The Freedom of the Theological Word

Andrea Vestrucci’s Theology as Freedom and the Emergence of a Nova Lingua

Abstract

Andrea Vestrucci’s Theology as Freedom (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021) is one of the most rigorous reinterpretations of Luther’s De servo arbitrio in modern theology. This essay argues that Vestrucci’s work inaugurates not only a new understanding of the will but a new freedom of theology itself, a freedom of theological language from philosophy’s logics of modality, normativity, and teleology. Through precise logical analysis, Vestrucci shows that theology speaks truly only when it allows revelation to generate its own grammar. As he writes, “Divine revelation is not an object of investigation, but the lumen in which all human forms are re-considered as dependent on revelation and thus as theologically limited.” Building upon this insight, I interpret Vestrucci’s metalogical Reformation within a framework of model-theoretic realism, arguing that theology’s freedom must culminate in participation, language rendered true by the causality of the Word and the breath of the Spirit. Accordingly, Theology as Freedom thus marks a turning point in post-critical dogmatics: a theology whose linguistic emancipation becomes, in the Spirit, the very sign of its obedience to being.