Abstract
According to G.E. Moore, Wittgenstein said that “different religions treat something as making sense, which others treat as nonsense: they don’t merely one deny a proposition which other affirms’ (MWL 8:78). Although Lindbeck probably has not read this exact statement from Wittgenstein, no theologian has taken the depiction of interreligious disagreement that is encapsulated in it more seriously than George Lindbeck. For, while other theologians before or after Lindbeck have recognized the phenomenon of grammatical incommensurability between conceptual systems of different religions as an important factor in interreligious communication, Lindbeck made incommensurability and untranslatability absolutely central, indeed programmatic, for his approach to interreligious relations (Lindbeck 2002, 223).
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Notes
- 1.
See Mike Higton’s (2014) recent and very helpful article. Higton identifies four intellectual cultures since the 1950s and later which shaped, or were shaped by, Lindbeck’s theological development and which constitute the background to Lindbeck’s Nature: official ecumenical culture, liberal theological culture, the culture of ethnographical studies, and postliberal theological culture.
- 2.
- 3.
Compare a similar but universal idea about the language-reality relationship expressed by the early Wittgenstein (TLP 2.161; 2.17). As we have seen in Chap. 2, however, this idea does not relate to religious ‘propositions’ for the early Wittgenstein.
- 4.
Lindbeck notes he has learned this from his Yale colleague Paul Holmer (Lindbeck 2009, 14 n. 28).
- 5.
See Chap. 2, 41–42.
- 6.
For a less sympathetic theological critique of Lindbeck’s postliberal theology with an eye for the comparative theological culture, see Moyaert (2012).
- 7.
- 8.
Elsewhere, in Lindbeck’s work (2002), we do find brief comments on similarities between Christian and Jewish understandings of ‘Israel’. E.g. Lindbeck writes that “Scripture read classically by Christians agrees with rabbinic Judaism in not ascribing the possibility of a universal redemptive role to any communal traditions except those of biblical faith” (ibid. 249). However, the essay in question is predominantly concerned with the “grammar of the Israel/Church relation … as that of prototype to ectype” (ibid. 237), which is Lindbeck’s way to express Christian ecclesiology as “Israel-ology” (ibid. 238) in a way that would avoid both liberal and traditional versions of supersessionism. In other words, the essay is an exercise of intra-Christian reflection on the possibilities of the Christian meaning of ‘Israel’ responsive to the ethical challenge of avoiding anti-Judaism. The similarities of meanings between Christianity and contemporary (or rabbinic) Judaism are not its focus.
- 9.
- 10.
The passage that betrays this is the following: “Yet, despite this information vacuity, the significata can be affirmed: it is possible to claim that the intellectual judgements ‘God is good’ or ‘Space-time is a four-dimensional continuum’ refer or correspond to objective realities even when one cannot specify the modi significandi by offering, e.g. a falsifiable description of God’s goodness or of a four-dimensional space-time continuum” (Lindbeck 2009, 53).
- 11.
This is how Assmann (2008, 144) sums up the internal, theological explanations for untranslatability in the Antiquity: “As long as there is the possibility of translation, there is no need of conversion. If all religions basically worship the same gods, there is no need to give up one religion and to enter another one. This possibility only occurs if there is one religion claiming knowledge of a superior truth. It is precisely this claim that excludes translatability. If one religion is wrong and the other is right, there can be no question of translating the gods of the one into those of the other. Obviously they are about different gods.”
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Andrejč, G. (2016). George Lindbeck, Wittgenstein, and Grammar of Interreligious Disagreement. In: Wittgenstein and Interreligious Disagreement. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49823-6_3
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