Theology and the End of Doctrine by Christine Helmer

Author:Christine Helmer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781611645255
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press

I.2.3. Christian Beliefs and God

Until now there has been no reference to a “transcendent reality” that might bestow divine truth on human words. But when Marshall looks to ground the coherence of human assertions about Christian faith, he calls on God, making an argument that relates coherence to the divine simplicity. Marshall acknowledges that he is appealing to a “technical device … of the way a simple or incomposite reality may be known,” which Thomas “derived from Aristotle.” With Aquinas as his interlocutor, Marshall claims that the divine simplicity is the way in which God holds things together as one. God’s “own self-knowledge” is true, furthermore, because God is the “first truth.” By contrast, according to Marshall, human minds can know composite reality through sense perception, but in “‘simple things’… there are no real distinctions which correspond to the distinctions between the relevant true sentences.”112 The simplicity argument undergirds the coherence among beliefs. There is a problem in identifying the kind of simplicity that Marshall might have in mind, however. He does not make the relevant distinctions between the simplicity of God’s mental act by which God knows all things, for example, or the simplicity of objects of God’s thought, or even if the objects of God’s thought are connected by relations of entailment.

Further down the line, Marshall must find a way of relating God’s self-knowledge to human beliefs that can be deemed perceptions of divine truth. These linguistically articulated statements, as they exist in the human mind and are “conformed to … reality,” admit no distinctions between them when they are conformed to a reality that is simple. That reality is God, and the simplicity of this reality is preserved when God reveals God’s own knowing to humans. Even though these assertions are “manifold” in the human intellect, because they are conformed to the reality of God’s knowing, which is simple, they yield “perception of divine truth.”113 Marshall’s argument goes as follows: “Faith, in other words, clings to the incarnate and triune God who manifests himself to us as first truth by way of the scripturally normed discourse of the Christian community. Indeed the teaching and preaching of the Church are not simply this community’s talk about God, nor even God’s talk about himself, but God’s way of giving the world a share in his own self-knowledge.”114 Although this statement regarding revelation in incarnation does not quite cohere with the earlier claim about God’s simplicity—because incarnation disrupts the divine simplicity—it identifies revelation as the source of belief and its truth as coherence among the articles of faith. In addition to the simplicity argument, revelation too emerges as another explanation for coherence among beliefs. When God reveals some of what God knows about God’s self to us, then the divine act of revealing this body of beliefs together is what constitutes their coherence. Under the human conditions of faith, the revealed “package deal” is truly and normatively formulated. The different assertions are asserted to cohere by virtue of God’s revelation.

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