Do you know the drinking game “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon“? Sam Norton and Mike Higton have just invented its theological/philosophical equivalent: Wittgenstein to Williams in two steps.

First, this is what Sam Norton would like to be read at his funeral:

I should like to say that … the words you utter or what you think as you utter them are not what matters, so much as the difference they make at various points in your life. How do I know that two people mean the same when each says he believes in God? And just the same goes for belief in the Trinity. A theology which insists on the use of certain particular words and phrases, and outlaws others, does not make anything clearer… It gesticulates with words, as one might say, because it wants to say something and does not know how to say it. Practice gives the words their sense.¹

(Good on you Sam! No “Death is nothing at all” for you. I bet you don’t even want Crimmond and Abide with me to be sung)

Then Mike Higton wrote this about Rowan Williams:

He assumes that ‘freedom of religion’ isn’t just a case of freedom of opinion, or freedom of speech, or freedom of association - not because religions deserve some extra aura of special ‘respect’, but because none of those freedoms quite captures what religions actually are. To be free to practice a religion is to be free to be involved in a complex, social, ongoing context - a ‘tradition’ or ‘community’ to use some shorthand - that deeply forms ones identity. If freedom of religion is to mean anything at all, it must mean freedom to be formed by such a community, and freedom to participate as a citizen in public life as one who has been formed by such a community.

Simple: W to W in two steps. In other words, (for any broadsheet journalists out there who don’t understand the big words), religious is as religious does.

Hats off to Sam and Mike.

1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch, English translation with the amended second edition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), 85e. [↩]

Around the fringes of every crowd, there is always a group who doesn’t understand what you say or mean. The reactions to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s speech about civil and religious law show that the fringe of misapprehension has just got a whole lot bigger.

 

 3MT : Misapprehension at the fringes [3:59m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (67)

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