**MISSING FIRST PAGE, PG 19**

a computer. Uncustomarily, they made plans to leave before the computer finished its last long series of names.

On the last day of the computer's run, Chuck and George said good-by, but the monks did not seem to mind, because they knew that the machine was running smoothly and that in just a little while their work would be culminated. Early that evening, the two engineers rode the tough mountain ponies down the winding road from the lamasery toward the old DC3 which they arranged to have waiting for them at the end of the runway. As they descended, the cold, perfectly clear Himalayan night settled in, ablaze with the now familiar, friendly stars. The end of the story is worth quoting at length:

. . . George glanced at his watch.

"Should be there in an hour," he called back over his shoulder to Chuck. Then he added, in an afterthought: "Wonder if the computer's finished its run. It was due about now."

Chuck didn't reply, so George swung round in his saddle. He could just see Chuck's face, a white oval turned toward the sky.

"Look," whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything.)

Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.1

The story, as we know, is just fiction. But it suggests the universal preoccupation of men with our language about God. To put it in a rather contemporary way, it is hoped that study of religious language moves us closer to a deeper understanding of God and our relation to Him. Understanding "God-talk," as it is frequently called, does not give any magical influence over divine activity in the world. Neither does the attempt to clarify language about God somehow drain religion of its proper mystery or God of His deity, as our story suggests. It seems that, whatever our relation to God, it is at least linguistic: however inadequately and however differently we may talk of God, we still must talk of God. The only real choice is whether we will do it carefully and self-consciously or uncritically and irresponsibly. To do it carefully, as I see it, is the fundamental motivation of philosophical examinations of religious language.

In this paper, I want to discuss the philosophy of religious language, or alternatively, the linguistic analysis of religion. The discussion divides naturally into three parts. First, it is necessary to survey the general philosophical interest in language which has prevailed in our day, and the main theories of language which have emerged from it. Second, it is enlightening to trace the implications of philosophy of language for religious language, especially Christian language. Third, it is fascinating to explore some of the areas of direct concern to those of a Wesleyan persuasion and to suggest, even if tentatively, how they are affected by these approaches to religious language, although nothing definitive and systematic has been done in this area.

It is helpful to bear in mind throughout this treatment that the various analytic schools were all interested in the same basic questions, such as "How do words get their meanings?" and "How can any use of words be justified?" Furthermore the various analytic schools agreed that these kinds of questions could be answered by finding a theory which would specify the proper relationship of language, on the one hand, with thought and reality, on the other. What distinguishes the analytic schools from one another is that they give quite different answers to the same fundamental questions. Recognizing this is a key to fully understanding the impact of analytic philosophy-through any one of its schools-on religious language.

The development of analytic philosophy in this century falls into four phases: common sense realism, logical atomism, logical positivism, and conceptual elucidation. Each historical phase was characterized by a distinct view of the nature and function of language. In the early realism phase and the later elucidation phase the basic notion was that the ordinary language is adequate for its purpose and is the repository of our most fundamental philsosophical commitments. On this view, the analysis of ordinary language should reveal and clarify the assumptions which we commonly make about reality, knowledge, values, etc. However, according to the phases of logical atomism and logical positivism, ordinary language is fraught with confusions and must be supplanted by a rigorous and precise language. Though atomism and positivism differed in their specification of what this new technically perfect language

should be, they agreed that constructing such an ideal language is the philosopher's main task. Let us now review how these two motifs of ordinary language analysis and ideal language analysis find expression in the appropriate phases of the analytic movement.

Realism at the turn of the twentieth century was formulated by G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell. They were spokesmen for the growing discontent among professional philosophers with the absolute idealism of F. H. Bradley, a view which held that all individual finite things are ultimately unified in one overarching mental or ideal Reality, and that their plurality in human consciousness is merely in appearance.2 Perhaps the foundational document of the realistic movement was Moore's "Refutation of Idealism" (1903) which argued for the independent status of perceived material objects subject to real external relations.3 The early writings of Moore and Russell articulated and defended many important realistic, anti-idealistic themes: matter is not reducible to mind; universals are not reducible to particulars; sense perception and ordinary judgments about it are trustworthy; and, with Moore, goodness is a real, but non-natural property known by intellectual intuition.4 As the realistic movement developed through the first quarter of this century, Moore became entrenched in his common sense position and Russell gradually became skeptical of it.

By 1918, Russell's philosophy was clearly changing. His publication of "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism" was a pioneer effort to formulate a metaphysical interpretation of the import of logic.5 Just a few years before, Russell had collaborated with A. N. Whitehead on Principia Mathematica (1910-1913) and had thus already developed a rigorous and technical logical apparatus for philosophy.6 But the shining achievement of the movement was undoubtedly Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), a notoriously difficult book which espouses the view that traditional philosophical problems are due to logical and linguistic confusions and that such difficulties can be solved by generating a rigorous logic for language.7 Although Russell and Wittgenstein differed somewhat over the exact nature of the ideal language program, they essentially agreed that elementary units (i.e., atoms) of language, thought, and reality could be correlated with each other and structured according to logical form.8 Language which cannot be so structured is devoid of meaning.

Logical atomism was but another stage in the gradual evolution of the analytic movement. Atomism was eventually replaced by what is probably the best known of the analytic schools, logical positivism. Logical positivism thrived approximately from the beginning of the Vienna Circle (1922) to the outbreak of World War II, though positivists were active into the mid-1950s. The rallying point for the positivists was the verifiability criterion of meaning. According to this criterion, no statement could have cognitive significance or meaning unless it could be verified in empirical experience. This doctrine soon led to the rejection of metaphysics and theology as cognitively significant, a reduction of ethics to emotive expression, a conventionalistic or formalistic view of mathematics and logic, and a notion that all sciences were in principle unified by the empirical method.9 Interestingly, most of these perspectives were wrongly attributed to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, an error which he was later to correct and in doing so initiate yet another historical phase of the analytic movement. Other foundational writings of positivism include: Rudolf Carnap, The Logical Syntax of Language (1934); and A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (1936).10 The basic task of philosophy came to be understood as that of clarifying the proper logic of empirical meaning and verification for the sciences. All other areas of language (e.g. metaphysics and ethics) which are not readily amenable to strict empirical standards became viewed as cognitively meaningless.11

The logical positivist movement was plagued both by its own internal difficulties and by external criticism. Internally, positivism was unable to verify itself by its own empirical standard. Externally, it was unable to account for the empirical status of universal generalizations (to unobserved empirical events) as the laws of science. As positivism struggled to deal with these problems, the verifiability principle transmuted into strong and weak versions, and then into a falsifiability principle, and still fell short of the goal for a perfect logico-empirical language.12 Furthermore, the great German genius, Wittgenstein, decided to free philosophers from the spurious ideal. As Wittgenstein put it, "a picture [of language] held us captive," and we must reject it in order to find the correct understanding of our language.

The appearance of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (1953) marked the beginning of a major trend toward ordinary language analysis once again.13** Another influential work which arose independently of the investigations, Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind (1949)," also expressed the same ordinary language theme: what is needed in philosophy is a detailed description of how common language actually works rather than a new schema for logically perfect language. Wittgenstein, Ryle, and others such as John Wisdom and J. L. Austin, advised that we look to language to elucidate the role of important philosophical concepts (e.g., "cause," "mind," "pain," "knowledge," "will," etc.). Like Moore's early realism, this new stage of conceptual elucidation rested on the belief that traditional philosophical theories end in puzzlement and confusion when the implicit conceptual structures of ordinary language are misunderstood or ignored. So the emphasis returns to ordinary language analysis as the way to eliminate the philosophical puzzlement.

Of the four stages of linguistic analysis in the twentieth century, only the first-early realism-developed no clear and definite theory of the nature and function of religious language, though some extrapolation could be made as to what the early realistic doctrines would imply.15** However, subsequent stages of the linguistic movement involved quite interesting and important views of religious discourse which must now be reviewed.

The logical atomism of the early Wittgenstein seems to recommend mysticism about the ultimate matters of religion. But the mysticism in question is not the popular type which typically involves extraordinary and unusual experiences. Instead it is a sophisticated realization that there are certain "givens" to the philosophical mind about which it can only wonder and never formulate complete explanation.

Early in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein claims that two of these "givens" are the very existence of the world and the necessity and universality of logic. Regarding the world, he begins by affirming that

(1) The world is all that is the case.

He then explains that the world is the totality of individual facts. Facts relate how things are; but that there is anything at all is mystical:

it exists.

Since only discrete facts are capable of being asserted, or "said," the world as the totality of contingent facts is an object of sheer wonder.

Furthermore, the conditions of factual or empirical assertion (or "saying") are the laws of logic. But the conditions of assertion cannot themselves be asserted (or "said"); they can only be "shown" or "made manifest," according to the Tractatus:

(4.1212) What can be shown, cannot be said.

or rather they represent it.

So, logic too is an object of wonder; it is in a real sense, mystical.

This general sense of the transcendental and mystical leads Wittgenstein to talk about other ultimate matters which also seem to lie beyond simple empirical assertion: the self, values, the meaning of life, and God. Consider just a few of the relevant passages in the Tractatus:

41. The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists-and if it did exist, it would have no value.

421. It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental.

52. We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have

These remarks by Wittgenstein are particularly intriguing in light of another emphasis which he has-that all I can know of the empirical world is what my own cognitive field contains of it, and that my cognitive field can contain no more than what my language can deliver. Consider:

5. (5.61) Logic pervades the world: the limits of the world are also its limits.
6. (5.61) . . . The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world.

These and other aphorisitic statements in the Tractatus express what many commentators call Wittgenstein's peculiar form of solipsism, linguisitc solipsism.16 This is the position that all I can say about the world is what I can empirically experience, and that the boundaries of empirical experience are somehow linguistically defined. Yet there is a religious character to my experience of the world which I cannot put into meaningful assertions. I want to say more about myself, values, God, and other absolute concerns, but I cannot. The implication here for religion, then, is what we may term linguisitc mysticism.17 According to this position, any attempt to assert the meaning of life or the existence of God or the like must therefore be viewed as a trivialization, entirely beside the point of ultimate importance (cf. 6:41 above).

The implications of logical positivism for religion are much easier to explain than those of logical atomism. Essentially, positivism's most direct point of contact with religion is the verifiability criterion of meaning, or the later falsifiability criterion of meaning. Probably one of the most familiar positivistic attacks waged on religion, using an empirical standard of meaning, was Antony Flew's "Theology and Falsification."18 Flew claims that no statement is cognitively significant unless it is falsifiable in empirical experience. Any statement which is not thus testable is thereby meaningless, neither true nor false. Flew then argued that religious believers refuse to allow their statements even to be tested, much less falsified, by what appears to be strong negative empirical evidence. Hence, their claims are cognitively meaningless, not to be taken with intellectual seriousness.

Flew makes his point by relating a parable about a Believer and a Skeptic who are exploring in a jungle. The explorers come upon a clearing where many flowers and many weeds are growing. The Believer says, "Some gardener tends this plot." The Skeptic replies, "No gardener tends this plot." So, they pitch their tents and set a watch to see whether a gardener will come. They do not see a gardener and thus erect an electrified barbed wire fence. Still no gardener is detected. So they set out bloodhounds with no better results. Test after test uncovers no gardener, contrary to what the Believer had thought. The Believer is driven to modify his original claim again and again until it ultimately means an "invisible, intangible, eternally elusive" gardener, which Flew calls "death by a thousand qualifications." In other words, the Believer eliminates all empirical meaning from his assertions until they cease to be assertions at all.

Logical positivism lands in what I call linguistic reductionism. In effect, what positivism does is to require that religious statements conform to the strict empirical standard of meaning appropriate to scientific claims. Thus positivism reduces religion to science and then conveniently finds it lacking. It is now history that positivism did greatly clarify our thinking about the meaning and empirical reference of certain areas of language, but eventually failed even to make full sense of science, much less of religion. At best, positivism opened the way for philosophers to look elsewhere for the meaning of ethical statements. Theories of emotive meaning, moral meaning, and eschatological meaning, among others, gained currency. But it is also history that these theories, having assumed that positivism had crowded religion out of the cognitive sphere, also failed to find fully adequate meaning for religious language.

Arid positivism had to be overthrown. Who better to overthrow it than Wittgenstein whose misunderstood Tractatus gave impetus to the movement in the first place? Wittgenstein rethought the whole notion that the elements of language, thought, and reality could be neatly correlated with one another and structured by perfect logical form. He decided that this orientation produces "mental cramp." Wittgenstein set out to discover new insights about words and meaning in his Blue and Brown Books, which he begins with the question "What is the meaning of a word?" But his most notable achievement in this area is his Philosophical Investigations. The essential claim of the Investigations is that the meaning of a word cannot be identified with one constant thing or concept. Instead he came to hold that

He insisted that this emphasis on use is not just another theory of meaning, in which case it would be subject to overgeneralization and rigidity in the same way classic theories had. No one constant element can always supply the meaning of any given word. Language is too rich and varied for that. Words are invested with meaning through being used in various ways in language.

Furthermore, according to Wittgenstein, language itself is really a composite of "language-games." What this metaphor of "language-games" suggests (at the risk of oversimplification for brevity's sake) is that there are different areas of human language, each with its own set of implicit rules, meanings, uses, and purposes. In this way, we might call science, religion, ethics, and other contexts of speech "language-games." The insight which emerged out of this very fertile idea is that it is absurd to require talk in one language-game to conform to the rules and practices appropriate for talk in another language-game.

Hence, for our interests, positivism is mistaken because it tries to make religious language subject to the standards of meaning and truth for scientific language. Each area of language is as legitimate as any other, though they are all different. And, Wittgenstein reminds us that it will not do to try to specify something common to all games such that the various language-games might also be judged by common standards:

In other words, empirical investigation of the ways we actually use language supports Wittgenstein's thesis that there are many uses for language and many sources of meaning. Religious language, then, must have its own legitimate uses and appropriate sources of meaning which can be determined by close study.

Much of what Wittgenstein says about the variegated texture and pattern of our human language seems correct. Many authors have adopted his approach and have provided more thorough studies of religious language per se, particularly Christian language. These authors generally accept the later Wittgensteinian idea that language is a human activity, and perhaps the distinctively human activity, and then set out to examine the linguistic activity of religion. Paul van Buren is one who has done this in his book, The Edges of Language, a work which explicitly claims to be an application of Wittgensteinian insights to Christianity.21 Van Buren's aim is not to argue that Christianity is true, but to describe the various modes of discourse actually employed by professing Christians. His approach is quite typical of the neo-Wittgensteinian penchant for what Carl F. H. Henry calls impressionistic lexicography, which focuses attention exclusively on grammar and function, and hence becomes "talk about talk."22 This approach, as enlightening as it may be about the ways we actually do use language-even religious language, has come to serve a purely descriptive, not normative, role. It essentially takes religious language usage at face value and tries to delineate its inherent logic and application. It arrives at what are variously called "linguistic models," "grammatical maps," "paradigms cases," and so forth, for religious language.

Although it could be argued that van Buren and other linguistic philosophers of religion do not understand the later Wittgenstein (much as the positivists did not understand the early Wittgenstein),23 their work is typical of most contemporary linguistic philosophy of religion done under his impact. Philosophers under this influence view the Christian religion as a distinctive way of speaking about the world and experience, and thus of interpreting the world and relating oneself to the world. To become a Christian, whatever else might be involved, is to become competent in a certain distinctive way of speaking about and, hence, of interpreting, the world.

However, van Buren and others generally lose sight of the further question which arises after this distinctive way of speaking has been properly described: Is the Christian language-game valid, are its linguistic paradigms adequate-in short, is Christianity true? Paul van Buren and others never question whether the Christian language-game ought to be played, whether Christian language ought to be used at all. At most, they say that it expands our horizons, gives added dimension to life, provides a new way of interpreting the world of experience. But they seldom raise the question of whether it is true. This neglect leads rather obviously to what I call linguistic relativism. Just as the linguistic philosophers of religion have told us that the Christian language-game is as valid as those of science, ethics, romance, etc., they would presumably have to admit that those of Hinduism and Buddhism are also equally valid. In short, many neo-Wittgensteinian philosophers are remiss in providing grounds for internal revision within, say, the game of Christian God-talk, and in specifying the grounds on which the objective truth of Christian language can be judged.24

Remaining with van Buren as our representative linguistic philosopher of religion, we can detect certain misplaced emphases and mistaken commitments which lead him and others to linguistic relativism. First is the idea that not the proposition (or truth-claim) but the word (or propositional component) is the proper locus of genuine religious meaning. Hence linguigtic analysis of religion is frequently an analysis of words whose grammar or logic can be elaborated into a whole model or paradigm.25 But this means that propositional claims of a religion lose significance in deference to words, and hence that the question of truth and falsity does not tend to arise. Second, many linguistic philosophers of religion have at least implicitly capitulated to the positivist insistence that literal truth belongs primarily to the domain of scientific, empirical facts. Hence, philosophers of religion look elsewhere for the significance of religious discourse, such as its ability to organize human experience, instill hope, and so forth.26 The main reason van Buren says that Christianity is at "the edges of language" is precisely because he tacitly accepts the positivistic picture that the clear straightforward center of language is occupied by science. By positivistic standards, then, Christian language is out at the limits of language, stretching and straining at the boundaries of our human discourse, trying almost to say more than can meaningfully be said and running the risk thereby of lapsing into total meaninglessness.27

Linguistic philosophy of religion today, done under the impact of the later Wittgenstein, hag resulted in a number of important studies of Christian language by van Buren and others. But it is not always apparent just what hearing these studies have or could have on the concerns of the Wesleyan-Arminian wing of Protestant Christianity. In this last section, I venture some exploratory remarks about the application of linguistic philosophy to certain concerns which those of Wesleyan-Arminian persuasion have. Although the list of such concerns might grow quite long, I select here just two: biblical authority and Christian experience.

First, the whole issue of the authority of Scripture is perhaps more alive today among evangelicals themselves than it was a generation ago between the conservative evangelicals and the liberals. Various labels are employed to denote a "strong view" of Scripture: inerrant, infallible, authoritative, divine, absolutely trustworthy, sufficient, and so forth. The general field of religious language seems to have some application to this very important concern, particularly in respect to the nature of the inspiration in the giving of the Scriptures and to their continuing intrinsic nature.

First, some comments on the giving of the Scriptures. Neo-Wittgensteinians make a great deal out of the meaning of language arising from a shared form of life. Mutual understanding of language, they hold, develops from a common background among persons. The implication of this for any notion of verbal inspiration of the Scriptures would seem to be that God is (if not "wholly other") "significantly other" and does not seem to share our human form of life. Van Buren makes this kind of point when he reminds us of wittgenstein's remark that if a lion could talk, we could not understand him-the clear implication being that we and lions do not share a common background.28

Now these neo-Wittgensteinian insights at least throw up a caution about portraying our knowledge of God in a glib and simplistic way, and at most provide one more reason for rejecting a strict verbal or dictation theory of biblical inspiration. However, I believe that Wesleyans can go a long way toward satisfying the neo-Wittgensteinians at this point, and in doing so find deeper understanding of some of our own cherished doctrines. We affirm both that God was in Christ and shared our common human life and that God is the sovereign Creator who made man in His image-affirmations which suggest important areas of commonality between human and divine. And, if the neo-Wittgensteinian emphasis on commonality is correct, it provides an interesting and somewhat unexpected critique of competing religions which are non-incarnational and which make God so wholly other or transcendent that man has nothing in common with Him.

Second, a few remarks about the implications for the whole issue of biblical authority vis-a-vis the present intrinsic nature of Scripture and how to characterize it. There is a general insistence among evangelicals that the Bible is somehow "infallible." Yet the neo-Wittgensteinian approach to ordinary language reminds us that language is an imperfect and developing human tool, a growing and changing organism, a phenomenon in which there is no inherent standard of exactness or precision, and so on. On the one hand, this kind of linguistic suggestion would seem to eliminate our using words such as infallible" to evaluate the character of Scripture. And yet I think that this point is well taken if we mean by "infallible" that every term and proposition must be taken literally, as though it could not have been expressed otherwise, as though God directly carved each phrase out of stone. On the other hand, if we take this linguistic insight seriously, it supplies a healthy way of understanding our present written Word of God. Whatever else the language of the Bible is, it is fallible human language, and as such allows no transcendent or absolute criterion of exactness or precision. Language is not a static entity but an activity, according to modern linguistic philosophers. And, as an activity, it is more or less adequate for its purposes. The Scriptures, then, are perhaps better characterized in terms of their adequacy, trustworthiness, effectiveness to accomplish relevant purposes. It is in this sense that Wesleyans can call the Bible "infallible" or "inerrant." This approach still takes into account its divine or miraculous aspect, since it is entirely compatible with God's moving and guiding the human writers as they use human language.

The second general point of interest for Wesleyan-Arminians is that of Christian experience. The Wesleyan emphasis on the reality of Christian experience, whether in initial conversion, subsequent sanctification, or daily confirmation, can be understood in new and fresh ways by drawing insights from linguistic philosophy. If one gets past the anti-supernaturalistic bias of some theories of religious language (e.g., any view which entails that Christian experience is wholly explicable in naturalistic terms and hence that Christian language does not really refer to any supernatural person or activity), then he can still benefit from much of what linguistic philosophers of religion have to say about Christian experience.

To begin, linguistic philosophers typically hold that "experience" is not just an emotional or non-cognitive phenomenon. Instead human experience is linguistically conditioned.29 In other words, our distinct language or language-game is the repository of our beliefs, values, and categories-most of which we simply inherit by being born into or initiated into a certain community of language users. And any experience is conditioned by this framework of beliefs, values, and categories, such that a purely and strictly emotional experience would be nothing to us. To have significance, experience must be interpreted by conceptual commitments which we have, and these reside in a very real way in language. This gets at what Wittgenstein called the difference between "seeing" and "seeing as."30 Applying this insight to experience in general, it may well be that we never have pure, uninterpreted experience, which we then interpret through some temporal process. Rather, we always experience some object or situation in the light of an existing interpretation. We see, or experience, linguistically.31

To elaborate this theme, we next need to realize that persons with a different language or language-game thereby hold different conceptual commitments. And persons with different conceptual commitments have qualitatively different experiences. This accents the importance of mastering to a high degree the Christian language-game: It is a key to having proper Christian experiences of all the relevant Christian realities. Furthermore, since a language-game is fundamentally a public phenomenon, the Christian public, or better, the Christian community, must undertake to examine the experience of its members. It makes this examination in large part by what its members say-by how well its members have mastered certain distinctively Christian ways of speaking about their experience.

One conclusion which can be drawn from all this is that no experience per se, not even what we call Christian experience, can be properly understood apart from its being linguistically conditioned. But this entails that it is the conceptual structure, residing as it does within a specific linguistic structure, which makes any experience meaningful or significant. Hence studying the language which embodies the conceptual structure becomes very important. The purely emotional dimension of one's experience, so to speak, is determined by a host of other factors, including chemical reactions, the state of the nervous system, and his unique personal history-and thus are deeply personal and private, not capable of being fully felt by or communicated to anyone else. Only insofar as our Christian language, and with it our Christian conceptual structure, is shared, can we have common Christian experience. This recognition should prompt a measure of humility in talking of one's personal experience with God, and remind us that the conceptual dimension is not divorced from but is intimately connected to the experiential dimension of Christianity.

The importance of the linguistic philosophy of religion in the twentieth century cannot be underestimated. During its development, it progressively forced religious believers to be more responsible in their talk of God, and now offers believers helpful approaches to a host of serious issues. It is capable of exposing meaningless religious gibberish for what it is and of providing new and fresh ways of understanding legitimate religious discourse. This paper has all too summarily surveyed the history of the linguistic movement, traced some of its well-known implications for religion, and ventured some of its applications to Wesleyan concerns. Much more of interest is presently being done in this rich and exciting field, including the comparison of the logic of "God" with the logic of "I," the examination of paradox in religion, the performative function of credal statements, and the integration of the language of faith with the language of reason.32

Our opening story suggested that the human investigation into God talk has some fixed terminus, some designated point at which words can exhaust the knowledge of God. It is almost as if the holy and transcendent-when it is robbed of its mystery-will not continue the human endeavor. However, I believe that the

interest in words about God is in reality open-ended, as it should be; for religious language seeks insight into the infinite and inexhaustible God of Christianity. It seems to be God's good pleasure that we continue to speak and examine human words about Him, so that we may ever find new treasures within

the divinely bestowed gift of language. And furthermore, we know that it is His delight to give us His Words, for in them is life eternal.

Notes

1Arthur Clarke, "The Nine Billion Names of God," in his collection of short stories entitled The Nine Billion Names of God (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1967).

2F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality (London: Oxford University Press, 1930).

3G. E. Moore, "The Refutation of Idealism," reprinted in Morris Weitz, ed., Twentieth-Century Philosophy: The Analytic Tradition (New York: The Free Press, 1966) pp. 15-34.

4See Weitz' Introduction, Twentieth-Century Philosophy, p. 3.

5Bertrand Russell, Logic and Knowledge, Essays, 1901-1950, Robert Charles March, ed. (New York: Capricorn Books, 1968).

6A. N. Whitehead and B. Russell, Principia Mathematica (London: Cambridge University Press, 1910-13).

7Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, trans. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961).

8An excellent summary of this and other atomistic theses can be found in Justus Hartnack, Wittgenstein and Modern Philosophy, trans. Maurice Cranston (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1965).

9See Weitz' Introduction, Twentieth-Century Philosophy, pp. 8-9.

10Rudolf Carnap, The Logical Syntax of Language (New York: Humanities Press, 1961); A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, 2nd ed. (New York: Dover Press, 1936).

11E.g., Carnap, "The Rejection of Metaphysics" and Stevenson, "The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms" in Weitz, Twentieth-Century Philosophy.

12See Weitz's Introduction, Twentieth-Century Philosophy, and Barry Gross, Analytic Philosophy: An Introduction (New York: Pegasus Books, 1970).

13Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., G. E. M. Anscombe trans. (New York: Macmillan Press, 1958).

14Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1949).

15For example, one might expect the early realists to hold that certain religious concepts are irreducible and refer to objective realities. And yet the tendency of realism toward empiricism and naturalism is ever present.

16G. E. M. Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), chapter 13.

17I first suggested this term to Carl F. H. Henry for his appraisal of linguistic philosophy. See his God, Revelation and Authority, Waco: Word Books, 1979), 3:451-52.

18Antony Flew, "Theology and Falsification," in Antony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre, eds., New Essays in Philosophical Theology (New York: Macmillan, 1955).

19Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 20e.

20Ibid., p. 31e.

21Paul van Buren, The Edges of Language (New York: Macmillan, 1972), p. i.

22Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, vol. 3, chapter 26.

23For instance, it is not completely clear that Wittgenstein would call religion and science different "language-games," or that he would hermetically seal off religious language from other areas of language, or that he would put religious language at the "edges of language."

24I fear that many neo-Wittgensteinians rob Christianity of what Carl Henry calls its "persuasive epistemic credentials" by ignoring its claim to objective truth; God, Revelation and Authority, 1:213-14.

25See Frederick Ferre, Language, Logic and God (New York: Harper and Row,1961); it is an excellent survey of the different models which have been generated, including the logic of verification, the logic of function, the logic of obedience, the logic of analogy, the logic of encounter, and others.

26Ibid.

27vanBuren, The Edges of Language, pp.129-131.

28Ibid., chapter 4

29Ibid., pp. 66-67.

30Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 12 le,

310f course, all this must be elaborated in such a way as to allow for a temporal process in some further interpretations of experience and for revision and correction of a given linguistic-interpretive framework.

32For just a small sample of the work being done in the linguistic philosophy of religion, see the attached bibliography.

Bibliography

Anscombe, G. E. M. An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971.

Ayers, Robert and William Blackstone, eds. Religious Language and Knowledge. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972.

Bendall, Kent and Frederick Ferre. The Logic of Faith. New York: Association Press, 1962.

Brown, Stuart. Do Religious Claims Make Sense? New York: Macmillan, 1969.

Charlesworth, M. J. The Problem of Religious Language. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1974.

Donovan, Peter. Religious Language. New York: Hawthorne Books, 1976.

Ferre, Frederick, Language, Logic and God. New York: Harper, 1961.

Flew, Antony and Alasdair MacIntyre, eds. New Essays in Philosophical Theology. New York: Macmillan, 1955.

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