or diakrisis always and already takes place within a social and relational
dynamic. Therefore, theology is repeatedly tasked with accounting for this
situation for the sake of transparency to be sure but more determinedly for
the proper and faithful pursuit of its subject matter.
F EATURES OF A FIRST THEOLOGY
In a chapter included as part of a collection that is a Festschrift for Jürgen
Moltmann, Lyle Dabney notes that prolegomena continues to be a major,
if not the most signifi cant, feature of theological division in the twentieth
century. As evidence of this claim, he recounts Karl Barth’s clash with
Protestant liberalism, particularly identifying Friedrich Schleiermacher’s
assumptions at the beginning of the Glaubenslehre which were countered
in Barth’s Church Dogmatics. In this, the debate revolves around “how to
start” or “where to begin” theology: the proposals in this vein tend to be
the divine or the human, a theology of descent or ascent, God as always in
and around us or God as “Wholly Other.” Dabney summarizes: “It may
very well be that one of the primary reasons that theological discourse
has come to its present confused and unhappy state is that we literally no
longer know what to say fi rst .” 1
In light of this stalemate, Dabney’s strategy (as has often been the case
in Western intellectual history) is to appeal to a philosophical proposal, in
his case Steven Smith’s The Concept of the Spiritual. For his part, Smith
offers three ways to consider philosophia prima or “fi rst philosophy,” and
Dabney thinks these might help one make headway in determining a “fi rst
theology.” The fi rst alternative is ontology and the second is epistemol-
ogy, both options quite familiar to those aware of the history of Western
philosophy. The third is language, which is a matter that has come up
repeatedly in philosophical proposals of the twentieth century. But Smith
believes that in the case of language, one can posit a more basic consid-
eration. After all, language exists within a given interpersonal context or
dynamic. Smith avers that language “is essentially interpersonal, or to be
more specifi c, essentially an activity of creating and maintaining forms of
commonality among persons. Interpersonal commonality is not just what
language is for ; it is in language, and in it more than in anything else.” 2
Now this claim by Smith is quite intriguing in that it certainly is not
intuitive given the way the analytical philosophical tradition and other
language- focused perspectives are sometimes pursued. As an exception,
one could say that speech-act theory acknowledges this point to some
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