Later Wittgenstein and Death of God Theology...Transcript - ST503 Contemporary Theology I: Hegel to Death of God Theologies

Contemporary Theology I:

Transcript - ST503 Contemporary Theology I: Hegel to Death of God Theologies© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 22 of 24ST503

Later Wittgenstein and Death of God Theology

Contemporary Theology I:Hegel to Death of God Theologies

This is lecture 22 for the course Contemporary Theology 1. At the end of my last lecture, I was talking about the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein. I want to conclude my thinking about that and relate his philosophy to theology, and then I want to turn in this lecture to the last of our topics for this course: the God is Dead Theologies. But before we get to any of that, let’s bow for a moment of prayer.

Father, again we thank You for the privilege of study. We just pray that as we continue to reflect upon these great thinkers and what they have said about language, what they’ve said about Yourself, that You would give us insight into what they mean, and that You’d help us to see the valuable insights that they give us—but also help us to keep from falling into the errors in which they have fallen. And so bless our time together as we study, for it’s in Christ’s name we pray it. Amen.

In my last lecture, I laid out for you Wittgenstein’s notion of a language game and also his use theory of meaning that goes with it. What I’d like to do, at this point, is turn to one other concept in the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein, and then we’re going to look at the implications of his philosophy or theology. That last topic is his anti-essentialism. Let me explain what that is and the implications of it. In The Tractatus, you remember, Wittgenstein set forth what he thought to be the essence of language and reality; that is, he set forth for us what he thought to be common to all languages and to all of reality. In his later philosophy, he thoroughly rejected the idea that you could speak about what is common to all languages or to any other phenomena, like games or pains or whatever. The Investigations is full of comments about this. Let me just share with you one of them in regard to the notion of a language game. Wittgenstein writes:

Here we come up against the great question that lies behind all these considerations. Where someone might object against me, “you take the easy way out. You talk about

John S. Feinberg, Ph.D.Experience: Professor of Biblical and

Systematic Theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

Transcript - ST503 Contemporary Theology I: Hegel to Death of God Theologies © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.


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all sorts of language games but have nowhere said what the essence of a language game, and hence of language, is: what is common to all these activities and what makes them into language or parts of language. So you let yourself off the very part of the investigation that once gave you, yourself most headache, the part about the general form of propositions and of language.”

Wittgenstein replies to this imagined objection.

And this is true. Instead of producing something common to all that we call language, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all, but that they are related to one another in many different ways. And it is because of this relationship, or these relationships, that we call them all “language.”

What Wittgenstein here is saying, at this point, is that if you’re looking for the essence of things, whether those things are words or objects, you’re not going to be able to find it. If you try to figure out the precise meaning of a word, for example, and try to specify that it means one and only one thing, that won’t work. As he has said, you find that a given word can mean any number of different things, given the context in which it’s used. That is an example and an application of this anti-essentialist doctrine of Wittgenstein later philosophy.

Let me mention a further concept that naturally stems from Wittgenstein’s anti-essentialism. Wittgenstein claimed in The Tractatus that meaning is determinate. Now I hinted at that just a moment ago. Let me elaborate it a little bit further here. You could plot the boundaries between one word’s meaning and another word’s meaning, because there were supposed to be such sharp boundaries. However, once Wittgenstein rejected the notion that you could talk about the essence of things, it naturally followed that no longer could you draw clear boundaries to set off one concept from another. Wittgenstein claimed that on occasion one can draw and does draw boundaries between games or concepts or languages. You draw the boundary for a purpose, but that doesn’t mean that there really truly exists such a boundary.

Wittgenstein writes, “I said that the application of a word is not everywhere bounded by rule, but what does a game look like that is everywhere bounded by rule, whose rules never let a doubt



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creep in but stops up all the cracks where it might?” I think the answer that Wittgenstein expects is we don’t know what that kind of language game would be. That’s Wittgenstein anti-essentialism, and I think you can see how it fits with his notion of language game and the use theory of meaning.

Let me turn now to talk about some of the implications of these views for theology. Again, some of the implications will relate to inerrancy, but I think the implications are broader than just that. As you reflect upon Wittgenstein’s concept of language as a complex of language games, and as you reflect on his use theory of meaning, I think you come to realize that there are some very important implications of those views for the inerrancy issue. In the first place, Wittgenstein argued that if you are to understand what a word or a sentence means, then you have to look for its use. Sentences, you remember he said, are instruments or tools. And their use determines their sense.

It seems that this notion can have both a positive and a negative relation to the issue of inerrancy, depending on how one decides to use this notion. On the positive side, you could use it to answer critics in regard to specific alleged errors in Scripture. For example, in cases where someone says that a biblical statement is historically or scientifically false, you might simply respond that the critic fails to understand that the scriptural statement is not being used to teach history or science. Instead it’s being used to teach some moral or religious truth. Thus, to require exact factual accuracy, as if the statement were being used to teach history or science, would be to mistake its use. However, in light of its use, it accurately accomplishes its purpose. And, as a result, you can say that biblical inerrancy would be of help.

I would suggest to you that there are, on some occasions, evangelicals who do respond to certain complaints about alleged errors in Scripture in just this way. And this seems to be a fairly acceptable way to respond to the claims of some who doubt the inerrancy of Scripture. Of course, if you use this kind of strategy, you’re going to have to be able to demonstrate that, in fact, the biblical writer was not trying to make a historical or a scientific statement. If you admit that, taken as straight history or science, a statement is false, then you’d better be able to demonstrate that the writer was trying to make a moral or a religious point, not a historical or a scientific one. That, of course, is a matter of hermeneutics; and, hopefully, one could demonstrate that one’s interpretation is correct. If not, then even using this strategy is



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going to get you into hot water. But, as I’m suggesting, there can be a positive use of this idea.

What about the negative side of this doctrine? On the negative side, if you try to answer claims of alleged errors by this strategy, you may be making what some would consider to be damaging concessions to the view that Scripture is filled with some errors. The point is that using this line of argument commits the inerrantist to saying that at certain places the Bible does contain factual errors; but nonetheless, since the sentences involved are not being used to state facts but to teach a moral or religious lesson, the Bible should still be considered inerrant.

Since, in the case of many of these alleged errors, inerrantists do not admit factual errors and then plead for inerrancy on the grounds that the sentence accurately does whatever it’s supposed to do; but, instead, they try to show that the statement is factually correct, without any attempt to escape the dilemma by appealing to use, the errantist could charge the inerrantist with inconsistency and special pleading. The errantist might say, for example, Look, you inerrantists want to have things both ways. On the one hand, you say there are no historical or scientific errors in Scripture. And, on occasions, you try to remove such alleged errors by showing that the propositions are historically and scientifically correct. But, on the other hand, sometimes you want to be allowed to remove alleged errors, not by producing facts to show historic and scientific accuracy, but by telling us that in spite of such factual errors there is really no error, since the sentences are being used to assert moral truths. You ignore the use strategy on occasions when you have facts to prove your case, but you demand that you be allowed to use it on occasions when you find no way to remove the factual errors. This whole project sounds very subjective.

Well, that’s quite an objection. Let me say, at this point, that I am not, in fact, claiming that there is no response to this kind of attack. In fact, I think that there are appropriate ones that can be made. Of course, a lot of it hinges on your ability, hermeneutically, to be able to demonstrate that your interpretation of the passage as making a moral or religious claim, rather than a scientific or historical one, your ability to show that is going to be very crucial and critical in this situation. But, at this point, my whole point in raising this is that there may be some inerrantists who just feel a bit uncomfortable with this way of resolving alleged discrepancies. And there may be many more errantists who feel that such a method of answering alleged contradictions is subjective, it’s



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special pleading, and they would therefore tell inerrantists that if the use strategy—if I can put it that way—is the best that can be done to remove the alleged error, then it’s not good enough. The use approach is not an altogether unmixed blessing, then, I would have to say.

Let me point to a second implication from Wittgenstein’s ideas on meaning and language in his later philosophy. Suppose the proposition that we are considering is the following: The Bible is inerrant. You could substitute, if you like, the biblical passage John 17:17, where Jesus says, “Your word is truth.” Either one of those propositions will do for the point I’m going to make. Now the question here that I want to ask is: what do either of these propositions mean? And are they true, or are they false? If we adopt Wittgenstein’s approach in his later philosophy, we would have to say that Wittgenstein would tell us, “Look at the proposition’s use and its language game, and you’ll have your answers.” But then, what is the language game? And, whatever that language game, in that language game does one speak of truth or falsity of propositions? The answer that could be given would be: The Bible is inerrant. That proposition is a proposition in the language game of religion. In that language game, propositions are not assertions of empirical facts about the world in the way that propositions in the language game of science are. Consequently, whereas it does make sense to ask whether the propositions of science are empirically true or false, it doesn’t make sense to ask whether propositions of religious belief are true or false, nor does it matter if they’re empirically false. They aren’t being used in the way the propositions of science are, and thus one shouldn’t expect any of them—including propositions like “The Bible is inerrant”—to be factually, empirically true.

Indeed, there are modern philosophers who’ve argued that statements of religious belief are not empirically significant, let alone true, for they’re not being used in that way. We are going to talk about some of them once we get into our discussion of Paul van Buren and his form of “God is dead” theology. But, now, if those notions are applied—the idea that a religious language is not making an empirical assertion that’s either capable of truth or falsity in the way scientific or historical statements are—if those notions are applied to the proposition, “The Bible is inerrant,” you could come up with the following conclusions: You could conclude, for example, that if one insists on treating the proposition as empirically significant, it’s false, because of supposed errors in Scripture. One might also conclude that, given



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its language game, the proposition, “The Bible is inerrant” isn’t being used as a statement of empirical fact, so one should not really ask whether it’s true or false.

A third conclusion that seems to follow from this is that talk about biblical inerrancy or biblical errancy is mistaken. These notions should be dropped altogether, and they should be dropped because such talk mistakes the use of a proposition in its own language game, a language game that’s different from that of science, in which one does make statements about the empirical world that are true or false.

Let me turn to another implication of Wittgenstein’s views in his later philosophy. You remember Wittgenstein claimed that each language game is logically distinct or independent of every other language game. Let me apply that to the inerrancy issue in the following ways: The notions of errancy and inerrancy that are built on truth and falsity seem to presuppose that we are dealing with matters that are to be verified or falsified as though they were matters of science; that is, there was some way to show that these propositions are asserting things about the world and to verify or falsify the assertion. However, when you realize that the Bible is filled with religious beliefs, and then you recognize if Wittgenstein’s views are correct about independence of language game, you recognize that the biblical statements are not the same kinds of things as the propositions of science. To think that they involve evidence in the way that science does is, to use Wittgenstein’s language, “destroy the whole business.” Thus, it doesn’t even make sense to speak about the errancy and inerrancy of these propositions. To do so is, in Wittgenstein’s terminology, “to make a big blunder.”

In addition, you could claim that the same comments could be made in regard to the statements of Scripture that appear to be purely historical or scientific. You could say, for example, using Wittgenstein’s notions that since these statements appear in a religious book, we have to see them as part of the language game of religion, not as part of the language game of science or history.

However, if such statements are to be treated as part of the religious language game, and if that language game is logically independent of the language games of science and history, then it no longer makes any sense to speak about errancy or inerrancy of any Scripture, if by those terms we mean truthfulness or falsity of these terms. And by truth and falsity, we mean correspondence



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to the way the world is or lack of correspondence to the way the world is.

One final implication of Wittgenstein’s views of language appeals to his view that language games, as a whole, are not to be justified but merely accepted. As a result of that, religious propositions, as a whole, are not to be doubted or justified. They are just to be accepted. Of course, if this is true, I cannot then speak about the inerrancy or errancy of such propositions, because I’m defining these concepts in terms of truth and falsity. But truth and falsity are not supposed to apply to the language game as a whole.

Someone hearing this might respond: But, look, even if you don’t justify the language game as a whole, can’t there be justification of specific items within the language game? For example, granted that one doesn’t justify the language game of religion as a whole, can’t one justify certain things within the language game, like specific propositions of Scripture? The answer, I think, that Wittgenstein would give is that there is obviously justification within a language game, but it’s justification according to the rules for justification that pertain to that language game itself. While one does not justify the whole language game of science, for example, you may indeed justify or disprove a specific hypothesis that falls within the broad domain of science.

Still, the cause of inerrancy is not helped, I think, when we remember that Wittgenstein said that language games are logically independent of one another. And then he said that the language game of religion has a very distinctive character. One can speak about justification of religious beliefs, but not as though they are to be proved or disproved by evidence, as if they were scientific propositions. To do that is to treat them as though they are scientific or historical propositions, maybe even are in the language game of science and history; but Wittgenstein says no, they aren’t in that language game at all.

In fact, religious propositions even turn out to be just as certain as scientific propositions, according to what Wittgenstein says; but their equal degree of certainty doesn’t indicate the same kind of certainty since the language games differ. As a result, religious propositions have meaning, they have use, they are certain, they even have a certain justification within their language game; but since Wittgenstein holds that in that language game there is neither proof nor disproof, as in science or history, there is still no validity in applying the terms inerrant or errant to propositions



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of religious belief, because those words are used typically in the inerrancy discussion to speak of a notion of truth and of falsity that is relevant to verification of propositions, either empirically or some other way. But surely that, according to Wittgenstein, is not what religious propositions are all about.

I think you can see, then, that the views of the later philosophy of Wittgenstein can be, to a certain degree, helpful to theology; but they can be also very devastating to certain forms of theology, especially orthodox theology. You see: it’s not as though Wittgenstein would say that religious propositions are meaningless and that they speak of nothing whatsoever. We’re not going to come to the same conclusion that the logical positivists did, but he is going to say that they are not meaningful as assertions of fact about the world. The person who uses religious propositions is using them to do something different. He may be using them to state his own personal convictions. He may be using them to state his own intentions to act in a certain way. What he is not doing, though, with such propositions is making assertions about the empirical world. If he thinks that that’s what he is doing, then his propositions turn out to be false, and we might even go so far as to say they are meaningless.

It seems to me here that the fundamental problem, at this point, is with Wittgenstein’s demand that the language games are absolutely, logically independent; and also with his view of the nature of the religious language game. It seems to me that it’s hard to deny that language is a complex of language games, but it seems to me that the idea that there is no overlap between any of these language games is problematic. In addition, I think that there are just many of us who would say that in the language game of religion, we are not just expressing emotion, opinion, conviction, intention to act in a certain way. We are also saying some things about the way we think the world is and the way the universe is. I find it, at this point, very intriguing to see what Wittgenstein is doing. Wittgenstein, in a good bit of his later philosophy, tells us that language games are things that we observe. In other words, the intent in his later philosophy is not to prescribe what should be in a language game or how it should work, but rather to describe what he sees. After all, a form of life is a form of life. This is the way a thing is. But when it comes to the language game of religion, he does not so much describe the way people use language as prescribe what they must mean when they use religious language.



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Indeed, I am sure that there are some who use religious language to perform just exactly the kind of functions that Wittgenstein thinks it does perform; but there are also an awful lot of us who use it to do something further, mainly, make assertions about reality. And if Wittgenstein were true to the basic principle of his beliefs on language games, that what he’s doing is not prescribing the nature of a language game but describing it, I think he would’ve said, All right. There are people who use religious language in this way. Now if that’s the way we’re using it, let’s see if there’s any way to show that they’re using it to make sentences that are true or false.

Enough on Wittgenstein at this point. Let me move to the last topic for our course: the God Is Dead theologies. I think you will see, as I begin to talk about this movement—the notions in analytic philosophy in Wittgenstein in particular—get adapted and adopted for the purposes for certain of these theologians.

The God is dead theologies wound up being very popular, if we can use that term, in the 1960s in particular. As with the other movements that we’ve discussed in this course and the other theologians, we can’t look at every God is dead theology; but I want to give you two examples of this kind of theology.

The first one that I want to turn to is the theology of Paul van Buren. In particular, I want to look with you at his book The Secular Meaning of the Gospel. This was published in 1963. Even though the whole of this book, I think, is very interesting and would be profitable for us to study, my purpose here is to look specifically at the parts of that book that lead van Buren to declare that God is dead. We also, in looking at those portions of the book, want to find out just exactly what he means when he says, “God is dead.”

Van Buren begins by posing what he believes is the problem for modern man, who would at one and the same time be a Christian and yet lives in a secular world. He raises the problem that confronts the modern Christian from the writings of three different theologians and philosophers. First of all, he points to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s comments about Christians living in a world—to use Bonhoeffer’s phrase—“come of age.” In that kind of world, men and women no longer believe in a transcendent realm where their longings will be fulfilled by and by. In this world in which we live, in the twentieth century, one must live, Bonhoeffer says, as though there is no God. Now Bonhoeffer doesn’t want to throw out Christianity altogether, though; so he offered a



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nonreligious interpretation of biblical concepts, is the way he refers to it.

Van Buren says Bonhoeffer’s work ultimately leaves us with the following question: How can the Christian, who is himself a secular man, understand his faith in a secular way? Not only does van Buren begin with Bonhoeffer, but he also begins by appealing to Antony Flew. Antony Flew is a contemporary atheist philosopher, and van Buren appeals to an article written by Antony Flew, published in the work New Essays in Philosophical Theology. Flew begins that article with a parable; and then, of course, he wants to make a point on the basis of that parable. Let me read the parable to you, because this is part of the background of the whole work by van Buren. Flew writes:

Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, “Some gardener must tend this plot.” The other disagrees, “There is no gardener.” So they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. “But perhaps he is an invisible gardener.” (This is the statement of the one who believes in him.) So they set up a barbed-wire fence. They electrify it. They patrol with bloodhounds. But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No movement of the wire ever betrays an invisible climber. The bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not convinced. “But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves.” At last the Skeptic despairs, “But what is left of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?”

Flew concludes: “A fine brash hypothesis may thus be killed by inches, the death of a thousand qualifications.” And, of course, the point that Flew wants to make is that religious assertions about belief in God are of the same nature as these assertions of belief in an invisible gardener. Ultimately, they come to amount to nothing. They die “the death of a thousand qualifications.” As van Buren says, the point that Flew is making is not entirely unlike Bonhoeffer’s point. I quote van Buren,



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Whatever ancient man may have thought about the supernatural, few men are able today to ascribe reality to it as they would to the things, people, or relationships which matter to them. Our inherited language of the supernatural has indeed died the death of a thousand qualifications. Flew’s point is that the believer has said no more than the skeptic about how things are. His implied question, then, is reasonable and straightforward. Can the Christian today give any account of his words?

Finally van Buren, in setting out the problem for his study, turns to Bultmann and looks at Bultmann’s belief that the Bible presents a mythological worldview. We’ve already talked about that in this course, so I don’t need to review that with you. But what van Buren says is that, in light of the scientific revolution, as Bultmann suggests, we have a different way of thinking and seeing the world. It’s an empirical way, and because of this, we have to demythologize the Bible in order to get at the kerygma. That was, of course, Bultmann’s conclusion.

Having set out the discussion in this way, van Buren then notes that Bultmann made a proposal as to how to handle the message of the gospel and how to deal with Scripture. And yet van Buren says that Bultmann’s proposal has been criticized from both those who are on the right theologically and those who are on the left theologically. On the right—and here you’re going to see just how far right this is. It’s not as far right as orthodox theology. But on the right—he points to Karl Barth who claimed that Bultmann’s existentialist interpretation of the kerygma actually throws the baby out with the bathwater. Now Barth’s thesis is that one should not concern oneself with the problem of contemporary understanding of ancient thought, but instead we should concentrate exclusively on the content of their discipline, which is the biblical testimony to God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. The fact then, for example, that what Patristic thinkers said about Christ—that He was very God and very man—the fact that today that is literally nonsense doesn’t bother Barth. The emphasis still has to be on Christ, according to Barth.

Van Buren comments that Barth’s proposal rests on the idea that what we say may be considered without respect to how we say it. Now van Buren thinks that is wrong. He thinks it’s wrong, since language functions in a historical context always. And the twentieth century, twentieth-century America, in particular, is not the first-century Greece. Still, though, van Buren thinks that



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Barth is right to emphasize the need to focus on Christ, rather than on man or anything else. It’s just that we can’t be so oblivious to the language that we use, as Barth seems to suggest.

On the left of Bultmann, though, there is also complaint. The complaint against Bultmann from the left is that—and I quote here from van Buren—“His insistence on the kerygma and its historical foundation compromises his existentialist interpretation. It frustrates his intention to interpret the gospel in a fully contemporary way. In binding faith to a particular incident in the distant past, he has retained a mythological element which violates modern man’s self-understanding and leaves the gospel as incomprehensible as before.” What van Buren is saying here is that, according to the critics of Bultmann on the left, the problem with Bultmann is that he didn’t go far enough. He demythologized, to a certain point, but he didn’t demythologize entirely. In wanting to still have some emphasis, historically, in a particular person and particular incident in the past, he has not, in fact, brought this into the contemporary discussion enough. He needs to demythologize a little bit more.

As examples of this general criticism of Bultmann, van Buren offers Fritz Buri. And then, much more extensively, he shows what Schubert Ogden has said about this in Ogden’s work Christ Without Myth. According to van Buren, neither of these options—the option from the right or the option from the left—is satisfactory. He says, and I quote van Buren on page 12, “The Christian is asked to exist today either by forfeiting the world in which he lives and his involvement in it.” And, of course, for van Buren, that’s what the conservative option forces you to do. You hang onto Christ, but you ignore the fact that you’re living at the end of the twentieth century. So either it forces him to forfeit “the world in which he lives and his involvement in it, or by forgetting the historical basis of his faith and settling for Christ without myth, which turns out to be a Christ without Jesus.” Well, you can see the latter is van Buren’s complaint about the liberal reaction to Bultmann.

How do we get out of this impasse? Van Buren thinks that the way out of this impasse, created by these different reactions to Bultmann, as well as the answer to how a secular person who’s a Christian can understand the gospel—the way to handle that is provided by the strategy of linguistic analysis. In other words, van Buren’s proposal is to go back and look at our language about God and Christ, and see how we’re using it. In making this



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proposal, van Buren appeals heavily to logical positivism and to Wittgenstein, especially the later Wittgenstein. And what you’re going to hear in my description of his analysis of this will remind you very much of what we’ve just said a little bit ago about the later philosophy of Wittgenstein.

Well, what does van Buren suggest? As he notes, linguistic analysis and the analytic tradition, generally, is deeply rooted in the tradition of British empiricism. Linguistic analysis is related to logical positivism, of course, though it’s not identical with it. There are some linguistic analysts who were not logical positivists; and so we need to recognize that the two views don’t absolutely overlap. But van Buren is talking about linguistic analysts in general. In particular, though, van Buren appeals to the positivists’ verification principle of meaning. And he notes that on that principle, language about God as invisible, as transcendent, is absolutely meaningless. Van Buren says that the verification principle has continued to be important, but it has another function in contemporary linguistic analysis. He says that a modified verification principle is now being used to ask what sort of things would count for an assertion, and what sort of things would count against it. If we know that, then we can say in which language game the assertion is at home. This, of course, raises the idea found in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy: that the meaning of a sentence is its use in the language game.

I would just interject here that it is indeed debatable that the emphasis on use is, in fact, a modification of the verification principle, per se. But, in spite of that particular item, I think van Buren is surely right that the basic motivation behind interpreting various language games as games in which one is not making empirical statements is a thoroughgoing commitment to empiricism and to some form of the verification principle that rests on empiricism.

Well, what is van Buren’s proposal? Van Buren proposes to handle the problem of the meaning of the gospel by submitting its language to linguistic analysis in order to see how that language is used or how it functions. In making this analysis, we have to remember that modern men and women think empirically and pragmatically, van Buren said. They have the modern scientific worldview. Van Buren thinks that the way to handle the problem of the meaning of the gospel is to take seriously the conservative concern for Christology, on the one hand; the liberal concern with a contemporary way of thinking; and the logical analysis of

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theological statement. So his proposal is going to include those three elements: the emphasis on Christ; the need to focus on a contemporary way of thinking, so we state this in a way that makes sense in this empirically oriented, scientifically oriented society; and then an answer that appeals to the logical analysis of theological statement, so that we understand what we’re really trying to do when we use these sentences.

But, of course, for van Buren, the key is really going to be linguistic analysis. As he says on page 19, “A careful, functional analysis of the language of the New Testament, the fathers, and contemporary believers will reveal the secular meaning of the gospel.” As we’re also going to see, this tool of linguistic analysis becomes especially important in understanding whether language about God, in particular, has any meaning whatsoever.

In chapter two, van Buren addresses the concern for Christology at some length. In chapter three, he tackles the concern for understanding; that is, the concern to put our language in terms that contemporary men and women think about and understand. I think especially interesting in this analysis of contemporary ways of thinking is van Buren’s critique of both Bultmann and Schubert Ogden. I would, in fact, encourage you to read that and study that, as you have opportunity; but time and emphasis here in my lectures does not really allow me to focus on that item. Instead, I need to focus on what he has to say in chapter four, where you really get to the heart of van Buren’s concern. It is in that chapter that he turns to the analysis of theological language.

In my next lecture, I want to pick that up immediately and see what he says about how statements of religious belief and theological language should be understood.

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Later Wittgenstein and Death of God Theology...Transcript - ST503 Contemporary Theology I: Hegel to Death of God Theologies