Literal vs literal
Reading the Bible with Wittgenstein
“I don’t turn on my headlights because: …Jesus is the light so I don’t need headlights, I just need Jesus!”1
This appeared on my Twitter feed a couple of years ago and even though it was written as a joke, it gets to the heart of biblical interpretation arguments, specifically what is a proper, literal interpretation and what isn’t. What does literal even mean? Meaning and its mapping onto language is complicated.
Literal cannot be just physical. A “literalist” who interprets the creation story as occurring over seven 24-hour Earth days does not usually balk at the figurative interpretation of John 5:9–Jesus is light for the darkness of our souls and psyche, not an ever-present irradiation of our retinas by photons. Elsewhere, Jesus says he will make Andrew and Peter “fishers of men,” and we don’t envisage them out with fishing lines, hauling people in by their mouths. Figurative language is rife in the Bible and our lives. To describe and communicate psychological and spiritual experiences that are very real, if not physical, and even to convey the depth of some physical experiences, we turn to figurative language. Whether it’s broken hearts, long, dark nights of the soul or blue-milk moonlight (a line I read 30 years ago in Frank Herbert’s Dune and never forgot), metaphor, allegory and other figurative techniques speak truth via our imagination in a way pure naming of physical objects never can.
Many will concede literal doesn’t mean physical but insist it does, to quote the Collins dictionary, mean “the most basic” interpretation. The. Behind such an assertion is the assumption that language precisely labels or refers to a single state of the world. A particular combination of words has a particular meaning while another combination of words has another particular meaning, and there is a one-to-one correspondence between combinations of words and the world. This breakdown of language into a “logical atomism” was the goal of Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege, founders of modern analytic philosophy. Frege was trying to ground mathematics in logic and was less interested or assertive regarding what his project meant for natural everyday language and ontology. Russell was more vehement that everyday language and the world were reducible to a more precise and pure logical rendering.
In a perfectly precise language, if I said “The cat is on the mat,” there’d be only one correct (a “most basic”) way to interpret that sentence–perhaps, a furry four-legged creature is reclining on a polygon of fabric that covers a floor. It doesn’t take much thinking to see that even such a simple sentence can have more than one meaningful and correct interpretation. If we were at the climbing gym and had recently been commenting that my friend rock-climbs like a cat, then “The cat is on the mat” could as easily (and in fact, more likely) refers to my friend resting on the crash mats. Context is everything.
Enter Wittgenstein.
Initially, Wittgenstein was on board with logical atomism. His Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus became like a bible for its adherents. But Wittgenstein turned.
We, Wittgenstein highlights, use language for various purposes: to, joke, report, command, speculate, query, not just to point. As such, “tree” means something very different if it’s uttered on a balmy spring day than if it’s screeched in fear while skiing at speed. We use words that don’t correspond to a specific object in the world (this, that, five, everybody). We then use language that refers back on itself, creating a web of reference. If I say “Pot, kettle,” I may be pointing to two things in front of me, but more likely I am admonishing you for being unnecessarily critical of something you do yourself. Meaning splits into ever more nuances with each new combination of purpose, abstraction and self-referral. Without such multi-faceted meaning, humour would be starved, poetic resonances lost.
For Wittgenstein, language does label, as many before him have noted. He quotes Augustine in Confessions:
“When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out… Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified….”)2
But, argues Wittgenstein, labelling is not all language does. Such a simple language would be a “language more primitive than ours.”3 I imagine trying to explain the trinity with ostensive language and am convinced. Instead of being purely ostensive, Wittgenstein states (and he does tend to state rather than argue) that “for a large class of cases…, the meaning of a word is its use in the language”4
Dictionaries gesture to the truth of this statement where examples of how to use a word of interest are given–a tacit acknowledgment that examples of use are as helpful as any definition. Though an accompanying definition is also given, it is given with words in the same language as the word of interest. But defining something by itself is inherently circular. Language points back at itself as well as at any outside objective reality.
In this way, Wittgenstein forces us to confront whether ostention is really that basic. Ostention works for humans because of something we can already do “as if [we] already had a language, only not this one,” a language of thought perhaps. “One already has to know (or be able to do) something in order to be capable of asking a thing’s name.”5 Frege was also aware of such complexities, writing, “our thinking is closely bound up with language…. Perhaps our thinking is at first a form of speaking.”6 For ostention to work, there must be some common ability and purpose between communicator and receiver. We cannot teach monkeys mathematics or philosophy.
If the meaning of language is (primarily) in its use, then language use and meaning are going to be impacted by our cultural position. The old aphorism that the Innuit have 50 words for snow compared the English’s paltry one (though as an English-speaking meteorologist, I contend this is wrong!) results from the more common occurrence of snow and pressing day-to-day need to distinguish its different types for the Innuit. The different experience and goals of each cultural group leads to a different quality in their language.
Such effects can also be detected in Christian doctrine. Theologian Jonathon Hill, in The History of Christian Thought, attributes the different models of the atonement given by John Calvin and Anselm of Canterbury to their experience of different legal systems.7 Anselm describes the atonement in terms of Jesus giving back to God what we owed but could not give–an analogous role to that of a benevolent feudal lord in the medieval world in which Anselm lived. Calvin, on the other hand, describes the atonement as Jesus taking punishment we deserved, mirroring the modern punitive legal system in which he lived. Both theologians use a framework of what they know to elucidate something complex. And though both accounts describe Jesus doing something for us, the emphasis is different. One may balk at Calvin’s emphasis on judgment but be comforted by Anselm’s emphasis on kindness. The meaning of their respective models (or doctrines) of complete divine truth are not identical.
We rely on language to communicate meaning. Since potential meaning is as innumerable as human experience itself, our finite language code must bend with context and experience. We are unwise to dare think ourselves so future-privileged and superior that our interpretation of the atonement (or any other reduction of Biblical words into doctrine) is exactly right. What we have words for and the concepts these words sketch are based on experience and purpose which differ over time and between cultures. Language then feeds back on experience and purpose, providing frameworks to describe what we didn’t before have words to illustrate. Language use twines, web-like with our experience and evolves with time.
As with the poetic and the humorous, we can embrace or at least work with this [God-given] limit of not being able to always exactly specify meaning. Like Origen did. Origen painstakingly constructed the Hexapla, a comparative table with six Greek translations of the Bible alongside the original Hebrew. He realised, Hill writes, “that before he could hope to understand the text, he had to establish exactly what the text was.”8 Though “exactly” is overly ambitious in Wittgenstein’s eyes, Origen saw that by examining multiple translations, he could more easily hone in on the kernel of truth. Different shades of meaning in different translations sketch what is common and coherent, revealing what would be fuzzy and less defined in a single language rendering. Origen, in line with Wittgenstein much later, knew that no one translation, no one interpretation could be perfect. There is often no single “most basic” interpretation.
This is not relativism. Wittgenstein maintains that there are correct and incorrect ways to use language. Imprecision of meaning or understanding result because we just don’t have the full or precise code such that the “rules” of our language are generalisable. I may know how to act in a loving way, but I can’t write down every rule of acting in a loving way or write down an exact definition of love in a codebook. Wittgenstein, in this way, though he may not have liked it, was on the same page as God. God gives us Jesus as a model, not a list of commandments encompassing every situation we may encounter in life. We are limited. Our inability to always agree on what a portion of language means or when to distinguish the figurative from the physical (for example) is something we must deal with in our limited creatureliness. Creeds and doctrines help, but they are not perfect renderings of divine truth.
Thus Wittgenstein did for language what Dostoevsky did for theodicy what Schrödinger, Heisenberg and Bell did for the physical world. Dostoevsky showed, via his characters, how to live with the problems of evil and doubt, not how to construct a theology to explain them. For Dostoevsky, theology, as a human construct, was not big enough to be capable of any such explanation. Analogously, early quantum physicists showed that intuitive models of matter and causality broke down at small levels. The models of classical physics were not big enough to explain all that we saw.
Though logical atomists try to start with the small to explain the big, the 20th century has been one long lesson in how such reductionism doesn’t work. The “building blocks” of our world–usually words or sentences in language and an ever changing array of subatomic particles in physics–do not fully account for the totality of our world and moreover elude us whenever we try to pin them down. Wittgenstein highlighted the elusiveness of such atoms in our language as physicists of the 20th century faced the elusiveness of such atoms in the “physical” world–are they waves or particles, both or neither? In answer to Wittgenstein’s question “what are the simple constituent parts of which reality is composed?”9 physicist Wolfgang Pauli’s comment on the implications of Quantum Mechanics is an appropriate answer: “When he speaks of ‘reality’ the layman usually means something well-known, whereas I think the important and extremely difficult task of our time is to build up a fresh idea of reality.”10 Reality amounts to more than a lego construction of human concepts.
By acknowledging the complexity of language, we are not just playing semantics or saying nothing can be known. Rather we assert that what we know is limited and affected by where, who and when we are. God’s word is inerrant, but our interpretation of it is not. If we could understand perfectly everything the Bible said, we’d be outside language and outside the world. We’d be God.
References:
Owen, Jan J. [@janjowen]. (2021, August 12). A client sent me this. I will add: Also it's against my religion because Jesus is the light so I don't need headlights, I just need Jesus! Hallelujah! [Tweet]. Twitter. https://mobile.twitter.com/janjowen/status/1425587397199339529
Augustine, Confessions, Book I, Ch 8, ~397 CE 3.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations (PI), 2, First published 1953. Edition cited translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, MacMillan Publishing, 1968. ISBN 0-02-428810-1
Wittgenstein, 43
Wittgenstein, 30
Lotter, Dorothea, Gottlob Frege: Language, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ISSN 2161-0002, https://iep.utm.edu/, August, 2023
Hill, Jonathan, The History of Christian Thought, Lion Publishing plc, 2003. ISBN 0 7459 5145 7, pp. 132-134 & 192-195
Hill, p. 41
Wittgenstein, 47
quoted by Stapp, Henry, Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics, Springer-Verlag, 1993, p. 175