Reasonable Atheism (14b): Religious grammar continued

At the risk of making this even murkier than it seems to be already, a few thoughts to expand what I said in the earlier post.

Think of different languages. Think of the different words for ‘cow’. Clearly there are connotations to the word for cow in Sanskrit and Urdu that aren’t present in English or Welsh. However, there is enough in common for the term to be more or less translatable.

You could say that the words for cow across the different languages share a family resemblance. There may not be any one item which is the exact ‘essence of cow’ which all the words for cow correspond to, but there is enough correspondence for people of different languages to understand each other, and recognise what is being referred to, in just the same way that different members of a family might more or less resemble each other, without there being any one specific feature which they all have in common.

My argument is that there is something similar going on with religious frameworks. There may not be any one essential thing which all religions have in common (in fact, I’m pretty certain there isn’t) and there are all sorts of ways in which religions differ – to the extent that even using the word ‘religion’ is suspect – but there are family resemblances across the different religions which mean that they more or less resemble each other.

Much of that resembling comes in terms of what could be called ‘the practice of holiness’, ie cultivating certain attitudes and virtues like forgiveness. Again there may not be one specific element which is ‘the essence of forgiveness’ but, as I see it, there is enough correspondence in behaviour across the different faiths (and even no faiths) for this to become a meaningful analogy.

Now the way in which these different behaviours are described (or justified) across the different cultures may be very diverse, but if the underlying behaviour is sufficiently similar then I believe we are justified in saying ‘these are the same sorts of behaviour’. My point is that when this happens the different religious perspectives do not in reality contradict each other, however diverse the explanations may be. (I would say they each correspond to the will of God – but that’s an example of what is at issue.)

Ponder for a moment what it would be for this not to be true. It would mean that there is no common humanity across different cultures, no way in which, for example, one person could communicate their hunger to someone from a different society. Making motions towards an open mouth, rubbing the stomach and so on – are we saying that human beings are so shaped by their culture and language that no communication is possible?

Perhaps this is true. My wife is a translator, and certainly some things, some concepts, are untranslatable (I’m sure the word logos is one). Yet I would place this into a spectrum of understanding, whereby some things are more or less clearly common to human nature, and other things are more or less untranslatably a product of specific circumstance. This is why the word schadenfreude is used in English – in order to preserve a more specific meaning (and of course, that word may well by now have developed different overtones and connotations to what it had in its original linguistic home.)

The point I would want to drive home is that differences in spoken or written language do not necessarily make for a substantial difference in belief. They may, they may not. The key is the practice or form of life within which the words are embedded, and which give the words any meaning that they possess. I have no interest in saying that Christianity, Islam, Buddhism etc are all the same (they’re not). I do want to say that there are family resemblances, areas of correspondence and compatibility, and that what might seem at first sight to be a contradiction ain’t necessarily so.

I return to that Wittgenstein quotation I make much use of:
“Actually I should like to say that … the words you utter or what you think as you utter them are not what matters, so much as the difference they make at various points in your life. How do I know that two people mean the same when each says he believes in God? And just the same goes for belief in the Trinity. A theology which insists on the use of certain particular words and phrases, and outlaws others, does not make anything clearer (Karl Barth). It gesticulates with words, as one might say, because it wants to say something and does not know how to express it. Practice gives the words their sense.”

Reasonable Atheism (14): A point about religious grammar

It is sometimes argued that because religious beliefs and experiences contradict each other, they can’t all be true. Whilst I’m sceptical that religions are ‘basically all the same’ I also believe that this criticism isn’t as strong as proponents believe.

Let’s take these four theses for our purposes of comparison:
a) Jesus Christ is the Son of God;
b) Muhammed is the final prophet;
c) the Buddha teaches the noble truth;
d) the Flying Spaghetti Monster is the source of all goodness.

Now on the face of it, it is impossible to reconcile these four theses. At most only one can be true. Yet this is only the case if these theses are certain sorts of claims, principally, that the theses are factual claims about states of affairs in the world. It is as if there is a spiritual equivalent of the periodic table, and the claim in each of the four theses is that a particular entity occupies position #1. The other entities, however wonderful, cannot occupy that position, they have to occupy other numbers. As the Highlander tagline had it, ‘there can be only one’.

To take the religious language in this way, however, is in my view to fundamentally mistake the grammar of religious language. Accepting this way of understanding religious language is, in fact, a hallmark of what I call the humourless perspective (both atheist and theist).

Wittgenstein said (PI § 43) “For a large class of cases – though not for all – in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.” In other words, to understand what each of those four theses means – and therefore whether there is a contradiction involved – we need to look at what is actually being done with the words.

Now it is perfectly possible to imagine a Buddhist, a Muslim and a Christian whose lives closely resemble each other in certain particular respects, for instance that in response to suffering a wrong (being cheated in a business transaction) they each choose to forgive. Each one explains their behaviour in terms of their religious commitments: the Christian says that forgiveness is of God, the Muslim says he must follow Allah the compassionate and merciful, the Buddhist says something about the importance of cultivating boundless compassion to all creatures.

The point being that in this case, the meaning of the language is identical across the different religious beliefs. There is no more contradiction involved than there is when a Frenchman uses the word ‘vache’ where an Englishman would use the word ‘cow’. Although the surface grammar of the statements appear contradictory, the depth grammar is the same.

Should we find someone who was a genuine worshipper of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, who, as a result of their spiritual disciplines and learning, ends up behaving in the same way (practising forgiveness) then we can say that their language means the same thing. We can even say the same thing about an atheist, or about someone who said nothing more about their behaviour than ‘this seemed the right way to behave’. In each of these cases it is the behaviour which is fundamental and which gives meaning to the language used to describe it.

Which means that contradictions between religions come at the level of behaviour, not of speech.

For it is also easy to imagine Christians, Muslims and Buddhists who use the same language as their brothers and sisters in the faiths, but whose behaviour is markedly different. In response to being cheated in business, each one may respond with violence of thought and action, or resort to legal and judicial processes and so on. In this instance it becomes clear that there is certainly a contradiction between the beliefs of the first group and of the second – but the contradiction isn’t a logical one (which person belongs in position #1 of the spiritual periodic table), the contradiction is one of behaviour.

One can push this a little further and say: the holy in each faith recognise each other and resemble each other. To use Jesus’ language “Not everyone who calls me ‘Lord’ shall enter the Kingdom… but those who do the will of my father who is in heaven.”

The fundamental claim of faith is that there is a right way to live, independent of our own choices. There are some disagreements across the faiths about what that right way is, but the disagreements should not be assessed at the surface level of grammar, but at the depth level of forms of life. Once that is done, and greater clarity is obtained about the claims of each faith, we can more easily see where the real contradictions obtain. Then, and only then, the conversation can become interesting and important.

The Minster Model (March Synchroblog)

Before there were parishes in England, there were Minsters. ‘Minster’ is simply another word for monastery, or monastic community. However, these Minsters were not enclosed orders, they were instead the central social and economic hub for a network of communities. The Minster church was a place for pursuing worship, prayer, study and formation in discipleship. There was room for specialisation in ministries given the concentration of resources, and these served as a resource for the surrounding communities known as parochiae – what became the parishes. The Minster model was fundamentally missional in orientation and concerned with evangelising and nurturing those local communities.

The parish model succeeded the Minsters principally because the Minsters were successful in that evangelisation. The local communities, converted to the gospel, raised sufficient resource to employ their own local minister – often with the support of a wealthy local landlord who saw the establishment of a church on his land as a feather in his cap – and so, over time, was born the classic pattern of the English parson – the George Herbert model. In this context the work of the church was primarily one of pastoral care and maintenance, with the local minister being a more or less capable jack of all trades, providing for the sacramental and pastoral needs of the local community.

There are several pressures acting upon the church today which, to my mind, make the restoration of the Minster model the way forward for the church.

Amongst those pressures are:
– the contraction of clergy numbers over time. The broader pattern is familiar, but I was surprised to discover recently that the local pattern is more alarming than I had realised – the Colchester area (ie North Essex) is facing a decline in stipendiary clergy of two posts per year for the foreseeable future;
– the need for, and embrace of, the ministry of all the baptised, in this diocese called ‘Ministry as Partnership’, which has allowed a great many gifts to be explored and expressed in the life of the church;
– an acknowledgement of the collapse in Christian belief amongst the wider population, and therefore the necessity to shift to a more missional model of church.
We are now in a situation where the evangelistic success of the Minsters of England, a thousand years ago, has been destroyed. The population of England has just enough exposure and inherited acceptance of Christianity to inoculate it from genuine commitment and discipleship. In this context the inherited pattern of Christian life – local parishes and the George Herbert model of ministry – are incapable of being obedient to our Lord’s command to ‘go out and make disciples of all nations’.

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Other people writing on related themes this month:

Phil Wyman at Phil Wyman’s Square No More

Beth at Until Translucent

Adam Gonnerman at Igneous Quill

Steve Hayes at Notes from the Underground

Jonathan Brink at JonathanBrink.com

Sally Coleman at Eternal Echoes

Brian Riley at at Charis Shalom

Cobus van Wyngaard at My Contemplations

Mike Bursell at Mike’s Musings

David Fisher at Cosmic Collisions

Alan Knox at The Assembling of the Church

Erin Word at Decompressing Faith

Sonja Andrews at Calacirian