1 - The task of theological realism

Summary

Realism makes the commonsense claim that physical objects exist independently of being perceived. ‘On this perspective’, comments Hilary Putnam, ‘the world consists of some fixed totality of mind-independent objects. There is exactly one true and complete description of the way the world is. Truth involves some sort of correspondence relation between words or thought-signs and external things and sets of things.’

The state of the art

In her essay ‘Theological Realism’ Janet Martin Soskice defines theological realists as ‘those who, while aware of the inability of any theological formulation to catch the divine realities, none the less accept that there are divine realities that theologians, however ham-fistedly, are trying to catch’. And Thomas Torrance observes rather more uncompromisingly that ‘it belongs to the very essence of rational behaviour that we can distinguish ourselves as knowing subjects from the objects of our knowledge and distinguish our knowing from the content of our knowing. If we are unable to do that, something has gone wrong: our minds have somehow been “alienated” from reality.’ It is hard to argue with this imperative; suggesting how we might do this distinguishing is another matter. Torrance's view is that we can and must get past the deflecting, distorting lenses of culture and language to ‘grasp the deep structure of reality’, a reality that has a structure independent of our cultural and linguistic structuring, a ‘graspable’ coherence independent of our various perspectives.

While Soskice and Torrance both regard the relation of scientific or worldly truth to theological truth as a matter of analogy, they differ in the species of analogy posited.