Talking to or about God? Reconsidering the identity of religious language

The study of religious language aims to explain what people mean when they use language religiously, but what is a ‘religious’ use of language? Content theorists think using language to talk about religious subjects, like God or miracles, is religious; context theorists think using language in a religious context, like in prayer or hymns, is religious. This has led some philosophers to distinguish language used to ‘talk about God’ (TAG) from language used to ‘talk to God’ (TTG), with most focusing on the meaning of the former. However, William Alston notes that some protest against this focus, arguing that ‘the heart of religion is found in talk to God in prayer, worship, and liturgy. Talk about God is a secondary phenomenon that gets its religious significance by its dependence on the former’. This paper does not assess whether this is true, but rather what it means to say that one use of language can gain religious significance by its dependence on another. Without defending any theory of identity, this paper examines what ‘dependency’ means, proposes two forms, and evaluates its impact on the study of religious language.