Spirituality and Christianity

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) continues to challenge contemporary theology to be relevant, and his most potent weapon is his postmodern sense of language. Persuaded perhaps by his own evangelical conversion experience, he struggled to understand and explain the Christianity that is lived more than talked. Many theologians today respond to this calling, convinced there is a reality-constructing nature in language that must be applied to contemporary life practices. Both Wittgenstein and Stanley Grenz find particular ways in which language is the means by which theological meaning has powerful impact on human behavior and culture. Rebecca Chopp and Elizabeth Johnson are good examples of feminist theologians who acknowledge the transformative and emancipatory potential of theological discourse and use it to liberate the global community from oppression in many forms.
Wittgenstein’s primary objective was to engage language-users in a fully human life. His great contribution toward this effort was his ability to break out of the foundational restrictions of modern systems of thought. The Cartesian and Kantian thought tended to reinforce solipsism and metaphysical irrelevance, both of which isolated individuals from community. But, Wittgenstein argued, “no human self was alone in a private world.”1 The very existence of language is proof that humans live in relation to others. He saw that words were not merely pictures of the world, but in fact words are part of the world. They constitute the reality that indicate human endeavors. For example, building, traveling, playing, and fighting are human practices that require a mutual understanding of rules between participants. And even a religious life could not be practiced alone. After all, he claims, anyone can be self-critical, but faith requires an acknowledgment and confession of sins to those we have injured and to those dearest to us.
Wittgenstein also demonstrated the inadequacy of language understood in modern terms as representational. Disputing the notion that language is private knowledge preventing the speaker from relevant action, Wittgenstein sees language as the means to go on in meaningful relation to others. Like a city that we learn to navigate, the grammar of language shows us how to understand the thoughts (and convictions) of others and how we relate to them. Language games, teaching us the reality of life with others, show that the foundation of language lies in a “web of understanding, interdependence, and shared practice”.2
Wittgenstein’s liberation of language beyond the private representational realm opened the way for theology to play a more active role in cultural and social contexts. Grenz points out, for example, that the “ultimate purpose of theology is not simply to establish ‘right belief’ but to assist the Christian community in its vocation to live as the people of God in the particular historical-cultural context in which it is situated.”3 The grammar for Christians to live rightly is based on the claim that the Spirit performs an illocutionary act. Rather than a locutionary act (merely presenting the words on the page of the Bible), Spirit is seen as speaking (or performing) in the midst of people, in cultural context.
The usefulness of this concept is that it enables theology to be culturally relevant. Finding meaning, Grenz explains, involves cultural practices and uses of symbols; therefore culture brings its resources of meaning-making to the development of theology. A relevant theology is one in which the specific issues raised by the greater social context are addressed. Theology is thereby strengthened, as the relevance of an idea from Scripture brings greater meaning to it, and consequently the illocutionary message of the Spirit is better heard.
Chopp notes that the loosening from modern subjectivity language allows for “otherness” to be appreciated. The problem with subjectivity is that the individual identifies himself in history and with God alone, and there is no need to be concerned with the plight or value of others. It also reinforces the dominant ordering in language and in politics through what Chopp refers to as the “social-symbolic order”. This ordering, she explains, is “a patterning of certain values and principles establishing often anonymous rules that run through discourses about different arenas and different discourses about one arena of social life.”4 But this ordering is not totalitarian in everyday living, and there are margins that allow language to be corrected and transformed.
Marginalized women, who are “other than men” find, for example, that their inferior place in society is a result of social codes and cultural practices rather than their personal inadequacy. By marginal, Chopp does not mean trivial or unnecessary; on the contrary, the border of the social-symbolic order is the place where the questioning of rules and practices takes place. Postmodern feminist theology has strengthened this voice on the margin, by giving it new ways to hear and new possibilities for constructive action. The modern hermeneutic of suspicion (“why are women excluded?”) has given way to a postmodern language shift: “rather than demanding ‘let us in,’ feminists began saying, ‘share our vision.’”5
The freedom to participate in constructive discourse, even from the margins, is supported by the understanding that signs are open and transformative. Chopp shows that words themselves are not fixed by their self-referentiality nor by their essences but by their context and the relationship of signs to each other. Therefore, all words, even “the Word of creation” are perfectly open, allowing symbols to have meaning and pushing against fixed meaning. The liberating aspect of the perfectly open Word is that it creates and restores speech without breaking into discourse or governing it.6 It gives freedom to women’s words and leads their words to new life.
The creative aspect of feminist theology invites others into the shared vision. No longer a corrective or reacting voice, it promotes discourse that includes the marginalized. Women and other marginalized people (the poor or minority races) challenge the social-symbolic order, because they must speak a language that does not reinforce it. It is not Christianity itself that weakens, belittles, and eliminates women from its practices and discourse, but feminist theology recognizes its task as an emancipatory transformation of Christianity. “The Word” in which women speak their own words, struggles against the repressive ordering of patriarchy and asserts a freedom for caring, receiving and establishing new ways of speaking. In fact, the linguistic practices of feminist theology in the form and substance of the Word is no longer for women only and a few men; but they are central to Christianity and Christian witness in the world, thereby creating the possibilities of emancipaory transformation for all.7
Johnson considers the feminist theological agenda of crucial importance, not only to the freeing of both men and women from debilitating social roles, but to the very viability of Christianity (or any religion) itself.8 She cites Wolfhart Pannenberg’s analysis of religious vitality which concludes that religions die when they lose the power to interpret convincingly the full range of contemporary experience in the context of their idea of God. Thus if the “God of Christianity” is unable to illumine and integrate the current experience of women, then the power of experience pulls people on, and this god fades from memory. Another way of looking at the importance of feminist theology to the practice of Christianity is to consider how religiously unconscionable sexism is. “Wherever women are violated, diminished, have their life drained away,” Johnson writes, “God’s glory is dimmed and put at historical risk.”9 She also raises issue with the effort to attribute feminine traits to a masculine God or seeking feminine dimensions of the divine. Both of these terms retain an androcentric focus, whereas the practice of speaking of God as the creator of both male and female in the divine image highlights the capability of women and of men to be made in God’s image.
Wittgenstein’s challenge to contemporary theology is being met by theologians, such as Grenz, Chopp, and Johnson, who find the means for language to emancipate the marginalized and to lessen the patriarchal fears of those clinging to power. The illocutionary act of the Spirit must be seen as spoken in the midst of all the people, where women’s own self-definitions are heard, and the people in the metaphorical “language-game city” know how to go on in the discourse of relevant Christianity.

1. James Wm. McClendon, Jr. Witness: Systematic Theology, Vol.3, (Nashville: Abington Press, 2000), McClendon paraphrasing Wittgenstein, 248.
2. Ibid, 259.
3. William C. Placher, ed., Essentials of Christian Theology, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 30.
4. Rebecca Chopp, The Power to Speak, (Crossroad, 1991), p. 14.
5. Ibid, 17.
6. Ibid, 31.
7. Ibid, 22.
8. Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is: They Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourses, (Crossroad, 1992), 15.
9. Ibid.