The Edges of Language: An Essay in the Logic of Religion by Paul M. Van Buren (review)

618 BOOK REVIEWS The Edges of Language: An Essay in the Logic of Religion. By \'Aur, M. VAN BuREN. New York: The Macmillan Company, 197!'!. Pp. 178. $2.45. When the" death-of-God" controversy was making headlines in the secular and religious presses, Thomas Altizer, William Hamilton, and Paul Van Buren were often listed as the principal advocates of the proclaimed demise. Van Buren's The Secular Meaning of the Gospel was an effort to show that the word God was meaningless and to reconstruct Christian discourse without it. His point of departure was twentieth-century analytic philosophy and biblical criticism, and the distinction of the book, in contrast to the writings of Altizer and Hamilton, was its modesty, clarity, and reasonableness. Since that time Van Buren has been engaged in an intense reconsideration of the position taken in The Secular Meaning of the Gospel. The essays collected in Theological Explorations represented the development of his reconsideration over several years, and now The Edges of Language: An Essay in the Logic of Religion gives coherent form to his most recent reflections. Van Buren takes his inspiration in The Edges of Language not from the positivistic wing of linguistic analysis but from Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations and John Austin's How to do Things with Words. Both Wittgenstein and Austin suggest to him that one errs in seeing human language as chiefly a vehicle for making factual claims and in taking words as uniquely means of naming. The error is significant for Van Buren ecause he discerns it at the heart of many of the disputes about religious beliefs, for instance, the dispute between theists and atheists about the existence of a transcendent, benevolent being. Each party to this latter dispute tends to understand God-talk as talk about "factual" realms beyond the experience and discourse of men. The alternative proposed in The Edges of Language is to focus more sharply on the " doing " involved in religious language, especially as it arises among educated Christians of the mid-twentieth century. Van Buren expects this shift in focus to reveal the extent to which the Christian navigates along the edges of the rule-bound activity of speech in his God-talk. In making his way along this border he engages in an enterprise akin to that of the poet and the punster: he stretches language right up to the limits of its intelligibility and God marks the final edge of that intelligibility. In interpreting the language of the Christian thus Van Buren puts aside his previous conviction that God-talk is meaningless and useless. He likewise refrains from taking its significance and value as straight-forwardly ethical or metaphysical in the sense of R. B. Braithwaite's " An Empiricist Analysis of Religious Language " or of John Wisdom's " Gods. " Rather it has both significance and value for him as do all attempts to extend language and experience BOOK REVIEWS 619 through paradox. One may prefer to remain on the home-field of speech where ambiguity is excluded, but he need not stay there. What is more, the move away from the center can enrich and illuminate the existence of human beings. The peculiar ethical and metaphysical side of Christian discourse will have its genuine sense when one grasps the relationship of such discourse to the other fashions of taking a stand on the edges of language. Van Buren believes that a reconsideration of God-talk along these lines is in continuity with the best of traditional theology and of great importance for the contemporary man who would speak as a Christian despite his uneasiness with the " factual " interpretation of his utterances. The Edges of Language has one great similarity with The Secular Meaning of the Gospel: it manifests the author's capacity to write clearly and simply and his concern to state his case fairly and honestly. It makes a major advance over the earlier work in its richer perspective on language in general and on religious language in particular. One cannot but be grateful for the endeavor to study the latter in the light of the moves of the poet and the punster. Yet Van Buren is surely right...