Usu sõnakusest ja sõnatusest

Abstract

Andrus Norak, About the Wordiness and Wordlessness of Faith.
The article is trying to deal with the postmodern challenges to the religious language. The question is: can we just go on using the same kind of language and terminology as during the modernist era? The response is given that we can not since the whole religious context has changed and expressions that once made sense to common people do not work any more. For example the basic Christian expression “Jesus is Lord” can sound in many ears like dadaism and nothing more. The article is trying to give a basic sequence of the development of religious articulation which starts with a shock that makes us speechless. After getting over the initial shock we start trying to find words for the experience we had, giving birth to the initial phase of religious language - a testimony about the experience we had. Personal experience combining and comparing it with numerous others creates theology. Modernist theologians attempted to develop a systematic theology. This attempt made theology look like something comparable with natural sciences although there are numerous systems according to which the collective reflection over the religious experience could be systematized. In the end the article poses a question: would it be possible to find an other and more biological basis to the religious language granted that the connection between reality and language has been vanishing during the postmodernist era and the language is turning into different kinds of mere wordplays?