Taking Wittgenstein to Church: Part 3

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . .

Here in the opening verse of John, we have an antithesis to Wittgenstein’s assumption that language is entirely a creation of human societies. For Wittgenstein, language is a culture’s form of life, and only things common to that life can be expressed. Religion, then, is a code that expresses the inexpressible. It is (to use the language of the early Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) senseless but not nonsense. It expresses things that are at the edge of language and which cannot be said directly. What religion cannot be, is a word from the outside, for such a word is excluded. Wittgenstein says, cryptically:

If a lion could speak, we would not understand him.

The life of a lion is qualitatively different from human life together, and therefore no communication is possible. Similarly, religion cannot be about anything outside language and human life, for otherwise it would not be part of human life. As Wittgenstein says:

Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.

There is no way to escape from language, nothing meaningful outside it. It is a creation of human society and all its philosophy is merely playing with the borders.

Unless, of course, there is a word from the outside breaking in. The first chapter of the Gospel According to St. John suggests something different: language itself is Divine in its origin, if not in its development, and further, God has spoken and partaken in our form of life. When the word became flesh, He entered our life and was thereby able to communicate, not simply by the signs and mysteries of the prophets, but by simply being. Because Christ is the God-man, He is able to illuminate Divine mysteries in human language.

Further, the Divine origin of language itself means that God can speak in language. The inspired words of Scripture stand counter to the claim of Wittgenstein that God could not speak to us. God is there and not silent: the Divine has broken into our form of life.

Wittgenstein tries to counter this in a particularly Kierkegaardian moment, saying:

Christianity . . . offers us a (historical) narrative and says: now believe! . . . don’t take the same attitude toward it as you take to other historical narratives! Make a quite different place in your life for it. There is nothing paradoxical about that. (Culture and Value 31e-32e)

Yet Kierkegaard himself affirms the opposite: that we must accept Scripture’s authority as fact in addition to its role in shaping our life. He affirms the paradox that Christ was not only a historical figure, but that we are to be “contemporaneous” with Him by the Spirit, entering into the life of Christ. And we cannot relate ourselves to someone who does not exist. I cannot, try as I might, relate myself to Gandalf, to Harry Potter, or Elizabeth Bennett. The talk of relationship with God assumes the existence of God.

The truths of Christianity must be literal, else they make no sense. St. Paul argues that if Christ is not risen, “your faith is in vain” (1 Cor 15:14). Karl Barth comments:

Do you want to believe in the living Christ? We may believe in him only if we believe in his corporeal resurrection. This is the content of the New Testament. We are always free to reject it, but not to modify it, nor to pretend that the New Testament tells something else. We may accept or refuse the message, but we may not change it. (quoted in Time magazine 20 April, 1962)

The proclamation of the Gospel that is central to Christianity is not some set of existential or moral platitudes: it is either true or it is false. It may be accepted or rejected, but it must be taken at face value. The Wittgensteinian picture of Christianity misses the mark because Wittgenstein simply does not understand Christianity—he underestimates its claims and fails to realize that if Christianity is true, his picture of language is in serious jeopardy.

Taking Wittgenstein to Church: Part 2

In part 1, I set up Wittgenstein’s view of Christianity and religious language as a way of expressing the existential truths of religion. For Wittgenstein, religion is not speaking of an external object, but is a way of speaking about subjective religious experiences in a community of faith. Fergus Kerr in Theology After Wittgenstein says, insightfully, that Wittgenstein does not view religion as a language-game, his way of designating disciplines and their discourses. Religion is much too big to be a language-game: it is a language—a complete syntactical structure that is almost incomprehensible to outsiders. This is a very attractive picture of religion: now we can have religious community without ontological or metaphysical commitments of any kind. As I wrote in my essay on this subject:

for Wittgenstein, the real issue is the existential one: the consciousness of sin, the black night of the soul, and the moment of faith. Christianity is an internal story of creation, fall, and redemption: it is about the torment of the individual, not the response of the individual to some truth. There is no truth here to respond to, except possibly truth about ourselves.

It’s a delightfully human-centered view of religion where we can talk about a God who isn’t actually there. We can have the trappings of religion and still be intelligent moderns or postmoderns. All religions can be equally valid because they actually aren’t about anything out there.

Except that Wittgenstein overlooks key elements of Christianity in this analysis. The first chink in the armor is the linguistic function of private prayer. Wittgenstein maintains that language is a social construct of the community, and therefore there can be no private language. But what then of solitary prayer? This phenomenon goes overlooked, I think, because it’s hard for one outside a faith community to understand the centrality of this individual act. What is the object of private prayer? Is it simply getting things off the believer’s chest, so to speak? What is the linguistic function? According to Wittgenstein’s notions of language, it can have no function unless there are really two or more persons involved. One is left here with the nasty suspicion that either private prayer is nonsense (despite its function at the center of religion, which is not nonsense) or else that the believer really is trying to address an external subject—God.

Another hole in the argument is the existence of theology. The trouble here is that if religion is really about existential-subjective experiences, why does it discuss them in terms that seem to be talking about metaphysics—about a God who is there? On Wittgenstein’s view, we are left with the troubling dichotomy that religious language is either (again) directed at and talking about an actual existent thing, or else that it is simply a superfluous cover for existentialism, in which case we might as well just do away with the frills and cut to the chase (something that Wittgenstein desperately wants to avoid). Why all the talk of an external object if there is none? If theologians are just grammarians, then what’s with the metaphysical jargon?

In my next post, I will show how Wittgenstein has fundamentally misunderstood revealed religion, and Christianity in particular, and how, if true, Christianity undermines Wittgenstein entirely.

Taking Wittgenstein to Church: Part 1

Well, I think I’ve been absent from the blogosphere long enough. For those who don’t know, I’ve been to England and back, and hopefully some of the philosophy I studied there will make it into posts.

I have written a bit on Wittgenstein before, but in the last term, I ended up attending a series of lectures by P. M. S. Hacker on Wittgenstein’s conception of language and metaphilosophy. For those non-philosophers in my readership, metaphilosophy is just the question of what it is to do philosophy—how does it relate to other disciplines? What does it study? I’m not going to write much on this subject, though, as I have some very severe agreements with Wittgenstein on what philosophy is (yes, you read that right: “severe agreements”). Where I disagree, though, is on the subject of religion and religious language. Here is what I mean:

Grammar tells us what kind of object anything is (theology as grammar). (Philosophical Investigations, 373)

“Theology as grammar.” This is the only real reference to religious language (apart from a few passing nods to religious customs) in the Investigations. However, Wittgenstein deals more fully with theological language in Culture and Value. What is interesting to note here, though, is the way in which Wittgenstein has divorced language from describing reality. Elsewhere, language is presented as a construct of a community, therefore theology would be the grammar of a religious community. That is to say, theology is the grammar that governs discourse in a religious community.

Now, before we write this notion off as completely absurd, let’s note what is right about it: there is a normative aspect to religious language. In my church, we often say a creed—a creed which is held to be normative: binding upon all members of the community so as to say “this is what you must believe.” That’s not to discount the fact that religious language is actually about something, but to note that it is normative.

For Wittgenstein, though, religious language cannot be about anything because traditional theism is absurd. He says:

God’s essence is supposed to guarantee his existence—what this really means is that what is at issue is not the existence of anything. (Fergus Kerr, quoting Wittgenstein in Theology after Wittgenstein).

God, then, is the construct of a religious community. But if that’s all that “God” is, then what is the purpose of religious language and the religious community? Well, for Wittgenstein, religion is not about anything objective, out there in the world, but about subjective experience, a sort of “God-consciousness” of a kind that would make Schleiermacher very happy. He says:

‘consciousness of sin’ is a real event, and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan, for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them. (Culture and Value, 28e).

The realization of sin, the dark night of the soul, the coming of hope, the inner peace, those are the objects of religion, for Wittgenstein. The language of religious communities is aimed at meaningfully expressing these sorts of realities and theologians serve either as chroniclers of personal experience, or as systematizers of the “grammar of God.” The existential parts of religion are the point, though, and once religion starts mistaking its language for propositions expressing metaphysical truths, it has lost its way.

In the next post, I will begin to analyze some of the problems with this view and in the final post of this series, I will provide the alternative, Christian, view of religious language.

Personal Commitment to Truth vs. the Scientistic Paradigm

One of the controversial topics of our day in philosophy of religion is the so-called “new atheism.” It’s a bit of a misleading term, since there’s really nothing new about this atheism except that it thinks that respect for religion is not warranted or immoral (where they get their standard of morality is a discussion for another time). The major figures of this movement include Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins, all of whom think that religion and religious people are following what Dawkins calls the “God delusion.” God, they say, is an unwarranted hypothesis resulting from some sort of cognitive malfunction.

I do not intend here to address the absurd attacks that these thinkers mount against theism, but to address the issue that is at the heart of their thinking: scientism. Scientism is the idea that science is the premier and paradigmatic form of knowledge because of its disinterested pursuit of “the facts.” It’s an attractive picture, really: the scientist as the priest of the mystery religion of science, doing strange and wonderful experiments to get at the utter essence of the universe. And, to make it even more attractive, the method is completely dispassionate, with no presuppositions: a purity that would make the ancient Pythagoreans drool with envy.

Such is the mythology of science, and a powerful mythology it is: a heady mixture of optimism, reason, and romanticism. The trouble is, though, that it is a misleading myth: science is not without its presuppositions. For example, the early scientists, such as Isaac Newton, operated with certain presuppositions: effects have causes, what happens today will happen tomorrow, the universe operates according to universal laws, and so on. In addition, since the 17th Century, scientists have built up a great tradition of doing science, without which, it would lose itself. Thus, new discoveries build upon earlier ones, old experiments are done in new conditions, and the body of theory and hypothesis grows.

This is not in any way intended to denigrate science or its achievements, only point out that it too is bound by commitments to certain propositional attitudes and presuppositions. Indeed, no discipline could proceed unless its community of scholarship agreed, to some degree, upon common methods and approaches. What it does do is to shatter the edifices of scientism, of which the new atheists are modern-day prophets. It is a fact that we must accept that no fact can be established without a set of commitments that help to establish it. No argument can proceed without premises, after all, so no discipline can proceed without commitments.

Of course this destroys utterly the myth of objectivity. Here I have to be careful to distinguish between objectivity and absolute truth: I am committed to the existence and knowability of absolute truth. However, we cannot know it objectively, in a kind of dispassionate detached way. To grasp a fact in this way is not to know it, for knowledge is a much more intimate and passionate kind of thing. In order to know truth, we must be rightly related to it. It is this fact which scientism fails to grasp, and thus, for all the accomplishments of science, the philosophy of scientism is a chasing after wind.

But unless truth itself is personal, how could one be in any sort of relation to it? Much less a right one? Yet this is what Christianity uniquely provides: the Truth Himself, the eternal Word, came down. So when Pilate the cynical Roman politician asked “what is truth?” Jesus was silent, for if Pilate even then would not recognize that the Truth was standing in front of him, nothing more could be said. Only if one is in a right relationship to Truth can one know the Truth. And only if one knows the Truth can the Truth make one free.

A New Renaissance: a Challenge

Apologies to my readers (those who are still with me) for my unfortunate dearth of posting in the last few weeks. I’m currently overseas and rather busy with study. This particular idea came to me a while back and I’ve been mulling over it some today.

The year 1454 was not unlike our own time: plagues, famines, and wars had taken a toll on the economic and military strength of Europe. Climate change was wreaking havoc that people could not begin to understand. New military technologies and tactics were changing time-honored traditions or warfare. There was uncertainty about the faith due to over a century of religious debate and discrediting of religious institutions. And with the fall of Constantinople, Islam once again loomed menacingly on the horizon of Christendom.

As I said, it was a time not unlike our own, and it produced the high renaissance, a period of rediscovery of western roots and traditions. A new civic pride and cultural flowering took place that rivaled even the Roman achievements that it sought to emulate. Scholarship flourished, science advanced as never before, and there was celebration of humanity created in the imago Dei. This movement produced such figures as Michelangelo, Leonardo, Erasmus, even Luther and Calvin. In Protestant England a century later, it would produce Shakespeare, Raleigh, Donne, and Herbert.

Many in our day have written gloomily (or gleefully) of the decline and fall of western civilization, pointing to all kinds of statistics. I cannot deny that the last fifty years have produced precious few individuals who we might reasonably claim were truly “great:” Nelson Mandela, maybe, or Mother Theresa, John Paul II, and (to me at least) the Anglican bishops of Africa. Yet I am not terribly pessimistic: there is still opportunity for a new flowering. Things are not hopeless after the train wreck of modernism in the twentieth century.

Like the masters of the high Renaissance, though, the way forward lies in the mantra of ad fontes! To the sources! C. S. Lewis suggested something like this in his celebrated On the Reading of Old Books, saying:

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.

If we want a way forward, Lewis suggests, we must look back. It has been said that we can see farther when we stand on the shoulders of giants. This was the genius of the Renaissance: they produced something truly original by looking to the past. The achievements of the “enlightenment” which sought to create something new, ended up either in dull platitudes (like the sayings of Emerson or liberal Christianity) or in frightening brutality (the French and Russian Revolutions).

The men of the Renaissance and Reformation knew better: they knew that if there was a way forward, it was to look to the past. The result was a cultural flowering that we today still benefit from. And it is this kind of renaissance that I am calling for today.

We live in an age of much information and little wisdom. In the cascade of data that we get each day through the internet, we often miss real wisdom. Thus it is that we need to seek a way forward through the wisdom of our ancestors more than ever before. A new renaissance: a look to the past that can inspire us to create a better future. And like the renaissance men, we must begin from a position of faith, for

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

Jesus Part 2: Fully Man

Do you ever consider that Jesus laughed? Many commentators like to think he didn’t, even orthodox commentaries often miss the humor in Jesus’ words. Yet when Jesus said to Peter, “On this rock I will build my church,” one has to imagine at least a slight smile from the savior, and a slight groan at the bad pun from the disciples. Or when Jesus describes the comical picture of a man who has a log in his eye trying to take the speck out of his neighbor’s. Jesus had a sense of humor, and it is those who forget His humanity that fail to see it.

For the creed says that Christ:

For us and for our salvation . . . was made man

He was made man. The Son of God became man: if you cut Him, He would bleed. He had the whole range of human emotions: He was hungry, tired, angry, frustrated, happy, sad, He laughed, He cried, He joked. And yet all of it was without sin. This is why the writer of Hebrews claims that He is not a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses. Jesus was as human as you or I, yet He was also God. How can this be? I don’t even pretend to understand, yet it is true.

You see, while for the world, the stumbling block is that Jesus is God, for Christians the hard thing to swallow is that Jesus is man. We explain away hard things in terms of “well He was God, right?” yet in reality, we end up treating Him not as the God-man, but as God-who-was-sort-of-man: God-with-a-body. Yet according to Scripture, God is Spirit, not flesh. Further, Scripture is clear that Jesus is a man. Yet He is also God, for otherwise we would not worship Him.

Does it ever strike you funny that Jesus could learn? Yet in Luke 2, we read that “Jesus grew in wisdom.” How does the “God-only-wise” grow in wisdom? For if Jesus was God, then He had all of God’s attributes, including omniscience. Yet Jesus learned. Frankly, I’m not sure what to do with it either. No wonder Jews and Muslims cannot swallow it! No wonder the Greeks, philosophers, and skeptics call it foolishness! If Christians find it difficult to deal with, can we expect that anyone else will be convinced?

Yet God the Word became man. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” says the verse. Jesus Christ is the God-man. This is what the Scriptures teach. Jesus Christ is just as much a man as you or I, for only a man could make atonement for a man’s sin, just as only God could atone for sin against God. Thus Jesus is the God-man.

Jesus part 1: the Incarnate Word

Apologies to my readers for the regrettable lack of posts in the last month. Between finals, travel, and preparations for a trip overseas in January, I have been swamped.

However, among the things I have studied has been Christology: the study of Jesus. As a reformed believer, I often forget to focus on Jesus, instead emphasizing St. Paul, with his towering intellect. I think of my theology in terms of justification, with Jesus necessary only as the means of justifying sinners. How wrong I am, though. For the Apostle himself wrote that he would not boast in anything but Christ, and Him crucified! He wrote of Christ, who being in nature God did not consider equality with God something to grasp, but made Himself nothing, taking the form of a servant.

Here we see the mystery of the incarnation, which the Church has historically celebrated at Christmas. In John 1, we read of the mystery of the incarnation:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

. . . And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

. . . And from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.

The word became flesh, now here is mystery indeed. The one who was co-eternal with God, the pre-existent eternal word, “God of God, light of light, very God of very God, begotten not created” became created flesh. And now God is revealed to us in His fullness, for in Jesus, who was both God and man, we have knowledge of God, for Christ as the Word is the self-revelation of God. In Christ, we have both the mercy and judgment of God personified. In Him we have one who could make a perfect sacrifice. In Him we have a great high priest, who constantly intercedes for us because of His great love for us. In Him God is revealed. As the hymn says,

Thou who wast rich beyond all splendour,
All for love’s sake becamest poor.

That God would humble Himself? That God would submit to His own law? That the pre-existent Word would become obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross? For Christmas is the beginning of the humiliation of Christ that ends with His death and then His resurrection.

Amazing love! How can it be,
That Thou, my God, should die for me?

Reading and a New Project

I have always been a big reader. I love settling down with a good book and just engaging with a good story or good set of ideas. I suppose it’s part of being a Christian and therefore one of the “people of the book.” Reading is good but reading good books is better.

C.S. Lewis, in his introduction to On the Incarnation by St. Athanasius suggested that a person read one old book for every two new or recent books, so I thought that Faith and Philosophy really needed a list of recommended books. So, to that effect, in the next couple of weeks, I intend to compile one, arranged by subject. The list will (Lord willing) be annotated and possibly updated once in a while. Check back soon for it!

The Doctrine of Scripture

Many people like to talk about the Christian Scriptures as if they were like the sacred writings of other religions. Many would like to put them alongside the Book of Mormon, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita as great religious and moral works, but not Divine and not inspired. It is claimed that the Christian Scriptures are just the thoughts of men, maybe even holy men, men with deep religious experiences, about God. They are, so it is claimed, a glimpse into the numinous, but not inspired—no more worthy or valuable than any other book of theology or mystical experience.

But that is not what the Scriptures are. The Scriptures are not the words of men about God, for how could man know God unless God had revealed Himself? The Koran claims to be the Words of God, yet itself admits that human language and understanding cannot fathom them, and therefore the Koran is equivocal. Yet the Scriptures are not, for they are not the words of men about God but the Words of God translated into the language and literature of men. They may not be the words we would like, or the words we would have used, but they are the words elected by our perfect God.

This is of utmost importance, for it is primarily through the Word, both read and preached, that we encounter God Himself in the person of Jesus Christ. For Jesus is the pre-existent Logos or Word, so that we may say that through the written Word of God we encounter the Person of the Word of God. And therefore we must listen, as God has spoken, and when God speaks, the earth shakes. Christ is truly the self-revelation of God and is revealed through the written word. For we must always remember that the Scriptures as the Word of God are subordinate to Christ the Word made flesh.

The Scriptures are therefore unlike any other so-called “holy” text. For the Book of Mormon, the Koran, even the Gita are all the words of man about God. None of them are inerrant nor are they infallible. Through none of them does the Spirit of God speak to us of the Son of God. For the Scriptures are inerrant in their intended meaning, being the words elected by God to reveal Himself. We may not like them; we may accept them or reject them; but we may not change them, for God has spoken. “Hear O Israel” says the Lord.

Do you want to believe in the living God? The resurrected and living Christ? Then hear what He says in His word, by which He is revealed.

Words of Wisdom from St. Anselm

This is a quote that I’ve been pondering a bit this week:

Be it mine to look up to thy light, even from afar, even from the depths. Teach me to seek thee, and reveal thyself to me, when I seek thee, for I cannot seek thee, except thou teach me, nor find thee, except thou reveal thyself. Let me seek thee in longing, let me long for thee in seeking; let me find thee in love, and love thee in finding. Lord, I acknowledge and I thank thee that thou hast created me in this thine image, in order that I may be mindful of thee, may conceive of thee, and love thee; but that image has been so consumed and wasted away by vices, and obscured by the smoke of wrong-doing, that it cannot achieve that for which it was made, except thou renew it, and create it anew. I do not endeavor, O Lord, to penetrate thy sublimity, for in no wise do I compare my understanding with that; but I long to understand in some degree thy truth, which my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe,—that unless I believed, I should not understand.

~Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion Chapter 1.