Jenson on metaphor and theological language

Across the two volumes of his systematic theology, Robert Jenson makes a number of comments about the nature of metaphor in theological speech. I tracked down one of these the other day, only to stumble across others. I thought I’d share them here. Some are in the body of the text, some are footnotes; I’ll signal when which is which.

At the first mention, Jenson has just spent some paragraphs discussing the Old Testament’s description of the relationship between God and Israel, as well as between God and individual Israelites, “as a relation of father to son” (I:77). He then writes, “Given that such language is indeed used, we should not too quickly interpret it as a trope.” To which is appended the footnote (n.20):

That is, “. . . is a Son of God” is used in these passages as a proper concept. If someone has a theory of “metaphor” such that the use can be both concept and metaphor, well and good.

Clearly, Jenson has certain theories of metaphor in mind. We see in the next chapter whose these are. As he writes (I:104):

When the bishops and other teachers left Nicea and realized that, along with condemning Arius, they had renounced the established subordinationist consensus, many began to backtrack. Indeed, refusal to face Nicea has remained a permanent feature of Christianity’s history. If modalism has been the perennial theology of the pious but unthinking, Arianism has continually reappeared in the opposite role, as the theology of those controlled more by culture’s intellectual fashion than by the gospel.

He then adds in a footnote (n.99):

Most blatantly in recent memory, the “theology of metaphor,” paradigmatically represented by Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982).

The culprit at last! Nor is she, or theories like hers, far from Jenson’s mind in the next volume. Three chapters in, he is writing of “the sheer musicality” of “the divine conversation”; he argues that “to be a creature is to belong to the counterpoint and harmony of the triune music” (II:39). Immediately he anticipates an objection:

The previous paragraph is likely to be read as metaphor, and indeed as metaphor run wild. It is not so intended, or not in any sense of “metaphor” that is alternative to “concept.” Such words as “harmony” are here conscripted to be metaphysically descriptive language more malleable to the gospel’s grasp of reality than is, for central contrary example, the language of “substance” in its native Aristotelian or Cartesian or Lockean senses. That we are used to the metaphysical concepts of Mediterranean pagan antiquity and its Enlightenment recrudescence does not mean they are the only ones possible; there is no a priori reason why, for example, “substance”—which after all simply meant “what holds something up”—should be apt for conscription into metaphysical service and, for example, “tune” should not.

On the second sentence he hangs a footnote (n.41):

This may be the place to insist on a vital point against most recent “metaphor” theology. Its practitioners want to have it both ways. Sometimes it is important for them to note that metaphor is a universal function in all language. This of course is a truism, and when we think of “metaphor” in this way, there is no opposition between “metaphor” and “concept.” But then the key step in their theological arguments is that they pit metaphor against concept: we have, they say, “only” metaphors for God. It is perhaps safe to say that what most theologians now have in mind when they speak of metaphor is trope that is not concept; it is for this reason that I am so leary of “metaphor.”

Later in the same volume the subject reappears one last time, in the opening to the chapter on the church’s polity (II:189-190):

In ecumenical ecclesiology it has become customary to discuss the church’s reality under three headings drawn from the New Testament: the church is the people of God, the temple of the Spirit, and the Body of Christ. The trinitarian echoes of the pattern are obvious, as must be its attractiveness to this enterprise.

But much twentieth-century theology has succumbed here also to an endemic strategy of evasion: “people,” “temple,” and “body” have been treated as unconnected “images” or “metaphors” of the church, which at most need to be balanced or variously emphasized, that is, which need not be taken seriously as concepts. But although “temple” may be a simile when applied to the church, which to be sure is not literally a building or place, “people” clearly is neither metaphor nor simile; and if one pauses to examine Paul’s actual use of the phrase “body of Christ,” it becomes obvious that neither is it.

If we are to follow this scheme, then it must be the task of systematic theology to take “The church is the people of God, the temple of the Spirit, and the body of Christ” with epistemic seriousness by displaying the conceptual links between these phrases.

In the second paragraph, after the word “emphasized,” Jenson attaches the following footnote (n.2):

It perhaps needs to be repeated in this volume: I am well aware of the sense in which all language may be said to be metaphorical in its origins. But this trivial obsession has recently been widely used to escape the necessary distinction in actual usage between concepts and tropes. Both concepts and tropes are “functions,” sentences with holes in them. A concept is a function that, if the hole is filled in, yields a sentence that can be a premise in valid argument. Thus “The church is the temple of the Spirit” is a properly metaphorical proposition precisely because it will not, together with “All temples are containers for a god or gods,” yield “The church is the container of a god.”

Jenson was always attentive to the nature of language and, in particular, to the linguistic turn in philosophy and theology. See his long footnote back in the first volume, incidentally in a chapter dedicated to God the Father, here following discussion of Jonathan Edwards and Immanuel Kant (I:120n.21):

The most notorious line of this line of work [that is, the postmodern deconstruction of the “Western notion and experience of the self”] begins, significantly, with a theory of language, the “structuralist” theory founded by Ferdinand de Saussure . . . . A “language,” in structuralist theory, is a system of signs, whether of words, gestures, or other cultural artifacts. Each such system functions as possible discourse merely by the internal relations of its constituent signs, independently of any relation to a world outside the system. A language system as such can therefore have no history. It simply perseveres for its time and then is replaced by another, built perhaps from its fragment-signs; a favorite term in this connection is bricolage, the assembling of a new structure from fragments of former structures.

“Poststructuralism” combines structuralist understanding of language with an ontological position widely held in late-modern Continental thought: the personal self is said to be constituted in and by language, to subsist only as the act of self-interpretation. The emblematic figure in this movement has been Jacques Derrida . . . . The combination undoes the self, for the human self, inescapably, does have history. If then the self is linguistic, constituted in self-interpretation, and if language’s history is discontinuous, then so is the self’s history; then the self is constituted only as an endless bricolage of succeeding self-interpretations. A human life can have no status as a whole; that is, there is no self.

There’s much more where that came from. For essays along this line, there are some great ones available online. For a whole book on the matter, consult The Knowledge of Things Hoped For: The Sense of Theological Discourse.

Ethics primer

There are two sets of fundamental distinctions in ethics. The first concerns the kind of ethics in view. By my count, there are four such:

First is descriptive ethics. This is, as the name suggests, ethics in a descriptive mode: it does not propose what is good or evil, what actions to pursue or avoid, but rather offers an account, meant to be accurate but not evaluative, of what individuals, groups, religions, or philosophies believe to be good or evil, etc.

Second is metaethics. This is a philosophical approach to ethics that takes a bird’s-eye view of the very task and concept of ethics, asking what is going on when we “do” ethics. If first-order ethics is the exercise of practical reason in real time on a daily basis by ordinary people, and if second-order ethics is critical rational reflection on the reasoning processes and resulting behaviors embodied in those daily habits of moral living, then metaethics is third-order ethics: critical rational reflection on what we’re up to when we engage in second-order reasoning about first-order living. Metaethics asks questions like, “What does the word ‘good’ have in common as between its use in, e.g., Thomist and Kantian discourses?” Or: “Is all second-order ethics ineluctably teleological?” So on and so forth.

Third is normative ethics. This is the second-order ethics mentioned above: critical rational reflection on what the good life consists in and what behaviors conduce to it. Put differently, normative ethics is prescriptive; it wants, at the end of its labors, to arrive at how you and I should live if we would be good persons. The mood or mode of normative ethics is the imperative (though not only the imperative): Thou shalt not murder, steal, lie, covet, and what not. Only rarely does anyone but academics do metaethics or descriptive ethics. More or less everyone does normative ethics, at least in terms of making appeals to concrete traditions of normative ethics on appropriate occasions: faced with a hard decision; helping a friend work through a problem; teaching a child how to behave; etc.

Fourth is professional ethics. This is the code of conduct or statute of behaviors proper to a particular profession, institution, job, business, or guild. It is a contingent set of recommendations for what makes a fitting or excellent member of said sphere: If you would practice law/medicine/whatever, then you may (not) do X, Y, Z … It is important to see that professional ethics is a derivative, secondary, and belated species of ethics. It is derivative because its principles stem from but are not synonymous with normative ethics. It is secondary because, when and where it requires actions that are (normatively) wrong or forbids actions that are (normatively) right, a person “bound” by professional ethics not only may but must transgress the lines drawn by his or her professional ethics, in service to the higher good required by normative ethics. By the same token, much of professional ethics consists of “best practices” that are neither moral nor immoral, but amoral. They aren’t, that is, about right or wrong in themselves, only about what it means to belong to this or that career or organization. Finally, professional ethics is belated in the sense that late modern capitalism generates byzantine bureaucracies beholden to professional ethics not as a useful, if loosely held, revolving definition of membership in a guild, but instead as hidebound labyrinths by which to protect said members from legal liability. In this way professional ethics partakes of a certain mystification, insofar as it suggests, by its language, that persons formed by its rules and principles will be good or virtuous in character, whereas in truth such persons are submitting to a form of ideological discipline that bears little, if any, relationship to the good in itself or what makes for virtuous character.

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Having made these distinctions, we are in a position to move to a second set. The following distinctions concern the difference between morality (which is what ethics proper, or normative ethics, is about) and other terms or concepts we are prone to confuse with morality. By my count there are five such:

1. Morality and legality. This is the difference between what one ought to do and what one is permitted by law to do. So, e.g., it is morally wrong to cheat on your spouse, but in this country, at this time, adultery is not illegal. Or consider Jim Crow: “separate but equal” was legal for a time, but it was never moral. If a black person jumped into a public swimming pool full of white people, he did nothing wrong, even if the police had a legal pretext by which to apprehend or punish him.

2. Morality and freedom. This is the difference between what one ought to do and what one is capable of doing. E.g., when I ask student X whether it is morally permissible (or “ethical”) for student Y to cheat on an exam, eight times out of ten the answer is: “He can what he wants.” But that’s not the question. No one disputes that he, student Y, “can do what he wants.” I’m asking whether, if what he wants is to cheat on an exam, that action is a moral one, i.e., whether it is right or wrong.

3. Morality and convention. This is the difference between what one ought to do and what one’s community (family, culture, religion) presupposes one ought to do. If I ask, “Is it right for person A to perform action B?” and someone answers, “Well, that’s the sort of thing that’s done in the community to which person A belongs,” the question has not yet been answered. Cultural assumptions are just that: assumptions. They may or may not be right. Ancient Rome permitted the paterfamilias of a household to expose a newborn infant who was unwanted or somehow deemed to be defective. But infanticide is morally wrong, regardless of whether or not a particular culture has permitted, encouraged, and/or legalized it. That is why we are justified in judging the ancient Roman practice of exposure to be morally wrong, even though they could well have responded, “But that’s the sort of thing that’s done here by and among us.”

4. Morality and beliefs-about-morality. This is the difference between what one ought to do and what people think one ought to do. In other words, no one is morally infallible; each of us, at any one time, has and has had erroneous ethical beliefs. This is why, from childhood through adulthood and onward, to be human is to undergo a lifelong moral education. It is likewise why it is intelligible for someone, even in midlife or older, to say, “You know, I used to believe that [moral claim] too; but recently my mind was changed.” This distinction also makes clear that relativism is false. It is not morally right for a serial killer to murder, even if he genuinely believes it is good for him, the serial killer, to do so. It is wrong whatever he believes, because murder is objectively wrong. The truth of murder’s wrongness is independent of his, your, or my beliefs about murder. If it is wrong, it is wrong prior to and apart from your and my agreement with its wrongness—though it is certainly desirable for you and I to come to see that murder is objectively wrong, and not merely wrong if/because we believe it to be wrong.

5. Morality and behavior. This is the difference between what one ought to do and what people actually do. No one believes human beings to be morally perfect; further, no one believes human beings to be perfectly consistent in the application of their moral convictions. E.g., whether or not you would lie in such-and-such a situation does not (yet) answer whether or not it would be right to do so. My students regularly trip up on this distinction. I ask: “Would it be morally justified for you knowingly to kill an innocent person in order to save five innocent persons?” They say: “I guess I would, if I were in that situation.” But as we have seen, that isn’t an answer to my question. The question is not whether you or I would do anything at all, only whether the behavior in question is morally right/wrong. Jews, Christians, and Muslims are doubly committed to the importance of this distinction, between we believe that all human beings are sinners. Our moral compass is broken, and although we may do good deeds, our proclivity runs the other direction: to vanity, pride, selfishness, sloth, self-loathing, lust, envy, deceit, self-justification. If that belief about human sinfulness is true (and it is), then on principle we should never suppose that what anyone would do in a given situation, real or hypothetical, reveals the truth of what one ought to do. The latter question must be answered on other grounds entirely.

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In my experience, these two sets of distinctions, if imbibed thoroughly or taught consistently, make a world of difference for students, Christians, and other persons of good will who are interested in understanding, pursuing, and deliberating on what makes for good, ethical, or moral human living. If we agreed on them in advance, we might even be able to have a meaningful conversation about contested ethical matters! Imagine that.

“X is not in the Bible”

In an annual course I teach on moral philosophy I assign a textbook that contains a chapter on X. The author of the textbook is an ethicist, and the ethics he seeks to present to his readers (imagined as college students) is general or universal ethics; though he doesn’t out himself as a Kantian, those with ears to hear spy it from the opening pages. In the chapter on X the author has a sidebar dedicated to religious, by which he means Christian, arguments about X. He observes blithely that the Bible doesn’t mention X, though he allow that one or two passages have sometimes been trotted out as containing implicit commentary on X. Accordingly, he deploys a few perfunctory historical-critical tropes (without citation, naturally) to show how and why the original canonical authors in their original cultural context could never have meant what contemporary readers of the text sometimes take them to mean with respect to X.

I always dedicate time in class to discuss this sidebar with students. It is a perfect encapsulation of the naive inanity of non-theological scholars commenting on Christian thought. So far as I can tell the author is utterly sincere. He really seems to think that Christian thought, whether moral or doctrinal, is reducible to explicit assertions in the Bible, double-checked and confirmed by historical critics to have been what the putative author(s) could have or likely would have meant by the words found in a given pericope.

I used to think this sort of stupidity was willful and malicious; I’ve come to see, however, that it is honest ignorance, albeit culpable in the extreme.

A few days ago I was reminded of this annual classroom discussion because I read an essay by a scholar I otherwise enjoy and regularly profit from, who used the exact same argument, almost identically formulated. And he really seems to have meant what he wrote. That is, he really seems to believe that if he—neither a Christian nor a theologian nor a scholar of religion not a religious person at all—cannot find mention of X in the Bible, then it follows as a matter of course that:

1. Christians have no convictions about X;

2. Christians are permitted no convictions about X, that is, convictions with a plausible claim to be Christian;

3. no Christian teaching about X exists, past or present; and

4. Christianity as such neither has, nor has ever had, nor is it possible in principle that Christianity might have (or have had), authoritative doctrinal teaching on X.

All this, because he, the erudite rando, finds zero results when he does a word search for “X” on Biblegateway.com.

So far as I can tell, this ignorance-cum-stupidity—wedded to an eager willingness to write in public on such matters with casual authority—is widespread among folks of his ilk. They are true believers, and what they truly believe in is their own uninformed ineptitude.

The answer to the riddle of what’s going on here is not complicated. Anti- or post-Christian scholars, writers, and intellectuals in this country who spurn theological (not to mention historical) learning—after all, we don’t offer college courses in alchemy or astrology either—are sincerely unaware that American evangelicalism in its populist form is not representative of historic Christianity. They don’t realize that the modernist–fundamentalist debate is itself a uniquely modern phenomenon, and thus bears little relationship either to what Christianity is or to what one would find in Christian writings from any period from the second century to the seventeenth. They don’t know what they don’t know, and they’re too incurious to find out.

Were they to look, they would discover that Christianity has a living body of teaching on any range of topics. They would discover that over the centuries Christianity has had a teaching office, whose ordained leaders speak with varying degrees of authority on matters of pressing interest, including moral questions. They would discover that, in its acute American form, radical biblicism—the notion that Christians have beliefs only about things the Bible addresses directly and clearly—is one or two centuries old at most. They would discover that, even then, said biblicism describes a vanishingly small minority of global Christianity today. They would discover that the modernism on offer in Protestant liberalism is but the mirror image of fundamentalism, and therefore that to ape claims like “X isn’t even in the Bible—QED,” even intended as secular critique of conservative Christians, is merely an own goal: all it reveals is one’s own historical and cultural parochialism and basic theological incomprehension. They would discover that the church has never read the Bible the way either fundamentalists or historical critics do, in which case the word-search proof-text slam-dunk operation is not only irrelevant; in light of exegetical and theological tradition, it is liable to induce little more than a suppressed snort laugh.

They would discover, in a word, that the Bible does contain teaching about X, because the Bible contains teaching about all things (you just have to know where to look, that is, how to read); that the church’s tradition likewise contains considerable and consistent teaching about X, as any afternoon in a library or quick Google search would reveal; that Christianity is a living, not a dead thing; that Christian moral doctrine did not fossilize with the final breath of the last apostle; that postwar American evangelicalism is not the center of any universe, much less the Christian church’s.

They would discover—rather than learning the hard way—that asking someone in a position to know before writing about something of which one is wholly ignorant is a wise and generally admirable habit. But then, owning the fundies is a lot harder to do if you treat them as adults worthy of respect. This way is much more fun.

It’s all just a game anyway, right?

The most stimulating works of systematic theology from the last 20 years

On Twitter yesterday I made an observation followed by a question. I said that Paul Griffiths' Decreation is, in my view, the most thought-provoking, stimulating, exhilarating work of systematic theology written since the first volume of Robert Jenson's systematics was published in 1997. Then I asked: What are other plausible candidates from, say, the last two decades?

I thought of half a dozen off the top of my head, then started adding others' replies to the list. See the (lightly curated) resulting list below.

A few preliminary comments, though. First, everything on the list was published (for the first time) in 1998 or later. That's arbitrary, but then, all lists are; that's what makes them fun.

Second, your mileage may vary, as mine does; I think some of these books are in a league of their own compared so some of the others. But I've tried to be broader than just my own preferences.

Third, candidates for this list are works of Christian systematic theology. As ever, the genre is loose enough that you know it when you see it. But I had to make some choices. So comparative theology is out, as is moral theology—excellent examples of the latter might be Cavanaugh's Torture and Eucharist and Herdt's Putting on Virtue. The same goes for historical theology: Ayres's Nicaea and Its Legacy, though laudably normative in many of its proposals, and arguably one of the handful of most important theological books in recent decades, is not itself an instance of systematic theology. I've similarly ruled out works of theology primarily interpreting a single theologian, past or present; so books with Augustine or Barth or whomever in the title are excluded. (I imagine this is the most contestable of the criteria. I'm only half persuaded myself, as evidenced by the exception I allowed.) Works of practical or popular or narrative theology are out too; whereas Cone's God of the Oppressed is certainly systematic theology at its most bracing, The Cross and the Lynching Tree belongs to a different genre (which, lest I be misunderstood, is not a judgment of value). Biblical scholarship is excluded from consideration as well; N. T. Wright and Richard Hays and John Barclay and Paula Fredriksen are brilliant and theologically stimulating writers, but their work is not systematic theology. Oh, and I suppose I should add: I'm limiting this to works originally written in English, if only to narrow the purview of the list (while lessening its potential hubris).

Fourth, this is not intended as a list of the "best books" from the last two decades. My words about Decreation were sharp and specific: it's a knock-your-socks-off kind of book, the sort of work you can't put down, that leads to compulsive reading, that changes your mind 10 times in as many pages, and makes you rethink, or refortify, what you always thought about this or that major topic. A book on this list should not be boring, in other words; and there are good works of scholarship that are undeniably boring. Such works are not included here.

Fifth, some might quibble with the choice of book for a given author. Should Tanner's book be Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity or Christ the Key? Should Rowan Williams's be On Christian Theology or The Edge of Words? John Webster's Holy Scripture or God Without Measure? I've opted for my own idiosyncratic preference or gut sense for what made a bigger "splash" at the time of its publication. Again: your mileage may vary.

Without further ado (ordered alphabetically):

1. Marilyn McCord Adams, Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology (2006)
2. John Behr, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (2006)
3. J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (2008)
4. Sarah Coakley, Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy, and Gender (2002)
5. Paul J. Griffiths, Decreation: The Last Things of All Creatures (2014)
6. David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (2003)
7. Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (2010)
8. David H. Kelsey, Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology (2009)
9. Matthew Levering, Scripture and Metaphysics: Aquinas and the Renewal of Trinitarian Theology (2004)
10. Alan E. Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday (2003)
11. Bruce D. Marshall, Trinity and Truth (1999)
12. Eugene F. Rogers Jr., Sexuality and the Christian Body: Their Way Into the Triune God (1999)
13. Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (2015)
14. Katherine Sonderegger, Systematic Theology: Volume 1, The Doctrine of God (2015)
15. Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology (2001)
16. Linn Marie Tonstad, God and Difference: The Trinity, Sexuality, and the Transformation of Finitude (2016)
17. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship (2010)
18. John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (2003)
19. Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language (2014)
20. Frances Young, God's Presence: A Contemporary Recapitulation of Early Christianity (2013)