From Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle through to the great scholastics and on to the modern masters, all philosophers of note have been at pains to proceed logically, and to begin by defining their terms as clearly as possible. That is not to say words have not been used ambiguously or inconsistently, or understood by all in like manner. But, in general, the great scholars have done as best might be expected of their day and academics to not speak willy-nilly. The truth of the matter is this: language is an art. Our sounds may be more precise than the strokes of a brush full of paint or a twirl of the body, but still they are tools to convey an image, and the less tangible the entity denoted, the less precise the tool and its usage. We do not speak to one another in mathematical equations, we speak in words, sonic pictures, verbalized ideas, entities saturated in nuance–personal, cultural, historical.
However, just as physics began the twentieth century with a move within to the depths of things once considered depth-less, so too philosophy plunged itself into vocabulary and forgot about where words were once wont to take us—to visions that in-form us from our beyond. This was not an intellectual, academic or cultural anomaly. This immanentist minimalism was likewise played out in art and architecture. Buildings once meant to inspire became boxes in which to function; the arts that once strived to wrap in wonder and wonderfulness descended into splotches, lines, and torturous lumps of banality. Academia and art but imitated reality. The Renaissance’s rebirth of individualism reached its zenith, and everyman became his own cosmos, his own, isolated, coveted self. But, self as self-coveted reduces society to a world of disassociated parts, it decapitates those pillars of social structure: cult and culture. The scientifically observed universe—overwhelming in its seemingly infinite infinitesimal and seemingly infinite in its infinity, becomes something to be escaped in the insularity and solitude of “my-space”, “my-reality”, and the gravity of society is reduced to the mere mass of the masses. It is all a matter of terror and fear, shrived of awe and wonder, hidden below a veneer of technology and pseudo-self-affirmation. Thus man contents himself with morsels while the feast—too sumptuous for his sapience—eludes him.
It is not, therefore, a surprise that the brace of modern scholars who have taken up the dissection of language have been inclined to be somewhat clinically detached and rather stringent minded, that they fell prey to denigrating philosophical speculation and metaphysical vision as senseless day-dreaming giving rise to problems where none exist, describing the impossible to describe, the what and how things are, rather than merely listing the things that are. The abiding enchantment became the notion that philosophy should be a science capable of speaking in and with mathematical certainty, that the quest for the meaning of life should be enunciated in some type of binary automatonic tongue.
G.E. Moore sets the tone of this radicalization of empiricism in claiming the proper work of philosophy is to clarify the meaning of scientific terms, explaining in ordinary language and from the perspective of common sense the progress of science (Cf: Wundt, in Part 22). Not metaphysical vision but common sense statements hold universality, self-evident truth, and ultimate meaning. He theorizes that sense data does reveal only the surface of things, but common sense affirms the thing is thereby and therein indicated “as it is”. This is a leitmotif we have encountered over and over in varied phrasings, and yet every enunciator of this idea seems so enwrapped by his discovery as to think here is something startlingly new.
According to Moore, philosophy has consistently added to the catalogue of things items that are not things—the transcendent ideals and universal ideas (God, beauty, good, truth, etc.). They, however, represent simple and ultimate notions that common sense knows not to debate or further investigate; they cannot be defined. Philosophy has also deleted from the catalogue of things—most importantly the fact that knowledge always contains two things: consciousness and the experienced item, and has thereby caused these two to be confusedly commixed.
Bertrand Russell endeavoured to find for philosophical investigation an ideal language—a mathematically certain and clear language. Surveying the history of philosophy, he finds all philosophical problems are either problems of language or fundamentally non-philosophical problems. The non-philosophical problems have been resolved by the fledging of the modern sciences from the nest of philosophy. As chemistry superseded alchemy, physics, astronomy, and psychology have supplanted metaphysics, cosmology, ethics and theology.
Russell contends that certain knowledge cannot rest upon induction or a priori ideas of reasoning. These avenues of approach, in one way or another, presume the universe is self-consistent. Philosophy ought not to be concerned with the universe, but with self-consistency itself. Much of philosophy has gone astray by not considering common sense as something common. Much of philosophy has fallen on its logic, upon the improper use of the word “is”. If every statement of “x is y” is understood to indicate an existence, a being, then we are on a trek to claiming the logic of an absolute being. But not all statements are about “be-ing”, not all statements are existential propositions (Socrates is a man.), some are universal (All men are mortal.). Universal propositions are existentially empty; they do not tell us there is a man or men, only that if there is such a thing as a man, he is mortal. Philosophy, and logic as the essence of philosophy, must pay attention to the types or forms of propositions, the things they denote, their properties, and their relations. In the attempt to create mathematical certainty, philosophy becomes a branch of calculus.
Moritz Schlick differentiates two types of unanswerable questions: those of principle, and those of some empirical difficulty. All questions of metaphysics, of God, soul, cosmos, are questions of principle, and therefore, futile fields for investigation. Philosophy can only investigate language, how it is used, how it is intended, its grammar and context. Its proper questions are to ascertain the criteria for claiming an empiric statement is true or false, to distinguish between statements of object (There is a tree.) and statements of subject (I see a tree.), and to investigate how the distinction between self and body arises within the data of experience.
A.J. Ayer views both idealism and empiricism as making unprovable statements, claiming certainty when, in fact, the claim of absolute certainty about anything is unjustifiable. Experience is not exhaustive. Any claim of certainty is at best a claim of probability. Traditional ideas about substances, being, realms of being are all mistakes. They do not even qualify to be considered poetical in so far as poetry is meant as an artistic statement and philosophy has claimed such things as the very truth of the universe and its structure. Philosophy must confine itself to the analysis and clarification of language and its usage. Metaphysics ought to content itself in being meta-grammar. Matters of ethics, morals, and all other value judgments are founded in experience or experiential hypotheses, and are fundamentally emotional. With this, his logical positivism gives way to utilitarianism.
Ludwig Wittgenstein initially went to learn from Bertrand Russell, but, in influence at least, exceeded him. I have chosen to speak of him last for his work may be taken as representing the alpha and omega, the first and last words, the parameters, of linguistic analysis. In his earlier work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he delimits the role of philosophy. The function of philosophy is not to discover new facts, but merely to clarify the ideas arrived at by science. In concert with Russell he contends most of the work spun out by philosophy has been either false or nonsensical, and a considerable part of this folly has centred on the use of the word “is”. This term is used to equate a subject and object of a sentence, but also to indicate existence. Philosophy as faltered in erroneously conflating the two usages. Language has a logic, a set of limits, and Wittgenstein sets out to define them.
A statement of fact, a proposition, is a picture of reality, and like reality it is a physical fact made up of elements that correspond to the elements in reality. The statement expresses a thought about reality, it mirrors reality, but it does not reveal anything about reality. We are again somewhat in the Kantian divide between the phenomenon, the thing as experienced, and the thing-in-itself, the theoretical groundwork of the experience, the noumenon. Therefore, only propositions that speak of tangible things or qualities can be judged true or false; they can be verified by the senses. All verifiable propositions belong to the field of science.
Philosophers have trekked beyond their purview, and deludedly played scientists by making statements of fact about items that are non-verifiable. Physics, astronomy, anthropology, and psychology have all evolved beyond the speculations of philosophy and established themselves as sciences. Philosophy is left with clarifying their language. In this endeavour, philosophy must know it is impossible for language to express the structure of the world whose functioning science describes. This is not to deny there are items inexpressible, but they remain exactly that, they remain beyond the reach of language, they are mystical, the “that which cannot be expressed”. This terminates in a paradox. To speak of the fullness of the world we may well intuit we need go beyond the logic of language, beyond verifiable propositions, and this we logically cannot. We end with the world of either science or silence.
Wittgenstein did indeed go into silence. When again he took up his investigations into philosophy he was still of a mind that metaphysical problems resided in the misuse of language, but he approached language more broadly. The Tractatus had considered language a collection of words each of which was merely a name denoting an object or objective quality. Language had but one use: the depiction of reality, something that could be engineered with pixilated, mathematical precision. Wittgenstein now proposes language is infinitely more flexible. It is a group of “games” which share a fundamental and familial resemblance. Words are tools, and like unto hammers and saws, they may be used in both normative and novel ways, each way, each usage, indicative of a particular language game. We do not learn a language by simply identifying a name with a thing; that is merely the acquisition of a vocabulary. We learn a language by comprehending how a name can be variously used, by learning specific language games, their rules, and assorted purposes. Philosophy’s task is to define the usages of words, the games of language, and critique accordingly. We are still left with a mathematics of words, but at least a word is allowed some room to be something more than an indivisible atom.
There have been generations of scholars involved in this fractioning of that which had traditionally been considered the elemental particles of philosophy, and they have relegated these quarks of logic to the whole of the reality of philosophical enterprise.
I do not wish to end my glancing at this school of thought on its linguistic minimalism. Thus, I will turn to Edmund Husserl to provide some elevation of the situation. Husserl will, I hope, forgive me. His work is usually placed among the existentialists or in a category of his own founding: phenomenology. According to Husserl, neither idealism nor realism properly account for the distinction between subject and object. If we are to properly consider the subject encountering the object, we need to understand that we are viewing not just subject and object, but a third thing which is not merely either.
According to Husserl, if we stand upon the ground of common sense and reflect, we find ourselves looking on that which may be described as the world-for-me, the vast given-ness of reality as I am experiencing it. It is the factual world and it exists with or without me, but it is always for-me the world as I am experiencing it, a world of objects, facts, items open to my usage of them. Out of the field of given-ness I am always selecting a field of immediacy, a for-me, a my-world, the world as held in my field of attention. Philosophy has often fallen into error and contradictions because the investigator has not been attentive to the fact that he has used a certain stand point, a certain field of attention, or changed from one field to another. Husserl brings us to a new law of relativity, but, unfortunately, not all will agree that it trumps linguistic analysis, for they that are given to words and grammar are not given to being silent.
We can take the seeming cacophony of modern thought as the noise of destruction or we can gaze upon it as we might a cell dividing—parts coming apart toward new life, the limitations of ideas and visions being catalogued, coded, calibrated—a busy-ness, a growing asunder, a certain violence of life as new life coalesces and appears renewed. It is a process of birth–messy, painful, ever precarious, yet essential, vital.
A note on theology under the influence of linguistic analysis: Lindbeck, Tracy, Hick, Nygren, McFague, Ricoeur, Ruether, and Daly
A host of modern theologians have turned to words, their usage and abusage. This is far from a novelty in the history of theology. As soon as the proclamation of faith became something to be expressed and demonstrated in philosophical terms and argument, the rules of logic needed to be enforced. Terms were examined to insure their extension, the boundaries of their meaning, were kept consistent throughout the argument. The rules of logical deduction and inference, the laws governing syllogisms, were scrutinized as to their proper application. Each investigator indubitably thought of himself as faithful both to logic and revelation. Perhaps church and world history would have been more felicitous had each also relentlessly contemplated his inherent intellectual finitude and spiritual delimitations. In this ever evolving world caught up in unfolding revelation adamantine intellectualism and unbending religiosity serve neither self, other, nor God. To them that hold revelation unfolds not, I ask an explanation of grace, prevenient grace in particular, and the role of Holy Spirit in general, for they are without meaning and context in a world, a heart, and a soul where nothing is not moving toward something else, something other, to something faith names the terminus wherein God becomes all in all.
The core beliefs of Christianity encoded in the sundry scriptures were by the early 2nd century unified and summarized in the baptismal confessions of faith–I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth; I believe in Jesus his son, our redeemer, born of Mary, crucified under Pilate, buried, and risen; I believe in the sanctifying Spirit, in the church, in the forgiveness of sin, and the promise of resurrection into Christ’s. Most will recognize here the core elements several centuries later enshrined as the “Apostle’s Creed” (a basic enunciation of the apostolic faith, and not a document created by the ancient twelve). When the confession of faith moved from the sacramental to the apologetic, to the explanatory, to form-al statements meant to give form or structure to the understandings of a burgeoning institution made up of many philosophical and cultural parts, the simplicity of faith fell subject to the complexities of intellection. Faith is a vision not easily translated into pixels. It is a trust, a valuation meant to colour, to flavour a life. Reducing it to a logical series of dots may be an interesting exercise of mind, but mind, as saints ever tell us, is subservient to heart. The great fourth century gatherings at Nicaea and Constantinople, which gave us the creed commonly known as the Nicene, exemplify obsession with linguistics, and how easily the effort to define descends into weapons of deterrence and destruction.
Bishops and their theologians needed to find a consensus response to the questions as to the nature of Jesus the Christ and his relationship to the Almighty. In what manner was he God’s son? Was he at some point—at baptism or resurrection—adopted by God? Was he the first of creation through whom the rest of creation was undertaken, or was he with God before creation, was he a type of Neo-Platonic Nous or something more? Did he share in God’s nature, and if he did, was he in some manner subservient to God, was the Father superior to the Son? If he was divine, and that in the Greco-Roman philosophical world meant impassible, how could he have suffered and died? If he was in fact the impassible God was his humanity merely a semblance of man, or did the divine element vanish from the human Jesus before the crucifixion and death? Was he a human person with a human mind and soul or was he a human appearance masking a divine mind and will? How could a human being be a divine being? There was no shortage of answers to these and related questions, and divaricating opinions made for events considerably less civil than academic debates. Bishops were dethroned and exiled. Excommunications were tossed with liberty. Intrigue and animosity ran amok. It materialized as something about as bitter as the Thirty Years War of the Reformation period. The imperial power in Constantinople was not amused, and mandated that these tortuous quizzings be given one response sufficiently open-ended to which all parties could agree.
There were some concerned that monotheism was giving way to polytheism, that the divine nature being accorded the Son was eroding the unity and singularity of God. Some thought to emphasize the absolute unity and sovereignty of God (Monarchianism or Sabellianism after one of its proponents). Among these some claimed Jesus as Christ represented a temporary mode or expression of divine activity in the world (Modalism or Dynamic Modalism). Some forwarded the idea that under the mode of Jesus it was the Father who had suffered (Patripassianism). Some claimed Jesus was in some sense, as were the ancient kings of Israel, adopted by God on the basis of his mission and the fidelity with which he embraced it (Adoptionism).
There were some under the influence of Gnosticism with its discounting of the world, matter, and flesh in favour of the divine and spiritual. These contended God was beyond change and suffering, and thus, Jesus, as the divine Son, simply appeared to be human, to suffer, to die; his humanity was an illuminative illusion (Docetism).
The greatest threat to orthodoxy, institutional integrity and civil stability was the teaching of a populist priest named Arius (Arianism). He set his groundwork in a literal interpretation of the Pauline enunciation that Christ was the “first-born” of creation. Arius concluded Jesus Christ was, therefore, neither divine nor of a divine nature; he was God’s first “begotten”, a purposefully made instrument to effect the planned creation, an intermediate being between the absolute and eternal God and his creation, belonging by nature to neither. He was given the honour of being named the Son of God in virtue of his unfaltering adherence to the will of God, a virtuousness God foreknew from all eternity. Arianism did not vanish simply because the fathers at Nicaea spoke contrarily and issued a series of anathemas against it. It deliquesced into several softer variants some claiming a likeness in nature twixt Christ and God, some a similarity in essence but not in being, and some merely a moral accordance. These interpretations lingered on in the far reaches of empire, notably in the Germanic tribes of northern Europe, and predisposed them toward the teachings of later missionaries from Rome.
Apollinarius set out to defend orthodoxy against Arianism. However, in trying to explain Christ as fully divine and human but without sin, Apollinarius delved into an au currant Neo-Platonism that dissected human nature into body, soul/mind, and spirit. The perfect divine nature could not exist in union with the imperfect human nature unless the human nature was rendered in some manner incomplete. In the man Jesus the human spirit was replaced by the divine Logos (Apollinarianism). This, of course, meant Jesus was not fully human, but only in this manner could redemption be effected, for henceforth the human spirit could receive a higher, a Logos-like, spirit that would draw humanity toward the divine. Some tried their hand at refining this idea claiming the Logos had assumed human nature “in general”, in a logical or abstract manner and not concretely. Jesus had an “impersonal humanity” (Anhypostasis). Some held that there could be only one dominant nature in the God-man, and it was of necessity the divine (Monophysitism).
The last major metaphysical challenge came from Bishop Nestorius. His concern was to correct Apollinarianism and Monophysitism. He claimed, contrary to the settlement of Chalcedon (451AD), there was not one person with two natures in Jesus the Christ, but two persons, a divine and a human. He maintained there was an oneness in Christ, but it was effected by an accordance of the two (divine and human) wills rather than by a hypostatic union, a personal union, of natures. It followed that Mary could not be, as she was beginning to be, hailed the Mother of God [Θεοτόκος, Theotokos, God-bearer], for she was merely the mother of the human person.
If the great theologians and bishops of the day took seriously the prophetic apothegm that claims where charity and love prevail God is ever found, they would have all ascended into heaven or descended into silence. But theologs prefer to debate, argue, discourse, opine, pontificate, and so the fourth century and the church became defined not by the richness of the creative Word, but by a paucity of technical words— ούσία, [ousia], όμοούσια, [homo-ousia], όμοιούσια, [homo-i-ousia], óμογενή, [homogena], and ύπόστασισ, [hypostasis]. Ousia [in Latin: substantia, in English: substance] references that Aristotelean base of being. It indicates one’s being, essence, reality [in Latin: esse, essentia, re]. It is of note that there are here four Latin words corresponding to one Greek word. Homoousia [in Latin: consubstantia, in English: consubstantial] means of the same substance, but some understood homoiousia [same type of substance] as synonymous with ousia while others thought it merely indicated a similar substance, to which homogena [in Latin: homogenea, in English: homogenous] was meant to give the counter-balance by stressing the unity and identity of substance. Hypostasis tended in the Greek mind to indicate person [προσωπον, prosopon] but occidental theologians read it as denoting substance or ousia, thus when the Greeks spoke of the three hypostases of the divine, the Latins recoiled in horror thinking polytheism was being proposed, that the Greeks were suggesting three separate divine entities rather than something understandable as three divine “masks”, centres of action, or persons [personae]. (Cf: on “Mask” and its Christian heritage, Febrary 2012)
It must be noted that we are in the century when Latin has replaced Greek as the lingua franca of the West, that we have not only two languages, but two technical languages in transition within two cultures in transition. Furthermore, Aristotle had used ousia in two senses, and it is debatable any scholar thereafter looking to Aristotle has used the term consistently throughout his arguments. Consensus amidst confusion is no small task. (I presume my readership to consist largely of the general public with an interest in religion, and that navigating the above paragraph stacked with Greek and Latin obscurities must have been akin to slowly walking through a brick wall. If that be the case—Huzzah! I have successfully imparted some small degree of the eclampsia compressing and threatening the ecclesial mind, spirit, passions, and aspirations at this parturition of dogmatic theology.)
The consensus position achieved stated that Jesus was of the singular divine ousia (substance, essence, being, reality), and that beyond any possibility of fuller explication was an unmixed, unconfused, and inseparable union ( a hypostatic union, a personal union) of two natures, one truly and fully divine and one truly and fully human–except for sin. Whether one name it by their ambiguity or by their generous boundaries of meaning, the above bantered and sacralised terms were meant to stifle debate. A conciliar fiat did not immediately resolve the matter. Debate and alternate understandings continued. Within a few generations the matter did subside, possibly because no one had the stamina to argue on, or so it seemed. Nevertheless, this ecclesio-philosophicalism which defined Christianity for centuries was at root a veiled political stratagem to squash cult-ural and civil disintegration. The fact that it was the command of the Byzantine Imperium renders to the term “byzantine” a nuance few Christians appreciate as they regularly recite the “Nicene Creed”, the most effective ecclesio-political concordat ever devised.
The occidental church never really understood the theological and philosophical nuances of the East, and the East was ever at a loss for the academic vacuity of the West. Two centuries later this would emerge to full boil when a church in Spain decided to unilaterally insert into the ecumenical creed that the Spirit was from both the Father “and the Son” [Filioque]. The Greeks objected that the traditional enunciation was the Father generates the Son and the Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son, a linear movement. In the West, after Augustine’s theological speculations, the “psychological” explanation of the trinity was the accepted. According to this view, within the singular “moment” that is eternity, the Father knows himself in such perfection as to generate his true and living image, the Son, and the Son and Father looking in bliss upon the perfection which they constitute breathe forth in mutual love the Spirit, a triangular movement. Some tried to un-muddle the situation and explain the ancient and linear view captures the internal structure of the triune Godhead (the immanent view) while the psychological view relates the working of the trinity as regards its missions or interactions with the making, redeeming and sanctification of the world, (the so-called economic [rules of management] view). Once again excommunications flew, and despite a few attempts at some mutually acceptable statement, not until recently did the two great patriarchs of East and West see fit to formally lift the everlasting damnations the antecessors of each had settled upon the opposing camp.
As has been marked in earlier parts of this survey, the issue of what constitutes divine nature or being, and how such is present in man, in the man Jesus, in his confessed disciples has once again been opened to consideration and debate. Have we come full circle back to scripture’s claim God was actively present in the person and work of Jesus his Christ, and weary of trying to explain how the eternal and divine creative exists, manifests, animates, revitalizes, and exhilarates? When Browning asked “How do I love thee…” I doubt the words ousia, substantia, prosopon, hypostasis were in the arsenal of her possible response, and thus, I opine that for all the devotion some may have poured into getting this answer to “Who is Jesus?” right, the result may well be deemed more politics than faith, more cultural concession than dogmatic crystallinity. It was undoubtedly an evolutionary code-writing necessary to establishing an institution capable of sustaining a viable corpus of believers. It was also a far venture from those simple baptismal affirmations of Maker, Redeemer and Sanctifier of the world. It was a work for and by bureaucrats too many of whom were by the “economic” nature of church bishops, thus orienting the structure of church toward a singular seat of legislation and interpretation, making being-church more a matter of knowing than doing, more about dogma than action, intellection than love.
In the present day, George Lindbeck has comprehensively contributed to the search for the proper nature and function of doctrine, the logical limitations to its terms and usage. He divides religious enunciations into three types: the objective wherein propositions give cognitive information about the truths claimed (the mode understood by traditional orthodoxy), the subjective wherein propositions are experiential statements that symbolically express inner attitudes and feelings (Schleiermacher, Otto, Bultmann, Tillich, Tracy, et al.), and the cultural/linguistic wherein propositions constitute the authoritative rules for speaking, acting, being, for the existential word-game of the faith community (Weber, Durkheim, Wittgenstein). In this last view-point, Lindbeck’s, the doctrines of a religion constitute a comprehensive system for interpretation. They encode the myths, narratives, and rituals, and function to structure both the experience and the understanding of self and the world. In concert with Durkheim, he gives priority to society over the individual, to social formatting over how the individual comes to experience and express himself. Doctrine, thus, operates as a religious a priori, a pre-condition for religious experience. As the social milieu of language stands prior to the individual such that the individual must learn the language to become a part of the culture, doctrine dictates how one learns to experience, express, and live the cult, the religiosity of the group. Doctrines are not primarily metaphysical or ontological statements about God, but rules dictating how to speak about God, about how to be a part of this community that believes in God, how to live in such manner that this God is manifest. He notes St. Athanasius had considered the enshrining of homoousia [oneness of substance] into the official statement of faith constituted a proposition about a proposition, a rule of usage, denoting whatsoever proposition can be made of God the Father can be made also of the Son except that the Son is not the Father. He contends the work of Chalcedon and Nicaea formulated the basic word rules, the grammar, of orthodoxy: there is one God, Jesus is fully human, Jesus is fully divine. Arianism, Docetism, Monarchianism, Nestorianism, and the like, were heresies precisely because they violated that grammar; their “usage” created the illogical, the religiously and spiritually non-functional. The modern tendency toward experiential and subjective expression of religious experience stimulates theologians to look to the world as the base from which to re-interpret scripture. However, given the cultural-linguistic approaches’ fundamental thrust, it is not surprising that Lindbeck holds with Barth that the world must be interpreted in the light of holy writ. The community is grounded in its religiosity only if the sacred text interprets the world, not the world the text.
Religions may all share in the movement to perfect man and reverence life, but every religion does so within its own grammatical, its own interpretive, structure. A pathway to inter-denominational and inter-faith dialogue can reasonably reside only in examining grammars rather than vocabularies, in the comparative analysis of the word-games of the particular faith communities.
David Tracy follows a different approach. He proposes all existence is a matter of interpreting experience. The fundamental understanding of the world is an interpretation of the sheer given-ness of the world. In and by our finitude that interpretation is never all encompassing, and so the venture of life carries with it an uncertainty. This ever incomplete yet ubiquitous interpreting becomes theology when the experience interpreted demarks a boundary situation, when it touches upon the mystery of existence, when it galvanizes existence to hope, trust, love. It becomes Christian theology when the symbols employed are Christian. In this sense, theology is not the preserve of a chosen few; it is part of the public domain. A theologian, therefore, needs speak not merely to the faith-community, but to society at large, and to academics in other fields of scholarly inquiry.
Tracy speaks of certain encounters as carrying a surplus of meaningfulness, value, or intensity (Cf: Rahner, and Tillich in Part 21). Such an encounter, be it with a person or a thing, reveals new possibilities, new horizons, excites with a certain wholeness. It exhibits a power that provokes, lingers, and haunts finitude with intimations of infinity. As such it becomes a path beyond the quotidian, it carries a sapience for the possibility of multi-dimensionality, plurality, reflection, dialogue. This inherent openness, freedom, always constitutes a risk, but it is essential to authentic theology. It keeps theology attuned to its incompleteness, its need of the mystical and prophetic, its vocation to stand in both awe and terror before the experience of the holy, its obligation to know God both as love and as intelligence (Logos), as incomprehensible and hidden, and yet as the manifest in the world, in our weakness, our suffering, our crosses.
Authentic theology exists under two forms: the analogical and the dialectical. The analogical is comparative. It contrasts similarities and dissimilarities in the relationships among God, world and self, and seeks their synthesis, their harmonization; it relates to a sensitivity for the unity of all being and is at the heart of the approach taken by Aquinas and many of the Roman tradition. The dialectical negates all relation between God and his creation. Man is man, God is God, only grace can conjoin them; it is the approach of Barth and many of the Reformed tradition. These two are not, however, competing languages, for neither in itself is complete, neither in itself is capable of interpreting the superabundance of meaningfulness disclosed. Both are requisite for dialogue, for understanding, for releasing the power encountered into freedom, into trust, hope, and thankfulness for the given-ness, the gift we come to understand as love.
John Hick is often categorized a philosopher of religion rather than theologian, and his work may seem to some better placed in the shadow of Kant or Tillich, but my assessment garners him a curule amongst them analysing the usage of religious language. Hick turns to Kant’s critique that we know nothing of God but may postulate God as the necessary basis and surety of morality. God, in himself, along with all else not directly experienced, constitutes the noumena, the unknowable, the “un-categorizable”. Hick counterbalances this with an appeal to Aristotle and claims whatsoever is behind the experienced, the phenomenal, can be reasonably assayed as similar to it. He then turns to the world of the pragmatists, and names God that which causes certain experiences commonly called religious. God is not then the Kantian moral exigency beyond categorization, but the “trans-categorical”, that which can be indicated within our limited “categories” for filtering and organizing experience but which remains above and beyond them. It is, admittedly, a change of nuance, and the nuance amplifies, for these indicatives of God are culturally conditioned in their enunciation. There are two major cultural forms: Western and Eastern. The ultimate reality in the West is referenced as a personal God, with Christianity providing the majority opinion. The ultimate reality in the East is referenced as an all transcending Absolute, with Hinduism providing the majority statement. Despite the cognitive ability to point toward God and its cultural encodings, there exists no necessary connection twixt them and the “trans-categorical”, for God remains at an empiric distance from man, and purposefully so. The lack of a necessary connection between God and the human enunciation of God insures man’s freedom, his capacity for authenticity and true spirituality. Hick accords with William James; religion is a rule for action, a rule of life, and the proof of its truth, its utility, is the product it produces.
The common claim of linguistic analysts that religious language, theology, and dogma are objectively and cognitively empty is false. For the believer religious propositions have an empirical value. The contrary argument arises on the basis of a severely delimited view of experience. Experience, however, occurs within a vast field; it is multi-dimensional, and fundamentally exists on three levels: the natural, the social, and the spiritual (Cf: Jaspers in Part 21). Hick revisits the traditional rendering of aesthetical, ethical, and spiritual man, not as progressive stages of development, but as tripartite empiric structure. Every experience tells us something about the physical world and equips us in some degree to navigate this world. Some experiences inform us also of our sociality and enlighten us regarding social behaviour (ethics). There is a deeper level to some experience that orients us toward both the physical and social worlds in our wholeness (faith/spirituality). Hick’s analysis of experience remains within a Kantian orbit; there is an “as if”, an ambiguous aspect to all experience. The viability of an experience is the significance given it. Religious experience is that experience interpreted as having spiritual significance, as inspiring and fostering a holistic orientation to life, and in this sense, a religious experience is as much a part of the field of knowledge as those cognitive aspects that allow us to successfully navigate the physical and social worlds.
While religious propositions reflect empiric, cognitive aspects of knowledge, the traditional doctrines of Christianity, the truth claims about God and Christ in particular, need to be appreciated not as ontological truths but as affidations of the significance of Jesus and his life. They are revelation, but that revelation is their inspirational impact, their ability to capture a mind, a soul, and move it toward wholeness. The same holds true for the dogmatic statements of other religions. Thus, there can be no dialogue among various faith groups unless the significance of propositions rather than the terms of propositions are the topic.
Anders Nygren notes language cleaves into four types of understanding: the scientific which deals in matters reducible to true or false, the ethical which deals with matters definable as either good or evil, the aesthetic which speaks to the ideas of beauty, and the religious which looks to the questions concerning the eternal. Because religion deals with the eternal, it is beyond historical verification and rational scrutiny. More properly said, faith is an a priori, a mode, a “category” for interpreting the world not a conflux of propositions to be verified by the world. The task of theology is, therefore, to systematically study, not God, but the idea and the experience of God.
Sallie McFague builds on Wittgenstein’s thesis that the human world is the world of language, of words and grammars. The art of communication adapts in conjunction with the broader socio-political evolution. If the images and terms used to express and explain the beliefs of a faith do not remain open to this movement they become stagnant relics of times past and frustrate the continued proclamation of the faith. The task of theology is to engage in continuous critique to ensure the message of the faith is made both comprehensible and relevant. Theology must address the questions and ambiguities of life, and in the particular case of Christianity, present Jesus Christ as the embodiment of positivity toward life, as the resolution of the tension twixt the sacred and secular, as the person in whom holiness in the world for the world is made manifest and demonstrated possible.
According to McFague, all language is fundamentally metaphorical or symbolic. Language does infinitely more than note this is X and this is not-X. It focuses similarities and dissimilarities, captures the shadows, contrasts, nuances of reality and experience. It transmits context, colour, flavour, insight. Theology, therefore, ought not to deplete itself in trying to abstractly define God; it needs to speak of the experience of God. It needs to speak not in metaphysics but in parables and allegory. Yet, even such symbolic speech requires constant scrutiny lest it become something concrete. This hermeneutical duty of theology involves being ever turned toward the sources of its metaphors, reinterpreting them in whatsoever literary forms will best serve to engage the world, open the world to the understanding that it is the manifest of God’s creativity and redeeming love. As patent example, the traditional presentation of God as Father is symbolic, yet the metaphorical nature of that paternity has been forgotten, rendering God the Father an idol, the monarch of a cosmic patriarchy largely irrelevant or offensive to modern occidental culture. There is, however, no scriptural injunction against presenting God as mother, lover, or friend, or of presenting the world as God’s body. (Indeed, the first three images are motifs within scriptural Wisdom literature, reflected in the gospels, and well represented in Christian spirituality; and the cosmos, say Paul, has its salvation as the fullness of Christ’s risen body.)
Durkheim postulated the priority of society over the individual, presenting society as the milieu wherein the individual comes to the expression of self. Husserl spoke of the given-ness of the world that was nevertheless a purposefully intended and defining world. Paul Ricoeur speaks of language in somewhat the same manner. As scripture presents the Word as the beginning through whom all is made, Ricoeur places language as an a priori of thought and understanding. Language is there before thought; it gives something, something about which to think. It is a gift, a social, communal, historical, evaluative gift. It is given in community, and in its sharing it creates community. It encodes an understanding and in communal sharing, in conversation, it opens to deeper, fuller understanding.
The philosophies of the Renaissance and Enlightenment cloaked the occidental mind with a propensity to doubt—self, world, God, values. They concretized the flow of time to analyse ideas, objects, self, reality, but in so doing robbed them of their immediacy, vitality and interconnectedness (Cf: Bergson in Part 19). Rational and empirical doubt supressed the sensitivity for the symbolic. The quest for scientific surety exiled faith. Modern, autonomous, rationally detached, scientific man suffers for this loss, and needs rediscover the essential interconnectivity of being, the power of symbol, of narrative, of the poetic to give vitality and reconciliation to the polarities of life. This does not eradicate all human difficulties, failings and faults, but it opens them to reinterpretation, to re-evaluation, broader understanding, and deeper appreciation.
Rosemary Ruether also approaches theology as symbolic language. Christianity applied to Jesus the Messianic prophesies of Jewish Scripture, proclaimed them as a fait accompli, explained them within the framework of ancient philosophy, and presented Jesus as God and Saviour. Because this interpretation of Judaism’s messiah was at variance with Judaism itself, Christianity defended its position with anti-Judaic arguments, and these eventually replicated themselves in the social sphere as anti-Semitic prejudices. Christology, therefore, needs to be revisited, reinterpreted, and represented. “Jesus is the Christ” does not indicate the exhaustion of being Christ. Jesus Christ is not a project undertaken and completed. Jesus the Christ is the beginning into which all are called to be partakers, the paradigm of being God’s child. Christianity anciently presented itself in patriarchal dress, but neither Logos, Word, nor Christ are terms necessarily masculine. Jesus did not preach the conservation of the status quo. To the contrary, his teaching was iconoclastic—socially, ethically, religiously. It challenged any attempt to write things in stone. It was about spirit not law, the attitude within not merely the action. His positive and holistic approach needs to be reignited in the world, giving freedom, and empowering equality and respect for all creation.
Mary Daly’s linguistic focus echoes Tillich. Women must find the courage to be, specifically, to be free of patriarchy, and therein to reveal a new vision of God wherein both male and female are valued as made in the image of God. God is not masculinity apotheosized, and God is something more than Father. God is Be-ing. “God” is a verb indicating creativity, meaningfulness, power. (I have long argued that Christianity has been too long entrenched in patriarchal prejudice because it has not differentiated between Jesus’ personal vision and valuation of God as his father, and the need for the disciple of Jesus to come to God in the power of the same Holy Spirit by whom Jesus was made. (Cf: Dogma and Science, May 2013)
While the work of them involved in the analysis of words, usages, “grammars”, and new methodologies may seem abstruse to the general public, such endeavours have served to open theology to the relativity of its words, and set again the Word above and beyond the words of men, have in some small way underscored the necessity of the divine transcendent to make the divine immanent and dynamic intelligible and engaging. There is a caveat all intellection must carry: the words of man can never solely reflect a logic of head opposed to heart. Occidental history gives ample evidence that giving primacy to the head, to logic, to the rational, the individual, manifests as the isolated and ideal. It conjures up something cold, doctrinaire, legalistic, and abstracted from reality; it places the scales of justice, if but a tad, above the reality of life, the inescapable and essential presence of the other and the world and their connatural evocation for acknowledgement, acceptance, and ultimately, for love. The closest approximation to love such a constriction of reality can produce is the idea of mercy. If, however, the heart is whence we begin, there will be a trust that the head can do its part and find for love a creatively reasonable path-way into the world. It is ever without surety and so is a matter of faith and an openness to process regarding self, other, world and God. Add to uncertainty, faith, and openness to process a commitment of presence and have we not–from any perspective–a viable “grammar” of love? (Cf: on “Systems” and the proper use of language, February 2012)