Category: Language

The question of whether religious language is meaningful has sparked fierce debate among philosophers. Religious language refers to any statement or utterance made about the transcendental, or about God. The fundamental disagreement over whether religious language has any significant stems from different philosophies of meaning.  For example, on the authority of the verifiability theory of meaning, one cannot extract meaning from a statement that can neither be verified nor falsified. All cognitively meaningful language must be, in principle, either empirically or formally verifiable. Thus, since there is no factual knowledge associated with the statement “God exists”, this statement is deemed meaningless. Alternatively, according to early Wittgenstein’s picture theory of meaning, the talk of God and the transcendental do not deal with facts, so they equitably share the fate as ethics, arts, poetry, etc.: they represent the very limits of language because thoughts and utterances are meaningful only when they correspond to the world. Wittgenstein himself admitted that we could not talk about them, not because it is not worth doing so, but simply because they are beyond the real function of language. The problem here is these truth-conditional theories leave us no choice but to accept the incompetence of language. Music, arts, poetry constitute greatly to the civilization of the human race, still they are essentially meaningless.  

1.  The religious language game

Wittgenstein did, however, exchanged his method of truth conditions to that of assertability conditions. His new way of language philosophizing, characterized by language games in their forms of life and the use theory of meaning, frees language from the limit placed on it by truth conditions. Now with what Wittgenstein had informed us, we should consider twice before saying anything like, “That doesn’t make sense!” — After all, what sort of sense are we expecting? Let us take a look at religious language under Wittgenstein’s notion of language game. 

From the perspective of the use theory of meaning, what is said is not bound to the verification principle, nor must a word denote any entity at all to gain its meaning. In different circumstances, a word possesses different meanings, and the meaning comes from understanding the specific rules of the language game we are playing. Language has a comparable function to games. Language, like any other game, has its own set of rules. With this theory of use, Wittgenstein had dismantled the fundamental premise on which he established his initial absolute division between what language could properly convey and the so-called “transcendental” values which must remain inexpressible eternally by their very nature (1). Religious language is meaningful insofar as it has a use. The religious could appropriately be categorized as a language game with its own set of meanings (2). The words used in the religious language game might be articulated similarly to other language games, still they are following a different rules; and therefore cannot be deemed meaningless by player of another language game: religious language makes sense in a religious language game as much as scientific language does in a scientific language game. Besides, a language game, just like any game, is not just played. It has a point. It is played to attain certain goals, and it shows what the players consider important (3). The religious language game, therefore, is used to achieve goals it is intended for. 

2. The meaning of religious language

The rules governing the religious language game are radically distinctive. One simply cannot interpret utterances in the religious language game by a set of rules governing another language game, such as science. Unfortunately, such things do happen. Had Wittgenstein ever used the well-known Italian phrase “Traduttore, traditore!” I suppose he would have meant that the translator had either failed to recognize the form of life in which the language of the original text was articulated in, or he had misunderstood the language game the author was engaging in. We make the mistake of assuming people truly mean what we think they mean so often that just leggere can be traditore. We thus miss the point of their language game. 

What, therefore, are the goals of the religious language game? Religious language is used for specific purposes that do not include portraying the natural world. Prayers, rites, songs of praise, etc. do not aim to denote entities of reality. Rather, religious language is confessional, and it is used to instill a sense of commitment to a set of moral ideals (4). That is to say, religious language conveys what one believes in instead of claiming truths. Though Wittgenstein himself did not make any definite claim about the purposes of the religious language game, his philosophy inspires many later philosophers in their pursuit of the intelligibility of religious language. George Lindbeck (1984) suggested the experiential-expressive approach, according to which religious doctrines are “non-informative symbols of inner feelings, attitudes or orientations, rough and groping articulations of a core inner experience”(5). According to this approach, the phrase “God is omnipotent”, for example, serves as a manifestation of a human experience rather than a description within the empirical world, and it is a statement that should not be interpreted literally. Because the religious language-game dwells in the religious way of life, employing it users are to commit to that form of life. Prayers and praises bind the speaker to a complex web of emotions, attitudes, and behaviors (6). These employments of religious language happen in the religious practices, such as praying and praising, which are also aimed to achieve certain emotional needs. Commenting on religious practices, Wittgenstein wrote:

“Burning in effigy. Kissing the picture of a loved one. This is obviously not based on a belief that it will have a definite effect on the object which the picture represents. It aims at some satisfaction and it achieves it. Or rather, it does not aim at anything; we act in this way and then feel satisfied.” (7)

Finally, the meaning of religious language is not to be judged by truth-conditioned scientific philosophizing. Though what we are attempting to discuss transcends human language and concepts in the sense that nothing in the empirical world can verify or falsify it, the discussion remains meaningful because it takes place within a language game in which players recognize and follow the rules, thus see its point.

Notes and Reference

(1)  Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin. Wittgenstein’s Vienna. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973, p.234.

(2) It is crucial to abolish the unfortunately common misinterpretation that Wittgenstein had characterized religion as a language game: he never did denote religion as a language game. We are only looking at religious language as gaining its meaning from a religious form of life. Again, this religious form of life and religion are two distinct concepts.

(3) Wittgenstein. G.E.M. Anscombe and R. Rhees (eds.), G.E.M. Anscombe (trans.), Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell, 1953,

“§564. So I am inclined to distinguish between the essential and the inessential in a game too. The game, one would like to say, has not only rules but also a point.”

(4) Chad Meister. Introduction to Philosophy of Religion. Routledge, 2009, p.151.

(5) Philosophy of Religion: a Critical Introduction. 2^nd Edition.

(6) V. Brummer, Atonement, Christology And The Trinity Making Sense Of Christian Doctrine, 2005, p. 13.

(7) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, Doncaster: Brynmill Press, 1979, p. 4.