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.
an interesting post, but I fear that you misunderstand Wittgenstein. He was personally very sympathetic to religion and I have no doubt he would have been furious if anyone had told him that his philosophical work called religion into question or undermined religious belief. He certainly would not say that God cannot speak to us. I think in his later work he would also reject the metaphor of language having limits. After all, you have been able to convey what you what to convey via language and all that tradition has passed down to you (including what God has said to Man) has involved language, so it would be strange to argue that everything religious and divine was beyond (human) language. Finally, his point about Christianity and historical narratives is not intended to suggest that the New Testament claims are fairy tales or some kind of metaphor; rather his point is precisely the point you and Kierkegaard make, that this is not just about something that happened 2000 years ago. Wittgenstein was not a committed religious believer, but he had a deep reverence for religious belief. His philosophical work “leaves everything where it is” and if that includes the superficial, progressive outlook of people like Betrand Russell (and Richard Dawkins) which he despised, then it certainly includes religious views of the world, to which he was strongly attracted.
I’m not questioning the idea that Wittgenstein is sympathetic to religion. However, the effect of his thought is to render religious language innocuous—something that Kierkegaard especially is desparately trying to avoid.
The problem with Wittgenstein and Christianity is that he simply doesn’t understand the import of the claims that Christianity makes. If revelation has happened, then his critique of metaphysics, for example, is highly dubious, because we actually now have something beyond immediate or communal experience that we can talk about.
Yes, but I don’t think Wittgenstein would claim we can only talk about our immediate or communal experience. I know that a lot of philosophers invoke Wittgenstein to make all sorts of strange claims about the social nature of language and society pre-existing the individual etc etc. What the people who make these claims are actually saying varies from case to case but at the very least what they are trying to say is confusingly expressed. And it certainly is not anything that Wittgenstein would have wanted to touch with a barge pole! I am also a bit intrigued by your own position on this – are you saying that before revelation, it would have been correct to argue that we could only talk about things within our own immediate or communal experience?
Paul, I’m tipping my hand here, but I don’t think that there is any “before revelation.”
I think I may have misspoken because I use the word “about” too liberally. For Wittgenstein, meaning has little to do with “aboutness.” Again, I would recommend Fergus Kerr’s excellent work, Theology after Wittgenstein. And again, much of my interpretation of his thought is filtered through Peter Hacker.
The question, for Wittgenstein is not what religious language is about, but what it is supposed to be doing. The quote from Wittgenstein on Christianity and history might have been stronger if I had included the preface: “Christianity is not based on a historical truth . . .” Wittgenstein doesn’t think that the historical or factual content of Christianity is at all relevant, whereas orthodox practice has always taken the contrary position. In CV 33e, Wittgenstein goes on to say that the resurrection’s historical content is irrelevant. Even if it’s not necessarily an atheistic approach to theology, it’s an approach to theology that is fully compatible with atheism.
As I said, I would recommend reading the relevant passages in Culture and Value as well as Kerr’s work and Steven Emmanuel’s interesting development of it in Kierkegaard and the Concept of Revelation (which, needless to say, wanders far from Kierkegaard on this point).
I read the other two posts in the series that I probably should have read before (!) and it is clear that we disagree pretty radically in our understanding of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language and even more so in relation to what he would have said about religion. I can understand that anyone who believes in God (as I do) would have issues (!!!) with anyone who claimed that “religion is not about anything objective, out there in the world, but about subjective experience”, but IMHO Wittgenstein’s philosophy does not lead to this conclusion and Wittgenstein himself would have seen it as ridiculous. I can certainly imagine how G.E.M Anscombe would have responded if anyone had tried to tell this to her! I will look at Fergus Kerr’s book and see what I think. As for Peter Hacker, like you I do think he is a good guide to Wittgenstein, so would be interested to know if he endorses Fergus Kerr’s conclusions.
As for Hacker, he actually made a comment in lecture to the effect of “Wittgenstein’s philosophy may be compatible with some religion, but certainly not with any revealed religion.” Admittedly it was an offhand comment, but it was consistent with various things I found in “Culture and Value” as well as the material that Kerr quotes.
“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.”
I have consulted a higher authority and my learned friend accepts that you are in good company on your understanding of Wittgenstein, but notes that Fergus Kerr is a Dominican as well as a Wittgenstein so presumably has found some way of reconciling Wittgenstein’s philosophy with revealed religion
Perhaps more to the point he highlights Cora Diamond’s paper “The Gulfs Between Us” as providing a different and in his (and I assume) my view a more accurate account of Wittgenstein’s approach and implications. I hope that is of some interest to you and I do apologize for making lots of assertions without any arguments. When I get the chance to read the Kerr book, maybe I will try to move out of assertion-mode 
Paul, just so we’re clear, I find many of Wittgenstein’s methods to be useful and many of his observations to be accurate. However, I find his overall picture of language and philosophy to be highly flawed.
I’m a critic of Wittgenstein, but a sympathetic critic.