A Semiotic Christology

Cyril Orji

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781725269194
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Systematic Theology & Ethics

This book details how semiotics furthers an understanding of the science of Christology. In the light of the trend towards evolutionary worldview, the book goes beyond description and critically engages the sign system of C. S. Peirce, which it sees as a conceptual tool and method for a better understanding of some of the basic issues in Christology.

Chapter One

Outlining Some Basic Issues

It is hard to do Christology today and not be attentive to the major shifts—developments in philosophy and the social and natural sciences—that have affected both the questions that Christology raises and the way of going about answering these questions. It is too simplistic to reduce the shift that occurred in theology to the efforts of one person, but the mathematician and philosophyer Rene Descartes (1596–1690) and the empiricist John Lock (1632–1704) were influential figures in the new anthropological turn that places emphasis in a conscious human subject who thinks, feels, and acts in response to his or her self-consciousness as a subject. Descartes’s discoveries on how the human mind comes to know an object became the foundational ground of subsequent developments in philosophy and science. Isaac Newton (1642–1727) built on it and regarded the world as a machine or closed continuum of causes and effects and the French mathematician and physicist Pierre-Simon Maquis de Laplace (1749–1827) summed it all up by suggesting that the universe was mechanistically determined.1 “Their remarkable progress in physics and the natural sciences in general encouraged many scholars in other disciplines to endorse the search for absolute objectivity. The ideal frequently became a dispassionate, neutral, and value-free version of reality (often conceived in merely physical terms), which reduced or even eliminated personal participation and could establish conclusions in a mathematical way.”2 Their quest for scientific objectivity affected the way both theology and Christology will be done moving forward.3 In its extreme form, their fixation for objectivity became one-sided, such that where in earler generation the maxim was crede ut intelligas (I believe in order to understand), the new maxim became “ If you believe, you will not understand.”4

The anthropological turn influenced by Descartes and Locke in the seventeenth century was mediated to the twentieth century through the transcendental analysis of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and those that came after him. “Kant challenged classical metaphysics in the sense that whoever makes claims about such matters as God, the immortality of the soul, and its liberty must first inquire whether such an enterprise is at all possible.”5 In its extreme form, the Kantian transcendetnal method, which attends only to the knowing subject, reduces external reality, i.e., anything not perceptible to the senses, to the product of the human mind.6 The twentieth century attempted to correct the nineteenth century science’s fixation with objectivity and “began to modify the dream of absolute ‘objectivity,’ and accept the fact that pure objectivity does not exist, not even in physics.”7 The German-born theoretical physicist, Albert Einstein (1879–1955) developed in 1905 a Theory of Relativity that rehablitated the observer’s viewpoint and dealt a deadly blow to the idea that there are absolute markers for time or space. The German theoretical physicist, Max Planck (1858–1947) discovered what came to be known as the Planck’s Law—that energy is emitted from a black body in discrete amount or quanta that is proportionate to the frequency of the radiation that is absorbed by the black body. It was his work that led to Einstein’s discovery that lights exist in discrete quanta of energy or photons. The German theoretical physicist, Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976), also developed an Uncertainty Principle (introduced in 1927) to further throw doubt on the notion of absolute objectivity, at least in physics. His Uncertainty Principle states that we cannot know accurately, at the same time, both the position and the velocity of any of the particles which make up an atom because we cannot know with accuracy the position and velocity of atomic particles. The Uncertainty Principle also states that the subatomic processes cannot be explained by causes and effect, but by statistical laws.8 Taken together, Planck’s Law, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle all brought an end to the classical Newtonian physics that was built on the idea that there is an objective measurability of causes and effects.9 They fostered the idea that all knowledge, when all said and done, is properly subjective. “The results of observations and experiments inevitably depend upon the observer’s point of view; we get answers only to the questions we put. As forms of our knowledge, scientific laws put together the many observations we have made. There is no such thing as a view ‘from nowhere.’”10 It was left to Vatican I (1869–1870), the first twentieth century Council of Catholicism, to wrestle with the implications of the subjective-objective poles of knowledge for theology and our understanding of the mystery of the incarnate Word, Christ, in the Scriptures.

In its extreme form, the scientific principle that there is no such thing as a view “from nowhere,” which was intended to tame the rising tide of excessive objectivity, led to a new form of rationalism, liberalism, and materialism. The net effect was that it challenged the teachings of the Church in a way not seen since the Protestant Reformation three centuries earlier. Vatican I’s response was to refute these ideas by defining papal infallibility and the Church’s doctrines. Some of the dissentions that followed the Church’s definition of its teachings and papal infallibili...