A Response to Mark Mattes

A Response to Mark Mattes
WordAlone Fall Theological Conference, Fall 2006
Dennis Bielfeldt, South Dakota State University

Mark Mattes points out that I have concentrated on the constative
elements of religious and theological language, and thus may have
underplayed 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, 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 traditional ontological
claims, some 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 startling assertions once again: 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.