CHRISTOPH SCHWÖBEL
This chapter explores the conceptual possibilities opened by understanding creation as a speech-act of the triune God. Starting with some reflections on the epistemological and ontological significance of metaphors, I take a closer look at the two metaphors that have dominated the relationship between theology and the sciences in the West: nature as a book and as a mechanical clock. With the help of Martin Luther’s exposition of creation as a divine speech-act—presenting everything as a part of the divine vocabulary, connected by the rules of divine grammar—I develop some of the implications of such a view for knowing creation. Relating the view of creative divine speaking with the incarnation of the Word and the perfecting role of the Holy Spirit leads to an understanding of God as triune conversation. Thus, for the conversation between theology and the sciences, the task of knowing creation can be presented as listening to the dissonances and consonances between the two disciplines as they reflect the resonances of the triune conversation in creation.
Our human language is pervasively metaphorical. It connects signs from one use of discourse to another and thereby creates a network of multilayered dimensions of meaning. There is a rich variety of metaphorical discourse, and not all metaphors conform to the same pattern. What they have in common is that they connect words associated with a field of meaning from one area of discourse to a reference associated with another area of discourse and another realm of our engagement with reality. In this way, metaphors expand the connections between particular functions of language by referring, predicating, and establishing meaningful associations between fields of signs and what they relate to in acts of signification. At first, metaphorical modes of communication can often evoke in the hearer or reader a moment of irritation about an unusual use of words that can seem to disrupt the usual flow of communication. But then, hopefully, an element of illumination will arise where, through the unusual use of words, connections of meanings appear that were not obvious at first glance. Once we become used to these connections, we automatically expand the field of metaphorical meaning further, becoming aware of implications or contradictions implied in metaphorical speech. Meaning is never atomistic but always potentially holistic. Ascribing meaning always implies a network of meanings that can be organized in distinct, variably cohesive fields; structured by affirmations, negations, similarities, and dissimilarities; and often expressed in analogies.
Such patterns of meaning not only affect the way we use language but also the way we engage with the world. Metaphors always show that the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic dimension of every form of sign-use are intricately connected. We distinguish them only when we take a step back and focus on the sign-use itself. In this way, metaphors illustrate both how we do things with words and how things act on us through our use of words and signs. The relation between signs and what they signify is not a one-way street. Once things have been signified, they relate to the sign-users in different ways, affecting the way they use signs and engage with the realities signified. The relationship between signs and signs, signs and meanings, and sign-users and signs, identified by the three dimensions of a semiotic event, often appears more as a dialogue in the different dimensions of semiotic processes than a unidirectional act.
Metaphorical speech not only changes the way we talk about the world and ourselves but also the way we deal with the world in nonsignificative acts and how we experience the world relating to us. The meanings that metaphorical discourse suggest shape our view of the possibilities of action in the world and our view of ourselves as agents and patients who experience the agency of others on us. “Onward, Christian Soldiers” evokes different images of the Christian life than the petition “Make Me a Channel of Your Peace.” The ways in which metaphorical discourse influences our relationship to the world and ourselves are ontologically significant. Metaphors do not simply add a coat of meaning to things which underneath remain what they are. They change the way things are for us and how we are to relate to them. One of the best ways to explore the scope and perspective of reality is to ask which possibilities of action it implies for us. The possibilities of action we perceive in our engagement with reality provide us with a clearer understanding of our ontological commitments than many formal presentations of our view of reality, delineating the structure of the world in formalized hierarchies of being. Looking at the possibilities of action (and passion) presents us with the being of ourselves and the world as our being in the world so that we have to start from the recognition of the way in which we are involved in the order of being. The fundamental relationality of this order is the first thing that impresses itself on us—and that is different from a theoretical view of reality. Yet this relationality, as it is presented to us in metaphorical speech, is not self-explanatory. It provokes our practical and interpretative activity to give an account of ourselves in relation to the world and ourselves in practical and in theoretical terms. Theory appears as one form of praxis which already presupposes our practical entanglement in what we are trying to grasp in theory.
In religious discourse, the enrichment of meaning inherent in metaphorical discourse can be grasped in all dimensions of a lived religion. It informs not only ways of speaking in religious situations but also our modes of acting in religious contexts. The enrichment and the irritation of meaning in lived religions and their metaphorical forms of discourse cannot be contained in these contexts but always spills over into all dimensions of life and confronts them with a new dimension of interpreting them, often in ways which become explicit in the religious use of language. Religious signs indicate the focus of the meaning-systems that provide orientation for our lives; they relate the ultimate significance of our lives to dimensions of meaning which thereby become penultimate. The use of metaphorical discourse in religions, as it spills over into all dimensions of life, serves as an illustration that religions indeed focus on the ultimate concern; they are anchored in that on which we hang our hearts. Religions deal with the first stories and the very last stories, stories about the primordial origin and ultimate destination of everything. They try to identify an ultimate dimension of reality and relate all other dimensions to it. They envelop our actions and passions in every dimension of life in an ultimate framework in which everything is believed to find its meaning. Metaphorical discourse plays a crucial role in the way that religious believers frame reality in all its dimensions. The clarification of metaphorical discourse—in identifying the layers of meaning and testing out its interpretative and practical implications—is therefore not only a fundamental challenge within all religions but also in relation to religions, be it from another religious or a nonreligious perspective. The conversations between theology and the sciences are a good illustration of the range and the contentiousness of religious or quasi-religious forms of metaphorical discourse.
In the history of the West, two metaphors have dominated the debates over how we understand reality in both theology and the sciences. These are the metaphor of nature as a book to be read or as a clock whose mechanical laws we are to follow. Seeing nature as a book to be related to the book of Scripture is a central element of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. All three Abrahamic religions concur that the book of Scripture (the Tanakh, the Bible, or the Qur’an) enables us to read the world for what it is. Reading the book of Scripture implies an inherent summons to understand nature in such a way that it also becomes a book which we read in order to gain understanding and find guidance. Understanding creation as a fundamental speech-act of the Creator is an important element in the Hebrew Bible itself.
By the word of the LORD the heavens were made,
And all their host by the breath of his mouth. (Ps 33:6)
The address of the Creator not only enables creation to respond to God and gives human beings the status of being accountable and responsible before God. It also invests creation with the capacity to respond to God in praise.
The heavens are telling the glory of God;
and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours forth speech,
and night to night declares knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words;
their voice is not heard;
yet their voice goes out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world. (Ps 19:1–4)
Archaic as the powerful image of the heavens communicating the praise of God may seem, the text itself clearly indicates an understanding of the metaphorical character in which language is ascribed to the heavens and to God. Related to this, let us consider Psalm 33:9:
For he spoke, and it came to be;
he commanded, and it stood firm.
This verse, which refers to God speaking creation into existence, offers precise criteria for distinguishing the speech of the Creator from all created speech. On the one hand, speech-acts that posit existence and meaning are a divine prerogative. On the other hand, all that God creates speaks to his glory, not only human beings but the whole of creation. For Paul, this means that nothing is without language (1 Cor 14:10b). Everything that exists testifies to the Creator who creates by performative and effective speech—through an activity that is communicative of God’s glory. Being and meaning are never separated: God’s work creates effects that have being and order, and God’s work has to be understood as communicative action, even when it is not expressed as divine speech. The whole of creation is an ordered network of communicative relationships in which being and meaning are intrinsically connected.
Against this background, it is not surprising that the metaphorical forms of expressing the communicative capacities of creation as communicating the meaning which it had first received through the word of the Creator could be elaborated in the fully developed model of the book of nature which stands in a constitutive relationship to the book of Scripture. As in so many theological questions, Augustine’s use of the relationship of the two books became the matrix for many versions of the view of creation as the book of nature which is consonant with the message of Scripture. He distinguishes between different ways of receiving the messages of the book of Scripture and the book of nature. The distinguishing mark of the book of nature is that it does not require literacy in order to be read by those who lack the skills only available to educated people. “The divine page” (Scripture), he says, “shall be a book for you that you listen to. And the whole universe shall be a book to you that you see. In these codices (of Scripture) only those who are literate can read; while in the whole world even the uneducated can read.”1 The whole of nature becomes a meaningful whole. It is not a collection of unconnected facts, nor the actualization of forms, but contains in it meaning which connects the parts and the whole by intelligible structures which provide orientation to those who read their message.
For Augustine, the book of nature does not declare its own meaning and does not relate its own story. In order to be understood properly, as he explains in his exegesis of the creation story, it needs to be read with the other book, Scripture, in hand, which tells the readers that both books have one author.2 While Augustine can see nature as a system of interconnected meaning, it is nevertheless Scripture for him that has the primary authority such that he views the firmament as a symbol of the all-encompassing and comprehensive meaning of Scripture. For Augustine, therefore, Scripture is the key to decoding the message of creation since Scripture identifies the unitary author of both books and so provides the hermeneutical key for reading the book of nature.3
The metaphor of creation as a book of nature, to be read in conjunction with the book of Scripture, has had a long history, flourishing in later medieval times.4 Reflecting on this metaphor, Ingolf Dalferth notes, “Ironically, the Two-Books Model achieved precisely the opposite of what it set out to achieve; it began as an attempt to integrate nature, and the natural knowledge of the world, into the theological perspective, and it ended by freeing the study of the Book of Nature from domination of the Book of Scripture.”5 However, what is described here as “freeing” has also proven to be a process of growing enslavement to seeing nature as a field of interaction of blind and dumb forces following mechanistic laws.
The great opponent of understanding the world as a book is the metaphor of the world as a clock—a clockwork machine that follows mechanistic laws. While the roots of this model can be traced back to Greek antiquity—to the atomism of Democritus and the materialism of Lucretius—and while its rediscovery in medieval times was still theologically motivated, the extension of this model to all spheres of reality is one of the hallmarks of early modern times.6 And when the image of a mechanical machine started to become the dominant way that modernity viewed reality, the link that this image had with theology became increasingly tenuous. Together with the axiom that natural phenomena must be explained by natural reasons, the mechanistic metaphor had, from the beginning, the drive to displace the doctrine of creation in the scheme of things. The elaborate constructions of physicotheology, which focus on the teleological explanation of final causes for their theological import, present a view of God as the divine watchmaker who first sets up the mechanism and then takes early retirement—although some forms of world-explanation preserve a theistic element by assuming that the watchmaker is called back to correct mistakes and adjust the mechanism from time to time. Descartes (1596–1650) would still talk about the great book of nature, but this metaphor had become just a turn of phrase since the real world-explanations were seen to be discerned by way of calculation and experiment, through the observation of meaningless forces that were to be understood purely quantitatively. If the whole of the world is understood as res extensa—an extended thing, as opposed to the res cogitans of the reflective mind—then the world becomes devoid of qualities and must be accounted for in quantitative measurements. What is a philosophical program in Descartes becomes scientific procedure in Galileo (1564–1642), reducing every observation to quantitative properties so that mathematics can become the “language” of science. However, this language does not say anything; it is merely the medium for transferring measurements in a mode of expression that can comprehend everything because it is compatible with everything.
Once the clock is established as the guiding metaphor for reality, its metaphorical influence envelops more and more of reality. The understanding of human nature as a machine, as in the title of La Mettrie’s L’homme machine (1748), soon shapes the understanding of medical diagnosis and therapy. If humans can be understood as automata, humans can be viewed as mechanical apparatus in societies and states. Not only do the external relationships of humans come to be perceived as bodies of individuals that can be explained by mechanical laws, but also the internal relationships of the human person come to be interpreted as the workings of a sophisticated mechanism.7 Once this step is taken, the field is open for every application of the mechanistic model in all areas of reality, including the workings of business, as in Taylorism—the ghost of which still haunts business studies and practice. Because of the suggestiveness of the metaphor of a mechanism or a machine, which facilitates its easy expansion from physics to political theory, this way of dealing with reality, be it of ourselves or of other beings, has survived its demise as a theoretical model in the sciences, made obsolete by more than a century of relativity theory, quantum theory, chaos theory, and evolutionary theory, among others. Even the developments overturning the clock as the dominant paradigm of perceiving reality still retain its metaphorical suggestiveness, as in “quantum mechanics” or “molecular genetic mechanics.” The mechanics of the clock are still a widely used image for what makes the world and ourselves tick.
The chief characteristic of the clockwork view reality is the explanation of everything in terms of the interaction of noncommunicative forces, which are often understood as discrete entities externally connected by external relations. The specific difficulties of determinism, whether rigid or statistical, and of reductionism, not as a scientific method but as a way of explaining reality, are all connected to the persuasiveness of this metaphor. Meaning, information, address, resonance, and response are all external to the processes of nature themselves. Furthermore, the processes of mechanics are all reversible by virtue of the construction of the mechanism. Everything depends on the initial conditions. This raises several questions. Can the mechanistic view really make sense of the cosmic history of the universe, of the history of evolutionary processes, and of the historical structure of all process of life—a history which prompted Ernest Mayr to see biology as a historical science and so question the reduction of living systems to the laws of physics? Is there no better view attentive to the polydimensionality of reality, which allows for connected but not reductionist ways of communication processing?
Interestingly, however, with the rise of molecular genetics, we have seen a return to the communicative metaphor of reading. Geneticists think in terms of encoding and decoding—terms that recognise their subject matter as inherently characterised by the communication of active information. This indicates a different way of seeing nature where the attention shifts from the meaningless transmission of force to the communication of information—communication which may have very real effects by triggering processes of physical interaction. Moreover, the change of the guiding metaphor reduces what one looks for not to the classical laws of physics, as the interaction between defined physical entities, but to a wider network of communicative relations. In reflecting on the relationship between theology and the sciences, it might therefore be interesting to follow the possible implications for the conversations between theology and the sciences further by exploring a classic theological example of understanding creation as a divine act and as the created result, in other words in terms of communicative relationships.
Towards the end of his life, Martin Luther spent ten years delivering lectures on one biblical book, the book of Genesis—lectures which survive in extensive notes from his students. Formerly regarded as a somewhat questionable source for Luther’s theology, they are now seen as a reliable guide to Luther’s mature theological thinking. In his exegesis of God’s work on the first day, we find a striking passage on God’s creative speaking:
Here attention must also be called to this that the words “Let there be light” are words of God, not of Moses; this means that they are realities. For God calls into existence the things which do not exist (Rom 4:17). He does not speak grammatical words; He speaks true and existent realities. Accordingly, that which for us has the sound of a word is a reality with God. Thus sun, moon, heaven, earth, Peter, Paul, I, you, etc.—we are all words of God (vocabula Dei), in fact only one single syllable or letter by comparison with the entire creation. We, too, speak, but only according to the rules of language; that is, we assign names to objects which have already been created. But the divine rule of language (Grammatica divina) is different, namely: when He says: “Sun, shine,” the sun is there at once and shines. Thus the words of God are realities, not bare words.8
Luther’s interpretation of the creation story in Genesis 1 emphasizes those elements which speak of creation by word and of creation as word. Luther asks, “What else is the entire creation than the Word of God uttered by God or extended to the outside?”9 Theological language—rooted in the language of Scripture and its ultimate author, the Holy Spirit—is a specific language for Luther, comparable to the language of lawyers, physicians, and philosophers. These languages have their own relative integrity. Luther, therefore, states something like a principle of the mutual availability of these languages by means of a division of labour:
Every science should make use of its own terminology, and one should not for this reason condemn the other or ridicule it; but one should rather be of use to the other, and they should put their achievements at one another’s disposal. This is what craftsmen do to maintain the whole city which as Aristotle says, cannot be composed of a physician and another physician but of a physician and a farmer.10
This is somewhat surprising if one remembers Luther’s criticism of reason as a “whore” or his less than complimentary remarks about Aristotle which are pervasive in his works. Luther clearly has a regionalized understanding of the modes of knowledge in the sciences and becomes polemical where philosophy, for instance, oversteps the boundaries of its territory, the study of worldly things, and makes pronouncements upon divine being and work.11 Only theology can claim a comprehensive perspective, albeit not in terms of any superiority of theology as an intellectual discipline but only in virtue of its subject-matter, God. This, however, also confronts theology with the task of critically integrating the insights of the other sciences.
The question then becomes: What does Luther’s view—of the act of creation by word and of creation as the vocabulary of God, structured by the divine grammar—contribute to the dialogue of the sciences?
First, the view that God creates by creatively speaking particular realities into being, avoids the disjunction between meaning and being that is characteristic for much of modern science. The world of nature in all its dimensions cannot be understood as a set of data that appears meaningless unless meaning is ascribed to it. The metaphor of speaking creation into existence—creation as a divine speech-act—posits an indissoluble unity of being and meaning, which, in Luther’s view, is only disrupted with the displacement of humans in the relational order of creation (the fall) when they attempt to be like God, to assume the place of the Creator in creation. Following Luther’s view, the investigation of created reality cannot be reduced to causal explanation. From the beginning, it has a hermeneutical dimension. Causality is included in the framework of understanding creation as a divine speech-act. Explanation is therefore based on the modes of discovery and disclosure and does not arise by way of human invention. And so, knowing creation requires the observation of this unity of being and meaning, keeping epistemological and ontological concerns together. The knowability of the created order of being was invested in creation from the beginning by God’s creative speaking. Following from this first characteristic, theology’s task in the conversations with the sciences would be twofold: to listen carefully where the sciences explain natural processes in terms of communication processes and to be a constant reminder of the dimension of meaning in all dimensions of reality.
Second, if creating by the creative word points to an original unity of being and meaning, this also avoids the initial disjunction of fact and value. Everything that is created by the word carries a particular dignity in virtue of being created as this particular being, a dignity that addresses all other creatures and calls for their respect for this invested dignity. The created dignity conferred in the act of divine speaking becomes intrinsic to created being. If one attempts to develop a view of reality inspired by Luther’s account of creation, one cannot focus on mere facts in abstraction from all questions of ethical or even aesthetic value. The judgement by which God assesses the results of his creative speaking (“And God saw that it was good” [Gen 1:10, 12, 18, 25], culminating in the statement “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good” in 1:31) connects fact and value in such a way that questions of ethics cannot be a matter to be considered after the facts have been established. The demand for value neutrality becomes in this context a call for value transparency in a situation where the focus on facts alone already implies a negative value judgement. From this perspective, knowing creation includes ethical and aesthetic questions from the start. If theology attempts to follow Luther’s recommendation that the sciences should be “of use to one another,” it will need to listen carefully when the sciences raise ethical concerns (e.g., in all ecological considerations) or aesthetic considerations come into play (e.g., references to beauty or elegance) and protest wherever ethical considerations are only brought in after the fact.
Third, Luther’s view of created reality as God’s vocabulary interprets cosmic realities (sun, moon, etc.), personal realities (Peter, Paul, you, and I), and in other places everything that exists as particular bearers of being and meaning.12 This theological view of knowing creation, therefore, sees creation as the creation of particulars, each of which has a particular significance. Similarly, that which is conferred together with existence is never a generalization but always a particularly conferred meaning that requires a similarly particular response. Knowing creation is knowing creation in its particularity. If theology is to contribute something to the conversation with the sciences, it would be as an advocate of particularity.
However, created particularity is not the particularity of discrete isolated entities. Particularity is, fourth, always understood as relational particularity—namely, bound together by the grammar of God’s creative speaking, which is one universal that includes everything there is. While Luther can explain God’s creation as calling into existence particular beings that can be understood as nouns, these nouns that indicate particular beings are nevertheless connected by the rules of divine grammar. One has to keep in mind that grammar in Luther’s time comprised more than the formal rules of language. It also included the semantic dimension, which is the basis for the operation of dialectics and rhetoric. This divine grammar operates both synchronically and diachronically. Synchronically, Luther can grasp the relational order of reality in creation as a system of concentric circles. Most famously, this form of relating synchronically appears in the exposition of the creedal statement “C” in the Small Catechism: “I believe that God has created me, together with all that exists,” and the organizing of creatures in concentric circles in which God upholds my created existence.13 The divine grammar also operates diachronically insofar as every creature is the beginning of a story that is supported through time by God’s promise. This is most famously expressed in the Large Catechism with the statement: “He created us that he might redeem us and make us holy.”14 Every created thing exists in this network of synchronic and diachronic relations. On the basis of this account, knowing creation always means knowing creation in its God-given ordered relationality. It is a form of knowing that is always self-involving and understands created relationality as a holistic order that includes the creature’s own perspective of knowing and being as an element of the order of creation. The perspectival character of knowing does not relativize the objectivity of knowledge. The objectivity rests in God’s giving and in God’s promising; the subjective receptivity of this objectivity is its appropriation to me in faith. Both the language of gift, so famously employed in Luther’s expressions of God’s Trinitarian self-giving, and the language of a divine conversation bridge the subject–object dichotomy by the reciprocal, though asymmetrical, character of personal relationships. Knowing creation is therefore always a form of personal knowledge. Theology’s role in the conversations with the sciences will therefore be a constant attentiveness to the relational character of an entangled universe in which relationality connects particulars and universal rules.15 Conversely, it will try to direct the attention of the sciences to the forms of rationality that point to alternatives—to the dichotomies of realism and idealism, cognitivism and functionalism—because of their relationality.
Fifth, one can ask which forms of rationality are implied in such a view of creation. This seems to be the ongoing debate that Luther has with philosophy in his Lectures on Genesis. Luther combats all necessitarian schemes that posit the necessity of worldly events, processes, and their subsequent rational expressions. However, he maintains the position he adopted in On the Bondage of the Will and in his debate with Erasmus: On the one hand, Christians are committed to maintaining the central distinction between God’s work and human work. On the other hand, we must address whether God foreknows anything contingently or everything is a consequence of divine necessity. Luther’s position has been under continuous discussion. With regard to the contingent character of the knowledge of creation that cannot be deduced from necessary principles, Karl Barth has drawn the conclusion that we know of contingents only by revelation (nihil constat de contingentia mundi, nisi ex revelatione)—in events of disclosure which are the basis for grasping the rationality of the contingent.16 Luther would, I think, go beyond that. For Luther, we have to rule out the idea that God knows anything contingently because God’s knowledge could then be seen as reactive towards human free will. If that were the case, human willing would somehow have an independent position over the will of the Creator who, according to Luther, alone possesses the freedom of will that defines necessity for all created things. However, he would also claim that we can only know divine necessity as the freedom of God’s self-determination from revelation, only in Christ through the Holy Spirit and through the witness of Scriptures as authenticated by the Spirit. It is precisely because of this necessity—which is rooted in the freedom of God’s love, on which the trust of faith rests—that God will never revoke his promises. In this sense, divine necessity is an expression of God’s freedom of self-determination, which, for the Trinitarian God, must always have a form mediating self-relation and relation to the other and which seems to be required for any consistent doctrine of creation. If this is true (de necessitate divina constat nihil, nisi ex revelatione), it would open up a fruitful exchange on the issues of chance and necessity, of rule-governed processes and the emergence of novelty that have played a major role in the debates with the natural sciences from cosmology to brain research. On a theological view, both what appears as chance and what appears as necessity do not reflect an impersonal fate but the personal self-determination of the triune God.
Luther transformed the metaphor of the two books into a metaphor of creation as a divine speech-act that is calling for a human response, and he receives additional support from his interpretation of the incarnation of the divine Word in Jesus of Nazareth. The incarnation of the divine Word makes the creative divine speech at the beginning accessible through the means of communication in the field of created experience. The point of the incarnation is that the form and content of God’s creative speaking through the uncreated Word, giving meaningful being to the whole of creation, is communicated in creaturely forms of communication in the life-witness of Jesus Christ and his continuing presence in the church and the world.
The impact of the incarnation for knowing creation has rarely been more radically underlined than in Luther’s Christology of the radical personal union of God and man in Jesus Christ and in his teaching on the sacraments. The scandal of the incarnation is that the fundamental rational structures of reality are disclosed in the medium of human experience and that the eternal is disclosed in the temporality of human life and death. Such scandal is radicalized by Luther’s insistence that the personal mode of knowing creation in Christ is always in an embodied form, be it in Christ, in the church as the body of Christ, or in Holy Communion as the self-giving of the Lord who is the Creator-Logos and the Redeemer in the very materiality of a shared meal.17 In Christ God’s address takes the form of an embodied personal presence and upholds the church in this form of embodied personal presence. The very materiality of creation becomes, in Christ, the communicative medium of the disclosure of knowledge of creation and of its Creator, so that the Spirit’s activity remains bound to these bodily forms of communication. The link here between created matter and the ultimate forms of creative communication remains breathtaking, both theologically in negating all dualisms between mind and matter, Spirit and flesh, and scientifically in offering the challenge of a link that unites the basic configurations of material reality with the most complex dimensions of reality and the most elaborate forms of organisation.
If we follow the line of Luther’s thought, the incarnation deepens, not only the understanding of everything in creation as divine words (part of God’s vocabulary, held together by the rules of divine grammar), but also the assertion that the creative Word speaks these words and the divine grammar arranges their relationships, all of which become accessible in the medium of created matter. As the continuing embodied address of God, Christ becomes the key to understanding all reality though the experience of reality. It is here that the metaphor of the book is in a most radical way subverted. The author of the book, who has made the book a meaningful whole, no longer stands outside the story but becomes a character within it. His life and death become the overarching plot. A Christian theology that takes the incarnation seriously in this sense will be an awkward conversation partner. It will constantly have to be self-critical with regard to theological modes of rationality that take the words of the book either as data from which knowledge about its author can be inferred or as sign-posts to the axiomatic rules of divine grammar from which as a first principle everything can be deduced. The epistemic direction is inverted, not from the book to the author or from the world to God, but from the author as the main character in the book to the other characters, from the Creator-Logos incarnate in creation to the structures of creation, and from the embodied address that is heard in creation to the creative address that called creation into being and invested it with meaning.
Yet taking the incarnation seriously in this way may also open constructive encounters between theology and the sciences. Questions which first appear as theology-specific, like the sixteenth-century debate between Lutherans and Calvinists whether heaven is a spatial concept, may have far-reaching consequences. For the Lutherans, the expression “at the right hand of the Father” did not refer to a spatial location but meant “everywhere,” which played an important role in the acceptance of scientific discoveries in astronomy and their implications for a scientific worldview. It was this debate that led to the development of a relational concept of space which Leibniz later formulated for the physical sciences, fully aware of the concept’s Lutheran heritage.
The Word made flesh encourages theologians and scientists to take the communicative structure of physical reality with utter seriousness. Not only is this mode of knowing one that is understood as embodied knowing, but the “object” of knowing can never be understood as a mere object but as a conversation partner in the very materiality of creation. It is the impact of the incarnation that is continued as the mode of Christ’s presence in the preaching of the word and the administration of the sacraments, and in the community of the church that is in this way constituted that makes creation a conversation partner in the efforts of human creatures to know creation. From this christological perspective, the vision of the Roman Catholic Romantic poet Joseph von Eichendorff (1788–1857) acquires a new poignancy:
A song sleeps in all things.
Which dream on and on,
And the world begins to sing
If only you find the magic word.18
From a christological perspective, one would have to say: the Word has been found, and it is not magic.
If the divine speech-act is the beginning of a history characterized by the constant interplay between the creative communicative relationality of the triune God and the created communicative relationality of the created order, then a question arises—namely, what is the goal of this history? In the Lectures on Genesis, Luther rejects the idea of an instantaneous creation and insists on creation as a sequential process, expressed in the scheme of six days. The directionality of creation, which insists that nature understood as creation is not an iterative or reversible process as suggested by a mechanistic understanding of the world, raises the question of how this directionality is to be understood theologically. With various accentuations in the biblical writings, the different forms of Spirit-discourse seem to agree with the Nicene Creed’s confession of the Spirit as the Lord, the life-giver who spoke through the prophets, who proceeds from the Father (and the Son), and who is worshipped and glorified with the Father and the Son. Life is the beginning of a story of existence, and prophetic speech is the announcement of a future that cannot be deduced from the antecedent conditions of the past. Luther’s slogan that creation means always to make something new (creare est semper novum facere 19) can be applied to the Spirit-dimension of creation. This would indicate that the possibilities for the actualization of novelty are not restricted to the possibilities contained in the past of creation and are thereby not restricted to the possibilities inherent in what has already been actualized. On this view, there is space for genuine novelty in creation, for forms of emergence which receive their intelligibility not from antecedent conditions but from subsequent fulfilments. Paul’s language of the Spirit as the anticipation of what is to come, the one who liberates us from our bondage to decay (Rom 8:19–25), offers freedom that is not grounded in the past and liberation from the past and to the past. However, for Paul, the Spirit not only brings the promise of future glory but also the help needed to bring our futile suffering before God. The Spirit, who has enabled creation to respond to the word of the Creator since the beginning, is also the one who restores the capacity to respond to the Creator where our words fail (Rom 8:26–27). The discovery of phenomena that point to emergent novelty in the story of cosmic evolution, however, raises the issue of how novelty can be reconciled with the familiar processes of conditioning by antecedent conditions. As the Pauline view of the Spirit indicates, the promise of future glory requires a genuine reconciliation, the overcoming of all the futility and suffering to which creation is subject, and its liberation which will be revealed in the children of God (Rom 8:18–21).
It is here that the significance of the Trinitarian specification of talking about the Spirit in the Nicene Creed can be appreciated in its full significance. The Trinitarian framework identifies the Spirit as the one “who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified.” This points to the theological necessity and to the theological space of integrating eschatological novelty as freedom for the future with both a God who creates by speaking things into being and the presence of God in the incarnate Word. When we understand the Spirit as the perfecting cause of God’s work, the work of the Holy Spirit becomes the goal of the work of the Father as the originating cause and of the Son as the creative cause of everything there is.20 These different aspects must be compatible if one confesses the triune God. Every work of the Trinity is perfected in the operation of the Holy Spirit. In conversations with the sciences, the Trinitarian perspective offers a strong argument for nonreductionist integration. Can the integration that Trinitarian doctrine attempts—between unity and plurality, between the transcendence of the first speaker, the uncreated word, and the incarnate Word, between absolute beginning and absolute future—be reflected in the art of knowing creation?
These considerations show that our understanding of God is at the heart of knowing creation and, indeed, at the heart of the dialogue between theology and the sciences. Asking the big questions in the physical and life sciences always exercises a temptation to engage, whether polemically or constructively, with the biggest of all questions—the question of God. Is there an understanding of the God of Christian faith that can support an emphasis on communicative relationality in understanding (1) creation as a divine speech-act, (2) the incarnation as an encounter with the Creator-Logos in created, bodily, and historical forms of communication, and (3) the interplay between order and freedom that the Spirit introduces between the Creator and creation?
In Luther’s Lectures on Genesis, there is a consistent emphasis on creation as a triune speech-act. Immediately after Luther identifies every being as part of the divine vocabulary, he states, “Thus God reveals Himself to us as the Speaker who has with Him the uncreated Word, Through whom He created the world and all things with the greatest ease, namely, by speaking.”21 Soon thereafter he discusses Augustine’s Trinitarian interpretation, with “He said” referring to the Father, the attribution of “made” to the Son, and the expression “sees” (when God sees that the creation he has spoken into being) to the Holy Spirit.22 And then he mentions the appropriation of “mind” to the Father, of “intellect” to the Son, and “will” to the Holy Spirit,23 but immediately qualifies these references to the tradition by saying: “They speak thus because we picture these matters to ourselves this way in order to remember and explain the doctrine of the Trinity.”24 When Luther states his own Trinitarian theology—based on the prologue to John’s Gospel and the description of the Holy Spirit’s role therein—he develops the metaphor of a conversation between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. The metaphor of the inner-Trinitarian conversation points to the different personal particularities of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit and locates the divine essence precisely in the eternal communicative exchange.
Thus, there are two distinct Persons: He who speaks and the Word that is spoken, that is, the Father and the Son. Here, however, we find the third person following these two, namely, the One who hears both the Speaker and the spoken Word. . . . All three, Speaker, Word and Listener—must be God Himself; all three must be coeternal and in a single undivided majesty. For there is no difference or inequality in the divine essence, neither a beginning nor an end . . . just as the Father is a Speaker from eternity, and just as the Son is spoken from eternity, so the Holy Spirit is the Listener from eternity.25
In his Table Talk, Luther can summarize his Trinitarian teaching almost epigrammatically, by identifying the Father as the grammar of the divine conversation, the Son as the dialectics giving order and intelligible structure, and the Spirit as the rhetoric who makes the divine speech lively and impressive so that it can conquer the hearts.26
What is gained by understanding God as the inner-Trinitarian conversation? For Luther, this is not mere metaphor but the ultimate ontological foundation for conceiving of reality in terms of an ontology of communicative relations as a conversation, which is demonstrated by his attempts to formulate the revisions necessary in metaphysics to account for the hypostatic identities of the three persons.27 In the speech-act of creation, God begins a conversation with his creation that is continued in creation through the incarnate Son and perfected in the Holy Spirit. The conversation God has with his creation is ultimately rooted in the conversation God is in his Trinitarian being.
With these reflections, we have tried to explore some of the critical and constructive possibilities opened by understanding the act of creation as a divine speech-act: the whole of creation is a part of God’s vocabulary and thus the bearer of being, meaning, and created dignity. By giving this understanding of creation a distinctive Trinitarian form, as Luther does, we can recognise that God’s conversational relationship with creation is rooted in God’s own communicative being as a Trinitarian conversation. As we have seen, Luther’s reformulation of the metaphor of the book of nature offers a number of promising avenues for a conversation between theology and the sciences. The particular ontology of relations that can be developed on this basis is one where the whole multidimensional structure of reality could be seen as a highly differentiated and complex structure of resonances.
The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa has demonstrated the fruitfulness of such an approach for analysing the human relationship to the world.28 It seems useful to recover the theological roots of the metaphor of resonance, which is particularly apt for exploring communicative relationships in both horizontal and vertical dimensions. And this metaphor can be extended, as Rosa does, to help explore the embodied character of human relationships in the social world and the natural world.
Many of the obstacles that have made conversations between the sciences and theology so difficult seem to be located, not in particular scientific discoveries, models, and theories, but in the metascientific assumptions often connected with the power of metaphors that can stand in the way of a fruitful and mutually enriching conversation. The discovery of the crucial significance of relationality, both in theology and the sciences, was an important step in the direction of a more constructive view of God and the world—a view unrestricted by adherence to the metaphysics of substance and to modern theories of subjectivity. The next step has to be a continuing conversation on the question of which understanding of relationality can be most fruitfully explored. The view of relationality as communicative seems to offer one way forward, and as it does so it not only informs the practice of theological thinking but also the most fundamental practices of Christian worship. Following this way, we can expect dissonance at every stage of the conversation. Yet, as in music, the very character of dissonances points to the fact that there is still a way towards a satisfying consonance. It belongs to the very character of both theology and the sciences that we have not yet reached that point. Such an approach, which we have explored a little further with the help of Martin Luther’s theology, not only offers the hope of listening more attentively to the resonances of a universe of communicative relationships; it also calls us to hear the Word that called everything into being, as part of God’s vocabulary.
1. “Liber tibi sit pagina divina, ut haec audias; liber tibi sit orbis terrarum, ut haec videas. In istis codicibus non ea legunt, nisi qui litteras noverunt; in tot mundo legat et idiota” (Augustine, Enarrationes in psalmos, Patrologiae Migne Latinae Elenchus 36, 518; on Ps 45, 7b. This reference can be found here: http://www.augustinus.it/latino/esposizioni_salmi/index2.htm).
2. Augustine, De genesi ad litteram, Migne Latinae Elenchus 32, 219–21.
3. Bonaventure emphasizes that while in paradise, Adam and Eve could read creation like a book, their fall makes the book of Scripture necessary to restore the meaning of creation and so guide human creatures to the Creator. Bonaventure, Collationes in Hexaemeron, ed. and trans. W. Nyssen (München: Kösel, 1979), XIII, 12.
4. This history has been charted with a wealth of scholarly detail by Hans Blumenberg, Die Lesbarkeit der Welt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981). However, his somewhat mournful history of the loss of the notion that the world can be read, is dominated by his attempt to show that the thesis set forth by Karl Löwith in philosophy and by Wolfhart Pannenberg in theology that modernity is the secularization of the Jewish and Christian view of history is wrong and to argue for the legitimacy of the emancipation of theoretical curiosity from its religious roots.
5. Ingolf U. Dalferth, Theology and Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 69.
6. It seems to me that the momentous spreading of this model has to do with the capacities of metaphors to transfer meanings from one area of experience to another. If one tries to describe the process of the extension of the metaphor, one is struck by the fact that it is not so much a picture of the world that impressed itself on human observers but rather the human engagement with the world in the development of constructing mechanical instruments that are employed to gain access to the understanding of the world. It is not science that makes us understand our engagement with the world, but our engagement with the world in developing craftsmanship and technology that makes us conceive of science as a world-disclosing enterprise.
7. The introductory passage of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan is a conspicuous example of the transfer of the metaphor: “Nature (the Art whereby God hath made and governs the World) is by the Art of man, as many other things, so in this also imitated that it can make an Artificiall Animal. For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principall part within; why may we not say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificiall life? For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body, such as intended by the Artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that most Rationall and most excellent worke of Nature, Man. For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN, called COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE (in latine CIVITAS which is but an Artificiall Man . . .)” (Hobbes, Leviathan [1651; repr., Oxford: Clarendon, 1909]).
8. Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, vol. 1, Lectures on Genesis 1–5, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (St. Louis: Concordia, 1958), 21–22 (hereafter LW). For a detailed explication of this passage cf. Martin Wendte, Die Gabe und das Gestell: Luthers Metaphysik des Abendmahls im technischen Zeitalter (Tübingin: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 397–407.
9. Luther, Lectures on Genesis, 22.
10. LW 1:48. The difference and connection is most clearly defined in Luther’s Disputation Concerning Man (1536), LW 34:134–44. Luther seems to refer to Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 5.5.
11. On the relationship between philosophy and theology in Luther’s thought cf. Mark Mattes, “Luther’s Use of Philosophy,” in Lutherjahrbuch 80 (2013): 110–14. For the systematic implications of this highly differentiated relationship, cf. Wilfried Härle, “Reformatorische Rationalität. Luthers Verständnis der Vernunft” in Rationalität im Gespräch—Rationality in Conversation, ed. Markus Mühling (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2016), 261–74. For the application of this relationship for the understanding of what it means to be human, cf. Christoph Schwöbel, “Like a Tree Planted by the Water: Human Flourishing and the Dynamics of Divine-Human Relationships,” in Flourishing in Christ: Essays in Honor of Miroslav Volf, ed. Matthew Croasmun, Zoran Grozdano, and Ryan J. McAnnally-Linz (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, forthcoming).
12. Cf. LW 1:49: “Therefore any bird whatever and any fish whatever are nothing but nouns in the divine rule of language [grammatica].”
13. The Book of Concord, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), 354. The original “Ich glaube, dass mich Gott geschaffen hat samt allen Kreaturen” avoids the problematic implications of “all that exists.” The inner circle of divine gifts (“eyes, ears, and all limbs and senses; reason and all mental faculties”), which refers to the bodily and spiritual constitutions of humans as embodied sensitive and rational beings, is enveloped by the outer circle (“shoes and clothing, food and drink, house and farm, spouse and children, fields, livestock and all property”), which comprises the fundamental bodily needs, primary forms of sociality, and their material presuppositions. This is summarized in the formula, “All the necessities and nourishment for this body and life” (The Book of Concord, 354).
14. The Book of Concord, 439.
15. For the state of the discussion between theology and the sciences, cf. John Polkinghorne, ed., The Trinity and an Entangled World: Relationality in Physical Science and Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008).
16. Cf. Karl Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik III/1, 4th ed. (Zürich: EVZ, 1970), 5. For a thoroughgoing discussion, cf. Thomas F. Torrance, Divine and Contingent Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 26–61. The principle can be traced back to the Lutheran dogmatician J. A. Quenstedt. For full documentation, see the chapter “Theologie der Schöpfung im Dialog zwischen Naturwissenschaft und Dogmatik,” in my Gott in Beziehung (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), 131–60, esp. 154n53.
17. Cf. Christoph Schwöbel, “Tamquam visibile verbum. Kommunikative Sakramentalität und leibhaftes Personsein,” in Leibhaftes Personsein. Theologische und interdisziplinäre Perspektiven: Festschrift für Eilert Herms zum 75, ed. Elisabeth Gräb-Schmidt et al., Geburtstag, Marburger Theologische Studien 123 (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2015), 197–210.
18. This is, of course, a theological appropriation or, indeed, an illegitimate subversion of a poem titled “Divining Rod.” However, it seems that the implications of the incarnation point indeed in this direction and make all divining rods redundant.
19. Martin Luther, D. Martin Luthers Werks, 121 vols. (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1883–2009), WA 46, 556, 26.
20. Cf. Basil, On the Holy Spirit, 16.38.
21. LW 1:22.
22. LW 1:50. Luther seems to refer here to Augustine’s De genesi ad litteram, 2.6.
23. LW 1:50. This seems to be a reference to Augustine’s De Trinitate, 10.11–12.
24. LW 1:50.
25. LW 24:364–65.
26. Luther’s Works, WA, Tischreden 1, 564, 2–7.
27. For a more detailed treatment of Luther’s Trinitarian teaching cf. my chapter “Martin Luther and the Trinity” in the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Religion (Oxford: forthcoming). doi:10.1093/ acrefore/9780199340378.013.326. For a systematic exposition of the understanding of God as Trinity, cf. Christoph Schwöbel, “God as Conversation: Reflections on a Theological Ontology of Communicative Relations,” in Theology and Conversation: Towards a Relational Theology, ed. Jacques Haers and Peter De Mey (Leuven: Peeters, 2003), 43–67.
28. Hartmut Rosa, Resonanz: Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2016).