By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
I realize now that it has really been only by a fairly long self-correcting process that I have come to my present understanding of the relation of theological assertions to metaphysical assertions (as presented, say, in "Theology without Metaphysics?").
Although I may never have simply identified the two types of assertions (and whether I ever have I simply don't know or particularly care), I've certainly argued that "metaphysical reasoning" and "religious or theological [reasoning]" "overlap" (RG: 39, n. 64). By this I meant, presumably, "that the class to which theological statements, insofar as they express assertions, logically belong is the general class of metaphysical assertions and that, therefore, the kind of rational justification to which they are open is the kind generically appropriate to all assertions of this logical class" (94). But, significantly, the only reason I give for not saying that "theological assertions simply are metaphysical assertions" is that "[on] the definition of theology given here [sc. in "the specific sense explicitly conveyed by the words 'Christian theology'" (72)], this could not be said, since theological statements have a necessary relation to specifically Christian faith in God that would not obtain in the case of metaphysics."
Not surprisingly, then, I have continued to think and speak as though this were the only differentia specifica of theological assertions as distinct from metaphysical assertions generally. So I have often said or implied that the credenda necessarily implied by Christian faith are themselves (in their foundational part, at any rate) metaphysical assertions – the while allowing myself to say, self-contradictorily, such things as that theological assertions about the trinity do not have much, if anything, to do with metaphysics!
20 March 2009
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