An Embodied Apologetic

Paul’s emphasis upon Christians living a life consistent with the proclamation of the gospel, by having unity in the church, practicing hospitality and care for the poor, and breaking down social barriers is particularly important in a postmodern world. Robert Webber notes that in the modern period, both “conservative” and “liberal” Christian exegetes “approached the Bible through empirical methodology in search of truth.”[1] “Liberals” emphasized reason and biblical criticism, while "conservatives" emphasized the correctness and inerrancy of the Bible. Webber argues, “In this vicious circle the liberals tore the Bible to shreds with biblical criticism while the conservatives continually followed the liberals in trying to put the pieces back together with rational arguments,” which led conservatives to emphasize “evidential apologetics.”[2]

Figures like Wittgenstein are highly critical of the common rationalistic and evidentialist arguments for religious belief. Kerr notes of Wittgenstein’s Roman Catholic upbringing, “It must be said that, like many another, his faith in God seems to have been strained, if not undermined, by the rationalistic apologetics then common in Roman Catholic schools.”[3] A further example of his criticism of rational apologetics can be seen in this passage from Culture and Value:

"A proof of God’s existence ought really to be something by means of which one could convince oneself that God exists. But I think that what believers who have furnished such proofs have wanted to do is give their ‘belief’ an intellectual analysis and foundation, although they themselves would never have come to believe as a result of such proofs. Perhaps one could ‘convince someone that God exists’ by means of a certain kind of upbringing, by shaping his life in such and such a way."[4]

Based on this passage, Wittgenstein believed that while rational arguments might help a person give their faith a foundation, he did not believe these arguments could convince a non-believer of God’s existence.[5] Wittgenstein even cites the New Testament to argue against rational apologetics: “Anyone who reads the Epistles will find it said: not only that it is not reasonable, but that it is folly.”[6] In his lectures on religious belief, Wittgenstein instead concentrates on his “denial of the necessity to have reasons for religious belief.”[7]

Wittgenstein would argue that evidence for a person’s belief is not just seen from their arguments or their participation in particular rituals. Wittgenstein argues, “It will show, not by reasoning or by appeal to ordinary grounds for belief, but rather by regulating for all in his life.”[8] Kallenberg argues, “Wittgenstein’s real position” is “religion does not involve doing deeds instead of speaking, but doing deeds in order to speak about religion.”[9]

More Christians are coming to critique modern evidential apologetics. Kenneson argues not only against rationalist apologetics, but against the modern belief in objective truth. Kenneson says, “Too often appeals to the objective truth of the gospel have served as a means for the church to evade its responsibility to live faithfully before the world.”[10] This was the case because “Christians insisted that the gospel was objectively true regardless of how we lived.”[11]

In a postmodern context, Webber argues “the church and its like in the world will become the new apologetic. People come to faith not because they see the logic of the argument, but because they have experienced a welcoming God in a hospitable and loving community.”[12] Thus, Webber argues for an incarnational view of the church which sees “Jesus present in the assembled people.”[13] Webber thus calls for the contemporary church, especially Protestants who have tended to emphasize the invisible church, to affirm the church as a visible community that is local and universal. This visible and incarnational church, as the body of Christ, continues the presence of Christ in the world, is a sign of God’s presence, and displays a new way of life made possible by Christ’s redemptive action.[14]

Living this embodied life, as Kenneson says, “gives our truth claims intelligibility and credibility” and moves the Christian faith from a modern form of gnosticism to an “embodied witness.”[15] While many Christians want to say the proposition “Jesus Christ is Lord of the universe” is objectively true, Kenneson urges Christians to reject “views from nowhere.” Kenneson argues, “To make such a claim intelligible, let alone true, one must have a concrete historical community who by their words and deeds narrate this story in a way that gives some substance to it.”[16] George Lindbeck illustrates this point in a famous passage from The Nature of Doctrine. Lindbeck argues that while “Christus est Dominus” is true when used in a way “consistent with what the pattern as a whole affirms of God’s being and will,” the proposition is false when used by a crusader “to authorize cleaving the skull of the infidel.”[17]

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[1] Webber, 45.

[2] Ibid., 19.

[3] Kerr, 153.

[4] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 85.

[5] Kerr, 155.

[6] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), 58.

[7] Monk, 410. In this line of thought, Wittgenstein disagreed with both those who use rational arguments for religious belief and atheists like his teacher, Bertrand Russell, who “encouraged the idea that a philosophical justification for religious beliefs is necessary for those beliefs to be given any credence.” Wittgenstein argued, “Both the atheist, who scorns religion because he has found no evidence for its tenets, and the believer, who attempts to prove the existence of God, have fallen victim to the ‘other’ – to the idol-worship of scientific thinking. Religious beliefs are not analogous to scientific theories, and should not be accepted or rejected using the same evidential criteria” (410).

[8] Ibid., 54.

[9] Kallenberg, 112. Monk notes of Wittgenstein, “Though he had the greatest admiration for those who could achieve this balancing act” of religious belief, “Wittgenstein did not regard himself as one of them. He could not, for example, bring himself to believe in the literal truth of reported miracles” (464). Monk then notes, “The belief in God which he acknowledged to Morgan did not take the form of subscribing to the truth of any particular doctrine, but rather that of adopting a religious attitude to life. As he once put it to Drury: ‘I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing everything from a religious point of view’” (464).

[10] Philip D. Kenneson, “There’s No Such Thing as Objective Truth and It’s a Good Thing, Too,” in Christian Apologetics in the Postmodern World, ed. Timothy R. Phillips and Dennis L. Okholm (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1995), 166.

[11] Ibid., 166.

[12] Webber, Ancient-Future Faith, 72.

[13] Ibid., 73.

[14] Ibid., 74–83.

[15] Kenneson, 166.

[16] Ibid., 167.

[17] George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1984.), 64.

The Eucharist as Proclamation in 1 Corinthians 11:23-26

For the church, the primary way to display its form of life, to “show” the message of the gospel, is in the Eucharist. The Eucharist as a place of “showing” is emphasized by Paul in the words of institution in 1 Corinthians 11:23–26. That Paul says, “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you,” shows that the words of institution are a part of the tradition of the church from Christ, even at his time.^[1] With Paul’s line of argument, “To have received the tradition from the church is to have received it from Christ.”[2]

The text proceeds to say in verses 23–25, “the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’” Partaking of a loaf and drinking from a cup “in remembrance” of Christ is mentioned in two of the four accounts of the words of institution: 1 Corinthians and Luke.

Some debate exists concerning the meaning of the Greek term is ἀνάμνησις (anamnesis), often translated “remembrance” in English. Some Christians believe ananmesis implies that the Eucharist is nothing but a memorial of the past. For example, Alexander Campbell viewed the Lord’s Supper as “commemorative and restitutive in character, i.e. as something New Testament believers did weekly to keep Christ’s sacrificial death before them and therefore what Christians should do today if they want to be like them and want to be united.”[3] Robert Louis Wilken, however, notes that for early Christians, liturgical acts like the Eucharist did not only pertain to the past. Wilken says, “In the Eucharist the life-giving events of Christ’s death and Resurrection escape the restrictions of time and become what the early church called mysteries, ritual actions by which Christ’s saving work is represented under the veil of the consecrated bread and wine.”[4] Wilken thus translates anamnesis “recall by making present.”[5]

Jasper and Cuming also note, “Anamnesis . . . has overtones of ‘proclamation’ which the English does not suggest.”[6] They argue the idea of anamnesis as proclamation stems from Jewish usage of the term.[7] As William Robinson points out, the word anamnesis is used in the Septuagint translation of Exodus 12:14,[8] which says, “This day shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance.” Robinson says, “Even after the lapse of all these years, the modern Orthodox Jew keeps this day, not simply as calling to mind the trials of his people in Egypt, but as sharing with them that slavery and that release.”[9] Thus the story of the Passover is “re-enacted” in the present.[10] For this reason, later Eucharistic prayers include a special section called the anamnesis which “proclaims the Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension of Jesus Christ.”[11] So, the Eucharist is, as Stephen Long and Tripp York call it, a “living memorial.”[12]

In verse 26, Paul adds, “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (NRSV). This passage is unique among the four accounts of the Last Supper in the New Testament. Jasper and Cuming argue that in this verse Paul emphasizes the proclamatory aspect of anamnesis.[13] Paul says that the proclamation of Christ’s death not only occurs during the preaching before the meal, but that as the community partakes of the bread and wine, they proclaim “the death of Jesus ‘for us’ and the community’s common participation in the benefits of that death.”[14]

Paul uses the same verb translated “proclaim” in 11:26, καταγγέλλω, that he uses in 1 Corinthians 9:14, which says, “In the same way, the Lord commanded that those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel.” καταγγέλλω is also used in Acts 4:2, where the Sadducees are annoyed with Peter and John for “proclaiming that in Jesus there is the resurrection of the dead.” Also, in Acts 13:5, Paul and Barnabas, “proclaimed the word of God in the synagogues of the Jews.” Anthony Thiselton notes that καταγγέλλω can also mean “to perform a declarative speech-act openly.”^[15] So, in the Eucharist, the entire church, not just the person or persons officiating, visibly preach the gospel and their sharing in the body of Christ in the meal (cf. 1 Cor 10:16–17). So while preaching is a “verbum visible,” figures like St. Augustine and Calvin call the Eucharist a “verbum visible,”[16] or what Herbert McCabe calls, “the creative language of God.”[17] For this reason, the King James Version of 1 Corinthians 11:26 says, “For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come.”

As can be seen in verse 26, the visible proclamation of the Eucharist connects together the past death of Christ (τὸν θάνατον τοῦ κυρίου) with the present proclamation of the church (καταγγέλλετε). Thiselton thus argues that Paul connects the Christian community’s proclamation in the Eucharist with the recital that takes place in the Passover Haggadah. Thiselton says, “Yet like those who recite the Haggadah of the Passover on the understanding that ‘in every generation a man must so regard himself as he came forth himself out of Egypt’ (m. Pesahim 10:5), it also witnesses to the participant’s self-involving appropriation of the cross both for redemption and lifestyle as those who share Christ’s death in order to share Christ’s life.”^[18]

Paul also connects the past death of Christ and the present proclamation of the church with the future return of the Lord (ἄχρι οὗ ἔλθῃ). As Wilken says, “Liturgy is always in the present tense. The past becomes a present presence that opens a new future.”[19] Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells similarly point out the connection of past, present, and future in worship by saying, “Worship does indeed commemorate the past because it sees the past as the theater of God’s definitive and self-revelatory actions in the world. But worship also anticipates the future, particularly through the Eucharist, in which Christians share a meal that anticipates the heavenly banquet.”[20] So as J.B. Rotherham says, “The apostle saw this whole gospel thus shining forth in and through the Supper.”[21]

Thus, the church is a community “bound together by a form of life that embodies the story of God,”[22] the story which flows from creation to the eschaton. The church then recites the story in its worship, especially the Eucharist.[23] For the Eucharist to properly communicate, for it to inform the life of a community, it must be a common practice. As Wittgenstein says, “a person goes by a signpost only in so far as there is an established usage, a custom.”[24]

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^[1]Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians: A Commentary on the Greek Text, NIGTC, ed. I. Howard Marshall and Donald A. Hagner (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans, 2000), 866.

[2] M. Eugene Boring and Fred B. Craddock, The People’s New Testament Commentary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 533.

[3] Byron Lambert, “Have We Understood the Lord’s Supper?,” in The Lord’s Supper: Historical Writings on Its Meaning to the Body of Christ, eds. Charles R. Gresham and Tom Lawson (Joplin, MO: College Press, 1993), 200.

[4] Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 34.

[5] Ibid., 34.

[6] R.C.D. Jasper and G.J. Cuming, Prayers of the Eucharist: Early and Reformed, 3^rd ed. (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1990), ix.

[7] Ibid., 14–15.

[8] William Robinson, “The Meaning of Anamnesis,” in The Lord’s Supper: Historical Writings on Its Meaning to the Body of Christ, eds. Charles R. Gresham and Tom Lawson (Joplin, MO: College Press, 1993), 230.

[9] Ibid., 231.

[10] Ibid., 231.

[11] Jasper and Cuming, 14–15.

[12] D. Stephen Long and Tripp York, “Remembering: Offering Our Gifts,” in The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, in The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, eds. Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 342.

[13] Jasper and Cuming, 15. While the text of 1 Corinthians seems to indicate that verse 26 is a comment by Paul or a tradition passed down to him alongside the words of Jesus (Jasper and Cuming call it the “Pauline comment”), some of the Eastern Eucharistic prayers, such as The Liturgy of St. Mark, The Egyptian Anaphora of St. Basil, The Deir Balyzeh Papyrus, The Liturgy of St. James, The Apostolic Constitutions, The Byzantine Liturgy of St. Basil, The Anaphora of the Twelve Apostles, and one western text, Ambrose’s On the Sacraments, reword the comment to be in the first person (55–56, 65, 71, 80, 90, 110, 119, 126, 144, 146). For example, The Egyptian Anaphora of St. Basil says, “For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim my death until I come” (56).

[14] Richard B. Hays, First Corinthians, Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching, ed., James Luther Mays (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1989), 200.

^[15] Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, 887.

[16] Robinson, “The Meaning of Anamnesis,” 232. Lambert similarly says, “The Supper is a symbol and motion and has missionary power. It arouses curiosity and provokes the reply of the gospel. It proclaims a death, a resurrection, a continuing Presence, and a triumphant return” (209).

[17] Herbert McCabe, “The Eucharist as Language,” Modern Language 15, no. 2 (Apr 1999): 132.

^[18] Ibid., 887. Emphasis original.

[19] Wilken, 35.

[20] Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells, “Christian Ethics as Informed Prayer,” in The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, ed. Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 7.

[21] J.B. Rotherham, “Let us Keep the Feast: The General Character of the Institution,” in The Lord’s Supper: Historical Writings on Its Meaning to the Body of Christ, eds. Charles R. Gresham and Tom Lawson (Joplin, MO: College Press, 1993), 20.

[22] Kallenberg, 148. Wilken notes similarly that in the early church, “The liturgy provided a kind of grammar of Christian speech, a key to how the words of the Bible are to be used” (43).

[23] Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Faith: Rethinking Evangelicalism for a Postmodern World (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1999), 93, 97.

[24] Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 198.

Wittgenstein's Concept of Showing, Part 2

It is difficult for a person to understand a word or concept in a language game in which they are not fluent. An example of this can be seen in the film The Gods Must be Crazy. The film opens by introducing a tribe of bushmen in the Kalahari Desert. The tribe is happy because they are provided for and they believe that the gods only put good useful things on the earth for them. Their world is interrupted when a pilot flying overhead throws a glass Coke bottle out the window, which falls to the earth unbroken. The bushmen, who discover the bottle, had never seen a bottle before so they try to discover its use. Some used it to cure snake skin, one man used it to make music, and others used it for a variety of other tasks. Since there was only one bottle which had proven to be useful for multiple tasks, the people, for the first time desire to own something as property and start to become jealous and fight over the bottle. One of the bushmen, Xi, begins to call the bottle the “evil thing” and decides to leave the tribe and throw the bottle off of the edge of the earth to restore peace.

This does not mean one cannot learn a new language game or come to understand a different culture. Kallenberg says, “Namely, one can also get a grasp on a form of life as an outsider by being shown, not told, the form of communal life.”[1] Kallenberg goes on to argue, "Proximity to and recognition of a group’s characteristic form of life, as might be the case for an anthropologist who lives among an aboriginal tribe for a decade or two, prove enough of an insider’s grasp of the form of life—even if from the outside—to allow an understanding to occur."[2]

This means that for fluency to take place, a person must not only learn the vocabulary of a people group, for, “fluency also requires familiarity with activities.”[3] For, activities give sense to the vocabulary used.[4] For example, if someone had come and shown the bushmen how to drink from a bottle, the bushmen would have come to understand the use of a bottle.

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[1] Kallenberg, 116.

[2] Ibid., 117.

[3] Ibid., 122.

[4] “Post-liberal theology in the vein of McClendon and Hauerwas reminds us that claims about God are claims about God. However, in order for these claims to be intelligible, they must find a home in the context of practices (for example, confession, worship, and witness) which give to all forms of Christian language their sense” (Ibid., 233–234).

Wittgenstein's Concept of Showing, Part 1

Monk notes that after Wittgenstein arrived back in Cambridge in the autumn of 1930, he had a “clear conception of the correct method in philosophy.”[1] Monk goes onto argue that "the really decisive moment came when he began to take literally the idea of the Tractatus that the philosopher has nothing to say, but only something to show, and applied the idea with complete rigour, abandoning altogether the attempt to say something with ‘pseudo-propositions’."[2]

As Monk mentions, a concept of “showing” is seen in the Tractatus. For example, Wittgenstein says things like, “What can be shown, cannot be said,” which expresses the weakness in language.[3] Wittgenstein takes this notion further in his later philosophy. Monk notes as an example, “Appreciation takes a bewildering variety of forms, which differ from culture to culture, and quite often will not consist in saying anything. Appreciation will be shown, by actions as often as by words.”[4] Wittgenstein also laments his inability to write poetry, since “poetry is able to show what cannot be said.”[5]

Wittgenstein also uses images in his writing in order to better show his meaning. For example, in “Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment” (originally known as Part II of Philosophical Investigations), Wittgenstein borrows Jastrow’s picture of “the duck-rabbit”

to show that at times people have different interpretations or perceptions of illustrations.[6]

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[1] Monk, 298.

[2] Ibid., 302.

[3] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears & B.F. McGuinness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), § 4.1212.

[4] Monk, 405.

[5] Kallenberg, 3.

[6] Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 204–207.

Wittgenstein's View of Language, Part 2

Wittgenstein argues instead that the meaning of a word comes from its use or its practice.[1] That, for Wittgenstein, does not mean a person can use a word anyway they want. A person cannot decide to start using the word “orange” for the color green or start calling a banana an “apple.” Wittgenstein denies that a person can develop their own private language to describe their own private experiences. As Hans Sluga says

Wittgenstein went on to maintain that the words of our language have meaning only insofar as there exist public criteria for their correct use. As a consequence, he argued, there cannot be a completely private language, that is, a language which in principle can only be used to speak about one’s own inner experience.[2]

This demonstrates a shift from Wittgenstein’s understanding in the Tractatus that a proposition pictures reality. Monk argues that the shift in perspective came from Wittgenstein’s interaction with Piero Sraffa. Sraffa was an Italian economist who had to leave Italy because of a tract he published attacking the policies of Mussolini. John Maynard Keynes invited Sraffa to come to Cambridge and the university created a teaching post for him.

Upon Wittgenstein’s return to Cambridge in 1929, Keynes introduced Wittgenstein to Sraffa and the two became close friends. They met weekly to discuss Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Sraffa helped Wittgenstein develop an “anthropological approach” to philosophy, leading Wittgenstein to emphasize communal life.[3] So, while the Tractatus discusses language apart from the context in which it is used, “the Investigations repeatedly emphasizes the importance of the ‘stream of life’ which gives linguistic utterances their meaning.”[4] Wittgenstein expresses his indebtedness to Sraffa in the preface to Philosophical Investigations by saying, “I am indebted to that which a teacher of this university, Mr P. Sraffa, for many years unceasingly applied to my thoughts. It is to this stimulus that I owe the most fruitful ideas of this book.”[5]

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[1] Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, 4; Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 30; and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 85.

[2] Hans Sluga, “Ludwig Wittgenstein: Life and Work. An Introduction,” In Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, ed. Hans Sluga and David G. Stern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 21.

[3] Monk, 260.

[4] Ibid., 261.

[5] Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 4. As Kerr points out, by emphasizing communal life and action Wittgenstein rejects the “picture of the solitary disembodied consciousness” (140).