Philosophy: Religious Language

Philosophy and Religious Language

• Philosophical inquiry allows for religious faith to be identified through its language as a kind of discourse.
• Linguistic expression is not the only dimension of religious phenomena
• Religious experience comes to language and is articulated in a language, suggesting linguistic expression is the most appropriate way to interpret it.
• Religious discourse is worthwhile analyzing because it communicates something unique compared to ordinary, scientific, or poetic language, therefore its meaningful.
• Religious discourse claims to be both meaningful and true.
• Philosophy is implied in this inquiry because the truth value of religious discourse must be understood on its own terms, and not according to scientific criteria of verification or falsification
• Philosophy is confronted by a discourse displaying claims to meaningfulness and fulfillment.
• These claims necessitate a new formulation of truth.
• Hermeneutics and linguistic analysis both agree that religious faith or experience can be identified through language
• Hermeneutics qualifies this assumption in a way that is specific to it.
• Hermeneutics and linguistic analysis both acknowledge that the meaningfulness of a kind of discourse should be measured by its own criteria.
• Hermeneutics is more aligned with revising the concept of truth to mean manifestation rather than adequation.
• Hermeneutics seeks to clarify the assumptions of a philosophy of religious language using a hermeneutical method
• Religious faith is approached as it is expressed in language.
• Linguistic analysis typically begins with statements of theology, reinterpreting religious discourse with speculative philosophy, while hermeneutical philosophy seeks originary expressions of faith.
• Documents of faith contain ordinary expressions of religious faith in narratives, prophecies, legislative texts, proverbs, wisdom sayings, hymns, prayers, and liturgical formulas rather than metaphysical theological statements
• Hermeneutics seeks to identify such originary modes of discourse.

Methodological Tools for Philosophical Hermeneutics

• Philosophical hermeneutics uses tools to clarify modes of discourse, considering discourse itself and describing traits that change when discourse is reshaped into narratives, proverbs, and hymns, thus it considers what is said at a distance from the event of saying.
• There's a primary distance between discourse and speaker, inner structure and outer referent, and discourse and its initial audience.
• Interpretation begins with these dialectics of oral language.
• Modes of discourse function as a mode of production.
• Discourse as a work is organized in wholes of a second order compared to the sentence.
• In the Rhetoric, Aristotle calls this fundamental category "taxis" which means "composition" and believes it is essential to interpreting the inner organization of a text.
• Text requires consideration as a hierarchy of topics
• Literary codes have a generative function, serving to generate discourse as a narrative or a proverb, and connect to Chomsky's generative grammar.

Distanciation and Interpretation

• This concerns the new specific kinds of distanciation linked to the production of discourse as a work.
• A work of discourse is an autonomous object at a distance from the authorial intention, its context, and audience and is open to many interpretations due to the initial event of discourse.
• Hermeneutics overcomes distance by using it as both obstacle and instrument to re-enact the initial event.
• The religious faith of a community can be identified through its language.
• Identifying modes of discourse constitutes the field of interpretation for understanding religious language.
• Modes of articulation dictate the meanings of religious language, particularly confessions of faith found in biblical documents.
• Different forms of discourse give rise to varying styles of confession of faith
• The Pentateuch, Gospels, prophecies, parables, and hymns all give rise to a style of confession of faith.
• Confrontation between these forms causes tensions and contrasts within the confession of faith itself, with opposition between narration and prophecy is fundamental for mentality of the Old Testament.
• Closing the canon is a structural act delimiting space for interplay of forms of discourse and the finite configuration for forms to unfold its signifying function
• There are three problems: affinity between form of discourse/confession of faith, relation between pairs of structures and theological message, and relation between literary corpus configuration/space of interpretation.
• Gerhard von Rad's understanding of the relation between form of discourse and theological content, and confirmation of his method in works by Amos Wilder and William A. Beardslee is helpful.
• Narration is important because structures has had success in of narrative forms, something specific is said about Jahweh and about his relations with his people Israel because it is said in the form of a narrative.

Confession of Faith

• The very concept of a "theology of traditions" expresses the indissoluble solidarity of the confession of faith.
• Nothing is said about God, or about man, or about their relations, which does not first of all reassemble legends and isolated sagas and rearrange them in meaningful sequences, so as to constitute a unique story centered upon a kernel-event, which has both a historical import and a kerygmatic dimension.
• Deuteronomy 26 connects the narrative and kerygmatic dimensions.
• Taking the narrative structure into consideration permits the extension of structural methods into the domain of exegesis.
• There is a contrast between the God of Israel and the God of Greek philosophy because theology knows nothing of concepts of cause, foundation, or essence, and speaks of God in accord with the historical drama.
• This is a theology homogeneous with the narrative structure itself, a theology in the form of Heilsgeschichte
• There must be correspondence between literary forms and theological discourse
• The tension between narrative and prophecy extends to perception of time and the meaning of the divine.
• The God of the Exodus has to become the God of the Exile to remain the God of the future
• Throughout these discourses, God appears differently each time, sometimes as wrathful and compassionate, sometimes as he to whom one can speak in a relation of an I-Thou type.
• All forms of discourse might constitute a circular system in which forms of discourse constitute a circular system and theological content receives signification from the forms of discourse
• Religious language would then appear as a polyphonic language sustained by the circularity of the forms.
• There is a limited space for interpretation in which the theological significations are correlatives of forms of disclosure
• The significations can't be interpreted without structural explication of the forms.

The World of the Text

• The third presupposition of a philosophy of religious language is specific claims to truth measured by criteria appropriate to the discourse developed.
• A philosophical hermeneutics paves the way to a more specific treatment of religious expressions, documents, and texts.
• This notion prolongs what he earlier called the reference of discourse at the level of complex works of discourse.
• Gottlob Frege's distinction between sense and reference, with sense is purely immanent to discourse, and reference is the truth value.
• Writing and the structure of the work alter the reference, rendering it problematic.
• In oral discourse the problem is resolved by ostensive function of discourse.
• Reference is resolved by showing a reality common to the interlocuters.
• With writing, there is no longer the writer and reader
• In this sense, there is abolition of the demonstrative characteristics of reference which makes possible the phenomenon which we call literature.
• It is the role of fictional literature to destroy its world and refers to another, more fundamental level than descriptive, assertive, or didactic discourse.
• There's an abolition of first-order reference with a liberation of a second order which reaches Husserl's Lebenswelt and Heidegger's being-in-the-world
• This is an original referential dimension with fictional and poetic works which poses a hermeneutical problem.
• Interpretation explicates one's being-in-the-world as it unravels in front of the text.
• Understanding is not comprehension of others, but a structure of being-in-the-world.
• Understanding responds to being in a situation, and texts have proposed worlds which people the reader might inhabit.
• The world of the text is not the world of everyday language and constitutes a distanciation of the real
• Through fiction and poetry, it opens up new possibilities of being-in-the-world
• Fiction and poetry do not intend being because of modality of givenness but rather through the modality of possibility.
• Aristotle called this a way of metamorphosis by means of imaginative variations that literature works on.
• Fiction is the privileged path to redescription of reality and poetic language effects Aristotle's mimesis of reality.
• Tragedy imitates only because it recreates it by a mythos, reaching its deepest essence.

Applying to Biblical Texts

• Religious texts are kinds of poetic texts: they offer modes of redescribing life, but in such a way that they are differentiated from other forms of poetic texts
• There are several illusions, one being the temptation of existential categories prematurely introduced to counterbalance excesses of structural analysis.
• Structural explanation and self-understanding requires an unfolding of the world of the text
• Theological implications include hermeneutics allowing the world of being to unfold, rather than prompting decision on the reader's part.
• The Bible projects a world, which is what one might call the objectivity of the new being projected by the text
• Ceasing to ask about inspiration in psychologizing terms and to say that the "issue" of the Bible, is a new being which is displayed
• Revelation is a trait of the biblical world through structures of the work.
• All that we have said above about the relations between, for example, the narrative form of the signification of Jahweh as the actor, or about relations of the form of prophecy with the signification of the Lord as menace and promise beyond destruction, constitutes the sole possible introduction to what we are now calling the biblical world.
• The power of revelation is born in the contrast and the convergence of all the forms of discourse taken together.
• Question of a world in the sense of a global horizon of a totality of meanings.
• The biblical world has aspects which are cosmic, communitarian, historical, cultural, and personal.
• The world of the "literary" text is a projected world which is poetically distant from our everyday reality.
• Heidegger's remarks on Verstehen contrast it with Befindlichkeit in that Verstehen is addressed to the ownmost possibilities.
• "The kingdom of God is coming," means this appeals to our ownmost possibilities and the meaning doesn't come from us.

Biblical Hermeneutics

• The route is that of the application of a general hermeneutical category to the biblical hermeneutic.
• Only at the end of this route we can recognize the specificity of the biblical "issue."
• Authors didn't repeat in their ears. This recognition is addressed to the quality of the new being as it announces itself.
• God-reference is the central place in biblical discourse
• The result of earlier analysis is that the signification is implicated in literary forms of narration, prophecy, hymn, wisdom.
• "God-talk" proceeds from the concurrence and convergence of partial discourses
• the God-referent is the coordinator of varied discourses and the index of their incompleteness
• the word "God" does not function as a philosophical concept
• To understand the word "God" is to follow the direction of the meaning of the word
• Incarnate religious significations into a powerful symbol, a sacrificial love stronger than death.
• In its meaning is contained the notion of its relation to us as gracious, and of our relation to it as "ultimately concerned" and as fully "re-cognizant" of it.
• Biblical hermeneutics unfolds implications of this constitution.
• It is a unique case because all the partial discourses are referred to a name which is the point of intersection and the index of incompleteness of all our discourse about God, and because this name has become bound up with the meaning-event preached as Resurrection.
• It can only claim to say something unique if this unique thing speaks as the world of the text which is addressed to us, as the issue of the text.
• For a hermeneutical philosophy, faith never appears as an immediate experience, but always as mediated by a certain language.
• Faith is the attitude of one who accepts being interpreted at the same time that he interprets the world of the text
• There is ceaseless movement of interpretation and faith, "ultimate concern, is a nonhermeneutical origin of all interpretation.
• It underscores that it responds to an initiative which always precedes me.
• "Unconditional trust" is inseparable from a movement of hope which turns reasons for despair into reasons for hope.
• Biblical faith cannot be separated from the movement of interpretation which elevates it into language.
• Ultimate concern would remain mute if it did not receive the power.
• The feeling of absolute dependence would remain a weak if not the response to the proposition.
• Unconditional trust, would be empty if it did not rely on a constantly renewed interpretation.
• Such as the Exodus in the Old Testament and the Resurrection in the New Testament.
• These are the events of deliverance which open and disclose the utmost possibilities of my own freedom and thus become for me the Word of God.
• Such is the properly hermeneutical constitution of faith.