When we hear about ‘modern theology’ we often hear attendant with that the language of ‘postmetaphysical.’ In this we might think about the Hegelinization or immanentization of all of reality; or the maybe even the Cartesinization of it. Whatever mental cues come to mind when we hear ‘modern theology’ I think we would be right indeed to think that it is a theology that would like to move away from speculative modes of thinking, and instead focus on the concrete material world as we experience it. This is why modern theology is so often associated with existentialism and its focus on the subject; and in particular, the subject’s experience of God under such conditions (as the modern presents us with). Here is a quote from Fergus Kerr, in description of Wittgenstein’s project to engage in postmetaphysical thinking. Here he offers an anthropological critique with anti-metaphysical implications.

The longing for unrestricted incorporeal freedom lies deep, if not in human nature, then certainly in the culture to which we belong. The craving to burst out of the bonds of body and of time may well be exactly what it takes to free animals of our kind into the space of culture and history; but it is an ambivalent gift. If we never learn to own our finitude we remain tormented by a powerful inability ever to be satisfied by anything. The desire to transcend the present, whatever it may be, comes out in the whole variety of ways in which human beings have made the world inhabitable. But the thought of the transcendent spirit inevitably bring with it a certain notion of the body as weighing down and trammeling it. From this it has been easy to conceive the body as little more than a corpse that requires to be animated: the face becomes a veil, a mask that needs to be manipulated from behind, while the production of meaning retreats from the materiality of signs into the recesses of the invisible mind. In effect, a metaphysically generated concept of the human body, derived from the thought of the immateriality and invisibility of the soul, displaces our experience of the whole living man or woman. This picture of the body gets in the way of our conversation with one another. The body become [sic] a site for occult spiritual going-on-which turn out in the end to be how the individual enjoys a private view wither of the divine or, perhaps more commonly, of himself.

There is no sense in regretting the history of the metaphysically generated body, but the time has long since come to try to deconstruct it. The latest form of this metaphysical reduction of the human being is no doubt, as Charles Taylor suggests, the drive in many of the social sciences to extend the objectifying way of conceiving things to our own case. Behaviour as such is supposed to lack significance, in such a way that when it does appear significant it has to be because it is the outwardly observable effect of certain internal mental goings-on. The mind retreats from the face, just as the immaterial soul once disappeared behind the body. The idea of the mind as radically private and inaccessible to outsiders then becomes inescapable.

What this amounts to, in the end, is the devaluation of intrinsically expressive behaviour. The rumor spreads that we are an assembly of zombies. The difficulties that are certainly present in everyday conversation are exploited to strengthen the belief that people’s minds and selves are essentially – as hidden as the mind and nature of God. An ‘objectifying’ scientific conception of human behaviour turns into a highly ‘subjectivist’ religious or theological one. Either way, the soul withdraws, leaving nothing but a quantity of matter for others to measure. The mind retreats inwards, out of the public world, and this undermines the confidence in direct openness to the world itself. Before we know where we are, then, we find ourselves with problems about how we could ever have knowledge of anything outside our own self-certain solitary minds. The metaphysically generated body turns out to hide a paranoid-schizoid soul.[1]

Ironically, on this reading, what we have in Wittgenstein, per Kerr’s reading, is what I might call a proto-Post Modern deconstruction of things. In other words, Wittgenstein’s project could be understood to be just as critical of the so called Father of Modern Theological Liberalism, or Schleiermacher, as it is of the precritical Augustine. But here we have an illustration, a description even, if Kerr is correct, of a project undertaken by Wittgenstein, that genuinely attempts to immanentize all of reality, and remove the strictures that so called ‘metaphysics’ supplies thinkers worldwide with.

More to be said, but out of time for now.

[1] Fergus Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstien (London: SPCK, 1997), 45-6.