Surely God himself existed before he spoke.

And of that God, what can we say? If the idea he is “one,” seems to prohibit saying anything else about him (the “One” allegedly having no qualifies; though cf. Plato’s original definition of One, in Parmenides)?

Then after all, what if we saw God in say, Nature. Which seems to pre-exist not only words, but human beings. In the Beginning “God created heaven and earth.” And only much later, human beings, and words.

So before words, contracts, is God in nature. And surely nature has a lot to say, even about God.

Things which a science of God would begin to hear.

Helms therefore, was correct to criticize Wright. And Ward deserves criticism too. Both, for thinking that writing, words, contracts, are the only, or adequate, way to know God. For in effect, denying a doctrine of God – and indeed, denying any describable God at all – before writing – and written contracts, covenants – appear.

For that reason, I’m interested in what sense in fact, Nature itself might express God’s nature; or for that matter specifically, his “righteousness.”

In the past, it was thought that to be righteous meant … honoring one’s verbal or written covenants or contracts.

But that surely, is a very limited idea of being good, or right, or righteous. How about a Good that is so transcendent, or complicated, that there is no all-too-human, written contract for it, as yet?

In fact, I’d say that Poststructuralism itself, was actually derivative; its own focus on Language, the idea of the “word” as being primary, even indendent of material reality, came actually, in large part, from the Bible. And Bible scholarship.

Ward seems to be relying on echoes of Post Structuralism etc., to make his own work echo more in scholarly circles. But from your summary to date, I can’t say that really works. By now, in theology, the whole examination of the “word” has long been a Protestant cliche; and for that matter, in Philosophy, Poststructuralism and Philosophy of a linguistic “turn,” seems rather dated as well.

There has always been a seemingly rather natural fit, between this school of thought, and Christianity; based on scripture, the Bble tiself; a written document in which God himself is sometimes thought to be called the “word”; a God that brings things into existence it seems, merely with a word. The Bible itself at times, seems like proto-Poststructuralism. And Wright and Ward are playing on this, it seems.

At the same time, the mystique of Poststructuralism began to fade c. 1982.

And elsewhere in the discussion of Wright, we became suspicious of a view of God speaking things into existence, with just a word; “ex nihilo,” out of nothing. Which might only have been shorthand for a more complex process of creation; for something coming into existence from at least a pre-existing potentiality (or even a “one”?). Or from a sort of History. Something prior to the word. Something before language.

And indeed, the suspicion that there was something before language and the “word,” is why poststructualism faded. And we might therefore also do well to begin to question any too-late poststructuralism, that finds its locus in the “word,” in language.

To be sure, after Jesus died, and his thoughts survived primarily in remembered words – and increasingly, texts, gospels – it would have been natural for disciples to begin to speak of Jesus himself as “the Word.” Yet at that point, the disciples might have turned their back too far on the world of physical things; failing to see God in the glory of the “things that” he “made.”

Fixating on God as merely “words” on a page, like a contract, or abstract thoughts, without a physical reality before or after the text, seems to almost fix on the “letter of the law,” once again.