In the Middle Ages, philosophy was dubbed the handmaiden of theology. The servant rebelled during the 17th century, and most of the time since then, the two disciplines have gone their separate, sometimes hostile ways. But during this century, philosophy and theology have been groping toward a new and nonsubservient dialogue. The German disciples of Biblical Theologian Rudolf Bultmann found in existentialism a way to rephrase the eternal Christian message. In Britain and the U.S., other theologians are enthusiastically exploring a different direction—applying the philosophic method known as linguistic analysis to the clarification of religious thought.
A technique rather than a metaphysic, analysis rejects the traditional approach to such philosophic questions as the nature of being or the meaning of life, which they say cannot be studied in such universal terms at all. Instead, analysis limits itself to a modest but possibly more productive intellectual task: discovering the meaning of words and sentences by examining how they are ordinarily used, and by classifying different kinds of statements. Linguistic analysis grew out of a philosophic movement which had no use for theology: logical positivism. Such philosophers as A. J. Ayer of Oxford and Vienna's Rudolf Carnap, now a professor emeritus at U.C.L.A., argued that the only meaningful propositions were the analytic statements of logic and mathematics, or statements that could be verified by empirical procedures—which meant that the ethereal language of theology was literally meaningless.
Language Games. Many philosophers —including Ayer himself—have now backed away from that dogmatic view, thanks in large part to the influence of an eccentric Austrian-born Cam bridge don named Ludwig Wittgenstein, who died in 1951. Wittgenstein, perhaps the century's most important philosopher, believed that there was a wide variety of discourse—ranging from jokes to the "God-talk" of theologians —that could not be empirically verified, but nevertheless was useful and in some ways meaningful to man. Instead of dismissing this nonempirical discourse as nonsense, Philosophy should treat it as a "language game" and—without passing on its value—clarify the rules and make it more intelligible.
Many philosophers still regard theology as illogical nonsense; but within the past decade, a number of British theologians have increasingly found linguistic analysis to be a helpful tool in interpreting the religion "games." It has dissolved some of the old conflicts between science and theology, by making it clear, for example, that pastors speaking of God the Creator and cosmologists talking of the "continuous creation" of the universe refer to different and nonparallel propositions. It has made analytically minded theologians suspicious of the cloudy speculation that sometimes wafts out of German seminaries. More important, analysis has provided the theologians with a method of thinking that will help them make a fresh approach to such vital religious terms as soul, creation and mystery.