Humility has not always been regarded as a virtue. Aristotle, if he recognized it at all, seems to have regarded it as a vice, a deficiency in regard to magnanimity. In the popular culture of the twenty-first century, while courage is held in high moral esteem, the regard given to humility is more questionable. Humility, however, is not universally dismissed as a virtue. Many see it as having moral value. In fact, a number of contemporary philosophers are relatively clear that (...) humility is a morally valuable trait and so is a moral virtue, although they disagree about its character. For traditional Christianity and Judaism, of course, and for other religious traditions, humility is a religious virtue. However, if humility is a religious virtue, is it different from humility as a moral virtue? Below, we shall start in section II with the question, What is the best way to understand the general notion of humility? In section III it shall be followed by the question, What are the core contrasting states that humility opposes? Third , in section IV we shall ask, Does humility as a religious virtue have a distinctive and abiding character? (shrink)

This book is an inquiry into the extent to which human relationships are foundational in morality. J. Kellenberger seeks to discover, first, how relationships between persons, and ultimately the relationship that each person has to each person by virtue of being a person, underlie the various traditional components of morality—obligation, virtue, justice, rights, and moral goods—and, second, how relationship morality is more fully consonant with our moral experience than other forms of human morality. Kellenberger traces the implications of relationship morality (...) for an understanding of religious duty to God and for the status of our obligations to animals. He also examines issues relating to a feminist "ethics of caring." While this book is a work in ethics, its approach is not limited to an examination of theories of obligation, such as utilitarianism, nor is it limited to the traditional areas covered by wider philosophical treatments of ethics. It embraces these but examines such moral categories as love, respect for persons, shame, and their place in morality. (shrink)

THREE CONCEPTS OF MIRACLE ARE EXAMINED: INTERVENTION MIRACLE, CONTINGENCY MIRACLE, AND NATURAL MIRACLE. IT IS ARGUED THAT EACH CONCEPT OF MIRACLE IS COHERENT. REGARDING THE FAMILIAR CONCEPT OF INTERVENTION MIRACLE, IT IS ARGUED THAT PROBLEMS RELATING TO GOD’S INTERVENING IN THE COURSE OF NATURE, RAISED BY HUME AND OTHERS, CAN BE OVERCOME. THEN IT IS SHOWN THAT IN ANY CASE THERE ARE TWO OTHER COHERENT CONCEPTS OF MIRACLE--CONTINGENCY AND NATURAL MIRACLES--EACH OF WHICH BY ITSELF GIVES US SOME GRASP OF HOW (...) A TRANSCENDENT GOD CAN HAVE A PRESENCE IN THE WORLD. (shrink)

In this article, after providing a preliminary characterization of pacifism, the author first argues that pacifism sensibly articulates with the concepts of force and rights and then critically discusses the just war position, the correctness of which would entail the wrongnessof pacifism in a strong construction. The author goes on to argue that a primary moral obligation of justice is sufficient to make it wrong to resort to war and that, moreover, utilitarian ethics, deontological ethics, and the religious ethics of (...) love, on their own separate grounds, arguably should agree on a repudiation of war, but, finally, religious ethics repudiates war best because it sees best the heart of the matter. (shrink)

The thesis of this essay is that human relationships are deeper than moral principles or moral rules human relationships generate and fashion moral principles. This thesis has three elements: moral principles have their provenance in human relationships and are intelligible only in their application to the relevant human relationship; relationships determine what counts as a violation of a principle and so determine if a principle is violated or even applies; relationships inform our understanding of the specific demands of principles. The (...) thesis of this essay is supported by advancing each of its three elements. It is acknowledged that it can be argued that moral rules must in some way be accommodated by moral philosophy and that they play a role in our moral lives. Several claims about moral rules that are compatible with the thesis of this article are identified, such as the claim that moral rules are universal and the claim that they are not. Cogent views about the importance of relationships for morality, developed in feminist thought, are acknowledged but distinguished from this essay’s thesis. (shrink)

Recent philosophy of religion, particularly neo-Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion, has reminded philosophers that there is more to religion than belief and, indeed, that there is more to religious belief than mere belief. D. Z. Phillips is among those who have made a contribution here. He has emphasized how religious belief is very different from the kind of belief that amounts to holding a hypothesis, even a God-hypothesis. However, perhaps because of his non-cognitivist tendencies, Phillips, unlike Kierkegaard to whom he often (...) appeals, has failed to bring into relief another quintessential fact about belief in God, namely that it is for the believer an entered relationship with God. We do well to appreciate that belief in God is not identical with making a truth claim. But if the essential core of religious belief is construed as an attitudinal or affective response, as non-cognitivists tend to construe it, an important conceptual dimension of religious faith will all but be overlooked, as, paradoxically it seems it has been by the philosophical approach that strives to describe the religious ‘form of life’ in its own terms. In what follows I shall endeavour to bring into relief what I take to be an essential dimension of religious belief, one which presupposes that religious belief is an entered relationship for the believer. This I shall do by pursuing a contrast which, I think, at once clarifies and makes undeniable religious belief's essential nature as a relationship to God. (shrink)

If determinism is correct, then all that men do is in principle predictable. Further, all that they do is predictable in a certain way, namely on the basis of the causes of their actions, where those causes are sufficient for their actions. That is, according to determinism, the antecedents of human actions, their causes, are such that, given a knowledge of those antecedents, the actions that are their effects can be predicted with certainty because they cannot but occur.

C entral to most religions are God and belief in God. But while this is so for nearly all religions, questions regarding the nature and existence of God have long been a welter for believer and nonbeliever alike. This is not purely a historical comment. Long enduring confusions about God's existence and nature persist and, it seems to me, have even deepened recently. Consider the spectrum of things contemporaneously said about God's existence.

Two forms of ethical relativism are examined: a societal form (ser) and an individual form (ier). The thesis of ier is elaborated, What seems to be the strongest argument for it is analysed, And a number of implications of ier are made explicit. The same three things are then done for ser. The strongest argument for ser reasons from descriptive relativism to ser. It is usually recognized that such premises do not establish such a conclusion. But, In addition, It is (...) argued, Such premises may well be false. Finally several possible sources of ethical relativism are discussed. (shrink)

Starting with Job's reaction to evil, I identify three elements of Job-like belief. They are: (1) the recognition of evil in the world; (2) the conviction that God and God's creation are good; and (3) the sense of beholding God's goodness in the world. The interconnection of these three elements is examined along with a possible way of understanding Job-like believers beholding and becoming experientially aware of God's goodness. It is brought out why, given that they are as they understand (...) themselves to be, Job-like believers properly do not see evil as evidence against God's goodness. Finally, Job-like belief is related to the different reactions to evil by Ivan and Aloysha in The Brothers Karamazov. (shrink)

This book is about the relationship between God and the world’s evil. It proposes a religious, Job-like approach to evil that does not approach evil through the problem of evil and accepts that both good and evil are given by God.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Receiving Søren Kierkegaard: The Early Impact and Transmission of His Thought by Habib C. MalikJ. KellenbergerHabib C. Malik. Receiving Søren Kierkegaard: The Early Impact and Transmission of His Thought. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997. Pp. xxii + 437. Cloth, $59.95.At the end of the twentieth century no one who has any acquaintance with Western philosophical or religious thought would fail to recognize Kierkegaard’s name. This (...) was not always so. Kierkegaard wrote in his native Danish in the first half of the nineteenth century, and for decades his thinking and his name were virtually unknown outside Scandanavia. Habib C. Malik’s book contains the richly detailed story of how Kierkegaard’s thought became known in Europe and in the English-speaking world. Malik breaks down the reception of Kierkegaardian ideas into several phases: “non-reception,” the beginnings of reception, “misreception,” suppression, and serious reception. In the first phase Kierkegaard was read in Denmark, but not understood. In [End Page 637] the second phase, during the 1840s and 1850s while Kierkegaard was still alive, his writings started to become known outside Denmark in Scandanavia (and even reached North America via Scandanavian-American immigrants). In the period of “misreception,” as Malik calls it, Kierkegaard’s ideas or catch-words are appropriated but not fully understood—as with Ibsen, Malik argues. After Kierkegaard’s journals and papers began to be published in the 1870’s, there developed a new kind of interest in Kierkegaard, the “biographical-psychological approach,” initiated by Georg Brandes, in which Kierkegaard’s ideas and themes were interpreted in terms of the crucial events in Kierkegaard’s life. This approach led to the substance of Kierkegaard’s thinking being suppressed by what became a morbid interest in Kierkegaard’s personal life, such as a preoccupation with Kierkegaard’s relationship to Regine Olsen and then reading “The Diary of a Seducer” or key parts of Fear and Trembling as an expression of this event. The period of suppression reaches into the 1880s and 1890s as scholars and translators, like Christoph Schrempf, use Kierkegaard for their own ends. Schrempf, a Lutheran minister who renounces his belief, looks to Kierkegaard for support for his new stance and translates Kierkegaard into German, omitting passages that do not foster his end. Finally there is the period of serious reception, or its beginning, especially in the German-speaking world. Malik ends the story of Kierkegaard’s reception with the period following the First World War, before the development of twentieth century Existentialism.In the book’s eight chapters a vast number of minor and major cultural figures are dealt with. Some, like Hans Christian Andersen and Hans Christian Ørsted (the rector of Kierkegaard’s university and the discoverer of electromagnetism, whose approach to religion was cosmological) Kierkegaard knew and interacted with. Most, like Ibsen, Brandes, Schrempf, and Hans Peter Barford (the first editor of Kierkegaard’s extensive papers) and Albert Bärthold (who learned Danish to translate Kierkegaard into German and during the 1870’s regularly produced translations and commentaries) enter the story after Kierkegarrd’s death. Malik recounts Kierkegaard’s Kirkekampen (church-struggle) with the Lutheran Danish state-Church, and he brings out how Kierkegaard’s writing in this period of his “Attack on Christendom” greatly influenced the way he was initially received. He discusses the reaction to Kierkegaard by the early Swedish writer and feminist Fredrika Bremer, and he discusses Kierkegaard’s later influence on such various thinkers and writers as Miguel de Unamuno, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, and Ludwig Wittgenstein (to name some of the more familiar).There are many nuggets of detail in the book. For instance, those who have read Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist would know that in 1888 Brandes called Kierkegaard to Nietzsche’s attention, but too close to the onset of Nietzsche’s madness for him to read Kierkegaard. However we learn from Malik that Brandes in a letter had characterized Kierkegaard as “one of the profoundest psychologists that have ever existed” and that Nietzsche in his reply in February of 1888 actually expressed the intention to “take up the psychological problem of Kierkegaard” when... (shrink)

In recent years the issue of whether mysticism can be induced by drugs has been pursued by both scholars of mystical literature and psychological researchers. R. C. Zaehner is perhaps the best known among the scholars of religious literature who have addressed the issues of drug-induced mysticism. While on the side of empirical psychology investigators such as Walter N. Pahnke, R. E. L. Masters, and Jean Houston have pursued some of the same issues using the techniques of laboratory experimentation. Zaehner, (...) who was familiar with both Eastern and Western mysticism, argued that drug-induced experiences are not the same as religious mystical experiences of the theistic variety. It was farcical, he argued, for Aldous Huxley to posit a connection between his preternatural feeling of oneness with his chair and the Beatific Vision. The issue between Zaehner and Huxley was not over the veridicality of Huxley's mystical experience. It was over the significance of Huxley's experience: Was it or was it not a drug-induced mystical experience of the sort attained by mystics after heroic struggles of self-discipline? This was the issue again when Zaehner came to address himself to the claims of Timothy Leary, a chief proponent of ‘the LSD experience’, and, in general terms, this has been the central issue pursued by the psychological researchers. (shrink)

In recent years the issue of whether mysticism can be induced by drugs has been pursued by both scholars of mystical literature and psychological researchers. R. C. Zaehner is perhaps the best known among the scholars of religious literature who have addressed the issues of drug-induced mysticism. While on the side of empirical psychology investigators such as Walter N. Pahnke, R. E. L. Masters, and Jean Houston have pursued some of the same issues using the techniques of laboratory experimentation. Zaehner, (...) who was familiar with both Eastern and Western mysticism, argued that drug-induced experiences are not the same as religious mystical experiences of the theistic variety. It was farcical, he argued, for Aldous Huxley to posit a connection between his preternatural feeling of oneness with his chair and the Beatific Vision. The issue between Zaehner and Huxley was not over the veridicality of Huxley's mystical experience. It was over the significance of Huxley's experience: Was it or was it not a drug-induced mystical experience of the sort attained by mystics after heroic struggles of self-discipline? This was the issue again when Zaehner came to address himself to the claims of Timothy Leary, a chief proponent of ‘the LSD experience’, and, in general terms, this has been the central issue pursued by the psychological researchers. (shrink)

Flew's challenge to the religious believer asks him to specify what would count as a disproof for, e.g. ‘There is a God’. A statement of such a specifiable condition I called an ‘empirical denial’. In my earlier paper I was concerned to show that a statement is a statement whether or not it has such an empirical denial. I was not particularly concerned to show that there are some statements which do not have an empirical denial; my concern was to (...) show that it is not essential that they do. It was in connection with this point that the statement ‘John loves Mary’ was discussed. But this very same example may indeed serve as an example of a statement for which, in certain complex situations, there is no empirical denial. That is, in some circumstances, no matter what empirical conditions are specified, when the statement ‘John loves Mary’ is made, they could obtain and still John might love Mary, as the developing situation would make clear. If the condition specified is that John is cruel to Mary and shows no concern for her, details could always emerge in such a situation to explain why, even though he loved her, he was cruel and showed no concern. And so on. (shrink)

One in the series New Dialogues in Philosophy, edited by Dale Jacquette, J. Kellenberger brings together a group of hypothetical individuals from different backgrounds with real philosophical views to discuss their ideas on morality and moral relativism. The dialogues examine arguments for and against adopting a relativistic stance on morality.

This book aims to clarify the debate between moral relativists and moral absolutists by showing what is right and what is wrong about each of these positions, by revealing how the phenomenon of moral diversity is connected with moral relativism, and by arguing for the importance of relationships between persons as key to reaching a satisfactory understanding of the issues involved in the debate.

This book aims to clarify the debate between moral relativists and moral absolutists by showing what is right and what is wrong about each of these positions, by revealing how the phenomenon of moral diversity is connected with moral relativism, and by arguing for the importance of relationships between persons as key to reaching a satisfactory understanding of the issues involved in the debate.

Both philosophy and theology are given a raison d'etre by their problems. Some of their problems they share, and some they do not. They share a concern with the nature of morality and they share the problem of human freedom. But the filioque issue and the controversy between Arius and Athanasius regarding the consubstaniality of the persons of the Trinity belong to theology, if contemporary theology will have them. The problems of reference and denotation, and of classes, in the cast (...) given them by Frege, Russell and others, are exclusively in the domain of philosophy. Sometimes the problems shared by philosophy and theology are also human problems: they intimately touch human lives and have palpable ramifications for the way men live. Camus, who said with a flourish that the only philosophical problem is whether or not to commit suicide, was saying in part that the only philosophical problems worth considering are human problems. And William James would perhaps concur; he would insist that only philosophical problems that are “living, forced and momentous” present a genuine option to men. (shrink)

This book addresses the different forms that religious belief can take. Two primary forms are discussed: propositional or doctrinal belief, and belief in God. Religious belief in God, whose affective content is trust in God, it is seen, opens for believers a relationship to God defined by trust in God. The book addresses the issue of the relation between belief and faith, the issue of what Søren Kierkegaard called the subjectivity of faith, and the issue of the relation between religious (...) belief and religious experience. After the introductory chapter the book continues with a chapter in which features and forms of belief allowed by the general concept of belief are presented. Several of these forms and features are related to the features of religious belief examined in succeeding chapters. The book's final chapter examines God-relationships in the Christian tradition that de-emphasize belief and are not defined by belief. (shrink)

The purpose of this book is to raise the possibilities of religious knowledge and religious discovery. By religious knowledge and discovery I mean knowledge and discovery of God, and by possibility I mean a viable possibility, the kind that a new look under a new light finds; I do not mean a minimal or a "logical" possibility. -- Introduction.

This book explores religious epiphanies in which there is the appearance of God, a god or a goddess, or a manifestation of the divine or religious reality as received in human experience. Drawing upon the scriptures of various traditions, ancillary religious writings, psychological and anthropological studies, as well as reports of epiphanic experiences, the book presents and examines epiphanies as they have occurred across global religious traditions and cultures, historically and up to the present day. Primarily providing a study of (...) the great range of epiphanies in their phenomenal presentation, Kellenberger also explores issues that arise for epiphanies, such as the matter of their veridicality (whether they are truly of or from the divine) and the question of whether all epiphanies are of the same religious reality. (shrink)

This book addresses the place of religious knowledge in religion, particularly within Christianity. The book begins by examining the difference between the general concepts of knowledge and belief, the relation between faith and knowledge, and reasons why belief as faith, and not knowledge, is central to the Abrahamic religions. The book explores the ambivalence about religious knowledge within Christianity. Some religious thinkers explicitly accepted and sought religious knowledge, as did St. Thomas Aquinas, while others, notably Søren Kierkegaard, cast knowledge and (...) seeking it as incompatible with faith. The book also examines two antithetical religious intuitions about knowledge, both at home in the Christian tradition. For one, faith requires a struggle with doubt. For the other, faith requires a certainty that excludes doubt. For the first, religious knowledge would destroy faith. For the second, religious knowledge is compatible with faith and completes it. Though the book focuses on the Christian tradition, it also considers other traditions, including a chapter on the place of religious knowledge in nontheistic religious traditions. The final chapter examines how coming to Wisdom as personified in the Jewish and Christian traditions may be distinct from attaining religious knowledge. (shrink)

This book is about religion, pacifism, and the nonviolence that informs pacifism in its most coherent form. Pacifism is one religious approach to war and violence. Another is embodied in just war theories, and both pacifism and just war thinking are critically examined. Although moral support for pacifism is presented, a main focus of the book is on religious support for pacifism, found in various religious traditions. A crucial distinction for pacifism is that between force and violence. Pacifism informed by (...) nonviolence excludes violence, but, the book argues, allows forms of force. Peacekeeping is an activity that on the face of it seems compatible with pacifism, and several different forms of peacekeeping are examined. The implications of nonviolence for the treatment of nonhuman animals are also examined. Two models for attaining the conditions required for a world without war have been proposed. Both are treated and one, the model of a biological human family, is developed. The book concludes with reflections on the role of pacifism in each of five possible futurescapes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Receiving Søren Kierkegaard: The Early Impact and Transmission of His Thought by Habib C. MalikJ. KellenbergerHabib C. Malik. Receiving Søren Kierkegaard: The Early Impact and Transmission of His Thought. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997. Pp. xxii + 437. Cloth, $59.95.At the end of the twentieth century no one who has any acquaintance with Western philosophical or religious thought would fail to recognize Kierkegaard’s name. This (...) was not always so. Kierkegaard wrote in his native Danish in the first half of the nineteenth century, and for decades his thinking and his name were virtually unknown outside Scandanavia. Habib C. Malik’s book contains the richly detailed story of how Kierkegaard’s thought became known in Europe and in the English-speaking world. Malik breaks down the reception of Kierkegaardian ideas into several phases: “non-reception,” the beginnings of reception, “misreception,” suppression, and serious reception. In the first phase Kierkegaard was read in Denmark, but not understood. In [End Page 637] the second phase, during the 1840s and 1850s while Kierkegaard was still alive, his writings started to become known outside Denmark in Scandanavia (and even reached North America via Scandanavian-American immigrants). In the period of “misreception,” as Malik calls it, Kierkegaard’s ideas or catch-words are appropriated but not fully understood—as with Ibsen, Malik argues. After Kierkegaard’s journals and papers began to be published in the 1870’s, there developed a new kind of interest in Kierkegaard, the “biographical-psychological approach,” initiated by Georg Brandes, in which Kierkegaard’s ideas and themes were interpreted in terms of the crucial events in Kierkegaard’s life. This approach led to the substance of Kierkegaard’s thinking being suppressed by what became a morbid interest in Kierkegaard’s personal life, such as a preoccupation with Kierkegaard’s relationship to Regine Olsen and then reading “The Diary of a Seducer” or key parts of Fear and Trembling as an expression of this event. The period of suppression reaches into the 1880s and 1890s as scholars and translators, like Christoph Schrempf, use Kierkegaard for their own ends. Schrempf, a Lutheran minister who renounces his belief, looks to Kierkegaard for support for his new stance and translates Kierkegaard into German, omitting passages that do not foster his end. Finally there is the period of serious reception, or its beginning, especially in the German-speaking world. Malik ends the story of Kierkegaard’s reception with the period following the First World War, before the development of twentieth century Existentialism.In the book’s eight chapters a vast number of minor and major cultural figures are dealt with. Some, like Hans Christian Andersen and Hans Christian Ørsted (the rector of Kierkegaard’s university and the discoverer of electromagnetism, whose approach to religion was cosmological) Kierkegaard knew and interacted with. Most, like Ibsen, Brandes, Schrempf, and Hans Peter Barford (the first editor of Kierkegaard’s extensive papers) and Albert Bärthold (who learned Danish to translate Kierkegaard into German and during the 1870’s regularly produced translations and commentaries) enter the story after Kierkegarrd’s death. Malik recounts Kierkegaard’s Kirkekampen (church-struggle) with the Lutheran Danish state-Church, and he brings out how Kierkegaard’s writing in this period of his “Attack on Christendom” greatly influenced the way he was initially received. He discusses the reaction to Kierkegaard by the early Swedish writer and feminist Fredrika Bremer, and he discusses Kierkegaard’s later influence on such various thinkers and writers as Miguel de Unamuno, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, and Ludwig Wittgenstein (to name some of the more familiar).There are many nuggets of detail in the book. For instance, those who have read Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist would know that in 1888 Brandes called Kierkegaard to Nietzsche’s attention, but too close to the onset of Nietzsche’s madness for him to read Kierkegaard. However we learn from Malik that Brandes in a letter had characterized Kierkegaard as “one of the profoundest psychologists that have ever existed” and that Nietzsche in his reply in February of 1888 actually expressed the intention to “take up the psychological problem of Kierkegaard” when... (shrink)

Discusses the complexities and paradoxes of love as represented in the history of Western philosophy and Christianity. In The Asymptote of Love, James Kellenberger develops a theory of religious love that resists essentialist definitions of the term and brings into conversation historical debates on love in Western philosophy and Christian theology. He argues that if love can be likened to a mathematical asymptote, which is a straight line that infinitely approaches a curve but never quite reaches it, then the asymptote (...) of love reaches toward the infinite endpoint of love at its uttermost, namely, God’s love. Drawing upon a broad range of thinkers who have put forth classic debates on love—such as St. Augustine of Hippo, Anders Nygren, and St. Thomas Aquinas, as well as some lesser known figures in the debate, such as Leo Tolstoy and Albert Schweitzer—Kellenberger explains the profound connection between human agape and God’s infinite love in its capacity to offer both directive guidance and to exist beyond human conception. James Kellenberger is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Northridge and the author of God’s Goodness and God’s Evil. (shrink)

‘God is dead’ can mean many things. It can mean that the way God has been thought of is no longer adequate, or that there is no God and never has been, or that human consciousness of God has receded. 1 Our concern in what follows begins with ‘the death of God’ in this last sense, in the specific sense of the death of an awareness of God or of an affective consciousness of God. Or rather, this is where half (...) of our concern begins. The other half begins with a phenomenon which is the mirror image of the death of God:the death of persons. By ‘the death of persons’ I mean something analogous to the sense specified for ‘the death of God.’ I mean the death or at least the decline of a consciousness of the inherent worth of persons, of the worth persons have as persons. In Kantian terms the death of persons is the loss of a consciousness of persons as ends in themselves. The death of God and the death of persons are parallel, and, furthermore, they are connected. The connection is not difficult to see, particularly if we remind ourselves of what Nietzsche said about the death of God. (shrink)

Not too many years ago Antony Flew voiced a challenge. His challenge was directed to religious believers and it was this: ‘What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or of the existence of, God?’ It was Flew's implicit argument that unless such a challenge could be met an utterance like ‘There is a God’ in fact denied nothing and so asserted nothing either . One great merit of Flew's (...) challenge was that it crystallised a malaise felt by many into a hard, pointed question. As a challenge this question elicited two basic reactions. (shrink)

There is a certain view of religion, deriving from Wittgenstein’s thought, that might be called the language-game view of religion. It has many parts, but in essence it holds–in its own terms–that religion is a language-game in fact engaged in by men; or, what seems to be an alternative way of saying the same thing, or very nearly the same. thing, religion is a form of life participated in by men. As such it is in order. Although one needs to (...) enter into the torm ot lite and engage in the language-game to learn its grammar or logic and to see the order that it has. For its order has internal criteria: what count as, e.g., rational and meaningful within religion are determined not by criteria appropriate to physics or chess playing but by criteria appropriate to religion as it is lived by the religious. (shrink)