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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
Within the framework of the “empiricist” philosophy widely assumed in English theology, there is a serious problem about how to represent God’s action in the world. This applies equally to God’s action in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and to God’s action today through the Holy Spirit. Here I will argue that the problem can be eased by a change of philosophical framework. I will do so in dialogue with Maurice Wiles’ The Remaking of Christian Doctrine which reveals with outstanding honesty and clarity the difficulties that the empiricist framework throws up.
By the “empiricist” framework I mean a general set of philosophical presuppositions that are deeply entrenched within our culture in general, and widespread within our university departments of science, philosophy and theology in particular. Of these (often only implicit) presuppositions I am interested in just two: firstly, that the chief function of language is to represent or “picture” reality; secondly, that “action” must take place via some causal mechanism, the model for which is given by the causal mechanisms of the natural sciences. Thus the only relation that language can have to action is to “picture” it.
This pair of assumptions is peculiarly deadly for theology, because it pushes back our possibilities for conceptualizing God’s action to only two. Either we think of God’s action as the communication of knowledge about a state of affairs—a picture of reality—or else we must see it as an intervention in the causal nexus so as to rearrange the course of events in the physical world.
1 M., Wiles, The Remaking of Christian Doctrine, SCM (London) 1974Google Scholar. Especially chapters 2, 4 and 5. Quotations from this book are denoted by the use of single quotation marks.
2 J., Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, Heinemann (London 1978)Google Scholar. Compare Hesse M., Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science, Harvester (Brighton) 1980, for a broadly similar stance.
3 Habermas’ concept of communicative action is now most accessible in The Theory of Communicative Action vol 1, Heinemann (London) 1984 pp. 284–288 and 293–295. This massive two volume work explores the implications of the model of communicative action for modem social theory as a whole.
4 For the sake of simplicity I have neglected Habermas’ concept of “strategic action”, which denotes language used to manipulate other people for one's own ends.
5 Habermas’ term for the realm of experience to which the individual has privileged access. It does not imply acceptance of what he calls the “philosophy of consciousness”, i.e. Descartes et. seq.
6 To use language thus is a misuse of it that he calls “strategic action”. See note 4.
7 “Consensus” is a term in Habermas' vocabulary that suggests the unforced nature of a relationship in which the interests of both sides are taken equally into account in mutual respect.
