From Theolinguistics to Critical Theolinguistics

Faith is undeniably more a matter of how people live than how they talk; and it would be an overstatement to say that religion is simply and exclusively a matter of language; but it must be granted that religion as we know it is, in many respects, a linguistic enterprise, and that language is an indispensable instrument for understanding the ways in which faith is experienced, expressed, and practised: the central statements of the belief system are recorded in a canon of writings, and reading, reciting, studying and commenting on these authoritative texts is part and parcel of religious behaviour. Other activities in Christian life and worship, such as praying, hymn-singing, meditating, preaching, praising, blessing, forgiving, confessing one’s belief, excommunicating, theologising and many other practices are, first and foremost, forms of linguistic behaviour, which may be described as different sorts of speech acts, in which language not only means things to people, but is actually used to carry out certain actions. Yet, even though faith and religion cannot live without language, the relationship between them often seems to be a tense, strained one, not least because religious expression centres—directly or indirectly —around the concept God. To philosophers of language, this implicit or explicit reference to a transcendent divinity makes religious discourse ‘problematic’ in that it supposes a logical status which distinguishes religious propositions from expressions referring to, say, tables and chairs (the most hackneyed examples), and does not allow empirical verification of its assertions. But then again, not all human discourse can be boiled down to verifiable statements: the languages of, say,