Wittgenstein and Interreligious Disagreement
A Philosophical and Theological Perspective
Gorazd Andrejč St Edmunds College
University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK
ISBN 978-1-137-50307-7
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-49823-6
ISBN 978-1-137-49823-6 (eBook)
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© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016
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To Žaklina and Natan
A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to the Woolf Institute, Cambridge, for the Junior Research Fellowship that allowed me to carry out the research which went into this book between August 2013 and December 2015. I profited greatly from the interdisciplinary spirit and academic freedom at the Institute, as well as the unique way in which serious scholarship is combined with public engagement at the Institute. I am also grateful to St Edmund’s College, Cambridge, where I was a research associate during this period. This made it possible for me to work long hours when needed, in the lovely atmosphere of the college, and with regular doses of coffee in the Senior Combination Room.
Many people deserve thanks for the various ways in which they have contributed to this book. I can only mention a few here. I want to thank especially those who have spent a lot of their energy and time to read various drafts of the chapters of this book, or to listen to my talks which were based on those drafts, and give me valuable comments and critique. First and foremost, I would like to thank Ed Kessler, whose patience with, and persistent interest in, my developing research for this book were a constant encouragement. His constructive criticism reflected his extensive knowledge in interreligious studies and experience in interreligious dialogue, from which I have profited greatly. Another friendly critic, who spent many hours to read my chapters, is Ulrich Schmiedel. I am deeply grateful for his insightful comments on the penultimate draft of the chapters of this book.
Next, I would like to thank other friends and colleagues who gave me valuable feedback on various parts of this book, either in written or
oral form, especially Boris Gunjević, James Aitken, Klaus von Stosch, Mikel Burley, Mark Wynn, Paul Hedges, Marianne Moyaert, Marius van Hoogstraten, Srđjan Sremac, Davor Marko, and Daniel Weiss. I would also like to thank Bradley Arnold, George Wilkes, Ben Humphris, Muhamed Jusić, Marko-Antonio Brkić, and Father Alban McCoy, with whom I have had numerous informal, but very stimulating and valuable, discussions on the topics of this book through the years.
I want to thank Pat Metheny and Jan Garbarek for their music, which is the best contemporary music I know and which provided a musical background to, and often spiritual inspiration for, the thoughts that went into this book.
Finally, the greatest thanks are due to my wife and son, Žaklina and Natanael Andrejč. Their love, support, patience, sacrifice, and closeness are an invaluable part of my life and have reached new depths while I was writing this book. Without them it could never have been written.
T HE W ORKS OF L UDWIG W ITTGENSTEIN
( W ITH A BBREVIATIONS U SED IN T HIS B OOK )
AWL—1979. Wittgenstein’s Lectures: Cambridge, 1932-1935, from the notes of A. Ambrose and M. MacDonald. Edited by A. Ambrose. Oxford: Blackwell.
CV—1998. Culture and Value—Revised Edition. Edited by G.H. von Wright. Oxford: Blackwell.
LC—1970. Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
LPP—1988. Lectures on Philosophy of Psychology, 1946-47. Edited by P.T. Geach. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
MWL—2016. Wittgenstein: Lectures, Cambridge 1930-1933, from the Notes of GE Moore. Edited by G. Citron, B. Rogers and D. Stern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
OC—1975. Über Gewissheit—On Certainty. New York: Harper and Row. PI—1968. Philosophical Investigations. 2nd Edition. Edited and translated by G.E.M Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell.
PG—1974. Philosophical Grammar. Edited by Rush Rhees, translated by Anthony Kenny. Berkeley: University of California Press.
RFGB—“Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough.” In Philosophical Occasions: 1912-1951, edited by James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann, 119–155. Indianapolis: Hackett.
RPP I—1980. Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology. Vol. I. Edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
RPP II—1980. Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology. Vol. II. Edited by G.H. von Wright and H. Nyman. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
xi
TLP—1974. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness. London: Routledge.
TLP1—1922. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by C.K. Ogden and F.P. Ramsey. London: Kegan Paul.
Z—1981. Zettel. Second Edition. Edited by G.E.M Anscombe and G.H. von Wright. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wittgenstein’s works are referenced in the book in the following way: In case the segment of the text referred to or cited is a numbered remark, the abbreviation of the work (for example, PI for Philosophical Investigations) is followed by the § sign and the number of the remark (like this: PI §124). In case the reference is to the page number of the book with the text in question, the abbreviation is followed simply by the page number (like this: CV 34, for Culture and Value, page 34).
There are only two exceptions to the above rule. The citations from and references to Wittgenstein: Lectures, Cambridge 1930-1933, from the Notes of GE Moore (MWL) include the number of Moore’s original notebook in question and the page number in it where the text appears, separated by a colon (for example, MWL 8:78). The citations from and references to the Tractatus are, following the established practice, to the number of the remark but without the § sign (like this: TLP 4.001).
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
In the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks of November 2015, an atheist propaganda video1 made in 2014 has experienced fresh rounds of shares and likes on social media. The video begins with a conversation between an ‘atheist’ and a ‘theist’. The atheist says that God has not Himself revealed to him, and even if he did, how would we know that ‘it wasn’t just some kind of delusion’? The theist reassures the atheist: ‘Oh, trust me, you’d know. God revealed himself to me.’ She is joined by a dozen or so ‘theists’ (this epithet appears written out above each of them) who all exclaim the same, namely that they all know God and that he speaks to them. They join the first theist in trying to convince the atheist that, since they all agree on this, he should believe in God as well.
But then the ‘theists’ start arguing between themselves. The Muslim expresses a disagreement with a Christian who claims that God reveals himself through Jesus Christ. The Methodist and the Catholic disagree about whether one can be saved by faith alone or by faith and works. The Baptist and the Universalist disagree whether hell exists or not, and so on. When the cacophony of disagreeing voices becomes so noisy that one can hardly understand anything, the Jew and the Muslim in the group who disagree over whether the Holy Land has been given to the Jews by God or not, start pointing guns at each other. Eventually, the Jew raises a fighter jet to end this particular disagreement. At that point, the atheist— clearly representing ‘the voice of reason’ in the video—says:
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 G. Andrejč, Wittgenstein and Interreligious Disagreement, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-49823-6_1
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OK everyone, calm down! Put the fighter jet down! If God is speaking to all of you, and he appears to be telling all of you very different, contradictory things—perhaps this rather glaring discrepancy can be explained if we examine the fact that your relationship with God seems to be precisely shaped by the culture in which you were raised, and the predominant version of God you were taught to believe in. … Typically, religion obeys borders, while truth does not. In America, God is Jahve, and in India, God is Vishnu. Truth does not behave in this way. In America 2 + 2 = 4, and in India, 2 + 2 = 4 also. If God’s message to us was so dire, so vitally important, then why wouldn’t he give it to us in such a clear and precise way so that we would all be in agreement, as evident as a simple math problem in which there is universal agreement, rather than trusting his precious message to be spread by fallible, corruptible human beings? (‘Do You Know God?’)
After his short speech, which the atheist has hoped would enlighten the religious listeners, the ‘theists’ simply resume their disagreements and the cacophony continues undisturbed. Presented as the only reasonable person who also has relevant knowledge, but a person who believers unfortunately do not listen to, the atheist then turns his back to the group of disagreeing believers and walks away, upright, not losing his time with them anymore.
This video presents a well-known piece from the arsenal of atheist apologetics, called The Problem of Religious Diversity (Harrison 2013, 478–483). In this book, I do not attempt an elaborate response to this atheist/agnostic argument. Others have done and will continue doing so.2 I have summarized the video because it includes widespread assumptions about interreligious disagreement, popular, at least, in the more secularized societies. One such assumption is that religious disagreements, either interreligious or interdenominational, are obviously and sheerly irrational. The only rational resolution to them is to explain away all the conflicting religious beliefs as delusions. Another popular assumption reflected in the video is that religious disagreements lead inevitably to conflicts, and hence they ultimately lead to war. In response, it assumes that the atheist’s message is the most peaceful and the peacemaking one (‘OK, everyone, calm down! Put the fighter jet away!’). The only problem is that this message is unheeded, so the evil caused by religions continues. This is not an unusual picture of religious disagreements. Although these assumptions are problematic, simplistic, or simply false, there is some truth in them. After the world had seemed, in the mid-twentieth century, to be heading inevitably towards secularization, and religion had seemed
bound to lose influence (how grand and miscalculated generalizations these now seem!), interreligious and interdenominational disagreements appear to have returned as important factors in politics and international relations. Indeed, despite the continuing secularization in Europe, they are seen as an increasingly worrying sign of our post-secular times. Our unease with such disagreements has to do with a revived perception that they lay behind several terrible conflicts and humanitarian disasters of the modern world, and that they very often seem unresolvable. We do not normally expect interreligious disagreements to be resolved doctrinally, at least, let alone ‘once and for all’, on the basis of evidential procedures and rational arguments. In other words, we do not expect different religions to resolve their differences in matters of belief and wait that most of the world ends up sharing one religion (or, as atheists would wish, having no religion at all)!
But this does not necessarily mean that religious disagreements are simply irrational, as the atheist video presents them. Rather, it is to say that most of us are aware on some level that interreligious disagreements are, normally, of a deep and difficult kind. It is common among philosophers and theologians nowadays to observe that people of different religious traditions who disagree over matters of faith operate with disparate semantic systems. Grammatically different concepts and claims frame the very thinking of the believers of different faiths and orientate their lives. Disagreements across religions often involve misunderstandings, or a lack of clarification or definition, which makes any meaningful communication, let alone intelligible discussion, difficult. But the challenges are not always due to misunderstandings. Indeed, even when this is not so, the disagreement normally persists. And yet, it need not be seen as irrational. Religious disagreements can be seen as ‘speech situations in which reason is at work’, but which happen ‘within a specific structure of disagreement that has neither to do with a misconstruction that would call for additional knowledge nor with a misunderstanding that would call for words to be refined’ (Ranciere 1999, xi).
Such a perspective has strong affinities with a number of Wittgenstein’s remarks on language, religion, and, indeed, on (inter)religious disagreement. Theology should be thought of ‘…as grammar’ rather than ‘science’ (PI §535, LC 57–59), Wittgenstein affirms, and the concept of God is more like the concept ‘object’ (a basic and central concept of grammar which enables us to talk about reality at all), rather than a term for any particular object or a class of objects in the world (CV 97). In Chap. 2, I will
argue that this conception of religion—I will call it ‘grammaticalist’—is not the only conception of religion in Wittgenstein. But it is an important one, reflected also in Wittgenstein’s remark (as recorded by G.E. Moore) that ‘different religions treat something as making sense, which others treat as nonsense: they don’t merely one deny a proposition which other affirms’ (MWL 8:78)—a remark to which we shall return a few times in this book. According to the Wittgensteinian grammaticalist conception, then, interreligious disagreements can lack a common framework or criteria for its resolution, such that can more easily be found for disagreements over empirical or ‘non-religious’ historical propositions.
The atheist propaganda video mentioned above does not pay attention to this. It presents all confessional and interreligious disagreements as grammatically non-problematic, propositional disagreements. It presupposes that a deceptively simple idea of ‘mathematical truth’ of simple rules of arithmetic like 2 + 2 = 4, which, in philosophy, are customarily considered as necessarily true, should apply to all beliefs of all religions. But, if Wittgenstein’s remark is even partly on the mark, sometimes the differences between beliefs of different religions are less like the disagreement between 2 + 2 = 4 and 2 + 2 = 5, and a bit more like the difference between asserting 2 + 2 = 4 in a decimal system and asserting 2 + 2 = 4 in a binary system; in the former, this is clearly or ‘necessarily’ true, while in the latter it is nonsensical. Another message of the video is that, since the disagreeing parties are not willing or able to consider scientific evidence which appears to defeat their beliefs (cultural contingency of their beliefs, psychological factors, and so on), the disagreements are bound to deteriorate either into a shouting competition (in the video, the Pentecostal who is speaking ‘in tongues’ seems to be winning that particular competition) or even an armed conflict. However, according to the grammaticalist Wittgensteinian picture above, the solution to (inter)religious disagreements—if a ‘solution’ is a sensible concept here at all—will most likely not be reached through scientifically modelled evidence game, at least not primarily. Given the life-guiding and depth-grammatical nature of most central religious concepts and beliefs, and given that different religious cultures give rise also to somewhat different criteria for what is rational to believe, at least in the domain of religion, there are good reasons to think that seeking resolutions through scientific evidential reasoning is not the most promising way to resolve such disagreements.
This book aims, with the help of Wittgenstein, to avoid simplifications of interreligious disagreements, such as that portrayed in the video
mentioned at the beginning. It tries to understand them in their considerable complexity and propose a way of seeing and dealing with them which will, hopefully, help us (inter)religiously disagree in better ways.
SCHOLARLY CONTEXTS, AND CONTENTS OF THE CHAPTERS
This book is envisioned as a contribution to the following scholarly contexts: Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion, Wittgenstein and theology, and theology of interreligious relations. But I also need to say a few words about a scholarly context which I am not addressing directly, the analytic epistemology of religious disagreement and the reasons why I am not doing so.
In the analytic philosophy, at least in the English-speaking world, the topic of religious disagreement (interreligious or/and interconfessional) has recently achieved considerable attention, within a currently flourishing subfield of epistemology, the epistemology of (peer) disagreement. Essays such as that of Inwagen (2010), Oppy (2010), Audi (2011), and Vainio (2014) all address the question of rationality of holding (on to) one’s religious beliefs in the face of extensive (inter)religious disagreement. In other words, the question they seek to address is whether a person who persists in her particular religious beliefs which appear to contradict those of many others, even in the face of persistent disagreement and after rational resolutions have been attempted, ‘violate[s] any of their epistemic duties’ or not (Inwagen 2010, 11).
Graham Oppy (2010, 197) recognizes that there are many circumstances which make an assessment of rationality of one’s religious beliefs in the face of religious disagreement extremely difficult, such as ‘differences in starting points’, the fact that disagreement is ‘on a relatively wide range of topics’, the fact that ‘there is not total transparency of reasons for beliefs about religious matters’, the fact that our religious judgements are often not ‘independent of the judgements that other people make’, and the fact that ‘there is mutual knowledge’ which interferes with the particular disagreement in question. Nevertheless, or perhaps party because of these considerations, he still feels confident to conclude that ‘there can be reasonable rationally sustained—peer disagreement on questions about religion’ (ibid.). His talk of ‘alethic impurity’, the possibility of ‘blamelessly accepting false testimony’, and so on (ibid. 198, italics added), reveals that he aims to be responsive to some normative standard of ideal rationality,
even if the ‘interesting cases of “real” peer disagreement’ (ibid. 196) are often far removed from that ideal, due to the factors mentioned above.
In one of the most recent contributions to this debate, Olli-Pekka Vainio concentrates on the most widespread and ‘deeply entrenched… cognitive heuristics and biases that have effects on our reasoning’ (Vainio 2014, 44, 40), and thus contribute to the persistence of interreligious disagreements. The biases such as ‘Self-Serving Bias’ (‘We are harsher towards an out-group than an in-group’), ‘Confirmation Bias’ (‘We automatically seek to confirm our present beliefs and neglect the conflicting evidence’), and ‘Groupthink’ (‘If a significant majority of the group favors a particular solution it is increasingly difficult for individual members to oppose the majority’) (ibid. 41–43) impact heavily on our decisions what to religiously believe (or persist in believing) or not in the face of interreligious disagreement. Vainio goes furthest than most participants in this debate in his recognition of the baffling plurality of religious beliefs and disagreements. He rejects any general rule that would define ‘the [epistemically] proper way of conduct in all possible cases of disagreement’ (ibid. 46). Rather, ‘we need to consider every case as unique’ (ibid. 47).
Furthermore, Vainio, following William Alston (2006), comes closest to responding to Wittgensteinian concerns in trying to take seriously the fact that, in (inter)religious disagreements, we not only disagree about particular claims but also ‘about the criteria of how to evaluate those claims’ (ibid. 50). He suggests that, since there are multiple ‘epistemic desiderata’—such as ‘adequate evidence’, ‘sufficiently reliable belief-forming process’, ability to ‘carry out a successful defense of the probability of truth’, and so on (Alston 2006, 39–57)—each having a different normative force in different communities (different religious communities can have different cultures of reasoning), a highly complex approach to assessing the rationality of religious beliefs in the face of disagreements is needed:
From the Alstonian perspective it could be possible to recognize degrees of rationality of competing claims … [,]… recognizing this irreducible plurality of values and worldviews and meeting it with multiple relevant criteria of evaluation could be seen as a fruitful way to evaluate, communicate, and criticize beliefs; this would prevent the slide to simplistic standoffs and enable the possibility of transcommunal discourse, when the competing parties have multiple epistemic desiderata to choose from and which they recognize as their own. (Vainio 2014, 54)
At the end, Vainio agrees with Robert Audi (2011), that ‘[religious] commitment is a “‘life-choice” rather than just “cognitive-choice”… [which] rules out all straightforward solutions to demonstrate the truth or falsity of religious (or any) worldviews or convictions’ (Vainio 2014, 55). He still values ‘examination and evaluations of these convictions’ but concedes that the ultimate answer as to why (and how) this should be done is ‘theological’: ‘to secure good religious grounds for growth in virtues and knowledge … is possible only from a very conscious and strong religious identity’ (ibid. 55).
Vainio’s essay is interesting since, in the first part of the essay, he appears to be applying concepts such as ‘rationality’, ‘evidence’, ‘probability’, and so on, to religious beliefs in a non-problematized way, typical of much (but not all) of the analytic philosophy of religion. The talk of ‘biases that have effects on our reasoning’ (Vainio 2014, 40) seems to presuppose something like the idea, if not the actual possibility, of Perfect Rationality: ‘the idea of a being who is perfectly (fully, completely, ideally) rational’ (Heal 2008, 49), but from which the biases make us depart. In the latter part of the essay Vainio suggests that there are no good reasons for a hope that Perfect Rationality could be achieved. Interestingly, however, he still hopes that Alstonian epistemic desiderata approach would ‘enable the possibility of transcommunal discourse’ (ibid. 54; italics added) which would allow for considerable criteriological plurality and particularism in addressing interreligious disagreements but would nevertheless ground the hope to ‘construct an adequate theory of rational religious commitment’ (Audi 2011, 296; quoted in Vainio 2014, 55). Does this entail that the idea of Perfect Rationality is sensible and coherent even if it is not achievable?
I do not see a clear answer to this question in Vainio’s reflections (to be fair: the essay does not set out to answer it). What is clear, however, is that a Wittgensteinian approach, like the one I try to develop in this book, must proceed differently. In her essay ‘“Back to the Rough Ground!” Wittgensteinian Reflections on Rationality and Reason’, Jane Heal explains well why the later Wittgenstein ‘does not talk much explicitly about reason as a general concept’ (Heal 2008, 47), or suggest any general criteria for, or theory of, epistemic justification of beliefs. The reasons have to do with Wittgenstein’s peculiar conception of philosophy, which will be examined in Chap. 2, and with the later Wittgenstein’s understanding that our
need for some notions in the area of ‘reason’ and ‘rationality’ are rooted in our ability to engage in discursive and persuasive linguistic exchanges. But
because such exchanges can (as Wittgenstein emphasises) be so various, we should expect the notions to come in many versions, shaped by history and culture. (ibid.)
Communally agreed criteria of rationality are achievable only when the community operates with common-enough meanings of concepts they use, agreed possibilities of their logical correlations (their grammar), and at least some commonality in values. But these things, of course, vary with culture, religion, historical period in which we live, and often even from person to person. Explicating, again, the later Wittgenstein’s understanding, Jane Heal continues:
A person’s concepts … are not given once and for all. They are open to questioning, development and replacement. The use of any concept rests on presuppositions, for example about what it is worth aiming at or about empirical regularities in the world. As assumptions about these things change, concepts change and language develops. … There is … no end to the project of making presuppositions explicit. The formulation of a claim which was presupposition-free would require use of concepts which are guaranteed to apply in all possible worlds, concepts which could not be inept or unusable, whatever developments occurred. … But the idea of such ultimate metaphysical/conceptual simples, the referents of risk-free concepts, dissolves into incoherence when we try to think it through. (Heal 2008, 54)
Perfect Rationality, then, is not only unachievable but nonsensical. The attempts to understand (inter)religious disagreements with a background idea that what is rational is generally so, even if granting that different ‘epistemic situations’ and ‘biases’ make epistemic justification context dependent, are doomed to failure. ‘There is … no such thing as what perfect rationality demands of me or you here and now, because there is no given, context independent, set of beliefs and desires for the demands of rationality to bite on’ (ibid. 56). The question of meaning of the concepts we use, of convergences and divergences in those meanings, and the questions of what Wittgenstein calls the ‘depth grammar’ of different language games (PI §664, §7) are prior to any elaborate theory of, or systematic approach to, the rationality of beliefs. Wittgenstein’s philosophy, therefore, investigates uncomfortable and deeper questions than the question of what is rational or irrational to believe, or which biases and factors interfere with our rationality and block us from attaining perfect
rationality. He even writes that ‘[when] you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there’ (CV 74).
Now, this does not mean that, from a Wittgensteinian perspective, no ‘reasoning’—that is, no ‘reason-giving discussion’ (Heal 2008, 61)—is ever possible on religious matters across religious boundaries. But, so far as different religions do use different concepts that are life-guiding and central to their respective internal reasonings, sensible and religiously meaningful interreligious communication which can involve reason-giving will not be easy to achieve. This book will focus, then, on the questions prior to any such discussion, questions such as: What does it mean to say that different religions operate with different meanings of their central concepts? Do the resemblances between religions have a role in enabling interreligious communication despite their divergences? Are there different kinds of interreligious disagreements and, if so, how could these different kinds be described and what is there significance? Can anything like ‘transcommunal discourse’ (Vainio 2014, 54), in which interreligious disagreements would be straightforwardly propositional, be achieved? And, what do we mean by ‘interreligious’ and ‘religion’ here, anyway? Can philosophy help us understand all this? Or can theology help us understand interreligious disagreements better than philosophy? Can the two be combined in this task, and if so, in what way?
I will approach these questions with the help of Wittgenstein’s descriptive, conceptual method of investigation and his approach to ‘religion’ in particular. But I will also proceed by examining theological perspectives on these topics in some detail, especially those by chosen theologians who have engaged with Wittgenstein’s thought. Since my own theological background is Christian, and since Western Christian theology has grappled with Wittgenstein’s thought quite extensively and for several decades, I will take as my main conversation partners three Christian theologians who have, both, (1) engaged with Wittgenstein in creative and different ways, and (2) directly addressed the questions about interreligious understanding and disagreement I am addressing in this book. They are George Lindbeck, David Tracy, and David Burrell.
These theologians belong to different schools of thought in Western Christian theology of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. The Lutheran Lindbeck is a co-founder of postliberal theology, Tracy could be described as a liberal Roman Catholic (at least for the most of his career), and David Burrell belongs to the so-called Wittgensteinian or Grammatical Thomist school in the post-Conciliar Roman Catholic
theology. Their readings of Wittgenstein are different and influenced, of course, by the theological standpoints and visions from which they proceed, respectively, but also vice versa: their theologies are, to different extents (Burrell’s the most), influenced by their respective readings of Wittgenstein. For this reason, and because all three continue to have considerable influence not only in the theology of interreligious relations but in contemporary Christian theology more generally, I will—in Chaps. 3, 5, and 6—devote considerable space to the examination of their interpretations of Wittgenstein, their engagements with philosophy more broadly, and their theological outlooks, before turning my attention to how each of these theologians approaches interreligious dialogue and disagreement in the final parts of each of these chapters.
The primary goal of this book is to understand how Wittgenstein has been and can be interpreted in order to elucidate interreligious disagreement. But my examination of Lindbeck’s, Tracy’s, and Burrell’s readings of Wittgenstein and the related themes in their theologies also has a secondary goal, which is to respond critically to what has become perceived as a dominant kind of ‘Wittgensteinian theology’ today: the postliberal application of Wittgenstein which is traced back to the influence of Hans Frei and George Lindbeck. Lindbeck’s book Nature of Doctrine (2009) has been particularly influential in framing the postliberal approach to interreligious encounters. I will focus on this book in my examination of Lindbeck’s work in Chap. 3, where I will explain how Lindbeck takes up and develops the grammaticalist conception of religious language which we can find in Wittgenstein.
However, if we read Wittgenstein more carefully and holistically than does Lindbeck, we find other conceptions or ‘pictures’ (PI §1) of religion in Wittgenstein’s work as well. I call them existentialist, instinctivist, and nonsensicalist conceptions of religion; I will describe these, together with the grammaticalist conception, in Chap. 2. These conceptions of religion can inform, be combined with, or indeed rejected by theology in interesting and varied ways. We shall see that a somewhat different uptake of Wittgenstein’s conceptions of religion from that of Lindbeck is found in Tracy’s work (Chap. 5), who focuses more on the existentialist conception of religion than do Lindbeck and Burrell. Burrell, who takes Wittgenstein’s understanding of philosophy programmatically and puts it to work, in a quite particular way, throughout his philosophical theology, takes most seriously the grammaticalist and the nonsensicalist conception
of religious language (Chap. 6). This makes his approach notably different from both Lindbeck’s and Tracy’s.
Under the influence of Lindbeck’s interpretation, Wittgenstein’s relevance for interreligious studies has become associated with the view that different religious languages are and remain incommensurable and untranslatable ‘in such a way that no equivalents can be found in one language or religion for the crucial terms of the other’ (Lindbeck 2009, 34). An important part of my response to this interpretation of Wittgenstein will be developed in Chap. 4, where I will suggest how interreligious communication can nevertheless be achieved in spite of grammatical disparities between religions. Importantly, I will do this from a Wittgensteinian perspective, which affirms ‘[the] common behaviour of mankind [as] the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language’ (PI §206) and emphasizes ‘the importance of finding connecting links’ (RFGB 133) between forms of life and meanings in different religious traditions. The conceptual framework for addressing the problem of incommensurability will be developed in critical conversation with relevant anthropological and historical scholarship, on the conceptual relations between Western Christianity and African Nuer religion (Evans-Pritchard 1956; Needham 1972; Lambek 2008), and on Hellenism as a common language into which different religions of the Greco-Roman world are said to have been translated (Assmann 2008; Smith 2008), respectively.
The possibilities of reading Wittgenstein on religion in a richer way than the exclusively grammaticalist interpretation allows have become clearer to me primarily through studying recent research in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. As a result, I engage little in this book the classic repertoire of Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion: the works of Peter Winch, Norman Malcolm, Rush Rhees, and D.Z. Phillips (Phillips is the only one of these ‘big four’ whose work does feature in this book). Their valuable earlier contributions to Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion (Phillips’s work was particularly productive and continued to develop until the very end of his life) have resulted in lively discussions in the philosophy of religion and paved the way for the more recent and somewhat different interpretations. In this book, I will interact with the recent scholarship which does not always have Wittgenstein’s approach to religion in focus but aims to re-examine the received ways of reading Wittgenstein in the light of new and careful textual and exegetical work on Wittgenstein’s major writings—principally, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP, TLP1)
and Philosophical Investigations (PI)—other philosophical remarks, lecture notes and lectures (as written down by his students or colleagues), personal notes, even personal letters, and so on. I will engage mostly with the work of Oskari Kuusela, David Stern, Stephen Mulhall, Daniel Hutto, Russell Goodman, Brian Clack, and Robert Plant, but also Severin Schröder, Joachim Schulte, Robert Fogelin, Genia Schönbaumsfeld, Gabriel Citron, John Canfield, Martin Kusch, Jose Medina, and Danièle Moyal-Sharrock. Stern (1995, 2004), Kuusela (2008, 2014), Goodman (2008), and Citron (2012) especially have influenced my understanding of the nature of the later Wittgensteinian philosophy, while Plant (2005), Schönbaumsfeld (2007), Mulhall (2007, 2015), Clack (1999a, b), and Citron (2012) have importantly, but in different ways, influenced my understanding of the possibilities of reading Wittgenstein on religion. I lay out, both, my understanding of Wittgenstein’s philosophy more generally, as well as my reading of Wittgenstein on religion in particular, in Chap. 2.
In this way, the book aims to contribute both to Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion and Wittgenstein-inspired theology. In fact, it is evident from Chap. 2 and from my application of this approach in Chap. 7 that I do not see these two fields as strictly separate. Philosophy and theology work best when they are significantly interrelated and interpenetrated, although they are and need to remain distinct intellectual disciplines. I will explain my interpretation and application of Wittgenstein to the relationship between philosophy and theology in the final section of Chap. 2, where I will also address the important topic of the relationship between descriptive and normative aspects of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Differently from most Wittgensteinian philosophers of religion, I will argue that Wittgenstein’s conceptions of religion also have normative aspects. Moreover, in Chap. 7, I will take these conceptions, together with their normative force, on board and apply them theologically. A proper understanding of the dynamics between descriptive and normative aspects of both philosophy and theology will, therefore, prepare the reader not only for my critical engagement with Lindbeck, Tracy, and Burrell but also for my application of Wittgenstein to the topic of interreligious disagreement in Chap. 7. I try to be as explicit as possible about when my intellectual moves in investigating interreligious disagreement are descriptive and when normative.
Finally, this book also aims to contribute to the field of Christian theology of interreligious relations, a broad term that I use to denote various approaches to interpreting, with ambitions also to guide Christians in,
interreligious encounters (discursive, activist, practical, in various areas of life, ritual, and so on).3 Instead of directly entering methodological debates within this field, such as that between the theology of religions approach, adopted by Perry Schmidt-Leukel (2009, 90–105), and comparative theology approach, adopted by Clooney (2010, 14–16) and Stosch (2007), I hope that my comparative reflections on how Lindbeck, Tracy, and Burrell read Wittgenstein and how they approach interreligious communication and disagreement will prove a fresh and valuable contribution to theological explorations of interreligious relations in their own right, and perhaps shed light on some of the current debates in this field indirectly. Notably, Tracy and Burrell have both contributed significantly to comparative theology (c.f. Tracy 1990a, b; Burrell 1986, 1993, 2011a, b), and Lindbeck has contributed greatly to the ideological background of the now wellestablished movement and practice of Scriptural Reasoning (c.f. Adams 2006, 2013). Examining their approaches in some depth, both in terms of how they read Wittgenstein and negotiate between philosophical and theological investigations as well as in terms of how they interpret interreligious disagreement, can, to an engaged and informed reader, shed some critical light on the recent literature in the theology of interreligious relations, such as that of Adams (ibid.), Cornille (2008), Barnes (2011), and Stosch (2012a, b, 2015).
Of the theologians I mention above, Klaus von Stosch is the only one (apart from Lindbeck, Tracy, and Burrell) with whose work I will engage more extensively in this book, especially in Chap. 7. His approach to interreligious communication, like mine, takes Wittgenstein as the main philosophical conversation partner and methodological guide, which makes him a natural conversation partner for me in this context. When I finally develop my own approach to interreligious disagreement in Chap. 7, I will do this in two stages. First, I will engage in a predominantly descriptive investigation by examining comparatively two actual verbal exchanges from Bosnia-Herzegovina which constituted, or at least appeared to have constituted, interreligious disagreements. By doing this, I want to show both the elucidating potentials and some limitations of a descriptive philosophical investigation for understanding ‘real’ interreligious disagreements, as well as the limitations of theologically guided approaches to examine such phenomena descriptively.
Second, I will offer a normative Wittgensteinian interpretation of interreligious disagreements, which will be intertwined with my theological perspective and developed in conversation with, and partly based on the
theologies of, Paul Tillich and Klaus von Stosch. I will be applying my interpretation of Wittgenstein on religion, laid out especially in Chap. 2 but also in the later chapters, to the central questions of this book mentioned above, building on the work of Lindbeck, and even more on the work of Tracy and Burrell, analysed in the earlier chapters. I will try to show how Wittgensteinian conceptions of religion can further a theological understanding of, and indeed guide our approach to, interreligious disagreements, also beyond the ways suggested by Lindbeck, Tracy, and Burrell. It is my hope that the ways in which I learn from Wittgenstein in the task of addressing interreligious disagreement will be of some use not only to other Christian philosophers and theologians but also to my fellow philosophers and theologians of other traditions of reasoning, both religious and secular.
NOTES
1. ‘Do You Know God?’ (2014).
2. For useful overviews of the philosophical discussion of this question see Basinger (2002) and Harrison (2013).
3. See, e.g., Cornille (2008, 2013), Schmidt-Leukel (2009), Clooney (2010), Barnes (2011), Moyaert (2014), Stosch (2012a, b, 2015, Forthcoming), Leirvik (2014), and Adams (2006, 2013).
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