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Making Sense of Christian Worship: Language, Truth, and Metaphysics

How do we make sense of the basic claims present in most Christian worship? We hold up bread and a cup and say, ‘‘The body and blood of Christ.’’ We read some words from a text and proclaim, ‘‘The word of God.’’ Seldom does anyone object at these odd moments. No one says, ‘‘That is neither body nor blood; it is bread and wine.’’ Or, ‘‘Why are you trying to pull a fast one? That was not God’s word, it was yours!’’ These would be reasonable retorts, but I have never heard them voiced in a worship service, even one where theologians and philosophers are present. In fact, we seem to know how to go on, what to do next. We do not ask philosophical questions; we humble ourselves and receive the host or give thanks for the word. Will it always be so? Will there come a time when we find it too laughable, too outlandish to engage in such practices? If so, it will most likely not be because we lost the proper relation between language, truth, theology, and metaphysics. Nevertheless, thinking about what these basic worship practices say about these philosophical concerns might help us understand what it is we are doing when we find ourselves consenting to such odd claims, and help us to negotiate between some conflicting contemporary trends in theology. It is a necessary exercise in fides quaerens intellectum. Contemporary theology is moving in two different directions, both of which I find troubling because I don’t think they need to be different directions. One direction emphasizes context. It celebrates hermeneutics, the linguistic turn, culture, and a historicism that eschews metaphysics. Theology is not about universal truth (is there any other kind?), but about context, about what our=their use of God-language means for us=them, and no one can determine or critique another’s use. This trend is based on a peculiar philosophy of language, a certain version of the linguistic turn in philosophy. Because all our knowledge is linguistically mediated, so the argument goes, we know the limits to our knowledge. The limits of language are the limits of knowledge. This claim is then used to relativize, deconstruct, minimize, or possibly even deflate, universal claims to truth. Here our worship makes no metaphysical claims. It is only about us, our community, our context. A second direction reacts against this, often finding in the first direction a fideism where reason becomes reduced to some community’s use