Linguistic Analysis: A Way For Some to Affirm Their Faith

In the Middle Ages, philosophy was dubbed the handmaiden of theology. The servant rebelled during the 17th century, and most of the time since then, the two disciplines have gone their separate, sometimes hostile ways. But during this century, philosophy and theology have been groping toward a new and nonsubservient dialogue. The German disciples of Biblical Theologian Rudolf Bultmann found in existentialism a way to rephrase the eternal Christian message. In Britain and the U.S., other theologians are enthusiastically exploring a different direction--applying the philosophic method known as linguistic analysis to the clarification of religious thought.

A technique rather than a metaphysic, analysis rejects the traditional approach to such philosophic questions as the nature of being or the meaning of life, which they say cannot be studied in such universal terms at all. Instead, analysis limits itself to a modest but possibly more productive intellectual task: discovering the meaning of words and sentences by examining how they are ordinarily used, and by classifying different kinds of statements. Linguistic analysis grew out of a philosophic movement which had no use for theology: logical positivism. Such philosophers as A. J. Ayer of Oxford and Vienna's Rudolf Carnap, now a professor emeritus at U.C.L.A., argued that the only meaningful propositions were the analytic statements of logic and mathematics, or statements that could be verified by empirical procedures--which meant that the ethereal language of theology was literally meaningless.

Language Games. Many philosophers --including Ayer himself--have now backed away from that dogmatic view, thanks in large part to the influence of an eccentric Austrian-born Cam bridge don named Ludwig Wittgenstein, who died in 1951. Wittgenstein, perhaps the century's most important philosopher, believed that there was a wide variety of discourse--ranging from jokes to the "God-talk" of theologians --that could not be empirically verified, but nevertheless was useful and in some ways meaningful to man. Instead of dismissing this nonempirical discourse as nonsense, Philosophy should treat it as a "language game" and--without passing on its value--clarify the rules and make it more intelligible.

Many philosophers still regard theology as illogical nonsense; but within the past decade, a number of British theologians have increasingly found linguistic analysis to be a helpful tool in interpreting the religion "games." It has dissolved some of the old conflicts between science and theology, by making it clear, for example, that pastors speaking of God the Creator and cosmologists talking of the "continuous creation" of the universe refer to different and nonparallel propositions. It has made analytically minded theologians suspicious of the cloudy speculation that sometimes wafts out of German seminaries. More important, analysis has provided the theologians with a method of thinking that will help them make a fresh approach to such vital religious terms as soul, creation and mystery.

The Convert. In many U.S. seminaries, linguistic analysis is still treated as a foe of faith, although there is a growing band of theologians who strongly disagree. One young religious thinker converted to this new method is Paul van Buren of Texas' Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest, whose recent The Secular Meaning of the Gospel (Macmillan; $4.95) is a radical and controversial effort to translate a major theological issue into language that would pass the scrutiny of the philosophical analysts.

Van Buren's study focuses on the declaration of the Council of Chalcedon (A.D. 451) that Jesus was both man and the divine Son of God. Since secular-minded modern man does not understand or accept the notion of "divine," he argues, the church must find a logical but nonsupernatural equivalent of what the Chalcedonian Fathers were trying to express. Van Buren suggests that one persuasive way of referring to Jesus today is as a "remarkably free man." This description capitalizes on an adjective that is a touchstone of contemporary aspirations, but it concurs with the Gospel testimony. The Evangelists constantly refer to the personal authority of Jesus' teaching, his freedom from claims made upon him by parents and brethren, his departure from rabbinical teaching and disregard of the Jewish law.

After the Resurrection, the Apostles proclaimed Jesus the man as the Risen Lord and the Son of God. These words, says van Buren, were an attempt to describe their new understanding of Jesus in language appropriate to an age that saw God in every tree. In a technical term used by some linguistic analysts, the Apostles' expression of this faith was a blik--a statement that is not subject to empirical proof but has its own validity as an individual's interpretation of existence.

"Contagious" Freedom. How should the Christian church translate the Easter blik into contemporary language? Van Buren suggests that after the Resurrection the Disciples suddenly possessed some of the unique and "contagious" freedom that Jesus had. "In telling the story of Jesus of Nazareth, therefore, they told it as the story of the free man who had set them free. This was the story which they proclaimed as the Gospel for all men." Down through history, millions of others have been called by faith in Christ--which means, in van Buren's translation: "He who says, 'Jesus is Lord,' says that Jesus' freedom has been contagious and has become the criterion for his life, public and private."

Van Buren concludes that Christianity will have to strip itself of its supernatural elements to become believable again, just as alchemy had to abandon its mystical overtones to become the useful science of chemistry. Many Christians firmly disagree, and van Buren has been roundly charged with clarifying Christian doctrine to the point where there is hardly anything left of it. But even some theologians who disagree with van Buren's conclusions admit that Christian thinkers can no longer dismiss the linguistic approach as invalid or irrelevant. Professor Ian Ramsey of Oxford, a pioneer in relating linguistic philosophy to theology, goes so far as to argue that some analytical religious thinkers "are on the threshold of a theological revolution which might prove to be more significant than the relationship of Aristotelianism to scholasticism."

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