The Impossibility of Ideal Religious Language

Philosophers of logical paradigm in Linguistic Philosophy asserted the following theory: “Only the cognitive propositions are meaningful. Ordinary language more or less contains ambiguity. It is therefore essential to build an ideal language.’’ This insight was reductionist. It ignores the fact that language has various linguistic forms, and propositions and utterances shall not be limited by cognitive propositions and utterances. This lead to a reaction on reasonable grounds. This reasonable reaction was called Ordinary Language Philosophy. These developments in language philosophy have influenced the ways of religious philosophizing and have lead to the expansion of religious language studies. Religious language studies have two various forms. The first is to search for motives to the problems of religious language in the scriptures. The other is the search for a general linguistic criterion that can be applied in all studies of the Philosophy of Religion. The second category of religious language studies was emerged mostly by the influence of the formal language theory of logical paradigm. Consequently, based on some linguistic elements selected from scriptures, an ideal language and terminology has been tried to be created in the Philosophy of Religion. In addition, arguments are given in a logical form. However, it is not possible to construct a universal linguistic criterion that allows us to understand the scriptures correctly. It is also impossible to idealise the language and linguistic features of a religious text. When conveying their messages to their acceptors, they do not use a general linguistic significance criterion or a formal language that is a source for all languages. On the contrary, like all linguistic expressions, they use the everyday language of the society they address