50 Key Concepts in Theology

Theological Realism
The belief that God exists independently of our ideas about him.
On the face of it, the assertion that ‘God is real’ would seem to be basic
to any Christian theology. However, the question of God’s reality is not
straightforward. On the one hand, God necessarily surpasses our conceptions
of reality; on the other hand, God’s reality must somehow connect with ours if
we are to have any knowledge of him. So how we speak of divine reality is a
theological puzzle.
Christian theology has, very broadly speaking, been an uneasy
combination of the Jewish conception of God as the force guiding human
history, and the Platonic conception of God as eternal and unchanging truth.
Thus God is spoken of as being supremely real for us both in the flesh-and-
blood historical figure of Jesus Christ, and as a ‘transcendent’, ‘immortal’ and
‘invisible’ deity. When we speak of God’s transcendent reality, we appear to
deny his immanent reality, and vice versa.
Thomas Aquinas tried to reconcile the tension between the transcendent
and immanent dimensions of God’s reality by arguing that God’s reality
(Being) underpins our reality (being): ‘To be everywhere primarily and per se
belongs to God, and is proper to Him, because whatever number of places be
supposed to exist, God must be in all of them, not as to part of him, but as to
his very self.’ In this way our reality is intimately connected with God’s.
The philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) marked a watershed in
Western thinking about the reality of God. Before Kant, theologians had
worked on the assumption that God really existed ‘out there’ as a supernatural
being. Because God was assumed to exist, it was reasonable enough for
theologians to attempt to describe God’s attributes and speculate about where
and how in the cosmos God might exist.
Kant is significant because he undermined the old supernatural idea of
God and replaced it with the idea that God is only real within human life and
consciousness. Kant argued that it is beyond the power of reason to
demonstrate the supernatural reality of God (see ‘Proofs for the Existence of
God’). The best we can say of God, argued Kant, is that he is an Idea that we
can’t do without. We need the idea of God if we are to make sense of the rest
of our experience. Thus with Kant, the question of the reality of God merged
with the question of how we make sense of our existence both theoretically
and practically. In other words, theology became a special way of reflecting
upon the human condition.

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The emergence of Kantian philosophy coincided with stunning
discoveries in the natural sciences that were threatening to make God
redundant to the explanation of the physical universe. If science can explain
the processes of the natural world, then (Kant had implied) God may only be
needed to help us understand how to behave in the world (ethics) and how to
give meaning to our lives (aesthetics).
In the centuries that followed Kant, the question of God’s existence was
replaced more and more by the question of human language about God.
Instead of asking, ‘Is God real?’ theologians asked, ‘In what sense does the
word “God” refer to something real?’ This subtle but crucial shift opened up
the possibility that the word ‘God’ is merely expressive of something real,
without having to say that God himself is real.
Thus ‘God’ was said to express our ‘highest ideals’, or our ‘ultimate
concern’ (as Paul Tillich put it), or ‘the ground of our being’ (John Robinson),
or just ‘life’ itself. In this way, many theologians stopped trying to prove or
describe (or even believe in) the reality of God. Instead they used the word
‘God’ as a way of categorising dimensions of human experience. God lost his
own independent reality status, and became part of our human reality.
Despite a vociferous conservative backlash from theologians like Karl
Barth, the Kantian theological paradigm still dominated the twentieth century.
The ultimate summary of Kant’s theology was made by Don Cupitt in his
landmark book Taking Leave of God (1980). Cupitt argued that God ‘is the
religious demand and ideal, the pearl of great price and the enshriner of
values. He is needed – but as a myth.’ Cupitt has since moved beyond this
position to argue that God is not really needed at all, and that non-theistic
ideas of ‘being’ and ‘life’ may provide us with a better vocabulary for making
sense of things.
It could be argued that calling God ‘real’ involves a category mistake.
God doesn’t need to be ‘real’, he just needs to be God, because being God is
much better than merely being ‘real’. Indeed, as many philosophers have
pointed out, God is not so much ‘real’ as the guarantee of what is real. Saying
‘God is real’ is like saying ‘God exists’: it doesn’t tell us anything about him.
The question then is not whether God is ‘real’ but whether we trust that God
is God. It all comes down to faith.
THINKERS
George Berkeley (1685–1753) was the arch-idealist, arguing that God
causes our experiences of the world to be real, but that the world itself is not

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real. So as you read this text, it appears to be real. But all that is real is the
idea you have of reality.
Don Cupitt (1935– ) has argued for a position called ‘non-realism’. This
means that the world is only as real as it appears to be, and there is no
metaphysical reality hidden behind the manifest world.
Michael Dummett (1925– ): an anti-realist philosopher who has argued
that a statement can only true or false when we have agreed in advance the
means by which the truth of the statement can be verified. So there is no such
thing as ‘reality’ out there that our words refer to. Instead, calling something
‘real’ is an agreed way of speaking about things: ‘We are entitled to say that a
statement P must either be true or false … only when P is a statement of such
a kind that we could in a finite time bring ourselves into a position in which
we were justified in either asserting or denying P; that is when P is an
effectively decidable statement’ (‘Truth’ in Michael Dummett, Truth and
Other Enigmas).
G. E. Moore (1873–1958) described himself as a ‘natural realist’,
defending the ‘common sense’ view that the external world is objectively real.
D. Z. Phillips (1934–2006): a Wittgensteinian philosopher of religion
who argued that since God is not ‘real’, language about God cannot explain
anything. However, religious language does function as part of a ‘form of life’
which is real and does have meaning.
Hilary Putnam (1926– ): in Reason, Truth and History (1981) he
abandoned his early metaphysical realism in favour of what he called ‘internal
realism’, meaning that reality is constituted in our internal structures of
cognition. There is no ‘God’s Eye View’ of reality, said Putnam, only our
human perspectives. This leaves open the possibility of more than one ‘true’
version of reality.
Richard Swinburne (1934– ) argues that it is rational to believe that God
is real because belief in God’s reality makes best sense of the full range of
human experience.
IDEAS
Constructivism: the belief that we construct reality (collectively and
individually) within culture and language.
Critical realism: the belief that some aspects of our experience are real
and others are not. The critical realist maintains that God is real at the same
time as arguing that the languages used to speak about God are cultural

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constructs.
Empiricism: the belief that all knowledge derives from information
received via the senses.
Fideism: the belief that the reality of God can only be grasped by faith.
Idealism: the belief that reality is constituted in human consciousness.
(See ‘George Berkeley’ above.)
Metaphysical realism: the belief that the reality of the world is objective
and independent of the way that we view and interpret the world.
Narrative realism: the belief that God’s reality takes the form of the story
of his relationship with the world.
Nominalism: the belief that so-called ‘universal concepts’ have no reality.
For example, ‘green’ is a universal concept embracing all green objects. We
may say that green objects exist, but the nominalist says that ‘green’ per se
does not exist. So individual things are real, but the categories (universals) to
which they belong are not real.
Non-realism: the belief that our ideas of reality are human inventions.
Positivism: the belief, dominant in the natural sciences, that the physical
world is real and provides us with the basis of all knowledge.
Religious realism: the belief that God is real for those who believe in
him.
Speech Act Theory: the theory that words are also actions, and the
meaning of words depends upon the act of speech in which they are used. For
example, the phrase, ‘Let there be light!’ means more than the sum of its
individual word-meanings; it must also be understood as the speech act of
giving a command.
Textualism: another term for constructivism.
BOOKS
Andrew Moore, Realism and Christian Faith: God, Grammar, and
Meaning (CUP, 2003)
Peter Byrne, God and Realism (Ashgate, 2003)

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