D. Z.

Phillips on the grammar of “God”

Anselm K. Min

Originally published in the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Volume 63, Nos 1–3.
DOI : 10.1007/s11153-007-91 50 - 9 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007

Abstract In this essay dedicated to the memory of D. Z. Phillips, I propose to do two

things. In the first part I present his position on the grammar of God and the language game
in some detail, discussing the confusion of “subliming” the logic of our language, the con-
textual genesis of sense and meaning, the idea of a world view, language game, logic, and
grammar internal to each context, the constitution of the religious context, and the grammar
of God proper to that context. In the second part I present my appreciative critical reflection
by arguing that the conception of context and language game must be made more dialectical,
that the grammar of God needs more systematic metaphysical analysis, and that a greater
sense of the radical transcendence of God over a language game is necessary in order to avoid
reductionism always inherent in any contextual approach.

Keywords Anthropocentrism · Anthropomorphism · Contextualism · Form of life ·

Foundationalism · Grammar of God · Language game · Meaning · Metaphysics · Naming
God · Realism · D.Z. Phillips · Philosophy of religion · Wittgenstein

D. Z. Phillips has made many important contributions to philosophy of religion, such as

defending the integrity of religious experience in its irreducible uniqueness, critiquing the
untheological consequences of anthropomorphism in much of analytic philosophy of reli-
gion, and discrediting the instrumentalist and consequentialist versions of theodicy. It seems
safe to say that central to these contributions is his insistent demand that we observe “the
grammar of God” in all our talk of God. His work of over 40 years, however, has also been
controversial, generating both loyal defenses and vigorous challenges. His theory of lan-
guage games and the grammar of God in particular have produced a variety of charges and
counter-charges, contributing to the further development of his own theories and insights.
In this essay I focus on his concept of the grammar of God or religious belief and his
theory of language games on which that grammar depends. I will first present a discussion of

A. K. Min (B)
School of Religion, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA 91711, USA
e-mail: [email protected]

E.T. Long, P. Horn (eds.), Ethics of Belief: Essays in Tribute to D.Z. Phillips. 131
DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-8377-8_10
132 Ethics of Belief: Essays in Tribute to D.Z. Phillips

his position on these two on his own terms, and then follow up with my largely Hegelian and
Thomistic reflections on some of the more controversial aspects of his position. My basic
argument is that Phillips’s concepts of the language game and the grammar of God are sound
at their core but that they demand extension and development in three directions: (1) intro-
ducing more complexity into the concept of the language game in terms of more movement,
heterogeneity, and dialectical tension with other games, without which a language game tends
to be reified into a game fixed and isolated from all other games; (2) providing more system-
atic metaphysical analysis of the nature of God to spell out precisely the “absolute” character
of the divine reality that Phillips so insists on without which the grammar of God tends to
be something simply given in a religious form of life with far less intellectual self-reflection
than actually has been the case; and (3) recognizing the radical irreducibility of objective and
transcendent reality to any form of human subjectivity, individual or collective, including
forms of life and their language games. Human language games are much more dynamic and
dialectical than Phillips tends to believe; the intelligibility of the grammar of God requires
much more “metaphysical” analysis than Phillips seems ready to allow; and objective reality,
especially God’s transcendent reality, remains the irreducible test of the adequacy of any
language game as of the adequacy of any human concept, ideology, or products, to which
both Western modernism and postmodernism tend to reduce reality in their anthropocentric
preoccupations. In order to escape the imperialism of rationalism and positivism one need not
fall into the anti-intellectualist, potentially anthropocentric empiricism of a fixed language
game without metaphysics.
At the root of so many problems in philosophy of religion Phillips finds our inveterate
tendency, in Wittgenstein’s expression, to “sublime the logic of our language,” that is, to take
language out of their normal contexts of application and treat it as an abstraction in a contex-
tual vacuum. The meaning of words and concepts is not autonomous but always mediated by
their context. They make sense only in the context in which they originate and which does
justice to their proper nature or character. There is nothing that is free of all contexts and
makes sense for all contexts. To take things out of their appropriate contexts is to distort and
denature their character in their specificity. The first order of philosophical business, there-
fore, is to specify and locate the proper context of application in which alone it makes sense
to speak of a particular concept or problem at all, that is, to attend to the a priori conditions
of its sense and meaning. It is no wonder, therefore, that so much of Phillips’s books and
essays begins with or at least is devoted to unmasking instances of subliming the logic of
our language and specifying the condition or context in which a concept or a problem makes
sense. For Phillips this confusion of subliming or decontextualizing can occur in a number
of ways, by ignoring the proper context of a concept, regarding proof as an independent,
external, and prior condition for the context of believing, or abstracting from all contexts.
We ignore the proper context whenever we speak of God as though God were simply one
object among others and try to apply the same logic to God that we apply to ordinary empiri-
cal things. We forget that the proper context of the speech about God is the religious context
of worship, and God is experienced in this context as an absolute reality with necessary and
eternal existence, as the graceful and loving creator of all things. The confusion of subliming
or decontextualizing occurs when Gaunilo objects to Anselm’s so-called ontological argu-
ment by appealing to the example of the “perfect” island. Such an island may be “perfect” but
clearly lacks the necessity of existence. Gaunilo assumes that God is just another object like
the perfect island whose existence has to be proved, without realizing that the very concept
of God is that of an absolute reality with necessary existence. For Phillips, Anselm’s point
is not to prove but to clarify or elucidate the kind of concept we are dealing with when we
speak of God’s existence: God is a radically different kind of reality to which the logic of
Ethics of Belief: Essays in Tribute to D.Z. Phillips 133

ordinary empirical things does not apply. We cannot determine in the abstract whether it is
fitting to speak of God’s existence, any more than we can determine the fitting role of the king
apart from the context of the chess game in which his role is played. Denying “existence” to
God as atheism does because existence is always contingent is to apply the context of finite
beings that come to be and pass away and ignore the specific religious context in which alone
we can speak of the divine being with sense. In the eyes of faith God’s existence is eternal,
necessary existence; it is not necessity added on to an otherwise contingent existence simply
externally and factually, as though God, without ceasing to be God, could just possibly be
contingent although, as a matter of fact, he is not. Likewise, God is love, not contingently but
necessarily so that “God is love” constitutes a rule for the use of the word “God.” It makes no
sense to say that God can be malicious although, as a matter of fact, he is loving. Separation
from God is not a contingent consequence of sin; sin is—necessarily—separation from God.
We also commit the confusion of subliming when we regard proof as a prior, independent,
and external condition for the practice and context of believing. This is the confusion com-
mitted by epistemological foundationalism that regards the belief in the existence of God as
something to be proven in order to serve as the foundation of religious life (1988, p. 12).1
John Searle, too—and many like him—are guilty of this when they present the prior belief
in the existence of God as an explanation—not elucidation—for engaging in religious lan-
guage games. For Phillips, this is like trying to first prove the existence of the physical world
before we actually use it for our many practical purposes. For him, we do not presuppose the
existence of physical objects before we sit on chairs, set tables, and climb stairs, but rather
show the reality of physical objects in such activities, which is the very context in which
alone it makes sense to speak of the reality of chairs and tables and outside of which it does
not. There cannot be a purely logical demonstration of the existence of chairs and tables,
which then can also serve as the external foundation or basis for the context of sitting on
chairs, setting tables, and climbing stairs. It is this context itself that gives concrete sense to
the reality of chairs and tables and in which alone, therefore, it makes sense, not to “prove” in
the sense of providing logical, external evidence, but to “elucidate” their reality. In the same
way, we do not first “presuppose” God’s necessary existence, as though it were in need of
demonstration—in order to talk of his love and judgement. We show the meaning or sense of
the talk about God’s necessary existence precisely in the talk about God’s love and judgment.
Finally, we commit the confusion of decontextualizing when we abstract from all partic-
ular contexts and discuss issues and concepts in a complete vacuum of a concrete context
and entertain the illusion of philosophizing for and above all contexts. This is true especially
of metaphysical realism, which therefore can be regarded as underlying all other instances
of subliming. Metaphysical realism asks the question of whether something is really the
case, apart from all contexts and therefore apart from the logically prior question of what it
“means” to offer a description of reality or to make an existential claim in a particular context,
forgetting that what is so only makes sense in a particular context. Metaphysical realism tries
to raise questions outside all language games. However, we cannot speak, for example, of
“necessity” and “necessary” propositions apart from all contexts. It is not “necessity” that
explains the various ways we speak of necessity but the various ways in which we speak
that elucidate the status of necessary propositions. Even Norman Malcolm is guilty of this
decontextualization when he summarizes Anselm’s conclusion by saying that “God neces-
sarily exists.” He puts the conclusion almost like a religious declaration or confession. He
should have said, if he meant to be grammatical, that “in this concept of God, he is said to
necessarily exist.” The moral of all these examples is that “as long as we sublime the logic

1 References without names are to the works of D. Z. Phillips.

134 Ethics of Belief: Essays in Tribute to D.Z. Phillips

of ‘existence’, we shall never appreciate what it means, in religion, to speak of the existence
of the sublime”(1993, pp. 19–20).2
For Phillips, then, considering the context of application is essential for determining the
sense or meaning of a belief. The meaning of “context,” however, needs further elucidation.
Phillips provides this by discussing the grammatical issues involved in the relation between
belief and its object. The relation between belief and its object is not as straightforward as
realists tend to make it when they say that “we cannot believe in God unless we believe there
is a God to believe in,” or that “we do not worship God unless we believe that God exists.”
The relation depends on the character of the object, which requires considering the context
in which belief has its sense but which realism refuses to take into account. For Phillips,
the context of application for belief is the context of actions and practices entailed in the
belief. For realism, on the other hand, action is not internal to belief but only an external
consequence of belief. To believe in a “true God” is to worship God, whereas to believe in a
theory does not entail such commitment. By divorcing belief and practice realism makes any
kind of believing unintelligible. Whether we believe in something is concretely shown in our
practices and actions. What a belief amounts to is shown in how it regulates and illuminates
one’s life. This is not to reduce the reality of the object to our actions and practices but to
locate the sense of our object of belief in its proper context. By emphasizing the internal
relation between religious belief and the actions it informs such as forgiveness, thankfulness,
and love, we are not reducing God to such actions of ours but rather locating our actions in
the religious context of God’s forgiveness, God’s love, and gratitude to God. The relation
between belief and its practical consequences or fruits is internal, not external as realism
would have it. It is precisely in and through these fruits that God is operative in us. To believe
in God is to love God because God is love. The fruits of belief are not secondary but essential
to belief (1993, pp. 33–55).
It is this context of practices that forms religious concepts and provides the appropriate
condition for the sense and meaning of religious beliefs. For example, the whole discussion
of the relation between grace and works and predestination makes sense only within the
religious context where believers have a sense of sin, their inability to overcome their sins for
themselves, and a holy and just God. Taken out of this context, and made a subject of abstract
metaphysical speculation, the doctrine of predestination turns into the frightening doctrine of
an arbitrary God decreeing an arbitrary destiny for human beings in ways wholly unmerited
by what they do. Unmediated by a sense of sin and moral responsibility the doctrine of grace
becomes a magical conception. On the other hand, within a concept of God as the creator
of all things and of human beings as creatures who do not possess conditions of their own
existence in themselves, grace means acknowledging the giftedness of all existence, rejecting
self-absolutization as idolatry, and the moral obligation to care for others as fellow creatures
in God. In this religious context there is an internal relation between grace and works. Grace
does not “cause” good works in the way one object causes another, but acknowledgement
of grace internally demands the good works of caring for fellow creatures as expression of
gratitude for one’s own existence. It is indeed the fruit of grace itself to be able to look upon
all things as grace. Outside this context, grace becomes magical, and the nature of good
works is distorted into an extrinsic means of attaining salvation. The perspective of grace
changes our attitude to life as a whole, to works, successes and failures, praises and blames,
loves and hates (1988, pp. 291–302).
Constituted by a set of practices or form of life, every context also generates, for Phillips, a
distinctive language game with its own world view, grammar, and logic. Every language game

2 For the preceding discussion of “subliming the logic of our language,” see 1993, pp. 10–20; 1995.
Ethics of Belief: Essays in Tribute to D.Z. Phillips 135

contains a world view or picture of the world, an informal system of basic propositions each
of which depends on the other in ways that are more practical than logical, whose function
is not so much to provide “evidence” and proof as to provide “elucidation” by “underlying”
and shedding light on others that “surround” them. This means that the world picture with
its basic propositions is not a theoretical foundation of what we think and do in the sense of
providing the logical starting point from which everything else must be demonstrated as in
evidentialist foundationalism. Rather, they are foundational in the practical sense that they
are not themselves in need of demonstration but simply taken for granted in what we think
and do while shedding light on other propositions that surround them. The meaning of belief
in God, a basic proposition, for example, is shown in “the light it casts on all that surrounds
it” (1988, p. 43).
Just as we show our belief in the existence of other human beings by actually talking to
them and dealing with them in many practical ways, so basic propositions and their totality
called the world picture show their reality in the many particular ways of our thinking and
acting. They provide the very context that makes our statements and actions meaningful,
where we can make meaningful arguments and predicate truth and falsity, correctness and
incorrectness of statements and claims. It makes no sense, therefore, to say that the world
view as such or the basic propositions themselves are true or false, correct or incorrect, which
would be to reduce the context itself to the level of a proposition and confuse the validity
of a statement with the validity of the conditions of its meaningfulness. Our world views
themselves are neither right nor wrong, any more than our languages, which make particular
statements possible, are either right or wrong. “The grammar of a language, the concept
of reality in terms of which denials and affirmations may be made, is not itself a belief or
a theory about the nature of reality” (1988, p. 61). The criteria for judgment of particular
statements are internal to this world picture, which in turn requires no external justification
other than those practices that generate it. Whether something agrees with reality is itself a
question that arises and makes sense only within a certain world picture. As for the practices
themselves, they are “simply there as part of our lives” (1988, p. 33) or “simply there, like
our life” (p. 25).
Does the distinctiveness of a language game mean that it is so isolated from other areas of
human life as to be sufficient unto itself? Phillips is aware of these and many other criticisms,
and adds “misgivings” of his own about the recourse to the idea of language games. He wants
to clarify, however, what these misgivings “amount to,” to use his favorite expression.
One misgiving people have is that treating religion as a distinctive language game might
trivialize religion as something purely esoteric; religion should be regarded as something
important and valuable. It depends, however, on what people do to make religion important.
If belief in God is important only as a means relative to some human ends in the fashion of
instrumentalism and consequentialism, this will be to treat God as a relative, not an absolute,
value, and this will falsify the nature of religious belief. Belief in God is a matter of an
absolute, intrinsic, not a relative, extrinsic judgment of value.
Another misgiving people have about treating religious belief as a distinctive language
game is that it makes impossible any justification of religious belief to non-believers on the
basis of common criteria of rationality. To respond, Phillips appeals to Wittgenstein. Disputes
are possible only on the basis of some common understanding. If someone argues that the
sun is 90 million miles away from the earth, while another argues that it is only 20 million
miles away, they are disputing about the facts, but they can meaningfully dispute because
they agree on methods of calculation in astronomy. On the other hand, whether handling
a ball is a foul or not depends on whether they are playing the same game with the same
rules. Lack of a common understanding makes even disputes impossible. With regard to the
136 Ethics of Belief: Essays in Tribute to D.Z. Phillips

belief in God, this raises an anomaly: Do believers who affirm God’s existence contradict
non-believers who do not? Do they have the same concept of God? Believing in God is not
like believing in the existence of unicorns, where those who believe unicorns exist contradict
those who do not. God is not an object among other objects, the name of a thing to which we
can point. The reality of God cannot be measured by a common measure that also applies to
things other than God. Of other things it makes sense to ask when they came into existence
and when they will cease to be, questions it does not make sense to ask of God. To ask such
questions of God would be to treat God as a hypothesis, a probability, a relative reality. This
does not mean that worshipers “just” believe that God exists. To worship God is to take God
as an absolute reality whereby we are judged, not something we judge. The believer and the
non-believer, therefore, do not mean the same thing when they talk about God, which means
they are not disputing about the same thing; that is, they are not disputing at all.
How do we know, though, that such beliefs are not forms of disguised nonsense which
believers themselves simply fail to recognize? For Phillips, this is a serious misgiving. To
respond to this question, it is not enough to say that every language game has criteria of
meaning and intelligibility internal to itself, according to which we can distinguish between
what can and what cannot be said, between blunders and non-blunders. A language game
may be internally consistent and still be pointless nonsense as a whole. This points to a strain
in the analogy between religious beliefs and games. Games may be distinguished and sepa-
rated from other sorts of games, but religion separated from other spheres of human activity
and confined to its own purely religious formalities of worship will not have the absolute
importance it claims to have and will cease even to be true worship. The very absolute nature
of religion requires that it have something to say about all sorts of our worldly experiences
such as birth, death, joy, misery, despair, hope, fortune and misfortune. Any sharp separation
between religion and other areas of human activity falsifies the absolute character of reli-
gion. The force of religious belief depends, in part, on understanding the sense things have
outside the sphere of religion. To understand Jesus’ saying that “not as the world gives I give
unto you,” we must also know the sense in which the world gives. Religion isolated into the
formalities of ritual will be empty estheticism, literally a game one plays, but no more.
While Phillips continues to claim that we cannot assess religious reactions to worldly
situations according to criteria extrinsic to religion, he also insists that such reactions should
not be “fantastic” in the sense of contradicting, distorting, or ignoring “what we already
know” (1993, p. 70). For example, if some religious persons say that all suffering has some
purpose, it is legitimate to accuse them of not taking suffering seriously. Furthermore, it is the
connection between religious belief and our wordly situations which makes religious belief a
matter of “striving” to believe. The tension between our beliefs and our desires such as pride,
envy, and lust makes believing a matter of genuine struggle. Similarly, the existence of evil
and tragedy in the world puts our faith in God on trial, not because it tests what is essentially
a theory or a hypothesis but because it renders useless a certain picture of the situation and
makes it impossible to react in a certain way. The meaning and force of religious beliefs,
then, do depend, in part, on their relation to worldly situations.
For Phillips, however, these objections to the idea of religious belief as a distinctive
language game still remain “confused.” They are drawing false conclusions from impor-
tant truths. The fact of partial dependence of the meaning and force of religious beliefs on
non-religious situations does not deny that religious beliefs are distinctive language games.
Religious beliefs still have their own intrinsic criteria; they do not derive their justification
or conclusion from the non-religious facts they depend on. For example, if a boxer crosses
himself before a match in the thought that it will protect him from harm, this contradicts
what we already know about causality, and his crossing himself will be a blunder based on
Ethics of Belief: Essays in Tribute to D.Z. Phillips 137

ignorance of causal relations. He will also be treating his religious belief as a testable hypoth-
esis. On the other hand, he may be dedicating his performance in the hope that it will be
worthy of what he believes in, in which case his crossing himself has the different significance
of expressing his faith and trust. It is in ignoring this religious character of the performance
that the attempt to dismiss it as superstition remains confused. The faith and trust expressed
in the crossing of oneself is something absolute and cannot be justified in any external way
(1993, pp. 56–77).
What, then, is the grammar of God, the concept of God operative in its proper context of
faith practices? What does the religious context say about what is appropriate and what is
not about God? Does “God” refer to anything beyond this world? Again, Phillips’s answer is
that what is important is not whether God does or does not refer to a transcendent reality but
what it means to say such a thing or what such a statement “amounts to.” For this, we have
to look to religious language. Here, depending on Rush Rhees’s example, Phillips argues
that we have to pay attention to the basic difference in grammar when we are referring to
God and other objects in the world. We can know, for example, who Winston Churchill is
without knowing that he was prime minister, but not also without knowing that he had a face,
hands, voice, etc. Being a prime minister is not essential to being Churchill, but having the
characteristics of a body is. On the other hand, we cannot know who God is unless we also
know God as the loving creator of all things and the source of grace. These attributes are
essential to God in the sense of defining the very concept of God or the kind of reality that God
is, and constitute “grammatical” attributes, as bodily characteristics constitute grammatical
attributes for human beings. Any notion of God as essentially an object of fear and hope from
whom one expects reward and punishment as from another human being is a purely instru-
mentalist and consequentialist notion that reduces God to an object of my fear and hope, and
violates the grammar of God, who is God only as an absolute reality to be worshiped for her
own sake (2007). Any notion of divine omnipotence conceived as another moral agent like
us or conceived as simply the power to do whatever is not logically contradictory violates
the grammar of God. To use Phillips’s favorite examples, God cannot ride a bicycle, lick a
Haagen-Dazs ice cream (his favorite!), bump his head, have sexual intercourse, or learn a
language, all of which are appropriate to bodily beings but hardly appropriate to the spiritual
creator of all things (2005, p. 12).
It is precisely in this religious context that we can also meaningfully talk about the tran-
scendent, objective reality of God. Against the many charges brought against his views,
especially that of linguistic idealism that seems to reduce the objective reality of things to the
reality of words, Phillips insists that it is the practice of faith and worship that itself stresses
the irreducible reality of God by distinguishes between the objective reality of God and our
own mental act of faith and denounces the vice of idolatry by distinguishing the nothingness
of the creature and the transcendence of the creator. Believers are answerable to God, not
to their words about God. It is true that it takes participation in the religious form of life to
appreciate the meaning of God as creator, for God can be confessed and worshiped only as
the creator of all things. Confession, however, is not about our language about God but about
God herself. We do refer to God indeed, but we can do so without violating the grammar of
God only in the context of faith and confession. God is indeed independent and transcendent
but can be truly so acknowledged only on condition of faith. The existence of a thing is
not reducible to the mental activity of speaking about it, but what that existence means or
amounts to can be understood only in the way we talk about that (2005, pp. 168–191).
Finally, then, does Phillips allow for the inexpressibility of God in religious language?
For him, this too is an example of confusion. Religious language is precisely that proper
medium in which alone it makes sense to speak of the mystery of God. To argue that the
138 Ethics of Belief: Essays in Tribute to D.Z. Phillips

mystery of God cannot be expressed in religious language is in effect to place the mystery
of God outside its only proper context and thereby make divine mystery as divine mystery
impossible. Furthermore, it is absurd to speak of God’s unknowability; in the religious con-
text God is known as mysterious. When we say that “words cannot tell you how grateful I
am,” says Phillips, we are not expressing our failure to thank due to the limitations of our
language; it is precisely the form and way we express our gratitude. When we confess to
God that “you are beyond mortal telling,” we are not expressing our failure to worship but
precisely the way we worship. Just as it is within the religious language that we can refer to
God’s objective and transcendent reality, so it is within that same language that we witness
to God’s inexpressible reality. The religious language, for Phillips, is itself only a medium
of expression, and it is confusion to blame language itself for its failure or success to do any
particular thing (2007).
There is a large core of truth and plausibility about Phillips’s contextualist understanding
of religious language. The sense or meaning of a word or concept is not autonomous but con-
textual. This context is constituted by our practices and forms of life, each of which in turn
generates a world view, language game, grammar, and logic internal to itself. The religious
concepts of God, grace, omnipotence, and others are not exceptions to this contextual condi-
tion for all meaning and sense. It is, therefore, absurd to think that Phillips’s contextualism is
motivated by a desire to so isolate religion as to make it immune to all criticism. He is only
applying to religion what are the a priori conditions for the possibility of any genuine sense
and meaning.
Moreover, ever since Hegel, Marx, Durkheim, phenomenology, and structuralism, some
sort of contextualism has been generally accepted by most Western intellectuals. The meaning
or sense of a thing depends on its place in the whole to which it belongs, whether this whole
is political, economic, or cultural. This contextualism, one can say, is the completion of the
logic of Western modernity. Ever since Descartes, modernity has put the issue of meaning in
terms of subjectivity and objectivity, always subordinating the objectivity of things to some
form or other of human subjectivity, to the thinking subjectivity of the isolated ego, or his
sensing subjectivity, or the formal a priori structure of the collective subject, or the idealist
dialectic of the human spirit, or the materialist praxis of collective subjectivity, or our social
construction of reality. In an important sense, the Wittgensteinian subjection of meaning and
sense to human forms of life and practice is one of the latest forms of the typically modern
Western subordination of objectivity to the human subject.
In reflecting on Phillips’s position let me begin by pointing out certain inherent ambigu-
ities. The basic outlines of his theory of language games and forms of life are reasonably
clear, and it is easy enough to follow what he is saying. What is not clear, largely because he
does not really provide an extended analysis of his theory anywhere, contenting himself with
giving ad hoc examples and appealing to certain intuitive plausibilities, is the scope of the
practices and forms of life which are meant to provide the conditions of meaning for religious
beliefs such as the concept of God and various divine attributes. Can we say, for example,
that Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Luther, and the present Archbishop of Canterbury share
the same form of life since they all seem to share a certain conception of God as an absolute
reality, eternal, omnipotent, and loving? Should we say that Lutherans share the same form of
life because they share the same understanding of justification by faith? Are we going to say
that wherever we find a shared conception of some basic propositions and world views, there
is a shared form of life? Where does a form of life begin and end? Do all Christians share the
same form of life regardless of their historical, denominational, and dogmatic differences?
Or, shall we say that forms of life overlap with one another in the most complicating ways
that it is not really possible to separate one form of life from others? For example, shall we
Ethics of Belief: Essays in Tribute to D.Z. Phillips 139

say that a Christian today shares one form of life with all other Christians, another form
of life with all members of her denomination, a third form of life with all members of her
generation, a fourth form of life with her fellow citizens, Christian or otherwise, and so on,
so that in one and the same person many forms of life are interacting?
This ambiguity leads to my first important point. Even though the idea of forms of life and
practices is reasonably clear in Phillips’s works, and even though he is fully aware that they
are interacting and changing, he does give the impression on the whole that these forms of
life and practices are relatively fixed and isolated. I think it is imperative to develop his ideas
further by introducing movement, heterogeneity, and interaction into his forms of life and
practices so as to bring his ideas closer to the objective reality of such forms and practices.
Forms of life and practices vary in scope from the relatively simple cases of playing chess
and adding numbers to academic practices of taking courses, grading, degree requirements,
and importance of degrees to business practices in the many areas of banking, heavy industry,
electronics, and investing to cultural practices of going to movies, concerts, and museums to
religious practices of worship, prayer, meditation, and religious education. What complicates
the picture is that all these practices can be further divided under different cultural settings
(Confucian, Islamic, Hindu, Christian, African, etc.). Forms of life and practices not only
vary in scope; they are also products of historical changes. The “Davos culture,” the culture
of the international business elite, and the “Faculty Club International,” the internationaliza-
tion of Western intelligentsia, are obviously products of contemporary globalization (Berger
1997). Not only are forms of life variant in scope or products of history; these variations in
scope and historical genesis are themselves results of complex interactions with other forms
of life and practices, interactions which increasingly become internal to the affected forms,
promoting, eroding, and in any case significantly changing their identity, which is no longer
identical but internally heterogeneous.
The point of this dialectical reflection on forms of life and practices is that the grammar
or concept of God that Phillips so insists on is itself a product of a long history of human
consciousness and subject to all the dialectic of interaction with competing forms of life and
their world views in the contemporary world. The idea of God as an absolute, eternal, and
infinite reality radically different from things in this world is an idea that has taken thousands
of years to mature and take root in a particular group of people, and is now being exposed
to the totalizing, often trivializing, and always commercializing impact of the internet with
all its conflicting ideologies, values, and conceptions of the good life. The forms of life that
promote the absolute understanding and grammar of God are being changed, eroded, and in
any case severely challenged by the forces of globalization that leave no form of life and
practice untouched and therefore no grammar unaffected. It is not only that, as Phillips knew,
the “world” puts our faith on trial or partially determines the meaning and sense of religious
belief; the world can put faith to a more radical challenge, trivializing it into non-existence
by making absolute commitments increasingly impossible, or relativizing it into non-sig-
nificance by exposing it to the competition among rival forms of ultimate belief systems,
or confusing it in any case by compelling it to make sense of the trivializing, relativizing,
and pluralizing tendencies of globalization. Forms of life and their world views are far more
dialectically complicated than Phillips seems to realize.
There is another point to this dialectical reflection. I think it is important to see a matching
relation between the scope of the form of life and the scope of the belief in question. If, for
example, the belief whose meaning is at issue is a belief about where to park your car on
campus, the appropriate context or form of life to look for as the condition of its meaning
will be the common practical life of the particular school. If the belief at issue is about where
to go to graduate school in America, the appropriate context will be the set of academic
140 Ethics of Belief: Essays in Tribute to D.Z. Phillips

practices governing graduate education in contemporary America. If the belief at issue is a

belief about the stock market, the appropriate context or form of life will be the business
practices of the Wall Street. These examples should make it clear that it is necessary to look
for a form and context of life appropriate to the kind and scope of the belief in question.
This, however, also raises a complicating question with regard to religious beliefs. The
more external and practical a belief is, the easier it becomes to identify its appropriate context
of meaning, a certain historically determinate form of life and practices. Where to move a
king or a queen in a chess game, for example, simply depends on the rules of the game.
When the question at issue touches the existential and religious domain, however, it is not
so easy to locate and point to the appropriate context. The question of the meaning of death,
for example, is not only a historical question concerning its meaning for a particular society
and religion but also an existential question concerning its meaning for all human beings
regardless of their particular historical setting. Guilt about one’s moral failure, love as a per-
manent human need, hope for something enduring, death as a definitive end of human life:
these are not only historically specific in the responses elicited but also humanly universal in
the challenges they provoke. It is quite reasonable to look for historically specific responses
in their institutionalized form as the context of the meaning of these beliefs; it is equally rea-
sonable to also look for certain universal or common patterns among the historically variant
contexts of responses insofar as those phenomena are universally human. Human beings are
indeed historically different, but they are not so different as to be only different with nothing
in common.
Regarding the grammar of God this raises the important question: Does Phillips’s view
allow for both historical specificity and existential universality? He insists that the grammar
of God is that of an absolute eternal being and creator of all things. How does he know this?
Because the form of life that makes “God” meaningful is the life of faith and worship, and
this life says that God is such an absolute reality. It is clear that this concept of God is deriv-
ative from the Judeo-Christian tradition. This concept does not mean that it is relevant only
to the situation of worship separated from all other spheres of life. In fact, we saw Phillips
insisting that the grammar of God makes God relevant to all fields of human concern and
activity because we are asked to practice God’s creative love in all human situations. What
about God’s relevance to all human beings, not just to all human situations? If the grammar
of God is that of the loving creator of all things including all humanity, does Phillips ever
argue for this universal human relevance? Should we not look by the very logic or grammar
of God as the loving creator of all human beings for some traces of faith and yearning for
God in all humanity and in the various religions in which human beings concretizes their
relationship to God? It would seem that the grammar of God requires not only that God is
not a means relative to some particular human purpose, like greed and ambition, not only
that God is relevant to all human situations, but also that God loves all human beings as
her creatures, and that if so, all human groups must also show some religious expressions
of faith and worship appropriate to the meaning of God. The idea of a God relevant only to
some nations and cultures will be just as ungrammatical as is the idea of a God who doles
out arbitrary destinies for different human beings. Will Phillips allow this, which means that
the context of the grammar of God is constituted not by a single form of life of a particular
religious tradition but in some way by a plurality of often conflicting forms of life belonging
to many different religious traditions?
The logic or grammar of God raises another issue. It raises not only the question of God’s
relevance to all human situations in the consciousness of the religious believer, not only the
question of God’s relevance to all human beings in their religious consciousness, but also the
question of God’s relevance to all human beings in all their mundane situations regardless of
Ethics of Belief: Essays in Tribute to D.Z. Phillips 141

how explicitly conscious of God they may be in such situations. That is to say, is it possible
to regard all human situations of all human beings as the form of life or practical context for
the belief in God? If the grammar of God requires making the belief in God relevant to all
situations, and if the same grammar requires making the same belief relevant to all human
beings, can’t we go one step further and say that we have to regard all forms of life and
practices as the appropriate context for the belief in God?
Doesn’t the idea of God as creator of all things entail God’s lordship over all things and
therefore over all situations? Can there be any realm of human groups and activities to which
God may be irrelevant? Some human beings like Italian spaghetti, others like Chinese noo-
dles. One can say that these are simply matters of contingent tastes. Will the grammar of God
allow us to say that God is relevant only to those who like to believe in God, in much the same
way that Chinese noodles and Italian spaghetti are only relevant to those who happen to like
it? Different things become relevant to different people according to their specific context
of existence according to nationality, gender, profession, status, ethnicity, etc. The Stars and
Stripes are relevant to American people and those who study national flags. Techniques of
car repair are relevant to car drivers and car mechanics. Is God, then, one of the things which
people may or may not find relevant according to their varying, contingent contextual needs?
If the grammar of God does not allow limiting the relevance of God to a contingent situation,
isn’t there a sense, a very important sense indeed, in which we can say that the grammar
of God as an “absolute” reality makes God relevant to all contexts and all forms of life? It
seems that we should not only allow a particular context—faith and worship of a particular
community—to provide the proper concept or meaning or grammar of God; we should also
follow the logic of this grammar in its absolutenss and universality and allow that logic to
determine the kind of contexts to which it should be relevant, that is, to be relevant to all
contexts and all forms of life insofar as these are creatures internally related to their creator.
In an important sense we can say that just as God is not one object among other objects,
God’s relevance is not limited to one context among other contexts either; the one is as much
confused as the other. The true grammar of God seems to demand nothing less.
This raises another important issue. Most people including most Christians are not always
conscious of the presence of God in their worldly situations, which remains “secular” as
opposed to their “sacred” moments in specifically religious situations where they are con-
scious of the presence of God. It is precisely to meet this situation where we are not always
conscious of the divine, although perhaps we should be, given the omnipresence of God in all
created things, that Tillich and Rahner came up respectively with the notion of the “depth”
dimension of the human spirit and the “horizon” of all human existence and knowledge. For
Tillich, religion is not one special function among others of the human spirit but “the dimen-
sion of depth in all of them, … [that] points to that which is ultimate, infinite, unconditional
in man’s spiritual life” (1964, p. 7). For Rahner, God is present in all things we do as the
ultimate “horizon” whose reality we implicitly affirm in every act of judging and doing as
its a priori condition by virtue of an anticipatory grasp or Vorgriff (1969, pp. 53–68). For
both Tillich and Rahner, God is not a being whom we can meet only in a particular form of
life or language game, although we do become “explicitly” conscious of God in specifically
religious activities. We meet God in every situation and every context as the absolute ines-
capable horizon of our existence in its totality, although only “implicitly” or “latently.” This
is only possible because God is not an object among objects but the ground and horizon of
all being and knowledge. For both this is a consclusion of a long but insightful metaphysical
analysis of the structure and dynamics of human existence. But perhaps this is precisely what
Phillips does not like, metaphysics.
142 Ethics of Belief: Essays in Tribute to D.Z. Phillips

My second point of reflection, then, has to do with the role of intellectual, metaphysical
reflection in the settling of the meaning of religious beliefs. In Phillips I detect an empiricist
tendency to directly attribute our beliefs to our practices as given in the life of a community,
an existentialist tendency to equate the objective meaning of a belief with its actualization in
the qualitative transformation of a person’s existence a la Kierkegaard, and an anti-intellec-
tual tendency to dismiss metaphysical analyses as useless abstractions. All these tendencies
excessively belittle the role and power of the human intellect in human life.
It is true that we acquire our religious beliefs by participating in the practices of a believing
community, but this does not mean that there is no room for our own intellectual judgments in
the process of appropriation. No matter how long and how intensely we may participate, there
comes a moment when our own intellect has to give its own assent to the truth and reasonable-
ness of the practices and articles of faith we participate in. Our appropriation is never totally
blind but requires varying degrees of participation on the part of our own intellect. Phillips’s
empiricism seems to deny this. What is most important to note, however, is that the Christian
Church itself from its earliest beginnings has always incorporated metaphysical analysis into
its noetic structure, as witness all the great theologians. Metaphysics was an intrinsic part of
theology as such. Phillips might say that this is acceptable as long as theologians do this in
the context and light of their faith seeking understanding, as Anselm did. Philips, therefore,
might accept metaphysical analysis within the context of faith, just as Barth exempts Anselm
from the strictures against natural theology on the ground that Anselm was carrying on his
reflection within faith. This is all very well.
Furthermore, Phillips himself engages in metaphysical analysis, as witness his appeal to
the ideas of creator, creation, creatureliness, contingency, giftedness of existence, the radical
difference of reality between God and creatures, and other theological concepts that are also
thoroughly metaphysical. Grammatical differences are in fact differences in the kind of real-
ity things have and therefore metaphysical differences. Granted, for the sake of argument,
that we cannot do metaphysics outside all contexts. Why not then do more metaphysics and
do it more systematically and thoroughly within the context of Christian faith?
Phillips argues like a good metaphysician that God is a different kind of reality than an
object among other objects, but then refuses to engage in a further, systematic analysis of
the being of created and uncreated entities precisely to show the metaphysical basis for the
difference in reality and therefore also in grammar between God and creatures. Likewise, he
argues that the point of the doctrine of grace and predestination is to show the basic crea-
tureliness of all human beings and the need to care for fellow creatures as an expression of
gratitude to God, but then refuses to go further by providing a metaphysical analysis of what
it means to create, what the creator must be in order to be able to create, how this creating
is not comparable to the making of things at the level of created things of our experience,
and how human freedom and divine grace are not mutually exclusive in the way that two
human freedoms might be. I do not know of any place where Phillips provides a lengthy
systematic analysis of these profoundly metaphysical issues. He usually contents himself
with an appeal to some telling examples and intuitive plausibilities followed by some gen-
eral remarks based on such intuitions. He leaves so many issues simply dangling, issues a
traditional metaphysician would grab and explore with enthusiasm and gusto.
My third and final point of reflection has to do with the irreducible difference between
human subjectivity in all its forms and the objectivity of reality whether created or divine. I
earlier noted certain modern and postmodern Western desire to measure and evaluate reality
by the criteria of human subjectivity in its many forms, individual and collective, theoretical
and practical, saying that the Wittgensteinian appeal to language games and forms of life as
the context of meaning and evaluation is only one of the most recent attempts in the same
Ethics of Belief: Essays in Tribute to D.Z. Phillips 143

anthropocentric direction. My assertion of the irreducible difference between subjectivity and

objectivity or between human thought and objective reality should be taken in a postcritical
sense. No modern intellectual today would be a naïve realist. Reality is indeed mediated,
theoretically interpreted and practically transformed, by human beings in light of their world
views and horizons. This fact, however, should not lead us to the anthropocentric illusion that
there is nothing outside the text, or language games, or stories, or horizons, or ideologies.
Being creatures means that we have not created the conditions of our own existence;
these conditions are given there prior to our initiative, and all our initiatives, theoretical or
practical, must conform to these conditions. It means that we should not absolutize ourselves,
individually or collectively, not only in the sense that we should care for others as fellow
creatures, as Phillips rightly remarked, but also that we should not try to dominate reality by
subordinating it to the criteria and perspectives of our own horizons and language games.
Despite all the inevitable mediation by our own subjectivity, reality remains both other and
more than what it means to the human subject(s).
We can begin with something elementary. There is a world of difference between the
idea of a thing and the reality of the thing of which the idea is an idea. Without in any way
denying the isomorphism of being and thought so foundational to the classical tradition, it is
also clear that the subjective idea is not identical with the objective thing. My idea of war is
not the same as the reality of war. It is not only that my idea of war does not bleed, but that
the reality of war is bloody. It is also that my idea of war does not reflect the reality of war in
all its complexity and dialectic. This is something we can easily generalize to the level of our
collective ideas, ideologies, language games, perspectives, and horizons. Without denying
that some ideas might be more adequate than others, our collective ideas are not identical
with the objective reality of the things and situations of which we have ideas. We like to
assume a simple identity between our ideas and the objective reality of the world. We think
and claim that the world is what we think it is. We entertain the illusion that our ideas are
themselves the realities of the world, reducing the world to our subjectivity. Through vari-
ous experiences, empirical researches, but most dramatically disasters natural or social, we
learn that our ideas were wrong, often shocked and disillusioned into the recognition of the
persisting difference and contradiction between our thoughts and the world we think about.
It took the shock of World War I for Barth and Neo-Orthodoxy to shake off the illusions
of liberal Protestant theology. It took the shock of the Depression to shake both capitalists
and socialists from their social complacency and illusions. It took the shock of Hurricane
Hugo of 1990 to shake me from all my anthropocentric illusions about the world. Changes
in the real world have a way of replacing and displacing philosophical systems. Things are
not what we think they are. Kierkegaard spoke the truth: the identity of thought and being
applies only to divine creative thought, not to the human created thought, which does remain
ever vulnerable to the shock of reality (Min 2004, pp. 79–82).
We try to hang on to the modern Western myth of constitutive subjectivity through pure
formalism. The Enlightenment rationalists used to claim that the world is what reason thinks
it is; to say that it is not is itself a judgment of reason and therefore valid only for reason,
thought, or concept. It seems we cannot escape the reign of reason. Contemporary contextu-
alism comes along and repeats the claims of modern constitutive consciousness: the negation
of context, the distinction between context and reality, and the transcendence of context are
themselves possible only within a context. Even in its self-negation and self-transcendence
context remains constitutive: we cannot stand outside of all contexts or language games. This,
however, is an empty claim, purely formal without content. When the complacent middle
class American boys came home from Vietnam in plastic bags and on crutches, with their
world view shattered and their illusions exposed, what comfort would it be to say that the
144 Ethics of Belief: Essays in Tribute to D.Z. Phillips

experience of the shattering is still possible only for their constitutive subjective conscious-
ness, that it makes sense only in a worldview and a language game, when the constitutive
role of such collective subjectivity is precisely to be shattered and to negate and transcend
itself, like the last hurrah of a defeated general about to surrender himself? Wouldn’t it be
more reasonable to recognize up front that we can “constitute” the world only because we
are, as creatures, first constituted to do so and learn to relativize ourselves?
This has more than a little bearing on our present problematic. Phillips tries to place God
in the religious context where God can be recognized as an absolute reality. This is done in
two different ways which can perhaps be misinterpreted. In one way he does this by saying
that to know God is to worship God, that to worship God is to change our ways in light of
God. To know that God is love is to practice love for one another. This is an existentialist,
Kierkegaardian approach. The claim is that there is an internal relation between belief and
practice: belief by its nature is meant to lead to the transformation of our existence. We have
to be careful here, however. We should not equate the perfectly necessary ethical exhorta-
tion to subjective transformation with a statement of the objective reality of the object of
belief. To say that there is an internal relation between belief and practice is still to maintain
a distinction between the two; if not distinct, how can they be related, even internally? By
the nature of the content, however, the belief demands to be actualized by each subject who
believes. However, we should not forget that there is also the objective side of that reality,
which should not be equated with and reduced to its role in the transformation of subjective
existence. To say God is love indeed demands that we practice that love, but the reason why it
does is precisely because it is God, not another human being, who is love, that is, because God
is a certain reality even apart from her role in transforming our human existence. The internal
demand to actualize love in our human life is itself parasitic on the antecedent objective
reality of God as creator, infinite, eternal, etc.
It is important, then, to realize that in our haste to emphasize the ethical imperative of trans-
forming our subjectivity, we do not forget the transcendent reality of God over us, beyond us,
and apart from us, and do not reduce the meaning of “God is love” to what it entails by way of
our subjective transformation. Even if we are not transformed, it does remain true that God is
love. Even if we are sinners indifferent to divine grace, God remains a graceful God. Even if
Christians are all hypocrites, Christianity can remain true. We should not confuse the objec-
tive sovereign reality of God with the ethical imperative of subjective transformation. The
difference between objectivity and subjectivity, especially between divine objectivity and
human subjectivity, remains implicit precisely in the ethical imperative of subjective trans-
formation which is imperative only because it comes from a sovereign God who is more, far
more, infinitely more, semper magis, than what we are or what God means to our subjectivity.
The classical distinction between immanent Trinity and economic Trinity, between what God
is in herself and what God is for us, is a distinction that must be maintained for the sake of
both the infinity of God and the finitude of humanity.
The other way of recognizing the absolute reality of God in the context of religious faith
is to show that it is the believing consciousness itself that makes a distinction between God
and idol, between the irreducible sovereignty of God and human lowliness. As I already
mentioned earlier, however, this is still to maintain the priority of constitutive human con-
sciousness in relation to the sovereignty of God: God is sovereign because believers can
themselves humble and negate themselves. This is not dissimilar to the postmodern phenom-
enological approach of Levinas, Derrida, and Marion, all of whom treat the transcendence
of God as a function of human subjectivity in its self-negation and ironically reduces and
relativizes God to human subjectivity (Min 2006).
Ethics of Belief: Essays in Tribute to D.Z. Phillips 145

The question of whether Phillips’s Wittgensteinian approach is reductionist or not comes

to the fore once again in the treatment of religious language in its ability to express the
inexpressible God. Phillips is quite content with the statement that God is known in religious
language as mystery, and that the confession to God that “you are beyond mortal telling” is
itself the way, not a failure, to worship God, as the statement that “words are not adequate
to express my gratitude to you” is itself the way, not a failure, to express gratitude. There
are three points to be made here. One is that Phillips only says that the proper context of
mystery is precisely the religious context of faith and worship, which is an important insight,
but he fails to go on, for fear of metaphysics, to provide an analysis of what mystery might
be as divine mystery. A distinction like the distinction St. Thomas makes between our ability
to know God through her created effects and our inability to know God in her own essence
would have been very helpful in the further analysis and development of the concept, as
would have been Rahner’s profound essay on the Catholic concept of mystery (McCool pp.
108–119).
Secondly, it is worth noting the paradox in Phillips’s remark on the two statements that
the self-negation of language is itself a positive way of worshipping God, not an expression
of failure to do so. I am afraid here that he is not sensitive enough to the tension involved
in that self-negation. We cannot avoid using human language to worship God, but human
language can do its worshipping function only by negating itself. There is no avoiding a
tension between the form of language and the content that negates and transcends and breaks
through that form. It would be a travesty of true worship if the worshipper was quite content
and happy because she just did the best she could with the human language, the only language
at her disposal, without any sense of regret and sorrow that her language is not even remotely
adequate to express God in her splendor and glory. Between her regret and her performance
there is an ongoing tension between the form she cannot avoid using in order to worship
God and the divine content that overlows and breaks through the form. Here is the tension
and paradox. Religious language does its job only by acknowledging a sovereign reality that
transcends it, only by negating and transcending itself in the direction of something indeed
totally other.
Finally, why is human language radically inadequate? Phillips seems to deny that human
language can be inadequate. In fact, he would consider it a matter of confusion to predi-
cate adequacy or inadequacy of human language. Language as such is neither adequate nor
inadequate. Here he seems to ignore the many philosophical reflections on the nature of
human language, on how human language is suited to express the subject/object relations
in the material world (Aquinas), “representational” thinking (Heidegger), and “predicative
language” (Marion), which, left to itself, would necessarily lead to ontotheology that reduces
God to an object among objects, an idol, unless one consciously uses language in an analog-
ical way (Min 2005, pp. 168–174; 2006, 2007). It is unfortunate that someone like Phillips,
who spends so much time talking about language, spends so little reflection on the structural
inadequacies of language as such when it refers to transmundane realities.3

Acknowledgements I came to Claremont in the same year (1992) that D. Z. Phillips did and had the pleasure
and honor of being his colleague for 14 years. He was one of the most truly remarkable philosophers, col-
leagues, and above all human beings I had ever known, and for all my serious philosophical differences with
him I will always count his friendship as one of God’s greatest gifts. I thank Eugene Long for his invitation to
contribute to this commemorative volume. I dedicate this essay to the memory of D. Z. Phillips, a truly great
human being. Requiescat in pace.

3 One of the most sensible critics of Phillips’s philosophy of religion, I think, is Patrick Sherry (1972), who
pointed out the need to “locate,” “relate,” and “justify” language games. For other criticisms, see Hoyt (2007)
and Richards (1978).
146 Ethics of Belief: Essays in Tribute to D.Z. Phillips

References

Berger, P. (1997). Four faces of global culture. The National Interest (Fall 1997), available online: http://www.
findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2751/is_n49/ai_20319595
Hoyt, C. (2007). Wittgenstein and religious dogma. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 61,
39–49.
McCool, G. A. (Ed.). (1975). A Rahner reader. New York: Seabury Press.
Min, A. K. (2004). The solidarity of others in a divided world: A postmodern theology after postmodernism.
New York: T & T Clark International.
Min, A. K. (2005). Paths to the triune God: An encounter between Aquinas and recent theologies. Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press.
Min, A. K. (2006). Naming the unnameable God: Levinas, Derrida, and Marion. International Journal for
Philosophy of Religion, 60, 99–116.
Min, A. K. (2007). Speaking of the unspeakable God: The dilemmas of the Christian discourse about God.
In D. Z. Phillips (Ed.), Whose God? Which tradition? London: Ashgate.
Phillips, D. Z. (1988). Faith after foundationalism: Critiques and alternatives. Boulder: Westview.
Phillips, D. Z. (1993). Wittgenstein and religion. London: Macmillan.
Phillips, D. Z. (1995). At the mercy of method. In T. Tessin & M. von der Ruhr (Eds.), Philosophy and the
grammar of religious belief (pp. 1–15). New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Phillips, D. Z. (2005). The problem of evil and the problem of God. Minneapolis: Fortress.
Phillips, D. Z. (2007). Whose God? Which tradition? London: Ashgate.
Rahner, K. (1969). Hearers of the word. New York: Herder and Herder.
Richards, G. (1978). A Wittgensteinian approach to the philosophy of religion: A critical evaluation of D. Z.
Phillips. Journal of Religion, 58, 288–302.
Sherry, P. (1972). Truth and the “Religious Language Game.” Philosophy, 47(179), 18–37.
Tillich, P. (1964). Theology of culture. New York: Oxford University Press.