| The present project argues that theological speech constitutes successful agency, and so demonstrates understanding, only when it is used to perform actions that are proper to the human form of life, that finite mode of existence that takes its shape from responding to God's eliciting address. Human agency will be cast in communicative terms, since all action, by its very nature, is a form of communication. These natural human actions, which constitute the many and various ways we respond to God in the world, set the epistemological limits for us as contingently communicative creatures. However, in seeking knowledge beyond the human form of life, not only do our concepts idle (thereby inhibiting our communicative agency), but they also become idolatrous. Such efforts constitute the attempt to know as God knows, a human impossibility that renders theological speech an exercise in performative futility. In establishing a criterion for efficacious communicative agency, as well as its idling counterpart, appeal will be made to the philosophical resources of the Ordinary Language tradition (with special attention to Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and Stanley Cavell). The project seeks to yield new insights for theological method, particularly by binding together human action and human understanding, two interrelated entities that are often pried apart. Along the way, through sustained dogmatic dialogues and an emphasis upon the theological interpretation of Scripture, theology will play the sovereign and philosophy the servant. That is, any conclusions regarding theological method must themselves be thoroughly theological. |
