Book Review
by John M. Frame
Paul
M. Van Buren: The Edges of Language.
This book gives some indication that Paul
Van Buren, at last, is growing up philosophically. This reviewer still wishes,
however, that this author were a bit less eager to share his growing pains with
the reading public.
Van Buren received his A.B. from Harvard—cum
laude in government, the book jacket informs us—and his theological
doctorate from the University of Basel for work with Karl Barth (summa cum
laude!), work which is reflected in an early (and thoroughly
Barthian) book by Van Buren called Christ in Our Place. The jacket,
however, does not claim that Van Buren acquitted himself cum laude in
the field of philosophy. Nor did he gain any academic plaudits from his first
venture into the philosophy of language analysis, the notorious Secular
Meaning of the Gospel, a book which, though it cashed in handsomely on the
“God is dead” fad, won fairly unanimous scorn from philosophically trained
critics. Apart from the more theologically focussed criticisms against the
book, it was urged by many that as philosophy the book was a collection of bits
and pieces— a bit of 1930’s—style positivism here, a bit of “use-analysis”
there, plus a lot of dogmatic secularist metaphysics of a type that few
analytically-minded philosophers of any school would tolerate. Well, Van Buren
kept at it. His next book Theological Explorations had at least the
merit of being modest in scope—a collection of essays, some of which showed
real promise. Promising novices in philosophy, however, are best advised not to
rush into print until the promise shows more fulfillment than did that of Theological
Explorations.
So now we come to The Edges of
Language, the result of the author’s attempt “to work out . . . the
implications for Christian theology of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical
Investigations” (ix). We are initially amazed at the extent to which this
proposal amounts to a confession of earlier irresponsibility. Granting the
universally recognized importance of Wittgenstein’s book, how could Van Buren,
in clear conscience, not have worked out its implications before writing
a book like Secular Meaning? That, however, is in the past. We can be
thankful that The Edges of Language, unlike Secular Meaning, is
fairly consistent in its choice of principles. Almost too consistent; for Edges
leaves the reader with the distinct impression that Wittgenstein’s Investigations
contain nothing wrong whatsoever! Van Buren here turns out to be as slavish
a follower of Wittgenstein as he has been previously (and to some extent still
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is)
of the verification principle and of the modern secular metaphysics. (Readers
will understand that last sentence; they should be reminded, however, that
“slavish follower of Wittgenstein” is almost as much a contradiction in terms
as “slavish follower of Socrates.”) Edges, then, considered as philosophy,
is another basically adolescent work. It ranks high in consistency and in the
basic soundness of its interpretation of Wittgenstein, but it is weak in that
crucial quality which separates philosophers from mere students of philosophy,
namely the ability to present a cogent and clear critical stance over against
one’s sources.
Journal readers, therefore, who wish to
heed my admonition (often made on these pages) to study language analysis, will
probably find more challenging and interesting works in the field than Van
Buren’s. However, Edges is easy to read, contains many interesting
examples and illustrations, and in general is probably as good as anything else
as an introduction to Wittgenstein’s later thought as it bears on religious
subjects, at least if its reader keeps in mind the caveats of this review! A
few more specific caveats—and appreciations—are therefore in order.
As a phenomenology of some aspects of
religious language, the book makes some points which, though not new, deserve
more consideration from theologians, especially orthodox ones. Van Buren points
out that language has a vast variety of functions alongside the more generally
recognized ones of referring to and describing objects. Not all words are
names, and not all sentences “state facts” or “communicate thoughts.” Language
is used in many ways, to accomplish many human tasks. In fact, everything we
do is affected by our linguistic capacity; thus in a sense human existence
is “linguistic” (though not only linguistic). Further, in an important
sense, there is nothing “supra-linguistic”; for we admit nothing to exist
unless such an admission can be made in language. Language also contains
the predicates which we ascribe to objects. Therefore, the real is the sayable
and the sayable is the real! Van Buren does admit that there might be something
“unsayable” ; but if there is, he reminds us, we had best be silent about it.
“Something unsayable,” if it is truly, completely beyond language, may not even
be called “something.” Thus when language changes, the world changes; to the
extent that we differ in our language, the worlds we live in also differ.
Christians oriented to the cosmonomic
school of philosophy are likely to object at this point that Van Buren’s view
amounts to an “absolutization of the lingual aspect” of reality. Against that
sort of criticism, however, I am inclined to defend Van Buren. Note again:
Van Buren does not say that human existence is merely linguistic, as if
it could
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not
also be characterized in other ways. I think also that Van Buren is right to
say that there is no supra-linguistic Archimedean point by which we can account
for language, if by that is meant something which cannot itself be spoken of.
Discussion of language is always circular at least in the sense that we must use
language in order to understand it; and it is the attempt to avoid
such circularity (and other related types of circularity) which in my view
partly accounts for some of the confusions in the cosmonomic philosophy.
Back to Van Buren. Religion, on his view,
is a type of human linguistic activity; we can therefore learn about its
purpose, its point, by studying its language, of course in its life-context.
His discussion focusses on Christianity. Christianity, he says, contains much
straightforward “literal” language (e.g. “Moses was born in
Theological optimists in the orthodox
camp may be happy to know that whereas in Secular Meaning Van Buren
considered the verification problem insoluble and therefore as an invalidation
of all God-language, he has now changed his view. The word “God” is no longer
“dead,” rather it is very much alive! Those optimists should be informed in no
uncertain terms, however, that Van Buren has not changed one whit in his
attitude toward the God of the Bible and of historic Christianity. He makes
quite clear that such a God does not exist in his view, although he
finds some support for his own view in the Christian sources. His Christianity
is that of “educated Christians in the West in this last third of the twentieth
century” (1) , those who have among other things fallen under the sway of
Bultmann, Bonhoeffer and the verification principle and therefore have gone
beyond “literal theism.”
What then is the function of God-talk and
other problematic forms of Christian language? Van Buren does not want to say
that such language is literal description of persons, events, etc., but neither
does he want to make of such language a merely arbitrary marker for something
“wholly other” and therefore “unsayable.” This dilemma of literalism vs.
unsayability is one which in his view traditional theism (and also the
nontraditional theism of Paul Tillich 1–74) has been unable to avoid. Van
Buren’s alternative: such talk is to be located at the “edges of language.”
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Van Buren explains that language is at the
“edges” when it is neither straightforwardly literal, nor utter nonsense. He
gives many examples of metaphors, puns, jokes and poetry to illustrate this
concept. Poetry, for example, often stretches the dictionary definitions of
terms, using them in unusual ways, yet in ways sufficiently analogous to our
usual talk to be understood with some effort. By “stretching” the rules in this
way, it risks abandoning them altogether-i.e. it risks falling into nonsense,
non-language. But it also makes it possible for us to express things that could
not be expressed through the ordinary conventions. And in stretching our
language, poetry stretches our world; for it opens to us new ways of seeing, of
experiencing that world. Problematic Christian language, says Van Buren, is a
kind of word-stretching activity which focusses particularly on “history”—i.e.,
it tries to say more about certain historical events than can be said through
straightforward literal sentences. “God led his people out of
But this is, after all, only half an
answer to the verification question, and unless more can be said, it risks not
being an answer at all. Granting that such sentences are a type of poetry, we
must then ask what it is that distinguishes good poetry from bad poetry, and
what distinguishes poetry itself from nonsense. We cannot expect to have
cut-and-dried criteria for every poem; yet for poetry in general there are
means of answering such questions. What sort of answers fit the religious case?
When a poet tries to say more than can be said in ordinary language, we often
evaluate his work in part by asking “was there something to be said?” If the
poet’s “message” turns out to be trivial or dull or incomprehensible or false,
wemay still give him high marks for aesthetic craftsmanship, but we would be
less impressed with the poem as a whole. In religious “poetry,” “message”
becomes even more important and aesthetic craftsmanship less so; thus it
becomes all the more important to evaluate what the religion is saying. As
Van Buren points out, of course, we must not
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demand
a precise translation into more prosaic language; but we must have some
criteria for determining whether or not the statements in question are nonsense
and, if they are meaningful, what statements tell the truth and which ones
don’t! On these crucial questions, Van Buren gives no guidance that I can see;
at times he almost seems to make the choice of statement a matter of taste
(though at other times he does insist that these statements say something about
the world and thus apparently can be true or false). But even poetry is not
purely a matter of taste. There are all-around bad poets, merely skillful
poets, and then there are poets worth listening to. Van Buren’s scheme displays
an arbitrariness characteristic of thought which is not bound to God’s self-revelation:
In defending the meaningfulness of God-language, he appeals to the fact that
God-language is language—i.e. it is ruled and therefore is not
nonsense. But when asked to specify what those rules are, he replies that
God-language is at the “edge” of language, and therefore stretches the
rules. But one never learns what the rules are, or how the stretching of those
rules differs from breaking them. One finds therefore an uneasy balance between
what Dr. Van Til has called a “principle of irrationalism” (the “edge”) and a
“principle of rationalism” (the “language” with its “rules”). Van Buren
therefore fails to stake out a firm middle ground between literalism and
unsayability.
Van Buren is right to say that talk about
God is not just like talk of tables and chairs. There are many ways in which
God-talk differs from ordinary language, among them the much discussed tendency
of Godsentences to resist the kind of verification and falsification which we
require of some other sentences. He is also right to suggest that there is a
sort of tension between “transcendence” and “immanence” in God-sentences: we do
want to avoid either making God too much like us or making him too different
from us. Biblical concepts of transcendence and immanence could have
helped him here, however. The transcendence of the biblical God is not a
Wittgensteinian “unsayability,” but is rather God’s Lordship—his
sovereign control and authority over the universe. Similarly the
immanence of the biblical God is not a tendency for Him to become
indistinguishable from man; rather it is his sovereign freedom to enter man’s
life and to reveal himself clearly and distinctly. Van Buren rejects both of
these biblical concepts; but his acceptance of them could have greatly eased
the “God-talk” problem for him. God-sentences resist ordinary sorts of
verification and falsification, because they are based on God’s sovereign
revelation of Himself, clearly presented to man in history, not because they
are indeterminate as to their meaning and truth.
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And
the tension between “transcendence” and “immanence” is also relieved when
alleged analogies and disanalogies between God and ourselves are subjected to
the supreme test of God’s own self-witness in Scripture. We are not shut up to
the alternatives of literalism and nonsense; for God’s revelation to us is both
adequate to our understanding and adequate to its divine message-it is neither
obscure nor prosaic.
In general, Van Buren has a lot of
homework to do on the Bible. His use of it is highly selective, terribly
dogmatic on disputed issues (as the use of the divine name in Exod. 3),
terribly unpersuasive on controversial points (is it really true that
narratives contain no propositions? (17) or that believing in God is “in no way
like believing a statement to be true” (76) ?) And while we’re at it, there are
also a number of minor blunders on extrabiblical matters. Is it really true,
for instance, that “the test for the proper use of ‘intend’ lies in what people
say they intend” (94, emphasis his) ? If that were true, then no one
could ever falsely declare an intention. Much about the book needs to be
rethought. Most of all, however, Van Buren will have to come to terms with his
own dogmatic and uncritical awe of modern secular thought and to see how diferent
all of this is from the biblical message of creation, fall and redemption.
Then he will have to make a choice-between an arbitrary amalgam of dogmatism
and silence on the one hand, and on the other that service of Christ which
opens the mouth in true freedom of speech (parrhesia).
John M. Frame