12/29/2021 – How Does Religious Language Work?

Is the sun a god…or a goddess? What does it mean when people talk about God, enlightenment, salvation, karma, sin and all the other religious words religious people use? You wanna find out? Stick around dudes and dudettes. This is TenOnReligion.

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This episode is based on John Macquarrie’s book, God-talk: An Examination of the Language and Logic of Theology. So, in ancient Egypt the sun god, Ra, was male, but in ancient Japan the sun god, Amaterasu, was female. In one sense there is no real question here because the sun does not belong to the class of entities about which one can assert maleness or femaleness as neither really provides objective information about the sun. What this means is that when one studies language, one can’t really go too far in separating language from the language-speaker. Let’s talk for a minute about language in general and then get to religious language in a minute.

Language can’t be cut off from the personal existence and world in which language arises and has life because that is what gives it its meaning. But one also cannot go too far in the other direction. Language isn’t entirely in our heads as a thinking subject such that we make a world out of all the things we experience. The balanced view is that language shapes the world that we see but also that the physical environment we experience shapes our language. It seems like a two-way street but it’s actually a triadic relation. Person A talks to Person B about something, the Subject matter. How that is said is language. The context, or discourse situation, is key. If you overhear me having a conversation with someone about strikes, you might think I was talking about baseball, but instead it could actually be bowling, or labor unions. How the word is being used in a larger context matters. Because people who speak a specific language all use the same words, they are public and thus transcend any particular discourse situation. This gets tricky because when something is said in a given situation, the language might imply something more or something different than was explicitly intended by the speaker. This characteristic of language makes possible misunderstanding and also makes necessary interpretation and the working out of hermeneutic principles. Communication may fail if shared presuppositions are lacking, that is to say, if there is not a common universe of discourse. For instance, an ancient myth might both express and represent something, yet it would fail to communicate to any person who no longer shared the presuppositions of that mythical discourse, and to them the myth would be mean [crickets] nothing. What would be required in such a case would be a new act of interpretation if what the myth expressed and represented is to be meaningfully communicated again.

What then can be said about religious or theological language? Can it be verified empirically through sense experience? Perhaps, but more on that later near the end of the video. A better question is can it be falsified, as in, can one point to evidence that would count decisively against the belief in question? Story time. A man is crossing the street and gets narrowly missed by a bus. He said, “God loves me. The bus didn’t hit me.” On another occasion he is struck by a bus and injured. This time he says, “God loves me. The bus didn’t kill me.” Finally, he is actually killed by the bus. But now his friends say, “God loved him. For God has called him out of this unhappy and terrible world.” The ground of verification shifts each time, and it seems that nothing that might happen could be taken as falsifying the religious belief. But anyone trying to press this point just shows their ignorance of what religious language actually is.

Now if one tries to eliminate the transcendent nature of the religious language, what happens? If the religious language only has value in expressing the personal and social life while rejecting any “religious” account of the universe, or if all religious language is assimilated into moral language such that it’s a kind of poetry helping us to form our life and character, then religion kinds of turns into non-religion, right?. So, where does that leave us? A few steps will help lead the way out of the forest, metaphorically speaking. First, there are many languages. This will become important because all languages cannot be reduced down to one “super-language” in the same way that all colors cannot be incorporated into one “super-color.” Second, many words have a diversity of meaning, such as my “strike” example, and so language needs to be understood in the context of the discourse situation out of which it arises. Third, and this gets interesting, is the common use of indirect language, which happens a lot in religion such as myths, symbols, analogies, or parables. What these three points mean is that it cannot be assumed that one language or mode of expression can say all that the others say such that the interpretation can be complete. It is always a reciprocal process in that each language or mode of expression sheds light upon the other, and at the same time receives light from the other. This is why Google Translate can easily fail because the equivalent concept does not exist in both languages.

To get to the heart of what religious language is, we need to talk about myth, symbol, and analogy. Myth is constructed from a community. Its language is often dramatic, employing the actions of people or religious beings. Its language is evocative meaning it’s more like poetry – more about images than concepts. It is immediate such that the distinction between what is literal and what is symbolic hasn’t happened yet. A lot of people don’t understand this because in this state of immediacy, the symbol and what it symbolizes have not yet been separated out from each other. The logic and categories of myth are a little bit alogical. They tend to enter into a world of fantasy from our modern perspective, and so much so, that the ordinary usage of the word “myth” has come to be used in a negative sense for an absurd or incredible story. But this does not mean that the myth should be described as absurd. Lastly, religious myths often have supernatural agencies involved. But we have to be careful not to attribute to them distinctions which had not yet emerged. The heavens and underworlds of mythology were spiritual or religious regions rather than physical regions. They were not to be taken too literally. The ascension of Jesus to heaven in the New Testament book of Acts doesn’t mean he’s in orbit around the earth. Such religious myths were adopted by communities as cohesive forces in terms of a basic ideology to explain that community’s history and purpose. Myths fails to communicate when people no longer participate in the presuppositions on which the mythical talk was supported. So, a hermeneutic is required whereby the self-understanding can be disengaged from its mythical setting and restated in the language of existence. The myth gets broken, its symbols are recognized as symbols and are elucidated by an existential interpretation. This does not necessarily imply that the symbols are to be discarded. It might be that their evocative power is such as to make them worth retaining, and that they may even be able to illuminate the existential terminology. However, the symbols would no longer be embedded in the dead language of myth but recognized in their symbolic character and explored in their existential connotations. Many religions have this such as the idea of a nation in Judaism, the anchor in Christianity, or the yin-yang image in Daoism.

This leads us to symbol. An important German scholar named Rudolf Bultmann became famous for his writings on demythologization. In spite of its negative-sounding name, demythologization does not aim at the elimination of myth but at its interpretation, and more specifically, its existential interpretation. But mythological language cannot be entirely translated into existential language. The language of myth is resistant to get rid of its concrete, pictorial, or imagery character, because it wants to speak about a level of reality transcending the human level, and if one is to speak at all of the ultimate mysteries of religion, one cannot avoid using an indirect language of images. This is the problem of symbolic language. The best analogues are almost always self-interpreting, whereas symbols frequently require much explanation of background before one begins to see where they are pointing. Look at the example of a sign vs. a symbol. Take the cross in Christianity which can be viewed as a sign. It does not fully participate in the actual meaning of what it represents because it’s only a piece of wood. Water, on the other hand, is commonly used in many religions in some form of purification because it can be viewed as a symbol. It both represents cleansing and actually cleanses in reality. Symbols only remain symbols for as long as they successfully point to the reality which they symbolize. This depends on a background of shared ideas within which the symbols can operate because without conceptual clarification of the symbol’s meaning, it would lapse into utter obscurity and could not perform its function.

And now, analogy. Is religious language really meaningful, or is it just, to put it bluntly, a kind of mumbo-jumbo nonsense that we go through because it is a well-established tradition or because it affords us some comfort and enjoyment or because it is supposed to inculcate in us “desirable” moral attitudes? Unless one can say that it is meaningful, if people were really honest, why not just get rid of the whole shebang? This means that unless we can produce some reasonable account of the logic of analogy, there is no support for ways of talking about religion, except the via negativa – we can only say what it isn’t, not what it is because it’s ultimately inexpressible. Taken solely by itself, the via negativa leads straight to non-religion. One way to look at it is to say that religion expresses not “a being” – as in God is a being, for example – but rather religion expresses “Being” as in “Being-itself.” Analogy is simply finding something that is like or similar enough to something else so it can be used as a communication tool. Although this does become a bit paradoxical. Simply to affirm an analogue or symbol is to fall into some kind of over-literalness which, when taken too far in religious language, leads to a breakdown. Whatever symbol or analogue is affirmed must at the same time be denied; or, better still, whenever one symbol is affirmed, others that will modify and correct it must be affirmed at the same time such that no one image should have a monopoly over all the others. One shouldn’t hold on too closely on one aspect to the neglect of others.

These three ideas, myth, symbol, and analogy, all connect religious language with existential language; how people understand and interpret existence. Now I promised we’d get back to empirical language as it relates to religion and now is the time. What can one empirically say about religion? There is the large field of natural theology. There are historical assertions which can be verified by archeology and reasoned through historical methods. In the past, and to a lesser extent, in the present, communities believed in and made arguments through the use of things like miracles and prophecies. There is personal religious experience and the related concrete results of faith that can be seen in human experience of those living out their religious ideology.

I realize that some of this seems subjective. So, if one begins with a language of existence, is it possible to break out of the subjective circle? Is one just describing what is it like to live as if there were such religious entities as God and as if such entities direct and inform us about our own lives and the universe? If this is merely an “as if” then all such religious language fails. But…internal coherence in religious language within a given religious community tends to be more important than whether or not religious language can be aligned with empirical reality. A lot depends on whether one accepts or rejects the account of the transition from the language of existence to the language of Being. Our anxiety about our own existence and its limitations creates the capacity for causing us to notice situations to which we would normally remain oblivious. There is a thinking in which we are passive rather than active. A thinking in which we hold ourselves open and in which Being discloses itself to us, and has the initiative in this disclosure, so that one could truly say that this is Being, thinking and speaking in us, rather than we are thinking and speaking of Being. And that, my friends, ends John Macquarrie’s book.

So, what do you think about his explanation of myth, symbol, and analogy? Does it adequately account for religious language? Leave a comment below. Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, support the channel in the link below, please like and share this video and subscribe to this channel. This is TenOnReligion.