Three ways of professing a creedal claim

For suppose that Marcus has a well-deserved reputation for honesty, knowledge of medieval architecture and is known to be a fluent French speaker, while Fritz does not know any French.  Marcus then assured Fritz that some some sentence s in French is a true claim about medieval architecture.  Moreover, Marcus assured Fritz that based on accidentally overhearing a fairly recent conversation that Fritz was a party to, Marcus knows that Fritz believes the proposition expressed by s to be false.  Fritz cannot bring to mind a particular such conversation, so he cannot guess what the proposition expressed by s is.  Anyway, Fritz meets Jeanne, a Frenchwoman, and to impress her, he utters s.  In uttering s, he knows he is affirming something he believes to be false.  Nonetheless, he knows on Marcus' expert testimony that the proposition expressed by s is true.  He thus speaks sincerely and truthfully, and in doing so he is knowingly affirming something he believes to be false.  Thus, (*) is true on this coherent story.

A sentence like (*) can seem contradictory but not be.  There are ecumenical consequences, too.  It would have been possible for you to affirm the impossibility of (*) and me to affirm the truth of (*), and for us both to be right.  For the word "affirmed" in (*) (this is starting to sound self-referential;  there'll be more of that later;  I'm having too much fun with this example to stop) has a range of closely related meanings that ordinary language rarely distinguishes between.  In one sense, to affirm a proposition p is just to utter an assertorial sentence in an affirmative context where that sentence expresses p, vouching for the truth of that sentence.  In this sense of "affirm", (*) is true on the coherent story given.  In another sense, "to affirm" requires that one be asserting a proposition in uttering the sentence, and hence that one understand that sentence.  In this sense of "affirm", (*) is impossible.  None of this should be a surprise.  Some creedal disagreements are "verbal" and require careful analysis of the senses of words to resolve.  (I am certainly not claiming that all creedal disagreements are like that.)

Now suppose that a trusted expert tells me that (*) is true, but I do not see how possibly it could be true, perhaps because on the interpretations that come to my mind, (*) is self-contradictory, and I am not clever enough to think of the story of Fritz and Marcus.  If I continue to trust the expert, I will conclude that these interpretations of (*) are incorrect.  Moreover, I will now be able to sincerely profess (*) in those contexts in which the contextually correct interpretation of (*) is that interpretation which the trusted expert has, even if I do not know what that interpretation is.  To what does such a profession commit me?  Well, first of all it commits me to the existence of a reasonable interpretation of (*) faithful to the intentions of the trusted expert on which interpretation (*) is true.  And it also commits me to the truth of the proposition that (*) under that interpretation expresses.  However, since I do not actually know the interpretation under which (*) is true, I do not know which proposition I am committed to by my profession.  But there is nothing strange like that.  Commitment outruns explicit knowledge, both in the case of moral and of epistemic commitment.  I have thrown myself behind the proposition by professing (*), but I do not understand what I have thrown myself behind.  Indeed, I have done so on trust--pistis--in the expert.

This, then is the third way of professing a creedal claim.  One does not know which proposition is expressed by a part of the creed--say, homoousion to patri--but one believes that the trusted expert has an interpretation of (*) that is both reasonable and correct.  Moreover, one makes the profession in a context in which the trusted expert's interpretation is the contextually appropriate one. 

From this point on in the post there may be some Catholic / Protestant disagreement.  But let me continue filling in the story as it seems to me, though I am less sure from this point on.  The trusted expert is the Church, who is the author of the creeds.  Her interpretation is the normative one.  Moreover, creeds are professed in ecclesial contexts in which the contextually appropriate interpretation of the creed is the one that the Church gives it. 

One interesting question to ask at this point is whether it follows that the Church itself has to know the interpretation of every point of the creed.  In the above example of believing (*) on an expert's testimony, the expert was assumed to know the interpretation of (*).  However, the expert could also himself accept (*) on the testimony of another expert (he might be an expert at gauging expertness rather than a first order expert), and inherit the other's interpretation without grasping it.  (x inherits y's interpretation of a sentence s provided that x's use of s is in a context that indicates that y's interpretation of s is the appropriate one.  This is similar to Kripkean stories about proper names.)  So, it seems, the Church could accept some part of the creed on divine testimony without herself understanding it.  Here by "Church" I mean "Church Militant", not including the Christ her Head, and not including the blessed in heaven.

On the face of it, this would require verbal divine inspiration of the creeds.  But the creeds are probably not verbally divinely inspired, though I do believe the creeds are infallible.  However, it is also possible to have sufficient grasp of the way a sentence one does not understand functions so as to derive further sentences from it logically, and in such wise that the latter sentences have a determinate interpretation derivative from the un-grasped interpretation of the original sentence.  For instance even if I do not understand the right interpretation of (*), I can recognize that on any reasonable interpretation of (*), the proposition expressed by (*) will have to entail that (**) "Fritz affirmed something".  Moreover, if I utter (**) in a context in which it is taken to follow from (*), the interpretation of (**) is derivative from the right interpretation of (*) (so, for instance, "affirmed" is meant in the sense in which it is meant in (*), i.e., in a sense that does not entail grasp of the proposition expressed by the affirmed sentence).  If so, then the Church can derive--explicitly or implicitly--creedal claims from the <em>kerygma</em>, the Apostolic deposit of faith, no doubt as mediated by the liturgy.  And she can do so even without understanding the propositions contained in the deposit of faith.  The right interpretation of the creedal statements is then induced by the process of derivation from the deposit of faith.  And the sentences in the deposit of faith have the interpretation given to them by God.  This is one of several stories one might have.  Alternately (additionally?) one might see the interpretation of the claims from which the creedal ones are derived as embodied in the liturgy, and then the derivation process transfers meaning to the creedal ones.

If this is all correct, it is possible to sincerely make a creedal statement even if no one on earth understands it.  (Suppose that long ago some of our ancestors came in contact with an alien, and the term "weegle" came into our language as referring to the natural kind that the alien exemplified.  The term weegle could continue to be used for centuries, and used meaningfully, even after all memory of what the weegle was like was forgotten, and all that was left was the bare belief that "Our ancestors met a weegle."  In some sense, no one understands that sentence at this point, but the sentence is meaningful, since it inherits meaning from that attached to it by ancestors to whom it was meaningful.)

In practice, I suspect there is no real trichotomy.  I suspect that for most if not all creedal claims, we in part have a discursive understanding, in part a non-discursive mystical understanding, and can affirm the sentence without fully knowing which proposition it expresses.  (What does it mean to partially know which proposition is expressed by a sentence?  Maybe it means to know some of the relevant entailments of that proposition?)

Objection.  The third way does not involving believing, say, that Christ is homoousion to patri but believing the metalinguistic claim that the phrase "homoousion to patri" in the context has a reasonable interpretation under which it is true.  But surely in our creeds we express belief.  Do the creeds not start with "I believe"?

Response.  The Nicene and Apostles' creeds begin not with "I believe that" but "I believe in".  Thus the claim made is: "I believe in ... the Lord, Jesus Christ ... [who is] homoousion to patri."  But that is perfectly true.  For based on the discussion of (*), it is clear that I can sincerely affirm that Jesus Christ is homoousion to patri without knowing what it means to be homoousion to patri.  Thus I can sincerely affirm both that I believe in Jesus Christ and that Jesus Christ is homoousion to patri. 

Now on the third way it might be problematic to say "I believe that Jesus Christ is homoousion to patri", although it is perfectly fine to say "Jesus Christ is homoousion to patri".  This may seem absurd.  And with good reason.  For I think sometimes, maybe often, when in ordinary language we say "I believe that s", we are not implying a grasp of the proposition expressed by s, beyond perhaps something minimal which might be present in the creedal cases as well.

Corollary.  When giving a theological account of a creedal claim, what we need to do is give an interpretation of the claim that is contextually reasonable, and that has a hope of being correct.  It is not, however, required that the interpretation be one that was in fact discursively held by the framers of the creed, for the framers of the creed might not in fact have discursively had an interpretation of the requisite level of determinacy.  (Nor is it required that the framers of the creed would have agreed with the interpretation had it been presented to them.  Such counterfactuals are poorly defined.)  However, it is required that the interpretation is contextually appropriate both to the present liturgical context and to the context of framing.  Thus, the interpretation must take on board the discursive understanding of the interpretation by the framers, insofar as the framers had a discursive interpretation, and insofar as that discursive interpretation was the one that they were contextually working under.  (We must interpret statements of Church Councils in the sense in which they were made.  However, it does not follow that the interpretation of these statements is fixed by the discursive understanding of the Council Fathers, though the interpretation of these statements should be compatibile with that discursive understanding insofar as the Fathers took it to be relevant.)

(I want to qualify the above.  I am pretty sure it is flawed in some ways.  It may even be heretical in some ways, in which case (as always) I ahead of time withdraw the heretical parts and apologize for them.)

 Have a blessed Good Friday, everybody.