Ascension Day 13.5.10

Tonight, a philosophy lesson. Concerning the ideas of a certain Austrian philosopher called Ludwig Wittgenstein, who died in 1951
The reason is because Wittgenstein’s ideas really help us understand the Ascension better.
Wittgenstein was a philosopher of language, and he coined the term ‘language games’ to describe the way we use language in different contexts. Now it’s a straightforward idea, the easiest way to get the hang of it is to think about the words we use in different sports. If you think of tennis, golf, bowls, cricket, rugby –each sport has its own vocabulary doesn’t it, and you need to understand that vocabulary to understand what is going on in the sport. More than that, you often find that a certain word is used with a particular meaning in a sport but with quite another meaning elsewhere. Take cricket as an example, – a sport I know little about but it has some nice terms. My favourite is a ‘duck’. Not a thing that quacks, at all. Being out for a duck is a term that would make no sense to you unless you understood what it means within the game of cricket. Equally you can score runs without running at all. And there are mysterious things called silly point, and silly mid on and, obviously, silly mid off. Where silly isn’t quite the word it otherwise is. And so on. Well, you get the idea.
Wittgenstein pointed out that actually all the time we are using language within a particular game, that is we know what our language means within the context where we are using it, and on the whole we understand how meaning changes in different contexts. But we do get confused, and if you overheard a snippet of conversation and didn’t realise it was cricket talk you might get the wrong end of the stick. Or if you read a poem and thought it was a historical text, again you would be misunderstanding it. Another way of looking at is this: did you know that the Chinese and the Japanese and I think Korean as well, use the same characters, but give them different meanings?

So how does this help with understanding the Ascension? It relates to all religious language, which is a different language game to any other, but I think this approach is particularly illuminating when we think about the Ascension.
What happens at the Ascension? Jesus goes up to heaven. Sounds a simple sentence, not complex at all. Easy language, we all understand the words. So what does it mean?
Jesus goes up to heaven – OK, he goes. Goes indicates a departure, leaving. So does that mean he has left? He is not here? He is absent? How can it mean that? Here we are, the body of Christ in this place, as Paul says. Jesus said I am the vine, you are the branches. Those two are connected, right? Paul told us we are in Christ as he is in us. And here at the Eucharist we are about to celebrate the presence, the Real Presence of Christ in the bread and the wine. Huh. Not absent at all.
Well let’s move on. Jesus goes – up. Ah. What a problem that tiny word ‘up’ is to us. What do we mean by ‘up’? Not difficult for Luke writing Acts really, as he would have shared the ancient world view of a flat earth, no way could he have realised that we live on a globe. Now we do know this, why do we still say ‘up’? Even if it’s say a space rocket, leaving Houston, we say it is going up. But if you happened to be in Australia at the time, wouldn’t it be going down, for you?  If we say ‘The space rocket went up from Houston’ and ‘Jesus went up to heaven’ are those two sentences part of the same language game? No, they are not!
Do you remember the comment supposedly made by the first man in space, Uri Gagarin – who went up, looked around in space and said well, now we know there is no God, because there is nothing here. Actually it may have been Khrushchev who said that. Classic case of mistaking the language game. And so often people’s objections to the idea of God are based on confusion over language games. When we use ‘up’ language for God, we don’t really mean vertical height or altitude.
What comes next: Jesus goes up to heaven. Well Yuri Gagarin probably got this wrong too, if he thought heaven was supposed to be a place that you can travel to. It’s not! It’s not a term to be understood in a similar way to words like Malta; London, Cape Town. Or even Jupiter, Venus. It doesn’t belong in a geographical language game,. So if you ask ‘where is heaven’ in a geography language game the answer has to be ‘nowhere’, as heaven is not a locality, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It means you have got your language games in a twist.
Now because ‘up’ and so on can be misleading, some theologians have suggested that we replace those terms with different ones and talk about ‘within’, and ‘depths’, and so on. Change the metaphor. But you still have the same problem. Within is a spatial reference just like up, above etc. Depth is just the opposite of height. The problem is that our language is designed for the physical universe and when we use it to speak of spiritual matters it breaks – it is inadequate, it can’t express those things literally, so we have to use the same words in a different language game. The same characters of the alphabet, but with a different meaning. And we need to understand that the language game has changed, or we will get very confused. Or we might think that religious faith is a load of rubbish, because it doesn’t make sense, we can’t believe it.
So what can we say about the meaning of this sentence, Jesus goes up to heaven. Well, we can think about the other characters in the Bible of whom similar language is used. Elijah, going up to heaven in the whirlwind. Enoch who mysteriously walked with God, and was not – According to Hebrews he was taken up into heaven without going through death. Moses who went up the mountain to meet with God and receive the commandments Jesus went up the mountain and was transfigured. In all these cases we are trying to make the closest possible connections between a person and God, we are putting them in the same category as God, bracketing them together ( I am trying to avoid spatial terms but it is hard). And we use ‘up’ language for God to express our awe, wonder, our smallness compared to God, our reverence and so on. We look up to God as we talk about looking up to people of authority and power. Revelation, meeting with God, is so often expressed in Scripture through ‘up’ language. It almost becomes a code for being with God. Hence heaven must be above us, within this language game.
You can see how hard it is to speak of this stuff without using those spatial metaphors. Maybe that’s one reason why some of the great visionaries and mystics, who had extraordinary experiences of God, refused to speak about them. As soon as you put it into words, it is wrong, misleading, is misunderstood, so better not speak of it. But if we all kept that rule we would have not a Bible, and we couldn’t pass on our faith. It’s OK to use our language, as long as we understand what we are doing. Our language needs to communicate, not confuse – it needs to be a Pentecost experience, not a Tower of Babel one. But this is hard work, it’s not easy. We have to be continually reminding ourselves and others of the language game we are in. As children mature into a more adult faith, we need to teach them that the words we use to express our beliefs have more subtle meanings than they might have thought when they were young. Otherwise, religious talk becomes a stumbling block, a hindrance to faith.
Here endeth the philosophy lesson. And I hope you can spell Wittgenstein, because there might be a test. And for homework – or for your prayers this evening – I want you to reflect on this sentence: ‘Christ is seated at the right hand of God the Father’. Remembering to think about the language game.