Doordacht doorgaan met spreken over God

Abstract

How to continue meaningful God-talk It is often thought that talk of God is meaningless because God’s existence is implausible. The philosopher of religion Vincent Brümmer convincingly argued that this modern conviction is rooted in the Enlightenment way of thinking, which presupposes an empirical foundation to justify the meaningfulness of utterances. This foundationalism reduces religious belief to an epistemic hypothesis and thus neglects various characteristics of God-talk. This view is questionable because it uses a referential theory of meaning. Brümmer argues for an anti-foundationalist way out of this bias; he stresses the commissive nature of religious language and defends a holistic philosophical theology. However, this holistic programme is not completely convincing, since Brümmer assumes that metaphors are reality-depicting. Reality-depictingness, however, also assumes a referential theory. In order to avoid this problem, one should use a relational conceptuality which makes talk of God understandable in an ecclesiological perspective as the network of the Kingdom of God.