In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein argues that there are significant limitations as to what language can actually say. Language, Wittgenstein argues, is only meaningful when it is used descriptively, as a model of reality. Any attempt to say anything beyond such things is nonsensical (i.e. lacking in meaning, having no sense). Consequently most of philosophy and theology is revealed as just that sort of nonsensical language. What we say when we speak theologically cannot be described as true or false, it simply lacks meaning altogether.
Naturally, this seems to strike the Christian reader as a disturbing conclusion. Surely we want to be able to say something meaningful about God, or about ethics, or about metaphysics, or whatever. However, just as we must wrestle with Wittgenstein's argument, and his conclusion (part of which is: “whereof one cannot speak, about that one must remain silent”), we must not also be too hasty to suggest that Wittgenstein intends his argument to be an assault on Christianity or on faith. Wittgenstein actually has no desire to limit human imagination, yearning, feeling, or thinking, he is simply suggesting that there are limits on the meaningful expression of thought.
In this way, it could be argued (indeed, it is argued by Alfred Nordmann in his introduction to the Tractatus) that Wittgenstein is following the trajectory of critical philosophy established by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason. Kant argues against the ability to gain certain knowledge about God because knowledge is always knowledge of objects or appearances. Thus, to attempt to gain knowledge about God would transform God into just another object. Consequently, Kant draws the limits of knowledge so narrowly that God is beyond them. Kant concludes: “I had to deny knowledge to make room for faith.”
Wittgenstein does not deny knowledge of God per se, but he does deny that any such knowledge could be expressed meaningfully. Nordmann aptly summarizes Wittgenstein's position when he writes: “Those who believe that they can talk just as sensibly about absolute or ethical value as they can about cars an cookies are actually conflating them.” The problem, according to Wittgenstein, with taking an absolute (whether that be an Absolute Being, or an absolute Value) and making it “just a fact like other facts” is that everything absolute is then drained from that Being or Value, because all facts are necessarily contingent. Therefore, Wittgenstein denies meaningful expressions of the absolute, not in order to deny faith, but in order to make room for faith. Therefore, by drawing a line which language cannot cross, Wittgenstein situates God beyond language, and allows God to exists as God.
Of course, the notion of situating God beyond human speech should cause the reader to think of another major influence on 20th century thought — Karl Barth. Writing at the same time as Wittgenstein, Barth described God as God who is “distinguished from men and from everything human, and [who] must never be identified with anything we name, or experience, or conceive, or worship, as God.” God, he went on to say, “is that which lies upon the other side.” Consequently, when God is encountered, he is always encountered in his hiddenness, breaking forth like “a flash of lightening, impossibility and invisibility.”
Of course, there are some significant differences between Barth and Wittgenstein but it is interesting to begin by exploring where they overlap. Indeed, the differences only gain their proper significance once we understand the similarities (actually, it's pretty interesting to note the biographical similarities of these two men, but I'll save that for another time).

Recently I have found myself returning again and again to the parable of the sower and the seed in Mt 13 and Lk 8. I have been struck by how the odds are stacked against being the sort of seed that bears fruit. The seed that falls on the road (lacks understanding), the seed that falls on the rocky soil (too afraid of suffering), and the seed that falls among the thorns (too much money and worldly concerns), all of these seeds die. It is only the seed that falls on the good soil that bears fruit. It worries me that the absence of understanding, the fear of suffering, and an overabundance of money and worldly concerns seems to define much of the contemporary Western church. No wonder our churches are dying. However, this is a tangent to the point that has recently struck me, so I'll turn to that point now.
For the longest time I read this parable as though it contrasted abundant life (the seed that falls on the good soil) with the sort of life that is destroyed by the powers that are pressed into the service of death (all the other seeds). I have only just realized that this is a false dichotomy. I began to understand the parable differently when I began to read it in light of Jesus' words in Jn 12.24:
Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.
The seed that falls on the good soil has not escaped death. It too will die, just like the other seeds! The contrast between the seeds in Mt and Lk is not a contrast between life and death, it is a contrast between fruitful dying and fruitless dying!
Of course, as the context of Jn 12 makes clear, Jesus himself is the good seed, and his death produces many more seeds, it produces the crop that is “a hundred times what was sown.”
If we, then, are to live as those rooted in the good soil, we too must live a life that is oriented towards death. We too must set our faces towards Jerusalem. This orientation has nothing to do with morbidity, rather it is the inevitable outworking of the love commandment. Because we are so committed to loving God, and loving our neighbour, we choose to die to ourselves. Furthermore, this orientation is normative for Christians because those who are “in Christ” share in his death. To be in Christ is to be crucified with Christ (Gal 2.20). As Jimmy Dunn says, “[Paul's] gospel is not that the trusting sinners escape death, but rather that they share in Christ's death.” Naturally, the only way we can live with this orientation towards death is in the power of the holy Spirit that provides us with hearing, understanding, a true heart, and the ability to persevere (the characteristics of the seed that fell on the good soil).
Thus, the supposed contrast between abundant living and suffering death, that I first imagined existed in the parable of the sower, is revealed as a false dichotomy. All seeds will die. All of us will die. The question is what sort of dying we will experience. And we must remember that our type of dying determines whether or not we will bear fruit or remain fruitless.

In his latest book (Evil and the Justice of God), Tom Wright spends some time addressing how the crucifixion of Jesus is the climactic revelation of evil. The story of Jesus' death is the story of “how the downward spiral of evil finally hit the bottom.” As a part of this event, Wright also argues that the cross is the climactic expression of corruption within Israel. The Israel that has longed to become “like all the nations” (1 Sam 8.5, 20) is now reduced to declaring that it “has no king but Caesar” (John 19.15).
This movement from longing to be “like the nations” to declaring “no king but Caesar” is quite troubling. It seems to suggest that if one longs to be like the nations, one inevitably ends up so much like the nations that one now lives in a way that completely contradicts the true identity of the people of God (which is rooted in the proclamation that “there is no king but God“).
This movement should cause us to reconsider many of our contemporary desires for “Christian relevance.” I wonder: to what extent is our desire to be relevant simply a desire to be like the nations? If this is the case then we may have deceived ourselves into thinking we are living faithfully when we are actually decarling that we, too, have no king but Caesar. Indeed, I suspect that our scramble for relevance has lead us to serve the same lords as those around us, instead of leading us to proclaim the “there is one God, the Father almighty, and one Lord, Jesus Christ” (1 Cor 8.5-6).

When the the children grow up, try to keep them busy. Try to see that they become addicted only to legal substances. That's about it.
~ Wendell Berry, “The Joy of Sales Resistance”
I have often wondered about this:
Within social services, shopping is often offered as the way in which one can overcome the power of drug addictions. This may sound odd but it makes a lot of sense and it seems to actually work more than some other approaches. Thus, the addict, who is often coming from a fairly rough and poor environment, is taught the joy of buying and owning nice things — nice clothes, nice music, nice electronics, and so on and so forth. When addicts are first coming out of addiction they are encouraged to quickly spend their money on other things so that they cannot spend it on drugs. Then, whenever the urge to use comes up, the addict is encouraged to go out on a bit of a shopping spree. Now I've seen this approach work quite well (at least for certain periods of time). It seems that shopping is actually more powerful than crack or crystal meth. Odd, Bush tells us to go shopping so that we can win the war on terror… and social workers tell us to go shopping so that we can win the war on drug addiction.
However, I find this a little unsettling (not least because it seems that the Christian gospel is weaker than the power of shopping! Am I totally off base to wonder if shopping is more powerful than drugs simply because it is a bigger idol in our culture?!). Here is my issue: it seems to me that what we have done is simply transition people from a socially unacceptable addiction (consuming crack or meth or whatever) to a socially acceptable addiction (consuming clothes or electronics or whatever). And, while we have perhaps raised their standard of living, we have not addressed the root causes of their addictions. Because, based upon my experiences, I quite emphatically believe that addiction is almost always a symptom that has arisen from a deeper issue — addictions are those things which allow people to survive in states of brokenness even though they then go on to perpetuate that state of brokenness. Thus, by engaging in the movement from drugs to shopping, we are simply teaching people how to hide their brokenness and survive in their brokenness in a more socially acceptable manner — we're not doing much to address the brokenness in and of itself. In then end, moving people in this direction can lead them to simply embrace their brokenness as their natural, or normal, or only possible, way of being.
Now I'm probably going to sound crazy to suggest that this movement is disconcerting — after all isn't being a shopaholic with a nice house, a nice car, and a nice family infinitely better than being a junkie with no home and no clean clothes sharing needles down on the corner of Main and Hastings? Well, to be honest, I'm not sure that one is any better than the other. Certainly one is more socially acceptable than the other but this is precisely what I am challenging. The first addiction is more insidious, and the second is more immediately vicious, but both are overwhelming and trap us in a less than human state. Indeed, it seems to me that the first is actually more difficult to overcome than the second, in part because it is so acceptable and because the harm it causes isn't immediately apparent on our own bodies. If I go on a speed run, I'll end up breaking out in sores. If I go on a run at the GAP, I don't have to see the bodies of the children that were broken when they made my clothes. If I shoot heroin I feel great… but I remember my brokenness when I come down and I can't accept my state as “normal”; but if I go shopping I feel great… and somewhere along the way I tend to normalize my brokenness and just accept my state as “the way things should be.
So, at the end of the day are we doing our addict friends any favours by turning them into shopaholics? Sure, I suppose we are, but it might not be much of a favour. It's sort of like offering somebody a slow death instead of a quick death. It's not really offering any sort of genuine transformation or new life. But isn't it at least a step in the right direction? A stage along the way that we can later discard? Maybe. I don't know… but I suspect not.

Remember my chains.
~ Paul in the Epistle to the Colossians
I wonder, when I read this passage, how it is that we today remember Paul's chains. Do we remember Paul's chains and thank God that we are not persecuted for our faith or do we remember Paul's chains and wonder why it is that we fit so comfortably into the society around us? Do we even remember Paul's chains at all? Why is it that we are not struck by the oddity of the fact that Paul — who said such supposedly positive things about the state in Romans 13 and who wasn't afraid to appeal to his Roman citizenship when he found it to be useful — spent so much time in prison and ended up being executed by the Roman authorities? Sure, Jesus had to die to save the world, but what the hell happened with Paul?
Here's the thing: Jesus wasn't killed to save the world — nobody killed Jesus thinking “hey, I'll kill this guy and that way everybody who believes in him will go to heaven.” Perhaps God ended up using Jesus' death for greater things but none of Jesus' executioners were in on the plan. Ultimately, Jesus was killed because the political authorities identified him as a rebel — which is why he was crucified (crucifixion was the form of execution that Rome liked to use upon those who tried to rebel against her power). Furthermore, Paul's death, and his chains, were not accidental or incidental to his understanding of what it means to live as a follower of Jesus. Indeed, if one spends any time reading Paul, one quickly discovers that he seems to think that suffering, and specifically political persecution and oppression, is essential to the Christian identity.
Thus I remember Paul's chains and I wonder about our lack of chains. But then I remember the American Mennonites who have been jailed because they refused to pay taxes — because all those who pay taxes in America support the war in Iraq and these Mennonites felt that they could not, as Christians and as Mennonites, sponsor that war (or any war). Consequently they have been jailed. I remember the chains of Paul and I remember the chains of our Mennonite brothers and sisters and I still maintain hope for our North American church.
God, help us to remember Paul's chains. Help us to remember the chains of our brothers and sisters. Help us to remember the chains that await us if we end up faithfully following Jesus. And help us to find our current lack of chains to be shocking and odd. Convert us, Lord, to the type of life the ends up in chains. Ad majorem Dei gloriam — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

To understand a proposition means to know what is the case if it is true.
(One can understand it, therefore, without knowing whether it is true.)
It is understood by anyone who understands its constituents.
~ Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4.024
In relation to this particular point, I am not sure whether or not I am entirely in agreement with Wittgenstein. Here is why I think I disagree:
I am inclined to accept Wittgenstein's initial statement that understanding a proposition means knowing what is the case if that proposition is true. However, I have trouble with the next two statements because I am inclined to believe that to know what the case is if any proposition is true requires us to experience something of that case. Or, to translate that into more Christian language, knowledge of the truth is premised upon an encounter with the truth. Thus, I am inclined to argue that there is actually no understanding of a proposition that is not true, for one cannot even understand a proposition's constituents apart from an encounter with the truth, and false propositions cannot provide such an encounter. All false propositions are as comprehensible as the statement, “this circle is a square.” Furthermore, apart from an encounter with the truth, what we imagine the case to be if a certain proposition is true, and what the case actually ends up being if a certain proposition is true, will always end up being radically different.

“I still maintain that what I have written is harmless in one respect. No believer will let himself [sic] be led astray from his faith by these or any similar arguments… But there are undoubtedly countless other people who are not in the same sense believers. They obey the precepts of civilization because they let themselves be intimidated by the threats of religion… They are the people who break away as soon as they are allowed to give up their belief in the reality-value of religion.”
~ Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion
Within The Future of an Illusion, Freud makes his argument that reason, and not religion (which is understood to be an “illusion” — i.e. that which is primarily motivated by wish-fulfillment, regardless of its relation to reality), should become that which forms and structures human “culture/civilization” (both of those words — culture and civilization — are captured in the German term 'Kultur' which Freud employs throughout). Religion, perhaps a neurosis necessary to infantile humanity, has served its purpose and now must be transcended — just as children often overcome their neuroses as they transition to adulthood — so that civilization may continue to better conquer the forces of nature and better govern the way in which people relate to one another. Science, of course, is the dominate means offered as the proper alternative to religion, although Freud recognizes that science cannot make any definitive statement on the grand topics that religion attempts to address. However, Freud argues that science should not attempt to answer these questions, and a mature and intelligent humanity should not be troubled by this. (By the by, it is interesting to note that Wittgenstein ,in his Tractatus, comes to a very similar conclusion about language. He concludes that language is useful to discuss daily practicalities, but it is not at all useful for the discussion of the grand themes of philosophy. Therefore, Wittgenstein concludes, “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”)
In the passage cited above, Freud anticipates the negative reaction that Christians will have to this book and, to a certain extent, he tries to assuage their fears. It it interesting to try to evaluate Freud's words from the perspective gained within a “postmodern” Christian context — especially considering the ongoing demonization of Freud within the Christian community.
So, my question is this: is Freud right? Did Christians really have nothing to worry about? After all, don't many postmodern Christians see the secularization of society as a good thing? Didn't the secularization process simply reveal that a large contingent of those who were declared to be “Christian” actually weren't Christian at all but merely accepted the label because “Christianity” had become a social norm? If this is so, shouldn't we be thanking Freud for deconstructing Christianity as a punitive social power and thereby allowing a more genuine form of Christianity to emerge? Is there now room for a more gracious reading of Freud's reflections on religion?
Anybody want to answer these questions?

Just an unformed idea that I've been thinking about researching:
(1) As the Church universal became increasingly corrupt, the nation state arose and was offered as the true society and that which held salvation.
(2) As the nation state became increasingly corrupt, the nuclear family became increasingly the focus of social interaction and well-being.
(3) As the nuclear family became increasingly corrupt, the individual became the focus of life (that is now lived in a state of “homelessness” and solitude).
(4) Individualism leads to nihilism and the collapse of meaning.
(5) The movement from the corruption of the Church to the State to the family to the nihilism of individualism was the inevitable outworking of a single trajectory. That is to say, as soon as the church collapses all other social bodies are bound to fail and we will only be left alone,homeless, and in the pursuit of ever-elusive meaning.
(6) Therefore, the solution to today's nihilistic individualism is not to be found in a return to focusing on the family or focusing on being good citizens. The solution is found in returning to and restoring the Church and allowing the body of Christ to function as the Christian social body.
(7) I am not arguing for some sort of Christian State or Constantinian utopia, I am simply arguing that the Church is the polis for Christians. The nation state, and even the nuclear family, are simply parodies and perversions of the Church.

“It used to be said that God could create anything except what would be contrary to the laws of logic.—The truth is that we could not say what an 'illogical' world would look like.”
~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 3.031
And this is precisely why Christianity is utterly dependent upon revelation as opposed to reason or natural science. The core of Christianity can only be understood as 'logical' after it has been revealed as that which is real. Thus, for example, it is only after encountering Jesus as both God and man that we are able speak of a person who is both divine and human without drifting into 'illogical' or impossible expressions.
This, then, is why the suggestion that “God can create anything except what would be contrary to the laws of logic” is not a complete or genuine Christian statement. It must be dramatically modified to read as follows: “God can create anything according to God's logic.” Logic, in particular our understanding of logic, does not rule over God's actions; rather, God rules over our logic and only through revelation can we discern what is truly logical and what is not.
(As an aside: I am currently reading my way through both Barth and Wittgenstein and I have been struck by the ways in which their works challenge, compliment, and further each other. Does anybody know any good studies that compare and contrast the two?)