Retrieving Truth and Universals

Part 2 of The Nature of Theological Truths

If we are going to rediscover the essential nature of theological truths, then we have to get back behind the modern and postmodern way of looking at things. And I mean that literally—the idea of “things” is no longer an idea at all (i.e. no longer an object of the mind) for the modernist; and, whatever else it is, it can no longer be pointed to from one mind to another, for the postmodernist. Now because our more immediate forefathers never bothered to show that the criticisms of Hume and Kant were demonstrably false, we inherited the atomistic and subjectivist models that remained.

The Anglo-Saxon part of the brain took the atomistic puzzle pieces and jealously guarded the scattered mess as “the Puzzle,” while the Continental part of the brain split between sentimentalists and deconstructionists. In each generation, a new fight breaks out between deconstructionists who insist that the puzzle was conceived by someone in power, and the atomists shoot back that such ideas are not “in the puzzle.” The sentimentalist remains in the corner, looking on at all of this, very, well, puzzled.

But let us arise from this mess, and go back to the box top, or at least to that world in which it was insisted that there was one.

Retrieving Truth 1: Words, Ideas, and Things

Let us begin with Augustine’s classic work on interpreting and teaching Scripture called On Christian Doctrine. While his core theory will involve the relationship between sign (signum), word (verbum), and thing (res), we will build upon this, bringing it historically right into the Realist-Nominalist debate among the medieval scholastics. We begin at the simplest step, where he says, “A sign is a thing which causes us to think of something beyond the impression the thing itself makes upon the senses” [1]. While he uses many other examples, I prefer to use the example of a tree because of its place at the beginning and end of the Bible, as the Tree of Life, and its cursed place in between those two trees.

A tree is a particular, material thing. There is also the word T-R-E-E. That is a linguistic symbol that we call a word. Yet both the material thing and the linguistic thing are also signs. In other words, both the actual tree and the word “tree” point beyond themselves.

All of this is to say that the word points to the thing, and even particular instances of the actual thing can function as diverse signs to some more universal source of life, or else death, as the case may be (e.g. Genesis 2:9; 3:22, 24; Deuteronomy 21:23; Galatians 3:13; 1 Peter 2:24; Revelation 22:2, 14, 19). Both the word-sign and the material-sign point to some greater thing.

How Augustine moves from there to develop his overall approach does not so much concern us. What does is the far simpler, yet profound, truth that words mean things. This is true both in nature and in Scripture. This is only the linguistic dimension of the correspondence theory of truth: that conformity of the finite mind to the ways things really are. Analogously, the conformity of our words to realities—the words as windows to that reality outside of all conversationalists—serves as a common field between both signer (author or speaker) and the signed (reader or listener). The word, or “sign-window,” is only as good as an intelligible field to the degree that it truly represents the reality on the “objective side” of the window.

That there are other things going on above merely speech and intended meaning, within Speech-Act theory, for example, means only that there is more to it, but there is never less. Augustine goes as far as to suggest a burgeoning anti-intellectualism wherever we cannot move from mere soundwaves and inkblots to the other side of the window that these comprise, “He is a slave to a sign who uses or worships a significant thing without knowing what it signifies” [2]. 

One more concept will help us get our start on the ontology of theological truths. This comes from Thomas Aquinas, and it has to do with the sense in which our thoughts and words properly signify “the thing” as God means it. This will have obvious implications for the division between archetypal and ectypal theology [3]. What will also come into focus is at least one sense in which the words of Scripture are like our words: namely in their finitude.

Thomas suggested that the relationship between our words and “the thing itself” is neither univocal nor equivocal, but rather analogical. In other words, when (a) I think of “infinity” and (b) God knows “infinity,” the relation between set (a) and set (b) are not even close to being identical (univocal), nor do they have nothing whatsoever to do with each other (equivocal).

Rather they are sufficiently like unto each other for communication from God’s mind to the finite mind in order to constitute real intelligible meaning. That is analogy. Not identity, but likeness. Not all things, but some things. Not totality, but intelligibility. All that is required is some relevant shared predicates.

Exegetical grounds for this often come in just those places where we initially read the opposite. Take Isaiah 55:8-9 for example: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” God has thoughts and ways; we have thoughts and ways. So there is likeness. But ours are immeasurably below his. So there is unlikeness. The question of where to draw the line on this spectrum of analogy can take the extremes that it did in the Clark-Van Til debate, where one leaves thinking that the choice is between total univocity or else equivocation at every point [4]. But this is only to solidify the triumph of analogy in theology. Our real choice is between some analogy or else agnosticism. 

Moving again from words to things, there is an analogy of meaning in words because there is first of all an analogy of being. Our words can be “sufficiently like” the thing in itself—and so there can be objective meaning—because God has created each and every thing outside of himself as an “image” [5] that communicates some-thing (not everything) about himself. Consequently, a proper understanding of the analogia entis is solidly rooted in the biblical doctrine of general revelation and its insistence that all effects are communications of the First Cause (Ps. 19:1-3; Rom. 1:19-20)—not exact identities certainly, but analogies nonetheless [6].

As we ascend in meaning from the mundane particular things around us in the physical world, to our use of things and our words as signs, we are performing an act of mind that is often called “abstraction.” In popular writing, the “abstract” and the “concrete” are set in opposition to each other. We can get the idea that as we reason “up,” toward the head of a general category (genus), we may be covering a wider ground of particulars (species), but what we are talking about is less of a real thing. In some cases that is true. In the terms of biological taxonomy, “canine” is not more real than my two dogs, Carly and Leo; but does it follow that the “one thing” (Lk. 18:22) the rich young ruler lacked was less real than the “many things” he thought he had sufficiently performed? We will come back to how universals function in exegesis of Scripture texts. For now I want to only leave open the more modest proposal that not all abstractions are ontologically equal. 

We ought to bring closure to this first section by asking another question so simple that we are liable to miss how profound its answer can be. The question is simply: What all exists? One way to answer is according to the Thomistic definition of theology: God, and all else in relation to God. That is true, of course, but it will not help us much here. All parties among the orthodox can agree to that. We need an answer that will bring us closer to sorting out how theological truths can be both lexical and ontological, keeping Scripture (and thus God) as the ultimate Determiner of meaning, and yet keeping the entire nature of every-thing (A) that exists to be what it is, rather than something contradictory (~A). 

Leaving aside the existence of God and other spiritual beings (which, again, all of the orthodox would grant), let me offer this list of seven classes of real things: 1. physical phenomena; 2. propositions; 3. quantitative entities; 4. universals; 5. possible worlds; 6. states of affairs; and 7. relations (and totalities of relations).

1 through 3 are fairly uncontroversial unless one is a naturalist. We will explain 4 in our next section on Realism. Whatever contemporary philosophers may say about 5 and 6, for our purposes these correspond to the objects of God’s necessary and free knowledge: the former being all that logically can exist, the latter being all that God has chosen, in his decree, to exist. That leaves category 7, which I very much want to draw out to bring us to our investigation. A logical relation is, from one point of view, a necessary relation. It may relate to the mode of existence (necessary, contingent, possible, impossible, etc.) of entities in any of the other six classes. To see why we would make a separate category for it, we can turn to familiar examples in our systematic theology.

One such example can be approached by this question: “Is the righteousness of Christ’s active obedience accounted to me through faith alone?” The Reformed will answer in the affirmative. But is this a theological truth? If so, in what sense? Anyone familiar with the debate over this doctrine will remember what its opponents will say. It will not be very different from the complaints that the words Trinity or covenant of works or moral law are “not in the Bible.” Likewise it will be objected that the “active obedience of Christ” is not in the Bible. Leaving aside the rhetorical punch of the retort that the words “X are not in the Bible,” are also not in the Bible, we need to understand why this response is as meaningful as it in fact is. 

By now it should be clear what is at stake in the question of whether theological truths are lexical or ontological. Each of these truths have the quality of logical relations, which are simply logical states of affairs. What I have called a “totality of relations” is nothing other than the whole scope of the set one is considering. But unlike what philosophers call “states of affairs,” which do not necessarily account for logical relations as real entities, totalities of relations belong to theoretical constructs. Systematic theologies are, among other things, such finite theoretical constructs, attempting to approximate (as ectypal theology in subjecto) that perfected set that is fitting for creatures (ectypal theology in se) [7]. A few things remain to be established before applying this to our system of theology and to Scriptural language: 1. the ontological status of universals, and especially of truth; and 2. how universals bring unity to the diversity of information in a theological system. With that ground cleared, we will have arrived at what I will call “theological universals.”

Retrieving Truth 2: Theological Realism

Since this is not an essay on metaphysics proper, a full treatment of the Realist-Nominalist debate will have to be left for elsewhere [8]. However, some elaboration and defense of what I would recognize as Augustinian Realism is in order if the unity of systematic theology is going to flow from real metaphysical essence to all of the particular logical relationships that we call “truths” or “doctrines.” It was said above that we must first establish the ontological status of universals and the relations of theological truths.

To be concise, universals were for Augustine either 1. divine attributes [9] or 2. divine ideas, or both, but not so as to transgress the archetypal-ectypal divide. Unlike Plato’s doctrine of recollection, Augustine held that the mind came to grasp a universal by divine illumination [10]. As the light on the tabletop is reflective of its light source, so the conformity of our reason to a universal is a participation in being.

Yet it is intellectual participation where being has come down to us, not where we have ascended, as he saw Romans 1:19-20 as determinative here [11]. For Aquinas it was much the same, as the active intellect is “participating in the divine intellect that contains the eternal types of created things” [12].

Not only are beauty, goodness, justice, and oneness universals; but truth itself is a universal. Truth is “independent of the mind it rules” [13]. Here we come at once to our first burden to establish. The ontological status of universals is that they are not only real essences: they are the most real and of one essence with the God who is simple being [14]. But because truth is a universal, then all true logical relations participate in, or reflect, this same divine idea. Some such relations are more universal than others. These I call “theological universals.”

As surely as divine justice is more real than that a just war was fought, or that a just piece of legislation was passed (and hence the conformity of the instance of justice to the essence of justice), so divine truth is more real than that Abraham truly believed or that what Jesus foretold of the Jerusalem Temple came true. Vos comes so close to such Realism in his commentary on Hebrews that it is difficult to know what else to call it. In speaking of typology in the epistle and the recurring concept of the “copies and shadow of the heavenly things” (8:5; cf. 9:23, 24), he imagines a triangle. Its base moves from left to right in redemptive history. At the left is a starting “sketch” that is the old covenant types, and at the right is still an “image,” a completed artist’s rendering that is the first century fulfillment. Yet neither first sketch nor finished masterpiece are the object itself [15]. A universal of Christ’s work gives sense to the particular ectypes, old and new. 

Theological truths, in terms of our expressions, are the finite mind’s conformity to the form of the way things are concerning God and other things in relation to God. None of this is to say that all truths or relations between truths are equal. There are necessary truths and contingent truths.

There is hierarchy in truth because there is hierarchy in being. Some things are more necessary than other things. Consequently, many truths will be contingent upon those truths about more necessary things. This relationship between a hierarchy of being (metaphysics) and a hierarchy in knowledge (epistemology) calls attention to another weakness in Plato’s realism, which the Augustinian form resolves.

Plato’s forms had no causal power. Indeed there was motive, in the Platonic mindset to leave the question aside, the present world of bodily shadows being more of a hindrance to meaning than a guide. The Christian does not reject the supremacy of the universal in Plato, but rather we reject the unintelligibility of the particulars. The puzzle pieces are not kryptonite to us. What explains the creation of the world, the unity of all of its diversities, and its reason for being? For Aquinas, divine beauty is the primal cause of all order in the creation. So, “The beauty of the creature is nothing else than the likeness of the divine beauty participated in things” [16]. This is at least part of Paul’s meaning about how love “binds everything together in perfect harmony” (Col. 3:14), such that the form of love to God and love of neighbor demonstrates a universal (Love) of which obedience to the particular commandments are instances.

How does all of this come closer to the nature of theological truths? It is simply that the sooner we can see the patterns in the pieces and so arrive at conformity to the picture on the box top, the sooner we can get on with the mind of the Puzzle Maker. But we will have had to have known what trees are, and why the ones surrounded by darker tones are their reflection in the water, and the function of the corner pieces, and so on. The tracing of the pattern is biblical theology, while the circling back with pieces from patterns already discerned is systematic theology. The objects in the picture are, in a sense, in the picture, and yet (whether from an artist or a camera) not at all “in the picture.” Hence there are things in Scripture, and those same things with natures. As things known in the Puzzle Maker’s mind, they are all truths; as things in the conforming puzzle-constructor’s mind, they are also all truths.

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1. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, II.1

2. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, III.9.13

3. Kelly helpfully discusses the way that Duns Scotus was using the concept of univocity differently than Thomas, and that by dividing predication between propositions about creatures (formal) and those about God (identity): Systematic Theology, I:101-102.

4. cf. John Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 1987), 21-40.

5. Even K. Scott Oliphint, who would not approve of the Thomistic analogia entis, will nonetheless acknowledge the sense in which all created things are made an eikon of the attributes of God; cf. Reasons for Faith (Philipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2006), 178-81.

6. Duby seems to hold to the same reasoning of rooting analogical predication in the analogia entis. He speaks of “genuinely creaturely participation in what God is and does, a participation according to which there is some ontological basis for utilizing words that properly signify created things in our description of God himself” - God in Himself, 234.

7. Franciscus Junius, A Treatise on True Theology (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2014), 118-20.

8. Among summaries of the debate that I find basic agreement with are Edward Feser, Scholastic Metaphysics (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Books, 2014); Frederick Copleston, Medieval Philosophy (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961); Etienne Gilson, Thomist Realism and the Critique of Knowledge (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012) and The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine (Providence: Cluny Media, 2020).

9. Kelly affirms at least this much about the divine attributes when analyzing Thomas’ Fourth Way; Systematic Theology, I.91

10. cf. Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine, 109.

11. Augustine, Confessions, 7.20.26.

12. Duby, God in Himself, 85.

13. Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine, 22.

14. Jonathan King argues that Anselm, Aquinas, Bavinck, and Barth all held that beauty was a divine perfection and that this was grounded in divine simplicity: cf. The Beauty of the Lord (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018), 40-44.

15. Geerhardus Vos, The Teaching of the Epistle to the Hebrews (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1956), 55-58.

16. King, The Beauty of the Lord, 34.