The roles of argument in religious discourse.

摘要

The current assumption seems to be that argument's role is the same for all types of discourse. That role is persuasion of an opponent through justification of a position. For many people of Christian faith, certain passages within the Bible suggest a prohibition of argument as a means of justificatory persuasion, even as the practice of using argument in evangelical Christianity seems unavoidable. My thesis explores the question of whether one can avoid this aforementioned conflict for evangelical faith. From the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, I claim that if we apply a Wittgensteinian “multi-use” view of language in general to arguments in particular, we have a solution to the dilemma. I claim that at least one function of religious argument is to perform an elaborate speech act, i.e., acting out one's faith by confessing one's personal faith in Christ. Here argument's role is simply to profess/confess rather than to justify one's religious beliefs.