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.

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