Belief, Change and Forms of Life

Abstract

At the end of the last chapter I said that no serious account can be given of religious belief which does not take note of the way in which it is interwoven with the surrounding features of human life. It is how a religious belief is acted out in this context which determines what kind of sense, if any, it may have. That is why the importance of Wittgenstein’s remark, ‘To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life’,1 cannot be overestimated. Becoming acquainted with a language is not simply mastering a vocabulary and rules of grammar. It is to know how things bear on one another in such a way as to make it possible to say certain things and see certain connections, but not others. The same must be said for religion. It is a misunderstanding to speak of a religion as a form of life. What can be said is that it is impossible to imagine a religion without imagining it in a form of life.

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