically, the Church functioned as the requisite authority, finally determining what Scripture and Creed really meant.  Within the Lutheran tradition, however, Scripture and Confessions have always constituted the final authority for the tradition. But what happens when we are no longer sure what Scripture and Confessions mean?  In the ongoing debate within the ELCA on the sexuality issue, it is apparent that people read Scripture in quite different ways.  Some say that Scripture proscribes homosexual activity; others say it does not.  In this situation, how does one decide who is right?  Moreover, how does one choose among vastly alternate readings of the Lutheran Confessions themselves?  These are difficult issues.  Our Lutheran theological house of studies must find its authority in the Word alone as it confronts us in the Biblical witness, and as it is testified to in the Lutheran Confessions.

The Rights Challenge

Another problem concerns the nature of rights.  We live in a time where talk of human rights often predominates in our churches even over gospel proclamation.  We deeply believe that all human beings have equal rights.  We believe this so profoundly that we worry about offending someone or violating his or her rights when we share our Lutheran-Christian values with them.  At all costs it seems, we don’t want to be ethnocentric; we want to avoid claiming that values of our faith tradition are objectively right and true, and that they should therefore be normatively determinative of the values of other cultures.  In our rush to avoid any trace of ethnocentrism, we often adopt the problematic view that our values, while “right for us,” are ultimately only one option among many options, no one of which is ultimately more justifiable than another.  Accordingly, we often believe that others have the right not to have us proselytize to them.  This fear of ethnocentrism and our penchant for rights has adversely affected the logic of Christian mission.  It is very difficult to share the Gospel with non-Christians without making a normative claim that the other should adopt the “religious values” of the one doing the sharing.  When the Christian story is assumed to be one cultural value among others, the perceived danger of ethnocentricity seems to preclude the very possibility of sharing it.  But our house of studies will not privilege the rights of the citizen above the scandal of the Cross.  It will steadfastly ground itself on the notion that the Christian story ought to be shared because it is true, not merely because it is or has value for us.

A final challenge exists that we have not yet mentioned.  We must always ask in what ways the putative truths of our Lutheran Confessional heritage connect to truths within the other disciplines.  There has been an unfortunate tendency within confessional traditions to ignore the difficult task of relating theology to the other academic disciplines, especially the sciences.  If theological language is to be true, it must in principle be relatable to the disciplines generally regarded as offering true theories:  the natural and social sciences.  Part of the apologetic task of our time is not to allow theology to become a marginalized discourse, relegated merely to the valuational margins of our lives.  Our house of studies must be intentional in its desire to connect confessional Lutheran theology to the intellectual horizon of our day.

In summary, there is a language challenge, an authority challenge, and a rights challenge within the current ELCA educational context.  Coupled with the economic, sociological, leadership and theological challenges already specified, these challenges have resulted in the tendency within ELCA seminaries to lose thecogency of the Gospel message, to manifest a diminished confessional competency in proclaiming that message, and to become unclear about the nature of the religious authority supposedly grounding the proclamation of that message.  What is needed is a house of studies that focuses on the Confessions, iscompetent in relating the Confessions to the world in which we live, and that recognizes that proper authority can be located in the Word alone.  In developing a house of studies proposal, we must always take seriously the question as to what such a house of studies is for.  If either there is no problem for the house of studies to address or if the house of studies is incapable of addressing the problem, then such a house of studies ought not be established.

Our Proposal and Rationale

The Question of Accreditation

Probably the most important question as to the nature of any educational institution is whether or not it should be accredited.  Our task force has concluded that the challenges are so great in the present ELCA educational context that only an institution having strong academic qualifications can address them.  It is our sense that we are faced with a “confessional crisis” within North American Lutheranism, and that we owe it to our Savior, and to our Lutheran tradition, to offer an attractive vehicle by which to train future pastors and perpetuate the Lutheran confessional tradition.  Accreditation does three things:  1) It provides an external motivation to build academic excellence; 2) It provides increased opportunities for students; 3) It symbolizes to all that taking the Confessions seriously does not mitigate taking academics seriously.

Firstly, the very nature of external accreditation demands that our house of studies will have an adequate research library and fully qualified faculty.  While we might have good intentions in building excellence into a non-accredited house of studies, the natural discontinuities of temporal life make it difficult to achieve academic excellence in the long-term without institutionalizing external accreditation demands.  Accreditation implements externally our internal demand for excellence and keeps us honest long-term when hiring faculty and acquiring educational resources.

Secondly, being accredited allows greater student flexibility and opportunity.  Students can transfer in and out of accredited programs.  Each is treated fairly in accordance with objective standards developed and monitored by the accrediting agency (ATS).  In addition, accreditation grants greater flexibility for people studying at different schools and seminaries.  In accredited programs there can be certain assumptions about standard courses that are not found in nonaccredited curricula.  Preparation for becoming a pastor is more “seamless” when there is a general program of preparation clearly defined, whose various parts can, to some degree, be gotten in different places.  Moreover, an accredited house of studies allows students to prepare not only to fill pastoral pulpits, but also be educated to be teachers in the church.  We wish to nurture an academic competency in teaching and relating Lutheran confessional theology within the marketplace of ideas.  It is our hope to offer advanced academic opportunities for highly motivated students.  We hope not only to train pastors for the future, but also to train teachers of those pastors.  While we could possibly train pastors short-term on a non-accredited basis, we cannot educate teachers of pastors.

Thirdly, accreditation symbolizes the consonance within our Lutheran tradition of confession and academic competence.  Lutheran theology was born in the university.  The “new theology” at Wittenberg was debated in academic halls and written in scholarly tracts and books.  It is a university-bred theology that sought to be captive to the Word alone.  We live in a time in which the pastor often serves congregations with members more educated than she or he is.  In an environment in which the very plausibility of the Christian worldview is up for grabs, we need educated pastors who know the intellectual terrain of the various disciplines, and who are able and willing to give an account of that which lies within them.  Thus it is manifestly important that future pastors have good libraries, great professors, and an intellectually stimulating campus environment, precisely the characteristics of accredited programs.

The Question of Location

We thought seriously about the option of a fully “virtual” Lutheran house of studies.  We thought perhaps that such a house of studies could function as a “brokerage house” bundling a number of programs happening elsewhere, and somehow delivering them to those who needed them.  However, as we reflected on this, we decided that this could not be our principal approach in the house of studies. We desire to be more than a “brokerage house” connecting confessionally starved Lutherans with already existing programs.  We rejected the brokerage house model because we determined that the demands of theological education called for something bolder, something more integrated, something more intense than such a model could deliver.  We believe it important for students to actually meet and be mentored by their professors, and we thought that it would not be possible for true theological mentoring to occur in a virtual program.  The medieval and Reformation traditions knew the importance of one-on-one mentoring in the perpetuation of a theological tradition.  Given the hermeneutical latitude of our time, we thought it unlikely we could develop a truly normative theological position without having a geographical location in which to do it.  We need office and classroom space for students to interact with faculty and, just as importantly, faculty to interact with each other.

The Question of Normativity

Early on in our discussions, the question of the deep task of the house of studies surfaced.  What is this house of studies to be actually?  Should it be a place of increased theological/academic competency over and against many ELCA educational institutions, or should it be a place of theological rectitude?  How open ought the house of studies be to faculty who believe that Lutheran theology allows the practice of the Anglican historic episcopate, or who believe that the Joint Declaration of the Doctrine of Justification is consonant with the historical conception of justification in the Lutheran tradition?  We believe it important that a WordAlone house of studies should assume the theological principles of the WordAlone movement; we believe the house of studies should have a normative edge that defines us theologically over and against the ELCA seminaries.

The Question of Critical Distance

So where would the LHOS locate its accredited program?  After much discussion, phone calls, correspondence, and personal visits, we make the following recommendation:  The primary site of the WordAlone Lutheran theological house of studies should be located preferably on a seminary campus with a good library, congenial faculty, a Lutheran ethos, and institutional support for the program.  It is my opinion, and the opinion of the Committee, that we are best served if we locate the primary site of our house of studies on a non-ECLA campus.  Why is this?  The short answer is that the Lutheran theological house of studies must have critical distance.  In order to offer a prophetic voice within the present ELCA context, the house of studies cannot be institutionalized at an existing ELCA seminary.  There are a number of reasons for this:

• The WordAlone Lutheran theological house of studies must never be limited by its institutional affiliation in what it can or cannot say, or in what it can teach or not teach.  It must have full curricular autonomy.  There must be sufficient academic freedom for it to do the task set before it.  The house of studies cannot ever be in a position of having the sharpness of its critique blurred by ecclesiastical politics within the ELCA.  Just as the WordAlone movement has been a fully autonomous critical movement within the ELCA, so must its house of studies project be both autonomous and critical.
• The WordAlone Lutheran theological house of studies will take positions that may sometimes be quite critical of the ELCA or its institutions.  Housing such a house of studies at an ELCA seminary could easily cause problems and tensions at that seminary, both among students, faculty and administration.  The requisite autonomy of the house of studies could easily be problematic for any ELCA seminary housing it.
• The WA house of studies should ideally establish its primary location at a place where most of the voices of the faculty are not theologically more liberal than its own confessional witness.  Having almost the entire faculty being more liberal than it will lessen the capability of the confessional witness over time.  I believe, theologically, that it is easier to start from a more conservative position and move to embrace the Reformation hermeneutic, than to start from a very liberal position, and try to work back to the right.
• Although we are not trying to establish theological purity at the WordAlone house of studies—we are not trying to establish a “sausage faculty”—we recognize that most of the voices students have been exposed to in their lives are not Scriptural/confessional voices.  Therefore, we do not think there is any particular danger in heavily exposing students to confessional theology within the context of their theological studies.

ELCA Endorsement

We take Bishop Mark Hanson at his word when he affirmed that there are two equally valid ways of interpreting Scripture.  We believe, however, that the present ELCA seminaries have privileged the revisionist over the traditionalist approach.  Because there is no ELCA educational institution wholly committed to or embracing the traditional approach, it is our hope that the ELCA will endorse our house of studies as a place in the ELCA where students will be exposed to the time-honored way in which Christians have historically read Scripture.

A Preliminary Mission

In contradistinction from the prevailing ethos in Lutheran theology since the time of Kant, the WordAlone Lutheran theological house of studies will proclaim the priority of ontology (being) over epistemology (knowing).  Being is prior to any knowing of being.  Instead of ontology recapitulating epistemology, the house of studies shall tirelessly proclaim that epistemology recapitulates ontology.  Accordingly, the house of studies shall be:

• Realist with respect to the ontology of God.
• Realist with respect to its semantics.
• Realist with respect to divine causality.

However, it shall never forget the infinite qualitative difference between time and eternity, between human beings and God. It understands the problem of history, and the difficulties attending any effort to invest more in the finite than it can deliver. Accordingly, it is:

• Aware of the problems of granting absolute certitude to creedal and confessional statements and,
• Aware of the Protestant Principle, the view stating that all attempts to absolutize the finite are quasi-idolatrous, whether or not these attempts are Biblicistic or ecclesiastical.

In addition, the Lutheran theological house of studies shall be solidly theocentric.  It holds that only the divine can save, and that human beings cannot add anything to their own salvation.  Instead of the divine being a category in human experience, the human is a concern only for divine experience.

Accordingly, the Lutheran theological house of studies will exist to accomplish the following:

• Provide solid Biblical foundation for understanding and articulating the Lutheran theological tradition
• Provide solid confessional basis for understanding and articulating the Lutheran theological tradition
• Provide the requisite philosophical equipment to understand and articulate the Lutheran theological worldview within the context of the plethora of options for postmodern man and woman.