THEOLINGUISTICS “THE ENGLISH OF RELIGION: AT THE EDGES OF LANGUAGE”

To describe this religion as a form of linguistic behaviour is to focus on its central feature and therefore to present it fairly.  There is no need to deny that religion is more a matter of how men live than how they talk.  However, a human form of life is precisely linguistic; it is the fact that language is woven into all the rest of our activities that makes those activities distinctively human and, also, that gives our language its peculiar character.

Faith is undeniably more a matter of how people live than how they talk; and it would be an overstatement to say that religion is simply and exclusively a matter of language; but it must be granted that religion as we know it is, in many respects, a linguistic enterprise, and that language is an indispensable instrument for understanding the ways in which faith is experienced, expressed, and practised: the central statements of the belief system are recorded in a canon of writings, and reading, reciting, studying and commenting on these authoritative texts is part and parcel of religious behaviour.  Other activities in Christian life and worship, such as praying, hymn-singing, meditating, preaching, praising, blessing, forgiving, confessing one's belief, excommunicating, theologising and many other practices are, first and foremost, forms of linguistic behaviour, which may be described as different sorts of speech acts, in which language not only means things to people, but is actually used to carry out certain actions.

Yet, even though faith and religion cannot live without language, the relationship between them often seems to be a tense, strained one, not least because religious expression centres - directly or indirectly - round the concept God.  To philosophers of language, this implicit or explicit reference to a transcendent divinity makes religious discourse 'problematic' in that it supposes a logical status which distinguishes religious propositions from expressions referring to, say, tables and chairs (the most hackneyed examples), and does not allow empirical verification of its assertions.  But then again, not all human discourse can be boiled down to verifiable statements: the languages of, say, poetry, love, or metaphysics would be open to the same indictment; but the question whether the divine and transcendent can be referred to in a language 'normally' designed to cater for this-worldly human situations and realities deserves some critical attention nevertheless

The adverb “normally” and the phrase “ordinary language”, however, entail an implicit value judgment on the “meaningful” or “valid” use of human linguistic resources; and any possibility of discourse about the divine will, therefore, have to be guarded rather carefully against charges of meaninglessness. It has been, in our view, the error of logical positivists and empirical verificationists to judge God-language against criteria valid only within the perspective of the physical sciences.  The basis for the refusal to assign any truth-value to theological statements (as, for that matter, to any metaphysical proposition) and for regarding them as a “misuse of language” is the fact that utterances like, say, “God exists” cannot be proven true or false when the cognitive import of the word “God” cannot be adequately assessed by relying upon sense-experience or, specifically, upon “religious experience” which, being private, is neither verifiable nor communicable.

If God-talk and much other religious language do not obey all the rules governing truth-valued propositions, it must, if it is to be meaningful, respond to some logic which may account for “meaningful non-propositionality”, as the divine cannot be spoken about in literal, univocal terms; a logic, moreover, which can be demarcated and understood, lest religious discourse should become a hermetic and incommunicable private language. If the meaning of religious utterances is to be accessible to humans, it must be human-centred, i.e. not repose on extralinguistic “revelation” or on any exotic epistemology. 

For this reason also, claims on truth-value in theography must be qualified as tentative: human discourse about the divine bears on one side of the Man / God relationship only; in this sense, part of the “infinite qualitative difference” may be regarded as being “beyond” human expression. In its descriptive (”theographic”) phase, however, religious language can be satisfactorily described in terms of metaphor logic, which, providing some indispensable reserves and qualifications, may encompass the above criteria.