Michael Raposa has offered his readers a compelling method for philosophical theology in his Theosemiotic: Religion, Reading, and the Gift of Meaning—one that is steeped in the Peircean logic of relations, pragmaticistically oriented toward action, and advances a “semiotic consciousness” (to use a John Deely-ism). My task in this essay is to further query Raposa in order to learn the extent to which it might be compatible with the aims of Christian theology, specifically a form of which I call “semiotic theology.” Given theosemiotic's and semiotic theology's common conceptual grounding in Peirce's philosophy, there is, ostensibly, considerable promise; however, there are certain ambiguities that remain in Theosemiotic that require explanation, especially those which are rooted in the claim that it may make ground in theological inquiry “without any practical or strategic purpose.”1 I am hoping that Raposa might then clarify his project so that a confessional, philosophical theologian like myself might better understand its relation to semiotic theology.Toward that end, I have identified three specific subject matters about which I would be grateful for further elucidation: (1), the extent to which theosemiotic could endorse a kataphatic theology (or any specific theology at all), which would permit determining “God” in certain important respects; (2), whether theosemiotic would welcome any doctrinal claims about humanity's final end that might sharpen its emphasis on religious action; and, (3), whether semiotic complementarity is able to maintain the distinctions of lived religious traditions for preserving unified, communal practices. Having these questions answered, it would go a long way toward understanding how, and in what senses, theosemiotic might become partner with semiotic theology. But, before exploring these matters in depth, I will briefly address the character of semiotic theology.Semiotic theology may be described as an effort to revise Christian theology into a form of discourse that operates upon a semiotic rationale. It attempts to take the history of biblical, theological, and doctrinal reasoning and critically judge and reinterpret its conclusions according to a framework that embraces the paradigm-shifting work of semiotics, especially Peirce's and the community of inquiry that has followed in his footsteps. I believe this is important for Christian theological discourse to advance beyond various impasses that have been created by centuries of misplaced philosophical and theological bases (e.g., substance metaphysics; the division between nature and supernature; conception/perception dichotomies; and so on) and am personally committed to a project that seeks to rethink what a confessional theology should look like given the insights of semiotics.To give some concreteness to this project, my own attempt to describe the foundational structures of semiotic theology—insofar as it concerns the reasonableness of speaking about a meaningful relation between God and creatures—was offered in my recent book, The Analogy of Signs: Rethinking Theological Language with Charles S. Peirce.2 Therein, I argued that discourse about God in the Christian tradition is untenable if framed as sufficiently described through an analogy of being (i.e., an ontological principle establishing a connection between God's being and the creature's being), grammatical analogy (i.e., a linguistic practice that connects God and creatures through an expressive performance), or analogy of faith (i.e., a relation that enables the creature's acts of free obedience to God in imitation of Jesus Christ). That is because these views reflect a dependence upon deceiving metaphysical dualisms, largely derived from classical Greek philosophy. For instance, the distinction between matter and form has done much to create an unbridgeable gap between divine and human realms. It holds that, whereas form is the basis of the cognizable, matter is merely the unintelligible stuff that receives a form to be cognized. Such a distinction effectively negates any possible continuity between God and creatures when theologians presume God is pure form and human conception is inextricably based in sense experience mediated by material stuff (as in, say, Aquinas). On such a set of views, speech about God can only be non-sense, for no association of ideas to conceptual objects can be allowed to be determinately meaningful for an object totally different from what is conceived.By my lights, the only sufficient way to enable theological discourse is to found it on an analogy of signs: God and creatures are commensurate in the action of signs, for both are meaningful through the univocity of semiosis—that is, the triadic relational process wherein representamen, object, and interpretant interact. The pivotal, confessional component in such an account is establishing Jesus Christ at the intersection of the analogy of signs’ formula: Jesus the God-Man demonstrates by his life the compatibility of divine and human signs. So, in Jesus is disclosed the reality of semiotic univocity, and divinity is determinately knowable and interpretable in his person as a result. Any metaphysical claim is contingent upon that semiotic univocity, but inferences made from Jesus’ sign activity must be analogical insofar as those signs are abstracted and rendered generalizable with our own. Yet, whatever inequality those signs might express in their constant fluctuation (whether through growth or atrophy), the univocity of semiosis establishes their core commensurability.Having recognized the semiotic touchstone for Christian theology, the rest of it must be based on this prolegomenal framing for the discourse to be intelligible. In so doing, all doctrinal claims must be made semiotically interpretable—that is, they must be subject to semiosis's triadic relation, and potentially instantiated within a taxonomy of signs (which is not to say entirely reducible to any particular sign-type; but, rather, could be articulated as belonging among sign-types). The theologian cannot merely jump from a study of what appears in experience (i.e., phenomenology) to the most general categories of reality (i.e., metaphysics), but must mediate them with semiotic (including, in Peircean terms, both the study of signs proper in speculative grammar, and the study of arguments in logical critic). The upshot is that—to borrow a metaphor from Peirce—all religious reflection must have first come through the gate of semiotic, or be “arrested as unauthorized by reason.”3 Whether that concerns theology proper, protology, anthropology, Christology, ecclesiology, eschatology, etc., all theological expressions stand on the solid rock of semiosis. Conversely, putative religious or theological symbols that are incompatible with semiotic classification are useless at best, and—under the guise of meaningful expression—destructive at worst; in either case, a theologian should have nothing to do with such symbols.Thus, the theologian must not be simply aware of the discipline of semiotic, or have some speculations about how certain doctrines can be interpreted along semiotic lines; no, the theologian must be a semiotician. If Christians might generally agree with Paul Tillich that theology is “the methodological interpretation of the contents of Christian faith,”4 interpretation must here be understood as the practice of rendering judgments intelligible through sign-action and its specific classes. A theologian who cannot regard her claims with semiotic consciousness should be regarded with the utmost suspicion. This is not to say that her claims populate a semantic wasteland, but rather to advocate the suspension of judgment over their theological veracity until the claims are semiotically coherent.So much, then, for a précis of semiotic theology. What I hope has been made clear is the following about it: (1), operating within the Christian theological tradition, it does not seek to do away with that tradition's sources of theological truth, but to primarily reinterpret its contents while excising those elements that play no semiotic role;5 (2), it takes the insights of semiotics to be crucial to structuring theological discourse, both for establishing its intelligibility and acting as a judge over its constructive claims; and, (3), it understands the theologian as semiotician: as reasonably reflecting upon Christian revelation in semiotic consciousness.To turn to the main objective of this essay, my question for Raposa is this: to what extent may theosemiotic become a partner with semiotic theology in its efforts to rethink and reframe Christian theology? Surely, Raposa's goals for his book are not identical with mine for semiotic theology; however, our common interest in theology that is constructive, spiritually edifying, important for the health of living religious traditions, and keen to read the universe of signs purposively, seems to go some way to prepare a potential convergence and, perhaps, symbiotic relationship between the two. It is this potential that intrigues me about Raposa's project, and so I will begin by questioning him on theosemiotic's ultimate referent.“God, of course,” one might reply. But, Raposa continually reminds his reader about the imprecision of the idea of God, and this leads me to ask about what sort of claims can be applied to the object of religious thought and devotion. He writes that theosemiotic “embrac[es] a form of apophatic or negative theology, a theology of mystery,” and this is informed by Peirce's logic of vagueness, which consequently must hold that “all talk about God must be necessarily and exceedingly vague” (TS, 7). Much of chapter 3 explores what this means.Before proceeding, though, it is worth spending a moment to consider Peirce's logic of vagueness, for it will be important as the paper proceeds, and Raposa himself does not offer an explicit description of its logical function in the book. Peirce takes vagueness to be a property of signs, those gears upon which logic turns: “a sign that is objectively indeterminate in any respect is objectively vague in so far as it reserves further determination to be made in some other conceivable sign, or at least does not appoint the interpreter as its deputy in this office” (EP 2:351, 1905). In other words, a vague sign requires some other sign—and not the interpreter of the vague sign—to either affirm or deny some character or predicate to the vague sign. Until that other sign is presented, the principle of contradiction “does not apply”6 to that character or predicate. Thus, “That pen is mine . . . ” allows the recipient of the statement to neither affirm nor deny the pen is the black, blue, or red one in a group; rather, the speaker (or something else) would need to offer some other sign to further determine the vague sign (say, “ . . . the black one,” “ . . . not the black one,” or by gesturing in the black one's vicinity). We should notice three things here: (1), the initially vague sign itself is not entirely indeterminate of character: it is a statement about a known kind of object in some proximate space belonging to the utterer; (2), the recipient may still be successful in guessing the correct pen without the “other conceivable sign,” but nothing in the vague sign by itself will establish the correctness of the guess made; and, (3), only the other sign—the statement or gesture, in this case—is privileged to determine positively or negatively the character or predicate for the recipient. Thus, (a), the usefulness of vague signs is contingent upon the respects in which it is determinate; (b), vague signs will not affirm or deny the truth of further determinations made by the interpreter; and, (c), vague signs require another sign, not vague in the same respect, to further determine them.As I said, Raposa makes much use of the notion of vagueness, which for him seems to amount to “determining a range of possible meanings [wherein a symbol's] interpretation [is] left indeterminate to some extent and in certain respects” (4). But, compared to what was just said above, this presents an incomplete picture: specifically, it leaves out the interpreter's limitations in further determining the vague sign or symbol, and the requirement for the “other conceivable sign” to accomplish that task. It is not surprising that Theosemiotic presents this partial view of vagueness, since it is being used with an eye toward one of its particular aspects: it opens up the door to many possible meanings for the idea of God without affirming or denying their truth status. But the result is that the other side of the coin of vagueness, the consequent loss of particular meaning, is treated with less scrutiny. The upshot is that Raposa seems more concerned to avoid “idolatry,” and less “vacuous nonsense” (85). On the one hand, he says, theosemiotic need not hold to the “personal deity” of theism in order to pursue “genuine theological reflection” (TS, 75–76). Of course, following Peirce's lead in the “Neglected Argument,” Raposa will claim that some classical idea of God as creator is a legitimate and fruitful hypothesis; however, the idea that follows from that argument is itself quite indeterminate, and holding to its conclusion is no requirement for belonging within theosemiotic's bounds (hence the inclusion of Buddhism, Daoism, and contemporary forms of religious naturalism within its parameters [e.g., 76, 85, 218, 252]). Indeed, theosemiotic distinguishes itself by marking “the limits of semiosis,” and upholds the notion that takes ultimate reality to be “no-determinate-thing” (85), and potentially the totally different “ground of being” of all determinate things, which therefore would “not possess consciousness, have purposes, or display agency” (90).But, on the other hand, closing the door against a “collapse into meaninglessness” is Scotus's view of the univocity of being—the claim that ultimate reality and contingent reality share in a single sense of “being.” But, given theosemiotic's brand of apophaticism mentioned above, this looks to be a vacuous affirmation if not joined with some semiotic sense of similarity; alone, it is a distinction from non-univocity without a difference. The appeal to continuity between ultimate and contingent reality needs to be demonstrated in some specific way. Raposa is not ignorant of this problem: he writes that the apophaticism espoused by theosemiotic must be a qualified one, wherein the “extreme vagueness of [“God”] does not rule out the critique of various ways in which it might be interpreted, nor does it suggest that in the matter of such interpretation ‘anything goes’” (95). But, the explanation for this qualification leaves much unanswered.Raposa claims, with Peirce, that some kind of anthropomorphism is appropriate for understanding “God,” yet it is likely also a term more capaciously inclusive of senses than even “love” (TS, 87). He also says that God is “living” and “personal” as love's perfect object (95), but it is difficult to see how those terms could be made meaningful by theosemiotic, given how capacious the concept of ultimate reality may be within it. It is not satisfying to be told the idea is one that is instinctual (88). Instinct is that “inherited [or acquired] disposition” representing “some general principle working in a man's nature to determine how he will act” (CP 2.170, 1902); the judgments resulting from instinct are vague, yes, but not overly indeterminate, as evidenced by the fact that they lead one to act in general ways (“Fight back against an attacker!”), which then may be refined upon receiving some other information (e.g., “Strike the bear in the eyes!”).But, in the case of the idea of God, one sees a double challenge in its necessary and exceeding vagueness: first, discerning the particular character that may be known of its idea that leads us to act; and, second, securing the character and authority of the “other conceivable sign” that may affect the interpreter's thought and action about that vague idea. I am not so sure that theosemiotic meets this challenge adequately. In one case Raposa writes that, though “divine reality” cannot be “perfectly captured in signs,” these signs can somehow be “seized by” that reality to “get itself thought” (TS, 138). But, however that reality may “crus[h] our symbols, and then bring new ones to life in the semiotic debris,” we still trade in semiotic vocabulary that forms its residue—so, what is therein discerned about divine reality, if only so slight, fleeting, or fragmentary? And, why do the new symbols have any authority in the search for truth over those that were crushed? In another case, he says that the God of Peirce's theosemiotic is always indirectly mediated by “certain signs,” but this seems to lose any notable determinacy if those signs include “all of the signs that it is possible for one to consider” (226). Surely, if any particular expression is to make sense, then some signs must be inappropriate—or, at least, of subordinate importance—for applying to ultimacy. But, how would one be able to judge their relative importance if ultimate reality is just as well signified by nothing in particular as everything in general?Perhaps a specific example would be useful to illustrate the problem. If theosemiotic might be used to support a notion that God is (even if vaguely) omnipotent, omniscient, creator, infallible, purposeful, and so on (CP 6.494–510, c. 1906), then it is hard to see how it could simultaneously uphold Buddhist “ultimates”7—as Raposa seems to suggest it does, under the idiom of ultimacy (TS, 89–90)—like anātman, dependent co-arising, or suññatā. It would be one thing to say that theosemiotic makes no claims one way or the other about them, but such a panoply of ideas would not suffice for a rationally consistent philosophical theology that Raposa hopes to achieve. So, to the double challenge, what does such an idea of God that is open to such predicates now mean, and what religiously meaningful signs (themselves “extraordinarily” vague [97]) may contribute to the vague idea to make it more determinate in a way that commands the interpreter's assent without being arbitrary? Without some determinacy to the idea of God possessed, or some conferred authority to certain signs to make that idea more determinate, I am unsure of what can be said for ultimacy on these grounds.Even in the seventh chapter, “On Prayer and the Spirit of Pragmatism,” wherein is explained the sort of inquiry that Peirce's Neglected Argument undertakes, it is not clear what about a belief in God is supposed to motivate one to loving conduct. The hypothetical object of that form of inquiry is understood to have an “irresistible quality” in the mind of the muser, and then to lead one into conduct in conformity with the generated belief (TS, 232–233). But, what sort of beliefs about the object are produced that should then have this effect? Surely, this must be more than the belief in a mere ens necessarium (EP 2:439, 1908); what about the “Mind” (TS, 238) encountered would suggest authority over my intellectual and practical conduct? What is there to love in the God-idea, in contrast to simply acknowledging it? Why does one cultivate “gratitude for the being of things” because of it (250)? Without answers (even hypothetical ones) to questions like these, I struggle to see how theosemiotic could know its object of inquiry, or what encountering it could be like.So, I think that theosemiotic—in being framed as a method inclusively embracing many approaches to ultimacy—swings itself into the shadow of indeterminate negation, and Peirce's anthropomorphism will not provide the momentum to return it into the light. Rather, the resulting vagueness incapacitates both intelligible speech about the object of religious sign-activity and other religious sign-activity that would further determine the object known. Vague signs may offer “greater . . . potential depth of meaning” (TS, 95), but unless that potential has reason to be actualized via other signs to mean something specific for us, there is nothing to lead our thought or action in one way or the other. Therefore, I do not currently see how theosemiotic has struck the right “balance [between] apophaticism and anthropomorphism” (90) with respect to its object. Without distinct kataphatic elements in this philosophical theology, then, I am reluctant to say that theosemiotic's God is “knowable” (95); it seems, rather, just “deeply mysterious and vastly indeterminate.” Such a conclusion is, of course, going to be incompatible with semiotic theology, which shares with Christian theology and other living religious traditions a commitment to speaking reasonably about God as having certain predicates (i.e., determining positively) and not others (i.e., determining negatively).8Raposa describes persons as “living legisigns” (TS, 60)—legisigns because they are representamens, or sign-vehicles, that are instances of something general or lawful; living because, unlike conventional legisigns such as words on a page, persons are animated, mindful things with histories of (at times intentional) specific semiotic action. This seems to be right, for a person-as-sign-vehicle should not be reduced to some abstracted qualities (i.e., qualisigns) or individuating existence (i.e., sinsigns), but should be regarded as a continuum wherein habits of mind develop through time.9 And, as Raposa points out, the self as living legisign can only be so understood abstractly, for this aspect of herself is always already conveying some meaning through the interpretant, and for some object. But it is this more holistic view that I wonder about when one regards the self-as-sign: what is this sign's purpose? More specifically, what are the chief goods toward which theosemiotic gives the self to aim?This seems to be a salient question for many aspects of the book, but I will choose three to examine here: disinterested love, therapy, and ideals. To the first, Raposa fleshes out the notion of “disinterested love” as one that is deeply attentive to the one loved, and that does so without any pre-established motivation: “[t]he truly disinterested lover will attend not to what she chooses or prefers, but to whatever she happens to find, just as it manifests itself” (TS, 101). But what seems missing from this depiction of love is what one's love, in its disinterestedness, should desire for the sake of the beloved. On the most abstract level, we can say, as Raposa does, that it would “seek the good” (103); however, to leave that as the end of conduct is to express something with little use for conduct. What is the good that is to be sought after, and that toward which one attends? Moreover, how is that continuous with what is already present in the beloved object? Peirce says in “Evolutionary Love,” that love seeks out the “germs of loveliness in the hateful, gradually warms it into life, and makes it lovely,” for love sees the hateful as an “imperfect stage” of itself (EP 1:353–354, 1893). Thus, love seems to be seeking always for some good thing, in the hope of turning it—by the “gentle force exerted by a loving sympathy” (TS, 80)—into something better. But the question remains: what is the germ, kernel, or provenance of the good that one might seek to grow into its mature form? And, is maturity its own end? If source and telos are continuous in the way that Peirce seems to imply, then what can we identify about them that makes them so?Again, Raposa seems to be aware of concerns like these. He speaks of love as a “giving”—ideally, as a mutual giving in reciprocity between persons (TS, 104). The giving described is one made out of “fundamental gratitude for the gift of meaning that each sign presents to one who is ready to discern and prepared to receive it” (106). But, while this might describe a state of attention and gratitude in the interpreter, it does not identify what the object of gratitude is other than that which serves to offer meaning, which could be nearly anything. Nor does it address that for which one ought to be grateful.On a higher level, accounting for the rationale of gratitude seems to be important for marking a difference between the theistic move that Raposa suggests one embrace (via Peirce's NA) and the religious naturalism that would discount that move: on the one hand, love for God as the vague source of all meaning is rather abstractly opaque; on the other hand, the religious naturalist's espousal of a gratefulness for being as such (105) arrives at a similar vague totality of meaningfulness. Is there anything that would make this love of Peirce's hypothetical theism more compelling? More mundanely, if a habit of love is what a person should “ultimately come to mean” anyway (83), what is that supposed to be like? If love is “central to the agenda of a theology formulated as theosemiotic” (50), then what about that agenda motivates it, and how? Is, for instance, the parable of the Good Samaritan, which Raposa draws upon at various instances (50, 175, 186), authoritative for my conduct (i.e., do I actually “go and do likewise”), or just illustrative of what might amount to a “neighbor” in theosemiotic description?10 If so, in what way?With regard to therapy, one of the major themes of chapter 4, we hit another iteration of the previous concern. Therapy—at least the form about which Raposa writes—is a means to secure positive change to personal habits through some “disciplined practice” (TS, 124). Theosemiotic embraces the notion that theology is a therapy that mediates the traditional religious notions of the bad spiritual condition in which we find ourselves (e.g., sinfulness, suffering, ignorance, etc.) and the often momentous personal change one experiences in overcoming it (e.g., salvation, enlightenment, awakening, conversion, etc.). But, the character of the good to be achieved in such therapy is remarkably ambiguous. Raposa mentions attaining to “authentic selfhood,” or “individual flourishing” (125), but what do these mean? He reflects on the importance of various forms of action that facilitate such a change, as well as psychotherapeutic methods, but the aims of these remain undisclosed: what do the methods achieve, and what is considered success? If the “goal of therapy” (135) is allowing certain of the self's interior voices to speak, to which ones should we listen, and why? If theology guides habit formation toward “self-transformation,” what is the character of a better form? To be clear, I neither seek from Raposa demonstrations that his pragmaticism will not allow, nor some “goals . . . rigidly designated in advance” (110). Rather, it is about the reasonable hypotheses that might be offered about these things—hypotheses to be put to the test in the crucible of life's conduct, as would any others.Why should this be important? If there is some “ideal state of mind” (TS, 132) that is sought for by a religious person, it seems important to know what that is. And, if it is pronounced as a sort of nothingness (as in the suññatā of Mahayana Buddhism) in contrast to a state of perpetual learning and advance into divine plenitude (say, the epektasis within strands of Eastern Orthodoxy), presumably the means to achieve these respective ends would turn out to be quite different, including those therapeutic. Thus, it makes sense that theosemiotic ought to take a more definitive stance on the ideal to achieve. This quickly butts up against the first matter discussed: if the subject of therapy is the self as living legisign (136), and some aspect of its growth is the development of disinterested love, then we still must ask, for what does one love?Third, respecting ideals, we run into the concern of what an ideal may be, and what sort of ideal is permissible within theosemiotic's ambit. Raposa reminds his reader that pragmatism will emphasize some flavor of fruitfulness—but, the question is, what counts as fruitfulness? He does warn that ideals formulated by theosemiotic must be “sufficiently broad” and “vague” so as to include what “all responsible inquirers would eventually affirm” (TS, 159). I am not so certain that the final opinion on ideals would be so vague, but, at any rate, the accretion of ideas from Royce, Dewey and Peirce does not seem to bring shape to any clear rule for conduct available to the reader right now. How does Royce's “loyalty to loyalty” become something more than mere tolerance when a feature of it is the right for others to be loyal to ideals not your own (158)? What are Dewey's ideals for democracy that are available to theosemiotic? Or consider the wills to interpret, learn, or believe (162)—what is the good object of the subject's volitional attentions and modes? Can theosemiotic commit to some ordering and enrichment of these ideas to formulate a concept useful for practical action, and that can contribute toward concrete reasonableness? Raposa at one point wonders how far the concept of community can “stretch without breaking” (161) if employed vaguely and with analogous instances; I wonder whether theosemiotic has itself been stretched by vagueness so thinly that it cannot support these questions about purposed conduct.The exploration of agape in chapter 5’s first section seems to leave us in a similar situation. Raposa writes that love is “an act of giving” (TS, 162)—but, as before, his analysis is of love's relational character, not its purpose or object. Lacking these, it is remarkably difficult to nail down the whence, whither, and wherefore of agape—for what is one “being toward,” what is the rationale of “dispositional attentiveness,” and in what sense are these done in “a certain positive way” (163)? And, in love's display as “compassion, as nurturing and care,” without a precise