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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
In the two decades following the publication of New Essays in Philosophical Theology, a metatheological awareness has been steadily developing among systematic theologians. Gordon Kaufman is one of those theologians prepared to face the rather embarrassing question as to whether sentences containing the word ‘God’ provide information about a transcendent reality called ‘God’. Kaufman has, indeed, always seen the need for a constructive relationship between theology and philosophy, a relationship in which both philosophy and theology retain their respective autonomous standpoints. In arguing for an historically orientated philosophy, he claimed that here one would treat what is concrete and specific for Christian faith in abstract and general terms, showing how ‘every philosophical perspective finds its focus and meaning in a historical event which is the centre of history - the Christ - for it’. Because it has grown out of a generalizing of Christian faith-affirmations, this philosophy does not threaten theology's autonomy. Indeed, it would ‘already be determined by the Christian perspective in its fundamental orientation’. It is the methodological importance of this notion of a perspective which the present article seeks to make clear.
page 89 note 1 New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. by Flew, Antony and Maclntyre, Alasdair (New York: Macmillan, 1955)Google Scholar. For the term ‘metatheological’, see, for example, Heimbeck, Raeburne S., Theology and Meaning: A Critique of Metatheological Scepticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969); this work helpfully reviews the main issues and contains a large bibliography.Google Scholar
page 89 note 2 Kaufman, Gordon D., ‘Can Man Serve Two Masters?’, Theology Today, XV (1958), 59–77 (p. 76); see also p. 91, note 1, below.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 89 note 3 Ibid. p. 77.
page 89 note 4 Kaufman, Gordon D., God the Problem (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 17–37. References to this article will be given in the text.Google Scholar
page 90 note 1 See Kaufman, , ‘God as Symbol’, God the Problem, pp. 82–115 (p. 96, n. 16)Google Scholar; also Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations trans. Anscombe, G. E. M., 3rd ed., (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968)Google Scholar, II xi and § 539, and his Zettel, ed. by Anscombe, G. E. M. and von Wright, G. H., trans. by Anscombe, G. E. M. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), §§ 198–226Google Scholar; Wisdom, John, ‘Gods’, in Logic and Language, ed. by Flew, Antony, 1 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1951, 1963), 187–206Google Scholar, and also his ‘The Logic of God’ in Paradox and Discovery (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), pp. 2–3Google Scholar; Hick, John, ‘Religious Faith as Experiencing-As’, in Talk of God, Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures, II (New York: St Martin's Press, 1969), 20–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 90 note 2 This does not seem to reflect Wittgenstein's views. He asks, ‘Do I really see something different each time or do I only interpret what I see in a different way?’ He is inclined to say the former. See Philosophical Investigations, p. 212.Google Scholar
page 91 note 1 One notes here the confessional standpoint associated with the name of Niebuhr, H. Richard; see his The Meaning of Revelation (New York: MacMillan, 1941)Google Scholar. To assume the Christian perspective, on the terms, is to ‘begin to perceive and understand…existence in terms oriented toward the Christian revelation, begin to measure and evaluate the various dimensions of experience by Christ’. The lines of the perspective are formed by ‘revelatory events’, seen as revelatory ‘not only because their meaning and significance seems self-evident to the adherent of the perspective, needing no further explanation in terms of some other deeper or more intelligible ground, but also because they throw their light on all the rest of experience, “revealing” its meaning’: Kaufman, Gordon D., Systematic Theology: A Historicist Perspective (New York: Scribners, 1968), pp. 23, 27.Google Scholar
page 93 note 1 This is argued at great length in ‘Transcendence without Mythology’, God the Problem, pp. 41–71Google Scholar. As this article has already received much comment and criticism, I have concentrated on other areas; see, for example, McLain, Michael, ‘On Theological Models’, Harvard Theological Review, LXII (1969), 155–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nielsen, Kai, Scepticism (London: Macmillan, 1973), pp. 73–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wiebe, Don, ‘On Kaufman's Problem God’, Religious Studies, X (1974), 189–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Griffin, David R., ‘Gordon Kaufman's Theology: Some Questions’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, XLI (1973), 554–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 93 note 2 God the Problem, esp. pp. 85–100.Google Scholar
page 93 note 3 Ibid. pp. 85–6.
page 93 note 4 Ibid. p. 98. One should add that, for Kaufman, ‘the knowledge of God is given more in the presuppositions (i.e. the faith) with which experience is apprehended and interpreted than with the particularities or details of experience’. While ‘a direct encounter with and apprehension of God is not possible’, a ‘definitive image or paradigm’ has been given in order to let this theistic perspective develop. See God the Problem, pp. 239–41.Google Scholar
page 94 note 1 ‘Revelation and Cultural History’, op. cit. p. 169, n. 13.Google Scholar
page 94 note 2 Systematic Theology, pp. 39–40Google Scholar. This embeddedness of the criteria within the perspective raises the problems usually associated with so-called ‘Wittgensteinian fideism’; see, for example, Nielsen, Kai, ‘Wittgensteinian Fideism’, Philosophy, XLII (1967), 191–209 and the discussion stemming from that article.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 94 note 3 ‘Revelation and Cultural History’, p. 150.Google Scholar
page 94 note 4 Ibid. p. 151. See also ‘Transcendence without Mythology’, p. 71, and the discussion of the ‘centre of history’ in Systematic Theology, a centre which is the result of a movement from outside the bounds of human history into man's world’ (pp. 30–1, 37).
page 94 note 5 Kaufman, , ‘On the Meaning of “Act of God”’, God the Problem, pp. 119–47Google Scholar (p. 131, n. II); Schleiermacher, F. D. E., The Christian Faith (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1928), §47, 2.Google Scholar
page 96 note 1 ‘God as Symbol’, pp. 110–12, n. 29 and n. 31Google Scholar. We cannot here enter the discussion as to whether or not the religious perspective is a ‘form of life’. Briefly, one must insist on the variety of perspectives between and within religions. That is, rather than being a form of life, religion embodies forms of life. See, for example, Patrick Sherry, ‘Is Religion a “Form of Life”?’, American Philosophical Quarterly, IX (1972), 159–167Google Scholar, and Bell, R. H., ‘Wittgenstein and Descriptive Theology’, Religious Studies, V (1969), 1–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 96 note 2 See here Nielsen, Kai, ‘Wittgensteinian Fideism’, and ‘Wittgensteinian Fideism: A Reply to Hudson’, Philosophy, XLIV (1969), 63–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also Sherry, Patrick, ‘Truth and the “Religious Language-Game”’, Philosophy, XLVII (1972), 18–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Barbour, Ian G., Myths, Models and Paradigms (London: SCM, 1974), esp. ch. 7.Google Scholar
page 96 note 3 ‘The Foundations of Belief’, God the Problem, pp. 226–56 (pp. 242–4).Google Scholar
page 97 note 1 See, for example, Kaufman, Gordon D., Relativism, Knowledge and Faith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 104Google Scholar. For the view that Anselm's reflective methodology has dominated theology until the present, see Daecke, S. M., ‘Soll die Theologie an der Universität bleiben?’ in W. Pannenberg et al., Grundlagen der Theologie - ein Diskurs (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1974), pp. 7–28.Google Scholar