Published Papers by Dennis D Bielfeldt
Verba Vitae, 2024
What is it that makes a person who she is? Traditional accounts of personhood rely on intrinsic c... more What is it that makes a person who she is? Traditional accounts of personhood rely on intrinsic criteria: A person is his body or his mind, or perhaps his soul. Yet, these accounts are problematic because one could have a different body or a different set of psychological experiences. Moreover, appeal to an immaterial soul to individuate persons is unhelpful because each soul seems to have the same set of properties. This problem of personal identity is linked, of course, to a host of deep questions, e.g., Is a fetus a person? Does one in the throes of dementia still have personal identity?
After reviewing the standard objections to understanding personal identity intrinsically, I suggest an extrinsic account of individuation, e.g., Bob is Bob, not because of Bob's body or mental experience, but because of God's intentionality. Just as God's love individuates the Persons of the Trinity, so does His love individuate extra-Trinitarian persons. Bob is Bob because God eternally regards Bob to be Bob and eternally loves and sustains Bob in being.
If the problem of personal identity finally demands such an extrinsic account of individuation, then personhood itself is a matter of God's grace. Divine love brings persons ex nihilo into being. Accordingly, the question of whether it is justifiable to choose to terminate the life of the fetus is profoundly altered, for viability is grounded in divine intent, not in biological and/or psychological development and achievement.
Verba Vitae, 2024
There is a fundamental distinction between the essence of a thing and its existence, a metaphysic... more There is a fundamental distinction between the essence of a thing and its existence, a metaphysical distance that grounds the irreducibility (or even incommensurability) of the latter to the former. In modern logic this is the distinction between specification of polyadic predicates and their instantiation. The irreducibility of existence to essence problematizes easy consequentialist arguments arguing to the existence or nonexistence of a baby/fetus on the basis of the likely effects that the existence of this being shall have on the overall utility of a group. I argue that arguments from the utility of a group to the existence of an individual while prima facie problematic, can proceed cautiously when structured as defeaters if and only certain conditions are met to the overall inferential isolation of existence from essence.
Verba Vitae, 2024
Since from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective, life -- particularly life like ours -- i... more Since from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective, life -- particularly life like ours -- is exceedingly rare in the universe, it has a prima facie preciousness. Ontology of life questions cannot be pursued in isolation from the immediacy of this preciousness.
Dialog, 2022
Much has been written about Heidegger’s indebtedness to Luther in developing Being and Time. Rece... more Much has been written about Heidegger’s indebtedness to Luther in developing Being and Time. Recently Duane Armitage has claimed that since Heidegger is the “root to all continental philosophy of religion and postmodern theology,” and since his “disdain for onto-theology is rooted in Luther, . . . essentially all postmodern theological thinking is fundamentally Lutheran.” Clearly, both Martins deemphasize theology’s penchant for abstract metaphysics and look instead to recover the facticity of concrete lived Christian existence. But surface similarities should not occlude what profoundly differentiates the two, for the Martins depart radically in what they thought thinking did and what the truth-conditions of their respective discourses were. Luther who assumed theological realism, was concerned with how human beings really stand in relation to God, while Heidegger brackets such questions in favor of a description of the phenomenological shape of the Christian life. I employ elementary model theory in order to provide greater precision and accuracy in evaluating the stark semantics differences of their respective approaches.
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Martin Luther , Jun 2017
While many have interpreted Luther as “anti-metaphysical” and therefore unconcerned with the ques... more While many have interpreted Luther as “anti-metaphysical” and therefore unconcerned with the question of being, careful scrutiny of his texts show otherwise. Trained at Erfurt to read Aristotle in the via moderna tradition, Luther did have ontological and semantic convictions that are displayed throughout his work, but especially in his disputations dealing with Trinitarian, Christological and soteriological issues. While rejecting as idolatrous the human attempt to grasp the summum bonum through natural reason, Luther nonetheless assumed that God’s revelation in Christ has ontological implications.
The Finnish School of Luther interpretation, founded by Tuomo Mannermaa, has done a great service for Luther research by highlighting the motifs in Luther of Christ’s real presence in the justified believer and the presence of God’s love in faith. Although the Aristotelian categories available to Luther were inadequate for conceiving the paradoxical presence of the infinite in the finite, Luther did not thereby adopt a relational ontology more characteristic of the late nineteenth century than his own time. Instead he simply regarded as true what his philosophical categories could not fully conceive: Just as God became a human being while remaining God, so too do humans become God while remaining human. While the Finnish scholarship highlights Luther’s use of participatio in speaking of the presence of the divine in the justified believer, Luther did not mean thereby that human beings are essentially transformed into God, but rather they are in faith profoundly interpenetrated by the divine.
Luther’s discussion of the nova lingua of theology connects to the “real-ontic” presence of Christ in the believer. As a good nominalist, Luther understood that sentential truth presupposes ontology. While everyday language, the language of philosophy generally, has truth conditions that can be articulated in terms of the existence of particular substances and their particular qualities, things are not so clear for the language of theology that speaks of the Trinity, incarnation, and the presence of God in the world and particularly in the life of the believer. How is this language constituted so that the real presence of the divine can be spoken with meaning and truth? While Luther assumes the extensionalism of nominalism when speaking philosophically, it is not clear that this is the case when he speaks theologically. Luther understands that language itself must be profoundly changed in order to grasp and state the reality of the infinite in the finite. Whether this change can be understood on the horizon of an extensionalist semantics is an open question.
Dictionary of Luther and the Lutheran Traditions, Aug 2017
Habits in Mind, eds., Gregory Peterson, James van Slyke, Michael Spezio, & Kevin Reimer, 77-99, Jun 2017
Hilary Putnam famously argued that meaning is not in the head, i.e., the meaning of a term is not... more Hilary Putnam famously argued that meaning is not in the head, i.e., the meaning of a term is not determined wholly intrinsically by our psychology, but in part extrinsically by the actual reference of a term. This entails inter alia that two people with molecule-by-molecule replica brains can mean different things and that the supervenience of meaning upon brain states fails. Meaning is not a non-relational, intrinsic property of agents, but is extrinsically related to the world beyond the agent. This view is standardly called semantic externalism. Much of the philosophical tradition has tacitly assumed that virtue is a non-relational, intrinsic psychological or behavioral property of agents and that it thus supervenes upon appropriate behavioral and/or neurophysical realizers. Accordingly, two people with molecule-by-molecule replica brains must possess common virtues. But within the context of late medieval scholasticism, virtue came to be increasingly understood as relational and extrinsic to the agent. Later within Lutheran theology, there was an "Exodus from virtue to grace," a paridigmatic upheaval in understanding the nature of virtue. Just as the external world determines what terms mean, so an external agent determines what acts are virtuous. We might call this virtue externalism. This paper surveys the late medieval notion of virtue as it develops in the pactum theology of the via moderna and attains classic form within Lutheran theology where the following holds: S is virtuous in doing P if and only if God regards S as being virtuous in doing P. The goal is to show that virtue externalism was, and still remains, a vibrant alternative to traditional virtue internalist accounts. The paper concludes by pointing out that the possibility of virtue externalism has deep implications for any attempt to locate physical realizers for ethics. As it turns out, it is possible for two people to be behaviorally and neuro-physically indiscernible and yet display discernibly different ethical properties, and, as I suggest in conclusion, this is true not only if we posit the notion of divine agency, but any external agency whatsoever.
Word at Work , 2015
A firm understanding of the truth-conditions of theological language can help us greatly in doin... more A firm understanding of the truth-conditions of theological language can help us greatly in doing theology. This article takes truth conditions seriously.
The Word at Work , May 2015
The Annotated Luther Series, Vol I: The Roots of Reform (Minneapolis: Fortress Press), ed. Timothy Wengert, 66-121, 2015
The philosophical theses of Luther's Heidelberg Disputation follow the theological theses in clai... more The philosophical theses of Luther's Heidelberg Disputation follow the theological theses in claiming that Aristotle is improperly used as a theology of glory. In the epistemic realm, as in the moral order, human beings cannot build a bridge to God on the basis of their own deontological or epistemic merits. Luther criticizes in the disputation the penchant of the late medieval tradition to interpret Aristotle in ways showing consonance with Christian theology.
Word at Work 2:4, Dec 2013
Encyclopedia of Sciences and Religion, 2013
A great many things possess meaning, e.g., thoughts, actions, gestures, natural objects, cultural... more A great many things possess meaning, e.g., thoughts, actions, gestures, natural objects, cultural artifacts, and linguistic expressions. Although all have meaning, some bear logical relationships and some do not. Clearly, while relations of synonymy (sameness of meaning), antonymy (oppositeness of meaning), hyponymy (meaning inclusion), homonymy (same words/different meanings), analyticity (truth by virtue of meaning alone), entailment (whenever A is true, B is also true), logical truth (B follows necessarily from A), and equivalency (B follows necessarily from A and vice versa) obtain among linguistic expressions, they are not present in religious rites, hadrons, paintings, or storm clouds. Although both kinds of objects have meaning, they do not have it in the same sense. Theories of semantics arise principally in response to questions about meaning of the second variety: How do linguistic expressions gain and bear meaning?
The Devil's Whore: Reason and Philosophy in the Lutheran Tradition, ed. Jennifer Hockenbery Dragseth, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press), 61-68, 2011
In the essay, I shall say a couple of things about how philosophers today understand the philosop... more In the essay, I shall say a couple of things about how philosophers today understand the philosophy of language, what was happening in the late medieval context that is similar to what philosophers of language do today, and what Luther was saying about language (and doing with language) within that context. By situating Luther's work in this way, we can make some suggestions about key features about what could be called "Luther's Philosophy of Language."
Lutheran Forum , Oct 2011
Journal of Lutheran Ethics, Nov 2011
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Published Papers by Dennis D Bielfeldt
After reviewing the standard objections to understanding personal identity intrinsically, I suggest an extrinsic account of individuation, e.g., Bob is Bob, not because of Bob's body or mental experience, but because of God's intentionality. Just as God's love individuates the Persons of the Trinity, so does His love individuate extra-Trinitarian persons. Bob is Bob because God eternally regards Bob to be Bob and eternally loves and sustains Bob in being.
If the problem of personal identity finally demands such an extrinsic account of individuation, then personhood itself is a matter of God's grace. Divine love brings persons ex nihilo into being. Accordingly, the question of whether it is justifiable to choose to terminate the life of the fetus is profoundly altered, for viability is grounded in divine intent, not in biological and/or psychological development and achievement.
The Finnish School of Luther interpretation, founded by Tuomo Mannermaa, has done a great service for Luther research by highlighting the motifs in Luther of Christ’s real presence in the justified believer and the presence of God’s love in faith. Although the Aristotelian categories available to Luther were inadequate for conceiving the paradoxical presence of the infinite in the finite, Luther did not thereby adopt a relational ontology more characteristic of the late nineteenth century than his own time. Instead he simply regarded as true what his philosophical categories could not fully conceive: Just as God became a human being while remaining God, so too do humans become God while remaining human. While the Finnish scholarship highlights Luther’s use of participatio in speaking of the presence of the divine in the justified believer, Luther did not mean thereby that human beings are essentially transformed into God, but rather they are in faith profoundly interpenetrated by the divine.
Luther’s discussion of the nova lingua of theology connects to the “real-ontic” presence of Christ in the believer. As a good nominalist, Luther understood that sentential truth presupposes ontology. While everyday language, the language of philosophy generally, has truth conditions that can be articulated in terms of the existence of particular substances and their particular qualities, things are not so clear for the language of theology that speaks of the Trinity, incarnation, and the presence of God in the world and particularly in the life of the believer. How is this language constituted so that the real presence of the divine can be spoken with meaning and truth? While Luther assumes the extensionalism of nominalism when speaking philosophically, it is not clear that this is the case when he speaks theologically. Luther understands that language itself must be profoundly changed in order to grasp and state the reality of the infinite in the finite. Whether this change can be understood on the horizon of an extensionalist semantics is an open question.
After reviewing the standard objections to understanding personal identity intrinsically, I suggest an extrinsic account of individuation, e.g., Bob is Bob, not because of Bob's body or mental experience, but because of God's intentionality. Just as God's love individuates the Persons of the Trinity, so does His love individuate extra-Trinitarian persons. Bob is Bob because God eternally regards Bob to be Bob and eternally loves and sustains Bob in being.
If the problem of personal identity finally demands such an extrinsic account of individuation, then personhood itself is a matter of God's grace. Divine love brings persons ex nihilo into being. Accordingly, the question of whether it is justifiable to choose to terminate the life of the fetus is profoundly altered, for viability is grounded in divine intent, not in biological and/or psychological development and achievement.
The Finnish School of Luther interpretation, founded by Tuomo Mannermaa, has done a great service for Luther research by highlighting the motifs in Luther of Christ’s real presence in the justified believer and the presence of God’s love in faith. Although the Aristotelian categories available to Luther were inadequate for conceiving the paradoxical presence of the infinite in the finite, Luther did not thereby adopt a relational ontology more characteristic of the late nineteenth century than his own time. Instead he simply regarded as true what his philosophical categories could not fully conceive: Just as God became a human being while remaining God, so too do humans become God while remaining human. While the Finnish scholarship highlights Luther’s use of participatio in speaking of the presence of the divine in the justified believer, Luther did not mean thereby that human beings are essentially transformed into God, but rather they are in faith profoundly interpenetrated by the divine.
Luther’s discussion of the nova lingua of theology connects to the “real-ontic” presence of Christ in the believer. As a good nominalist, Luther understood that sentential truth presupposes ontology. While everyday language, the language of philosophy generally, has truth conditions that can be articulated in terms of the existence of particular substances and their particular qualities, things are not so clear for the language of theology that speaks of the Trinity, incarnation, and the presence of God in the world and particularly in the life of the believer. How is this language constituted so that the real presence of the divine can be spoken with meaning and truth? While Luther assumes the extensionalism of nominalism when speaking philosophically, it is not clear that this is the case when he speaks theologically. Luther understands that language itself must be profoundly changed in order to grasp and state the reality of the infinite in the finite. Whether this change can be understood on the horizon of an extensionalist semantics is an open question.
The Finnish School of Luther interpretation, founded by Tuomo Mannermaa, has done a great service for Luther research by highlighting the motifs in Luther of Christ’s real presence in the justified believer and the presence of God’s love in faith. Although the Aristotelian categories available to Luther were inadequate for conceiving the paradoxical presence of the infinite in the finite, Luther did not thereby adopt a relational ontology more characteristic of the late nineteenth century than his own time. Instead he simply regarded as true what his philosophical categories could not fully conceive: Just as God became a human being while remaining God, so too do humans become God while remaining human. While the Finnish scholarship highlights Luther’s use of participatio in speaking of the presence of the divine in the justified believer, Luther did not mean thereby that human beings are essentially transformed into God, but rather they are in faith profoundly interpenetrated by the divine.
Luther’s discussion of the nova lingua of theology connects to the “real-ontic” presence of Christ in the believer. As a good nominalist, Luther understood that sentential truth presupposes ontology. While everyday language, the language of philosophy generally, has truth conditions that can be articulated in terms of the existence of particular substances and their particular qualities, things are not so clear for the language of theology that speaks of the Trinity, incarnation, and the presence of God in the world and particularly in the life of the believer. How is this language constituted so that the real presence of the divine can be spoken with meaning and truth? While Luther assumes the extensionalism of nominalism when speaking philosophically, it is not clear that this is the case when he speaks theologically. Luther understands that language itself must be profoundly changed in order to grasp and state the reality of the infinite in the finite. Whether this change can be understood on the horizon of an extensionalist semantics is an open question.