In the last chapter it was suggested that an internal-realist model of a Putnamian kind may find a place within a theistic realism. The question was raised at the end of the chapter whether such a model could accommodate a postmodern linguistic element within the theistic framework.

The postliberal proposal

In attempting to follow the perilous path of postmodernity without leading Christian theology into the wilderness, postliberal theology has faced the challenge of reconciling a biblical theology with a world in which all human reality comes historically and contextually shaped and human beings are constituted as persons in relation to a particular inherited communal reality. In maintaining the priority of first-order language in biblical narrative and Christian practice over propositional knowledge and experience and suggesting an alternative ‘cultural-linguistic model’, it aims to put a combination of Wittgensteinian models and Geertzian ‘thick description’ ethnography in place of traditionalrealist and phenomenological assumptions.

In The Nature of Doctrine, George Lindbeck suggests a cultural-linguistic model as the framework for a ‘common denominator’ theory that will enable interfaith dialogue. This means, importantly, that his discussion context is initially the pre-theological one of theories of religion rather than Christian theology as such. The cultural-linguistic perspective is advanced as an alternative to the prevalent ‘cognitivepropositional’ and ‘experiential-expressivist’ perspectives which Lindbeck considers have hindered or inadequately served this dialogue. This alternative is attractive because it does not deal in the truth claims or expressive symbols (respectively) peculiar to a given religion. From the viewpoint of this model, becoming religious is like learning a language or acquiring a culture.

It is time to draw the theory into the pragmatic reality in which it is tested: the Church. If the Church has to be realist unless it holds the belief that it constructs its own reality, divine as well as human, it is also faced with engaging with a postmodern world, and in its humanness is, of course, itself a part of that world. Most of this inquiry so far has been concerned with how theology, as Christian theory, might do this engaging. With the shift of focus to practice, the investigation of theory continues as the net of investigation widens to include ecclesiology, for according to the model advanced throughout, the nature of the Church is inseparable from its practice.

The Church as personal

Theological realism has often been labelled exclusivist and imperialist. That this accusation is in part justified is due to the realist tendency to regard Christian facts as true for everyone in the same way. As a corrective to this approach, Lindbeck maintains that as we do not know how much (or whether) our ecclesial forms of life – the ‘giant propositions’ of our traditions – correspond to a divine reality, we cannot take their doctrines as being absolute immutable truths cast in concrete, but must regard them as ‘categorially true’ – that is, true for their context. On the other hand, however, he would agree with Lesslie Newbigin and other theological realists that the Christian Church must be universalist (if not exclusivist) in that it ‘points unambiguously to Jesus Christ as the one whom God has set forth to be the given centre of human unity, the one who “through the blood of his cross” can reconcile all people and all things’.

It has been noted that while theological realism and liberal revisionism are both able to account for new truths, they differ on whether this new truth is something we discover as our concepts are brought into line with it and are able to grasp it, or whether this is at least in part something that human concepts participate in and have a role in creating. Although these positions may seem implacably opposed in coming from quite different metaphysical stances, this opposition might be construed as simply reflecting these different premises rather than ruling out one or the other as false. In other words, the clash of premises may itself be seen as indicating the need for a more comprehensive integrative model that is able to accommodate both realist and postmodern elements. What has emerged so far in the search for such a higher organizing model is a sketch of a theistic realism whose logic has been identified as both incarnational and trinitarian and its dynamic accordingly as co-inherent, or perichoretic.

It has been suggested that it will be necessary to supplement the horizontal ‘how’ dimension with some input from another paradigm before beginning to work out the ‘vertical’ aspects of such a model. If this imported paradigm is able to supply more infrastructure, it will be possible to describe more adequately the process as well as the content of the theological endeavour in a way that is still consistent with its structure. The proposal to be tested here is that a Wittgensteinian paradigm will serve this purpose, but a Wittgensteinian paradigm that goes beyond the postliberal use of Wittgenstein and is more comprehensive than the postmodern weak thesis although essentially consistent with it.

In the process of this inquiry three strands or levels of argument have been knitted and cabled together into a sort of theological Aran sweater. Hopefully, the inevitable loss in theoretical elegance accompanying the complex task of trying to think together models and schools that have traditionally been kept separate has been compensated for by a gain in theological comprehensiveness and explanatory force, so that the resulting pattern is at least interesting and useful if not stylish.

The first strand has been the meta-theological one of integrating schools of theology. Here a critical/postcritical realism now expanded and complicated, has come to subsume and incorporate postliberal and revisionist insights. In the process this realism has itself been modified but, it is contended, not critically. The second strand has been the shift from the theoretically non-pragmatical (theological realism and language-riddenness) through the theoretically pragmatical (language games and agency) to the practically pragmatical and then corporately pragmatical (ecclesial practice). The third strand has been the shift from an impersonal and static perspective to the personal and dynamic view of reality already present in theological realism but, for the purposes of this inquiry's incorporation of the weak postmodern thesis, allowed to come progressively into focus.

The contention was put forward in the introduction that if progress is to be made in theology it will not be by digging existing lines of thought deeper, but by developing lateral and synthetic approaches that aim to overcome the shortcomings of realist, liberal-revisionist and postliberal approaches while building on their strengths. In endeavouring to develop these approaches this inquiry began with two premises.

It has been suggested that the innovative capacity of human thought and language cannot be explained without a ‘vertical’ (theistic) dimension. Having drawn human cognitive and linguistic re-grammaring and refiguring processes inside the ‘horizontal’ process of conversion, we may describe more adequately the ‘how’ of the conversion of old realities into new ones but we cannot explain conversion itself without drawing it inside Christology as a whole, just as we cannot explain Christology itself except in relation to the doctrine of God. In the same way, neither can Christology alone make sense of divine involvement in human language-using and cognitive processes in revelation and conversion. If these processes help articulate the way God works in the world, they articulate an Economic Trinity which includes the pneumatological operation within creation.

The giant proposition

On a Wittgensteinian and Putnamian view the distinction between reality and truth is an internal one as it relies on a correspondence that in turn relies on certain premises. These premises lay down a distinction and correlation between language and world, which lies so deep in our concepts that much of our language and thinking cannot make sense without it. According to Fergus Kerr, behind the realist notion that we have access to ‘objective’ reality lies the illusion that our context is the only reality. That this context is apparently divisible into mind and matter tempts us into a choice between things and thoughts as the primary reality, a choice which overlooks what Wittgenstein has called das Leben, the stream of life.

This inquiry's twin concerns are the nature of theology and the nature of reality, where the issue that links them both is the role of language – not the content of language as in theological language, although that is part of it; rather, language as an entity in itself. The scope of the inquiry is the combined context of contemporary realist, postliberal and liberal revisionist theology. It straddles all these schools to a greater or lesser extent in that it arises out of the awareness that, while their various preoccupations and insights are different and potentially complementary, their shortcomings are essentially similar.

The nature of theology

Contemporary theological realists (such as T. F. Torrance) tend to operate with what might be termed a linguistic-window-on-reality model, however much the view from that window is acknowledged to be partial, theory-laden and in need of progressive revisions. While this window on reality is clouded by the limitations and distortions of human concepts, it becomes clearer if not transparent in the search for the truth as the truth gives itself to us to be known. Theological realists accordingly regard theology as having a scientific character in that, like scientific observation and theory-building, it is governed by its object. The being of God reflected in contingent creaturely being has an intrinsic rationality which the human knower comes to know in the same way that he or she comes to know worldly reality – that is, by ‘grasping it in its depths’ through participating in the given (revealed) structures of its being. This approach, therefore, asserts a universal rationality which is in the first place divine and in the second place, contingently, cosmic or worldly.

Colin Gunton has suggested that the concept of ‘person’ is ontologically and logically primitive – the ‘idea’ in terms of which other concepts are understood, an idea which can only be grasped (like language-games) in respect to particular instances. The task of this chapter is to examine the nature and relation of divine and human personhood. This will be done by first constructing a ‘language-ridden’ Christian anthropology from below – that is, in its horizontal aspects – with a view to drawing this anthropology inside its vertical component. Second, the nature of divine personhood will be explored in relation to human personhood. It will be suggested that incarnation is the linchpin between immanent and economic trinitarian realities that draws human personhood into participation with divine personhood and enables us to know what God is like.

The intention is to provide a programmatic sketch of a series of burgeoning implications of a ‘language-ridden’ theistic (and incarnational) realism for the doctrine of God and Christian anthropology (including the doctrine of sin and ethics) which will beg a great deal of further development in terms of both delving deeper into the areas already covered and generalizing sideways into other areas of Christian doctrine.

Language and relation

Gunton argues that a relational model best describes the complex pluriformity of contemporary reality. Personal distinctness is constituted in relation. Everything is constituted as what it uniquely is in relation to everything else. It follows that ‘persons also are constituted in their particularity both by their being created such by God and by the network of human and cosmic relatedness in which they find their being’.

David Ford has argued that a ‘middle-distance realism’ that takes a course between realist and idealist perspectives is able to allow both a ‘finding’ and a ‘fashioning’ of the Gospel. This is consistent with the suggestion that the incorporation of a postmodern weak thesis within a critical- or internal-realist perspective is not incompatible with a notion of God as the ultimate reality and final judge of truth. One of the questions remaining to be considered is the extent to which human thoughts and words do fashion as well as find a theistic reality.

Reading and commitment

If on a postmodern view people are inseparable from their stories, arguably reading becomes primary. One of the consequences of the linguistic turn in theology is that theological concerns become hermeneutical ones. Revisionist theologian and hermeneut Werner Jeanrond emphasizes the hermeneutical dialectic between the text as witness to revelation and the reading of it as mediating that revelation, between texts themselves and theories of reading texts, and between genres and styles in both. As he points out, such a dialectic renders both the purely objective and the purely subjective impossible. Jeanrond proposes a pragmatic middle way akin to Putnam's internal realism, in which meaning is at least in part determined by use. As a language-using activity, reading ‘includes but transcends purely linguistic concerns’.

Where Tony Eagleton, another advocate of a pragmatic approach, contends that all language is socially constituted and therefore all theories political, Jeanrond questions whether this is the only or best way to employ the insight of the social nature of language.

Realism makes the commonsense claim that physical objects exist independently of being perceived. ‘On this perspective’, comments Hilary Putnam, ‘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.’

The state of the art

In her essay ‘Theological Realism’ Janet Martin Soskice defines theological realists as ‘those who, while aware of the inability of any theological formulation to catch the divine realities, none the less accept that there are divine realities that theologians, however ham-fistedly, are trying to catch’. And Thomas Torrance observes rather more uncompromisingly that ‘it belongs to the very essence of rational behaviour that we can distinguish ourselves as knowing subjects from the objects of our knowledge and distinguish our knowing from the content of our knowing. If we are unable to do that, something has gone wrong: our minds have somehow been “alienated” from reality.’ It is hard to argue with this imperative; suggesting how we might do this distinguishing is another matter. Torrance's view is that we can and must get past the deflecting, distorting lenses of culture and language to ‘grasp the deep structure of reality’, a reality that has a structure independent of our cultural and linguistic structuring, a ‘graspable’ coherence independent of our various perspectives.

While Soskice and Torrance both regard the relation of scientific or worldly truth to theological truth as a matter of analogy, they differ in the species of analogy posited.