Contextualization and the non-obvious meaning of religious symbols: New dimensions to the problem of truth

Neue Zeitschrift fur Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie

Volumn 44, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 71-88

  Neville, Robert Cummings ^a  

^a BOSTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 70450064321     PISSN: 00283517     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1515/nzst.2002.006     Document Type: Review

References (23)

1. George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984)
2. He and his colleague Hans Frei sometimes characterize theology as self-description of the Christian community and therefore closer to cultural anthropology than to philosophy. See FREI'S Types of Christian Theology, ed. by George HUNSINGER and William C. PLACHER (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992)
3. In fact, it is close to what Frei characterizes as the "fifth" kind of Christian theology epitomized by D. Z. PHILLIPS, op. cit., 46-55
4. He says, ibid., p. 113, "The task of descriptive (dogmatic or systematic) theology is to give a normative explication of the meaning a religion has for its adherents." The question is whether there is a larger meaning of theology, normative with regard to truth
5. That extremely complicated question has been approached by theology, philosophy, and each of the social sciences with many different results. I examine some of these in The Truth of Broken Symbols (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996) where I present a definition of religion arising from a semiotic theory of the sort sketched here below. Briefly put, religion is any aspect of that dimension of human personal and social life shaped by symbols referring to finite/infinite contrasts; a finite/infinite contrast is a finite thing taken to be world-making such that without it the world would be indeterminate in a crucial respect; examples are the world's existence as such, the ground of value, the identifying place of people or one's tribe in the cosmos. Lindbeck also construes his book to be about defining or characterizing religion as such, and this is his theory of religions as cultural-linguistic systems. I share his theory as a partial definition of religion, though would emphasize the flexibility and porousness of the boundaries of such systems
6. See Peter BERGER and Thomas LUCKMANN, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966)
7. and Peter BERGER, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967)
8. PEIRCE'S theory of signs and interpretation is set forth at length in The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. by Charles HARTSHORNE and Paul WEISS (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931-1936), vol. 2, book 2 "Speculative Grammar."
9. The pragmatic theory of hypotheses is explained in many ways throughout vol. 5. Peirce's writings on religion, including the important "Neglected Argument for the Reality of God" which contains the best statement of interpretation and truth seeking as hypothetical, (from Collected Papers, vol. 6)
10. are translated into German by Hermann DEUSER with Helmut MAASSEN in Charles Sanders Peirce: Religionsphilosophische Schriften (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1995)
11. DEUSER'S Gott: Geist und Natur (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1993) draws out many of the theological implications of Peirce's theory
12. My own brief exposition of Peirce on these matters is in The Highroad around Modernism (Albany: State University of New York, 1992), chapter 1
13. This point is not merely a repeat of the pragmatists' evolutionary fable but has been worked out in detail in the three volumes of my Axiology of Thinking (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981-1995)
14. Reconstruction of Thinking (1981) shows how physical stimuli are transformed into imaginative experiential fields and how form is a function of value rather than the other way around
15. Recovery of the Measure (1989) presents a cosmology in which intentionality and interpretation are construed as natural causal processes, and defends the thesis expressed in this paper that truth is the carryover of value from the object into the interpreter in the respect in which the interpreted signs represent the object, qualified by the interpreter's biological, cultural, semiotic, and purposive conditions
16. Normative Cultures (1995) presents a theory of theorizing according to which even hypotheses about theological matters can be tested, and also a theory of practical reason which contextualizes moral value through Confucian notions of ritual rather than Aristotelian notions of tradition
17. See BARTH'S "An Introductory Essay," trans. James Luther ADAMS, to FEUERBACH'S The Essence of Christianity, trans. George ELIOT (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957)
18. I owe this point about Barth, Feuerbach, and the conception of religion as social constructions to Wesley J. WILDMAN'S "Theological Literacy: Problem and Promise," in Theological Literacy, ed. by Rodney PETERSEN (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming in 2002)
19. See BARTH, ibid., xxii-xxiv
20. See my Recovery of the Measure (see above n. 8), chapters 3-4
21. In his Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1902), lectures 4-7
22. For a more detailed analysis, see my The Truth of Broken Symbols (see above n. 5), chapter 2
23. See the three volumes of the Comparative Religious Ideas Project: The Human Condition, Ultimate Realities, and Religious Truth, all ed. by Robert Cummings NEVILLE (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000); they explain and illustrate this theory of comparison