5 - The nature of theistic realism

Summary

It has been suggested that the innovative capacity of human thought and language cannot be explained without a ‘vertical’ (theistic) dimension. Having drawn human cognitive and linguistic re-grammaring and refiguring processes inside the ‘horizontal’ process of conversion, we may describe more adequately the ‘how’ of the conversion of old realities into new ones but we cannot explain conversion itself without drawing it inside Christology as a whole, just as we cannot explain Christology itself except in relation to the doctrine of God. In the same way, neither can Christology alone make sense of divine involvement in human language-using and cognitive processes in revelation and conversion. If these processes help articulate the way God works in the world, they articulate an Economic Trinity which includes the pneumatological operation within creation.

The giant proposition

On a Wittgensteinian and Putnamian view the distinction between reality and truth is an internal one as it relies on a correspondence that in turn relies on certain premises. These premises lay down a distinction and correlation between language and world, which lies so deep in our concepts that much of our language and thinking cannot make sense without it. According to Fergus Kerr, behind the realist notion that we have access to ‘objective’ reality lies the illusion that our context is the only reality. That this context is apparently divisible into mind and matter tempts us into a choice between things and thoughts as the primary reality, a choice which overlooks what Wittgenstein has called das Leben, the stream of life.