Theology After Neo-pragmatism is the title of my forthcoming book from Paternoster, due out early 2008. It is a work in quasi-analytic philosophical theology. It is a conversation between philosophers like Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty and John McDowell, theologians like Bruce D. Marshall, Kevin Vanhoozer, William J. Abraham, and finally religious scholars (Terry F. Godlove, Kevin Schilbrack, Delwin Brown, William Dean, Jeffrey Stout, Cornel West) about what a historicist, pragmatist theology might look like which took seriously the human perspective. Is there a place for revelation as a source of authority for theology; can we tak seriously the intention of religious believers to refer to invisible gods, whose ties to empirical experience are tenuous at best? Is there such a thing as an essence of a religious tradition? I argue that Donald Davidson has a significant advantage over Rorty’s version of neo-pragmatism, but his austerity with regard to what we can use in a theory of interpretation is detrimental to his appropriation for the study of theology. I propose a way forward by calling for: more ‘modesty’ in the theory of interpretation; the significance of first person authority even in religious studies; the continued significance of languages and traditions as setting normative contexts of meaning, while nonetheless staying away from incommensurability. These and many more wonderful ideas…

Hot on the heels of Theology After Neo-pragmatism comes a book which perhaps will take the better of four years to complete. I haven’t been able to come up with a title for it yet, but titles come last anyway. A this stage, Aspects of God and the World will have to do. It attempts to model the notion that our knowledge of reality is always perspectival and on the background of anterior purposes and desires (the pragmatist insight). However, while reality as such does not a single favoured way of being represented (no unique perfect or true description of reality), it does have perhaps an infinity of such perspectives. The reason for this is that it was created. I draw on Vico and Milbank to put forward the notion that only God has perfect knowledge (scientia) of reality, in view of the fact that he has created it. What about human knowledge? Briefly put, since knowledge is always involved with desire, it is not to be separated from ethics (as well as aesthetics). In terms of knowledge of God, it must always presuppose that specific orientation of the person as was ordained by God. This is nothing but an attempt to philosophically develop St. Paul’s notion that the spiritual things are known to spiritual people alone. I argue that such ’seeing’ of these spiritual aspects of reality requires training and habituation into a certain way/ form of life. Such an ‘inculturation’ into the world ruled by the Scriptures neither simply discovers that unique description of reality, neither creates it from scratch, but it opens one’s eyes to real aspects of the world.

Other research projects

I am turning back to systematic theology in a series of articles that explore the benefits of the theological method I outlined in Theology After Neo-Pragmatism, but which should be more fully developed in  Aspects, for particular theological issues. The first in the series is ‘Atonement and Violent Metaphors’. Future papers will deal with the doctrine of Scripture, sin, and so on.