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.

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