God in Postliberal Perspective (Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology)

God in Postliberal Perspective Between Realism and Non-Realism

Robert Andrew Cathey

God in Postliberal

Pers pective

Who is God? T he variety of images of God tends to overwhelm us in the present age. Is ‘God’ a .ction of human construction, or a reality that makes claims upon how we practice ‘faith in God’? How does this quest for an understanding of ‘God’ illumine who ‘we’ are? God in Postliberal Perspective presents an introduction to the doctrine and concept of God in contemporary philosophy and theology, exploring how some theologians and philosophers dare to speak of God as ‘real’ in our sceptical, pluralistic, and interfaith age. Robert Cathey tours the ‘house of realism’ as constructed by postliberal Christians (David Burrell, William Placher, Bruce Marshall), in conversation with living communities of faith and critical work in philosophy and theology, and develops a distinctive argument about the relation of realism and non-realism in constructing the doctrine of God in postliberal theology. Offering a reading of postliberal theology which is open to critical discussion with other types of theology, philosophy, and faith traditions, this book proposes a model of theological reflection that may be extended to the reality-claims of a wide range of doctrines and concepts.

Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and T heology S eries editors: Martin Warner, University of Warwick, UK Kevin Vanhoozer, Trinity International University, USA Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology is an interdisciplinary series exploring new opportunities in the dialogue between philosophy and theology that go beyond more traditional ‘faith and reason’ debates and take account of the contemporary reshaping of intellectual boundaries. For much of the modern era, the relation of philosophy and theology has been conceived in terms of antagonism or subordination, but recent intellectual developments hold out considerable potential for a renewed dialogue in which philosophy and theology have common cause for revisioning their respective identities, reconceiving their relationship, and combining their resources. This series explores constructively for the 21st century the resources available for engaging with those forms of enquiry, experience and sensibility that theology has historically sought to address. Drawing together new writing and research from leading international scholars in the field, this high profile research series offers an important contribution to contemporary research across the interdisciplinary perspectives relating theology and philosophy. A lso in this series: On Søren Kierkegaard Dialogue, Polemics, Lost Intimacy, and Time Edward F. Mooney The Future of Reason, Science and Faith Following Modernity and Post-Modernity J. Andrew Kirk Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology Reason, Meaning and Experience Edited by Kevin Vanhoozer and Martin Warner Creation, Evolution and Meaning Robin Attfield

God in Postliberal Perspective B etween R ealism and N on-R ealism

Robert An drew Cathey McCormick Theological Seminary, USA

© Robert Andrew Cathey 2009 All rights reserved. N o part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Robert Andrew Cathey has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Cathey, Robert Andrew God in postliberal perspectives: between realism and non-realism. – (Transcending boundaries in philosophy and theology) 1. God – Attributes 2. Postliberal theology 3. Realism I. T itle 231’.044 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cathey, Robert Andrew, 1956– God in postliberal perspective: between realism and non-realism / Robert Andrew C athey. p. cm. – (Transcending boundaries in philosophy and theology) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-1680-1 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. God – History of doctrines – 20th century. 2. Postliberal theology. 3. God. I. Title. BT103.C39 2008 231–dc22 2008030842

ISBN 978-0-7546-1680-1

This book is dedicated to the Rev. Barbara Houck Cathey, a minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA). Her ministry of preaching, pastoral care, social advocacy, ecumenical and interfaith dialogue has inspired me to become a more faithful theologian. Her faith has taught me to trust. Her hope has brought us new life. Her love has created a family of care and compassion. Her partnership makes it possible for me to follow God’s call.

This page has been left blank intentionally

C ontents Acknowledgements   Preface  

ix xi

Introduction: What was “Postliberalism”? What is the “Postliberal Perspective” T oday?   1 1

The Christian Doctrine of God in the Late Twentieth Century  

15

2

The Cultural-Linguistic Turn in Postliberal Theology  

49

3

Realism(s) and Its Other(s)  

83

4

Three Exemplars of a Postliberal Doctrine of God  

123

5

Imagining God: Revelation, Construction, or Destruction?  

171

6

Hospitality in the House of Realism  

205

Bibliography   Index  

213 227

This page has been left blank intentionally

Acknowledgements This book was made possible by the generosity of McCormick Theological Seminary, Chicago, Illinois. My thanks go to its trustees and President Cynthia Campbell for a sabbatical term in 2001 and a semester of sabbatical in 2005. All theology begins in a context that makes faithful practices possible. McCormick is an ideal institution for theological reflection. My colleagues in the theology and ethics field over the years were the first to discuss this project with me: Cynthia Campbell, Anna Case -Winters, Hearn Chun, Lois Livezey, Luis Rivera, and most recently, Jennifer Ayres. David Esterline, Dean of the Faculty, was supportive at many stages along the way. McCormick’s partnership with the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago made it possible in 2003 for me to teach a course on “Realism and Imagination” with Antje Jackelén, the past Director of the Zygon Center for Religion and Science. Through the work of the Zygon Center, I was introduced to The Chicago Group, a meeting of scientists and theologians in the home of Carol and John Albright in Hyde Park. Bishop Jackelén, Zygon and the Chicago Group shaped the writing of this book in ways they never imagined. Another formative context was the American Theological Society – Midwest Division. The meetings of our Society became the occasion for me to learn more about a different kind of postliberal theology crafted by Bernard Meland (1899– 1993) at the University of Chicago Divinity School. My colleagues in the Society critiqued part of an early version of this book in 2004. Their voices are always with me when I write. The Hyde Park cluster of seminaries and the Association of Chicago Theological Schools put me in touch with faculty colleagues who also contributed to this project. Thandeka, Research Professor at Meadville Lombard Theological School, discussed part of an early draft of this book with me in 2003. I give thanks to her and all my colleagues who critiqued this work at various stages. My two editors were Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Research Professor of Systematic Theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois, U.S.A., and Professor Martin Warner, Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick, Coventry, England. They first contacted me about writing this book, and saved me from some of my errors and too many detours along the way. A ll the other errors and detours are now my responsibility. My final words of appreciation must go to Sarah Lloyd, Publisher, Ashgate Publishing Ltd. She was infinitely patient yet called me to accountability when I needed it. It was a pleasure to work with Ms. Lloyd and her able staff from whom I have learned so much as a writer.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Preface In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor describes the “N ova effect” of secularization on religious belief from the nineteenth century down to the present. B elievers in Europe and N orth America are no longer faced by stark choices between belief and unbelief, theism and atheism, realism and non-realism. Rather we make choices along a wide spectrum between belief and unbelief that continues to expand in its options. Some choose to be spiritual, but not religious. Some recover orthodox spiritual and doctrinal traditions, while others re-imagine the liberal spirit. Moderate, half-way houses and new forms of religious community abound. Interfaith experiments are popularized. Contextual theologies proliferate. And some call for a new Enlightenment with its suspicion toward all religious traditions. Whatever forms belief may take in this century, they will develop in the context of ongoing processes of secularization. Among these options is an extended family of Christian theologians known as “postliberals”. This book shows how their convictions, methods and constructive projects enrich our conversations about God today. Their writings are both philosophically sophisticated and doctrinally orthodox in a generous spirit. They understand God as Trinity and Jesus Christ as the centre of Christian faith and practice. And they communicate these convictions in full awareness of the “N ova effect” on belief and unbelief. This book concludes with the recognition that there is more than one postliberal option open to theology today. For what if some who stand in the liberal tradition along with postliberals are reaching beyond the “present-mindedness” of our secular age to find new ways of testifying to the realities of faith? I hope this book will contribute to creative dialogue among theologians and students of theology who are ill at ease with the forms of polarization that divide churches, the academy, and society today.

  ���������������� Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), Part III .

This page has been left blank intentionally

Introduction

What was “Postliberalism”? What is the “Postliberal Perspective” Today? In Iris Murdoch’s dialogue between Socrates and his friends about what is religion, a fictional character named Antagoras takes the part of the atheist: SOCRATES: Y ou don’t believe in divine spiritual beings? AN TAGORAS: N o! And if there were such beings we would be their judges. A ny god who existed would be just a thing in our world, which we could decide about. It’s not that God must exist, or might exist, it’s that he can’t exist. We are the source of morality and rational judgment. Once we understand this we can’t believe in gods. We can’t go back once we’ve become rational and free, it’s an irreversible move. SOCRATES : We are the gods now? AN TAGORAS: Y es, if you like. The gods were just ideal pictures of us; we have to get rid of them to realize our own possibilities. Much later in the dialogue, Socrates reveals his own position: SOCRATES: … We are not gods, we are absurd limited beings, we live with affliction and chance. The most important things are close to us, the truth is close, in front of our noses, like the faces of our friends, we need no expert to tell us. Religion is our love of virtue lightening the present moment. It is respect for what we know, and reverence for what we don’t know, what we can only approach, where our not-knowing must be our mode of knowing, where we make symbols and images, then destroy them, and make other ones, as we see now in our own time. Images are natural, art is natural, sacraments and pictures and holy things are natural, the inner and the outer reflect each other, there is a reverence which finds what is spiritual everywhere in the world, he is right (pointing to the servant), God is everywhere. If we love whatever God we know and speak to Him truthfully we shall be answered. Out at the very edge of our imagination the spirit is eternally active. Respect the pure visions that speak to the heart, find there what is absolute. That is why we go to a holy place and kneel down. There is nothing more ultimate than that. (Pause) 

 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������� Iris Murdoch, “Above the Gods: A Dialogue about Religion”, in Peter Conradi, (ed.), Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature / Iris Murdoch (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, U.K. and N ew Y ork: Penguin Books, 1999), 496–531. The quotations are taken from pp. 499 and 525. Originally published in Iris Murdoch, Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues (London: Chatto and Windus, 1986).



God in Postliberal Perspective

Who is “G-o-d” for “us” today? Specifically, who is the “God” worshipped by Christians in the variety of global settings in this ecumenical and interfaith age? Does it still make sense to speak as if all Christians worship one God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, into whose name we are all baptized? Or, following the trail of modern pluralism and late modern scepticism, should we speak of multiple images and doctrines of “God” among the diversity of Christians? And what about the diversity of Jews and Muslims? Should we speak of the variety of images of “God” rather than assume a false essentialism in the name of “the one God” or in the name of a violent monotheism? How do we come to terms with the variety of images, symbols, metaphors, stories, and concepts used to refer to “God” by communities and persons who identify with the name “Christian”? In practice, do Christians not fall somewhere between an ideal monotheism and a heterogeneous polytheism? Does not the very variety of ways of naming God in different contexts and churches suggest that all our talk about “God” is a type of fiction, human constructions of “the divine” that meet different needs and purposes in different contexts? So we move in liturgical language from the patriarchal construction of God as “Father” and Christ as “Son” to the feminist constructions of God as “Mother”, “Parent”, “Friend”, “Partner”, and “Verb”. Or in academic contexts we move from the classical substantialist account of the God of theism, constructed in terms of the metaphysics of substance and presence, to a modern process account of God as dynamic, evolving, being enriched by the world and suffering its evils. Or we deconstruct the metaphysics of both substantialist and process accounts of God in the name of a new negative theology which gestures toward the absence of God in hopeful silence, awaiting a messianic future with no specific messiah. Or giving up on the metaphysics of all Thomisms, we dare to speak of a “God without Being” in the space opened up by agapic love, the Eucharistic gift that is utterly gratuitous. The variety of options bedazzles us and in the end we stand condemned to the tyranny of our own choices and the contingencies of our autobiographies,   �������������������� Regina M. Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997).   ������������������������������������������������������������������������������� H. Richard N iebuhr, “The Doctrine of the Trinity and the Unity of the Church.” Theology Today 3 (1946–47):371–84., idem, “Theological Unitarianisms.” Theology Today 40 (1983–84):150–57; idem, Radical Monotheism and Western Culture (N ew Y ork: Harper & Row, 1960); Diana Eck, Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), Chap. 3 “The N ames of God.”   ������������������������������������������������������������ John D. Caputo, “The Messianic: Waiting for the Future”, in Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (N ew Y ork: Fordham Univ. Press, 1997), 156–80. For a fuller exposition, see idem, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington, IN : Indiana Univ. Press, 1997), 117–59.   ����������������� Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being: Hors-Texte, Thomas A. Carlson, (trans.) (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991).

What was “Postliberalism”? What is the “Postliberal Perspective” Today?



constructing “God” to meet temporary needs, concerns, and styles of discourse. Pluralism collapses into contextual relativity and historicist fate, and then glides down the surfaces of life without a centre and certainty into relativism, subjectivism, and nihilism. In this new millennium, a post-metaphysical atheism (denying the “God” of western theism, the god “In Whom We Trust” on the US dollar bill) or a pluralist agnosticism appear to be the only responsible stances for those who care enough to think and pay the price for thinking. The history of critical thinking about “God” over the last three centuries seems to have reached some kind of ending in our times. What of “God” after the end of modern history as we have known it? In the light of these problems, influences, and the “sense of an ending”, the doctrine of God in late twentieth-century Christian theology underwent multiple revisions. One of those attempts flourished under the title of “postliberal”. T he term signified a group of Christian and some Jewish scholars and clergy who sought to break out of the modern, liberal paradigm of doing theology to address a new age of rapid social change and anxiety in the historic mainline (or ‘oldline’) institutions of religious and academic life. The very term “postliberal” had multiple meanings. For some it signified the end of one liberal way of doing 

 �������������������������������������������������������������������������������� For an insider’s brief account, see William C. Placher, “Postliberal Theology”, Chap. 18 in David F. Ford, (ed.) The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology in the Twentieth Century, second edn. (Cambridge, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell Pub., 1997), 343–56. Also see George Hunsinger, “Postliberal Theology”, Chap. 3 in Kevin J. Vanhoozer, (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology (N ew Y ork: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003). For selections and introductions to some of the crucial texts, see John Webster and George P. Schner, (eds), Theology After Liberalism: A Reader (Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell Pub., 2000). For a synthetic account that situates postliberalism in relation to liberationist and revisionary theologies, see David G. Kamitsuka, Theology and Contemporary Culture: Liberation, Postliberal and Revisionary Perspectives (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999). For a Roman Catholic reception, see Jeffrey C. K. Goh, Christian Tradition Today: A Postliberal Vision of Church and World, Louvain Theological and Pastoral Monographs 28 (Louvain, Belgium: Peeters Press; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000). For a neo-pragmatic revision of Lindbeck’s methodology, see C. C. Pecknold, Transforming Postliberal Theology: George Lindbeck, Pragmatism and Scripture (London and N ew Y ork: T. & T. Clark, 2005). For the reception of Lindbeck’s program in the Francophone world, see Marc Boss, Gilles Emery, and Pierre Gisel, (eds) Postlibéralisme? La ����������������������������������������������� Théologie de George Lindbeck et sa Réception (Genève: Labor et Fides, 2004). For a constructive critique of how Hans Frei and George Lindbeck were misread, see Paul J. DeHart, The Trial of the Witnesses: The Rise and Decline of Postliberal Theology (Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell Pub., 2006).   �������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Concerning Jewish philosophers influenced by Lindbeck, see Steven Kepnes, Peter Ochs, and Robert Gibbs, Reasoning After Revelation: Dialogues in Postmodern Jewish Philosophy (Boulder, CO and Oxford, UK: Westview Press, 1998).   ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� George Lindbeck wrote, “The type of theology I have in mind could also be called ‘postmodern,’ ‘postrevisionist,’ or ‘post-neo-orthodox,’ but ‘postliberal’ seems best because what I have in mind postdates the experiential-expressive approach which is the mark of



God in Postliberal Perspective

theology and being the church that had its last stand in the popularity of liberation theologies in the 1960s and 70s. For these Christians, liberalism had been at the core of their theological training and ecumenical outlook. Its fragmentation in the late 1960s and concessions to pluralism in the 1970s and 80s signalled the end of an era when political and theological liberals could influence both the church in theology and society in politics. Others who joined the postliberal cause never had a liberal bone in their bodies. Postliberal theology was their way as Evangelicals, Pentecostals, or Roman Catholics to enter the theological conversation on new terms that preserved distinctive contributions of their own traditions. This distinction between postliberals who remembered a liberal past and postliberals without a liberal heritage contributed to the confusion in theology about what it meant to claim the title. Postliberalism became another plural social reality. The postliberal moment in theology opened the door for a variety of re-readings of traditional Christian doctrines of God. On the one hand it could draw on the “first postliberal” movement in American theology, so-called neo-orthodoxy or dialectical theology (1919–1965). Along with the first postliberalism, the new movement sought to retrieve classic doctrines and practices of the faith rather than radically revising them into fashionable new forms and trendy fads. Thus it was committed to reflection on the doctrine of God in the context of trinitarian and christological confession from Early Church, Medieval, and Reformation sources. At the same time, it contributed to a new scripturalism in theology that took seriously the critical insights of post-structuralism and other pre- and postmodern ways of reading texts. The hegemony of historical criticism and the hermeneutics of Bultmann’s generation, especially the more positivist versions of its assumptions, methods, and results, were directly and seriously challenged by the second postliberal movement.10 liberal method. This technical use of the word is much broader than the ordinary one: methodological liberals may be conservative or traditionalist in theology and reactionary in social or political matters, e.g., the ‘pro-N azi Deutsche Christen’.” The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984), 135, note 1.   �������������������������������������������������������������������������� James C. Livingston, “Christian Realism: Post-Liberal American Theology”, Chap. 15 in Modern Christian Thought: From the Enlightenment to Vatican II (N ew Y ork: Macmillan; London: Collier Macmillan, 1971), 446–77.; Chap. 6 in James C. Livingston and Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, Modern Christian Thought, vol II: The Twentieth Century, second edn (Upper Saddle River, N J: Prentice Hall, 1997). 10  ����������������� Stephen E. Fowl, Engaging Scripture: A Model for Theological Interpretation (Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell Pub., 1998). Background readings are collected in Stephen E. Fowl, The Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Cambridge, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell Pub., 1997). See especially David C. Steinmetz, “The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis”, 26–38. On the problematic relation between historical-criticism and biblical narrative, see Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (N ew Haven, CT and London: Y ale Univ. Press, 1974). The debate over the appeal to biblical and Christian

What was “Postliberalism”? What is the “Postliberal Perspective” Today?



On the other hand, the new postliberalism was much more open to the contributions of past and present philosophy (first analytic and more recently postmodern philosophy) to the tasks of theology than the first postliberalism. Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and other classic figures in western philosophical theology were full partners in the postliberal conversation. The critiques of early modern (e.g., Descartes and Locke) and Enlightenment figures (e.g., Hume and Kant) by philosophers like Wittgenstein, Rorty, and MacIntyre were central to the postliberal suspicion about modernity and its projects of political and theological liberalisms. A new historicist attitude toward modernity developed that showed influences of philosophers like Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Foucault and Derrida. Since I am not an insider to the Y ale school of postliberalism, I will cite two insider definitions. In an overview chapter on “Postliberal Theology”, William Placher proposes the following four characteristics.11 I will add a fifth: 1. Postliberal theology is “non-foundationalist”. It has given up on the modern quest for foundations of certainty upon which to ground all claims to scientific or religious knowledge. Since “experience always comes already interpreted”, one cannot evaluate beliefs “by checking them against some primordial, uninterpreted experience” (344). Rather, postliberal arguments for the justification of religious beliefs tend to be holistic and seek justification by coherence rather than correspondence. They grow out of ongoing interpretive traditions, seek coherence with other shared beliefs, and periods of reflective equilibrium rather than certainty. 2. It avoids “systematic apologetics”. Given the turn away from foundations of certainty, there is no one privileged philosophy or framework in which theological claims become meaningful and true. Rather, postliberals engage in ad hoc, contextual translations and justifications of their claims reflecting the distinctiveness of Christian convictions within the wider pluralism of contemporary life. 3. Its concern is for the “differences among religions” rather than the lowest common denominator or essence behind their particulars. The turn away from foundations and systems is linked to a valorization of religious differences. As Y ale philosopher William Christian wrote of interfaith dialogue: “understanding one another does not always lead to agreement and … respect for one another does not depend on agreement” (345). . “It emphasizes the scriptural stories … by which Christians identify God and the Christian community and come to understand their own lives” (345). This fourth characteristic grows out of two practices: the first is, “attending to the shape of the biblical texts as we have them, especially the structures narratives in theology is collected in Stanley Hauerwas and L. Gregory Jones, (eds.) Why Narrative? Readings in Narrative Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Pub., 1997). 11  �������������������������������������������������������������������������������� William Placher, “Postliberal Theology.” Hereafter citations are in parentheses.



God in Postliberal Perspective

of their narratives, utilizing techniques analogous to those of literary critics” (344). The second practice is, “thinking about the relations of biblical texts to the communities that read them – how the narratives shape the identities of those communities, their members, and their understandings of the God they worship” (ibid.). 5. A “generous orthodoxy”. I add a fifth characteristic to this list. Many postliberals share a concern for what Hans Frei (1922–1988) called a “generous orthodoxy” in theology and church. Their turn away from the liberal tradition is motivated by a sense of loss, of a fall that occurred in modernity. Frei’s account of the eclipse of biblical narrative in early modern hermeneutics, Michael Buckley’s story in At the Origins of Modern Atheism of the turn toward metaphysical and scientific foundations alone for belief in God in early modern theology, and Placher’s narrative of the domestication of transcendence in modern doctrines of God all speak to this sense: today we do theology after a great fall. Breaking that fall, recovering part of what was lost, then, sets the agenda for postliberal theology. For Frei that meant learning how to read biblical narrative in ways in which readers become figures within the storied world. For Buckley it means recovering christology, pneumatology, and the history of Christian experience as the proper testimony to faith in God. For Placher it means relearning the dialectic of the hidden and revealed God known to the generations of Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin. This is a generous orthodoxy because its roots are ecumenical. It engages in a critical study of the history of Christian thought to uncover the contingent and contextual decisions that shape our present sense of constraint. It mines those same historical veins to imagine new possibilities for reading the Bible and tradition on different terms today. Another way to characterize postliberal theology on its own terms comes from Hans Frei’s five types of Christian theology.12 T his is de.nition by contrast with four major alternatives to the postliberal way. For the sake of brevity I will follow David Ford’s summary of the five types:13 Type 1: The first type falls on the extreme end of the continuum. It gives first importance to a “contemporary philosophy, worldview, or practical agenda” and approaches theology on those terms. Thus Ford summarizes, … [Type 1] treats Christian theology from the outside, coming to it with a mind … already made up and simply using [theology] within its own framework where 12  ������������ Hans W. Frei, Types of Christian Theology, George Hunsinger and William Placher, (eds) (N ew Haven, CT: Y ale Univ. Press, 1992). 13  ������������� David F. Ford, Theology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), 20–29. Hereafter citations are in parentheses.

What was “Postliberalism”? What is the “Postliberal Perspective” Today?



it fits. Y et [this type] represents a very common attitude to … theology in our culture: assuming it is outdated, untrue, immoral, or imaginatively restrictive, approving of it when it fits one’s own framework, but not having any serious dialogue with theology or allowing it any practical influence. Often it is simply ignorant of the best in theology, and is working with caricatures of Christianity; but, even when it is well informed, it frequently displays … the ‘superiority complex’ of much modernity (22–3).

Frei’s primary case study for this rationalist type is Gordon Kaufman. Here theology becomes “a philosophical discipline, and its endeavour to grapple with specific Christian … self-description is not only subordinate to, but undertaken as part of, a general intellectual-cultural inquiry.”14 The academy and an abstract concept of “western culture” become the primary contexts for doing theology. Type 5: The fifth type falls at the other extreme end of the continuum. This is an “attempt to repeat a scriptural worldview, classic theology, or traditional version of Christianity, and to see all reality in those terms”. Contemporary philosophy, worldviews, or agenda are rejected. “Type 1 cuts off dialogue because it is convinced of the superiority of its own external framework; Type 5 cuts off dialogue because it is convinced that some internal Christian framework is sufficient” (23). Some forms of fundamentalism exemplify this type. But a certain appeal to Wittgenstein’s notion of language games and forms of life as macro phenomena also fits. Ford summarizes this version of Type 5: … we are all involved in complex ‘languages’ through which our understanding, behavior, and imagination are shaped. Christianity is one such language game, it has its own integrity, and you should not judge it by the rules of other games any more than you would apply the rules of chess to tennis. Therefore it cannot be adequately explained in terms of other language games such as … [naturalism, rationalism, Islam, etc.] The task of theology is to make clear what sort of ‘game’ Christianity is and to draw the consequences for living within it. It is pointless to try to justify Christian faith in alien terms – that would be to switch games (24).

Frei’s primary example of a Wittgensteinian philosopher within this type is D. Z. Phillips. Type 2: Between these two extremes fall three other types that represent what Ford considers the mainstream of academic theology (24). The second type … takes external frameworks seriously but also wants to engage with what is distinctive in Christian theology. Among the external philosophies and worldviews some are more suited to Christian faith than others. Why not choose  ������ Frei, Types of Christian Theology, 30.

14

God in Postliberal Perspective



one of these and then apply it to understanding C hristianity and showing how faith makes sense and is relevant today? (24–25).

Ford’s example of Type 2 is Bultmann’s turn to existentialist philosophy as the framework into which the Christian message should be translated in order to communicate with so-called “modern humanity” in our scientific era. “The mark of Bultmann’s strategy is … the use of contemporary thought to reinterpret what he sees as the core of the Gospel and to abandon the rest” (25). Frei’s example is the hermeneutic-phenomenological approach of David Tracy in Blessed Rage for Order. The historical and hermeneutical search for this core or the essential elements to be translated into the chosen contemporary framework is one sign of the liberal spirit at work in Type 2 theologies. Type 3: The third type falls in the middle of the continuum where it refuses to privilege any one framework for its translation project. Its formula is: “avoid any systematic way of relating Christianity and other forms of understanding, and instead set up dialogues between them” (26). The method here is ‘correlation’: one should “correlate issues raised by Christian faith and practice with other approaches to those issues. Until you enter into the dialogues you cannot predict what will be most illuminating” (ibid). Whereas existentialism may enable a correlation of “human anxiety and insecurity” with the Gospel, it may be of little use in correlating issues of cosmology and God as Creator. Ford’s example is Tillich’s project to “correlate faith with culture.” Frei’s case study is Schleiermacher although he admits that he may not fit Type 3. According to Frei, Schleiermacher’s theology sought to answer the question, “How is Christian self-description related to external descriptions of Christianity?”15 In the prolegomena to The Christian Faith, his method is to lead the reader “more and more toward a place where you will replicate, as it were from your own inside or by placing yourself within the conspectus of religious life, what he has been saying to you as a kind of didactic specialist”.16 Schleiermacher seeks to retain the integrity of Christian self-description while correlating it with external descriptions of Christian experience and expression, e.g., philosophical, phenomenological, or historical accounts that are offered within the academy. The two forms of description are “autonomous yet reciprocally related”.17 Ford describes Type 3 as a “middle way”. According to its critics, theologians like Schleiermacher and Tillich had great difficulty maintaining the balance between faith and culture, between Christian self-description and external accounts. Type 4: The fourth type is the postliberal approach. It gives first importance to Christian self-description. Seeking to avoid the extreme of Type 5, it “still insists that no other framework should be able to dictate how to understand the main 15

 ��������� Ibid. 35.  ��������� Ibid. 36. 17  ��������� Ibid. 38. 16

What was “Postliberalism”? What is the “Postliberal Perspective” Today?



contents of Christian faith” as in the extreme of Type 1. Lindbeck once called this approach “Anselmian scripturalism”. “It is ‘faith seeking understanding’, basically trusting the main lines of classic Christian testimony to God and the Gospel, but also entering into a wide range of dialogues” like Type 3. It considers Type 3 as “inherently unstable: there can be no neutral standpoint from which to carry on dialogues, and therefore there has to be a basic commitment either for or against Christian faith.” This type of theology “acknowledges a basic commitment in faith, but also the need continually to test it and relate it to other positions.” For Type 4 postliberals, according to Ford: Christian faith is not just an intellectual position, but is also a way of life in a community that stretches around the world and down the centuries. If you live in that community, you cannot pretend to be neutral yet you will want to seek truth wherever it is found, and type 4 is one way of doing this. If you are not a Christian you may still value type 4 highly because you want to know what an intelligent mainstream Christian understanding is like in order to be clear what there is to agree or disagree with (27).

Both Frei and Ford offer Karl Barth as the case study in Type 4 theology. Indeed, much postliberal theology is pursued in the shadow of Barth (1886–1968). If we return to the five characteristics of postliberal theology with which we began, Barth’s influence is pervasive. Although a reader of Barth’s doctrine of revelation in Church Dogmatics I/1 would hardly characterize him as a nonfoundationalist who had given up on certainty as a mark of the knowledge of faith, his way of doing theology avoids certain forms of foundationalism. As Frei notes, “Barth leaves absolutely no doubt that for him, unlike Schleiermacher, fundamental theology … is internal to, part of, the dogmatic enterprise. It is not a procedure for correlating theology to other disciplines in the academic spectrum.”18 Barth refused to build his dogmatics on the foundations of (a) natural theology; (b) systematic metaphysics; (c) historicist recoveries of Jesus; (d) an existentialist anthropology per se. This refusal prefigures the postliberal turn toward nonfoundational epistemology. The refusal to offer a systematic apologetics is also prefigured in Barth’s famous debate with Emil Brunner over natural theology. His ad hoc approach to engaging thinkers from other traditions and frameworks within the excursuses of Church Dogmatics and in his “irregular dogmatic” writings is a model for postliberals. Barth not only accentuated the differences between religions but also the differences between different expressions of Christian doctrine and forms of theology. In fact, he attempted to claim a critical difference between God’s revelation in Christ and all forms of human religion, including Christianity. When my students in Chicago read Barth for the first time, they are often struck by how 18

 ��������� Ibid. 39.

10

God in Postliberal Perspective

much he shares in common with his partners in debate but how often he underrates their common ground. His theological exegesis of biblical narrative is also a model for postliberals. His attempt to understand all reality and all Christian doctrine in light of a biblicalnarrative world centred on Jesus Christ inspired Frei’s notion of absorbing the world of human experience into the world of scriptural stories. Finally the postliberal goal of a generous orthodoxy is modelled by Barth’s attempt to write a theology that is scriptural, contextually modern, and ecclesial for persons engaged in church and society. In his doctrine of Scripture in Church Dogmatics I/2, Barth does not cast out historical-criticism but claims it as a necessary preparation for theological exegesis. N or does Barth confine himself to mere repetition of previous dogmas, e.g., he reverses the traditional order by treating God as Trinity before he takes up the doctrine of divine unity. And within his doctrine of God, he engages in a creative, christocentric recasting of divine election, a work of theological critique and revision of Calvin and reformed notions of predestination. If these are some of the characteristics of postliberalism, what are some of the challenges facing the doctrine of God today that should concern postliberals at some level? Here are six of the most important: Appeals to realism and other challenges Challenge 1:  As it turned away from the apologetic and accommodating approaches of liberal theology, postliberal theology was called to task for its account of Christian truth-claims under the issues of reference and rationality.19 Were second wave postliberal accounts of the justification of faith in God any less circular and question-begging than so-called neo-orthodox appeals to special revelation? Didn’t the privileged postliberal categories like narrative, community, identity, character, and tradition become inflated with meanings that simply ignored issues of historical-critical scholarship, academic freedom, the segmentation of life in secular societies, and the renewed influence of science, technology, and global capitalism in every sector of life? At bottom, were not postliberals subject to a fideism, relativism, and sectarianism inspired by Wittgenstein’s over-simplified accounts of language-games and forms of life? Finally, was it accidental that these neo-liberal charges of fideism, relativism, and tribalism came in the midst of the resurgence of Islam on the field of politics and debates over multi-cultural curricula in public and theological education? Challenge 2:  The neo-liberal reaction to postliberal accounts of the justification of faith in God was joined by conservative theological voices. In their accounts of Scripture, doctrine, authority, and God, postliberals sounded like non-realists 19  ����������������� Mark I. Wallace, The Second Naiveté: Barth, Ricoeur, and the New Yale Theology (Macon, GA: Mercer Univ. Press, 1990), Chap. 4, “The N ew Y ale Theology”.

What was “Postliberalism”? What is the “Postliberal Perspective” Today?

11

to many readers who were otherwise sympathetic to their critiques of modernity and liberal revisionism.20 In some ways, this was due to the confusion over the meaning of The Nature of Doctrine by Lindbeck. What the author intended was a pre-theological account of the nature of doctrine in a variety of religious and cultural settings, a kind of neo-Thomistic natural theology of doctrine as a cross-cultural religious practice. When this pre-theological account was read as a positive theological account of the authority and reference of Christian doctrines per se, confusion multiplied. The fact that most of Lindbeck’s examples were drawn from Christian sources did not help. And the fact that some postliberals then used this account to try to solve intra-Christian theological problems of methodology, hermeneutics, and doctrine only compounded the confusion. As an exercise in meta-theological reflection, The Nature of Doctrine solved or resolved little for Christian theologians working on specific doctrines per se, or questions like the status of experience as subject matter for doing theology (an issue better addressed by N icholas Lash in conversation with Lindbeck).21 However, for theologians engaged in ecumenical and interfaith dialogue, the text became an invaluable resource for focusing the conversation in new ways that responded to a late modern awareness of cultural dynamics and theological openness to both classic and contemporary insights. Challenge 3:  Internal to postliberalism, Ronald Thiemann summarized the issue of the knowability of God most succinctly: How can we claim to have knowledge of God? If we bring God into a context dominated by our categories and concepts, we treat him as if he were simply another object among the many objects we know through rational schematization. If we set God outside that framework and allow him to create his own conditions and content of knowledge, then we cannot say how it is that we know him. The former option denies God his divinity; the latter denies us our humanity.22

This neo-Kantian formulation of the very problem of the knowability of God (rational schematization vs subjective appropriation and the trace of subject/object dualism) reveals one way in which postliberalism was still a liberalism or form of modern reflection about God. Once this neo-Kantian way of setting up the problem is called into question, postliberalism must encounter other ways of imagining the 20  ������������������������������������������������� Timothy R. Phillips and Dennis L. Okholm, (eds), The Nature of Confession: Evangelicals and Postliberals in Conversation (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996). See especially Chap. 3 by Miroslav Volf, “Theology, Meaning and Power: A Conversation with George Lindbeck on Theology and the N ature of Christian Difference”, and the essays in “Part III Realism and Foundationalism”. 21  ��������������� N icholas Lash, Easter in Ordinary: Reflections on Human Experience and the Knowledge of God (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1988). 22  �������������������� Ronald F. Thiemann, Revelation and Theology: The Gospel as Narrated Promise (N otre Dame, IN : Univ. of N otre Dame Press, 1985), 42–3.

God in Postliberal Perspective

12

reality of God and the meaning of faith’s knowledge of God – how did postliberal theology relate itself to the revision of notions of realism and non-realism going on in other disciplines, e.g., the philosophy of science (Kuhn-Feyerabend-Lakatos debates), cross-cultural studies of rationality and realism in the social sciences, the postmodern critique of truth, objective knowledge, and universality as false totalizations and expressions of power relations, and post-structuralist literary criticism which focused on ways readers construct the meanings of texts rather than discover a normative author’s intended meaning? In Thiemann’s case, he appealed to a new version of the doctrine of revelation which was explicitly trinitarian and claimed to find in Matthew’s gospel a scriptural ground for his claim that “the selfdifferential unity we observe in God’s narrative relations is a reiteration of God’s inner but hidden identity”.23 But can his assumption that “the world depicted by the Bible is the only real world” survive critical scrutiny, especially in an interfaith and secular age with access to much more historicist ways of interpreting biblical narratives, placing in sharp relief the fragility of postliberalism in the old-line churches, the late modern academy and society?24 Challenge 4:  From the perspective of political theology, other questions were raised. Given postliberalism’s appearance at a time of neo-conservatism in western politics (the era of Reagan, Bush and Thatcher, the collapse of Communism, and the crisis of the international Left) and in religious institutions (e.g., the backlash against feminism, the formal exclusion of gay and lesbian Christians from many church offices, and the emergence of neo-Evangelical and Pentecostal mega-churches and global movements), wasn’t this scholarly movement another manifestation of conservative reaction against the pluralism and secularity of the late modern age, and the decline of the influence of religious elites and churchrelated institutions? Challenge 5:  The internal political and ecclesiological pluralism of postliberals themselves became an issue. While some were attracted to the congregational turn among Protestants newly opened to the witness of the Anabaptist tradition, others sought to shore up notions of civic responsibility and critical citizenship among the faithful. Where is the true church or congregation in which faith in God is well-formed? What are the relationships of such congregations to a plural, interfaith society? Were postliberals called to a new Christian “realism” in politics, a utopianism like the liberationists, or a radical critique and rejection of liberal and liberationist Christian thought about society?25 These issues had both practical and theoretical implications since the postliberal turn away from the quest for

23

 ���������� Ibid. 139.  ��������� Ibid. 85. 25  ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Two postliberals who strongly disagreed on these issues were Ronald F. Thiemann, Constructing a Public Theology: The Church in a Pluralistic Culture (Louisville, KY : Westminster John Knox Press, 1991) and Stanley Hauerwas, In Good Company: The Church as Polis (N otre Dame, IN : Univ. of N otre Dame Press, 1995). 24

What was “Postliberalism”? What is the “Postliberal Perspective” Today?

13

foundations of religious certainty was redirected toward a new pilgrimage in faithfulness toward integrity, truthfulness as a virtue, and sanctity. Challenge 6:  How would postliberal theology relate itself to the presence and contributions of women, persons of colour, heterodox/heretical thinkers, and others who have been historically excluded or silenced in the church and academe? What difference, if any, would the histories and concerns of these persons make to postliberal reflections on God? In its retrievals of classic Christian doctrines and practices, what did postliberalism need to confess and seek forgiveness for in the presence of “others” and the God of its biblical faith? How would the “generous orthodoxy” of postliberalism be different from past orthodoxies and their complicity with social and ecclesial structures of domination and violation?26 Among these issues, I focus on the conversation and debate over realism and non-realism in postliberal accounts of faith in God for today. The other issues will be introduced to remind the reader of the historical and social location of postliberalism as a theological movement in search of a church, academy, and even a society to embody its convictions without being watered down into a new flavour of the old liberal soup. In Chapter 1, I recount some high points in the transition from the theology of “the death of God” in the 1960s to the renewal of trinitarian doctrine in Christian theology today. This chapter wagers that the “God” who died for many intellectuals and secular folk in the last century was the “God” of western theism, a conflation of elements both biblical, Hellenic, Roman, and modern. However, this “God” is not necessarily the same reality that Christians address in worship, prayer, and witness as “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”, or in more functional terms as “Creator, Liberator, and Transformer”. This other “God” or divine reality constrains Christian speech and action in ways that make a difference to Christian social and personal practices in the world. The second chapter unpacks the cultural-linguistic turn in postliberal theology by a detailed exegesis of George Lindbeck’s rule theory of doctrine and its implications for the doctrine of God as Trinity. The influence of Wittgenstein’s theory of meaning, language-games, and forms of life for Lindbeck are explored. Chapter 3 explicates both philosophically and theologically what is meant by realism and its other (imagination or non-realism) today. The contributions of Hilary Putnam, William P. Alston, Karl Barth, and Ian Barbour to this conversation are noted. In particular I focus on how theological discourse invites the suspension of our modern and late modern disbelief in the reality of things divine in ways similar to how fictional works invite the suspension of our disbelief. The pervasiveness of common sense realism among many Christian believers when we refer to God is qualified by an account of the realism internal to trinitarian forms of life. O n my 26

 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������� “ … we need a kind of generous orthodoxy” in “Response to ‘N arrative Theology: An Evangelical Appraisal,’” in Hans W. Frei, Theology and Narrative: Selected Essays, George Hunsinger and William C. Placher, (eds) (N ew Y ork and Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), 208.

God in Postliberal Perspective

14

account, both human beings and God are co-constructors of language addressed to God and about God. Thus I offer a qualified realist account of Christian Godtalk. The fourth chapter looks closely at three postliberal accounts of the being of God: • •

•

David Burrell’s linguistic retrieval of Thomas Aquinas’ concept of God and the contributions of other medieval Jewish, Muslim, and Christian philosophers; William C. Placher’s reconstruction of early modern theology as a “fall” away from the insights of Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin into the transcendence of God which still shadow notions of Christian pan-en-theism, pantheism, and the cosiness of much popular Christian discourse today. Bruce Marshall’s explication and presentation of trinitarian truth-claims in modes of discourse appropriated by neo-analytic philosophy that allows him to read Aquinas, Luther, and Barth as his postliberal contemporaries.

Chapter 5 explores both non-realist and quasi-realist accounts of the doctrine and concept of God. Garrett Green’s work on imagination as the point of mediation between God’s revelation and human being is explored as a postliberal alternative to both modern objectivism and nihilistic relativism. Don Cupitt’s version of nonrealism poses an alternative account to the postliberal one. This chapter concludes with the dilemma posed by both Cupitt and Green’s sense of loyalty to their own frameworks of inquiry. Chapter 6 offers a summary of why the realist vs non-realist debate matters to theology today. In the controversy between realism and non-realism a middle way was opened up by a quite different “postliberal” theology: the “postliberal empirical realism” of Bernard Meland (1899-1993). Drawing upon resources from N orth American philosophies of religion, Meland’s theology avoids both the nonrealism of Cupitt and the supernaturalism of some forms of theological realism. Rather than dismiss the liberal tradition as passé, he sought to revise and restore it through a fresh engagement with the natural and social sciences, a cosmology of emergence, and the emphasis on worship contributed by dialectical theology. Meland’s example is posed as a challenge to contemporary postliberal theologians to think in terms of a new understanding of creation and our Redeeming Creator.

Chapter 1

The Christian Doctrine of God in the Late T wentieth C entury From the “Death of God” to the Renaissance of Trinitarian Re.ection The modern conflicts between theistic religions and anti-theism raise issues that fall in the space between realism and imagination. On the one hand, believers in God find in their lives and communities a sense of constraint: that to which the word “God” refers is more real, substantial, essential, categorical, and enduring than our passing lives and civilizations. On the other hand, there are both believers and sceptics who recognize the indispensable role of imagination in all talk about God. For the sceptic, “God” is a product of human imagination without remainder, and thus “God” in most traditional senses of that concept is dead. For thinkers in theistic traditions, God’s reality cannot be just one more thing or being in our world. Y et what scepticism has failed to overcome thus far is that sense of constraint, “where our not-knowing must be our mode of knowing, where we make symbols and images, then destroy them, and make other ones, as we see now in our own time”. Some future historian of the late twentieth century may wonder how the “death of God” proclaimed by theologians, philosophers, and cultural critics so quickly became one more option on the intellectual menu of pluralistic western societies. In the 1960s there was a growing recognition within academe that both traditional theistic conceptions of “God” and the proclamations of dialectical theologians were losing credibility. But in the decades that followed, the doctrine of God 

 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� These words are spoken by a fictional Socrates in Iris Murdoch, “Above the Gods: A Dialogue about Religion”, 525.   ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� When the word “God” is in quotations, I refer to one concept or image or symbol of God among others. Or, “God” in quotations refers to a human imagined construction of the meaning of God. Gordon Kaufman refers to this as “the ‘available’ God”. When the word God is without quotations, I refer to that most important or ultimate reality for which the word “God” is a sign or symbol. For many Christians, “God” is an inclusive symbol for the Trinity, the God of Israel, Jesus, and the early church, the One who is Creator, Liberator, and Sanctifier of all. For Muslims, “God” is a word that signifies Allah, the one God revealed through the prophets to Jews, Christians, and Muslims. For many Jews, “God” refers to “Ha-Shem”, the one whose N ame is sacred above all. Gordon Kaufman refers to this as “the ‘real’ God”. I employ this distinction in a heuristic way without committing myself to the Kantian framework that grounds it for Kaufman. See Kaufman, God the Problem (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1972), 169–70, fn. 13.

16

God in Postliberal Perspective

underwent a pluralization as new cultural and gendered voices constructed new images of “God” and Christian theology rediscovered its own trinitarian roots. Certainly the “death of God” signalled a crisis of confidence in western theism as it had evolved in the social world of advanced technological societies. What do I mean by “theism”? A compact philosophical definition is that “Theism signifies belief in one God (theos) who is (a) personal, (b) worthy of admiration, and (c) separate from the world but (d) continuously active in it”. Here is a fuller definition offered by one of my students: “God is revealed in the Bible like an infinite and eternal being that exists in itself and that is the first Cause of all that exists …” The attributes of this “God” include “… eternity, sovereignty, omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, immutability, justice, sanctity and grace”. To this list could be added the attributes of aseity (‘God’ exists of and from ‘himself’ alone) and divine simplicity: “God” has no parts or passions and is unified ontologically. To immutability we could add impassibility: this “God” can neither change nor suffer for “he” already has all the great-making metaphysical properties and thus does not need to grow, change, or evolve. The fact that this “God” cannot change or suffer also means that “he” ultimately cannot be affected by anything that happens in the world, and therefore does not need the world in a fundamental way. Because “he” is omnipotent, this “God” controls all things through primary (supernatural) and secondary (natural) causes. Being eternal and self-sufficient, this “God” created the cosmos out of nothing. For if anything were co-eternal with “him” or preceded creation, that being, matter, or energy would be a potential competitor or equal to this “God”. “He” is the source of all truth, justice, order and well-being. How did this grand “God” of theism become proclaimed as “dead”? The loss of credibility by traditional arguments for the existence of this “God” and sermons demanding tremendous leaps of faith, the process of secularization in growing urban regions, the eclipse of nature and traditional rural-agricultural life, Marxist and counter-cultural revolutions, and the growing set of options offered by pluralistic societies promised a new secular age of widespread agnosticism and atheism. The resurgence of radical traditionalist movements in Judaism, Christianity and Islam signals that this crisis of confidence is still with us as new generations seek certitudes for faith in our hyper-modern age. While the “death of God” theologians and social scientists were wrong about the inevitable secularization of the world in ways they could not imagine, the globalization of the world’s religions and the growing interfaith movement challenges any easy confidence in inherited images and doctrines of “God”. Michael Welker has described this social and intellectual transformation as “the collapse of classical bourgeois theism and the crisis of religious existence”. Although widely noted and commented upon, what has failed to attract adequate

  ��������������������������������������������� H. P. Owen, “Theism”, in Paul Edwards, (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London: Collier Macmillan; N ew Y ork: Macmillan, 1967), 8:97.

The Christian Doctrine of God in the Late Twentieth Century

17

attention is how twentieth-century Christian theology both contributed to and continuously responded to this collapse: The major churches in Europe, and partly in N orth American as well, are currently experiencing [this] collapse … More and more people are turning away from belief in a personal figure who exists over and above this world, who has brought forth both himself and all reality, and who controls and defines “everything” without distinction. They no longer affirm the omnipotence and ubiquity of God. This collapse, which naturally gives rise to powerful countermovements – for example, fundamentalist ones – is hitting churches and cultures hard. Many institutions and many people are experiencing a crisis of landslide proportions. Laments over this development mostly overlook the fact that almost all significant theologies of the twentieth century have actually worked toward this collapse. This has been a deliberate goal in the thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Jürgen Moltmann, in many theologies of liberation, and in almost all feminist theologies. At least initial steps in this direction have occurred in the work of Karl Barth, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Eberhard Jüngel, and David Tracy, in process theologies, and in other thinkers and developments.

The world after 11 September 2001 is even more uncertain and suspicious about the future effects of radically resurgent theistic faith. “Monotheism” itself has been charged with contributing to both the crisis in international politics and the ecological dangers facing the biosphere. The turn toward “constructivism” in postmodern philosophy and theology has also contributed to the fragility of traditional conceptions of “God”. The critiques of Euro-American God-talk as inherently biased toward white, male, and imperial perspectives have produced a growing number of “reconstructions” of the concept and doctrine of God by feminists, liberationists, and post-colonial theologians. In the context of late modern pluralism and scepticism, the lingering doubt about these hopeful revisions of the doctrine of God is suggested by their own methods of deconstructing traditional God-talk. If the Euro-American “God” of theism is a construction of white, male experience, then why not reduce the new “reconstructions of God” to the experiential limits of their authors (women, Diaspora Africans, Hispanics, Asians, sexual minorities, etc.)? “God” as merely the reflection of the experience of a majority or minority group fails to point toward what is most important in reality, regardless of the sins of past and present oppressors. In the shadows of Feuerbach, Barth, and Mary Daly, the role of realism and the place of imagination draw our attention to what it means to speak about “God” and to God in this new millennium.

  ���������������� Michael Welker, Creation and Reality, (trans.) John F. Hoffmeyer (Minneapolis, MN : Augsburg Fortress Press, 1999), 1.

God in Postliberal Perspective

18

Whose “God” Died in the 1960s? – Theism and Its Discontents The wealth of revisions of the concept and doctrine of God since the 1960s and the renewal of religious life across the globe suggest that the “death of God” was a more highly contextual affair than first imagined. Which “God” or whose “god” died in the modern world? From the perspective of different communities of faith, the “God” who died was primarily a reference to other people’s gods, e.g., the “God” of western civil religion or the “God” of philosophical theism. For resurgent Islam, global Pentecostalism, Latin American base communities, or Protestant evangelicals, the reality of the one true God was never at stake or threatened by the proclamation of the “death of God”. Their struggle and the struggle of many other believers is how to articulate and testify to God in an age when agnosticism and atheism are not merely schools of thought but ways of life for many educated elites in positions of power. The issues are not only theoretical today in terms of arguments for and against belief in God. N ew attention has been brought to bear on not only the contents of the word or symbol “God” but also on the discontents of belief in God. What differences have faith in “God” made for human existence in the past, present, and future? Does faith in God contribute to the flourishing of nature and human communities? Or, in fact does faith in God author forms of human domination and submission that contribute to the destruction of the planet and the heteronomy of social life, e.g., how have the three western monotheisms contributed to the subjection of nature and women to a second-class existence where “God” is modelled on the image of royal male control, or the intimate bond of father and son? What has traditional faith in “God” done for the liberation of women from the gender roles of rural-agricultural societies? How has belief in “God” as “Creator of Heaven and Earth” contributed to the subjection of nature as a warehouse of resources for human projects, both industrial and now genetic? Finally, how have the western monotheisms contributed to forms of religious exclusivism that underwrite violence and persecution in the name of “the one true God”? Faith in God as “Creator of Heaven and Earth” provides numerous examples of how the concepts of theism have contributed to the alienation of biblical interpretation, theology, and the natural sciences. The fusion of theism with Jewish, Christian, and Islamic readings of the creation stories spawned a problematic set of assumptions that still show up in public debates over the teaching of evolution, so-called ‘creation science’, and intelligent design in public schools. T hese assumptions include: • •

There is only one creation story in the Bible; Creation was a past event – only primordial;

  ��������������������������������������������� See, for an example of this, Langdon Gilkey, Creationism on Trial: Evolution and God at Little Rock (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985; revised edition, Charlottesville, VA, University Press of Virginia, 1998).

The Christian Doctrine of God in the Late Twentieth Century

• • • • • • •

19

The creation stories only deal with beginnings, origins, or protology; Faithful Jews, Christians, and Muslims cannot both affirm the evolution of the cosmos and living species and confess faith in God / Allah as Creator – that these beliefs contradict each other or conflict; Creation is about nature, but culture and society are unrelated to what the Bible calls creation; Genesis 1 teaches creatio ex nihilo, or creation out of nothing; God alone creates and creatures cannot create (an implication of creatio ex nihilo); The terms “myth” and “demythologizing” are always negative terms that should not be used to refer to the Bible and its creation stories; Biblical creation stories are directly comparable to scientific explanatory theories of cosmic and biological history both in terms of their scope and method of confirmation.

In light of these and other conflicts in modern thought (traditional use of biblical narratives versus historical research, distinctions between ancient and modern morality around issues of gender, sexual orientation, leadership roles in church and family, etc.), it may be argued that the collapse of classical theism and its collusion with biblical authority has been a necessary condition for the liberation of modern thought, social life, and the reading of the Bible for millions of educated people. Problematizing the Symbol “God”: Kaufman’s Thorough-Going Critique In Anglo-American context, one theologian who has sustained attention on these issues for three decades is Gordon Kaufman. The publication in 1972 of God the Problem helped to mark the end of the era of so-called “neo-orthodoxy” and the opening of a new chapter for Protestant liberal theology in a time of even greater pluralism, eclecticism, and resurgent traditionalism. In 10 ways, Kaufman found that the symbol “God” had become a problem, not only for sceptics, but especially for philosophers and theologians whose task it is to interpret the meaning and truth-status of our God-talk. Uses of the God-symbol raise the following problems: 1. Semantic problems: “God” as a noun defines that transcendent reality which has no specific location in the cosmos or our experience. God as “Creator of heaven and earth” cannot be confined or reduced to any cosmic or human reality. As the ultimate object of faith, God is unique and distinguished   ������������ See Welker, Creation and Reality for an alternative biblical theology of creation that takes into account modern cosmology and a post-critical reading of Genesis 1–3.   ������������������� Gordon D. Kaufman, God the Problem, 9–15. Specific pages numbers for each way are cited in the text in parentheses after their summary.

God in Postliberal Perspective

20

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

from all specific human values, loyalties, or commitments in this world. But if this is the case, then “God” the noun is so unique that it refers to no specific human experience or object of our experience. Therefore, is the word “God” meaningful at all? Does it make cognitive sense for us still to use the word “God” if we cannot by definition locate its referent anywhere in the world? (7) Conceptual or metaphysical questions: If “God” by definition transcends the world of our experience, then what positive conceptions can we have of God? Just like the Kantian Ding-an-sich, an unknowable X, God hides beyond the limits of our historically conditioned categories, forms of experience, and culturally constructed languages. Secondly, how are we to understand the relation or interaction of this “God-in-himself” to the cosmos and the evolutionary, historical world we indwell? Here the many debates between naturalistic accounts of reality versus supernaturalistic pictures of “God” come into play. Should we offer naturalistic or supernaturalistic accounts of divine activity in our scientific-technological age? (10) Methodological issues: Given that it has become so difficult to know with confidence how we are to think about God and what to think of God, how do we even begin the task of theological reflection today? Further, how do we worship or pray to an unknowable X, to a God who is not only greater than we can conceive, but also unconceivable, beyond all human conceptions? (11) Epistemological issues: If God exists, how is such a transcendent One knowable by us? Via religious experience? Ordinary experience and scientific accounts of nature? Scripture, tradition and the community of faith? Self-revelation? Arguments for divine existence? What do we mean by “revelation”, and how do we recognize it? Is our knowledge of God grounded in nature, in revelation, or both? How is our natural knowledge of God related to specially revealed knowledge of God? (11) Interfaith issues: How should the Judeo-, Christian, and Islamic concept of God be related to non-western concepts of ultimate reality? What unique contribution does the western notion of “God” as a conscious, transcendent agent have to make to the dialogue of the world’s religions and cultures? (12) Existential issues: Divine “hiddenness” poses problems for the life of faith itself. God’s presence and activity appear as mysterious, elusive, and occasional even among the faithful. Given the traditional divine attributes of greatness, goodness, and reality, why do the spiritual life and disciplines fail to fulfil the personal quests of so many believers and seekers? Why do so many clergy report dryness and bankruptcy in their spiritual lives today? (12) Our experience and problem of evil: Before the multiplicity of natural and moral evils, in the face of genocide, global hunger, and ecological destruction, how can believers continue to confess that God loves everyone, is full

The Christian Doctrine of God in the Late Twentieth Century

21

of compassion, and wills the well-being of creation? What justifies such confidence in God in the face of evils abounding? Doesn’t our experience of evil, pain, and suffering (both in our own and other species) propose that God is malevolent rather than benevolent, given God’s authorship of the world and divine power? How can we still sing the hymn, “This is my Father’s world” in all honesty? (13) 8. Problems of human autonomy and responsibility: The traditional doctrine of God proposes that the divine will commands our obedience and that we are to conform our lives to God’s moral pattern. But isn’t this one more way of avoiding our own freedom and responsibility for our lives and the lives of others? Does traditional faith in God undercut one of the necessary conditions of human morality and ethics, our own autonomy and accountability for our own behaviour? What if faith in such a “God” actually contributes to human passivity and irresponsibility when we need to be engaged in confronting the social evils of our day? (13–14) 9. Technical theological problems or paradoxes: How are we to explain the divine Trinity as three Persons in one Substance; Christ as both divine and human; biblical anthropomorphism versus philosophical attributes of transcendent greatness; and the relation of God’s attributes to one another? (14) 10. “‘God’ is dead” but ‘God’ will not leave us alone: God’s very elusiveness, dubiousness, and problematical nature calls upon us to engage these issues with the best resources of our culture and traditions. Even in the face of a problematic “God”, many still struggle to believe, obey, and think through the meaning and truth about God for our day. For this symbol has been too important, pervasive, and basic to our ways of life and understanding of the world and the human condition to be easily left behind and forgotten. In fact, “God” is the most significant symbol of western culture and no adequate replacement has yet to appear. (14) It is striking that Kaufman, a self-confessed Christian theologian, initially engages with these problems with little or no reference to Christian resources that respond to them. The realities interpreted by christology, pneumatology, sacramentology, and ecclesiology as “points of contact” between believers and what we refer to as “God” stand in the margins while a philosophic theology tries to address the problems before other theological constructions can proceed. Of course, Kaufman understands these “points of contact” to be so shot through with traditional, problematic assumptions that they cannot function directly as theological resources for us today. This shyness toward specific Christian resources is related to his later problems with the whole representation of God as a personal agent in the Bible and church doctrine.

22

God in Postliberal Perspective

Over 20 years after God the Problem, Kaufman’s one-volume constructive theology appeared, In Face of Mystery. While recognizing the continued central significance of the model of God as a personal agent for Christianity, a notion he sought to reconstruct and defend in God the Problem, he now found this model beyond reconstruction. First, the personal divine agent can be imagined as a cosmic tyrant who then underwrites the will to power of believers in “his” cause. Here he invokes the image of the God of double predestination. Second, the Creator/creature distinction at the heart of this model creates an implausible dualism. For Kaufman, “the universe is all there is”, so a God above, beyond, outside of, or transcendent over nature is no longer thinkable in light of modern cosmology (271). Third, the very sense of agency and selfhood invoked by the model are products of cosmic and biological evolution that did not exist historically or metaphysically prior to their emergence in the human species. Fourth, the cosmic, conscious agent model is lacking in adequate warrants for belief today: “Indeed, it is not clear just what might count as a reason for speaking of the existence and nature of some being … who exists on the other side of a metaphysical divide as absolute as that supposed to obtain between the creator and creation” (272). In fact, the only reason that can be given for retaining this model is that it has such long-standing use in the tradition. Fifth, “God” the omnipotent, personal agent is too dangerous a symbol for today’s world. The dualistic schema and the ascription to God of all power and wisdom set “him” apart from all rational and moral criticism. Therefore, “his” commands for moral and doctrinal purity, exclusive devotion, and unquestioned obedience have authorized human atrocities, religious persecution, and the suppression of critical thinking. In contrast to “God’s” problems in 1972, Kaufman’s more recent theology reflects an even more pragmatic and emancipatory concern for human and cosmic well-being. Although the traditional model of God is well established as a way of ordering human life and religious devotion, it is judged counterproductive in helping us to confront the threats to both nature and our neighbours. Finally, Kaufman has integrated feminist objections to the traditional “God” into his critique of God the agent. In the face of “God’s” multiple problems and dysfunctional traditional models, some other theologians have opted for process metaphysics as a way to reconstruct the concept of “God” for our time. Although Kaufman is also committed to a new natural theology, to process or change as the metaphysical ultimate over an unchanging, eternal structure (251), and prefers the model of “the process-God” to the “traditional agent-God” (273), he makes a strong case for theology’s autonomy. Process theology should not be used as an easy way out for those who are concerned for the integrity of theology as a discipline:

  ������������������� Gordon D. Kaufman, In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1993), 270–72. Page numbers that follow in parentheses are from this citation.

The Christian Doctrine of God in the Late Twentieth Century

23

… in the absence of other well-thought out alternatives to Whitehead’s cosmology many theologians have felt pressed simply to take it over and do they best they can … Doubtless there is much to be learned from Whitehead about contemporary conceptualization of the world, but in my opinion we theologians must do our own work with respect to the question of God, not simply take over someone else’s. We must explore carefully the basic conceptual scheme with which the inherited notion of God had its place and meaning, and then see whether it is possible to reconstruct that scheme in such a way as to take account of contemporary experience and knowledge (46).

If “God” is dead but God will not leave us alone, how did belief and unbelief arrive at our contemporary situation? What were the historical paths followed by believers and sceptics in recent centuries that contributed to the crisis of confidence in God’s existence and the traditional understanding of God’s essence? The Forgotten Testimony: Buckley’s At the Origins of Modern Atheism Michael Buckley provides a crucial part of what may be called “atheism’s theological history”. Contrary to the general notion that traditional theism first came under attack from philosophers like Hume, Kant, and Hegel, Buckley traces the origins of atheism to the methods and principles of early modern Christian theology itself. Every atheism is a co-relative response to a certain version of theism. The atheism of the ancient world constituted a denial of the traditional pantheon of deities. The charge of atheism against the early Christians was dependent on their rejection of the Roman civil religion. The theism of early modern Christian thought was so constituted as to produce its own other, its own distinctive version of atheism. The critical issue for Buckley is why Christian theologians chose to engage the issue of God’s existence on external grounds that cut them off from specific Christian modes of testimony to God’s reality. In particular, why did early modern theologians fail to appeal to the figure of Jesus as the most important and distinctive Christian witness to the existence and being of God? Why did they fail to appeal to the work of the Holy Spirit in Christian experience, and to the lives and witness of the saints to the transforming reality of God? Why did C hristian testimony to the person and work of Christ, enlivened by the Spirit, and appropriated in ordinary human lives make no difference to the encounter with early modern atheism?   ��������������������������������������������������������������������������� In Chapter 6 I briefly summarize the contributions of Bernard Meland to an understanding of God that is influenced by Alfred N orth Whitehead’s (1861–1947) cosmology but not simply taken over from that metaphysics. Kaufman’s warning is well put, but his own turn toward a form of theological naturalism and central concept of “serendipitous creativity” in his In Face of Mystery shows the background influence of process cosmology in his own project.

God in Postliberal Perspective

24

The question of God’s existence underwent a radical transformation in the hands of theologians like Leonard Lessius (1554–1623) and Marin Mersenne (1588–1648). Whereas Aquinas had presented his five ways to demonstrate the existence of God in the context of a Summa Theologiae that opens with an explication of Christian theology, the early moderns shifted the grounds of the question to the fields of natural theology, natural philosophy, and metaphysics alone. In other words, these thinkers imagined a sceptical interlocutor for whom appeals to Christ, the Spirit, and Christian experience would have no weight. Rather, they sought common ground on the fields on nature, the origins and order of the physical cosmos, and the necessary conditions for any human thinking at all. By shifting the burden of proof from the theologian to the natural philosopher, physicist and metaphysician, they opened the door for the appearance of a new kind of atheism that would seek its warrant not in the internal critique of Christ and Christian testimony but in the new cosmology of early modern science. In the 1600s and early 1700s, this cosmology was open to interpretation by two kinds of natural theology. In the case of René Descartes (1596–1650), the challenge of sceptics like Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) could only be answered by adopting an even more radical scepticism that called into question all traditional human claims to knowledge and truth. To save science, philosophy, and theology from being undermined by scepticism, Descartes discovered within his doubting self the idea of God as the most perfect being whose perfections included necessary existence.10 This perfect God became the epistemic bridge back from the isolated cogito (‘I think’, the thinking self or mind) to a mechanical cosmos of cause and effect, a dualistic world of extended substances and thinking substances. The perfect God who could not deceive us became the new foundation of certainty that overcame the global doubts of the individual sceptic. Descartes ascribed the mechanical cosmos of his science to this “God” as its origin and principle of intelligibility. The second kind of natural theology grounded itself not in the thinking self but in the cosmos as observed by astronomers, physicists, and mathematicians. In the case of Sir Isaac N ewton (1642–1727), the physical cosmos and its structures of matter in motion required universal natural laws of such order, mathematical precision and design that could only be ascribed to a cosmic mathematician. Further, the irregularities in the motions of planets and moons in space required a “God”  ���������������� René Descartes, Meditationes de prima philosophia / Meditations on First Philosophy: A Bilingual Edition, George Heffernan, (ed. and trans.), (N otre Dame, IN and London: University of N otre Dame Press, 1990), Third Meditation, Paragraph 22, p. 137. Martin Warner (University of Warwick) notes that Descartes made two attempts to use his concept of God as the epistemic bridge back from the isolated cogito: (a) in the Third Meditation he argued that “the infinite is not a merely negative idea and that hence the idea of God as infinite substance could not have originated from a finite being”. (b) In the Fifth Meditation he presented his version of the ontological argument. My thanks to Prof. Warner for his nuanced reading of the Meditationes. 10

The Christian Doctrine of God in the Late Twentieth Century

25

to fix and maintain the cosmic clockwork. Both of these kinds of natural theology assumed a cosmos and a theory of matter that were not self-explanatory or selfregulating. Doubt required a “God” to bridge the gap between thought and world. Matter (as conceived by N ewton) required a “God” to set it in motion and order its irregularities. This “God” filled necessary gaps: in epistemology for Descartes and in cosmology for N ewton. Samuel Clarke’s (1675–1729) Boyle Lectures entitled Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (1704 and 1705) is the classical text of the wedding of N ewton’s cosmology with a natural theology designed to respond to atheistic scepticism. That the new physico-theism was distancing itself from central features of traditional Christian doctrine was summed up in Clarke’s The Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity (1712) which appealed to the N ew Testament to undermine the pseudo-A thanasian C reed. The evidence of Descartes and N ewton undermines the common notion that theology and science were at war with each other from as far back as the days of Copernicus. Both natural philosophers used and appealed to the best science of their day as requiring and preserving an integral place for “God” as the ground of certainty or agent of cosmic design. They exemplify specific ways to integrate theology and science that today’s renewed religion and science dialogue demands. B ut the great strength of their fusion of natural philosophy with natural theology became its greatest weakness when early modern cosmology shifted away from the dualism of divine Architect/designed cosmos. As Buckley observes in the case of Descartes, “if there is one thing that the history of philosophy indicates, it is that dualisms, especially dualisms of independent and conjoined substances, exhibit a radical unintelligibility”.11 Denis Diderot (1713–1784) and the Baron Paul Henri d’Holbach (1723–1789) were the philosophes whose atheism responded to the new physico-theism. They accepted the terms of engagement offered by the defenders of “God”: natural philosophy and metaphysics would be the common ground, and Descartes’ method of global doubt would be the way to seek the truth. In Diderot’s philosophical writings, one finds a retrieval of the classic atheistic argument from chance for the occurrence of the cosmos, an idea first proposed by the Roman philosopher Lucretius (c.100–55 BCE) in his poem On the Nature of the Universe.12 D iderot 11  �������������������� Michael J. Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (N ew Haven, CT and London: Y ale University Press, 1987), 98. Page numbers that follow in parentheses are from this citation. 12  ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Martin Warner (University of Warwick) notes that Lucretius put into “poetic form the physical theory of Epicurus” and thus was not author to the idea. “Epicurus himself did not originate the idea that the cosmos occurred by chance; he was drawing on the atomists Leucippus … and Democritus (late fifth century BCE) who, in reacting against the teachings of the Eleatic school, developed the theory that our cosmos is not unique but one of an indeterminate number, and that any given cosmos, including our own, is produced by accident out of the infinitely numerous atoms moving through the infinite void.” My thanks to Prof. Warner for this genealogy of the materialist universe.

26

God in Postliberal Perspective

uncovered the “god of the gaps” in Descartes’ and N ewton’s metaphysical limitations. He rejected the appeal to religious experiences in his own times as valid evidence of theism by offering a counter-explanation of such experiences as grounded in the variety of human temperaments that led to contradictory religious claims. But most importantly he proposed a new vision of matter that went beyond both Descartes’ mathematical cosmos and N ewton’s Universal Mechanics: “Dynamic matter generates the various forms of inorganic and organic existence and continually dissolves them once generated” (222). There is no need to appeal to a transcendent Mover or Designer outside the cosmos to impart order and motion to matter for all matter is self-generating and self-transforming. Motion is found within matter itself, not supplied from beyond. Coupled with the claims that matter has always existed and over endless ages has combined and re-combined in infinite combinations, complex systems and organisms have risen out of the physical cosmos itself. “God” as Creator of the physical cosmos is an unnecessary hypothesis. D iderot’s genius was to present his new vision of matter in the form of a dramatic dialogue, Letter on the Blind for The Use of Those Who See (1749). Buckley summarizes how Diderot’s character Saunderson spells out the more radical implications of the new cosmology for theism: With such an understanding of experimental physics, a science universal and self-contained, any metaphysical introduction of a “god hypothesis” is simply an attempt to cover ignorance. It is pride and not philosophy, Saunderson contends, that calls for a transcendent explanation of the problems we cannot immediately resolve. Instead of resorting either to the Cartesian metaphysics or to the N ewtonian god of the gaps, “my good friend, Mr. Holmes, confess your ignorance.” Diderot’s Saunderson introduces a critical transition in Western thought with his dismissal of transcendence and assertion of the virtualities of dynamic matter. He introduces atheism (ibid.).

D’Holbach gave Diderot’s new vision a more comprehensive exposition in his The System of Nature (1770). In this total atheistic materialist account of the cosmos, d’Holbach also seeks to account for “God” and the observation of the ubiquity of belief in “God” among the variety of civilizations and cultures. He recognized that: … “the unanimity of human beings in acknowledging a god has been commonly accepted as the strongest proof of the existence of that being.” … From the Stoics to Descartes, this universality supported an innate idea of god, but this conviction only took its shape because they failed to note how culturally conditioned and perspectivally dependent every notion of god was. If the idea was innate, its essential contours would be prior to historic experience and not show the differences that come from divergent experiences and persuasions. That is not the case [according to d’Holbach’s System of Nature] (304).

The Christian Doctrine of God in the Late Twentieth Century

27

If the notion of “God” is not innate, where does it come from? Here d’Holbach appeals to the human imagination as the factory of our relative, plural, and perspectival images of “God”: A survey of [the idea of god’s] variations in different times and civilizations does more than eliminate any persuasion that the idea of god is innate. The correlation between culture and religion indicates that “each made himself a God after his own manner … Thus the God of one human being, or of one nation, was hardly ever that of another.” The notion of god is not only acquired; it is a human creation that bears the mark of its creator. Any universality divinity has in the beliefs of human beings simply manifests the common human experiences of terror and dread and the attempt of the victims to imagine some means of escape. “The theological God, although incomprehensible, is the last effort of the human imagination”, [System of Nature 2.2] (305).

The differences between the natural theologians and d’Holbach could not have been more extreme. Whereas the theologians followed an ontic interpretation of natural phenomena, d’Holbach’s method was existential or phenomenal. This difference between them already highlights issues of realism and non-realism that remain disputed in philosophy and theology today. T he early modern theologians distinguished between the apparent and the real and introduced a fusion of ontology and theology (or “ontotheology”) to account for all things. By contrast, the existential approach appeals to human experience of the phenomena of nature and physics as the only guides to the real. For d’Holbach: Either the structure of the real comes only from the essences of things, from natures which manifest themselves in their functions, as in the essentialist interpretation of Aristotle; or the knowing subject confers a structure and hence an intelligibility on phenomena through the perspectives he takes, the matrix of distinctions he brings to bear, or the aspects he selects, as in the existentialist interpretation of [John Stuart] Mill. In either case, there is no place for a theology built upon a pattern in nature whose “real truth” or intelligibility lies with an ontic dimension of reality. The clash, then, between the argument from design and the Système is mortal. D’Holbach has insistently used an existentialist interpretation. We do not know things in themselves. “We only know the effects which they produce on us, and according to which we assign them qualities” (315).

Given the centrality of the argument from design to early modern theism and its ontic interpretation, d’Holbach’s radically different approach to “the real” reduces the argument’s credibility. Buckley summarizes d’Holbach’s two counterarguments to design:

28

God in Postliberal Perspective First: there is no order or disorder in the universe as such. Everything happens by necessity in universal nature, and cannot be other than it is once the integers and forces act upon one another. Order and disorder are different human perspectives … Second: if order is considered to manifest a divine intelligence, the corresponding disorder must equally manifest a divine neglect and malice. If god is to account for one, then he must account for both (315–16).

Given the perception that Enlightenment atheists had undermined the primary arguments for the existence of “God” in their day, could theology have turned from external arguments from the cosmos to internal arguments from Christian testimony? In fact, it was the theologians themselves who had barred the door to such an escape by constituting the terms of engagement in the open field of natural philosophy. Appeals to particular revelations and Christian experience begged the question when belief’s credulity was made to depend on inferences and implications from nature and metaphysics alone interpreted in ways amenable to both atheists and theists. On the other hand, the price of admission to the new scientific materialism was very high. Freedom from theistic belief and institutional religion also meant for many Enlightenment atheists and their modern children freedom for naturalistic determinism: The central paradox of the Enlightenment gradually assumed its ironic shape through each of these removals to new meaning, drawn perhaps most sharply in the claims staked out for nature and culture. Diderot had effectively reduced culture to nature, leaving the age with as strong an internal contradiction as any that civilization had borne. The philosophes urged a gospel of unhampered human liberty, a gospel that should have had a telling effect on private morality and on social structures. At the same time, often within the same exhortations, they formulated a rigorously mechanical doctrine of nature and human beings enclosed within this nature. Every form of nature, each of its movements and resultant organizations, emerged necessarily, completely determined by the interaction of its particles and by the iron rule of their invariant laws. The rhetoric of human freedom registered a sharp, if unnoticed, dissonance with this undeviating causal determinacy … The Enlightenment had forged as severe an internal inconsistency as previous generations had found between faith and reason, grace and nature, or predestination and freedom (274–5).

Buckley offers a persuasive account of Christian theology’s responsibility for the particular forms and methods of modern atheism. Any conversation and debate in the conceptual space between realism and imagination must include Buckley’s history as data, and his telling conclusions. But on a constructive level, let me raise an open question: could christology, pneumatology, and the history of Christian experience be used as a response to atheism today? How would this christological and ecclesiological turn help the Christian case against atheism today? This might

The Christian Doctrine of God in the Late Twentieth Century

29

have been telling or effective in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, but today total worldviews, lifestyles and communities have emerged that have no need of a god to explain or understand their visions of reality. A problem for some theologians who write history is that they trace the sources of unbelief to their roots but then prescribe theological solutions that would have been contextually relevant in the past but not today for many people in Europe and N orth America. The response to this question may illumine a common strategy among some postliberal theologians. For they see their task as reframing the entire conversation with unbelief and modernity rather than accepting the early modern terms of engagement that many Christian thinkers have assumed without question. Recovering God as Trinity: Barth and Rahner Buckley’s return to the root sources of Christian testimony to frame new questions is a common strategy of postliberal theology and its theological predecessors. Two of the most important predecessors were Karl Barth and Karl Rahner (1904–84). If the “God” of early modern theism “died” under the intellectual assaults of the philosophes and masters of suspicion (Feuerbach, Marx, N ietzsche, and Freud), Barth found the decks had been cleared for the advent of the self-revealing God in Jesus Christ who speaks in scripture, proclamation, and sacrament. For his part, Rahner lamented in 1967 that, “despite their orthodox confession of the Trinity, Christians are, in their practical life, almost mere ‘monotheists’; we must be willing to admit that, should the doctrine of the Trinity have to be dropped as false, the major part of religious literature could well remain virtually unchanged.”13 Barth gave the doctrine of the Trinity a distinctive placement in his Church Dogmatics in the first volume.14 Rather than follow the traditional order of doctrinal loci and treat God’s unity first, then later at some point take up God’s trinity (as in the case of Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae), Barth reversed the order. This allowed him to develop the doctrine of the Trinity apart from any natural theology of the one God (e.g., the images and concepts of ‘God’ in early modern theism) and to root it in the very structure of revelation as witnessed to by Scripture. Rather than appeal to proof texts alone to demonstrate that the God of the Bible is triune, Barth argues that the dogma of the Trinity is a necessary and appropriate interpretation of revelation, and “revelation is the self-interpretation of this God”.15 B y an analysis of a statement that summarizes revelation in both testaments, “God reveals  ������������� Karl Rahner, The Trinity, Joseph Donceel, (trans.); Catherine Mowry LaCugna, (introd.) (N ew Y ork: Crossroad, 1970, 1997), 10–11. 14  ������������ Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics vol I: The Doctrine of the Word of God: Part I, G. W. Bromiley, (trans.); G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, (eds), (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975), see Chap. II, Part I under the headings “The Doctrine of the Word of God”; “The Revelation of God”; “The Triune God”. 15  ������� Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/1: 311. 13

30

God in Postliberal Perspective

Himself as the Lord”, Barth finds three “modes or ways of being” (Seinsweisen): God as Revealer, God as Revelation, and God as Revealedness. God’s three ways of being in the event of revelation correspond to the N ew Testament names or trifold name Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Barth finds evidence of this threefold pattern throughout Scripture.16 Finally, he adopted the terminology of three divine “modes or ways of being” over the traditional “three persons” given the modern sense of “the person” as “personality”, which implies tritheism or three gods in the divine unity. This earned Barth the accusation of “modalism” for his explication of the doctrine, but his willingness to revise the traditional terminology proved his openness to redevelop ancient dogma in new contexts. In the wake of Vatican Council II, Rahner saw an opportunity to free the trinitarian dogma from the sterility of neo-scholastic theology. Like Barth, he rejected the Thomistic division of the doctrine of God into the two treatises, “On the One God”, elaborated first, and “On the Triune God”, developed later. Following Scripture, ancient creeds, the liturgy, and the patristic theology of the East, he begins with the N ew Testament referent of θεός, the Father as the fount of the divinity of the Son and Holy Spirit. He moves away from metaphysical theories about the Persons in order to ground statements about the triune God in salvation history and the spiritual experience of the Church. In Catherine LaCugna’s introduction to Rahner’s treatise, she summarizes: “God’s self-communication (selbst-Mitteilen) is necessarily triune and constitutes salvation history to be what it is: the total offer of God’s self through Christ to the human being who is created as the recipient of the self-communication of God, and who is made capable by the Spirit of receiving God’s free gift.”17 Rahner’s re-grounding of Trinity-talk in salvation history and Christian experience leads him to make his most important claim: “The ‘economic’ Trinity is the ‘immanent’ Trinity, and the ‘immanent’ Trinity is the ‘economic’ Trinity.”18 Rather than treat the economic Trinity of salvation and experience as a mere representation or image of an immanent Trinity in-and-of-itself but unknown to us, a trinitarian X behind revelation, Rahner argues that the very nature of God is self-communication by the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. Again, in LaCugna’s summary: “The identity of ‘economic’ and ‘immanent’ Trinity means that God truly and completely gives God’s self to the creature without remainder, and what is given in the economy of salvation is God as such. Both the distinction and identity between the economic and immanent Trinity are conceptual, not ontological.”19 Finally, Rahner proposes to translate the traditional term “Person” as “distinct manner of subsisting”. Following eastern patristic theology, what 16  �������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Isaiah 61:1f; Matthew 28:19; Romans 1:1–4; 11:36; 2 Thessalonians 2:13; 1 Peter 1:2; Revelation 1:4; 2 Corinthians 13:13; Mark 1:9f; Jude 20–21; 1 Corinthians 12:4f; Ephesians 4:4f. are briefly discussed in I/1:313. 17  �������� Rahner, The Trinity, “Introduction”, x. 18  ����������������������� Ibid., 22, my emphasis. 19  ����������� Ibid., xiv.

The Christian Doctrine of God in the Late Twentieth Century

31

it means to be a “Person” is distinct for each of the Three: the Father is “the Unbegotten Begetter”, the Son is the “Begotten and Incarnate”, and the Spirit is the One who Proceeds “from the Father [through the Son]”.20 What is striking about Barth and Rahner’s treatments of the Trinity are the commonalities despite their differences in methodology and confessional commitments. They both reintegrate the treatment of God as One and God as Three; they turn away from natural theology and metaphysical speculation to ground the doctrine in specific forms of revelation (Scripture, salvation history, or Christian experience); they emphasize the communicative being of God in revelation, salvation, and the creation and sanctification of creatures to correspond to God’s self-communication; they propose a doctrine of God that is radically different from the “God” of early modern theism who was unitary, radically transcendent but not necessarily self-communicating. The challenge of Barth and R ahner is their dawning awareness that the God of Jesus C hrist did not die at the hands of atheistic sceptics but was forgotten by the Church and transmuted into the “God” of western theism, the target of anti-metaphysical materialism and antireligious suspicion. Confessing Faith in God under the Cross of Modern Atheism: Jüngel Barth’s project was developed in new exciting directions by his former student, Eberhard Jüngel (1934–). Under the aegis of a theology of the cross, Jüngel brings Luther’s theology of the cross, Barth’s theology of God’s triune self-revelation in Christ, and Bonhoeffer’s prison meditations on God’s worldliness in Christ into a critical conversation with modern theism (Descartes, Kant, Fichte, Hegel) and atheism (Feuerbach, N ietzsche, Heidegger). The goal of his work entitled, God as the Mystery of the World, is “to think God as the original unity of life and death for the sake of life”.21 Traditional Christian theology failed to think God in this way due to claims of divine absoluteness and the impossibility of God’s

20   Christians disagree on the procession of the Holy Spirit in the eternal Trinity. At the Council of Toledo (589), the Latin phrase filioque (“and the Son”) was inserted in the N iceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (381) to affirm that the Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son (a “double procession”). The filioque was rejected by the Eastern Church (1054) and contributed to the East – West schism between Orthodox and Catholic Christians (Donald K. McKim, Westminster Dictionary of Theological Terms (Louisville, KY : Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 105)). Cf. John 14:26; 15:26–27; 16:5b–11; 16:12–15. 21  ����������������� Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute between Theism and Atheism, Darrell L. Guder, (trans.) (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983), x. Page numbers that follow in parentheses are from this citation.

32

God in Postliberal Perspective

immortality becoming mortal. But the word of God that addresses humanity in the cross requires theology today to think God’s being in relation to mortality. The double agenda of this ambitious work is to think together two assertions found in John, Chapter One: “N o one has ever seen God (1:18a).” “It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known” (1:18b N RSV). According to the author, traditional and modern Christian thought (Augustine, John Chrysostom, Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, Aquinas, Wilhelm Herrmann, and Gordon Kaufman, we may add) erred by over-emphasizing the first proposition, and thus elevated the divine essence to a place “above us” in such a way that “God” became an unknown and unknowable X, a Kantian thing-in-itself. Such a conception denies the humanity of God revealed in Jesus of N azareth and refuses to imagine the deity of God in conjunction with the cross of Christ. The presupposition of the Christian theology that dialectically emerges out of the dispute between theism and atheism is the category of revelation as God’s address or speech to humanity: “God becomes thinkable on the basis of his speakability” (12). When human being is conceived in terms of our capacity for language and for being addressed which calls us into personal and corporate identity, then the notion of a revealing or speaking God finds a conversation partner in twentieth century philosophical anthropology (e.g., Heidegger). Like Michael Buckley, Jüngel traces the roots of atheism to the early modern quest to secure the existence of “God” from unbelief: [Descartes’] proof of the necessity of God is the midwife of modern atheism … Specifically modern atheism could be said to arise from an ascension which is the self-establishment of the “I think” in the thought of God, an approach which attacks the ramparts of heaven. Once God has been made a theme in the context of man’s self-establishment and thus declared necessary, it is not far to the next step, which is to question the necessity of God (19–20).

In place of the theistic claim that God is necessary for the world (to secure the bridge of certainty between the self and the knowledge of external reality; to fill the gaps left behind by physics and astronomy; to account for the patterns of design found in nature; to provide the hierarchy of values that lead up to ‘God above’), the theologian argues that “God is more than necessary” in the sense of “not necessary because more than necessary” (24). This creative suggestion that God is “non-necessary” to the world because “more than necessary” opens this theology to affirm both the reality of secular, atheistic social life and the free pathways of God through a world which has no place for the Christ. When a Christian theology affirms “the non-necessity of God”, it is prepared to say that:

The Christian Doctrine of God in the Late Twentieth Century

33

1. Man and his world are interesting for their own sake. 2. Even more so, God is interesting for his own sake. 3. God makes man, who is interesting for his own sake, interesting in a new way (34). The God who is more than necessary is groundless in terms of the categories of natural theology and western metaphysics. This is a God who “comes from God”, is “motivated by God”, and who is “an event which determines itself” (35–6). The radical freedom of this God takes concrete form in our world in God’s freedom to be for others in Jesus Christ, even to the point of betrayal, suffering, and mortality on the cross. For what does this God determine “himself” for? According to Luther, “God determines himself for the human existence of the man Jesus, in order to be God in and with this man. Thus the Christian faith … can speak of no other God than the ‘incarnate God’ and the ‘human God’ (deus incarnatus, deus humanus)” (37). Historic western metaphysics made these questions central: does God (the God who is necessary to the world) exist, and can God’s existence be known with certainty against all doubt? Jüngel changes the question to N ietzsche’s more modern one: “where is God?” “Where can God be encountered and where can he be addressed as God?” (49). To respond to this poignant, sceptical question, the theologian still wants to make a critical use of metaphysical questions without traditional metaphysical answers. He proposes something like a sabbatical from western metaphysical theism for the sake of the freedom of a theology that seeks to follow the pathways of the God who is “more than necessary”. So, where is God? God is to be found in the Word, according to an evangelical theology that moves beyond the problems of philosophical theism. It is a theology that begins with certain presuppositions. Most importantly, for this theology, “God cannot be thought without faith” (154). Otherwise, the human self which seeks to be the ground of all certainty places itself between the essence and existence of “God”, opening the door to the atheistic critique that such a “God” is not necessary to the world as we know it today. Beginning with the faith evoked by God’s word, evangelical theology makes three basic hermeneutical decisions: 1. “… to think ‘God as God …’” rather than seeking for a new conception of thought itself in order to arrive at a concept of God; 2. To think “God as God” is “guided by a very definite possibility which is given with a very special experience of God … with a special relationship of God to human thought which claims to have general validity …” (154– 5). For Jüngel, to hear the word of God is like having “an experience with experience”. In such critical experiences that may take the form of either anxiety or gratitude, “not only every experience already had, but experience itself is experienced anew” (32). When one discovers how one’s being is perched on the razor’s edge of nothingness and how our world and

34

God in Postliberal Perspective

ourselves have been “plucked from nothingness”, it transfigures all other experience in the light of God’s creating and preserving word. 3. Finally, to think “God as God” is guided by “the reality of the biblical texts”. Where is God? “… the place of the conceivability of God is a Word which precedes thought” (155). The dynamic expression of that Word is found in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of N azareth for he is “that person through whom and in whom God has become definitively accessible”. His story is conveyed by the biblical texts that are not revelation themselves but witnesses to God’s revelation in him. Thus this theology of the Word is open to the insights of both critical and hermeneutical study of the concrete biblical texts for they convey a dynamic, living Word that evokes encounter with this specific God in past, present, and future. Jüngel’s critical engagement with metaphysics, constructive conversation with atheism, committed thinking, and specific approach to the biblical texts prepares the way for his very different portrayal of God. It may be summarized under the subtitle of his earlier work, “God’s Being is in Becoming”. For even: God himself proceeds along a pathway … On the divine way of life, God makes himself into that which he is … God’s being is in coming … God makes himself accessible in that he goes on ways to himself … God goes on ways to himself even when they lead to other places, even to that which is not God. God’s ways to himself include something like distance from himself too … (159).

We have briefly surveyed Kaufman’s argument that the human symbol “God” is a collection of our limit-concepts and images that we construct in imagination to function in certain ways that enable human flourishing or debasement. Jüngel’s portrayal of God and method of theological thinking suggests a very different conception. “To think God means to be taken along by God … In this movement of thought, there then comes a ‘construction’ of a thought of God which thinks God as the subject of himself” (159). When we think with Kaufman of God-talk as a human construction, the terms suggest the question, what is the plan, the blueprint, or design that we follow in constructing the house of “God”? In the case of Jüngel, God and human faithful witnesses and thinkers are co-constructors of images, stories, and concepts of God’s pathway of coming to us and to God in worldly historical time. Except in this case, the image of constructing a house with foundations is too static. The image of constructing a road, highway, or path that leads from God to humanity and mortality and back to God is perhaps more apt. Without going deeper into this doctrine of God, some critical questions must be raised when we consider Jüngel’s achievement in relation to other figures in this chapter. These questions concern what I call Jüngel’s revelational realism, his conviction that in God’s disclosure in Christ, faith is given both the essence and the existence of God in union to believe and to conceive.

The Christian Doctrine of God in the Late Twentieth Century

35

1. In his concept of revelation as God’s self-disclosure that makes God conceivable and accessible for faith, does Jüngel introduce by way of presupposition everything he wants to argue for vis-à-vis atheism? Is his doctrine of revelation warranted by a canon within the canon of the biblical texts (primarily John and Paul), or is it in fact warranted by the whole counsel of Scripture (what of the wisdom literature)? But even if he has scriptural warrant, how does that help a contemporary atheist who finds no authoritative address coming from the reading and study of the Bible? Can the atheist simply be asked to exchange a naturalistic or materialistic worldview for theological presuppositions? 2. In his concept of revelation, Jüngel draws strongly on metaphors and models of personhood, agency, and speech. But these tropes grow out of ways of engaging the world that are specific to our species and that have arrived fairly late in the history of evolution. Where was the speaking God when the world was created? How did this personal, consciously acting, speaking God interact with the world over aeons of time before the appearance of our species? Are the very human metaphors and models of this God found in Scripture so anthropocentric that the use of them to think “God himself” is already too severely limited? For example, in translation, the references to God in Jüngel’s writings are predominantly couched in male pronouns, names, and figures. If the triune God is in fact the creator of gender but not engendered as specifically male or female, how do we understand God’s way in the world as an address to persons of both genders? 3. Is Jüngel’s understanding of God’s mortality warranted by an historicalcritical reading of the N ew Testament texts? Or is he giving the texts a special symbolic or theological reading that goes beyond what any firstcentury author could have imagined? In other words, did the N ew Testament writers consider the cross the execution not only of Jesus of N azareth, but also of God? Or is this a liturgical and speculative innovation? 4. D oes the notion of the pathway of God through the world mean that on some level God needs or requires the world and humanity to realize God’s self as the One who can unite life and death to the advantage of life?22 In Jüngel’s revelational realism he offers us a way to think about the being and activity of the triune God that is not defined or limited by either early modern theism or by traditional orthodoxy. He raises and engages both ontological and existential issues based on reflective interpretation of the biblical texts and the doctrines of God, Christ, the cross, and Trinity. He does all this in conversation with atheistic criticism of metaphysics and classical theology. Thus he combines Barth’s sensitivity to the particularity of the Word of God in Christ witnessed to by Scripture with Rudolf Bultmann’s (1884–1976) contextual concern for the 22  ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ Jüngel replies in part to this issue on pp. 37–38. The key for him is that “God is love”, and therefore has decided not to “perfect or consummate himself” without humanity.

36

God in Postliberal Perspective

unbelievers of secular society and faith’s own quest for intelligibility in modern social and intellectual contexts. From Social Trinity to Social Revolution: Moltmann If Jüngel replies to complacent unbelief and easy believe-ism with the scandalous word of the cross, Jürgen Moltmann (1926– ) recovers the ancient social doctrine of the Trinity as a way to revolutionize how we understand and encounter God, personhood, social life, and the Church. In this recovery he moves through and beyond both Barth and Rahner to articulate a doctrine of God in which divine Persons-in-community becomes the basis for understanding divine unity. “The Western tradition began with God’s unity and then went on to ask about the trinity. We are beginning with the trinity of the Persons and shall then go on to ask about the unity. What then emerges is a concept of the divine unity as the union of the triunity, a concept which is differentiated and is therefore capable of being thought first of all.”23 One reason that the tradition began with divine unity had to do with the classic trinitarian formula dating back to Tertullian (150?–225? CE): “una substantia – tres personae”: God is one divine substance (in which subsists) three divine Persons. Thus the divine substance that the three Persons share in common defines the being of God, not the fellowship or union of the Persons. In the classical age of metaphysics where substance defined the most ultimate categories of reality in stable or even static terms, this formula was useful. But when Hegel introduced the dynamism of history into reflection on being, a new formula was required: “one subject – three modes of being”. The shift from ultimate reality as substantial to a living, relational subject was part of a more inter-subjective and historicized theory of God’s relation to the cosmos, and a more individualized understanding of human being as subjectivity. This formula reminds us of Barth’s redefinition of the divine Persons as God’s three ways of being the Lord. But like Tertullian’s formula, it privileges the divine unity (now explicitly conceived in dynamic terms) over the fellowship and relations of the Persons. Moltmann’s revision of the tradition is to take more seriously (almost literally?) the classic meaning of personhood for each of the divine Persons. According to Boethius (c.480–c.524 CE), “persona est rationalis naturae individual substantia”:

23  ����������������� Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God, Margaret Kohl, (trans.) (London: SCM Press; N ew Y ork: Harper & Row, 1981), 19. Page numbers that follow in parentheses are from this text. For his more recent work on trinitarian doctrine, see Moltmann, History and the Triune God: Contributions to Trinitarian Theology, (trans.) John Bowden (N ew Y ork: Crossroad, 1991), where he takes up the social analogy of the Trinity, gender roles in the Trinity, a trinitarian theology of the cross, and of history.

The Christian Doctrine of God in the Late Twentieth Century

37

“a person is an ‘individual substance with a rational nature.’”24 C ontrary to Hegel and Barth, “If we take Boethius’ definition, the trinitarian Persons are not ‘modes of being’; they are individual, unique, non-interchangeable subjects of the one, common divine substance, with consciousness and will. Each of the Persons possesses the divine nature in a non-interchangeable way; each presents it in his own way” (171). Thus on Moltmann’s account, we have three subjects in one dynamic divine reality: “The trinitarian Persons subsist in the common divine nature; they exist in their relations to one another” (173).

There is an objection heard from some historians of doctrine to Moltmann’s theory of trinitarian doctrine. Although he seems deeply concerned about the prevalence of modalism in the history of the doctrine of God as Trinity, Moltmann ignores the fact that he himself has opened the door to a form of tritheism: God as three divine subjects or centres of “consciousness and will”, which implies three “gods”. If the heresy of the western version of trinitarian doctrine is modalism (one God who appears in different modes in time but who lacks the internal relations named by ‘Persons’), then the tempting heresy of Moltmann’s version is to undermine or undervalue the divine unity: the three individual Persons become three distinct personalities who then must be wed or fused back into some kind of unity. Moltmann’s approach to this kind of objection comes in how he re-imagines the divine unity on the model of John Damascene’s (c. 700–750 CE) eternal perichoresis or divine circumincessio.25 There is a divine dance or “circulatory character” to the “eternal divine life” (174). “An eternal life process takes place in the triune God through the exchange of energies. The Father exists in the Son, the Son in the Father, and both of them in the Spirit, just as the Spirit exists in both the Father and the Son” (174–5). There is love, the dynamic process of relations, indwelling, and a “most perfect and intense empathy” (175). This leads to his revised notion of divine unity: “T he unity of the triunity lies in the eternal perichoresis of the trinitarian persons. Interpreted perichoretically, the trinitarian persons form their own unity by themselves in the circulation of the divine life” (175). One important consequence of this version of divine unity is that like Hegel’s “God”, for Moltmann the Trinity has a history, not merely in the world of time as we know it, but in the divine life itself. There is no room for a timeless eternity for Moltmann, and thus God’s transcendence is re-imagined as the power of the eschatological future, not the height of an ontological relation.

24  ���������������������������� Van A. Harvey, “Person”, in A Handbook of Theological Terms (London: Collier Macmillan; N ew Y ork: Macmillan, 1964), 182. 25  ��������������� The Greek word perichoresis (literally translated ‘penetration’) or Latin circumincessio (translated ‘coinherence’) is a term in trinitarian doctrine that refers to “the intimate union, mutual indwelling, or mutual interpenetration of the three members of the Trinity with each other”, Donald K. McKim, Westminster Dictionary of Theological Terms, (Louisville, KY : Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 207.

God in Postliberal Perspective

38

This social doctrine of the Trinity is then spelled out in terms of social revolution. Political and clerical monotheism that elevate one ruler, tyrant, dictator, or party above all others come under critique. Forms of life that enhance mutual relations rather than hierarchy, community rather than domination, and hospitality rather than neglect are grounded in the triune life of God in the world. Both church and society stand in need of reform and renewal by the freedom of God to be for each other in the triune fellowship and to be for the “least ones” in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Son. For Moltmann the social revolution implicit in the trinitarian confession of faith is the re-conception of what it means to be a person or self in relation to others. The “turn to the subject as individual” which was one of the hallmarks of modernism, capitalism, and existentialism receives a greatly needed corrective from the triune life. If my personhood is constituted and learned in the interplay and mutual relations I have with all other individuals in my social setting, then I cannot be myself in isolation from others or ignore the consequences of my behaviour for the quality of our life together in webs of interdependence. When the doctrine of the Trinity is linked to the anthropology of the image of God (imago Dei), then I can only become myself as a creature of God in relationship and interdependence with others. The ordinary relationships of love, family, friendship, civil and ecclesial community, and our wider community with the human species and all forms of life become occasions for the mutual enrichment of personhood rather than a quest for radical autonomy. I cannot find myself by fleeing from others into an absolute and artificial solitude and independence, but by opening myself to the circulation of life between us. Thus contrary to the Enlightenment thinkers Thomas Jefferson and Immanuel Kant, the doctrine of the Trinity has practical implications for daily life in the world and offers challenging ways to rethink some of our basic moral concepts and social practices.26

26

 �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Jefferson criticized the “incomprehensible jargon of the Trinitarian arithmetic, that three are one, and one is three” as an artificial barrier between his contemporaries and the “simple doctrines” of Jesus. Taken from a letter by Jefferson to Timothy Pickering with regard to a sermon by the “Unitarian” Channing, quoted by T. C. Hall, The Religious Background of American Culture (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1930), 172, as quoted by Charles W. Lowry, The Trinity and Christian Devotion (N ew Y ork and London: Harper & Brothers, 1946), 21–22. Kant found “no practical relevance at all” to the doctrine when “taken literally” because the distinction between Persons in God makes no difference for “rules of conduct”. See Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties / Der Streit der Facultäten, bilingual edn., (trans. and introd.) Mary J. Gregor; The Janus Library (N ew Y ork: Abaris Books, 1979), 64–67. However, Kant believed he had found a “moral meaning” for the doctrine in his Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, (trans. and introd.) Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (Chicago: Open Court, 1934), 132–3, 136–8.

The Christian Doctrine of God in the Late Twentieth Century

39

God as Trinity in Time and Narrative: Jenson One of the best examples of a trinitarian doctrine of God worked out in categories close to the concerns of postliberals is found in Robert Jenson’s (1930–) The Triune Identity.27 Writing in N orth America in the early 1980s, the author claimed that trinitarian language was in a state of decline among western Christians. In liturgy he accused Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism of forsaking the triune name as the primary identity description of God. Rather, liturgies and prayers addressed to “Jesus-Mary-Joseph” (in Catholicism), to Christ (in Lutheranism), or to the eternal, almighty sovereign (in Reformed churches) had replaced the triune structure of N ew Testament and early Christian worship. In the religious life he found little relation between the doctrine and Christian self-understanding. Thus the language had become functionally idle. Coupled with its dogmatic status as a “revealed Mystery”, it was usually presented in theological education as something abstract or supernatural. The result was the churches’ “benign neglect”. The impact of the Enlightenment on the doctrine was to destroy the first naïveté of orthodoxy, or that received doctrine is to be believed because it has been handed down by authoritative tradition. This opened up space for a return to pre-N icean pluralism in the understanding of the doctrines of Christ and God. This was manifested in both the older Unitarianisms and in the British debate over the “the myth of God incarnate”. The roots of this eclipse of the doctrine in the West lie buried deep in the past in the Christian encounter with Hellenism. Jenson connected Schleiermacher’s presupposition of God’s timelessness with Hellenism’s concept of timeless deity.28 In this encounter, he locates the uniqueness of biblical faith, which understood the God of Israel and Jesus Christ in relation to time, compromised by the deity of Hellenism. The characteristics of deity and time in Hellenism included the following: 1. “Greek religion was the quest for a rock of ages, resistant to the flow of time, a place or part or aspect of reality immune to change.” By contrast, “Y ahweh was eternal by his faithfulness through time; the Greek gods’ eternity was their abstraction from time.” 2. “Greek religion and reflection were an act of human self-defence against mysterious power and inexplicable contingency, that is, against just what mankind has mostly called ‘God’.”

27  ������������������ Robert W. Jenson, The Triune Identity: God According to the Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982). Page numbers that follow in parentheses are from this citation. 28  ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ For Schleiermacher, “the divine causality … must be conceived as utterly timeless”. See Schleiermacher, Glaubenslehre, cited by Jenson from the 7th edn. in German (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1960), paragraphs 171 and 52; idem, The Christian Faith, (ed.) H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart, (trans.) D. M. Baillie et al. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark and Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1928 c., 1976 ed.), 204. Quoted by Jenson, Triune Identity, 133–34.

God in Postliberal Perspective

40

3. The concept of the divine became understood as “a unitary abstraction of godly Explanatory Power in and behind the plural gods of daily religion”. 4. This concept of a timeless deity resulted in another characteristic that “Greek religion and reflection, by their inner function, were ‘metaphysical’, a quest for the timeless Ground of temporal being, that just so is a different sort of being than we ever immediately encounter.” 5. This quest for the timeless “God” demanded an analogical understanding of all language about the deity. All our language originates within the temporal horizons of our world, yet deity is timeless, therefore predication of “God” is “essentially negative”. The “God” of Hellenism is spoken of in the predicates of “invisibility”, “intangibility”, “impassibility”, “indescribability”, and “incomprehensibility”. 6. Access to this timeless deity is via the human mind. “[T]his theology’s penetration to true deity is accomplished by mind, that is, not by discursive analysis or argument but by instantaneous intellectual intuition, by a sort of interior mirroring, in the ‘mind’s eye,’ for what is to be grasped is a timeless pattern” (58–60). The God of biblical faith, in radical contrast, cannot be conceived apart from the time of his history with his people. The primal identity description of God in Israel was “whoever delivered us from slavery in Egypt”. The primal identity description of God in the earliest Christian Gospel was “whoever raised Jesus from the dead”. God according to this Gospel may be explained in terms of the assertion, “God ‘is’ Jesus”. 1. “God … is what happens with Jesus.” We do not first know the timeless deity of the Hellenic heritage, and then learn how to identify it with the God of Israel and Jesus Christ. Rather, we learn to identify God by paying attention to the fate and destiny of Jesus as narrated in the Gospels. 2. “God is what will come of Jesus and us, together.” In Jesus’ story and resurrection from the dead Christians discover our own fate and destiny. Thus the triune God is no abstract metaphysical speculation but the very meaning of our living and dying as ‘he’ encloses the modes of our temporality in ‘his’ eternity. 3. “God is the will in which all things have Jesus’ love as their destiny. Jesus … ‘is’ God only as God’s identifiability.”29 These three affirmations enable Christians to identify the God of Israel and Jesus in terms of the three modes of temporality – past, present, and future. God the Father is the “Transcendence given” over against Jesus’ prayers, deeds, and passion. Jesus as Lord is “the present Possibility of God’s reality for us”. And the Holy 29

 ���������������������������������������� Ibid., 22–24 for (1) – (3), my emphasis.

The Christian Doctrine of God in the Late Twentieth Century

41

Spirit is “the Outcome of Jesus’ work” (24). Jenson’s critique is that this biblical understanding of God and time is incommensurable with the timeless deity of Hellenism (and, by default, the ‘God’ of much of western Christian tradition and early modern theism). One consequence of the fusion of timeless divinity with the God of the covenant was the assertion of “God’s” simplicity. Because Augustine posited “God” as timeless (in good, neo-Platonic fashion), he argued that “God” must be changeless, and thus ‘his’ substance admits of no accidents. Aquinas also argued that “God” is simple. But how is this doctrine to be distinguished from Arius’ refusal to admit any differentiation in God at all? The metaphysical doctrine of divine simplicity is: … incompatible with the heart of N icene trinitarianism. If all attributes of God are his one substance, none can be predicated of one of the identities [or Persons] in any special sense without “confusing” the substance with the identities … The consequence is that the three persons are not only equally related to the one substance, but identically related, so that the differences between them, that is, the relations, are irrelevant to their being God. But the original trinitarian insight is that the relations between the identities are their being God. When the N icenes called the Trinity as such God, they so named him because of the triune relations and differences; when Augustine calls the Trinity as such God, it is in spite of them (118–19).

In other words, God cannot both be simple in the metaphysical sense and triune in the N icene sense. For the trinitarian relations of the Persons constitute what it means for “God” (as used in the N icene sense) to be God (ultimate reality) in the ecumenical Christian sense. The Hellenic-Christian concept of God’s eternity is timeless. Y et this God’s salvation history with Jews and Gentiles is temporal. The attempt to reconcile this concept of eternity with temporality resulted in the problematic distinction between the “immanent” and the “economic Trinity”. With regard to the economic Trinity, theologians speak of the divine missions in salvation history, and thereby acknowledge the three Persons from their distinct missions in time (e.g., the Son was sent by the Father to redeem ‘his’ people from sin, the Spirit was sent by the Son and the Father to sanctify them). With regard to the immanent Trinity, the Father generates the Son, and the Spirit is breathed or “spirated” by the Father (and the Son). But how could anyone ever conceive of generation and spiration as atemporal processes or events unless we engage in intentional equivocation? Here Jenson states this complex issue as simply as possible: The three derive from God’s reality in time, from time’s past/present/future. But if the One is one precisely by abstraction from time, the one-and-three can never be made to work. The relations are either temporal or empty verbiage. In

42

God in Postliberal Perspective Western trinitarianism, which will not let the relations be temporal, that God is “one and three” becomes … sheer mystification (125–6).

Further, what would atemporal inner-trinitarian relations mean? What meaning would love, fellowship, and participation have without some sense of time? Rather than posit more speculation ungrounded in Scripture, creeds, liturgy, and Christian experience, Jenson returns to the temporality of the God of biblical faith: “both as the hidden … and as the revealed God, the one God directs us away from himself as we might seek to grasp him ‘above’ his human life and cross and resurrection, toward himself as he defines himself for us in these events of our own time and history” (28). Jenson’s best contributions to the conversation and debate about “God” in late twentieth-century theology are the ways he reframes trinitarian doctrine in terms of his meditations on time, history, and narrative. Once we are willing to jettison the timelessness of deity, new categories are opened up in the quest to imagine God as meaningful and true for today.30 In place of the traditional formula, “God is three Persons in one substance”, Jenson proposes, “There is one event, God, of three identities”. God is the One who delivered our Hebrew ancestors from slavery in Egypt, the One who raised Jesus from the dead, who identifies ‘himself’ in time as the Three: the Father of Jesus, the risen Christ, and the Spirit who comes upon the Church and creation as the sign of the future. Such a Christian-specific naming of God places us in another world from the divine designer of early modern theism. Practising Trinitarian Faith and Transforming Life: LaCugna and Cunningham One challenge to these proposals that name God in more intrinsic, biblical, and historic Christian terms is whether Christian communities of faith exist today who are prepared to appropriate critically such reforms into their worship, spirituality, and witness. Can faith in God as re-described by Barth, Rahner, Jüngel, Moltmann, and Jenson be practised in the ordinary life of churches and believers in the context of our pluralistic world? Two N orth American theologians who addressed this issue out of a strong commitment to Christian community are Catherine LaCugna (1952–97) and David Cunningham (1961– ).31 30  ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� For a classic statement of the case that timeless deity is foreign to the understanding of God found in the N ew Testament, see Oscar Cullmann, Christ and Time: The Primitive Christian Conception of Time and History, (trans.) Floyd V. Filson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1964). 31  ������������������������� Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God For Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (N ew Y ork: Harper Collins, 1991); David S. Cunningham, These Three Are One: The Practice of Trinitarian Theology, in the series ‘Challenges in Contemporary Theology’, (eds) Lewis

The Christian Doctrine of God in the Late Twentieth Century

43

L aC ugna’s God for Us was received at first as a feminist revision of God as Trinity. However, this is not an informed reading of her text.32 It would be more accurate to say that she engages in a series of studies of the history of doctrine and liturgy in order to explicate Rahner’s axiom, “The ‘economic’ Trinity is the ‘immanent’ Trinity and the ‘immanent’ Trinity is the ‘economic’ Trinity.” More specifically, she understands the divine economy on the model of “emanation and return”. The economy is a parabolic movement from God (the Father) through Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit into the world that then returns in the Spirit through Christ to God (the Father) (222–23). This dynamic economy is full of implications for the Christian life when divine Personhood and God as the communion of the divine society of Persons is taken as the model for human personhood and community. In explicating Rahner’s axiom as a statement about our knowledge of the eternal God within time rather than an ontological claim, she provided the following principles: 1. There is one God, and one self-communication. 2. Salvation history is one mode of the divine self-communication, and salvation history is truly God’s self-communication. Who and what God is, is fully expressed and bestowed in creation and history, particularly in the person of Jesus and the activity of the Spirit. 3. The historical form of God’s self-revelation establishes the order of theological knowledge. Thus the starting point and context for knowledge of the eternal mystery of God (theologia) is the economy of salvation (oikonomia). 4. The incomprehensible and ineffable mystery of God is not diminished by God’s self-expression in the history of salvation. N onetheless, because of the unity of theologia and oikonomia, the specific details of God’s selfrevelation in Christ and the Spirit reveal God’s nature (221). These principles help to show how Rahner’s axiom does not intend to collapse the economic and immanent “trinities” since it is about the order of knowing rather than the order of being per se. But they also remind us of two problems that recur in Christian theologies of the Trinity. First, the concept of revelation as divine self-communication that is rooted in the Gospel of John and was elaborated by Hegel has dominated much of modern theology (Barth, Rahner, Jüngel, et al.). But it does not do justice to the plurality of ways divine action is signified in the Ayres and Gareth Jones, (Oxford, U.K. and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998). Page numbers that follow in parentheses are from these texts. 32  ����������������������������������������������������������� I agree with Peter C. Hodgson when he wrote that LaCugna’s God For Us “is a major scholarly study, but it does not represent a feminist reconstruction, nor does it fundamentally question traditional trinitarian conceptualities”. See Hodgson, Winds of the Spirit: A Constructive Christian Theology (Louisville, KY : Westminster John Knox Press, 1994), 364, endnote 3.

God in Postliberal Perspective

44

Bible.33 Further, it is more at home in a modalistic theory of trinitarian doctrine with God as the divine Subject interrelated in three modes of being rather than in a social analogical theory (LaCugna affirmed the social analogy). Second, if it is the case that “the historical form of God’s self-knowledge establishes the order of theological knowledge”, then why does LaCugna limit her discussion of the divine economy to the N ew Testament? Why does she minimize the role of Israel in that economy? Where is the Shema in its historical priority in her discussion of revelation? The minimal role of the Hebrew Bible in her explication of the economy leaves the impression that divine plurality is prior to divine unity in the “historical form of God’s self-revelation”. Apart from these perennial problems (what do we mean by ‘revelation’? what is the proper relation of divine unity and trinity?) and other issues, LaCugna’s chapter on “Living Trinitarian Faith” suggests something like these brief descriptions of what I call “trinitarian forms of life”. The following eight forms of life use elements of LaCugna’s theory of trinitarian doctrine as a set of norms, rules, or ideals for worship, interpreting Scripture, and life together: 1. Perichoretic love: the mutual indwelling and life-giving love of the divine Persons provides a regulative ideal for the kind of sharing in community (koinonia) sought by Christians. 2. Triune community without inferiority: trinitarian forms of life are modelled by ordered relationships that free persons for missions of service without a false sense of priority, hierarchy, or greatness. 3. Triune community is the form of freedom: trinitarian forms of life are characterized by the shared conviction that one is only free “to find and be oneself” in the community God creates, in both its historical and global dimensions. 4. The peace of the triune God: trinitarian forms of life aim at approximating the peaceful fellowship of the divine Persons in the midst of a violent world. 5. The ecstatic Persons: to be a person means to exist outside oneself in relationship to others in ways that overcome alienation and resentment without coercion. 6. The creative Persons: to be a person means to be created by God through the Logos in the Spirit, and therefore “personhood” is not limited to human creatures but may be ascribed to the whole creation. 7. The cruciform life: to be a person means to seek wherever possible to overcome evil by self-giving and suffering love that is stronger than death.

  See F. Gerald Downing, Has Christianity a Revelation? (London: SCM Press, 1964); Paul Ricoeur, “Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation”, (trans.) David Pellauer in Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, (ed.) and introd. Lewis S. Mudge (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980), 73–118; Avery Dulles, S.J. Models of Revelation (Garden City, NY : Doubleday, 1983); Thiemann, Revelation and Theology. 33

The Christian Doctrine of God in the Late Twentieth Century

45

8. Unity without assimilation: to live in unity as God is one is neither monistic nor conformist but a unity that incorporates differences without destroying the distinctiveness of persons. David Cunningham has developed a provocative account of trinitarian faith as inherently related to a set of beliefs (positioning, producing, and paralleling), virtues (polyphony, participation, and particularity), and practices (peacemaking, pluralizing, and persuading) that are aimed at the transformation of so-called ordinary life in both church and society. In light of the horror cast over the world by the events of 11 September 2001 and the inconclusive wars between nation-states and terrorists, I want to summarize his work by focusing on his understanding of peacemaking as a trinitarian practice. Cunningham would agree with my claim (4) above that the internal peace of the triune God models a peaceful fellowship for human life in a violent world: The Triune God is a God of peace; and God’s peace, through the grace of the Living Water poured out upon us, nourishes and strengthens us to participate in the practice of peacemaking. In so doing, we are taken up into the peace of God, restored to the image of the God of peace. Through God’s work in our lives, we have the opportunity to become a peaceable and peacemaking people (238).

He detects two basic meanings for peace: first, “harmonious relations … the ability to face and negotiate the strife, quarrels, and disagreement that mark our daily existence without resorting to violence”. Second, peace “implies unity, or oneness, or at least coexistence; it implies a decision to give up or sublate whatever could bring one into conflict with another, whatever disrupts harmonious relations” (239). When the Bible ascribes peace to the internal life of God, this implies the possibility that God could be dissolved by conflict, strife, and violence but elects to do no violence to the unity of the Three. Jesus’ prayer of agony in the Garden of Gethsemane (or his lament on the cross) show that there is “at least a potential for conflict within God” (241). Thus the divine life makes space for the difference of the Persons without turning those differences into the occasion for violence. In its affirmation of difference that does not devolve into strife, the doctrine of the Trinity establishes the theological priority of peace. God is internally differentiated, but the resulting potentiality for conflict is faced and negotiated by means of mutual love and abundant donation – not through coercion, strife, or violence. In this polyphonic orchestration of oneness and difference, Christian thought finds its highest good and perfection (243).

The Bible narrates a world in which human beings have failed to live out the peaceableness of the divine image, and have come to see violence as an intrinsic part of our “human condition”. In both testaments, the language of violence, warfare, and

46

God in Postliberal Perspective

judgement is appropriated as well to describe God’s response to human violence. This biblical image of the violent, punitive, and crusading God has been abused by Christians and Jews to underwrite the persecution of enemies, sinners, and persons of other faiths. This abuse ignores the fact that in the biblical drama, “God is not merely a propagator of violence against the world, but also one who suffers the world’s violence”, especially in the passion narrative at the heart of the Gospels. In the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God acts to break the endless cycle of violence and revenge, of invasion and retaliation, of murder and statesponsored execution. But the way God acts to interrupt this vicious cycle is not by coercion or the destruction of human agency. Rather, God invites us into the divine peace to become new creatures: “In this process, God’s Triunity plays a key role: in their polyphony, mutual participation, and non-individualistic particularity, the Three form us – through specific communal practices – into a peaceable and peacemaking people” (248). And how does the Trinity do this? Cunningham distinguishes two kinds of Christian practices that make for peace: (a) those that are intrinsically related to trinitarian doctrine as God’s declaration of peace; (b) those that seem unrelated to either the Trinity or peacemaking. In the first set (a), he identifies the Eucharist (the mass, holy communion, or the Lord’s Supper) and the use of the N icene and Apostles’ Creeds to confess the faith. In the second (b), he creatively interprets the stewardship of the earth and time. The Eucharist is the practice most obviously grounded in the triune God of peace. Participation in Christ’s body and blood relates Christians through the words, acts, and ritual drama to the Three. Five aspects of Eucharistic celebration are important: 1. Before the ritual begins, the gathered community is asked to offer signs of peace and reconciliation to each other. 2. The liturgy retells and re-enacts the passion narrative and resurrection of Christ as the Good N ews of God’s peacemaking activity for the world. 3. The Holy Spirit is invoked to set apart the bread and wine for holy use, and to set apart the people gathered for the sake of God’s call to holiness. This distinguishes the Eucharistic community from the violence of the world and identifies peaceableness and peacemaking as intrinsic to the holiness God seeks for Christians. 4. The Eucharist itself is a symbolic drama of table-fellowship, thus reminding the community that gracious hospitality marks God’s peacemaking and should mark the life of the community in relation to each other and to other peoples. 5. The Eucharist prepares the gathered community for missions of service and peacemaking in the world by the prayers offered after the receiving of the bread and wine. Confessing the faith using one of the ecumenical creeds is often related to belief but not to practice. But Cunningham argues that if creedal confession were more

The Christian Doctrine of God in the Late Twentieth Century

47

clearly grounded in distinctive practices of the Church, the meaningfulness of the creeds’ content would be more visible. By distinguishing the God of Jesus Christ from all other gods and powers, the creeds have the potential to distinguish Christian life from blind obedience to the “God” of civil religion. The contrast between the creeds’ identification of the story of Jesus with that of God’s way in the world on the one hand, and the “God” whom citizens and school children acknowledge on the other, e.g., in the American “Pledge of Allegiance”, can be heightened. God’s ways in the creeds are not the ways of super powers and nationstates. Further, creedal confession can be linked to a searching examination of other ways in which the life and symbolism of churches distinguish or fail to distinguish themselves from the deity of “In God We Trust”. This calls for an understanding of the Church as an alternative polis within the nation-state, commissioned by the triune God to offer alternative ways to peace in contrast to the coercion and violence of the civil exercise of power. The stewardship of the earth and time widen the scope of peacemaking into so-called ordinary life. The violence humanity does to nature on a global scale betrays the anthropocentric flaw in even our best ethical systems of human rights that ignore the status of other species as members of God’s good creation. By rediscovering nature as the production of the triune God rather than the warehouse of “natural resources”, a variety of Christian practices stand in need of reform if the Church is to identify with God’s peace. Cunningham calls for “an ethic of minimal interference in creation” as the Church’s witness to the domination of nature by our species (263). Finally, the stewardship of time calls upon Christians to break out of the tyranny of overwork, over-consumption, and the secular clock and calendar to rediscover the Sabbath and the Christian calendar as a more peaceable way to configure time in the world. Therefore, the doctrine of the Trinity offers us not only a different understanding of God to think about but also different ways of being in the world in light of God’s life. The late modern crisis in faith in God is deeply related to the loss of practices like Sabbath and Eucharist, as well as a crisis concerning the meaning and truth of the language used to refer to God. Any recovery of the Christian doctrine of God today must attend to both theoretical and practical dimensions of confessing the faith. Conclusion Looking backwards, what are some of the dominant issues and problems in the late twentieth-century Christian doctrine of God? 1. The scientific, philosophical, political, ethical, and theological critiques of traditional western theism have cleared the decks for major ecumenical theologians to appropriate critically conclusions of these critiques, and to recover critically the early Christian doctrine of God as Trinity in order to

God in Postliberal Perspective

48

2.

3.

4.

5.

distinguish Christian confession of God from western theism’s conception of deity. On the level of theology’s engagement with unbelief, can the particular subject matter of the doctrines of Trinity, christology, pneumatology, and the history of Christian experience be used in a persuasive response to the forms of atheism today? The recovery of God as Trinity has renewed debate among Christians about which understanding of the Trinity is most adequate for theological use today. Some of the debated issues include: a. The meaning and intelligibility of revelation. b. The relation of historical-critical interpretations of the Bible to symbolic, hermeneutical, and theological uses. c. The appropriate trinitarian language for today: Persons? Substance? Father and Son? d. Whether trinitarian faith shapes the virtues and practices of Christian communities of faith in distinctive and transformative ways? To what extent does the trinitarian renaissance depend upon a Christian sense of constraint or realism? Can this sense of constraint be made persuasive within and beyond the Christian community, or is it internal to the churches and believers alone? A related issue is: if natural theology provided the theory of knowledge and truth for early modern theism, what plays those roles for the Christian doctrine of God today? A doctrine of revelation? Or a more nuanced account of grace and nature, of divine and human activity in the naming of God? To what extent does the trinitarian renaissance depend upon a renewal of theological imagination? Is this appeal to imagination in conflict with or contradict the sense of constraint or theological realism?

These issues welcome us into the space between realism and non-realism where postliberal theologians witness to the God after “God”.

Chapter 2

The Cultural-Linguistic Turn in Postliberal T heology

How do I know that two people mean the same when each says he believes in God? And just the same goes for belief in the Trinity. A theology which insists on the use of certain particular words and phrases, and outlaws others, does not make anything clearer (Karl Barth). It gesticulates with words, as one might say, because it wants to say something and does not know how to express it. Practice, [Die Praxis] gives the words their sense.  ��������������������� Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, G. H.. von Wright, (ed.) (in collaboration with H. N yman), Peter Winch, (trans.) (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1980; University of Chicago Press paperback edn, 1984), p. 85e. Cf. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd edn., (ed.) G. E. M. Anscombe and Rush Rhees, G. E. M. Anscombe, (trans.) (N ew Y ork: Macmillan; Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell & Mott Ltd., 1958), p. 218f, hereafter abbreviated as Investigations. My guess is that Wittgenstein refers here to Barth’s substitution of the term Seinsweise for ‘Person’ in the doctrine of the Trinity. On Wittgenstein’s knowledge of Barth, see Fergus Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 152–53. On the meaning of Einstellung in Wittgenstein’s writings, see Joseph M. Incandela, “The Appropriation of Wittgenstein’s Work by Philosophers of Religion: Towards a Re-evaluation and an End”, Religious Studies 21 (1985):457–74, especially 469: “Belief is an Einstellung, a way of being situated in the world, a readiness to engage in a certain praxis”. Further, Wittgenstein’s reference to die Praxis in this remark is not identical with what some liberation theologians meant by praxis. A lthough he was greatly indebted to his friend, the economist Piero Sraffa, and to certain Marxist concepts that were afloat during his later life, Kerr acknowledges, “[Wittgenstein] was not a Marxist”. See Kerr on “Marxist Connections” in Theology After Wittgenstein, 65–69. To quote Incandela again, “Einstellung [in the Investigations, On Certainty, Zettel, and Culture and Value] always refers to a tendency to act, a type of behaviour” as contrasted with Einstellung as a “subjective feeling” in the Anglo-American sense of “attitude” (Incandela, “The Appropriation of Wittgenstein’s Work”, 469). T he only other reference to the Trinity in Wittgenstein’s writings I know of is from his conversation with Friedrich Waismann dated 17 December 1930: “Men have felt a connection here [between experiencing wonder at the existence of the world and the ethical] and have expressed it in this way: God the Father created the world, while God the Son (or the Word proceeding from God) is the ethical. That men have first divided the Godhead and then united it, points to there being a connection here”, F. Waismann, Wittgenstein und der Wiener Kreis, (ed.) B. F. McGuinness (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1967), 118, as cited by James C. Edwards, Ethics Without Philosophy: Wittgenstein and the Moral Life, (Gainesville, FL: University Presses of Florida, A University of South Florida Book, 1982), 

50

God in Postliberal Perspective

Beyond the Cognitive-Propositional Theory of Doctrine? One of the problems of early modern theism was that it assumed something like (if not identical to) the “cognitive-propositional” model of religion and theory of doctrine. This model is rejected by George A. Lindbeck, whose name is often associated with postliberalism. This chapter will show the philosophical and theological reasons why Lindbeck rejects this approach in favour of a “cultural-linguistic” model of religion and a rule theory of doctrine. There is an inherent connection between “cognitive-propositionalism” in doctrine and the epistemology of metaphysical realism. Geoffrey Wainwright et al. have criticized Lindbeck for too quickly and easily dismissing the traditional interpretation of doctrines as a set of true assertions about divine, cosmic, and human realities. My task shall be to provide the philosophical and theological backing for Lindbeck’s turn toward a “cultural-linguistic” model. One can only be fair to Lindbeck by presenting the strongest possible version of his position before criticizing it and considering possible alternatives. This will primarily include showing how the later anti-metaphysical writings of Wittgenstein and the uses made of them by his interpreters attempt to lead us beyond the classic epistemological dispute between idealism and realism. What could lie beyond such an enduring problematic in the history of philosophy and theology? Take our lives in the world: our embodied existence, our story-shaped selves, our traditions, institutions, and communities, our many and variegated “language-games”, our many “forms of life”, our daily existence as agents who engage the world in a variety of projects, who constantly follow or disobey rules, and who render judgement in action. Only in this rich context 88. For the interpretation of Wittgenstein’s idiosyncratic reference to the Trinity in this conversation, see Edwards, Ethics Without Philosophy, 88ff.   ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� For Wittgenstein’s definition of “language-games” by the citation of examples, see the Investigations, pp. 11-12e, Para. 23. For the particular interpretations of what “languagegames” and “forms of life” mean in Wittgenstein, throughout Chapter 2, I rely on the following commentators: Patrick Sherry, Religion, Truth and Language-Games (London: Macmillan; N ew Y ork: Harper and Row, 1977), Chap. 2; idem, “Is Religion a ‘Form of Life’?”, American Philosophical Quarterly 9/2 (April 1972):159–67; James C. Edwards, Ethics Without Philosophy, 126–43 (pp. 123–42 in the 1985 edn.); N icholas Lash, “How Large is a ‘Language Game’?”, Theology 87/715 (January 1984):19–28; Incandela, “The Appropriation of Wittgenstein’s Work”. Unlike D.Z. Phillips, I shall not accentuate the alleged autonomy of language-games (see his essay, “Religious Beliefs and Language Games” in The Philosophy of Religion, (ed.) Basil Mitchell, (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1971), 121–42), which comes under sharp criticism in both Sherry, Religion, Truth and Language-Games, 27–32, 34–40, 42–45, 52–59, and 189–91 and Richard Schaeffler, Religionsphilosophie, (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1983), 150–161. Rather, following Incandela, I shall accentuate the agential dimensions of language-games as modes of action construed linguistically (especially as construed in the genre of narrative) and the agential dimensions of forms of life as aspects of distinctive patterns of agency in the world as lived through or

The Cultural-Linguistic Turn in Postliberal Theology

51

of Christianity’s traditions, stories, metaphors, liturgies, creeds, confessions, and concepts do faithful agents and communities refer the doctrine of the Trinity to God. It is not the language or the doctrine that refers itself, as if they existed in abstraction, but agents who refer themselves and all things to God by means of the language and doctrine in worship and witness. The “cultural-linguistic” model of religion and a rule theory of doctrine point us in the direction of a trinitarian ethics which is concerned with how faith, love, and hope in God as triune shows itself in the lives of Christian agents and communities. By this turn toward the communal and linguistic dimensions in the uses of doctrine, I mean to correct a common misunderstanding: that the meaning of concepts used in religious discourse (e.g., ‘God in Three Persons’) should be sought in individual, mental processes. The turn away from the Cartesian or Kantian individual presupposed by many accounts of meaning and truth, will highlight the role of Wittgenstein’s “life-philosophy” as therapy for the imposition of metaphysical accounts of human being in theological anthropology. In other words, when we ask the questions of Chapter 1 – • • • •

What or who is God? Does God exist? What do Christians mean by “God”? Is the “God” of Christians identical with the “God” of early modern theism?

– we must be careful not to look for mental processes in the minds of believers. Lindbeck’s Rule Theory of Doctrine Lindbeck finds inadequate what he dubs “the cognitive-propositional theory of doctrine”. That theory, in close conjunction with aspects of “the experientialindwelt. On Wittgenstein’s life and writings as a testimony to a certain quality of religious and moral life, see Edwards, Ethics Without Philosophy, especially Chap. 6.   ��������������������������������������������������������������������������� On the crucial distinction in Wittgenstein’s writings between “saying” and “showing”, see Edwards, Ethics Without Philosophy, who traces the development of this distinction through Wittgenstein’s entire corpus.   ������������������ The discussion of The Nature of Doctrine’s cultural-linguistic turn in Chapter 2 and the following sections is one-sidedly weighted toward the philosophical and theological background of that turn (hereafter abbreviated as Doctrine). I have omitted discussion of the important sociological literature that Lindbeck cites, especially from the work of Clifford Geertz, Peter Berger, and Thomas Luckmann. Further, I note that Lindbeck offers both non-theological and theological reasons why the cultural-linguistic turn provides a way out of the present impasse between traditionalist and progressive studies of religion and doctrine. In my discussion I shall not always be concerned to distinguish which kind of reason is being offered in a particular point since I am more interested in his theory of doctrine than his theory of religion. One must also

52

God in Postliberal Perspective

expressive theory of doctrine”, has strongly influenced a number of late twentiethcentury theologians and their critics. For many Christians it appears commonsensical to suppose that doctrines are first-order propositions that correspond to objective divine realities, i.e., that their claim to truth is ontological and not merely functional or categorial (in the sense of truth-as-coherence). This intuition is often shared across the theological spectrum. Y et, one of Lindbeck’s central convictions is that both cognitive-propositional and experiential-expressive theories of doctrine, or their mix, fail to account for both ecumenical convergence among theologians and the ways doctrines in fact function within religious communities. First, we take up Lindbeck’s critique of propositionalism, and the way in which he shows the proper place of assertions in Christian speech and life. He defines the propositional truth in cognitivepropositionalism as follows: Those who are to some degree traditionally orthodox understand the propositional truth that they attribute to religious statements as a function of the ontological correspondence or “isomorphism” of the “structure of knowing and the structure remember that in arguing for the superiority of a cultural-linguistic theory of religion and doctrine over the cognitive-propositional and experiential-expressive theories, Lindbeck fully recognizes that he is comparing and contrasting all-inclusive theories which carry with them their own criteria of adequacy and their own theory-laden observations of the evidence. Therefore, he admits his case is ultimately circular by design, but the same must be said for the case for propositionalism or symbolism. This is due to the dependence of the enterprise of argument on more inclusive contexts of meaning. He cites Wittgenstein for this point (Doctrine, 11, n. 5): “All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which arguments have their life”, (On Certainty, (ed.) G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H.. von Wright, (trans.) D. Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe, (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1969; N ew Y ork: Harper and Row, Harper Torchbooks, 1972) Para. 105.   ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Lindbeck admits, “It seems odd to suggest that the N icaenum [N icene Creed] in its role as a communal doctrine does not make first-order truth claims, and yet this is what I shall contend. Doctrines regulate truth claims by excluding some and permitting others, but the logic of their communally authoritative use hinders or prevents them from specifying positively what is to be affirmed” (Doctrine, 19). B ut he also explains, “[I]n a culture influenced by what Lonergan calls the systematic differentiation of consciousness, even ordinary common sense supposes that truth by correspondence must be propositional … [I]n the early centuries of the church, ontological truth by correspondence has not yet been limited to propositionalism” (ibid., 51). T he distinction between “first-order” and “second-order propositions” in Lindbeck signifies his distinction between religious language as used by Christians to do a variety of tasks, which include making assertions about the character of God (first-order), and doctrinal and theological language as used by theologians to describe the Christian religion or show its depth grammar, the rules that govern its uses of language (second-order).

The Cultural-Linguistic Turn in Postliberal Theology

53

of the known”. Each proposition or act of judgment corresponds or does not correspond, is eternally true or false: there are no degrees or variations in propositional truth.

Thus, propositional truth is a function of ontological truth which is “that truth of correspondence to reality, which, according to epistemological realists, is attributable to first-order propositions”. N ow the initial problem is that such a concept of truth presupposes a language, and thereby a cultural system, in which meaningful statements can be made. The categorial adequacy or intrasystematic truth of such a culture guarantees the meaningfulness of its language that makes possible the expression of both true and false propositions by competent speakers of the language. But when we try to describe one such cultural-linguistic system, Christianity for example, the cognitive-propositional theory of religion turns out to be too intellectualistic for the task. In the Christian case the system is constituted … by a set of stories used in specifiable ways to interpret and live in the world. The mistake of a primarily cognitive-propositional theory of religion, from a cultural-linguistic perspective, is to overlook this difference. It is unable to do justice to the fact that a religious system is more like a natural language than a formally organized set of explicit statements, and that the right use of this language, unlike a mathematical one, cannot be detached from a particular way of behaving.

The intellectualism of the propositional approach is further revealed in its preference for doctrine and theological texts as the locus for truth-by-correspondence. For the cognitivist, it is chiefly technical theology and doctrine which are propositional, while on the [cultural-linguistic] model, propositional truth and falsity characterize ordinary religious language when it is used to mold lives through prayer, praise, preaching, and exhortation. It is only on this level that human beings linguistically exhibit their truth or falsity, their correspondence or lack of correspondence to the Ultimate Mystery.

When the truth-claims of a religion are construed in an intellectualistic fashion, the problem of possible error becomes acute.   Doctrine, 47. Geoffrey Wainwright objects that this is “too simple an account of propositionalists who take seriously the principle of analogy as enunciated by Lateran IV … ‘between Creator and creature there is no similarity so great that the dissimilarity is not greater’” (G.Wainwright., “Ecumenical Dimensions of Lindbeck’s ‘N ature of Doctrine’”, Modern Theology 4/2 (1988), 122–23).    Doctrine, 64.   ����������� Ibid., 64.   ���������� Ibid., 69. 

God in Postliberal Perspective

54

According to [propositionalism], the final religion must be exempt from error (for otherwise it could be surpassed). This propositional inerrancy has usually been attributed in Christianity to the original “deposit of faith”, though it has also been ascribed to Scripture and de fide church doctrines. Both the Protestant who insists on scriptural inerrancy and the Roman Catholic traditionalist counterpart are likely to be suffering from vulgarized forms of a rationalism descended from Greek philosophy by way of Cartesian and postCartesian rationalism reinforced by N ewtonian science; but in the early centuries of the church, ontological truth by correspondence had not yet been limited to propositionalism. Fundamentalist literalism, like experiential-expressivism, is a product of modernity.10

Propositionalism’s quest for the inerrant core of Christianity has endangered the very future of doctrine itself. Lindbeck makes three charges: The conceptual difficulties involved in traditional propositional notions of authoritative teaching have contributed to discrediting the whole doctrinal enterprise. They have helped legitimate unnecessary and counterproductive rigidities in practice because, first, propositionalism makes it difficult to understand how new doctrines can develop in the course of time, and how old ones can be forgotten or become peripheral. Second, propositional accounts of how old doctrines can be reinterpreted to fit new circumstances are unconvincing: they have difficulty in distinguishing between what changes and what remains the same. Third, they do not deal adequately with the specifically ecumenical problematic: how is it possible for doctrines that once contradicted each other to be reconciled and yet retain their identity?11

The third charge grows out of Lindbeck’s own labour in ecumenical dialogue between Lutherans and Catholics. On the propositionalist account of doctrine, ecumenical convergence can only be purchased at the price of one side’s admission of misunderstanding, error, or heresy. If doctrines are first-order propositions, then in the debate between western and eastern Christians over relations within the Trinity there will have to be winners and losers, or both sides will have to admit they misunderstood the internal relations of the triune Persons. This is because “‘classical’ propositional views of doctrine … tend to take a particular formulation of a doctrine … as a truth claim with objective or ontological import, and thus have difficulty envisioning the possibility of markedly different formulations of the same doctrine”.12 If doctrines are first-order propositions, then in the debate between those theologians who entertain the identity of the economic and immanent trinities 10

 ����������������� Ibid., 49 and 51.  ���������� Ibid., 78. 12  ���������� Ibid., 80. 11

The Cultural-Linguistic Turn in Postliberal Theology

55

(the Eastern Orthodox and Rahner) and those theologians who emphasize “the immanent trinity of psychological analogies and substantial relations” (Augustine, Aquinas, and Bernard Lonergan), one side will have to surrender. T he propositional view suggests that one of the two main streams of C hristian theological thinking about the Trinity is unwittingly heretical, even though the church has not yet made up its mind which one. Given this grave implication, there must be very good reasons indeed for saying that the doctrine of the Trinity is propositional as well as regulative, but it is not at all apparent that either party to the dispute have even attempted to supply them.13

The practical disadvantage of the propositional theory of doctrine is that it tends to obstruct the ecumenical convergence of theologians and the churches they are commissioned to represent. It is important to note one of the advantages of the cultural-linguistic perspective Lindbeck takes up on doctrines. Then we will turn to the way in which he shows the proper place of assertions in Christian speech and life. Does the propositional model adequately account for the way doctrines in fact function within religious communities? This question is structurally parallel to Wittgenstein’s concern that an intellectualistic account of meaning in terms of ostensive reference fails to map the variegated uses to which we put language in everyday life. Just as Wittgenstein assembled examples of non-ostensive uses of language, so James Buckley has assembled the following list of the variegated uses of doctrine as rules from the pages of The Nature of Doctrine: Doctrines as rules are extraordinarily various. Some rules have to do with the lexicon of a religion; others are syntactical rules and still others “provide semantic reference” (81). Rules can be informally operative and/ or formally stated (74–6). They can also be unconditionally and permanently necessary (e.g., perhaps, “Feed the poor”), conditionally necessary and irreversible (e.g., perhaps, doctrines against slavery or, for Catholics, doctrines about the papacy and Mary), conditionally necessary and reversible (e.g., perhaps, early Christian pacifism, the immortality of the soul), simply “accidentally necessary” (e.g., perhaps, post-Scriptural liturgical developments; for Protestants, the papacy). Some doctrines “define” correct usage or are “explicit statements of general regulative principles” (perhaps the sola gratia or sola fide). Most doctrines “illustrate correct usage rather than define it”; they are “exemplary instantiations or paradigms of the application of rules” (e.g., perhaps, N icaea) (81, 95). Other doctrines might be characterized as tragic in the sense that they involve “a

13

 ����������� Ibid., 107.

56

God in Postliberal Perspective decision between two alternatives, both of which are bad, but one of which is worse than the other” (98; cf. 103–104).14

One major problem with the propositional and experiential-expressive theories of doctrine is that their accounts of what doctrines are meant to do are too restricted to cover the many uses exemplified above. Theologians have used doctrines to refer to objective divine realities and to express or symbolize the self’s experience of divinity, but these two uses do not exhaust the many ways in which Christian communities have put their doctrinal heritage to work to regulate their life and speech. Lindbeck acknowledges that one of the advantages of the propositional account over the symbolist one of religion and doctrine is the propositionalist’s concern for ontological truth-claims. We must not simply allow for the possibility that a religion may be categorially as well as symbolically or expressively true; we must also allow for its possible propositional truth. Christians, e.g., generally act as if an affirmation such as “Jesus Christ is Lord” is more than a categorial truth: N ot only do the stories about Jesus define a singular concept of Lordship … but this concept … – so a theology of the cross maintains – is alone adequate to what is indeed most lordly in reality. N or do Christians stop with symbolic truth … but they go on and assert that it is propositionally true that Christ is Lord: i.e., the particular individual of which the stories are told is, was, and will be definitively and unsurpassably the Lord.15

Can the cultural-linguistic theory allow for this possibility as well? Some of Lindbeck’s readers think not, and this is precisely the point where some critics have taken aim at his proposal.16 Contrary to them, I am convinced that Lindbeck 14  ���������������������������������������������� James J. Buckley, “Doctrine in the Diaspora”, The Thomist 49 (1985):451–52. The overlap between Ian T. Ramsey’s philosophy of religious language and Lindbeck’s rule theory of doctrine is notable. Donald Evans summarized Ramsey’s philosophy: “For Ramsey, all first-order talk about God must be understood in accordance with second-order rules, ‘rules for our consistent talking’ about God. And often, as in the case of ‘immutable’ and ‘impassible’, what may look like a first-order description at first sight is actually a second-order rule. A great deal of theology is for Ramsey formal-mode discourse: it is not talk about God, but talk about talk about God”, (Donald Evans, “Ian Ramsey on Talk about God”, Religious Studies 7 (1971):222, in reference to Ramsey’s Religious Language (1957) (ed.), 84, 173, and 179, and idem, “Theological Literacy”, The Chicago Theological Seminary Register 53/5 (May 1963):38–39). 15   Doctrine, 63. 16  ������������������������������������������������������������������������������ For example, see Mark I. Wallace, “The N ew Y ale Theology: Liberalism, Realism and the Problem of Truth”, Christian Scholar’s Review 17/2 (December 1987):154–70, and Gary L. Comstock, “Two Types of N arrative Theology”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 55/4 (Winter 1987):699–700.

The Cultural-Linguistic Turn in Postliberal Theology

57

allows for this possibility without caving into the urge for either epistemological realism or idealism that animates his critics. On my account, one of the major strengths of Lindbeck’s proposal is his refusal to think that a theory of religion or doctrine should commit us one way or the other to classic versions of realism or idealism. The reader is left free in making epistemological commitments. This frees us from the notion that there must be one privileged “Christian metaphysic” or “Christian epistemology” that all Christians throughout time and space implicitly teach (or should have taught). In fact, as the Christian community encounters various cultures and new worlds there have been and will be many different Christian appropriations of philosophies for various uses over time. The global scope of the Gospel requires this kind of philosophical flexibility and resistance to dogmatism. In order to make room for propositional truth-claims in a cultural-linguistic theory of religion, Lindbeck develops a “‘performative-propositional’ theological theory of religious truth”.17 T his theory maintains that it is only in determinate settings that religious utterances acquire propositional force. The first determination of situations that is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the utterance of ontological truth is the background of “intrasystematic truth” or “the truth of coherence” to which I have already referred above. Utterances are intrasystematically true when they cohere with the total relevant context, which, in the case of a religion when viewed in cultural-linguistic terms, is not only other utterances but also the correlative forms of life. Thus for a Christian, “God is Three and One”, or “Christ is Lord” are true only as parts of a total pattern of speaking, thinking, feeling, and acting.18

“Ontological truth” or the truth of the correspondence of something or someone to reality can be described on three levels: the conformity of the religion as a whole to the being and will of God, the conformity of the self to the divine being and will, and the conformity of first-order propositions to God’s being and will. First, what would it mean for a religion as a whole to correspond to God? A religion thought of as comparable to a cultural system, as a set of language games correlated with a form of life, may as a whole correspond or not correspond to what a theist calls God’s being and will. As actually lived, a religion may be pictured as a single gigantic proposition. It is a true proposition to the extent that its objectivities are interiorized and exercised by groups and individuals in such a way as to conform them in some measure in the various dimensions of their existence to the ultimate reality and goodness that lies at the heart of things. It is a false proposition to the extent that this does not happen.

  Doctrine, 67.  ���������� Ibid., 64.

17 18

God in Postliberal Perspective

58

[T]he categorially and unsurpassably true religion is capable of being rightly utilized, of guiding thought, passions, and action in a way that corresponds to ultimate reality, and of thus being ontologically (and ‘propositionally’) true, but is not always and perhaps not even usually so employed.19

N ote on this level how the correspondence of a proposition to reality is used as the model for discussing how a religion would correspond to the reality of God. A religion is ontologically true to the extent that it is the occasion for the formation of a people who will correspond to the divine. Ontological truth is shown in life by a religion’s (or a certain deity’s) power of sanctification in the lives of those communities and persons who constitute the religion’s members. Thus, the truth of religious assertions can only be seen when they are taken as part of a greater whole, as part of religious forms of life. [Religious utterances’] correspondence to reality … is not an attribute that they have when considered in and of themselves, but is only a function of their role in constituting a form of life, a way of being in the world, which itself corresponds to the Most Important, the Ultimately Real.20

Second, ontological truth-as-correspondence means the conformity of the self to the divine being and will. To illustrate, Lindbeck takes the examples of Paul’s teaching in 1 Cor. 12:3 (“no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit”) and Luther’s teaching concerning “Christ pro me”. These statements are difficult to accommodate if one holds with cognitivists that the meaning, truth, and falsity of propositions are independent of the subjective dispositions of those who utter them … Paul and Luther, at any rate, quite clearly believed that Christ’s Lordship is objectively real no matter what the faith or unfaith of those who hear or say the words. What they were concerned to assert is that the only way to assert this truth is to do something about it, i.e., to commit oneself to a way of life … it is only through the performatory use of religious utterances that they acquire propositional force.21

This understanding of religious utterances requires at least two qualifications, which Lindbeck makes. As we have already noted, the correspondence of the self to God does not automatically inhere in the utterances themselves, but is a correspondence 19

 �������������������������� Ibid., 51–52, my emphasis.  ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Ibid., 65. Sometimes Lindbeck writes of religion as “a form of life” (pp. 33 and 51), but at least once he writes of “forms of life” (p. 64). When he equates “a form of life” with “a way of being in the world”, i.e., with a religion, as he does in the sentence quoted above, he appears to misuse the concept in the way that the first generation of Wittgenstein’s interpreters did, e.g., N orman Malcolm, D. Z. Phillips, and Diogenes Allen. 21  ����������� Ibid., 66. 20

The Cultural-Linguistic Turn in Postliberal Theology

59

that must be enacted: “a religious utterance … acquires the propositional truth of ontological correspondence only insofar as it is a performance, an act or deed, which helps create that correspondence”.22 The second qualification is that in religious performative speech, utterances can “simultaneously function both performatively and propositionally”,23 i.e., just because a sentence is being used in a liturgical context (“Laura Cathey, I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”) to perform what it says does not diminish its propositional force (“Laura, may you be conformed to the character of the God named ‘Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’”). This is an important qualification because some sentences may have multiple functions (e.g., the sentences of the N icene Creed may be used in a liturgical context propositionally or symbolically and in doctrinal dispute as rules). To say that doctrines are rules is not to deny that they involve propositions … For a rule theory, in short, doctrines qua doctrines are not first-order propositions, but are to be construed as second-order ones: they make … intrasystematic rather than ontological truth claims. [A] doctrinal sentence may also function symbolically or as a first-order proposition. Insofar as it is employed in these other ways … it either cannot or need not be construed as a norm of communal belief or practice: it is not being used as a church doctrine.24

Lindbeck’s analysis of the multiple uses of sentences in a religion is in harmony with Wittgenstein’s analysis of the functions of rules in a language-game. … what we call a rule of a language-game may have very different roles in the game. … The rule may be an aid in teaching the game … … – Or it is an instrument of the game itself – Or a rule is employed neither in the teaching nor in the game itself; nor is it set down in a list of rules. One learns the game by watching how others play.25

This brings us to the conformity of propositions to God’s being and will, the third level of ontological correspondence. Here Lindbeck admits a “modest cognitivism or propositionalism” is neither implied nor excluded by a cultural-linguistic theory of religion. He then offers the example of Aquinas’ theory of the relation of theological statements to God.

22

 ���������� Ibid., 65.  ����� Ibid. 24  ����������� Ibid., 80. 25   Investigations, pp. 26-27e, Para. 53–54. 23

God in Postliberal Perspective

60

Aquinas holds that although in statements about God the human mode of signifying (modus significandi) does not correspond to anything in the divine being, the signified (significatum) does. Thus, e.g., when we say that God is good, we do not affirm that any of our concepts of goodness (modi significandi) apply to him, but rather that there is a concept of goodness unavailable to us, viz., God’s understanding of his own goodness which does apply. What we assert, in other words, is that “‘God is good’ is meaningful and true”, but without knowing the meaning of ‘God is good’. Somewhat similarly, nonphysicists who do not know enough mathematics to understand the theory of relativity may rightly assert the truth of “Space-time is a four-dimensional continuum”, without knowing the sense in which this statement is true or even meaningful. Both they and theologians may use analogies to exclude erroneous interpretations, but they are only able to specify how these predications cannot correspond, not how they do correspond to reality (or, as a modern might say, how they are falsifiable), and therefore are unable to affirm them together with their modi significandi. Y et, despite this informational vacuity, the significata can be affirmed: it is possible to claim that the intellectual judgments “God is good” or “Space-time is a fourdimensional continuum” refer or correspond to objective realities even when one cannot specify the modi significandi by offering, e.g., a falsifiable description of God’s goodness or of a four-dimensional space-time continuum.26

This use of Aquinas’ distinction between the modi significandi and the significatum solves a number of problems for theological language, and raises several more. First, the distinction is useful when applied to trinitarian doctrine. If I may paraphrase, when eastern and western theologians say that God is triune, we do not affirm that any of our concepts of Trinity (modi significandi) apply to “him”, but rather that there is a concept of Trinity not yet available to us, namely, God’s understanding of “his” own tri-unity which does apply. Thus, although East and West differ over the modi significandi, we both refer to the significatum by means of our various trinitarian formulations. N ow we turn briefly to the problems. How do we know that “there is a concept of goodness unavailable to us, namely, God’s understanding of his own goodness which does apply” to him? In response, a contemporary reader of Thomas might turn to four sources: natural theology, divine revelation, the total canon of Scripture as unified by its narratives, or a fusion of these sources into a complex theological theory. N atural theology might be employed to demonstrate that the statement “God is good” is meaningful and true, and then one would have to defend the claim that God understands “her” own goodness in a uniquely divine manner that transcends our limited modes of human understanding. But this approach would then in turn have to answer to both the philosophical and theological critiques of the whole enterprise of natural theology. Or, a reader of Thomas could appeal to revelation: God has revealed that “he” is good and that “his” goodness transcends   Doctrine, 66–67.

26

The Cultural-Linguistic Turn in Postliberal Theology

61

all human understanding. But this approach would then in turn have to answer both the philosophical and theological critiques of the concept of revelation. Or, Thomas’ reader could appeal to the total canon of Scripture as unified by its narratives, and this is what Lindbeck in fact does: … despite its informational vacuity, the claim that God truly is good in himself is of utmost importance because it authorizes responding as if he were good in the ways indicated by the stories of creation, providence, and redemption which shape believers’ thoughts and actions; or, …, seriously to commit oneself to thinking and acting as if God were good in relation to us (quoad nos) in the ways indicated by the stories involves asserting that he really is good in himself (in se) even though, as the canonical texts testify, the meaning of this latter claim is utterly beyond human comprehension.27

Lindbeck’s language of “as if” alerts us to the primacy of practical reason in his reflections on this issue. To live “as if” God were good as he is depicted in biblical narratives involves us in asserting that God is good although we do not yet know what this assertion means. As he stated previously, “What we assert, in other words, is that ‘“God is good” is meaningful and true,’ but without knowing the meaning of ‘God is good’”. But if the meaning of “God is good” is unknown in our present state of creatureliness, how do we know that “‘God is good’ is meaningful and true” is a meaningful statement? Must we not posit a family resemblance between our concept of divine goodness and God’s own understanding of his goodness? Otherwise, the terms might turn out to be equivocal rather than analogous. T he fact that we do posit such a resemblance is an exercise of practical reason in the service of the God portrayed in Scripture who calls people to faithful living and dying in the world as created, preserved, reconciled, and redeemed by “her”. There is, in the present state of our knowledge, no adequate theoretical solution to the problem posed above, but a “‘performative-propositional’ theological theory of religious truth” does indicate practically how this problem is overcome in life.28 27

 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Ibid., 67, my underlining. Here I read the testimony of the “canonical texts” to include the biblical narratives and more, the testimony of wisdom literature to the present hiddenness or mystery of God even in his living relation to Israel and the Church. 28  ��������������������������������������������������������������������������� I am not sure if Lindbeck would find acceptable my solution to the problem underlined above, but it is consistent with all the other things he says about a culturallinguistic theory of religion, a rule theory of doctrine, and a postliberal theology. Patrick Sherry provides another alternative solution: “Kant objected that concepts like ‘understanding’ are derived from our own experience and that it is illegitimate to proceed to apply them in a new context. But I think that a reply can be given to him … although we learn the meaning of words from our everyday experience, it does not follow necessarily that their use is to be confined to the contexts in which we learned them, provided that we can give good grounds for extending their use. In the case of perfection terms there is already a great variety in our application of them: we use words like ‘strong’, ‘sound’, ‘rich’ and ‘flourishing’ in all sorts of contexts.

62

God in Postliberal Perspective

Thus Lindbeck shows the proper place of assertions in Christian speech and life. N ow I shall turn to Lindbeck’s construal of the doctrine of the Trinity in terms of his rule theory. The arguments outlined above would not necessarily persuade a cognitive-propositionalist or a mixed theorist like Rahner or Lonergan because they do not guarantee the truth of a traditional “Christian realism”. But, as I have indicated, that in itself is a reason for commending Lindbeck’s theory for he leaves us free to make up our own minds on the idealist-realist debate, or to push beyond the terms of this debate as Wittgenstein does in his later writings. As Lindbeck points out early in his work, there are no knock down arguments against propositionalist, symbolist, or cultural-linguistic accounts of religion for these accounts are themselves the elementary background in which arguments are proposed and defended. N ow, what is at stake in the “paradigm shift” from propositionalism to the cultural-linguistic approach? Is it possible to use the writings of the later Wittgenstein, but in such a way as to clearly distance my position from the so-called Wittgensteinian fideists who are often associated with postliberal theology?29

If perfection terms do not necessarily imply any limit, then we do not need to follow Aquinas in distinguishing between the ‘mode of signification’ of words, which we learn from creatures, and the ‘thing signified’, and then claiming that our intellect is able to soar above the former and to ascribe the latter to God (S.T. 1a. xiii.3, 6; De Pot. VII.2 ad 7). We can regard the via remotionis and the via eminentiae as already implicit in our use of perfection terms, and not as an extraneous procedure introduced in order to cope with the problem of God’s attributes”, (Religion, Truth and Language-Games, 156 and 157). Sherry attributes the view in the final sentence above to David Burrell, Analogy and Philosophical Language (N ew Haven, CT and London: Y ale University Press, 1973) in Sherry’s essay, “Analogy Today”, Philosophy 51 (1976):443, n. 14. He continues, “Unfortunately [Burrell’s] anxiety to grind an anti-Scotist axe prevents him from critically evaluating Aquinas’ theory of meaning”. If Sherry is right about that, then Lindbeck’s dependence on Burrell’s interpretation of Aquinas might have led him to adopt the modi significandi / significatum distinction without sufficient critical evaluation. However, Burrell is quick to point out problems with the distinction and notes, “In point of fact, if Aquinas invokes [the distinction], he does not rely upon the distinction for his practice contradicts it”, Analogy and Philosophical Language, 139. Wainwright believes that I am right about Lindbeck’s dependence on Burrell’s interpretation. Contra Burrell and Lindbeck, he notes, “To accentuate Aquinas’ ‘agnosticism’ (Doctrine, 66–69) is to minimize his cataphatism” (“Ecumenical Dimensions of Lindbeck’s ‘N ature of Doctrine’”, 123). 29  ����������������������������������������������������������������������������� For example, Lindbeck notes his indebtedness to Paul L. Holmer’s (1916–2004) appropriation of Wittgenstein for theological uses in Doctrine, 28, n. 28, where he refers to Holmer’s essay, “Wittgenstein and Theology”, in New Essays on Religious Language, (ed.) Dallas M. High (N ew Y ork: Oxford University Press, 1969), 25–35. But in William C. Placher’s review of Doctrine, he notes, “It is partly because [Holmer] moves in this direction [of Wittgensteinian Fideism] that I have not treated Paul Holmer’s work as central

The Cultural-Linguistic Turn in Postliberal Theology

63

“(Theology as grammar)”: Lindbeck on the Trinity What difference does the cultural-linguistic turn in the theory of doctrine make for the reality of talk of God as Triune? Let me state from the outset that the application of Lindbeck’s regulative theory to the problems of the reality or non-reality of God means that the historic trinitarian language of substance and Persons is neither unsurpassable nor essential to the future of Christian doctrine and worship. Rather, the rules behind this language in the creeds and theology of the early Church are “unconditionally and permanently necessary to mainstream Christian identity”.30 Thus, we need not bemoan the fact that traditional trinitarian terms (e.g., divine substance and Persons) appear to be on the wane in most Christian communities. What should worry us is the question whether the rules behind this language are applied to Christian speech about God in the creation and use of liturgy, sermon and hymnody, confessions of faith, religious education, and witness to the world, theology and apologetics. Regulative theory provides an alternative reading of trinitarian doctrine and language. Rather than treat the doctrine as a special ontology or a symbol, it proposes a grammatical reading. The notion of theology as the grammar of faith that rules religious uses of language may be as old as Luther.31 However, the to my account of postliberal theology”, “Revisionist and Postliberal Theologies and the Public Character of Theology”, The Thomist 49 (1985):408, n. 35. Mark Wallace charges Lindbeck with treating the Bible as one self-enclosed languagegame or incommensurable conceptual scheme that stands in need of no historical or extratextual referent for the backing of its truth claims (Mark Wallace, “The N ew Y ale Theology”, 169). My cumulative argument in Chapter 2 shows how unfair this criticism is to both Wittgenstein’s concept of language-games and Lindbeck’s theory of Scripture. 30   Doctrine, 96. Cf. Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1:355-59 on the historical and dogmatic problem of ‘Person’ in trinitarian language: “The man who wants to retain [‘person’] consistently will find that in addition to ancient ecclesiastical and academic usage about the only valid argument for its venerable position is that he does not have any other or better concept with which to replace it … We have no cause to want to outlaw the concept of person or to put it out of circulation. But we can apply it only in the sense of a practical abbreviation and as a reminder of the historical continuity of the problem” (ibid., 359, my emphasis). 31  ������������������������������������������������������������������������������ In the context of discussing christological language, Luther wrote, “The Holy Spirit has his own grammar”, Weimar Edition 39, 2; 104, 24, as cited by Gerhard Ebeling, Introduction to a Theological Theory of Language, (trans.) R. A. Wilson (London: Collins; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1973), 134–35. In the context of discussing trinitarian doctrine, he wrote: “If one wishes to speak of God, the whole of grammar must adopt new words. For even the series of numbers, ‘one, two, three,’ cannot be applied here. It holds for creatures, but here there is no order in number, space and time. Consequently we have to do something quite different here and lay down a different mode of expression from the natural one”, Weimar Edition 39, 2; 303, 22–304, I., as cited by Ebeling, Introduction, 134–35. Finally, in the context of discussing hermeneutics, Luther noted, “[Grammar] is in fact of theological significance”, Weimar Edition 5; 27, 8, as cited by Ebeling, Introduction,

64

God in Postliberal Perspective

impetus to re-conceive theology as the grammar of faith in contemporary theology came not from the Reformer but from one of Wittgenstein’s remarks, “Grammar tells what kind of object anything is (Theology as grammar.)”.32 R arely has a single parenthetical remark occasioned so much commentary among philosophers of religion and theologians.33 Rather than survey these commentaries, I shall turn to the particular use that Lindbeck makes of the concept of theology (especially doctrine) as the grammar of faith, since his usage is basically consistent with the interpretations provided by Bell and Holmer.34 Lindbeck uses the concept of “theology as grammar” to interpret the abiding function of doctrines in a religion despite the changing social worlds and experiences which a religion’s members encounter in their passage through time. The novelty of rule theory … is that it does not locate the abiding and doctrinally significant aspect of religion in propositionally formulated truths, much less in inner experiences, but in the story it tells and in the grammar that informs the way the story is told and used.35

134–35. For a discussion of grammar in language and theology (which omits, however, reference to Wittgenstein), see Ebeling, Introduction, 131–37. 32   Investigations, p. 116e, Para. 373. 33   For example, see Richard H. Bell, “Theology as Grammar: Is God an Object of Understanding?” Religious Studies 11 (1975):307–17; Sherry, Religion, Truth and Language-Games, 140–43; Garth Hallett, S.J., A Companion to Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical Investigations” (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1977), 426–27; Paul L. Holmer, The Grammar of Faith (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978), Chap. 2; Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein, 145–48. 34  ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� For example, Holmer defines: “The grammar of a language is that set of rules that describes how people speak who are doing it well and with efficacy. A logical schematism is also that set of criteria and lawlike remarks that describe how people think when they make sense” (Grammar of Faith, 20). He develops three ways in which theology is like grammar and one way in which it isn’t. (1) “If theology is like a grammar … then it follows that learning theology is not an end in itself” (ibid., 19). (2) Theology is like grammar in the sense that we do not make up the rules or set of criteria for good speech or true thought (ibid., 20). (3) Theology offers explicit rules for playing “the whole game of God’s presence” (ibid., 21–22). Unlike grammar, theology is “the declaration of the essence of Christianity” (ibid., 19). From these remarks, one can see how one moves from the analogy “theology as grammar” to the concept of a “descriptive theology”. 35   Doctrine, 80. It is important to note that Lindbeck describes the relation between religious agents and a religion’s doctrines in terms of “obeying a rule” rather than “making an interpretation”. Here he refers to Wittgenstein’s remarks that “there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call ‘obeying the rule’ and ‘going against it’ in actual cases” (Investigations, Para. 201). “Any interpretation still hangs in the air along with what it interprets, and cannot give any support. Interpretations by themselves do not determine meaning” (ibid., Para. 198). See Doctrine, 111, n. 25.

The Cultural-Linguistic Turn in Postliberal Theology

65

Grammatical rules are about the correct usage of a language. They describe the way a language should be deployed, not what ontological or historical claims one should affirm or deny. One uses language to make such affirmations or denials, and grammar shows one how to do that in a particular linguistic community. Thus the truth of doctrines as grammar is intrasystematic, not ontological. In other words, doctrines aid the creation of a space for internal, intrasystematic realism, not the imperial realism of universal ontological claims. One of the unique-making factors of Lindbeck’s rule theory is the way he relates doctrines as grammatical rules to that “set of biblical stories that stretches from creation to eschaton and culminates in Jesus’ passion and resurrection”.36 The doctrine that Jesus is the Messiah … functions lexically as the warrant for adding the N ew Testament literature to the canon, syntactically as a hermeneutical rule that Jesus Christ be interpreted as the fulfillment of the Old Testament promises (and the Old Testament as pointing toward him), and semantically as a rule regarding the referring use of such titles as “Messiah”.37

Thus, doctrine as the grammar of faith is not related abstractly to a vague category called “religious language” or a technical category like “theological language”, but rather is related concretely to the “lexical core” of Christianity: the biblical canon and christological-trinitarian language. Doctrines rule how speakers within the linguistic boundaries of the Christian community should use this lexical core to talk about everything else. Such a theory of doctrine allows for appropriate qualifications not possible in propositionalist or symbolist accounts. I have already noted the qualification that doctrines qua doctrines involve second-order propositions rather than firstorder ones, and that a doctrinal sentence may also be used to make a first-order propositional truth claim, or may be used as a symbol depending on the linguistic surroundings and the purposes of the speaker. Further, most doctrines illustrate correct usage rather than define it. They are exemplary instantiations or paradigms of the application of rules. Faithfulness to such doctrines does not necessarily mean repeating them; rather, it requires, in the making of any new formulations, adherence to the same directives that were involved in their first formulation. It is thus … that faithfulness to an ancient creed such as the N icene should be construed.38

Whereas traditional propositionalist accounts ascribe infallibility or inerrancy to doctrinal sentences, a grammatical theory of doctrine can make more modest claims for itself. 36

 ���������� Ibid., 84.  ����������������������� Ibid., 81, my emphasis. 38  ����� Ibid. 37

God in Postliberal Perspective

66

Even more than the grammar in grammar books, church doctrine is an inevitably imperfect and often misleading guide to the fundamental interconnections within a religion. In part this is because every formulated rule has more exceptions than the grammarians and the theologians are aware of … The experts must on occasion bow to the superior wisdom of the competent speaker who simply knows that such and such is right or wrong even though it violates the rules they have formulated.39

N ow, let me apply the regulative theory of doctrine to trinitarian language since Chapter 1 contrasted modern theism with God as Trinity. Then I shall turn to Lindbeck’s own discussion of trinitarian doctrine. The doctrinal statement, “the triune God is three divine Persons in one divine substance”, is neither an ostensive definition of God nor a sophisticated metaphysical way of representing God to a Christian audience. As a grammatical rule, it tells us how to use the concept of God within the linguistic bounds of the Christian community. As a rule it means: in this community speak of God as the One named ‘Father’, ‘Son’, and Holy Spirit. In this community ascribe to the Three named by this name all the perfections and actions attributed in the two testaments to the one God of the Shema, the God of Jesus Christ. This rule makes sense when used in reading the story of the God of Israel and the Lord of the early Christian communities. It has a grammatical function in wedding two sets of narratives together in one book to be read as the story of the living God who has made one new people out of Jews and Gentiles as a foretaste of the future. Without this rule, Christians may be tempted to set off their story of God as if it were separate from the story of Y ahweh’s love for and fidelity to Israel and the narratives of “his” creation of all things and all humankind. Without this rule, Christians may be tempted into believing that the story of Israel’s sinfulness against Y ahweh and suffering has nothing to do with the Church and her faithlessness to the God of Jesus Christ. Without this rule, Christians may be tempted into believing that we know God more intimately and obey God more faithfully than all other people. The concepts of divine substance and Persons serve to rule the reading of Hebrew Scripture (with its emphasis on the one true God who relates to the concept of the one divine substance) and the N ew Testament (with its naming of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who relate to the concept of the three divine Persons) as a unified set of witnesses to the living Lord of both Jew and Gentile. When we move from this grammatical rule back to first-order discourse, we could say, to call upon God as triune is to call upon the one Lord of both Jew and Gentile. Lindbeck’s grammatical reading of trinitarian doctrine deals directly with the problem of trinitarian language we have struggled with. Rule theory requires us to make a distinction between trinitarian doctrine qua doctrine (as enduring rules) and trinitarian language (as changing sets of concepts). 39

 ������������� Ibid., 81–82.

The Cultural-Linguistic Turn in Postliberal Theology

67

Some of the crucial concepts employed by [the trinitarian and christological] creeds, such as ‘substance’ (ousia), ‘person’ (hypostasis), and ‘in two natures’ (en dyo physeis), are postbiblical novelties. If these particular notions are essential, the doctrines of these creeds are clearly conditional, dependent on the late-Hellenistic milieu. Furthermore, their irreversibility would then seem to be dependent on the irreversibility of the conditioning circumstances, that is, on Greek philosophy. This, at any rate, is the way in which opponents have argued, beginning in the fourth century, but even more in modern times. The argument … is compelling unless a distinction can be made between doctrine and formulation, between content and form … such a distinction seems to be required in Christianity.40

If the doctrines contained in the creeds of N icaea and Chalcedon must always be taken as first-order propositions which correspond to the inner life of God, then the necessary separation between form and content becomes more difficult. If we change the conceptual form of the doctrines into the concepts of some more modern ontology, do we not risk changing the ontological truth claims that the doctrines are supposed to make? Rule theorists do not have this problem. If the doctrines in the creeds are construed as rules for Christian discourse, then the distinction between doctrine and formulation can be made more easily. In contrast to [experiential-expressivist perspectives], it is self-evident that both first-order and second-order propositions (e.g., rules) are separable from the forms in which they are articulated. One and the same proposition can be expressed in a variety of sentences employing a variety of conceptualities … the change in conceptuality need not change the truth claim or rule that is being enunciated … the only way to show that the doctrines of N icaea and Chalcedon are distinguishable from the concepts in which they are formulated is to state these doctrines in different terms that nevertheless have equivalent consequences.41

Lindbeck shows that this is possible in the case of the N icene Creed. First, he summarizes Lonergan’s historical argument that Athanasius took the homoousion as a rule of speech: “whatever is said of the Father is said of the Son, except that the Son is not the Father”.42 Then he proposes three regulative principles that make up the enduring normative content of the Creed: 1. The monotheistic principle: “[T]here is only one God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus.” 40

 ���������� Ibid., 92.  ���������� Ibid., 93. 42  �“[E]adem de Filio quae de Patre dicuntur excepto Patris Nomine”, (ibid., 94). 41

God in Postliberal Perspective

68

2. The principle of historical specificity: “[T]he stories of Jesus refer to a genuine human being who was born, lived, and died in a particular time and place.”43 3. The principle of christological maximalism: “[E]very possible importance is to be ascribed to Jesus that is not inconsistent with the first rules.”44 If this is what is normative about N icaea, then the concept of the homoousion (and thus the concept of divine substance) is only one way (albeit a venerable one) of conceiving what is authoritative in the creed for ecumenical Christian identity. By extension, a similar argument could be made for the language of Persons in the so-called Athanasian Creed. Therefore, regulative theory provides one plausible solution to the plurality of Christian speech about God as Trinity. The future of trinitarian doctrine, worship, and witness does not depend on whether we find the language of divine substance and Persons meaningful and true today.45 O ther concepts may be proposed and tested as to whether they embody the normative content, the rules of the ecumenical creeds. Foundations with Faces What is at stake in the conflict between Lindbeck and cognitive-propositional theorists of doctrine is the future of Christian theology as a discipline that both makes claims about reality and shapes the way Christians construe reality. T he shift away from foundational theories of knowledge in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy and theology helps to explain in part why the cognitive-propositional theory of doctrine and its doctrinal realism are in need of defence or revision.46 For some readers the critique of epistemological foundationalism seems to leave everything hanging up in the air. To criticize claims that expressions of ecstatic reason in early Christian worship, divine illumination, revelation, the concept of being, and historical facts provide indubitable (i.e., absolutely certain) foundations 43   Doctrine, 94. Holmer argues that words or concepts do not refer all by themselves, but people use words and concepts to refer, Grammar of Faith, 92. If I may extend this argument to stories, Holmer’s version of the second principle would read, “Refer the stories of Jesus to a genuine human being who was born, etc.” 44   Doctrine, 94. 45  ��������������������������������������� In Colman E. O’N eill, O.P.’s review of Doctrine, he restates the propositional content of N icaea and Chalcedon without any use of the language of substance and Persons, O’N eill, “The Rule Theory of Doctrine and Propositional Content”, The Thomist 49 (1985):436–38. 46  ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� See John Searle’s criticism of Jacques Derrida’s residual foundationalism in “The Word Turned Upside Down”, in New York Review of Books 30/16 (October 27, 1983):74–79, and Thiemann’s critique of foundationalism in modern doctrines of revelation in Revelation and Theology, Chap. 2.

The Cultural-Linguistic Turn in Postliberal Theology

69

on which Christian theology erects its structures of doctrines gives the appearance of an attack on the truthfulness of theology and faith itself. But that is neither my intention nor that of many anti-foundational theologians. In fact, it is precisely a passion for the truthfulness and reality-making claims of Christian faith that drives anti-foundational theologians to think through these issues with care and which keeps us on the lookout for nonsense.47 In the wake of the arguments against a foundational mentality in Christian theology, what is the alternative? Once one demon is cast out, will not seven come to take its place? The quest for epistemological foundations may give way to what I shall call, following Alvin Plantinga, the “grounds” of faith and theology.48 These grounds are trinitarian communities and believers, those forms of life and tradition shaped and formed by worship of the God named Abba and “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”.49 These grounds are not theoretical foundations, but historic and living traditions of trinitarian worship and language interwoven in the life of communities of faith, hope, and love. These grounds in themselves as contingent, historical, created realities are not indubitable (i.e., absolutely certain even within the Christian faith), but in fact are in need of ongoing repentance, renewal, and reform. This reforming of the personal and communal grounds continues in the primary (but not exclusive) context of Christian worship as the Scriptures are interpreted and the sacraments celebrated in the hermeneutical continuum of the liturgy. It is in the fellowship, practices, and pedagogy of these communities or 47

 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ On the role of “nonsense” in Wittgenstein’s practice of therapeutic philosophy, see Edwards, Ethics Without Philosophy, 5–6. 48  ����������������������������������������������������������������������������� Alvin Plantinga, “Reason and Belief in God”, in Alvin Plantinga and N icholas Wolterstroff, (ed.), Faith and Rationality (N otre Dame, IN : University of N otre Dame Press, 1983), 78–82. 49  ������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Wainwright suspects that the argument coined by Holmer, that believers are the grounds of faith (in the sense of the “faith of our fathers”, the faith which baptizes infants and adults in the triune N ame), is finally circular. He asks, how did the first believers come to believe? I respond that in “the textuality of faith” (Paul Ricoeur’s phrase) believers look to the canonical narratives for an answer to this question. By contrast, Wainwright seeks an historical-critical reconstruction of Jewish and Christian origins. On the problem of circularity, see Barth on the circulus veritatis Dei as a circulus among the circuli-circuli vitiosi and circuli veritatis in Church Dogmatics II/1:243–54, but especially 244ff. and 252 on the incarnation; Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, (trans.) Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, Beacon Paperback (ed.), 1967), 347–57; Ricoeur, “N aming God”, Chap. 12 in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative and Imagination, (trans.) David Pellauer; (ed.) Mark Wallace (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995); and Charles C. Hefling, Jr., Why Doctrines? (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 1984), 86–89. Ricoeur relates Anselm’s concept of faith seeking understanding to the hermeneutical circle in Bultmann, et al., and argues that any philosophy or apologetic that objects to the circle of faith and understanding seeks to be a philosophy without presuppositions or an apologetic “that pretends to lead reflection, without a break, from knowledge toward belief”, Symbolism of Evil, 357.

70

God in Postliberal Perspective

in the presence of their witnesses in the world that persons come to call upon the God of Jesus Christ for salvation. These renewed grounds, or renewed “forms of life”, or renewed “foundations” have faces and bodies. They explain themselves by particular stories which are gathered up in the canon of Scripture, the history of Christianity, and the living testimonies of ordinary believers. These foundations with faces do not claim to be anything great in and of themselves apart from one face among them. In this sense, all the grounds of the Christian community’s faith and life refer themselves, directly or indirectly, back to a Jewish rabbi whose living reality is celebrated with things as common as bread, wine, water, and oil and whose identity is narrated in the stories of Israel and the E vangelists. T o test these grounds means to become a fellow-traveller with one of these communities, even if from a great distance like the Gentile Magi in search of “the King of the Jews”. If that sounds like a strange way to find the truth, then it certainly is strange for all of us trained to look for indubitable foundations that any “mental-individual” could verify or falsify in thought abstracted from the particularity and historicity of life in this world. But now that such theoretical foundations have slipped from our grasp, perhaps foundations with faces make better sense than it did before.50

50  ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Holmer describes the grounds of Christian beliefs in these terms: “likening beliefs, not least religious beliefs … to a building, as if both needed ‘foundations’, is a little peculiar after all. For beliefs … must be believed, cared about, and put to all kinds of purposes, such as ‘saying the confession’, ‘singing the Creed’, or ‘informing someone what a Church teaches’, answering questions like – ‘What did Presbyterians believe that was distinctive?’ or ‘Can you tell me what I ought to believe?’ The practice of comparing buildings (with foundations) and edifices of thought (again with foundations) supposes that those beliefs are separable from ‘saying’, ‘telling’, ‘singing’, and other such practices – that is, it supposes that they can be significantly discussed without considering, believing, singing, saying, etc … are there foundations for beliefs? We do clearly have buildings without the builders; but there is an odd sense in which we do not have beliefs without believers. Without the latter, the beliefs are really nothing at all” (Grammar of Faith, 84; cf. Investigations, p. 11e, sec. 23). For Holmer the grounds or foundations with faces are believers who believe in beliefs. He describes the “foundation” of Christian theology as: “Consummatum est. S omething was settled and is therefore ready; some things have been done; sin and death are vanquished; God is in Christ, and Christ has been born, has lived, has died, and been raised from the dead. In a certain way of speaking, these together make the fact, the foundation, of at least Christian theology”, Grammar of Faith, 109. Also cf. N icholas Wolterstorff’s concept of “actual Christian commitment”. “To be a Christian is to be fundamentally committed to being a Christ-follower … To be a Christian is also, of course, to belong to a certain community – a community with a tradition. But what identifies this community is that its members are those who are fundamentally committed to being Christ-followers.” This community is characterized by the fact that it has certain sacred writings, the Old and N ew Testaments. These Scriptures “have … been judged by the community of Christ-followers at large to be authoritative guides for the thought and life of those who would be Christ-followers”. “Actual Christian commitment” is “[that] complex of action and belief in which [a person’s] fundamental commitment is in fact

The Cultural-Linguistic Turn in Postliberal Theology

71

The risk involved in making the transition from foundationalism to practical, communal, traditional, and personal grounds of faith and theology is the possible fall into some kind of fideism and the transmutation of theology into “pisteology”.51 For Christians have historically used (and many continue to use) the language of divine substance as a reality-making claim about the relation of God the Father and God the Son. Have I not opened the door to Feuerbach’s transformation of theology into anthropology? Would not foundations with faces, my metaphor for the well-grounded but nonfoundational character of faith and theology, indicate a “turn toward the communal subject” of theology, but not a turn toward her “divine subject”, the triune God?52 Haven’t I endorsed a mixed theory of contemporary philosophy and traditional theology that leaves philosophy in charge as the “master discourse” ruling over the deliberations of theology? I am particularly concerned to show that a postliberal theology need not jettison the reality-making claims of a trinitarian doctrine of God as long as they function or are explained within a “‘performative-propositional’ theological theory of religious truth”.53 Such a qualified realism bears a family resemblance to what Hilary Putnam called “sophisticated” or “internal realism” in contemporary philosophy and theology.54 Issues of realism call upon us to follow the path in our thinking from the issue of meaningfulness to the issue of truthfulness in our God-talk. The critique of foundationalism in late twentieth century philosophy and theology means, in part, that the truthfulness of talk of the Trinity should have many grounds, not merely one (such as sola Scriptura or sola whatever source of authority might be prized in a certain community or theology). N one of these grounds are indubitable in themselves, as the critical history of theology has shown. But the recognition that neither Scripture, liturgy, spiritual illumination, early Christian worship, ecclesial traditions, nor the so-called “biblical concept of revelation” provide foundations of certitude does not necessarily eliminate them as sources of reliable testimonies to God and ‘his’ promises and purposes realized”, Reason within the Bounds of Religion, 2nd edn. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984), 71–72). 51  ���������������������������������������������������������������������������� Barth warns, “[M]odern Protestantism … excessively emphasizes the desire to understand and pursue theology as pisteology, the science and doctrine of Christian faith”, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction, (trans.) Grover Foley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979), 99. 52  ������������������������������������������������������������������������������� This is Thiemann’s charge: “[Hauerwas’] stress on narrative is merely a socialhistorical version of the modern ‘turn to the subject’”, Revelation and Theology, 175–76, n. 19. 53   Doctrine, 67. 54  ����������������������������������������������������� Jeffrey Stout, “A Lexicon of Postmodern Philosophy”, Religious Studies Review 13/1 (January 1987):18, citing Hilary Putnam, Realism and Reason: Philosophical Papers, vol. 3 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Also see Putnam, “Realism and Reason”, in his Meaning and the Moral Sciences (London, Henley, UK, and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 123–40.

God in Postliberal Perspective

72

for creation. Their reliability is a matter of inter-subjective confirmation in the historic and on-going worship and witness of Christian communities in their many different forms (both practical and theological). One of these “forms of life” includes the theological virtue of hope that God will fulfill and thus verify the promises of the Gospel in “the Day of the Lord”.55 Another such “form of life” is the path of dialogue and a modest apologetics between Christians and persons of other traditions where the truthfulness of the Christian way is not a given but open to question, criticism, and debate. For now, I shall take up the last question first and issue promissory notes to return to the others later. What does nonfoundationalism have to do with Wittgenstein? In his quest to think and live beyond both solipsistic idealism and common sense realism, Wittgenstein criticized and provided an alternative to foundational epistemology.56 T he following paragraphs from the Investigations and On Certainty show some of the problems of foundationalism and the uniqueness of Wittgenstein’s alternative. The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something – because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.57 “How am I able to obey a rule?” – if this is not a question about causes, then it is about the justification for my following the rule in the way I do. If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: “This is simply what I do.”58 Our mistake is to look for an explanation where we ought to look at what happens as a ‘proto-phenomenon’. That is, where we ought to have said: this language-game is played.59 What has to be accepted, the given, is – so one could say – forms of life.60 55

 �������������������������������������������������������������������������� Wittgenstein asks, “Can only those hope who can talk? Only those who have mastered the use of a language. That is to say, the phenomena of hope are Modifikationen [= modes or modifications] of this complicated form of life”, (Investigations, p. 174e, Part II, i). 56  ������������������������������������������������������������� His concept of the self tended to fall into solipsism in his Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, (trans.) D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), e.g. in 5.62, p. 57 (hereafter referred to as Tractatus). His friend G. E. Moore defended common sense realism against solipsism and idealism. 57   Investigations, p. 50e, Para. 129. 58  ������������ Ibid., p. 85e, Para. 217. 59  ������������� Ibid., p. 167e, Para. 654. 60  ������������� Ibid., p. 226e, Para. c. In the context of the preceding paragraphs, “forms of life” would include the use of memory and comparison with other means of calculation in the testing of our means of calculation.

The Cultural-Linguistic Turn in Postliberal Theology

73

“An empirical proposition can be tested” (we say). But how? and through what? What counts as its test? – “But is this an adequate test? And, if so, must it not be recognizable as such in logic?” – As if giving grounds did not come to an end sometime. B ut the end is not an ungrounded presupposition: it is an ungrounded way of acting.61 Giving grounds, however, justifying the evidence, comes to an end; – but the end is not certain propositions’ striking us immediately as true, i.e., it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game. If the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, nor yet false.62 I want to say: propositions of the form of empirical propositions, and not only propositions of logic, form the foundation of all operating with thoughts (with language). – This observation is not of the form “I know …”. “I know …” states what I know, and that is not of logical interest. In this remark [above] the expression “propositions of the form of empirical propositions” is itself thoroughly bad; the statements in question are statements about material objects. And they do not serve as foundations in the same way as hypotheses which, if they turn out to be false, are replaced by others. … and write with confidence “In the beginning was the deed.”63

One problem of a foundational mentality in epistemology is the risk of falling into an endless regress of giving reasons or specifying grounds in search of the fundamentum in re, or final ground in reality. As soon as one indubitable foundation is discovered to be open to doubt or suspicion (and here I mean concrete, not global doubt), another is searched for to substitute in its place while the normative theory of theory formation (foundationalism) remains secure. Wittgenstein’s remarks above lead his reader to consider the limits of this kind of quest for theoretical foundations. What he uncovers is that foundationalism’s solution to the danger of infinite regress leaves us unsatisfied, for we are told that at the bottom of our knowing and beliefs is “an ungrounded presupposition” or the claim that certain propositions strike “us immediately as true”, i.e., we simply “see” their truth without inference or recourse to our other justified true beliefs.64 B ut this   On Certainty, p. 17e, Para. 110.  ������������ Ibid., p. 28e, Para. 204 and 205. 63  ������������ Ibid., p. 51e, Para. 401 and 402. The quote is from Goethe, Faust, I. 64  ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� The idea that certain propositions strike us as immediately true, e.g., ‘I am now being appeared to greenly by the courtyard below my office windows’, begs a number of questions. Suppose a colleague who is colourblind is looking out of my windows. The proposition above would not be self-evident to her unless I explain how the courtyard appears to me. But how would she test my explanation to see whether I was playing a trick on her or not? (I could tell her the courtyard was a dull brown rather than bright green and 61 62

74

God in Postliberal Perspective

leaves us hanging in mid-air, so to speak. Whereas we require justification or grounds for holding certain of our beliefs as true (i.e., as knowledge), we are told by certain forms of foundationalism to suspend this requirement when we get to the presuppositions or necessary conditions of the whole enterprise of knowledge and critical thinking. “If the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, nor yet false.” But if you then question what I claim as the final foundation, the ungrounded presuppositions, or the self-evident propositions, we are led into a transcendental argument that must bracket the messy contingency of all our actual feats of knowing and believing. Otherwise, you end up driving me to give grounds for my ungrounded presuppositions or arguments for my self-evident propositions, and I fall into self-contradiction. N ow is there any alternative to this quest? Has Wittgenstein shown us an alternative to the transcendental realms of mental-individualism? My wager is that he has. The Wittgensteinian alternative shows us the “real foundations” of our inquiry into the future of God-talk. They are our agency in the ordinary world of our common intercourse with other agents and the situations and contexts (construed by means of narrative) in which our agency is embedded.65 O ne set of these situations and contexts includes the historical Christian communities and the collection of distinctive forms of life, language-games, and agential patterns that have emerged from these communities (e.g., the patterns of patriarchs, prophets, priests, kings, disciples, apostles, martyrs and saints). One language-game, among many others that Christians have played (and which they did not invent but inherited from the Jews and Greeks), is that of analogical predication. From the “real foundation” of ordinary human agency in the world, Christians have predicated agency to the God of Jesus Christ, particularly as the agency of this God is narrated in the Bible and liturgies.66 In the distinction yet the unity in action of the will of Jesus and the will she would normally not be able to tell the difference.) The above proposition is true for me given my visual capacities and the colour system that is most widely used among all English speakers, and by these qualifications I have admitted a host of other considerations that are the background beliefs of the claim that this proposition strikes me as immediately true. But without these background beliefs the proposition only appears to carry its truthstatus internal to itself for all rational agents to “see” upon examination. 65  ����������������������������������������������������������������������������� These situations and contexts are construed by means of narrative since none of them are self-interpreting, no matter how ordinary they may appear. In raising young children, one comes to see how many simple language-games, stories, and plots of ordinary action they have to learn before they can more fully participate in the lives of families and communities. One of the most primal language-games or stories children begin to learn is the one that identifies “mama”, “dada”, and child as one on-going unit of daily interaction. One of Wittgenstein’s prime examples of a language-game is, “Making up a story; and reading it” (Investigations, p. 12e, Para. 23). 66  ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� For an account of ordinary human agency in the world which relates the experience of our embodied agency to the concept of the will, see Max Black, “Making Something Happen”, in his Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1962), 153–69.

The Cultural-Linguistic Turn in Postliberal Theology

75

of the Father, we are on the road to something like the concept of the triune God. (It is simply no accident of Hellenic metaphysics that Christians speak of God in this way.) The triune Persons first appear on the horizon of Christian God-talk and worship as agents in the N ew Testament writings and early Christian liturgy (here I am speaking synchronically). In the course of the formation and transmission of Christian Scriptures and liturgies, this three-fold agency became more complex over time (here I speak diachronically). This distinctive three-fold agency that was interpreted and transmitted via Christian liturgy over time became the real foundation of the need for something like the concept of divine Persons. Y et, because Christians lived according to the storied life and teaching of their Lord Christ, Jesus the Jew, they were constrained to confess the unity of this three-fold agency in the one living God of Israel. Thus there arose the need out of discipleship (a distinctive pattern of agency in the world) after the figure and story of Jesus the faithful Jew for something like the concept of one divine substance in which the three-fold agency was grounded in unity despite its manifold patterns of enactment over time in the narratives of Israel and the early Christian communities. In brief, the alternative to theoretical foundationalism is a renewal of our attention to the ordinary, daily, embodied ways of living and dying which bracket all our prideful system-building and foundation-laying. For theologians, this means the exorcism of our desire to prove the universal intelligibility of trinitarian language in abstraction from the concrete language-games, forms of life, and patterns of Christian agency which are called worship, baptism in the triune name, and witness to the one true God.67 One possible method that exorcism may employ is practice in thoughtful reflection on Wittgenstein’s therapeutic remarks in his later writings. In particular, I now turn to Wittgenstein’s critique of the ways we in the enlightened West have gone about our philosophizing (and directly and indirectly our theologizing) by assuming a mentalistic and atomistic concept of meaning. “The meaning of a word is its use in the language.”68 The psychological concept of meaning (the notion that meaning is a private event or that words carry their meaning with them like an ambience) falls under Wittgenstein’s critique of the use and abuse of language in metaphysical philosophy. The problem that Wittgenstein raises for his theological readers can be put into a question: how would you know if two Christians meant the same thing by the words “God” or “Trinity”? How would the identity of what they meant show itself? Just because two Christians both claimed to confess the N icene 67  ������������������������������������������������������������������������������ On the issue of refusing the urge to give an unqualified demonstration of the intelligibility of the doctrine of the Trinity, see Barth’s critique of the Augustinian tradition of the Vestigia Trinitatis in Church Dogmatics I/1:333–47. 68   Investigations, p. 20e, Para. 43.

God in Postliberal Perspective

76

Creed, how would you know that they both referred to the same concept of God by means of the language of the C reed? This question becomes more concrete when we think about a problem in ecumenics: trinitarian confession and theology in East and West. As mentioned previously, when Eastern Orthodox theologians refer to the Trinity, they may explain what they mean in terms of a divine ontological order in which “the Father” is “the fount of deity”, “the Son” is generated from the ousia of “the Father” and the Spirit is spirated from the ousia of “the Father”, and therefore they are “subordinate” ontologically in relation to “the Father”, although no less divine.69 When western Christian theologians refer to the Trinity, they may explain what they mean in terms of the self-differentiation of the one divine essence into the three co-equal Persons, and emphasize the procession of the Spirit from the Father “and the Son” (the debated Filioque).70 A n eastern theologian may picture the triune God as a divine order cascading into creation and rightly ordering all things in relationships that mirror the divine order. A western theologian may picture the triune God as a divine society of equals, or as the one God’s three-fold self-expression. The eastern one may emphasize the three Persons’ distinctions in Perichoretic (interpenetrating or mutually indwelling) unity. The western one may emphasize the Theo- or christocentric unity of the Three. In sum, they may think of the Trinity with different pictures in mind, and show this in how they describe what they mean by “Trinity” or in the icons or symbols they each find best suited for use in the worship of the triune God.71 How could we explain these differences synchronically? One way would be to assume with Augustine and many other theologians and philosophers in the western tradition that meaning is a mental phenomenon.72 O n this standard account, eastern and western theologians each possess a different mental picture of the Trinity, like an icon in “mental space”. We assume that there is a physical or mental object (a “meaning”) that corresponds in our minds to every word in 69

 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� The problem with the term “subordinate” is that its connotations include “inferiority” in western ears. B ut the profound meaning of eastern trinitarianism is that the S on and the Spirit are ontologically subordinate without being inferior in deity, for the Father has generated the S on and spirated the S pirit from his very own ousia. . 70  �������������������� For example, Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, (trans.) G. T. Thomson (N ew Y ork: Harper & Row, 1959), 44–5. 71  ��������������������������������������������������������������������������� On the theological nature of these distinctions, see Lukas Vischer, (ed.), Spirit of God, Spirit of Christ: Ecumenical Reflections on the Filioque Controversy, Faith and Order Paper N o. 103 (London: SPCK; Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1981). 72  �������������������������������������������������������������������������� Wittgenstein takes up Augustine’s “picture” of meaning as narrated in his Confessions, I. 8, in the Investigations, pp. 2e-31e, Para. 1–64. He summarizes the fruit of this picture in the common western philosophical idea that: “Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands”, (ibid., p. 2e, Para. 1). Thus meaning a word is a matter of ostensive reference either by means of gesture in space (“There’s a mouse over there in that cupboard”) or by the mental correlation of word and meaning (“Oh now I see what you mean by a coloured quark”).

The Cultural-Linguistic Turn in Postliberal Theology

77

our language. This “something in the mind” which becomes put into words in the process of communication is meaning as a mental phenomenon. In the context of trinitarian language, this means that we assume under the standard account that trinitarian terms must correspond to at least a mental object or mental icon called the meaning of these concepts. (And for these concepts to be true there must be a further correspondence between their mental objects – their meaning – and that which the concepts represent, i.e., the ontological structure of God.) But when we think that this picture grasps the essence of meaning or explains what happens whenever we mean something, we have become ensnared in an impoverished portrayal of the multiplicity and diversity of what we do when we mean something. The standard Augustinian account of meaning strips away our agency in the use of language. We assume that words and concepts mean in-and-of-themselves apart from our deployment of them in the tasks of our lives. We assume that meaningful and truthful language refers to objects apart from our engagement as the agents of reference.73 We tend to think that concepts refer themselves to reality rather than speakers.74 We ask, does this concept of God refer to anything real, or does it fail 73  ������������ See Holmer, Grammar of Faith, 52: “if one were going to say [that the concept of God] was meaningful, one could only then be commenting upon what the word God did for people when they believed, prayed, worshipped, and perhaps tried to love him with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength.” The philosopher goes on to comment that words do many things besides “communicate”. They also convey, command, please, stir emotions, and entice thoughts. “[In theology] truth is neither disparaged nor denied, but the true judgments that theology proffers, like the judgments of the morally inflamed man, are made to incite, not merely to inform”, ibid., 67. He goes on to argue in very Wittgensteinian fashion that, “[T]here can be no generic theory of meaning … we can learn the differences between ways of speaking and ways of understanding … there is still no common scale of meaningfulness bridging [religious talk] and all other expressions … There are scales of meaningfulness within certain kinds of contexts and uses” (ibid., 68, my emphasis). 74  ������������������������������������������������������������������������������ If one conferred agency upon our concepts and language, the transfer would be metaphorical, not literal. Here I note a profound similarity between a concept of language inspired by Wittgenstein and Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology of language. Ricoeur wrote: “The decisive fact … is that language has a reference only when it is used. As Strawson has shown in his famous response to Russell’s article, ‘On Denoting’, the same sentence, i.e., the same sense, may or may not refer depending on the circumstances or situation of an act of discourse. N o inner mark, independent of the use of a sentence, constitutes a reliable criterion of denotation … To refer is what the sentence does in a certain situation and according to a certain use. It is also what the speaker does when he applies his words to reality. That someone refers to something at a certain time is an event, a speech event … O nly this dialectic [of sense and reference] says something about the relation between language and the ontological condition of being in the world. Language is not a world of its own. It is not even a world” (Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning, (trans.) David Pellauer, et al. (Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), 20, with reference to P. F. Strawson, “On Referring”, Mind 59 (1950):320–44,

78

God in Postliberal Perspective

to possess reference and therefore fail to make any claim on reality? Or we ask, is this concept of God instantiated in reality? When we think in these terms, we continue to operate under the auspices of the standard account of meaning that Wittgenstein traces back to Augustine’s story of how the Bishop of Hippo learned language as a child via ostensive reference. To combat our bewitchment under the spell of Augustine’s picture of meaning, Wittgenstein enriches our stock of examples of what we do when we mean something. He calls our attention to the plurality of ways we put our language to work for us in a variety of institutions, “forms of life”, “language-games”, and daily intercourse with our fellows. Thus he redescribes meaning as a function of our uses of language in life.75 To discover the meaning of our words and concepts, we have to listen and look out for how they are used in the sentences (exclamations, promises, commands, questions, answers, etc.) and larger units of discourse (conversations, narratives, prayers, etc.) that we constantly use in a variety of ways to do a variety of jobs. This suggests an alternative way to look for the meaning of trinitarian language: how is this language and the doctrine used in the life of Christian communities and their members? As we answer this question we begin to do theology in a descriptive mode that takes the historic, tradition-shaped, doctrinally-ruled, and on-going concrete modes of Christian life and language into account in a way ignored by some revisionist theology.76 Such revisionist theology often looks for the meaning of theological language in general metaphysical, historical, or anthropological schemes of an all-inclusive nature that abstracts from the concrete behaviour, texts, and diction of trinitarian communities. A descriptive approach to trinitarian concepts is much more modest and circumscribed, yet also directs us to the living foundations that keep the issues of meaning and truth alive

reproduced in Logico-Linguistic Papers (London: Methuen; N ew Y ork: Barnes & N oble, 1971), 1–27, and Bertrand Russell, “On Denoting”, Mind 14 (1905):479–93, reproduced in Logic and Knowledge: Essays 1901–1950 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1956), 39–56). 75  ��� In Investigations, see p. 10e, Para. 20: “doesn’t the fact that sentences have the same sense consist in their having the same use?” Wittgenstein’s solution of the problem of whether two persons mean the same thing by the word “Trinity” would be to look for the use(s) to which these two put this word in life. We must look in this way because, “the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life” (ibid., pp. 11-12e, Para. 23). “[H]ow [someone] ‘takes’ the definition [of a word] is seen in the use that he makes of the word defined” (ibid. p. 14e, Para. 29). “‘N ’ has become meaningless … this expression would mean that the sign ‘N ’ no longer has a use in our language-game (unless we gave it a new one). ‘N ’ might also become meaningless because, for whatever reason, the tool was given another name and the sign ‘N ’ no longer used in the language-game” (ibid., p. 20e, Para. 41). 76  �������������������������������������������������������������������������������� On the idea of a “descriptive theology”, see Richard H. Bell, “Wittgenstein and Descriptive Theology”, Religious Studies 5 (1969):1–18; Bell, “Theology as Grammar”, 307–17; and Thiemann, Revelation and Theology, Chap. 4.

The Cultural-Linguistic Turn in Postliberal Theology

79

because without on-going trinitarian worship and witness, there would be little more than historical interest in an examination of such language. There are at least eight uses for trinitarian concepts in living Christian communities today: 1. Christians use the concepts of trinitarian doctrine to identify and defend distinctive claims about God in the context of religious and secular pluralism. 2. Trinitarian language is used to unify the biblical witnesses to God. The doctrine of the Trinity establishes a kind of hermeneutical continuity between the Hebrew Bible and early Christian writings. It enables Christians to claim the identity of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob with the God of Jesus and the A postles. 3. The third use is closely related. N ot only has trinitarian doctrine functioned to construe the canonical writings as a unity, it has also made the interpretation of Scripture conform to a rule authorized by church authorities, and thus limited the chaos of private interpretations of Scripture. 4. A fourth use of the doctrine is related to the first, but with an eye to the internal life of Christian communities. In the first use, the doctrine helps to specify the Christian concept of God over against other concepts of God taught by some within Christianity or by other religions or philosophies beyond the institutional limits of the church. Once the Christian concept of God has been made distinctive by ecumenical and authoritative church teaching, it may be used to indicate membership in the Christian community. 5. There is another apologetic use of the doctrine. An emphasis on the trinitarian uniqueness of Christian God-talk enables the believer to avoid some of the critiques of philosophical and theological theism launched by a-theological philosophers of religion. In the context of this use, one type of apologetic reply to the sceptic is that Christian faith in God has no stake in the fate of metaphysical theism. Whether metaphysical theism in its traditional or modern varieties can answer the challenges of a-theology or not, a Christian theological response to those challenges employs a uniquely different concept of God, and is not theoretically grounded in the traditional arguments for the existence of the God of metaphysical theism. In short, whether the metaphysical concept of God rises or falls on the intellectual stock market, theology is not disturbed. To speak of God as Trinity is to tell a very different story about God from the one defended by theistic metaphysicians. 6. The liturgical uses of trinitarian language occur in the context of baptism in the three-fold name and catechetical instruction. As in the case of biblical interpretation above, trinitarian language functions like a rule or standard by which to measure the language of worship. When this language is used, it makes the worship of God conform to a rule authorized by church

80

God in Postliberal Perspective

authorities. Thus, the chaos of idiosyncratic versions or revisions of the liturgy is avoided where the language of worship is made to measure up to the doctrinal rule. 7. Are trinitarian terms and concepts used in the ordinary day-to-day conversations of Christians outside the context of public worship on the L ord’s D ay? In what follows I merely offer my own impressions without any claim to comprehensiveness. The reader may test this against his or her own stock of memories. The language of Persons does continue to appear among Christians, although it is not found in the major creeds most often used in public worship. One may hear phrases like, “the Person and Work of Christ”, or “the Person and Work of the Holy Spirit”. Some Christians may simply speak of “the Person of Christ”, or “the Person of the Spirit”. This language is often used in the context of spirituality to indicate the character of the speaker’s relationship to the God addressed in prayer or worship. The speaker uses a simple analogy: “the Person of Christ or the Spirit” is One to whom or through whom prayer may be addressed for Christ or the Spirit listens to prayer like a person to whom communication may be addressed. These uses of the concept of “Person” may border on ascribing personality to God the Son or God the Spirit, or they may simply emphasize the ways in which God is more like a person than like anything else we know of in creation. Here the danger of anthropomorphizing God into a personality among personalities is acute, but the threefold character of divine Personhood points toward something more rich and complex than a projected father-figure. 8. Trinitarian language may become used in a trinitarian ethics. It is not ordinary for many Christians to think about morality or ethics in relation to the doctrine of the Trinity. Instead, we may think of them in the context of the doctrine of creation, or ecclesiology, or the rule of God. The closest we may come to something like a trinitarian ethic would be reflection upon the christological and eschatological grounds of ethics in Gospel narratives. A full-blown trinitarian ethic would reflect on ‘the Father’s’ sending of ‘the Son’ and promise of the Spirit as essential to understanding the character of Christian corporate and personal identity in the world. Thus, it would not be christocentric in a narrow sense, but both christological and pneumatological in the context of ‘the Father’s’ purposes for all things. Such an ethic could take as its navigational stars the imperatives from Leviticus 11:44–45: “be holy, for I am holy”, and Matthew 5:48: “Y ou, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” If the divine perfections include the fact that God is the triune community of reconciling love, then the character of Christian community and identity finds its goal in the richness of inner-trinitarian life, the mutual love of the divine Persons that overflows in the reconciliation of all things to God in Christ by the S pirit.

The Cultural-Linguistic Turn in Postliberal Theology

81

I have provided eight examples of ways that trinitarian language comes into play in the lives of Christian communities. The language of the doctrine of the Trinity need not provide us with either a metaphysic (a general scheme about all things) or a Christian ontology (a theory of being). In fact, it has many other uses in the Church. The doctrine of the Trinity is a way of reading Scripture and Christian liturgy which is (or may be) used in Christian life and speech about God, both within the Church and beyond it. In its rudimentary biblical form (the threefold name) and in the concept of God as “triune” or “Trinity”, the doctrine provides a mark of Christian identity among the member churches of the World Council. Finally, the doctrine provides conceptual resources for the tasks of Christian polemics, apologetics, and ethics. In the presentation of the eight examples above, I have attempted to engage in a descriptive theology in the spirit of Wittgenstein. Whereas our habit is to search for the essence of trinitarian concepts via mental reflection upon their meaning, Wittgenstein commands his reader, “don’t think, but look!”77 “Don’t ask for the meaning; look for the use.”78 A descriptive theology carried out in this spirit is not an explanatory phenomenology of how God manifests himself in language. Wittgenstein describes the task of his later investigations in contradistinction from any such phenomenology. We feel as if we had to penetrate phenomena: our investigation, however, is directed not towards phenomena, but, as one might say, toward the ‘possibilities’ of phenomena. We remind ourselves, that is to say, of the kind of statement that we make about phenomena. Our investigation is therefore a grammatical one.79

How Christians use trinitarian language, the tasks in which we put this language to work, what kind of statements we make about the Trinity will show us what we mean when we speak of God in this way. The reader may feel disappointment. Isn’t the purpose of an analysis of trinitarian language to show how God is revealed through this language to all who use it? The task of a descriptive theology is more modest. Wittgenstein once wrote in his notebooks, “The way you use the word ‘God’ does not show whom you mean – but, rather, what you mean.”80 T he multifarious uses of trinitarian language themselves do not reveal God automatically upon inspection. Rather, the uses show what the users mean when they refer to God in this way. Of course, the users trust and hope that the God of Jesus Christ wills to be spoken of in this manner, based on the witness of Scripture, liturgy, the ecumenical creeds, the example of all the saints, ecclesial authority,   Investigations, p. 31e, Para. 66.  ������������������������������������������������������ One of Wittgenstein’s epigrams as quoted by Thiemann, Revelation and Theology,

77 78

56.

79   Investigations, pp. 42-43e, Para. 90. Cf. the later parenthetical remark, “(Theology as grammar.)”, p. 116e, Para. 373. 80   Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 50e (dated 1946).

82

God in Postliberal Perspective

etc. But it takes a certain kind of community to trust and hope that this is the case, a people who enact the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love and who teach their children to love God in this way. Wittgenstein also remarked, “Y ou can’t hear God speak to someone else, you can hear him only if you are being addressed.”81 An analysis of trinitarian language cannot reveal God in abstraction from the kind of education that prepares faithful listeners to be addressed through the means of grace. Part of that training may include theology, philosophical reflection, and apologetics that address our capacity for rational reflection on the content and aims of faith.

81   Wittgenstein, Zettel, (trans.) G. ����������������������������������������������� E. M. Anscombe; G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, (eds) (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1967), Para. 717. Immediately he notes, “That is a grammatical remark”.

Chapter 3

Realism(s) and Its Other(s) Varieties of Realism and Irrealism in Philosophy, Science and Theology In the previous chapter I presented a sensibility and a sketch of a theological anthropology inspired by Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language and Lindbeck’s theory of doctrine. This sensibility and its anthropology seeks to think beyond the terms of the debate set by solipsistic idealism and common sense realism when we ask fundamental questions about the doctrine of God: • • • •

What or who is God? Does God exist? What do Christians mean by “God”? Is this “God” identical with the “God” of early modern theism?

This sensibility seeks to avoid one form of non-realism in theology: Feuerbach’s reduction of theology to anthropology. At the same time it recognizes the human face of the doctrine of God and its communal functions in a Christian context. Given my departure from the ordinary terms of the debate and my attempt to vindicate Lindbeck before his critics, one may wonder if the sensibility sketched thus far is willing to give up on the claim that God as Trinity is real, present, or there-for-us, for-others, and for-the-world, i.e., is the Trinity a mind-independent reality who preceded the Christian linguistic community as Creator and Redeemer, who is active in our plural world of religions and cultures, and who will endure after all communities and civilizations have disappeared? Such a question calls for an exposition of some of the major types of realism and anti-realism found in the literatures of philosophy and theology today, especially as these disciplines encounter each other in the renewed dialogues of the natural sciences with religions. A brief handbook of terms includes: Realism – According to Ian Barbour (Carleton College, USA), “The basic assumption of realism is that existence is prior to theorizing.” In the case of scientific realism, theories should model and explain what is real, not what is merely hypothesized, projected, or imagined. In the case of theological realism, doctrines or symbols should refer to or represent sacred realities that transcend or go beyond an individual’s pious wish-dreams. The non-realist in theology claims   ���������������� Ian G. Barbour, Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues (N ew Y ork: Harper Collins, 1997 rev. edn.), 118.

84

God in Postliberal Perspective

that our doctrines and symbols do not refer to such realities but are about something else, like the inherent possibilities of nature or human being per se as in the case of the character of Antagoras in Iris Murdoch’s dialogue in the introduction to this book. Metaphysical or classical realism – The position that the proper relation between theories, models, or concepts and reality is one of correspondence. In the case of science, the test of a theory is whether its explanatory structure corresponds to the phenomena it intends to explain in the natural world. Where a community of inquiry stands to discover whether a theory corresponds to the real world is subject to debate. In epistemology, metaphysical realism is associated with the correspondence theory of truth. In Lindbeck’s typology of doctrine, metaphysical realism shows up as the cognitive-propositional type. According to Hilary Putnam (Harvard University): On this perspective, the world consists of some fixed totality of mind-independent objects. There is exactly one true and complete description of ‘the way the world is’. Truth involves some sort of correspondence relation between words or thought-signs and external things and sets of things … [I]ts favorite point of view is a God’s E ye point of view.

Critical realism – One viable alternative to metaphysical realism is critical realism. This is one candidate that may cover postliberal claims about God. In science, “models and theories are abstract symbol systems, which inadequately and selectively represent particular aspects of the world for specific purposes”. Scientists intend to be metaphysical realists but they must use models and theories that are “imaginative human constructs”. On this account, models “… are to be taken seriously but not literally; they are neither literal pictures nor useful fictions but limited and inadequate ways of imagining what is observable. They make tentative ontological claims that there are entities in the world something like those postulated in the models.” In religion, we should take religious models “seriously but not literally. They are neither literal descriptions of reality nor useful fictions, but human constructs that help us interpret experience by imagining what cannot be observed.” Critical realism in science is opposed to critical idealism that claims we can be objective only from within the categories of human understanding (space, time, causality, etc.), but we cannot know whether things in-and-of-themselves are spatial, temporal, causally related, etc., for we impose our human categories on the raw material of experience. Critical realism in theology is opposed to non-realist or anti-realist accounts of the reference of God-talk.   ��������������� Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 49.   ��������� Barbour, Religion and Science, 117.   ����������� Ibid., 119.

Realism(s) and Its Other(s)

85

Internal realism (or pragmatic internal realism) – Another candidate I have considered for postliberal claims about God is internal realism. Putnam has proposed two versions of such a theory of knowledge, language and truth: internal realism and natural realism. He cites Kant, William James, and Wittgenstein’s influence. According to Putnam, human claims about reality are only possible from within systems of language, concepts, and theory that provide ways of testing these claims. In contrast to metaphysical realism, there is no language-neutral or concept-neutral standpoint from which we could check to “see” if our reality claims really correspond to the world denuded of language and models. Reality claims go hand-in-hand with worldviews and systems of thought for there is no universal framework of reason or science that tests all other frameworks for their truthfulness or reliability. Paraphrasing Putman, it requires both human minds and the world to make up our minds about the way the world is. He summarizes his internal realist version of this theory: … the mind does not simply ‘copy’ a world which admits of description by One True Theory. But my view is not a view in which the mind makes up the world, either (or makes it up subject to constraints imposed by ‘methodological canons’ and mind-independent ‘sense data’). If one must use metaphorical language, then let the metaphor be this: the mind and the world jointly make up the mind and the world. (Or, to make the metaphor even more Hegelian, the Universe makes up the Universe – with minds – collectively – playing a special role in the making up.)

Putnam’s internal realism appeals to me as another analogue to some postliberal claims about God. For a theological internal realist can imagine that Christian convictions about the triune God’s reality emerge out of this community’s forms of life and practices like baptism, Eucharist, and forms of ministry and mission. Christian tradition, as practiced by believers over time, and God’s ongoing work in creation, jointly make up the living reality of faith and God. Or, God makes 

 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Ibid, xi. In fact, Putnam’s thinking on realism, knowledge, and truth has gone through three stages: metaphysical realism, internal pragmatic realism (exemplified in Reason, Truth and History), and natural realism (exemplified in his John Dewey Essay in Philosophy, The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and World (N ew Y ork: Columbia University Press, 1999). For a brief overview of these three stages, see Chapters 3 and 5 in Keya Maitra, On Putnam (Toronto, Canada: Wadsworth, 2003); N icholas Rescher, “Knowledge of Truth in Pragmatic Perspective”, and Hilary Putnam, “Comment on N icholas Rescher’s Paper”, Chap. 5 in James Conant and Urszula M. Zeglen, (eds) Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism (London and N ew Y ork: Routledge, 2002); Wolfgang Künne, “From Alethic Anti-Realism to Alethic Realism”, and Hilary Putnam, “Comment on Wolfgang Künne’s Paper”, Chap. 9 in Conant and Zeglen, (eds), Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism. For my purposes, I will not take up Putnam’s natural realism since it addresses issues in the theory of perception: see The Threefold Cord, 10–11.

God in Postliberal Perspective

86

up God – with creatures or believers – collectively – playing a special role in the making up. Agential realism – Karen Barad (Mount Holyoke College, USA) offers a happy compromise between the sciences’ need for constraint and the uses of imagination. On the agential realist account, what past epistemologies left out of consideration was the role of human agency in the construction and co-constitution of the objects of scientific inquiry. For agential realists, there is no mind-independent world beneath our languages and forms of scientific inquiry. Rather, the reality of the world is constituted by both material reality and human discursive practices that have arisen in the course of evolution. Not the substance or essence of an objective entity observed from some neutral point of view but, rather, the dynamic relation or ‘intra-action’ of both subject and object constitute the sense of constraint that we mean by ‘the real’. Barad defines her philosophy of science as … … a theory of knowledge and reality whose fundamental premise is that reality consists of phenomena that are reconstituted in intra-action with the interventions of knowers. ‘Intra-action’ signifies a dynamic involving the inseparability of the objects and agencies of intervention (as opposed to interactions which reinscribe the contested dichotomy [of subject and object]). Agential realism accounts for both the contingency and efficacy of scientific knowledge. It provides an understanding of the interactions between human and nonhuman, material and discursive, and natural and cultural factors in the production of knowledge. One of its basic aims is to move considerations of epistemic practices beyond the traditional realism versus social constructivism debates.

What are the implications of this epistemology and ontology for postliberal reflections on God? On the one hand, the traditional recognition of the need for faith and practice to apprehend God implicitly assumes human agency (as graced in creation and redemption) in religious knowing and forms of life. The challenge of agential realism on the other hand is that human faith and religious imagination have implications for both our knowledge of God and God’s being-in-relation

 ��������������������������������������������������������� Karen Barad, “Agential Realism”, in Lorraine Code, (ed.) Encyclopedia of Feminist Theories (N ew Y ork: Routledge, 2000), 15–16; idem, “Agential Realism: Feminist Interventions in Understanding Scientific Practices”, Chap. 1 in Mario Biagioli, (ed.) The Science Studies Reader (N ew Y ork and London: Routledge, 1999); idem, “Meeting the Universe Halfway: Realism and Social Constructivism without Contradiction”, in Lynn H. N elson and Jack N elson, (eds) Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science (London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996), 161–94; idem, “Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality”, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 10/2 (1998), 87–128.   ������� Barad, Encyclopedia of Feminist Theories, 15–16. 

Realism(s) and Its Other(s)

87

with us. This appears to domesticate God’s transcendence in ways not acceptable to many postliberals. In the science and theology dialogue, non-realism, anti-realism or irrealism, the opposing position to realism and its varieties, takes three forms: Conventionalism – Our languages do not map or model the categories of being, the world, or nature. Rather they display the conventions of human language, social arrangements, ideology, gender preferences, religious affiliations, and other institutions imposed upon the world in ways that are or may be arbitrary. These conventions of human invention become appropriated as natural or given via socialization over time. Instrumentalism – In philosophy of science, this position holds that … [M]odels and theories are calculating devices whose only function is to allow the correlation and prediction of our observations. Instrumentalism sees them as useful intellectual instruments for organizing research and for controlling the world. According to instrumentalists, models and theories do not describe or refer to real entities in the world.

Science is true because it is powerful; it enables us to do more in the world through its application in technology and engineering, not because it reveals to us the structure of reality. In religion, an instrumental form of anti-realism would argue that religious practices are useful in achieving human ends (e.g., inspiring altruism), not in mapping the structure of the Godhead. Constructivism – In science and theology, this is the position that our models, theories, symbols, and doctrines are human imaginative and social constructs alone, not products of reality shaping our models, or language corresponding or conforming to the world, or God revealing certain truths about what is holy. As our constructions, they present us with ideal aims for inquiry or devotion. A humanly constructed concept of God may be helpful in achieving certain human ends like the preservation of nature or respecting human agency. But we are the ones responsible for the imaginative construction. Constructivism makes explicit what is implicit in conventionalism, and turns conventional invention into a program of reconstructing our maps and models of reality, whether in nature, society, or the sacred. One limitation on all of the types of realism and non-realism above is that they emerge from the philosophy of science and the dialogue between science and religion, i.e., they describe different ways of accounting for our scientific knowledge of the natural world. There may be analogies between knowing the world and knowing “God” as conceived by Jews, Christians, Muslims, and other  ��������� Barbour, Religion and Science, 117.



88

God in Postliberal Perspective

theists. But according to classic versions of theism in all three traditions, the disanalogies between our knowledge of the world and God would be even greater. Of course, God cannot be perceived or objectified the way a particle or species is studied in physics or zoology. Taking the dis-analogies into account is crucial for maintaining the integrity of theology’s subject matter. Further, for those postliberals influenced by Barth, the shadow of an analogy of being between the world and God (analogia entis) hovers over the facile appropriation of scientific models of knowing and being for theological purposes. For isn’t the knowledge of God more like personal or social knowledge (specifically the persons of Jesus the Christ, the One he called “Abba”, and the Spirit of their mutual love) than it is the impersonal knowledge of particles, supernovas, and viruses? Doesn’t faith in Christ find its own analogies in revelation, scripture, preaching, sacraments, and so on? Philosophical versions of realism: Alston’s Alethic Realism William P. Alston (Professor Emeritus, Syracuse University, USA) has developed a theory of alethic realism and distinguished it from metaphysical realism per se. According to Alston, “realism” refers to views about items: … items of certain kinds are “real”, “really exist”, “have an independent status in reality”, and the like. Such views differ both as to what kinds they have to do with and as to what being ‘real’ or “really existing” is thought to be … One can be a realist about physical objects, events, universals, facts, propositions, intentional psychological states, space, time, meaning, God, and so on … I believe we can best bring out what it is to be a realist about Xs by considering what that excludes, by considering what would be involved in being nonrealist about them. [There are two ways to reject realism about Xs:] (1) A flat denial that Xs exist and (2) a reduction of Xs to Y s.

Alston’s realism draws on our scientific sense that, for example, before there was any trace of homo sapiens on a given day T at the time of the prehistoric earth there would have been Y number of dinosaurs alive. We may not know the number Y but the existence of dinosaurs as living entities was not dependent on any of us being around to observe them. In this sense, our whole evolutionary picture of the cosmos and life presupposes some form of external realism, the view that certain physical objects, events, facts and so on, exist external to human ways of knowing. But note how Alston places “God” on his list as if “God” is an entity or category among other real entities and categories. Is the being of God that kind of reality? Does Alston’s list ignore or blur the distinction between creaturely and divine   ������������������� William P. Alston, A Realist Conception of Truth (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), 65.

Realism(s) and Its Other(s)

89

reality? Does placing “God” in this way recognize that God’s way of being as understood by many Jews, Christians, and Muslims is not the same way of being as trees, gold, silver, electrons, and genes? Does God merely have reality like all other entities, except to the nth degree? Or does God’s way of being require concepts like necessary being (Anselm et al.) or “more-than-necessary” (Jüngel)? Does this list offer evidence of a category mistake in that Alston assumes God is an entity or super-entity or that God’s reality is a fact or super-fact of the same generic type as other entities or facts? Here one is reminded of Kant’s argument that existence is not a predicate in the same way that other terms that characterize an entity are predicates.10 God is not an entity in the same way that finite realities are entities. To reduce or comprehend God as one entity among others is to start down the road toward conceptual idolatry.11 Alston makes a helpful distinction between two versions of conceptual transcendence in the Christian tradition that may overcome this problem. In one version, God transcends the world but is also conceptually immanent in the world as creator of its perfections (e.g., in Aquinas’ doctrine of God). In the other version, God transcends the world in such a fashion that none of our concepts can even possibly be related to the ultimate reality. God becomes in this second version a Kantian Ding-an-sich and Alston identifies this approach with theologians like Gordon Kaufman and John Hick. These theologians and many others suffer from what Alston calls “‘transcendentitis’”, for they attribute “transcendence to God so radical as to rule out the possibility of using any human concepts to make realistically true statements about Him, and to rule out the possibility of knowing some of them to be true”.12 Alston’s defence of “God” as metaphysically real is related to but not necessarily identical with his general formulation of a minimal realist conception of truth.13 In brief, alethic realism is the position that: … a proposition is true if and only if what it claims to be the case is the case. Accordingly, the proposition that grass is green is true if and only if grass is green. N othing more is necessary for the truth of that proposition, and nothing less is sufficient. This is a realist conception of truth because the truth of a proposition

10  ��������������� Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, (trans. and ed.) Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge, UK and N ew Y ork: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 564–69. The argument falls in the section on Kant’s critique of the ontological argument for the existence of God. 11  ��������������������������������������������������������������������� The notion of “conceptual idolatry” is discussed in Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being: Hors-Texte, (trans.) Thomas Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 16, 29, 35. 12  ������������������������������������������������������ William P. Alston, “Realism and the Christian Faith”, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 38/3 (1995):53. 13  �������� Alston, A Realist Conception of Truth, 5–38.

90

God in Postliberal Perspective is said to depend on a reality beyond itself (grass’s being green), rather than on an internal or intrinsic feature of the proposition (e.g., its epistemic status).14

For Alston this minimal theory “does not entail a correspondence [theory of truth] because minimalism stops at the modest claim that a proposition is made true by a fact. It is silent about the nature of the relationship between that proposition and that fact”.15 However, truth may have properties like correspondence that go beyond this minimal definition. Also, alethic realism should be distinguished from metaphysical realism per se: “Alethic realism is a theory about what it is for a proposition to be true; whereas metaphysical realism claims that one or more categories of entities (physical objects, events, abstract objects, etc.) exist independently of our minds and conceptual schemes.”16 Alston works with only two truth values, true and false, in his writings on realism. How paradoxical or dialectical assertions which often appear in religious, doctrinal, and theological language are to be handled is unclear. There is also a notion of a God’s eye point of view or omniscient narrator that becomes assumed in his more than minimal explication of the theory. What makes this conception metaphysical is that it “ascribes to a certain range of facts a sort of independence of human cognition that is characteristic of realist positions. Call this position cognition-independent-realism.”17 I wonder if Alston’s realism assumes a non-relational or a-relational (substance or atomistic-type) ontology. High value is put on the independence of real entities from each other and from knowers over inter-dependence and intra-action. The theory also calls upon us to imagine a world independent of human cognition. Is alethic realism a kind of hyper-fiction or hypothetical use of imagination to posit facts and states of affairs we could not know or verify but that only an omniscient knower, a traditionally theistic God could know? Here’s a short version of alethic realism: 1. S’s are genuine factual statements. 2. S ’s are true or false in the realist sense of those terms. 3. The facts that make true S’s true hold and are what they are independent of human cognition.18 N ote how this formulation assumes stable or static being or conditions. Once you add the drama of cosmic and biological evolution and of human history, wouldn’t 14  ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ Heather D. Battaly, “Introductory Essay: Justification, God, and Truth”, in Heather D. Battaly and Michael P. Lynch, (eds), Perspectives on the Philosophy of William P. Alston (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Pub., 2005), 13. 15  ���������� Ibid., 14. 16  ����� Ibid. 17  ������������������������������������������������ Alston, “Realism and the Christian Faith”, 38–9. 18  ���������� Ibid., 39.

Realism(s) and Its Other(s)

91

Alston need to make dynamic or temporal (i.e., more contingent) his understanding of facts? Otherwise, Alston needs to imagine a particular point at which to stand in space-time in order for the facts to hold and be what they are. Or he needs the standpoint of a theistic God surveying all points in space and time equidistant from eternity. The beauty of Alston’s proposal is its simplicity and appeal to our intuition that things existed before we were born, endure while we sleep, and the world will go on long after we are dead. He appeals to this intuition and others: Who could deny that the statement that gold is malleable is true if and only if gold is malleable? And yet those who construe the truth of a statement as consisting of some favorable epistemic status of the statement (being confirmed, rationally acceptable, justified, or whatever) are committed to denying this, whether they realize it or not. For they take something to be necessary for the truth of the proposition that gold is malleable other than gold’s being malleable.19

The phrase “favorable epistemic status” is part of Alston’s charge that those who deny realism (whether metaphysical realism or Alston’s minimal alethic realism) are committed to making truth-claims dependent on human epistemic practices. And if that is the case then our scientific intuition that on a certain day T in the past there must have been Y dinosaurs (even though only God could have “perceived” or been aware of them) fails to stand as a true assertion. One thing that is striking about both metaphysical and alethic realism is that they still involve an act of human imagination, an image of a world without human agents, into which we posit the enduring entities like dinosaurs, God, etc. Without this imaginal world from which we have detached ourselves, enduring entities and states of affairs have no logical space. Metaphysical realism itself relies on acts of human imagination that draw upon other human acts of knowing and interacting with the world. The notion of day T in the prehistoric world when there were Y number of dinosaurs itself is dependent on our scientific reconstruction of the earth’s history using the evidence of fossils, rocks, and the theory of evolution as an interpretive framework in which we place and make sense of the data. Before the nineteenth century, the very notions of dinosaurs existing in a prehistoric world before homo sapiens would not have made sense to most scientists. Thus what is self-evident to us is the product of a long history of human inquiry, weighing of evidence, debate over interpretive frameworks, and reaching states of consensus and reflective equilibrium in the scientific community. Further, most of us who are not paleontologists take it on the authority of the scientific community that the evidence and arguments are all in place to justify the notion of day T with its dinosaurs.

19

 ���������� Ibid., 38.

God in Postliberal Perspective

92

Philosophical versions of realism: Putnam’s pragmatic internal realism I began this section with Alston’s alethic realism because he articulates a strong version of what many call the classical account of realism in conversation with contemporary non-(metaphysical) realists. Putnam notes that “The theory that truth is correspondence is certainly the natural one. Before Kant it is perhaps impossible to find any philosopher who did not have a correspondence theory of truth.”20 Putnam has articulated his pragmatic internal realism as a critical alternative to many versions of both metaphysical realism and postmodern versions of antirealism. Although his accounts of realism, knowledge, and truth are not linked with a full-blown philosophical theology as in Alston’s case, Putnam’s account provides a fresh way of thinking about what postliberals are trying to say about the linkages between faith in God, community, Scripture, practices, and how the justification of Christian convictions is a holistic task.21 Putnam shakes up our sense of what is most basic: “theory of truth presupposes theory of rationality which in turn presupposes our theory of the good” (215). Truth is not foundational or more axiomatic than our sense of rationality and ethics. Without an account of our theory of rationality and our sense of basic human values, theories of truth tend to fall into abstractions like Alston’s, “A statement is true if and only if what the statement says to be the case actually is the case.” But what does it mean for a statement “actually” to be the case? Without a theory of rationality to specify that sense of “actuality”, we don’t find traction to connect the theory to the business of knowing and judging between contestants for “truth” in various realms of life. What Putnam seeks is a “conception of truth which unites objective and subjective components” (x). Here is a rough sketch of his view: … there is an extremely close connection between the notions of truth and rationality; that … the only criterion for what is a fact is what it is rational to accept … There can be value facts on this conception. But the relation between rational acceptability and truth is a relation between two distinct notions. A statement can be rationally acceptable at a time but not true; and this realist intuition will be preserved in my account (x).

Contrary to Rorty, Putnam is not ready to celebrate the end of metaphysics as “the world well lost”.22 With Rorty he shares the pragmatic critique of metaphysical realism, which holds a perspective external to human categories of description  ��������������� Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History, 56. Hereafter citations are abbreviated as page numbers in parentheses. 21  ������������������������������������������������������������������������������� For a theological appropriation of Putnam, see Victoria S. Harrison, “Putnam’s Internal Realism and von Balthasar’s Religious Epistemology”, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 44 (1998), 67–92. 22  ������������������������������������������������� Richard Rorty, “The World Well Lost”, Chap. 1 in Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press, 1982). 20

Realism(s) and Its Other(s)

93

and inquiry, the fabled “God’s Eye point of view”. However, homo sapiens in this life has no access to the perspective sub specie aeternitatis.23 Therefore, Putnam draws the features of realism internal to human practices of communicating and inquiring in the service of ends that challenge us to better practice. To ask the question, “what objects does the world consist of …? … only makes sense within a theory of description. Many ‘internalist’ philosophers, though not all, hold further that there is more than one ‘true’ theory or description of the world. ‘Truth’, in an internalist view, is some sort of (idealized) rational acceptability – some sort of ideal coherence of our beliefs with each other and with our experiences as those experiences are themselves represented in our belief-system – and not correspondence with mind-independent or discourse-independent ‘states of affairs.’ … there are only the various points of view of actual persons reflecting various interests and purposes that their descriptions and theories subserve (49–50).

Putnam’s perspective is sometimes pigeonholed as the “coherence theory of truth”, “non-realism”, “verificationism”, “pluralism”, or “pragmatism”. Given the historical baggage these titles carry, he prefers to emphasize that his version of realism is internal to communities of communication and inquiry that can speak of correspondence from within: In an internalist view … signs do not intrinsically correspond to objects, independently of how those signs are employed and by whom. But a sign that is actually employed in a particular way by a particular community of users can correspond to particular objects within the conceptual scheme of those users. ‘Objects’ do not exist independently of conceptual schemes … the externalist wants to think of the world as consisting of objects that are at one and the same time mind-independent and Self-Identifying. This is what one cannot do (52, 54).

Much weighs upon what we count as “rational acceptability”, and the reader is probably aware that concepts of rationality vary among our species across history and culture. Putnam humanizes objectivity by bringing it down to earth while refusing to abandon it for a nihilistic relativism:

23  ������������������ One definition of sub specie aeternitatis makes clear the connections between the ideal or God’s Eye point of view of metaphysical realism and metaphysical theism: “under the aspect or form of eternity; viz., the viewing of a thing or idea in terms of the essential or universal principle that defines it; therefore, in accord with God, who is the essential or ontological ground of all things, the eternal measure of his creation”, Richard A. Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms Drawn Principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1985), 290.

94

God in Postliberal Perspective What makes a statement, or a whole system of statements – a theory or conceptual scheme – rationally acceptable is, in large part, its coherence and fit … Our conceptions of coherence and acceptability are … deeply interwoven with our psychology. They depend upon our biology and our culture; they are by no means ‘value free.’ B ut they are our conceptions, and they are conceptions of something real. They define a kind of objectivity, objectivity for us, even if it is not the metaphysical objectivity of the God’s Eye view. Objectivity and rationality humanly speaking are what we have; they are better than nothing (54–55).

Here is the exchange offered: Putnam asks us to surrender our claims to metaphysical objectivity in return for a social and humanized objectivity. The choice is not the either/or of metaphysical realism or subjectivism, objectivity or private preference, absolute truth or the endless play of signifiers. By staking out a centrist position between extremes and a mixed theory between the dichotomies into which our thinking so easily falls, Putnam offers a winsome alternative to the usual realism vs non-realism debate. At several points his theory of knowledge and truth suggests analogies to how many religious and Christian communities go about making claims to know God and something of God’s reality and purposes in time: 1. The Christian community as a community of inquiry: A lthough some Christian communities work hard at earning the negative image of dogmatic fortresses of the faith, others exemplify the life of learning communities in which there is space for questioning, critical inquiry, and the formation of group consensus and personal conviction about the things of God, neighbour, nature and self. Examples include the following: (a) Christians have been and continue to be instrumental in founding and supporting institutions of teaching and research that do not merely replicate the faith in new generations but test it, stretch it, and generate new versions of Christian conviction in response to an evolving world and the dynamism of history; (b) From time to time Christians find ourselves called upon to confess the faith via creeds, confessions, and declarations of faith that require critical theological reflection on church and society; (c) Christians help to support the activities of theological reflection and critical inquiry in a number of fields: biblical studies, the history of Christianity, theological interpretation and revision, ethics, church/state relations, congregational studies, ecumenical and interfaith partnership, etc.; (d) Christians seek for their children, young people, seekers, and candidates for ordained office to come to some sense of conviction about the truth and goodness of God as a prerequisite to full membership and participation in the church and its offices; (e) Christians have maintained a centuries-old tradition of apologetics that for better and worse has engaged in debate and conversation with persons and thinkers beyond the membership of the Christian community across boundaries of time and culture. Of course, many of these same claims can be made for other religious communities, e.g., Judaism and Islam. N onetheless, the practices of confirming or verifying

Realism(s) and Its Other(s)

95

the claims of faith are social practices that shape individuals to ask and seek responses to questions like, what or who is God? 2. The eschatological qualification of Christian truth-claims: In an essay on the question, what is truth, W. Pannenberg (1928–) reflects on how the recovery of early Christian apocalyptic hope qualifies all Christian claims about truth and reality.24 In terms of such an eschatology, the truth about God and God’s relations to all reality is not a foundation in nature or past history to be relied on for absolute certainty, but an open future promise that has been already manifested but not yet fulfilled. Christian truth when it is faithful to its origins in Jesus’ proclamation of the rule of God and the early Christian proclamation of Jesus’ resurrection, are oriented toward a future revelation of the unity of all truth in God that has not yet appeared in time. In that sense, Christians hope in the truth but do not have the truth in a way that can be reproduced in mind-shattering arguments or proofs. The future course of human and cosmic history bears the ultimate judgement on the question, is the Christian message true? N evertheless, enough of God’s promised future has appeared already in Israel, Jesus (his life, fate and destiny), and the history of Christianity that Christians depend on this message and its faithful embodiments to guide them to the truth in fullness. When C hristians are faithful to their roots and their hope, they need not to be smug or presumptuous about their truth-claims. On these terms, Christians are encouraged to join with all who seek the truth with a sense of openness and freedom that no human community (religious or scientific) stands yet at the end of history and therefore everyone’s claims to truth must be tested for their contribution to the hoped for unity of all truth. Further, Christians are freed to be sceptical about all premature foreclosures on the truth, especially those that divide up the truth into segments or fragments of reality or that have given up all hope for truth. A Philosophical Version of Irrealism: Nelson Goodman One need not turn to the deconstructionists to find an intriguing critique of both realism and idealism in the genre of analytic philosophy. In the work of N elson Goodman (1906–1998) of Harvard University, especially in Ways of Worldmaking, provocative examples from art, literature, the psychology of perception, and philosophy are presented to convince the reader that “the world” or rather the “worlds” we indwell are as much made, fabricated, or constructed as discovered “ready-made”.25 In fact, when we come down to it, there is no “ready-made world” at hand waiting to intrude itself upon our perception or be discovered by our 24  ��������������������������������������� Wolfhart Pannenberg, “What is Truth?”, Basic Questions in Theology, (trans.) George H. Kehm, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1971), 2:1–27. 25  ���������������� N elson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis, IN : Hackett Publishing Company, 1978). Hereafter citations to this work appear in parentheses in the text.

96

God in Postliberal Perspective

science. Unlike many versions of realism and non-realism that focus on science, Goodman was concerned that the philosophical implications of the arts were overlooked in the modern debate over knowledge and reality. A major concern that drove his inquiries was “that the arts must be taken no less seriously than the sciences as modes of discovery, creation, and enlargement of knowledge in the broad sense of advancement of understanding, and thus that the philosophy of art should be conceived as an integral part of metaphysics and epistemology” (102). In sharp contrast to metaphysical realism which generally assumes that there is one world to discover and (ultimately) one true account of this world that philosophy and science aim at, Goodman argues for a radical pluralism and relativism of worlds. What is a world or worlds, anyway? “If I ask about the world, you can offer to tell me how it is under one or more frames of reference; but if I insist that you tell me how it is apart from all frames, what can you say? We are confined to ways of describing whatever is described. Our universe, so to speak, consists of these ways rather than of a world or of worlds” (2–3). The objection from common sense that something about the world and its unity is already known to every rational person-in-the-street failed to impress Goodman: For the man-in-the-street, most versions from science, art, and perception depart in some ways from the familiar serviceable world he has jerry-built from fragments of scientific and artistic tradition and from his own struggle for survival. This world, indeed, is the one most often taken as real; for reality in a world, like realism in a picture, is largely a matter of habit (20).

On this account, all candidates for “reality” or “the world” are world-versions produced through human imagination, projection, and inquiry. There are right and wrong world-versions in different contexts and for different purposes, but not “one true world” against which we might compare our world-versions. In his only reference to theology in Ways of Worldmaking in a section entitled “How Firm a Foundation?” Goodman consigns to it the Quixotic task of seeking the origin of all such versions: The many stuffs – matter, energy, waves, phenomena – that worlds are made of are made along with the worlds. But made from what? N ot from nothing, after all, but from other worlds. Worldmaking as we know it always starts from worlds already on hand; the making is a remaking. Anthropology and developmental psychology may study social and individual histories of such world-building, but the search for a universal or necessary beginning is best left to theology. My interest here is rather with the processes involved in building a world out of others (6–7).

In a footnote, he added, “We might take construction of a history of successive development of worlds to involve application of something like a Kantian regulative principle, and the search for a first world thus to be as misguided as

Realism(s) and Its Other(s)

97

the search for a first moment of time” (7). To the extent that metaphysical realism or theology depends upon this notion of a first or ultimate world, they stand as obstacles in the path of Goodman’s radical pluralism and relativism. The shift from seeking the “one true world” to focus on the ways we make world-versions would seem to demolish the ideal of truth in inquiry. Like Putnam, Goodman wanted to subordinate the quest for truth under another concept: … a statement is true, and a description or representation right, for a world it fits. And a fictional version, verbal or pictorial, may if metaphorically construed fit and be right for a world. Rather than attempting to subsume descriptive and representational rightness under truth, we shall do better, I think, to subsume truth along with these under the general notion of rightness of fit (132).

But how do we know when we have “rightness of fit”? The quest for such rightness leads Goodman into a radically epistemic or verificationist notion of truth. For as with criteria of rightness … Much the same may be said for truth; in the absence of any definitive and informative characterization, we apply various tests that we check against each other and against a rough and partial antecedent classification of statements as true and false. Truth, like intelligence, is perhaps just what the tests test; and the best account of what truth is may be an ‘operational’ one in terms of tests and procedures in judging it (122).

Of course, any set of tests will be highly contextual which further reinforces the radical relativism of Goodman’s account. This contributes to his much more humble account of truth in comparison with metaphysical realism. For according to Goodman … Truth, far from being a solemn and severe master, is a docile and obedient servant. The scientist who supposes that he is single-mindedly dedicated to the search for truth deceives himself. He is unconcerned with the trivial truths he could grind out endlessly; and he looks to the multifaceted and irregular results of observations for little more than suggestions of overall structures and significant generalizations. He seeks system, simplicity, scope; and when satisfied on these scores he tailors truth to fit. He as much decrees as discovers the laws he sets forth, as much designs as discerns the patterns he delineates. Truth, moreover, pertains solely to what is said, and literal truth solely to what is said literally (18).

For the theologian who is willing to follow Goodman down this path, there appear to be some advantages. Scientism, many versions of naturalism, and philosophical atheism are exposed as incomplete accounts of how humans in fact go about the tasks of world-making, i.e., these anti-theological accounts are founded on the

98

God in Postliberal Perspective

notion that there is one true version of the world and that we can confirm that it does not include anything like “God”. But if truth is a servant, not a master, and if communities of faith are free to construct worlds that are theocentric or symbolized as “creations of God” out of the worlds found in scripture, ritual, and religious practices, then there can be no a priori objection from philosophy to such world-making. It merely becomes a part of the greater pluralism of world-making that goes on all the time in the arts, sciences, education, and media. Whether religiously and theologically constructed worlds “fit” within their relevant contexts and address the human quest for greater understanding, should be the relevant tests of their “rightness”. Goodman distinguished between two senses of “realistic”, and one of them might well apply to theological visions or versions of the world. According to the more common use of “realistic” … … a picture is realistic to the extent that it is correct under the accustomed system of representation; for example, in the present Western culture, a picture by Dürer is more realistic than a picture by Cézanne. Realistic or right representation in this sense, like right categorization, requires observance of custom and tends to correlate loosely with ordinary judgments of resemblance, which likewise rest upon habit (131).

In the second sense, “realistic” qualifies an enlargement of our very sense of reality: When a painter or photographer makes, or discloses to us, erstwhile unseen aspects of a world, he is sometimes said to have achieved a new degree of realism by discovering and presenting new aspects of reality. What we have here, in representation under a right system strange to us, is realism in the sense not of habituation but of revelation (131).

If one is open to an analogy between works of art and religious texts and rituals, then part of the power of theocentric versions of the world is to take us out of more habitual modes of knowing and introduce us to a more complex, rich, and winsome vision of the world structured around the symbol of “God”. The price of admission to the theologian willing to consider Goodman’s pluralism is the consistent relativization of theocentric versions of the world as merely one more option among others, including scientific, aesthetic, and ethno-cultural versions. And all these versions are humanly constructed. God as the constructor or coconstructor of a theocentric version of the world could be a “fitting” or “right” claim made from within a theological version but could not be a universal claim that automatically excludes or trumps other world-versions and their accounts of God-talk. One further implication of Goodman’s pluralism is that it seeks to transcend the conflict between realism and idealism. To recast that point in terms of our central theme, the debate between realism and non-realism over the doctrine

Realism(s) and Its Other(s)

99

of God is based on a false dichotomy. Citing experiments in the psychology of perception using a dot moving across a screen at different intervals of time, Goodman concludes: Is the screen that a dot moves across the same as the one no dot moves across? Is the seen table the same as the mess of molecules? To such questions, discussed at length in the philosophical literature, I suspect that the answer is a firm yes and a firm no. The realist will resist the conclusion that there is no world; the idealist will resist the conclusion that all conflicting versions describe different worlds. As for me, I find these views equally delightful and equally deplorable – for after all, the difference between them is purely conventional (119).

Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) provided a useful summary of Goodman’s overall argument in Ways of Worldmaking in the form of three theses: 1. We “make” the world by construing symbolic systems … which are numerous and equally legitimate: descriptive theories, perceptions, novels, paintings, musical scores, etc. 2. Each of these ways of world-making is a world version rather than a version of the world, in the sense that there is no world in itself before or beneath these versions. 3. World versions other than the scientific one are neither true nor false. And yet some may be said to be right and others wrong. There must be therefore criteria to assign or to deny rightness to non-descriptive world versions.26 On these theses, Ricoeur offers some critical comments worth noting for the sake of our comparison of alethic realism (Alston), internal pragmatic realism (Putnam), and irrealism (Goodman). First, Ricoeur finds that because Goodman argues for the “cognitive significance of works of art”, he “transfers into the realm of knowledge categories which have their first use in the field of production” (210). N ow Ricoeur has no objection to the use of the metaphor of fabrication in the realm of art for the concept has a venerable tradition going back to Aristotle’s notion of poiesis. However, “these modes of construction do not exhaust the intentionality constitutive of the referentiality of symbols. The factor of otherness proper to this intentionality is overshadowed by the factor of fabrication proper to the ways of world-making …” (210, my emphasis). Following his hermeneutic phenomenological method, Ricoeur shifts the focus of attention from the work of art or the world-version in Goodman to the  ������������������������������������������ Paul Ricoeur, “Review of N elson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking”, in Mario J. Valdés, (ed.) A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination (Toronto and Buffalo, NY : University of Toronto Press, 1991), 200–202; originally published in Philosophy and Literature 4/1 (Spring 1980):107–20. Hereafter citations to this work appear in parentheses in the text following pagination in A Ricoeur Reader. 26

100

God in Postliberal Perspective

world-maker, the artist, scientist, or thinker, through a series of questions: “Does a painter like Cézanne make a version of the world in the same way as one makes a car?” For Ricoeur, rendering a work of art is something different from making a Volkswagen: Tell a creator, say Van Gogh or Cézanne, that he is fabricating a world-version. He will not recognize himself in this account of what he is doing. And if by chance he accepted it, he would stop painting, because he would lose faith in the kind of constraint which makes his predicament. The painter – at least this kind of painter – understands himself as the servant – if not the slave – of that which has to be said, depicted, exemplified, expressed. Because a gap keeps recurring between making and rendering, he is never relieved from the duty of painting … The experience of the artist … encompasses the whole range of meanings from making to surrendering, through representing and interpreting (211).

The sense of “constraint” encountered by the painter as creator speaks to the “factor of otherness” not fully accounted for in Goodman’s radical relativism of world-making. Both members of the scientific community as an institution seeking to explain and create models of nature and theologians seeking to understand and critique our rituals invoking God can testify to this sense of constraint and fidelity to factors of otherness. Ricoeur also seeks to retrieve and rejuvenate a “concept of world that would not fall under the blows of Goodman’s critique” (211). He notes that Goodman never banishes the term “world” from his multiple “world-versions”. In fact, Goodman argues that even non-representational works of art have reference for they exemplify and express something that enriches our understanding and capacity to perceive different world-versions. “What … compels Goodman to preserve reference at all costs, if not a dimension of experience entailed in the term world that he has not considered?” (211–12). Here we reach a fundamental conviction in Ricoeur’s critique of Goodman: … no [world-]version exhausts that which requires to be, literally or metaphorically, described, depicted, exemplified, or expressed. Otherwise, why, throughout cultural changes, would men have wanted or needed to make new kinds of versions and new versions of the known kinds again and again? What are they after, what are they seeking for, by making new world-versions? (212).

So which “world”-concept did Ricoeur prefer here, a world-in-itself beyond all our versions, or one particular imperial world-version that absorbs, denies, or colonizes the others? True to his phenomenological tradition, Ricoeur argues for “the world as horizon” of all our world-making. … the world may be more than each version without being apart from it. It is the very experience of making that yields that of discovering. And discovering

Realism(s) and Its Other(s)

101

is to confront the opacity of the world. The world is included – excluded as the horizon of each intentional aiming. It is not something to which versions refer, but that out of which, or against the background of which, versions refer (212).

The world is not merely one phenomenon among others, but the horizon of all perceptions, phenomena, and world-versions. As embodied perceivers, we learn this from our daily habitation in the world. Embodiment, indwelling, and encountering the world as our horizon, these are correlative experiences that fund our fabrication of different world-versions. … our body, as our own, is the basic medium of our being in the world as the place where we dwell. Dwelling, construing, and thinking, these are … human acts of an inexhaustible significance. To dwell is to be received as a guest. And construing is making, but in such a way that we do not make the world less worthy of dwelling in. Some kind of humility, accordingly, is entailed in the act of dwelling. This kind of humility in turn says something of the openness proper to perception (212).

Ricoeur argued that “the world as horizon” is reducible to neither a Kantian world-version (an ideal dualism of representations and the thing-in-itself) nor a phenomenalist world-version (the only real world is constituted by what appears to consciousness) due to that fact that perception is “inexhaustible” and the “indefinite flight of the perceptual horizon” (213). The inexhaustibility of perception “displayed by the experience of observing, makes possible the shift to other versions … The perceptual inexhaustibility of the world and its opacity are hints of, and clues to, the function of the world as horizon, as that which makes possible, suggests, and sometimes requires the transition from one version of the world to another” (213). He invokes a poetic metaphor for this sense of the world as horizon from Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843): das Offene, “The Open”. Das Offene suggests the imagery of the sky – inexhaustible, opaque, and subject to multiple observations and renderings that never exhaust the horizon that bounds and goes beyond our dwellings. Finally, Ricoeur criticized the third Goodmanian thesis with regard to right and wrong world versions as opposed to true and false ones. … the duality rightness – truth seems to me to be a residue of the philosophy that the author condemns, i.e., the reduction of reference to denotation and to statements … does he not remain captive of a verificationist (or falsificationist) prejudice that his whole philosophy of symbolic forms denies? If one gives back to the world its character of horizon, of inexhaustibility, and of opacity, has one not to question anew the concept of truth and to acknowledge that its amplitude is equal to that of world? … By calling rightness truth, we respond … to a phenomenological requirement, namely to the same requirement which compelled us to distinguish making and rendering (214).

102

God in Postliberal Perspective

What preliminary conclusions may we draw from this brief survey of three significant versions of realism and irrealism in recent N orth American philosophy? 1. Metaphysical realism in its modern versions has fallen on hard times. To render it defensible philosophers like Alston have proposed and defended “sensible” or stripped-down versions that appeal to our common sense that the world was there before us and endures despite changes in our ways of approaching the world. However, accounts, even sensible ones, of this world behind our backs always take their place within someone’s language and frame of reference. 2. Irrealism is attractive to some for it liberates us from the dogmatism and imperialism of philosophies and religions which claim to know the one true world and how to access it. It helps to account for our sense of the relativity of frameworks over the course of time which makes possible our reality- and truth-claims. However, Goodman’s version fails to account for our experiences of the claim or constraint upon us of what we are trying to express in multiple world-versions. Our sense of the otherness of reality needs a fuller account and that account may help to explain better what we mean by truth as the ideal of inquiry. 3. Versions of realism that justify them within a frame of reference and practices of inquiry offer a via media between classical notions of metaphysical realism and contemporary manifestos of irrealism and deconstruction. Putnam’s pragmatic internal realism, itself a work in progress evolving through different stages of Putnam’s career, and Barad’s agential realism provide us with what Putnam calls “realism with a human face”.27 Further I have suggested that the eschatological reserve of Christian realityclaims and the construal of congregations and church-related institutions as communities of inquiry offer analogies between Christian realism and pragmatic internal realism. However, this chapter has not yet directly addressed what realism means to C hristian theologians. Theological versions of realism: Barth between realism and idealism The theology of Karl Barth , especially his Church Dogmatics (1932–1967) is often cited as a prime example of realism in modern theology. This characterization is often not complimentary due to Barth’s formulation of his theological method in terms of a particular theory of revelation which finds no necessary or given 27  �������������������������������������������������������������� Hilary Putnam, “Realism with a Human Face” (1987), Chap. 1 in Realism with a Human Face, (ed.) James Conant (Cambridge, MA and London, UK: Harvard University Press, 1990).

Realism(s) and Its Other(s)

103

noetic or ontological point of contact with humanity in our religious and cultural experience.28 However, more recent scholarship has called attention to Barth’s more nuanced account of the relations between realism, idealism, and the Word of God in his 1929 lecture, “Fate and Idea in Theology”.29 This lecture can be divided into a table of terms and categories which Barth explored in dialectical tension: FATE O ur destiny R eality N ature The Objective T he C onditioned B eing Heteronomy Experience R ealism Romanticism T he Given “God is reality” Accidental & particular truths of history Receptivity with spontaneity Theology blurred with natural science (leads to ‘demonology’)

IDEA Our project T ruth S pirit The N on-objective The Unconditioned Thinking A utonomy R eason N ominalism Idealism “It seeks for something not given” (43). “God is truth” (46). Timeless truths of reason (47) Spontaneity with receptivity (50) Theology blurred with humanities (leads to ‘ideology’) (52)

The two intellectual powers of fate or the given idea or critical thinking that abstracts from the given are reconciled by Barth’s description of theology as a “matter of understanding, a matter of rendering to ourselves an account of God in the form of human concepts, i.e., in the form of intellectual work, by abstracting from the given and interpreting the given” (45). Such understanding or rendering may take, in fact, must take the form of both realism and idealism since it is we human creatures who do the theologizing. But whether our preferred approach is more realist or idealist in emphasis, it only becomes authentic theology when 28

 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ For example, see the critical assessment by Graham White, “Karl Barth’s Theological Realism”, Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 26 (1984):54–70. 29  �������������������������������������������������������������� Translated by George Hunsinger in H. Martin Rumscheidt, (ed.) The Way of Theology in Karl Barth: Essays and Comments (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1986), 25–61. Hereafter citations from this translation appear in parentheses in the text.

104

God in Postliberal Perspective

it serves in faithful obedience the Word of God (specifically, Jesus Christ as proclaimed in the Gospel and witnessed to in the Bible) which we can neither control nor verify by our philosophical or theological labours. This way of incorporating both a realist and an idealist moment in theological reflection depends, in part, on Barth’s unique conception of theology as an “academic discipline (Wissenschaft)” with the particular vocation of inquiring into the “truth about God as the object of ecclesiastical proclamation. It thus does not investigate and teach the truth about God as such [as in philosophy of religion] … [Rather it] investigates and teaches the truth about God as he is proclaimed and should be proclaimed in the church” (26). With the accent on proclamation rather than sacrament or ritual, we know that this Wissenschaft occurs in the particular realm of the Protestant Church. Given its vocation, theology as an academic discipline is distinguished from philosophy and the natural sciences for its datum is “the Word of God” (God’s living, dynamic, eventful speech-act in Jesus Christ as testified to in the Bible). Since theology is a human discipline performed by all-too-human sinners, it can neither prove nor verify its object in the way other Wissenschaften are able. N or, like some forms of philosophy, can it take human existence as such as its subject matter. In fact, theology does not even have its own unique set of categories. “Only one thing keeps [this theology] from being doomed to failure: the presupposition of divine miracle” (29). In this sentence, Barth distinguishes his theology of the Word from those forms of post-Enlightenment Christian thought that seek to accommodate theological claims to naturalistic accounts of action and events. One of his concerns about those other forms of theology is that they tempt the theologian to “actually become what he seems to be – a philosopher” (29). S o rather than assuming that theology needs a foundation or prolegomena in some kind of realist or idealist philosophy, Barth’s perspective is consistently theological: “… all philosophy has in fact had its origin in some kind of theology …” (30). From this theological vantage point, he divides (western) philosophy into two great types or tendencies: fate (realism) and idea (idealism). He begins his exposition with realism because human inquiry begins with the knowledge of experience or of existing reality, then later moves on to knowledge of truth via critical clarification of our ideas, i.e., human thought begins with the concrete (the world as experienced by our species) from which it abstracts (forms concepts, ideas) by means of which we criticize our initial ways of ordering our experiences. On the side of fate/realism and theology (as human inquiry) that borrows realist categories; Barth follows the path of thinking that leads to one of his consistent objects of criticism. Theologians who tend to be realists reason like this: 1. “God is.” 2. “God takes part in being”, in fact, “God is himself being.” 3. “Everything that is as such participates in God” or analogia entis, the analogy of being (33).

Realism(s) and Its Other(s)

105

The problem with this “framework” is that it fails to distinguish the being of God from the being of the world. God becomes just another being among others, albeit one with many great-making properties. Further, realist theology tends to assume that “we stand in relation to God by virtue of the fact that we ourselves are and that things outside us are” (33). To live in a world that includes God becomes our fate, what is given, and as existing beings we have a natural capacity to recognize this, perhaps through our sense of “absolute dependence” on something or someone else, or our ability to reason from ourselves or the world to God (which both stand along a continuum called “being”). Realist theology imports a subject/object schema into its notion of revelation. For does not “God’s being revealed” mean “at least”: … that God becomes an object of our experience? What is revelation – God’s revelation – if not God’s making himself accessible to our experience, if not God’s giving over of himself to that objective-subjective similitudo, [likeness] of himself, if not God’s letting himself be found within and without, his givenness there for us here and for us there? (36).

Barth acknowledges how pervasive and unavoidable a realist perspective is for any theology that acknowledges the “actuality” of God. But at the same time, he does not confine his proposal of a renewed theology of the Word to realist categories tout court. For it “is by no means obvious that the guidance realism offers can simply be equated with the final and authentic guidance to be received from God’s Word. N or is it obvious that the two will never disagree … [The question is] not whether, but to what extent, theology may think and speak realistically” (38). Another problem with realism is that its confidence in reality as given and the God believed to be found as our fate is too naïve. For it trusts that “via certain precise conceptual formulations God can be found in a subjective-objective givenness, and that therefore the similitudo Dei [the likeness of God] must also occur in knower and known. [But does] revelation really do no more than confirm and reinforce supernaturally a naively presupposed human capacity and necessity apparently somehow given with our existence as such?” (38) Realism’s understanding of revelation as a mere supplement to our natural knowledge of God fails to do justice to the specific content of revelation in Christ. For it leaves in place an optimistic anthropology for which, “The experience of God becomes an inherent human possibility and necessity” (39). Such an anthropology and notion of revelation rob the Word of God of its capacity to speak to us something new, and to say to us something we could never have said to ourselves. To all theological realists, Barth puts the question, “have they really taken into account that it is grace which encounters sinners?” (40). In addition, Barth makes trouble for realism’s doctrine of God. Is God the One who is merely given in all experience as our fate, as the One we will eventually run up against in all our ordinary living or in some extraordinary experience, the God we could be socialized into believing as result of our birth into a certain culture

106

God in Postliberal Perspective

and family? He shifts the realist image from God as the One who is there as our fate to the biblical images of God as the One who comes in “self-giving” or grace. In 1929 Barth was both more pessimistic about human nature as given, and more optimistic about God as living, dynamic, and unbounded by our notions of fate. “… our will is perverse, fundamentally incapable of knowing God and of acting obediently toward him. That is why the similitudo Dei has to be given to us in every moment as something divinely new” (41). This critical engagement with realism and realist theology should lay to rest the common notion that Barth can be easily pigeon-holed as a theological realist per se. He posits a much more dialectical relation between realism and idealism in theology. In fact, realist theology itself draws on idealism’s resources, “For doesn’t realism itself go so far in analyzing the given as to talk about analogia entis and similitudo Dei?” (43). The critical approach of idealism toward all common sense and naïve forms of realism calls for a distinctive understanding of God. “God’s givenness must not only be distinguished, but fundamentally distinguished, from all other being. In relation to all other being God’s being takes on the ascribed quality of non-givenness and to that extent even non-being” (44). The basic move of idealist theology is, to use a poetic phrase Barth quotes, “‘to swing yourself up over nature’”. God is hidden and other “beyond the existentially given” in our experience. To this extent, all theology is idealist because “thinking about God’s given reality always involves referring to its non-given truth” (45). Recalling his previous concept of God as the “Wholly Other” in his Epistle to the Romans (1919, 1921), Barth denies that God can be identified with our fate, with nature, with history, or that God is “simply there” for us in experience (46). Theological idealists disturb the dogmatic slumbers of realists when they speak of the “figurative or symbolic character of God’s objective and subjective givenness. Hence [idealism] stresses similarity to God in the midst of even greater dissimilarity” (46). For ultimately “all human thinking and speaking about God is inadequate” (47). If theological realism’s first word is the claim of God’s givenness in nature, reason, history, or experience, then the second word must be said by critical idealism. Thus theological idealism plays the role of guardian for the sake of God’s transcendence. The temptation it faces is to identify its quest for truth or its concept of truth with God. Barth asks the idealist to admit that in the context of theology, “‘accessibility’ here can only mean the possibility of God’s access to us, not of our access to God” (47). In fact, he asks the theological idealist to concede that “in himself he possesses no criterion by which to distinguish truth from reality, but that this criterion must be given to him in and with revelation itself” (48). In the context of this lecture, Barth’s account of revelation (as the critical and very particular principle of a theology of the Word) is a one-way street, from God to the human sinful creature. Such a theology suggests a game in which God not only makes the opening move but makes all the moves for both sides. Theology “neither re-issues, nor replaces, nor proposes to be God’s Word itself. It merely copies …” (49). We learn to play the game by copying God who has already made

Realism(s) and Its Other(s)

107

all the moves for us, moves we could not have made for ourselves since the very actuality and truth of God is at stake. The truth the idealist seeks in distinction from reality as merely given cannot be verified by their own use of critical reason: “the truth is substantiated by God’s action – not by God’s action along with ours, but by God’s action alone.” For “faith understands its knowledge as given by God – not as a human work, nor as divine and human collaboration, but as our being known by God’s Word” (49). The subject (the human knower) who sought the truth about reality becomes the object who is truly known by God alone as the Creator, the true subject. “… faith is not the kind of knowledge in which we see ourselves as creative [but rather as] obedient” (51). Both a creative role for human imagination and a sense of mutuality between God and the human creature are foreign here. “There can be no question of reciprocity between God’s action and our own … We have not proven that such a [divine] command exists … We can only establish that on the basis of [God’s] command theology speaks of God. In this case that is how truth is ascertained” (51, my emphasis). If we alter the grand types in this lecture from fate and idea to fideism and rationalism, Barth proposes a kind of revelational fideism that relies on a selfauthenticating notion of God’s Word as an event only God can make happen (a divine ‘miracle’) to whomever God chooses to become a hearer of the Word.30 Given the specific way he defines a “theology of the Word”, it is clear how he conceives of this as true knowledge of God. It is not as clear here how this becomes our knowledge of God since human capacities and works are ruled out of bounds when it comes to constituting this Word. Our obedient task is to copy the divine original, but not claim divine status for our copying. If God wills to use our copy to proclaim God’s Word, sola gratia. If God does not, we have failed to hear and obey. This criticism was anticipated by Barth in his conclusion to the lecture. There he argues for the purity of theology over against a mixed philosophic-theological discourse. The vocation of the theologian is to “think dialectically about how God is given and not given at the same time” (52). Leave to the philosopher the “art of synthesis” and in this context he cites Thomas Aquinas and Hegel. Theology “must refrain from all reaching – however ingeniously, piously or covertly – for a grand synthesis of opposites” (54). Otherwise, theology fails its vocation and becomes another form of anthropology. If theology seeks to bear witness to “an ultimate word, a naming of God worthy of the name”, then its reflection can only take the “form of a thinking from rather than a thinking toward” (54, my emphasis), i.e., it must think from the Word of God as its critical principle rather than seeking some ground in philosophy or human experience that would enable it to prove, demonstrate, and understand (thinking toward) the reality and truth of  �������������������������� Here I use fideism (Latin fides = faith) as “the view that faith rather than reason … is the means by which Christian truth is known”, Donald McKim, Westminster Dictionary of Theology (Louisville, KY : Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 104. Of course, Barth would reject this dichotomy by his appeal to revelation. 30

108

God in Postliberal Perspective

God. Between a pure theology and a purified philosophy (one that has given up the ambition of being theology’s foundation or alter ego), Barth imagines a “rich and instructive community of work” (54). So rather than taking sides in the conflict between fate and idea, he reminds his audience three times that, “it is the concept of sin, of fallen humanity, which we have had to bring to bear against realism and idealism” (54). Against the quest of theological idealism for a mediating third power or tertium beyond both realism and idealism, Barth appeals to the “person of faith” (which may be an alias for Kierkegaard’s “knight of faith”): “Wouldn’t he have to say that insofar as he took fate and idea to be his God, he was still pursuing idols of his own making, deified ‘principalities, powers and dominions’? Wouldn’t he have to say that his natural religion of salvation was related to faith not as a useful prelude or preparation, but as darkness to light, as death to life?” (55). Thus he rejects the “synergistic picture” in which natural knowledge of God is fulfilled by revealed knowledge of God. For even “our best concept of God” without the purifying Word can become a “deified concept” or idol of the mind (57). While arguing for a pure theology of the Word, Barth rejects those who would seek to purify the ranks of theology of all idealists: “Theological reality, in our case and theirs, might always be as mixed and ambiguous as reality in general” (57–8). The final unity of reality and truth can only be found in God’s Word, not our theologies. In the theological reality of others, God may still address us. Two criteria for a theology of the Word are proposed. First, we must ask “whether this theology is conscious of its own relativity” so that it will not replace the living God with a “deified concept”. The background for asking this is the “free doctrine of election”. “If I am called to do this theology, then so I am. N ot because I found a way to God, but because God found a way to me” (59). Second, in turn a theology of the Word must make the “concept of predestination central” to the concept of God. Otherwise, we fall into the trap of trying to “capture God in a theory” (59–60). That anyone obeys God is due to faith, the “human affirmation of God’s free, unearned, unowed and uncompelled grace”. The conclusion points forward to the work Barth will do in his Dogmatics: “Theology will really be theology – of Word, election, faith – when from beginning to end it is christology”(60). What do we make of Barth’s use and critique of both realism and idealism in theology? On a positive front, he relieves us from a sense of being obligated to choose between the two, or between any great tendencies in the history of philosophy. If we will purify theology of slavish dependence on a particular philosophy or anthropology, and find our criterion for theological reflection in God’s Word in Christ, then a fruitful “community of work” is possible with philosophy. One often finds in classic theological works a realist and an idealist moment that serves greater theological ends. Further, he reminds us of the Christian theologian’s distinctive vocation and accountability to God and the community of the Word.

Realism(s) and Its Other(s)

109

Theological Versions of Realism: Ian Barbour’s Critical Realism In contrast to Barth’s quest to reform modern theology and purify its method and data by appeal to the particular revelation in Christ, Ian Barbour developed a dialogical model of theology drawing on the natural sciences, process metaphysics, and the rhetoric of symbol, myth, models and paradigms. As a physicist who also taught religion and worked the boundaries of science, technology, and society, Barbour’s concern is for an interdisciplinary conversation that finds itself at home in the academy and that seeks at least a dialogue if not a synthesis between philosophy, the natural sciences, and religious thought. He draws the metaphysical framework for this conversation from process thought, and considers all theologians to be indebted to the work of previous thinkers who suggested more general categories for reflection on the particular beliefs and practices of religion. Barbour was one of the first pioneers in the late twentieth-century dialogue between science and religion to introduce critical realism as a theory of knowledge that can bridge between scientific inquiry, philosophical scepticism, and religious commitment. He seeks to position critical realism as a via media between literalism and functionalism in the interpretation of both scientific and religious truth-claims. In a summary statement to his earlier work, he proposed … … among the wide variety of kinds of [scientific] models, there are some which are neither literal pictures of reality (naïve realism) nor useful fictions (instrumentalism) … [T]he occurrence of major paradigm shifts, rather than simple cumulation or convergence in the history of science, militates against naïve realism. The dominance of paradigms in the life and thought of a religious community is even stronger than that in a scientific community, and naïve realism is correspondingly more difficult to accept. Y et acknowledgement of the influence of paradigms need not lead us to instrumentalism or a total relativism concerning truth-claims … [I]n both science and religion there are experiential data and criteria of judgment which are not totally paradigm-dependent, though … the absence of rules for choice among paradigms is far more problematic in religion than in science.31

The criteria Barbour refers to include “coherence, comprehensiveness, and consistency with experience” (180). A critical realistic account of the truth-claims of a religion must show how its beliefs cohere with the other things we hold to be true (thus the need for dialogue between science and religion, the historian and the believer, etc.), how its beliefs account for the fullness and depth of our visions of reality (cosmos, history, anthropology, culture, society, religious diversity), and finally whether those beliefs are consistent with the life-experiences of believers 31  ������������� Ian Barbour, Myths, Models, and Paradigms: A Comparative Study in Science and Religion (N ew Y ork: Harper & Row, 1974), 172. Hereafter citations appear as page numbers in parentheses.

110

God in Postliberal Perspective

as they interact with communities of faith and other publics. Part of the value of a critical realistic approach to the study of religion is that it makes room for multiple modes of inquiry into issues of meaning (phenomenology, sociology, psychology, history) and truth (philosophy of religion and theology as the “systematic and selfcritical reflection of a paradigm community concerning its beliefs”) (176). Barbour’s point is that the dialogue between science and religion has shown that science has not delivered to us a literally true account of the natural world (due to its dependence on metaphors, models, and paradigms). On the other hand, religions and religious choices are not purely subjective, individualistic, and segmented from the rest of our beliefs and practices as holistic beings in multiple contexts. A more humanistic (historical, philosophical, cultural, social, aesthetic) account of the sciences becomes the occasion for a vision of religious community as accountable to others for its truth-claims and practices. “Though no decisive falsification is possible in religion … the cumulative weight of evidence does count for or against religious beliefs” (172). While the challenges to naïve realism, literalism, and absolutism in religious orthodoxy have increased over time, Barbour rejects the often preferred alternatives of cultural and individualistic relativism. Cultural relativism has asserted that each religion can be considered only as a product of its culture. Personal relativism makes religion merely a matter of individual preference, or of what is ‘true for me.’ There are no criteria beyond culture, in the one case, or the individual in the other, by which religions can be evaluated. … [O]n the contrary … religious beliefs are open to discussion, and grounds for preference can be given (177).

Critical realism thus stakes out a conceptual space for inquiry and dialogue between the false options of rationalism in science and fideism in religion. It offers a dialogical approach to religious diversity by treating different religious communities as subject matter for inquiry and as capable of proposing truthclaims for evaluation by shared criteria. It makes room for both faith and doubt in the religious life: The ‘critical’ element includes recognition of the limitations of religious models. Doubt challenges all dogmatisms and calls into question the neat schemes in which we think we have the truth all wrapped up. There is a ‘holy insecurity’, as Buber calls it, in our lack of certainty about the finality of our formulations. There is a risk in acting on the basis of any interpretive framework which is not subject to conclusive proof. Faith, then, does not mean intellectual certainty or the absence of doubt, but rather a trust and commitment even when there are no guaranteed beliefs or infallible dogmas (180).

Built into critical realism is a form of anti-foundational fallibilism that forges another bridge between the paradigm-relativity of scientific inquiry and the community-relativity of religious commitment. Although both scientific and

Realism(s) and Its Other(s)

111

religious paradigms resist falsification, they do evolve over time and can become replaced by new paradigms that offer more coherence with other true beliefs, greater comprehensiveness, and better consistency with lived experience. At the same time, critical realism poses an alternative to Kantian critical idealism that seeks to compartmentalize our beliefs into spheres of theoretical and practical reason, and aesthetic judgment. Critical idealism justifies objective knowledge within the world as it appears to beings like ourselves, but posits the unknown and unknowable noumenal world of the Ding-an-sich beyond the limits of theoretical reason. In a more recent statement of critical realism by John Polkinghorne, the Kantian option is rejected on the basis of conviction arising out of scientific practice: At the heart of scientific realism lies the conviction that intelligibility is the reliable guide to ontology, that concepts and entities whose postulation enables us to make deep sense of wide swathes of experience, are to be taken with the utmost seriousness as candidate descriptions of what is actually the case. While the resolute skeptic can never be defeated in logical argument, neither can the epistemologically optimistic who decline to despair of gaining verisimilitudinous knowledge of reality. It is the instinct of a scientist to encourage a trusting attitude towards those insights that afford a satisfying basis for understanding what is going on.32

Although critical realism describes a theory of knowledge and approach to dialogue favoured by many in the science and religion dialogue, it has not (yet) become a widely used term among philosophers of science and the scientific community. This may be due to its reception as a kind of mixed-theory: neither a return to naïve realism nor a postmodern rejection of scientific objectivity. But there are some who reject critical realism as theologically inadequate on its own terms to account for the specific truth claims of Christianity. To one such theologian we now turn. Theological Versions of Realism: Andrew Moore’s “Christocentric realism” A recent critique of critical realism takes its inspiration from the realist side of B arth’s theology. In Realism and Christian Faith, the Anglican theologian Andrew Moore argues that Christian theology has no stake in the fate of either religious, theological, or critical realism, but only in the future of a “Christocentric realism”. This Christian-specific type of realism is elaborated in order to defend the following traditional realist propositions: “(1) God exists independently of our awareness of him and of our will, but that (2) despite this, we can know him and that (3) human 32  ������������������� John Polkinghorne, Belief in God in an Age of Science (N ew Haven, CT and London: Y ale University Press, 1998), 109–110.

God in Postliberal Perspective

112

language is not an inadequate or inappropriate medium for truthful speech about God.”33 However, Moore seeks to detach these propositions from philosophical theism and ground them in a solus Christus perspective. Rather than establish a dialogue (as in critical realism), Moore seeks to erect a “methodological cordon sanitaire between philosophical theism and Christocentric realism” (29). From the outset I wonder whether Moore’s whole approach to the realism vs non-realism debate – making ontological and confessional commitment the price of admission to Christian realism – is another way to beg the questions of knowledge and truth. Why should an undecided seeker or interloper in the conversation in fact make Moore’s commitment in face of alternative ontologies and confessions? For hasn’t Moore couched in philosophical terminology his very first move in the game, a leap into a christocentric fideism already committed to tradition, orthodoxy, and Christian uniqueness, thus giving only the appearance of critical engagement in the broader debate over realism? Would a critical reader summarize Moore’s central claim as, “God is (or is like) a Christian realist theologian, and we should become like ‘him’?” Moore responds to the critical reader in elaborating his own perspective: It might appear that … my argument fatally begs the most important question by assuming the independent reality of the one whose independence I wish to defend. Against this … some such circularity is unavoidable in any argument for realism … One is reminded of Barth’s famous image of the ‘self-enclosed circle’ within which theology and its epistemology operate: theology ‘realizes that all its knowledge, even its knowledge of the correctness of its knowledge, can only be an event’ … – that is, a self-originating divine action which can be understood only in terms of itself (9–10).34

For those to whom the “event” of the Word of God has happened, they stand inside the circle of Moore’s realism. But for all others, they are left with the circularity of Moore’s formulations. The flow of his argument employs particular theological convictions and perspectives to answer general philosophical questions about realism vs non-realism with regard to God i.e., there is no pre-theological inquiry in Moore’s perspective. Those who aren’t already convinced appear excluded from the start. In the dialectical relation of the given (realism) and the critical search for truth (idealism) in Barth’s lecture of 1929, Moore strongly comes down on the side of realism. But what happens to the critical voice of truth that asks us to question our fate in inheriting certain convictions as revealed within our own tradition?

 �������������� Andrew Moore, Realism and Christian Faith: God, Grammar, and Meaning (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1–2. Hereafter quotations from this book will be cited in page number in parentheses. 34  ����������������������������� Moore is quoting Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of the Word of God, G. W. Bromiley, (trans.) (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975), I/1:42. 33

Realism(s) and Its Other(s)

113

Along the way of defending his position, Moore raises a host of important questions for critical and theological realists. He suspects that they put the creation before the Creator when they assume that “God can be known in broadly similar terms to that in which the physical world can be known” (12). The ghost of analogia entis haunts their bridge-building between science and religion, nature and God. Further, they take “realism about creation to be less problematic than realism about God” (ibid.). Since in Moore’s ontology, God is the ens realissimum, the most real being and source of creation’s reality, God’s reality cannot finally be a problem. This move is typical of his way of arguing against theological realists because their emphasis on “theology’s cognitive claims reflects a post-Enlightenment, foundationalist, and apologetic concern with epistemology” (54). Christian realists like Moore should be concerned first with ontology while epistemological and semantic issues are secondary. But I wonder if all forms of critical, theological, and pragmatic internal realism can be dismissed as foundational? And doesn’t the very discussion of realism vs non-realism raise ontological, epistemological, and semantic issues that will be prioritized differently by different thinkers? Two propositions summarize Moore’s position: “One way of avoiding idolatry is to adopt a methodological distinction between the God of philosophical theism and the triune, biblical God” (30). “Central elements of Christian faith resist explanation” (34). Theological and critical realists, he asserts, tend to subsume the radical otherness of the Gospel message and the God of the Gospel under notions of explanation at home in the natural sciences. But this is a category mistake. For they “represent the ‘grammar’ of God’s existence as if it ‘belonged to one logical type or category’ [i.e., science] ‘when actually [it] belong[s] to another”, which is “God’s self-revelation in Christ” (40).35 Moore accentuates the dis-analogies between theology and the natural sciences in a variety of ways to undermine the critical realist approach. One of those ways is the extreme limitation he puts upon the data theology can consider: “… since [God’s] revelation has been proleptically consummated in Christ and dogmatically articulated in the church’s creeds, it seems reasonable to conclude that – this side of eternity – there cannot be any new ‘data’ or experimental evidence which can claim a higher authority in Christian theology” (46). So outside of the Bible and the creeds, there cannot be any new data for theology at all? Here he makes no reference to how the Bible and the creeds have been received and interpreted differently in different historical and cultural contexts, and how Christians have reflected on the various relationships between the Bible, creeds, and all their other beliefs as informed by the sciences, culture, society, etc. His worry is that if he admits new data from other fields and new data within theology’s own scope, then he must open his convictions to fallibilism. Since he also seeks to avoid foundationalism, this seems like a logical place to end up. But “fallibilism is a central epistemic component of the critical realism advocated by theological 35  ������������������������������� Moore is quoting Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1963), 17.

114

God in Postliberal Perspective

realists influenced by the philosophy of science; because we could be wrong about our beliefs, we must be critical of them and ready to revise them” (48). Again, his ontology trumps others’ epistemology: “Christian faith is motivated by (the God at work in) unique events rather than our beliefs about them” (48). Apparently for Moore the revealed knowledge of those unique events (e.g., Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection) is beyond revision. If theology in principle cannot have any new data after what has been revealed, then its methods are distinguished from the natural sciences: “… since revelation is proleptically complete it cannot predict or be confirmed by new facts” (50). Like his model Barth, and unlike Pannenberg and Moltmann, Moore’s eschatology is almost totally realized already in the Jesus story. Jesus’ promise of the “already but not yet” coming reign of God plays no strong ontological, epistemological, or semantic role for him. Theology is also dis-analogous with the sciences since it does not make progress in the same way they do. “Applying the concept of progress to either the church or its doctrine is a category mistake, especially when the concept’s content is specified by the philosophy of science … As Jean-Luc Marion … puts it, ‘theology cannot aim at any other progress than its own conversion to the Word’” (52).36 T he only type of progress Moore allows is moral and spiritual growth. On this account, the history and development of doctrine and biblical interpretation, plus the encounters of Christian theology with a variety of cultures with their own religious and wisdom traditions seem to offer no occasions for progress toward more true, complex, and rich accounts of God’s work in the world. Another case of dis-analogy involves appeals to experience in science and theology. Although critical realists distinguish sense experience from religious experience per se, or a great part of the data of science from the data of theology, they have not shown “why experience should be given a theological realist rather than a naturalist account” (55), i.e., religious experiences are not self-interpreting and are subject to both theological and natural explanations. Here Moore refers to the arguments of the physicist and theologian Willem Drees who offers a naturalistic account of the origins and functions of religion as an alternative to both supernaturalistic and process explanations.37 In fact, neither the varieties of religious experience nor philosophical debate has settled the controversy between realists and non-realists in theology. According to Moore:

36  ���������������������������������� Moore is quoting Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being, 158. The note of realized eschatology is sounded in Marion as well: “We are infinitely free in theology: we find all already given, gained, available” (ibid). 37  ����������������� Willem B. Drees, Religion, Science and Naturalism (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For a significant critique of Drees, see David Ray Griffin, Religion and Scientific Naturalism: Overcoming the Conflicts (Albany, NY : State University of N ew Y ork Press, 2000), 64–81.

Realism(s) and Its Other(s)

115

… the problem of underdetermination strikes at the heart of theological realism, for it points up just how far whether or not we are realists about Christian faith depends on the commitments we choose to make to an over-arching theory or meta-narrative by which to interpret the data of experience … the empirical phenomena of religion do not of themselves offer grounds for postulating a supernatural cause (56).

There is a subtle shift in Moore’s argument here from God’s revelation to our human commitments to meta-narratives. From the perspective of a religious naturalist like Drees, Moore’s appeals to the event of special revelation are just as subject to natural or functional explanation as any other religious experience. How Moore would distinguish special revelation from other religious experiences apart from its content (Christ), context of occurrence (Christian communities in the world), and ascribed source or agency (the Holy Spirit) remains unclear. Of course, the ascribed source or agent remains the issue under debate with religious naturalism. Critical realism builds on the analogy between scientific realism (the alternative to instrumentalism, conventionalism, or constructivism) and theological realism (the alternative to non-realism). But here again Moore finds more dis-analogy than analogy. Scientific realism is a “hypothesis … in the process of being confirmed. It is not a settled position; it could turn out to be false. Fallibilism is therefore built into scientific realism. Theological realists learn from this and describe their positions variously as ‘tentative,’ ‘skeptical,’ ‘qualified,’ or ‘critical’” (61). In fact, this is one sign of how critical theological realists have tried to move beyond the modern quest for foundations of certainty whether in philosophy, science, or religion. But Moore rejects fallibilism as impossible given the nature of orthodox Christian commitment: “The initial ‘observations’ of the risen Christ which gave rise to Christian faith were unique and unrepeatable, so, unlike hypotheses in the philosophy of science, no falsification of God’s self-revelation is possible” (ibid.). Here Moore’s christocentric realism shows signs of his own distinctive version of foundationalism. There are at least four logically possible ways in which orthodox Christocentric convictions might be shown fallible: 1. If Christians became convinced the God of biblical witness did not exist, there would be no agent of the resurrection. 2. If we became convinced via historical-critical research that Jesus of N azareth never existed, N ew Testament claims about the “risen Christ” would no longer make sense. 3. If we became convinced via historical-critical research that Jesus was crucified but not raised from the dead (however defined), then resurrection claims would be meaningless. . If such research showed that Jesus of N azareth’s moral character was radically misrepresented by the N ew Testament, that in fact he was a

God in Postliberal Perspective

116

violent revolutionary put to death by the Romans for acts of terror, then N ew Testament christological claims would be overturned. I submit these four as “logical” possibilities. They all have been posited by various writers since the 1700s and subject to much debate especially in philosophy of religion, biblical studies, and theology.38 Whether or how we could go about moving them from logical possibilities to probabilities or confirmed claims is also subject to debate. Thus far none of the four has achieved an overwhelming set of arguments and evidence that have required critical realists in theology to jettison basic N ew Testament christological claims. In fact, discussions of these possible alternatives to traditional christology have been included in the curricula of church-related higher and theological education for quite some time. However, Moore does show a problem in easily equating fallibilism about scientific claims with fallibilism about religious convictions. “… whereas a scientist holds their hypotheses tentatively and with a willingness to drop them if they are not confirmed experimentally, the security of a Christian’s beliefs ‘seem to be greater than an account of these beliefs as “hypotheses” would warrant’” (ibid.).39 On the phenomenological level of worship and daily life, most Christian believers do not tend to treat their most basic claims about Christ as tentative hypotheses awaiting falsification or confirmation. The practice of science falsifies many more hypotheses than it ever confirms, and scientists are much more accustomed to dealing with negative outcomes in their research. Many Christians treat their most basic biblical and doctrinal convictions as part of the encompassing framework that orients their lives and gives value to their struggles and suffering. Therefore, what would count as falsification with regard to these convictions and who must assume the burden of proof is subject to much more ongoing debate than the most recent and tentative hypothesis. So we can say that fallibilism with regard to basic Christian convictions is logically possible and conceivable by many Christians with a general education in modern thought, but not as central to Christian practice in the way in which it is central to the practice of the sciences. A sceptical, critical attitude is considered a virtue in the practice of science. Many Christians still experience doubt about their most basic convictions as a temptation to unbelief or sin, and this may be due in part to foundationalism being part of their background beliefs. Incorporating a critical realist sensibility into Christian life remains a project of theological education, not an achievement. The strength of Moore’s other arguments with critical realism depends on all the dis-analogies he can draw between scientific and theological realism. So, for  ������������������������������������ See, for example, George W. Stroup, The Promise of Narrative Theology: Recovering the Gospel in the Church (Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1981), 236–37; William C. Placher, Narratives of a Vulnerable God: Christ, Theology, and Scripture (Louisville, KY : Westminster John Knox Press, 1994), 92–94. 39  ������������������������������������ Moore is quoting Michael C. Banner, The Justification of Science and the Rationality of Religious Belief (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1990), 94. 38

Realism(s) and Its Other(s)

117

example, physics and chemistry seek to explain unobservable entities or forces by means of observable phenomena or evidence in experimental observation. By contrast theology’s main subject matter, God, as the Creator of all things, is invisible yet revealed in Christ, manifest in the incarnation yet still hidden in revelation as a mystery we cannot exhaust (e.g., Christ’s passion and cross). When Moore writes, “We cannot see God’s essence, but we can see his glory”, he finds no analogy to either direct or indirect access to nature in science (68). The distinction he appeals to is that God, in christocentric realism, is self-revealing (and self-hidden) while we are the ones who unveil nature’s forces, structures, and entities by our science. God as the subject matter of theological inquiry is not subject to scientific modes of access to nature. Critical-theological realists “have confused the ontology of derived, created reality with the underived reality of the creator” (71). The implication is that if Christians are to be realists, we must purify our theology of false analogies to the sciences. In fact, Moore suggests a return to something like the independence approach to the relationship of science and religion.40 He urges scientists and theologians to draw “uncompromising contrasts between their businesses” and Christians must “avoid contaminating the ‘grammar’ of their faith by dipping their brushes into other people’s paint pots” (72). How realism “takes off” in theological discourse: suspending our disbelief We have encountered among a select group of philosophers and theologians some of the varieties of realism and its alternatives: alethic realism (Alston); internal pragmatic realism (Putnam); irrealism (Goodman); realism and idealism held in dialectical relation by a theology of the Word (Barth); critical realism in science and theology (Barbour); and a pure Christian realism (Moore). What have we learned from the conflicts and conversations among these thinkers for the sake of clarifying where postliberal theologians stand in the debate between realism and non-realism over God? • •

•

Philosophy and science can provide theologians with models for thinking about the variety of realisms at play in the ways we construe the doctrine of God. However, as Moore reminds us the importation of philosophical and scientific models into theology’s work must be attuned to the differences in subject matter and method between general inquiries about reality and nature and the distinctive claims of Christian theology about God. One suggestive model is Barth’s inclusion of both a realist moment and an idealist, critical moment in his dialectical understanding of theology’s

40  ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Barbour outlines four ways science and religions have related to each other in the modern era: conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration. See Chap. 4 in Religion and Science. He offers Barth as a prime example of the independence approach.

God in Postliberal Perspective

118

•

•

work. Different modes of realism that allow something or someone to constrain our theological reflections should play a part in any adequate theology today. Different modes of critical non-realism that critique our inherited and customary pictures of what constrains theology’s reflections must play their part as well. Thus an irrealist philosopher like Goodman may help us imagine how creative communities and persons engage in world-making as well as world-rendering. Another useful model is Putnam’s internal pragmatic realism for it calls attention to the network of language, beliefs and practices from within which we make reality claims. In thinking about Christian theology as a pursuit of a specific community of inquiry and faithfulness, this model recalls our attention to how Christian reality claims are relative to and take off from somewhere and someone’s framework. General claims grow out of particular practices and commitments: “theory of truth presupposes theory of rationality that in turn presupposes our theory of the good”. This model suggests that we might think of theology as the Christian community seeking the truth via rational inquiry for the glory of God. One temptation facing Christian communities since the Reformation has been to treat their most basic convictions as foundations of certainty in the face of scepticism and pluralism. Critical realism as a mode of postfoundational fallibilism offers one way to build bridges between Christian reality claims and the reality claims of other communities of inquiry, both scientific and religious.

The question of exactly “how” communities and persons come to have realistic convictions about “God” has a variety of answers, as various as the set of examples under consideration. The influences of both socialization (into a community’s ways of life and framework), and transformation (from one community to another or to a deeper degree of conviction) all come into play. The following paragraphs provide an analogy for only one of many ways this happens in real life. When some students encounter a theologian’s work or a well-developed doctrine for the first time, there is a tendency to respond with an allergic reaction of disbelief. The terms and manner of expression seem strange, the style of argumentation may be hard to follow, and the insights may be contrary or contradictory to the background beliefs of the student. To help students through this first stage, I often use the analogy of reading a novel or other work of fiction. In the early pages and chapters of a novel, there comes a point where the reader must suspend their disbelief in the fictional world and characters.41 One begins to ascribe a certain sense of reality to the story-world 41

 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ For the concept of “suspension of disbelief” with regard to the values, beliefs, or attitudes of a fictional work, see Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, second edn. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 112, 138. Booth cites Coleridge as the author of this idea.

Realism(s) and Its Other(s)

119

in its own internal coherence and drama. One may become interested and involved in the fate of the characters. In the closing pages, one may experience a certain dismay that the story is coming to an end. Afterwards, life in the world and the possibilities for indwelling the world may seem different from before, although the journey of reading was a fictional one. Reading theology can be like reading a good novel. The student must read along for a while until they suspend their disbelief in the objects and references of the theological work or system. In the process of reading, there comes a moment (hopefully) when the theologian’s expressed vision takes on a life of its own. The reader becomes intrigued with the internal connections within the web of meaning spun by the theologian. There are also the textual references to other texts (e.g., the Bible), practices (e.g., sacraments and preaching), and experiences (suffering, guilt, insight, disclosure, forgiveness) that throw new light on old assumptions and interpretations. In the end, the student may discover that they have learned to look with new vision and different perspective on ordinary beliefs and practices because they let go of their disbelief long enough to catch a glimpse of the theologian’s vision. In this sense, our ascription of reality or realism to the objects or references of Christian belief is something that occurs within a process of engaging in the practices and encountering the expressions of the Christian community. Until we have suspended our disbelief long enough to make religious texts, rituals, language, and the conceptual system they exemplify part of our own web of meaning, in fact, part of our lives, we will not get the point of the reality-transfiguring claims of the Christian message. This is not a unique aspect of Christian faith. Other faith traditions also communicate their sense of the real via engagement with their practices, rituals, forms of meditation and prayer, and ways of reading and using texts and language to re-frame human experience. The analogy could be extended further. Like religious communities, scientific communities induct their members into a set of practices and conceptual schemes about the natural world that produce over time a powerful set of convictions about what to take as real and what to disbelieve in our ordinary perceptions and intuitions about the world. In the process of education, we don’t offer children or students a choice about whether they want to learn part of the body of scientific theory that has altered the modern world. We simply induct them into it as part of the process of growing up in our particular age and civilization. A minority of them go on to learn how to conduct the experiments and engage in inquiry to demonstrate or give evidence that parts of this body of theory are justified or true (primarily by falsifying a lot of other hypotheses and beliefs). A vital religion like a vital scientific community counts on engagement, practice and exposure over time to communicate its sense of reality in ways that shape and form long-lasting human convictions and enduring patterns of action. Another example of how persons and communities gain realistic convictions involves the role of narrative, especially a sense of being alive within a story that gives meaning, truth, and purpose to life. On their way to Mount Doom, Sam

120

God in Postliberal Perspective

Gamgee and Frodo Baggins fall into a conversation about “tales” in Tolkien’s The Two Towers.42 Sam speaks with Frodo about the great, old stories in which risky, courageous deeds are done (like their quest to destroy the Ring). The characters somehow have fallen into these tales but they have choices to proceed or go back: they become “folk inside a story”. Strangely the tale has become both their fate and their decision. Sam wonders what kind of story they have fallen into. Frodo says they cannot know, just like the characters within an actual tale who don’t know yet how the story ends, whether it’s a comedy or tragedy. When Sam remembers that the Lady Galadriel had given to Frodo a phial that contains light from the storied star of Eärendil to be “a light to you in dark places”, he exclaims that they are in a tale they have heard before that seems to have no end. Frodo says that the tale will go on with or without them someday. Sam wonders if their exploits will end up in tales told around fires in future generations. Frodo laughs as he tells him that “Samwise the stouthearted” will be one of the main characters. But then he pulls them back to the present with the recognition of just how difficult their part in their story has become. Sam has the last word: in a great tale we cannot always predict how the characters will turn out, who will be good and who evil. Even Gollum might turn out different from what they expect at this stage on their journey. T he reader of The Two Towers has encountered Sam and Frodo as characters within a great tale. Living inside of tales involves a sense of both our destiny and choice. The stories of our lives and the larger histories and communal narratives we find ourselves part of have ways of choosing us and of us having opportunities to continue within them or back out. Sometimes we feel as if we have fallen into them without conscious or rational deliberation. Y et how and whether we go on living within and with certain tales may depend on a variety of choices we make in response to the beliefs, values, and attitudes we find within them. If we suspend our disbelief to consider what the tale has to show us, and to try to discover where it leads, we risk being challenged, changed, and incorporated into the community that relates the tale. The story with its effects must somehow draw us in or we reach a point and “shut the book”. In light of a particular tale, are we challenged to see ourselves as heroic, betrayers, or betrayed? What possibilities for living and dying are suggested to us? D oes this tale propose a world and life to live within that makes better sense or less of the complexity of my experience in relation with others? Great tales cannot coerce me to continue reading and telling them, but invite, elicit, and intrigue me to discover how they end and what part I have to play in their plots. The characters I meet in them may take on a life and agency of their own. In Christian context, many who hear, read, and ritually enact biblical narratives in worship, community, witness, and personal life come to the conviction that God, the main character of the tale, is an agent to be reckoned with in and beyond the 42  ���������������� J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1954, 1965, 1966, 1982, 1993, 1994), 696–97, cf. 929.

Realism(s) and Its Other(s)

121

tales. Something subtle happens to the imagination, beliefs, attitudes, and values of such hearers and readers. Y ou might say that their first suspension of disbelief has become a way of life. There is no magic here for not all who begin down the road of these tales continue the journey. But for those who do there is a sense of promise, and that it is worthwhile to be found within this tale in the company of the central character and the people who are making this quest. On one level there is nothing unique about this function of scriptural narrative in suspending our disbelief. Scriptural narratives in other religions and great literature play that role for others. The brief general account given here is not intended to exclude or replace those other tales. My goal is more modest: to point toward one way that hearing, reading, and remembering through ritual the stories in Scripture and the history of their communities, makes a context where Christians come to a sense of God’s reality in life and hope for God’s reality in all times and places.

This page has been left blank intentionally

C hapter 4

Three Exemplars of a Postliberal Doctrine of God Postliberal “Gods”? There is no such thing as one essential theory about the doctrine of God that all postliberals must share. Postliberalism is a set of shared convictions rooted in historic and contemporary Christian communities and some common tendencies in method (philosophic and theological). Different theologians who share these convictions and methods focus on the plenitude of God’s being and action in the world. What they produce is not one uniform doctrine of God that all postliberals subscribe to; rather they propose different yet overlapping understandings of God that bear a strong family resemblance. The three postliberal theologians I take as case studies in this chapter overlap at crucial points: all are trinitarians, yet with different emphases on the unity of God and T rinity of Persons. A lthough postliberals are often identified with Barth’s theology, two of our exemplars are deeply influenced by Thomas Aquinas. They all distance themselves, explicitly or implicitly, from the strong revisions in the doctrine of God proposed by process theism, although one less so than the others. One consistently uses the traditional threefold name, “Father, Son and Holy Spirit”, although all three would agree that God as Creator transcends gender categories. All share a concern for how Christian testimony to God as Trinity engages religious pluralism, especially in relation to Jewish and Islamic testimony and reflection. All bring Scripture and Christian reflection into conversation with philosophy. But they seek to transform philosophical water into the wine of theology, to use Bruce Marshall’s allusion to Jesus’ first miracle in John’s Gospel. They share a common concern for the particularity of Christian convictions, language, and witness to God’s reality in the world, but apply those convictions to all of reality, not merely the subjectivity of believers or the inter-subjectivity of the Christian community. From a contextual basis (Christian community, Scripture, and tradition), they make universal claims (the reality of God; the triune God is the Creator and Redeemer; there is One named ‘Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’) yet do not appeal to foundations of certainty to justify those claims. Their approaches to the justification of contextual beliefs differ, but they all ascribe a role to the Holy Spirit in turning sinful creatures by various ways toward the truth, who is Jesus Christ. Their dialogue partners   ������������������������������������������ Bruce D. Marshall, “Theology after Cana”, Modern Theology 16/4 (October 2000): 517–27.

124

God in Postliberal Perspective

are both past (Aquinas, Barth) and present (any reader with some background in philosophy, world religions, or theology; fellow Christians and some Jewish and Islamic scholars share their interests). If theology is an ellipsis with two foci, one called “tradition” and the other called “the present context”, their privileged focus is tradition (Scripture, creeds, liturgy, past theological masters), but their thought keeps moving around the ellipsis bringing both foci into dialogue. Why focus on these particular postliberal theologians? For one, they have all made constructive proposals about the doctrine of God. Second, they have addressed issues of the justification and truthfulness of Christian claims about God with an eye on traditional sources while acknowledging contemporary debates, like realism vs non-realism. Third, they have all made an impact on theology in N orth America and beyond. In the sections below there are sketches of the doctrine of God one finds in each theologian’s major works. I will not attempt to correlate their efforts to discover one true postliberal doctrine. Issues for discussion conclude each section. How do their constructive efforts position their readers to engage more critically with the terms of the debate over God’s reality or non-reality? An Interfaith Journey in the Doctrine of God David B. Burrell (1933–) is a priest and teacher in the Congregation of the Holy Cross (CSC), and the Theodore M. Hesburgh Professor of Philosophy and Theology at the University of N otre Dame. After graduate theological studies at Laval University (Quebec) and Gregorian University (Rome), his PhD at Y ale concentrated in logic and analytic philosophy. His comparative studies of Islamic, Jewish, and Christian philosophical theology in the Middle Ages have carried him to Jerusalem and Cairo. His close readings of sources in Arabic and Latin manifest his concern for precision in language, argumentation, and the difference that faith makes when it takes up such tools to serve the God who is both unknowable (as the transcendent Creator) yet revealed to particular peoples (in Torah, Christ, and Qur’an). Out of his distinguished career of teaching and research, a rich series

  �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� As an example of post-critical and postliberal scholars from three traditions engaged in interfaith text studies, see the website of The Journal of Scriptural Reasoning Forum: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/journals/jsrforum/ (accessed 16 August 2007).   ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� As further evidence that there is a strong family resemblance between doctrines of God proposed by postliberals, I could expand these three into four by including the work of Kathryn Tanner who is cited by all the others: God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (Oxford, UK and N ew Y ork: Basil Blackwell, 1988). Due to limitations of space, I focus on these three in this chapter.

Three Exemplars of a Postliberal Doctrine of God

125

of writings have appeared. Some of his insights and approaches include the following: First, philosophic theology must renew itself today by a closer, critical reading of its sources in the Middles Ages when Muslims, Jews, and Christians reasoned about God in relation to their scriptures and the Hellenic heritage. “Philosophic theology” is redefined as an enterprise grounded in revelation and religious conviction that supplements the language of faith with philosophical resources that help to respond to questions raised in inquiry by believers and non-believers. In a trilogy, Knowing the Unknowable God, Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions, and Faith and Freedom, Burrell traces the genealogy of convictions, metaphors, and arguments that composed the background of the doctrine of God among medieval thinkers. These are primarily works in comparative philosophical theology for they show how concepts, religious language, and theological reflection interacted in the writings of Ibn-Sina (Avicenna) (980–1037), Maimonides (1135–1204), Aquinas (c. 1224–74), et al. Burrell argues that the critical distinction between essence (what something is) and existence (that something is) and the insight that God’s indescribable essence is “to-be” led to a unique, creative, and fruitful concept of God among these thinkers. Further the critical distinction between the Creator and creation, liberated by Al-Ghazali (1059–1111), Maimonides, and Aquinas (who criticized the emanation schema (or “great chain of being”) used by the Christian John of Damascene (c. 700–750), the Muslim Al-Farabi (870–950), and others) leads to a way of preserving the uniqueness of God as ontologically simple and the freedom of creation from divine coercion. Al-Farabi’s imaginative schema was a way of picturing the connection between God and the world via a necessary emanation. First Burrell outlines that schema and then he notes how John of Damascene’s own schematic outline corresponds to Al-Farabi’s theoretical realities with an emphasis on creation: 1. Existence and nature of God: limitless and incomprehensible 2. Creation: threefold division – invisible, visible, human being 3. Angels: intellects with custody over earth and vision of God  ������������������ David B. Burrell, Faith and Freedom: An Interfaith Perspective (Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2004), hereafter abbreviated Faith followed by page numbers in parentheses); Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions (N otre Dame, IN : University of N otre Dame Press, 1993), hereafter abbreviated Freedom followed by page numbers in parentheses; Knowing the Unknowable God: Ibn-Sina, Maimonides, Aquinas (N otre Dame, IN : University of N otre Dame Press, 1986), hereafter abbreviated Knowing followed by page numbers in parentheses; Aquinas: God and Action (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; N otre Dame, IN : University of N otre Dame Press, 1979), hereafter abbreviated Aquinas followed by page numbers in parentheses; Exercises in Religious Understanding (N otre Dame, IN : University of N otre Dame Press, 1974); Analogy and Philosophical Language (N ew Haven, CT and London: Y ale University Press, 1973). This list is selective, not exhaustive. 

God in Postliberal Perspective

126

4. Visible creatures: heavens and four elements 5. Paradise 6. Creation of “man” “according to God’s image”: intellect and free will (Knowing 10–11) Although all of us have such imaginative schemas as part of our background beliefs (populated with different agents and entities in different times and cultures), problems arise when we bring them into the foreground and turn them into objects of explicit faith, especially for the three Abrahamic traditions. For in imagining the connection between God and the world, we tend to obscure the distinction between Creator and creature by making God the most important agent of our world, or “by pretending that anything created [the orders of the schema] could share in the act of creation” (Knowing 14). Second, philosophic theology must recover the apophatic character of God-talk in these three traditions, how they proceeded by way of denying that our ordinary (created) categories apply to divinity. Believing in the one true God requires learning how to know the God who is unknowable as merely the greatest object in this world. In his earlier work on Aquinas, Burrell emphasizes that Thomas’ only direct statement about God in his philosophical theology is that “God is pure act” (Aquinas xii). He calls attention to Aquinas’ qualifications of our language and knowledge of God as in the following sentences from Summa Theologiae: N ow God is both simple, like the form, and subsistent like the concrete thing, and so we sometimes refer to him by abstract nouns to indicate his simplicity and sometimes by concrete nouns to indicate his subsistence and completeness; though neither way of speaking measures up to his way of being, for in this life we do not know him as he is in himself. … we can know clearly that there is a God, and yet cannot know clearly what he is. … we cannot know what God is, but only what he is not.

The mistake that many readers and commentators on Aquinas have made is to take his working definition of God, “the beginning and end of all things and of reasoning creatures especially”, and his five ways to the existence of God as a description of God’s properties, as if we were in a position to define what it means 

 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� The reader may recall my juxtaposition of Kant’s argument that existence is not a real predicate in Descartes’ ontological argument with Alston’s critique of “transcendentitis” in Gordon Kaufman and John Hick. See my Chap. 3, “Philosophical versions of realism: A lston’s Alethic Realism”.   ��������� Burrell, Aquinas, 6, my emphasis; see Summa Theologiae 1.13.1.2. Hereafter abbreviated ST.   �������������� Ibid., 8 from ST 1.3.4.2.   ��������������� Ibid., 13 from ST 1.3. Introduction.

Three Exemplars of a Postliberal Doctrine of God

127

to be God, what God essentially is. In fact, in the opening questions of the Summa Theologiae 3–11, Aquinas does not present the reader with a doctrine of God. In these questions, “What God is like is treated in the most indirect fashion possible …” (Aquinas 13). Third, philosophic theology must distinguish between formal features of divinity (simpleness, perfection, limitlessness, unchangeableness, oneness, etc.) and attributes that are applied to God analogically from the language of scripture and worship (God is just, wise, good, etc.). Here Burrell borrows a concept from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, the distinction between facts we use to describe the world and “factuality” as a formal feature of the world which is not just another fact about it.10 In ordinary religious language, we ascribe to God the attributes of mercy, power, knowledge, etc. But a formal feature of divinity “defines the manner in which such properties might be attributed to God” (Knowing 46). As creatures of this world, we speak of God using languages that are also part of creation. Our terms of divine attributes include symbols, metaphors, and analogies drawn from our experience of the world. But when we apply these terms to God, we need reminders that they are being put to different and extended use. The formal features qualify all the “ordinary” attributes of God. But they themselves are not attributes. When they are taken as such, we end up with false and misleading images of God, just as we do when we take the language of attributes univocally rather than analogically. So, for example, when Burrell says that simpleness is a formal feature of God, he is following the negative way of denial. For Aquinas God is the One whose essence is simply to-be (Knowing 22). Therefore the distinction we draw between what a thing in the world is (essence) and that it is (existence) does not apply in the same way to God. Without formal features to remind us, we end up reducing God to another thing or person, albeit the greatest one, within our world. And such a god cannot be the One who transcends the world as the beginning (creative source) and end (ultimate goal) of all things. Problems arise when we take these formal features to be another set of facts predicated of God: “the unchangeableness implied by simpleness here does not mark a divine indifference to change so much as it suggests a life not subject to the metric of time” (Aquinas 16). This distinction between formal features and attributes or properties of God is crucial to remember when we look at Burrell’s critique of process theism. Fourth, we have already referred to the distinction between God and the world that is crucial to certain medieval thinkers, especially Aquinas. Drawing on the work of Robert Sokolowski (1934–, Catholic University of America), Burrell argues that distinguishing God from the world is a way of signifying that God is “the free creator of the universe”, and that means “one must thenceforth speak of

 ������������������ Ibid., 12-13 from ST 1.2.Introduction.  ����������������������������������� His source for this reading of the Tractatus is Eddy Zemach, “Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of the Mystical”, In Irving Copi and Robert Beard, eds. Essays on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), 359–75. 

10

128

God in Postliberal Perspective

things, indeed, of the entire universe, ‘as possibly not having been at all’”.11 T he concept of the contingency of the created universe distinguished medieval thinkers like Aquinas from Aristotle’s influential cosmology. For Sokolowski this means, “God is understood as ‘being’ God entirely apart from any relation of otherness to the world or to the whole. God could and would be God even if there were no world’” (Faith 219). God transcends the inner-worldly distinctions of the same and the other for “God is not in the universe” (Faith 220). “God is understood … to have permitted the distinction between himself and the world to occur. [And since] no distinction made within the horizon of the world is like this … the act of creation cannot be understood in terms of any action or any relationship that exists in the world” (ibid.). If this is the case, then divine activity modelled on creation will always elude our cosmologies and metaphysical schemes. The uniqueness, distinctiveness, and greatness of God are at stake. Since Anselm’s insight was that God is “that than which no greater can be conceived”, a world or creatures that enrich God’s being would mean there is a state of affairs (‘God plus the creature or God plus the world’) greater than “that which no greater can be conceived”, or God alone (ibid.). Burrell goes on to argue that Sokolowski’s Christian distinction between God and the world is also present in the philosophical theology of AlGhazali and Maimonides. Thus the three traditions confirm each other starting from different scriptural and metaphysical paths of reflection. Fifth, one marker of the postliberal character of Burrell’s philosophic theology is his critique of process thought. If process theology is one of the major intellectual projects of theologians who identify with the liberal Christian tradition, then its critique signals a major shift. In one piece, Burrell has offered his philosophical criticisms of Whitehead’s constructive philosophy and its appropriation by Hartshorne and Ogden.12 In a brief article, he has sharpened that critique in terms of four issues where he finds “misunderstandings” among process thinkers.13 1. He charges Hartshorne with having projected the problems of modern theism back onto Aquinas and medieval thought. Rather than distinguishing Thomas from later Thomism and modern theism, Hartshorne drew false conclusions “from Aquinas’ insistence that God was not really related to God’s world”.14 11  ��������� Burrell, Faith and Freedom, 219, with reference to Robert Sokolowski, The God of Faith and Reason (N otre Dame, IN : University of N otre Dame Press, 1982; Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 1994), Chap. 2–4. 12  ������������������������������������������������������������������� Burrell, “A Philosophical Objection: Process Theology”, Chap. 6 in Aquinas. 13  ���������������������������������������������������� Burrell, “Does Process Theology Rest on a Mistake?” Theological Studies 43 (March 1982):125–35. See the reply by Philip E. Devenish, “Postliberal Process Theology: A Rejoinder to Burrell”, Theological Studies 43 (September 1982):504–13. 14  ������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Burrell, “Does Process Theology Rest on a Mistake?” 127. According to Burrell, Hartshorne failed to take account of the distinction between “real” and “intentional” being among the medievals. He refers the reader to W. N orris Clarke, S.J., The Philosophical

Three Exemplars of a Postliberal Doctrine of God

129

2. He seriously doubts that Whitehead’s system has provided a “superior philosophical synthesis” for theology to appropriate, given the scepticism of many professional philosophers about Whitehead’s claims. The irony is that Whitehead’s philosophy has found a more welcome reception among theologians than philosophers. This is especially ironic since process categories do not easily lend themselves to theological purposes, e.g., “Despite its constant reference to ‘relatedness’, the notion of an ‘agent’ remains underdeveloped in process thought”.15 By contrast, the analogical concept of person has been crucial to the development of the Christian doctrines of Incarnation and Trinity. So, Burrell wonders “what might be gained by seeking illumination in a philosophical mode which takes its principal analogies from natural process … and resolves to endemically abstract notions like creativity, concretion, and even process, rather than return us to the individual agent as the prime analogate”?16 T he theological audience that finds such philosophical moves appealing would be primarily one for whom the doctrines of Incarnation and Trinity were too mythological to guide reflection on God’s relation to the world. Once the nineteenth-century liberal tradition had reduced the Christian doctrine of God to monotheism, some way was needed to relate its “remote and solitary divinity” to the world.17 3. Does process thought illuminate biblical and theological tradition better than other conceptualities? Here Burrell fears that the biblical confession of God as the free creator, and all of nature as divine gift, is subject to revision because for Whitehead, “creativity … reigns supreme”.18 In the process imaginative schema, God’s “aim for [each actual event] is depth of satisfaction as an intermediate step towards the fulfilment of his own being”.19 Thus “creative process” is metaphysically more ultimate than God, and creation is no longer an utterly free gift, for God needs the world for divine fulfilment. Burrell then summarizes the consequences of other process revisions for Incarnation, Trinity, immortality, and resurrection. When Whitehead’s system is accepted as the norm, religious doctrines are not merely illuminated or even revised but replaced. 4. What are the implications of process thought for theological method? Here Burrell draws the parallel between process theology and nineteenth-century liberalism. In theology’s dialectic between providing a “faithful rendering Approach to God: A Neo-Thomist Perspective (Winston Salem, N C: Wake Forest University, 1979), see especially 89–93. 15  �������������������������������������������������������� Burrell, “Does Process Theology Rest on a Mistake?” 128. 16  ����������� Ibid., 129. 17  ����������� Ibid., 130. 18  ����������� Ibid., 131. 19  �������������������������������������� Ibid, quoting Alfred N orth Whitehead, Process and Reality (N ew Y ork: Humanities, 1929), 161.

God in Postliberal Perspective

130

of one’s tradition” and finding a “conceptualization adequate to one’s time”, process and liberal theology gave the privilege to making conceptual sense.20 But what if the conceptuality chosen as the means to communicate with one’s contemporaries (in this case, a philosophical system that fails to interest many professional philosophers) turn out to isolate theology from the wider public and the church? Sixth, returning to Burrell’s insights, given our previous attention to issues of realism and non-realism in the concept of God, how does his own philosophic theology address the question whether it is rational to believe in God? In an essay entitled, “Religious Belief and Rationality”, he analyzes brief passages from the works of Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and Kant that address the concept of and belief in God. Then he constructs his own proposal: 1. The activities ingredient to rational inquiry can be shown to presuppose an operative belief in some overarching unity; 2. The practices of religious faith require a living connection with divine reality at work in us and in the world; 3. While it is reasonable to begin from the practices mentioned (rational inquiry or religious belief) and to trace what each presupposes, one can try to identify as one reality what both presuppose, and so construct a path from the practice of rational inquiry, through its presupposition and that of religious belief, to the practices of faith. It is unlikely, certainly, that anyone would actually follow such a path to its goal, but its very presence lends some plausibility to thinking of the endeavor called “proving God’s existence” as foundational to religious belief.21 This proposal takes the form of a transcendental argument for the rationality of religious faith, not a “proof” that belief in God can be triggered by the conclusion of an argument, or that we can supply physical evidence from nature or scientific inquiry that God exists. The term “foundational” in the proposal is used in a highly qualified sense. N either rational inquiry nor religious practices provide foundations of logical or empirical certainty that God exists. Rather Burrell uses it here in a different sense: The metaphor [of foundations] remains attractive … so long as we feel compelled to ask for the grounds on which an assertion is based. It is misleading … in that a foundation must be laid down first, as the initial step in constructing a building. S o one easily presumes that God must first be shown to exist before we can 20

 ������������������������������������������������������������� Burrell, “Does Process Theology Rest on a Mistake?” 125, 133.  ������������������������������������������������������������������� Burrell, “Religious Belief and Rationality”, in C. F. Delaney, ed. Rationality and Religious Belief (N otre Dame, IN and London: University of N otre Dame Press, 1979), 84–115. 21

Three Exemplars of a Postliberal Doctrine of God

131

legitimately engage in those practices associated with belief in God. In fact, however, the situation is quite the reverse. It is those who participate in such practices who come to appreciate how intimately these practices are intertwined with a conviction of the reality of God.22

Thus arguments to probe for the existence of God, like those of Anselm or Aquinas, are instructive as forms of inquiry into the presuppositions of faith, just as philosophy of science is instructive when it lays bare the presuppositions of scientific inquiry. They are critical inquiries into the concept of “God” and they illumine the situations in life where faith becomes a possibility, but they are not universal proofs intended to persuade sceptics of the rational inevitability of belief in God. When taken as such, they can be shown to fail on logical grounds, or that the god they demonstrate is just another force within the world. When taken as forms of inquiry, they offer retrospective justification for belief in God rather than prospective justification. Burrell distinguishes these modes of inquiry: PROS PECTIVE

RETROS

PECTIVE

probabilities of success: what have I gained? learned? become? a legitimate risk? cost benefit analysis ongoing investment counsel arguments in favor of entertaining a arguments confirming/disconfirming a hypothesis hypothesis23.

23

The retrospective interpretation of the proofs is a challenge to the sceptic in the sense that one needs some engagement with the life and practices of religious communities to discover the kinds of situations in life, questions, or persons that would bring one to consider belief in God. It is a challenge to the believer in that faith, no matter how deeply felt or habitual, is tested or “proved” by life in the world. Thus the “proofs” can be taken as a way of testing in thought faith’s understanding of God and God’s relation to all things. Persons respond to the “proofs” differently depending on whether they are asking about God prospectively or retrospectively. When they are re-contextualized in the writings of those who believed in God (Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Kant), they can aid the quest for grounding faith rather than establishing independently of faith that God exists. Seventh, what does it mean to say that God (the transcendent Creator) acts in the world? This question has been part of the contemporary problematic of Godtalk since 1961 when Langdon Gilkey (1919–2004) raised serious questions about

22

 �������������� Ibid., 99–100.   Ibid., 108.

23

God in Postliberal Perspective

132

whether the biblical theology movement had a coherent concept of divine action.24 The question is critically important for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam since all ascribe their origins and preservation to God’s special and providential activity. Burrell’s philosophic theology is able to approach this question with insights drawn from his careful analysis of the grammar of God-talk in three traditions. He begins with the scriptural narratives which portray God in two ways: “(1) [as] the real author of all that happens, be it good or evil, and to be so despite the appearance of genuine human agency.” In other cases God is placed “within the narrative, carrying out specific actions, either (2.1) directly or (2.2) through human actors” (Freedom 67). The danger is to construe divine agency as if God intervenes in the cause/effect ordering of the macro-world from a metaphysical position outside or above the cosmos. Following Aquinas, Burrell takes creating as his primary model of divine action, including God’s providential conservation as a creative activity: “all of God’s activity partakes of creating: all that God can do is to create; God does not ‘fiddle’ or ‘micro-manage’”.25 What God does in creating/ conserving the world is to give esse, to-be, existing, to creatures.26 Since God engages in creatio ex nihilo, creatures owe their total existence and preservation in the world to God’s providential-creative activity. N ot only does God cause each creature to be throughout the moments of its life, but “God also acts in its acting by causing it to be the cause that it is”.27 Here Burrell’s attention to the analogical resources of language becomes crucial. There is no univocal meaning of acting that is the same for the Creator and creature. Aquinas states that in the case of God’s activity, “creating is not a change”.28 “God’s activity is indeed required to effect changes in the world of creatures, but that activity need not – indeed, must not – be construed as change … Only God’s activity can enter into the actions of creatures in such a way as to make them actions. N o creature’s activity can do that” (Freedom 69). Here we are returned to the apophatic or “formal feature” qualification of all our God-talk. If we insist on imagining God as an agent just like us, then neither creatio ex nihilo nor God’s activity in the actions of creatures will make sense. For God the Creator is not merely one being, agent, or person among others in the world (for in trinitarian doctrine, “the use of ‘persons’ … is expressly and notoriously analogous, as are the names ‘Father’ and ‘Son’”) (Freedom 70). In the end, “one must acknowledge that one cannot conceive how God acts if one is obliged to consider all such acting as partaking in the paradigmatic bestowing of esse which is creation. But those are the rules of the game …” (ibid.). And this is 24

 �������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Langdon B. Gilkey, “Cosmology, Ontology, and the Travail of Biblical Language”, Chap. 3 in Owen C. Thomas, (ed.), God’s Activity in the World: The Contemporary Problem, American Academy of Religion Studies in Religion N o. 31 (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983). 25  ��������� Burrell, Freedom, 68 with reference to ST 1.104.1. 26  ������������������������� Ibid., with reference to ST 1.45.5. 27  ����������������������������� Ibid., 69, with reference to ST 1.105.5. 28  ������������������������� Ibid., with reference to ST 1.45.2.2.

Three Exemplars of a Postliberal Doctrine of God

133

because as human we cannot “conceive directly the creator/creature relation” and thus the best we can do is to “construct a set of rules for the proper use of language here …” (ibid.). That is the purpose of reflection on metaphysics, the practice of analogical speech, and attending to the doctrines of religious communities. One such rule Burrell proposes is that “divine activity will ever be ‘nonviolent,’ never be an ‘intervention,’ since the ‘universal cause of all being’ already acts in every agent”.29 Once again, the apophatic way qualifies ordinary religious speech and any sense of easy answers we might derive from the convictions of faith. Issues for Further Conversation with Burrell In his attention to the philosophical challenges to faith in God as he draws upon the reflective wisdom of three traditions, Burrell is an outstanding exemplar of postliberal reflection on the meaning and truth of God-talk. The questions below are intended to illumine (a) whether this brief summary of Burrell is faithful to the spirit of his project, and (b) how he might help us reflect on the debate over God’s reality or non-reality. 1. A hermeneutical issue: what difference does it make to a reception of medieval thinkers for philosophic theology today that, according to our best astrophysicists, biologists, and philosophers of nature, we live in an evolving cosmos and understand both cosmic systems and biological species as products of evolution? For example, what are the implications of scientific-evolutionary world views for basic ontological categories like substance that are part and parcel of Aquinas’ appropriation of Aristotle, and B urrell’s appropriation of them?30 2. A metaphysical issue: Burrell’s concept of God often seems to be the exception to some of his basic metaphysical categories, not their prime instantiation. With regard to God’s formal features (simpleness, perfection, limitlessness, unchangeableness, oneness), creatures in the world are composite, imperfect, limited, changeable, and plural. In sharp contrast, Whitehead asserted, “God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse. He is their chief exemplification.”31 Thus Whitehead argues for the following schema of God and the world’s interrelations:

 ������������������������������� Ibid., 70–71 with reference to ST 1.45.1.  ��������������������������������������������������������������� For example, see Burrell, “Substance: A Performatory Account”, Philosophical Studies (Maynooth) 21 (1973). 31  ������������������������ Alfred N orth Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, (eds), Corrected Edition (N ew Y ork: Macmillan; London: Collier Macmillan, 1978), 343. 29 30

God in Postliberal Perspective

134

It is as true to say that … … God is permanent and the World fluent, as that the World is permanent and God is fluent. … God is one and the World is many, as that the World is one and God many. … in comparison with the World, God is actual eminently, as that, in comparison with God, the World is actual eminently. … the World is immanent in God, as that God is immanent in the World. … God transcends the World, as that the World transcends God. … God creates the World, as that the World creates God.32

And he qualified such schemas of speculative philosophy as made up of “verbal expressions which, when taken by themselves with the current meaning of their words, are ill-defined and ambiguous”.33 This issue distinguishes Burrell’s philosophic theology from process thought. For Burrell, metaphysical systems primarily function as explanatory schemas for the whole of the physical cosmos. The model of an existing entity is a particular real agent known via ordinary human perception. Metaphysical schemes should explain how all these agents make up a cosmos, and point toward what unifies them into a cosmic whole. The danger is when these schemes are expanded to include God as the source of cosmic unity, for divinity can become subsumed as just another being, agent, or person within the system. By contrast, for process thinkers, metaphysical systems cover all realities, both the physical cosmos and God. The model of the thing to be explained is the evolving cosmos itself as a totality that includes the reality of God. Burrell’s approach begins from particular things embedded in human practices and works its way toward unity. The process way begins from the cosmos as a total system unveiled to us by modern science and works its way back to particular beings that instantiate metaphysical properties (thus nothing can be an exception to the system). How to choose between these two ways in philosophic theology? For Burrell, one way is by asking, which one better coheres with forms of life that transform humans to become conscious of ourselves and all other beings as creatures of God? Which way leads into metaphysical illusions about who and what we are that have negative consequences for communities of faith? Another way for him is by asking, which one preserves and illumines the ancient Christian distinction between Creator 32

 ����������� Ibid., 348.  ������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Idem, “In Defense of Speculative Philosophy”, Appendix in Donald W. Sherburne, (ed.) A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality (Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 1966). See 200–201. 33

Three Exemplars of a Postliberal Doctrine of God

135

and creatures, God and the world, that makes possible the world as pure gift, as contingent rather than necessary for God’s self-fulfilment, and that has conceptual space for both divine and human freedom and action without intervention or tyranny? 3. Triads and Trinity: why would God reveal God’s self and will to three peoples (Jews, Christians, and Muslims) in ways that seem to codify contradictions and conflicts between their doctrines of God? Burrell seems to ascribe these contradictions and conflicts to polemics between these peoples, not to God’s self-revelation, but the conflicts became inscribed in the scriptures of Christians and Muslims (Freedom 179). Thus biblical scholars debate whether the book of Hebrews in the N ew Testament is supersessionist vis-à-vis ancient Judaism, and Burrell acknowledges those polemic passages in the Qur’an regarding the Trinity and Christology (Freedom 178–183). His resolution is to draw attention to a triadic pattern he finds in all three traditions’ overlapping doctrines of creation: “a source (identified with God), the word revealing that source as the One from whom all-that-is freely emanates, and the community in which that revelatory word is received and through which it is articulated, elucidated, and celebrated” (Freedom 161). In other words, beneath the polemical words of scriptures, a deeper unity shines forth with regard to the created, natural world as the work of the one God who has spoken and created three communities to acknowledge God’s work. Of course, the triadic pattern will appeal to Christians as a way of thinking about revelation in all three traditions. What do contemporary Jews and Muslims make of it? 4. Should tradition absorb the other? At times in working out his comparative philosophical theology, Burrell writes as if it were Aquinas who both learned from and overcame the limitations and inconsistencies of Islamic and Jewish thinkers (Knowing 35, 83). This suggests something like a fulfilment model of inter-religious relations where one tradition fulfils the many: God revealed God’s self to three peoples, but it has been Christian thinkers like Aquinas who have articulated this revelation in the most coherent, adequate way.34 At other times, Burrell distances himself from a Christian imperial or neo-colonial approach to the other two Abrahamic faiths: … ‘free creation’ is a matter of revelation rather than a philosophical inference and … each tradition’s understanding of it will be modeled on the pattern of revelation proper to it. Here is where our insistence on the fact that inquiries reflect a tradition of faith allows us to learn from each

34  ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� The phrase “fulfilment model” comes from Paul F. Knitter’s typology of Christian theological approaches to religious pluralism in his Introducing Theologies of Religions (Maryknoll, NY : Orbis, 2002), 63–106.

God in Postliberal Perspective

136

without attempting to colonize others in the name of a “unique” Christianity (Faith 212).

T his issue also draws attention to a related one: how would B urrell relate his comparative theology of creation to the eastern traditions that historically originated and flourished outside the scope of special revelation of Jews, Christians, and Muslims? He does make some preliminary remarks regarding Hindu scriptures and the sage Shankara.35 How an interfaith perspective on creation and the transcendent Creator would relate to Buddhism and other eastern traditions, he leaves to others more knowledgeable in those sources to work out. 5. Any place for eschatological novelty? Burrell’s project is consistently protological: God’s activity is always divine creation of creatures for existence. Redemption is understood as new creation. But eschatology is marginal in his account. What difference does the apocalyptic-eschatological framework of the N ew Testament writings make for imagining God and God’s activity today? 6. Trinity and Simplicity: How can a simple God, who is “not incompleteness but undivided wholeness” also be the Trinity of divine Persons? (Aquinas 16). Here Burrell might respond that simpleness is a formal feature of divinity, not a description, and points to the way of negation. Trinitarian language is the cataphatic speech of the Christian community at worship, the affirmative testimony of this community to God’s being in Christ by the Spirit for the renewal of the world. The reminder of divine simplicity warns this community neither to reduce the Persons of the Trinity to three parts of God (for divinity is not composed of parts), nor speak as if there were three gods. Thus it can serve as a guard of the divine unity and Trinity against misunderstandings. 7. Which Creator and which creature on the Cross? When Burrell takes up christology under the topic of “A Creator Free Enough to Participate in the Created”, he refers to the Creed of Chalcedon as one of his models (“two natures‑creator and created‑in one person, yet without confusing the modes of agency”), then writes, “The actor, to be sure, is the person of the Word.... Y et inasmuch as that person is also human in Jesus, that very person – the Word of God – can suffer” (Freedom 61). An endnote sends the reader to an article by Dom Sebastian Moore on “God Suffered”. It begins with this statement of profound paradox for all whose Christology is bound by Chalcedon: Was God humanly conscious on the cross? Did it hurt God when they drove in the nails? D id God have the taste of death in him? If we share the faith of the Church, expressed in the great conciliar definitions and  ��������� Burrell, Faith, xx, 120, 134–5, 139, 205, 222, 233.

35

Three Exemplars of a Postliberal Doctrine of God

137

systematized in the so‑called communication of idioms, the answer to all these questions is yes. N ot “yes, but” but yes. Can the Godhead be touched by suffering? Can there be suffering in God? The answer to these questions is no. N ot “no, but” but no. This “yes” and this “no” contain together a huge problem … It is the problem of the consciousness of Christ, which urges in its most acute form the union and distinction of the two natures.36

The response Moore offers is to affirm that the Person of Jesus Christ had no purely human ego as its centre but was centred in the Second Person of the Trinity. Y et, “That God suffered for us is a mystery of which we can have little understanding.”37 Here we may wonder if it is truly possible to wed Aquinas’ philosophical theology as recovered by Burrell (with resources from Wittgenstein, ordinary language analysis, and a richer history of Islamic‑Jewish‑Christian influences in the Middle Ages), with the Pauline proclamation of a “crucified messiah”? As Putnam says in regard to the problem of reference in philosophy of language, “genuine paradoxes are never unimportant; they always show something is wrong with the way we have been thinking.”38 Fundamental theological convictions are at stake here: logically do we root our concept of God in the doctrine of creation, and then wed that concept to our Christology, or does the N ew Testament’s testimony to Christ have logical priority such that we understand creation under the cross of the crucified and risen One? Burrell’s creation theology provides the metaphysical and anthropological categories in which he works out his Christology, thus restoring the dialectic of creation and redemption. Here both Protestant theologies rooted in Luther’s theology of the cross and process theology, by very different routes, suggest very different ways to conceive God that take account of other than protological elements and other starting points in the tradition. A God both Vulnerable and Transcendent: William C. Placher William Carl Placher (1948–2008) was LaFollette Distinguished Professor in Humanities and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana (USA). He chaired the Advisory Committee of the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion. A graduate of Y ale University (MPhil and PhD), he was a student of Hans Frei, and

36  ������������������������������������� Dom Sebastian Moore, “God Suffered”, Downside Review 77/24 (Spring 1959):122. 37  ����������� Ibid., 138. 38  �������� Putnam, Reason, Truth and History, 35–6.

God in Postliberal Perspective

138

co-edited Frei’s writings published posthumously.39 His service to both church and society were marked by his activities in the American Academy of Religion and the Presbyterian Church (USA). Recognized for excellence in teaching by the American Academy of Religion in 2002, he published many books and articles for both beginners and scholars in theology. In this section, I will focus on three of his works that exemplify a postliberal spirit, especially in relation to the doctrine of God.40 In Unapologetic Theology, Placher offers his theological method in conversation with a pluralistic understanding of the academy, society, and religion. Ranging over topics from foundationalism, science, anthropology, the liberal political tradition, and relativism to religious dialogue, he constructs a cumulative argument: the apologetic theologies associated with the liberal tradition that sought to build an enclave for faith within the western world of enlightened modernity assumed that the intellectual and cultural world was well founded. However, many of the intellectual foundations and common assumptions of modernity have come under critical scrutiny in the late twentieth century by both secular and religious scholars. The well-founded certainties of the modern mentality have been replaced with a much more plural intellectual world. These intellectual and cultural shifts have created an opportunity for theology to recover its voice without either pretension or apologetic anxiety. The recovery of a Christian voice among others on a somewhat more level playing field means that theology could, once again, make a vital contribution to the life of higher education, church, and society. But it will require theologians, philosophers of religion, ministers and others to unlearn the accommodating mentality of Protestant liberalism. One of the major challenges Placher faces in this work is to show what “authentic” or “real pluralism” is, and how it is socially enacted without descending into cacophony or chaos.41 What is “genuinely pluralistic conversation”, or a “tolerant pluralism”? (102, 106) His overarching goal is “pluralism – the most open conversation possible” and he judges various proposals by the “ideal of  ������ Frei, Types of Christian Theology, (ed.) George Hunsinger and William C. Placher; idem, Theology and Narrative: Selected Essays, (ed.) George Hunsinger and William C. Placher. 40  �������������������� William C. Placher, Unapologetic Theology: A Christian Voice in a Pluralistic Conversation (Louisville, KY : Westminster John Knox Press, 1989); idem, Narratives of a Vulnerable God: Christ, Theology, and Scripture (Louisville, KY : Westminster John Knox Press, 1994); idem, The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking about God Went Wrong (Louisville, KY : Westminster John Knox Press, 1996). William Placher died 30 N ovember 2008. He is very deeply missed. Some years ago I had the privilege of discussing this book with him. He commented on a draft of it in spring 2008. My issues for further conversation with him now must await “the communion of the saints … and the life everlasting”. In this hope, I have left this section in the present tense. 41  ��������� Placher, Unapologetic Theology, 67, 101. Hereafter citations to this text appear in parentheses following quotations or summaries. 39

Three Exemplars of a Postliberal Doctrine of God

139

pluralistic conversation” (115, 154). Three areas where Placher finds theology challenged to enter into such conversation are the dialogue between religion and science, the dialogue of the world’s religions, and the conversation between what he terms “revisionist” and postliberal theologies. Two extreme yet related positions that threaten the very possibility of “open conversation” are either: (a) a defence of the Enlightenment’s universalism, that what we need is “universally acceptable common ground for rational conversation”, or (b) the kind of relativism that denies such ground is available and therefore conversation is impossible (12). The problem with the search for common ground is that intellectuals within some particular culture, society, or religion must define what those grounds are before other cultures, societies and religions can join the conversation. In the past, those who defined common ground were usually western scholars committed to modern philosophy, science, and the liberal political tradition. The universal conversation often resulted in forms of cultural hegemony where western values and ideals became portrayed as essentially human for all peoples. The price of admission to so-called common ground was that much cultural and religious particularity had to be checked at the door. The other unintended side effect of this notion of universalism was that its denial in extreme relativism made mutual conversation between diverse peoples impossible. Placher challenges himself to find a middle way between universalism and relativism so defined. The book proceeds by a series of radical critiques: of foundationalism as enlightened modernity’s “ideal of knowledge” (Chapter 2); of how the history and philosophy of science have undermined the notion that scientific rationality is “unique” and exhaustively explains all of reality we need to know about (Chapter 3); of anthropological approaches in philosophy of religion that consider only three accounts of religious beliefs: atheism, natural theology, or fideism (Chapter 4); of Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls’ philosophical defences for the liberal political tradition of the Enlightenment (Chapter 5); of Michel Foucault and Richard Rorty’s turns away from modern objectivity toward forms of relativism and nihilism (Chapter 6). His own constructive position maintains: “The lack of any universal criteria of rationality … need not imply that there is no way to criticize the beliefs and practices of a particular tradition, if traditions contain within themselves reasons for questioning their own beliefs and practices and, in the natural course of things, encounter challenges from other traditions” (74). He couples his ideal of “authentic pluralism” with the practice of bricolage: “For good bricoleurs, the bits and pieces inherited from their own tradition often suffice for the task of raising questions about that tradition and moving on to a new way of looking at the world” (67). Against extreme relativism, he makes “modest claims … for ‘progress’ in conversation” (74). The constructive heart of the book offers the reader no general theory of conversation between diverse traditions but a middle ground. That ground is “unsystematic, ad hoc, a work of bricolage”, and not easily summarized because it is where “we live most of our lives” (105). Each time we encounter other persons, we can discover the common beliefs we do share that make further conversation

140

God in Postliberal Perspective

possible without having to prove that those beliefs are universal or that all rational, sane persons should hold them. Another aspect of this middle ground is the traditions (moral, scientific, political and religious) that make shared conversation and argument possible. Each of us inherits various traditions and the responses we make to questions and arguments we find persuasive are more related to these traditions than we imagine. This need not enslave us to the past, for “A tradition is itself a pluralistic affair, and some values or practices within a tradition often raise questions about other values or practices” (108). As we encounter each other’s traditions in conversation, opportunities arise to question particular aspects of our own. But our very questions will draw on someone’s beliefs or tradition; an absolute scepticism about all beliefs and traditions spell the end of conversation and argument. Drawing on the works of Alasdair MacIntyre (1929–) and HansGeorg Gadamer (1900–2002), Placher revitalizes concepts like “argument from within tradition”, story (both ethical and scientific theories have storied, historical backgrounds), authority, reading a text with prejudgements (“assumptions, biases, particular questions”), horizons and particularity of meaning in texts, and modest notions of progress in conversation (with texts, with other persons) (108–112). The middle ground refuses both the quest for “an Archimedean point, a universal standard of rationality” and the notion that the variety of languages, cultures, and truth-claims segregate us from each other. To Habermas’ critique that Gadamer gives too much authority to tradition, Placher replies, “We should be suspicious of authority, but we should also be suspicious of the systematic suspicion of authority” (115). Just as theology can no longer reign as “queen of the sciences”, “E nlightenment modernity also can no longer reign as queen of the sciences and also must take its place as one voice among others … We have to find ways to avoid the stultifying force of tradition without refusing to listen to the voices of tradition altogether” (115). But why enter into the kind of conversation Placher seeks? He offers specific reasons why Christians should seek such dialogue with others grounded in the conviction all are made in God’s image which shows itself in human rationality. This is not just a Christian claim: “Those who admit they argue out of a tradition … can nevertheless believe in the truth of their claims: truth not just for them but for everyone. They too can believe that everyone really should join the conversation” (117). In a chapter devoted to “truth”, Placher tries to explain how truth-claims can be universal, but arguments for the justification of such claims are always contextdependent. When dealing with issues of justification, he sounds moderately relativistic, and operates with standards of rationality and verification that stand within his traditions. But when dealing with issues of truth, he sounds a note of metaphysical-alethic realism: “I also believe that the God in whom Christians believe exists and loves regardless of whether any human tradition acknowledges that God” (122). Part of the difficulty is that his justification of the Christian truth (true for all, not just Christians) depends upon a certain way of reading the Bible that is subject to debate, even among Christians. If one is convinced by the way Placher reads Scripture, then his presentation of Christian truth-claims at

Three Exemplars of a Postliberal Doctrine of God

141

least makes sense, or perhaps is true. But if one reads the Bible with a different hermeneutical lens, a different presentation of truth-claims may be needed that require different arguments for justification. Central to Placher’s account of Christian truth is the notion of patterns that emerge in perception, in reading texts, and looking back over one’s life: Christian theology … makes a claim about an emerging pattern. Christians will admit that the current evidence is ambiguous. They see a pattern in their own lives and the world around them, but they can understand that others do not. They believe, however, that at some future time this now ambiguous pattern will become clear (126).

Placher locates this emergent pattern, first, in Jesus’ life-story as told in the Bible that can be traced in other biblical stories (as in the ancient practice of typology, finding types of the Christ-figure in other biblical characters), in history, and in life. So a pattern emerges as we re-read Scripture, history, and life in light of Jesus’ story. Second, our life-stories can become refigured by the biblical narrative world centred on Christ. We become contemporary with the characters in the story caught up in the biblical retelling of history as a story of salvation centred on Jesus. The biblical stories and our life-stories become patterned after Christ’s story found in the N ew Testament. Our lives come under the “power” of a narrative “epic” in which “the crucial battle has already been fought” in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection (128). Placher qualifies this justification of Christian truth claims in two ways. On the one hand, “One does not ‘prove’ such a way of looking at the world, if ‘proof’ means a series of syllogisms from universally accepted premises. Y et Christians want to claim that these really are the patterns of reality” (128). On the other hand, his justification does not depend on every detail of the gospel and other biblical narratives being historically accurate. More importantly, we should ask ourselves, what kind of world do the biblical narratives depict for us to indwell, and who is the God who figures as the central character in that world? Here I think Placher links up issues of the meaningfulness of biblical stories with truth-claims: for those who come under the power of the biblical epic about Jesus’ faithfulness to God, this storied world and God become the most important truths about reality, truths worthy of being communicated to others as true for them as well. At the same time, “what we believe is all tied up with a series of stories, and the way in which those stories are true is a more complicated question. After all, we can use many different stories to make sense of our lives and use them in different ways” (130). In this account of truth, much depends on the “special hermeneutics” one brings to the biblical texts. If one comes with a hermeneutics derived primarily from historical-critical ways of reading the Bible in a quest for the historical Jesus, one may miss out on the very dimensions that Placher (following Frei) highlights as crucial. If one absorbs the biblical stories within some other body of literature or

142

God in Postliberal Perspective

sacred writings as figures or types of its world, one will miss out. This is a fragile truth-claim amid the conflict of interpretations over the Bible. I noted earlier a commitment to metaphysical-alethic realism in Placher’s presentation of truth. Belief in God and divine activity are woven into the pattern in the biblical narratives. … to the extent that I take the pattern of these stories to be the pattern for my life and of the world, I am committed to believing that the God they describe is not the projection or useful construct of the people in the story. The logic of the stories is that God’s action comes first and generates human responses. If I buy into the stories, then I have to buy into that logic (134).

This reminds one of an Anselmian way of arguing: if I understand that “God” means “that than which no greater can be conceived”, I will see why God necessarily exists. If I understand the biblical stories in a certain way (a claim about a pattern/s of meaning), then I will also see why their logic must be true (the primacy of God and divine activity). In the final two chapters of Unapologetic Theology, he returns to three forms of dialogue. Christians should enter into a more truly pluralistic conversation with the natural sciences with the conviction that “no one [dialogue partner is] necessarily less rational than another” (141). He lays out three rules for interreligious dialogue (147). He concludes with a defence of the task of postliberal theology as “simply to describe” and “to preserve the Christian vision free of distortion” (154). Taking this as a summary of Placher’s method, how does he describe and preserve the doctrine of God? In Narratives of a Vulnerable God, he presents a theology of the cross with a more immanent understanding of God than some other presentations in the Christian tradition. This God who is love exists eternally in mutual relations of Persons within the triune life, and with creatures in the world. In Domestication of Transcendence, the urgency of defending God’s transcendence from too much immanence in modern thinking returns. How does Placher hold together in one doctrine the portrayal of God as vulnerable in his Narratives book with the radically transcendent God of the other? From the outset of Narratives, he presents the reader with two conflicting images of God identified with the Bible. The first is the God of power: “God is all-powerful, omnipotent. God is in charge of everything. God is like a king, and one who rules very much without parliament as an absolute monarch. God is like a father, and a patriarchal, domineering father at that. God is ‘the Lord’.” The second is the God who is love: “Love involves a willingness to put oneself at risk, and God is in fact vulnerable in love, vulnerable even to great suffering.”42 However, far too many have identified with this first image of God and ended up worshipping power and appropriating the story of Jesus on false terms. T here is a 42  ��������� Placher, Narratives of a Vulnerable God, xiii for both quotations. Hereafter citations to this text appear in parentheses following quotations or summaries.

Three Exemplars of a Postliberal Doctrine of God

143

pervasive sense of “fall” in this book, that “something has surely gone desperately wrong” in all our thinking about power and love in relation to God. To break this fall, Placher returns to Scripture: “what sort of God one would believe in if one took the biblical narratives, especially the Gospel stories about Jesus, as the best clue to who God is” (xv). His initial answer is that “God is the one who loves in freedom, and in that free love God is vulnerable, willing to risk suffering” (xv). In light of this basic conception of God, he then reframes the doctrine of divine eternity as “the fullness of life experienced in all its richness, and therefore not closed off from the changing vulnerabilities of love” (xvi). This leads into his exposition of the doctrine of the Trinity in which “the mutuality and equality of love” are modelled, not the “hierarchy of power” (xvi). In a chapter entitled “Gospels’ Ends: The Vulnerability of Biblical N arratives”, he responds to the critique that he treats the Bible as a meta-narrative that overwhelms other perspectives that diverge from the biblical script. This is a much more nuanced account of the Bible than the one offered in Unapologetic Theology, and it brings Placher into conversation with biblical and literary critics. In the following chapter, he responds to three further critical perspectives from contemporary forms of “revisionist” theology: “Does a theology with a male savior inevitably contribute to the oppression of women? Does a theology with a suffering savior valorize suffering in a way that only makes it more likely to continue? Is a theology that identifies one human figure as the self-revelation of God, the unique savior, somehow intrinsically unfair to and oppressive of adherents of other religious traditions?” (xvi). The final two chapters offer a vision of the church and of the vocation of theology in society. In the following paragraphs I focus on Placher’s doctrine of God in Narratives. In the first chapter, he recounts how the God of love revealed in Christ became identified in the early church with the God of invulnerable power. In the encounter of the God of the Bible and Christian gospel with Hellenic culture and philosophy, a Hellenization of the image of God occurred. For example, The Council of Chalcedon dismissed the view that the divine nature could be passible as ‘vain babblings’ and condemned those who held it. The two natures, human and divine, were so united in Christ’s one person that one could say, in a manner of speaking, that the divine nature ‘suffered’ when Christ died on the cross – but only in a manner of speaking, for it is really power and impassibility that characterize the divine nature (5).

When divine impassibility is made central to the doctrine of God, one result is that, “Christology can only take the form of a series of radical paradoxes, because a God so described has little in common with the crucified Jesus” (6). Another is that we should not be surprised that the quest for power as domination and achievement over others stands at the heart of many societies with a Christian heritage. The God of power has gone to seed in the will to power over others.

God in Postliberal Perspective

144

The corrective to the Hellenization of the doctrine of God and Christology is a recovery of the different portrayal of God found in biblical narratives. A case study of the Apocalypse is presented that shows how the visionary author subverted images of imperial power to identify God with the symbol of a “Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered” (Revelation 5:6 N RSV). In a case study of Mark’s Gospel, Placher shows how the evangelist subverts the images of Christ as a “divine man” and wonder worker to portray Jesus as the crucified messiah. Following Frei, Placher revises the Christology of power by the power of the Jesus story: “For Christology … the doctrine is not the meaning of the story but rather the story is the meaning of the doctrine.”43 When biblical stories inform Christology, both Christian understanding of what it means to be human and divine are transformed: … in this story God is most God, for in coming vulnerably into creation God is not giving up the characteristics of divinity but most fully manifesting them. God is not essentially impassible and omnipotent, so that divine self-revelation in the vulnerable Jesus would be utterly paradoxical, but God is most fundamentally of all, in Karl Barth’s phrase, the one who loves in freedom, the one whose essence these stories reveal (15–16).

This passage and others like it highlight the plurality among postliberal doctrines of God when one recalls Burrell’s very careful distinction between formal features of divinity (like impassibility) and divine attributes (like love). For Aquinas and Burrell, as creatures we cannot know what the essence of God is beyond the very formal assertion that God’s essence is to-be. For Barth and Placher, the essence of what it means to be God is primarily revealed in Christ as witnessed to by Scripture, and Placher reads the gospel stories to disclose a radically vulnerable God of suffering love. In Burrell’s emphasis on the apophatic way and the analogical character of all our God-talk, what love means for the Creator God cannot be univocal with what love means for the vulnerable human creature. Therefore when Placher moves from phenomenological statements about the vulnerability required in authentic (human) love to ascribing such vulnerability to God, he mixes two levels of discourse that Burrell distinguishes (xiii, 16). Placher appeals to the cataphatic language of the N ew Testament about God in Christ. And he appeals to two authorities he shares with Burrell to mix these two levels of discourse: N ew Testament narratives and the doctrine of the Incarnation which speak of the human being Jesus in the most exalted, divine terms of his religious world. One difference here is that Burrell begins with the doctrine of creation as key for distinguishing God from the world on Jewish-Christian-Islamic terms. He then frames his understanding of redemption in terms of new creation, whereas Placher begins with the gospel narratives as tales of redemption for a creation lost in sinfulness and fallen into error about our most fundamental concepts: “human”,  ������������������������������������������� Ibid., 15, with reference to Hans W. Frei, Types of Christian Theology, 126.

43

Three Exemplars of a Postliberal Doctrine of God

145

“divine”, “power”, “love”, “freedom”, etc. So Placher begins with the stories and doctrine of Christ the Redeemer as key for subverting the very terms we use to speak of God in relation to creation: “Christian talk about God ought to start with love, not power, and introduce the language of power only in the context of love and only in a way that keeps challenging and subverting it by way of reminder of how easily it might be misunderstood” (17). This issue of the proper starting point is not solved by an appeal to Scripture alone, for one can begin reading the Bible at either Genesis or at Mark and find warrants for both Burrell and Placher’s points of departure. This postliberal internal difference can help to explain why Placher can refer positively to Whitehead’s definition of God as “the fellow-sufferer who understands”, whereas Burrell strongly rejects process metaphysics and its theology.44 While claiming not to valorize suffering and vulnerability per se, Placher asserts, “God suffers because God is vulnerable, and God is vulnerable because God loves – and it is love, not suffering or even vulnerability, that is finally the point. God can help because God acts out of love, and love risks suffering” (18). In this set of assertions, love functions as a form of the analogy of relation (analogia relationis): in the language of Scripture and human sociality, relations of love become models for God’s relation to creatures. When Placher transfers the suffering of human loving (as modelled in Jesus and our ordinary experiences) to the vulnerability of God, Burrell’s philosophic theology would question whether love means the same thing for the Creator who sustains the cosmos in existence as it does for the creatures who are sustained. Suppose for Burrell there is a formal feature (not attribute) of divinity called invulnerability. It serves to remind us that God loves without being utterly overcome or diminished by the perils of love. Indeed, God raised the crucified Jesus from the dead and promises resurrection for the vulnerable creation. In this sense, Burrell’s doctrine of God more closely resembles that of Joan N ortham whom Placher cites as an objector to his own: “… if she found herself at the bottom of a pit with a broken arm, ‘what I want and urgently need is a Rescuer with a very bright light and a long ladder, full of strength, joy and assurance who can get me out of the pit, not a god who sits in the darkness suffering with me.’”45 There is no easy way to resolve the differences between Placher and Burrell over these points for they reflect the very pluralism within the traditions of theology itself. Rather they point to the capacity of postliberal theologians to generate understandings of God that are creative, diverse, and address some of the contemporary concerns in church and society about the human condition in relation to God. In a dense chapter on “The Eternal God”, Placher seeks to portray the God revealed in the Johannine Christ as neither: (a) ensconced in a timeless eternity,  ����������������������������������������������������� Ibid., 18, with reference to Alfred N orth Whitehead, Process and Reality, 351.  ��������������������������������������������������������������������������� Ibid., 18, with reference to Joan N ortham, “The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory”, Expository Times 99 (1988): 302. 44

45

God in Postliberal Perspective

146

nor (b) merely everlasting, enduring within the same kind of sinful, anxious time that humans experience in the world. Rather, God’s eternity is a kind of Christic time or redeemed time modelled on Boethius’ (480–524 C.E.) concept of eternity as the “perfect possession all at once of limitless life” (28). Along the way Placher engages in a conceptual analysis of different concepts of time, and the phenomenology of time-consciousness in Augustine, Husserl, and Heidegger. His path of thinking moves from below (human time) to above (eternity as God’s time) through Christ (whose human life in time demonstrates a radically different temporality or eternity): “If thinking about eternity requires getting clear about time, then it has to look at time as humanly experienced, the starting point for what we mean by time” (33). But the phenomenology of human temporality shows that our time in the world is a being-toward-death. The moments of our lives, past, present, and anticipated future, do not cohere into meaningful wholes but are fleeting, disjointed, and ephemeral. N o wonder we imagine eternity as timelessness given the anxiety, regret, and guilt that accompany our brief lifetimes in the world. Juxtaposed to Heidegger’s account of temporality is Barth’s retelling of Jesus’ life as the revelation of God’s time for us, or eternity. In Jesus’ story as narrated in the Gospel of John we see a human life in which past, present, and future come together in a meaningful whole. The play of analepsis and prolepsis in the story world of the fourth gospel configure a mode of time in which Jesus’ past and future keep impinging on his present in the narrated action.46 Placher’s approach gives eternity a human face in the figure of Jesus thus liberating notions of the eternal from vagueness. But is there a place for cosmic time and the time of non-human life in his account of eternity? Further, if eternity is “a different kind of temporality”, then is the horizon of God’s eternal life a more ultimate form of time? (45). Is this form of time more ultimate than or co-equal with God? In light of these questions, Placher’s account of eternity sounds more anthropocentric than he may intend. Perhaps it is fair to say that he has avoided the negative consequences of a timeless, empty eternity but has yet to deal with the consequences for his doctrine of God of a temporal eternity, even if the new mode of temporality is rooted in Jesus’ redeemed experience of time. By way of comparison, Burrell has also developed a theory about God’s eternity which claims: “(I) God, to be God, must be eternal;” “(II) there is no eternity other than God’s eternity.”47 Like Placher, he refuses the notion that to be eternal God must be “‘atemporal’ or ‘timeless.’” Rather, here we are trying to speak of that One who “cannot be temporal yet must (ex hypothesi) be intimately

46

 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ Ibid., 41. Placher quotes these definitions: analepsis is “‘any evocation after the fact of an event that took place earlier than the point in the story where we are at any given moment.’” Prolepsis is “‘any narrative maneuver that consists of narrating or evoking in advance an event that will take place later.’” From Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, (trans.) Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, 1980), 40. 47  ������������������������������������ David B. Burrell, “God’s Eternity”, Faith and Philosophy 1 / 4 (October 1984): 389.

Three Exemplars of a Postliberal Doctrine of God

147

related to temporal things – as the source and origin of them all.”48 Like simplicity, eternity is a “formal feature of divinity”, not an attribute like love. God is neither temporal (for God has no beginning and no end) nor atemporal (utterly unrelated to temporal things). When we try to define this formal feature by concepts like God’s “atemporal duration”, we run up against the limits of our language as creatures of time.49 T hus B urrell suggests that “we need some new images for the relation of time to eternity” and one he proposes is a “thoroughgoing sacramental vision of daily practice” as modelled on the celebration of Passover. By ‘sacramental’ I mean that sense of the reality of ritual which brings God’s saving presence into the home – the family with the strangers in their midst – which celebrates the Passover seder conscious of their connection with a people commanded to recall that liberation to each passing year. The event recalled was a happening in history, but of such a sort that its ritual celebration renders its effects present to each generation. There is, then, an eternal dimension to such shaping acts of God which allows us, when duly celebrating them, not to reenact them but to render their inner reality as events present in our midst.50

A past event made present in a ritual that looks forward to future celebration in the sacred city of Jerusalem: three modes of time come together in this one event that is full of life and the promise of freedom. Rather than obliterating time, eternity qualifies and redeems it for a renewal of the relationship between the faithful God and the covenant people. Burrell admits that faith lives with “a vast unknowing about matters eternal”, a cautionary warning for my probing questions for Placher.51 This survey of Placher’s constructive doctrine of God concludes with his reflections on “The Triune God”. In an endnote to his chapter on eternity, he says, “I am beginning with the triune life of God rather than a doctrine of divine simplicity” (47, note 10). This marks one of his primary differences from Burrell whose philosophic theology begins with the divine unity attested by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and then relates that unity (a formal feature of divinity) to Christian trinitarian doctrine. Placher follows primary clues that he finds in N ew Testament narratives from christological confession to trinitarian doctrine, and then relates the vulnerable God disclosed there to other traditions and confessions about divinity. A theologian who appeals to trinitarian doctrine today must clarify for others which theory of the doctrine of the Trinity she has in mind. Placher expresses no preference for either the psychological analogy of the Trinity associated with 48

 ����� Ibid.  ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ Ibid., 394. The technical concept of eternity as “atemporal duration” was coined by N orman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump, “Eternity”, Journal of Philosophy 78 (1981): 444. 50  ����������������������������������� Burrell, “God’s Eternity”, 400–401. 51  ����������� Ibid., 401. 49

148

God in Postliberal Perspective

Augustine and the Catholic west or the social analogy of the Trinity associated with the Orthodox east. He prefers to use both analogies and let them deconstruct each other given their internal limitations to model God. Placher is convinced that trinitarian doctrine carries ethical implications for the church and the Christian life: “… it implies that God is not about power and self-sufficiency and the assertion of authority but about mutuality and equality and love” (55). If the symbol of God functions in part as the ideal of our conduct, then how we understand God will impact how we live. Ted Peters (Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, Berkeley, CA, USA) has challenged the notion that one should read Christian ethics off trinitarian doctrine: “The image of the immanent Trinity ought not to be used as a model for human society; rather, we should seek to transform human society on the basis of our vision of the coming kingdom of God in which God alone is the absolute.”52 Among his reasons for rejecting trinitarian ethics is that, “The doctrine of the Trinity is a second order symbol, a conceptual apparatus constructed for the purpose of clarifying the more primary symbols of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”53 However, for Placher, Bruce Marshall, and other postliberals, trinitarian doctrine is more than a “second order symbol”. Even after admitting that many Christians today are practical Unitarians, Placher asserts, “Christians come to know God precisely as triune: the Logos incarnate in Jesus, the one whom Jesus called Father, and the Holy Spirit” (55). Placher also admits that the traditional names and terminology of “Father”, “Son”, hypostaseis = personae = persons, and ousia = substantia = substance do not convey in contemporary usage what they did in the past. Like many revisionist (i.e., neo-liberal or liberationist) liturgists and theologians, he is willing to play with a variety of alternative terms and symbols. One traditional term he does retrieve is perichoresis, the “‘passing into one another’ of the divine Persons” (71). This means that “God exists three-personedly, but none of those three Persons has independent existence, for they are what they are in relation, so that God is what God is in this interrelation” (72). (Or, God is not a metaphysical realist about the Trinity!) This model of God could subvert both hierarchical concepts of God, church, and society, and individualistic notions of what it means to be a person. The perichoretic Trinity thus returns the reader to the vulnerable God of love who is defined by relations that are egalitarian and mutual, and by eternal life in which past, present, and future are whole (73–74). One leaves Placher’s Narratives with the impression that when C hristians come to know God as triune, we know God’s identity, who God in fact is in God’s eternal “self”. So he follows Rahner in seeking a more intimate relation between God in relation to salvation history and God in the community of divine Persons. And he states, “The issue is God’s self-revelation, but, if the triune way in which we know God does not disclose the triune way in which God really is, then God 52  ������������ Ted Peters, God as Trinity: Relationality and Temporality in Divine Life (Louisville, KY : Westminster John Knox Press, 1993), 184. 53  ����������� Ibid., 185.

Three Exemplars of a Postliberal Doctrine of God

149

has not revealed God’s own self, and a hidden God remains unknown behind the revealed God” (57). Although Placher qualifies this claim by his metaphysical realism, “God could be God without revelation to the world”, he certainly goes beyond Burrell’s philosophic theology that argues we as creatures cannot know what God is, for God is the only reality in which essence and existence are one in simplicity. For Placher, “the revelation to the world is God’s authentic selfrevelation and therefore reveals who God really is” (57). Would Placher further qualify his claims by saying that Christians know who God is by the divine action of revelation, but we do not know what God is for ultimately the perichoretic relation of divine Persons is a mystery not to be explained by our theologies? When Placher asks us to suppose “there were disembodied agents who were also without sin, each defining its own identity in genuine otherness, each losing itself in common enterprise pursued without jealousy or conflict, so at one that each was in the all”, do we embodied agents know what he is talking about? (71). On this note of contrast between Placher and Burrell, I turn to Placher’s historical-theological monograph, The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking about God Went Wrong. In important ways in this work, Placher does for the doctrine of God what Hans Frei did for Scripture in his study of biblical hermeneutics, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. Placher recounts the story of a tragic fall away from revelation and insights of the Christian past. He locates the classic western understanding of divine transcendence in the theologies of Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin. But in the seventeenth century he traces a cultural, religious, and theological falling away from such a mysterious image of God into greater emphasis on divine immanence, especially in relation to notions of revelation and grace. This fall occurred along both Catholic and Protestant lines. Aquinas’ notion of analogical language for naming God was corrupted into more and more literal language. Lutheran and Calvinist notions of grace were reduced to particular experiences of piety and conversion with observable results. Due to this fall, it is difficult for us today to encounter what revisionary thinkers call “classical Christian theism” without being offended by an image of God who refuses to be reduced to a part of our frameworks of natural reality. In light of the insights of his past masters, Placher’s judgment on the modern doctrine of God, whether Catholic or Protestant, is that “our God is too small”.54 Placher shows why it is hard for many of us today to read classic theologians on the doctrine of God without being offended, even scandalized. What they perceived as the freedom of God whose will, ways, and being are mysterious, we read as the tyranny of God the despot over an unruly creation. In particular, for N orth Americans it is difficult to read the doctors of the Church on God for we are the products of a political heritage that tells us the most important good in life is freedom of choice. Anyone or anything that appears to limit our freedom to decide for ourselves our own destiny must be evil. We move from our political and 54  ����������������������������������� Using the title of J. B. Phillips, Your God is Too Small (N ew Y ork: Macmillan, 1953).

150

God in Postliberal Perspective

economic freedoms in our social life to assume that we are metaphysically free, endowed with free will and a neutral rationality that enables us to be the masters of our fate. At the same time, we ignore or diminish the fact that for the last two hundred years biology, sociology, and psychology has discovered more and more dimensions of our being which are determined or shaped by factors over which we have little or no control. We have a difficult time coming to grips with the fact that our sense of personal freedom is always embodied, concrete, contingent, limited, and can be lost. Further, for interesting reasons we do not think a lot about the freedom of God. We assume that God is determined by divine attributes or the process of creation set into motion aeons ago, so we do not expect any surprises out of God that might question our sense of expansive freedom. Domestication develops a cumulative argument in the history of theological ideas that our notion of “classical Christian theism” is much more a product of the seventeenth century than the doctrines of God one finds in pre-modern theologians who are often represented as the sources of that “theism”. By recovering rules for speaking about God in their historical and textual particularity from his three exemplars, Placher lays the groundwork for a different kind of faithful affirmation of God’s reality that is not dependent on the success or failure of one metaphysical scheme, whether that scheme is medieval or modern. There is also a kind of liberal moment in his postliberalism: these retrievals of past masters are critical of the contexts from which they are retrieved, and therefore we cannot and should not affirm all we find in medieval and Reformation theologies, especially with regard to gender relations, cosmology, exegesis of Scripture, etc. As in UnapologeticTheology, this is a mixed theory: historical, cultural, and theological relativity must be respected while the author defends truth claims rooted in traditional authorities with resources from close readings, philosophy, and theology R eading Domestication exposes one to the practice of certain theological virtues: “caution, modesty, and reticence” with regard to what and how we can know God.55 The key concepts are transcendence and immanence which came into use in the nineteenth century with reference to Deism. By “transcendence” the author intends that “before the seventeenth century, most Christian theologians were struck by the mystery, the wholly otherness of God, and the inadequacy of any human categories as applied to God”. In contrast, “in the seventeenth century philosophers and theologians increasingly thought they could talk clearly about God” (6). In this new context, the meaning of theological language shifted. Even before “transcendence” and “immanence” were coined, in the 1600s writers were … … already explaining God’s difference from created things by saying that God was transcendent (distant, unaffected) in contrast to immanent (close, engaged). Rather than explaining how all categories break down when applied to God, they 55  ��������� Placher, Domestication of Transcendence, 3. Hereafter citations to this text appear in parentheses following quotations or summaries.

Three Exemplars of a Postliberal Doctrine of God

151

set the stage for talking about transcendence as one of the definable properties God possesses – a quality we could understand and that many writers today could then find deeply unattractive (7).

This seventeenth-century eclipse of more modest claims about divinity is reflected today in the project of process theism that ironically presents itself as postmodern. Like early modern thinkers in the 1600s, it seeks to “get clear on the categories we use to speak of God, to subject the divine to the structures of human reason, and thereby … to domesticate the transcendent” (7). For in process metaphysics, God turns out to be another being in the evolving world of creativity. If one steps outside of the schema of transcendent / immanent that marks both early modern and process theologies, a different concept of transcendence can live with a “kind of agnosticism about certain sorts of metaphysical questions” (9). The reality of God is the exception to our categories of distance / closeness, impersonal / engaged. Echoing Burrell, he frankly asserts that Whitehead’s “deity” is not the God of Christian faith (10). In fact, a theology influenced by pre-modern theologians “may adapt better to many characteristically ‘postmodern’ assumptions about the fragmentariness and ambiguity of all knowledge than does the epistemological optimism of process thought” (10–11). At the other extreme, such a classic-yet-postmodern theology can also help us avoid the scepticism of some postmodernists. But Placher’s scepticism about metaphysical schemes fails to connect with his moments of metaphysical-alethic realism when he rejects non-realism: “If our language about God is merely a story we tell, an imaginative construction, a fiction, then the otherness of the Wholly Other has disappeared” (12). The antidote to theological non-realists is to appeal to God’s self-revelation. For in a-theology, “the possibility that God, as subject, might reach toward us does not seem to arise” (12–13). Further, Placher rejects Gordon Kaufman’s theological functionalism, for if human beings design a concept of God to impact social and environmental crises, we merely end up serving those with the leisure and privilege to write theologies: “If we let human beings design God, then the socially dominant result will not be a deity fitted to the needs of the oppressed of the world” (16). Thus the challenge for a theologian like Placher is to affirm God’s metaphysical realism (‘the otherness of the Wholly Other’) without metaphysical schemes, and Jesus’ revelational particularity without licensing idolatry. His theological game cannot even begin unless God makes the first move and somehow indwells all the moves of the game: “God has to come to us, and, when that happens and we manage to notice, we will find all our intellectual, moral, and social orders mightily upset” (17). Returning to pre-modern wisdom, Domestication works to liberate us from standard readings of Aquinas’ doctrine of God. Its key insight turns on a distinction between system-building in metaphysics and grammatical rules for speaking about God:

152

God in Postliberal Perspective [Aquinas] offered, not a metaphysical system that would place God within our understanding of the world and specify the meaning of our language about God, but metalinguistic rules that remind us of the limitations of our language about God and thereby make it clear that we cannot place God within the world we can understand (31).

To warrant this claim, he comments on passages from Aquinas’ writings and the secondary literature that emphasize divine simplicity (as a formal feature of divinity) and the limitations of human knowledge of God. For example, “N ow we cannot know what God is, but only what He is not; we must therefore consider the ways in which God does not exist rather than the ways in which he does” (21; ST 1a.3, pref.). This text stands in some tension with passages like the following: “We cannot know of the existence of something without also knowing its essence in some way” (23; Commentary on Boethius’ “De Trinitate” 6.3). Keeping this tension in mind, Thomas’ “five ways” are not independent, rational proofs of the existence of God, but exercises in theological understanding that show the limits of our natural knowledge of both the world and God. Like many postliberals, Placher is influenced by Victor Preller’s (1931–2001) interpretation of Aquinas’ theology: “‘… the mind of man is ordered to its Creator as to One Unknown’” (26).56 This is true as well for those who stand within the light of disclosure. For in this world, “‘revelation does not tell us what God is, and thus joins us to him as to an unknown” (27; ST 1a.12.13 ad 1). One wonders at this point how Placher reconciles this profound hiddenness and silence with his invocation of divine selfrevelation. A paradox opens up between the hidden, transcendental God of Thomas and the vulnerable, responsive, open God of Placher’s earlier constructive work. O ne gets the impression that how God is both formally unknowable and materially affirmed by faith as love, as triune, as the God with a face and a name in Christ, in brief, both transcendent and immanent, is a mystery Placher will leave unresolved for it points to the different sense of transcendence he is trying to recover. Aquinas did not give us a metaphysical system that captures God in the world but a set of metalinguistic rules that distinguish God from the world; he also left us no systematic theory of analogy. In fact, even analogical speech about God is a type of equivocation, not an alternative to it (31; ST 1a.13.10 ad 4). N evertheless, “there is some connection between the ‘thing signified’ in our experience [like wisdom or goodness] and the ‘thing signified’ in God”, but a connection beyond our understanding (29). “… situated as we are, we cannot understand the ‘mode of signifying’ that any term has as applied to God, and hence we simply cannot imagine how such terms would turn out to be appropriate” (29). Why not, then, be agnostic or more radically apophatic about whether our terms or names apply to God at all, like “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” since we cannot know how our experiences or Jesus’ experience of paternity, sonship, and spirituality connect with 56  �������������������������������������� The quotation is from Victor Preller, Divine Science and the Science of God (Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 1967), 24–25.

Three Exemplars of a Postliberal Doctrine of God

153

divinity? For did not Aquinas also write, “… the knowledge by which God is seen through creatures is not a knowledge of his essence, but a knowledge that is dark and mirrored, and from afar” (31; Commentary on the Gospel of St. John 1:18)? What draws Aquinas and Placher back from a kind of transcendental agnosticism is the role of faith in our knowledge of God. We believe our created words somehow connect with the Creator on the basis of trust in the authority of God revealed in Christ. We assent with our created will moved by the grace of the Holy Spirit. In brief, “I believe that the language I use about that mystery [God] is somehow true, but I do not know how it properly applies” (36). Looking backwards, the believer knows that she has been so moved to give assent to the reality of God using the language of faith, but not how independently of God she could justify such language based on natural reason alone. In the seventeenth century, others would take up Aquinas’ five ways and remarks on analogy as means to an independent philosophical justification of the existence of God disregarding the place he retained for faith and authority in justifying theological claims. The second example of a more dialectical, pre-modern understanding of God is taken from the life and witness of Martin Luther (1483–1546). Here the central issue is not the knowability of God per se, but how sinners can be justified by a righteous yet merciful God. From the perspective of justification by grace through faith the problem of the reality of God is refracted differently. The cross of Christ reveals a God not manifest in glory but in suffering, under contradictions that rational and virtuous achievers least expect. It is this merciful God suffering in Christ who makes the sinner just and opens the way to a life of hope. God in Christ becomes knowable not by an ascent of reason moving from created nature to supernatural glory, nor by the will that does quod in se est, “what is in one”, to be supplemented by the merits of Christ, but by an excessive righteousness bestowed upon sinners without qualification. In Luther’s theology of the cross from The Heidelberg Disputation (26 April 1518), we find the root of Placher’s Vulnerable God. Behind the merciful God revealed in Christ stands the hidden God of Luther’s debate with Erasmus, The Bondage of the Will (1525). The dialectic of revelation in the Gospel means that even in disclosure God remains hidden (47). Placher cites Brian Gerrish’s distinction: at Heidelberg Luther spoke of a God who was “hidden in” revelation; in Bondage of the Will we read of a God “hidden outside” of revelation (48).57 The God “hidden in” revelation seeks to save the lost by means of the cross, exchanging Christ’s righteousness for human sinfulness. “Hidden outside” of revelation is the God of predestination who decides which sinners will in fact turn to embrace in faith the absolute gift of Christ’s righteousness. Distinguishing and relating these two faces of God in Luther’s theology has employed the labours of many. Placher finds it difficult to reconcile these two concepts of divinity into one doctrine of God for “If there is a God hidden outside revelation, then can Christ really be God’s self-revelation?” (48). His interest in Luther is weighted 57  ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� The distinction is from Brian Gerrish, “To the Unknown God: Luther and Calvin on the Hiddenness of God”, Journal of Religion 53 (1973): 268.

154

God in Postliberal Perspective

toward the central doctrine of justification by grace through faith which became domesticated in the 1600s by Protestant and Catholic scholastics, Pietists, and Puritans who began to seek evidence of orthodox belief, sanctified living, religious experience, or election as if these could justify sinners. N evertheless, Placher does find a point of contact between Luther’s wrestling with a more dialectical understanding of God and the challenge of believing in God today. In his radical understanding of justification, all supports of religious experience, devotion, piety, social action, church loyalty, virtuous character, etc. are taken away. Faith lives in hope suspended over the void of death and nothingness, confronted with the chaos of unpredictable change day to day, aware that Job’s God stood hidden behind both the beauty and tragedy of created life. The life of justification is for “the most insecure among us – the doubters, those who struggle with despair, and those who have most reason to know themselves as sinners …” (51). We come to Jean Calvin (1509–1564) before the fall into a less dialectical understanding of God and more anthropocentric doctrine of grace. As in the case of his other masters, Placher seeks to convince the reader to lay aside old stereotypes and caricatures in order to listen to the humanist Reformer with the benefit of close textual readings and new historical commentary. Rather than Calvin as the first Protestant scholastic, an image associated with the final edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), Placher accentuates the rhetorical Calvin of his legal and humanist education. The historical Calvin produced a theology that was intended to serve as commentary on the biblical witnesses, deeply practical, and “accommodated to our capacities” as God accommodated the language of divine revelation and the Person of Christ to finite human understanding. Above all this was a theology in service to the Christian community and the training of its ministers. It has a strong “antispeculative” bias even when Calvin is discussing topics like divine predestination (58). When the rhetorical functions of Calvin’s theology were forgotten in the next century, the way opened to build scholastic systems in abstraction from his commentaries and sermons on biblical texts which he sought to interpret in all their particularity, inconsistencies of detail, and paradoxes. Calvin’s hermeneutic of divine revelation as accommodated to the weakness of human understanding qualifies all scriptural and theological language. Thus the shape of biblical language about God is non-literal, non-representational, and non-descriptive for the infinite God can never be fully comprehended in finite language (58). The biblical portrayals of God as a powerful sovereign, a patient father, a recovered son, a mighty spirit, a woman nursing a child, a wrathful judge, a repentant ruler, etc. are authoritative but also accommodated to move human beings to worship and obedience. Even the incarnation of the Word accommodates God’s infinite divinity to human finitude so that creatures may come to know the invisible Father through the visibility of the Son. In contrast to Luther, and consistent with Chalcedon, the deity of God does not suffer on the cross for the humanity of Jesus does not circumscribe the totality of divinity. The Word in Christ

Three Exemplars of a Postliberal Doctrine of God

155

is totally divine, but not the totality of the triune Godhead. Thus Calvin takes the communicatio idiomatum (communication of properties, idiomata, between the two natures, divine and human, in the Incarnation) as rhetorical, not an ontological transformation of impassible divinity into suffering humanity (66, footnote 80). With regard to this doctrine of divine accommodation to our limited human frame, Calvin sounds close to Aquinas’ dialectic of divinity. He considered “three ‘epithets’ of God’s essence: immensity, spirituality, and simplicity. Like Aquinas, he argued that such attributes can give us only negative knowledge about God: God is not finite, not material, and not divisible. But in addition, the epithets invite us to certain attitudes toward God” (58). These include humility and reverence, for ultimately God has only given us negative knowledge of the divine essence. It is in Calvin’s doctrines of anthropology, revelation, and Trinity that Placher finds his own understanding of divine self-disclosure. Both the finitude and sinfulness of human nature after the Fall require that God the Creator show “himself” to us in Christ the Redeemer (66). What is shown in revelation in both Testaments is not the essence and utter glory of God (which would overcome us) but the identity of God as our Creator and Redeemer, and as the Trinity. The reference to the Trinity is important here for the work of the Spirit is to bond us to Christ, to testify to the meaning and truth of Scripture, to persuade us to trust what God has revealed, and to make the sacraments graciously efficacious. Thus in revelation God the Father sends both the Word (in Christ, found throughout Scripture) and the Spirit (who testifies within us so that we are moved to believe in the scriptural witnesses to Christ). Despite the differences in the contexts, educations, and doctrinal interpretations of his three theological masters, Placher finds profound similarities that point to a different kind of “classical theology” than so-called “classical theism”. In their different ways, all three emphasized how little we can understand about God, and how inadequate our language is for talk about God … All three agreed that human reason and human efforts cannot make it to God, that thus whatever relation we have with God depends on God’s gracious initiative, to which we must be related in faith that never fully understands, a faith which, in Calvin’s phrase, “consists in assurance rather than in comprehension.” … All three writers, finally, understood this divine initiative, and therefore the basis of all our knowledge of God, in Trinitarian terms (67–68).

The story that comes after the high middle ages and the Reformations is one of a turning away from the insights of Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin. Future doctrines of God would become more rationalistic, speculative, and optimistic about human capacities to find God in the world or in the self, and less assured about the biblical witnesses to Christ and the testimony of the ecumenical church to the trinitarian God. The God of classical theology became eclipsed by the God of classical theism, which was an amalgam of natural theology, philosophy’s quest for certainty, and the apologetics of a divided Christendom in the face of

156

God in Postliberal Perspective

growing modern scepticism. Placher agrees with Michael Buckley that the origins of modern atheism lie in the advent of this “new” theism. The deity rejected by E nlightenment philosophes was the one conceived by orthodox thinkers of the 1600s who argued “for the existence of God with virtually no reference to Christ or the Holy Spirit” (170). The quest to find independent proofs or evidences of the existence of God apart from faith’s reasons of the heart and of Christian communal testimony inevitably required different conceptions of God (remotely transcendent, the God who “intervenes” from outside the world to create nature and perform miracles in history) and different, more constricted modes of theological reasoning (the search for evidences of design in the world, the need for universal foundations of reason that believers and sceptics recognize in common, the quests for the historical Jesus, etc.). Once theological reasoning was constricted in these ways and impacted exegesis, preaching, catechesis, liturgy, and apologetics, it became more and more difficult for modern thinkers and their audiences to understand the dialectics of the hidden/revealed God who was immanent in all things by virtue of his free creation and providential care of nature in the Word and Spirit. Issues for Further Conversation with Placher 1. Pattern or Patterns? In reading Scripture and life do Christians find one pattern of emergent meaning in Jesus’ story (Unapologetic Theology, 126) and/or the real “patterns of reality” (128)? Placher affirms that the pattern / patterns are ambiguous when it comes to epistemic justification. But does he adequately take account of the search for patterns and one overarching pattern as subject to the war of interpretations among Christians themselves, and among Christians and Jews? Christian searches for one pattern have proved useful to supersessionist readings of the Hebrew Bible (“our Jesus pattern is better than your Torah pattern”). Both the vast plurality of readings and ambiguity of the justification of these patterns even among Christians who agree on the biblical canon as the primary resource for theology require more attention within Placher’s descriptive theology if it is to become truly descriptive of global Christianity. His biblical hermeneutic is extremely limiting when one compares new contextual readings of the Bible in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, or those exegetes and theologians influenced by the work of Paul Ricoeur.58 58  ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� From an enormous body of literature: on conflicting Jewish and Christian patterns, see Jon Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son (N ew Haven, CT and London: Y ale University Press, 1993). On new contextual Christian readings in contrast to Frei and Placher, R. S. Sugirtharajah, (ed.) Voices from the Margin: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World, second edn. (London: SPCK; Maryknoll, NY : Orbis, 1995); Fernando F. Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert, (ed.) Reading from this Place: Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in the United States, vol. I; idem, Reading from this Place: Social Location

Three Exemplars of a Postliberal Doctrine of God

157

2. From Christological to Theological Paradoxes? In Narratives, Placher argues for a dehellenization of the doctrine of God and for a true selfrevelation of God in Christ. He faults ancient and medieval doctrines of God with setting the stage for christological paradoxes that obscure C hrist’s revelation. In Domestication he inadvertently transfers some of those paradoxes to his doctrine of the hidden / revealed God. He wants to claim paradoxically that God’s real self is really revealed in Christ and that God’s self as divine is ultimately unknowable. Can he have it both ways, or is this the evolution within his theology? Does he intend his two books to deconstruct each other? 3. Epistemic election? Why didn’t God’s self-revelation in C hrist as T rinity happen to influential religious thinkers in the 1600s? Why does that not happen to more agnostics, atheists, and liberal-minded religious thinkers today? In Domestication Placher warns us up front that his account is long on intellectual history and short on social context (4). There is a fragility to his appeals to special revelation that remind one of notions of particular election, local knowledge denied to outsiders, or even Gnostic wisdom. Certain Christians, the “mightily upset” ones, have come to know a God hidden from others who inevitably domesticate the Holy One. Their particularities are idolatrous, but a certain Christian particularity is epistemically and socially salvific. One can turn one of Placher’s own questions to process thinkers around and ask it of his own project: “… how do we decide what is essential to make God really God and what merely seems such because of our cultural-psychological conditioning?” (10). For even if we believers in God have a special revelation, it is always already interpreted through our bodies, our language, our historicalcultural context, with our conceptual resources, and will be reinterpreted again (domesticated?) as it is communicated across time. Can it escape our metaphysical schemes (even those embedded in our ordinary languages and grammars) and remain pure? Will it be self-authenticating or should we test it for coherence with other beliefs we hold to be true? Doesn’t the very notion of self-revelation bring divinity into a scheme of active subject (God) and passive recipients (creatures) of communication? Does God the Wholly Other even have a “self” to reveal? Can revelation show us who God is (divine identity) if we as creatures cannot know what God is (divine essence)? These kinds of questions can accompany a critical reading of Domestication for it seeks to break us out of habitual ways of thinking about God. Placher and Biblical Interpretation in Global Perspective, vol. II (Minneapolis, MN : Fortress Press, 1995). On philosophic and exegetic readings in contrast to Frei and Placher, see André LaCocque and Paul Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically, (trans.) David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

God in Postliberal Perspective

158

also has resources by which to respond critically. For since he takes God’s selfrevelation in Christ by the Spirit to be intrinsic to Christian theology, to question such revelation in the manner of the questions above is already to step outside an authentic Christian context. Such questions allow another framework of meaning and truth to dominate and set the agenda for theology on apologetic, philosophical, or interfaith terms. To accept such questions at face value is to proceed along the lines of a liberal theology in dialogue with other ultimate frameworks. This version of postliberal theology is not going to find in claims to divine self-revelation an event or process in which both God and Christians communicate and construct together what believers mean by “God”. That understanding of revelation would domesticate God. One might say that his God is vulnerable in reconciling love, but invulnerable in the event of revealing truth. Revelation as God’s act is utterly trustworthy although witnessed to by fallible human creatures in the historically, gender-biased, and cosmologically fallible Bible. The Christic and Trinitarian Shape of Truth: Bruce Marshall Our final exemplar is Bruce D. Marshall (1955–), Professor of Historical Theology at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University (Dallas, Texas, USA). Marshall studied for the MA in Religion at Y ale Divinity School, and the PhD at Y ale University. Prior to joining the Perkins faculty in 2001, he was Professor of Religion at St. Olaf College (N orthfield, Minnesota, USA). He was a student of George Lindbeck and Hans Frei at Y ale. His first book was a comparative study in modern theological method with regard to the particularity and universality of Jesus, Christology in Conflict. N ext he edited a Festschrift for George Lindbeck, Theology and Dialogue. Along with essays in journals and articles in reference works, his most recent major work is Trinity and Truth.59 In his theological life journey, he has turned from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America to Roman Catholicism without deserting the Augsburg Confession of 1530.60 This closely argued text moves in two worlds at once: neo-analytic philosophy (Donald Davidson, W. V. O. Quine, Putnam, et al.) and orthodox trinitarian doctrine, both east and west. The author proposes a comprehensive theory of truth  ������������������� Bruce D. Marshall, Christology in Conflict: The Identity of a Saviour in Rahner and Barth (Oxford, UK and N ew Y ork: Basil Blackwell, 1987); idem, editor, Theology and Dialogue: Essays in Conversation with George Lindbeck (N otre Dame, IN : University of N otre Dame, 1990); idem, Trinity and Truth, Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine (Cambridge, UK and N ew Y ork: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Hereafter citations to Trinity and Truth appear in parentheses following quotations or summaries. 60  ��������������������������������� Jason Byassee, “Going Catholic”, Christian Century 123/17 (22 August 2006), 18–23. For the Augsburg Confession, see The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, (ed.) Robert Kolb and Timothy Wengert, (trans.) Charles Arand et al. (Minneapolis, MN : Fortress Press, 2000), 27–105. 59

Three Exemplars of a Postliberal Doctrine of God

159

which works on two levels: creation and redemption. Davidson’s (1917–2003) linkage of meaning with the fulfilment of truth conditions functions on the level of creation or philosophic theology. Marshall seeks to demonstrate the usefulness of this philosophy of language for thinking about how the doctrines of the Trinity and Christology should shape all the beliefs that Christians take to be true. So this is a proposal for the construction of a thoroughly Christian world-life view. On the level of redemption, Marshall’s trinitarian ontology carries the linkage between meaning and truth beyond philosophy of language to show how the community of Christians can know the truth by the acts of the triune Persons. Chapter 1 introduces the problem of truth in theology and sets out key definitions.61 The problem of modern theology with truth is that it seeks to live up to the epistemological criteria of modern thought. How should we justify Christian beliefs before the bar of critical reason under the aegis of natural science, historical inquiry, and philosophical foundations of certainty? The imposition of these criteria requires radical revisions of these beliefs (sometimes beyond the point of recognition by the community of faith) or a watering down of the criteria (thus undermining the academic appeal of such theology). Marshall would have theology go in a new direction: … rather than taking the church’s central beliefs to be especially in need of epistemic support, [we] take the church’s trinitarian identification of God itself to confer epistemic right. In order plausibly to maintain that the Trinity and other distinctively Christian doctrines are true, without drastically altering the meaning the Christian community ascribes to them, these doctrines must be regarded as epistemically primary across the board, that is, as themselves the primary criteria of truth (4).

Chapter 2 shows the primacy of the doctrine of the Trinity for the church community by a description of the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist where the Persons of the Trinity are called to act upon worshippers. The “church’s liturgical practice exhibits the body of beliefs which identify the triune God as most central for it” (43). To discern primacy of a faith community’s beliefs, we should look at its central ritual actions to find out which beliefs are invoked. N ow what gives a community the epistemic right to hold certain beliefs as primary? “A community’s most essential beliefs will be those which it is least willing to give up, and least willing to modify or reinterpret” (44). Some of our beliefs function as the criteria for accepting, rejecting, or modifying other beliefs. Therefore, primary beliefs do not depend on other more basic, foundational beliefs for their justification.

61  ������������������������������������������������������������������������������ This overview will follow the summary in the review by Charles M. Wood, “Book Symposium: Bruce D. Marshall, Trinity and Truth”, Modern Theology 16/4 (October 2000): 510–517.

160

God in Postliberal Perspective

Chapter 3 surveys five “implicit theses” about epistemic justification among modern theologians: 1. An interiority thesis, according to which Christian beliefs are justified to the extent that they adequately express certain inner experiences; 2. A foundationalist thesis, according to which justified beliefs (including Christian ones) must either be tied in virtue of their meaning to self-evident or incorrigible data, or logically grounded in beliefs which are; 3. An epistemic dependence thesis, according to which the primary criteria for deciding about the truth of Christian beliefs, at least in part and perhaps as a whole, must not themselves be distinctively Christian; 4. A pragmatic thesis, according to which Christian beliefs are justified by the communal and individual practices bound up with holding them true; 5. A correspondence thesis, according to which the truth of beliefs, including Christian ones, consists in their agreement or correspondence with reality (50). Subsequent chapters critique all five as inadequate if primary Christian beliefs are to function as standards of truth. The interiority thesis associated with Schleiermacher fails to recognize the necessity of already having beliefs for having “inner experiences” or pious affections. Both the meaning and the justification of our religious experiences depend upon some prior beliefs for such experiences to be expressed at all. The foundationalist thesis suffers from the failure of the quest to discover “selfevident or incorrigible data” upon which edifices of justified beliefs could be built. Marshall defines foundationalism as the theory about knowledge that claims: (F1) that with regard to at least some of the sentences that we hold true, we have direct or immediate access to states of affairs, events, or experiences in virtue of which those sentences are true; (F2) that this direct access guarantees the truth of these statements, and so justifies us in, or serves as the ultimate evidence for, holding them true; (F3) that the rest of our beliefs must be justified by establishing some suitable kind of warranting link with those which are directly tied to the world (and thereby serve as the justificatory ‘foundation’ for the rest) (54). Four types of belief are candidates to serve as foundations: 1. Self-evident or self-authenticating beliefs, which impress themselves on us with such clarity that we cannot doubt their truth, and require no recourse to other beliefs in order for us to see that they are true. Proposed instances include basic logical laws, and so-called “analytic truths”, like “All bachelors are unmarried men”. 2. Empirically evident beliefs, which can be construed in two ways.

Three Exemplars of a Postliberal Doctrine of God

161

a. They have their truth directly guaranteed, though perhaps only for the moment, by certain percepts, sensations, sense data, or the like, whose content they state. An instance might be “I am appeared to treely (or greenly)”, which might itself be taken as empirically evident to the one who holds it, or might be taken as directly based on an experience regarded as a bit more primitive (like ‘Green here now!’). These veridical beliefs about sensations then justify further beliefs about an objective world, that is, about matters other than beliefs and sensations (‘There is a tree’). b. They are themselves about an objective world, and so state more than the content of sensations (again, ‘There is a tree’), but are directly justified by sensations. 3. Incorrigible beliefs, which cannot be false, or, in one current idiom, are true in every possible world, and so must be true in the actual one. The examples given for 1 and 2 might also be incorrigible, but a belief might belong to neither category and still be incorrigible, though perhaps not foundational – complex truths of arithmetic (such as 89 x 125 = 11,125) are standard examples, since it seems impossible for them to be false, but they are not self-evident, at least to most of us. 4. Beliefs which are certain, in that the holder is fully convinced that they are true, and indeed, at limit, cannot coherently conceive the possibility of doubting them. The Cartesian cogito is a classic proposal of this type (81). One of the many problems of foundationalism is that statements (F1, 2, and 3) are themselves neither self-evident, nor empirically evident, nor incorrigible. To replace foundationalism Marshall offers Davidson’s alternative: “beliefs are justified by other beliefs, that is, by their coherence with other beliefs whose justification is, at least for the moment, not in question. Marshall avows a ‘coherentist’ view of justification, distinguishing this from a coherence theory of truth.”62 The epistemic dependence thesis (the one Marshall faults for modern theology’s need to jettison so many Christian beliefs) suffers from a common confusion about the relation between meaning and truth. According to holders of this thesis, one should define the meaning of beliefs while suspending the question of their truth or falsity. Then, once meaning is in place, truth can be assessed for by other procedures. Against this thesis, Marshall follows Davidson’s reflections on “radical interpretation”. … we understand what others say to us – whether these others are speakers of an unknown language, or our own intimates – only by holding that what they say is, in the main, true. If we discover that our way of interpreting someone’s beliefs makes most of what they believe turn out to be wrong, the chances are that more is wrong with our way of interpreting them than with their beliefs.  ������������������������ Ibid., 512 paraphrasing Trinity and Truth, 88.

62

God in Postliberal Perspective

162

Only by “holding for belief” – or, as Marshall puts it, “holding for truth” – while seeking meaning can we interpret others’ utterances correctly.63

The implication of “radical interpretation” is critical for the epistemic dependence thesis: “Because ‘[o]ur truth commitments determine, on the whole, the meanings we assign to words’ (98), the course of any interpretation will be heavily determined by what we are prepared to find true.”64 Thus we cannot suspend truth while we search for meaning. This explains why modern theology had to be so revisionary with regard to inherited meanings. Marshall summarizes: The truth commitments by which [epistemic] dependence theorists test Christian beliefs naturally have a considerable effect on the interpretation of those beliefs. Add their determination not simply to assess, but to hold true, Christian beliefs by the standard of those commitments, and the interpretive effect of the commitments becomes overwhelming (100).

By Chapter 5 Marshall has disposed of the interiority, foundationalist, and dependence theses. He now turns to construct his Christian alternative to the justification of beliefs. He takes his cue from scriptural and traditional beliefs about Christ and the triune God. In the N ew Testament, Christ is portrayed as the agent of creation (the creative Logos), of providence, and of consummation. Therefore, all things (ta panta) are related to Jesus. T his C hrist is most importantly related to the God he called Father and to the Spirit that came upon him in baptism. These three agencies are one God at work in all things which “cohere” in Christ. Marshall seeks the warrant for these christological and trinitarian beliefs in the N ew Testament narratives themselves. Here he locates the centre that justifies Christian beliefs about all the rest of reality: “The narratives which identify Jesus are epistemic trump; if it comes to conflict between these narratives and any other sentences proposed for belief, the narratives win” (116). N ew Testament narratives have “unrestricted epistemic primacy”. Marshall defines their status in the negative: “… no sentences which are inconsistent with those beliefs can be true …, but consistency with the church’s central beliefs does not normally guarantee, all by itself, that other beliefs are true” (119). By this move Marshall turns the tables on modern theology. Rather than philosophical, scientific, historiographical, or ethical beliefs playing the role of epistemic trump over what Christians are and are not justified in believing, the Church turns to its own core readings of Scripture and doctrines to discover the beliefs that should function to justify other beliefs about the world. Doctrines that suffered under the imposition of modern standards of belief like the incarnation of the Word in Jesus or his resurrection from the dead now are free to illuminate Christian beliefs about other aspects of reality. 63

 ����� Ibid.  ����� Ibid.

64

Three Exemplars of a Postliberal Doctrine of God

163

Chapter 6 responds to the unbelief in our belief. Why believe that Christ has this exalted ontological role in the cosmos? Why believe that N ew Testament narratives that identify Jesus in relation to God are the epistemic trump over other beliefs? Why believe that truth has a trinitarian shape? “Holding beliefs in an epistemically responsible way does not require that we be able to give reasons for every one of our beliefs. But our epistemic responsibilities do seem to require that we be open to changing any one of our beliefs if given sufficient reasons to do so” (145). Verification of all our beliefs in this life may be impossible, but we must be open to the logical possibility of falsification of some of our beliefs. Y et what would count as verification of beliefs about Jesus, the Trinity, and N ew Testament narratives? Here Marshall returns to the biblical absorption metaphor of his teacher Hans Frei. In the biblical-narrative world centred on Christ, Christians find a realm of truth that is powerful to include, assimilate, or absorb other beliefs about reality, to refigure them in light of the triune God, and to be changed positively in the process. “A community whose belief system displays an ongoing capacity to assimilate novel beliefs will naturally be one which shows itself capable of changing its established beliefs, and so of holding its beliefs in an epistemically responsible way” (149). Primary beliefs do not change (for these give the community its very identity), but the interpretation of those beliefs does change as the church encounters new cultures, sciences, forms of wisdom, etc. What would count as falsification in the biblical narrative realm? Marshall offers two examples: 1. In terms of fact, the continued disunity of Christ’s body, the church in the world, constitutes a crucial challenge to Christian belief in Christ’s reconciliation of all things. 2. Hypothetically if authentic textual evidence were discovered someday undermining our belief in the resurrection of Jesus, then the N ew Testament narratives could no longer function as epistemic trump over other beliefs. But logical possibilities do not count against core beliefs until they become factual: “Christians can conceive of conditions under which they would be obliged to give up their central beliefs, even though the content of those beliefs gives them confidence that the conditions will never obtain” (168–169).65 Chapters 7 and 8 deal with the pragmatic and correspondence theses of epistemic justification. The pragmatic thesis, according to Marshall, misunderstands the proper role of Christian practices. That role is not to justify Christian beliefs but to interpret them in the ongoing life of the community and believer. The pragmatic thesis suggests something more profound: “the epistemic role of the Spirit”. The Spirit guides the explication of beliefs through practices. “It is by the Spirit, moreover, that the world depicted by Christian doctrine is rendered attractive 65

 ����������� Ibid., 514.

God in Postliberal Perspective

164

and habitable, and that Christians are brought to the love of God” (204–208).66 With regard to the correspondence thesis, Marshall follows Davidson in rejecting a general theory of truth as correspondence between mental beliefs and extramental reality. One problem with this theory, among others, is that “to the extent that truth has to be borne by sentences, truth cannot usefully be thought of as the correspondence of mind to reality” (226–227). In the concluding chapter, the theologian introduces another way of conceiving correspondence in the biblical narrative world. The Johannine Jesus says to Thomas, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6 N RSV). In the N ew Testament and Christian doctrine, truth is borne, not just by sentences, but by this person. Here correspondence means the “correspondence of Jesus Christ to the Father (as ‘the image of the invisible God’) and, on another level, a correspondence of creaturely reality to God …” 67 As our lives correspond to the truth in Christ by the Spirit, we are set upon the way that leads to the Father’s house. We can become witnesses to the truth Christ bears for the world as the eikon, image of God. Appropriately, Marshall placed this quotation from Thomas Aquinas at the very head of his book: Ille homo esset ipsa divina veritas. “This human being is divine truth itself” (viii). Issues for Further Conversation with Marshall Of our three exemplars, Marshall gives the most sustained attention to issues of truth with regard to particular Christian beliefs about God. Because the identity of the living God is communicated and justified in biblical, Christic, and trinitarian language, and explicated in Christian practices, those who come to share belief in the God of Christ know the truth in person and grow in conformity to the living truth by the Spirit. He rejects the correspondence theory of truth assumed by metaphysical-alethic realism and anti-realism.68 Truth is a more basic concept that we grasp as language users, holders of various beliefs, and interpreters than any of the theories that defend it (in terms of realism) or seek to abolish it (in terms of non-realism) (233–41). To put it sharply, for Marshall the central issue is not whether we are metaphysical realists or anti-realists with regard to western theism. T he issue is whether we have found an inhabitable world and a responsible realm of true belief in the biblicalnarrative world centered in Christ and in the community that indwells this world. Without the Spirit of truth identified in this world and community, our will to believe and enact the truth in Christ are insufficient to the task. To become truthbearers of the truth of the holy Trinity we must be transformed in our believing and willing. N ow, where does the conversation go from here? 66

 ����������� Ibid., 515.  ����������������������������������������� Ibid., with reference to Colossians 1:15. 68  ������������������������������������������������������������ See my Chap. 3:‘Philosophical versions of realism: Alston’s Alethic R ealism.’ 67

Three Exemplars of a Postliberal Doctrine of God

165

1. Philosophical partners: Marshall infrequently engages in “radical interpretation” of hermeneutic phenomenological thinkers (100–103). He is content to depend on neo-analytic philosophers to explain language, meaning, and truth. He offers justification for his preference for analytic thinkers (xi, 13). But if all things cohere in Christ who is the truth, should we not seek to absorb both analytic and phenomenological thought where possible and desirable into a Christian truth-theory? 2. Marshall’s portrayal of analytic philosophy: Related to Marshall’s choice of philosophical partners is his choice of which analytic philosophers to be in conversation with. From reading Trinity and Truth or Placher’s Unapologetic Theology, one may get the impression that foundationalism as a theory of knowledge is rejected by mainstream analytic philosophers and therefore modern theologians who employ foundational-style arguments (whether consciously or unconsciously) are philosophically in error. Both Marshall and Placher overlook the fact that in the years 1975–1987, foundationalism remained in the thick of Anglo-American philosophical discussion. When Marshall follows Davidson down the road that ends with “only beliefs justify beliefs” (80–88), he falls into a form of coherentism criticized by neo-foundationalists like Timm Triplett. Marshall like other coherentists “allows no exit from the circle of the subject’s beliefs. How then can such beliefs be properly grounded?”69 Recall Burrell: “The metaphor [of foundations] remains attractive … so long as we feel compelled to ask for the grounds on which an assertion is based.”70 T riplett limits foundationalism to “justified empirical beliefs”.71 Within this limit, I wonder why Marshall has little to say about embodied perception as our primary way of indwelling and knowing the world. The closed “circle of the subject’s beliefs” suggests a vestige of Cartesian mentalism in Marshall’s coherentism. If Marshall engaged other philosophical partners, for example, the French phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) who returned human embodiment to the centre of epistemology, one wonders how this might enrich and expand his concepts of incarnation, knowledge, and truth.72 Or, sticking with his analytic commitments, he could have explored the dialogue between cognitive science, anthropology, and theology about the natural basis of belief-formation in the evolving brain.73  ������������������������������������������������� Timm Triplett, “Recent Work on Foundationalism”, American Philosophical Quarterly 27/2 (April 1990): 109. My thanks to Millard Erickson (Truett Theological Seminary, Baylor University, Waco, TX, USA) who brought this article to my attention. 70  ���������������������������������������������������� Burrell, “Religious Belief and Rationality”, 99–100. 71  ���������� Ibid., 93. 72  ����������������������� Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, (trans.) Colin Smith (London and N ew Y ork: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958). 73  ������������������������������������������������� For an overview source, see Gregory R. Peterson, Minding God: Theology and the Cognitive Sciences (Minneapolis, MN : Augsburg Fortress, 2003). 69

166

God in Postliberal Perspective

3. Partnership or passivity in truth? Marshall uses ontological beliefs drawn from scripture, trinitarian, and christological doctrine to answer questions about the justification of beliefs (epistemology) and questions about truth. We do not learn much about how human inquiry, pedagogy, and learning are related to seeking the truth. Human practices result in interpreted beliefs, and beliefs are justified by core beliefs, but truth for the author comes down as utter gift from above. Or, God constructs the truth for us by sending Christ in the Spirit as witnessed to by biblical narratives. We receive it, interpret it, give reasons for or against it, but do not construct it. Does this result in an excessively passive role for disciples who follow Christ, the truth-bearer? 4. He Who Is versus She Who Is? What can we say about the author’s consistent use of the traditional names for the Persons? Are the symbols of paternity, sonship, and spirit which presuppose ordinary human experience projected by Christians onto uncreated, eternal reality based on scriptural warrant alone? There is a sense for Marshall that scriptural, liturgical, and doctrinal speech about the Trinity is already God-constructed language that we have no authority to revise: “When Jesus designates [the first Person] as ‘the Father’ and invites us to join him, therefore, he issues an invitation which we can of course refuse, but whose terms we cannot define: they are defined by the persons of the Trinity themselves” (15). At this point, Marshall does not appeal to analogical qualifications of speech about God in the Bible, nor does he refer to notions of divine accommodation. Does this imply that his conversation with feminist and womanist theology just comes to a full stop as soon as it begins? Rather than absorbing feminist theories of language into the biblical narrative world, or engaging womanist uses of Scripture, does the logic of Marshall’s trinitarian truth imply that we should associate some feminists and womanists with those who have refused C hrist’s invitation? O r does he have other ways of engaging in conversation with feminists and womanists as Christian partners? 5. Who is the audience? As long as one shares Marshall’s primal belief that “Jesus Christ is the truth” and therefore has epistemic priority over all true beliefs (Christian or otherwise), then his argument is internally coherent. But does Marshall offer interesting reasons why his potential readers (any scholar interested in truth) should hold or adopt this particular belief? At times his primary audience is limited to other postliberals who would find his arguments appealing that one can absorb novel beliefs into the trans-historical biblical narrative world, and that even primary beliefs are hypothetically open to falsification. He leaves it to the Holy Spirit to convince us that “Christ is the truth” since the Person of Christ is not at our disposal like other persons or beliefs. For example, in the passage quoted above in the summary of Chapter One, he assumes a priori that central Christian beliefs are true, then works out the consequences: “[Distinctive Christian doctrines] must be regarded as the chief test for the truth of the rest of what we want

Three Exemplars of a Postliberal Doctrine of God

167

to believe” (4). Surprisingly, his rhetorical approach to readers who don’t already share his beliefs has affinities with those “presuppositionalists” in Calvinist apologetics.74 This leads me to a related question. 6. Truth and academic freedom? How much room does Marshall leave for open inquiry when it comes to research that might have consequences for his account of the primal truth, Christ, for example, the resurrection? On one hand, he says he is open to the impact of finding textual evidence that the resurrection was a hoax. But if that evidence threatens belief in the Person to whom he has given epistemic priority over all other beliefs, then how can the evidence receive a fair and honest hearing in the context of Marshall’s Christic truth-theory? All one needs to say is, this evidence proposes a belief (‘Jesus was not raised from the dead’) that contradicts one of our primary, central beliefs (‘Jesus is risen’). Therefore, the evidence must have been tampered with, or in due time we will find another, better explanation of how it came to be. If primary beliefs function as criteria for truth with regard to all other things, then justifying, revising, or falsifying them becomes problematic. If Marshall were to consider textual evidence that the resurrection was a hoax with fairness, then for the purposes of inquiry he would have to suspend at least one of his primal beliefs (‘Jesus is risen’) for a period of critical reflection. But that would mean for the purposes of inquiry other beliefs would have to serve as criteria for truth (e.g., beliefs about authorship in the ancient world) that might contribute to trumping some of his primary, central beliefs. Already in this issue we have returned to a modern mode of thinking about truth as freedom in inquiry that Marshall would find difficult to reconcile with the rest of his truththeory. One wonders how and whether Marshall’s truth theory could be embodied in a university or theological school that was open to students and scholars with different truth theories. 7. The eclipse of critical biblical exegesis? D oes Marshall’s use of trinitarian language to identify God include a belief in Jesus of N azareth’s awareness of being a Person in the Trinity? Two passages suggest this: When Jesus himself on the cross cries out in the language of Israel’s Psalms “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” … his address to the God of Israel is presumably not an address to the Trinity – and so in part to himself – but specifically to the Father who has abandoned him in death (36, my emphasis). [In death Jesus offers] back to the silent Father the Spirit that he has received from the Father (Lk. 23:46; Jn. 19:30), trusting that the Father who has abandoned him in death (Mt. 27:46; Mk. 15:34) will not forever exclude him from the bond of love in their common Spirit

74  ��������������������� See Greg L. Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetics: Readings and Analysis (Phillipsburg, N J: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1998).

168

God in Postliberal Perspective – trusting, i.e., that the absent Father will raise him from the dead, in the power of the Spirit (41).

In these passages, Marshall ascribes to the crucified Jesus not only messianic consciousness but also triune consciousness. But is that to read the Gospels anachronistically through the lens of later trinitarian doctrine rather than using the later doctrine as a heuristic device to return to the particularity of the stories? Does Marshall’s Christic truth theory allow him the privilege always to trump the results of historical-critical exegesis of the N ew Testament? How does the dialogue between critical biblical studies and theological exegesis proceed if one buys into his truth-theory? 8. The temptation of total frameworks: Marshall acknowledges that the absorption metaphor he borrows from Frei sounds like a new form of “totalism” to those influenced by Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995). And he distinguishes two forms of totalism; one he rejects and the other he endorses: If “totalism” is the view that all possible beliefs have on some sense already been assessed, so that there can be no genuinely novel beliefs and, on that account, no possibility that we will have to change our epistemic priorities, then the present argument is anti-totalistic: there will be novel beliefs until the eschaton, and they might lead us to change our minds at any point. If, by contrast, “totalism” is the view that there may be beliefs with unrestricted epistemic primacy, beliefs whose epistemic scope is the whole open field (perhaps to a large extent yet unexplored) of possible belief, then in this sense theology is totalistic, because Christian belief is itself totalistic; it’s not even possible to say what counts as “Christian” belief except by reference to the entire open field of possible belief, across which some beliefs have a decisive epistemic role (153, footnote 15).

In the sense of this second “totalism”, the Christian community makes “universal and unrestricted” truth-claims over all possible belief (153). Thus Marshall’s account entails the development of a Christic Weltanschauung: The “narrative identification of the triune God organizes a comprehensive view of all things, and especially of human nature, history, and destiny” (3). I wonder how Marshall would respond to a critique Barth made in his lectures on the Apostles’ Creed at the University of Bonn in 1946. When he came to the lecture on God as “Creator of Heaven and Earth”, he warned his students not to confuse the message of the Bible and Christian faith with any “definite worldpicture” or cosmology. Here he may have alluded to Rudolph Bultmann’s program of demythologizing the N ew Testament. But then he turned his critique on general world-life views:

Three Exemplars of a Postliberal Doctrine of God

169

… above all we must not combine the Church’s business with this or that Weltanschauung. Weltanschauung means something still more comprehensive than world-picture, since in it a so-called philosophico-metaphysical conception of man is added to the harmony. We must beware as Christians, and the Church must beware of establishing itself on the basis of any sort of Weltanschauung. For Weltanschauung is very near ‘religion’. But by the decisive content of the Bible, Jesus Christ, we are by no means enjoined to adopt a Weltanschauung for our own. We Christians are once and for all dispensed from attempting, by starting from ourselves, to understand what exists, or to reach the cause of things and with or without God to reach a general view. So my advice would be, that if you are faced with any such general view, you should bracket it, even if it should be called a Christian Weltanschauung. Perhaps this warning should be expressed with special emphasis in the German sphere!75

At times Marshall’s programme reads like a temptation to erect a new Christian Weltanschauung, a total framework, borrowing its theory of ultimate being from trinitarian doctrine and its theories of language, knowledge, and truth from analytic philosophy, appropriately revised in relation to Christ the Logos. In a time of late modern uncertainty and international insecurity, it presents a strong postliberal (or theologically neo-conservative) conviction that truth-talk is Christic communicated in a biblical and traditional vocabulary for the divinity. Such a total framework may well appeal to many Christians in Europe and N orth America where historic churches and church-related institutions find themselves in exile from the cultures they helped to shape. The problem is discerning when the humanly constructed framework itself has become the new object of worship and loyalty. In the Confessing Church’s struggle with the “German Christians”, Barth rejected both natural theology and radical traditionalism as false allies of the truth in C hrist. I raise this discussion point in concluding this section because Marshall counts both Aquinas and Barth as allies in his project. And so here is another passage from Barth’s lectures in Bonn that Marshall might quote in reply to this issue: The truth of Jesus Christ is not one truth among others; it is the truth, the universal truth that creates all truth as surely as it is the truth of God, the prima veritas which is also the ultima veritas. For in Jesus Christ God has created all things, He has created all of us. We exist not apart from Him, but in Him, whether we are aware of it or not; and the whole cosmos exists not apart from Him, but in Him, borne by Him, the Almighty Word. To know Him is to know all. To be touched and gripped by the Spirit in this realm means being led into all truth.76 75  ������������ Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, (trans.) G. T. Thomson (N ew Y ork: Harper & Row, 1959), 59–60, from lecture 9 on “Heaven and Earth”. 76  �������������������������������������������������� Ibid., 26, from lecture 3 on “Faith as Knowledge”.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 5

Imagining God: Revelation, Construction, or Destruction? To Exclude? Absorb? Embrace Non-Realism as “An (Other)”? In our journey to understand the God confessed by postliberals, now we pause and take account of our travels thus far and where we are headed. Summing up from our point of departure: on a postliberal account, the reality or existence of God can neither be proven nor falsified on the basis of universal, foundational principles that all rational beings somehow must share. For (a) God as understood by most practicing Jews, Christians, and Muslims is not that “kind of reality”; as Creator, Governor, and Consummator of the world, God transcends (is both greater than and hidden within) the particularities of existent beings as we creatures engage life in this world. The Holy One is not just like electrons, genes, fields of force, or distant galaxies that can be demonstrated to exist by theoreticempirical methods of inquiry. God in terms of formal features is more like an all encompassing framework, network, ethos, atmosphere, or living language that makes communication and any rational inquiry at all possible. (b) Also, our evidence that counts against belief in God is ambiguous and incomplete. The reality of evil, pain, suffering in the world, and schism in the body of Christ are occasions for both some believers and sceptics to doubt that God exists, but these powers are subject to interpretation and assimilation into the biblical narrative world of Christ who rules creation from a cross and an empty tomb. Further (c) the “God” whose existence the atheist doubts, the agnostic is uncertain of, and the civil religionist appeals to for national blessing is often not the God of Jesus Christ. The deities of the theistic proofs and atheistic suspicion are abstractions from the dynamic, interpersonal God who discovers us in biblical narratives, Christian witness and worship, and discipleship. There are as many ways to find or be found by this living, true God as there are human journeys and quests. N o particular way of finding or being found is privileged for the point is the saving knowledge of the triune God, not the particular apologetic path. Finally (d) life with this God and the community of Christ can be productive of critical inquiry that can test its own truth claims and the truth claims of others against beliefs about the Christ who is the dependable and living way to truth. Arguments that explore concepts about the triune God in relation to our best cosmological insights, critical knowledge of the Bible, and the social issues of each new generation are welcomed by many postliberals who engage life in the world rather than retreat into ghettos of the spirit. Further, postliberals are unafraid to compare their christocentric scriptural

172

God in Postliberal Perspective

framework with the scriptural worlds of other faith traditions for the comparative project is fruitful for mutual illumination of scriptures and practices and is one way to test the “assimilative power” of the Christian story and community. Having said all this, postliberal theology is adept at facing various challenges from modernity for it submits the critical presuppositions of modern thought about divinity and religion to suspicion. But what happens when late modern bodies encounter postliberal theology? Do postliberal accounts of God sound neo-conservative at a time of hyper-pluralization, hybrid cultures, feminist revisions, and interfaith syncretism? What about the long history of institutional and interpersonal effects that classic, orthodox, and traditional interpretations, doctrines, and forms of life bring in their wake? What of the founding role of the Bible, early Christian doctrine, and governance in the evolution of anti-Judaism, misogyny in church and society, religious and cultural imperialism, the persecution of sexual and religious minorities, nationalism, and environmental degradation? Can postliberals build a firewall between their sources of authority (Scripture, trinitarian and christological doctrines, ritual and liturgical language, Christian practices) and the concrete effects of these authorities at various times and places on the bodies of women, Jews, Muslims, native Americans, Africans, Asians, gays, doctrinal deviants, and others who have been disciplined, persecuted, or “converted” in the name of Christ the Saviour? Is there unjustified violence hidden in postliberal claims to know the reality and will of God and the truth in Christ in this age when radical religious insurgents and secular armies slaughter each other? For here and now many truths, forms of knowing, and forms of life proliferate and relativize each other without any one privileged, overarching metanarrative to transmute chaos into cosmic genesis, fallen innocence, redemptive time, and benevolent telos. Late modern critiques of postliberal theology are more indirect and pragmatic than the anti-metaphysics of modern atheism. Whether or not the triune God exists and is active in the world, the institutions and elites who identify with this “God”   ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� In terms of religious pluralism as a challenge to postliberal theology, the religionists known for “comparative theology” exemplify best how postliberals think about other-thanChristian traditions. See Francis X. Clooney, S. J., “Reading the World in Christ,” Chap. 5 in Gavin D’Costa, (ed.) Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, Faith Meets Faith (Maryknoll, NY : Orbis, 1990); idem, Theology After Vedanta: An Experiment in Comparative Theology, in SUNY series “Toward a Comparative Philosophy of Religions”, (Albany, NY : State University of N ew Y ork Press, 1993); James L. Fredericks, Faith Among Faiths: Christian Theology and Non-Christian Religions (N ew Y ork and Mahwah, N J: Paulist Press, 1999). For an overview, see Paul Knitter, “Part IV The Acceptance Model ‘Many True Religions: So Be It,’” Introducing Theologies of Religions. For the concept of “assimilative power” as a test of truth-claims, see Bruce D. Marshall, “Absorbing the World: Christianity and the Universe of Truths,” Part One, in idem, (ed.) Theology and Dialogue: Essays in Conversation with George Lindbeck (N otre Dame, IN : University of N otre Dame Press, 1990). This essay serves as an excellent prolegomenon to what Marshall is up to in his book, Trinity and Truth.

Imagining God: Revelation, Construction, or Destruction?

173

have constructed regimes of truth that privilege some and marginalize others in ways that arbitrarily repress human diversity and difference in the name of the unity of ecumenical Christian identity. These regimes of truth and forms of life constitute the deep background and presuppositions of modern, secular society in such a way that the waning of institutional Christianity in Europe and N orth America hides its pervasive influence in science, gender relations, the formation of collective identity, and our use and abuse of the biosphere. In fact, in a late modern critical reading of our times, we should not be surprised that neo-conservatism in AngloAmerican politics and economics appeared at the same time as postliberalism in church-related institutions of higher learning. Postliberalism on this account is the theological face of a more sophisticated Christian traditionalism that is horrified at the fragmentation of social life and the decline of traditional institutions (historic churches and church-related institutions, marriage, family, etc.). For a time such as this, some postliberals prefer to salvage forms of thought and life from the Christian past rather than dialogue and creatively engage with contemporary cultural and social forms of life that are the occasion of new syncretistic and more complex identities. The contemporary dialogue includes those Christians or post-Christians who no longer embrace traditional Christian forms of thought and yet seek to live a moral and spiritual life. In this chapter we turn to two figures, one in fiction and the other in life, who offer this kind of challenge to postliberal theology, and bring them into dialogue with a postliberal theology of imagination. San Manuel Bueno, Mártir In 1930 and 1933 Miguel De Unamuno (1864–1936) published a novella entitled San Manuel Bueno, Mártir, or “Saint Emmanuel the Good”. The narrator, Ángela, tells the story of her priest in the village of Valverde de Lucerna, Spain. This brief work is hauntingly beautiful. Don Manuel is no ordinary priest. He identifies with the life of his parish and village in ways that win the trust of the people. His celebration of the mass, preaching, hearing of confession and giving absolution, presence with the suffering and dying, participation in the hard labours of rural life and wise words endear him to both saints and sinners. Ángela begins to support Don Manuel’s ministry rather than pursuing a life in Madrid. When her sceptical brother Lazarus returns from America and their mother dies, Don Manuel is present with the family up to the bitter end. He then tries to befriend Lazarus who is a progressive anti-cleric who has no faith in God, Christ or the Church.

  ������������������� Miguel de Unamuno, Comparative and Critical Edition of San Miguel Bueno, Mártir, Mario J. Valdés and María Elena de Valdés, (ed. and trans.) (Chapel Hill, N C: University of N orth Carolina, 1973), 81 p.

God in Postliberal Perspective

174

It has already begun to dawn on Ángela that her priest is a saint, and then her brother is taken by surprise. He and Don Manuel become close friends and Lazarus eventually returns to mass. Like his sister, he changes all his plans in order to support the priest’s work among their people. Over time, Don Manuel shares his secret with Ángela and Lazarus: he no longer believes in the immortal soul and eternal life. In fact, any sense of holiness as an Other or more than the faith and good works of mortals is beyond his capacity to believe. Rather than disturb the parish (and his bishop) with these doubts, he conceals them for he believes disbelief would only trouble and disturb the good, simple life of his people. They should not bear the agony of soul that he carries as a thorn in his flesh. Don Manuel finds himself in Christ on the cross: “¡Dios mío, Dios mío! ¿por qué me has abandonado?” (Matt. 27:46). The disclosure of this secret is almost impossible for Ángela to bear for the priest she knows mediates the presence of God in her life and the life of her family and village. Don Manuel becomes a type of martyr to his secret, and the thorn in his side wounds Ángela and Lazarus. How can they reconcile the person they know who inspires faith to flourish in so many others who cannot bring himself to believe these same tenets within his own mind and heart? Why does D on Manuel reveal his secret to them? After his death when the Church begins the process of inquiry into Don Manuel’s possible sainthood, why does Ángela write down this disturbing account “by way of confession – although to what end only God, and not I can say”? Is Don Manuel’s secret a new kind of gospel of the devout life at the end of faith in God? Does he embody true spirituality and love without the Holy Spirit, or the promise of rewards in eternal life? Does his (fictional) story prefigure the life and ministry of Don Cupitt and other clergy who share or do not share their secret doubts with the public? In this chapter we will explore some ways that divine revelation and its denial have been imagined by theological realists and non-realists in our times. From Divine Revelation to Human Imagination The enduring interests in language, hermeneutics, rhetoric, and cultural studies in modern and late modern thought have brought imagination into the foreground of philosophic and theological method. There is a viable consensus among many theologians, religionists, and philosophers of religion that the human capacity for imagination is crucial for indwelling the world religiously. Whereas talk of and debate around the topic of revelation dominated Euro-American theology for more than a century, talk of imagination drives theology today. As we become more aware of the role that different cultures (past and present) play in shaping the content and practice of faith, the different ways we symbolize God look more 

 ������������ Unamuno, 45.

Imagining God: Revelation, Construction, or Destruction?

175

like creative products of human imagination. For we respond to the symbols, metaphors, and stories of our religious heritage in the dynamic contexts of our own life-worlds and personal experiences. In the Introduction, I quoted Thiemann’s version of the problem of the knowability of God. In the epistemic tradition inspired by Descartes and Kant, the dilemma he faces is that either: (a) God becomes merely a function of our context ruled by human categories and concepts (God the object we construct); or (b) God rules a special context beyond our own with divine epistemic rules and content that are somehow mediated to us (humankind the subject of special revelation). The path of (a) helps us understand how we as finite, socialized creatures can know God, but then God turns out to be just one more of our many constructs or even idols. The path of (b) helps us to understand God as Otherwise and More than our religions, but it remains unclear how this divine knowledge becomes part of our human knowing and being in the world as creatures of our own natural and cultural contexts. Imagination may offer one way out of this conundrum. We may find consensus around claims like: imagination is a critical resource in religious life and theological reflection for the religions and theology call upon us to engage in “worldmaking”, i.e., the religious life calls upon us to imagine reality as other than, more than, or different than the world limited to ordinary bodily perception and the “commonsense realism” of everyday life. Think of the following: • • • • • • •

The gift and practice of living in the awareness of God’s presence and absence; Hope for life after death; Attending to prophets, apostles, messianic figures and angels; Encountering evil as powers of wickedness; Viewing nature, society and history in terms of creation and eschatology; Miracles (signs or blessings); So-called “ordinary” forms of divine activity (providence, sacraments, forgiveness, personal transformation, social liberation).

All of these notions of our language in worship call upon us in advanced technological societies to imagine reality and the world as quite different from the way it is taken to be by major institutions. In the ordinary practices of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (and in eastern religions like Hinduism), the life of religious imagination mediates “a sense of reality” that shapes the world, the self, and our sense of community with others.

 ���������� Thiemann, Revelation and Theology, 42–3.  ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ For examples from psychology, literary criticism, scientific theories, and works of art that “all facts are fabricated and … knowing or understanding is no more a matter of finding than of making”, see Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking. 



176

God in Postliberal Perspective

Out of ordinary sense perception of the world, there emerges a sixth sense (the illusive ‘I’ of consciousness) that integrates our varied experiences into more or less meaningful wholes. William James described it this way: It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call ‘something there,’ more deep and more general than any of the special and particular ‘senses’ by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.

Via analogy to this emergent and integrative “sense of reality”, in the lives of religious communities, families, and persons there is also a “sense of the real” intrinsic to the objects, goals, or values of faith that is felt, experienced, and lived with a sense of conviction matching (and in some cases exceeding) the reality of the physical world. Further, a religious “sense of reality” has become the subject matter of critical reflection in the major western and many eastern traditions, each of which has produced forms of scholastic inquiry and dissemination of critical thought internal to the practices and symbols of their respective tradition. Imagination as Point of Contact between God’s Knowledge and Ours According to Garrett Green (Connecticut College, N ew London, USA), our capacity to perceive God and the world in relation to God as real is possible by means of human imagination, a creative capacity intrinsic to the Imago Dei. T hat capacity to image more than what is present to our visual field is the formal “point of contact” between God and human selves. In response to Thiemann’s question, “How can we claim to have knowledge of God?” Green finds a solution that neither reduces God to an idol (merely one more being among others in our experience of the world) nor posits God on a transcendental plain so removed from the world that the life of faith is reduced to agnosticism or Deism. Imagination is the point at which God’s divinity (which is always greater than we can comprehend) and our humanity (part and parcel of any claims we make to knowledge) make formal contact. “Imagination re-presents what is absent; it makes present through images what is inaccessible to direct experience.” Proceeding from the resources   ��������������� William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, The Gifford Lectures 1901-1902, Martin E. Marty, (ed.) (N ew Y ork and Middlesex, UK: Penguin Books, 1982), 58. See the appropriation of James’ insight by Ursula Goodenough, The Sacred Depths of Nature (N ew Y ork: Oxford University Press, 1998), 100.   ���������������������������� José Ignacio Cabezón, (ed.) Scholasticism: Cross-Cultural and Comparative Perspectives, SUNY series “Toward a Comparative Philosophy of Religions”, (Albany, NY : State University of N ew Y ork Press, 1998).   ��������������� Garrett Green, Imagining God: Theology and the Religious Imagination (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), 62; hereafter cited in parentheses.

Imagining God: Revelation, Construction, or Destruction?

177

of “recent Anglo-American philosophy” (35), Green turns to philosophy as a “descriptive grammar” of ordinary linguistic usage (39), including the language of faith. Rather than found theology upon a generic natural theology or philosophical ontology, he seeks to draw the criteria for a philosophical theology of imagination “from the grammar of theology itself” (ibid.). Ostensibly, Green wants to chart a path between the Scylla of natural theology and the Charybdis of a self-imposed religious ghetto: “an unacceptable isolation of theology from common norms of public discourse” (41). One grammatical confusion he seeks to overcome is the notion that science and philosophy offer the high road to reality (and thus constitute the models of any acceptable version of realism) while religion and theology are based on the vagaries of imagination. Building upon the priority of Kuhn’s paradigms in the natural sciences, he concludes: Imagination turns out to be not the opposite of reality but rather the means by which manifold forms of both reality and illusion are mediated to us. Religions characteristically employ this power of imagination in order to make accessible the ultimate “shape,” the organizing pattern, of reality itself, thereby illuminating the meaning and value of human life (83).

At the end of Green’s first theory of imagination, one is left wondering whether he would claim humans have reliable access to “reality itself” apart from Hebraic and Christian revelation, or even what “reality itself” means in his philosophy of imagination. Further, does his philosophical theology of imagination help us when we face conflicting appeals to religious imagination, e.g., the claims of the Bible concerning Jesus as the Christ and the claims of the Qur’an concerning Jesus as the penultimate prophet? Green acknowledges that imagination is the organ of both divine revelation and human illusion. He agrees with Calvin that human nature is “a perpetual factory of idols”. So what are the resources of a faithful imagination in order to discriminate between illumination and illusion? What is “given” to the believer, and therefore to the theologian, is not a foundational experience but a religious paradigm: a normative model of “what the world is like,” embodied in a canon of scripture and expressed in the life of a religious community. The way to recognize Christians … is … by observing how they imagine themselves in the world (133, my emphasis).

Without such a normative model of reality, the religious imagination would be subject to the vagaries of illusion and the temptations of idolatry. But like Kuhn’s   ������������� John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book I, Chap. XI, Section 8, John T. McN eill, (ed.), Ford Lewis Battles, (trans.), Library of Christian Classics Volume XX (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 1:108.

178

God in Postliberal Perspective

account of revolutionary paradigm shifts in science, the very process of conversion to a new religious paradigm calls for a “transvaluation of all values” (N ietzsche). In an allusion to 1 Corinthians 1:25, Green sums up the turning of the tables created by religious imagination: “the illusions of God are more real than the realities of men” (150). On a formal level we may find ourselves agreeing that imagination is the point of contact between divinity and humanity and that to distinguish reality from illusion, we need a normative model from some source(s) of “what the world is like”. But on a material level, what justification does Green offer for Christians’ particular normative models, the two testament canon of Scripture and the Person of Christ as the image (icon) of God? Here hypothetical questions that have been put to the theology of Barth (one of Green’s theological masters) by Bruce McCormack (Princeton Theological Seminary, USA) may be asked of Green: Even granting that if God chose to elevate a human work to the level of divine authority, one would then be justified in recognizing it as revelation, which work or works has God chosen? How is one to know? Why could the Koran not be that work instead of the Bible? The question of how one is to know is exceedingly important for the problem of arbitrariness in the selection of a starting point.10

In brief, Green makes a good case for imagination as a meaningful point of contact between God and humanity, and scripture as the vehicle of a meaningful claim to divine revelation. But a meaningful or highly significant statement for a religious community may or may not be true. (Witness the failed expectations of utopian communities scattered through history, conflicts between religious and scientific cosmologies, and various supersessionisms). Without a comparative analysis of scriptural texts and the uses of concepts like “revelation”, “manifestation”, “proclamation”, and “canon” in traditions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Green’s material (as opposed to formal) appeal to Christ and the Bible as the normative paradigm for religious imagination is open to question from the middle ages down to our day. To avoid this kind of comparative or apologetic question is to give in to “an unacceptable isolation of theology from common norms of public discourse” (41). One problem facing any theology that seeks to ground or justify its claims by the content of Scripture (the classic Scripture principle) is that today religious seekers have greater access to many sacred writings in fresh translations and original languages and many appeals to revelation or wisdom that lead to different construals of world, community, self, and divinity. N ow what does this have to do with the challenges of non-realistic or naturalistic accounts of God-talk for postliberals and others? According to Green …

10  ���������������������������������������������������������������������� Bruce L. McCormack, “Divine Revelation and Human Imagination: Must We Choose Between the Two?” Scottish Journal of Theology 37/4 (December 1984): 451–2. McCormack is speaking in a sceptical voice in this passage, not presenting his own.

Imagining God: Revelation, Construction, or Destruction?

179

The new place of imagination is nowhere more evident than in recent philosophy of science, which one might summarize by saying that the history of science is the history of the scientific imagination, the narrative of the successive paradigms that have held sway in communities of scientists for shorter or longer periods, enabling them to agree about the theory, methods, and results of their research … It is therefore prudent for theologians to ponder the relation of their work to the world of modern science.11

Having said all this, what would Green make of Karen Barad’s concept of “agential realism” in the sciences that I introduced in Chapter 3? Seeking a way beyond the dichotomies of realism and social constructivism and of subject / object in scientific epistemology, she proposes that we should embrace both human agency and constraint in scientific world-making: Agential realism is an epistemological and ontological framework that provides an understanding of science as “material-discursive” practices. These practices are recognized as being productive rather than merely descriptive. However, what is produced is constrained by particular material-discursive factors and not arbitrarily construed. Agential realism theorizes agency in a way that acknowledges that there is a sense in which “the world kicks back” (i.e., nonhuman and cyborgian forms of agency in addition to human ones) without assuming some innocent, symmetrical form of interaction between knower and known.12

Using the example of N iels Bohr’s writings on epistemology in his account of quantum physics, Barad argues that neither classical realism (e.g., N ewton’s cosmology) nor idealism (e.g., social constructivists’ accounts of the history of science) accounts for what goes on when we “know” the world scientifically. She cites this provocative passage from Aage Petersen: Traditional philosophy has accustomed us to regard language as something secondary, and reality as something primary. Bohr considered this attitude toward the relation between language and reality inappropriate. When one said to him that it cannot be language which is fundamental, but that it must be reality which, so to speak, lies beneath language, and of which language is a picture, he would reply “We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say

 ��������������� Garrett Green, Theology, Hermeneutics, and Imagination (N ew Y ork: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), 14–15. 12  ������������������������������������������������������������������������ Karen Barad, “Agential Realism: Feminist Interventions in Understanding Scientific Practices,” Chap. 1 in Mario Biagioli, (ed.), The Science Studies Reader (N ew Y ork: Routledge, 1999), 2. 11

God in Postliberal Perspective

180

what is up and what is down. The word ‘reality’ is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly.”13

The perspective of agential realism suggests that one issue not yet reflected in Green’s first philosophical theology of imagination is the difference human imagination makes to the God who discloses, i.e., the early Green still conceives of revelation in a unilateral fashion alone, from above (from God’s side of the relationship) to below (to our side of the relationship). But what if the human material appropriation or interpretation of revelation has significant implications for the face of God in ongoing disclosure? Just as human observers change or disturb a system by observing it under one set of assumptions rather than another and with one set of scientific apparatus rather than another, so how do our imaginative interpretations of God’s revelation not only change us but also change who God comes to be for us in the world-making of imagination inspired by paradigmatic disclosure (for Christians in the face of Christ, the Gospel, the Eucharist, and ordinary life)? If agential realism provides a provocative model for thinking about a more interactive engagement of God and humanity in the imagination of revelation, then I wonder how God, the world, and the human are in some sense co-constituted when God as Creator and Redeemer images us anew and thereby we imagine God as the One who wills to know us better than we know ourselves. O n some versions of divine transcendence and sovereignty, to know God in ordinary time is a oneway street, from above to below. Or to put it another way, revelation is an act of mono-causality: God alone causes us to know and understand God in certain ways for reasons that remain ultimately inscrutable (compare Luther and Calvin’s hidden God).14 But if there is a suggestive analogy between the “intra-action” of knower and known in science, and knower and known in religion and cultural studies, then all knowledge is a mutually transformative experience for true partners in the relation.15 Speaking in a Christian context, by willing to know a world in all 13

 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ Barad, 6, citing Aage Petersen, “The Philosophy of N iels Bohr,” in A. P. French and P. J. Kennedy, (eds), Niels Bohr: A Centenary Volume (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 302, my emphasis. 14  ���������������������������������������������������������������������������� Bishop Antje Jackelén, former director of the Zygon Center for Religion and Science, Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, first proposed this way of stating the problem of Green’s understanding of God’s sovereignty in revelation. For her constructive theological statement, see Time and Eternity: The Question of Time in Church, Science, and Theology, Barbara Harshaw, (trans.) (Philadelphia and London: Templeton Foundation Press, 2005); in German, Zeit und Ewigkeit (N P: N eukirchen-Vluyn, 2002). 15  ������������������������������������������������������������������������������� An important counter-argument to my point is that the analogy between agential realism and theological realism breaks down: knowing God is more like personal knowledge (living subject encountering or being changed by living subject) than impersonal knowledge (conscious knower encountering and changing unconscious physical phenomena, in a cloud chamber, for example.).

Imagining God: Revelation, Construction, or Destruction?

181

its complexity through creating, calling Israelites and Gentiles, sending Jesus the Word, and sharing the Spirit, God is not the same Character as primordial Being or an Abyss without creation, covenants, peoples, and persons. The God of Israel has so constituted the relationship of knower and known that authentic knowing, Godinspired knowing changes subject and object into dialogical partners beyond a static subject / object relationship.16 God eternally wills to be different in God-self than a nameless, faceless deity by knowing us in Israel, Jesus, the church, and in all creation. Our ongoing, ever renewed knowing of God in the particular persons and media of revelation and sacred signs makes a difference to God, a difference in God, makes “a different God” from our images of abstract, primordial divinity (whatever lies ‘behind’ the original singularity of Big Bang cosmology) in the sense that God has willed to enter this relationship in the hazard and risk of love. Our images of God, our imagining of God, matters to the eternal life of God in creation and Christ, and not only to ourselves as if we were isolated and alien from God, and God were isolated beyond and alien toward us. Put another way, Green’s work in the 1980s suggests that faithful imagination leads to a relatively bounded communion of Christian canon, canonical Christ, and doctrinally faithful people lest wilful human imagination lead them into sin and error. In contrast, faithful imagination inspired by (not hobbled by) the biblical God calls for an open circle that acknowledges the plenitude of revelation and communion between God and creatures, not its scarcity. Of course, discernment between divine illumination of the imagination and self-serving illusion and ideology remains the critical task of all faithful peoples. We hear more on suspicion and discernment from Green later.

However, if the analogies are drawn from the field experiences of anthropologists, to learn by indwelling another society in another culture is to be changed and to alter, perhaps in small ways or more significant ways, their society by intervening through presence and observation. See, for example, the impressionistic ethnography by Martha Ward, Nest in the Wind: Adventures in Anthropology on a Tropical Island, 2nd ed. (N P: Waveland Press, 2004). 16  ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Barad’s agential realism as a mutually transformative relationship between human knowers and the rest of the natural world reminds me, mutatis mutandis, of provocative passages in Barth’s doctrine of election: “The election of grace in the beginning of all things is God’s self-giving in His eternal purpose … God sent forth His own Word. And in so doing He gave Himself. He gave Himself up. He hazarded Himself … But will the human live by the Word of God? What a risk God ran when He willed to take up the cause of created man even in his original righteousness, when He constituted Himself his God and ordained Himself to solidarity with him!” (Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of God, G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, (eds) (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1957), II/2: 161, 163–4).

God in Postliberal Perspective

182

Overcoming God as Other: Don Cupitt Contra Metaphysical Realism In Anglican context there is a late modern philosophic theologian whose life, writings, and public role typify the debates over realism and non-realism we have followed throughout this book. In our age of secularized public institutions and privatized spirituality, the Rev. Dr Don Cupitt (1934–) has publicized, televised, and coaxed “out of the closet” clergy and laity sceptical toward the classic doctrines of the Christian faith, especially the reality of God as conventionally conceived.17 N o one who cares about the future of the doctrine of God in advanced technological societies can afford to dismiss “TeleDon” as a mere populist for marginal village atheists.18 In some ways, he is the San Manuel Bueno, Mártir of late C hristian non-realism. This is very important for readers of Cupitt in N orth America to consider. If one compares the data reported in a 2005 Associated Press / Ipsos Public Affairs poll, it is obvious “the United States differs from other wealthy nations in its religious devotion”.19 What many Americans fail to reflect on is that Don Cupitt’s England and Europe have endured tragic catastrophes since August 1914 that have undermined the moral confidence of many citizens in the established Churches and the God in whose N ame they minister: two world wars in which “our God / unser Gott” fought on both sides, the Shoah of E uropean Jewry and other peoples targeted for genocide that the majority of Christian churches failed to oppose with adequate and timely moral and political force, the collective shame following these disasters, the complex “Troubles” in northern Ireland, and the established role of certain churches in government that failed to extend to other religious communities comparable public recognition and support.20 Further the late twentieth-century surge of religious-ethnic genocide in the Balkans, ongoing conflicts over the Land and nationhood in Israel / Palestine, and the uses of violent terror against civilians and civic workers (N ew Y ork, Madrid, Baghdad, London, Mumbai) by cell groups  ����������������������������������������������������� See the two excellent introductions by N igel Leaves, Odyssey on the Sea of Faith: The Life and Writings of Don Cupitt (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 2004); idem, Surfing on the Sea of Faith: The Ethics and Religion of Don Cupitt (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 2005). These contain up-to-date bibliographies of Cupitt’s works and summaries of his reception. 18  ���������������������������������� D aniel D ennett refers to C upitt’s After God: The Future of Religion (N ew Y ork: Basic Books, 1997), in Breaking the Spell (N ew Y ork: Penguin), 197, 204–205. 19  ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� “AP/Ipsos Poll – Religious Attitudes” based on data collected between May 13 and May 26, 2005: http://wid.ap.org/polls/050606religion.html, accessed 20 August 2007. 20  �������������������������������������������������������������������������� Clifford Longley, “Religion in European Society”, Plenary Lecture for the International Conference: “Healing the World – Working Together: Religion in Global Society”, International Council of Christians and Jews (ICCJ), Chicago, IL, USA, 25 July 2005. Clifford Longley is a journalist, author and broadcaster in the United Kingdom; see idem, Chosen People: The Big Idea that Shaped England and America (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2002). 17

Imagining God: Revelation, Construction, or Destruction?

183

of radical religious traditionalists around the globe (relentlessly covered by and exploiting the media) have impressed upon many the fanatical face of murder and mayhem in the N ame of a wrathful deity. Rather than casually dismiss Cupitt’s critique of metaphysical realism in western Christianity with the traditional categories of error or heresy, I take his œuvre and its reception as significant for a diagnosis of the intellectual and cultural ills facing ecumenical Christianity today. Cupitt’s story is one example of theological malaise within historic churches that will not be cured by minor revisions of traditional doctrine or the restructuring of denominational institutions. In the tradition of Feuerbach, Marx, N ietzsche and Freud, Cupitt suspects that the liberal Christian spirit has failed to inspire the faith and loyalty of recent generations for reasons internal to the “faith of our fathers”. In fact, it is the more anti-modern (not postmodern) forms of monotheism that are enjoying mass renewals. N ew Age syncretism caters to those in search of alternatives to established religions. However, its supermarket approach to spirituality and pantheon of mystical celebrities fails to satisfy the quest of some university-educated adults for a mature faith with intellectual honesty, a faith with “eyes wide open”.21 The globalization of popular, low-cost, low-commitment alternatives to historic religions bodes ill for the future of revisionist, progressive Christianity in mass society. For mainline (or side-line) denominations call upon congregations to give their time and talents sacrificially while engaging their members in more rhetorically complex social, political and theological commitments. Why be among unpopular Protestant dissidents when one can “go with the flow” of mega-churches?22 In fact, if religious membership and commitment are so low cost in seeker sensitive networks, why take it up in the first place? Late modern consumer society offers many people greater physical and psychological well-being, endless entertainment, expanded access to education, new scientific and technical revolutions, longer life spans, and civil religion during war-time and national crises. For those with a guilty conscience over their good fortune, philanthropic opportunities arrive via the internet and the post daily. So why resist hyper-individualism and materialism when civil society, mass culture, science, medicine and technology have taken over so many of God’s functions?23

21

 ��������������������������������������������� For example, see the N ew Age website hosted: http://www.integralnaked.org/, and the Chicago-based publication, Conscious Choice: The Journal of Ecology & Natural Living; http://www.consciouschoice.com, accessed 20 August 2007. 22  ������������������������������������������������������������ On the Willow Creek phenomenon, see Kimon Howland Sargeant, Seeker Churches: Promoting Traditional Religion in a Nontraditional Way (N ew Brunswick, N J and London: Rutgers University Press, 2000). On the rhetorical and strategic problems of liberal Protestants, see Robert Wuthnow, “Fundamentalism and Its Discontents”, Chap. 9 in Christianity in the Twenty-First Century: Reflections on the Challenges Ahead (N ew Y ork and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 23  �������������������� See David F. N oble, The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (N ew Y ork and London: Penguin Books, 1999).

184

God in Postliberal Perspective

Cupitt shows how beginning in the 1600s in the lives of ordinary people in Europe and the Anglo-American world, many things have gone wrong with the cognitive-propositional expressions of the historic western traditions. Rather than castigate him for popularizing this explanation of the decline of institutional religious loyalty, one shared with many social scientists, a postliberal doctrine of God and late modern ecumenical Christianity must find ways to understand and recognize Cupitt’s protest. For he gives voice to a religious other among us in our own families and communities of faith, and within ourselves as we walk between the abyss of terrorism and the labyrinth of technology. San Manuel Bueno, Mártir and the ministry of Don Cupitt are parables of the crisis in faith facing members of late modern religious institutions. As I understand Cupitt’s life and work, his vocation is to give expression to persons who no longer find the concept of God in metaphysical ‘monotheism’ at the centre of their concerns. N evertheless they find particular sacred and secular practices, symbols, places, and stories from more than one tradition transformative and life-giving regardless of whether there is a transcendent divine-in-itself lurking behind them as their origin and goal. In one sense, Cupitt speaks for those professionals (e.g., in education, medicine, social work, therapy, the arts and sciences, government, community organization, some clergy) that have appropriated Feuerbach and Freud’s reductive explanations: all human religious behaviour is a projection-game of the imagination in which the referent of our images of God are our own idealized, best sense of self and society. Therefore, we should construct the best sense of self and society we are able since those ideals have taken over the place once inhabited by transcendental Goodness (Plato) or the God who ruled heaven and earth. A mature spirituality today takes responsibility for constructing the sacred ideals for oneself, rather than ascribing them to a God behind, above, or below our agency. Reality is bracketed by our natural, scientific models of the cosmos, and even these models are our social constructions that will change over time as our knowledge of the cosmos changes. The stability of Aristotelian substances and the certainties of early modern subjectivity must be left behind. In Cupitt’s vocabulary, our humanly invented cultural-linguistic worlds are “outsideless”. With no transcendental referent, “The God of objective monotheism is traditional culture personified.”24 Y et for Cupitt the critical insight unleashed by Kant and Hegel that for centuries Europeans and their descendents have been living inside a “man-made” PlatonicAristotelian matrix that was taken for the ultimate truth about “the real” should be an occasion for creative joy rather than nihilistic despair. In The Sea of Faith BBC series this distinctive Cupitt note is overshadowed at times by N igel Osborne’s musical score that often evokes tones of existential anguish rather than Dionysian joy.25 If one reads the scope of Cupitt’s writings over the decades, the predominant 24  ������������ Don Cupitt, Taking Leave of God (N ew Y ork: Crossroad, 1980), 20. Hereafter references to this book will appear in parentheses. 25  ������������ Don Cupitt, The Sea of Faith (London: BBC, 1984; 2nd ed., London: SCM Press, 1994). Unless one has access to certain university and seminary libraries, the original BBC

Imagining God: Revelation, Construction, or Destruction?

185

theme is one of creative freedom rather than meaninglessness and denial. The return to dust and ashes awaits us across the threshold of death, but until that final day we should enjoy the passage of time detached from anxiety about the afterlife or divine judgement. In fact, the loss of the God of metaphysical realism and hope for immortality frees us to experience the fullness of life, individuality, and relationship here and now in all its tragic and comic dimensions. Without the biblical God framing cosmic history, and Satan ambushing our souls, we no longer need fear divine retribution and church-sanctioned temptations. Exiting this canonical schema opens us to rediscover the historical Jesus as an iconoclastic teacher of wisdom and the Buddha as a symbol of detachment from resentment and envy. Writers, thinkers, artists, and activists who were marginal or heretical in the eyes of their contemporaries can now be welcomed as our spiritual mentors and guides (e.g., Pascal, D-F. Strauss, �������������������������������������������������� Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Annie Besant, N ietzsche, Schweitzer, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Jung, secular humanists, and feminists). ����������������������������������������������������������������������� On the other side of orthodoxy is not a labyrinth leading to decadence and disillusion, but rather an honest, open-eyed, authentic love of self and others that enriches life and struggles for the alleviation of pain and suffering in the world following the example of Jesus and other spiritual guides. The appeal of Cupitt as a minister who speaks for those outside, on the margins of historic Christianity also helps to explain the scorn that greeted his anti-confession of faith. The insider to the Church of England who becomes a converted outsider to the secularity of the vast majority of his fellow Europeans recalls for some Christians the gospel figure of Judas Iscariot. The reprobate disciple betrayed his master for a price and then took his own life voluntarily rather than live with the shame and guilt. However, from Cupitt’s perspective it was the historic Church and traditional theology that betrayed Jesus into the hands of metaphysicians who have obscured the whole point of his life and message. For Jesus lived and died for the proclamation and enactment of a transformative commonwealth, a utopian vision with a social programme in an age of brutal imperialism. Being free to live in the light of this humanly constructed but emancipatory vision is the point of following Jesus, not elevating him to a divine status he never sought nor claimed. In this sense, Cupitt’s sensibility is akin to the Anabaptist heritage of radical discipleship over sedimentary tradition, the liberation theologians of the 1960s and 70s who sought to recover Jesus the cultural revolutionary from the hands of his establishment devotees, and the historical Jesus portraits of Robert Funk’s Jesus Seminar.26

video series is difficult to find in the United States for the original Chicago-based distributor for N orth America is no longer in business. 26  ������������� Marcus Borg, Jesus, A New Vision: Spirit, Culture, and The Life of Discipleship (N ew Y ork: Harper Collins, 1987); John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (N ew Y ork: Harper Collins, 1994).

God in Postliberal Perspective

186

Contra Theistic Metaphysical Realism Cupitt is best known for two in particular of his 34 books, Taking Leave of God (1980) and The Sea of Faith (1984). Y et according to N igel Leaves (Wollaston College, Perth, Western Australia), they represent only the second of seven stages in the radical theologian’s path. These stages include: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

(1971–1979) The N egative Theology (1980–1985) N on-realism – “Coming Out” (1986–1989) Postmodernism and Anti-realism (1990–1997) Expressionism (1998) The Turn to Be-ing (1999–2000) Ordinary Language (2000 onwards) The Religion of the Future.27

This restlessness in Cupitt’s thought over time, his habit of engaging in global doubt as he strips away the sediment of inherited beliefs until he reaches a point of new insight, then submitting his own new insight to critique as well, makes it difficult to know what his current constructive position may be on any issue. Some critics would say that this restlessness is symptomatic of the loss of stable foundations of certainty: once one takes leave of God, biblical revelation, creedal faith, the formative role of tradition in shaping one’s faith, and becomes a radical critic of one’s own church, it is hard to achieve any reflective equilibrium by means of which to construct a new and better philosophic theology. The very method of global doubt precludes any resting point for very long. Being authentic about one’s own doubts replaces certainty and stability as the goals of reflection. However, one repeated theme since Cupitt’s second stage in the early 1980s is his conviction that modern and postmodern persons who are intellectually and culturally aware of what is going on in this age of secularization and pluralism notice the absence of God as traditionally conceived rather than God’s abiding presence. N ow why is this so? What kinds of rationales, rhetoric, evidence, or arguments does Cupitt deploy as he makes this point over and again? One strand in the weave of Cupitt’s thought is the notion that the practice of religion can be viable without the metaphysical underpinnings of modern theism, i.e., one can experience salvation without an objective divine Saviour working behind the process. Or, spirituality is a fruitful way of being in the world without a Holy Spirit that exists objectively apart from my subjectivity, or our inter-subjectivity in communication. So the death of theism’s God cannot falsify C hristianity as a religion in this sense: What would falsify Christianity would be a state of affairs in which Christianity had perished as a religion. If a time were to come when people no longer found  �������������� N igel Leaves, Odyssey on the Sea of Faith, 2–3.

27

Imagining God: Revelation, Construction, or Destruction?

187

salvation in Christianity, no longer heard a divine call in Jesus’ words, no longer experienced conversion through union with Jesus in his death and no longer received the divine spirit, then in that time Christianity would indeed have died. Christianity claims to be saving truth, and if Christianity were to lose the power of salvation it would not be true any more. What else can true religion be but religion through which salvation can be had? Religion is not metaphysics but salvation, and salvation is a state of the self. It has to be appropriated subjectively or existentially. There is no such thing as objective religious truth and there cannot be. The view that religious truth consists in … the objective correspondence of doctrinal statements with historical and metaphysical fact is a modern aberration, and a product of the decline of religious seriousness. Religious truth is not speculative or descriptive, but practical (42–3).

At this stage of his thought around 1980, Cupitt is fusing together concepts of religious truth from Kant, Schleiermacher, and Kierkegaard. Religion is practical not theoretical, salvation is a “state of the self”, and must be appropriated subjectively. In this passage objective religious truth refers to claims that would be asserted as true for all persons, regardless of individual persuasion. In Taking Leave of God, Cupitt does not consider an alternative way. According to internal realism as my way of framing postliberal theology, assertions of “justified true beliefs” (religious, scientific, ethical, artistic) always emerge in time out of our communities of inquiry, cultural-linguistic systems, personal life-experiences, and the testimony of others. Even as finite, fallible, temporal, socialized truth-tellers, we make these claims about something more and other than our so-called private states of experience. Religious persons make claims about the origin and goal of creation, history, society, and corporate life as well as personal ways of being. Embodied human truth-tellers aren’t disembodied brains in a vat or mysteriously hooked up to a deceptive digital matrix we could never detect. When Christianity gives up its stake in claims about creation, history, society, and reality that are more or other than my private states of the heart, then the multiple dimensions of salvation become truncated. “Salvation” as self-fulfilment for the sake of personal well-being displaces the larger senses of salvation as the renewal of the cosmos with implications for history, society, and corporate life. Unfortunately Cupitt at this stage writes as if he were reinventing C hristianity for an audience where cynical scepticism, radical individualism, political passivity, and mid-life crises set the agenda and content of theology. In this second stage of his “coming out” as a disbeliever in the deity of orthodox Christianity, Cupitt downplays other alternatives to non-realism. One viable alternative is the path taken by ecumenical and interfaith religious scholars in a variety of traditions: selective realism and non-realism about the referents of religious texts and practices. Take the biblical stories of the Garden of Eden, Mary’s extraordinary conception of Jesus in Matthew and Luke, and the visions of the end of time in apocalyptic literature like the Book of Revelation. There are numerous biblical scholars, theologians, religionists, clergy, and laity who would not require

188

God in Postliberal Perspective

that other believers and church leaders should confess an unequivocal belief in the historical, biological, anthropological, gynaecological, and cosmological realism of these narratives. Being selective about what one takes to be real, realistic, or factually accurate in the Scriptures and liturgy and what one takes to be symbolic or figurative is a common practice among Christians, Jews, and other believers in the reality of God. Further, many believers are aware that the language of Scripture and liturgy about God need not always be taken in a literalistic or factual way. Conservative evangelical scholars, clergy, and laity have cared about being distinguished from Protestant fundamentalists since the 1940s and are active in the renewed dialogue between the natural sciences and religion. This and other ordinary social phenomena offer evidence that conservative or orthodox faith need not preclude a selective non-realism and non-literalism. One possible historical explanation why the Sea of Faith N etwork is not well established in the United States is that the fundamentalist vs modernist controversies of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries disseminated the idea that one could be realistic about some beliefs and non-realistic about others. Cupitt and the Sea of Faith N etwork in the United Kingdom, N ew Zealand, and Australia are faced with an ironic situation at the beginning of the new millennium. In the very age when they and others proclaimed the triumph of secularization over traditional metaphysical faith, and celebrated N ietzsche’s philosophy as prophetic in regard to our age, we have indeed witnessed the eternal return of the same. Various forms of orthodoxy or more conservative versions of the faith are ascendant among Christians, Muslims and Jews. Ecclesial liberal movements are anxiously on the defensive. The growth sector of Christianity is not on the old liberal mainline but in the Pentecostal, charismatic, evangelical, and fundamentalist movements among the developing nations that proclaim the Gospel in a supernatural framework, and for some congregations miracles of divine tongues, healing, and prophecy are expected every weekend. Thus Cupitt is challenged to find pure non-realists to follow his movement against the Christian tradition to restore the Kingdom proclaimed by Jesus (but without God in it). Are there philosophical and theological reasons why more academics are not drawn from the ranks of either secularism or the Church to join the Sea of Faith to renew religion in our time? Doubting the Non-Realist Philosophy of Religion There are a number of weaknesses in Cupitt’s arguments with both metaphysical and critical realism. These weaknesses open the door to both agnostic, theistic, and internal realistic alternatives to his programme: 1.  Given the early influence of Kant on Cupitt’s philosophy of religion, it is surprising that he doesn’t draw out the implication from Kant’s first critique of the traditional theistic arguments that by the nature of the case, God’s existence can neither be proven nor falsified. Within Kant’s philosophy when theoretical

Imagining God: Revelation, Construction, or Destruction?

189

reason applies itself to this task, its categories end up demoting God to merely another being within the world as we apprehend it through the pure intuitions of space and time, the category of causality, etc.28 If Kant is correct, then theoretical reason can neither include God into its theories as if God were one more fact about the world, nor exclude God as if “She” were an extinct species. In a Kantian framework, theoretical reason must content itself with a critical agnosticism about God’s existence, and therefore whether it is rational to believe in God must be taken up by practical reason.29 2.  Because he can offer significant objections to the traditional theistic arguments for God’s existence, and alternative psychological and socio-historical explanations of why faith in God arose, Cupitt writes as if he has disproved God’s existence and so can exclude any sense of the reality of God from his theology, i.e., for Cupitt if traditions like natural theology, philosophy of religion, or philosophical theology fail to prove God’s existence to the sceptic, then God must not exist. The kinds of rationales or testimony that are offered from within communities of faith by persons that believe in God (Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or Hindu), or that are presented by constructive theologians, are discounted from the start. The success or failure of natural theology is taken to be the test case for rational belief in God (21–33). 3.  As a consequence, God’s non-existence becomes the new dogma or basic conviction of Cupitt’s theology. This dogma is fortified by retelling the story of the secularization of the western world as evidence that many educated persons no longer believe in God, and therefore have rejected the established churches and religion. Rather than a late modern openness to criticize the modern critique of God and religion, Cupitt carries into his version of postmodernism a residue of the psychological and rhetorical certainty of modern atheism that God never has existed. 4.  Once God’s non-existence becomes the new given, Cupitt’s project of radically demythologizing religious language can proceed apace without his concern about the counter-intuitive nature of many of his proposals. So the nonrealist Christian can practise spirituality without the Spirit, follow Christ without incarnation or resurrection, and build a Kingdom community inside or outside the Church. In Cupitt’s project, the task of the Christian is to take over all the functions of God since there is no divine agent left to enact them. 5.  The new religion or the non-realist Christianity that replaces the old is by default an exercise in human good works. There cannot be divine grace, 28  ����������������������������������������������������������������������������� Kant’s arguments were also applied to William Alston’s language about God in Chap. 3, “Philosophical Versions of Realism: Alston’s Alethic Realism”. 29  ��������������� Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Ingeborg Heidemann, (ed.), UniveralBibliothek (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam Jun., 1966), 671; idem, Critique of Pure Reason, (trans. and ed.) Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (N ew Y ork and Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 588–89 (B 668, Kant’s second edition); also see Stephen Körner, Kant (N ew Y ork: Penguin, 1955), 122.

God in Postliberal Perspective

190

atonement, forgiveness, justification, or sanctification in a context where we must assume the functions of divinity for ourselves and the world. Thus to be hopeful about the future of humanity and the planet, Cupitt must be more optimistic about the human condition than many modern and late modern theologians and moral philosophers have been in the shadow of the twentieth century. For example, the religious individual can contain “God”: “It is true that I know I can achieve my spiritual destiny just because I am capax dei, that is, capable of recognizing and laying upon myself the religious demand” (87). Such individuals have a “spiritual destiny … to achieve perfect disinterestedness … almost like egolessness, for it is perfectly non-acquisitive, non-defensive, self-communicating and free” (87–8). The new religion fusing elements of Buddhism and Christianity requires spiritual virtuosos. O rdinary sinners need not follow for there is no holy God to transform them into saints. 6.  Cupitt’s strategy in defence of his non-realist theology is never to be committed for very long to any particular stage or emphasis of his project. This elusiveness helps to hide the fact of the basic dogma in the background of many of his writings, the non-existence of God. Once one has come to doubt the dogma of God’s non-existence for whatever reason (as an agnostic, a seeker, a thinker, or a convert), Cupitt’s programme of demythologizing loses its radical capacity to shock. 7.  Another theological issue that Keith Ward and other critics of Cupitt have raised is whose “God” has died for Cupitt?30 The fairly consistent Victorian presentation of God as supernatural, authoritarian, a punitive patriarch, heteronymous, remote, arbitrary, and legalistic, causes one to wonder how intimately acquainted Cupitt was with the presentation of “God” in modern theology. For Cupitt, the prophetic Spirit has ceased: …������������������������������������������������������������������������������� the original prophetic type of experience of God is today no longer available to us. [It is] no longer possible for us to have quite the original prophetic experience of being summoned by an alien almighty and commanding will. The awesome theophany of pure commanding authority seems not to occur now. For us God is no longer a distinct person over against us who authoritatively and by his ipse dixit imposes the religious demand upon us … God is not an almighty individual other than the religious requirement whose will creates the religious requirement, makes it authoritative and binds it upon us. Rather, God is the religious requirement personified, and his attributes are a kind of projection of its main features as we experience them (85).

 ��������������� In Keith Ward, Holding Fast to God: A Reply to Don Cupitt (London: SPCK, 1982), p. 106ff, the author combines aspects of both traditional and process theism to reply to C upitt’s Taking Leave of God. The cumulative effect of Ward’s arguments shows that Cupitt failed to consider the varieties of theism within modern theology, and how both traditional and process theists have been responsive to atheist criticism of rational belief in God. 30

Imagining God: Revelation, Construction, or Destruction?

191

But those attributes of God as a set of ideals for spiritual virtuosos include immutability and impassibility (93–94). For Cupitt in 1980, God was “that silent, unconditional, unchanging demand” of the religious requirement (94). He appends a qualification to traditional talk of God (summed up in the single quotes): “‘But God is an unchangeable person, an eternal person who cannot be bent, who yields to no persuasions.’ An unchangeable person is scarcely in the usual sense a person at all” (104). In fact, Cupitt criticizes the notion of divine suffering for, “There is nothing wrong with orthodox theism as an ideal” (111). “… although [Christianity] gives such prominence to its great tragic story of the passion of Christ, it traditionally insisted that this was only a human event. God does not suffer: he cannot” (112). For Cupitt, “modern patripassian theism is found inadequate as a substitute for the older faith” (112). Why? I suppose it is conceivable that there should be such a being [who shares human suffering], but is it not grotesque that God himself now fails to achieve the religious ideal? God is immersed in affliction, and struggles to achieve salvation! However comforting it may be to have so large a shoulder to cry on, such a being is as much in need of deliverance and victory over evil as we are. The god of the modern patripassian believer is nothing but Humanity … (112).

In these and other passages, Cupitt is more open to denying the existence of the God of orthodox theism than reconstructing the Christian doctrine of God in light of fresh reading and new experience. Thus there is no sustained attention in his work either to Barth’s trinitarian and christological reconstruction of the doctrine of God or the di-polar concept of God in process theism. 8.  A more humble natural theology: An alternative approach to the test of natural theology in Cupitt would be to ask a different question: not whether natural theology has proven or falsified the existence of God, but whether natural theology has shown it is not irrational to believe in God, i.e., can the theist offer rationales (not proofs) for belief in God and respond critically to arguments that attempt to undermine that belief (e.g., theodicy)? The theist’s motivation for offering such rationales and critiques may itself be a faith formed within a religious tradition, or transformative religious experience. But the engagement with non-realism can be carried out in more public terms of rationales and criticism of attempts at falsification (arguments that both theists and non-theists acknowledge as part of their philosophical heritage). Alvin Plantinga’s God, Freedom, and Evil is one example of this kind of programme in natural theology that Cupitt does not engage. In the conclusion to this book, Plantinga (University of N otre Dame, USA) writes, … it must be conceded that not everyone who understands and reflects on [a version of the ontological argument’s] central premise—that the existence of a maximally great being is possible—will accept it. Still, it is evident, I think, that

God in Postliberal Perspective

192

there is nothing contrary to reason or irrational in accepting this premise. What I claim for this argument, therefore, is that it establishes, not the truth of theism, but its rational acceptability. And hence it accomplishes at least one of the aims of the tradition of natural theology.31

In fact, it would be interesting to know if Cupitt has considered the neo-analytic renaissance in philosophy of religion represented by the work of Plantinga, William Alston, et al. 9.  A postliberal critique of Cupitt’s theological method can be mounted from Frei’s Types of Christian Theology that was summarized in the introduction using Ford’s version.32 In terms of Frei and Ford’s ideal types, a deep-seated problem in Cupitt’s whole approach to the Christian theological enterprise is that another framework, a nonrealist philosophy of religion, is so privileged that dialogue with the mainstream of Christian academic theology (Types 2, 3, and 4) is made extremely difficult if not impossible. Thus Cupitt cannot enter into dialogue with Type 2 that takes external frameworks seriously; engages with Christian distinctive beliefs and practices; finds one privileged, external framework and applies it to understand Christianity and show its contemporary relevance. Ford’s examples of Type 2 are Bultmann’s use of existentialism (related to Cupitt’s early writings) and Tracy’s use of hermeneutic phenomenology. But because both Bultmann and Tracy’s theologies affirm the reality of God, Cupitt today must reject them as insufficiently radical to address the “outsideless” postmodern world of his cosmology. Likewise, Cupitt cannot enter into dialogue with Type 3, a middle way between extremes, in which no one framework is privileged. This approach seeks dialogue between Christian theology and other frameworks by using a method of correlation. For example, Tillich’s theology sought to correlate the questions and issues of modern culture with informed responses from Christian theology. Or, Schleiermacher’s project was an attempt to relate Christian self-description (the expression of Christian pious affections in the doctrines of the community) with external descriptions (historical-critical approaches to the Bible and life of Jesus). But because both Tillich and Schleiermacher’s theologies affirm the reality of God (using different ontological vocabularies), Cupitt today must reject them as insufficiently radical to relate the Christian community to his audience of a posttheistic secular world. Finally, Cupitt cannot enter into dialogue with Type 4, the postliberal approach. It gives first importance to Christian self-description, and seeks to avoid the two extremes of a segregated framework (Type 5) or one dominated by external frameworks (Type 1). Type 4 finds Type 3’s dialogue “inherently unstable”.33 It both acknowledges faith’s commitments and the need to test those commitments  ����������������� Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1977), 112.  ����������� Hans Frei, Types of Christian Theology. See my introduction, pp. 6ff. 33  ����������� Ibid., 27. 31

32

Imagining God: Revelation, Construction, or Destruction?

193

in dialogue with others as in Barth’s theology. Because Barth affirmed the reality of God in trinitarian and christological terms, Cupitt must reject him (although they could share in the critique of natural theology and systematic metaphysics). Because Barth refused to build his theology on foundations of historicist recoveries of Jesus or existential anthropology per se, Cupitt would reject him as too withdrawn from the modern world. Barth offered no systematic apologetic, but rather an ad hoc approach to different thinkers and frameworks. Ironically, Cupitt can also be read as an ad hoc theologian, but his commitment to non-realism is so important that it is hard to imagine a Cupitt–Barth dialogue getting off the ground. Likewise, it is hard to imagine a Cupitt dialogue with postliberal theology. As N igel Leaves argues, “Contrary to the approaches of … post-liberals like George Lindbeck … who have withdrawn into the cultural-linguistic narratives of particular communities, Cupitt proposes religion that embraces postmodernism. With postmodern irony [Cupitt] quips: ‘a seriously postmodern definition of true religion: religion that makes you smarter than your god.’”34 Again, the secular postmodern framework so dominates Cupitt’s later writings that dialogue is cut off with the mainstream of Christian theology across most of the spectrum. 10.  A brief statement of the framework of Cupitt’s writings is his “A Democratic Philosophy of Life.” N igel Leaves calls it a “creed for non-realism”. • • • • • • • •

Until about two centuries ago human life was seen as being lived on a fixed stage, and as ruled by eternal norms of truth and value. (This old worldpicture may nowadays be called ‘realism’, ‘platonism’ or ‘metaphysics’). But now everything is contingent – that is, humanly postulated, mediated by language and historically evolving. There is nothing but the flux. There is no Eternal Order of Reason above us that fixes all meanings and truths and values. Language is unanchored. Modern society no longer has any overarching and authoritative myth. Modern people are ‘homeless’ and feel threatened by nihilism. We no longer have any ready-made or ‘dogmatic’ truth, nor have we access to any ‘certainties’ or ‘absolutes’ that exist independently of us. We are, and we have to be, democrats and pragmatists who must go along with a current consensus world view. Our firmest ground and starting-point is the vocabulary and world view of ordinary language and everyday life, as expressed, for example, in such typically modern media as the novel and the newspaper. The special vocabularies and world views of science and religion should be seen as extensions and supplements built out of the life-world, and checked back against it.

34  �������������� N igel Leaves, Surfing on the Sea of Faith, 84, quoting from Cupitt, After God: The Future of Religion (London: Weidenfeld and N icholson, 1997), 85.

God in Postliberal Perspective

194

•

Science furthers the purposes of life by differentiating the life-world, developing causal theories, establishing mathematical relationships and inventing technologies. Religion seeks to overcome nihilism, and give value to life. In religion we seek to develop shared meanings, purposes, narratives. Religion’s last concern is with eternal happiness in the face of death.35

•

What is striking about this creed is how it begins as a kind of counter-narrative to a metanarrative called “‘realism’, ‘platonism’ or ‘metaphysics’”, but by its sixth tenet it becomes a new kind of metanarrative itself: “We are, and we have to be, democrats and pragmatists who must go along with a current consensus world view.” Whose “current consensus world view” must “we” (‘modern people’ or non-realists) go along with? N aturalism? Secularism? Global capitalism? Multiculturalism? Consumerism? The United States of America and its allies? Global Islam? Global Christianity? Our late modern situations have made multiple world views available to us. Who gets to define what our “current consensus world view” is? And if that “current consensus” calls upon us to do things, believe things, or engage in practices that appear false, unjust, or cruel in light of our other convictions, don’t we need a counter-narrative to the metanarrative of the “current consensus”? In the conflict of counter- and metanarratives that make up our social worlds and lives, some persons and communities search for something more or better than the “current consensus world view”. That search (that always begins from within our acquired frameworks and vocabularies) can turn toward old or new versions of “‘realism,’ ‘platonism’ or ‘metaphysics’”. But it can also turn toward sources of divine revelation, sacred wisdom, or prophetic critique that resist reduction to anyone’s “current consensus world view”. A Postliberal Response to the Masters of Suspicion Beyond my (left-wing postliberal) criticisms above, what would a more (rightwing) postliberal critique of Cupitt’s non-realist philosophy of religion look like? Garret Green’s Theology, Hermeneutics, and Imagination is a useful work to bring into conversation with Cupitt. 36 For Green takes as his conversation partners the “masters of suspicion” (with Feuerbach and N ietzsche as the primary exemplars). He brings them into dialogue with Kant, Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788), Barth, Kuhn, Frei, and Derrida. Since Kant, Marx, N ietzsche, and Freud play major roles in Cupitt’s story of secularization and the ‘death of God’ in The Sea of Faith, it is helpful to see how a postliberal theologian enters into conversation with them. Would Cupitt or some members of ‘The Sea of Faith’ N etworks be open to or impressed by Green’s arguments? But if Green offers a viable alternative  ��������������������������� As quoted by N igel Leaves, Surfing on the Sea of Faith, 157.  ������� Green, Theology, Hermeneutics, and Imagination, hereafter cited in parentheses.

35 36

Imagining God: Revelation, Construction, or Destruction?

195

to both theological non-realism (Cupitt) and religious conservatism, that profits from a critical conversation with suspicion, then there is evidence that postliberal claims about God can hold their own in today’s hyper-pluralism of theological discourse.37 Green begins with a helpful distinction between (a) Cartesian doubt and Hume’s scepticism, and (b) the new kind of doubt invented by Feuerbach. That suspicious doubt was utilized by Marx, N ietzsche, and Freud to undermine traditional faith in God in western discourse. The first kind of doubt, (a) is epistemological, and attacks the knowability of the objects of belief (God, the supernatural, miracles, etc.). Hume denied the “validity or meaningfulness of faith in God” for he had no need for the “theistic hypothesis” to explain nature, history, and human nature (189). An improved apologetics, natural theology, or philosophy of religion can respond to this form of doubt (a). The second kind of doubt (b) in the hermeneutics of suspicion is moral: “it undermines the credibility of religion by attacking not its objects … (at least not directly) but rather its motives” (12). This critique of faith claims its place as immanent to believers’ worlds rather than an external perspective. Feuerbach’s doubt is not susceptible to conventional apologetic arguments but requires instead “theological therapy to cure the propensity to suspicion that is embedded in our own tradition” (189). Green’s offers such a therapy by criticizing the apologetic obsession of modern, i.e., liberal theology and offering in its place a postliberal hermeneutics of “faithful imagination”. A major contrast in Green’s work is the changing status of imagination between our modern past and late modern present.38 For modern thinkers like Feuerbach, imagination was posited in opposition to reality. Without the discipline of critical reason, imagination was the “source of speculation, fantasy, and illusion … the organ of fiction and error”. Feuerbach’s hermeneutic of suspicion presupposes that “religion is the product of imagination; therefore religious claims are untrue” (14). Y et Green documents a sea change in the role accorded to imagination in late twentieth-century thought and culture. With the loss of foundations of certainty in epistemology, recognition of the relativity of cultures, religions, and morals in anthropology, and Kuhn’s account of scientific revolutions as global paradigm shifts, our immediate access to reality has become problematized across the board. “Imagination now becomes the unavoidable means to apprehending ‘reality’”, rather than the necessary root of all illusion (14). Green extends this insight to religion and theology as well: “religion – including the Christian religion – is a product of human imagination” (16). The human capacity to image things that are “not there”, in other words, not immediately present to bodily sense (e.g., the 37

 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� It is surprising that Feuerbach is a relatively minor character in the historical narrative C upitt tells in The Sea of Faith, 25, 76, 141–42, 213, 227, 230, and 248. 38  ���������������������������������������������������������������������������� For a history of imagination Green overlooks that traces its course through premodern, modern, and postmodern narratives of culture and thought, see Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture (London and N ew Y ork: Routledge, 1988).

196

God in Postliberal Perspective

whole cosmos, planet earth, or the human species as a whole), and to organize sense experience and complex data into creative new patterns functions as the point of contact between humanity, the world, and ultimately God’s revelation in Christ. “The mark of the Christian in the twilight of modernity is therefore imaginative faithfulness, trust in the faithfulness of God who alone guarantees the conformity of our images to reality, and who has given himself to us in forms that may only be grasped by imagination” (16). This is a pregnant statement of Green’s hermeneutic: he still functions with a type of correspondence theory of truth (‘conformity’) but grounds it in unique divine action rather than a metaphysic, apologetic, or philosophy of religion. The “forms” in which God is given are found primarily in the Christian canon of the Bible and the sacraments (baptism and the Eucharist), and the figure of Jesus Christ functions as the normative sign or form of God’s self-giving. Through imagination Christians should indwell the texts of Scripture to discover images of the world and human life as God’s creations redeemed from sin and evil through Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and promised return. Access to God’s revelation in Christ mediated by Scripture and sacraments became an obstacle to faith in the Enlightenment due to the problem identified by first Kant, and then Hegel as the “positivity” of the Christian religion. Doctrines and practices were grounded “not on universal reason but rather on arbitrary appeals to the authority of specific historical figures and occurrences” (26). “Positivity” was Kant’s term for the scandal of particularity: if the Christian gospel was intended as God’s means of redemption for humankind, then why was this essential message disclosed only in certain times and places in the ancient world and only to certain peoples (the ancient Israelites and early Christians) in historically specific forms? Why not reveal the divine will through nature, human reason, and conscience that could be accessed by all at any time or place? Green finds it necessary to defend scriptural positivity for it is the source of the very images and patterns through which God makes contact with Christians. Kant’s project of removing the positivity of the biblical message to uncover the moral and rational core of the faith is identified as the origin of modern, liberal theology and Green labels all such theology “accommodationist”, i.e., once the biblical images, patterns, and narratives were found to be too particular to convey universal truths of reason, other secular or proto-secular visions of reality took their place and theology had to accommodate its vision to Enlightenment and modern standards of truth, reality, being, etc. The scandal of positivity and an accommodationist strategy are certainly represented in Cupitt’s programme with his commitment to the various quests for the historical Jesus and openness to accommodate the Christian message to the post-theistic secularity of the western world. Certainly one can see a continuity of ideas and rhetoric of accommodation from Kant and Hegel through Bultmann’s demythologizing and the “death of God” theologians of the 1960s to Cupitt’s radical non-realism. But one wonders, how much positivity is required for Green’s biblical theology of imagination?

Imagining God: Revelation, Construction, or Destruction?

197

Apparently, quite a bit, enough in fact to close down a potential conversation with Cupitt, the Sea of Faith N etwork, some religious feminists and womanists. In a chapter contributed to a collective project that defends the one and only name of God as “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”, and that condemns Christian feminism as an outright alternative religion to Christianity, Green argues that, “God is not male, yet the appropriate language in which to describe, address, and worship him is nevertheless masculine”.39 Green’s view of the positive language of the Christian biblical canon is so high that he claims, “… in a Bible whose cultural setting is so thoroughly patriarchal one never encounters an explicit appeal to the masculinity of God for any purpose whatever. Even in the history of doctrine one is hard-pressed to find such appeals”.40 When we recall Christian institutional history, it is hard to dissociate the masculinity of biblical language for God, the patriarchs, most of the prophets, Jesus, and the apostles from the exclusion of Christian women from education and ordained offices for most of Christian history.41 When Green asserts that the negative task of faithful theology is “the critique of all idolatry – that is, of every attempt to construct models of God out of human religious, moral, and cultural experience”, he fails to take account of the prophets, poets, sages, and redactors of the Bible who worked with their own human religious, moral, and cultural experiences to represent God’s image to their contemporaries.42 When Green raises for himself the kind of question that Cupitt might raise, why the biblical story rather than the Qur’an or a classic philosophic text as the religious norm, he responds that this is “a question for which the theologian has no answer – except the one implicit in the narrative itself: that this story is not just another figment of the imagination but God’s own story; in short, that this story is true”.43 So the grounding of Green’s appeal to the Bible as the norm for Christian understanding of God, the world, and the self is that the Bible confirms the truth of the biblical story. This circular argument may reassure some orthodox believers but excludes many others, including those Christians who seek better rationales for the faith that claims their loyalty to God as real. In his critique of both patriarchy and theological feminism, Green must admit that not all positivity in the Bible is theologically relevant: The error of role-model theology [among both feminists and traditionalists] is to confuse form with content: to assume that the cultural language of the story, rather than the narrative depiction of the protagonist [i.e., God in Christ], is the 39

 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Green, “The Gender of God and the Theology of Metaphor,” in Alvin F. Kimel, Jr., (ed.), Speaking the Christian God: The Holy Trinity and the Challenge of Feminism (Grand Rapids, MI and Leominster, UK: Eerdmans; Gracewing, 1992), 64. 40  ���������� Ibid., 62. 41   David F. N oble, A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science (N ew Y ork and Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1992). 42  ������������������������������������������������������������ Green, “The Gender of God and the Theology of Metaphor,” 57. 43  ���������� Ibid., 58.

198

God in Postliberal Perspective theologically normative content. I do not wish to minimize the difficulties of making the distinction; the attempt to do so, however, is as unavoidable as it is controversial.44

Green’s version of the form vs content distinction has the makings of a good argument for retaining the divine kernel beneath the husk of ancient culturalbiblical language, or that demythologizing is a modern way of seeking the theological content that norms belief without requiring literal belief in the detailed forms of biblical narration of the acts of God. One can imagine some feminist theologians replying to Green that he is the one who has confused the form of biblical language (the representation of God as King, Father, and Son) with the content of theological affirmation, God as Creator and Provider, God as the one who sends the Christ into the world, God as Trinity. This argument about positivity between Green and feminists could be extended to other topics in biblical interpretation: demonic possession and exorcism, “the mighty acts of God”, religious and moral exclusivism, biblical cosmologies, marriage and family, household ethics, homosexuality, etc. Green views as a threat to biblical language and revelation “the ‘naturalization’ of the gospel in the modern world” (27–8). But I wonder whether the alternative is a “supernaturalization” or “transcendentalizing” of ancient biblical language that disrupts meaningful dialogue with the natural and human sciences, many feminists, and post-theists like Cupitt. In the impasse between reductive forms of naturalism and interventionist supernaturalism, between biblical positivity and universal reason, there must be alternative ways Green does not explore.45 These alternatives would aid postliberal faith in God to escape the positivism (as opposed to an inevitable ‘positivity’ or ‘particularity’) of biblical revelation alone. Theological interpretation of the Bible must engage both its positivity and the history of its effects in culture and society. Apart from Green’s disappointing defence of biblical positivity, I also wonder whether his account of imagination in science and theology is overly dependent on Kuhn’s philosophy of science. Green writes as if Kuhn’s theory of incommensurable scientific paradigms is the postmodern theory of science that both scientists and religionists ought to affirm. He employs Kuhn’s concepts of logically holistic paradigms and conversion-like paradigm-shifts to overcome the charge of fideism (authoritarian, experiential, or relativistic) against theologies like his own that rely on Barth, Wittgenstein, and the positivity of biblical language. For Green, scientific 44  ������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Ibid, 56. By comparison with this chapter from 1992 where some form vs content distinction is justified, Green consistently attacks the form vs content distinction in 2000 in Theology, Hermeneutics, and Imagination, 43, 47. 45  ������������������������������������������������������������������������������ In the conversation between process thought and dialectical theology, seeking alternatives to reductive (i.e. atheistic) naturalism and supernaturalism has been going on for some time. See Bernard M. Loomer, “N eo-N aturalism and N eo-Orthodoxy”, Journal of Religion 28/2 (April 1948): 79–91, for a comparison of Whitehead and Henry N elson Wieman with Emil Brunner and H. Richard N iebuhr.

Imagining God: Revelation, Construction, or Destruction?

199

and religious paradigms may be incommensurable (not subject to falsification by an external set of standards dependent on a different paradigm) as long as they are not incomparable. What he fails to engage with are neo-naturalist perspectives on the history and justification of scientific knowledge that offer important alternatives to Kuhn, e.g., Willem Drees employs Philip Kitcher’s philosophy of science as an alternative to both Kuhn and Imre Lakatos’ theories of science to argue that we should understand science as the “interplay of various aspects (theories, techniques, questions, etc.) in a variety of interacting individual practices”.46 D rees’ point is that just because one can show “methodological parallels between science and theology”, does not guarantee that the rational validity of scientific claims transfers to theological claims.47 Green argues that if we buy Kuhn’s philosophy of science, then the sharp Kantian distinction between scientific knowledge (theoretical reason) and religious knowledge (practical reason) falls apart. But Drees asks why must we follow Kuhn if better alternatives have appeared since the publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions? Here’s an example of how Green uses Kuhn’s concepts to bolster his position. With regard to the Bible, The vision of reality that Christians glimpse in Holy Scripture has the kind of specificity, particularity, and uniqueness that resists reduction to systematic principles and is incommensurable with other ways of organizing the world.... Our claim is that just this collection of ancient writings, the canon of the Old and N ew Testaments, uniquely embodies the paradigm that allows our mortal minds to imagine, not just an ideal world, but the real world! ....like Galileo, we can invite others to look through our lenses, but we cannot predetermine or control what they will see (81–2).

But note that the uniqueness and truthfulness claimed for the biblical vision of reality is made without detailed material comparison to any other sacred writings or religious worldview. Where Green does some comparative analysis is between his summary of the biblical vision and the philosophical critiques of Kant, Feuerbach, and N ietzsche. Following the scholarship of John Glasse and Van Harvey, Green agrees that there are two suspicious theories of religion in Feuerbach.48 In the early Feuerbach, 46  ������� Drees, Religion, Science and Naturalism, 240. See 236–83. He draws upon Philip Kitcher, The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions (N ew Y ork and Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1993). More recently see John H. Zammito’s critique of appeals to Kuhn to justify the “science studies” movement in his A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-Positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), Chapters 3–5 on Kuhn. 47  ������� Drees, Religion, Science and Naturalism, 139–44, especially 142–43. 48  ����������������������������������� John Glasse, “Barth on Feuerbach,” Harvard Theological Review 57/2 (April 1964):69–96; Van A. Harvey, Feuerbach and the Interpretation of Religion (Cambridge,

200

God in Postliberal Perspective

the objects of religious faith are alienated self-projections that originate in the human subject and therefore are illusions without cognitive support. In the later Feuerbach, “… religion ‘is no longer explained in terms of self-consciousness alone but in terms of a contingent self confronted with an all-encompassing nature upon which it is absolutely dependent’”. This later theory is superior for it “‘assumes, as the earlier did not, that believers have intellectual grounds, albeit mistaken, for their beliefs’” (86).49 The problem Green detects with both of these theories of religion is that they assume without justification the axiom: “that imagination and reality comprise an unproblematic duality, that they are opposed and mutually exclusive terms” (92). Feuerbach could assume this axiom with his nineteenth-century audience for many then believed that humans have access to reality apart from imagination in the natural and historical sciences, or in many cases of immediate sense perception. Green agrees with Feuerbach’s statement of fact that “religion is the product of imagination”. He disagrees with his value judgement that “because religion is produced by imagination … we are justified in treating it with suspicion. Why is Feuerbach suspicious of religious ideas and sentiments? Because they are the fruits of imagination and therefore cannot be true” (93). Green credits Feuerbach as the first modern philosopher of religion to turn to imagination to explain the origins and vitality of human religions. “Specifically, [Feuerbach] locates religion at the point where the emotions impact the imagination. The job of the imagination is to represent the contents of emotion, a task it carries out by means of images taken from the world of the senses” (100). This connection between imagination and emotion will be picked up later by Barth when he appropriates Feuerbach in his critique of Schleiermacher’s influential appeal to pious affections. According to Feuerbach, human mind or reason (Vernunft) presents itself as “type-creating”, “emotional”, and “sensuous”. The problem of imagination is that it “cheats reason … [it] is deceptive in the nature of the case, esp. when it becomes allied with feeling and wishing”. What Green uncovers through Harvey’s reconstruction of Feuerbach’s two theories of religion is that there is a suspicious “prejudice against images, feelings, and – most striking of all in this philosopher of sensuousness – the senses as sources of truth” (101). Since the intent of the hermeneutics of suspicion is to carry out a more ethical, radical critique of religion and conventional wisdom, to uncover the internal prejudices assumed as criteria of judgement is to find a way out of Feuerbach’s reduction of religion to (mere) imagination or projection and out of his reduction of theology to anthropology. A fair postliberal response to Don Cupitt can learn here from Green’s reading of Feuerbach. What are the internal prejudices assumed as criteria of judgement in Cupitt’s critique of Christian theism for which he offers no justification and that function at the axiomatic level of his writing? UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 49  �������������������� Green cites Harvey, Feuerbach and the Interpretation of Religion, 162 and 199.

Imagining God: Revelation, Construction, or Destruction?

201

Like Barth, Green shows his appreciation for what faithful theologians can learn from passing through the “brook of fire:” Feuerbach’s greatest contribution [was] his insight into the fundamentally imaginative nature of religious belief and practice. In his passion to reverse the effects of Hegelian spiritualizing, he saw with refreshing clarity the concrete, sensuous substance of religious life – its intrinsic connection to the earth, the body, and the natural world generally … He … taught … that religion is not first of all a matter of ideas and ideals but of images and practices. [His] corresponding “vice” [was] his unquestioned assumption (so typical of his age in this regard) that such a product of sensuous imagination could not possibly be the bearer of truth. [Green replies to Feuerbach] Y es, the imagination is indeed the source of religion, but N o, religion is not thereby disqualified from the search for truth (103).

Out of his appreciation, Green derives two summative points: 1. “religious teachings, whatever their truth value, can never be exempt from critical examination, because they are rooted in imagination and therefore implicated in the complex tangle of human desires and mixed motives.” What is needed is a hermeneutics of imagination. “If imagination not only is the source of error, as Feuerbach believed, but can serve the cause of truth as well – indeed, is necessary to our apprehension of truth – how can we tell the difference? Suspicion of imaginative excess is deeply rooted in religious tradition: ‘The heart is deceitful above all things’ says the prophet (Jeremiah 17.9). … how to imagine rightly is the central theological question to emerge from the conversation with Feuerbach” (104, my emphasis). 2. “One of the strongest indications that religious objects are unreal, Feuerbach argues, is that each religion demythologizes the gods of earlier ages …” [Feuerbach’s historical thesis … is that] “there has been a progressive weakening of the religious imagination over time, something akin to Max Weber’s demystification of the world” (105).

What Green’s appreciative inquiry into Feuerbach suggests is that in the encounter with Cupitt’s non-realist philosophy of religion, what the postliberal theologian must show is a failure of religious and theological imagination. By accommodating his account of religion to western secularity and failing to imagine what faith in the reality of the living God can mean after the demise of western theism, Cupitt lets himself off the hook too easily and creates the occasion for a failure of imagination among his readers. In fact, I can imagine Green appropriating parts of Cupitt’s writings to say, if Christian theology grounds its knowledge of God in apologetic arguments, natural theologies, and metaphysical frameworks, it both misses the saving particularity (‘positivity’) of biblical faith in God and alienates

202

God in Postliberal Perspective

itself from God’s self-testimony in revelation, the only ground that can finally secure the faithful imagination from the Bible’s own radical critique of idolatry. Of course, Cupitt would be in his rights to ask Green how we can tell the difference between faithful and idolatrous imagination. For when Green appeals to the Christian community’s reading of the Bible and orthodox Christian doctrines to make this distinction, what if the Christian canon itself as read by the church over time and the origins of Christian doctrine harbour false imaginations in the name of God that have spawned such evils as Christian anti-Judaism, institutional patriarchy, and missional imperialism? Doesn’t Green need a kind of theological reality principle against which to test or compare the claims he derives from his imaginative readings of the Bible and doctrine if he is to avoid begging Feuerbach and Cupitt’s questions? At some point, doesn’t Green need to render a richer account of how Christians (and others) connect with reality through our life experiences that include, but are not limited to, reading the Bible, celebrating the sacraments, and applying doctrines? Otherwise, these means of grace can become used as idols that make God’s presence too clear, distinct, and certain. This application of Green’s reading of Feuerbach to Cupitt’s non-realism could be extended by listening to Green’s critical appropriation of N ietzsche for a hermeneutics of faithful imagination. Apart from the inadequacies in Green’s constructive account of his own position, his insight is that when theology encounters disbelief, it needs to look into the use and abuse of the imagination for the sake of faithfulness. Whatever theologians can do to nurture and edify more faithful imagination among their students, in the church, and in society, will contribute to whether future generations will believe in the reality of the living God. To avoid the impression that my account of Green reads him as excessively conservative in the face of Cupitt’s challenge, his own constructive notes on hermeneutics are important. His rules for reading the Bible in communities of faith include the following: 1. “… acknowledge the open-ended character of biblical interpretation” for “‘no concept can exhaust the requirement of further thinking borne by symbols’” (173–4). 2. “The meaning of scripture is never simply given; it is always the fruit of an interpretive act” (175). This is one implication of the biblical metaphor of a God who speaks (and writes) for, “Just as in the case of human agents, God does not necessarily mean the same thing every time he says the same words …” (176). 3. “… the never-to-be completed interpretive task is something good” (177) for believers can look to the scriptures for new insight into God’s will and ways.

Failure to observe these rules or ones like them is one reason that biblical authority is perceived as tyranny in some churches and in secular society today. Finally, my hypothetical debate between Green and Cupitt ends in a dilemma similar to the one John Glasse detected in “Barth on Feuerbach”. Glasse showed

Imagining God: Revelation, Construction, or Destruction?

203

that Barth’s final response to Feuerbach’s atheism “… seeks to let God vindicate himself by ‘the manifest radiance’ of his own witness to himself”. That response is sufficient for the believer who has seen “the manifest radiance” of the living God in Christ. But what about the others, Glasse asks, who do not see that “radiance”? Here’s the dilemma: Either [Barth’s] negative anthropology prevents deification of man but leaves the accusation of illusion about God untouched, or his affirmation of the reality of the God beyond Feuerbach’s divinity of man appeals so exclusively to its own theological circle that Feuerbach could not recognize its authority and Barth cannot acknowledge Feuerbach’s skeptical question.50

Like Barth, Green has good grounds for rejecting Cupitt’s imperative that with the recognition of the death of God, Christians and others must take up the tasks of becoming what we projected into our concept of God for so long. But does that address Cupitt’s claim (following the early Feuerbach) that “God” is no more than a projection of our religious imagination? On the other hand, Green’s reply to the atheism of the masters of suspicion is to (a) show the internal weaknesses of their own systems of thought, and (b) offer a better special hermeneutics of scripture. That seems intended to draw secular readers out of their own circles of suspicion into Green’s circle of biblical understanding. But what if, like Green, they refuse to give up primary loyalty to their own frameworks of inquiry? What if they will not be so drawn out? The dilemma between Green’s faithful imagination and Cupitt’s non-realist philosophy of religion appears to be as old as the proclamation of the Gospel: “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables; in order that ‘they may indeed look, but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand; so that they may not turn again and be forgiven’” (Mark 4:11–12 N RSV).

50  ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Glasse, “Barth on Feuerbach,” 95. I wonder if Glasse’s reading of Barth’s negative anthropology was in touch with Barth’s more positive anthropology in Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Creation Vol. III, Part Two, (ed.) G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, (trans.) Harold Knight et al. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1960), 661 p. For a summary see Daniel J. Price, Karl Barth’s Anthropology in Light of Modern Thought (Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 2002), especially Chap. 4.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 6

Hospitality in the House of Realism Invitation to a Conversation between Realists and Non-Realists We have reached the conclusion of our passage between the “house of realism” and Cupitt’s non-realism. By the “house of realism” I mean a Christian theological account of the doctrine of God must be more than the following: • • •

a general pre-theological theory about the nature of doctrines (Lindbeck); a nostalgia for the first naiveté of doctrinal realism (some versions of Christian conservatism and defences of orthodoxy); An indefinite and indecisive celebration of various critiques of the doctrine as if Cartesian scepticism was the only mode of philosophical theology today (Cupitt’s non-realism).

What that “more” signifies has been the subject of the previous chapters. My wager is there is a realism internal to Christian forms of life, and it comes to expression in both the Christian community and beyond in our pluralist and interfaith contexts. By its grounding in the worshipping, confessional, witnessing life of Christian congregations and institutions, this realism makes claims upon our understanding of God, our selves, and all of reality as creatures called to new creation. By its world-openness, this realism incorporates into itself the critiques of naive doctrinal realism that have proliferated since the Enlightenment. Thus it is a critical theological realism which builds bridges from the reality-making claims of Christian uses of doctrinal sentences to engage counter-claims of other philosophies, religions, institutions, and ways of life. In the interaction, exchange, and mutual witness that occurs between critical theological realism and other forms of realism and non-realism, Christians are called upon to understand anew and to renew our forms of life and expressions of theology as contexts where the broken body of Christ encounters God’s alienated creatures, and vice versa. Another way of describing a critical theological realism today is that it joins the gift of Christian hope with the tasks of an apologetic theology carried out “with fear and trembling”. Or, it re-inscribes the kataphatic/apophatic distinction into Christian discourse about God. In sum, the House of Realism means that the Christian doctrine of God today is self-involving, doxological, and eschatologicallyoriented.   ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� The distinction between first and second naiveté was coined by Paul Ricoeur in the conclusion of The Symbolism of Evil, 347–57.

206

God in Postliberal Perspective

A critical theological realism may be explained in similarity-and-yet-difference with critical realism in the philosophy of science. Critical realism in science does not entail the common sense or metaphysical realism criticized by Wittgenstein, Rorty, and other post-Cartesian philosophers. It does not hold that “the terms of a mature science , [e.g., “sub-atomic particle”, “Black Hole”] mirror the world in an unrevisable fashion. Its terms are seen as representing reality without claiming to be representationally privileged.” Our scientific models must be open to revision given our lack of definitive or exhaustive knowledge of natural phenomena. Since this is the case with scientific models it is even more so in the languages of worship and theology where we are called to speak of God who creates and transcends reality from within. Critical realism in Christian context underlines in ways that conventional empiricist and idealist approaches did not, “the importance to Christian belief of experience, community, and an interpretive tradition”. To incorporate Christian experience, community, and interpretive tradition into our doctrine of God makes space for us to acknowledge the human fingerprints on our dogmatic propositions. At the same time, the self-involving, doxological, and eschatological orientation of Christian discourse about God reminds us that via this discourse we are called to address the living God, the “triune community of reconciling love” (Barth), who goes before us in ways not reducible to our wishdreams, psychological projections, and cultural expectations. Having said all this an important question remains: does postliberal theology have adequate resources to enable Christian (internal) realists to encounter and remain in conversation with religious and theological non-realists in our times? I have brought the conception of God in Burrell’s version of Aquinas, Placher’s paradoxical concepts of an undomesticated yet vulnerable God, and Marshall’s radical trinitarianism into dialogue with Cupitt’s non-realist spirituality of secular, late modern existence and other thinkers. In surveying the terrain of non-realism, I discovered a brief book by the Anglican philosophic theologian Keith Ward (Oxford University). In response to Cupitt’s Taking Leave of God, Ward responded with Holding Fast to God. He employs a modest account of the di-polar nature of God inspired by Whitehead’s process theism wed to more traditional affirmations about God among western theists to engage Cupitt’s challenge. His argument in part is that Cupitt rejected a supernaturalistic concept of “God” that is no longer required after the insights of Whitehead and Hartshorne into God’s nature and relationship with an evolving cosmos. After reading Ward, what if postliberal accounts of God’s nature and reality (new readings of Aquinas, radical recoveries of divine transcendence grounded in Luther, Calvin and Barth, or a radical trinitarianism) simply have little to say to Cupitt and the Sea of Faith N etwork of non-realist Christians? For on a   ���������������������� Janet Martin Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1985), 132.   ���������� Ibid. 149.   ������������ Keith Ward, Holding Fast to God, 106–119.

Hospitality in the House of Realism

207

postliberal account of God, we really do not know and cannot know what the radically transcendent God is, and therefore cannot understand how God indwells or interacts with the world. What if in the encounter with the passionate atheism of Cupitt and some of our contemporaries, postliberal theology is a conversation stopper? In other words, the affirmation of God’s reality is so internal to Christian forms of life that Cupitt’s practice of the forms but rejection of the doctrinal sentences leaves the conversation with nowhere to go. Ward’s book suggested to me an alternative way to think between and beyond postliberal theology and nonrealism. This led me to ask about another type of postliberalism. The Other Postliberalism: Bernard Meland (1899–1993) In 1962 Bernard Eugene Meland, an ecumenical Presbyterian theologian at the University of Chicago Divinity School, published a provocative article entitled, “Analogy and Myth in Post-Liberal Theology”. Over a long teaching career spanning the 1930s to the 1960s, Meland brought into conversation the neo-naturalist movement in Anglo-American thought, dialectical theology, cultural anthropology, and phenomenology in a theology that provided resources to renew both Protestant mainline churches and western societies. As a student at McCormick Theological Seminary, the University of Chicago Divinity School, and Marburg University in the late 1920s, he realized that Protestant liberal theology had reached intellectual, theological, and cultural dead-ends. But the way to renewal was not to abandon the liberal tradition as some among the “Theology of the Word” intended, but to bring   ������������������������������������������������������������ Cf. Burrell, “one must acknowledge that one cannot conceive how God acts if one is obliged to consider all such acting as partaking in the paradigmatic bestowing of esse which is creation. But those are the rules of the game …” In Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions (N otre Dame: University of N otre Dame Press, 1993), 70.   ���������������������������������������������������������������� Bernard E. Meland, “Analogy and Myth in Post-liberal Theology”, Perkins School of Theology Journal 15/2 (Winter 1962), 19–27; reprinted as “Analogy and Myth in Postliberal Theology”, in Delwin Brown, Ralph E. James, Jr., and Gene Reeves, (eds) Process Philosophy and Christian Thought (Indianapolis, IN : Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), 116– 27. For an excellent introduction, bibliographies, and critical review of Meland’s career, see Tyron Inbody, The Constructive Theology of Bernard Meland: Postliberal Empirical Realism, American Academy of Religion Studies in Religion 69 (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1995). Meland’s trilogy on theological method and theology of culture includes Faith and Culture, (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press; London and Amsterdam: Feffer and Simons, Inc., 1953, 1972); The Realities of Faith: The Revolution in Cultural Forms (N ew Y ork: Oxford University Press, 1962); Fallible Forms and Symbols: Discourses on Method in a Theology of Culture (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976). A good introduction to his theology of culture applied to the church is Seeds of Redemption (N ew Y ork: Macmillan, 1947).   ������������������������������������������������������������������ For example, see Bernard E. Meland, “Toward a Valid View of God”, Harvard Theological Review 24/3 (July 1931): 197–208.

God in Postliberal Perspective

208

Protestant liberalism into a deeper, transformative conversation with the natural and human sciences, the new cosmology of evolution and emergence, cultural anthropology, dialectical theology, and a renewed empiricism. What nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Protestant liberalism lacked was a compelling metaphysical vision, a rich concept of experience, a more complex theology beyond the Social Gospel, and a religious vision of creation and redemption that could address persons caught in the tragedies of twentieth-century history. A retrieval of Meland’s theology in the context of the argument between postliberal realists and Cupitt’s non-realists suggests a via media. R ather than a stark choice between Lindbeck, Burrell, and Placher’s radically transcendent God, on the one hand, and Cupitt’s spirituality of “God” as the project of human spiritual aspiration on the other, Meland understood God as the sensitive nature within the natural cosmos that hovers over all occasions of creativity, seeking to redeem them from brute force for the sake of order, beauty, and humanization. Whereas postliberals claim to know who God is (the self-revealed ‘Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’) but not what God is (for the Creator always transcends the creature), Meland claimed that the data of the human experience (broadly conceived) of “the Creative Passage”, the ongoing coming into being and passing away of reality in all its multiplicity and ambiguity, gives us an indirect knowledge of God as both hidden and discerned. The important distinction between Meland and Burrell here is that they disagree over what should be placed in the category of the formal features of God. For Burrell simplicity (or aseity), perfection, limitlessness, unchangeableness and oneness qualify all of our scriptural and doxological speech about God. For Meland, our forms and symbols for God are always fallible and thus we need to be open to revising these formal features in light of new understandings of the evolving world God is creating, new readings of the Bible, and new insights from cultural anthropology.10 To refuse to take a second look at the formal features is to give in to our tendency to create dualisms and shelter them from scrutiny as paradoxes. 

 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������� Meland’s theology reminded me of a fine essay by William Alston, “Hartshorne and Aquinas: A Via Media,” Chap. 6 in Divine Nature and Human Language: Essays in Philosophical Theology (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1989).   ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Meland wrote that his reflections on the reality of God “have drawn heavily upon the imagery and sensibilities of Whitehead’s exposition of organismic cosmology, esp. as they relate to modes of awareness in exploring the relational theme [‘relations are dynamic’], which I have found to be basic to his philosophy of theism” (‘Prolegomena to Inquiry into the Reality of God’, Essays in Constructive Theology: A Process Perspective, (ed.) Perry LeFevre (Chicago: Exploration Press, 1988), 208. He offered these excerpts from his writings as exposition of the influence of Whitehead on his thought: Seeds of Redemption, Chap. IV; The Reawakening of Christian Faith (N ew Y ork: Macmillan, 1949), Chap. 3; The Realities of Faith, Chap. IV; Faith and Culture, Chap. VIII; Fallible Forms and Symbols, C hap. IV . 10  �������� Meland, Fallible Forms and Symbols.

Hospitality in the House of Realism

209

In a brief credo published in 1953 in the final chapter of Faith and Culture, he affirmed his faith in … 1. … God to be a reality of grace and judgment which both interpenetrates and transcends the life of man in the way that the hopes and judgments of a father transcend and intermesh with the life of his son. 2. … God to be both hidden and discernible. 3. … Jesus Christ to be the revealer of God and the mediator of God’s redemptive work to men. 4. … the Holy Spirit to be real God. 5. … the work of Christ as mediator of redemption and the work of the Holy Spirit may be distinguished; yet they stand related. 6. … the church is the self-conscious and continuing witness to the revelation of God in C hrist.11

This theological vision was affirmed in the context of a naturalistic theism in which the evolving cosmos is the ultimate environment of God, nature, humanity, and the self. For Meland, “God” is a complex symbol that names the plurality of structures that create and nurture life in the world. The symbol “God” unifies this plurality in the context of worship and devotion so that an “appreciative awareness” for divine activity in nature, culture, society, and the church is cultivated over the course of history and the span of life. In a hypothetical conversation between Cupitt, Placher, and Meland, who would have the greater probability of continuing a conversation with Cupitt about his non-realist position? Meland would stand a much better chance for his neonaturalism already incorporates an evolutionary cosmology and concern for the impact of science and technology on both church and society. Further, his empirical approach to philosophy and theology would not require Cupitt to acknowledge an autonomous authority for Scripture, creed, or church institution. One can imagine Meland asking Cupitt whether the spirituality, ethic, and community he seeks to nourish after the death of the supernatural God could find a new frame of reference within the “Creative Passage” of being and becoming. For Cupitt’s quest is to discover holiness within secular and natural life and language. The price of admission to a postliberal faith in the transcendent God of Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin is too high for a non-realist like Cupitt. Meland’s version of empirical realism offers C upitt ways to: a. maintain his critique of supernaturalism in Christian doctrine and practice; b. affirm without regret an evolutionary cosmology in which there is no greater or higher reality than our home in the natural and social world;

 �������� Meland, Faith and Culture, 211–23.

11

210

God in Postliberal Perspective

c. live in openness to the creative and redemptive realities named by the symbol “God,” the most enduring symbol of goodness in western civilizations for many Jews, Christians, Muslims, and others. In this regard, the influence of Alfred N orth Whitehead and Henri Bergson (1859– 1941) on Meland’s “fundamental notions” offers a different framework in which to engage Cupitt and other non-realists. These seven notions form the background beliefs to Meland’s brief credo outlined above. They include: 1. Events are primary … each moment of time is viewed as the creative passage taken as a total datum. What can be said of each moment can be said of each emerging event (129). 2. There is a matrix of sensitivity in which all life is cast and out of which all structured events arise … God in his concreteness is a sensitive awareness at work in every emerging event which accounts for qualitative attainment in existence: the emergence of you and me, of creatures all about us, of the glories of earth and sea, the emergence of mind and spirit, of creatures in all their complexity, discipline, and form. God’s concreteness is an act within the process of every instance.... (130, my emphasis). 3. Social nature of reality: The fact of sociality derives from God’s intent as Creative Event in which individuals are created in community (130). 4. Relations are dynamic: a static reading of anything, of formal philosophic meanings, of words in a sentence, or of the elements of consciousness in the thought of a person, is a false reading … 5. Emergence: The dynamic character of relations presages the idea of emergence … R elations are thus seen to suggest not simply the notion of pattern but the interaction of structures in a way which makes for a subtle progression from lower to higher organizations of events. 6. Structure of experience: ‘the persisting, living nexus of relations and residual meanings as they are presented in immediacy as actualized events.’ Illustrated by two levels of family history: ‘the one they talk about and the one they possess more hiddenly’ (131). 7. Dynamic and corporate character of faith, or faith as a social energy: this follows from ‘that relations are dynamic and that reality is social’ (132, my emphasis).12

So a strategy suggested by Meland’s theology is engaging Cupitt in a discussion about his fundamental vision of existence (a philosophic approach) rather than a postliberal ad hoc apologetic (a Christian theological approach). This philosophic

12  ��������������������������������������������������������������������������� Meland, “Interpreting the Christian Faith within a Philosophic Framework”, Journal of Religion 33 (1953): 87–102; reprinted in Bernard Eugene Meland, Essays in Constructive Theology, Chap. 10. The pagination follows this edition.

Hospitality in the House of Realism

211

approach is followed in much of process theology as summarized by John Cobb (emeritus, Claremont School of Theology, USA) and Griffin: The major contribution of process philosophy to the doctrine of God … is its enrichment and clarification of thought about the divine nature. As a convincing notion of deity emerges that illumines human experience and coheres with our understanding of the world, the demand for an isolated and abstract proof [of God’s existence] diminishes. A theistic vision of reality can gain adherence best by displaying its superior adequacy to other visions.13

Our journey through more recent postliberal theology has taken us back to an earlier generation of N orth American postliberals who proposed more radical revisions in the doctrine of God and the philosophic framework of Christian thought to meet the challenge of modern naturalism, atheism and agnosticism. Further dialogue between so-called “new Y ale school” and “Chicago school” theologians, or right-wing and left-wing postliberals, would be fruitful if Christian theology is to meet the challenges of new cognitive scientific, cultural evolutionary and social psychological approaches to religion and belief.14 As I write this final chapter, Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything have appeared in T he New York Times bestseller lists this year.15 The resurgence of Christian, Islamic, Jewish, and Hindu N ationalist fundamentalist movements plus the inroads of so-called Christian Science and Intelligent Design movements into public education have provoked a “new Enlightenment” of scepticism, a backlash of atheism and antirealism against all forms of theistic belief. If postliberal believers in the reality of God are to address the issues facing our students, the laity and honest seekers, they will need to move forward from their discussions of the doctrine of the Trinity to offer new conceptual frameworks and intellectual practices for our time. I hope this book has shown that good beginnings have already been made and that a renaissance in Christian philosophic theology can aid the Church in confessing the faith amid the powers and principalities. Finally, I hope my patient reader is prepared to move beyond the typology of liberal vs postliberal theology, modern vs postmodern philosophy, or metaphysical realist vs non-realist. N o theologian’s or thinker’s work can ever be reduced to 13  ����������������������������������������� John B. Cobb, Jr. and David Ray Griffin, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976), 43. 14  ������������������������ Daniel Clement Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (N ew Y ork: Viking, 2006). Dennett’s work poses a greater intellectual challenge than Dawkins, Hitchens et al. for he provides a naturalistic, evolutionary explanation of many phenomena that believers ascribe to God or the gods alone or supernatural causes. 15  ����������������� Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006); Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (N ew Y ork: Grand Central, 2007).

God in Postliberal Perspective

212

their place in a type. Let each theologian’s work be heard and seen for itself, for the God who created all things delights in the rich plurality of our voices. As Meland wrote, “The richest reality may be not the One, but the Many”.16

16

 ������������������������������������������ Meland, “Toward a Valid View of God”, 203.

Bibliography Primary sources Alston, William P., A Realist Conception of Truth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). Bahnsen, Greg L., Van Til’s Apologetics: Readings and Analysis (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1998). Banner, Michael C., The Justification of Science and the Rationality of Religious Belief (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). Barbour, Ian G., Myths, Models, and Paradigms: A Comparative Study in Science and Religion (N ew Y ork: Harper & Row, 1974). Barbour, Ian G., Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues, rev. edn (N ew Y ork: Harper Collins, 1997). Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics, (trans.) G. W. Bromiley et al.; (eds) G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1936–1975). Barth, Karl, Dogmatics in Outline, (trans.) G. T. Thomson (N ew Y ork: Harper & Row, 1959). Barth, Karl, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction, (trans.) Grover Foley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979). Battaly, Heather D. and Michael P. Lynch (eds), Perspectives on the Philosophy of William P. Alston (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, (trans.) Charles Arand et al.; (eds) Robert Kolb and Timothy Wengert (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000). Booth, Wayne C., The Rhetoric of Fiction, second edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Borg, Marcus, Jesus, A New Vision: Spirit, Culture, and the Life of Discipleship (N ew Y ork: Harper Collins, 1987). Boss, Marc, Gilles Emery, and Pierre Gisel (eds), Postlibéralisme? La Théologie de George Lindbeck et sa Réception (Genève: Labor et Fides, 2004). Brown, Delwin, Ralph E. James, Jr., and Gene Reeves (eds), Process Philosophy and Christian Thought (Indianapolis: Bobs-Merrill, 1971). Buckley, Michael J., S. J., At the Origins of Modern Atheism (N ew Haven: Y ale University Press, 1987). Burrell, David B., Analogy and Philosophical Language (N ew Haven: Y ale University Press, 1973). Burrell, David B., Exercises in Religious Understanding (N otre Dame: University of N otre Dame Press, 1974).

214

God in Postliberal Perspective

Burrell, David B., Aquinas: God and Action (N otre Dame: University of N otre Dame Press, 1979). Burrell, David B., Knowing the Unknowable God: Ibn-Sina, Maimonides, Aquinas (N otre Dame: University of N otre Dame Press, 1986). Burrell, David B., Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions (N otre Dame: University of N otre Dame Press, 1993). Burrell, David B., Faith and Freedom: An Interfaith Perspective (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). Cabezón, José Ignacio (ed.), Scholasticism: Cross-Cultural and Comparative Perspectives (Albany: State University of N ew Y ork Press, 1998). Calvin, John, Institutes of the Christian Religion, (trans.) Ford Lewis Battles; (ed.) John T. McN eill (2 vols, Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960). Caputo, John D., Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (N ew Y ork: Fordham University Press, 1997). Caputo, John D., The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). Clarke, W. N orris, S. J., The Philosophical Approach to God: A Neo-Thomist Perspective (Winston Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 1979). Clooney, Francis X., S. J., Theology after Vedanta: An Experiment in Comparative Theology (Albany, NY : State University of N ew Y ork Press, 1993). Cobb, John B., Jr. and David Ray Griffin, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976). Conant, James and Urszula M. Zeglen (eds), Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism (N ew Y ork: Routledge, 2002). Crossan, John Dominic, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (N ew Y ork: Harper Collins, 1994). Cullmann, Oscar, Christ and Time: The Primitive Christian Conception of Time and History, (trans.) Floyd V. Filson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1964). Cunningham, David S. These Three are One: The Practice of Trinitarian Theology in series ‘Challenges in Contemporary Theology’, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). Cupitt, Don, Taking Leave of God (N ew Y ork: Crossroad, 1980). Cupitt, Don, The Sea of Faith (London: SCM Press, 1994). Cupitt, Don, After God: The Future of Religion (London: Weidenfeld and N icholson, 1997). Dawkins, Richard, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006). DeHart, Paul J., The Trial of the Witnesses: The Rise and Decline of Postliberal Theology (Malden: Blackwell, 2006). Dennett, Daniel C., Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (N ew Y ork: Viking, 2006). Descartes, René, Meditations on First Philosophy: A Bilingual Edition, (trans. and ed.) George Heffernan (N otre Dame: University of N otre Dame Press, 1990). Downing, F. Gerald, Has Christianity a Revelation? (London: S.C.M. Press, 1964).

Bibliography

215

Drees, Willem B., Religion, Science and Naturalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Dulles, Avery, S. J., Models of Revelation (Garden City: Doubleday, 1983). Ebeling, Gerhard, Introduction to a Theological Theory of Language, (trans.) R. A. Wilson (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1973). Eck, Diana, Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993). Edwards, James C. Ethics without Philosophy: Wittgenstein and the Moral Life (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1982). Ford, David F., Theology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Fowl, Stephen E., Engaging Scripture: A Model for Theological Interpretation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). Fowl, Stephen E., (ed.), The Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). Fredericks, James L. Faith among Faiths: Christian Theology and Non-Christian Religions (N ew Y ork: Paulist Press, 1999). Frei, Hans W., The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (N ew Haven: Y ale University Press, 1974). Frei, Hans W., The Identity of Jesus Christ: The Hermeneutical Bases of Dogmatic Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975). Frei, Hans W., Types of Christian Theology, George Hunsinger and William C. Placher, (eds) (N ew Haven: Y ale University Press, 1992). Frei, Hans W., Theology and Narrative: Selected Essays, George Hunsinger and William C. Placher, (eds) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Genette, Gerard, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, (trans.) Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980). Gilkey, Langdon, Creationism on Trial: Evolution and God at Little Rock, revised edn (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998). Goh, Jeffrey C. K., Christian Tradition Today: A Postliberal Vision of Church and World (Louvain: Peeters Press; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000). Goodenough, Ursula, The Sacred Depths of Nature (N ew Y ork: Oxford University Press, 1998). Goodman, N elson, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978). Green, Garrett, Imagining God: Theology and the Religious Imagination (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989). Green, Garrett, Theology, Hermeneutics, and Imagination (N ew Y ork: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Hallett, Garth, S. J., A Companion to Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical Investigations” (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977). Harvey, Van A., Feuerbach and the Interpretation of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Hauerwas, Stanley, In Good Company: The Church as Polis (N otre Dame: University of N otre Dame Press, 1995).

216

God in Postliberal Perspective

Hauerwas, and L. Gregory Jones (eds), Why Narrative? Readings in Narrative Theology (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 1997). Hefling, Charles C., Jr., Why Doctrines? (Cambridge: Cowley, 1984). Hitchens, Christopher, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (N ew Y ork: Grand Central, 2007). Hodgson, Peter C., Winds of the Spirit: A Constructive Christian Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994). Holmer, Paul L., The Grammar of Faith (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978). Inbody, Tyron, The Constructive Theology of Bernard Meland: Postliberal Empirical Realism (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995). Jackelén, Antje, Time and Eternity: The Question of Time in Church, Science, and Theology, (trans.) Barbara Harshaw (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2005). James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, (ed.) Martin E. Marty (N ew Y ork: Penguin Books, 1982). Jenson, Robert W., The Triune Identity: God according to the Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982). Jüngel, Eberhard, God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute between Theism and Atheism, (trans.) Darrell L. Guder (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983). Kamitsuka, David G., Theology and Contemporary Culture: Liberation, Postliberal and Revisionary Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, (trans. and eds), Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, Cambridge Edn of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Kant, Immanuel, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Ingeborg Heidemann, (ed.), UniveralBibliothek (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam Jun., 1966). Kant, Immanuel, The Conflict of the Faculties, bilingual edn; (trans.) Mary J. Gregor (N ew Y ork: Abaris, 1979). Kant, Immanuel, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, (trans.) Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (Chicago: Open Court, 1934). Kaufman, Gordon, God the Problem (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972). Kaufman, Gordon, In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). Kearney, Richard, The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture (N ew Y ork: Routledge, 1988). Kepnes, Steven, Peter Ochs, and Robert Gibbs, Reasoning After Revelation: Dialogues in Postmodern Jewish Philosophy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998). Kerr, Fergus, Theology after Wittgenstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). Kitcher, Philip, The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions (N ew Y ork and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

Bibliography

217

Knitter, Paul F., Introducing Theologies of Religions (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2002). Körner, Stephen, Kant (N ew Y ork: Penguin Books, 1955). Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, second edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). LaCocque, André and Paul Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically, (trans.) David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). LaCugna, Catherine Mowry, God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (N ew Y ork: Harper Collins 1991). Lash, N icholas, Easter in Ordinary: Reflections on Human Experience and the Knowledge of God (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1988). Leaves, N igel, Odyssey on the Sea of Faith: The Life and Writings of Don Cupitt (Santa Rosa: Polebridge Press, 2004). Leaves, N igel, Surfing on the Sea of Faith: The Ethics and Religion of Don Cupitt (Santa Rosa: Polebridge Press, 2005). Levenson, Jon, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son (N ew Haven: Y ale University Press, 1993). Lindbeck, George, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984). Lindbeck, George, The Church in a Postliberal Age: George Lindbeck, (ed.) James J. Buckley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002). Longley, Clifford, Chosen People: The Big Idea that Shaped England and America (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2002). Lowry, Charles W. The Trinity and Christian Devotion (N ew Y ork: Harper & Brothers, 1946). Maitra, Keya, On Putnam (Toronto: Wadsworth, 2003). Marion, Jean-Luc, God without Being: Hors-Texte, (trans.) Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Marshall, Bruce D., Christology in Conflict: The Identity of a Saviour in Rahner and Barth (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987). Marshall, Bruce D., (ed.), Theology and Dialogue: Essays in Conversation with George Lindbeck (N otre Dame:University of N otre Dame Press, 1990). Marshall, Bruce D., Trinity and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Meland, Bernard E., Seeds of Redemption (N ew Y ork: Macmillan, 1947). Meland, Bernard E., The Reawakening of Christian Faith (N ew Y ork: Macmillan, 1949). Meland, Bernard E., Faith and Culture (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1953, 1972). Meland, Bernard E., The Realities of Faith: The Revolution in Cultural Forms (N ew Y ork: Oxford University Press, 1962). Meland, Bernard E., Fallible Forms and Symbols: Discourses on Method in a Theology of Culture (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976). Meland, Bernard E., Essays in Constructive Theology: A Process Perspective, (ed.) Perry LeFevre (Chicago: Exploration Press, 1988).

218

God in Postliberal Perspective

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, (trans.) Colin Smith (N ew Y ork: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958). Moltmann, Jürgen, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God, trans. Margaret Kohl (N ew Y ork: Harper & Row, 1981). Moltmann, Jürgen, History and the Triune God: Contributions to Trinitarian Theology, (trans.) John Bowden (N ew Y ork: Crossroad, 1991). Moore, Andrew, Realism and Christian Faith: God, Grammar, and Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). N iebuhr, H. Richard, Radical Monotheism and Western Culture (N ew Y ork: Harper & Row, 1960) N oble, David F., A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science (N ew Y ork and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). N oble, David F., The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (N ew Y ork: Penguin Books, 1999). Pannenberg, Wolfhart, Basic Questions in Theology: Collected Essays, (trans.) George H. Kehm (2 vols, Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1971). Pecknold, C. C., Transforming Postliberal Theology: George Lindbeck, Pragmatism and Scripture (London: T. & T. Clark, 2005). Peters, Ted, God as Trinity: Relationality and Temporality in Divine Life (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993). Peterson, Gregory R., Minding God: Theology and the Cognitive Sciences (Minneapolis:Augsburg Fortress, 2003). Phillips, J. B., Your God is Too Small (N ew Y ork: Macmillan, 1953). Phillips, Timothy R. and Dennis L. Okholm (eds), The Nature of Confession: Evangelicals and Postliberals in Conversation (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1996). Placher, William C., Unapologetic Theology: A Christian Voice in a Pluralistic Conversation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1989). Placher, William C., Narratives of a Vulnerable God: Christ, Theology, and Scripture (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994). Placher, William C., The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking About God Went Wrong (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996). Plantinga, Alvin, God, Freedom, and Evil (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977). Polkinghorne, John, Belief in God in an Age of Science (N ew Haven: Y ale University Press, 1998). Preller, Victor, Divine Science and the Science of God (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967). Price, Daniel J., Karl Barth’s Anthropology in Light of Modern Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002). Putnam, Hilary, Meaning and the Moral Sciences (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, University Press, 1978). Putnam, Hilary, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

Bibliography

219

Putnam, Hilary, Realism with a Human Face, James Conant, (ed.) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). Putnam, Hilary, The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and World (N ew Y ork: Columbia University Press, 1999). Rahner, Karl, The Trinity, (trans.) Joseph Donceel (N ew Y ork: Crossroad, 1997). Ramsey, Ian, Religious Language: An Empirical Placing of Theological Phrases, second edn (N ew Y ork: Macmillan, 1963). Ricoeur, Paul, The Symbolism of Evil, (trans.) Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967). Ricoeur, Paul, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning, (trans.) David Pellauer (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976). Ricoeur, Paul, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, (trans.) David Pellauer; (ed.) Mark I. Wallace (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995). Rorty, Richard, Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972–1980) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). Rumscheidt, H. Martin (ed.), The Way of Theology in Karl Barth: Essays and Comment (Allison Park: Pickwick, 1986). Ryle, Gilbert, The Concept of Mind (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963). Sargeant, Kimon Howland, Seeker Churches: Promoting Traditional Religion in a Nontraditional Way (N ew Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000). Schaeffler, Richard, Religionsphilosophie (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1983). Schleiermacher, Friedrich, The Christian Faith, ed. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart (Edinburgh: T. & T.Clark, 1976). Schleiermacher, Friedrich, Glaubenslehre, (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1960) Schwartz, Regina, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Segovia, Fernando F. and Mary Ann Tolbert (eds), Reading from this Place: Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in the United States, vol. I. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995). Segovia, Fernando F. and Mary Ann Tolbert (eds), Reading from this Place: Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in Global Perspective, vol. II. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995). Sherry, Patrick, Religion, Truth and Language-Games (N ew Y ork: Harper & Row, 1977). Sokolowski, Robert, The God of Faith and Reason (N otre Dame: University of N otre Dame Press, 1982; Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 1994). Soskice, Janet Martin, Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). Stroup, George W., The Promise of Narrative Theology: Recovering the Gospel in the Church (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1981). Sugirtharajah, R.S. (ed.), Voices from the Margin: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1995). Tanner, Kathryn, God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988).

220

God in Postliberal Perspective

Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). Thiemann, Ronald F., Revelation and Theology: The Gospel as Narrated Promise (N otre Dame: University of N otre Dame Press, 1985). Thiemann, Ronald F., Constructing a Public Theology: The Church in a Pluralistic Culture (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1991). Tolkien, J. R. R. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994). Unamuno, Miguel de, Comparative and Critical Edition of San Miguel Bueno, Mártir, (trans.) Mario J. Valdés and Maria Elena de Valdés (Chapel Hill: University of N orth Carolina Press, 1973). Vischer, Lukas (ed.), Spirit of God, Spirit of Christ: Ecumenical Reflections on the Filioque Controversy, Faith and Order Paper N o. 103 (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1981). Wainwright, Geoffrey, Doxology: The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine and Life (N ew Y ork: Oxford University Press, 1980). Wallace, Mark I., The Second Naiveté: Barth, Ricoeur, and the New Yale Theology (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1999). Ward, Keith, Holding Fast to God: A Reply to Don Cupitt (London: SPCK, 1982). Ward, Martha, Nest in the Wind: Adventures in Anthropology on a Tropical Island, second edn, (N P: Waveland Press, 2004). Webster, John and George P. Schner (eds), Theology After Liberalism: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). Welker, Michael, Creation and Reality, (trans.) John F. Hoffmeyer (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1999). Whitehead, Alfred N orth, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, (ed.) David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, corrected edition (N ew Y ork: Macmillan, 1978). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, (trans.) D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, (trans.) G. E. M. Anscombe; (ed.) G. E. M. Anscombe and Rush Rhees, third edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Zettel, (trans.) G. E. M. Anscombe; (ed.) G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, On Certainty, (trans.) D. Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe; (ed.) G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Culture and Value, (trans.) Peter Winch; (ed.) G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980). Wolterstorff, N icholas, Reason within the Bounds of Religion, 2nd edn (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984). Zammito, John H., A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-Positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

Bibliography

221

Secondary sources Alston, William P., ‘Hartshorne and Aquinas: A Via Media’, in Divine Nature and Human Language: Essays in Philosophical Theology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). Alston, William P., ‘Realism and the Christian Faith’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 38/3 (1995): 37–60. ‘AP/Ipsos Poll – Religious Attitudes,’ http://wid.ap.org/polls/050606religion.html, accessed 20 August 2007. Barad, Karen, ‘Meeting the Universe Halfway: Realism and Social Constructivism without Contradiction’, in Lynn H. N elson and Jack N elson (eds), Feminism, Science and the Philosophy of Science (London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996), 161–94. Barad, Karen, ‘Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 10/2 (1998): 87–128. Barad, Karen, ‘Agential Realism: Feminist Interventions in Understanding Scientific Practices’, Chap. 1 in Mario Biagioli (ed.), The Science Studies Reader (N ew Y ork: Routledge, 1999). Barad, Karen, ‘Agential Realism’, in Lorraine Code (ed.), Encyclopedia of Feminist Theories (N ew Y ork: Routledge, 2000), 15–16. Bell, Richard H. ‘Wittgenstein and Descriptive Theology’, Religious Studies 5 (1969): 1–18. Bell, Richard H., ‘Theology as Grammar: Is God an Object of Understanding’, Religious Studies 11 (1975); 307–17. Black, Max, ‘Making Something Happen’, in Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962). Buckley, James J., ‘Doctrine in the Diaspora’, The Thomist 49 (1985): 443–59. Burrell, David B., ‘Substance: A Performatory Account’, Philosophical Studies (Maynooth) 21 (1973): 137–60. Burrell, David B., ‘Religious Belief and Rationality’, in C. F. Delaney (ed.), Rationality and Religious Belief (N otre Dame, IN : University of N otre Dame Press, 1979). Burrell, David B., ‘Does Process Theology Rest on a Mistake?’, Theological Studies 43 (1982): 125–35. Burrell, David B., ‘God’s Eternity’, Faith and Philosophy 1 / 4 (1984): 389–406. Byassee, Jason, ‘Going Catholic’, Christian Century 123/17 (2006): 18–23. Clooney, Francis X., S. J., ‘Reading the World in Christ’, in Gavin D’Costa (ed.), Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1990). Comstock, Gary L., ‘Two Types of N arrative Theology’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 55/4 (1987): 687–717. Conscious Choice: The Journal of Ecology & Natural Living; http://www. consciouschoice.com, accessed 20 August 2007.

222

God in Postliberal Perspective

Devenish, Philip E., ‘Postliberal Process Theology: A Rejoinder to Burrell’, Theological Studies 43 (1982): 504–13. Evans, Donald, ‘Ian Ramsey on Talk about God’, Religious Studies 7 (1971): 125–40 and 213–26. Gerrish, Brian, ‘To the Unknown God: Luther and Calvin on the Hiddenness of God’, Journal of Religion 53 (1973). Gilkey, Langdon B., ‘Cosmology, Ontology, and the Travail of Biblical Language’, in Owen C. Thomas (ed.), God’s Activity in the World: The Contemporary Problem (Chico: Scholars Press, 1983). Glasse, John, ‘Barth on Feuerbach’, Harvard Theological Review 57/2 (1964): 69–96. Green, Garrett, ‘The Gender of God and the Theology of Metaphor’, in Alvin F. Kimel, Jr. (ed.), Speaking the Christian God: The Holy Trinity and the Challenge of Feminism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992). Hall, T. C. The Religious Background of American Culture (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1930). Harrison, Victoria S, ‘Putnam’s Internal Realism and von Balthasar’s Religious Epistemology’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 44 (1998): 67–92. Harvey, Van. A., ‘Person’, in A Handbook of Theological Terms (N ew Y ork: Macmillan, 1964), 182. Holmer, Paul L., ‘Wittgenstein and Theology’, in Dallas M. High (ed.), New Essays on Religious Language (N ew Y ork: Oxford University Press, 1969). Hunsinger, George, ‘Postliberal Theology’, in Kevin J. Vanhoozer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology (N ew Y ork: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Incandela, Joseph M. ‘The Appropriation of Wittgenstein’s Work by Philosophers of Religion: Towards a Re-evaluation and an End’, Religious Studies, 21 (1985): 457–74. Integral N aked (N ew Age website), http://www.integralnaked.org/, accessed 20 August 2007. Journal of Scriptural Reasoning Forum: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/journals/ jsrforum/ (accessed 16 August 2007). Kretzmann, N orman and Eleonore Stump, ‘Eternity’, Journal of Philosophy 78 (1981). Lash, N icholas, ‘How Large is a ‘Language Game’?’, Theology 87/715 (1984): 19–28. Lindbeck, George, ‘Ecumenism and the Future of Belief’, Una Sancta 25 (1968): 3–17. Lindbeck, George, ‘The Sectarian Future of the Church’, in J. P. Whalen, S. J. (ed.), The God Experience (N ew Y ork: N ewman, 1971). Livingston, James C., ‘Christian Realism: Post-Liberal American Theology’, in Modern Christian Thought: From the Enlightenment to Vatican II (N ew Y ork: Macmillan, 1971).

Bibliography

223

Livingston, James C. and Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, ‘Christian Realism: PostLiberal American Theology,’ in Modern Christian Thought: vol. II: The Twentieth Century, second edn (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall 1997). Longley, Clifford, ‘Religion in European Society’, Plenary Lecture for the International Conference: “Healing the World – Working Together: Religion in Global Society”, International Council of Christians and Jews (ICCJ), Chicago, IL, 25 July 2005. Loomer, Bernard M., ‘N eo-N aturalism and N eo-Orthodoxy’, Journal of Religion 28/2 (1948): 79–91. Marshall, Bruce D., ‘Theology after Cana’, Modern Theology 16/4 (2000): 517– 27. Marshall, Bruce D., ‘Absorbing the World: Christianity and the Universe of Truths’, in Bruce D. Marshall (ed.), Theology and Dialogue: Essays and Conversations with George Lindbeck (N otre Dame: University of N otre Dame Press, 1990). McCormack, Bruce L., ‘Divine Revelation and Human Imagination: Must We Choose Between the Two?’, Scottish Journal of Theology 37/4 (1984). McKim, Donald K., ‘fideism’; ‘perichoresis’, in Westminster Dictionary of Theological Terms (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996). Meland, Bernard E., ‘Toward a Valid View of God’, Harvard Theological Review 24/3 (1931): 197–208. Meland, Bernard E., ‘Interpreting the Christian Faith within a Philosophic Framework’, Journal of Religion 33 (1953): 87–102. Meland, Bernard E., ‘Analogy and Myth in Post-Liberal Theology’, Perkins School of Theology Journal 15/2 (1962): 19–27. Meland, Bernard E., ‘Prolegomena to Inquiry into the Reality of God’, in Perry LeFevre (ed.), Essays in Constructive Theology: A Process Perspective (Chicago: Exploration Press, 1988). Moore, Dom Sebastian, ‘God Suffered’, Downside Review 77/24 (1959): 122– 40. Muller, Richard A., ‘sub specie aeternitatis’, in Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms Drawn Principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1985). Murdoch, Iris, ‘Above the Gods: A Dialogue about Religion’, in Peter Conradi (ed.), Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature / Iris Murdoch (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1999). Murdoch, Iris, Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues (London: Chatto and Windus, 1986). N iebuhr, H. Richard, ‘The Doctrine of the Trinity and the Unity of the Church’, Theology Today, 3 (1946–47): 371–84. N iebuhr, H. Richard, ‘Theological Unitarianisms’, Theology Today, 40 (1983–84): 150–57. N ortham, Joan, ‘The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory’, Expository Times 99 (1988): 302.

224

God in Postliberal Perspective

O’N eill, Colman E., O. P., ‘The Rule Theory of Doctrine and Propositional Content’, The Thomist 49 (1985): 417–42. Owen, H. P., ‘Theism’, in Paul Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (N ew Y ork: Macmillan, 1967), vol. 8, p. 97. Phillips, D. Z., ‘Religious Beliefs and Language Games’, in Basil Mitchell (ed.), The Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). Placher, William C., ‘Revisionist and Postliberal Theologies and the Public Character of Theology’, The Thomist 49 (1985): 392–416. Placher, William C., ‘Postliberal Theology’, in David F. Ford (ed.), The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology in the Twentieth Century, second edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). Petersen, Aage, ‘The Philosophy of N iels Bohr,’ in A. P. French and P. J. Kennedy (eds), Niels Bohr: A Centenary Volume (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985). Plantinga, Alvin, ‘Reason and Belief in God’, in Alvin Plantinga and N icolas Wolterstorff (eds), Faith and Rationality (N otre Dame: University of N otre Dame Press, 1983). Ramsey, Ian, ‘Theological Literacy’, The Chicago Theological Seminary Register 53/5 (1963): 38–9. Ricoeur, Paul, ‘N aming God’, (trans.) David Pellauer, Union Seminary Quarterly Review 34/4 (1979): 215–27. Ricoeur, Paul, ‘Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation’, (trans.) David Pellauer; (ed.) Lewis S. Mudge, Essays on Biblical Interpretation (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980). Ricoeur, ‘Review of N elson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking’, in Mario J. Valdés (ed.), A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991). Russell, Bertrand, ‘On Denoting’, Mind 14 (1905): 479–93, reprinted in Logic and Knowledge: Essays 1901–1950 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1956), 39–56. Searle, John, ‘The Word Turned Upside Down’, Review of On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism by Jonathan Culler, New York Review of Books 30/16 (1983): 74–9. Sherry, Patrick, ‘Is Religion a ‘Form of Life’?’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 9/2 (1972): 159–67. Sherry, Patrick, ‘Analogy Today’, Philosophy 51 (1976): 431–46. Steinmetz, David C., ‘The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis’, Theology Today 37 (1980), 27–38. Stout, Jeffrey, ‘A Lexicon of Postmodern Philosophy’, Religious Studies Review 13/1 (1987): 18–22. Strawson, P. F., ‘On Referring’, Mind 59 (1950): 320–44, reprinted in LogicoLinguistic Papers (N ew Y ork:Barnes and N oble, 1971), 1–27. Triplett, Timm, ‘Recent Work on Foundationalism’, American Philosophical Quarterly 27/2 (1990): 93–116.

Bibliography

225

Wainwright, Geoffrey, “Ecumenical Dimensions of Lindbeck’s ‘N ature of Doctrine’,” Modern Theology 4/2 (1988), 122–23 Wallace, Mark I., ‘The N ew Y ale Theology: Liberalism, Realism and the Problem of Truth’, Christian Scholar’s Review 17/2 (1987): 154–70. White, Graham, ‘Karl Barth’s Theological Realism’, Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 26 (1984): 54–70. Whitehead, Alfred N orth, ‘In Defense of Speculative Philosophy’, in Donald W. Sherburne (ed.), A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), Appendix. Wood, Charles M., ‘Book Symposium: Bruce D. Marshall, Trinity and Truth’, Modern Theology 16/4 (2000): 510–17. Wuthnow, Robert, ‘Fundamentalism and Its Discontents’, in Christianity and the Twenty-First Century: Reflections on the Challenges Ahead (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Zemach, Eddy, ‘Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of the Mystical’, in Irving M. Copi and Robert W. Beard (eds), Essays on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966): 359–75.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Index

agnostic(s) 152, 157, 171, 188, 190 agnosticism 3, 16, 18, 62 fn. 28, 151, 153, 176, 189, 211 Alston, William P. 13, 88–91, 99, 102, 117, 126 fn. 5, 164 fn. 68, 189 fn. 28, 192, 208 fn. 8 analogy 36 fn. 23, 44, 53 fn. 6, 62 fn. 28, 64 fn. 34, 80, 88, 98, 115, 117, 118, 119, 125 fn. 4, 145, 147, 148, 152, 153, 176, 180, 207 analogies 55, 60, 87, 88, 94, 102, 117, 127, 129, 148, 181 fn. 15 disanalogy(-ies) 88, 113, 114, 115, 116 analogate 129 analogia entis (analogy of being) 88, 104, 106, 113 analogia relationis (analogy of relation) 145 analogical(ly) 40, 44, 74, 127, 129, 132, 133, 144, 149, 152, 166 analogous 61, 132 dis-analogous 114 analogue 85 Anselm, St (1033–1109) 5, 9, 69 fn. 49, 89, 128, 130, 131, 142 apologetics 5, 9, 63, 72, 81, 82, 94, 155, 156, 167, 195 apologetic 10, 69 fn. 49, 79, 113, 158, 171, 178, 193, 195, 196, 201, 205 ad hoc apologetic 5, 9, 193, 210 Unapologetic Theology (1989) 138–142, 143, 150, 156, 165 Aquinas, St Thomas (c. 1224–74) 5, 6, 14, 24, 29, 32, 41, 55, 59, 60–62, 89, 107, 123–37, 144, 149, 151–55, 164, 169, 206–209 atheism xi, 3, 6, 16, 18, 23–9, 31–5, 48, 97, 139, 156, 171, 172, 189, 198 fn. 45, 203, 207, 211 atheist(s) 1, 28, 35, 157, 171, 182, 190 fn. 30

a-theology 79, 151 Augustine, St (354–430) 5, 32, 41, 55, 75–8, 130, 131, 146, 147 Avicenna / Ibn–Sina (980–1037) 125 Barad, Karen 86–87, 102, 179–81 Barbour, Ian 13, 83–4, 87, 109–11, 117 Barth, Karl (1886–1968) 9–10, 13, 14, 17, 29–31, 35, 36, 37, 42, 43, 49, 63 fn. 30, 69 fn. 49, 71 fn. 51, 75 fn. 67, 76 fn. 70, 88, 102–8, 109, 111, 112, 114, 117, 123, 124, 144, 146, 158 fn. 59, 168, 169, 178, 181 fn. 16, 191, 193, 194, 198, 199 fn. 48, 200–203, 206 belief xi, 6, 16–18, 22, 23, 26–28, 46, 49 fn. 1, 59, 69 fn. 47, 70, 111 fn. 32, 116 fn. 39, 119, 130, 131, 142, 154, 160–71, 188, 189, 190 fn. 30, 191, 195, 198, 201, 206, 211 beliefs 5, 19, 45, 50 fn. 2, 70 fn. 50, 73, 74, 93, 109–23, 139, 140, 157, 159, 160–71, 186–88, 192, 200 background beliefs 74 fn. 64, 116, 118, 126, 210 belief-system 93, 163 believe-ism 36 believers xi, 13, 15, 18, 20–3, 42, 48, 51, 61, 69, 70, 85, 86, 109, 116, 123, 125, 156–58, 171, 188, 195, 197, 200, 202, 211 believer 79, 109, 131, 153, 163, 177, 191, 203 unbelievers, non-believers, disbeliever 36, 125, 187 disbelief 13, 117–21, 174, 202 Bible, the 6, 12, 16, 18, 19, 21, 29, 35, 44, 48, 63 fn. 29, 74, 104, 113, 119, 140–45, 156, 158, 166, 168–9, 171–2, 177–8, 192, 196, 197–99, 202, 208

228

God in Postliberal Perspective

biblical authority / canon / revelation 19, 65, 71, 156, 186, 197–8, 202 Hebrew Bible / Old Testament 44, 65, 79, 156 biblical narrative(s) / story(ies) / drama / epic 4 fn. 10, 6, 10, 12, 19, 45–6, 61, 65, 120, 141–44, 149, 166, 171, 187, 196–8 Bible as metanarrative 143 biblical narrative world 10, 141, 163–64, 166, 171 biblical exegesis / hermeneutics / interpretation / studies 18, 44 fn. 33, 79, 94, 114, 116, 149, 156–7, 167–8, 198, 202 scriptural reasoning 124 fn. 2 biblical language / vocabulary 132 fn. 24, 154, 164, 169, 197–8 biblical absorption 163 biblical anthropomorphism 21 biblical message / theology / understanding 19 fn. 6, 41, 132, 196, 203 body (ies) / embodiment inagency and perception 13, 50, 68, 70, 74 fn. 66, 75, 95, 101, 149–50, 157, 172, 175, 177, 187, 195, 199, 201 body of Christ 46, 163, 171, 205 disembodied 149, 187 Booth, Wayne C. (1921 – 2005) 118 fn. 41 Buckley, James J. 55–6 Buckley, Michael J. 6, 23–9, 32, 156 Burrell, David B. (1933–) i, 14, 62 fn. 28, 124–37, 144–9, 151, 165, 206–8 Calvin, Jean / John (1509–64) 6, 10, 14, 149, 153 fn. 57, 154–5, 177, 180, 206, 209 Calvinism / Calvinist 39, 149, 167 certainty (e.g., foundations of) / certainties 3, 5, 9, 13, 24–5, 32–3, 49 fn. 1, 52 fn. 4, 68–9, 72–3, 95, 110, 115, 118, 123, 130, 138, 155, 159, 161, 185–6, 189, 193, 195, 202 uncertainty 17, 169, 171 Christ (Word / Son of God, second Person inthe Trinity, God of Jesus Christ, etc.) xi, 2, 9, 10, 21, 23, 24, 29–35,

39, 40, 42, 43, 46, 47, 56–8, 65, 66, 70, 74, 75, 80, 81, 88, 104, 105, 108, 109, 113, 115–17, 123, 124, 136, 137, 141, 143–46, 152–58, 162–67, 169, 171–73, 177, 178, 180, 181, 189, 191, 196–98, 203, 205, 209 Christology / -logical 4, 6, 21, 28, 48, 63 fn. 31, 65, 67, 68, 80, 108, 116, 135–7, 143, 144, 147, 157–9, 162, 166, 172, 191, 193 Christocentric xi, 10, 76, 80, 111, 112, 115, 117, 171 Jesus of N azareth (c. 4 BCE – c. 30 CE ) 9, 23, 32–5, 38, 39, 40–3, 45–7, 56, 58, 65, 67, 68, 74, 75, 79, 95, 114, 115, 123, 136, 137, 141–46, 148, 151, 152, 154, 156, 158, 162–4, 166–9, 177, 181, 185, 187, 188, 192, 193, 196, 197 Cross / crucified 31–3, 35, 36, 42, 45, 56, 115, 117, 136, 137, 142, 143, 145, 153, 154, 167–8, 171, 174, 187 discipleship / follower 70 fn. 50, 75, 166, 171, 185 risen / resurrection 42, 95, 115, 137, 162–3, 167 Church 4, 6, 10, 12, 13, 19, 30, 31, 36, 38, 42, 45, 47, 52 fn. 5, 54, 55, 61 fn. 27, 63, 66, 70 fn. 50, 79, 81, 94, 104, 114, 130, 136, 138, 143, 145, 148, 149, 159, 162, 163, 169, 172–4, 181, 185, 186, 188, 189, 202, 207 fn. 6, 209, 211 Church as polis 12 fn. 25, 47 churches xi, 2, 12, 17, 39, 43, 47, 48, 55, 81, 173, 182–3, 189, 202, 207 congregations 12, 94, 102, 183, 188, 205 church-related institutions of education 102, 116, 169, 173 community xi, 5, 9, 10, 20, 38, 42, 46, 48, 57, 65, 66, 70 fn. 50, 71, 79, 80, 82–4, 91–5, 100, 108–11, 118–20, 123, 135, 136, 154, 159, 163, 164, 168, 171, 172, 175, 177, 178, 189, 192, 205, 206, 209, 210

Index community, trinitarian 36, 43, 44, 80, 148, 206 Cobb, John B., Jr. 211 cognitive (adjective) 20, 99, 113, 165, 200, 211 cognitive-propositional theory of religion and doctrine 50–3, 62, 68, 84, 184 creed(s) 30, 42, 46–7, 51, 63, 67–8, 70, 80–1, 94, 113, 124, 186, 193–4, 209 A postles’ 46, 168 A thanasian 25, 68 Chalcedon 67, 136 N icene or N iceno-Constantinopolitan 31 fn. 20, 52 fn. 5, 59, 65, 67–8, 75–6 culture(s), cultural contexts 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 26–8, 83, 86, 93, 94, 98, 100, 103, 105, 109, 110, 113, 114, 126, 138, 139, 140, 143, 149, 150, 157, 163, 169, 172–5, 180, 181 fn. 15, 183–6, 192, 194, 195, 197, 198, 206–9, 211 cultural linguistic turn, or theory of religion and doctrine 13, 49–82, 184, 187, 193 Cunningham, David S. (1961–) 42, 45–7 Cupitt, Don (1934–) 14, 174, 182–94, 195–98, 200–3, 205–10 deconstruction (of metaphysics or theology) 2, 17, 95, 102, 148, 157 Descartes, René (1596–1650) 5, 24–6, 31, 32, 126 fn. 5, 175 Cartesian legacy inphilosophy and theology 51, 54, 161, 165, 195, 205, 206 doctrine(s) The Nature of Doctrine (1984) 4 fn. 8, 11, 51–68 Drees, Willem B. 114–15, 199 ecumenical Christian dialogue and partnership 2, 4, 6, 11, 41, 46, 47, 52, 53–5, 68, 76, 79, 81, 94, 155, 173, 183, 187, 207

229

Enlightenment (1600 – 1700s) xi, 5, 28, 38, 39, 139, 140, 156, 196, 205, 211 post-E nlightenment theology 104, 113 epistemology / epistemic (theory of knowledge) 20, 24, 25, 50, 53, 57, 84, 86, 90–2, 96, 97, 111–14, 151, 156, 157, 159–68, 175, 179, 195 epistemology, foundational 11, 68, 69, 72, 73, 113, 175, 195 eschatology (doctrine of last things) 37, 72, 80, 95, 102, 114, 136, 175, 205, 206 eternity, eternal life of God 16, 37, 39–42, 43, 91, 93, 113, 142–3, 145–8, 166, 174, 180 fn. 14, 181, 191, 193 experience (human, scientific, cultural, etc) 5, 10, 11, 17, 20, 23, 26, 27, 40 fn. 1, 61 fn. 28, 74 fn. 66, 84, 93, 100–104, 107, 109, 111, 114, 115, 119, 120, 127, 145, 146, 152, 160–61, 166, 175, 176, 180, 181 fn. 15, 185, 187, 196, 197, 208, 210, 211 Christian religious experience 6, 8, 19–21, 23–4, 26, 28, 30–31, 33, 42, 48, 105, 106, 109, 114, 115, 143, 146, 149, 152, 154, 160, 186–7, 190, 191, 198, 202, 206 experiential-expressive theory of religion and doctrine 3 fn. 8, 51–2, 54, 56, 64, 67, 160, 177 faith see belief Farabi, al-(870–950) 125 feminist critical theory 86–7, 179, 185 feminist theology 2, 17, 22, 43, 166, 172, 197–9 Feuerbach, Ludwig (1804–72) 17, 29, 31, 71, 83, 183, 184, 194–203 Filioque (“and the Son”) 31 fn. 20, 76 Ford, David F. 3 fn. 6, 6–9, 192 foundationalism (intheory of knowledge, philosophic or theological) 9, 11 fn. 20, 68–75, 113, 115–16, 138–39, 160–61, 165 nonfoundationalism 72

230

God in Postliberal Perspective

Frei, Hans W. (1922–88) 3 fn. 6, 4 fn. 10, 6–10, 13 fn. 26, 137–8, 141, 144, 149, 156 fn. 58, 158, 163, 168, 192–4 Ghazali, al-(1059–1111) 125, 128 Gilkey, Langdon B. (1919–2004) 18 fn. 5, 131–2 God xi, 1, 51, 57–8, 83, 88–9, 95, 171–3, 205–12 attributes of God 16–17, 21, 31–32, 40, 52 fn. 5, 62 fn., 28, 127, 133–4, 191 agency 21–2, 25, 74–5, 107, 126, 131–33, 136, 142, 189, 198, 202, 207, 210 eternity 39–42, 93 fn. 23, 145–7 freedom 150 glory 117, 118 goodness 60–1, 94 immanence 89, 134, 142, 150, 152, 156, 180–81 impassible 143 knowledge (omniscience) 84, 90, 93–4 love 142–5, 148 mercy 153 power (omnipotence) 142–5, 154 simplicity 41, 126–7, 136, 149, 155 suffering 136–7, 143, 145, 153, 154–5, 191 transcendence 14, 20, 37, 87, 89, 106, 127–8, 134, 137, 142, 149–52, 171, 180, 207, 209 vulnerability 137, 142, 144–5, 147, 148, 152, 153, 158, 206 concept / conceptions of God 15 fn. 2, 17, 20, 22, 33, 34, 66, 76–9, 87, 89 fn. 11, 103, 105, 108, 125, 127, 130–31, 133, 135, 137, 143, 148, 151, 153, 156, 175, 206 “death of God” 13, 15–29, 173–4, 182–8, 194–203 doctrine(s) of God 3–4, 10, 15–48, 83, 98–9, 117, 123–4, 138, 142–3, 144, 149, 150, 151, 155, 157, 184, 191, 205, 211

essence 125–7, 144, 155, 157 God as C reator 8, 16, 18–19, 21, 24–6, 31, 35, 85, 98, 107, 113, 117, 123, 124 fn. 3, 126, 129, 132, 134–5, 144, 155, 168–9, 198, 212 God as T rinity xi, 2, 10, 13, 29–31, 35, 36–47, 49, 51, 59, 60, 63–8, 69, 71, 75–6, 79–81, 83, 85, 123, 132, 135, 136, 142, 147–9, 152, 155, 159, 162–3, 166–8, 171–2, 193, 198, 206 God as ‘Father’ 2, 32, 40, 43, 49 fn. 1, 69, 71, 142, 164, 197–8 God as ‘S on’ 2, 32, 33, 40, 49 fn. 1, 71, 80, 136–7 God as Holy Spirit 2, 13, 23, 30, 31 fn. 20, 43, 46, 58–9, 63 fn. 31, 66, 69, 80, 115, 123, 148, 152–3, 156, 166, 174, 186, 190, 197, 208–9 God’s ‘Kingdom’ / Rule 80, 95, 114, 136, 148, 188, 203 God’s Word (revelation) 31–6, 81–2, 103–8, 111–17, 135, 143, 144, 146, 151–5, 157–8, 180–81, 196, 201–3, 208 God-talk 178–9 apophatic (“way of negation”) 126 cataphatic (“way of affirmation”) 144 gods 1, 3, 18, 30, 39–40, 47, 193, 201, 211 fn. 14 symbol 15 fn. 2, 18, 19, 21, 34, 98, 148, 174, 209–10 word 15, 18, 20, 49, 75,77 fn. 73, 81 theism 2, 3, 13, 15–18, 29, 31–2, 41, 47–8, 51, 57, 66, 79, 155, 186, 191, 201 ens realissimum (most real being) 113 monotheism 2, 29–30, 36, 66–7, 184 panentheism 22, 191, 206, 208, 210 Goodman, N elson (1906–98) 95–102, 117–18, 175 fn. 5

Index grammar (of faith) 63–8 Green, Garrett 14, 176–81, 194–203 Hartshorne, Charles (1897–2000) 128, 206, 208 fn. 8 Hermeneutics (theory of understanding / interpretation) biblical 4, 6, 48, 141, 149, 156 philosophic 77 fn. 74, 99–102, 165, 174 theological 8, 11, 33–4, 44 fn. 33, 64 fn. 31, 65, 69, 79, 133, 154, 192, 194–203 Holmer, Paul L. (1916–2004) 62 fn. 29, 64, 68 fn. 43, 69 fn. 49, 70 fn. 50, 77 fn. 73 Holy Spirit see God as Trinity – God as Holy Spirit Hunsinger, George 3 fn. 6, 6 fn. 12, 13 fn. 26, 103 fn. 29, 138 fn. 39 Ibn-Sina / Avicenna (980–1037) 125 idol(s), idolatry 108, 113, 151, 157, 175–7, 197, 202 conceptual idolatry 89 Imago Dei (“image of God”) 176–81 imagination ix, 1, 7, 13, 14, 15, 17, 27, 28, 34, 48, 86, 90, 91, 96, 107, 121, 173, 174–81, 184, 194–203 interfaith dialogue and partnership i, xi, 2, 5, 11, 12, 16, 20, 94, 124–8, 136, 158, 172, 187, 205 interpretation see hermeneutics Jackelén Antje xi, 180 fn. 14 Jenson, Robert W. (1930–) 39–42 Jesus of N azareth see C hrist Jews and Jewish faith 2, 3, 14, 15 fn. 2, 18, 19, 41, 46, 66, 69 fn. 49, 70, 74, 75, 87, 89, 123–5, 135–7, 144, 156, 171–2, 182, 188, 189, 210, 211 Jüngel, Eberhard (1934–) 17, 31–6, 42, 43, 89 Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804) 5, 23, 31, 38 fn. 26, 61 fn. 28, 85, 89, 92, 126 fn. 5, 130, 131, 175, 184, 187, 188–9, 189 fns. 28–9, 194, 196, 199

231

Kantian philosophy 11, 15 fn. 2, 20, 32, 51, 96, 101, 111, 199 Kaufman, Gordon 7, 15 fn. 2, 19–23, 32, 34, 89, 126 fn. 5, 151 Kerr, Fergus 49 fn. 1, 64 fn. 33 Kuhn, Thomas (1922–96) 12, 177–78, 194–5, 198–9, 199 fn. 46 LaCugna, Catherine Mowry (1952–97) 29 fn. 13, 30, 42–5 liberal Christian theological tradition ix, 3–4, 6, 8, 10–14, 19, 128–30, 138, 150, 157, 158, 183, 195, 196 liberal (“mainline” / “oldline”) churches 183, 188 liberal political tradition 138–9 neo-liberal theologies 10, 148, 207–12 Lindbeck, George A. (1923–) 3, 3 fns. 6–8, 9, 11, 11 fn. 20, 13, 50–68, 83, 84, 158, 193, 205, 208 Luther, Martin(1483–1546) 6, 14, 31, 33, 58, 63–4, 137, 149, 153–4, 155, 180, 206, 209 L utheranism 39, 149 L utherans 54, 158 Maimonides (1135 – 1204) 125, 128 Marshall, Bruce D. (1955–) i, 14, 123, 148, 158–69, 172 fn. 1, 206 Meland, Bernard E. (1899–1993) ix, 14, 23 fn. 9, 207–12 Moltmann, Jürgen (1926–) 17, 36–8, 42, 114 Moore, Andrew 111–17 Murdoch, Iris (1919–99) 1, 15, 84 Muslims and Islamic faith 2, 14, 15 fn. 2, 19, 87, 89, 125, 135–6, 171, 172, 188, 189, 201 narrative see Bible – biblical narrative(s) / stor(ies)/ drama / epic The Nature of Doctrine (1984) see doctrine(s) N iebuhr, H. Richard (1894–1962) 2 fn. 3, 198 fn. 45 non-realism see realism

232

God in Postliberal Perspective

ontology (theory of being) 16, 30, 35, 37, 43, 63, 65, 67, 76–7, 81, 84, 86, 90, 93 fn. 23, 103, 111–14, 117, 125, 132 fn. 24, 133, 155, 159, 163, 166, 177, 179, 192 ontological argument for God’s existence 24 fn. 10, 89 fn. 10, 126 fn. 5, 191 ontological truth by correspondence 52–9, 67 ontotheology 27 Pannenberg, Wolfhart (1928–) 17, 95, 114 performative-propositional theological theory of religious truth 57–61, 71 perichoresis / divine circumincessio (“dance”, “circulation”) 37, 37 fn. 25, 148 Placher, William C. (1948–2008) i, 3 fn. 6, 5–6, 14, 62 fn. 29, 137–58, 165, 206, 208, 209 Plantinga, Alvin69, 191–2 pluralism 2–5, 12, 17, 19, 93, 96–8, 118, 186 authentic pluralism 138–9 ecclesial pluralism 12 religious pluralism 79, 123, 135 fn. 34, 172 fn. 1 theological pluralism 39, 145, 195 process metaphysics / theism / theology 2, 17, 22–3, 109, 114, 123, 127, 128–30, 133–5, 137, 145, 150, 151, 157, 158, 190 fn. 30, 191, 198 fn. 45, 206–12 Putnam, Hilary 13, 71, 71 fn. 54, 84–6, 92–5, 97, 99, 102, 117, 118, 137, 158 quantum physics 179 Rahner, Karl (1904–84) 29–31, 36, 42, 43, 55, 62, 148, 158 fn. 59 Ramsey, Ian Thomas (1915–72) 56 fn. 14 Realism(s) i, ix, xi, 10–13, 15, 17, 28, 56– 7, 71, 83–121, 177, 188, 205–12 agential 86–7, 179–81 alethic 88–91, 126 fn. 5, 140, 142, 151, 164, 189 fn. 28

Christocentric or Christian 4 fn. 9, 48, 62, 111–17 common sense 13, 72, 175 constructivism (inphilosophy of science) 87–88 critical (inscience and theology dialogue) 84, 109–111, 188, 205–6 empirical 14, 207 fn. 6, 209 imperial 65 instrumentalism (inphilosophy of science) 87 internal 13, 65, 71, 85–6, 92–5, 187, 205 irrealism (cf. non-realism) 95–102, 164, 186 metaphysical (or classical realism) 50, 84, 102, 149, 151, 179, 182–8, 193–4, 206 natural see internal non-realism i, xi, 12–4, 27, 48, 124, 130, 151, 164, 171, 182, 186, 188, 191, 193, 195–6, 202, 205–7, 211 pragmatic see internal revelational 34–5 selective 187 theological / doctrinal (cf. Christocentric realism) 14, 48, 56 fn. 16, 68, 102–121, 180 fn. 15, 205–6 resurrection see Christ – Jesus of N azareth – risen / resurrection revelation see God – God’s Word Ricoeur, Paul (1913–2005) 5, 10 fn. 19, 44 fn. 33, 69 fn. 49, 77 fn. 74, 99–101, 156–7, 156–7 fn. 58, 205 fn. 1 sanctify (make holy; cf. Christ – Jesus of N azareth – discipleship) 15 fn. 2, 31, 41, 58, 154, 190 Schleiermacher, Friedrich (1768–1834) 8, 9, 39, 39 fn. 28, 160, 187, 192, 200 Schwartz, Regina M. 2 fn. 2 Sherry, Patrick 50 fn. 2, 61 fn. 28, 64 fn. 33 Tanner, Kathryn (1957–) 124 fn. 3 Thiemann, Ronald F. 11–12, 44 fn. 33, 68 fn. 46, 71 fn. 52, 78 fn. 76, 81 fn. 78, 175, 176 T rinity see God – God as Trinity

Index truth 51–62, 88–91, 95, 158–69 Unamuno, Miguel de (1864–1936) 173–4 Wainwright, Geoffrey (1939–) 50, 53 fn. 6, 62 fn. 28, 69 fn. 49 Wallace, Mark I. 10 fn. 19, 56 fn. 16, 63 fn. 29 Ward, Keith 190, 190 fn. 30, 206–7 Whitehead, Alfred N orth (1861–1947) 23, 23 fn. 9, 128–9, 133–4, 145, 151, 198 fn. 45, 206, 208 fn. 9, 201 Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1889–1951) 5, 7, 10, 13, 49–51, 55, 58 fn. 20, 59,

233

62, 64, 69 fn. 47, 72–82, 83, 85, 127, 137, 185, 198, 206 Wood, Charles M. 159 fn. 61 worship (doxology, liturgy, praise, prayer, ritual, sacraments) 2, 6, 13, 14, 20, 39, 42, 44, 51, 63, 68–9, 71–2, 75–6, 77 fn. 73, 79–80, 116, 120, 127, 136, 142, 154, 159, 169, 171, 175, 197, 205–6, 209 Y ale University 5, 124, 137, 158 N ew Y ale Theology 10 fn. 19, 56 fn. 16, 63 fn. 29, 211