Reply to Dennis Bielfeldt, “The Freedom of the Theological Word: Andrea Vestrucci’s Theology as Freedom and the Emergence of a Nova Lingua”

Abstract

This reply to Dennis Bielfeldt's review clarifies the central claim in Andrea Vestrucci's Theology as Freedom: Luther’s De servo arbitrio is not simply a doctrinal intervention about human freedom and agency but a performative reconfiguration of the conditions under which theological language can speak meaningfully. Responding to Bielfeldt’s concern that “formal freedom” risks becoming a purely structural account that leaves an “ontological absence,” Vestrucci argues that “formal” does not mean merely linguistic; it names the theological intelligibility of speech whose conditions are judged and re-founded by the unconditional event of revelation. Revelation functions as an “absolute beginning” that is already an act and cannot be domesticated by inherited modal or teleological frameworks of freedom. The reply situates formal analysis as derivative of the revelatory event and the status of belief, and agrees with Bielfeldt that pneumatology is the decisive bridge that unites language and being without treating ontology as an external tribunal or as an addition appended after a linguistic prolegomenon. The reply concludes by framing Bielfeldt’s critique as a productive agenda: to show more explicitly how theology’s formal freedom and participatory truth belong together under the priority of divine revelation.