Abstract

What has Jerusalem to do with Athens? The everchanging contours of the answer to this question have taken an arresting shape with the confluence of existentialist theology and analytic philosophy. This improbable union has led to an impressive and attractive account of religious belief and its language. Under the influence of Kierkegaard, Buber, and others, existentialist theology has argued persuasively for the non-theoretical, practical character of religious belief; it has, of late, discovered inspiration and assistance for this position in the reflections of recent analytic philosophy on the difficulties involved in speculative philosophy. The resultant theological point of view is one which argues for a ‘practical’ interpretation of religion, one which holds that the meaning of religious language is to be found exclusively in its use. Religion is seen as a self-contained ‘form of life’, and its language is held to have its own peculiar ‘logic’. It follows that religious beliefs and conceptions are intelligible in their own right and do not need to be explicated or justified with the aid of an ontology or metaphysic. I propose in this essay to appraise a recent statement of this position, and, in so doing, explore the broad question of the bearing of analytic reflections on the question of Christian theology's relationship to philosophy