How Can Human Symbols Represent God? A Critique of and Constructive Alternative to Robert C. Neville’s Account of “Indexical” Theological Truth

Charles S. Peirce’s semeiotic—his theory about signs, reference, interpretation, meaning, and communication—is applicable with illuminating results to innumerable processes of semeiosis or sign interpretation. Robert C. Neville is the first deep student of Peirce’s semeiotic to have systematically applied that theory to the analysis and theory of theological signs, interpretation, and truth—hereafter, theological semeiotic. The result is easily the deepest and richest theological semeiotic currently available. Being the best, it is also most worthy of critique. In this essay, I argue that Neville misinterprets Peirce’s concept of an index, conceiving an index in terms of the interpreter-object rather than sign-object relation. Among other unfortunate consequences, this error mars Neville’s account of theological truth, especially his claim that theological signs can be “iconically false and yet indexically true.”¹ After making this critique in section 2, I offer an alternative account based on the hypothesis that the creation itself is a genuine index, a sign representing the Creator both indexically and iconically (section 3). This thesis, when combined with the thesis that the idea of God arises via a logical process Peirce termed “hypostatic abstraction” (section 4), provides the logical backbone needed for developing a realistic theory of theological reference and truth.

I. Peirce’s Concepts of Degenerate and Genuine Indices

Let us begin, not with Neville’s misconceived index, but by summarizing Peirce’s concepts of degenerate and genuine indices. Peirce’s “first and most fundamental”² classification of signs into icons, indices, and symbols divides signs according to the different ways they represent their objects. An icon represents its object because the icon’s qualities are like the object’s qualities. Thus, a squiggly arrow on a road sign is like the curvy road ahead, a drawn caricature resembles the portrayed, and an accurate map corresponds point-by-point with the represented territory. Iconic significance is the simplest and most ubiquitous kind. Anything imaginable is an icon of whatever it is similar to. An index represents its object via a direct relation, whether causal or consisting in mere spatio-temporal proximity. Examples include footprints, weathervanes, pointing fingers, and letters attached to geometrical diagrams. Indices denote. They are essential for representing anything existent. A symbol represents its object because a convention or instinct determines that the interpreter will interpret the symbol as standing for that object. Almost all words are symbols. So are the red, green, and yellow colors of a stoplight and signals devised by conspirators, like the lanterns American revolutionaries used to signal the mode of the British invasion.

Peirce recognized two kinds of index.³ A degenerate index represents its object thru sheer spatio-temporal proximity. For example, a pointing finger represents whatever it indicates, regardless of likenesses or causal relations holding between the finger and its object. “This” and “that” are words whose grammatical functions are purely indexical: although capable of standing for any object or word within a sentence, these words are incapable, by themselves, of communicating anything about those objects or words. Peirce provides another example: “Horatio Greenough, who designed Bunker Hill Monument, tells us in his book that he meant it to say simply “here!” It just stands on that ground and plainly is not movable. So if we are looking for the battlefield, it will tell us whither to direct our steps.”⁴ A two-hundred-foot-tall obelisk crowning Bunker Hill in Charlestown, Massachusetts, Bunker Hill Monument is visible from nearly anywhere in Charlestown. Thus, you can reach the battlefield from anywhere in Charlestown by simply walking uphill toward the monument. The monument is a degenerate index because it soars dumbly, high above all else, communicating nothing about the battle, yet indicating for all to see where the battlefield is located.

Like everything else imaginable, the inherent qualities of degenerate indices make them icons of whatever exhibits similar qualities—e.g., Bunker Hill Monument is like other obelisks. Nevertheless, degenerate indices are not icons of the objects they indicate. The letters labelling a...