Theology within the Bounds of Language: A Methodological Tour

12. Privileged Senses

Chapter 12 ‫ﱾﱻ‬ Privileged Senses With his characteristic wit, style, and good humor, plus a slight edge, the philosopher Peter Geach recounts: After a lecture I gave to first-year students at Leeds, an overseas student gravely rebuked me: “Professor, in your lecture you spoke of perfect circles. That was very wrong: only God is perfect.” I could not help remembering, though I was too kind to say, that in English (and in several other European languages) the adjective for “perfect” is often attached to the noun for “imbecile” or “idiot.”1 One senses that Geach was right to take lightly this innocent bit of essentialistic dogmatism. It reveals kinship, though, with solemn pronouncements of eminent theologians. In similar fashion Karl Barth, for example, declared: “God is known by God and by God alone.”2 Still more trenchantly he insisted: “At this very point the truth breaks imperiously and decisively before us: God is known only by God; God can be known only by God.”3 Not by humans, hominoids, or angels. By God alone. Yet elsewhere Barth wrote, for instance: “We are now speaking of the revelation of this event on high and therefore of our participation in it. We are speaking of the human knowledge of God on the basis of this revelation and therefore of an event which formally and technically cannot be distinguished from what we call knowledge in other connexions, from human cognition.”4 Only God knows God, yet we too “have knowledge of God.” If this apparent contradiction were brought to Barth’s attention, he might reply that he was speaking of what we can know about God on our own. Or perhaps he would explain that in one place he was speaking strictly and properly, in the other place 105 106 Theology within the Bounds of Language loosely and improperly. Strictly speaking, only God knows God. Or, as Hick (speaking of the Scholastic tradition) has put it, “only God knows, loves, and is righteous and wise in the full and proper sense.”5 This exegetical surmise is made plausible by the frequency with which theologians, in particular, speak this way. Expressions such as “strict,” “proper,” “primary,” “true,” “authentic,” “genuine,” “essential ,” and “literal” sprinkle theological discourse, privileging certain applications of terms over others. In the “strict,” “literal,” “proper,” “primary” sense of the word, faith is only this, revelation is only that, grace is only this other, and so forth. With advertising techniques in mind, one might suggest that theologians often indulge in theological “puffery.” If they said simply that in one sense of the term, or in one of its varied applications, faith is this, revelation is that, and the like, it would sound much less impressive. Although this unflattering surmise may contain a grain of truth, there is more to this widespread feature of theological linguistic practice than shady salesmanship. It can be viewed, for example, as a more circumspect version of the generalizing tendency examined in the last two chapters. There Ebeling, for example, touting his privileged paradigm, declared: “The one thing that is true is love.” To this we might object, “What about true beliefs, statements, or propositions?” In reply, rather than simply deny that these, too, may be true (which would be a hard saying), Ebeling might explain that in the original, primary, strict, proper, fundamental, or most profound sense of the term true, only love is true. And this he might suggest for reasons similar to those that motivated his actual, less qualified assertion. He might, for instance, aspire to a certain theoretical profundity, or to unity and clarity amid all the heterogeneous multiplicity of things called “true.” More surely, one can sense that he wished thus to honor his favorite, that very special thing, love. Repeatedly, as here in Ebeling’s assertion, in Barth’s, and in that of Geach’s student, we can spot an underlying value motivation. The Principle of Relative Similarity would suggest that other things besides God (e.g., “the precepts of the Lord”) may be perfect in some way, that others besides God may have at least some minimal knowledge of God, and that other things besides love (e.g., beliefs or propositions) are true. But time and again, the desire to laud and glorify overrides PRS: only God is perfect, only God knows God, only love is true, and so forth. This style of predication is so common in theology, and so linguistically problematic, that it merits attention in a work such as...