Notebooks

By Schubert M. Ogden

As artists not uncommonly keep sketchbooks, so thinkers often write notebooks. Schubert Ogden is a thinker for whom writing notebooks has been an essential discipline throughout his long career of trying to think as a Christian systematic theologian. By his own confession, constantly writing down his thoughts so he could discover what he wanted to think has always been as necessary to learning how to think theologically as constantly reading in order to think fruitfully with the minds of others.
This volume is a selection from the indefinitely larger corpus of Ogden's notebooks now archived in the Drew University Library. All arising from his thinking as a theologian, the entries selected are addressed to some of the more fundamental, and therefore mainly philosophical, issues now facing anyone who would do Christian theology systematically. While each entry stands on its own and may well be read discretely, they together make up a single many-sided argument for a distinctive way of doing theology today by resolutely pursuing a comparably distinctive way of doing metaphysics and ethics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Nov 6, 2018
• ISBN: 9781532657122

Schubert M. Ogden

Schubert M. Ogden is University Distinguished Professor of Theology Emeritus at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University. His books include The Understanding of Christian Faith (Cascade, 2010), Doing Theology Today (Wipf & Stock, 2006), and Faith and Freedom (Wipf & Stock, 2005).

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Preface

Just as thinking, in my case, has always meant trying to think with the minds of others as well as my own, and therefore reading, so has it also always meant writing, for myself as well as for others. Why? Well, because writing it out so I can read it is the only means I’ve ever found by which I could be at all sure about what I wanted to think and whether I might possibly be right in thinking it. In one form or another, then, the notebooks in which most of my writing has been done have always had a prominent place on my desk, and writing and rewriting them, or what eventually became them, has ever claimed a large part of my time and energy as a theological scholar-teacher.

The present volume consists of some selections from these notebooks. Taken altogether, they contain many of my first thoughts—and as often as not some of my best ones—on matters with which I believe a Christian systematic theologian today most needs to be concerned. But the small selection published here neither is nor is intended to be representative in scope. It is deliberately focused instead on some of the more fundamental issues (often philosophical) now facing anyone who would do Christian theology systematically. The other criterion I have applied in making the selection is to include entries that, in one way or another, fill in or fill out the approach to the understanding of Christian faith for and from which I have argued in my other published writings.

Central at this point was my ever-deepening conviction that the metaphysics and ethics that are called for in doing theology today have to be not only materially neoclassical instead of classical in form, but also (and just as urgently) austerely transcendental rather than categorial. However, any metaphysics and ethics that are likely to be worth considering are of a piece with a whole range of other philosophical analyses; and the one issue that both philosophy and Christian theology have to deal with sooner or later is the issue of God. Whence my rationale for ordering the entries I selected into the three main parts of the book.

But this order, like that of the entries themselves, both within their respective parts and also internally, is suggested only. Most of the titles are relatively recent and now cover more than one original or independent entry, as indicated in most cases by the fleurons. I have, of course, tried to organize the book so that it can be read as a single, if many-sided, argument. But one of the values of a good notebook is that it is precisely a book of notes, each of which ideally stands on its own and can also be read as such with profit.

There are certain persons I think of with gratitude in writing this preface. One is Andrew D. Scrimgeour, Dean of Libraries Emeritus at Drew University, in whose archives the bulk of my notebooks in their form at the time have been housed since 2009. Thanks especially to his efforts, they have now all been scanned and integrated into the database, so as to be accessible to the general public online. The other persons are my literary executor, Philip E. Devenish, and his team of fellow editors, Franklin I. Gamwell, George L. Goodwin, and Alexander F. Vishio, who have all worked with Andy in the important final stages of integration. To all of you, as always, my heartiest thanks.

Westminster, Colorado

June 2018

Part 1

Philosophical Analyses

The ideal aim of philosophizing is to become reflectively at home in the full complexity of the multi-dimensional conceptual system in terms of which we suffer, think, and act.

—Wilfrid Sellars

1

Basic Faith

To live as adult human beings is to live by faith in the existence of a reality beyond, but also including, oneself and to make distinctions between what only seems to be, or is said to be, and what really is, what is appearance and what is reality, and what is false and what is true. This faith, in reality and in truth, can be understood critically, but life cannot be lived without it. No reason can ever replace faith, although faith can be understood ever more reasonably, insofar as successive understandings of it are better able to withstand relevant rational criticism. But to give up faith, as distinct from giving up this, that, or the other relatively inadequate understanding of it, would be to give up life itself.

In much the same way, to live humanly is to live by faith in a value beyond (but also including) one’s own value, and to make distinctions between what only seems to be valuable and what really is so, what is good and what is evil, and what is right and what is wrong. This faith, in value, goodness, and rightness, can be understood critically, but life cannot be lived without it. No reason can ever replace faith, although faith can be understood ever more reasonably, insofar as successive understandings of it are better able to withstand relevant critical reflection. But to give up faith, as distinct from giving up this, that, or the other relatively inadequate understanding of it, would be to give up life itself.

So, too, to live as a mature human being is to live by faith in something that makes all lives, including one’s own, both possible and meaningful. The ultimate question of life is never Is living both possible and worthwhile? but only What is it—really and truly—that makes it so? Affirmation of life’s possibility and worthwhileness is inalienable, even though what makes life possible and worthwhile can always be more or less misunderstood. And so this faith can also always be understood more critically, more reasonably, insofar as some explicit understandings of it are better able than others to stand up to relevant rational criticism. And yet no reason can ever replace the faith. To give it up, as distinct from giving up any and all understandings of it that prove to be relatively inadequate, would be also to give up life.

This third question about the possibility and worthwhileness of life is rightly thought and spoken of as the existential question, and as therefore the religious question as well. It does not ask whether life is possible and meaningful, but only what it is that makes it so or how we are to understand that it is. What is the source or ground of life’s possibility and meaning—and so, in a very broad, heuristic sense of God, who or what is God?

In what I mean by radical monotheism—which I take to be only more or less illustrated by the traditional theistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—the answer to the question of life’s meaning is: The source or ground of life’s possibility and meaning, and so God, is the one strictly ultimate, universal reality that is the necessary condition of the possibility not just of human existence but of all existence. But if this answer is relatively more adequate than any other, it is only because this one strictly ultimate, universal reality is understood to be not just abstract but also concrete, and therefore a genuine individual: the one reality that is as individual as it is universal, and vice versa, because it is as internally related to all things, as all things are internally related to it. Thus it not only makes all things really possible, both in principle and in fact, but it also makes all things really real and everlastingly significant by incorporating them into its own everlasting life. As such, it is arguably the one eminent or unsurpassable (and therefore all-worshipful) reality that alone is deserving of authentic faith—meaning both unreserved trust or confidence, and unqualified loyalty or fidelity.¹

•

Our basic faith as human beings includes at least the following:

1. a faith that there is a reality in which we are to believe that comprises all three modes of the actual, the possible, and the necessary, and that this reality, being independent of what we believe about it, individually and collectively, is the measure of the truth or falsity of all our beliefs;

2. a faith that there is a good and a right that we are to pursue and do, and that, being independent of what we believe to be good and right, individually and collectively, is the measure of the rightness or wrongness of all our actions, as well as of the truth or falsity of all our beliefs about them; and

3. a faith that there is a meaning of ultimate reality for us that we are to accept in obedient trust and loyalty, and that, being likewise independent of what we believe about it, individually and collectively, is the measure of the truth or falsity of whatever we believe it to be.

This third faith included in our basic faith may also be described as a faith (1) that there is a true and authentic way for each of us to understand ourselves and others as all parts of the one encompassing whole; (2) that to understand oneself in this way and to lead one’s life accordingly are both really possible in fact as well as in principle and, like everything else, real and abidingly significant; and (3) that the structure of ultimate reality in itself determines its meaning for us, or determines the true and authentic way to understand oneself and others and to guarantee that this way of self-understanding and the life-praxis that accords with it are both really possible.

1. Cf. Niebuhr, Life Is Worth Living.

2

Experience Of/Thought About

Experience is always experience of—of reality as given to, and as independent of, our experience. Thought, or as may also be said, understanding or reason, is always included in some experience and therefore is always thought about—about the reality given to, and independent of, our thought as well as of our experience. More exactly, thought is always about reality; not in its concrete content, quality, or value, but in its abstract structure. Insofar as concrete reality is given to us at all, it is not given through thought but through experience, although our experience, being fragmentary, is itself so abstract as to mediate concrete reality as such only poorly.

Any concrete reality has a content, quality, or value in itself, as well as for all other concrete realities experiencing it (or otherwise really, internally relating to it); and it may have a meaning for us, as well, as beings who not only experience it, but also understand, and think and speak about, what we experience. It has this meaning for us, not in its intrinsic value as a concrete reality, but in its different abstract aspects, and thus in its constitutive or instrumental value for us.

But if any concrete reality has a content, quality, or value in itself as well as for others, and may also have a meaning for us, it also has a structure which, relative to itself as concrete, is abstract, offering different abstract aspects in which we may find it to be of constitutive or instrumental value.

Thought about reality, as distinct from experience of reality, is always either about ultimate reality (including strictly ultimate reality) as mediated by our experience in its vertical dimension or existential aspect, in which case it is properly distinguished as, implicitly or explicitly, metaphysics; or about immediate reality as mediated by our experience in its other horizontal dimension or empirical aspect, in which case it is properly said to be, implicitly or explicitly, science, i.e., one or the other of the so-called special sciences.

Thought also takes place on two closely related, but clearly distinguishable, levels: on the primary level of self-understanding and life-praxis, and on the secondary level of critical reflection/appropriation and proper theory. Thought on the primary level is already involved in normal adult experience, which when examined closely is as truly thought about reality as it is experience of reality. On this primary level, thought consists of asking and answering our various vital questions, existential and also intellectual, thereby making or implying certain claims to validity, including the claim for the truth of our answers to our questions.

Thought on the secondary level, by contrast, consists in critically reflecting on/appropriating our experience and thought on the primary level. Specifically, critical reflection/appropriation includes both critical interpretation of the answers to our various vital questions, existential and also intellectual, and critical validation of the claims we make or imply in answering them as we do, especially the claim that our answers are true. In other words, the questions we ask and answer on the secondary level are not the various vital questions we ask and answer on the primary level, but rather the theoretical questions of meaning and validity—not simply as such, of course, but as oriented by, and corresponding to, our various vital questions.

Still another word closely related to thought, along with understanding and reason, is belief. And what has been said so far about thought, understanding, and reason may be said, mutatis mutandis, about belief as well. Thus, for example, if we may say that thought about reality on the primary level is already a part of normal adult experience of reality, we may say the same concerning belief, because our ordinary experience of reality is shot through with beliefs about the reality we experience. Or, again, we may and must distinguish our various vital beliefs on the primary level from our corresponding theoretical beliefs on the secondary level.

In the same way, we may and must distinguish between our basic beliefs about ultimate reality as mediated by our experience in its vertical dimension, or existential aspect, and all of our other beliefs about immediate reality that necessarily presuppose our basic beliefs, but that are themselves mediated by our experience in its other dimension or aspect previously distinguished as horizontal or empirical.

If, then, the claims to truth that we make or imply for our beliefs are valid, this can only be because our beliefs about reality, like our understandings of it, or our thoughts and reasonings about it, agree with, or correspond to, reality as it is. And the only conceivable test, finally, of whether this necessary condition is satisfied, is that our beliefs, or the assertions that we believe to be true, may somehow claim the support of our experience of reality in its vertical dimension, or existential aspect, in the case of our basic beliefs; and in its horizontal dimension, or empirical aspect, in the case of our other beliefs. This is the only conceivable test, finally, because the abstract aspects or structure of concrete realities with which our beliefs, thoughts, understandings, and reasonings about them must agree, or to which they must correspond, in order to be true are mediated only by our experience of concrete realities in one or the other of its two dimensions or aspects.

Experience is to the content, quality, or value of a concrete reality as thought, understanding, reason, or belief is to its abstract structure. This means that if the structure of a concrete reality can be thought, understood, reasoned, or believed about, the concrete reality itself cannot be thought about, but can only be experienced. Therefore, relative to thought, the content, quality, or value of a concrete reality remains as mysterious as its structure is intelligible, although human thought, like human experience, is also fragmentary and abstract, excluding most, if not quite all, even of the abstract reality or structure thought about.

Reasoning, as distinct from reason, is a synonym for argumentation, and thus refers to the entire process of giving reasons—from the primary level of self-understanding and life-praxis to the secondary level of critical reflection/appropriation and proper theory, and with respect both to our basic beliefs and our other beliefs, as well as the purely hypothetical, necessary, but nonexistential, assertions of formal logic and mathematics. All such reasoning is rightly said to consist of discourse or argumentation somehow grounded in, and involving final (or primal) appeal to, experience in one or the other of its two dimensions or aspects.

In addition to the connections among the several distinctions previously clarified—experience and thought, concrete and abstract, mystery and intelligibility—there is also the connection between all of them, on the one hand, and the distinction between the unsurpassable and the surpassable, on the other. This distinction does not parallel the others, but cuts across them, in that the unsurpassable and the surpassable can each be said to be, in infinitely, qualitatively different ways, objects of both experience and thought and to have aspects in themselves that are both concrete and abstract, content and structure, mystery and intelligibility. The infinite, qualitative difference between the unsurpassable and the surpassable is the difference between all and some (in contrast to none), or whole and part. Thus, while the unsurpassable, as much as anything surpassable, is an object of both experience and thought, it is properly distinguished as the object, the universal and all-inclusive object thereof, even as anything surpassable is simply an object, a particular and partially exclusive object among many others, both of experience and of thought. Or, again, the unsurpassable qua concrete and abstract, or in its content and also in its structure, is not simply a concrete or content, or an abstract or structure, but is the concrete or content and the abstract or structure. This is because the unsurpassable as all or the whole includes within itself as concrete or content all other surpassable concretes or contents, even as in its aspect as abstract or structure it is included within all other abstracts or structures, as well as all other concretes or contents. In the same way, or for the same reason, the unsurpassable qua concrete or content is not simply a mystery, but the mystery, all mystery compounded into one all-encompassing, impenetrable mystery, while qua abstract or structure, the unsurpassable is not simply an intelligible, but is the intelligible, all intelligibility united into one incomparably lucid abstract or structure.

3

Reality, or the Real

What is properly meant by reality, or the real?

According to William James, the real is what we in some way find ourselves obliged to take account of.² Charles Hartshorne answers the question differently, but in no way contradictorily, by saying, The real is that to which true affirmations refer. So by reality is properly meant, not simply "whatever happens to exist, taken in its contingent aspects alone, but rather having a character of its own with reference to which opinions can be true or false. [R]eality is the object of correct affirmations (that which measures their truth)."³

On this meaning, not only the contingent, or "that which contingent true assertions affirm," is real, but also the necessary, or what necessary true assertions affirm. By the necessary here is meant the common element of all possibility, and so reality as such, which "is neither a fact, nor something merely ‘behind,’ or additional to all facts[,] but rather something in them all."⁴

Hartshorne, in my judgment, is right: the best word for what contingent true assertions affirm is not reality, or the real, but rather fact, in the sense of "something in nature that, having been made or produced (factum, fr. facere) might conceivably not have been as it is."

•

Reality is what experience is experience of, and thus what is disclosed through experience—and reason based on experience.

There are two main forms of this experiential-rational disclosure of reality: empirical-rational and existential-rational.

Correspondingly, there are two main forms of the reality thus disclosed: the immediate reality disclosed empirical-rationally (facts); and the ultimate reality disclosed existential-rationally (principles).

2. James, Some Problems of Philosophy, 101.

3. Hartshorne, Wisdom as Moderation, 65–66.

4. Hartshorne, Wisdom as Moderation, 63, 65–66.

4

Concerning the Senses of Symbol

I use symbol in three distinct—albeit closely related—senses:

(1) in connection with the symbolic capacity (Hartshorne)—i.e., our capacity to grasp and express meaning at the high level of thinking and speaking exhibited by normal adult human behavior. In this first broad sense (sensu lato), symbol is applicable to any and all expressed meaning, whether the mode or medium of its expression be language, conduct, or artifacts generally, including sociofacts;

(2) in connection with the expression of specifically religious (or philosophical) meaning, which is analogical in a broad sense insofar as concepts and terms ordinarily used in thinking and speaking about the empirical or the merely factual existential are also applied to the transcendental. In this second strict or proper sense (sensu stricto), symbol is equivalent in meaning with analogy, broadly understood; and

(3) in connection with a particular, historically significant kind of expression of religious (or philosophical) meaning—namely, myth—insofar as it is understood to be precisely that. In this third narrow sense (sensu strictissimo), symbol means any myth insofar as it is understood as myth and used accordingly. (This, by the way, is also pretty much Rudolf Bultmann’s use of symbol; and Hartshorne uses it similarly in distinction from analogy in his strict, term-of-art, sense of the word.)

In my use, myth designates a species of analogy, understood broadly, and hence also of symbol, used in what I distinguish as the second, strict or proper sense of the term. Myth is not the only species of analogy in the broad sense or of symbol in the strict or proper sense, since there can be analogies or symbols in these senses whose concepts and terms are derived, not empirically, from our external sense perception, but existentially, from our internal nonsensuous perception of our own existence as related to others and the whole. But where the concepts and terms used in an analogy are not derived existentially but empirically, it is an instance of the properly mythical species of analogy, as well as of symbol in the second sense of the term. So I would not disagree with the statement that some of the things I am wont to say about myth would apply also to symbol in that second sense; for in that sense, symbol is to myth as genus is to species. But if all myth is symbol in this second strict or proper sense of symbol, not all symbol in this sense is myth. My main objection to the way in which Paul Tillich and others talk globally of religious symbol without making any such distinction is that it does not clarify but only confuses relevant issues—allowing, for instance, for such popular but hopelessly misguided claims as ‘Demythologizing’ is really ‘remythologizing.’

It will be noticed that I have implied a further distinction between broad and strict senses of analogy, as when I said that symbol sensu stricto is equivalent in meaning with analogy, broadly understood. In its strict sense, analogy designates what is really only a particular kind of analogy sensu lato—namely, a nonsymbolic analogy (in the third, strictest sense of symbolic). Whereas symbol in the third sense designates religious (or philosophical) thought and speech whose concepts and terms are derived empirically, analogy in the strict sense of the term designates discourse whose concepts and terms are derived existentially.

5

Philosophical Anthropology: Some Tentative Conclusions

A human being is nature become spirit, or in other words, is nature become understanding of itself, others, and its ultimate ground and end. As such, a human being is continuous and also discontinuous with the rest of nature, and is to be conceived as emergent from it in accordance with its own immanent laws of evolutionary development. This implies that there is as little reason to appeal to a special creation by God to explain the appearance of human beings as to explain the appearance of any other level of natural emergence (living from nonliving, animal from living, etc.). As Hans Jonas effectively shows in The Phenomenon of Life, the very structures that existentialist philosophers have isolated as definitively human—freedom, creativity, self-determination, etc.—are foreshadowed or anticipated at all earlier levels of life, so that the entire process of life’s emergence is one long history of freedom culminating in human beings. To take this view, as I see it, is to move beyond humanism, whether in its earlier supernaturalist form or in its more recent naturalist forms. As I read it, the story of human beings’ discovery of themselves as spirit distinct from the rest of nature is not without its deeply tragic side—by which I mean their self-alienation or estrangement from nature, the original counterpart of which was the estrangement they conceived to exist between God and nature as well. The accomplishment of more recent thinking, prompted by the gradual adoption of the hypothesis of human evolutionary emergence, is to have opened the way to the overcoming of this alienation from nature on the part of God as well as human beings.

As a new emergent level within nature, human beings as nature become spirit are more than simply a compound of animal with something more than animal. There is an integrity to the distinctively human structure such that even the biology of human beings is peculiarly human. This is evident from the fundamental biological conditions of human existence—notably, the lack of instinctive specialization and the presence of a greatly enlarged neocortex, together with the peculiar pattern of growth to which each human individual is subject (premature birth, extended youth, and a relatively long period of maturity). These biological characteristics directly correspond to the fact that a human being is nature become spirit, and at once condition and are conditioned by that fact. Also relevant in this connection is the conclusion of Theodosius Dobzhansky and others that there was a feedback process of cultural achievement on genetic endowment in the late evolution of the human brain.

The fact that a human being is nature become spirit explains the further fact that she or he is a uniquely cultural and properly historical creature. If the question is asked whether there is any such thing as a universal human nature, the answer, in my judgment, is definitely affirmative. But this does not mean that there is any good reason to understand human nature in the oversimplified ways in which it has often been understood. The human, I should say, is really an abstract variable, which can have any number of different concrete values, and indeed must have some such values, but which, as abstract, also has a constant aspect. This can be put as well by saying that, as biologically unspecialized, and yet also able and constrained somehow to specialize her- or himself, a human being is both homo hominans and homo hominatus—or, as we may translate, a human being making her- or himself and a human being made by her- or himself. Qua making her- or himself, a human being shares in the human only insofar as it is understood as an abstract variable that can have many values, contingently upon her or his exercise of the capacity to determine her- or himself. But this is just what is meant by saying that a human being is the uniquely cultural creature; for by culture is meant the sum total of everything that a human being has not received from nature via heredity, but has produced through her or his creative power to determine her- or himself. Strictly speaking, of course, culture exists only in plural forms: human beings create culture only in that they create cultures. And this, in turn, explains why they are also properly historical creatures, for as William H. McNeill has written, When cultural evolution took over primacy from biological evolution, history in the strict and proper sense began.⁵

But both culture and history involve a dialectic; and a human being as nature become spirit is essentially involved in this dialectic. On the one hand, she or he is the creator of culture, the one through whose creative freedom culture first comes to be. On the other hand, she or he is also the creature of culture, the one whose life is given shape by the cultural heritage into which she or he enters precisely in being born and raised as a human being. Thus it is possible to apply to human culture generally Wilhelm von Humboldt’s well-known statement about that foundational element in all culture—language: Man is man only through language; but in order to discover language he already had to be man; von Humboldt’s statement is exactly paralleled by A. N. Whitehead when he says, the mentality of mankind and the language of mankind created each other.⁶ In a similar way, one may show that a human being is at once creative of history and created by it. Thus Michael Landmann has spoken of the dialectic of subjective and objective spirit; and Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, in The Social Construction of Reality, develop a similar dialectic in working out their sociology of knowledge. As they put it, "the relationship between man, the producer, and the social world, the product, is and remains a dialectical one. That is, man . . . and his social world interact with each other. The product acts back upon the producer. . . . Society is a human product. Society is an objective reality. Man is a social product."⁷

The important point is to recognize that this dialectic is exactly that, and that, therefore, neither side can be collapsed into the other. If a human being as nature become spirit freely transcends nature, even while remaining within it, a human being as spirit expressing or externalizing itself in culture and, in turn, internalizing culture also transcends culture, even while remaining within it. This, it seems to me, is the abiding importance of existentialist anthropology, which refuses to treat a human being as simply the product of her or his cultural and social environment, just as it also refuses to treat her or him as merely an animal. One compelling reason for thinking this view true is that it alone seems able to explain how human beings can develop, as they have in fact done, such transcendental analyses as sociology of knowledge and anthropology of culture. If the statement that reality is socially constructed applied tout court, and thus also to the reality putatively disclosed by the sociology of knowledge itself, we would be faced with an obvious and, I should think, unacceptable paradox. On the other hand, the value of the kind of anthropology of culture developed by Landmann and others, or the sociology developed by Arnold Gehlen and Peter Berger, is to fill in the stark abstractness of a merely existentialist understanding of human being—just as much the same may be said, mutatis mutandis, for more biologically oriented anthropologies.

But also implied by this, in my judgment, is the continued relevance of the kind of philosophical anthropology worked out, in effect, by Henry Nelson Wieman, although I would have to say that Wieman himself is unable to do justice to the other side of the dialectic: the freedom of a human being as nature become spirit, beyond the power even of her or his own creative accomplishments, to create her or him anew, provided she or he meets the conditions for their accumulation and integration.

Consistent with—if not, as I would wish to argue, required by—the basically existentialist understanding of a human being as nature become free, self-transcendent spirit is the view that the human as abstract constant includes a human being’s understanding, even if only nonreflectively or nonthematically, of self, others, and the whole; and that the human as abstract variable includes subjectively either the authentic or the inauthentic actualization of this understanding and objectively the externalization-internalization of this understanding in cultural and historical forms—explicitly in religion, and implicitly in all other fields of culture. In this way, one can, I believe, provide the ampler anthropological context for what I take to be the key both to philosophy and to Christian theology—namely, that any human being as nature become spirit exists by faith in the primal possibility and final worth of life. She or he can exist at all, authentically or inauthentically, only by somehow accepting the threefold reality of self, others, and the whole as really possible and abidingly significant. Hence the task of philosophy and Christian theology alike, albeit each in its own way, is the fully reflective understanding of this basic faith—by way of a methodical hermeneutic of religion and culture generally, in the case of philosophy; and, presupposing and implying this philosophical hermeneutic, a similarly methodical hermeneutic of the witness of Christian faith specifically, in the case of Christian theology.

•

I should like to argue, I think, that something like Wieman’s analysis of the creative good as the growth of qualitative meaning (or, as I would suggest—more aptly catching what he really means—meaningful quality!) is an appropriate and credible way of understanding just how God works in individual human lives, creatively/emancipatively, as distinct from consummatively/redemptively, To become all that one can and should become as a distinctively human individual requires not only that one be socialized and acculturated (which I take to be a secular way of thinking and talking about the process of creative good that Wieman identifies with God), but also that one continue to be ever and again resocialized and re-acculturated—or as he would say, remade into a new human being.⁸

But if Wieman’s analysis, for this reason, belongs to or may be critically appropriated by an adequate Christian systematic theology, it has to take its place there in the same way as such other wholly naturalistic analyses as belong to, or have been critically appropriated by, more recent political and liberation theologies. These are analyses highlighting the place and importance of social and cultural structures/orders and the corresponding need—to put it in Wieman’s terms—to use all "created goods to provide the conditions necessary for the working of creative good," not only in his generally moral sense pertaining to the transformation of individual persons, but also in the specifically political sense pertaining to transforming societies and cultures by also recreating and emancipating them. These two processes, arguably, are significantly interdependent. The process of creating, maintaining, and (where necessary) transforming social and cultural structures/orders is necessary for providing at least some of the required conditions for creative good to do its work in individual human lives, even as the process of creative good, as Wieman analyzes it, is necessary to providing at least some of the necessary conditions of the political process of creating, maintaining, and transforming social and cultural structures/orders in the direction of ever greater justice and more inclusive human community.

But even as I find it necessary to draw a clear and sharp distinction between creation-emancipation in its political meaning and consummation-redemption-salvation in an appropriately Christian understanding of the terms, so I would insist that just such a distinction has to be drawn between the creation-emancipation that creative good, in Wieman’s sense, is capable of producing, and what is appropriately understood by consummation-redemption-salvation in a proper Christian sense of the words. This is to say that, on my understanding, the relation between creation-emancipation, on the one hand, and consummation-redemption-salvation, on the other, is an analogous (or analogical) relation—such as Abraham Lincoln expresses in speaking of Americans as God’s almost chosen people. For what is his point in so speaking? Whatever else it is, it surely includes frankly acknowledging the difference as well as the similarity between biblical Isræl and America as viewed from the standpoint of Lincoln’s radical monotheistic self-understanding/understanding of existence. Americans so viewed are God’s "almost chosen people" in something like the sense in which creation-emancipation, while liberation in its own way, is not liberation simpliciter, because it is only like, and in that sense, only almost, liberation in the other way of consummation-redemption-salvation.

5. McNeill, World History, 6.

6. Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 57.

7. Berger and Luckmann, Social Construction of Reality, 61.

8. See Wieman, Source of Human Good.

6

On Nonexecutive Authority

The basis of all authority is the supremacy of fact over thought.

—Alfred North Whitehead

The primal ontic source of all nonexecutive authority can only be reality itself, even as its primal noetic source can only be common human experience. What is somehow authorized by experience of reality as corresponding to it or agreeing with it is insofar authoritative; what is not thus authorized is insofar without authority.

If reality is what we in some way find ourselves obliged to take account of (according to William James), it may be said to include both ultimate and immediate reality, the first being everything that we have to take account of in the vertical dimension, or existential aspect, of our experience; the second, all that we must take account of in the horizontal dimension, or empirical aspect, of our experience. Thus ultimate reality includes the necessary condition of the possibility of everything that we experience nonsensuously—ourselves, others, and the whole of which we and others are all parts—while immediate reality includes everything about this threefold reality that we can also experience through our senses, however indirectly and abstractly.

Immediate reality, like ultimate reality, may be the primal ontic source of authority in two respects: (1) in respect of its structure in itself, and (2) in respect of its meaning for us. In the first respect, immediate reality is the primal ontic source authorizing true science, in the sense of explicit understanding of immediate reality in its structure in itself. In the second respect of its meaning for us, immediate reality is primal ontic source authorizing true technology and true policy, moral and also political, in the sense of explicit understanding of how, in fact, we are to act and what we are to do regarding means as well as ends consistently with immediate reality’s having the structure in itself that true science shows it to have.

As for ultimate reality in the first respect, it is the primal ontic source authorizing true metaphysics and true ethics, the first being explicit understanding of ultimate reality in its structure in itself that corresponds to or agrees with that structure; the second, explicit understanding of how, in principle, we are to understand ourselves and lead our lives consistently with ultimate reality’s having the structure that true metaphysics shows it to have. In the second respect of its meaning for us, ultimate reality is the primal ontic source authorizing true religion, in the sense of the explicit understanding of human existence necessarily implied by authentic self-understanding in relation to ultimate reality and necessarily implying, and, in substance, implied by, true metaphysics and true ethics.

Any religion as such makes or implies a claim to decisive authority and therefore also claims to be the true religion, in that it is not just substantially true in the sense clarified, but also formally true, in the sense that it is the formal norm or canon by which the truth-claim of any other religion has to be validated—namely, by its substantial correspondence to, or agreement with, that religion. Thus any religion understands itself to be uniquely authorized by ultimate reality itself in its meaning for us as its primal ontic source.

Of course, it is typical of religious traditions that they are heterogeneous in composition to the extent that, through special acts of self-definition, they acknowledge certain of their elements as authoritative and therefore normative for some or all of the remaining ones. Thus elements acknowledged in a religious tradition as authoritative for all of its other elements constitute its primary authority, and therefore its formal norm or canon.

But no religious tradition is constituted as such simply by its primary authority or formal norm and whatever secondary authorities or norms it in turn authorizes or norms. Any authority, properly so called, is and must be authorized by a source beyond itself, just as any norm in the proper sense can only be, in the theological term, a "normed norm" (norma normata), even if what norms it, although the source of its normativeness, neither is nor can be itself a norm in the same proper sense. Therefore, any religious tradition is also constituted by some explicit primal source of authority and therefore of normativeness as well. To be sure, the primal source of a religious tradition’s authority, insofar as it is authorized, is reality itself as experienced—more exactly, ultimate reality as experienced in its meaning for us. But ultimate reality in its meaning for us, even as in its structure in itself, remains merely implicit and cannot function as the primal ontic source of authority for any religious tradition except through some explicit primal ontic source of authority corresponding to it, or agreeing with it, in its meaning for us. This explicit primal ontic source of a tradition’s authority is the explicit self-understanding/understanding of existence constituting it as a religious tradition whose claim to decisive authority, and thus also to be the formally true religion, is a valid one. As such, a religion’s explicit primal ontic source of authority is also authorized—namely, by ultimate reality itself functioning as the implicit primal ontic source of all religious and existential authority. And yet, although it is indeed thus authorized, it itself is not, in the proper sense, an authority, not even the (primary) authority, for its religious tradition. Although any religious authority, properly so-called, is itself also a source of authority, the converse statement is false: not every source of authority itself either is or can be also an authority in the proper sense of the term.

If a religion’s implicit primal ontic source of authority, being ultimate reality itself in its meaning for us, can only be transcendental, its explicit primal ontic source has to be historical. This means, among other things, that although both sources—implicit/transcendental and explicit/historical—have a constitutive significance with respect to the religion of which they are the authorizing sources, only the first has a constitutive significance with respect to human existence and its authentic possibility. In this respect, the significance of the second source is not constitutive, but representative only. Although a religion’s explicit primal ontic source is uniquely constitutive of it as the religion it is, even it is at most representative of the meaning of ultimate reality for us, which is constituted solely and sufficiently by ultimate reality as such in its meaning for us, as determined by its structure in itself.

7

On Questions

[Y]ou cannot find out what a man means by simply studying his spoken or written statements. . . . In order to find out his meaning you must also know what the question was (a question in his own mind, and presumed by him to be in yours) to which the thing he has said or written was meant as an answer.