Although they are both ultimately problematic, Fundamentalism and right-wing Postmodernist theologies are more workable than theological Liberalism because they remain committed to the basic content of the Christian faith. The issue tends to be more how they seek to establish the validity of their epistemic judgments and less at the content of their judgments. Similarly, in the dialectic of antinomianism and legalism, legalism has the advantage of at least acknowledging the existence of the law. This is true even if legalists suffers from the same delusion as antinomians, namely that we can escape the condemnation of the law. Hence, it is not wrong to acknowledge the acceptance of a law of belief (fides quae creditor) as a necessary condition for possessing genuine Christian faith (fides qua creditor). Rather, what is problematic is to see the law and not the promise of grace is the foundation of the divine-human relationship, and therefore the starting point of all our truth claims.
Postmodernism is correct that there is no neutral starting point for our epistemic projects, even if we admit that the frameworks we employ are vulnerable to critique and falsification. Therefore, we begin with the explicitly biblical presupposition that humans are made in the image of God (Gen. 1:26). Christians confess that the biblical God is always and eternally the Holy Trinity. God as Trinity is an eternal linguistic agent, who gracious gives of himself in speaking forth the Word and the spiration of the Spirit. Hence, the Christian God is an eternally gracious and responsive God. God gives and responds to himself within the eternal dialogue and self-communication of the divine life.
Analogically, human subjects mirror the Trinity in our relational and linguistic constitution. Just as the Trinity is constituted by eternal responsiveness, so too the human subject knows the truth through suffering reality and then responding to it with true belief and action. Since all reality is constituted by God’s speech, the human starting point for discerning truth must be responsiveness to the divine address embodied in nature and supernatural revelation. Humans, and indeed all of creation, come into existence through the address of the Triune God (Gen. 1, Jn. 1). In the Genesis narrative, when God speaks humanity into existence, unlike the rest of creation, he addresses them directly as his image bearers. In this direct address, the Lord expects his efficacious Word to elicit a response of trust and obedience (Gen. 1:28). As God’s hearing and speaking creatures, humans properly function when they appropriately respond to God’s speech.
Through his address, God makes humans his representative rulers in creation (Gen. 1:28). As God’s viceroys in creation, humans must reign in the manner of God by language. To rule wisely as moral agent, humans must possess the gift of language and therefore be linguistic agents. Just as God eternally corresponds to himself in his Word (Jn. 14:9), so too, humans speak and respond to words that correspond to reality. If they did not, they could not speak truthfully about the past or pledge to act in certain ways in the future. Indeed, the whole human moral and epistemic life is held together with what might be called a “covenant of language.” Without primal trust in the faithfulness and truthfulness of God’s establishment of language, it would be impossible to wisely exercise dominion in creation as God’s image bearers.
Postmodernists have been essentially correct to see language as the medium that colors all human interaction with reality. Only by seeing God as a truthful linguistic agent who is the gracious and truthful foundation in all reality can we maintain a linguistic and epistemic realism in its fullest sense. On the one hand, it is unfair to characterize Postmodernists as purely skeptical or subjectivistic. Yet, the rejection the of God of the Bible in western thought over the last few centuries has created extreme skepticism about language’s ability to truthfully represent reality.
Reformed philosopher Alvin Plantinga has argued that without presupposing that God designed human minds to produce accurate truth claims, philosophies like metaphysical naturalism breakdown into incoherence. Random evolutionary process unguided by God could only produce a human mind that would represent reality in evolutionarily useful ways (i.e., to reproduce and escape of danger), not necessarily truthful ones. With such presuppositions, all worldviews would ultimately be proved untrustworthy since they would be unable to coherently assert linguistically or epistemically realistic claims about the world. Hence, evolutionary naturalism necessarily self-destructs due to its inability to assert its own truthfulness.
Indeed, as Augustine observed in On True Religion, all thought systems are based on an ultimate authority upon whose premise one subsequently draws conclusions. The systems of thought generated by secular modernity relied on the autonomous rationality of the human mind without grounding reason in anything other than itself. Reason not only needs something that makes it reasonable, but premises from which it can work. Indeed, if Plantinga is correct, then many secular systems of thought grounded themselves in an authority that could not bear the weight placed upon it, namely the allegedly purely naturalistic process of the universe that generated human reason in the first place. Seen from this perspective, Postmodernism’s skepticism about language and truth is nothing but the modernity’s epistemic chickens coming home to roust.
From the biblical perspective, language is indeed the medium through which God addresses us and the filter through which we interpret all creation. Therefore, we must not try to ground knowledge in autonomously known universal rational foundations, but in the Word of God spoken in creation and redemption. By his promise that we are his image bearers, God has made known to us that our minds and our language can carry the freight of reality. Since we can only indirectly see past our linguistic constructions of the world, the maintenance of any form of linguistic and epistemic realism presupposes trust in God as the author of our language. Humans can certainly gain knowledge of the world apart from the revealed Word of God. But, if our quest for truth is not grounded in God’s gracious gift of creation and the truth necessary to reign in creation, then invariably our epistemic projects will become antinomian or legalistic, as we have already seen in our earlier discussion of Modernism and Postmodernism.
From the draft manuscript for Lutheran Dogmatics: The Evangelical-Catholic Faith for an Age of Contested Truth (Lexham Press).