Mark Mattes points out that I have concentrated on the constative elements of religious and theological language, and thus may have underplayed a bit its performative nature. Mark asks if we might not embrace a realism less concerned with ontological and semantic questions, a realism more consonant with the Reformation/Lutheran emphasis on the reality of the Word itself. Simply put, he wants me to concentrate more upon the Word, and less on what the Word is about.
However, I believe it is this aboutness of the Word that we must now be about. The time has passed when we can languish in theological preoccupation with the wordiness of the Word. In reality, the Word of God is not merely a linguistic unit or word-event, but is rather an ontological reality: It is the Second Person of the Godhead. Since this is the case, our words about God have meaning because they recall the ontological divine reality these words ultimately presuppose.
In the history of western Christian thought, we retreated to the comfort of the Word itself when the aboutness of our words about God became problematic. So it is that we concentrated upon how our words went together and what effects those words had in our lives and the lives of our tribe. Following John Austin, we became enamored with locutions and perlocutions. We charted what words really did, and looked for the meaning of the words in their use to which they were put in our community. We did nothing wrong; it was a very good thing to do this.
It is, of course, a very good thing that Mark has pointed out that Luther and the Reformers did not follow the dry scholastic method of their theological precursors. After all, they were primarily interested in the effect of the Word in the lives of Christians, not in the endeavor of effecting a divine calligraphy, nor in any attempt to chart the ontological contour of God.
But, I argue, that while we should remember that Christian faith is not merely an attempt at an ontological calligraphy, we must not forget that Luther and his contemporaries clearly presupposed that there was a divine realm. They actually thought that God exists, that God has will, intention, and agency, and that God’s being transcends language. They did not think it useful to turn theology into ontology, because they saw that theology had everything to do with saving, not merely being and knowing. They did not have to thematize that which they presupposed.
But our time is not the time of the Reformers. We live on the other side of the Enlightenment, on the other side of those days where an unproblematic acceptance of a divine reality was possible. For us, divine reality is a deep problem. In the face of this profound problem of the divine, we have tried to find ways to do theology that are not so problematic, ways that concentrate upon human language about the divine and what effect that language has upon human lives. But human language about the divine is not the problem of our time; the divine that language is about is the problem. So, I would aver, to confess in our time is not to confess that which is not the problem, but rather to confess that which is the problem, that which is the scandal. To confess now is to claim, inter alia, that God exists, that God has will, intention and agency, and that God transcends human conception and language.
To reiterate, I am not saying that faith should become merely an “affirmation of a set of propositions” (Tillich). I fully acknowledge the complexities of faith, the paradox, and the complicated way that language functions. Rather, what I am saying is this: The time of the “great divorce” between language about the divine, and the divine about which that language is about, must now be gotten over. We simply cannot move ahead any longer in Lutheran theology without making some of the traditional ontological claims, some of the affirmations the classical Christian tradition made. It is simply misguided to suppose that Luther did not presuppose a constative view of language, even as he explored the performative perlocutions wrought by the language. One only needs to read his disputations to be assured of this. (I know that Mark is not saying this, but others in our theological tribe might.)
We stand today at the crossroads. Will we Lutherans have what it takes to steer back into the center of Western Christendom and assert in realist fashion some traditional fundamental like “God has created me and all creatures?” Can we confess this fundamental without collapsing into a fundamentalism ahistorically reading back into the text a creationist mechanism of our own invention? Can we confess that God is not a mere abstract idea, but that He is a real being having causal powers? Can we confess that there is some ontological contour to the divine such that some theological assertions are true and some are false? Can we find the courage to assert again that the God that Luther knew to be hidden apart from Christ was nonetheless a real being with causal power, a being that could not be domesticated by human beings simply by making Him an abstract idea? Do we Lutherans have the courage to re-enter that horizon where the good news of the gospel can again radically free us from the bondage of a real divine over-and-againstness?
We are at the crossroads. The old ways no longer work. If we do theology the way we have done it, we shall continue to produce pastors without passion for the scandal at Golgotha. How, after all, can one be passionate for a Christ unhinged from the living God? Let us re-energize this old theology of ours and make again some startling assertions: God exists, God causally interacts with our world, and theological language is either true or false, even when we don’t know exactly what or how it is so.