Abstract

The question of truth, far from being peripheral to the consciousness of the Christian faith, is in fact correlative with it, as attested to by Jesus' self-identification: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life" . A theology pursuant with the ontological implications of this statement can hardly afford to relinquish its prerogative and duty to make truth-claims. But the verity of the gospel has been persistently resisted and marginalized since the dawn of the Age of Reason, first as competing secular systems offered more plausible visions of reality, and nowadays because the very notion of "truth" has been so de-transcendentalized as to have lost the integrity it once enjoyed. ;A growing number of theologians and philosophers of religion, reared in this recent retreat of realism to the backyard of philosophical legitimacy , have sought to embrace the prevailing immanentism as an opportune ground for indulging in more self-contained theological reflection. Chief among such efforts has been George Lindbeck's postliberal manifesto, The Nature of Doctrine, whose "cultural-linguistic" model brackets ontological reference and truth as hindrances to theology and the progress of ecumenical dialogue. In their stead, Lindbeck promotes a regulative, as opposed to the standard propositional, construal of doctrines. ;The present study will attempt to counter Lindbeck's post-empiricist proposal by offering a more viable, apophatic model of theological realism drawn directly from the empirical theology of Gregory Palamas and its backbone, the celebrated "essence-energies" distinction. By positing an asymmetry between language and reality, the proposed apophaticism diverges from contemporary nominalism, where linguistic analysis and deconstruction have had a devastating impact upon the modern critical look at the categories of transcendence and normativity. But by also deeming language a contingent and conventional phenomenon, apophaticism exempts its theory of reference from the essentialism and linguistic reifications characteristic of realist alternatives based on correspondence theories of truth. It may thus serve as a sounder guide to theological claims, devoid as it is of both essentialism and the overbearing immanentism epitomizing the irrealist philosophies shaped after the so-called "linguistic turn," of which Lindbeck's model is a typical instance