Beyond Agreement by Steinkerchner Scott;Clooney SJ Francis X. ;

Author:Steinkerchner, Scott;Clooney, SJ, Francis X.,;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2011-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Other Interpretations of Wittgenstein

Other authors have seen a connection between the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and theology. Though I makes use of different aspects of Wittgenstein’s thought for somewhat different purposes, my interpretation of Wittgenstein is right in line with that of Fergus Kerr in his book Theology After Wittgenstein. The same cannot be said for many other theological appropriations of Wittgenstein’s thought, and before we move on I feel need to address these differences.

Perhaps the most influential theological appropriation of Wittgenstein’s thought is George Lindbeck’s 1984 book The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age. However, Lindbeck’s appropriation of Wittgenstein’s thought has some serious flaws. In The Nature of Doctrine, Lindbeck follows Wittgenstein in asserting that statements had meaning only within a meaning system. He called this model of religion “cultural-linguistic,” explicitly tying it to Wittgenstein’s understanding of language-games.53 There is a common interpretation of Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic view of religion as relativistic that is very influential in other contemporary theological appropriations of Wittgenstein’s thought. Lindbeck, however, has since renounced both this common interpretation of his work as well as his use of Wittgenstein, but the relativistic caricature of Lindbeck’s work is still more influential than his own interpretation. We will examine both the relativistic interpretation of Lindbeck and his own significantly different amended position because both positions represent possible and popular alternatives to my use of Wittgenstein’s thought.

In The Nature of Doctrine, religious doctrines of various denominations are portrayed as serving to reinforce group boundaries by defining the language-game of a particular group.54 “Genuine discussions over the relative adequacy of specifiably different positions” between different Christian churches are difficult, because each of these different churches has a different view of religion that is “so comprehensive that it shapes its own criteria of adequacy.”55 In this view, the task of systematic theology is “intratextual,” finding the meaning of terms such as “God” by “examining how the word operates within a religion and thereby shapes reality and experience” rather than locating the meaning outside the text “in the objective realities to which it refers.”56 This view cuts off one cultural-linguistic group from another, preventing the possibility of judging between truth systems or making claims that transcend any particular group.57

Kai Nielsen labels this interpretation of Wittgenstein’s thought “Wittgensteinian Fideism” and describes it as a way that proponents of religion try to wall themselves off from the views of science, claiming that religion and science are different modes of discourse and thus each one has criteria of intelligibility to itself.58 Nielsen objects that this is merely compartmentalization, asserting that a scientific perspective does not presume the existence of God; science investigated the God-hypothesis and found it lacking, while a religious perspective merely presumes the existence of God against all reason. Nielsen further asserted that these are not simply two perspectives, but that there really is only one perspective, since “ ‘religious discourse’ and ‘scientific discourse’ are part of the same overall conceptual structure,” culture.59 That is, Nielsen argues that there

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