Critical Reflection on Religious Language

            Iris Murdoch thought it useful to ask what a philosopher fears. What philosophers fear about this line of thinking is that religious language seems insulated from philosophical reflection and criticism, and this seems to open the door for any kind of subjective projection onto a blank ontological screen – to obscurantism. Yet this fear only arises from within the “fog” that descends when the language of the sublime is treated as propositional language subject to philosophical speculation. In the course of our lives, many of us come to critically reflect on deep-seated attitudes, and the clarifying of a certain approach to philosophy as not conducive to these ways of reflecting in no way interferes – it really leaves everything as it was.

 

            We can illustrate this with another Bonhoeffer prayer from prison:

 

Father in Heaven, Praise and thanks be yours for the night’s rest. Praise and thanks be yours for the new day. Praise and thanks be yours for all your kindness And faithfulness in my past life. You have shown me much good, Let me now receive from your hand What is hard. You will not lay upon me More than I can bear. For your children you let all things Serve for the best.

 

We can easily imagine that under the circumstances he was in his faith might have weakened; I suppose many a believer’s faith did weaken in these circumstances. And that under this impact, another man might begin to critically question the idea of an agent-God who has shown goodness and kindness, to whom one attributes as blessings what others would describe as good fortune, but who now stands back and allows the man to wait to be cruelly hanged. Admittedly, we might use such reasoning to criticize a literary character as implausible, but here God’s reality encounters what we consider intelligible in terms of morality and agency. We know that goodness means something different that we cannot grasp when predicated of God; yet an agent who had the power to save a man, one of his own, from a cruel execution and for inscrutable reasons allows it – perhaps to test faith – would not in any intelligible sense be considered good. This is so because we cannot find it intelligible that any possible good that might come out of such a cruel execution – and some good came out of it: Bonhoeffer’s writings and the example of the man and his courage – could possibly justify allowing that to happen. Not even compensations in the afterlife would seem to excuse God’s passivity in this case. None of these reflections need lead to a loss of faith – as argued, to give up an organizing attitude pictured can be like giving up one’s identity of soul – but in some situations it happens.

            The contrast with philosophical reflection should be clear. The context and the significance of what is at stake matters, changes the logic or grammar of the reflection. It has an irreducibly personal character. God’s reality or lack thereof shows itself in the response to situations like Bonhoeffer’s to people like Bonhoeffer. Academic philosophy would like to think the logic of the language may be abstracted from people in their concrete lives and treated abstractly in terms of clarity of concepts, validity of conclusions, and acceptability of premises. But the point is by abstracting the sublime from the sublime experience changes what all these things can possibly mean. It is like making a game – monopoly – out of a serious human practice like capitalism. Monopoly, like philosophy, features some points of analogy with the real capitalist thing, but the reality of capitalism is utterly “transcendent” to the game. (This analogy may break down at the point that abstract models – even Monopoly – may tell us something we hadn’t thought of about the practice of capitalism just as Wittgenstein’s simplified language games may tell us something about “the grammar of our language.”)

            But in the Bonhoeffer case, philosophical translation utterly distorts meaning and reality. Though I would resist applying the game metaphor to Bonhoeffer’s situation, the translation of his language into philosophy talk would be like switching games altogether – like going from chess to a role-play describes going from critical reflections on God’s reality of a man in Bonhoeffer’s situation to academic proofs of God’s existence and the criticisms of these. But it is in only contexts like Bonhoeffer’s (and the ritualized performance of such language, which had better make contact with such situations if it is to retain any meaning-force) that religious language can make contact with reality. The reflections after the fact, in other words, might concern the point the man might see in such prayers, in such a notion of God, perhaps of the very notions of God and prayer themselves, in the concrete living of his life. But crucially, these reflections would have a radically different character than academic speculations about the problem of evil, for example.

            Compare this to the type of account a logical-positivist minded interpreter of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus might give about the prayer: that Bonhoeffer had failed to give a reference for certain signifiers (cf. Tractatus 6.53). In that case, it would be logic that was “sublime”, as Wittgenstein put it in the Philosophical Investigations (§89). This over-simplified version (of which there are many complex variations) will make the kind of account I mean clear: the sense or nonsense of language must be determined by analysis of the underlying, hidden logical structure of the language; for example, names stand for objects; the signifier “God” does not refer to a possible object, and thus is without content, meaning. Humanly it is understandable that Bonhoeffer would use such cognitively empty yet emotively powerful language in the circumstances and given his socialization; yet philosophically that changes nothing about the nonsensical character of the prayer, which logically is analogous to writing a thank you letter to Santa Claus for the presents or a petitionary letter to the current King of Prussia (Winch, “The Meaning of Religious Language”). 

            Speech acts like ‘thanking’ or ‘petitioning’ obviously presuppose the existence of the one to whom gratitude is owed or the one to whom the petition is directed if the act is to have a point. The way I previously imagined critical reflection treated God much like a character in a book about whom we suspend our disbelief while reading and discussing. The critical reflection consisted in questions about the character’s plausibility within the narrative. Religion projects its narrative onto reality, however – logically akin to imagining Ahab as a historical figure and Moby Dick as biography because this satisfied some emotional need. And this would transgress the logical limits of language use. Thus the religious apologist must find ways to make this projection onto reality plausible in order to secure the meaning of a prayer – the language of prayer depends for its sense on a philosophical account of language.

            Religious language can be seen in such ways. It is not a mistake to see it so, as one can be mistaken about some factual state of affairs or an arithmetical sum. That is a possible, intelligible attitude, and clearly attitudes are not subject to testing by evidence (which does not imply that they are beyond all critical scrutiny – more on that below). The confusion is to mistake a possible attitude for a theory corresponding to some objective state of affairs “out there.”