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Gordon Kaufman's Perspectival Language
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
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In the two decades following the publication of New Essays in Philosophical Theology, a metatheological awareness has been steadily developing among systematic theologians. Gordon Kaufman is one of those theologians prepared to face the rather embarrassing question as to whether sentences containing the word ‘God’ provide information about a transcendent reality called ‘God’. Kaufman has, indeed, always seen the need for a constructive relationship between theology and philosophy, a relationship in which both philosophy and theology retain their respective autonomous standpoints. In arguing for an historically orientated philosophy, he claimed that here one would treat what is concrete and specific for Christian faith in abstract and general terms, showing how ‘every philosophical perspective finds its focus and meaning in a historical event which is the centre of history - the Christ - for it’. Because it has grown out of a generalizing of Christian faith-affirmations, this philosophy does not threaten theology's autonomy. Indeed, it would ‘already be determined by the Christian perspective in its fundamental orientation’. It is the methodological importance of this notion of a perspective which the present article seeks to make clear.
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page 89 note 1 New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. by Flew, Antony and Maclntyre, Alasdair (New York: Macmillan, 1955)Google Scholar. For the term ‘metatheological’, see, for example, Heimbeck, Raeburne S., Theology and Meaning: A Critique of Metatheological Scepticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969); this work helpfully reviews the main issues and contains a large bibliography.Google Scholar
page 89 note 2 Kaufman, Gordon D., ‘Can Man Serve Two Masters?’, Theology Today, XV (1958), 59–77 (p. 76); see also p. 91, note 1, below.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 89 note 3 Ibid. p. 77.
page 89 note 4 Kaufman, Gordon D., God the Problem (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 17–37. References to this article will be given in the text.Google Scholar
page 90 note 1 See Kaufman, , ‘God as Symbol’, God the Problem, pp. 82–115 (p. 96, n. 16)Google Scholar; also Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations trans. Anscombe, G. E. M., 3rd ed., (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968)Google Scholar, II xi and § 539, and his Zettel, ed. by Anscombe, G. E. M. and von Wright, G. H., trans. by Anscombe, G. E. M. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), §§ 198–226Google Scholar; Wisdom, John, ‘Gods’, in Logic and Language, ed. by Flew, Antony, 1 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1951, 1963), 187–206Google Scholar, and also his ‘The Logic of God’ in Paradox and Discovery (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), pp. 2–3Google Scholar; Hick, John, ‘Religious Faith as Experiencing-As’, in Talk of God, Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures, II (New York: St Martin's Press, 1969), 20–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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page 91 note 1 One notes here the confessional standpoint associated with the name of Niebuhr, H. Richard; see his The Meaning of Revelation (New York: MacMillan, 1941)Google Scholar. To assume the Christian perspective, on the terms, is to ‘begin to perceive and understand…existence in terms oriented toward the Christian revelation, begin to measure and evaluate the various dimensions of experience by Christ’. The lines of the perspective are formed by ‘revelatory events’, seen as revelatory ‘not only because their meaning and significance seems self-evident to the adherent of the perspective, needing no further explanation in terms of some other deeper or more intelligible ground, but also because they throw their light on all the rest of experience, “revealing” its meaning’: Kaufman, Gordon D., Systematic Theology: A Historicist Perspective (New York: Scribners, 1968), pp. 23, 27.Google Scholar
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page 93 note 3 Ibid. pp. 85–6.
page 93 note 4 Ibid. p. 98. One should add that, for Kaufman, ‘the knowledge of God is given more in the presuppositions (i.e. the faith) with which experience is apprehended and interpreted than with the particularities or details of experience’. While ‘a direct encounter with and apprehension of God is not possible’, a ‘definitive image or paradigm’ has been given in order to let this theistic perspective develop. See God the Problem, pp. 239–41.Google Scholar
page 94 note 1 ‘Revelation and Cultural History’, op. cit. p. 169, n. 13.Google Scholar
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page 94 note 4 Ibid. p. 151. See also ‘Transcendence without Mythology’, p. 71, and the discussion of the ‘centre of history’ in Systematic Theology, a centre which is the result of a movement from outside the bounds of human history into man's world’ (pp. 30–1, 37).
page 94 note 5 Kaufman, , ‘On the Meaning of “Act of God”’, God the Problem, pp. 119–47Google Scholar (p. 131, n. II); Schleiermacher, F. D. E., The Christian Faith (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1928), §47, 2.Google Scholar
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