God-Talk by John MacQuarrie (review)

REVIEW ARTICLE God-Talk. By JoHN MAcQuARRIE. New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, 1967. Pp. 255. $6.00. In an age of advanced technology there are signs that man has suddenly lost interest in the world he has learned to manipulate and has given over all his attention to the mystery of himself, of human life and existence. A significant focal point of this anthropological concern is the phenomenon of language, man's "linguisticality ." This provides, for instance, a point of convergence for two contemporary schools of philosophical thought that were quite disparate in origin, namely, existentialism and a movement that began as logical positivism but has since become linguistic philosophy . For theology, one of the consequences has been a representation of the problem of God in critical and largely empirical terms, amounting to a tendency to reexamine with some distrust the traditional modes of speech and of discourse about the divine. Surely this is by no means unfamiliar to: theology, but the problematic is being urged with new earnestness and within the perspective of a new self-understanding of man that deepens the problem somewhat and challenges the hitherto available solutions. It is language then that offers the precise " locus " of the problem of God as pursued by John MacQuarrie in this characteristically lucid study; "God-talk," as an Anglo-Saxon equivalent for theology, makes the terms of the investigation abundantly clear. Any raising of the linguistic problem in theology is going to suggest rather quickly the prior and deeper epistemological problem. It has become somewhat of a commonplace in Catholic theological circles to acknowledge that the underlying difficulty in the Modernist crisis lay here and that Catholic theology lacked at the time the resources to deal with the crisis on its own level; and indeed what advancements have been made up to the present are still far from yielding any satisfying solution to the problem. At times, this present book calls for some sort of underlying gnoseology, but the absence of any explicit theory of knowledge is not in the present case, I think, necessarily a defect. However closely allied, the 116 GOD-TALK 117 epistemological question is a distinct and far vaster one and tends to obscure the purely linguistic problems; thus there is a decided advantage in a study conducted, somewhat empirically, within the narrow confines of language itself. Also, Dr. MacQuarrie's concern is not mere linguistics but language as it is grounded in and emerges from thinking; the area of attention is the nebulous one of the relationship, at once derivative and reciprocal, of language to understanding and conception. MacQuarrie dismisses as inadequate attempts by linguistic philosophers to rehabilitate religious language by considering it as purely emotive and subjective in kind, meaningful under the assumption that it does not purport to assert anything about reality. On the contrary, he insists on searching for the objective cognitive content of such speech; in a word, since such speech is at once unique and varied in kind, he is seeking the basic logic underlying all "God-talk." MacQuarrie is clearly convinced that the theologian cannot seek to fathom the mysterious role of the believer's language without attending to the highly specialized studies done within linguistic or analytic philosophy. This represents the first of the influences on his own theological stance-a lesser one in the final analysis than the Heiddegerian, but a formative one all the same. His own Scottish background happily provides him with a rich acquaintanceship with such qualified thinkers as Ian Ramsey, Antony Flew, Karl Popper, P. F. Strawson, and a host of others. All of this provides him with a starting point and a methodology that is and remains dialectical and strongly empirical; the constant touchstone is the need for verification-a healthy sign if the search after God is to be, in James Collins's words, "something more than a domestic clarification of intended meaning on the part of theistic believers." 1 Still, the empiricism that functions here is not the narrow sort relied upon by Bertrand Russell and the early Wittgenstein ; indeed some of MacQuarrie's most telling criticisms are directed against the " picture theory " of knowledge associated with...