Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Realism and Christian faith: towards an ontological approach
- 2 ‘Limping with two different opinions’?
- 3 Taking leave of theological realism
- 4 Realism and Christian faith after Wittgenstein
- 5 The grammar of Christian faith and the relationship between philosophy and theology
- 6 Representation, reconciliation, and the problem of meaning
- 7 God, reality, and realism
- 8 Speaking the reality of God
- 9 Realism: conformed to the conforming word
- References
- Index of scripture references
- Index of names and subjects
2 - ‘Limping with two different opinions’?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Realism and Christian faith: towards an ontological approach
- 2 ‘Limping with two different opinions’?
- 3 Taking leave of theological realism
- 4 Realism and Christian faith after Wittgenstein
- 5 The grammar of Christian faith and the relationship between philosophy and theology
- 6 Representation, reconciliation, and the problem of meaning
- 7 God, reality, and realism
- 8 Speaking the reality of God
- 9 Realism: conformed to the conforming word
- References
- Index of scripture references
- Index of names and subjects
Summary
ON BEING A REALIST ABOUT THE LIVING GOD
What's in a name?
Our concern in this book is with being realist about God, but this implies that we already know who God is, or, to put it another way, who is God. Many theological realists assume without further examination of the topic that the God whose reality they set about depicting is the God attested in the Bible and that to argue for realism about some deity is eo ipso to argue for realism about this particular deity. However, it is not self-evident that these assumptions are sufficient for referential access to the living God.
For example, Soskice combines religious experience with Thomistic arguments for God's existence to support her causal theory of linguistic reference and acknowledges that ‘If that which the Christian refers to as the source and cause of all bears no resemblance to God as conceived by Christianity, then he must admit himself to be so deluded as to the nature of the referent that his faith must be lost’ (1985: 139; cf. 140, 152). For Soskice, the Christian refers to ‘the source and cause of all’, but this God might not bear any ‘resemblance to God as conceived by Christianity’, in which case the Christian is deluded and his faith is lost. To avoid this outcome, ‘the source and cause of all’ needs to be shown to be identical with ‘God as conceived by Christianity’, but we are not offered an argument for this.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Realism and Christian FaithGod, Grammar, and Meaning, pp. 21 - 39Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003