Abstract
This is an important and rich book, manifesting sophistication and learning in spades. The author works on the principle that language should not be understood as a container, whereby concepts frame objects into predetermined categories. Understood like that, concepts do violence to an object’s particularity or otherness (p. 52). No, language is really about trying to get things done. Of course one does use a word as a concept by seeing that use in line with the use of others before us, yet one should also remember that concepts as norms are being constantly rewritten. Building on Stout’s Flight from authority, he argues that Protestantism discarded tradition as supplying its own validation for meanings, which then grew into the maxim of ‘thinking for oneself’, having found that scripture could not give them answers (p. 74). Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age is called upon to substantiate the thesis that Reform(-ation) aimed to raise the game of all Christians, encouraging their private justice. The empiricists’ attempt to give reasons for one’s reasons would lead to infinite regress, even as Kant suggested norms implicit in one’s judgements. What Schleiermacher then offered was the access to God through feeling (Gefühl) and pre-reflective harmony, or what Hector goes on to describe as implicit dispositions, an attunement to one’s circumstances. Hence pious disposition-states get articulated into doctrines. ‘A concept is a norm by which one orders the manifold of one’s experience’ (p. 100).
Chapter 4 is perhaps the most interesting: we can intend God with words, so long as this implies no essentialist-correspondentist account that would try to inscribe God within any metaphysical framework. Here then is a therapeutic response to metaphysics: ‘explaining theological concept use in terms of the Spirit’s circulation through practices of inter-subjective recognition’ (p. 148). It has to be said that for a theology that wants to work with ‘everyday language’ this is still playing to a scholarly audience. Put more simply, it seems that the Spirit provides not only immediacy to God, but also ‘reference to God is secured by an anaphoric chain of reference with which God identifies’. This chain is itself a work of the Spirit (p. 168). All this is to say that one can then have confidence, with Janet Soskice, that even if one says false things about (e.g.) Columbus, one is still referring to him. The same with God. For God enables us to see God through the Spirit, and then one sticks on the relevant concepts: this does not mean that concepts are the route to God, but they work more as checks against false prophecy, for example. Jesus introduced a novelty here by referring to God, and the Spirit enables us to do the same.
The final chapter picks up on the implication for an ‘emancipatory theology’. Yet in Chapter 4, we get a foretaste. Robert Jenson has insisted on the traditional naming as ‘God…he’, not ‘God…Godself….’. The retort? ‘Jenson is entitled to his masculinist pronouns’ (p. 182). Apart from this rather dismissive sentence, Hector argues that we hardly keep to Jesus’ own naming when we translate the Semitic word Jesus used to name God (p. 184). But the main question he seems to want to raise is: ‘whether these precedents establish a normative trajectory which is necessarily complicit in certain unjust social arrangement’. One appreciates the concern, but questions the logic. If one is to be as centred on Jesus’ faith and its expression as the author is (and Schleiermacher was) then one has to do better than this in reasoning why ‘God the Father’ should be abandoned.
The good news Hector offers is that one can refer to God at a distance-through the mediation of language, yet without the right concepts (for how could our concepts be right enough?) (p. 185). Hence perceiving God as Baal is indeed mistaken, yet there is common ground between that view and the one who views God as God. He offers the analogy: one who hears Jimi Hendrix sing ‘kiss this guy’ rather than ‘kiss the sky’ is close enough to the truth that she might be helpfully corrected. ‘Although the truth of a statement [Jesus is Lord] does not depend upon its role in a particular form of life [e.g., it might be converting], one’s ability to recognize it as such ultimately may’. This is a step back from Lindbeck’s The Nature of Doctrine, which Lindbeck himself was prepared to take under instruction from his student, Bruce Marshall (p. 238). So doctrine is second-order. The experiential-expressive paradigm seems to have triumphed.
Yet is it the case that we can be joyfully concept-free, or that health is to be found in questioning concepts and trusting in their presence such that we remake them afresh for the sake of reflection and communication? Is it not a straw man that ever believed one was ‘saved’ through concepts? And is it not the theologian’s task to offer an account of concepts which might, like the garments of Christ, draw us to follow him? True, the Gospel as narrative suggests ethical transformation, and this might be a refreshing change from the ubiquitous apophatic theologies doing the rounds. But wherever our concepts come from, please can we get on with saying something about God?